Taking Space 2

- Complications -

"Oh, come on, that's not even fair!" Daniel exclaimed breaking Catherine's concentration at the crucial moment and she missed the opening she had been waiting for.

She sighed and turned off the tablet. She'd been working on that scenario for over an hour and she thought she'd finally figured out how to beat it but with this interruption she would have to start all over again.

She lifted her left hand and massaged her eyes. Snoire's scenarios were some of the hardest nastiest things she'd ever seen and she really should be trying to complete them in private where she could concentrate better but the premise of almost all of them were also disturbing and she didn't feel like being alone right now. Besides she liked being the others.

Catherine lowered her hand letting the tablet fall to the side and looked around the rec room. The rec room was set up much like the recreational room they had back on the mining station, the front part of the room had a giant viewscreen that looked out into space providing a sense of openness and relaxation. The back of the room housed a long giant table with Steven's experiments and other paraphernalia littered all over it, Steven currently stood at the edge of the table staring at a hologram of Zion, as it was being built, twisting and turning the hologram around. The left side of the room was where Stephanie's and one of Catherine's personal computers were along with the couch she currently sat on. Stephanie reclined in a chair beside her computer with a pair of headphones on watching some type of farming instructional video on her personal station, no doubt trying to decide what types of food they would be growing on Zion once it was complete.

The right side of the room was where the boys' computers sat and the GTX 4000 that her husband was currently in. To her surprise Michael stood beside the virtual cockpit watching Daniel twitch back and forth, as if he was in a fight for his life, with a giant smile on his face.

"No, you can't do that, that's not possible!" Daniel shouted in frustration. Seconds later the GTX 4000 lurched forward then power down settling back into its normal position. Apparently, whatever her husband was controlling just got destroyed.

"What's going on?" She asked.

Michael turned to her the smile on his face even bigger than it was a few seconds ago. "Maddog and Dan are fighting each other and Maddog is destroying him. The score is fourteen to zero so far," Michael answered his voice practically bubbling with laughter.

"That's only because Hamish is cheating," Daniel protested.

"Oh," Catherine said, and her eyebrows furled as she looked around the room. "Where is Hamish?"

"I'm here," Maddog voice stated as a picture of his face appeared on Michael's personal station. "And I'm not cheating I'm just ten times better than you are," the ghost protocol stated his voice dripping with antagonism.

"No, you're not! You're just constantly using the terrain to get cheap shots at me, if we fought in open space like we should be I own you," Daniel declared defensively.

"A loan fighter should never be out open space," Maddog stated. "If it is you have one of the worst strategist that ever existed."

At this statement Catherine suddenly remembered something that struck her as odd. "Wait, how is Maddog beating you? The micro jitters that international dampeners cause makes it impossible for computer aiming to work on spacecraft, for both the aimer and the target."

"The game they are using doesn't simulate micro jitters all that well," Michael explained. "It also calculates lasers and particle beam cannons as hit scan weapons, so they don't have the nanosecond delay before impact like they have in real life. On top of all that you know S class AI like the one we now have installed in Zion are able to overcome that barrier due to their processing power. I'm pretty sure that Maddog is close to an S class AI."