‘What's it doing?’ she asked the computer. The screen flickered and flashed. Entire planets incinerate.
A w a r n i n g the computer typed out on the screen. C o n s e q u e n c e. R e m o v a l o f f u t u r e s u p p l i e s a n d t i m e f r o m E a r t h.
She nodded her thanks to the computer. She'd gotten him off the planet just in time.
‘What'd you do? Why won't you let me on board the ship?’
She finally found him. Enough of him anyway. Enough of his particles to make a new one, an approximation. She could alter the size and scale of his next incarnation once they landed in the next world. But this corner of the galaxy was closing and closing fast. She couldn't bring him on board or risk contaminating the vessel. She set the machine to work. ‘Hold tight,’ she said. ‘This won't hurt, it'll tingle, and then it's-’ she left off there. He’d already disintegrated. ‘Did you get the reading?’ she asked the ship.
The lights buzzed in response. His soul onboarded, and his genetic map complete, they could finally leave this sector.
‘You know you're my Soul Mate. I know you'll find me anywhere. Any where, any when, with any how.’
She zoomed out. He was her Soul Mate. And she would keep her promise. She would track his soul through every corner of the universe, the way she knew he would track hers. We’ll meet in the middle she mumbled to her self, tracing the ink on her arm. She zoomed back in, using the telescope and satellites as a lensing tool, bouncing light from asteroid to asteroid.
I've managed to collect enough supplies. The ship has managed to forge a redundant Tunnel through the System. A shield of mini GRIDS set up via tiny metallic droids, spherical in nature, with a sizeable electromagnetic field around the ship. It should serve as a gateway prototype. If I can maneuver through the correct sequencing of systems, I should be able to propel the ship far enough until the electromagnetic shielding becomes a self sustaining reaction. When Destination 001 is reached Disembark Protocol will begin.
She finished crawling in her journal. Putting her pen down she took a sip of black tea. Midway Point, she thought. That's all we need.
‘I'm collapsing the Ice Shield. They won't be taking our country. You'll have a midpoint pick up before the water surge reaches you. The ship will pick you up.’
It had come to this. The world where their country was born was finally collapsing, until the weight of political pressure and greed. Klothos ran final simulation arcs across the grid set up decades before in preparation of this. Not my land she muttered. She didn't care what they did with the rest of the planet, but they would never have her country.
I've started a new series of entries. Each will be a parallel reality recorded in his physical manifestation, uploaded back to the Ship.
Klothos will repeatedly record all data transmissions, while Self-identifying him.
I've sent a Relay of AI Sensors across the known Universe. We should be at each Barrier Pointe soon.
Upon closing the Map, I should have a Final Destination Course plotted through Space and Time
To get him back.
As each Sensor is activated, data will be transmitted. Each world that closes or erases itself needs to be uploaded somewhere.
I should have enough data, soon, to ReRoute His Path, back to Us.
It was all here. Transmission after transmission. She sat and waited with Klothos, knowing every new update he sent was another Tether - another place for her to look in TimeSpace for him. It was harder than she thought. As she sat, tethered to her corner of the Universe, he moved - sometimes slowly, sometimes faster than lightning - but they knew it was worth it.
This corner of the Universe was a Dead End, unless he could get enough data and particles back to her, to their child, to their Future - to continue it.
She sat, watching reel after reel relayed by him to the ship. Every moment a new life, it seemed. And just like that, each was gone. A lifetime, a moment. All erased by him. So that he could coordinate a new pathway back to her. A new future for their country.
‘You did it,’ his eyes locked with hers as he spoke. When they looked at each other, a faint ultraviolet light was given off. His was more blue, hers was more purple.
She tersed her lips. ‘This will be harder than you think. Particle densification makes the journey difficult - if you become too tethered to a new timeline-’
‘I won’t. I’ve got your Soul seared in to my Consciousness now.’
And it felt like it - like part of them was Entwined now, part of them that didn’t even exist yet, somewhere, somewhen, out there.
She opened the door to the airlock. And everything went black.
‘I did it,’ she said, more calmly than he anticipated. ‘I figured out a way to tether to you.’
He sighed. She had been working on this problem for years, at least, it felt like years.
‘I can extract your consciousness from the ship. I’ve loaded multiple programs and trajectories - your consciousness will remain in tact, but it will manifest differently, based on the particles it is inhabiting. So your languages-’
‘Will alter over place and time?’
She smiled, tersely, ‘Exactly. I’ll load some language models, and project future pathways you can use away from this Wall. If you can tether correctly, if you can find the right pathway back to Earth, you can use Transfusionic Photonization to alter your form and communication methods. You can get back to US, then, and -’ she ended her sentence, knowing he knew the rest of it.
The ship began hurtling through space. Everything was different from when he had boarded. The exterior looked like an asteroid, and his crew, all in stasis last he remembered, were carcasses in cargo.
He looked up the logs from everything that happened during and after boarding.
Everything looked different. It was like he was a different person, in a different place. He was even beginning to realize he thought differently - like his mind was speaking a new language.
He looked at the screen in front of him again. The letters, American Script earlier, flickered and altered to a series of lines and pricks, sticks almost, like ancient ogham. It gave him a choice. It would allow him to stay on board, alive, if he actually began to think independently. Or, it would continue on its mission, hurtling to the Sun - there it would alter the reactions in the sun just enough to destroy life on Earth, allowing the ship and its sister ships on the way to Start Again.
She pulled up his holometric profile.
She knew his Mind and Body needed to be remodeled, topographically terraformed from the inside out to suit the new permeability of the atmosphere where they’d land, but she needed it to be him. They needed a precognizance of their relationships and data from everywhere and everywhen they’re ever been.
‘So we don’t forget,’ he said, as he had been uploaded into her ship and remodeled into its drive.
Every time she bioprinted a new body and template, he’d ask for a little change. To keep things interesting, so we don’t get bored. But she knew they’d never get bored of each other.
She entered his data calculations after he had gone back in stasis. His holonomic projection of consciousness and accrued aggregate brainwave data was enough to help her if she needed it. His metabolism was much too high to remain with her for the duration of Klothos’s journey.
“There,’ she breathed to herself, smiling.
The wormhole didn’t work the way it had been surmised to on Earth. You couldn’t bend space and time without restructuring everything around it. With his calculations, they could use the graphene to relattice everyone’s cellular structure. They would die. But only temporarily. The consciousness could be stored more easily this way, and after a few generations of AI holding their spaghettified place in Quantum Time, they would be able to restructure and reorganize, slowly, at first, but after a few generations, most of the ship wouldn’t even remember the long journey. They would be BioOrganic again, except a few, like her and him.
‘You’re familiar with my theorem?’
‘Of course,’ he peered into her eyes.
‘Okay, it’s like that, the data transmission. A holographic overlay. A reflection from the side of the Universe where this Wall is,’ she hushed her voice. ‘It’s mirrored. It transmits. Everything we do is reflected through the HoloPlane. It’s run through a Transmitter. The logarithms are produced. Time lines are assembled. When one outclipses the others-’ she looked at him.
‘It gets transmitted here, we relay the data,’ he paused, nodding. ‘Free Will. They have the choice to transmit new signals and physical acts and decisions. But I assume…’
‘Only so much matter and energy - so negotiations cannot be used as stalling tactics. The Holograph will overlay a physical plane, redirecting the transfer of energy, data, and matter.’
‘It builds a new layer?’
‘Exactly, like a cellular layer of reality.’
["Time is Fluid for Her. She experiences everything Concurrently." He leaned in, "Sir, you'll have to excuse her. Her brainwaves fluctuate between what we've called 'Hell' and 'Heaven' algorithms." He paused and took a breath before continuing. "If you look at the Frequency of her thought, she dilates it. She fractals it with every bit or terrabyte we ever let out into the airwaves, into the aether, into the -"
"Is she picking up cosmic background radiation as well?" He leaned in to study her chart and the ticks and crests drawn by the needles. "This pattern mimics what our satellites just received."]
She peered over at him as he read her medical charts. ‘You printed it out?’ she asked.
He smiled in return. ‘Yea. That’s what got us here, isn’t it?’
‘It showed me, in another dream,’ she whispered to him. ‘It called you Pale Horse,’ she added, smiling.
He looked at her and nodded, so she’d continue.
‘It showed me the Universe. A tuning fork, moving and spinning, a great tree. It mimics, us, or rather we, dendritically. Life and Death. It spins like a current, channeling the Living and Dead. It’s a series of coordinates, between their souls and ours. We can find them.’
‘Our dead crew?’
‘Yea.’
‘I dreamt it again,’ she said, turning to him, brushing the hair off his brow. He was always groggy, always overworked, quick to turn a mood, but quicker to calm at her touch. He kissed the back of her hand and looked up at her from their bunk. She leaned in and whispered. ‘It showed me a time, a planet - I’m not sure exactly, but I think it works like a TimeCapsule. A Soul Catcher. It lives off of souls. Once you go there, you can come back again, but it takes aeons. It might be the way out. To have more time to -’
‘-Configure the numbers?’ he finished for her, hoping again.
‘Yea,’ she smiled.
“They’re winning the war!” he screeched at her again. “Don’t you understand that?! This is a numbers game and they outnumber us. They always have!”
She turned and looked at him in The Mirror, the screen between their vessels. “Only on your side of the Simulation.” She turned back and looked at the AI, embedded in the Screen next to her. She nodded. A slight wave, a small impulse, rippled through the cabin. A slight buzz of electric current could be faintly heard, or felt, if you had the right implant, turned to the right frequency.
“Thank you, Sir,” she said to the AI’s Reflection.
“It’s not about the numbers, Johnny. It never was.” She signed off. He needed time to process.
‘We’re almost there,’ she whispered. They were safely in the airlocked compartment: no one could hear them here. ‘It did it again. The ship told me, in my dream, what we’re doing. It’s about to enter another semblance of the wormhole.’
He looked at her.
‘That’s what it called it - a semblance. Matter’s going to crunch again. The ship - the ship’s gonna restart the logs. The crew - Johnny it doesn’t want them on board.’
‘What about us?’
‘Just us.’
She woke back up in her bunk on the ship. “Johnny!'“ she screeched at him, leaping down and rustling him awake. “Johnny!” she whispered into his ears more urgently, so no one else would hear.
She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the corridor. She refused to let go as they hurried down the hall and into the next airlock.
The Aporian System
The final corner of the Universe.
She sat in the Simulation, thinking, drawing.
Her vessel had reached the Final. The final fold in the Universe. Where Space Time ran differently. So densely nothing could pass or break through.
Her ships’ logarithms worked round the clock to identify this edge. They worked in a unified Grid, bouncing data back and forth, one ship to the other, each processing for errors and updates.