Mette was hating life.
The problem with being in a crisis was sometimes a crisis could drag on for hours, for weeks even. There had been a time on the Natrix when one of the fusion cores had needed an emergency fix, because it was making the entire Natrix move at about half the speed it was supposed to move at. Half speed wouldn’t have been that much of a problem, since the Natrix was fast enough to outrun the sun a few times over, but the extra cycles of travel meant that the farms would be active for less time, and that would have a downstream impact on everything that depended on the farms. They didn’t run lean enough that it would be a problem for at least two cycles, but of course there were other concerns, like how this first problem could make any other problem life-threatening for the entire colony. A crisis had been declared, and Mette was one of the critical members responsible for resolving it.
The first cycle of that crisis had been fine, more or less, but with every cycle after that, Mette found herself less and less functional. She would eat at her desk, not get enough sleep, and skipped on basic hygiene. You couldn’t stop to take care of yourself when the lives of the entire colony were on the line. You burned through reserves, then burned past reserves. You abandoned everything but the mission. And yes, there was some acknowledgement that you couldn’t give up on sleep entirely, couldn’t get by treating your body like a battery that could be drained down to nothing, but how could you sleep when lives were on the line?
She’d run herself ragged. It had lasted two weeks. By the end of it she was doing work more by instinct than actual cognition, which was a terrible way to get any work done. The cycles had blended together, and there were only brief naps stringing together arduous work. She’d been in a perpetual state of nausea the last few cycles, and would break out into a sweat at no provocation, along with getting the runs, but she had done it in the end, the problem had been fixed and there was only a hitch in the schedule, not the spiral into problems that they’d been worried about.
And after it was declared finished, she had still had all the regular work to do, all the things that had been piling up in the background that whole time. She had laughed about it and said “I’m going to sleep for a week now”, but the health issues felt like they lasted a whole year. She’d had more problems sleeping, the unrest echoing through her, and her stomach had taken a long time to get right again. She’d pushed herself past limits she wouldn’t have asked other people to push past … unless it was an emergency, unless lives were on the line.
Every crisis after that one had felt the same, like she was burning a piece of herself to keep going. Something had changed in her brain, and now there was a block there, one that she had to push against with all her weight. Every crisis felt like it carried the burden of every crisis before it. In her time with Perry after coming through the portal, she hadn’t experienced it. She had suffered and fought, but hadn't actually had anything that weighed down on her for appreciable periods of time, hadn’t had people’s lives depending on her, hadn’t had a project with a firm, inflexible deadline.
And now here it was, the end of the world, or at least a portion of it, the end of all their lives, and it was down to Mette and the other Mettes to grind themselves down trying to understand and solve it. The Eggys were there too, but they were vastly inferior in spite of being (ostensibly) the ship’s scientist.
And worse, they were chipper.
Someone had decided to pair together the Mettes and the Eggys, on the theory that the different viewpoints on each subproblem would allow them to synergize. Mette couldn’t recall who had made that suggestion, but she hoped that it wasn’t one of the Mettes. The Eggy she was saddled with was the third one, who was going by the name Belle, or sometimes Belly.
“I just think it’s such a wonderful opportunity,” said Belle during a mandated break. “To be not just a clone, but a clone who can see other clones? Think about how much we’ll learn about ourselves, how much it lets us know ourselves, and it seems likely that the clones will diverge from each other, and of course that will also be fascinating.” She spun around in her chair, almost spilling the bowl of noodle soup she had in her lap, then resumed eating. “I didn’t come on this ship for new adventures, but there are just so many new adventures, and the only shame about this world is that we’re not nearly going to have the time we need to explore every facet of it, or of the power we have with all these systems running side by side.”
“Another downside is that we might die,” said Mette.
“Eh, we’ll make it through or we won’t,” said Belle. She smiled. “We put in maximum effort, then either that’s it or we keep going. That’s kind of nice, right? No nuance.”
“You’re not thinking about getting out?” asked Mette. By their best estimations, the portal was going to close within the hour. They had a video camera up and looking at it, and she knew Perry was pacing nervously, waiting for it to close. Hella had made an open offer for people to go through, but there hadn’t been any takers — if Mette or Eggy were up for it, it was likely that all the clones would have gone through. But Mette and Eggy hadn’t actually talked about why they’d stayed on.
“If we have a month, it’s very likely that one of the other teams will figure out an exit strategy,” said Belle. “And I’m reasonably confident that we can get the punch drive working again. Once that’s fixed, we have an out, one that won’t maroon us and turn us into thresholders … no offense.”
Mette was the original Mette, Mette Prime, which only made a difference in that she was the one who’d become a werewolf. The others would too, in time, and in fact had already procured teeth just in case, but the transformation wasn’t the most gentle thing in the world. The werewolf thing made her bulkier and more hairy than them, a change that had mostly come on in the course of time, after the clones had been created. She was “hairy Mette”, which wasn’t entirely complimentary, but Mette’s physical appearance had never been something she prided herself on. Her mind was sharp, maybe not as much as Brigitta’s, and not in the same way, but she was good at thinking, plotting, and planning.
Unfortunately, that had been impacted too. She was more impulsive since the change, quicker to anger. Perry had his magic powers to compensate for that, along with time spent practicing and adjusting, but Mette had nothing. He claimed the effect was minor, if it existed at all, but to her it felt stark, and of course he then started talking about something called the placebo effect, which was new to her.
“Would Hella move the ship?” asked Mette. “Would she abandon these people, if our counter ran down?”
“If it didn’t seem like it would help,” said Belle. She saw Mette’s look and shrugged. “She’s a pragmatist. We’re in a bad spot though. We’re close on the wake of the thresholders, which isn’t a good place to be, and … it’s just me and the other mes, and Hella, and you and the yous, and that’s not really enough for a full crew. We could recruit from the locals, but Hella’s not a fan of that.”
“You’re cavalier about the losses,” said Mette. They had a minute left on their break. She was timing them. This conversation wasn’t important, the meal was, and they were both pretty much finished.
It took Mette a moment to realize that Belle had gone silent.
“Sorry,” said Mette. “I didn’t know those people well, nor what they meant to you.”
“No,” said Belle. “It was … they were friends, you’re right, I should grieve for them, Hella says that’s important. We went through a lot together, even if we didn’t always see eye to eye. Nitta was the one I was closest with, and she stuck to Cark, they had been traveling together before we met them, so …”
The timer went off, and Mette silenced it. She was willing to go a little bit over, if it would increase Belle’s working efficiency. Mette was good at keeping her emotions contained, holding in the stress, anger, resentment, and irritation until it went away. Not everyone was quite so gifted, and in the confines of the Natrix, it was sometimes necessary to shuffle around personnel just to handle that, which was always a hassle.
“We should hold a memorial,” said Belle.
“After the crisis is resolved,” said Mette.
“That could be a month,” said Belle. “And depending on how it resolves, we could just be running straight into another crisis, that’s how it works on this ship, one crisis follows another.” She placed her bowl on the table. “I’m going to talk with the others about it, send a message real quick.”
“Look, I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” said Mette. “What they would want from us is for us to survive, for us to make the most of our time to get the work done. Right?”
Belle stared at her. “You didn’t know them. L’onso was always ready for a break, ready to kick back and see the sights, if we could. We’re traveling between worlds for a reason, but it was also … a spirit of adventure, a sense that we were explorers. And when this is over, that’s what I hope we go back to being. That’s what L’onso liked, even if I think he’d have liked it better if he fit in more places.” L’onso was the hulking lizard man, with tongues inside his nostrils.
“We need to keep working,” said Mette gently. “There will be time for this later. Next break will be time for sleep. You can tell me then?”
Belle nodded, then turned back to her computer and shook out her hands. It took a few seconds, but her face lost its seriousness, and she began typing as Mette looked on. Mette returned to her own work, hashing out some ideas on how to better map the energy spikes radiating from this world, algorithmic improvements rather than mechanical ones. The device that took the energy readings was laughably primitive, and had only recently been adapted to using the techniques they’d taken from Moss. There was a different team, another Mette and another Eggy, working on making a better version. Mette had to hope that they would be able to make some substantial improvements.
The readings could be interpreted into a manifold, and the most common visualization they used looked like someone had placed a sheet over a series of nails. The data was messy, but they had applied smoothing to it, and they could look at every one of the spikes. There was more data than that, and this in theory could be used to make a general map of the wider multiverse, but so far they had two examples of what they called “punches”, and many more examples of what they were now calling “pre-punches”, along with “entries” that marked places on the manifold where someone had come in, all those people that Fenilor had killed, along with Perry, Third Fervor, and Nima.
Something was happening to the fabric of the multiverse, or maybe just this one specific universe, when people went through that portal.
They had almost made a terrible mistake in allowing all those other people to go through. If they hadn’t pinpointed Fenilor before that, they might have lost him in the sea of others, not knowing his signature from theirs. But Mette had caught that before it happened, and was at a computer with the sensor running, cataloging every change to the manifold, annotating them using pictures from Marchand’s cameras. Perry’s dead girlfriend had apparently specialized in signals analysis, which was why she’d found the signal from the portal in the first place, and Marchand was an asset, allowing the use of some algorithms that Mette was still trying to tear apart.
So they had the manifold, and the annotations, and they could “see” the imprints. The sensor didn’t actually give data about the entire manifold at once, there was a set of small motors inside that rotated in a scanning pattern, which then had to be translated into math and processed, then smoothed. There were plenty of glitches, since the entire system had been set up from spare parts and vanishingly little knowledge of what they were actually sampling, but with the data and deductions from Moss and some of Mette’s own contributions, it was working far better than the version the Farfinder had when they’d first come to this world.
There were, unfortunately, still a fair number of bugs, and Mette wasn’t entirely sure that their team of two was going to get anything accomplished just by updating the code and sifting through the numbers.
“There’s gotta be something,” said Belle after an hour had passed. They had a private channel set up between the two of them, and did at least half their communication through that, usually terse messages that confirmed that something had been tested or updated or tried.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“No,” said Mette. “There might be nothing. This might be all we ever know.”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” said Belle, sighing to herself.
“Again, no,” said Mette. “This is a question of engineering and science. The monitor gives us data, and it might be that this is the sum total of data that we ever get from it. We’re here in the hope that’s not true, but hope doesn’t make something true.”
“If we could at least get some kind of estimation on when a punch is going to go through,” said Belle.
Mette didn’t reply to that. It was one of their directives, to get some kind of prediction system. They had two examples of a ‘waiting’ punch actually manifesting, but the data was terrible, mostly because the sensor didn’t cover the entirety of the manifold fast enough. What they really wanted was to capture the moment that a punch-in-potential turned into a punch-in-actuality, and then there might be some way to parse out the data that gave them some kind of predictive power for Fenilor’s punch. That was seeming like more of a long-shot though. The best they could do was refine the system to be as fast and accurate and bug-free as possible so that they wouldn’t miss it if it happened.
And of course Fenilor’s punch could go through at literally any time, and in all but the most optimistic estimates, they and millions more people would die. It didn’t do a lot to help Mette focus on the problems at hand.
Perry came into the room they were working in and stood by the door. He had his helmet off, and he was looking as perfect as usual, not showing the lack of sleep they were all suffering from, armor in mint condition, like it had just gotten waxed and polished. He had a scruffy beard that was somehow perfectly positioned, and it made him look unearthly handsome.
“The portal is closed,” he said after she held his gaze for a moment. “Did that do anything?”
“No,” said Mette. She glanced at the manifold, but it hadn’t moved. She would have noticed immediately if it had. “But we hadn’t expected that it would. The portal by itself, it’s just a connection to … whatever does this.” She gestured at the screen. “No way out now though, is there?”
“No,” said Perry. “No way out.”
“We could go to the edge of the star system,” said Belle. “Then race back if we find anything. That would be a way out. Then we have time to repair the punch drive.”
“I’d be done being a thresholder,” said Perry.
“True,” said Belle. “And our engines can’t really take us that far, plus we’d lose contact with all the resources here. I think Hella might move us to the far side of the moon though, which would let us withstand a certain range of blasting power.”
“No progress?” asked Perry.
“Lots of progress,” said Belle with a chipper smile. “We’re working miracles here, fixing the systems, improving them. What we don’t have are results.”
“You’ll be here for a while?” asked Perry.
“No,” said Mette, shaking her head. “We’re sleeping soon, unless something changes. That’s mandated. We just need to make sure that the systems can run by themselves while we’re out.”
“I’m going to talk to Nima,” said Perry. “Your match was never resolved, and there’s a chance that we can make a portal by staging a fight between the two of you.”
“Uh,” said Mette. “That … shouldn’t work, should it?”
“It’s unclear,” said Perry. “Nima’s been down, you’ve been down, now Fenilor is gone … nothing was clear there, it was a misfire from the portal, either because of the way you came in or because he’d been slumming it for so long. But it would give more data, maybe some information that would let us sneak our fingers into a crack, if we could make the portal appear.”
“Okay,” said Mette. “Talk to her, I guess.” She turned back to her computer.
Perry left, and Mette caught Belle looking over.
“Yes?” asked Mette. “What is it?”
“Are you and him … ?” asked Belle. “I don’t think I ever got the full story.”
“We’re facing down a gun aimed straight at our face,” said Mette. She briefly considered how long it would take to rant about that, compared to how long it would take to just tell Belle what she wanted to know. “I flirted with him when we were on the Natrix, hoping to get pregnant and improve our breeding stock. I’ve always been attracted, and he knows that. Once we got here, it was inevitable. Then Kes came along, and he was tender in a way that Perry isn’t, and I would indulge myself with both of them, but they’re weird about it, so it’s just Kes. No further questions.”
“That was a lot,” said Belle. She turned back to her computer. “Thanks.”
“Do you have any thoughts on this wiggle?” asked Mette, mostly to change the subject. She sent over a link to a timestamp, something that hadn’t been possible to do six hours prior. The ‘wiggle’ was an aberration in one of the spikes that Mette had noticed mostly by chance. It jogged to the side by a bit before going back where it was, visible only when zoomed in.
“Weird,” said Belle after a moment. “I haven’t seen that.”
“Probably nothing,” said Mette. “Might be an artifact.”
“Possible,” said Belle, biting her lip. “We don’t have much time left before bed. I’m going to try to write something that checks for more of them.”
“Let me,” said Mette. She was much, much faster at that sort of thing, mostly owing to what were apparently biological differences in their brains. “What exactly am I trying to do?”
“Wiggle detection,” said Belle. “Use that one instance as a template to see if there are other instances, mark them all, then use a larger set to see if it means anything. One wiggle is weird, a dozen would be a pattern.”
It didn’t take very long, owing to the system they were using now being relatively mature, but when Mette ran the algorithm that would look for more of the wiggles, she thought that she’d made a mistake.
“This is just … too much,” said Mette. The detection algorithm had logged hundreds of thousands of hits. Mette went through and sampled a few of the timestamps, and saw that they were accurate — the wiggle was there.
“I don’t get it,” said Belle.
“It must be nothing then,” said Mette. “It happens so frequently, we just hadn’t noticed it, maybe because of the smoothing.”
Belle had come over to share the monitor, though she was perfectly capable of using her own. “Huh.”
“Strange, but it’s probably for tomorrow,” said Mette. She rubbed her eyes. “If we start trying to dig into this, it’s going to be hard to sleep.”
“Is it regular?” asked Belle. “If you map it, is the interval a set amount?”
This took another few minutes to do, and once it did, they had their answer: the interval was extremely consistent, though it skipped a ‘beat’ every now and then when measured per-spike. Each of the spikes was ‘wiggling’ at the same set interval, though all with different time offsets.
“Instrument error,” said Mette. “It has to be. I’ll alert the other team, they can deal with it next cycle — tomorrow.” There was still a part of her that wasn’t comfortable with days, that saw the sun hanging high in the sky as being horribly wrong.
“No, hang on,” said Belle. “What does the wiggle represent?”
“Instrument error, algorithm error, precision error,” said Mette. “I don’t know.”
“If it weren’t those things,” said Belle. “If it were real.”
“Uh,” said Mette. “If the spikes represent a ‘primed punch’, some high-energy holding pattern the Grand Spell is engaged with to send people on to the next world, then a wiggle would be …” she paused, then stopped. “The manifold represents energy overall, it’s the skin of this universe, maybe. The spikes are … well, in theory, positional. But we’re not even sure that’s true, because it would imply that the Grand Spell is picking out a destination very soon after a person goes through the portal, and somehow only does the matchmaking afterward.”
“Huh,” said Belle. “Right, yeah. So if the wiggle is ‘real’, then it shows … moving the destination? Changing the angle of attack? The Grand Spell is testing other locations for suitability?”
“You wouldn’t do it like that,” said Mette. “You would do the testing or monitoring some other way, not physically aim at another universe.”
“Maybe,” said Belle. “So the tiny movement in destination would represent … compensation for a shifting web of universes?”
“No,” said Mette. “Look, it goes back.” She clicked through. The wiggle didn’t actually change the position of the spike. “And it doesn’t make sense that they’re on the same interval, but don’t happen at the same time. There’s got to be a pattern there.”
“Wait,” said Belle. “Can you uh … hrm. Is the interval divisible by …” She frowned. “Nope, don’t know it off the top of my head. The scanning interval.”
Mette paused and typed in the numbers. It was an almost perfect match. She let out a breath. “So this is nothing. Just a sensor error.”
“Looks like it’s happening right when the peak is sensed, yeah,” said Belle with a frown. “Well, at least we caught that before we went to bed.”
“Bah,” said Mette. “I’m going to send a quick message off to the sensor team.”
It wasn’t much more than two minutes before the sensor team was in the room with them. It was another Mette and another Eggy, both of them working on the actual physical sensor that was gathering the data. The details were opaque to Mette, who became Mette Prime once the other Mette was in the room. The other Eggy was Henrietta.
“It’s weird,” said the other Mette. “We took the sensor down — we really need a second one, we’re working on that — and ran some tests to try to isolate where the problem is, and we can’t fix it.”
“Because it’s not a problem,” said Henrietta.
“Meaning what?” asked Mette Prime.
“It’s measuring something real,” said Henrietta. “Might just be an artifact of the measurement, some kind of latent energy within the element that registers a higher reading after we record a spike measurement, but we don’t really have a way to rule that out.”
“And it might be that,” said the other Mette. “That kind of error.” She looked haggard. She wasn’t a werewolf, and didn’t have the same reserves of energy. Running on fumes this early into a crisis wasn’t good, but the sensor they were using was incredibly important, and having a second one up and running was a top priority. “But if it’s not an error, then the thing that’s causing the ‘wiggle’, as you call it, is the measurement itself.”
“Wow,” said Belle. “That would mean … well, that the measurement device is actually a wiggling device.”
“It would mean that we have a way to affect the skin of the universe,” said Mette Prime. “Why did this have to come right before we’re supposed to sleep?”
“You were the one to send it,” said the other Mette. “But we need to make the second sensor, we can’t leave this offline, and we need to get some sleep too, which means we need to put this back together so it can log overnight.”
“There’s a temptation to push off sleep,” said Mette Prime.
The other Mette nodded. “We have to assume that the world isn’t going to end in the next eight hours though.”
“We’ll flag it,” said Mette Prime. “But there’s so little to flag, and we’re going to have to rule out all kinds of errors.”
“How would it even work if the sensor is affecting things?” asked Belle. “Is the sensor not passive?”
“No, it’s not,” said Henrietta. “Which explains the power draw! I’d always wondered about that.”
“Me too!” smiled Belle.
They split off before the Eggys could get too smitten with each other, and Mette double and triple checked that everything was running once they got the sensor back online and running in autonomous mode. The manifold was looking the same as it ever was, and Mette resisted the urge to program in a set of alerts to wake her up. She needed her sleep, and there was nothing that couldn’t wait until the next cycle. If the software crashed, that would be bad, but not as bad as trying to go into the next cycle on too little sleep.
“It’s exciting,” said Belle. “We’ll probably have to scale up the sensor, if we want to make actual changes at a distance.”
“We need to rule out all kinds of things first,” said Mette. “But yes, it’s exciting.”
“I’m hoping that we can prove it all tomorrow,” said Belle. “It would be a real feather in my cap, the kind of thing that would put me ahead in the clone rankings.”
“What’s a feather?” asked Mette.
She was too tired to retain the full explanation.
When she got to her room, a small place off the side of an extra dimensional corridor, Kes was waiting for her.
“You should have been here at least an hour ago,” he said. “I was getting worried that I would have to drag you away from your computer.”
“Maybe you should have,” said Mette with a yawn.
“Sorry, if you’re tired I can go,” said Kes.
“I’m wiped,” said Mette. She leaned against her door frame. “I’m not up for deep conversation.”
“That’s fine,” said Kes. “I just … wanted to be with someone.” He said this like he was admitting to a high crime.
“If you mean you want to have sex, you’re going to have to do all the work, and be fast,” said Mette.
“I wouldn’t put you in that position,” said Kes.
“I wouldn’t mind being put in that position,” said Mette. She lingered on the word ‘position’. “Not a bad way to destress and then immediately fall asleep.”
She looked him up and down. He didn’t have the same look as Perry, and they were getting further away by the day, but Kes still had the same muscular arms and piercing blue eyes. He must have gotten some sleep. He’d probably done it while she was working, the bastard. They said he’d had his arm broken, but he must have fixed it, because he looked right as rain. He smelled nice, like sweat and mud. Her heart had started beating a bit faster, waking her up a little bit.
“I can just lay with you,” said Kes.
“I need a shower,” said Mette. “I was going to wait until the start of the next cycle.” He knew she needed a shower though, he was a werewolf too.
“You smell good,” said Kes. He shifted his posture, straightening up.
“You sure you don’t want to do the other thing with me?” asked Mette. “Then you can sleep beside me.”
“I never said I didn’t want to,” said Kes. He moved forward, putting himself closer to her, and for a moment they were standing in the doorway together, with the question hanging in the air.
It was brief but good, and when it was over, Mette felt like her head had cleared. They were still in a crisis, but she’d flipped the switch that let her not care about that.
Still, as Kes fell asleep beside her, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm, sleep was eluding her. There were problems to work, and the work was done in the brain, and the brain didn’t just shut off so easily, even if the stress had somewhat abated. The more she thought about the problems, the more the stress started coming back.
They would solve it, or they would turn tail and run, or the whole thing would blow up in their face before they had a chance to do either of those things.
But that thought didn’t help the sleep come any faster.