Chapter 53

Time: January 2, year 204,894 5:40 AM Honolulu Local Time (T plus 19 hours, 40 minutes)

Twenty minutes before black-hole injection, the slip-ship's reality projection point jumped from one meter above the event horizon to five microns above the event horizon, approximately 71.5 kilometers from the geodesic center of NBHX35. The orbital period remained at 1.50 milliseconds. The ship was now traveling 99.9999999997% of the speed of light. A second of Kyle's and Brianna perceived time appeared as 4.75 days to Honolulu flight control.

From Honolulu's perspective, the next slip jump would occur in twenty minutes. From the slip-ship's perspective, the jump would occur in 2.9 milliseconds. Kyle and Brianna were at the threshold of forever.

Time: January 2, year 204,894 4:58 PM London Local Time (T plus 19 hours, 58 minutes)

I jumped into Jim's kennel room a couple of minutes before injection time. He was deep into reading a bunch of physics journals laid out before him.

He looked up at me and smiled, and then looked at the clock and sighed. "Nice to see you Gary. I guess we've succeeded. Time to go?"

I smiled. "We have time. Isabelle got put on a flight to Tokyo. The new schedule is for all of us to meet in Nebraska twenty hours from now. A'moth will pick up Issie when she lands. Want to hang out in Acapulco?"

"Yeah, in a bit..." He gazed at the hand-written journals before him.

"Kyle's work?" I asked.

"Yeah. My son is brilliant Gary, truly brilliant. He and Brianna discovered a whole new branch of science. It's not slip-bubble formalism, it's not quantum mechanics. They call it singularity mechanics. It's a whole new field. I'm trying to understand it. It's a whole new branch of science, the physics of singularities. And there's something strange in what they're doing. They have a theory for some strange way to cut the Honolulu control cord. I'm trying to understand it..."

"Want to just hang out here for a while then?"

"Gee, can we do that?"

"Sure. I can keep watch; jump us out of here if there's trouble. Expecting anybody?"

Jim shook his head. "No. Things should be quiet. The military is gone. And I'm not scheduled to be exercised and fed again until early tomorrow morning. This society would take some getting used to if we lived here for real. To be asleep by sundown I mean..."

"Yeah... So why don't we just hang out here?"

"Okay, thanks... Look! It's almost 5:00 PM right now."

We paused for a moment in silence and thought about our victory.

Time: At the edge of forever...

The slip-ship jumped at T plus 20 hours into a state undefined by its originating spacetime continuum. Brianna and Kyle had worked long and hard on the issue of how to cut the Honolulu control channel. They did not understand the true nature of slip bubble shadows, and how crossing the Black Hole's event horizon would cause the other slip-rings to instantaneously vanish.

Their method to cut the cord was to orbit five microns above the event horizon for twenty minutes. Brianna was constantly worried someone would ask her why she had included this in her flight plan, but no one ever did. The purpose was to execute approximately one million orbits in a state of extreme time dilation.

Kyle had theorized that in the frozen time, the control channel could not rotate fast enough to adjust and would be tied into a twisted knot with each orbit. When they left the spacetime continuum, the control channel would be choked with a million knots, preventing any signal from Earth from reaching the ship. They would then have four hours to break the seals on the slip-generator room and reverse the polarity on the slip bubble before the slip-ship returned to Earth automatically.

Their idea in itself was valid, but there were severe unintended consequences. Enormous interspatial stresses were created by the knots in the temporal fabric of reality, and when they finally crossed the Black Hole's event horizon and the Honolulu rings ceased to exist, the net effect was that of a twisted rubber band of cosmic size stretched to the breaking point and then suddenly losing its anchors on both ends. The resulting cosmic whiplash fractured the slip-channel.

The immediate effect at Honolulu was not from the ruptured slip-channel but from the slip-generator shell casings aboard the remaining fleet of slip-ships still present at the shipyards. Deprived of the slip-rings, they assumed their normal weight of more than twelve million tons each. Comprised of thin shells of solid nuclear neutronium, they had the effect of being car-sized bowling bowls supported by the "thin air" of the rock beneath them. The casings plowed into the Earth's crust, accelerating rapidly. Minutes later, giant geysers of red hot lava began erupting across the expanse of the ancient Martian Planetia shipyards adjacent to Pearl Harbor bay. Honolulu slip-control began a hasty evacuation.

The two conduits of the dying channel whipped and snapped through spacetime. At the Black Hole location, the wickedly twisted cord went trans-light and burst into an inflationary expansion phase. It covered the sixteen light-day journey to the region of the red giant star in less than 50 milliseconds, locking onto the orbiting gas-giant planet in one great snapping motion. The outer channel enveloped the planet in a giant slip bubble 102,000 km in radius, about 30,000 km above the gaseous surface. Meanwhile, the inner channel was driven like a spike deep into the planet's liquid crust.

At Earth's end of the dual cord, the broken outer channel enveloped the planet, conforming to the Earth's surface at a height of eleven kilometers above the local surface of the globe. The inner channel was repelled by the Blue Ring shadow still present in the alternate reality at the North Pole. It raced southward at light speed and expanded to a circle with a circumference of seven thousand kilometers. Within milliseconds it was directly centered at the South Pole and had no place left to go. And then...

Time: T plus twenty hours plus one second

Aboard her jet twelve minutes after takeoff, Isabelle was crossing 9,000 meters and rising rapidly to the jet's targeted cruising altitude. The jet would be climbing to 16,000 meters before going supersonic.

Isabelle heard an unusual pinging sound over the jet's intercom, and with her commander training she recognized the sound as a warning signal from the automatic guidance system of the plane. It had lost its lock on the carrier wave of the global satellite internet that was piloting the plane. Isabelle waited for a second signal that would tell her whether the primary lock was reestablished, or that the system was switching to one of the numerous backup satellite networks...

The inner channel slammed into its south polar position like a hammer smashing into the defective bell of the outer channel. The collision ruptured the reality-creation interface boundaries of both slip-channels. The area above Earth's outer channel suddenly shared both quantum and classical reality with the distant gas giant. Earth's outer bubble pulsed and bifurcated.

An outer shell expanded outward at light speed and sifted through Earth's upper atmosphere and beyond like a cosmic fisherman's net. Loose gaseous molecules were too fine to catch, but anything solid and larger than a golf ball was encapsulated by the slip rupture and instantly transported thousands of light-years away to the region 30,000 kilometers above the gas giant.