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On a scale from robot butter-passer to ecumenopolis, the infrastructure that
Ramses’ forge core was able to construct during their interim year sat at
about a 5.6. This logarithmic scale was designed by a team of futurologists
back in the very late 21st century; not just something that he made up
himself. The core’s interface was very intuitive for even the dumbest of
dum-dums. It was basically a store, where they added things that they wanted
to a shopping cart, and the cost—the time it would take to complete
the whole project—automatically calculated in the corner. At first, all they
wanted was to build a Nexus, which took a healthy chunk of time alone due to
its sheer complexity, outmatching all other buildings on their plans
combined in that category. Without it, the starter nanites could have
resulted in a continent-wide civilization-ready network of interconnected
megacities. But what they ended up with was more than enough. There were
only nine of them, including the three on the away mission.
There were several arcological megastructure tripods now. If any Earthan
were to move here, they would feel right at home. They weren’t actually
expecting that to happen, though. They only built all this because they were
trying to maximize the time available by hitting that 365-day mark. They
figured it was better to have it and not need it than need it and not have
it. They had no idea what they wanted to use any of this for yet, but that
was where the Nexus came in. People from anywhere in the galaxy, or farther,
would be able to travel here near-instantaneously. It only had the capacity
of a few dozen people, so it wasn’t suitable for some kind of mass-exodus,
but it wasn’t useless either. If Hrockas had had access to this level of
technology back when he was building Castlebourne, it could have been
completed in under a decade. Now there was the simple question of what to
name all this.
“I’ve been trying since we got here,” Romana revealed.
“What have you come up with?” Mateo asked her.
“Nothing good. The best ones are Lorramm, Ramlorm, and Marmorl.”
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...” Mateo said.
“They’re all seven of our initials.”
“Oh.”
“Not enough vowels.”
“Right.”
“We could add E and C for Echo and Clavia,” Angel suggested.
“Leave me out of this,” Clavia insisted, weirdly offended.
“I thought this planet was named Echo,” Marie pointed out.
“Yeah, on the other side,” Romana agreed. “Firstly, I started thinking about
this before the weird interversal portal we went through. And secondly, I
was brought up to believe that there is no such thing as an alternate self.
We’re each unique, even when we come across people who look just like us,
and share our memories. I think that goes for planets too.
That’s Echo. This is somewhere else.”
“That’s completely true,” Clavia agreed. “When Olimpia screamed the Sixth
Key pocket universe into existence, she based it on the original Milky Way,
but it’s not an exact copy. It was just mostly close. You should name
it something else. My brother would say the same thing if he were here right
now.”
Mateo nodded in agreement. “Well, let’s keep thinking while we explore. We
also need names for the various domes and cities, I guess. And there’s still
the issue of what the purpose of this planet is.”
“I think it’s whatever it needs to be,” Marie began. “If there are more
refugees, we can bring them in. If people want to come here for vacation, we
will have recreational facilities available too. If someone is in need of a
prison, we’ll build a remote site somewhere here, and house them safely.
Even if they escape, where are they gonna go? It’s an all-purpose planet. It
will serve as the central hub for the Milky Way galaxy one day, and maybe
sooner than you think.”
“Well, if that’s the case, we need someone to host,” Angela said. “We need
someone who is here every day of the timestream.”
They all looked over at Clavia.
“Oh, no. That’s not my job,” she contended. “I don’t even live in this
universe. I’m just here to keep an eye on you people until your friends and
lovers come back.”
“Most of our permanent friends are on Castlebourne,” Mateo pointed out, not
expecting her to change her mind. “We would have to poach them.”
“Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be a sanctuary,” Romana argued. “I thought it
was going to be just for us; a place that no one else could get to. They
wouldn’t even know about it. Whatever happened to that plan? We got so
wrapped up in what we could do with the forge core that I think we lost the
plot.”
“It was always going to end up like this,” Marie countered. “We don’t stay
out of things, even when we try. If we ever do need a real sanctuary just
for our team, we’ll use some other distant world that Rambo’s Operation
Starframe colonizes for us. It doesn’t even have to be big. It could be a
hollowed out asteroid, like Linwood’s.”
“That’s gonna take over a hundred years from these staging grounds,” Romana
volleyed. “I’m not saying we can’t build out, but my Future!Dad was warning
us about something. Even if this planet had nothing to do with anything in
his timeline, there might be an inevitable threat that us coming here only
worsens, or at least doesn’t alleviate. We keep making these choices which
have lasting consequences for the universe. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful
for your meddling. I would not exist if my Past!Dad hadn’t randomly ended up
on Durus at the exact right moment, but what he and Leona did that day
resulted in more than just me. It impacted the future of an entire
civilization.” She focused her gaze upon her father. “Present!Dad, you
helped make Dardius what it is today. I still believe we hastened the
carnage on Proxima Doma. Who knows what we’ve done to Thālith al Naʽāmāt
Bida just by helping a woman carry her potatoes? Again, I’m not saying we
bury ourselves in a hole, but let’s try to think things through. Romana
Nieman, youngest one here, unlikely voice of reason.”
Romana was right to be cautious. Despite only living one day out of the
year, their actions have rippled out in ways that few could have predicted.
They would need someone like Bhulan Cargill to see all the branches. That
metaphor gave Angela an idea so she went off alone to unpack it. The rest
had their own things going on. Marie left the city entirely, reacclimated to
the planet’s natural atmosphere, and took a walk in the wilderness. Clavia
accompanied her for protection since they didn’t know what else could be out
there, and no one should be alone outside of the controlled environment of a
dome. Mateo tried to activate the Nexus for a test. Everything seemed to be
in working order, but they had not been given their own term sequence. The
gods only assigned it once everything was engineered to absolute perfection,
but he didn’t know what was wrong, and obviously could not have fixed it
either way. Romana just sat down on the dirt, apparently to meditate. This
far out, no grass had been planted yet.
A few hours later, Angela called everyone back, claiming to have figured it
out. They didn’t know what exactly she had been working on, but they came
anyway. After a moment of silence, she began with a single word. “Ramosus.”
She uttered it in an accent a couple of times, like she was getting the feel
of it, before returning to her normal voice.
“Is that a band, errr...?” Romana hadn’t gotten the chance to make that joke
yet.
“It sounds like a corruption of Ramses,” Marie suggested.
“It is,” Angela confirmed. “But it’s not just that. Romana certainly helped
point me in that direction, but your comment about branching timelines is
what really led me there. It’s Latin for branched, which I think
works because the initial hope for this outpost was to serve as the launch
point for Starframe. Plus, it has natural life on it. I love those
willow-like trees we saw that we think recycle their water by sending it up
the trunk, running it across the stems, which hang down, and dripping it
back into the soil.
“Yeah, I like it,” Mateo decided. “It’s good that he’s not here, or he would
argue against it. We need to find ways of solidifying the name so it’s
established before he has the chance to come back here and put a stop to it.
Maybe we build a welcome sign?”
“We can start to spread the word,” Romana offered. “If we send it out into
the universe, what’s done will be done, whether he likes it or not. People
in the past will probably even hear about it. Were you able to turn on the
Nexus?”
“On?” Mateo questioned. “Absolutely. Power is not the problem. It just won’t
go anywhere. It’s a cell phone without service. I think we need him and
Leona back for that. I probably shouldn’t have even tried. It was too risky
for an idiot like me.” When they were all silent, he added, “wow. Not even
gonna argue that I’m not an idiot. Thanks.”
They all laughed.
“All right,” he went on. “Clavia, do you have anything to contribute?”
“Like I said,” she began, shaking her head, “I’m just here to protect you.
I’m not a part of the team.”
“Well...” Mateo thought about it. “Olimpia is my wife, and Echo is her son,
and you’re Echo’s sister, so whether you like it or not, we’re family. That
doesn’t mean you have to help, or even stick around. Romana’s sisters don’t,
but we still love them.”
“I have plenty of family,” Clavia reasoned. “Thanks, though.” She didn’t
sound pretentious or arrogant, more just trying to keep her distance. That
was fine.
“We don’t need the Nexus,” Marie said after the group relocated from the
middle of nowhere to a picnic table. The biggest bottleneck in construction
was managing heat dissipation. The laws of thermodynamics always slowed
rapid deployment down when not utilizing temporal manipulation technology.
Life, on the other hand, was a different story. It would take years to make
this dome look less artificial or dead, so for now, this park was only a
placeholder. It was just this one table and some fast-growing resilient
shrubbery. “We have our tandem slingdrives. We should go to Castlebourne.
We’ll let Hrockas know what we’ve built, and give him an idea of where we
are. If some refugees from the Exin Empire would like to move, now they have
a new option.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for the others?” Angela figured.
“They’re making decisions that affect the multiverse,” her sister reasoned.
“They can stand to come back to a surprise or two.”
“They’re your wives best friend,” Romana said to Mateo. “I say it’s your
choice.”
“Let’s wait until tomorrow,” he decided. “If they’re not back, we’ll pull
the trigger. For today, let’s focus on the capital. I think I have an idea
of what we should do with the dome. Let’s lean into the
branching theme.”
