Chapter 3

"This was a really nice idea," said Kathy, practicing her Farsi as she sipped her hot chocolate, bundled in her parka while sitting on the rock ledge. "Paris was so beastly hot. Remind me exactly where we are again..."

"About halfway between Christchurch and Greymouth, on New Zealand's southern island." replied Matt in Farsi. "Don't be too hard on our chateau in Paris, and its lack of air conditioning. The average high temperature in Paris for the first week in August should be about 75 F. When we jumped, it was at 8 pm Thursday there and 98 F. A few minutes in Chicago to make the cocoa and grab our coats, and presto! It's 6:10 am Friday under a beautiful southern winter sky! The constellations down here are so beautiful..."

"These last two weeks of traveling have been like a dream. A whirlwind tour of Europe. I'll remember the joy of this time forever, Matt." Kathy played with watching her frosted breath for a moment. "I admit though, the anticipation of our future is beginning to pull me out of our fairytale honeymoon. On Sunday, we fly directly from Frankfurt am Mein to Riyadh. Al Mamlakah al Arabiyah as Suudiyah will be our new home for almost a year."

"We'll be traveling a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if we visit all 13 provinces in the Kingdom. We'll also be making trips to Iran, Iraq, and Yemen. It's probable we'll be in Syria too before the year is out. Siemens is certainly getting their pound of flesh for the bargain I made with them, royalties on the best of the intellectual property arrangements. They should provide us with several hundred thousand dollars of annual income for life, all for less than a year of work. Not that we really need it Kathy, but it would have been suspicious not to drive a hard bargain..."

"Four hours after we're scheduled to land in Riyadh, we'll have access to both tesseracts. It'll be nice to get the security back, as well as check out the new facilities. I'll set up the portals for first access to the new rooms, afterwards we can just jump in from visual memory..."

In their sixth subjective year of living in their tesseract, Matt and Kathy had made an intense effort to study how tesseracts were constructed. They found that the size choice was not continuous, but quantized. Their own tesseract was built on a scale length of about 45.4 feet, and to interface a new tesseract to their spacetime, other tesseracts would have to be of sizes that were plus or minus factors of two of this length. Larger tesseracts were exponentially more difficult to create. Matt was delighted to discover that their tesseract had the technology to built another, taking over 20 days to build one with a scale length of 22.7 feet. Their target design was a prison about 20 km from their home tesseract, with 8 rooms labeled E0, M0, P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, and P6, for an entrance hall, manufacturing room, and six prison rooms, each higher number implying a more comfortable room. The structure contained a single door between E0 and M0, all other traveling would be via teleport or portal openings. Each room had over 500 sq ft of floor space, and ceilings over 22 feet high. M0 had individual time controls for each room except E0. The rooms could be varied to run from 4096 times more slowly than Earth, to 16,777,216 times more quickly than Earth. At maximum temporal contraction, a year of living could be pushed into less than 2 seconds of Earth time.

"Yeah, it's a great back-up, Kathy. The new tesseract even has the power to build one the size of home, though it would take half a year to do it. The new Manufacturing room is fully equipped, just more compact. Working with the operations sequencer was such an eye-opening experience. It didn't want us anywhere near the moon's core during any of the construction, saying the space folding involved could damage our minds. The sequencer was so sweet. It told me that it had to operate in interface mode with our spacetime for the construction, and there was thus no way it could be sure we wouldn't return in spite of its warnings, but it was willing to trust us not to. Having a computer program tell me that it was willing to trust me, that was a really strange feeling..."

"We'll meet Eternal Jihad in the Kingdom, Matt. Not in the first week. Maybe not even the first month, but soon. The battle is coming... I can feel it. Feel it in my core... Ha! None of these thoughts now, not on our honeymoon! Tell me some exciting, something wonderful! Tell me about your plans for terraforming Mars again."

"Well, I've tested portal casting to 300,000,000 miles. Mars is definitely within range, even when its orbit is on the opposite side of the sun from Earth. The terraforming capabilities of the tesseracts are really so immense, the issues really come down to what you want to preserve, and what you want to change. I think the biggest issues are surface gravity and surface air pressure. Mars' surface gravity is about 38% of Earth's. It means the planet just doesn't hold its atmosphere that well. It will lose over half its air molecules to space in less than a 100,000,000 years. That sounds like a long time, but over a couple of billion years, everything gets lost. The current surface air pressure is only 1% of Earth, and it's almost all carbon dioxide. The carbonate rocks are outgassing, maintaining the thin atmosphere. To get the full Earth's air pressure at 38% gravity, you would need more than 2.5 times the mass of air above your head. Doable, but if you make the leap to change more than just the surface of Mars, why bother?"

Matt paused for a moment, then continued. "Our baseline design now has us bringing the planet to full Earth gravity and air pressure by adding hundreds of billions of cubic kilometers of silver and iron and slightly radioactive heavy metals at the core. The radioactive heat will give Mars back a liquid metal core. The silver has high density and is a great conductor, and we'll spin it up with the iron to generate a nice protective magnetic field for the planet. End result, a planet that's 20% denser than Earth, with a 20% smaller radius and a third less surface area. We'll port over an Earth biosphere. It'll have a 24-hour day, and a more circular orbit. Its sidereal period will still be 1.88 years, and its distance from the sun still a little over 50% more than Earth's. Those are about the only two things staying the same. Oh, its two small moons will stay the same, just be pushed into much higher orbits. Mars as we know it will disappear. This is more like planet replacement, rather than terraforming. And the two tesseracts working together can do all this in less than a month! Perhaps the best time to do it is when Mars is farthest from Earth, let the sun hide what we're doing. More mysterious that way... With the right greenhouse mix for the atmosphere, huge areas of both the equator and middle latitudes will be temperate. The poles will still be very cold, but not as super cold as they are now."