Bungula: Buffer State (Part III)

< > Entire Story

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

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

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

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

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

“Indeed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They laugh.

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

“Okay...”

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

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

“Right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something goes wrong.

< > Entire Story

Microstory 1145: Makarion Dimitrios

< > Table of Contents

In an earlier reality, Makarion Dimitrios was chosen as one of the last Saviors of Earth. His career was different than those of his predecessors. He was less involved with choosing ones and other salmon, and more linked to the powers that be. To be sure, he never met them in person, but he did meet with The Emissary more often than one might expect. His tenure did not last long, however. In an attempt to free himself from cruel torment, Mateo Matic tried to kill his torturer, who was a man named The Rogue. But the Rogue had a secret, that he could subvert death, by transferring his consciousness to the body of anyone else with temporal powers. In this case, the Rogue didn’t have time to hunt for a suitable host, nor did he have any control over which body he possessed, so the nature of his attempted murder changed his powers permanently. He found himself in possession Makarion’s body, but unlike with his previous hosts, he was unable to leave. This was his last body; he would be stuck with it until the day of his death. Masquerading as Makarion, the Rogue continued to force Mateo and his friends into challenges, one of which involved them both traveling back in time, and killing Adolf Hitler before he would have died on his own. This act elicited a new reality. Mateo no longer existed, and since Mateo was instrumental in his creation, nor did the Rogue. So now there were two people running around the timeline with Makarion’s face. This seemed okay, because it allowed a version of Makarion to fulfill his duty as Savior, having no idea that he died in a different timeline. But there were consequences. The Rogue had made a deal with an even more powerful man named The Cleanser, and the Cleanser felt this deal had been broken, so he finally ended the Rogue’s life. It turned out, maybe the Rogue wasn’t so bad after all, but his death was not the worst of it. The Cleanser’s sister was known as The Conservator, except when she wasn’t; she was instead The Extractor. Their entire family was born with some ability to perceive alterations to the timeline, and they used these powers to manage certain outcomes. Sometimes, a time traveling act did, or undid, a particular event in history, even if only accidentally. It was their job to manipulate the timeline again; to correct what they believed to be a mistake. This family was egotistical, narcissistic, and uncaring, so the Extractor decided no Makarion would live past the moment the Rogue died. At the exact same time the Cleanser was killing him, she was killing the new Makarion herself, even though there was no real justification for this—and, in fact, no link to it at all. Even though the Rogue looked like Makarion, they had nothing to do with each other, so this was completely pointless. Makarion wasn’t the shortest-lived Savior in the long history of the program, but he certainly didn’t live the longest. His untimely death had a major impact on the future of the program, totally changing who was chosen next, and perhaps more importantly, who was chosen to be The Last. Had Makarion survived the Extractor’s morbid logic, neither Xearea Voss, nor Étude Einarsson would have become Saviors themselves, and maybe their lives would have been that much less dangerous. Then again, maybe those two were exactly what the Extractor had in mind when she murdered him.

Microstory 1144: Keilix Oliver

< > Table of Contents

Everyone who signed up for the Kansas City Metropolitan Area City Frenzy event had their own reasons for it. About the only thing they all had in common was that they were athletic. Some were faster than others. Some were more competitive than others. Keilix Oliver was one of the few racers who was really just a runner. When she raced, she went straight for the finish line, not stopping for anything but traffic, and other obstacles. She studied the map exhaustively, and was extremely familiar with the entire metro. Unfortunately, her tactic wasn’t the most efficient. Even though she didn’t get distracted with dancing and waving at the cameras, she also didn’t take many risks, so she never won the Frenzy. That was okay, though, because that wasn’t why she did it, and when she finally aged out of it, she pretty much just moved on with her life. Keilix wasn’t ashamed of the things she did when she was young, but competition was never very important to her. She wasn’t a tracer, or a dancer, or a martial artist. She ran for health, and to fight against the wind. She could do that alone. She went off to college in Ireland, partially to gain new and exciting experiences, but also to deliberately separate herself from everything she had ever known. She wanted to be cut off from her family—her always reliable support system—so she would be forced to deal with her own problems, with no safety net. She lived in a world with people who had special time powers, and even knew a few of them personally, but she never discovered the truth. She lived in a time of great change, technologically and biomedically, though she remained as she was, and chose not to undergo youth and longevity treatments, or transhumanistic upgrades. She took an unremarkable job in a modest town, met a humble man, raised three lovely children, and lived out her days in the countryside. She kept running for exercise, until her body could no longer do it. She died as a content old woman, surrounded by her loved ones, which included seven grandchildren. She was a normal person—nothing to write home about, as they would say—but perhaps that’s exactly the kind of person whose story deserves to be told.

Microstory 1143: Mahala Davidyan

< > Table of Contents

Out of everyone in the Freemarketeer faction, Mahala Davidyan was one of the least capitalistic, second only to Ramses Abdulrashid, though the question remains if Ramses was ever that open-minded, or if he managed to improve a great deal, due to his exposure to Brooke Prieto and her friends. Mahala was never much for change, even though the entire point of her faction was to completely alter the way the economy operated. She didn’t outwardly question her parents’ convictions, because she didn’t really have any of her own, but she didn’t exactly agree with them either. No one was forcing her to stick around, but she saw no reason to live any other way. If there was one thing the Freemarketeers did right, it’s that they didn’t force anyone to be part of the group. Anyone born into it was given the choice to leave with no social controversy. Mahala didn’t leave, though she probably should have. And that’s not just true because of how badly things turned out. After decades of scarce recruitment, and zero progress towards their goals of a capitalistic society, the Freemarketeers realized the only way they would be able to live how they wanted was if they did it somewhere else. The ship that was trying to transport them to a nearby exoplanet, however, suffered a cataclysmic malfunction, prompted by their own resentful leader. They thought they were rescued when a comprehensive network of portals opened up, and spirited them away, but they soon found them in a complicated situation when the same exact thing kept happening. Parallel timelines are nearly impossible to stabilize for an extended period of time. Most potential outcomes only last for microseconds, which is why they’re known as microrealities. For most universes, this is completely irrelevant on a practical level, because people aren’t conscious of the path they might have taken, especially since they’re not the only ones walking down the metaphorical path. When you’re dealing with time travel, it’s entirely possible to access these short-lived realities, and even steal from them. They’re about to collapse, so it doesn’t matter much anyway, except when it becomes cancerous. For some reason, the technology that rescued them had a malfunction of its own, and kept trying to rescue them, over and over and over again. It just kept drawing alternate versions of the same people from microrealities, and transporting them to the planet of Dardius. Every day, a new batch of alternates would arrive. This was causing problems for the planet’s natives, and for the Freemarketeers, and war broke out for resources. Both sides knew that nothing was going to get better if they didn’t start communicating with each other. Mahala was chosen as the Ambassador to Dardius primarily for her apathy. It was a strange tactic, but the truth is the Freemarketeers wanted a solution just as much as the Dardieti. They didn’t want to keep fighting either, so if Mahala could negotiate a peace, and they would have to make sacrifices, then fine. This is what she did, and after years of fighting, the war was finally over. But that didn’t mean all of the issues between them were resolved. Mahala’s job as an ambassador was just getting started.

Microstory 1142: Tick Tock

< > Table of Contents

Byron Minett, a.k.a Tick Tock, hated making mistakes, and according to everyone around him, he literally stopped making them when he was eleven. It was around this time that he developed the ability to undo the immediate past. He couldn’t travel too far back in time, but it was usually enough to correct what he needed to. He wouldn’t just suddenly jump back to an earlier point in time. He would actually watch the recent scene play in reverse, until he reached his chosen destination, and pushed play on reality. The further back he tried to reverse, the harder it was on his mind, though, so he tried to stay within a day. Others had this same ability, but could only have on do-over. That is, one of their time jumps could not overlap with another time jump. He could try an occurrence over and over again, until he felt he had it right. Byron used his power all the time, and it became so second nature, that he sometimes didn’t even notice it happening. If something didn’t go well, he would just give it another go, and hardly remember the original timeline. He quickly became the best student in every one of his classes, sometimes spending the equivalent of weeks on a single school day. His teachers were astonished at how intuitive the topics seemed to be for him, including his judo instructor. As you might imagine, this life started getting a little boring. Sure, it still took him about as long to master something as it would anyone else, but most of the time, the choices he made had no consequences. Theoretically, he wouldn’t be able to undo his own death, and he had never tried to reverse more than two weeks, but everything else was fair game. One thing a person like that can realize is that everyone has their limits. No matter how many times he retried a foot race, he couldn’t change his finishing position. He signed up for the City Frenzy thinking that he would be able to find his way to first place, but it never worked out. Sure, he could steal a few seconds here and there if he memorized how the traffic lights were going to change, but nothing major. He just wasn’t fast enough, and no matter how hard he worked at it, that wasn’t going to get significantly better. Every time he reversed time, his body went back to its state in that moment, so his power didn’t help him build muscle, or anything. There were still only twenty-four hours in a day. In the end, he decided to accept this reality, because his life was still easier than most, and there were plenty of other, more useful, applications.

Microstory 1141: Bruna Pereira

< > Table of Contents

Bruna Pereira was born on Durus under the First Republic, which would retroactively be called the phallocracy. As a woman, she was not allowed to practice medicine in any form. Doctors, nurses, and emergency technicians were all positions filled by men, because women could not be trusted. All they would let her do was clean up the medical facilities after they were done, though even that was humiliating, because a man would have to come in afterwards every single time to check her work. She studied at the library every day before or after work, learning what she would had she attended their culture’s version of university. One of the first things Hokusai Gimura and her rebel friends from the thicket did was overturn all discriminatory educational and employment policies. She immediately registered for classes, as did many of her contemporaries, first testing out of most college courses within a year, then going on to the four-year medical program. She wasn’t the first woman on the planet to become a doctor, but she did graduate in the first class. She ultimately decided to specialize in obstetrics, believing that it and gynecology were the two fields in most need of female representation. She hadn’t even been a practicing obstetrician for a year when she started getting mixed up with some of the Earthans visitors. Many people from Earth were sent up to Durus when the two worlds nearly collided in 2161, but there were a few others here and there who had the means to escape. These people had different rules, and in order to protect her patient’s lives, Bruna had to break some as well. Durus had changed by then, having fully entered the Democratic Republic, but equality was only the official position of the government, and plenty of people were still around who remembered what they believed to be the good ol’ days. Had a man made similar questionable decisions to value patient over policy, he would have been suspended for a brief period of time, at worst, and he probably would have had the option to spend it in another temporal dimension, so most people wouldn’t have even noticed that he was gone. Bruna was not so lucky. She was harshly reprimanded the first time, but as she continued to color outside the lines, her superiors felt they had no choice but to let her go. To make matters worse, they dragged the process out so long that the visitors had by then left, and returned to Earth without her. Lots of people, past and present, possessed powers, but not a one had the ability to take her offworld. However, that didn’t mean she couldn’t move to somewhere more accepting. Worried something like this might happen, she had procured illegal access to a database of paramounts; one of whom could send her to the future. She didn’t know exactly how things would turn out, but she strongly believed life there would get better in the future, so she just skipped over all the struggle in between. She landed thirty years later, when Durus had traveled so far through interstellar space that it had been picked up by a new binary star system. It was finally  a real planet, capable of sustaining its own atmosphere, and forming a water cycle, and this gave residents hope for peaceful lives, in a good society. This prompted greater change in policy, and she was quickly reinstated as a medical professional, following a year’s worth of studying to catch up with biomedical advances, of course. And from there, she continued on doing what she did best, ushering life into the world.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: November 1, 2239

« < » > Table of Contents

The first face that Leona saw when she returned to the timestream was Eight Point Seven’s. She had been given a new android body, which looked just like her original substrate. Last year, Leona had had only enough time to manufacture a basic robot model, so she must have given herself skin later on. The second face she saw belonged to Hokusai Gimura, and the third to Loa Nielsen. “You’re here?” she half asked, half stated. “Last I heard, you built a lightspeed engine.”

“That’s a bit of a misnomer,” Hokusai said. “It’s still sublight, but you can going ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine-nine percent the speed of light. It’s nothing compared to my next invention.”

“What’s that?”

Hokusai and Loa just looked at each other.

“Here,” Eight Point Seven said. “Let me help you get out of this ship. The base you helped design is almost finished. It will be ready for primetime when the colonists arrive next month.”

As Leona was crawling out of the baby ship, Loa injected her with a gravity-regulating serum. It was true that her artificial legs helped her walk on the surface with such high gravity, but that wasn’t enough to protect the rest of her body. Her heart couldn’t pump blood throughout her body very well on its own. Well, it technically could, but it was needlessly taxing, so these drugs helped maintain healthy blood flow. A normal individual would be able to use permanent nanites, but the powers that be didn’t allow that level of transhumanistic upgrades. Hokuloa must have been using them, though, even though that likely meant the latter in the pair would lose her powers. They would not otherwise be able to thrive here for an extended period of time. Again, it was possible, but quite uncomfortable. The colonists would not be living like this on a regular basis. They were being set up with an entirely different type of environment.

“Have you been here long?”

“Couple months,” Loa answered.

“How are you guys doing in the long-term? Are you spending most of your time in the water?”

Hokusai laughed. “We don’t need that stuff.” With a charming smile, she hopped into the air, and tapped her shoes together dramatically. She went up and fell down a lot slower than she should have. “Antigravity shoes, from the future. I would have invented something myself, but why bother when someone else is going to do it for you?”

“Right now, we’re walking on point-nine-g,” Loa detailed.

“That...is impressive,” Leona said. Though it wasn’t surprising, because impressive was Hokusai’s resting state.

“She can do that for you too,” Loa said excitedly.

“Allegedly,” Hokusai clarified. “I might be able to integrate the technology into your prosthetic, but I would need to at least take a look at them, which I’ve never had the honor before.”

Leona was just as excited. “That would be amazing. I’m interested in this other invention you hinted at, though. You gonna leave me in the dark forever?”

Hokuloa gave each other another look, so Leona glanced at Eight Point Seven, whose facial expression implied she didn’t know what they were talking about either.

“Okay,” Hokusai relented. “I call it...the reference frame engine.”

“I prefer reframe engine,” Loa added. This prompted a hushed, but still audible, conversation between the two of them.

“Honey, we talked about this.”

“I just think it’s more succinct.”

“It sounds like we’re changing people’s perspectives.”

“That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

“No, the frame of reference for the passengers remains constant. I’m not changing that. The engine just changes the temporal outcome.”

“You mean for, like, the people observing from outside the ship? Their reference is being reframed?”

“They’re not actually observing anything; the ship is going too fast.”

“Oh, that’s semantics.”

“Wait,” Leona was pretty smart, but she was having trouble figuring out what they were talking about. “What is this? Who’s reframing what?”

“Okay,” Hokusai prepared to explain. “You know how, as you approach the speed of light, the relative time that has passed from the perspective of the traveler shortens?”

“I follow,” Leona said. This was all basic stuff.

“So, it took us almost eight years to get here from Earth, but since we were going so fast, for us, it only felt like four days.”

“Of course,” Leona agreed. She couldn’t do those kinds of calculations in her head, but the math sounded sound.

“Well,” Hokusai went on, “if I get this new drive working, it will coordinate—”

“Or reframe,” Loa interrupted.

Hokusai continued as if never interrupted, “the inside frame of reference with the outside. Basically, the ship is still going the same sublight speed, but it’s also technically traveling backwards in time, which allows it to arrive before light would.”

Leona understood. “It feels like four days to you in the ship, and it takes four days, even though it should take eight years.”

“That’s right,” Loa confirmed with a nod.

“That’s brilliant, Miss Gimura.”

“Don’t get too excited. It’s an idea; one that obviously requires a cylicone. I haven’t even so much as drawn up designs for it beyond that, though.”

“Still, it’s...I mean, if I were just some normal girl, I might not believe it, but we know that faster-than-light travel is possible. This wouldn’t even be the fastest we’ve seen, so surely it’s possible.”

Loa giggled. “Well, we can’t all be The Trotter. This will allow more reasonable jumps in space for anybody with the power to sit their butt in a seat.”

“Oh, that’s right; The Trotter. He said he was going to be here. He could reunite me with Mateo.”

“We’ve not seen him,” Loa apologized. “We’ve only seen the three of you.”

“Eh, I guess that makes sense,” Leona realized. “He’s not meant to show up for another five years.”

“Five days,” Loa corrected.

“That’s true,” Leona admitted. It was one of the few benefits of this life. On the other hand, how long was he going to stick around? Would he wait until Leona returned to the timeline, or would she miss him by that much? They never nailed down specifics. He knew what her pattern was, but did he keep track of the exact days? Not likely. Damn. She shook the thought out of her head, because it wasn’t worth worrying about right now. Besides, there was something else. “Hold on. You said you’ve seen three of us.” She pointed to Eight Point Seven, then to herself, then back to Eight Point Seven, all the while pretending to struggle with counting to two.

“Yeah, there’s someone else here. I guess she’s been here awhile. She refuses to tell us how she survived this long, but we put her in the water. She is not happy about it.”

So, life on a heavy world is difficult at best. Drugs and nanites are only capable of doing so much. At some point, walking around on a super-Earth becomes so tiring for the average human being that it’s not even worth it anymore. The alternative technology would be more important on an even heavier world, but not useless here on Varkas Reflex. Instead of injecting one’s system with drugs, chemicals would remain outside the body, which is suspended within it. Submersion in water simulates weightlessness, by distributing pressure evenly. Obviously this is not a good solution, unless there is some way for the person to breathe, which is why they’re not being suspended in just regular water. This oxygen-rich liquid can be absorbed through the skin, effectively turning a human into an aquatic animal. The tech was first used centuries ago, for certain medical treatments. It was also incorporated into a special suit to counteract the effects of acceleration—until internal inertial negators were invented—but this method doesn’t work well on a relatively static orbital surface. Enter habitat tanks, stage left.

Leona had to fight extremely hard against the urge to laugh at the person she was seeing inside the tank, like a penguin in a zoo.

Sanaa Karimi, who was not too pleasant of a person, was floating around in what was evidently her new home, staring back with dead eyes. She removed a device from her belt, and pressed it over her mouth. “What the f— are you looking at?” Like before, she self-censored. But why?

“What the hell are you doing here, Sanaa?”

“You tell me!” Sanaa shouted back.

“I have no clue. You’re the one who escaped Bungula without a word.”

“I have a few words for ya,” Sanaa spit back. “First one is bitch!”

“Settle down there, Spongebob,” Hokusai scolded.

“Why does she get to walk around?” Sanaa complained.

“I’ll tell you what,” Leona began, “you come out of that water, I’ll cut off your legs, and give you new ones. Then you can go wherever the f— you want. That’s more than I got. I had to cut them off myself!”

Sanaa appeared to not have known that about her.

“All right,” Eight Point Seven said in her mediator voice. “Nobody’s cutting off anybody’s legs here.”

“Tell me your story,” Leona asked calmly.

“The ship’s systems were pretty easy to operate. Everything seemed fine. I just told it I wanted to go to Earth, and it went on its way. Then something went wrong, and it changed directions. Next thing I know, I’m here. Her ship is broken.” Sanaa pointed to Hokusai.

Hokusai frowned. “I legit have no idea what happened. I’ve run diagnostics three times, and everything checks out. According to the logs, she never requested it take her to Earth. It thinks Varkas Reflex was always her destination.”

“I told you—!” Sanaa tried to say.

“I don’t think you did anything wrong,” Hokusai assured her. “Someone messed with the computer. I have no idea how, and I have no idea who.”

“Who would do that?” Mateo asked.

“I think you know who,” Weaver replied.

“Mirage? Mirage wants us to go to Thay...thay”

“Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida,” Goswin spoke for him.

“Yeah, there. Why would she not want us to go to Varkas Reflex?”

“We’re not even certain Leona is there,” Weaver reminded him.

“Is it possible she’s at, umm...you know what I’m talking about. We gotta come up with an English word for this planet; goddamn.”

“Some people call it Bida,” Thor jumped in.

“We can’t change vector,” Weaver said apologetically. “AOC is heading to Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, or at least in that general direction. It’s the most likely candidate. We won’t arrive for another sixteen years.”

“Wow, déjà vu all over again,” Mateo lamented. “But you said Cassidy and I have only been gone for five months.”

Weaver nodded. “It’s been about twenty-one weeks for us, but a year has passed for the rest of the universe. You see, when you approach the speed of light—”

Mateo waved his hands erratically in front of his face, like a swarm of mosquitos were on the offensive. “I don’t need to hear the sciencey relativistic bullshit again.”

Weaver cleared her throat, on the defensive.

“I’m going back to bed,” Mateo declared. “When I wake up, we better be on our way to Leona, wherever the hell she happens to be.”

“You know I can’t promise that,” Weaver shouted after him.

Mateo just threw up his hand, because he knew he was being unreasonable, but didn’t have the constitution to apologize for how rudely he was treating everybody right now.

“Is he always like that?” he could hear Thor say to the group.

He didn’t hear a response.

This was going to be a long flight.

« < » > Table of Contents

Bungula: Black Stuff (Part II)

< > Entire Story

Mirage wanted to allocate a year to run a more detailed survey of Bungula, but Brooke wasn’t happy with these parameters. With that amount of time, even with three highly advanced artificial and upgraded intelligences, you can really only get an idea of what it’s like on the surface. Brooke needed to see below the surface, and deep in the world’s oceans. Life is tricky to find, and even harder to recognize. She demanded they spend no fewer than two years on the project before they started altering the planet’s dynamic conditions. They ended up spending three years on it, just to make sure. Fortunately, Mirage’s plans for terraforming were a lot more sophisticated than the humans would have been able to accomplish. This all had to be a pretty big secret, because if word ever got out that people were using temporal powers in full public view, they risked being sent to Beaver Haven Prison.

Mirage hinted that the way she wanted to terraform Bungula was less advanced than she probably could do it, but they wanted to remain somewhat plausible for this time period. They could theoretically teleport any nearby celestial objects they needed, but residents and scientists would wonder how they hell that got there so fast. There were already going to be enough questions about this process, so Mirage didn’t want to field even more. While teams were surveying the planet, others were constructing the machines and ships they would one day need to get started. At the moment, Mirage had some news for Brooke. Sharice was presently in the far reaches of the solar system, studying a field of icy planetesimals, like those found in Sol’s Oort cloud.

“First things first,” Mirage says. “It’s too cold here. I was thinking about using the second moon to paint the surface hyperblack, which would lower the albedo, but based on the survey you insisted we take, we’ve discovered that this would take far too long.”

“You’re welcome,” Brooke says.

“Yes, thank you. I freely admit this project needs you, which is why I asked you to be part of it in the first place.”

“Well, what else did you have in mind?” Brooke asks.

Mirage grinned. “Mavrophyllic algae.”

“What is that?” I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a synthetic, algae-like organism created in a laboratory. Except it doesn’t use chlorophyll or photosynthesis to generate energy.”

That doesn’t explain much. “Go ahead and say it. I think I can guess from the morphology of the word, but I don’t want to assume.”

“The organisms feed off of dark matter.”

“And there it is,” Brooke says. “That’s insane.” It should be impossible.

“I assure you, it’s very real.”

“Why have we not heard of it?” Brooke questions.

“Well, technically it doesn’t exist yet, but we can invent it. It grows really fast, and can cover the entire surface in a matter of months. It can also be killed when it gets out of hand.”

“Mirage, if it’s invented in the future, we can’t invent it now. It’ll alter the future.”

“Oh, we’re altering the future all the time. This is a reasonable scientific development that’s going to shock people, but not expose time travelers. No one’s going to be like, we didn’t predict that happening until seven hundred years from now!”

“You’re looking to do this seven hundred years early!” Brooke exclaims. “That’s way too far. No, I won’t allow it.”

“Too bad, it’s done.”

Brooke is offended. “Excuse me?”

“You have the ability to control your involvement in this project, and perhaps even Sharice’s, but I can do what I want. I’ve been assigned the administrator of this place, and I’m free to conduct whatever experiments I deem necessary. I’ve had a team working on this for months. I barely gave them a nudge. They figured most of it out on their own.”

“And you’ve already deployed this stuff?”

“No, it’s still just in the lab, but I can release it without your permission.”

“I can contact Beaver Haven about this. They may not be so happy with you suddenly sending us all to the thirtieth century.”

Mirage laughs. “I thought you might say that, which is why I’ve already spoken with The Warden. She assures me she don’t give a shit. She would have a problem if we were trying it in her time period, but it’s 2229. We both agree, the vonearthans aren’t going to freak out.”

“Can you even mass produce enough of this? I mean, you said it grows fast, but metabolism has its limits.”

Mirage doesn’t seem to want to answer the question.

“Okay, now I’m getting really worried. What’s the problem?”

“You’re right. The lab can’t just create this on its own. It has to start with a base organism...which we found..in the oceans.”

“You found life in the oceans?”

“We found bacteria,” Mirage clarifies.

“You lied about the survey results! What did I say about that?”

“Nothing.”

“Another lie. I told you I would pull the plug if you did something like this, and here we are.”

“The bacteria is going to stay just that,” Mirage tries to assure her. “It’s not going to evolve into complex life.”

“How do you know that?”

“I used a time mirror. It lets you slide back and forth through time, watching how things change. I went billions of years into the future; Bungula remains a lifeless rock.”

“If Bungula remains lifeless,” Brooke points out, “then this project obviously fails.”

Mirage shakes her head. “I removed everything we’re going to do from the equation. I saw the future of this world if we shut down the domes, and left it all alone.”

“Time mirrors don’t have buttons. How did you input those parameters?”

“I’m a genius,” Mirage explains with a fake sigh. “I interfaced with the mirror. Trust me. I waited to say anything until I was sure, because I knew exactly how you would react.”

“Oh, you did?” Brooke asks her rhetorically. “Did you see me in the time mirror too?”

“I would never exploit you like that.”

Brooke shakes her head. “Well, it looks like you’ve already thought this through. Wadya need me for?”

“I don’t need you for this part of the project,” Mirage admits, “but your services will become useful in the future.”

“Well, you won’t be getting it if you do this.”

“I don’t understand what the big deal is. Bacteria don’t have souls. Dark algae is easier to contain than you would think.”

Brooke scoffs. “And what if the kind of organism your scientists created is unlike the kind you witnessed in the future when you were a god?”

“Stop calling me that,” Mirage complains.

Brooke goes on, “what you made could have unforeseen consequences, because if you’re not lying, and you only gave them a nudge, the algae could grow uncontrollably without you realizing it. It’s not necessarily the same black stuff the people in the future invented. This could threaten the lives of the people living here already, and I do consider that my responsibility, whether you’re the administrator, or not.”

“I can use the time mirror again,” Mirage supposes. “Make sure I’m making the right call.”

“You want to mess with the timeline even more? I can’t condone that.”

“There’s just no pleasing you,” Mirage argues. “You worry about what’s going to happen in the future, but you worry about what happens if we find out. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Sure, I can!” Brooke cries. “Time travel is a dangerous thing, which is why it just shouldn’t be done. If you didn’t find dark algae in the future, regular scientists would have come up with it organically. They would have done so with the consideration of ethics, and systems thinking, and it still could have turned out badly.”

“Don’t talk to me about time travel.” Mirage raises her voice as well. “You wouldn’t be here without it. You may be pristinely ungifted, but your entire life has revolved around time powers. Half of the people in your family have powers or patterns. You survived the near-destruction of your ship because of a time bubble, and then the actual destruction of your second ship because of a life-preserving time object, and teleportation! I told you we were going to terraform Bungula three and a half centuries ahead of schedule. What did you think that meant!”

“I don’t know!” Brooke shouts even louder. “It’s not the speed; it’s just...how you’re doing it. You’re messing with a very delicate balance. I just feel like you’re not taking it seriously.”

“You’re the one not taking it seriously. Humanity needs protection, and redundancy. If Earth is destroyed, maybe people can flee to Mars. But what if Mars is destroyed too? We have yet to find an exoplanet with the necessary requirements to sustain life on its own. Even once we do, are we allowed to move there? Is it ethical to interfere with its own development? Terraforming a dead—or mostly dead—world is actually the most ethical option of all. You may be virtually immortal, Miss Prieto, but there are still a lot of vonearthans who will die in a matter of seconds if you open a door on their spaceship. We have to find a way for them to survive beyond the confines of one solar system, in some capacity, or the organics could be wiped out.”

“What do you know?” Brooke presses.

“Quite a bit, of course. To what specifically are you referring?”

“Is something going to happen to Earth and Mars?”

Mirage laughs. “They are never not in danger. When I was trapped in the higher dimension, I didn’t see the future; I saw every possible future. Even with a consciousness as advanced as mine, it was hard to synthesize all the information, but one thing I did learn is that life is always one rusty ladder rung away from death.” She pauses. “Bungula is not humanity’s last and only hope, but it’s important. True aliens don’t exist anywhere in the universe—which is something not even I can explain—but that doesn’t mean The Great Filter doesn’t exist. I know in my proverbial heart that a species that stays on one world is doomed to die out on it. You think it’s a risk to do this, but it’s a greater risk not to. I can’t make you help us, though. I recognize that.”

“This is how I’m helping,” Brooke says. “You don’t really need a pilot. Pilots are just computers these days, and you have loads of those. What you need is someone who questions your every move. I made a mistake with the survey; letting you do it on your own, and it led you to lie to me. I won’t make that mistake again. I will be with you every step of the way, and you’re just going to have to deal with the criticism, because every war ever fought was started because people in power refused to listen to reason.”

“I would appreciate that greatly.”

Brooke simulated a deep, meditative breath. “Now. There’s no life whatsoever on the primary moon, correct.”

“Correct.”

“But there are ice caps.”

“Yeah, why?”

“It’s going to take longer, but I need you to do this for me. I need you to melt the ice, and plant the mavrophyllic algae there first. You can test in a lab all you want, but it’s not going to give you a very good understanding of how a specimen reacts in the field. Test on the moon first, and then we’ll talk about trying it here.”

Mirage nods. “That’s not an unreasonable request.”

Brooke shakes. “I wouldn’t call it a request.”

“No, I suppose not.”

< > Entire Story