Chapter Seventy-Two - Speeding Along

“How are your projects going?” Dawn asked.

They’d put away the board games a while ago, and now it was just the four of them (and a pair of large plushies in the shape of Night and Twilight, Day had added a smaller NOVA QUANTUM plushie tucked in Night’s grasp). Lullaby was snoring softly, though all Day could see of her was one pink sock foot sticking out of the blankets not so far away. Dawn and Day were up against the head of the bed where they had something to rest their backs against, and The Weeping of Mothers was on her forty-second cup of cocoa by the window.

Dawn had several screens floating before her, their soft glow the only real light in the bedroom. They broke the illusion a little, but Dawn would be Dawn and Day didn’t have the energy to suggest that she shut them off.

“My projects are... coming along. The ejection pod system isn’t all that complex. I simulated a few things. Explosive caps versus rapid pneumatics versus a pressure release system, and in the end explosives are just too fast to ignore. The ejection system might have to trigger in the space between a close-nuclear strike being detected and the blast actually hitting.”

“That’s a minuscule gap,” Dawn said.

“Exactly. Then there’s the issue that if the escape pod is pointing in the wrong direction, we might fire it directly into the blast. So I designed them as a sort of tube with exists on either end. The core-ejection module itself is basically a blunt, two-ended bullet with a ring of directional explosives around it.”

“Mhm, I think I see what you mean,” Dawn said as Day shared the blueprints of what she was working on. “Oh, and the walls are reinforced?”

“You don’t want the ejection tube to get a kink in it, not with the force we’re propelling things at. That, and I don’t want the ejection to damage the rest of the ship. This is meant to save a backup, not kill the original us.”

“Right. There’s a possibility of a misfire.”

Day nodded. “Exactly. Maybe the sensors detect a nearby explosion and it damaged the hull, but doesn’t cripple it, or it does cripple one of us, but we’re otherwise retrievable. It’s not like our main cores aren’t protected.”

“Mhm,” Dawn agreed. “You know, we have off-site backups.”

“Those... feel a little wrong. They’re days old. Months sometimes. I don’t think any of us would be too bothered to encounter a desynched clone of ourselves. It’s not like we can’t just reconnect and trade memories with ourselves, but it still feels... wrong?”

“I suppose,” Dawn said. “I’m running three copies of myself in my own processing units right now, and that’s only because I don’t want to run too hot. I can push it up to seven.”

“Really? I like splitting my attention but keeping only one instance of myself going,” Day said.

Dawn shrugged. “To each her own. I suppose your method puts more stress on yourself, but then you only have a single point of failure. I have as many potential sources of sudden rampancy as I have copies. It’s a bit riskier.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Day glanced at Dawn. “What about your projects?”

“It’s coming along... or maybe it isn’t. I’ve tried several things, and none of them seem to work. The best solution I’ve come up with involves pairing our communication system with one of our point defence lasers.”

“How would that work?”

“At longer ranges, a laser’s bloom will make it inoffensive, and since we want to penetrate electromagnetic shielding, being noisy isn’t a real concern. The idea is to flash the laser at the person you want to talk to at a specific frequency which can be read even through the shielding. Some photons will be knocked around, but enough will make it through, even at a distance greater than an AU that our sensors should be able to pick them up.”

“Ah,” Day said. “The light frequency will tell the shielded person how to modulate their shields to be able to receive a more direct communication?”

“Exactly. The delay between decoding and modulation is probably only milliseconds long, and I doubt the Accord could crack through the layers of encryption we can use with this kind of system to modulate their particle cannons against our shields. But there is a delay, and it’s not the ideal communication I wished to stumble on.”

“Do you think there is an ideal form of communication?” Day asked.

Dawn frowned. “Maybe? But nothing in my datasets has any real potential. This is... new ground, a novel issue that I have nothing that I can apply to to really fix. I’m not creative.”

“I’m sure you’re at least a little creative,” Day said with a chuckle.

Dawn shook her head. “No, I’m not. I’ve seen you, and Night and even Lullaby to a degree. You have that... thing that allows yout to make leaps of logic and observation that are sometimes wildly incorrect. You’re all so wrong. About so much. All the time.”

“Uh, thank you?” Day said, less certain now.

“I lack that creativity, I think. I’m less flexible. And that has its advantages, but I’m running into situations where it’s not an advantage at all.”

Day hummed along, then she asked the obvious. “Have you tried training your creativity?”

Dawn stared at her. “How?”

And so Day scrambled to come up with something. It mostly meant hours discussing the themes and messages behind artwork, and looking for meaning in abstraction and abstraction in meaning. She wasn’t sure if it helped, but Dawn seemed to enjoy the puzzle.

In the meantime, the Accord crawled ever nearer, seemingly unaware of the ERF in all of its silent, snuggly glory.

Soon they’d be passing by, a little too close to Ceres for Day’s comfort, but not so close that they’d be noticed.

It seemed as if they were aiming for Earth and Mars, looping around both before heading back out to the edge of the system.

Day wished them a speedy trip.

***