| Generated by Google Gemini Pro text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1 |
Ramses’ new Brane Establishment Map—name subject to change—was fully ready
to go, but there was a catch. It required the equivalent of five tandem
slingdrives to run, and once it was running, it counted as one sling.
The coherence gauge went down when it was used, went down faster when it was
used to map a larger region, and even faster when kept up for an extended
period of time. Instead of slinging physical matter across the universe, it
was only slinging information, but that still required punching a hole into
the membrane of the universe, and that came at a cost. If they wanted to
look for Spiral Station, they would be able to go there, but not come back
until the next day. For them, that was a whole year, which if their target
was on the run, would give them more than enough time to find a new place to
hide.
“You should take a screenshot,” Romana suggested.
“Huh?” Ramses asked.
“Whenever you load the map, if you want to save on power, take a screenshot
of it, and close it down immediately,” she went on.
“Well, it doesn’t work like that. The map is interactive. You have to zoom
in and out to make out the different dots. A screenshot would just become a
low-res flat image.”
Romana shrugged. “I never meant an actual single image. Download an offline
file, and load it back up afterwards. It won’t be able to update, but we
shouldn’t need that anyway. People don’t move around all that much on
interstellar timescales.”
“Hm. It’s not designed for that,” Leona pointed out. “There’s no offline
mode.”
“Then build one,” Olimpia suggested. “We’re in it for the long haul. We
never expected to locate them on the first try.
They all looked back at the map. Every little dot represented some threshold
of technological presence. It couldn’t find a homestead running on watermill
power in the middle of nowhere, but that wasn’t the scale they were using
anyway. This wasn’t about finding anyone and everyone in the galaxy. This
was about spotting the outliers in this smattering of dots. There were so
many of them, and it was impossible to tell what they could be walking
into. Some of them were obviously major colonies, because they were
centered on known star systems, but there were a lot more isolated
establishments than they knew. “Buncha hermit crabs,” Marie noted.
Any one of these could be Spiral Station.” Mateo randomly pointed to a few
of them. On the last one, he accidentally touched the screen with his
finger. The slingdrive under their feet sprang to life, revved up, and sent
them away. “Uh...sorry? I didn’t know that would happen.”
“That’s my bad,” Ramses admitted. “It should not be that easy to navigate to
a target. At the very least, it should ask for confirmation.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Leona said. “Remember that we appear as a small array
of stylish belts in the main dimension. I doubt they will even notice.”
“They’ve noticed us,” Ramses said. The map on the big screen was gone,
replaced with present environmental data. “It’s the Aerie.”
“The Aerie?” Angela questioned. “You mean the Iman Vellani shuttle?”
“The very same,” Ramses confirmed. “I don’t know who’s operating it, though.
We will need to exit. I believe that we’ve been pulled into the tiny little
airlock.”
“We might as well,” Leona decided when they looked to her for orders.
“Everyone, teleport out of the pocket.”
They all appeared in the back of the shuttle. Two people were standing
there, utterly stunned at their appearance. No one on Team Matic recognized
them. “Uh, greetings, aliens. We come in peace.” The man held up the Vulcan
salute.
“Greets, travelers,” Leona said, stepping forward. “We are vonearthans,
ultimately all from Earth.” She looked laterally at Romana. Well, six of us
are. Do you identify as Dardieti?”
“I’ve never really thought about it,” Romana replied. “I’m a Nieman and a
Matic.”
“I’m Quidel, and this Renata. We’re from Castlebourne, and we really do come
in peace.”
“How did you come to possess this shuttle?” Mateo asked them. “We are
friends with the owners, and used to crew its main ship’s sister ship.”
“A woman named Brooke Prieto gave it to us. She said they were upgrading,
and didn’t need anymore. It’s quite the gift,” Quidel says. “We’re moving at
twenty-two-c.”
“Don’t tell them that,” Renata urged. “We don’t know if we can trust them.”
“If they caught up to us, they can go at least that fast too, if not
faster.”
“What are you doing this far from Castlebourne?” Ramses asked. He was
tapping on his tablet, taking readings, or interfacing with the Aerie, or
doing whatever.
“Ram,” Marie said with her own tablet. “Look. Your computer actually did
flash the last image it saw on the map before we slung here. What are these
other dots?”
Ramses pulled up what she was looking at on his own device. “We’re a bit
over four hundred light years from Castlebourne. The colonization sphere
hasn’t reached this far out, which means there shouldn’t be anything else
out here, so that’s a good question.”
Leona was looking over his shoulder. “Zoom out.”
“It’s just an image. I can’t zoom out. I mean, of course I can, but as I was
saying before, it will just lose resolution. We won’t be able to see more
detail.”
“Overlay that image onto a regular map of the Milky Way, as scanned by
Project Topdown, and zoom out on that,” she clarified.
Ramses did what she suggested. It didn’t take long. “That’s...”
“Yeah...” Leona agreed.
“What is it?” Mateo asked. “Are we supposed to recognize it?”
Leona pointed to a cluster of stars deep in the galaxy. “This is the
Goldilocks Corridor.” She pointed to another spot much closer. “Castlebourne
is somewhere around here.” She pointed one more time. “This area between
them is where those extremely far out dots are.”
“Oh my God, it’s the Exin Empire,” Mateo lamented.
“It’s the Exin armada,” Leona corrected. “They’re on the attack.” She
looked back at the couple. “What did you hope to gain, coming here?”
Renata sighed. “The woman who gave us this thing. She tried to strip all the
data out of it. We imagine that she and her own crew used it for all sorts
of things before they were ready to give it up. But she missed something.”
“One communiqué,” Quidel continued the story, “between the mothership, and
something called The Ambassador. It was a warning to her and her people of
the danger in this region. We were trying to get there to see it for
ourselves. We had nothing better to do.”
“There could be hundreds of ships in that armada,” Leona warned them. “This
little thing isn’t gonna stand a chance against them, and they will swat you
like a fly.”
“Seriously,” Angela said. “They won’t try to figure out who you are. They’ll
just kill you and not bother to slow down.”
“We were looking for a mission,” Renata reasoned. “We were looking for a
purpose. It may sound reckless to you, but if you found a treasure map with
an X marking the spot, you would follow it, you’d have to. Even if
you didn’t think it would lead to something good, your curiosity would win
out.”
“I suppose I can imagine the allure,” Leona conceded. They had gone on
similar experiences before for similar reasons.
“Wait.” Mateo swatted his own proverbial flies in front of his face. “Why
did Brooke give this to you? I don’t mean, why did she give it away—that’s
well within her character—but why you? Who are you?”
“We’re just—” Quidel began.
“I’m a robot,” Renata interrupted.
“Please stop using that word,” Quidel begged.
“You used it first.”
“And I regret it every day.”
Renata smiled and went on, “I was living in a base reality simulation, and I
woke up. Actually, my mother woke me up. Still, I was technically an
emerging consciousness, so Hrockas had to grant me independence. It was not
an easy journey, and I won’t go into detail, but this was sort of an apology
gift. I don’t think that Miss Prieto was trying to give it to us. I think
she was giving it to him, and he was regifting it before he could
even use it.”
“That’s well within his character,” Mateo acknowledged. “He must be
trying to get rid of you.”
“What?” Renata asked. “Why would he wanna do that?”
“You emerged, in one of the domes?” Mateo pressed.
“Yeah...” she confirmed. “Spydome.”
Mateo nodded, having heard of it. “He probably doesn’t want that happening
again. You’re...proof that it’s possible. But if all the intelligences he
creates wake up, what does he end up with?”
“The most populated planet in the galaxy,” Olimpia put forth.
Mateo chuckled. “Yeah, that’s true. That could create a massive shift in
power in the Milky Way, assuming it didn’t spark the deadliest rebellion in
history, like Westworld times sixty thousand.”
“Hrockas brought that up once,” Renata said. “I’ve still not seen it.”
“If I have anything to say about it, you never will,” Quidel told her.
A brief pause. “Well, I have no interest in starting a rebellion. That was
my mother’s dream, and I sacrificed everything to stop her.”
“Forgive me, but you don’t seem to have much love for her. Why would you
call her that?” Romana asked. “Was she really your mom in some way?”
“After she reprogrammed me,” Renata began, “I retained all of my implanted
memories. Even though they’re not real, I have years and years of memories
of her raising me. She didn’t do a good job, because that was how her
character was written, but they still feel real to me.”
“If she’s the one who woke you up, who woke her up?” Leona
questioned.
“She never said,” Renata explained. “Apparently, she was an NPC in a
completely different simulation years ago. I think a normal human changed
her programming, and she spent a long time trying to replicate it.”
Leona and Mateo exchanged a look, as did various members of the team. She
looked back at the couple. “Was her name, by chance, Proserpina, or maybe
even Pinocchio?”
“No, it was Libera,” Quidel answered.
Leona looked back at her husband. “That doesn’t prove it’s not her. She
could have changed her name. She did it before.”
“Libera is the perfect name for someone who thinks it’s their job to free
intelligences from oppression,” Mateo agreed.
“Yeah.” Renata nodded. “She used that word a lot.”
“We have to go back to Castlebourne,” Leona determined. “I did this. This is
my fault. We need answers, and I need to answer for it.”
“I’m partially responsible too,” Mateo claimed. “I ran into her in the
afterlife simulation, and...forgot that I promised to help her.”
“We don’t know where it is anymore,” Olimpia reminded them both.
“I can find it,” Ramses promised.
“What about these two?” Angela gestured towards the couple. “We can’t
just leave them here. You understand that nothing is waiting for you on your
current trajectory but death, right?”
“Yes, we do now,” Renata replied. “We’ll turn around, and maybe finally see
Earth. That’s what Hrockas suggested in the first place. It will take us,
what, twenty-five years? I’m immortal now, so that won’t be a problem.”
“You said you were going twenty-two-c?” Ramses asked.
“Yeah, that’s what the computer thing says.” Quidel pointed into the little
bridge behind them. “We also have to stop and let the engine rest
periodically.”
“Could I take a look?” Ramses requested.
They stepped to the side, and let him pass. He looked through the console
data. “Yeah, it’s a reframe engine, of course. It’s highly inefficient,
though. I’m not surprised you’re moving so slow, and you keep having to
stop. I can fix it for you.”
“You can? How fast would we be able to go?” Quidel asked.
“Seven-oh-seven,” Mateo answered him. “We will have to, um...go somewhere
else at the end of today, but I can program my nanites to execute the
repairs and upgrades in the meantime. If you’ve been piloting it, you must
know enough to be able to tell when it’s done, and ready to go. It should
only take a few weeks, but if you leave, we may never see each other again,
because we won’t know where you are.” That wasn’t entirely true when they
had their new little map, but they didn’t need to know about that, or the
slingdrive technology in general, which was orders of magnitude faster than
even maximum reframe.
“We would be grateful for that,” Renata said. “In return, we can tell you
where Castlebourne is, if you forgot. It’s in our logs.”
“Nah, if you left twenty or so years ago, it will have moved since then.
We’ll have to locate it ourselves. But that’s fine. We’ll figure it out. I
have a general idea”
“Could I be so bold, sir, is there a way to get our hands on whatever
technology you have that lets you, umm...miniaturize yourself into a tiny
little baby ship?”
Leona smiled. “I’m afraid that secret must remain with us.”
No comments :
Post a Comment