Free We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology by Lavie Tidhar, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Sofia Samatar, Sandra McDonald, Ernest Hogan, Sunny Moraine Page A

respond well to authority. That was why he always preferred working for civilian companies. This time, however, he thought he might have made the wrong choice. Maybe there was no right choice at all in this line of work. It was a depressing thought.
    “Good morning, Hiran,” Raitek said, closing on him like a shark upon its prey. “Shall we begin the mission briefing?”
    “What mission?”
    “Why, the retrieval mission, of course.” Raitek showed his big-toothed smile.
    In five minutes the entire team was in the meeting room.
----
    “The funny thing,” Raitek started the briefing, “is that we never see the elevator disappear at any given moment in time, from our side.”
    “Yes,” a young black man cut in. “This happens because only the environment travels in time.”
    Raitek stared for just the smallest amount of time at the young man.
    “You are Jonathan, right? Jonathan Kufuor? One of the techs who was originally in the carriage when it traveled back?”
    The young man smiled.
    “Yes, sir. That’s me.”
    “Call me Raitek, please. Same goes to everyone here. No red tape, no ass-kissing. We must do what we must do. The sooner we get this solved, the sooner we get home.”
    Yes, but we are staying here and you are going to a hotel every night , Patel thought grimly. Nice try, though .
    “Do we know why that happened, Jonathan?” Raitek asked.
    “Not exactly,” he answered.
    “But we suspect,” Patel said.
    Raitek nodded. “Pray tell.”
    “The Faraday cage principle.”
    Raitek shook his head. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but I agree with you that the analogy seems solid enough.”
    “Why is that?”
    “We are not talking about electricity here, but tachyon flow.”
    “We haven’t established this with absolute certainty yet.”
    “You probably won’t,” Raitek said. “We don’t have the tech for it, nor the necessary measurement tools. Unless we use the Gambiarra Method.”
    “The what ?”
    “It’s just a thing we learn to do in Brazil,” Raitek explained. “How to do things with whatever you have at hand.”
    “Oh, you mean a kludge,” Jonathan said.
    “No, not a kludge,” Raitek corrected him. “Kludges are for electromechanical things. A gambiarra goes for anything . Even abstract stuff.”
    “And how do you propose we use this gambiarra of yours…?” asked Patel, already feeling very uncomfortable. The Brazilian guy was insane.
    “First, assuming that everything you experienced was absolutely real, and not an illusion provoked by extreme immersion, what probably happened was that a bubble formed inside the carriage. Not a spherical, topologically perfect bubble, but an extradimensional structure, or better yet, an n-dimensional structure according to the parameters of the Calabi-Yau Manifold.
    “Theoretically, a Calabi-Yau space can project itself beyond the borders of our, let’s say for lack of a better term, ‘traditional’ space. Kähler manifolds could also apply, but the calculus involved seems to make it a poorer choice. Right now, it doesn’t matter: we should be able to repeat the experiment with no problem at all and no harm to the test subjects.”
    “Test subjects? What do you mean, test subjects?” said Patel.
    “May I go again?” asked Jonathan.
    Damn , thought Patel. This is getting out of control .
----
    As Raitek explained to them, the Calabi-Yau Manifold (if that was what really formed inside the elevator) opened not a window, but a kind of excrescence, something like a vesicle, a ballooning organ with only one end stretching towards our so-called normal reality. So, one could enter and exit the CYM via this stretch the same way one could use a door—probably, in this case, the elevator doors. Maybe they would not even need to do alignment procedures.
    “We’ll probably have to do lots of calibrations for years and decades before going for something bigger,” Raitek said. “That is, if the mechanism isn’t already locked in