Life, Liberty, & Pursuit of Justice

Matt keyed a master switch, then reached his hand directly into the display window, and pulled out a gold coin. "My gosh! This is unbelievable!" said Matt, staring at the coin. He was totally oblivious to the look of absolute shock on Kathy's face. "It's a $20 double-eagle, from Carson City. And the date is 1870! This is so neat! Look Kathy, at the very bottom of the reverse, just above and to the right side of the letter N in TWENTY, that tiny cc stands for the Carson City mint. I used to dream about owning a coin like this when I was a kid. The official name for this coin is the $20 Liberty Gold, but everybody calls them the double-eagle, with 0.9675 troy ounces of gold. They were minted starting in 1850. But the first ones from Carson City were minted in 1870. Heck, the city itself was founded just twelve years before, in 1858, named after the Wild West hero Kit Carson. This coin is in extra fine condition. You can see touches of wear, but that's what you can expect. It's part of their history. These gold coins actually circulated in the Old West. I wonder how many saloon drinks this coin bought in its life? This particular coin is so rare and sought after; it's worth at least $100,000 now, no kidding... It's a shame it's wasting its life in a deposit box. This coin deserves to be held daily by someone who can appreciate its beauty and history..." Matt motioned to drop the coin into his shirt pocket.

"Matthew!!!" shouted Kathy in indignation.

Just then a ding sounded from the console. Matt had set up a 20 second warning for when temporal control would re-engage balance mode. "Oops!" said Matt. He carefully placed the coin back in its original position within the box. Ten seconds later, the tesseract was back in balance mode, and the display portal collapsed to a blank screen.

As he pulled them off his fingers, Kathy noticed for the first time that Matt had covered his fingertips in a clear plastic. "I thought it would be fun to play at being Bonnie and Clyde for the demo. Finding that treasure was a real fluke though, totally unrehearsed..."

"Matt, we could have walked through that portal, couldn't we? Let the portal take us to where we've never been before..."

"Yes... It's a powerful addition to our abilities. We won't have to take airplane flights to go to new countries to acquire jump sites. Just tune this portal to wherever we want to be, and walk through. Jump back to home whenever we want. The only problem remaining is we won't have the correct documentation, not the right visa stamps on our passports... But it's a big jump in the right direction! Ha!"

"Matt, how far can you send the portal?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think it'll go interstellar distances. I still have more exploring to do... I also believe I can't move the portal faster than the speed of light. It can definitely reach Earth though. And that's a biggie. It would really be something if it could reach Mars. I know how to tie this end of the portal directly into the manufacturing arrays. Your research and this portal indicate we might actually have the power to terraform Mars... What a great gift to humanity, having a new habitable planet in the solar system. Definitely something to pursue..."

"Matt, this is mind boggling. I hereby cast my vote for you to be the winner of contest day."

"Not so fast. Your differential teleporting is a major improvement too. And all the safety issues you identified and solved might save our lives someday. I vote for you to be the winner. Objectively, I really do."

"Then I guess it's a tie. A perfect ending to contest-day, we're both winners. It's time for our workout. I can't wait to try out our new home dojo. Come, I've been practicing a neat combination throw and spin kick that I'd love to try out on you..."

Chicago time: 13:14:.33.523

Tesseract subjective time: six years in balance mode.

"Well, today's the big day" Matt said in Arabic during breakfast. "Think you're ready?"

"Sure. It's nice that Tabata's dojo is just two blocks from my apartment. We can walk to it in a couple of minutes. We agreed to jump to Chicago in synch with our sleep cycles, which means we drop out of balance mode and jump in six hours, our time... and about 5 seconds from now, Chicago time... To tell the truth, I am a little nervous about this..."

"Why? Our appearances look fine. From the baseline videos we took six years ago, we have our hair lengths exactly right. And our loose clothing will cover our more athletic bodies. We haven't aged at all, the quantum cleansing has you locked at 22 years old and me at 24 years. No one will be suspicious..."

"It's not our snapshot appearance. It's the way we used to walk. It looks so clumsy, in the old videos. We move like cats now. Maybe our church and office friends won't notice, but some of Tabata's top students are very perceptive about body stance, they might wonder a bit... Nah, you're right. Everything will be fine. My biggest problem will be not to hug everybody, not treat everybody like long-lost friends that I haven't seen in six years."

"If you had to guess Kathy, who do you think Tabata's best student is?"

"Keith, the third-degree black belt. No question. He is so polite and kind off the mat, but when he's sparring, he's all business."

"Think you can handle him?"

"Oh, Keith will be no problem!" Kathy laughed easily.

"Do you think you could handle Tabata now?"

Kathy turned thoughtful for a long moment. "I've got a complicated answer to that. If we fought right now, in our first round, I might beat him. Surprise would be on my side. And if I used subtle touches of differential-teleport fighting, he'd have no chance. But in a completely honest contest, I think our sensei would still have the edge, just barely. He's lightning fast, not like us, but for an unmodified human, lightning fast... He still will beat me on KI, killer instinct. His combination attacks are twenty, thirty punch-kick-block works of art. He could still take me. But the window for him to do this is closing" Kathy continued with a smile, "and by Monday night it'll be slammed shut. We have planned a four-year training session Saturday night, and an eight-year training session between Sunday church and our Monday workday. By Monday night, Tabata will have no chance."

"Well, it's not just martial arts training. Our next target languages are Farsi, Pashto, and Kurdish. Hebrew would be useful too. I must say, I used to feel a bit overwhelmed when we first decided to become counter-terrorists. The skill sets we need are incredible. It's wonderful that the time controls make it feasible..."

"Over this last year, I've noticed you spending more and more of your time working on papers for your law firm. Does your old job still interest you?"

"Yes. It might actually be a good opening to the Arabic countries. Remember my 3 pm conference call the day we returned to Earth? I thought it was a disaster right after it happened, but now I'm thrilled with it. It was with our new Siemens clients, Stan our firm's beloved senior partner and your official boss was on a second line. Stan was promising these guys the moon. No, let me be more precise, Stan was promising that I would deliver the moon to them, and I was too bewildered to say no. Six solid months of work, they demanded it in two months, and Stan agreed. I'm going to deliver it to them complete this coming Monday morning, two weeks early. It's a massive tangle of intellectual property issues involved with a bunch of interlocking acquisitions and spin-offs Siemens is doing in the Middle East. I'm going to present them a fantastic solution. It's so complicated, I would be surprised if Siemens doesn't beg me and my beautiful assistant to come to the Middle East and help implement it, especially after I let it drop that we're both fluent in Arabic, Farsi, and Kurdish."

"Not yet we aren't! We haven't even started with the last two yet!"

"By Monday morning we will be. You'll look so cute in a veil!"

"Well, I guess... Ha! My wedding dress will give me some practice! Now remember, on Monday morning, we start the construction plan. We'll be locked out of the tesseract for almost three weeks. No more tesseract until after the honeymoon!"

"I know. The construction plan is a great fit to our schedule. I'm looking forward to getting swept up in the wedding excitement, though it's still twelve years in our future... It's such a unique feeling, being so intimate with you all these years. You are my wife; I am your husband, but I still have an intense longing to have you as my bride, in the social sense."

"Yes, I'm eager for the social recognition too. That diamond you created in Manufacturing though is obscene! I'd get a sore wrist from the weight! Your final job this morning is to go back and create a ring that's believable. Stop joking around!"

Chapter 3.

"This was a really nice idea," said Kathy, practicing her Farsi as she sipped her hot chocolate, bundled in her parka while sitting on the rock ledge. "Paris was so beastly hot. Remind me exactly where we are again..."

"About halfway between Christchurch and Greymouth, on New Zealand's southern island." replied Matt in Farsi. "Don't be too hard on our chateau in Paris, and its lack of air conditioning. The average high temperature in Paris for the first week in August should be about 75 F. When we jumped, it was at 8 pm Thursday there and 98 F. A few minutes in Chicago to make the cocoa and grab our coats, and presto! It's 6:10 am Friday under a beautiful southern winter sky! The constellations down here are so beautiful..."

"These last two weeks of traveling have been like a dream. A whirlwind tour of Europe. I'll remember the joy of this time forever, Matt." Kathy played with watching her frosted breathe for a moment. "I admit, though, the anticipation of our future is beginning to pull me out of our fairytale honeymoon. On Sunday, we fly directly from Frankfurt am Mein to Riyadh. Al Mamlakah al Arabiyah as Suudiyah will be our new home for almost a year."

"We'll be traveling a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if we visit all 13 provinces in the Kingdom. We'll also be making trips to Iran, Iraq, and Yemen. It's probable we'll be in Syria too before the year is out. Siemens is certainly getting their pound of flesh for the bargain I made with them, royalties on the best of the intellectual property arrangements. They should provide us with several hundred thousand dollars of annual income for life, all for less than a year of work. Not that we really need it Kathy, but it would have been suspicious not to drive a hard bargain..."

"Six hours after we're scheduled to land in Riyadh, we'll have access to both tesseracts. It'll be nice to get the security back, as well as check out the new facilities. I'll set up the portals for first access to the new rooms, afterwards we can just jump in from visual memory..."

In their sixth subjective year of living in their tesseract, Matt and Kathy had made an intense effort to study how tesseracts were constructed. They found that the size choice was not continuous, but quantized. Their own tesseract was built on a scale length of about 45.4 feet, and to interface a new tesseract to their spacetime, other tesseracts would have to be of sizes that were plus or minus factors of two of this length. Larger tesseracts were exponentially more difficult to create. Matt was delighted to discover that their tesseract had the technology to built another, taking over 20 days to build one with a scale length of 22.7 feet. Their target design was a prison about 2 km from their home tesseract, with 8 rooms labeled E0, M0, P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, and P6, for an entrance hall, manufacturing room, and six prison rooms, each higher number implying a more comfortable room. The structure contained a single door between E0 and M0, all other traveling would be via teleport or portal openings. Each room had over 500 sq ft of floor space, and ceilings over 22 feet high. M0 had individual time controls for each room except E0. The rooms could be varied to run from 4096 times more slowly than Earth, to 16,777,216 times more quickly than Earth. At maximum temporal contraction, a year of living could be pushed into less than 2 seconds of Earth time.

"Yeah, it's a great back-up, Kathy. The new tesseract even has the power to build one of the original's size, though it would take over a year to do it. The new Manufacturing room is fully equipped, just more compact. Working with the operations sequencer was such an eye-opening experience. It didn't want us anywhere near the moon's core during any of the construction, saying the space folding involved could damage our minds. The sequencer was so sweet. It told me that it had to operate in interface mode with our spacetime for the construction, and there was thus no way it could be sure we wouldn't return in spite of its warnings, but it was willing to trust us not to. Having a computer program tell me that it was willing to trust me, that was a really strange feeling..."

"We'll meet Eternal Jihad in the Kingdom, Matt. Not in the first week. Maybe not even the first month, but soon. The battle is coming... I can feel it. Feel it in my core... Ha! None of these thoughts now, not on our honeymoon! Tell me some exciting, something wonderful! Tell me about your plans for terraforming Mars again."

"Well, I've tested portal casting to 300,000,000 miles. Mars is definitely within range, even when its orbit is on the opposite side of the sun from Earth. The terraforming capabilities of the tesseracts are really so immense, the issues really come down to what you want to preserve, and what you want to change. I think the biggest issues are surface gravity and surface air pressure. Mars' surface gravity is about 38% of Earth's. It means the planet just doesn't hold its atmosphere that well. It will lose over half its air molecules to space in less than a 100,000,000 years. That sounds like a long time, but over a couple of billion years, everything gets lost. The current surface air pressure is only 1% of Earth, and it's almost all carbon dioxide. The carbonate rocks are outgassing, maintaining the thin atmosphere. To get the full Earth's air pressure at 38% gravity, you would need more than 2.5 times the mass of air above your head. Doable, but if you make the leap to change more than just the surface of Mars, why bother?"

Matt paused for a moment, then continued. "Our baseline design now has us bringing the planet to full Earth gravity and air pressure by adding hundreds of billions of cubic kilometers of silver and iron and slightly radioactive heavy metals at the core. The radioactive heat will give Mars back a liquid metal core. The silver is a great conductor, and we'll spin it up with the iron to generate a nice protective magnetic field for the planet. End result, a planet that's 20% denser than Earth, with a 20% smaller radius and a third less surface area. We'll port over an Earth biosphere. It'll have a 24-hour day, and a more circular orbit. Its sidereal period will still be 1.88 years, and its distance from the sun still a little over 50% more than Earth's. Those are about the only two things staying the same. Oh, its two small moons will stay the same, just be pushed into much higher orbits. Mars as we know it will disappear. This is more like planet replacement, rather than terraforming. And the two tesseracts working together can do all this in less than a month! Perhaps the best time to do it is when Mars is farthest from Earth, let the sun hide what we're doing. More mysterious that way... With the right greenhouse mix for the atmosphere, huge areas of both the equator and middle latitudes will be temperate. The poles will still be very cold, but not as super cold as they are now."

"Matt, speaking of super cold temperatures, I think my rump feels sub-zero from sitting on this rock! How about we return these parkas and mugs to Chicago, and then jump back to the hotel for a stroll. The paths by the Seine are a sauna, but a sauna is just what I want right now."

"Sure!" Matt reached out and held Kathy's hand, and a second later the wind was blowing across empty rock.

Early Thursday evening, five weeks later...

"Matt! I'm glad you're back! Did you hear the news? It broke almost an hour ago."

"No. I was stuck in traffic with a couple of Aramex executives, and we didn't have the radio on. What's up?"

"Eternal Jihad struck in Portugal. Not the major attack they've been threatening. They called this just a warning. The monsters! They dirty bombed a maternity ward in Porto, 22 infants killed, plus about the same number of adults. There were only two survivors in the room, at least for now. Two infant girls. The blast pattern somehow missed them. But they were irradiated."

"How much?"

"It's bad. They were both heavily dusted with cobalt. Dosage well beyond lethal. The news announcer said they would be dead within hours from circulatory collapse. Oh, Matt. Parts of this society in the Kingdom are shocking. I've been talking to a number of our neighbors about the attack. Most are saddening by it. But a shocking number just shrugged after they heard that the two infant girls are Jewish. What the hell does that have to do with anything!? A few even smirked and smiled..."

"It's the concept of infidel. To some people, a Muslim killing a non-Muslim just isn't as much of an issue, compared to a Muslim killing a Muslim. It reminds me of my childhood fascination with the Old West in the nineteenth century. Kit Carson was an Indian fighter, and was glorified for it. Wiping out the ignorant savages was okay, partially because they weren't Christian. Fortunately Christianity in America has moved beyond this... I've been hit with an automatic response too, that Palestinian children are dying, so it's okay to kill Jewish children. Some imams here keep preaching that the scheming Jews are sub-human, and thus unworthy of compassion. It's twisted hatred, incredibly in error, but it's here..."

"Matt, I have a big question I want to ask you. We have agreed to keep tesseract technology in the tesseract, and we have agreed that we're not responsible for the world's health issues. But can we make these two girls part of our stand against Eternal Jihad? I want to try to save them."

Matt snapped to an instant decision. "We'll use the pocket, rather than home. The pocket gives us more options with the time contraction. Jump to the medical bay for setup, I'll start working portal access. Jump now!"

In less than four minutes, Matt had two portals hovering near the tops of two isolation incubators. "We have to move fast, Kathy. You can already see the circulatory systems breaking down under the skins. The incubators are surrounded by doctors and nurses, no way this will go unnoticed. Portals are sequenced for auto-termination as soon as we make the transfer. Engaging spatial fold... NOW!"

Several nurses and doctors shrieked as they saw disembodied hands appearing from the roofs of both incubators and lifting the infants away. The hospital ICU broke into pandemonium. Meanwhile, Matt and Kathy each jumped an infant to a waiting medical couch. The couches engaged, and within a second both entered red-3 status, signaling they were not to be interrupted under any circumstances.

"Well, we've done the best we can, Kathy. I had maximum time contraction start with the termination of the portals. The next year here will be 2 seconds of Earth time. We also picked up a minute amount of cobalt in the air. Nothing serious at all, but I'm quantum cleansing it now."

"Matt, how about I set up a pair of cribs in P6? These auto-docs are signaling a long-term treatment plan for the infants, at least a few days. Let's just hang out here in the pocket with them..."

Several days later, Matt and Kathy were each sitting in rocking stairs in P6, Matt feeding Emily, and Kathy feeding Carly. "They're so adorable, Matt! I love nursing them. I'm really going to miss them... Perhaps we can meet them again in some future year, to see and enjoy what we have saved. Ha! This is also stirring up all my maternal instincts. Soon, my dear husband, soon, I'll want you to impregnate me..."