Temporal Incursion

by Neil A. Hogan

  Hogart peered at the scrawled handwriting. His own. Or rather, his clone’s. “He spent a million years to fossilize a plant?”

  “It only takes about 10,000 years to fossilize something.” Raj shrugged. “I guess he did it as a hobby. Now about Admiral Heartness…”

  Hogart ignored him, and walked over to two dodecahedrons joined together with some crystalline wires. One was slightly larger than the other one. “Would you look at that. This is intensely interesting.”

  “Oh, do you know what it does? We haven’t worked it out yet.”

  Hogart stood looking at it for a moment. He’d seen something like that before. Similar in shape to the Storyteller’s memory storage systems, but smaller. And the crystal cable connection looked strange. A large black circuit wrapped them in the center, and the crystals on the left next to the larger dodecahedron were shiny and new, while the crystals on the right next to the smaller dodecahedron were aged and dirty.

  Crystals, thought Hogart. Similar to the Storyteller’s memory systems.

  One younger, one older, or aged.

  If the first crystal was designed to access Frequency One records, and the circuit transmitted the information to the second crystal…. Why create it? Unless you were going to do something with the record.

  Some kind of conversion?

  One larger, one smaller. Could it slow the vibration? Slowing Frequency One to Frequency Zero? But you would need thousands of years to slow a memory to…

  Hogart stared at the device for a full minute before understanding dawned. “Oh my god, I didn’t!”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “I mean, him. My clone. You know what he’s done? He’s created a step-down frequency record system!”

  Kumar looked at him confused. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “When we take the ship to a higher frequency, it’s sometimes not possible for the memories to be kept when we return to our frequency - Frequency Zero. Our scientists for years have tried to find a way around it, and eventually gave up.”

  “Which is why we made a deal with the Storytellers so that they could absorb all our thoughts, then interpret them for us when we return to our own frequency.”

  “Yes. But this device means there is another way around it. I always wondered how the Storytellers could do it. It was because they could live for hundreds of years. That was the secret. They simply used their brains to slow the vibration down by experiencing hundreds of years in a moment. That’s the missing equation!”

  “And we humans are still on the lower end, so we need a bit more than hundreds of years to convert the higher frequency recordings to something we can perceive. We need thousands!”

  “Exactly. To step down a vibrational memory from Frequency One to Frequency Zero would take thousands of years, unless you have one of these.” Then Hogart covered his mouth in realization. “Raj! Do you know what this means? We don’t need the Storytellers anymore. We can record everything with drones no matter what Frequency we end up in, and then simply run it through copies of this at high speed so that thousands of years pass in an instant.”

  Kumar looked speechless at the device. “We could access all those old records from our first explorations, too!”

  Hogart saw Kumar was so taken with it that it was the perfect time to get back to work. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

  “No wait,” Kumar said, as Hogart hit his flash band and disappeared.

  Kumar shrugged, then excitedly went over to the step-down device. “I guess I’ll be here a while.”

  *

  Hogart rematerialized outside the Center, and found that the door to the Center had reformed.

  He pushed his hand on it, but it wouldn’t dissolve.

  “Wha… A.I. Open up.”

  There was no answer. Hogart flicked his flash band and attempted to flash in but then the avatar’s voice said, “internal flash system offline.” He rolled his eyes.

  Just then there was a bright light behind him, and a spikey purple alien materialized.

  “External flash system now offline,” said the avatar’s voice.

  Hogart frowned at this. He hoped the flash systems wouldn’t be offline for long.

  “Captain Jonathan Hogart,” said the alien’s translator. “Reporting for duty, Sir.”

  “First Officer Spiney. So good to see you again. How was your trip to Spinos?”

  “The families are well and send their regards. My brother has a message for you.”

  “Oh?’

  “He said that he was briefly astrally visited by one of his associates, the Deputy CEO of the Frequency Research Institute. – Dr. Vilanna Szuki.”

  “How does that help me?”

  “He recognized a human accompanying her, and thought you’d like to know.”

  “Who?”

  “Admiral Victoria Heartness.”

  Chapter 7

  A tall, Asian man with a shock of white hair, wearing a brown cardigan with elbow patches, jogged over to Patel as he was making his way down the Space Station corridor. “There you are!” he called.

  “Hiro, how goes the day?” Patel smiled disarmingly at his old friend. He’d known Doctor Hiro Watanabe for many decades and valued his counsel above all else. But from the look on his aging face, he knew Watanabe had found out something he probably didn’t want to know about.

  “Bad news, I’m afraid. We’ve been attempting to work out why doors weren’t opening properly on the Stellar Flash, why the communications system works sporadically, why the internal flash system works on and off, and other things. Originally we put it down to the ship being 2.5 million years old.”

  “Well, that would be the most logical conclusion.”

  “You’ll never believe what it is.”

  After living through almost 2.5 million years, the Stellar Flash ship had returned to Earth thousands of years ago, and had been hidden in a Planck Time Bubble under the Second Egyptian Sphinx. They’d only just got it back to Saturn Space Station X-1a and, while they hadn’t expected it to work perfectly after all this time, records indicated it actually had been, right up to the moment it had revealed itself last week.

  “Well. Don’t leave me in suspense!” Patel pretended to be annoyed.

  Hiro gave a tiny smile, then said “Upgrades.”

  “Well, we assumed Jonathan’s clone had done a lot of upgrades and changes to the systems over the million years, or so, he had been taking care of it. Not to mention the evolution the A.I.’s avatar went through before it left.”

  “No. Our upgrades. More pointedly. Your research team in the Proxima Centauri system. Flash ship upgrades happen every day.”

  Patel’s mouth fell open. “So, the moment the Stellar Flash returned to our timestream it began installing all the upgrades that it had missed, even though it had long ago superseded them.”

  “No facepalm?”

  “Tempting, but no. Please continue.”

  “Well. Current upgrades ended up overwriting more progressive customizations, essentially taking much of the ship’s configurations back to how they were.”

  “And causing a number of systems to freeze up.” Patel groaned. “Can we do a roll back?”

  “Overwrites on overwrites with no backups. Billions of updates. I’d say that’s definitely a no.”

  “We’ll have to tell Jonathan.”

  Watanabe frowned. “That’s the other problem. Since Spiney jumped in, the Stellar Flash has become inaccessible. No one can flash jump in or out, and communications are down. I detected a large packet of data was autodownloaded only minutes before. I’d say it’s not only updates that it’s getting. A major upgrade must have just started.”

  Patel sighed. “Well, if we can’t get in contact with them within the next hour, I guess we’ll have to get suited up.”

  “You’re not proposing a phase-shift entry in space?”

  “Yes, and you’re coming with me.”

  Chapter 8

/>   Szuki led Heartness out of the room to a cage-like corridor with a mercurial moving walkway, and they were shifted along it, past the pilot’s systems and the end of the square room, and down along a connecting corridor to a rectangular section, nanobots balancing them and guiding them to their chosen destination.

  “The connection room doesn’t generate a hologram,” continued Szuki. “I wouldn’t want anything so fake. The room connects with your subconscious and projects an astral version of you instantly, enabling you to travel the universe.”

  “Traverse,” whispered Heartness, understanding.

  “The system recreates you almost exactly so that you can interact with anyone anywhere at any time. However, there are certain restrictions regarding conveying the sense of touch, thanks to the Secret Services. Also, when Earth Council heard about it, we were strictly forbidden from using it within the Solar System, until they had developed the appropriate privacy legislation.”

  “I had no idea that it existed,” said Heartness.

  “We’ve only just got Earth Council’s approval for the Proxima Centauri System. The size is what makes it work so we will only be able to install it in the larger flash ships. You really need something the size of the pyramid of Giza to get the full effect, though we were able to develop it using a different resonance field to the one in Cairo. Your Stellar Flash will get one soon.”

  Heartness knew then that she’d completely misread Szuki. She’d probably traveled to more places than any other human being in thousands of years, without needing to take her body with her.

  Perhaps Space Station X-1a could get one, Heartness thought idly. Ring Four was going to be mainly taken up by the new detector, so she might be able to petition it for Ring Five. Then she realized what she was thinking, and quickly white-noised her thoughts again.

  The fluid path slowed, then dropped them at one of several oval airlocks. A brief glance down the corridor revealed more. The rest of the rectangular space was fairly similar. A whole section devoted to shuttle bays, with easy access energy locks along almost all of the sides. She understood now that the pilot’s center in the pyramidal section was a backup. The main pilot center was probably in a spherical section at the front, if the ship’s designers had been able to get away with their penchant for prisms.

  Through the window of the airlock, Heartness could see the entrance to a shuttle. She raised an eyebrow at Szuki. They were still quite a distance from ProxiBee, and Szuki wanted to take a shuttle?

  The airlock door hissed, then lifted upward, and Szuki led Heartness into the tiny vehicle.

  Heartness looked puzzled at the cockpit. The console looked like someone had fired a blaster at it. Half the panels had holes in them, and much of the autopilot systems looked burnt beyond repair. A small, new-looking box had been attached on top of the broken systems, with metal clamps and moving lines. A cyberplant from the Florans. As far as Heartness was concerned, things had just gone from bad to worse. “I’m not entirely comfortable using Floran tech. Isn’t there a security risk?”

  "Quite the opposite,” explained Szuki. “Floran tech, being a fairly alien system to ours, is almost completely unhackable when we combine the systems. But you know that plant-based entities are initially better at navigating flash ships. You had a plant pilot when you were Captain of the Stellar Flash. Pilot Leafy?”

  Heartness nodded.

  “This sector of space has become unstable, and this plant hybrid hardware will tell us if our shuttle is approaching any temporal disturbances, or pieces of frozen time."

  “So, is the hand in the hologram frozen in some kind of temporal field?"

  "As far as we can tell, the temporal shift that happened to that person has not cut the hand off. Whoever it is, is moving through an energy hole, and the other part of them is still on the other side. It's happening very, very slowly. Just a few minutes ago I was able to see the elbow. Hopefully the rest of her will come through within a day."

  "So, it's definitely a 'her'?"

  "The image is too unclear to tell for sure, but it was found in hexicle 18 which is registered to Doctor Cheree Wallams, astrophysicist. So, we're making a guess on that one."

  Szuki took the front left of four seats, and Heartness sat next to her. The seat activated a stabilizing forcefield around them, the airlock closed, and Szuki hit the release button. The shuttle shot out of the docking bay, dodged quickly to the right, then headed straight.

  "The system can detect an already existing temporal disturbance klicks away," continued Szuki. "It's the sudden appearances of micro time particles that we need to be worried about."

  “The micro time particles. Were they caused by something the scientists were working on?”

  “We’re unsure about that, too. Perhaps they were attracted here by our experiments?”

  Suddenly the screen in front of them began flashing bright red, and an alarm sounded.

  “Victoria,” yelled Szuki above the noise. “Hold on!”

  The shuttle dived downwards, and Szuki screamed. Heartness gripped the sides of her chair and gritted her teeth.

  As the little shuttle began spiraling out of control, Heartness’ brief thought was, she’d hate to die on an empty stomach.

  Episode 2

  The Hive

  Chapter 9

  Heartness felt her stomach leap into her throat, then the ship righted itself again.

  "That was close," said Szuki. "Systems indicated a microparticle of reverse time coming in from behind. Glad we didn't end up as babies."

  "Could that really happen?"

  "To be honest, I don't think so. There's the whole 'where does the energy go?' problem. Unless it actually absorbs the energy while allowing a time reversal..."

  "Or the action is really just shifting people to alternate versions of themselves within the local timeframe, so no energy needs to be released."

  Szuki's mouth dropped open, then closed it again. "Of course. I wasn't expecting you to be up on the latest multireality research. You could be right."

  The ship began breaking-maneuvers, and then slowed as it met the minor particles of gas that make up an atmosphere.

  ProxiBee.

  Heartness looked surprised. “I thought it would take at least an hour to get here.”

  “The organics gave us a few microjumps when it thought we’d be safe. Space is pretty big so, for something as small as this shuttle, a random micro time particle mid jump would have been implausible.”

  “I don’t really like the word implausible. It sounds too much like ‘unsinkable’.”

  Szuki smiled, and pointed at the screen. "Docking with the Clarke elevator. The atmosphere is too volatile for my little ship to land, but the orbital elevator can withstand even a comet strike, in theory. The nanites will simply rebuild any part of it that breaks. It’s a similar system to many of the new flash ships, and your space station."

  "What about these, what did you call them, micro time particles?"

  "The elevator has been here since 2071, and is made up of time crystals and nanite shields. I'd assume it would take a lot more to knock it down. The micro time particles are really only affecting organic things - recent fabrications and other matter mixtures that are comparably young. The elevator is quite safe.”

  Heartness hadn’t felt this unsafe in a while, but she let it pass. "Well, while we wait for docking maneuvers to be completed, can you tell me more about the research here? My lobe data is a bit vague on details.”

  Szuki set the shuttle on auto and turned to her. "We gave research space to a group of 27 scientists, consisting of 24 researchers and 3 administrators. We wanted to find a way to access Frequency Six without having to use a flash drive to get there. Flash technology was readapted to attempt a shift to that dimension."

  Heartness looked confused. “But. We’re in contact with the beings in Frequency Seven. Why is there further research needed?”

  Szuki looked surprised. “But, this is where the research ha
ppens! Your ship, the Stellar Flash, and other Flash ships, were originally developed in this system, with only basic assistance from the Interdimensional Coalition. Without our research, you wouldn’t have been able to go to any frequency. We’ve already sent a new update for the Stellar Flash ship, and when it upgrades it’ll be even more efficient than before. We’re also developing a new type of flash ship that integrates back up space-fold technology. Ships never need to fear being stuck in another frequency without a working flash drive again!”

  Just then, Heartness realized what Szuki had said, and gasped.

  "Upgrade? As in, updating all the ship's systems?"

  "Well, yes. It's all the daily updates plus a major upgrade and reconfiguration that…"

  "But, the Stellar Flash was on a secret mission to the Andromeda Galaxy. It went back in time 2.5 million years. We told the media it was just a minor timeslip of a few thousand. You didn't get that X-report?"

  Szuki could see Heartness was agitated. "I read it. I don't see the problem."

  "Really? How much customization do you think the ship must have received from its augmented immortal clone captain over a million years? You don't think those changes might influence a forced upgrade? No, you just send updates out and hope the user hasn’t made any personal modifications, or kept things in rooms they shouldn’t have."

  Szuki's hand flew to her mouth. "We just thought it had been dormant. You know, reports of the clone being in suspended animation for a million years..."

  "He did a lot of work. That ship is quite different, now."

  Szuki frowned. "Then we have to hope that he disabled updates. Otherwise that sector of space is going to get a new star."

  “I have to warn them.” Heartness reached for her flash band, but Szuki grabbed her hand.

  “Victoria. Please. You can’t flash back. It’s too dangerous with all the micro time particles. Trust that your staff will know what to do.” Szuki took her hand away and smiled. “Look. I might have exaggerated about the star bit. Part of the upgrade is a protective mechanism for the flash drive. After the report that an entity had tried to flash it into a black hole, we installed a new failsafe. Even if the flash drive explodes, the most that could happen is those very close would be blinded temporarily.”