Echo Rift

by G. S. Jennsen

  “And you as well.”

  Parc Eshett had stood almost as soon as he’d sat to meander around the perimeter of the table looking bored, but now he leaned in by Devon’s shoulder. “Hey, did you bring one of those Rectifiers with you?”

  Devon’s face lit up, the ‘executive’ mask slipping a little to make way for excitement. “No, but give me five seconds.” He leapt up, opened a wormhole in the middle of the meeting area and disappeared through it.

  Isao stared at the wormhole with intense interest, but Nika and Dashiel had seen one enough times by now to…actually, they also stared at it with notable interest. Given her and Nika’s plans for the rest of the day, Alex probably shouldn’t be surprised.

  Devon quickly reemerged wielding one of the handheld negative energy guns. “Voila!”

  “Excellent! I heard about Alex tearing up a bunch of Rasu using one of these on Namino.” Parc motioned for Devon to follow him, and they went to a workbench in one of the nearby unoccupied enclosures. “How do you keep the particles stable? A Bose-Einstein condensate?”

  Devon carefully laid the Rectifier on the workbench, then removed the outer casing covering the center of the weapon. “Close, but we didn’t need to go to such an extreme. The bundle of negative energy particles is enclosed in a He4 superfluid shell.”

  Parc leaned over to peer into the inner workings of the weapon. “Brilliant. Is the propulsion mechanism an ionized plasma burst?”

  “No. Since the outer capsule is constructed of physical material, we used standard cryogenic propellant. But now that you mention it, a plasma burst might be an even better idea.”

  “I’ll work on something using it. Can I see the code running the firing mechanism?”

  “Sure.” Devon pulled out a tiny quantum cube from his pocket and set it beside the Rectifier. Lines of code sprang to life above it.

  Parc scanned it for a minute. “Oh, clever use of magnetic field dynamics to keep the He4 shell intact.”

  “Yeah, I wrote the code myself. It’s slick.”

  Back at the meeting table, Nika regarded Alex with an arched eyebrow. “I see you have one, too.”

  “One of…oh.” Alex chuckled. “We do indeed. I guess no society is complete without a wise-cracking programming genius with attitude.”

  “I guess not.” Nika eyed the two men in amusement for another second before turning to Dashiel. “Everyone seems to be settling in nicely. If you can handle this from here, Alex and I have something else we need to do.”

  “Not a problem. I think Hoya and I can wrangle those two for a few hours.”

  Nika stood and squeezed Dashiel’s shoulder. “On that, I wish you luck.”

  Alex gestured a farewell to the men and sent Devon a pulse to let him know he was on his own, then followed Nika out of the lab. “Hopefully they won’t blow up the building for fun while we’re gone.”

  Nika frowned back at the door. “I give it fifty-fifty odds. So, where to?”

  “We should go someplace with lots of open space, far from valuable property, so we’re not the ones blowing up buildings.”

  Nika smiled. “I know just the place.”

  11

  * * *

  MIRAI

  Mirai One

  Nika’s choice of setting turned out to be an open, grassy field in sight of the Mirai One skyline. A salty breeze wafted in from the harbor, though rolling hills obscured it from view.

  “Does here seem good to you? It’s isolated enough that I doubt I can damage anything but the grass.”

  The air was cooler this close to the water, and Alex zipped up her jacket. “Here’s fine. Your city should be safe.”

  Nika’s gaze unfocused and drifted toward the harbor for a moment, then she visibly exhaled. “Good. Before we get started, I have a mission you and Caleb might be interested in, whenever you have time. The Supreme Commander—sorry, Corradeo Praesidis—brought back a tale of an advanced species he believes were wiped out by the Rasu, but not before they deployed some sort of mysterious weapon against them. He thinks this weapon could have some value in our own conflict.”

  “Interesting. Was it a species he encountered during his lost millennia?”

  “You mean after his son tried to kill him? I, um…” Nika’s brow furrowed “…I’m not certain. I confess I didn’t press him for details.”

  “He likely would have waxed poetic for a while without answering your question, anyway. We’ll look into it.” Alex took in the dramatic skyline for another beat. “I admit, I half-expected there to be two of you on hand for this.”

  “Oh. No.” Nika wandered in a slow circle. “I put the other body down for a nice, long nap. Once the immediate crisis was over, having two of me walking around was…awkward.”

  “I can imagine.” She wasn’t surprised that Nika had chosen to keep the kyoseil-soaked body active. The woman seemed to always be pushing ahead, seeking, searching, though for what wasn’t so clear.

  Alex plopped down in the grass and motioned across from her. “Sit down.”

  “Why? What good is opening a wormhole if I’m not going to walk through it?”

  “Valid point, but we’re not opening wormholes straightaway. We need to start with sidespace.”

  “What-space?”

  “Sidespace. It’s what us Prevos call the…it’s a sort of quantum dimension, unbound by distance or…well, much of anything. It’s part comm channel, part virtual playground overlay, part expressway to anywhere in the universe. Devon once described it as a dimension where qubits hold all their possible values, where waves are particles and particles are waves. There are no wormholes without sidespace—at least not for Prevos. I can’t imagine it will be different for you.”

  “Understood.” Nika dropped to the ground and curled her legs beneath her. “Show me how to access it.”

  “Right. So you….” Alex suddenly realized she had no good way to explain it. You simply shifted your perception, and you were there. Dammit, she should have done the homework ahead of time.

  Valkyrie? Can I ask for an assist?

  “Of course.” The voice wafted into existence in time with Valkyrie manifesting beside her, already seated cross-legged on the grass. “Good afternoon, Nika. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

  One corner of Nika’s lips curled up. “And you, Valkyrie. Welcome to Mirai.”

  “Ah, yes.” Valkyrie tilted her head up to look around. “It’s beautiful here. As are you—this new glow of yours is quite lovely.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “You are welcome. Tell me, can you not sense sidespace all around you here?”

  “No, I can’t. Unless you mean the kyoseil waves.”

  “Not exactly, though kyoseil undoubtedly crosses through sidespace. Can you follow a kyoseil wave using your mind?”

  “Well…yes, in a sense. If I’m connecting to an existing ceraff or creating one with someone else.”

  Alex nodded. “It’s basically the same thing, except sidespace isn’t limited to following kyoseil waves. It’s an overlay upon the entire universe. Any universe—it existed back in the Aurora portal universe, too.”

  Nika shook her head. “Sorry, I only see the kyoseil.”

  Valkyrie smiled pleasantly; she was clearly a much better teacher than Alex. “Let’s try this: follow a kyoseil wave you’re familiar with to its destination, but don’t form a ceraff when you arrive.”

  “Dashiel…” Nika’s eyes closed “…done.”

  “Can you see the area around where Dashiel is currently located?”

  “I think he’s still somewhere in the Conceptual Research lab, but I know this because his thoughts are leaking across the connection, even without a structured ceraff. When I try to see what he’s seeing, though, it’s as if there’s this filmy, half-opaque barrier wherever I try to look beyond the kyoseil.”

  “Can you swat away the barrier with your mind? Or gently nudge it to the side?”

  “I…” Nika’s brow furrowed t
ight in concentration “…no. It’s as if it’s fighting against me.” She groaned and sank back on her hands. “I must be doing it wrong.”

  “I’m confident you have the tools and capability to access sidespace, but your brain is structured differently from those of both Humans and Artificials. As I assume it is steeped in quantum programming, in theory this ought to be easier for you than it is for us, but it could require a completely different approach.” Valkyrie’s voice was soothing and kind. “I do have a theory regarding the problem here, though regretfully it doesn’t come with a solution.”

  Alex motioned for her to continue anyway. Despite the difficulties, Valkyrie was obviously enjoying herself.

  “As I understand matters, the belief has emerged among Dominion scientists that the kyoseil in your body protected you—protected every Asterion on Namino—from the ravages of the Rasu’s quantum block.”

  Nika nodded. “It’s true. There’s no way to test it empirically, and for evident reasons we don’t want to, but it’s entirely possible that without the kyoseil in our bodies, every person on Namino might well have died the instant the quantum block was activated.”

  “I suspect you are correct. Therefore, my theory is this: in the same way, and perhaps for the same reasons, that the kyoseil protected your neural output from the interference of the quantum block, it’s preventing you from accessing a purely quantum realm.”

  “But we traffic in quantum matters constantly. Those neural processes are themselves quantum in nature.”

  “Hence the need to protect them.”

  “Granted, but we also walk through d-gates all the time. Practically every day. D-gates are merely wormholes held open through mechanical means. Alex, you said wormholes are formed in sidespace.”

  “They are, but….” She leapt to her feet and opened a wormhole back to Akeso. “In scientific terms, the wormhole is the fissure itself.” She ran her hand a few centimeters away from the outline cutting into real space here and on Akeso megaparsecs away. “The interior—the opening itself—is just space.”

  “Actually, it is nothing at all.” Valkyrie barely skirted the edge of sounding condescending. “Within the bounds of the open wormhole, the distance between here and there is smaller than the Planck length. It effectively does not exist. So walking through a wormhole is no different from walking from this spot in the grass to that bush over there. There is no barrier to cross or transition to make, thus nothing to ward against.

  “Sidespace, however, is not part of you. It’s not physical, but rather ‘other.’ Perhaps to the kyoseil, it appears the same as the quantum block—something intending on intermingling and possibly interfering with your own internal quantum processes.”

  Nika rubbed at her forehead, looking increasingly frustrated, so Alex returned to the grass and latched onto Valkyrie’s train of thought. “Nika, how much do you know about how kyoseil operates?”

  “Not enough. Not nearly enough. Yes, we’ve been using and manipulating it for millennia, but not as a sentient life form with independent awareness. That part’s new.”

  Valkyrie lifted her face to the breeze, and Alex slipped a tiny portion of her consciousness into Valkyrie’s. Instantly she was awash in the tingling sensation of the air slipping past each individual particle Valkyrie controlled. Exquisite.

  After a halcyonic moment, she reluctantly focused back on the task at hand. “You mean it’s newly discovered by your people. It’s always been there.”

  “And a part of us all this time. Don’t think it’s not a trifle unsettling. But that’s a conversation for another time, preferably when drinks are involved. So how do I signal to the kyoseil that it’s safe to let me access this dimension?”

  Valkyrie mulled over the question. “As I forewarned you, I do not yet see the path to a solution. Has anyone succeeded in communicating with the kyoseil in any real way? In talking to it?”

  “No. Dashiel’s trying, after a fashion, but so far it’s only harmonics and resonance, not language.”

  Alex chuckled. “That’s the closest I’ve ever gotten.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She fished her Reor slab out of her pocket and placed it flat on her palm. “This little guy was a gift to me from the Reor cluster in the Oneiroi Nebula. I really do need to take you there sometime…” Mesme’s enigmatic warning echoed in her mind “…once things calm down a bit. The purpose of the gift eluded me for a long time, but it turned out that a specific harmonic frequency unlocked the Reor’s natural encryption. Now, using this slab as a filter, I can follow the strings passing through it to any Reor slab anywhere in the universe and access the data stored on it. But that’s all it does.”

  Nika stared at her strangely. “Does this mean you can use it to read my mind?”

  “I have no idea. Do you want me to try?”

  “I suppose the secrets I keep mostly wouldn’t interest you. Go ahead—but don’t delve too deeply, okay?”

  “To the extent I can control the delve—which isn’t much of an extent at all—I’ll try not to.” Alex held the slab aloft and slid into sidespace. It was an effortless, almost unconscious transition, which was what made the act so hard to describe and teach. Strings undulated through the air, wandering off toward the city in bulk, but also leading a short meter away to Nika, where they bound up into a tremendous knot of prismatic light.

  Wow. Do you see this, Valkyrie?

  I do. She’s even more stunning now than in physicality.

  And more otherworldly. But there’s no data stream flowing out through her strings, is there?

  That’s not quite accurate. There is not data precisely, but I am detecting an aura of…knowledge, possibly of awareness. Do you sense it?

  Because Valkyrie sensed it, so too did she. A fully quantized mind, swimming with data organized at a level of complexity far beyond what any Reor slab held, but also girded with elemental consciousness none of them understood, yet….

  She and Valkyrie both spoke at once. “Where are all your memories?”

  “What?” Nika flinched, sending a discordant vibration through the strings. “What do you see?”

  Alex switched back to the ‘real’ world and eyed Nika almost warily. What were the Asterions, truly? “It’s difficult to explain. Not discrete data. Not your secrets, but the sense of there being secrets. And winding through everything is an unnatural absence, almost like a…wound.”

  “You are not a data storage unit, which is what we are used to reading using the Reor slab,” Valkyrie said. “If you were, you would be nothing more than a machine. Instead you are a mind, a consciousness, a fully realized, sapient living being.”

  Nika studied the grass at her feet. “This doesn’t make me feel as relieved as you might expect.”

  Alex leaned forward until Nika was forced to look at her. “Where are all your memories?”

  Nika exhaled and tipped her head to the sky. “Your wound analogy is painfully accurate. They’re gone. Stolen from me almost six years ago. I had discovered that our leaders at the time, the Guides, made a deal with the Rasu to provide Asterions for their experiments, and in return the Rasu agreed not to attack our worlds. When I confronted the Guides about what I’d learned, they psyche-wiped me and dumped me in an alley.”

  “That sounds uniquely terrible. But if they wiped your memories, how do you know what happened?”

  Nika’s smile was heavily tinged with sorrow and wistfulness. “Dashiel, in fact. We were together before the psyche-wipe. It took several years, but we found one another again. On accident, though thinking back, it feels like fate. He told me who I had been and helped me recover a few of my most important memories. In time, I was able to reclaim the life that was stolen from me. In a stroke of luck, I had always kept personal journals, and they filled in the rest of the blanks.”

  Valkyrie sighed; on her virtual lips it sounded like a lament. “But written words are not memories.”

  “No, they are not, and they
never will be. But they’re all I have. And most days, they’re enough.” Nika huffed a wry breath. “Want to fire me as the Dominion representative to Concord now?”

  “Hell, no. You’ve been incredible, and I never would have guessed. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to…” Alex rolled her eyes “…I’ll probably tell Caleb, but it won’t bother him.”

  “It’s not even a secret. It’s also not public knowledge, but at this point dozens of people know. It’s become part of who I am now.”

  Alex couldn’t help but wonder what it said about who she’d been before…but there was no undoing the past. Not for Nika, not for any of them.

  Nika laughed faintly. “Did anything you saw by chance point us toward a way for me—for Asterions—to open wormholes?”

  “I’m sorry, no.” Alex climbed to her feet and stretched her arms over her head. “I thought this would work. It should work, but you’re more complicated than I expected.”

  Nika held her hands out in front of her, tilting her head to ponder the glow emanating from her skin. “Thank you for trying. I suppose Dashiel and I need to have a long conversation about harmonics. We need to learn how to properly talk to our kyoseil companions.”

  Nika’s Flat

  Nika lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Kyoseil strings danced through the ceiling and onward to the floors above her, out the window and into the city. On the edges of her perception, she could sense ‘hotspots’—concentrations of kyoseil signaling the locations of active ceraffin.

  She focused on the strings emanating from her person, on the evanescent light waves that originated inside her body. She sent a clear, direct thought to herself: open the way.

  Nothing happened.

  She grabbed a pillow, threw it over her face and groaned into it. Open the way, godsdammit!

  A chime sounded, and she jumped in surprise. But it wasn’t the kyoseil, merely the door. She checked the security feed to see Perrin fidgeting in the hallway.