Chapter 63

Future Loop-Back Time: Inter Locus

Mayoni's mind was filled with grim determination as her consciousness drifted down the reddish maelstrom. She wasn't sure she could feel her physical body, but she was beyond caring. "No regrets," she thought, as she rotated down the vortex. "No regrets! The loop or the physics must end! My love demands it!"

There seemed a shimmering rainbow iris in front of her, filled with swirling reds and blues, and then she was through it. She found herself surrounded by an intense blue light, in a room filled with intense noise and vibrations. She was looking out over a great ocean, with a sun whipping back and forth across the path of its annual migration.

"It worked!" shouted Mayoni in her mind. She turned and saw her sister Kalea working furiously at the terminal behind her. Mayoni turned again and saw her other self at the primary slip station a short distance away. And then she saw the great yellow iris in front of her first self crack and begin to bulge.

"Mayoni!" she heard Ekela call out. In a flash of inspiration, Mayoni leaped to be behind the chair of her first self. Ekela ran right in front of her just as she got there, and she grabbed him and hurled him with herself away from the impending explosion.

As she sailed falling through the air to the floor, Ekela wrapped in her arms, Mayoni's eyes looked up and into the eyes of her other self still in the chair. There was one instant to exchange recognition and affirmation, and then the wall of the inner torus blew, shredding Mayoni's first body into many pieces.

Ekela let out a wail of anguish as he witnessed this, and then turned his crazed head to the person who had stopped him from saving his beloved mate. His eyes seemed to lose their sanity as he stared at Mayoni holding him in her arms.

"Ekela! My love! It's all right..."

Kalea was standing near the site of the explosion, her eyes flashing back and forth to Mayoni's torn body, the nose of the plane, and Mayoni's unhurt body standing up with Ekela. She started to laugh hysterically. "Mayoni! What?!"

The door in the nose of the plane opened, and a man who somehow looked impossibly familiar gestured to Kalea. "Help us please! We have to evacuate!"

Kalea nodded and ran to help. Mayoni and Ekela started to also, but then Ekela stopped by Mayoni's broken body.

Mayoni kissed him and whispered, "Later! It's okay!"

The three helped the passengers from the jet flee the plane. Incredibly there were several children with them. Kalea kept staring at one of the two men from the plane. He looked so hauntingly familiar. And he in turn kept staring at Kalea's sister, as if he were trying to recognize her. Soon all the passengers seemed off the plane except for one woman. She started throwing backpacks out the door.

"Cindy," yelled the man, "Forget the data! Get out now!"

The woman shook her head no and kept throwing the backpacks out the door. Then she leaped through the door just as the plane began to dissolve into broken bits. The crowd of people stood around each other in astonishment as the air seemed filled with little tiny shards of nothingness that tore apart the reality of everything they touched. Kalea glanced down at her body and her last moment of vision was to see her body disintegrating. There was no pain. "Time loop reset," she thought dimly. Kalea tried to shrug the shoulders she no longer had, and then she thought nothing at all.

Post Loop-Back Time: Inter Locus

Memories... Memories and dreams... Memories and hopes and dreams... Jim Arnold felt he was slowly awaking from a great peaceful slumber. His mind wanted to drift, to relive his life, all the experiences, the good and the bad, the joys and sorrows, the pride of accomplishments, the embarrassments of his failures and being teased, the first girl he ever kissed... It was all floating through in mind, images and memories and dreams, and above everything his emotions, which gave the memories meaning and purpose...

He remembered one foster family he had spent almost three years with, from four to six years of age. During the summers of the mid 1990's, they would take him with their extended family to Wildwood, NJ, and Jim would spend most of his summers at the shore. It was one of the happiest times of his life, and he had many fond memories of playing in the ocean with his foster sisters and brothers, of flying kites and building sand castles at the surf's edge...

So many memories, playing Frisbee along the beach as the sun would set, walking the boards and riding the tram cars, all the wonderful rides and arcades... Eating the soft ice- cream in waffle cones as he walked the boards in the cool of the night, his older foster sister holding his hand so he wouldn't wander off...

Part of what he liked the most about the shore was the nature, so different from center city Philadelphia. The ocean smelled so clean, and the dune grass and the sand beneath his bare feet felt so fresh and alive...

He loved the birds, the silent sandpipers and the noisy gulls. He would often go out in the early morning, at the break of sunrise way before his siblings wanted to be up. He would lie down at the surf edge and close his eyes and listen to the gulls cry at each other and at him. He never chased them, and after a while they accepted his presence. He would lie on the beach and stare at the gulls, admiring their sleek bodies and boundless energy. He loved to hear their cries...

Jim's mind flashed forward years into the future. He was with Cindy and Isabelle at their arctic room. A'moth had been gone for eight years and Gary for five. Jim's son Kyle was now four years old. The arctic complex was monitoring Kyle closely, and it touched Jim's heart to see his son taking after him. Kyle would sneak out of his pen at night during the migration seasons, and listen for the wild geese flying along the Peruvian coast on their long journeys up and down the Andean mountains.

The kennel operators were rather amused by Kyle's love of nature, and as he always returned to his pen on his own, they decided in kindness not to stop his nocturnal excursions. Jim and Cindy spent many hours together, watching the exterior video feeds of the kennel's perimeter fence, watching their son lying on the grass at night, his head cradled in his hands, watching and listening to the wild geese above him. It brought back so many memories to Jim, seeing his son enraptured by the birds, just as he had been as a small boy... Jim thought he could almost hear the gulls crying now... and hear the ocean surf... and smell the salt air... and feel the warm clean sand beneath his body...

He could. He could do all of those things. Jim slowly opened his eyes to an achingly clear blue sky filled with gulls that were crying out to him. Jim stared at the birds in wonder. Their cries were similar to the birds in Wildwood and yet subtly different... more complex he thought. And the carriages of their bodies looked strangely different too.

They were as agile as any gull he had ever seen, but they also seemed able to hover in place like a hummingbird, a strange rotating beat of their wings that was quite unlike anything Jim had ever seen before. He stared in amazement as one bird in particular hovered two meters in front of him and about five meters up. The bird seemed to float stationary with very little effort, and its cries to Jim sounded very complex and non- repeating, almost like a language...

Jim sat up and looked around the beach. There were over a dozen people nearly, lying down and appearing to be asleep. Jim stood up and did an inventory. All twelve of his group were there, in addition to three people he did not recognize, two women and a man. Jim guessed they looked to be about his apparent age, about nineteen years old, though Jim's mind was several decades older. Jim shook his head and tried to remember the last moments of the plane ride...

One of the new women began to stir. Jim knelt by her side and waited for her to wake up. He felt tugged by feelings of recognition, and he tried to place the memory. He glanced for a moment at the other unknown women. She had stared at him strangely in the great curving room after the crash, as if she were trying to recognize him. What was going on? The women beside him on the ground opened her eyes, and Jim looked down to greet her.

It was her eyes that brought the recognition. "Havika's picture!" Jim thought. "This woman is the close image of the picture of Mayoni, but looking a lot younger! But her eyes! Her incredible, beautiful eyes! So full of love! This must be Mayoni! How is this possible?! A descendent?" Jim cleared his throat and spoke out loud, "Mayoni?"

The woman nodded her head as she stared up at him. The sound of Jim's voice stirred the second woman to sit up and stare at him. She blinked for a moment and then exclaimed, "I don't believe it! You're Jim Arnold, aren't you?"

Jim gasped at being recognized by a total stranger. "Yes. And who are you?"

"My name is Kalea, and this is my sister Mayoni. Jim Arnold?! You're supposed to be dead?"

"What?! Mayoni is your sister? Kalea?! THE Kalea, Hiapo's wife?! How can you be so young?! What?! Mayoni's sister?! I thought Amy was Mayoni's sister!" Jim was almost shouting in his confusion.

Both Mayoni and Kalea said simultaneously, "Huh?!"

Time: Unknown, apparent sun position of late afternoon at mid spring on Aina

Jim took a moment to look enjoy the beauty of the ocean before returning his attention to the two women with him. He was having the most wonderful and challenging conversation in his life, and though he had known both Mayoni and Kalea for only a few hours, he almost had the feeling that he was sitting down with family...

All the other members of their party had split up into three teams and had set off hours ago to explore the small peninsula they appeared to be on. Each of the three teams took two of the young girls with them. Both Mayoni and Kalea admired the very complicated language the girls seemed to speak, and they even seemed to speak some English. The two sisters also noted with amusement how circumspect the girls were as they watched Mayoni and Ekela being affectionate with each other.

Cindy and Gary's team headed west along the coast, Hoshi and A'moth's team headed east along the coast, and Isabelle and Ekela's team headed inland to the north. The remaining three adults spent their time trying to understand the physics of what had just happened. Over the last three hours Jim thought they had made tremendous progress...

Mayoni smiled at Jim watching the ocean. "This must be Aina," she said. "The birds are native Aina birds, the sunlight is the color of native Aina, even the shoreline looks just as it did before. But the solar tower and all the X-tree life-forms are gone. I think this is what the shoreline would have looked like, if X-tree never existed."

"I'm still not convinced it has existed," said Kalea. "Not now, not yet. Mayoni! You set the slip controls to run in reverse! That must have been how the time loop was first created, five thousand trillion resets ago. To do so again, inside the loop, why didn't that destroy all reality?"

Mayoni smiled and looked at Jim. "You know the answer, don't you?"

Jim smiled back. "You and your sister keep staring at me as if I were Albert Einstein."

Kalea laughed. "Good analogy! Actually, both of us are more impressed with your work than his. You are the father of slip-bubble formalism. I'm still feeling goose-bumps talking to you!"

Jim laughed back. "I am so unprepared to be a celebrity! But... how did you know what I looked like?"

Kalea shrugged. "Back at the beginning of 1407, early 2010 in Earth years, I traveled back to Earth and spent several months there. It was a very difficult time for me. The people I was with, the people who paid for Project Jumpstart... We were all assuming the plague was on Aina too. I was very depressed. I surfed the net a lot... finally found a few pictures of you in newspaper stories on the I-80 Nebraska tragedy."

"I was in the newspapers?"

Mayoni chimed in. "Sure! It was a national tragedy. I remember seeing it on the news during a portage. An entire stretch of elevated road became an inferno. Hundreds of cars were incinerated... The press did a lot of human interest stories, on all the people who died."

"Wow... I never realized... Where'd they get a picture of me?"

Kalea smiled. "They had a few, one from your high-school yearbook. They also had one from a girl named Susan in Philadelphia... Uh, did I say something wrong?"

Jim sighed. "No, not at all. Susan and I dated for a while. I didn't think she would have kept any of my pictures. She did... wow..."

Kalea shook her head. "You have no idea how much your papers influenced me, back in 1406 during Jumpstart. You are the true father of slip mathematics. Jim Arnold, you are a legend to the Hopewell scientists."