MISC: The Girl Who Saved the World part 62

[George Phillies]

Readers may wish to enhance this:

But first, visitors at LNH HQ, speaking to whoever is at the front desk, 
in events that may not have happened.

"Hi, I'm Natural Law Revision Lad, and I'd like to buy tickets for the 
RACCies ceremony.  Two.  One for me, one for my sister Cosmic Cataclysm 
Lass."  The speaker, in his early 20s, was a handsome young man who wore 
the classic superhero colorful shirt-and pants outfit.  His sister,  
equally tall, wore the classic female version of the costume, slightly 
tighter at key points.

Neither of them knew the person to whom they were speaking.

"Yes, Sir, we can set that up for you.  By the way, I see you are not in 
our files. Might I ask what your powers are?"

"He changes natural laws," Cosmic Cataclysm Lass explained.  "For 
example, he made time go backwards to undo the Warlords of Zargon 
blowing up the galaxy.  And then I fixed the Warlords."

"Fixed?" the receptionist asked.

"Fixed," the Invincible Sky Marshaless of the Universe answered. "They 
had conquered their universe, and wanted to expand.  So I blew up their 
universe."

For unclear reasons, the receptionist began to show signs of alarm.  "Do 
you always blow up universes?"

"I only did that once, and they deserved it."

"What about last month?" her brother asked teasingly.

"That doesn't count.  That was only a local group of galaxies. And, 
besides, they asked for it.  They said mean things about my new costume."

"They also," her brother hastened to add, "had exterminated every 
intelligent species except their own in their local group."

"Yes.  But they insulted my new costume. The one I'm not wearing."

And now, the Girl Who Saved the World


  Chapter Twelve

The Invisible Fortress

Morning

January 16, 2018

Unfortunately, yesterday evening was when the healing matrix decided 
that I should start ramping down the mind control, meaning I would feel 
a bit more pain, so the matrix would know exactly what it had to fix. I 
did what I was told, but I certainly can’t claim I was comfortable 
afterwards. I allowed that if I lay in my bed I was actually falling 
asleep a reasonable part of the time, even though I was very aware of 
the interminable minutes when I was too uncomfortable to sleep.

I finally got up and pulled all of my curtains tightly closed, so I 
would sleep through the sunrise into the next day. I did wake up in time 
for more stretching and bending exercises, hot shower and getting 
dressed, and finding that it was very definitely time for a very late 
breakfast. Chopped onions, chopped green pepper, chopped portobello 
mushrooms, chopped sausage, all sautéed in olive oil with garlic and a 
nice dose of curry powder, followed by two eggs whipped up with a bit of 
milk, and I had a nice omelette. The supply of multigrain toasted 
sunflower bread was unfortunately starting to go downhill, but I was 
very definitely not up to assuming my old lady disguise to go shopping. 
Perhaps I would have to start baking scones. They’re nice and simple. 
Even I can make them well. And I had a quite adequate supply of 
components for the frosting.

I went out to the barn, checked on ponies and cats, and was happy to 
learn the ponies and cats thought outdoors was just fine at the moment, 
so that I had no barn work, I still visited my ponies, hugged and 
curry-combed them, checked their hooves, and spent a while petting two 
cats. Then it was back to Liouville’s butterflies.

I can’t claim I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with people who lie 
out of habit. Mum gave me some abstract lessons. Yes, I’m a persona. 
I’ve met a few criminals. Most of them were dead afterwards. Some were 
less lucky. When I skimmed the later parts of the book, it was really 
obvious that the people who did not want to believe the Liouville-Gibbs 
theorem were prepared to say almost anything in order to discredit it. I 
don’t know if they were lying out of habit, but they were certainly 
working hard at lying, for no particularly obvious reason. Indeed, one 
of the later chapters, one that I much enjoyed reading carefully, spent 
its time going through the arguments against the Liouville-Gibbs 
theorem, and explaining exactly how the authors of the arguments had 
cheated in making their cases. Learning how people cheat in arguments is 
good.

The book really wasn’t all that long, a couple-three hundred pages. The 
30 pages of theorem had been really demanding. That’s assuming ‘really 
demanding’ is a synonym for ‘mostly incomprehensible’. I was going to 
have to learn a fair piece to understand them. The 250 following pages 
were much, much easier. No one tried to prove the math was wrong. They 
just argued about what the math meant. Well, except for the strange 
chapter on the Dagger of Time. The Dagger is not the same as time 
travel, but it somehow ignores cause and effect because it lives 
sideways to the flow of time. The chapter was imprecise about whether 
the Dagger was an artifact or a person, or both. On the other hand, the 
chapter was very clear on why the Dagger appeared.It existed to correct 
side effects when people were using time travel. How could it be both an 
artifact and a person? The chapter was very obscure. It also didn’t seem 
to have anything to do with the rest of the book. The chapter author 
claimed to be a Prioress of the Goetic Knights, an office that ceased to 
exist thousands of years before the book was written. She said she had 
used time travel to make what appeared to be tiny changes that actually 
had the desired effects. The Dagger of Time cleaned up the minor issues 
the Prioress had left behind. Time travel requires enormous amounts of 
power.It was only on rereading an obscure sentence that I realized that 
the Prioress appeared to have used the Orb of RetCon.

GR, now I sort of understood what the book said. For sure I hadn’t 
learned the math parts. There were a bunch of places, like almost all of 
them, where I had to take the word of the author that the math actually 
did what she said it did. It was still a marvelously strange result. How 
could a world start out totally different than ours, and end up very 
nearly the same as the world we live in? I suppose the answer is that 
it’s the same as ‘a world almost like ours at the start can end up 
totally different at the far end’. A world that started like ours, and 
ends up very different, ends up very much like some other very different 
world, so people on that other world and its neighbors would see that 
totally different starting points could lead to almost the same present, 
the one they lived in.Those people are not in a special place, so our 
world has the same property.Some nearly-the-same presents, present times 
very much like ours, had very different pasts. Once I told myself that, 
I decided that the book’s conclusions actually were kind of obvious, 
even if I might never have thought of them myself. The “Ambassador of 
the United States of America” could then have been a cross-time 
traveler, except cross-time travel is impossible.

That left another riddle. Why was this book on mum’s forbidden list? 
After all, there really is only one world, two if you count Otherearth, 
so this image of a huge number of different worlds doesn’t match 
anything that really exists. It matches up against the proof that I read 
last month, another forbidden book, the proof that you can’t build a 
sideways time machine. The reason you can’t is that the number of 
alternate universes is infinitely more than how many numbers there are, 
so to reach all the universes you would need an infinite number of 
dimensions into which a sideways time machine could travel, and an 
infinite number of control knobs to set the destination, all at the same 
time. I’m not sure I understand the infinite real number part.I do 
understand “There are as many integers as there are fractions”, though I 
had a flash of joy when I finally saw how obvious the proof was. It was 
as good as understanding acceleration. There can’t be an infinite number 
of control knobs, I think, so there must not be any, so therefore a 
sideways time machine can’t let you cross from time line to time line, 
watching the universe gradually change through your window.

With that I had dinner. I finished off the cold chicken I had remembered 
to debone, and made fresh-boiled lima beans, spaghetti aglio e olio, and 
a nice pile of hand-shredded romaine with Italian garlic dressing. That 
prepared me for an evening at the lessoncomp. I had dozed off a couple 
of times during the afternoon, no matter how interesting the reading 
was, but by now I was pretty much awake. There were people I would’ve 
liked to see, but it would be hard to explain how I managed to break my 
ribs. At least three of the people were astute enough to notice that my 
injuries were remarkably similar to the injuries Eclipse might have 
suffered in the Maze. Also, while I could go deep into my gifts if I 
need to, for example if I were jumped by a persona team, I certainly 
didn’t want to do that if I could avoid it.

I did spend an hour in front of the video.The advantage of watching a 
satellite broadcast is that no one can tell which channel you are 
watching. Up came the eight o’clock Persona Network News, and on came 
the Vera Durand Hour of Power.Her garb was a bit silly, but her coverage 
of persona news was top line.I would have been just as happy if most of 
her reporting was not centered on plans to capture me. She had worked 
vigorously to secure interviews with Great Power Ambassadors to the 
League of Nations. That would be a future program. Most of them knew 
things. Some were up to reading the speeches their governments had sent 
them. Computer reconstructions of my physical appearance were evolving. 
They were getting worse. Now the computers had concluded that I was a 
well-endowed woman in her late 20s. Good. It was now less likely than 
ever that someone would look at me and think I resemble the Eclipse they 
had not really seen on video.

Durand turned to coverage of Medford, Massachusetts.Medford? Up on the 
screen came photos of Janie, Trisha, Brian, and their parents. The Wells 
family refused to be interviewed. Why did anyone care about Janie? It 
was my City of Steel move.Janie had created the original move, and shown 
me some of the good variants. I used one of them in the Maze. It turns 
out that the move was better than I thought.The move was Janie’s 
super-secret spring-at-the-nationals surprise move, and I’d given it 
away. She was furious.GR, my fault.I didn’t know the move was that good. 
The Russians had somehow figured out that Janie knows Eclipse. Of 
course, Janie actually does know Eclipse, but she doesn’t know that.I 
for sure didn’t tell her that game-opponent Joe and Namestone-bearer 
Eclipse are both me. She thinks Joe is boy. Now the Russians had 
threatened to kidnap Janie.

The situation was absolutely terrible. It was my fault that Janie was in 
danger. I couldn’t do anything to help her. I knew there were books of 
recorded games.I’d studied some.I didn’t know the Russians could find 
Janie’s games on the datanet and, worse, trace them back to her personally.

When the gamesmasters appeared to talk to her, Janie had had a persona 
champion.Durand explained how champions worked, in case someone in the 
audience didn’t know.Then she interviewed the champion. The champion was 
Morgana Lafayette, Sunssword in her public persona. She was on my ‘avoid 
at all costs’ list.She knew what Joe, the kid who rescued Janie, looked 
like. She’d realize that Janie’s game opponent was the same Joe. She’d 
want to ask me a few questions, like where I live and how to contact my 
mom. One question would lead to another. She’d work out Joe is Eclipse 
in disguise. Then I started to wonder: Why hadn’t Janie’s parents asked 
those questions? They’d been happy to meet another Janie game opponent, 
but hadn’t been at all curious about where I live or who my mother is. 
They were less curious than is reasonable. I should have noticed.If I 
hadn’t been so busy prepping for the Maze, well, that’s an excuse.

It was a standard video interview…very short. Lafayette was very good at 
not answering questions in a way that sounded as though the questions 
had been answered. Durand was very good at noticing that she still 
needed an answer. Lafayette gave away nothing about Janie’s persona 
identity. She stayed with the official position.Janie has been 
questioned.She never used my move in competition play. She plays with 
friends, but none of them is Eclipse.For starters, none of them is a 
woman of the right age.

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