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Cloneborne 003 – Quantum Jump
🕑 Added 2025-11-14 11:34:06 +0000 UTCThe Venture left the orbit of Jhalnas—though Jenny had heard some people call it Jhalnasm—the next day, which Jenny found out about when the announcement was made on the ship’s PA system. She also received a notification on her phone, which had finally been authorized to connect to the ship’s phone network, letting her finally exchange contacts with the rest of the survey team and peruse the ship’s library of entertainment once she handed over the scrypt for the subscription to the navy’s streaming app.
For most of morning, Jenny kept feeling the ship moving around her. The movements were slight, almost gentle, but it felt very disconcerting, and once she started feeling a little nauseous she needed to lie down until the ship stopped maneuvering.
“Sorry,” she told her roommates as they bustled about, making their room a bit more like home. “I’m not usually like this. I swear I’m not usually space sick.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Vakhali said as she pulled her hair back to fix her ponytail, the thumb-sized horn on her forehead becoming more prominent as a result. She had a build that was roughly the same dimensions as a male body builder, which meant she was a very sedentary person. Rakido didn’t get fat, they just started losing muscle mass. “It takes a while to get used to being on a ship when you can’t see outside. It should even out once the ship is going straight.”
Rose was pulling some rolled up screens from a case in her bag and adhering to one of the bare metal walls of the room, magnets on the back of the flexible black polymer letting them stick securely onto the painted steel. “I’ve found having a view helps,” the other geoscientist said as she stuck a sixth screen in place, red hair cut short in a way that spoke of not wanting to have to deal with it for some time. She took a charging cable and adhering to a corner of one of the screens, then adhered the other end onto an induction strip on the wall. The screens powered on, all six briefly showing the same corporate logo before the finished synchronizing into one large screen, the slight seems between each roll almost invisible.
Pulling out her phone, Rose quickly synchronized the screens, and pulled up a view of one of the Venture’s accessible external cameras. Cathedyne station came into view, a massive construction of metal containing dozens and dozens of berths, ports, hangers, and other ways to connect to a ship that Jenny didn’t have a word for. Only about a quarter of them weren’t in use, and through the screen Jenny could distantly make out the moving forms of ships coming and going. Many of them were large cargo ships, their near-skeletal frameworks filled with modular cargo containers. There were the more familiar passenger ships, long vessels that resembled skyscrapers, their sides plains and just as windowless as the Venture.
And those were just the ones made to human aesthetics. There were spherical Changer ships; Rakido ships that looked like stylized skull, ribs and spinal column, bristling with glowing thrusters for maneuvering; vaguely disquieting, biological-looking Pajhadin ships in ring-like shapes that seemed to move in unnatural ways; and tree-like Tiwada ships that would suddenly appear and disappear.
The station and its cloud of ships were slowly moving across the screens as the Venture rotated so it could move along the station’s designated exit direction, the window-like view giving Jenny’s brain a point of reference for the movement it was feeling.
The illusion lasted until the screen on the upper right started to flicker, desynchronizing with the rest and causing them to recalibrate again and again.
Rose groaned, and started pressing her fingers along a spot where the screens overlapped, then started banging her fist there. The screen flickered a couple more times before becoming steady, the image resolving.
“That’s going to break your screen,” Vakhali said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s working now, isn’t it?” Rose said. “I’ve had this screen since I started middle school, doing that’s always worked.”
“It’s going to end up delaminating.”
“Good. Then maybe I’ll finally be able to fix whatever’s wrong with it.”
“Why not just actually have it fixed?”
“It’s still working!”
Romola had the determined look of a woman ignoring how stupid the discussion was as she adhered a screen to the reinforced bars on the underside of the bunk above hers. The bunks were actually very large by human standards, as they were made to also fit the average dimensions of a rakido and pajhadin, meaning they were two and a half meters long and a meter and a half wide. The only part lacking was the headroom, and designers seemed to have decided that any pajhadin who joined the navy would have enough sense to duck when getting into bed. Jenny watched as the doctor pulled out a large bottle and placed it on the bed at Jenny’s feet. “Here,” Romola said. “Navy food should be balanced to prevent deficiencies, but take one of these a day anyway, just in case. At the very least you’ll need the Vitamin D.” The label said it was vitamin supplements.
“Uh, thank you,” Jenny said awkwardly, but the doctor just nodded and turned back towards her bag.
Watching the screen until she felt better, Jenny was about to get to her feet when there was a chime over the PA system. “All hands, secure for quantum jump. All hands, secure for quantum jump.”
Jenny immediately lay back down, fumbling for the bed restraints, then sat up again to grab the bottle of vitamins and putting it next to her head. She got the restraints into place as the other women in the room started stowing loose objects with the smooth motions of people who had practice at doing this. And Jenny would have believed if they hadn’t just tossed everything not bolted down or magnetically stuck to the walls into the room’s closets and locked the doors. Jenny managed to pull the restraints tight over her legs and torso, shoving the vitamin bottle under the strap and weighing it down with her arm.
As the others secured themselves in place, Vakhali sighing in exasperation at the apparent flimsiness of the restraints, Jenny kept her eyes on Rose’s screens. There was a flashing countdown displayed on the corner of each individual screen, impossible to miss.
This wasn’t Jenny first quantum jump, although she was hardly a regular traveler. She’d made the jump from Earth to Jhalnas—some say Jhalnasm—before when her family had gone to visit her uncle, who worked there as a ship engineer in varying capacities, and vacation there for a few weeks. She’d spent a year there before she’d started college, and then she’d moved there to get a job among the various surveyors scouting out the stars in the sky.
She was familiar enough with the sensation of a quantum jump to know that every bit of ‘traveling advise’ there was to help with dealing with it was completely and utterly useless—
“Initiating quantum jump in 30 seconds. 30… 29… 28… 27…”
Jenny heard Rose groan. “Oh, come on! Just get it over with already!”
“Some people have more things they need to put away, Rose,” Vakhali said.
“Aren’t the navy supposed to report that they’re done before they start the jump? So at this point they already have everything stowed away, this is just dragging things out.”
This was going to be a thing with those two, wasn’t it?
Jenny adjusted the bottle under her arm, keeping her gaze on the screen as Rose and Vakhali continued their exchange, watching the number go down and involuntarily tensing as it hit zero.
There was an anticlimactic moment as nothing happened.
“Ugh, now, what—!” Rose began.
“Initiating quantum jump.”
The world exploded into fire.
Jenny burned. The bunk burned. The restraints burned. The walls burned. The air itself burned. There was only heat. Pure, burning, omnipresent, contiguous and without differentiation. There was no light, there was only fire. There was no gravity, there was only fire. She could see, because her eyeballs were fire. She couldn’t hear anything except the eternal, pervasive crackling of all-consuming flame. She smelled nothing, because her sinuses burned more thoroughly than any capsaicin could ever hope to cause. The only thing she felt was hot, so hot she should be burning, she should be ash, she should be plasma on the solar wind…
It wasn’t hell. Hell was suffering, hell was pain. This was the heart of a sta—
Jenny starred at the support beams on the underside of the bunk above her, her nose full of the scent of burning hair, melting plastic, hot metal and the disquieting flavor of well-roasted pork… until she actually took a breath, and the clean, bland air of the room banished away the phantom sensations. The bottle of vitamins under her arm felt scalding, until she moving, and then it was just plastic at room temperature…
“Quantum jump stabilized. ETA to first course correction, seven days. All hands stand down from jump stations. All hands stand down from jump stations.”
Jenny heard a quiet groan and people removing their restraints. “Why do we even need to wear these? It’s not like quantum jumps give you whiplash. And if we hit something when we’re moving faster than light we won’t even notice—”
“Rose. Shut up,” Romola said.
“Shutting up, doc.”
“You too, Vak.”
“I haven’t even said anything yet!”
Well, at least her nausea was gone. Pushing the vitamin bottle to the corner of the bunk, Jenny undid her own restraints and sat up, looking forward to relaxing for the rest of the day.
Her phone pinged to inform her she had a message.
Comments
Menthewarp
Kos, or some say, Kosm...
SCM2814
I'm getting better at writing these aliens and their strange, inexplicable ways. Hopefully I can get back to twice a week soon.
