39
???
Without any sense of transition, I was standing somewhere else. I felt solid floor under my feet, and air filled my lungs when I breathed in, but all around me was colossal ship after ship in the void. They were graceful shapes covered in a very familiar white hull plating, visible only because the surface produced just enough light to see them by. There had to be countless thousands of them, parked neatly side by side and bow to stern in every direction. It was hard to judge size without the usual cues to judge distance, but at a guess most were two to three miles long. Smaller ships were among them, but they looked to be a minority.
Beyond the ships I saw no stars. No galaxies, or nebulae. No light at all. Only a blacker than black void in every direction.
How was I here? Where was I?
User Advisory: Simulated environment active. Remote connection active. Manual disconnect available.
So the implant was projecting this onto my senses, and the information was coming from elsewhere. From the origin civilization, through the wormhole in my brain.
"Welcome," a voice off to my right greeted me, and I turned.
It wasn't an English word that I heard, or even a word in one of the languages I'd learned, but I understood it just fine. Strange.
Standing in space beside me was a handsome man in his late twenties, with striking snow white hair and luminescent indigo eyes. He wore an outfit in navy blue with gold trim that had the look of a military uniform, absent any insignia or other markings.
I tilted my head. "Hello. I wasn't expecting this."
The words I spoke weren't English, but they felt right. My implant must have been integrating knowledge of the language to help me communicate.
He offered me an apologetic smile. "Simulated environments can be a little disorienting until you get used to them, I'm told. I am Caretaker." He looked away and made a grand sweep with one arm. "Welcome to the Exodus Fleet. It's rather quiet right now. We are at Condition Torch, which means every sapience in the entire fleet is in storage to keep heat production to a minimum while we wait. We're in an enormous warp bubble, the largest ever created."
I thought it through. "You ran out of space to run to, then. Outside the bubble must be the vacuum decay firewall. With the outside unimaginably hot there's nowhere to vent heat to, so you have to keep everything shut down or you'll slowly cook in here. Even then, powering the drive must be generating heat all the time, so you're on the clock."
He turned back to me, and offered a single solemn nod. "Good, I'm glad our gift found someone who can navigate it. That was one of the failure states the development team were worried about. How shall I address you?"
I hesitated. "That's complicated, but I suppose you can call me Scientia."
He smiled, and his voice filled with warm conviction. "Well then, Scientia, the fact that you're here means our very last hope has come through after a very, very long time searching and waiting. Whatever the complications are, I assure you that we will work through them. I am charged with the protection of the fourteen point seven trillion souls in the Fleet. With your assistance we will save every last one of them."
I sighed heavily. "It's a worthy goal and I'm happy to help, but I have a lot of questions. And problems. From what I've been able to glean I don't think things have gone as planned on my end. At all."
His brows furrowed. "You can use your implant to send memories, could you -"
With a thought I directed a feed at him, just as I'd done for Dragon.
He blinked.
I waited.
"Well, fuck," he swore. "That's…"
"Yeah," I agreed.
He began to pace, hands clasped behind him. "This…is a messy situation. Sensitive. Hostile alien first contact, and another version of an ancient Earth under threat. I have limited authority to make decisions, but with an inhabited world facing extinction at the hands of hostile alien life…I think we have no ethical choice but to get involved despite the development gap. Especially if we expect you to help save us."
He turned to me and his face softened. "And then there's the mystery of you."
I couldn't help but ask. "What happened to me? How am I in the wrong body? Why that girl, at that time? And why can't I remember my name?"
He chewed his lip in thought. "I don't know everything you want to know yet. I can tell you that we don't assign names to our children - it's been the popular custom to let them choose their own names for a long time - but that's not a custom shared in the world you remember. And I have no idea how you, from somewhere else, wound up there. It doesn't make any sense at all. I wasn't on the development team, but there's no way I can imagine that the implant seed could have somehow picked up another personality from a whole other universe by accident. That's not how it worked at all."
What?
He sighed. "I can at least answer the question of why Taylor Hebert, and why at that critical moment. That much was planned. Sort of. We knew it would go to someone important. It's probably best if you see the discussions for yourself. I need time to wake the Council anyway, heat budget be damned. I'm authorized to safeguard the fleet, but I can't engage in diplomacy." His expression shifted to a frown, and he flexed his hands. "Or take us to war."
User Advisory: Memory transmission from user Caretaker. Start playback?
Might as well gather what information I could. Yes, I thought.
Day Cycle, Day 9, Fourth Period, Year 47,262,823,141
Exodus Fleet Virtual Council Room
Earth ???
"Director Shoferi, Director Wisdom, what do you have for us?" a man's voice asked. He was one of a number of men and women seated around a large wooden conference table with the fleet of titanic white ships extending off into the distance in all directions save the nearby star, a lifting station visible against it as a tiny black dot. Beyond all that, the light of stars and galaxies that were likely long dead by this point.
The man who spoke wore another navy and gold military uniform, and seemed familiar for a moment until I recognized him as the Commander I'd dreamed of being, the one in charge of the project that found the vacuum collapse while looking for sapient alien life.
I was seeing the memory from the perspective of one of the people sitting around the table. Caretaker. Caretaker had been here, and I was seeing events from his point of view. His thoughts were too fast and expansive to be comprehensible, like a voice saying different things recorded over itself so many times that it was impossible to make anything out.
He was an AI. I could tell that much.
I recognized three other people at the table. The woman who had built the first stellar lifter was here, the Engineer, seated across from my viewpoint. Off to my left was the man I'd been in the arena, the fighter. Just past him was Ghost, the intelligence expert for hire I'd dreamed of being on the partially constructed ringworld.
A man and a woman dressed in white shared a look. The man had luminescent indigo eyes like Caretaker, and unusually for the young faces at the table had an older face with gray hair and a full beard. He nodded to the woman, who looked to be in her twenties with hair the color of copper.
She stood, and I caught enough of Caretaker's thoughts to get the impression that she was Director Shoferi. "Our project, using the Fleet's spare computing resources to brute force a workable multiversal physical model in pursuit of inter-universal travel, has met with some results. I caution that what we have is no grand unified theory at this time. We have the foundation of a mathematics and some of the laws figured out to what we believe is a high degree of confidence, but we're working blind from an experimental point of view and there are large open questions. Our understanding is incomplete."
The man with the beard cleared his throat meaningfully.
"Right," the woman said, and waved at the table. Above it a tiny translucent bubble appeared with a flash of white light inside, the bubble growing rapidly and cooling from an opaque white to red to black, then little stars and galaxies lit up inside.
On the surface of the bubble, remaining in contact as it grew, other tiny bubbles formed with flashes of light and followed the pattern, growing and forming new bubbles of their own, growing endlessly until the space above the table was filled with a bubbling mass.
"This is a three dimensional metaphor of how we believe the multiverse works. A variant of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics appears to be essentially true. Each universe spawns countless daughters, with conditions that diverge. Like a branching tree, although because the connections are atemporal it's truer to say that by the time you need a new universe it's always existed."
"Are you saying there's an infinite number of other universes out there?" A man I didn't recognize asked.
Director Shoferi shook her head. "We don't believe so. Instead of every tiny quantum fluctuation creating another branch, potential universes converge on a likely countable number of actual universes. To understand why, the closest metaphor we have is to think of constructive and destructive interference in waveforms. Like a complex sound made out of many component tones. What you see is the end result, but the unseen components determine the shape of that result. All of this, we suspect, will explain a great deal of why observable physics are the way they are when we fully understand it, but that's not what's important for us right now. This is."
She waved and the roiling mass of bubbles disappeared to be replaced by only two, touching at a single point on their surfaces.
"According to the math, there are points where branes remain in what we might call contact, although that's oversimplifying a great deal of mathematics. Singularities! Those are the key. A singularity, a point where spacetime is infinitely bent, is 'sticky', for lack of a better word. Two universes with singularities cannot detach completely from one another in brane-space under normal energetic conditions."
The Engineer spoke, having watched the presentation to that point with a look of intense focus.
"So if we can travel through a black hole we could find another universe very close to our own. Close enough to be survivable. Maybe even one where humans also evolved. But how do we avoid universes with the same vacuum collapse problem we have, and how do we travel through a singularity in the first place?" she asked.
The man with the gray beard stood and spoke. "As it turns out, the first question tidily handles itself. As Director Shoferi mentioned, the connection between universes in brane-space is atemporal, meaning the connected universes exist relative to one another at all times in the two respective universes simultaneously. They also cannot remain in connection if they undergo a total vacuum collapse."
"Other universes that undergo vacuum collapse will, from our perspective, never be connected because they retroactively erase any connection that would have formed?" The Engineer asked.
Director Shoferi nodded.
"That's...difficult to wrap my head around. It sounds like time travel," she said.
The copper-haired Director Shoferi nodded. "Paradoxes like that might be a big part of why we never reasoned all this out from first principles, and we had to rely so much on brute-forced simulations. The tools we use for reasoning about the universe are counterproductive when fundamental laws like causation and conservation go out the window, and so much of what's going on in brane-space does bizarre things to both. In principle, the atemporality of the connections means that a traveler could even perceive the entirety of a universe's timeline and then enter whenever they wished and change the whole thing."
"How the hell does that even work?" the Engineer asked, incredulous.
The woman winced, and the bearded Director Wisdom spoke again. "The math shows that it has to, but the why and the how are gaps in our present knowledge. Director Shoferi already pointed out our lack of experimental data, and even with the computing resources of the whole Fleet we cannot simulate a multiverse in every detail. It's the simulation problem; it would require a computer the size of a multiverse. So we had to simplify while trying to capture the essence of the more complex reality. The important thing is that we don't have to worry about going into a universe that will experience vacuum collapse."
"But because we're acting from the perspective of our place in our universe's timeline, we can still connect to other universes, even though ours is doomed?" the Engineer asked. "They can't see us or travel here, because from their perspective the connection to us has been retroactively erased, but we can go there because from our perspective it isn't gone yet?"
"Yes," Director Wisdom confirmed. "We have exploitable connections elsewhere from our side until our universe is completely overtaken. And there is a tremendous advantage of coming from a universe that has no anchor from the perspective of the other side. Without being confined to an anchor point, the traveler from here could arrive anywhere and anywhen there, in principle. Not just a corresponding singularity on the other side. This is because a corresponding singularity could have formed there, but would retroactively never have existed due to the ultimate vacuum decay on this side."
The Engineer visibly frowned at that. "There has to be a causality violation there somewhere."
Director Shoferi nodded. "From the perspective of the destination, yes. Anything from our universe would arrive out of nowhere. An unmoved mover. From our perspective, causality is preserved, which is why it works. It turns out in multiversal physics that causality only needs to be preserved in one reference frame."
"Limited though our understanding may be," the Commander interjected, "if it offers a possible solution to our problem then I'll be happy with it. Do you have a solution to the question raised about whether we can travel through a singularity without being utterly destroyed?"
Director Shoferi smiled. "We do," she said, and waved again. The touching bubbles disappeared and were replaced by an utterly black eye of the void surrounded by gravitational lensing. A black hole, seen from the outside.
"Singularities are points where gravity has bent spacetime into a sheer drop. But we do have a way to manipulate spacetime ourselves. We use it frequently, in fact."
"An FTL drive," the Engineer whispered, loudly enough to be heard. "But the energy…"
Director Shoferi's smile turned into a fierce grin. "Yes, exactly. FTL drives use energy and negative mass to bend spacetime." She waved again and a white cone appeared, point facing the black hole as it revolved around it, gradually spiraling inward. As the cone approached the surface of the hole space lensed powerfully around it. The lensing around the black hole distorted in response, until a tiny point of white was visible on the surface of the hole where the distorted image of the cone nearly touched it.
"With a large enough FTL drive and enough power we can crack open a primordial singularity and access the universe on the other side," she explained.
The Engineer's mouth worked for a moment. "Have you done the math on the power required?" she asked.
"Yes," replied Director Wisdom. "We pick a hole with a relatively small mass, and send through the smallest amount of mass we absolutely have to send. It also turns out that the more branching, potential universes emerge out of a single time and place in the destination universe, the lower the energy requirements for traveling there. Each daughter universe has a…weight, for lack of a better metaphor. The equations produce an effect somewhat analogous to gravity. The 'mass' of it pulls down the curve at the point where it originates in the parent universe. Stack enough of them on one point of extreme variability and the energy required gets a lot more reasonable. All together, those factors will minimize the required size of the drive, and reduce the energy requirements to only a few supernovas' worth."
"That's billions or trillions of times what the whole fleet put together could manage," the Engineer replied, her augmented mind enabling her to do the math far faster than any biological human. "I'm willing to go exponential and pillage every galaxy still in existence for materials if that's what it takes to save us, but we have a limited amount of time and space left. Maybe if we'd discovered this a billion years ago I could have done it, but what you're asking for is more than we could possibly produce. Nevermind the technical challenge of conveying it all to one place."
Director Shoferi nodded. "Yes. Which is what got us to think about other potential sources of energy."
The floating image above the table reset, and the rate of the cone's orbit dramatically slowed down to show that the playback was being done in extreme slow motion. A wall of white approached the cone from behind. As the wall met the cone it consumed it, but the white wall lensed along with the destruction until it overtook the singularity.
"You want to use the shockfront for power," the Commander said.
"Yes. The singularity itself should be unbothered by the shockfront. We believe they're the only things in the universe that are," she said. "With appropriate design the engine can warp space along the shockfront as it's destroyed, building up and driving a spike into the singularity to rip it open just long enough to shove a small package through."
"How much can we send?" the Engineer asked.
"About a gram," Director Wisdom replied.
Whispering broke out around the table.
"What's your math say about pushing one end of a wormhole across?" the Engineer asked over the susurration of voices.
Director Shoferi grinned. "According to the simulations, a wormhole doesn't even notice if two ends are in different universes. Pushing one across will create a new bridge across the gap. A new 'sticky' point, like the singularities."
The Engineer looked pensive. "One gram is enough for an FTL comm and nanite seed. It might be possible to make a self-assembling industry on that budget, if it landed somewhere with mass to build with and not in empty space. Perhaps we could build machines and bodies and start mindcasting across."
Director Wisdom shook his head. "We had the same thought at first, but there's an implication we haven't explained yet that makes things more complicated. We've mentioned that the lowest energy destination point is going to be the time and place of maximum potential outcomes."
He waved a hand and a glowing line emerged up from the table, branching like a tree as it ascended.
"Whatever we send through will arrive at the energy minima, which is going to be the place and time where the most branches occur. And by the models, nothing creates universes like things that affect the choices of sapient life. The actions of one sapient being have the potential to ripple across the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations happen everywhere, but the ones in sapient wetware or hardware are usually the most influential. At least in universes with sapience."
"If the universe we pick at random has sapient life, whatever we send is going to wind up in someone's brain," the Engineer gasped.
"Yes," Director Wisdom agreed. "The most important person, at the most important moment, in that entire universe's history."
The table was quiet for a long moment.
A new voice spoke up. A woman with long purple hair, braided back, in a pristine white uniform. I caught a passing thought from Caretaker that she was something like a chief of medicine.
"I could make a neural lace seed with an onboard VI that's less than a gram," she said softly. "It could interface with an FTL comm."
"An AI would take too much mass, but a decent VI is doable," the Engineer agreed.
The table was quiet again. Caretaker surveyed disconcerted faces.
"There's no way for us to ask for consent, is there?" asked a thin man wearing a uniform in a shade of blue. Caretaker's thoughts revolved around ethics when he looked at him.
"No," Director Shoferi conceded. "There is not."
"Or to ask if they'd even be willing to help us," the Commander added.
"No," Director Shoferi agreed.
Silence reigned for another long moment.
The Chief of Medicine closed her eyes. "It has to be said, but a VI and a neural lace could compel someone."
The faces around the table looked at her. Some were horrified. Some just looked weary.
"That's not who we are," the thin man protested.
"Even with the lives of literally everyone on the line? I've been running projections; I don't think we have time to try this more than once," said an indigo-eyed woman across the table.
The thin man shook his head, visibly upset. "No. No. We're talking about hedging our bets by mind controlling some innocent. At the most critical juncture in a whole universe, for that matter, with no idea what the impact will be. Bad enough we need to do this at all. But to force it? No. There's a better way."
"What is your proposal?" the Commander asked.
The thin man took a breath, calming down. "An exchange. We don't know if this person will be human, or what sort of technology their civilization will have, or what peril they might be in. It's quite possible they're going to need knowledge to build what's necessary to transfer us across anyway, and they may find themselves in some sort of danger, or with the pressing need to solve some sort of problem. We offer them everything we have to offer. We give them a VI advisor empowered to help, access to the entire Storage database of our accumulated skill and knowledge via the FTL comm, and a full military augment neural lace pattern. We give them everything we can, and we do it out of enlightened self interest."
"It's our best chance of keeping them alive," the Commander agreed. "But what makes you think it will encourage them to help us?"
The woman with indigo eyes spoke. "Some form of social reciprocation instinct or behavior is highly likely to exist in any sapient species that manages to create a civilization. We believe it's virtually a requirement for the necessary cooperation. It stands to reason that if we offer help, most sapients in most universes would feel favorably inclined to help us in return. And even under a number of psychologies we consider abnormal it would still work; out of greed for the power we can offer, or fear of our retribution, perhaps, but they would still have incentives to do as we need. A VI could be released from the usual ethical restraints if bargaining or manipulation prove necessary." She tilted her head to the thin man. "A plan both ethical and cunning, Doctor."
He grimaced, apparently not appreciating the praise. "Manipulative, perhaps, but better."
"Building trust isn't manipulation if it's done in good faith," the Chief of Medicine offered.
"They could use the knowledge we give them to do horrible things, you know," the Engineer interjected.
The thin man met her eyes. "If they do, we can deal with it after we're safely across. We have no shortage of options."
"Not if their civilization is more advanced than ours," she pointed out.
The thin man shrugged. "If they are, then nothing we offer them will enable horrors they couldn't have committed anyway, and we'd have little chance of doing anything about it regardless."
The Commander surveyed the faces around the table. "Are we ready to vote?" he asked.
When no one spoke for a long moment, he spoke again. "Very well, then. All opposed?"
The faces around the table shared looks in silence.
"The motion is carried," the Commander concluded. "Engineering and medical," he said, directing looks to the Engineer and the Chief of Medicine, "get your people on it. If you need any additional help you have authorization to wake people with the appropriate skills from storage and ask them if they would be willing. This is our first real chance in a long time. Some hope might change their minds about staying awake. If there are no other matters, this meeting is adjourned."
More secrets revealed. A few left.