Noumenon Infinity

by Marina J. Lostetter

  Once the sphere was complete, the engineers would go searching for answers to energy retrieval. And all the while, LQ Pyx would make deposits in their node banks, so that when they could tap it, there’d be plenty available.

  Joanna put a hand on Anatoly’s shoulder—a gesture more familiar than they’d ever shared. “Good luck today. I know you’re just putting on a show for convoy morale, but it’s also remarkable. This is it, ’Toly. This is what our entire continuum has been leading up to. Your success isn’t just important to all of those in the convoy who have passed, or all of those in the convoy now, or even all of those in our line who propelled us toward this moment. It’s important to me, personally, and I feel . . .”

  She trailed off for a moment. He couldn’t tell if she was searching for words or stifling a geyser of emotion. “I am extremely grateful—and privileged—to share an embodiment with you—the seventh Revealer of our line.”

  Something finally broke through Anatoly’s emotional walls—whether it was the monumental importance of the day, or the openness in her expression, he couldn’t say. An overwhelming compulsion to embrace her swept over him, and he gave in. He felt a sense of kinship with his biological sister that he’d never felt before.

  When they parted they both smiled and laughed lightly, aware that their embrace was not something they could have achieved on any other day, and might not feel comfortable indulging in ever again. But that was all right.

  “Everything’s wonderful today,” Joanna said dreamily. “Everything.” She shook herself—the small shiver wracking her body as she seemed to drift out of a euphoric unrealism back into the now. “I better return to Mira. Good luck with the send-off. I’ll await your signal.” She saluted.

  He saluted in return. “I’ll see you in the amplifying booth later?”

  “Of course.”

  Anatoly’s was the last shuttle for the next twenty-four hours—no one would be allowed to travel between the ships unless an emergency called for it. Almost all normal activity aboard the convoy had ceased. Ninety percent of the crew was now packed onto Mira, settled in the arms of friends and family, eagerly awaiting the momentous event.

  Once Mira’s bay was sealed, a horde packed inside. The large monitors there made for prime viewing of the Web’s completion.

  The amplifier booth had been constructed within the hangar, off to the leftmost side against the wall. Its sides were clear, so that Anatoly could see the crowd and they could see him. All part of the planned spectacle.

  Opposite the booth on a raised platform sat his cycle partner, Jamal Kaeden the Forty-Fifth—he, too, belonged to one of the most important lines, and Anatoly could admit Jamal’s had perhaps the most spectacular Reveals of all. The convoy might never have known about the continuum without his ancestor. The silliness of his own self-importance when thinking about Joanna came crashing down, and he almost felt grateful for the dose of humility. He smiled at Jamal, who smiled back. Board members sat all around Jamal on the platform. They looked regal in their high-backed chairs, like kings and queens of old.

  Stepping inside the booth, Anatoly connected a few wireless sensors to his temples and settled into the cushy lounge chair. The sensors let I.C.C. connect to his brainwaves and amplify the signal through its system. I.C.C. would route the commands to outer broadcasting units, where they would be reinterpreted back into proper bio-signals and sent to the Extensions working three dozen AUs away.

  The Extensions were currently en route to the Web, propelled by a special delivery shell.

  When the puppets arrived ten minutes later, Anatoly indicated to I.C.C. that it was time for the captains to reposition the fleet. They sailed away from the star—back, back into the inky black of space.

  The monitors in the bay broadcasted various false-color feeds of LQ Pyx and the Web. None of the convoy’s cameras could zoom in close enough to make out the tiny workers diligently putting the final touches on the construct. If someone wanted to see that, they needed only turn to the amplifying booth, where Anatoly was acting out the commands given to his Extensions.

  Only a few minutes of construction time had passed when Joanna joined him in the booth. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine. What’s happening out there? It’s noisy.”

  “Lots of people are mumbling to themselves—calling on their lines. A group was just breaking out into dance and song on the other side of the bay as I was passing. They’re starting to get rowdy.”

  “What, no drinking games?” He accidentally let a tool slip and had to quickly refocus on the construction.

  “Are you kidding? No one wants to risk a hazy memory. They want today to slide as cleanly and clearly into their continuum as possible.”

  “I don’t blame them.” Another slip.

  “Sorry,” she said, realizing she was forcing him to divide his attention. “I’ll leave you alone. Just let me know when you’re ready for me to announce completion.”

  The hours slipped by and the party raged on. The excitement built, burgeoning throughout the room, creating its own visible haze and sweet scent. There wasn’t a melancholy face or still body to be found. The people formed a mass that jumped and writhed like a non-Newtonian fluid pumped with a heavy bass beat.

  It neared a hedonistic frenzy. Whatever felt right in the moment was done. Pure joy exuded from every human being present.

  They were ready for their Dyson Sphere to come into being, to reflect the glory of their efforts back to them.

  There were so many things they could do with the power from LQ Pyx’s Sphere. Their civilization could expand, go on for millennia. They would no longer have to constrain themselves to a hundred thousand souls. Think of how many new Reveals there could be—how many new connections could be formed, how many lines of understanding could be drawn—if they could grow. If they no longer had to be confined to their nine-ship environment. They could create other, more permanent structures. This system could become a new home for humanity.

  Many people thought maybe it could be more than that—a new refuge for scientists, engineers, and artists. A place those in the Sol system would seek in pilgrimage, to learn the ways of Convoy Seven’s devotion and dedication. A place where the resources were plenty, minds were sharp, and creative passions fueled prosperity.

  More important to some individuals was what this would signal to their sibling convoy—Noumenon Ultra. Hopefully they would receive Noumenon Infinitum’s message of triumph and come home, rejoin with the rest of Convoy Seven. They yearned to be one again, sharing in their long-awaited success.

  While such hopeful visions of the future flitted between the more cogent crew members, and as the throng’s ecstatic vibrations hit a fever pitch, Joanna called out updates. Each of her announcements was met with a hearty cheer.

  Meanwhile, Anatoly’s brow glistened with sweat. The mental effort of keeping himself in a separate consciousness from the process of building weighed heavier in his limbs than any physical strain. “I’m about to finish,” he told Joanna, “And I’m going under. I want to be there—within the Web.”

  “Do it,” she said, laying her fingertips briefly against his wrist. “I’ll make the announce—”

  He let himself go.

  In the next instant the convoy was gone. It sat, invisible to the Extension’s eyes, millions of kilometers away. Now all he could hear and feel was the deep resounding quiet of space, and the occasional wisp of solar wind.

  The vast globe of nodes and lines fanned out around him, creating mind-bending curves in all directions. His muscles tensed suddenly, as the familiar sensation of being caught in a trap descended. He’d made this mental trip into the Sphere more times than he could count, but the initial sensation of eminent collapse—as if, like a lead fishing net, the Web could suddenly swallow and crush him—never lessened.

  It was impossible to become desensitized to the Web’s greatness.

  Narrowing his focus to one Extension’s visual input, he gazed at the ot
hers while still guiding their work. One last wire connection and the Web would be whole.

  He knew what the Sphere looked like from the convoy’s perspective: complete. It had since the party began. Only he’d been able to sense its progress toward final unity.

  Please let this work. Please let something happen, he said silently to himself, gazing back, back across the continuum.

  He spoke out loud, knowing Joanna would hear his words and repeat them, “I’m about finished. Completing the last circuit and—”

  Pure fire—the most pain he’d ever experienced—flashed through him so quickly the signals hardly registered in his brain. The receptors almost couldn’t accept the input fast enough.

  But he felt it.

  He lost contact with the Extensions. Their sudden absence kicked him back into his body with the force of a shuttle crash, further adding to his pain. He gasped and thrashed in the chair, confident he was drowning but his lungs hadn’t caught on yet.

  The rush of sound back into his brain made it seem amplified ten times over. There was shouting and clapping and stomping and whooping.

  Everyone was enraptured by the monitors. The only one who noticed Anatoly’s distress was Joanna.

  She fought with his flailing arms, struggling to keep him still while shouting, “What’s wrong. Anatoly? What is it?”

  The ambient noise from the crowd coalesced into a collective gasp, and slowly Anatoly regained control of himself.

  Calm enough for his eyes to focus on the monitors, he was surprised by what he saw:

  It appeared as if LQ Pyx was expanding. Its light and matter billowed outward with incredible speed, swelling within the net of the Web. In one false-color image, what looked like purple light radiated from each node in streams, locking them together with three times as many beams as the physical tethers that held them.

  The burgeoning of the star soon clarified itself. “Oh my god,” Joanna whispered, “it’s lifting Licpix—siphoning off its external layers.”

  Each mechanism was forcing LQ Pyx to put forth a massive solar flare, but with a notable inconsistency: the older devices were exerting more pull on the star than the newer ones. But that wasn’t what concerned Anatoly. The Web wasn’t, as Joanna thought, lifting the star.

  It was doing something far worse.

  “The Web’s doing it too fast,” Anatoly gasped, righting himself. “It’s ripping the star apart. It should just absorb the output. How can it have the energy to take Licpix apart?”

  “I thought the devices were off . . .” Her gaze darted to his.

  A pit overwhelmed Anatoly’s insides, sucking them in as quickly as the star was being sucked apart. They’d come to rely on LQ Pyx as their standard of normalcy. To lose their star was as profound a blow as if they were to lose the Web. It was a constant in their universe.

  They’d never meant to . . .

  What have we done? Anatoly thought, asking all those who had come before.

  Their silence was as pure as the vacuum of space.

  The people of the convoy stared for hours in stunned silence. The elation of moments previous had morphed into muted denial. No one else wanted to give voice to what Joanna and Anatoly had whispered to each other. Perhaps if they kept watching, their fears would be erased. They’d see that they were wrong—that LQ Pyx wasn’t dying.

  Long past the start of the sleep cycle, people were still standing and watching. The star’s layers pulled back like wisps of smoke, and its brightness dimmed as a candle being slowly carried off into the night. Solar winds whipped the star’s atmosphere into a flurry: the nodes extracted both energy and matter.

  No matter which electromagnetic input they flipped to, they couldn’t figure out what the devices were doing, what force they were exerting. They could identify no magnetic field, no particle acceleration to superheat the outer layers of the star, nothing.

  The true nature of the Web was simply beyond their understanding.

  All they could do was stand by and watch a core player in their daily lives destroyed, knowing they had killed it.

  Anatoly and Joanna remained in the booth, slumped against each other in the reclined seat.

  Their only comfort was in understanding that this act should give them enough energy to power their civilization for generations upon generations, that they could leave and explore further, create new missions and new purposes for themselves—presuming, of course, that they could in fact extract the energy from the hungry nodes.

  May 4, 1079 Relaunch

  6666 CE

  Mixed feelings ran manically across the convoy. Waves of depression washed away waves of hope, and vice versa. The incredible speed at which the devices worked seemed less dire now. No matter what forces were at play, destroying a star took time. LQ Pyx’s accelerated life had not yet breached its death throes.

  So Anatoly turned his attention to the question of extracting the energy. They weren’t destroying a star for nothing. It was a natural resource, not a friend or a god, and they needed to face it as such. There were plenty of stars in the universe, and there was no reason to view this one with emotionality.

  We don’t dream of Sol. We’ll get over LQ Pyx.

  Yet, that line of thinking was only a way to fool himself, of course. The convoy losing LQ Pyx was like Earth losing its moon. The changes to daily life would be dramatic. Could they live without it? They would find a way.

  Did they want to live without it?

  That was another question.

  No one could face it and not feel a sickening pit in their gut. LQ Pyx was revered and respected, seen as everlasting, even if no one in the convoy had ever matched those words with their sentiments before.

  Right now, though, those were notions Anatoly couldn’t afford to harbor. There was still work to be done. He couldn’t just sit back and mourn.

  At the moment, he and a subteam surrounded a harvested node in Slicer’s monstrous belly. This particular node the crew had cherry-picked from the Web centuries ago and replaced with a replica. Like blood-sucking parasites looking for the best place to lay into an animal, they searched tirelessly for an outlet—anything that could be a retrieval point.

  Hundreds of years, and they’d still had no success.

  “There has to be a way to access it,” Anatoly stated for the umpteenth time, swinging limply in a sling hung from the scaffolding. He had a hand in among a nest of wires near its top, the other lay at his collar. He was unconsciously touching his new undershirt. Seven points now instead of six. Receiving the garment hadn’t been the occasion he’d hoped, what with morale so low. It turned out there were certain things it was no good Revealing. He pulled his hand away. “The project is pointless unless something can be extracted,” he said.

  Static zinged through his headset. “Maybe the joke’s on us,” one of the team members replied morosely. “The devices were on the whole time and we didn’t know it, gathering enough energy to suck Licpix out of its gravity well. Suppose the buggers who started it are out there, waiting to get the signal that the Web is working, so they can swoop in and steal the finished product out from under our noses.”

  Anatoly scratched his unshaven chin even as he shook his head, dismissing that idea. Why wait millennia for someone else to build the thing? If the original builders were still out there, wouldn’t they have completed the Web themselves? And it didn’t answer the question of how the energy was meant to be utilized, accessed.

  But something that was just said niggled at him. “‘On the whole time . . .’” he mumbled. “You really think it could extract enough energy from one star to tear Licpix apart this fast?”

  “Was that a rhetorical question, sir? Because there’s only one star here.”

  But that’s what had been bothering Anatoly—something he’d glossed over many times before. The gap had been uneven and damaged before their work had begun. The records said it looked like a section of the Web had been torn away, yet he had never doubted that it was simpl
y incomplete. He’d written the inconsistencies off as natural damage wrought by space junk.

  But what if someone had damaged it on purpose? To stop it from doing exactly what it was doing now?

  His mind was trying to connect the dots, but either his synapses weren’t firing fast enough, or he was missing something altogether.

  Why had he thought of the frayed edges now? What did that have to do with a lack of obvious output?

  Trying to make his thoughts come together, he stared off blankly into the hangar’s distance, where a holographic replica of the ancient Nest hovered high above the activity below. Noumenon Ultra had taken the real thing long ago.

  Why was the Nest left orbiting within the Web? The mystery had long bothered previous generations, but it had never been within his field of study. He thought back to what little he knew about the alien craft.

  The crew had perished, and the ship had been left undisturbed. Didn’t the crew have companions? A convoy would never leave a ship behind—a human one, at least. But it didn’t seem logical, this far from crucial resources, that any beings would abandon such a trove of material. It would be stripped if unusable, anything and everything would be salvaged from the wreck—but the Nest had appeared unabused.

  Could a ship that small have traveled solo?

  No, no one thought so. It was assumed to be equivalent to one of their shuttles.

  An inkling at the back of his mind told him the gap and the Nest had something to do with each other, but he couldn’t decide on what. Why would a ship come to visit the Web and abandon one of its shuttles? And what was he trying to imply?

  That they’d vandalized a portion of the megastructure?

  “Sir!” A man approached waving a ‘flex-sheet, urgency paling his features. “A message from Mira.”