Lonetrek region – Okela constellation
Tsuguwa system – Planet VI
Caldari Navy Assembly Plant Station
9 March YC 127
For the last few days Aura was badgering me about Guristas data sites in hi-sec. For some reason, she couldn’t get the datacores, or rather a lack thereof, out of her mind. If she were any old navigational AI, I would have sent her to the repair shop. But since it was my Aura…
I sighed and gave up, “Okay what exactly do you want me to do?”
Aura brightened up, “Just jump into the Buzzard and explore data sites in other constellations. Surely, we must find some datacores there.”
“But what constellations?”
“Oh,” she thought for a moment, “all constellations in Lonetrek would give us a representative sample, I’m sure.”
“What?” I gasped. “The whole region?”
“It’s just 91 systems,” said Aura airily and batted her eyelashes at me.
“That will take ages!” I objected.
“I don’t think so. If we have the same luck in other constellations as in Okela, we won’t spend much time in each system. You just need to scan all the signatures and check if any of them represents a data site. Odds are that none will. Then we move to the next system.”
“Okay,” I sighed, “just calculate the optimal route through the region while I am loading the pod into Nosuri.”
Now it was Aura’s turn to make round eyes, “You want me to solve a travelling salesman problem for 91 nodes? Vlad, you are dreaming!”
“What’s the issue? You are a navigational AI, aren’t you?”
“I am, but it will take forever to find the optimal route through Lonetrek. Do you know how many possible routes are there? Factorial ninety-one!”
I winced, “But why do you have to use brute force for that problem? Surely, there are optimised methods.”
“There are, but whoever programmed me decided that a brute force algorithm would do.”
I scratched my head and smiled, “Shall I dust off my coding skills and knock up a quick and dirty script?”
Aura rolled her eyes, “Vlad, trust me, you’ll spend more time on writing, testing and debugging the program than you will waste on following a suboptimal path.”
You know, as much as I wanted to object, I had to admit that Aura was probably right.
“Alright,” I grumbled, “we’ll take a scenic route.”
“You are an angel,” purred Aura.
Lonetrek region
As we travelled through Lonetrek, I was slowly coming to a conclusion that my theory about the dependency between the number of exploration sites and the volume of traffic was wrong. Systems which contained data sites had, on average, 4,500 jumps in the last 24 hours, which was also an average across all Lonetrek systems. Aura’s demeanor became increasingly morose as she was having the same realisation. Her hopes of finding a quiet cluster of systems where we could regularly harvest the elusive Guristas data sites were fading quickly.
On the second day of our journey I finished exploring Sela constellation which yielded a meagre one data site across six systems.
“Well, we are almost done,” I told Aura. “Only Karnola constellation is remaining.”
“Hey, and what about Pietanen and Malariya?” asked Aura.
“They are isolated by a low-sec system, Aunenen. I thought you were interested in hi-sec systems only.”
“I am, and there are 11 hi-sec systems in those constellations. I am sure that that hi-sec pocket will have a treasure trove of Guristas data sites.”
After all the time I spent exploring Anoikis, I could not, hand on heart, say that flying through a low-sec system was an unacceptable danger. Especially, with a Tech II CovOps Cloaking Device. So I acquiesced to Aura’s demands but took all regular precautions such as checking the kills in the last hour. There were none. As expected, our transit through Aunenen was quite uneventful.
The average jump rate in Pietanen and Malariya was the lowest in the whole region – only 600 jumps per day. And they did contain a treasure trove of pirate sites but not the kind that Aura was expecting. Each system was rife with active pirate bases which one could locate even without a probe scanner. The data sites, however, were as sparse as they were elsewhere in the region – there was a grand total of four in both constellations.
“The locals seem to be more interested in raiding Guristas data and relic sites than in exterminating their bases,” I remarked.
Aura did not reply.
It was getting late and I spent a night in Caldari Steel Warehouse station in Otalieto. Next morning, I successfully escaped the hi-sec pocket and completed my exploration of Lonetrek by travelling through Karnola constellation. The number of data or relic sites we discovered there was zero.
When we returned to the station in Tsuguwa, I took stock of the loot from the whole region and found that we had obtained 13 datacores: one Graviton Physics, three Hydromagnetic Physics and nine Mechanical Engineering.
“Happy?” I asked Aura.
I knew she was not but I couldn’t help this little passive-aggressive jibe after wasting three days on that senseless expedition. Aura seemed to be deep in thought and ignored my barb.
“Hmm…” she said. “I’d say our trip raised more questions than it gave answers.”
“Questions like what?”
“Like why did datacores appear only in Com Towers? Why weren’t they present in Info Shards? If the names reflect the function of each structure, I would expect datacores to be part of Shards, not communication devices. And I am no closer to understanding what the pirates keep on the second partition in the datacores.”
I was tired of that wild goose chase and tried to direct Aura’s thoughts toward less time-consuming endeavours, at least the ones consuming my time.
“Look, maybe you can glean some information from these new cores. Before, you only had Electromagnetic Physics, and now you have three more types. Why don’t you experiment with those datacores for a while?”
“Yes, I think it’s a good idea,” Aura answered absent-mindedly.
I was about to extract the pod from the Buzzard when Aura stopped me, “Vlad, can you please leave the pod in the ship?”
In response to my questioning gaze, she explained, “I’ll need some computing power to analyse the cores. The capsule has just one teraflop while the Buzzard has 300.”
I shrugged my shoulders, “Whatever floats your boat, baby,” and started draining the pod goo.
After three days in an exploration frigate I was ready to kill someone, but I decided to give Aura time to play with her datacores, lest I find myself in the middle of a fight with deactivated railguns.