“What if we need to contact you?” Lyn asked.
“I’m leaving this communications channel open. If I’m not here, the computer will know how to get in touch with me.”
“How long will we need to wait before you find Gil and send him back?” asked Simon.
“A week at the most.”
After a bit more conversation, Simon and Lyn found themselves back on Earth.
“What a load of crap,” said Lyn. “Too bad that lie detector wasn’t on when he was talking. Seems the runaround is the same no matter what planet you’re from. Fairly useless trip other than the whole teleport thing which was kind of neat.”
“Not entirely useless, I got two good things out of it.”
“Great, I could use some positive news.”
“First, I got this.” Simon held up a cell phone sized device. “It kept flashing text messages at me from across the room so I grabbed it when that Agent Tomas guy was focused on you.” Simon tapped it with his finger. “Hello in there.”
“No need to tap, Simon, I’m voice activated. My name is Ellie,” said the device.
Simon and Lyn exchange glances. “Well now, isn’t that interesting,” said Lyn. “What’s the second thing?”
“I just noticed that the time on my watch is off by almost an hour. I think we were in a particle state for that period of time.”
“So?” said Lyn.
“We’re not technically alive when we’re in a particle state.”
“Again, so?”
“Well, if we weren’t alive, we must have been dead for a bit and I distinctly remember an agreement we made right before we entered the teleport,” said Simon as he moved closer to Lyn.
“Don’t even think about collecting on that,” said Lyn raising her voice and putting her hand out, stopping the advancing Simon dead in his tracks.
“Okay, what did I miss?” said Ellie.
Agent Tomas sat back in his chair. “I know, you don’t have to tell me, they were omitting certain components from their story. Track their teleport and keep it available, I’ll probably need to pay Earth a visit at some point.”
10.
“Princess Alicia, thank you for coming. There is an unscheduled teleport coming in on your code. I thought it might be another…friend?”
“You’re quite correct. Release him to my care.”
Jon materialized, looked about and saw Alicia. “Hello,” he said.
Alicia nodded to the teleport officer, turned and walked out of the station with Jon and her personal guards following behind. She didn’t say a word until she was alone with Jon in her transport.
“You were right to call me instead of my sister or father. They would have arrested you and had you tortured after what happened last time you were here.
“They’re still upset over that?”
“You stole my sister’s jewels and disappeared, Jon. That's not something a girl bounces right back from.”
“But you’re okay with it?”
“I knew you had asked her to run away with you and she turned you down. I also knew you were too much of a scoundrel to stay here and live the royal life. Quite the story of star-crossed lovers from different sides of the galaxy,” Alicia said somewhat whimsically before continuing. “Personally, I’m more of the forgive and forget type, more of a lover than a hater. And I bounce back better. I’m more bouncy in general.”
Jon took a good look at Alicia. She had certainly matured in the years since he was last here. Very bouncy indeed, but he needed to keep things at a professional level. He knew she had a crush on him when he was seeing her older sister and took a chance on her clearing him through security.
“What did you tell the security personnel to get me clearance?”
“I told them you were my father’s special friend.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope. Isn’t that a hoot? I’ve used it a few times now and there’s actually a rumor going around that one of the biggest womanizers in the galaxy has a gay side. It’s driving him crazy! Talk about getting back at him for all the times he grounded me or had my boyfriends shipped to the asteroid mines.”
Jon began to relax as the limo drove on. “So where are we off to, darling?” he asked.
“To my suite. I have a small apartment in the city.”
Keep it professional, thought Jon taking another sideways glance at Alicia. He knew that a small apartment for the royal family means at least four floors and a block wide. The limo was just under half that size. Stay professional, he thought, I need to maintain a professional relationship to make this work. Or semiprofessional. What I really need to do is develop a working relationship with Alicia. A working and loving relationship.
“How long till we get there, love?” Jon asked, pulling Alicia closer.
“Doesn’t matter, I instructed the limo to keep driving until I tell it to stop.” Alicia put her arms around Jon’s neck.
If asked, Jon’s friends and acquaintances will quickly provide a list of his many failings. Always making the top five is the fact that he often thinks with his penis, and it hasn’t been right in years, as well as his inability to determine if he’s betting with or against the odds. Depending on who you’re speaking with, you may not even need to raise the subject to hear the list.
“So tell me, love, where’s the rest of your family?” Jon asked as they ate lunch the following day.
“Well, my mother is in residence at the palace, my father and brothers are away at a conference for the week. You know that after you left my father married my sister off to the first prince he could find so now Zita lives on …,” Jon was only half listening. The important part was that Alicia’s father and brothers were off world and not due back for a bit. Things ran a lot smoother and were more relaxed when they were gone. Though the planet had a ruling monarchy, 99% of the government was run by parliamentary councils. The monarchy had actually been abolished decades ago, but after a while things got dull and predictable so it was reestablished with the hope that the royal antics would add some juice to people’s daily lives while adding some local color to the tourist trade.
Now if there was one thing that Jon hated, it was to be juicy, which is why he left in the first place. Helping himself to Zita’s jewels on his way out was just his special way of being juicy without actually getting squeezed. Unfortunately, Zita’s father and brothers could not let a good thing pass and jumped on the bandwagon by giving chase and setting a price on his head. He needed to be extra careful during this visit.
“Do you think it may have aroused suspicions to have your father’s special friend show up when he’s off planet?”
“No, he prefers to have his women friends here waiting for his return, like he’s some sort of triumphant warrior returning from battle. I mean, the conference is on beverage taxes. It’s not like he’s ever allowed to make any important decisions.”
Now let’s take a second and talk about the universe. First, the only intelligent life discovered out there has been relatively human. Sometimes they’re seven feet tall and other times they’re less than four feet, but the basic formula stays the same. Fact is, there are more variants due to human science than Mother Nature. For example, there were a group of people that wanted wings so they could fly like birds. Wings and muscles were grafted on, bigger hearts were added to pump more blood as well as an extra stomach to process more food for energy. They lived in the trees and mountains and had a great time. Since there weren’t any changes made to their DNA, any children they had were born as regular humans. Some converted, some didn’t. Sooner or later the fad died out. Oh sure, there’s still a few diehard bird people out there that like to fly, as well as fish people that like to swim and dog people that like to, you know, do it doggie style, but in general people are people.
As for planets, well, there are lots of planets, but statistically speaking, an extremely small percentage are what we would call earth-like. Still, an extremely small p
ercentage of a very humongously huge number is nothing to scoff at, but out of the millions of Earth-like planets an even smaller percentage are what we would consider habitable. Some of the planets are too cold, some too hot, some too wet, some too dry, some have dinosaurs; you get the idea – not a lot of vacation spots.
Now Alicia’s home world turns out to be the perfect getaway destination. Land masses spiral across the planet in a never ending twist separated by crystal clear fresh water, a pair of suns positioned perfectly that keep it bathed at just the right temperature from pole to pole with just the right amount of wind at the coast and, best of all, hardly any bugs and no land animals so there aren’t any pesky lizards crawling around or birds crapping on your car.
Like many other Earth-like planets, it was void of any human life when discovered. Putting humans on a distant planet requires the same two things that it takes to do almost anything in the universe; time and money. Time to send a spaceship there, and depending on the distance it could take years, and the money to finance the journey and colonization. It’s not necessary to send a lot of people, just a few to run the ship and deal with pirates and such. Teleport stations are part of the initial cargo and once they’re set up you can move in as many folks as you need. Alicia’s ancestors were the head of the investment pool that sent the first ship and bought out most of the other investors during the start-up phase, then put themselves in power as the reigning sovereignty.
Over the years more ships arrived, setting up hotel chains across the globe until the planet became one of the richest in the known universe. It also has the best swimsuit contests and beach side bars in the galaxy as well as a continuous show on the travel channel.
“Jon, I need your help”
It’s never good when one of the richest people in the galaxy asks for your help, thought Jon. “I am always at your service, my dear,” he said, as if he had a choice.
“It’s complicated,” Alicia said, “and involves a man.”
When isn’t it, he thought. “Let me guess, you love him, but he doesn’t love you or he loves you, but you don’t love him or you both love each other, but your families don’t approve.”
“That’s it, the third one. Though it’s mostly his family that doesn’t approve.”
“Now what could they possibly not like about you?”
“Oh, pretty much everything. They’re from BB89.”
“Ahh, the fog lifts. A very hard working group over there. I don’t believe they have words for ‘fun’ or ‘vacation’ or ‘fluffy’ in their vocabulary. The closest they’ve got is ‘job satisfaction’ and ‘sleep’ and ‘flaccid.’ They don’t even have enough imagination to name their own planet, they just stuck with the designation that was being used when they were discovered. How in the world did you two ever meet?”
“I was traveling with mother and he was on a business trip. We kept bumping into each other in the strangest places. Once he came out of an elevator so fast he crashed into all my shopping bags. Can you imagine?”
“I don’t have to. I think I saw that movie a hundred times on the late, late, late show.”
“I need to get off this planet without being followed. I need you to help.”
“You must realize that I’m on the run myself, that’s why I needed you to sneak me in here.”
“Of course I know that. Now here’s what you don’t know, I contacted the royal guard and told them who you really are. They’ve surrounded the apartment.”
“Now that’s no way to get me to help. In fact, that’s the opposite way.”
“I have a teleport in my apartment.”
This news didn’t brighten Jon’s day since he had already assumed that as a member of the royal family Alicia would have a teleport in her apartment, but that it would be limited to planetary use only. There are strict rules about going off planet without prior authorization, and sure, you can bribe a guard or two, but in the end there’s no way to do it without being traced and detained on the other end. Sometimes they don’t even accept you and you just bounce right back to the point of origin. If they’re really feeling nasty, they collect you at the other end and then have a ‘system malfunction’ that clears the buffer. The only thing to do after that is for the next of kin to check for old bank accounts.
“I’ve had it modified to hack into the network and send us off planet,” Alicia continued. “We should be able to get one blast out of it before it’s shut down. After that, it’s set to self-destruct if tampered with. I haven’t used it yet because I don’t fully trust the destination codes I was given. I know you wouldn’t have come here without exit codes you could trust.”
Jon thought about it. He could see Alicia’s dilemma. It’s very possible to get someone from the criminal element to modify the teleport as she described, but you can’t trust a crook so it’s a good bet that the codes they gave her will send her right to their teleport where they’d hold her for a sizeable ransom. You can’t trust a crook, unless of course their own skin is in the game, which is why she alerted the guard. “Okay, show me the teleport.”
“Oh, Jon, don’t be mad at me. Remember, I’m in love and people in love commit desperate actions.”
“As to that, did I mention that I didn’t believe one word of your story?”
“Not one word?”
“Well, maybe the part about shopping.”
“And I worked so hard on it.”
“Will you please tell me what’s going on?”
“Later. We need to leave now, the guards are getting edgy and they’re planning to storm the building.”
“Did you even call the guard?”
“I sure did, no turning back now. Here, look at the news broadcast.” Jon looked at the screen Alicia was pointing at and, sure enough, there was his picture in the corner and the royal apartment surrounded by guards, all ready to rush in and collect the reward. Looks like he got juicy again.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Oh, don’t be grumpy just because I outsmarted you.” Alicia smiled, “So tell me, love, what’s the plan, where are we going?”
“BB89.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
11.
If asked, Gilbert would grudgingly admit that the past few days spent on Ellie’s ship were the happiest days of his life, at least so far. The ship was immense, though Ellie assured him that it was typical for a cargo ship. Gilbert had wondered about the need for spaceships, what with teleport technology and all.
“Teleportation is very limited when it comes to very dense materials, such as metals.” Gilbert was told when he asked Franco, the ship’s engineer. “The human body doesn’t contain a lot of dense material; just the bones and they’re not that dense when compared to most metals so people go through easy enough.”
It also turns out that teleportation is a fairly expensive thing to do. Simon and Gilbert have been bopping about on the ICC’s nickel and haven’t had to pay, but to most folks teleportation can be a bit pricey. Even when Gilbert and Simon left Earth, their homemade teleport signal only sent them to the orbiting probes which then relayed them on through via the ICC’s private network.
Gilbert was spending most of his time on Ellie’s ship studying the physics behind teleportation and faster than light travel.
“Look,” said Franco, “everything you know is correct. You just don’t know everything yet. You guys haven’t gotten to the point where you’ve taken a black hole apart or figured out how to generate dark matter in your basement. Let me set you up with access to the ship’s computer and you can read up on it.”
Once online, Gilbert didn’t leave his room for seven hours. When he did leave, he had that ‘I can’t believe what I just saw’ expression on his face. He stumbled past Ellie who noticed his bewildered expression and just assumed that he had found the hyper-porn channel.
Here’s some interesting stuff Gilbert learned about the universe. First, as far as anyone can determine, it’s finite but growing in
finitely larger by the second. The crazy thing just keeps on expanding, though it gets pretty funky at the leading edge. All types of phenomenon happening out there that nobody wants to get up close and personal with. Some probes were sent out, but time and space got so screwy that they never reached the end. They did send back enough data for scientist to discover that the universe just creates more of itself as it expands in all directions with nothing slowing it down. The best description they can give breaks it down to normal space, then a kind of mixed buffer zone, followed immediately by wacky town – kind of like driving into Vegas. Here’s something Gilbert learned about human nature: even with this understanding of the universe and the verified existence of the human soul, most people still care more about what goes on during life than before or after.
Gilbert also spent time trying to locate Earth using the ships navigation system with the hope that Jon had sent him here because Ellie was close to Earth and she could possibly swing by and drop him off. He asked Ellie about the possibility.
“Since you were able to teleport off your planet,” said Ellie, “it must be on the universal grid, meaning they had detected life there already, but weren’t ready to make contact due to your lower than average intelligence.”
“Now you’re just being abusive,” said Gilbert.
“That’s half the fun of talking with you,” said Ellie.
“Yeah?” said Gilbert with a smile. “What’s the other half?”
“Down boy, stay focused. Can you describe your galaxy?” she asked.
“Sure, it’s spiral, about 100,000 light years across, maybe 13.4 billion years old, moving at about 630 km per second, around 300 billion stars in it. It has a binary component and they’re grouped with about 50 other galaxies.”
“Pretty typical stuff.”
“Alright, let’s see, there are two real gaseous galaxies alongside it with a hydrogen vapor stream connecting them that warps my galaxy as it passes through. And it will collide with its binary galaxy in about three billion years. My planetary system is on the outer rim, yellow sun, Earth is third of eight or so planets, depending on how you count planets.”
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