Chapter Three: Centrifuge — Part 1

Orchid sat in the void of space, Bamboo having just arrived. Orchid looked almost transparent as she was dimly lit by a sporadic red backlight from the lasers her hundreds of banders were adjusting into a powerful, sympathetic glyph. Occasionally a laser would drift too close to the black hole they were working with and part of the stream would disappear, only to have the bander readjust the laser back to a point where it didn’t cross the event horizon. Bamboo had arrived during one of those awkward moments, and at Orchid’s prompting, took over the fine-tuning that would prove quintessential to the success of whatever Orchid was planning. As Bamboo began writing out the mathematical formulas, each bander responding to the formula by adjusting, very often only fractionally, the angle of the laser being shot at them, his curiosity began to get the best of him. From what he could tell, they were making a massive, four-dimensional cat’s cradle around the local black hole.

“What are we doing?” Bamboo had to wonder.

Orchid spun around so she could look at her brother as she spoke. Two things made Orchid’s instinctive turning to face her brother unnecessary. First, all communication was being transmitted between the two, not broadcast as sound. Second, Bamboo couldn’t see, and had no way of knowing if Orchid were facing him, or staring off into the distance.

“We’re speaking the language of the universe, a language more accurate and dangerous than pure math, pure science, or even pure ignorance. We are asking, quite firmly, that the universe do something wonderful.”

“Yes, of course we are. It’s what we do.” Bamboo waited patiently for Orchid to get to her point, until seconds passed into minutes. “And?”

“‘And’ what?” Orchid asked, seeming agitated, her mind already ahead of the curve. “Perhaps you should be focusing on the eight dimensional counter pulsed tetra cube you’re building up with lasers, as we are on a time limit.”

Like all languages, Orchid’s version of her native language — Uzol — had nuances and flavors within it that made it unpredictable, even dangerous, under the wrong circumstances. Her twin brother, a master of the language of the universe, and of Orchid’s personal dialect, heard the warning flags in the words chosen that told him this was one of Orchid’s perhaps less considered experiments. His ears locked on the most dangerous two words that Orchid could utter — especially so close to a black hole.

“Time limit?” Bamboo asked, his fingers fairly flying over two sets of keyboards already. “And for the record, four squared dimensions are not eight dimensions, but 16. Four will be stable, four unstable, four imaginary, and four purely chaotic.”

“That’s why I have you do the hard math on these things, sweetie. I’m just the concept machine.” Orchid spun back, sounding somehow nervous and confident all at once.

The resultant emotion in her brother was an awkward coupling of disillusionment and madness. “You mentioned something about a time limit.” Bamboo said, knowing he would be done in a minute or two.

“The pulse charge for the mechanism will be here in less than three minutes. It will boost the energy level and induce the super conductive properties of this shape. I know it seems contradictory, but all the heat —”

Bamboo waved her off “— will leak out across the unstable twelve dimensions, causing the glyph itself to become conductive to an incredible range of energy. But for goodness sake, why?”

“Because without the superconductive properties of the glyph and its influence across all sixteen dimensions, I can’t neutralize gravity within the containment field.” Orchid said, sounding, for the most part, as meek and inconsequential as she could muster.

She finished talking just as Bamboo completed the last keystroke of his efforts.

“Oh, well … Shit.” Was all Bamboo really had time to say.

Most of the space around them seemed, because of the black hole, darker than normal. It looked as if light itself were being sucked out and replaced by particles of ink. Bamboo wasn’t particularly bothered by it, but Orchid had to shiver at the power of the black hole on the space around her. What bothered Bamboo was the odd feeling of lethargy, and more specifically his proximity to the source. He couldn’t actually see the darkness, but he could feel its ‘coldness’ deep into his bones. A black hole, or what Orchid sometimes referred to as one of the most massive atoms in the universe, was something to avoid, as far as Bamboo was concerned. But Orchid felt she had to play. Because of Orchid’s playful nature, entire books of laws had been written by the government of Coven and by the Intergalactic United Community of Interspecies Contact to keep her experimentation within controlled parameters. Still, there was no way to predict her next experiment in time to make it illegal, so Orchid almost always got away with her grander experiments before anybody (other than her brother) could try to stop her.

Her last little experiment created thirty-seven pages of laws, all requiring multi-governmental control of any experiments involving shifting of large, planet-sized objects across planar dimensional short cuts engineered into particular points in space. The laws were written despite the fact that Orchid was never actually found guilty of criminal acts. Her actions had been classed as a humeitarian effort, and she received the highest civilian honor Coven could place on her for saving so many people’s lives. The action was not without cost to the peoples of the planet in question, however. Orchid had a strange way of charging people for her services. To save a planet from being blasted by thousands of life ending asteroids, she made it disappear for an entire day — stopping time for the planet and therefore essentially removing it from space. When she brought it back into space, the people’s eyes were all the same color as her own. She had also locked in the genetic coding. That had been her fee, and the political consequences resultant of it were merely a bonus to her.

It was no coincidence, the purple eyed clans were certain, that their eyes now matched Orchid’s so closely — eyes the color of the Lower Serving Class they had genetically programmed as a means of discrimination. Galactic lawsuits immediately followed Orchid’s experience. The most conservative of their political body quickly forgot that she had saved them from annihilation, and some even suggested that she had put the asteroid field on its deadly course in the first place. In the end Orchid’s supposed involvement in moving the asteroids could not be proven, the comment was determined slanderous, and therefore was not admissible as evidence in court. The person making the suggestion was fined a year’s pay and imprisoned for twenty days. Bamboo was almost certain that he was breaking laws that hadn’t even been written yet, staring at the black hole, hoping his radiation shields would hold up should the glyph fail to hold the energy it was about to release.

Somewhere in the galaxy, a massive nuclear detonation had resulted in a beam of pure laser energy concentrated to millions of times the power of any laser ever produced by any person previous to its production. The laser took close to five minutes to arrive, building power and collecting mass as it pushed its way through several plasma pockets in space. When it did finally pass through the Snap, it struck the back of the laser being used to tune the glyph straight on, vaporizing it instantaneously and dragging the atomized material along with it. The beam hit with the combined lifetime power output of a typical sentient species having just reached the end of its industrial age, to include all acts war and peace, all calories used by those living, and all energy exerted by mechanical and chemical processes.

It slammed into the magnetic field of the first bander at the lowest point of the glyph (relative to Bamboo’s perspective.) The energy diverted along all the lines, losing almost none of its energy to the reflection. It began forming the glyph, exposing the glyph’s shear size because it took more than a second for the energy, which was moving at just under the speed of light, to reach all the banders within the matrix. As had been predicted, the beam pushed the banders out from their original positions as it struck them, each using all their propulsion ability to counter the blast and keep as close as possible. One could almost see it forming, like a deadly flower or mandala, spreading out to fill a sphere. If one could see in the multiple dimensions it was expressing itself, one would truly have been amazed. As it was, the glyph seemed to blossom out from the center of the black hole itself. Fortunately, the banders didn’t have to absorb the energy, they simply had to redirect it to the next bander, using magnetic energy as a lens.

Should even one bander fail, it would be destroyed, the beam making the glyph would have shot out into space on a path of brutal destruction. Orchid had been prepared for that, coming up with plans bent on diminishing the damage such a beam would ultimately cause, should the energy free itself. She sincerely hoped she wouldn’t have to use such contingencies. The glyph lit up white, getting brighter with every second that passed. Everything, apparently, was going according to plan.

“Detonation in ten.” Orchid laughed excitedly, starting her victory dance.

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