Alice has bits of viral information – so-called vitbits – to share. Despite her best efforts, she coughs up a strong signal and emits it using directional breathforming. Luckily, the line-of-sight is masked. Nearby Bob is unconcerned, he relies on an outage. After all, he is not in the near field, and he wouldn’t touch any of the non-intelligently reflecting surfaces in the room.
However, masking the main lobe of transmission leads to multi-path propagation and diversity. Waves of vitbits sitting on droplets (scientifically known as votons) are traveling along different paths, in an attempt to reach a destination. Their power decays quickly over distance, according to a power-law, with an empirical free-space limit of 2 m. But in this case, votons from different directions meet coherently, joining forces and managing to maintain strength and collectively carry sufficiently many vitbits.
Unfortunately, the vitbits find their target. There is no outage, just Bob’s outrage. He became a victim of his vir-ility.
Stogblog by M. Haenggi 