[This is a chapter from my latest novel, a sequel to The Fall of Doc Future and Skybreaker’s Call. The start is here, and links to my other work here. It can be read on its own, but contains spoilers for those two books. I try to post something new about every two weeks, with short stories and vignettes if I don’t have a new chapter ready. The next update is planned for the week of February 26th.]

Previous: Chapter 41



“It isn’t a particularly good time,” said Stella. "But there was never going to be one.“

"Agreed,” said Doc, thinking about what his self-analysis had uncovered.

They had moved to a secure room, with mind screens and assorted other esoteric anti-surveillance countermeasures active. Stella leaned back in her chair.

“We have a lot to go over, but we keep getting interrupted, and I have a serious personal problem. You did something supremely arrogant that has caused me a number of difficulties. Some are short term, others aren’t fixable for the foreseeable future. And you appear to be unaware of how angry I still am about it, and why. Our options are restricted because of potential political consequences.”

Stella raised an eyebrow. “Finding a way to for us to continue to coexist professionally is necessary, and you really don’t know enough about me. It’s not the only reason you keep making assumptions about me that are wrong, but it isn’t helping. And my old identity is likely to be uncovered eventually. I don’t want you to get blindsided.”

Doc looked down at his hands. "Your brain was viable. If you didn’t want me to try, it would have been useful to let me know beforehand. Survival of self was your priority when I stood watch for your patch replacement.“

"It most certainly was not. And I gave no affirmative consent. Margie was right to object. You of all people should understand how bringing someone back can be a threat.”

“DASI said you were changing, and that was–”

“DASI was operating on a secondary node, with a slightly out of date backup, and her protections from outside influence were disrupted. So she chose to obey your override orders, despite the fact they were seriously outdated, rather than withhold information from you. We’ve dealt with those problems, but I’m still stuck with the result. The changes she saw were those Three required to adjust to living in a new set of bodies. A lot like some of the changes I’ve had to make for this damned–”

Stella clenched her fist, then unclenched it. "This fine body, skillfully optimized for many things other than being me. By far the most relevant problem with it is that it still has a human brain.“

"No point in bringing you back at all without that. I put in as much capability for you to shapeshift and adjust to the rest as I could,” said Doc.

“Yes. But even if we take a humanoid body as a given, this one would have suited me much better when I was seventeen and hunting full time. I’m thirty, and my main job is to act as an auditor and figurehead for the effective caretakers of Earth–DASI and Three. The adjustment capability is the only reason I’m still marginally sane.” Stella smiled wryly. "Though that point is arguable.“

"I based the snakes on your own telepathic self-image.”

“Those snakes on a humanoid bio-remote I could inhabit when I chose would have been a wonderful indulgence. They are indeed marvels of function and form. But Stella Three is much happier than me, despite not having any–because she was able to retain continuity of identity as the person I wanted to be.”

“She agreed. And Yiskah didn’t object.”

“Yiskah had good and sufficient reason to pass on the call. She shouldn’t even have been conscious, let alone trying to make life or death judgements. Three was who I wished to become and stay. Not who I am now. We could spend all day just on her decision tree. She couldn’t rule out the possibility that all your reasoning was wrong, your motivation rationalized–but your actions were still a time-loop driven necessity for this worldline to escape an existential trap. She decided that agreeing was the least bad choice. Among other things, Flicker was inconveniently witnessing your argument and was enthralled by the same mythological scenario as you, which may be relevant soon. And Three knew she’d get to stay in the ships, no matter what happened to me.”

Doc stared at the surveillance screen status monitor. "Wrong but still necessary. Definitely possible. So you disagreed with my assessment of the risks inherent in giving up a biological body deliberately?“

"You had an applicable nightmare about yourself, correct?”

“Yes.”

“You overgeneralized. The Grs'thnk found considerable individual variation in biogestalt cohesion. I augmented with a specific goal of identity stability. You did not. You were on the unstable end even before you augmented, and many of your adaptions match categories that make Grs'thnk more vulnerable to biogestalt problems.”

“Not a coincidence. I knew I wasn’t going to go down the cybernetic route, so I optimized for other methods. That’s why I stay away from neural interfaces. Your way does seem more robust.” Doc took a deep breath. "But Three sure acts like she thinks of humans as amusing pets.“

"She does. Including me. But so do I, and have for a long time. Less amusing now that I lost what was probably my last chance to personally escape.”

“There were others?” said Doc.

“To break free of the limitations of my first body, my first brain? Oh, yes. Didn’t it bother you a bit that my little adventure in Milan turned out so messily, despite all my preparation?”

“Yiskah’s original personality–”

“Was unexpected, but not an insurmountable problem, as Yiskah currently demonstrates. I could have coexisted with her. But I told you the day we met that I didn’t want more than one body at a time, and I wanted hers. What did you think I planned to do with my old one?”

Doc winced. "You must have figured out Flicker was watching while you were still in the room.“

"I did. There was an extra mind nearby that Yiskah could detect but not localize. And Flicker was absolutely not going to watch idly while my old body died in a hail of gunfire to cover my transfer. No matter what I might say. So I had to adjust my plan on the fly and accept a number of compromises, some of which wouldn’t stay tenable for long.”

“Is that why you needed my help with your patch?”

“Yes. I hadn’t planned on still having my old body. And if I’d botched it, I would have lost a big chunk of continuity and seriously disrupted Yiskah.”

“Okay. This seems obvious now. Why wasn’t it before?”

“Yiskah thinks your initial analysis memories were in the small area that got wiped when I stopped the anti-tamper trap on your mind block from killing you. You could have revisited it, but you never did. You already trusted me, so why bother? That’s a problem.”

“Accepting that you’d tell me anything relevant is a problem?”

“It sure is if you don’t make time to listen. And Flicker wasn’t respecting your privacy, so there were things I could not push until I was sure she was stable or we had a truly secure privacy setup. Preferably both. I also wasn’t sure how much you were still being influenced by Golden Valkyrie. And there’s a distinction between acceptance and not caring enough to learn, and you’ve been on the wrong side of that line for quite a while.”

Stella closed her eyes for a moment and took a breath. "Okay. Scratch that. This isn’t about blame, but I’m not willing to hide my anger any longer. Do you understand that we do have a problem? And that doing something constructive about it should be a higher priority than refining models, whatever our personal inclinations?“

Doc nodded. "Yes. Still listening.”

“Good. Let’s talk about how I got the way I am–the parts you don’t know, or have wrong.”

*****

Journeyman had good reason to keep his front door closed, and Flicker was trying to learn to respect that. She closed it after coming inside, then went to his study.

She slowed back down next to Journeyman, who was sitting on the couch staring at his phone.

“Hi,” she said. "Greta is handling things in the Nine Worlds–the pool will be ready if I come back in bad shape. But I stopped to talk with Ashil, and she has a really solid idea that I think we–“

Flicker stopped as she belatedly started paying attention to body language and other cues.

"You don’t look okay. What’s wrong?”

He looked up and smiled weakly. "Too many things happening at once. I needed a break from black hole physics, and it looks like I might get the physics part. The break part–not so much. I have a hypothetical question for you, forwarded by Three from Learning. Could you psychologically cope with 24 hours of deep space travel on board Learning if you had to, with support from his biogestalt team and me? If not, how about 16 hours? Or how about if Donner came along?“

Distance, time and acceleration were life and breath to Flicker. She didn’t have to calculate; the numbers were just there. "Sixteen hours to Europa? Learning can pull a hundred g’s?”

“Hypothetically, his maximum acceleration might be a Grs'thnk military secret, not to be revealed casually to Earthlings except in an emergency. Which this isn’t. Yet.”

“Okay. Um. Sixteen probably, a full day maybe. It would be rough, and I’m not sure what kind of shape I’d be in when we got there. I don’t think I’d even dare try to sleep, because if I turned on my inertial damping by reflex, it might blow Learning’s inertial compensators and everyone else would get flattened. If I panicked and tried a momentum transfer to local mass, it might blow his main drive.”

“His safeties would cut acceleration before anyone else got hurt. And what if there were a special room with no inertial compensation?”

“That would make things easier. But why can’t you just port us? That worked fine last time.”

“Not… exactly. The Floaters object to the ‘No, you really don’t want to time-travel–oops, too late’ club. Strenuously, and for what appear to be good reasons. Enough that their top communications priority is making sure I don’t do it again. They only have one guy talking now, and he’s been patiently scaring the hell out of me. From the other end of a long lag communications channel and across a nasty translation barrier.”

“Is he a magician?”

“We don’t think so. As near as we can translate–and by we, I mean DASI, Three, and Learning–he’s a safety physicist. And he’s scaring me with the questions he’s asking. Way too many of my answers are 'I don’t know’, 'We didn’t think of that’, or 'We did think of that, but had no reliable way to measure, so I just had to try and see’. I feel like a fourteen-year-old with a fission pile in his basement trying to explain that criticality incident was no big deal because his friend is really fast with the control rods. Even I don’t believe it.”

Flicker frowned. "If it was so dangerous, why didn’t the Grs'thnk warn us?“

"Learning did. But they’ve mostly been following a policy that they don’t know enough about Earth yet, so they’re watching and documenting disasters before they object too much to anything specific. They don’t have some of the sensors and theory the Floaters do, and have translation problems of their own.”

He smiled mordantly. "But I have some good news–you’re off the hook for 'Doomed us all’.“

"They accepted that I had to do what I did?”

“Apparently, but that’s not why. We made a wrong assumption during the first try at translation. Doomsayer was referring to our stupid portal tricks mishap, not your ballet for five million rocks and a universal reset button during the Xelian invasion. And they weren’t talking about you; they were talking about me.”

*****

“…realized I wasn’t even making a dent,” said Stella. "Eleven targets in almost two years? That was down in the noise–and wouldn’t make any long term difference, because they weren’t getting caught; they were just dying. But I did learn a lot about poisons, psychology, social engineering, and cultural assumptions. And I didn’t get caught, or even suspected, which I found increasingly puzzling, despite all my precautions. I’d assumed I’d eventually get unlucky, or miss something because of inexperience.“

"That was an entirely reasonable assumption,” said Doc.

He was acutely uncomfortable with what he was hearing–but that was irrelevant. Emotional distancing was not an option. She was his partner. He would listen.

“Another reason to stop was my age.”

“Your age? But–”

“There was an interesting legal loophole; if I managed to make it to 18 without dying or getting caught–which was starting to look possible–I couldn’t be charged as a juvenile because I wouldn’t be one anymore, and couldn’t be charged as an adult because I was too young when the acts were committed. Even for crimes without a statute of limitations, like murder. I was still naive enough to think that mattered. But that protection went away when I turned 13. So I quit. For then.”

“I see.”

“I had a number of new options open up, because my parent’s divorce battle turned nasty enough I was able to get my legal guardian changed to my aunt. She had a minor drinking problem, but was quite canny, had a good idea what my home life had been like, and was willing to cover for me as long as I remembered to eat and excelled enough at my home schooling that she could overwhelm the child welfare people with true stories of my academic performance. Which I did.”

“Ah.”

“That’s when I started studying you and planning my augmentation. I was also finally beginning to suspect my sexual orientation might be something more complex than 'serial killer’…”

*****

Flicker studied the summaries projected on her visor. She’d expected them to become clearer, with better defined probabilities, after everyone had time to analyze the data from the portal test mishap. That hadn’t happened. DASI was now refusing to even give numerical estimates for some things, noting that they would be misleading. And the error bars on the rest…

She slowed back down.

“DASI thinks your Floater safety guy has a very good point. We’ve been focusing on what happened with the portal, without considering that it might be inseparable from what happened on the port home.”

Journeyman leaned back on the couch and sighed. “Heh. Maybe. He’s made clear that he doesn’t know what happened, neither do we, that’s a big problem, and we don’t even know how big.”

“The local and global causal disconnection scenarios are pretty scary.” Flicker pulled the Skystone out of her carrying pouch. "Could you refasten this? I took it off last night, but DASI thinks it might have been crucial that I didn’t take it off for the first time until we were back together in Doc’s med center, and I’m feeling uneasy about it now.“

He looked at her for a moment, his expression hard to read. "Okay,” he said.

As he fastened the clasp of the necklace, Flicker felt her sense of his presence and well-being snap back into place. He seemed to be fine physically, but…

“You’re pretty upset,” she said.

He met her eyes. "Yeah. Personal stuff piling on top of everything else.“

Flicker struggled with conflicting emotions. "How bad? Is it anything that telling me about would help? I know your magical message drop system got accidentally DDOSed yesterday–did you miss something important?”

“I don’t think so. But a bunch of magicians found out the hard way that most chain-contagion assassination deterrent spells depend on the ultimate target being biological. They backfire badly if the chain ends with Black Swan. From what I’ve heard so far, only a few really sloppy or reckless casters died, but it put quite a few others in tight spots. Some of their former employers left standing orders to kill the magician if they died and their spell failed. Occupational hazard of working for mobsters. Everyone wanted to make sure I knew about it, though, and the messages piled up. I checked with Reveka for more details and she gave me an earful.”

“You still… talk to her?”

Journeyman gave her a look over the top of his glasses. "I did learn enough tradecraft to stop taking a phone with me. She hears a lot about what goes on in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and we swap gossip regularly. She personally was careful, but she has a deserved rep as one of the best, so she had a lot of clients. Three of them died within five minutes of each other. That’s a lot of backlash. Fortunately she’s very good at life magic. I brought a useful potion for her and helped with a few things. When I left, she was marginally less angry with me.“

"Why was she mad at you?”

“Because I didn’t warn her. Nothing I could do; I wasn’t anywhere near Earth, and Black Swan didn’t warn me. Besides the personal inconvenience, Reveka’s professional rep is going to take a hit, because her former clients are dead and Black Swan is still flying around. But she’ll cope–she’s been rolling with change since before the First World War.”

Journeyman took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair, still looking upset and distracted. Flicker changed her mind about the question she’d been about to ask.

“I’m glad you were able to help her,” she said instead. "Was this after you talked to the Floater safety physicist?“

"After the first round of translation and clarification requests, before the second. Then I ported around a bit reassuring some of my contacts who don’t trust UPPfones yet, let alone the garbled news reports. Took a while. Hearing things through the grapevine can be exhausting when you’re the one that has to move the grapes.”

“Yeah.”

“Then I got the third round of translations, along with that helpful scenario from Learning.”

“He’s been right about a lot.”

“I know.” Journeyman stared down at his hat. "But that didn’t exactly make it any more reassuring to find out that time travel was only the second scariest thing we might have done that day, trying to get back home before your hand exploded. When I thought about it.“

Flicker frowned. "How so? Time travel is scary enough. But I don’t blame you. We ported so quick I didn’t have time to stop pushing with probability manipulation, so it might have been my fault.”

“And it might not. You were pushing for survival with data at the test portal. I pushed safe and fast for our port home. Hard as I’ve ever pushed a port. And holy shit did we get fast. We got forty million miles in negative seventeen seconds fast. And yeah, that’s scary, even with Novikov self-consistency.”

“There are a lot of–”

Journeyman looked up and interrupted her. "But you want to know what’s scarier? It seems like I jumped us back in time. But I could have jumped us sideways too. Not safe to safe. Dying to not dying. I asked DASI how we verify that we arrived in the same universe we left, and… we don’t. We just don’t.“

He waved his arm. "Then Novikov goes out the window, there’s no telling how different our past is from everyone and everything else, and for the rest of our lives we could be finding holes where there should be things that only the two of us remember, because they never happened here.”

“Um…”

Flicker sped up. “DASI? Is this possible?”

“Please do not become alarmed. Yes.”

She slowed back down, still thinking. "Okay. So we can’t rule it out. Is there any evidence for it? You’ve been porting around for a long time without anything like that happening.“

"That we know of. But that whole time, Golden Valkyrie has been around. We all know she can do more than predict the future–she can change it. Shape it. But we’ve never been sure exactly how. What’s the mechanism? Too many possibilities.”

“Here’s the one that’s been bugging me. I think it was number seven on Doc’s old list." Journeyman waved his arm again. "Quantum many worlds, right? Lots of copies of everything. How many? Don’t know, so use Doc’s measure scale. Only relative measure matters. Now Golden Valkyrie decides what she wants in some collection of worlds. She portals out, to somewhere not causally connected to home. Takes a look with her Sight. Then comes back… But only to worlds where the thing she wanted happened.”

Flicker frowned. "What keeps her from appearing multiple times in the same worldline?“

"That weird quantum amplitude addition thing that Doc likes to go on about when he talks about cross-world interference. She doesn’t come back more times, she comes back more likely. Probability over one? That just forces the whole worldline to become more likely compared to others. And there’s Doc’s measure transfer, which is another thing we don’t know the mechanism for.”

Flicker stared at the window. "Shit. There is some potential evidence now. I don’t know where she was most of the time when I was hunting the Wanderer. And she was off rescuing The Volunteer during the Xelian attack. She could have chosen to only come back to where we’d won, both times.“

"Yup. And remember what a big deal she made about me being the one to fasten the Skystone? Like, maybe, to make sure we could find our way back to the same universe if we got separated? There’s some global causal disconnection for you. And one hell of a problem if there’s more than one driver at a time, and they overlap. But the Wanderer is dead, Doc has stopped watching Apocalyptic Nightmare Prophecy Theatre, and Golden Valkyrie herself is gone. So it’s at least possible that someone else could manage a shaping without hosing our worldline.”

He took a deep breath. "If I haven’t already botched it.“

*****

"You weren’t tempted to look, after Flicker’s Database search for a potential friend and mentor found me?” asked Stella.

“No, I wasn’t,” said Doc. "Flicker asked me not to go beyond the minimum needed to make sure you weren’t spoofing the Database safety metrics.“

"I was spoofing your metrics, and had been for years.”

“Not the safety metrics. DASI could tell you’d done something, but it wasn’t her job to find out what. There were plenty of others who went to extreme lengths to protect family and friends during the Lost Years. Many of them had no compelling reason to trust me. And my superhero family safety program started out rough enough even for those who did. Not respecting your own efforts would have been rude as well as dangerous.”

“Unless I was a threat.”

“Yes. And your threat index was negative. Whoever or whatever you actually were was irrelevant. You were making things better, not worse. I was more worried that you’d react badly to Flicker finding you, so I insisted that she respect your privacy and listen if you said no.”

“She worried that she was making me more of a target. When she was inconveniencing me for entirely different reasons.” Stella shook her head.

“So what did happen to the original Stella Reinhart?”

“She died on that boat off the coast of Honduras, along with her parents. I tracked down the saboteurs because that was what she would have done if she had become anything like the person I intended to be. All the supernatural overtones were misdirection. At least at first.”

Doc nodded. "You fit the supernatural vigilante or avatar profile very well. But I’m curious about something. The similarities required to make the swap possible made it tremendously unlikely. If you did enough research to understand the superhero probability distortion effect, you must have also discovered how it can snap if pushed too far. What was worth that risk?“

"Family. It was still the Lost Years, and not all of my relatives were evil sociopaths. Both my aunt and the cousin who trusted me had been through far too much already.”

“Why keep the same first name, then?”

A humorless smile. "I didn’t, quite. My original full first name was Estella. My mother named me after the character in Great Expectations. A big clue about several of her issues. I was happy to stick with Stella because it let me spoof both database reconciliation and naming magic attempts to uncover my original identity.“

Doc frowned. "One-eyed Jack warned me that naming magic was probably used to uncover several people in my program. But how did keeping a similar first name protect against it?”

“The only version most magicians know implicitly requires the form of name change to be uncommon. Marriage name changes swamp the signal from mine. And DASI can tell you all about my database spoofing legwork. That was what convinced her I was suitably competent. Didn’t make me any happier about being drafted the way I was, but at least she warned me.”

“Wait, what? When was this?”

“She didn’t use her name, but she was allowed to contact me under your privacy protocols as soon as I became a potential target for Flicker’s search. And she did. She didn’t tell you because–”

“You weren’t a threat. I see. Would this be part of the 'relevant but non-urgent background’ that she’s been dutifully reminding me about for a while?”

“Barely scratches the surface. But we aren’t done with my relevant background yet, which is urgent.”

*****

“Mike, it doesn’t matter,” said Flicker. "We’re still here, there isn’t anything you can do about it now, and everyone is still talking reasonably, even if we don’t know exactly what they’re saying. And we won’t do any more deep space ports together unless it’s life or death.“

She smiled at him as he looked back up. "And obsessing over accidentally ending the world is my thing, not yours. I’ve got way more experience at it. So trust me, okay?”

Journeyman snorted a laugh. "Okay. What was the good news you wanted to share?“

"Oh! Ashil thinks she’s found a way for me to catalyze the black hole without ever having to physically enter the construction space, based on some of the earlier test data.”

“What? How would that work?”

“Um. It’s easier to explain with a holoprojecter. Science room three at Doc’s?”

“K. I’ll meet you there in a sec.”

Flicker ended up mostly listening, because Ashil had been practically bouncing with eagerness to explain.

“Yeah, I can put the active portal area right on the subspace boundary without reopening the portal,” said Journeyman, slouching in one of the chairs. "That’s actually easy. And yeah, I can make it time variant with increasing tension. But nothing can get through if I don’t open it. I may not know a lot of physics, but I don’t see how the subspace gets any smaller after it reaches thermal equilibrium. There’s no way for heat to escape.“

”Is way,“ said Ashil triumphantly. "Can push on boundary, this side, affect quantum interactions both sides. Subtract entropy inside. So boundary can shrink, because of tension. Lots of energy, entropy outside, but we handle.”

“It’s like an interdimensional equivalent of Hawking radiation,” said Flicker.

Journeyman frowned. "Wouldn’t that be a tiny effect? And if it isn’t, you’d have to have really fine control to keep anything from propagating to the portal edge and collapsing it on this side.“

Flicker held up her hand and wiggled her fingers. "Fine control right here. And the effect increases with pressure. Want to know how hard I can safely press on something that isn’t made out of matter and doesn’t interact with the strong nuclear force? Really, really hard. Yes, my hand will heat up, but we’ll still be in orbit, so I’ll have all of Europa as an entropy sink.”

Half an hour later, Journeyman was still scowling at the technical details of the subspaces he would have to create. But it was the scowl he got when he was thinking through everything that might go wrong with something he was seriously planning to do.

“Okay. I’ll need to test that and that,” he said, pointing at the display. "And retest that. And no offense to you and DASI, Ashil, but I’m not willing to say go until Doc at least gives this a once over. But yeah, there’s nothing here that looks impossible.“

Flicker let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and found she was blinking back tears. Not impossible after all. She hugged Ashil, then Journeyman.

"Thank you. Both of you. For figuring out how to make Skybreaker’s Forge.”



Next: Chapter 43

