New personnel were brought on as the first generation retired or died, but the number of active operatives was allowed to slowly dwindle. As interstellar space travel became more common in the latter half of the twenty-first century, Jörmungandr’s test flights became less conspicuous, and when the first Cho-ta’an attacks came, all attention was directed off-world. No one had the time to look into the motives of an obscure environmental foundation. Every artifact of the Iron Dragon project that was going to be unearthed had already been acquired. Jörmungandr had no need to procure more land or wealth. Eventually all that was left of the foundation were fifty or so engineers, scientists, programmers and test pilots, working long hours to crack the problem of the self-contained hyperdrive.
By the time the first human-controlled hyperspace gates were built, in 2151, Andrea Luhman was no longer taking any stasis breaks. As with most of the developments in interstellar travel, the invention of the hyperspace gates was an iterative process: Jörmungandr fed ideas to the IDL’s scientists to help them reverse-engineer the Cho-ta’an gates, and then Jörmungandr’s spies relayed information on their successes back to the foundation. Jörmungandr would not be able to rely on the IDL’s help much longer: the IDL had never cracked the problem of the self-contained hyperdrive, and after the Cho-ta’an assault on Earth in 2185 the IDL scientists who were still alive were put to work on weapons programs with a more definite return on investment.
The attack on Earth had minimal effects on Jörmungandr. The foundation had finished consolidating all its operations to the Iceland location the previous year, and the facility was self-sufficient in terms of food and energy, as well as hardened against nuclear attack and fallout. The Cho-ta’an didn’t bother to send a bomb to Iceland, but most of the island’s population was killed in the famine that followed. A few hundred refugees from Reykjavik, having heard rumors of the existence of an underground facility far to the east, fled there and were taken in.
On April 29, 2226—one year before Andrea Luhman would disappear—Freya was brought out of stasis for the last time. She had spent 175 of the last 200 years in stasis. She was now nearly fifty in terms of biological age: she had been seventeen when she left Earth aboard the Iron Dragon, then spent four years ship’s time aboard a Cho-ta’an frigate, several weeks with the Varinga, and then another four years subjective time returning to Earth.
Freya was shocked at how much Andi and the others had aged since she’d seen them last. Usually the changes were imperceptible, but those still working on the hyperdrive looked visibly older. As Freya approached Andi in the hyperdrive test lab, she tried to remember how old Andi was, in biological terms. She had been thirty-five when she’d come to Jörmungandr, and the last time Freya had checked the logs, Andi had logged 155 years in stasis. That meant she was effectively eighty-five years old. Well, Freya thought, I suppose she doesn’t look so bad for all that.
“Good morning,” said Andi, looking up from her console. “How’d you sleep?”
“It never gets any easier,” Freya replied. “Thank God that was the last time.” She’d spent three hours fighting nausea after coming out of stasis. “You look tired.”
Andi laughed, a thin, rasping sound. “I look old. The only thing keeping me alive at this point is the faint hope we might still lick this problem.” Freya was afraid there was more than a little truth to this. And Andi wasn’t the only one: the whole team looked gaunt, pale, and haggard, like they hadn’t a good night’s sleep in weeks. They couldn’t keep this up much longer.
“How is it going?”
“We’re getting close, I think,” Andi said, taking a step back to regard the hyperdrive test chamber—essentially a hundred-foot long polycarbonate vacuum tube, split in the middle by a steel wall. The thing had been built twenty years earlier, under Andi’s direction, and since then they had been trying with no success to get a small Self-contained Hyperdrive Assessment Module (affectionately referred to as “the SHAM”) to jump from one side of the tube to the other.
“The trick,” Andi went on, “is to stabilize the proton reversion field by leveraging the overflow, like an entropic feedback loop. That’s probably how the Izarian stasis pods work. They turn entropy back on itself, creating an actual temporal stasis, rather than just slowing biological activity the way ours do. If I had another few years….”
“You could build a stasis pod that doesn’t make me puke my guts out?”
“I was going to say I could figure out time travel.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, maybe. I’m beginning to see it’s all related. Stasis, hyperdrives, traveling backwards in time… it’s all different applications of the same idea.”
“What idea?” Freya had kept up with Andi’s work as best as she could, but for the past couple of decades it began to seem as if Andi were venturing into an entirely new field—more metaphysics than physics. Freya worried that Andi’s mind was slipping, but she was the only one on the team who still seemed to have any idea how to proceed. So they followed her lead, like sailors in the fog, following the orders of a captain who claimed to have seen land.
“It’s—this is going to sound odd. Quantum mechanics tells us that consciousness creates reality. That is, the universe can’t be understood without reference to a conscious entity, and in some sense a thing that is not observed doesn’t exist at all. But I think there’s more to it than that. I think that the universe has a direction, a purpose.”
“Are you talking about time?”
“Yes. Well, that’s half of it. Time is a measure of entropy. Things fall apart, and we note a given amount of dissolution as units of time. But that can’t be all there is. There has to be a countervailing force, something that pulls things together.”
“Like gravity.”
“Gravity doesn’t actually decrease entropy, though. It just redistributes it. I’m talking about a more fundamental force, like consciousness. Consciousness is essentially static. If consciousness is the force that produces existence—that is, counteracts nonexistence, then what is the force that counteracts entropy? What keeps things from falling apart?”
“My understanding is that nothing does. Entropy eventually pulls everything infinitely far apart, and that’s the end of it.”
“But do you believe that, Freya? I mean, I know you accept it as a postulate of physics, but do you really believe it, in your heart? That things are just going to fall apart, and there’s no point to any of this? If that’s the case, why are we even doing this? Why build a Titan II rocket to get to space? Why fight the Cho-ta’an or the Izarians? Why build a hyperdrive?”
Freya shrugged. “If you’re asking me, personally, then I’d say I’m too stubborn to give up. It runs in my family.”
“Yes! But that’s a negative formation of the principle. Think more positively. Why do you keep going?”
“Hope, I guess.”
“Yes, hope. Or love, even. ‘Faith, hope, love. But the greatest of these is love.’”
“You are telling me that the key to building a hyperdrive is love?”
“I think… yes, something like that. I’ve got to think about it more. Not think, exactly. I need to meditate on it. It’s good to see you, Freya. We’ll nail this yet.” With that, she walked away.
Freya stood alone in the laboratory, wondering if her chief engineer had gone insane.
Chapter Thirty-four
N ine months later, Andi’s team seemed no closer to solving the problem. The SHAM remained on the left side of the chamber, unable to move on its own accord, much less jump through the steel barrier. A nearly identical, but much larger, device had been built into the hull of Valkyrie, the ship that was to carry Freya and the Norsemen to Kiryata. Jörmungandr’s scientists had worked out the principle of the hyperdrive using Amelia’s data and the specifications of the Cho-ta’an gate seized by the IDL, but building what was effectively a hyperspace gate that acted on itself created a seemingly intractable problem. Essentially the p
roblem was one of infinite recursion: the hyperspace gates worked by opening a wormhole between two points in space and leaving it open long enough for matter to pass through. But once the SHAM moved into hyperspace, its location relative to the two points would change, forcing it to create another wormhole at the new starting point. Then the SHAM would go through that wormhole, changing its position relative to the two points again. The end result of this was a real-world Zeno’s paradox: the SHAM never moved because it always had one more wormhole to create. Andi was convinced that there was a simple solution, some algorithm built into the fabric of the universe itself—the hyperspace equivalent of E=MC2. In theory, all they had to do is program the magic algorithm into the SHAM’s control software and they’d have a working hyperdrive. The algorithm, however, remained eternally elusive.
Several of the scientists and technicians came to Freya privately to voice concerns that they were at a dead-end. None of them spoke the words, but it was clear that at least a few of them would have quit already if that had been an option. But they’d signed up for life, in the belief they were working for the salvation of humanity, so they remained on the project, going over calculations for the hundredth time or executing tests they knew were bound to fail.
Andi seemed unconcerned. She spent less time in the lab and more and more time “meditating.” She remained frail, but the weight of the years of frustrating toil seemed to have lifted. While the project foundered, Andi’s spirits rose. Sometimes she would visit the lab, speak a few words of encouragement to the men and women still working on the recalcitrant SHAM, and then spend the rest of the day in her room or in one of the holochambers. She would have gone outside if Freya had let her, but the radiation levels made that unadvisable. At last, with only six weeks until the End Of Known History (generally referred to at the facility as the “EPOKH”), Freya was forced to confront Andi.
“I put you in charge of this project,” Freya began, “because I believed that you were the only one with the vision to see it through.”
“And what do you believe now?” Andi asked, her tone betraying mild amusement.
“I still believe that,” Freya said, “but I think you’re getting distracted. I think you’re mistaking personal development for technological advancement.”
Andi laughed. “Is that you think what I’m doing? Working on ‘personal development’?”
“What do you call it?”
“You know, before the horrors of the twentieth century, it was widely believed that technological advancement went hand-in-hand with moral growth. A lot of people thought that as science improved our lives, we would also become better people.”
“Then science gave us mustard gas, atomic bombs and gas chambers. I know the history. So what?”
“What if there’s some truth to it? Not necessarily that science advances lockstep with morality, but rather that there are scientific discoveries that require a certain level of moral understanding. If you look at someone like Einstein, I think it’s clear that more than mere intelligence went into his discoveries. He had a certain open-mindedness and playfulness, and a reverence for creation, along with a kind of modesty about his own ability to understand it. It was his attitude and imagination, as much as his intelligence, that allowed him to discover the principle of relativity. Did you know that when he finally won the Nobel Prize, it was for his work on the photoelectric effect? His discoveries of general and special relativity were so beyond the science of the day that no one could even grasp their true importance.”
“And then they built on his work to make an atomic bomb. Even the Soviets and the Communist Chinese had them after a while. What’s your point?”
“Once an Einstein points out the truth, others are able to grasp it. And of course technology can be duplicated without fully understand it, the way we duplicated the Cho-ta’an gates. But the original intuitive leap has to be made by someone who thought differently, someone who possessed real wisdom.”
“While you are pursuing wisdom, a war is being lost.”
“I know, and that is a tragedy. But you have said yourself that the war cannot be won until the EPOKH. Your LOKI principle is a tenet of faith. I’m asking you to have faith in me.”
“My faith in you is based on your ability.”
“Is it? You’re certain it wasn’t because of the symbolic resonance of my name? Would you have sought me out if you had never heard of me before arriving on Earth in the twenty-first century?”
“There are very few people with a résumé like yours.”
“True, but I am hardly unique. You know, one thing that puzzled me for a long time after coming to Jörmungandr was this ‘iterative’ process of developing technology. Superficially it seems to make sense, you feeding information to other companies and then gleaning the results of their research. Basically, you’re giving humanity’s development of technology a nudge, causing it to move more quickly. Without your help, humanity might have taken another hundred years to get to the stars. But here’s what bugs me: how do you know how much help to give? For that matter, how did you know to help at all? You’ve said there’s no record of Jörmungandr making any significant contributions to science or technology at all. So why not sit back and wait for the IDL to reverse-engineer the Cho-ta’an gate and then start building your hyperdrive?”
“You don’t just start from scratch on something like this. We would have needed to build an infrastructure—”
“And embed spies in the IDL, et cetera. I know. But you didn’t need to spend two hundred years in a secret underground facility in Iceland, acquiring artifacts of an ancient space program and bribing governments through off-the-books subsidiaries. And another thing: if this mission is vital to the survival of humanity, why not train a team of soldiers to go with you to Kiryata rather than depend on a bunch of illiterate, undisciplined Vikings? We have your mech suit. We could certainly build more.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of extra weight to carry into space.”
“Sure, but we had two hundred years. Except for the hyperdrive, the ship has been ready for almost a decade. We could have built a bigger ship.”
“That’s true,” Freya admitted.
“For that matter,” Andi said, “why are you going? I understand you founded this organization and have every right to determine who goes to Kiryata, but is that all there is to it? Because you can?”
Freya thought for a moment. “I suppose it’s because it feels right. The same with Eric and his men. They were with me from the beginning.”
Andi laughed. “They were with you for a few weeks, and then for two years on the way back to Earth. They’ve been in stasis for the past thirteen hundred years.”
“Even so, it feels right.”
“That’s what I’m getting at, Freya. A lot of what you’re doing is based purely on intuition. I know you’re tough as nails, but you’re not heartless. You feel it too. Something bigger than us. It’s the thing that pushed your grandparents to build a damn rocket in the Middle Ages. And it’s what made you trust me to build a spaceship to get you to Kiryata. So trust me. For just a little longer.”
Freya sighed. It wasn’t like she had a lot of choice. A few of the scientists had suggested avenues to pursue to get the SHAM to make the jump, but none of them seemed promising. “All right,” she said. “I’ll trust you.”
“Thank you. I have one more request.”
“Really?”
“I’d like to go outside.”
“It isn’t safe.”
“I’m eighty-five years old. Radiation at the current levels usually takes years to cause problems. I’ll take my chances.”
Freya sighed again. “All right.”
*****
After that day, Andi spent most of her time outside. The stark landscape of Iceland hadn’t changed much since the Cho-ta’an attack. In fact, the Jörmungandr campus now looked much the way it had two hundred years earlier: the global warm period that had started in the late ninetee
nth century ended in the middle of the twenty-first, and Vatnajökull and the other glaciers began to advance once again. It was mid-winter in Iceland, and Andi made the most of the few hours of daylight, going for long walks across the snowy plain. Andi spurned company on these walks, but Freya had a man in a radiation suit follow her at a distance in case she fell. Often she would return well after dark, half-frozen despite wearing three layers of thick clothing. Freya would help her undress and get into a warm bath, where she would sit until her teeth stopped chattering. Then Freya would help her to bed. They rarely spoke, and they never talked about the status of the hyperdrive project. Andi rarely went into the lab anymore; the scientists and other engineers were left without direction. Some continued to show up for work, while others sulked in their rooms. One, a physicist who’d become increasingly distraught over the lack of progress, slit his wrists. When Freya told Andi about this, Andi sat and wept for nearly three hours. She didn’t go for a walk that day.
The weeks wore on. The EPOKH was now in twelve days. Even if they did, by some miracle, manage to get the hyperdrive working, there would be no time to test it. They had done several test launches of craft similar to Valkyrie, but none with a working hyperdrive. The engineers had stopped working entirely, as there no longer seemed to be any point. Freya herself was close to despair. She had never felt so low, even during the four years she was alone on a Cho-ta’an ship. Andi’s minder no longer followed her on walks, and Freya couldn’t muster the will to care. She had spent nearly her entire life working on this project, and now it was going to end, not with a bang, but a whimper. She and the others would die alone on a dead planet.
Three days before the EPOKH, Andi went for a walk and never returned. Freya formed a search party and found her the next day, lying still in the snow. Her face was white and her blue lips were frozen in a beatific smile. Well, thought Freya. I guess you found what you were looking for. And you doomed the rest of us in the process.
The War of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 5) Page 25
