Leona looked over the new control console that Ramses had installed on the
bridge of the Vellani Ambassador. He had revamped the whole thing, instead
of simply integrating this new engine that he had fabricated into the old
system. He was calling it the quintessence drive. It worked by pushing
against the fabric of the universe, which was composed of what was once
known as dark matter. Instead of fully piercing the membrane, it only
reached through it enough to adjust the temporal properties of the ship.
Outside of any universe, time was a spatial dimension, instead of a temporal
one, which essentially meant that time didn’t really pass in any humanly
fathomable sense. One could travel untold distances in the blink of an eye
by stealing energy from the highest dimension possible. Machines like the
Crossover and the Transit did this all the time, but they usually did it to
travel from one brane to another. All the quintessence drive did was skip
over the realspace in one brane, and end up somewhere else much faster than
any other vessel in histories. Not even The Globetrotter, Maqsud Al-Amin was
as fast. At least that was the idea. They had yet to test it.
“Show of hands, who is willing to risk it?” Ramses asked, now that he had
clearly explained the deal.
“That’s not your call,” Leona reminded him. She took a beat before repeating
the question herself verbatim.
Everyone raised their hand.
“All right,” Leona decided. “Rambo, this is your thing, so if you say you’ve
done the necessary preflight check, I’ll believe you.”
“I’ve done it,” Ramses said. “Navigation is the hardest component, as it
always is. I can’t guarantee that we’ll be right on target, but we’ll
be close, and we’re not going to be liquified, or turned back into babies,
or something.”
“Why would you even bring that up?” Mateo questioned.
“Because it’s not going to happen, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.” He
slammed his hand on the physical button that he had incorporated into the
console, and declared, “yalla!” That was usually Leona’s line, but it was
his language.
A web of technicolor threads appeared on the viewscreens. The bridge offered
them a 360 degree view of the outside using exterior cameras. The web
continued to spread out, and encompass the whole ship. It closed in on them
tightly, like a silkworm forming its cocoon. It didn’t remain in this state
for long before it stretched back out into infinity, pulling all of
spacetime along with it. The stretching decelerated as the colors faded into
oblivion, and for a moment, they saw nothing in the absolute black. Not a
single photon of light was making its way towards them. And then the stars
blinked into existence as if God had switched them back on. They were there.
Well, they were somewhere anyway.
“Report,” Leona ordered.
“PMS is recalibrating,” Ramses replied. Back when researchers were first
really contemplating using the galaxy’s pulsars to determine a ship’s
relative position in space, they devised the Pulsar Mapping System. By the
time people pointed out the unfortunate acronym, it was kind of too late.
They did officially change it to the PPS, a.k.a. the Pulsar
Positioning System, but a lot of developers preferred the original
term specifically for its humor value, and it wasn’t illegal to call it
that.
“Just call it the PPS, dude,” Leona suggested.
“What? Oh, yeah.” Ramses watched the screen, gradually falling into a blank
face.
Leona could have read it the whole time herself, but it was his job,
so she hadn’t bothered. Now she turned her head to check as well, and saw
what he was seeing. “Insufficient data. Position indeterminable,” she read.
“What does that mean, we’re too far for it to know?” Marie asked.
“We could be too far from the extent of the pulsar map in three dimensions,”
Leona began, “or in four.”
“We may have traveled through time too?” Angela surmised.
“Lee-Lee, your watch,” Mateo pointed out.
“Right, of course.” Her watch could tell her the time no matter where or
when she went. It would either default to standard human culture, or reach
out to the nearest civilization that was advanced enough to have their own
timekeeping standards. If none of these was available, it would display the
relative temporal distance from its last known position. “Two thousand,
eight hundred and fifteen years.”
“That’s the year, or the...” Olimpia prodded.
“That’s how far back we went,” Leona clarified. “We’re about 350 years
before the start of the common era.”
“Can you...plug that into the PMS?” Angela asked, gesturing towards the
console. “Or the PPS. Do we know where these pulsar things were back then?”
“We do not,” Ramses answered, shaking his head. “The map doesn’t account for
such big time differences. Perhaps a time traveler could make such a map,
just for people like us. Because without it, there’s no way to know where we
are. There’s no decent way to even measure regular stellar drift in this
period. Everything is different. And until we figure it out, we’re not going
anywhere. Trying to make another jump would be even more dangerous. I seem
to have sorely overestimated my abilities.”
“It’s all right, bro.” Mateo slapped him on the back. “We’re still here in
seven pieces, that’s all the matters.”
“I need to run a diagnostic on the rest of the ship’s systems,” Leona said.
“If we’re stranded, we need to know if anything’s damaged. Waltons, could
you take stock of our inventory?” She placed her hand on Ramses’ shoulder.
“Keep working at it. Find Sagittarius A* and at least two neighboring
galaxies. Those will not have moved much. It won’t give us our exact
location, but we’ll get a better frame of reference.”
“That’s a good idea. Thanks.”
Leona went off to check the other systems, like the reframe engine, and hull
integrity. Verdemus was nowhere to be seen, so the new drive had taken them
somewhere else, and they needed to understand whether there were any
consequences or limitations to that. Angela and Marie went off to see what
kind of supplies they had with them. This left the dummies with nothing to
do once again.
For the most part, the six of them preferred to be rather close to each
other. Their private rooms in the main pocket dimension were small; no one
was more than several meters away at any time while they were on the ship.
There were times when that was just a little too much. Fortunately, Ramses
had built this second pocket altogether, which was used by the delegators
during The Rock meetings. Though Ramses was considering upgrading his lab to
the entirety of this space, it was presently still completely vacant. There
was a bicycle in here, which someone must have requested from the industrial
synthesizer in the engineering section. He didn’t think that any of the
delegators were allowed to use that without supervision, so maybe they had
had it, and someone else on the team had decided that it was okay.
“Got one for me?” Olimpia asked, having followed him inside.
“I don’t think so,” Mateo replied. “We could take turns.” He tilted the bike
away from his body, balancing the end of the left handlebar on the tip of
his index finger.
She brushed it away with a wave of her hand. “It’s all you, buddy. I don’t
even know how to ride.”
Mateo smiled. “Neither did my daughter. I taught her while we were in the
Sixth Key. It was a touching moment. Shoulda caught it on camera.”
Olimpia nodded. She was alone in the void during that time. Well, it was
technically the future, but they didn’t reunite with her until she had spent
some time there, fighting for freedom, and also for what little hope she had
left.
He sighed, and looked around. “There’s not really much room. I don’t know
how they used it. I guess there’s this hallway that wraps all around. But
when you’re learning, you kind of need wide open spaces.”
“It’s fine,” Olimpia replied, sincerely confused. “I wasn’t asking for you
to teach me. I don’t need to know how to ride. It’s...” She consulted her
forearm interface screen. “...the fucking future.”
He thought about it for a moment, then he leaned the bike back against the
wall, and started to leave the pocket. “Come on.” He led her across
Delegation Hall, and into their usual pocket. He opened Olimpia’s door, and
ushered her inside. “Lie down.”
“For..for what?” she stammered.
He tapped two fingers against the corner of the VR drawer to open it. He
took out the headband, and waited patiently. “We can have as much space as
we need.” All in all, they didn’t use the virtual environments that
much. They just didn’t really have the time, what with all the running
around, fighting bad guys, and saving universes. They were always there,
though, and the Ambassador came equipped with a decent number of virtual
stacks.
She smiled without showing teeth, and lay down on her back.
“Scooch over.” After she was closer to the wall, he gently placed the band
over her head, like a nurse preparing her for a medical procedure. He then
reached back into the drawer to retrieve the second band. He lay down next
to her, and slipped his on.
They appeared next to each other on the street that ran by Mateo’s childhood
home in Topeka. Thanks to satellite imagery, stitched panoramas, and
supplemental photographs, the majority of civilization since the late two
thousand aughts was available for visiting through the stacks. People were
dreaming up virtual worlds every single day. It was pretty much impossible
to have a copy of every single one of them, especially since most of the
point was for people to come together on a joint server. But these mapping
images, which could be scaled to any point since 2007, depending on where
you want to go, had become standard issue in every copy of the central
archives. This included the street images, ocean views, and sky maps. The
idea was to simulate the real world, using a real world physics engine.
Anything beyond that was user’s choice. This was what they needed today.
Olimpia needed to feel what it would be like if she were sitting on a real
bicycle.
They could smell the fresh autumn air, and hear the dogs and leaf blowers in
the distance. There was no pollution, or bits of trash on the street,
though, so it wasn’t exactly like it was in the real world, but it was an
idyllic version of it. This is what things looked like in 2013, not long
before Mateo first disappeared.
“Why am I wearing a helmet?” Olimpia questioned.
“For safety,” he answered.
“I can’t die in here,” she reasoned.
“It’s a simulation,” he argued. “We’re simulating it. No, you can’t
actually die. Even if we really traveled to Earth, and you fell down, you
would barely be hurt in this all but perfect body of yours. But I want you
to feel like it was like back when I was learning. Well, I mean, twenty
years later, but we don’t have data from 1992.”
“Who taught you?”
Mateo smiled, and looked up at the house. The imagery didn’t contain people
unless the user programmed them in. Even then, likeness was difficult to
acquire. He couldn’t just conjure up his family out of nothing, and there
was no getting the rights to them from here. “My mother. My birth mother.
She couldn’t take care of me on her own, but she still wanted to be there
for the milestones. She disappeared in ninety-four.”
“I didn’t have much in the way of parents myself,” Olimpia said. “I couldn’t
be around people with my voice the way it was before this—” She cut herself
off when she looked at her arm, and realized that she had no need for the
Cassidy cuff in here. “Well, you know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah.” He placed one hand underneath the seat, and the other on the
handlebar. “Put both feet on the pedals. Don’t worry, I won’t let go.”
“It would be fine if you did, remember?” Olimpia turned her head, and
realized how close their faces were. “But please don’t anyway.”
They could smell each other’s breaths. Regardless of what they ate today,
they both smelled good in this world. Scientists did studies centuries ago,
and while there was no accounting for taste, citrus seemed like a pretty
universally appreciated scent, so that was the default in VR. In fact, pink
grapefruit was the most common default in most systems. She looked up at him
with those eyes.
Scared of whatever the hell was happening, Mateo jumped back, accidentally
pushing the bike over in the process. “Holy shit, I’m so sorry.”
Olimpia stood back up, leaving the bike where it was. “I’m fine, my pain
sensors are at a very low setting.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that...Leona...”
“I know. I’m not trying to get between you two. But you were just talking
about my perfect body, and you have to admit, we’re more alike than you two
are.”
“Yeah, because we’re both morons. We could be the progenitors of
Idiocracy!”
“I don’t think a moron would know the word progenitor.”
Their comm discs buzzed in the real world. It was from Ramses. “Team, I found something. It’s a planet, and there’s an energy signature
coming from it.”
“How far?” Leona asked.
“One hop, one skip, and one jump.”
“Plot a course. Everyone get back to the bridge. I’m pretty sure it’s the
Exins.”
Mateo and Olimpia looked at each other awkwardly. “We need to talk, the
three of us,” he decided.
“I know.”
They removed their bands, and got out of bed.
