Amalfi Echo by John Zanetti Read Free Book Online Page B

air. “And if
it proves necessary, the ship will deploy heavier weapons. The fact
is, the people down there won’t know that the jellyfish are running
on automatic. If the jellyfish have to kill anyone, the opposition
will assume that they’re under your control. You don’t come out of
it clean whichever way you look at it so you might as well have the
Amalfi weapons.”
    “I’ll know it’s
not me using the jellyfish,” Marion said.
    “In the eyes of
everyone you will still be responsible for the deaths.”
    “I don’t have
any plans to go down to the surface, just now,” Marion said,
looking at the image of the General Assembly.
    Digby indicated
the screen. “You could try this option since you’re not otherwise
getting the message through.” He shrugged. “Unless you’ve given up
on that idea.”
    “No, I have not
given up on that idea. But I don’t see why that should mean people
get killed. I won’t have that.”
    “Are you going
to send the jellyfish down with me too?” Tessa said.
    “Yes, although
I’d like you to learn how to control them. Be a useful addition to
your weapons’ kit,” Digby said. Immediately both he and Tessa
looked at Marion.
    “What?” Marion
said. “Am I always the killjoy here?”
    “Yeah,” Tessa
said.
    “It was where
Tessa was headed anyway,” Digby said. “USAFA. Jet fighters. I don’t
have to help her to be an Amalfi warrior. That was always going to
happen.”
    “I don’t have
anything to say right now,” Marion said.
    “So it’s back
to school,” Digby continued, “and this is a good time to talk about
how the learning programs work.”
    At this, Tessa
sat up, all bright-eyed, as though it was ‘walkies’ time.
    Digby halted,
nonplussed.
    “Tessa’s
already spent the zillions she’s going to win on Lotto,” Marion
said.
    “Lotto?”
    “The Time
Machine!” Tessa said. “The little trick with time? Hello?
Hello?”
    “Hmm,” Digby
said. “Sorry, no Time Machines. Never run across any in my travels
which is not surprising when you consider that many species don’t
have the concept, ‘Time’, so they’re not likely to be interested in
developing a Time Machine.”
    “Oh, crap,”
Tessa said, slouching down in her seat again. “What a rip-off.”
    “Okay,” Digby
said, “what the learning programs do is alter your subjective time.
That’s the time you experience rather than real time as measured by
clocks. Subjective time is like when you’re watching a really
exciting movie and the whole movie goes by in five minutes. Or
you’re waiting in a queue and the time takes forever to go by. It’s
simply this. The learning programs stretch out your subjective time
so that it will seem to you that you have spent a whole day in a
lesson and you’ll learn the equivalent you would have learnt in a
day but when the lesson ends, in real time, only, say, 10 minutes
has passed. Because it will feel like all day you’ll get hungry and
you’ll need to eat because you’ll still be using up the amount of
energy you would have used in a real day. This could cause problems
with the ageing process so that when the lesson has finished you
might find that your body has also aged a day, putting you out of
sync with everyone else but there’s a counter-balancing force. This
is the fact that you are now in an environment free of toxins, and
this will greatly slow down the ageing process in your body. When
we add in a few little critters, to repair and maintain your cells,
you won’t age much at all, and so it won’t matter if your time is
out of sync with the rest of us.” This wasn’t strictly true because
Tessa, especially, would mature emotionally and intellectually,
practically before their eyes. Digby felt it best not to dwell on
this.
    Tessa sat bolt
upright, “Are we going to live forever?”
    “Critters?”
Marion said. “What critters?”
    Digby answered
Tessa first. “Not forever but a lot longer than you do now.” Then
he said,