DLM, Bk 6, Chapter 6

After my conversation about the future with Sophia, there were plans to make. The Greene’s and the organisation they were part of, the Colours, needed to go. There was simply no way around it, not if I wanted to ever have peace. Given that they were still hounding me, still abusing my name and piling hate on me, despite myself being absent for years. And that was while ignoring the whole question of revenge and, the possibly more important question of morality. Would I be willing to let the destruction of Accord Island slide, would I be willing to let the death of my mother slide? And would I be willing to let an ideology who was willing to cause such destruction, to say nothing of their spiritual predecessors, expand without acting?

In search of an answer, I began to look at the people living in the countries getting incorporated into Europa Magna. New Brunsburg, my old home, there were still cameras I knew about, knew how to find their data-streams and look at the world through them.

The first cameras I used to watch the people were in a location I remembered fondly, the mall in which Sophia and I had our first day. In some ways, it felt like it was only yesterday, the pleasant time we had spent together, with me completely oblivious that she had a vastly different idea about our time than I had. Just thinking about it made me grin at my previous self, so blind, so oblivious, yet, it made me wonder, what was I now blind about? Back then, that single, first kiss, quick and furtive, had been like a hammerblow to my head, striking me senseless for a moment, too stunned to process what had happened. What would be the next hammerblow, shattering the scales before my eyes?

The people I was watching certainly were not giving me that sudden realisation. There were differences to the place I remembered, obviously, but overall, little had changed. Stores had opened, others had closed, the usual process of business. Teenagers, looking so very young to me, despite there only being a few years of difference in our ages, nothing hinted at the fact that their countries were in the process of uniting under a force, a super-national, political group I could only consider as ‘evil’. It was just life, ordinary and utterly unspectacular.

The Colours’ Coup was just that, slow, unspectacular and covert, the majority of their forces remaining under the radar. In hindsight, I could see the various small changes they had made, hundreds of individual events scattered across the last three decades. By themselves, the changes they had made to society were incrementally small, unconnected, and had little impact. But now, after the destruction of Accord Island and the resulting downfall of the Guild, they had been able to utilise the shockwaves, riding them into positions of power on an unprecedented level. What was worse, there seemed to be people who were simply unwitting collaborators, products of a system that had formed them into tools for an unseen puppeteer. All data I could find pointed at them being wholly unaware of what they were doing, whom they were empowering.

How could one convince a populace that their collective actions were leading them towards a dark path, if the individual actions were innocuous? Laws, customs and rules, that, on their own, were common-sense ideas that I could barely argue against but, once their combinations and combined effect was modelled, meant something vastly different. So far, I could not prove wrongdoing on their part, for that, I would have to find another of their facilities and get direct evidence.

Out of curiosity, I accessed the channels I had put into place if I ever wanted to re-active the base I had above New Brunsburg, simply to see if it was still there. Given that the bunker had remained lost in time for decades, I had expected that nobody seemed to have disturbed anything, at least according to the sensors I had access to. There may have been an intrusion that the sensors could not catch, but I somewhat doubted it.

And it gave me options.

The bunker had been an excellent base, well-hidden, defendable yet within easy reach of New Brunsburg and several other, important cities. Reactivating the base certainly had potential but it had also the potential to go horribly wrong.

As I was pondering that, Galatea began dumping a vast amount of data into our shared mental construct. It was obvious that she had yet to form a coherent model, that she essentially was thinking, considering the data and forming conclusions on that, with a new piece of information as a starting point, a kernel around which she was now forming a hypothesis. And she was using me, and my mind, to bounce off ideas. The amount was enough to overwhelm me and I shut down any outside, sensory input to deal with it, fully focusing inwards. There was just no other way to keep up with her and her processing power, I even had to slave most of the processing nodes within my body to my brain, allowing me to outsorce some of the computations. If I had been standing, that process would have had me drop to the floor, as every non-essential node in my body started to process data from Galatea.

With that one kernel, a pattern within the resonance we had observed and a correlation to the crystal growth, I followed along Galatea’s train of thought, reading and digesting the theories of others, some discarded as unfalsifiable, others put aside as untestable, trying to comprehend what she was considering.

More and more information was processed, conclusions I would normally discard as impossible remaining within my mind, not as firm fact but as predictions we might have inadvertently been testing. Theories, which I had regarded as universally applicable were called into question, if they truly applied in that particular instance. Or if we had managed to form something outside of the previously accepted theory, something that fell outside the laws of physics as we understood them.

Galatea’s theory was that the resonance we had observed, the impossibility that multiple points within the crystal lattice would behave in such a way, creating a resonance without having a direct, physical connection, was caused by a connection, just not a physical one. One would expect that a resonance would have a time-lag, to account for the distance between atoms within the lattice, a travel-time to transmit the stimulus from one side of the crystal to a different place. That travel-time seemed to be nil and that was what had us previously stumped. We had discarded a connection, because everything we had ever observed in nature said that you had to have a travel-time, with the speed of light the observed maximum velocity anything, even information, could travel. 

Outside of anecdotal observations, there was nothing that could do so. And those anecdotes concerned Powered, with only visual observation applied, meaning there was no data to analyse what was going on. Or, in other words, how could anyone get an accurate understanding of the process a teleporter employed, whether his teleportation allowed him to move fifty meters instantly or if the process took a few hundred nanoseconds? Without serious equipment, it just could not be done.

If we assumed that there was an instant transmission of an impulse, the resonance and the growth of it, accumulating until the catastrophic failure-mechanism was triggered was plausible, expected even. If there was such a transmission, which I still was unable to wrap my head around, it made sense.

But how could there be such a transmission and why would the transmission occur with that latest sample, while also occurring when Volitc used her electro-magnetic powers to stimulate them. With the limited sample-size, I could not even reliably rule out coincidence, which only added to my annoyance.

The more I considered Galatea’s idea and the information she presented in support, the more I began to see that it made sense. It should not make sense, not within our understanding of the Universe, but it did. So, either, our understanding of the Universe needed updating or there was something wrong with our data.

As Galatea continued to find more and more correlations within the data, I began to map out different experiments and set-ups that would give us new data to work with. While Galatea began to form a model, how an impulse could be transmitted without a need to cross the intervening space, I began considering what that would mean, for our understanding of the world.

And I was not certain if I was excited about the idea, or scared.