"Shu-Qi, take a look at this. Come here!"
He paused, turning to look at Enza Lu Rinu's beaming face. After six months working together, he had at least managed to learn her name. She was from a separate nation of Chozo from Shu-Qi's, which had different naming conventions. That had made it much harder to remember hers. He'd also learned that she was an excitable and, dare he say it, flighty person.
"I was going to check on the transceiver—"
"Oh, that can wait." She waved his excuses aside. "The battery has lasted this long, it'll last a while longer. I think I'm starting to get an idea of how it works!"
Now, that… grabbed his interest. She wouldn't give him a superficial explanation. They'd long since noticed it was losing mass, in exact proportion to the amount of power that was drained—though they couldn't measure that directly—but matter annihilation on that small a scale, without radiation hazards, was unheard-of.
Her hands flew over the keyboard, bringing up a hologram of the battery.
"Notice the lower-density channels. It's hard to tell, because we don't have the scanner resolution and we're probably barely touching its capacity, but I think they're holding some equivalent of steam. Those discs look solid, but they can't be blocking the flow, and there's strobe—I think they're rapidly spinning fan blades. I can tell you right now, though, we won't be able to replicate it. Not on our own system of physics. The problem—" She pointed at the core of the hologram. "Is this. The power source.
"This generator depends on intrinsic properties of the Poison, it's matter annihilation, but it's actually a lot simpler than you'd think. I believe a species growing up there, if such a thing could exist, could conceivably make a primitive version of this even before their first electronics.
"How?" Oh, she had his attention now.
"Basic physics. Electrodynamics…" She nodded to the wall, where they had the beginnings of a particle model for this variant of the Poison. "Electrons don't exist. The Poison interacts only weakly with electromagnetism, in general, and most particles not at all. So what keeps nuclei from colliding?" She went on, the question clearly rhetorical. "Nothing. Doesn't matter. Nuclei also don't exist! We were so busy drawing that thing, we forgot to check our most basic assumptions. Particles, for example."
She stopped then, eyes sparkling as she invited him to make the obvious reply.
"…don't exist?"
"That would be a little sad, after Lozal spent so much time drawing that map. As descriptions go, 'Poison particle families' isn't exactly wrong, it just isn't… descriptive. I'll send you the math later, but the gist of it is that all the particles are huge. Larger than the average distance between them in static, structured matter, and not a little bit larger; thousands of times larger. If this was what we'd had to work with, we wouldn't have wave-particle duality; we'd have wave-wave duality, with two different kinds of waves. And the importance of that, is that there's no clear distinction between 'chemistry' and 'nuclear physics', which means…"
He clicked his beak. "So that's why burning fabric produces radiation."
"Probably." She hesitated, calming down a little. "It would make sense. If the Poison's equivalent to nucleons can be bound at sufficiently variable strengths, then even fire might be enough to dislodge some of them, and depending on how they're bound together you could get a self-limiting, relatively slow chain-reaction that would look like fire, but is actually a form of catalysed nuclear fission. I did some simulations, and instead of atoms or molecules I think you could form a three-dimensional, fabric-like lattice from the fundamental particles without making it too dense to be useful. It depends on the exact parameters, which I don't know, and most of this is speculation. We still don't have detectors for any of it."
He nodded, appreciating her forthrightness.
"Well, good work. I'll look forward to your email; it's the most promising idea we've had so far."
"But can you imagine the material strengths?" Enza went on, now addressing no-one in particular. Her face was rapturous. "Sure, most patterns won't be stable, but the right one might let you… I don't know, build a tower to the moon. Nucleons interacting with nucleons all the way up, there's practically no limit to how strong you could make it."
"I really do need to check on the transceiver—"
"All we're doing is replicating the Poison's version of physics, verbatim, and we can't mix that with ours. That doesn't mean there isn't some version which can be, in fact, it might be how this was made. Oh, it might take decades, but I can't wait to get started. I should do some quick test runs…"
He snuck off while she was distracted.
Matter annihilation. If he understood her explanation, the 'battery' was closer to being a highly advanced steam engine, one that ran off particle decay. The analogy wouldn't hold precisely, and duplicating its functionality might be impossible. How could anyone have built up the knowledge to create such a thing, when even they hadn't seen the possibility? It couldn't be a local race, none of which had ever surpassed the Chozo.
Whoever they were, they hadn't been perfect. However their ship had achieved FTL, it hadn't survived the experience. He found himself wishing he could speak with its creators, but after all this time, it was unlikely that they knew where it had crashed. Perhaps they simply believed there'd be nothing to find, never having anticipated his intervention. A pity. First contact would have to wait.
——————
A loud bang echoed through the jungle one afternoon, roughly a year since Hana had arrived on this lonely planet. Some distance away from the source of the sound, a tree split in half when a stone ball crashed through it. The young girl's eyes zoomed in, she noted the effect with some satisfaction, and patted her new steam cannon with a smile.
The old one had exploded.
Hana wasn't entirely sure why she built this. She certainly didn't need it to fend off predators, and even had she needed to eat anything it would have just turned any animal into messy chunks. She was, however, finding it useful for testing the limits of her understanding of metallurgy, and it was slightly amusing to make big booms. She didn't want to use it very often, though. It scared away all the animals, even the big six-legged tree-climbing cats.
With the test finished, Hana picked up the heavy and overly complicated contraption, with its big steam tank and boiler inconveniently separate from the barrel, and carried it back to her cabin. It was still early morning and she had a lot of other things to work on. There were so many experiments to run and inventions to make, and only so many hours in a day to get them done. Not that she really needed daylight to work by. Rather, she just enjoyed it more, and she still needed to sleep sometimes.
On her way back, she heard a sharp whistle echo through the thick jungle. Giggling excitedly, Hana upped her pace and arrived back at her abode in only a few minutes.
The little lean-to she threw together a year ago had long since disappeared. The original room was still in there, somewhere, but it had been buried under several stories of expansions, and now she wasn't sure she could go there without dismantling part of a wall.
Taking a cue from vague memories of home, she'd built her own house around the trunk of a massive tree. The entrance was several meters up in the air, high enough that she had to crouch to jump that far and most of the critters inhabiting the jungle couldn't get in. From there, corridors wrapped around the trunk in both directions, the clockwise one going downwards while the other one spiraled up.
She'd found out that there was a limit to how much weight the tree could take. That's why the workshop part of her house was on the ground, and also why there was a large crack going straight through the middle of the seven-metre wide trunk, but a metal band wrapped around the tree kept it from getting any worse. She still felt a little bad about that.
There was also a windmill on one of the tree's larger limbs, which turned whenever the wind changed. It didn't power anything in particular at the moment, but she'd been playing around with some sticky bits of metal and thought there might be a way to push power through metal wires rather than having mechanical shafts everywhere. Mindful of what had happened with her first boiler, however, she'd put it out on the opposite side of the tree from everything else.
That meant she had to go climbing on the vines that still covered most of the tree whenever she wanted to go there, but she hadn't had time to build a platform that far yet. She was still working out how to make reliable nails, after her first batch turned red and practically disintegrated only a few months after she made them.
But right now, it was one of her tiger traps that was whistling.
———
Hana bounced up and down as she waited for the trap to lower from the tree canopy. For weeks she'd been setting these traps hoping for a tiger to enter one, without success. She'd captured a lot of other things, most of which she really didn't think looked very cute or nice; giant bugs chiefly, and a big worm thing that spat a corrosive fluid at her.
"Oh please oh please oh please be a kitty!" Hana begged, ready to burst from the anticipation.
This time, this time, this time—!
With a squeal of delight, Hana cheered the appearance of the cage containing her (hopefully) new pet: A big, six-legged cat. Like any other ambush predator, it was camouflaged to resemble its environment and break up its silhouette. In this jungle, that was purple and brown stripes.
She really loved purple.
Calling it a cat wouldn't be quite accurate, though. It had a feline body profile and mannerisms, but… well, its face sort of resembled a bat's. And it had six legs, obviously. And sometimes hunted in packs, which she didn't think cats did.
"I'm going to tame you. And hug you, and play with you, and hug you—and call you Charles," she chanted, before seizing up for a second. Oh no—Oh good, the tiger was still there. "Or… Melon. Do you like melon?" She thought there was a kind of melon with tiger-like stripes.
She smiled winningly at it. The tiger, for its part, scratched at its cage with all six limbs and hissed at her.
———— —
"Please, Melon!"
"Grrrrrrrrrr."
"Just taste it!"
She felt her eyes filling with tears. At this rate, Melon would… Melon would starve! Her lower lip trembled. This world was too cruel. Her hopes and dreams had been shattered, she would never have a pet.
"RAWR!"
With a roar, Melon pounced on the hand holding its morsel, four of its six limbs wrapping around her waist. Her eyes lit up.
"Good cat!"
She tried to let go, so she could hug it back, but it had bitten a bit too far up and her hand was… stuck. It tickled a lot. The claws on her back were prickly as well.
Now, how to get her hand out without hurting her pet?
——————
"Wait. Cocona..."
She didn't. Couldn't stop, even for mother. Dogged determination was a point of pride with her, and she'd made her decision months ago, back when it first became obvious that her little sister wasn't coming back.
"Wait, I said!"
Dodge her telegraphed lunge. She'd be out of here and on her v-board before—
Pain flared as mother pulled hard at her arm, staggering her. She nearly winced. That would leave a bruise, but if she was careful neither of them should spot it. Sasha had a makeup kit, though she never used it herself.
"Do you even know what you're doing?" Mother pleaded with her, tears running down her cheeks even as her face remained straight and composed. Mir always struggled when it came to expressing emotion, but some things were too painful even for her to contain. "It took us two years to make a stable soul for her. I don't know how many times we failed. I can't… I can't lose you too."
She set her expression. She'd promised to meet Sasha at noon. That was more important.
Mir didn't resist as she tore herself loose.
