Chapter 55

Time: 1 hour 52 minutes post injection

Isabelle had spent the last several minutes running preliminary diagnostics. Hoshi looked on quietly and admired her expertise. The other four teachers were gathered near the door.

"This confirms it," Isabelle called back to the other teachers. "The plane has dropped back to its very last solution. It's activated both terrain mapping radar and gyroscopes, and is being guided by its internal map software."

"I didn't even know the jets had such capabilities," Hoshi whispered.

"Why did it leave the net?" the principal called out from the door.

Isabelle looked at the jet's log and replied. "It lost net-lock at 6 PM local Venice time, about twelve minutes after liftoff. It's saying it can't even find the internet carrier wave now."

"That's impossible."

"Yeah, well... It's still searching..."

"Why not just lock another sat-net?"

Isabelle gave a mirthless laugh. "That's what it has been trying to do that for the last two hours now. It can't find anything. I know how impossible this sounds. But the internal diagnostics don't show any local problem. I'm going to assume the sat-nets are down, all of them."

There was a moment of utter silence as the teachers considered her words. The youngest one, a woman Isabelle's age, asked quietly, "Are we going to die?"

Isabelle tried to sound optimistic. "Not today I hope. The plane should just fly to Tokyo and land by itself. But as an extra safety margin, I'm considering commanding the plane to fly an optimal altitude profile for its weight. Fuel efficiency will be slightly better in thinner air, and as the plane gets lighter we won't need as much lift... We'll catch a few more cosmic rays, nothing to worry about." Isabelle paused for just a moment, and hearing no objections began to type.

The teachers by the door looked very uncertain and shocked that Isabelle would do such a thing. Hoshi stared at her in pure admiration.

Time: 2 hours post injection

Cindy looked at clock and sighed. It had been two hours since she lost all contact with Earth. She had been expecting to lose the Honolulu connection through the slip rings, but her monitoring of the sat-net from the arctic also went down, and she had no idea why. She thought for a moment if there was anything she could do. Nothing came to mind, and she decided to walk around for a bit before trying the sat-nets again.

Time: January 2, 204894 6:03 PM Local Venice Time (2 hours, 3 minutes post injection)

The Level-1 network e-tech was in the archive room below the flight control tower, working to bring up a long unused diagnostic that might help her superiors upstairs understand the sat-net linkage failure. The last hour had been pandemonium as two different flights had failed to land. With the local city-net down, city communications were a horror and communications with the jet computers impossible. The Venice- cluster was located at the top of the Adriatic. It was both the northernmost town and the hub flight town for the entire Mediterranean area.

The e-tech frowned when she heard the door open behind her. She thought she had locked it, and she couldn't imagine her superiors coming all the way down here in the current situation. Turning, she had a shock of recognition and stammered, "Why! You look just like..."

A'moth gave a quick smile and flashed her brown badge with a bright blue 6 on it. "You recognize me. Great. There's no time to explain. I need some help with the archives, with the departing flights. Can you do local retrieval here, even without the net?"

"Huh? Departing flights? Well, yeah, I guess... Without the net to search the index keys, it'll take a few minutes. I had no idea you were..."

A'moth gave a curt nod, dismissing her bewilderment. "I need the details of Flight 1704. It departed this afternoon for Tokyo. I need the complete details of the flight route. I also need a technical document on how to manually program the plane." The e-tech stared at her in frozen amazement. A'moth barked, "Move!"

Time: January 2, 204894 12:23 PM Santa Fe, New Mexico local time (2 hours, 23 minutes post injection)

I jumped back to Jim from a small spring about twenty kilometers away. He was lost in his work, buried in Kyle's journals. He gave me a brief nod as I handed him some spring water. Then I turned and just watched the desert for a while. It was so beautiful...

"Holy shit," Jim whispered. "Holy, holy shit!"

I smiled. "Find something interesting?"

"What an understatement! Holy cosmic catastrophe Batman!" Jim replied, trying to use some humor to take the edge off his worry.

"Well, that's just the way life is sometimes, Robin..." I replied. "What's up?"

"Kyle and Brianna. They twisted the slip channel before they snapped it, twisted it big- time. They didn't know! I don't think they knew what they were doing..."

"Huh? How bad could it get?" I asked, not really understanding my own question.

Jim looked out at the desert. "Well, Earth still exists. That's something..."

"What?!" I stared at him for a moment. "You're kidding, right?"

"No, not at all. Remember those shards you saw, when you burst through the Antelope Freeway channel?"

"The ones that chopped up the corn plants? Yeah, sure. So?"

Jim frowned. "You would get the same reality contradictions with what Kyle and Brianna did. A ruptured slip-channel filled with shifting reality potential. Except in their case, our case now, the shards were not contained in a slip-bubble as they were on Antelope Freeway. You had classical-level counterfactuals existing naked in the universe, without the covering of a slip bubble or an event horizon. It's probably the first time that's happened since the creation of the universe."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that it's anything-can-happen day; raw unbounded reality shifts."

"Oh... For how long?"

Jim sighed. "Not long. I first guessed less than a second at the Freeway. Isabelle proved the true limit is less than half a second..."

I shrugged my shoulders. "Well, injection was over two and a half hours ago. So we're okay now?"

Jim smiled. "Yeah, I guess. Except for some after-effects maybe..."

"After effects? Like what?"

"Anything at all. Like the Earth could have been kicked away from the sun at half the speed of light, or maybe straight for it."

"Holy shit!"

"Exactly!" said Jim. He looked at the peaceful landscape and sun before us. "But that obviously didn't happen. So I guess we're okay..."

Jim and I stared at each other for a moment, and then we both laughed to release some of the tension. "Jim," I said, "there's something I have to talk to you about."

Jim gave a deep sigh. "Caroli and Anupa?"

"Yeah..."

"I'm so embarrassed now about how much I... well, enjoyed it. Gary, you made the right decision not yanking me out of there..."

"I think so too, though it was a close call. Still, I want to offer you an embarrassment oath."

Jim smiled. "Ah, the Hopewell custom. Gary, I really appreciate the offer, but"

"No! I'm serious. You have my oath that I will never mention what happened to anyone. And to seal the oath, I'm going to tell you something deeply embarrassing to me."

"Gary... Oh, okay... Thank you."

I nodded. "It concerns Cindy."

"What?!"

"My last day at the polar home, before I left with your sperm and Cindy's egg... Ah, this is so embarrassing..."

Jim came up to me and gave me a hug. "Gary, I love you as a brother. I'll forgive you if you had sex with Cindy, but I must say I"

"Oh heck no Jim! Nothing like that!"

Jim breathed a sigh of relief. "Then what?"

"Well, if you remember, I remote teleported Cindy's egg out of her left Fallopian tube. I also jump-sensed her left ovary and left side of her uterus to get my bearings. She was lying down on the medical table, a bare midriff and trusting me completely..."

"Yeah, I remember. So?"

"Well, I found what I was doing was... arousing..."

"What?! To her?!"

"No! You idiot! To me! Oww, this is so embarrassing!"

Jim looked thoughtful and then smiled at me. "And a perfect counterweight to my own embarrassment. Thanks Gary!"

"Uh, wait Jim. There's one amendment I'd like to make to this..."

A few seconds later we touched our foreheads together to seal the oath.

Time: January 2, 204894 1:40 PM Latitude 12-degress South, Lima, Peru local time (2 hours, 40 minutes post injection)

Dr. Ceres stared out of her downtown office window in amazement. She had been promoted to Level-IV commander less than a month ago, and she had been spending the last several hours wishing she hadn't been. The combined losses of both city-net and sat- nets were driving her crazy. But then, over the last several minutes, she witnessed something that made all her other worries pale to nothingness.

"The ocean..." she thought slowly, "The Pacific Ocean... It's disappeared..." As far as the eye could see, the once blue ocean was a great expanse of dark brown sandy mud. Dr. Ceres knew about tsunamis, but from her 50'th floor visa the world still seemed safe and solid. It was only the view out the window that was impossible, not the reality of her building. A small part of her mind was screaming at her to do something, but she just couldn't comprehend the reality before her.

On the horizon ten kilometers away, a swirling line of whiteness appeared. Dr. Ceres stared at it, her mind balking at making sense of the images she was perceiving. She watched the white line swiftly grow, her mind refusing to understand the scale. Several seconds before impact, the three-kilometer-high wave seemed to fill half the sky, even though it was still two kilometers away.

A massive supersonic shock wave of air hit the building, shredding the window in front of Dr. Ceres and hurling her cut and broken body against the office wall behind her. She did not die immediately, but was mercifully unconscious when the water hit her office building five seconds later at 400 meters per second. The second of the ten great cities was no more.