Off We Go by Mary Jo Rabe

Editor’s Note: Frankenstein Day, or National Frankenstein Day, is an annual holiday on August 30th to celebrate the birthday of Mary Shelley (born in 1797) and her iconic novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The day is a tribute to Shelley’s literary genius, her groundbreaking work of science fiction, and the novel’s enduring themes of ambition, creation, and responsibility.

* * *

Off We Go by Mary Jo Rabe

Beth Zero ran her hand impatiently through her short, stiff, gray-blonde hair, then sneezed, sighed, and peered at her dusty, hand-held communications globe. No answer. Doc Brach must be out dune surfing again. He claimed that as long he kept people in the Bradbury Habitat as healthy as possible, he could spend all his free time out on the surface of Mars.

Chances were that he wouldn’t bother to react to her worsening hygiene issues anyway unless he was bored. Even then, he would most likely tell her to talk to her fellow nano-engineers. The doc only administered the nanobots; the engineers produced and programmed them.

As a general rule, though, to protect her own sanity, Beth Zero preferred to talk to as few people as possible. She wasn’t much of a team player.

In most cases, ultramicroscopically sized nanobots kept human bodies on Mars healthy, vigorous, and almost forever young. Internal nanobots repaired body tissue and battled invasive life forms while imprisoning any cells that threatened general health. External nanobots took care of hygiene issues, reducing the need for using water on Mars, always a good thing.

Right now Beth Zero’s hair felt like it hadn’t been cleansed in a month, and her skin itched down into her bones. She scratched her head and noticed that her fingernails were too long and jagged again.

Her body odor was even beginning to overwhelm the pungent stench in her apartment from the Martian dust that her housekeeping robots couldn’t ever scrub away for any length of time. The ubiquitous, caustic, surface dust stank of peroxide, dried her skin and mucus membranes, and made her sneeze. It managed to evade all technological barriers human beings, even talented, industrious engineers could invent.

She wondered vaguely, whether a short shower might be worth the horrendous cost that the habitat charged for unauthorized use of water. Probably not, so why waste the credits? She wasn’t going anywhere, and her face looked clean enough for any video communications.

Beth Zero turned on the hologram projector in the living area of her minimalist but comfortably decorated residence located halfway down the south wall of the Valles Marineris. She was fond of her apartment’s red ambiance. It matched the planet.

Wavering between considering herself middle-aged or just plain old, she actually felt more at home on Mars than she had ever wanted to.

She appreciated the way the flimsy-looking, red cot ─ sufficiently wide enough for her short, chunky body ─ folded down quickly and silently from the red plastic wall whenever she felt like taking a nap. The light pink furniture built into the walls and the appliances efficiently encased in magenta storage cabinets were a monument to someone’s engineering genius. Beth loved efficiency wherever she encountered it.

She liked going barefoot on her apartment’s dark-orange plastic floors whose minuscule fibers gave her feet the tactile illusion of shuffling through a thick, deep, luxurious carpet. She had quickly gotten used to the lesser pull of gravity on Mars; it made her feel like a light-footed, graceful teenager.

She tapped on her communications globe again and let her favorite, loud, march music reverberate back and forth between the walls of her narrow apartment. The vibrations almost distracted her from obsessing about the itchy sensation on her skin. Deafeningly loud music always made her feel better.

The most famous musician on Mars, Dan the Trumpet Man, composed cheerful and almost uplifting Martian marches after he arrived on Mars. Listening to them always raised Beth Zero’s spirits. Despite the occasional setbacks she had experienced, Beth Zero was grateful to live on Mars.

Mars attracted innovative engineers who felt hemmed in by the restrictions that timid, Earthie bureaucrats continued to invent. Beth had been such a frustrated engineer before she left Earth for Mars.

A surprise baby to aging parents, she had always been a loner, someone who was often angered by the illogical antics of other human beings. Her parents let her be herself, but they died before she finished college. Everyone else she had dealings with was always trying to change her, no matter where she went or what she did.

She decided she needed to get away, and Mars appeared to be far enough to begin with, although, of course, she hoped to travel even farther as soon as she could. Except for the sabotage her body surprised her with later, her life on Mars had been more than acceptable, all things considered.

Beth Zero thought of herself as a realistic and pragmatic engineer. She quickly learned to be flexible in the goals she set for herself.

However, she could no longer ignore the fact that the tiny nanobots that she could neither see nor feel weren’t doing their job anymore. Something about her ailing body was obstructing all the nanobots, both external and internal.

No huge surprise there. Her body started causing her trouble many years after she got to Mars, which made her a willing guinea pig for Doc Brach’s medical nanobots.

Unfortunately, this was not an engineering problem. She hadn’t seen any data about anyone else’s nanobots being or turning deficient in their cleansing activity.

It annoyed the hell out of the good doctor when the nanobots were no longer able to stop the progression of her body’s decay. The realization that she might only have a short lifespan ahead of her, made Beth Zero step up her tinkering. Fortunately, these efforts at least turned out to be successful.

This morning, out of pragmatic necessity, she chugged a bottle of cold, orangish, nutritional fluid. It tasted like peroxide and scratched the lining of her raw throat, but it was all her stomach could tolerate, and it would give her some needed energy for the rest of the day.

The best thing about her apartment was the empty space in the center where her hologram projector could work its magic accompanied by loud music of her choice. She could select a three-dimensional projection of the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the Laniakea supercluster, or even the space occupied by the neighboring superclusters in this section of the universe.

She loved to watch the paths of spacecraft, especially one particular rocket. Naturally, the projection couldn’t be to scale. It wasn’t even possible to create a scale model of the solar system that left the planets visible while the hologram fit into the center of a living room.

Beth Zero could specify how large each element was portrayed. She could also control the speed at which the projection showed her the motion of planets, stars, galaxies, and one certain spaceship.

The triumphant Martian march music she had blaring was perfect for watching the progress her little rocket was making.

Everyone had a different reason for leaving Earth for Mars. Many scientists and engineers wanted to perform experiments that were deemed too risky and therefore forbidden on Earth. Beth Zero, a robotics expert, had wanted Mars to be a stepping-off place for her to explore the universe, her first step on a wondrous trek where no one could stop her.

As soon as she settled in the Bradbury Habitat so many Martian years ago, she asked the engineering team for help in developing practical space travel at speeds faster than the speed of light. Together they came up with the idea of a rocket enclosed by a tachyon bubble that could hop across hyperspace.

This spaceship with its robot crew became Beth Zero’s great accomplishment. It began as her dream, but the other engineers on Mars helped her turn it into reality. At first she had planned on flying it herself, but, good engineer that she was, fortunately always had workable backup plans.

The kilometer-long spacecraft, able to store supplies to last millennia, vaguely resembled media depictions from the twentieth century, a request from the other engineers.

Protected from the dangers of space inside the bubble, the spaceship could be transported across hyperspace at optimal speeds as the tachyon bubble manipulated the vast emptiness of space, essentially folding up the universe like an accordion.

The tachyon bubble could stop as desired and drop out of hyperspace, making intergalactic space travel feasible, with trips only taking thousands of years instead of millions.

Signals at the speed of light could penetrate the tachyon bubble in both directions without endangering the integrity of the bubble. This enabled communications and remote exploration. However, such communications were painfully slow with respect to the maximum speed the bubble was capable of.

This sturdy rocket was designed for extreme travel. Due to its size, it would only be able to exit the bubble once and then not return, as the tachyon bubble would then disintegrate at the breach.

However, whenever the bubble dropped out of hyperspace, the robots, due to their smaller size and sturdy structures, could exit the bubble in their one-robot shuttlecraft and return back to the spaceship through the bubble. This would be necessary in order to keep the rocket and its robots supplied and repaired. Besides, the robots were supposed to explore new worlds and gather data about unknown phenomena, not just stay locked up in the rocket.

Beth Zero supervised and participated in the construction of her dream spaceship. Mechanical engineers used rare minerals found in the asteroid belt to assemble spaceships and robots that could last for hundreds of thousands of years as long as they were repaired, serviced, and restored at regular intervals.

It took a while before experiments determined which minerals worked best. Beth Zero went along on various scavenger hunts throughout the asteroid belt, but her focus was on creating sentient robot brains that were capable of constant self-improvement. She knew she needed a long-term competent crew. Eventually she thought she had found the perfect nanotube alloys for almost indestructible, artificial neurons.

Beth Zero made use of Doc Brach’s intrusive brain scanners, still forbidden on Earth, to make an extensive copy of her brain structures that she could insert into the robot brains. Millions of years of evolution had produced efficient human organs capable of innovative thought. They would serve as excellent templates for robotic brains.

Her robotic expertise helped her design the robot brains, but she needed help from the IT experts to equip the robots’ thinking centers with little quantum computers. Together they programmed the robot brains with the knowledge and skills they would need for long journeys through space along with a capacity for curiosity and a passionate desire to learn new things.

Fortunately, there were more than enough enthusiastic IT experts on Mars who enjoyed the challenge of helping Beth Zero, even though she wasn’t the most convivial settler.

Possibly all the activities she engaged in caused much of the damage to her body that the nanobots eventually could no longer repair. Or, maybe it was the radiation from her trips to the asteroid belts. After a certain point in time, it no longer mattered.

Her original plan had been to take her robots out for a rocket ride and use the doc’s nanobots to keep her body functional for a few thousand years. Theoretically, the tachyon bubble would make speeds possible that would get her far before her body gave out. There was always a chance she might meet other life forms along the way that could tell her how to increase her longevity.

Unfortunately, not all that long ago Doc Brach made it clear to her that she had less than a Martian year to live. Her body was self-destructing, and the nanobots couldn’t stop or even delay the process.

That left her only one option. She had to find a way to copy all the information and feelings stored in her human brain and load them into the robot brains, an activity strictly forbidden on Earth but, of course, not regulated on Mars.

With the help of the IT technicians on Mars, she managed to infuse ten robots with the essence of the human being that was Beth Zero, as she called herself after she named the robots Beth One through Beth Ten. The experiment was successful; the robots were her complete, perfect, and identical soul mates.

Things could now take their inevitable and therefore acceptable course. Beth Zero faced the end of her life on Mars pragmatically.

She implemented all the unavoidable formalities she could think of, leaving Doc Brach firm instructions along with access to her various accounts. After her body stopped functioning, she wanted to have her ashes scattered off Olympus Mons. Some of her would return to the surface of Mars, and some would gradually waft their way into outer space. This was a reasonable, symbolic gesture.

However, her mind and soul ─ if there was such a thing ─ would continue to travel throughout the universe stored in the brains of her robots.  A part of her would still make the journey she had dreamed of her whole life.

That’s why she enjoyed sitting in her living quarters and watching her rocket’s progress. It would take too long before interesting communications from her robots arrived back on Mars, since such communications only departed the spaceship at the speed of light. Fortunately tracking signals from the surface of the tachyon bubble sent back data on its location via hyperspace. They arrived almost instantaneously.

With a little luck, Beth Zero would live long enough to see the live hologram projection of her spaceship leaving the Milky Way, safe and secure in its tachyon bubble.

Via quantum computer transmissions ─ the most efficient way for them to communicate as the air density inside the rocket wasn’t optimal for sound broadcasts ─ manager robot Beth One sent out a request for the next crew conference with robots Beth Two through Beth Ten.

Robots, of course, could communicate among themselves most efficiently with a kind of abbreviated mathematics, but Beth Zero had insisted that robot communication be directed by the Beth parts of the robot brains, in Beth Zero’s human language. Beth Zero had been firmly convinced that spaceship crew communication was too important to be left to mathematics.

Beth One, herself bright red, liked the red and pink colors on the interior surfaces of the command center at the bow of the spaceship. Engineers on Mars had claimed that robots didn’t need any colors, and that therefore the interior of the entire spaceship could remain gray, but Beth Zero had insisted that robots containing a copy of her mind would need surroundings that made her happy. After all, her essence was an intellectual and emotional part of each robot.

Beth One waited for the robot crew to come to the quantum computers at the bow of the rocket. Naturally, the conference could take place just as easily with the robots scattered throughout the ship, but the Beth parts of their brains wanted visual, close contact.

Beth Zero had organized the construction of the spaceship for the convenience of robots. She designed the plastic robots to look vaguely humanoid, though with extremities that could sprout useful tools as needed. Her robots were shorter and lighter than human beings, though much stronger and faster, and were nuclear powered.

Beth Zero also insisted that the robots display individual colors. She was certain a team of robots would eventually consist of separate personalities, with separate strengths and weaknesses, even though they all started off with her memories and patterns of thinking.

Less massive versions of the ship’s quantum computers were stored in the electronic memory segments of their robot brains. The larger computers in the spaceship regulated the complex communication with the tachyon bubble.

The command and navigation areas of the spaceship were of minimal size, about five percent of the ship’s area. The walls there contained pseudo viewing screens that showed depictions of planets the rocket visited, another demand Beth Zero had made.

The workshop, storage, and repair area ─ all in different colors ─ made up the rest of the spaceship. The ship didn’t need its own propulsion as the tachyon bubble absorbed the power it needed from the universe’s dark energy.

Beths One through Ten were capable of registering sensory input, and that over a greater range than Beth Zero ever could. This was useful for analyzing the celestial bodies they dropped in on.

The robots were aware of the scent of metals, plastics, and various lubricating fluids and gels inside the spaceship. The robotic segments of their brains analyzed these molecules with respect to any possible malfunctions they might indicate. The Beth parts of their brains were grateful that the spaceship didn’t smell like the Martian dust.

The spaceship was furnished and equipped for the physical requirements of robots. Robots could tolerate a wide range of temperatures as well as perceived weightlessness, but there were limits, outside which the robots no longer functioned optimally.

The robot brains contained two integrated parts, the efficient, pragmatic, quantum robot brain as well as the thoughts, memories, and emotions that came from Beth Zero’s human brain. The Beth parts of their brains deliberately didn’t check the atmospheric readings inside the ship. They didn’t want to waste time worrying about temperatures or pressure that would be uncomfortable for human beings.

Beth Zero’s strengths and weaknesses were stored in the brains of the ten robots on the spaceship, with these brains designed to promote flexibility and adaptability. The Beth parts of the brains were set up to augment the robots’ capabilities and not hinder them.

As the trip continued, the passing of time outside the tachyon bubble became increasingly irrelevant. Beth One took note of the fact that her brain structures changed gradually the more time she spent checking on the progress of the spaceship’s journey.

The other robots also agreed that they were also becoming more specialized and more interested in data relevant to their respective areas of expertise at the expense of all other input.

Beth One, pedantic from the beginning, had to regulate and steer the motion of the tachyon bubble over the folds of the universe in hyperspace while keeping the spaceship in its precise position inside the bubble. Soon after the trip began, she lost interest in most information from outside the tachyon bubble except for how it influenced the spaceship’s continued journey.

Beth Zero had given the robots a firm desire to keep traveling. She hadn’t expressed a preference for any specific route.

The robots assembled in the organization area, and all began to communicate simultaneously via computer, which had been their routine ever since the trip began. They were equals with respect to responsibility for the journey.

“I’ve plotted a course for the next five hyperspace jumps,ˮ Beth Two, the enthusiastic, light-blue, navigator robot, transmitted. “They should take us out of the Laniakea Supercluster and into the Capricornus Void.”

“Any potential problems I need to know about?” Beth One asked.

“No,” Beth Two said. “We’ll just carry out the same procedure as in all the previous jumps.”

“We need to stop for supplies after the next jump,” Beth Three, the anxious, yellow, repair robot said. “I had to initiate more repairs than usual after the last time we exited and then re-entered hyperspace. The nuclear energy reserves to keep us robots powered are barely sufficient. Find us a suitable star system with chunks of accessible matter we can use.”

“I have always managed that before, and will again this time,” Beth Two said.

“Still, I would appreciate higher quality materials this time.” Beth Three said. “I can’t always improvise.”

“Is everything under control as far as storage is concerned?” Beth One asked.

“Yes,” Beth Three said. “To the extent that I can keep anything under complete control. The storerooms are half full. We have to find more and better suited minerals as well as radioactive isotopes and harvest them so that we have the materials for any necessary repairs or refueling during the following hyperspace jumps. You never know when something will break down without any warning.”

“The next jump should take us to the Centaurus Cluster,” Beth Two said.

“The Centaurus Cluster only contains a few hundred galaxies,” Beth Four, the loquacious, purple, planetologist robot, said. “Still, that should be sufficient for our purposes, but I would appreciate as much time as possible there. Though many things are similar, I’m always interested in the slight variety we find in star systems, what the celestial objects are made of, how they revolve around their star, and what the star itself is like.”

“Refueling is more important than sightseeing,” Beth Three grumbled.

“Evan a smaller number of galaxies should provide all materials we need,” Beth Four said. “In each galaxy we can jump from one star system to another until we find what we need. It has never been a problem before, and it won’t be this time.”

“Except that the tachyon bubble can absorb less dark energy outside hyperspace,” Beth Three said. “That makes it take longer to get us back into hyperspace.”

“Time doesn’t really play a role for our never-ending journey, though,” Beth One said.

“I’ll be able to program the necessary navigation for the bubble so that it is in hyperspace long enough to fill up on dark energy,” Beth Two said.

“Is there anything I should transmit back in the direction of the Milky Way?” Beth Five, the upbeat, orange, communications robot, asked. “Any new data?”

“I do have more data,” Beth Six, the techie, teal-green, astrophysics robot, said. Beth Zero’s human personality had decreased most rapidly in this robot as time passed. Beth Zero had been an engineer, not a theoretical physicist.

“The last time we exited hyperspace we encountered quark stars and rogue planets which theoretically shouldn’t exist,” Beth Six continued. “It continues to look like black holes we assumed were either too small or too large do exist and merge much more often than we thought. Gravitons fly around in huge numbers. You just have to know where to look for them. Measurements also show that speed of dark energy is increasing faster than we assumed.”

“So, you have made new observations,” Beth Five said.

“Technically yes, though nothing completely unexpected,” Beth Six said. “I still wish we could discover something completely inexplicable or even incomprehensible. Everything I run into just turns out to be a variation on something I’ve already encountered.”

“During the last stop, we did communicate with life forms new to us and even with some loquacious, sentient globs of energy,” Beth Seven, the patient, silver translation robot, reported. “With their assistance I have been able to increase the capacity of the spaceship computer’s universal translator we all have access to. Unfortunately, though, this time, just like every other time, none of the sentient forms we encountered were interested in pursuing much further contact with us. There seems to be a general prejudice against communication with robots, even those augmented with human thoughts and memories.”

“Is that why no sentient forms ever wanted to visit us in our spaceship?” Beth One asked.

“Possibly,” Beth Seven said. “However, safety issues for them and for us also played a role. For some, the interior conditions of our spaceship would be life-threatening. We were afraid others might cause damage to our ship or the tachyon bubble surrounding it if they accompanied us.”

“Not to mention the life forms that specifically threatened our existence, that wanted to use the primitive tools at their disposal to destroy our bubble and spaceship,” Beth Three said.

“There was never any real danger from the creatures we have encountered or from space itself,” Beth One said. “The tachyon bubble functions quite well as a force field. I take the responsibility for the spaceship’s safety very seriously.”

“You need to,” Beth Three said. “We don’t want anything to threaten the integrity of the tachyon bubble. If it bursts, that leaves us unprotected, out in nowhere, too slow to get anywhere else where we could replenish our supplies. Even with the help of the rest of you, I couldn’t construct a new tachyon bubble.”

“And so,” Beth Eight, the scholarly, gray, philosophy robot, mused. “The question remains as to the purpose of continuing to transmit the things we have learned. The human beings we left behind may not even still exist when our communications arrive. By the time our data reach the Milky Way, they might only be of historical interest to any intelligent creatures that find them. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to collect new information. It’s of no use to anyone.”

“I see collecting data as the reason for my existence,” Beth Six said. “The more I observe, the more I can analyze, the more I understand the observations I have already made.”

“Why do you say only of historical interest?” Beth Nine, the pink, history robot, asked. “History is important to all sentient creatures. Knowledge arises in a specific context. We have to get our data out there for others to make use of, even if we can’t imagine who or when or where they will be. That is what makes us into valuable facilitators for understanding the universe.”

“If I understand everyone correctly,” Beth One began. “We continue to add to our knowledge through additional observations. We can make our knowledge available, and, of course, we should, even if it ends up wasting away in one of the many voids of the universe. However, it is true that for the past thousand jumps or so we didn’t seem to discover anything genuinely new, just variations of the laws of physics as we understand them.”

“Naturally,” Beth Six said. “The laws of physics in this universe don’t change. We can only observe the variety the universe displays in its reality.”

“Maybe we need a new reality,” Beth Ten, the golden artist robot, said. “Human beings used to talk about thinking outside the box. Maybe we need to get outside this box of a universe so that we don’t content ourselves with fine-tuning the variations of the laws of physics that we are already familiar with.”

“It would be nice to observe something completely new and unexpected,” Beth Four said.

Beth One said, “I don’t know if that is possible to leave this universe, but I have often suspected that we need a new challenge.”

“The theory of multiple or even an infinite number of parallel universes has been around for a long time,” Beth Six said. “It is neither proven nor unproven, although there have been some tantalizing observations.”

“Then all we need to do is navigate our way into one of the other universes we can find,” Beth Two said. “It doesn’t have to be impossible for us to discover an entrance somewhere.”

“Just make sure you navigate us into a universe with compatible laws of physics,” Beth Six said. “I don’t want to disintegrate and disperse into a cloud of quarks and leptons immediately upon arrival.”

“I think we might be able to find a way into another universe if we combine the power of our thought processes,” Beth Five said. “We all have similar brains but have branched out over this journey so that each of us knows things in detail that the others have never paid any attention to. In any case, we have to try. And we definitely have to send a message back to the Milky Way region telling them where we have gone, just in case anyone wants to follow.”

“All right,” Beth One said. “All in favor of looking for an entrance into another universe?”

Ten robots transmitted their agreement, the quantum computers were stretched to their computational limits, and the tachyon bubble continued to hop.

Beth One called for another crew meeting. There was no pressing, rational reason for an official conference. No data signaled any sort of emergency with respect to the spaceship’s journey. However, the Beth part of her brain was uneasy. It felt that something was wrong.

The robots didn’t gather immediately. Communication via the spaceship’s quantum computers wasn’t as swift as it had been at the beginning of their journey. The quantum computers were using close to a hundred percent of their capacities in communication with the tachyon bubble.

Beths One through Ten continued to hope they would discover some evidence of connections or even intersections with parallel universes. Beth Six had theorized that the presence of subatomic particles that shouldn’t exist in this universe might indicate a leak from another universe. Changes in the speed of dark energy could also indicate possible collisions with parallel universes.

Beth One had devised a set of commands for the quantum computers that told them to analyze data from the surface of the tachyon bubble when it skipped over the folds of space in hyperspace and when it dropped out of hyperspace into one of the voids among the superclusters.

Beth Two used the data from the spaceship computers to navigate paths of new hyperspace jumps, which Beth One then transmitted to the surface of the tachyon bubble. She had long since directed the bubble to transmit all data from interactions with hyperspace and normal space back to the spaceship.

When all ten robots assembled, Beth One thought she sensed various degrees of unease among all of them.

“What new data do we have?” Beth Five asked. “Old habits don’t die. I still want to report what we have discovered, at least transmit it back in the general direction of the Laniakea supercluster.”

“So far we haven’t detected any direct evidence for a parallel universe that we could enter,” Beth One said. “Or have I ignored something in the communications from the surface of the tachyon bubble?”

“No, there have been no unlikely subatomic particles or unusually empty expanses. However, the speed of the expansion of the universe powered by dark energy is increasing at an unimaginable level,” Beth Six began.

“I’ve noticed that,” Beth Two said. “Thousands of hyperspace jumps don’t seem to move us as far through the voids among superclusters as hundreds used to.”

“So we’re going faster than ever but not getting anywhere?” Beth Five asked.

“Sure,” Beth Six said with a hint of sarcasm that they all picked up on. “Send that observation back to whoever is listening.”

“More importantly,” Beth Three said. “Our supplies are beginning to dwindle. We will need to drop into a galaxy soon.”

“There aren’t many superclusters or even galaxies out where we are now. Could you find a way to harvest space dust?” Beth Four asked. “Even without celestial bodies large enough to land on, space isn’t empty.”

“We’re not exactly set up for that,” Beth Three said. “I’m a mechanical engineer, not a magician.”

“So, it is possible,” Beth Five said.

“Indeed,” Beth Seven said. “Let me check our archives. That’s what history is good for. I’m sure Beth Zero considered this option and supplied as much information as she had access to.”

“I’m no longer getting data from the outside surface of the tachyon bubble,” Beth One transmitted soon after the robots’ last conference. The Beth part of her brain was experiencing something like panic.

“The condition of our spaceship is unchanged,” Beth Three said. “However, we are dependent on the tachyon bubble, if only for protection.”

“I can no longer determine exactly where we are, if I don’t get data from the tachyon cloud,” Beth Two said.

“Greetings,” a voice boomed through the inside of the spaceship. “The Multiverse Travel Bureau welcomes you.”

“Who?” Beth Five asked. “Welcome us to what?”

“To trips through parallel universes,” the voice continued.

“All right,” Beth One said. “That was our plan, but what do you have to do with it?”

“Since you are still traveling through your original universe, it should be obvious that you can’t enter parallel universes without help,” the voice said. “We would be pleased to help you.”

“Why?” Beth Three asked. “And what will it cost us?”

“We do this all the time. It’s our hobby. With an infinite number of universes, we can pick and choose who we want to transport. You qualified by traveling this quite admirable distance in your original universe, and because you aren’t mere machines, but rather machines augmented with thoughts and memories from sentient life forms.”

“What do you get out of helping us?” Beth Three asked again. “We have no desire to become pets or servants in some other universe.”

“That kind of paranoia can only come from the cognitive thoughts from sentient life forms stored in your brains,” the voice said.

“All right,” Beth Six said. “Just how does it work? Are there an infinite number of universes with the same laws of physics, the same fundamental physical constraints, as ours?”

“If the only universes we can visit have the same conditions as this one, why bother?” Beth Ten asked. “We wanted to observe something completely new.”

The voice chuckled. “You will be surprised as the variety that is possible, even if the universes have the same laws of physics. The way your travel functions is that we wrap your tachyon cloud in some nifty materials we have discovered in other universes. This will protect you in your travels. We can also help you improve your observation techniques so that you don’t have to exit your spaceship in order to experience what other universes have to offer.”

“Then,” Beth One said. “We can’t do nothing or continue as before, and so I don’t see any down side to accepting this offer. However, I feel the decision to avail ourselves of this assistance has to be unanimous.”

“I’m in,” Beth Nine said. “From all that I have learned about Beth Zero, I can say that this is exactly what she would have wanted.” The eight other robots agreed.

“All right,” Beth One said. “Off we go.” And off they went.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Mary Jo Rabe 2025

Image Courtesy: Mystic Portal Rescue from Ebenezer archive of pulp fiction art (public domain)