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Nothing interesting happened by the end of the day in 2543, except for some
unusual environmental readings that Ramses was getting, so they made plans
to leave. To give Romana time to finally come to a decision for where they
were going to go next, and to maximize the time they had to actually do
that, they decided to wait a year to leave. Those unusual readings turned
out to only be the start. When Trinity Turner founded this colony, she did
so with the benefit of future knowledge. She knew how much work would go
into making it habitable for humans, so she continued to travel through time
to make it happen. She had the ability to transport anywhere that she could
see. This could be as short as the other side of the room, or as far as
across intergalactic voids.
Because light travel wasn’t instantaneous, when she looked at a distant
star, she was looking into the past. Indeed, this was how it worked for
everyone. This meant that Trinity could end up as far into the past in years
as her destination was away in light years. But she could also just land in
the present, if she so chose. It was a fluke of her ability that no one
could explain, but she did not take it for granted. For untold amounts of
time, she would jump back and forth, ferrying experts from the timeline to
help terraform this world. One thing that they never understood was the
gravity. It was the biggest mystery in space colonization that people kind
of did take for granted. The only reason it hadn’t been the top headline
every day for the last 300 years was because a sort of religion formed
around it. Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida was a very spiritual place. Science
wasn’t outlawed by any stretch, but it just wasn’t done. Even though the
implausible gravity couldn’t be explained, people were simply not putting
that much effort into studying it. Not even Leona truly knew how Trinity did
it. But perhaps she should have asked, because things were going wrong now.
“So, is it going to hurt when we teleport outside?” Olimpia asked.
“We’re fine,” Ramses assured her. “I designed our bodies to withstand a lot
heavier gravity than this. It could go all the way back up to where it
should be, and we would still be all right, but will it stop there? I don’t
know. I don’t know what’s causing it, because I don’t know where the
artificial gravity comes from.”
Leona was looking at the data. “It did not increase suddenly, or a lot of
people would be dead, but it’s been rising all year.”
“Actually, it’s been rising since we arrived,” Ramses corrected.
“The whole planet?” Mateo asked.
Ramses sighed. “Yes, but not evenly. I hesitate to call this region the
epicenter, because it appears to move anisotropically, but...um...” he
trailed off.
“But it’s us,” Leona finished what he was unable to say. “We’re the cause.”
“I don’t know how, but I don’t see any other plausible trigger,” Ramses
agreed.
“Should we leave then?” Romana offered.
“The damage is done,” Ramses explained. “I believe it was our arrival with
the slingdrive. We interfered with the natural order.”
“There was nothing natural about this,” Leona told him. Everything
artificial requires maintenance. Hell, natural processes experience constant
change. We call it entropy.”
“Whatever was keeping this planet human-compatible, we interfered with it,”
Ramses argued. “Natural or no, it’s our fault, and I don’t know how to fix
it.”
“We’ve been to a ton of places with the slingdrives,” Marie put forth.
“Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
“We’ve never been anywhere with planetwide artificial gravity,” Angela
responded.
“Yes, we have,” Leona said. “We were just on Varkas Reflex. That’s where
this tech was born. Hokusai Gimura invented it while she was living there.”
“Well, we can’t just pop back there and see how they’re doin’,” Ramses
reasoned. “That could make it worse for both worlds. I’m calling it, no
sling travel until further notice.”
“We don’t have to go there physically,” Romana contended. “Let’s just read
the news.” She created an interface on her wrist with her nanites, and
connected to the quantum network. No one else did the same, they just
watched her as her face fell. “It’s happening there too. It’s further along.
They’ve consolidated to certain buildings which apparently have their own
gravity generators, but most of the surface has become inhospitable to
normal human life. Fortunately, there aren’t many of them left anyway. A lot
of people are as sturdy as we are.”
“But these are two of the four main hubs for human colonization,” Leona
pointed out. “Proxima Doma is the closest to Earth, Bungula and Bida have
been terraformed. Regular humans love Varkas Reflex’s VR. In fact, after
Doma fell, a lot of people started migrating to the other three.”
Mateo looked at his wife. “Well, out of all of us, Leona, you were the only
one on Varkas when Hokusai created artificial gravity. How did she do it,
and could it be the same way they did it here? Did she give it to Trinity?”
“I don’t see how,” Leona replied. “It’s not genuine artificial gravity. It’s
transdimensional gravity. You open a two-dimensional portal to a
region of space with lower gravity, and set it in superposition just under
the surface of wherever you want to stand. When I was there, they were
struggling to build single buildings with efficient gravity regulators.
Evidently, they have expanded across the globe, but that should have taken
years at best. This planet had it as soon as we landed, only a few
years after we left Varkas. It’s just not possible.”
“Unless you account for time travel,” Marie reminded her. Trinity might have
conscripted Future!Hokusai for help a decade or two in the past. That was
her whole modus operandi back then, wasn’t it?”
“That’s true,” Leona admitted.
“It sounds like we need to find Trinity,” Olimpia determined.
“We need to find Trinity and Hokusai,” Marie added.
“No,” Leona began. “Ramses and I can do this. We can fix it.”
“No, I can’t,” Ramses argued. “I’ll just screw it up, like I have everything
else.”
“We can…together,” Leona reiterated.
Ramses just shook his head.
“You said it was happening anisotropically,” Leona went on. “Let’s map that.
However Trinity lowered gravity here, she didn’t do it by magic. There must
be something changing the gravity, and also maintaining it, so let’s find
whatever it is, and repair it.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Ramses, no moping,” Mateo ordered. “Let’s get to work.”
“Let’s?” Ramses echoed.
“Well if you’re so dumb that you’ll screw this up then I might as well help
you, because I’m dumb too,” Mateo reasoned, completely aware that this did
not make sense.
“Well, I mean...it’s not really that—”
“Not really what? True? Oh, you might be on to something. Maybe you and
LeeLee should just try without me, see what you find.” He shrugged. “Start
there.”
Ramses sighed. “Okay, I’ll make a map.”
The normies stayed in their shared space while the smart ones went into
Ramses’ lab. They only had to be in there for less than an hour. “We’ve done
it,” Leona announced as they came back in. “The gravitational failure is not
random.” She threw up a hologram of a globe of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. They
are centered on these thirty-two evenly spaced locations.” Chevrons appeared
on the surface, all around the planet.
“Actually, they’re specifically outside of these points,” Ramses
clarified. “These particular spots are suffering less than elsewhere
when it comes to the gravity issues. Fortunately, we noticed that they
coincide with population centers. Which we found interesting and alarming,
because Trinity could not have known where people would settle. But then we
realized—”
“He realized,” Leona corrected.
Ramses smirked. “They’re not random either. If you zoom in to any of these
points, you will find sacred ground. Trinity chose these thirty-two sites,
probably to some degree of randomness, but well-distributed for maximum
efficient coverage across a sphere. In math, it’s called the spherical
covering problem. If they use transdimensional gravity—which is the only
means of artificial gravity that I know of—it stands to reason that
the regulators were installed in these places. And since there appeared to
be preexisting infrastructure when the first colonists showed up, they....gravitated
towards them due to their significance. So their religious interpretation
did not come out of nowhere. There’s something there, probably underground,
but also probably detectable.”
“Gravity is failing all over the world due to some unknown issue with these
regulators, but it’s going to fail closer to the regulators last,”
Leona finished.
“Do we know the cause?” Marie asked them.
“Well, it’s not us,” Leona argued. “Rambo, you’re off the hook. It was
happening before we showed up, for a few years. We just didn’t know, because
it started in more remote regions, and we didn’t look up the news. People
have actually been migrating because of it, and the problem has just now
reached this area. No one has been doing anything about it, because they
don’t know what to do.”
“What can we do?” Mateo asked. “There are thirty-two sites. Is one of
them the central command maybe?”
“Not that we can tell,” Leona replied. “I wouldn’t think so anyway. We might
be able to interface with all of them if we go to one. We’ll know more when
we get down there.”
Romana suited up with shiny body armor, showing her usual amount of cleavage
that Mateo didn’t like. “Then let’s get on it. Boot ‘n’ rally!” She
disappeared, only to return a few seconds later. “Sorry. Sync up ‘n’ rally!
I’ve already chosen the chevron.”
They followed her to the site she had picked out. Ramses began to sweep the
area to find the signal that would lead them to where they were actually
trying to go.
“Guys,” Romana called out from around the bend of the cliff that they were
next to. “You should see this.”
They all went over there to meet her. She was staring at the cliff face,
where a gargantuan stone monument had been embedded in it. It was at least
two stories tall, perhaps three.
MATEO MATIC MEMORIAL ESCARPMENT. HE LED A LIFE OF LIFTING OTHERS. HERE HE
FELL. NOVEMBER 18, 2256. Below the words was a non-volumetric hologram of
Mateo Matic himself,standing tall and looking outwards at an angle. It made him
seem like some kind of hero head of state; like he was a modern-day Abraham
Lincoln. It made him feel rather uncomfortable.
“Jesus,” Angela said in a breathy voice.
They all stared at it for a moment, but then shifted their gazes to Mateo.
“I didn’t know they put this here,” he said.
“Me neither,” Leona concurred.
Romana reached out and took her father in a hug. He kissed her on the
forehead.
Ramses’ wrist sensors beeped. “Sorry. That just means it found it.”
Mateo turned away from his monument. “Then let’s go.”
“We can wait a moment,” Olimpia suggested, taking hold of his arm.
“That won’t be necessary.” As Mateo continued to walk away, her grip slid
down his arm, into his hand, and then back out of it.
“Are you sure?” Ramses asked.
Mateo glanced at his friend’s interface. “Yes.” Then he teleported to the
coordinates. He was in an underground lab now. The transdimensional gravity
regulator stood before him. That was what he assumed it was anyway. He heard
the erratic hum of fluctuating power. It was trying to hold on, like a dying
lightbulb. Each time one of the others appeared, the machine reacted with a
surge of energy. “Wait, don’t come yet! Just hold on!” he cried into his
comms, but it was too late.
Once Romana appeared, a wave of light spread out from the machine and
engulfed them all before they could teleport away. It was blinding, even for
them with their advanced substrates. It took a couple of minutes for their
vision to return. They were no longer underground, but in a high desert.
Shrubbery kissed their feet. There were buttes scattered about in the
distance. And a beetle. An absolutely gigantic beetle, towering over them,
but paying them no mind. “Whoa,” Romana said as it slowly skittered past
them.
“Who are you?” came a voice behind them. They turned around to find a gun
pointed in their general direction.
“We’re not here to hurt anyone. You don’t need that,” Mateo told the
stranger.
“Teleportation is highly regulated. So who are you?” he repeated. When
they started to introduce themselves, he put his weapon away. “I’ve heard
of you, you’re okay. I’m sorry for the mix-up. Welcome back. My name is
Lycander Samani.”
“Welcome back where?” Leona pressed. “Where are we?”
“Castlebourne,” Lycander answered, “specifically, Gientodome.”
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