Chapter 32

Earth time: 5:03 AM Saturday, September 27, 2024 (EST)

Aina time: 3:30 PM day 256 of 1425

Mark and the rest of the council looked quite perplexed as Kalea and Hiapo finished their report on the blue ring. Mark was surprised his daughter Mayoni didn't look more confused. She had just nodded thoughtfully as the reports were being made.

"Guys," said Mark, looking at Kalea and Hiapo. "There's something here I'm just not getting. You keep personifying the blue ring, using phrases like playing with it, offering it invitations, having it refuse to obey you, having it go to sleep, having it make agreements... This is a machine, isn't it? It's not alive, right?"

"Good point Mark," replied Kalea. "My best guess is that it's both alive and not alive."

"Huh?"

"The real question is, is it conscious? The slippage between the nested 11-D spatial manifolds within the ring is creating a self-organizing, incomputable resonance. Human consciousness is created by a self-organizing, incomputable resonance of electromagnetic radiation... light... in the microtubules of the brain. The ring might well be conscious, but it would be a consciousness based on a completely different physical process than ours. The ring is not biological. It's not alive, in the common definition of the word."

There was a long pause. Finally Mark asked, "Is it angry with us?"

Kalea thought for a moment. "I don't know if it has that emotion... When it's awake, I think it likes to play... play with numbers..."

"Shit... Oh, excuse my language. How should this affect our dealing with it? Are issues of ethics or morality involved, if we try to force it to do something?"

Kalea thought for a long moment, and finally just shrugged her shoulders.

"Well," said Hiapo, "At least we'll have a long time to consider the issue. While the ring was still active, my wife managed to echo-pulse the structure of the manifold currently controlling path openings. The path will open next in eleven years. My wife and I expect the ring will be completely inert until then."

Kalea spoke. "The ring is in a state of deep sleep between openings. When it was shutting down after the latest opening, we managed to flip the transition to shut down the path to Earth, but for some reason I still don't understand the path to Aina shut down too. Only one of our free-electron lasers managed to maintain echo-feedback lock with the ring's primary resonance. We were barely managing to keep the ring from falling into its deep sleep. I kept nagging the ring to play with me, to play number-games with me. The Ring finally agreed. In the brief moment when it was fully conscious, it agreed to open the Aina side of the bubble. But it turns out the Ring didn't exactly open the Aina bubble. It popped it..."

The room was silent for a moment. Mark finally asked, "Popped it?"

"Well," said Kalea. "A word to approximate the mathematics. The Aina bubble was inverted, inverted from a negative slip bubble to a positive slip bubble. There is a slip exclusion principle that says that negative and positive slip bubbles cannot share common volume nor surface areas. There was a repulsive force. The core bubble is anchored to the blue ring, but a pure slip bubble has zero mass. You had a non-zero force pushing on something with zero inertia. The Aina bubble zipped away with infinite speed. I called it popping the bubble..."

Mark blinked and smiled. Talking with Kalea always seemed like such a random-walk endeavor, but he always learned so much... "Uh, you mean the speed of light?"

"No, I mean a non-zero force pushing on zero inertia. The acceleration was truly infinite... HOLLY SHIT!"

"Kalea?! What?!"

"I just realized something. Hiapo! Mayoni! If we could somehow attach a mass to a slip bubble, the acceleration would not be infinite, but could still be greater than the speed of light!"

Mayoni laughed. "I see your point Kalea! Wow! Just like the Star Trek movies! We could actually build the Enterprise!"

Hiapo was deep in thought. "But how to handle the matter-bubble interface... Wait! We could do it with a high enough density... Solid neutronium would work..."

"Yes! Brilliant Hiapo!" shouted Mayoni. "Perhaps some sort of neutronium shell casing around the slip ring! The combination in theory would be a slip generator..."

The three geniuses appeared lost in thought. Mark finally cleared his throat and said, "People, what the heck are you talking about?"

Mayoni finally answered. "Forgive us father. We need to develop a lot of mathematics before we take this conversation any further..."

"Well, okay," said Mark. "Hiapo, are we done with your report then?"

Hiapo spoke. "One more point, and then Kalea will speak. Unfortunately we are on the last facet of the manifold currently controlling the openings. We'll have a better view of what the future opening schedules will be like in eleven years, when the next manifold rotates into position and becomes visible to our laser pulses."

"Well," said Mark, "even knowing the interval until the next opening is incredibly useful."

"Oh yes, I agree," said Hiapo. "I do have one immediate concern, all of our laser equipment at the ring site. I don't want rain to hit it..."

"Oh," said Mark, "Your equipment has already been moved out to storage. I've also ordered that a temporary roof be built over the pit... At least it'll be waterproof for now. Eventually, we'll probably want something much more extensive at the site, maybe a building covering the top..."

Hiapo thought for a second and nodded. "An excellent idea. It'll be easier to control the power feeds that way. And to take active control of the ring, the power requirements will be immense. I think that's all I have to say. Kalea wants to speak about the new hexagonal geometry of the Ring. Kalea?"

Kalea nodded her head and looked about the council. "Both the Ring and its slip bubble have evolved from a circular to a hexagonal geometry..." Kalea paused and looked very thoughtful. "Actually, that's not the right thing to say, not the right way to say it. Both the Ring and the bubble are folded space constructs, they don't have geometries..." Kalea looked lost in thought...

After a moment, Mark asked, "Kalea, you okay?"

Kalea nodded but appeared to be talking and deep in thought at the same time. "I've just realized something. The Ring is manifesting a hexagonal presence into our spacetime. It is not correct to think of it as having a physical structure."

"What does that mean?" Mark looked puzzled. "It does exist at the end of the hexagonal tunnel in the pit, right? There's only one Ring. It's there and not somewhere else..."

Kalea looked troubled. "If you consider the full 11-D space-time manifold, there's only one Ring, true. But it's all shadows... A single object can have multiple shadows... One ring can project many image-shadows into our spacetime... I can show you this clearly in the mathematics..." Kalea's mind appeared to drift.

"Ha!" laughed Mark. "Clear maybe to Mayoni or Hiapo... Kalea, can you pretend that the Ring is physical and just continue with your report?"

"Sure! Sorry. There used to be three slip bubbles, The Aina bubble, the core bubble, and the Earth bubble. The Ring popped the Aina slip bubble. The core bubble is in direct contact with Aina. This is a much more stable connection, perhaps infinitely stable, perhaps impossible to destroy. I still have more analysis to do on this."

Kalea took a deep breath and continued. "The top of Blue Spirit Mountain is a flat circle 200 meters in diameter. At the exact center of the circle is a perfect hexagonal pit twelve meters to a side, and twenty-four meters deep. The distance between opposite vertices on the hexagon is also twenty-four meters, and the distance between opposite sides about 20.78 meters... Surface area at the bottom of the hexagonal cylinder is around 374 square meters, over 4000 square feet. Compared to the old circular geometry shadow, this is huge."

"At the bottom of the pit is other hexagonal cylinder, half the size of the first and oriented in a horizontal direction. The distance between opposite vertices on this hexagon is twelve meters, and it just fits to interface on a single side of the hexagonal pit. It extends for twelve meters in a horizontal direction, and ends at the new location of the Blue Ring, which is also currently hexagonal in shape. The Earth slip bubble is right after the Ring. It is currently closed, as you heard Hiapo say. We'll only be able to study it when it opens... I guess that's all I have to say..."

Mark nodded and decided to close the meeting. "Well, welcome home again to all our Path travelers! I think you'll best enjoy learning about what's been happening on Aina from your own families, so I'm going to close the meeting now. Again, welcome home!"

A short time later Leon was riding in a four-person fuel-cell car, his wife Nalani driving and Sarah and Ura sitting in the back. They were in the eastbound lane of a deserted concrete highway, traveling about 80 kph. "Wow," said Leon. "This is different! What, we'll be home in twenty minutes?"

"Close, a few minutes more..." said Ura, smiling from the back. "We have almost 400 km of paved roads now, first class stuff. The road bed is over 70 cm deep, layers of packed sand, crushed stone and reinforced concrete, probably better than any road on Earth."

Leon nodded approvingly and muttered, "400 km... How in the world did you build so much with so few people?"

"Oh," laughed Nalani. "We did a lot of development with automated road building equipment. It doesn't require many people, just guidance. Most of the work is in driving along the new roads with new raw materials, to keep up with the production speed..."

Ura nodded. "The current road system is like a big cross, with branches at the top and bottom. This East-West highway connects Blue Spirit to the village, the Athens-Sparta areas, and the dam. Our two other highways run North and South from Sparta, to the various farming and mining areas... The highway south was completed at the end of 1422, all the way to super-canyon. It's about 130 km long. The highway north will eventually go all the way to the pass at the entrance to the Northern Plateau. But that'll probably take another 5 or 6 years..."

"Ah, Athens and Sparta," said Leon. "This is so exciting! Mark mentioned those at the meeting..."

"My gosh, you're right. There's so much you don't know about," said Ura. "Kikapua died in 1419. He was a very old man, finally his heart just decided to rest. He left a lot of writings for the tribe, suggestions he wrote we might like to consider. He and Kara spent a huge amount of time working together, his last year. A lot of his writings were probably done together, but they certainly had Kikapua's full approval. He was very enthusiastic about the ideas."

"One major idea," said Nalani, "was to build two new cities at new sites, a manufacturing complex and a residential city. Sparta is our manufacturing area. There's major construction going on there right now. Athens is just everybody's dream for now, though we're beginning to grade the site. Our plan is to build a super-green city along classical Roman guidelines. We have the technology to do it. Earth-modern water and sewer treatment plants, modern power and data feeds into all the housing units, it'll be a beautiful place to live. Our university will be there, our hospital, our government buildings... The majority of the land will be gardens and parks... There's still a lot of voting going on, deciding how it'll all look. Log in and check out all the options. I'd be curious to see how you vote."

"I get to vote on this?"

"Well of course!" said Ura. "Let's see, what else? Jumpstart is making great progress. Our current target is to be up to full Earth 2010 abilities by the year 1442, in both electronics and medicine. And as for voting, Nalani! It's your nickname to be called the mother of the nation. Why don't tell Leon about it?"

"Ha!" laughed Nalani. "I didn't birth the nation! Everyone voted for it!"

Ura shook her head. "You're being way too modest. All the grand structures were your ideas. Everybody else just gave their approvals."