Quantum Cultivation by Jace Kang (simple e reader TXT) 📕

Better vision. “What about his sense of smell.”

The CT scan shifted to Ishihara’s nose.

Subject has over twenty-five million olfactory receptors.

Not nearly as good as a dog, but still four times more than anyone else. Might as well ask— “And his hearing?”

The image shifted to his ear canal.

Cochlear nerve fibers are fifty percent denser. With a wink, the fox spirit held up two images of the nerve, one with a wider range.

Meaning he could hear pitches beyond normal human ability.

Just what was Ryusuke Ishihara? After spending so much time snooping around the government’s classified regions of the EtherCloud, she of all people should’ve known if these theoretical technologies and gene manipulations were already being integrated into prototypes.

She would’ve gasped again—the deeper scans revealed no signs of artificial wiring to explain Ishihara’s speed. Nothing non-organic in him.

This was all genetically engineered. There was no other explanation for Ishihara’s abilities. Maybe the next iteration of the shocktrooper? After the Onslaught, the hulking Bovines had been instrumental in repelling platoons of Tivarae landing forces. Very few of their descendants remained, since they were genetically programmed to only sire male offspring, and they all died at age thirty-three. Perhaps Earth was now preparing for the next hostile alien species.

But who? The Elestrae? With a lifespan over thrice that of humans, and the ability to channel istrium radiation, they’d become a formidable enemy if their alliance with Earth ever fell apart.

Though that didn’t make sense, either. Ishihara had to be at least thirty, meaning they would have to have begun developing him a long time ago. Unless they’d sped up his maturation, like the earliest shocktrooper lines. That would explain his apparent age.

For now, this would be her working theory:  he’d escaped from wherever they were developing him, and the Ministry of Defense had sent shocktroopers to reacquire their asset before the Peacekeepers got ahold of him.

Well, now that she knew this shadow program could possibly exist, she’d uncover it. With a command, she swapped her Avatar code’s outer shell, shedding the virtual kimono and donning the Armor of a Level One Sentinel.

Unlike a Cloak code, which could make her nearly invisible to almost anything on private corporate EtherSpaces, but not to high-level government Sentinels, the Armor would allow her to hide in plain sight with minimal energy usage. With a wave of her hand, she opened a portal in her firewall to the Peacekeeper EtherSpace, and slipped past the heavily-armored samurai—her representations of Level Five Sentinels.

Over the years, she’d meticulously coded her perception of the EtherCloud to display as feudal Japan. Inside the castle town, Level Two Sentinels appearing as lightly armored foot soldiers slipped among lumbering carts loaded with scrolls,; while swifter Data Transfer AI taking the form of carrier pigeons zipped through the air with smaller packets of data.

Low-level Operators running the EtherSpace’s processing functions looked like laborers running grain mills and irrigation sluices, while higher levels appeared as Dwarves working geared machinery. Basic Maintenance resembled craftsmen painting and carving as they repaired simple code, while high level gnomes patched walls and fixed machines representing more complex code.

In addition to these AI entities, the only other beings buzzing through the EtherSpace were Level Zero Avatars of real people, operating in Real Time. Aya almost felt sorry for them. In the real world, they’d be swiping their hands left and right, viewing output thousands of times more slowly than her. Only a handful of hackers had figured out how to code a sensory interface, dubbed an SI, that allowed them to experience the data like her.

She darted in and out of the Avatars as she headed to one of the many archives. Since no Sentinel would access files, and real Sentinels would investigate if she removed her Armor, she created a copy of her Sentinel Shell and programmed it to patrol around the archive.

As soon as she passed through the door, she activated her Filer Shell.  Here, she blended in with the dozens of Filing AI, all resembling imperial court officials wearing different robes based on their level. Higher levels received scrolls from carrier pigeons, while lower levels unloaded laden carts.

One Filer was actually a fellow hacker, Dig, his disguise Shell obvious to Aya due to a flashing blue patch in his robe—her SI’s interpretation of Dig’s coding fingerprints. Per hacker conventions, she didn’t acknowledge him, lest Sentinel AIs take notice of any abnormalities. They’d certainly cross paths in one of the rotating hacker hangouts, where they could compare notes and perhaps trade information. She looked past him to the rows and rows of scrolls representing files.

One particular file was at the center of attention, glowing like the sun as thousands of authorized Avatars accessed it. The vast majority were Peacekeepers, but some were marked as Ministry of Science and Technology. Unsurprisingly, given their contentious relationship, none of the Avatars appeared to come from the Ministry of Defense; but if they’d sent shocktroopers to fight Ishihara, they surely knew about him and would come knocking soon.

A quick look confirmed what she already knew: the file was all the information they’d gathered on Ishihara so far.

She tracked him from the point of his capture, an hour ago in real time. They’d taken him to the closest Peacekeeper facility. Coincidentally, that was just a block away from her home, at the Peacekeeping Headquarters in Kyoto Central.

The Ministry of Science had put in a request to transfer him to New San Francisco Bioengineering Laboratories. Unlike the hour-long shuttle civilians might take, the government’s high-altitude, sub-light transport would get him there in about four minutes. Of course, without the need for inertial dampeners to combat the laws of physics in the real world, her Avatar could cross the space between the servers in a millionth of a second.

Using a stealth copying macro,