Sunday March 8, 2009
Book 11: Massively Parallel — Part I: High Olympus Command
* Note: The concept of simultanaeity in a purely relativisitic setting is iffy at best. With the advent of the Hypernet, wormgates, and eventually the Teraport it became obvious that the old models of causality in the observable universe were flawed. Information which propagates faster than light does not result in paradoxes, or if it does they're only very small, non-exploitable ones that pop like soap bubbles in a stiff wind. That experiment with the really long, really fast train, where instantaneous communication from one end to the other violates cause-and-effect? It was performed in the late 25th century, and effect followed cause with no trouble at all. (Okay, maybe it wiggled around a little bit, but not enough to get things out of order.)

The important thing to glean from the 2nd narrative panel above is that for story purposes we are rewinding about a month.

Also, terms like "hour," "day" and "month" are translated from Galstandard West into the crude English of our 21st-century readers. Just as Americans with no proper set of metric measuring cups get confused and flustered by recipes calling for grams of this and milliliters of that, pre-Contact Earthlings with no proper Galro Calendar will get depressed when they can't figure out where their next three-day weekend is coming from.

Transcript

Narrator: And so General Kerchak put on some pants and got on the comm. . .
Kerchak: Hey, Mikhail. . . You wanna make some money helping out an old friend?
Narrator: Seven hundred forty hours and thirty-two minutes earlier (and twenty-six thousand light-years away. . .*)
Narrator: The mercenary warship Touch-And-Go. . .
Narrator: This is what it looks like when a warship limps.
Ennesby: Captain, the unifield feeds from the forward annie are wobbling. We have got to slow down.
Captain Tagon: Okay, cut speed, but get those feeds tuned up!
Ennesby: This is not a tuning problem, sir. This is structural. We knocked something loose back there in Credomar.
Captain Tagon: You told me we were good to go, Ennesby!
Ennesby: Well, I guess I was wrong then. Maybe TAG could have spotted this before we left. I don't know the guts of this ship like he did.
Captain Tagon: Kevyn! We've got feed problems in the Forward Blade!
Kevyn: I know that! Chisulo, hold that accumulator down! I can see the cont--
Ennesby: Blade comms are down. Feeds are offline. Looking for the problem now. . .
Captain Tagon: The problem is right out the window, Ennesby.
Ennesby: I told you we were going too fast.
Narrator: This is what it looks like when a warship has the structural equivalent of advanced leprosy. . .