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Life, Liberty, & Pursuit of Justice

By: hammingbyrd7



Copyright 2004 hammingbyrd7

Chapter 1.

"A little lower Matt... Lower still... Ah, that's right, right down to my tailbone. Perfecto! Don't stop until I say stop, and I might not say stop for a long while..."

Matt and Kathy were lying in bed in their tesseract, a thousand miles below the lunar surface. It was bedtime after a very busy Friday, six weeks after their return to Earth. Kathy had taken off her bathrobe after her shower, and was lying sprawled out and relaxed, getting a much-needed backrub. Matt was massaging the base of her spine with one hand, and gently caressing her buttocks and the backs of her thighs with the other.

"You were so cute, Kathy, flying through the air like that! You should have seen the expression on your face! My compliments for not jumping to avoid hitting the mat. Having the entire dojo see you teleport would have created quite a scene..."

"Laugh it up, big boy! Sensei Tabata is going to kick our butts Monday night, when he gets back from Japan. Having us learn both karate and tai-kwon-do were reasonable ideas, even the grueling schedule of six 3-hour workouts a week was okay. But your challenge to Tabata was insane! We may have Olympic bodies, but we're no match yet even for his top students. He is absolutely going to kick both our butts. And don't think us having our wedding five days later will make any difference, not with that guy!"

"It wasn't insane, dearest. Tabata really is thrilled to have us as students. He told me he first guessed we were professional dancers; we both have such great balance and reflexes. But it has been more than a month now since Portugal got its ultimatum from Eternal Jihad. We need the accelerated training, and the challenge was the only way I could get Tabata to do it. Besides, I have a secret weapon that just might let us hold our own against our sensei's tender mercies..."

"Matt! We absolutely cannot do teleport-fighting in the dojo! I know we've been practicing it in the Gym, and we both know how deadly effective it is, but"

"No no, that's not what I mean! I've been doing a lot of research on the mezzanine. I've learned quite a bit. I have a lot to tell you."

On their first day in the tesseract, Matt and Kathy had both noted with interest that the Manufacturing room was the only cube out of the eight with an internal second level. "Yes.... I've noticed you've been spending a lot of time on the mezzanine's northwest corner. But Matt! As far as I can tell, that second level, particularly the northwest corner, is the operational control center of the tesseract. I've been reluctant to explore it..."

"Oh? Why?"

"You have to ask!? What if I accidentally took the air temperature up to stellar levels, or down to absolute zero? What if I changed the atmosphere to 100% chlorine, or bathed everything with neutron radiation? What if I flipped a switch and increased gravity by a million times? I'd be a thin puddle on the floor in microseconds, dead before I'd got a chance to correct my mistake... You're a braver man than I am, Gunga Dinn..."

"Well, that's the key point right there! You're not a man at all. Ah, you women are all alike! Do you know what your problem is? You talk a good line, but when you get right down to it..." Holding Kathy down on the base of her spine, Matt's other hand came up from Kathy's inner thighs, and he started caressing her vulva. "The bottom line is, you have no balls..."

"Matt!!! I... Ah.....  Oh, Matt..." All conversation ceased for the next hour...

Matt sighed in contentment. He was lying on his back, and Kathy was curled up by his side. Her hand was resting on his breast, and the warmth of her body felt delightful. Kathy leaned over and kissed his cheek. "You masher!" she whispered affectionately. "You have just molested the uncommon woman. I guess that makes you the uncommon masher!"

"Huh?"

"Oh! The Uncommon Woman. It's a phrase used to describe women from Mount Holyoke College. Mary Lyons' phrase, I think. She founded the college in 1831 as a school for girls, as a seminary at first. The word uncommon had a slightly different meaning back then..."

"The uncommon masher... I like it! A title to strike fear into the heart of Sensei Tabata when we spar in three days..."

"So what's your big secret, oh great one? Oh you with the functioning testes..."

"Ah, that does feel exquisite... But I won't be able to think enough to talk... if you keep moving... ah... your fingers around... inside... my scrotum... like that... Ah..."

A half hour later, Kathy had finished her scrotal explorations, and was caressing the skin surface of the sac with a feather-light touch, quietly listening to Matt's deep breathing. She whispered "Asleep?"

Matt opened his eyes. "No, just drifting... Oh Katherine, I love you so much! So much of what I am is you. Thank you for becoming my wife. As the creature would say, great gratitude and appreciation!"

"I love you back, Matthew. With all that I am... Shirley picked up on it within a week of my working for you. She really is empathic, well deserving of her reputation for correctly predicting who will go out with whom. She sat down for lunch with me over a month ago, as confessed that you and I had totally destroyed her predictive methods. She said all her indicators were telling her we were already married, and she knew we had just met a few days previously. She's very insightful... I'm glad she's coming to our wedding. She really has turned into a good friend... Being married officially will be so nice! I really like our new church, and I've got a burning desire to express how much I love you in front of all of our new friends... Ah, I guess I'm drifting too. But I want to know! What's your secret weapon against our sensei?"

"Well, you're quite correct about the mezzanine's northwest corner. It really is the operational control center. There's a great user interface there for someone like me who doesn't know what he's doing. The creature was so thoughtful. Remember how we both noticed our first night here that, contrary to my warning, the showers will not let you turn the water to boiling hot? This whole tesseract is filled with safety interlocks. If I wanted to increase gravity here by even 10%, I'd have to present my case to the operations sequencer. And it might well reject my request if it didn't have enough merit. It's not sentient, not a creature. Just one hell of an interactive computer program. Adaptive logical reasoning far beyond anything I've ever imagined..."

"And you've kept this a secret for six weeks!? You fiend! Now I want to play there too!"

"Awake enough to want to play now?"

"Yep! Let's walk over. I could use stretching out a bit."

Matt and Kathy got up and put on their bathrobes, and walked first south from their Bedroom to Manufacturing, then halfway up the spiral staircase and across a short bridge to the east side of the mezzanine. They then circled around to the northwest corner.

"I've learned more about gravity and spacetime over these last few months than I ever would have thought possible," said Matt. "Here, before I show you what some of these controls do, and especially my secret-weapon control, let me test you on something." Matt moved his hand behind his back, out of Kathy's view. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

Kathy looked thoughtful for a moment. "I'm not sure. Can you spread them out more? Thanks... Three, I think... Now two. Now four. Your right, I've noticed this ability within me before. Having firm confidence before jumping that I wouldn't be colliding with loose furniture, knowing where you were in the tesseract by just thinking of each room until I could sense your presence. I assume you have this gift too. It's like an inner vision, or maybe a better description would be inner hearing. Have you learned how it works?"

"A little. It's the gravitational entanglement of our consciousness. It works like a bat's echolocation; tied in with visual memory. I think our ability to teleport starts with our mind echo scanning for the desired location, echo scanning with folded-space gravitons. When it finds a good, unique match between our current location and the focus of our visual memory, we have the ability to concentrate the space fold, overlapping the two distant 3-D points in 4-D, exchanging our body positions, and then releasing the fold. It's kind of like having two distant dots on a sheet of paper, and then folding the paper so the two dots touch. This is why we can jump so fast in teleport fighting. We've both gotten up to better than three jumps a second. If our destination is already in view, the echo feedback is superb! No normal human could keep up with punches, kicks, and elbow strikes coming in from random directions that fast. But to jump from here to Earth, it takes a minimum of a second, longer if the visual memory isn't super sharp. If the visual lock isn't good enough to uniquely identify the destination, the mind just can't figure out how to fold the space, and we go nowhere. We have to be a little careful. If an enemy realized how this works, they could set a trap by destroying an old location, and building a set-up which might fool us into jumping into something deadly..."

"This is fascinating, Matt. Seriously. It ties in with some ideas I have about all the closets and cabinets here in the tesseract, running up over 45 feet to the ceiling, with no ladders to reach them. I'll explain later. But since we're not teleport-fighting Tabata, how does this tie in with your secret weapon?"

"It has to do with the joining of space and time. We tend to think of the two as separate concepts, but I think the creature just saw spacetime as one construct. There are even books on Earth about this, about relativity, about how a light-year of distance is the same thing as a year of time multiplied by the square root of negative one. Frankly, I just don't get it. But the creature certainly did, and the operational sequencer has been trying to teach me how this works for weeks. There are some key differences between tunneling in space and tunneling in time. Time provides the base for all the spatial dimensions, all the spacetimes in the multiverse use it as their foundation. To tunnel through time is a dangerous business, with the adversary loose in some spacetimes. It potentially opens up avenues for invasions. The entity who built the tesseract loved us enough to take the risk, to time-jump us back to the start of our escalator journey. Just using the fourth spatial dimension to jump within our own 3-D spacetime is harmless. To jump from one spacetime to another, you have to move in all 11 spatial dimensions. We don't have this ability. With the adversary around, it would be suicidal anyway. Those jumps create permanent tears in space, ones the adversary is sure to find. Jumping in and out of the tesseract is safe, by the way. Seven of the cubes here are not exactly part of our spacetime, but they don't belong to any other spacetime either. The creature called them artificial constructs of folded space. It's an exception to the rule, I guess..."

"The poor creature. What a horrible burden it had, suffering billions of years of loneliness, when companionship was only a jump away. The temptations must have been incredible..."

"Yeah... It's inspiring to think of its caring love surviving through that hell... It left us a note in the operations log, apologizing for the rough traveling we had in the escalators. The creature was expecting a well-equipped expedition to make the journey, not two unprepared people. After all the efforts to design new human gene sequences for teleporting, it was horrified to realize only two unprepared people answered its call for help, and that we might die of thirst. It did the best it could. Each sink addition was done one at a time to minimize detection, but they still carried a slight risk of adversary invasion. It didn't feed us. It was hoping our hunger would encourage us to make the trip as quickly as possible. When it added the fourth sink, our luck ran out. A tiny bit of the adversary penetrated to one of the landing pads. At the end of our journey, when a hexagonal access tube had to be attached to the bottom of the escalator well, that point and the adversary's existing pinpoint penetration allowed the adversary to echolocate the escalator well accurately, opening the way for a full-scale invasion. We got out just in time. The creature apologized again and again in its note, saying that it would have had to sacrifice us if the adversary was about to make it to our spacetime. I'm so glad we make it, for its sake as well as ours. It would have broken its heart to have us die from its efforts..."

Kathy moved next to Matt and hugged him fiercely. Matt hugged back, and they both just stood there for a moment, not saying anything.

"It's an honor to carry the memory of the creature, Matt. A real privilege."

"Yes... I feel the same way... There was no danger from the sphere, by the way. The log called it a gravitational echo thread, just a combined visual-tactile-auditory illusion. We could talk to the creature because our consciousness had already been adapted to gravitational entanglement. Normal humans would have seen and heard nothing..."

"And now" continued Matt, moving over to a control console, "Let me show you my secret weapon." Matt pointed to a display with two numbers on it. The first number was 1 displayed in white, the second number was 16,777,216 displayed in orange. There was a small horizontal level underneath the display, set to the far right.

"Okay" said Kathy, staring at the display. "What am I looking at?"

"I'll give you a demo in a moment. It'll be the first time for me to try this too. But first, I want you to think, could you jump into my office in Chicago now?"

"Sure. But wearing just this bathrobe? It's after midnight on a Saturday morning, but could there be a janitor there?"

"Oh, sorry! That's not what I mean. Echo locate my office for a second, but don't actually make the jump."

Kathy looked thoughtful for a moment, and then said "It was no problem. There was no one in the room, by the way."

"Try south to the Entrance hall next."

"...No problem."

"Try the other end of the tesseract, somewhere in the Living room."

"...No problem."

"Now, watch this!"

Matt switched the level from the maximum right to the maximum left position. The display changed, the white 1 becoming a green 4096, the 16,777,216 also becoming 4096, but keeping its orange color.

"Kathy, try to echo locate my Chicago office now. I'll try too."

Kathy looked distressed after a moment. "My gosh, Matt. I can't echo anything! I feel completely blind!"

"Try the Entrance hall."

"...Nothing. This feels horrible..."

"Try the Living room..."

A brief smile appeared on Kathy's face. She popped out of view, and returned a second later. "What a relief! The Living room jump was no trouble at all. I didn't realize how fond, how attached I've gotten to my jumping ability. This is your secret weapon, Matt, to limit our ability to teleport? What's going on?"

"Here's what I've learned. Tearing time to tunnel through it and time travel is dangerous. The temporary tear runs the risk of an adversary invasion. But dilating or contracting time is harmless. It happens all the time in nature. Just being in a different gravity well will dilate time. The surface of the Earth is in a deeper gravity well than where we are now, in the core of the moon. Thus time is running very slightly faster here than at the surface of the Earth. The deeper the gravity well, the more time dilation, the slower the clocks run. Now, take a look at this control. Remember the old display, when the level was still on the right side? The operations sequencer calls that the interface mode. The top number on the display used to be 1. It's the ratio of how fast time is moving in the seven folded-space cubes of the tesseract, compared to the Entrance hall and the rest of our spacetime. This bottom number represents the ratio of time movement of the Entrance hall to all the closed closets and cabinets and refrigerator here. This other extreme position we're in now is called balance mode. The green 4096 means time here is moving 4096 times more quickly than it is now on Earth, and the orange 4096 means the time in the cabinets is moving 4096 times more slowly than Earth's..."

Kathy stood silently for several moments. "The implications are staggering, Matt... We have all the time in the world on our hands now, don't we? Our Saturday dojo session starts at 1:30 pm, over 13 hours from now, Earth time. What's that in tesseract time, if we run in balance mode?

"Just over six years..." Matt said, after a moment. "We have six years to prepare for our next dojo class... My explanation from the sequencer went something like this: We are using level-one time dilation technology, the most basic kind. It can contract or dilate time by a factor of two for every dimension, 11 spatial dimensions plus one time dimension result in two to the twelfth power, or 4096. Then there's a neat twist to split the plus and minus directions into two pseudo dimensions, east versus west, up versus down, backwards versus forwards in time, so the final maximum temporal gradient possible is 4096 squared, or 16,777,216. This particular tesseract is designed to operate with the maximum gradient present between the closed closets and the rest of the seven rooms, though I gather other design choices are possible. When you left my watch in the refrigerator for a minute our first breakfast here, time didn't exactly stop. About 4 microseconds passed by for the watch. But of course we couldn't see that. The same would not have been true for the wing box in the Entrance hall, but we never bothered to test it. The Entrance hall and the rest of our spacetime are not touched by any of this."

"And why can't I jump outside of the seven cubes now?" asked Kathy.

"Remember how we couldn't jump in the temporal tunnel when we went back in time? Our echo gravitons were being defocused by the time dilation gradients. The same is true now. Natural microscopic gradients from relativity aren't a problem, but according to the sequencer, a ratio of less than 0.99 or greater than 1.01 will be impossible to jump across, and the current ratio is 4096. You'll find the 4 doors and the top and bottom stair entrances to the Entrance hall are now locked. Trying to walk across such a sharp temporal gradient would be fatal. If you ever want to leave the remaining seven cubes, come here first, and put the tesseract back in interface mode. Here, let me start a display to show the movement of Chicago time..." Matt typed a few seconds on the controls. A display of 00:12:19.779 appeared. The last digits, Chicago time in milliseconds, began to increment once every 4.096 seconds of local tesseract time.

"Gosh Matt, this is a lot to think about... Can we jump back to bed now? If you're agreeable, let's leave the time control in balance mode for now. Having six years to train for tomorrow's class is mind boggling, but my gut reaction is that we should do it. I just need some time to absorb all the impacts this will have on our lives..."

Matt and Kathy jumped back to bed and turned out the lights. Kathy spent over an hour just silently thinking while being lovingly caressed by Matt, before finally drifting off to sleep. From an Earth-time perspective, she went to sleep in less than a second.

Chapter 2. 

Chicago time: 02:20:44.384

Tesseract subjective time: 1 year anniversary of balance mode, contest day!

"Thanks for making breakfast, Kathy. These new berries were superb! Up for starting the contest soon?" Matt was speaking in English today. Over the last year, he and Kathy were making intensive efforts to learn Arabic. They were making great progress, and had recently switched to conversing in it every other day. But today was contest day, and Matt was glad that it fell on an English day. Kathy would not have cared. She was the better linguist by far, and was now close to fluency in Arabic.


Life, Liberty, & Pursuit of Justice



"It's already started. This is the first time I've served non-Earth food. It was a little difficult for me to be sure about this, but I think the genetic-coding for these berries comes from the creature's home planet, the one where it was constructed."

"Wow!" said Matt thoughtfully. "Food from 7 billion years ago and another spacetime. Definitely worth a few points. We could make a fortune selling these on Earth. They are like a cross between a raspberry and a peach, with a delicate hint of whipped cream. A lot of subtle flavors, I really like them."

"It'll be a challenge to score this contest, everything is so subjective. Do you want to go next, Matt? Should we take turns with our Wows?" Several weeks ago, Matt had proposed a one-year anniversary contest, a challenge to Kathy to see who could come up with the best new Wow ideas for ways of using the tesseract technology. Kathy had enthusiastically agreed. Matt and Kathy would both contest and judge, an added challenge to their competitive natures. 

"Well, to be honest Kathy, I have only one Wow to present, but it's a humdinger! How about you?"

"I've got a basketful. Okay, why don't I go through mine, and let you go last? Great! Okay, for my next Wow, watch this!"

Kathy stood up with Matt, and looked up high to one of the top Kitchen cabinets. She then teleported almost 40 feet up, her head inches from the ceiling, and two feet away from the top cabinet. She started to fall from gravity, but kept re-jumping to her target position.

Initially she fell about one foot before re-jumping, making four jumps a second. But as time went on, the jump rate increased to more than ten, then to more than fifteen a second, Kathy falling less than an inch between jumps. Her image began to flicker; Matt was getting dizzy trying to focus on her. Then Kathy said "Nuts!" and jumped down to stand by Matt's side. "I could do this yesterday!"

Matt waited a few seconds, then reached over and hugged her. "I love you" he whispered in her ear, and then he softly began to kiss her earlobe.

Kathy hugged Matt back. "My dear husband, I love you too... I have a sharp memory from a year ago; lying with you just after you put the tesseract in balance mode. I was wondering what impact six years of isolation would have on our marriage. Wondering what the danger signs would be. I figured if we started to quarrel a lot, that would be a danger sign. But we never have, not once. And it's not that we have everything. The tesseract is wondrous, and we have tremendous liberty to do what we want, but the human mind can always find something to complain about... I love you, Matt. And I love how you're always so gentle with me..." Kathy gave Matt a fierce hug. "Ha! Let me try again!"

Kathy teleported back to her high position. She flickered for a second, and then suddenly her image was stable, floating in midair. She opened the high cabinet, and called out "This one's full of wines, looks like some good vintages too." Kathy calmly floated to several different cabinets, calling out their contents. She then smiled at Matt in delight, folded her legs underneath her in a lotus position, and calmly floated to the floor, extending her legs just in time to catch an upright standing position.

"How in the world did you do that?" asked Matt quietly.

"It's an offshoot of our ability to teleport. I kept thinking the creature had to know what it was doing, putting all these cabinets up so high. I finally figured it out. I'll teach you how to do it. In a nutshell, don't release the space fold after you teleport. Keep jumping to a mid-air destination point at first, that's how I practiced. After a while, the mind is trained to just hold the fold, the feeling is one of floating in water. Next is the really neat part. I call it differential teleporting. Instead of desiring a destination point, desire instead a velocity from your current position. The mind picks up on this, and you can push around the space-fold you're standing on. It's a really neat feeling. It does take quite a bit of concentration at first, but I've got a hunch it'll be as natural as walking with enough practice."

"A major-league Wow, Kathy. Great work!"

"Will you head south to the Gym with me? My next Wow is related to this."

Matt was surprised to see the Gym ceiling was only about 15 feet above his head. The quarter of the room they had set aside for their martial arts training was now equipped for table-tennis. Matt followed Kathy up the spiral staircase into a new room. Kathy said "I figured, why should the Manufacturing cube be the only one with a second level? The entire floor here, as well as the walls and ceiling, are padded. Even the staircase is padded. With the 30 feet ceiling, I feel we still have enough height to practice differential-teleport fighting. You know, 30 kicks within one leap, just like in The Matrix and all those funny impossible Bite the Dragon's Tail Gung Fu movies. Let's see if we can do it without laughing too hard..."

"This is really nice, Kathy. A great idea!"

"Next we head west to Manufacturing. The rest of my Wows are there."

Kathy led Matt to the Medical bay on the main level of Manufacturing. Kathy had set up two diagnostic/operations couches, and had them running in full stand-by mode. Matt turned to Kathy for an explanation, and was surprised to see her snap her body into a very well executed roundhouse kick, targeting a metal cabinet with full force, equal to what they both had been using to break pine boards in the Gym. "Ou.....ch!" cried Kathy. Matt turned back to the couches, Kathy had already teleported in mid cry, and a full body diagnostic scan had already begun. After a few seconds, the couch released everything but her left foot.

"Our days here are peaceful and joyous, Matt, but we both know it's the calm before the storm. Our days of reckoning and confrontation with Eternal Jihad are coming. I want you to practice this too. For any serious pain, make it instinctive to teleport to your medical couch. We might get caught in a booby-trap or an explosion someday, and this reflex could save our lives." The couch released her foot, and Kathy stood up smiling and at ease.

"A very thoughtful idea. Bravo, numerous Wow points."

"My next Wow is right next to here. Move over with me to main power generation. Thanks. Remember a few months ago we were wondering if there were any limits to the manufacturing arrays? Would I one day run out of fresh spinach leaves, or could we create millions of cubic kilometers of water and air and start terraforming Mars? I have the answer, and it is that terraforming Mars is peanuts. This system is tied to a huge black hole at the center of our galaxy, many millions of stellar masses. When I order up my spinach leaves, the black hole loses a few spinach leaves worth of matter. I've tried to get the operations logic to explain to me how this works, and have failed miserably. You and I have both have been trying to study quantum mechanics, to get a dim understanding of how some of the tesseract technology might work. But this is something completely different, something the log calls singularity mechanics, a field of science totally unknown to Earth. The creature left a few notes in the operations log about it. It was at a loss for words to describe how this worked. It finally decided to call our power source a singularity cascade, using a dark-matter / dark-energy resonance pump for entropy reduction, but then it apologized that this wasn't the right description."

"I've now got three Wows left to show, all by the primary time controls. Jump with me there?" Kathy held Matt's hand, and an instant later they were both at the northwest corner of the mezzanine. "Thanks. For my next demo, I need to move the tesseract slightly away from balance mode, just for a moment or two. Is this okay with you?"

"Sure" said Matt. "Actually, for my Wow, I have to put the tesseract in full interface mode to show it, maybe for about 10 minutes. Do whatever you like..."

Kathy typed a few keystrokes on the console. "Try teleporting anywhere in the tesseract, Matt, even a foot away from where you are now."

Matt frowned after a moment. "Absolute zero. My teleport ability is totally shut down."

"Take a look at this console. I have our time dilation ratio with Earth sweeping from 4096 to 3900, on a 10 millisecond cycle time. It's defocusing our echo gravitons. Remember our first night after returning to Earth? I was wondering what kind of crib we could use for a baby who could teleport. Once our future child is here, we can all give up teleporting until we can teach the child not to teleport in public. Not a perfect solution, but at least a doable one." Kathy typed a few more keystrokes. Matt felt his ability to echo locate the rest of the tesseract return, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Kathy continued typing...

"There, I've just implemented my next to last Wow. The switch in the wing box in the Entrance hall has just been rerouted to here. If it's flipped, it will lock all the entrances to Manufacturing, bring the Manufacturing room to interface mode with the Entrance Hall, and then unlock the south door of Manufacturing to provide access from the Entrance Hall. This way, neither of us can ever be locked out of the tesseract, even if it's running in balance mode."

"And now" continued Kathy, "my last Wow. This is just a concept. I haven't implemented any of this, but take a look at the display here. It's a plan to turn the Poolroom into a Prison. Each cell can be individually controlled for temporal gradient, and will be accessible only by teleporting. We can get our initial visual locks during construction. This sensor here would be in each room. It's a safety feature so we can't get locked in. If it senses either of us in the room, it'll automatically run the cell's time in synch with Manufacturing. The design is modular, if we decided that a 15 ft by 15 ft cell with 8 ft ceilings is not inhumane, we could have up to 45 separate cells. We could slow time down, put someone on ice, so to speak, or speed things up. In one week of Earth time, hand someone a sentence of 4,096 weeks, 78.5 years, a lifetime. It's depressing to think about this, I know. I don't want terrorists in my dear home at all, and I hate the thought of punishing people, but we are heading to war against Eternal Jihad, and we might need this.... Forgive me, Matthew, this really is depressing. I can see it in your face too. I didn't mean to take the fun out of contest day... Will you pet me? Nothing too sexy... Please?"

"I'd like to very much. How about our favorite couch in the Living room?" A short time later, Matt was sitting on the couch with Kathy's head in his lap. After dimming the lights a bit, Kathy had kicked off her shoes and was resting comfortably. Matt was using his right hand to caress the underside of her left breast and ribcage, and was using his left hand to pet her head from temple to ear. Neither had spoken for quite a while. Kathy's breathing was deep and relaxed, but her eyes were wide open.

"I remember you holding me just like this Kathy, our positions reversed, the very first day we met. I felt that I had woken up from fainting being cradled by an angel. And I was right..."

Kathy smiled up at Matt, remaining silent for a moment. Then she asked "You don't blame me, do you, for being reluctant about taking on Eternal Jihad?"

"Blame you? Oh no! I've been doing a lot of reconsidering about this myself. What we're planning, being vigilantes, taking the law into our own hands, goes against all my training as a lawyer. And it's not just going against the letter of the law. I actually believe in what I was taught. There's a damn good reason for separating the powers of the prosecution and the judge. Both functions are noble and just, but there's an incredible conflict of interest between the two. We're assuming both functions, prosecuting a war against Eternal Jihad, and judging and punishing the murderers we find... God can do it. He is a perfect and merciful judge, as well as being the offended party, the plaintiff. And God has a good case. Our sins are real. God has every right to be offended with us... But how can we judge someone not guilty by insufficient evidence, without feeling like failures, that as prosecutors we failed in our discovery to find enough evidence? It's inherently a tremendous conflict of interest..."

"We've talked a lot about revealing our abilities to our government, having us focus just on warfare, letting the government judge the people we catch. My gut still says not to do it. I think our government is mostly filled with good, honest people, but I just don't want to trust a bureaucracy to make the right calls on this. They might fear us, and fear our children..."

"I agree, Kathy...."

"It's a war, not a court case. The standards have to be different... My gosh, Matt, that's it! In warfare, prosecutor and punishing judge are intrinsically the same job! To prosecute a war is to punish the enemy. To go to war at all, we must do both..."

"That's an incredibly perceptive point, Kathy. Obvious now that you've made it... Very profound...." Matt bent down and gently kissed Kathy's forehead.

Kathy nestled her head against Matt in response, silent for a while. She then briefly petted Matt's hand and said, "Eternal Jihad is tearing the European Union apart over this question of warfare. France capitulated without a shot being fired, releasing its few suspects, and shutting down its terrorist court. Spain balked, and last year Barcelona was the result. Their upcoming elections will be diagnostic on how things are evolving... And now Portugal is under the gun. Why is it so difficult for Europe to unite and stand against this horror?"

"I think because Europe is so secular. They see Eternal Jihad as a political movement with a religious focus. It's really just the opposite, a religious organization with a political agenda. Their trademark phrase "You love life, we love death!" is not a political statement. It's a religious statement. Europe is still searching for a political compromise, but they'll never find it. Eternal Jihad won't stop until their caliph is ruler of the world. Their current focus against the Jews in the Middle East is just a convenient place to park their hate for now. History is filled with injustices, but that's no excuse for fighting your grandfather's war. They fight from religious zeal. They're telling the truth, their hate makes them crave the death. No compromise will be acceptable to them..."

"But I don't want to hate, Matthew! To the very core of what I am, I don't want to hate! These monsters killed close to three thousand children in Barcelona last year, intentionally targeting them, an absolute monstrosity, and I still don't want to hate them. I want to stop them with a passion, but hate will eat my soul... How do I fight terrorism, without sinking into its hate?"

Matt paused for a long moment before answering. "The question becomes, how to make a stand, and still forgive. I think the answer is, by not enjoying the pain and suffering and loss of life we will someday inflict on these terrorists. Many years in the future for us, perhaps a few months in the future for them. Never take our stand against them outside of the context of a tragedy, Kathy. They're still God's children, though horribly eaten up by hate. It is just and appropriate to resist evil. I guess I disagree with the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus gave an unqualified command not to resist evil. The main problem of not resisting evil is that people's lives get trashed. If someone strikes your cheek, offer the other cheek. If someone flies a plane into your north tower, do not forbid them to fly a second plane into your south tower. If someone is raping your nine-year old daughter, do not forbid them to go on and rape your six-year old daughter. It's absurd! I accept Jesus as my Redeemer, but an unqualified command not to resist evil is absurd! The closest I can come to grasping it is to frame my resistance in tragedy, not hating my enemies, asking God's understanding that my conscience, my core understanding of right and wrong, is compelling me to make a stand. The Sermon on the Mount puts forgiveness versus the resistance of evil at the opposite ends of a decision. But I think the decision to forgive or to hate can be quite independent of the decision to capitulate or to make a stand..."

"Yes!" said Kathy, "and thus a Christian response to unfairness would be to forgive, but then make a second decision on whether to resist based on... On what?"

"There's no set answer to that. Just be proactive, not reactive. If you have a set response, and somebody strikes your cheek, your reaction might be to turn the other cheek. Or maybe you're following the rule of an eye for an eye, and your reaction is to strike back. Or maybe your reaction is, if you strike me once, I'll strike you twice. Sounds like a great deterrent, but it's positive feedback for a hate cycle. If you're proactive and somebody is unfair to you, your response is: Anything you want it to be! If the issue is important enough and the cause is just, you make a stand, otherwise in love you subordinate your desires to your neighbor's, as a gift."

Kathy sat up and kissed Matt. "Yes. I understand what you're saying, and I agree. In essence, you and I are one in this. Thank you for your thoughts and guidance. This talk has helped me a lot."

"I think you've helped me as much as I've helped you. I feel more at peace with our mission now than I have in months." Matt bent over, rested his head against Kathy's breast, and sighed.

Kathy snuggled with Matt for quite a while, their petting drifting in and out of sexual, but remaining playful and unfocused. They finally broke for a late lunch, and then continued to the Manufacturing room for Matt to present his side of the contest.

"This is so neat, I can't wait to show you" Matt said, as he walked with Kathy to the southwest corner of the mezzanine.

"You've figured this section out? Congratulations. I never could make sense out of all the joysticks here..."

"It was a lucky accident for me to guess what this is all about... I've been practicing in demo mode, because of the time gradients between here and Earth, but let me run in interface mode for..." Matt was typing rapidly on a console "an override of 10 minutes, starting NOW."

"Wow!" said Kathy, "I just echoed one of my old dorm rooms at Mount Holyoke. It feels so nice to be part of the universe again!"

"Now pay attention. Think of this display here as a graviton-based window. Portal creation starts just outside the tesseract. Zipping up to the surface... There, a real time view of the lunar surface. Nice craters, a bit bright in the sunlight... Now zipping to Earth... That big circle to the right is symbolic for the sun, the system auto-jumps to schematic for objects when the brightness gets too high... Slowing down... Here we are about 10,000 miles from Earth.... You can see dawn breaking over the Atlantic.... About 1,000 miles away now, I thought I would try for New York City... Entering the atmosphere..." Kathy noted how adept Matt was at operating the scanner, his hands in motion among several different joysticks and trackballs....

"There it is, the New York skyline from 100,000 feet... Now 10,000 feet... I'm heading for the Bank of New York building, on Park Avenue.... Passing through the roof... Humph, lobbies, offices, where are the goodies? Ah, here we are, the safe deposit boxes. That'll do. Let me rotate the window to see the outside of the boxes. It's totally dark in the vault now, but I can illuminate with echo gravitons... Video cameras will detect nothing... Box 607, let's try that. I'm slipping the window directly into the box. Let's see what's in here. Looks like some deeds, a few coins... And if we need an even closer inspection, watch while I engage the spatial fold!"




Life, Liberty, & Pursuit of Justice



Matt keyed a master switch, then reached his hand directly into the display window, and pulled out a gold coin. "My gosh! This is unbelievable!" said Matt, staring at the coin. He was totally oblivious to the look of absolute shock on Kathy's face. "It's a $20 double-eagle, from Carson City. And the date is 1870! This is so neat! Look Kathy, at the very bottom of the reverse, just above and to the right side of the letter N in TWENTY, that tiny cc stands for the Carson City mint. I used to dream about owning a coin like this when I was a kid. The official name for this coin is the $20 Liberty Gold, but everybody calls them the double-eagle, with 0.9675 troy ounces of gold. They were minted starting in 1850. But the first ones from Carson City were minted in 1870. Heck, the city itself was founded just twelve years before, in 1858, named after the Wild West hero Kit Carson. This coin is in extra fine condition. You can see touches of wear, but that's what you can expect. It's part of their history. These gold coins actually circulated in the Old West. I wonder how many saloon drinks this coin bought in its life? This particular coin is so rare and sought after; it's worth at least $100,000 now, no kidding... It's a shame it's wasting its life in a deposit box. This coin deserves to be held daily by someone who can appreciate its beauty and history..." Matt motioned to drop the coin into his shirt pocket.

"Matthew!!!" shouted Kathy in indignation.

Just then a ding sounded from the console. Matt had set up a 20 second warning for when temporal control would re-engage balance mode. "Oops!" said Matt. He carefully placed the coin back in its original position within the box. Ten seconds later, the tesseract was back in balance mode, and the display portal collapsed to a blank screen.

As he pulled them off his fingers, Kathy noticed for the first time that Matt had covered his fingertips in a clear plastic. "I thought it would be fun to play at being Bonnie and Clyde for the demo. Finding that treasure was a real fluke though, totally unrehearsed..."

"Matt, we could have walked through that portal, couldn't we? Let the portal take us to where we've never been before..."

"Yes... It's a powerful addition to our abilities. We won't have to take airplane flights to go to new countries to acquire jump sites. Just tune this portal to wherever we want to be, and walk through. Jump back to home whenever we want. The only problem remaining is we won't have the correct documentation, not the right visa stamps on our passports... But it's a big jump in the right direction! Ha!"

"Matt, how far can you send the portal?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think it'll go interstellar distances. I still have more exploring to do... I also believe I can't move the portal faster than the speed of light. It can definitely reach Earth though. And that's a biggie. It would really be something if it could reach Mars. I know how to tie this end of the portal directly into the manufacturing arrays. Your research and this portal indicate we might actually have the power to terraform Mars... What a great gift to humanity, having a new habitable planet in the solar system. Definitely something to pursue..."

"Matt, this is mind boggling. I hereby cast my vote for you to be the winner of contest day."

"Not so fast. Your differential teleporting is a major improvement too. And all the safety issues you identified and solved might save our lives someday. I vote for you to be the winner. Objectively, I really do."

"Then I guess it's a tie. A perfect ending to contest-day, we're both winners. It's time for our workout. I can't wait to try out our new home dojo. Come, I've been practicing a neat combination throw and spin kick that I'd love to try out on you..."

Chicago time: 13:14:.33.523

Tesseract subjective time: six years in balance mode.

"Well, today's the big day" Matt said in Arabic during breakfast. "Think you're ready?"

"Sure. It's nice that Tabata's dojo is just two blocks from my apartment. We can walk to it in a couple of minutes. We agreed to jump to Chicago in synch with our sleep cycles, which means we drop out of balance mode and jump in six hours, our time... and about 5 seconds from now, Chicago time... To tell the truth, I am a little nervous about this..."

"Why? Our appearances look fine. From the baseline videos we took six years ago, we have our hair lengths exactly right. And our loose clothing will cover our more athletic bodies. We haven't aged at all, the quantum cleansing has you locked at 22 years old and me at 24 years. No one will be suspicious..."

"It's not our snapshot appearance. It's the way we used to walk. It looks so clumsy, in the old videos. We move like cats now. Maybe our church and office friends won't notice, but some of Tabata's top students are very perceptive about body stance, they might wonder a bit... Nah, you're right. Everything will be fine. My biggest problem will be not to hug everybody, not treat everybody like long-lost friends that I haven't seen in six years."

"If you had to guess Kathy, who do you think Tabata's best student is?"

"Keith, the third-degree black belt. No question. He is so polite and kind off the mat, but when he's sparring, he's all business."

"Think you can handle him?"

"Oh, Keith will be no problem!" Kathy laughed easily.

"Do you think you could handle Tabata now?"

Kathy turned thoughtful for a long moment. "I've got a complicated answer to that. If we fought right now, in our first round, I might beat him. Surprise would be on my side. And if I used subtle touches of differential-teleport fighting, he'd have no chance. But in a completely honest contest, I think our sensei would still have the edge, just barely. He's lightning fast, not like us, but for an unmodified human, lightning fast... He still will beat me on KI, killer instinct. His combination attacks are twenty, thirty punch-kick-block works of art. He could still take me. But the window for him to do this is closing" Kathy continued with a smile, "and by Monday night it'll be slammed shut. We have planned a four-year training session Saturday night, and an eight-year training session between Sunday church and our Monday workday. By Monday night, Tabata will have no chance."

"Well, it's not just martial arts training. Our next target languages are Farsi, Pashto, and Kurdish. Hebrew would be useful too. I must say, I used to feel a bit overwhelmed when we first decided to become counter-terrorists. The skill sets we need are incredible. It's wonderful that the time controls make it feasible..."

"Over this last year, I've noticed you spending more and more of your time working on papers for your law firm. Does your old job still interest you?"

"Yes. It might actually be a good opening to the Arabic countries. Remember my 3 pm conference call the day we returned to Earth? I thought it was a disaster right after it happened, but now I'm thrilled with it. It was with our new Siemens clients, Stan our firm's beloved senior partner and your official boss was on a second line. Stan was promising these guys the moon. No, let me be more precise, Stan was promising that I would deliver the moon to them, and I was too bewildered to say no. Six solid months of work, they demanded it in two months, and Stan agreed. I'm going to deliver it to them complete this coming Monday morning, two weeks early. It's a massive tangle of intellectual property issues involved with a bunch of interlocking acquisitions and spin-offs Siemens is doing in the Middle East. I'm going to present them a fantastic solution. It's so complicated, I would be surprised if Siemens doesn't beg me and my beautiful assistant to come to the Middle East and help implement it, especially after I let it drop that we're both fluent in Arabic, Farsi, and Kurdish."

"Not yet we aren't! We haven't even started with the last two yet!"

"By Monday morning we will be. You'll look so cute in a veil!"

"Well, I guess... Ha! My wedding dress will give me some practice! Now remember, on Monday morning, we start the construction plan. We'll be locked out of the tesseract for almost three weeks. No more tesseract until after the honeymoon!"

"I know. The construction plan is a great fit to our schedule. I'm looking forward to getting swept up in the wedding excitement, though it's still twelve years in our future... It's such a unique feeling, being so intimate with you all these years. You are my wife; I am your husband, but I still have an intense longing to have you as my bride, in the social sense."

"Yes, I'm eager for the social recognition too. That diamond you created in Manufacturing though is obscene! I'd get a sore wrist from the weight! Your final job this morning is to go back and create a ring that's believable. Stop joking around!"

Chapter 3. 

"This was a really nice idea," said Kathy, practicing her Farsi as she sipped her hot chocolate, bundled in her parka while sitting on the rock ledge. "Paris was so beastly hot. Remind me exactly where we are again..."

"About halfway between Christchurch and Greymouth, on New Zealand's southern island." replied Matt in Farsi. "Don't be too hard on our chateau in Paris, and its lack of air conditioning. The average high temperature in Paris for the first week in August should be about 75 F. When we jumped, it was at 8 pm Thursday there and 98 F. A few minutes in Chicago to make the cocoa and grab our coats, and presto! It's 6:10 am Friday under a beautiful southern winter sky! The constellations down here are so beautiful..."

"These last two weeks of traveling have been like a dream. A whirlwind tour of Europe. I'll remember the joy of this time forever, Matt." Kathy played with watching her frosted breathe for a moment. "I admit, though, the anticipation of our future is beginning to pull me out of our fairytale honeymoon. On Sunday, we fly directly from Frankfurt am Mein to Riyadh. Al Mamlakah al Arabiyah as Suudiyah will be our new home for almost a year."

"We'll be traveling a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if we visit all 13 provinces in the Kingdom. We'll also be making trips to Iran, Iraq, and Yemen. It's probable we'll be in Syria too before the year is out. Siemens is certainly getting their pound of flesh for the bargain I made with them, royalties on the best of the intellectual property arrangements. They should provide us with several hundred thousand dollars of annual income for life, all for less than a year of work. Not that we really need it Kathy, but it would have been suspicious not to drive a hard bargain..."

"Six hours after we're scheduled to land in Riyadh, we'll have access to both tesseracts. It'll be nice to get the security back, as well as check out the new facilities. I'll set up the portals for first access to the new rooms, afterwards we can just jump in from visual memory..."

In their sixth subjective year of living in their tesseract, Matt and Kathy had made an intense effort to study how tesseracts were constructed. They found that the size choice was not continuous, but quantized. Their own tesseract was built on a scale length of about 45.4 feet, and to interface a new tesseract to their spacetime, other tesseracts would have to be of sizes that were plus or minus factors of two of this length. Larger tesseracts were exponentially more difficult to create. Matt was delighted to discover that their tesseract had the technology to built another, taking over 20 days to build one with a scale length of 22.7 feet. Their target design was a prison about 2 km from their home tesseract, with 8 rooms labeled E0, M0, P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, and P6, for an entrance hall, manufacturing room, and six prison rooms, each higher number implying a more comfortable room. The structure contained a single door between E0 and M0, all other traveling would be via teleport or portal openings. Each room had over 500 sq ft of floor space, and ceilings over 22 feet high. M0 had individual time controls for each room except E0. The rooms could be varied to run from 4096 times more slowly than Earth, to 16,777,216 times more quickly than Earth. At maximum temporal contraction, a year of living could be pushed into less than 2 seconds of Earth time.

"Yeah, it's a great back-up, Kathy. The new tesseract even has the power to build one of the original's size, though it would take over a year to do it. The new Manufacturing room is fully equipped, just more compact. Working with the operations sequencer was such an eye-opening experience. It didn't want us anywhere near the moon's core during any of the construction, saying the space folding involved could damage our minds. The sequencer was so sweet. It told me that it had to operate in interface mode with our spacetime for the construction, and there was thus no way it could be sure we wouldn't return in spite of its warnings, but it was willing to trust us not to. Having a computer program tell me that it was willing to trust me, that was a really strange feeling..."

"We'll meet Eternal Jihad in the Kingdom, Matt. Not in the first week. Maybe not even the first month, but soon. The battle is coming... I can feel it. Feel it in my core... Ha! None of these thoughts now, not on our honeymoon! Tell me some exciting, something wonderful! Tell me about your plans for terraforming Mars again."

"Well, I've tested portal casting to 300,000,000 miles. Mars is definitely within range, even when its orbit is on the opposite side of the sun from Earth. The terraforming capabilities of the tesseracts are really so immense, the issues really come down to what you want to preserve, and what you want to change. I think the biggest issues are surface gravity and surface air pressure. Mars' surface gravity is about 38% of Earth's. It means the planet just doesn't hold its atmosphere that well. It will lose over half its air molecules to space in less than a 100,000,000 years. That sounds like a long time, but over a couple of billion years, everything gets lost. The current surface air pressure is only 1% of Earth, and it's almost all carbon dioxide. The carbonate rocks are outgassing, maintaining the thin atmosphere. To get the full Earth's air pressure at 38% gravity, you would need more than 2.5 times the mass of air above your head. Doable, but if you make the leap to change more than just the surface of Mars, why bother?"

Matt paused for a moment, then continued. "Our baseline design now has us bringing the planet to full Earth gravity and air pressure by adding hundreds of billions of cubic kilometers of silver and iron and slightly radioactive heavy metals at the core. The radioactive heat will give Mars back a liquid metal core. The silver is a great conductor, and we'll spin it up with the iron to generate a nice protective magnetic field for the planet. End result, a planet that's 20% denser than Earth, with a 20% smaller radius and a third less surface area. We'll port over an Earth biosphere. It'll have a 24-hour day, and a more circular orbit. Its sidereal period will still be 1.88 years, and its distance from the sun still a little over 50% more than Earth's. Those are about the only two things staying the same. Oh, its two small moons will stay the same, just be pushed into much higher orbits. Mars as we know it will disappear. This is more like planet replacement, rather than terraforming. And the two tesseracts working together can do all this in less than a month! Perhaps the best time to do it is when Mars is farthest from Earth, let the sun hide what we're doing. More mysterious that way... With the right greenhouse mix for the atmosphere, huge areas of both the equator and middle latitudes will be temperate. The poles will still be very cold, but not as super cold as they are now."

"Matt, speaking of super cold temperatures, I think my rump feels sub-zero from sitting on this rock! How about we return these parkas and mugs to Chicago, and then jump back to the hotel for a stroll. The paths by the Seine are a sauna, but a sauna is just what I want right now."

"Sure!" Matt reached out and held Kathy's hand, and a second later the wind was blowing across empty rock.

Early Thursday evening, five weeks later...

"Matt! I'm glad you're back! Did you hear the news? It broke almost an hour ago."

"No. I was stuck in traffic with a couple of Aramex executives, and we didn't have the radio on. What's up?"

"Eternal Jihad struck in Portugal. Not the major attack they've been threatening. They called this just a warning. The monsters! They dirty bombed a maternity ward in Porto, 22 infants killed, plus about the same number of adults. There were only two survivors in the room, at least for now. Two infant girls. The blast pattern somehow missed them. But they were irradiated."

"How much?"

"It's bad. They were both heavily dusted with cobalt. Dosage well beyond lethal. The news announcer said they would be dead within hours from circulatory collapse. Oh, Matt. Parts of this society in the Kingdom are shocking. I've been talking to a number of our neighbors about the attack. Most are saddening by it. But a shocking number just shrugged after they heard that the two infant girls are Jewish. What the hell does that have to do with anything!? A few even smirked and smiled..."

"It's the concept of infidel. To some people, a Muslim killing a non-Muslim just isn't as much of an issue, compared to a Muslim killing a Muslim. It reminds me of my childhood fascination with the Old West in the nineteenth century. Kit Carson was an Indian fighter, and was glorified for it. Wiping out the ignorant savages was okay, partially because they weren't Christian. Fortunately Christianity in America has moved beyond this... I've been hit with an automatic response too, that Palestinian children are dying, so it's okay to kill Jewish children. Some imams here keep preaching that the scheming Jews are sub-human, and thus unworthy of compassion. It's twisted hatred, incredibly in error, but it's here..."

"Matt, I have a big question I want to ask you. We have agreed to keep tesseract technology in the tesseract, and we have agreed that we're not responsible for the world's health issues. But can we make these two girls part of our stand against Eternal Jihad? I want to try to save them."

Matt snapped to an instant decision. "We'll use the pocket, rather than home. The pocket gives us more options with the time contraction. Jump to the medical bay for setup, I'll start working portal access. Jump now!"

In less than four minutes, Matt had two portals hovering near the tops of two isolation incubators. "We have to move fast, Kathy. You can already see the circulatory systems breaking down under the skins. The incubators are surrounded by doctors and nurses, no way this will go unnoticed. Portals are sequenced for auto-termination as soon as we make the transfer. Engaging spatial fold... NOW!"

Several nurses and doctors shrieked as they saw disembodied hands appearing from the roofs of both incubators and lifting the infants away. The hospital ICU broke into pandemonium. Meanwhile, Matt and Kathy each jumped an infant to a waiting medical couch. The couches engaged, and within a second both entered red-3 status, signaling they were not to be interrupted under any circumstances.

"Well, we've done the best we can, Kathy. I had maximum time contraction start with the termination of the portals. The next year here will be 2 seconds of Earth time. We also picked up a minute amount of cobalt in the air. Nothing serious at all, but I'm quantum cleansing it now."

"Matt, how about I set up a pair of cribs in P6? These auto-docs are signaling a long-term treatment plan for the infants, at least a few days. Let's just hang out here in the pocket with them..."

Several days later, Matt and Kathy were each sitting in rocking stairs in P6, Matt feeding Emily, and Kathy feeding Carly. "They're so adorable, Matt! I love nursing them. I'm really going to miss them... Perhaps we can meet them again in some future year, to see and enjoy what we have saved. Ha! This is also stirring up all my maternal instincts. Soon, my dear husband, soon, I'll want you to impregnate me..."




Life, Liberty, & Pursuit of Justice



"I... I'd like that very much, Katherine. I think I love these two girls as much as you do. But the auto-docs have finally given them both clean bills of health. It wouldn't be right to imprint more tesseract memories on them, nor let them age here. It'll be easier on all of us if we send them back today."

"I know, and I agree" said Kathy, as she burped a sleeping Carly, and tucked her into her crib. "I took the pocket back to interface mode for about 15 minutes yesterday, and did a preliminary scan for a portal return. Their original incubators are still slightly radioactive from cobalt. I won't return them there. I picked a nice spot in the rear of the nurses' station down the hall. They're sure to be found within a few seconds of being returned, especially since Emily likes to yell over new places. I've also made two nice pure wool blankets in manufacturing, snow white, except for the dark grey wool of the lettering. I'd like to wrap each girl in one before we return them..."

"My God..." said Matt, as he read the message. "...What a wonderfully brilliant idea!"

A short time later, the head floor nurse was stunned to hear the healthy wail of a baby coming from behind her chair. Turning, she saw two infants wrapped in blankets, where she was sure there was just empty floor space a few seconds before. Within minutes, reports of the event spread to the reporters covering the bombing, and as stunned doctors examined the infants, the blankets were being stared at and reverently touched by everyone in the hospital that was capable of going to see them. The account of the event spread around the world, as did the message written on both blankets, in Arabic on one side, and Hebrew on the other: "STOP THE KILLING. SHARE THE LAND. LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR."

Chapter 4. 

Matt continued to pet Kathy's foot on the Living room couch after the symphony ended, lost in thought. "Really great sound system," Kathy said after a while. "If you close your eyes, it sounds just like a live performance."

"Yeah. You wouldn't guess it with the 45-foot high ceiling, but it's true. The creature was a damn good audio technician. Another one of its many talents..." Matt said idly. It had been a week of Earth time since the Porto event. Kathy and Matt had dropped into a habit of jumping home for 64 seconds at the dawn of each day, and relaxing there for three days of play and combat practice. They were scheduled to return in 9 hours of local time, or 8 seconds of Earth time. They were about to head off to bed.

"The people tracking me have really stepped up their activity," said Kathy. "This week's news has really rattled Eternal Jihad. The outcome of their bomb wasn't at all what they wanted. They're super eager to get the spotlight off Porto. My guess is they'll make their move tomorrow. Friday is the holy day. It'll be their best chance..."

"Agreed. Perfect for us too, my day off. I'll be portal tracking you the whole time. Remember, any use of drugs to knock you out, I jump in immediately and we both go on offensive ops. No exceptions. I can barely accept using you as bait as it is...."

"It's worth the risk, Matthew. Having a young American female whom they'll probably threaten to behead is just what they think they need to grab back the world's attention. They're eager to let the world know they reject the message of Porto. We've got a good chance of me meeting someone in the senior leadership. We have to do this."

"Humph. They're not the only ones rejecting the message. Everyone I've talked to in Aramex thinks it's a CIA plot, even though there are two Muslim doctors in Porto swearing it's true. Everyone here thinks it's a Hollywood style fake. Actually, in some sense, I guess they're right. God didn't do this, we did! I wonder what the divine penalty is for impersonating God?"

"Well, we didn't sign God's name. We just gave a message that we both feel is God's true message. Regarding our salvation, I think we're still okay," Kathy said with a smile. "Israel has reacted positively. Their peace rally was more active than it has been in years. Not too much movement with their government, though. The control of the special interests of the settlers is still too strong. And as for the Pals, what a sad hopeless case. No movement for reconciliation at all. Hamas has that society sewed up tight. Anyone not for continuing the war of liberation is branded a Zionist collaborator, and we all know what comes next after that..."

Late next morning, just before noon, Kathy was coming out of a grocery market when the attack occurred. As she walked to cross the street with her bags, a car with dark tinted windows braked to a halt in front of her, and the rear door flew open. Someone behind her pushed her hard into the car, where two pair of muscular arms yanked her in. Kathy noticed that the few passersby were too stunned to help her. The attacker still outside closed the door, and the car drove off.

Kathy was held face down on the rear floor of the car, a booted foot pushing into the back of her neck, while a gag was forced into her mouth, and tied around her head. A hood was then placed over her head. Kathy was in total darkness, and she felt her arms yanked roughly behind her back and secured with steel handcuffs. She was held in this uncomfortable position on the floor for several minutes, as hands roughly and completely frisked her body. She was then yanked up by her neck and thrown into a sitting position between two of her attackers.

"One sound from you, just one, and I'll slit your throat. Behave, and you'll be okay."

"Oh, I bet you tell that to all the girls you pick up, Mr. Muscles," Kathy thought, as she nodded her head to signal understanding. Kathy sensed the attacker sigh in satisfaction at her compliance, and he began to relax a little. "Actually," she thought, "you guys were pretty smooth. You must practice this an awful lot."

"Status report?" chirped Matt, a brief burst of gravitons from a tracking portal. "5 by 5" Kathy chirped back with gravitons, a code that meant the mission was proceeding within acceptable parameters. The attackers could sense nothing.

The car trip lasted for hours. Matt would ping Kathy occasionally to let her know he was still with her. Kathy was actually beginning to get a bit bored, in spite of it being stuffy to breathe under the hood, when the man on her left started to grope her breasts.

"Oh, nuts," thought Kathy in resignation. Kathy heard a weird chirp from Matt, which she decided to interpret as a growl. She smiled, and chirped back a signal for him to take it easy.

"What are you doing?" came a voice from the front of the car.

"Just testing the female American dog again for weapons," came the reply on her left. 

"Let me help!" said a voice on her right. Hands from Kathy's right joined in, and soon both of her nipples were being pulled. Kathy bore it in silence.

"Ha!" laughed the voice on her left, "the dog's body is stiff with fear."

"?" chirped Matt.

"5 by 5" Kathy chirped back, as she tried to puzzle out the man's comment. Her nipples had not swollen under the cruel treatment. She finally decided that the man had misinterpreted her body carriage. Kathy's muscles were toned to inhuman quality. If her attacker had bothered to take her pulse as he was pushing his fingers into her breasts, he would have realized her heart was beating at a calm 56 beats a minute. But he never bothered.

"Operations control is the other way," came a voice from the front.

"I've been cleared by operations," said the driver. "Our leaders want to inspire our followers. We're going straight to video production with our demands. Al Jezeera will already be there when we arrive. The Americans and their Zionist masters will learn what big mistakes they are making. This interrogation is going to show our fury. The Accountant himself will personally oversee all of this."

"!" chirped Matt. "!!!"

"Calm down!" Kathy chirped back, but she felt a rush of excitement too, one which she was very, very careful to hide. This was a development beyond their wildest hopes.

"Do you forgive me, cross believer, for checking you for weapons again?" came the laughing voice on her left, as her nipple was pinched again. A deadly soft voice whispered in her ear, "Will you turn the other breast for me?"

Kathy calmly decided it would be best not to respond, but she also decided to treat the question seriously. "I do forgive you, voice on my left," Kathy thought. "Utterly and completely. You are still God's child, and thus worthy of forgiveness. It's tragic that you ask only in jest. I forgive you, and in pursuit and in love of justice, I still stand against you."

Several hours later, the car ride finally ended and Kathy was led from the car into a quiet house. From the air temperature, Kathy guessed it was just past sundown, and a ping of her echo gravitons told her the house was small and very isolated. She was forced into a kneeling position, and held in it for over an hour. During the time, she heard several other cars pull up, and most of their occupants enter the room. Then she heard a convoy of many cars pull up, and the opening and closing of numerous car doors. A large crowd of people entered the room. A man walked by Kathy and sat in a large, comfortable chair in front of her. "Well done. Allah be praised! You have done Allah's will. This is just what we need!" said the voice. "Unclean female dog, are you frightened? Are you frightened that you cannot see?"

Actually, Kathy could see everything. She had engaged combat mode echolocation a few moments before, and had a precise multi-point stereographic 3-D display in her mind, tracking the position of each of the 27 men in the room. Kathy could also see the bright echoes of Matt's pings from the portal, as he also was preparing for combat mode echolocation. The mission plan was for Kathy to decide when to begin offensive ops. Kathy decided there was no reason to wait. She made her final preparation, and then reached with her mind and used a powerful skill that Matt had discovered during their last year in the tesseract, remote differential teleportation. Within a distance of about 30 feet of their bodies, Kathy and Matt could create a tight space fold, a disk of up to 1 cm in diameter and less than a micron thick. Then, they could shear the space fold. The shear could cut anything, even tesseract metal. The links in the handcuffs parted. Kathy kept them pressed together with her fingers. Then she reached out with a shearing space fold to the man sitting before her in the chair. After a second, the man sighed and rested back into the chair, appearing to consider Kathy in deep thought.

But he wasn't resting at all. Kathy had completely severed his spinal cord above the first vertebra, and the man had lost all body control. Kathy was expecting shouts, and spent close to 800 milliseconds reconsidering her situation when they did not occur. She finally decided it was time to go to offensive operations anyway, and pinged Matt the go code just before teleporting 5 feet up and 16 feet to her left.

Kathy felt Matt's combat pings as he entered the room, and she snapped her body into a spin kick, using differential teleporting to accelerate her strike foot to over 200 mph before impacting the skull of her first target. Two milliseconds after impact and after seven inches of penetration, Kathy jumped to her next target location, selecting a boosted elbow strike to shatter the next skull.

The room was alive with echo gravitons. Kathy and Matt were using them to lock their current targets, and also to paint their next four to five target selections with descending levels of illumination. By keeping track of each other's attack patterns, they were able to tightly coordinate their offense, achieving the attacking potential of a single integrated mind attacking with two bodies. Together, they were crushing skulls faster than six per second.

After 4 seconds of offense, the battle was over, 26 men in the room were dead. It had been so bewildering to the men and was over so quickly that no one had even shouted. Matt jumped outside and easily killed the 14 lookouts stationed around the house. He then retrieved a laptop from the backseat of a large BMW. By the time he jumped back into the room, Kathy had removed the hood from around her head and the gag from her mouth. Matt noticed that tears were streaming from her eyes.

"It's not like practice, is it?" he said quietly.

"Oh, no," sobbed Kathy. "Not like practice. It's so easy not to enjoy this! Look at all these people here, Matt. Ten, twenty years ago, they were all teenagers, or younger. Learning to explore their worlds, having hopes for their futures, excitements in kissing their first pretty girls, dreams of their future families, fantasies of sexuality and romance... All that potential, Matt, all that potential for joy and fulfillment, lost! Lost to their stupid, stupid hate!"

Matt said nothing, but his hand came up and he gently brushed away one of the tears from Kathy's cheek.

"Matt, will you do the more difficult part? Jump to the pocket and handle the body disposal? I'll handle the Accountant..."

Matt nodded and jumped. The portal he had used to enter the room was still active, and a few seconds later it began to bifurcate, splitting again and again. The bodies around the room then started rapidly to disappear.

Kathy walked over to the Accountant. It had been close to a minute since he had taken his last breath, and Kathy could see the look of distress in his eyes. His entire body was also sliding into shock. Cut off from the control center of the autonomic nervous system, his heartbeat was beginning to become erratic.

Kathy gazed into his eyes, and saw a little hate, but mostly just bewilderment, and.... embarrassment? Understanding set in. "Oh, don't be embarrassed about voiding your bladder," Kathy said kindly. "You couldn't help it. It's not your fault. I'll clean you. Come, Mr. Accountant. You are in serious need of medical attention, and I know just the place for you to get it." Kathy easily lifted the limp man to her shoulders, wrapped her arms around his back, differential teleported several feet into the air, wrapped her legs around his hips, and jumped to pocket medical.

Chapter 5. 

Day 0

The man slowly woke from a peaceful rest, and reached up with his hand to scratch his nose. "What a weird dream," he thought. "What a bizarre, stupid dream." He suddenly realized he had no idea where he was. He became fully awake in an instant, looked around the room, and felt fear gripping at his heart. He had never been in a room anything like this, and had no idea how he got here. He was in a large, cubical room, with a ceiling of 23 feet. There was the bed that he now sitting on, a table, a desk, a few chairs, and a corner of the room that seemed to contain a sink, toilet, and shower. Turning his head, he gazed at the last corner of the room. It held a comfortable reading chair, a prayer mat, and a several large shelves of books. On the wall above the books was a 24-hour clock showing 00:43:28 and ticking. Above that was a counter that was currently registering zero.

Over the next hour, the man explored his room. He thought he had the disposal chute figured out, and the other chute was full of puzzles. It had provided him with a lunch after he started to test the controls. He was very surprised the food was of such high quality, very tasty, though he didn't recognize the various fruits at all. The most amazing thing about the room was that there were no doors or windows. The walls and floor felt like highly polished stone. How did he get in here? He assumed there was a secret entrance. Perhaps in the roof...

Turning, he gasped in surprise. In the center of the room stood a young, beautiful woman, wearing a white robe tied with a golden rope. Her feet were bare, the robe not reaching her ankles, and she wore no veil. Recognition set in. "You!" he shouted.

"Yes, it's me. Hello, Mr. Ata."

A brief look of shock appeared on the man's face. "You know my name?"

"Yes. I'll get right to the point. I want to offer you the possibility for a trip back to where we met. If you cooperate, you can be there within an hour."

"And in exchange?"

"I want all the bank accounts, transfer routing codes, and fiscal node locations of Eternal Jihad. I want the names and locations of all your funding control agents. I want the decryption codes to your organization's complete sub-ledger. And I mean complete. I'll know if anything is withheld."

"HA! Never!"

"Never is a long time, Mr. Ata, perhaps a lifetime. You will find that I am very patient. Do you see that clock there? I will return in 100 days to offer you this same choice. If you still refuse, I will return again in an additional 200 days, then 400 days, and then 800 days, and so on, until either you agree or die. I respect your right to choose death. The choice is yours."

"Don't make me laugh. No interrogation is like that. No one could be that patient."

"Please look in my eyes and hear the ring of truth in my voice, as I speak the following words. I am that patient."

Mr. Ata's face broke into a nervous grin. He stepped closer to Kathy. "I demand a lawyer! This is against the Geneva convention!"

"I've never signed it. There will be no lawyers. Your demand is rather amusing. I don't think the interrogation you had intended for me would have met Geneva's humanity standards... Another major point, you cannot count on any further medical care while you're here. Your pain and death will be considered your choice. Weigh your choices carefully... I don't do this from cruelty. If you want new clothes or towels or bed linens, just throw the old ones in the disposal chute. As often as you like. You are free to keep this place as clean or as messy as you like..."

"Did you also capture any of my followers?"

"At the house? No, they're all dead."

"What! All?"

"Yes, everyone, including the 14 sentries outside."

Mr. Ata looked furious. "And did you give them a filthy Christian burial?"

"No, actually. They were given a rather singular burial... I did weep for them though. All deaths of Allah's children deserve to be wept." Kathy turned to face away from his hateful gaze.

"Wait! Don't go. Perhaps I'll tell you what you want to know." The man moved closer to Kathy. "Tell me, where is this place?"

"I call it P2."

"Peetu? Where is that?" The man was almost within striking distance of Kathy.

"Just P2."

"No, I mean what country!"

"I won't answer that. Think about your choice, Mr. Ata. I will return in 100 days."

"Wait! Which way should I face when I pray? Which direction is Mecca?"

"Oh!" said Kathy, "The qibla, a valid request. Let me think." With the moon locked into maintaining its same face to the Earth, the question actually did have a constant answer. In her thoughts, Kathy aligned the pocket with the lunar geometry. The direction could have been anywhere, but by chance was quite horizontal. The man kept inching towards Kathy. Kathy pointed and said, "Face the bookshelves from my current position."

The man twisted his body into a spin kick, aiming for Kathy's abdomen. Kathy teleported as his head was turned away from her. The man lost his balance when his foot failed to connect, and he fell on the floor hard. He sprang up, and then howled in dismay and confusion into the empty room.

Kathy sat down by Matt by the temporal control console in M0. "Well," said Kathy, "that went pretty much as I expected."

"Do you want to go to Day 100 now?" asked Matt. "If I go all the way to interface mode, we can be there in less than a second."

"I just might, soon. But not right now. I'm getting an idea, something monumental. Ha, literally. It's an idea about monuments, and how so such of this hatred seems to be tied to them... Matt, our home tesseract is running in interface mode right now, right?"




Life, Liberty, & Pursuit of Justice



"Yep."

"I want to create a mission for our home operations sequencer. It'll take me an hour to write it. Then let's have a late snack in P6 and sack out for the night. It's been a big day, hard to believe I was buying groceries 12 hours ago. Tomorrow morning, return to interface mode for a few milliseconds, and I'll burst-mode transmit the program before I speak to Mr. Ata again. It'll only save us a minute or two of Earth time, but I don't want to waste a second...."

Day 100

Kathy teleported into the room just as the counter clicked 100. Mr. Ata had been standing in an extreme corner of the room, trying to see where Kathy would enter, so Kathy jumped in ten feet above his head and just stayed there.

"Hello, Mr. Ata. I've returned to offer you the choice again."

The man jumped and ran to the center of the floor, looking back up at Kathy. "Why don't you fall?"

"I won't answer that. Do you choose to go home?"

"You stupid, unclean female dog! A hundred days have gone by! Allah be praised! You have missed your chance! All the codes will have changed by now. As soon as my disappearance was noticed, within a day, all the codes would have changed! I've won! The codes are useless to you!"

"Then tell me all the useless codes and you can go within the hour. I promise. You have my word."

"No!" The man turned and grabbed a chair to throw at Kathy, but she had already jumped by the time he turned back.

Day 300

The man was in the center of room, staring at the spot Kathy had appeared previously. Kathy jumped in about 10 feet behind his back.

"Hello, Mr. Ata. I've returned to offer you the choice again."

Mr. Ata turned and glued his eyes on Kathy. "How did you get in here?"

"I won't tell you that. What is your choice, Mr. Ata?"

Mr. Ata sneered at Kathy. "I think you're unclean, and you think I'm evil, don't you?"

Kathy paused. "I won't stay for conversation, but I will answer that question." Kathy looked downward in thought for a moment, and then looked up into the intense hatred in Mr. Ata's eyes. "A great poet once said, all spirits are enslaved who serve things evil."

"So you do think I'm evil!"

"I think the cause you serve is evil. Look at you, a slave to your hatred, chained to believing your own lies, trapped by your own pain... I offer you the opportunity to renounce your hatred, Mr. Ata. Let go of your pain! You can renounce your caliph and your caliph's lies and let truth set you free. That is your choice, Mr. Ata."

With his eyes remaining glued on Kathy, Mr. Ata raised a chair over his head, and began walking toward her. Kathy sighed and jumped before his eyes.

Day 700

"Hello, Mr. Ata. I've returned to offer you the choice again."

"Stay a while," said Mr. Ata with a smile. "I won't attack."

"I don't trust your word, Mr. Ata. I won't stay for conversation. What is your choice?"

"I think I'll tell you. I've been here almost two years. The codes will be worthless to you. Tell me first, though, the one picture in this room. I can't smash it. How is that possible?"

"I won't tell you. What is your choice?"

"At least tell me who they are!"

"...All right. Their names are Carly and Emily. This picture was taken three days after your attack in Porto. I thought you should see the beauty that survived. Consider their innocent faces, and how they are too young to hate you for killing both their mothers."

The man shrieked, and lunged for Kathy. Kathy jumped.

Day 1500

"Hello, Mr. Ata. I've returned to offer you the choice again."

"I hollered for you for the last two years. I would have told you everything. You never came!"

"The choice will only be offered during my visits. Decide yes now, or wait for the next 1600 days for the next opportunity."

"Go to Hell!" he shrieked. The man was then astonished by the look of sorrow and compassion in Kathy's eyes.

"That path, Mr. Ata, must surely be yours." A tear rolled down her cheek, and she jumped to Matt's side by temporal controls.

"Ready for Day 3100?" asked Matt.

"Not quite. Give me a few moments to collect myself." Kathy sat down in a chair next to Matt. After a few minutes, Matt reached over and held her hand. Kathy smiled at Matt in gratitude.

"He made an interesting comment," said Matt. "Do you think he would have told us before? We talked before we set this up, of putting a panic button in the cell. Letting him be able to call us as soon as he wants to tell us the codes..."

"No, Matt. Giving him the power to have me at his beckon call would be a mistake. It would hand him a huge victory in our contest of wills. Our current setup is the correct one."

"...This current setup is still boggling my mind. Earth time, less than 9 seconds have elapsed since I disposed of the last of the bodies into the black hole, but it's been 1600 days for Mr. Ata, and a night's sleep and part of a morning for us. Logically, I can do the math. It's easy. But my gut reaction is still that what we were doing is unbelievable."

Kathy stood up and gave Matt an affectionate kiss, and then Matt reached for a control and began to reduce the extreme time contraction of pocket room M0.

Day 3100

"Hello, Mr. Ata. I've returned to offer you the choice again."

"Don't go away. Whatever you do, don't go away."

"I won't stay for conversation. What is your choice?"

"Can I have some more books?"

"You threw everything but the Quran in the disposal four years ago."

"I know. It was just a few months after your last visit. I was in a rage. It was a stupid, stupid mistake. Please? It's so lonely here..."

"Are you sure your choice is no?"

"Please, just the books."

"... What kind would you like?"

"Newspapers! I know the caliph does not yet rule all. I am still here. But in what parts of the world does he reign? At least tell me the Zionists have been driven out of Palestine! Surely they are all dead by now!"

"I'm sorry. Nothing about current news."

"It's just that I'm so lonely..."

"I know..." said Kathy, "I know." Kathy walked to stand before him, reached up and in pure compassion put her hand on his shoulder. It was his first human contact in over eight years. The man appeared to reach for Kathy's hand in gratitude, and then launched a vicious backhand knuckle strike at her face. Kathy jumped before it hit. The man howled.

The next morning, the man awoke and was astonished to find a huge pile of books near the reading chair, more than enough to fill the shelves. He also stared at a polished wooden box, that when opened revealed a beautiful flute. Among the books were numerous instructions books on how to play it. The man spent hours trying to grasp the meaning. Very surprising to him, the gift was stirring memories of his childhood, and he couldn't figure out why. Usually, the only childhood memories he had were of school, he and his classmates being led in rousing chants of "Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!" by his Hamas teachers. But the gift of the flute reminded him of his mother, and he couldn't figure out why. She had been shot dead when he was 4 years old, during a resistance gun battle with Israeli troops. He was told she had been killed by Israeli bullets. He never doubted it.

Day 6300

"Hello, Mr. Ata. I've returned to offer you the choice again."

"My choice is yes! Here! I've written everything you've asked for." Mr. Ata pointed to a set of papers on his desk. He stepped aside so Kathy had clear access to walk to it. Kathy just jumped instead. Mr. Ata cleared his throat. "I've been here for more than 17 years."

"Yes, I know" said Kathy, looking at the papers.

"You've promised to let me go!"

"Within the hour, if these are correct."

"It's been 17 years! All the people will have moved! You'll never be able to verify anything in an hour."

"You have no idea of my abilities, Mr. Ata. If all this is correct, you will be home within an hour. If not, I will give you the choice again in 6400 days, 17.5 years in the future. Do you wish to change any information here?"

"Perhaps my memory has failed me. It's been so long. What can I do?"

"Accept responsibility for the choices you have made, even if they result in your dying here.... I'm glad you liked the flute. Your play has become quite good. Very precise."

"You have heard me play? Why did you give it to me?"

"Because you are Allah's child, Mr. Ata, and thus deserving of compassion." Ata looked at her with a complete lack of understanding. "Are you sure, Mr. Ata? Sure you don't want to change anything here? Very well. You'll be home within an hour if this is correct. Goodbye."

Day 12700

"Hello, Mr. Ata. I've returned to offer you the choice again."

"You! You haven't aged a bit! I've become an old man, and you haven't aged a bit! Are you Shaitan?"

"Satan?... I won't answer that. What is your choice?"

"You must be Shaitan. I pledged a life oath to my caliph, Shaitan. No, wait! But... All of this is impossible! I'm I already dead?"

"In mercy, I will answer that. No, you are not dead. What is your choice, Mr. Ata?"

"Can I touch you?"

"Yes" said Kathy after a moment's thought, and she walked up and offered her hand. Mr. Ata took it gently, and then held it to his face.

"I'm 65 years old now. I won't live another 35 years. This is my last chance, isn't it?"

"I won't answer that."

"I can't betray my caliph. You must be Shaitan, but I dream of you as my mother. It's very strange.... You knew that the papers from last time were fakes?"

"Of course."

"Disappear when you will, Shaitan. Until then, I hold my mother's hand to my face." Kathy felt his tears wetting her hand. She let him finished his sobbing before she jumped to Matt's side.

"Katherine, I have a dim understanding of how hard this must be for you. Is there anything I can do?"

Kathy was silent for a long moment, and then said "Just hold me... It might help... It might not..."

Matt held Kathy for a while. It did help, just a bit. They broke for a light lunch.

"It's been almost 35 years for him now, and still only about one minute of Earth time" said Matt. "Is he right, about this being the last time? Our next temporal jump will be 66 Earth seconds, just over another 35 years for him... Will he live to be a 100? We might have lost..."

"He'll live. I told him he couldn't count on medical care, but I never said he wouldn't get it. I won't stretch his life beyond 100. That would be torture. But it's possible for a normal human to reach 100, and I'm going to help him get there."

"Over this last Earth minute, your program from the home tesseract completed. I got a burst status report at the end of our last touch of interface mode. Wow, Kathy! What you're doing will change the foundations of three religions! I see your point about monumental!"

"I wrote my message on the Wailing Wall, across the mosque dome at the Haram-esh-Sarif, what the Jews call the Temple Mount, and on all four sides of the Ka'ba in Mecca. Carved it deep into the stone, right through the mosque dome at the Temple Mount. Big bold letters, the messages filling the sizes of the monuments, both in Hebrew and Arabic. I don't care that I'm defacing history. The message must be heard!"

"Kathy, can I make a suggestion? I've been developing a number of programs for my Mars terraforming project, and I'd love to test them out on Earth. I've been thinking of the Sea of Galilee. The Israelis have abused it, overworked it. It's filled with brackish water, polluted mud flats, salts and waste, it's a mess... The water level is more than 10 meters lower than where it should be. We've got the power here to turn it into a garden lake, clean up the mess, make the bottom sparkling clean sand, add two cubic km of cold pure water, even more if we deepen the sea, eliminate the salts, make the water drinkable, it would be really nice. Landscape the entire perimeter with deep groves of fruit trees and picnic areas. Here, take a look at some of these projections from the pocket sequencer... "

An hour later...

"Gee, Matt, some of these options for restarting the aquatic ecosystem are fascinating..."

DAY 25500

Kathy was petting Mr. Ata's head as he slept on his bed. He opened his eyes and smiled.

"Are you really here? Or is this another dream?"

"Oh, I'm here, Mr. Ata." Kathy said, as she continued to pet his head. She was also differential teleporting, calmly floating on thin air by the side of his bed, her legs curled in a lotus position. Mr. Ata turned his head and gazed at the folds of her robe hanging loosely beneath her legs.

"My life is almost over, isn't it?"

"Yes, almost over. At least this part of it. I still think of you as Allah's child. I do not judge what will come next."

"Here," said Mr. Ata, as he reached into a shirt pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. "I wrote this last night. There are seven decryption codes here. It would have unlocked all the information on an old laptop I used to have. I know this is symbolic, just keys, not the actual information you asked for. But I can't remember all the details. I do renounce my caliph though. I don't want to die filled with hate."

Kathy took the paper, and she started to sob.

"Can I ask you a question, angel?"

"Angel? I'll answer your question."

"The two infants in the picture, they must be almost 70 years old now. Are they both still alive?"

"Yes, they're both still alive."

"And do they hate me now, for killing both their mothers?"

"No, they don't hate you now. They have never hated you, and I hope they never will. The cycle of hate must end."

"Shaitan would never say such a thing. You're an angel, aren't you? Are you the angel of my mother? Tell me, was it an Israeli bullet that killed you?"

"Oh, I can imagine the scene! Resistance fighters moving and firing among the civilians, Israeli troops engaging with militant targets... Mr. Ata, neither side wanted to kill your mother. Both sides were thinking that the importance of the land justified the violence. I don't know which bullet killed your mother, and I don't care."

"Do you forgive me for all the children I killed in Barcelona and Porto?"

"Mr. Ata, I don't want to deceive you. I'll be your mother's angel only as much as you want me to be. As much as it's my right to forgive you, I do forgive you. But it's Allah's forgiveness you should ask for."

"Angel, will you accept my paper for letting me go?"

"Yes."

"Will you take me to Mecca then? There's nothing at that house for me, where we first met. I'd like to ask for Allah's forgiveness in Mecca."

"The Masjid al-Haram mosque? Yes, I promise. I'll be back very shortly, in less than an hour." Kathy kissed his forehead, and then jumped directly to temporal controls.

Chapter 6. 

Kathy's very first act out of P2 was to modify the temporal controls and push the pocket into balance mode. She reduced the time contraction in M0 and P6, allowing her to push P2 from maximum contraction to maximum dilation. P2 was now running 4,096 times more slowly than Earth, and M0 and P6 running 4,096 times faster than Earth. Kathy and Matt spent the next three days working furiously on the data from Mr. Ata's laptop. At the end of their analysis and program setup, a total of 195 seconds of Earth time had elapsed since Kathy had teleported the Accountant away from Earth.

"Well," said Matt, "it's set to go. All that's left is to switch M0 to interface mode, and engage the programs."

"Who did you finally decide would steal cell 16's money, the Spanish team in charge of isotope procurement?"

"The cell running the safe houses in France. This plan is so brilliant, Kathy! With the accountant's complete records, we have a fiscal map of everything. I don't think even the caliph knew what a stickler for details that guy was. The caliph would be horrified to know the entire fiscal layout of Eternal Jihad was being carried around in one laptop! Who would have guessed they have over $3B of liquid assets? And once I push this button, with our knowledge from the laptop and the tesseract's technology, the following will happen: Within two seconds, the $3B will disappear. Gone. Totally, permanently gone. The money withdrawn into bit-bucket oblivion. For that brief period of time, we'll have total interbank control. And we'll spoof the withdrawal addresses of all the control agents! Each cell will think the some other cell has stolen its money! With the incredible news of the monument writing coming out of the Middle East, each cell will think that the other cells have panicked, and are trying to run off with the money. Hell hath no fury as a terrorist who's been ripped off. When the smoke clears, I wonder if anyone in Eternal Jihad will be left alive?"

Kathy flipped the master M0 temporal switch, and a second later engaged programs FISCAL-0 and GALILEE-0. "I've started the terraforming project too. You were so correct to design it. Our God is a God of abundance. I'm very happy to give the world back the Sea of Galilee the way is was before people spoiled it... I must say, Matthew, I did have a few second thoughts about FISCAL-0 over the last three days. Deceiving your enemies into killing themselves, is this a Christian response to terrorism? My heart is a peace with this now, but it took some thinking to get there... What did you finally do with the caliph's personal assets?"

"There's a Pashtun tribe on the Afghani border he's hanging out with, bankrolling them big-time. The caliph and the entire tribe are bankrupt now. They'll find irrefutable bank wire evidence that the tribe's money was transferred by the caliph himself to another rival tribe, one that's been trying to curry his favor as his protector. I wouldn't want to be the caliph when he wakes up this morning."

Four days later...

"Well, it wasn't as if we didn't try..." said Matthew quietly. "At least Eternal Jihad is history. News of the caliph's death is spreading around the world, and his cells are so actively killing each other, they're becoming quite visible to the police. The sequencer projections of 80% of the organization killed or in custody within the first week appears right on schedule..."

"It's ironic, Matthew. Eternal Jihad had been in existence for 12 years, just the same amount of time from 1933 to 1945, the existence of the thousand-year Reich." Kathy's face broke into a smile. "And why the sad face on our other efforts? The Sea of Galilee is pristine, surrounded by beautiful parks filled with orchards. And I would guess from the demonstrations that almost all the Israelis want reconciliation... Well, not their government, and not the settlers... It's interesting how the settlers have concentrated in Jerusalem, desperate to see that the Pals don't get any of it... How stubborn can you get?"

"In the Middle East, Kathy, the word stubborn takes on a definition all its own..."

"But the Pals! This is really encouraging, Matt! Their peace rally led by their intellectuals was huge! Hamas is furious!"

"And Hamas has the guns! And the Israeli government has the guns! All the decision makers are against what we're trying to do. And the government of the Kingdom is sand-blasting your message off the Ka'ba."

"Matthew, Matthew, think big! We didn't come this far just to let the idiots of hate and religious superiority run the show! We've got the technology for terraforming. Take a look at program PORTAL-0. Those guys in Mecca and Jerusalem have got to understand that they just can't mess around with me on this. The cycle of hate will end, I swear it! Even if I have to take these cities down to their bedrock!"

"My God, My God!" said Matt a few minutes later, as he studied the program. "Kathy, are you serious?!"

One day later...

The process started as a single portal. Entering the Earth's atmosphere, it began to bifurcate rapidly, swelling in number to well over ten million in less than a minute. Every man, woman, and child in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank found themselves standing in the parks by the banks of Galilee, the adults naked, the children in clothes. And then the vacant city of Jerusalem disappeared, old and new, pizza shops and discos, quarters and neighborhoods, gates, walls, cathedrals, minarets, temples, basilicas, and mosques; over four thousand years of human history destroyed as the city was taken down to its bedrock, and then rebuilt as a garden...