Episode Ten

'Talking Tech'

The Lounge at Capsule Corporation was filled with smoke and the muffled sounds of training coming from outside. Trunks' teams were working as hard as ever though some of them were still getting used to training in weighted clothes and armor.

Bulma wanted to have the next phase of their training ready by the time they mastered weighted clothes and flight, however . . .

"Well the machine is installed but . . ." Thyme was saying, but Bulma raised a hand to silence him. She took a long drag on her cigarette and exhaled more smoke into the room, looked over the blueprints for the new training facility.

"You can't get the machine running properly." Bulma guessed.

"Yes ma'am. I don't know what kind of crazy magic you and your father managed with this gravity device but I can't replicate it here."

"But the one on the space ship should work?" Bulma asked.

"Yes ma'am," Thyme said again. "There we're not having to contend with Earth's natural gravity though there's a danger of the generator causing the pod to crush in on itself like a Styrofoam ball at the bottom of the ocean."

"A pleasant thought considering my son and his team are hoping to use that ship once we locate New Namek." Bulma said. She put out her cigarette and took out a red pen. She felt like a teacher making corrections on her student's homework, but she could already see a few of the spots where the mistakes had popped up.

"I'm doing the best I can," Thyme told her, "I understand the urgency-"

"You do, do you?" Bulma interrupted, and sighed. "That's the problem here. You have this perceived urgency. I don't want the job done fast, I want it done right. If it takes you a whole year get it done right take that year and get it done right." She pointed at some of the mathematical corrections she had made, "You wouldn't have made most of these mistakes if you weren't rushing."

Thyme frowned, "But what about the training of Earth's defenders?" He asked. "Wouldn't a gravity control room speed them along?"

"It would, which is why we want it." Bulma explained. "But we're not in a rush just yet. It's true Trunks could get stronger in this room but right now his trainees are too weak. Two or three times Earth's gravity for a few minutes might be taxing enough."

"How did the concept of this even come around?" Thyme asked.

"Oh . . ." Bulma smiled, reminiscing, "I guess I never told you and Basil. Well Trunks' father and an old family friend of ours came from a planet with ten times Earth's gravity. Turns out it can make a huge difference in training. But that doesn't mean just anyone can do it. They'll need to build themselves up to it."

"Moving past the fact that Master Trunks is half alien," Thyme said, taking Bulma's pen and correcting one of his own mistakes, "doesn't that mean we should get the machine up and running all the sooner? If using it is a gradual process won't the fighters want to start as soon as they can?"

"Sure, but with something as dangerous as this we can't just do a rushed job." Bulma told him.

She stood back and admired the changes to the blueprints.

"But Ma'am . . . don't we want to make sure the warriors are prepared?" Thyme asked.

"Of course, but prepared for when we send Trunks to New Namek. We don't even know where New Namek is yet. Until then Earth has my son, and nothing is going to be strong enough to stop him."

Bulma said it but she didn't really believe it. She'd thought nothing would be strong enough to stop Goku, then she thought nothing would be strong enough to stop Vegeta.

In the end she'd lost them both, her childhood friend to a now treatable disease and her husband to the despicable Androids.

She learned to expect the impossible, and that there was always some unexpected threat on the horizon.

She didn't know when or how but she knew something was on its way to Earth, something was going to happen and if Trunks wasn't prepared he'd fail.

They didn't have the support network that Goku had had. They wouldn't have Senzu beans, they wouldn't have dragon balls until Trunks could bring a new Guardian back from New Namek.

And even with a gravity machine Bulma suspected it would be years before the new fighters were anywhere near the level Krillin, Tien or Yamcha had been at in the end.

But she couldn't let her assistants realize she had these kinds of doubts. "Just get it right, Thyme. Don't rush. Work on the ship some more if you need to. After all if we can get that up and running the team can train in the ship. Besides, we have nothing to worry about, even if we do find New Namek it isn't as if Trunks needs to rush off."

Thyme nodded. "Yes ma'am. I'll do my best."

"Good." Bulma smiled. "I'll go see how Basil is doing."

"Yes ma'am. I won't let you down." Thyme said, rolling up the blueprints and leaving the lounge too, no doubt to get back to work."

Bulma sighed and went down into her her own lab where Basil would be working on the time technology.

She didn't want to seem misanthropic, but truthfully . . . Trunks wouldn't be enough and a bunch of fighters who'd spent most of their lives either not training or training the wrong way weren't going to be much help.

As it was now the time machine wouldn't be able to do much to help but Bulma had an idea or two.

She stepped through the automatic door which sighed which emitted a satisfied sigh. Basil was standing over a desk covered in emptied coffee mugs and crumpled up papers. Bulma approached and asked Basil, "How's the new machine coming?"

"Not amazing." Basil admitted. "But I've got an easier job than Thyme. After all I only need to replicate this technology on a larger scale, you built this with a few spare parts I have the full might of Capsule Corporation behind me."

Bulma frowned, "Then why isn't it going well?"

Basil turned to face Bulma, a cup of coffee in a shaking hand, "Well boss, imagine that our time and the past are different continents, yeah? Well if we bring people from the other time here they're here. Not on their continent."

"Yes . . . are we about to discuss immigration?"

Basil ignored the question and began speaking very rapidly, "So that's what we've got going on right now, it's been proven that it works but the time stream gets ruptured, right? Or at least we're tunneling through to some other dimension instead of actually going back in time right? So we go back in time, grab people, bring them here, they're gone from their time, see?"

"But it's a time machine, we can bring them back to the same moment they left."

"Sure, sure, it only costs them the months or years of their personal lives and if we did want to send them back so that their time and their personal time would align for all we know that would just create another alternate time line, right? The flow of time and all that." Basil took a sip of her coffee and Bulma tried to interrupt but Basil swallowed and began chattering again.

"But like I said two continents yeah? So every time we go back and grab someone we're making a new continent, Trunks could come back every time because it was just set to return here but for all we know there's some alternate time line where he never came back, there's some alternate time line for them where he never went back again to help with the Androids, right? So every time we send someone back or bring someone here we make a new continent, the Earth is mostly covered by water but eventually you're going to have so many continents and that you run out of ocean not to mention inconvenience all the whales."

"I don't care about whales." Bulma said as Basil took a sip. "What are you getting at?"

"I'm getting at this!" Basil said, showing Bulma a piece of paper. "If we keep making new continents, even if we just keep making new islands eventually we will fill up the ocean until there is no ocean then every time we make a new continent we're going to destroy another one, and another one, we'll cause more and more disruptions."

"That's just math, Basil!" Bulma snapped.

"The universe is math, boss!" Basil implored.

"But near as anyone can tell time is infinite, you can't run out of it even if every trip did make an alternate universe, and we don't know that they do, who's to say it matters?"

"Don't you see? Changing the past creates a new time line, it creates a new dimension, it creates a new continent. This is an insane power born of our greatest desperation and used in those circumstances but now without that I can't see the ethical justification of it. If we really wanted to it'd probably be less damaging to take everyone from our time to this other continent—er this other time line where things are better and the world's population was never devastated. But since we want to live in our own time and try to rebuild-"

Bulma shook her head and held up a hand. She decided to light a new cigarette, and Basil took a few steps back to avoid the smoke. "Basil, if you don't settle down I'm going to sedate you. So in simple terms you're telling me that time travel is more dangerous the more often we use it and we just got lucky?"

"No . . . wait, yes." Basil said, blinking a few times and seeming to count in her head. Finally she said, "It's more dangerous the more we change the past. The more alternate time lines we make the more likely we are to encounter problems. Not problems like being your own mother or father, which wouldn't be possible anyway unless it was already possible, I mean for you personally, I suppose you could go back in time and still have the one night stand the kid just wouldn't be you and-"

She was going to give herself a heart attack, Bulma thought. She took a puff of her cigarette and asked, "Just what are you planning on using my time machine for, Basil? This isn't the kind of ambition you've ever mentioned."

"What? Not that, don't be absurd!" Basil scoffed and finished her cup of coffee. "Look I'm just saying I think we can . . . you know, make fewer continents. Use this technology with fewer risks."

"So . . ."

"We can use it without changing things."

"No we can't, that doesn't make any sense. Just using it changes things."

"Butterfly wings and stuff boss, if we make a big change it makes a new time line but if we just make a little one something no one would notice maybe it won't make so many waves." Basil explained. "I mean we have this thing, as a joke we could make a list of the worst dictators and go back and have Trunks take 'em all out, right? But what happens to the world we leave behind? Who rises up to take their place? Now if we swoop in right before that dictator would have died anyway and whack him for fun and nobody sees it then . . . you know, less of an issue."

"What exactly are you trying to say?" Bulma groaned.

Basil stared at her in silence for a moment, then just shrugged.

Bulma sighed. "Great." She said. "So you're not saying anything. And your progress designing the mark two?"

"It's been done." Basil coughed. "But look, going back to continents . . ."

"Do we have to?" Bulma asked.

"No. But say we do, boss. Going back to continents, right? So if you think of years as coordinates it should be theoretically possible to go to a different place in our continent. Instead of taking people from their time, take people from ours."

"So . . . take Goku or Vegeta from a time right before they died in our own time?" Bulma asked, feeling just a little hopeful.

If they could bring their own dimension's Vegeta or Goku back . . . not just as brief reinforcements but as permanent residents to help Trunks, defend earth and more importantly—

"No," Basil said, dashing Bulma's budding dreams, "I'm sorry boss, but we know that won't work because it didn't happen. We'd have a record of that, right? Besides they were weaker then anyway, so they can't be relied on to help Master Trunks if he does need reinforcements from another time."

"Then what are you saying?" Bulma asked a little sharply.

It was only for a moment, but for that moment it seemed like maybe she could have truly set things back to normal instead of simply trying to manage the damage that had already been dealt. Back to Dragon Balls, she thought to herself.

Basil frowned, "The time machine saved us once. But it didn't change our past, it just made an alternate dimension we need to worry about now. Using it again could do the same thing, but it won't change our course, our course is going to flow like a river. We won't see changes to our own time because we can't change our own past, it's already happened."

"Okay . . ." Bulma said, taking an exceptionally tolerant breath. "And?"

"Whatever we do in the future has already happened in the past. That's the best way to think of it." Basil said simply. "So if I can find our coordinates I can make sure we don't make new continents, I can use coordinates on our own continent."

Bulma waved a dismissive hand, "That's a fine side project, Basil but it doesn't matter. Making changes to our own time line doesn't matter. You said you've perfected the mark two time machine?"

Basil sighed and nodded. "Yeah, boss. A time machine built for a crew. Now Trunks can bring back up to five people to help him out if he needs it . . . only takes a month to charge, should only take us two months to build."

"So three months." Bulma said with some relief. "In three months we can get reinforcements from the other continent—I mean from the other time line if we need them. Do you think you can help Thyme with the training room and the ship?"

Basil frowned and went over to the coffee pot, "The training room still? Slacker, just like the time machine the tech is already made and the hard part is done, right? Yeah, I can save his butt, but I don't advise it, I think it's better if you let me continue my research on this instead of moving on. I really think we can use this technology in a far safer way."

Bulma sighed, "You've done your part, Basil. You're hyped up on caffeine so you're not thinking clearly. Your job is done, it doesn't matter if we make more alternate time lines, we won't use the time machine carelessly. It's a last resort, so don't worry about it. Besides, we're months away from using it."

Basil sighed and nodded. "Okay, I'll work on the training room and the ship, but I'd like to have the data from this project to at least work on it in my spare time."

Bulma took a puff of her cigarette and nodded, "All right, I won't police your spare time. And like I said, it's a fine side project."

"Yeah . . . yeah . . . I'll have the build-boys get started on the time machine, boss. Then I'll take a nap, maybe when I wake up Thyme will have had enough time to stop embarrassing himself and have some of the work done."

"He's not doing too badly." Bulma smiled, "He's just been worrying about the wrong things, kind of like you."

"Mm. But I got finished." Basil pointed out.

"True." Bulma granted. "Are you sure you're going to be able to get to sleep after so many cups of coffee?"

"Huh? Yeah, it shouldn't be a problem. Talk to you later boss . . . but . . ."

Bulma raised an eyebrow, "But what?"

"Your project is to find New Namek, right? But . . . when you do . . . what are you going to do?"

"Hopefully bring back some Namekians to protect Earth, one to become our Guardian and create Dragon Balls. I just know we'd be safer with their help than without it."

Basil nodded and said, "So why do we need a space ship if we have a time machine?"

Bulma folded her arms, "I don't understand."

"You don't care what time line our help comes from . . . so why do we need a space ship?" Basil asked. "With the time machine can't Trunks just go back in time, ask them where New Namek is then use one of their space ships to reach it and bring someone back then use the time machine to come back? Maybe the time machine can travel far enough in space to reach New Namek itself and just take some Namekians straight from the source."

"It's an idea, but I don't know that it can travel that far." Bulma shrugged, "I don't want my son stranded in the middle of outer space in a time machine that'll take ages to recharge and enough oxygen to last him a few hours."

"No . . . that'd be pretty bad." Basil agreed, then yawned. "I'll see what I can do. In my spare time that is."

"Well just get some sleep." Bulma sighed. Basil looked at all the empty coffee cups on her desk and just laughed.

To Be Continued . . .

Next Time on Dragon Ball COED . . . Unexpected problems start to arise within the ranks of the Earth's Defense Force, Karuto learns more about Goulder but the young Arcosian's patience is running out and he's starting to want real answers.