The Heisenberg Corollary

by C H Duryea

  When Narissa wasn’t enjoying much-deserved downtime with Augie, she committed herself to finding solutions to the Heisenberg corollary’s uncertainty problem, conducting multiple iterations of a variety of high-powered experiments involving particle accelerators and atom smashers. Her new capacity to see reality in terms of its underlying math came in handy as she poured over the resulting data, frequently walking her lab through a VR projection of one particle collision map or another, her fingers etching glowing vectors and equations into the air in front of her almost faster than the eye could see. At other times, she spent hours scanning local star charts and conferring with Harbinger. Occasionally, the two could be seen pooling their respective powers onto webs of free-floating astronomical and gravitational data. To decompress from the intensity of her mental work, she practiced her martial arts, applying her new perceptions here as well, to maximize the efficiency and power of her movements and blows.

  Zeke, however, suddenly found himself with frustratingly little to do. That is, when he wasn’t spending hours on end in scanner tubes and testing chambers, Narissa and Harbinger obsessively measuring, gauging, and finding new applications for his new energy conduction capacity. Preliminary tests showed him able to take in and redirect power levels so high, they frankly bordered on the ridiculous. But the rest of the time he felt like a race car revving in the garage. His team was grappling with purely applied objectives—his leadership, and his vision for the project, seemed less important with each completed task. For the first time since they escaped the XARPA platform in the Friendly Card, he truly felt like a man out of time.

  There was one thing he knew he had to do. His experience on Inverketh clearly established that he not only had no skill with a blade, but he didn’t have much skill in any form of combat. Given where they were going, that was going to have to change.

  He trained on the edged weapons with Harbinger, and with Qaant Yke, he got familiar with their new weapons. He visited a neuro-programmer, who plugged a network of wires into him and installed the muscle memories of a variety of fighting styles never heard of on Earth.

  “So you know Kung Fu now, Neo,” Narissa quipped after one such programming session.

  “Who’s Neo?” Zeke asked.

  On the afternoon of the sixth day, after testing a new set of tiny-nukes, Zeke and Qaant Yke wandered some of the ancient inner rings of the armillary, long since deserted and decrepit. Zeke stopped and looked around next to an old landing ramp.

  “This is where you saved my life,” he said.

  “And landed myself in a world of inconvenience.”

  Zeke shot the alien a look. “Is that what you call it?”

  “My forehatchers had a more precise word. It lacks a human translation.”

  The old ring was out of alignment and a vibration shuddered through it on regular intervals. Zeke grabbed the railing and absorbed the kinetic energy created by the wobble, and the vibration stopped. He let the energy flow up his arm and extended his other hand to discharge the energy from his finger like the tip of a Tesla coil. Turning kinetic energy into electricity felt like second nature to him now—he hardly thought about it.

  “Why’d you do it?” Zeke asked. “Why not just let those guys kill me?”

  “Besides their nutritional value,” Qaant Yke asked. “I told you, I was weak.”

  “That’s rocket scorch and you know it. What’s the real reason?”

  The alien paused, and Zeke could not tell if it was a pensive pause or something else.

  “They were going to slay you,” Qaant Yke said finally. “Had that occurred through my inaction, my debt to Fate would have been the same. By slaying your assailants, I shifted the line of causality in a less destructive direction.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” Zeke said. “So at the end of the day, you’re a do-gooder. None of this ‘Qaant Yke, the inscrutable guardian of the cosmic status quo’ at all. You’re a— what would Chuck call you? You’re not lawful neutral—you’re lawful good!”

  “There’s no reason to be hurtful.”

  “You’re a paladin!”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  Out on the wide, gleaming, and much bigger loops of the new armillary, Zeke ordered a custom set of battle gear from an armorer who specialized in unusual applications of energy. Over a second-skin pressure suit, the outfit also featured a layer of ablative material tough enough to handle an atmospheric reentry. On top of that, a thin layer of tightly woven but highly pliable mesh would serve not only as a protection from physical attacks, but it was also lined with a network of superconductive filaments that allowed Zeke to more efficiently and effectively charge and discharge a dizzying variety of energy types and frequencies. A heads-up display showed tactical readouts of the location and strength of both potential and actual energy sources, among other data that Zeke suspected he would be needing soon. The whole arrangement would have been quite hot, except that the energy-exchanging mechanisms of the suit drew away Zeke’s excess body heat to power its systems.

  When they returned to the ship, Augie and Narissa were off in Augie’s workshop and Harbinger met them outside the landing bay, holding a small spray bottle in each hand. He stopped before Zeke and held up one bottle.

  “Before you freak,” he said, “just know that I have the antidote in the other bottle.”

  Zeke didn’t have a chance to object as Harbinger sprayed Zeke’s eyes with the first bottle.

  “What the—” Zeke yelled, trying to rub away whatever was just sprayed into his eyes. But it was too late. A ringing in his ears became a buzzing that increased in volume until he could hardly stand it. Then the buzzing seemed to break up and atomize in his head into a million tiny buzzes, like gnats. Zeke gripped his head and the gnats turned into voices, and it felt like he could hear every voice on the station. After a few more moments, the sea of buzzing faded, then disappeared.

  But not quite. One insistent buzz still knocked around in his skull. The buzzing shifted and modulated until it finally resolved into something else.

  Pretty cool, huh? Harbinger asked. It’s called MindLink. Delivered via nano-spray through the eye and into the neocortex.

  Zeke heard Harbinger’s voice—but Harbinger’s mouth was not moving.

  “Telepathy?” Zeke asked.

  Don’t speak, Harbinger said inside his head. Just think the words.

  Zeke thought that if he had known what Harbinger was going to do, he would have clobbered him.

  “Why do you think I didn’t warn you,” Harbinger replied aloud, shuffling away. “Practice. It’ll get easier. We should all get it so we can stay in communication. Whaddaya say, Qaant Yke? We could do away with all those faulty translations of your forehatchers.”

  “I would rather not use this as an occasion to test nanotech calibrated for humans on my neurology.”

  The cargo door to Augie’s workshop slid open. It took Zeke a second to realize just what—and who—came striding through.

  “What do you think?” Narissa asked.

  She wore a suit of armor—the kind of high-tech battle suit the armorer Zeke had seen and their like were known to design. The smooth surfaces, sleek lines, and technological enhancements were very much like he was used to seeing out on the armillary. But this one was different. The metal that made it up was different, a slightly red-tinged gold, and it took Zeke a moment to recognize it.

  “Moolite,” he said. “Looks like you’ve made your peace with it.”

  “Back on Inverketh I was able to kick butt with this substance,” she said. “I figured a battle suit made out of it might come in handy. Augie made it for me.”

  “Leave it to Augie,” Harbinger said, “to make you a set of battle armor that’s literally made of money.”

  The big hangar door hissed and slid open, and through a burst of steam, a massive, walking fortress of mechanized destructive power strolled out and stopped before them. The eye-like viewports looked down at them, then flicked open. />
  “Price is no object,” Augie said from inside the monstrosity, “when it comes to protecting my beloved. I tried to talk her into staying on the sidelines—”

  “Good luck with that,” Harbinger said with a smirk.

  “But since she is insistent on participating in this endeavor,” Augie went on as he disengaged from the mech and climbed down. “I figured this material would give her a singular advantage where we’re going. Although one thing continues to escape me. These new abilities we’ve picked up. How can they work without the magic that created them? We were all able to use them at the station—and out at the hyperstack.”

  “It’s not magic,” Harbinger explained. “It’s more akin to mutation—but at a much more fundamental level. The space-time you’re comprised of has been reprogrammed. You alter the laws of physics wherever you happen to be.”

  That seemed to satisfy the engineer.

  “How do you like my new armor?” he asked.

  Zeke looked up at the unmanned hulk. “Subtle,” he said. “How do you propose we get it inside the ship?”

  “I’ll strap it to the hull if we have to.”

  “Aren’t we lashing enough to the hull as it is?” Harbinger asked.

  Zeke turned to him. “How big has that toy store of yours gotten anyway?”

  Harbinger shrugged. “Let’s go see.”

  “Now’s probably a good a time as any for a tour of the new ship,” Augie said.

  They went out onto a catwalk over the landing deck that ended at the Friendly Card’s airlock. At first, Zeke thought they had entered the wrong bay. He hardly recognized the ship before him as the battered and boxy Friendly Card. Over the ship’s original chassis, a new, shimmering hull gleamed in the bay’s lights. It looked bigger, but then part of that was the additional armaments arrayed at regular intervals fore and aft.

  “Impervium hull,” Harbinger explained.

  Zeke shot him an incredulous look.

  “Heisenberg,” Narissa said.

  “Right,” Zeke relented. “What else?”

  “Bigger, more powerful engines,” Augie explained. “New guns, a massive new power plant to run them, and a second array of ultra-high threshold inertial capacitors.”

  “We’ll need those,” Narissa added.

  “And we finally got that cloaking device they didn’t have time to install last time,” Harbinger added.

  “What are they putting up there?” Zeke asked as they passed around the aft burners.

  “A pair of after-market ramscoops.”

  “And there?”

  “Phase plasma cannon,” Augie said. “Forty petawatts.”

  “And that?” Zeke asked, pointing at a sleek, goldish shape attached like a remora to the ventral hull.

  “That,” Augie said, “is our new dropship.”

  “I had the idea,” Harbinger said, “when I remembered how we lost power approaching Inverketh. I figure if we encounter any other such non-tech world, we should park the Card at a respectable orbit.”

  “It’s spaceworthy,” Augie added, “but completely mechanical—not a power lead on the whole vehicle. Controls and life support are entirely clockwork."

  “Very steampunk,” Narissa noted.

  “Technically,” Harbinger said, “it’s closer to dieselpunk, but who’s arguing?”

  “The hull,” Augie continued, “s ablated with the same processed cyex your vambraces are made of, Zeke, which will absorb the heat of any standard reentry. It’s not much more than a glider, but it’s better than crash landing.”

  “Great,” Zeke said. “But how does it take off from the surface?”

  “The plating is solid moolite,” Narissa added. “I’m pretty sure I can magic it back into orbit. Once in space, the onboard tractor beam will do the rest.”

  Zeke moved in for a closer look. “It’s small.”

  “It holds two,” Harbinger said. “Three if you’re not shy. I couldn’t see a reason why we would all need to go planet-side on a non-tech world if we didn’t have to.”

  “It looks like an old Corvette,” Zeke said, “with wings.”

  “I call it the Gold Bug,” Augie said.

  Zeke noticed a large, square magnetic containment vessel on the other side of the bay.

  “What’s in the mag vessel?” he asked.

  “The rest of the cyex-encrusted hull plates,” Harbinger explained. “Seems that the unrefined cyex turns into a massively aggressive hydro carbonic solvent if you let it ferment long enough.”

  “We got it off the chassis just in time,” Augie added. “That mag vessel is holding at a ridiculously high pressure. They’re going to have to shoot it to open space and vent it at a safe distance, at some point.”

  Zeke returned his attention to the ship. “Will she be ready to fly on time?”

  Harbinger took out his dice and rolled them across his fingers. “She’s ready to fly now, boss,” he said.

  “But we still have a challenge,” Narissa said.

  “Two challenges,” Augie corrected.

  Zeke didn’t like the sound of that, especially with their time limit so close. What Augie and Narissa called challenges, most others called flat-out impossibilities.

  “Explain,” he said.

  Augie gestured to the loading ramp.

  “Let’s talk inside.”

  Twenty-Six

  Zeke and the others made their way across the catwalk over Landing Bay Alpha Zed Alpha. In every direction, a dozen or more cyborg or multi-appendaged engineers and techs were busy making final calibrations on the new, souped-up Friendly Card. They passed through the open airlock and by several more techs as they made their way up to the new and expanded flight deck. The new deck now had stations for all of them, surrounding a new navigation tank. The tank blinked and flashed with icons and course plots that Zeke recognized, including a pulsating black circle indicating the position of a medium-sized singularity in the neighborhood. Overlaying the standard navigation icons inside the tank, he saw a different set of symbols and modulating planes—all corresponding to the multidimensional physics of the Frogger.

  On the side, a ladder gave access from the flight deck to the engineering deck below. Harbinger, Augie and Narissa slid down the ladder and out of sight. Zeke took one more look around, his eyes lingering on the co-pilot’s seat, with the leads and fittings of the NeuralNav installed and waiting, then he too descended.

  The station techs eventually finished and disembarked. Zeke and the crew gathered around the work table in engineering, and Narissa set a holotab down between them and toggled the display.

  “We knew when we decided to come here,” she said, “that we would have to find a way to bridge the uncertainty gap if we were to return to Inverkethi space anywhere near the right place and time to rescue Vibeke.”

  “When we built the Frogger,” Augie continued, “it was only a prototype—proof of concept was all we needed. And since we needed to get it back from its test runs at a reasonable proximity to time and place, we built it to run on very little power. Consequently, the chronospatial variance was negligible in the lab.”

  “But out here,” Harbinger said, “with the amplification of power needed for the Frogger to bring the Card along with it, the variance becomes very quickly unmanageable.”

  “But the math on the Heisenberg corollary,” Zeke said, “placed the variance potential along a Gaussian distribution.”

  “Right,” Narissa said as she brought up a graph that levitated over the table, showing a normal distribution, bell-shaped curve that rose up in the middle and tapered at both ends. “The corollary holds that, with the introduction of sufficient additional power, the variance will resolve.”

  “But we never learned exactly how much power was needed right of the mean.”

  “The Tozzk had to go and blow up XARPA,” Harbinger said, “before we could work that out.”

  “But we knew it would be massive,” Zeke said. “More than we could possibly access w
ithout the XARPA contract.”

  “A massive, inverse relationship,” Narissa confirmed. “That much we knew.”

  “But we know more now?”

  No one answered. The other three shared a few nervous glances.

  “What?” Zeke pressed. “How bad is it?”

  “That depends on what you mean by bad,” Narissa said as she punched up a new graph and overlaid it over the other. “If by bad you mean how much more do we know after my experiments, then it’s really quite good.”

  “But if by bad you mean what the numbers imply,” Harbinger said.

  “Hell’s bells,” Zeke breathed as he traced the hockey-stick shaped upward slash on the graph. “It’s exponential.”

  “Then it’s very bad,” Narissa finished.

  “We could pour the combined power output of this entire station into the Frogger,” Zeke said, desperation rising in his throat like bile, “and not even touch the amount we would need to bring the variance to an acceptable threshold.”

  “In terms of pure mega-joules,” Augie said, “we’re looking at the output of a small to medium-sized star.”

  “And how do you suggest we—” Zeke stopped, turned, and then took another look at the two long banks of supercapacitors and the heavy leads coming off them, wrapping around the Frogger’s interface panel like octopus tentacles. “No. To get close enough to a star for these capacitors to work, the radiation would fry the Card—and us—to a crisp.”