Defying the advice from the elders, Zorandi had taken a ship towards the affected zone. He could study the detailed stats for hours on end and not feel he truly understood the phenomena. Of course, he had his team of diligent assistants with their specialist knowledge of temporal physics, who could interpret the data much better than he, and advise an appropriate course of action. But it was he who would make the final decision. He needed to get a proper feel for it before his recommendation was to be sent to the council.
Approaching the Lyridian-7 region, this was the edge of where the phenomenon was known to be affecting space with its most intense sign-wave. The console display forward in his vision – receiving data from the FTL probes half a light year ahead – gave a confused analysis ... yet again. Sure, he knew there was temporal fracturing: pockets of time existing in a kind of uncertainty state, bits of the future and past breaking through, much like general quantum uncertainty but on a macro scale. As soon as the probe attempted any kind of detailed analysis the system collapsed; it wouldn’t bear scrutiny. He could find no coherent pattern to the level of fracturing; no mathematical formula fitted. True randomness.
The ship’s AI was programmed to reactivate the envelopment field after the six nanoseconds of contact – set to detect spacial distortion; that was all the sensors needed, but still the nagging doubt that somehow it would not be recognised, or the time for sensor data gathering was still perilously too long. Except it was not all about the information gathered; it was all about him being there, to see it if not to feel its effects.
Visual relay gave the illusion of a 180 degree screen, with light-shift corrected for optical clarity. At full magnification he could see space was distorting, stars had a kind of shimmering effect as if seen through water. The wave’s approach was indeterminable: its presence metaphysic. The ship, at ten per cent light speed, was now at the maximum allowed deceleration. He should still be billions of kilometres from the primary wave’s edge, but he knew it was only a matter of minutes. He remembered seeing a surfer heading towards a wave, flat on his board, propelling himself along with his arms, then scrambling onto the board just in time for that big wave, to then ride just for those few seconds before being wiped out. He could see the joy that human experienced, the danger of being caught verses the glory of riding one of most powerful forces on earth. Am I that surfer, he thought, they’ll welcome back the brave, intrepid ... Wipe out. Life wiped out. Oblivion.
Velocity now at only half a per cent light. The wave was almost upon him. It was not noticeably moving, he could see the stars within its watery presence, as if a tide were cleansing away some impurities; nothing with any consciousness to appreciate its immense destructive power.
How starkly apparent now: this was what his life had been building up towards. Not that he could have ever predicted this opportunity would be within reach, or that he’d have the courage to take it.
The ship had stopped; the wave was tantalizingly close. He would just wait now.
Now it was too late. Zorandi knew for sure. He tried to focus his thoughts on the readouts, what they meant for those brief moments of exposure. The revelation: causality, uncertainty – the two were being fused and rendered into a determinate state by ... the temporal eradication wave. Tachyons and gravitons again fused. But then ... it was all gone.
... The gentle, familiar, pale green of his bedroom. Zorandi had been sent there, told to stay, for being naughty; he’d used his dad’s holoviewer, who’d left it active whilst taking some call, and this was his big chance. What he found was so strange: these pink and brown skin figures in clothes of a similar colour to their dusty surroundings, with some kind of weapons that went bang after they were aimed. The scene then showed others on the other side but in similar outfits receiving hits from these weapons, falling, then a red substance spreading on the outfit. He’d heard about these creatures from an archive docucast, they were a primitive race who like to kill each other for fun. He was shocked by it, though, the way some of those hit writhed about, another twitched before dying. Then there were the screams of pain turning into a choking sound. He knew that when the B’tari killed it was done very quickly, there was none of that suffering. What was the name of that world? Glito-3 (though the natives referred to it as Earth), third planet from a medium-sized star. He liked astronomy; one day he would know all about that planet, and his community would listen to him. But now he was young, and he’d done wrong. But he could dream, they couldn’t stop him from doing that; in his mind he’d go to the stars. In his mind he was free.
***