Binary Systems [Complete, Slice-of-Life Sci-Fi Romance]

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Harry: Well. I met her father today. And I got away in one piece. So I'm sitting here wondering: now what?

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Friday, November 22nd, 2090, about 3:00 pm MST, Montana City

Gordon stared at the dark bulk of the orbiter, parked like a monument in the middle of the complex. Behind it, the launch gantry arched back like the gnarled arms of some great, sleeping ogre. Smoke still rose from the surrounding warehouses, a testament to its recent, violent arrival.

That can probably be hotwired, he thought with a flicker of dark amusement. It was one of the other reasons he had to carry a sidearm—just in case someone tried to use him for that very purpose. Apparently, it had happened to his father once.

His portable buzzed. A message he'd woken up to late in the day, a summons. I am waiting, Hiram had texted. His father.

Gordon hadn't had hours to come to terms with what had been done to him. A week wouldn't be enough.

His father was an idiot if he thought Gordon would just roll over and play dead. But then—wasn't that what he had always done? Performed the role his father expected? Maybe Hiram wasn't the idiot here.

No. It's never effective to try to get inside the old snake's head. He'll drag you down to his level and then beat you with experience.

Still, he was in an absolute black mood. He could feel his brows beetling, a scowl settling on his face. Why shouldn't he be angry? Why did home deserve a performance? As he had so many times, he corrected his own train of thought. The real question wasn't about what Hiram deserved. It was, "Why do I deserve to go through what happens when he knows I'm mad at him, on top of everything else?"

Harry had made fun of him for not wanting to feel his feelings. It had bothered him because it rang true. Avoidant behavior. A lack of "epistemic integrity," as his father would say. The man loved using those words, a cosmic joke from someone who treated truth as a tool for leverage. And yet, that was the only valid lesson Hiram had ever taught him: the quest for truth. What do I know? How do I know it? How sure am I?

In this case, he was pretty damn sure his father had no respect for him at all.

This wasn't getting him anywhere. Satisfaction is preceded by striving. Act, dammit, he told himself. Also, I can never tell Harry about this.

Okay. Where to now?

His mind began a review, walking through the options, a grim flowchart of his own life.

Point A: Open immigration to Mars was out. Hiram practically owned one of the seven colonies; none would risk his wrath.

Point B: Hiram was not the only wealthy man with rocket ships. There was Joe. He hadn't talked to Joe face-to-face in a while. A lunch meeting seemed plausible. A long shot, but a shot nonetheless.

Option C sucked: Wait a year, maybe a year and a half, for the UN to process his immigration request. They'd find nothing to deny him—he wasn't a criminal or an addict—and Hiram couldn't block it forever. All he had to do was survive eighteen months in a long-distance relationship without it crumbling under the weight of jealousy or simple attrition. Without Marie finding someone else. Someone there.

The thought was stupid. It was also, he admitted, not entirely irrational. He knew Marie wasn't a statistic, but he'd looked up the data once before, back when he was feeling more optimistic. The odds weren't good.

I am waiting. The text again. A summons to one of Hiram's self-important "in-person audits"—a waste of time designed to parade Gordon around like a recaptured asset, a whipped dog. A show of power for the board.

He remembered the arguments, the seductive logic, the sheer skill at argument his dad used against him. Which irked him, because the same man had tried to teach him the same skills. It shouldn't work.

"You're the only one who knows the entire process," Hiram had argued. "You're the QA. Your absence, combined with my potential demise, represents an unacceptable security risk."

Hiram had backups, of course. "Archive-grade DVDs," he'd said, as if that meant anything. Stored in a vault. Gordon knew the truth: they were user-unfriendly to the point of being indecipherable. There were simply too many moving parts. Gordon knew this because he had once tried to explain the simplest concepts of the twin-sun engine to Claire. He was more than aware that his stepsister was no idiot, yet she had found the whole thing impenetrable.

The basics were fine. Oscillation? She understood that. The fact that fusion engines generate oscillating fields? Also fine. She even claimed to understand waveform interactions—how phases could interact constructively or destructively. That was the first point in the explanation where she'd looked a little dubious, but she didn't generally oversell herself. So far, so good.

That was when he'd lost her.

"So," he'd explained, "all you have to do is lock the oscillating fields in a negative phase—a self-destructive, subtractive waveform. You do that across 360 degrees of access for all the variable-length magnetic tunnels that link the two fusion cores. Then, you dynamically adjust the length of each arm to maintain that negative phase lock, and your engines don't blow up."

The first edge of the impulse hits in under a millisecond. The neural net can't catch it—but the hardware layer can, just barely. It lags, but not so much it fails. As long as the compensation wave keeps following the disturbance close enough, the system damps it instead of riding it. You don't stop the wobble—you chase it. Forever.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

It was that simple, and that impossible. No cheats. You had to manage perfect phase synchrony at full spherical symmetry, all while the system was in constant oscillation, and chase disaster every step of the way.

Without this? Forget braking thrusters on a torchship—plasma hits the wall, everybody dies.

And even grasping the theory wouldn't have helped. Knowing how the magnetic arms were paired was most of the trick, and that was a black box. The pairing was done by a neural network. It worked, but no one—not even Hiram, its designer—could fully articulate the first principles involved. They had figured out the important variables, trained the network, and the network had produced a solution. They had tested that solution with extreme rigor, but that wasn't the same as understanding it.

The ability to verify something, Gordon had learned early in his QA career, is not the same as the ability to understand it.

He'd learned that lesson again while working with Karen on her "pain device"—a name he still found hilarious and was sure she still hated. Properly calibrated, it was a neural readout that could, in theory, resolve a core difficulty in caregiving: reporting pain from patients unable to communicate. Are they in pain? Where? It was a noble, complex goal. And as they worked together, Gordon discovered that just knowing the brain uses chemicals and electricity didn't prepare him at all for the complexity of tracking them.

He didn't know what questions to ask. He only knew how to ask them, once Karen—the expert—told him what to look for. It had been humbling, and he was grateful for it. The last thing he needed was the kind of ego his father and his father's friends possessed. He had enough trouble keeping his own in check.

So no, you couldn't know it all at once. Not unless you'd been exposed to it repeatedly, over a long period of time. You could eventually learn the shape of it, and for most things, that was functionally enough. But for something as complex and dangerous as the twin-sun engine, "functionally enough" still felt like a massive security threat.

"Our competitors could reverse-engineer what we do from the parts list," Hiram would counter. "I could, so they could. And that's bad enough." It was, Gordon had to admit, a valid concern.

So, yes, Gordon's freedom was a threat to the company. That was valid.

Which always led back to the central question: "Why should I sacrifice my happiness for the company? Do I owe them that?"

And from there, Hiram would pivot to duty. Oh yes. Duty. Hiram: (Scoffs, but it's not a sound of dismissal. It's one of pity.) "Your happiness? Gordon, you're still thinking like a child. Adulthood is the act of giving up your dreams. For everyone."

Gordon: "That's a bleak way to look at the world."

Hiram: "It's a realistic one. Mothers do not dream of wiping feces off screaming children. Parents do not dream of going hungry so their family can eat. They do it because it is their duty, and because society would rightly condemn them if they did not. Life happens whether you are prepared for it or not. I am simply trying to prepare you."

Gordon: "By taking away my choices?"

Hiram: "By giving you clarity. By killing your foolish dreams now, before they die a slow, painful death and take the company down with them. We are all in cages, Gordon. I'm trying to gild yours as much as is possible."

Gordon: "I don't want a gilded cage."

Hiram: (Leans forward, his voice dropping but gaining intensity.) "This isn't about what you want. This is about the megatons. It's about the fact that your choice, your selfishness, carries a quantifiable, non-zero risk of getting other people's mothers killed. You are intelligent enough to understand that. You are the one who verifies the safety protocols. So tell me, how do you justify placing your 'happiness' above that?"

And . . . if Gordon's happiness was driving bumper cars in supermarkets, and other people's lives were at risk, he shouldn't be allowed to drive. He knew that. He had a driver's license.

Gordon approved of driver's licenses. He believed in standards. Hiram knew this and used it. He'd create a false binary. "There are two types of companies in this world, Gordon: those with an adult in the room, and those that collapse to market pressure." He'd talk about the American auto industry in the 2000s, about radium workers, about leaded gasoline. "Cars used to catch fire in accidents," he'd say, "not because it was a bug—because people forgot that it was one."

"With a fusion engine capable of accelerating to significant fractions of the speed of light," Hiram would press, his voice taking on the weight of prophecy, "do you have any concept of what that means? Orders of kilotons. Megatons. Your sister wouldn't understand that scale. But you do."

Then came the final turn of the screw. "So you want to marry for love? Is it worth what it could cost—what it could cost—if the company folds, and you are responsible?"

Gordon had shaken his head then, just as he was shaking it now. "Everybody makes the same mistake," he'd said. "If it's the end of the world, and I'm there—I can always come back. Not forever. But to fix it. I know it's possible."

"I simply don't believe you would," Hiram had replied, his voice flat. "But perhaps I'm mistaken. In any case, after a few years on Mars, you wouldn't be capable."

"I'd wear an exoskeleton. I know the research."

"Then you know it was regulated out of existence—on ethical grounds. If it worked, DARPA would use it."

"Then why not just train a replacement?"

"It took you ten years to reach acceptable proficiency, and you're hardly an idiot," Hiram had said, the closest he ever came to a compliment. "I'm seventy-two. I don't have that kind of time." He'd offered a rare, sardonic smile. "And even if I did—say I found some wunderkind—where would we find one with the moral fiber to brave an exoskeleton? Heroes don't grow on trees."

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The Martian doctor finished tightening the last strap, his voice even and clinical. "The therapy is intensive. The exoskeleton rig will grow painful. I can't guarantee success here. Are you sure you want to do this?"

Marie looked at the screen-mounted heads-up display—blood pressure, liver markers, kidney markers. The warning symbol, not currently lit.

She thumbed the on button.

"If this is what it takes to be with him, I'll walk through fire."

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At the end of the way, what was he doing? Sitting in a cold car, waiting for his father to rehash the same old arguments.

Act, dammit.

He picked up his portable. "Time to call Joe."

[Admin_AI: Gordon, you are nearly in breach of contract.]

Gordon blinked.

[Gordon: Oh? Send me the details.]

Gordon reviewed the contract.

Oh. I never resurrected Gallant.

Let's get that done.

[2:00] Hiram: Gordon, we are doing a ride-around audit. Meet me at the car loop.

[2:02] Gordon: Audits are looking good, and I have something I need to do real fast per contract.

[2:05] Hiram: Your split focus is not an asset to this company.

He didn't argue. Hiram understood about contractual obligations. That was as good as it was going to get. Besides, it would only take a few minutes.

[2:05] Gordon: Be out in ten.

NOW time to call Joe.