MISC: The Girl Who Saved the World, Episodes 21 and 1

[George Phillies]

You are about to see a drastic change in the branching time lines trope. 
  The discussion of Liouville and Gibbs is real physics.
After Episode 21 comes Episode 1A.  I decided to interchange the first 
two chapters so we open, immediately, with the lead character.

Episode 21

Two roast chicken sandwiches, all grain bread, plenty of lettuce, just a 
bit of butter, and more of the curried vegetables did quite nicely.  I 
postponed the ice cream and fudge crumbles until later. Water came to a 
boil while I was cleaning up.  Some parents would have been scandalized 
that I was brewing coffee, worse, cocoa-tinged coffee.  I really am a 
persona, not easily poisoned.  Coffee would make me a bit sharper while 
I was reading, but all the alkaloids would burn off soon after I 
finished reading, leaving me ready to drop into sound sleep.  Besides, I 
really am too young for chocolate to have its alleged effect.  I suppose 
if I always ate like this I would worry a bit about my figure, but that 
is one of my gifts. I may eat, but I remain leanly athletic.

After lunch it was clearly time for my next book.  I suppose I could 
start studying instead.  I could also have read a history. For some 
reason, Mum did not entirely approve my reading historicals. I agree 
that most books on history are pretty pointless. Here are these great 
men and women and their heroic deeds that you can copy. Here is a record 
of past ages and their mistakes, leading upward to the present when we 
do everything right. If you don’t like moral histories, there are 
historical mysteries. Historical mystery books tend to be completely 
crazy.  Yes, it is hard to understand how the eight different 
civilizations of ancient Washington, 2000 years ago, could clearly have 
coexisted along the Columbia River, had advanced science, technology, 
mathematics, and art, yet failed to notice each other.  Even if they 
weren’t all there at exactly the same time, whichever actually came 
later might in their historic records occasionally have noted ruins of 
the past. No such luck.  Massachusetts is even more confusing. There are 
12 or 15, I tend to forget, different ancient advanced civilizations 
whose traces may be found near Massachusetts Bay. Most of them left at 
least some reasonably detailed historical records, not to mention 
observations on the world around them. Seven left observations on the 
moons of Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, observations that apparently 
make no sense.  They had the moons in the wrong places. You’d think they 
couldn’t see the sky. There was a mystery here, one in which most people 
seem to be remarkably uninterested. The people who are interested write 
totally crazy things.  They talk about world civilizations of 50,000 
years ago, before Homo sapiens evolved, with a remarkable collection of 
nonsense as allegedly serious evidence.

My target today was one of Mum’s forbidden books.  Liouville’s 
Butterflies makes remarkable claims about historic time. I’m not sure 
why Mum didn’t want me to read it. I curled up in my comfortable chair, 
my feet on the large hassock, with a pot of mocha, pitcher of milk and 
vacuum mug at my side, pulled up a quilt, and began reading. The front 
part of the book was fairly simple. I could even understand it. There 
are computer pictures of how atoms move in air. They show -- I noticed 
that the book skipped the proof -- if you make tiny changes now, in not 
very long what happens is hugely different.  If you do time travel – I 
did not just tell you whether I can travel in time or not – go back not 
very far at all, and make very small changes, when you come back the 
world is totally different.  The famous story is the fellow who traveled 
in time to just before the maiasaurs started their march to 
intelligence, smelled a flower by shooing away a butterfly, and when he 
returned to the present there had never been a dinosauric civilization. 
  Most small changes have tiny effects, but some are different.

Episode 1A

The Girl Who Saved the World
Text copyright © 2016 George Phillies

Meet Eclipse.

She's pretty, hardworking, bright, self-reliant, good with tools.  She’s 
everything a twelve-year old girl should be.  She also flies, reads 
minds, and is not afraid of necessary violence.

Now she’s procured the Key to Paradise. And everyone in the world will 
be happy to kill her to get their hands on it.
 
Chapter One -- Flashforward
The Invisible Fortress
Evening
January 11, 2018

I awoke at half past dark.  To put it mildly, I hurt.  Some places hurt 
even more than others. Yes, I was doing mind control on myself, so I 
didn’t exactly feel my pain. That meant I could sleep.  I still knew I 
hurt. A lot. “Hurt” was better than the alternative, which did not 
involve being alive.  I’d landed the right way when I was thrown into 
the wall, missed getting a disabling concussion, and dodged getting 
gutted by the fellow with the knife.

One of the times when I woke up, the healing matrix  prompted me to ramp 
down my mind control down, so the matrix could tell exactly where I had 
been injured.  I overdid it. I cut the mind control off.  Incredible 
pain swallowed me. I burst into sobs and uncontrollable tears. 
Fortunately the healing matrix kept me from going into shock. After a 
few minutes I remembered I could simply ramp control back up.  By then I 
was soaked in sweat. The matrix was putting me back together, but it had 
its own order of doing things, and some of the reasons I really hurt 
were late on its list.

Then I remembered where I was.  Not safe at home, the home I grew up in. 
I was in my own house, the one I bought. I don’t know why Mum threw me, 
her only daughter, out of the house those six months ago, leaving me 
with the money in my pocket and everything I owned locked in a 
U-Store-It bay.  I’d come home, finding home gone, Mum vanished, and a 
pair of U-Store-It keys anchoring a really short note.  The note told me 
to get lost and take care of myself. Not in my worst nightmare had I 
ever expected Mum to dump me onto the streets. But Mum was right.  I can 
take care of myself.  I just wish I didn’t have to, not with no advance 
notice.

I’d been in a major knock-down, drag-out fight?  Where?  With whom? Then 
I remembered.  Atlanticea. It was the most wonderful memory in the 
world.  Or would have been, if everything didn’t hurt so much. Not to 
mention I was totally exhausted. I’d solved the Maze, the Maze that 
defeated Julius Caesar and Cortez and Jackie Fisher and the French 
Imperial Guard.  I’d reached the Tomb and matched wits with the Martyr 
himself.  I’d recovered that palm-size sphere of crystalline sky, the 
Namestone, the Key To The Earthly Paradise. No one else in the history 
of the world had ever come close, but I’d done it.  The Namestone was 
the wonderful birthday present I gave myself, a couple months late for 
my twelfth birthday, almost as good a present as my ponies. The ponies 
were a better birthday present, not to mention I gave them to me a 
couple months before my twelfth birthday.