Averting Epsilon Chapter 4: Multidi-what now?

  Jagra looked over a rack of equipment curiously, “The hound at the mining camp said electrical gear resonates on the crystals, but I see a lot of electric motors on these digging supplies, how do you prevent interference?”

  Marcus looked up from a terminal and responded, “Farraday cages embedded into the housings, we duct it all into a cell on the hazmat suits that stores the static for safe discharge later.”
  “That strikes me as technology a mining company would value greatly, why do they not use it?”
  “The cells are made using silver and they're only good for two or three trips before needing to be scrapped and rebuilt. It's not worth the expense to use it for mining.”

  Akaila glanced over at them while sitting at a table. There was a coin on the table in front of her, balanced on one side. She was practicing her telekinesis by attempting to keep it slowly spinning, but her lack of experience showed every time it shot several feet across the table, sometimes falling to the floor and forcing her to retrieve it. After one such trip, she asked, “So what exactly do you guys do here, besides collecting data all day?”

  “We study the multidimensional manifestations of the psionic, temporal, and ethereal anomalies which proliferate the vicinity of the seven superior magicka majoris formations, with the end-goal of manipulating and potentially nullifying their detrimental effects while multiplying, magnifying, or otherwise amplifying their beneficial factors.”

  She stared blankly, “You lost me at multidimensional.”

  Sapien stifled a laugh, “They try to figure out what makes magic tick, so they can control it. You could have just read his mind to figure it out, you know.”

  “It doesn't work like that. If my mind can't readily grasp a concept, it comes across as equally confusing gibberish. I peeked at what he was thinking when he said it, and trying to pull that from his mind was like being shoved snout-first into a trigonometry book.”

  He just grinned at that and Jagra spoke for him, “Smart enough to stump a telepath, I must say that's a first for me.”

  Marcus went back to typing on his terminal and after typing in a few more numbers, leaned back with a slight yip, ears forward.

  Akaila looked over at him, “Something interesting?”

  “I just finished crunching that month's worth of survey data Sapien collected. First off, I'm going to assume whatever buried the needles on every single one of our scanners earlier today originated on your ship.”

  She whimpered, looking down at the coin, remembering the pain, actually thinking about the moment before she lost consciousness, hearing the thoughts of every single person on the planet, knowing absolute pain, pleasure, hunger, energy, exhaustion, and a dozen emotions so complex they lack a title, and the sheer, overwhelming, indescribable sensation of absolute godly omnipotence before her mind overloaded and couldn't contain it.

  “Hey! Hey! Akaila!”

  She blinked and looked up, seeing Marcus leaning over her with Jagra also looking down...and a ceiling fan in front of her, “How did I get on the floor?”

  “I mentioned that energy spike and you went glassy eyed for a good three minutes, you don't remember that?”

  She shook her head, slowly sitting up, her head spinning, then she noticed several overturned items on a nearby shelf, her chair on its side, and the coin she'd been practicing with folded neatly in half, “I get the feeling that's not all that happened.”

  “Hell no it's not, when we noticed something was up, Sapien tried to shake you out of it, you screamed like a banshee and fell to the floor, damn near broke everything in the room when you did it too, just what the fuck was that pulse you sent out?”

  “I honestly don't kn-wait, where's Sapien?”

  He grimaced and pointed towards the corner, where she was sitting pressed against the walls, ears back, hugging her tail and gently petting it, clearly traumatized. She glanced over at them, and nervously spoke, “I, I'll be okay, it's just...I saw it, it was second-hand, but I saw it, god, no wonder you blacked out, no mind should be able to handle that. It's too...it's just...that can't be right, my mind must have filled in the blanks, censored it, you know? Replaced the stuff I couldn't comprehend with something I could.”

  Marcus looked back and forth between them, then at Jagra, “One of them explodes when we mention it, and the other is shell-shocked, would you mind telling me what the ever loving fuck happened up there on that ship?”

  “It was mythril that syndicate rat was smuggling, a good three crates worth, and not an ounce of it shielded or grounded out, one of the crates busted when we went to throw it overboard, Akaila was standing in the middle when they stopped sliding across the deck.”

  He groaned, collapsing into a chair and burying his muzzle between his hands, “Yeah, that would do it. It's a miracle she's not dead, and anyone standing nearby for that matter. And I'm not even exaggerating, an overexposure to mythril is supposed to be fatal to a psycher, so what, she screamed and let out a pulse, like she did just now?”

  “Aye, but a good ten times stronger, we had to hit the deck to avoid being hit by shrapnel, and the storm reached right up and pulled us in right after, if I didn't know better, I'd say the clouds took on the shape of a hand just to grab at us.”

  “You probably wouldn't be too far off. I think what happened is her brainwaves got amplified so much she was able to see between planes, it's exactly what we've been trying to do here, but we're smart enough to let a computer handle the number crunching, and to keep all energy sources behind a shitload of shielding.”

  Sapien glanced up at him before going back to nervously stroking her tail, “You mentioned survey data?”

  “Yeah, yeah, the survey data, well Akaila plugging herself into the fabric of spacetime inadvertently gave us the final piece we needed to do something practical with it. That pulse was like a massive psionic sonar ping, and an order of magnitude more powerful than anything we've been able to make using machines. Since your ship was sitting at the epicenter, the sensors got perfect resolution when that ping came back. We now have a snapshot of the entire anomalous region, frozen at one instance. It's like a decryption key, I lined up each energy field reading to the exact second that range peaked, and all those random numbers started to come together into meaningful sums. To put it bluntly, she hacked God's computer and stole a copy of the map to the universe off it. I'll need to give Tulpa and Michael a chance to run some equations first, but I think we could prove multiverse theory with this.”

  Akaila blinked a couple times, “And the other guy?”

  “Who?”
  “The fourth guy who works here.”
  “Fourth?”

  Jagra shot him a look, “There were three of you that greeted us at the door, then Tulpa was inside, that makes four, there's a fourth member of your team, is there not?”

  He rubbed his head, wincing slightly, “Yeah, now that I think about it...but I can't for the life of me put a name to the face...Oh, if you guys are hungry, there's a fully stocked pantry here, just down-”

  “Fourth man.”
  “Huh? Oh, yeah, just thinking about that is making me nervous, Michael is supposed to run all new hires past me...oh, hires! Akaila, you're going to need to fill out some forms, I almost forgot all abou-”

  She growled and slapped him as hard as she could, then before he had a chance to react, grabbed his head with both hands, staring him in the eyes and focusing on him directly, exploiting the shock of the unexpected actions to look deep into his mind. He started whimpering and shaking slightly from the mental intrusion before she let go.

  She sighed, “He's using memetic cloaking. People see him, but he's not seen as important, and thoughts about him get redirected.”

  Jagra asked, “So then why isn't it affecting us?”

  “Because we haven't been exposed to it directly, and he's not present in the room right now. I don't know anyone who could pull off a cloaking job like that though.”

  Marcus tilted his head, “What kind of cloaking job? Who?”

  “Yeah, he's not gonna be any help here, it would take a couple hours of hypnosis to fix that.”

  Sapien looked up at them, “Anybody slipping a cloaked person into a research team can't be up to anything good.”

  “No, they can't. And I'd bet money they'll want the numbers Marcus just came up with.”

  Marcus grinned, leaning back in his chair, “Damn straight, the academy is gonna flip when they hear about this.”

  “I'm not going to keep explaining the situation every time his memory blanks.”

  Sapien got to her feet, still a little shaky, “I can stay here and keep Marcus and the computer safe, lets face it, I'm fried after that pulse hit me, a psycher could play me like a musical instrument right now.”

  Akaila nodded and the two of them headed towards the door. Marcus got up and spoke, “oh, hey, before you guys go, I found something amazing in the numbers Sapien collected.”

  “You might want to make it fast, I think it cuts deeper into his memory each time his focus is pulled towards the topic.”

  Marcus looked towards her, “What cuts deeper?”

  “Please hurry.”
  “No, seriously, what cuts deeper?”