by Garon Whited
I finally found a place specializing in rare metal supply. When I realized what I’d found, I used the bigger gate, robbed the place, and made another gate to come back to base. They had most of what I wanted, including ruthenium and iridium, but I still needed more osmium. I’d come back to the timeline later, rather than the branch, and rob the same place multiple times.
By then, my crystals were running low on charge. I debated swapping them in the Cretaceous and decided against it. I used the last two gates to grab a few more large crystals. If this was going to be long-term, power-intensive work, I needed more batteries.
I started the reshaping spells on stacks of osmium ingots, leaving them to self-process into the optimum tubular shape. While they did so, I enchanted the new crystals into power storage and expanded my charging rack.
My Ring of Spying only registered thirty-three connections from the Tautan auto-gate and a good portion of my night was already over. My current totals were around six hours here for sixteen minutes there. I rummaged around, found a notebook, tore out someone’s terrible math homework, and made notes. I’ll set things up better, next time, and include a measurement of the elapsed time between each individual auto-connect.
With nothing else to do but wait—at least until things charged up again—Bronze and I went for a walk. I added some more solar conversion panels, expanding the network to even more rooftops. It was still night, of course, so I did it “by hand,” gathering up magical power by expending some of my personal energies. Maybe I should give up on being super-duper-subtle about it and just build a damn dome spell. I did it with Applewood Hall and tuned it to affect everything except visible light, so who’s going to notice? It’s invisible and intangible, and I have the distinct impression the locals don’t have much in the way of wizards. What few magically-sensitive individuals they do have obviously have better things to do than come out to Elbe.
Oh, why not? I relocated the new roof-mounted panels to a position above my base of operations. With them magically fixed in place—they’re only patterns of force, after all—I laid out the replication directions and the stop conditions. Given time, they would form a dome maybe a hundred feet across, then start expanding it until it eventually reached one mile in diameter.
I can’t imagine needing such a large power converter. Not here, anyway. But there is no kill like overkill.
With everything set up, I checked the Ring again. Forty-six. Still a long way to go.
I fired up a portable generator and my electromagical transformers. They juiced up my alloying and reshaping spells, then started pumping up the replication process for the power-dome. I made sure it was quietly chugging along before Bronze and I went out for a quick patrol. The generator did make some noise and the exhaust was not a natural smell. I wanted to make sure there were no zombies homing in on us.
On the other hand, if there were, they were technically alive…
Zombie World, Experiment Continued
There were a few zombies in the general neighborhood, but they were the normal sort—not sprinters or shriekers or bulkers. Deaders, that’s what Mike called them. They didn’t try to attack us. I think they were scouts, wandering beyond zombie gangs’ normal hunting range. Assuming, of course, the things have a hunting range. We dispatched them easily enough. I didn’t even have to cut them down. Bronze kept moving while I lashed their vital energies with tendrils and drained them. Then Firebrand poked holes through their heads. We went back to the house and I took a shower.
I’ll say this for the over-prepared types. When the world ends, they can still enjoy hot water. I forgot the house’s generator was wired in to supply the house with current, including the electric water heater.
I have spells to turn off my nose and tongue. I had to in order to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at one sitting. After the first bag of chili-with-beans I lost my appetite, and that’s saying something. Nevertheless, I forged on since it would kill some local time and provide calories. I swear, though, I’m going to lay in a supply of emergency rations. Chili-with-beans is no longer for emergencies. It’s a last resort, where the choice is severing my own foot for food, raw, or eating chili-with-beans.
I’m not sure which I’ll choose, if the time comes.
Also, my amulet now has more spells. If I go through a sudden shift and wind up lying there in shock, I don’t know if I’ll need to be cooled or warmed. The added spell is for maintaining a constant body temperature no matter what the external temperature is. I’ve also added a set of spells to create four power fans around me, all blowing inward, and a small Ascension Sphere to concentrate it. And, while I’m at it, the Ascension Sphere can be covered in a solar conversion layer. On second thought, three solar conversion layers, simply because I have time and spare gems in the amulet. I’ll have to add those.
Ring check. One hundred and seven. Hmm. The ratio is decreasing. I’ll have to get a much larger sample size.
Now that the sun has been up for a while, we’ve made a lot of progress on recharging the power crystals. I’m checking out some previously-viewed worlds, looking for good spots to hide some dynamos. Here in Zombie World, there are some nice places, too. Abandoned houses with solar panels and house batteries can run electric motors and keep the dynamos turning. Find me a ruined-looking house out in a desert area. Who’s going to bother it?
Even in inhabited worlds, there are similar places. How many spots in, say, the New York subway system have both power and absolutely no human contact for years, even decades on end? If I add a Somebody Else’s Problem spell to the containment diagram, what are the odds a hidden dynamo will remain hidden indefinitely?
True, once I have some built I could put them all in one spot and leave them, but after my discussion with my starving altar ego, I’m concerned about attracting celestial attention. Maybe it’s the way the last angel I encountered tried to cremate me. Incineration attempts give me the vapors. I may have to put them all in one place, at least for now. We’ll see how much time goes by before the gate-contact counter is up.
I coiled up a length of orichalcum wire and hung it on Bronze’s built-in saddlehorn like a lariat. With her brand-new jumper cable in place—priorities—I untwisted more wire from the jumbo coil and started setting up the physical structure of the dynamos.
Zombie World, Experiment Still Going
I’ve been here sixteen days. Sixteen days! My Ring has counted a hundred and eleven contacts with the automated mini-gate, and there it seems to have stopped. I think the time differential hit the jackpot and I’ve got lots of time here while only thirty seconds goes by in Tauta. What worries me is the possibility something in the system has failed, and time is marching on unpredictably in Tauta. I can’t check without disrupting the time flow. I should have posted a guard on the automatic gate and left instructions.
Dammit, this sort of problem never happened with Diogenes! Maybe I should enchant a new one. I resist the idea, though, because it feels like I’d be trying to replace a friend. It’s irrational and stupid and makes perfect sense, at least to me. I hate being complicated.
On the plus side, I did some scrying and found a nice house in what is either Arizona or New Mexico. It’s got a Frank Lloyd Wright feel going on and is built partially into a hilltop. It also has a fairly long commute from what was once civilization. There are no signs anyone has been there in quite a while, so Bronze and I gated down to it, gave it a hard look, and I did some spellcasting. Now my latest dynamos are tuned, in the basement, connected to the house’s power, and spinning madly.
As for the spells, I think I’ve thought of everything. The sigil-crystal gave me a pattern to tune them. The containment diagram minimizes the residual signal’s leakage. There are repair spells on each dynamo, so their structure will remain intact—no burned-out motors or seized bearings. The basement is now sealed, the door plastered over and hidden. There’s a small array of solar conversion spells in the back yard—not on the roof; the mundane solar panels
are up there. The magical panels power a repair spell on the house to eliminate most of the effects of entropy. They also power a Nothing To See Here spell and a minor psychic illusion. At a distance, the house looks dilapidated, ancient, dusty. As they get closer, the visual starts to override the psychic, but by that point, they’re starting to feel the effects of the Nothing To See Here spell, hopefully making them lose interest.
I don’t anticipate a lot of foot traffic out here, but you never know.
I did consider, briefly, an enhancement spell on the solar panels. They have a cleaning spell to keep them clear and polished, but to enhance their power production would require more magical power in a direct relationship. There are already a lot of repair spells maintaining the place and especially the individual dynamos. Low-magic universes are sometimes a pain. True, I could go to the additional effort of growing a solar-conversion farm for more magical power, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. How much effort do I want to put into any given divinity farm? Especially since I’m evidently going to need to establish several of them?
At any rate, we now have a basement full of the things, all whizzing away. According to what my altar ego tells me, I’ve concealed them as well as possible from angels, gods, and whatever else might enjoy feeding on their energies. This reminded me of my earlier questions regarding angelic visitations vis-à-vis gate detection.
My hypothesis is they do not detect gates. They detect leakage and other emanations from gates when the gates connect to a location outside a Firmament. In a region of the void, inside the guts of a chaos demon, whatever—that’s what gets their attention. Point-to-point gates where both ends are inside a structured world of order don’t seem to be on their list. Simply looking back on my own travels, this hypothesis accounts for the observations.
Now, how would I test my hypothesis?
Since I apparently had plenty of time, I made a few side trips to set up some bait.
In one alternate timeline, there are now a pair of pinpoint gates maintaining a constant connection between New Zealand and Spain—about as far apart as it is possible to get without leaving the planet. I thought of connecting to one on the Moon, but I have no evidence they care about anything but Earth. That’s an experiment for later.
In another alternate timeline, a similar pair of gates are connecting and disconnecting, in case the celestial beings detect the forming of a gate connection, rather than an ongoing gate. Forming a gate connection is more disruptive to the local spacetime than a steady connection.
In four other alternate timelines, we have the same setup, but across from one alternate Earth to another alternate Earth, rather than across one world. Two are maintaining a steady connection, two are constantly re-connecting.
I may not be able to generate celestial energies without mechanical aids, but I have spells to detect them. We’ll see how many celestial hits we get on these experimental pieces of bait. If I don’t get any, we’ll try dialing up the infinite void of chaos and see how quickly the antibodies gather.
Bronze and I left everything running and gated back to Elbe to filch more osmium.
Another thought crossed my mind as I hauled in osmium ingots. It’s power-intensive to open a gate and grab the things, but even worse, it requires my personal attention. Can I automate it? Not easily, no, but there’s another option. How about making osmium? Ancient alchemists were always interested in turning lead into gold. In my case, gold isn’t a problem. I can find huge bars of it relatively easily, but osmium is, at best, in small ingots. At worst, it’s in some sort of alloy or chemical compound.
Looking at the periodic table, what’s near osmium? Hafnium, tantalum, tungsten, rhenium… and on the other side, iridium, platinum, gold, and mercury.
Can I overcome the nuclear strong force? Probably. I can disintegrate matter into energy, after all. But can I swipe protons from something relatively common, like mercury—as well as some neutrons, to make sure the isotope is stable—and drag it down the periodic table to gold, then platinum, then iridium, then osmium? Am I risking an unexpected nuclear fission event? Or would it be safer to experiment with, say, tungsten? It’s common, and hydrogen is readily available from water. If I stick more protons into tungsten, can I push it up to rhenium and then osmium? It needs two protons and one to four neutrons to be a stable isotope.
If I take a hydrogen atom and stuff the electron into the proton, it becomes a neutron. If I take that neutron and stick it to an existing hydrogen atom, I get deuterium—a key component in heavy water, and easy enough to acquire if you know how to separate the naturally-occurring heavy water out of normal water. If I fuse two of these deuterium atoms to a tungsten atom, I get a stable isotope of osmium.
“Fuse.” That’s the word giving me trouble.
I have a terrible feeling about this. As a physicist, thinking about the energies involved doesn’t concern me. As a person, thinking about the energies involved anywhere near me is deeply disturbing.
Fusion of elements heavier than iron requires energy. Sticking a pair of deuterium atoms to a tungsten atom will take energy. And we’re talking about doing it a lot. Avogadro’s Number is 6.022 x 1023 atoms. That’s how many atoms—how many times the spell setup would have to do its thing—to get roughly a hundred and ninety grams of osmium.
This particular dynamo design takes about eight times as much.
Still, I have ideas on how it could work. A source of water provides the heavy hydrogen. A store of tungsten is the target. An array—a huge array—of conversion panels provide the magical energy. Or a matter-conversion reactor…
I’m tempted to set this up somewhere and see what progress it makes. It may be completely impractical. On the other hand, it may be useful enough to be worth it if I don’t have to exert myself every time I want to build another dynamo. I’ll look into it, but I’m not building one here in Zombie World. Maybe in the Cretaceous Lair. It’s a good spot for long-term experiments.
No, not the Cretaceous Lair. That’s for hiding. That’s an emergency shelter. An alternate Cretaceous, perhaps? Some other unoccupied-as-yet alternate timeline, surely. It’s sometimes tempting to think of my pyramid as another place to use, but it isn’t. It’s meant as a bomb shelter and shouldn’t be used for anything else! I shouldn’t even be dropping in to swap out power crystals. I’m sort of using it as an alternate charging station when I should be ignoring it until I find a desperate need for it.
I checked my ring. It hasn’t clicked again. I’m getting more antsy about the time differential between here and Tauta. If something has gone wrong, years could be going by over there. What are the odds the time differential is so extreme as to give me sixteen days or more here in thirty seconds there? That’s a ratio of roughly forty-six thousand to one!
I need to have faith my setup is working properly and ignore the burning urge to check it. I probably should exercise a little self-confidence.
I’ll give it twenty days. It’s a nice, round number. I’ll have more dynamos built by then. I’ll have caught up on my reading—we went into Eatonville to pick up a load of books. And, perhaps most telling, another four days of stuffing tasteless, odorless food—I know what it is, but I don’t want to think about it—is all I think I can endure without going mad. Mad, I tell you! Mad!
Okay, maybe it’s not quite that bad, but I’m damned tired of these things.
Tauta, still 27th Day of Milaskir
After twenty days in Zombie World, I waited for nightfall, checked for sunlight with my Ring of Spying, and returned to the shift-booth barn in my keep.
My automated gate connected to my Ring for the one hundred and twelfth time a few seconds after I arrived. “The Spirits have done it all in one night,” and all that. My programmed gate-launcher was working perfectly.
I spent nearly three weeks in Zombie World. I was gone for less than an hour.
There are ramifications to this I absolutely must think about. How many times have I lamented the fact I
’m immortal and simply don’t have time to do things? This is huge.
Wait.
Before I get too excited, I have to remind myself: This is Tauta, an independent world not linked to the Earth timelines. The rules I’m seeing now may not apply for Earth-to-Earth connections. This behavior may not apply to independent-to-independent connections, either. On the other hand, having a process to make use of a time warp can be handy. Not too useful on a moment’s notice, perhaps, but for larger projects where the laws of probability are on my side, immensely useful.
Not as exciting as I first thought, but useful, nonetheless.
I went into the tower, wound my way up the stairs to the workroom, and fired up my sand table, dialing for deity. His/my face appeared, flowing upward in sand.
“What the hell did you do?” he asked, without so much as a “Hello.”
“Problem?”
“No! The opposite! There’s a trickle of energy—a perceptible trickle—flowing into me. It varies a lot, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. It reminds me of the fluctuations from Diogenes’ dynamo room, only smaller. What have you done?”
“I built a few dozen dynamos and set them to spinning, same as in the dynamo room.”
“How?”
So I explained about the time differential. At first, he thought I simply got lucky and hit a fast-time track, but he caught on when I told him how I had an automated gate connection.
“This is huge,” he decided.
“I said that already.”
“I have to think about this.”
“Said that, too.”
“We think a lot alike and I’m playing catch-up,” he grumped. “Quit it.”