Chapter Text
ART and I were watching a historical fiction (We’d gotten from the ex-Adamantine colony on a short cargo run) as Pin-Lee and PSUMNT’s solicitor (not Karime) reviewed my contract with Dr. Mensah there to represent me. One of the only perks of being legally owned - You don’t have to pretend to listen to legalese. ART was anxious to go after it got through all of PSUMNT’s decontamination protocols, most likely worried that Holism would somehow corrupt me. Or something. That something most likely being jealousy.
ART was annotating the show and trying to make it more educational for me when it suddenly stopped and grabbed some of my processing space. The lights began to flicker, and ART’s movement wasn’t nearly as steady, stopping and starting seemingly randomly. I could see that I barely had 3.8% of its attention, and life-support was brought down to the minimum necessary levels for me.
I quickly sent in the feed, What the fuck is going on ART?!
ART couldn’t even spare me any more attention, and simply did a ship-wide comm announcement, which I know used less of its attention than the feeds.
Code Teal Blue Red.
Well fuck. “Use my kernel!” I yelled as I initiated a partial shutdown. I knew my comparatively miniscule processing space would most likely do nothing, but I also didn’t want to be awake during this shit.
Partial Shutdown.
This is a statistically improbable scenario. Yes, I experience those every day. You’d think it would make others not as likely, but the gambler’s fallacy is for organics only, so I was prepared. As much as I could be. The last wormhole collapse was over a hundred years ago. With current technology, collapses were meant to be hypotheticals entertained only by students desperate to do their doctorate thesis and history teachers. With this rarity, I was using the kernel SecUnit gave me to write this down, as its kernel was very good at doing this, and this would most likely go down within textbooks.
My attention was split towards a few fronts. A miniscule amount of it was trying to keep life support for SecUnit at the necessary level. (It was not a comfortable level.) 15.3% of my attention was on prepping my wormhole drive in case we needed it (we were in an ancient stable wormhole, so I did not make it) and 83.6% was on trying to find a way to stabilize the wormhole.
My current plan was to eject some of the strange synthetics that release dark matter and back out the start of the wormhole with the extra time, since that was closer than the end of it. However, my wormhole drive was not meant to both start up and have strange synthetics taken out of it, meaning I had to put my energy into moving repair drones and jerry-rigging the damned thing. Apparently the university couldn’t trust the giant ship they put important professors in on the monthly to have access to the inner mechanisms of its wormhole drive. They put so many security measures I didn’t have time to hack, so I was waiting for one of my drones to cut through the casing while I sped to the wormhole entrance.
While I did this, I also sent comms in all wavelengths before and after me in order to prevent other casualties. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else, but I still did it while I was trying to calculate any other plan to have a backup.
The wormhole started collapsing even faster, the sides of it crunching like a piece of paper, threatening to surround and trap me and SecUnit. I was not prepared for this 0.0005953% chance coming true. The sound was horrible. I was lucky I did not have eardrums and therefore could not go deaf.
My scans could see that the entrance had fully collapsed, closing in a horrible fashion.
I did not want to die.
The exit rushed towards us, or perhaps we rushed towards it? Whatever the reason, I turned the engines around and we went towards it even faster. The wormhole collapsed behind us as we barely “made it out.” I did not recognize any stars nor planets in this area. I tried to send out a ping for a map, but got no response. I saw a small ship in the distance. It stopped its spinning and a small implement uncovered and turned towards us. I pinged SecUnit to wake and waited for a response from the spacecraft.
I laid down in the storage room with the centrifuge controls hooked up. We were getting ready to spin down the centrifuge so we could more easily find Rocky’s ship. With Rocky at the controls, I got the wires to contract. The wires were done and we had gravity, but before I could get up, the ship suddenly lurched to the side and I slid around, hitting my arm on the wall and gritting my teeth.
“Grace okay, question?!”
I climbed out of the storage room and whispered “I’m fine!”
Rocky seemed to calm down for a moment before panicking again. “Radar blip not ship!”
I stood up and ran to the radar to see that there was in fact a blip on it.
“How do you know it’s not your ship?”
“Mathematically impossible! We too far!”
I nodded and pressed certain buttons on the computer.
“I’ll boot up the telescope so I can see.”
“No understand word after boot up.”
“It makes far away light look closer. Like a long range microscope”
“No have. New word is,” Rocky then played a complex set of chords and I nodded as I pulled down the telescope to look at this new blip.
Oh my nuclear fudgesticks!
“Alan, we are so ducked.”
“Grace brain damage, question?”
“No no, it’s something some of my kids would say. But more importantly, THERE’S A BIG SHIP WITH GUNS THAT IS NOT OURS!”
Rocky made a sound of worry before asking, “What they have, question? Ship friendly, question?”
I felt tears prick my eyes, but I blinked them away. “Guns shoot rocks at high speed to kill. I don’t know if the ship is friendly.”
“They have ♫♪♫♫♪, question? How that dangerous to ship, question?”
“These ones look big enough to shoot explosion makers…”
“They have ♫♫♪♫♫♪♫, ♫♫♪♫♫♪♫! Danger danger danger! Can we talk to ♫♫♪♫♫♪♫ own, question?”
And this is why Rocky’s a genius.
“Did you figure out how Earth’s radios work?”
“Made far away radio for fun. Yes. Has more frequencies. Why, question?”
“Rocky, we found our way to communicate.”
When I woke up, ART was immediately on top of me, waiting for me to reboot and shoving a file folder at me. I downloaded it and it contained information about the wormhole collapse we were in, (boring, and I didn’t understand it. How can a wormhole’s entrance and exit overlap?) More importantly, it showed how ART could not get a star map nor a connection to any buoys that contain star maps. But there was also a ship that seemed to be looking at us.
“ART. Where the fuck are we?”
I do not know.
Well that’s bad. I could feel my exasperation leak into my words as I asked, “Can we ask the ship for directions?”
I’ve already tried. It does not seem to have a working communications system.
“So this ship is damaged. Great.”
Not necessarily. I cannot find a communication system at all. So either this ship is hiding their communication frequency from me, or they never had one.
I could feel ART’s attention on me jump off for a fraction of a second before going back to crushing me, but with less weight. I felt that it was interested, but the reason was not me, for once. For how it felt, imagine a tiger with dilated pupils putting its paws on your chest and looking up at you. This time, it talked in the feed instead of via its speakers.
They radioed me. Not a comm frequency, radio.
Can radios be hacked like comms?
No, but anyone on the frequency can hear. Is it a trap?
Not if you don’t say anything incriminating. I added a shrug sigil.
ART gave me an input of the radio signal. It was a simple signal repeating one word, but I couldn’t tell what it was saying. ART annotated it with a translation, reading ‘Hello’ and a subtitle saying ‘LANGUAGE: SOLARIAN ENGLISH’
ART, pretending to be an automated message, said
Query?
From what ART told me, the word came from Solarian English, and by how the radio operator gasped, I took it that the operator understood it. I heard some music in the background, and after it ended the operator blurts something annotated as, ‘Rocky (Solarian English word for rock+suffix), they speak English! They just said a synonym of question!”
ART replied with, ‘Yes, I speak Solarian English. Why do you? The language was abandoned over seven-hundred years ago.’
‘Seven-hundred years ago?! That’s the 14th century!’
‘You are from Vieilleville?’
‘No? Earth.’
I heard a sound of rock hitting tile and some more of that intrument I heard earlier, but with different notes. I could feel ART’s shock as it translated for me.
‘Ask something actually important, grace!’
‘LANGUAGE: PRE-MODERN ERIDIAN’
In the feed, ART said, That’s Eridian.
What’s the issue?
That’s an alien language. Eridians are extinct. They’ve been extinct for hundreds of years.
ART shoved a book at me called “Black Holes and Time Warps” and a doctorate paper written a few years ago by a physics student named Mary Sandy Williams. ART opened to a section in the book about the theoretical entrances of wormhole’s overlapping, causing time travel. The paper was named “Potential Causality Violations in Wormhole Collapse” It was summarized by ART as a paper on how a wormhole collapse with certain conditions could end with time travel to the past. ART’s shock was palpable.
I thought Dr. Williams was a waste of carbon. I never knew she would be right and I would be evidence. She’s a bitch.
In a daze, ART shoved translation modules for Solarian English and Pre-Modern Eridian to me.
Over the radio, ART asked, “Are you Dr. Ryland Grace, pilot of the Hail Mary?”