A pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09 and overlaid upon itself
Things to do when you are running a crew of 735 when you normally have 434, but you rescued a whole starship and two-thirds of that crew still wants to work instead of processing their trauma in that particular two-week span: embrace the possibility of cracking the really tough scientific problems your ship's crew has been assigned.
“Extra genius on board – I love it – make it happen, Commander!” I said, and my first officer and chief science officer, normally so calm in temperament, smiled and almost bounced out of the room with my approval for his genius plan.
Commander Helmut Allemande has a huge bass voice, and knows how to be overheard. He made it his business to be overheard quoting me about the 301 extra geniuses on board when discussing his work plan, meaning that both crews, being the geniuses that they were, of course had no problem coalescing instead of thinking about how between us we had two ships that would likely fly apart if we had to go above Warp 4 and one was towing the other, and we were not going to be home for any of the holidays.
“Well,” Admiral Benjamin Banneker-Jackson said, “the ship's chief science officer is the discoverer of the Allemande Resonance, and I'm here with my old skills if anyone needs me. I have always said that if you can't get home for a celebration, find your own reason for celebration where you are.”
Adm. Banneker-Jackson was among and was also mentor to many of the greatest science officers in the fleet. The Amanirenas crew was thriving in the sunshine of his confidence in us, and the crew of the Farragut also glowed up in it.
“He's a whole rear admiral, he's 82, and he still does real science while his real science from like a billion years ago is still working for us!” I overheard a young ensign from the Farragut gushing.
“OK, this is why you gotta get it together before you can be promoted to lieutenant,” a slightly older-sounding officer said. “Real science means you can't be 82 and be doing science a billion years ago!”
“But you can if you're a genius – like Captain Biles-Dixon can be 37 but still be captaining like she knew the real Queen Amanirenas of Cush and learned from her how to defend and nurture and rebuild for the people after stupidity attacks!”
“But that was only 2,400 years ago, Ensign!”
“But do you see what I'm saying now, Lieutenant?”
This was actually an exciting time for the Amanirenas, and, were it not that the rules for starships meant that the Edgemont would be the ultimate reward for the good crew of the Farragut, I would have gladly have run a crew of 735 indefinitely!
The mystery of the Kinggems of Rhoadmaap 4 had awaited solving for a long time, being important but no longer urgent. All the threats about blasting through obstacles with phasers from orbit had long since stopped, and all those people had been banned from the system. Only the human-led mining companies willing to work with the native miners who stopped at a Kinggem were allowed permits.
Kinggem was a reference to the regal, unique beauty of each of these phenomena of nature, but also to the fact decried by the mining companies who had gotten banned from the system – “You are letting these hunks of titanium and lead run the mining of everything instead of us!” Indeed.
The natives of the Rhoadmaap System, for thousands of years, had understood that when a Kinggem was unearthed, no matter how rich the deposit was of whatever was being mined, it was time to change direction. The idea of scanning the crust of their world from orbit to find deposits had never occurred to them. They had been perfectly prosperous all that time without needing it, and there was more than enough for the human-led mining companies willing to work with them because Rhoadmaap 4 was workable but not comfortably habitable, and so could be mined to the point in which its specific gravity was notably changed – a projected date so many millennia hence that it was not a major concern.
The consortium had settled that it was not going to allow companies without long track records of respect for native practices to mine in the Rhoadmaap System, but still desired to know if Kinggems were sentient, how they had formed out of a crust largely devoid of both titanium and lead, how they had developed their unique and beautiful patterning, and if there was a meaning to how they occurred.
“But because nobody is bleeding, about to bleed, or about to have me blow their rustbucket into an aurora for even thinking of firing phasers from orbit on a mining site to clear an obstacle, this fell back in the priority list for twenty years,” Commodore Wilhelm Allemande said about this. “It's about time it gets the attention it deserves!”
The crew of the Farragut felt much like the crew of the Amanirenas did about the commodore, but even more so since he had mopped the floor with their captain who had nearly gotten them killed: they knew they had best stay to the right side of him, but that he also was a force for good.
“I feel like I am the pilot of an old wooden ship, and the commodore is the gale,” Lt. Cmdr. Joe Patterson from the Farragut said. “If we steer right, we won't have a better friend, but Davy Jones is also his friend, and he will have no problem filling Davy Jones's locker with anyone who won't steer right.”
“I would have said something about a blizzard in Germany, but I like yours better,” Cmdr. Robert Smalls of the Farragut said. “I like it, Joe! I like it!”
That mind of Lt. Cmdr. Patterson gave us a new approach to the Kinggem question.
“I might be bugging out here, sir, but I keep looking at this thing and hearing music,” he said to Cmdr. Allemande.
“Synesthesia is a real phenomenon between music and sounds in the thinking of many people,” the ship's chief science officer said. “B flat major is a beautiful golden orange to me.”
“No – I mean, that too, but it's a particular song – my kids love ancient cartoons and they really love 'Dora the Explorer' and I love that because I'm the explorer of the family and it helps me to connect with them, but there's this song: 'I'm the Map,' and I can't get it out of my head!”
So, a whole fleet starship computer was utilized to find archival footage of ancient cartoons for an hour before 'Dora the Explorer' at last came up.
“A good thing it was popular, because the 21st century was rough in terms of the explosion of web content and so television began to fall back in archiving,” Lt. Cmdr. Almuz, ship's chief communications officer, said when he was roped in to help out. “But fortunately, my ancestors grew up on that stuff!”
So, a whole fleet starship science team, including the ship's chief science officer, sat there watching a cartoon episode and listening to two lieutenant commanders – one of whom was the ship's chief communications officer – singing along with “I'm the Map!”
Cmdr. Allemande was himself a masterful musician, and as humble as he was masterful. As a captain now being considered for a promotion to commodore, admirals talk about how everything he touches runs like a symphony, in masterful harmony, because that is how his mind actually works. So, he could hear what Lt. Cmdr. Patterson was hearing, and also had sense enough to ask Adm. Banneker-Jackson to come down and join the viewing … and of course Cdre. Allemande and I, both hearing what was going on, showed up to see the commander looking at several pictures of Kinggems while “I'm the Map” was playing, and then programming the computer to run backward on time lapse, to see how Rhoadmaap 4 had been mined in particular regions.
“So, what are we all looking at, Commander?” Adm. Banneker-Jackson said.
“I think Lt. Cmdr. Patterson may be right,” Cmdr. Allemande said.
Lt. Cmdr. Patterson jumped a mile.
“What I mean is,” Cmdr. Allemande said as he turned around, “in terms of how the natives respond to these Kinggems, they are the literal map, simply because whenever they meet one, they go in a different direction, so in a real way, the Kinggems are guiding the natives through the crust of Rhoadmaap 4. We already know that in regions in which there are more than one Kinggem, the images are complementary – they are self-similar. What I think is going on is that each of them represents the same guide looked at from a different cardinal direction.”
Adm. Banneker-Jackson considered this.
“It makes sense on a very on-the-ground level,” he said. “We as a fleet do our mapping to know what the layers of a planet are, primarily – of course we know where big concentrations of titanium and lead are and noted them when the planet was discovered by us, but they were just part of the ground truth to us. The mining companies made their maps based on what they wanted to get it and the fastest way they thought they could – to them, these lumps of mostly titanium and lead are just an obstacle far too big to blast through efficiently even with modern tools because of the potential of damaging more delicate minerals around them.”
“I was still a captain when the fleet was first asked by the more impatient mining companies to just beam those Kinggems out of the way,” Cdre. Allemande said, “and it just so happened that one of them was dumb enough to ask me as I came flying by trying to get to somewhere else.”
“Oh no,” Lieutenant Crosby said softly to herself. “Did that poor fool even survive?”
“This was at least forty years ago and I distinctly remember thinking the head of the mining company was stark raving mad – where exactly was I supposed to be beaming the nearest thing a planet has to a neutron star in its crust without causing everything around it to instantly collapse? This is to say nothing of the size and density of those things. I distinctly remember telling that individual that he was the type of individual who would have the fleet beam out the middle of Mt. Everest between base camp and the summit so he could just have a nice walk up and say he climbed it!”
“Permission to ask a question, sir,” I said.
“Granted!” the commodore said.
“May I ask, from a command perspective, why you opted not to explain to him that no starship can transport, in a single action, any mass comparable to its own mass?”
The commodore smiled.
“Captain Biles-Dixon, that is a good question, coming from one of the finest newer captains and before that one of the longest-serving and most effective base commanders that the fleet has ever had. You are also one of the most genuine, caring individuals I have ever had the honor to know. You are content and rightly so to give orders to your own crew. I was made a commodore just because it was already known I have the ability to command everybody of a contrary mind around a captain or commander like you to get out of your way or else.”
“Aye, sir, that's clear,” I said. “I appreciate everything you do, Commodore.”
“There's another way to do this,” Adm. Banneker-Jackson said as he sat down by Cmdr. Allemande after watching the computer running the commander's program. “And by another – attention! – ” and all of us right up to Cdre. Allemande instantly obeyed the admiral's command and gave him our full attention – “By another I don't mean faster, team. The reason it has taken 20 years to solve this is simple human impatience. How we do space exploration, and therefore how we do planetary exploration, is defined by the early space program's inception in the United States of America, which was and still is one of the more impatient cultural regions of Earth. That is, we are informed by the thinking of 'how fast can we get from point A to point B and get what we want there?' much more than by more ancient ideas of the rich gift of the journey itself.
“But consider this: if a Kinggem is a map, it is far too big to read at a sitting. The native people do not read it to know which way to go; they turn to the directions in which the rock will yield to digging safely while also yielding good ore.”
“So then,” Lt. Cmdr. Patterson said, “if we do the reverse of what happens in 'Dora the Explorer' when they kinda go into the map and the small scale becomes the big scale … if we map the present mining over a section of these Kinggems by sizing it down, we'll see that the Kinggem is the total map of what can be mined in a region?”
“Yes, Lieutenant Commander, that's where we're going with this,” the admiral said as he wrote a parallel program to run alongside Cmdr. Allemande's. “Now, this is the equivalent of trying to map the Himalayas onto the face of Mt. Everest – the mountain is immense, but scale-wise it is tiny. Trying to match what has been done in a mining region over hundreds of years and seeing if we can match the pattern to a Kinggem is the same kind of operation, but if we get a match, we can time-lapse what we know has been done as a reasonably good checking mechanism.”
“May I suggest a slight addition to your program, Admiral?” Cmdr. Allemande said. “There is also a probability that the different colors of a Kinggem may represent different minerals available in a region.”
“Excellent idea,” the admiral said, and added it. “I expect that your team is going to be able to refine this much more.”
And we pure bridge and higher-ranking officers left them to do just that. 48 hours later, the mystery was largely solved. Each Kinggem was indeed a kind of map of how to safely navigate to all the minerals in a particular area, and indeed, all miners were being gently “herded” by the Kinggems – or rather, the sentient creatures that inhabited the surfaces of each one, to go through safe paths to the minerals they were interested in.
The collective microscopic civilizations on the surface of each Kinggem had maneuvered those huge lumps of titanium and lead that had come from the mantle of the crust upward with the deposits miners were more interested in – had maneuvered those gems into filling unstable places for stability of the crust, and therefore where it would be very dangerous to remove them. They had drawn the colorful coding from crystal salts as mining interest grew as an effort to communicate – and indeed, although it was subliminal, the natives had taken the cues on which way to go next with very little deviation. It was actually hard to be wrong, as each Kinggem represented a region on its home planet, looked at from whatever direction it faced.
“It will take centuries for a single Kinggem to ever be walked out as an experienced map,” Cmdr. Allemande said, “but as Adm. Banneker-Jackson said, truly the gifts are in the journey.”
And thus, as the admiral also had said, the combined crew of the Amanirenas and the Farragut made their own reason to celebrate!