It didn’t take long to reach the surface, relatively speaking. Izzy lead us down a hall off of the main room, giving me a chance to look at the dead, frozen bodies of all the people Rook had turned into robots as well as his own transformed body.
Amy shuddered as she passed it, telling me, “The little bit of him that’s left saw his dead body. Even for him, it’s weird and creepy.”
Haley shook her head, saying only, “Yuck.” Continue reading Reality Tweaks: Part 4
Lim glanced off to the side, adding, “I really should go now. I’m going to assume that explaining what’s going on with Ray’s corpse and the Xiniti is one of those things that would cause more problems if you explain it than if you don’t. Tell me if that changes.”
“Sure,” I said, intending to say nothing forever unless Ray reappeared on Earth.
Lim stared into the camera for a moment, giving the impression that he was studying me even though I knew he was just getting a still of the Rocket suit in his video feed. Continue reading Reality Tweaks: Part 3
The glowing ring of the portal appeared before us, with the grey concrete of the dock’s control room visible through the circle. It grew larger by the instant, making it clear that we were exiting immediately.
It was less that we stepped through to the room, so much as fell through at an angle. There was no law, I supposed, that a tunnel through time and space had to synchronize with the orientation of the exit point.
Haley let go of my hand, rolling and coming to her feet. I turned on the suit’s anti-gravity, floating to the ceiling like a Rocket-sized party balloon. Continue reading Reality Tweaks: Part 1
From where she stood next to Nataw, Kee smiled. “You met him in the future, and he chose not to kill you. I think Govan will be reasonable, provided we’re talking to the version of him who spared you. If we’re about to talk to a version of him that doesn’t know anything about that, it could become messy.”
“Great,” I thought back to her.
Tiger, meanwhile, had begun to sniff Nataw and Lee, starting with their butts and crotches.
I wondered if he’d still do that if he understood that they were older than our universe. Then it struck me that, given his understanding of English, he might have decided to start there because he’s a dog.
Nataw watched him and then scratched Tiger behind the ears. Then he said a word that my implant translated as Hideaway’s name in the language of a long-fallen galactic empire. “[Hideaway]. You’re a long way from home. I never liked the Abominators, but I did like what they did with your people. Dogs for hunting dinosaurs. Who’s a good boy?”
Tiger leaned in to the head scratches. Continue reading Engine: Part 8
Lee and Nataw stepped up to the group. I overheard Lee say, “I told you that I couldn’t go with you because I was already inside but from a different time. It wasn’t that far, but the future’s unpredictable.”
He looked over the group—both versions of the League and Jody’s unconscious body on the ground.
“This is Nataw. He’s a very, very old friend.” Then he winked.
Grandpa said, “One of your people.” Continue reading Engine: Part 7
The dog observed the hand and sniffed it, but didn’t lick it. Tiger was smart enough to know he didn’t want to taste the metal-and-ceramic gauntlet.
Within a few moments, everyone had arrived: the old Heroes’ League, the new, Prentkos, and both Jody’s and Colette’s unconscious bodies. Talk about not being able to save everyone. Being turned into Rook’s mind-controlled cyborg was still in this Jody’s future. Though I didn’t need to, I made a check, changing that future had the same problems as saving Travis. I checked on Colette, too, but hers wasn’t any different.
I could do it, but it wouldn’t be worth the price. Continue reading Engine: Part 5
“I have the ability,” she said, “but I’ll need ideas from you for how to do it. I’m not allowed to change the past on my own without the command of a living being.”
“Okay,” I said, and realizing that this might take long enough that people would notice, I asked, “How hard is it to stop time?”
The instant I thought it, I knew. Using the device, it wasn’t hard at all. Everything froze around me, and I told Spark, “Tell me if I’ve got this right. Because Lee left this place hidden and abandoned, all times from the moment that he left until now are accessible if someone opened a portal here and stayed?”
She nodded. Continue reading Engine: Part 4
Hoping that if Ray realized he’d been manipulated by telepaths, he wouldn’t decide to come back and kill me, I connected with the device and instantly understood how to send him back to his own time.
It was actually simple. Ejecting him to anywhere else would be hard and not just hard. It would also have consequences, changing the past in ways I couldn’t predict.
I hadn’t been wrong about my earlier guess about obvious subsystems to include. The GCD did include subsystems for predicting what would happen based on what someone had experienced in here and being sent back to their own time.
Using them, however, was another thing. Continue reading Engine: Part 2
As the stone touched my gauntlet, I connected with it and through it the Galaxy Core Device (GCD) itself. How did it feel to use a device that could destroy galaxies and create new ones?
You’d think it would be a moment of enlightenment or maybe ascension, since you assumed powers that you’d normally think were reserved for gods.
What surprised me is how normal it felt. I’d been absorbing knowledge from my implant on demand for years now. I’d been training with Kee to understand what Artificers could do for years and while I’d only been interfacing with Abominator and Artificer technology with those skills for a few days, it felt natural. Continue reading Engine: Part 1