Trinity's Fall

by P A Vasey

  But then a wall of doubt appeared. How could I let something so incomprehensible, so inconceivable happen? I traced his lip lightly with the tip of my finger, and it pouted slightly, and I had an urge to bite it and start the kiss over again, this time with passion. But then the feeling passed as the reality of the here and now imposed and closed down my emotions: the unpleasant reality that our existence now consisted of human minds inhabiting sexless machine creatures.

  I averted my eyes at last and gently unhooked my arm from his grip. He seemed wracked with guilt. His eyebrows furrowed and a pinched look appeared on his face.

  “I tried to get others, you know … for them. Colleen’s parents, her brothers, Hubert’s children … but it was too dangerous. The bombs were detonating and I could sense Vu-Hak everywhere. They can use all of the machines’ capabilities without AI – just like me. They have adapted.”

  “You could have contacted us earlier, you know, given us time to prepare,” I said.

  But I wondered whether we would we have come back for him, if we’d known what he was up to. Then I remembered what I’d put Cain through, what I’d risked, to save Colleen. Were we so different, Adam and me? Did I have any right to be angry with a father just wanting to save the life of his only daughter?

  He seemed to be reading my thoughts. “The shadow cannot be conquered by shadow, only by light.”

  His words hung in the air, heavy with a burden I found hard to bear.

  “There’s something else,” he said. “Something that may allow you to forgive my … my indulgence with Amy.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “There is. Of course there is. So … Well … as you have already experienced, death does not have to be the end.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  This time he smiled, impulsively and unexpectedly. “Before I set off to find Amy I completed the modifications on the Vu-Hak cloning technology to make it suitable for human DNA. It is already running on the ship.”

  “I assumed that was the case,” I said slowly. “Cain implied as much. It’s needed to grow and mature the embryos.”

  “That’s not all. I kept biological tissues from your dying body, Kate. They are in storage on the ship. Cryopreserved. You can live again, as a human, not as a machine.”

  I was lost for words. But there was more to come.

  Much more.

  “You kept a sample of Kelly’s hair. You had it with you on the submarine.”

  My mind tingled, like a hand that had been slept on. “I lost it,” I said, not daring to believe.

  “No Kate, I found it. You can have your daughter back too.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  We are arriving.

  Cain’s voice boomed around my head and Adam’s too. We locked eyes.

  Many things still unspoken and needing to be said.

  But they would have to wait.

  We ran back to the flight deck to find Cain sitting in front of the main screen, which showed a 3-D image of the vortex. Directly ahead was a pulsing, spinning disc which was enlarging second by second.

  He pointed at the screen. “We’ll be coming out of tunnel space soon. Just a few seconds …”

  I nodded and took a seat next to him, Adam taking a seat behind us. Amy had been placed in another of those chairs that extruded seamlessly from the floor. She was snoring softly, as were Stillman and Hamilton, also in similar chairs.

  Cain saw me looking and said, “It’s better this way … for their own safety.”

  The ship lurched and we exploded into normal space.

  At first the blackness appeared flawless and absolute until billions of stars appeared, like pins in a backlit velvet cushion. Gas clouds and nebulae came into view and drifted across the sky like psychedelic clouds.

  The screen flickered and transformed to an electronic orrery as the ship’s sensors identified a solar system dead ahead. I scanned the data as it came in.

  Two stars appeared in a wide binary: one a yellow G-type and the other a cool white dwarf. The G-type had seven planets in stable orbits, and one was a gas giant, milky white with multiple rings of blue and black and a solitary red spot. It was in the habitable zone of the star and had a couple of moons orbiting in equatorial planes. The biggest moon was planetoid-sized, about two and a half times the diameter of Earth. The planets were two billion years old, according to the data scrolling beneath their hologram representations, but the big moon was the most interesting. Gravity was about twice Earth normal, indicating a bigger, denser core and mantle. It was rotating equatorially with a period of fifty-seven hours and was in sync with the gas giant. It had a perihelion of one hundred and seven million miles. Its atmosphere was fifteen percent oxygen, eighty-four percent nitrogen and one percent argon and other trace gases. About twenty-four percent of the surface was covered in water, and there were two small polar ice caps. There were rainforests and deserts. Lots of deserts.

  And life forms.

  The planet was teeming with life in astonishing profusion and diversity. Multicellular, large and small, animals and plants in abundance.

  There were no obvious signs of civilization: no cities or road networks, no pollution, no radio chatter or electronic signals.

  I worked on controlling my excitement as Cain brought the great ship to orbit, and then spiraled it down into the thin upper reaches of the thermosphere. The dull roar of the engines increased as we hit the atmosphere, a distant thunder that became louder as the density of the air thickened. Becoming visible as we passed through the creamy clouds was a body of water hundreds of miles across, waves lapping against a couple of large islands ringed by grey-yellow sand. Trees and vegetation spread from the beaches into nearby hills and onto the lower slopes of mountain ranges before they thinned out into the yellow of the desert.

  Cain pointed at a large bay with shallow water, turned the ship on its axis and descended stern first onto the beach. Huge plumes of sand and spray were kicked up and blew in great eddies, gyrating and spinning, obscuring the landing site. We touched down with barely a bump or tremor.

  As the engines shut down, the walls around the deck became transparent. Bright light flooded the compartment, and my eyes spun down to adjust. The yellow sun was high in the sky, its white neighbor just visible at the edge of a cloud, like a turning page. I could almost imagine seagulls crying, and the smell of saltwater in the air.

  “About time we caught a break, eh?” I said, smiling broadly. “I mean, what were the chances of arriving somewhere like this?”

  There was silence and I glanced at Cain first, then Adam. Cain was accessing data hieroglyphics on a personal screen, scrolling pictograms faster than I could keep up.

  “What?” I said.

  Adam shook his head and shot me a look that froze me to my core.

  “What’s the problem?” I said. “Where are we?”

  He waved a hand and the external panorama transformed into to a night scene.

  A canopy of luminous stars materialized in the ocean of blackness in the night sky. The beach appeared monochrome and glistening, a faint wind brushing against the water’s surface, rippling the stillness and shattering the reflection of the giant planet dipping below the far horizon. Its multicolored rings seemed to melt into the ocean, leaving a dappled track along the sea to the beach. Another moon could be seen traversing just above the equator, a mottled green and black sphere.

  Memories exploded in my mind like 4th of July fireworks.

  Figures rising out of the water, thousands upon thousands of human figures. Mike Holland, dying as a wraith-like form, ripped apart by unimaginable gravitational forces and frozen in the absolute zero of space, as he had traveled here, to this world, through the Trinity wormhole.

  “No!” I said, bringing my hand to my mouth.

  Cain’s voice was quiet, but his words echoed around my head. “Yes, Kate. This is the planet of the Vu-Hak.”

  FORTY-NINE

  The ship had fo
rmed a balcony by extending a piece of its hull outward and fashioning a plasticized transparent shield bubble to cover it. We sat around a low table facing the distant mountains and away from the sea. Night had fallen, and rivulets of rain were being blown horizontally as the winds picked up and buffeted the side of the ship. The first heavy raindrops started to patter on the windshield and silent lightning discharges illuminated black clouds that had blown in from the north. Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” tinkled in the background, and a bottle of clear golden liquid and two glasses sat in the middle of the table.

  “I don’t understand,” I said for the second time to no one in particular. “This system was about to be destroyed.”

  I looked around the table, and gave Stillman a look to say ‘back me up here’. Instead, she leaned forward in her chair and poured herself a glass of the liquid. She sank back again, taking a drink and making a theatrical swallowing sound. “Not bad,” she said, raising her glass at Adam, who was sitting next to me. “Where’d this come from?”

  “The ship made it.”

  “Amazing. Tastes like bourbon.” She poured a couple of fingers into the other glass and offered it to Hamilton.

  As they clinked glasses I glanced at Cain, who was standing by the window watching the approaching storm. The sound of thunder filled the room and lightning flashed again, this time much nearer.

  “Cain, maybe you can help me out here. Make me understand.”

  Cain didn’t turn, but his voice was clear. “What is there to understand? This is the planet of the Vu-Hak.”

  I felt my frustration rising and gritted my teeth. “This doesn’t make any sense. How did we end up here? Don’t tell me this was a coincidence?”

  “It is no coincidence. The wormhole opened by the Trinity formula connects to this specific location, in this galaxy. Where else would it take us?”

  “But this can’t be the same planet.” I stabbed a finger at the windshield, my voice raised. “Those suns were about to go supernova, and the Vu-Hak were constructing a Dyson sphere around them. I saw it happening.”

  Hamilton drained his glass and waved it at Stillman for a refill. “What if this is the same but an alternate planet? In an alternate universe?”

  I threw him a sharp look. “You’re kidding, right?”

  He passed the bottle back to Stillman and shrugged at me. “Why not? Something must have happened when the ship blew that gravitational wave away. Maybe something happened to the wormhole. Maybe it split into multiple wormholes, and one of them opened at another universe? A parallel universe?”

  “So we were lucky enough to end up in a universe where the Vu-Hak don’t exist? Another coincidence?”

  Stillman filled her glass with more of the ship’s bourbon and gave a strange giggle. “I don’t see why not. Should anything surprise anyone anymore?”

  The ship’s bourbon was clearly starting to have an effect.

  Cain turned from the window to face us. He had his hands behind his back as if he was about to deliver a lecture.

  Which he did …

  “I think we can exclude the ‘other universe’ concept. Almost every other universe is unlikely to have the requisite conditions for life. Our life could only exist in the universe that happens to be finely tuned for us. To quote an ancient philosopher: ‘Our world must be the worst of all possible worlds, because if it were significantly worse in any respect it could not continue to exist’.”

  Hamilton made a ‘humph’ sort of sound and sank back into the chair, sipping his drink. Stillman had also gone all quiet and reflective as well.

  I looked sideways at Adam, who had his eyes closed. I nudged him. “Adam, what do you think?”

  His eyes opened lazily and he steepled his fingers. “There is only one answer. We have traveled a long way back in time.”

  Hamilton coughed and sprayed some of his bourbon over his dolphin-skinned jumpsuit.

  I looked at Adam in disbelief. “You’re kidding.”

  “It is possible to find solutions in general relativity that allow for backward time travel, and the solutions require the invocation of quantum mechanics – or wormholes.”

  I shot Cain a look next. “Do you go along with this? I mean, I thought any difference in time outside the wormhole would be minutes or seconds only.”

  He gave a non-committal kind of head wobble and crossed the floor to take his seat next to me. “We are in uncharted scientific territory, but yes, it is possible. Construction of a traversable wormhole like the one we have just traveled through requires the existence of a substance with negative energy. That is because the two mouths of a wormhole could not be brought together without inducing quantum field and gravitational effects that would either make the wormhole collapse or make the two mouths repel each other like magnetic poles.”

  “What negative energy was used?” I said, my eyebrows furrowing.

  “Remember that the ship used dark matter to stabilize the wormhole,” said Adam, looking at me. “It is the unknown in this equation. Its effects on time dilation would have been difficult to calculate.”

  “Indeed,” said Cain. “In this case the amount of dark matter was sufficient to do just that. The quantum effects must have produced sufficient violations of the null energy condition to allow us to both travel a huge distance, cosmologically speaking, but also backward in time.”

  Hamilton was staring wide-eyed and trying to follow the conversation like a spectator at a tennis game. “How far back in time have we come?” he asked, a slight tremor in his voice.

  Adam closed his eyes again, and I could almost see the cogs whirring as he accessed the data and made his calculations. After a few seconds his eyes snapped open and he looked around the table. “Approximately fifteen thousand years.”

  You could have heard a pin drop.

  “No fucking way –” started Hamilton.

  “How the hell –?” shouted Stillman.

  “Wait,” I said, holding a finger up and turning to Adam. “Are you saying we’ve almost certainly arrived at a time before the Vu-Hak developed their murderous, galaxy-destroying proclivities?”

  Adam paused, considering the implications of my question, and nodded. “I believe that would be a correct interpretation of the time scale involved.”

  “So we can prevent the annihilation of humanity,” I blurted, excitedly. “We can change the future, by our actions in this time.”

  Cain raised a hand. “Not so fast. There are infinite possibilities. The ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics involves the time traveler arriving in a different universe’s history from their own. A mutually exclusive history not interacting with ours.”

  Stillman leaned forward, clearly thinking what I was thinking and ignoring Cain’s objection. “Kate, in this universe, at this time, if we destroy the Vu-Hak they never travel to our galaxy?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Hamilton clapped his hands together. “Humanity is saved from extinction. Fuck yeah!”

  Cain held his hands up. “Please, you need to think this through. Each time traveler would experience a single self-consistent history, so they remain within their own world rather than traveling to a different one. Nothing will change.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” I said. “It won’t matter if this is the same universe or an alternate timeline – destroying the Vu-Hak here and now will ultimately lead to the same thing. They will never be a threat to humanity.”

  “Kate, I think I have made my position clear –”

  I gave him a fierce look. “Yes I understand that you’re a pacifist, Cain. Which I find incredible taking into account your race’s history of slavery to the Vu-Hak. But I see it one way – if it’s a choice between them or us – I choose us any fucking day of the week. Especially after what we’ve just witnessed.”

  Adam abruptly stood up and walked over to the windscreen, his back to us. He stared out at the torrential rain that was now obscuring the view. The nig
ht sky was a featureless haze and lightning strikes continued to leave afterimages on my retinae. I got up and joined him on the balcony.

  “Hey, are you okay?” I said.

  He nodded wordlessly.

  “Is this about Amy?”

  Amy was resting in another part of the ship, having declined to come to this meeting. In her defense she had looked terrible and was clearly shell shocked. Adam had put her into the med-lab along with Hubert and given her a mild sedative.

  He shook his head and gave me a crooked smile. “I was just reflecting on what would happen to me if we destroy the Vu-Hak here, or even prevent them from becoming sentient.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Consider this: if the Vu-Hak no longer dominate this galaxy, it will make no difference to the wormhole, which was generated by the Trinity Deus device back on Earth. So, I would still be in that crater when the wormhole opens and I would again be transported, dead, to this galaxy. But this time I would not be resurrected. There would be no Vu-Hak to ‘save’ me and send me back.”

  “Wait –” I began.

  “Amy would be orphaned, and would continue living as a prostitute in Las Vegas, until her untimely death …” He reached out and grasped my hand. “Kate, you and I would never meet. Your life, such as it was in Indian Springs, would go on. Your daughter would be dead, forever …”

  He raised his eyebrows and waited for me to process what he was saying. It didn’t take long. While I was still wrestling with the ethics of resurrecting Kelly as a clone, I wasn’t prepared to sacrifice this chance he’d given me of having her back in my life. My love for her had been so close to pure love that to lose it so violently was something I wasn’t ever going to heal from. I’d held her on the day she came into this world, and I’d held her before I buried her. She’d vanished into thin air, twice over as my memory of her was subsequently taken away. Now I had my memory of her back, and unbelievably the chance of another life with her, I realized that I couldn’t – I wouldn’t – give it up.