Quoted By:
>X: THE WHEEL [WHEN DID/WILL THIS START/END?]
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I dreamt of the wheel last night. I remember her glittering spokes and the low rumble of perpetual movement. Always clockwise. Always rigid. Always forward.
Her attention fell on me for only a second, and she told me this:
“The future does not yet exist. The present cannot be changed. But the past belongs to history. And history can always be revised.
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I remember less than I should. I notice it day by day. Hour by hour. The universe is taking far more than what it is owed.
Fifty-one years of censorship have grown into sixty. Memories of critical deployments fade. The most recent faces of my family. Slowly, tendrils of forgetfulness chew away at early adulthood – too clinical and procedural to be the gentle mellowing of age. For once, I am grateful for the thoughtless decades that I have spent in cryogenic reefersleep – the only buffer I have against slow grind of cosmic repossession.
MERRYGATE has been surprisingly sympathetic when I have discussed this trend her. Perhaps it is in her nature. Artificial intelligences are nothing but data; they understand the pain of forgetfulness even more keenly than we do.
But she also provided something more than sympathy. While the mathematics underlying FTL travel are horrifically complex, they remain pseudodeterministic. They do not permit interest. Fifty one years stolen equates fifty one years repaid: no more, no less. MERRYGATE was emphatic about this.
“There are two possibilities,” she said with a tone of gentle concern. “The phenomenon could be biological – a form of delayed-onset neural pruning caused by the initial causal discontinuity. The other – more radical possibility – invokes a physical explanation.”
I remember feeling a growing sense of foreboding as she continued.
“The jump coils were experimental, and the process of FTL travel forbids accurate timekeeping within a superluminal reference frame. The fifty-one year figure could be an underestimate. Perhaps by a considerable margin”
It all I culminated in a single, awful moment of realization. The Mizarians. Their surprisingly primitive computational technology. Their impressive – but not overtly militarized – industrial base. The fact that their star was eighty odd light years from sol.
It was unlikely. But it was possible. The original purpose of the FTL drive was to mitigate the first-strike advantage: to prevent a retaliatory strike from confronting an adversary with an unassailable, century-long head start. But the tempting conclusion of this logic is to strike even earlier: to punish before the crime is even committed. Before the criminal is even born.
