Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  But it was all academic, right? I was real.

  Wasn’t I?

  FORTY

  When I reached the bridge, there was no one present but the ship’s avatar up on its perch. I was too worked up to stroll back out, though, and found myself pacing in a wide circle around the control center, trying to burn off the excess energy. My confrontation with Zel had shaken me, and I wasn’t sure yet what I thought about all of it.

  “Captain?” the avatar finally said, having remained silent until then. “You seem to be somewhat preoccupied. Is there something I can help you with?”

  Yes, I felt like saying. Did your friends in the Plenum cook me up in a Petrie dish to pull one over on everyone?

  But I bit back the words. To even ask the question would be to admit that some part of me believed that the second-in-command had been right, and I refused to accept that. Besides, it was ridiculous. Far more likely was the idea that Zel i’Cirea had been trying to rattle me, and had picked a remarkably effective means of doing so.

  “Further, just what is Zel’s beef with me, anyway?”

  “Sir?” The silver eagle cocked its head quizzically to one side.

  “Sorry, idiomatic expression. What I mean is, the second-in-command seems to bear some animosity toward me, and I don’t have any notion why.”

  “Have you asked her?” the avatar asked simply.

  “No,” I said, feeling foolish. “But then, our last conversation got away from me a bit, I think.”

  “Well,” the avatar said thoughtfully, “perhaps she resents you for taking command of the Further.”

  “Wh…” I began, and then the penny dropped. “You mean she was going to be captain?”

  “Of course, sir. First Zel i’Cirea has spearheaded the Further project since its infancy, more than a hundred years ago. It was always her intention to be the commanding officer of the completed vessel.”

  If it had been a snake, it would have bit me. Repeatedly.

  “And the Grimnismal brothers see me as some kind of interloper, too.”

  “Perhaps, sir. It isn’t surprising if they do. The drive engineers have been First Zel’s associates for a number of years.”

  I slumped into the command chair, feeling like an idiot.

  “So what else don’t I know about this ship I’m meant to be commanding, Further?”

  “Oh, a great many things, I’d imagine, sir. I don’t believe you’re familiar with the ship’s armament, for example.”

  I sat upright, looking up at the eagle on its perch. “Armament?” I’d been thinking of the Further in terms of my last command, Wayfarer One. And while I’d brought along my cap gun on the journey to Alpha Centauri B, just in case, the boffins back in Vienna had never for a moment considered outfitting the ship with weapons. Why would it need them? “What sort of armament?”

  “I have been designed to accommodate a wide range of possible scenarios, including engagement with hostile forces. In the interest of the ship’s safety, I have been equipped with launchers, emitters, and an inverter.”

  I leaned forward, my elbows on the table, fingers steepled. “Run that by me again, Further. And slowly, if you don’t mind.”

  “Certainly, sir. Our primary offensive weapons are the launchers. Integrated into my metric engineering drives, the launchers are essentially barrels in which small regions of extremely high gravity can be induced. Matter is placed in one end, gravity is momentarily induced at the other, and the matter accelerates to terrific speeds in an extremely short amount of time. The far end of the barrel opens onto my outer hull, and the matter continues at its high velocity until it strikes its target. The energy costs of the launchers are relatively low. The projectiles can be anything that fits into the barrel; though, most often, the raw material kept on board to be used in fabricants is utilized. In certain circumstances, the projectile is configured to deliver an explosive charge at the target, but most often, the projectiles are nothing more than inert ‘slugs.’”

  “OK,” I said thoughtfully. “That’s the launchers. What about the emitters?”

  “I am also equipped with emitters, particle beam weapons capable of firing beams of accelerated protons. Extremely effective in certain circumstances, though shielding can diminish their impact.”

  “And the…inverter?”

  “Yes, sir. I have one field inverter, which redirects the metric engineering drive’s field to create a region of altered space, similar to the ‘bubble’ that surrounds me under propulsion but directed outward. Within this inverted region, the characteristics of space can be altered at will: Time can run faster, gravity can increase to near infinite, etc. This can have a devastating impact on a target, but the use of the inverter can leave me defenseless and without power, even without life support in extreme circumstances.”

  I whistled low. “Just what is it you people expect to find out there?”

  The eagle waggled its head from side to side in a shrug. “That is the question, now, isn’t it, sir?”

  In the brief silence that followed, I wondered how far other technologies had evolved while I’d slept. As much as I loved the cap gun hanging from a peg on my wall, I wouldn’t want to walk into a firefight having no notion what the black hats were packing.

  “What about personal armament, Further? What are our options there?”

  “I’d be happy to configure a testing range, if you’d like to see for yourself.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. I might just have found a way to work off that excess energy, after all.

  FORTY-ONE

  I didn’t realize, until the Further fabricated a projector for me, that so many of the people I’d seen walking around the worlds of the Entelechy had been armed.

  “Projectors have manifold uses,” the Further explained as I picked up the sleek arc, looking for all the world like a golden wrist cuff about seven centimeters wide, inset with a small hemisphere of what looked to be obsidian. “It is principally a personal multifunction tool for energy manipulation, and its use as a weapon is only one of its possible applications.”

  I snapped the cuff onto my right wrist, and it conformed immediately to my forearm. “How do you control it?”

  “There are a variety of control options, but in your case, direct interlink integration would likely be the most efficient.”

  We were in a long gallery, which just a few moments ago had been part of a larger storage space but the ship had reconfigured into a separate firing range. At the far end of the room floated a pair of spheres, one white and one black—my targets, I presumed.

  “There are as many types of projectors as there are individual configurations,” the avatar went on, “but this is the standard model, whose functions include a flashlight, a cutting tool, a plasma discharge, and a limited-use defensive force field.”

  I nodded, holding my arm up, inspecting the cuff.

  ::Flashlight,:: I thought, and a blinding white ray of light leapt from the obsidian hemisphere, shooting right in my eyes. Squinting, I shouted, “Off! Off!”

  The light blinked off as quickly as it had come on.

  “There are safeties built into the projector that prevent you from accidentally discharging a plasma round or injuring yourself with the cutting tool. You could disable the precautions, if you preferred, but in most circumstances, I would recommend—”

  “No, no,” I said quickly, rubbing my still-watering eyes, seeing spots. “I’m quite happy with the safeties, thank you.”

  The silver eagle nodded, satisfied.

  “So the projectile is plasma, you say?”

  “Yes, projectors fire toroids of charged plasma. But a projector of this sort holds fairly limited—however, efficiently compressed—reserves of charged gas and is primarily intended for short-term use.”

  I turned my wrist back and forth, looking at the smooth unbroken line of the cuff, which felt almost weightless on my arm. “How is it powered?”

  “Projectors of this sort are rechargea
ble and draw energy from the ship itself. However, a projector can be configured to absorb any energy in the appropriate bands of the electromagnetic spectrum in order to recharge, a capacity that can even be adapted in the field to drain energy from other devices. Similarly, a projector can be used to manipulate external electromagnetic fields, though to a limited degree.”

  I glanced at the spheres floating at the far end of the gallery, more than a hundred meters away. “Mind if I give it a try?”

  “By all means,” the avatar said, hopping out of the way and taking up a position behind me. “I’ve cleared the area and reinforced the walls, ceiling, and floor of this chamber so that any errant shot need not cause any damage.”

  “You have that much faith in my marksmanship, do you?”

  The avatar waggled its head in a shrug. “Merely a precaution, sir—no value judgment intended.”

  “Hmm,” I humphed, but smiled.

  I held my arm straight out in front of me, my hand curled in a fist and pointed at the targets.

  ::Fire.::

  I might have had time to blink, but I doubt it. As soon as I’d thought the word, there was a brief flash, and then there was only one sphere floating at the end of the gallery, the other drifting slowly to the floor in a cloud of dust.

  “Just point and shoot,” I said. “Seems pretty simple to me.”

  “Quite impressive,” the eagle said with a sigh, and I got the feeling I was being patronized.

  I glanced from the eagle to the target and back. “Well, we’re just getting started. Now let’s make it a little more interesting. How fast do you think you can get one of those spheres to move?”

  FORTY-TWO

  It was past midday, with fewer than two standard days until we would reach our destination and the end of our shakedown cruise. I was in the bridge with the brothers Grimnismal and one of the Jida emissaries. I sat in the command chair, while the two corvids, the Further’s drive engineers, gave me a tutorial in wormhole engineering and the possible benefits of faster-than-light travel. The Jida emissary, draped gracefully over one of the chairs at the control center, listened in with a bemused expression.

  The walls and ceiling of the bridge consisted of an unbroken dome, which had been coded to display a real-color image of the exterior view of the ship so that it seemed like four of us sat in the midst of a great expanse of empty blackness, with the stars before us shrunk almost to a single red point, the stars behind a small cluster of blue.

  “OK,” I said as confidently as possible, “the basics of thresholds have been explained to me. They’re initiated with both ends in one place, and then one end is dragged to its destination at slower-than-light speeds. But one can transit the threshold at any point throughout the process, right?”

  “Well, naturally,” one of the corvids said, as though there were something terribly wrong with me for having to say it out loud.

  “Though,” the Jida emissary said, “in some instances, the threshold’s journey is the destination.”

  I gave her a confused look, at which the corvids exchanged weary glances and sighed.

  “There are sailships that have thresholds as permanent onboard fixtures,” she went on. “Some carry exceedingly small ones, capable of sending only information back and forth but that allow those on board to remain connected to the infostructure—a tremendous expense, but worthwhile for some, I suppose.” She gave me an odd, unreadable look, which suggested I should have been reading more into her statement than I obviously was. “And some cruise ships are equipped with even larger ones, capable of allowing a sentient to travel through bodily; these cater to those who enjoy the romance of traveling between the stars but who prefer not to spend decades or centuries on board. They pay hefty sums of power, step through the threshold, enjoy the rugged shipboard life—from the comfort of their staterooms, naturally—and then return home at their leisure. Their clientele may be somewhat select, given the enormous costs, but even so, it’s an extremely lucrative business.” She smiled slyly. “I’ve been known to make a fair amount of power off my cruise line investments, myself.”

  “In any event,” the other corvid said impatiently, “you are quite right, Captain Stone, that thresholds must be maneuvered in place at sublight speeds, and given that the fastest subluminal ships can accelerate to speeds no greater than half that of light, the installation of a new threshold can be a time-consuming procedure.”

  “And my brother Hu fails to mention,” said the other, who I guessed must be Mu, “the problems associated with the cosmic string material that is the fundamental component of a threshold construction.”

  “Too true, brother, too true.” Hu nodded eagerly. “I’m sure, in your primitive era, that such things were scarcely dreamed of, but the fundamental principle of threshold engineering is negative mass.”

  “Yes,” Mu put in, “negative mass is required to stabilize the wormhole mouth, and before the discovery of a cosmic string in interstellar space, thousands of kilometers long but only a proton in diameter, thresholds were only theoretical. The creation of the first threshold, the moment from which their calendar is measured, was the true birth of the Human Entelechy.”

  “A cosmic string is a topological defect in the fabric of space time,” Hu said, interrupting his brother. “They form when different regions of space time undergo phase changes, resulting in domain boundaries between the two regions when they meet. This is somewhat analogous to the boundaries that form between crystal grains in solidifying liquids, or the cracks that form when water freezes into ice.”

  “Precisely right, brother. Extremely thin and with a diameter on the order of a proton, they nevertheless have immense density and represent a significant source of gravity. As a result, the transportation of cosmic string material through normal space can be a very time-consuming and costly task as well, undertaken only by those—like our erstwhile employer First Zel i’Cirea—who are quite experienced in such matters.”

  “But why wouldn’t you just transport the cosmic string fragments through existing thresholds like everything else?” I asked. “Why do they have to be transported in normal space?”

  The two corvids glanced at one another, shaking their heads sadly. “Haven’t you heard anything we’ve said? Cosmic string fragments have negative mass, correct? And so any attempt to transport it through a threshold destabilizes the support and causes the wormhole to collapse.”

  “And you couldn’t transport it aboard a faster-than-light ship like the Further for the same reason?” I asked.

  “Hardly the ‘same reason,’” Mu said, his tone scornful, “but such a childish analogy will suit for your purposes, I suppose.”

  “The gravitation effects and negative energy characteristics of the comic string could collapse the local distortion of the quantum vacuum,” Hu added slowly and simply, as though talking to a simpleton or a child.

  “Which is, of course,” the Jida emissary said, her eyes narrowed but her tone playful, “where you two come in, no doubt?”

  The two corvids paused for a moment, seeming to swell with pride, lifting their beaks higher and straightening their rounded shoulders. “As you say, Madame Jida,” said Mu.

  “As you should know, Captain Stone,” Hu explained, “my brother and I have hypothesized the existence of a novel form of exotic matter, one that would have negative energy characteristics similar to cosmic string material and would likewise be able to stabilize and sustain thresholds, but that could be transported at faster-than-light speeds via a metric engineering drive.”

  “Expansion in the Entelechy,” his brother declaimed, “has always been limited by the time needed to transport cosmic string material to one terminus of a new threshold, the creation of the threshold, and then the transport time as the other terminus is moved into position. With distances of hundreds, even thousands, of light-years, this means that the rate of expansion is slow, to say the least.”

  “If our predictions are correct,” Hu said hau
ghtily, “and we’re able to locate a transportable form of negative matter, then we might even be able to design new forms of thresholds, themselves capable of being moved at faster-than-light speeds. And then humanity would be free to expand throughout the galaxy at unimaginable speeds.”

  “Throughout the galaxy?” Mu scoffed. “Throughout the universe!”

  “And,” Jida said, smiling sweetly but with an edge beneath her voice, “I imagine you boys will make them pay dearly for the privilege, won’t you?”

  The two corvids only exchanged a quick glance and grinned hungrily.

  FORTY-THREE

  To be “commander” of the Further was a somewhat nebulous concept, I quickly discovered. As the spokesperson for the majority shareholder, I was able to make decisions—or at least cast a tie-breaking vote—on large-scale decisions affecting the ship as a whole. On the small scale, though, the various departments and groups that made up the ship’s crew were functionally autonomous, essentially their own little fiefdoms. So long as they carried out their designated role, the departments were free to govern themselves however they saw fit. Most had adopted a more or less strict hierarchical structure, individual workers reporting to supervisors, who themselves reported to department heads, with the department heads themselves directly answerable to me. But a few of the departments, particularly those that constituted only a handful of sentients, had adopted more novel organizational approaches.

  Astrogation was, so far as I was aware, made up of only three individuals. The department head, and member of the command crew, was Xerxes. Ey was assisted by two others, though it was some days into our shakedown cruise before I discovered who. At first, all I knew was that Xerxes didn’t appear to be terribly busy and that ey could often be found in the Atrium watching the birds.

  It was there that I found em, with still a day’s journey ahead of us before we reached Aglibol.

  I had been rambling around the ship, trying to familiarize myself further with its layout, and been stymied by the fact that some of the corridors and compartments had been restructured even since I had passed them last, only a few days before. In the end, all I really managed to do was tire myself out and make the nodding acquaintance of a hundred or so of the crew I’d not previously met. At the end of a few hours of that, I was ready to get off my feet for a while.