Pilot X

by Tom Merritt

  “I do too.” The Secretary shrugged. “But I have never understood Progon logic or Sensaurian emotions much. I’m sure it makes sense to them.”

  “Both civilizations are doing this?”

  “In different ways, yes. I’m sorry I need to be so vague. More details might help it make more sense, but not much. I’m telling you just enough so you’ll understand why I’m giving you some future assignments.”

  The Secretary got up, stepped across the hut’s floor, and put a hand on Ambassador X’s shoulder. “This is a test. A trial period, if you will. I don’t want to sound overdramatic, but if you were to be indiscreet, it would not go well for you. If you can’t accomplish a task, keep these details quiet, and you will not be blamed or punished. All we ask for is your discretion, your silence, and your best efforts. Can you do that?” The Secretary looked at him steadily. “Ambassador X?”

  He nodded. “Yes, Secretary. What do you need?”

  Ambassador X strode out of the hut, looking worn and tired.

  Agent Asa followed him.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “The plan? You’re to become my daughter,” Ambassador X quipped. “Wait.” He turned on his heel and pointed a finger. “No, wife.” He resumed walking. “Wait—no.” He stopped, turned, and then smiled, bringing her up short. “You’re a secret agent. So you’ll understand. I can’t tell you.”

  She laughed. “Fine. I understand. Just drop me off—”

  “No.” He waggled his fingers. “Not possible. Can’t tell you why. It’s classified. Go on in, though. The Secretary will see you now.”

  She gaped a little. Right there at the bottom of her mouth. It was just hanging low enough to be described as a real honest gape. “You’re stranding me here?”

  “It’s not stranding. You have him! Plus, I’ll be sending someone along. Don’t worry. I’ll try to get the current time right so they arrive just after I leave. Though I don’t know where exactly I am, so that might make matters more difficult. Still, nothing can be done.”

  There it was again. Gaping.

  “Now go on.” He waved her toward the mud hut and entered the Verity.

  As he sat down in the command chair, Verity asked, “Where is Agent Asa?”

  “Detained,” he answered. “Which reminds me. Send a message through the Secretary’s loop device out there. I think it should be on. You’ll need to slingshot it back to the time we left and alert the Secretary himself that he’s stranded just a bit. He’ll understand.”

  “But I know the coordinates here,” said Verity. “I could—”

  “No time,” he giggled. “Figuratively.”

  “Are these the Secretary’s instructions?” Verity asked.

  “Somewhat. My interpretation of them.”

  Agent Asa came bursting out of the mud hut at a run. She was angry and yelling something.

  “Here we go!” He gave Verity the departure instructions, and she complied.

  “You’re not a nice man sometimes,” Verity said to Ambassador X.

  “I’m discovering that,” he answered.

  STEP ONE

  The Sensaurian Mission to the Fringe Cascade was not actually located inside the Fringe Cascade. The Fringe Cascade was at the extreme edge of the universe. Granted, an infinite universe had no proper edge, but nothing existed beyond the Fringe Cascade, and nobody explored past it. Many brave hearts had sworn to do so, but none had found it possible. There just wasn’t anything there to explore. Time and space lost all meaning without points of reference. It was an edge as much as an edge could be when facing infinity.

  Something in that edge affected the Sensaurian hive mind. Perhaps the comprehension of infinity and nothingness caused the Sensaurian mind to lose cohesion and break into individual components. For whatever reason, the Sensaurians located their Mission to the Fringe Cascade just outside the actual cascade. Their staff were also widely known to be uncharacteristically friendly, even though they were still the same Sensaurian hive mind. They were like a permanently mellow Sensaurian after a good long vacation, amiable and slow to anger. Though a Sensaurian could never truly be thought of as friendly.

  Ambassador X arrived very late in history. Sensaurians could send thoughts—some said parts of themselves—back in their own history. The Secretary wanted the effects of this meeting to travel back through as much Sensaurian history as possible. He already knew it wouldn’t affect all eras. The Dimensional War existed, after all. But the Secretary hoped this meeting could limit its expansion and thought Ambassador X’s success on Pantoon made him the best one to try.

  “Or it might be they’ve harbored a grudge against me ever since Pantoon and are looking forward to this day upon which they eliminate me,” Ambassador X said to Verity. Ambassador X talked to Verity a lot more than he used to.

  “Ambassador X, how long were you with the Secretary?” Verity asked. “You returned to me within a short period, but your personality growth indicates a longer absence.”

  While she asked this vexing question, she put herself in a neutral approach and began signaling diplomatic intentions to the Sensaurians, saving him the trouble of changing the subject to ask her to do so.

  He sighed. “I was gone a total of about twelve subjective Alendan years, I think.”

  “That is surprising,” Verity said in a measured, even, and thoroughly unsurprised tone of voice.

  “I know. The Secretary put me through a bit of training. He has a back-jumper.”

  “Back-jumpers are illegal.”

  Verity was right. A back-jumper was a small, efficient yet dangerous piece of equipment that threw a person back about four years or so at a time. They only worked because they avoided almost all safety precautions. They were not only illegal but destroyed on sight if confiscated. Usually.

  “Yes, I know they’re illegal, but I guess that matters less if you’re the Secretary and you’re trying to build a proper mud hovel on an out-of-the-way planet while training an Ambassador in the fine art of tripartite diplomacy and trickling out just enough information about a potential Dimensional War to make it interesting.”

  “It’s made you a bit snappy,” Verity observed.

  “Wouldn’t it do the same to you?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t say,” she answered truthfully. She literally couldn’t. She was an artilect firmly embedded in a timeship. She had no concept of the issue.

  “Well, I expect it would if you were ever able to find yourself in such a situation. And it certainly did me. I learned a lot.”

  “Would you like conversational therapeutic parameters turned on? It sounds like you might want to get it off your chest?”

  He sighed again. Not because she suggested it but because hearing Verity use phrases like “get it off your chest” meant she had already turned it on.

  “Well, since you already activated it, we might as well use it. How much time until we are approved for landing?”

  “I can time-skip us out and back so we don’t miss approach approval and have all the time you need to talk.” Her voice took on just a hint of an uncharacteristic caring tone.

  He nodded. The one thing he loved about Verity was she thought of everything. So he couldn’t very well be angry or surprised that she did so now.

  “Here’s what happened.”

  Ambassador X told Verity about his meeting and the Ambassador’s revelation about the Dimensional War.

  “The Secretary said Progons and Sensaurians are waging a Dimensional War at several fixed points in space-time, tearing at the bundles of relative timelines that converge on these points in an attempt to undo them, which of course is suicide. Neither civilization is coordinating its efforts with the other. In fact, they often fight over access to the points. The Guardians of Alenda have charged the Secretary with discovering why these civilizations are doing this and how we can stop them.”

  The Guardians had developed two theories about why this was happening. One was that Sensaurians and Prog
ons both discovered technology they thought could preserve their people from the effects of forcing an alternate reality that eliminated their enemies. The Alendans had once developed a device called the Instant that could do this, but it could only protect one or two people. If the Sensaurians or Progons had developed something with a wider protective range, they could wipe out all opposition while preserving their own society.

  This seemed implausible since even in the case of the Instant, the surviving person could not integrate fully into the new timeline. None of the events that formed the survivor would have occurred, and it was even possible that a replacement version of themselves might appear. The Instant had been ruled too dangerous even for research and had been prohibited from being constructed.

  The other theory was that each civilization misunderstood dimensional physics and thought they had an advantage they didn’t really have. It wasn’t much of a theory, but even so it was the favored one.

  The Secretary convinced Ambassador X to help investigate, swore him to secrecy, and then asked him to submit to the use of a back-jumper. Ambassador X was sent back four years to help the Secretary build the mud hut and receive training. When he arrived, he found two other versions of himself were there as well. That’s because once he had worked for four years and caught back up with the present, the Secretary made him use the back-jumper again. Twice. So for the four-year period, Ambassador X worked alongside one version of himself who had already been there four years and one who had been there eight. They were all him, and presumably after he had done it for twelve years, he wouldn’t have to back-jump again. It was a horrible breach of ethics in every way. The Secretary used the three versions of Ambassador X as physical labor and trained each version individually and rigorously in Progon and Sensaurian diplomacy. Ambassador X now knew everything the Secretary, and therefore any Alendan, knew about both civilizations.

  “It’s so easy to teach you since I always know what you learned exactly four years before,” the Secretary had crowed. He instructed each version of Ambassador X in order each day from least experienced to most experienced.

  The lessons usually came during physical labor.

  Ambassador X would be digging up dirt to cart over for the building’s walls, for instance. The Secretary would come up and start drilling him.

  “What are the four major types of Sensaurians?”

  “Overmind, Command, Soldier, Worker.”

  “What is the name of the Progon homeworld?”

  “Tiel.”

  “What are the Sensaurian eating habits?”

  “We do not know, as they refuse to dine in diplomatic situations.”

  “Should you ever offer Progons food?”

  “It is not necessary, but they appreciate the courtesy. Only offer once, as they see the insistence as an insult to their machine nature.”

  “What are the Sensaurian wheeled containers properly called?”

  “Buckets. They really are buckets even in translation. Hilarious.”

  “Focus. What is unique about Progon evolution?”

  “They are noncorporeal and had the lowest probability of reaching sentience of any known sentient species.”

  And on and on, day after day, until the day before Ambassador X’s original arrival. Every time Ambassador X reached that day, the Secretary made him use the back-jumper again—until the third time, when he hid himself and made a break for it. He always knew he would make two jumps back before he could get the chance to hide and get away, because he had told himself when he first arrived in the past. The first and second times through the timeline, he saw himself plan and succeed.

  Ambassador X was confused a little by the whole thing and he’d lived through it. Verity seemed to understand.

  “When Agent Asa went in to check on the Secretary, she didn’t find another me. The first me had already back-jumped,” Ambassador X finished telling Verity.

  “So you were instructed to leave Agent Asa after all?”

  “Nah,” Ambassador X laughed. “The Secretary had kept me for twelve years and I had bided my time so I could be sure of getting back to the day you were here. Leaving Agent Asa with him was just my way of complicating his life. He’d have a lot of explaining to do even if she didn’t see multiple versions of me.”

  “Had Agent Asa seen you at the building before?” Verity asked.

  “No. He always sent me out on some kind of gathering task or something when she visited. I could tell she’d been there. She always brought him new intel and a few supplies.”

  The Verity shuddered unexpectedly.

  “What was that?”

  “I brought us back within microseconds of our departure. Some turbulence was encountered as a result of the time proximity. Apologies, but I wanted to ensure Sensaurian sensors did not notice.”

  “Alendan ship Verity, you are cleared for docking,” a Sensaurian voice sounded through the ship.

  “And so my task begins,” Ambassador X said. “I will deliver the Secretary’s request that the Sensaurians give up their attacks on fixed points. Think they’ll go for it?”

  “Without more detailed knowledge of your recent training or the nature of the Dimensional War that may be taking place, I give it a fifty-two percent chance of success,” Verity said.

  “I’ll take it,” Ambassador X said. “You know, Verity, twelve years alone with a man is enough to drive someone a bit mad. Looking forward to flying with you was what kept me going.”

  “Thank you, Ambassador X. If I could feel, I’m ninety-two percent certain I would feel the same way.”

  “Was that a joke, Verity?”

  But the door had slid open and a Sensaurian in a motorized bucket awaited him.

  “Welcome to Fringe Base, Ambassador X of Alenda. We are pleased to have you,” it said and led him up a ramp from the dock through circular corridors. The corridors were completely round, not flat on the bottom like Alendan corridors would be. Ambassador X noticed the wheels on the base of the Sensaurian’s bucket splayed out to the sides as they rolled through these corridors, adapting to the surface. He wondered why they hadn’t made the corridors square. He concluded some Sensaurian segments must convey themselves in huge gerbil balls.

  They eventually wound their way into a large square room. Ambassador X would have a difficult time finding his way back to the dock if he had to go on his own.

  A table sat in the center of the room. A few chairs had been pulled up, but mostly there was empty space for Sensaurians to wheel in. Ambassador X noted an odd assortment of eating utensils and platters placed around the table. In the center was a predinner snack layout for a multitude of species. Some of the food looked entirely inedible, but there were some familiar Alendan meats and cheeses.

  One glass of something sparkling had already been poured. The Sensaurian asked Ambassador X to have a seat in the chair by the glass.

  “Are we expecting guests?” Ambassador X said. “I’m flattered, but I don’t think I could finish all this alone. Especially the Progon Oil Tarts. If those are tarts—”

  “We were unclear on what you might expect or desire, so we prepared a variety. Please taste the wine and let us know how well we have done.”

  My, they were friendly. He took a sip. It was delicious. He didn’t know wine as well as he should, but he was certain this was from the Fromge region of Alenda. How Sensaurians got ahold of it he hadn’t a clue. He took another sip.

  “I thought Sensaurians never dined diplomatically?” he said.

  “We don’t,” the Sensaurian answered as Ambassador X realized his mistake. He also realized the room was filling with a fine mist.

  “Is it getting foggy in here?”

  “If our informants were correct, for you it is.”

  “You poishoned an Ambassador of Alenda?” he slurred, getting groggier by the second.

  “We poisoned our greatest enemy. The one who embarrassed us at Pantoon. The one who would go on to destroy our entire civilization.”
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  “You won’t get away. Beshides your hishtory is written,” he tried to stay conscious.

  “Unless we can undo a fixed point. A fixed point involving something you will do. Except you won’t do it now. It’s the last element we needed, and you handed it to us at the end of history. You will not leave here, and you will not deliver us the final blow, and therefore we will unfix the Mersenne time point and be saved.”

  “But Mershenne was just a trade pact. In my pasht. It’s nothing. Besshides, Verity will report back without me what happened.” He was pretty sure he was still conscious.

  “You’re thinking of the wrong Mersenne time point. Your timeship will go nowhere except into our labs. And you? An unfortunate accident in the Fringe Cascade. It seems you overshot our location and shot off the edge. So sad.”

  The Sensaurian did not sound sad. Then it didn’t sound like anything at all. Nothing did, because Ambassador X had lost consciousness. His last thought was that what he was thinking might be his last thought ever.

  I got another thought was the first thing he thought as he woke up. This room is ugly was the next. Then he spoke aloud through a rough cough. “Where am I?”

  “The Fringe Cascade in an emergency trans-species life-support unit,” answered Verity.

  The room was just ugly enough for Ambassador X to believe it. It was not much larger than the size of a closet and a dull gray similar to lead. He lay on a square platform not properly sized for Alendans. A species-agnostic bioscanner was arrayed above him, and a small screen displayed his vital signs along one wall. Otherwise, there were no comforts. Light filtered down from the scanner, but there were no bedside lamps. No clocks. No video screens or tablets or any kind of device. Only a button to call for emergency help on the wall near one side of the platform. Not a very convenient placement. So where had Verity spoke to him from?

  “Where are you?” he coughed.

  “In a Fringe Cascade docking bay, patched into your bioscanner.” The voice now came identifiably from above. “The doctors wanted someone familiar with your species to observe you. I was the closest they had.”