Chapter Text
Chapter 1
"So, you understand, radio is the exact same thing as heat! It just behaves differently because it's so much lower pitched. Amazingly enough, there's even higher pitched EM frequencies than heat! The EM spectrum emitting bodies put out frequencies even lower pitched than radio, and much, much higher pitched than heat! But that's a topic for our next class."
I pulled the lever to reset the pin board on the northwest side of the room. A sheet of metal contacted the back, pushing all the pins that had been pushed in out again and erasing my depiction of radio frequencies vs heat frequencies vs high and low pitched sound waves.
There were stations set up around the decagonicalhexagonical room with various relevant activities, models that the kids could explore and examine, as well as a decompression station with puzzles and games for when someone had reached the limit of their focus. As the kids scuttled from station to station, I had been keeping my auricles wide to make sure that the conversations were on-topic.
"Now, before we get into our second day socialization break, it's time for a thunder round!"
The various conversations echoing through the room dulled as my kids locked in. This was often one of the most competitive times of class. I had a cluster of prizes that could be traded for with these points, and most of the kids had one that they had their focus on.
"Who can tell me when the other planets were discovered?"
Twelve kids raced to triple-tap the ground, but I could tell that one kid near the south wall had gotten there first.
"Cthonic cluster, second clutch, third hatchling!"
"Well- it's- uh- the second planet was discovered 11143 sweeps ago, wasn't it?"
"That's a fantastic answer, but Coordinated Scientific Time, remember? This is a science class, after all. Yes, Forbearance, eleventh clutch, fifth hatchling?"
"It was 14262 decades ago! And it was 5434 decades ago for the third planet!" it proclaimed with a satisfied trill.
I made an excited sound like a clamour of bells. "That's correct! And who wants to bring it home? Abeyance cluster, fourth clutch, tenthsixth hatchling!"
Abeyance 4-106 swayed east to west anxiously. I waited patiently for it to work up the nerve to answer. "Teacher Granite-South/Central Educator 3, is it true that the world's going to cool down and kill everyone?"
All the excitement drained out of me in an instant. "Abeyance 4-10- I- erm-” The tension in the air was palpable, and the anxiety in my core built as the room quieted, everyone’s attention audibly on me. “I think that's a better question for your parents."
There was a moment of silence, and then, chaos. "I told you! I told you!” Abeyance 4-2 screamed, shaking its clutchmate. “We're all going to die!"
"Woah, woah, hold- hold on. Everything’s going to be okay, I promise." I was quickly losing control of the classroom. Abeyance 4-2 was bruxing in distress, and all of Abeyance in the classroom seemed on the verge of falling into a panicked thrum and letting that panic amplify and resonate on itself until there was no calming them down, and they started pulling the other students in with them.
"Okay. Okay." I prepared myself for a hard talk. "Who can tell me what they know about our local EM spectrum emitting bodies?"
As I spoke, I made my way to the cabinet that held the classroom’s models. There were a number of models useful for various scientific topics in there, as well as clay and a roll of malleable wire so that I could craft my own if need be. I stayed far away from the wire in general; artistic, I was not. But in this instance, I wouldn't actually need to craft anything with it. I pulled out a 300 unit long length and snipped it off.
I already had a model of the local system hanging from the ceiling, which was convenient for this particular demonstration. It had the primary EM spectrum emitting body, the four planets, and the binary outer-orbit EM spectrum emitting bodies. It wasn't to scale, of course, because that would require a space far bigger than what I had in my classroom, but I had done my best to show relative distances.
"Um. The EM spectrum emitting body is what causes heat?" a quiet voice piped up as I was adjusting the wire to lower the models to my level.
"Very good, Forbearance 117-2!” I trilled, “The EM spectrum emitting body is what warms our planet and keeps it at just the right temperature for life. It's only our primary EM spectrum emitting body that gives our planet heat, however. The outer EM spectrum emitting bodies are too far away to give us heat. TwelveEight years ago, Voidhearer, an astronomy-focused career cluster, was collating historical data and noticed that the primary EM spectrum emitting body's recorded heat-energy output was dimming a teeny bit compared to the previous decades on record. They used these very sensitive electromagnetic frequency detectors built onto the void elevator to hear whether something in its electromagnetic output could explain the loss in heat. Just last year, the astronomy constellation discovered that in the 14060 nanounit frequency, there was a line stretching from the primary EM spectrum emitting body to the third planet."
As I was explaining all of this, I had been tying one end of the wire to the model of the main EM spectrum emitting body, looping it around the equator. I started guiding it past our planet, all the way to the third planet.
"This 14060 nanounit frequency has been growing in intensity in pace with the primary EM spectrum emitting body's recorded rate of cooling. If it continues, climatologists estimate that the planet might cool a tiny bit over the next few millenia. Maybe, um…” I winced internally. “40-10024-36 degrees?" I said the last part quickly, hoping that the implications might not fully register. Unfortunately, my kids were too smart for that.
It felt like half the class was trying to speak at once, a cacophony of noise overtaking me.
"But, Teacher Granite, that actually does sound like a big deal! Very big! Can people even survive at that temperature?!" Abeyance 4-106 called out, managing to make itself heard.
"It does sound kind of scary now, but just a few days ago," I rotated the model of our planet so that the void elevator that was sticking out of the surface touched the line of wire, "The void elevator passed through the line, and now we'll finally be able to find out what it's made of, and why it's cooling our primary EM spectrum emitting body. And once we know that, all the best scientists on the planet will be able to come together as one and make a plan for how to fix it. Remember, we have millennia. This isn't anything we need to worry about any time soon."
My voice hung in the air, unconvincing to my own auricles. My students were still divided, some of them clinging onto the reassurance, some of them still shifting uneasily. There was nothing for it, then. I had to make them feel like they had some autonomy in the situation, like solving global cooling was something realistic and feasible, even if I wasn't quite sure of that myself.
"Why don't we all get into a thrum of our own and brainstorm ways to keep the planet warm while we wait for the science thrums to figure out a solution?"
I always felt a bit uncomfortable assigning thrum work. It was a normal tool in any educator's kit, and logically, I knew it was useful for the students to be able to get deeper into concepts and explore them from all possible angles. However, whenever I assigned thrum work, a part of me remembered how when I'd been a student myself, I'd always tried to play hooky for classes where I knew that we would have to thrum. Thrums had always made me feel weird, in some indefinable way. I had never been quite sure why I found the whole experience unsettling (well, I knew why, but I was obviously in the wrong, considering how natural and normal everyone found it).
At least, in educational thrums, I was more aware of the boundaries of myself than I was in other types of thrums. All of my students automatically deferred to me out of respect for their teacher, so the thrum that we made up held me somewhat apart. I was left with just enough awareness of myself to be able to keep my students on track and moderate the thrum.
I let out a low infrasonic hum, inviting my students to harmonize with me. I wasn't in conscious control of the dips and peaks and complex vibrations that I was emitting. Rather, all of my vocal chords were occupied in reproducing my brain activity in audible form. Researchers were still trying to determine how precisely different notes corresponded to different areas of the brain, but the general consensus was that there was a direct correspondence between brain activity and the thrum melody.
As such, as my students started to hum back at me, their voices were chaotic and clashing, but as the minutes passed, the common tones started to resonate with one another. People's voices began to modulate to align with the others in the room. As the voices started to complement each other more, I could feel my students' minds pressing up against my own, beating against my fragile barriers in order to subsume me with them. Consciously, deliberately, I let myself go, my barriers shattering as my mind melded and mixed with the others. Most of me was them, but I still retained some threads that reminded me that I was the one with the most experience and maturity here. It was ‘my’ job to prevent the thrum from getting off track.
-Maybe we could build a ton of heaters and put them everywhere? That's so stupid! {reprimand} {acknowledgement} Do it like the polar cities instead- the heated domes- build them around every city- feasible?- polar cities do it- need to build domes for the animals too- maybe make everyone move to a few cities- pipe up heat from the oceans- teacher told us- water holds heat really well- lots and lots of heat in the oceans- but the sea creatures, they'll get too cold- oceans are big- they can migrate- heat from the ground- also lots of heat- in the center of the planet- dig deep!- capture the heat- explode the line- no???- the skywhales?- can't protect upper atmosphere ecosystem- sad but people are more important-
We went on in that manner for some time, until we had as many ideas as we were going to get and we were mostly bouncing off our various components about the nature of the line, and how long it would take the scientists to figure things out and what parts of the planet we wanted to visit. It was then that the part of us that was our teacher reminded us that it was time to stop being us for now.
We grumbled, because it was nice being us! Mostly nice, there were always some threads of awkwardness there, but it was mostly overtaken by the tangible energy of being one. But we were also our teacher, so we knew that learning new things as a thrum could be weird. Which, and how many brains the things we learned were etched in could be unpredictable. Cthonic-3-2 could get our collective understanding of integrals while Riverbank-5-1 would be completely lost once we were no longer us. We didn't want any of us to struggle (okay, some of us wanted some others of us to struggle, but most of us didn't, and that was what mattered), especially not when we were discussing something so important, so we slowly let go, letting ourselves separate.
And then we were I and I- I was the teacher, wasn't I? Had to be, I was standing at the north of the room staring back at my students, my joints tense against some inaudible threat. I was me again.
No time to indulge my lingering, irrational discomfort though. I'd already been silent for a beat too long. There had been a point that I'd wanted to make here.
“Understand? If we were able to come up with all of that in such a short amount of time, just imagine how much the science Thrums will be able to come up with. All of the very smartest clusters on the planet are joining as one in order to solve this very problem. We'll be okay."
The chill of the desolate room worked its way into my core until I felt like I might never be warm again. Something deep, deep below was letting out a rat-tat-tat-tat-tat that wouldn’t go away. The noise drove itself deeper and deeper into my brain with every passing second. I was huddled in the southeast-down corner of the engine room, my fear tangible, clawing into my vents, suffocating me. I couldn’t move from this spot. The panicked part of my brain screamed at me that I didn’t know what had saved me. There were too many variables, and if I changed any of them, then there the illness would be, waiting for me, inaudible, deadly, ready to liquify me and make my own body turn against itself as I died in horrific agony.
My vocal chords were moving without my conscious input, reciting a string of epic poetry that I remembered my parents telling me when I was young. Each time I had to skip over a line made my voice tilt higher, more panicked.
I could hear the voidship moving around me, the hum of machinery, the places where gears were sticking, and nothing, absolutely nothing, beyond its walls. It was as if the only thing that existed in the universe was it and me, alone, adrift in a vast, soundless ocean.
There were so many things that I knew that I needed to do to keep the ship on course to the stable EM spectrum emitting body, but I couldn't bring myself to leave the small room to do any of it.
I had no idea how Salvationseeker had thought that I was in any way capable of saving the planet. Maybe as one appendage of a larger organism, sure, but on my own, it was insurmountable. Nothing mattered. I was going to die just like everyone else and so were my kids and so was the entire planet.