Chapter 62

Time: December 3, 207145 6:57 PM Nebraska Standard Time

We started the meeting right after dinner, and had been working on the plan for almost an hour. All twelve of us were in Conference Room A, the primary situation room of the arctic home. Jim and Isabelle had finally come up with a plan of what we should be doing, and it was a doozy. All twelve of us had been debating it ever since. Even the girls were chiming in...

"If we decide to do this, how soon should we leave?" asked Cindy.

Isabelle looked at Jim and then answered. "There's no reason at all to wait. None at all. Once we agree, immediately, as soon as this meeting ends."

"We've been very lucky so far," added Jim. "But we do know time-loop reset will occur sometime in the next four weeks. If we don't act soon, the loop will be forced to find another path to its destiny." Jim looked at the clock. "I'd be happiest if we all left right now."

We debated just a bit longer. No one felt like going out without at least a token stand against the end of the universe. So a little after 7:00 PM we took a vote, and it was unanimous, twelve votes to put all bets on a single throw of the dice. Another credit to the WFM, I'll give them that. They taught their kids to be courageous.

As soon as the meeting broke up, Cindy, Jim, and Isabelle started dream-jumping us from the arctic home to the center of Antelope Freeway. I jumped to sit on top of the 400-foot walls; and from there I started remote teleporting everybody directly into the jet twenty- three kilometers away. It was damn hard staying on top of such a slippery wall. I wound up hanging onto a rope for balance.

Cindy was last, porting several backpacks from the arctic filled with optical disks. I pushed those to the rear of the front cockpit, and then when Cindy was finished she waved at me and I jumped us both to the plane.

A'moth was already active at the controls. "Doors are already sealed. Batteries are full charged. Amazingly, there's still a bit of liquid hydrogen in the tanks. It never boiled off..."

I nodded as I sat in the pilot seat next to her. Behind us were Jim and Isabelle. Cindy and Hoshi were with the six girls in the main cabin. It was hard not to telescope the moment. After all the struggles, all of our successes and failures, after all the years, all of the deaths of so many good and not-so-good people, after all of the centuries and the eras... it was all coming down to one throw of the dice. I felt as if I were standing before the greatest cosmic crap table of all eternity, and the dice were red hot in my hands...

"Anytime you're ready Gary," said A'moth calmly. "I love you."

I nodded, and before I could lose my guts, I locked the plane and jumped us into turbulence of the strange quantum shadow channel that exists below the Nebraska channel. The plane became filled with pulsing rainbow light, brighter and even more colorful than the trip from Earth.

Jim thinks the fork in this path is the degenerate shadow channel that Havika used to reach us from his timeline at the end of the previous loop. Normally these channels are strictly one-way, but so close to time-loop-reset Jim has theorized that the channel walls will be too weak to destroy us. He thinks the walls will rupture instead.

What happens next? A ruptured slip-channel is the universe's ultimate insanity. We're setting up one last chance for an anything-can-happen day. Infinitely dangerous, but hey! It beats certain death.

Outside the windows, we could see the channel expanding and pulsing like a great snake to accommodate the enormous width of the plane. The entire jet seemed encapsulated by an embryonic bubble, and quantum shards were dancing with us outside the bubble and down the channel. The ride started to become very bumpy, and up ahead I could see the terrible fork rushing up to us. Our rendezvous with destiny had arrived.

Future Interlude XIII: The Temporal Storm

Aina time: 12:34 PM day 198 of 1474 H.E.

Eleka had wandered over to the outer rim of the donut shaped room, gazing out southwards over the calm ocean. He turned and watched Mayoni as she worked. His bride to be! She was so beautiful, so perfect, so sexy... Ekela still couldn't quite believe she had accepted him to be her husband. He felt like the luckiest man in the world. Their future looked so bright...

He suddenly heard Kalea scream out, "Mayoni!!! What the hell are you doing?!"

Mayoni yelled back, "I see it too! It's not me! It's massive! Some sort of temporal surge!" She stared at a new monitor and suddenly screamed, "Hang on!"

Ekela's breath exploded out of him as he felt as if his body were in a gigantic blue flashbulb that had just gone off. He turned to the outside and shook his head to clear it, and saw absolute chaos in the reality outside. The sun was streaking across the sky too fast to be seen, a great band of light vibrating across the sky in its annual range faster than once a second.

In a shock of recognition, he understood the horror. Aina time loop reset was scheduled to occur on day 254 of 1537, sixty-three Aina years in the future. If he was interpreting the outside events correctly, they would hit time-loop reset in less than a minute. The solar tower chamber was filled with a massive vibration and a thunderous roar that seemed to come from all directions. "Mayoni!" he cried out.

Time: Undetermined, riding a shock wave of reality

As we approached the fork in the shadow channel, I felt a tremendous pull guiding the plane into the main channel, the one that loops back to Antelope Freeway. But I shivered in fright as I stared at the closed circuit monitors showing the view out the rear of the plane. The quantum counterfactuals were tearing the channel apart behind us. The channel walls looked like shredded spaghetti, fading into a soupy mush.

The moment of Earth-loop reset had arrived. If we stayed in the main channel, we'd loop back to a Freeway that didn't exist anymore. We'd only get one shot at this. The spiraling branch looked hopeless, but the main branch was certain death. A moment before we would have passed it, I shouted "Now!" to A'moth, and jumped the plane directly in front of the spiraling path.

A'moth throttled the engines to full power. Amazingly, the instruments were reading full thrust, though I don't have the faintest idea what they were using for oxygen. We hit the spiral nose-on and placed our bet, matching the best plasti-titanium alloys of the WFM against the unbounded power of a rupturing shadow channel. The dice were in the air!