Click the thumbnails to view Craig's art in its original large format. He does amazing work, and it's totally worth the trip! Continued from yesterday ... Shadows Part Four As soon as Macali transported into the lab, she knew that Margaret had finally let her guard slip. For months they had shared the same space without touching, saying little, barely getting to know the limits of their trans-dimensional communication. Macali activated the entrapment vortex to capture Margaret in the same temporal entanglement as the two trackers, for whom the past months had lasted an instant, and an eternity. Macali didn't visit her captives every day. The two humans she had trapped nearly half a turn ago had been interesting, but the energy fields they produced while trapped in the vortex seemed neutral to her. Only when she got bored did she sit with them and try to read their fields. With those two the cats came and went, paying no more attention to the vibrating statues than they did to the furniture. Margaret was a different matter. So far neither of the cats had jumped up to investigate Margaret's vortex, but they were certainly more interested in her than they were in the two trackers. Macali wondered idly what would happen if one of the trans-dimensional felines wandered too close to the golden glow that signaled the outer edges of the field, but she wasn't interested enough to stick around and find out. She had an assignment to complete, and the Beridae didn't like to be kept waiting. Something about the assignment wasn't right. When she looked at the contents of the file, there were five tiny red lights drawing her attention. She had never seen five lights before. Red lights. What was it in the Beridae files she had read that made her stop and think about those lights? She knew in human cultures red lights had many meanings, but there was something about the way her internal lights functioned that she found suddenly intriguing. To Macali, green lights were an indication that everything was fine. A red light meant she should stop. Values in between indicated caution at various levels. She knew that humans also had similar values for those colors in some places and times, but it didn't make sense that she would be programmed with that information. The files. Humans. Internal controls. Intuition! That was it. Humans were said to have intuition in the face of a lack of data. A lack of data was not a problem for Macali, so why did she have the lights? She engaged a dimension of the matrix to work on the answer, and continued to evaluate her new assignment. On the surface it seemed fine, but ... there were those lights... Macali's thoughts kept straying back to the humans trapped in the temporal entanglement, and the strange resonance she had felt with Margaret as soon as she had activated the vortex. Abandoning her assignment, Macali spent days trawling through the nine-dimensional data matrix of the entanglement, scouring the spatial, temporal and energetic parameters for overlapping waveforms that could account for the resonance. When the patterns eventually started to coalesce, she could not bring herself to accept the inescapable conclusion - she and Margaret were superpositions of the same person. If this was correct, then any attempt to disentangle Margaret could result in their merging into a single entity, or more likely would lead to both of their deaths. Macali understood quantum entanglement at the subatomic level, where particles can be in a combination of two or more states at the same time, and two particles in superposition remain in nonlocal contact with each other however far apart they are -- they become correlated in the sense that their fates are intertwined forever, however far apart they get, until one of them interacts with a measuring device. In other words, they are described by just one unified waveform function that contains the combined shared information about both their quantum states. However, her understanding was that these superpositions are increasingly unstable with increasing complexity of the quantum system -- they get destroyed extremely rapidly as soon as the quantum system comes into contact with its macroscopic environment in the process known as decoherence. How was it possible to control decoherence sufficiently to maintain two living, breathing organisms in superposition? In a flash, Macali realized that the Beridae had managed to do exactly that. The seemingly empty files wiped by the data worms on her first interaction with the kalilja suddenly opened up to her, with additional information encoded in the deepest levels of the data she had received in her latest visit to Augidarr's space station. The Beridae had split her and Margaret into a superposition of different states that depended on each of two alternatives of the sum of all their atoms. Suddenly Macali realized she was in mortal danger from the shadowy Beridae. Her assignment, which would include a complex spatiotemporal maneuver that would fully remove Margaret from this environment, would surely destroy the resonance with Margaret and kill them both! Should she attempt to merge her two superpositions and fight the Beridae with her combined consciousness, or could she find a way of freeing Margaret from the entanglement and fight the shadows as two separate beings, each with their own training and abilities? One thing was certain. Macali would have to bring Margaret out of the vortex before she made a final decision. She couldn't assume Margaret would fall in line with either course of action, and fighting a battle on two fronts was never a good idea. Their lives literally depended upon cooperation. They needed to resolve their own battle before they could take on an outside force. Macali set the parameters on the vortex generator carefully. For now, she and Margaret needed to be two separate beings. A slip in her settings could kill them both. Margaret had no sense that any time had passed. She had heard the sound of Macali returning via the translation portal, but now Macali was standing in front of her holding a data pad in her hand, staring into Margaret's eyes as if her life depended upon it. Macali held Margaret's gaze until she was sure Margaret was fully aware, then started to talk. Over and over again she explained. Showed Margaret the data. Answered Margaret's questions about the nature of the quantum entanglement, the Beridae, the origins of the split, the nature of the Opae and their use of energy, Macali's understanding of humanity. Margaret paced the room, angry at first, then slowly understanding. Realization dawned slowly. The same person. They were two parts of the same person! It seemed unbelievable, but there it was. Something clicked... "It's agreed, then? We reunite." "Yes." Macali programmed the sequence. Margaret checked her calculations. They went over the process carefully, together, knowing this was the most important thing they would ever do. Their calculations showed that the energy dissipation would blow the walls out, so they walked outside together to the plateau. Margaret keyed in the final sequence. She looked at herself lying on the ground, looked up at herself crouched above, saw sky and stone, felt the energy pulse. Then just sky, stone beneath her, energy dissipating slowly... Part Five It took a long time for Macali'Margaret to come around. At first she could not make any sense of the two streams of consciousness running simultaneously through her brain, but slowly she found that she could weave the kaleidoscope of thoughts, memories and sensations into a coherent whole. As separate beings, the human and Opae machine thought patterns had seemed incomprehensible, but in combination they forged a powerful and accelerated set of integrated functions - synapses and circuits working in synchrony, analysis tempered by empathy, calculations given context - carbon and silicon, matter and antimatter, time and anti-time collapsing the quantum waveforms like musical strings vibrating and rippling far into the space-time-energy matrix, and within their interference patterns every wave held an infinite number of secrets. Macali'Margaret broke her reverie and deliberated on what she should do about the shadowy Beridae, who would now redouble their efforts to destroy her. She had noticed immediately as she came around that the colony tower had gone, but she was unsure if they had removed themselves into orbit or shifted into a parallel dimension. Slipping through the translation portal directly to her laboratory, she set about re-writing her search-and-destroy programs incorporating some of Margaret's predatory subroutines. Leaving the algorithms to evolve, she returned to her living quarters to take the time to rest, feed the cats, sit and think. It took a bit of practice to just think and not try to have a conversation with herself, but her mental process seemed more streamlined every hour. She was becoming more and more sure of herself and her capabilities all the time, and found herself fully understanding things she had only dimly perceived before. It was so much easier to make decisions now, easier to trust her conclusions. She had a hunch that the Beridae in the tower were not really gone, and when she checked the outcome of the simulation embedded in the search-and-destroy protocol, she immediately saw the marker that indicated a large phase-shifted mass on the plain. Just as she had suspected, they were still there. Macali'Margaret made adjustments to the scanning parameters and the tower jumped sharply into view. It wasn't visible to the naked eye, but her screens showed every phase of the nine-dimensional matrix she had used herself, and ... Oh, of course! The tower was exactly where it had always been. She herself had phased during the integration process. From the point of view of the tower, she must have flickered and suddenly disappeared! The tactical advantage of being invisible to one's opponent was huge. Macali'Margaret breathed a sigh of relief. If she moved quickly, they would not find her. The first item of business was to make the Beridae believe she was well and truly gone. They knew the signature of her spatiotemporal matrix from their previous dealings with her, and they could not have helped but notice the energy discharge during her integration. She began writing a subroutine that would mask any emissions coming from her location. Whatever transmission noise was still being monitored from the tower, it would appear to pulse, flicker, then lose cohesion and slowly fade away to nothing. She was about to key in her ID as the final seal on the security protocol when she realized she needed to update her identity. She thought for a minute, then keyed the last five characters of the protocol ... MARCA. Marca had learned enough about the shadowy Beridae to know that they should not be underestimated. Already they would be scanning the multidimensional matrix for signs of her phase shift, but her modulation subroutines would keep her hidden for a while. It was imperative for her to keep phasing through all three meta-dimensions -- space-time-energy -- which would be relatively easy for her machine form and consciousness, but would ultimately expose the weaknesses, imperfections and fragility associated with her humanness. What she needed was a way of turning the Beridae's predatory tendencies back on themselves. Marca thought of quantum waveforms as musical strings - the waves set into vibration not only the strings, but also any other body that had the same harmonic period as the plucked string, and these vibrations persisted for nanoseconds, hours, days, years, eons... If she could tap into the fundamental frequencies of the Beridae's search-and-destroy routines and reverse their meta-dimensional parameters, there was a chance that she could send them back in time, remove them entirely from the spatial domain, and liberate all of their consumed energy for the rest of the universe to use, for eternity. In order to do that, once she had calculated the dynamics of their meta-dimensions, she would have to set herself up as a target, inviting them to destroy her and so destroy themselves. Marca didn't have any trouble figuring out how to use the shadow people's predator nature against them. Her Human/Opae intelligence was functioning in ways she had not thought possible. Rather than move from one logical idea to the next to the next looking for a protocol that would work, she had a flash of insight that proved to be sound in the final analysis. Her carbon-based body was a liability because it was so easily broken, but it was also wholly immune to the problems of the nine-dimensional matrix her predominantly silicon-based being was subject to. Since the Beridae didn't know that she now had a unified carbon-silicon body, she could use that to her advantage. Marca set up her plan quickly, knowing the clock was ticking down. If the Beridae moved before she was ready, there would be no second chance. She was done before she knew it. Calculations verified, sequence double-checked. It was time to move. Slowly raise the barrier. Allow the Beridae to see that she is still here. Shift energy, create a bit of a ripple, and set the hook. They do not disappoint. Almost immediately an energy beam engages from the tower colony, locking onto her energy hook. Shift time, ever so slightly, and intercept the beam. The infinitesimal, nearly undetectable time shift is enough. It has to be enough. Engage the time shift, become momentarily out of reach, and the beam locks on, flips back, mirrors itself and runs the length of itself back up to the tower. Marca can feel them up there, frantically trying to shut it down. Shift space. In her physical body now, all she can do is watch, but watching is all there is left to do. She can tell they're trying to find her, trying to kill her in order to stop the beam, but there's nothing left of her in the matrix. She is safe in her physical body. The more the Beridae try to shut down the temporal resonance of the beam, the more smoothly it pulses. Harmonics are set up across time and space, and the tone becomes audible to her physical ears. Suddenly, nothing. The tone fades, the beam is gone, the tower colony with its shadowy crew has disappeared. Marca smiled, felt the sensation in her face, across her skin. She walked to her control boards, ready to verify the kill. She stood there for a minute. Flexed her hands. Wiggled her fingers. Slight spatial shift, and her fingers tingled, the tips shifting dimensions. Marca put her fingers on the terminal and got back to work. All her search programs verified that the Beridae were gone. She spread the search to include the solar system, all proximal star systems, the entire galaxy. Nothing. It was as if they had never existed. All that remained of them was in her memories, and those she filed away in a secure encrypted location. If she and Margaret were two halves of the same person, it stood to reason that there were other Human/Opae splits out there as well. If those dual beings were reunited, the resulting warrior force would be formidable. Her scan of the two trackers showed that they were not superposed beings, so Marca let them go. She lifted the vortex, adjusted the nine-dimensional matrix, and sent them back to the place where she had found them. Marca shut down the terminal and stepped through the translation portal to the dunes overlooking the quiet cove where, as Macali, she had spent hours trying to decipher the data she had acquired on Margaret. She smiled again as she thought of the impossibility of trying to understand herself one half at a time. Marca was still smiling when one of the trans-dimensional cats trotted over and demanded her attention. Epilogue Augidarr watched the black sun climbing into the yellow sky and marveled at the glowing shadows that it cast. It was going to take a while to readjust to her golden skin and green eyes, but that was the least of her concerns after being trapped for millennia as a shadow in the human universe, invisible and insubstantial, slipping through normal matter like a ghost. When humans had begun to probe the nature of matter, with so little understanding of what their primitive particle acceleration experiments were doing to the fabric of the parallel universes they were adjacent to, they had unwittingly dragged the Beridae superstrings out of alignment. It had taken centuries to harmonize the superstrings of the Berid and Human universes, to isolate the waveform superpositions from the environment and control the original nine Human/Opae entanglement wavefunctions, and centuries more for the primary Human/Opae superpositions, Margaret and Macali, to develop sufficient understanding of their own natures to reconcile and successfully collapse the wavefunctions of their entangled states into the unified being, Marca. Augidarr had gambled that Marca would correctly interpret the coded instructions embedded in the deepest layers of the kalilja to create the flux of negative quantum vacuum energy required to disrupt the gravitational field around the Berid ship, which had kept the throat of the wormhole to her universe open long enough for them to slip through. It didn't matter that Marca would eventually work out where the Beridae had gone -- she would need the combined skills of all nine disentangled hybrids to attempt a crossing. As Marca still had to work out which of the Opae were the hybrids and persuade them to find and re-unite with their entangled humans, the Beridae would have plenty of time to prepare to meet them on their own terms. .......... That's all for now, my friends, but Craig and I have had so much fun with this story, we're already talking about future installments as time allows.