The only thing that was a higher priority than building the machine that would let me go back to Selene was doing the things that would allow me to remain alive long enough to do it. Call it self-destructive if you like, but I just didn’t care about what was happening on the world where Laura wasn’t. It wasn’t where I belonged.
The longer I looked into building that machine, the more plausible it became. My understanding of electromagnetovitalics was shoddy at best, but as I started to do the math I realized that it didn’t need to be top-notch, firstly because there were a shocking number of holes that I could fill in with my knowledge of Earth-side physics, and secondly because I wasn’t actually being forced to invent the new machine the way Tersine had. I had the design for Tersine’s version burned into my memory, so for a lot of the design work I could just copy that, using my understanding to extrapolate backwards into the parts that had been out of sight.
The more difficult challenge was figuring out how to get the damn thing built at all. Tersine’s version had been enormous, no doubt containing thousands of pounds of copper wire and capacitor material, on top of the more exotic arrays of alloy necessary to extend the electric field into the fourth, vitalic, space. Modern machining technology meant I could reduce the size down substantially; but that still meant an array the size of an entire room. It ended up being my bedroom, in our apartment. I had to move a lot of stuff out, into the bathroom, into the living room, but like I said: nothing was higher in my priorities.
Then I started stealing. I told my professors that I was working on something, something of my own that I’d figured out that could advance our understanding, and that got me some access to our materials, but without a larger team or any coherent explanation of what I was doing, that access had strict limits. So I stole to make up for it. Every time I was allowed access into the supply closets I stole; every time I stayed late and there was nobody else left in the lab I stole. I stole cash from my parents to buy more materials online, and I stole access cards from my coworkers at the lab in order to disguise what I was doing. Over days and weeks I stole enough to rack up a substantial jail sentence if I ever got caught, and used it to transform my bedroom into a second laboratory.
Every wall and the ceiling was a network of intricately-woven copper wire. One corner was occupied by an enormous bank of batteries and capacitors, one that spent twenty-four hours every day increasing our electricity bill, just for the chance at one test run. Under the bed and by the door were the secondary nodes, big blocks of alloy wafer in the precise arrangements that instinct and computation told me would generate the proper EV field.
Yasmin asked a lot of questions and didn’t get answers. I didn’t really care what she thought, so I’d just brush her off by saying it was about work. Tangentially, I guess it was.
In theory, once it was on, it would work. One great electrical impulse would create a field surge encompassing the entire volume of the cage, and my mind, already attuned to the void by having twice passed through it, would be sent off. I didn’t fully understand how it all worked, but if it had sent me off one way it should have been able to send me off in the other. Theoretically.
The first test run worked on a timer. I didn’t want it to be too obvious that the machine was to blame if it worked; I figured they could ascribe my death to an aftereffect of the initial injury and let that be that. Ninety seconds from when I pressed the button to the energy pulse; I took off my crutches, then laid down on the bed with my arms folded over my stomach, as though I’d gone to sleep an hour earlier like I normally would have. My heart raced, not knowing when it was going to come; then the flash of light, and darkness.
I was out for two hours, according to the clock. No memory, no presence. It was as though I’d skipped over that span of time in its entirety. After weeks of effort, it felt like my life had ended for the second time, a pre-existing wound reached into and wrenched open even wider. I cried for most of the rest of that night.
But I wasn’t going to give up. The next night, I activated the machine from outside, this time using some borrowed instruments to figure out how well the actual, practical device lined up with my theoretical predictions. They were off, but not wildly so, which meant that I could start refining it. Gradually, over the course of days and days of further labor, I went through every single component and tweaked it, sometimes by millimeters, to bring its functioning more into line with the theoretical ideal. The second test run happened five days after the first.
This time I was out for two-and-three-quarter hours, and it didn’t quite feel like a complete blackout. I could feel something, a few seconds of awareness, though that awareness was limited to a vague noise and a sense of crushing pressure. Something was progressing. The process of measurement, calculation, and refinement, started all over again.
There was no way I could have kept what I was doing a secret from Yasmine. All it took was one time where I borrowed a pair of tweezers and forgot to return them, and suddenly we were having an awkward conversation about what the hell I was doing with my bedroom. I wished that I didn’t have to care, that she would just accept that I was going to be doing this and get out of my damn way, but her fucking concern just wouldn’t have let her leave it alone. I explained that it was something for my work, that she wouldn’t have been able to understand its purpose, and that it was dangerous for her if she messed around with it too much. That last part wasn’t even necessarily untrue.
The folks at the lab must have noticed something, too. They didn’t have the access to see what I was building, and thankfully nobody noticed that I’d been stealing, but the looks I sometimes got could only have been looks of pity. It was true that I was exhausted; balancing my work at the lab with my work on the machine meant burning my way through reserves I hadn’t even been aware of. The thing was that I didn’t care.
I only had one hope of getting back to Selene, of living the life I was meant to live, and that was the machine. I was walking through a dream, Yasmin and the lab and my home all just shallow, illusory mimics of my real life. The machine was the only way to wake up.
The same pattern repeated again and again: I would test the machine, cast myself into the void for just a little bit longer than the last time, only to return back to my broken, miserable body, more disappointed than ever. Then I would iterate with some practical tests, searching for which part of the project wasn’t living up to its greatest potential using every detector and neurological substitute I could think of. Finally, more modifications, sometimes merely adjusting the position of components and other times adding new pieces altogether, requiring yet more theft.
Returns soon diminished. The first round of improvements increased my black-out time by forty-five minutes. After that, the second round only upped it by thirty-five, then twenty-five, then twenty. Each round of improvements took longer as well, as I was forced to seek out new ways to test for flaws, spend even more time on ever-finer improvements, search further and further afield for more exotic materials.
Even four hours spent unconscious, outside of my body, wasn’t enough to send me back to Selene. I hallucinated, vivid visions of places I’d seen, of underground caverns and high Selenian spires, pacing through imagined battlefields as bullets and shrapnel passed through my body like insects flitting through fog. But I wasn’t back; those visions were just as much a dream as life on Earth had been. I started to wonder if it was impossible, if there was something more that I needed, an anchor point on the far side to catch me, or if there was some lower bound on the physical size of the machine that I hadn’t reached yet.
The lurking desperation started to catch up once again. Months had passed, so many months; it had been almost a full year since the first time I’d travelled to Selene, and I couldn’t repeat the same feat. If I needed a larger machine, it could take months or years to find a location and construct something on that time scale, months or years of wasting away, months or years for Laura to forget I’d ever existed. And if I needed something on the far side to catch me, then…
I cried, I slammed my fists against the walls, I neglected my physical therapy, I had entire days where I couldn’t be bothered to leave bed. There was no life for me on Earth, no future, no hope. Some things I contemplated in that span of days are things that I don’t ever want to have to think about. What saved me from a complete collapse was remembering my oath, my definition: always move forward, never stop. Having exhausted the intelligent ways of doing that, and shying away from the truly difficult ones, that left only the bull-headed idiot ways of doing it.
I said fuck my electricity budget, and started using the machine as often as I could. There was, to be fair, some small degree of logic to it beyond just mad desperation: it was possible that there was a biological aspect that I wasn’t understanding, that more frequent exposure would weaken the link between my mind and my brain in a way it hadn’t before. Four hours spent unconscious wasn’t something I could afford to do very often, of course, so I ended up using the machine roughly once every day, skipping over much of the night. If nothing else, it made sure I got a minimum amount of sleep each night instead of crying and cursing my own existence.
It was a desperate move, made by a woman clinging on to the very edge of hope. The sort of stupid, reckless, useless thing that signified the need for a total rethink of the whole priority system, starting over and reconsidering what was actually necessary and possible. And the crazy thing was, it worked.
I went through the motions one more time, my limbs feeling like they were made of lead, my thoughts swirling with doubt and fear and rage. Exhaustion was poisoning me, but I would never have been able to sleep without the machine. I tried to remember what number this was in the consecutive tests, five or six, and came up a total blank. Checking the electricity meter would probably answer that for me. Once I had it all set up and the timer going, I lurched across the room, nearly collapsing as a sudden muscular attack rendered me unable to balance myself. The mattress caught me, and gave me the leverage necessary to bring myself up into bed.
Time ticked down while I lay in bed, marinating in every awful decision that had led me to this. Dark thoughts of what I would do if I failed had become more and more common over the previous few days, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t run through a few of the familiar ones in those last few moments. Fortunately I didn’t have long with which to think before the machine popped to life and left me with no brain to think with.
The next thing I remember was pain. Being in all of those fights had gotten me used to pain, so used to it that I could identify the nature of the pain even while I was still totally blind, deaf, and paralyzed. There was a sharp blade hewing into the meat around my right elbow. I tried to thrash, but the void closed around me, holding me down. For some reason that got me in the mindset of what Alonhall had taught me, her techniques for fighting off telepathic attacks, so I focused through the paralysis. All of a sudden, the red void-dark turned into normal dark, and I could control my body again. I jerked my arm, trying to get it out of whatever was hurting it; when that failed to work, I instead used it as a pivot, swinging my whole torso around in one huge punch.
That punch hit home. There was a thud of knuckles against meat followed by a deep-voiced woman swearing. The pain vanished, soon to be replaced by the much less severe pain that results from someone rolling off of a table and falling onto the floor. Impact made me suck air into dry, inflexible lungs, which in turn reminded me that I did in fact have a body. My eyes flickered open and were almost immediately blinded by the dim light. Even still, knowing there was someone in the room trying to attack me, I stood up and placed my back against the table I’d been resting on.
Slowly, vision resolved. Standing immediately in front of me was a tall, powerfully built humanoid with milk-pale skin and a hairless, lumpen skull. She wore simple clothing, sewn-together scraps making a basic shirt and pants, and in one hand held the long, broad, lightly curved knife she’d been using to hew into me. I locked eyes with her, and she didn’t seem to have a choice about looking at me.
“Don’t try anything,” I said with a sneer, instinctually shifting to Blueroser. She almost definitely didn’t understand me, but my tone carried across. The stonewose—right, yes, that’s what those were called—dropped the knife, then backpedaled out through the front flaps of the tent in an absolute panic.
I was inside a tent. All around me were various jars, both ceramic and glass, as well as a rack full of various-sized knives, a ring of stones around a pile of ash in the back, and two high wooden folding tables, one of which I had just fallen off of. It was very high for a table, uncomfortably so, high enough that it would be almost unusable. Unless, of course, the intended user was substantially taller than I was.
I looked down.
It was me. The real me. Short and a little bit pear-shaped, athletic and soft, still wearing the same plain black pants and button-up shirt that I was pretty sure I’d been wearing when I left? It had been several months, my memory wasn’t great. I clamped my legs together, ran my hands through my hair, which hadn’t grown at all, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend the next minute crying. It didn’t matter that I had no idea where I was, that a stonewose had been going at me with a knife a moment earlier, none of it mattered. The machine had worked; I was where I was supposed to be.
Of course, just because I was having an emotional moment, that doesn’t mean that the world outside stopped moving. I just didn’t pay any attention to any of it until the moment that it decided to intrude upon my privacy. That moment came with the opening of the tent-flap, as it admitted a huge figure into the chamber.
She was massive, nearly seven feet tall and rippling with powerful muscles. Her eyes, black points in milk-pale skin, glared at me with a detached curiosity as she walked forward. Black leather boots crunched on the dirt alongside the tapping of the heavy steel glaive that she carried in one hand. A revolver clanked against her belt, partially concealed under the huge green overcoat that shrouded much of her form. Atop her head was a blood-red tricorne cap, marking her as the ultimate commander of all she surveyed.
The last time I’d seen her had been maybe nine months earlier, in Zrimash, when we had dueled for the fate of the continent. I had beaten her, my first-ever application of the blood-on-the-blade trick, and in so doing had earned a measure of respect. I’d used that respect to forge an alliance of convenience with her, one I’d used to wield her and her flesh-eating followers against a greater threat.
“Ikamja the Conqueror,” I said.
“Emma Farrier,” she replied. “You’re alive.”
“That I am.” I turned around, glancing at the table I’d been laying on top of. “Would you care to explain why you were trying to make a meal out of me?”