astrophysics fiction

[Editor’s note: if you missed any of Mark Laporta’s serialized astrophysics science fiction epic, you can still read the entire story from the beginning.]

Zach’s throat went dry. A call from a murdered Crelenk was the last thing he expected.

“You’re supposed to be … be dead,” he said.

“They don’t want me to speak about what we saw,” said Loor.

Zach tried to ask her location, but she cut him off.

“No time,” she said. “Find the equation. My captors … speak of an equation and … must stop.”

Zach’s comstreamer went dead. He had to assume that Loor had an implanted device similar to his own. All but the most sophisticated models were traceable from ten meters away, and only the highest government operatives were given those.

Must have come back for her, he thought.

But what could he make of her request? Like the average non-mathematician, Loor probably had no idea what an equation actually was. Or had she meant “make the equation,” that curious phrase in plain language that meant “find the connection?”

Despite Zach’s confusion, the fact that Loor was alive took a weight off his mind. Otherwise, the information was useless; no one would believe that he’d heard from her. Even if he allowed the authorities to scan his internal comstreamer log — a painful process involving a mental probe — some might still question its authenticity.

In Zach’s world, everything electronic could be faked. All it took was evil intent and a morbid degree of obsessive perfectionism. And according to Altov, even the University President was willing to believe he couldn’t be trusted. An alert tone from his computer array distracted him from this gloomy line of thought. His heart raced. Only data could save him — and the fabric of space-time.

By now it was just past sundown and he hadn’t eaten since the meagre breakfast he’d barely kept down. Yet his appetite still had a long way to travel before it would reach his consciousness. While that didn’t stop him from feeling dizzy and spastic, fear drove him to ignore everything except his frantic search for exoneration.

Yet what was he thinking? Even if he established a connection between the Extrasol incidents and the granular effect, he could still be convicted of murder, if a powerful interest wanted it badly enough. He must also prove that … somewhere … there was a connection between a third party’s actions, the granular effect and, by extension, the two-hundred-seventy-five Extrasol explosions. The data: what could it tell him?

It took only a few clicks on his gray, ovoid handheld to compile a significant cross section of the available data into a convenient holographic display. From that point on he worked rapidly, with hand signals that were as second nature to him as “touch typing” was to his distant ancestors.

Within three hours, which passed for Zach as if Time had no meaning, correlations began to appear. It was not, thankfully, the tentative kind so beloved by peer-reviewed journals or politicians splitting hairs to scrounge up votes. This was solid evidence.

Each of the explosions on Extrasol-built colonies had occurred within forty-eight hours of a routine inspection tour. Each inspection tour had been preceded and followed by the transmat of massive repair and monitoring equipment. Zach, eyelids drooping, pressed on.

The white paper he thought, said something about exponential latency increases … there!

His eyes came to rest on the sentence he’d been searching for.

As indicated in Figure 1, the growth rate of the latency effect increases exponentially with the mass and weight of the object subsumed by the Ultramat quantum signature field.

The white paper went on to say that the simultaneous use of transmat equipment by anyone else in the vicinity of the transfer:

could create pockets of dense gravity commonly associated with an event horizon, but contained in a volume no larger than the physical dimensions of the affected object.

Zach nodded, as he thought back to his conversation with Craig Rynerson.

“Overlapping latency zones,” he said. The pieces were beginning to fit together. Haliak colony had been built by Extrasol, whose inspection crews had been on its lunar surface only the day before Loor TreVal’s unexpected late night call to Zach’s hotel room. And Loor, he now remembered, had shown him the sapphire-encrusted shoes that she’d just received by transmat ─ as a birthday present from her daughter. The following day, boom.

It was the sort of correlation he’d been hoping for but, as he quickly realized, it wasn’t enough. So far, all he’d proven was the likelihood that Ultramat’s transmat process was behind the explosions. Yet, despite his unscientific survey of one blast survivor on Haliak, he’d found no quantifiable cause and effect relationship between Ultramat and the granular effect. There was still the nagging possibility that the occurrence of the granular effect at the blast site had been a bizarre coincidence.

Still, Zach’s discovery counted as progress. For the first time since he arrived at the Physics Department Annex twelve hours earlier, his mind cleared and he realized how ravenous he was. Nothing would have pleased him more than to shower and capsule into New Copenhagen. There was, after all, an undeniable charm to that prim college town, whose yearning to be a major cosmopolitan city surrounded the University like a dense fog. But that, he knew, might only draw ill-advised public attention.

It was the Faculty Club Dining Hall for him, where his pariah status would at least gain him the solitude to ponder his next move. He picked up his jacket from a wobbly hook on his office door and headed down the Annex staircase. Something about the building’s maglev lift still filled him with dread.

Looks like the rodents got to It again, he told himself.

Yet he soon found his decision to take the stairs had consequences of its own. One flight down, he could swear his steps had acquired a suspicious echo. The farther he went, the more distinct it became and, by the time he’d reached the second floor, it was clear the echo was not only more out of sync with his shoes, but was gaining speed. Too late, he followed its lead and raced ahead to the main floor landing — only to feel a powerful tug on his right bicep from behind.

He spun around and caught a glimpse of a menacing blood-red android. He struggled to tear his arm away and opened his mouth to yell, but his effort was cut short by a silencing blow that sent his limp body to the floor. In his remaining seconds of consciousness, he thought he heard … he thought … he.…

Whether it was hours or days later, Zach felt a trickle of warm water run over his eyes and down his cheeks. Eyelids still clamped shut, he tried to breathe deep and was met with waves of discouraging pain. His effort to talk out of a desert-dry mouth met with even more resistance.

“Don’t, Hon,” said a soft female voice. “You’re not up to it. You’ll find out everything you need to know when Dalamacras is ready to tell you. Want my advice? Do what everybody else with a brain does. Listen. You’re a smart guy, right? Sure you are. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here. Now. Don’t go nowhere. I’ll be back with a nice IV unit for you. Fix you up in no time.”

Zach heard a pair of soft-soled shoes scrape their way out of the room and decided his only option was to give up any thought of escape.

Dalamacras, he thought. Sounds like an Alegarli name.

What, he wondered, would an Alegarli Khalarnoch want with him? Alegarli society being what it was, only someone from the top caste would have the resources to hijack him on secure University grounds and then fly him out, undetected.

Or had this particular hive-based mentality found human allies to facilitate Zach’s kidnapping? It was hard to see why. The Alegarli had been the one species among the advanced civilizations that had challenged human dominance. In the last few years, competition had been stiff and now they’d surpassed the humans in some areas. Creatures not too far removed from terrestrial honey bees, they were endowed, en masse with a composite world mentality of undeniable strength and versatility.

When their unique group consciousness had first emerged from the miasma of natural selection, they made slow strides. Eventually, they learned to manipulate the simpler minds of their homeworld’s lower life forms. Then, through a long-range program of selective breeding, they produced several different domesticated species capable of building what their own anatomy would not allow.

Through these remotely controlled servants, they created their culture’s first monumental architecture. Ever restless, they set about to master the rudiments of science and technology. After centuries of slow, steady rise, their command of microelectronics set them on the path they strode in Zach’s time. With the construction of their first robotic shells, the Alegarli had entered a new phase in their history. When Zach finally did have his first meeting with Dalamacras, he’d actually encounter a roughly humanoid figure that was home to a minimum of a thousand tiny insectoids, working in concert.

Intriguing as that thought was to someone still new to the diversity of life in the universe, Zach knew it told him nothing about why he’d been captured. It also offered no clue as to the unsavory bargain he might need to strike to regain his freedom. For the moment, however, he was in no shape to meet with anyone, let alone wheedle their motives out of them. Every muscle in his body ached and, if he had to guess, at least one rib was badly in need of reconstruction.

So it was with a strange sense of relief that he heard the same shuffling walk re-enter his room, presumably with the promised IV unit.

“Did you think I forgot you?” asked the now-familiar voice. “Forget it, Hon, I’m here for you, OK? Lie still so I can get this needle in you real quick. Whoa, look at you: all skinny. Don’t you never get no exercise?”

Even if Zach could’ve mustered the energy to speak, he had the distinct impression it would’ve served no purpose. Nurse X, it seemed, needed no prompting to hold up both ends of any conversation.

After a skillful pinch from an IV needle stuck into the crook of his arm , Zach was on the receiving end of who-knew-what kind of therapy. Was it intended, he wondered, to heal him, make him more cooperative — or more dead? Somehow, he made his dry throat croak out a question.

“What?” he asked.

“Nanobots, Hon,” said Nurse X. “Fix you up real good. But no talking! Not ‘til you’re better.”

Zach heard her shuffle out again and promptly fell asleep. When he awoke, the relief that washed over every part of his body was almost too much to bear. Gradually, the bizarre sensations passed and his head cleared.

So hungry, he thought.

He was even tempted to sit up, though the thought of ripping a suture or snapping an incompletely healed bone made him keep still. The most he was willing to risk was opening his eyes, a decision that granted him a mixed blessing. He was, by the look of things, in a hospital bed, but not in a hospital per se. His surroundings resembled news footage he’d seen of a military sickbay. He’d also seen this kind of setting mocked up in high-budget holovids about life on a battle cruiser. Its pristine, pastel colors were bathed in soft lighting and stocked with an array of monitoring equipment, some of which took the trouble to beep from time to time.

So there was reason to believe he might be on an Alegarli ship, either orbiting Central Colony Four or parked out in deep space. Before long, his speculations were cut short, as two nearly identical androids walked into his room. They resembled a pair of ancient shop mannequins, cast in a shiny, lavender composite material. They were distinguished only by the insignia emblazoned on their chests: a double helix for one and a standard pulse rifle for the other.

The one with a double helix insignia carried a device Zach recognized as a handheld medical scanner. Its ethereally calm voice took him by surprise.

“Hold out your hand,” it said.

In spite of himself, Zach complied.

“Internal repairs ninety-two-point-seven percent complete,” it said. “Residual scarring, contusions and hematomas within the scope of palliative care. Patient is cleared for transport.”

Zach knew better than to ask the medical android what “transport” meant. Its companion, which Zach assumed was a security specialist, acknowledged Zach’s diagnosis with a nod.

“Informing Dalamacras,” it said. The two androids turned and filed out of the room with comic precision. Zach’s hope for a moment of peace was dashed as a tall, slender Alegarli stepped in from a side door he hadn’t noticed before. Unlike the true androids that had just stalked out, the shell that housed this particular subset of the hive mind was disturbingly lifelike. From its jet-black, shoulder-length hair to its natty, up-to-the-minute sportswear, it might even have been mistaken for a holovid celebrity.

At times, its simulation of humanoid mannerisms and tics bordered on parody ─ as if the Alegarli were making a statement about humanoid failings. So, too, when Dalamacras spoke, “his” unctuous inflection was both pitch perfect and unintentionally satirical.

“Dr. Griffin,” he said. “You’ve shown a remarkable ability to make a mess out of your life.”

“So this was my doing?” asked Zach. “Does that include the beating?”

“What beating?” said the Alegarli. “In less than a rotation-and-a-half, you will have no medically detectable signs of any so-called beating. But let me be clear. What you think you received was merely a ‘wake-up call.’ Curious expression, considering you were wide awake at the time.”

“Don’t tell me you brought me to this … luxury hotel,” said Zach, “to give me a lecture on comparative linguistics.”

“So typical,” said Dalamacras. “Your flat-footed insistence on linear logic will be the undoing of your entire species ─ and you in particular. There is always time for learned observation, regardless of the narrow context. In your case, one might observe that you’ve deluded yourself. On the basis of a casual encounter on a second-rate colony, you want to draw cosmos-spanning conclusions.”

“My data isn’t casual,” said Zach. “And neither, I’m beginning to think, is your relationship with the Ultramat Corporation. When did you purchase a controlling interest? I’d guess five cycles ago, when it announced its last major innovation.”

The Alegarli shook his head.

“Such a magnificent intellect,” he said, “wasted on the most tawdry trivia. Wouldn’t you rather get back to your temporal experiments?”

“No point in that,” said Zach. “Not with the universe crumbling. But I’ll tell you what. If you admit your mistake to the Cosmic Consortium, I’ll get right on revamping your process so it doesn’t generate so much latency.”

“Your innocence is phenomenal,” said Dalamacras. “If it weren’t so dangerous, it would be charming. But time is short, so I’ll make myself as clear as I can for one so … what is the phrase … ‘reality challenged’? There’s a lot more to this universe than the tiny slice defined by your notions of truth and fairness. You’ll understand that someday. For now, I’m going to give you a simple ultimatum.”

In a series of terse statements, the Alegarli laid out a stark choice and left Zach no time to ponder his decision. He must sign a binding agreement never to reveal what he’d seen on Haliak and turn over every scrap of data he’d obtained on the subject. It he refused, he’d face extradition to Haliak, where his sentencing would be swift and irrevocable: imprisonment, followed by the “rehabilitative reconstruction” of his murderous mind.

“Not everyone agrees with the use of AI adjudicators, Dr. Griffin,” said Dalamacras. “What a shame to lose such a talented scientist to the rehabilitation process.”

“Can’t be a scientist if I deny the data,” said Zach. “So, to use another curious human expression, feel free to shove your ultimatum up your rear access panel.”

The Alegarli shook his head, and sent waves of simulated hair cascading across his face.

“You are such a disappointment,” he said. “You will be escorted to a Crelenk transport within the hour, after your medical needs have finally been met. I’d say ‘farewell,’ but I can’t, considering how absurd that statement would be in this context.”

Dalamacras stormed out of the room, this time through the main doors. A moment later, Nurse X entered, wheeling a pile of clothing and other supplies in a small cart. After a bit of perfunctory wound care, she told Zach to get dressed and, minutes later, he was escorted out of his hospital room by two securitybots, who led him into a mid-sized launch bay. At a signal from one of the bots, a four-passenger short-range starship fired up its engines.

“You’ll arrive at Haliak in three rotations,” said Dalamacras through the ship’s comsystem. “If at any time you regret your decision, a member of the crew can get word to me. Otherwise … well, you know the rest.”

With the Alegarli’s resonant voice still echoing in his ears, Zach allowed a securitybot to strap him into the nearest launch chair, and handcuff both wrists to its arms. The contrast to Dalamacras or even the medical android he’d seen earlier couldn’t have been more stark, especially when it spoke.

“You will be fed as needed,” it said.

Zach felt a slight inertial tug as the compact ship lurched forward on its way to the launch bay doors. As his transport zoomed out into interstellar space, he couldn’t help wondering what his parents back on Pasterol 3 would think of their ‘genius boy’ now.

“I will be fed, as needed,” he said, and silently wept.

(To be continued)

^^^

Mark Laporta is the acclaimed author of the Changing Hearts of Ixdahan Daherek series and the new novel, Probability Shadow, published by Chickadee Prince Books, available now in paperback or ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or at a bookstore near you.

Design by Steven S. Drachman, from an original image by Pixel2013/Pixabay.

[Editor’s note: read the entire story from the beginning.]

Through most of Zach’s seven-hour spaceflight back to Central Colony Four, he could think of nothing else but the bizarre granular effect he’d seen first hand. Well, that and the startling sensor readings he’d taken in his hotel room the following morning. Well, that and being a murder suspect on an alien lunar colony. Well, that and Paula Altenberg, whose dark brown eyes seemed to gaze at him from every smooth surface in his cabin.

Surely, he told himself, it was just the heat of the moment. Paula had been a friendly face in an alien environment, after a night of terrifying dreams. But whatever his logical mind demanded he believe, his body refused to comply. The memory of her voice, the light bouncing off her hair, the way she smiled at him, as if….

“What good is it?” he whispered. He clapped both hands over his face and tried to make peace with the truth. He was infatuated with that woman, but felt as if the odds of seeing her again were lower than the freezing point of mercury. Wait, he realized, that made no sense. Lower odds equated with lower temperatures? Maybe space-time wasn’t the only thing that was breaking up into dysfunctional bits.

Get a grip, he thought.

Earlier in his life, he’d had a best friend to confide in. But the stress of work and the inertia of his daily routine had made friendship into a time-intensive luxury. Now he had no one.

After too many postponed dates and absent-minded conversations, his last two relationships had also dissipated, like steam off a hot griddle. The fact was, his work had become everything to him. And now, his inability to either analyze or classify the granular effect, much less combat it, left him all alone in the universe.

But only if he gave up, he decided. It wasn’t as if he knew nothing about the forces that shaped space-time. Whatever the granular effect was, it had to be an outgrowth of existing phenomena. If he could just identify the trigger mechanism. But so far, he lacked the data to reach a meaningful conclusion. When he returned to his lab on Central Four, he could analyze the meagre datastream he’d managed to collect before Altov’s shocking call.

Fortunately, he’d already retrieved that data with his handheld, from the scanners he’d abandoned in his hotel suite. It was now safely uploaded to Bohr University’s NexusNebula. Good thing he’d acted fast. Now that his commercial star liner had enfolded itself in a so-called “warp bubble” ─ an archaic term that Zach loathed ─ no wireless signal could come in or out.

And now what? With three more hours to go, he might have thought to read through archived output from the inter-temporal analysis he’d left behind to pursue this madness. Yet it wasn’t at all clear that his project was relevant anymore. Maybe, perish the thought, the nature of space-time itself had changed. He and the rest of human science might have to start over from scratch!

Need a drink, he told himself.

Unlike the cramped quarters endured by conventional air-travelers in centuries past, the average star liner was spacious and well-appointed. With only a tiny fraction of external gravity and no wind resistance, a star liner’s size was limited mostly by market forces. That meant a weary traveler looking for diversion had a lot of options.

He walked out of his cabin and headed for the star liner’s food court. In his fevered state of mind, the “Gravity Well Bar and Grill” seemed to materialize like a desert mirage just a few meters to his left. On entering, Zach waved off a robotic server and slid onto the corner barstool. On the next stool was a human male absorbed in day-old news on a bright red quantum tablet. Zach ordered two fingers of Epsilon Eridani scotch and tried to make his heart settle down. But the moment the android bartender set his glass on the counter, Zach’s neighbor looked up from his reading. A burly man, his salt and pepper hair was a jagged array of asymmetrical razor cuts.

“Civilization’s going crazy,” he said. “Did you hear the latest?”

“Haven’t kept up with the news,” said Zach into his drink.

“You gotta,” said the man. “This reporter just blew the lid off the Extrasol Construction Company.”

Zach glanced at him sideways. There were conspiracy theory jockeys all over his university campus ─ most of whom were first-year students. He didn’t expect to find any on a commercial star liner and certainly not in this man’s age bracket.

“Hey, I know that look,” said Zach’s bar mate. “Listen, my name’s Preston Carter, I’m a journalist. You heard of me?”

“Sorry,” said Zach. “Like I said, I’m not much of a news hound.”

“OK,” said Preston. “I respect that, even if I can’t understand it. But at least you know the difference between news and misinformation, right?”

“Sure,” said Zach. “But in my field, we hear all kinds of space-related rumors. I mean, haven’t people been crying wolf about WorldGov colonies for the last hundred revs?”

Preston stared at him a moment, then jammed a pudgy thumb into the screen of his tablet.

“Yeah?” he said. “Well this is real. Reporter from the Sidereal Chronicle … uh … Paula Altenberg. She’s top notch. See? Even you’ve heard of her.”

Zach’s jaw had dropped just enough to give him away, but he decided there was no reason to let on exactly how he’d heard of Paula.

“So … what’s going to blow the lid off Extrasol?” he asked.

According to Paula’s reporting, Preston told him, there’d been a sharp rise in severe accidents at space colonies originally laid out by Extrasol’s automated construction crews. Particularly jarring had been a series of explosions in the colonies’ main power grids.

Preston’s eyes widened.

“What do you think?” he said. “It says here that there was an explosion on Haliak just yesterday, over in the high-rent district ─ and Haliak was totally an Extrasol job. Lucky for me, I was covering the opening of the new Crelenk space observatory on the other side of town. Hey, what field did you say you were in?”

“I just said I’d heard a lot of rumors,” said Zach.

“Naw,” said Preston. “You said ‘in my field.’ You a scientist?”

Zach shrugged. At some point, he decided, a little bit of truth might go farther than a whole lot of denial toward keeping his mission secret. He raised his glass, as if in a salute.

“Zach Griffin,” be said. “I’m in the Astrophysics Department at Bohr University.”

“Right,” said Preston. “The Time guy! Wow, would I like to get a statement from you about this Extrasol scandal.”

Zach winced.

“Oh … no … no,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t seen any of the data. Ms. Altenberg might be very reputable, but that doesn’t make her scientifically literate. You see what I mean?”

Preston let out a sigh.

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Hey bartender, another round for me and my friend. Don’t worry, I’ll cover it. I’ll bet those university types are pretty stingy with reimbursements, am I right?”

Zach nodded knowingly, even though his expense account was more than adequate for any reasonable expense.

“So, tell me,” said Preston. “What’s a hot-plasma guy like you doing all the way out on Haliak? Don’t tell me you have a thing for Crelenk females.”

“It’s classified,” said Zach. “And for the record….”

“Aw, come on, that was a joke,” said Preston. “But help me out, will ya? Here I am, a science journalist, alone for three hours with a top temporal expert. Can’t you give me something? My editor is already chewing me out for letting Altenberg get the Extrasol scoop.”

Zach took a deep breath and made two key realizations. In the first place, with the potential for murder charges to be leveled at him by the Crelenk government, he wasn’t in a position to make an enemy of an aggressive journalist. Second, with the gist of Paula’s article nibbling at the edge of his consciousness — not to mention everything he’d been through in the previous twenty-four hours ─ talking shop with Preston was probably the best way to escape his obsessive thoughts.

“Buy me dinner,” he said. “I’ll see if I can come up with something exclusive about my latest work, OK?”

Later that night, well fed and a bit more inebriated than he was used to, Zach found himself fighting to stay awake on the lander for Central Colony Four. So when a team of three plain-clothes members of the Bohr University security team confronted him after Customs, it was a little overwhelming. The first to speak was a tall, Chinese woman dressed as if for a formal dinner party.

“Professor Griffin?” she said. “No need to worry. We have your security needs met. Your car’s waiting. Come this way.”

Zach’s slurred speech embarrassed him, but not nearly as much as the phrase ‘security needs’ scared him.

“Security?” he asked. “What? Am I in some kin’ of … of dangerous?”

The woman glanced at her companions.

“We’ll explain on the way,” she said. “But please, the car. Now.”

The next few hours were forever a blurry patch in Zach’s memory. As he pieced together later, they consisted of him being escorted home, given strict instructions not to answer his door and then tucked into bed, following an injection to counteract the worst effects of his high blood-alcohol level.

“That stings,” he remembered saying, and just about nothing else. That is, except for a general sense of urgency that he couldn’t quite grasp. Only the next morning, after he’d been escorted by a security team to Semyon Altov’s office, did he begin to understand.

Altov’s grim face, drained of anything resembling good humor, already told Zach more than he was ready to hear. Altov shut his office door.

“Sit down, Son,” said Zach’s department chair. “Before I fill you in on the current situation, I want you to know that this department, in fact, the entire University administration, will do everything possible to protect you in the coming months.”

Zach’s eyes and mouth opened wide, but Altov put his hand up for silence.

“Please,” said Altov,  “Listen first. You need to hear the facts as soon as possible.”

Facts? Zach’s mind reeled.

The word “facts,” when applied to a human being, never boded well. As it happened, his anxiety was justified. Based on Loor TreVal’s time of death, only an hour after Zach was spotted entering her home, and corroborated by the presence of human footprints near her strangled body, the Crelenk governor of the Haliak colony had demanded Zach’s extradition.

Zach shot out of his chair and began pacing Altov’s crimson shag carpet like a man obsessed.

“But I … I didn’t…” he stuttered.

Altov stood up from behind his desk and grabbed Zach by the shoulders.

“I know that, Son,” he said. “We all know it. Listen to me, this is just protocol. The AI adjudicator has already confirmed that it couldn’t be you,”

Zach’s shoulders tensed as he fought back tears.

“Adjudicator?” he asked. “I thought those AIs only handled government cases.”

“Come on, Zach,” said Altov, “Your lab is entirely funded by the government. You’re WorldGov from your quantum tablet down to your … your socks. And here’s why you should be grateful. The footprints at the murder site don’t match your shoe size. Not based on your last purchase, anyway.”

“WorldGov tracks my purchases?” asked Zach. “What else do they know?”

“Don’t go there,” said Altov. “Look, they know all my secrets, too. But just the AI and just as classified data points. It’s for your own protection. Nobody cares what you buy or what you do outside the lab. Now sit down again and listen carefully.”

Though the AI adjudicator had fairly well demolished the Crelenk governor’s case against Zach, it would take time for his case to go through Interstellar Court. There, the University’s attorneys could pull out all the stops, including the Certified Psychological Profile (CPP) that WorldGov required of every citizen.

In general terms, the CPP was a combination of exhaustive interviews, cognitive testing, a genomic work up and a quantum computer-assisted holographic brain scan, that could do everything except read his thoughts. Though in fact, a skilled image expert had already demonstrated an ability to narrow the subject’s probable train of thought down to a convincing short list.

Because Zach’s CPP showed conclusively that he lacked the aggressive tendencies required for murder, that and the circumstantial evidence was more than enough to acquit him.

All the same, for at least the next six months, Zach would be under suspicion and, as such, a target for anyone seeking retribution. Or, for that matter, anyone trying to score points against WorldGov “hegemony.”

“I don’t want to scare you,” said Altov, “but the danger is real. You’re not just a suspect, you’re a symbol of everything our non-human allies fear about us. That’s why later today, University Security will transfer your things to a Faculty Club guest suite, where they can protect you better.”

Zach ran his hands through his off-blonde hair.

“Can’t believe it,” he said. “But OK, enough of this nonsense. Doesn’t anybody care about the phenomenon Loor contacted WorldGov about? We need to follow up on the data I captured right away.”

Altov shook his head.

“That’s the other thing we have to talk about,” he said. “Since you’ve been back, we’ve heard from the Haliak governor’s office. Turns out Ms. TreVal was a known crank. That phenomenon she described was the third wild goose chase she’d sent the Haliak government on in the last year.”

“But I saw it myself,” said Zach.  “And later, there was another incident, an explosion. An eye witness described the same granular effect I saw in Loor’s living room.”

“Zach,” said Altov, “Let me give you a piece of advice. I’ve never met anybody with a better command of our field. If you tell me you saw something unusual and you have data to prove it, I believe you — without question. But there are times when the truth has to take a back seat to survival. You start raising a fuss about this and you’ll end up on the street.”

“Why?” asked Zach. “It’s just data. And if I’m right, every space colony between here and the belt of Orion is in big trouble. Who is it? Who doesn’t want me to report my findings?”

“No idea,” said Altov. “What I do know is that the University President called me an hour ago and asked me to ensure you wouldn’t go public with any new findings until this trouble blows over.”

“President Delaney?” asked Zach. “What’s it to her, unless she’s doing the bidding of her big donors? Whose the company that just donated forty million credits to renovate the Quantum Computing Center? There’s your answer.”

Altov sighed.

“You mean the Ultramat Corporation?” he asked. “They’re a shipping company. What possible interest would they have in an obscure, unproven cosmic phenomenon? Now look, I know this isn’t easy, but you have to calm down. As soon as you raise your voice about this, someone will post that video of you shambling out of Central Four spaceport the other night.”

Zach’s throat tightened.

“There … there’s a video of that?” he asked.

“Son, there’s always a video,” said Altov. “That’s the universe we live in. And while we’re on the topic, I don’t want to hear any more about you talking to journalists.”

“What?” said Zach. “You think he got me drunk just so he could video me?”

“All I’m saying is,” said Altov, “take the rest of the week off and give yourself a chance to settle into your new reality. Just lie back and catch up on your favorite holo-series. I can get Suvir to cover your classes.”

Zach looked out at his superior through new eyes. Was Altov complicit? Regardless, someone, perhaps the same person who had Loor TreVal killed, was determined to keep Zach quiet. He knew his best bet was to play along ─ but for how long?

The universe is crumbling, he told himself, but not as fast as me.

(To be continued)

^^^

Image: Spirit111/Pixabay

Mark Laporta is the acclaimed author of the Changing Hearts of Ixdahan Daherek series and the new novel, Probability Shadow, published by Chickadee Prince Books, available now in paperback or ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or at a bookstore near you.

[Editor’s note: read the entire story from the beginning.]

Paula Altenberg, the reporter from the Sidereal Chronicle, would not let herself be brushed off.

“You want to explain yourself?” she asked. “My readers already know you’re a leading light in the current generation of….”

Zach’s pale blue eyes flashed.

“Really?” he said . “And why does your research department believe I respond well to flattery?”

“I’m just quoting what….” said Paula.

“What ignorant people say,” said Zach, “about research they don’t understand. In real science, there are no ‘leading lights.’ There’s just data. Some researchers have more insight into it and some have less. But it’s a collaboration.”

Paula ran her hands through her curly black hair.

“OK,” she said. “Looks like we’re off to a bad start. I’m just curious why someone who has … collaborated … with the best minds in the human community thinks he knows nothing.”

Zach looked into her intelligent, dark brown eyes and saw the same wounded look that had cost him his last two girlfriends.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just … tense is the word. I dropped everything to come to this luxury moon and now the local patrol won’t even let me do my job.”

“If I buy you a cup of caffedren, will you tell me what your job is?” asked Paula.

“That’s classified,” said Zach. “Though I have a feeling it’ll be common knowledge pretty soon. Still … since my mission is completely screwed for the moment, I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

Paula gave him a conspiratorial smile and told him about a human café about four blocks away. Though in a city like Delubruah, the word “block” had to be interpreted loosely. The Crelenk’s preference for laying out streets in irregular concentric circles weakened every landmark a human might use for navigation. In that sense, Delubruah bore a closer resemblance to a colony of cells in a living organism than a human’s tidy urban grid.

But the trim reporter, dressed in what Zach assumed was her “field outfit” of khaki and denim with scuffed brown calf-length boots, obviously knew her way around. She led him without hesitation along a meandering path until, ten minutes later, they stood at the threshold of “Time Lapse,” a small café in the human sector of the city.

“Catchy name,” said Zach.

“Yeah,” said Paula. “I guess, as a scientist, that must make your skin crawl. I mean, there aren’t really any gaps in time are there?”

They walked into the decidedly quaint establishment, whose self-conscious décor was a parody of human style. Yet the homey mood and the smell of non-replicated food put Zach’s hyperactive mind at ease. They found a small table nestled against a floor-to-ceiling window, framed in dark brown neo-wood.

“Gaps in time?” asked Zach. “Well a starship moves space and time around a bit, but you can’t really call that a gap. The process is too orderly ─ and the Alcubierre engine maintains the balance of forces. I suppose a gap might appear if … if an unusual set of conditions disturbed that balance.”

A human waiter came to the table, a rare event in an interstellar community awash with every grade of android ─ from minimally sentient servicebots to mobile AI units that could give History’s greatest minds a headache. Yet the sheer charm of the situation went a long way to settling Zach’s racing thoughts. For the first time in the last two days, he had the peace of mind to smile.

At the sound of a quirky computerized chirp, Paula hunched over the tablet she’d just pulled out of a small satchel. A bit of touchscreen typing later, she looked up sheepishly.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s my editor. I guess when you’re new at something, there’s always a big shot hovering over your shoulder. Do you get that?”

Zach looked into Paula’s youthful face carefully for the first time and decided she might well be around his own age. His answer began as a weary shrug.

“Yeah,” he said. “They hover until you actually need them and then they disappear. There’s probably an algorithm for that.”

“Cute,” said Paula. “But getting back to what we were talking about. You said that … physical laws … might get out of balance. Do you mean like gravity getting more … grave?”

Zach’s gasping laugh made heads turn in the otherwise quiet diner.

“Sor … sorry,” he said. “That just struck me funny. But yeah, or if time got more timely … Craters, that sounds so stupid.”

“OK, but I guess all that giggling means you think that couldn’t happen, right?” asked Paula.

“Can’t actually say that,” said Zach. “I mean the real problem is that the only language to have this conversation in is Mathematics. Humanistic languages aren’t precise enough. That’s what makes the analogies so funny … at least to me.”

“I get that,” said Paula. “But even if you said it in Math, somehow, the idea isn’t completely crazy, right?”

“Not completely,” said Zach. “But how did we even get onto this?” The last thing he wanted was to get trapped into talking about the phenomenon he’d witnessed in Loor TreVal’s living room.

Just then, the waiter came by with their order of caffedren and cranberry muffins, whose warm aroma seemed to add an ethereal quality to their conversation. Before retreating to the kitchen, the waiter, a forty-ish human male with his hair in a topknot, gave them a knowing smile that they were too engrossed to notice.

“It was something you said about the name of this place, about ‘Time Lapse’,” said Paula. “It reminded me of what my source said about a recent uptick in temporal anomalies in this sector.”

“Unlikely,” said Zach. “I would’ve heard of that. What did he say was causing them?”

Paula fiddled with the placement of her mug on its forest green, pressed cardboard coaster.

“That’s the part I didn’t understand,” she said. “She told me the increase was likely caused by….”

A thundering explosion not more than a hundred meters left of the diner made Paula, Zach and the other six people jump out of their chairs and rush to the diner’s street-facing wall of windows.

Outside was pure chaos, as dozens of Crelenk and a handful of humans rushed away on foot from the site of the explosion. Paula ran to the door, stuck her head out and accosted a pair of android patrol units that were rolling by on lightweight treads.

“What is it?” she called out. Zach hurried to her side in time to hear the taller of the androids say,

“Electrical lines destroyed by unknown phenomenon. Non-residents ordered to evacuate Haliak colony at earliest opportunity,”

The androids rolled away, apparently in response to new orders. Zach’s mind reeled as he squeezed past Paula to grab the arm of a fleeing figure. The astonished face of the heavyset human spoke volumes.

“What did you see?” asked Zach.

“Hey, leggo,” the man snarled. “Don’t wanna get stuck in that sparkly air like the others!”

“What others?” asked Paula.

“How should I know?” the man asked, “Whoever was crossing the street when the sparkles came. I said let go!”

The dark-skinned human wrestled his arm away from Zach’s grip and dashed off as fast as his bulky frame would let him.

“What do you make of that?” asked Paula.

“If it’s what I think, we need to get off this moon pronto,” said Zach. A message in his comstreamer told him his equipment had just arrived by transmat. “I’ll run a few scans from my hotel room, then book a flight back to Central Four. Based on my observations, the team at Bohr should be able to sort this out.”

“Sounds exciting,” said Paula. “… I mean, from a news perspective.”

“Oh, no,” said Zach. “I can’t take you along. I’d blow my security clearance. But don’t get me wrong, it’s been great meeting you.

Paula grinned.

“How great?” she asked.

“What did you say?” asked Zach. He held his eyes steady, but the left corner of his mouth betrayed him by snaking up into a smile

“Just kidding,” said Paula. “I have to get back to the Chronicle and convince my editor he didn’t fly me fifteen light years for nothing.”

Yet despite the pressure of work responsibilities, neither one of them made the first move to leave, as if fumbling to find the right kind of goodbye. That is, until Paula leaned in and kissed Zach on the cheek.

“See you around the cluster galaxy,” she said.

A stunned astrophysicist, who was used to being in control of every scrap of data in his purview, watched as she hurried off down the sidewalk in the direction of the nearest autocapsule station. His face flushed, his breathing surprisingly asthmatic, it was a good thirty seconds before he could remember the name of his hotel.

But as late morning shaded into early afternoon, Zach regained his composure. The capsule ride back to his hotel was another matter. Was he … could he be …? Like many a brainy twenty-something, who’d spent too many hours hovering over computer readouts, nothing stumped him more than the output of his own emotions. Sure, he’d had girlfriends but, truth be told, that had been largely their idea. While intimacy could be teased out of him, it wasn’t, so to speak, his native tongue.

Ironically, his lifeline in this sea of what most people would consider positive emotion was the evidence of “granular space,” which had popped up on this isolated moon. The universe, it seemed, was coming dangerously close to disintegration. Not for the first time, his fingernails bore the brunt of his frustration.

Can’t be, he told himself.

After a deep breath, he yanked out his quantum tablet and tried to make a rough mathematical sketch of the phenomenon. Or was this, more likely, the manifestation of several different forces going out of alignment at once? The answer lay in the data.

Trouble was, he had none ─ nothing quantifiable, anyway. “Glittery air” wasn’t a variable he could plug into an equation. So the moment he arrived at his hotel and completed the forms the receptionist android required to receive his equipment, he raced to his suite on the seventeenth floor. Drenched with sweat, he slipped out of his ankle-length neoleather boots, changed his clothes and, hands trembling slightly, settled down to work.

After a few clicks on his handheld, the packing material opened and an array of compact components floated out on gravity modulators. Only a few minutes later, after a complex ballet of autonomous action, the components had assembled themselves into a primary cosmic scanner and three supplemental devices. Each of the three smaller devices had a discrete function: one for measuring fluctuations in background radiation, another for detecting traces of antimatter and the third, a dark matter scoop that he hoped against hope would remain empty.

For if dark matter itself had fallen out of alignment on a scale large enough to be detected, the impending crisis would be even more swift and merciless than he already feared.

His first step was to make a general sensor sweep. At least at the level of the solar system, physical forces appeared to be in their typical alignment. There was no indication of an anomalous imbalance in gravity that might create even the tiny patches of relative spatiotemporal instability that typically occurred from time to time. Furthermore, Zach’s check of readings from orbital GPS satellites turned up nothing. “Time,” in the most literal sense, was unaffected.

Yet the more he fine tuned his readings, first to Haliak itself and then to the city of Delubruah, minor deviations appeared in the data. Ordinarily, they would have been too small to raise concern. But the evidence of his eyes and ears told him otherwise. And when he entered the coordinates of Loor TreVal’s residence and of the Time Lapse café, those same deviations became wider and, for lack of a better word, “weirder.”

His temperature rising, Zach turned to his secondary scanners and tuned each one to the same set of coordinates. The result was even more startling. So while the damage, for now, appeared confined to a limited geographic radius, its inherently random nature meant it was dangerously unpredictable. Just then, a headlight that glinted off a wall mirror, from a passing autocapsule, made him duck for cover ─ until he realized what he’d actually seen.

“Have to get off this moon,” he said. The only saving grace was that the bizarre, granular phenomenon was localized to this sector of space-time for now. There was still a chance to contain it here until his team could come up with a remedy.

The insistent chirp of his comstreamer forced him to push speculation aside.

“Griffin?” said a familiar voice. “Altov here. Time to get out of there.”

“I was just about to leave,” said Zach. “The anomaly….”

“Forget Physics for once, Son, and think about your own neck,” said his Department Chair. “Loor TreVal has been missing since you visited her last night.”

“I’m aware,” said Zach. “The patrol suspects the anomaly.”

“Anomaly?” said Altov. “Listen carefully. Loor TreVal was found strangled this afternoon about a hundred meters from her home. Looks like her body was dragged out of her home, and there are human footprints everywhere. Bottom line, you’re the prime suspect.”

“Me?” asked Zach.

“Look, I know it makes no sense,” said Altov. “But right now, drop everything — I mean everything ─ and capsule out to the spaceport. You have less than three Earth Standard Hours to get on a starliner, before the Crelenk government can issue an arrest warrant. After that, I can’t help you.”

“But, my data….”

“The only data I care about are your bio signs back on Bohr campus,” said Altov. “Hurry it up. I’ve got a capsule waiting for you at street level. Tell it to go express. I’ll figure out how to pay for it later. ”

End of transmission. Flummoxed, Zach stared forlornly at his equipment, slipped his feet back into his boots and rushed out of his hotel suite. Down on the street, he leapt into the autocapsule and yelled “Spaceport, Express!” at the top of his lungs.

With that, the normally wingless vehicle sprouted a pair of radically angled wings from its sides, pivoted up on its back and shot straight up into the sky. Now effectively a space plane, it arched high into airless space, before it snapped back abruptly on a breakneck trajectory toward Delubruah Interstellar Spaceport. In less time than it would take the average denizen of twenty-first century Manhattan to reach Kennedy International, Zach could be seen dashing into the next starliner for his homeworld ─ nerves shot and still strangely fixated on a captivating female newsnet reporter.

(To be continued)

^^^

Mark Laporta is the acclaimed author of the Changing Hearts of Ixdahan Daherek series and the new novel, Probability Shadow, published by Chickadee Prince Books, available now in paperback or ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or at a bookstore near you.

Image by Kalhh / Pixabay

When Zach Griffin walked off a commercial lander at Delubruah Interstellar spaceport, his mind was spinning like a pulsar with a bad attitude.

The 26-year-old astrophysicist glanced at the approaching customs window, brushed a strand of off-blonde hair out of his eyes and fought hard to unclench his jaw. He didn’t relish stating the obvious to a team of hulking securitybots. Not when they could scan every qubit of his personal data from his ID chip. Semyon Altov, Zach’s department chair, had tried to put the situation in perspective for him.

“Just protocol,” Altov had said.

Or was it sadism? Regardless, the official rituals weren’t the real reason Zach’s heart had sunk to his toes.

Imagine breaking off an inter-temporal analysis just to follow up on a rumor,” his overactive mind railed.

No matter how Altov had rationalized it, this side trip felt like a colossal waste of time. But as high as Zach’s star had risen in scientific circles, he was still bound by the academic chain of command. It was a humiliation he’d just have to endure.

All the way out of the spaceport and over to his hotel by autocapsule, Zach fumed over his government’s poor judgement. On the basis of a fragmentary police report, WorldGov had ordered him to investigate a mathematical impossibility. For the reported “granular” effect to occur, everything his civilization knew about physical laws, including the Alcubierre-4 engines that had brought him there, would have to be false.

“Any idiot knows better,” he whispered.

The steel blue autocapsule came to a gliding halt in front of Zach’s hotel and its two wing doors opened out and up into the crisp night air. His luggage, decked out with late-model gravity modulators, floated out on a trajectory set by his dark gray, ovoid handheld. The lanky academic, formally dressed, as always, strode into the hotel lobby atrium — where a hovering, mint green robotic attendant greeted him with unctuous grace. It was another consequence of leaving the Centrals for a small lunar colony on the edge of the Cosmic Consortium.

“We trust your stay with us will be most pleasant,” said the shiny ball of a robot. “Third maglev on the left. Your chip will do the rest.”

Zach’s mind overflowed with sarcastic replies. But he was too exhausted by his seven-hour flight to stay angry. Let him just lie down for a bit, he told himself, and replicate a decent meal. Then maybe he could bear to review his notes for the next day’s meeting. It was to be a formal briefing on the evidence presented to WorldGov by the Crelenk. Or rather, by one particular Crelenk female named “Loor TreVal,” who claimed to have witnessed a series of disturbing phenomena.

“Spontaneous disintegration,” was the phrase thrown around in casual academic circles, among the few scholars with sufficient security clearance. The fact that Loor came from a distinguished family had lent her story an automatic credibility, which Zach resented.

“Science, anyone?” he asked the inside of his high speed elevator. As far as he was concerned, he knew everything about the cosmos that mattered. Little patches of shimmery, sparkly air just weren’t a part of it.

Yet even with the facts on his side, Zach was in a tight spot. Explaining the laws of physics to a lay person was always challenging, but Loor’s alien status made the task exponentially harder. Especially, that is, for a young man who’d grown up amongst humans only and, in the past eight years, had rarely ventured off the campus of Bohr University. He had no experience with sentient non-humans and Loor, as a Crelenk, belonged to a species set apart from the human family in almost every respect.

Though the Crelenk were carbon-based, oxygen-breathing and fully sentient, their ancestors had followed an evolutionary path radically different from that of any Earth creature. They had, for instance, nothing comparable to a human head, neck or face. Instead, their external organs were arranged around a roughly cylindrical torso. Four compound eyes ringed the upper portion of that torso and, about fifteen centimeters below them, a semicircle of mouths faced forward.

To the left of the central, speaking mouth, was a mouth dedicated to ingesting protein, followed by one for vegetable matter. To the right of center was a mouth for liquids and one for starches. And surmounting the Crelenk were two pairs of nostrils. Each pair was the gateway to one of two separate olfactory centers sensitive to different categories of chemical compounds. All four Crelenk ears, by contrast, were tucked discretely behind semicircular flaps that opened and closed depending on the ambient noise level.

On average, the Crelenk ranged from 1.75 meters to 2 meters tall. Their torsos were nestled into flexible folds of tough, hairless skin, reminiscent of a terrestrial lizard; the males were a slightly darker shade of brown on average, than the females. Out of these folds emerged four strong but spindly legs, and a pair of arms. Each arm ended in a delicate, seven-fingered hand. Finally, about two-thirds of the way down, an articulation in their musculoskeletal system allowed them to pivot about forty-five degrees left or right.

How, Zach wondered, would he be able to discuss abstruse scientific concepts with a being who, by all accounts, would have a completely different frame of reference? Worse, there was no indication that Ms. TreVal had any scientific training.

That, he told himself, was “tomorrow’s headache.” It was time to relax, dine and daydream. Later on, he might even run a data check on the experiment he’d left running on his homeworld. But right now, the weary traveler only wanted to drape his young body over the edge of his soft bed and just….

Three sharp sonic jabs from his embedded comstreamer shattered his fragile peace like fine crystal. Though he was tempted to bark at anyone who dared call him so late, he forced himself to project a tone of calm professionalism.

“Griffin,” he said.

His ears were greeted by the slurred tones of an alien voice pushed through an outdated translation filter.

“Griffin Zach you come now,” it said.

“Who is this?” asked Zach.

“TreVal Loor. You come now,” said the voice.

Zach bit his lower lip.

“I believe our meeting is for tomorrow … Ms. TreVal,” he said.

“Tomorrow too late,” said Loor. “Much damage. I call Altov.”

‘Wait,” said Zach.

The last thing he needed was a bad report from a disgruntled alien on a moon that WorldGov wanted desperately as a trading partner. A fresh market for human technology products was sorely needed. Especially, that is, when the Alegarli were outshining Earth’s Central Colonies in every discipline.

“Where can I meet you?” he asked.

The answer entered his handheld as a set of GPS coordinates that he could plug into an autocapsule as soon as he was downstairs. Unlike most members of his generation, Zach hadn’t gone totally “internal.” The e-mag radiation given off by all but the most expensive cerebral implants played havoc with the delicate sensors he used to measure spatiotemporal fluctuations.

He dressed hurriedly, but took into account the rapidly falling temperatures on an non-rotating lunar surface. Though the Crelenk had fitted its Haliak lunar colony with an atmospheric system, the expense in credits and resources to give it a spin was simply too great. Fortunately, the hotel’s autocapsule service was more than adequately adapted. He rode in comfort to a posh neighborhood on the northwest side of town. The neopelt overwrap he’d thrown on was simply too hot for the ride.

The town of Delubruah was Haliak’s capital city. Zach wasn’t surprised to find himself surrounded by luxurious homes ─ as oddly shaped as their owners. Whereas a standard human city would have looked familiar, in its general outlines, to any resident of a twenty-first century metropolis, the Crelenk’s interlocking clusters of low-rise octagonal structures gave Delubruah a meandering sprawl unlike anything Zach had seen before. Polyslate walkways traced with color-coded lighting and an embedded signaling system aided navigation.

Meanwhile, the buildings themselves rose from their octagonal foundations into a riot of shapes, whose contours were determined by everything from official function to personal whim. Loor’s home, which he could just make out now on the left, suggested a wildly abstracted mound of vanilla frosting. In spite of himself, Zach chuckled at the improbability of a Crelenk being familiar with human desserts. In fact, the two species had so little in common that their populations rarely mixed. Considering the Crelenk had been members of the Cosmic Consortium of Worlds for the last seventy-five years, that was particularly telling. Where possible, meetings were carried out remotely through AI ambassadors.

The reason was simple. The two species couldn’t share a meal, enjoy the same video presentation, or shoot the breeze about childrearing. Their only common ground lay in commerce and the various branches of science and mathematics ─ at which, in human terms, the Crelenk were a few generations behind the curve.

Nevertheless, by the time Zach arrived at the GPS coordinates he’d received from Loor, he’d settled into the objective frame of mind he adopted in his lab work. Yet as he stood in front of the Crelenk’s circular, e-mag protected doorway, he couldn’t help wondering what could be so urgent. Seconds later, the cladding dissipated and he swept into a purely functional, unadorned entryway, the color of dark chocolate.

A spherical, crimson servicebot no sooner took Zach’s coat than he was face-to-face with his Crelenk hostess. She wore a swirling robe of a silky blue material, which extended from her shoulders down to her four ankles. Black cloth slippers, adorned with slivers of sapphire peeked out from beneath the robe on each of her four, slender feet.

Of course, the expression “face-to-face” was wildly inaccurate. Zach was glad he’d invested time on the spaceflight over to acquaint himself with the Crelenk. Now he was forced to wonder exactly how hideous he must appear to Loor TreVal. Yet if she had any qualms about speaking with him, it wasn’t reflected in the steady pace of the AI-emulated voice that emerged from her translation grid.

“I apologize for my late call,” the voice said, “and for the crudeness of the hotel translation matrix. You must have thought me quite rude.”

Distracted as he was by the sight of her pulsating speaking mouth, Zach still managed to keep his composure.

“You obviously felt it was urgent,” he said. “Can you explain?”

“That, Mr. Griffin, is exactly what I cannot do,” said Loor. “But perhaps if you follow me to the … the locus of the problem, you will find an explanation of your own.”

Without waiting for an answer, the Crelenk made a short, pivoting hop and crawled through an adjacent threshold into the house proper. Zach followed and was soon standing in a large, high-ceilinged room, decorated in an array of multicolored stripes that his eyes needed a moment to adjust to. He reminded himself that Crelenk vision extended farther into the ultraviolet scale than human eyesight allowed. His host saw the world differently than he did.

While the room’s peculiar layout obviously suited Loor’s needs, Zach discovered he couldn’t identify the function of any item in it, with the exception of the octagonal ceiling light. Maybe, he concluded, the interlocking array of geometric shapes in the center of the room housed a holojector of some kind. Along one wall, a structure that looked for all the world like a crockery cabinet glowed with an eerie, pale yellow light.

On second thought, Zach seemed to make out the low pulsations of a sort of music coming from the cabinet. Embedded at odd intervals in the floor were deep wooden troughs, into which Loor, or someone, had planted bright yellow globular flowers. And there, in the far corner, looking completely out of place, was a silvery, transmat send/receive pod, of the kind used throughout the civilized universe. Emblazoned on its circular base was the logo of the Ultramat Corporation: A stylized, bright yellow lightning bolt flashed across a dark blue, simulated star field.

The pod’s presence was so unexpected, Zach couldn’t stop himself from pointing to it.

“Do you use that device much?” he asked.

The lids on Loor’s compound eyes fluttered.

“Why yes,” she said. “Just today, my daughter used it to send me a lovely holiday present.”

She swept a delicate hand down toward her four cloth shoes with what seemed to Zach a rush of pride.

“It was shortly before I called you,” she said.

Zach puzzled over that detail a moment, but as soon as Loor led him around to the back of the oddly-appointed room, all thought of the transmat device left his mind. Around the corner from what might have been a Crelenk couch, Zach saw what he’d rarely encountered in his young life: a physical phenomenon he couldn’t explain.

“See how it … wavers … as you might say?” asked Loor.

But to Zach’s eyes, the wavering was the least of it. Based only on naked-eye observation, the implications were devastating. There before him was the real-world equivalent of a phenomenon no one had yet observed outside of computer simulations. That is, simulations that pushed the prevailing theories of physical laws to their absolute extremes. As one thought-experiment ran:

Given an ongoing attenuation, due to an unexplained gravitational or temporal anomaly, space-time in the immediate vicinity might begin to dissolve into its constituent particles. The resulting instability, if not resolved, could eventually result an erosion of the boundary between one metaverse and the other and a mixing of physical laws with disastrous consequences.

Zach glanced over at Loor’s four eyes and wondered if she had any idea how dangerous the situation was.

“When did this … phenomenon … appear?” he asked.

“Tonight,” said Loor. “But only in this room. It has appeared and disappeared in every room in this house over the last thirty rotations. At first I assumed it was an optical illusion. But my doctor has found nothing wrong with my vision. What do you make of it?”

Zach gulped. There was no need to alarm his host until he had a more precise answer, but there was also no reason not to issue a warning.

“I’ll have to send for equipment,” he said. “Whatever this is, we can’t understand it without a proper analysis. There’s even a slim chance it could be an illusion.”

“But you don’t believe that, do you?” asked Loor.

“No more speculation,” said Zach, “until we have hard data. In the meantime, I urge you not to go near any … granular … space you might see. In fact, I suggest you stay somewhere else for the time being.”

The Crelenk’s torso trembled. Was it with laughter or grief?

“You don’t understand,” she said. “This is our sacred time. I cannot interfere with anyone else’s meditations by entering their home. And the only hotels open now are the ones that serve off-worlders like you.”

Zach took a deep breath and cursed himself for not bothering to learn about the Crelenk’s customs.

“At least keep your distance,” he said. “I can begin taking measurements in the morning with the equipment I brought with me. I’ll send for the rest tonight. May I return tomorrow?”

With a few more translated words, Zach finalized his plans with Loor and headed out into the chilly evening air. The autocapsule that arrived in mere minutes whisked him back to his hotel. His hands trembled as he unpacked a quantum tablet and sketched a series of rough calculations.

A quick survey of recent scientific journals confirmed his suspicions that the phenomenon he’d just witnessed was entirely new. After a lengthy entry in his field journal, he made arrangements for the express, long-range transmat of his equipment, and dozed off.

In spite of his exhaustion — or because of it — the events of the day followed him into his dreams. He saw himself scrawling a white mesh of calculations on an ancient chalkboard, the kind of thing he’d seen only in fictionalized holovids. Try as he might, the solution to his vast equation continued to elude him — until a section of the blackboard began to sparkle and appear to break apart. His eyes bulged as a seven-fingered Crelenk hand reached through the disturbance and grabbed hold of his throat.

Zach Griffin, confirmed rationalist, woke up screaming. In the glare of Haliak’s artificial morning, his night terrors were replaced by the disturbing reality of his meeting with Loor TreVal.

“Pull it together,” he scolded himself on the way to the shower. He took a deep breath and ticked off his plan for the morning. He’d have a quick meal at the hotel, then capsule right over to Loor’s house with his portable equipment. Then a break for lunch, by which time his transmat shipment should have arrived. By evening, with any luck, he’d know what he was dealing with.

It was a perfect plan, whose only missing element was Reality. For when Zach made it back to Loor’s neighborhood in record time, his breath stuck in his throat at the sight of four android patrol units protecting the perimeter of the octagonal house. Undaunted, he moved in for a closer look and was surprised to hear a gruff voice in his right ear.

“Hold it there, Griffin Zach,” it said.

The perplexed human turned to face a tall Crelenk male in a shiny gray patrol uniform.

“I have an appointment with Ms. TreVal,” he said.

“Likely not,” said the patrol officer. “This abode is under investigation, as you might say.”

“But…” said Zach.

“No more words now,” said the officer. “Press release later. Best you returned home.”

Despite the evolutionary gulf separating them, Zach caught the determination in the Crelenk’s manner and turned away, down the sidewalk, leading to the nearest capsule station. Lost in thought, it took him a moment to notice the human female who was dogging his steps.

“Professor Griffin?” she said at last, “Paula Altenberg, Sidereal Chronicle. You mind telling me what your connection is to the victim?”

“Victim?” asked Zach.

“According to my source,” said the reporter. “Ms. TreVal might have stumbled on a bizarre cosmic phenomenon and perished. Would you happen to know anything about that?”

Zach looked off into the distance at the orderly clustering of octagonal homes that spread out for kilometers in every direction. Did each one of them hold the potential to develop a twinkling patch of disrupted space-time? He turned his startled eyes back toward Paula.

“Honestly?” he told her. “I doubt I know anything about the cosmos.”

(To be continued)

^^^

Mark Laporta is the acclaimed author of the Changing Hearts of Ixdahan Daherek series and the new novel, Probability Shadow, published by Chickadee Prince Books, available now in paperback or ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or at a bookstore near you.

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