Eyre was sitting a large glass desk. She dressed in a black corporate suit with a skirt and heels her red hair tied back in a bun. Much had changed in the five hundred years since her mother’s disappearance. The large windows of her high-rise office looked out to a glowing neon city in the night cycle of the environmental dome. She was typing on the glass of her desk and watched some numbers and data scroll past her on a holographic screen. A band on her wrist began to vibrate and swept her hand over and towards her desk and a black-haired woman with purple cybernetic eyes appeared in three-dimensional hologram form.

“President.”

“I prefer Chairwoman.”

“Of course, you do, the other one makes you feel like your mother. What’s up hon?”

The black haired woman frowned at Eyre.

“How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make me feel like I’m a fifteen-year-old girl again.”

“It’s a mom thing, you should try it sometime.”

“Very funny. How is Mitena?”

“The usual. Living in sin with Violet. Organizing protests. Lobbying for dreg rights, environmental reforms, and a solution for the grey.”

“And you’re still supporting all of them for her with Aurelius Corp funds.”

“I’m her sister. Of course, I am.”

“Are you calling to catch up or is this business?”

“Business. I’m looking over the…funding for Project: Black Hole.”

“Yes?”

The chairwoman of the WTO held up a datacrystal.

“You handed me a massively redacted file with a project name and a cost estimate. With all due respect to you as my sort of surrogate motherly figure, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”

“Check the approved box and digitally sign it.”

“Unfortunately, I’m the Chairwoman of the World Trade Organization and President of the System Alliance, not the World Charity Organization. I have board members to answer to, one of which is you.”

“What would you say to instant transit between planets, and eventually different solar systems, no FTL drive just fly in one end and out the other?”

“I would say, that sounds awesome. However, this doesn’t say that, this says, Project: Black Hole, Projected cost estimate – one hundred trillion dollars.”

“Look, corporations would start wars to get a hold of this tech that Maria has theorized is possible. We were specifically vague. Aurelius corporation is matching WTO contributions and giving sharing the tech with them and no one else. WTO has exclusive rights to it and pays Aurelius some royalties.”

“What are you getting out of it?”

“My mother back.”

“Stop. Hold up. What?”

“Maria can already create wormholes between two points with a send and a receive. To do it without an end point requires massive power draw, could be potentially dangerous. But it also means we don’t have to target our space-time; We could say target a pocket universe eight hundred years ago. We need the tech to be secret and we need it far away from anywhere it can cause catastrophic damage, like say anywhere near the sun. I know you have a secret shipyard by Pluto and combat drone factory on the planet. I simply want to refit the station there. We’ll call it Pluto Defensive Station. Put some weapons on it, say we’re guarding the solar system. You’re the queen of dazzling the board with bullshit I’m sure you’ll think of something. Then we station Maria there, she is an Admiral in the WTO space forces. We fund the project, WTO eventually get a gate system that lets people transit between planets and star systems like they’re hopping on an elevator. That the WTO has exclusive rights to market, or control as it sees fit. Aurelius gets twenty-five percent of revenue once the gate system is in place. And might I add, we can already do point to point with two gates. Imagine, someone lives on Earth but works in the Asteroid mines. You charge that person a hundred credits a month for access to that specific gateway, or better yet, you sign contracts with the mining corp for yearly usage rights… It pays for itself. You just have to tell the board this project will revolutionize our entire transportation system and leave it vague.”

“Great, but go back to the part where you are going to get your mother back.”

“My mother trapped herself in a pocket universe we could not get too. Maria thinks she can reverse engineer your temporal shielding technology to create a time portal into that dimension.”

“No. You cannot do that. You know why you can’t.”

“We can. The gateways will be to other dimensions, so there won’t be any temporal events here. Also, that is why we’re doing it at Pluto. If Alpha Centauri was viable for the project I’d say we go there but it still takes nine months to get there. Besides you said it yourself war is inevitable. Try as I might I will not get the vampires on your side. My mother can. They are still scared she’s going to reach out of her grave and turn them to ash. Hell, the young ones have a whole mythology that she is going to wake up and devour them all to slake her eternal thirst.”

“Okay, I see the benefit of that. Are you sure she won’t bring the evil whatsit with her?”

“Donno, but hey we can trap him in a body, send a ship on a collision course with a black hole at max speed and dust our hands of him now. Unlike five hundred years ago.”

“One last question. What is the maximum range on these…gates?”

“Currently? Maria has tested one from a ship orbiting Neptune.”

“And she is sure she can do it for ships?”

“If it works how she theorizes, we could send a ship, anywhere in the universe almost instantaneously if we had the coordinates, with a big enough gate.”

“Wow.”

“Take the fight to your enemy.”

“Okay I’ll sign off on it. You could have just put this in the request.”

“And risk someone seeing it?”

“Thanks Eyre.”

“Thank you, hon.”