Menu

science fiction serial

Sidonia photo

Recap: Watt O’Hugh, Episode 8: “Sidonia”

, , , ,

[This article contains spoilers for The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh.]

“In one narrow and green Montana valley,” intones Watt O’Hugh, at the beginning of this week’s episode of his eponymous radio drama, “which a 19th century adventurer might reach only by traversing a seemingly endless row of mountain ranges, lay the flush little town known as Sidonia, which was then, as now, hidden in myth and legend.”

And, the 19th-century fugitive gunman might have added, bathed in wealth, teeming with insurrection, starry-eyed with utopianism, and protected by an army of deadlings.

Watt, played with humor and grace by the great Sal Rendino, knows little about this mysterious city, but events that unfurled over past episodes have told him enough to understand that it plays a big part in his destiny, and vice versa. The Sidonian movement will offer Watt either redemption and paradise on Earth, or a chance to defeat a terrible evil.

So it’s fitting that this episode mostly breaks away from Watt’s story to show us daily life in this fantastic, impossible city, from a young child watching an elaborate parade down Main Street, to the movement’s shadowy rulers, Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley.

We also learn a bit more about J.P. Morgan’s motives, and his strange obsession with Allen Jerome, who absconded with a small bit of Morgan’s fortune some years earlier. It seems that Jerome has found a way to revive Morgan’s long-dead first wife, Mimi. Jerome is baffled by her appeal, her wispy prettiness, but, in a touching final scene set in New York’s 19th-century Greenwich Village, Morgan makes it clear to his mistress that he still loves Mimi above all, and that he would risk his fortune to see her again.

“On the day of her death,” Morgan says mournfully, “we’d been married four months and ten days…. Some people say they can bring the dead back to life. Just for a while. For a hug, a kiss. A long-delayed honeymoon night. That’s all. Some people make that claim.”

^^^

Watt O’Hugh, which stars Sal Rendino, Emily Dalton and a full cast, is available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get your podcasts.

MIscalculation illustration

A Slight Miscalculation, Episode 7: New SF by Mark Laporta

, , , ,

[Editor’s Note: Read the Story from the Beginning]

His body now considerably more lithe, due to the nanobot treatments he’d received through GalaxyPol, Crawford dashed down the Sky Rock’s corridors, jumped into the nearest bank of maglev lifts and raced into the ship’s launch bay. A fresh lander waited for him on deck and he wasted no time climbing in. A familiar voice greeted him.

“This lander is prepped and ready,” said 6N7.

Crawford’s head whipped to the right, where he saw the lemon yellow-and-black android once again housed in a clear wall compartment.

“How did you…” he said. “I left you on the bridge.”

“As with any modern android,” said 6N7, “my consciousness is not housed in a structure analogous to an organic brain. It is stored on COSNET or, as now, on Sky Rock and piped in as needed. Every lander on this ship is equipped with an android casing of this type. Agent Chaplin simply rerouted my consciousness here the moment she authorized your return to the asteroid.”

Crawford smiled. He hadn’t waited for authorization, but the official report would assure Arielle’s higher-ups that he had. Even in a crisis, he realized, the bean counters would insist on leaving no legume behind.

“Right.” he said. “Let’s go, before our Frankenstein decides it’s not scared of us any more.”

Soon they were back out in space where the action was. Crawford had to hope, he realized, that “the action” didn’t involve a spatiotemporal rift big enough to swallow him up before he reached the asteroid’s surface. But luck was with him and the lander completed the short hop the hollowed-out rock that was rapidly becoming the center of the universe. As he disembarked, after first freeing 6N7 from his plastic cage, he crunched across the asteroid’s surface with the confidence of inevitability embedded in his heart. Just up ahead, he found the entrance escalator exactly where he’d left it.

Either this works or nothing does, he told himself.

Before long, the kreljebtra’s increasingly misshapen form hove into view. He stopped a few meters short and pointed at the device

“Test the waters,” he told 6N7.

The android hesitated before taking a wide, spiraling path toward the kreljebtra.

SAID WOULD NOT HARM.

The kreljebtra’s clanky voice echoed through Crawford’s encounter suit like a voice shouting across a canyon.

“No need to scream,” said Crawford.

His heart racing, the geologist-turned-GalaxyPol-agent walked straight up to the hulking structure and saw for himself just how distorted local space time had become to produce such a monstrosity. At a meter out, the kreljebtra spoke again.

CLOSER NOT ADVISABLE. INSTABILITY. WHAT DO YOU WANT?

“To understand,” said Crawford. “You said your mission was to fix a hole in the Cosmos made by the Skelanese, by Djaleerin. But you’re making more holes — rifts — and that’s got to stop.”

NOT ME. OTHERS MAKE HOLES. I TRY TRY TRY TO FIX. OTHERS MAKE MORE.

“Others like you?” asked Crawford. Though the kreljebtra’s broken command of language made it laborious, Crawford eventually arrived at what sounded like a reasonable explanation for the dilemma they faced. That is, if something so bizarrely complex could be considered reasonable. As 6N7 had already suggested, the “others” that the kreljebtra referred to were parallel versions of itself. How many versions? The kreljebtra’s estimate ranged from a few dozen to a number large enough to stand in for infinity in any sense that a human mind could grasp.

“What if you just stopped?” asked Crawford. “if you are all trying to repair each other’s errors, wouldn’t it make sense to break the chain?”

NOT STOP. CREATE IMBALANCE. MUST KEEP BALANCE.

6N7 stood up on its hind legs and spoke on an encrypted comlink to Crawford’s encounter suit.

“I suggest the device is locked in a logical fallacy not unlike those you humans were susceptible to in your early years as a technological society,” it said. “The idea is that an illogical action must be continued indefinitely to resolve a conflict that the action itself perpetuates.”

Crawford frowned. If 6N7 were right, the kreljebtra was engaged in what used to be called a “forever war” with an unseen enemy, little realizing that the enemy was its own anxiety.

“What do you suggest?” he asked the android. “If you’re right, we’ll never talk that monstrosity out of wrecking the universe. Besides, even if we did shut this thing off, what chance will we have to bring the Skelanese back from the … the limbo they’re in?”

“While I recognize your impulse toward empathy,” said 6N7, “I believe it is misguided. The Skelanese made a tragic miscalculation that we may never reverse. However, if the kreljebtra continues, all is lost.”

Crawford wasn’t ready to give up on his former employers just yet. Despite their colossal failure with this device, he figured their brilliance was worth fighting for. He turned his attention back to the kreljebtra,

“Where are your makers now?” he asked. “They didn’t intend just to “make holes” as you say.”

The kreljebtra spoke again, but with a marked shift in ferocity, that made Crawford regret asking so blunt a question.

SKELANESE NOT MAKE. ONLY DESTROY. ONLY I STOP THEM. SAVE UNIVERSE.

The kreljebtra began spewing out wave after wave of micro spatiotemporal rifts that registered on the visor of Crawford’s encounter suit as a series of smoke rings at a distance of no more than five AU from the asteroid.

Completely bonkers, he thought.

At the moment, they had only one weapon against the out of control machine, and he had no idea if it would work a second time. If they were going to risk giving the Skelanese device another “migraine,” he had to be sure it was worth the risk.

Have to take control, he thought. But I need remote access….

Crawford reached out to 6N7 over the same encrypted comlink that they had just used

“You know that trick you did on the Sky Rock,”he said, “where you rerouted your consciousness? If we distracted the kreljebtra long enough, do you think you could reroute your mind into that?”

“Possibly,” said 6N7, “provided I can find a compatible signal network within the device. The odds of that are low, given the differences between the human and Skelanese technology base.”

Stunned, Crawford wracked his brain for any scrap of memory — anything at all — that might enlighten his android companion. What was it Djaleerin had told him when he first arrived at her research lab?

Our technology is based on the reification of information. What we wish to achieve we first express as interactions between multiple data sets, each with its own properties. Their intersection becomes “real” when we find those core interactions. From there design templates flow like oil.

“Too bad I don’t actually understand that,” he muttered. But he realized that he had nothing to lose by passing the thought on to 6N7.

“Is there any way to reconfigure your internal data to match the kreljebtra’s signal network?” he asked. “You know, find analogous patterns and ‘translate’ yourself into them?”

He held his breath and hoped that he hadn’t just spouted complete nonsense. When the android appeared to freeze, he feared the worst. But before long 6N7’s status lights began blinking rapidly.

“That is an interesting proposal,” said the android. “I gather you mean I should reify my consciousness in a novel manner.”

Crawford tried his best to sound nonchalant.

“Why of course,” he said. “How long do you think you’ll need?”

The news was not good. The alien intelligence was built from a complex series of number relationships that, as Gwendolyn had theorized, had been reified as a functioning consciousness. 6N7 would need time to assimilate the patterns created by this process and sort out each of its many discrete functions. The android’s estimate of at least an hour made sweat break out on the back of the geologist’s neck. Was it for this that he originally studied asteroid formations at the far edge of the Sombrero galaxy? Who knew how much more damage the kreljebtra might do in that much time?

“We’re gonna need a distraction,” he said. “So you can slip in unnoticed. Dial up Arielle and get the Sky Rock to give this thing another migraine.”

“You are forgetting the temporal dilation we discovered on our last visit,” said 6N7. “The crew of the Sky Rock will not receive my request until sometime tomorrow at the earliest. Should I postpone my work?”

“Get started,” said Crawford. “I’ll think of something.”

It was go time, he realized, and even though his personal risk was clear, the risk to … everything … was greater still if he didn’t act.

Have to hope this thing is just smart enough to be confused by ‘magic,’ he told himself.

He walked a good ten meters away from his android companion, planted the boots of his encounter suit firmly in the asteroid’s crumbly interior surface and issued a fateful voice command. 

“Call mirroring subroutine,” he whispered. Instantly, the asteroid’s surface was littered with holographic projections of himself, just like the ones that had filled his living room the day he first met Arielle.

“Hey you!” he called out to the kreljebtra, ”it looks like the Skelanese are making copies of me, too.”

The flurry of micro spatiotemporal rifts died down rapidly. The hulking machine’s central unit, a misshapen sphere lit up in an ominous, dark orange glow.

THAT CANNOT BE. ONLY I CONTROL HOLES IN THIS UNIVERSE.

Crawford bit his lip. This was no time for a fit of the giggles.

______________________

ADVERTISEMENT

_______________________________________

“Looks like they outfoxed you,’ he said. “I … I can feel myself being pulled in a million directions.”

The retired geologist gave a whispered command to the holoprojector embedded in his encounter suit and watched as a new bevy of “Crawfords” appeared, looking eerily stretched and attenuated.

WHAT IS … YOU… INCORRECT … PHOTONS … ONLY PHOTONS.

Crawford glanced at 6N7, but the yellow-and-black android was standing stock still, its head pointed toward the kreljebtra. He realized he’d have to take his con game up a notch. He clutched his throat and fell to his knees and, for extra measure, channeled his voice through his suit’s external comsystem, distorting its overtones.

“It’s … ripping … me … apart!” he shrieked. “Make it … make it stop … you have to … to help….Help!”

NO. NOT ME. NOT ME. I STOP NOW SO YOU SEE. I STOP NOW.

Little by little, the flurry of micro rifts faded away and for the first time since he touched down on the asteroid, Crawford felt his sense of time returning to normal. A split second later, he heard 6N7 over their encrypted comlink.

“I will begin the transfer now,” it said. “On my signal, run for the lander, return to the Sky Rock and persuade them to leave the Skelana system. I will explain when I am able.”

“Will you shut the kreljebtra down?” asked Crawford. “Can you?”

“Unknown,” said 6N7. “But it is not my intention for the moment in any case. I must test my conclusions about the kreljebtra’s inner functions. My immediate goal is to put the AI into a kind of stasis. Stand by.”

No surprise to Crawford, the alien device noticed the intrusion immediately.

WHAT IS … NO … MY SYSTEM IS SECURE …SECURE …YOU CANNOT …YOU …

Crawford took this opportunity to shut down his projector, which he feared was too big a drain on his encounter suit’s power reserve. 6N7 had told him to run back to his lander. But if he were expecting a message from the android it was clear he was too preoccupied at the moment. By all appearances, a violent struggle was underway. The kreljebtra, which up until then had been dark, with the exception of a few winking status likes, began to glow, starting with its roughly spherical center. Within mere seconds, however, the entire three-meter monstrosity, its metaveral accretions included, was a virtual fireball of greenish-blue light.

Crawford whispered a voice command to increase the shielding on his encounter suit, but he needn’t have bothered. Before he could get the words out, the Skelanese suit had compensated, though not without issuing a disturbing warning.

Shield capacity at maximum. Retinal damage immanent at current energy levels.

Crawford stared hard at 6N7, hoping for some sign that the android was about to take control of the kreljebtra. He was tempted to flee to the lander but, he realized, he had no idea what response that would elicit from the infernally glowing machine. As if in answer, Djaleerin’s voice emanated from the device, though this time, it was impossible to see her image on its view screen, Her voice, distorted by static rang out clearly enough, all the same, into the sound system of his encounter suit.

“Crawford, Beloved,” she seemed to say. “If you cannot yet leave the asteroid, have the good sense to turn around. You were always too absorbed in your work, as I was. Save yourself!”

Startled, Crawford could only assume that this new message had been triggered by the kreljebtra’s sudden spike in temperature,  With the light and heat coming off the  alien devicealready beyond intolerable, he turned and ran for the lander. For all he knew, he reasoned, 6N7 might have failed or might need several more hours to accomplish his long-shot goal. But running, it turned out, proved more difficult than he expected. Panting, he called out to his android companion over their encrypted comlink.

“What’s happening?” he said. “Can … barely …  move.”

“Temporal displacement,” said 6N7. “It’s trying to shake me off by tossing me out of Time altogether. But I’m too far integrated for that. One moment more.”

His back to the glowing alien device, Crawford could do nothing but hope. Pointlessly he closed his eyes as a last defense against its intense glare, which now permeated everything. His mind roamed over his memory of his first meeting with the Skelanese, with Djaleerin and everything that followed. Did he wish now, he’d never accepted that last assignment from the IMC? If only he’d followed his instinct. If only…

Suddenly, Crawford noticed a stillness behind him and saw his visor displays gradually returning to normal. A reassuring voice entered his ears.

“All clear,” said 6N7. “Hurry to the lander and follow my previous instructions.”

“But if you’ve deactivated the kreljebtra,’ said Crawford, “why not join me?”

“Mission not accomplished,” said the android. “I must stay to interact with the metaversal variants and bring them under control as well.”

By now, Crawford had reached the lander and opened its main hatch.

“But there must be … millions of them,” he said.

“The number is undoubtedly several orders of magnitude higher,” said 6N7. “I will not return from this mission in your lifetime. Please leave. I cannot with absolute confidence assert that I have this device under my complete control,”

Crawford shook his head. He spared himself the absurdity of a sentimental goodbye to the android, flung himself into the lander’s airlock and initiated the launch sequence as soon as possible.  Within half an hour, he was back onboard the Sky Rock, where he was greeted by a storm of incredulous questions from the crew.

To be continued … Read Episode 8 Here

A new Episode of A Slight Miscalculation appears every other Monday. See all episodes here.

^^^

Mark Laporta is the author of Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, the first two novels in the science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. He is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.

Image by Steven S. Drachman

Miscalculation Episode 4

A Slight Miscalculation, Episode 4: New SF by Mark Laporta

, , , , , ,

[Editor’s Note: Read the Story from the Beginning]

Three days into his surprise mission for GalaxyPol, Crawford Caldera watched the data feed from Sky Rock’s Nav-AI on his workstation monitor, as the mid-sized ship reached the outskirts of the Skelana system. It was now only a few hours before the ship reached the system’s expansive asteroid belt. Soon after, Crawford would crawl back out onto a rocky surface he hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. For a man who’d become accustomed to the comfort of a magnificently ergonomic home, that was a scary prospect. 

His only consolation was that GalaxyPol’s nanobot regimen had finally started to take hold. While he was still far from the ideal of a “lean fighting machine,” he no longer worried that an extra-vehicular jaunt on an asteroid would pop a tendon or blow out a heart valve. Besides, he reminded himself, the reddish-brown johlantra suit he’d received from the Skelanese would also improve his odds of returning to the ship unscathed. 

Not only was it made of a complex material unknown to human science, but it was designed, apparently, to interact with his metabolism and keep his vital signs in the “green zone.” It had something to do, he surmised, with the millions of sensors woven into the suit’s novel synthetic fiber, which resulted in a surface that resembled the tight array of taste buds that dotted the human tongue.

Though the suit included no defensive weapons, Crawford had taken the precaution of slipping the miniature holographic projector that he’d used to torment Arielle, when they first met, into a small pouch built into the suit’s left arm. Like every other Skelanese device, it was voice-activated. Now that it was integrated into the encounter suit, the projector would pick up his commands through the suit’s collapsible, hood-like helmet.

But none of that was enough to dampen his mounting anxiety about what he might find. Despite his limited knowledge of engineering, the schematics that Djaleerin had absent-mindedly left on her workstation screen from time to time had made a lasting impression on him. Whatever the Skelanese had built in the hollowed-out asteroid he’d created for them was bound to be a thing of daunting complexity and power. Would one slip of his ungraceful feet trigger a cascade of cosmic disasters?

Try not to wet yourself, he thought. 

If his experience with the Skelanese had taught him anything, it was that they worked out every technical detail with excruciating precision. He’d more likely burn himself on one of the Sky Rock’s replicators than wreak havoc with the mystery device he was about to examine. Djaleerin, he remembered, had called it a kreljebtra. At some point, he told himself, he’d have to dig up his Skelanese/Standard dictionary and look into the origins of that word. 

Just in case, he sent a joint text to the entire team, which offered up that factoid for what it was worth. Could it offer a clue to the purpose it served? Maybe an old school linguist at the Mars Collective might make something out of it. Though truth be told, no one was quite sure that the descendants of the first human extraterrestrial colonists hadn’t shaded off into a type of science-inflected mysticism. 

In the meantime, there were reams of data for Arielle Chaplin’s team to analyze, regarding the relative stability of the solar system they were entering. In daily briefing sessions and even in casual, hallway conversation, the topic came up repeatedly. And as their analysis brought the situation into ever-sharper focus, one thing became clear: If the Skelanese had actually weakened the boundary between their universe and a neighboring one, the Sky Rock would need an effective escape plan.

“Escape to where exactly?” was Gwendolyn Tanby’s constant question. No one could deny she had a point. Even skeptical Elton Cameron had come around to taking the matter more seriously, as he confided at breakfast the day before Crawford’s rocky expedition.

“Not looking so much like a ‘ghost in the data’ now,” said Elton. “Last night we saw evidence of micro- deflections across a cubic lightyear of space in the vicinity of the asteroid belt. Whatever’s generating these … gravity waves … or whatever, is keeping its distance from them.”

“Can’t blame it,” said Crawford. “But, honestly, I can’t see what these weird phenomena have to do with the Skelanese mission. They wanted easy access to other universes. Never said anything about tearing this one to shreds.”

“Hate to say this,” said Elton, “but we may be looking at hardware failure. Whatever the aliens built may have simply gone haywire or … or developed a mind of its own.”

As before, with Dulcey, Crawford’s puzzled expression triggered a mini-lecture from Elton, this time on the theory of “spontaneous sentience.” Given a device with enough computing power and a sufficiently independent sensor array, sentience might arise of its own out of the machine’s experience of the real world. Even, that is, if artificial intelligence programming or circuitry were not included in its original configuration. 

All the while, Crawford couldn’t help noticing how erratically the status lights on Elton’s cerebral implants had begun to flicker.

“You think the Skelanese kreljebtra might have gone rogue?” he asked. 

“Can’t rule it out, is all I’m saying,” said Elton. “I’d recommend you take a lase pistol or particle gun with you, if I thought that wouldn’t likely trigger more cosmic mayhem, depending on what you hit.”

Crawford snorted. 

“Me with a weapon,” he said. “Now you’re talking cosmic catastrophe.”

A crash of mess hall furniture in the near distance made both men whip their head around. There, sprawled out on the off-white tiles was Dulcey, gasping for breath, as if the wind had been knocked out of her. Crawford leapt out of his chair with uncharacteristic grace and rushed to her side as she started to sit up. 

“There you are,” she gasped. “I … sorry about this. But I found exactly what we’re looking for.”

_______________________________________

ADVERTISEMENT

__________________________

Crawford’s eyebrows shot up as he helped her to her feet. His first thought was how grateful he was that her young body had most likely absorbed the shock of her fall.  In spite of his worries, he did his best to put a comic spin on the situation. If only to put himself at ease, he flipped his hands, palm up in the air. 

“No use getting killed over it, though, is it?” he asked. Dulcey gave him a sheepish look. 

“Good point,” she said. “Can I show you my data? Lucky me, I left my tablet in my quarters. Otherwise … smasheroo.”

Crawford shook his head and was startled when Dulcey insisted they reconvene in the ship’s computing bay. 

“We have to see how this plays out on a larger screen,” she said. “There’s too much detail to cram into a small frame.”

On his way out of the mess hall, Crawford checked the time on a readout embedded in the wall above the mess hall entrance. In twenty-four hours, he’d be inside the carved-out Skelanese asteroid. Would anything Dulcey told him count for a hill of beans by then? He found the nearest elevator bank that would take him down to Level 5 — where he’d yet to venture. 

As the door to the computing bay whooshed open, he was surprised to see Arielle waiting for him, her sour expression a harsh contrast to the room’s cheerful white, forest green and ochre décor. Sitting next to her was Saffron Davies, leader of Arielle’s physics team. Her intense, dark brown eyes stared out through a swoosh of black hair that concealed most of her face. 

“Don’t look so stunned, Mr. Caldara,” said Arielle. “I get called whenever anyone requests access to this bay.  It’s normally off limits. But when I saw it was Dulcey, I approved it. There she is now. This better be good. I have to account for every….”

“Sorry to take so long,” said Dulcey. “Hi, Agent Chaplin. I hope this won’t be too boring for you.”

Arielle glared at her.

“I’m not easily bored, Ms. Shear,” said Arielle. 

“Of course not, Sorry,” said Dulcey. “I’m just so excited by what I found.”

“I hope this is worth it,” said Saffron. “I have reams of my own data to analyze. You know, actual data.”

Dulcey stared at Saffron a moment, before rushing over to a central workstation, connecting her tablet to the Sky Rock’snetwork interface and entering a command string at lightning speed. Crawford, Arielle and even Saffron were startled to see a vibrant, pulsating image appear on the computer bay’s expansive holoscreen. 

“Mind explaining yourself?” asked Arielle. 

Dulcey winked at Crawford and summarized their recent speculations about the Skelanese project and the likely function of the kreljebtra they built in the Skelana asteroid belt. After a tentative nod from Arielle, she started a video that her computer-modeling software had created that morning. 

“We were looking for evidence of extra-universal proton migration,” she said. “I’ve checked space lane logs across each of the major colonial routes and there’s nothing. But this is what I found in the Skelana system.”

Crawford’s eyes widened as the simulation showed a steady, ongoing exchange of particles in both directions, plummeting in and out of what appeared to be a dark chasm. 

 “The kreljebtra is doing that?” asked Arielle. “Craters, this is much worse than I thought. How … extensive … is this?”

“I know what you mean, Agent Chaplin,” said Dulcey, “but that isn’t the right question. This phenomenon isn’t like mold or rust or anything at the macro level that creeps over the surface of a solid object. It’s more like a tendency. It’s not so much that proton migration is happening in so many places, but that it can happen at any moment.”

“Clever girl,” said Saffron. “But simulations like this leave a lot to be desired. ‘Plausibility’ and ‘probability’ are two separate words — for a reason.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Dr. Davies,” said Arielle. “But until your analysis is complete, this is what we have to work with. And time, you have to admit, is running out. Or don’t you worry about getting swallowed by an alternative universe?”

Saffron slapped her palms down on her thighs and stood up. 

“Fine,” she said. “Ms. Shear’s speculations are noted. I’ll let you know if they pan out, which I doubt. For one thing, she has no predictive model, at least that I’ve heard. Kind of important really.”

The others watched her stalk out of the computer bay in silence, though the lopsided smile on Crawford’s lips spoke volumes.

“Nobody likes being scooped, I guess,” he said. “But is she right, Dulcey? You haven’t found a pattern, an array that the kreljebtra might generate that would help us know where it will strike next?”

“Maybe if we could get a more zoomed out view,” said Dulcey. “Trouble is, it’s hard to monitor submicroscopic phenomena over a large distance. Besides, as Dr. Davies pointed out, everything I’m showing you now is just … extrapolation. We can’t actually see anything.”

“You should be able to see the effect it’s having, though,” said Arielle. “What if we replicated a steady stream of small, space worthy drones and shot them out into the Skelana solar system. Wouldn’t some of them have to bump into your wandering protons?”

“That might work,” said Crawford, “but we should get the astro team to weigh in. If Dulcey’s right, we might only have days to sort this out before this ‘space disease’ leaps to another galaxy.”

“I’ve already sent this simulation to Elton and the others,” said Arielle. “I do my best thinking when I’m bored. Dulcey, you’ll turn all of your data over to the rest of the team immediately. And you, Mr. Crawford, you’d better start getting ready for your asteroid walk tomorrow. I’m sending 6N7 along to keep you out of trouble, whatever happens. But he’ll need time to acclimate to your speech patterns and you’ll need to learn how to give clear commands.”

Crawford sighed. As if his upcoming foray weren’t stressful enough, he’d have to put up with a snippy android dog. 

“If you insist,” he said. “Though if that little bastard gets in my way, he’ll get a boulder shoved down his throat.”

“Very colorful,” said Arielle. “6N7 would cost you about fifteen million credits to replace. What account should I charge that to?”

To be continued …. Read Episode 5 here.

^^^

A new Episode of A Slight Miscalculation appears every other Monday. See all episodes here.

Mark Laporta is the author of Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, the first two novels in the science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. He is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.

Image design by Steven S. Drachman, from an original photograph by Mikhail Nilov / Pexels

Trust Episode 3

Proof, Episode 3: Warning

, , , ,

[Editor’s Note: Read the entire story from the beginning!]

At sunrise, on Tuesday, Tucky woke to the bouncy ringtone of his reconditioned Samsung Galaxy, which he neglected to answer. Gerd had decided to stay over in Cynthiana for the rest of the week, the gravelly voicemail said. No explanation. Tucky shrugged. He was used to Gerd’s unpredictability, though all signs pointed to a romantic encounter.

At fifty-five, the tall, muscular German, who spent at least as much time at the gym as he did in his shop, was still a devoted “lady killer,” if only in his imagination. Tucky had met a few of his hapless girlfriends in the past eighteen months. Most of them looked as if Gerd’s main attraction was his offer of three square meals a day. Regardless, his absence meant Tucky was free to study the contents of the four boxes, for as long as, it seemed, the tablet demanded.

Before falling asleep in his clothes the night before, Tucky had been thrilled by his progress. But as he starred down at his workbench the next morning, his enthusiasm waned. He realized that he’d merely arranged the pieces by size. It had been a desperate attempt to find a sense of order in the crazy-quilt of titanium, nano-tube composites and heat-resistant ceramic. And that was not to mention containers filled with a glistening substance resembling chicken guts — minus the stench.

Wherever these … components … had come from, it wasn’t Best Buy. Tucky figured the tablet would have the answer, and spent the next few hours fiddling with its triangular buttons. If he could make sense of the characters that crawled across its screen, he decided, he’d have a better chance of sorting the components out. Though he failed to grasp their meaning, the more he peered into the tablet’s milky-white screen, the more he thought he sensed an intelligence lurking behind it.

Must be going nuts, he told himself.

Still, anything was better than fixating on Carla. He stepped away from his workbench, took a deep breath and tried to reassess the tablet’s behavior. A bright orange beanbag chair, Gerd’s one concession to luxury in the shop’s back room, gave Tucky a soft perch from which to clear his head. Had he really encountered a mysterious, unknown language? Maybe the tablet was programmed to display Greek or Chinese but a burned out circuit in the LCD board or a simple software glitch had made the text come out garbled.

By now the sun was streaming into the front of the shop and Tucky’s stomach reminded him of last night’s pizza — the one he forgot to eat. He grabbed his white jeans jacket off its hook on the back of the workshop door and rushed out to the street. Ten minutes later, the smell of scrambled eggs and bacon at Cooper’s made him forget about everything except how great it was to be eating. Yet, once the last bite of smoked ham had slid down his throat, his mind filled again with the components, the tablet … and the fact that his life was going nowhere.

The components, on the other hand, were going somewhere; he couldn’t let this chance fall out of his hands. If he could figure out how these seriously weird circuits worked and prove it, nobody would ever again call him the name that Carla Soto had screamed at him on that terrible Sunday night.

Nobody.

Tucky passed on his third coffee refill. There was no other way. He’d have to show the components to Mr. Nagy over at the Cole Community College Science Center. Nagy, he decided, didn’t need to see the whole pile. Two or three of the weirder ones would be enough to whet his appetite. Best of all, Tucky decided he only needed a white lie to cover his tracks. Drew Flaherty had dropped off components from an unknown source.

But Mr. Nagy didn’t need to know about the tablet, its strange characters or the nonverbal way it was now directing Tucky’s every move. Though the miserable young man preferred to believe he was acting independently, he knew full well that this planned visit was uncharacteristic. When had he ever taken so much initiative? A sinewy man in his early fifties, Mr. Nagy, was welcoming and solicitous, without ever shading over into intrusion. As he stared at the components over a pair of black half-glasses, his graying eyebrows shot up high. Tucky was startled by the intense look in his eyes.

“Never seen anything like these,” said Mr. Nagy. “It’s a lucky find, Tuck. Sure wish I could help you, but I’m stumped, too. I’ll tell you this, though, these aren’t just toys. Look how intricate they are. I hope you do figure this out — but you better be careful. No telling what you might find. All right. I see there’s no putting you off this … mission … so here.”

He reached for his iPhone and texted Tucky the name and address of Inga Gestirn. She had been Mr. Nagy’s own Engineering professor at the University of Louisville, whom he must have mentioned a hundred times while was teaching Tucky’s class.

“I’ll give her a call and tell her you’re coming,” said Mr. Nagy. “Just get started. If she’s not free this afternoon, I’ll get you another appointment and give you a call. Might do you good to get out of Carrollton for the day, either way.”

Tucky’s throat went dry, but he managed to choke out a “thank you,” as he backed out of the older man’s office. He’d never seen Mr. Nagy so serious before. What, he wondered, had he stepped into? But in spite of himself Tucky couldn’t resist following this new lead. He stumbled out of the Science Center and into its parking lot, where he was surprised to find the Civic’s engine running.

Though he was sure he’d switched the car off — the keys were in his pocket, after all — that thought wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the one that entered his mind next. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that the tablet had started the car for him, remotely. But there was nothing to do but get in the driver’s seat, and hope he’d still be the one driving.

Three hours later, a wave of nausea crashed over Tucky’s stomach as he pulled into a Visitor parking spot near the Speed School of Engineering.

Smart old lady like that, his anxious mind told him, will analyze the whole thing in a second.

But Tucky knew he had to risk sharing credit for his discovery. Another night of hearing the tablet babbling into his mind and he’d have to plug his ears up with steel wool. After a few minutes of fidgeting in a sterile, modernist waiting room, a trim 70-year-old woman came up to greet him. At five-foot-five and wearing a jet black pants suit with a white, old-fashioned, pleated blouse, she reminded Tucky of a train conductor, even though he could still count the number of times he’d been on a train.

“Mr. Calloway?” she asked. “I’m glad you came. You’re on fire about something, I can tell.’

For the first time in two days, Drew Flaherty’s junk box took second place in Tucky’s mind. No one had ever called him “Mister” before. After a chatty conversation in the elevator to the 3rd floor of the stately brick building, Tucky felt more at home with Inga Gastrin than he had with just about anyone he could remember.

“So?” she asked, as she creaked her birdish frame into an overstuffed leather chair behind a heavy walnut desk. Tucky smiled to himself, recognizing it as exactly the kind solid wood furniture that Gerd was always pining for; it was even topped with an 1/8 slab of bottle-green glass. He fished a paper bag out of his jeans jacket and spilled out two of the components onto the desktop, whose shiny surface acted like a mirror. The inverted image in the glass drew his eye to a series of patterns, almost like a foreign alphabet, running along the outer rim of each component. His voice caught in his throat.

“Any idea what these are?” he asked. Something about their reflection made the tablet’s image shimmer more intently than ever behind his eyelids. But Inga Gestirn did nothing but glance at the components, stare at the disheveled, red-haired young man in front of her and get up from her chair. She walked over to one of three multi-paned windows that lined one wall of her office, stared out and took a deep breath.

“Where did you find those?” she asked without turning around.

And though Tucky explained earnestly, he could tell that Mr. Nagy’s old professor was completely uninterested in the answer. The moment he finished, she turned around abruptly, as if driven by a motor.

“Get rid of them,” she said.

“But Mr. Nagy said you might know what they’re for,” Tucky asserted.

“Erno knows nothing about that!” shouted Inga. “Mr. Calloway, you asked for my advice, and I’ve given it. Dig the deepest hole you can and throw those things into it. Then cover it over and get as far away as you can.”

The tiny woman hurried back to her desk, yanked open one of its lower drawers and pulled out the black leather purse jammed uncomfortably inside. She was breathing hard.

Here,” she said, “I’ll write you a check, I’ll pay you to bury them.”

Tucky stared at Inga and grabbed the components off her desk.

“What’s … what’s going on, what is it?” his voice trembled. “Look, I’m putting them away.”

“That’s not enough, you have to bury them!” yelled the elderly professor, as if she were suddenly thirty years younger. “Is five thousand dollars enough?” She scribbling furiously, the ink from her fountain pen smearing as she wrote.

Tucky jumped to his feet.

“Stop!” he said. “Tell me what’s so freaking important about this … this junk!”

Inga let the fountain pen drop from her fingers and glared at him.

“It’s not junk,” she said. “You know that, or you wouldn’t be here. Now, tell me something. Do you have a monkey wrench?”

“In the trunk of my car,” said Tucky meekly.

“I suggest you use it,” said the professor. She tore up the ink-stained check, wrote out a new one and handed it to him. “Start with these few pieces and smash every last one of them. Then cash the check and buy yourself a ticket to anywhere in the world. When you run out of money, give me a call. My number’s at the top left.”

Tucky grabbed at his hair with both hands.

“But what is this about?” he asked. “What’s so damn important?”

“Take the check,” said Inga, “and call me when you’re relocated. But you must promise: If your widower friend turns up again with another device, destroy it immediately.”

“Another…device?” asked Tucky. “What’s it look like?”

But the image of the tablet that now fairly burned the underside of this eyelids, was all the answer he needed.

(To be continued in Episode 4)

^^^

Mark Laporta is the author of Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, the first two novels in the science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. He is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.

Design by Steven S. Drachman, from an image by Johannes Plennio

Granular Episode 10

Granular, Episode 10: Uncertainty, On Principle

, , , ,

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

If Barsoom spaceport had merely been smaller than Zach expected, he might not have minded. But from every angle, the archaic facility, located on the outskirts of Zubrin City, Mars, looked disturbingly primitive. No more reassuring was the lengthy docking procedure which, at one hour, was nearly ten times longer than the Cosmic Consortium standard. Factor in the intermittent clang of alarm bells that accompanied every step of the process, and it was no wonder that Zach felt as if he’d stepped into a disaster zone.

But as he glanced at the minimal crew of his small WorldGov transport, he saw not a trace of anxiety in their eyes. That didn’t stop him from asking after the delay.

“Can’t rush this old tech,” said the Assistant Engineer. “Unless you’d rather suffocate.”

Zach realized the futility of asking why the planet had clung to centuries-old technologies. Still, his ignorance of the subject irritated him. He was curious to know whether the venerable colony had been plagued by local stubbornness alone, or by WorldGov neglect.

Or did the roots of Martian backwardness run deeper? Though Zubrin City had once been the pride of humanity, it was now decidedly “the outback.” Parsecs away from the current hub of interstellar civilization, Mars didn’t even appear on some star charts. Maybe, Zach figured, after twenty-seven hundred years of isolation, the allure of The New had faded from Martian culture.

At long last, the final klaxon sounded, and it was time to disembark. As he stood up to approach the gently sloping exit ramp, he was unnerved to be surrounded by his two android bodyguards. Code named “Abagail” and “Kieran,” they were several orders of magnitude more lifelike than the servicebots at Bohr University. And after his scary encounter with Dalamacras, Zach couldn’t help wondering if these two androids might actually be Alegarli replicas.

If I’d wanted guarantees, he told himself, I would’ve stayed home.

Besides, as the past few weeks had taught him, there was no such thing as absolute safety. In an embattled universe, the most he could hope for were conditions that allowed him to believe he was safe. Regardless, with his feet planted on “Martian soil,” he could no longer afford to dither over his anxieties — least of all the well-founded ones. Fortunately, once he was in motion, the clap of his ankle-length boots on the spaceport’s outmoded pseudo-cotta tiles was strangely heartening.

As he took in the sights, his stress-level dropped another notch. It dawned on him that Paula’s choice for a meeting place couldn’t have been more apt. There was nothing he’d seen so far that would have the slightest appeal to the Alegarli as a base of operations. The spaceport and its surroundings, often the very heartbeat of a colony world, were as quiet and unassuming as the laziest of small towns on a typical agricultural planet.

On their way to the ungainly hover car that would take them to a conveniently located hotel, Zach was relieved to see confirmation of recent news reports. Over time, the collapse of the colony’s original terraforming systems had led to WorldGov intervention. Starting fifteen years earlier, updated methods were introduced. Some of these improvements had even forced local governments to upgrade other vital systems to accommodate the new tech.

Yet here, again, the well-documented “Martian-lag” had revealed another side of itself. That the phrase “local governments” had turned up so often in Zach’s reading reminded him that Mars was one of the last worlds in the Consortium without a centralized government. There were even some Martian provinces whose citizens had adopted neither Planetary Standard nor its Martian variant. Instead, they spoke dialects of languages brought to Mars by its original colonists.

It didn’t take a degree in psychology to see through Zach’s momentary obsession with the minutia of Martian life. With the pressure mounting, his overheated mind looked for any alternative to dealing with the Alegarli threat. But his involuntary avoidance strategy came crashing down, once the hover car was airborne. Out of the blue, Abigail stared into his eyes and forced him to focus on the here and now.

“What do you anticipate that Ms. Altenberg will tell you?” she asked,

“I … I have no way to anticipate anything,” said Zach. “I only know the kind of data I hope she has.”

“Have you considered,” asked Kieran, “the possibility that she may demand a price for her data?”

Zach felt his temperature rise. He’d so far assumed that Paula was simply being helpful, either out of decency or, if he were honest with himself, out of affection.

“She may,” he said. “But I’ve nothing to give her. I can’t asked Colin — Colonel Harris — for money. We’d have to make do without her.”

“Based on my analysis of similar cases in human history,” said Abagail, “we cannot assume that her demands, if any, would be monetary.”

Zach’s eyes widened. The gynoid’s insinuation stirred up a confusing mix of emotion. But his disciplined mind refused to be distracted.

If I don’t stop the Alegarli, he told himself, the granular effect will make me, Paula and everything else irrelevant.

The outmoded Martian hovercar swayed a bit in a light breeze coming off the terraformed planet, before banking right to make a graceful enough landing at the base of Zach’s hotel. With the first leg of his mission complete, he tried to steady his swirling thoughts. After a hot meal, a shower and a few minutes to collect his thoughts before bed, he hoped to gain a fresh perspective.

But it was not to be. No sooner had he entered the hotel lobby than he was confronted by disturbing news. A tinny 2-D video screen blared out what purported to be an interstellar news brief. In Zach’s world, no one had seen this kind of broadcast since before his parents were born. Yet here it was, complete with a dolled-up news reader, who spoke in the measured cadences of theatrical objectivity.

Reports of an alleged assault by Alegarli forces on a major WorldGov

colony in the Cannon system have been confirmed by Fleet reconnaissance teams.

Rumors of a new type of weapon were corroborated by Fleet Captain Caroline

Walker. Quoting now: “The weapon ripped up half the main installation and

what’s left is sparkling like it’s about to explode. The entire colony is useless.”

For details we go now to….

“It would appear….” said Abigail.

“I know what it appears!” Zach shouted. “Let’s get up to the room, fast.”

But Zach’s urgent request for speed ran smack into the brick wall of Martian obsolescence. Not only was the hotel’s reception desk staffed with humans instead of androids as he’d expected, but they were unable to interface with the data feed from either his implanted comstreamer or his handheld. He was reduced to registering on an archaic manual keyboard. The only good news was that his nearly eidetic memory made adapting to the keyboard fairly easy. The hard part, nonetheless, was the sheer physicality of the experience.

Surprised I don’t have to rub two flints together, he thought.

Twenty-five minutes later, Zach rushed into his hotel suite, locked the door and collapsed onto its overstuffed bed.

“Should I call Room Service?” asked Kieran. “You must be hungry.”

“Doubt I’ll ever be able to eat again,” said Zach. “Maybe later. First let’s gather all the intel we can about that Alegarli attack.”

But if Zach had hoped to escape his raging anxiety in the cooling shade of objective data analysis, he was disappointed immediately, by the insistent buzz of his implanted comstreamer.

“Doctor Griffin — Zach — It’s Paula Altenberg,” said the woman he hadn’t stopped thinking about for weeks. Was Colin right to be suspicious? It hardly mattered. The sound of her voice pushed all doubt from his mind.

“I’ve just arrived,” said Zach. “Looking forward to….”

“That’s what I want to tell you,” said Paula. “I’m sure you heard about the attack on Johnson Colony. Well my editor insists I rush over to cover it. I told him I had and exclusive with you and he let me off the hook for now. But … well, I was wondering if we could meet today, right now, even. I have to be in the Cannon system by 1100 Standard Time.”

Zach gulped. Paula might well be sincere. Yet if this were an elaborate trap, a sudden change of plans might be the perfect way to make him more vulnerable to attack. But what were his options? As the news report confirmed, Paula’s intel might be his last chance to stop the Alegarli.

“OK,” he said. “But I doubt the outdoor restaurant you mentioned can accommodate us on such short notice.”

The lilt in Paula’s voice was both endearing and irritating.

“Of course it can,” she said. “This is Mars. Life is slower. You won’t find a packed restaurant on the entire planet. Not on a Tuesday.”

Zach’s heart pounded as he tried to assess the un-assessable. And what, by the way, was Tuesday? The ancient names for the days of the week, long since changed, were as foreign to him as a Crelenk hat box. In the end, he agreed and hesitated just long enough to verify the address. If there were any chance that Paula could help him defeat Dalamacras, he was determined to grab it.

Zach brushed aside Kieran and Abigail’s reluctance to accept this last-minute change. Without discussion, he grabbed a quantum tablet from his carry-on luggage and dashed out of his hotel room. Despite their objections, the two androids followed. Unknown to Zach, he owed their unflagging loyalty to the strict protocols Colin had made sure were impressed on their otherwise independent minds.

Fortunately, the restaurant Paula had picked out was less than two city blocks away from his hotel. He dashed into the entryway, gave Paula’s name to a rather alarmed hostess and was ushered into the main dining room of “Chez Bradbury.” There, in the far corner, sat the journalist Zach had seen only once, on his ill-fated visit to the Haliak lunar colony. Her smile, as he approached her table, was as easy and unforced, as if he’d known her since childhood.

Has to be an illusion, he said.
Like many a young man who’d spent too much time lost in his work, Zach failed to reckon with the power of infatuation. Did Paula really see more in him than a promising interview subject? He had no idea. Both his immaturity and the urgency of the situation forced him to take his impressions at face value.

“You look harried,” said Paula. “Sorry. But I think you’ll like this place. The food is fabulous — though I can’t be sure your two friends will like it.”

Zach blushed, yet, besotted as he was, he realized he didn’t owe Paula an explanation. With luck, the two androids would at least fool the waiter, who’d just arrived at their table.

“What can you tell me?” he said. “I don’t have much time before….”

Paula reached out and touched his right hand.

“Not while the waiter’s here,” she whispered.

Zach’s shoulders drooped. It embarrassed him to think how little he knew of the everyday world. To compensate, he pretended to be preoccupied with his tablet while Paula ordered for the four of them. Soon enough, however, the waiter stalked off, miffed by the lack of alcohol in her order. Sensing Zach’s agitation, Paula put her index finger to her lips and reached into a small satchel that was parked on the bench beside her. In her right hand was a silvery data cylinder, which she slid across the table into his fingers.

“I’m pretty sure this is what you’re looking for,” she said. “Why not let Tick and Tock take a look?”

Zach stared at her a moment, glanced down at the cylinder and handed it to Abigail with a faux nonchalance that would have tipped off any observant spy. For her part, Abigail slipped the cylinder into her palm and closed her eyes.

“Accessing,” she whispered. Zach watched breathless until the gynoid’s eyes opened less than a minute later. “Confirmed,” she whispered again. “I suggest I return to the lander and transmit this data to HQ.”

Zach was about to agree until Paula grabbed his right forearm.

“If anyone were paying attention,” she said. “that would look pretty suspicious. Trust me, on Mars no one’s in a hurry. Besides, here’s our food.”

The waiter, accompanied by a comically graceless robotic serving platform, arrived and set out four servings of penne alla vodka with grudging care, before stalking off again. Paula smiled.

“Must have a migraine,” she said. “I hear they’re common here. Something about the low natural gravity, even though, supposedly the Martians reinforce it with local gravity modulators. But you’d know better than I.”

“I might,” said Zach. “If I could think straight. But I can’t help wondering. If you had all the data we needed on a cylinder, why did you need to deliver it here?”

Paula’s face went pale and she looked down at her plate.

“So you aren’t glad to see me after all,” she said.

“It isn’t that,” said Zach. “But we are in a time crunch — and you knew that. So I have to assume you had another reason.”

Paula looked up again, her eyes wet.

“I have a confession,” she said. “I was hoping … well, let me ask you. Why do you feel it’s your personal responsibility to fix everything? You’ve done the hard work. The bean counters at WorldGov Intel can take it the rest of the way home.”

“I doubt that,” said Zach. “Every aspect of our counterattack involves new tech. I only have a theory about how to repair the damage the Alegarli do. And as soon as we finish with the Alegarli, the entire transmat industry needs a makeover — and fast. Hey!”

Zach had glanced over at his two bodyguards to see how much of the conversation they’d absorbed, only to find them deactivated.

“I’ve taken the liberty,” said Paula, “of shutting them down. Just long enough so we could talk.”

Zach’s jaw dropped.

“Colin was right about you,” he said. “Want to tell me what’s really going on?”

“You know,” said Paula. “You just don’t want to believe it. I’m not what you thought I am. I’m not even from this time. I came here to save you from yourself.”

“Please,” said Zach. “If this is your idea of a sales pitch, you’re barely at the level of a grade-B holovid.”

Paula grabbed his hands and squeezed them hard.

“Zach, listen,” she said. “If you follow your original timeline, you’ll stop the Alegarli and fix the latency issue within the current state of transmat tech.”

“What’s wrong with….” said Zach.

“And die doing it, six months afterward,” said Paula. “I’ve seen it, over and over again. In every metaverse we studied, you get struck by a random unshielded transmat beam and … well, that’s the end of you.”

“Unlikely,” said Zach. “I know my way around a lab. I have since I was a teenager. But if I humor you, what’s the alternative?”

Paula explained that, as a resident of the far future, she could whisk him away before his untimely death.

“We’ve done it,” she said. “We’ve developed time travel. It turned out to be an extension of transmat tech. And we owe it to you. That’s why we want to save you. Think of it. There’s so much more you could accomplish.”

Zach sat back in his chair and gave a dry, cynical chuckle.

“Again, grade-B theatrics,” he said. “I don’t know what your game is, but I’ll bet my last charmed quark there’s no extension of transmat tech that could create a ‘time machine.’”

“But….” said Paula.

“There’s more,” said Zach. “Even if I believed you, I’d never abandon my universe and take a free pass into yours. It’s not ethical. Worse, it’s what Dalamacras would do. Now, come on, switch Abigail and Kieran back on and let me get on with this.”

“What if I told you I loved you?” said Paula.

Zach’s eyes shut tight. Her words soothed his heart almost as much as they seared it.

“How is that possible?” he asked. “This is only the second time you’ve seen me.”

Paula put her head in her hands.

“That’s not true,” she said. “I’ve watched you — different versions of you — across dozens of metaverses, even ones where you don’t look the same. And always … your courage, your commitment to the truth … you move me.”

“It’s too late for that,” said Zach. “This universe is about to turn into glittering dust. Besides, you can’t honestly say you know that your own world would be the same if I left with you. Whatever your people discovered, it can’t have changed the basic structure of causation. You might be able to zip around between causal delimiters, but you can’t control where they are. That’s only controlled by action.”

“In this universe,” said Paula. “I want to take you where nothing that happens here matters.”

“That’s what you don’t get,” said Zach. “Everything that happens here matters, including my death. I won’t allow you to say the people of this time are less important than their descendants. Besides, you’ve already altered my timeline. You’ve warned me. I’ll be prepared.”

Paula wiped her eyes with the restaurant’s oversized blue napkin and sighed. Almost instantly, Kieran and Abigail revived.

“You’d better leave,” said Paula. “I can’t hold back the timeline any longer. I’d say good luck but … but I can’t.”

Zach leaned forward and kissed her. It was a delicious moment he’d never forget. The only question was how long “never” would be.

Within half an hour, the WorldGov Intel Lander had docked with its base ship. As Zach began his return trip, his heart swelled with a curious mix of joy and sorrow. As miserable as he was, this was the happiest moment of his life. Nevertheless, the pressure to work out a set of critical calculations left him little time to wallow in emotion. He worked feverishly and, with the help of Kieran and Abigail, designed the blocking and repair devices they needed to minimize the impact of any Alegarli assault

Once back with Colin, the data on Paula’s cylinder proved a gold mine of information. It took seven painful weeks, during which the Alegarli’s rampage grew to horrific proportions. Finally, WorldGov Intel agents, disguised as shipping clerks, delivered the first batch of contaminated supplies to the covert Alegarli factory that produced the insectoid’s food supply. .

Soon afterward, reports of Alegarli ships veering off course in the midst of an assault gave Zach and Colin hope. In the following weeks, thanks to state-of-the-art replicators, Zach’s newly-minted counterstrike weapons rolled off the assembly line. Now, even the few Alegarli who could still pilot a ship ran into a blocking field that rendered their transmat-latency weapons useless. Within eight months, diplomats from both sides arranged a cease fire. Both the Alegarli’s latency cannon and WorldGov’s contaminated food capsules were permanently banned.

Next, WorldGov Intel exposed “President Delany” as an Alegarli duplicate and Zach was finally able to return to his prized lab at Bohr University. The real President Delaney, though eventually released from an Alegarli prison, was too broken to resume her old post. The search for her replacement would take months, during which the status quo would be maintained by her former subordinates. Among these were Semyon Altov, who greeted Zach’s return with the sad realization that he’d be forever eclipsed by his former student.

The upshot was that Zach’s department remained fully funded. In no time, he took up his original line of temporal field experiments. But with a greatly expanded grasp of the physics of transmat tech, his work gradually veered in a new direction. What if, he asked himself, instead of merely altering an object’s physical coordinates, he could alter its temporal coordinates as well? The invention of practical time travel, still a century in the future, had its inception in the decade that followed.

In the short term, however, Zach emerged from the suspicions that had shadowed his every move since he arrived at Haliak colony over a year before. If nothing else, Loor TreVal’s burgeoning interstellar music career established that she was definitely not his murder victim.

As soon as WorldGov Security would allow, he made contact with his disbelieving parents. He got in touch with old classmates and routinely set aside more time for socializing than he had in years. After months of pining over mysterious, atemporal Paula, he realized he couldn’t continue to live like a hermit. And though he never married, he never again allowed himself to live for work alone.

Years passed, and Zach’s achievements fulfilled his early promise. At the same time, he’d seen what happens when scientists aren’t vigilant and allow corporations to play fast and loose with ethics. That’s why he doggedly lobbied the Interstellar Consortium to adopt his “latency-zero” transmat tech as the new industry standard. He’d caused a sensation by developing it with an interspecies team, which included Crelenk and even Alegarli specialists. But he didn’t stop there.

With Colin’s help, he also established a broad-based civilian review board, tasked with overseeing every new technology product introduced by corporations large and small. From that point forward, fraudulent claims supported by “proprietary research,” were disallowed at every level of society.

One night, toward the end of his life, Zach looked out over the night sky, as seen from his patio. He allowed himself to wonder what might have happened if, decades before, he’d followed Paula out of Time into a future that was forever out of reach. But after just a few minutes, he lost interest. In Paula’s future world he realized, everything he knew would have been centuries out of date. He’d have been a relic, a toy for historians — a fragment of the person he’d grown into.

Like subjecting my soul to the granular effect, he told himself.

In the near distance, light from the night sky bounced off the surface of an artificial pond. It was one of several that dotted a Bohr University campus that had been greatly expanded since he’d arrived, forty years earlier.

Light knows the way of the universe, he thought. It’s relentless, just like I tried to be. Have to hope I was half as ‘enlightening.’

With a soft chuckle at his stupid joke, Zach dragged his tired body into bed. Would the universe be there tomorrow? There was no way to know and, he decided, that was the way it should be.

^^^

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.

Illustration from an original image by Kellepicks/Pixabay

Granular 8-1

Granular, Episode 8: Ferocity Squared

, , , , , ,

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

A wash of indistinct noise, accompanied by blurry blotches of light and color, entered the fractured consciousness of a prone figure. A rhythm intruded, a continuous beat, accompanied by a new, distinct sound:

“Ack, ack? Ack? Ack, ack….”

A sudden inward rush of air forced the figure bolt upright. Gasp after gasp welled up from a slim abdomen as two pale blue eyes opened wide to see a military sickbay. The sound transmuted, acquiring a new initial.

“Zach!” said a vaguely reassuring voice. “Lie down. No, don’t try to talk. The doctor will be here soon.”

The figure blinked once, twice, three times, initiating a flood of tears as a soft pair of hands pushed its torso down to the stretched, white sheets. A flicker of recognition began a cascade of self-awareness. The sound, “Zach,” was a name, was him.

“Should be … should … dead,” he croaked.

“Shush,” said a female voice. The soft hands that brushed the hair out of his eyes sent a soothing wave of relaxation down his spine.

For the next several hours, the bewildered fugitive from Crelenk justice was completely overwhelmed by the protocols of physical recovery. The lander crash that had knocked him unconscious had also subjected him to a barrage of bruises, burns, scrapes and contusions. Those were well in hand, thanks to a variation on the same nano-medtech he’d only recently benefited from at an Alegarli facility, His mental state, however, was in a dangerous state of flux.

Between his terrifying memory of the crash and his unquenchable frustration, Zach’s mind veered from rage to despair faster than was consistent with any coherent definition of sanity. No wonder an ethereally calm psychiatrist saw fit to inject him with a customized sedative that was exquisitely matched to his genome, gender, age, weight, height and brain wave patterns.

After an initial period of disorientation, Zach Griffin, brilliant astrophysicist and card-carrying workaholic, felt his mind lose its moorings and drift into a Neverland of peaceful contemplation.

Beautiful universe produces ugly intellects, he reflected. Or are they beautiful expressions of its inherent cruelty?

A magnificent spiral staircase opened out and down at his feet, a masterpiece of tungsten steel, exotic inlaid hardwoods and rare gems from across the cosmos. With an easy flip of his right leg, he slid down its polished right banister. The gliding motion, soothing at first, whooshed him past a thousand recollections of life, including his first fateful trip to Haliak.

Spread out before him briefly, in cinematographic detail, was his breezy lunch date with Paula Altenberg. Her smile, still captivating, even as he glided by, once again soothed his soul. Until, that is, he rounded the next curve, and a fearful acceleration began. Faster and faster and faster he slid, until he felt as if he were hurtling down to a collision with a planetary core. What was it … what was it for … what was it…?

“No, no, no!” he shouted. For a second time that day, he sat bolt upright, in what was now a darkened room, and spoke as if in a trance. “The merger of the overlapping latency fields can be blocked by the steady application of controlled gravity modulation fields in increasing increments, starting at 0.0175 graviton per square millimeter.”

Artificial light flooded his hospital room, which for the first time he identified as a WorldGov facility. Even in his desperate state, its tell-tale characteristics registered immediately. From its high ceilings, ornamented in a curious abstract leaf pattern, to its gentle pastel color schemes and spare, yet impossibly elegant furnishings, it was nevertheless a wonder of functional, efficient design.

A team of nightshift medicos crept toward the edge of his bed, accompanied by a sleek medbot. Zach stared at them quizzically.

It’s like I’m made out of glass, he thought.

“Professor Griffin,” said a male nurse. “You’re a lucky man. The Alegarli nanobots that were already in your system repaired some of the critical damage from the crash before we even got to you. but…”

“Jenkins,” said Gloria Szabo, the resident physician, “let’s not tire our patient with too many details just now. How do you feel?”

“Relieved,” said Zach. “And worried. The longer I lie here, the more likely the fabric of the universe will unravel.”

Dr. Szabo smiled.

“It’s normal to have a heightened sense of purpose after a traumatic injury,” she said. “I promise you, the universe will be just fine until you recover.”

“But….” said Zach.

“Jenkins,” said Szabo, “get the nutritionist up here and see if we can get some food into our patient. You’re looking a little pale, Professor.”

She smiled at Zach again and swept off through the room’s double doors to another part of the facility.

“Sorry,” said Jenkins. “You hungry?”

“A little,” said Zach. “But let me ask you: Did Colin Harris survive?”

“Colonel Harris?” said Jenkins. “Yes, though his military training came in handy. I guess no one bothered to tell you to strap in.”

“Need to … to talk … to …” said Zach.

The effects of the crash took over again. Eight hours later, when his eyes fluttered open, he saw Lieutenant Colonel Colin Harris sitting beside his bed in full dress uniform. For a brief moment, the shiny array of brass and satin medals on Colin’s chest seemed just a tad too fanciful to be real. Zach surprised himself by sitting up with ease.

“It’s time you told me the truth,” he said.

Colin adjusted the cuffs on his forest green tunic.

“What truth?” he said. “it comes in many flavors.”

“Cut it out,” said Zach. “The only truth that matters to me, is that I’m here on my back and the granular effect is still running wild. Sunspots! I can’t even measure it, let alone stop it.”

“If that’s what you’re worried about,” said Harris, “you’ll be happy to know you’ve been officially declared dead.”

“You want to explain….” said Zach.

Colin cut him off with a wave of his right hand.

“It’s really simple,” he said. “Being dead means no one’s coming to look for you. You can work here in secret with no one to knock you in the head or shoot missiles at you.”

Zach’s eyes widened.

“You … you planned it this way,” he said. “I could have been killed.”

Colin laughed.

“Haven’t you ever seen a magic show?” he asked.

Over Zach’s grunting attempts at indignation, Colin explained the carefully staged faking of his death. The missiles were WorldGov concussion blanks, whose impact sent the lander into a programmed nosedive-and-roll-maneuver to a specific set of GPS coordinates. It eventually came to rest, as planned, over a concealed sliding door in the roadway, through which everyone on board escaped the badly damaged vessel.

But not everything had gone as planned. In the rush to take off, Colin had forgotten to remind Zach to fasten his safety harness — and there was one more unexpected development.

“One of the missiles was real,” said Colin. “Someone must have tipped off the Crelenk, or the Alegarli. Though that makes no sense. We figured they’d want to keep you alive.”

“If you’re right,” said Zach, “and it was the Alegarli, then the situation is worse than you know. If they think I’m expendable, it could only be because they’ve already figured out how to weaponize the granular effect.”

Colin took a deep breath and squeezed his eyes tight.

“Good point,” he said. “But at least now, they won’t be expecting any interference from you.”

“That only matters if I’m ambulatory,” said Zach. “And listen. Whatever Dalamacras is planning, the danger is a trillion times greater than one more interstellar power grab. I’m telling you, if the granular effect spreads beyond a few local occurrences, I wouldn’t put any money on the survival of current physical laws.”

“Meaning?” asked Colin.

“Total annihilation!” said Zach. “Of everything! Can’t believe President Delaney put a ban on research related to the granular effect. If not by me than…someone.”

“Which Delaney is that?” asked Colin. “The one who originally took up the post at Bohr six arcs ago, or the one the Alegarli replaced her with?’

Zach thumped his mattress with both fists.

“We’re doomed,” he said. “I was hoping I could get word to Altov back at the University. He could put a team together.”

Colin rested a hand on Zach’s tender left shoulder and tried to allay his fears. Apparently, his branch of the WorldGov Intel Corps had downloaded Zach’s field notes only hours after he’d uploaded them to the Bohr University cloud server.

“We’ve made some interesting extrapolations,” said Colin. “I’ll show them to you when you’re better rested.”

“Show me now.” said Zach. “Any more rest and we’ll never stop the Alegarli. Come on, you’ve got the uniform — make it work for you.”

“The uniform?” asked Colin. “You have a lot to learn. Let me see what I can do. Meanwhile, eat something and — seriously — brush your teeth.”

Colin bolted out of the room, in what Zach hoped was a real state of urgency. A few minutes later, nurse Jenkins returned with a food cart and strict instructions to eat slowly. The menu, as Zach had expected, was depressingly bland. But after a hearty meal, at least from the perspective of someone who hadn’t eaten for longer than he wanted to admit, he felt stronger, and even more determined.

Yet, as often happens, Zach’s good spirits had a brief shelf life. A familiar blur appeared in the air next to his bed. Just as before, in the Crelenk Rehabilitation Center, the blur resolved itself to a holojection of Dalamacras.

“See what your so-called bravery has netted you?” he said. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but human security systems are not up to current specifications — as set by us, of course.”

“What do you want?” asked Zach. “You can’t have gone to all this bother just to gloat.”

“Again,” said the insect-filled android shell, “your mental agility wastes itself on trivia. Brilliant observation, all the same! Just several rotations too late. We have found the perfect application for the phenomenon you discovered. A little trick of Physics involving emag containment fields. I’d love to show you what we’ve accomplished. An elegant solution really.”

“Mind elaborating?” asked Zach.

“Too late.” said Dalamacras. “You’ve squandered your last opportunity to join us. Know that your fate is, as you humans say, ‘sealed.’ Though implying that an abstraction from basic probability equations can be bound up by … paraffin wax … is simply illogical.”

“Logic’s overrated,” said Zach. “Your very existence proves that.”

“I disagree,” said the tall Alegarli. “At any rate, as of now, this entire facility is rigged to detonate the moment you step out of that filthy hospital cot. Really, on my homeworld, we don’t subject farm animals to such revolting conditions. But this, my dear boy, is the path you have chosen. Enjoy it!”

On that note, the holojection faded away. Instantly Colin burst into Zach’s room with a large uniformed security force behind him.

“They jammed every system,” he said. “We couldn’t get in any sooner.”

Zach smiled.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“What?” asked Colin. “What do you….”

“Something Dalamacras said,” said Zach. “Tell me, did WorldGov ever make progress with that emag cladding project?”

“Shelved it,” said Colin. “As far as I know. The energy requirements were … insane.”

“Get me the specs and the latest test data,” said Zach. “I have an idea.”

“You do know that’s classified,” said Colin.

“You know what you sound like?” asked Zach.

Colin nodded, turned to leave and signaled his adrenalized security team to follow him. Jenkins, who’d hidden pointlessly in a nearby utility closet when Dalamacras’ holojection appeared, peered around the closet door at Zach.

“I’m … I’m going off shift now,” he said. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

“Yes,” said Zach. “Get me a quantum tablet and as much caffedren as you can sneak past Doctor Szabo.”

“Not sure that’s a good idea,” said Jenkins. “In your condition….”

Zach pivoted on his hips and dangled his feet over the edge of his bed.

“You heard our friend, right?” he said. “If I don’t get what I want … ka-boom.”

“But … you,” said Jenkins, “you wouldn’t do that. We have fifteen-hundred personnel here, easy.”

“If I can’t find the basis for a defensive weapon,” said Zach, “before the Alegarli go on their rampage, I’d be doing you a favor. Or would you prefer to have everyone you love disintegrate while you watch the flesh drip off your bones?”

Jenkins stared at him, open-mouthed, shook his head and walked slowly toward the room’s double doors, where he paused and turned back.

“You want Sirius Dark or Eridani Mild?” he asked.

Zach shrugged and Jenkins walked out.

“Now we’ll see who’s cornered the market on trivia,” he said.

He pulled his feet back on to his bed and shut his eyes.

The steady application of controlled gravity modulation fields in increasing increments, starting at 0.0175 graviton per square millimeter, he thought. Interesting approach.

(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.

Illustration, “A Wash of Indistinct Noise Accompanied by Blurry Blotches of Light and Color,” by Steven S. Drachman

GRANULAR EPISODE 7

Granular, Episode 7: At the Center of Gravity

, , , ,

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

With pressure building from WorldGov and its allies, Zach’s impending trial had taken on the aura of an interstellar incident. Thanks to Paula’s interview, he now realized, his case had become a symbol of government corruption. As Colin Harris, aka Craig Rynerson, pointed out, odds of his exoneration were climbing.

But given what the Alegarli’s willful negligence was doing to the fabric of space-time, Zach could be excused for not celebrating.

“There’s no point in being free in a universe about to implode,” he told Colin. “If I could access the data I collected after I met with Loor TreVal….”

“Forget it,” said Colin. “Whatever else that sparkly thing is, it’s also evidence. Any attempt you make to study it would count as evidence tampering. You’d trash all the good will you racked up with that interview.”

Yet as desperate as Zach was to stop Dalamacras’ reckless abuse of physical laws, he was distracted by a nagging thought.

“Once you discovered Ultramat’s secret,” he said, “why did you bother to pose as Rynerson? The University would’ve given your white paper every consideration. I know Altov. He’d have led the analysis team himself. And why wait five cycles to try again?”

“Five cycles ago,” said Harris, “that was the real Rynerson. We saw the reception he got and decided that Academia wasn’t ready for the truth. Once your story came out, we thought if we could reach you, we’d get some action — but we weren’t ready to show our hand.”

“We?” asked Zach. “Now I know how a football feels, when it’s kicked from player to player. Where are you planning to take me?”

Harris stared at him.

“It’s not like that.” he said. “Come on, you ought to have figured a few things out by now. The treatment you got from the Alegarli is the way of the universe. You think WorldGov doesn’t have a few thousand “suspicious operatives,” in lock-up right now?”

“So you’re the good hijacking kidnappers?” asked Zach.

By now, they’d reached the steps of a small, four-story octagonal building that tapered off at the top to an egg-shaped dome. Colin grabbed Zach’s left forearm.

“Here’s what I am,” he said. “Your last chance to ensure you live long enough to save me from that … sparkly air. Is that honest enough for you? Make up your mind. I can leave you right here for Dalamacras to find, unless Cosmos gets you first.”

Zach wrenched his arm away from Colin’s grip and tugged at his off-blond hair with both hands.

“Do my new quarters have a street view?” he asked.

The two humans walked up a short polyslate stoop and, based on Colin’s retina scan, gained access to the low-rise townhouse. A short ride in a narrow maglev lift later, they emerged on the top floor. Here, too, the Crelenk preference for bold, bright interior colors made him squint. Zach noticed that there was only one door off the corridor.

“You have the whole floor,” said Colin. “Which is good, because you’ll have to stay in until your court date. Anywhere else is too risky.”

A second retina scan unlocked the door to what Zach now saw was a suite of rooms decorated in “human style” ─ or rather the closest approximation the decidedly alien Crelenk could manage. While the oversized, aqua-marine-plaid living room couch was large enough for a pair of hippopotami, the dining room chairs were only suitable for small children. And, had Zach looked, he would have seen that the bathroom was a comedy of errors that barely squeaked by in terms of functionality.

“Better off here than out on the street,” said Colin. “If you stay long enough, I’ll see what I can do about the … irregularities.”

“You mean there’s a chance my trial will be moved up?” asked Zach.

As Colin explained, the Crelenk, as a second-tier political power, couldn’t afforded to be stuck between the humans and Alegarli for long.

“The sooner they release you,” said Colin, “the sooner WorldGov gets off their scaly, cylindrical backs. Of  course, once released, you’re fair game for Dalamacras again, this time with no apparent involvement by the Haliak colonial governor.”

“So even my good luck is bad luck,” said Zach. “Can’t you get me a tablet? I can’t spend all day watching Crelenk holovids. They make even less sense when they’re dubbed.”

Colin snapped his fingers.

“That reminds me,” he said. He hurried over to a lopsided, blonde-wood credenza on the opposite wall of the living room and reached into one of its front shelves. He returned with a silvery data cylinder in his right hand, which he tossed to Zach. “I have to step out for a few hours. Take a look at this. We can discuss it when I get back.”

“Discuss what?” asked Zach. “When?”

“Gotta go,” said Colin.

Zach’s sad eyes watched his only contact with the outside world slip into the hallway and engage the electronic door lock. He glanced around the Crelenk’s surreal approximation of human living quarters and sat down gingerly on the ungainly couch.

Prisoner again, he thought.

Far from saving the universe, his mission was to survive. As Colin had warned, winning his trial would win him no protection from Dalamacras. His best bet, ultimately, might be to liquidate his holdings, empty his credit account and buy himself passage on a star liner, headed for the remote regions of the Cosmic Consortium.

Take my chances in the uncharted sectors, he thought.

At that, Zach shuddered. Life on a world without a quantum computing infrastructure was unthinkable. And just as hard to endure would be a population of sentients whose view of the universe was necessarily rather limited. With no knowledge of faster-than-light travel, let alone the wide array of worlds that space-folding ships had opened up, they would likely still be chained to a host of archaic ideas about their place in the universe.

At that thought, Zach was reminded of the general course in cultural evolution he’d taken as a student. As hard as it was to believe, the current theory predicted that every advanced civilization had gone through a phase in which its residents believed the cosmos had been created especially for them. How would he fare amongst people who entrusted every aspect of their lives to the will of one or even several imaginary beings?

Better stay closer to home, he decided.

Yet exactly how far away was far enough from Dalamacras within the Cosmic Consortium? If the Alegarli caught up with him a second time, he’d have nowhere to hide — and least of all, a relatively benign Crelenk prison.

Rather than torment himself further with nightmare scenarios, he decided that Colin’s data cylinder might be distracting enough to clear his head. He glanced around and found a standard-issue holovid player mounted to the wall to his left, almost out of reach. With a flick of his wrist, he inseted the cylinder and stepped back.

A holoimage of a dignified woman in a dark green military uniform emerged less than a meter in front of him. Her snow white hair gleamed from an unseen light source and made Zach wonder if she‘d been standing on the bridge of a starship.

“Good day,” she said, “This is Fleet Commander Alison Dohnányi, WorldGov Sector Three. Though I assume that if you’re seeing this, your “day” is less than optimal. We had hoped, Dr. Griffin, to prevent the events of the past few rotations.’ Obviously, the Alegarli were several moves ahead of us. But to our credit, the minute we saw you in that compromising spaceport video, we knew….”

Zach stopped the holovid.

Has everybody seen that? he asked himself. My parents? My students? Paula?

Yet as humiliating as that thought was, he knew he didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in remorse. He’d just have to make a point of counting his drinks in future. Provided, that is, the universe didn’t collapse before that future could possibly emerge. With a deep sigh, he resumed the holovid.

“…we knew,” Commander Dohnányi was saying, “that you’d been targeted by disruptive forces. Yet, when we saw that you’d been captured by Dalamacras, we were unable to rescue you for fear of compromising our surveillance methods. We apologize for the harm that may have come to you. Rest assured, however….”

Zach listened to the rest of the Commander’s speech in a dark mood, perking up only at the mention of the lander that was scheduled to descend into an octagonal plaza a few hundred meters from his quarters. Though he understood the Commander’s reluctance to extract him by transmat, per protocol, he wished for once that he hadn’t been quite so persuasive in describing the nature of the threat to Colin.

While the thought of immanent rescue filled the young physicist with hope, Zach was troubled by the idea of “skipping bail,” and landing in more legal hot water as a fugitive. But after what he’d seen since he returned from his first trip to Haliak colony, it was clear that the law, as such, had become meaningless.

Focus on survival, he admonished himself.

That is, living long enough to establish a link between the granular effect and Ultramat’s lingering latency zones. Beyond that, he’d ceased caring. After what he’d seen of life, he wasn’t enthusiastic about enduring more of the same. At the moment, however, he was barred from both action and inaction.

“Wish I could get some news,” he said to the four walls.

A mellow machine voice, emanating from the apartment’s concealed entertainment center startled him by replying with a menu of audio or holographic news options, including local, worldwide and interstellar. Considering the sheer volume of information implied by the last option, Zach chose “Sector Court” from a submenu. Almost immediately, a slick corporate holojection filled his irregularly-shaped living room. A smooth-tongued newsreader appeared in the threshold leading to Zach’s still unexplored kitchen.

“… on the docket this arc is the shocking murder trial of Professor Zach Griffin, late of Central Colony Four’s renowned Bohr University. Accused of the brutal murder of the Crelenk singer-songwriter Loor TreVal….”

Zach shook his head. What, he wondered, made the newsnets pepper their stories with irrelevant details? He thought back to the unfamiliar music he’d heard in Loor’s home the one time they’d met, but … but no. The whole point, the only point was the granular effect. He might had drifted off into a lengthy solitary mental rant if it weren’t for the disturbing images that soon flashed in front of him.

What was the news reader saying?

“Apparently riled by the controversial nature of the Griffin case, a crowd of protesters is growing steadily outside a small townhouse on the outskirts of Delubruath, capital city of the Crelenk lunar colony of Haliak  As you may recall, it was to Haliak that Griffin was extradited for trial earlier this arc. Was the extradition legal? Well, the jury’s still out on that. But from the look of that crowd, there are a lot of Crelenks and a fair number of humans who think this once-promising astrophysicist is guilty as charged..”

Zach’s eyes widened at the sight of a scraggly mob that, he realized must be right below him. Was the townhouse secure? The next sound he heard was the door to his apartment opening. His heart pounding, he crouched down pointlessly behind the living room’s hideous couch and held his breath. The last thing he expected to hear was a familiar voice.

“Relax, it’s just me,” said Colin.

Zach’s supposed attorney switched off the holojection by voice command and peered around the couch at him.

“Don’t blame you for being scared,” he said. “But the mob has the wrong building. They’re about three blocks away — though I wouldn’t count on them being confused for long. So come on. Time to go.”

To Zach’s puzzled face, Colin explained that the two of them would soon be joining Fleet Commander Dohnányi, whose ship was parked in a geostationary orbit on the other side of Haliak.

“How?” asked Zach. “I guess you’re not really a Worldgov lawyer.”

“Sure I am,” said Colin. “But it’s a sideline. Now move it.”

Zach’s heart sank as he realized his vague hope of returning to his beloved lab on Bohr University campus after a flashy show trial was permanently shattered. After a nerve-wracking ride in the building’s tiny maglev lift, they were down at street level again. At once, Zach was assaulted, not by the mob, but by a confusing tangle of whispered commands from Colin.

“This way. Keep you head down,” said his impossibly thin savior.

The arbitrary nature of the route they followed made Zach’s rational head spin. Yet he knew that nothing but strict obedience would give him the slightest chance of escape. Case in point was the roar of Crelenk and human voices mingling in the distance as Colin hustled him down Delubruath’s twisted back alleys

Never had the 26-year-old run so hard and fast, even as a child. Sweat poured down his cheeks and it was all he could do, in his ill-fitting prison-issue shoes, to keep from falling on his face.

Half an hour later, Colin nudged him around one last street corner and into the large back lot of what Zach assumed was an abandoned warehouse. As they approached the center of the lot, a large military lander lowered its light-cancelling shield just enough to reveal an entry hatch.

“Jump in,” said Colin, who followed close behind. No sooner was the hatch shut tight than the lander lifted off vertically on its whisper-quiet thrusters. A second later it was airborne. But if Zach assumed that the ship’s light canceling tech was foolproof he was quickly disappointed. As the ship rose rapidly above the rooftops of Delubruath, the dull thud of particle gun-fire on the hull broke the crew’s breathless silence.

“Surface-to-air missiles at 130 degrees,” the ship’s second-in-command shouted.

“Since when do the Crelenk…” said the navigator.

The captain’s voice growled out from the forward bulkhead.

“Enough chatter!” he said. “Escape velocity in….”

A flash of reddish-yellow light, accompanied by the sound of crunching hull material filled Zach’s ears as his heart started pumping sheer terror in lieu of blod. As if there was any doubt they’d been hit, the downward tug of gravity instantly confirmed his worst fears.

This is it, he thought. Why not? Entropy is the only cosmic force that counts. What was the point? What was the….

A second missile hit and a gaping hole appeared in the bulkhead behind him. Anything not bolted down flew out into the onrushing air, including the navigator

“Grab hold of something!” Colin shouted.

Zach gripped the arms of his acceleration chair until his fingers turned white and squeezed his eyes shut. A moment later, the lander hit solid ground in a terrific crash and rolled sideways along a wide city boulevard. Jolted out of his seat, Zach’s skull smashed hard against the lander’s ceiling. As consciousness drained out his mind, the final sound to reach his ears was the crackling of an electrical fire ignited by a ripped-out power cable.

And all the while, the lander, a searing pile of twisted carbon composites on the verge of exploding, continued to roll toward an uncertain destination.

(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 Brian Mcgowan /Unsplash

Load More