Marcello strode over to the port side. He could have stayed in the water, but swimming around the ship with a line around his waist would have tired his arms unnecessarily, and securing the ring to the brackets below the waterline in the chilly waters would have been harder with tired arms. She picked up the wrench and followed him over. Once again, he picked up an iron ring, accepted the wrench from her, and stepped off the ship whuile she braced herself with the line in her grip.
He fastened the ring in place a little faster this time, now that he had the practice of the first one fresh in his mind. By the time he scrambled back onto the deck, though, she had begun to worry in earnest about their missing friends. If that officious harbor-master decided to come look at the 'monstrosity' for himself, who knew when they'd be able to get uhnderway?
“I hope we don't have to leave them behind,” she muttered, coiling the line.
“You won't,” he said, and pointed. She swiveled and saw the pair finally coming down the pier. Francesca was hauling a par of leather suitcases. Benito pulled a trunk that looked big enough to serve as his own lifeboat.
Alessia met them at the gangplank and helped Benito pull his trunk up onto the deck. “it would have been considerably less conspicuous to do this last night,” she told him.
Benito grimaced. “Don't look at me,” he said. “Franny told her parents over dinner and they spent half the night trying to talk her out of it.”
Alessia glared at Francesca. “Didn't we agree not to tell anyone? What were you thinking?”
Francesca glared right back. “You agreed. Easy enough when you've got no parents to say goodbye to.”
I said goodbywe to my father many times, she thought. Until I was old enough to go with him. “Get your gear stowed. We need to leave ahead of the tide, before the day fishermen head out and get in our way.”
Francesca saluted wth her middle finger extended, and Alessia had to laugh in spite of herself. She picked up one of the suitcases and followed her down to the cabins.
The bow and stern lines were already singled up. Rubin and Marcello loosened the onboard ends from their cleats and tossed them back onto the pier as Benito and Colin hauled the gangplank in. “Looks like someone finally noticed,” Colin remarked while they were stowing it.
Alessia could see a pair of figures heading for the pier. Time to leave all this behind. She looked over the starboard side, down into the water, and concentrated, reaching out with her mind. There, a meter below the water's surface, she saw the iron ring, flat against the hull, tremble, and then swing forward perpendicular to it until a protrusion on the mounting bracket smacked against an iron plate like a doorstop. There should have been a clang, but with the water around it all she heard was a dull thump as she also felt it through the deck.
The Libertà began to swing left, its bow moving away from the pier as the off-center thrust of the starboard swizzle began to churn the water backwards. Quickly, she ran over to the other side and activated the port swizzle, balancing the thrust so that the ship began to head out diagonally away from the pier.
The men were halfway down the pier now and beginning to run and shout toward her. She grinned and waved to them as she stepped back to take the wheel. She could have steered the ship mentally, by fiddling with the swizzle thrusts, but until she got more practice with that, the wheel was far easier.
France receded behind her. The Libertà sliced through the waters of the Mediterranean like a spear thrown by a giant as they left the past behind and headed into the future. Alessia held the wheel as she had held onto her dream, the dream that was finally beginning: to sail beyond the sunset, and see what had become of America.
( end of preview)
Appendix I: Tonespace
Once again, as I did in Pathspace and Spinspace, I'd like to share a few thoughts on the component of metaspace that I explored in this novel.
As before, with pathspace and spinspace, I am not entirely making up the idea of Tonespace. Perhaps I ought to have called it something more scientific-sounding like Ergspace. I chose, however, to call it Tonespace for a reason, which is that in physics quantities of energy can be associated with frequencies, which in sound can also be called tones. (The scale used in Western music is called the twelve-tone scale.)
Energy and frequency are associated with other kinds of waves too. Light, for example, can be described both as a wave and as a particle called the photon. Photons of ultraviolet light, (which have enough energy to break molecular bonds in the skin and cause damage) are of a higher frequency than blue photons that have less energy. The higher the frequency of a visible photon, the closer its “color” is to ultraviolet, and the more energy that photon contains. Lower-energy light is closer to the red end of the visible spectrum. This explain why a fluorescent object in a dark room can absorb some invisible ultraviolet light and then release some of it as visible light, like breaking a large bill and making change.
Back in the early part of the 20th century, when a seemingly random element entered Physics with the creation of Quantum Mechanics, Einstein didn't like it, to put it mildly. The idea that a particle could just be seemingly teleporting about at random, as if God were throwing dice to decide where to put it, offended the sensitivity of Einstein who, though not especially religious, nonetheless had a deep-seated conviction that all events in our universe are the unfolding of orderly processes – deterministic, predictable ones. But the new theory seemed to be saying that we could only predict the probability that something would happen. Sometimes quantum physicists joke about this saying that in Quantum mechanics, the impossible “just takes a little longer.”
The Uncertainty Principle, which stated boldly that we could never know – even in principle – the exact position and momentum of a particle, rubbed poor Albert the wrong way, and he set out to find a way to destroy it before it reduced his beloved Physics to nothing more than a sort of statistics.
Einstein showed that Heisenberg's position/momentum uncertainty principle,
if true, could also be written in terms of energy and time. He then described a thought experiment called “Einstein's Box” that could measure both the elapsed time and the total energy as accurately as we wanted, violating the uncertainty principal. Niels Bohr couldn't sleep that night. The next morning he showed that Einstein's thought experiment was flawed and did not refute the energy-time uncertainty.
The result of this was remarkable. By attempting to attack the theory, Einstein had instead enlarged it! He had derived a new uncertainty principle. In fact, we now know that any two variables in a description of reality which do not commute, such as position and momentum, energy and time, angular position and angular momentum, and so on, will in general have an uncertainty relationship between them. Sorry, Einstein, it's even worse than you thought.
The Einstein version of the uncertainty principle is important in many applications of quantum mechanics. In particular, the Einstein energy-time uncertainty can be used to predict the half-life of so-called virtual particles. These ephemeral particles pop into existence, seemingly by “borrowing” enough energy to create their mass in the familiar e = mc2 equivalence.
Once the particles have secured a Heisenberg loan and gotten enough energy to exist, the Einstein energy-time uncertainty can be used to calculate how long they should persist before they have to vanish again and “pay back” the extra energy they “borrowed”. Simply put, the more massive a virtual particle, the shorter half-life it will have.
But notice what this implies – that there is energy to be borrowed in the first place. Empty space contains hidden energy.
I decided, therefore, to ascribe this to a part of metaspace I call tonespace – the distribution of energy in space. I proposed that when my characters can mentally affect this distribution, then free energy can be extracted (as in the case of an everflame, which concentrates it onto a small region for useful purposes), or conversely, can be banished (in the inside of a coldbox, where there is less ene
rgy, and therefore lower temperatures, than there is outside of it).
In the literature of fringe science, this free energy is referred to by the terms Overunity (getting more out than you put in) or alternatively, as zero-point energy (the minimum energy particles can have because they never stop moving).
If anyone has successfully devised a way to extract such “free” energy, their discovery hasn't yet made it into any practical applications. Such a thing could change the world, by eliminating our dependence on fossil or nuclear fuels.
So far, however, the only actual kind of energy appearing to come from “nowhere” is the Hawking radiation emitted by the space near a black hole.
The extreme curvature of space at the event horizon of a black hole makes a gravity field nothing can escape from. When virtual particles appear near the black hole, such as a proton-antiproton pair, it is possible for one of them to get sucked into the black hole allowing the other to escape instead of recombining with its partner. The result is a broth of all kinds of particles seeming to be radiated by the black hole – sometimes the proton escapes, but sometimes the antiproton escapes, so you get both kinds escaping in every kind of particle-antiparticle pair creation event.
There is no indication that we will be able to use this effect to get free energy on Earth, since we do not have a black hole. However, if we could engineer the structure of spacetime to simulate the existence of a black hole, then we would be able to get free Hawking energy.
Since in my story I already have humans appearing who can interact with spacetime and structure it in terms of pathspace and spinspace, it seemed logical to invent the everflame and the coldbox as examples of alien technology which we could learn to create.
This is, of course, only fiction. But what if it were possible? It would be a world-changing event if we ever learned how to manipulate Tonespace – the space of energy.
– MRK
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 38