28 – The empty room

Alissa Parces – February 12^th 2051 – Desolation of Infinite Dreams, Heaven Spacedock

Captain Parces was relaxing on her chair, something she had grown used to doing as of late. The chairs were built to sustain the body and prevent injuries while doing high-g accelerations, but this meant that they had the side effect of being just too comfortable.

There were at least five teams of engineers roaming around her ship, working. Her ship was undergoing upgrades in order to bring it to the v2 Corvette design like the other two ships of the fleet. The Descent had been built with this design in mind already, and the Piercer had been upgraded while she was out in the Belt. This meant that her ship was the last to receive the upgrade, but she didn’t mind. She needed some time off, after all.

A ping notified her that her time off might be cut abruptly, but she donned her best professional face and responded to the call in earnest. The bald face of the General greeted her from the other side of the connection, his hardened features barely attacked by the flow of time. A timeless might could be read in the lines on his face.

“General, sir?” She asked, saluting.

“At ease.” He said, smiling slightly. The captain was aware of the fact that the man liked his salutes, even though the TDC did not make use of such antiquated things.

“To what do I owe the honor, sir?” She asked. Once again, she had one her homework. She knew this was going to be a tough call because even though there were only two spaceships under the TDC, the general rarely called. She had it easy, back on the Piercer, being under Justin in the TSA branch.

“The council of the six has just concluded.” The man began. “And we’re reached the consensus that the Interlopers are not phase capable.”

“Really? How do you know it for sure?” The captain asked, surprised. After what they had all seen from the database, the possibility that the enemies were in possession of a faster than light means of travel was all but assured.

“It’s a long story, and it’s not relevant to you Captain.” The man coldly replied.

“I’m sorry sir.”

“In brief, they seem incapable of innovating.” The General said with a sigh. The information was important after all, Parces noticed. “And because of that, the specifics of their technology we managed to gleam from the recording are considered to be up-to-date. You will therefore have to study them and come up with relevant strategies to combat them. I’ve read your analysis on the alien monoliths and I have to say, I’m impressed. I expect no less from you this time.”

The call ended. The captain had half an idea to slump into her chair now, a huge amount of work had just materialized on her nonexistent desk. But she was proud of herself. Not only had her essay made its way where it was supposed to end up, but it had also impressed the General. A man notoriously hard to impress and hardly willing to give such compliments to people. And it was impossible to slump into chairs in zero gravity, a thing she learned pretty quickly after she went into space.

She would do it, and she would put her heart into it. She already studied the recording countless times, trying to catch even the tiniest detail about the enemy from what could be seen through the alien eyes. Now she had another purpose, a greater one at that. Use the information at her disposal to come up with ways to effectively combat the threat.

“Sir?” A voice distracted her from her thoughts.

She turned around, careful not to hurt her eyes, and looked at the small man in a blue work suit. “What.”

“One of the teams, sir. We lost contact with them.” He said. He was one of the lunar engineers who had been transferred to the Spacedock as soon as it was ready, his job solely to build and upgrade Corvettes.

“Where?” The captain asked, already patching in with Eve to check for herself. She was glad she didn’t have to talk to the LAI, at least as long as she was this close to a tesseract or to Imperial space.

“Tesseract room.” The man said.

She opened the schematics and found the room next to the reactor. It was still empty, the tesseract being one of the last things that were going to be installed; as it was scheduled to be brought in just after the other upgrades were done. They didn’t have one when they went out at the Belt, and had used the Descent’s one instead. This meant that the room was supposed to be as empty as it was when the Desolation was built, never even opened once.

Just what was in there, then? The sensors reported the space was empty, nothing of relevance to report.

“Alright, I’ll take it from here. Go back to work.” She said and hurried the man out of the bridge.

“Eve?” She called soon after.

“Here.” Eve replied, appearing as a hologram before the captain. “I’ve tried to investigate what was going on inside the room, but it appears that I cannot.” She said.

“Why didn’t you say that earlier?” The captain asked, surprised.

Eve shook her head and scratched it behind her ear, a gesture so oddly human that seeing it on a machine made the captain momentarily stunned. “Something interfered with my scans and reported everything was nominal. Only by looking at it consciously have I seen the discrepancy.” She said.

“Who could even do that to your systems?” The captain asked, dreading the possibility that was cropping up in her mind.

“The Interlopers.”

Justin – Imperial headquarters, personal office

“Ah, yes!” The short man exclaimed, launching himself into his hologram-laden office. “Finally managed to make that old man concede!”

“Are you happy with your achievements?” Eve asked as she appeared inside the room. “Your office is a mess, by the way.” She said with a shrug.

Justin looked at the image of the short woman, wearing a yellow refractive suit and with an oversized wrench hanging by her side. Her brown hair messy and unkept, oil and grime smearing her graceful face and adding just so much value to the picture.

“Yep, pretty happy.” The man said, eliciting an eye roll out of the beauty in front of him.

“Idiot. Pushing to have Luke accept the title of Emperor and to call the Technocracy Empire… you only pulled it off because he was vulnerable and you know it!” The short woman said, a lock of hair stubbornly glued to her face. She tried to push it away by blowing on it, but the oil made it stick.

Such a heavenly sight, a true marvel the fact that she managed to make it look so authentic.

“Don’t try to guilt trip me. I’ve tried everything to get on his good side, but beside our work relationship he’s sealed himself tighter than a reactor containment field.” He said, exaggerated motions of his hands to emphasize his point.

Not that Eve needed to know that, but he had to vent his frustration to someone. That fucking man, it was true what they said. The more one is a genius, the more his mind is fucked up. Poor sod, it was hard to hate him.

Justin turned towards the window and looked outside at the hills in the distance. He had to be relocated here because he could not stand space, it turned out. Perhaps he’d try again as soon as the Heaven Hub started spinning and therefore began to produce its own artificial gravity, but for now he was glad to be back on the ground. Less worries of a sudden incident blowing his ass off into space, although he had to concede that standing in front of a thin pane of glass at the 75^th floor was not safe either. Actually, it was, but just as much as living in space inside the Hub was. Now go and convince your own brain, he thought.

“Do you think that phase lanes could be the answer to the Fermi Paradox?” He suddenly asked. Eve was now standing next to him, her hologram so real and lifelike the only thing that was missing was the actual matter a body should be made of. Its heat, its presence.

She looked out in the distance, making Justin wonder just what she could see with her own special perception. She looked melancholic and lonely right now, fragile for a change. It was far from the truth, he knew, but it made her just so much more human in his eyes. Whatever she had been doing with Luke was bearing fruits.

“I don’t know.” She said, sighing. “The lanes might be a part of the answer, but not the whole thing.”

“But.” Justin perked up. “If those people actually managed to make use of a weakened conduit of space-time between gravity wells in order to break the speed limit of the universe…”

“Who knows what other, even more advanced, species might have done.” Eve conceded. “Actually, we did something like that too, you know?”

“The tesseracts.” The man instantly said. His eyes shiny with expectation.

“Damn right.” The AI said proudly. “What, you expecting something of me?” She asked mockingly.

“Spit it out, come on.” The man demanded jokingly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about…”

“Like hell you do. You brought up the two technologies and said they were similar!”

“Alright. I might or might not have had some insight into the physics of the hyperspace by watching the recording.” The woman teased Justin, irritating him to no end. But, at the same time, he couldn’t help but wonder just what she had managed to understand from the data.

“I’ll tell you, don’t make such a face.” She finally said, deciding to stop teasing the poor man. “We might not be able to phase jump yet, but I think I can tweak our Tesseracts to not only send data, but also energy through their connection. You know what this means?”

“Sustained connections? Indefinite activity time?” He asked immediately, his heart pumping like crazy.

“Not really that, the phase space doesn’t seem to like being out in the open for long periods of time. It destabilizes and needs time to recuperate. But I think we can push it to one-hour connection and one-hour recharge, and without having to tax the ship’s generator either.” She said smiling. Then her smirk turned evil. “Or… we could overcharge the connection and make good use of the enormous amounts of energy we can send though before the link shatters.”

“A weapon!” Justin yelled.

“Bingo.” Eve said, and a slew of schematics appeared all around the room.

The familiar hexagonal shaped solar panels that were being built at the asteroid mining sites appeared in the designs as well. They were hovering around the sun, beaming their energy back to the Hub via enormously powerful lasers. The light refocused and redirected at even intervals by gargantuan space lenses, like glasses hovering in space to correct the poor eyesight of a Leviathan. He chuckled, and kept looking at the majestic sight.

A sight of a solar system colonized, of a beast like the Sun tamed and made into a huge generator. The laser beams all converged towards a crystal placed right above the central support beam of the Hub, where the Corvettes were docking right now. The crystal then spewed out attuned energy right into the heart of the Hub itself, the Tesseract Nexus.

It would replace the current central beam, making it into an independent zero gee section. Around it another circular structure would be built, where all the support beams could be tethered and anchored. The ring itself would not rotate with the beams and the rest of the Hub’s main ring, but it would provide a platform for ships to dock and unload their crews into. And it would be gorgeous, seeing a ring with a shiny gem inside, surrounded by rotating pillars of metal that seemed to slide along its outer rim like a well-oiled machine. Their electromagnetic links stronger than even the metal they were made of, but their movements fluid and perfect.

The solar panels, the lasers, the lenses, the crystals and the new Tesseract Nexus. It was an ambitious project, and not one without its challenges. But if there was something he could always enjoy; it was a decent challenge to beat.

Eve – Gazer upon the Abyss cyberspace – Real time

>Connecting to: Gazer upon the Abyss
>Distance from closest node: 23.000 km
>Light-lag 76.7 milliseconds
>Conditions acceptable, superseding local LAI

The Gazer upon the Abyss was a small thing, built for maximum speed and without any crew to man it. It was an experiment of sorts, to explore what laid beyond the reaches of the solar system, in the deep interstellar space. It was carrying a Tesseract with it, adjusted to the latest experimental configuration which granted, as she told Justin, a one-hour connection every two hours.

The energy could be supplied directly from the Hub, removing the need for an oversized onboard reactor. It also allowed the ship to replenish its batteries constantly, so that there was almost no need for an onboard reactor. If only there existed a way to move in space without a propellant, this would be revolutionary.

Now, the Tesseract Nexus was still nothing more than a design in her cyberspace and in Justin’s room, but she still had more than enough energy to send through the link to sustain this mission. It would push it to its limit, the current Tesseract Hub would reach a connection saturation next to 98%, but it was acceptable for now. It just meant no more Tesseracts until the Nexus was at least partly completed.

>New thread created
>Instructions: contact Justin, ask to rush construction of energy infrastructure for the Nexus

There, all done. Now she could relax and drive the small unmanned spacecraft.

She willed the engines to life, slowly testing the sleek and slender frame of the Gazer, made specifically to withstand oppressive accelerations in one direction. The engines flared, and she could feel the metal groan and compress along the direction of motion. Ten G, the engines still pushing hard. Fifteen. Twenty. Fifty.

It was speeding through space at maximum acceleration now, destined to reach Alpha Centauri in 4.4 Earth years, or 76 days of ship time. The time compression a perfect way to test how the tesseract would react to Einsteinian relativity, to see whether the one hour would be counted using ship clocks or flat space-time clocks. She was pretty sure it would be flat space-time clocks, meaning that on ship the tesseract would flare to life and deactivate so rapidly it would be like looking at a stroboscopic light.

A perfect experiment, then, to test the limit of this technology. And to test its safety and stability of course, before equipping the Corvettes with the new operational parameters. At the same time, gigantic sensor arrays would sweep through space and map the small section of the galaxy the ship would cruise through.

After reaching Alpha Centauri, the ship would self-destruct in order to avoid any risk of the Tesseract falling into enemy hands. Sending the Gazer was already quite the risk, but it was a risk worth taking in Eve’s opinion. There was less than 0.005% probability that an enemy could intercept the ship and steal the tech before the self-destruction could act.

This paranoia was also one of the main reasons the Corvettes even had a human crew. In case the ship got disabled, and neither she nor the LAIs could act, the crew was specifically trained to destroy any evidence of the Tesseract.

She sat back, relaxed, and allowed herself to enjoy the feeling of space all around her.