“Well, can you fix it?” Siddhārtha asked, peering down at Orionae’s hands as he worked. He had been asking the same question every minute or so, and each time, Orionae had answered “I think so,” though it was doubtful whether he was listening at all.
Siddhārtha shrugged and turned around to Asura. “Do you think he can fix it? Shouldn’t we consider other options?”
Asura was lying down on the cold earth of the basin, gazing up at the indigo sky. Her eyes betrayed no emotion. She seemed indifferent to the icy ground, her arms and legs sprawled out unfeeling.
Looking at her, Siddhārtha ruminated on how different he was from his strange companions.
“Give him a chance,” she said at length. “We’ll consider other options if he fails.”
Orionae was struggling to reconnect a pair of broken supports beneath the sphere. If these could not be fixed, the secondary coils that slid along the outermost surface would remain stuck in place.
“Well? Can you fix it?” Siddhārtha asked again.
Orionae used his maser to separate the broken pieces into three sections. “I think so.”
Siddhārtha extended a hand. “What if we melted some metal and fashioned a pipe the same length? We could probably find some in the city.”
Orionae pushed Siddhārtha’s hand away. “We won’t need to do that.”
Orionae cut another section, fusing it to part of the sphere.
“If you break it, it’s all over.” Siddhārtha frowned over Orionae’s shoulder.
“I know.”
Carefully Orionae measured out a second, equal length of pipe, cutting off the excess from the part he had fused. Then he took the remaining fragments and fused them together to make a small orb that he then passed through the polls of a gravitational generator, reshaping it into a length of wire. Siddhārtha walked away, shaking his head.
The whole time, Asura laid splayed out on the ground, as unmoving as a stone.
Siddhārtha looked up at the sky. Through the barrier dome they had erected over themselves, the edges of the small, yellowish sun appeared to stretch to either side, like a strange mouth opening in the sky.
In Orionae’s hands, the sphere had lost half of its size. A considerable bundle of tubes, twisted into all manner of shapes, were stacked at his feet. It appeared as though he was in the process of constructing something entirely different.
“What’s that?”
“Please don’t touch. It will destroy your processors.”
Siddhārtha withdrew his hand at the last moment.
✦ ✦ ✦
Again, night visited the plains. The thin atmosphere rapidly lost its heat. A dry, cold wind blew from one edge of the basin to the other. The scattered stars winked in the sky above the ancient stillness.
“It’s done.” Orionae sat up.
“You finished it?” Siddhārtha leapt to his feet, then gaped. “What is it?”
The sphere they had taken from the ruins was completely gone. In its place rested a pair of coils, one inside the other. Lying on their sides, their height was roughly the same as Orionae’s.
Siddhārtha’s gaze shifted suspiciously back and forth between the coils and Orionae’s face. “You’ve rebuilt it?”
Orionae turned slowly toward Siddhārtha. “No. I did not rebuild it. I’ve made an entirely different thing. Though I did use two or three of the basic principles that were fundamental to the original sphere.”
Asura slowly rose to her feet behind them.
Orionae lifted the coils and placed them in front of her. He touched a part of the device, and the coils and the cylindrical space inside them shimmered a beautiful aquamarine. Fine bands of light formed on the surface of the cylinders, moving from one end of the coils to the other at an incredible speed.
“This flow of light reveals an extraordinary transfer of energy from the exterior of the coils to the inside.”
“Where does the energy come from? I don’t see any kind of generator attached.”
“Asura, look here. See the part that looks like a diffraction grating woven of wire? I made this wire out of the supports from the original device—though one of these also existed in the sphere. If you induct this with a secondary coil, an incredible amount of power will flow through it. I believe the source of its power to be the Dirac sea.”
“The Dirac sea?”
Asura and Siddhārtha stepped forward.
“Yes, the birthplace of all protons.”
The two others scanned their own neural memory webs, discovering recollections of this strange term from ancient atomic physics.
“And so?”
“I aim this secondary coil’s deflector toward an unlimited function index. This is the same as orienting it toward the entropy D index that was in the sphere. Then, observe—another space is generated on the inside of the larger coil.”
The primary coil’s diameter was about a meter and a half; Orionae reached over it and held down the deflector on top of a rail fastened to the secondary coil. The deflector slid down the rail.
ZZZZING
They heard a faint sound like a metallic wire trembling, a vibration that echoed at the bottom of their ears.
Suddenly, the space within the coil grew dark: a true darkness, permitting absolutely no light to escape. The blue brilliance of the coil wrapped around it grew in intensity until it was blinding.
“What is the inside of this coil connected to?”
Orionae returned the deflector to its original position. The darkness inside the coil gradually brightened into the original blue bands of shimmering light.
“The thing that was hardest to understand at first was the coordinate system of the grid. I had no idea what the numbers represented. However, while I was analyzing the Milky Way’s galactic latitude, longitude, and the equator baseline range, I figured it out. According to my results, the darkness we just saw here originated from the following coordinates: Y=88.5711; X=43.026; Z=19.3920; T=n-n Δt.”
Asura’s eyes grew as narrow as needles. “Those coordinates sound like they’re inside the Andromeda galaxy.”
Orionae nodded quietly. “Indeed. They lie within the second arm in the eighth quadrant of Andromeda.”
A deep silence followed. No one said a word; even their breaths were drawn lightly. Starlight twisted by the polarizing effect of the gravitational barrier played across Asura’s still features.
The path toward destruction that had begun far in their past had taken a new turn here, heading off into the night sky. Destruction had come to their galaxy, their solar system, their Earth along that path several times—the result of some transcendent being’s displeasure with human progress. The seeds that being had planted had grown into inescapable tethers, and the once great civilizations of humanity were now reduced to ruin and dust and sand. It was already too late to try and stop it. The damage was done. Their enemy’s work was complete, leaving no tomorrow for the three cyborgs.
“Let’s go.”
The necklace around Asura’s neck sparkled in the blue light, reflecting in the eyes of her companions.
His face expressionless, Orionae once again reached out to the deflector. The coil emitted a bright blue light.
“I will go in last. It would not do to leave this here behind us.”
Asura crouched down, stared at the darkness inside the coil, then slid inside.
Ziiiiiiiiiiiiiin.
The strange vibration struck her skin like countless needles. She thought she heard Siddhārtha shout something, but in an instant, everything was swallowed in darkness.