by M. D. Cooper
Sabrina said with a chuckle.
“It’s a long story,” Finaeus replied. “Do you have any good food on his monstrosity of a ship? We’ve been making do with some…less than savory rations. Let’s get something in our stomachs before we explain all this.”
“Of course,” Tanis replied. “Come, there’s a mess hall not far from here. They have a great selection.”
A small smile crept onto Sera’s face, though there were still tears in her eyes for Cheeky. “I guess some things never change, Uncle Finaeus. You always did do your best thinking on a full stomach.”
“A little bit of beer won’t hurt, either,” Finaeus replied. “This is quite the story.”
Tanis turned and signaled for a groundcar to approach. It had an open carriage, with no doors or ceiling, and the group quickly piled in. During the short drive across the docking bay, a half-dozen muted conversations broke out, Trevor and Misha asked about the ship, marveling at its size, Finaeus asked Sera about her father’s death—having learned about it while aboard the Daedalus—and Jessica asked about many of her friends.
Jessica cast her a bright smile.
“Stars, a lot has happened over the last eighteen years,” Tanis said aloud. “It’s going to take a long time to get caught up. But first,” she said with a smile as they approached the kilometer-tall forward bulkhead of the main bay, “I would like you to meet my daughters.”
Standing before the entrance to the mess hall—which looked more like a bistro, complete with tables and umbrellas out on the deck in front of a cozy-looking dining room beyond—were two young women.
“I’d like to introduce you to Cary and Saanvi,” Tanis said with a sweep of her arm. “My daughters.”
“Daughters?” Jessica exclaimed as she leapt from the groundcar. “There are two of you, and grown up!” There was a tear in Jessica’s eye as she turned to look at Tanis.
Cary stepped forward first, her hand extended toward Jessica. “It’s really nice to meet you, Jessica. We’ve studied you in our history classes.”
“Oh core, no, studied me? That’s horrifying.” Jessica laughed as she swatted away Cary’s hand and hugged her. “You too, Saanvi,” she said and reached out an arm. “I can’t wait to get to know you two. You’re the ones that will give me the real dirt on Tanis that no one else will dare share.”
Cary laughed and a slow smile crept across Saanvi’s face. “Don’t you worry, Jessica. We have more juicy stories than you can imagine.”
Tanis felt happiness and that her daughters finally got to meet Jessica, but sorrow that it was only just now.
“Yes, yes. You’re very lovely girls. Now can we get some food?” Finaeus asked.
“Of course, of course, Uncle Finaeus. We wouldn’t want to upset your growling stomach any more than it is,” Sera laughed as they walked in and pushed several tables together.
“Seraphina,” Finaeus said somberly. “You are now the President of the Transcend Interstellar Alliance. You can dispense with ‘uncle’.”
Sera snorted. “I’m a president in exile before my rule has even begun. Airtha is the real ruler—though I mean to take it back.”
“Then it is as I feared—what I warned Jeff about has finally come to pass.”
“And what is that?” Tanis asked.
“First, let’s fill our stomachs, and we’ll tell you about our adventure, and then I’ll tell you what I know—that which Airtha was willing to kill us to keep from you.”
“OK, Un—Finaeus,” Sera nodded. “I do really want to hear what you were doing in Perseus!”
Once everyone had settled in their seats around the combined tables and placed their orders over the Link, Jessica, Finaeus, and Cargo glanced between one another.
“Who should tell it?” Cargo asked.
“Well, you’re the captain,” Jessica said.
“And Finaeus is the man of ancient times,” Cargo chuckled.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Trevor swore. “I’ll tell it.”
Before he could begin, the servitor arrived with their drinks, and Trevor took a long draught of the beer set before him. “Oh, gods below, that’s good!”
“Just wait till you taste strawberries,” Nance said with a grin.
“Wha? Wow!” Trevor exclaimed. “OK, anyway, here goes. So first off, as you know, I’m Trevor. I almost got Jessica killed in an illegal fighting ring back in Virginis, and as punishment, I was forced to schlep across the stars with this sorry crew.”
“Something he’s been all too glad to do,” Jessica said as she wrapped an arm around the massive man—as far as she could manage, at least—and planted a kiss on his cheek.
“Yeah, so anyway, we tooled around for a while, and Jessica here managed to hunt down our friend Finaeus—something we just barely survived, I should add.”
“Sorry about that,” Sera grimaced. “I had a bit of a purge after that little dust-up. Well, as much as I could with my father watching over everything I did.”
“Not surprised,” Finaeus shook his head. “Jeff was the ultimate control freak.”
“Guys, let him tell the story already,” Nance cut in.
“Sorry,” Sera grimaced.
“OK, so anyway, Finaeus here has this bright idea that we should go to this star called Grey Wolf in the Inner Stars where the Transcend is mining the whole freaking white dwarf remnant—which is…beyond description. Turns out that they were expecting us, and things didn’t go so well. They captured Cargo and Jessica, and the rest of us had defend the ship, and get a Ford-Svaiter mirror.” Trevor explained. “Wasn’t pretty, Cheeky and Finaeus went for a crazy little jaunt outside the station. In the end we pulled it all off, and got aboard, but not before we dealt with Colonel Bes—dude was a real hardass.”
“Bes?” Sera asked. “So that’s where he went. I can’t believe I didn’t hear about any of this at all. Apparently my father was better at covering things up than I thought.”
“Or someone…” Finaeus said ominously.
“But wait, there’s more,” Jessica added with a wry smile.
“So, we get a mirror, get it on the ship—thank the stars for stasis shields—and used a hackit our AIs planted on the Gisha Platform to re-align the jump-gate so we can get here.”
“So, there we were,” Trevor continued. “All lined up on the gate, ready to go, and Jessica boosted on in. Everything was finally coming up aces, but at the last minute they managed to fire a thruster on the ring and spun it right as we went in. Finaeus tried to compensate and then our mirror control system had a failure and we couldn’t shut it off.”
“Shiiit,” Sera whispered.
“No kidding,” Finaeus nodded. “They were lucky I was on board, or they would have ended up in the Sextans Galaxy, or worse.”
“Fin!” Nance scowled. “None of that would have happened without you. We would have been here
years ago.”
“Yes,” Finaeus nodded sagely. “But you we wouldn’t know what we do now about Orion.”
“What is that?” Tanis asked.
“We’re getting there, trust me,” Trevor replied. “OK, where was I? Oh yeah. So, we finally dump back into normal space and have a pretty serious ‘Oh Fuck’ moment or two while we try to figure out where the hell we were.”
“At least three, or four, moments of solid ‘Oh Fuck’,” Jessica added with a wink at Trevor.
“Well, we were pretty close to a black hole,” Cargo said.
“Seriously, guys, can I tell the story or what?” Trevor asked. A few sighs and nods greeted him and he waited a moment to ensure the silence held before continuing. “We dropped a few probes into the dark layer, and ascertained that it was safe enough for us to jump to the closest star system—which had radio signals coming from it, so we knew someone was there.”
He took another drink from his beer before continuing. “Turns out it was a backwater sort of colony named Naga, just one TP and a few dozen stations and habs. We stripped the beacons from way out, and faked our ident as a freighter from a ways away. Then, we went in and traded what we had onboard—after spending a week removing any traces of where it came from.
“They could tell we were shady as fuck. I mean, who shows up on a ship that looks nothing like any other ship around, and has holds filled with completely untraceable cargo. And not rare stuff either, just melons and generic shit in crates with no markings. Not a lot of call for black market melons.”
“That was a fun dock-side excursion,” Jessica chuckled.
“Sure was,” Trevor nodded. “Luckily, we ran into Misha there. He was looking for a ship to sign on to, and knew the locals. We managed to leave Naga with our skins intact and started working our way across the Perseus Arm to get here.”
“But that would have taken a lot longer, twenty years, at least,” Sera said with a frown.
“Sure would have,” Trevor agreed. “From Naga, we hopped star by star, jumping as far as we dared on each leg of the trip. We were between the Perseus and Orion arm—near an open cluster they call the Trireme—when we stumbled upon a Guard base. It wasn’t very well defended—not like some of the major fleet outposts that we had seen. But it still had a jump gate. By then, we had learned a lot about Orion—things that even Finaeus here didn’t know—strengths, their beliefs, lots of stuff—and we decided it was worth attempting another jump.”
“That seems like a serious risk for that sort of intel.” Sera shook her head as she spoke.
“It may have been,” Cargo added. “But we knew that Orion was on the move. If we didn’t get to New Canaan soon, we’d miss the entire war—and then all our sacrifices would have been for nothing. And then there’s what we learned at that outpost.”
“Save that for last, I need to say my bit first,” Finaeus advised.
Trevor paused and took a deep breath. “OK. So, the short version is that we infiltrated their base and…” he paused a moment and cleared his throat before continuing. “and that’s where we lost Cheeky and Piya. They sacrificed themselves to ensure the gate remained aligned.”
He stopped and took a gulp of his beer. In the resulting silence, Cargo spoke up.
“They gave their lives to get us back here. Made the ultimate sacrifice.”
“Oh, Cheeky…” Sera whispered and shook her head.
“It was good that she did,” Finaeus said. “With Airtha making her move, it’s very fortuitous that we made it back when we did, and not years later. This could have all be over by then.”
“Sounds like it’s your turn to tell a story,” Tanis said to Finaeus. “I sure hope it’s worth what everyone had to go through to get you here.”
“Oh, trust me, it’s well worth it,” Finaeus said somberly. “So, even if you took even the worst history classes in school, you know that Jeffrey Tomlinson left Sol in 2392 as the captain of the first FGT Worldship, the Starfarer. I left not long after in 2442 on the Tardis. Not as captain, though. I was the chief science officer.
“We all flitted off through space, happy as clams in mud, terraforming worlds and cleaning up systems for human habitation. We built our own shipyards, and worlds out at Beta Hydri—Lucida it’s called now, and again at Alula Australis. Everything was going fine until that whole FTL wars thing you know about oh so well.
“That was when Jeff got us all together and we formed the Transcend. It took forever to convince everyone to do it, but once we suffered a few losses to the wars, it came together pretty quick. We set up with a few core areas, one just past the Orion Nebula, and another out beyond M24, plus a few others, as well. The nebulae hid what we were up to from the rest of humanity, and we worked to build a civilization that we hoped to use to bring humanity back from the brink. The whole ‘uplift’ idea that you all must know about already.”
Even though she knew much of this, Tanis found it surreal to hear it from Finaeus himself—a man who had left Sol fifteen hundred years before she was born.
The arrival of their food added a further distraction—especially for Finaeus, but after several bites, and exclamations of joy over the sear on his steak, he continued.
“Anyway, about that time, Jeff and a few others decided that we needed to map out a lot more of the galaxy. His wife, Jelina, left on an expedition to survey the core past the inner 3-Kiloparsec arm. What they found…well…it was not what we expected.”
“Core devils…” Sera whispered, her eyes wide.
“I’ve heard people use that curse before,” Tanis said. “I always thought you were referring to the Hegemony.”
Finaeus chuckled. “Well, ‘core devils’ certainly applies to them, too. But when it’s used in the Transcend, it refers to what Jelina found in the galaxy’s center. I assume you all know the theories about how super-advanced civilizations will eventually migrate to black holes, because that’s where the bulk of the matter and energy in the universe will be stored when all the stars burn out in trillion years or so.”
Everyone around the table nodded, and Tanis noted that Saanvi appeared particularly interested, hardly blinking as she watched Finaeus.
“Well, when the ascended AI left Sol after your Sentience Wars, that’s where they went—to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy: Sagittarius A*.”
“I knew it!” Tanis announced triumphantly. “I knew they got away and set up somewhere.”
“Yeah, and set up, they did. They have built quite the civilization there—from what Jelina, or rather, what Jelina had become—told us.”
“Had become?” Sera asked.
“OK, let me step back a bit,” Finaeus said. “First off, let me tell you about ascended AIs. You’re looking at probably only one of a dozen humans—or non-ascended AIs for that matter—who really knows what the term means. To properly explain it, let me tell you about two-dimensional beings.”
Finaeus paused, noticing the expectant looks on the faces around him. “Sorry, no, to my knowledge, no one has ever discovered two-dimensional beings. This is just an example.”
He took another bite of his steak before raising his hands in the air. He spread them wide, and a horizontal square of light appeared over the table, hovering above their food. “This is two-dimensional space,” he said, and then touched the pane of light, and a black dot appeared. “Here is something the two-dimensional creatures hold dear. They build a vault to protect it and keep it safe.” As he spoke, a small black line appeared and traced a square around the dot.
“As you can see, in two-dimensional space, this square, which is nothing more than four lines, protects the exalted dot that our flat little friends value so highly. However, I,” and with that, Finaeus reached out and plucked the dot from within the square, “as a three-dimensional creature, have no issue taking their prize.”
He held it in his fingers and gestured at the p
ane of light. “I have just done something magical, beyond the laws physics as they understand them. To them, I am a god, an exalted being. And if, perhaps, I had begun life as a two-dimensional creature, one could say that I have ascended.”
“So, the ascended AIs are four-dimensional creatures?”
Finaeus shook his head, and waved his hand, creating the familiar form of a tesseract—a four-dimensional cube. “To perceive the third dimension, we utilize two-dimensional eyes. However, we do possess the technology to create three-dimensional eyes. With those we can, with some difficulty, perceive the fourth dimension. Though, as you can see with the tesseract, it is difficult to map a four-dimensional image into the human mind. Some can do it, but they are few, and they are on the road to becoming something more, themselves.”
“How do physical dimensions apply to AIs?” Saanvi asked, as rapt as she was in any science class, or at the feet of Earnest during one of his visits to their cabin.
“Well, AIs operate in three-dimensional space, same as us. They are constrained by the strictures of three-dimensional physics. Of course, we all take advantage of every dimension—even though we can’t perceive them—since they all construct the universe around us. Still, an AI lives within a core that is a three-dimensional construct, just as our organic bodies are.
As Finaeus spoke, Tanis gazed at the Tesseract, perceiving it in the fourth dimension—viewing all of its planes and angles as though it were a solid object. Not the semi-transparent ‘double cube’ that it appeared to be normally—that she had seen every other time she had looked at a tesseract.
“This,” Finaeus said as he produced a new object. “This is a hypercube. It is a five-dimensional cube. In simple terms, it consists of ten sides, each of which is a tesseract.”
The image swam before Tanis’s eyes and she winced from the pain looking at it caused. It wanted to resolve into a solid object, and kept coming close, but just as she thought it would stop being a mess of lines and become a thing, it dissolved into chaos again. She closed her eyes, though doing so did not remove the hypercube from her mind.