The Grand Ningy
17 Dec 2016Mara Korine
“Mara?” Jim started.“Yes Jim?”
“The bear talks.”
“It would seem so, Jim”
“And it just tried to kill us,” he continued.
“Well, you did threaten to toss him into space before you’d even seen him.”
“I am right here,” Thelonius interrupted, floating topsy-turvy into the wall. “Hey, sorry about the, you know, trying to kill you thing. I didn’t know you were with Mara,” He added - taking the opportunity of being near the wall to stop his tumbling and float right-side up.
“Mara, a word please,” Jim led Mara out into the corridor and sealed the room. Thelonius shouted from within to no effect. Jim took a breath and with a stern look asked Mara why she hadn’t mentioned the bear. “What the hell is it even? It must be run from an AI, I can’t believe you’d bring that onto my ship without telling me!”
“I didn’t know! I thought he was just a pose-able stuffed bear. I’d found him on my last ship along with that chip with the music. I did scan it you know. Nothing came up,” Mara explained. They debated what to do with him. Jim was in favour of shutting him off somehow, but Mara felt empathetic toward the bear.
“It’s cute. I get that, but it’s dangerous. I need order and safety on my ship. How can I have that with this thing on board?”
“Maybe if we talk to him and let him explain. I’m curious about where he came from,” Mara suggested.
“It’s an it, not a he,” Jim said sternly but agreed to talk to the bear, though he insisted only for the purpose of estimating the threat the bear posed. Mara opened the door and called for Thelonius, who pushed off the wall and floated toward the pair. Jim started, “What are you? How much control do you have of my ship? Have you sent any communications? Is anyone on their way to us?”
“Perhaps let’s start with the basics,” Mara interrupted, “I’ve been calling you Thelonius, is that your name?”
“Yeah, that’s my name,” Thelonius answered and added, “I only broke into environmental. Man, I got mad when you were going to throw me off the ship you know? I’ve set it back the way it was. I haven’t tried to contact anyone. What’s going on? Mara you were alone last time I was awake, and that was weeks ago. I remember the ship was going down so I shut myself off.”
“So you did know it,” Jim accused.
“Him,” Mara corrected.
“She didn’t know. I was awake, but I was hiding from her. I wasn’t sure if she would do yet,” Thelonius explained.
“What are you talking about?” Mara asked.
“I’m looking for someone. He disappeared a long time ago and even if he’s dead I need to find where he ended up. I need help from someone with,” he paused before continuing, “specialized knowledge. The guy was bloody cryptic. But then he did have a crazy cult after him. Guess he had to be careful what kind of trail he left behind.”
“Heartwarming, you’re looking for your long lost whatever. Why should I let you stay on my ship?” Jim demanded.
“I can help Mara with her research, and I can help you run your ship. I can fly around the clock when you need to rest, spot mechanical failures long before your in ship diagnostics will. You don’t know me but I do good work. I don’t ask for much, but if you decide not to let me stay can I be shut off instead of thrown out?” He gave Mara puppy-dog eyes until she agreed. She wouldn’t have let Jim throw him out anyway. She found Thelonius endearing and preferred to keep him around.
Jim set boundaries for which, when crossed, Thelonius was warned that he’d be spaced regardless of Mara’s objections. The bear agreed to the terms and Jim was satisfied. If Thelonius didn’t pull his own weight, Mara would have to pay for an extra passenger. It was settled.
After a week of work in the field with Thelonius helping to keep the ship going all hours and even taking and logging scans while Mara slept, she had enough data to make up for her time away. The bear had made good on his promise to be helpful. Mara was pleased as well, however the data collection for the Borderlands Venture study had always felt to her like busywork that was second place to the possibility of her making a real mark in theoretical physics. The interferometer, however out of alignment, was waiting for her. She had been trying to calibrate it the entire trip in, but hadn’t a sensitive enough tool to see if the gravimetric emitters were properly aligned. Thelonius used his diagnostics to identify the problem and allow Mara to adjust it. She still couldn’t use it for a paper, but she could personally use the data to direct her further studies.
“So you’re trying to figure out why frame-shift drives get unstable at higher power levels huh?” Thelonius prodded as they finished work on the device.
“Yes actually, how did you guess that?” Mara wondered, watching the view outside her room go by as Jim piloted them through another jump.
Thelonius explained that he hadn’t guessed at all, that he’d sought her out because of her interest in the matter.
“My friend was really into that stuff you know,” he said, “he was studying it. He got very excited about some results or other but then my memory was wiped. There’s just a blank where I should know things, and then I woke up nearly twenty-five years later. And here I am, trying to reconnect with him and find out what happened. I was supposed to let his wife know everything if he couldn’t himself. I don’t know how I can do that after so long. I need to find out what went wrong. You’re studying his work and I thought if anyone could help pick up his trail it was you. You’re smart, and you have money and connections.”
“But I found you, not the other way around,” Mara questioned.
“Well I let you find me right? The only Asp on the market for light-years around that weren’t stupidly overpriced, right? It didn’t take much to hack those. Mostly I just deleted any appealing offers so they didn’t even show up on the boards. And then I did a favour for the guy who owned your Asp and he lowered his price. And he stashed me in a compartment where I thought you’d look. It was a gamble, but I was already loaded into the ship’s systems so even if you didn’t find me I could get out if I wanted.”
“Wow, slow down. I don’t understand half of what you’re saying but let me ask. You profiled me, hunted me down, manipulated markets as well as my own decisions in order to get access to me? That’s phenomenally underhanded Thelonius. How am I to trust you? Why in the Milky-way didn’t you simply contact me?”
“Well you know that crazy cult I mentioned?” he started.
“I don’t recall, but go on.”
“They now own a huge corporation, Donnelly Vallum. Any time I sent a public message I’d have goons hunting me down. I couldn’t risk that so I had to go underground, stay under the radar,” Thelonius explained.
Mara felt uneasy with this exposition. It reminded her that she was on the run from unknown assailants herself. She wondered if when they returned, they might have double the chance of running into someone. This was certainly not what she’d imagined when she set off for the frontier in the first place.
“So you know about me, and my research. And your friend also did this kind of research years ago. Did your friend ever make any progress that you can recall?”
“Yeah, I think he did. But it’s been erased from my memory. Like I said, I remember him getting excited but that’s all. So, will you help me find Dr. Cebaya?”
“Dr. Cebaya!” Mara exclaimed,”Your friend was Dr. Skekiy Cebaya?”
“Uh huh,” affirmed the bear.
Finding Dr. Cebaya was an exciting prospect for Mara. At the risk of ridicule, she had been secretly studying his work for most of her higher education. Now as she was trying to make progress in solving that she had the opportunity find what happened to the man who’d disappeared twenty-five years earlier. And Thelonious had known him personally! “Of course, if I can. Where do we start?” Mara asked and then considered that if a corporation had been hunting Thelonius down, perhaps it was the same group that had sent goons after her. “Do you know anything about something called the three-two-one chip?” Mara asked.
“No, what is it?”
Mara detailed the story of her escape from Jaques, and how her pursuers had been after the chip. Thelonius was silent for a moment, bumping his stumpy paws into one another with feigned distraction. He looked up and said, “They might have been after me. Early on when I first started lookin’ around for any hint where the doctor might be anything I did with Galnet broadcast my revision number. It was, is, 3.12. I stopped that from going out so long ago, but maybe they’ve found another way to identify me. When you were crashing, I did send an emergency message. If they intercepted that,” he paused, “well we’ll deal with it huh? That’s what we do. We deal with things!”
“Is that what we do? Jim has been the one that deals with things in my experience. All you’ve done is hide and get me into trouble.”
“And give you the chance of a lifetime to discover what happened to a famous scientist in your field,” Thelonius added.
“Yes, I suppose.”
Jim poked his head through the door and mentioned that he was going to be making a dinner that night. Mara realized that the ship had been still for several minutes. “Were you listening in, Jim?” she asked.
“Of course,” he replied, “and I don’t think we should head back for another week. These corporate goon squads only get paid for results and if we wait them out, they will move on.”
“So we have time to do my experiments,” said Mara.
Jim set them down on a planet with pleasant gravity and a nice view and cooked a roast he’d been saving. The smell of roast beef and vegetables with some kind of baked pudding had Mara’s stomach making noises. When it was ready he called Mara to the meal and even asked Thelonious if he’d be joining them.
Thelonius declined, “No thanks Jim, I’m stuffed.”
Mara scrunched her face up and complained, “If you’re going to make puns, then I’m inclined to side with Jim and throw you off the ship.”
Jim was laughing at Mara as they sat at the table, “No, I think we’ll let him stay. Could use a little humour around here. Come on, let’s eat. My stomach is growling, I’ve bearly eaten all day.”
“You too?” Mara observed, shaking her head. Thelonius chuckled and slumped in the corner of one of the benches lining the common room and seemingly turned himself off.
“So what’s this great mystery you’re going to solve?” asked Jim.
Mara considered how to explain the complexities, the intricacies of how the frame shift drives work and why they should work differently according to all the understood theories. She also imagined his eyes glazing over in boredom and settled on explaining that one factor had been added to the equations to make them work in the ways that we actually see frame-shift drives functioning. “They called it the Ningy. You can laugh, it’s short for number thingy. They thought they were really funny back then. I think they thought we’d figure out what it represented before long or they’d have given it a more serious name. What I’m trying to do is get some hints about it. Either the theories are wrong and the Ningy just corrects bad math, or there’s something real out there affecting the warp fields we create. I’m hoping my experiment can show one way or the other,” she explained.
“And you think you can do it?”
“So most people think the Ningy just makes up for bad math, and I did too. There are teams of theorists working up new and ever more complex ideas on how to calculate frame-shifts without it. So to rule out the Ningy representing a real physical thing, I have been conducting experiments designed to rule out different physical phenomena from having an effect. I’ve ruled out several at this point with much greater certainty than those who have tried before me. But last time I was here, one test kept showing numbers skewed in one direction when they should have been random. It was mostly within the margin of error though so I’m not certain it wasn’t just a bad experiment. I crashed my ship and lost my equipment. I’m trying to replicate that here now so I can see where I went wrong.”
“And what if this Ningy does have a physical cause?”
“Then perhaps we can manipulate it, and jump to unknown reaches of space.”
“Really?” said Jim, skeptically.
“Well, maybe. We don’t know. Without the Ningy, the math says there’s virtually no limit to jump distance or fuel economy. That’s obviously not true.”
Thelonius perked up and quipped, “Is it really? I’d love to know if the Doc was wrong.”