Death's End

The three-dimensional space they were in accelerated toward the two-dimensional plane. The two-dimensional Sun, which had now completely extinguished and appeared as a vast, dark red, dead sea, took up most of the view from Halo. Cheng Xin and AA noticed that the plane was not completely flat, but undulating! A long wave slowly rolled across the plane. It was a similar wave in three-dimensional space that had allowed Blue Space and Gravity to find warp points to enter four-dimensional space. Even in places where there were no two-dimensional objects in the plane, the rippling wave was apparent. The waves were a visualization of two-dimensional space in three dimensions that occurred only when the two-dimensional space was large enough.

On Halo itself, the space-time distortion produced by the accelerated fall had started to become apparent as space was stretched in the direction of the fall. Cheng Xin noticed that the circular portholes now appeared as ovals, and the slender AA now looked short and squat. But Cheng Xin and AA felt no discomfort, and the ship’s systems were operating normally.

“Return to Pluto!” Cheng Xin ordered the AI. Then she turned to Luo Ji’s window. “We’re going to come back. There’s time—Uranus is still being flattened.”

The AI replied stiffly, “Among all authorized users in communication range, Luo Ji has the highest authorization level. Only he can order Halo to return to Pluto.”

Luo Ji smiled before the tunnel. “If I wanted to go, I would have gotten on the ship with you earlier. I’m too old for voyages far from home. Do not worry about me, children. Like I said, I don’t think I’ve missed anything. Prepare for curvature propulsion!”

Luo Ji’s last words were directed at the ship’s AI.

“Course parameters?” asked the AI.

“Continue along the current heading. I don’t know where you want to go, and I don’t think you know, either. If you do think of a destination, just point it out on the star map. The ship is capable of automatic navigation to most stars within fifty thousand light-years.”

“Affirmative,” said the AI. “Initiating curvature propulsion in thirty seconds.”

“Do we need to be immersed in deep-sea fluid?” AA asked—though rationally, she knew that under conventional propulsion, such acceleration would compress her into a pancake no matter what kind of fluid she was immersed in.

“You don’t need any kind of preparation. This propulsion method relies on manipulating space, so there’s no hypergravity. Curvature propulsion drive online. System is operating within normal parameters. Local space curvature: twenty-three point eight. Forward curvature ratio: three point forty-one to one. Halo will enter lightspeed in sixty-four minutes, eighteen seconds.”

For Cheng Xin and AA, the AI’s announcement was like a Full Stop order, because everything suddenly quieted down. They understood that the silence was due to the nuclear fusion engine being shut off, but the humming produced by the fusion reactor and the thrusters disappeared without being replaced by any other noise. It was hard to believe that some other engine had been started.

But signs of curvature propulsion did appear. The distortion in space gradually disappeared: The portholes returned to being circles, and AA looked slender again. Looking through the portholes, they could still see other escaping ships passing by Halo, but they now passed far more slowly.

The ship’s AI began to play some of the messages passing between the escaping ships—perhaps because the messages concerned Halo.

“Look at that ship! How is it able to accelerate so fast?” a woman screamed.

“Oh! The people inside must have been crushed into meat pies,” a man said.

Another man spoke up. “You idiots. The ship itself would be crushed under that kind of acceleration. But look at it: It’s perfectly fine. That’s not a fusion drive, but something entirely different.”

“Curvature propulsion? A lightspeed ship? That’s a lightspeed ship!”

“The rumors were true, then. They were building secret lightspeed ships so that they could escape….”

“Aaahhhhh…”

“Hey, any ships ahead? Stop that ship! Crash into it. No one should live if we all have to die!”

“They can reach escape velocity! They can run away and live! Ahhhh! I want the lightspeed ship! Stop them; stop them and kill everyone inside!”

Another scream—this one from AA inside the ship. “How can there be two Plutos?”

Cheng Xin turned to the information window AA was looking at. The window showed a view of Pluto taken by the ship’s monitoring system. Although Pluto was some distance away, it was clear that both Pluto and Charon had been duplicated, and the twins were lined up side by side. Cheng Xin noticed that some of the flattened objects in the two-dimensional space had also been duplicated. The effect was like selecting a portion of a picture using image-processing software, cloning it, and then moving the clone a bit to the side.