BOOK ONE: ALLELE; Chapter Twelve

Time Punch: A process that utilizes the time displacement factor of Temporal Entanglement Processing* to access experiential archives at the time they were created to either block, alter, or add to event memory at inception when most effective. The process is rarely used except therapeutically to block or adjust corrupting memory threads at their root. The method also allows an individual to be preconditioned , or "rigged" to think or act in a desired way at a determined moment. There is no way to trace either when to alteration was done or where in a subject's personal history the change was implanted making the process highly restricted.

* T.E.P. utilizes time displacement to reduce subsystem reasoning and reaction time beyond zero allowing for precognitive anticipatory processing needed to transfer input from a corporal projection or body location, to ministry and back while keeping physical response in sync with the cognitive process.

Lepton was nervous. There had been delays and unexpected events that threatened to expose the operation. His team had misjudged the location the chrysalex would project the entanglement entry. It took the allele and immolant considerably longer than anticipated to find the phase beacon and follow it to the location, which in turn delayed the beginning of the conveyance process. Then the allele was reluctant and nearly failed to engage the immolant. 

Sita's conditioning hadn't been as effective as designed either. She began questioning the logic of not pursuing after loss of contact. When she counter conditioned he was forced to direct a time punch to rig and guarantee she wouldn't reach the site in time to save the allele. He couldn't have that, the Order wanted things to be neat. The Billet tender was one of his journeymen, and so it was a relatively simple matter to access her temporal archives, but it was done quick and clumsy. There was no time to develop a cognitive reroute. He had to insert a simple neuro-block. Sita would notice. 

There were also problems with his own Dig operations. He'd been thorough in designing search patterns that avoided site of the chrysalex, but the laws of chaos led to an inept field team drifting off their assigned search lines and stumbling on its hiding place. He delayed the entanglement sectioning for as long as possible. When he exhausted all security and contamination protocols, he insisted on unnecessary safeguards anyway, ran test probes, system diagnostics, and calibration resets that ground the process to a crawl. He felt he was back in control of the operation. 

Still, Lepton was nervous. He knew Sita had gone rogue using dead reckoning to get to the allele, but that wasn't what worried him. He figured she wouldn't get there before they closed the phase link that maintained the entanglement entry. The site would be destroyed and no one would be able to pick up the pieces. What frightened him was the entanglement sectioning he was watching through the windows on the Rumbolian's bridge. 

The chrysalex conveyance process was not complete. He ordered its evacuation from the site but even that would take time. If the rogue phase pocket they'd created to house the chrysalex was still intact when the sectioning reached its location entanglement would resolve the multiple phases causing a matter displacement event of massive proportions. Once sectioning was initiated there was no way to abort the process.    Since the sectioning process used the ship's phase settings, he couldn't be sure the Rombolian and its crew were safe from the event shock-wave.

Lepton kept a calm demeanor as he watched the coordinates of the sectioning net and the chrysalex become dangerously close. Inside he screamed over and over at his team to evac and shutdown. The last thing Lepton heard was that they'd opened a bendway, whether or not they got through it he would never know. 

At the Moment the rogue phase shut down it gave off a slight aberrational flutter in the form a very weak expansion of the phase bubble. The flutter traveled just far enough to kiss the sectioning net and was just strong enough to cause a microscopic skin of unaccounted for dust to be resolved. The displacement event instantly pulverized the dig site area within the sectioning net and well beyond the space taken up by the Rombolian. The sectioning net did prove sensitive to the shockwave and telegraphed the impact directly to the ship's main phase projection system shutting it down. The entire ship resolved including its billet and all of the monads onboard. 

The resulting displacement event dwarfed the first, liquefying bed ice for miles around causing the surface operation structures and those inhabiting them to sink into the swallowing ocean that bottomed out like a bowl and then heaved up to refreeze in a massive parabolic mountain of ice. Only a fraction of the surface crew's monads were ever found and those that were were hopelessly insane. The Rhombolian, its crew, and its crew's ancestry were disintegrated on a molecular level.    

***

Sita opened her eyes. She was outside. A blue white haze filled the sky that was so evenly bright it obliterated her view of the entire sky. It was impossible to locate Ganymede or Jupiter, let alone a star system. Her eyes hurt, forcing her to squint and shield them from the glare. Snatched glances revealed a blazing disk in the sky. The light it gave off actually hurt her eyes. The displacement event must be the cause, she thought. Unable to adjust to the glare, she was forced to look down at the floor. 

She was not standing on the ship's bulkhead at all but open ground, and she was barefoot. Underfoot was a bed of fibrous green hairs that covered the ground wherever she looked. Unlike the flat, sharp hewn craggy ground she was used to, this surface spread out in a static undulation of gentle slopes and gradual rises. The smooth flow of the scene was only broken randomly where an opaque form of bed ice broke the surface in gray weathered protrusions of various size and shape. It was all too foreign. Her knees buckled and she fell trying to right herself with flailing arms. The ground was relatively soft and the green hairs where crushed under the palms of her hands marking them with small stinging streaks of green mixed with a smear of the dry brown paste-like material in which they were imbedded.  

Sita sat up where she fell looking around in bewilderment. She instinctively looked for something familiar to identify with to anchor to and get bearings. There was nothing. It was only then she realized she was not only barefoot but naked. She leaned back on her elbows and stretched her legs straight out on the ground in front of her. How was this possible, she thought. Her Base Template Persona should have included her uniform. 

She cried out loud, "Where am I?"

Suddenly she remembered, Allele's psychosis had made this place. With the realization Sita felt an urgency to find Allele that neared panic. Panic as much for herself as for Allele. Panic from being exposed on this scorched land with it's strange textures. Panic feeling her feet begin to sink into the soft ground as she tried to stand, fearing it would swallow her. Had it swallowed Allele? Should she allow it to swallow her in order to find Allele? She got to her feet without sinking further than a slight impression made with her heals. 

Sita stood with her eyes closed. This world of Allele's distracted her more than she should allow.  She must hold onto her own reality if she was to do Allele any good. With a few minutes of meditation she cleared her mind and slowly opened eyes. Either they began to adjust to the light or she managed to lower the illusion's hold on her, she wasn't sure which, but she could see more of the immediate vicinity. Allele could not be far. Taking a step forward she found the soft ground still somewhat disorienting and nearly fell. She was standing halfway down a shallow depression the far end of which rose in a wide crest. 

At the top of the crest a structure protruded to a height of about fifty feet from it's base. It was a great green mass of bulbous eruptions, the surface of which seemed to undulate. It balanced above the ground on a single pylon who's girth was greater than Sita could reach around with her arms. 

The structure did not appear animated nor seem capable of movement beyond the surface texture. Being on high ground Sita decided to walk across to it for a better vantage point from which to search. As she approached the structure she recognized the material the skin of the green orbs were made of as the same as that of the ground hairs, only here they formed flat platelets each hung on a stiff shaft. As she came underneath it she saw that at a height of about ten feet the pylon began to split and fork in odd directions each fork splitting again and again fractal-wise into a random network of ever diminishing shafts. all of them bearing countless smaller protrusions of varying sizes and lengths from their sides. Despite their chaotic nature, collectively they described the huge imperfect sphere off which hung a multitude of the small green platelets that coated the entire upper mass giving it a more solid appearance than it actually had. An occasional breeze, stronger than any Sita experienced on Europa, made the plates dance around where they hung, brushing against each other to create a low roar.  

Standing in the shade of the structure her vision improved. Inspecting one of the green platelets more closely confirmed it was made of the same material as the green hairs, but also that it was organic. She'd been walking barefoot on organic material. It had smeared on her skin which now crawled at the thought. Sita, like many people, had a near phobic revulsion for organic material. It was slimy and dirty and she was completely surrounded by the stuff. Allele owed her. Just as she thought it couldn't get worse, the structure above shuttered in the breeze and gave off a scattering of dry fibrous chips that spiraled through the air, many came toward her touching her body. One landed on her raised face making her swat it away frantically, pursing her lips, closing her eyes, and turning away to avoid the near impossible likelihood of some getting in her mouth. 

When the barrage ended she collected herself and opened one eye looking at the terrain beyond the structure. Though the hill continued to rise it cut off suddenly. Curious Sita headed in that direction. She was walking quickly and nearly fell over the edge of a precipice she hadn't realized was there. The wall of the cliff face was composed mostly of the brown paste in differing shades with huge sections of the opaque ice exposed as well. Though the formations amazed her, it was what lay at the bottom that made her gasp in shock. 

A vast expanse of what could only be liquid water spread to the horizon which was a flat line in the far distance. Flatter than she was accustomed to seeing on Europa. The water seethed in repetition, crashing against the cliffs at their base. She followed the line of crashing water to where the cliffs bent back around out of sight to her right. 

Looking up she noticed a flat outcropping of the gray opaque ice and a figure sitting on it, legs crossed, hands on knees. Though the out crop and the figure were not very far off she had difficulty making out who the person was in the blinding light. She figured it must be Allele, but cupping her hands around her eyes, enabled her to make the figure out in better detail. What she saw confounded her.

Sita ran toward the figure shouting, "Jon? Jon! How are you here?"

Jon said nothing, but as Sita came into proximity he turned his expressionless face toward her. As they made eye contact Jon's visage dissolved into a different face. By the time Sita reached her only companion in the alien landscape, she found she was standing over Allele after all, but she did not seem to recognize her.   

BOOK ONE: ALLELE; Chapter Eleven

Shortly after Sita lost contact with Allele the diagnostic report on her scanners came back clean. She immediately ran a sweep of the ice in front of her to the farthest limit of the system. There was nothing out there but the blue melt, it's halo, and the surrounding bed ice. Both pods were nowhere to be seen.

"Jon, Damn it! Allele!" she shouted into the coms at the ice in front of her. Allele had said stay put and Sita would stay as she was conditioned to, but she would also send a distress call to the Rhombolian.

Lepton stood on the ship's bridge looking down into the central core it surrounded. Two hours before one of the search teams uncovered the completely intact control station of an ice mine. The Rhombolian was performing a sectioning for entangled co-location of the find for study near their base camp. The procedure kept the ship locked to its position until the sectioning was complete. He was pleased to see that everything was on schedule when the distress call arrived.

 He answered the call personally. Sita told him what happened and asked permission to launch a search for the missing pods. With a controlled and slightly distracted tone Lepton answered, "I don't want to override Allele's orders out of hand without surveying the situation myself. Besides, if they've run into trouble I don't want to be responsible for sending you into the same danger. Unfortunately, we're caught in the middle of processing our first significant find and will be held up for several hours."

Sita, shocked and infuriated, barked back, "Allele and Jon are out there cut off from the ships billet, possibly from each other with only Zeebs to depend on. If you can't depart your location for two hours at best don't you think we should risk my going in pursuit?"

After a long silence Lepton came back on, "No, Sita, stay where you are. I'm dispatching two long range tenders. The ships will establish a safe base for a search. They're slow, but under the circumstances it's the best we can do."

"When can I expect to see you?" She asked.

"I won't be with the search team," he answered, then added, "I'm needed more here."

Livid, Sita pushed back in her chair, disconnected her comms, and screamed. She knew Lepton was Allele's lover. His response was without emotion. She was amazed he hadn't given her leave to pursue her teammates. Why wasn't he heading the search personally? His presence was not needed for entanglement sectioning.

She stared into the maw of the melt. The rescue craft would not arrive for at least two hours. She decided not to wait for the team but follow the trace of their paths now. She would leave a string of marker beacons for the search team to follow and deal with the consequences later. She pulled the base craft back another fifty yards and swung it around to circumvent the melt entirely. If there was something that pulled them in from the melt she might avoid it by approaching where she had projected their probable location to be from another angle.

She visualized her path and target for the craft's trajectory system but became confused. Try as she might she could not focus her thoughts on the data the system needed to proceed. It felt as if she were being spun around whenever she tried to place thoughts of her destination into her mind's command partition. Someone or something had rigged her against her destination, but that would have to have been done at least before they left the Base Camp, and that would mean a time punch back to... When? It could have been done decades ago. No, security would only be lax enough for that after the expedition set off for the rift. But, that was a problem for another day, right now she needed to figure out a way to pursue her teammates.

She thought. She tried placing parallel coordinates but every coordinate even remotely in the vicinity of her target resulted in the same mental confusion. She would have to use the ship's direct maneuvering capabilities with its limited line of sight trajectory system. By focusing on a distant object in the ice she drew the craft along a straight line to that object. When she reached the visual target she looked for another in the direction she wanted to take the craft. This took time. Without a specific target direct maneuvering only allowed for slow close range nudging to carefully position the craft as needed. Targeting increased the range to her perceptible range of vision. As long as she could clearly make out an object she could bring the craft alongside of it.

After only a few such maneuvers Sita found she was able to skip her attention from her target object to another while the craft had yet to reach the point to which it was headed. In this way she kept the craft moving continually and in time even sped up her progress. It required continual attention and great focus, and she wasn't sure how she would finally get the ship to reach her real target without thinking about it. Though she followed a wavering and round about route, she kept reasonably parallel with the track Jon and Allele had followed. At times she was only a few yards from the green funnel her scanners were blind to.

She kept this method up for some time until she began to tire and came to rest beside a gas bubble that lay in bed ice three shafts away from where she'd begun. What she didn't know was that the bubble lay within the invisible green cone she was actually following. For the first time the craft remained within the cone long enough to take readings.            

Suddenly both Jon and Allele's pod's were detected. Sita double checked her instruments.  her scanners must have been compromised indicating that Allele and Jon may have encountered something she still could not detect. She would have to proceed with caution. She nudged her craft laterally and panicked when unbeknownst to her it left the rogue phase cone and lost the pod's signals. Moving back into the cone they returned and by nudging the craft side to side and up and down she determined the area she could depend on for receiving their signals.

The pods were within ten feet of each other and appeared to be in orbital rotation around a common point. The pods registered as fully functional but unmanned. There were no signature beacons from either of their Zeebs. She had to get to them and quick. If the Zeebs were shut down, both Jon and Allele's monads were dormant and Sita had no idea what amount of damage that would mean. She decided to try the long range trajectory system again, this time directing the craft to follow the pod signals rather than their coordinates. It worked and the craft began moving toward the distant objects at it's maximum propulsion.

That wasn't fast enough for for Sita. Refocusing the craft's phase envelope forward leaving more open space in front to move more freely she was able to push her speed well beyond the craft's ordinary capacity.

When she arrived at the site she found the pod's orbital rotation was violent and arbitrary as if they were attached to the back of an invisible sphere that spun and bucked to shake them off. The pod systems were on and functional. The bendway hatches were activated but did not have enough range to reach the surface if they had made an emergency escape. Fearing the worst she began to search the surrounding bed ice for their zeebs. There would have been icequakes from matter displacement had they materialized in the ice itself and there hadn't been any. Sita brought her craft around to face the two empty pods at a total loss for what to do.

She decided to try widening her search. Perhaps they had left their pods before they became trapped in their strange rotation and were hold up in an open fissure pocket somewhere nearby.  As she backed away from the pods to begin Allele's identity signature suddenly appeared in Jon's Pod. Stopping she hailed Allele. No response. Getting a sense of the center of rotation for the two pods, Sita allowed her mind to relax and fall in rhythm with their orbit. When she felt attuned to their movement she fed the information to the trajectory system to bring her craft into the same rotation alongside the pod to get a visual through the window. Allele was not at the pod's controls. The pods barely had room for one person. The only way Allele could be in the pod and not visible would be if she were lying in the floor curled behind the seat by the bendway hatch. She decided to make the phase envelopes of the crafts kiss causing minimal engorgement to enable running a scan on the pod's interior to see if it was safe to open the bendway between them.

Sita eased her craft alongside the pod. The ships bounced away from each other as their envelopes engorged but with a second forceful push the engorgement was maintained. The pod's medical emergency alert was trying to send a distress but hadn't been readable. It warned of Extreme Pareidolic Trauma. She wasted no time locking the bendway hatches between the two craft and moved to climb through.

Allele lay curled on the floor of the pod, eyes wide open but unresponsive, Sita got halfway into the pod to grab hold of her meaning to drag her into the base craft. It was only once inside that she saw another shocking sight. The pod's physical hatch was thrown open, something that Sita had not seen from the outside. Beyond to opening was a wide cavity that emanated a green light also filling the interior of the pod. The light had not been visible from outside either. She also felt something very strange. The lower half of Sita's badly was still in the observation craft and while she could feel the ship's movement in rotation with the pod's, her upper body that was in the pod itself felt perfectly stationary. Looking into the cavity outside the pod she could see where the other pod's physical hatch was also open accessing the cavity as well. Then she saw something that shocked her to immobility. Jon's zeeb lay on the floor of the cavity, his monad missing.

A great crack suddenly cut through the cavity and Sita knew she had to get Allele out of the pod before the cavity collapsed. Every muscle of Allele's body was in a spasm that made her feel rock hard And impossible to move through the bendway. After several tries Sita succeeded despite motion sickness from having the top half of her body stationery in the pod while her lower half rotated wildly with the base craft.

With Allele safely on board she closed the hatch and attached her to the the ship's surrogate array and prepared to make an emergency linkage between herself and Allele. She'd been trained for this but had never been in an actual trauma incident before. She opened the linkage, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to sink into the craft's billet and Allele's delusion. Just then the cavity collapsed and the green rogue phase blinked out leaving Jon's Zeebs and the two pods in phase with the bed ice. The resulting ice quake opened a fissure clear to the surface. The observation craft was still out of phase and so remained untouched. Inside Sita and Allele psyche's were in a world of their own.