Chapter 13: Chapter 13: TRILLION – Faster than Light

Trillion and her team hunted down every fabricator for more than eighteen months. And even then, she wasn’t sure they had found all of them. “Lex, how certain are you that we have found every fabricator?”

The orb didn’t change.

Ship rolled his eyes. “The simulation predicts we have found every fabricator with ninety-three per cent certainty.”

“That’s basically one hundred per cent.” Trillion pointed her finger at Lex. “You need to learn to deal with uncertainty.”

Ship shrugged. “You know what Lex is like. He hates giving probabilities unless it’s one hundred per cent.”

“Okay team.” Trillion stood on the tips of her toes as she spoke. It occurred to her that if she wanted to get higher and think, she could simply float. She was a simulation. She didn’t need to observe those rules. She jumped, then floated in the air, folding up her legs.

She began addressing the team as she bobbed up and down. “Lex, I want to you map this system. Scan every single corner.” She turned to Ship. “You’re in charge of sending the probes out everywhere. And you can’t outsource that job to Lex. You have to do it.”

Trillion teleported out.

*

One month later, Trillion stood in her cargo hangar. She had cleared out a large space and projected the entire system in the hangar.

The team had searched several light-minutes cubed of space. They found three which included one that was on a trajectory out of the system.

She looked at the projected system in front of her, and highlighted one of the fabricators in green. It had made it out to the Oort cloud. “Are we sure this is the final fabricator we haven’t made contact with?”

Lex’s orb flashed green. She knew if Lex was confident then she could take it as fact. “Thank you Lex, I just needed to make sure. One Steel World is enough.”

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Trillion had started calling the planet Steel World, using ‘Steel’ as shorthand for the system. She wondered what she should do with the planet, now that it was all metal. “Now that we have all these resources, what should we do with them?”

She pointed at a tiny dot on the projected image. The image zoomed into that dot, showing the initial planet she had hoped to colonise. She pointed at the planet. “Could we create a ring world?” she asked. “Maybe set up two rows of rotating habitats that orbit in opposite directions like a road. That was―”

Ship lifted up a palm, interrupting her. “Trillion, we’re receiving messages from Atlas.”

“What is it?”

“He claims to have invented faster-than-light communications.”

“How does it work? Can we use it?”

“It requires us to quantumly entangle two―”

“I don’t care how you do it. Can you start upgrading our comms system today?” She thought about the possibilities. “It’ll be good to speak with another human again.”

Ship shook his head. “That’s just it. We have to wait for our q-bits to reach them.”

Trillion raised an eyebrow. “How long will that take?”

Ship frowned. “If we start building it now, we’ll have to wait two hundred and fifty years for the network to be established. Because he’s two hundred and fifty light years away.”

Trillion started to laugh. “This has got to be one of his sick jokes. What sort of faster-than-light communication requires us to wait until our light signals get to them?”

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