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They broke into two teams, but they weren’t ready to split up just yet.
While Leona, Mateo, and Olimpia were preparing a block of the domes for the
arrival of anyone from the Goldilocks Corridor who wanted to escape the Exin
Empire, Ramses, Angela, and Marie were planning to figure out how to ferry
those refugees. Ramses still didn’t know how to properly navigate with the
slingdrive. He was starting to worry that it was impossible, which could
explain why apparently no one had ever managed to use dark matter for
anything before. They couldn’t just go off and run their tests, though,
because then they could end up just as lost as they were the first time.
There needed to be some way for them to return home, even if that was the
only place they could ever go.
Leona was presently examining the Livewire. She wasn’t using any tools or
instruments; just looking it over with her eyes. “Hm.”
“Hm, what?” Ramses asked.
“Look at this.” She set the wire on the table, carefully reaching for a
particular spot with both her thumbs and index fingers. She slowly pulled
them apart while Ramses watched closely from the other side of the table.
“Oh. Huh.”
“What is it?” Mateo asked. “What did I miss?” He wasn’t as close to it as
they were.
“It can grow,” Ramses replied.
“Hold on, wait.” Leona reached for two more spots, and did what she did
again, but this time in reverse.
“Interesting,” Ramses noted.
“Did you just make it shrink?” Mateo guessed.
Leona nodded. “When Vearden first pulled this thing out of his much smaller
necklace, I thought that it was just being stored in a pocket dimension,
like a really narrow bag of holding. But this suggests that the wire’s
size-shifting ability is an innate property. When we’ve used it, we’ve had
to figure out how to make it reach where we need it to, but that’s because
we didn’t notice these...expansion points.”
“Will they help do the thing that we need it to do?” Mateo pressed.
Leona sighed. “Probably not. I mean, they’re nice to have. They’ll certainly
make it easier to do whatever we end up trying with the six of us, but it
doesn’t help us understand what that’s going to be. Did this Arqut
fellow say anything else?”
“He just said that this thing can help protect us from Buddy’s summoning
power,” Mateo replied. “I don’t know if it can link us to each other, it
just seems like a natural secondary use.” The slingdrive testers couldn’t
leave until they were sure that they would be able to come back here, or
rather back to their friends. That was the point, really, to not be
permanently separated from each other. The wire may or may not be that
solution. If they could crack the code, the idea was to form multiple
spatio-temporal tethers between each other. Basically, the Livewire was
meant to serve as a connection between each pair in the group, so that no
matter what, they would always be able to get back to each other. “I don’t
know how to do it, though. Is it psychic?”
“I’m not sure,” Ramses said. “But it must be, right? When we used it before,
we told the wire when and where to transfer the consciousnesses. They didn’t
end up way off course, like my slingdrive, or something stupid like that,”
he started to mumble.
Leona smiled softly, and patted him on the back.
Mateo nodded. “So we essentially need to quantum replicate the Livewire
fourteen times, so each one of us is linked to all of the other five. Or we
don’t replicate the wire itself, but the power that it holds.”
The two geniuses gave him a look.
“What? We studied the Handshake Problem in my stupid people’s high school
math class. I know some things,” Mateo insisted.
“I think if we just successfully form fifteen total links,” Ramses began,
“we’ll have our fix. The issue is that I have no clue how to do it even
once. We still don’t know what this thing is, or where it came from. We
wouldn’t want us accidentally swapping bodies, or erasing our memories. We
have to somehow program it to generate the invisible tethers without
doing anything else to us.”
“How do you program a unique temporal object?” Leona asked rhetorically.
Mateo took the wire from Leona, and walked aimlessly around the room while
he was holding it up to the light, and covering it in shadow, and thinking.
“Rambo, didn’t you figure out how to make your own pair of HG Goggles?”
“Uh, it wasn’t technically me. It was my alternate self who we left on
Ex-324.”
“You’ve maintained contact?” Leona questioned. “What does he say? What’s
happening there? Is he okay? Are the Welriosians okay?”
“That is a lot of queries,” Ramses said in a robot voice. “Not enough memory
to compute.” He went back to his regular voice. “He’s fine, they’re fine.
It’s a pretty peaceful planet as far as the Corridor goes. We’re lucky,
though, because it’s not all that important to Oaksent’s needs, so he
doesn’t pay much attention to them.”
“The goggles?” Mateo reminded him after a moment of awkward silence.
“Right.” Ramses went over to a filing cabinet, and pulled out the goggles.
They looked fairly similar to the original pair, though they were
distinguishable.
Mateo accepted them from him, and put them over his face. He started to look
the wire over again. The whole thing was glowing green, but some bits were
shinier and white. He was able to pinch and zoom to get a closer
picture. “Yeah, I can see the expansion points more clearly. They’re
not everywhere, so there’s likely a limit to its scope. Hopefully
that’s not a problem, or we’ll always have to stay within a few meters of
each other.”
“What are you thinking?” Leona asked him.
Mateo looked up at her with the goggles still on. Other objects in the room
were glowing as well, different colors, to varying degrees. Ramses and
Leona’s comms discs were quite noticeable from here, even though they were
embedded under their skins. “Just what I suspected.” He pointed at the two
of them, back and forth several times over. Then he handed her the goggles
so she could see for herself. “Here,” he said, taking them off, and offering
them to Leona.
“She put them on, and looked around as well, particularly at the boys. She
nodded with understanding. “We’re already linked through a quantum network.”
She tapped at her neck behind her ear.
“Oh,” Ramses exclaimed. “Yeah, I think I can work with that. If I can
convert the quantum frequency of our discs into something that the wire can
interpret, I might be able to resonate them until they become entangled.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Mateo joked. “I’ll leave you two to do it to
it.” He left the room, and closed the door behind them. “Pia, where are
you?”
“We’re in the 3D maze!” Olimpia shouted back. It sounded like she was
running.
“Hey, gang, stay off comms for the rest of the day, please. I’m messing
with them,” Ramses requested.
If the other three were in the dome that was literally a maze, and they
could no longer communicate with each other remotely, then there was no way
that he was finding them. He was just gonna have to come up with his own way
to pass the time. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out his handheld
device, where he had downloaded the dome brochure. Since there were people
here now, Hrockas had gone through, and highlighted the domes that were
actually ready to be tested. That was what he was busy with right now,
further developing the unfinished themed domes, so they would be ready for
his customers twenty-four years from now. He wasn’t actually going to
charge anyone for anything, of course. The bragging rights of being the most
popular planet in the galaxy would be payment enough, if he succeeded.
Varkas Reflex and Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida would sure give him a run for his
money, though he might have an edge with all of this paraterraforming.
Almost the entire surface was habitable, giving potential visitors and
residents an amount of freedom that none of the other destination worlds
could yet match, even with their time and proximity advantages.
Mateo checked the list once, twice, three times. Nothing was speaking to
him. Zombedome wasn’t finished yet. Hrockas imagined that it would be one of
the most popular, so he was spending a lot of time perfecting it, and didn’t
want anyone to see it until he was satisfied with the results. Mateo decided
to switch to the map, which showed where each dome was in relation to the
others. Something here caught his eye. There were two giant black spots that
were on the exact opposite sides as each other. He guessed that these were
the poles, and that there were no domes there at all. He was terribly
curious about what they looked like, whether they resembled Antarctica and
the Arctic on Earth, or if they were wildly different. He laughed out loud.
Hrockas expected people to come here, and have to be transported to each
dome using Vendelin’s hyperloop network, which could easily exclude these
poles. But Mateo could jump there in seconds. Nothing was off limits to him.
Boom. Splash. He was in the water, and it was freezing cold. If he weren’t
an upgraded posthuman, he would probably be on the brink of death by now,
even in this short span of time. Before he left, though, he spun himself
around. He could see no land anywhere, nor anything else. The sky wasn’t
what he expected, however. He wasn’t just looking at the blackness behind a
very thin atmosphere. It resembled what one would find on a fully habitable
planet, with clouds, and blue scatter. It was likely a hologram. Was this
whole thing just another dome? One last thing, he took his device back out,
and concentrated on the edge of the black zone, so he could teleport there,
instead of back to Castledome. He made the jump, and landed on a rocky
beach. The hologram was still here, but now that he was closer, he could
also detect the curve of the dome over his head, and the faint imperfections
of the image on the opaque surface. If this entire pole was covered by one
giant dome, it would have to be hundreds of kilometers wide.
“Here, take this.” There was actually another person here; a teenage girl.
She was holding a large blanket up for him. It was ombre striped, of varying
shades, but mostly in the greens. She had evidently built a fire nearby too.
Had she been expecting him?
“Thanks.” He took it graciously, and wrapped himself in it, rubbing his
shoulders to warm up. “I don’t know how you got here, but it’s nice to meet
you. I’m Mateo.”
“I know.” She paused for a good long time. “It’s Romana, your daughter.”
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