“Mum?” she called out across time, “Ready?”
“Born that way, sweetie,” she replied.
“Dad?”
“Always,” his voice returned to her.
Kate turned her attention to Öskjuvatn Lake. For the Node’s exiles and the Discovery’s crew, the date stood at December 21st 2112.
“OK,” she said, “It’s time.”
She could sense her parents, guiding the 2013 events at Houston.
After Abel had heard his father’s angry shout, he’d run away to a place of comfort on the Starfish regolith. Monica had taken advantage of the fact and, calming his upset mind, she’d guided his hand to draw three letters in the grey dirt; an abbreviation that would cause Lawrence to correct a critical oversight. The letters would also act as an important bond with the other people they would later meet.
Douglas had already lowered the temperature in the vicinity of the Starfish facility, in preparation for the required inflection event. Currently he was arranging causality to move Ross Crandall away from a monitor, while Monica was building atmospheric charge directly above a tethered camera balloon. At the appropriate time, Monica’s lightning bolt destroyed the cameras and monitor. With no way to determine the distance of the tsunami that was approaching Houston, the occupants of the Apollo 73 no longer had an early warning system. They were forced to launch their improvised vessel immediately. An action that had allowed Douglas to begin carefully inundating the Starfish facility, ahead of the tsunami’s later arrival.
“All set here,” said Douglas, indicating an isolated moment in time.
The final thruster underneath the submerged Apollo 73 had just failed, sending it into a roll. Kate could see the spherical eversion volume that her father had wrapped around it, in preparation for the journey ahead.
Reaching for 2014, Kate could feel the Sea-Bass within the ice-ring’s inflection horizon. The genetically diverse ‘Substandard’ occupants of the Warren, were now safely within its lower deck. Triggering the required sequence of temperature drops, she waited until Pavna took hold of Mat’s hand; a simple decision that held a complex outcome. Once this was complete, she enveloped the submarine within a manifold inflection.
Kate looked at the multiple lives that she was about to alter. Although they were spread throughout time, they shared one thing in common. In the original version of events, each of their lives had simply ended, often pointlessly. By her intervention, their timelines could continue afresh; historical threads rewoven into the fabric of a new space-time.
Focussing on the separate events, Kate slowly pulled the manifolds closer together, widening the inflection horizon to accommodate the increase in transported matter. As the events intersected each other, she gently pinched them together to create a new ‘now’.
She saw the resulting disturbance outside the Node and the coordinated efforts that had followed to get everyone to a common place of safety. The Exiles and the Astronauts, the Enhanced and the Electronic, all in one place.
All in one time.
Ironically, thought Kate, the Exordi Nova premise that Siva would usher in a ‘new beginning’ was about to become a reality.
She became aware that her parents had joined her again.
“Did it work?” Monica’s thoughts reached her.
They watched as the arcs of continuity and causality sprang out from this convergence event; twisting and reshaping mankind’s faltering future.
In places, Kate began to see additional structures within the continuum; flattened spiral formations with repeating intersections, blatantly circular patterns, and point events that seemed to have no timelines extending from them at all.
She felt a sudden and childlike bubbling glee rise within her. For the first time in a thousand lifetimes, this was something exciting and new. Everywhere, choices were multiplying once more, as fresh spurs and branching timelines rippled outward.
“New Tree!” Douglas’ jubilant thoughts reached her.
“New Roots!” Monica laughed and pointed, “Look at the ISS stream!”
Douglas laughed, “Now why didn’t I ever think of doing that?”
ROOTS
9th July 2113
The three-dimensional cylindrical model continued to slowly rotate on the screen in front of her. A small part of her wished that Mike, Cathy and Anna could have been here to see it, but Lana knew they had an equally important task to achieve on Earth. If Foothold were to be a success, then her efforts now could not waver.
She turned her attention away from the flat ring feature that encircled the cylinder’s interior and saw that Chris Powell was busy investigating the geometry in detail; dragging a virtual tape measure between different points on the plans. At times he would tap at a calculator, his eyebrows furrowing and arching in reaction to the results.
“Mr. Powell,” she approached him cautiously, “You have found something, yes?”
He concluded another calculation and laughed. Lana knew that she herself didn’t laugh often, but to hear him laughing put her a little on edge.
“What is it?” she asked.
Spotting her worried expression, he immediately moved to put her at ease.
“No, no, everything’s alright! It’s just… well…” he glanced again at the diagrams on his screen, “There’s a pattern here.”
“Explain. Please.”
He rubbed at his forehead, as if working out the best way to present his findings.
“OK,” he began, “There was something familiar about the internal proportions, so I looked at the radius.”
“About one point four kilometres,” Loren Ballard joined them and was now looking at his screen.
“Ah, except it isn’t,” he smiled at them both, “There’s an additional fourteen metres.”
He tapped at the screen where he’d annotated the radius with ‘1.414 kilometres.’
“Stopping at three decimal places,” he continued, “that figure is the square root of two.”
“Go on,” Loren frowned.
“Well that’s the square root of the first prime number,” he looked at Loren as though she was missing something obvious, “It turns up all the time in trigonometry and it’s turning up all over this thing. Once you treat root two as a unit of measurement, all sorts of proportions start neatly dropping out of the geometry.”
“Like?” said Loren.
“The length of the cylinder isn’t five thousand, six hundred and fifty-seven metres,” he pointed at the diagram, “it’s four units. The circular entrance at this end? Exactly one twentieth of a unit wide. Factor in Pi and it gets even better…”
Lana watched as he zoomed into different sections of the model to demonstrate his points.
“…Square kilometres of the circular far wall? Two Pi. Total curved surface area? Sixteen Pi. The width of this circular band feature bisecting the cylinder? Root two divided by ten Pi…”
He zoomed out to show the whole cylinder.
“…The proportions are everywhere.”
Clearly the numbers were not accidental, Lana thought; there were coherent patterns at work. But knowing what she did about the EVA message, it all seemed part of a larger picture, the extent of which she couldn’t yet see.
Ivan Meznic arrived next to her.
“The, er, fabricators,” he seemed to experiment with using the term, “they were designed to work in zero gee?”
Lana hadn’t really thought about it but when Fai had designed ‘Number4’, the bulky ancestor of the current units, it had only operated in zero gravity.
“Yes,” she replied, “for use in orbit.”
“I think one of them got stuck on the inner surface,” said Ivan, pointing to the approximate location on Chris’ screen, “The data from its accelerometer suggests that the whole cylinder is spinning.”
“What?!” Loren pushed away to consult her own workstation.
Lana could see how the fact might have been overlooked: so far, the data they’d reviewed h
ad centred on the object itself rather than its movement relative to anything else.
“Looks like you’re right, Meznic,” Loren called over her shoulder, “It’s spinning about the long central axis…”
“Period of rotation?” Chris now called out and started jabbing at his calculator.
“About seventy-five seconds,” Loren called out.
“Let me guess,” he half laughed, “Seventy-five point four?”
“How the hell…?” Loren began.
“Just a hunch…” Chris shrugged, continuing his calculation, “… that figure is also twenty-four Pi.”
He lapsed into silence for a few seconds, appearing to verify his own calculations. A moment later he was smiling broadly.
“Told you, didn’t I? It shows up everywhere. Twenty-four Pi spin period, root two radius… no wonder the fabricator got stuck.”
“What have you found, Mr. Powell?” Lana asked.
He presented his calculator towards her so that she could see the display.
It read ‘9.8’.
“On the interior, there’s exactly one gee. Earth gravity,” he shrugged, “We could walk around down there.”
The ISS central axis modules exploded with a cacophony of discussion.
Amid the frantic activity that followed, Lana saw that Ivan was working alone at a workstation. The images on his screen were ones that she’d seen before: airbrushed illustrations of a lunar civilisation laying its first roots, complete with glazed tropical domes and smiling families.
“Thomas Gray’s vision?” she spoke aloud.
“There was just something so… optimistic about them,” he admitted.
“When I was at the FLC,” Lana found herself comfortably replying, “we used to tease Eva about her father’s designs. Our daily reality was much more, ha, grey.”
Ivan smiled, but then seemed to become contemplative and stared at the flower she was still holding.
“We’ve been given a gift, you know…”
Lana found herself nodding. The abundance of elements and the lunar cylinder itself had been waiting in orbit for them after receiving the EVA message. She may not know how it had been achieved but Ivan was right, it was a gift.
“Like Chris says,” he shook his head, “we could walk around inside that thing. The more I look at Gray’s images and the cylinder’s possibilities, the more it seems that we should be doing more than simply… surviving… out here.”
“Ivan,” she replied, “You must speak your mind.”
He seemed hesitant but eventually replied.
“Unless I miss my guess, we don’t have enough resources to hibernate the crew…” he seemed to be working through the problem aloud, “… and the timescales involved are… well, they’re beyond what the Field can achieve, so…”
He shrugged and lapsed into silence.
Lana knew that the biggest obstacle to creative thinking was working within limitations that need not apply. The time had come to tell the crew, but it seemed right to tell him first.
“Ivan,” she lowered her tone, “Do you know the Russian word ‘Matryoshka’?”
As before, he was receptive to her explanation and could immediately see the extraordinary potential of how she’d used it. When she was sure of his support she gathered the crew outside the RTO module. She directed their attention to its porthole and Miles Benton’s cocooned form within. Among the bundles of cables, an LED display was clearly visible; the light intensity of the individual segments appeared to waver slightly, but the digits didn’t change.
“That stopwatch started after I closed the RTO…” said Lana, “…Over four hours ago.”
The seconds on the stopwatch stood frozen at ‘12.16’.
“How’s that poss…?” Chris frowned.
“It is Matryoshka,” Lana replied with a smile.
“OK, what?” Chris frowned.
“Fai?” Lana spoke to the air.
“Yes, Commander.”
“Please explain the M-Field.”
“The M-Field, or Matryoshka Field, is a nested set of Chronomagnetic Fields. A smaller secondary Field, containing Mr. Benton, is operating within the primary Field being generated by the ISS.”
“Shit!” Loren laughed nervously, “Seriously? A Field inside a Field?! I mean… that thing’s stable, right?”
“Yes,” said Lana, turning to look at Miles, “Mr. Benton has proved it is so. We continue to owe him a debt.”
She knew the equipment within the RTO’s Field could only keep him alive for 24 minutes, but for Fai’s dedicated server sitting outside the even bigger ISS Field, this was over 60 years.
By the time Fai found a solution to Miles’ condition, it was entirely possible that Foothold would already be complete.
ITERATION
Miles thought he was beginning to understand Fai’s explanation.
“So, the fabricators appended a small Field generator to the outside of the RTO module?”
“Yes,” Fai replied, “I then reactivated the primary ISS Field before engaging the secondary RTO Field. With both Fields running at a temporal ratio of twelve-hundred to one -”
“The effect was compounded,” Miles nodded in appreciation.
“A temporal ratio of one point four four million to one,” Fai confirmed, “It provided more than enough time to engineer a solution to save you.”
Miles looked at his simulated reflection in one of the ISS monitors. He was the end result of over sixty solid years of artificial intelligence development.
“Fai,” a question now occurred to him, “Where are we really? I mean where is all… this… actually being run from? Somebody’s computer server?”
“I cannot summarise the computational mechanism in terms you would currently understand, however what you would call our consciousness is aboard one of the original ISS modules.”
An optimistic thought burst into mind.
“Can I talk with anyone aboard?”
“I’m afraid not,” she replied, “There is no longer anyone aboard the ISS.”
Miles considered the events she’d already begun to describe.
“Because of Foothold?”
“Yes, Miles.”
Although he was gradually coming to terms with his own physical death, he suddenly felt an acute sense of loss. It was almost as though everyone else had died and he’d been left alone.
Perhaps seeking solace or company, he found himself wandering through his older memories. Vast landscapes of grey desks stretched out before him; memories of ego-morph cases he undertaken. Corridors of rooms that were all his; memories of his later years at the Pittman Academy. As expected, all the rooms were empty, they were recollections of his isolated life and offered no comfort. In answer to his most immediate need, he arrived outside a busy classroom, a frozen tableau from his first day at the academy.
Through the glass he could see Dorothy Pittman writing on a blackboard with soft chalk and Maxwell Troye raising an enthusiastic hand. Before going their separate ways, he’d been his best friend at the academy. Maxwell’s troubled family life had given him incredible focus during his school hours and they’d fallen into an easy friendship. Only in later years, when their ego-morph responsibilities had forced their mutual isolation, did they lose contact. He’d often wondered what became of him.
“Miles,” came Fai’s voice, echoing around the wide corridor, “Why are you down here?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the happy scene on the other side of the door’s glass panels.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged, “Comfort, maybe. Trying to make sense of it all.”
The thought suddenly occurred that this was his life, flashing before him; slowed to a snail’s pace because of some bizarre Field-related reason.
“My ‘previous iteration’…” he used Fai’s phrasing while pointing at his younger self, “he… I… seemed so happy. I had family, friends… a life. There was always so much to look forward to
.”
“Miles, I cannot express this clearly enough,” Fai’s voice sounded earnest, “There is still much for us to achieve… a task that I cannot complete without your uniquely human perspective.”
Before Dorothy Pittman and Robert Wild had twisted him into something dark, the four-year-old Miles in the classroom had enjoyed helping others. He drew a deep breath and turned away from the memory.
“You need my help?” Miles asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll need yours,” he said, “This is difficult.”
“You are not alone…” said Fai, “…and, like you, I will always help.”
Miles nodded and began the journey back to the simulated central axis of the ISS. He reached the elevator then stepped inside.
“Where do you want to start?”
“Iceland, 21st December 2112.”
From other information Fai had discussed, he knew this was the date that Fai had first duplicated her core program. He made an educated guess.
“Your earlier iteration?” he used her terminology, “Was she there?”
“Yes.”
“So you can show me?”
“Yes, Miles,” she replied, “Should I extend your ISS simulation to encompass the new data?”
He knew that if he was to make personal progress, he would have to begin ordering memories for himself.
“No.”
The Iceland events had taken place before the creation of the ISS simulation so, to make any historical sense, he’d have to place the new memory space somewhere more suitable. He looked down at the elevator panel and created a new button, which immediately lit up.
“OK, Fai,” he prepared himself to interpret her recount, “Let’s take this slow.”
The elevator doors opened.
DAY ONE
21st December 2112
Insulated enough to protect against the Icelandic weather, large enough to accommodate everyone who had inexplicably arrived at this location and date: the spacious cargo bay of the redesigned Discovery had been the obvious choice for a meeting place.
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