Mobius

by Garon Whited

  I’d forgotten how much osmium these things needed. I believe the exact amount was a metric crapload. Diogenes had the advantage of millions of robots, centuries of human efforts in finding and refining it, and no competition.

  My advantage was a small gate, a knowledge of what I was seeking, and the willingness to swipe an ingot from each of several hundred worlds. Or more than an ingot, if there were several in easy reach of where the gate opened. It bothered me, at first, to be grabbing things through gates, what with the recent angelic attention, but I’ve been using gates forever without trouble. Either it’s extremely unlikely they’ll notice, or they only notice when I open a hole directly into the void beyond the worlds. I hope it’s the latter. I really do.

  Before I started the process, I took some charged crystals and set them in my garage gate. This led me to realize the spell was expended in our recent arrival, so I had to re-cast the spell, as well. The point being, I had an escape hatch if angels, zombies, angelic zombies, or zombie angels showed up. Anything else I felt competent to handle.

  Mind you, if we stepped through into a mob of zombie dinosaurs, I was going to have a persecution complex as well as a meltdown.

  My larger plan was to draw the divinity dynamo out, select the appropriate parts, and either steal or salvage them all. Electric motors I can find lying around. Orichalcum I have to alloy out of copper wire—I’m not asking Bronze to contribute that much of her mane and tail! Osmium? I have to steal osmium, but I can focus on, say, any lumps of it buried in sand, silt, or dirt. Surely, in an infinite set of universes, someone has lost an ingot.

  Which gave me a thought. If there are an infinite set of universes, how many of them have divinity dynamos already? Can I find one with a gate-search? I wouldn’t have to steal it, but I should probably find out if they exist.

  For the record, they do not. At least, there were no unshielded locations with the things. There may be millions hidden by shielding spells, but there were none out in the open where I could find them. Does this mean they are never developed by anyone? Or that the total possible universes isn’t truly an infinite set? A huge set, yes, but not infinite? Could there be no lightsabers, for example, not because I don’t know how they work, but because they simply aren’t developed by anyone so far?

  This led me to other questions about things I could find. For example, if I’m working on building divinity dynamos here in Zombie World, is there a variant of Zombie World where I started working on the things as my first priority? Say, where I decided to help my altar ego more forcefully, instead of building a Cretaceous Lair?

  No, there is not. As far as I can tell with a number of searches, I don’t exist anywhere else. This is not entirely unexpected, since I’m in the distant past. Most of the “modern” worlds I know of are materially different from the one where I was born, so I may not ever exist in them. However, I would have thought I would exist in alternate worlds based off later branchings from worlds I’ve visited.

  It’s like this. I go to… the Cretaceous, let’s say. I find a good spot for my pet pyramid. Eventually, I start it growing. I did all this, so there are two timelines—the original, where I never showed up, and the alternate where I did. I’ve looked for the “untouched” Cretaceous and it’s there. It’s a world I didn’t visit. It branched off, as far as I can tell, from the moment I connected with a gate. The other is an alternate timeline where I did show up and did plant my pyramid.

  Theory suggests my alternate timeline should have alternate branchings, as well. There should be a world where I planted the pyramid on the opposite side of the creek. There should be a world where I constructed a gate-arch, rather than hanging a loop of enchanted wire. There should be a world where I put my lair in what would one day be Africa, instead of Russia. Yet, no matter what parameters I try, I don’t find anything resembling these worlds. Variations on the Cretaceous, yes—a forest fire here, an earthquake there, whatever. None of these variations have me in them. I tried with Zombie World, the Cretaceous, and the kilt-wearing Seattle. “My” alternate timeline is there—the branch created by my interference with the original—but no alternates of “my” timeline appear to exist. Once I show up, the timeline created is a single branch, without sub-branches of its own, as far as I can tell. I won’t say it’s a fact, since I haven’t done a full-scale research project on it, but it seems that way from my initial observations.

  I’m both disappointed and relieved. It would be interesting, to say the least, to call myself up for help. Or go help myself in another world. Or, if worse came to worst, call up several hundred or several thousand or several million of me.

  Nuke Rethven? What for? I have a million nightlords willing to do anything to keep it from happening. What’s on the other side? A billion drug-crazed maniacs? Is that all? Oh, and only one Lord of Light? Pfft. Come here, you glowing son of a bitch. We want a profane Word with you.

  Sadly, this does not seem to work. I think—I can’t prove it, but I think—the action of connecting with an inter-universal gateway has some sort of stabilizing effect on the… I hate to throw around the word “quantum,” but it’ll have to do. It has some sort of stabilizing effect on the quantum signature of the universe. The “original” universe continues to subdivide normally, but “mine” doesn’t do it anymore.

  It’s almost as though any world I’m in won’t give second chances. There’s no alternate timeline where I made the other choice in a decision.

  I don’t feel comfortable with the implications.

  On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about some other-universe me popping in to ask for help with something he screwed up, either. So there’s that.

  Elbe, Zombie World, Still Here

  Mary would be appalled. I think. I’ve been using the Ring of Spying and a mirror to locate suitable sources of osmium. Homing in on buried ingots is not as profitable as I’d hoped. I can’t open a gate inside the ground. On the other hand, I can open a gate on the surface, directly above my target. If it’s not buried too deeply, this works pretty well.

  I have learned to check the depth of the water, if the ingot I’m after is buried in silt. At the bottom of a river is okay. I can open the gate in the back yard, reach through the blast of water from the gate, and grab my target—assuming it doesn’t get washed through! On the other hand, if I find an ingot at the bottom of a larger body of water, the blast coming through the gate reminds me uncomfortably of Johann’s attempts at assassination-by-gate. Being shot by a water cannon is not an ideal outcome.

  After the gate shut off and I finished sputtering and wheezing, I let the back yard drain for a few minutes. I crawled into the house, mindful of the way my ribs moved. I lay there in the kitchen for a while, concentrating on breathing. I try to do my gate-work during the day, for obvious safety reasons, so being hammered by a ton or more of water pressure is bad for me. New safety protocols are coming up as soon as I cough up a lung to see if it’s punctured and recover a bit more.

  Mary would be appalled at this, yes, but I was going somewhere else with the idea. Sorry. Still recuperating from being water-hammered. Oh! I remember. She would be appalled at the ease with which I steal things. All through the Earth timelines, there are multiple variants on any given source of… well, whatever. Open a portal, grab it, close the portal. Repeat as needed and as power allows.

  I know she doesn’t steal things for the value of them, but I think she would lose some of her delight in the challenge. If there’s an easy way to get it, her hobby would be nothing more than deliberately taking the hard way. Or am I thinking about it wrongly? Is the whole point to do it the hard way? Maybe I don’t understand her.

  Maybe I should stay still and let my healing spells do their work until nightfall.

  I should have stolen something to eat, too. All I have in the house is… yeah, chili and beans.

  Can I go back in time to kill the man who bought nothing but chili and beans? No, I didn’t build a gate before it happened,
so I can’t go back to it. Pity.

  Osmium is darn near impossible to work with. My collection of fountain pen nibs, scientific ingots, and containers of powdered metal is more a junk pile than a supply. At least I finally realized I could keep recovering the same lost ingot over and over. When I open a gate, the world-line branches, making a new branch where I opened it. I take the ingot and close the gate. Then I look for the original world-line, where I never swiped the ingot—and I swipe it again, creating another world-line.

  This feels like cheating, somehow. I’m sure there are implications to creating world-line after world-line, but I’m not sure what they are. There are already an enormous number of them, growing all the time. What’s a few dozen more? Or a few million?

  It still worries me, at least a little.

  As for working with my pile of metal, osmium is not a friendly element. I simply don’t have the equipment. Processing it by heating it and hammering it in mundane fashion isn’t really practical. It melts at around 3,300 C, or 5,500 F, so even getting it to soften is challenging. Oh, Firebrand and I can do it, but it’s like pulling dragon teeth.

  On the other hand, here in Zombie World I have a steady supply of magical power. The spell is changing the shape of the metal, much like a spell to reshape and join individual stones. The pile is slowly turning into the cylinder I need for the field rotor. It’ll take a while, but the whole project will take a while.

  I have orichalcum wire to alloy and an electric motor to clean. I’ll be back.

  Cretaceous Progress Report

  I have wire, motors, and most of the other components I need. As I suspected, the osmium is the holdup. The hardness of the material is a factor in my gradual-manipulation spell. The material flows slowly into the shape I want, so it’ll get there eventually. I do have a workaround, though. Firebrand can melt osmium, but it’s a lot of work—and I have nothing to keep molten osmium in! Fortunately, osmium is also somewhat brittle. Beating it to pieces with a hammer or carving it into strips with my Saber of Sharpness are both decent methods of turning a lump into smaller lumps. Small lumps are laid out like smoothing a layer of gravel. I add the powdered osmium to fill in the gaps. With a little help from Firebrand to soften the metal, I can sort-of hammer it flat. Flattish. Less lumpy. It means my reshaping spell has a lot less work to do.

  Anyway, the new lair.

  I’ve checked on the Cretaceous Lair. It’s looking good. The size is about right, the rooms inside are fully formed, and the solar power panels have spread all around it. In fact, there are a number of new animals hanging around the place. The panels are placed above the ground, about fifty feet up to avoid interference from the plant and animal life. They act as an invisible sunscreen to the tune of four percent or so. This makes the area around the pet pyramid slightly cooler. It’s not enough for me to notice, but some living things find it wonderful. The Go Away spell is targeted on larger animals, so all my new neighbors are of the one ton and under variety.

  I’m not sure I approve, but I need the power. They might turn into snack food if they prove troublesome.

  I’m debating on the door, though. There’s a cut-out section of one edge of the upper pyramid and the door is set back in that. It’s a stone pivot-door, large enough for Bronze. It ought to be good enough, but I know from experience the pivot-point is a weak spot. I can break it and knock down the door. I’m sure most dinosaurs can, too. I might want to replace it with a vault door or similar hatch. It doesn’t need to be an actual vault door, but it does need to be dinosaur-resistant if not dinosaur-proof. Then again, most dinosaurs have no interest in big rocks and seldom try to shove them. I haven’t decided how to handle it.

  Since I have so many new neighbors, I’ve relocated my outdoor gate site from between two trees and into the pet pyramid. It takes a while to absorb things into a wall for mounting, especially since the pyramid is running on low power. It has solar panels, not a matter-conversion reactor, and they’re turning sunlight into magic and then magic into vitality. It’s not terribly efficient. It’s still scorchingly fast for a pet rock, but the bar was never all that high. At least now, though, my arrival in the Cretaceous Lair will be in darkness, rather than potentially in sunlight. Under no circumstances will I enjoy a time-zone mistake, but at least I don’t have to worry about being flash-fried. With the addition of an actual gate enchantment and some power crystals, I shouldn’t have to worry about power problems in getting here. If I can make a connection at all, this gate should maintain it long enough for Bronze and I to step through safely.

  For more mundane biological problems, I have a temporary solution to the air, at least. The pollen doesn’t seem actively hostile, but it’s triggering almost allergic reactions, so I have a filter spell to keep the air clean. Another filter spell is accepting or rejecting individual air molecules—oxygen and nitrogen—based on ratios more appropriate to the modern era. Yet another spell is pushing air around to circulate it and spread the more-breathable air throughout the lair. I’ve got some smaller passages—air conduits—forming near the surface of the pyramid. Heating from sunlight will cause convection and eliminate the need for the air-moving spell.

  It’s not a bio-dome. It’s an undead pyramid lair, which is simpler.

  Come to think of it, mummies get pyramids. Is this because they’re primarily Egyptian? What’s the proper shape for vampires? Do vampires even have a proper lair shape, aside from coffins? Tombs, maybe. Seems unfair, really, how mummies get a simple geometric shape and vampires have to muddle through with a mess of other things. Bats, coffins, and the like. Maybe I should have been a mummy.

  Undead lair or not, I’m sometimes all too mortal. I also need to think about stocking this place with mortal food. Dinosaurs are edible, but I’m thinking about less-than-ideal conditions. What if I arrive through a gate and collapse from a night-to-day shift? I won’t want to crawl outside and kill my breakfast. I won’t want to crawl to the kitchen, either, but I might actually manage it. Then there’s the water. How do I want to store it? How will I heat it? How will I cook food? Or will I rely only on pre-packaged not-chili-with-beans meals?

  Setting up a vampire disaster shelter isn’t as easy as I thought.

  Here in Elbe, I’ve revamped the garage gate. With a powered gateway in the Cretaceous, I thought I might as well have one here, too. This makes a reasonably good spot as a bail-out point and I want more than one. I’d hate to have to exit one Earth and be followed by an energy being back to my nice lair. The gate here is still only a spell, but I’ve added more power storage to it. Again, the objective is to have enough power on this end to make an emergency arrival and emergency departure safely. It’s still set up to self-destruct, as are all the other spells around the place, if I give it the go-code. The spells will unravel, hopefully harmlessly, leaving nothing for a pursuer to work with.

  I’m thinking I need other places to hide, as well. Maybe someplace not under potential threat of super-intelligent zombie hordes. On the other hand, anyone who traces me to this world will have a whole new set of problems while tracking me down.

  Elbe, Zombie World, Still Going

  I’ve been looking at other worlds through my Ring of Spying setup and I’ve had some disturbing thoughts.

  The energy-state beings I call “angels” seem to have a preference for Earth-based universes. My guess is this place is their native habitat. This is all fine and dandy, but hanging around here means I’m easier to find. This makes me uncomfortable, but it isn’t a pressing matter. Since they don’t consistently show up on my doorstep every time I come to a halt, I tentatively conjecture they need to actually lay eyes on me—usually—rather than consult some sort of radar-like sense.

  Which brings me to my divinity dynamo. My present generator is a wimpy little thing, little more than a hand-cranked flashlight in terms of power. When I bring the actual dynamo on-line, however, it will produce an order of magnitude more power. Connecting direct leads to my altar ego’s sigil wi
ll keep it—effectively—tuned to his specific frequency, yes, but it will inevitably have some bleed-over. In Apocalyptica, we had a sealed chamber with heavy shielding to hide the emanations, but we also had an active altar ego sucking up the effects. I’m worried about blasting a firehose at my dried-up husk of an altar ego and spraying water everywhere for a while. When—and if—he wakes up and starts gulping it down from the end of the hose, everything should be fine, but how much of a ruckus am I going to make until then? Is it going to be noticeable in the celestial realms? Is it going to attract angels and demons and ghosts and whatever else may feed on these emanations?

  I want more places to run to before I start trying to feed my altar ego in earnest. I also want a less conspicuous position, preferably in a world outside the Earth timelines, where angels fear to tread or at least don’t go.

  Another selling point for non-Earthly worlds is the Orb. If my gate into the guts of a void-dwelling creature is what attracted attention in the first place, I’d rather do my Orb-hunting and Orb-launching from somewhere outside their jurisdiction. Call me crazy, but I don’t think being a chaos-infested monster caught by order-aligned energy beings in the act of opening a portal to the void is a good thing. Again, it’s too specific to be a general maxim, but you get the idea.

  Unfortunately, while I have some yardsticks by which I can judge Earth-based worlds, alien worlds outside the nominal history of Earth are a bit trickier. I suspect I’m going to have to look for horses, armor, and swords. I want to blend in comfortably.