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According to the protocol, the launcher cannot send personal belongings of immortals with them. I don't know who wrote it, but he/ she / they / it has clearly never worked in logistics. Over the millennia, so much junk has accumulated here that those ridiculous 2 times a month that we were ordered to launch it into the Baby was just not enough, criminally.
We could not dump junk into garbage universes, no, we could not send it to the Lagrange points of the nearest planets, as it is prescribed to do with unidentified space debris. No, we had to launch it into our black hole as well as the owners of these things. But apart from them.
The manager who worked at the launcher before me just went to the Central Computator (CC) to deal with this issue. But he never came back.
Personal belongings were accumulated in a four-dimensional warehouse, and twice a month it was necessary to select from the list those that had matured for the “evacuation” to the Baby. That's what I assigned Rob to do. He didn't grumble, he didn't talk much at all. He was not the first one who stayed to work on the launcher, not daring to make the jump and finally end his immortal life in the event horizon of the Baby. Some lived at the station for a year, some for three, then jumped or flew away. Different things had happened.
Rob went to the warehouse right after the start of the work shift. I habitually smoked, spat into the boundary of the gravitational cocoon and watched as the saliva was slowly stretched by the Baby's attraction. The old man had been gone for too long.
I went down to the sled and started the scanner, which showed me the point where the package with things was last requested, and moved there. Turning the corner near section 7014, I found an open box with glowing cubes in it. And everything immediately fell into place.
Many years ago, a case stuck in my memory. Another tenthousander arrived at the launch site. These guys always brought problems. He was rushing between those waiting in line with his box and hindered me from working. At first, he demanded to be “evacuated” along with his belongings, then to bring him into the warehouse and let him pack his stuff. The protocol strictly forbade both. In the end, he refused to jump, but after receiving some personal message from the Central Computator, he gave up, calmed down, and a week later “evacuated".
It was his box. And there were Tesseracts inside it. How did he get them? A long-banned ancient technology. At that time, science had not yet learned how to get to the angelic dimensions. And people were “digitized” into subuniverses. They were sold this idea – as eternal life. Each such tesseract was an ordinary 4d-verse, three dimensions and time, only with the information unit lower than ours. It was possible to live there, but the resolution was worse and the quality of perception left much to be desired. Of course, it was a breakthrough for the time. But those who decided to live there sooner or later, and this was estimated in millions of years, realized the finiteness of these worlds. By that time, everyone had forgotten where they came from. It was not possible to keep such knowledge. Nobody canceled the property of information to be distorted with time.
I knew right away what had happened to Rob. The poor guy touched one of the four-dimensional cubes and fell inside. This has already happened to a person I knew.
I was faced with a choice, to report the incident to the Central Computator and wait for an answer, which could last for centuries, or to do for Rob, what he himself had not dared for several months now, and drop the tesseracts together with him into the Baby. At the same time freeing from the torment of a dozen virtual universes. Many may not support me, but I chose the latter. I don't like to wait. Moreover, the protocol did not prohibit this.
I carefully closed the box, trying not to touch the cubes, sealed it with eternal tape and slipped myself to the launcher. There, the AI quickly calculated the trajectory, I pretended to check the calculations, conducted guidance and fired a slingshot. With the usual whistling sound, the “cargo” left the launcher and rushed to the Baby. I came out of the hangar and lit a cigarette. The doofr creaked and Rob appeared behind me.
"Oh, already launched it? And I found gloves for carrying multidimensional loads," the old man said, shaking thick pieces of manymaterial in his hands.
I looked at it, narrowed my eyes, took a drag and looked at the sky, where the launch trail has been disappearing.
“Well, shall I go?” Rob asked.
"Sure,” I nodded.403Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRNubBDyDCg
