I Just Write's Short Story Collection

I Just Write

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Backshot

“You want to do WHAT!?” exclaimed Councilor Lavender in response to the shocking proposal.

In the echoey sunlit council room in charge of the simulated world, Rotani reiterated “Not want, we need to build a time machine. Our last opportunity to do so is coming up very soon, and if we do not take it we will have doomed ourselves to perish in the universe’s heat death.”

At this confirmation, Councillor Gamma replied “Very well. Present your reasoning.”

Nodding, Rotani said “As you know, our simulated world is powered by the Hawking radiation from a black hole. In ages past we extracted energy from it by dumping excess matter in to make a miniature Quasar, then by harvesting its angular momentum through super-radiant scattering. Both of those energy sources have long since been tapped out, leaving us with just the radiation from the black hole evaporating extremely slowly. Our black hole itself is now nearing its end as it has already reached a kilowatt of Hawking Radiation. If we don’t have a replacement energy source ready by the time it evaporates completely, we will be doomed.”

Though it wasn’t strictly necessary, Rotani paused to take a breath before continuing. “If we utilize the brief period of high energy output from our black hole’s final burst of Hawking radiation to produce extremely specific space-time metric infrastructure, it may be possible to slingshot one end of a wormhole back to an earlier, more energetic state of the universe. If we are extremely efficient with our use of this energy, we might even manage to access the Stellar Era at the dawn of time. All other black holes within our range of observation have already evaporated. We are the last people in the entire observable universe who could possibly take this step.”

There was a brief pause as the Councillors considered the information, before Lavender spoke, noting “While you are indeed correct in your assessment of the situation, there are several issues of practical implementation that I don’t believe you have considered. Namely, almost all the mass of our civilization is either energy harvesters being used to collect the trickle of radiation from our black hole, or the computers being used to run our minds in extreme slow time. We cannot construct infrastructure without cannibalizing one or both of these systems, and cannibalizing the energy collectors would directly impede the functioning of the time machine you wish to build. You are effectively advocating the genocide of the majority of our population in order to allow the few lottery-winners among us access to a more energetic past.”

Rotani rapidly shook his head in over a century of external time, before stating “No, that is not my position. I’ve run the numbers on the resources required for active consciousness compared to simply archiving our population for later retrieval, and we can free up enough mass to construct the time machine by putting ninety five percent of our population into inert file storage. Once we get access to an earlier stage of the universe, we can build more computronium from the matter we get access to and re-instantiate the archived people.”

Gamma spoke again, noting “There are still quintillions of years before the Hawking output of our black hole will reach the point where we can even feasibly begin the process of construction for the time machine, let alone actually power it. There is plenty of time to discuss implementations and possibly perform small scale experiments. Still, I would like to know what theoretical basis your initial idea for a time machine rests on.”

Nodding enthusiastically, Rotani replied “Relativistic time dilation as pertaining to wormhole mouths, and Lorentz transformations as pertaining to warp drives. In extremely basic terms, if you accelerate a warp-capable spaceship to relativistic speeds then warp backwards relative to the velocity vector, the ship is displaced backwards in time. This is a known phenomena that has been used to access prior states of the universe by countless predecessor civilizations, though each time some have opted not to go. Opting not to go back in time is no longer a valid choice.”

At this point the third councilor, simply known as Horizon noted “That last point presents a disconcerting possibility. How do we guarantee that by traveling back to the Stellar Era we will not run afoul of the local civilizations, who will have far more energy available for purposes of warfare than we do?”

In reply, Rotani sighed as he said “Councilor Horizon, I am proposing the construction of a time machine. The laws of thermodynamics themselves guarantee that high energy civilizations are nearly impossible to hide. If our time probe arrives in a time and place with easily detectable signs of such civilizations, we simply send the probe further back and preempt them. Further, due to the fact that a time machine arriving is guaranteed to produce a causally disconnected timeline fork, the odds of encountering other time travelers are effectively zero.”

An extremely long time passed between that conversation and the time machine program officially being launched. When the energy output of the black hole reached ten gigawatts, a lottery was announced to see who would be put into storage and who would keep thinking while the machine was constructed. Rotani could have been exempted for having come up with the time machine program in the first place, but he had opted to instead join the random drawings. As expected, he hadn’t won.

Still, in his virtual home Rotani was taking the opportunity to put matters in order before being put into inert storage. This included a conversation with Serrim – his daughter of three trillion years – a few subjective hours before he was due to be archived. It started with Serrim asking “So dad, why exactly didn’t you take the exemption? You’d have been qualified for it, given the incredibly active role you’ve been taking in the project so far.”

Sitting down in his smooth leather armchair, Rotani said “I’ll be honest, the stress of the whole affair has been getting to me. We as a civilization will only have one chance to get this right, and if we screw up that’s it, we’re doomed. I’ve been talking with the therapists for ages and I’m still incredibly nervous about the project, with this nervousness compounding on itself by making me worried that my nervousness will itself lead to me screwing things up somehow. If I’m inert I can skip over the whole episode and avoid a mental health crisis.”

Thinking for a few moments, Serrim eventually admitted “I’ll miss you while you’re dead, dad. I drew a pass in the lottery, so I’ll be awake and working on the time machine while you’re gone.”

Nodding somberly, Rotani remarked “I figured as much. Think of it this way; I’ll only be inert for a few billion years, which isn’t that much time at all in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, want to have one last family gaming session before I go under?”

Nodding, Serrim said “Sure. Lingua, perhaps?”

Rotani smiled and noted “Lingua sounds fun. But we’ll be using the two dimensional board, I don’t think we have the time for a four-dimensional game.”
Serrim chuckled, even as she replied “Yeah, that checks out. System, start game: Lingua, two players, two dimensional.”

With that, a hex-grid game board appeared on the table between Rotani and Serrim, each player receiving a rack of letter tiles that appeared with similar rapidity. In the background simulated birds were chirping away, even as Serrim played the first word.

The atmosphere during the game that followed was a somber one, but still the both of them pressed on with the game, putting words to hexgrid turn after turn. At the end, Serrim won by a few points. Looking at the scores, Rotani noted “Good game, Serrim. I guess I’ll be seeing you later.”

Serrim simply looked down at the board for a few moments before she noted “Thanks dad.”

Rotani did not reply as he was already inert; his virtual avatar having disappeared and left Serrim alone in the room. Standing up, Serrim said to herself “Right, time to get to work. System, fast travel to Project Engineering Headquarters.”

There was a brief flicker, before Serrim found herself in the virtual lobby for the engineering facility. As she walked forwards, Terrace the receptionist remarked “Why if it isn’t our favorite beneficiary of nepotism.”

Walking past on her way to the virtual office, Serrim fired back “Shut up you spiteful bitch. I passed my qualifications like everyone else here so you can stop waving that baseless grudge around.”

From behind her, Terrace sent a parting shot of “Ooh, someone’s in a bad mood! Sad that your daddy dearest isn’t here to cover for your inadequacies?”

With that, Serrim whirled around and announced “System: report user Terrace for verbal abuse.”

Subjective seconds later a Moderator – kept anonymous for reasons of personal safety – had arrived on scene, looking over the logs before noting “Terrace, your treatment of your co-workers is unacceptable. I’m going to heavily recommend you leave the premises and seek out mental help.”

Instead, Terrace just sneered at Serrim even as she said “So that’s the level you’ve sunk to? Reporting me because you can’t handle the truth on your own, faker?”

The Moderator stared at Terrace completely nonplussed, before noting “I’ve already restricted your communications privileges. Please stop digging yourself deeper, before I’m forced to use coercive measures.”

Immediately Terrace turned on the Moderator and snarled “You can’t do this to me! That stuck up bitch thinks she’s better than me! Well I’ll show you all, I’ll hack-” and then Terrace disappeared.

Sighing, the Moderator turned to Serrim and said “I’ve put Terrace on inert file storage. There is something deeply wrong with that woman, but that can get looked at when she’s not a sabotage risk.”

Serrim just nodded somberly as she thought for a moment, saying “Well. I suppose I’d best be getting to work. Thanks for the help.”

Frowning before they fast traveled away, the Moderator noted “The thanks are appreciated, but I really wish I wasn’t needed.”

With that, Serrim walked the rest of the way to her virtual workspace and got to work on helping plan what parts of the computer system would be cannibalized, and how to go about doing it without causing problems for the parts kept fully functional.

This process was… slow, to say the least. While energy was no longer exactly in cripplingly short supply, there were still major problems with the whole endeavor. Namely, there was barely any physical hardware left to cannibalize systems with, since almost everything had been repurposed into fuel or computronium over the eons. Still, there was at least some, and with nothing else to work with the engineering crews got to work with what they had. In the process, they were being extremely careful not to let even a single nanogram of matter escape into space, or fall into the event horizon. The residents of the universe’s demise couldn’t afford even the slightest losses if they wanted to make this work.

Several million years passed getting all the relevant infrastructure in place to construct the time machine, before it was time for the most crucial part of the project: Redeveloping the capabilities needed to construct wormholes and warp-equipped spacecraft. Another million years of carefully controlled small scale experimentation took place before finally a tiny micrometer-wide wormhole was eventually created.

At one of the many ensuing parties Serrim found herself getting waylaid by a group of her coworkers, all of them exhorting her to make a speech.

In response, Serrim protested “But I don’t want to do a speech, I just want to enjoy the party!”

Someone in the crowd shouted back “Your dad would have loved to do a speech!”

Reflexively, Serrim fired back “I’m not my father, I just want to be an engineer!”

But her objections fell on an unlistening crowd as the attendees started chanting “Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech!”

At this point, peer pressure had reached a point where Serrim couldn’t see any way out aside from bailing via Fast Travel, which would only postpone the issue. So, sighing in resignation, Serrim trudged up to the stage and stood there awkwardly for several subjective minutes. Eventually, the sheer absurdity of the situation got to her, and she started laughing loud and hard.

The crowd started looking around nervously, even as Serrim eventually spoke, saying “Sorry, but this is just so ridiculous. You’ve put me on this absurd pedestal because of my dad’s role in the project, and it’s really getting to me. You want to know why he archived himself? It’s because he couldn’t handle the stress from all the pressure being placed on him, and I honestly wonder if he had the right idea! Regardless of whether or not the project succeeded I’d at least not have to deal with people I thought were professionals treating me in such a bizarre manner. So either back off and stop idolizing me, or I’ll be going into inert file storage. System: Fast Travel someplace no-one else is currently visiting.”

And with that, Serrim vanished off to who knew where, leaving the crowd she’d just rebuked to mull over her words. A few subjective days later, Serrim was hiking one of the simulated wilderness areas when she heard someone calling her name behind her.

Turning around, Serrim was somewhat shocked by who she saw, asking “Aunt Lavender?”

The former Councilor simply nodded as she sat down on one of the rocks along the trail and said “Yeah, I heard about that horrible party you were at. Want to talk with me about it?”

Serrim shrugged, then said “There’s not really all that much to say. I’ve been living in my father’s shadow for trillions of years one way or another, and getting forced onto that stage was just the last straw. Unless you can find a team that won’t treat me like that I’m not coming back to the project.”

A few subjective moments were spent in thought, before Lavender noted “I’ll see what I can do. Still, in the meantime maybe some self-reflection would help?”

Serrim chuckled for a moment, before saying “You think I haven’t been doing that?”

At this, Lavender hummed for a moment, before saying “Not like this. As a test run for the whole time travel thing, the crew sent one end of the wormhole for a dip near the black hole and gave it a time differential of a few milliseconds. Plenty to cause a timeline fork. Anyway, now there’s a set of booths where you can talk with parallel timeline versions of yourself, or get up to more intimate interactions if you really want to.”

Blinking in surprise, Serrim asked “Are you seriously telling me to go screw myself?”

Lavender just smiled as she said “Only if you actually want to. Still, I think the experience may do you some good.”

Bursting out in laughter at the idea, Serrim eventually managed to reply “Alright, I guess I’ll give it a go.”

Half a subjective hour later, she’d arrived in a booth resembling a hotel room. In fact she had arrived twice, sitting down next to herself on the bed. After a few moments, the one who was from a few milliseconds into the future asked “So, I’m pretty sure we diverged sometime during the hike.”

Serrim’s past remarked “That seems pretty likely; the closed timelike curve wasn’t built until after the party, so we couldn’t have diverged during it.”

“Mmmhm. So, was it Lavender who told you about the booths?”

“Yeah. She was pretty suggestive with regards to the idea of intimate interactions, which I’m not exactly opposed to. Still, I’d like to talk for at least a little bit first.”

“Same here. I’m still rather iffy on the idea of going back to work if I’m just going to get propped up on a pedestal like that.”

“Full agreement there. Fortunately, Aunt Lavender’s looking for people who won’t do that for me to work with.”

There was an awkward pause as both of Serrim realized that she’d completely forgotten which of them was supposed to be past or future. Eventually, one of her asked “So, has that been enough foreplay, or do you want to keep talking for a while?”

Serrim replied to herself, shrugging “Let’s go for it. Only one question: who gets to be bottom first?”

Both of her blinked, before saying in unison “System: disable gravity.”

A few subjective hours later, Serrim arrived at Lavender’s virtual residence via Fast Travel. Walking over to the door of the stately garden manor and sending the ‘visitor here’ ping to Lavender took a few subjective seconds. Shortly thereafter, Lavender came to the door and greeted Serrim “Ah, I see you’re back from your self-reflection session. Did you help yourself de-stress?”

Serrim couldn’t help but smile as she replied “Absolutely. That was the best intimate recreational activity I’ve done in a million years. Mind if I come in?”

Lavender stepped aside, clearing the doorway for Serrim to step through into the foyer. In a few moments, both of them were seated around the low table. After a moment, Lavender asked “So, can I get you anything? Tea, perhaps?”

Giving a wry grin, Serrim noted “Wow, you still take those ancient hospitality customs seriously don’t you? Still, far be it from me to refuse.”

Nodding with silent approval, Lavender sent a ping to the system, and a pot of hot tea appeared on the table along with cups. Both Serrim and Lavender poured, picked up the cup, and drank. After a few moments, Serrim noted “Interesting, I don’t quite recognize the flavor.”

Lavender just smiled knowingly, before she noted “I’ve had my garden set up as a medium-fidelity evolution simulator for eons now, with selection pressures tuned to produce a wide variety of delicious fruit. That particular tea contains juice identical to one of the more recently-evolved varieties.”

Serrim stared down at the tea for a few moments, commenting on the brew “Hmmm… It’s quite sweet, but also savory at the same time, and is that a bit of spiciness in there?”

A nod from Lavender, before she asked “So, do you like it?” even as she took a sip from her own cup.

Unable to stop herself from smiling, Serrim replied “It’s wonderful.”

Lavender just chuckled, even as she commented “Well drink up and enjoy. It’ll only be available for the next few million years, since I set my garden to extinct any varieties that haven’t undergone significant change recently.”

Serrim looked down at her cup and replied “Well, I guess I’ll be needing to stop by more often. Anyway, I do believe you mentioned that you were looking for a crew who wouldn’t idolize me. How’s progress gone on that?”

Lavender set down her tea. Then she turned to Serrim and said “I’ve got some mixed news there. I’ve found several potential candidate groups who seem like they wouldn’t have that particular problem. That said, they’re all in high-profile prestigious roles within the backshot initiative. So you’re likely to get a major spotlight no matter who you sign up with.”

Serrim sat in silent thought for a few moments, answering “I think I can deal with that, so long as at least my co-workers evaluate me for what I’m actually contributing, rather than who I’m related to.”

With that, Lavender said “Understood. I’ll start getting you in touch. System: send messages to the following groups...”

A few subjective years later, Serrim was working with one of the crews, currently looking over the projections for energy requirements to reach the Stellar Era. After several looks over the numbers, Serrim noted “There’s no way we’ll be able to get back to the Stelliferous on just the power output of our own black hole. Even with a contracted warp metric and all the other tricks reducing energy costs for the warp drive to the point of getting about a trillion and a half years of reverse per joule of energy, the required energy costs are so ludicrous that the amount of energy we’d need requires scientific notations of our black hole.”

After checking Serrim’s figures several times, Charret – one of her co-workers – responded “You’re absolutely correct, but I think I’ve already figured out a way to get more energy. Remember that timeline fork we made to use as a test run a while back? If we make an agreement to pool energy between a large enough number of parallel instances, we should be easily capable of making up the difference.”

Serrim blinked, before running the numbers on how many timelines would be needed. After doing that, she noted “To get enough energy, we’ll need to network 1.44*10^29 timelines together. That is a MASSIVE co-ordination problem, and if any inter-timeline infighting takes place, the entire project is doomed.”

Rubbing his beard, Charret noted “I think I have an idea to make the coordination problem much more feasible, but we’ll need to talk to the Council about it.”

“YOU WANT TO DO WHAT!?” exclaimed Councillor Verdance in response to the shocking proposal.

In the echoey sunlit council room in charge of the simulated world, Serrim reiterated “We need to archive people who aren’t going to comply. We’ve run the numbers, and the only way to get enough energy for our time probe to reach the Stellar Era is to pool energy from 1.44*10^29 timeline branches. With that level of coordination being required even the slightest infighting could doom us. Therefore, before we start branching time to such an extent, we need to ensure that every single person kept active is fully onboard with doing this. In addition, it will free up some additional mass to cannibalize for wormhole production, which we will need.”

Groaning, Councillor Frictive remarked “So what you’re saying is that we need to archive people for political crimes if we want any of our efforts to mean anything whatsoever, otherwise we simply won’t have the energy needed to do this. Is this descent into totalitarianism really the only way to acquire enough energy?”

Nodding sadly, Serrim noted “Unfortunately that seems to be the case. There were a few other ideas batted around about plundering our past selves or other civilizations closer to our current time, but those ideas were not only extremely immoral, they were also entirely unworkable due to navigational issues. Putting it bluntly, networking with present timeline forks is our only workable option that’s remotely viable.”

Sighing, Verdance noted “Well, I suppose that we had best get on with it then. The only question is how we hide that we’re archiving people for political reasons, since if people realize that’s what’s going on the ones due to be archived are almost guaranteed to try and sabotage things.”

Then the downright ancient Councillor Horizon spoke up, noting “We have options. The first is to simply set up a lottery to archive more people, claiming truthfully that more mass is required. Then we secretly code the lottery drawer to always draw archive tickets for all the people who would oppose the networking project, using predictive psyche modeling.”

Sitting off to the side as the Councillors began hashing out the details of how to archive trillions of people for political reasons, Serrim couldn’t help but frown a bit at the necessary bit of totalitarianism that was about to ensue.

What followed was a brief period of unrest when in the aftermath of the archival, the fact that it was primarily being used to archive political dissidents was leaked. Still, as predicted almost everyone left was willing to go along with the plan, even if they had some minor misgivings about doing so. Many more wormholes were produced and used to fork the timeline to the necessary degree. Shortly thereafter, a random selection algorithm chose which timeline would actually be making the time probe, the rest downclocking massively to minimize potential political problems and free up even more energy for the probe.

It’s in this randomly selected timeline fork that Serrim was once again at the forefront of the time probe project. Currently, she was putting the finishing touches on the actual warp drive that would transport the time probe across truly vast distances of time and space, making certain that it would be able to handle the absurdly huge amounts of energy being shoved through it without exploding, or collapsing into a Kugelblitz.

It was as the simulated probe once again crumpled into a singularity that Berruja – another coworker – sarcastically noted “Huh. You know, we’ve got more than enough energy to outright make a replacement for our black hole now, why don’t we just do that?”

With an incredibly irate tone, Serrim answered “Because turning the backshot initiative into a multiverse-sized ponzi scheme is both a massive breach of trust, and on top of that it sets a horrible precedent that means any future attempts at intercausal cooperation like this would be doomed to failure. When the energy ran out again – which it would – there would be no chance of ever pulling off anything remotely like this ever again.”

Berruja frowned, before she noted “Not quite what I meant, though I could see why you might think that. The problem is that you’re trying to shove way more power through that probe than it can actually handle, meaning that you need some way to make the power last much, much longer at a constant, manageable output. Use the energy from the multiverse of black holes to feed ours and keep it at a constant, usable output, and stagger the rest across the multiverse to stockpile enough energy in slowly evaporating black holes to keep things running for an immensely long time. That should let us convert the unified spike of energy from all the black holes evaporating at once into a vastly longer period of pretty flat output, which would massively simplify the design of the time probe. On top of that it allows the option of branching timelines with higher mass holes to share if we miscalculate and need extra energy.”

Immediately, Serrim changed the numbers around in the simulation, and when the simulated probe managed to make it all the way back to the period where galaxies were easily visible, she whooped with joy.

Charret walked into the virtual room from his break just in time to see Serrim and Berruja hugging each other in enthusiasm. Smiling, he made sure to take a picture of the scene before he interrupted.

It was with this new plan that the time probe was finally assembled. It massed thirty kilograms, of which twenty five kilograms were propulsion in the form of its warp drive, laser sail, braking ramscoop, and reaction drive. The rest was the computers to keep it running, the wormholes that would supply it with power and its connections to the futures, and an electrostatically recoverable smart dust array telescope that would let it evaluate the state of the universe every time it stopped, which it would start doing every trillion years once it had reached almost all of the way into the past.

The target was the early Stellar Era, about fourteen billion years after the start of the universe. Of course, reaching this far back would take a truly absurd length of time, 10^49 years of travel in fact. Nothing compared to the age of the universe, but still quite a long time to wait.

So as soon as the time probe had been pushed up to nearly light speed and the warp drive kicked in, Serrim announced at the party “So, I’m going to archive myself until the time probe arrives back in the Stellar Era. My role in the project is done, and I miss my dad.”

As soon as he was done sipping his drink, Charret noted “Can’t say I blame you. Personally, I’ll be exploring the multiverse; it’s all so massively downclocked that I’ll only experience a few subjective centuries, and I’m interested in learning how the various worlds diverge from each other.”

Shrugging a bit, Lavender remarked “I’ll be doing neither of those. Someone has to keep an eye on things, and I might as well take a shift doing that.”

Raising an eyebrow, Serrim asked across the table in Lavender’s manor “You don’t trust the automatons we set up to stagger power outputs and maintain the probe in-flight?”

Lavender frowned, before noting “It’s not that I don’t trust the automatons, it’s that I don’t trust everyone else. It’s a long time for people to go crazy in, and someone’s got to be mental health support so it might as well be me.”

Charret nodded as he said “Fair enough. Still, that’s going to be quite a long wait.”

Serrim grinned wryly, before noting “Don’t worry, aunt Lavender won’t remember most of it. She already told me that she’ll be limiting her active memory buffer during the interim to only a thousand years at a time, so that she won’t be totally unrecognizable when I get reinstantiated.”

With that, Lavender gently elbowed Serrim and fired back “Don’t you know it’s rude to talk about someone while they’re present?”

As Serrim replied “Sorry, aunt Lavender.”, Charret couldn’t help but chuckle at the events taking place.

After a few subjective moments, Lavender raised a glass of some as-yet unnamed beverage and said “Anyway, I propose a toast to the past we’ll soon be experiencing.”

Silently, Serrim and Charret raised their own drinks, and knocked them together as they agreed “To the past we’ll soon be in.”

With that, everyone drank and dug into the meal before they prepared for their ways of passing the time.

The next thing that Serrim was aware of was Lavender gently rubbing her back and saying “Morning, Serrim. Probe’s reached the Stellar Era and braked to a halt relative to the adjacent galaxies, though they haven’t quite settled on where they’re going to set up shop yet.”

Hauling herself upright from the virtual bed she’d been laying in when reinstantiated, Serrim said “That’s neat, though I was admittedly hoping that I wouldn’t be woken up until it was time to bring back everyone.”

Lavender just shrugged, noting “Yes I know, but you need to see this. System: show current visual feed from the time probe.”

With that, the room fell away to show something beautiful. The majority of the sky was still dark, but lighting up the night were countless bright spots, shining like beacons for all to see. Zooming in revealed that each of these bright spots were themselves composed of hundreds of billions of smaller lights. After staring for several moments, Serrim couldn’t help but remark “Wow… So that’s what galaxies look like. I’d always been imagining, but what I’d been thinking has nothing on the reality.”

Lavender smiled, before she noted “Told you you’d want to see it.”

Then the feed cut out, with a message saying “Smart Dust Telescope retracted. No visual feed.”

Looking at that, Serrim said “Ah, guess they’ve decided on a galaxy and gone to warp then. The only question is if they’re just doing the parallax rangefinding jump, or if they’re actually going in.”

That question was soon answered when the feed came back, and the probe was very obviously inside the galactic disk. A few more feed cutouts occurred as the probe warped around, before eventually showing a tidally locked rocky planetoid orbiting a red dwarf.

Grinning, Serrim said “It’s beautiful. Anyway, there’s a lot of work to do getting infrastructure set up, forking timelines for the entire multiverse we’ve had helping us to inhabit, and just generally moving into that time, and I want in.”

As the probe feed cut out, Lavender couldn’t help but laugh, replying “Ah, there’s the Serrim I know, always looking for something to do. I’ve still got people in the project who listen to me, so I should be more than capable of getting you back into the swing of things.”

Pulling the other virtual woman into a hug, Serrim smiled as she said “Thanks, Aunt Lavender.”

What followed was thousands of years of frantic construction, building industrial infrastructure, computronium, enough wormhole forges to make timelines for everyone to inhabit, and plenty of other construction projects. There wasn’t anything terribly critical that Serrim was involved in, as she was perfectly content to stick with maintaining manufacturing quality at one of many computronium factories. It was a nice change of pace from standing at the head of the project to save an entire civilization.

Still, the process of downloading all the archived people to the new conputronium was going slowly, largely due to bandwidth issues; even with the truly massive number of wormhole ends shipped to the black hole era through the existing connection. Despite this slow pace of progress, eventually everyone had been brought through. It was time to wake up everyone who had been put in storage while the project was completed.

Rotani woke up sitting in a chair under a glass dome, the sky above filled with stars. The next thing he knew, he’d been tackle-hugged by his daughter as she said “It’s been so long dad, I’m so glad to have you back!”, tears streaking down her face as she did so.

Rotani simply patted his daughter on the back as he noted “I told you it would only be for a few billion years, didn’t I?”

Somewhat awkwardly, Serrim noted “It was much, much longer than that, dad, though I was inert for most of it. Turns out that the actual transit back in time took about 10^49 years.”

Rotani blinked, before he noted “That’s longer than our black hole would have lasted by a frankly absurd degree. How in the world did you manage to to stretch things out for that long?”

And so, Serrim gave her father the rundown of the solution they’d come up with. She started with the first wormhole, the ensuing timeline fork experiment, and her intimate encounter with herself. With that done, she covered the energy requirement problem and the measures taken to implement the timeline fork solution, followed by the staggering of the black holes.

When Serrim had finished her tale, Rotani simply nodded with understanding. Eventually, he noted “I wonder how many of me there are right now? Since I’ve been inert since prior to the timeline branches, any divergence should still be minimal.”

Blushing with slight embarrassment, Serrim, noted “1.54*10^29 of you, actually. That’s not counting any forks caused by the branch from the initial experiment.”

There were a few moments of silence, before Rotani noted “Well, I for one am in the mood for a meal. System: dinner, please.”

Nothing happened at first, and Rotani turned to look at Serrim before asking “Did you limit my access privileges?”

Serrim chuckled as she shook her head ‘no’ and noted “We’re just in physical bodies at the moment, since I was feeling a bit extravagant for this particular event. It’ll take a little while for the resort’s drones to prepare something.”

Looking down at his hand, Rotani commented “Interesting. I’ve never actually not been virtual before. Still, I’m willing to give it a try.”

Smiling, Serrim said “It’s a new experience for me too, dad. Anyway, want to watch some news streams while we wait for food?”

At this, Rotani just grinned ad noted “Sure. System: news”

Immediately, an augmented reality window opened showing a virtual feed overlaid onto both Serrim and Rotani’s sensory inputs. In the window, the commentator was saying “-other news, the exploration corps has found a primitive civilization living on a tidally locked planet in orbit of a red dwarf. Observation from orbit leads us to believe that they’ve developed agriculture but haven’t yet managed to refine metals. No cultural details have yet been determined, but plans for more detailed observation in preparation for first contact are currently in development. We now go to our reporter at the Exploration Corps headquarters...”

– FIN –​
 
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