Monroe-Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Seven. Endings and new beginnings.

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Bob was reminded of a line he'd read in a Jim Butcher novel, Summer Knight. It had described how despite all the time and effort that had gone into making travel in a modern, jet propelled air liner possible, that people took it for granted. The fact that when on a plane you were basically hurling through the air by exploiting a loophole in the laws of aerodynamics, stuffed into a metal can that was sealed well enough to hold air, moving so quickly that if you hit so much as a goose you'd die instantly. Despite the awe inspiring nature of just how incredible it was to travel across distances in mere hours that would have taken years only a few generations earlier, it was taken utterly for granted.

As he jumped the Freedom, again, he felt like Jim Butcher had really gotten that feeling right.

"Raising masts," he announced, fighting back a yawn.

They'd gotten into a routine during the past two days. Bob would jump the ship, a process that took about twenty minutes, for eight hours a day. He'd then delve for six hours, adding an hour for meals at each end of his delve, and then rest for eight.

The crew had been adamant that he eat meals with them, and that he get a solid eight hours of sleep.

This was the forty-fourth jump, and Bob was starting to wonder just how random the end point of their jump was. The masts locked into place, and the display began flaring to life. He leaned forward, surprised. They'd arrived in a solar system! 𝔣𝔯𝔢𝔢𝔴𝔢𝖇𝖓𝔬𝖛𝔢𝔩.𝖈𝔬𝖒

It took a few minutes but the display began to clear up, and he could see the star, as well as fuzzy shapes that were likely planets. He knew it would take a bit for the computers to gather enough data to have a general idea of each planets size, and even longer to produce a rudimentary orbital model of the solar system, but they'd at least found a star with some sort of planetary body orbiting it.

He tapped his armband, opening a message window that would notify the entire crew. "We've jumped into a solar system, if anyone wants to check it out," he said, then tapped the display to send the message.

Dave and Amanda were the first to arrive. "What did we find?" Dave asked as they hurried into the cabin, peering at the display above the center of the table.

"Well, there's a star, and at least half a dozen planets," Bob gestured toward the display. "I'm not sure where this software even came from."

"Jack said we shouldn't ask, because we wouldn't want to know," Amanda smiled, brushing a stray tendril of dark hair away from her eyes.

"Doubt it matters anymore," Jack entered the room wearing only a pair of gym shorts and scrubbing his hair dry with a towel. "But it was the software they had developed for NASA to try to get a better read from the Hubble and Webb telescopes. I kind of wish we had a few telescopes on the Freedom, I can only imagine the sort of things we'll see."

"Something to consider for the next design," Bob replied.

It took almost four hours for the display to finally give them a workable image. There were eleven planets in the solar system, the first five terrestrial and remaining six giants, of those there were three gas giants and three ice giants. There was an asteroid belt between the first two gas giants.

The star was a yellow dwarf, the same type as Earth and Thayland's, although it was about four percent larger, and burning slightly hotter. The first three planets were too close to the star to be habitable, although the third was a narrow miss. The fourth and fifth planets were in the habitable zone, although the fifth was close to the edge, which meant it would likely be quite a bit colder than they'd like, even more so than Thayland.

Maybe. The sad truth was they were going of data gathered by magical sensor arrays which was then processed by a series of computers running pirated software that was designed to analyze optical inputs.

"Well, two possibilities," Mike said as they stared at the display.

"Oh, look, there's another moon!" Eddi said excitedly, pointing at a dot that had appeared around the seventh planet.

"I'd say this is definitely a place we should check out," Amanda pointed to the fourth planet. The sensors had been able to provide some color, and it showed greenish-blue, streaked with white.

"Well, we're definitely too far away from that planet to get there before the update," Bob replied. "We've got a possible target here, and we found it a lot more quickly than I thought we would."

"It's been two days, with you jumping the ship over and over," Eddi grumbled. "It's already taking forever."

"I wonder if we aren't jumping between roughly the same point in each dimension," Amanda mused. "I mean, Thayland's solar system was pretty clearly analogous to Earth's, just a lot younger. G-Type stars make up just under nine percent of the stars in the universe, I think. It seems pretty odd that the three solar systems we've visited have all had the same type of stars."

"That would make sense," Dave reached out and wrapped his arms around her, resting his head on her shoulder. "The System has been integrating dimensions for billions of years, and each time it does, it stops the expansion of that universe. You've got to figure that there is a wild range of basically fixed points of expansion, if that's the right way to describe it, some of which will be empty, as they're so much earlier that there isn't anything here yet."

Jessica frowned. "I don't think the universe expanded that quickly?"

"I think that we need to accept that while we were getting pretty good at our terrestial sciences, we were still a long ways away from understanding the rest of the universe," Bob shook his head. "It's an interesting intellectual exercise, but ultimately we don't know yet." He smiled. "I'm going to reincarnate at tier eight, with an Endurance Affinity Crystal. That means I'm going to live for twelve hundred years or so, at tier eight." He closed his eyes, still smiling. "I've got time," he said softly. "I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around just how much time I'm going to have." He opened his eyes and looked around at his friends. "You're all going to have just as much. Working together, helping each other, we have all the time in the world."

Bailli walked around the table, and pulled him into a hug.

Eddi chuckled quietly. "Before I met Wayna, I would have given just about anything for a hug from Bailli," he whispered to Mike.

Bailli let go of Bob and fixed a haughty look toward Eddi. "You," she stalked over to him, glaring down imperiously, which was impressive given that Eddi was a solid six inches taller than she was, "were far too young and immature."

She then spoiled the effect by whispering loudly to Wayna as she walked back to Erick, "He did turn out cute, though."

"Cute?" Eddi grumbled.

"Take it kid, believe me, cute is better than the adjectives normally used to describe me," Mike advised. He paused. "Well, the old me, before I reincarnated, when I was in my forties with a lot of years of riding a desk and eating chili dogs."

"Yes, yes, we're all markedly improved," Jack waved his hand, "except for me, of course, as there's little you can do to improve when you're starting so close to perfection."

"What are you going to shoot for, species wise, when you go for tier eight?" Jessica asked. "I know you went paragon and then pinnacle, but the next step is going to require an actual change."

"I'm hoping that the update is going to help with that," Bob replied. "I know I definitely want to remain humanoid."

"Speaking of the update, and hopefully bring us back around to current events," Harv began, "we're a day and a half from the update, and we're much further from that planet. Wouldn't it make sense to head back to Thayland and wait it out?"

"Or, and hear me out on this," Jack began, "make a quick stop by Earth and pick up some telescopes. Or at least the designs for some of the good ones, as we can always fabricate them later."

"Shouldn't we have schematics for telescopes on our drives?" Mike asked.

"Maybe?" Dave frowned. "We focused on text books, scientific papers and journals, and lots of entertainment. Are telescopes something that someone would have patented? I know that someone was trying to get a factory going to manufacture microchips, but they were having trouble getting all of the exact details for a modern chip."

"I'm pretty sure they are," Bob replied. "It doesn't cost us much to stop by Earth anyway, and at this point, with a potentially viable target planet, we have time to kill as we're going to wait out the update some place safe. I doubt that the changes are going to prevent me from jumping the ship, but it's better to be safe than to be sorry."

Eazy was cursing under his breath.

The decision to leave everything behind had been easy to make. Alice had been his whole world, and after losing her, nothing else had really mattered. If he'd been devout, going to Temple might have helped, but he'd lost his faith decades earlier, and going to Temple had become an exercise in self restraint. He'd wanted to grab the Rabbi and scream at him, shake him until he explained why his wife had to die.

Ultimately, it was the condolences. Everyone was sorry, so very sorry. He didn't want to hear it anymore. He'd hired a pair of young men years ago to run the front of the shop, allowing him more time with Alice, so he'd continued to work, but every day he came home to the empty house that was still full of their memories together.

He'd made it six months after her death before leaving. When he'd finally made the decision, he'd felt a modicum of peace for the first time since her diagnosis.

Eazy had packed his truck, and started heading north.

He loved Colorado, but everything was too close. He needed some place more remote.

He'd crossed the border into Canada, and gotten a cheap motel at the edge of Calgary. Exhausted from the eighteen hour drive, he'd slept without night terrors for the first time since Alice had died.

Banff National Park was twenty-five hundred square miles of rugged wilderness. The edges were riddled with paved and graded roads leading to tourist destinations. He'd been to a lot of them with his grandfather, and then with Alice. There weren't a lot of people visiting in early May, and a lot, most even, of the roads were still closed.

That suited Eazy just fine. His old F-150 might be dinged and dented, with one quarter panel having more bondo than steel, but the five liter v-eight purred like a kitten, and she shifted in four wheel drive just fine.

What would have been a six hour drive in the summer took three days. He'd had to use the winch twice, but ultimately he'd made it to the end of the service road. Looking back, that had been the easy part. He'd loaded his gear onto a sled, and started working his way into the park, sticking to the valleys, taking a winding path that ended up being a mere fifty miles as the crow flies, but almost a hundred and fifty on foot.

He'd chosen his destination based on aerial photography of the park. The unnamed valley was filled with lodge pine, with multiple streams flowing down into it to form what could, if you were generous, be called a tiny river.

There was nothing here to attract tourists or hunters, or at least nothing that they couldn't find around the edges of the park, which meant the odds of anyone intruding on his solitude were incredibly small.

He'd arrived a week later than he'd intended, and was down to two weeks worth of the powdered meal replacement mixture that compromised the majority of the weight the sled had started with.

Eazy had always been an outdoorsman, something he'd learned from his grandfather, whom he'd spent his summers with as a child and then a teenager. His profession as a kosher butcher worked hand in hand with his experience hunting and fishing, supplementing his diet as he worked to build his little slice of solitude.

He'd been there for a year when that weird blue screen had appeared.

At first he'd thought he'd lost his mind. He'd developed the habit of talking to himself, as well as some of the local wild life, and he knew that he probably wasn't in the best shape, in terms of his overall mental health.

Still, he'd stopped having night terrors a year earlier, and then four months after, the nightmares had stopped.

He still thought about her, but it had hurt a little bit less, and he was reaching the point where he could remember the good times, and while it hurt, it didn't crush him like it used to.

The weird blue hologram, and it's attendant count down, were a concern.

Eazy had left the world behind because he needed to heal, not because he wanted to die. If there was something wrong with him, he needed medical help. If there wasn't anything wrong with him, and the blue box was real, then he needed more information.

Either way, he'd decided to head back to civilization.

If he was going to say he had any luck at all, it was that it was July. If it was winter, there was no way he'd make it back.

The stupid timer was ticking down with relentless regularity. He'd borrowed a forest service truck that had been left unattended at the work shed at the end of the forest service road, his own truck having likely been towed long ago.

His sense of dread had been growing as he'd exited the park. There was absolutely no one there. The park should have been full this time of year, but he didn't see a single soul.

As he entered Calgary, he was becoming increasingly concerned. The timer was counting down in minutes now, not hours. Eazy wasn't one to panic, but his heart had been hammering when he pulled into the city center and let out a gasp as he saw a group of soldiers milling around what looked like a damn stargate.

Two of the soldiers rushed over to him as he climbed out of the truck.

Bob was petting Monroe as he waited around the table for the update. They'd parked the IIDS Freedom in orbit above Thayland after a quick trip to Earth. It turned out that the plans for the latest and greatest telescopes were indeed part of the public domain, and they'd had them already. So, they'd picked up the parts they'd have had a hard time manufacturing to make their own. It wasn't going to be anything as grand as the Hubble, let alone the Webb, but they thought that they would be able to put together something akin to one of the smaller models attached to the ISS.

"Well, it's about time," Bob said as the counter neared zero. "I'll see you all on the other side."

System Update Initializing. Stand by.