Naecia settled gingerly onto the rim of the dredge. “If one was going to play within the rules of the universe as we know it, yes, you’d be limited by the location of the space ports you’d set up. Payne-Gaposchkin wasn’t trying to break those rules,” she said, feeling her understanding of what she’d seen crystalizing. “She hypothesized that the substance of the Fray was already entangled. Ubiquitously. A great blanket of material waiting to be triggered. And why not? It is the raw matter of consciousness. It may not itself be aware, but it is already connected – conscious in the sense that Fray particles stand ready to talk to each other. Input data in any one place creates output somewhere else. If it’s already entangled, there’s no transmission so there’s no delay. It’s instant.”

The others exchanged dubious glances.

“And your machine makes that connection?” asked Izairis.

“No,” answered Naecia. “I think the machine is a... a camera.”

“Explain. And quickly,” said Aptat. “Because none of this is making me want to run away any less.”

Naecia paused to think through what she was going to say. Her own understanding of what she had pieced together was taking shape in real time. “Think of it as a hyper-advanced tomographic imager. Only instead of imaging body tissues or geological formations or mechanical structures, it’s imaging the subatomic particles making up the atoms for whatever is being transported. Quantum tomography. For any theoretical transportation of matter from one place to another, the information for that matter has to be faithfully catalogued so it can be reproduced exactly. I think the machine does that. It records the objects to be transmitted at a particle level.”

“Did you say reproduced?” asked Oush, his orange face blanching some.

“That’s how you don’t violate the rule against light speed travel. You’re not moving something from one place to another. You’re just copying it and then rebuilding it elsewhere,” said Naecia. “These women discovered the fabricator.”

“The machine is a replicator of some type?” asked Izairis.

Naecia answered, “No, the machine only aggregates the data. The Fray does the replication.”

“Okay, replication? So, there would be two of us?” asked Oush.

“No cloning,” said Naecia. “Sorry – er, another rule of physics. Basically, when it comes to conventional entanglement, remember, you’re dealing with connected particles of opposite spin. So, in ‘turning on’ the destination particles, the original set is automatically sort of ‘turned off’. By nature, you’d never end up with two. Payne-Gaposchkin hypothesized that what we call the Oblivion Fray worked the same way. The original is erased. You’re one of a kind, Oush. There won’t be two of you.”

“We get murdered?” exclaimed Izairis.

“Okay!” said Aptat, clapping hands. “You’ve clearly decohered.” They took the axon diadem from around their neck and propped it on Naecia’s head.