"First thing first, what's your name?" I'm struggling with anger and grief, interspersed with curiosity.
"My name is Alonzo."
"What happened? Are you my sister?"
"I was. Guess I'm your brother now."
"You survived the Hermosa. What happened to the ship? Is mom alive?" I'm confused and on the verge of panic, but excited at the same time.
"Yeah, she made it. Some didn't. A lot didn't."
I'm holding onto a railing, and I'm grateful for it, as my head is now spinning. "Pearl, give us gravity. And let's starting heading toward that storm." I'm not sure if I should trust Alonzo, but I think catching up to the storm is not unreasonable, under the circumstances.
The ship slowly accelerates. Both I and Alonzo gently fall toward the floor, feet impacting first, and we cautiously stand up against the artificial gravity.
Alonzo looks into my eyes. "I didn't kill our father."
"I know you didn't kill him. You couldn't have. You saw him, what kind of shape he is in. He was already gone." I wipe away unexpected tears. "What happened to the Hermosa? What went wrong?"
"The Hermosa powered up its engines and was struck by the storm. The algorithm had flaws in it. Mistakes that we didn't catch."
This is news to me. Following the Hermosa disappearance, our research was shut down very quickly. We never had a chance to go back and rework the algorithms. The potential for misuse was too high, the oversight committee concluded after a few days of closed-door deliberation.
Alonzo's watching my face, as if he's watching my thoughts jump from one concept to another. When he's satisfied that I'm mentally back, he continues his story."The Hermosa leapt out of this reality, was momentarily picked up by that storm, but then we got free of it and started heading toward Jupiter. It was about forty light-minutes away, and the new algorithms accelerated us at insane speed. We came barreling at the gas giant. Then some sort of EMP went off, killed our acceleration but not our velocity. That fucked us over. The Hermosa crashed onto the Moon Plain."
"And this Moon Plain is where you're from? That's where we're going now?"
"Not quite," Alonzo shakes his head. "That storm out there, it would take us somewhere else entirely...", he trails off slowly, as if distracted. He looks down at the exposed but sealed flesh of his torso. I follow his gaze.
There is a disconcerting shimmer around Alonzo's wound, like mercury frothing and bubbling on the surface. Blood drips out of the wound.
"What the fuck- Pearl, open the airlock door, let's get him into the med pod, we need to-"
"NO! Wait, Jaz. Stay in the ship. This is a multi-dimensional parasite. You don't want to catch it." Alonzo starts moving around in the airlock and I'm trying to figure out his plan. He puts his helmet back on, takes a tool from the first aid kit, and starts applying an expanding foam layer to his torso, atop the bubbling mess. The foam starts to solidify in seconds. The bubbling mess still permeates the foam, slightly, so Alonzo puts down another couple of layers on top.
I look at Alonzo. His face-plate is clear, and the face behind it is pale. Alonzo is chewing on his upper lip, a habit I remember seeing in my sister thirty years ago. Alonzo's in pain.
"Is that going to kill the parasite?" I ask.
"Not even close. This is just to slow it down, and keep it from hopping to you. I need you to get us out of this dimension. The Watchtower, they can help me there." Alonzo speaks through clenched teeth as he finishes sealing up his torso. "This hurts like hell. I'm going to put myself into a chemically-induced comma. My life is in your hands. Here."
Alonzo pulls a hologram out of the tool on his arm, holds the blue-tinged construct up by the thumb and index finger, and tosses it toward me. It's a standard holographic envelope and floats through the airlock door like a ghost, straight to my outstretched hand. I open the hologram and my vision is filled with diagrams, videos, articles, graphs, charts. In the foreground, closer than all of this research and notes, is a personal letter in a familiar scrawl.
I look back at Alonzo in the airlock. His form is still, his helmet is once again a dark featureless mask. Pearl pops up a hologram of Alonzo's vitals to the side of the airlock window. He is unconscious. The solidified foam looks unblemished, no sign of the strange bubbling mercury.
"Dear Jaz, [Alonzo's letter begins], I need your help. If you're reading this letter, it means I'm not around to tell this story. For the sake of everything, please believe what I am about to tell you..."
We reach the storm and begin the slow climb kata through it. I'm back in the acceleration suit, in the center of the ship. Pearl is keeping an eye on Alonzo, but he's a tough bastard. My sister was tough, and she went through a body-altering process at least twice. There's the gender swap, but Alonzo also seems to have upgraded each bone in his body with a nano-sculpted replacement. Event the soft organs appear upgraded, they are performing at inhuman levels, competing with but ultimately failing in their fight against the parasite's attacks.
We're following the instructions in Alonzo's notes. We run a bit ana, then come back to kata, flit around a dome-like shape of the storm at its far kata reaches. The hologram shows our motion as a blue trail, one that closely follows a green path that Pearl devised based on Alonzo's notes. At the ana side of the dome, we perform a multi-axis rotation and I feel like a fool. We're flipping the ship up and around its long axis, as if a trick-performing dolphin spinning on its tail in a water park.
I'm watching the radar and see a sharp hologram of a claw appearing all around us. A dozen long multi-jointed fingers wrap themselves around The Midnight Pearl like a living cage, and then the sponge-like hologram of the storm shrinks around us. We're leaving the storm behind.
"Shit, what the hell is this thing?", I ask Pearl.
"Multidimensional gigantic eagle? I don't have enough information on our current situation."
The shakes and shudders and the storm slowly disappear from view as we move- are moved, I correct myself, by the gigantic multi-dimensional claw. The claw takes us kata at an incredible rate.
For a while we just sit in silence and watch the holographic radar. It's a three-dimensional Rorschach that flows and changes as I twist and turn the hologram. The gigantic fingers are a static cage around us. They flex this way and that a bit, as if breathing, and this terrifies me. I cannot imagine the terrible creature that holds us.
"22nd Century, the First Half: Stream Tech - Chapter 4"
We've compared lily pads on the surface of a lake to our own existence.
If our own universe is a lake, are there other "lakes"? What about oceans or rivers? Above-ground pools?
If a lily pad was picked up by a tornado and was thrown into a pool, would it understand what was happening? Could it even survive in such a strange environment?
A boxy shape appears on the radar, and just like that we approach the bismuth-like boundaries of The Watchtower.
The familiar sponge-like shape of the Stream storms is now replaced with this strange, blocky, nested monstrosity. It's a structure so large that it extends far past the limits of our ship's meager radar.
What we do see close up are a handful of spires, cubic towers that jut out into space. We head towards one of the closer towers.
As we approach, the tip of the tower begins to unfold itself like a cubist fractal flower, a welcoming multi-dimensional Picasso.
The gigantic claw maneuvers us through the multi-faceted opening and gently deposits The Midnight Pearl on a large metallic expanse. Then the fingers of the cage unfold and leave, just as quickly and discreetly as they appeared.
I cycle through the outside cameras. The landing bay - if that is what this space is called - is a large open and empty space, comparable to our bay on Childish Abandon, but uncluttered. The floor has the look of brushed titanium.
An uneven titanium obelisk grows out of the floor, then cracks open, its sides slowly falling away to reveal three human shapes, as well as a normal-looking hospital bed. The sides slowly return to the floor and after a few moments the surface is once again unblemished titanium.
The three strangers resemble Alonzo: they wear the same pitch-black suits and dark helmets obscure their faces. One is about a head taller than the other two, and acts like the leader. His face-plate glows a light blue. The two shorter persons face toward the taller one, as if waiting on command. Their faceplates are a pale red.
The blue-faced stranger starts to walk toward the ship. The shorter red-faced fellows follow, one towing the hospital bed behind them.
"Pearl, what's the atmosphere out there?"
"Earth-standard pressure and air. Two of the strangers, ones with the red faces, are not breathing that air or venting CO2. Keep your helmet on, for now."
"Right. Drop the ramp and open the outer airlock door."
The inner airlock door remains closed. I know that Alonzo trusts these people, but I don't. Not yet, anyway.
The blue-faced stranger stops outside the ship, then gestures towards us and Alonzo's still form floats out of the airlock and onto the hospital bed. One of the red-faced strangers pulls the bed away from the ship, back to the nondescript spot of brushed titanium where they started.
"How did he do that? Pick up Alonzo's body like that?" I ask Pearl.
"If Alonzo is from this place, it stands to reason that Alonzo's stream suit was made by this place, and can probably be controlled by them. The blue figure just activated the suit and brought it out."
"So, the stream works here. Good to know."
The blue-faced stranger quietly directs his accomplices, a wave of the hand here or there, but otherwise remains still, reserved.
A prism of titanium forms around the red-faced stranger and the hospital bed with Alonzo on it, and in seconds they are gone. The prism disappears into the ground, which once again looks like an unbroken plain of brushed titanium.
The other short stranger remains at attention, waiting for commands from the leader.
"Jasmine Toombs. Your presence is requested." A loud voice emanates from the tall stranger. The outside microphones pick it up and pipe it through to Pearl, who analyzes the airwaves for viruses before playing them to the human crew. I think that we aren't being hacked, at least not in ways we're expecting.
"You want me to leave my ship behind?" That's certainly one of my concerns.
"Negative. Your ship AI can use this android to accompany you while you are guests of the Watchtower." The tall blue stranger gestures to the short red stranger. Only now do I notice the in-human vibe I got from "it". The tall stranger pulls out a small rod, then splits it in two. "This is a repeater. Keep one half here with the ship, and the other with you at all times. It will allow you to communicate with your ship while you're within the Watchtower. Normal radio doesn't work here. And Pearl won't be able to talk with her avatar if she can't reach it. So try not to get separated."
I stab at the mute button. "Brusque intro, don't you think?"
"Sure, but it's also clear and to the point. Maybe theirs is a military society?"
Pearl strives to provide a divergent view. Good for us. Yay.
"Can you control that?" I tilt my head toward the red-faced android.
"Thought you'd never ask!" Pearl replies, with what I swear sounds like glee. "Look out there."
I expand the holo that's showing the outside camera and see the red-faced stranger waving at me, waving at the camera.
"Hey Jaz! I'm Pearl, in person. So to speak. Huh, this is pretty cool..."
I briefly consider the strangeness of the situation. Pearl is controlling the android outside the ship, using it to produce sound-waves that are picked up by Pearl's external microphones. Pearl then has to analyze her own speech for neural viruses before playing the generated audio through the ship speakers for me to hear.
The tall blue-faced stranger is quietly watching the interaction. I wonder how often the Watchtower gets visitors, how frequent is this sort of welcoming committee.
I check to see that the blue-faced stranger still can't hear us. The red holographic mute icon glows reassuringly. "Pearl, what do you think about all of this?"
"Alonzo trusted you, just as he trusts these people. Do you trust Alonzo?"
"Despite the initial lies and my father's death... Help me out of this suit, Pearl. I'm heading out."
Pearl peels the gravity suit off me, then seals me up in my Stream suit, the same one I used for the games. I think back on the last game I played aboard Childish Abandon, the first time I met "Alonzo". The good-byes I said to friends, coworkers, lovers.
The stream suit is on and I trigger it, float through the ship, into the airlock and out. I float over to the two figures outside the ship. I turn off the stream and stand upright, opposite the blue-faced stranger.
He moves his hand up over his face, as if flipping up a visor, and his faceplate fades away and I can see his face. He's about Pops' age. I remember him as one of the Hermosa crew.
"Jasmine Toombs. It's a pleasure to welcome you to the Watchtower, despite the rather unfortunate circumstances. My name is Oliver and I will be your guide for the duration of this trip."
"Hi Oliver. Ehh, nice to be here, I guess. You mentioned that my presence is requested? What's going on?"
"Alonzo is one of us, so the leader of our little group would like to thank you, in person, for your heroic rescue," Oliver explains with ease, like this is a practiced and everyday occurrence.
"Oh, right. Is Alonzo going to be okay?"
"The Watchtower is uniquely equipped to deal with such extra-dimensional threats. We're the best chance he has, but even then, he is still in considerable danger. We'll know more in an hour or so. Shall we?" Oliver extends his arm and points to the spot on the landing bay floor where Alonzo disappeared just a minute earlier.
As we were talking, Pearl was experimenting with her brand new android body. She tested out the model's range of motion, did some headstands and rolls, stood on one foot and tucked her other foot behind her head, rolls, etc.
"Seems like she's really enjoying herself," I say and look over at Pearl - the android one, not the ship - and smile at her childish hijinks. "Pearl, ready to go?" I ask the bouncing android.
"Right right! Just one more thing."
Pearl's android takes one of the repeater halves, the device that will allow us to stay in touch with the Midnight Pearl, examines it, then winds up and throws the device toward the ship. The repeater flies through the airlock opening, hits the padded wall of the airlock and bounces down to the padded floor. The airlock shuts and Pearl holds up her hand in an "OK" gesture.
"Show-off," I stage whisper out the corner of my mouth.
Oliver just kind of nods along and guides us to the area of the bay where he came in, and we follow.
Sides of brushed titanium come up from the floor and surround us in an uneven obelisk, the plates interlocking about three meters over our heads. There's a faint but unnerving sense of motion as our newly-assembled elevator moves. I have a sinking suspicion that we are traveling ana or kata.
Oliver notices my reaction. "Lean against the wall if you feel light-headed. This'll be over soon, we're not that far from the palace."
I lean against the wall behind me, it's pleasantly cool to the touch. Pearl is swaying from side to side, back and forth, almost as if she is testing out the stability of her new body. I focus on Oliver's face.
Oliver waves at the plates around us. "The walls are opaque for our benefit. Seeing outside would be confusing, nauseating." His head points down, as if he is considering what is below us. "One of your visits, you should ask for a transparent elevator. It's a singular experience. That is, if you choose to come back."
I nod, then look over at Pearl. Her faceplate is a mesmerizing melting pot. I watch as Pearl quickly tries out and discards various faces and expressions, her tastes varied and experimental. She starts with various simple smiley faces, then those melt to become cartoons. The cartoons cover the gamut, from Mini Mouse to Bart Simpson to Akira and beyond. Pearl starts off experimenting with both male and females faces, but eventually her choices lean feminine. She transitions through a who's who of female movie, holo, and sim stars.
All of this happens in the span of about ten seconds. By the time the strange motion of the elevator stops, Pearl has settled on a cartoon rendering of a mildly-famous US movie star from the 20th century. She sports spiky red hair, freckles, even a bandage on her cheek. I recall watching two of her films during the first days of my sabbatical, the first days of our adventures.
The top of the obelisk cracks open and its sides begin to slide down and out of the way, except for the wall I'm leaning against. I push back against the wall and stand upright, and eventually that side also slides away.
We are standing in the middle of an empty tree-lined avenue. The sky is blue, and a handful of puffy clouds pepper it. In front of us is a great big building full of columns, large curved stone facades. A picture of this building has graced the wall of my various rooms throughout my life. We're standing in Paris, on Avenue Winston Churchill, in front of the Grand Palais.
Of course the real palace burned down long ago, and obviously we aren't in France, but this still looks like a very detailed and well-done replica.
"Whoa, the Grand Palais. That's gotta be strange for you," Pearl comments. I nod. She knows my past better than I do.
Oliver walks us in through the main entrance and winds through the palace, turns this way and that. We pass familiar works on the walls. This path was designed with a Luminism focus. I linger by a painting.
"Many of these pieces are originals, not replicas or holograms," Oliver notes.
As we walk, Oliver goes briefly through history behind the palace.
"This habitat was added about twelve years ago. Alonzo had a hand in its design. These days we mostly use it for meetings, gatherings. And of course many come here to appreciate the art," Oliver nods toward suiters, in small groups or alone, who are wandering the halls with us.
We reach the garden. The sun shines through the curved glass above and filters down through the interwoven branches and vines.
She stands with her back to me, but I know instantly who she is.
"Mom!" I squeal and run to her.
She raises her right hand in protest and I freeze.
Her hand above the elbow is made of polished titanium, the surface of the bay we left minutes ago.
I finally take her in, look her up and down multiple times. New legs, new left shoulder and left arm. Most of the right hand. She's more android than human. I'm sure Pearl, if forced, can tell me exactly how inhuman my mother is, expressed as a percentage.
She turns around. She's missing a left eye. There's a prosthetic in its place, the best I've ever seen.
"Mom..." I walk over to her and we embrace and instantly start crying.
"I can't believe this is happening," I managed in between the sobs. "I can't believe you're alive. But you are. I'd know you anywhere."
Mom just stands there and hugs me close. I look at her face. Hers are tears of happiness. But there is something else there as well.
"Mom, what the hell is going on?"
"Half of us packed into the escape pod, half stayed in the ship. Then the Stream sail went up. The Hermosa had sails the size of a playing card. We had just theoretically unfurled a sail as tall as a skyscraper. Our ship was pulled kata and we left our reality. For a while, everything was a blur. We saw impossible things. Time flowed backwards and forwards and backwards again.
"I launched the escape pod.
"The last we saw the Hermosa, she was flying ana straight at Jupiter. Then it happened. The Flash rippled through our reality. Hermosa lost her engines, popped back into our reality, then fell into and exploded within Jupiter's clouds.
"The Flash messed up our pod's electronics, we floated for days, and then we crashed onto a desolate rocky landscape. It was an infinite expanse of sunlit moon rock, so that's why we call it the Moon Plain. The med system in the escape pod was still working, so we used it to heal some injuries. We tried to reach out with our radios, but there was no response, like there was no one else out there. We were the only sources of radios waves, it seemed.
"Then the Nodes began to drop in, from kata or ana, in about equal measures. They just started popping out of thin air. These were drones with super-computer cores. We didn't understand what was happening. Then Gabriel found a drone with some boiling mercury on it. He was the first known human victim of a trans-dimensional parasite. Others followed. The parasites ate most of me before we found a way to fight back."
"Fucking hell, mom."
I can't believe what's happening. My mother is alive. As is my sister, who happens to now be my brother. And he is dying from a trans-dimensional parasite. None of this makes any sense.
We're in one of the gardens inside Grand Palais. It's just the three of us right now: Pearl, Mom, and myself. Oliver left on some Watchtower business. We're sitting at a wrought iron table. I'm holding a glass of iced tea, but I'm not thirsty. I lean back in the chair and rub my eyes. This is madness, I think for the hundredth time.
"Have you been here for the past thirty years?" Pearl asks my mom.
"Mostly, yes. I've made a few trips back to Sol, but this is my home now."
"Your 'home'?" I'm flabbergasted. "Your home was with your family. Pops. Me. All of us, together! Why didn't you come back to us?!" I'm on the brink of tears again. I take a deep breath and try to center myself. I need to get this rage out, right now, but I need to do it on my terms. I don't want to hurt mom. "Why didn't you contact us? Me?"
Mom looks down, and I wait. That was an emotional outburst, and I need to keep calm. I breathe in and count down from five, then breathe out, slowly.
"I couldn't," she finally manages to say. "For a long time, we couldn't figure out a way to leave this place. Decades. Then, six years ago, we finally succeeded. Alonzo took a scouting party, but they were shot at. Alonzo almost lost his life. Someone did not want us coming back. We couldn't put you in danger."
"Danger? Alonzo's letter mentioned something along those lines. What the hell are all of you so afraid of? You know what?" I straighten up in the chair and look my mother in the eyes. "I'm tired of this piecemeal approach. Start at the beginning and tell me everything. I need that."
Mom reaches across the table and puts a hand on my shoulder. "I know that you have questions. Why didn't I tell you and your father that we were still alive. Why I stay in this strange place. You want to ask these, and I want to answer them. But first, understand that everyone you know is in danger."
"Danger? From what?"
"Jupiter."
"Alonzo mentioned it, in a letter, before he went into a coma. Alonzo seemed afraid of Jupiter."
"Because I am afraid of Jupiter," Alonzo speaks from the garden entrance. He is leaning a bit, relying on Oliver to hold him up. "What did I miss?"
"Aren't you supposed to be recovering?" I'm amazed to see him up and about. I expected days of waiting by his bedside, awkward conversations with strange doctors, Pearl pacing back and forth.
"One of the advantages of having a mostly artificial body. They can just replace the broken bits with off-the-shelf components." He knocks on his hip and it sounds like metal knocking on metal. I look back at mom and can't help but compare their destroyed and rebuilt bodies.
"Tell me what happened," I ask Alonzo.
"I'll show you."
An overhead house-sized hologram displays the Solar System. There's a label indicating that this is from 6 years ago. The first time the Hermosa crew made it back to our solar system. A blue dot between Jupiter and Saturn is identified as ANN Hermosa LP2 , the second of Hermosa's life pods.
"We used the masses of the two gas giants to home in, this is how we were able to come back to this reality," Alonzo explains, changes the display.
The blue dot begins to move toward Saturn, a large planet rendered the size of a bed and partially transparent, ringed with green billiard-sized ships. Alonzo swings a pointer and one of the ships glows white and grows in size. A label pops up and identifies the ship as ANN Greer. Our old lab ship is now a government facility. I remember it fondly for my college years there. And with infinite sadness when I think of Pops' work and the Hermosa disappearance.
"The plan was to make contact with Greer. We started transmitting, then we were being shot at." Alonzo waves his hand and the hologram shifts, now shows the ANN Hermosa LP2 as it rests in a museum. In the middle of the ship is a hole big enough for me to stand in.
"There was no blow-out. We ripped out the atmosphere controls years earlier, so the ship didn't have an atmosphere. So the damage wasn't as bad as it looks. But we lost two people, and I lost my legs." Alonzo stares at the ripped-apart ship as if he's seeing it for the first time. "She was a beautiful ship, and she got us back to the Watchtower."
"Who attacked you?" asks Pearl, who has been taking on the role of the investigator, a feature that I appreciate right now. I'm just a bit frazzled with the recent discoveries.
"We think, it was Jupiter."
"Jupiter?!" This gets me out of my reverie. It feels like I've been wading through quicksand in a blizzard, and the first clear thing I see is fucking Jupiter. "Jupiter the gas giant?!"
"Yes," Alonzo nods. "We've come up with at least two theories about how it could do this." Alonzo waves his hand and the holo changes again. We are looking at brown and yellow clouds. Arrows and text indicates an air speed of 1200 kilometers per hour. The figure is familiar enough that I understand this to be a diagram of Jupiter's atmosphere. We're looking at the shifting winds in a cross-section.
A long vertical cylinder begins to form in the holo. "A cavity is formed in the atmosphere, for instance with a storm vortex, and microwaves from the planet's interior rise up and cause the gases in the cavity to generate photons, blah blah blah, it's a freaking laser shooting out of a gas giant. This requires the control of the localized weather, which apparently Jupiter is able to do. What we have, in short, is a Death Star in the Solar System."
Alonzo waves at the holo and another sideways rendering appears. I gather it's the second theory they have about the creation of a blasted beam of energy in Jupiter's atmosphere, so I ignore this part.
Why does Jupiter want to kill the Hermosa crew?
After Alonzo finishes up the physics lesson, I ask "How were you able to hide from Jupiter this time? How did you get to our habitat without Jupiter noticing?"
"We've found safer insertion methods. We can now drop onto planet's surface, or even into a ship. Then we blend in with the other humans and it's just going through customs with forged credentials. Easy. Jupiter never sees us dropping into the system, doesn't have a clue."
"What was your mission?"
I wonder if Alonzo is going to look to my mother for permission, if this is some local military secret that I need clearance for. But he doesn't even blink, just starts in on the mission details.
"To obtain a number of objects on Earth. And to attempt contact with Bernard. I was inserted on Earth, in Israel. Objective A was in a storage room in a cultural museum, so I made it over there as a tourist. We didn't know how many spies Jupiter has on Earth, so I used a suiter persona to do recon on the museum. Broke in that night and retrieved Objective A." Alonzo waves to the holo screen and a large melted piece of jewelry pops up over us. It is cyan in the center and gold on the outsides.
It was melted, partially, at some point in the past, and so now the piece of jewelry is just a record of the environmental conditions that happened centuries or millennia in the past. Is essentially what Alonzo says while I'm mesmerized with the jewelry.
"What happened?" I ask.
"This piece of jewelry was hit by the exact same wavelengths that ripped a hole through our hull, six years ago."
"When did this piece get hit?"
"1,700 BCE."
"Why does that figure sound familiar?"
"Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed in 1,700 BCE," Pearl offers.
"Right you are," Alonzo nods. "This piece was recovered by archeologists from the former location of Sodom and Gomorrah, in Israel, and made its way to a museum collection.
"This next piece is Objective B." Alonzo waves to the holo and it shifts to a similar piece of jewelry. It is red and silver, but mostly it is melted, like the previous piece. "Same thing here. This piece was on display in a museum in Portugal. But it is thought that it came from a destroyed monastery in Spain."
"Has it been dated?"
"Sixteenth century, CE."
"Jupiter?"
"That's what it looks like. Humans certainly didn't have this technology, not until the twentieth century. And never on this scale."
Alonzo waves at the holo and a new piece pops up. This one is not melted, it is a clockwork mechanism put together with copper materials and a crystal in its core. The holo zooms in on the crystal.
"We found plans for this mechanism in an old archive in Spain. The design was very specific about the stone that had to be used." Alonzo looks at me, almost expectantly. He is waiting for me to say something.
"The crystal was important. Crystals are routinely used in lasers... Something about frequencies, wavelengths?" I'm curious now.
"Correct. Same infrared wavelengths. We recreated the mechanism and it seems to be a primitive receiver. It responds to specific infrared radiation." Alonzo waves a hand and a piece of metal on top of the mechanism begins to shake and oscillate. "The mechanism can also utilize the incoming wavelengths to transmit a message."
"An infrared radio?" I can't take my eyes off the mechanism. Its copper parts are buffed to perfection and the whole thing glitters. "How old are the plans?"
"Seventeenth century, CE. Archaeologists in Cambridge found the plans almost a century back, but couldn't make sense of them. Then we found the plans during our own research into the infrared blasts."
"Someone was talking with Jupiter in the seventeenth century, and you're collecting evidence. That's the hook."
Alonzo nods.
"Fascinating. OK, so you retrieved these jewels, sent them to the Watchtower," I look at mom to confirm and she nods, "and then stopped by the Childish Abandon to see our dad. And get in a game with me."
Alonzo nods. "Pretty much. After you left I made contact with... our people on the ship, played a few more games, then went to see our father. And almost died. You've been there for the rest."
I look up at the cloudless sky and wonder how my boring life brought me here.
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