A Glibertarians Exclusive: A Glibertarians Exclusive: Riding the String III
Somewhere else
Only a faint hum marked their passage along the String.
I need time to think. Will looked over at Anne’s station; she had extended her chair down into a cot and had, mercifully, fallen asleep. Will reached out to the touchscreen, tapped an indicator, and dragged it down some. The reactor’s hum changed, subtly.
Where the hell was that place? How did we end up there? Couldn’t be another planet, those were dinosaurs. Some kind of… evolved, intelligent raptor. And the atmosphere was Earthlike.
Another dimension?
He frowned and looked out into the black; he hadn’t told Anne but had harbored a few doubts about his calculations and had not felt confident enough to tell her.
I wanted so badly to make all this work, he remembered. And now we’re lost. I got us lost.
I got her lost. And she’s not strong enough to deal with all this.
Will looked again at the display and double-checked his countermarch program; if he was correct, the Transiter should come out off the String within view of Sutter High Orbital. He tapped the indicator again and dragged it back up. Here we go.
The Transiter shuddered, and the ports filled with light. Anne suddenly sat up with a startled squawk.
Will looked out the portal, then at the camera displays. “Huh,” he said. “There’s a planet out there. There are two planets out there.”
The system looked to be not a planet-moon system like Earth and Luna, but a binary planet system, with the smaller about two-thirds the size of the Earth-like larger. Both orbited at some distance from a blue-white supergiant star.
Will looked out at the larger planet. “Anne,” he asked, thinking of the need to keep her focused on some task or other, “how far away is the bigger planet?”
Anne looked out the port at the bigger planet, swirling golden in the blue-white light of the giant star. “Uh,” she said, “give me a couple minutes.”
“Looks like about five hundred thousand kilometers,” she said at last. “A little farther than from Earth to Luna.”
“How long to get there with the gravitic drive?”
“A day, maybe.”
“Our air should hold out OK.” Will had not failed, at least, to anticipate every possible problem, so the Transiter was equipped with an oxygen reserve and CO2 scrubbers. “Let’s head that way. If we can top off the water tanks, then I’d like to do that, and maybe we can get some kind of clue as to where we are.”
“All right. I’ll program it.”
Twenty-six hours later, the Transiter settled gently to the surface. Will checked the environmental readout. “Warm,” he said. “About thirty-eight degrees. Oxygen is on the low side. The relative humidity is damn near a hundred percent. Won’t be comfortable, but we can survive it. For a while.”
“Are we going out, then?”
“You can stay in the Transiter, hon,” Will assured her. “If it’s this humid, there should be groundwater; I can send the auto spike down for water. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it at the last stop. But I want to go out and have a look around.”
“Don’t go far,” Anne warned. She was calmer, but her face was still flushed, her eyes damp.
I’ve gotta get her home, Will thought. She’s not taking this well at all. I thought she was stronger than this. She knows I’d move the sun and the moon if it would make her happy; I just wish she was holding up a little better.
I only did this to try to make a home for us both. Something better than a damn Medium Personal on Sutter High Orbital. Maybe even a place down on Earth. Instead, now I seem to be stuck in a bad horror story.
He hugged Anne, then undogged the hatch and climbed outside. The ground underfoot let out a soft squish when he put his feet down; a damp feeling made him look down to see water bubbling up around his shoes, up from between the short, golden, grass-like growth that seemed to cover every inch of the ground.
No wonder it’s so damn humid. Sweat broke out on Will’s face almost instantly; the air was like a steam bath. He looked up to see the rust-red mass of the secondary planet off to the east, appearing several times larger than Luna as seen from Earth, while behind him, the great blue-white star dominated the western sky.
Will opened the recharger panel and tapped the contact that sent the auto spike down into the wet soil; a pump started to whir, drawing water into the reaction chamber. With that done, Will wandered a few meters away, examining the strange surroundings.
The odd, golden grass-like… plants? They seemed to be everywhere, covering the ground like a carpet. Will squatted down to examine them more closely. They looked more grass-like up close, each a long, slim, golden leaf-like structure, flattened like a blade. He noticed that each blade had the flat side facing the great blue-white star.
Then Will noticed a faint rumble. The ground shook. Will stood up.
The rumble had come from the east, and to the east, the ground was… changing.
The gold of the grasslike plants was fading, giving way to a darker, yellow brown of the soil underneath. Curious, Will walked a few paces that way and looked ahead.
The golden blades were retracting, into the soil, in a wave that was rushing towards him and the Transiter.
Will looked back and the Transiter, then to the east again. The rumble was growing louder.
Oh, shit, he thought. Tides. The wet ground. That big planet…
He ran for the Transiter. Behind him, the rumble grew louder. The wave of retracting golden plants shot past him, past the Transiter, off to the west. Will slapped the control to retract the auto spike, slammed the panel and dogged it shut, then opened the hatch and climbed inside.
He looked out the port to the east. In the distance, a wave was building, a wave of water. “Get us out of here, Anne,” he barked. “Straight up! Low orbit, for now, we’ll figure out what to do but get us out of here fast!”
Anne sat up. Her hands flew over the gravitic controls. The Transiter lifted, slowly, then faster.
Will watched the camera displays. They had just gotten off in time; beneath them, a kilometer-high wall of water flooded over the landscape, reaching from horizon to horizon.
“What the hell?” Anne demanded.
“It’s a binary planet,” Will reminded her, “And this one, at least, has an ocean. You know how Luna pulls on the oceans of Earth, and that causes tides?”
Anne nodded, an impatient look on her face; she had learned that in elementary school.
“The secondary planet does the same thing here. Only it’s a lot bigger than Luna, and it drags the whole ocean behind it, with every rotation. Those little golden grass-like things that grow everywhere, they retract when it’s coming in, probably the only way they can survive it. And if they didn’t, if I hadn’t noticed them doing it, noticed a wave of them retracting ahead of that water…”
“…Then we’d still be down there,” Anne finished for him.
Surprisingly, Anne flew into Will’s arms, hugging him fiercely. “You saved us,” she breathed into his ear. “You saved us, and you’ll get us home again. I know you can do it.”
The interlude that followed was enjoyable, but at the end of it, they still had to face being lost in a way that no humans in history had ever been lost before. Beneath them, the golden planet still rotated; the ocean was draining away to the west, following the secondary planet. The hot light of the blue-white supergiant flooded in through the ports.
“Well,” Will said, “I could try another countermarch; if it takes us back to the world where the raptors are, we can always bounce into orbit and think about what to do from there; it’s one step closer to home, anyway.” He checked a gauge. “We got the reaction tanks full up, anyway.”
“We can try,” Anne agreed. “We sure can’t stay here.”
“I’ll program it.” Will made the proper entries, then tapped the contact to execute. They sat back in their chairs as the light of the supergiant star faded, and the Transiter rode the String into the now-familiar black of nothing and nowhere.
Then they emerged. Into a howling chaos.
***
I ain’t too good at conversation, girl
So you might not know exactly how I feel
But if I could, I’d bring you to the mountaintop, girl
And build you a house made out of stainless steel
But it’s like I’m stuck inside a painting
That’s hanging in the Louvre
My throat start to tickle and my nose itches
But I know that I can’t move
Don’t fall apart on me tonight
I just don’t think that I could handle it
Don’t fall apart on me tonight
Yesterday’s gone but the past lives on
Tomorrow’s just one step beyond
And I need you, oh, yeah
Not all the way through yet, but Jesus man…
That’s when you use a probe or something, Dr. Beckett — you don’t start the experiment with the one guy who knows how to fix it if something is wrong in the setup!
Now I want them to end up in a world where life never crawled out of the ocean so he can meet his counterpart, a large marine mammal. Oh, the huge manatee!
Hitting the ground like wet bags of cement
You have to wait until Thanksgiving to say that.
He started it . . . .
Booger!
And apparently even if it doesn’t…
At first I was thinking he jumped to a timetrack where the Lunar creation didn’t quite happen, but instead formed a binary system without collision/ejecting the moon… but if they haven’t moved spatially, it would have to be an odd one where Sol got significantly more mass to begin with so wasn’t a yellow dwarf.
More likely they’ve got 30% of a TARDIS… all the space time jumping, no real control — minus the dimensional transcendentalism and chamelon circuits.
Like the idea, though Animal… the tidal shifts in such a system are the kind of nuance a lot of folks don’t cover. I’m kind of wondering what the tectonics are like, honestly… and a bit surprised that it is even habitable, but I certainly haven’t run any numbers.
Good read, Animal… here’s to looking forward to finding out about the chaos next week.
Can’t he just piss in the tank for water?
Re: the time squardle — impressive, damned impressive. But I will gripe that their Bonus word of the day (assuming you see the same one) is a perfectly acceptable word, especially given the theme. Jerks.
I don’t know how they classify things as a “bonus” word, but it is a legit word.
I played https://squaredle.com 10/30:
*27/27 words (+1 bonus word)
🎯 Perfect accuracy
🔥 Solve streak: 10
Then they emerged. Into a howling chaos.
So even more lost.
They landed in Congress?
““You saved us, and you’ll get us home again. I know you can do it.”
She’s got a whole hell of a lot more confidence in him than I do. And considering he’s probably killed them both, she’s taking it perfectly well.
In an at least 4-dimensional problem where you got two previous solutions incorrect, what are the chances #3 gets you to the right answer?
Third time’s the charm.
Anyone who has done some elementary surveying (and that’s only 2-3 dimensions) knows how finicky stuff like this is.
Nah, It’ll be fine.
My suspicion is they are still where they started only tripping on some futuristic drugs. It is all a dream.
This was not supposed to be a reply stupid wordpress
Paging Agile Cyborg.
He just needs to slap the side of the terminal. That’ll fix it.
Sure, Doctor.. “Have you tried turning the Universe off and back on again?” Typical Gallifrey IT Crowd…
“You want us to rollback the timeline to before the first jump?”
In theory
“The demands in different business districts and at different times of day suggest we price curbs differently,” said Mike Estey, manager of curbside management for the Seattle Department of Transportation.
Seattle adjusts on-street parking rates based on demand — anywhere from 50 cents to $5 an hour depending on location and time of day — to achieve a goal of one-to-two free spaces available per block. The city regularly adjusts rates using data on parking occupancy and other metrics.
The demand-based pricing policy allows Seattle to better prioritize competing needs at the curb, reduce congestion, and make on-street parking more available. This means that visitors and shoppers can find a parking spot more easily, with less time spent driving around in traffic.
“What we’re trying to achieve is that the curb is well utilized for the public but visitors can find a space to park,” Estey said.
To the observer, I suspect it will look completely random and inexplicable.
How does it work? I’ll bet they don’t take cash. An “app” which charges your phone? An RFID chip om your windshield tracking you for monthly billing purposes? I’m sure it will integrate seamlessly with the surge pricing road tolls.
Most current parking systems have a kiosk where you go to pay and put the ticket on your dash. These can be updated dynamically for whatever rate they want to charge. So it doesn’t require getting buy-in from the users beyind “pay ot we ticket you”
I eagerly anticipate the wailing about parking deserts.
The real problem is with the rate not being posted. So you finally find a spot, go to pay and go oh hell no.
On hold to deal with some customer service drone.
Hold music is supposed to be boring and inoffensive. They’ve got some hip-hoppy crap that I swear is designed to make people hang up.
is designed to make people hang up.
I would not assume that this is not the intention.
I couldn’t take it anymore and hung up.
It helped that while I was on hold (having not reached a single human) I found the piece of information which let me calculate the answer to the question I was going to ask.
Long story short, the anticipated bill will be for what I intended to order, so I probably ordered the right thing. (premium offering versus standard sort of confusion).
Hopefully their KPIs this month include call abandons as a negative, because I was waiting too long
“Closed by inquiring party”
Having worked in a call center you only get to use that code for a ticket if the caller connects to an agent.
Calls that drop unanswered are recorded by the system and get a tut-tutting from management.
And you would be correct.
One of those “American Girl” doll catalogs came to the office addressed to an ex-employee, so I tossed it in the break room. After flipping through it at lunch, I’m relieved to report that so far (knock wood) they don’t seem to be promoting any tranny dolls.
Just wait until they publish the swimsuit edition.
There was a controversy not that long ago about them pushing that in a book or something.