Chapter 12

Fantasy Physics and Thermodynamic Tangents, 102. Class in session. The girls switched to a conversation about how tricky it was to put words to the situation.

They tried anyway: To the girl observing in the standard time stream, a contemporary piece of her Year 1 disappears and is instantly replaced by a piece of Year 10. Another girl, decade later, sees a piece of her Year 10 instantly replaced by a piece of Year 1. The Year 1 piece can go forward, but the Year 10 piece can’t exist to go backwards until Year10 arrives. Nor does the piece of Year 1 have a place to go until Year 10 comes around in the time stream.

But the consecutive events actually occurred simultaneously. Therein lies insanity. The way a girl could understand this temporal impossibility would be to observe from a fifth dimension point of reference outside of the time line. She would have to be able to perceive and process all of history in an instant, because all of history was an infinitely folded or compressed singularity. Even the AIs didn’t have that much RAM. To a girl living in our time line, that means that in order for that view point to actually exist, she had to give up one of the first three dimensions. Or go nuts.

In her world, objects had depth, length, width, and the time they existed. Therefore, the physics of the wormhole becomes possible if that surrendered dimension is depth. Length, width, the point in the present time stream and the temporal fifth dimension point, which is theoretically anywhere or anywhen she puts it. Since all of time is an infinite singularity, suggested by the loss of consecutivity during the chaos, the traveling girl enters one depth-free portal and comes out of the same portal in another place.

Why do the two faces of the portal have to be permanently anchored in separate places? Is the immeasurable missing dimension the infinite nothingness of the ‘hole’ itself?

After all, the wormhole did exist and it did work. The time machines used different technologies and both functioned, his better than the Aurorans’. Why not the same for the portals? Did you really need two doors if infinite distance and time could fit between two nothings? Wasn’t the one portal nothing enough to hold whatever they wanted in it?

Express service to Paradox City leaving on track 6.

As far as the girls were concerned, if it was imaginable, it was doable. Period. Kevin would figure out the calculus of metaphor and create the mechanism to make solid the intangible because that is what he did second best. What he did best was the next subject of the chatfest.

To Kevin, who seldom understood the girls, it almost made a certain amount of crazy sense. If they could clean up the syllogism, solve for a couple of variables and make the imagery a bit less illogical, maybe it was doable. Which could only mean he was as every bit as crazy as they were.

He dozed off, thinking through the ways the ideas could become math and how the math could apply to machinery that could be built, tested and operated. Can you reverse calculate the size of two separate pebbles dropped into a calm pond three weeks after the ripples have subsided? Wait for the pond to dry up and simply pick up the pebbles if time allows. It doesn’t. One analogy is as good as another.

He thought himself to sleep. Apparently, nothing worth mentioning happened during the night because neither the girls nor the AIs disturbed him. That was a good thing. Clearly he needed the rest. The girls were dead to the world when he squirmed out from under the haphazard pile of tasty girl parts, sighed over the need for haste and took a hot shower.

Wearing hiking shorts, Kevin was munching a BLT and sipping a triple espresso when Alice thought at him. -Good. You are awake. Be glad you didn’t stare at the monitors last night. Major disappointments. Gaia has her work cut out for her. The parts of the planet that are habitable, aren’t. Except for some small mammals and huge insects, there’s a lot of empty space. There are bunches of fishes, but they are not likely to develop functional sentience in the near future, in truth, ever.-

-The Aurorans came very close to erasing humanity. Bummer. At least they missed us. Humans, as a rule, hate to be erased. We tend to take it personal.- He perked up. -An unoccupied Terra-type planet is a big old colony magnet. Alice, please start boosting us out to the Asteroid Belt where we can blend into the clutter. Make the ship look as innocuous as you are able, passive sensors only. Redline it. The quicker, the better. Never know who was waiting at the event horizon for a land grab.-

-We don’t know where it was and can’t predict the travel time. Could have been at the Oort Cloud or Proxima Centuri, but we have to assume company is coming soon.- Alix uttered. -I’m for being somewhere else, Kemo Sabe.-

-Accelerating away from the sun now, Boss. Figuring around 650 million miles direct, more on a curve, we can average .01C. It cannot be a beeline trip. So, at max acceleration and deceleration, reaching for any available gravity source and plotting a smooth orbit entry, we can be on station in six or seven days.- Alice estimated. -One runaway near-Earth rockball served up to order.-

-We really do need a simple FTL drive to complement the hamster drive. Wait a minute, Alice, I have a new strategy. Boost us out of here as hard as the AG drive can manage. After twelve hours, shut it down. We’ll coast along a course plotted to spiral us out so it looks like we’re merging naturally with the asteroid belt. If you have to, use the AG briefly at the last second to avoid a collision that will do real damage, otherwise extend the force field like a bumper cushion. I have a feeling our pillaging imperialists or someone else is going to get here in two or three days. I might be wrong, but better safe than sorry. We don’t want to get caught out.-

-If we are powered up, they will notice. Not good.- Alice agreed. -We are a little lucky. Mars is close enough to slingshot by, flatten the curve and gain some speed. It will take longer, about ten days, now to orbit. Longer, if I have to shut down early.-

-I call it a fair trade. Keep the passive sensors running wide open.- Kevin changed the subject. -Did you and Alix listen to the musings of the crazy girls?-

-Rational insanity.- Alice laughed. -Not only is it great entertainment, it’s unavoidable. The earwigs, remember?-

Alix chimed in. -As usual, most everything they said is impossible, a condition you people don’t recognize. But we should posit that it has already happened and see what the numbers say calculating inside out anyway? Right?-

-You’re catching on, Sister. With the right bits and pieces of the diverse technologies we already have on hand, used in totally different combinations, our Möbius hamster drive wormhole can be more than imaginary. We simply create the proper conditions in a mathematical model and coerce reality to match.-

-So the girls, Alice and I tell you what needs to be done. You make the device and make it happen. Easy peazy.- Alix cyber snorted. -What do we do with the wormhole we have now?-

-We don’t leave it here to be compromised by aliens. If we leave it somewhere else, I want it to be in a place with a nontoxic atmosphere, otherwise having access is useless. It would take forever for us to get to an Earth-type planet assuming we knew where to look. At our present speed, the nearest star is 40 years away with no guarantees.- He shrugged. -We can’t stay here, so nothing to do but work out a non-destructive way to take it with us when we develop our own star drives, FTL and Hamster Probability.-

-Which means we talk to the people on the other side.- Alix said, -Something we should do soon. The dome is fading but so are the indicator lights. The emergency entry code used to be a slap on the palm print and saying ‘Open Now’, but your print is not Amy’s database.-

-She knows you and Alice. Can you introduce us properly? There is some history of getting probes through the door controls. In fact, you were going to try it from this side.-

-Communicating now. Time streams are synched and equalized. Amy’s situation is bad and getting worse. I gave her and she accepted everyone’s info. You need to open the portal so we can boost her batteries. Lives depend on it.-

Using the earwigs, he began issuing orders. “Alice, help Amy get ready. Direct electrical feed, all we can spare. Patty, get any extra reactor mass you can find and AG it to the lobby. We’ll replace it in the Asteroid Belt. Ask questions later.”

Kevin, spurred into action, teleported (?!!?!!) himself to the lobby and slapped open the door. He took in the scene while running down the stairs: a huge room, high ceiling supported by columns, and five raised white platforms with domed tops to one side. In the middle was a great gray cube, which he assumed was the AI’s housing. A hole opened and a standard ‘male’ double inlet suddenly appeared under the stairs.

Amy was alert enough to help Kevin help her.

“Patty, bring the fusion fuel down here! Dump it in the hopper. ASAP! Marly, plug in two heavy gauge extension cords close to the livingroom door. Drag the other ends down the stairs and start charging Amy. You’ll see where to attach cords.”

He sent out feelers. “We have an Eridanian fading away just outside but within Amy’s field. There are five people in stasis beds. Girls, bring more reactor mass. Amy, I suggest you protect your core self, strengthen the shields, stabilize the Eridanian and the girls in suspension. We’ll pump in fresh air and monitor life support.”

A screen lit up on the cube. <Thank you, Kevin. I’ll have everything under control in an hour. A lot has happened since we launched Alice and Alix. There is quite the tale to tell.>

Alice piped in. “Good news. No incoming threats on the sensors. The AG is performing 30% above expectations. We are ahead of schedule. Now the ETA is no more than 5 days. Did you do something special during assembly?”

“My money is on weirdly functional.” Amber laughed in his ear.

Kevin laughed. “If subbing in the odd superconductor, adding a second repulsor and dumping overloads into a capacitor instead of the limiter is special, then yes. Now, the pushers push harder and the new attractor pulls whenever the pushers are over spec, which are beyond those designed in the original plans. Don’t worry, the safety cutouts still work, but most excess juice is redirected and used before the breakers trip.”

“You did more than that! Come clean.” Alice paused briefly. “That thing you called an attractor is really a mini-particle accelerator coil like the one in your time machine. The bar of Co-Fe-Cu alloy in the core is attached to the floor joists. And there’s more. I’m afraid to ask, but why?”

“It was a hunch. I configured the mini-coil to be a 95% particle accelerator/5% time attenuator hybrid. With the big time machine on high-level stand-by energizing the whole alloy structure, the space ship is treated like a single proton in a linear accelerator. The net effect is to boost the ship’s speed in tiny accumulating increments. In addition, the ship does time travel, but to the same instant. The dimensional modality shift means it has no measurable mass 5% of the time, making the AG drive work more efficiently because it is moving nothing but itself.” He admitted, “The slight pulse of the mini-coil switching phases a hundred times per second is easily masked by the inertial damper. But there really is an attractor mechanism fed by the overload. I worked out an independent polarity-reversing circuit to operate it without affecting the main repulsors.”

“Intuitive non-linear logic strikes again!” Alix giggled like the girl she almost was. “This is good. Enhanced redundancies we cyber girls would never have imagined. So you just did it?”

“Felt right and seemed reasonable at the time. Now you compu-girls have to figure out to say it in numbers.”

“If it ain’t broke, fix it anyway!” Andrea laughed. “That’s our Kevin: make it up as we go along. Given enough time, we can achieve near-, but not trans-, light speed at continuous acceleration. Yes, it beats what we have, but not what we could build with the technology already available if we had the facilities. Little steps.”

“It eliminates variables and gives us data points. The AG worked normally during time travel, suggesting gravity, whatever it is, is a trans-dimensional constant. Kevin’s temporal field coil can function as a regular particle accelerator, and paired with an idling coil in time travel mode, is able to move both, and whatever else is attached, around in real space.” René blurted suddenly, “It all gets us closer to our Möbius hamster drive.”

Marly added, “Most importantly, since it didn’t FUBAR the wormhole to Amy’s house when Kevin opened the door, I think the energized Co-Fe-Cu alloy neutralized, or at least ameliorated, the chronological shock. The dissolution of the event horizon probably resynchronized both houses in the time stream. Now we are physically separated, but in the same instant.”

“FUBAR?” Alix asked, “I don’t know that one.”

“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Considering the size of our lobby, the potential flip-flop and the more likely time re-disassociation, it seemed appropriate in a graveyard humor sort of way.”

“That’s one way to put the potential end to everything as we know us.” Ruby giggled, “But I’m not upset. Instant atomic vapor clouds aren’t very self-aware.”

“Speaking of being aware, I’ll have the girls revived and Crysta recharged soon.” Amy injected herself into the conversation through the earwigs. “Meanwhile, I try to bring you up-to-date on the last 48,000 years. Forgive me if I ramble. The visual highlights are in my memory, but here is a summary:...”

“After leaving Aurora under less than cordial circumstances, we traveled around a lot the first couple of thousand years. We witnessed stars being born in nebulae and stars dying, recycling their atoms in a great circle of creation. Both are extremely violent events. Monstrous super novae that warped time, actually destroying suns lightyears away, put normal violence to shame.

‘Normal’ was redefined several times. Fortunately, we are fast enough to outrun supernormal.

Max speed was 4400C, about 12 ly per day, but we still spent a tremendous amount of time between destinations.

Saturnian ringed planets are everywhere, but not for very long. The rings soon are either absorbed or coalesce to become moons. Binary systems are fairly common. Some are so perfectly balanced they support planets in figure eight orbits. A number of huge suns had smaller stars orbiting. Jupiter would be a star if it had a little more mass and collapsed. Some planetary stars even had their own planets! We saw proof of that and much more.

Every four hundred years we took a pit stop to rest and relax. I needed refueling and they needed downtime.

The wonders and mysteries were endless and varied. But the crew eventually began to experience astonishment fatigue. They wanted to settle down somewhere safe and restart humanity. Ten thousand years on the road gets old after a while, even for people who, while not technically immortal, can self repair well enough to seem that way, barring catastrophe.

Catastrophes were easy to find and harder to avoid. They sensed the clock ticking. One day, the supernormal might be faster. Better get those little cottages and white picket fences while the getting’s good. The ‘where’ is the problem.

Terra-type planets are fairly rare, but on most of the ones we visited, life had developed with shocking diversity. But there are three or four hundred billion stars. ‘Rare’ in human terms, on that galactic scale, is a lot. Ready for occupancy is

really

rare. Some had flora that would not be out of place on earth, most were scary strange and toxic. Fauna ran the gamut from algae to Aurorans. If the plants didn’t kill you, the animals would. And sometimes the weather sucked.

You would be surprised at the number of interstellar empires out there and how xenophobic they are. A couple were multi-species, but were allied more for protection than altruistic respect for life. Alliances of convenience are ephemeral and self-serving.

We learned quickly that new guys were not welcome in most territories.

Any tales of a United Federation of Planets or the Council of Worlds cooperative scenario are naïve myths. Aliens generally do not play well with others, but they do respect superior force, avoiding conflict until they see a chance to win. Amoebae communicate by pheromone emission and reptiles see all carbon-based beings as food. Eridanians, the rather chatty and philosophical otters on Polaris Three, and a species of quite personable spiders from Gemini Beta Six are among the few exceptions.