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A year later, and Tinaya is still made of glass, but she’s doing okay, and
adjusting to her new life. Solid walls no longer faze her. She’s gotten used
to walking right through them whenever she needs to. She’s not technically
phasing through them though, as one would conventionally picture a
superhero’s atoms curving around the object’s atoms without interacting.
It’s more like she makes the atoms disappear, even while they appear to
still be present. There is a time when the house that Belahkay built for him
and Spirit is standing there by the river. And there is a time when that
house isn’t there at all; it doesn’t exist yet. What Tinaya does when she’s
passing through the wall is steal little bits of spacetime from the past,
specifically the mostly empty air that was once occupying the area that is
now occupied by the wall. While it may look like Tinaya and the wall exist
in the same point simultaneously, a clever bit of time travel allows her to
become the only solid object in that moment. There has only ever been one
recorded case of someone with this temporal ability. It was reported in the
early 23rd century, on a ship called the Sharice Davids, but this was never
confirmed.
While Tinaya was learning to accept her new physiological situation, she
also needed to accept her new life in general. She is on a planet in the
middle of nowhere with almost no hope of reconnecting with her friends and
family back on Extremus. They considered manufacturing a long-range
communications device of some kind, but ultimately decided against it. The
True Extremists who now live somewhere kind of close to this area are under
the impression that Verdemus was destroyed. There could be spies from this
civilization amongst the people of the ship. They were there before; there
could be more who have as of yet not been found. Even if they’re all
eventually rooted out, the nature of time travel places all intel at risk at
any other point in time. It simply isn’t safe to return, if the people on
the ship could even find a way to backtrack. This is their home now, and
they are better off acknowledging that. Tinaya has finally managed to do
that today. She’s in a good place, and ready to move forward. Today is also
the first day that she’s going to speak with the prisoner.
Everyone had a job to do on this planet in the beginning, but thanks to
Belahkay’s extensive understanding of automated engineering, they don’t have
to do a single thing at all anymore. Agricultural robots tend the fields.
Kitchen robots make the food. Construction robots build the structures. This
is like a permanent vacation. Of course, automation is the name of the game
back in the stellar neighborhood too, but people still pursue goals. There’s
no way to advance the human race here, though, so the simple life is the
only rational pursuit. There is still plenty that they’re missing.
The boy’s mother, Lilac was assigned to be Hock Watcher for their one
prisoner, who was not fit to serve his time on Extremus, where he might be
discovered by someone who was not aware of the persistent human presence on
this world. Since her job was mostly incredibly boring, she was allowed to
bring the majority of central archives, including the grand repository and
the core compendium, with her. She was not, however, given copies of any of
the virtual stacks. She wouldn’t be very good at watching if she were
spending time in a simulation. Niobe was living too simple of a life
in Exin territory where she was a slave-in-training, so she’s been eager to
learn computers now, hoping to one day build the Verdemusians virtual worlds
to explore. Tinaya isn’t worried about that right now, not only because
there’s still plenty they don’t know about this world, but also because all
she can think about is Ilias Tamm.
“First Chair Leithe, you’ve finally come.”
“I’m not First Chair anymore,” Tinaya volleys.
“I don’t see it that way.”
“You better. My chances of going back to that ship aren’t much higher than
yours.” She looks around at his four walls.
“I’m holding out hope,” Ilias says cryptically.
She sighs. “Why did you ask to see me?”
“That explosion killed most of the people who were living here.”
“The explosion that you caused,” she reminds him.
He shuts his eyelids. “I’m not arguing that. I’m stating a fact to lead to a
point.”
“Well, get on with it.”
“The Hock Watcher is the only survivor, besides the children, who know
nothing. Many secrets died with the rest of the victims. Why do you think I
was here?”
“You wanted a pardon for your father.”
He smirks. “It was more than that. I wanted you on these lands, so you could
uncover those secrets. Yes, I wanted to restore my father’s name, but it
will do him no good, since he’s already dead.”
“What are you saying, there’s a conspiracy of some kind?”
“Well, we’re talking about Extremus; of course there’s a conspiracy. You’re
part of at least two of them. How’s Thistle doing, last you spoke with him?
Still one hundred percent sentient?”
“No comment.” He isn’t supposed to know about that.
He doesn’t mind her stonewalling him. “Tell me, what is the purpose of the
Extremus mission? What are we trying to do?”
“We’re trying to find a home in the farthest reaches of the galaxy.”
Ilias flinches as if that’s a bad answer. “Why? What’s the point of that?”
“It has its intrinsic value. The mission is the mission.”
This makes him laugh. “That’s a nice tautology, but it’s bullshit. Everyone
who started this is dead now, and they mostly did not pass their motivations
onto the latter generations. My bloodline is an exception. And I’ll explain
it to you, if you want.”
“Only if you’re not lying...”
He nods slightly. “Operation Starseed is a secret subprogram under Project
Stargate, designed to seed human-based life all over the galaxy, starting
from the stellar neighborhood, and propagating outwards. The galaxy is a
couple hundred thousand light years wide, which means it will take about
that long to reach the whole thing. The point of Extremus is quite
simply...to beat ‘em to the punch. It’s a race, and Extremus is trying to
win it.”
“Okay. Well, that’s a pretty cynical way to put it. What does that have to
do with Verdemus anyway?”
“It has everything to do with Verdemus, as well as the Goldilocks Corridor
and the True Extremists-slash Exins. The goal of the
farthest reaches of the galaxy has always been vaguely defined. Who
wins this race has therefore always been determined by your
definition of that goal. Bronach Oaksent decided that the goal was in the
past. He won the race thousands of years before any of us were born. He
didn’t just beat Extremus, he beat modern Earth. Verdemus is just another
off-shoot of that idea. The people who were meant to live here would have
been just as much Extremusians as our descendants will be, who will exit the
ship together on a hypothetical world out there.”
“No, that’s not true. The goal was a factor of the time that we were going
to spend on the journey. That’s why there were nine captains planned,
because it was going to last 216 years. This is not Planet
Extremus, and not only because we didn’t literally call it that. We’re not
even halfway across the galaxy yet.”
Ilias nods again, but more substantially. He removes a piece of paper from
under his pillow, and sticks his arm through the bars. “Go to these
coordinates. You’ll see what I mean. I’m right about this.”
Tinaya reluctantly accepts the sheet. “What the hell is this? What are
coordinates? Is this based on the Earthan system? We’re not
on Earth.”
“Turn it over,” he urges. “I stashed a satnav there that’s coded to
Verdemus’ coordinate system,” he goes on when she flips it to the back where
there’s a map to a second location using the settlement as the origin, and
various large landmarks as points of reference.
“Why didn’t you just draw a map to the coordinates?” she asks.
“That’s about a quarter way around the world,” he explains. “I wouldn’t
recommend trying to walk there.”
“The satellite up there is new,” she begins to argue. “It doesn’t have a
coordinate system, because it’s just a warning station. The original ones,
which would have been programmed with such a system, were destroyed by the
crew of the Iman Vellani, because they might be detected by the Exin
invaders.”
He shakes his head dismissively. “The data is in my satnav. It will send the
program to the new satellite once you establish the link. It will take some
doing, but the way I hear it, you know your way around a microchip.”
Tinaya reluctantly follows the map, and digs up the lockbox. She punches his
code in, and retrieves the device that he was talking about. It does indeed
take a little work to find a way to interface it with the orbiting
satellite. Once she manages to do it, her window to actually use it closes
up. In order for it to be able to warn them of external threats, it can’t
remain in geostationary orbit, which would place it above them at all times.
It’s constantly moving around the world, so she enjoys a limited amount of
time before it disappears over the horizon, forcing her to wait. The good
thing about this is that it can effectively map the coordinate system that
it has just learned to the actual geography. A geostationary satellite would
not be good enough to help her get to where she needs to be. About an hour
and a half later, the coordinates are locked in, and the device receives an
accurate set of directions. The easy part is over.
Tinaya walks over to Belahkay’s workshop where he’s building them something,
or rather working on something that a robot will build when the plans are
ready. “Hey, Tiny,” he says. That’s what he calls her.
“I need the jet.”
“The jet?” he questions, surprised. “Wadya need that for?”
“Fishing,” she lies.
“I hear the..bass is good on the..third continent.”
He slowly smiles, and twists his chin. “All right, I’ll let you have the
jet, but I’m going with you.”
“No, I would like to be alone. That’s part of what I enjoy about fishing.”
“Tiny, I’ve never synthesized any fishing gear for you, and you’ve never
mentioned it before. You’re obviously lying, which is fine, but I’m not
letting you go off alone; you’re literally made of glass.”
“Ugh, everyone’s always saying that. It’s magic glass, I can’t break.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe you just haven’t got hitten hard enough.”
“Hitten?”
“It’s a word, don’t look it up. So how’s about it? I’m goin’, or no one’s
goin’...? Or I’m goin’...?”
“Okay, fine. But don’t ask questions, I don’t have the answers. And you have
to promise to not tell anyone what we find unless I tell you it’s okay.”
“Very well. Just let me run a preflight check, and we’ll go.”
They came up with a quick lie about the two of them wanting to feel like
free birds, far, far away. The rest of the group bought it because they had
no reason to believe that they were being deceived. The six of them spent
time together, and they spent time apart. Aristotle went on a hike alone for
a week a couple of months ago, and no one tried to stop him. He stayed in
contact the whole time, and agreed to let an aerial sentinel drone fly over
his head at all times. As mentioned before, this is basically all one big,
long vacation.
The jet that Belahkay engineered is sleek and modern, but it’s not
hypersonic. It will be some time before they mine the necessary raw
materials to build anything like that, and it might not be necessary anyway.
The point of getting halfway around the world in a few hours would be to
connect people to each other. There’s no one else where they’re going. At
least there shouldn’t be anyway. Perhaps that’s where Ilias is leading her.
It could be a trap too, but it’s unlikely that he ever had enough power here
to set anything like that up so far from the settlement. They didn’t find
any preexisting jets over the course of the last two years, nor any place
that they would have been manufactured. What could possibly be all the way
out here?
A building, that’s what. A series of nested buildings, in fact. Belahkay
lands the jet in an open field, and then they get out to walk back there.
They’ve already seen it from the air, but they want to get a more detailed
picture. Tinaya remembers learning about these in class. In the late 21st
century, most people lived in arcological megastructures that towered over
the landscape kilometers high, and could accommodate hundreds of thousands
of people. But they didn’t go straight from modest highrises to this
hypercondensed style of living. They gradually worked up to them. They built
superblocks first, which housed hundreds of people, and later thousands.
Then they upgraded to megablocks, which housed tens of thousands. What
they’re seeing here is a megablock. A giant complex several stories high
surrounds a courtyard, and on the inside of this courtyard is another
building, shorter than the first. They just keep going like that, each
layer being smaller in two dimensions than the one outside of it. In
the very center is a 10,000 square meter park.
The fact that they’ve found this thing is shocking enough. It shows that the
people who first came to this world weren’t just curious about the flora and
fauna. They were planning to settle it with a significant human population
who would never see the Extremus again, and would start a new civilization.
Ilias was right, different people were making up their own definitions for
the end state of the Extremus project. But that isn’t the only thing they
find here. In the park is what looks like a downed jet. It seems to have
crashed here many years ago. There was one apparent survivor, or maybe he
had nothing to do with it. He comes out of a handcrafted structure next to
the pond, and approaches to shake their hands. “Hi. Welcome to Sycamore
Highfields.”
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