From Many Places

Nora was acclimating quicker now. The first few days she'd only talked to me, Nerin, and occasionally Nai. But with each thing she learned, she seemed to accelerate. During our workshops she was talking with other Adepts and specifically barring me from translating anything. Now, she was struggling through a conversation with Tiv about bio-Adeptry. She’d come a long way with Starspeak, but she also had a long way still to go.

Something about interfaces and motile creations, no doubt related to her tendril trick.

I was failing to keep an ear on the conversation, fascinating as I knew it was. No, today I wasn’t very talkative in our psionic workshop. I was absorbed with my own mind.

It felt like I was on the cusp of a breakthrough.

Ever since Tiv’s clone had expired with psionics in its head, I’d been mulling a theory in the back of my head.

I just couldn’t get over how the clone’s psionics had persisted in some perceptible form for a few moments. In the moment, I’d assumed that the psionic pieces had just eroded without a mind to stabilize them.

And yet that didn’t quite track.

Strictly speaking, the transceiver I’d shared wasn’t one creation—it was two. An extremely simple receiver, and a relatively more complex transmitter.

Based on that disparity, you would have expected the transmitter to erode more quickly. It was more intricate. Or rather, the receiver was passive. It was so incredibly simple that it should have lasted longer.

Yet, I’d lost sight of them both simultaneously after the clone expired.

So…what if they hadn’t been eroding, as we’d previously assumed?

What if psionics remained perceptible outside of a mind, even if briefly?

Disconnecting a construct from a mind was easy, but the more I chewed through the problem, the more I realized how narrow our methods of psionic perception had been.

Even my radar, which was dozens of times more advanced than any other current psionic perception tool, was painfully limited to perceiving minds.

It looked at consciousnesses. People.

Technically, it wasn’t suited to look at psionics themselves.

That begged the question just how perceiving psionics worked. They were attached to our minds in some abstract way, but not identically between individuals.

Nora’s ‘grip’ on her constructs was much looser than Nai’s. It was easier to perceive her tools and when they were active.

Nai’s psionics, by comparison, were opaque to almost everyone but me. And I could only perceive her psionics because of my own original mega-construct. Daniel’s ‘phantom’, and whatever connection it had made between us.

It was that inscrutable connection I wanted to analyze.

The radar in Nai’s head perceived minds, most specifically, their physical positions. But it did very little to illuminate what connection had been forged between us, or if that connection still existed, was dormant, or had already exchanged all the information in our minds it cared to.

So without a tool for the job, I wanted to make one. Something geared more for perceiving psionics themselves, even those not in my own mind…

Easier said than done.

Even after several days of beta versions. It was frustrating. Building that tool revealed a new fundamental limitation to psionics.

Or rather, a limitation to the minds wielding them.

I’d been dragging my feet recreating my radar. There were a number of additional functions that I’d thought would be nice to include in the rebuild. Pursuing each tangent and getting the new functions to cooperate had proved difficult. The current half-baked version was impressively good at spatial processing, but I hadn’t even begun to recreate the core functionality of sensing minds.

But as I was trying to put together this new perception tool, I ran into the same problems again, only this time they were coming from my incomplete spatial processor.

My mind, I realized, wasn’t capable of supporting too many perception tools at once. Tools with the same general purpose occupied the same conceptual space in my mind. I only had so much ‘perception’ or ‘sensory' space to work with.

Similar psionics became mutually exclusive.

If I wanted to build up my new psionics-detector, I’d need to trash the spatial processor.

I consulted,

I said.

I tossed her a crude reproduction of the spatial processor. It wouldn’t even be fully functional, in fact, next to the actual radar, it would be completely redundant.

But if I was right…

she said.

I guessed.

she reported.

Nai followed.

That posed problems.

It meant that there were going to be sharper opportunity costs to particular psionic creations than I’d previously imagined.

We were probably running into the limitations of ‘perception’ psionics this quickly only because of how advanced the radar Daniel and I had made was. That implied there would be similar limits with other mental functions.

How much overlap would there be between related functions? What qualified as a distinct function?

Okay, okay, let’s not get sidetracked. One problem at a time.

To make my new psionic-detector, I was going to have to destroy my spatial processor.

That sucked. My progress had been rough around the edges, but I’d put a lot of work on it. I didn’t want to just throw it away.

A new possibility occurred to me.

Half of this endeavor was based on the hunch that psionics, when disconnected from a mind, might persist for longer than previously assumed. So, if psionics decayed, and did so much slower when connected to a mind: what if it wasn’t a mind they were connected to?

External hard drive…

The grin on my face was probably manic.

Okay, new material. Normal safeguards should be fine. Inert physical structure should be fine. No biocompatibility…

After those precautions, it was a matter of sharpening my focus on what qualities I wanted in this new material.

I reached out, bending energy into quasi-matter. A material never before seen in the universe shimmered into existence in my hand.

It was dark block of stone with a faint orange sheen around the edges. It was small and rectangular, like a particularly boring chess piece.

But cascading it made me burst into fits of mad laughter.

“[Caleb?]” Nora asked. She wasn’t the only one concerned. Nai and several other workshop members had noticed. Even Tiv gave pause.

It was incompatible with active psionics. The spatial processor had to be deactivated and…compressed, just like a computer file, in order to be stored inside my new creation.

“[Catch,]” I told Nora, tossing it to her.

“What. Is. It?” she asked in Starspeak.

“Cascade,” I answered.

Her eyes widened.

“I took your idea,” I said. “Set a definite expiration date. Can you extract it?”

“Yes!” Nora grinned. Yeah, that was the right expression. She tossed the storage stone back to me. I could feel it was empty.

I whipped up a quick psionic document, copied it a few times, and stuffed it into the storage stone.

“Your turn, Nai,” I said, tossing her the stone.

She caught it and cascaded it. Her expression betrayed exactly when she read the words on the psionic page stored inside:

Psionics can be stored in physical objects. Take one, pass it on.

“You just cracked this? Here, now?” one of the workshop Adepts asked.

I nodded.

“What constraints did you give the material?”

“Is it unique? Could different qualities be imposed while keeping the psionic storage capacity?”

“How does a physical structure contain something that has no physical presence at all?”

Questions abounded, and it was the last one that I latched onto.

Whatever the truth about psionics was, whatever they actually ‘were’, the one undeniable fact about them was that we’d made them with Adeptry. And the properties of Adept creations varied according to the Adept creating them.

Therefore…

I made another instance of a storage stone, and whipped up a quick abstract psionic structure. It didn’t really need to do anything, but as long as I could tell if it was broken or whole, I could experiment.

“Here,” I said, passing the new storage stone around. “Take a look at this, then pass it back.”

“It doesn’t do anything,” Tiv frowned, considering what I’d put in the stone when it came to him.

“No,” I said. “But it can prove a fact.”

The workshop passed the stone back to me, and I snapped it in two in my hands. Sure enough, damage to the physical structure translated to the abstract construct it contained.

I passed the broken pieces around the group again, showing the now damaged construct.

“I think…we need to reconsider the assumption that psionics have no physical basis,” I said.

“You thought they might be detached from time,” Nai pointed out. “Still keen on going down that road?”

“No,” I admitted.

My conversation with Nora had reminded me of some of the more complicated physics I’d—well, not so much learned, but was aware of.

Matter and energy were the same thing.

Time and space were too.

“I’m not sure my assumptions are going to be valuable,” I said. “I might be too…intuitive about this. I’m flying too much by instinct, rather than comprehension.”

“Share them anyway,” Tiv suggested, analyzing the broken storage stone. “You never know.”

“Well, with this ‘storage stone’, I’m wondering if each of our psionics isn’t literally stored in our heads. What if psionics don’t connect to consciousness like we thought? What if they actually connect to the brain?”

“Ah…I see,” Tiv nodded. “Our flesh is not made by Adeptry though, so why would it have a characteristic of Adept matter?”

“Unless…” Nai said, “Caleb just happened to be first…what if the material you made isn’t special?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Nai snatched up the other piece of the broken storage stone in one hand and grabbed a carabiner from her hip.

“What’s the difference between these? Psionically? I mean.”

“One’s Adept made,” I said. “The other is just metal.”

“And so, you made this stone intentionally so that it might be able to hold psionics?”

“Yes.”

“And so how does it hold psionics?”

“I don’t know, but I meant for it to, and it does.”

She tossed me the carabiner.

The moment my fingers touched the metal, my cascade filled the loop of metal and found Nai’s message.

So can this.

“Oh boy…”

“[What is it?]” Nora asked.

I tossed her the carabiner.

“[Holy shit,]” she whispered.

Two workshops a day, each one usually split half-and-half between Adept drills and psionic tinkering.

But nobody was going to be doing Adept drills for the rest of today…

Psionics were…placeable, within even non-exotic materials. How long would they last? The line between mental and physical had already been blurry.

·····

Things were not simplified any more when Nora made a breakthrough of her own.

Two days later Nora let out an excited squeal.

“[Ahhh! Yes!]”

In her hands she held a small lightbulb attached to a small block.

“[On. Off. On. Off. Blink-blink-blink. Onoffonoffon!]”

The bulb blinked to match her words and I saw the block didn’t have a button or switch on it.

She handed me the creation, and I cascaded the circuit she made. It was a rudimentary battery connected to a bulb, but the filament in the bulb was one of the most exotic materials I’d ever tried to comprehend.

“[Dash-dot-dash-dot, dot-dot-dot-dot, dot, dash-dot-dash-dot, dash-dot-dash…Dot-dot, dash…Dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dash, dash!]”

She matched the morse code with the light bulb, the conductive filament inside responding to the psionic signal she’d aimed at it. Its…electrical conductivity wasn’t constant. Something about the material was modulating itself in accordance with the presence or absence of her psionic signal.

It was simple and crude, but she’d taken the torch and run with it. It wasn’t just possible to store psionics in physical objects, it was possible to make Adept materials influenceable by psionics too.

“Oh… shit…” I realized.

·····

I would have gone to Laranta, but she was busy.

For the umpteenth time I wished she would take up psionics—it would have made it so easy to touch base with someone important—but she didn’t want to risk compromising her faculties, or her subordinates’ trust in her judgement. It wasn’t keen reasoning to me, but I wasn’t going to press the issue, nor could I force her.

So finding Ase Serralinitus would have to do.

His pit bull of a clerk, Dirdten, surprisingly did not bar me from his office.

“I don’t need an appointment?” I asked.

“Ase Serral isn’t typically stationed here,” Dirdten drawled. “And he isn’t exactly in command of Demon’s Pit anymore. Most of his duties now are related to you and this investigation you’re not contributing to. It would be inane to keep him from those duties…”

Oh wow. He was in a good mood today. Usually Serral’s aide couldn’t get through one sentence without telling me I was ruining the Ase’s career.

“I’ve been busy with the obvious? You really think Serral isn’t going to benefit from another human being brought up to speed? You know, once Nora’s got a grasp for Starspeak, Serral doesn’t have to rely on me for information, right? He’ll get to talk to Nora too.”

“Dealing with one child is already insulting to his station,” he grumbled. “Go in.”

Yeah, that was typical.

I’d found Serral was a much more flexible Casti than most of his peers’ impressions would suggest.

But the reasons I needed to speak with him today had nothing to do with his attitude.

I needed his expertise in logistics and alien science, the cunning rationality of someone near the top of an interstellar military…

Because the facts eluded me.

“Caleb,” Serral greeted me. “I thought we weren’t meeting about the other abductees today.”

“This is unrelated,” I said. “At least not directly. I need to ask you more about Beacon travel and what Marshal Tispas’ accused me—accused psionics of.”

“The Marshal doesn’t have any firsthand information about psionics. Nora was unaware of them, nor did she indicate any of her group had created any. They are presumably a creation unique to you.”

“But the Beacons,” I said. “They are out.”

“Only in Vorak space,” Serral said. “And even so, reports are difficult to confirm—being Vorak controlled space…why do you ask?”

“Because I dismissed the idea initially because psionics had only ever interacted with minds, consciousnesses. But now, I’m concerned, because of this.”

I recreated Nora’s psionically controlled lightbulb and placed it before Serralinitus. Attached to the creation was a psionic tag instructing the Ase what signal it would respond to.

He flicked it on and off a few times in awe.

“Beacons are some of the most advanced Adept technology ever. They depend on a hundred different crazy exotic materials and components, and I’m worried…it’s possible Tispas could be right,” I explained.

“You think…one of the exotic materials in the Beacons might have been influenced by psionics somehow.”

“I…I don’t know what I think,” I admitted. “But I’m concerned, and I didn’t know who else to bring it up to.”

“What you’re talking about…it’s almost unprecedented. Two completely unrelated Adept creations…”

“Not two,” I said. “My one, and dozens in the beacon components. And it’s not completely unprecedented is it?”

“…No,” Serral admitted. “It’s exceedingly unlikely. But…no, it’s not impossible.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but what if Marshal Tispas can be taken at his word? What if psionics are dangerous?”

“If—and I mean if— psionics are as dangerous as Tispas says, then he has no one to blame but himself,” Serral said. “If his motivations really are what he claims, then he utterly failed to present his concerns sooner.”

“But if psionics really could knock out more Beacons, aren’t I putting people at risk?”

“Not intentionally,” Serral said. “Caleb, the truth is you’re concerned about what you’ve created, and that’s good. It’s a healthy instinct, but even if Tispas is unambiguously correct, what could you do about it?”

“I could research the problem,” I said. “I could dig into the risks psionics pose—”

Wait.

“…And you’re already doing all of that. If—and again, I mean if— psionics are dangerous, then none of your actions need to change. We couldn’t just throw away psionics blindly hoping abandoning them might solve the problem. No, the correct course would be to research exactly what went wrong, learn precisely how the Beacons were shut down.”

“…Tispas is acting blind,” I gathered. “He’s leapt to assumptions because he doesn’t know details. So he’s fearing for the worst.”

“Indeed.”

Ase Serralinitus had never given me an indication he was unreasonable before. But he was now, in an unexpected way. Unless I was mistaken…he was sugarcoating it.

“Alright, unless Tispas is extremely correct, it doesn’t matter. But, what if it is that worst case scenario? What happens to me then? I don’t mean with the Vorak, I mean with the Coalition? What are you guys going to do if I pose a threat to interstellar travel and stability?”

“…I do not know,” Serral admitted. “But I do understand why you ask.”

I’d made a deal with them, the Coalition he served. They would help me, help the human abductees. And in exchange, I was teaching them my secrets.

So what if one of those secrets was toxic? Worse, what if helping us humans was the source?

“I’m…letting myself imagine a worst-case scenario,” I admitted. “Where we succeed, rescue Nora’s campers, and we’re stuck here anyway. What if we get through all the other steps, what if we even find Earth, and we can’t go back because the Beacons are ruined?”

Serral, master stoic, hid all but the faintest traces of his feelings. But I saw the tension in his face.

It was more emotion than I’d expected. Just how possible were these fears?

“I keep forgetting,” he admitted. “It’s painful every time I remember.”

I gave him a questioning look.

“That you are a child,” he explained, “and that somewhere, someone tore you from your home. War is my business, and it is a brutal business. But…abducting children…that quality of evil, that it even exists…it disturbs me.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Your question,” he explained, “reminded me of your age. I’m sorry. But the truth is, you still have some of a child’s instinct: to look for a parent, or a peer for a solution first.”

“I didn’t think that was a bad thing.”

“Far from it,” Serral agreed. “But you are the most accomplished psionic in known existence. You are asking what the Coalition might do confronted with such a problem?”

I fell silent, realizing their answer.

“You would come to me.”

Suddenly there was a weight pressing down on me, and I realized just how Nora felt about her campers.

She was responsible for them. Their leader.

And if Tispas’s fears came to pass, then it would come down to me more than anyone else to find us a way home.

“…I think I need to hop back in on the investigation,” I said.

“Nora’s still not fluent,” Serral pointed out.

“Then she’s going to have to learn to swim in the deep end of the pool. I don’t want to chance anything. If Tispas is right, then the Beacon problem is spreading. That puts us on a clock. We can’t afford to wait.”

“We can learn more about the Beacons,” Serral promised. “You’re not going to be stranded here.”

“I know,” I said, “because we’re going to find whoever set this whole mess in motion.