Interlude-Second Chair

(English)

Jordan knew she needed to pull her weight.

The night Caleb had crashed and burned in front of all the abductees, Jordan had been worried. She hadn’t known him very long. Just a couple weeks. She’d felt so guilty not sticking up for him, but he’d brushed off her silence.

It never occurred to him that she’d let him down in any way.

And yet he’d quickly agreed to leave her with the psionic half of their work here. What had she done to earn that kind of trust?

Whatever the reason, she wasted no time getting to work.

·····

The psionics activity group was impressive.

A handful of the youngest kids were muddling their way toward something AR adjacent; (the words ‘shared mental hologram’ had been tossed around a few times). Valerie—a girl with foot-long bug antenna sticking out of her temples—was doing solo research about traditional psychic abilities, trying to see if they could be misunderstood forms of psionics. There was a rumor about a group trying to figure out why psionics could be embedded into real matter, but Jordan hadn’t managed to learn more about that.

She had her own concerns, namely, deciphering Caleb’s notes.

‘Superconstructs handle orders of magnitude more psionic ‘stuff’ than ordinary psionics. They’re more draining to use, but it’s really unintuitive why that is. Because they—my superconnector, at least—sure seems to operate on zero physical energy. Or maybe it’s just infinitesimally close to zero. Kinda a moot point. But there’s still a clear difference in burden between the superconstruct and ordinary constructs. So its it just in the brain? Does it take our nervous system more calories to handle connecting to something like that? It feels like the superconnector itself could require zero energy, but the neurons in the brain that respond to it can still be taxed and exhausted.’

They went on like that.

For a while.

Caleb left her with so many stray notes on the topic, she was worried she would run out of room. But unlike the psionic documents she kept, Caleb’s seemed to fold down into compressed versions of themselves for storage. In the storage state, each one could be easily organized according to their timestamps, but that wasn’t truly helpful.

Caleb had almost a year’s worth of documents filled to the brim with endless notes.

Even with how easy psionics made reading—she could practically do it passively—there was still too much content to absorb, much less comprehend.

So she had to pick a different starting point.

Caleb had been pretty vague explaining his superconnector, but when they’d been preparing to leave for Kemon’s camp, Jordan got a better view of it. Caleb had adjusted his firewall to be transparent so Jordan could give feedback on how well he’d disguised the superconnector.

As he’d wrapped it in layer after layer of psionic insulation, she’d noticed that it…’physically’ took up less room…Surely that couldn’t be the right word though. Psionics were anything but. And yet, mental space was nonetheless limited. And when completely shut down, the superconnector had folded up into something half its normal size.

So it was ‘size’ Jordan tried to replicate first.

She already knew that the distance a signal could propagate was related to the size of the psionic construct used to broadcast it.

But how big could you get one of those transmitters? She could only make the transmitter so large in her own mind…but what about beyond?

The question ate at her for days until Caleb rang for her help putting together some music for everyone.

It was a welcome distraction, but Jordan put herself back to work immediately.

·····

Movie night had come once again, and the shallow variety in entertainment was beginning to show. The Princess Bride was showing again.

It was a great movie, no matter how many times they watched it. But kids on the periphery of the dozens of couches were mostly chatting among themselves, not paying so much attention to the dialogue.

But Caleb’s loudspeaker rig let everyone hear the movie better than ever, and one of the psionics activity groups had put together Starspeak subtitles for the aliens to follow.

Jordan noticed the ‘left-handed’ exchange garnered a lot more laughs with the benefit of good translation…

Really, she was paying more attention to everyone else rather than the movie itself. Her sister was the same.

They two of them had been sitting together out of everyone’s way so their idle chit-chat didn’t disturb the movie. But apparently Drew finally got fed up with chit-chat.

“Alright, I give up,” Drew sighed dramatically. “Are you going to tell me what you’re up to or not?”

Jordan’s gut clenched.

Drew exaggerated the words. Back home she’d already been one of the most energetic and enthusiastic people Jordan knew. Out among the stars, Drew wore exuberance like armor.

An instinct Jordan couldn’t identify told her why; she was exaggerating her tone because she knew no one could see her face.

“…No,” Jordan admitted. “I can’t spill the beans just yet.”

“Okay.”

Jordan blinked. She’d not expected Drew to fold so easily.

“Just like that?”

“Sure,” Drew said, shrugging.

“…Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why not get more on my case?”

“Because it’s personal? I’m not going to pry any more than just asking if you’re ready to talk,” Drew said. “We’ve all been through a lot. You more than the rest of us, I think.”

“That’s not…” Jordan frowned. “It’s not a trauma secret that I’m just not ready to share…”

“Oh. Okay. But you’re still not going to tell me right now, right?”

“Yes…” Jordan said.

Drew shrugged again, turning to face the movie more.

“…And you aren’t mad about that?” Jordan asked.

“No, why would I be?”

“Because I’m keeping a secret from you, for very not emotional reasons,” Jordan said.

“Ah. Gotcha. Big sis is feeling all guilty,” Drew needled. Even invisible, it was impossible to miss her grin.

“Shut up,” Jordan hissed.

“Ahaha, knew it,” Drew said. But…she made no effort to continue the thought.

“That’s not the point—” Jordan tried.

“Shutupshutup, this is my favorite part,” Drew said. “You fell for one of the classic blunders!”

“You’ve gotten really frustrating to talk to ever since you turned invisible,” Jordan complained.

“Come on, you’re the Roman Empire nerd,” Drew said. “You can’t appreciate a good joke about a land war in Asia?”

“You can’t just correctly suss out that I’m feeling guilty and then just ignore it,” Jordan said.

“Why not? Maybe you should feel a little guilty,” Drew joked.

“Drew!”

“Kidding, kidding…” her little sister said.

“I feel bad about this,” Jordan said. “Why aren’t you upset?”

“You said it yourself, didn’t you? You’re keeping a secret for ‘very not emotional reasons’. I trust you. If you’re keeping a secret, those not-emotional-reasons are probably pretty good.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Jordan said.

“Tough,” Drew shrugged yet again. “I am only mortal. There’s only so much I can do. You taught me not everything needs to be complicated. Sure, it would be really easy to be hurt over this, but a simple change in perspective makes it easy to see the truth; you’ll tell me when you’re good and ready.”

“…Yeah, I will.”

“Cool. Let’s talk about something else.”

Uhhh…

“Okay…what’s it like being invisible?” Jordan asked.

“Weird,” Drew gushed. “I am never ever going to get used to it. You’ve seen what it looks like when I eat? The stuff just…vanishes!”

Jordan let out a giggle despite herself. It was a baffling sight. She took advantage of the relaxed evening to collect herself, trading small talk with Drew until long after the movie was over.

“Whatever else…I’m just glad you’re safe,” Jordan said.

“I hate that you’re out here too,” Drew said quietly, “but I’m glad you’re safe too.”

·····

Jordan said.

It was a small matter for Jordan to cover for Caleb’s absence in the morning jog. She’d thought no excuse would be necessary, with a hundred kids running, who’d notice just one missing?

But the older abductees literally stood out among the shorter, younger crowd. It would only take one person asking where ‘Ted’ was to risk someone poking into what Caleb was up to. So if anyone asked, Jordan was ready with a tried-and-true distraction that was more embarrassing than the truth. Just in case anyone asked.

she warned.

He didn’t reply immediately. Jordan could imagine how tempted he was to tempt fate in turn. But he decided to leave it for another day.

he said.

Jordan said serenely.

he grouched.

His lack of progress digging into Kemon’s affairs was disheartening, but Jordan was not encountering as many delays.

Obstacles, sure. But her progress was steady, and she had plenty of ways to circumvent anyone who might pry about the psionic monstrosity she was putting together.

The excuse she used was meditation.

In the last hours of afternoon activity groups and dinner, she isolated herself atop a good rock and…‘meditated’.

No one begrudged her the time. They’d all been abducted by aliens. More than most other abductees, Jordan had become friends with the other girls on her ship only to watch them die right in front of her.

It galled her that their peers gave her leeway. Really, she was abandoning several kids to their own devices, foisting them off onto other accountable abductees. No one complained.

Caleb had been through much worse, and intimated as much to everyone. But reactions had been totally different.

But her false meditation became something close to the genuine article.

Working on psionics was so cerebral, shutting herself off from her surroundings was actually helpful. According to Caleb, Nora had been awake on Lakandt about three months, and put together a superconstruct in secret within that time.

And that was under Caleb’s scrutiny.

Jordan didn’t know her deadline, but she knew no one here knew psionics like Caleb did. She felt clear to make more aggressive progress. There were only a handful of abductees who had the skills to peer past the default firewall, and even though her psionic defenses appeared default, Jordan knew Caleb had given her anything but.

The firewall was the first piece of psionic work that had inspired her to look for psionic answers beyond the confines of her own mind. What exactly defined the boundary of her ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’ was rather nebulous. But she was sure of one thing: the firewall wasn’t properly stored ‘within’ the mind the same way other constructs were.

The whole point of a wall was to be outside. Now, in the firewall’s case, it was not all beyond the mind’s edge. The pillars that anchored it in her mind were of course in her mind. And yet some of the construct could stretch a tiny bit outside her mind.

So what exactly was that space?

The inside of her mind was easy. It was practically self-comprehending. But beyond…it was the empty void, stretching out endlessly until, somewhere in the distance, you could detect the flickering light of someone else’s mind in the distance.

Minds were, Jordan thought, easy to think of like cities or castles. With the firewall and transceivers, it was tempting to think of terrestrial metaphors. One city using radios to talk with another, or a medieval town defending itself behind tall stone walls…

But the more she mulled over that metaphor, the more she decided it didn’t quite fit.

Minds were much more like planets in her mind. Maddeningly intricate, increasingly detailed the smaller in scope you examined, surrounded on all sides by empty void, perpetually buzzing with activity and yet also startlingly still at a distance.

So she imagined the psionic firewall, not as a set of castle walls, but some kind of fantastic planetary defense shield. The firewall hovered a few miles above the surface of her mind’s planet, touching the ground nowhere, yet still undoubtedly anchored to her mind/planet.

What did she need to reach further into the void then?

Caleb’s superconnector apparently built bridges between consciousnesses. The mere prospect of that boggled her mind. She couldn’t imagine any kind of structure that could somehow extend from one mind’s planet to another.

The sheer distance alone made minds and planets faint specks of light in the distance. It daunted her.

And that intimidation was all it took for her meditation to break.

Rats.

Jordan climbed to her feet to stretch while she shook off the discouragement. Just minutes later, she was back at it, breathing deeply…drawing herself back into that state…

·····

Jordan got quicker at it over the weeks.

She fell deeper, pushing her brain at the problem. Inspiration was fickle. She couldn’t count on it coming to her, so she had to hunt it down. Like gas filling a container, or liquid flowing to find every crack…it felt like she needed to move in every direction at once. But she lacked the words to describe the directions.

Psionics didn’t deal in ‘up’ or ‘down’, ‘unders’ or ‘overs’.

Her mind’s planet had a ‘north’, but just like back home, it was arbitrary. Space itself didn’t have a direction. Even something moving on its own couldn’t have a direction. Something on its own couldn’t even have motion.

It was all relative…

The question was…were psionics the same as those ‘somethings’?

Going as painstakingly slow as she could…psionics could travel through space. Through volume. But simultaneously, they didn’t exist in that space. So were they like tangible constructs with proper mass, that just didn’t interact with anything? What if psionic constructs and their signals didn’t follow the same rules? Didn’t move through the same space?

The beginnings of her superconstruct had long since become clear.

It was a grand machine stretching across the surface of her mind’s planet. Like an entire continent turned into…well she wasn’t sure about that part.

Maybe it needed to be like a satellite dish, for gathering and amplifying signals.

Or maybe it needed to be smaller, a more intensive project, punching a hole through space…

Space.

Relativity.

The words were more discouraging than anything else know. How did you go faster than light? It was impossible. You had to go shorter than light instead.

But how?

That question was a wall, looming in front of her.

It silently taunted her daily. Jordan had never thought of herself as a competitive person. Not once. But in front of that wall, she thought of Nora having grasped a superconstruct to decipher the incomprehensible noise of neuromuscular cells. She thought of Caleb, halfway to insanity and delirium, forging something capable of fusing minds and unifying raw perspective and experiences.

Jordan wasn’t a competitive person on her own. But when she thought of what Drew might say…it wasn’t hard to imagine.

‘You’re just as cool as both of them! You can definitely make something impossible for either of those chumps’.

And Jordan hated letting her little sister down.

·····

Weeks later, Kemon announced their departure from the planet.

Caleb shot her a questioning glance. It was surprising, seeing him unsure enough to check with her. But she nodded reassuringly, not totally knowing what exactly he was thinking. But he darted out the door after Kemon.

Ah, another risky conversation.

She didn’t feel like she’d made any mistake reassuring him. If there was one thing she’d learned about Caleb Hane, it was that he learned from his mistakes. Whatever Caleb’s past social blunders, Kemon had better watch out.

Jordan busied herself the same way she did every evening then, climbing atop a good rock under the stars and letting her mind open up upon itself.

And just like every other evening, that damn wall stood in her way again.

How?

How?

How?

Drew had taken to meditating alongside her some evenings. Her presence was no help whatsoever, but her sister wasn’t distracting either. So Jordan continued to dive through her psionics, making attempt after attempt. Throwing out idea after idea.

It was a game of resilience really. Steadfastly, with all her heart, she had to believe a solution truly existed. Anything short of a refusal to believe otherwise would break her.

She needed a solution to exist.

Therefore, she must assume one did.

So…

How do you go shorter than light?

Light moved in straight lines, never going backwards upon itself. Only bending for gravity. And even then, the light wasn’t really bending. It was spacetime that was bending. The light just kept moving straight.

So what if everything was actually bent? What if everything in the universe moved in a bent way, and things that looked like they moved in curves were actually just moving in two curves simultaneously? Maybe light moved in curves too, and just gave the impression of moving in a straight line because no one had ever managed to grasp what a truly straight line was?

If space and time were the same…

…Then time was just like space. Then what if light curved…through time?

Gah. Caleb’s notes on physics were the worst combination of helpful and arcane.

Jordan needed her mind to think in a dimension beyond the ones she usually did. But that wall still loomed.

How?

How?

How?

The answer came as a possibility, and it sprang into her mind without ceremony or warning.

It didn’t feel like a triumphant breakthrough. It felt like just one more idea that would flounder upon the rocks. The very question wasn’t even fully formed in her mind. What exactly was the wall standing in her way?

There it remained, unmoving.

What had Drew said?

A simple change in perspective makes it easy to see the truth.

Maybe that obstacle wasn’t truly a wall like it seemed…

Maybe it was a cliff.

There was a millisecond where she doubted. Was this a good idea?

It might drive me insane.

I’m scared to find out.

But her mind went back to the moment Caleb had caught her knife with his bare hand. She’d been so stunned, she could hardly believe what he’d said.

‘This is a rescue.’

Months of agony and fear had crumbled at a single word. If something went wrong, she had good friends and allies to rescue her now.

Before she could let herself second guess it anymore, she tipped her mind over that cliff.

·····

What was a mind?

Just a brain? Something more? Something less?

Where was she?

…She?

…Who was she?

As soon as the question occurred to her, the answer popped into existence.

She was her. Of course. What else could she be?

Now… where was she?

She used to be more than this. She was not all of her. Not right now.

Where had the rest of her gone?

Ah…

‘Where’ indeed? It was a decision. Decisions could be changed, if you accepted the consequences. Her ‘where’ was a decision, one she’d need to make carefully. But it was still her decision.

She decided on a new ‘where’—or, actually an old ‘where’, the one she’d had minutes ago—immediately finding herself in the same place as her missing parts—the rest of her.

As she came back to herself, physical sensations started returning.

Someone was screaming. Someone else was laughing.

·····

Jordan was laughing like a maniac. Howling fits of laughter cackled out of her lungs uncontrollably.

It was just too funny! It was the stupidest joke she could never hope to begin putting into words. This must have been how Caleb felt trying to explain Coalescence. It was just…obvious.

Baffling, that no one else could see it.

There were only three locations in the universe.

Here.

There.

Anywhere.

And her new superlocator was for meddling in those three.

Those first two were easy. Everyone understood ‘here’ and ‘there’. But anywhere… it was just as close to there as there or there, or there, there, and there, and there…and there…and everywhere! Everywhere was exactly as close to everything else as here. ‘Here’ was ‘there’ just as easily as it could be ‘anywhere’.

It practically rhymed! Physics could rhyme!

“Jordan!” Drew’s was frantic. She was screaming just inches away from her face.

Jordan knew she’d need to apologize to Drew later. Her sister had no context for what was going on. But coming out of her fugue, she couldn’t quite give Drew’s panic the reassurance it deserved.

She was just too caught up.

“” she shouted.

“Jordan, you are scaring me!”

The panic in Drew’s voice sharpened Jordan’s attention. She remembered where she was. Atop a rock. On an alien planet. With her scared sister.

“Sorry!” Jordan said, mania draining out of her voice. “Sorry.”

“Jordan, what was that? You’ve never sounded like that…” Drew said. Her voice was deathly quiet. No longer was she exaggerating her emotions in her tone. She was too worried right now.

Jordan dimly recognized this must be what Drew faced every time she wanted to decipher Jordan’s own stony expression. Whether invisible or inexpressive, no one could read their faces.

But Jordan knew what tricks Drew used. Her face might be unexpressive, but her posture wasn’t. So too was Drew’s mood still readable in how she carried herself.

Though…actually examining Drew’s posture, her mood was rather obvious.

Panic.

But of course she was. It would be trivially easy to mistake what just happened as a seizure.

“You are not—”

“I’m not fine. I am better than fine,” Jordan said breathlessly. “I am okay. I just…got a surprise is all. Sent me for a loop in my head.”

Drew was at a loss for words. Jordan could tell her sister wasn’t reassured.

“…I’m sorry…but…tough,” Jordan said. “This is important. And you’re right, I have real reasons not to share.”

“…But you’re going to, eventually, right?” Drew asked. “Share?”

“Soon,” Jordan promised.

Drew wiped invisible tears from her face, and sniffled. “...Okay,” she said, voice strengthening. “I trust you.”

“Thanks,” Jordan said.

she prodded on the most secure psionic line they had.

·····

As soon as Jordan fell asleep, she got to work.

Deep in slumber, she unfurled her new creation. It wasn’t her new superlocator. That had been made in a brilliant and terrible flash, all at once. But in order to use it, she’d need to move some ‘here’ to ‘there’ first, and that meant a scaled-up version of the psionic transmitter.

Jordan’s Adept range was almost a mile, so she used every scrap of it. Clocking in at exactly zero grams, materializing her emitter didn’t consume a lick of her mass limit. No one else could see as the arms of the thing unfurled beyond the limits of her mind.

Maybe Caleb would, but he’d have to be paying pretty close attention…

He didn’t really need to be involved. He’d already shared with her the most critical information in need of sharing.

The arms of her psionic emitter unfurled, reaching invisibly past her mind, brushing against the edges of real-space. When it was all ready, Jordan spun up her superlocator.

Its continent glowed white-hot on the surface of her mind’s planet, churning out a single drop of ‘here’.

She didn’t place the drop into the unfurled emitter yet, she needed to get return feedback first.

She needed something from ‘there’ to aim at.

That was a limitation of her creation, she supposed. You couldn’t get to ‘anywhere’ from ‘here’. Everything started ‘here’, that ‘here’ could move ‘anywhere’, and then it could be made ‘here’ again…’there’. ‘Here’ could be in two places then, but you had to get to ‘there’ from ‘anywhere’ first. There needed to be specific endpoints.

But of course there would be. All Jordan had done was learn how to draw lines between two points shorter than straight ones. They were still lines though. Lines with points. And specifically in her superlocator’s case, endpoints.

Jordan tapped the gas on her massive emitter. Just the tiniest fraction of its full signal output. It was still enough of a thrum to rattle Jordan’s psionic defenses. Would that have woken anyone up? She was using long-wavelength radio waves as her structuring metaphor. So probably not in camp…it was like signal cutting out too close to a radio tower.

But Kemon’s ship was in orbit. More than a single wavelength from her broadcast source. He would probably feel the pulse, at least a little bit. Hopefully only that much.

Jordan had to send out another pulse, every ten minutes, to satisfy her diligence. Each time, she bumped up the amplitude on her massive emitter. After seventy minutes of pulses, she finally got a recognizable return signal.

The direction…there. Low to the horizon, straight into space.

Jordan snatched her tiny glowing pearl of ‘here’ and dropped it into her emitter. She took the miles of unfurled arms and tightened them, curling them into spirals all converging on the direction she’d felt the feedback.

At just shy of one-third strength, Jordan pulsed her emitter and the mote of ‘here’ vanished from her mind and the planet, flung into deep space toward her target. Like throwing a grain of sand from Newfoundland all the way into a thimble in Vancouver.

Piece of cake.

·····

A white-hot pearl of impossibility crashed into Shinshay’s mind like a meteor. A tiny, tiny meteor. And from that meteor pearl came a torrent of information.

Shinshay’s mind flailed under the unexpected intrusion. It took them too long to realize they weren’t awake.

Jordan apologized.

Shinshay mumbled, struggling to cope with the dream.

Jordan said.

That was all the information Jordan herself shared, shoving the rest through in the form of a tightly wound psionic data card.

That was enough to get their attention, drowsy or not. It was what the whole crew had been waiting for.

Shinshay promised.

·····

“Captain,” the nav officer called. “You remember the Jackie Robinson?”

“The Coalition diplomatic ship?” Kemon asked. “Yes.”

“Well, I have an alert in the ship’s passive scans for any vessel that diverts course on a direct route toward us…most of them are just cargo, but…”

The Fafin officer showed Kemon the screen.

Sure enough.

The Jackie Robinson was making a hard burn, straight for Scozha.

“Dira, dira, [dammit!]” Kemon hissed.

They were so close! But this was bad. The timetable needed to move up.

Ready or not, Win needed to go, now.