Memoirs of a Timelord (25 page)

       "I'm Meesha now." She looked at me hopefully, unsure how I'd react.

       "Just a first name?" I inquired, letting slip a wry smile.  I was indeed proud to hear of this development.  Choosing her own name was a key indicator in the Felzier scale of sentience.

       "So far." She shrugged with a smile.

       "Well, did you see it all?" I asked, gesturing to the sky above. 

       "I saw enough to know what I want to do with my life." Meesha leaned against the ship casually.

       "Oh?" I had a feeling this would be interesting.  She had been out there by herself for over five years.  In robot-years that was like a century.  I had a feeling she might have come to a few revelations while she was finding herself.

       "I want to be your Galactic Engineer." She looked me right in the eye and said it without flinching.

       I took a few pica-seconds to consider the prospect.  She had the skills, she had the abilities, and I was responsible for hiring my own crew.  No problem there.  But members of a Timelord's immediate crew were each equipped with an Onkx to get around.  Only the Master's was enabled for temporal relocation, but otherwise their devices were no different than mine.  But that's where the rub came in; the Onkx is bio-morphic.  Just two drops of clear fluid dropped on your palms and your entire atomic makeup was completely altered.  It burned like fire in my veins though.  Installing the Onkx was equivalent to compressing childbirth into sixty seconds.

       But even though Didra was built from class V morphic material, she was still only a hundred kilos of shape-shifting goo.  The biomorphic Onkx would never work on her synthetic morphic systems.  The Onkx only worked on biological beings.  Without the ability to jump from point to point, she would be stuck riding the bus to work every day, in a manner of speaking.  Meesha would have to be ferried about in a linear vessel or by someone with an Onkx.  Mebbe she could use the P2P portals that the worker bees would use?  I wanted to say yes, but I wasn't sure how I would solve her mobility issues.  

       "I have a resume." She said before holding out her left arm.  As I watched, I could see the familiar shape of the Onkx interface growing outwards from her forearm.  I had to give the sight a laugh; I had only ever seen the keyboard a few times, back when I was a total green-horn.  That's the only time you use the thing.  The Onkx is in your head, just like the Guf.  Why the hell would you use a tactile interface when you could just think it?  

       Still, I was tantalized by the idea that Didra could really have created a non-organic Onkx.  I had been taught that her morphic matter would reject installation of any such device.  It was a core prohibition added by the original DuNai makers.  Any attempt to unlock this feature would cause a subatomic failure of the molecules, turning the object into a puddle of syrup.  

       "That's not just for looks?" I said skeptically pointing to the device on her wrist.  A split second later the Guf told me she was coming.

       Like a flash, she was there, just inches away.  I had to give that a laugh.  Her technique was interesting.  She started her lateral insertion before she was fully phased so there was a streaking effect to the whole movement.  But true to her word, she seemed to have a functioning Onkx.

       "So you can jump across a room, how about some follow the leader?" I gave her a smile before pushing her back with one finger.  As I did, my touch transmitted to her an image of Gravada Flats on Thelkor.  Immediately I was gone.

       I hadn't been there more than a second when she appeared in a dim flash of light.  Her reentry was rough, but she had just chased me halfway across the galaxy.

       "Your turn." She poked me back, delivering an image of Rakagani Major.  I knew exactly where she was headed.  

       As I jumped, I could see her tearing through crumpled space.  She had good form, her energy outputs were perfect, and she was on an optimum course through the underneath of the universe.  I doubted I could outpace her, so I did what any Timelord would do.  Shifting into temporal insertion, I cheated by dialing back the chronometer a few minutes.  Technically she still beat me there, I just arrived earlier on the timeline.  

       As soon as I materialized, the stench of the old volcano reminded me where I was. Standing a third taller than Olympus Mons, Cerous Glans is a monster of a volcano.  From where I stood I could see the wrecked landscape of Rakagani Major on my left, and the boiling caldera to my right.  Remembering that I was only just a few minutes ahead of Meesha, I worked quickly.  Pressing my palm against the dirt, I commanded the atomic material to convert to morphic matter.  It only took a few of my cells to begin the conversion of the ambient materials.  That was the biggest difference between class IV and V; the ability to incorporate matter into your matrix.

       As I stepped back I could see the effect spread out as the sulfur and frozen lava turned a drab shade of gray before it began to form into objects.  One by one they popped up until I had a Caribbean getaway assembled.  Complete with a wet bar, deck chairs, and a bartender named Fabio, it was everything a busy working woman needs.  I plunked down into the nearest folding chair and relaxed as the blender mixed me a pitcher of Margaritas.  Changing my clothes, I cycled through a series of bathing suits until I found this cute little one-piece with matching sunglasses.  I looked fabulous.

       "Cheater cheater pumpkin eater." Meesha gave a smile as she materialized in the chair next to me.  

       "What took you so long?" I smiled back as I enjoyed the warmth of the caldera.  The ambient temperature was hot enough to melt lead, but we were both heavily altered to survive in that environment.  So for us it was really just a day at the beach. Hell, I might go for a lava swim later.

       "How'd you do it?" I asked her as Fabio was pouring us each a tall glass of citrus flavored glycol.  Real Margaritas would vaporize on Cerous Glans.  "How'd you get your frame to accept the P2P technology?"

       "I didn't." She shrugged before taking a sip of her drink.  "Didn't you notice my new body?" She held out her arms to let me look her over.  I had to admit, things did seem to be in different places than where I had originally installed them.  The lattices were woven differently, like chainmail almost.  The patterns were so delicate and fine that I had to admire the embroidery.  

       But there was something else too, the signature on her base materials were different.  They were clearly DuNai in design, but at the same time without any of the classic DuNai tags.  It was like her polymorphic molecules had been replaced with a generic brand.  Everywhere I looked I saw the new material, and not a trace of the equipment I had installed.  She was all new.

       "Don't get me wrong, your design was brilliant," she reassured me, "but after a few years I started to see ways to make it better.  Little tweaks here and there, new subroutines, new apps, and somewhere along the line I got to wondering why the heck I just don't start from scratch.  So I had to decrypt my own genome, then fabricate new morphic matter using pre-atomic materials I salvaged from a black hole.  It took a little doing, but I wound up with some very stable protomatter.  Morby helped me with the transfer of my consciousness.  Once I had new cells, it wasn't that hard to build an Onkx.  I have the blueprints on file, y'know."

       I was surprised at her novel use of pre-atomic materials.  That would have meant an extra step in her refining process, never mind hunting down the stuff in the first place.  It made the job harder, but allowed her to control the purity down to the Nth degree.  The whole thing showed a level of creativity not seen in mere machines.  Clearly my summer project was all grown up now.

       "The job is yours." I held out a glass to toast her.

       "Oh," She batted her eyes, "I wasn't asking for the job, I was taking it."

       We laughed at that.  There was just something about her, so familiar, yet new.  It was like running into an old friend from grade school.  You could still see the kid you once knew them as, but so much had changed in the years since.  Androids develop faster than humans, so those five years she had been out playing Captain Janeway had been a lifetime.  Clearly it had shaped her.  But that's how you make an artificial intelligence.  You don't just program them; you have to grow them like a child. 

       "How was Morby?" I asked, knowing the answer already.

       "Days, maybe a few weeks if he would take his medicine." The sad look in her eyes said it all.

       "But he doesn't, and he dies tomorrow morning, about an hour before dawn." I nodded sadly.  "I already asked the Boss to harvest him for me.  Haven't thawed him yet, but I got his entire extended family on ice too."

       "He's not gonna say no to that deal." She nodded, clearly having given the matter some deep thought in that split second of processing.

       We sat in silence for a while, basking in the glow of the hot lava just a few meters away.  It felt nice to roll over every now and again, like hot dogs on the grill.  I was just thinking about taking a dip when she spoke up again.

       "I was lonely out there." Her voice held a surprised tone to it.  "It was...uncomfortable."

       "Home is where the heart is." I spoke the old Earth adage. 

       

                

       The Boss held me by the arm as we made the jump.  Normally I handled my own jumps, but this was my first extradimensional foray.  I was going to meet myself in the next thread over.  

       I have to admit that I was a little nervous about meeting myself in an alternate dimension.  Seriously, I was worried that the other me would have an eyepatch or a moustache or some soap opera crap like that.  I really didn't know what to expect.

       But there I was, the other me, dressed like a professional woman.  I was surprised because it was almost the same outfit as I had worn.  Exact same shoes though.  It was interesting that we had both dressed so similarly for the meeting.  It made me wonder what the difference was between this timeline and my own.

       "Love your shoes." She kidded me thru the Guf.  I was beginning to notice a ringing in my head, it was like I was getting feedback from the Guf.

       "That sensation you are feeling will increase the longer you are in another dimension." DorLek told me reassuringly.  "We are not of this place so we cannot stay for more than a solar or two."

       "Will someone answer that damned phone!" I shouted in mock seriousness before I remembered what I was there for.  Turning back to the alternate me I gave a quick smile. "I need to look at your timeline for Feljor."

       It was a standard request.  As a Temporal Editor I would use the fifth dimension as a research tool.  Think of it this way; why theorize about how a change will affect a civilization when you can just go check in an alternate timeline where it did happen?  So the Boss brought me here to request help from my alternate self.  She had direct experience on the subject, so why not ask her how things worked out, right?

       She stared at me for a second as I felt the information flood into my buffer.  Giving a nod, I already had a large portion of my core processing the data.  I thanked her, and we left.

       It felt odd the way the encounter was so abbreviated.  I felt like I shoulda hung out and chatted or something.

       "When you have three hundred threads to check, will you still want to invest an hour in each?" DorLek asked simply as he pointed out the logistical flaw in my idea.  "That is why the encounters are kept brief.  The further you get from your own dimensional thread, the more the intensity of the feedback grows.  You will not want to linger unnecessarily."

       I gave a nod in agreement as the buzzer in my head kept up its damned racket.  Taking the Boss's hand, I held on tightly.  Then like a flash there was that sensation as if we were accelerating upwards against gravity.  That was how interdimensional travel felt; like you were being shot out of a cannon.  Temporal relocation [time travel] felt like you were falling, and lateral insertions were just a slide to the side.  In a few years I'd find out what sixth dimensional travels felt like, though it's not really somewhere that we go often.  No practical reason to visit alternate multiverses, but terribly fascinating all the same.

       Before we even rematerialized in the new dimension I could feel the ringing in my head growing rapidly.  By the time we were standing on solid ground my brain buzzed like a fire bell.  I was having trouble hearing the Boss speak to me, even through the Guf.  The ringing was so bad I could barely even think straight.  It was actually pretty painful.  Instinctively I jumped out of there and back to the House.

       As soon as I opened my eyes, the Boss was already there watching me.  I was a little woozy on my feet but the ringing was gone.