Chapter 13: Fairing Separation
Along the Row Stream, Northeast of Rondel
The next thing the courier knew, the Apostle's halberd had crunched through his shoulder, slicing through his lung, heart, intestines, liver, and one kidney before it finally came to rest against his pelvis. Rory allowed him a second more to contemplate his folly—one never drew a knife on an Apostle—before placing a booted leg on his stomach, pushing him off her weapon, then ending his life with a swift chop that send his head flying from his shoulders.
Itami and the others were half a kilometer downstream, questioning the one guard that had surrendered as soon as he saw their LAV. The courier's other guards were scattered in pieces by the riverside, and Rory had outpaced Tuka's arrow in finishing off the man himself.
As pleased as Rory was to see some action, she longed to be with the real fight, against Zorzal and his men near Beza, rather than this backwoods creek. Yet, Hazama had insisted that they remain in this area for a time, until Rondel finished assembling its own army, and evaluate whether travelers had heard of the city's change of allegiance.
It was methodical, which suited people like Lelei and Tuka just fine. It was also boring, which, despite Rory's arguments, had not convinced the Lieutenant to get them sent back to the front. "I like boring," Itami said. "Boring means that my friends are less likely to get injured, and boring increases the chance of my living to see the next Comiket."
Now that the action was over, Rory patted down the body and located the letter that the man had been carrying. On it was Zorzal's seal.
She opened it and, after browsing it, couldn't help but grin. The contents were fascinating. Not pressing, but fascinating nonetheless. Zorzal was about to make another serious mistake, and it involved a name that she hadn't seen for nearly three centuries.
"Hey!" Itami shouted. "What's that, Rory?"
She quickly closed and folded up the letter. Itami didn't need to see the contents. Not now, not yet. "Oh? Nothing," she said.
"I could see you looking at a piece of paper."
"Fan mail, Itami-dono. Don't you know that I'm popular with the warrior class?"
He gave an irritated sigh and extended a hand. "Come on, let me see it."
But Rory wouldn't be deterred. She took the letter and shoved it down the front of her dress. Spreading her arms, she declared to Itami, "Come and claim it!"
As she had come to expect, Itami despaired immediately and said, "Fine. But don't hold out on me for too long, otherwise I'll have Shino or Mari steal it while you're in the bath."
"It's not important," Rory promised. "And when the time comes, I'll gladly present it to you."
The Pentagon, Washington D.C., United States
Compared to the open stone amphitheaters of the Special Region, the lecture hall hidden within one of the inner rings of the Pentagon was smaller, but packed with the quiet hum of technology that suggested that there were more eyes on the meeting than those of the people physically present. "I've never liked it here," Administrator Kosinski told Carol as they took their seats. "It feel like we're sitting in the middle of some giant bull's eye. Everyone watches you, and they're all armed."
Towards the front of the room, Carol recognized a few other people, including Secretary of Defense Clayton, the Secretary of Energy, and the Director of the NRO. Also present were several civilian agency heads and military officers, including an Air Force General who approached Carol and introduced himself as Eric Barton. Colonel Mullan's superior officer. "Rich hasn't been giving you that much trouble, has he?" The officer asked.
Carol raised a hand to the bandage on her head and replied, "He means well."
At the front of the room, an officer called for silence and for everyone present to take their seats. A suited man promptly took the stage and introduced himself as Director Ed Silcott, from DARPA's Strategic Technology Office.
A projector snapped on, and a slide displayed the title of the presentation.
MANIPULATION OF QUANTUM FIELDS VIA NEURAL INTERFACE WITH UNSTABLE SR-PHIZONS.
(AKA MAGIC)
This brought out some murmurs, of course, to which the Director stated, "Yes, I know. It's a mouthful. We're still piecing together how much of this works, and it's been a bit difficult to reproduce in our world, but we'll get into that during the presentation."
The first proper slide was of the Japanese National Diet. They were all familiar with the picture, Rory Mercury standing at the podium, Halberd in hand, telling off a member of the minority party. "This was the first proper, public indicator of magic to the world," Silcott stated. "We were called up by several physics and medicine professors within minutes of the presentation, all of which who claimed that Rory should not have been able to lift the weapon shown. This lead us to believe that magic must invoke some underlying principle of the universe, and must not be limited to just the Special Region. We found ourselves asking the obvious question: if magic existed in the Special Region, and can be brought to this side of the Gate and still work, what do their people have that isn't present here on Earth? We have only recently been able to answer this question."
The image switched to a series animated loops of fMRI and CT-scans. "The key we were looking for is here," he said pointing to an area of the displayed brain. "While running fMRI tests of magicians from the Special Region, we noticed that magic was triggered by a consistent cascade between this spot on the anterior-left hemisphere and Broca's Area. This is consistent with similar brain functions when it comes to thinking about language—not actually speaking, just thinking about it—and makes us think that there's a language component to directing magic. As long as there's this neuronal relationship between some concept and speech that passes through this area, we see an activation of magic."
Now he pointed to the CT scan image. "But again, Earth humans use this part of their brain as well, so magic doesn't arise simply out of neuroplasticity. While looking for it, we also noticed that X-rays produced by the CT scanner either reduced or blocked the magician's capability to use magic for a period of time. We finally found our culprit while simultaneously having the magician perform magic while the CT machine was running. The result was a sudden drop in reflectivity in that section, there."
One of the officers claimed that he couldn't see it, and Silcott provided a zoomed in, side-by-side comparison of the region. Carol could see it, but just barely. Between the deep grey and absolute black, there wasn't much to discern.
"With this identified, and with the magician's permission, we went in for a sample. We expected to only find brain tissue. What we found instead was far, far more interesting."
The next slide displayed a particle model. Carol was more of an engineer than a chemist, and didn't have as much experience in quantum modeling, but she knew the speculative particle shapes and symbols when she saw them. "We call this an SR-Phizon," Silcott explained. "It's an elementary particle, a lepton, and it seems to bind with Iron and Magnesium. Tests have revealed some very interesting properties. For one, like most of the other particles, Phizons change their field-space when directly measured. So, while electrons will coalesce into one of a few orbits about a proton nucleus in an atom, Phizons collect into a kind of grid that follows gravity lines in relation to a planet. The difference is that we typically think of electrons as being constrained to a given atom or molecule when considering them in relation to the rest of the universe. Not so with Phizons-they are connected to everything, and I mean everything through a stable quantum entanglement connection.
"But I'm sure that you're wondering how elementary particles translates to warping gravity fields or launching ice spikes at people," Silcott said with a smirk. "That's where it gets complicated. As I mentioned, the focus of this discussion is on unstable Phizons. Apparently, when you run the right kind of electric current over Phizons, it bridges the entanglement and allows complex, near-instant manipulation and reconfiguring of particles at the far end. We call it unstable in this state, because some property of transferring quantum information excites the Phizon and causes it and other Phizons around it to become more energetic. This is unpleasant on biological structures, and explains why magicians become fatigued from using magic, or can even kill themselves by using magic too much. The theory for why Phizons become more energetic during use is another long, nasty discussion on quantum foam, gauge bosons, and virtual particles… which are way, way, way over my head and, to be perfectly honest, a real chore to talk about anyway."
Some of the audience members chuckled, and Silcott said, "I'd like to turn the floor over to NASA Administrator Kosinski, to discuss the astronomy aspect of Phizons. Andrew, if you would?"
There was a brief applause as Carol's boss stood and made her way to the front of the room. "Good morning," he said, "On behalf of NASA, I'd like to thank you for your willingness to include us in Phizon research. We pride ourselves in sixty years of cooperation with the Department of Defense, and appreciate your continued trust and patronage.
"Phizons are an odd bunch. Much of the time, when we are examining elementary particles, we are looking for either an electromagnetic aftereffect, or a particle decay like with muons into positrons and neutrinos. Phizons are a pain, because we had to look for cases in the cosmos where radiation was inducing a decreased reflectivity presence. NASA has only recently started thinking in terms of decreased reflectivity when it comes to exoplanet hunting, so we had to come up with an effective way to identify Phizons in deep space before we even started accumulating time on the telescopes.
"What we discovered, we feel, answers the question as to why Phizons are so readily present in the Special Region, but are less common on Earth."
He switched to another view, this time from some satellite instrument. "This picture," he explained, "Is from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and it's a picture of the Eagle Nebula. If you were to pan up, left, zoom out a bit, and switched from x-rays to visible light, you would see the famous Pillars of Creation photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.
"But the key point of this photo is to discuss completed solar systems sitting within molecular clouds. On the right-hand side of the slide, we see a few systems… you will notice that the ones further away from the nebula have clear spaces in the middle, indicating that the rotation of the solar system and energy from the star has cleared the nebula's molecular cloud from the system, leaving the planets within to be protected from solar radiation by their magnetospheres, if they have them, and whatever atmosphere they have below that. A proto-planet forming in an environment like this cannot support Phizons, as they would deteriorate under radiation exposure from the parent star. But now, look at the system to the left of it. This one is actively moving through the molecular cloud, and continues to pick up nebula materials. In this environment, the planets being formed in such a system get additional protection from their parent star.
"What does this mean? Our scientists at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center have been analyzing imagery of Falmart's night sky, and have concluded that the system is floating on the outer edges of a nebula, not so different from the Eagle Nebula, and that early in the stellar evolution of the Special Region's solar system, their planet was shielded from their host star due to dense materials from a molecular cloud. This allowed Phizons to gather and remain on the planet until the planet gained the necessary systems to guard against solar radiation on its own. Even today, the space above the Special Region contains molecular gas pockets, as expressed by Professor Shirai in a paper about a week ago."
"So, to put it in English, Phizons exist in the Special Region because the system evolved and remained in a stellar nebula. The nebular materials in the Sol system were cleared by the ignition of our sun, and so we don't have the particles to produce magic here today. However, a magician from Falmart can work their magic here because the Phizons are protected by Earth's magnetosphere and ozone layer. Finally, because magic itself relies on unstable Phizons and quantum entanglement, if a magician is conscious of the position of matter on this side of the Gate, they will be able to use their magic just as easily as they would on their side of the Gate."
"That's fine and dandy," a Navy Admiral said, "But in terms of controlling any of this, how do you go about it? And what kind of information are these Phizon things sending that allows such exact manipulation of matter?"
Kosinski and Silcott exchanged a glance before Silcott answered, "We don't know."
"How about the Gate?" A Marine General asked. "Isn't that just a wormhole? Surely a hole from point A to point B should be the easiest part of the whole thing."
"Actually, it's the hardest," Kosinski said, then asked, "How many of you have seen Interstellar?"
Most of the audience raised their hands. "I like that movie because they boil down the basic concept of a wormhole through a non-Euclidean space to an understandable level. Just so we're on the same page, Euclidean Space is where we exist right now, with an up down, left-right, forward-back. A non-Euclidian space is any space that doesn't follow those rules. For example, if you're thinking of a way to go from A to B that skips all points in between, like the Gate, then that's non-Euclidean geometry. In Interstellar, they try to show you this through their own wormhole through space-time. The explanation you see in the movie says that a hole in a piece of paper is a two-dimensional hole in three-dimensional space. The next step up from that is a sphere as a three-dimensional hole in four-dimensional space. One of these that you can pass through, like the one in the movie, would be a four-dimensional hole in five-dimensional non-Euclidean space.
"But here's the problem. The Gate doesn't follow these rules at all. Anyone who's seen camera footage from a vehicle driving through the Gate will tell you that it isn't even a hole, it's a tube. And the length of the tube is longer than the depth of the Gate on either side. Where did the tunnel in the middle come from? This means that you have a Euclidean tube functioning as a non-Euclidean object, and this was the point where the MIT think tank got very drunk and called it a night."
The audience laughed. An Air Force General asked, "So if this is true, how do the people of the Special Region rationalize it?"
"Good question. Dr. Carol Dawson is in the back, and she just returned from a special assignment to Falmart. Would you like to add anything, Carol?"
Carol stood. Even in front of an audience of military officers, she wasn't sure if she was allowed to talk about Hardy and the nuke, so instead she talked about her experience with the heliocentricity lecture.
"It's a good question, Dr. Kosinski," she said. "I spent an extensive amount of time talking with a Falmart astronomer about natural theory, and the easiest way to explain it is to begin by coming at it from their direction. To the people of the Special Region, magic was a fact of life even before anyone came up with a scientific method, mathematics, or natural philosophy-science, as we call it today. As a result, whenever they find something that they cannot explain, then it falls into the categories of being a Visible natural property, or an Invisible magic property. If I'm following the conversation correctly, SR-Phizons use quantum entanglement, which is invisible to anyone without the proper instruments. Because of this, any invisible property of the universe needed to have a foundation in magic, or have a visible component that grounded it in the natural world, otherwise it couldn't exist.
"This gave us a bit of a headache, because I was required to come up with a way to explain Gravity to the people over there. They had rejected Gravity at the offset because it wasn't a visible natural property, and it wasn't tied to any known invisible magical action. I solved the problem by arguing that it, like wind, became a visible property when you placed items within it, and they found this acceptable.
"As for how this applies to magic and the Gate, they assume these things work because magic is where they are fundamentally coming from. They don't ask why, any more than we ask why the Universal Gravitational Constant, the irrational number Pi, or any other fundamental piece of our universe is what it is. In short, they feel no need to rationalize it, because that's the way the world is for them."
She sat down, and the Secretary of Energy raised a hand. "You mentioned earlier that an unstable Phizon damages the magician over time as it is being used. Can you describe precisely what kind of damage it is causing? Typically, we expect radiation damage when it comes to particle physics, but you've already said that radiation eliminates or weakens the particle."
"That's correct," Silcott said. "I meant to say this earlier, but now is as good a time as any. Unstable Phizons, in addition to exciting the other Phizons around them, tend to cause a disruption in the electron bonds in proteins and minerals. This manifests in magic users as a disruption in fluids and nutrient fields in that part of the brain, and can cause fatigue, nausea, or seizures. The test subjects mentioned that extreme cases could lead to the death of the user which, if you think about it, would be consistent with the effects of a brain hemorrhage or stroke. Each could easily kill someone in Falmart due to their general lack of medical knowledge and technology.
"This is why we are so keen to come up with a way to utilize unstable Phizons outside of a human brain. Perhaps a headset would be more successful. We have neuroscience teams continuing to study this as we speak, but due to the limited sample that we have of SR-Phizons and our general aversion to drilling into the brains of our special guests, progress has been slow.
"But to review the dangers of unstable Phizons; they excite other Phizons into instability due to quantum entanglement, and they have a degenerative effect on complex molecules and minerals. Going forward, these effects will be the major limitations when it comes to implementing it in technology."
He looked around and said, "We have time for one more question… yes, the General in the corner?"
An Army General asked, "How do these particles get into their brains in the first place?"
"It's in the rocks and soil over there," Silcott said. "They wind up getting transported into the plants, which are then consumed by animals, including humans and demihumans. Since it's an elementary particle, they don't have any issue passing the blood-brain barrier, and as I mentioned earlier, it's being transported by Iron or Magnesium. Again, it has been notoriously difficult to trace, and we're working on seeing if Special Region residents have a reservoir somewhere else in their bodies since the magicians that we CT scan or took the brain sample from were back at full magical capacity within an hour or two.
"So, before you depart, let's review the key points."
He put up one more slide:
UNSTABLE SR-Phizons, TL;DR
1) Elementary particle (like electrons).
2) Dissipated by radiation.
3) Uses quantum entanglement to move other particles around.
4) Found in brains, activated by brain signals. Also found in Special Region rocks/dirt/etc.
5) Excites other Phizons if left 'on' for too long, can cause surrounding materials to begin falling apart.
6) Found in Special Region because their planet was protected by lots of nebula dust early on. Earth wasn't.
The conference ended, and Kosinski approached Carol to ask, "Well, what did you think?"
All she could think about was Secretary Clayton's line from nearly two days before. Now that we have access to magicians and are gaining a fundamental understanding of magic, we're certain that the EM pulse and radiation will be enough to severely disrupt the forces that generate Hardy. The man had sat in the front row for the entire presentation, not reacting, rarely blinking. What these officers were hearing, he'd already heard long ago and had acted on it. She wondered if this was how members of Obama's cabinet had acted the day before they took down Osama bin Laden.
Instead she said something vaguely related, but far enough that the connection couldn't be made. "So this stuff doesn't mix well with radiation, huh? So much for using this in space probes, then. The Phizons would be dispersed the second that the craft passed through Earth's Van Allen belts."
"Radiation hardening has always been the bugbear of space exploration," Kosinski said and gave her a wink. "Well, we're NASA, right? If a way through doesn't exist, we invent one."
"That reminds me, has anyone from JAXA spoken with you about the instruments that they plan to have on their Epsilon orbital launch?"
Kosinski shrugged. "Visible light camera, radar topography scanner. Maybe a spectroscope… it sounded like a light package, which makes sense since they're going for a polar orbit. Why, upset that they're putting something in orbit before we are? We did lead the way with two suborbital launches."
Carol shrugged. She couldn't say much more, not without bringing up the less-than-pleasant payload sitting on the remaining American rocket at Alnus.
"Well, don't worry about it. There's been… a development… it's very exciting and I want to tell you about it but I can't go into any details because it's still at the proposal stage—"
"Oh, come on," Carol said. "You want to tell me."
"All I can say is that President Dirrell met with three interesting people regarding American rockets in the Special Region."
She gave him a wry grin. "These 'interesting; people, their last names wouldn't happen to begin with B, M, and B respectively, would they?"
"My lips are sealed!"
Arlington, Virginia, United States
The drive down to her sister's living accommodations was lonely for Greta. The driver did not speak Japanese, and the American guard didn't have much to say. At one point, the guard asked her if she would like to "browse the internet" on his phone, but the device that he handed her was truly alien with its glowing screen, moving pictures and English writing. After five minutes of trying to figure it out without much success, she sighed, passed the object back to the guard, and curled up against the side door.
It was almost noon outside, but her body felt like she'd been awake all night. Indeed, she'd had trouble sleeping the night before, and on the plane, and Carol had spoken about something called Jet-lag, where her body had a chemical timekeeper that needed to readjust itself. The bottom line was that she felt miserable.
She should have been happy that she was going to see Teesa, but as she watched the buildings and giant portraits pass outside the car window, she wondered what they would have to say to each other. Greta's sampling of Earth was a joke compared to weeks of living in a place like this. She could describe the rocket launches and the science lecture, but what if Teesa had seen things like that already?
The car eventually stopped at a tall building (but then, on Earth, all buildings seemed to be taller than they were in Falmart) and the guard led her past the front door where, to Greta's shock, they passed a pair of armed soldiers before they entered an elevator. "We used to use this building for the staff of foreign diplomats," the guard said. "Not anymore."
Together they entered an elevator (Takagi had taken her on a few in Japan, so she was less surprised than she was the first time) and the guard lead her to a room near the end of the hall. There he knocked twice and, on hearing noise from the other side, turned to Greta and stated. "I'll be waiting outside. Once you're ready to go, I'll still be here."
The door opened and, for the first time in two months, Greta found herself standing before her older sister.
Teesa La Sareteian shared Greta's green eyes and some features of her face, but that was about it. She was half a head taller, and her hair was deep black instead of Greta's walnut-brown. She hesitated a moment, then asked, "Greta?"
"It's me, sis."
"Look at you! All cleaned up, T-shirt, jeans and all… I barely recognized you!"
Greta felt the blood rush to her face. True, the American hotel's showers and baths were above-and-beyond superior to anything offered elsewhere in Falmart, and Takagi had managed to outfit her with some 'modern' clothes during her trip to Osaka, but had she really changed all that much?
"Come on in!" her sister beckoned. "I was halfway through the last season of Dancing with the Stars; you've got to see it. The shows they put on are above anything I've seen on the other side of the Gate."
Greta followed her sister into the apartment. It wasn't large, but it wasn't painfully small either. A set of polarized windows looked out over Wilson Boulevard towards the south, and the central room was dominated by a couch, table, and large television. She could also see to a space in one wall to a small kitchen, and a pair of doors to the bathroom and bedroom. It was larger than her loaned room back at Alnus, and it looked very comfortable overall.
Teesa lifted a small black object from the couch, pointed it at the TV screen, and pressed a button, causing the device to turn off. Greta remembered seeing Carol train Flat in how to use such a device for the heliocentricity lecture, but she had never had time to learn herself. After her sister casually tossed the device on the table, she sat on the couch and, patting on the space next to her, said, "Take a seat! So, they decided to let you come too? I'm not surprised. You're smart enough for it, and I did tell that Yanagida guy that they should send you too. Oh, well, just turned out to be a matter of time, right?"
"I'm-I'm not staying," Greta said, taking a seat next to her. "I'm a guest."
Her sister's smile faded slightly. "Really? Whose guest?"
"Dr. Carol Dawson. She's a scientist that I met in the settlement. She's been teaching me all kinds of cool things about space travel and astronomy and engineering—"
"Huh?" Teesa cocked her head. "Space travel?"
"It's where you take a rocket, which is a—"
"I know what space travel is. What organization would be dumb enough to want to set up space travel in Falmart?"
Greta wasn't sure what to react to first. She had spent the past two weeks absorbing every word that escaped Carol's mouth, and it sounded like her sister had already beaten her to the punch with that knowledge. Worse still… "Dumb? Carol works for NASA. They're the best of the best!"
Teesa gave her an odd glance, then burst out laughing. "Best of the best, huh?"
"It's true!"
"Greta, you always were one to go for the ideal version of things. I looked them up when I saw the news report about America sending soldiers to the Special Region with the rockets. The whole thing is one big joke. NASA hasn't done anything important in half a century."
She reached over to the table and hefted what Greta eventually realized was a laptop. Unlike the ones that Carol or the USAF airmen used, this one was remarkably thin. Teesa flipped it open, displaying the keyboard and screen to her sister. "While NASA puttered around, the rest of the world moved on. Why care about going up in the air when there's a world of interesting things you can do on here? With computers, the Americans have created whole worlds to explore. There's stories to watch, games to play, and people to talk to from all over the planet. And the technology to make it work just gets better and better, faster and faster. Look."
She picked at the keys on the keyboard, and the screen changed to display a page in Japanese. "See this?" Teesa said. "It's a giant library called Wikipedia. It contains everything there is to know about Earth, and would probably fill up the entire Alnus Settlement if you were to try and print it out. The important part is that it's always getting better, always growing. Then, there's NASA… look at the thing in the article.
Greta tried, but it was very slow going as most of her experience with Japanese kanji and katakana was limited to non-technical words. Ultimately, Teesa huffed and said, "It's a NASA rocket called SLS. They've been working on parts of it for over ten years now. It goes nowhere, does nothing useful, and the American government keeps dumping money into it to keep the rocket-makers happy. Meanwhile, other places like India and Europe are sending probes to Mars on smaller rockets and at a fraction of the cost.
"Greta, NASA's a joke. They have been since their moon program finished, and whatever reason they were sent to Falmart is a joke too. I've asked a few American soldiers around here, and all of them think that the President sent the US Air Force and aging rockets in, hoping that they would get attacked so that the United States has an excuse to invade Falmart as well. I don't know who this Carol person is, but she's been feeding you a romantic fantasy, filled with 'Maybe' and 'Someday' and sold on the backs of rockets that are older than both of us combined. That's what NASA is now, and until someone like China beats them back to the moon, that's all it will ever be."
The conversation wasn't going anything like Greta had hoped that it would. She had hoped that her sister would be happy to see her, would be interested in what she had to say. Instead, it had all been swept aside as 'a joke.' It made no sense. What was there to joke about? Perhaps NASA meant something different to the people of Earth, but to the people of Falmart, it had introduced a new way of thinking, forced the stiff academics of Rondel to rethink old ideas, and had resulted in the delivery of science and mathematics to the Special Region that ought to advance technology by decades, if not centuries. Two weeks ago, Greta had never heard of a rocket. Now, she not only knew what it was, she knew the basics of how to build one. Teaching and new knowledge had power. "Can I ask you a question?" Greta said. "When was the last time you thought of La?"
"La?"
"Yes, the Goddess La."
"I don't see how she relates."
"These things you learned about NASA, did you actually experience them? Did you learn them, or are you just repeating someone else's line like an Elange follower?"
"Does it matter? It's what the people of this world say."
"And if they're wrong? The people of Falmart were wrong about Mochrie and Heliocentricity for centuries."
"It's published articles, everyone I've read on the internet seems to agree, and NASA itself has yet to prove anything otherwise."
"Then I have one more question," Greta said, standing. "If you knew NASA to be like this, or simply wanted to know more, why didn't you write me? For that matter, why didn't you write to me anyway?"
"Why didn't you write to me?" Teesa said.
"I tried! The Japanese didn't know where to send the letter. Did you at least try?"
She slid back onto the arm of the couch. "I got distracted. There's a lot to see and do on this side of the Gate, and the internet is a big part of it. For example, they have this place called Reddit—"
"I don't understand. What happened to us?"
Teesa looked her dead in the eye. "We changed. I moved ahead, you stayed behind in a fantasy land. You're still in a fantasy land. My suggestion? Dump this Carol woman and her NASA show, and join the rest of us here."
But Greta didn't want to hear any of it. She headed back for the door, thinking all the while, screw her and her internet. I'll learn more about NASA and space than she'll ever know. I'll go further than she ever will sitting in front of a computer, and I'll do it without her, just as I have for the past few weeks.
"You're making a mistake," Teesa shouted after her.
Greta turned on her heel and shouted one of the few complete phrases she knew in English. She wasn't quite exactly sure what it meant, but the airmen at Alnus said it often enough during arguments, and now seemed like an appropriate time to use it.
"FUCK YOU!"
She left, slamming the door behind her.
Author's note
It's appropriate that this chapter is being published on April Fools day. The truth of the matter is that while I know a lot off-hand about spaceflight history, I know very little about particle physics and non-Euclidian geometry. As such, please don't take anything from the lecture section of this chapter at face value and do your own research before bringing any of it up in a conversation with peers, professors, and coworkers.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and Eagle Nebula are all real, however. Molecular cloud nebulae are real too, and are more common in the densest part of a galaxy's disk. When you see a long-exposure image of the Milky Way in the sky, you're mostly seeing molecular cloud nebulae.