The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 1, 2545

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While Team Matic was living semipermanently on Castlebourne, Hrockas set up an annual meeting on their days in the timestream. He typically wanted them to be caught up on certain things, and maybe ask for their advice or help. Even though the team had since left, this meeting was still going on and going strong. It was a review of the prior year, and a general check-in for the planet’s administrative staff. Of course, they held meetings all the time, but this was the big one. Lycander left the meeting after the unauthorized teleportation alert because responding to such threats was part of his job. They were pressed about it because everyone who was given the ability to teleport was in the meeting, and none of them had left. He reported that all was quiet on the western front, and escorted them back so they could join the meeting too. But they weren’t necessarily going to participate as if it were business as usual.

Since Hrockas wasn’t expecting them, he didn’t simply continue with the agenda. He called a recess for an impromptu debrief. His trusty bodyguard, Azad leaned against the credenza behind him, and didn’t speak. “The last time I checked, you did not have the coordinates to Castlebourne’s new location. I’m not mad, but how did you find us?”

“Truthfully,” Leona began, “you can be found, but not by just anyone. First of all, we did not come here on purpose, and we did not go through the bulk. We were investigating a gravitational anomaly on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. We still don’t know how it works, but we found a key piece of technology. Due to our presence, it sent us away. It sent us...here. We have no idea how or why. Maybe it read our minds, and thought we considered it home. I don’t know. We’ll need to look into it more, but to answer the spirit of your question, Ramses created a map that sends signals through the membrane of the universe, and pinpoints technological establishments. It is precise enough to target a single-person habitat. So yes, we knew where you were. We were using it to look for someone else, and initially avoided this region, because we guessed that the signal was coming from you. That being said, if Ramses could do it, that means it can be done. It doesn’t mean that the Exin Empire can do it, but it’s not impossible. The bottom line is that you’re not safe here, but to put it in perspective, you’re not safe anywhere. Moving the star was still your smartest move.”

“You just answered all of my follow-up questions,” Hrockas said. “Thank you.” He looked over to Ramses now. “I hesitate to believe that it was a mind-reading machine. What is your hypothesis? I know you always have one.”

Ramses looked around at his friends as he hesitated. “Bida, and presumably Varkas Reflex, generate their gravity artificially. Basically, what they do is blanket a surface with an invisible portal that blocks the gravitational pull of the celestial body that you’re actually on, and just gives you gravity from somewhere else. That somewhere else part is critical. It has to come from somewhere.” He looked around again, but this time at the walls and ceiling. “My hypothesis, sir, is that it comes from here. To Trinity Turner and-or Hokusai Gimura, it might have been a random point in space. They might not have chosen it with any level of intentionality. The gravity regulator may have even chosen it for them, and it worked, so they left it as it was.”

Hrockas closed his eyes and nodded. “But then we moved a new solar system to this region, and screwed everything up.”

“Honest mistake,” Mateo assured him. “In fact, not even a mistake. You couldn’t have known that it was here.”

“Actually,” Hrockas said. “I think I did.” He stood up from his chair, and tapped the back of his ear. Ramses had given him his own set of communication discs, which operated on their own network. “Telman, could you come to my office?”

A man they didn’t know appeared. “Sir?”

“What did that—what was that thing you saw a few years ago when we first started decelerating the stellar engine?” Hrockas asked him.

“The blip?” Telman asked.

“Yes, the blip.”

Telman looked at the others in the room very briefly. “It was a blip. It messed with our quantum connections. People’s consciousnesses weren’t properly received for a few weeks. Fortunately, our safeguards worked, and their signals were rerouted to an off-site back-up facility on the outer edge of the system. But then for a few weeks after that, transmission to Castlebourne started working again, and it was the off-site facility that stopped working. We’ve had to shut it down permanently, and rely on a second outpost on an adjacent side of the system for emergency back-up streaming.”

“Teleportation stopped working too,” Azad added. “We all took the trains during that period of time.”

Hrockas nodded again. “We didn’t know what to make of it. We never found the source of the issue, but things are mostly back to normal.”

Leona paced clear to the other side of the room. “Your stellar engine, was it polar?”

Hrockas cleared his throat. “There are some things even you are not allowed to know, but...no. It wasn’t a traditional thruster. We used other means. We just call it that because there’s no other name for it, and it’s what people understand. We moved laterally, sometimes towards the planet, and sometimes away from it, depending on its place in orbit at the time. We didn’t have to worry about any sort of exhaust beam with the technique that we used, and that was the direction we wanted to go.”

“That’s okay,” Leona said. “I’m guessing that the first back-up site was on the trailing edge of the ecliptic plane, which means Castlebourne crossed a particular point first, and then it followed.”

“Yes, that’s what happened,” Telman confirmed.

“Which means we can plot where it is now,” Leona said. “If you give us the data we need, we’ll get your other outpost up and running again, and maybe save a few hundred million lives in the stellar neighborhood while we’re at it.”

Ramses holed up in his lab, and processed the data that Hrockas okayed Telman to provide for him. Telman even spent a little bit of time in there with him to discuss the issue. Ramses occupied himself all day with doing that, and designing some kind of new probe. He launched that probe before the team left the timestream, and reconnected with it after they returned on the first of September, 2545. “I found it. The probe found it. This region of the galaxy has its own gravitational anomaly. It’s kind of like a planetary-mass black hole, but it behaves unlike what the science predicts. I’m guessing the added mass of the solar system is interfering with its function.”

“Why use this?” Olimpia questioned. “Why get your gravity from a random point in space using an invisible black hole, when you can get it from a planet that already has the mass you need, say, Earth?”

“Because as we’ve seen,” Ramses continued, “that interferes with the equilibrium on both sides of the portal. You can’t share the gravity. You can only steal it. I’m starting to think that this area wasn’t the least bit random. Hokusai somehow managed to either find an Earth-mass black hole, or collapsed a comparable planet into a singularity to create one. I’m guessing that it was a rogue world, which made it inhospitable to life, and ripe for the taking according to ethical standards.”

“The timeline doesn’t make sense to me,” Angela said. “Castlebourne and the star both have deeper gravity wells than the outpost asteroid that it says the black hole is next to right now. Why have things been getting progressively worse on Bida? It seems like they would have been so much worse before.”

“That’s why it was so hard to find,” Ramses started to explain. The black hole didn’t pass through Castlebourne, or the star. They just got close to it. They got the ball rolling, so to speak. Now that the solar system has settled where it is, the issue has been worsening because it’s been persistent. The current competing gravity hasn’t been enough to destroy it all at once, but it’s been throwing things off. Before you ask, it’s actually not just compounding gravity here that is raising the gravity on the other planets. It’s simply disturbing the optimal operation of the regulators on the other side of the portals. Indeed, they were well-engineered to compensate for this disturbance, but are constantly fighting against it, and it’s taken a toll.”

“So, what can you do?” Hrockas asked him. “Can you move the black hole, or...should we try to move? I’m gonna tell ya, that’s not gonna be so easy, and definitely not fast. I can’t reach out to my contact whenever I want. We had a deal. Getting us here was the deal. I said nothing about a second move.”

“Relax,” Leona said with a laugh. “We have another solution. For the permanent one, we’ll need a reframe engine, but for the temporary one...a slingdrive.” She glanced at Rames. “A bigger one than we have. Incidentally, we must enact both plans, even if the permanent one sounds easier. It’s not easier at all. I couldn’t help but notice that none of the crew of the Vellani Ambassador was at the meeting. We really need them, and preferably yesterday.”

“They don’t come back here much anymore,” Hrockas revealed. “Their days of regularly transporting refugees are behind them. Anyone who wanted to escape pretty much has already. They mostly go on diplomatic missions on an as-needed basis. There’s still a lot of internal conflict that needs to be managed so it doesn’t explode into all-out war.”

“I assume you know about the armada that is on its way to where Castlebourne used to be,” Marie said to him.

“We do. We’ve been monitoring their progress. So far, they’re still headed in the wrong direction, but we will be prepared to fight if we absolutely have to,” Hrockas said.

“Do you happen to know where the VA is at this moment?” Leona asked.

“They don’t keep me updated,” Hrockas answered, “they don’t have to.” He paused for a second. “I can call them, if this is an emergency. Is it an emergency?”

“Not for you,” Romana said, “but for the Bidans and Varkas, uh...Reflexers...”

“Varkans,” Leona corrected.

“All right.”

Hrockas stood up, but Azad placed a hand upon his shoulder. “I’ll take care of it. It’s still glass, and you’re not armored.” He opened a cabinet on the wall and removed a few objects, like a stack of tablets and what appeared to be a king’s crown. Behind them was a second cabinet, made of glass. He punched through it with the side of his fist, letting the shards scatter in the main cabinet. He reached deep into a dark hole that they couldn’t see into, then quickly jerked backwards.

“It might be a few hours,” Hrockas told the group, “and it might not happen. Our needs do not take precedence over absolutely anything else going on. They might not be able to get away quickly, but they will eventually show up, and definitely within the year. Once they do, I’ll speak with them, and I’m sure they’ll work around your schedule so they’re here next year. I wish I could do better. I wish I had realized what we had done.”

“It’s not your fault,” Angela insisted. “Black holes are invisible.”

Mirage suddenly appeared, standing upon Hrockas’ desk. She was wearing an extremely loud rainbow outfit, and presenting in a hero stance, with her hands on her hips. “Have no fear! Mirage Matic shall be the tip of your spear!” She looked down to see the team. “Oh, hey, guys.”

“Why do you still use my name?” Mateo questioned.

Mirage teleported off the desk, and onto the floor, right behind Mateo. “Because I can see the future...husband,” she whispered into his ear. Then she nibbled on his earlobe, and slapped him on the ass before starting to walk towards the center of the room. “What can I do for you all? Your words; my deeds.”

Ramses stepped forward, and evidently decided to lean into it. “My queen, we ask for access to your great vessel. A marble-sized singularity must be moved out of this solar system. It will take a great deal of quintessence to perform such a feat, but we have no time to waste. Will you help us?”

Mirage frowned at him, but only still playacting. “This marble of yours, it wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with what’s going on with Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, Varkas Reflex, and Muñecai?”

The group looked amongst each other. “We didn’t know it was happening on Muñecai, but yes,” Leona answered.

Mirage nodded. “I’m quite familiar with interstellar filter portals. That is how we ended up in the Goldilocks Corridor in the first place.”

“So, is that a yes?” Mateo pressed.

Mirage pursed her lips, and turned her chin to the side. “You son of a bitch, I’m in!” she exclaimed with a smile.

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Tangent Point: Reads Like Science Fiction (Part VI)

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Breanna Jeffries didn’t want to tell Reed about the man in the photo, but he didn’t actually need her to say anything. He asked his AI, Thistle instead, who informed him that the man was still on board, and also where to find him. His daughter had recently given birth to a baby girl, and while most of the evacuees were gone, she had chosen to stay here. The child had already been through so much, they wanted her to wake up every day with some level of familiarity and comfort. The doctor who delivered it eventually evacuated from Proxima Doma as well, and was still here too. She asked the mother if she could continue to look after the baby, and the mother agreed. “You said there was something weird about the birth?” Reed asked this doctor.

Dr. Duward looked almost paranoid. “You understand that most kids being born these days gestate in artificial tanks, right?”

“I do.”

“That’s because giving birth kinda sucks,” Dr. Duward explained the obvious. “Proxima Doma has—I’m sorry, had—more live births than anywhere in the galaxy, which is why I still have a job. I’ve been doing it for 550 years now. If you’re trying to do that math, I was twelve years old when I had to deliver my older sister’s baby. Mama was drunk, daddy was at work, and I was in charge. Since then, I have successfully welcomed over 100,000 new human beings into this universe. Every single one of the mothers was in pain, whether we gave them drugs or not. Granted, traditional births are my specialty. Nanomedicine can make even live births painless, but that’s just not what I do. They come to me because they don’t want that. This woman, Aeterna refused any sort of pain relief. She refused an IV; everything. The baby just slipped out. She came in to inform us that her water broke, and it was time, then she crawled in bed, and let it out. No struggle, no contractions, barely any labor time. It started, and it was done. We have some impressive transhumans in the galaxy, but I’ve never seen anything like her.”

“How’s the baby?”

“Little Dilara is fine,” Dr. Duward replied. “We performed the very basic tests, and followed procedure, but didn’t have to provide any unusual treatments. She cried a little bit but stopped quickly. I hesitate to say this, but it was almost like she was putting on a show...like she knew we expected her to cry, but after that, she quieted down and just lay there against her mother’s chest.”

“Who else have you told about this?” Reed presses.

“No one,” Dr. Duward answers. “Like I said, she came in so quick, the only people there were me and my nurse. And she won’t tell anyone unless I order her to.”

“No bots need their memories erased?” he suggested.

“We didn’t use bots down there. Traditional births, remember?”

“Right. Well, I need this family on my side, so keep it to yourself. In fact, if you could just move on and pretend like it never happened, that would be for the best.”

“This sounds important to you,” she noted.

He sighed. “What do you want?”

“I want the quantum signature for New Earth.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Reed replied honestly.

“I gave a consultation to a Teaguardian a few weeks ago, and overheard them talking about it. They’re about to go on assignment there, and are actually happy that you delayed their departure. It’s very hush-hush, but they said it was 121 light years away. They’ll have to give it a huge berth because I think it’s a protected human preserve. No advanced interference. It sounds like it’s basically a base reality ancestor simulation. They’ll need a good OB/GYN.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t have access to that. I’m just a Bungulan captain.”

“I suggest you find it,” the doctor said. She was not who he thought she was just a moment ago when they first met.

“I don’t like being blackmailed.”

“I don’t like being ripped from my home, but things happen.”

Reed nodded. “I’ll get you to this New Earth place, but I need to speak with the family first.”

“Go right ahead.” Dr. Duward stepped off to the side.

Reed walked down the hallway, and rang the doorbell.

A man quickly opened it. “Hey. They’re both sleeping,” he hissed.

“That’s not what the door indicator says.” Reed pointed at the indicator tube, which lit up for different conditions, such as sleeping, emergency, or unoccupied.

“I don’t know how that stuff works,” the guy said. He looked back to make sure that mother and baby weren’t awakened, then slipped out of the room, and closed the door behind him. “Can I help you?”

“First of all, I’m Captain Reed Ellis—”

“I know who you are, I’m not impressed. What do you want?”

“The Vellani Ambassador. You seem to be a crewmember of it. Tertius Valerius?”

“Not really anymore, why?” Tertius questioned.

“There are whispers that it can travel faster than light,” Reed said.

Tertius folded his arms. “Lots of ships can do that.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say lots. It seems to only be Teaguardians, and yours. Do you work for Teagarden?”

Tertius snorted. “No. The Ambassador is a stateless vessel. Well, I think it technically flies the Castlebourne flag now, but that’s more of a matter of logistics.”

“Well, anyway. You are aware of the circumstances of the Tangent, aren’t you? I commandeered it.”

“I know.”

“Your daughter bene—”

Tertius waved his hand dismissively to interrupt Reed again. “Don’t play on my sentimentality. Just spit it out.”

“As of today, we’re maybe one-third of the way through our rescue efforts,” Reed continued. “Months from now, when it’s over, and the last evacuee is safely off the platform, I have promised to release the hostages, and forgo my leverage. What I have not promised is to return the Tangent and turn myself in. My crew hasn’t done that either, and I don’t want them to have to. I don’t know where we would go, but if we try to run with what we’ve got, they’ll catch us. I don’t want to hold hostages past the rescue. I certainly don’t want to hold them forever. I don’t want to condemn my people to decades of prison either, though. You have no obligation to do anything for us. If you refuse, you and your family can stay as long as you want, or leave whenever you want. You are in no way hostages. I’m asking you with my tail between my legs, and my hat in hand, will you help?”

Tertius stared at Reed, presumably in thought. “Over a hundred years ago, the brightest minds in history you’ve never heard of held a meeting. It was called The Edge. They had developed certain advanced technologies, and limited their use to a select few who needed it. I won’t get into who these inventors were, or anything about our subculture, but the year 2400 marked the end of that exclusivity. It was inevitable that the general population would uncover the truths. So these inventors agreed to hand out some of these technologies to some others, in some ways. Don’t ask me for details, anything I happen to know about The Edge is still not common knowledge. What I’ll tell you, however, is that The Vellani Ambassador operates under a special form of FTL that was not a part of any agreement, with Teagarden, or anyone else. That will probably never be made public. It’s too powerful, it’s too dangerous, and it has some serious theoretical applications that could quite literally destroy the universe. The reframe engine, however, is a different story. That is what the Teaguardians use. It caps out at 707c. That’s a fundamental physical limitation of the mechanism, and there’s no going beyond it.”

“Okay. I’m not picky. Even simply being on par with them would be useful.”

“Well, I’m not an engineer, I don’t know how to build a reframe engine. The way I understand it, it’s only half of the equation. In order to reach maximum reframe, you have to already be able to reach maximum sublight. Can the Tangent do that?”

Reed sighed. “It can’t. It uses classical fusion, not antimatter.”

“That’s going to be a problem,” Tertius said. “Let me put it this way, if this thing were moving at its maximum speed, and traveled one light year, how long would it feel like on the ship?”

Reed tapped on his wrist device to make the calculation. “About 1.73 years, but it would take two years in realtime.”

Tertius nodded. “If someone smarter than me installed a reframe engine, it would take you 1.73 years. That’s what you would experience, and that’s how much time would pass for everyone not on the ship. That’s what the reframe engine does. It makes those two numbers the same. It doesn’t just arbitrarily go fast. You still have to reach certain speeds, the engine just consolidates the reference frames. It reframes the passage of time so everyone ends up on the same page.”

Reed leaned his head back at hearing this, and regarded Tertius. “That’s why there’s a maximum speed overall. You’re not actually breaking the light barrier.”

“Bingo.”

“But this Ambassador, it goes faster. It indeed breaks the light barrier. True FTL.”

“I wouldn’t tell you how it worked, even if I understood it. I won’t even name it for you, because that alone would give you too much information.”

“Would they be willing to help, though?” Reed pressed. “Maybe they can just pull us away once, and then leave us wherever, just so we can find someplace to hide, and maybe some lasting peace.”

Tertius looked up at the walls and ceiling. “The VA’s mission is not unlike yours. They rescue people from bad situations. The difference is, they didn’t steal their ship to do it. The intelligence that designed it is still there. Well...the person who designed the special FTL tech isn’t, but they gave their contribution away freely. Anyway, the people they rescue are innocent. The people they’re rescuing them from? Not so much. You...are neither. Mirage would understand why you did what you did, but she wouldn’t reward you for it. She would expect you to accept the consequences of your actions. I know her well, I can hear her say that in my head. Before you ask, the person who came up with the magical FTL isn’t available until...” He tapped on his handheld device. “Let me do my own calculations...August. And even if we were able to find him on that date, he would only be able to help you for a day, and then you would have to wait a whole year for his return.”

“Huh?” Reed didn’t understand all this FTL stuff, but he wasn’t even following the logic of what Tertius just said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tertius replied, shaking his head. “The point is, it can’t be done. I would love to help, but it’s just not gonna happen. I can reach out to Mirage, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. And if by some miracle, she does say yes, you’re not keeping the Tangent. It would be like trying to stuff a skyscraper in the trunk of your car. At best, she would ferry all the people somewhere safe.”

“That’s all I can ask.” Reed pulled up his contact card. “You can reach me any time. It has my quantum signature on it if she’s on the other side of the universe, and wants to talk to me personally. Now, before I leave you, how big is this reframe engine?”

“I think it scales to the size of the vessel,” Tertius answered. “I can probably get you the specs, but you’re gonna be done with the evacuation in, what, a few months? It’s gonna take longer than that for you to build one from scratch.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you, Mister Valerius. I’ll let you get back to your family now. Please do stay in touch. I’ll give you anything you need.”

Reed walked away and returned to his bridge office.

Shasta was already there, which was good. “Hey. I wanted to let you know, Vasily has been asking for you. I have no idea what it’s about.”

“That can wait,” Reed decided, possibly forever. “We have more important things to worry about. I need ideas for how we can prolong the southern evacuation. We need to stall for time while we come up with a more long-term solution to our little problem.”

Shasta considered it for a moment. “Well, if that’s what we need, that unauthorized express trip was actually good news. Maybe we need more time to inspect all the tethers. Maybe the constant up and down placed too much stress on them, and they all require maintenance. And maybe to prevent that from being a problem again, we need to slow the trips moving forward.”

“Okay, those are all good ideas. Let’s start working on it, but obviously don’t explain to anyone why.”

“I don’t even know why,” Shasta admitted.

“Good. I’ll tell you later so it’s easier for you to spread the new plan. Slower ascents and descents. But not too bad. It doesn’t need to take years, and in fact, that would backfire on us. Just maybe another month.”

“Got it, I’ll talk to Trilby to calculate the math on that. He won’t ask questions.”

“Actually, I need to talk to him myself. I’ll go with you.” His device beeped, so he stopped to check it.

It was a message from Tertius. Found this while I was digging up the specifications for the reframe engine. I didn’t realize that The Shortlist gave Teagarden access to this tech. It might have come in handy a few months ago.

Reed tapped on the file, and read the overview. “On second thought, I’ll talk with Trilby later. Go ahead and do your thing. I need to set up a meeting with someone else.”

It was only a few hours later. Reed was back in the dusty hot interrogation room of a virtual environment. President Burkhart Abrams resolved in front of him, sitting in the chair. “What am I doing here, Ellis? Something wrong with the evacuation? Can’t stay in place? Are you demanding pizza for all the gunmen and hostages?”

Reed threw a tablet on the table hard enough to make it break in the real world, but it landed undamaged. “If you already knew, then this won’t come as a surprise, but if you didn’t know, then I encourage you to verify it...quietly.” He needed to test him.

Abrams reluctantly picked up the tablet, and started looking over the info. He threw it down with nearly as much gusto. “This reads like science fiction.”

“It’s not, it’s real. I’m guessing you didn’t know about it, because you’re not that good of a liar. So now you have to ask yourself, for the first time in all of this, are we on the same side?”

“Why the hell would we be on the same side? Teagarden is only letting you do this because you have leverage. You and I are not friends.”

“What about Matar Galo? Is she a friend?”

“She’s my superior officer.”

“Right.” Reed leaned forward, and repeated, “right” as he was swiping to the next page. “And because she’s your superior, she had no obligation to tell you about this.”

“If it’s true...if it exists, then no, of course she didn’t. She didn’t invent military secrets. What are you driving at here?”

Reed shook his head. “You commanded two Teaguardians for Proxima Doma. These people were your friends. You were here to protect them, and the one time when they really needed you, you couldn’t do shit. You just sat there, staring at the screen, utterly hopeless. Useless. A giant paperweight floating in space.” He angrily pointed at the tablet. “If you had this kind of technology, you may have been able to save them all.”

Abrams scoffed and shook his head.

“Maybe not all, but a lot; at least more. I wouldn’t have needed to steal a damn thing. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. I just didn’t think we had any other options. But she—she had this. Your military had this.” He swiped over again. “Apparently, Gatewood has it too. Why does Gatewood have it? Nobody lives there!”

 “You’re right. This would have been a game-changer, but if she didn’t come here with it, she must have had her reasons. Maybe it’s not ready. Maybe only a tiny shuttle has a prototype of it. We don’t know. This document doesn’t say anything about the actual operational deployment. It just claims that it exists, and it’s in the Teagarden’s privileged data vault. I’m not going to ask how you got your hands on it, but this...this means nothing. It proves nothing.”

“Burkhart, this is real. They have teleportation, like freakin’ Star Trek. They left your friends to die when they could have just beamed them into the sky. They didn’t even read you in. They did nothing.” Reed pointed to his own chest. “I did something. I came here. I risked everything to save the people that you were sworn to defend. Aren’t you angry about that? I would be livid. I am.”

“Maybe I am. Maybe I believe you, and I’ve never been more pissed off about anything in my whole life. What the hell does it matter? The south is stable. The elevators are working. There’s no point in rocking the boat now. Just finish your mission, and turn yourself in, like you promised.”

“I never promised that.”

Abrams dismissed it. “That’s not my problem. They’re not gonna give us teleportation. What are you gonna do? Try to steal it?”

Reed shook his head. “No, not that. Like you said, we don’t know where it is. But I need to steal something else, and to make up for being unable to do anything for the Proxima Domanians before I showed up...I want you to help me.”

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Microstory 2634: In the Doghouse

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Mandica is less than four weeks into her trip, yet 48 years have passed for the rest of the universe. She thinks about that sometimes. If she had never latched onto this relativistic ship, she would be 76 at this point. A couple of centuries ago, had she died at that age, people would have said that she lived a good, long life. Now 76 is still quite young, even for the undigitized. It’s not like she doesn’t accept any medical intervention. For the less enhanced, it’s still unusual to not make it to at least 100. But that means in about 15 or 20 days, she will have passed her own expected lifespan. Her parents were already pretty old when they had her, and she was only 22 when they died themselves. She spent the next six years carrying on their nomadic legacy, but alone...except for Mordred and her bot pack. It is finally time to move on from that. By the time this arkship comes to a full stop, it will be the 26th century. Who knows what the world will look like by then? She doesn’t even really know what it looks like now. Castlebourne isn’t open to the public yet. They only announced it early to build hype, and give ship travelers like her time to cover the expanse.

Most people have no use for the ships. Once Castlebourne does officially open, they will simply transmit their consciousnesses through the quantum network, and arrive in a matter of days at worst. She doesn’t know if they will have facsimile substrates waiting for them or skeletal android bodies, or what. She doesn’t pay attention to that stuff because it doesn’t apply to her. She has chosen to not be able to do it. Those are the values that her family instilled in her. You’re born, you live, you die. That is the cycle. That is how humans have been doing it for millions of years. That’s what life is. She honors her ancestors by becoming one of them one day. Going on this trip isn’t changing the plan, it’s just delaying it by a century, and making it happen on a different planet. If someone had invented faster-than-light travel like they have on the TV shows, she would have absolutely done it that way instead, and stayed on the schedule that her parents predicted for her. But this is what she has. She has a 108-year wait, experienced as 56 days. Then, for the next 80 or 90 years after that, she will lead the kind of life that she wants, and die peacefully on her terms.

Mandica set herself up with exigent alerts. While she can’t see outside—which is normally no problem, because there’s usually nothing to see—the pod has external sensors, keeping tabs on the environment. That environment is always shifting as they’re shooting through space at luminal speeds. That’s a new word she learned. Luminal is for those extremely high relativistic speeds that allow her to survive the journey in a reasonable amount of time. Any slower, and it’s not worth it given her lifespan. That gift isn’t enough now, though. There’s a breach in the hull. Nothing in the ship is going to die, but it needs to be dealt with, and they will send a bot out here to do that. Since there are live specimens on board, most of the vessel has to be spun to simulate gravity using centrifugal force. They don’t spin that whole thing, though. The spinning section is fully enclosed, and kept separate from the hull using electromagnets. The spinning cylinder is fine for now, but they can’t just leave that gaping hole there like that. Someone will come eventually.

The alert told that there was a problem, but it didn’t give her the whole story. A deeper dive into the “local news” explained it further. A micrometeoroid, probably the size of a grain of sand, managed to make it through the shielding, and puncture a hole in the front of the arkship. The EM shield surely slowed it down, after the plasma shield ionized it, but wasn’t enough to deflect it, and definitely could not have stopped it. Since the space between the spinning cylinder and the hull is also a vacuum, it was able to continue to fly backwards like a bullet. It then blasted another hole in the back as an exit wound. Right now, the automated systems are prioritizing that entry wound, because it makes them more vulnerable, but it’s only a matter of time before they head this way. It’s close enough to where Trilby attached the barnacle that a bot would spot her. She doesn’t know exactly how it will react, but it won’t ignore her. It will report the intrusion to a higher tier intelligence at the very least. She has to act.

But what can she do here? She can’t just move the barnacle somewhere else. This entire back section is exposed, and she is visible to anything nearby. She might be able to slowly walk around the engine nozzles, and hide behind them, but that’s a long-ass walk, and dangerous. Trilby said there’s a reason he chose to stick her in this spot. Even though the ship is coasting, and the engines aren’t on full right now, they still generate heat. Her suit, the tether, the barnacle; any of things could suffer damage during transit. She has to think, and she has to think fast. The port side maybe? That might be fine for now, but she’ll then be exposed to the kinds of micrometeoroids that just ruptured the hull. Again, that’s why Trilby put her right here. The way she sees it, she only has one choice at this point. It’s incredibly risky, but the worst that could happen is the bots finally do apprehend her. If she tries any alternative she could die instead.

Mandica gathers everything she can, namely the half-complement of dayfruit growers. After a quiet goodbye to her temporary home, she untethers herself from the barnacle, initiates the release procedures, and watches it fly off into the nothingness. Now she’s staring into the black. It’s haunting. Nothing on Earth is as black as this. No stars, no debris, just endless void. Everything is completely redshifted and invisible to the naked eye. They are simply moving too far away from it all. She shudders and turns away. It shouldn’t be her concern right now. There is no way to know how soon the repair bots will come. She trudges across the hull as fast as she can, which isn’t very fast. Her magboots have to be on maximum, unlike they would be if she were on the inside since a misstep out here could cost someone their life. She sees it with her flashlight now. It’s the hole. Man, is it huge. She was worried about being able to fit, but it’s not going to be a problem at all. You could send a truck through this thing if you had to.

She carefully contorts her leg to magnetize against the edge. To a giant, it would be an edge, but to her, the hull is so thick, it’s like its own wall. She walks along it until she’s fully inside. Now she’s looking at the rotating cylinder, moving at about one rotation every two minutes. It seems to be holding up. She watches it go by, looking for something—anything—to grasp onto. There, that’s it. It’s some kind of access panel. Hopefully, it grants her access to the inside, and not just wiring, or something. She leaps. The microthrusters on her PRU are designed for helium and neon, so they’re not particularly powerful, but they keep her pointed in the right direction. She grabs the handle, and holds on. Then she turns it and pulls. It’s unlocked, which makes sense, because who would they be worried about breaking in? Pirates? Insane human stowaways? She crawls up the tunnel, and comes out through a hatch in the ground, surrounded by timber wolves. “Hm. Could be worse.” It is here that she spends the next four weeks trying to figure out how she’s going to get off the ship unnoticed.

Microstory 2632: Pet Project

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Mandica Kolar is a perfectly normal human, which is rare in her time. The transhumanism movement might have begun in the middle of the 20th century, but it did not gain any real traction for many decades, when the science started to catch up with the ideas. Over the next few centuries, the population of undigitized organic humans (UDOs) gradually diminished. They weren’t being killed or replaced. It was just that fewer and fewer people were deciding to tolerate natural aging limitations, aches and pains, and kind of being sidelined. They have become a silent minority. Posthumans hold most of the power now, not out of some nefarious plan, but because that is how the math works out. Whether consciously or subconsciously, some undigitized people feel that they’re being treated as pets, or maybe children. They are so fragile, and people just wanted to protect that. This mindset can be problematic because it often leads to the UDOs being patronized, but honestly, most mean no disrespect. One little plane crash or massive explosion, and a UDO would die...forever. Most everyone else is constantly backing up their consciousness to a remote server somewhere, and don’t worry about such things. In fact, their virtual immortality often makes their lives pretty boring, especially since these adaptations come with other technological improvements, leading to higher quality of life in a post-scarcity society. They have turned to entertainment, and the most popular of these involve some level of simulated danger. They can’t die for real, but they can make believe, and the best systems do better at making them forget that the stakes are genuinely quite low.

Someone is paraterraforming an entire planet for these reasons. Instead of virtual simulations, they will be physical. Some might even alter a visitor’s memories to forget who they are, making them feel like life is still precious and fleeting. Tens of thousands of domes, each with its own theme, are being constructed on the surface of Castlebourne. Mandica isn’t necessarily interested in the simulations, but she does want to leave Earth, and she happens to know of a ship that is heading in that direction. There are too many restrictions here. She doesn’t want to feel like a pet anymore. She wants to live somewhere that will let her be herself. To accomplish this, she needs to move to a Charter Planet. Lying between 50 and 200 light years from Earth, Charter Worlds are not subject to the same laws that the Core Worlds and Stellar Neighborhood systems are. They have to protect themselves, but they often do so by chartering resources from other systems. Castlebourne is set to receive a shipment of lower lifeforms from Earth. They have already been sent one arkship, so this is a second wave with additional specimens, many of which are live. It will probably be Mandica’s last chance to get to where she wants to be. Arkships are rare, and Castlebourne is lucky to get two. They may not receive anything else ever again as most other resources can be found and processed in situ. The problem is, this ship is not for her. There was no chance that they were ever going to let her on it, so she has decided to stow away.

Mandica is a nomad, but she’s still a citizen of the state, and is entitled to certain amenities. Most people in this post-scarcity society get what they need from their local Resource Allocation Committees, which they voted for. As she has no local rights or responsibilities, an At-Large Allocation Board (ALAB) decides what she gets, and what she doesn’t. The people who sit on the board are reportedly mostly former RAC members, but she has never even met even one of them. All of her dealings have been fully automated, which she prefers. She accepts the bureaucracy, but that doesn’t mean she has to participate in government. Since life is so dangerous for nomads, she never goes anywhere truly alone. She possesses a bot pack of drones to aid her in her travels, and protect her. They practically force the pack on her, but she likes animals, and they’re quite convincing, so she doesn’t mind. Others in her situation have outright refused, or disabled them permanently.

There is something else that is different when it comes to Mandica. In addition to the horse, dog, hawk, and flutterby, she’s also accompanied by an android. This is fairly rare for nomads. It’s more of a hermit thing, and of course, there is overlap, but there is a clear distinction. Hermits live alone, and reject the state’s authority, which is why most of them have gone off-world by now. Nomads, on the other hand, frequently get involved in community affairs, they just like to shift between communities at will. They don’t typically need an android for human companionship, because they’re getting plenty of socialization through more conventional—albeit ephemeral—relationships. Mandica visits populated regions as well, but she spends a lot more time in the wilderness, exploring, hiking, and just enjoying the solitude. So why bother with an android? Well, Mordred provides something she might be able to get from others, but with a lot fewer complications. He gives her the sexual satisfaction she needs without all the emotional baggage. Well...there might be a little bit of emotion involved.

“But I don’t understand why I cannot go with you.” Mordred was programmed to adore Mandica, perhaps a little too much.

“Because I need you to stay behind to fake my death,” she explains once again.

He was also programmed to be able to forget things, act a little dumb, and be generally confused. “But I love you, my love. We said we would stay together forever.”

“It was only a fantasy. I must away to start my new life. If you truly love me, you’ll set me free, erase the animals’ memories, and protect me from being discovered.”

Mordred looks down at Mandica’s bioprinted facsimile. It’s state of the art, and looks just like her, down to the scars. A dedicated medical examiner could plausibly tell the difference, but they will hopefully not even bother with a post mortem. It will be a simple fall from an extremely high cliff, which is perfectly believable, given her lifestyle, and nomads aren’t exactly top priority. “This golem of yours...does she feel as you do? Does she love me as well?”

“She feels nothing. She is not a she at all, but only a husk. Her sole job is to pretend to be me...in her death.”

“Will we ever see each other again?” he presses. “One day?”

“I told you that I would never lie to you, Mordred, and I shan’t. I’m afraid you will never see me again. As the brightest candle burns the fastest, our love must end.”

“How can I go on without you? I shall end my own life.”

“You can do that, but only after you show others that I am dead. Please, this is of the utmost importance. I cannot have them looking for me.”

“I will, my beautiful flower,” Mordred promises. “Now turn away. If I see your face for one second more, I will not be able to say goodbye. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!” he shouts melodramatically.

“Goodbye, dear Mordred. I’ll think of you always.” Mandica walks down the trail, and heads for the launch site. Castlebourne calls to her from the distant sky.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: August 31, 2544

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Nothing interesting happened by the end of the day in 2543, except for some unusual environmental readings that Ramses was getting, so they made plans to leave. To give Romana time to finally come to a decision for where they were going to go next, and to maximize the time they had to actually do that, they decided to wait a year to leave. Those unusual readings turned out to only be the start. When Trinity Turner founded this colony, she did so with the benefit of future knowledge. She knew how much work would go into making it habitable for humans, so she continued to travel through time to make it happen. She had the ability to transport anywhere that she could see. This could be as short as the other side of the room, or as far as across intergalactic voids.

Because light travel wasn’t instantaneous, when she looked at a distant star, she was looking into the past. Indeed, this was how it worked for everyone. This meant that Trinity could end up as far into the past in years as her destination was away in light years. But she could also just land in the present, if she so chose. It was a fluke of her ability that no one could explain, but she did not take it for granted. For untold amounts of time, she would jump back and forth, ferrying experts from the timeline to help terraform this world. One thing that they never understood was the gravity. It was the biggest mystery in space colonization that people kind of did take for granted. The only reason it hadn’t been the top headline every day for the last 300 years was because a sort of religion formed around it. Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida was a very spiritual place. Science wasn’t outlawed by any stretch, but it just wasn’t done. Even though the implausible gravity couldn’t be explained, people were simply not putting that much effort into studying it. Not even Leona truly knew how Trinity did it. But perhaps she should have asked, because things were going wrong now.

“So, is it going to hurt when we teleport outside?” Olimpia asked.

“We’re fine,” Ramses assured her. “I designed our bodies to withstand a lot heavier gravity than this. It could go all the way back up to where it should be, and we would still be all right, but will it stop there? I don’t know. I don’t know what’s causing it, because I don’t know where the artificial gravity comes from.”

Leona was looking at the data. “It did not increase suddenly, or a lot of people would be dead, but it’s been rising all year.”

“Actually, it’s been rising since we arrived,” Ramses corrected.

“The whole planet?” Mateo asked.

Ramses sighed. “Yes, but not evenly. I hesitate to call this region the epicenter, because it appears to move anisotropically, but...um...” he trailed off.

“But it’s us,” Leona finished what he was unable to say. “We’re the cause.”

“I don’t know how, but I don’t see any other plausible trigger,” Ramses agreed.

“Should we leave then?” Romana offered.

“The damage is done,” Ramses explained. “I believe it was our arrival with the slingdrive. We interfered with the natural order.”

“There was nothing natural about this,” Leona told him. Everything artificial requires maintenance. Hell, natural processes experience constant change. We call it entropy.”

“Whatever was keeping this planet human-compatible, we interfered with it,” Ramses argued. “Natural or no, it’s our fault, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“We’ve been to a ton of places with the slingdrives,” Marie put forth. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

“We’ve never been anywhere with planetwide artificial gravity,” Angela responded.

“Yes, we have,” Leona said. “We were just on Varkas Reflex. That’s where this tech was born. Hokusai Gimura invented it while she was living there.”

“Well, we can’t just pop back there and see how they’re doin’,” Ramses reasoned. “That could make it worse for both worlds. I’m calling it, no sling travel until further notice.”

“We don’t have to go there physically,” Romana contended. “Let’s just read the news.” She created an interface on her wrist with her nanites, and connected to the quantum network. No one else did the same, they just watched her as her face fell. “It’s happening there too. It’s further along. They’ve consolidated to certain buildings which apparently have their own gravity generators, but most of the surface has become inhospitable to normal human life. Fortunately, there aren’t many of them left anyway. A lot of people are as sturdy as we are.”

“But these are two of the four main hubs for human colonization,” Leona pointed out. “Proxima Doma is the closest to Earth, Bungula and Bida have been terraformed. Regular humans love Varkas Reflex’s VR. In fact, after Doma fell, a lot of people started migrating to the other three.”

Mateo looked at his wife. “Well, out of all of us, Leona, you were the only one on Varkas when Hokusai created artificial gravity. How did she do it, and could it be the same way they did it here? Did she give it to Trinity?”

“I don’t see how,” Leona replied. “It’s not genuine artificial gravity. It’s transdimensional gravity. You open a two-dimensional portal to a region of space with lower gravity, and set it in superposition just under the surface of wherever you want to stand. When I was there, they were struggling to build single buildings with efficient gravity regulators. Evidently, they have expanded across the globe, but that should have taken years at best. This planet had it as soon as we landed, only a few years after we left Varkas. It’s just not possible.”

“Unless you account for time travel,” Marie reminded her. Trinity might have conscripted Future!Hokusai for help a decade or two in the past. That was her whole modus operandi back then, wasn’t it?”

“That’s true,” Leona admitted.

“It sounds like we need to find Trinity,” Olimpia determined.

“We need to find Trinity and Hokusai,” Marie added.

“No,” Leona began. “Ramses and I can do this. We can fix it.”

“No, I can’t,” Ramses argued. “I’ll just screw it up, like I have everything else.”

“We can…together,” Leona reiterated.

Ramses just shook his head.

“You said it was happening anisotropically,” Leona went on. “Let’s map that. However Trinity lowered gravity here, she didn’t do it by magic. There must be something changing the gravity, and also maintaining it, so let’s find whatever it is, and repair it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Ramses, no moping,” Mateo ordered. “Let’s get to work.”

“Let’s?” Ramses echoed.

“Well if you’re so dumb that you’ll screw this up then I might as well help you, because I’m dumb too,” Mateo reasoned, completely aware that this did not make sense.

“Well, I mean...it’s not really that—”

“Not really what? True? Oh, you might be on to something. Maybe you and LeeLee should just try without me, see what you find.” He shrugged. “Start there.”

Ramses sighed. “Okay, I’ll make a map.”

The normies stayed in their shared space while the smart ones went into Ramses’ lab. They only had to be in there for less than an hour. “We’ve done it,” Leona announced as they came back in. “The gravitational failure is not random.” She threw up a hologram of a globe of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. They are centered on these thirty-two evenly spaced locations.” Chevrons appeared on the surface, all around the planet.

“Actually, they’re specifically outside of these points,” Ramses clarified. “These particular spots are suffering less than elsewhere when it comes to the gravity issues. Fortunately, we noticed that they coincide with population centers. Which we found interesting and alarming, because Trinity could not have known where people would settle. But then we realized—”

“He realized,” Leona corrected.

Ramses smirked. “They’re not random either. If you zoom in to any of these points, you will find sacred ground. Trinity chose these thirty-two sites, probably to some degree of randomness, but well-distributed for maximum efficient coverage across a sphere. In math, it’s called the spherical covering problem. If they use transdimensional gravity—which is the only means of artificial gravity that I know of—it stands to reason that the regulators were installed in these places. And since there appeared to be preexisting infrastructure when the first colonists showed up, they....gravitated towards them due to their significance. So their religious interpretation did not come out of nowhere. There’s something there, probably underground, but also probably detectable.”

“Gravity is failing all over the world due to some unknown issue with these regulators, but it’s going to fail closer to the regulators last,” Leona finished.

“Do we know the cause?” Marie asked them.

“Well, it’s not us,” Leona argued. “Rambo, you’re off the hook. It was happening before we showed up, for a few years. We just didn’t know, because it started in more remote regions, and we didn’t look up the news. People have actually been migrating because of it, and the problem has just now reached this area. No one has been doing anything about it, because they don’t know what to do.”

“What can we do?” Mateo asked. “There are thirty-two sites. Is one of them the central command maybe?”

“Not that we can tell,” Leona replied. “I wouldn’t think so anyway. We might be able to interface with all of them if we go to one. We’ll know more when we get down there.”

Romana suited up with shiny body armor, showing her usual amount of cleavage that Mateo didn’t like. “Then let’s get on it. Boot ‘n’ rally!” She disappeared, only to return a few seconds later. “Sorry. Sync up ‘n’ rally! I’ve already chosen the chevron.”

They followed her to the site she had picked out. Ramses began to sweep the area to find the signal that would lead them to where they were actually trying to go.

“Guys,” Romana called out from around the bend of the cliff that they were next to. “You should see this.”

They all went over there to meet her. She was staring at the cliff face, where a gargantuan stone monument had been embedded in it. It was at least two stories tall, perhaps three. MATEO MATIC MEMORIAL ESCARPMENT. HE LED A LIFE OF LIFTING OTHERS. HERE HE FELL. NOVEMBER 18, 2256. Below the words was a non-volumetric hologram of Mateo Matic himself,standing tall and looking outwards at an angle. It made him seem like some kind of hero head of state; like he was a modern-day Abraham Lincoln. It made him feel rather uncomfortable.

“Jesus,” Angela said in a breathy voice.

They all stared at it for a moment, but then shifted their gazes to Mateo. “I didn’t know they put this here,” he said.

“Me neither,” Leona concurred.

Romana reached out and took her father in a hug. He kissed her on the forehead.

Ramses’ wrist sensors beeped. “Sorry. That just means it found it.”

Mateo turned away from his monument. “Then let’s go.”

“We can wait a moment,” Olimpia suggested, taking hold of his arm.

“That won’t be necessary.” As Mateo continued to walk away, her grip slid down his arm, into his hand, and then back out of it.

“Are you sure?” Ramses asked.

Mateo glanced at his friend’s interface. “Yes.” Then he teleported to the coordinates. He was in an underground lab now. The transdimensional gravity regulator stood before him. That was what he assumed it was anyway. He heard the erratic hum of fluctuating power. It was trying to hold on, like a dying lightbulb. Each time one of the others appeared, the machine reacted with a surge of energy. “Wait, don’t come yet! Just hold on!” he cried into his comms, but it was too late.

Once Romana appeared, a wave of light spread out from the machine and engulfed them all before they could teleport away. It was blinding, even for them with their advanced substrates. It took a couple of minutes for their vision to return. They were no longer underground, but in a high desert. Shrubbery kissed their feet. There were buttes scattered about in the distance. And a beetle. An absolutely gigantic beetle, towering over them, but paying them no mind. “Whoa,” Romana said as it slowly skittered past them.

“Who are you?” came a voice behind them. They turned around to find a gun pointed in their general direction.

“We’re not here to hurt anyone. You don’t need that,” Mateo told the stranger.

“Teleportation is highly regulated. So who are you?” he repeated. When they started to introduce themselves, he put his weapon away. “I’ve heard of you, you’re okay. I’m sorry for the mix-up. Welcome back. My name is Lycander Samani.”

“Welcome back where?” Leona pressed. “Where are we?”

“Castlebourne,” Lycander answered, “specifically, Gientodome.”

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Microstory 2630: If You’re Going Through Hell...Keep Going

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April 3, 2527. Each pod can hold about 2,500 people, and with three tether systems running concurrently, that means around 2.16 million people can be evacuated every day. On the north side of the planet, only around 147 million people ultimately needed to evacuate. The rest had died, transferred their consciousnesses to other worlds, or refused to leave. A lot of the people who had originally settled in the surviving domes saw no reason to go, and no one spent much effort trying to convince them otherwise. The future is wildly uncertain at this point. Science suggests that the poles will remain safe indefinitely, but that’s assuming nothing more changes about Proxima Centauri, and that anyone truly understands what’s happening. This has never occurred before. If Earth were this hostile, nothing would have likely evolved on it, let alone a species as intelligent as humans. The safe bet is to leave, but many don’t see it that way.

It’s been 69 days now. Breanna, Cash, Notus, and Calypso are still here, along with a handful of Tangent workers who are just finishing up. They have made one final announcement in case anyone wants to change their mind, but it’s time to leave now. People have had multiple chances to get on board, so this is it. They need to pack up and head off to the southern pole to do it all again. It is reportedly going to take a lot longer, as more of them want to leave, but the four of them have completed their responsibilities. They weren’t even expected to stay for the whole two-month stint, but they did, because they wanted to help. They have not been shown a whole lot of gratitude for their efforts by the evacuating Domanians, but that’s not why they did it, and it was a rewarding experience anyway. The Bungulans initially left two pods down here as staging pods. Each one is several stories tall, so filing everyone in was a lot faster when they were already in place. One of those staging pods has finally gone back up, completely empty, which means it can do it a lot faster. This last one is for the last remaining workers. They all climb the steps, along with Heracles.

“Wait! Wait, wait, wait!” Someone says. He’s jogging through the holo-stanchions, and jumping on stage. It’s none other than Sorel Arts.

“Hey,” Breanna says after he climbs into the pod. “You’re coming with us?”

“Yeah, everyone who’s ever gonna say yes to the upload has already done so. I see no point in wasting my time here. The southerners need my help now.”

“Good on ya,” Cash says. “It’s nice to see you again.”

“Likewise,” Sorel replies as the doors are closing.

One of the Bungulan workers comes over as the pod is closing and being moved out to the tether. “Listen, we were hoping to do an express trip. Can you all handle that? The pod isn’t equipped with inertial dampeners. We had to manufacture too many of them on our way here. It was simpler to basically just make a tin can tied to a string.”

“How many Gs are we talking’ here?” Breanna presses.

The Bungulan reaches over and waves a sliding door open. “A hundred and twenty. Because we have to break through the atmosphere first, so it will take nearly fifteen minutes total.” She steps to the side, revealing what’s in the other room. It’s a giant tank of some kind of fluid. Breanna is guessing perfluorocarbon.

“We’re trained for that,” Cash says, pointing to herself and Breanna. “They’re not,” she explains, indicating Notus and Calypso.

“No, it’s all right. We can handle it,” Calypso insists.

“You don’t understand,” Breanna says. “If you accelerated at these speeds without that tank, it would kill you. No matter what, unless you’re maybe a couple of certain someones, there would be nothing you could do to survive.” She gestures towards the tankroom. “This allows us to do it without feeling the full effects of such extreme acceleration, but you’re submerged in a special water that you breathe through your skin as it also fills your lungs. Everyone panics the first time. Even I did, and that was a controlled pull, at a lower acceleration than this.” She faces the Bungulan. “I’m sorry, I won’t allow it. You’ve been at this for seven months. You can wait sixteen more hours.”

“No.” Notus steps forward. “We have been through this much. We did things we never thought we would. None of those things was our choice, but this is. Let us do it. We promise, we’ll make it through. Even if it traumatizes us, it’s a story that we can tell our grandkids one day.”

“Our grandkids?” Calypso echoes.

“Our...respective...collective...grandkids.” Nice save.

“I assure you, it’s quite safe,” the Bungulan promises. “You won’t be able to talk, but it comes with an AI coach. Even the veterans will hear it guide us through the experience. The voice has been clinically tested, and proven to be fairly universally calming and helpful without sounding robotic or irritating.”

Breanna sighs and looks at her friends. They all seem amenable to the idea, and he’s right that it’s safe. The concern is not that something will go wrong, but that they won’t like, and won’t be able to tell anyone to stop. “Well, because of the atmosphere, I suppose we have to start off rather slowly anyway, so that will give us some time for human coaching, right?”

“Right,” the Bungulan agrees.

“Okay, fine,” Breanna concedes. “I’ve never actually done it in the field, so you’ll have to walk us through it. Explain like we’re five.”

“We can do that.”

Everybody climbs into the tank, and dips into the water. At first it feels like nothing, and then they move. They can feel the resistance of the thick fluid surrounding them, but still, the suit itself is fully sealed. Once everyone is in, the pod begins to move, but at very low speeds. The Bungulan instructs them on what to do. The suit, being as versatile as it is, is designed with the ability to accommodate this very thing. Valves open to let the fluid in. It’s the weirdest part. Humans evolved without the ability to breathe underwater. They are hardwired to not even try. It takes a great deal of will to force one’s self to overcome that impulse. Yet everyone does. While they’re still moving at fairly low speeds—though already accelerating—the group reports being prepared for this. Notus retains the wherewithal to send a message to Heracles, who is still in the main area of the pod, telling him that they’ll see each other on the other side. The pod moves faster and faster. Then it goes faster, faster, faster, and faster. The AI voice responds to their reactions, and alters its guidance accordingly. It’s rough and frightening, but they all get through it. Minutes later, they’re on the platform. Breanna may never see Proxima Doma again. She’s not sure yet if she wants to head for the southern pole, or take a shuttle somewhere else. She doesn’t have to decide right away.

Delegator Chariot greets them when they arrive. “Welcome to The Tangent. The Captain would like to meet you.”