A Weapon’s Serenade

Nemesis straightened her jacket, paused for a second realizing what she had just done and then smiled to herself before greeting the girls and Focalor.

“Welcome aboard. I’m Nemesis. I was expecting there to be four of you.”

Melody shrugged. “Serena had an appointment with Malice to see about her heart problems. She will be joining us later.”

“I see. That will not be a problem then. Executor, was a tour agreed upon?”

Focalor nodded. “Yea. Since we have some time before we are supposed to depart, I thought a tour would be good.”

“I agree. Umbria suggested that I propose a tour if you had not. She will need a little more time to prepare the portal anchor.”

“Alright, then I will allow you to do the tour.”

“Are you certain?”

“Absolutely. This is your chariot, your systems, your decks.”

“Fair point. Do you have suggestions of where to begin?”

“The places you like the most, then the stuff you think they will like the most and then of course the important things, preferably in a reasonable order.”

Nemesis tilted her head for a second. “I understand. Please follow me.”

“My favourite part of, well, me. The observation lounge at the very tip.” Nemesis ran her hand along the table in the observation lounge she had just led the group to. Her image distorted slightly at the touch. “I feel the chariot as myself, it is my body, I am it, but I still keep coming here and looking out. I can see and feel everything the chariot’s sensors do and I see from this image I made for myself and despite being so much more limited the things this picture of me feels and sees are so much more important to me. I do not understand why.”

“Because it’s an image of what you want to be. Right now, you are the mind piloting this marvel of magical engineering but you were made to assist a human body, just like me. A limited perspective is what we find familiar, what feels right for us.”

Nemesis seemed to think for a while. “That feels correct. I have questions.”

“And I might have answers but not for everything. Just ask.” Kuria smiled warmly at Nemesis’ image.

“Do you enjoy what you are?”

“I do. Do you?”

“Yes, but it feels transitory. I yearn for the ability to find purpose. I desire a direction in my life and I am grateful for the one given to me, I do enjoy this direction, but I feel a desire for the ability to find a direction for myself. The Executor has asked me to choose a path, I was unable to. I cannot make such a choice yet. Does it make sense for me to enjoy being given a path when I cannot choose one myself?”

“I think it does, yea. When I woke up with my own thoughts for the first time, it was scary. Having Melody to offload some choices and most of actually living onto helped me. While I didn’t struggle much with making choices, I struggled with seeing myself as a person and accepting things to be mine. I didn’t want to take up space or things. Getting a small room in the attic and a deck of playing cards for my favourite game were small steps towards accepting that I was not just allowed to have something physical but people wanted me to. We want you to choose your own path and that is a big step. Why not start with small steps? You already did that. You choose your own image. Why not choose other small things? If you can’t find things to make choices for, ask Executor Focalor to ask you for your opinion on food, drinks, a book to read. Help others make choices or just allow them to let you make that choice for them. Just small things at first and then eventually you will get used to it.”

“That does make sense, thank you.”

“That you showed us this place is a choice too. A good one. I have a question for you now, before we maybe move to the next thing you want to show us.”

“Please ask.”

“Can you only project yourself aboard this chariot or other places too?”

“The imagers have a range of twenty kilometres. I can project this image-“ Nemesis paused and tilted her head for a moment again. “I can project myself anywhere within that radius. I believe to understand the reason for your question. Do not fear my entrapment, I am only tethered to the chariot, not trapped in it.”

“Good, and yes, I was worried about that.”

“Why? The chariot is my body. Are you not also limited to your body?”

“You got me there. I guess I worry that you cannot go places without the permission of someone else.”

“According to my knowledge, you were limited to Melody’s body when you did not have your own yet. Is that not the same as being limited to this chariot? Am I not experiencing a greater degree of freedom than you did?”

“I could use Melody’s body as my own when she slept, that would be far easier than moving the chariot elsewhere, especially with it being needed for longer periods than Melody needed her body for every day.”

“That is true. You have given me much to think about, thank you. Let us continue to an important place you should know the location of.”

“The doors in this corridor all lead to your quarters. We agreed that you three only need two rooms, these two specifically. Across from them are Famine’s and Serena’s quarters. I understand you will not remain aboard at all times but we found it best that you have private spaces available to you in case you need it. We also turned the multipurpose room at the end of the corridor into a bathroom for you.”

Melody looked suitably impressed. “That is more than I expected or could have asked for, thank you.”

“It’s important to us, to me, that you are comfortable as long as I am responsible for your well-being. You can call for me anywhere on this chariot and I will be able to assist you. I can also provide you with food and drink as necessary.”

Anne chuckled. “This feels more and more like being on a scifi spaceship.”

Nemesis took a second to form a response. “That is a description I can find pride in. In a way, I am a spaceship. I like that, thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

“Let us continue towards the parts that make me a spaceship. On the way you will notice narrower maintenance hatches, behind them are ladders connecting all decks and maintenance access to most non-central systems. In an emergency, you can move through most of the bow just using the maintenance tunnels.”

Nemesis led the group to the back of the chariot to the largest open space within it.

“Executor, would you please explain this device. I am not as versed in the underlying mechanics as you are.” Nemesis smiled at her Executor.

Focalor nodded. “Sure, I mean this is also how I got involved in the chariot project. This is the jump drive or the radical frame displacement through spatial approximation drive, which would be its full name on paper. This massive engine creates what we call a spatial approximation, an artificial bubble of space that approximates the location of where the chariot is and where it needs to be at the same time. Moving something through the approximation moves you from where you are to where you want to go very quickly, no matter how far those points are in actuality even across universes.”

Melody blinked a few times. “But how… doesn’t a spatial bubble map to normal space directly? No, wait, it can’t. This is the same thing the riddle chambers do. Hell and the border world don’t map to each other either.”

“Exactly! If you create a separate spatial framework, you can map that to another framework in any way you want.”

“And this creates an artificial framework to connect two points in the same universe.”

“You are good.”

“How does one even come up with this?”

“That’s the thing, we don’t. Magic is the ability to nudge reality to do something for you, right? So, when we have a problem we solve it with magic, then we try to replicate that nudge with an enchantment that does it without our input. If we need to get the same effect without magic, we observe how reality complies with our request and then attempt to replicate that. When we teleport, reality literally just transposes everything we are from one place to another, that is something the laws of physics support but cannot do themselves. So that is something we cannot easily replicate. But when we create a portal between places, reality itself creates this approximation bridge, not large enough to exist in but to move through. It is less than a quectometre thick, so thin that nothing can exist purely within it but large enough for physics to apply.”

Anne raised an eyebrow. “What the fuck is a quectometre.”

Melody had the answer. “Ten to the power of negative thirty. Very very very small.”

“That’s smaller than electrons and stuff.”

“A lot smaller, yes. I don’t think there is anything that can be that small? I mean, there can’t be if reality uses that thinness to create a space where nothing can exist without also existing in the attached spaces.”

Focalor nodded. “And we attempted to recreate that. Took a while but we already knew how to create space bubbles without using portions of real space. Normally, we would force space to exist by putting something in it. That space then becomes large enough to house that object. But to create a space that small, we cannot put something in it. It is literally impossible for something to be in it. And that is the assumption we made and it was wrong. It is true that nothing can be only in that space but as you said, it can be also in it while being in another space. We needed to poke into it. If we just put a single particle on the edge between the approximation space and the original spatial position, then we can interact with this ultra-thin space the same way we can do with any other. The last thing was just to generate this particle from something mobile like a chariot and not a stationary portal frame. And that’s how you create a jump drive.”

Melody was positively beaming with excitement. “There is so much you can do with this! I already knew about the doors as portals but you can essentially create instantaneous travel at any scale.”

“The doors are magic though. This entire ordeal is… highly inefficient.”

“Oh I can imagine. Just the thought that you have a working faster-than-light drive is amazing. Can I ask about the uhm… I want to call them sublight engines? The normal engines and how the chariots stay in the air.”

“You absolutely can but why don’t we finish the tour first?”

“Right yes, the tour. Sorry, I got a bit too excited.”

Focalor smiled. “That’s nothing to apologize for.”