My Chiana, How You've Changed....

Chiana

Within the TARDIS, meanwhile...

"A’hunting we shall go!" I purr softly to myself right before willing myself into my dragon form (the form I feel most....comfortable in) and then move towards my mate/husband, Sigin, who himself had reverted to his draconian form so as to be the most comfortable while plumbing Crichton's mind for the wormhole equation. Since he had said that it would be the quickest (as well as the safest) way to complete the task was to do it without an audience, that meant that we all had to vacate the lair until he said the task was done.

Plan is that Sigin will basically bypass the mental blocks around the memory banks within John's mind, going at it from behind, as it were. Meaning that while the blocks will still be there, they'd be effectively neutralized.

Don't know, yet, how Sigin would do that, but he says it's safe enough and will be permanent enough for John (or as permanent as John wants)....

Uh, John had mentioned that perhaps when this is all over, for everyone's safety, he'd like that stuff erased . . . being that everyone would be after it.

.....

Could make a small joke about how it shouldn't take more than five micro . . . . er . . . . . five seconds (remember to use the Terra time units, Chiana!) to go through the entirety of John's mind, but that would be too low. He might sometime seem to be a total guibo at time, but I cannot say that he lack brains. Common sense, maybe, but not brains. Then again, there are times....

Nevermind. Besides, given how obviously "weird" (as Betty would term it) John's brain is, I'd say that Sigin may well have his work cut out for him!

Guy is farhbot!

.....

In the meantime, I'd cornered Betty and Ragan and forced a promise out of them to tell me all they knew about me, eventually. Would have pressed the matter (and believe me I can press very hard on certain things), but Ragan had protested strongly (pointing out how upset Ayrnn got by just watching that DVD with "near possible future" stuff). Betty had blurted out an agreement, adding something....that I found . . . chilling for some reason.

"Good god," she'd agreed with her analog sister, "It isn't like we'd want the other's from Moya to learn about how that relationship between you and Diarg....erk!"

The last was her sputtering to a stop, looking horrified that she'd revealed that much.

.....

You know....in a kind of....distant way now I could see....something could have happened between D'Argo and me, but..... But it takes a LOT of effort, now. I mean it's like....I don't know.

.....Frell...

I've changed. Tastes, at least. Dragon likes and wants. Stuff like that...

....

Maybe it is better that Betty and Ragan stopped where they had there. Looking over it (and trying to get my mind to look at it and not automatically dismiss it as impossible, a relationship with anyone else besides Sigin), I could coolly (dragons can do that) say that....it would be a frelling disaster! I mean, D'Argo's a....I mean big and appealing (though it comes across to me in some kind of odd, abstract appreciation for his looks....I at least remember him being that way before). Oh, I and he'd have a....time together. A great time, indeed! But.... Looking at how he dotes on his son and talks about his departed wife. The life they'd planned together....his love and the life he'd wanted.....

Uh, I don't think....such a life would have suited me and....

...

Drop it, Chiana. It's a unrealized reality and said as much to them (those terms), and as such I'd not worry or fret over such dren as "what could have been". The best thing did happen to me, after all. Meeting a life partner who's not going to tie me down to a....

Well, you get the picture. His lust for adventure (his words) is as strong as mine. We're just going to do it together, that's all....

.....

For some reason I'd just.....shivered as I'd thought of something.....

I hear Sigin (still facing away from me) chuckle a little bit, catching some of the thoughts and distress I feel. We do have a rather special bond, you know, between us!

Love, I hear him say to me by "mindspeak", Whilst my Church does frown upon it, I did use "protection" before each....session we had. Contra-ceptive spells work wonders, you know.

He adds that whilst eventually he (and I) might want hatchlings, that "blessed day" was still (hopefully) some ways off yet.

....

Have the hardest time picturing myself.....as a mother.....

But.....it doesn't....totally.....

Ah frell it. That's later....MUCH later.....

"What did you find?" I rumble, using my "dragon voice" instead of my more human seeming one (rather like the feminine but rumbling tones it has), "Anything....odd?"

The last part is drawn out because I see that besides the fact that John is still asleep (because of it being easiest to plumb a mind whilst it sleeps, according to the elves when I'd asked) Sigin has written out not one but two equations on the dragon sized "blackboard" he'd hauled out from somewhere.

"Besides John's mind itself? You might say that," he says, allowing a small sigh to follow that.

He then explained how the first equation (the "English" mathematic symbols I'd only begun to learn so far from Sigin) was that he'd gotten from John, whilst the second.....was the equation that expressed.... That expressed how standard Military/Alliance technology allowed their spacecraft to "jump" from one reality to the next. All looked like gibberish to me, but.....

"Is....it me or does this part look like the other," I say, pointing at a certain section of John's equation.

Sigin nods, explaining that INDEED it was. John's equation was, more or less, a much more advanced equation than the other. HOWEVER, the simpler one was something of the base for the other!

"Which is bloody ironic," John mutters, having awoken whilst I'd been peering at the blackboard, "But so what, exactly? I mean...."

He wants to know just why it was so worrisome, and so Sigin explained (while he erases the board, he and John have it burned into memory) as the others filed in to see the results.

See, the thing here is that those ships that Inquirer and her friends use generate a temporary wormhole which sucks them up and deposits them...elsewhere. Elsewhere at random if it is a "blind jump". They can adjust things to make the thing place them in "known space" (i.e. the places they'd gone before and set into some kind of BIG database which all ships are connected to, somehow). The thing that the Military (and the Company) had been trying for years and years to do, though, is to somehow find the means of doing a "controlled" blindjump. See, blindjumping is just that.....a trip out with NO way of influencing how far (or near) away the ship goes from it's departure point (i.e. how many realities away it goes). True one can sort of influence things by how much energy one feeds the "skip drive", but that's no guarantee at all. Small jumps and LARGE ones still happen, sometimes, with no seeming accounting for the "juice" one puts into the jump.

Say you want to jump something like "three realities over" to the....well....let's call it just "left" for some kind of direction into a reality that hasn't been touched before but is thought to be chuck full of this tiberian stuff (the source of energy for Alliance/Military/Company space/reality travel). You cannot do it with present day Military and Company tech (which is based upon the "simpler" equation), but with the later? Opens all sorts of opportunities here, folks. Now, you can aim! Now it's no longer a "crap shoot" (as I've heard the humans put it) but something else! With it the Company can rack up a lot of energy crystals (or whatever) and eventually they'd have the resources . . . . to go out and crush the Military/Alliance.

See, this CEO of the Company has an ax to grind here with not only these Torg High Lords, but with Inquirer's people as well!

1. "Originally," Inquirer explains quietly, "The Company had developed my kind and had this quaint idea that since they'd made the original AI in my series, the Inuit, that it gave them the right to own us, like property."

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