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Paul Edwards on Smashwords
The Principles of Sorcery
Copyright © 2010 Paul Edwards
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THE PRICIPLES OF SORCERY
Chapter One
The ships looked like they were thrown together from spare parts just lying around. Which in truth they were. They were both roughly rectangular the Discovery sleeker and slightly smaller then the Clipper, which was squarer and more utilitarian looking.
They both hovered silently about a meter off the desert ground, their unpainted aluminium skins gleaming in the hot sun, there were small stairs in front of the entrance hatches of both ships. A small stream of people was busy loading boxes and equipment into each.
"Come on people, let’s get it together!" I turned around and looked at the Air force Captain who had just yelled out.
"We ain't got all day, stop gawking and follow me."
The Captain had the same tense look that all military officers I had met so far seemed to have.
I first assumed that it was because of the mission that they were in charge of, but lately I was realizing it might be because this was the type of person that was attracted to this type of job.
I followed the Captain along with the rest of the group as we headed towards a very run down group of hangars.
The air force base that we were on looked as if it had been built in the fifties and abandoned sometime during the end of the cold war. The runway was starting to be overrun with weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt. The outside of the Hangars was covered in peeling badly faded paint and there were thousands of bird droppings littering the apron around them.
The base we were at was secret and so far no one had divulged its location. I suspected that we were somewhere in Nevada, having been to Las Vegas years before and having a feeling of familiarity with the desert surrounding that city.
We eventually were ushered into the nearest hangar and then into a medium sized room off of the hangar floor.
The room had been recently renovated as well as being air-conditioned. There were 40 or so chairs arranged in front of a lectern, behind the lectern was a large screen. A modern looking projector hung down from the ceiling.
We all took seats and waited for what appeared to be a briefing to begin. After about 10 minutes a balding middle-aged man in a grey suit walked behind the lectern and started to speak.
"You all know why we’re here, we will begin boarding the ships in 45 minutes, if you have any special equipment or supplies that you think you may need now is the time to ask."
I looked around at the audience to see if anyone had their hand up. A plain looking slightly chunky looking woman stood up and began to speak.
"Did you remember the samples? I added another 50 materials and objects to my list."
The bald man replied, "We got what we could, a lot of what you asked for can be synthesized when you get to Mars, such as the sterilized gases."
"But what if we get problems?" she whined.
"Then solve them. Anymore questions?" The bald man looked at the rest of the crowd while pointedly ignoring the woman.
"Ok lets start the briefing"
The lights dimmed and the projector lit up the screen with the start of a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide showed the planet Mars with the words OUR DESTINATION written on it.
The bald man started speaking again "The trip will take slightly over 3 hours, once you have landed the crew will unload the habitat modules from the cargo ship as well as the storage and science modules." The next slide showed a cartoon picture of seven modules on the surface of Mars decorated with various parabolic antennas.
"The Clippers crew will wait 2 days before departure to make sure that the outpost is functioning properly."
A slide with a cartoon version of the Clipper travelling through the stars appeared on the screen.
"After the Clipper departs Mars it will make a return trip every 3 weeks, unless there is an emergency. Remember you're safety drills, it will take at least 3 hours for the Clipper to make it back to Mars so its imperative to make sure you can get out a distress signal and get to the failsafe shelter"
A Slide with what appeared to be clip art of someone writing a report at a desk flashed up.
"We expect daily progress reports, daily!" The bald man gave us a stern look.
"The technology you are developing has to be evaluated immediately."
He straightened his tie and gave us an even sterner look.
"What you are doing is incredibly dangerous, not just for yourselves but the solar system in general, we have to make sure what you accomplish does not lead us to oblivion."
The final slide showed a cartoon of a bunch of happy looking people in space suits on a cratered surface.
"If you keep to your research requirements, we should have a safe and productive mission. That’s the end of the briefing, smokem if you got em, we board in half an hour"
The lights came on blinding everyone for a few seconds, when my vision came back the bald man was already gone.
I looked around at the group of people that I was with. There were six of us, five men and one woman. The lone woman noticed me looking at her and the others and started walking towards me.
"Hi I'm Whitney," she said sticking out her hand.
"Hi I'm Bob", I said as I shook it.
On closer look she still struck me as quite plain, she did however have very large and pretty brown eyes as well as an ample bust.
"I can't believe this is happening huh? How'd you end up here?" she said
"The Second life Website. I was building a complex that contained a lot of the elements of transcendent technology, It's funny, I hated Second life, I only spent a few hours on it building the complex, I couldn't stand the people on it. I started calling it No life, it’s a miracle they found me"
She looked at me with her big brown eyes looking slightly shifty, and started talking in a low voice.
"I overheard some of the suits talking, they were using a prototype NDA developed quantum search engine to comb the web for people, kinda scary eh"
"Ya, I guess they know about my porn addiction now," I chuckled at my own joke. Whitney just stared at me narrowing her eyes.
"Um, how did they find you?"
"It was my weird art, I was doing a show in a free gallery and I guess the guy who developed this stuff seen it and wrote my name in his notes before he lost his marbles."
"Do you know anything about him?" I asked
"Just that he flunked out of university, spent 10 years trying to figure out the nature of the universe while working as a security guard," she said.
"I also heard he was the guy that started the Pal-X corporation," I replied.
"You mean that company that faked a platinum mine in northern Canada?"
"Ya except it wasn't fake, I knew someone that worked there, they were producing platinum, it just wasn't coming out of the ground."
"Ahhh, that explains a lot," she murmured.
"So the mad genius was Franz Morton, and they found him because they knew the mine was a dud but couldn't explain were the platinum was coming from."
"Ya and then they just arrested him knowing no one would believe he could just make the stuff."
Her eyes showed a tiny bit of fear "So they just said he was nuts and took him away, scary."
"All right people!! Lets move out!"
The Captain was back, eager to get us going. We all started following him outside to the ships.
I looked at the Discovery as we got closer to our ship the Clipper. I noticed two men and one woman boarding it they were wearing blue coveralls with NASA written on one of many patches. I thought I recognized one of the men as a shuttle astronaut.
The Discovery gets the A team I thought, Mars gets us. I walked up the stairs and boarded the Clipper.
The inside of the Clipper was very utilitarian, the rooms contained nothing but boxes and zero gravity sleeping sacks hanging from hooks. The walls were all unpainted aluminium and every spare inch of floor space was taken up with boxes and equipment for our Martian expedition.
The flight deck consisted of a small cockpit with two pilot positions behind which were eight passenger chairs that looked like they were ripped out of a commercial jetliner. On closer inspection the chairs really had come out of a jetliner, complete with ashtrays and lap belts.
The two pilots were doing their pre-flight check as we walked onto the flight deck.
"Buckle up, we’re departing soon." One of them said as he heard us come in. The co-pilot got out of his seat and walked passed us as we sat down. We heard him yell "hatch closed and secure."
The co-pilot walked back checking to make sure we put our lap belts on before he took his seat beside the pilot.
Whitney sat beside me looking quite calm. I was feeling quite a bit of trepidation finally realizing I was actually going to Mars. It seemed very surreal, thirty days ago I was working as industrial electrician, now I was going to be one of the first people to walk on another planet.
I heard the pilot clear his throat over the Clippers PA system.
"This is the Captain speaking, we will be departing in three minutes. If we have any in-flight emergencies along the way just shut the fuck up and do exactly as I say. Captain out."
He obviously didn't come from the same airline as our chairs.
The ship took off soundlessly, first straight up and then slowly forward. We were probably going only 150 kph which seemed kind of slow to go to Mars. The PA came to life just then.
“We are currently exiting earth’s atmosphere, it will take about an hour to clear it completely. Then we can ramp up our speed into deep space and engage the transport window”
“I heard that these ships are too fragile for much atmospheric travel,” said Whitney.
“That’s reassuring,” I said.
“Don’t worry, the big danger in space is radiation and micrometeorites, this ship is equipped with a huge magnetic shield and self sealing walls, were probably safer then in a car.”
“How do you know so much?” I asked.
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Ya,” I said.
“I looked over the shoulder of one of the suits while he was logging into a workstation, I have a really good memory for passwords and stuff. So when I was in my own room at night I just typed in the IP address he was at and logged into my workstation in my room using his username and password.”
“That worked?”
“Oh ya, people are dumb when it comes to computer security, they were so paranoid about us emailing the outside world that they put us on their own secure Intranet system giving us low level access. They didn’t realize how easy it is to get high level passwords from over confident scientist types.”
“What all did you learn?” I asked.
“They don’t have a clue how any of this stuff works. Morton designed and built two interstellar engines and two large power supplies. They found them when they searched his company building after his arrest. NASA built the Discovery and the Clipper using them.
They gave all of Morton’s notes to the RAND Corporation so they could have the best minds available to decipher them. The RAND’s scientists managed to open a dimensional window after a few days of study, unfortunately it was into deep space sucking all these great minds and most of Mortons notes into orbit around the sun.
The hole would probably also have sucked out a large portion of the earths atmosphere too if it hadn’t closed on its own after a minute. That’s why they’re sending us to Mars, so if we have any catastrophic mistakes we only kill ourselves.”
“How are we going to decipher anything if Morton’s notes are gone? And why did they pick us?” I asked.
She replied “Morton escaped, using a dimensional window, he forgot to bring his transcendent program code with him, so we still have a small bit of something to work with. As to why we got picked, we’re expendable for one, and we all have some connection to Morton or to his technology.
I was in Morton’s personal diary and your second life complex matched his last known algorithm on some level.”
The Clipper was now high above the earth, the planet looked like a large blue beach ball hovering outside the cockpit window. I heard the pilots talking in controlled almost terse voices when suddenly a vague rectangular patch appeared in front of us obscuring the earth. It looked like someone had cut and pasted a different section of sky in front of us using Photoshop.
This must be a dimensional window, I thought. The ship slowly passed through the rectangular section of sky in front of us then slowly turned to the right. Mars swung into view replacing the Earth.
I thought back to the crash course in transcendent technology they had given us in our 30 day training session.
Dimensional windows they explained are the basis of transcendent technology, they are always rectangular, use no energy to create, can be any size and open up a window between any two places in the universe. This is what enabled the Clipper to travel to Mars in just a few seconds. The placement of the windows also enables many unusual effects such as perpetual motion.
Place a window deep underwater in a lake with the exit above the surface. The pressure of the water under the lake forces water out of the exit window above the lake to fall back with the force of gravity. So the stream of water would never stop. Put a turbine in between to catch the perpetual flow and voila free energy.
The more I had thought about it the more things occurred to me that could be accomplished using these windows, such as non-invasive surgery, instead of an incision use a dimensional window to look inside someone. The possibilities were endless.
Unfortunately the only people who knew how to create and manipulate them were missing or currently orbiting the sun.
I asked Whitney “Why didn’t they dissect one of the interstellar engines to find out how they worked”
“They dissected Morton’s platinum creation machine and discovered nothing, they didn’t want to risk the star drives,” she replied.
“Did you ever come up with an idea about how the platinum creator worked? I could never figure out how connecting two different places in the universe could create platinum,” I asked.
“I think there is more to this technology then anyone knows,” she said.
The Clipper started towards Mars. After an hour of travel we were slowly descending through the atmosphere. They had decided to place the outpost near the equator, using the well-known NASA protocol of landing on the flattest most boring spot of any celestial body.
The Clipper finally landed in what looked like an lendless plain of red gravel, there were only a few gentle slopes to break the monotony.
“OK kiddies we’re here,” the Captain blurted over the PA.
The next few hours were a blur of work, we donned spacesuits and exited the spacecraft with little fanfare. Whitney was the first person on Mars, accompanied by the Captain yelling “Hurry the fuck up!” over our suit intercoms. A murmured “go fuck yourself,” were the words first spoken by the first person to set foot on another planet.
We dragged the inflatable habitat modules into place, then we connected them together with inflatable access tunnels. The whole outpost was basically six inflatable buildings and a seventh metal container that would be released from the ship prior to taking off. It held a nuclear power generator and other electronics as well as our water and air supply.
The inflatable modules had super conducting wire woven into them; these would provide us with a magnetic radiation shield when power was applied.
We then hooked up the power and communication cables to the habitats and when that was done sat down and rested as air compressors filled each module.
When the modules were completely inflated we checked them all for leaks, which was easy to do because the moist heated air in the modules would instantly condense in the cold thin Martian atmosphere showing up as a fountain of steam.
We finally and wearily entered the air lock of one of the modules and went inside. The two pilots of the Clipper wanted us to start unloading all our equipment and supplies immediately and kept informing us of this on our suit intercoms. We however were exhausted and after checking all our habitats safety equipment removed our suits and fell asleep on our inflatable beds.
When I first woke up after my first night on Mars, I had an instance of confusion wondering where I was and why I felt so light. I quickly remembered my journey of the previous day and felt very surreal. I was on Mars, wow.
I looked over at Whitney who was sleeping on a bed on the other side of the same module. I was amazed at the size of her boobs. She was wearing just a t-shirt and they were completely unencumbered by a bra.
She woke up as I was staring at her, she quickly pulled up her blanket to cover herself, she smirked involuntarily as she pretended not to notice my gawking.
I quickly looked away in embarrassment.
All of us quickly got up and ate some rations. We then donned our space suits again in order to finish unloading the ship.
The two pilots did little to help other then constantly yelling at us to hurry up. Thankfully it looked like they had spent a sleepless and uncomfortable night in their ship.
It took a good eight hours to unload everything and test all the habitats systems. We waited until we were satisfied that everything was working before we pulled the release pins to free the seventh module from the ship.
We didn’t trust the pilots not to fly away before we knew everything was working, and from their anger and steady stream of profanity we were probably right. They took off within seconds of the module being released without so much as a goodbye.
We were alone on Mars.
We sat together around our inflatable table in our main living module. It was the first time we were all together and could look at and talk to each other without our space suits on.
There was Fred an ex-military paratrooper, he was the only one of the group with no connection to Franz Morton. He was there in case of any unexpected consequences of our research. Fred was in his early forties balding and built like the incredible hulk.
Sparky Smith, had worked as an assistant to Franz when he was running Pal-X. Sparky was young thin and nerdy. We peppered him with questions about Morton, all he could recall was Morton seemed to appear and disappear nobody ever seen him arrive or leave. He was always prepared, always gave very direct and easy to follow directions, wasn’t the type to chat and was sometimes accompanied by an impossibly beautiful exotic looking young woman.
Joe Bark was picked from an internet search like me. He was in his early thirties and had the start of a large paunch. He worked as a robot repair technician. He had written some robot manipulation code that had somehow matched Morton’s last algorithm.
I asked him if he knew what code it was.
“Not sure, I belonged to a tech support group on the web, we swapped miles of code with each other. It could have been anything,” he replied.
The last person was Miles Danderling. Miles had been Morton’s accountant. “I never saw him much, but god what a weird guy, he always wanted to solve his financial problems by paying more money.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Most people when they have a hidden fee or large tax bill, try to squirm out of it, that’s why people hire accountants. Not Franz, if paying more would solve his problems that’s what he did,” he replied.
Miles obviously didn’t know that Morton could create platinum out of thin air.
I decided not to be so quick to blab everything I knew about Franz Morton, Whitney was giving me a wary look and shaking her head almost imperceptibly.
We all decided to cook a meal and go to bed early as we were exhausted. We would sort through all our supplies and equipment tomorrow. The two habitat showers were working so while the food was warming up we took turns washing up and changing clothes.
After our meal we all decided to keep the same sleeping arrangements, so Whitney and I would sleep in the same module together again. I asked her if she would like to hang a curtain for privacy, she gave me a little smirk and said she wasn’t self-conscious.
I decided to turn in right away, Whitney followed me to bed about thirty minutes later just as I was drifting off to sleep, I watched her undress through my barely open eyes as I fell asleep. Her clothes had hid very attractive voluptuous curves. My last thought before falling asleep was that with five men and one woman there could be trouble.
The next morning after we got up we started sorting and storing all our equipment and supplies. It was fortunate that Whitney was there because she had a knack for arrangement and decoration that the rest of us lacked. She managed to make our main living area somewhat homey. This I thought would probably be important since we might be here for months.
Chapter Two
After all the sorting and rearrangement was done we still had a few hours left in our second Martian day, we all sat around our all purpose dinner/conference/workbench table drinking coffee and talking about our plan of attack.
Fred spoke first “We have to have all the available info you folks can provide so that we can figure all this out, so I suggest we start listing what we know, I’ll keep notes,” he said producing a large yellow legal pad and a mechanical pencil.
Joe replied “We need Franz’s final algorithm.”
“Can’t that wait?”
Whitney then piped up “Look Fred nobody elected you Mayor, we all know why you’re here, but we’re the ones who are going to figure this thing out, just give us the algorithm.”
Fred’s eyes lit up in anger for a split second but he quickly controlled himself. He struck me as the type who probably took all the other kids toys when he was a child. I also started to get the feeling that Fred wasn’t going to be real interested in our well being once our purpose had been served.
Fred got up and went to one of the other modules, he returned a few minutes later with a steel brief case with a sophisticated electronic lock on it. He had already opened it before he returned. I wondered if he knew about Whitney’s knack for finding out passwords.
He reached in the case and pulled out five photocopies of Franz Morton’s last known writings. There seemed to be more stuff in the briefcase but I couldn’t see it before he quickly snapped it shut and locked it.
The photocopies were quickly passed around. I looked at mine and this is what I saw.
Reference X
Lock reference
New TSW
Label “escape1”
Creation time:1545 EST 15 July 2008
Shape: Rectangular
Size: X=1m Y=1m
Distance from reference: +2m 180 degrees True N
Elevation from reference: +0m
Orientation off perpendicular from reference:
X axis: +0 degrees
Y axis: +0 degrees
Z axis: +0 degrees
Duration: 30s
B time: +0s
B space: +500m
New TSW
Label “escape2”
Creation time:1545 EST 15 July 2008
Shape: Rectangular
Size: X=1m Y=1m
Distance from reference: +1000m 180 degrees True N
Elevation from reference: +0m
Orientation off perpendicular from reference:
X axis: +0 degrees
Y axis: +0 degrees
Z axis: +0 degrees
Duration: 30s
B time: +0s
B space: +500m
End
It looked to me to be some kind of computer code written by hand by someone with meticulous handwriting. I looked around the table at the others, Joe had a look of enlightenment he was trying to hide and Whitney was looking at me with what appeared to be anticipation.
“I bet he escaped at three forty five on July the 15th”,” I said looking at Fred.
“Obviously,” Fred replied.
“What I don’t understand is why he’s appeared to have created two dimension windows?” I said looking at Joe.
Joe was trying very hard to be expressionless and failing badly.
“OK Joe, you obviously know something. If you don’t tell us we’re still going to try to do this on our own, you’ll be going down with the rest of us if we kill ourselves,” I said.
Joe caved in with a look of relief.
“It resembles a code I was writing for two different robots, it was an idea I had. I was just doodling. I put it on my tech support group forum to see what they would think.”
“What was the idea,” Whitney asked.
“Well robots now generally work on assembly lines. The job comes by and they do their thing, screw on a part etcetera, then the job moves off to the next robots station. My idea was to get rid of the assembly line and have the robots hand off the job between themselves. I wrote a bit of code just for the hand off procedure between two robots. That’s what this is, there are two windows whose exits meet 500 meters from a reference point with the two entrances 1000 meters from each other.”
“Why not just use one window with the exit 1000 meters away?” I asked.
Nobody had an answer. I also didn’t understand how this simple set of what appeared to instructions could create anything, let alone a dimensional window.
We decided to call it a night and get a fresh start tomorrow, I followed Whitney to our module. Once we closed the door Whitney turned to me and put her index finger in front of her lips and shook her head. I kept quiet while she turned on a small ghetto blaster which started pumping out loud music.
She sat down next to me on my bed and began whispering in my ear.
“I know why he used two windows,” She said.
“Why?”
“I think TSW stands for Time Space Window. I think these windows open up into another universe, so in order to stay in the same universe he creates a second window to meet the first one in that other universe,” she said.
“Huh? How do you get that?” I asked.
“That was the theme for my art show that Franz had seen. I read an article in a magazine years ago about time travel I think it was in Scientific American. It was about time travel and paradoxes. The solution to the paradox of going back in time and killing your mother before you were born, was that every time you travelled back in time a new parallel universe was created. This parallel universe would be exactly the same up to the point that you arrived. From that point on things would be different.”
“How do you make an art show about that?” I asked.
“I had a painting of a descendant of a concentration camp survivor shooting Hitler when he was a just a young man. And other stuff along that line,” she said.
“So every time someone opens a dimensional window it creates another universe?” I said.
“Yup, and if you look at Franz’s escape code again you can see that there is a spot for going back in time.”
I looked at the photocopy again.
B time: +0s
B space: +500m
It suddenly made sense, B time and B space must be the time and distance from the reference point in the second universe. The whole thing suddenly made sense the reference point X was just used to give a starting point, something to define were the window would appear. The lock command would just lock the reference point so if someone moved the paper the X was written on the reference point would stay in the same spot.
“So Franz just walked through his dimensional window, appeared 1000 meters true south from his prison cell and then his “TSW” disappeared 30 seconds after he left,” I said.
“Yup, and then he just walked away or created another TSW,” she said.
“Why didn’t the brains at the RAND corporation figure this out?”
“I don’t think that all this is possible with the current theories, guys with PhD’s in physics aren’t so big on huge new radical ideas. I don’t think they could believe it was so simple. That’s probably why they ended up killing themselves. They didn’t believe it, and blindly opened up a window into deep space,” she said.
“This doesn’t make any sense, how could defining a dimensional window on a piece of paper make it appear, and do it all using no energy,” I said.
“It works, we know it works otherwise we wouldn’t be on Mars,” she replied.
“Are we going to tell the others?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
Whitney got up and shut the Ghetto blaster off. “I’m going to bed,” she said.
I said good night and went to bed myself.
As I tried to sleep I started to think about Morton’s platinum creation machine, it suddenly occurred to me how it worked. Morton had just created a window five seconds back in time in front of an ingot of platinum and then reached through and took the same brick from the second universe.
I drifted off realizing that with the manipulation of these TSW’s almost anything was possible.
Chapter Three
I woke up the next morning hearing Whitney get out of bed. I pretended to be asleep as I watched her through barely open eyelids. She was standing naked except for her panties. The low light of her bedside lamp outlined the perfect curves of her voluptuous body in a dark ink of shadow and shading.
She certainly was magnificent.
I waited until she put on her robe and left for a shower before I got out of bed.
After I took my own shower and brushed my teeth I met the others sitting around the table in the main living module eating breakfast. Whitney followed me as I sat down.
“We’ll have fresh fruit, eggs and bacon for a week” said Fred. Then we’ll be eating mainly pre-packaged crap.”
“Are you saying this for some kind of motivation,” I replied.
Fred just stared at me. Whitney was eating cereal, she gave me a quick glance with her big brown eyes.
“I guess we can start after breakfast,” I said.
We all quickly ate and cleaned up the table. NASA had given us a conventional stove as well as regular plates and utensils. Most of our equipment and tools were off the shelf because of the immediacy of our project. The inflatable modules were originally prototypes for a future Mars mission.
Thankfully all the familiar objects made our short time here a little less jarring and surreal. We all sat down at the table again after it was cleared and the dishes cleaned and put away.
Whitney pulled out a note pad and a pencil from one of the pockets of her cargo pants. The pad had some kind of undecipherable writing on it. I couldn’t even find letters from the alphabet on the scribbles.
“What kind of writing is that?” I asked
“Oh I know shorthand” she said
“Shorthand? Were did you learn that? Isn’t that from the fifties?”
Whitney just smiled at me then started to speak.
“Ok I have come up with an idea. I thought that if we just change the numbers in Franz’s formula we could see if anything happens. We know that he escaped with this algorithm and that he probably created a window with an exit 1000 meters away. We don’t need to understand the rest of the formula to make it work.”
Sparky piped up with a look of alarm on his face,“What if it blows a hole in the module?”
“We’ll all put on our spacesuits, and use one of the peripheral modules so if its damaged we can just isolate it from the main one.” she replied.
“We can always signal for a rescue as well,” Fred said.
“Our suits are good for 72 hours.”
We decided that we all had to start somewhere so we started to put our spacesuits on. Once the main part of our suits were on we grabbed our helmets and gloves and followed Whitney into our sleeping module.
Whitney took out a blank sheet of paper and a large pen and put it on a small table we had. She then put one of her suit gloves on and grabbed the pen and wrote her name on the paper. It was reasonably legible.
“OK I can write with the suit gloves on, I’ll change the distance to 1m and the time 5 minutes from when I finish writing it, our suit watches are quartz so we have an accurate time reference. Lets put our helmets on and do our pressure checks.”
We finished putting on the rest of our suits checked each other’s and did a pressure check.
Whitney took out Franz’s formula and started copying it and putting in the changes. It took almost 20 minutes because of the difficulty she had writing.
When she was done we all looked at our watches and waited.
Nothing happened.
We all checked the formula independently, it was flawless as far as we could tell. We waited another 20 minutes just to be safe. Then we took our helmets and gloves off.
“Well that didn’t work,” I said.
“We’re missing something,” Whitney said.
“Miles you and Sparky worked with Franz the most, did you ever see anything like this formula?” she continued.
“I did” Miles replied.
“It was on his laptop when we had a meeting in his office, it was a lot longer and I think it had different types of commands in-between the TSW stuff. I don’t remember much just that it had stuff on it similar to what’s on the photocopy.”
“What about you Sparky?” Whitney said looking at him.
“Nothing, he was very secretive, he used to say confusing things sometimes and laugh like it was some kind of inside joke,” Sparky said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“You can always do a control break on life, that was one of his weird sayings, or its always between the header and footer,” he said.
I suddenly knew what we were missing. I looked at Whitney and started to wonder if she was telepathic, she could tell I knew, and managed to convey this, and to be quiet with just a look.
We all decided to get out of our suits and brainstorm some more. They left Whitney and I alone to get out of our spacesuits. Whitney turned on the Ghetto Blaster again and started whispering to me.
“What are we missing?”
“Control break is an old basic computer language command, its to stop the program so you can change it or insert new lines of programming,” I said.
“How does that help?”
“There must be some kind header and footer code that goes on the top and bottom of the algorithm to stop the grand program of everything so new code can be inserted,” I said.
“Franz probably just took that part with him or destroyed it when he escaped,” I continued.
“What could it be?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
We continued taking our spacesuits off and walked back to the main module when we finished. Whitney accidentally brushed my arm with her boobs as she sat down.
“Fred do you have anything else in that suitcase of yours?” asked Whitney.
“Nothing you need to see,” Fred replied.
“What about the Platinum making machine, do you have pictures of it?” I asked.
Fred put on a sulky look, “What do you need that for?”
“So you have pictures of it?” I asked.
“No, I don’t,” said Fred.
“You have the machine here don’t you,” said Whitney.
Fred crossed his arms with a stubborn look and said nothing.
“Look Fred, we’re not going to get anywhere without all the available information, if you have the machine get it, or we will,” said Whitney.
“Ya, get the machine,” said Joe.
Fred went back to his module and returned a few minutes later with a pelican case and put it on the table. I opened the case up and looked inside. There were a bunch of metal plates that looked like they had been cut apart with a hack saw. We all grabbed a piece to examine. There was no writing on any of the pieces except for a small X on one piece. They were all constructed of unpainted 14 gauge steel.
Whitney suggested that we reassemble the machine, she produced a roll of duct tape and we quickly matched the pieces and then held them together with the duct tape.
We ended up with a metal box about a foot square with one side open, we orientated the box with the small X on top.
I remembered my thoughts of the previous day on how the machine would work. I took my coffee mug and placed it inside the box. I waited 10 seconds and took the mug out. I looked into the box and waited. A coffee mug suddenly appeared. I reached in and took it out as everyone gasped. I compared it to mine, it was exactly the same I couldn’t find any difference.
“Holy shit, that’s amazing, how did you know that it worked that way?” Whitney said.
“Just a guess,” I said.
We tried copying a few other things until we realized we had a limited amount of space on our base and shouldn’t fill it up with junk.
“I can’t believe it still works after being hacked apart,” said Sparky.
Fred wanted to report this by radio immediately, I got the feeling that nobody in RAND corporation had bothered to try and work the machine before they cut it apart. They cut open the golden goose before it even laid a golden egg.
Nobody had any ideas on how the device worked, we spent the rest of the day examining the box and copying a thumb tack to see it we could see anything. We then disassembled the box so we could examine each piece again.
Fred wrote a long report and sent it back to earth via our transmitter.
As we prepared for bed in our module, Whitney and I had our usual whispered conversation with the Ghetto Blaster playing music.
“Do you have any ideas,” asked Whitney.
“The X on the top plate is a reference point, the code could be anywhere, it just has to refer to that reference point,” I said.
“Yes but on his escape algorithm the reference point was with the code, it has to be near,” she said.
I had a sudden thought.
“Maybe the code is in-between the steel plates. What if he glued two plates together to make one.”
“Wouldn’t the RAND corporation have found it?” she said.
“Not if it was regular ink, it wouldn’t show up in an x-ray,” I said.
We decided to sneak back into the main living module after everyone had gone to sleep and see if we could examine the top plate more closely. We waited until one o’clock in the morning then Whitney put her robe on and snuck in and grabbed the top plate off the table. It was in three pieces. She didn’t run into any of the others as she snuck back.
We looked at the three pieces under a lamp closely examining it to see if there were 2 plates glued together. It wasn’t they were one solid piece.
Whitney started to look at the plates again under the light looking very closely around the reference point.
“There’s something there, I didn’t notice it before,” She said.
“What?”
“Look at all the scratches on the plates.”
I looked more closely at the fine squiggles all over the plate. They just looked like random scratches made by grinding and being knocked around.
“I don’t see anything,.” I said.
“It’s written in shorthand, it looks just like scratches if you don‘t know what to look for,” she said.
Whitney grabbed a piece of paper and started to transcribe it. This is what she wrote.
Chapter Four
Reference X
START
New TSW
Label “Copier”
Creation time: now
Shape: Rectangular
Size: X=.3m Y=.3m
Distance from reference: +0m
Elevation from reference: -.15m
Orientation off perpendicular from reference:
X axis: +0 degrees
Y axis: +0 degrees
Z axis: +0 degrees
Duration: 10s
B time: -10s
B space: +0
CHANGE Distance from reference: -.3m
GOTO START
She also wrote two lines of what seemed to be random letters one above and one below the code. Each line was about one hundred and fifty letters long.
I looked at it and it twigged on how it worked. It created a new TSW 10 seconds back into the past then it moved that window backwards .3 meters leaving the copied object in our universe. The TSW would last 10 seconds and then the cycle would repeat.
It suddenly occurred to me how dangerous this was. If someone had stuck their hand in the box at the wrong time the TSW would cut it off when it appeared. It occurred to me how lucky we had been. I quickly told Whitney to keep her hands away. The top plate was separated so the code probably didn’t work but the paper she had just transcribed was whole. I lifted the paper up with some utensils and ripped it in half.
I realized that we also had the header and the footer code, it must be the two random strings of letters at the top and bottom of the code. If this was right we had our answer. I explained this all to Whitney. She looked at me with her eyes sparkling with excitement.
“We have to test it now, before the others figure it out. If it works we would we able to do anything,” she said.
We hastily constructed a box made of paper, straws and scotch tape. Whitney wrote the code on top with a sharpie. I took a thumbtack and put it in the paper box using a spoon to manoeuvre it for safety. I waited 10 seconds and then took it out again with the spoon. I waited another 10 seconds and looked in the box. There was a new thumbtack in the box. It had worked.
“What now?” I asked Whitney.
“We need to leave,” she said.
“How?”
“Let me think. What if we say there’s an emergency and get picked up?”
“They’ll know we’re bluffing when they show up and nothings wrong. Then they’ll and think we have something,” I said.
“I have another really crazy idea.”
“What?”
“We give Mars an atmosphere open the door and run away,” she said.
“Huh?”
“We have two tablet PC’s I think we can put the code into them. We put a version of the copier in them both. We then run a continuous copy of a sample of our atmosphere from inside our module. We wait until the atmosphere builds up outside then we grab some supplies and run away.”
“What do we do when our supplies run out?” I said.
“We just copy them,” she replied.
“How long will it take to build up an atmosphere?”
“I used to be pretty good at math, let me figure it out.”
Whitney spent a good thirty minutes doing the calculations on her laptop.
“I’ve got it, if we use 10000 windows 2 meters square it should take about a day. I’ll leave it to you to write the code,” she said.
“What about cosmic radiation when we go outside?”
“We should be safe for a few days by then we can come up with a solution,” she replied.
I spent the next hour writing code, by then we were both exhausted. We decided to get some sleep and finish up in the morning. Whitney snuck back and put the plates back on the table in the main living area but not before we had scratched off all the shorthand. She made it back unnoticed.
The next day Whitney and I both went through the motions of trying to figure out transcendent technology. The rest of the group put the copier back together and were shocked when it didn’t work anymore. I proffered the explanation that it had been abused too much by being cut apart and put together and was now broken. This seemed to satisfy everyone except Fred who kept staring at us both with a look of suspicion.
I surreptitiously completed the rest of the code to give Mars an atmosphere. I also wrote another transcendent code I called The Doorway. It was a variation of Morton’s escape algorithm, but instead of a fixed doorway I used the QuickBasic compiler in the tablet PC to make the code changeable. I could move the window and change its size by changing the orientation and size numbers on the code displayed on the tablet.
I was unsure if this would all work. The tablet displayed the algorithm the same as a piece of paper so it should, except I had no idea how any of this worked. I also had quite a bit of trepidation about giving Mars an atmosphere as well. It seemed to be kind of excessive in order to escape. I tried to think of another way to leave but couldn’t.
We implemented our plan at midnight. Whitney cranked up the heat in our room so the atmosphere we created would be warm counteracting the cold of the planet. She also took out a bag of grass seed, Kentucky Blue grass, and threw a handful in the air right before we implemented the program.
“If we’re going to terraform this planet we might as well go all the way,” she said.
I pressed return and started the program. It opened 10000 TSW’s five seconds in the past in our alternate universe’s habitat module and then cycled over and over. The 10000 TSW’s were placed around the planet.
We left our module before we started, feeling guilty because our other selves in the other universes would be sucked out onto Mars surface if we stayed. The philosophical implications of all this copying could be quit large. I could technically create infinite copies of anything even people.
We went back into our module after about 10 minutes and cleaned up the grass seed, which had settled on the floor.
“Why do we have grass seed?” I asked Whitney.
“I knew we could copy stuff, and I knew we were going to Mars, so I brought it just in case what I thought was possible was possible,” she said.
“Mars is going to look like one big golf course if this works,” I replied.
“Better than a gravel pit.”
We packed two duffle bags with everything we thought we would need including four fully charged extra batteries for out tablet PC’s.
We then went to bed, there were no obvious effects of what we had done yet. We didn’t even know if it worked.
We work up at 5am to a horrendous noise. I snapped on the lights and seen with much horror the walls of our inflatable module moving back and forth. The sound outside was like a jet turbine spinning up. Fred burst into our room, and started screaming at us.
“Windstorm Windstorm!! Get into your spacesuits now!”
He hadn’t realized what was going on, in his defence who would?
Whitney and I quickly got into our suits, we were scared shitless while doing it.
“Do you think we went to far?” she said.
“Probably, but we’re committed now, these modules weren’t meant to last in a partial atmosphere so we have no choice but to wait it out. We have 19 hours to go.”
The next 19 hours were an indescribable eternity of horror. We got as low as possible grabbing onto each other and our duffle bags.
The modules walls started to shred after 5 hours, we had no idea how the others were doing, all the power and communications systems had stopped working. It reminded me of the one hurricane I had experienced except this was about 100 times worse.
The sun started coming up and I took a quick look around. The module was gone, we were lying on the deflated floor which was basically just a tarp now. I could see the others lying down as well. Thankfully we had not upped the humidity in the module before we copied it or the rain that was falling would be much worse.
I estimated the wind to be about 200 kph. Thankfully the rain kept the possibility of dust down to a minimum. The wind began to abate when it started to get dark again and was a stiff breeze by midnight.
Whitney and I were again able to communicate with the others.
They still had no idea what was going on. Fred told everyone to wait, the ship would be here soon. He was probably right.
We all fell into an exhausted sleep.
I woke up feeling someone shaking me. I was stiff and sore. I looked up to see a flashlight in my eyes. I pushed it away and saw Whitney looking at me. She wasn’t in her suit. I popped off my helmet. The air hit my face, it smelled just like the air in the module. It was warm with a stiff breeze blowing into my face.
“Come on get out of your suit and hurry! The others are still asleep,” she said.
I got out of the suit as quickly and quietly as possible. I was sore and smelled unbelievably bad. We grabbed our duffels and left as quickly as possible.
We had to walk slowly with the flashlight so as not to trip on all the rocks. Our pace soon quickened as the sun came up and we walked as fast as we could.
The sight that greeted us with the new dawn was spectacular, the red earth was now much darker with pools and puddles of water. We could see the grass seed covering everything. The once red sky was now full of white clouds with patches of deep blue showing through.
“We have to get out of here, the ship will find us if we don’t get a good distance away,” I said.
“How?”
“I can try my new algorithm, Doorway.”
“Doorway?”
“Watch,” I said.
I took out one of the tablet PC’s, thankfully they were military grade and waterproof. I started the algorithm and immediately a TSW appeared in front of me. It was about a foot square.
“I want to see the sights,” I said.
“What sights?” said Whitney.
I fiddled with the controls moving the far end until I found what I was looking for then I enlarged the TSW so we could walk through.
We walked through to the most amazing sight I have ever seen. Whitney gasped as she saw it as well.
We were at the foot of Olympus Mons. It’s 16 miles high, the highest mountain in the solar system. The clouds had cleared on this part of Mars and we could see the whole thing. I had never felt so small in my life. The mountain just towered, It looked all at once ancient powerful and stoic.
I then realized how naïve the human race was, ignorant to the universe. We have no idea such things exist, that our own planet has nothing to compare to this.
I closed the TSW as Whitney continued to gawk. She turned to me with tears in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said.
“There’s one other thing I want to see.”
I opened A TSW again and started searching for Mars’s other tourist spot. I enlarged the window when I found it and we stepped through again.
We both gasped this time. The Valles Marineris was in front of us. We couldn’t see the other side of the canyon, but we could see the bottom, 3 miles down. There were clouds and mists below us and what looked like a river flowing. The ecology of Mars had already started to change, the grass would be growing soon, as well as whatever life we had brought with us.
“I guess we should be taking pictures,” said Whitney.
“Who would we show them to?”
“I know how to get back to earth now,” I said.
“I can use the Doorway algorithm. I don’t think there is any limit to how far you can go in time or distance.”
“How will you find earth?” she replied.
“It’ll be a big blue dot in the sky at night.”
“We should find a hiding spot until then,” she replied.
We found a small cave, and made ourselves as comfortable as possible. We shut off the tablet PC’s in case they had a way of tracking them. We were 1000’s of miles away from the outpost so it would be a long time before someone would find us.
We had waited until the sun had just started to set, then there on the horizon was a very bright large blue dot. I turned on my tablet and created a TSW a centimetre square. I manipulated the far end towards the earth hearing a high pitched whine as the air was sucked into the vacuum of space as the far end of the TSW went through deep space.
The whining noise stopped as the far end entered earths atmosphere. I was able to match the velocity of the orbiting earth with a bit of trial and error.
“Were do you want to go,” I asked Whitney.
She thought for a minute and then said.
“Las Vegas, we should be able to blend in there.”
It took me a few minutes to find the city, I then found a private spot in a small park area to step through. I enlarged the TSW and we stepped back onto the earth. We took our duffel bags with us. Whitney told me to keep the window open, then she started digging up dirt from around her feet and throwing it back through the window onto Mars.
“More terraforming, gotta have worms and soil bacteria. It’ll give humanity a new place to live,” she said.
I closed the window when she was done. We tried to clean ourselves up without much success. I used a TSW to take the money out of a nearby bank machine. The Doorway algorithm had endless uses. We walked to the nearest casino wearing baseball caps and sunglasses we had procured the same way and checked in.
The checkout clerk gave us some odd looks but gave us a suite when we showed her the cash.
We went straight to the suite. Once inside we peeled of our filthy clothing and took very long hot showers.
We emerged clean and in the bathrobes supplied by the hotel.
“We have no clothes,” I said.
“I’m to tired to care,” she said.
Whitney grabbed the remote and turned on the big screen TV and flipped the channel to a cable news station. A news announcer appeared.
“In our lead story tonight, scientists around the world are amazed and befuddled with the sudden changes that have occurred on Earths closest neighbour Mars. It appears that the planets crust has suddenly released large amounts of gas giving the planet a much thicker atmosphere. We have the latest pictures from the KEK telescope in Hawaii.”
The TV showed a fuzzy image of Mars now blue and white with a tinge of red.
“We have with us renowned astrologer George Smith to answer some questions.”
“That’s astronomer Gwen,” said George.
“Ya whatever, so what’s the scoop Mr. Smith is it aliens or what?”
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(Pages 1-36 show above.)