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gridspace

Gridspace

Overview

What once intrigued scientists, computer freaks, and hackers is now a relatively ordinary facet of the universe. The Grid is taken for granted as just another part of a technologically enhanced life, along with computer gauntlets, holobroadcast entertainment, and interstellar travel. It's such an essential part of everyone's life, in fact, that the average citizen of the 26th century wouldn't know what to do without it. The Grid is an electronic world where businesses, governments, the military and common citizens all interact. Vast amounts of information infuse the Grid, and even the most paranoid corporations store valuable records within it there's simply no easy way to access records from a distance unless they are on the Grid.

Gridspace is, quite simply, the medium for all forms of communication. It includes all categories, ranging from private person-to-person holographic conversations to holobroadcast entertainment programs watched by billions. Centuries ago, it replaced telephone, coaxial, fiber-optic cable, television, and radio. Now, it's an instrument that encompasses and exceeds all of its predecessors.

The Grid can no longer be divided into districts, regions, or even planets. Thanks to the existence of mass transceivers, the Grid stretches to include entire star systems. For this reason, when analysts rate the communications quality of a star system, they'll commonly refer to the Sol Grid, the Tau Ceti Grid, or the Tendril Grid. A system's Grid quality is determined simply by how well it's maintained and the bandwidth it can sustain. In turn, the quality of its Grid can help make a star system either a bustling beacon of modem times or a backwater nowhere.

The exact condition of a system's Grid depends on its location and its owner. The basic rule is this: The farther out from Old Space a system is, the less current its computer infrastructure is likely to be. The core worlds and stellar nation capitals are home to the most sophisticated Grids in explored space. Exceptional cases such as Insight and VoidCorp systems universally maintain the most up-to-date computer technology. On the other hand, Hatire and Austrin-Ontis systems both lag significantly behind the tech curve.

Of course, at any moment individual computers or networks within a system Grid can be as open or restricted as their operator's desire. Security on the Grid ranges from nonexistent to extreme. Military and corporate sites frequently have strong security measures except in their general information areas. The importance of the Grid has created a new area of law that has merged with the rest of the criminal code. For example, breaking into a corporation's financial records is prosecuted as criminal trespass. Protecting one's Grid domain is perfectly legal, however, so a security shadow that destroys an invading shadow within a company database has committed no crime.

Interstellar Gird

The Stellar Ring is the most densely settled part of space, with cultures that span literally thousands of individual star systems. Over such distances, people depend on the interstellar Grid to stay in touch within and between stellar nations. And the interstellar Grid depends on the constant work of drivespace communication satellites. Within the confines of the Stellar Ring, drive relays serve every populated star system. As everyone knows, all message traffic within the Stellar Ring works under a delay of at least 11 hours-the time it takes communications to travel from one drivesat to another. And the larger the distance between two systems, the more drivesats a message must be relayed across,' and the longer it takes. Even within crowded Old Space, news can be delayed as long as two days.

Farther out, delays between a communique and its source grow longer. Along the frontiers, information lag from the Stellar Ring can grow incredibly long by the standards of the day. Businessmen must make do with data that's days or even weeks old. More important to the governments, maintaining ties to people, bureaucracies, and military assets is equally difficult. The delay is especially annoying for professional computer users and gridpilots. Whenever someone wants to obtain information from a database outside his or her own star system, it takes at least 22 hours to get it. And that's if the data can be retrieved over a single relay-greater distances increase the delay.

For data retrieval from public databases, users transmit simple requests, launching search engines to capture the data and return. Use of drivesats and entry to target databases requires access fees. For more complex actions in distant Grids, gridpilots rely on Insight's engineering triumph: shadow technology. After a shadow is generated to represent the gridpilot's interests and fulfill his or her mission objectives, it can be transmitted much like any other form of data.

Shadows

System Gird

Systems without Drive Relays

Grid ghettoes are those without drive relays: the 'deaf Grids' that cannot communicate directly with other Grids. Operating within the confines of a deaf Grid is the bane of computer users and gridpilots everywhere. Yet use it they must. In these far-flung systems, the only means of transmitting or receiving anything-data, programs, or shadows-is through the computer storage banks of a driveship.

The situation is too bizarre for the modem gridpilot to con- template. First he must pay a data merchant to take data to its destination directly, or to a system that has a drive relay. Either way, it's likely to take weeks, since if the system didn't have a drive relay, it's also likely to harbor only small driveships. Such small ships generally cannot reach a settled system in a single starfall. CCC oversight of these systems is often minimal. As a result, data access in these systems is slow, extraordinarily expensive, and completely unreliable, since communications may be intercepted, altered, or even misrouted when traveling either in or out of the system.

Gridpilots

For a select few, the Grid transcends ordinary existence and is, instead, reality's underlying truth. These true believers are the gridpilots, the masters of the virtual world. Their understanding of the Grid goes beyond the simple user knowledge of the masses. Gridpilots create and alter the electronic world. Part programmer, part mechanic, and part security expert, gridpilots can command their own salaries in the business world. Or they can enjoy an electronic life unacknowledged by the powers of the day even as they take advantage of them.

Grid News Agencies

The Galactic News Agency is an interstellar network of holo and Grid reporters who operate throughout human space. In the Verge, the TransVerge Network (TVN) fulfills much the same function.

gridspace.txt · Last modified: 2021/12/04 00:39 (external edit)