On a Sailing Ship to Nowhere

Some interesting developments in the last week!

The control hub was pretty easy to find. I had obviously realised straight away that it must have motive power, to remain aligned with the Earth while closer to the Sun than Venus is. I also reasoned that they were probably using the stealthiest form of acceleration possible. I did an optical scan for stray light, and sure enough, it was there. A solar sail – very sneaky! They were sailing the solar wind to exert a suitable force vector on the motion and keep the hub in place.

I cloaked the minicruiser before approaching, of course. Since I was coming in along the radius, the reflected sunlight would have made me very visible otherwise. I passed the sail and managed to get within a few hundred metres of the hub, then slowed down for a look.

The design was extremely elegant, apparently based on the same hyperspatial structure it generated, which I have to admit I found rather beautiful. Certainly it wasn’t any kind of Utnepi design, though I had already kind of ruled out those particular Galactic pranksters, since this was hardly their style. They prefer harmless fun with low risk to bystanders. That said, I still haven’t quite forgiven them for building that anomaly that I foolishly wandered into one time, ending up halfway around the Earth!

I wondered about the Gorpulonians, but it didn’t look like their construction style either, and the direct and dangerous meddling seemed uncharacteristic of them as well: they prefer to lurk.

For a brief moment, the idea flickered across my mind that this might be the work of my former nemesis, Professor Maria Thessifus. But she was dead. Surely, she was dead! I knew that with 99% certainty, and the only reason it wasn’t 100% was that I’m a good Bayesian.

Perhaps, then, this was somebody new.

Passive scans showed no signs of life. I wasn’t keen on using an active scan in case I made my presence known. For a moment I thought of vaporising the thing, but the problem with that was that I wouldn’t ever discover what had been going on. Knowledge is the best defence.

In the end, I used a robotic probe. I sent it on a curved trajectory, cloaked until it was on the other side of the hub, to give the impression that it had come from the other direction. It soon found a hatch, and I was able to collaborate through an encrypted hyperwave link to get the thing open. There wasn’t a whole lot of security, which surprised me. The other thing that surprised me was that there was no airlock inside the hatch: it was simply a corridor that led to a control room, and the place was completely airless. Watching the whole thing remotely through the probe, I was fascinated. I’d never seen anything quite like this! There was no interior lighting, at least in the usual wavelengths. I wondered whether the beings that built this thing used infra-red, or similar, to perceive their environment.

Whoever they were, they were not here. The probe took only five minutes to verify that the place was deserted, it being quite a small structure. I decided to go and investigate, though of course I took suitable weaponry on the outside of my suit – in this case, a modified Quantum Disruptor that would cause severe damage to internal structures without resulting in any sort of explosion (the lack of air would make it even safer).

It took me a couple of hours to figure out the tech, this being something very new and different. In the end, I discovered the shutdown sequence for the hyperspatial structure, and managed to activate it. It took about ten minutes to collapse – it was a rather difficult operation, due to the unstable nature of entropic n-hedra. Once I had it shut down, I found the structure generator, and indulged in a bit of light but irreversible sabotage with my disruptor gun.

I was not disturbed during my investigations, so I’ve now concluded that the whole thing is automated. This does not mean, of course, that whoever built it will not eventually return, and for this reason, I’ve not destroyed it. I want to be able to observe them if they come back to check up on things, so I’m leaving the hub in safe mode, as bait. I’ve set up a few early warning devices to alert me if anyone approaches it, but I’ll also begin regular scans farther afield so I get the most warning possible if anyone enters the Solar system.

So, there you have it. No fights to the death, no space battles, just a mystery and an extreme danger… to Scotland. That part baffles me a little! Why would an alien species pick on Scotland as a particular part of Earth that they wanted to damage or destroy? Have they picked up old TV or radio broadcasts and decided they hate the sound of bagpipes? (Personally, I quite like it.) Perhaps tartan patterns hurt their eyes… who knows? Personally, I doubt any of that applies. For an alien species to pick up radio signals and single out Scotland from all the strange and horrific news reports from around the world that they would contain seems bizarre.

Maybe they just don’t like mountains.

The Shape of Things

Greetings, people with mundane lives. You may recall that last week I was alarmed to discover what seemed to be a plot to kill me by opening a portal into the core of the Sun and enticing me to step through it. It’s not the first time my life has been threatened, but I have to say this is probably the most melodramatic murder plan I’ve ever had directed at me. Somebody out there, I reasoned, had no sense of subtlety or style.

But now I’m beginning to doubt that this is about me at all.

Last week, after I had calmed down a little, I began to study the locations of the mountains into which the portal opened, each one housing a copy of my base. All of them were in Scotland, and the pattern was therefore constrained by topography, but we aren’t just talking about three dimensions of space here. A hyperspatial branch structure such as this can only exist in four different geometric configurations, and I wanted to look more carefully at the overall shape I was dealing with because I had begun to suspect something.

Both divergent 18-cell lattices were ruled out, being unsuitable for irregular sections in space-time (they couldn’t have fit a random pattern of mountains that was in constant motion as the planet rotated). That left just two possibilities: a stellated entropic six-dimensional n-hedron and a nine-dimensional Möbius manifold. The latter, I soon realised, was also ruled out because the probe had returned from its journey many times and had not been turned inside out once.

So we were dealing with the stellated entropic 6D n-hedron, which confirmed my worst fears (I’ll come to that). That meant it wasn’t easy to tell how many “faces” it might have (a face in this case being an entire instance of my base). On the other hand, such an object has a definite centre, and that would make an ideal location for a control room. After a rather difficult session working through the mathematics, I came up with a location for the centre. Of course, I had to take into account the face that was in the heart of the Sun, but that was all to the good because without that one the centre would have been inside the Earth, which would have presented some logistical challenges. Instead, the actual centre was just inside the orbit of Venus.

The thing I’m afraid of is that this weapon was not designed to kill me – after all, it seems far too elaborate; a sledgehammer, as they say, to crack a joke. If that’s true, then I can only suppose that the intention is at some point to open a valve and connect the solar core to all the other faces at once, flooding Scotland with brief eruptions of hypercompressed fusion products. I say brief because the event would quickly destroy the weapon itself – but it would operate for long enough to lay waste to the beautiful wilds of the Highlands. I have to stop this!

I’ve observed the putative hub location carefully for the last few days, and I believe there might be something there. I can detect hyperspatial power conduits running along the radius, based on the faint effect they have on interplanetary dust. I think I was right: there’s a power source there, and tomorrow I’m planning to pay it a surprise visit. I’ll get to the bottom of this, mark my words. I just hope I’m in time. I expect the weapon hasn’t been completed yet, or it would have been used… unless they’re planning to blackmail the government? Unlikely. I mean, what do humans have that anyone else would want or need? Don’t get me wrong, I like you funny little creatures, but whimsy doesn’t have much of a market value in the galaxy.

I Smell A Wumpus

Readers, I’ve had what you might call a very narrow escape. Someone has been trying to kill me, and I’ve blundered through the whole thing without so much as a flicker of my usual alertness to danger. Living in orbit for so long has definitely atrophied my cunning and paranoia to the extent that it’s made me vulnerable.

In my previous update, I described a strange phenomenon whereby a hyperspatial portal node had turned up in my hallway, leading to multiple duplicate copies of my base, each one in a different Scottish mountain. Over the next few days, I explored them extensively using a bubble field generator attached to my belt, and I managed to catalogue all the mountains involved and their respective hyperwave resonances. By Thursday I had listed over a hundred, and was getting rather tired of the task, not to mention feeling rather anxious about the responsibility that had descended onto my shoulders. Taking care of the environment is a priority of mine and is one of the conditions of the Galactic Non-Interference Treaty, but although looking after a single mountain was easily within my capabilities, there are obviously limits.

On Thursday night I had an idea, which I don’t know why I hadn’t had before. I could modify my probe, adding a bubble field to it as when I had sent it through the first time, but include a hyperwave tuning API in its firmware so that it could explore everything autonomously and complete the catalogue unattended.

I sent it out five times before realising that I’d forgotten to program it to take GPS surveys and open the door for photographic evidence before returning. That was a little tricky to do, and it took me until Friday morning. On Friday I repeated the five missions to add the full data, and then set it up to run through the remaining frequencies so that I could relax.

On the third mission, it failed to return.

At first, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take this. It could easily be a fault in the drone, or in my programming. I was about to activate my own bubble field and step through to retrieve it when – at long last – my paranoia kicked in. What if the probe had encountered something dangerous?

By Friday evening I had constructed a new device that was heavily armoured, and whose sole purpose was to send a high-bandwidth hyperwave stream to a relay satellite to transmit full sensor data as rapidly as possible before anything could destroy it. Hyperwaves can penetrate all normal matter in the universe except black holes, so I was confident I’d receive some data: I’ve actually used one of these devices in the past to test weapons by placing it inside the blast zone and recording the data for the 100ms or so that it survived due to its protective shields. If a probe of this type could survive for a tenth of a second in a superhot plasma, I was sure I’d get some sort of information from this one.

I got two microseconds.

At this point, I was thanking my lucky stars for the return of my paranoia. Whatever had destroyed the probe, I would have stood no chance against it. I analysed the data carefully, noting the temperature, pressure, and approximate location (which can be deduced based on gravitational lensing). When I found the answer, it explained everything.

The probe had ended up in the heart of the Sun.

I don’t know who is responsible for this horrific piece of trickery, but I’m terrified that I almost fell into their trap. In order to survive the next few weeks I need to become the Space Lord I once was. I had grown too lazy and too contented during my time with Jalaa.

I sincerely hope there will be another update next week. If there isn’t, don’t worry too soon: I might just be busy… 

The Warren

Well, that’s a bit odd. I seem to have accidentally done some creative hyperspatial architecture without even being conscious of it.

Let me rewind a little, as this needs some explaining!

I was getting up the other day after a very pleasant sleep, and as I crossed my entrance hall I detected something strange. It was a very faint sensation, but I thought I recognised it. At first I didn’t quite believe that a spatial fork could have spontaneously manifested itself in my base, so after breakfast I went back out into the hall with some sensor equipment, fully expecting to be proved wrong. But the evidence was right there on the readouts: a multi-way fork in space, accessible with the correct hyperwave resonance generated as a bubble field around my body, if I did it carefully. And of course, by this time I had cottoned on: this must have been a side effect of the anomaly, in which case it could be seen as a kind of farewell gift from Jalaa – although whether it would prove interesting or dangerous (or perhaps both) remained to be seen.

Not being one to ignore an opportunity, I got to work. It took a couple of days to construct the bubble field projector and test it using a pre-programmed probe. The probe vanished at the expected location and returned successfully within thirty seconds, bearing video footage that showed… guess what? Haha, well it showed the entrance hall of the base! OK, so we were dealing with duplicates. I wondered how many there were, but I knew it would take time to calibrate everything and do a survey. For now, I was ready to explore.

I spent another day or so kitting out my tool belt with a larger bubble field projector so I could set a resonant frequency and put myself through the portal. I made a very careful note of the resonance of the original base, of course, so I could return. And then I tried the same frequency I’d used with the probe.

The new place looked identical to the old one, though the kitchen hadn’t been used for days so I knew the copies had been made a while ago, which fit with my hypothesis. It was when I decided to check outside that I discovered just how interesting this situation really was.

Outside was a mountainside. But it was not the same one. GPS indicated that I was in Scotland, but around a hundred miles from my original base. The door in the rock wall was perfect, as though it had been designed deliberately by me – but of course, the location was a different shape, and so this seemed to me to require disbelief to be suspended about as much as a light-year-long pendulum over a supermassive black hole. In short, I just couldn’t accept that it had happened. How could a natural process have resulted in a second copy of my base in a different mountain, with a door camouflaged in the rock just as with the original?

I set the resonance for home and stepped back through the portal, then tried another frequency. Again, I was in an identical copy of the base, and again, it was in another mountain, this time only about ten miles from the original.

Abso. Lutely. Bonkers.

I’m going to continue exploring this labyrinth, as I’m not quite comfortable with it yet. I don’t like unexplained mysteries! However, if it turns out to be harmless then I suppose it might be a rather useful way to travel.