outer_divide | [Text] Saturday, Week 37: Saving Salvation

[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.

Threaded | Flat

[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.

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.]

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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.

Edited 2013-06-09 03:10 (UTC)

A dimensional rift? What exactly does that mean?

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.

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