Coordinates

She was on her own for now.

Wietse knew he needed to re-establish contact to the spaceship, to his granddaughter, but his quantum grid was all out of whack. At least she was out of direct danger. But where was she going? Where was the ship taking her? The ship that held his granddaughter had moved safely out of the debrisphere, but was now traveling away from the planet's surface into the outer Van Allen belt. "Child, what are you doing?" Where is that blasted ship taking you?

Wietse looked once more at his handheld console. Tens of millions of new nodes. Ghost nodes! Nodes that should not exist, 'could' not exist.

What was happening? Someone was trying to take control over part of Wietse's grid. Had PUPR caught up with him technology wise? They were somehow projecting ghost nodes to lead him astray. PUPR couldn't pull off anything this advanced. But then, who could? The other important fractions apart from New Zion had been disbanded. But even before they were, the usage of owned quantum slicing by fractions other than PUPR had lacked any sign of the creative thinking that would be needed to hack a worldwide m-brane folding grid. at least to this extent. Even the SAGDA with their hoards of skilled hackers could not have pulled this off. They were smart kids, sure, but when confronted with the intricacies of M-Brane theory, their minds simply didn't seem to connect the dots in the way those dots connected for Wietse. So who ...?

Was it ...? Could it be ...? If none of the former or current 'Earth' fractions were capable, the people hacking into his grid had to be outside of Earth! Outside of his grid. Mars-One? Damn, could Mars-One have secretly developed its own M-Brane folding grid? They had started out as allies to PUPR her on earth. How much technology had PUPR shared with the aristocracy? With his little champion? If they had, if this was Mars-One, were they trying to rescue his granddaughter themselves?

"Encyclopedia: what is the current distance between Earth and the Planet Mars?"

The computing unit that Wietse had acquired just days before answered in the artificial polite tone that had already started to annoy Wietse quite a bit.

"The distance between Earth and Mars on the 16th of September of the year 2047 is approximately two and a half astronomical units."

Ok, convert to AU, this should do it. Use AU as the base unit of height and display in exponential notation.

"Done!"

As Wietse stared in disbelieve at his hand-held console, the height of the ghost nodes still didn't make much sense. All height parameters looked quite similar, but they just couldn't be correct. Wietse stared at the first height number displayed on his screen:

1,592426821e+13 AU"

"Impossible!", Wietse exclaimed as he put his two hands on his head and pulled his own hair.

"Sixteen trillion AU! Impossible, that is light years! Millions of light years. This is nonsense!"

Wietse once more adjusted the settings, this time setting the display units to mega light years.

251.8 M-LY

"Two hundred and fifty million light years from here! No way these readings are real! They can't be! Or can they?"

Wietse knew he had to get to the bottom of this. He knew he had once before greatly underestimated the size of M-branes. Could it be that …?

"Encyclopedia: provide a downloadable spherical medium granularity galaxy-centered 3D map with a radius of 400 million light years!"

"The requested map is being constructed. It shall be ready for download in one day, seven hours, forty-two minutes and twenty-two seconds. The expected file size will be seventy-five Terabyte", the friendly voice of the computing unit spoke.

"No time for that", Wietse mumbled. "Encyclopedia, abandon map generation!"

"Map creation aborted."

"Encyclopedia: provide a legacy REST-API to your astronomy data set!"

"Legacy REST-API enables and available. Please be advised that use of legacy REST-API interfacing is incompatible with AI-augmentation. Would you like to enable AI-augmentation mode instead?"

"No!" Wietse spoke agitated as he started fiddling with his handheld console.

Wietse had considered Mars-One might have developed their own quantum trinity grid. He had even considered they could be related to the strange creatures on the strange octapod cigar-shaped space vehicle that had abducted his granddaughter.

The coordinates had been out of this world. Not just Mars-One out of this world. Not even interstellar space travel out of this world if such a thing was possible. The coordinated were outside of the galaxy. "Way" outside of the galaxy. Now Wietse was about to see how far. Likely he was about to confirm that indeed these nodes where ghost nodes created to obfuscate what the attacker of his grid was doing. To conceal where they were working from. But Wietse knew better than to go with assumptions. Ass the old adage went: Assumptions were the mother of all fuckups, and with his granddaughter's life at stake, there was no room for fuckups here.

So, this ought to do the trick.

"Encyclopedia: Summarize astronomical object proximity for recent legacy REST-API interactions!"

"The coordinates fall inside of four-hundred and ninety-two galaxies. All located in the Perseus-Pisces supercluster. Forty-one percent of the coordinates fall inside of galaxies that are located in the A426 cluster, also known as the Perseus cluster. Nine percent of the coordinates fall inside galaxies that are located in the N507 cluster, Seven percent of the coordinates fall inside galaxies that are located in the A262 cluster ..."

As the computing unit kept summing up the locations of the coordinates, the thing that hit Wietse was the fact that all of the coordinates were apparently 'within' galaxies. With all the void of space that ghost coordinates could be in, these coordinates all were in places with 'something there'. Either the attacker was messing with Wietse, or M-Branes were huge. Much larger than anyone, including Wietse could have ever imagined. If these numbers were right. If no one was messing with his mind by spoofing these coordinates, then M-Brane folding could form the key for interstellar, no, intergalactic travel. Instant travel without the need to have any concerns about the speed of light being a show stopper. For a moment Wietse got excited by the prospect. This could be the dawn of mankind. From a species confined to its own little solar system, skipping the interstellar, jumping straight to intergalactic travel. Yes. But humanity was small-minded in general. Not that far, if at all, evolved from the conquistadors. Wietse shivered at the thought of releasing intergalactic conquistadors on the universe with his technology. He had seen his tech corrupted by PUPR. No humanity wasn't ready for any intergalactic dreams.

Then it hit Wietse. Intergalactic conquistadors! Not human! Who knew what kind of alien civilizations could exist in places as remote as the Perseus-Pisces supercluster. So many nodes in so many galaxies! Could this be an intergalactic empire akin to the colonial empires of old here on earth?

All of a sudden Wietse felt what had seemed godlike power slip through his fingers. Things started to add up in Wietse's mind. Somehow his grid had created an attack survive. It was under attack. Earth was under attack. No! It was bigger than that. If these coordinates were right, the whole galaxy could be the target of conquest for an intergalactic empire 'this' big.

His granddaughter would have to fend for herself for a bit.

If he was right about this, Wietse stood like a single sentinel at the gates of the galaxy facing an armada of unimaginable size.

Not just the faith of his family lay in his hands now. Not just the faith of the planet for that matter.

No, unless he would stop whoever it was that was attacking 'his' grid, the whole galaxy, even the whole Virgo supercluster might fall prey to this intergalactic empire of alien conquistadors.

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Cover art by Keith Draws