Seeing Double
Author: Kazicht Cixit
Original post: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VchnE61BVmIoQKfzu-KgOF24Zaccmk_qE_d65plYtAE/edit
Entry for the YC116 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest in the Eight Thousand Suns in New Eden category.
Although the transit never felt any different than any other moment spent in her ship, traversing a wormhole never failed to give Hamara a sensation of the uncanny. Like the first time she traveled between planets as a teenager and stepped from the spacecraft onto foreign soil: the place had all the trappings of the civilization that she was familiar with, but closer inspection yielded an unsettling otherness. People ate at restaurants she didn’t recognize or sped by on scooters she had never seen on her local streets, as though it were some hologame’s generic approximation of urban life.
The Einstein-Rosen bridge, as it was technically called, was a rupture in the fabric of spacetime that directly linked two places. It was like stepping through an open doorway into another solar system, no warp needed. The planets still orbited a star and the nebulae in the distance were almost the same colors as they were back home, but something about the place invariably felt alien. Maybe it’s the fluid routers. You never notice the noise of the short-range comms channel until it’s gone.
R943. Hamara was familiar with the numerical designation on her scanner readout, having used exploration probes to seek it out many times before. This particular type of wormhole would take her into relatively safe unknown space, Class 2 of six possible graduations. Because of the small and infrequent Sleeper drones and the low strategic value of the outposts they protected, Hamara had heard it theorized that these lower-class systems were on the fringes of the star cluster in which the Sleepers resided.
Her ship approached the distortion in space with an even keel. Despite the bizarre appearance of the wormhole, she found it best to simply pass through it as though it were not there. Novice pilots frequently attempted to compensate for the apparently-undulating space on their first transits, but it was a mere illusion of light refraction interacting with the distorted spacetime curvature.
Hamara’s accumulated wealth meant that going through an ERB into Class 2 unknown space wasn’t necessary for her financial independence, but it was important to her to keep in touch with her roots as a self-made explorer from humble beginnings. The bulk of each universal month was spent exploring in dangerous or deadly territory, avoiding Sleeper drone patrols or running from potentially-bloodthirsty pilots. On the final day before the month would roll over, she would cleanse her palate of such intensity with a day trip into space that posed relatively little challenge for her now-considerable experience and equipment. The ritual was a calming, meditative experience and helped her approach the new month with a fresh mind.
Her Legion-class strategic cruiser was probably overkill for handling a few frigate-sized Sleeper drones, but Hamara relished the opportunity to test new equipment configurations with relatively little resistance. The virtual fitting simulations are only so satisfying. She had been fascinated with the idea of Khanid ships and their strange juxtaposition of golden, Amarrian hulls with missile-oriented ordnance more typical of Caldari engineering firms. Hamara saw the assault optimization subsystem demonstrated at a dealer and temptation overwhelmed her; the Legion’s cargo hold was stocked with explosive warheads instead of her usual laser-focusing crystals.
If there were a clock in her pod, she would have glanced at it, but instead there was a readout of the time and location fed directly to her optic nerve. Iderion system, 0.5 security rating, 13:35 30/11/115. She would be back before dinner. Hamara armed her missile launchers just as the nose of her ship entered the anomaly, but being new to their use, forgot that the ammunition required upwards of ten seconds to move from the loading bay into the launchers proper. Fuck! Now having fully traversed the wormhole, she frantically scanned the area for hostile ships as the ten excruciating seconds ticked by. I remember why I use lasers, she thought. Crystals load in a split second and last forever. It’s a wonder that the Caldari haven’t all been wiped out while they sit around reloading.
Tension drained from her body as the directional scanner registered the immediate area as free from hostiles and the missile bays showed loaded and ready to launch, but the moment of calm disintegrated as the safety on her weapons sounded its automatic alarms, as though she were entering high-security space with armed weapons systems. Silencing the alarm, she pulled up the time and location readout, expecting to find the seven-digit alphanumeric designation for the uncharted space, as was the standard for the ship’s avionics software. Iderion system, 0.5 security rating, 12:05 26/11/115. Several seconds passed as Hamara attempted to make sense of what she was seeing. Did I miss the wormhole? I flew right through it. Was there a glitch in that last nav system firmware update?
She began to run diagnostics on her ship’s systems, but something pulled her attention back to the date and location. What the fuck? Today isn’t the 26th. It was one thing for a ship’s solar positioning system to malfunction due to stellar interference, but the clock was synchronized with Yulai’s atomic clock via fluid router relay, accurate to within one billionth of a second. In Hamara’s decade of piloting she had never once observed a timekeeping error.
The solar overview collates data related to the location of nearby ships and major celestial bodies in a star system, typically stargates, space stations, planets, asteroid belts—any location to which a pilot would reasonably want to travel. Hamara’s diagnostics had returned a report that indicated her ship was functioning nominally and she had rebooted the navigation and avionics systems and manually re-synced the clock for good measure. As she logged in, she pulled up her overview: twelve planets, two space stations, dozens of moons. According to her ship she was still in Iderion, and according to the Yulai clock, it was slightly over four days prior to the day she thought it was. As a last resort, Hamara consulted the ship's artificial intelligence system, Aura. The AI helped new pilots acclimate to the strange, awkward world of the capsule, gently reminding them of procedures necessary for their continued survival. Hamara had muted Aura years ago, but she was at a loss and finally engaged the system.
“Pilot, there is an outstanding notification. Emergency status.” Hamara ignored this.
“Aura, where am I?” It wasn’t necessary to speak—and was indeed impossible due to the pod’s hydrostatic fluid—but it helped Hamara to conceptualize interacting via the neural link as a conversation.
“You are in the Iderion system, 3.97 astronomical units from Iderion IX.” Aura’s calm, accented voice was fed directly into her auditory cortex.
“Aura, what are the time and date?”
“It is 12:27 in the afternoon on November 26th.” Hamara considered this. Am I dreaming? Did someone dose me with some fucking sooth sayer? She had dabbled with boosters before, but only the relatively weak synth variants, and had never had a bad trip. No, that’s absurd. I’m not hallucinating.
Aura’s voice startled Hamara from her reverie. “Pilot, there is a high-priority notification. You will want to hear this.”
“Fuck, what is it?”
“You do not have an active clone. The ship has lost contact with your designated medical services office.” The nonchalance with which the AI informed her that she was no longer immortal unsettled Hamara almost as much as the information itself.
“What do you mean ‘the ship has lost contact’? That’s impossible. That’s never happened in the history of the capsule. Ever.” Hamara knew this to an utter certainty; the burning scanner was linked to a clone bay via quantum entangled particles similar to the Bose-Einstein condensate used in fluid routers. No matter where she was in the universe, the pod would be linked to the medical office. If her ship were to suffer fatal damage, she would be euthanized instantly and reborn on a space station a few solar systems away.
“The standard ping used to phone home to the medical office went unreturned. I have contacted the station in an attempt to resolve the issue. According to their registry, your clone is active, paid for and in contact with the capsule.”
“So why is the pod saying that it isn’t? Are.. are you telling me that if some asshole in a Manticore decloaked right now and destroyed the ship, I’d be dead for good?” Hamara knew it was pointless to express incredulity to the AI, but was having trouble controlling her emotions. “I do not know what would happen, but if I were you, I would not try to find out.” No shit. “I advise that you proceed to your medical office to sort the issue out in person immediately.”
This was the first sensible thing Hamara had heard since transiting the wormhole. Yeah, okay, that works. I’m sure there’s an explanation for this. She pulled up her overview and set the autopilot to the Ghesis system, where she had set up a temporary staging area and met with a contact several days prior. As the ship cruised to stargates and initiated jumps between systems, Hamara paid frantic attention to every new item on her overview and refreshed her directional scanner as many times as the ship would allow. It was only a handful of jumps, but flying without an active clone put Hamara on edge.
As she exited warp near the station, Hamara hailed the control tower herself instead of allowing Aura to do it.
“This is the Rowdy Damsel, requesting permission to to dock in hangar three.”
“Back so soon, Rowdy Damsel? Permission to dock granted—proceed along the synced vector to berth 16.” The man on the radio seemed to think she had recently departed, but she hadn’t been this station in four days, since installing her clone and meeting with her associate. She had then gone off to check out the dealer for strategic cruiser subsystems.
“Uh, yeah, I just forgot to load something into my cargo bay. You know how it goes.”
“Ha, yeah, I do. No problem. Control out.”
The station was as she remembered it, and she was greeted by the same woman who had processed her new clone several days ago as she walked into the medical office.
“Welcome back, Ms. Sarren. I’ve barely had time to eat lunch, did you want to upgrade your clone so soon?” The associate was polite but seemed puzzled at Hamara’s presence.
“What? No. I’m having a problem with my ship. My diagnostics say that the capsule isn’t linked to the clone. Obviously, this makes flying impossible. Would you mind checking to see if your systems are operating properly?” Hamara’s impatience bled into her words.
“That’s very strange. Okay, let’s have a look,” the woman said as she accessed a terminal and punched a few keys. “The system is showing all green. You installed your clone this morning,” What the fuck? “and your pod is responding to pings, although…”
The woman narrowed her eyes as she trailed off and continued to type. “... the system is showing that the pod is currently jumping between stargates. And it just landed, in Munory. ” Hamara recognized the location as the site of the subsystem dealer. Wait… no. That’s impossible.
“Hey, do you mind telling me the date?” Hamara’s urgency caught the associate by surprise.
“Oh, uh, it’s the 26th. Why?” Hamara ran from the office back to her ship. Instead of re-entering the pod, she paced along the ship’s empty bridge. Seats for dozens of crew were made redundant by the capsule’s neural interface, but the living quarters and control decks on standard ships generally remained intact. No longer in the pod, she was free to talk to herself, and she did.
“It was the 30th a little while ago, but it’s the 26th now, since I went through that wormhole, which did not lead me to uncharted space, but right back to where I was. As soon as I finished the transit, my pod freaked out and disconnected from the resurrection network, and now the network says there’s nothing wrong and I’m two systems away from where I’m standing. What the fuck is going on?” Dim inklings of possibilities darted through her mind, but nothing made sense to her. Any solution seemed impossible.
“Pilot, I have a suggestion.” Hamara startled at Aura’s voice resonating from the bridge’s audio system.
“Fuck! You scared me. What is it?”
“Are you acquainted with the Peralles incident?” Hamara thought the name sounded familiar, and then she remembered. An important ship, maybe an ambassador’s or a diplomat’s, that was lost in a jump between gates. It supposedly initiated its jump, departed, and the receiving stargate registered its arrival, but no ship ever appeared. It was an urban legend told to scare children and novice pilots.
“Yeah, I think so. What does that have to do with this?” Hamara asked the question but a sense of knowing dread gripped her.
“It is a fact that the Peralles disappeared as it transited between stargates. The tale has been distorted over retellings, but to this day, the Peralles has not been found. The most salient detail is that it was lost between the stargates in the Dom-Aphis and,” Hamara knew what the AI was going to say, “Iderion systems. It has never been observed—or in the case of the Peralles, confirmed—but temporal displacement is theoretically possible when interacting with spacetime anomalies such as Dirac space and Einstein-Rosen bridges.”
For Hamara, this was a ridiculous proposition. She was not a scholar by any means, but she had a rudimentary understanding of relativistic physics. She knew that temporal displacement, Aura’s fancy way of saying “time travel,” was the holy grail of scientific inquiry. It was also impossible with any known technology. Even the Jove and Sleepers had not, as far as the Empires knew, figured it out. Wormholes were bridges in space and time, but the wormholes that had appeared in New Eden in the wake of the Seyllin incident had, until this point, only interacted with space.
“You’re telling me that the wormhole sent me back in time, and the reason why I can’t resurrect in the clone bay is that the pod’s quantum link became disentangled?”
“As I said, it is merely a suggestion. I do not know any more about this than you do. It would, however, also explain why medical services is not recognizing an issue with the pod: a version of you already exists in this time, and her capsule is functioning normally. You cannot both be entangled with the same clone.” Aura’s dry, deadpan tone once again compounded the horror that Hamara was experiencing. “I suggest that you report your findings to a reputable scientific organization immediately.”
“Fuck you.” The words echoed in the empty bridge, and Aura did not respond. Hamara was reluctant to accept Aura’s theory, but in light of what was going on, she felt as though she had little choice.
What the fuck am I going to do? Can I go back through the wormhole? Hamara contacted visitor services at one of the space stations in Iderion.
“I’m thinking of passing through the system. Can you tell me if there are any wormhole signatures active at this time?”
“No problem. Our last patrol checked in an hour ago, and they report no active signatures in the system right now.” Hamara cut off the comms abruptly and slumped into the captain’s chair. Aura is right. Two pods can’t be entangled with the same clone, and there can’t be two of the same people running around causing problems for one another. Even if I walked into medical services and had the scanner recalibrated to my pod, the other me would just change it back.
Hamara would occasionally entertain a horrible thought that appeared unbidden in her mind, as she was certain happened to others as well. She would wonder what would happen if she opened fire on a passing ship or vented an airlock while she was standing in it. These thoughts, she reasoned, were a natural part of life, and the measure of a person was not whether the thoughts occurred but what one did with them. Hamara told herself that she was not a lunatic as she contemplated the ease with which she could neutralize the version of herself that existed in this time and assume her—her own—identity.
The prospect of flying or even existing without a clone or the ability to obtain one was terrifying and unacceptable. Hamara held her head in her hands and her breathing shallowed as she considered it. It was the ultimate vulnerability. She took great comfort in the fact that she was immortal so long as she wished to be, but all of that had been ripped away from her and she would get it back at any cost. The only reason people fly in these fucking caskets is because they don’t have to die if something goes wrong. I need to get my clone back. Hamara felt as though her body were acting on its own as she opened a call to the subsystem dealership.
“I’m looking for my… sister. Do you have a Hamara Sarren there, in a Legion cruiser?” Hamara spoke through her teeth.
“Huh? No, but she just left. Said she was going down to the hangar to install her purchase. Seemed real excited about it.” She terminated the call. So it’s true. She told herself that there was no way the two of them could coexist in the same universe. They would eventually cross paths, and she was convinced that only one of them could remain standing. It’s inevitable. Hamara knew exactly what she needed to do.
Hamara thought that she had set a reasonably good trap, all things considered. She would lure her double out of her pod and kill her, then sync the clone to her own ship. Hamara had already sent a message to the present version of herself posing as her contact in Ghesis. “Let’s meet in my quarters,” the message said. “I have some information on an expedition into W-Space that you’ll want to hear. Has to do with newly-discovered Sleeper tech.” She knew precisely what to say to pique her own interest, and it was with manic delight that she read the response. “Okay, I’ll be there in half an hour.”
From the docks, Hamara nervously watched the Legion pull into its berth, and she followed behind her doppelganger in silence as she made her way to the designated meeting point. She had an Imperial scrambler pistol that she kept with her planet- and stationside for self-defense, and she reasoned that it would suit her purposes now. As it was a directed energy weapon, it produced very little noise and cauterized wounds instantly, so the mess would be minimal. Hamara’s hands were sweating as they rounded the final corner to the quarters she had rented and she watched her double knock. Swallowing hard, she stalked up behind her and jabbed the pistol into her back. She hoped that the other Hamara wouldn’t be able to feel the tremble in her hand.
“Don’t fucking try anything. The door is open. Go inside.” Hamara’s voice sounded husky and harsh, and the double slowly raised her hands into air instead of complying.
“What the fuck is this? What’s going on?” Hearing her own voice coming from another mouth caught Hamara off-guard in a way that simply seeing her doppelganger had not. She hesitated, and the other Hamara sensed it and turned around quickly, elbowing Hamara in the face and causing her to drop the weapon.
“Who are… you…” The other Hamara’s voice trailed off as their eyes met and and a strange understanding seemed to settle on her face. She clearly had no idea what was happening, but her expression communicated that whatever it was, she wanted no part of it. While Hamara got her bearings, her doppelganger fled down the hallway.
“Fuck!” She brought a hand up to her face to assess the damage and it came away with blood, probably from her nose. The sound of the other Hamara’s footfalls was fading, but the red streaks on her fingers mesmerized her. Hamara’s chest tightened and intrusive, tenacious thoughts waylaid her in the hall for several moments. She’s going to get away. She’s going to go to CONCORD. They’re going to arrest me, interrogate me. I’m going to rot in a fucking brig until I die. The narrow walls of the corridor seemed to inch closer and only when Hamara felt as though she was going to suffocate did she get up and start running for her ship.
It occurred to her as she ran that her own Legion was berthed much closer to these quarters than where the other Hamara had docked, and as she ran she thought she might be able to catch up. The hope that she could still come out of this with a clone worked her into a frenzy as she sprinted through the station. If she had just been assaulted by a person who looked just like her, the first thing she would have done was get the fuck off-station and out of system as quickly as possible. It wasn’t long before she reached her ship and stumbled into the capsule interface. Hamara climbed into the pod still wearing her clothing and screamed at Aura to initiate undocking before she had even plugged the neural link into her spinal interface. The ship lurched from its mooring and she fumbled the jack several times before it locked into its socket. Hamara closed her eyes and the camera drones outside the cruiser relayed a live feed of her surroundings.
As soon as she had cleared the station, Hamara pulled up the overview. There was a single Legion-class cruiser aside from her own aligning to warp. She directed the navigation system to run simulations on the ship’s trajectory and it predicted with a 98.9% confidence level that the other Rowdy Damsel was going to warp to the third moon of Ghesis IV. What would I do if I were her? Hamara barked out a laugh at the absurdity of the thought and hydrostatic fluid filled her mouth. The other Hamara would warp to 70 kilometers from the moon. She initiated a warp and calculated a landing point at 100 kilometers away.
The Rowdy Damsel once again appeared on the overview as Hamara’s ship dropped out of warp. As the sublight engines re-engaged, the rangefinder indicated that her ship was about 30 kilometers away. Perfect. As she instructed her targeting system to lock to the other Legion, her own sensors registered that it was targeting her as well. She would obliterate the ship, destroy the pod and return to the station to kill the clone as it emerged from the medical office. The other Hamara would not escape this time.
She disabled the safety on her weapons after being informed that an act of aggression in high-security space would be met with a CONCORD response. It doesn’t fucking matter. They can destroy my ship, but they won’t kill me. As long as I get rid of her, I can deal with whatever happens. She ordered her ship to fire its ordnance, but a series of clunks resonated through the superstructure. After re-engaging the safety on her weapons, Hamara had forgotten to reload the missiles in advance of the skirmish. The attack signal had been transmitted, however, and alarms screamed as pale green laser fire—Hamara recognized it as her favorite focusing crystal variant, Conflagration—ripped through the hull of the original Rowdy Damsel.
Hamara was having a strange week. A few days ago, she had encountered and been attacked by someone who looked and sounded just like her in a ship with the same class and name as hers as well. It was a stroke of luck that she had survived at all, having been about to install a new missile subsystem that she was unfamiliar with, but being called away at the last moment. If I had been forced to fight someone without learning how to use these systems, I’d be pretty fucking dead.
The strange woman had been destroyed in the struggle, and CONCORD was bothering her for a statement on the incident, but Hamara was eager to return to her routine and decompress. It was the last day of the month, and she was excited to venture through a wormhole into relatively safe Sleeper territory to test out her new missile launchers. She pulled up the scanner readout and set a vector for the wormhole in the Iderion system, designated R943.