Waking up inside a cramped, dark metal box is somehow even more discon certing the second time.
There are extenuating circumstances, I suppose. The first time I'd done this, I was full of excitement and optimism about my new job as the head foldgate tech on an entirely new planet, and while I had been a bit apprehensive about climbing into an actual fold-shielded transport crate for the rickety journey through a foldgate built with tech a full century older than I was instead of the smooth, instant journeys I was used to, I was too eager to get going to be properly apprehensive, and my destination was too busy for me to sit in the box and stress out all that much. Whereas this second journey, taking place nearly two years after the ancient gate's foldfield had unexpectedly collapsed, stranding six of us over eighty lightyears from Earth with limited supplies and no hope of ever re-establishing contact, is in somewhat more harrowing circumstances. My situation, and the fact that I made this journey through a collapsed foldgate isn't helping
Also, there's a bunch of dirt in the box with me that wasn't here when I went in. I'm not sure what that means but it's probably really bad.
Fortunately, I'm a fucking genius. I mean, I'm by definition the best foldgate tech on the planet, so. That has to count for something. Right?
The absurdly outdated tech of our fold gate was mandated by simple physics. Sure, we had long ago mastered instant travel; I could step out of my dormitory on Earth and into a bar on the moon for no cost higher than a few hundred ditting and some motion sickness induced by the sudden gravity change (a fair price to pay considering that low gravity was the best for getting absolutely pissed in), but that's because foldgates already exist in those locations. Going to a planted ninety lightyears away means transporting the gate ninety lightyears through normal physical space, subject to the twin tyrants of fuel capacity and time. My great-grandparents hadn't been born when this gate was originally built.
Which is absolutely fantastic news for me, and the entire reason I've just travelled through a disconnected foldgate that can only take me to the location I started in; a poorly maintained giant dome on a faraway planet featuring one (1) living colonist.
See, here's the thing about old foldgates: they're absurdly inefficient. A modern gate, you step in, you step out, it's all smooth, no problem. You don't need to be crammed in a shielded box or lose any time; they transmit your data and matter perfectly through the fold with very few, and very rare, errors. Old gates? Nothing like that. They hadn't figured out informational efficiency in transmitting string field data when this thing was built. It does the job with about the same rate of accuracy, but it's messy. It's bulky. It holds too much data too long, and now that the fold gate's collapsed, it has nothing to do with that data except feed it back to itself. What's the point of a fold gate that just pulls you apart, moves you really inefficiently in a tiny circle, and puts you back together again?
No point at all, if your goal is transport. But if you're a foldgate tech very highly trained on modern methods of packing data, given unrestricted access to an ancient beefy piece of shit that technology abandoned a century ago but was, at least, designed to deal with vast amounts of inefficiently packed data that required external shielding, in an environment completely free of most distractions and in a desperate race for your own survival, and, let's be honest, an absolute fucking genius, you start to think outside the foldfield.
Or more specifically, very much inside the foldfield. Specifically, the data inside the foldfield. 'Cause do you know what we call transport that doesn't go anywhere?
Storage.
The error-ridden mess of a machine currently towering over my little metal box (I assume, I can't see it right now) was a real deathbee to work with, but honestly, failure wasn't an option. The foldfield had collapsed before any living supplies were brought through; we hadn't had any seeds to grow, any algae to farm. We had stored, sterile food, and we had carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and the other trace elements necessary for life, and we had energy to store in it in our nuclear reactor, but no little living biomachines to turn it into life we could eat and gain that energy from. So I'd had to make my own machine, before time ran out. A foldgate picks up what goes into it, transmits the material and the data of the position of all its little bits relative to the rest to another foldgate via the field, and then it comes out the other end identical, more or less, to how it went in. Then it's done. But what if you looped a foldfield from one gate to itself (the only option I'd had, way out here), and transmitted the data round and round indefinitely? That's stored data. A stored pattern.
