Noumenon Infinity

Found that programmer you talked about—Kaeden. We worked in some upgrades I think you’ll like.

Good luck. See you soon.

Yours lovingly,

Swara

Vanhi turned the sundial over in her palm. The back wasn’t inscribed, but it didn’t have to be. It was made of a polished, brassy silver-gold metal she couldn’t identify, even after finding the jeweler’s stamp. It carried some weight, but not too much. The hour lines were labeled in Roman numerals.

She hurried to swipe the old phone from where it sat in a place of honor on her bookshelf. She didn’t need it aboard the ships—everyone’s chip implants were integrated into the comms system—but they’d have to pry her Intelligent Personal Assistant out of her cold, dead hands.

“Wake up, want to show you something. Look at what Swara gave me.” She flashed the sundial, then held up the note for C to scan.

“She’s not wrong, I am antiquated,” it agreed.

“But that’s why I love you,” she said, strapping the sundial onto her left wrist. “Hope I don’t jab anyone with the gnomon. Can’t tell if it would bend or skewer.”

“The stamp indicates it is a Ti-Au alloy, typically used for medical implants. It would likely puncture.”

“Odd thing to make a bracelet out of.”

“Agreed. You should probably assess its electrical properties before wearing it during experiment engineering.”

The strap pulled snug. The brown leather was soft on the inside of her wrist. A little green light lit up on the side of the dial. “That’s … interesting.”

“I’m detecting a software compatible device within range,” C said. “I believe the sundial can support my applications.”

“What? No way.” Now she understood the part about talking with Jamal. Swara always did give the best gifts.

“Shall I upload myself to the new device?”

“Yes please. I need to head to Breath for my shift, but let me know when the download is complete, okay?”

“Will do. Oh, and Vanhi?”

“Yeah?”

“The convoy communications team sent me another message from Dr. Kaufman. Would you like to hear it before you go?”

She’d asked comms not to contact her by implant with his drivel. Instead it all got shuffled over to C. “Nope. You know what to do with it.”

“Message number eighty-seven from Doctor McKenzie Kaufman—Archived.”

Vanhi was the first on the shift shuttle. She buckled up as other workers poured into the craft behind her, pulling the heavy harness straps over her shoulders one at a time. Most of the new recruits were dressed in slacks and button-downs, which would be hidden under lab coats and bunny suits once on the experiment ship. Vanhi hadn’t changed out of her jeans and loose-fitting kurta.

A thin, black-skinned man with yellow around the edges of his eyes slid into the seat next to her.

“Gabriel! No one told me you’d come aboard. Good to see you.” She held out her hand—the shoulder straps keeping her awkwardly pinned.

They hadn’t seen each other since he’d been awarded his Ph.D., and she’d gotten no direct word on whether or not he’d accepted her invitation for a stint aboard the convoy.

He shook her hand, but with a hesitancy. “Good to see you as well.”

She felt the corners of her mouth twitch, her smile slip, and she feared her expression was giving everything away, laying all her guilt bare. He seemed reluctant to talk to her. Did he know something? No, no, that couldn’t be it. Perhaps he suspected, though. Gabriel had seen Kaufman grease enough palms in his day that he likely believed—and not unrightly—that Vanhi had caved to a number of their advisor’s ethical mishandlings. Their faces were plastered all over, after all—always the two of them, together.

She felt sick and turned away.

Of the twenty people crammed into the shuttle, fifteen of them were new faces. Well—somewhat new.

She noticed Chen Kexin, whose uniform indicated she was a new Breath security guard. Vanhi had seen her face before—seen several of her faces before, actually.

While none of the convoys’ crews were entirely identical, most of them shared a core of at least a thousand clones who were present on all of the original twelve missions. People whose skillsets and fitness for service had been seen as ubiquitously advantageous. Those whose contributions to things like food processing or practical medicine would not be affected by the size of the crew, purpose of their mission, or growth-cycle patterns.

After all, why go through the hassle of identifying twelve suitable individuals to clone when it was far simpler to clone one qualified person twelve times?

Kexin was one of those individuals. And this particular clone had been displaced by the sudden cancelation of Convoy Twelve’s original mission. Vanhi felt a dagger of guilt slash across her side as she imagined the devastation Kexin and her contemporaries must have gone through. What would it be like to have someone tell you that the very reason for your existence—something you’d been training for your entire life—had been canceled?

At least they were all offered retraining and positions here, Vanhi thought, though it did little to assuage her regret. Sure, some had jumped at the chance, but others had vehemently rejected the offer, choosing to make their own way in the world instead. Because Convoy Twelve’s crew rotated, there were fewer than fifty clones aboard at any given time.

Vanhi didn’t know what job Kexin had originally been intended to perform, but she suspected it wasn’t security.

She’s been repurposed, too.

Kexin, like the other new crew aboard, had spent the past month in final training, and today would be their first shot at the real thing.

The seat on Vanhi’s right was occupied by a man with a deep brown tan. She glanced at his badge, trying to discern what position he’d come to fill.

Noticing her side-eyeing him, he made small talk when their glances met. “I like your, uh—” He pointed at the sundial. “What is that?”

She smiled secretly to herself. “A gag gift.”

“It’s nice.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m Stone—Stone Mendez Perez.”

“Vanhi Kapoor.”

“I know,” he said sheepishly. Vanhi wasn’t surprised at his admission or shyness—it wasn’t like the Planet United Mission heads weren’t paraded across the news every other month. It had taken some time to come to grips with her newfound celebrity, and luckily she was able to escape a lot of the global fame out here in space. Still, there was something about Stone’s manner that wasn’t simply “star shock,” but she couldn’t quite place it.

“I, uh, saw your ship dedication speech on the Moon,” Stone continued. “It’s why I applied for the remote-piloting job.”

Her stomach shriveled. “That’s—that’s great,” she said, trying to sound chipper, sure the words rang as hollow as they felt. It’d been years, and still the memory of that day was sour in her mind. “Where, uh, where are you from?”

“Originally? Puerto Rico.”

“How was the trip from Earth?”

He looked up at the shuttle ceiling and smiled a little.

“First extended space stay?” she asked knowingly.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Used to think I was hard to impress. Then I saw Jupiter.”

She smiled as the lighting shifted in the docking bay, yellow warning beacons flashing as the hangar decompressed.

When the exterior doors opened, three shuttles gently lifted away, carrying their passengers out into the dead silence of space.

The three convoy ships hung like fat insects hovering over a bottomless pit. Starlight dimly reflected off the portions of hull not directly illuminated by windows or exterior safety lamps. Sol was a cool pinprick in the distance, unobscured.

The housing ship, Pulse, was the most balloon-like of the ships, almost like a dirigible, save for the twinkle-light pattern of windows forming a multitude of great lines down its sides. It had been designed to hold tens of thousands of people, but less than fifteen hundred—consisting of crew and crew families—now called it home. Most of the interior rooms had been repurposed as command centers and supply storage.

Breath was the second ship, a long, thin bar, with dumbbell-like protuberances on either end. The center section was lined with giant windows for directly observing the experiment pods, and antennae and sensor towers stuck out of it in a haphazard-looking fashion. One dumbbell end contained the docking bay, the other was the experiment launch point.

The final ship, Life, was more of a warehouse than anything, and had a boxy shipping container quality. Fitting, as it stored the components for the experimental devices, the pod shells, and the mini-SD drives. “Mini-drives” was a misnomer to challenge all misnomers. While the SD drives that powered the convoy ships were the size of small office buildings, these were still the size of a studio apartment, the pods themselves matching single-family homes for square footage.

As the shuttle approached Breath’s docking platform, Vanhi caught sight of the resupply ship out of the corner of one window. It had originally been intended as the garden ship for Convoy Twelve, now, too, repurposed. It slid slowly away, putting enough distance between itself and the convoy to turn on its own SD drive for the brief jaunt back to Earth.

Bye, Swara. Safe journey.

She suppressed an impulse to wave at the ship, not wanting to seem silly in front of the new recruits.

Docking went smoothly, as did badge-check and equipment dispersal.

While the new hires lingered to unload their gear, Vanhi beelined for the breakroom, where she prepared a cup of oolong. Taking a deep breath, she savored a calm moment before the workday began.

The new crew members would be finding their stations in the mission control room now, settling in. Everything felt fresh, hopeful.

Today, she told herself, today we’ll sink a pod into a new SD.

After preparing herself a second cup, she hurried to the mission control room, angling for her station in front of the curved windows, eager to stare out into their testing ground for a moment before beginning.

One hundred and fifty-eight crew members worked mission control, either in the official control room, or in backrooms for supplementary support. The primary mission control room was also known as the Experiment Observations Lounge, the EOL, and it was stuffed to the brim with staffers working side by side at crowded console banks spanning across seven terraced platforms. The room was curved, much like an amphitheater, and the platforms provided a stadium-like view of the outer windows.

The ship’s long inner hall also sported a bay of tall windows, allowing special visitors to watch as a launch commenced.

The flight director’s platform jutted out from the right side of the room, and gave Vanhi an excellent vantage point for observing her staff and the experiment field. Opposite her station, on the left wall, were several projections of various readouts.

As she took her seat, Vanhi dialed her chip phone into the “loops.” This would let her communicate with any member of mission control directly at any time.

Once everyone was settled, she checked in with her newest crew members, including the shift’s pod attitude determination and control officer—Stone Mendez Perez, the man who’d commented on her sundial. He would control the pod like a drone, directing its flight pattern to the testing ground, then retrieving it if and when it reemerged from an SD.

She also had a new pod flight dynamics officer, thermal operations resources manager, mini-drive artificial intelligence manager, and a handful of others ready to test their grit.

She’d have all of their names committed to memory soon, but for now, she was eager to get to work.

After forty-five minutes of check-ins and verifications, the countdown was ready to begin. They began at T minus ten minutes. The bay doors opened. Everyone focused on their monitors.

“Pod number nine, gravity-repulse thrusters primed. Ready? Three. Two. One. Lift off.”

On her screen, the experiment pod—ovoid and spikey, like metallic dragon fruit (some enterprising younger workers had gone so far as to paint the bodies of the first five pink-and-green as a sort of christening)—glided away from the corrugated floor, sailing out into blackness.

Vanhi’s eyes flickered to the testing ground.

It didn’t look like much, the empty grid of space only a hundred kilometers out. But it was her Bikini Atoll.

She hated that she thought of it that way, that Kaufman had forever tied SD drives and nuclear weapons together in her mind.

But he’d been right about the danger.

So far they’d run eight successful launches, but had only two successful new SD breaches, though preliminary data showed it likely at least three of the others had slipped into the already-verified travel SDs, thrown there when they effectively “bounced” off the subdimensions they were trying to access. Those pods had all been retrievable.

The other three that had failed to breach? Most of their twisted remains were back on Life being disentangled and scrubbed of radioactive elements before they could be studied. One had imploded. Another exploded. The third had slowly, yet systematically, dissolved into a cloud of its base elements.

Thank the stars they’d decided to put off animal testing. Not even bacteria had been allowed aboard.

Each pod contained, besides its drive, an array of sensors and one hundred experiments. The tests looked for new atmospherics, matter state-changes both internally and externally, gravity changes, spontaneous subatomic particle creation, shifting photon behavior, electromagnetic transmission, and a whole host of other differences and data points.

Vanhi had also designed several experiments to carry organics—bacteria, algae, bees, spores, and even dogs. But as with Kaufman’s original SD discovery, they wouldn’t dream of sending anything living until they’d routinely gotten back their inanimate test subjects.

This wasn’t important solely for the safety of the animal subjects, but also for the sanitation of their local star group. If they lost a pod—if it dove and failed to reemerge as directed—it could have been destroyed on the other side … or it could have surfaced someplace and sometime that they’d never think to look. It could drift in regular space and come to land on some rock or another, bringing with it an infection. Contamination.

She was determined to make sure that never happened.

Over at the ADCO station, Stone had his gaze fixed intently on his dash, making sure the flight path was steady and everything fell within mission parameters as he guided the pod to the activation point.

He was experienced—just over forty, a little younger than she was—with a sharp jaw and cupid’s-bow lips, now set firmly in concentration. His shaggy black hair had waves that curled at the ends; it fell into his face as he leaned forward over the joystick, and for a moment Vanhi thought he looked more like a kid playing a video game than a professional remote-pilot.

She noticed herself noticing him and quickly looked away. Now was not the time to be pondering the aesthetics of her new crewmates … no matter how pleasing those aesthetics might be.

With a blush, she refocused on the pod.

It was twenty-five kilometers out now. She checked in with the technicians monitoring the nonpassive experiments. Everything was still a go.

Observation buoys and communications buoys lined the path out to the quadrant where the pod would officially dive. This made it easy to track, easy to watch even as it grew imperceptible from the EOL on Breath.

“Pod in position,” Mendez Perez said after a time on her loop.

“MID AIM, are we ready to cue up the drive?” Vanhi asked.

“Everything looks green.”

“Good. Dive in three, two, one—now!”

From the outside, the beginnings of an SD bubble looked like warped space, with stars reflecting and shifting over a curved surface. The lensing engulfed the pod, made it look like a shimmer on a pond, until the spot went black, then disappeared altogether.

On all cameras, the pod had vanished.

“Dive appears successful,” Vanhi announced. She clapped her hands and cheers went up, as they had thus far after every nondestructive run. Hopefully, in a few hours the pod would resurface, giving them vital information about a brandnew SD.

The trajectory officer gave Mendez Perez a hearty slap on the back. “Nice going, ace,” Vanhi called to him, tossing a cheeky thumbs-up.

He gave her a shy, endearing smile back.

JULY 6, 2127 CE

By the thirty-third launch, running the pods started to feel routine. Six had failed to dive, four more had blown their lids, and the majority had bounced into the normal travel SDs. But seven had gone where no one had gone before. The data from those dives was being processed around the clock. And still, Vanhi hoped for more.

Today—on what would have been a lazy Sunday back in Arizona, but was a full-on work day here in the glamorous world of convoy living—Vanhi went to her station with an extra spring in her step.

Mendez Perez—Stone, as he insisted she call him—had offered riveting breakfast conversation. The kind that got her mental wheels turning, and her cheeks flushed with the pumping of creative blood.

The whole table had listened in on their banter, and Vanhi hadn’t been self-conscious about it in the least. Stone’s friends Justice Jax and Eric Price had both wiggled their eyebrows at each other. And afterward, Gabriel had given Vanhi a nudge as they went to drop off their trays at the cleaning station.

“It’s not like that,” she’d insisted.

“Like what?” he asked, feigning perfect innocence.

“I would like to know as well,” said C from the sundial, sounding an awful lot like a child asking how babies were made.

She wasn’t about to let Gabriel rile her, so she’d given him a shake of her head and a friendly smile, and happily hopped on the awaiting shuttle.

Stone hadn’t been far behind. He took up the vacant seat beside her without a word about it, as though it were perfectly natural.

She wanted to hold on to this feeling forever. This was what space travel was all about. Good people, good ideas, experimentation, wonder, discovery. This was what she’d been fighting for, what she’d compromised for. If she could just keep this feeling close, maybe she could use it to scare away the bad days—the times when guilt came back and Kaufman haunted her dreams.

In the EOL, everyone took their positions.

“Give me greens,” she said on each loop. “MID AIM?”

“Go,” said Mini-Drive AI Manager, Pablo de Valdivia.

“CHEM EX?”

“Go,” said Soraya Ebadi, who was in charge of monitoring the chemistry experiments.

“COM EX?”

“Go,” said Anju Gautam, who managed communications.

She ran her checks all the way down the line. Everything was good.

“ADCO?” she asked last.

“Go,” said Stone.

“Then let’s do this.”

A few minutes later, the dragon fruit of a craft hovered in front of the windows momentarily before Stone sent it on its way.

The time ticked by as it always did, dragging out while they waited for the pod to achieve a safe distance. Vanhi watched over the team, making sure everyone looked as they should: relaxed, focused.

“Be advised,” de Valdivia said. “I have telemetry readings in the red …” His finger tracked a line on one screen. It jumped where it should have been steady.

“Copy. Where is that instrumentation located? Can you patch me the feed?” Vanhi asked.

“It’s the rear left quadrant,” he said. “Vibrations, there’re—something’s on. Something’s using power, but I can’t—”

“SD MEC, are you reading the same vibrations?” she asked. De Valdivia’s readout popped onto her leftmost screen. There was a distinct tremor, yes, but the AI wasn’t pinpointing its location. She glanced at the visual feeds. Nothing looked amiss on the test area cameras. But the pod was still little more than a shining dot on most of them. She flipped to the flight path monitor.

“Starting to get a lean,” said Stone. “Shouldn’t have to course correct this much.”

“Copy. Can anybody tell me where the aberrant energy is centered?” Vanhi asked, bringing up the real-time system log.

“It’s pulling starboard,” Stone said.

“It’s the drive itself,” said de Valdivia. “It’s got to be a malfunction in the AI quantum-reaction regulation. It looks like a compensation, but the main power hasn’t been cued, so there’s nothing to compensate for.”

“Can we reboot the AI?”

“Already initiating shutdown.”

The pod—a blip on her screen—was engulfed in white light.

Everyone gasped.

No, no, no. Damn it. “Did we lose it?” She held her breath, frantically hitting refresh on all of her feeds. “Did we lose it?” she demanded, articulating every syllable.

“No!” It was Stone. “I’m still—it’s fighting me, I can’t—steering’s out, it’s veering back.”

“Talk to me,” Vanhi said, voice even and expression stern while her heart battered itself inside her ribs. Losing a pod wasn’t new. They’d lost plenty, expected to lose the majority of what they had left. But this …

The white light flared out, but what was left in its wake wasn’t debris, or a dormant pod. The probe’s hull glimmered with new life. Around it, some sort of field pulsed, fading from petal-pink to tangerine and back again.

And Stone was right—it was sailing toward the convoy.

“Convoy Control—”

“We’ve alerted Captain Tan. He’s standing by to take evasive action.”

“Copy that. ADCO, TRAJ, any way you can reel it in, get it to stop?”

“It’s not responding,” Stone gritted, pounding the holokeys at his station.

“What happened? What went wrong, MID AIM?”

“I don’t know,” de Valdivia insisted, hands flying over his keyboard, brow furrowed, jaw stiff. “I rebooted. It should have gone dead. Should have—unless … Unless the meters were off, and we weren’t detecting … No … wait, wait …”

He didn’t have to elaborate. Vanhi’s internal monologue started to hammer out two words on repeat: Oh shit. Oh shit.

Oh shit.

The AI wasn’t malfunctioning, it was doing its damned job. It was trying to keep the system from engaging. Somehow the SD drive had started to pull power, to dive, and the AI was trying to hold it back.

But then they’d shut it down …

“Are we getting any readings from Thirty-Three’s external sensors? Talk to me, people, that’s not an SD bubble like I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m getting unusual readings,” called a woman’s voice with a heavy Danish accent—Esmée Jensen, Mechanical Maintenance Officer. “Power surges.”

“Distance between the pod and the convoy is shrinking, sir,” said Stone.

Vanhi had her head down, frantically looking for a way to remotely bar the pod’s path or even destroy it. They could launch number Thirty-Four. ADCO could pilot it on an intercept course, crash the two pods—

“These are similar to the same kind of surge forces found inside SD drives when they’ve hit main sequence,” Esmée called again.

“Copy,” Vanhi gritted out.