[Text] Saturday, Week 37: Saving Salvation

[standsentinel]

[The message pings its way across the communicators, encrypted and filtered to the Ship contingent (and Thor) on a lazy Saturday morning. ]


Kaidan Alenko here.

Now that we've all had a chance to catch our breath, I should share what I learned for my part of the timeslip. To give some context, I was dropped back a hundred years or so relative to now, to a point on board Salvation roughly a week before her crash.

The ship was functional, and I was able to speak to the AI and learn a few things about the nature of what's going on here. Most critical is the fact that we weren't brought here by Salvation or her crew for a specific purpose, we were rescued after having fallen through a dimensional rift out of our own realities and into the spaces in between, where it's pretty lethal to the point where several weeks of regeneration in the stasis pods still left one poor guy looking like what might some day become hamburger after the pod dislodged him ahead of schedule.

I'd say 'accidentally', but Salvation's AI suspected sabotage, but was unable to prove it due to gaps in her memory logs, likely intentional. I was unable to access key parts of her systems in that timestream, but if we can get her online again now, I bet I could learn more.

Back to the reality rifts thing -- one opened on the ship at one point, letting these energy-sucking creatures on board the ship. Exciting stuff, if you can imagine, and I wonder if they were the same things that people in the future timeline reported seeing.

Salvation has the computing power needed to get us all home again, if we can repair her enough, but to my mind the stakes are higher. Something's destabilizing different realities, and the goal of the ship was to figure out how to stop it. If that's the future of Verdana, and I have my suspicions about what that countdown on the ship is about, I think we might need to make a stand here before we think about going home, or we might not have homes left to go to.

Alenko out.


[In a private message to Tosh, Bruce and Tony]

On a lighter note, I scored an equation for calculating time travel off the AI, if anyone's curious. It's huge, though, you'll need some serious data storage just for the equation alone.

Comments

[voice]

[hypospraying]

[It's a lot of information to process, but she does her best. The part about the pod regenerating her after falling through a rift is particularly worrying.]

As far as I know, there weren't any rifts in the time I was in, or that time before the war that others were dropped to. This thing with the rifts, do you think it started here on Verdana? I mean, I get that we were pulled from all over via these rifts, but do you think it's possible? It might have something to do with the Ship crashing here.

[Voice: encrypted]

[standsentinel]

From what Salvation was saying, the rifts have been appearing in a lot of realities, and when it gets bad enough they completely collapse. Almost like some kind of virus spreading through cells, if you'll forgive the ham-handed attempt at a medical analogy.

[Voice: encrypted]

[hypospraying]

To keep with the theme, usually we get samples of the virus so we can study it and learn how to eradicate it. Was anyone able to get any readings on the rifts?

[Audio, because writing in English is exhausting]

[kazeninaru]

The ship in the far future, when Verdana was ending, was counting down, too. To the point when the little oasis the ship was in disappeared and the ship was all that was left.

... the ship now is counting down again?

[There's a kind of weary dread in her voice, there. Because she doesn't want the world to end, dammit.]

[Audio: encrypted]

[standsentinel]

Yeah... although it's a second-count, and if my math's right it won't hit zero for a little over four months. Not great, by any standards, but it'll give us time if we don't waste it.

[Audio: encrypted]

[kazeninaru]

Four months.

[That's better than the mere days they'd had, before, at least. Haruka makes a frustrated noise on her side of the screen.]

There has to be something that can be done. Would I be of use at all in helping? I am not a genius, I do not know much about technology besides how to drive fast cars... I am just a soldier.

But if there is anything I can do.

[text]

[galacticheroine]

I guess falling out of time and being damaged explains some things.

In the future timeline I took a small team down into the ship and we dug up some information, including energy readouts and decay patterns. I can pass those along to you, Tali should already have them since she was with me. There was a galaxy map, too.

[text]

[standsentinel]

Have I mentioned you're my favourite human Spectre? Readings and you found Tali? I'll take them both. I've got a place in Poseidon now, apparently, so we should meet up and compare notes.

[text]

[galacticheroine]

Yeah, I guess we didn't really get a chance to do a headcount after everything with realities being rearranged, and all.

I'm working with the sheriff to keep the peace, but we can definitely meet up. Got a few things besides readings to fill you in on, anyway.

[text]

[nodavinci]

[On the tech nerd filter, with a few more layers of complexity added to the encryption.]

How huge? Ballpark. We can probably rig necessary data storage, if we don't already have it.

One thing I can say for this time travel mess: the toys are a lot better this time around.

[text]

[standsentinel]

Remember I showed you the specs on my omni-tool? I've got it on here right now and it's taken up so much memory I can't even edit a music playlist. The numbers have to be precise to 97 decimal places, according to Salvation.

[text]

[nodavinci]

[Tony typically replies almost immediately.

This time, there's a gap of several minutes.

These minutes are probably filled with swearing.]

You want to hear the good news or the bad news first?

[Video]

[iwanttosettheworldonfire]

[Have an unreasonably irritated Indrani.]

She suspected sabotage? Every question I lobbed at that bitch about what might be wrong or cause a crash, she told me there was nothing the matter and nothing to be done.

[Video]

[standsentinel]

[Kaidan looks tried, but the sort of tired that speaks of a man with a lot of things to do, all of which are engrossing. He's in the somewhat spartan accomodations of the Authorities' bunkhouse at the moment, if the backdrop is a clue.]

Sabotage of the stasis pod that they were dealing with when we, uh, popped in. I would be really surprised if that was the only incident of it, but she was reporting deleted sensor logs and shifted access permissions just from that, so I didn't want to risk tripping more flags if whoever it was was still in the system. AIs are... literal. Even scarily powerful ones.

[iwanttosettheworldonfire]

[Sigh.]

I don't really get these AI things. The only one I ever had a conversation with before definitely wanted to gloat and then I got it to blow itself up. Every other computer I know you just use a keyboard.

[She'll admit when she's not good at things... but she won't like it.]

[video]

[djinnigenie]

I understood little of what you wrote, but if you need my aid to save Verdana and to help us all get home - then you have it. I am your ally.

[video]

[standsentinel]

I'm, ah, not sure what we have right now that you could help with -- it's pretty heavily based in either technology or lifting and shifting several tons of debris.

[Kaidan being Kaidan, his 'no' sounds faintly apologetic.]

I'll let you know if something comes up, though. What skills could I call on, for you?

[video] - private (She's getting better at this.)

[djinnigenie]

Stealth, infiltration, fighting. I also may be able to acquire any needed items without cost to you provided they are small enough for me to carry.

Other than that, I fear I am of little use to you at present. I stand willing to aid, however, if you find use for me.

[private, text]

[tiptoeing]

I'm not sure what's available around here in terms of data storage, but Tony probably has some ideas. I'm still trying to get everything sorted out after being unconscious for two and a half months and waking up in a new timeline.

Regardless, I'll do what I can to help get Salvation's systems online and sort out what happened.

[private, text]

[standsentinel]

Yeah, that would be a little... challenging. Glad to have you back regardless of the timestream, though.

Once Tony can get the equation off my omni-tool, I think you and Tosh should have some fun with it. The ship mentioned that she also can calculate dimensional shifts, but there was no way I was fitting the equation for that on it. I've got storage in the petabytes, not the yottas.

The problem with actually running it on the ship is that it took about 87% of Salvation's processing power. It really seems like the size of it is less about housing people and more about housing raw data handling capacity. We're going to need to get a lot more power back before we can talk to her, I think.

[private, text]

[tiptoeing]

I'm glad to be back, despite the confusion.

I'm certainly looking forward to playing with the equation. Getting power back seems like it should be our top priority, though. I don't know how much progress has been made on that front since I've been out, but it might not even be relevant after the temporal anomalies.

[video]

[growingwild]

A dimensional rift? What exactly does that mean?

[video]

[standsentinel]

I couldn't give you the science behind it, because there really isn't any, where I'm from. But think of reality, of the worlds we come from, like a sheet of cloth. The rifts would be tears in that cloth that we... fell through.

[It's kind've a lame explanation, and Kaidan looks sheepish that it's the best he can offer.]

From the sounds of things we didn't just land on another sheet of cloth, though, which is where my analogy breaks down. We fell into the spaces between everything, got pretty badly hurt doing so, and Salvation and her crew came and picked us up and put us all in the pods to heal up while the figured out how to stop the rifts and get us back where we belong.

[text]

[sadandsingle]

Fascinating. When you say 'the spaces in between', you don't mean the dimension we were in before we returned to this timeline, I'm assuming, as our exposure seems to have left us all relatively unscathed.

And the 'something' that's destabilising realities is different to the dimensional rifts, as well? I've wondered about the long-term effects of rifts in the fabric of reality - having a giant hole open like that, as it were, can't be good. Even in the short term, obviously.

[text]

[standsentinel]

No, from what I could pull together between talking with the ship and crew, realities are self-contained units, and they cluster based on how similar they are to each other, (I'm thinking we can consider the Many Worlds Interpretation pretty much confirmed at this point, even moreso than just by having all of us here)but they aren't sharing the same walls or whatever. There's a space between realities, like the interior of a wall between rooms: not part of the rooms but its own separate space.

What I don't know is if the rifts open into that space like taking down half the wall and leaving the insulation and wiring of the multiverse hanging out everywhere, or if they're doorways to some other place. We might want to see if anyone poked at one in another timeline.