Deep within the REM realms, memories and dreams mix until they become indistinguishable ...
... she’s small again, and young. So young daddy’s still alive. She’s gone into the kitchen, where she’s told not to go to when daddy is preparing dinner. But does she listen? Hell no, because that was who she was, Na-Yeli the toddler, the obnoxious infant who had to learn everything the hard way, while being curious about, well, everything, as well ...
... “Na-Yeli, don’t touch the conductive stove.” Her mother—who followed her in—stern but with loving undertones.
“It’s very hot,” her father says, matter-of-factly, “you’ll burn your fingers.”
Na-Yeli puts up her unbelieving face, steps forward, and—of course—touches the stove. Her father doesn’t stop her but lifts her as the burning pain sets in, and immediately puts her hand under the tap’s cold water.
Na-Yeli cries her heart out, but her father is relentless: “I told you so. Maybe you’ll learn to listen the next time.”
Mother is much more comforting, kissing her on the head, making shushing noises as she applies a soothing balm. “Relax, baby, shush, everything will be alright,” she says, “this lotion will stop the pain, will make your fingers good again.” To her husband: “Why didn’t you stop her?”
“It’s the only way she learns,” her father says, “otherwise she might have done it while we were away.”
... in the next scene, she’s just climbed out of the playpen barrier of her bedroom, walking towards the stairs with her uncertain steps ... she slips and suddenly the whole world becomes topsy-turvy—the ceiling’s become the floor, the walls are sideways and everything is turning. It hurts, but the overwhelming feeling is one of wonder, weirdness, and wild abandon ...
... eventually, she rolls onto the ground floor, no wounds nor bruises, only a little worse for wear ... alarmed by the noise, her father and mother rush out of the living room ... Mummy terrified and immediately picking her up ... Daddy dryly remarking: “there’s our little astronaut,” which angers Mummy no end ...
... a big jump forward where she’s doing all-important chemistry exam ... she’s sure she nailed all the questions except the last one, the most difficult one ... she wants to nail that one, as well, and not only to show she’s the best ... but also to show her father that despite her rebellious attitude, her pubescent temper tantrums and utter failure at being the nicest girl in class, her education, her learning, and her results haven’t suffered ...
... but the solution is evading her ... how is it possible that the electric conductivity of a HCl solution is so much higher than that of an equally strong NaCl solution ... after all, the charge of both H+ and Na+ is exactly the same ...
... then she remembers that night when she was in utter despair at the injustice of it all, her father knocked on her bedroom door ... took her in his arms and told her she’s not a failure ... that being small could be to her advantage ... “Sometimes, you’ll see, when the going gets tough, and when things become very crowded, the smallest ones can move the fastest … ”
... and she sees it: the H+ ions jump from H2O molecule to H2O molecule in a cascading effect that easily outruns the Na+ ions that have to go around all these H2O molecules ...
... she’s got it, this should give her the perfect ten ... I never truly understood you, daddy ... so often you were aloof, so often you were hard on me, yet sometimes you opened up ... why did you have to go before I could learn to know you? So unfair ...
... even as the dream arrives at the inevitable realization—she lost her father in her last year of secondary school—it ultimately remains a happy one ... because she was with daddy again, if only in her dreams …
Her intense dreams end the way they always do, as—nine hours later according to her internal clock—she wakes up. The pain in her bones, muscles, and punctured skin is gone, to be replaced by a massive migraine. She knows but all too well what that means, hoping it wouldn’t be necessary this soon.
In her experience, the longer LateralSys is in control, the more intense the migraine will be—for her, the poor, slow CEO—afterward. Hence, the hyper-creative personality from her right brain hemisphere must have been busy for quite a while.
Her pod—well, she, the shape-shifting metamaterials of her exoskin with the assorted batteries, sensors, and equipment are basically one—is still static, but somehow feels better anchored, not in the precipitous position right after the crash.
As is her wont, LateralSys left a note in her computer implant:
Dear CEO of this very slow company,
Those were some nasty cuts and bruises in the hyper-advanced metamaterials of our exoskin. Also a decidedly interesting environment (by way of the ancient Chinese curse). I do understand that even a slow-witted Miss Egotrip like you must rest once in a while, but the way you parked the vessel was far from elegant. So I must assume it was an accident.
The crystalline growths—fractal to the atomic level—are extraordinarily sharp, indeed. And hovering like a balloon in this turbulent, lightning-laden environment is not an option. So we must fight fire with fire.
For this, I have used our lasers to melt some of those crystalline materials over a few metamaterial bars that I repurposed as landing gear. The melted crystal has the same hardness as the fractal crystalline tendrils, so our craft can settle down without a problem (as you may have already noticed).
I see that we’re lost. I can’t find our position, coordinates, or even some estimate by dead reckoning anywhere. A flight path that gives the craziest virtual joyride a run for its e-money, an electromagnetic field signature in this layer that gives white noise a good name, and a crystalline, fractalized environment that would fill the gods of chaos, asymmetry, and random chance with pride.
In other words, a challenge.
And you know how I love those. Here are my recommendations: use a combination of the ‘touch-the-wall’ technique and the ‘pledge’ solution—combined with visual pattern recognition—for conquering this fractal maze.
Touch-the-wall; that is, choose a ‘wall’—for whatever your value of ‘wall’ in this sparkling, crystalline mountain forest—and keep following it, wherever it goes. This normally gets you out of any maze (with one exception, see my second recommendation), albeit not in the fastest way possible. But I don’t think we have much choice in the matter.
The ‘pledge’ solution with visual pattern recognition is needed when the ‘touch-the-wall’ solution can be thwarted by a stand-alone part of a maze that is not connected to the rest, for example, imagine walls in the shape of the capital letter ‘G’. Touching the wall of such a structure will let you do the merry-go-round forever. This is where the ‘pledge’ solution comes in. This checks if you’ve come back to the same heading—thank dog, the gyroscope’s still working fine—again, while checking if you haven’t made the same crossing by marking these.
We don’t have the luxury of being able to mark each crossroad (let alone if such markings would stay long in this crazy environment), so we need to rely on visual pattern recognition. So let the cameras make recordings of the ‘walls’ we’re ‘touching’ as we traverse this maze, and alert us when certain sections do look the same.
This is where the laws of chaos, symmetry, and random chance work in our favor: the chances of any two sections of these fractal structures being exactly the same are infinitesimally small. Also good that we didn’t skimp on computer power and memory.
Enjoy the rest of the ride,
—LateralSys;
PS: I’ve also been able to reclaim some of the atomic constituents needed for our metamaterials from both the crystals and the atmosphere. But there are still elements we need, so do keep an eye out for them—I already programmed the spectrometers for this—so we can replenish the metamaterials lost.
PS 2: Sorry to take over just before you woke up—otherwise you could have slept off the migraine—but our body was much too tired to do anything after you crashed.
Na-Yeli feels elated with overtones of shame. A little bit ashamed that her left brain didn’t think of these things, but she realizes that this kind of ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking isn’t part and parcel of that particular hemisphere’s set-up. On the one hand, she wishes that the brilliance of her right brain would be available at all times, but knows this comes at a cost, as the intuitive, artistic part of her is easily distracted and can get totally lost in shiny details, never mind if these are central to the mission or not. Hence the slow CEO is normally in command, as it can focus like nobody else—except when in overwhelming danger or exhausted.
In any case, she swallows a finely balanced broth that she can still think of as food—eventually, it’ll be recycled excrement with added vitamins, minerals, and proteins—and as the migraine slowly recedes, she prepares to tackle this fractal maze, well-rested and better prepared.
—or—
Author’s note: while Dante’s Inferno has nine circles before one reaches the Centre of Hell, the Enigmatic Object has six layers before one reaches the Core. “This is a tremendously impressive book!” Sarah B at NetGalley.