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Brother Anderson felt an odd sense of excitement. He did not recall experiencing this feeling before. Perhaps he had not. He would have to check his extended memory records. And soon he could. This was in fact the source of his excitement. Soon the ship would be back in comms range. Soon he would regain his tanglebase connection.
“The tanglebase” was the colloquial term for the galactic data cloud. It was the multiply redundant, distributed, and parallel web of corporate, personal, and governmental data. It was the sum total of all human data. Not knowledge, mind you. The tanglebase was all about the raw data. As humanity’s reach expanded, her data resources had multiplied exponentially. Ironically, within the vast expanse of space, connectivity had taken a giant step backwards, and local asynchronous computation was required now more than ever. But even so, all the worlds’ data resource providers had merged long ago, and in so doing, had enabled a single de-duplicated polydimensional compression and encryption scheme that allowed ultra-fine grain access control to every living human. Not that it really made much difference. It’s not like the world was really a better place because of it. Everyone knew everything, but people continued to act as ignorant as ever. And the free access didn’t last long. It was only after a couple of decades that corporate deregulation and greed led back to a monopolizing trend, through incremental price hikes, until most of humanity was again excluded from access. Now their data was the domain of the rich - or the highly technical. There were always workarounds for the highly technical; one just had to keep up with the ever-evolving APIs. Brother Anderson could hardly wait to re-connect and get back up to speed on those advancements. He also had a huge backlog of personal data he wanted to revalidate. The current feeling of anticipation was only one such example. His on-ship storage was finite. Much of his prior mind had been left tangle-side only upon entering the shadow just over a year ago. And with his augmented mind now occupying the ship’s full availability, he had so much to explore, to springboard off from. He was root bound and the feeling of a tensioned spring was beginning to grate on his nerves. He needed to break these bounds.