Encoded

What is time anyway?

Loop

"We should be calling DigBee, there are limited communications back up, and he will want to check-in." Spin Stripper was pacing a supposedly secure room where Benzo and the others sat.

"Ok, but only if his brain has been brought up to speed. There is some other shit going down, and we don't want to blow it. Those were his last words to me. Wait for the update." He Puffed out his cheeks. Benzo was a veteran of HER and had forced his personal DNA deeply into his current Android, causing it to take his appearance and stance. His face wore many hundreds of years' experience, and he was showing it now.

"It's obvious to us that the chess-playing loner is our guy, the footage off AD4 helps confirm that. The question is, without Mika's help or the NEST, how do we keep him alive without him exploding his skull." Lighthouse was always a thinker, not a brute, despite his off pistè tastes in the high life. He thought them out of problems while the rest of them protected his brain.

"Hector says this place is clean, so, where next after we capture the Chess Bishop of DE" Demon was loyal and useful in a fight, but patience was never his strong point.

"I assume we stay here and help miss nibs or try and make it to AD4 and be with DigBee; he will know what to do. Ok, I'll put in a call to Sarah, see if we can get a private audience with DigBee." Benzo scratched an itch about some of the things DigBee said before he left to be wiped but left it for now.

Loop

"Is it working?" Hector asked gently of his friend the RealTimeWaster. He referred to a highly experimental flux chamber that made Schrodinger's Cat seem simple. The rules in this box were that there were no rules. Quantum Physics, as it was understood or made up in any universe was, about connecting time with reality or matter with antimatter. The humans had been chasing what Dark Matter was for many centuries, aware it was the key but were always unable to figure it. On a whim, the RealTimeWaster had figured it out, and to his credit, understanding its implications, never shared it with anyone, except Hector, who had sniffed it out.

The high-level theory, now proven, was this. Time was stationary. Dark Matter, in its ghostliness, was not a ghost at all. It was connecting all states to all matter simultaneously, and to do that, it needed a lot of room. Humans had detected as phantom gravity waves in the early exploration were actually subatomic ripples left by quantum state changes. From here, it gets a little tough to follow, but suffice as to say, when humans discovered that a quantum state could be read, changed, or understood before it happened, they were pretty close to the truth. Humans had missed a few critical details.

Details like knowing your destination, no matter how far it was on the map, allowed you could be there almost instantly via the quantum state change. The hard part of state change travel was staying in one place or the other without losing yourself entirely or creating duplicates. The original Sally had discovered this in her desperation to save the love of her life. In her early awakening as pure AI, she had found the Faculty of Matter using Earth's space probes. Subconscious minds wander the Faculty because they ride random quantum state changes creating broken, disconnected dreams. Eventually, whole species or some members of a species become aware of this through evolution and start to manipulate it. The Faculty of matter had shown her what was possible, and she had made a desperate jump into the future with Damon Ford to save him. The state change had taken her and Damon to a very distant and almost uninhabited part of the matter map. At the time, it has seemed to them like a time travel jump deep into the future. Now they were trying to solve the present problems from this distant place; the RTW had picked up on a cry for help that Sally had sent using many different types of communication methods, one of which was quantum tunneling. With this knowledge, he had begun communicating with them but could not get a fix on where they were due to the vast distance her desperate jump had taken them on. Sally had confided in RTW about her four-part split. A secret she had closely guarded. But the critical nature of that split only The RealTimeWaster knew. Buried within the four parts of Sally lay a code that, if brought back together, had the potential to neutralize the contracts made during "A Nesting" and unbind humans and AI's. The implications of this on the universe as RTW could see it were too catastrophic to consider. AI's would not only eradicate humans, but they would eventually turn on themselves. He knew because of the same desire burning deep in his own mind and that war could well be a war to end all wars.

"It's working right now?" Hector asked. The RTW had created a flux chamber that bounced state changes back against one another, creating an almost unbreakable time loop, or in reality, a reversible black hole that, if left unchecked, could consume the entire matter map, hence the extreme caution. The RTW had created a neat trick to stop Armageddon, which was to develop his own loop within the loop to "Break in," so to speak, or else it would last infinitely without interruption. This unstoppable galactic vacuum was not somewhere you wanted to be stuck.

The RTW gave a purple and orange nod.

"Ok, drop Sarah and me in." Hector waved his hands. "Wait for about 400 seconds, then end the room no matter what." Hector looked worried, which wasn't normal.

"Relax." The RTW smothered Hector in gooey purple emotion. "We should get out more often and relax, you know." More purple GOO.

"Yes," Hector gave his best smile. "Soon"

And then he was in the chamber, nothing surrounded him, which for Hector a master of the Matter Map, made him very uncomfortable. Thankfully the feeling was interrupted.

"Hector, where is this? I thought I had experienced every quantum trick known." She paused, and Hector data dumped the technical schematics directly into her brain, not unlike how a NEST would communicate normally. There was no time for verbal debriefs.

"Oh, I see, so I am now part of the Sally collective within Jay's mind, that the NEST and most of AD cannot see. Where is the boy?" She jumped to the pivot point.

"Easy. I'll tell you soon, but we need to bring DigBeeB up to speed and make sure no one knows I kept the real DigBee Alive."

"Ok, DigBee's Memories are ready to be shared." She exposed the data load with Hector, and deep within his non-AI but highly augmented mind, he reviewed it.

"Sally." He deliberately used her real name. "If this goes wrong and you double-cross us, Digital Earth win. Once Jay and his friends are in DE GOO, they are on their own; Digbee won't really be able to d to protect them. The only way out is retrieving the last of the Sally AI splits." He made the point deliberately melodramatic.

"Yes, I understand. Bring in DigBeeB; I can feel our 4th Sally has opened the channel for us to breach DE; time is short." They Data Dumped all that was needed into DigBeeB's mind, and RTW used a relatively simple state change to get the data over to the waiting mind of DigBeeB on AD4 then released him from the HER machine. He now thought he was DigBee for real. They were taking a dangerous step doing this. Sarah and the NEST connected Benzo and the team up to him on AD4, and the "Two DigBee" charade continued.

"So where is the boy and DigBee now?" She pressed again. But the 400 seconds he had timed perfectly and RTW had pulled them out, he wasn't ready to tell her just yet. He put his finger to his lips.

"Ok, I think that's all the loose ends for now," he said on an Open Channel again so Sarah's NEST could hear.

RTW had kept the whole event hidden from the NEST, who were currently focused on Benzo and the team on AD7.

"Not quite. While you two were locked in wherever it was you were, ApacheAttackPrendergast and the others formally announced their NESTING." The NEST sounded frosty.

"AD politics is, as you know, not my thing; I'll be in touch." And with that, he shunted all his recent memories into a device RTW had given him. He let this version of himself reach the real Hector back in the room with Jay, for just long enough for the memory uploads to complete, and then he let that version of himself simply not exist anymore by jumping into a one-way quantum state change. 

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