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 2776: Jump

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The air escapes the rocket since they have no way of closing the bulkheads. Elise and Zelda strap themselves into the nearest seats as the inertial dampeners either don’t work, or don’t even exist. Elise feels her face collapse into itself as the apparent gravity increases. Back when she was much younger, high gravity training was required for space travel, even if you were just going into orbit. As the technology became more reliable, and redundancies were reinforced, they stopped treating everyone like an astronaut, and the first true passengers emerged. It has been centuries since she’s felt this, and she does not care for it. She turns her head to Zelda, who is, of course, loving it.

Several minutes later, the rocket has made it into orbit. The trembling stops, and the gravity stabilizes. They can finally relax and speak. Elise catches Zelda up on everything she missed after she was presumed dead. Their best guess is that this is not a new timeline, but the same one with more information. The girls sit there together, waiting for something special to happen, but it never does. This is a problem, because while the vacuum suit cartridge has its own carbon scrubber, it’s not the most efficient kind, and is only meant to be used in emergencies. That’s exactly what this is, but they should really get a more reliable source of air if they’re going to be here for a while.

Maybe this isn’t the final challenge, and never was. Maybe it was simply the hardest one yet, and the team has so much more to get through in any timeline. Elise doesn’t even really care about that anymore; she was only trying to save Zelda’s life and memories. If the hunt is going to continue, they have to get the rest of the team back somehow. Short of that, they have to reunite back on the real Castlebourne, and scrub the whole thing. But for now, all they can do is sit here and wait.

“There’s more we can do,” Zelda contends. “This is the same alien language that Colley encountered in the Empty Planet simulation, and the same one we’ve seen pop up every once in a while on this hunt. He figured it out eventually, so we can do the same.”

“Keyword is eventually,” Elise responds. “He beat Empty Planet because language and culture are his thing. I don’t know if we have time. He didn’t teach us.”

“We may as well try,” Zelda reasons. “One of these buttons shuts all of the bulkheads, and another one reestablishes air circulation. Or maybe a few of them, I don’t know, but the puzzle is here, we just have to solve it. We can do this, Elise.”

Elise sighs. “It’s alien. Maybe it doesn’t have the right atmospheric comps.”

“Then we’ll make it work. The hunt would not have led us here if it were impossible. The escape pod is a failsafe to get you out of the game, but you’re not supposed to take it. You’re supposed to be in here, and survive. Whatever we’re waiting to happen, it probably can’t happen until we turn on life support,” Zelda reasons.

Elise nods. “You’re right. There must be a way. The language is translatable.”

And so the girls start trying to understand what they’re looking at. They start by tracing the exposed cables from less dangerous systems to their controls. They figure out what turns the lights on and off, and which buttons open and close the panels. That gives them a baseline for what the alien symbols mean. From there, they incrementally learn what everything on the bridge does. It takes them hours, but they do figure it out.

Meanwhile, they start to understand what the ship is doing on its own. It doesn’t remain in a circular orbit. They’re climbing to a higher altitude. For what purpose, they don’t know, but Delta V will be lower farther from the planet’s gravity well, so it could be preparing to activate an ion drive, or something else, to leave Castlebourne entirely. They can’t let that happen, but none of these buttons says that there is a way to cross back over to the main dimension. The aliens probably couldn’t do that. The Facsimile is just the Custodians’ way of allowing the hunt to take the hunters anywhere in the world without interfering with the normal goings-on. It’s not actually part of the story.”

“Wait, I think this will do something,” Zelda says. She flips a switch.

An alien voice would occasionally make announcements through the speakers, particularly when they made some change. Knowing how to read the symbols, and understanding their spoken words, are not the same thing, so they have never been able to comprehend it. Until now. Now it’s all being said in plain English. Zelda flips the lights on and off a few times to confirm. “Lights on, lights off. Lights on, lights off—”

“Okay.” Elise pins Zelda’s hand down gently. “It works. That was the last piece of the puzzle. Now we just need to wait forty-two more seconds until that periodic announcement we keep hearing triggers again, and finally find out what it’s saying.”

“I think it’s counting down,” Zelda explains. “The second part is always the same, but the first part is always different.”

Elise nods. “That would be my guess too.”

“Eighty-three seconds to reintegration,” the voice says, confirming their guess.

They both widen their eyes. Reintegration? What exactly does that mean?

Eighty-three seconds pass. Sensors start going off. Proximity alert after proximity alert after proximity alert. They look through the viewports to see another space station. They’re fine—they’re not going to collide with it—but they’re clearly back in the real dimension. This is precisely what they were hoping for.

Elise opens her bag and grabs one of the communicators that she packed.

“Activating reframe engines in eleven minutes,” the computer announces.

“Is that the thing that makes a ship move faster than light?” Zelda questions.

“Yes,” Elise replies in a panicky voice. She opens a channel. “Laise, are you there? Please respond, Laise. This is Elise Perkins. Please respond!”

“Laise here, go ahead.”

“Have you been tracking the team? Do you know where they are?” Elise asks.

“Yes, they’re in a highly secure facility,” Laise answers. “I’ve been trying to break them out for an hour. I’m only at Step 2. I could really use your help.”

“If it’s secure,” Elise realizes, “then it probably doesn’t allow teleportation.”

“That was my thinking,” Laise agrees. “That’s why I’m shutting off the power.”

“Good girl,” Elise says. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

“Sending the coordinates now.” A brief pause. “Power will take a few minutes.”

“I can’t jump that far in one go,” Elise explains to Zelda. “I have to start now. She affixes the communicator onto her nanite vacuum suit, and seals most of it up, leaving only the visor open. “You stay here. If you can delay FTL, do it, but don’t stop it.”

“Aye, Captain,” Zelda says. “And Captain,” she adds when Elise tries to turn away. “One more thing.” She takes Elise by the helmet and kisses her passionately.

Elise lets her go and smiles. “I love you.” She drops her visor and teleports away.

Miracle called this burst mode. She can only jump about a thousand kilometers, so the first time she does it, she’s still in the middle of outer space. She immediately jumps again. Then again, and again, and again, until she’s back down on the surface. She’s standing next to Laise now, who is still waiting for Castledome’s power to turn off.

Laise salutes Elise, then shifts her fingers to count down. “Four, three, two, one.”

After all of the lights shut off, Elise picks Laise up, and teleports away.

They’re deep inside the castle now, in what looks like a dungeon. All of their friends are chained up on the other side of metal bars, which Elise is somehow not able to teleport through. They must be on auxiliary power. Azad is here too, dressed in medieval garb, instead of his usual heavily armored IMS unit. He draws his sword.

“I don’t have time for this,” Elise complains. “The ship is about to disappear.”

Azad jerks his head towards another sword leaning against the stone wall. “Then you better hurry. Because I’m the only one keeping that cell locked.” He tenses up.

Elise doesn’t move. She looks over at her friends, who are watching them, but not speaking. She can’t do this. Obviously, if she wins, Azad will either heal in this body, or transmit to a backup. That’s not really even the problem, though she might feel differently if she does put that weapon in her hands. The real issue is that she doesn’t want to transfer. She likes the body she’s in right now, and she was so preoccupied with training that she never went in to duplicate her current DNA. She will lose her wings, she’ll lose teleportation...she’ll lose everything. But her friends need her.

While Elise is frozen like a coward, Laise picks up the sword. She attacks Azad instead, and damn is she good. Elise didn’t take the time to get to know her, or ever ask why Miracle conscripted her for her team in the first place. This might have been the reason, because she is kicking Azad’s ass. He might be letting her win because he secretly wants them to complete the hunt, but he’s making a good show of it at least.

After a few minutes, Laise manages to knock the sword out of Azad’s hands.

Elise runs over to pick it up, because they never do that in movies, and it often leads to a final blow by the villain. She’s not going to use it herself, though.

“Do I have to kill you?” Laise asks Azad sternly, the tip at his neck.

“The gate is on a deadman’s switch,” Azad replies plainly.

Laise nods. She looks away, then quickly drives the blade into Azad’s throat. At his final heartbeat, the gate slides open, leading to hugs and kisses all around.

“Uh, Elise?” Zelda asks through comms. “You better get back here. The ship enters reframe speeds in three minutes. I couldn’t slow it down, or stop it if I tried.”

Elise frowns at her friends. “It’s too late. We’ll never make it in time.”

“We could try to compound our temporal energy,” Miracle suggests.

“I don’t know what that means,” Elise says, though she can hazard a guess.

“We don’t have time to get into it,” Miracle begins, “but when you cross the streams of two sources of temporal energy, it can create a feedback loop, pulling more than they normally would on their own. It’s dangerous, though. We could miss our mark, which we absolutely cannot do since you’re the only one with a vac suit.”

“We have to risk it,” Jolanda decides. “If worst comes to worst, we’ll each end up in our respective backup bodies, and miss the window. I would rather try.”

“We vote,” Rage says. “Raise your hand if you wanna risk it.” She looks over at Laise when everyone raises their hand. “Are you back in? Are you with us?”

“Damn right,” Laise says. “I regretted leaving the second I did.”

“Do it,” Rage says to Elise and Miracle.

There’s really nothing for Miracle to teach Elise. The latter already knows how to build her energy for longer jumps. She’s never been able to reach 8,000 kilometers before, and certainly not with any passengers, but she has the idea. She can feel it. As she’s holding Miracle’s hands, she can feel the power. It’s intoxicating. With every wave of energy, it feels like they’ve reached their limit, but then they let more and more in.

Elise focuses on Zelda again. She is their target. If they can get close to her, they’ll all be safe. The power feels good, but they may be reaching an actual limit, because the pressure is also getting to be a little much. She keeps pushing, though, no matter how much it hurts. They build until their hands are shaking, and then they build more until their whole bodies are shaking. A glowing white light starts bursting from their eyes, and their pores. If they don’t try this now, they could quite literally explode, and since we’re dealing with time travel, they might not all end up in their backups.

Now.

Elise wakes up on the floor. The architecture suggests that she’s back on the alien ship, but it’s nowhere she’s been before. It is definitely not the bridge. She stands up and wobbles a little before catching herself on a chair. She takes deep breaths to regain her balance while she stares at the door. Once she’s ready, she exits.

The others are in the corridor with her, having seemingly just woken up as well.

Minotaur leads them back to the bridge where they find Telman standing there patiently with a cool poker face.

Telman waits for everyone to file in. “Welcome...to Level 2.”

Spaghetti West: The Ark (Part III)

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The second black hole turned out to be far more than a coincidence, and far from an isolated event. They just kept coming after that. Now that Sugar’s sensors were tuned to look for them, they started popping up everywhere. They were appearing all over the system in no apparent pattern. Efforts on the development of the orbital defense grid were redoubled multiple times. All energy was going into building them as fast as possible, focusing almost exclusively on the ionic pulse canons, but she was also sharing her unique sensor suite to predict and detect subsequent intrusions. By the time they were finished, this was going to have to be the densest defense array in the stellar neighborhood—probably the galaxy, even though Castlebourne had that war.

Speaking of Castlebourne, through a chain of contacts, Sugar was able to confirm that these singulararities were Kugelblitz, meaning they were made artificially. She learned that they were not weapons, however, but a vital component of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. This was what solved the mystery of the surface gravity. The planet was a high-density, high-mass terrestrial. These numbers weren’t as high as they could possibly go while still being rocky worlds, but they were too high for baseline humans to survive on. Before even one person stepped foot on it, thirty-two transdimensional gravity generators were installed at even intervals across the globe. Sugar still wasn’t sure who was responsible for them, but they must have been incredibly powerful.

These generators were essentially portals that linked to a different region of space. Specifically, it was a kubelblitz black hole, also known as a KBH. They basically just ignored Bida’s real gravity, and stole the gravity from somewhere else. A couple of decades ago, the owner of Castlebourne resorted to moving their entire star system away from its original spot in the galaxy in order to conceal their location from a violent enemy. They just so happened to move it within spitting distance of the KBH, which disrupted gravity on Bida. They ultimately fixed it, but something was going wrong now. They either didn’t do it correctly, or this was inevitable. Sugar put a call in to the time traveler who solved the problem, but had yet to receive a response.

There were not dozens of KBHs threatening the lives of the Bidans. There was only one, and that one was somehow being duplicated over, and over, and, and over again. She had to believe this was an accident. It was probably how Mirage Matic chose to save Bida, but it had evidently triggered a runaway chain reaction. And Sugar had no idea how to stop it. Her only hope was to keep deflecting them. It had been going on for weeks now, and they were getting pretty good at it. Could they hypothetically do this forever? Probably. While they didn’t appear predictably, their appearances had plateaued. But that didn’t mean it would stay this way. What happened when the duplicate KBHs exceeded the number of lasers in too short a time? What if in all the chaos, they accidentally deflected one of them towards one of their neighbors? What could they do if—

The sensor alarms started to blare. They would go off pretty frequently, but they were particularly urgent this time. The system knew that something was unusually wrong; that it had changed, and she had to shift all focus to the latest problem. “Oh my God,” she whispered as she stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What is it?” Liselot asked. She spent a lot of time up here, having chosen to move her base operations to Sugar’s ship. They now had a crew of dozens.

“We should have been worried about this the whole time. The next KBH. It’s not going to be in space. It’s going to be in the atmosphere.” Sugar desperately started to turn part of the array. They weren’t designed to fire towards the planet, but it was technically possible, as long as the angle wasn’t too steep. The computer was still narrowing down the entry point to a smaller area. The KBH was only millimeters in diameter, so it was hard to know exactly where it would appear. That normally wasn’t so critical, but in this case, it was more important than ever. They only had a few minutes.

“Where?” Liselot began snapping at her people. They knew what she was saying.

“What is this region here?” Sugar asked, pointing at the map. “It looks pretty heavily populated, and unusually densely so for your intentionally minimalistic world.”

“That’s...Eyrenland,” Liselot answered. “It’s the hub for our primary export, eyren. I don’t have time to explain it, but that’s where your friends from Doma Tertia are currently being housed while they figure out exactly what kind of life they wanna lead.”

“It’s about to be destroyed,” Sugar said as she pivoted to something else after syncing the sensors with the canons. They could fire at the right spot if that was what it came too, but if it was as close to the surface as it looked like it was going to be, it wasn’t the right way to handle it. And either way, the people down there were gonna die unless someone did something about it...unless she rescued them first.

“Thousands of people live and visit there every day,” Liselot explained.

“The rest of the planet isn’t safe either,” Sugar warned. “This is going to cause bidaquakes and general tectonic instability all around the world. Send that emergency broadcast over the air. They only have a moment to prepare, at best.”

“Where are you taking us?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar was at the helm now. “We have to position ourselves just above the entry point. I have two things to do. I have to pull everyone down there up here, and then I have to force the KBH back to where it came from.” She flipped switches and tapped on the console.

“What are you talking about?” Liselot pressed. “How can you do that?”

Sugar programmed the route, and made the jump. They still didn’t know the exact altitude, but it would be somewhere around here. “It’s something I’ve been working on since we found out that the KBHs were coming here through portals, and not simply wandering through realspace.” She made a short-range teleport over to the transport workstation. “If this works, I can push it backwards, but as of yet, my ship is the only thing equipped with the right hardware, which...makes this next part tricky, and I need your authorization.”

“You have it,” Liselot replied. “Do what you need to do.”

Sugar shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. The only way to save those people down there is to teleport them all at once. The ship is already remodularizing to prepare for maximum capacity, but once they come up here, they won’t necessarily be safe, because this is also the gun. I’ve not had time to test it, so if I do this, and it literally backfires, it could kill everyone anyway. My emergency transporters can’t move people to anywhere else. It doesn’t have the data to make sure some of them don’t end up in the middle of rocks, or at the bottom of the ocean. They have to come here, but this could quickly end up the most dangerous place to be.”

“Besides the surface, where the black hole is about to show up?” Liselot pointed out. “They’re gonna die if they stay down there, so get them here, and hope for the best.”

“Okay.” Sugar looked over at the sensor readings. “They were now showing how high above the surface the marble-sized singularity was going to appear. It...wasn’t going to be high. She tapped on her comms. “Van! Open the pocket dimensions. Open them all! We can’t fit everyone in realspace!”

“You got it, boss!” Van replied.

While Sugar waited for the internal portals to be activated, she widened the capture radius. Thirty-one seconds from impact, regardless of what the unsuspecting inhabitants were doing on the ground, Sugar teleported every single one of them into the ship, mostly into the pocket dimensions. They would be confused, but they would be alive, and she would try to explain things later.

“Now that they’re clear, can you not just close the portal so the black hole doesn’t come here at all?” Liselot hoped.

Sugar shook her head as she went over and hovered her hand over the button. “If I tried, it would probably make things worse. Think of it like a swarm of biblical locusts trying to fly through a doorway. If you just close the door, they’ll congregate against it until it buckles. You have to slam the door shut so it expels them backwards.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Liselot argued. “A bunch of the locusts would get in anyway.”

Sugar sighed. “Exactly.” She watched the timer count down. Eleven, ten, nine, eight... “This hasn’t been tested. If it doesn’t work...that’s the end of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida.” Three, two, one—

The Kugelblitz black hole popped into existence in the sky. The planet, which up until this point always tried to pull everything towards the barycenter near the core, suddenly had a competing mass to contend with. The trees, the water, the mountains; everything was pulled up towards the singularity. The objects closest to the event horizon were being tugged on more, resulting in them being strung out like spaghetti. The rest of the world tried to implode like a deflating football. The black hole was the heaviest thing around now, so it didn’t stay in one place. It began to fall towards the barycenter. If Sugar allowed that to happen, the whole planet would collapse in a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Sugar fired her new machine directly towards the black hole. It came from somewhere. They still hadn’t traced the source, but it had to form somewhere else in space, and she needed it to go back. As the energy wave reached critical mass, the biomass and geosphere continued to head towards a single moving point. It only took seconds for the KBH to disappear, but the devastation didn’t need long.

In this short amount of time, a land mass the size of a large country was reduced to a crater. All of the plant and animal life there was destroyed nearly instantly. The tremors continued to plague the surface all around as the gravitational disruption’s effects persisted beyond the initial shocking event.

“What did we just lose?” Sugar asked. “What did they use that settlement for?”

Liselot stared at the satellite images showing the barren landscape that once thrived. “Eggs. We lost the eggs.”

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Spaghetti West: The Three-Body Problem (Part II)

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When Pribadium Delgado’s father was seven years old, he was staying with his grandparents while his parents went on a boring business trip in Iowa. Valde loved staying over there, especially since they lived two hours away, making it a rare treat. He was particularly close with his grandfather, because he was a young soul. One thing they loved to do was have the grandfather hold Valde’s hands and spin him around like a helicopter. They would do it all the time in the park across the street. Not everyone was happy about it.

A neighbor was fed up with their fun, so she called family services, citing the danger. Of course, this did not constitute abuse or neglect, but it still meant they had to stop, because the grandfather did not want to antagonize this woman. This saddened Valde, so he begged the grandfather to do it again. They knew the busybody would be watching, though, so they decided to give it a shot in the house, and it did not go well.

Their hands slipped from each other, and Valde went flying through the air. His head slammed against the wall, cracking them both open, and giving Valde permanent brain damage. He got through it, and ended up having a fairly happy life, growing up to have a family of his own. He couldn’t be alone with his own kids until they were old enough to kind of take care of themselves, but he wasn’t abusive, just easily distracted. The grandfather, on the other hand, couldn’t deal with the guilt. After years of heavy drinking, he either fell, or jumped off, a cliff. They were never sure which.

Pribadium’s mother was an astrophysicist, which was what got Pribadium interested in science. Her mother always called the tragedy the three-body problem, likening the grandfather, the grandson, and the wall to celestial bodies. She noted the wonder in the universe, and used the story to teach Pribadium a valuable lesson. Well, multiple lessons, really. The first was social and behavioral, which was obvious. The deeper lesson, however, was about gravity.

Outer space was monumentally huge. Most of it was made up of dark energy, which was basically just another word for space. Baryonic matter only took up a small fraction of the composition, yet...objects struck each other all the time. Galaxies were literally colliding. Thanks to gravity. Gravity was responsible for making life possible. It held things together, where otherwise there would just be a bunch of random particles flying individually through empty space. But it was still good to have space. If Valde and his grandfather had been allowed to swing around in the park, they would not have been so restricted, and Valde would not have crashed into a wall.

Now Pribaidum was grown up, and had been for centuries. Her parents were long dead, and she didn’t know where her brother was. She went by Sugar now, and had an entirely new face, in order to distinguish her from the Pribadium native to this time. Even though she had all of Pribadium’s memories up to a point, she sometimes felt like a brand new person. She could be too blunt about things, and even a little emotionally attached. It wasn’t her fault, news didn’t surprise her as much as it did to others. And she always preferred to just get right down to the point.

“A black hole?” Liselot asked. “A stellaris collapsis?”

“No. Planetary-mass; possibly primordial,” Sugar clarified. She had gone ahead and started constructing the defense platforms to orbit Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, but now she was going to have to halt the process and reprogram them. The basic design was just fine, but ablation lasers weren’t going to work for this situation, and they needed a denser solution to the spherical covering problem; probably dynamic.

“Possibly?” Liselot questioned. “What do you mean? What else would it be?”

“It could be a Kugelblitz,” Sugar answered. “Have you never heard of them?”

“I’m an astronomer, of course I have. It’s only recently become feasible for humanity to make one, though. If someone made it, we would have noticed, because in order for it to be passing through our system right now, it would have needed to form practically in our backyard. So unless you’re suggesting aliens are real... Wait, are you suggesting that aliens are real?”

Sugar had to ignore that question. “I need more time to study it. I still don’t know if it’s charged yet. That will tell me how we deal with it. I need to get closer.”

Liselot shook her head in disbelief. “Oh yeah, sure. Get closer to the singularity that just destroyed a moon and a planet in one fell swoop. Have fun, try not to get spaghettified, don’t forget to bring a towel. Will you be home in time for dinner?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll stay a couple hundred kilometers out. We’ll park, fire a few procession probes, and gather the data. Yes, we will be home for this proverbial dinner.”

“I’m coming with you,” Liselot insisted.

“No, that’s okay,” Sugar offered, knowing that it wasn’t really a request.

Liselot winced. “This is my planet, my responsibility. If you kick me off of your ship, I’ll just get my own, and pilot fish my way alongside you. They’re not expensive.”

Van was walking back on the bridge. “Read her in,” he encouraged. “It’s not illegal for non-travelers to know about this stuff, or I wouldn’t know. Read her in.”

Sugar breathed through her nose and considered it. Liselot was correct, this wasn’t their world. They needed help and approval from someone who lived here, and the Axiom of Astronomy was their best option. It already appeared like they could trust her. So Sugar nodded and cleared her throat to be blunt and aggressive again. “Time travel is real. Some people are born with the neurology necessary to hack the universe to manipulate timespace in one way or another. Others, like me—and now you—fell into the time traveler community.”

“Oh, she’s being modest,” Van says. “Sugar here invented her own, unique form of time travel. It’s entirely incompatible with how everyone else does it. Which means it’s protected from their vulnerabilities.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Sugar argued. “I...my brain connected to a primordial knowledge floating around the universe, from a different universe. It’s like—that’s what the cosmic microwave background radiation is. Someone else invented it, I found it.”

“Like transcendentalism?” Liselot asks. “You know that Bidans are essentially transcendentalists, right? We worship knowledge and science.”

“I didn’t give it much thought,” Sugar replied. “I try to stay away from religion.” She paused in a brief silence. “So you’re not freaking about learning the truth about reality. Do you just not believe it?”

Liselot smiled softly. “Many in our culture suspect that it’s real. In the year 2400, the collective knowledge of the known galaxy exploded unpredictably. I mean, just look at how fast a new substrate can be built on Castlebourne, and the artificial gravity on The Tangent. Actually, it must be the reason for the artificial gravity on our planet. Time travel would explain a ton of these leaps in understanding, wouldn’t it? It vindicated a lot of our beliefs about secret a priori knowledge, and now I’m in the inner circle.”

“Hm,” Van says. “I think she’s all right with it.”

“This is what you were afraid to tell me?” Liselot questions. “I’m sure if you spent time in Victorian England, you might be afraid to out yourself, but I think you’ll find if you’re honest with people in the modern world, they’ll be more receptive and calm.”

“It’s more complicated than that. Telling one person isn’t illegal,” Sugar explained. “Telling everyone is, because it’s a unilateral decision which robs others of consent. There’s a prison. If I were to make a broadcast announcement, they would undo that, throw me in prison, and potentially never let me out. I don’t even have to be the one to make that announcement if there’s a risk that you will, or if you go blabbing to your therapist, and they do it.”

“I understand, I know how to keep a secret,” Liselot assured them. “I’m sure there’s a lot more to know, but I’m guessing you needed to quote-unquote read me in because you’re not just gonna throw procession probes at the singularity.”

“Uh, no,” Sugar confirmed. “We’re gonna get a lot closer than I said. This ship was built with transdimensional shielding, which will protect us from the dangers of high gravity, though we could end up experiencing minor time dilation.”

“I’ve experienced relativistic dilation before,” Liselot says. “I went on a cruise around H-Gimura-11 in my youth. Lost eleven years.”

Sugar smirked. “I personally know Hokusai Gimura, from before she discovered HG-11. She was my mentor; introduced me to all of this.”

“Small world,” Liselot decided. “So are we going?”

Sugar looked over at Vantu and nodded lightly.

He teleported the ship away. “Now orbiting S-Delgado-1.”

Sugar rolled her eyes. “We are not calling it that.”

“We have to,” Van reasoned. “You discovered it.”

“If it’s a Kugelblitz,” Sugar argued as she was calibrating the sensors, “That means they discovered it.”

“I don’t see them here,” Van fired back. “We’ve still not proved it yet anyway.”

Sugar shook her head. “Would you just open the exterior spectrometers?”

They ran the sensors and gathered the data, ultimately confirming that it was indeed Kugelblitz. They didn’t know who made it, or where it came from, but now Sugar knew how to deflect it. Unless it was sent here intentionally as a weapon, they could fire ionic pulses at it, and get it to move out of the system. It only took a few weeks to complete the array, and that was all they did. They scrapped the full orbital defense complement, which was something this planet should have had the whole time. A Kugelblitz black hole was more dangerous than a primordial one. They didn’t have time to protect the globe against all threats. They needed to be offensive, and concentrate their efforts in one spot on the celestial firmament.

It took a couple of days for Sugar to be confident that they had pushed the object clear, so it didn’t cause further damage. If they had shot the black hole head on, each shot would have taken an immense amount of energy to make it reverse directions. By constantly striking it on the edge, they conserved that energy, and used it more wisely. They just wanted to change its course enough so that it moved out of Tau Ceti space. Now that that was done, they could focus on the debris from Qishra. That was their ongoing, long term problem, but it was possible to keep them at bay, especially once they did finally cover the sky in those defenses.

The world rejoiced and partied, and Sugar was happy for them, but then something new came up on their sensors. “This is impossible.”

“What is it?” Van asked.

“It’s the black hole. It’s...back.”

“So it is a weapon,” Van determined. “Someone’s controlling it.”

“I don’t see how,” Sugar argued. “We should be able to detect them, and what would be the motive?”

“Should we call Liselot?”

Sugar sighed. “She has a right to know. Just give me one moment to check something.” She frowned at the screens as she waited for her long-range sensors to respond. Her eyes widened when the information came in.

“What? I don’t understand what I’m seeing here.”

Sugar looked up at Van hovering over her shoulder. “That’s what you called S-Delgado-1.”

“Oh, okay.”

“It’s moving away.”

“Oh, so false alarm. We’re good.”

While still staring at him, Sugar reached up and tapped the screen to switch to a different readout. “If we’re sticking with the same naming convention, we might have to name this one S-Delgado-2.”

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Microstory 2723: Not Part of the Plan

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Pribadium always keeps an excess of nanites for such occasions. She releases enough to encompass Sora in a vacuum suit, as well as herself. When he takes her hand, she teleports them into orbit. The two Teaguardian ships here are powering their weapons, and it will do enough damage to the planet to still kill the two of them. She has cleared the signal jammer, so her consciousness has begun streaming to her backups again, but it will take some time before the update is complete. Besides, she has to protect this dumbass. So she keeps teleporting them until they’re far enough away.

From this vantage point, they watch as the weapons reach critical mass and converge on a single spot on the world below them. They seemed to have been aiming for the settlement, so everyone living there is already dead. The Teaguardians don’t have to keep going. Yet they do. In minutes, it’s quite clear that they’re planning to obliterate Doma Tertia. But there’s a reason Pribadium chose not to do it this way in the first place. It might be quicker, but it won’t last. The gravity well is too strong.

Every celestial body holds something known as gravitational binding energy. If you want to break it apart, you need any amount beyond that binding energy. If you don’t reach this threshold, it may still break apart, but then it will just come back together. Even if it takes years, it will recoalesce because the total mass has not changed. That’s why they constructed a stellar shotgun on Ross 154, because they needed a shit ton of energy to get it done. What the Teaguardians are doing here is only making things worse. The whole point is to get at all of the raw material without having to dig themselves out of the gravity well every time they want to redistribute it. Now that’s what they will have to do. But there’s an even greater problem. It’s all about safety.

You can’t just go blowing up planets without any regard for what else is around. The energy beams are coming from several light years away. They knew exactly when they were going to deploy, and what the Gatewood system would look like when that energy finally arrived. In order to protect the people who needed to live and work here during the blasts, they determined where the safe zones were. For the last several months, in preparation for the demolition, everyone was moved to a handful of little pockets of safety. These were calculated, recalculated, verified, and reverified by literally thousands of independent entities. All of those precautions are no longer viable. If she doesn’t undo this, the entire star system will have to be abandoned for decades.

Pribadium sighs. “I really have never heard of Tertius or Aeterna,” she begins, “but I am not surprised. A number of people were born with the ability to manipulate time or space in various ways. Others became that way later in life. I had to discover the power through years of science and exploration. Time travel is real, Sora.”

“You can go back and undo this?” Sora asks. “You can save my people?”

“No,” she answers. “But you can. The only way to stop the Teaguardians from shooting the planet is by not giving them a reason to. Only you can do that.”

“Was this all part of the plan?” Sora questions. “Was it nothing more than an elaborate ruse? Were you just trying to trick me into changing the past?”

“You think I blew up a planet just to get you to help me undo it? Mr. Shimizu, that makes no sense. I could have teleported you all offworld whenever I wanted. I was going for diplomatic avenues. I never wanted you to know the truth. So how about it? You wanna help me save the world? Or are you gonna be, like, a dick about it?”

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 17, 2561

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The team spent less than a minute on Ramosus in 2561 before agreeing to jump right to the coordinates of their newest mission. They were on a space station orbiting a star that was 299 light years from the Core Colonies. It would have to be a relatively fresh settlement, being this far out, and so newly reached by the Project Stargate quantum seeder module. This placed it well within the Extended Bubble, which meant it received no protection from Teagarden. Whoever was here would have to claim and defend it on their own, using whatever means they felt necessary. And if that meant violence, that was their choice, and it was looking like the choice that they made.

Team Matic found themselves on some kind of station or ship. There were two separate groups of people, standing opposite each other on either side of the room. They were all completely silent, confused and nervous, likely from having just witnessed seven strangers randomly appear through the technicolor burst of the slingdrive. Leona looked back and forth. “I am Leona Matic from a world known as Ramosus. I’m the captain of an outreach program, attempting to provide volunteer services for worlds that lie outside of Teagarden jurisdiction. How can we help?”

After some more silence, everyone began yelling. They were looking at Leona for the most part, but also at each other. It was completely unintelligible, but it was clear that the two groups weren’t preparing for a set dance. They were at war.

“I’m sorry,” Leona cried. “Did you think I could help you if you talked to me like that? Don’t answer that. Raise your hand if you are a leader of any faction in this room.” She raised her own hand as that applied to her as well. She nodded when two others did the same. “Well, that is much more manageable. You two, step forward, and tell me what the problem is. One at a time.” She pointed. “You first.”

“You’re right, I was first,” the man claimed. “This is our star. They are intruders.”

“We came here fairly, just as you did,” the woman from the other side argued. “It’s not our fault that you failed to lock out the quantum terminal.”

“We did lock it out! You snuck in through a different terminal!”

“Oh, don’t you use that word. There was no sneaking. When we were searching for a destination, we saw your lock, but then we saw another terminal, and thought that maybe the other one was damaged and replaced. We didn’t know you were here!”

“Wait,” Leona interjected. “There are two terminals. Who built the second one?”

“The automators,” the woman answered. “We think that it was damaged en route, so the nearest neighbor sent a replacement, but then somehow, the first one fixed itself, and went back to its implementation procedures. He’s on a moon; we’re on an asteroid. Now we’re both trying to colonize the unaccreted zone.”

Mateo looked through the nearest viewport when a large manmade object appeared. It was an expansive, complex space station. “How long have you been here?”

“Six years,” the man answered. “We just found out about each other two days ago.”

Mateo shook his head. They came here separately, and didn’t know it. It didn’t seem crazy to him that it could have happened in the first place, but that they could have spent quite this much time not realizing that it was happening. Did they not ever detect each other’s radio signals, or did they all stay pure quantum? Those weren’t necessary to answer. The solution was simply, though probably hard on principle. “Space is big; even the space within a single solar system. Have you ever thought about sharing the star?”

They all acted like they hadn’t thought of that before, but now the conversation could begin. The first thing they needed to do, however, was sit down and relax.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 15, 2559

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When no one else stepped up, Marie decided to choose their next destination. She consulted the bulk map, and cross-referenced it with an updated copy of the central archives, landing on a colony once more thanks to its funny name. The database listed it as the Patsy Richelieu Best First Quarter Star. Not even Ramses or Leona understood why it would be called that, and they decided not to bother trying to figure it out before they left. It seemed innocuous enough. They weren’t going unprepared, however. Ramses designed a go-bag filled with essential survival items, like multitools, a first aid kit, and a dayfruit starter pack. It also contained hardened, but dormant and shielded, electronics in case they ran into another issue. The chances of what happened on the last planet happening again weren’t high, but they were not zero. He wanted to be prepared. Romana wanted to carry it, still feeling guilty about last time.

They slung to the coordinates, finding themselves falling towards some kind of planet. “Not habitable,” Mateo announced, looking at his sensors. “Not naturally.”

“I’m not picking up any artificial structures on the surface,” Leona said, “but we can’t see the other side. Still, there are no radio signals, which makes some sense. It’s a super-terrestrial. The surface gravity is highly variable, but about 8.7G.”

“Maybe we ought to jump to that manmade object up there,” Angela warned, “unless we want to plummet to our deaths in the atmosphere.”

They jumped to the ship, but not inside of it. Leona cleared her throat after she opened a channel. “Orbiting vessel. This is Captain Leona Matic of Team Matic. We mean you no harm. Could we have permission to board?”

A woman’s voice replied, “come on in! I made bundt cake!”

An airlock opened. They floated inside, and waited for the hatch to close behind them, then for the airlock to repressurize. The inner door opened.

The woman was waiting for them, holding her plate. She was wearing a white tank top and a tennis skirt, like an off-duty college cheerleader. “Welcome to our home, new friends. My name is Patsy Richelieu. I’m in charge around here.” She took another bite. “How did you arrive? My logs didn’t record someone using the quantum terminal, though it is open to public access, so maybe I set the preferences wrong. I’m not an engineer.”

“I can check it out for you,” Ramses offered. “You probably have it set right. We came in through a nearby terminal, then flew here manually.”

“Oh, what fun,” Patsy decided. “Hungry?”

“We could eat,” Mateo answered. Everyone out here just wanted some intelligent connection, didn’t they? No one needed saviors or rescuers. Just good old fashioned human conversation. “Could we ask...the name of your star?”

“Oh, haha,” Patsy began as she was leading them down the corridors. I started a new job as a saleswoman in July of 2026. I had no experience; even fibbed a little on my résumé, but I was a natural talent. I had the best first quarter on the job of anyone in company history at the time. My boss awarded me with this star at the company retreat.”

“Oh, it was one of those name-a-star scams. I mean—sorry,” Leona apologized. “You obviously managed to convert it into a real claim after five hundred years.”

Patsy giggled. “Don’t you fret. I thought it was stupid at the time too, but it did mean something, because the company didn’t approve it. My boss had to pay for it with her own money, and the closer stars are much more expensive. They made me feel at home, which I honestly didn’t expect. I had been searching for a job, not a career. I ended up retiring from that same position after 44 years of service. Do you know money? Were you alive back then?”

“We were,” Marie answered.

Patsy nodded, then went on, “then humanity invented AI, net positive fusion, and anti-aging technologies, and it started to feel less ridiculous. Over the centuries, I kept this place in the back of my mind, and once Project Stargate reached this far into the galaxy, I decided I might as well lay claim to what a piece of paper and a $250 bill said I already owned.” It didn’t validate the entire scam, but at least this one person got what she paid for. Pretty cheap for an entire solar system. It looked like there was nothing for them to do here either, though. Their new paradigm of not being useful would continue. They could eat cake, and that was about it. Nevertheless, if this woman was lonely, maybe that would be enough.

As they were following her down the corridors, they started to hear chatter. A set of doors slid open, revealing a huge crowd of people in a mess hall, also wearing surprisingly sexy outfits, and also eating cake. They started cheering, and saying things like “hey, Patsy! and “Patsy’s back!”

“Forgive me,” Leona began, “but are they NPCs? I don’t mean to be rude.”

“No, they’re independent,” Patsy assured them. I have a lot of friends. I’m very friendly. I met most of these people on the quantum boards. They all wanted to do something weird, and there’s nothing weirder than living around a star called Patsy Richelieu Best First Quarter. Like I was saying, I have an open-door policy.”

“So, you don’t need anything?” Mateo pressed. “Everyone’s okay?”

“Yeah, why? What did you hear?” Patsy asked as she was licking the last of the frosting off of her fork.

“Nothing. That’s just what we do, going around making sure the colonies are all right,” Mateo answered.

She smiled, as she twirled the fork against her teeth. “Why, you’re even friendlier than I am, aren’t ya?” She faced her people. “Hey, everyone! These guys are part of some kind of volunteer colony outreach program! Isn’t that sweet!”

They cheered again.

“Well, we don’t need anything,” Patsy explained, “but we could always use a few more smiling faces. That’s the only rule. You have to smile.”

The seven of them kind of already thought they were smiling, but they forced themselves to make it more blatant.

“We’ll work on it,” Patsy decided. “Go, sit down. It’s time to eat!”

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