Chapter 1: Beginnings

The wind was blowing fiercely across Mendel's face, whipping through his shoulder length jet-black hair. He didn't try to move the strands of hair from flicking his nose and occasionally into his mouth through his slightly parted lips. The wind here was worse than it had ever been in Mendel's memory. It was hotter too. Much hotter. The air over the ground had a red hue to it because of the constant microscopic dust particles being kicked up by the wind from the exposed red clay on the surface. Actually, the soil here could hardly be called clay, now that all the moister had been sucked out of it by a combination of the hot sun and the sweeping winds.

Mendel reached into the pocket of his black leather jumper which covered him head to toe. It was all one piece from head to toe, closing around him in a turtleneck at the throat. It was tight around his neck, but he knew there was nothing he could do about the tightness. The leather used in these suits was treated with a cocktail of technology and chemicals giving it the ability to seal itself around the wearer leaving no visible seam. He had only to press a slightly raised circle embossed into the leather just over his Adam's apple to open the seam to remove the jumper.

His fingers closed tightly around the coin in his pocket. He rubbed his thumb over each of the surfaces of the coin a few times, turning it over and over between his fingers and thumb. After a few moments, he pulled it from his pocket and tossed the large silver coin into the air with a flick of his left thumb. It spun and gyrated quickly as it rose into the air, the sun glinting off of its quickly rotating surface, giving the reflected sunlight almost a haze, which Mendel squinted at. His eyes were sensitive to too much light, and this was certainly too much. He was already outside and was wearing dark glasses to protect his sensitive eyes from light.

            “Who came up with the name ‘coin’ ?” Mendel thought to himself. He reflected back over the ten thousand years of human history that had passed during his lifetime. He turned from the sun and went back inside.

            “It’s such an outdated term...” he thought, again, to nobody but himself. “We don’t even use money anymore.”

            Mendel had kept the archaic coin in his pocket since the year 5486, the year his father had died. Coins had become three-dimensional triangles in the shape of a pyramid. One one side, the likeness of Earth’s president starting in 5484, Jairus Cleventhal rose microscopically from the surface in a three dimensional holograph. The second side displayed a small globe, showing the three remaining continents of Earth’s surface (several continents had merged since what was then called Africa had merged into the Indian subcontinent in the year 2831, and when the Australian continent merged with South America in the year 5123). The third side was riddled with small scratches that gave it the texture of fine hair or a grass waving in the wind with a large “2” engraved deeply in the center. The bottom had a pin-sized hole in it which gave the Mint access to insert a sensor that told the computer the authenticity of each “coin.”

            “Of course, none of this matters to anyone anymore,” Mendel thought again.

Mendel made his way back into the observation room, and was sitting in a comfortable chair near the window of his Galleon-class star jumper. He was looking out over the barren landscape of the largest of the three continents, Monadnock. Monadnock was so named because of a single isolated hill rising out of the vast peneplain at the center of the continent.

            The final stages of fluvial erosion had been effecting the area since the scientists of earth had finally banded together to find a way and stabilize the tectonic shift of the earth before a new Pangaea was created. The political instability that had been witnessed in the previous merging and that was projected in the future was enough to unite the peoples of earth behind a single cause for the preservation of what was left of humanity.

            Mendel put his cherished coin back in his pocket. He stayed in the chair for what he perceived was several hours, all the while looking out over the barren land outside the ship. After so long being away, he couldn't believe how much further his former home had deteriorated since his last visit 2,100 years ago. He swiveled the chair around and got up to return to the ship’s bridge. He paused momentarily, and stretched the stiff muscles of his back and legs, before he made the short walk.

            “How long have I been sitting there, staring at this burned and dry lump of red dust?” Mendel spoke, seemingly to no one.

            “Sir, you were seated in the observation room for nearly 37 hours now. I've been monitoring your vitals, Sir, and you could use some nourishment. Would you like me to prepare you a meal?” replied the ships computer.

            “I’m tired of being home,” he said out loud so the ship’s computer could hear him. “Let’s get out of here.”

            “Where would you like to go?” asked the computer. The computer spoke in a quiet and subdued male voice that was just a bit gravelly.

            “Take me to the furthest inhabited planet from here. I just need to get away from it all. Cover my tracks. I don’t want anyone to follow us, or to know what we’re about to do,” shouted Mendel as he continued walking.

            “What do you intend to do?” asked the computer.

“I’m going put an end to the rule of Monarchs of the Fifty Galaxies!”

"And just how do you plan on doing that?" queried the computer.

Mendel again fingered the coin in his pocket, and scratched the back of his head with his other hand, thoughtfully. He stopped pacing around the bridge and replied, "I'm not sure yet, but I know we've got to get out of here. I can't stay. There's nothing left for me here... the Monarchs made sure of that a very long time ago. I'm giving you a command override order to never bring me back here, no matter what happens. I never want to see this place again."

"Very well sir. Command override order received and acknowledged. I've taken the liberty of setting a one thousand light-year perimeter of avoidance around Earth."

Mendel sat down in the captain's chair in the back of the bridge. He sat thoughtfully for a few minutes, and finally broke the silence with a question to the computer.

“Sir, I don't recommend you ignore your nourishment any further. I've taken the liberty of preparing your favorite dish, Sosaties. It's ready for you now in the galley.”

Sosaties was an ancient dish from a place on the old African continent, called South Africa. It was a sort of curried lamb or mutton grilled over open coals on a skewer with large pieces of onion or other vegetables. Mendel thought it was amazing that the ship's computer could so easily replicate the flavors and textures of this dish without so much as even a shaving of fresh lamb meat.

"How long will it take us to get wherever you're taking us?"

"We're already there... here, rather, but of course, I'm sure you knew the answer to that question. The furthest planet from Earth takes only 1,254,567 tesserotations to arrive, a duration of approximately 5.8081 cubed minutes to traverse."

"Man, how I hate the old Tessie," Mendel said, referring to the tesserotation, or rotation of the tesseract. "She takes the fun out of travel. I miss the days when you could get in your air ship and spend hours going from one big city to the next... there was so much more time to relax and enjoy the scenery. You could actually feel like you went somewhere, and didn't just pop up where ever you want to go."

"Sir," said the computer. "I could take us back and we could do it again, using the hyperbole drive instead. We'd be traveling at only three times the speed of light then, and it would take us years to return to this place."

"No. It's fine. We'll stay. I've got some work to do. I've put it off far too long already."

Mendel got up and went to the galley where he sat and enjoyed what might very well be his last really good meal for a while. What he was about to do would take him places and put him with people with whom he was sure not to be treated as a respected visitor, let alone like any sort of member of a family. He was hated for these many centuries that he'd been roaming the expanses of the universe alone. It had been nearly 50 years since he'd even seen another human being.

* * * * *

Travel by tesserotation had been around since the early 3000's. When scientists first discovered the tesseract itself over 1200 years earlier, there were only a handful of those working on the project who even had an inkling of what the discovery meant. The fourth dimension, time, was well known to all; but what it meant for travel, what it meant for space flight, was another thing entirely. Three scientists from the ancient Earth government agency EASA (Earth's Aeronautic and Space Administration) had taken their knowledge of what this meant with them to their graves. Then, many years later, a fringe group of scientists stumbled across their archived and encrypted notes. They had successfully broken the encryption codes on the information, and began to analyze what they found.

The tesseract was really a cube contained within a cube, or a three-dimensional hypercube, where the corners of each cube are connected. As time progresses, the inner cube rotates around a plane that intersects from the front-left to the back right, and from top to bottom. Since the laws of physics kept the corners of both cubes connected inseparably at all times, it meant that when an object on any side of either cube rotated through a point on the other cube, or along any point of any side connected to the tesseract, it eventually occupied the same time space as any other object which had passed through that location on the tesseract. This is what made the tesseract truly four dimensional.

The key to traveling the tesseract was to speed up the rotation of the hypercube itself so that the time between the two objects occupying the same location was reduced to the desired interval, or that the object was accelerated to the location the other object would occupy at some time in the very near future. The concept other scientists failed to grasp is that each object on the tesseract was itself on its own smaller tesseract, and that smaller tesseract could be made to travel faster along the time continuum of the larger tesseract on which it resided, by accelerating the rotations at virtually any desired rate. The acceleration of the tesserotation was limited by the capacity of the computer used to perform the complex calculations needed to perform it.

This is how Mendel had arrived at the planet Rasalas, the home world of the Monarchs. The computer accelerated the ships own tesseract so that it took only 5.8 minutes to arrive at Rasalas seconds before it arrived at its location with its own tesseract, both on the larger one. The effect of this acceleration was such that the ship was in orbit when it decelerated back to normal space time. Those 5.8 minutes were long enough to accomplish the 1.2 million rotations. A single steady tesserotation took one single second of what science had dubbed “standard time” in the old language.

Mendel was the only surviving fringe scientist from the team who had realized the full potential of the tesserotation. Once the technology was developed to a point where he and the computer could finish the development and actually implement the tesserotation, he copied all of the research to his own computers and destroyed the originals, removed the other scientists' access to the project and simply disappeared from the Earth.

Or so they thought...