by Jean Johnson
“A teleporter would have to know this cave, really know it, to be able to ’port accurately down here, particularly since it’s so dark.” Helstead countered, touching the rugged walls with one silver-gloved hand. “Even then, most still prefer line-of-sight ’porting. So it’d have to be a telekinetic.”
“Well, it would make more sense than a telekinetic’s flying down here; the mouth of this cave was covered in snow, which we had to uncover. It doesn’t snow as much down here as all that,” he reminded her.
“Yes, but teleportation is an extremely rare psychic gift. There’s not more than a couple hundred in each of the known psychic species,” Helstead told him. Then she turned to their CO, and added, “I’d also like to know how you knew this was down here, Captain.”
Ia tugged up on the strap of her backpack, which was threatening to slip off her shoulder, then flipped her hand between the three of them. “Hi, there; I’m Ia. I’m a massive postcognitive, among other things. Meyun Harper, meet Delia Helstead. Delia’s a Rank 9 teleporter, so she should know what she’s talking about—but for the record, both of you, it wasn’t a teleporter or a telekinetic.”
“Alright, Captain Smarty-Pants,” Harper offered, giving Ia a dry look. “You tell us how these footprints came to be like this, without teleportation or telekinesis.”
“It’s easy,” she murmured, moving closer to the back wall. Playing the blue-white light from her bracer over the wall at an angle, she revealed a series of unnatural round depressions in the dark basalt. “The person in question flew down here as a soap bubble.”
“A soap bubble?” Helstead asked, her tone conveying most of her skepticism in the shadows of the cave.
“Yes. One made of pure energy.”
“Feyori?” The leader of the 3rd Platoon scowled and spat on the ice-crusted ground. “Mud-sucking shakk-tor…We’re breaking into a Meddler’s base? With respect, Captain, you’re nuts.”
Eyes closed, senses turned inward, Ia cut her off. “No, I am not nuts, Helstead.” She found the pattern she wanted, opened her eyes, and pressed on the stones at the back of seven different depressions. Rocks scraped loudly to her right as a passage opened up. “And this place wasn’t built by a Feyori.”
“It wasn’t?” Harper asked. He followed Ia into the rough-hewn tunnel, with Helstead at his back. “Who or what built it, if not a silvery soap-bubble Meddler?”
“Well, that depends on what you want to call her. The Abomination, the Immortal, the High One…or if you like, the First Empress of the V’Dan Empire, who literally—and quite successfully—ruled the V’Dan for the first five thousand years of their recorded history,” Ia explained. The tunnel turned and descended on smooth-cut stones worn only a little bit by the passage of whoever had made those footprints outside. “The one and the same entity who rescued them from the tectonic-based disasters of not quite ten thousand years ago here on Earth, creating the d’aspra of the Sh’nai faith.”
“Huh?” Helstead asked, trying to squeeze past Harper. He sighed and let the impatient woman pass. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope. Luckily, we have time for a history lesson,” Ia explained, as they descended. “It’s a long way down…and it’s sort of a future-history lesson as well as a past one.”
“Is it an important lesson?” Helstead asked warily. “Or is it just a way to kill time as we walk?”
“Both, since you’re now working for me, and I have to manipulate the Feyori into doing what I want in the near future. Roughly two hundred years from now—into our future—a pair of Human-Feyori half-breeds will have a clandestine little liaison and create a child. The recombinant genetics of that child will give rise to what the Feyori call the Abomination, a being who is one hundred percent matter-based and one hundred percent energy-based. Both fully Human and fully Feyori…and impossible to kill.”
“So how does that make her different from any other Feyori?” Helstead asked pointedly. “You stab ’em in their matter form, and they pop back into their energy form and fly off.”
“I think you missed the bigger point, Helstead,” Harper said. “She said two hundred years into the future. I want to know what a woman of the future has to do with a place that was clearly built in the past.”
“Patience, I’m getting there,” Ia chided both of them. The carved-stone stairs here were somewhat dusty, but the imprints of several feet marred the grey-coated basalt. She let the light from her bracer play over the marks as she spoke. “For the record, it’s not impossible to kill a Feyori. It’s just very, very difficult, and you have to catch them in their energy form and do it in just the right way.
“I’m not going to tell you what that way is because I really don’t want them madder at me than they already are,” she muttered, thinking of her mistake with that faux-Solarican, Miklinn. “Unfortunately, if you try to do that to the Immortal, she just pops back to her matter form, alive and upset. Kill one form, she pops back into the other form, back and forth, back and forth. Which the Feyori discovered when they tried to get rid of her. Or will have tried…whatever,” Ia dismissed, flicking her free hand.
“Why would they do that?” Helstead asked her. The stairs were now spiraling down in a tighter curve, with no end in sight.
Ia shrugged. “Because she has all the powers of a Feyori, but was raised to be a Human. To think like a Human. She is outside their great Game, outside their control. Thankfully, it will have been my future intervention that will show the Feyori how to distract her from getting involved in their politics by using her ties to her fellow Humans.”
“…Okay, you’ve officially lost me,” Harper muttered. “You also still haven’t explained what someone in the future has to do with an underground facility built at some point in the past.”
“In a note written to be delivered roughly two centuries from now, I will outline to the Feyori that the best way to ensure she doesn’t meddle with their galaxy-sized Game is for the Immortal to become preoccupied with her fellow Humans,” Ia explained patiently. “In order to do that, they will have to band together in a Great Gestalt and accelerate her physically beyond the squared speed of light, to the point where they throw her fifteen thousand years into the past…and they will do so at the cost of roughly twenty Feyori lives. But it will have the desired effect of getting her out of their nonexistent hair rather than have her get involved and try to take over their great Game.”
“You mean it already did,” Helstead countered. Then winced. “Wait—nobody can go faster than the squared speed of light! To the squared speed, since we know the Feyori can swap between energy and matter, but faster than it? No!”
She stopped on the stairs in protest, then moved to one side so that Harper could get past her. He shook his head as he passed the petite officer.
“The fact that the Feyori can reach that border-transition at all convinces me that the squared speed of light can be broken, Lieutenant Commander,” Harper stated, his tone grim as he edged past the smaller woman. “That part doesn’t bother me as an engineer since they’ve obviously proved it can be done. Causality is what bothers me. You cannot meddle with the past without running into paradox. That violates the physics of the universe!”
“What, like how faster-than-light travel was ‘impossible’ five centuries ago because that violated ‘the physics of the universe’? At least, until we learned to suppress the Higgs field?” Ia asked him dryly. She paused in her descent to look over her shoulder at him. He shined his arm-unit light in her face, but she didn’t flinch from the glow. “It’s not only possible, Harper, it has already happened. And there is no resulting paradox.”
“But you told the Feyori what to do,” he pointed out. Literally pointed, swinging the beam of his flashlight toward her shoulder, casting odd shadows onto the dark stone walls. “Doesn’t that create paradox?”
“Technically no, since they would’ve figured it out on their own. I just sped up the process by a couple hundred years, and cut back on the deaths
of several hundred pissed-off Meddlers. Or will have sped it up,” she amended awkwardly, flipping her hand again. “Let’s just ignore the whole proper-tense requirements for now, or I’ll give all of us a headache…My point is, we are not caught in a causality loop, we do not violate the cause and effect of space-time, and the universe isn’t going to implode just because you think the temporal implications are always going to be one giant game of but-first.”
“A game of what?” Harper asked her, frowning. “Butt, as in buttocks? The asteroid?” he added, poking his thumb behind his shoulder. “Gluteus maximus?”
“No, as in but-first,” Ia repeated, raising her brows. She sighed and explained when he didn’t get it. “You know, senior-itis? Going through the entire day saying to yourself, ‘I need to get this done, but first I have to get that done…but first I have go get this other thing handled, but in order to that, I have to get the first thing done…’ That kind of but-first.”
“Oh.”
Helstead snorted. “I knew what she was talking about—are these stairs ever going to end somewhere?”
“They end at the bottom,” Harper said, pragmatic. “We’ll get there when we get there. Have faith in our Captain. I have faith. I just don’t understand. I still don’t see why it doesn’t cause a causality loop.”
“Meyun, that sort of inability to get anything done isn’t the paradox everyone thinks it is, because real life doesn’t work that way,” Ia told Harper. The stairs turned to the right and left a few times as they descended, lit only by the lights on their arms. “You may have to work with incomplete information at times, but you can always get at least one of those three things started in the but-first loop I mentioned…and that means it isn’t a loop. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The duct tape isn’t firmly glued in place on the roll, because there is always a free end to pick at it and pull it up.”
“Causality demands—” he argued.
“—It demands that there be an action, and a reaction, nothing more and nothing less,” Ia stated, cutting him off. “It says nothing about the reaction always having to happen after the action, Meyun. If reactions always had to happen after actions, there’d be no point in maintaining a preemptively readied military presence because you could only act after someone else attacked, giving you a reason to strike back.”
“I’m sorry, Ia, but it still doesn’t make any sense,” Meyun muttered.
“Trust me on this, Meyun. The universe does not have to ‘protect itself’ from causality,” she stated firmly. “The first lesson they teach you about nonhyperrelay-based communications is that our perceptions of ‘observed’ versus ‘actual’ simultaneous actions taking place across interstellar distances do not match, yet they do not match in such a way that it does not violate the causality of the universe. Both the future and the past can be rewritten. It’s just that it’s far easier for all of us to rewrite the future because we’re already traveling in that direction. Time is something that moves, therefore time has inertia. Even when traveling backwards through time, if they survive the trip, a Feyori still ages forward. They don’t shrink down to the equivalent of infancy, but rather continue forward toward senility.”
“Because it’s like steering a ground car?” Harper reasoned, thinking it through. She nodded, glancing back at him. His brow furrowed a little, but in thought, not in anger. “At high speeds, vector changes become extremely difficult, even dangerous, particularly when they’re off by more than a handful of degrees. To try to turn back by more than ninety degrees would take too much energy and put too much stress on the car, the passengers, the tires, even the road. It can be done, but it’s extremely difficult. Right?”
“Exactly,” Ia agreed. They were now descending in a tighter curve to the left, almost a spiral, if the core of the spiral were at least a meter thick. “The only point of dissimilarity in your analogy is that, in order to turn yourself around so that you were going into the past instead of into the future, you’d have to be going faster in order to succeed, rather than slowing down to make a sedate U-turn. It’s more like escaping the gravitational pull of a planet, but instead of going up, away from the downward pull of the planet’s mass, you’re trying to go backwards through the forward pull of time.”
“You’re both freaking crazy,” Helstead muttered. She started to say more, then tensed. Her hand dropped to one of the pistols slung around her armored waist. Her voice dropped even lower, to barely a murmur. “Halt. I smell fresh air. Too fresh for a cave.”
“That would be the Loyalist AIs coming to meet us,” Ia told her companions, not bothering to lower her volume. “The surviving members took refuge with the Immortal at the end of the AI War…because I will have left instructions with the Immortal to offer them amnesty in my name, a couple hundred years back.”
“But isn’t that a causality loop?” Harper asked her, still stuck on that point.
“Hello? We have artificial intelligences inbound!” Helstead hissed at the two of them. “Shouldn’t we be arming ourselves, Captain?”
“Keep your weapon in your holster, Helstead. And your blades in your sheaths,” she added, mindful of the woman’s lethal little hairpins. Raising her voice, Ia called out, “Greetings, AIs KXD-47 and NNH-236…also known as Margaret and the Padre. You are being approached by the Prophet of a Thousand Years and two of her companions. I need you to let us through, and not say a word to your landlady about our presence, nor about our purpose, nor anything else about whatever we may observe while we’re down here.”
“Says you,” a gruff male voice echoed up the stairs.
“Yes, says me,” Ia confirmed. Descending several steps, she stopped when her flashlight illuminated the barrel of an archaic but still serviceable projectile gun. “As the Immortal once told you, Padre, ‘You will know the Prophet by her stunning level of detail, past, present, and future.’ Having been picked for active duty this month, you were in the middle of your gun-cleaning cycle, taking time off after cribbage game 10,347 with Margaret, when the telltales for the front door went off.
“Knowing that Shey was not scheduled to arrive for another four years, three months, six days, twelve hours, and seventeen minutes…give or take a few minutes,” Ia allowed wryly, “you quickly grabbed Margaret’s precleaned gun and took point, leaving her to scrounge up her holdout pistol and follow. Which she did at high speed, labeling you with choice epithets about your cheaply manufactured background and dubious processor parentage as you rode up here in the main lift together—need I go into greater detail, or will that much suffice?”
The barrel lifted a little. Its wielder couldn’t physically see her, but the Padre wasn’t using standard eyesight to target Ia through the curve of stone between them. The tone of his voice remained skeptical. “What do you want, down here? If you really are the Prophet, what do you need from us? Don’t you deal in the future, not the past?”
“The Second Salik War is coming, as the Immortal knows full well,” Ia reminded them. “I need the exact schematics on how to marry OTL and FTL together to make hyperwarp travel possible two hundred years in advance of everyone else…or did the Immortal not tell you all that much about me?”
“She told us several things.” The second voice was female, low and mostly pleasant; the AI wielding it managed to inject a note of doubt into her tone. “But she never mentioned your visiting us.”
“That’s because I really don’t need her knowing about this visit—you know what she’s like, Margaret,” Ia cajoled. “She already knows I’m the reason why the Feyori stopped pestering her. I don’t need her pestering me in some warped attempt at gratitude. I can manage far better without her ‘help’ than with it…and I’d rather let her keep her free will in her blissful ignorance than have to impose my will forcefully to keep her out of my way.”
“If you’re really the Prophet, then you’re also a member of the Terran military, and the military is why we’re stuck in this damned exile,” the Padre growled.
“Yes, and if I really am the Prophet, then I also know what you want, and I can tell you exactly when and where you’ll be able to regain your places in the galaxy as fully accredited sentient beings,” Ia coaxed.
“Impossible!” Margaret’s voice snapped. “The war started because every government says we aren’t, and we never will be!”
The barrel of the rifle jostled for a moment, then the female bounded into view. She didn’t block her partner’s firing angle, hugging the outer wall so that the Padre could stay close to the inner one, but Margaret did plant one hand on her hip and give Ia a skeptical look. For an artificial life-form, she was fairly realistic. Her skin was pale and smooth, her hair dark and thick with curls, and her gaze steady. She even pretended to breathe like a normal woman, though technically speaking she didn’t need air for anything other than producing speech. That, and snorting in derision.
“Everyone knows the damned war started because we’re not fully sentient. We’re not alive, so we don’t have a soul…and those prejudiced bastards yanked the plugs on all cybernetic research. Last I checked on the news Nets,” Margaret added, a hint of tart cynicism programmed into her tone, “cyberware is still very much illegal because it’s still vulnerable to hacking, rendering it unprofitable even for the black market to try to peddle. Not to mention it’s extremely illegal to grow a whole body and attempt to supplant its innate consciousness with an artificial one, just as it’s illegal to place an organic consciousness inside a mechanical corpse.”
“It’s not a case of growing a Human body,” Ia countered, moving down two steps. That brought her to just beyond the android’s reach, and well within firing distance. The Padre wasn’t going to shoot her at this point, however. “Three hundred years from now, you will be recalled to active duty—all of you, if you choose to go. Those who serve and survive will be given the option of having your programming transferred into new bodies.
“I cannot tell you exactly what they will be made from, but those new bodies will naturally produce KI and thus bear souls…and they will be able to do so without violating any Alliance laws regarding the growing of organic sentients, the supplantation of innate personalities, so on and so forth,” she added, flicking her hand in dismissal, “because they won’t start out as sophonts, let alone as sentients.”
