Chương 63: The Limit

The company kept us busy. There were routes to test, procedures to write, schedules to work out, and a growing list of things Marek insisted we should never do. Ella still spent a lot of time in the control room. At first I assumed she was helping Andrej with the new routing system. Then I realized she wasn't looking at routes at all. She was looking at numbers. A lot of them. Coordinates, mostly. It took me a couple of weeks to realize it. When I finally noticed and asked about it, she gave me that look.

The" you're asking a dumb question again" one. I brought her coffee after that to soften her mood. As expected, it turned out to be a surprisingly effective way of getting information. Not all at once. But bit by bit. One afternoon, I sat down beside her while she was working. She didn't ask why I was staying here while she worked. That was progress.

"By the way... What have you been working on here for the past few weeks?"

"Testing."

"Testing what?" She typed something into the laptop. A set of numbers appeared. The gate control system processed them.

"That." I waited. Nothing happened. Then she changed a few numbers. The result came back almost instantly. She changed another. Again.

"What are those?"

"Coordinates." If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Okay, but what about these coordinates specifically is so interesting? I've been watching you for a couple of days now, and it's always the same coordinates." She looked at me. I raised my hands.

"Right. Sorry." She turned the laptop slightly toward me. A map. Then another. Then another. Different countries. Different cities. Different altitudes.

"I can target anywhere on earth," she said.

"Anywhere?"

"On Earth." She said it like she'd already had the argument with herself. I looked at the screen.

"You tested that? But then again what is the matter with theses coordinates then?"

"The gate doesn't actually understand places," she said.

"It understands a coordinate system."

"Okay."

"And the coordinate system it understands is Earth's." I looked at her.

"That's... probably convenient."

"It is. Mostly. But that's also the catch." She turned another page. I waited. She tapped a line she'd underlined several times.

"I tried to give it a destination outside Earth."

"And?"

"It rejected them, of course."

"Oh!? I think I understand the issue now." She turned the laptop back toward herself.

"It just resolves the coordinates to Earth no matter what." I watched her change the values again. A different point appeared on the map. Earth. She changed them again. Earth. Again. Earth, Just Earth every single time.

"No matter what you give it?"

"No matter what."

"What about the Moon?"

"Earth."

"Mars?"

"Earth."

"A different star?" She smiled faintly.

"Still Earth." I laughed. She didn't.

"So what's actually happening?"

"I don't know. It's a complex system. Maybe there's one part of it I didn't edit correctly when modifying the control interface." That was probably the first time I'd heard Ella say she didn't know something about magic. Everything we had ever done with it had been between two places that were both on Earth. The island and Earth. The warehouse. The cities. The ocean. All of them were just points inside the same system. But somewhere beyond that system... Nothing.

Or more likely, the planet of destination was still hard-coded.

"Can you make it work?" Ella looked down at her notebooks.

"I don't know. Probably." I smiled.

"You're getting better at saying that." She gave me a flat look.

"I know enough to know that I don't know."

"Fair." She closed the notebook.

"I also know that the gate was made by someone."

"Which means?"

"Which means someone knew how to do it." She looked toward the control panel.

"The question isn't whether it's possible." Her fingers rested on the keyboard.

"It's how." Ella opened the notebook again.

"One more."

"One more what?"

"Test of course." She entered another set of numbers. The system thought about it. Then returned the same answer. Earth. She stared at it.

"You'll get it. I believe in you princess."

"I know."

"That's a very confident answer for someone who just said she didn't know." She smiled.

"I don't need to know everything. I just need to know that I can do it." She stopped for a moment looking at the ground.

"Also... Arcene?" I stared at her expectantly.

"Thank you" She closed the laptop and turned around.