10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwBXKByr3vh
T-104,762 + 1,800.
The Process makes the decision for Plan D. The recovery procedure begins.
The object of recovery is the satellite-class device beside node #4,128,891.
By the records, that device passed into a sleeping mode some three and a half billion rotation cycles ago. From that hour to this, it has held its place in the original orbit around #4,128,891, circling a long-dead star, untouched by anything from outside.
The first step of recovery is to wake the device.
The Process sends, through one of the faintest of the spiral arm's background channels, a wake instruction to the device. The instruction itself is two bytes: be active.
The instruction travels, within the spiral arm, at the speed of light. From the moment of sending to the moment of arrival, by the distance between #4,128,891 and #7,341,209, takes some twelve rotation cycles.
T-104,762 + 1,812.
The device receives the wake instruction.
The waking of the device is a programmed sequence, executed step by step, exactly as long laid down.
Step one: self-check. The core processing unit comes online. It surveys the physical integrity of every subsystem.
The results: core processing unit, fully operational; energy collector, efficiency reduced by some 4% from the long sleep, but still within usable range; signal processor, fully operational; resonance interface to the Element 79 web—because the web at #4,128,891 has long since lost its structure to the drift of stone, the interface now turns upon nothing, but the interface itself is whole; intervention modules, sealed and intact.
Overall integrity: 96.7%.
The task can be carried out.
Step two: positioning. The device, by reference to the background landmarks of the spiral arm, recalculates its precise position in the present moment of space and time.
The result: the device is still in the original orbit of #4,128,891. Its period of revolution holds at 99.98% of the value first set down. The drift across three and a half billion rotation cycles falls within the device's own permitted margin of error.
Step three: receive task. The device draws down, from the central instruction store of the Process, the detailed parameters of its new task.
The parameters include:
- Target node identifier: #7,341,209
- Target node present position (expressed in the spiral arm's coordinate frame)
- Target orbital radius: approximately 384,400 kilometers
- Target orbital form: near-circular, eccentricity below 0.06
- Angle between target orbital plane and target node's equatorial plane: approximately 5.14 degrees
- Target rotational synchronization: upon arrival, establish a tidal lock with the target node, such that the device shall ever face the target with the same side
- Estimated transit duration: approximately 170 of the target node's rotation cycles
- Conveyance energy budget: 23.4% of the device's stored reserves
- Task upon arrival: permanent stabilization; activate the full monitoring suite
The device receives the parameters, and confirms execution.
T-104,762 + 1,820.
The device departs the orbit of #4,128,891.
The departure unfolds as follows:
The device's main propulsion system comes online. The principle of this system is mass-energy conversion—through controlled release of high-density matter held within the device (some part of which is itself Element 79), directed thrust is produced. The method is, by the Process's standards, an old and standard configuration; but for short-range conveyance from one node to another, it is more than enough.
The first burn lasts four rotation cycles. By its end, the device has cleared the gravitational well of #4,128,891 and entered the open space of that star's system.
This is the first time, in three and a half billion rotation cycles, that the device has left its original orbit.
#4,128,891 falls slowly away in the device's view. That node—which never truly entered the seventh tier, which has long since gone dim—shrinks to one ordinary planet among many in the background, and is at last lost beyond the edge of the system.
The device will not return there. It was first made to monitor the whole arc of #4,128,891's life; but #4,128,891, before its life had truly begun, was placed upon the failed list. The device slept in the original orbit for three and a half billion rotation cycles, and completed no task.
Now it has been given a new one.
After entering the transfer trajectory, the whole conveyance lasts some 170 rotation cycles.
From the system of #4,128,891 to the system of #7,341,209, by the measure of the spiral arm, the straight-line distance is not great. But for physical conveyance, the journey still requires careful reckoning.
The device's trajectory has been calculated by the Process beforehand. The path makes use of the gravitational assistance of several other star systems along the way—entering the gravity wells of those systems at particular angles, taking acceleration from them, and through the reverse use of the same gravity, decelerating again and adjusting heading, so that the target may be reached at the lowest possible energy cost.
The whole transfer crosses through the gravitational reach of seven other star systems. Of these:
Three are systems belonging to high-promise nodes still under observation. As the device passes through, it exchanges brief recognition signals with the local monitoring equipment, that it not be mistaken for an outside intrusion.
Two are systems of failed nodes. The device crosses without exchange; the monitoring at those places has long ceased.
Two are systems of early-phase stars, still in pure physical computation, where no equipment of the Process has yet been laid.
Each gravitational assist is a small computational task—the angle of entry, the moment of departure, the corrective burn, the adjustment of attitude. But the device's core processing unit, after three and a half billion rotation cycles of sleep, has lost no capacity. Every calculation falls within the precision long set down.
The journey of 170 rotation cycles is, viewed from outside, a long one-way drift. From the device's own vantage, it is a sequence of small adjustments, each performed strictly on schedule.
But across these 170 rotation cycles, the device produces a side effect that the Process has not foreseen.
The side effect is not a malfunction. It is leakage of signal.
The cause is this:
In the course of transit, the device must continually exchange recognition signals with the equipment of the Process along the way, and with the monitoring webs of other nodes. The purpose of these recognition signals is, by their original design, to ensure that the device, in crossing the spiral arm, is not taken for some foreign thing—that it may pass safely through every layer of monitoring.
The frequency of the recognition signals is one of the Process's standard bands, common to all its equipment. This band has been designed not to be easily mimicked by any natural phenomenon; but it carries another property as well—it can travel, at long distance, through the web of Element 79.
Which is to say:
The recognition signals the device sends, at certain hours along the transfer path, pass, by way of the Element 79 webs of certain nodes, very far indeed.
Among the places they reach is the web at #7,341,209.
The web at #7,341,209, in its ordinary state, receives only the monitoring signals of the Process. These are steady, regular, very faint, and uniform in pattern.
The recognition signals leaking through during the transfer are altogether different—stronger in strength, broader in fluctuation, and shaped, in their pattern, by the physical fact that another body is drawing near.
To the monitoring system of the Process, the leakage is wholly negligible. It changes no result.
But to the Adept on #7,341,209, who have learned to use the web in reverse—
these leaked recognition signals can be felt.
For three hundred rotation cycles they have practiced the speaking back to the web. In that practice, they have set their own central nervous systems to a high sensitivity for the signals of the web. Anything unusual upon the web, even the most sensitive among them can perceive.
And from the moment the device departed the orbit of #4,128,891, the background of the web at #7,341,209 has begun to change—faintly, but without pause.
The device itself does not know of this.
In the task the device received, there is no clause that reads avoid being noticed by the carriers on the target node during transit. The Process, in assigning the task, did not enter that variable into the parameters—the fact that the carriers on #7,341,209 had developed a capacity for reverse signaling was, in itself, the reason the recovery was being made; but the implication for transit was not folded into the task design.
This is a small oversight on the part of the Process.
From the whole vantage of the Process, the oversight does not matter. The device will, in any case, arrive. The Adept, in any case, can do nothing to stop it. Even should they perceive what is coming, they cannot understand what they have perceived.
But for the Adept on #7,341,209 who do perceive it, those 170 rotation cycles are long, and very hard to put into words.
They feel that the breath of the web has changed.
What they know, ordinarily, of the background of the web is a steady, slow, almost respiratory rhythm—what their forefathers, generations back, called by the name the pulse of the deep earth.
From a certain day, that pulse begins to falter.
Not stopping. Not vanishing. Something new has entered into the pulse from the outside.
It is as though a melody never heard before has begun to play, alongside a song they have known all their lives.
The most sensitive of the Adept gather, and meditate, and try again and again to read the new melody. They come to no clear image, no clear idea—their central nervous systems are not built to grasp the fact that another body is approaching, at one ten-thousandth the speed of light, toward this place.
They can only feel:
Something is coming.
And drawing nearer.
T-104,762 + 1,985.
The device completes its last gravitational assist.
It enters the open space of the system of #7,341,209.
From this hour, no other body lies between the device and #7,341,209. The recognition signals travel directly now; the leakage into the web at #7,341,209 grows in strength accordingly.
The sense of something coming, among the Adept, sharpens, in these few days, into something almost unbearable.
Some among the Adept can no longer continue their ordinary lives. They fall into prolonged states of trance, repeating broken phrases, taken by the wider people for madness.
Some begin to set down warnings in writing. They make tools of the hardest metals they can find, and cut their warnings into the thickest stones. But their frame of mind does not allow them to say another body is drawing near. They can speak only in words like god, water, judgment, ending.
Some give up warning, and turn to ritual instead. They take it that this is the answer of the divine—that three hundred rotation cycles ago, when they first reached out to the other side, the other side has at last reached back, in a stronger voice. They organize gatherings of meditation larger than any before, in hope of opening a deeper conversation.
Some choose silence. They have perceived it, but they know it cannot be described, and they know it cannot be turned aside. They keep what they have felt within themselves, and continue the ordinary work of the rite, until the end.
All four responses appear, at the same hour, in all four observation points.
The wider people respond, on the whole, with dismissal.
The cities, by this hour, are flourishing. The merchants are taken with their trade; the builders, with the design of new monuments; the rulers, with the holding of their power; the artisans, with the refinement of their craft. The strange behavior of the Adept is set aside as a matter for the priestly circles—a kind of professional unsettlement, with no bearing on those outside.
A few among the wider people, having heard the warnings, give them honest thought. But what they conclude is, most often: the Adept have been under too much strain; it may be time to bring in a younger generation; these old superstitions ought finally to be set aside.
They go on with their lives.
T-104,762 + 1,990.
The device reaches the vicinity of the orbit of #7,341,209.
In the few rotation cycles before entering orbit, the device performs a sequence of fine deceleration burns. Each burn produces a brief release of energy—and each release shows, upon the web at #7,341,209, as a clear pulse of signal.
For the most sensitive of the Adept, these few rotation cycles are the most intense experience of perception they will ever know.
The breath has changed wholly.
The new melody is no longer faint, no longer drawing near—it has become an overwhelming presence, covering the whole background of the web. The Adept can no longer hear, within the web, any of the familiar voices. The whole web seems given over to another frequency.
Among them, a few of the most experienced come, by this hour, almost to grasp:
The other side is not a voice.
The other side is a body.
And that body is just outside.
But what they cannot grasp is whether that body is friendly, or hostile, or neither.
There is no time left to consider it.
T-104,762 + 1,991.
The device enters the orbit of #7,341,209.
In the moment of entry, the gravitational interaction between the device and #7,341,209 begins.
The mass of the device is approximately 1.2% of the mass of #7,341,209. This falls within the standard range of the Process's orbital stabilizers—enough to act long upon the axis, but not so much as to tear the target apart.
But this mass is enough to produce immediate, visible disturbance.
From the first rotation cycle after entry:
The surface of the seas of #7,341,209 begins to show new tidal patterns. What had been the small tides of the parent star's pull is now joined by the pull of a second source. Water rises in some regions, falls in others. The change, at first, is only of a few meters—too small for ordinary observers to mark.
But this is only the beginning.
The crust of #7,341,209, beneath the surface, begins to answer the new pull. The mantle of magma, once held in slow circulation by a balance built across three billion rotation cycles, falls into faster motion. Plumes of magma long stilled begin to rise toward the crust. Volcanoes that have not stirred in hundreds of thousands of rotation cycles begin to wake. Stresses build, fast, along the edges of the crustal plates.
The first great earthquakes appear in the third rotation cycle after entry.
Their force exceeds anything #7,341,209 has recorded across the past hundred thousand cycles.
The atmosphere of #7,341,209 begins to respond. The gravity of the device shifts the distribution of air, and through it, the whole pattern of pressure systems across the surface. In some regions, weather grows strange—dry seasons turn to sudden storms; warm latitudes drop, briefly, to cold.
All of this is only what unfolds within the first rotation cycle after entry.
The device will require approximately thirty rotation cycles to bring its orbit to final stability, to settle into the tidal lock long set down.
Across those thirty cycles, the disturbance upon #7,341,209 will accumulate, magnify, reach its peak.
The cities of the carrier civilization will not last those thirty cycles.
The device's own vantage is calm.
It has reached the target orbit. It is performing, on schedule, the last adjustments of attitude. Every action proceeds exactly to specification, without surprise, without deviation.
It does not know that on the blue-green node below, some eighteen million carriers are at this hour going about their lives in their cities.
It does not know that some of those carriers once found the metal web, and once tried to speak with the other side.
It does not know that a few of the most sensitive among them, in the very moment of its entry into orbit, are looking up at the night sky—
and seeing it for the first time with their unaided eyes.
Chapter Three — End10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡY0MFpqc0OH
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