LITMIR.BIZ

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that my home planet was no longer my home.

      The light in my room shifted from a cool, crisp, natural blueish-white to a lovely shade of purple.

      We were about to go subdimensional.

      My hands shook as I reached for my helmet and fastened it back on as quickly as I could. It was a silly thing to do, really. If something went wrong with our subdimensional shift a space suit wouldn’t save me. But the uniform gave me some comfort, no matter the illogic of it.

      While consciously I would experience time as I always had, my body would experience something very different. It was about to move sideways through time as easily as I could move sideways through the room.

      The easiest way to explain it is that the “time” part of space-time is like an ocean. Normally, matter travels on the “ocean’s” surface, like a boat moving at a specific rate across the waves. Subdimensions are like underwater currents. A diver can find a fast current beneath the surface and be propelled much farther than the boat, while exerting less energy.

      That’s how a convoy—the diver in this scenario—can effectively harness faster-than-light travel without reaching speeds anywhere near that of light. It’s a handy-dandy little physics hack.

      And, if that same diver wanted to go really deep, in order to catch the really fast currents, they’d need a submarine to guard against increasing PSI. We need a subdimensional bubble, created by the SD drive, to protect us from the peculiarities of subdimensional submersion.

      Because that’s the thing about physics—it doesn’t like getting hacked.

      Our classes on subdimensional space travel had suggested myriads of possible physical side effects that might occur when “diving.” Nausea, elation, déjà vu, the sense that we were walking backward when actually walking forward, stretchiness—whatever that was supposed to mean—the illusion of floating. On and on.

      I told myself I could handle it. Whatever was about to go down, I could deal.

      My fluttering heart suggested otherwise.

      The monitor embedded in the center of my bookcase turned on, displaying a shot of the Moon.

      Grimacing despite myself, I waited for some violent indication that the ship had gone sub. I don’t know what I expected—more rattling, perhaps feeling pulled or squished like putty. Something extreme to indicate that I was messing about in pieces of reality I didn’t normally mess about in.

      I closed my eyes again, afraid that if I didn’t they might pop out of my skull.

      But then the light on the other side of my eyelids turned soft once more and lost its purple hue. A mellow chime of success came through the comms system. I opened one eye. Everything looked normal. Nothing distorted, no melting clocks or wiggling walls. Nothing changed strange colors or lost its density. It all appeared unaffected.

      And then we were in! The view through my porthole had turned a starless, inky black.

      The monitor replayed our transition—the thirty seconds before the dive through the thirty seconds after. And, oh—the Moon! It was there while simultaneously not being there. It flickered once, jumping a distance of millions of miles in a moment, then it came back (though, of course, we had jumped in time, not it through space). Instead of seamlessly floating by, it shifted more like a time-lapsed photograph—one frame blended into the other.

      It had a ghostly quality to it. Quite literally: if we had chosen to travel through the moon, we could have. That was one of the great discoveries about sub-d: the nature of these newly found partial dimensions was actually hidden in the greater dimensions. In picking apart time we could occupy the same space as other matter. Even though I understood that intellectually, I was still glad we’d opted for going around. My anxiety was already in high gear as it was.

      I looked at the monitor once more, to find there was nothing there. All of the moon’s odd behavior had taken place in a few seconds, and then it winked out. Space went black, starless, and we were officially in our SD bubble. Visible light could not penetrate, sound could not penetrate, most radiation could not penetrate—the only way we could communicate outside of our bubble now was with SD information packets. And that in itself was no small task.

      The feed to the screen repeated. They’d replay the dive over and over again for a while—because the effect was so stunning, or because it confirmed that our conversion was a success and we were all still alive, I wasn’t sure. Probably a bit of both.

      I watched it a few more times before my chip phone, now entirely contained to our internal network, indicated I had a call.

      “Yes?”

      “It’s Nika.”

      “Where are you?”

      “Outside your door. Let me in.”

      I was so enthralled with this new reality that I’d failed to notice the safety light above my door had turned from red to green. I could unbuckle and walk about.

      “It has a buzzer, you know,” I said, getting up. “A doorbell.”

      “How was I supposed to know you were in? I half expected you to be running up and down the halls by now.”

      Skipping, I thought with a smile. “Did you see that transition?” I pressed a button and the door slid aside. “It was spectacular.”

      Nika leaned casually against my doorjamb with her hands in her pockets, and gave me a funny look when I moved aside for her to enter. “Guess what?” she said, “The air here is breathable and everything.”

      “What? Oh.” I still had the space suit on, helmet and all. She came in and helped me slip out of it.

      When I and my party dress were free, Nika leaped onto my bed, bouncing a little as she looked out the window. “Trippy, huh?”

      “No kidding.” I crawled up next to her and sat crisscrossed.

      “So. Here we are.”

      “Yep.” I nodded and bit my lip, watching the last of the moon fade from view. “Here we are.”

      “You ready for it?” she asked.

      “What?”

      “This.” She gestured all around. “Our new lives.”

      I shrugged. “I guess. The place—outer space—is new, but has that much really changed? I’m still a communications officer. I’ve been doing that for the past five years. You’re still a historian.”

      “Archivist. I’m officially an archivist now. And diplomat.”

      “Oh yeah?”

      “Yep. When we bring all the info on LQ Pyx back, I’ll be the one to interface with all of Earth’s bigwigs.”

      She hadn’t told me that before. “Wow. You’re our representative, then?”

      “Only when we go back.” She lay flat on the bed, with her hands tucked behind her head. “Too bad I won’t really be there. But, hey, I like being an archivist just as well. It’s easy, it’s fun. I mean, how lucky are we? To get handed our dream jobs from the get-go?”

      I knew exactly what she meant. “I get to send the first crew report in five days.”

      “Exciting. How many days is that for them?”

      “About … forty-eight and a half. Give or take a few hours.”

      “Oh, right.” She was quiet for a long minute.

      “What are you doing?”

      “Calculating how much time goes by for Earth each minute.”

      “Nerd.”

      “We’re all nerds,” she said, smiling. She

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