Cacophony: Tuners, #3

By Aaron Frale

In exchange for the comfort of now, people gave up tomorrow.

The builders of Tuners HQ aren't what anybody expected. The conflict today was forged in the fires of yesterday.

The Tuners have lost too much to the cult and are forced into a choice that divides the team.

With the technology of Universe One on their side, they may find a way to end the reign of religious terror forever, but the cost is high.

The fate of the multiverse hangs in the balance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aaron Frale
• Release date: Jun 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223731580

Aaron Frale

Aaron Frale writes Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy usually with a comedic twist. Time Burrito is the audience favorite. He also hosts the podcast Aaron’s Horror Show and screams and plays guitar for the prog/metal band Spiral. He lives with his wife, his son, and two cats in the mountains of Montana.

Book preview

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1

Doctor Benjamin Weatherford -Rice knew the day was coming yet was powerless to stop it. He stood on the balcony of the science building with other students and faculty watching a vortex grow in the distance, crackling with purple lightning, darkening the sky, and sucking in the cloud cover that surrounded it. The only part that surprised him was that today was the day. The people were chatting with each other and recording it with their TF3s. It was like they were watching a curious cloud in the sky and not the beginning of the end of the world.

He had warned the policymakers and public of the impending crisis, but because the effects were barely noticeable in the short term, and the solutions were costly, his warnings were ignored. That wasn’t to say that people didn’t support him. There was a ninety-seven percent consensus among his colleagues that his research was accurate. The three percent were most likely corporate lackeys who sold themselves to the highest bidder long ago. There were also private businesses who had listened and changed their habits because of his lifelong work of informing about the crisis to come.

In the end, there was no one bad guy whose greed screwed up the planet for the rest of the population, but rather that society was hard to change, and the needle was moving too slowly to make a difference. By the time the events of today were transpiring, most of the world was on board with his vision of a sustainable future, and there was even a Weatherford-Rice Initiative signed by most of the world’s government, but it was too late. The point of no return had been reached years ago. All Dr. Ben, as his students called him, had to do was decide how to spend the rest of his time.

The part that boggled his mind was that catastrophic failure was at least twenty years earlier than even the direst of the predictions. A quick calculation in his head put the point of no return at roughly around the time when at least half of the voting public were deniers of his research, and politicians got a lot of mileage about being deniers too. Humanity didn’t even have a chance.

The only thing left was to protect the multiverse from his failures, and even though he was ringing the alarm bell before people knew there was an alarm bell to ring, he couldn’t help but feel accountable. If he had only done that third special on public television or decided not to take a break during the holidays from his lecture tour. If he had spent more time in the seats of power and less time with his students. There were so many what-ifs that were pointless to ponder but still made him feel the burden of today more than anyone.

He turned from the growing storm and went back into the building. While he was walking down the hall toward his office, a young student who was bright and native with ancestors who predated the European settlers to the land, stopped him in the hallway. She was worried and probably more than most because she had been in his class and would have perhaps rivaled his career had she been given more time.

Dr. Ben? she asked.

Yes, Peggy, he said.

Is everything going to be okay?

You have a couple days before it will grow large enough to reach the city. Maybe one or two more before it reaches the reservation. I suggest going home to be with your family.

She fought back tears and ran down the hallway toward the exit. A few corridors later, another student stopped him to get feedback on an assignment. Without even looking at it, Dr. Ben wrote the highest grade possible and gave it back to the bewildered kid and continued down the hall.

When the doctor finally got to his office, he tore off the note welcoming any students whenever they saw the light on and locked the door behind him. He didn’t even bother to pick up the crumpled piece of paper when it hit the wastebasket edge. Even though most professors had the smart screens on their door linked to their email calendar, he was just old school enough to appreciate forms like printed paper and probably had one of the few printers left on campus.

There was a hint of preparing for the future by keeping physical books and printed pages in his office. After his civilization was no more, there was no guarantee the devices they left behind would be comprehensible to the budding human cultures out in the multiverse. At least if he printed his books with nondegradable papers, there would be something left behind. There would be documentation that he existed, and maybe another would benefit from his mistakes and not make one of their own.

He sat back on his desk made from solid wood that wasn’t used much anymore in the furniture business that almost was all done by additive manufacturing. He waved his hand, and his computer display appeared around him. His email window hovered to his right, and an interesting article on quantum entangled computing was to the left. Several projects were up in front.

Dr. Ben closed all the windows, including the one notifying him that he was missing class, and pulled up an interface. He typed in a security password and let it scan his DNA. A command prompt appeared, and he typed in a few commands. In a few moments, a machine in the basement of the building would kick in, and the people of this world would be unable to leave or enter this universe.

Even though he was condemning every last one of them to death, it was necessary for the safety of other universes. People were already jumping into other worlds, taking their technology with them. There would be remnants of his civilization scattered throughout the multiverse, but at least he could stop the flood. In a couple days, people would be flooding out in droves and taking their tech with them.

Even though protocols were put in place to prevent the transport of weapons, there were strict observe only rules for travelers. All the regulations didn’t change the fact that almost everyone on the planet could go to another world with a push of a button. When it was clear their world was lost, they would destroy countless others in their exodus from this one.

His civilization had its chance. Perhaps another iteration of humanity would make better decisions. He initiated the sequence to power up the device that would seal his universe forever and pulled out a TF3 from his desk drawer. In a moment or two, a fusion reactor with millions of years of fuel would power a device that would leave the people trapped. The only exception were his personal devices. They were coded to pass through the barrier. He had important work to do.

He pushed a box off a private tuning platform, stepped onto it, and pressed a button on his TF3. He held his breath and appeared on a platform in the observation station he had created. He couldn’t believe that his government had funded a project to create a science station that was outside the existence of any known universe. It was one year from full operation, and he was glad that no one was there. He planned to shut down the air and kill everyone aboard, but thankfully it seemed to be empty.

If the place was full of scientists and technicians when the end came, he didn’t know if he could have gone through with it. As it stood now, there was only a construction crew who were thankfully on strike when the World Construction Authority decided to protest the use of drones replacing humans at the worksite. He assured himself that he was making the right decision.

While he went through the corridors of Research Station One, he used his TF3 to stream the news from his world. He was lucky the barrier didn’t stop the quantumly entangled communication network from working across the multiverse.

It was the same depressing trash he had dealt with his entire life. Some scientists who should know better said the vortex would go away in a couple days and reassured the world that the Weatherford-Rice Initiative would be successful. Religious zealots railed about the end of days. There were reports of panicking and some looting. However, overall, he was surprised that the world hadn’t fallen apart yet. People’s inability to travel between universes was a minor footnote in the news. Right now, it was thought to be a network outage.

He was glad that he got to it in time before the mass fleeing had begun while some preppers, people on vacation, scientists, and others who just happen to be off-world would have slipped through. Overall, he guessed that maybe one to three percent of the population of his universe had escaped. It was not enough to organize into a whole new civilization of multiverse travelers mainly because they were probably scattered, and only teenagers lucky enough to be able to do it manually would be able to bounce between the worlds.

He briefly considered turning on the barrier to this station too, but it would take too much time to fire the software up. He wasn’t worried about the remnants left behind. Maybe some intelligent teen would stumble on this place after figuring out how to use a TF3. It would be a place to go urban spelunking and nothing more. It would take another universe to grow to his world’s technological level to crack the multiverse barrier. Teens could never organize enough to make use of this station. It was way too complicated for them. They would probably only graffiti the walls and take their friends to drink here.

Tuning was such a rare ability that Dr. Ben was confident that travel between multiverses would be lost even with all the toys left behind. It didn’t mean that one day a civilization wouldn’t advance to their level on their own like his world. He was sure the technology would be discovered again. He hoped at that point, humanity would be ready.

The problem was that every time someone traveled from their universe, they weakened both the barrier of their own worlds as well as the destination one. The damage to the targets was nowhere near as bad as to their own. They were using the natural architecture of the multiverse and only traveled where it was safest to pass. The problem was the sheer volume of people going through. The passages between worlds were swelling beyond capacity. A river could sustain a few boats, but when hundreds of thousands of ships passed through every day, the stream broke down.

The core issue was that people’s way of life was dependent on multiverse travel. The raw materials necessary to run civilization came from all over the multiverse. Other universes wouldn’t know a mine or two that was always mining yet never seemed to be shipping anywhere local, considering everyone knew the iron from U-52b made the best steel. Water was discovered in U-16c that legitimately had positive health outcomes for the people of his world. An entrepreneur created a bottling plant all with local labor. The only people from Dr. Ben’s world were the handful of truck drivers who’d drive it to a warehouse that would tune it here.

The economy was too linked to the multiverse to stop all travel, so the best was to mitigate it, and then eventually transition to sustainable technologies that wouldn’t tear a hole in the fabric