“Oh, such a clown,” Opal said, without humour.
“Thanks, I’m getting good at being funny. But back to my point, which was important and super-clever: when your mind somehow got mixed up with Athene’s during the EMP blast that hit her just after she’d uploaded your data and was still incorporating it, that faint alien connection partly passed to her, and then a shred of it on to me. And I think you are doing exactly what you’re meant to.”
“Good. Now I just need to know where to go, especially if we haven’t got long. If all the shadowed layers are different places connected to my current point, then I could spend a lifetime exploring. And it would be a short lifetime if I run out of air.”
“I do not think you would be brought to a hopeless place. There must be clues in what you see now, and what you saw before passing through the fracture.”
As she floated amongst these giant vortices, which made her think of liquid being sucked down a drain, Opal tried to map out the shapes and sights of the adjacent spherical worlds – or rather, bubbles that contained worlds – which overlaid hers in their own flicker spaces. Some she recognised from before, but in different juxtapositions, and some were new. It was as if a whole 3D universe compressed into overlapping points but still enabled traversal along pathways that interconnected this matrix of bubbles – so many of them that, seen as a whole, it resembled a dense and colourful foam.
She gave descriptive names to some of the most distinct areas. Nonsense ones, with probably zero translatable reality to the phenomena that really existed there, but enabling some kind of mapping. And so the worlds nearby gained conceptual solidity.
The high-motion bullet ricochet. The stormy ocean. The gel-web that sliced through twinkling stars. The big brown twitching eye. Some kind of space full of swimming blurs, which seemed to invert every few seconds. A field of tree flowers. A tendril of annelid tissue folding within itself.
Some sounded like better places to visit than others.
Then Opal gave an estimate of distance. Of course, it was purely gut instinct, no way to really measure it, but she would take the cards she was dealt, as ever. No time for a reshuffle and to start a new game. At this point the suit generated schematics on the HUD, each world drawn as a distinctive bubble with its own cartoony icon, and all of them spread out as if existing in a 3D space so Opal could check the model and correct it.
“Move the square suns balloon further away ... that’s it, next to the neon tracery that keeps exploding.”
It actually started to make some kind of sense in this way. She told the suit which ones she had seen before, in what she thought of as the training zone, and whether they now seemed nearer or further. The suit then tried to create lines of possible explanation of where she’d been and gone to – interconnecting guesses at how the fracture had transported her, and what future routes it offered.
“Too many possibilities,” she said. “Useful, but we need to know more.” When she focussed on the correct distance she was relieved to see that the small gelatinous personal sphere still surrounded her. She’d been able to use it to pass from one area to the next before, maybe she could do it again. “I’m going to try and leave this whirlwind zone behind and pass through another fracture. I think I can do it quicker this time. I’ll pick one that seems nearby and quite calm. Then we can see how that changes the map.”
One of the bubbles which flickered over her world of outlines was relatively blank. From this distance it was just a smooth grey texture that would perhaps enable a clearer view of its surrounding zones.
She gritted her teeth, knowing the short-lived pain she’d endure on passing through the fracture. Nothing else for it if she was going to survive this. Pain is pain. It had as much power to control her actions as she allowed it. There wasn’t the luxury of slowing down.
Symbols zoomed in, stretched, changed angle. The flow came from her mind, tickling the interconnections, rotating dials of texture. It was so easy, almost as if they wanted to open for her. The matrix spread and pulled her through, and again it felt like she’d fallen from a great height onto a net of bone-severing nano-wire, but she was through and in a new space.
Understanding
< 8 >
CLOUDS OF SILVERY FOG drifted by as if it was a world of mist. It resembled the window view on planetary flights whose trajectories took you high in the tropospheric level so that glowing clouds piled up below and around the craft.
The peaceful grey haze obscured much of her view, but as it drifted breaks appeared, revealing partial glimpses of more open spaces which contained movement. She floated towards one of the larger cloud-voids, and it took concerted observation to make sense of what she saw in those moments when the fog parted.
Giant multi-jointed arms seemed to sprout from the silvery shroud to the side of this space, and each was as large as a tower block or construction crane, dwarfing anything as small as Opal. (What were they attached to, just out of sight in the obscuring layers? Opal shuddered at the thought.) These organic, but definitely inhuman, arms manipulated massive shell-like structures throughout this open space. Strings of sinewy material were being tucked and woven into them, like web from giant spinnerets. Small shapes darted back and forth against the vast hulls.
Then it clicked.
“It’s a shipyard,” Opal explained to the suit. “Off in the distance. A vast dock of some kind. They’re building space ships.”
“I detect emissions that may coincide with motion of external bodies. There is a lot of it here, disparate discharges. It’s as if I’m suffering kinaesthesia, but I can definitely distinguish the differences between this area and the last.”
“The movement here might be the things orbiting the hulls, some kind of drones or smaller creatures. Some of the ships are absolutely massive – though tiny compared to the humungous and weird appendages extruded from the fog and working on them. Other craft are far smaller. They’re being stitched together, or part-fabricated ... it resembles a kind of primitive 3D printing. The drone things might be supervising, or dealing with fine detail ... or even just be distractions, random organisms living in the same space, like those small marine beings that live alongside huge ones.”
“Red herrings. Only joking. Interspecific co-operation is often seen within threat-filled environments such as inhospitable depths, where the more robust species becomes a moving ecosystem for the smaller ones. So, Opal, do you think this is all construction? To me, that implies unified intelligence.”
“That’s what I feel. But one of the ships looks different, less alien. Hold on, let me try and focus ... somehow I can see closer without moving. It’s a weird medium everything exists in here, like a liquid that can be tightened and adjusted to become a lens ... yes, this one has markings. And it’s not being built, it’s being dismantled. I think it’s a ship from our world!”
“What condition is it in?” asked Aegis, excitement clear in her voice. “Do you think we could use it?”
“Erm ... no. The outer hull’s in pieces, propulsion systems seem to be half dissolved. It’s a wreck. I can’t see any humans, corpse or otherwise. But this whole section is definitely a production line. Maybe completely automated.”
“Even then, someone had to set it up at one point. And that implies purpose.”
“Yes, it’s totally different from the other overlapping worlds I’m coexisting in. Reminds me of some planetary exploration aptitude training I did when I was kid. Measuring probabilities versus conditions, and the way scale plays a part. You could find a planet, colonise a small part of it, sample all sorts of areas and deem it to be free of intelligence – then stumble across a subterranean transport network, or set of phytological infrastructure, or ruined terraforming mounds that revealed past civilisations. Luck of the draw where you touched down at first, and what you saw. But it’s not random here, I know it. What are the chances I’d emerge into this cloud world right next to a pocket of activity? As if I was led here, to witness this. But then
what? I have a feeling that I’m on the right track, but ... there are so many options, so many fractures nearby that I could transport, and even more beyond them, like I’m seeing through worlds to other worlds and – fuck, there are thousands of the things! And I know we haven’t got long.”
“So you can see other worlds, or spheres, even through this cloud?”
“Yes, with this weird mental focussing ability I can perceive the flicker of other distant places, their spheres glowing, all connected with this cold wind which passes through them.”
“You’re doing great. Fill me in on what’s around you, the other bubbles of reality or whatever you want to call them. Tell me which you recognise, and whether they seem to have changed position or distance from your last location.”
“I’ll do my best.”
And she did, trying to recall and explain it as succinctly as possible, adding in new locations that had come into overlaid focus, and existing ones that had receded to blurry flickers. The HUD images updated with new map possibilities, occasionally enhanced by the suit’s attempts to pull information from the alien sensory input which was the only thing it could work with, apart from Opal’s voice. One was overwhelmed with information, one underwhelmed by disabled senses, and yet they were piecing it together, and the projections seemed to work in terms of showing where she was. But they both recognised a problem. Each time she passed through a fracture, the relative locations didn’t quite match what they expected. And without knowing the rules, they might pass through a door and end up a lifetime away from the direction that tugged at Opal’s mind.
“Try different spatial realities,” Opal said. “Maybe they aren’t spheres I’m in, but other shapes that just look circular from my observation point. Scale might be distorted. They could be overlaid ellipses, maybe? Kidney shapes? Interconnected irregular patterns like the design as the fractures open?”
“I’m trying all that, but just don’t have the hardware to do the calculations for every permutation. I wish I had Athene’s processing capability. It’s not fair!” Exasperation in the suit’s voice. “I’m useless. Resources are down another fifty per cent. Soon we’ll be running on fumes and I’ll have to truncate my calculations further just to maintain life support.”
“You’re not useless. You’re amazing. You’re keeping me alive. Heck, more than that, you’re keeping me sane in this place. Have you any idea what would happen if I didn’t have someone to talk to? How lonely this would be, how quickly I’d lose it? I need you. But if we can’t do complex calculations, focus on the simple ones, see if any of that makes sense. I could do some other passages, maybe the next fracture could provide a clue.”
“I ... Well ...”
“What? Are you okay?” Opal asked.
“Yes, I think so. I was going to say I had an idea. Maybe I should scratch that and instead declare that I am a genius. Or even a mini-goddess.” And now Aegis started laughing. The display on the HUD changed. Aegis took the 2D plane map of bubbles with their silly interior images based on Opal’s creative descriptions, and transformed them into flat circular icons mapped onto a big 3D sphere.
“The answer was deceptively simple – and I think this model roughly matches all the descriptions you’ve given me so far. I had been approximating things to experienced geographies, but there are theoretical ones that can be mapped.”
Opal used her eyes to slowly scroll the globe, trying to make sense of why it seemed both familiar and alien.
“I tried out some non-Euclidean form maps,” said the suit. “Hyperbolic geometries. What you’re looking at is a disc model using truncated triheptagonal tiling. I won’t bore you with discussions of hypercycles and horocycle convergence, or the way circles in this model contain more area than their Euclidean equivalents. But it’s worth noting that parallel lines in hyperbolic geometry diverge towards infinity rather than remaining parallel, so it’s almost impossible to return to your starting point on this kind of hyperbolic plane.”
“Luckily I don’t want to go backwards.”
Now Opal used her eyes to give the tiled globe-shape a quick flick, impetus to make it spin at a steady pace. But all-too-soon the known (and named) areas faded to the Here Be Dragons of blackness. Dotted lines showed the route Opal had taken.
“It’s only an estimate until we find anomalies and can adapt to create a more refined model, but if it matches what you’ve experienced so far then, even if it doesn’t correspond to external reality, it can still be used as a tool for now.”
“It sort of makes sense to me, and at the same time there’s something ... well, alien about it.”
“There are marine invertebrates that co-exist in colonies and secrete substances such as calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton, which is sometimes referred to as coral.” Here the suit brought up an image of a heavily fringed fan-like creature. Although the HUD was transparent, Opal could make out the shape as it rotated next to the globe map. “This is one from the ocean planet of Fressus, where I know you once lived. The coral is flat at the base and frilled at the edges. Even if it was a soft substance you couldn’t press it down on a flat surface because of those massively-curved edges. You’d have to fold them over. However, in hyperbolic geometry, you could press it perfectly flat. That’s what my disc model approximates.”
The coral thing disappeared, and the round map grew to take over the centre of the HUD again. Opal moved it around, exploring the areas the model said were adjacent to her.
“Hold on, this map suggests I’m nearer to some of the bubbles than I thought,” said Opal. She looked beyond it, towards the edges of this zone she floated in, and focussed. Maybe ... yes, although some worlds flickered into blur, the indistinctness wasn’t caused by distance, but something else. Maybe the membranes separating them differed in thickness and consistency, or effect. That explained why some of her estimates of “distance” had possibly been wrong. That was probably good news. She explained this to the suit.
“Different containers ... yes, that could fit this model.” Aegis seemed excited by the possibilities of the place. “It reminds me of menageries – there is crossover with what you might call zoos,” said the suit. “Beings of different types are kept in cages for the amusement of the captors. The cages have to be of a type capable of both containing the creature, and providing the conditions of life support it requires. So the container for an aquatic creature might be made of a toughened transparent material that allows passage of light but not liquid; the conditions for a nocturnal oxygen-breathing desert-being may be completely different. Perhaps these different spherical zones act in that way, each one a world-biome, suited to one purpose, one being?”
“If that explains the difference between what I thought was there, and what your model shows, then that means I can take shortcuts, right? And some things that seemed far away could be stepping stones?”
“Possibly.”
“So even if your model is only a tool, it’s a useful one – it’s showing me areas that I can get to that I’d originally ruled out! See, I couldn’t do this without you!”
“Thank you. And I did it without all the iterative calculation power Athene has! That makes it all the sweeter. I feel a warm glow in my extremities.”
Opal tuned out Aegis’ boasting and focussed on surveying the places with her mind, and her eyes; noted what was near, what was distant. She tried to identify signs of the local conditions. Even as her sphere of awareness grew, it didn’t become overwhelming – rather, she seemed to remember and comprehend greater amounts. Maybe it was like a muscle, worked hard, quickly strengthening as micro-abrasions were replaced with hypertrophy, adapting to what’s required of it.
She even began to discern the contents better. Some spheres did contain beings, entities, and environments. Perhaps she was looking towards their home worlds, the gelatinous fracture substance acting like telescopic lenses, pipes of light she could float in. It filled her with wonder to see so much evidence of life, so much that
was alien yet identifiable, hardly visible yet intriguing and attractive in its partial glimpses.
Not all were like that though. As her mind vision spread out further afield, leaving her body behind, she found that amongst all the chaotic life and hardly-understandable bubbles there were also some apparently-barren dark zones, with no discernible details within. As her mind brushed them she felt abyssal emptiness, as if all motion had been sucked from whatever existed there before, along with all heat, light, and life.
She moved on, following the sensation of pulling, of intelligence, that emanated beyond and between these different areas, and communicated her goal to her. It felt like a promise: “If you can get here, then your sister will be found.”
Her mind snapped back into her body.
“Was I gone long?” she asked, noting that the air tasted stale as the gaseous recycling was pushed to the extremes.
“I did not notice you were gone at all. Well, a second or so, by my worthless estimation.”
“That’s good. I’m acclimatising. Able to far-sight different areas, and maybe that takes less time than I feel subjectively. Could be useful.” And she did her best to describe some of the surrounding zones, only the key places, the ones that seemed to be in the correct direction – or whatever it approximated as. “Let’s see if we can find a route before I suffocate.”
Fracturing
< 7 >
ANOTHER FRACTURE. THE pain was easier to ignore. Maybe it was because she had to keep moving if she was going to live, and what you can’t avoid, you put up with.
This bubble had light gravity. She found herself landing gently on a silty grey mess that clouded up in her touchdown. Above was an obfuscated sky, like fog. Large shadows passed over her, gliding forms silhouetted by the pale flickering light coming from above in a way which changed her perception, made her think of underwater environments, as if she stood on the off-shore slope beneath a shallow sea.
Chasing Solace Page 26