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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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: September 19, 2563

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Monster might not have been the right word to use for them. They were amorphous blobs that shifted their shapes as they moved in unpredictable ways. They were mostly a navy blue, though hints of other colors randomly appear like twinkling stars. They had no faces and no limbs, but they were heading right for the trio. Mateo didn’t know if Romana and Boyd were as worried as he was, so he took his eyes off of the apparent attack to study their faces. They both looked just as surprised as they stood up from the picnic blanket, and tried to back away. This was evidently not normal.

There were more monsters behind them, coming from up the ridge, in the tree branches, and even from burrows in the ground. The landscape and foreground objects, like the picnic supplies, started flickering. The waterfall moved backwards, and then forwards at superspeed. It wasn’t just that there were monsters in this world. It was that the world itself was unstable. The simulation was clearly corrupted. They would have to take it out of Romana’s head. But first, they had to find a way out of it. Any amount of time could have passed in the real world for them. She was not in control anymore. Perhaps she never was.

“We have to get out of here,” Mateo pointed out as they were running through the one gap they found between the monsters. “You leave first, Romy. I’ll follow.”

“She can’t leave,” Boyd argued.

“I don’t know if you’re real or not,” Mateo said to him, “but if you love her like you’re supposed to, you’ll let her save herself. I don’t know where you could go, but—”

“No, it’s not that,” Boyd argued. “The nanites are in her brain and body. She can’t simply log out. Whatever is happening will still be happening, and could still be damaging her. But at least here, she can see what’s going on from the inside.”

“Our friends don’t necessarily know that something has gone wrong,” Mateo reasoned. “We have to leave so we can tell them, so they can solve it from their end.”

“You go,” Romana urged. “Tell Ram and mother. I will stay and maintain the link.”

Mateo stopped, and stopped her by the shoulder. They had covered some ground. “That doesn’t make sense. You need to be able to talk to them about what you’re feeling, and what you’re thinking. They need to be able to ask you questions. I will stay here.”

“Time is different when she’s not here,” Boyd explained. “I don’t have to wait a full year for her to come back, but I do spend some time alone, so I live more like a normal person, instead of a program that she just turns on and off. Whatever these things are...”

“They could be messing with that.” Mateo turned back to his daughter. “That’s why you need to go. Please. We’ll take care of each other. If he were the original Boyd, or if he’s not; it doesn’t matter. I don’t know how to test for that. I have to assume that he’s a conscious being, so I will fight for him like I would anyone else.” He waited. “Now go!”

Romana gave Boyd a hug and a kiss, and Mateo only a hug. Then she disappeared.

“Do you have any idea what these things are?” Mateo asked. “Can we fight them?”

“I wouldn’t know, but I wouldn’t try. They might kill you. Just by touch, they might genuinely destroy your IDCode, leaving your body an empty husk in base reality.”

The monsters were closing in on them again, so they started running off again. “Can we simply shift to a different environment?” Mateo asked. “Anywhere but here.”

Boyd extended his hand, then transported them away when Mateo took it, but no matter where they jumped, the blobs were always in the exact same place, relative to their positions. The blobs could pass through solid objects, so the only way to stay ahead of them was to run. The humans had to keep running for a week before rescue came.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: May 17, 2398

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Everybody found their own room, and slept in The Constant that night. They didn’t make any plans for the next day, but it seemed as good a place as any. They stayed close to each other, even though they consisted of two parties of strangers. The next day, with nothing better to do, Ramses and Leona start looking into the database, or what’s left of it. There’s a lot still here, but it becomes clearer the more they look through the directories that a lot of data has been stripped. When Danica left, she knew someone else could find this place one day, and she didn’t want them to have access to certain information. The fact that she didn’t just run out all of the sudden, or die without warning, was already obvious. She had the wherewithal to seal up the top of the main elevator, and dismantle the elevator car itself. If she recorded some kind of log that might give them an idea why she’s no longer here, she took that with her too.

The little girl, Trina runs into the room, holding a small black box. “What is this thing?”

Leona isn’t paying her any attention, so Ramses takes it from her, and looks it over. “I have no idea? Wait. It looks like some kind of magnetic memory storage device.”

Leona turns her head. “It’s a video cassette tape.” She turns back.

“Where did you get it?” Ramses asks Trina.

“I think it was a library, but this is the only thing that was in it.”

Now Leona’s interested. “How big was this library?”

“Like, four stories tall, and maybe endlessly long?” Trina ballparks.

“And that’s the only thing you found?” Leona presses.

“Yeah, it was in this thing.” She hands Leona the case.

Jim Carrey is dreaming of himself lying on the snow next to Kate Winslet. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

“Is it a movie?” Trina guesses.

“Yeah.”

“Is it good? It must be good if they cleared out the entire library, except for this one thing.”

“Did you find it fallen on the floor, as if someone had dropped it, or still sitting on the shelf?”

“It was on the first shelf I saw when I walked in, facing the door. I looked through several aisles. They were all empty.”

Leona and Ramses give each other a look, but they’re not thinking the same thing. “Computer, where do you keep the VCR?”

The computer doesn’t respond vocally. It just lights up the floor and walls to lead them down to the legacy technology sector. Leona follows it, and Ramses and Trina follow her. They find the VCR already connected to a box TV, rather than tucked away somewhere. She expects to blow dust off of the top, but it’s perfectly clean. There’s a robot in here somewhere who’s been maintaining the bunker. Leona inserts the tape, and presses play.

“I love you,” says Joel.

“Meet me in Montauk,” Clementine whispers back.

That’s it. It’s stuck between 1:30:50 and 1:30:55, repeating those two lines over, and over, and over again. The tape keeps skipping. Ramses thinks he might be able to fix it, but Leona stops him. “It’s a clue.”

“It’s a clue for what?”

Leona pauses the video, and echoes the last line herself. “Meet me in Montauk. Meet me in Montauk.”

“Does that mean anything to you?” Trina asks.

“That sounds like a city. Is that where we’re meant to go?” Ramses questions.

Leona tilts her head, considering the words, and what they may mean in a more figurative sense. Thinking she has it figured out, she runs off. The other two follow her again, down the hallways, and into the main living area. Heath, Alyssa, and the boys are already there, chatting about this and that.

“Is everything okay?” Heath stands up to help in whatever way necessary.

Leona ignores him, and heads straight for the corner of the room. She stares at the wall. “Where’s that sledgehammer?”

“Why do you need it?” Heath asks.

She just turns to him and scowls. He’s not really in a position to question her. Intellectually, she knows she shouldn’t blame him—that it could never have been his idea to use a time bullet to blow a hole in a concrete ceiling five kilometers up—but she can’t help but be angry at him anyway.

He steps over to the main elevator shaft, and retrieves the sledgehammer.

“Rambo,” Leona says, “he’s still recovering. Could you do the honors?”

Ramses accepts the tool from Heath. He gets in position, but doesn’t swing. He places the business end against the wall that she’s staring at. “Right here?”

“Yes,” she orders.

He does as he’s told, bashing the hammer against the wall over, and over, and over again. The facility is constructed out of metal, probably graphene, and maybe other metamaterials. There’s no wood, or even brick anywhere. They wouldn’t last very long. Why is this made out of wood? Once he’s gotten through, they find a door on the other side. He knocks the last of the wall out of the way, and wrenches it open. A light flickers on to reveal an upright stasis pod. There’s only one reason to design a pod like that, and it’s if the user is literally kept in stasis. Time is probably moving at infinitely slow speeds, so almost none will have passed since they stepped in. As long as you have power, it’s the only way a normal person could survive for many thousands of years, if not longer. Other methods allow for too much aging, radiation poisoning, and other failures.

Leona uses the touchscreen to command the pod to open. When it does, Mateo steps out. “You’re here!” she exclaims. “You’ve been here the whole time?”

Mateo takes her by the shoulders, and pushes her out. He looks around the main living area to take stock. “Is everybody who came down here in this room right now?”

“What? What are you talking about?” Ramses asks.

Mateo screams in his face, “is everyone here!”

“Yes.”

“Then run!” Mateo sprints across the room, to the little secondary elevator. He holds the door open, and ushers everyone in one by one. First Leona, then Ramses, Trina, Carlin, Moray, and Alyssa. Heath and Mateo squeeze in last, making it a very tight fit. But it’ll be worth it. Mateo pops open the firefighter access panel with a flathead screwdriver that he has in his pocket. He reaches in, but waits. “There are more people in here than I thought there would be. Make sure the young ones are in the middle.

Moray has to adjust a little, but it’s about as good as they’ll do.

Mateo pulls the switch. They shoot upwards, faster than any elevator should safely move. They can feel the g-force desperately trying to squish them into the floor. But it’ll be worth it.

“Oh my God!” Heath shouts.

“Whoopee!” Trina cries.

At some point, the elevator car starts to tip over. Everybody begins to yell in fear, even the little one, because they’ve reached the surface, and now they’re coming back down. They don’t crash, though. They can feel themselves bouncing, rolling, bouncing, and rolling. When the ride finally ends, the door opens automatically, allowing them to see the giant air bags that released automatically, which are now gradually deflating.

“What the hell was that?” Leona demands to know.

Before Mateo can say anything, they hear a boom. A plume of dirt rises into the sky. He runs over, and the rest are compelled to do the same. They hear rushing water as they near the road, and after they get over the hill, they can see the crater. It’s filling up with water, resourced from pipes that they barely have time to see before they’re covered up.

“I say again...what the hell was that?” Leona repeats.

Mateo catches his breath. “It’s Danica Lake.” He falls to the ground, and passes out.

Extremus: Year 31

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It took a shockingly long time for Omega to realize who the photographer, September was, and what her weird cryptic messages meant. Her name was no random coincidence. There is a woman from Earth with the ability to travel through time—fittingly, through pictures. Sometimes when she does this, she will just be completing a loop of destiny. She hasn’t changed anything about the timeline; she stayed in one reality, and did everything she was destined to do. Other times, however, she’s able to change the past, and when that happens, it will generate a brand new timeline. The problem is, now there were two versions of her in this reality. It’s unclear how it occurs, but there are a few options to deal with this situation. Her method is for all the alternates to coexist in the same timeline. They usually avoid any confusion or complications by going off in different directions, and the traveler will give herself a different name to distinguish themselves. The original was and is named Paige. The second one is Dyad, the third Trinity, and so on. September is the seventh incarnation. How and why she ended up on Extremus, and how involved she is in its goingson, is something that Omega isn’t cognizant of. That’s not his concern right now, though. He’s on a mission of great importance, and the key to completing it lies in the comments that September made just before the detachment team left.

Omega was a clone. The original, Saxon Parker, was given his own mission, along with a few others. They were tasked with installing an outpost in every single star system in the galaxy. His superiors decided that they wanted a human touch to the automated ships. Thusly, the clones were grown. They were each given a number, Omega’s being the last, which inspired him to name himself accordingly. Omega also didn’t want to go through with the mission, so Saxon was forced to fill in for him. But this isn’t about Omega’s number. It’s about number 83. That’s what September offered them, so to the location of number 83 is where they’re going.

The team doesn’t want to travel through time, and Captain Leithe strongly suggested that they not anyway. Still, they needed to cover over 20,000 light years, and they needed to figure out how to do it in a matter of years. So instead of sending their whole ship back in time, they sent the original time shuttle on its own. Once there, it would take the long way around to finally reach the location of Anglo 83, which shouldn’t be too far from the border of what was deemed Earth’s stellar neighborhood. This neighborhood spans a radius of fifty light years in all directions, and the True Extremists have decided—without telling anyone, naturally—that everything beyond it belonged to them.

Surely they would claim that they were protecting fragile Earthans from the existence of their distant cousins by not actually telling them about the border, but this is a ridiculous stance. Sure, it’s fine for when the people of Earth were young and naïve, but when they began to try to spread out to the stars, the True Extremists should have made themselves known. As explained by famous futurist Isaac Arthur, if you don’t want people to come to your backyard, you don’t hide from them. You warn them that you’re there, and you do it loudly. No civilization capable of galactic colonization would ever dare trespass against a neighbor who has proven themselves strong enough to be seen for as long in years as they are far away in light years. That is, if the Earthans could witness the might of the True Extremists, they would know how powerful the aliens were based on their ability to be witnessed from 50 light years away at least 50 years ago. It’s even in the freakin’ handbook. According to protocols developed by Earthan scientists before they so much as passed the heliosphere, first contact with a superior alien force is to be made at those aliens’ discretion; not the other way around.

“Is it finally ready?” Captain Moralez asks.

“Yes, it’s arrived at the destination, currently pilot fishing Voussoir Splitter Seven,” Valencia answers.

“Any explanation for why it cut it so close? We have been ready to cast for over four years.”

Valencia shakes her head as she’s looking over the data. “Best guess, it went slow. It wasn’t traveling at maximum reframe. I’m not really seeing that in the logs, though.”

“Did you do this?” Yitro questions Omega.

“Why would I do that?”

“Your little riddle that the photographer had for you. She must have given you the impression that we shouldn’t arrive until now. So you programmed the shuttle to go just a little bit slower than it could have.”

“September told us to find clone 83. She didn’t say when. This had nothing to do with me, I don’t know what went wrong.”

The Captain isn’t convinced.

“He’s telling the truth,” Valencia argues. “Stop looking at him like that.”

“I’m still not convinced he should be here,” Yitro says to her. “It’s his brother out there on that ship. That could be a conflict of interest.”

Omega can’t help but laugh.

“What?”

“We don’t have the split schedule,” Omega tries to explain, “but we know that Anglo 83’s module hasn’t had time to split apart that much yet. There could be as many as 1100 people on that thing right now. They should all be asleep, but...we don’t know that.”

“Even more cause to be concerned about you going on this mission,” Yitro reasons.

“No offense to you, honey,” Omega says to the mother of his child before switching his attention back to the Captain, “but I’m the smartest person on this detachment. You need me.”

“Someone has to stay here anyway,” Yitro contends, knowing it to be a weak argument.

“Yes,” Omega says with a condescending nod, “the navigator, and the casting engineer, as well as the medic, and our amazing auxiliary crewmember. The rest of us are on the away team. This was decided long ago, why are you fighting it now?”

“I don’t know,” Yitro admits. “I’m just worried about what’s waiting for us on the other side of that quantum casting pod. I don’t like that we’re four years behind. But you’re right. Intelligence aside, having a clone on the team is an asset. Let’s go.”

“Not quite yet.” Kaiora wanted to send a doctor with them, but Extremus couldn’t afford to lose anyone right now. The crew was having a surprisingly hard time backfilling medical positions. Dechen Karma was the best medic currently licensed, so that was the compromise. “You need a fitness approval from me.”

“And I need to finish running diagnostics on these pods,” engineer Hardy Gibson adds.

“Oh, good,” Yitro says sarcastically. “Anyone else? Navigator Trimble?  Yeoman?”

They shake their heads, a little in fear.

“Great, then I think we’ll just be going. It’s been four months, there’s nothing wrong with the pods, or our bodies.” Yitro starts taking off his uniform.

“You don’t need to do that,” Gibson assures him. “It just hooks up to your brain.”

“I knew that, I’m just...getting comfortable.”

“Is he okay?” Omega whispers to Valencia.

“A lot can change about a person in four years,” she replies. “This is a small detachment ship. Cabin fever, if I had to guess.”

“Maybe he should be staying behind.”

The three of them climb into their respective pods. Gibson and Karma link them to the computer, and prepare to cast them thousands of light years away. “It’s just like playing Quantum Colony,” Gibson says, “except we’ll be sending your consciousness there intact, rather than having you pilot a surrogate.”

“Very well,” Yitro replies. “Do it.”

Omega tries to give Valencia another knowing look, but they can’t see each other from inside their pods. So he just closes his eyes, and lets himself go.”

Omega awakens in the destination pod, but it’s not what he expected. His new body ought to be tilted at a 135 degree angle, just like his real one. Instead, he’s fully flat, and fully encased. This looks less like a casting pod, and more like a stasis chamber. No, this doesn’t make sense at all. He slides the hatch above him open, and pulls himself up to look around. This doesn’t look like the time shuttle either, but it does look familiar. He tries to speak, but it’s always a little difficult at first, so he clears his throat profusely. “Computer, report.”

“It is February 12, 2300 at closest estimate to realtime. Cruising at point-nine-nine—”

“I get it,” Omega interrupts. “We shouldn’t be time dilating yet. We should still be at reframe speeds.”

“I’m afraid I do not understand,” the computer says.

“Hey, computer! I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Okay, well I’m sorry to have bothered you. Sorry, Anglo Eighty-Three. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.”

“What did you just call me?”

“I was programmed to recognize your designation as Anglo Eighty-Three. Would you like to provide me with a different name?”

“Where are we?”

“This is Voussoir Splitter Seven of the Project Stargate Quantum Seeder Program for the Milky Way Galaxy Colonization Initiative.”

That’s not right. He’s not supposed to be on the modular ship yet. He was just supposed to be cast to their time shuttle, where they would investigate from the outside, only intending to board the splitter if necessary. Omega has to work through this logic with the computer. “Why am I awake?”

“I’m afraid I do not understand.”

“Anglos are not meant to wake up unless something is wrong with the ship, so why am I awake?”

The computer took a moment to respond. “Unknown. Revival process triggered from inside the stasis chamber.”

“Doesn’t that seem a little odd to you, since I was asleep, and couldn’t have prompted said revival process myself?”

“Hmm.” That’s an interesting response.

“Computer, did you detect a quantum casting event prior to my awakening?”

“Checking logs. Yes, recent casting event detected.”

“Okay...”

“You’re not Anglo Eighty-Three, are you?”

“No, I’m a different Anglo.”

“This...is a problem.”

“Yeah. Do you detect any other vessels in this region of space?”

“One, traveling at incongruent relativistic speeds. Communication impossible.”

“Not impossible, just a shorter time frame. I’m gonna teach you how to reframe your communication protocols. I absolutely must connect with my Captain, and my...Valencia.” They never really did fully define this relationship. They have the same last name now, but never married.

Valencia sits before the computer, staring at the camera. “Engineer’s log, February 14, 2300. It has been two days since I arrived alone on the time shuttle. Still no word from the Captain, or Omega. I cannot reach the Perran Thatch. I have been monitoring the progress of Voussoir Splitter Seven, which is traveling at maximum relativistic speeds. So far, nothing has gone wrong. I am detecting no other vessels in the vicinity, nor any reason to believe that the True Extremists are anywhere near here. I have been able to make short jumps to confirm this. If they’re planning to come here at all, they’ve not arrived yet, though I can’t rule out the possibility that the casting problem is the result of some kind of sabotage. I may end up becoming the victim of survivor’s guilt, with my two crewmembers lost to the quantum void.” She sighs.

A message pops up on the screen, reading turn off the reframe engine, love.

“Computer, turn off reframe. Match relativistic speed with the voussoir splitter.”

After the computer complies, another message arrives, but video this time. “Valencia, you made it.”

“You’re on the splitter. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“It’s only been a few minutes.”

“It’s been a couple days for me.”

He shrugs. “I’ve heard it both ways. Where’s Captain Moralez.”

She sighs again. “Shit. I was hoping he was with you.”

“No. Hopefully he’s just back on the Thatch.”

“Are we ever that lucky?”

“We found the source of the meteor chain.”

“That took us twenty years.”

“I’ve heard it both ways.”

“We need to find him.”

“We will.”

Not too far away, but still out of sensor range, Yitro wakes up to find two weapons trained on him. They wait as he coughs profusely. “Oh, man, pardon me. Good day, I’m Captain Moralez of the Perran Thatch Detachment Ship. Got any water?”

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