“Thank you,” Ashley said aloud.
“It was surprising, but not unwelcome. I might feel differently if I were standing beside someone other than her, though,” Oz replied, squeezing Ashley’s shoulder.
Ashley pictured what it might be like if she was standing beside Frost and tittered a little. She was still under Oz's arm, and felt more comfortable there than ever. The kinship she’d gained with him in just a moment of being connected was deeper than anyone else. Knowing what it was like to be someone else was incredible, and Oz was so strong in almost every way.
“I’d like to share what I am with you through a few of my memories,” the Triton said.
Ashley took a deep breath and nodded. “I think I’m ready.”
“I’m ready,” Oz said.
Ashley’s mind was filled with vivid images of the Triton being moved into the bowels of the ship. Glad caretakers that were his closest friends from birth wished him well, and offered tearful farewells as they caressed him for the last time before he joined with his new home. That was when he became the Triton, creature and ship united, and he connected to his first captain.
That captain was a two hundred and six year old human general named Trent Syphus. Four of his great-grandchildren were officers aboard, and the Triton would be his last command. He was best known for being an officer on the bridge of the Tsunami, one of the first ships to make direct contact with the Issyrians.
His retirement mission was to explore the galaxy and eventually join with Lorander in extra-galactic explorations. It was an exciting time for the Triton and his new commander. There were other senior officers who all linked to the Triton as well, and they flashed by. The Triton appreciated them all in different ways, forming personal bonds with each.
A deluge of thought and images detailed the months that followed. The Triton watched every member of the crew as it managed the new vessel. He watched children grow, crewmembers who couldn’t cope with being so far from home fall into despair and recover over time. The Triton visited countless worlds, and eventually fought an undesignated race of aggressors. Their ships clamped onto the hull of the Triton and burned their way through, assaulting the crew in the corridors.
The fight was eventually won, but that first painful engagement with an enemy that offered no reason as to why they struck from the darkness was an enduring scar. After nine years, the Triton was recalled by Sol Defence. The disappointment shared between the Triton and Captain Syphus was still fresh, and they returned to Kuiper Spacedock. The last memory the Triton had to offer was a visit from one of the people who helped bring him into being, a man named Najim Ghali. He spent two days communing with him as he watched his systems get shut down so the ship could be refitted. The process wasn’t painful, but emotional support was appreciated as the Triton’s greater body was disabled.
Najim said farewell, sad that they’d be parted again, but he was also so enthusiastic. “I’ll see you soon, Triton,” Najim thought to him, a smile on his face. “When you wake up you’ll be refitted as a long range combat carrier. I told them you were a fighter, and they finally listened.”
The Triton was excited at the notion. While his experience in combat was painful, the fight was invigorating, and he quietly missed it. Energy was drained from most of the ship’s systems, and Najim infused his containment system with the chemicals that would preserve him while the ship was under construction. He didn’t recall anything until only days before, when Ashley was trying to make contact with the override code.
“Now I must have a moment alone with Oz,” the Triton told her.
Ashley gasped and staggered as the being released her mind. She ended up dropping onto the nearest seat. She watched Oz slowly lower himself to his knees, then his head jerked.
Slowly, he lowered his face into his hands, shuddering several times. Ashley started to stand, but Oz raised his hand. “No! It’s all right,” he shouted as if competing with a great din.
She sat back and watched worriedly. Her experience with connecting to the Triton was wonderful; she knew she’d be thinking about it for weeks. To feel what it was to have sensors, to move between stars and to observe thousands of people who made their home in your extended body was incredible. Her perspective seemed broader, so many of her problems felt so small compared to how she thought about things just moments before.
Whatever Oz was experiencing had him grimacing one moment and flinching the next, until he finally sighed and stood. “I understand. I’ll find a way to repair the damage and make the improvements uploaded from Earth.”
“Thank you,” the Triton replied audibly. “Start with connecting me to my main computer interface after you’ve attended to the needs of your crew. I’m eager to connect with the updated software Sol Defence uploaded before breaking their connection.”
Oz turned to her and Ashley knew immediately that there was something terribly wrong. She was on her feet right away. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine. The Triton had to show me the damage. The biological circuitry aboard is poisoned too, so he can’t connect to half the ship properly. We were prioritizing repairs. Something else just happened with the other team though, they need us.”
“What?” Ashley asked as she followed him down the stairs as quickly as he could. He was taking the steps two at a time.
“We have wounded, and three technicians are dead,” Oz replied.
Chapter 31
The Victory Machine
The sight of all her medical experts gathered in the furthest corner from the door in the conference room did not instil confidence in Fleet Warden Kimberly Harrison. One of them, a kind-looking man named Dr. Sewell, glanced over his shoulder as she came in and whispered something hurriedly to his five colleagues.
Kimberly sighed and slowly took a seat at the end of the table. Reflexively she let the tie holding her neck-length blonde hair loose and then tightened it even more. They finally took their seats at the end furthest from her. Most of them avoided her gaze.
Dr. Sewell activated a full-sized image of the isolation room where they were keeping the man called Roman. He was laid out on a gurney, his protective suit removed, and he moved his head as though having an intense dream.
"Report," Warden Harrison demanded.
"It's as I feared," Dr. Sewell started, sitting up extra straight in his chair. "When we removed Roman's suit, we contaminated a sealed section of Enzo Station with temporal radiation."
"We knew that section was contaminated when we built it. The construction crew said it was a problem with the materials," Warden Harrison said dismissively.
"I'm sorry, Warden," replied a weary looking doctor Kimberly hadn't met before as she shook her head emphatically. "You may remember that room being contaminated since the station was moved into place, but that's a new modification to the time line."
"That's not possible, Charmaine," interjected a doctor wearing a white recovery mask. "You're saying that events that have already passed are being modified by this person, and that a whole construction crew would be too stupid to just build somewhere else, or use other materials."
"That's Doctor Kershaw to you. You're the only one here who doesn't concur on this matter. It's been noted, now let me explain the theory according to the majority," Doctor Kershaw retorted. "The machine that our patient is attached to affects objects and people in the near vicinity for a nine year period in each direction. If something is exposed to its temporal radiation for too long, or a person survives an intense burst, they will be forever changed. Some minor exposure is about as harmful as a mild tan, but if there’s enough exposure to make someone ill, then that illness changes their past. There is also a ripple effect that changes reality as we know it, like your memories. Just a few days ago, that section was clean, safe. That's how anyone who knew about it would remember it, but then he arrived, we removed his containment suit, there was an intense surge of temporal radiation, and the exposure changed its state. Since it is tempora
l radiation, the state changes not only in the future, but also in the past thanks to some kind of wake effect we don't completely understand yet."
"All right, so a few days ago, that section was clean. He got here and now it's been contaminated for nine years," Warden Harrison concluded impatiently. "What about our people? How does it look for them?"
"The nurses who removed him from his suit?" asked Doctor Kershaw. "They're fully contaminated, like everything else that was caught in the radiation burst. Their entire life histories have changed in ways we can't be aware of. For all we know, one of them had two children, but because they were retroactively affected by radiation nine years behind us in the time line, they may have abstained from having babies. That's how dire this kind of radiation is. While we can measure how large the area of exposure is, there's no way of measuring what kind of change the exposure has caused, because as far as we're concerned," she shrugged and made a broad gesture, “everything in this reality has changed thanks to a ripple effect that started with a big splash of radiation nine years ago. In short, we shouldn’t have removed his containment suit, we shouldn’t have tried to activate the machine ourselves without understanding it first. It has a way of expending the energy before extended surges, it creates high-powered wormholes for travel and remote seeing. We disconnected that temporarily. That is why we’re seeing these problems. We shouldn’t have tampered.”
Fleet Warden Harrison nodded. "That was an order from the top. There are all kinds of new technologies. Wormhole generation that fits in the palm of your hand, new armour systems, materials beyond our scope of development, and who knows what else. I couldn’t talk them out of trying to study this thing. I thought you could control this, some of you told me it would be easy to contain.” Warden Harrison sighed and rubbed her temples. “I’m getting a headache. I think I get the theory, let’s move on. Do we have a way of treating exposure?"
Doctor Sewell gestured towards his colleague wearing the white mask. "Doctor Finch has been treating himself for nine years. He was present when our mystery man was removed from the suit and toggled the machine."
"Yes, and you can't know how relieved I am to know that my condition will only last nine more years. It's taken all our tissue regeneration technology, but I've managed to live a somewhat normal life. I expect that, using the same treatments, the nurses and I will make it."
"So the effects of this exposure are nine years both ways," Warden Harrison concluded. "What about Roman?"
"He's absolutely terminal," Doctor Finch replied. "We were only exposed for a few seconds. He's been bombarded for years as far as we can tell, and is suffering from full systemic degradation. He might last a few days longer, at best. Containment isn't a problem though; we’ve adapted the micro scale technology in his suit on a room-sized scale in short order, so we’re safe."
"All right. What about that thing he's attached to, what was it called? The Victory Machine?"
"As far as we can tell it's a combination of technology from several different races built on a Sol System frame," explained Doctor Sewell. "Our attempts at a deep scan get, well, fuzzy."
"Even using the station's scanners?"
"Yes. It's the same as the Triton's computer core. Any attempt at a detailed deep scan gets scrambled by some sort of signal interdiction system that generates interference, but we've learned a lot from Roman's connection to the device," Doctor Sewell explained as he brought up a diagram of a net spread across the back of Roman's cranium under the skin. "This soft cybernetic implant interfaces the entire brain through bone. From our observations, we've determined that he communicates with the Victory Machine through a type of dream state. What he's most likely seeing are characters and situations in the dream that are showing him events of the future. They're interpreters for the petabytes of information the cable is carrying per second. As far as we can tell, the Victory Machine is collecting information from thousands of points in space, all at once, using microscopic wormholes that reach nine years into the future."
"Have you tried an interrogation scan?" asked the fleet warden.
"Yes, I'll get to that in a minute," Doctor Sewell said. "What's amazing about this device is that those wormholes were initiated ahead of it, meaning that at some point in time there was a sister device that created these wormholes looking backwards. We assume it was destroyed by a surge of temporal radiation, but the Victory Machine uses the residual radiation to fuel itself. Something must have gone wrong when whoever built it turned it on though, since there is a constant build up of energy that it has to expend on a regular basis. That is how we found Roman on the Triton. The device creates a larger wormhole under incredible compression called a crush gate. Now a crush gate-"
"I know what a crush gate is," Fleet Warden Harrison said. "It's a high compression wormhole that projects the traveller through fast enough to create the sensation of being flung to their destination. I tried a simulated one as a cadet, just in case we had to use advanced Lorander technology."
"Lorander Company has been using crush gates for decades, I wouldn’t call that advanced in the strictest sense. Anyway, the Victory Machine creates real ones. For all we know, Roman came from twenty, or fifty, light years away. He would have travelled that distance in minutes, hours, or days at the most."
"So it's like an exhaust system."
"Exactly," replied the doctor.
"What happens when he dies?"
"Well, we don't know exactly. The line leading from the machine to his head is bidirectional, so he's determining the crush gates' destination as far as we can tell. The Victory Machine could start travelling on its own, or it could employ another kind of safety mechanism. One thing we do know is that it can never shut down."
"What, these things don't break? There have to be delicate electronics corroding in there," Warden Harrison said.
"We have no way of knowing what kind of electronics are at its core thanks to inconclusive scans. It could break down tomorrow, or in two hundred years."
"All right, and what happens if there's no safety mechanism for this thing's exhaust or it just fails one day?"
The masked doctor straightened in his chair and replied, "Did you learn about the Borucki Colony incident?"
"You mean the biggest temporal explosion in history?" Fleet Warden Harrison asked.
"Yes, it was the last serious large scale attempt at manned reverse time travel. One of the first colonized solar systems was rendered uninhabitable. That was one large negative temporal disposition wormhole set to travel a relatively short distance physically. If there were a temporal event due to the failing of the Victory Machine, thousands of points in our galaxy, possibly our universe, would suffer from smaller, but devastating explosions. The larger events could create black holes. While not as large as the one in the Borucki system, these microscopic wormholes most likely point to inhabited areas, so they'd be just as devastating."
"So there's no way of destroying it?" asked the Fleet Warden.
Most of the doctors looked down at the table in front of them, while Sewell and Kershaw looked at each other. After a moment they nodded at each other and Kershaw turned to the Fleet Warden. "We have to listen to Roman. If we give him what he wants, I believe he'll use the next crush gate to move the Victory Machine to a safe distance and he’ll begin shutting down the microscopic wormholes, greatly reducing the area a temporal implosion or explosion would affect."
"I have to ask, since the defence minister will have me ejected from the service if I neglect the question: can we make this machine useful? Could we hook our own man up to this to serve the Carthan government?"
"No," answered Sewell and Kershaw at the same time. "The consensus of this panel has determined that it's a death sentence to whoever we connect, even for a short time," Sewell stated flatly. "That, and keeping that thing near any of our installations, on any ship, puts them at risk."
"Out of all the military personnel we have here - who are mostly criminals serving a sent
ence, I remind you - you wouldn’t choose one to hook up to this machine? We could even send him or her from one unmanned station to another," Warden Harrison pressed.
“No, it would be inhumane and there’s another, more important factor here,” Doctor Sewell insisted.
“Go on.”
“There is an important interaction between the Victory Machine and its partner. We believe Roman is interpreting data from the future and is part of an extrapolation system that uses collected information to predict much further into the future. Not only that, but we are fairly certain that he chooses where to go. If we were to use even the most reformed criminal, or any human for that matter, there’s no way we could assure that they wouldn’t try to visit relatives, or change the future for their own ends, or even intentionally misguide us in some attempt at revenge. I hope that man in there, Roman, is some kind of saint, with the purest intentions, or he could do a lot of damage.”
“I can find saints in our ranks, Doctor. I can even find ultra-patriots. Our reformation program works, regardless of your well-known opinion of it,” the fleet warden countered.
"All right, let's say you do find someone perfect for the job. What would our time viewer look at? They'd view Carthan worlds, seeing what happens to us in nine years according to the actions we take right now. Sure, he or she would also be looking at our enemies, maybe into areas we don't normally have access to, but primarily, we'd be interested in ourselves, right?"
"Undoubtedly."
Kershaw continued where Sewell left off. "So we'd be at most risk. For all we know, the Victory Machine could fall apart just as whoever we replace Roman with is looking at Galt, population one point five million, and a black hole bursts open right in the middle of Union Square."
"Thank you, I think that'll be enough to turn the brass’s attention away from using it for the military. So we seal Roman back up in his suit, listen to what he needs, give it to him, and then he goes on his way," Fleet Warden Harrison concluded. "So, what does he want?"
Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework Page 27