Galaxia

by Kevin McLaughlin

  And that was when Bentley was subjected to the worst torture of her life: advanced mathematics. She wasn't exactly dumb, quite the opposite, but the levels of theoretical math that Jade was throwing at her was far beyond anything she had ever been taught. The worst part was that any notes she took disappeared when the loop restarted. She had to rely entirely on memory, and on several passes she had to be retaught things Jade already went over because she was remembering them wrong.

  First there was basic hyperspace theory. Bentley found it weird that it was still technically considered a 'theory' when the practical application (hyperspace travel) was so common, but Jade informed her that though they could build technology that used hyperspace travel, the way it worked was still fairly mysterious, and the common theory had a few holes that were the subject of scholarly debate.

  Then she had to learn all the physical parts of the Chesed's hyperspace engine. For this Jade took the entire engine apart to show Bentley how it worked, piece by piece. “Good thing everything’s going to go back to the way it was after the reset, otherwise I have no idea how to put this all back together,” Jade joked. Or at least, Bentley thought it was a joke.

  Once Bentley had a solid enough grasp on how hyperspace worked and all the associated terminology, it was time to learn what the readings meant. She was refreshed on where all the readouts in the Engine Room were located, and run through what standard values they could expect, the various units of measurement, and what kind of errors one might encounter when taking a reading. It still didn't explain to Bentley why a lowercase 'l' and the number '1' had to look so similar on the displays.

  Bentley was even given some hands-on time with the engines, under Jade's less than careful supervision. “Learning by mistake is great,” she liked to say. She was really taking advantage of the fact that any damage Bentley did to the engines would be cleared when time looped again.

  Eventually Bentley learned enough that Jade was confident she could repeat her findings without messing up too much and work began for real in determining the cause of the engine problems. Bentley's part every day was to convince everyone that the time loop was real (a task that became easier and easier as she memorized more of the conversation and could repeat it verbatim), then memorize a bunch of facts and figures for Jade to repeat to her on the next loop.

  It was about two weeks into her work with Jade when the engineer postulated a theory as to why Bentley specifically retained her memories. “You said you wake up every morning with Svend hitting you in the head?”

  The wake-up slap was just a fact of life that Bentley had come to see as unavoidable, as inevitable as death and taxes. “Yeah. In the upper face and forehead.”

  “This is just a theory, but I think that slap is the reason you retain your memories. Let's call it 'cranial recalibration.' Let's say this is not true time travel, but a kind of… reset button that is hit every day. You know, game over, start again from the last checkpoint. Ever play any video games? Never mind, not important. During the reset, everything is set to exactly the state it was at the point in time we have been returned to. That includes our memories. But what if the 'smack' is hitting you at the exact moment your memories are being reset? You may be causing a glitch in the system where your brain is jolted from the reset state to the one that has all your memories.”

  Bentley remembered Loco telling her that his days each started with him smacking his head while looking for alcohol. She hadn't made the connection that they both began their days with a head injury. What were the odds? “I think you're on to something, Jade. And to think, I've been grouchy at Svend all this time for hitting me in the morning, but if it wasn't for that we might have been caught in this destructive loop forever.”

  Jade sighed. “You're so lucky. I wish someone was hitting me in the head at the exact moment of the reset.”

  “Yeah, right.” Bentley rubbed the sore spot on her nose. “Lucky.”

  With Bentley's help, Jade was eventually able to reason the cause of the Chesed's engine failures during the storm. Bentley knew the answer had come to her when Jade did a little excited dance like a little girl asking her parents to use the potty while saying a bunch of 'Oh!'s and 'Ah!'s. She called a crew meeting to go over her findings.

  “Who here is familiar with quantum theory?” she asked unironically, and actually looked a little disappointed when no one raised their hand. “Oh, well, guess it's not important that you know that much. The crib notes are: quantum stuff is really, really small, and at that scale things get kind of wacky. Quantum particles don't behave the way everything else in physics does. Usually this doesn't mean much to us, cause at our scale, we don't notice any of the weird stuff that goes on down there. But in this case, it is our problem.”

  She tapped a few buttons on her console causing a projection to pop up that seemed to show a cluster of swirling clouds interspersed with frequent lightning. “What Bentley has been experiencing as a 'storm', well I guess technically what we all have been experiencing but only Bentley remembers, is actually a field of unstable quantum particles, doing… well, I could postulate all day, but it would all be theory and you wouldn't really understand anyway. Needless to say, it is an incredibly strange occurrence that I don't think anyone has ever observed before, so in a way, we are quite lucky.”

  This time it was Shango who muttered, “Lucky.”

  Jade tapped on her console a few more times, and the projection changed to one of the engines. “Basically, the shielding that the Chesed has to protect us from things like cosmic radiation aren't really rated for this kind of quantum clusterfuck. It starts to mess with our internal system, hence the ship being observed tearing itself apart from the inside. And more importantly, it messes with our engines, whose hyperspace capabilities are also rooted in quantum theory. That's why the engines show themselves to be running in multiple states: there's the true, operational state, and a chaotic one to match the storm outside.”

  Shango looked like he had grown tired of pretending to understand what she was talking about. “So how do we fix it? When we tried to simply stay in hyperspace and avoid the storm, the engines stopped us in the storm, anyway.”

  “Good question! See, the engines and the storm are linked in a way, now. So the state of the hyperspace-granting parts of our engines now match the chaotic state of the storm, which they probably have since the first time our ship entered it. We can input whatever command we want into them, but those commands will be ignored in favor of the engine seeking out the storm. Of course, the ship can't survive being in the storm, so it is destroyed, and somehow in doing so is reset to an early point in time. I'm afraid I still am struggling with that part. There's a theory of time travel involving quantum probability that might have something to do with it.”

  Shango rested his head on the table. “Fixing it, Jade! Fixing it! How?”

  Jade blinked, as if she suddenly remembered where she was. “Oh, uh, right. Sorry, just got a bit excited. Well, I have a theory.” Another projection replaced the current one, this one of the ship with what looked like a large bubble around it. “We can't avoid going into the storm, but we might be able to come up with a defense against it. A bubble created using the hyperspace engines by reversing the particles that have caused its new states should work. If we can survive passing through the storm, the engines should return to normal and we could resume our journey in hyperspace.”

  Shango breathed out loudly. “Good, let's do that.”

  “Well, there are a lot of calculations to do, yet. Enough to keep me busy for days. I'm going to need some more help to finish it.” Jade turned to Bentley, who could not hide under the table in time. “You ready for more fun work?”

  Bentley sighed. “Yeah. Lucky me.”

  +++

  A few days later, they were ready with the calculations for Jade's 'hyperspace bubble.' Despite all of Jade's lecturing, very little of the formula actually made sense to Bentley, but she was fairly confident she was able to re
peat it bit by bit so Jade could make the final few tweaks to prepare the engines.

  Today was the day they were finally going to try and break out of the loop.

  As Jade worked and Bentley observed in the off chance she needed to learn something for one more go around, Loco approached her. “So this is it, huh.”

  Bentley's head hurt from cramming and she wasn't really in the mood for whatever Loco had to say right now. “You going to beg me for one more chance to do something stupid consequence free? Cause it's a little late for that.”

  Loco scoffed. “Nah, I'm done with that. This ship is actually pretty boring, when you think about it. If I could only get time-stuck on a planet of loose women and booze … ah, well. Go get time moving again so I can get some new booze, would you? Even my high quality stuff is starting to lose its luster after I've had it every single day.”

  Somehow this didn't do much to disarm Bentley's frustration with him, but she didn't have time to dwell on it. The time was getting close to activate the bubble.

  Back on the bridge, Shango called everyone together to let them know they were approaching the storm. On the screen, the roiling, occasionally lightning-lit clouds were being prominently displayed. The crew was gathered around the screen, nervously watching the encroaching storm. It was a scene Bentley had become all too familiar with.

  And yet this tension was something she hadn't felt in a while. She had grown so used to the destruction of the Chesed, so desensitized to it, that she had barely felt more than if she was watching a rerun of an old sitcom. But now there were stakes. This was the culmination of everything they had been working on. If they couldn't break the loop here, they might never be able to, or they would all die.

  And that thought was horrifying.

  Jade was the only missing crew member on the bridge, since she was needed in the Engine Room when this all went down. Bentley was required at the helm, as the only other person in the crew who knew the inputs into the hyperspace navigational commands to complete the bubble. In theory.

  An alert that Shango had set up on the screen flashed red and he called out the order. “We're entering into the storm now. Everyone, ready!”

  Bentley took a seat in the captain's chair and breathed deeply to steady herself. She knew her part by heart, or at least she hoped she did, but it was still nerve wracking.

  Jade's voice sounded over her corteX. “The engines are prepped and ready to create the hyperspace bubble. It's all you now, Bentley.”

  Bentley opened up the navigational commands on the captain's console and input the passcode to manually override all the default calculation software. She entered a long string of variables that the software thought were commands for traversing hyperspace to their next destination but should, hopefully, instead get the engines to produce the bubble around the ship. There was only a brief moment to double check the variables she had entered before it was time to put it to the test.

  The alert on the screen in front of Shango began to blink. “Now, Bentley!”

  Bentley activated the hyperdrive and the engines came the life. The ship began to shake, and at first Bentley was sure that their timing must have been off and it was too late. But the shaking proved to be much milder than the kind the storm was usually responsible for, and right now the ship seemed to be holding together. Not that it stopped her from gripping the captain's chair so tight her knuckles went white.

  Jade's voice crackled again onto their corteXes. “The hyperspace bubble was successfully created! We just need to ride it to the end of the storm. Good work, everyone.”

  Bentley let out a sigh of relief and glanced over to the viewport on the opposite side of the bridge. The storm raged outside, and this close Bentley could see that what they took as clouds on their screens was actually millions, billions of long, impossibly twisted threads, speckled with an infinite number of white sparkles that illuminated the strands enough for them to be made out in the blackness of space. Sporadically one of these would suddenly grow bright along its entire length, creating an effect that looked like lightning. For such a destructive force, it was actually kind of beautiful.

  Especially when it was kept several meters away from the ship by a white hot, almost translucent bubble that surrounded it.

  It seemed they were really going to make it and Bentley let herself relax. Turns out, she had relaxed prematurely.

  The shaking of the ship began to grow worse, from a low rumble to a full scale tossing of its insides. The standing crew were tossed from their feet, and Bentley had to clutch the captain's chair for dear life to keep from being thrown from it.

  Jade's voice called out over their corteXes, “The hyperspace bubble is failing! Our engines couldn't…”

  Whatever she was going to say was cut off as a series of explosions rocked the ship. The power went out and the bridge was thrown into complete and total darkness.

  Not again, Bentley thought as she desperately slammed on the console to try and bring it back to life. Not again not again not again! This was supposed to be it!

  Though she couldn't see it, she could recognize the sounds of the bridge tearing itself apart around her.

  Somewhere, Shango was shouting. “Bentley! Don't forget…”

  ...

  Smack.

  Chapter Seven

  Jade looked over the calculations for the hyperspace bubble that Bentley had written out for her. She was quite excited about them, and made a lot of comments as she looked through them about how her past selves were geniuses.

  Bentley was feeling less enthused. She had gathered the crew together again, as she always did, but she wasn't sure what good it was going to do. They had failed, and it was clear that they were never going to get out of this loop. She tucked her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, shaking herself gently.

  She had wanted more time to herself. Now she was going to get all the time in the universe.

  “Hey, can I see that for a second?” That was Loco's voice, which was out of place enough here in the Engine Room that Bentley was thrown out of her self-imposed misery.

  Loco was looking over the sheets of formula, a very bemused Jade watching him as he scanned sheet after sheet. “Here, this is what I was looking for.” He passed one of the pages back to Jade. “This part here is about engine power outputs, right? But isn't there a more efficient equation, one that's used for extreme-distance long-term space travel.”

  Jade examined the sheet and scratched at her chin. “Why, yes, yes there is. I hadn't considered it because we don't use it often, but if an exploration ship is going out into deep space, where there is nowhere to recharge the engines, and intends to be there for a while it requires incredibly efficient energy use from its hyperdrive. If the problem with our last attempt was the engines failing to keep the bubble open for the length of the storm, than perhaps …” She trailed off into a quiet muttering, putting the sheets down and scribbling all over Bentley's formulas with newly modified ones.

  Bentley's shock was apparent on her face as Loco cockily strode past her, a stupid grin on his face. “How did you – were you actually paying attention during Jade's lectures this whole time.”

  He scoffed. “What, me, pay attention to that nerdy shit? Of course not. But you two were always going on and on about that crap, and I was around and had to hear it. I must have picked up some stuff through osmosis.”

  She could pick up the small signs of his discomfort and knew he was being dishonest. He would never admit it, but he wanted to help. She smiled at him, a silent thanks for giving them new hope.

  Loco's cocky grin returned. “Or maybe it’s just because I'm an all knowing god and I had the answer all along. You really should be nicer to me. Maybe leave the occasional offering.”

  “I'll keep that in mind.”

  There wasn't much for Bentley to do while Jade worked through the new calculations so she sat back and tried to relax. It wasn't easy; even with the new possibility of success Loco ha
d given them, she was still feeling discouraged. If this wasn't enough, would there be another miracle?

  She slowed her breathing and forced herself to calm down. Her mind became clear as she forced all the negative thoughts away. What she needed was a few moments of quiet. Peace.

  Calm.

  Finally, Bentley. I've been trying to reach you for weeks.

  The voice in her head came so suddenly that it startled Bentley out of her calm and she leaped to her feet with a startled yelp. Jade looked up from her notes to see what happened.

  “Uh, sorry, stubbed my toe,” Bentley lied poorly. Fortunately, Jade didn't need a lot of convincing to go back to her scribbling.

  Bentley knew that voice. It was one she had spent a long time around as he had taught her to use the sword and introduced her to meditation. The mysterious man who laid at the end of this trip the Chesed was taking.

  Legba.

  She sat back down and ran through the meditation exercises he had taught her. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Clearing the mind of all other thoughts, focus just on breathing. Let all the concerns of the material world just slip away, inconsequential.

  As she fell into her meditation, she began to sense the familiar presence of Legba through the mental connection they shared. It was just like when he had been mentoring her. During that time, he would only communicate to her through their connection. He could talk physically, but when he did he insisted on being a cryptic asshole. Well, he was still a cryptic asshole when talking mentally, but at least then he would occasionally say something useful.

  It was different, trying to communicate from this distance instead of meditating next to each other. She hadn't even been aware it was possible. Everything was distorted, like speaking to someone over the phone with a bad connection. But even with the distortion, the form that appeared in front of her mind’s eye was undeniably Legba. With his dirty face, unkempt beard, and clothing that looked like it may have never been washed, Legba looked more like a homeless drifter than one of the most powerful figures in a universe that included gods.