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Thousands of kilometers to the East, an impatient multi-billionaire fitfully paced his private office at the top of the tallest tower of the Medieval castle that he often called home, when he was here in this his home universe. He looked out over his marvelous Enterprise City and remembered the horror of his initial farsight visions of the Dannos incident. All the possible futures had been terrifyingly disastrous and vivid when he first experienced them more than twenty-five years ago.
Fortunately, Earth's destruction was now slightly less likely to become reality. That is, there were several new 'plot-lines' to the Dannos episode that he could farsee, and although most still resulted in the Earth's destruction, a precious few now resulted in the Earth actually being saved. The possibilities were changing all the time though, due to such things as both classical and quantum mechanical randomness, the strange behavior of chaotic phenomena, and the exercise of what was perceived to be free will, including Jigs' own attempted manipulation of events.
Jigs documented his different visions as best he could, at one point even formulating one as a 'fictional' novel, and although his writing was a pale shadow of his vision, and littered with fiction needed to fill in 'holes' in his visions, it served its purpose. The Traveler read the Government Men novel, as Jigs had foreseen, and come to find him, marking the beginning their long association. As it turned out, the Traveler was always on the lookout for individuals with useful talents, talents that could be applied to oppose the ultimate forces of evil that threatened the Multiverse.
Earth surely needed help. For the last twenty-five years Jigs felt a bit like a driver during an auto accident, sitting tightly strapped in and helplessly watching as his vehicle crashed through a guard rail, shot out over a gigantic cliff, and nose-dived towards the dark, jagged rocks below, with the whole thing happening in adrenaline induced super-slow motion, as painfully inadequate efforts were made in equally super-slow motion to prevent what appeared to be inevitable disaster. Manipulating breaks and steering wheels while falling off a cliff was hopelessly futile.
Any conceivable means of surviving Dannos seemed downright absurd, but with the advantages of farsight, he could see that there was hope. Using farsight, a plunging car could be manufactured ahead of time to sprout a parachute, or a lake of Jell-O could be manufactured and placed at the cliff bottom.
The problem of an asteroid made of trillions of tons of iron that was due to strike Earth at Mach 140 was much tougher, even for a billionaire that could see bits and pieces of possible futures. He certainly hadn't even been able to avoid the Dannos problem from developing in the first place, even though he had seen it coming and desperately but unsuccessfully tried to stop it.
The next few days were the last chance for Earth. Despite all Jigs' efforts on the Dannos problem, all that he had managed to do was to give Earth one final, improbable opportunity. Even he still didn't and couldn’t know how it would all come out.
He still spent endless days and nights trying to better recall this aspect or that of this or that farsight vision, trying to determine what else might be done to improve the odds. He had been over everything so many times, and 'seen' so many different outcomes, that he was by now confused on many points. Besides, what was actual farsight vision, and what was just normal thoughts or dreams that later distorted his recollection of those visions?
"Show me Rev-3 pages 302 to 310 again" he stated. Instantly, the computer controlled four-meter wide VISICOM screen changed. "OK, window in my raw notes, page sixty four.” The full screen view of several pages of text from the first published version of his novel Government Men shrank proportionally to accommodate what looked like the random scribbling of a child. On closer inspection, words and phrases could be found scrawled between pipe-cleaner doodles of spacecraft, aliens, Indians, buses, unicorns, and other odd figures. He closed his eyes and tried to bring it back. But it was no good; he couldn't even remember creating these notes, let along interpret them now. His visions and the resulting novel were too blasted complex! There were far too many characters, for example.
"The hell with the notes and revisions!” he shouted at last, and settled back into his recliner with his eyes closed. Shutting out farsight was so automatic for him now, he had to actually concentrate just to let it happen.
Off his id went, at first plunging and tumbling along some arbitrary path in space/time. He could travel loose and free and pause to see and hear arbitrary future scenes virtually without effort, but then he would end up staring at the roof of a house, an ant climbing the branch of a tree, the top-side of a cloud, the surface of the moon, the inside of the Earth, empty space, or some other irrelevant scene. Arbitrary farsight usually wasn't even good entertainment.
Instead, with the skill obtained through years of excruciating practice, he performed feats of multi-dimensional gymnastics, cutting across the ebb and flow of space/time towards the near-term future of the top of his desk. Shortly past dawn the next day, the morning newspaper appeared, and he watched his future self read it, and then hold up the paper for past selves to also read it. He had learned years ago that this was much easier than traveling all over space/time to farsee actual future events. First he checked the date on the paper. Then he read the places in the paper that his future self pointed to. Finally, he checked the desk to see if he had/would write any notes to himself. In a few minutes he was done. Exhausted, he let himself slip back into the present.
He has left with the usual migraine headache; the price that he paid for controlled leaps through space-time. He picked up a hand COM. "Lieutenant Kra, situation report.” A meter-square window appeared in the middle of the huge VISICOM screen where Jigs was staring. George Krazinski, alias Klingon Lieutenant Kra, stared back at him.
"Still no sign of them, sir," reported Krazinski.
"Of course not. They're somewhere in a damn mountain or parallel dimension, if revision 3 of my novel Government Men still holds, and according to my farsight, it probably does. What about the Falcon?" asked Jigs.
Krazinski shrugged. "We still haven't found the problem. The countdown is still on hold.”
Christ, thought Jigs, it was probably just faulty diagnostic software again! That's what they got for relying too much on testing against virtual reality simulations and not testing against real avionics hardware! Plus, he had probably made the classic mistake of hiring too damn many engineers. They were down there now bumping into each other and undoing each other's work. Why hadn't he farseen that? Was this 'supposed' to happen?
No, that was thinking about it wrong. He was convinced that there wasn’t any one ‘reality’ that was going to or supposed to happen, driven by fate or whatever. His alternative visions of the future were indistinguishable from one another in terms of legitimacy. What ‘really’ actually happened depended on chance, free will, and a lot of other non-predictable things. Or perhaps all possibilities actually happened, with chance and free will just helping to pick which paths would be followed by each bit of reality.
"I want that ship UP THERE George! JUST GET IT DONE!” he ordered, too loudly. As he signed out he chided himself for being so hard on George. He was a good man, from good stock. A second generation Trekkie, George took to the Enterprise Hotel skits like a duck to white bread. George didn't even seem surprised when real aliens attacked the hotel in real flying saucers. He was as nuts as some of the rest of the Jigs crew, and a damn good pilot and engineer to boot! And a hell of a nice guy and friend. Jigs would hate to lose him, if it indeed came to that.
Jigs scanned through his messages. There was one from his daughters; they controlled most of his financial empire now, thank goodness, but they still tried to get his OK on some of the more important decisions. This was possibly due to the fact that they knew he could still see into the future even better than they could.
'Dear Little Daddy, should we buy the rest of Dow Chemical or another bank with the corporate winter investment funds? How do you SEE it? And wh
at should we tell Gates and Jobs about their latest technical ideas? Love, Kris/Kim.' Jigs smiled, checked his Dow Chemical stock records for the next five years, and scribbled an answer into digital memory. Not that he needed another chemical company to address any of the on-going plot lines that were becoming reality, but felt good to deal with the trivia of the office sometimes. Gates and Jobs headed up his VISICOM and computer industries. In other possible histories they were multi-billionaires themselves, but not in this one, though he paid them both very well. He responded negatively to their ideas about moving his manufacturing plants to China. “Not on my watch!” he muttered.
Not for the first time, he thought of abandoning this whole business and taking his family to someplace more remote from the asteroid impact site. They could survive; he had the bucks to do it if he wanted to. "NO!” he told himself resolutely. Not after all he had been through! This plot-line would work out. It simply had too!
He settled back in his easy chair and switched the VISICOM to a view of the Millennium Falcon. It looked good, even with an army of clumsy engineers swarming all over it. Several times the size of the earlier designed Bus, the Falcon was designed specifically to combat the Ra. But it was supposed to be flying months ago; that would have coincided with Rev-5 of his novel Government Men, which over the years had become the version he had hoped would come to pass.
Simply wanting Rev-5 to happen didn't make it so; nor did his many manipulations do much good. They had slipped into Rev. 3. The Falcon wasn't doing Bates and his Team any good here in Enterprise City. Of course he pretty well knew it would be late, no matter what he did; he had seen that much in the vision that became Rev-3.
What was it, which tended to keep visions of momentous events on course, no matter how hard he tried to change the outcomes? Was there actually something called fate, or perhaps a personal god? Or, like the Traveler explained it to him once, was farsight really just a psychic reflection of causal interface eigen-solutions to multi-phased parallel universes that were holographic projections? He wasn't enough of a physicist to understand even vaguely what that meant, and the Traveler either didn't know more, or wouldn't tell. If they survived until next week, maybe he could get Mel Guthery and Bates to work on it. There was no time to think about it now. They were all running out of time, fast.
With completion of the Falcon so near, it was time to talk to the Falcon crew one last time. He called them to his office, and in minutes all three of them arrived. George, Karen, and Mark; his very best people and his close friends.
They were all made up as Klingon warriors, as expected per-Rev-3. Jigs was damn proud of all of them!
"The Falcon is almost ready, as you are ready. You have trained for years. You have all read Rev-3. You know what is expected of you. You also know what I was trying for in Rev-5.” They all nodded. They had all been through this, again and again. They knew that the old man had wrestled with fate about the Dannos event for over twenty years, and that he had apparently not gotten everything that he wanted, despite his farsight gift, power, and wealth.
The twisted paths of probability that made up the actual future could be nudged here and there, but could not easily or predictably be turned. Rev-3, or something close, was becoming reality. Rev-5 and the others were now simply wishful thinking. The question now was, which sub-version of Rev-3 would come to pass? There were still many possibilities, with most of them still leading to complete failure and the death of most life on Earth.
"Anyway, I want you all to have one last chance to pull out. I'm only your employer; I'm not God, or any sort of military or police commander. All of you are smart people, so of course you thought I was loony when you first hired on, and again, when you learned what I needed from you. When you agreed to it originally, you probably didn't think it would ever be real, despite what I told you. Do you all believe it now?”
They all nodded in the affirmative. It had all become terrifyingly real. The aliens were national news; they had even attacked Enterprise City. The Bus and its mission were real, and so, as evidenced by recent headlines in the news world-wide, was the asteroid Dannos. Despite unexpected Government cover-up efforts, the coming asteroid collision with Earth was now the number one news story.
Fortunately, the massive public panic feared by world Governments did not take place. There was limited panic, but mostly there was either quiet resignation or total denial and disbelief. Churches were full. Radio and COM shows addressed Dannos. Aspirin sales were up 300%. Beer sales were up 1000%. But the problem was too damned big and serious to say or do anything useful about it, and the public generally understood that, at least the ones that weren't in a state of total denial.
"George, Karen, Mike," continued Jigs, "this has to be your decision.”
George stepped forward. "I'm going, sir," he stated, simply and firmly. Karen and Mike also stepped forward and confirmed that they would also go.
"You all have family and friends!” said Jigs.
"That's why we have to go," explained George.
Jigs nodded sadly and shared a hug with each of them, a strangely non-Klingon gesture of friendship, and the trio returned to the ready room, leaving Jigs to stare the door that closed behind them. He wiped tears from his eyes. Bates and the others on his Team felt imposed upon and concerned with the grave responsibilities that they now shouldered, but Jigs had been saddled with such responsibilities since he was a child, responsibilities that came as one of the prices of his unique psychic farsight capability.
Tragedy was no stranger to Jigs. Many times he tried to change what he farsaw would probably happen, and nearly as many times he had failed. Sometimes he even made things worse instead of better, for those issues he found time to try to address. For most issues there wasn't time for him to try to 'fix' them at all. He couldn't afford to fail this time, but he was painfully aware that at this point, there wasn't much more that he could do personally. For the most part, the fate of Earth now was in the hands of Bates and his friends. Plus three folks dressed as Klingons in a new, untried ship. Plus others that weren't even part of the Bus Team yet, and would not become Team members unless the Team managed to survive this troubled day.
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