The Department for DeepTransit

*''Who knows how they keep track of where all those board-wires start and end, but whoever they are, you'd best hope they know what they're doing or we'll all end up as strings of data endlessly circulating the big DT.''*

## Overview

The Department of DeepTransit is easily identifiable by its colossal size, even when compared to other overly-bloated departments of the Corperium's administrative structure. The reason for this vastness is tied to its need to house both the supercomputer DeepTransit, and The Switchboard, the expansive wall of endless wires responsible for reliable inter-stellar travel.

After the development of datalite, it was simply a matter of time until an unusually bright engineer would leverage this new physics-bending technology to create some form of faster-than-light travel. Usually datalite allows for great volumes of information to be bounced across the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds, a necessity for keeping the Corperium running smoothly across its immense galactic holdings. Using this principle, Corperium engineer Marian Golospot devised a ship's drive that would allow whole fleets to move in this same way.

Simply put, the DL-Drive (or DLD) compresses all of the atomic data of any given ship, as well as its contents and crew, into a string of datalite that can then be redirected and used to reassemble said ship and crew at a new location. Although the DL-Drive's core function was easy enough to achieve, accurately processing and re-directing the streams of datalite (containing very real human lives) was much more troublesome.

To deal with the issues of processing all of these new DL-Drive streams, It was determined that a supercomputer unlike any other in scale and complexity must be constructed. All DLD streams would be sent there at the moment of drive-engagement so they could be properly organised and directed.\* This super computer was named DeepTransit, and has since been located in the Department for Deep Transit located on N-1.

With DeepTransit capable of ingesting all of the drive-streams only one problem remained, the problem of pinging these streams back out to their desired location in a timely manner. (The effects on the human mind of being stuck for elongated periods of time as data in a DLD-stream are largely unresearched, although anecdotally they are said to result in a lingering taste of copper and a newfound appreciation for household appliances.) Due to almost all of the Corperium's computing resources being consumed by the construction of DeepTransit, a more human-centred solution was devised. A vast monolithic switch-board was constructed and wired into the supercomputer. From this switchboard, diligent corperial operators would hastily rush from input to output, engaging and re-organising a countless number of directional cables, these cables acting as an interstellar bridge from point A, the point in space where a ship fires its DL-Drive, to point B, that ship's intended destination.

Although the switchboard remains in a constant state of rushed chaos, to the crew of a ship engaging its DL-Drive, the journey from flesh-to-data and then data-to-flesh feels like little more than stepping through a large doorway in the fabric of space.

*\*Before the finished configuration of DeepTransit was realised, there were many cases of crossed DL streams leading to bungled re-materialisations of crewman fused with parts of other crewman from entirely different ships. The resulting torrent of bureaucracy and reclassification of these two-person humans meant that this was an untenable kind of error.*