“Etherus must have saved us,” Addy said.
A civilian cleric laughed, and a few of his colleagues joined in.
“You have a better explanation?” Addy demanded.
“There are lots of theories,” Tyra said before the heckler could reply. “—including the supernatural,” she added. “But the most plausible theory that I’ve heard so far is that we just met a race of higher dimensional beings.”
“You mean gods?” Lucien asked, frowning.
“Not necessarily. Quantum theory is filled with extra dimensions. That’s how we think quantum comms and jump drives work—by transporting us through a higher dimension.
“How’s that explain how those things can move through walls?” Jalisa asked.
“A fourth spatial dimension would exist at right angles to our three dimensions of length, width, and height, meaning, you’d be able to travel through things that are solid barriers to us. There’s a helpful analogy that we can draw between our existing 3-D universe and a 2-D one.
“Imagine that we’re all two-dimensional shapes living on a flat plane.”
Tyra summoned a hologram to illustrate. A flat board appeared hovering in the air with colored shapes on it—circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles.
“As a shape trapped inside this realm, we can’t imagine what a three-dimensional world would look like, and if we were ever to encounter a three-dimensional being in our flat 2-D universe, it would show up as a 2-D cross-section of itself. My arm would appear roughly circular as it passes through this 2-D flatverse,” Tyra said as she extended her arm through the hologram.
“A three-dimensional being like myself can touch these shapes, and even pick them up,” she said, taking a red square off the board. “I can transport them through my higher-dimensional realm and drop them down somewhere else in their flat universe.” Tyra deposited the square somewhere else. “This would look a lot like teleportation—or quantum jumping—to another shape in the flat universe. To them, suddenly the square disappeared and reappeared somewhere else.
“But I can do something else in my higher dimension. I can poke my finger inside of a square, or touch the center of a circle,” Tyra said, illustrating that on the holographic board with her fingertips. “But these shapes can only touch each other along their edges. They can’t reach inside of each other without cutting their fellow shapes open. In the same way, a higher-dimensional being could reach inside of us without cutting us open—to remove implants from our brains, for example.” Tyra fished into her pocket and produced a tiny microchip like the ones Lucien had found beside his bed.
The crew murmured amongst themselves, and Addy whispered to him, “Are you buying any of this?”
Lucien shook his head. “I don’t know… it still sounds supernatural to me.”
“Would a higher-dimensional being be a god?” Garek asked. “Could that explain what Etherus is?”
Tyra hesitated. “That depends on your definition of god. They could do seemingly supernatural things—like reaching inside of you, or reading your mind, or even speaking to you with a disembodied voice that seems to come from everywhere at once, but could such beings create a lower-dimensional universe inside of their own? That’s a lot more complicated. Anyway—now you have one plausible theory for what happened.”
“How did those… polypuses even know we needed saving?” Addy asked.
“They may have read our thoughts,” Tyra suggested. “Just looking at our heads in four dimensions would be like conducting a mind probe on us.”
“Are any of them still on board?” one of the clerics asked. “Maybe we can study them?”
“All of our available bots are out looking for them, but they seem to have left without a trace,” Tyra replied. “We’d best focus on what lies ahead. Thanks to the polypuses, we will now be able to travel to the cosmic horizon and meet back up with Astralis there. In order to do that, our navigator will remain at the helm while we go into stasis for the next eight years. Are there any questions?”
“What if the Inquisitor gets destroyed before it arrives?” an enlisted crewman asked.
“Pandora has orders to stay away from any systems that look habitable, so that should keep us safe, but if she runs into trouble anyway, then we hope that Astralis didn’t get destroyed, and that we’ll go on living there.”
“They must be about to resurrect us at any moment,” the enlisted crewman said. “That means if we do meet them at the cosmic horizon, we’ll also meet our resurrected selves.”
“I raised that same point with my bridge crew when we first discussed this plan. If that happens, then we’ll have to integrate our memories with our clones once we arrive,” Tyra said. “Are there any other questions?”
No one spoke this time.
“All right, then we’ll all meet back in the med bay for stasis in one hour.”
The crew dispersed from the ready room, but Lucien remained seated. He was grateful for this second chance, but there still weren’t any guarantees.
“Stasis in one hour…” Addy said. “Why do I feel like there’s still a timer implant ticking in my brain?”
“Because we don’t know that we’re going to wake up,” Lucien replied. “A lot could happen in eight years, and if we don’t make it, then nothing’s changed—we’ll go on living in Astralis with no memory of ever even meeting each other.”
Addy reached for his hand. “I’ll find you,” she said. “And I’ll make you fall in love with me again.”
Lucien arched an eyebrow at her. “How do you know I’m in love with you? I’ve never said anything.”
“You didn’t have to,” Addy said, and kissed him possessively on the lips.
* * *
Lucien spent his last hour before stasis eating dinner with Addy in the officers’ mess. They had grazer steaks with sautéed taber root and fresh bread. Tyra was also there, eating her last meal by herself. Lucien felt bad for her.
“Maybe we should ask her to join us?” he asked.
“Wouldn’t that just be awkward?” Addy replied. “Being the third wheel on someone else’s date? Would you want to eat with Garek and Jalisa if you were over there by yourself?”
“I guess not.”
They finished eating with half an hour still left, so they stopped by Lucien’s quarters, and Addy took the opportunity to remind him not to forget about her.
With just five minutes left, they took a quick shower together and got dressed. By the time they reached the stasis pods in med bay, they were fifteen minutes late and almost everyone else was already there—most of them already in their pods.
Tyra watched them with a frown as they approached. “Get undressed and pick a pod,” she said. “Garek’s already configured them, so you just have to step inside.”
Lucien nodded and walked over to the lockers with Addy. They stripped naked and hurried to a pair of empty pods, hugging their shoulders and shivering in the chilly air of the stasis room.
Lucien tried to ignore the attention Addy was getting from the other members of the crew. “You ready?” he asked.
She nodded and flashed him a lop-sided smile. “See you in eight years.”
He smiled back and they shared a lingering kiss. Addy withdrew, giving his hand a squeeze, and they turned and walked into their pods.
The pod covers began automatically swinging shut, and Lucien heard his pod close with a resonant thud. Jets of stasis-inducing drugs misted the air, obscuring his view from the small window in front of his face. He felt his eyes drifting slowly shut, and he summoned an image of Addy’s face to mind. If he had any dreams over the next eight years, he wanted them to be with her.
Darkness encroached, pressing in and threatening to suffocate him. His racing heart slowed as the drugs took hold, and his thoughts turned to mud.
See you on the other side, Lucien.
He frowned, wondering why he was talking to himself in the third person. Then he realized it wasn’t his voice that he’d h
eard, but the silky smooth voice of one of the Faros. Adrenaline stabbed feebly at Lucien’s heart.
They’ve found us! he thought. I have to warn the others… but the darkness smothered him before he had the chance.
The Cosmic Horizon
Chapter 31
Lucien awoke dazed and confused inside a cramped space with hot air blasting him from all sides. Then he remembered where he was—stasis.
Had eight years passed already? On the heels of that question came another: he was supposed to meet someone on the other side… but who? And the other side of what?
The cover of his pod swung away, and he stepped out into the chilly stasis room. Other crew members came stumbling out of their pods all around him. Addy walked out beside him.
“We made it!” she said through a grin.
“Did we?” He checked the date on his ARCs. It was 31 EE. Eight and a half years really had passed. “I guess we did,” he said.
Pandora’s voice came over the ship’s intercom, telling the crew to report to their stations in preparation for a rendezvous with Astralis.
“They made it, too!” Addy said.
Cheers went up from the crew. They applauded and slapped each other on the back. Then everyone appeared to remember that they were still naked, and they hurried to the lockers to get dressed.
On their way up to the bridge, they were all so anxious to hear from Astralis and learn what had been found at the cosmic horizon, that no one seemed to notice Brak riding the elevator up with them. Lucien glanced at the Gor, remembering that Brak had a trial pending for when they returned to Astralis.
The bridge doors parted and everyone took their places—except for Brak, who didn’t have a station. He walked up to the blast-shielded viewports instead, as if to study the view.
“Welcome back, Captain,” Pandora said. “I would say it’s been lonely without you, but it was nice to have the conn all to myself.”
“Ha ha,” Tyra said as she paged through various displays from her station.
“We’re still locked out of the ship’s systems,” Addy said.
“Just a precaution,” Pandora replied. “We still don’t know who the spy is. I’ve informed Astralis of the situation, and they have some ideas about how we might be able to identify the individual.”
Lucien watched Tyra carefully. She was staring at a star map, zooming out to see their location at the largest possible scale.
“Well?” Garek prompted from engineering. “We’re at the cosmic horizon. What did we find?”
Tyra frowned. “Give me a minute…”
“I could save you some time,” Pandora put in. “The old cosmic horizon isn’t the edge of the universe, which is no surprise, because that would have made Laniakea the center. From here we can see that the universe goes on much farther than we could previously see.”
“But not infinitely,” Tyra said. She gestured to the star map hovering in front of her, sending it to the main forward viewport for all of them to look at.
A vast field of galaxies appeared, a shining web of light. It looked like it was made up of repeating patterns, but Lucien knew that was just a trick his brain was playing on him.
A red dot in the bottom right corner of the screen marked Laniakea, and a flashing green dot near the center of the display marked their current location. Running through that green dot was the forty-five degree arc of a blue circle—the old cosmic horizon. Up in the top left of the display, the shining web of galaxies abruptly ended, and an empty black void began. Another arc ran through that void, this one a lighter shade of blue.
“The light blue line is our new cosmic horizon,” Tyra explained. “As you can see, it passes through empty space. This means that we have found a kind of edge to the universe—that being the point where there are no more visible stars. The void might extend infinitely in all directions, or it might curl back on itself at much larger scales to form a finite sphere. Regardless, we’ve just disproved one of the most basic tenets of cosmology—the cosmological principle.”
“What’s that?” Lucien asked.
“It’s the idea that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic,” Tyra replied.
“And that means…”
Tyra glanced at him. “We’ve talked about this. You really don’t remember?”
“That was over eight years ago,” Lucien pointed out.
Tyra cracked a smile. “True. It means that on very large scales we used to think the universe was basically the same in all directions and at all locations, which is why it almost looks like you can see patterns on this map, but clearly we were wrong. That void proves it.”
“Not necessarily,” Pandora said. “The void and all of the superclusters of galaxies leading up to it could be a pattern that repeats infinitely at even larger scales than we can see now, like ripples on the surface of a pond. The void could just be the trough behind a consecutive wave of matter.”
“It’s possible,” Tyra agreed. “We don’t know of anything that could cause those troughs, but that’s what science is for—to come up with explanations for the unknown. We may have to travel into that void, or even past it to the next wave of matter, assuming Pandora’s theory is correct, in order to determine the real nature of the universe.”
“Hold on—” Jalisa said. “The mission was to reach the cosmic horizon. We’ve reached it. Aren’t we supposed to go back now and report our findings?”
“That’s for the council on Astralis to decide,” Tyra said.
“So the petition was a lie,” Jalisa said.
“The petition was just a means for us to get away from Etherus’s influence with enough resources to accomplish our goals. We specified ninety-six years to reach the cosmic horizon instead of the actual eight and a half that it would take for a reason. People won’t be expecting us to return until almost two centuries have passed. That means we should have time to answer all of our questions. And you all signed on knowing that we could be gone for that long, so you have no reason to complain now.”
“A simple yes would have been fine,” Jalisa muttered.
“We are about to jump to the rendezvous,” Pandora announced. “Five minutes and counting.”
“Understood. You can lift the blast shields now,” Tyra said.
“Are you certain of that, ma’am? If one of you is the spy, that person could conceivably learn the rendezvous location after we jump by studying the positions and luminosity of the stars around us.”
Tyra waved her hand dismissively at the bot. “Astralis had to have broadcast the rendezvous coordinates to us over omni-directional comms, so it’s hardly a secret where we’re headed. And besides, only a bot could triangulate our position just by looking at the stars.”
“Actually, that’s not the case, ma’am,” Pandora replied.
“Then you think very highly of our mental capabilities,” Tyra said.
“No, I mean, Astralis didn’t send us their coordinates via omni-directional comms. I broadcast our coordinates to them via omni-directional comms and then waited for them to reply with vector comms, which they did. Only I know the location of the rendezvous—and you, should you choose to query it from your station—though I would caution against that, in case Lucien gets a glimpse of the coordinates.”
Lucien frowned. “I’m not the spy.”
“You could be, sir,” Pandora replied. “Possibly on a subconscious level that you wouldn’t even be aware of.”
Tyra looked askance at him, and Lucien frowned. Before they’d even left New Earth, a mind probe had revealed a subconscious conflict in his motives for joining the mission. If he were some kind of sleeper agent for the Faros, that would finally explain his probe results.
“Even if I were a spy, do you really think the Faros are all the way out here?” Lucien asked. “We’ve traveled more than forty billion light years from where we last met them, and it took us over eight years to get here. Even if I wanted to contact them, there’s no way that I could communicate acros
s that kind of distance.”
“Lucien is right.” Tyra said. “Raise the blast shields.”
“Aye, Captain…” Pandora replied.
Lucien watched the blast shields slide up from the viewports, revealing the glaring red eye of a nearby sun, and the diaphanous veil of a bright green and blue nebula.
Moments later Pandora spoke again, “Jumping in five, four, three, two…”
Everything disappeared in a bright flash of light, and a new scene appeared—countless stars adrift in a boundless black sea. A glinting silver wedge lay dead ahead, no bigger than the tip of Lucien’s thumb at this range.
“It’s really them…” Tyra whispered.
“Astralis is hailing us,” Pandora said.
“Put it up on the main screen,” Tyra replied.
The head and shoulders of a man in ceremonial white robes appeared on the main forward viewport. “I am Chief Councilor Ellis. On behalf of Astralis, welcome back, Captain Forster. We have much to discuss. Please land your galleon in hangar bay forty-seven. Meanwhile, I have someone here who’s eager to speak with you. Councilor?” The councilman turned and nodded to someone off the screen, whereupon a familiar face took Councilor Ellis’s place.
“It’s… you,” Lucien said, looking from the woman on the screen to the identical copy of her sitting beside him. The one on the screen regarded him with wry amusement, while the one sitting beside him stared wide-eyed at herself.
“I’m a councilor?” Captain Tyra asked.
“We stopped sending out expeditions after yours almost got us all killed,” Councilor Tyra explained.
Captain Tyra nodded slowly, and Councilor Tyra’s gaze flicked between Lucien and herself, but she said nothing.
“What is it?” Lucien asked. “You keep looking at me like there’s something you want to say.”
“It’s just a shock for me to see us in this context.”
“Us?” Captain Tyra echoed.
“I suppose you’re going to find out before you integrate your memories, anyway, so there’s no reason I can’t tell you.”
Dark Space Universe by Jasper T. Scott Page 20