Chapter 21
‘Please be seated everyone’ said Admiral Scorah.
Will, Billy, Dev Khan, Sarah Hirst, Sunil Modaley and Jill Blake stopped chatting amongst themselves and sat down.
‘At ease. Welcome everyone. Thanks for coming. As you know, the various governments we’ve contacted are now here to discuss whether and how we share knowledge. I just hope that it works out. However, for the rest of us, there’s now a hell of a lot of work to do. The delegates need to decide whether to set up an inter-reality security service but logic says that they will need to, or chaos could ensue as more and more people become aware of the alternate realities. With that in mind, as I’ve said to each of you separately, I think we need to, in effect, map the realities. Angela and her team have now produced a modified device that allows us to move more smoothly between realities and is a completely different design to the one that we adopted from Zero. For this particular exercise, Dev is in charge and will be able to provide more details on it in a few minutes. We’ve built a small base out near the mountains. It’s been stocked with enough food to last a year and two patrol ships have been modified for the job, which will permit surveys both over the planet’s surface and in the local neighbourhood in space. Even though the ships are capable of it, I’m not looking to explore the realities themselves in any great detail or even, unless we have to, communicate with the locals but to just sequence map them at this stage. More detail can be gleaned later. By that, I mean we need to look through the realities in a logical order, so we know as much as possible about them and where our known realities fit within the order. Anyway, enough from me for a moment. Dev, you have the floor.’
‘Thank you, Admiral. Welcome everyone. Just a quick reminder first. Will and Sarah are our exploring guinea pigs. Their ship has been kitted out with everything we can think of that might come in handy. Much of it is still a prototype and has only been tested in the lab. We’ll be starting training for Will and Sarah later today. Despite it’s importance, this exercise could be highly dangerous, as we have no idea what we will meet in some of the realities we pass through. As a last resort, the wrist-worn devices can be used by Will and Sarah to switch back here but that would mean we’d lose the ship and the data they’ve acquired, so we’re hoping that won’t be necessary. Any questions so far?’
‘What exactly are you expecting of Sunil and I?’ asked Jill.
‘Whilst Billy and I are involved with monitoring the equipment and making sure we can maintain contact with Will and Sarah, the Admiral and I felt that it would be helpful if there was someone who could cover our backs. We don’t envisage any situation where the base would be under any form of attack or anything. We’re just being cautious. However, an extra pair of hands might come in handy if we have an emergency with the mission. With that in mind, you may need to use the second ship to rescue Will and Sarah. We’ll only use it if there’s absolutely no other option. Don’t worry, you’ll all be shown how to use it. Anyway, as the Admiral said, I think a quick explanation is called for on the new version of the RSC.
When we went through the realities in the dial sequence of the twelve positions on the rotary dial fitted into the Captain’s chair, we found ourselves moving between realities that spoke English , Chinese and Esperanto, as well as uninhabited versions of the planet but not in any seemingly logical order. We’ve concluded that the order isn’t in the order that the realities themselves exist. We would expect that the versions sharing a language would be sort of huddled together. Whether these abut realities speaking a different language, or whether there is an uninhabited reality between them, we don’t yet know. That is what we want to find out. Also, the Zero ships only had controls for movement to twelve realities. This might be only a small selection of what there is, but again, we want to know. What we also want to discover, even though the mission will only provide some initial data on it, is how far must we travel between one reality to get to another. We envisage that the differences between realities are relatively minute but the further you get away from any particular reality, those changes start to add up. What we don’t know is how far from the median of a particular reality we’re actually conscious of. For example, when we were testing our version of the Zero RSC, Billy was disconnected from us in a very curious way. Although he could send us written messages and we could send them back, neither party could see the other one. We now think we were at the extremes of what we could sense. Because we were in space, the effect was possibly different to what we might have experienced on land, because there were no other realities present that would have had the ship in that precise location at the time. We don’t know for sure. It’s just a theory at the moment.’
‘I have to say that the whole experience was somewhat scary. As Dev said, I could write messages and receive them back but I couldn’t see any of the crew and they couldn’t see me, even though we could interact, albeit in a very limited way.’
Dev continued ‘Hopefully, we’ll be able to find out more over time but I doubt this mission will deliver that sort of knowledge. Anyway, even though we’ve put the base well out of the way, the safest way to explore will be to be airborne, albeit only about a hundred metres up. That way, we should be above the tree line but below any local aircraft, should there be any. Will and Sarah will need to launch micro satellites, equipped with cameras, every so often to allow us to get a view of the whole planet. These should be less obvious than them scooting off skywards in their ship. That reminds me. We’ve managed to improve on the inter-reality communications devices somewhat. Our first efforts were rather crude but we’ve managed to link them into the new RSC, so that we don’t need to launch separate communications satellites. The advantage of the new design is that we can communicate with the ship wherever it is in the reality continuum and, just as importantly, the ship can maintain contact with the base station. Unfortunately, at the moment, we can’t see any way around the need to have only one person transmitting at a time, as we still need to send data bursts through the gateway. That apart, it does mean that we’re almost in real-time two-way communications. The primary technology has also been built into the satellites but they only send data back here, simplifying the circuitry quite a bit.’
‘How long do you expect the mission to last?’ asked Sarah.
‘At this stage, I’m afraid I’ve no idea. We need to go to the edges of the available realities until life is untenable. This is probably where the biggest risk is, as it might even be totally untenable for just a fleeting visit. Hopefully, there’ll be enough warning that such a state is being approached, so Will and Sarah can get out of there. Since we don’t know enough about where we sit on the scale, or even how big the scale is, we can’t predict timescales. All I can say is that I’d like to spend no more than a week going one way and one week the other initially. We’ll review progress after each return. Fortunately, the trip back can be done almost instantaneously using the reset function, which will speed things up’ answered Dev.
‘Couldn’t we just send a probe?’ asked Will.
‘We did consider it but decided that there were too many things that we want to cover for a probe. The other consideration is that, if there’s a problem, or we have unexpected contact with any locals, a human presence may be necessary, or we could lose everything.’
‘OK, everyone, we’ll have a short break, then make a start on the training. Each of the three teams has been assigned different training areas, so that you can concentrate on what you’ll need to know. Will and Sarah will be concentrating on what they need to know as regards piloting the ship and how to deploy the micro satellites. The rest of you will be trained to use the support ship, how to 78ealized78 some of the trigger events that Will and Sarah will be transmitting back and how to handle any emergencies that might arise during the mission.’