Mobius

by Garon Whited

  At last, I know what I’m doing, and it’s talking to a god. Did not see that coming.

  I fired up the sand table and the Ring of Spying. The mini-gate opened, light poured out and shone through the crystal, the sand table shifted and heaved up, and a face much like my own formed. It mouthed words at me, silently. I cursed in a non-silent fashion.

  “Hang on, hang on! I don’t have the sound sorted out.”

  I shut everything off and re-wired the audio subroutine. I hurried, because I didn’t like the idea of trying it again after sunset. Light came through that mini-gate. I didn’t want to test it on my undead state. Later, I could put the ring and crystal in a niche in the table, but for now…

  We tried again and his face formed.

  “Can you hear me now?” it asked.

  “Yes. I’m glad to see you. I thought you were dead!”

  “What?” he asked, shocked. “Dead? What for? Why?”

  “Someone stole your sigil-containment-thingy and cut all the wiring to get the gems out.”

  “So?”

  “So? So weren’t you curled up in there and trying to reboot after the incident at the Edge of the World?”

  “I don’t think you understand how the sigil works,” he observed.

  “Apparently not. I kept pushing dynamo energy into it, trying to wake you up.”

  “I was awake the whole time. I simply didn’t have the wherewithal to communicate. The dynamos did help, though. After all, I’m an energy pattern. The sigil is—was—a vessel for transporting a copy of that pattern to other material realms and their associated energy planes. It gives me time to attune myself to the local energy plane by providing a base in the material one. Once I have, I don’t need the sigil. My pattern was fine—is fine—on the local energy plane, but my amplitude was too low for you to detect.”

  “I wasn’t aware of the mechanism.”

  “Don’t sweat it. I should have explained better.”

  “I still have the crystal, so maybe we can build a new one. In the meantime, I’m glad you made it.”

  “Glad to be here. You would not believe what I’ve been through.”

  “Likewise. How are things on the energy planes?”

  “I can only access the local one,” he pointed out.

  “The local one?”

  “There are multiple energy planes, at least one for every physical world. Think of it as the energy shadow of a material realm.”

  “That throws my view of the multiverse way off kilter,” I complained.

  “You are living in a material world and you are a material guy. I’m not. Neither of us is going to have a complete picture.”

  “Moderately reassuring,” I acknowledged. “So how are things on the local energy plane?”

  “Tough. Imagine you’re dumped in the jungle and left there to survive or die. There are things to eat, but you have to find them, kill them, and maybe cook them. It’s not the same thing as living on a farm. I didn’t know how good I had it in Rethven.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll get you another dynamo as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you. I need all the strength I can get. I’m still getting to know this jungle. Now, back to my earlier comments. There are no gods for this world—at least, none with any real force. There are some proto-gods, formless things based around shaky concepts, but nothing of the well-defined ‘god of something’ sort.” The face grimaced in recollection. “I got into a fight with a proto-deity and ran,” he admitted. “The forces feeding it are still doing so, but it won’t hesitate to eat what force I do have.”

  “It’s still more powerful than you?”

  “Right now, almost everything up here is. My only advantage is I’m more coherent than any of the locals. I can think real thoughts and focus precisely. They don’t seem to have evolved so far, but they have a steady trickle of force coming in.”

  “Any idea where the force is coming from? We might be able to hijack it.”

  “For the most part, it’s not a religion, just a belief. I’m guessing it’s a cultural thing. Everyone knows the… the… the sky, for example, is always watching and is sometimes angry. They don’t think of it as a god, exactly, but they believe in it and in its power. The ocean is big, majestic, sometimes awe-inspiring, always mysterious and changing. It’s not a god—yet—but it is regarded in such a way as to generate, if not belief, then some awe and reverence. Like I said, it’s not a religion. There are no farmers—excuse me, priests—actively plowing and sowing and clearing land.”

  “Got it. So, since there is an actual religion down here, what’s it doing up there?”

  “Whether they know it or not, they’re working on making the religion real. Right now, it’s a scam.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “That’s hurtful.”

  “Sorry. You know what I mean.”

  “Even though I’m an energy-state being, I understand your viewpoint. The locals have manufactured a whole religious structure in the last few generations by revering some ancestors and they’re starting to form nascent energy-states up here. It’s not pretty.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m not sure how to describe it. I think the original ancestors are the base pattern—that is, their spirits are the nucleus of the snowflake. The trouble is, all the additions. Thousands of worshippers each have their own view on their ancient ancestor, pulling the design in another direction. Then the priests have their own doctrine and dogma, evolving over time. Whoever they were when they started, the ancestors aren’t those people anymore.” He sighed. “I had it so easy, being born a celestial entity. All I really had to worry about was the Lord of Shadow and the fish-men’s God of Fire. Being dragged two ways was hard enough until I got them aligned. These people up here are weaker than I was and are being pulled in lots of different directions.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. But they’re still the local gods, aren’t they?”

  “They’re gaining traction, but unless they radically expand their base of worship or go on a massive spree of sacrifices, it’ll be another century or three before any prayers get answered. They’re incoherent and some of their internal energies are working at cross-purposes. Plus, it’s still a jungle up here. The local gods aren’t up to the task of regulating or civilizing it. The local Olympus is still a barren hilltop with no fancy buildings.”

  “The century or three before prayers get answered—is that what you meant by someone becoming a local god?”

  “No. The one I’m thinking of is different. Someone down there is… well, still down there. How to put this? The force of the worship is flowing outward from the worshippers, but some of it is being siphoned off by someone down there, rather than radiating up here and exerting its influence on the fabric of the energy plane. It’s not forming an entity by defining it. An entity is already consuming it. Even the dynamos. Those aren’t tuned to anyone, so their force is visible. Up here, following the jungle metaphor, they would be a small watering hole. I should be able to detect them. So, they’re either not running or someone is absorbing the majority of the force.”

  “The majority,” I repeated. “There’s some leakage?”

  “There almost has to be. That’s why we tuned the dynamos on Apocalyptica and shielded the room. We didn’t want anyone—or any Thing—to drop in unexpectedly. There was still some leakage, despite our efforts, but it wasn’t enough to attract attention. Using the watering-hole analogy, it was a damp spot, not actual water. Someone would have to step in it and feel the squish to find it.”

  “Good to know. More shielding, next time.”

  “It won’t help.”

  “It won’t?”

  “There’s a point of diminishing returns. You tune the things as precisely as you can, shield them to damp out the rest, but you’re not equipped to manipulate the necessary forces to completely block out the residue.” He frowned for a moment, thinking. “You can build a sealed system so it doesn’t leak,
but you can’t stop the condensation on the outside? Bad metaphor, but maybe a useful one. Or maybe reactor shielding. No matter how much lead you use, some of the radiation still gets through. It may be an inconsequential amount, but something escapes.”

  “And if I don’t tune them?” I asked, still thinking about my stolen dynamos.

  “Those are a disaster waiting to happen. You’ll get the lesser entities on this plane clustering around the corresponding point like bugs around a searchlight. Since they were wired to my sigil, I saw them when they were running. I also recognized you had the best containment bubble you could build. It was still a visible light on this plane, even if it wasn’t too bright.”

  “Great. Now I’m concerned about angels finding our next dynamo facility.”

  “Me too, but I don’t have a good solution for you.”

  “What about the ones here? They can still work for us by leading us to whoever is bathing in religious radiation, right?”

  “Not in my current state,” he admitted. “With someone sucking up all their power, on this plane they’ll be hard to see. I’ll need… how about I’ll need to be taller, with bigger eyes, so I can see farther? Good analogy?”

  “I think I get it. Do you know which one of their ancestors it is? The one down here with my dynamos?”

  “I have no idea. I’m not feeling well, so all I can detect is the moderately obvious. While it does have to be one of the gods they’re actively worshipping, their fuzzy, not-quite-there forms up here are hard to pin down. I can’t tell who any of them are because they aren’t sure. I can’t tell you which one is missing. I probably need to stick my nose into the material plane to nail them down. Even at the best of times, it ain’t easy.”

  “I understand. I’ll use your crystal to tune a dynamo ASAP.”

  “Fair warning,” he cautioned, “I won’t be up to a miracle anytime soon.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have an idea. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you. The idea of you surprising me isn’t necessarily a comfortable one, but thank you anyway.”

  “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Not at the moment, but I really do need all the force you can direct at me.”

  “Are you asking for worshippers? We might be able to establish you as one of the local gods.”

  “Not unless you have a nation of people ready to be faithful. Go with the dynamos. Those don’t require convincing, need rest breaks from prayer, or have crises of faith.”

  “Got it. You stay alive. I’ll send supplies.”

  “You’re a pal.”

  The face crumbled to a table full of sand and I cut the connection.

  New goal: Build and tune divinity dynamos for my altar ego. There are other things I could be doing, but it sounds as though he’s struggling for survival, so setting something up for him has to take precedence over the less-immediate things. I’d like to industrialize the process of dynamo manufacture, but I don’t have Diogenes. Can I commission someone to make them? Not the enchantment portion, but the electric motor, the orichalcum wire, the osmium shell…

  It’s times like these I want a conversion spell to turn energies I understand into celestial energy. Maybe we’ll sort that out, someday, and I can build him a matter-conversion reactor in some semi-abandoned universe.

  Al right, mass-producing divinity dynamos. How long will this take? Do I find an Earth, commission someone, and hope we don’t time-skip a hundred years? Do I have Renata finish her pregnancy while acting as a contact? Will all this cross-universe travel have any effect on an unborn baby—or on a glowing ball of light, assuming it’s still in there, somewhere? Alternatively, can I go to an Earth and have an automated gate-spell here turn a mini-gate on and off? Will it matter if I’m on the other end of the connection, or is there some sort of Schrödinger’s Time effect?

  Dammit, I came here to study how time-slippage across universes works! Why do I always seem to need to know things before I’ve had a chance to study them?

  This is a long-term thing, I think, but it needs to get started. I can’t leave him—his metaphor—alone in the jungle.

  Maybe robbing Sarcana will give us enough time to conduct a time-slippage experiment. I hope this works the way I think it will. I’m feeling better after my nap, but am I up to a gate trip? Maybe. Maybe not, too. I definitely need another workroom, though. Bronze can’t make it up here and the Bronze-sized gate in the barn is more inconvenient than I realized.

  I killed a couple of hours building the spell-forms and enchanting another gem in my amulet, one to make sure my heart is already beating in the proper sequence and my lungs are breathing, assuming I have some warning of the change. Might as well make sure my blood is oxygenated before I actually need it to be. It’s one more thing to help with sunrise changes. It also gave me more time for recuperation, planning, and thinking.

  From the behavior of time-slippage and gate spells, I think I have a working hypothesis. We have two worlds, A and B. I leave A and go to B. The gate closes and a random time differential starts. Maybe I spend a day in A while a minute passes in B. Maybe seconds pass in A while a year goes by in B. That’s the differential rate. During this period, world A can have a gate connect to worlds C, D, and E, but this may or may not affect the ratio between A and B. I haven’t determined.

  But the differential is always positive. Time marches in one direction, although often at different speeds. I can’t control how much time goes by in both worlds without maintaining a constant link. If I let the link close, I can’t control which way the ratio goes. What I can control is the ratio reset. Every time a gate opens, connecting two worlds, they briefly come into synchronization. Then they go their own ways again. So, if I want to control how much time passes in one world, I put a gate in it.

  Let’s say I build a mini-gate here in the keep. I set it up to target my Ring of Spying once every minute. Here in the keep, it clicks on every minute, regardless of how much time passes in some other world, resetting the time-slippage ratio. For the one minute in the keep, maybe I get a second elsewhere. Maybe I get a minute. Maybe I get an hour. Maybe I get a week. I haven’t established the odds of any given level of slippage, but for Tauta-to-Earth, it seems likely to be a fairly high ratio. The first dozen minutes in Tauta may go by in seconds on Earth, but all it takes is one with a minutes-to-days to pull far, far ahead.

  Maybe gambling is a good analogy. If I bet a dollar and only get back ten cents for a hundred wagers, I’ve lost a lot of money. But eventually I get a good one. I bet a dollar and get back a thousand dollars. This paid for the first hundred and, potentially, nine hundred more bets. If I average one good bet out of every hundred, I make a consistent profit.

  Are the Earth timelines generally running faster, as a whole? Is this particular timeline faster because of some unknown reason? —Say, because some moron keeps poking it with a magical interuniversal wormhole gate?

  This could be a problem in my experiments. If a gate connection causes fundamental alterations, how can I get reliable data? If all I have to do is look at the experiment to corrupt it… On the other hand, the only worlds I’m likely to go to are worlds I connect to with gates, so does it matter? If the Observer Effect is going to corrupt my data, but my entire statistical universe is going to be equally corrupted by an identical Observer Effect at all points, is it a corruption of data or merely one more fixed value?

  Insert angry physicist muttering here.

  When the sun goes down, I’ll take the night off and go to another universe. Right now, I think I’ll eat again.

  Zombie World.

  Once the sun went down and I went through an exceptionally disgusting transformation, I felt immensely better. It never fails to amaze me how my own evaluation of my condition is always so far off. I have a fast shift from night to day, start recuperating, and by midafternoon I feel fine. Maybe a little weak. But come the sunset and I disco
ver just how low I really was. Night falls and gravity seems to let go and my feet are only there for clinging to the ground. A nebulous weariness, like winter fog, blows away and the world comes clear again by bone-white moonlight.

  I clicked my Ring of Spying a few times to get a nighttime landing in Zombie World, popped through with Bronze, and we started my first experiment. In the world of Tauta, the new pinprick micro-gate charged up enough to fire about twice a minute. In Zombie World, I had a spell on the ring to count the number of times it connected and, at a hundred and twenty—one local hour in La Mancha Valley—lock the gate on rather than let it turn off. I let it run as an experiment while I did other work in my Zombie World base of operations.

  Divinity dynamos take osmium. Orichalcum mostly requires copper, but there are a number of other metals alloyed with it. Ideally, I would also need some electric motors and a steady supply of electrical power.

  First order of business: Copper and other metals. I scouted out a local—meaning “in this world”—warehouse with big, dusty spools of copper wire, salvaged them, and went on to find ingots, wires, or objects to fill the rest of my alloying needs. A mixing spell started diffusing the various metals together and I left it running while I went off to steal osmium.

  There is a surprising amount of osmium to be found in any given world. Most of it is in some sort of chemical solution—not exactly what I want, but, in theory, I can strip the osmium out of any molecule. Still, with a whole world to salvage from, finding ingots of the pure metal wasn’t hard, merely tedious and somewhat expensive in terms of power. They were spatial gates within one world, though, rather than interuniversal ones, so that kept the cost down. I also used the smallest practical gate, not much more than the size of my hand, because I simply couldn’t find any giant bars or convenient stacks of ingots of the stuff. Mostly, it was single ingots, often used on some fancy desk as a paperweight, or on a shelf as an oh-so-expensive knickknack.