The Forgotten Planet
Chapter 8 – So Close, and Yet so Far...

“Dammit Poochy!” Adan shouted, tearing my attention away from the snow-crashed screen. The dog was snout-deep in the bag of Starchies. Poochy looked up at the sound of his new master’s voice, then went back to gorging himself on the bag of deep-fried starch.

Adan rushed over and snatched the bag of Starchies away from the dog and proceeded to brush the slobber off the edges with the back of his hand. After that, he sat down in front of the fight and resumed eating from the bag. Poochy wined and received another chip as a reward.

“I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to reward bad behavior,” I said.

He replied, but his mouth was too full for even my ’Seven to translate. Since whatever his reply was didn’t matter in the slightest, I just nodded and let him get back to his fights.

I wasn’t particularly worried about any undue attention from Vance’s people. The two hired guns had almost nothing to go on, and they wouldn’t be hearing about the item through any black-market channels, because we weren’t selling – regardless of what Adan said.

I flipped off the viewing screen we’d been watching and returned my attention to the disc and the turntable. In its prime, I’m sure the printer worked just fine, but now everything came out smelling like burnt plastic. I put the disc in what appeared to be the proper position – the little hole in the middle actually served a purpose – and flipped the analog switch. As the disc began to spin, I took hold of the armature that held the small needle.

“You ready for this Adan?” I asked. I was jittery with excitement, but my brother just shrugged, refusing to peel his eyes from the combatants on his screen.

“Well, here goes nothing...” I said, apparently to myself.

I gently placed the needle into the outermost grove, and the room was instantly flooded his with a wave of noise. The dog started howling and tore out of the room. Adan yelled, “It’s gonna blow!” and scrambled for safety behind the couch.

I could make out human language coming from the disc, but it sounded like the words were being speed-screamed by a kid high on helium. Then I remembered the illustration of a hydrogen atom in its highest and lowest states, and I quickly realized that the diagram was actually meant as a unit of time – specifically the time it took to transition from one state to another. Looking back at the first diagram with a fresh eye, I saw that it was a case of simple binary arithmetic.

Since I could do calculus in my head long before I had my Mercury Seven implant, I figured out the math in-between eye-blinks and set the turntable to 3.6 seconds per rotation. When properly adjusted, the noise slowed and then magically transformed into a song about a man named Johnny B. Good who, “could play the guitar just like ringing a bell.”

Admittedly, I’m a fan of music. I appreciate everything from Jump Blues to Deep House to Ska. This song sat squarely in the Rockabilly subset of Rock. It wasn’t quite my beloved Alternative, which came from the era historian’s dubbed Earth’s information age, I had to admit I liked the tune. It had a beat, and you could dance to it... if you wanted to dance, I suppose. Just the thought of dancing in public makes me sweat, but when no one’s looking... Music from the pre-war eras sell at a premium within certain circles of the upper-class elite, and I decided to keep that fact to myself for the time being. Adan was already in a hurry to unload the disc, and I didn’t feel like giving him any ammunition.

Americana is really the only genre I’ve heard that I can’t stand. It’s Adan’s favorite. It was also my dad’s. There’s probably some not-so-subtle psychology going on there, but dwelling on emotions and feelings isn’t really my thing.

I looked over at Adan, who was just peeking his head over the top of the backrest towards the source of the previously offending sounds.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked in a rhetorical sort of way.

“What? I thought I dropped a Starchie behind the couch,” he said defensively. He got up and tentatively made his way back to his usual perch, while continuing to steal glances back at the archaic music player.

“Whatever, you lunatic,” I answered. Adan is always so brave that it’s actually nice to see him in uncomfortable situations sometimes. Admittedly, brotherhood is complicated. I caught myself bobbing my head along with the music and began to feel the effects of dopamine and epinephrine on my system as my creative juices started flowing.

I never know what’s going to flick my creative switch to on, but once it is on, there’s no stopping what comes next. It’s like I have an overwhelming need to put something special into the universe. Music sometimes puts me in this creative mood, but other times it comes from reading a good book or seeing an elegant solution to a math equation.

“Hey, Adan,” I said. “I think I’m feelin’ it.”

Adan had seen that look in my eye many times, and he rose from the couch once again.

“You better not be,” Adan said in a firm tone. “The last time you were “feeling it,” he said, making the air quotes with his fingers, “I had to replace half the flat’s battery wall and all the circuits in the north side of building. The neighbors weren’t happy.”

The building was sectioned into fourths, and we were all separated from each other by poorly insulated walls. Granted, my experiments made some racket on occasion, but my creative use of the city’s electrical grid that gave everyone in the building free utilities more than made up for minor inconveniences like temporary power outages. Probably. Regardless, I ignored Adan’s concerns as I made my way over and powered up Betty. She came to life with a clicking rattle.

Betty structurally is three meters of processors, wires and mechanical gizmos, mostly housed in the frame of a battered and dinged-up T-11 intercontinental ballistic missile. She floated in a gently wavering magnetic field a meter off the floor and separated my lab from Adan’s workshop. Three fabricated arms had been welded by Adan to the missile’s frame at equally spaced intervals, and the tips of the arms ended in modified beam emitters. Those emitters could be angled so the three beams would intersect at a programmable distance in front of the ship that, at present, we did not own. Currently, they just pointed to an empty spot near the north wall.

Betty’s a thing of beauty, and as far as I’m concerned, she’s the second greatest invention in the history of humankind. Fire? Pretty cool, but it happens naturally without the need for human intervention. The wheel? Important sure, but bound to be stumbled upon eventually. The rounder something is, the easier it rolls downhill after all. The greatest is chocolate doughnuts, obviously. Deep fried dough topped with glazed sugar. But I didn’t invent doughnuts and I did invent Betty, so I’ll stick to talking about her.

Betty allows a ship to open a stable wormhole through any two points in space… almost. In theory, she does anyway, though not in reality up to this point. It’s the same idea as the gates the Great Races use for extrasolar travel. The obvious difference is that those are naturally formed wormholes from the dawn of the universe that we momentarily hijack with Casmir Stabilizers the size of small moons. Betty doesn’t need for there to be an existing wormhole – again, in theory. I’d never actually gotten her to work.

Part of the problem was that I built her out of a collection of second-hand starship parts, random bits of labor bots and a few standard home appliances. Wormholes were really the only way to travel between star systems in a practical time period, and up until now we’d had to rely on the natural ones, we and the other spacefaring races had discovered through trial and error. But Betty had the potential to usher in a new era of space exploration. One that didn’t rely on either fixed wormholes or years of travel at superluminal speeds between ungated star systems.

“Go...go Johnny go...go-go!” the music implored, to the accompaniment of a wailing guitar. The singer might as well have been saying “go Galen go,” as the music was speaking directly to me – pouring into the creative centers in my brain and flowing from there through neurotransmitters into my quick-moving fingers. I made adjustments to her micro–Casmir Stabilizer and changed programming codes on the fly. Somewhere deep in my brain the calculations were running at the speed of light and the results played out through my hands without conscious thought. Whenever I find myself in the zone, I try not to overthink it.

Adan made his way out of the living area and hunkered down behind the kitchen island – which was probably the sturdiest object in the flat.

“Couldn’t you just get a normal hobby?” he asked from relative safety. “Maybe a girlfriend?”

A part of my brain logged that he was still speaking, but the words were becoming faint and distant – like background radiation from the birth of the universe. I did things that, while obvious to me now, were leaps in logic that I had never made before. I was sweating from the creative process as much as from the manual labor, as I made the final adjustments.

“Adan, I think this is it!” I exclaimed. In response to that, he slid down, concealing his head completely behind the relative safety of the plassteel. A high-pitched whistle from Adan brought a nervous Poochy to my brother’s side.

I flicked an internal switch on my HUD and the lights of the flat dimmed as Betty sucked massive quantities of electricity from the local power grid. Setting up our free electrical service had been risky, both because we could have gotten caught – and likely executed and turned into green protein – or just turned into barbecued chicken by a poorly insulated conduit. But since neither of those things had happened and I could now power whatever projects I wanted essentially for free, the risk ended up being worth the reward.

And besides, the old fusion reactor running this city had basically been pumping out free energy for over a century, so we’re really talking about a victimless crime. Since the city managers wouldn’t necessarily see it that way, I occasionally manipulated their data to make sure Betty’s power surges were spread across the entire city’s usage map.

Betty began to throw off arcs of electricity from her hull that coalesced momentarily around the magnetic field supporting her, before eventually arcing off onto random bits of grounded material around the flat. While it looked really cool, the electrical storm wasn’t intentional. It was just a byproduct of the poorly insulated second-rate parts that necessity forced me to use in off-label ways. Once fully charged, the beam emitters fired up, generating crackling blue beams that flared outward and met in a single point a meter in front of the flat’s north wall.

My earliest experiments generated zero beams, and something would usually blow up. In the last six months however, I could get the beams firing most of the time – but they would just create a lot of heat and light, and then something would blow up. This time a portal actually opened. It was only a momentarily flicker, but it happened five separate times. The size of the portal varied each time, but the local was unmistakable – a simple but fastidiously maintained pale-blue house, standing in the shade of a massive oak.

Wind howled with each portal flicker as air tried to equalize between the two different climates. Adan poked his beautiful, cowardly head over the couch in time to see the portal open for the third time. After the fifth flicker, he ducked back behind the couch, because that’s when every circuit in the flat blew out simultaneously, showering us in sparks, burning bits of drywall and insulation and, if my nose was correct, flaming dog feces. Dammit Poochy.

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