Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

The Apparatus

"How do you find a needle in a haystack the size of the universe."

"Correction, how do you find a needle in a haystack the size of the universe when you don't know what the needle looks like."

"Way to make it sound worse." Ramirez muttered, and Adam shrugged lightly from where he stood on the ship's command platform. It had taken them some time to learn, but it turned out the pilot wasn't required to be active to power the ship. As long as Adam was present and touching some part of the ship he acted as its main power source. This was not something Ramirez or any f the others besides lord Cele could do, seeing as their human constructs prevented them from shedding the right amount of power.

They had talked with Krill extensively on weather or not they should continue preforming the anima surgery. Eventually they had come to an agreement that he would preform it on a request by request basis, but only after some more preparation and testing. Preforming the surgery on Adam made krill realize there were some significant holes in his knowledge that he wished to fill before performing any other risky surgeries.

All in all powering the ship was not an unpleasant sensation if not a little strange, a sort of thrumming that ran deep through his bones . In a way it was almost soothing . If there was one thing with the empyrean that he found lacking was the sound. Back on the omen and the harbinger, he had been used to a certain atmosphere, the distant thrumming of engines and working machine parts which could be heard pulsing through the walls and the floors, but the empyrean.

She was almost silent.

If not for a sort of ambient hum, or the soft rushing of air through the decks she was almost completely silent. It was a strange feeling.

The empyrean had no real engines in the way they would be understood by humans. Narobi could explain it better than he could but he didn't even want to try. Something to do with mass energy conversion or soemthing something whichwas amazing astonishing and soemthing something else that he didn't catch because he had zoned out.

Adam loved science, but sometimes he didn't understand it much.

Correction.

He actually understood science very well now. Since the changes to his brain, things had gotten a lot easier. He hadn't mentioned it to anyone yet, but since the chance he was capable of doing orbital calculations in his head without the aid of a calculator. When Narobi talked about her engines, he could visualize what she was talking about, and while part of that was the fact that he could see into her head, another part of it was his own mind running hotter than it had ever run before.

He wasn't sure how to feel about all that worried that maybe the surgery had profoundly changed him in ways that made him a fundamentally different person.

"So how does one find an unknown object in a haystack the size of the universe." Adam jumped a bit not realizing he had faded off for a minute there.

"Well.... The void isn't known for picking up after itself when they visit, so with a little help from the science nerds and others we have developed a sort of interstellar photodetection that can detect the specific values often found in void emanating light. We aren't sure if it is going to work, but we at least have to try." He turned his head to glance out the window, "I have my own personal theory on the subject.

"Oh?" Ramirez said rising an eyebrow.

"I think the void is on the edge of the universe."

"Bold of you to assume the universe has an edge." Adam opened his mouth to argue but Ramirez made a pretty good counterpoint depending on which theory you subscribed to the universe was either a flat plane or an ever-expanding bubble. In both cases the universe didn't really have an edge because having an edge implies that the objects exists within a three dimensional space that continues outward past the boundaries of wherever. Now in the globe theory of the universe, the object is round and universe only exists inside the bubble, there is no end because it simply goes in a circle. It would be like trying to walk to the edge of the earth, you just can't do it because there is no edge. In the end you just end up walking back around to where you started.