After another all-day lay-over, we finally left Land’s End harbour early this morning and we are now cruising out into the Eastern Equatorial Ocean. Our next, and for me final, destination is Eastleigh, still more than 5,000 kilometres away. It’ll be four days before we see the southern tip of the Eastern Continent and then a couple more days to follow the coast north to our destination.

We sailed through quite a storm on the evening after we departed from Land’s End. The sea built into pretty spectacular seven or eight metre waves and even the huge bulk of the Morning Star rolled and pitched in a very uncomfortable manner. I wasn’t the only passenger to feel the effects of the storm. I skipped dinner and spent a few hours up on the main deck watching the waves.

So, I’m not a great seafarer, but at least I know that we’ll probably only encounter one more storm before we make our final landfall. I’m also pretty sure that, just by keeping out in the fresh air, I can mitigate the worst of the effects of motion sickness. It’s something that I’ve never experienced before and not something that I ever want to repeat.

The following morning, after a bit of a late start, I got my expected call from Jordan. I’d finally managed to get some sleep as the storm had blown out and had even managed a little breakfast.

<Incoming Call: Jordan Callow>

“Nexima, accept the call.”

“Hello, Aidan?”

“Jordan, I was expecting your call.”

“Good. I just thought we’d get to know a little about each other today. I’ll go into more detail about work over the next few calls.”

“Sure. I’m just stuck here on the ship for the next few days anyway.”

“Right. This is your first job?”

“Yes, just finished school and this is my suggested position. I’m actually looking forward to it though. Travelling to Eastleigh is a bit of an adventure even if the ship is a bit boring.”

“So, you’re seventeen. I’ve read your paper. It’s very inciteful. I think we’ll be able to work well together.”

“Jane said that you’re the nearest to my age on the team?”

“Yes, Aidan. I’m nineteen. I started on the project right from school, just like you. I’ll send a couple of links so you can read my finals papers as it seems only fair after I’ve seen yours.”

“You’ve been working on the same project for two years?”

“Yes, but some of the other researchers have been working on the problem for more than a decade. It’s just one of those projects that’s not common knowledge. I’ll explain more tomorrow.”

“Okay. Are you short of time now?”

“Well, actually, I forgot to call you yesterday and now it’s nearly time for dinner.”

No, it’s just after ten in the morning. Sevrin never divided the planet into time zones. Day and night are so arbitrary here that we can all manage to stick to the same system without any bad effects.

“Sorry. I didn’t realize. You’re not on Sevrin?” It took a moment for the penny to drop. I’m not used to talking to Earth.

“Actually, I’m the one who should apologise. I thought you realized this was an interplanetary project. I should have made it clear where I am. I’m based in Castletown, on the Isle of Man, on Earth.”

“Right. With a family name like Callow, I thought you were one of us.”

“I’m much closer to being one of you than you’d ever guess. I know you are a descendant of Nick Quilliam and Peter Corlett. I’m a direct descendant of Peter’s sister, Sara.”

“Small universe, cousin.”

“Yes, indeed it is, cousin. Hopefully we’re going to make it even smaller.”

“So, we have to deal with the time difference every day?”

“Yes, to some degree. There’s the slight drift caused by the slightly longer days you have compared to us. It can get complicated and, as the weeks cycle round we’ll sometimes be day and night apart. Just get used to leaving messages with your implant and we will always catch right back up.”

“In that case, I should let you go and get your dinner.”

“Thanks Aidan. Will it be okay for us to speak tomorrow at about 8:30 your time?”

“Yes, of course. I’ll be free most of the day.”

“Great. we’ll speak tomorrow then.”

“Have a good evening, Jordan.”

“And you have a good morning.”

“So, you’re working with someone from Earth?” Sarah asks me when we finally get seated with our lunches. “That sounds pretty amazing.”

“I was quite surprised. I’ve never spoken to anyone on Earth before. It felt just the same as speaking to you here.”

“What’s he like?”

“Well, he sounds pretty nice. We’re distantly related apparently and he lives on the Isle of Man. I’ve no idea what he looks like. I’ll have to ask him about all that. I feel as if I need to know more about him to work with him effectively. Actually, that goes for the whole team.”

“Yeah, I get that. It would be very odd to work with someone locally and never actually meet them. I know you can’t meet with him, but you still need to make some sort of connection.”

“Yes. I think I also need my implant to start keeping track of the time differences for me. Just so I know when to make a call or when to just send a message. It’s all a bit complicated because of the differing day lengths.”

“Not something you thought you would have to deal with?” Sarah asks.

“Exactly. I fully expected that everyone involved would be in Eastleigh. That was a bit naïve. There have to be people at the other end if we are working on the Link.”

“So, you now have work to do?”

“Yes. He sent me some stuff this morning – mostly just some vague background and also his school papers that helped him get the position, just like mine did. I need to read through all that this afternoon and then we’re meeting again tomorrow morning.”

“Only mornings then?”

“Well, it all seems like it’s coming at a bad time in the time-difference cycle. Our short day is about 2% longer than the day is on Earth. Well, more or less. Every fifty days here will equate to 51 days on Earth. It’s a little counter-intuitive. We drift by almost half an hour each day.”

“Not something we normally think about, Aidan.”

“No. Having universal time works really well here. The people on Earth are more used to the alternative. They have time zones around the planet and often have to work with the differences. Jordan sounds much more confident with the situation than I do. Luckily, we will pass through the worst of the difference in the current cycle before I get to Eastleigh.”

“I guess Nexima can help a lot with this.”

“Yes, I’m sure. Jordan did say to just leave messages on the Mesh for him at any time. He sounded quite used to working that way.”

“So, you are speaking with him again tomorrow morning. Will we still be okay to have our first Nexima dinner with everyone tomorrow evening?”

“Absolutely. We really do need to work out exactly how to do it properly. Louisa has already asked me about it three times in the last four days.”

Time differences need to be put to one side really. I can’t do anything about it; well, we could all switch to be on the same cycle either way, but that seems a little extreme. I have to accept that I just need a little time to get used to it. Once I actually start doing some work with my new colleagues on Earth, it will drop into place and my implant will help.

I spend the rest of the day and most of the evening after dinner relaxing in my cabin, poring through a small mountain of research material. Jordan’s paper on singularities is very much like mine. He can also see the possibility of transferring matter through the link, but he has visions of more than a few micrograms. I never though big enough, apparently.

His paper hints at the possibility of transferring practically anything through a singularity if you can generate enough power or manipulate the equations to make it large enough. He even speculates that the power requirements can be greatly reduced with some very complex delivery systems.

So, in essence, what we term as a singularity is a point in space-time where two points on the fabric of the universe are touching. Once this was called a wormhole, particularly in twentieth and twenty-first century science fiction novels. Imagine folding a sheet of paper loosely and then punching a hole through both leaves, well away from the fold. Travelling through the hole is a much shorter distance than going across the surface and around to the other side.

What was discovered in 2264 was that we could create one of these singularities – on a nanoscopic scale – and dynamically determine the two points in space that it would link together. This was all incredibly complicated and it took vast mountains of research and some of the finest minds on Earth more than twenty years to figure out just how to stabilize and direct such a link.

Once we had built the necessary hardware to form our end of the link here on Sevrin, the ‘frequencies’ were matched and the singularity opened a tiny, zero-length conduit between us and Earth. It had already been successfully tested within Earth’s solar system and they knew that it worked on their end, but nobody was sure that it would work over interstellar distances.

Since the energy requirements were considered overly high on Sevrin at the time and the size of singularity that could be created was so small, we have only ever used the link to transmit and receive data. There’s been no impetus to expand on the capabilities of the technology until recently, apparently. In our current time, we use just one official singularity to send all the data needed to communicate with Earth. We have separate singularity links with the three other earth-founded colony worlds as well.

I’m not really sure what first began to fascinate me and make me particularly interested in the workings of the link and the complex physics surrounding the singularity technology. Mum was an astrophysicist and I do feel that this has had some bearing on my own thoughts and interests. She helped to characterize the workings of our solar system and that was probably some inspiration for me. I’ve always felt that I needed to know how things work. I’m not the sort of person who can accept a simple explanation – I need details.

The end of our time at school, even though only at the age of seventeen, is somewhat akin to the end of a university degree might have been hundreds of years ago. Our teaching and learning techniques have improved and there’s a freedom that is gained from having such powerful technology around us.

Whilst we still have to study without the advantages of an implant, our terminals give us access to the sum total of human knowledge and, as we get towards the end of our education, we are given a high degree of freedom to explore and study the subjects we enjoy. I had open access to all the public research and specifications of currently published singularity-related technology and it really was fascinating.

I clearly inherited the mathematical mind of my mother, but also the analytical and organisational skills that my father has as a historian and an archivist. This combination seems like an almost-perfect fit for the sort of physics topics that have now interested me for several years.

That final paper that has now set me on this path to a research position was the result of more than a year of work. I started out with the merest hint of curiosity about the workings of the Link and slowly learned as much as I could about its workings and the complex theories and mathematics behind the technology. At some point I simply came to realize that the Link may not be being used to its full potential. The deeper I went into the rabbit-hole, the more convinced I became that it could do more than we were currently doing.