by Ginger Booth
Alone in the privacy of her office in the small hours of the night, Sass gave herself permission to cry. She missed them so.
24
Ben Acosta stretched luxuriantly out in the officer’s hall. They all piled out of Teke and Elise’s cramped cabin on Prosper, currently above the rings of Pono en route to Mahina Orbital. “So Cope. Why’d you shut me down so hard on visiting Sanctuary?”
“Design of experiments,” his husband growled back. “You nearly got yourself killed on that last jump.”
“Our aim sucks,” Teke concurred. “Jumping as far as Sanctuary, those little errors add up to disaster. Fatal.”
Ben folded his arms over his chest mulishly. “It’s about time you let me in on your brainstorming sessions, guys. Yeah, I know, Teke. You’re the brains. And Cope and Elise, you’re the technical can-do. But gang, the test pilot is where it all meets cruel reality. Don’t count me out as the bus driver. I was there. You weren’t. That matters.”
Teke sinuously leaned on his doorframe. Though younger than Ben, he adopted Cope’s more subtle strategy with Yang-Yangs, and slowed his apparent age slightly older, not far from his natural 29 now. At 35, Ben lived and breathed the spacer norms of the Pono rings, where you either looked 25 or were a destitute loser. Though as the owner of Thrive Spaceways, Cope was famous enough to consider an exception. Ben could probably get away with aging too. His vanity preferred younger.
“Point, Ben,” Cope allowed reluctantly. “But let’s do the brainstorming session tomorrow. I want to call Nico tonight. He might be able to find some insight on how to crack this god password on the AI.”
Ben frowned. “Nico is 16.”
Cope shrugged. “He’s that good at software. He’s also surrounded by the best computer minds on Mahina.” His son now attended high school in Mahina Actual. But for programming, he studied at the university and worked professionally. “Tech geeks love a good challenge. Who knows, I might sponsor him on the ‘Ask An Engineer’ boards. But we’ll get better results if we hone the question first.”
Kassidy and Eli had lingered with them in the officer’s country companionway. She suggested, “I should call Abel and Jules. And send them the video of that call. They’ll love it.”
“You know, hold off, Kassidy,” Ben requested. “I’ll call Abel. Though you’re welcome to send the video.”
“Though not to the whole star system,” Eli warned. “Edit it first. News, not personal details. Keep it short.”
Cope ruled, “Don’t send anything until Hunter signs off on it.” That was Clay’s son, re-installed only a few weeks ago as settler power in the Mahina government.
“Spoilsport,” Kassidy accused. But she looked thoughtful.
“Yup, that’s me. The grown-up in the room,” Cope returned. “Beat it, gang.”
Ben told him, “I’m with you. To marvel at our son’s brilliance.”
The next morning on Prosper, Ben convened that promised brainstorming session in Teke’s cabin. “We should resume testing.”
Cope picked at his worn coveralls. “I can think of ten better things to do. We need to earn some money, Ben.”
Teke gave him a slight backhand. “Ben, you have insights. Let’s cut straight to that.”
“Alright! So we have this warp gate fractal.” Ben started to trace the warp flower design in the air with his fingers, the stunning light show that spread across the stars when they engaged their new inner-system warp drive. That was its core advantage. Any warp drive went from point A to point B instantaneously. But their micro-warp system skipped that bonus three-year round trip from the system ecliptic. Plus, traveling N light years didn’t lose N light years of objective time. You’d arrive at the same time you left.
But fingers and words wouldn’t convey what Ben needed to say. He brought up an image of the glowing phenomenon from his last warp test. “Remember how we made that adjustment, and the fractal slowed?”
“Stopped,” Cope amended.
Ben raised a finger. “No. Wait. After that change, I could go through without gross damage to my body. Good! But we still saw navigation errors. Big ones, unpredictable. Too fast, too slow, location off, not quite the right vector –”
“I thought the heading was right,” Teke interrupted.
“Nothing I couldn’t compensate for,” Ben allowed. “But they were all off. Anyway, this pattern is still moving –”
“How is it moving?”
“Cope, I’m trying to explain that,” Ben complained. “Prosper, the shuttle, the stars, Pono, Aloha, the galaxy – everything in the universe is moving. You know this.”
“I know this,” Cope agreed.
Ben continued, “You know that pattern was never still relative to Prosper. Well, it was never still relative to my shuttle either. I tipped the helm ever so slightly to match its rotation.” He demonstrated using video from their warp trials.
Teke murmured, “But you told us the pattern stabilized.”
“It did,” Ben agreed. “This rotational drift is slow. But what made the difference in my cellular damage was when it stopped boiling. I don’t know what else to call it, the roiling unfolding.” He illustrated with another recording.
“Night and day,” Elise murmured. “Hm. But there is change in shape on the latest video.”
“That I’m not sure of,” Ben admitted. “But my next point. I noticed these green filaments within the arms. They don’t show up on the video. Not high enough resolution. But I watched through armorglass. I saw more fine detail. Here.”
He zoomed in on the inner region of an S-curved lobe, slightly hazed with green. “In person, there are filaments here.” Using his stylus, he cross-hatched in the pattern he saw. “The lines are very fine, who knows how many. The same lines wriggle through a main frond. But I could see them separate against the black of space inside a curve like this.”
He tucked his stylus away. “I could show you in person. Costs fuel, but we don’t have to jump anywhere.” He clicked off the display. “So what I was thinking. Teke, when we stabilized the pattern, you fine-adjusted the power modulation and the software, right?”
“Cope and I did, yes,” Teke agreed. “And there’s nothing more we can do there?” He leveled the question at his engineering partner.
Cope furrowed his brow but shrugged noncommittally. “Nothing within the tolerance of our instruments. We could buy better ones.”
Ben shook his head. “Not where I was going with this. How to explain. There are lobes to the warp fractal, right? Picture my fingers as the lobes of the warp drive antlers. Like with the ansible.”
He held up two hands flat, and then gently pulsed the fingers as though squeezing a big pillow. “Imagine that each lobe of the antlers generates a frond of the unfolding pattern.”
Teke clarified, “That is exactly what the knobs on the antlers do. In more dimensions than the visible. But yes.”
“Good!” Ben pounced. “And they’re matched, right?” He put up his hands again and flexed only the index fingers, identically. “But what if they’re not quite? What if one knob is a little shorter or wider? Or lags the other?”
Elise sat back nodding thoughtfully. “This we did not test.”
“But we made them identical,” Cope argued. “Didn’t we?”
“But yes, Copeland,” Elise explained. “You make two cookies, same cookie cutter, they are identical by construction, yes? Maybe not. One is closer to the heat. It burns while the other cookie, she is delicious.”
Cope crooked a lip, amused. “I’ll take your word for it. So Ben, you’re suggesting the antlers are perhaps not perfectly mirrored.”
“Yes! Maybe.” He took a seat. “I could show you from the shuttle. Fire it up? It’s hard to describe, but I still see a roiling in the fine lines of the warp pattern. And every time we’ve stilled the fractal, our results radically improved.”
Cope nodded. “Like a wheel out of true. Messes up your steering.”
Teke poked him out of his train of thought
. “I want to see these filaments. I may be able to see some pattern in it. Sounds beautiful. Like the fine structure of the universe, the music of the spheres, a wonder to behold.”
Ben half expected Cope to crucify Teke for waxing poetic. But no, his husband’s brow rose, and slowly he nodded. “Insight is worth much. Elise?”
“I would not miss the chance!”
“Yeah, we can’t afford the fuel,” Cope noted. “But let’s do it anyway. I’d like to see these guitar strings of the universe. Thank you, Ben. But please understand. I won’t be surprised if it takes another decade to get this drive working. If ever.”
Elise sighed sadly. “Especially if it is as you say, the two antlers must exactly match. That cannot be. Close I can manage. Exact, perhaps God could.”
Teke shrugged. “And we’re trying to harness an inherently chaotic event. Like a wild pterodactyl. No matter how much you’d love to ride one, maybe it can’t be tamed.”
Ben glowered at them. “Defeatist. How many years did it take them to dispatch the first warp probes from Ganymede?”
“Probes!” Cope echoed thoughtfully.
“Maybe a decade,” Teke allowed. “But Ben, that was old Earth. The best and the brightest of ten billion minds. And the end was nigh. The price of failure was our extinction.”
Cope shook his head. “Probes. Teke, we have an observer at the other end now. No ship, no pilot to risk!”
“Ah! Yes, that does make your job easier, doesn’t it?” Teke grinned.
Ben sighed. He tried to persuade them the pilot might have useful insight. Figures his husband would instead argue him off the team. Cope was only trying to protect him, he consoled himself.
25
Cope paused at his shuttle seat to jot another idea on his tablet. He was supposed to be setting up for this fractal-inspection jaunt. Ben and Teke busily rigged the warp generator behind him. He should be helping.
Hell, he was lead engineer. He should be supervising.
But he was dead-set against more warp trials at this point. He nearly lost Ben last time. Probe.
“Hey buddy,” Ben called. “If you’re not gonna help, go take up space in the hold, huh?”
Cope shoved the tablet into his pocket. “Sorry. Preoccupied. So this conduit –”
Ben turned and poked him in the chest. “Out. I mean it. My call.”
The engineer glared at him. “You can’t be serious. This is my equipment.”
“And you will do final checkout before we undock from Prosper. Or even power it on. When you can pay attention. Go do what you’re doing, and come back when your head’s in the game. In the meantime, I trust my conduit routing more than yours. That’s an order. Get off my shuttle.”
Cope’s beloved turned his back on him to calmly resume his wiring. Cope looked to Teke in appeal, but the physicist shrugged. “What are you thinking about, anyway?”
“Probe.”
“Sounds fascinating,” Teke encouraged. “I look forward to hearing all about it. When I’m not busy.”
“Right.” Having lost the argument, Cope ducked out of the shuttle and clambered down the access ladder to the hold. His closest work table was tucked under the dogleg staircase in the hold, so he gravitated to that seat. For a moment, he dwelled on being miffed over his eviction. Ben didn’t often pull rank on him in space, but that was the deal. Cope was the owner, Ben was the captain. In space, Ben made the judgment calls and issued orders.
He was getting pushier, too.
But Ben was also the stakes. Cope couldn’t risk him testing this warp drive again. Just admit it, Cope. The biggest barrier to progress was his own emotions. He opened his scratch pad file and drew a box, and wrote inside, Ben, Kids. He couldn’t risk a test flight to another star system. He just couldn’t.
That’s why he was so taken with the idea of probes instead of the shuttle. But how the hell could he build a probe with this kind of capability? To open the warp fractal took the entire power of a star drive. And to get any results back, he needed a powerful transmitter, and ideally a moose-bot – ansible – as well.
To send back what? he reasoned. That was a cogent point. They weren’t using this probe to explore new star systems. Right now, he just needed to test their navigation – location, bearing, speed.
What if the probe didn’t create the warp? What if they could do that with the overpowered shuttle, and use it to launch a simpler probe? One that had no capacity to return, only to collect the needed information and beam it to Denali or Sanctuary? Then local observers at the destination could forward the results by ansible. That was the design challenge.
Such a probe was nontrivial. It still needed to discern its position and bearing data, find its communications target, and beam data. But at that point its life cycle was done. No, it needed to keep beaming that data until someone acknowledged receipt, and keep adjusting its aim in the meantime.
And somehow Cope needed to send the probe, not the shuttle, despite the shuttle being the focus of the warp pattern.
Lost in his design challenge, he jumped when Teke laid a hand on his shoulder. “Go check the wiring. I’ll check your work.”
“I was planning to –”
“I see that.” Teke shoved him off his high stool and took his place. “Damn, you’re good.”
“We’re good,” Cope said, and bopped his collaborator’s back with a fist. “I can do this, right?”
He poked the screen over his calculations. If he was right, they’d been thinking the wrong way about this invention all along. They hadn’t created a warp drive for a starship. They’d developed a warp gate generator. And that changed everything.
“That’s what I’m checking,” Teke growled. “Without you reading over my shoulder. Beat it.”
But Ben’s fractal demonstration trip could wait. Because Cope wasn’t wasting fuel again to light the warp until they could use it launch a prototype probe.
He had to build it first.
Nico Copeland hustled toward the university sector of the deluxe domed city of Mahina Actual. He suspected they intentionally placed his high school as far as possible from the university to separate teenagers from college lifestyles. Not that this was successful. MA wasn’t that big. He jogged through the downtown bricked pedestrian mall, lined with trees and toney open-air cafes.
His mornings at the high school were starting to drag. Today they studied World War II. His Earth History teacher was determined that his students truly grasp the concept of the deaths of 75 million people. The students, born to a world of about 150,000, were grossed out by the details and determined to clown their way out of comprehension. Thankfully, Nico only had to spend his mornings incarcerated with shallow imbeciles.
This afternoon Dad gave him a great new research project!
“Nico, wait up!” Nico sadly recognized Sock’s voice, his 9-year-old baby brother. He almost pretended not to hear. But Sock would know. He’d feel hurt.
“Hey, squirt!” He let Sock catch up, but didn’t stop. “Kinda busy this afternoon.”
“Let me come with you!”
Nico chuckled. “You don’t know where I’m going.”
“Yeah, I do. I listened to you talk to Dad last night. I can help!”
Nico stopped dead, and parked a fist on his hip. “Sock, I know you’re smart. But this is my thing. You and Frazzie don’t need to compete with me! Me big brother. You’re too little for this.”
“Frazzie competes with you,” Sock countered. “I just want to help!”
Nico sighed and resumed walking. “You’re supposed to be in class.”
“I handed in my homework and told the teacher I was with you this afternoon.”
“Great, now it’s my fault you’re playing hooky.”
“I just miss Dad. And I’m good at software! I want to learn from you! Please?”
“Fine!” Nico scowled. Saying no to their sister Frazzie was easy. She gave as good as she got. But Sock was devastated if Nico shooed him away.
“Dad’ll visit us again soon. You’ll see.”
“He’s been gone forever.” Sock fell silent for another block, then admitted in a small voice, “I wasn’t spying last night. I wanted a turn to talk to him.”
Nico folded the smaller boy into his arms. “Sorry, sport. Next time. I’ll wake you if I have to. Promise. I was all excited about the project. I thought you were asleep.”
Sock was supposed to sleep at the creche. But lately, he snuck out and walked home. Granddad Acosta was a softy, and called the school to excuse Sock’s absence. Nico didn’t exactly mind. Sock’s hero worship pumped his self-esteem.
Back home in Schuyler City, the kids were locked into the creche unless an adult or Nico signed them out. Which was fine with Socrates, until Nico chose to leave the creche to live with Dad and attend the city high school. Now in Mahina Actual, Sock could resume his ghosting habits, keeping tabs on his big brother 24/7.
It was flattering, to a point.
Nico wished Dad was home so Sock could haunt him instead. Though no, Dad worked on dangerous equipment, while Nico mostly talked to computers.
They arrived at the AI Lab, and Nico pressed the doorbell for access.
A cute girl grad student answered, in long cornrow-braids, Siena Hopper. “I think you’re lost, sweeties.”
“No, I’m found!” Nico assured her, hand to heart, with a lazy grin. “I have an appointment with Dr. Sinclair.”
Siena glanced pointedly at his 9-year-old brother.
“I’m babysitting,” Nico lied.
Siena leaned down to look Sock sternly in the eye. He recoiled against his big brother. “You won’t touch anything, will you.”
“I’m nine, not an idiot.” Despite his diffidence, Sock was still Copeland’s son.
Nico hugged the boy’s head to his side and gently rapped his skull. “He’s really very well-behaved. Quiet. Aren’t you.”
A dubious Siena led them through a cubicle maze of the cheap seats, to a high-walled prestige office. A man leaned back in his ergonomic chair, feet on the desk, eyes closed. The door advised he was Dr. Narinder Sinclair, Director of AI, presumably for the world.