Chapter 5 #2
The somber mood hit him as he thought of all those gone, and knew that they’d likely never return.
New people, with their faces, may walk around using their names…
but there was a good chance that even his slightest actions had already destroyed any chance of them being the people he’d known in his life.
Seb took a seat on an old bench that lay outside his childhood home and stared into the trees for a time.
Save the world, but not any of the people I know? How is that fair?
He sighed, shaking his head.
Or, maybe I’m completely wrong and time will progress as intended except where I hit it hard enough to change. I hated writing time travel stories for a reason back in the future… and that right there is one of the reasons, he thought with a dark chuckle.
Time travel stories sucked unless they were done right, and almost no one ever did them right.
Most treated the subject as an easy cheat to an ‘interesting’ source of conflict.
It smacked of laziness to see time travel introduced to most stories, and almost never failed to cause him to turn off the TV, skip the theatre, or move on to a new book series.
And here I am, stuck in the middle of one, and I still don’t know how the hell any of this bullcrap works.
All he could do, in the end, was treat his life now as an extension of the life that ended in Cheyenne Mountain during the evacuation. Seb didn’t die and go back in time, he just… went on living in another world, another time.
It was almost certainly not the way it worked, but it was the only solution that would allow him to go forward.
His friends of the past were in the past. His family, the same.
He would have to make new ones going forward, even if some of them reminded him of what he had lost. That was going to be hard.
Not making new friends and such. He was decent enough at that, he supposed. No, the hard part was going to be trying to not expect them to be the people he knew before, not when they wore the same faces and all.
Seb wasn’t sure he’d be able to do it, but he knew it was going to hurt regardless.
He glanced over to where his mother was cleaning up after the party, thoughts shifting to her. He’d lost his mother in her eighties the first time, and wasn’t sure he could survive that a second time. Hell, he wasn’t sure he’d survived it the first time.
The world had felt… different afterwards. He’d gone on, of course, but there was something indelible missing. A color gone out of the universe, to be poetic about it, but really… just something in him died that day, and his own experience notwithstanding… once dead, always dead.
Even now, he remembered the pain when he looked at her, and couldn’t separate the feelings.
Seb shook himself, forcing those morbid thoughts back, suppressing them and trying to forget. He was good at that, and knew it would work. For a time.
It wasn’t something he could deal with now anyway, so he’d put it off, and put it off again and again. The pain would be there, waiting to be noticed, but he could forget it for a time.
So when she looked over and smiled at him, he smiled back and almost managed to not remember one of the worst days of his life as he did so.
*****
Eve was worried about Sebastian, he’d seemed off a little when playing with the other kids.
That alone wasn’t really out of the ordinary, she’d known that he was a little different from most children for many years.
Smart, well spoken, capable of grasping complex concepts and breaking them down into fundamentals that he could understand and even explain to others…
most kids didn’t do that, couldn’t do that.
But he was awkward with children his own age, he’d always preferred dealing with adults, and now that seemed even more pronounced.
She hid her worry and smiled at him, getting a smile back.
He’d be ok, she knew. She didn’t know how she knew, but she had never doubted that he’d find his way in life, eventually. Whether it be with his current dream of being an astronaut… assuming that was still current, given his new interest in writing, or with whatever else he chose to pursue.
He was behaving oddly of late, though, and she didn’t know if it was just teenage drama rearing its ugly head or something with a little more weight to it. She’d never raised a teenager before, so she supposed it was likely the former, but she was determined to keep an eye on him just the same.
Maybe he’s just noticing girls and has to work through his feelings, She thought with amusement. Poor boy.
*****
Seb sighed as he slipped into his small bedroom and settled down. His mother was watching a show on TV, so he could be a little more relaxed while working with Al.
Since he’d determined to ‘beat’ the Sims game he found himself in first, that meant building up his ‘character’ and assets. To do that was going to take some work, but mostly it was pretty feasible.
Making money wasn’t hard, honestly, not even real money.
However, making the kind of money he’d need to switch ‘genres’ was all but impossible for most people.
Billions wouldn’t be enough, he was sure of that, and you couldn’t even get to the billionaire level without a stupid amount of luck.
Being born one was the simplest way, but that wasn’t in the books.
That really left only one option to gain that kind of money.
You didn’t get a bank account like that as a writer, or a scientist, engineer, teacher, or any other of the skill sets he might tangentially claim as his own.
No, you only got there through business.
Not a skillset he’d ever developed, unfortunately, but assuming the world events went on as before… he should be able to cheat like hell instead.
First, though…
“Al, bring up the research files on the invaders' dimensional technology. I need to know everything we knew about the inventory space before I came back,” He commanded.
"Jawohl, mein Herr."
*****
Few, even in his future, really understood the mechanism behind what he and others had colloquially referred to as ‘inventory space’. It wasn’t just some hole you tossed things into for storage, which would be insanely useful enough in all reality, but the truth of it was… far more than that.
Seb had been one of the first to put together the clues as to what the people in the field were trying to report back with frustratingly little success.
Trying to put something into a report when the language you were using literally did not have the words for what you were trying to describe was just an exercise in frustration for everyone involved.
In the early days, more than one shooter had caught a rebuke for messing around when their REMF commanding officer assumed that they were being purposefully obtuse.
By the time the issue had filtered out to the think tank he had joined, well the whole situation was a mess.
Hundreds of reports, all trying to describe the same thing, all using wildly diverging language and terms. Even the ones using the same terms seemed to use them differently for the most part.
The written reports were so badly mangled that it was presumed to be an enemy PsyOp or some sort of counter-intel move by the aliens.
Seb smirked as he refreshed himself on the details, The number of heads that popped among the military administration when they found out that we were doing it to ourselves…
He’d only gotten to see a few of them actually react, but that had been a darkly amusing day… well, a week or so if he were being honest.
Once the language problem had been identified, it became a matter of drudge work in short order.
Bringing in as many of the reporters as possible and just…
talking to them. Over and over again, room to room, listening to men and women tell the same horror stories about the worst moments of their lives over and over again until they were ready to strangle him and he was ready to let them.
But, in the end, it worked.
He managed to carefully nudge them into the same linguistic box and then tease out details until the picture became clearer.
The enemy used a dimensional tear, but it wasn’t a portal to another dimension exactly.
It was more of a hole to a crawlspace between dimensions, a place that had its own rules but they were rules that iterated off the universe proper.
That meant that the enemy, and people, could survive in there.
You could store things as well, and they would just…
last, as though put in stasis but not really.
Oxidation didn’t happen, externally at least, within the portal. However, internally, in animals and humans, things worked as normal.
No one ever really came to understand how that all worked, but that was for researchers to worry about. The Engineers very quickly worked out what worked and that was all anyone had time to worry about as things were going anyway.
Now, however, Seb was digging through the researchers' work.
Time is something I find myself with, oddly enough.
There wasn’t a lot there that he could use, but that was to be expected.
Pure research was all about throwing whatever you could think of at the wall, devising experiments to prove or disprove it.
Most of what they’d been able to work out was probably of use to some brilliant engineer, but that wasn’t Seb.
What he was interested in was the aspects of the technology that allowed them to create the Gate.
The Gate was humanity's last ditch plan for survival.
Not victory, that was forgone by the time they’d gotten a good idea about what was happening. Survival was the goal by that point, and they were more than willing to take long shots to ensure it.
The dimensional space is non-congruent with sidereal space. The aliens don’t seem to use that in any way we could determine, but we figured out that we could send people through space that was connected to two very different positions. The trick was getting the other end tethered somewhere useful.