Chapter 16

“As much as I like the inside-out wordplay and the abuse of perfectly normal norms, I feel weird hanging out in the open.” Kevin more or less ordered the 16 others to pay attention. “So we make a new star map as we skip above the galactic plane. How did we get from Sol to here when we didn’t know for sure where ‘here’ was with any precision?”

“I got this.” Marly laughed. “Based on how Amy described her location, we pointed the Hamster’s computers at the spot and that was that. ‘We’ being Dale, Myra and Trixie doing the astro-aiming thing.”

Trixie agreed. “I shot a research lab into the air. It fell to earth, or not, I know not when.”

“Great!” He had to smile. “We triangulated on us, a vague idea and blind faith.”

“Winwood, Grech, Baker, and Clapton? I love the classics.” Patty commented, “Oh, the other blind faith, unfounded belief in our infallibility?’

”Smart ass! Good thing it’s cute also.” René smacked her derrière playfully. “But now that I think about the math, we didn’t trig it before.”

“Not so much on purpose, but we did. It was part of fooling the dedicated computers.” Marly insisted. “Redefining reality caused the processors to make assumptions that forced certain calculations necessary to avoid a meltdown. It’s built into the quantum infinite possibilities equations. For instance, you say two plus two is four. The computers, which haven’t been programmed otherwise, believe it and have to create ‘addition’ to make it so.”

“Complex oversimplification out of control.” Andrea laughed. “Of course the computers have been taught basic arithmetic and can count both ways from zero, but they had to extrapolate the rest in order to model our ‘reality’.”

“Among the innumerable outrages you humans have visited upon logic, you are now confusing learning disadvantaged artificial intelligences into acting like you loonies?” Amy cyber giggled loudly. “Pardon me, that was rude. I meant personality deprived gullible super calculators.”

“Not confusing the poor innocent AIs, Amy.” Marly tried to look appalled. The cute redhead failed miserably. “We think of it as swimming lessons in the deep end. Builds character.”

“Or they drown and we never have this conversation.” Patty added happily. “Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not. But here we are.”

“Call it what you will.” Alix countered. “It makes less than no sense, but you are correct, ‘here we are’. Can’t argue with the facts. Unless you’re human, of course, in which case hard facts and the immutable laws of physics are just annoyances.”

“What she said.” Andrea smirked, “We are here, wherever ‘here’ is.”

“We are a thousand lightyears above the plane defining the middle of the disc of the Milky Way.” Kevin volunteered quickly, eager to get the girls refocused. “The galaxy is 1000 lightyears thick at the center. We are about four-fifths of the way to the edge, not that we know which edge it is, so I’m guessing we are 5-600 lightyears above the nearest star.”

“OK. Given what Master said, we ought to get 300 lightyears closer, then draw an octagon by traveling in straight lines, scanning and recording everything we can detect before moving on around the disc.” Amber said, perking up. “We find the stars we know, establishing the baselines. Then create an expanded map of the galaxy and, in addition, locating all sorts of places to visit.”

“If those places are occupied by beings who dislike visitors and attempt to kill or enslave strangers, we have the super shield for protection.” Thalia giggled like the little girl she appeared to be. “We have the Mad Hamster Möbius Quantum Improbability Wormhole Drive if they are too disagreeable to be around.”

“I can always drop asteroids on their cities if they’re really nasty.” Crysta suggested with a gravelly laugh. “Even if they have a counter measure, it will keep ‘em busy.”

“We have some experience with unpleasant lifeforms.” Petra joined the verbal festivities. “We were never interested in xenocide, but punished perfidy whenever we were double-crossed.”

“Then there were the really nasty species, who if allowed to travel beyond their homeworld, would be considered space pollution.” Clio remembered. “In our opinion, some were just too ugly to live. Maybe their mother thought differently, but she, or it, probably hid them in the attic when company came over.”

“Getting back to Amber’s excellent plan, talk to me about areas we should avoid.” Kevin gently ‘ordered’. “Amy, can you estimate the approximate locations of the unpleasant beings you encountered?”

“Eventually, I think so. To be precise, I have to locate something familiar against which to measure.” Amy was guardedly positive. “That ‘something’ being anything we recorded before we were beyond the limit of our existing knowledge base.”

“Shouldn’t you be able to reverse calculate your course?” René questioned. “It’s only math.”

“It’s 50,000 years of accumulated information, often collected under stress, mostly casual, not considered important. That is a lot of data points.” She defended herself. “Until we ran up against the extra-galactic bugs or transdimensional colonists or whatever they were, there was no reason to imagine we would wind up with empty tanks in the middle of nowhere. It might be ‘just math’ but that much will take a while to work out and the answers might not be all that accurate.”

“We can’t know if our perceptions were true nor is there any guarantee that the figures we recorded were factual, false, uncorrupted or incomplete.” Petra stepped into the discussion with both feet. “Without an independent observer, we have no absolute starting point.”

“Nor an absolute starting time. Face it, sisters, we have all been in places where ‘time’ is elastic.” Marly reminded the girls.

“Our truth may not match yours and therefore the ‘math’ is very unsimple.” René tried to make nice. “I owe you an apology, Amy. We skipped most of the real time. You folks didn’t. I’m so sorry I sounded critical. But probing your experiences, you said you were 175,000 ly from New Terra. That either puts them at the end of an arm at the extreme edge of the galaxy and you on the other edge, or you were way above the galaxy.”

Crysta interrupted. “I was the one that said New Terra was 175,000 lightyears away. My sense of direction, assuming it was not scrambled while drifting through the void, came up with that answer. That puts the human outpost on the other side of the Milky Way and us way above and close to the near edge.”

“Still too far to talk to Rocky. Bummer.” Patty chuckled. “In Amy’s defense, we are dealing with a time storm, the effects and extent of which are unknown. The old reference points aren’t where they used to be. Two FTL devices, a wormhole connecting separate realities, different time machines, and most recently, a dark matter manipulator can alter the database in ways we cannot imagine. It might be time to throw out the old rules, scan the galaxy and write new ones.”

“One thing you have proven: the galaxy is larger than previously thought.” Kevin spoke up again, using a little more mental ‘persuasion’. “I would like to see a different view soon. Amber, you and Trixie pick a starting place. The rest of you should go do that voodoo that you do so well.”

The original Lab Rats conferred and came to the conclusion the wormhole was the obvious steering mechanism when the lab successfully arrived near the brownstone.

“We astrogated to this infinitesimally tiny spot in the universe without a prearranged base point. Chances are it was either accidental good fortune, incredible luck or assisted telekinesis that allowed us to succeed.” Marly posited. “OK so far?”

“OK this time. Next time, not so much. I see problems. ‘Astrogated’ suggests we transited with directed intent, as if we knew where we were going and how to get there.” René giggled. “Turns out we knew where we wanted to be, but not exactly where that was. We were missing the part where we knew precisely where to aim. It worked this time but is not really predictable or calculable in the future.”