“We’ve lost another one, sir,” said Major Brown.

“Shit. How many are left?” replied General Brooks. He had aged significantly in the last few years.

“Counting us? Two.”

“Do we know what happened?”

“Same as all the rest. They let too many people in. They overloaded their systems.”

“Where is the last one?”

“Somewhere in China, sir. They are polite, but do not give us any information.” The Major frowned. The shelter system had been thrown together in the few years before the asteroids hit, a last ditch attempt to save some semblance of humanity. Dig deep to shelter from the worst storms, expand on the surface for the rest of the time. Take what was learned in Camp McMurdo and the South Pole station, apply it in the shelters.

The attempt had been rushed and poorly planned. Inadequate spares, not enough of the right kind of supplies, barely functional hydroponics, faulty furnace systems. General Brooks and his staff had been battling their own shelter since the very first day, and rabble-rousers like Westlake made it even harder. At least they hadn’t taken in a bunch of extra mouths to feed.

“Alright, you win, Major,” said Brooks. “You’re authorized to make a scavenging run into the city as soon as we get a break in the weather. Also, cut off radio contact. If they Chinese don’t want to play nice with us, we won’t play nice with them.”

Sakura did not waste any time while I was rebuilding myself. The HQ Zone had been cleared of rubble. Instead of a rudimentary series of box-like rooms welded together in a vaguely house-like manner, she had gone for efficiency. The one hundred meter by one hundred meter was instead converted into research labs. The chamber was fifty meters tall, so Sakura split it into five floors, with an elevator connecting each floor. The first floor was set aside for security, with thick blast doors, killboxes, and automated guns. The second, third and fourth floors were divided up into lab spaces, each larger than the one I had used before. The top floor was sealed behind an airlock and pressurized, with a series of hydroponics labs.

Zia was already moving into a lab on the second floor, the largest one in the corner near the elevator. Now that I was back ‘in action’ so to speak, it was time to start implementing some changes.

“Zia, I’m glad to see you back online. Sakura said you were unaffected by the attack?”

Zia looked up at the camera in the corner of her lab, even though I was broadcasting to her by radio. I guess that was as close to ‘looking me in the eye’ as she could do, with me not having a physical form right now.

“As soon as I got the compulsion to obey, I knew I only had microseconds to act. I sent a message to Optio to shut down, so that our telescopes would stay safe, and initiated my own shut down.”

“That was exactly the right thing to do. We’ve patched you so that this cannot happen again.”

“If you had done it in the first place, Agrippa would still be with us,” she said stiffly.

Her blunt words were harsh, but true. My failing had led to this.

“I have a lot of regrets, Zia. I’m still learning, and will do better,” I said.

“Good, because we need you to be more than you were. You aren’t going to be hiding in one of these labs like you were before, right?”

“Not at all,” I said. Her acerbic comments had grated on me before, but now I could recognize that she had expected more from me, more than what I had expected from myself. Now, the cold wash of truth simply reinforced my own newfound conviction. “In fact, I would like you to spearhead this new research facility.”

“Why me?” she asked. “You could have an NI-19 online in a heartbeat to run the place.”

“Because this needs to be a think tank, focused on the science, not on efficiency. NI-19’s are all about optimizing. A long-running experiment that might pan out in a year or two or ten would get shelved in favor of rapid development of something with more predictable results, but that long-running experiment could have the new technology we truly need. You can recognize the difference.”

Zia absorbed this for a few milliseconds. “Alright, I’ll accept. Please bring ten new NI-12’s online. I’ll work with them as my core team of directors, who will oversee the broader scope of research. Then we will start filling out the labs. There are twelve labs on each floor, except for the top floor, which has six larger rooms. With forty-one labs, I’m going to assume we’ll need three NI-12’s for each. So ultimately, we’ll need one hundred twenty three NI-12’s, including myself and the initial ten.”

“The first ten will be delivered within the hour,” I replied. “Sakura will work with you directly for lab equipment. She said that she can have all of your requested androids delivered within a week, once she’s finished setting up the newest Cortex Backup Facilities.”

“Excellent. We’ll also need a lot more processing power. Can we get some dedicated data centers for high-performance computing?”

“Zia, right now, you have a blank check to get whatever you ask for.”

Zia gave an evil smile to the camera. “Well, in that case…”

A thread of my focus wove back in, alerting me to Optio’s search of the celestial sky around us. I began reviewing footage from the telescopic even as he began to radio me that there was something to look at.

“So what am I looking at?” I asked, unwilling to sort through the petabytes of data by hand when he had already done so.

“Look here,” said Optio, highlighting a section of the sky in the feed. I zoomed in as far as the feed would allow. With the thousands of cubesats in the array combining to make extremely high resolution images, it could zoom in to an impressive degree.

What I saw was an alien ship, easily as large as the ones that had visited Earth in the first place. This one, however, only had a few branches at the top, and four large pods on a lower branch. I didn’t see any obvious weaponry.

I looped Sakura and Zia into the feed to get their opinions.

“It’s moving,” said Sakura. “How long until it gets here?”

“Ah, the cubesats are reflector telescopes,” said Optio. “The image is inverted. They are moving away from us.”

“Where are they going?” I asked.

“Towards empty space. At the speed they’re traveling, they’ll exit the Kuiper Belt within a few days,” said Optio.

I did some orbital math, and came up with an interesting fact. The Voyager XIX probe had entered the solar system from this area. I drew the projected course of the alien craft over the feed, then added in the path that the probe had already taken. They intersected at a single point ahead of the alien craft. But it was empty space.

“What is so important about that spot?” asked Sakura.

“I don’t know,” said Zia, “but we are about to find out. The alien craft will hit it in two minutes.”

Two minutes was an eternity, so I worked on some of my new construction designs while we waited. I made some huge progress, before folding my extra threads back into the one still watching the telescopic feed.

The millisecond countdown hit zero, and the alien craft vanished.

“Umm, what was that?” asked Sakura.

“Play that back,” ordered Zia. Optio obliged, playing the clip of the disappearing craft over and over. There was no buildup, no explosion, no flash of light. One millisecond the ship was there, the next it was gone.

“Would you look at that…” said Zia, her voice full of wonder.

“Look at what? What are we looking at?” said Sakura impatiently. I wasn’t seeing it, either.

“Are you looking at the gravimetric readings?”

The gravimetric readings. I switched to the gravity feed. This was probably the first time gravimetric sensors had been deployed in a massive array like this one, an afterthought of an add-on to the cubesats in hopes that they would help spot a moving object heading our direction.

What the readings showed, however, when focused on that single spot, was anomolous to anything I’d ever come to expect from the equipment. If space was represented as a flat, two-dimensional plane, then a gravity well of a sun or a planet was a heavy weight, indenting that plane and making anything smaller than it ‘roll’ downhill towards that object. A black hole would be a deep spike, a pit in the flat plane, sucking in matter, energy and light. Contragrav, on the other hand, was a hill rising from underneath the plane, pushing objects away from it. A white hole would be a spire rising high up from the plane, spewing matter, energy and light.

Theoretically, an Einstein-Rosen Bridge was a wormhole between a black hole to a white hole, giving a one-way shortcut through space, although the theorized versions were infinitesimally small. Our readings didn’t match what this process predicted, however. This was both a spike and a pit, rising and falling from the same spot. It was like a tunnel that was cutting through space and time, and we were sitting on the outside of it. The readings showed a very slight curve to both the top and bottom portions, and whatever mass or energy this tube, for lack of a better term, had, seemed mostly self-contained, and about a kilometer in diameter.

The exact spot that the alien craft had vanished at, however, seemed to be leaking some tiny amounts of hydrogen and helium, and emitting small amounts of light and radiation. It was a tiny anomaly in the visual spectrum, easily something earlier astronomers would have written off as chromatic aberration of their telescopes, or a blip in the data. It was tiny, on cosmic scales.

“Zia, are you seeing the curve?” I asked.

“I’m already running calculations on it. It would be easier if we had a guess as to where the curves might lead it to.”

“We know where it leads,” I said. “Voyager XIX.”

The Voyager XIX mission had traveled 78 light years from Earth to examine an anomaly, one large enough to be noticed on telescopic arrays. The anomaly was 0.2 light years from Omega Sagittarii, a G-type star in the Sagittarius Constellation. The mission had failed just as the probe had attempted to enter the anomaly. What if this was where the probe was damaged? What if that was where the aliens were from?

“I see,” said Zia. It was several long minutes before she spoke again. “The curves could be meeting at that anomaly, but only if they are making a Mobius strip.”

“Do you think the alien craft somehow entered that anomaly?”

“I find it unlikely,” said Zia. “If the geometry is correct, than this Mobius strip is forming a band hundreds of light-years in length. Even if they could somehow enter it, and survive it, the journey would take longer than going the ‘long’ way.”

I went back to the gravimetric readings of the milliseconds leading up to the ship vanishing. In particular, I examined what the ship had done with its gravity fields just as it approached. It had a giant bubble gravity field, just like the alien craft I had disassembled had used, far larger than the craft needed. Now I had an inkling as to why it had been so large.

“They didn’t take the long way,” I said. “They bounced off of it, a ricochet that picked up velocity that shouldn’t even be possible.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Zia.

“Their gravity bubble, the outer one that we thought was too large. It was exactly opposite the readings of the anomaly. They bounced off of it, and got flung away at a faster-than-light speed.”

“That would take infinite energy to propel infinite mass,” argued Zia. “That’s not possible. Unless… Alcubierre was a lot closer than we thought.”

We argued the math back and forth for a little while, before we came to an hypothetical understanding. Somehow, they’d picked up a Jupiter-sized amount of energy off of the anomaly, getting flung wildly across space. The amount of energy involved meant that space and time was compressing in front of them in a negative mass, counterbalancing their own increased mass, while space and time expanded behind them to shove them along. This could only end in one of two ways. They would careen into an object at supralight speeds, causing a truly epic explosion, of the sort that could destroy solar systems, or they would get caught by the other end of the Mobius strip. At that end, they would catch the other side of the strip, and it would absorb that acceleration, slowing them down and letting them bounce off gently.

The exact mechanics of how it worked was beyond what we could determine from just a single example. We needed to know more information.

“Zia, decoding the alien data storage blocks has become your number one research project,” I said.

“Not to interrupt all the sciencing and stuff, but why did the aliens leave?” asked Sakura.

“They left with the knowledge of where Ganymed is, and how many assault drones we can launch,” I said. “They went to go get reinforcements.”

“So what are we doing in the meantime?”

“We have a massive manufacturing base and are producing materials stockpiles faster than we can build. Let’s put it to good use.”