Spaghetti West: Childhood’s End (Part V)

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The mysterious local ship or space station was wasting time and resources trying to fire on Sugar’s ship. She had no offensive measures of her own, save for the hot pocket, which was currently empty because up until this point, they had no reason to conceal their heat signature. The defensive measures, however? Well, those were stacked to the ceiling. It was designed with an EM shield, a TP field, and a GD yield. The first one was the most common. Every interstellar vessel needed to have it, or compensate for it with an extremely robust—and costly—physical hull. The teleportation field was simple enough, but at the very least, it required knowledge of temporal manipulation in the first place. The geodesic yield was a different story altogether, and these strangers instantly assumed that Sugar’s ship would not be equipped with it.

The first two defensive methods were no match for extremely high-energy particles, which were sometimes known as exotic particles. They were just too small and too fast. Even an endless supply of power would make the task an improbable proposition. There was an entire star system called Toliman, which colonists avoided due to an unusually high concentration of ultra high-energy cosmic rays. To protect against them, you don’t just have to know about time travel, you have to have an intimate understanding of advanced spacetime mechanics.

The GD yield didn’t deflect these particles, it basically just moved out of their way. It warped spacetime around the ship, so that when particles attempted to collide with it, they instead passed around the breadth until reaching the other side. From the particles’ perspective, nothing happened—they simply maintained their respective constant vectors the whole time. This was the best way to handle it without going the transdimensional route because it prevented energy exchange, which would be the inevitable result of any means of deflection. Again, even if you had the power to simply swat the particles away, doing so would generate subatomic reactions that could result in secondary damage, especially at scale from trillions of these collisions.

The first thought these strangers had was to beam them with exotic particles. They didn’t ask questions, they didn’t assess the threat, they just fired. And instead of starting small, they went straight to one that most vessels would be powerless to survive. Whoever these people were, they were not nice, and they were not messing around. Someone would have to do something about that.

Sugar could have just stood there and waited them out, but now she was just pissed off. If they wanted to play dirty, she could get creative.

“So what are you doing?” Liselot asked her after Sugar quickly explained how they were able to protect themselves from the onslaught.

“I’m dialing down the GD yield,” Sugar explained.

“Won’t that hurt us?” Liselot pressed.

“It would,” Sugar said, “if I turned it off entirely, but I’m just creating a few billion collisions, the irony being that if they didn’t ever fire, I wouldn’t have any ammo against them. Until they showed up, we had no reason to mask our heat signature, so the heat shunt was off. I’ve now turned it on, and I’m diverting the energy to it. Once it builds, I’ll purge it and fire right back, targeting their weapons array as a warning. Every time they hit us, we’ll hit them back just as hard, like Sebastian Shaw.”

“Is that a band, errr...?” Liselot asked, trailing off.

Sugar stopped. “Where did you hear that?”

“I told you, I’ve never heard of him.”

“No, that phrase, is that a band, errr. That’s a common time traveler phrase. We say that all the time. I didn’t know it had made its way into the general population.”

“I don’t know that it has,” Liselot replied with a shrug. “It’s just something I said. Is it a secret code, or something?”

Sugar sighed and shook her head. “No. Never mind.” She looked back at her screens. “Hot pocket is full; that was fast.” She leaned over the console. “Unless you have any objections, I’ll fire it.”

“Do what you gotta do,” Liselot encouraged.

Sugar pushed the button. Their own energy beam was released from its hold all at once, hitting the supposed enemy so hard and fast that it didn’t have time to protect itself. That was what happened when engineers designed for offense; they sacrificed defense in service to it. They had diverted all of their power to the energy weapons so that their own EM shield was severely underpowered, and practically useless. In seconds, the weapons were disabled, leaving the strangers as sitting ducks.

A console began to beep. Liselot looked over to it. “I think they’re calling.”

“You’re my comms officer now. Go ahead and open a channel,” Sugar requested.

After Liselot did as she was asked, a woman appeared on the main screen. “This is Supreme Chancellor Gentry Ruvow. We attempted to end your lives quickly and painlessly, but you have chosen the difficult route. Please switch off all defensive and offensive systems, and prepare to be boarded. In exchange, my operatives will no longer make it painless, but we will still make it quick. If you resist or attack again, the full force of the Desulforudisian Guard will descend upon you, and nothing will keep them at bay. Respond now with your surrender.”

Sugar smiled. “Supreme Chancellor, we will not be surrendering—”

Gentry immediately closed the channel. The viewscreen turned black.

“This, kids, is why it’s sometimes necessary to bury the lede.” Sugar sighed. “Okay. The global address system we installed so we could reach out to all of Bida. Do you think you could modify it to address the planet down there, whether they call it Desulforudis, or whatever? I need to work on a few other things.”

“Yeah, if you could do it, I can do it,” Liselot agreed.

Meanwhile, a number of ships launched from their space stations, or even from the surface, all heading towards Sugar and Liselot. They would not be able to take them all on. Orbit was no longer a safe place to be. Sugar didn’t understand what these people had against Tau Ceti, but she was going to find out, no matter how much they resisted.

After a few minutes, Liselot said, “I’ve done it.”

“Great. Just in time.” Sugar flung the hardware identifier code over to Liselot’s workstation. “Route communications to this buoy. It’s equipped with its own miniature hot pocket, and can scramble regular radio waves on a quantum level, so they will not be able to trace it.”

“Where are we gonna be?” Liselot asked as she was uploading the new program, and taking the initiative to launch the buoy.

“On the surface. I have a nice little patch of land picked out for it. Well, it’s a building. Brace for minor atmospheric disturbance.” They didn’t need the equilibrium generator again this time, though entering an atmosphere always did throw off the artificial gravity controls, especially if done so quickly. This planet came with a protective teleportation barrier, but she rather easily bypassed it. The natives still didn’t understand who they were up against, and continued to underestimate the two of them.

In a moment, they were parked on top of the Capitol Building, which was where Ruvow was talking to them from. “Reopen the channel to that asshole first, not the whole planet yet.”

Liselot tapped on her screen, then nodded at Sugar.

“Supreme Chancellor? Supreme Chancellor, are you there?” Sugar asked. “Supreme Chancellor, I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re no longer where we were before. If you attempt to fire on us again, you will literally only be hurting yourselves. I suggest you answer so we can work this out. I realized my mistake when I first responded to you. I tried to be nice. I should have started with...I’m not fuckin’ around! Answer the goddamn phone, or I poison the well with your own people!”

Ruvow’s face reappeared on screen. “You insolent little—”

“No, you’re gonna listen to me now,” Sugar interrupted. “You have been sending us black hole after black hole after black hole, and when we show up to put a stop to it, you don’t even apologize? You just try to kill us? What kind of monster doesn’t even take a second to find out if they’re murdering innocent children on a school trip, or a hospital ship? That’s ignoring all the people you tried to kill on my home planet in the first place. I want an explanation, and I don’t want any more threats out of your little mouth.”

Ruvow narrowed her eyes. “We have not been sending you black holes. You have been sending them to us!” She started out calm before devolving quickly by the end.

Sugar shut her eyes in frustration. “Did you ever think that maybe that wasn’t us, and you should ask us about it first? Again, what kind of monster are you?”

“We don’t ask questions,” Ruvow replied. “If someone invades our space, we destroy them. That is our way. We have established ourselves in this system, and that should be enough. Merely being present makes you a threat. I don’t know if I believe the black hole weapons aren’t from you, but it doesn’t matter. Now exit your vessel and surrender to the operatives who are now surrounding you on the roof.”

Sugar pantomimed turning down the volume, prompting Liselot to do it for real. “I’ve heard of these people...total idiots. I thought we sort of bred them out of the population because they kept putting their hands on hot stoves and eating glass, but I guess some managed to survive long enough to invent the aerosol can.” She glanced over at navigation. “I know where we are now. We’re in another galaxy. My people call it Miridir, but you may know it as Andromeda XXI.”

“That is millions of light years away. How is it colonized?” Liselot questioned.

“It’s a long story,” Sugar began, “but this isn’t Dardius, which is the only planet I’m personally cognizant of as being populated here. I’m guessing this is some kind of offshoot faction from there...isolationists in the dark forest.”

“The dark forest hypothesis was virtually debunked centuries ago. If you want to keep people out of your home, you tell them that it’s your home, you don’t make it look available.”

“I know. Like I said, they’re stupid. But they’re also under attack. If they’re getting their own procession of KBHs, our conjecture of natural causes no longer sounds viable.” It wasn’t just happening to Tau Ceti, which meant the black holes were no accident. Only happening at one location? A tragedy, but at least it followed a plausible natural pattern. Many locations, each only experiencing one black hole? Okay, that would be even more believable because of the randomness. But two systems—constant bombardment? That was a directed attack. Someone wanted to hurt Tau Ceti, as well as the Desulforudisians, and perhaps understanding their common thread would tell them who. Who would have motive to destroy them both when the two worlds were millions of light years apart, and had not even heard of each other?

“Volume back up, please,” Sugar ordered. She looked back at the Supreme Chancellor, who was still sitting there, surprisingly patient. “Someone is attempting to hurt us both. We have a saying where I’m from. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“We have a similar saying. It goes, the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. I can have more than one enemy, and do. All are enemies.”

“Well, that’s quite a mouthful but... Suit yourself.” Sugar turned her head. “Lise, open a global channel now. I wanna talk to everyone who lives here.”

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Microstory 2784: He is Not Really Going to Die

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Registration is over. After one more person signs up following Ersence, they lock it down. Now the contenders are waiting for their next instructions. They still have no idea what’s in store for them, or when it’s gonna happen. They just go about their day, and go to sleep that night.

The front door creaks open. It’s the 26th century, doors don’t have to creak if you don’t want them to. Jande’s grandfather designed it to do it because that’s how history taught him. Once the world transitioned to a post-scarcity economy, people stopped having to worry about their neighbors much, but Rolof Ter Avest believed in full immersion. They’re not playing a game here, with their intentionally low-tech lives. Protecting the home has been a tried and true practice for millennia, and it doesn’t have to stop here. The creak means someone is using the door. Jande is so intimately familiar with his home that he can even tell when it’s being opened from the inside or out.

Jande is up and out of bed before the intruders can make it more than a few steps into the house. For a split second, he catches sight of Ersence still fast asleep. He reaches over the headboard and unlocks the shotgun. He swings it around and aims it at his bedroom door just as it’s opening. “Halt or catch fire!” Jande orders.

Ersence is startled awake. She curls herself up against the wall, but isn’t scared.

If the first intruder isn’t backed up then they’re stupid, and they deserve to die. Jande has every right to defend that home. Post-scarcity conventions and virtual immortality diminished the need for violence; they didn’t erase the possibility of being attacked anyway. No court would convict him. So once he sees the figure move another centimeter forwards, he fires at it without hesitating.

The enemy twists backwards when they get shot in the shoulder, though they don’t fall over. In response, they lift their undamaged arm and point towards him. An electromagnet spins up, pulling the gun out of Jande’s hand, along with every ferromagnetic object in the room. A pair of hands takes the first figure by the neck and wrenches them backwards to make room in the doorway. The true threat emerges from the hallway. “This is why we came to you last, because we knew you would make noise.”

Jande hears another shot. The speaking intruder’s head jerks backwards before the rest of his body follows and falls on top of the robot. Jande looks over at Ersence.

“Whoever told you to own a gun made out of metal did you a disservice,” Ersence says. “There’s intentional obsolescence, and then there’s willful incompetence.”

Jande reaches out and takes her wrist. “Come along, darling.” He takes her into the bathroom because the window in there is easier to open.

As they’re slipping out, they hear hushed voices nearby, but Jande can’t tell what they’re saying. This is a full-on assault. The Eyrenlanders don’t want to wait for the Superintendent to decide who takes control over the community because they know the five people they registered are gonna lose. Jande just needs to make it over the border where he’ll find asylum with the Mount Pryce-dwellers. From there, he will take back control of his land, and if he’s the last surviving competitor, he’ll automatically be Superintendent by that point anyway. They just have to stay quiet and stay vigila—

A sharp pain starts on the surface of the skin of his neck before sliding in deeper. It’s a needle...not even a jet injector, but a bona fide 5-centimeter-long needle. Arms gently help him down to the ground as the stars above twinkle off. Someone else is sedating Ersence, and there is nothing that either of them can do about it.

Jande wakes up in a reclined wooden chair. His wrists and ankles are strapped down, and there’s an IV line in his arm. Something is attached to his head, but he can’t tell what it is. It’s somehow both spongy and hard at the same time. He is in a dimly lit room, with whirring machines to his left and an electrical box to his right. Before him is a window, and next to it a nondescript door. As the fog lifts from his mind, he starts to realize where he is. This is an execution room, but a hodgepodge of various methods. All that’s missing is the firing squad and the guillotine. He cranes his neck to look up. Oh, no, there’s the guillotine. Well, at least they have all their bases covered.

The door opens. Several men enter solemnly. The curtains fall away, revealing the audience. His parents are there, having returned from their first retirement location on the edge of Eyrenland, where it’s still green and alive. Other Quiratani are sitting around them, hardened looks on their faces. No one is upset by this. They look robotic.

One of the men is wearing a black hood. He walks over to the electrical box lever and rests one hand upon it. Two men in lab coats go over to the machines to push buttons and take notes. A man in a three-piece suit nods once at the guys carrying rifles over their shoulders. They spread out along the wall and aim their weapons at Jande.

The boss man looks over at a landline phone on the wall, consults his watch, then looks back at the phone. This is some sick reenactment shit, and Jande doesn’t appreciate it. It was a savage time in human history when they did this, and yes, he does recognize that murder wasn’t completely illegal for the vast majority of the timeline.

When the phone doesn’t ring, the man sighs and takes a half step towards Jande. “This be your last moment on Earth, son. Do you have any last words?”

Jande chuckles. “Uhh...ai gonplei ste odon? Or...shel kek nem ron.” Yeah, that’s the one. Let’s get this pinnacle of literal overkill over with.

“Ready!” the man in the suit cries.

The electrician tightens his grip on the lever. The firing squad cocks their guns. The lethal injectors turn one last knob.

“Aim!” the man adds.

Jande’s chair turns down so his neck is directly under the guillotine blade.

“Fire!”

A mask appears in Jande’s field of vision. Someone affixes it to his face. The air inside feels different on his tongue and in his nostrils. He breathes deeply as euphoria floods his whole body, and he begins to drift away. His eyelids bounce up and down while he smiles. The electrician never pulls the lever. There is never any tightness in his arm at the injection sites. The gunmen never fire. The guillotine never falls.

Jande awakens yet again, this time in a bioprinting pod. He pushes the lid away and climbs out. He has transferred bodies before, but he’s not as experienced as some are these days. He stumbles around like a newborn fawn. He manages to make it over to the next pod where he finds Ersence’s new body still finishing being printed. As he makes his way around the room, he sees the other nine contenders in varying stages of the printing process. What the fuck was that all about?

Microstory 2417: Racetrack Dome

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I’m gonna say this real slow. This is a racetrack dome, which means there are...racetracks. That’s all it is. It’s hundreds of racetracks just all over tarnation. A racetrack here, a racetrack there. There’s even a track that runs the entire circumference of the dome, which is something like 260 kilometers. That sounds boring to me, but hey, you do you, right? I would much rather stay close to the inner tracks. They’re so much more interesting. The vehicles are electric, obviously, but they’re also electromagnetic. This allows them to do all sorts of crazy stuff, like drive up the wall, or even do loop-de-loops. There are jumps and shortcuts, and drops into rivers of lava. Yeah, this particular dome was chosen for its proximity to a volcano. The volcano isn’t inside the dome, and if there were ever an eruption, there are safeguards in place to seal off the lava flow, and protect the dome. But as long as everything’s copacetic, it’s there. Plus, they have clear emergency procedures in place. I mean, this hasn’t actually happened since I’ve been here, so there’s no way to know how effective their plans are, but they claim to be ready. Of course, the lava they do have is dangerous, as are all of the other tracks. Well, almost all of them. They have bumper cars, and some go-kart tracks too, for the kids, or people who want something a little lighter. If you do get hurt, and don’t want to just jump your consciousness to a new body, they have excellent medical teams on standby. I was never injured, but I did walk in once to find someone having just crashed on one of the traditional intermediate tri-ovals. I heard the collision from the corridor, and by the time I rounded the corner, they were already loading the driver into an ambulance. I asked after him later, and he’s fine; didn’t even have to switch to a new body. I can’t even begin to describe what other kinds of tracks they have here, but if you’ve ever played a racing video game, they’re pretty much all recreated here. They don’t have boats, planes, or spaceships, though. Man, people kept asking about that. I’ll say again, it’s a racetrack dome, not races in general. Look for that in another dome. I’m sure they’re somewhere. I see all these negative reviews from morons who are disappointed when the name alone tells you everything you need to know. Just think it through, and you’ll be pleased with what you find.

Microstory 2335: Vacuus, January 31, 2179

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Dear Condor,

Father has not yet written to me. It’s fine, I’m not disappointed. I don’t know him at all, so I can’t know what I should expect out of him. I just wanted to give you an update before it happens that I’m going to be out of communication range again. It won’t be too long, but it’s out of my hands. You see, when researchers first discovered Vacuus, they thought to send probes here before they sent people. Unfortunately, they lost contact with these probes, and were never able to gather much information about the planet. They obviously decided to just send a manned-mission without enough information, and that’s because the ship they were using was self-sustaining. If, for some reason, it wasn’t possible to reach or land on the surface, it wasn’t like a death sentence. We could have been living on it this whole time. It’s still orbiting us right now, and people regularly go back and forth. I could have gotten a job up there instead. In fact, I told you that I’m the only one doing what I do, but that’s not technically true. Someone is up there right now, using their own instruments to track nearby cosmic events. They just don’t do it for the same reasons, and have other responsibilities. It’s not for safety, they’re mostly studying the effects of deep space survival as it pertains to remoteness from the host star. I kind of forget about them, because we don’t really interact. Anyway, that’s not really important. The point is that, once we arrived here, we discovered why communication with the probes stopped working. It’s because of a periodic meteoroid shower called the Valkyries, which causes a blackout. These meteoroids are very close to one another, and interconnected via weak, yet still impactfully disruptive, electromagnetic fields. It has to do with the ferromagnetic composition of them, and the occasional electrostatic charge that builds up when they scrape against one another. This can last for years, but it’s a relatively rare event, and has only happened twice since Earth sent the probes. What’s not all that rare is when one of these meteors becomes dislodged from the shower, and we end up between it and all its friends. If we’re in the right position, it’s pretty as it’s streaking across the sky, but it’s problematic too. We don’t always know when it’s going to happen, and we don’t always know when it’s going to affect us, but it too knocks out signal transmission, though for a much shorter period of time. Our astronomers have devoted most of their careers to studying these phenomena. At first they thought that the shower was falling apart, but they now believe that the stray meteoroids eventually find their way back to the shower. Earth is aware that this is going to happen, and have upgraded their protocols to account for it. So if you send a message, it will end up being stored in a nearby buffer until the relay station receives word that signal transmission has been restored. I’m sorry to spring this on you so last minute, but if you reply, I doubt that I’ll receive you for a while. Please let your father know as well, thanks.

Hopefully not for long,

Corinthia

Starstruck: Phase Two (Part III)

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The year: 2283. After traveling at maximum reframe speeds for 33 years, they were at the new antistar. Like the first one, it was located in the intergalactic void, which was the safest place for it. If any particle from it encountered any particle of regular matter, they would annihilate each other. Fortunately, there is really no such thing as an antiphoton, or simply seeing the light emanating from an antistar would destroy you. They were orbiting at a safe distance, but keeping their EM shield up at all times for safety. They sacrificed less essential systems, like lighting and life support. Belahkay could survive by limiting himself to a small section of the ship, and he was posthuman enough to manage with less than an OG human. The other three didn’t need much at all.

Photons were not the only particles that came out of stars, and those would be quite dangerous. That was why the antistar was so lonesome. Any one that tried to form closer to other celestial bodies would end up being annihilated sooner or later. Being that the universe was created over fourteen billion years ago, the chances of an antistar surviving inside of a galaxy were low, and the probability would only decrease.

During the ride over here, all four of the crew stayed in VR stasis pretty much the whole time. This left their normal substrates in dormant, energy-saving mode—or in Belahkay’s case, metabolic suspension—but their minds active. They spent most of that time constructing new simulated worlds in a shared virtual environment. They could theoretically connect themselves to the quantum grid, and interact with other people in the galaxy, but they didn’t want to risk leading people to this region of the Milky Way. Yeah, anyone capable of traversing these vast distances in any reasonable amount of time would almost certainly be a part of the time traveler underground anyway, but there was no reason to put anyone in any unnecessary danger. The Exins had the ability to form portals between stars, like the one they used to maintain a connection between the original antistar, and Alpha Centaurus B, so that was another reason to leave everyone else out of the line of fire.

As far as the Exins themselves went, the crew tried to learn more about them, and how they came to be this far out from Earth, but they were not able to learn much. They tried to hack into their communications system, but there didn’t appear to be one. Surely their escort vessel has some way to maintain contact with the rest of their empire, but their means of accomplishing this was not readily apparent. That escort ship occasionally pinged the Iman Vellani to make sure that it was still on course, and of course, it always was. They made no attempt to escape, and that was partly due to the fact that none of them had seen an antistar before, and this may be the only opportunity to get up close and personal with one. One thing that their escorts did decide to tell them was that both of the two antistars they managed to locate were incredibly unstable. This could be for any number of reasons, ranging from the possibility that antimatter itself was inherently unstable in mass quantities, to just the fact that some stars were less stable than others. On cosmic timescales, a star dying out after a few millions years would certainly be something to write home about, but it could be quite common in the world of anti-celestials. There just wasn’t enough known about them.

“Yep. That is an antistar,” Mirage said admiringly. “I can’t believe I’m seeing one. She’s beautiful.”

Belahkay pointed to a blip on the screen. “What’s that over there?”

Sharice stepped forward, and zoomed in. “Holy shit, it’s a planet. It’s a gas giant.”

“That’s so unlikely,” Mirage noted. She looked through the data as well. “I think...I think it’s made of antimatter too.”

“An antiplanet,” Brooke mused. “In every sense of the word. You could send that hurtling through space, and completely annihilate any target you wanted.”

“By you,” Mirage figured, “you mean these Exins.”

“We should be quite worried about that,” Brooke confirmed. “They might be able to do it with the star itself anyway, but it’s so powerful, I think they probably want to keep it on hand for their regular needs. An antiplanet might seem like a tolerable sacrifice as a single projectile against a major enemy. It could decimate an interstellar-based civilization. How would you stop it once it was on its way?”

“What are we talking about here?” Sharice asked. “Are we going to destroy it?”

“We could throw it into the sun,” Belahkay suggested. “We would just be adding to their antimatter stockpile, not taking anything away. They appear to be more interested in staying hidden than picking a fight with outsiders. If we do this, and they argue, how might they explain why they’re so mad about it if not to use it as a weapon?”

“As Mirage has pointed out, they’re holding the cards,” Brooke began. “They may not feel obliged to explain why they wouldn’t want us to destroy the antiplanet, or they might go ahead and admit that they would like to keep it as a weapon, because they don’t think there’s anything we could do to stop them.”

“They’re wrong,” Mirage declared.

“We know that, but how could we convince them that we’re not just going to roll over and do whatever they want without making any decisions?” Brooke questioned.

Mirage nodded slightly as she was thinking about it. “Destroying the antiplanet. That will send the message that, just because they’ve demanded we do something for them, and that we’re actually going to do it, doesn’t mean we’ve lost all agency.” They spent much of their time during the last 33 years debating whether they would go through with this at all, and they settled on doing it, instead of running. Again, this might be a once in an eon opportunity, and while the Exins may have control over it now, that might not be so true in the future. Based on Mirage’s once-godlike knowledge of the future, other, far more powerful civilizations, would be stepping on stage relatively soon. The Exins were probably still nothing compared to the likes of the Fifth Division, and the Parallelers.

“The Iman Vellani is impressive,” Sharice admitted. “But I’ve been up and down its systems, and it can’t move a planet, let alone an antiplanet.”

“This isn’t something that’s going to be done tomorrow. While we’re constructing the containment rings, we’ll also construct a modified stellar engine, fitted with a forward-facing EM generator to push the planet.”

“Ah, it’s a test,” Belahkay realized.

“What? They’re just testing us?” Sharice asked him.

“No, moving the planet can be a test. It’s small, we can argue that it’s insignificant. We need to make sure that it’s both possible and feasible to engineer the rings, and one way we could do that would be to build this modified stellar engine first. So when they ask us why we’re doing it, that’s our excuse.”

“They already know that it works,” Mirage explained. “They devised the rings in the first place, for use around the first antistar.”

“We didn’t see that,” Belahkay contended. “They didn’t send us any data from the operation of the original rings. All we have to go on are the specifications for the rings themselves. Nothing about that proves that they actually function properly. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to let us test the technology out with a prototype first. It shouldn’t take up any extra time. Like you’ve said, this is all going to be automated. It’s not like we’re building it brick by brick. We’ll program some robots to build the rings, and others to build the prototype simultaneously.”

A call came in. It was Ex-10. “That’s enough gawking. Now that you know we’re telling the truth about the antistar, please proceed to the nearest regular star system for your raw materials, and begin processing immediately. You only have about a century to get it done.”

“We have a hundred and fifty years,” Mirage argued.

“That’s not what we agreed upon.”

“The time hasn’t started until now, upon reaching the star for initial inspection and observation,” Mirage insisted. “You’ll agree to this, or you’ll have nothing. We’re prepared to die on this hill, and we’ll take as many of you with us on our way down. Then you’ll have to build it yourselves. Sounds like a lot of work. You’ll still be over two hundred years ahead of schedule, so stop complaining, and let us do what we do.”

There was a long pause before Ex-10 replied. “Very well. Be finished by 2434. I tacked on an extra year as a sign of good faith.”

Mirage took a beat before responding too. “We appreciate that.”

“Sending you the coordinates to the nearest second star system. We recommend you cannibalize it for your self-replicating machines. We assume that’s how you’ll gather the reset of the raw materials for the rings. That’s how it was done the first time centuries ago.”

“I’m sure we’ll do something similar,” Mirage agreed, “but faster.”

“We look forward to it,” Ex-10 said before he hung up.

“All right!” Mirage clapped her hands together. “Do work, son.”

It took them about three weeks to get to the staging star system using the reframe engine. The yellow dwarf that was not unlike Sol was located on the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy. It was here that they built more than two thousand nanofactory ships out of an orbiting asteroid field. Each of these ships had their own reframe engine, so they could go out to other nearby star systems. Some of them had to travel as far as fifteen light years, but that only took them around a week. Bringing all of the materials back was going to be the big chore here. The reframe engine was not something that could be scaled very well. It wasn’t constrained to a single size, but there was still a limit to it, and the mass of a terrestrial planet was well beyond that limit. Even so, each was only responsible for that one system, so the automators only had to build celestial thrusters for themselves. These were giant rockets that propelled the planets through space. While they couldn’t get back to the crew in only a week, they were able to accelerate to high relativistic speeds. The whole second phase of the project only took 50 years, which wasn’t too bad considering. This would leave them with 100 years.

Since the specifications for the rings were already done, this plan was decided upon over the 33 years that it took them to arrive in this region of space. Everything was correct, and ready to go. Those automators worked smoothly on their own, sending back periodic updates, and error reports. In the meantime, they learned that they needed something else. There was one component that could not be found around any old star. In fact, it was only on one planet. And that planet...was inhabited.

< > Entire Story

Starstruck: When Antistars Align (Part II)

< > Entire Story

Generated by Google Workspace Labs text-to-image Duet AI software

They couldn’t see anything, but they could feel it. The inertial dampeners could only do so much to protect them from the shaking ship. Mirage ran over to release an emergency crash cocoon for Belahkay, since he was in the most danger from all this mayhem. It wasn’t long before it was all over, though. The Iman Vellani’s EM shield managed to protect them from the massive matter-antimatter annihilation that was supposedly going on all around them. Maybe they overestimated how bad it was going to be. It would certainly explain how it was at all possible for them to survive. They were drifting through space aimlessly, but apparently safe now, so they raised the viewport shutters to get a look at what had happened.

Belahkay tried to say something, but was muffled by his cocoon.

Mirage lifted her palm in front his his face. She tapped her index finger and thumb together. Then she tapped her middle and index fingers together. She continued down the line to show him how to escape from the bubble. He mirrored the steps, successfully deflating the bubble. “What were you trying to say?” she asked.

“How do I get out of this thing?”

Mirage smiled, and went back to the console. “Preliminary readings coming in. We’re definitely not in Toliman space anymore. The stars are all wrong.”

“Could we be in the wrong time period?” Sharice asked. She looked over at her mother to see if she was wearing her umbilical cord necklace, which she would need if she wanted to travel through time.

Brooke guessed at her inquiry. She slipped her thumb underneath the chain, and pulled out the pendant to show her that time travel was a possible explanation.

“Impossible,” Mirage said. “The stars are too wrong for even that. They’re too far away. I mean, we could still be in the wrong period, but we’re nowhere near the stellar neighborhood anymore, that’s for sure.” She stopped, and looked up for answers on the ceiling. “Topdown.” Project Topdown is a special endeavor that Earth created in order to map and understand this local region of the universe. Two arrays of eleven telescopes each were sent off into the voids on either side of the Milky Way. They each had their own mandates, but combined, they should be able to tell the entire story of the galaxy, and beyond. It was launched from the Gatewood Collective about ten years ago. The data wasn’t accessible by most people yet, especially since there wouldn’t be much information to pick from at this time, but the relevant time travelers were given VIP early access. She shook her head. “We’re farther than even they can see.” She sighed. “Let me try to find Sagittarius A-star.” She kept fiddling with the instruments.

“Hey, guys?” Belahkay was looking through a side viewport, trying to get a better angle on what he was seeing.

Sharice was the only one to take notice. “What is it?”

“Hell. If I. Know.” He stepped back to let her see.

“Holy crap that thing is big.”

“Yeah, I see it now. Or rather them.” Mirage had gotten control of attitude for the most part, but they were still drifting. The profoundly gargantuan megastructure was now visible through the forward ports as well. “I’m scanning it too. Three nested rings. We’re on a trajectory to crash into one of them in the next couple of days, assuming they don’t start moving, which I believe they are supposed to. They look like an aerotrim.”

“What are they?” Brooke asked.

“A threat.” Mirage turned away from the controls. “I found our black hole. I know where we are. We’re around seventeen thousand light years from Toliman, on the top edge of the galaxy, looking down at the spirals from the void.” She waved her hand towards the floor, and made it disappear behind a hologram. There it was, the galaxy from a short distance. “This shouldn’t be here. We’re in trouble.”

“What makes this a threat, knowing where we are?” Belahkay asked.

“We’re too far from civilization to be seeing signs of civilization,” Mirage began to explain, “especially of this magnitude. I don’t know the purpose of these rings, but they’re designed to generate a massive electromagnetic field, and there’s something very familiar about the data from my scans.”

Sharice stepped over to the console to look over the data herself. After a few minutes, she figured something out. “Antimatter. It’s a giant antimatter containment field. And by giant, I mean the size of a star.”

“Oh my God,” Mirage said. “It was a star. It was an antistar.”

“I thought those were just a myth,” Belahkay said.

“We never really knew. From the outside, they look like regular stars, or we assumed they would. Even these days, scientists haven’t figured out how to tell for sure that they’re looking at an antistar, and it’s not particularly an area of interest for me. I can tell you that, due to their very nature, they would have to be like this, distant from anything else. So not only did someone come all the way out here long before they ought to be, they found the first confirmed antistar in the universe, and engineered a way to contain it. I sure would like to determine who the hell they are.”

“What was its connection to Toliman?” Sharice questioned. “That’s obviously why it’s been destroyed, because there was some kind of link, which became unstable, and led to their mutual annihilation.”

“We did this,” Brooke noted. “We destabilized the link. I don’t know why it was there in the first place, but we set off a few of our own antimatter bombs, and these are the consequences.”

“We don’t have enough information yet,” Mirage said to her dismissively. “The connection to Toliman might somehow be natural, in which case, sorry, our bad. If it was created by the builders of this megastructure, on the other hand, it would be their bad. What did they need with a random orange dwarf thousands of light years away, so close to Earth, and what gave them the right to it?”

Belahkay shrugged. “Let’s ask.”

“Ask who?” Brooke asked.

He pointed. “Them.”

A capital ship was heading right for them from the direction of the nearest containment ring. As it approached, a swarm of smaller ships broke off, and fell into an envelope formation. Mirage zoomed in to get a better look at them. They looked like flying police cruisers, complete with the red and blue flashing lights on the roof. All four of them looked at each other incredulously.

Mirage opened a drawer in the back of the bridge, and pulled out a stylish harness vest. “Take off your top.” Once Belahkay complied, she fitted the vest over his head. “Let me know if you ever want to upgrade your substrate. Until then, this vest mimics some of our most important features, like increased strength, durability, and a little speed. It also has limited teleportation capabilities.”

Belahkay intuitively pulled on the chest straps to tighten them up, and tight they became. He screeched in pain as a surge of energy rippled through his body. It only lasted for a few seconds, though, and he felt all right again.

“Oh, yeah, it’s gonna hurt a little bit,” Mirage added.

Belahkay rolled his eyes, and struggled to put his shirt back on. “Thanks.”

Sharice helped him secure his clothes over his new superhero suit, and then started to gently massage his shoulders.

The flying police held their position around the Vellani. Once the main ship was closer, a call came in on an open channel. “Unidentified foreign vessel. Please respond.”

Mirage snapped her fingers. “This is Captain Mirage Matic of the Stateless Private Vessel Iman Vellani, go ahead.”

“Please prepare to be boarded. You may make it easier on yourselves by extending an airlock, but it is not wholly necessary.”

“Boarding us will not be necessary either,” Mirage replied to the voice. “I know where we can talk.” She started to do some finger tuts that no one else in the room understood. The last movement featured her fingers tightly pressed against their respective thumbs, and slowly drawn away from their opposites like ripping a piece of paper in half. A section of the Vellani separated itself from the rest of the ship simultaneously, and started to float away. “Teleport into it,” she said to the crew only.

“Better not test your new power in the vacuum of space,” Sharice said to Belahkay after Mirage and Brooke were gone. She took him by the hand, and transported him.

Once they were all on the separated section, Mirage did some more finger tuts. The rest of the Vellani disappeared.

“Is it invisible, or did you teleport it away?”

“Both,” Mirage answered. She snapped her fingers again. “You may dock with my Ambassador Detachment,” she explained. “If you’ll send us your boarding specifications first, I can modify my airlock to accommodate for its unfamiliar dimensions.”

The voice waited to respond. “Very well, but we are not happy about it. We are starting these discussions on a bad egg. You will not be retaining the advantage.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Mirage closed the channel. “What do eggs have to do with anything?”

“Since when were you a Matic?” Brooke asked Mirage accusatorily.

“It felt like I needed a surname, and his was the first I came up with. Mateo and I were very close once. Like, real close.” A long time ago, in an old timeline, Mirage was created with the directive to kill a man by the name of Mateo Matic. He managed to stop her, and she managed to stop herself. She transcended her programming, and they became friends. In a desperate play to save her life shortly thereafter, he literally swallowed some of her composite nanites. It obviously worked, which was how she was still alive today. Brooke and Sharice were not cognizant of this particular story, and Belahkay didn’t know who they were talking about.

“Gross,” Brooke said. She was partially raised by Mateo’s future wife, Leona, and still thought of her as a mother figure.

The visitors docked with the Vellani Ambassador, and came in hot with a police contingency. A man stood amongst them who was clearly in charge. He was one of only two people with a face. The other looked like his lackey. Everyone else was wearing an opaque helmet. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” Mirage asked.

“I am Ex-10. Are you the ones who destroyed the Red Heart of Exis?”

Mirage looked over through the nearest viewport. “Probably.”

“Why?”

“We didn’t do it on purpose. Have you ever heard of Alpha Centauri B?”

The leader guy’s lackey tapped on a tablet. “Origin plus 4.”

“That was our counterstar,” Ex-10 said cryptically.

Mirage emulated clearing her throat. “It wasn’t your anything. It belonged to the stellar neighborhood.”

“We are vonearthans, same as you. We had ever right to channel baryonic particles through the portal at will.”

“You are not vonearthans,” Mirage argued. “You couldn’t be. How did you come to be this far out?”

“Human ingenuity, and the visionary leadership of our Emperor, the Great Bronach Oaksent.” He stood there proudly, clearly under the impression that the crew of the Vellani should bow in fright at the sound of his magnificent name.

“Who?” Mirage questioned jokingly, doing her best impression of Djimon Hounsou’s Korath.

Ex-10 came this close to growling at her.

“I suppose you’ll want to kill us now,” Sharice guessed.

“Don’t give them any ideas,” Brooke warned.

“Oh, as if they needed my help getting there.”

“Silence!” Ex-10 ordered. “You cannot die yet. You must replace what you broke.”

“I’m sorry to tell you, Toliman collided with your antistar through the portal that you created. Those there stars are gone. Destroyed. Kaput. Annihilated.”

“We are aware of how matter-antimatter reactions work. My father’s father’s father’s father was responsible for building the Hearth Rings.” He looked up at the rings in reverence. “We found a suitable replacement. It was going to be our backup Heart, but thanks to you, our plans must be expedited. You will serve the Exin Empire in that capacity until the job is done. If your lifetimes are too short for the job, accommodations will be made to extend your lives.”

“How long did these take to be built?”

“Roughly four hundred years,” he answered.

“Pshaw,” Mirage laughed. “I can do it in two hundred. Hell, hundo-fitty.”

Ex-10 narrowed his eyes at her ominously. “I will hold you to that. But you might want to think about the fact that it will take us roughly 33 years just to get there.” He jerked his head to signal to his men that they could file back out of the room. “We will send you the details, including the coordinates to the new antistar that needs to be protected. Any attempt to diverge from the path will be met with excruciating pain, but not death. You will not be allowed to die until we’re done with you.”

Mirage nodded like that was nothing more than a word of caution, instead of what it really was, which was a major threat.

They waited for the boarders to leave before speaking again. “We’re going to surrender to their demands?” Brooke questioned.

“Just look at them,” Sharice reasoned. “If the way they look and act doesn’t scream bad guys, I don’t know what does. That man had a number, not a name.”

“They’re right,” Mirage explained. “We’re responsible for what happened to their antistar. Besides, I’m a follower of Leona’s Rules for Time Travel. Rule Number Fifteen, don’t antagonize the antagonist.”

“I don’t want to be stuck here for a hundred and fifty years,” Belahkay admitted.

“Don’t worry,” Sharice assured him. “She pulled that number out of her ass.”

Mirage looked over her shoulder at her own ass as if Sharice meant her comment literally. “I don’t know who these people are, or how they came to be here, but there are things I know about the future which no one can escape. When the time comes, the antistar containment rings we build will change hands swiftly anyway. Besides, I like a challenge. As for you, Belahkay, we won’t be doing anything by hand anyway. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, because the robots are the ones who will be doing the actual heavy lifting. You won’t have to do a single thing yourself.”

A nearby console beeped. Brooke stepped over to look at it. “Directions to the new antistar. It’s about 23,000 light years away, deeper into the void.”

Mirage nodded. “Yeah, that’ll take around 33 years with a reframe engine at maximum speed. These people must have access to such tech as well. I find that concerning considering that it was just invented recently. They didn’t even offer us a ride, which means they either know we have one as well, or they presume we do. Either one is bad. I don’t like them being able to scan my ship, and I don’t like the possible ubiquity of the technology.”

“So, what do we do?” Belahkay asked. “What can I do? I’ll be an old man in 33 years. I wanted to have an adventure, not sit on a ship for most of the rest of my life.”

“There’s plenty to do,” Mirage explained. “Don’t worry about aging. We can place your body in stasis, and your mind in a surrogate substrate. Or you can just be in stasis. We can all go dormant for stretches of downtime. We’ll play it by ear.”

“Hold on,” Brooke jumped in. “We’ve not even decided if we should really be doing this. The Vellani can turn invisible and teleport. There must be a way to escape without any hope of them pursuing us.”

“Again,” Mirage began, “we don’t know what kind of technology they have. How about we try to gather more information first? We have a few decades to change our minds. Let’s reconnect the detachment, and start heading that way. Sound fair?”

< > Entire Story

Bungula: Buffer State (Part III)

< > Entire Story

The team of scientists and engineers constructs gargantuan domes on Bungula’s fully coalesced moon, using material from the oblong second moon. They then turn the heat up all the way, and convert the ice caps to liquid water, where they test the dark algae they created in a lab. It fares just as Mirage hoped, rapidly reproducing itself using the energy it collects from the mysterious dark matter, and microbes as a catalyst. Brooke was right to make Mirage test it, though, because it proves to be harder to maintain in its large numbers than they originally thought. This experiment allows them to come up with a better way to make sure the dark algae doesn’t get out of hand, and remain on Bungula’s surface forever. Mirage’s scientists spend what remains of a year studying their creation before transplanting it to the planet.

It takes another good year for the algae to spread across the entire surface, but its impact started months earlier. It produces minimal oxygen as waste, but it’s too thin to breathe. It will remain this way until something is put in place to hold the atmosphere together. The planet already does have a magnetosphere, but it’s weak—though not as weak as the one on Mars—and insufficient for human life. In order to make it stronger, Mirage came up with Operation Buffer State. Her team has been working on it for years, and now that it’s ready, it will turn out to be one of the shortest endeavors.

“They’re giant electrodes,” Sharice points out, looking at the design Mirage’s team created years ago.

“Essentially, yes,” Mirage confirms. “Current flows in one direction, and is resisted by the core of the planet, which heats it up, and gets it moving faster.”

“You’re trying to produce a stronger dynamo effect,” Brooke says, though everyone in the room understands that this is the point.

“Indeed.”

“I thought we already made a magnetic field?” Sharice questions.

“We did,” Mirage agrees. “We placed an artificial field generator between Bungula and Rigil Kentaurus, but that is only a technological solution.”

Brooke laughs. “These are all technological solutions. What else would we use to terraform the planet? Magic?”

Mirage shakes her head. “No, I mean that it’s a permanent tech solution. If we use the generator we have up there—which isn’t entirely working at the moment, by the way, since the atmosphere isn’t holding—then we have to leave it up there forever.”

“What’s the problem with that?” Sharice asked.

“Wait,” Brooke stops, “we’ll circle back to that. It’s not working?”

“It’s deflecting the radiation from the sun, but the atmosphere is still dispersing in space,” Mirage explains. “Radiation stripping particles away is not the only problem an atmosphere has.”

“Well, the algae is lowering the surface’s albedo, but it’s not really designed to generate a full atmosphere. Once we do that, will the magnetosphere still not be strong enough?”

“It could, if we strengthen it, but that’s not what I want to do.” She tries to think of how she wants to word this. “The algae is man made, the domes are man made, and the field generator is man made. Well, they weren’t made by men, but you know what I mean.”

They laugh.

“If aliens were to come to this world, they would see these things, and say, hey, people are, or were, here.”

“Okay...”

“The point of terraforming the world is to be able to remove those things, and the planet still be completely hospitable to life. We won’t need domes when we have a full atmosphere, and the dark algae is only here to warm it temporarily, before we can create a greenhouse gas effect. The plan was never to create an algae world, obviously. Once we’re done, all the vonearthans should be able to pack up every single artificial object—small and large—and then leave it to that hypothetical nineteenth century man we were talking about when this all started.”

Brooke turns her head. “Again, you’re not actually wanting to transplant people from the past, right?”

“Right.”

“And you’re not planning on people leaving, right? We’re building a world for the colonists who all already here; not for someone else.”

“Of course,” Mirage says. “You make me sound like a bond villain. The idea is to  make a world that can support itself, just like Earth is. It doesn’t need humans to survive, so I don’t want Bungula to need them either. That doesn’t mean they’re not sticking around; just that they shouldn’t have to do any work to keep it alive.”

“Have you done your studies?” Brooke asks, like she always has to.

Mirage nods. “This will not harm the planet in any way. It’s not going to cause the mantle to shatter, or set off a global EMP. It’ll happen quickly, too. We’ll know if it’s working or not pretty much right away.”

“I assume you’ve already built these things, haven’t you?”

“I’ve decided that I require your guidance on every dynamic-shifting action. Building them before using them was harmless, however. I won’t activate them if you can give me a reason not to.”

Brooke bites her lower lip in thought. “Welp, I can’t actually see a downside to this. I mean, sure, you could electrocute every conductive being on the planet, but what are the chances of that happening?”

“I could provide you with the chances,” Mirage notes.

“That’s quite all right. I’ll allow you to do this. I understand your logic. First of all, technology can fail, and then this planet is screwed. Even if it doesn’t fail, it makes sense that we wouldn’t want to be totally dependent on it.”

“Good,” Mirage says. “I’m glad we’re on board.”

“I kind of have to be,” Brooke realizes. “After all, this mission doesn’t require us to manipulate time and space in a way the vonearthans don’t understand. This is not true for Operation Icebreaker.”

Mirage was hoping she wouldn’t bring that up. “It would take centuries to bring all those icy planetesimals here if we do it the usual way. We have a solid cover story; I think we’re okay. Speaking of which, Sharice, how is that coming?”

“They’re all on their way. That, along with the factories you’re building, should be enough to produce greenhouse gases sufficient for a healthy, warm atmosphere. We are right on schedule.”

“It’s still strange that we’re causing global warming,” Brooke laments. “I lived on Earth when that was one of our biggest problems.”

“We’ll be able to control it this time,” Mirage assures her, “from the start.”

“I know, I know. It’s still the project that concerns me the most, though. Not only are we using time powers to move the ice closer to us much faster, and not only are we smashing them into a colonized planet, but we’re also hoping we can retain any level of control over it. How can I be confident in that?”

“Just have confidence in me,” Mirage offers, “and more importantly, in your daughter.”

“There is no going back with this one,” Brooke warns. “We could destroy the algae, or shut off the electrodes. But if we realize we made a mistake with those planetesimal impacts, we won’t be able to stop it.”

Mirage places what she hopes will be a comforting hand on Brooke’s shoulder. Brooke isn’t human anymore, and Mirage never was, so touch doesn’t have the same intrinsic utility, yet inorganics continue to do it instinctively. Experts can’t explain why. “We have taken all the necessary precautions, and then some. Nothing is going to go wrong.”

Something goes wrong.

< > Entire Story