The Bechtel Protocol

Sarah awakened slowly from the dream. She liked to log dreams in the notebook by her bed, but her mother was yelling second warning, so she staggered to the bathroom and into the shower before the water could warm.

She ran across the frost crusted grass while the sun, cold, peeked over the hills. The school bus was leaving, but stopped as she approached.

After wiping the cold droplets from the window, Sarah again thought of her dream. The sun, fully up now, gained warmth and color. The dream was fragmenting, but the nuance of it stayed. In it, she was encased in a sleeping chamber aboard a starship. She had just awakened, her eyelids too heavy to open. Her school lessons were completed while she slept and she knew about the stars, the starship, farming, engineering, and much more. She had been sleeping for so long and there was still far to go.

The dream was slipping away. Sarah watched the sun move higher and felt it warming her skin.

Alicia awakened slowly, her eyelids heavy. The cryosleep chamber was hissing its pressure off.

“Alicia… get up. Activity time.”

Alicia ran the treadmill, did a yoga routine, and more exercises.

“Fanny?” A younger Alicia had been allowed to name the ship computer and Fanny had seemed a funny name for the AI.

“Yes, Alicia?”

“I dreamt I was on Earth.”

“You dream that often.”

“Do I?” Hard to remember other dreams. She woke every six days for exercise, every ten days for comprehension testing, and every… “Fanny, how long have we been under way?”

“134.641 years, Alicia.”

“How long to go?”

“104.234 years.”

Alicia was pulling resistance bands. “The sun was coming over some hills, bright but cold. Frozen grass made a strange noise as I ran over it… I got in a yellow transit vehicle with white plumes of exhaust. The sun moved higher and warmed as we moved. I felt it on my face, Fanny.”

“An interesting dream, Alicia. Very Earth sounding. Time for your chamber.”

The pod top closed hissing. Its air mix immediately made her sleepy.

“Fanny?”

“Yes, Alicia?”

“Will I ever feel the sun on my face?” She fell asleep without hearing the answer.

In her sophomore year of high school, Sarah won the Ogeturk Award for her simplification of the Henri Paradox. The award historically went to graduate students’ dissertations, but her math teacher had sent her work in. Sarah was quite embarrassed by the attention, partly because she felt that she could solve the Paradox and the simplification seemed insignificant. Most of her embarrassment was due to being head over heels in love with Carson Jenkins, a senior and demigod at school. She wanted him to notice her, but being known as the local math genius was not what she had in mind.

Sarah continued to dream of Alicia in her starship. The dreams were troubling because of their consistency and the feel of being in someone else’s mind. Sarah was always Sarah in her other dreams; scared Sarah or laughing Sarah or flying Sarah, but always Sarah. In the Alicia dreams, Sarah felt both herself and Alicia. It frustrated her to be Alicia yet not as smart as Alicia. The knowledge Alicia possessed was always just beyond Sarah’s comprehension.

Sarah decided to walk home after school instead of taking the bus as usual. It was a warm spring day with large cumulous clouds floating above. A perfect day to walk. The math award was bothering her. Her parents were thrilled. Sarah wasn’t sure she even liked math. It was just there. Always running in the background. She knew it was Alicia. Sarah sat on the grass hill in Alabaster Park, halfway home. She watched the clouds pass, island sized fluffs of moisture. She could see Carson’s face in one of the clouds.

Retention testing days always left Alicia with a headache. Studies showed that subconscious education was superior for retention and best for categorizing and organization. She thought that probably no one had done a study on how hard a person had to work to pull that subconscious data up into the conscious mind.

“Fanny, why did people on earth see things in clouds that weren’t there?”

“Do you mean the shapes of animals or things of that nature?” Alicia liked when Fanny hesitated a moment before answering. She liked to think that Fanny was looking desperately through billions of bits of information to find an answer. Technically, Alicia knew Fanny had all data for everything instantaneously and all hesitation was incomplete data in her query, but she loved the idea that Fanny could be desperate.

“Sure… animals, castles, boys’ faces.”

“A lot of the cloud shapes will have similar shapes to familiar objects, such as elephants or dragons. Often the cloud shapes are very amorphous and the viewer is more likely to see things they have been thinking about, like gods or boys’ faces. Are you interested in this subject?”

“Not really.” Alicia had stopped telling Fanny about her Sarah dreams. Not that she didn’t trust Fanny, but the Sarah dreams felt personal and not to be shared. “Just curious.”

Sarah’s dissertation at Princeton on a new theory of propulsion necessary for interstellar travel split the world’s astrophysics community in half, one group jumping on the opportunities for new math and science, the other calling it flawed logic. Time would prove Sarah’s theories correct, but that didn’t make her immediate post-doc life any easier. Her department had insisted that the dissertation be named the Bechtel Protocol, though she had thought something without her name would be better.

NASA and other space agencies contacted her about consultations. Sarah wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Before her dissertation she had received a couple offers from universities and nearly convinced herself that a life of quiet academia was what she wanted.

“Alicia, wake up. We need you on the bridge.” Fanny’s voice was no different than ever, but Alicia felt the urgency. For her scheduled awakenings her sleep chamber brought her up slowly, warming her to a natural temperature over hours. Now she was shivering and sluggish. Of course, she had never been called to the bridge, either.

“What’s going on, Fanny?” Her teeth were chattering and her body did not want to respond to her commands.

“Sorry for bringing you up so quickly, Alicia, but the ship is not responding correctly to its programming.”

Alicia forced herself out of her pod and pulled her workout suit on. The temperature settings of the suit immediately went up to make up for her low body temperature. She left her room, stiff-legged and groggy.

“Give me more information, Fanny.” The bridge was a 20 minute fast walk away.

“We have been slowing for the last 300 days as we’ve approached the target solar system. In the last six hours we have veered three degrees off the Bechtel Protocol parameters. Bridge engineers think there is another force pulling the ship off course. They have not been able to correct the drift.”

“Hmm, not my field of expertise…”

“Apparently even our experts are outside of their expertise.”

The bridge was fully manned and noisy. This was the most people she had ever seen. She recognized a few faces, but most of the crewmembers were strangers to her. A man in uniform approached her.

“Zhiyu 1116, pilot engineer.” He bowed.

“Alicia 4572, internal comm engineer.” Alicia also bowed.

Zhiyu motioned Alicia over to the nearest unused computer and pulled up the ship’s telemetry readings.

“Here’s our expected trajectory and here’s our new trajectory…” Alicia could see that the new line was breaking towards the sun of the solar system. Zhiyu opened a different page. “What we are seeing is higher than expected magnetic readings from the star. This is unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

“Can we compensate? What do the Bechtel Protocol numbers say?”

Zhiyu was frustrated.“The measurements are outside of the Protocol’s limits. The numbers coming out are garbage. We will be flying blind without the Protocol.”

“Zhiyu, I have a general understanding of the Bechtel Protocol, but I’m not a mathematician. I would have no idea on how to change its limits.”

“I understand that you do have contact with the one person who might change the limits, though. You are in contact with Sarah Bechtel?”

“Yes… but only in dream state. We are not allowed conscious contact. It is the primary rule of telepathic engineering.”

“I understand. We are desperate.”

Sarah was in the starship bridge in her dream. There were many people moving around. It felt different from her usual Alicia dreams, not as tied into Alicia’s thoughts and more herself.

“Sarah?” Never had Alicia spoken to her!

“Alicia?”

“Hi, Sarah. I know this seems strange to you, but I need to directly communicate with you. We are having a problem with your Protocol.”

“Alicia, you’ve always been better at math than me. The Protocol comes from your knowledge.”

Alicia laughed. “You’re wrong there! I can barely understand it. I gave you some kernels, but you grew this. You are the greatest mathematician in history, hands down. Our best mathematicians hundreds of years later only have a general understanding of it, but here we are, lightyears from home based on your math. But we’re in a difficult position right now. Look with me at this screen. On it are composition numbers of the nearest star.”

Sarah looked at the screen through Alicia’s eyes. “Why are the metals composition numbers so high?”

“We don’t know. The working theory is that the star subsumed high metal planets or asteroids.”

“Hmm. Even with that, the magnetic readings seem too high. I can see that they would be way beyond Protocol limits.”

“That’s exactly right, Sarah! Do you think you could correct the limits?”

Sarah thought about it for a few moments. “Maybe… it will take some time, though.”

“You take all the time you need, Sarah. Your timeline doesn’t affect mine.”

Sarah spent the next morning clearing her schedule of commitments. She had spent the last twenty years defending the Protocol and teaching a new generation of physics and math students. Most mathematicians accepted her system now. What she hadn’t realized until today was that she had become bored. Alicia’s problem was exciting and demanded her engagement. First, she would need to understand the magnetic anomaly…

“Alicia?”

“Hi, Sarah!”

“Sorry, that took a few more years than I thought. Here’s what you need to do…”

In her dream, Sarah was Alicia standing on a hilltop. In the valley below was a small town, mostly domed buildings, but new construction with lumber framing was emerging on the outskirts. There were trees and grasses, slightly different from what she knew, but easily recognizable. The sun was high in the sky, larger than her own and tinted pink. Clouds scuttled by.

“Sarah, do you see any faces in the clouds?”