EP2 The Blind Jump
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Hi everybody, I'm Aon. I am your interdimensional, transstellar tour guide through the world of Jack the Space Dog.
We left off last time with Victus — Aon's friend, the sentient mushroom. He is Aon's tech support and all-around invention gadget genius. Aon will have ideas, and Aon is very good at building things, but the technical aspect of the design — what you actually need to make it work — that's Victus's side of things. Together they have built a drive meant to fold space, so they can move from one part of the galaxy to another in a reasonable amount of time. Warp gates do exist in this world, but they're stationary, you have to pay to use them, and they only go from one fixed point to another fixed point. What Aon and Victus have invented is a drive that can go from any place to any place — except they have no way to make an address for where they're going. They know it will get them somewhere. They just don't know how to specify where. You'd need a map of all of existence, and they don't have that. Though they did try to get one at one point.
As we join Aon being chased by the Sect, he and Victus are in contact — they're usually on comms when Aon is traveling. Triggering the drive requires two people: Aon can press the button, but Victus has to enter the address. It's math. Complex algorithms. They argue back and forth for quite a while as Aon is also trying to expertly pilot his ship so he doesn't get blown out into space. Finally he yells to Victus: "I'm going to die if we don't use it. Worrying about whether it's going to kill me is pointless — because I'm certainly going to die right now if we don't."
Victus doesn't want to enter an address. He chooses numbers that seem to make sense to him, though he can't explain why. Something comes to him in the moment — the moment he thinks he's about to watch his best friend be blown to atoms — and he has an inspiration. His brain works like a complicated algorithm anyway. He enters a long string of code and sends it to the ship. The big button turns green. Aon hits it, and is folded into oblivion — at least as far as Victus can tell.
Aon tells Victus, "I'll see you soon," smiles, and blinks out of existence.
There are two perspectives on what happens next.
There's Victus's perspective, where he waits for a bit and then starts trying to raise Aon on their communication system. He gets no response. He tries for days. He tries everything he can think of — hacks into other interstellar communication networks he's not supposed to use, just short of space-faring homing pigeons. The point is, he tries everything for weeks and months. He begins to believe that he essentially let Aon talk him into agreeing to kill him. If that's true, it was better than being taken by the alien ship and processed into raw materials — but it doesn't make him feel any better about it.
The other perspective is a little more exciting and a lot less sad.
Aon and Jack get the opportunity to feel themselves pulled apart atom by atom and then reassembled almost at the very same time. The next thing Aon hears and sees is every single warning light going off inside his cockpit, and the outside of his ship peeling away from the central module — like a tornado ripping shingles off a house. It takes him a moment to get oriented, but he realizes what's happening: he is still traveling at spacefaring speeds, but he is now somehow inside the atmosphere of a planet. The friction of the atmosphere has destroyed his ship and is currently tearing its way through it. His ship is disintegrating down to its last components.
He doesn't have time to think about the implications. He pulls what you could think of as the lifeboat — essentially ejecting sections of the ship to slow the central module. The module disconnects from everything else, which is melting around him from the friction. What he's left with looks something like a half-clear ping pong ball with fins poking out, spinning like a reverse propeller to create drag and slow them down. It's enough to land. After that, it's useless — maybe a source of battery power later, but that's about it.
This is where Aon and Jack find themselves: on the Atlas planet, falling, with just enough ability to pick their landing point. Using the ship's scans, they can pick out non-natural structures on the ground — structures built by someone. And if someone built it, there might be someone there who can help. There's only one structure visible on this hemisphere of the planet, and it appears to be a very large city in the middle of a large body of water.
That city is the city featured in Morning Coffee. That's where Aon and Jack are sitting having their cup of coffee. Aon doesn't know this as he's crashing — but I can tell you why they're on this planet, and why Victus can't reach them even with the very good interstellar communication array he built.
The reason he can't reach them is this: since they had no addressing system for where in existence the drive might send you, what hadn't been contemplated was that you don't just need a where — you need a where in the quantum sense. Which dimension. Which slice of reality. Aon isn't just displaced in distance. He's displaced in reality. He is in a pocket dimension — one created by the Atlians, who moved their entire solar system into it to protect themselves from the Sect.
This was late in their struggle with the Sect — a struggle that began well before humanity was even conscious of itself. That gives you some idea of how long this has been going on.
The city is still whole because of what they did. Moving an entire solar system into a pocket dimension was the largest single thing they had ever attempted. They had moved suns before, moved all sorts of inanimate high-energy objects, but they had never tried to move an entire solar system of living, populated planets, suns, and orbital bodies all at once into a tailor-made pocket dimension. Their thinking was: give themselves time to breathe and come up with a new plan. They had a plan in the works to try to minimize, contain, or destroy the Sect — but they hadn't been able to implement it yet.
To complete the transfer, they were supposed to get help from the Bumbles. The Bumbles were meant to show up and provide defensive cover, making sure the Atlians weren't ambushed in the middle of the process. The reason they needed that cover was simple: the Sect knew where their home planet was, and perceived the Atlas civilization as a threat. As part of the preparation, the entire Atlas population had been moved off all their planets and onto massive Arc ships — so that if something went wrong with the transfer, not everyone would be caught up in it. The Bumbles were supposed to hold the line while the process completed.
They chose not to show up. They went radio silent. Their reasoning was that the Sect didn't know where the Bumbles' home planet was and didn't yet consider them a threat worth neutralizing. They gambled that the Atlians could handle their own problem — and that by staying out of it, they wouldn't end up on the Sect's radar.
That gamble turns out to be the fulcrum — the downfall of the Atlians. Because the Sect does show up. Their technology had evolved from using suns to using black holes — singularities — as their primary energy source, and they obliterate the Atlas Arc ships. They destroy enough of the Atlas population to push them to the edge of extinction — not enough individuals left to maintain a civilization. The transfer itself was successful, so the solar system is safely tucked into the pocket dimension. But almost everyone who would have returned to it was destroyed outside of it.
There's one important detail to remember for later: one prince — they didn't have hierarchy quite like that, but you'd think of him that way — stayed behind on the planet with his ship. That's not important right now, but it becomes an important plot point.
The remaining survivors, scattered across smaller ships rather than the Arc ships, now have no planet and no resources to continue the fight. Not enough people, not enough biodiversity to sustain a civilization. They disperse through the galaxy and take shelter with some of the Bumble groups — but that is effectively the end of the Atlas civilization. Their last gambit to stave off extinction from something they accidentally created fails. Or at least, they think it failed.
Plot point for later.
On that cliffhanger, we rejoin Aon as he screams through the atmosphere, having picked out a landing site, guiding what you might call a graceful crash — graceful for a crash landing, anyway — near an awe-inspiring structure in the middle of a large body of water.
To the eye, it appears to be made of vast blocks of white marble or limestone — some sort of white stone — except the height and scale of it could never actually be supported by stone. Even some of the angles and the ways it's held up, minerals just don't work that way. He crash lands outside of it and has a long trek ahead of him.
This is the city we see in Morning Coffee. This is the direction from which Aon first approaches it. It looks from a distance like a single building surrounded by ring structures — but it's actually a vertically built city, and the ring structures are additional sections of the city extending outward. It functions as an energy conduit, a city, a shield structure, and a center for research all at once. It holds the repository of all collected knowledge from an incredibly long-lived civilization. It is the Swiss army knife of their entire culture.
As their birth rate declined over time, this became the only city on their planet. Like most empires, they had begun consuming their own environment — using up resources, using up land. So, a very long time ago, they enacted an initiative to reverse this. They reversed their out-of-control population growth. They reversed their sprawl across the planet and brought it back to something closer to what it had historically been. They reduced their entire footprint down to this one city.
The city extends underground. It extends above ground. It extends out in these rings. The scale is difficult to put into perspective — but think of a structure that comfortably houses billions, and that begins to give you an idea. And remember, this is a civilization that has perfected the concept of pocket space — space separate from this dimension. You don't need physical footprint to have space. You can have a door that opens into a space far larger than the door itself. So they've reduced their physical presence down to a very small area while still having access to a planet's worth of pocketed spaces — and those spaces can have full environments. They don't have to be empty rooms. They can be whatever you want them to be.
This is also a civilization that has mastered the manipulation of energy and matter. They can create and destroy matter at will using contained suns — think of it as a super-advanced forge. Since all atoms began in the furnace of stars, you can theoretically pull almost any material out of that process. That's the foundation of all their technology. They use and reverse and funnel the gravitational pull of suns outward. A very advanced city. A very interesting place.
This is what Aon stumbles into. But when he walks through it, he can't tell any of that — because what it seems like is a very beautiful, very quiet tomb. There's nothing. All he sees is white stone-looking surface. Halls, meeting spaces, open areas — all of it just this pale stone. Like a blank slate.
He spends weeks wandering this place. He can't read the faint impressions on the walls that he believes are language. As he looks at them, they seem to shift and move — which gives him a headache, because they're not moving like a screen or a physical object. They never quite stay still. That's another plot point we'll come back to. The language system is a whole rabbit hole I won't go down right now. Yes, I've lost my mind on this project. Yes, I have designed a language system — and it works both spatially and as a function of time as you look at it. We'll leave that for another day.
He has a lot of trouble navigating the space, but he keeps moving, hoping to find something he recognizes. A factory. A scientific hub. Something that maps onto a concept he already has. But a civilization sufficiently advanced will appear as gods, just as technology sufficiently advanced will appear as magic. There's no way to get into the mind of these people. Their ideas have no relation to anything Aon knows. They've been around far too long.
Aon is an artist. He notices shapes and compositions. Once he gets past the panic of wandering what seems like a beautiful but dead place, he starts to notice something: shadows and light are landing in the wrong places for where the sun is in the sky. The shadow of this wall should make a certain shape on that wall over there — and it doesn't. There's light where there shouldn't be light. Subtle differences, just enough that you might not notice them at first. But they follow a pattern. They happen only along a certain path through the city.
So he starts following the light and shadow that doesn't make sense.
And he comes upon a door he hadn't found before. The door lights up with a symbol.
We'll get there next time.