Tetroid - an SF novel by Geoff White

Prologue

Crash let himself into the huge old house through a basement door. It was built in the 1970's with military-industrial contract dollars. Crash relished the vastness of the interior; he imagined secret rooms and hidden passages. On hot summer days like this one, his friend Mark, whose house it was, enjoyed the comfort of his fully finished basement with entertainment area - built in wet-bar and all. Mark's programing skills had earned him megabucks in the dot com boom and Mark had all the toys. The dim blue light from an active monitor glowed across the cavernous gloom.

"Hey Mark, whatcha workin on?" Crash called to a man who sat motionless in front of a very high-tech computer, the latest model screamer.

Mark grunted in concentration. One glance at the computer screen told Crash everything. "Oh, that! Park it will you. There's a bitchin' new site I want you to see. Here, let me get it."

Mark nodded without taking his eyes from the screen. "I wasn't going to win this one anyway," he said as he killed the program. "Too many Grab-ons, not enough time!"

Mark sat back, tilting his chair, relinquishing control to Crash. He folded his arms behind his head as he watched his fellow hacker boot the net browser. They knew each other's net access codes, although they changed them regularly enough, for fun as much as for personal security.

Crash grasped the electronic rodent gently as he clicked through several directories. Crash came by his hacker nick-name honestly - he could bring any bogus website to its knees with aplomb. Mark admired Crash's dexterity with computer systems. He possessed a skill acquired only from hours spent manipulating the search engines and various protocols he used to scan the world computer net.

Dialogue boxes and menus flashed on the screen as Crash made the mouse dance. Then the particular screen he had been searching for appeared.

"Time travel for the Proletariat!" it declared. "Throw off your chains and be free! Workers of the world unite!"

"This is what I wanted. Look here, Mark, old buddy!" He scrolled down past instructions, cautionary notes eg. "Never teleport from a fast-moving vehicle, car, train especially airplane - conservation of momentum still applies you know." and

"How to contact fellow travellers."

He paused, clicked on a menu and the screen began to change as the browser downloaded an image. At first it was a fuzzy blizzard, then a complete picture formed. It was a 3-D puzzle.

Mark protested, "Oh no, not one of those! Why can't they..."

"Shhh, just wait! You'll see!" coaxed Crash.

The two hackers stared at the screen as it changed again. The background began to slough away and parts of the hidden image became clear.

Mark frowned, "I've never seen anything like it! What is it? What does it do?"

Crash grinned smugly, teasing Mark, "It's a star-map - of Vega and the Lyrae sector, I think."

Then....the Tetroid appeared on the screen. It was brilliant.

"Yeah, so?" queried Mark.

"In 3-D, it represents the actual distances between and relative vectors of the stars." The Tetroid image began to rotate slowly. The prismatic spikes glittered as the image turned slowly on its vertical axis.

"Again. So?"

"So if you study it until you can internalize the image mentally, with a little extra conjuring you can go anywhere you want to."

Then the screen changed as the Tetroid began to rotate on its horizontal axis. The crystalline daggers appeared translucent as it did a slow transverse roll. Faint stars in the background showed through the arms.

"And I can read a book to do that too." Mark was impressed with its beauty, but remained skeptical.

"You don't get it do you? This is the key to teleportation, dummy!" Crash laughed at his friend's perplexity.

"Who're you calling dummy, you dummy. Are you kidding me? Or is this straight up? C'mon."

Crash stopped grinning. "Yeah, I've done it."

Mark turned away from the screen to look at Crash's face. His expression said it all, but it was a lot to swallow.

Crash looked Mark straight in the eye. His jaw was set firmly. He was as serious as Mark had ever seen him. Mark paused, frowning as he considered the impossibility of the concept Crash had just described. "So, just supposing this actually works, how do you get back?"

Crash's expression didn't change. "Yeah, that's the tricky part."