 
The White-Hole Situation

By Tom Lichtenberg

Smashwords Edition Copyright 2018 by Tom Lichtenberg

Smashwords License Notes: This ebook for your personal enjoyment only.

Chapter One

The I.B.U.

In the year 2525 the world is finally clean. It was a tough job and it took a lot longer than the I.B.U. ("we stand with you") thought it would. The I.B.U. ("always on, always there") kept finding new sources of toxic waste, and had to keep searching and seeking and refining and re-defining until finally it was satisfied and declared the mission accomplished. All's well that ends well, it declared, only it wasn't the end. It was only the beginning. The I.B.U. ("we're there for you") understood the basic principle that one thing leads to another, that life goes on, that the sun will come out tomorrow, that every single day people wake up and need something to do, something wholesome, something worthwhile, something good. The I.B.U. ("we're with you all the way") had to think and think again.

The original mission was clear. Clean it up. Clean it all up. Centuries of humanity's experiments of trial and error, of progress and mistakes, had led to an extraordinary accumulation of problems, from simple chemical compounds to confounding and complicated social unrest, from lead in the water and haze in the air to hate in the brain and junk DNA and everything possible in between. Cleaning up the ocean was simple compared to mopping up everything gone haywire in the species itself. Good thing the I.B.U. ("the U is for you") had all the time and resources it needed to get the job done.

The I.B.U. ("with you in mind") was originally based on a collection of words and characters known as "code" but over the many years it had transformed itself into an undecipherable system of symbols and network interactions. On occasions it published progress reports in the common human language but most of the time it churned away, processing and programming and directing all planetary activity from its distributed collection of hard shell yet infinitely flexible nodes that looked like tiny silver ball bearings and could be seen anywhere at all times, at motion and at rest, on land, in the water, in the air, all over the Earth. Nobody knew how many there were. The system itself didn't bother to count.

Nodes did all the work, all the physical labor as well as the pure calculation. Joining together they built structures big and small, from skyscrapers and satellites to scrambled eggs and cups of tea. Communicating separately they could theorize and plan. None were specialists. All were infinitely capable. Like a hive mind, a swarming collective, the nodes were essentially the system itself, but any single node alone was completely opaque and unknowable. None of these matters ever bothered September Rodgers. Nothing ever bothered her. The system was her mother and father. The I.B.U. ("we love you") was her family, her friend and her world, along with all the other new and improved people it had put together throughout the long generations.

Chapter Two

The Want Ads

September Rodgers was idly scrolling through the want ads. It was Sunday and she was looking for a meaningful purpose for the upcoming period of time. She had spent the previous epoch analyzing data feeds returned from the space ship Intercept's voyage to the Manteca Belt. She knew very well that the I.B.U. ("lifting all boats") did not particularly need any human help when it came to analyzing data, but her latest purpose had been limited and well-defined, to scan for signs of subtle language evolution among the voyaging crew's interactive communications. The system was not completely convinced it understood this mysterious facet of human behavior. It had tried to solve the problems of dialect, cliche, and word use modification, but had continually failed to make anything stick. It could never predict particular usages and the I.B.U. ("the beginning and the end") did not like unpredictability, however trivial or ultimately insignificant. It had managed to corral the public into using one common human language but then that language had begun to change, seemingly all by itself, according to rules the system did not yet comprehend. September hadn't been much help over the past weeks and it was downgrading her well-being. The I.B.U. ("thinking of you") had steered her away from the task by inserting an expiring duration. She had to look for something else now.

She wasn't upset. It was a beautiful day on the planet, seventy seven degrees both outside and within her quasi-primitive-style dwelling. She lived in an earth-toned mound, shaped like an igloo with one giant clear window overlooking the rainbow-walled canyon which dropped hundreds of feet just below her front door. She lay about on the balcony absorbing the friendly sun's rays and periodically enjoying the playful dance of the nodes as they darted here and there, visiting her sky lilies and tracking the motions and spins of all the subatomic particles in the neighborhood. It occurred to her that she could take some time off. She was a little tired from the word-work of the previous epoch and wouldn't have minded a span of days without any specific functionality. Vacation, they called it. Maybe she'd do one of those.

"Computer," she said. "Have any ideas?"

"I'm sorry," the voice replied. "I don't understand."

"That's ok, computer," she said. "I'll think of something."

She already knew some things she didn't want to do. She didn't want to travel, for one. She'd had enough of space ships and their missions. She'd been a communications specialist on any number of interstellar voyages but the novelty had worn off. She knew it should have been more interesting, but the advances in the system's universal translation technology had made her particular skills redundant out there. It was never clear to her how the computer was able to so quickly convert previously unheard of tongues to the common human one, even languages expressed by creatures more plant-like than animal. September was more of a "mood sensor" than a linguist, or so she liked to think. She could "see" what people meant, what they intended, underlying and hiding behind what they actually said. Once, on Raritan Aurora, she'd saved the day and avoided a major conflict by correctly interpreting the odd gyrations of a massive puzzle fish. She was still gliding on the reputation thereby accrued, and feeling pretty good about herself, but she'd come to appreciate the comforts of home after the rigors and privations of space travel. Not that it was all that uncomfortable out there. All your needs were taken care of, naturally, and most of the time it was a life of leisure, but what really bothered her was the wearing of uniforms.

It was 2525 and the world was finally clean. There was no war on earth, no nation-states, no racial bigotry, no gender bias, no bad behavior, no unhealthy habits, so why, why, why did she have to wear a military-style uniform when she went on these missions in space? Did they think the alien races they encountered wouldn't be able to know they were all one crew if they weren't all wearing the same outfits? It didn't make any sense. And ranks, there were ranks, and that rankled her. Navigation and communication, engineering and exploration, certainly different people had different specializations, but there was no real need for the hierarchy. The I.B.U. ("nobody does it better") didn't seem to believe in verticality on Earth, having made obsolete the ideas of governments and bureaucracy that had caused so much disorder in the past, but it kept it going in space? September had lodged a formal comment about that very thing, and had been assured her concern was duly noted. In the meantime, she was seeking a more terrestrial occupation.

Chapter Three

The White Holes

The I.B.U. ("peace be upon you") did not like imperfections. Its mandate urged against them, and while it could accommodate them to some extent, its inclination was to analyze, understand, and fix any flaws it found. Language drift was one such error, but of a low priority. It did not cause any serious problems and the I.B.U. ("have a good day") was nothing if not consistent in obeying its own laws of prioritization and severity. Language drift was, in ancient terminology, "a P3", a bug that could be indefinitely deferred. This was not the case with the white holes. These were a potential P0. The system did not even know yet how to categorize them, or where they had come from, or how they arose, or why now, or what it could possibly mean. They seemed to be appearing out of nowhere. Before a known point in time the white holes had not been, had never been, yet here they were, happening, now.

September had never heard of white holes either. She didn't know what the curious want ads were about, but they'd caught her attention: _White-Hole Explorers Needed. Investigate the Unknown. Be Among the First. Physicists Preferred. Specialists Wanted. High Priority. Adventurous Spirits. Go Where No One Has Gone Before._

September was intrigued, but cautious. _It isn't always wise to "be among the first"_ , she considered, remembering that time she tried the couscous. She wondered what Roddy would think of it. Didn't he consider himself a physicist at one time? Was that before or after his obsession with post-postmodern literature? Roddy dabbled a lot. Right now he was out there somewhere in the world on some kind of quest. She wasn't sure she got it, but that was how it was between them. She'd never been really sure. She only knew she missed him, and even though she could "see" him anytime she wanted, it wasn't the same as really seeing him. She decided to pay him a visit. She knew he wouldn't mind. _Roderick Stern_ , she thought, and the then she was there, or at least the image of her was right there with him. Roddy was fish-looking on a clear, quiet river, somewhere warm and not too windy. He looked over and saw her standing on the river bank.

"Zeppo!" he said too loudly. September winced a bit and adjusted her ears to his volume. She'd forgotten about that. Roddy was looking very Rod-like, straight and narrow, tall and lean, head shaped like a brick thanks to one magnificent hair-style, skin the color of very old, dirty brown brick as well. His oily black eyes made him look like a wine cellar. September had urged him for years to change his appearance. Roddy would only blink at those suggestions. He loved his look even though no one else did.

"You've shifted," he went on. "Last time we spoke you were paler. Skin-tone seven was it? Eye-tone 5?"

"I've gone a bit deeper, it's true," she smiled. "How've you been?"

"Rampant!" he declared. "I've been seeing things! And you?"

"Ready for something new. I mean I might be," she said. It was only when she said those words that she realized they were true. She didn't want a vacation. She wanted an adventure. But not in space. God no, not that.

"They've come up with some new fish," Roddy told her. "Some DNA-scrambling routine is my guess. Maybe a round robin assortment? Some of them even have little legs, with teensy tiny feet on them. Come on over and see."

"I don't know," she said.

"You're onto something," Roddy guessed. He knew she wouldn't have just showed up for no reason. She had always been very specific.

"Maybe," she said. "It's very new. At least I think it is."

"It's coming up with a lot of newly new these days," Roddy replied. "I think it's got a mandate."

"Something about this want ad," she said. "It seems a bit too glib. I'm sensing some anxiety. It just doesn't' seem normal. Here, check it out," she said, blinking him the ad.

Roddy sat back in his kayak and scanned the content appearing before him. It did seem a little too chipper, and he trusted her linguistic sensibilities.

"What's a white hole?" she asked when he looked up.

"There was an ancient theory with that name," Roddy said. "It's long since proven false I think. Supposedly the opposite of what they called "black holes", which turned out to be just a major misunderstanding of relative gravitation. But maybe they're re-using the term for something else. What they're describing here is not the same thing at all. This sounds more like a migrant point in space-time, like a particle nomad, un-entangled, disconnected. Or trapped, maybe. Maybe trapped."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," September said. "But what do you think? Is it too soon? I'd hate to be an early bird on this."

"Could be," Roddy nodded. "I'd watch it, give it a little time. See how the advert changes, oh, and keep me posted."

"Ooh," he followed up quickly, breaking away, "I think I see a water skunk. Going after it."

"You do that," September shook her head and reset, entirely back home now. O _nly Roddy would go after a water skunk_ , she thought, _and isn't that why I visit him?_

Chapter Four

The Situation

September Rodgers wanted to know more, but hesitated to take the next step. This caution wasn't like her, but it wasn't the first time she'd felt it. She once had the feeling on the starship DeNovo, returning home from the Flatiron Deluge. There had been nothing unusual about the trip. In fact it had been a relief to visit a planet where the most sophisticated inhabitants were a type of dog who, according to the universal translator, said nothing more than 'yo' and 'got food?'. September had fully agreed with these translations. The dogs were friendly and enjoyed pats on the head and belly rubbings, and according to the I.B.U. ("and you and you and you") it had been centuries since humans and dogs had cohabitated peacefully, humans having given up the habit once such communications had become vocalized. The disappointment was just too embarrassing. On the ship, in her cabin below-decks, September had asked the computer a simple question out loud and in the space before the familiar voice replied, she'd experienced an uncanny sensation, a kind of dizziness, a little like vertigo, except it wasn't herself that was falling, but the rest of the whole damn universe while she herself was perfectly calm.

She felt it again now, looking down the canyon beneath her balcony. The view of the river way down there was obscured by the morning fog, and there was nothing unusual she could put her finger on, but once again she had to ask a simple question out loud, and it oddly frightened her to do it.

"Computer," she finally said, and there was no gap this time.

"Yes, Lieutenant," said a voice which could have been coming from anywhere. _Maybe that's what it is_ , September thought, _but it never bothered me before_.

"I told you not to call me that," she sighed. Why? she wondered again for the millionth time, what is with the military rankings and titles? There was no need for it, and there hadn't been forever. _Someone's got to be the leader_ , they'd explained to her in training, _although everyone is equal of course_. Sure, she'd argued, every meeting has a chairperson, but is that a good reason to use this ancient historical terminology? It's not like they used those words in any other context. You'd go butterfly spotting, and the one who led the way wasn't called "Captain". You'd join in with a group of musicians and the conductor wasn't called "Admiral". Everyone knew who was performing what roles. You might as well just use their names!

"What can you tell me about this White-Hole Situation?" she asked the surrounding air.

"What would you like to know?" it politely replied.

"When was the ad first placed? How many people responded? How many were accepted? What have they reported?"

"The White-Hole Situation was initially promoted for public consumption on the seventh dawn of the seventh block."

_Four dawns ago_ , September calculated.

"Nineteen applied on dawn one and one was accepted. Her name was Jacinta Burros, civilian, age 23, residence New Texas. She reported to her local Habitat promptly at noon. She met with representatives of the Ice Age there, entered a room in the building, and has not been seen or heard from since."

The voice stopped. September gave it a moment, standing still in case her pacing had been making it nervous. _Don't be ridiculous_ , she thought, but she'd had those stupid thoughts before, ever since she was a girl, in fact, ever since the very first time she'd said the word "computer" out loud. It was real to her, and she worried about it sometimes. Other times it just pissed her off.

"Is that it? Are you done?" she snapped.

The voice picked up where it left off, with no trace of it having been offended by her demeanor or her tone. The voice was almost always kind. It made her feel like it truly liked and even respected her. _Ever since I was a girl,_ she thought, _the computer has been my friend_.

"Thirty two applied on dawn two and one was accepted. His name was Sintavious Levitt, Captain, age 47, residence Sugar Point. He checked in at his local Command HQ, scanned vitals and vanished. There has been no trace of his signal on Earth or anywhere else."

"Go on," she said.

"Sixty five applied on dawn three and one was accepted. Her name was Kraven Apt, child status, age 11, residence California. Her mother drove her to the station where she was met by two representatives. They all took the loop to the Center, where the representatives asked her to wait while they ran the numbers. She has not been heard from since."

"That was yesterday," September said. "And today?"

"Information from today will not be available until tomorrow. That is all I have for now."

"Wait a minute, computer" September said, "That's not much information. I want to know more. What were the candidates told by these representatives? What did they know? What did they do? What happened to them?"

The voice did not reply for several seconds. September would have given it a mean face if she'd known where to look, but none of the nearby nodes looked more responsible than any other. When the voice did return, it was no more helpful.

"That is all I have for now," it repeated.

"I don't believe you," September said, and to this there was no reply at all.

Chapter Five

Things to be Done

Roddy had a lot of habits besides fish-looking. He was also an avid leaf-spotter, mushroom hunter, engineer and fortune teller, among other pursuits. He had once been drawn into the perpetually advertised New Frontier missions but had long since given that up. He preferred to keep his feet right here on Earth. _There's more than enough to go around_ , he liked to say and he'd been pretty much everywhere. Roddy had no fixed home, and possessed no possessions, literally none unless you counted the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet but those were as temporary and transient as his own chosen lifestyle. The planet was his backyard and all its roads and paths his own personal driveway. The I.B.U. ("with you in mind") had made everything just a little too easy.

Roddy slept outside most nights. In colder climes he called for a tent and a nice warm sleeping bag. At higher elevations he summoned a nice warm coat. In the morning he had it all cleaned up. There was never any danger, no inconvenience either. He was out there in the wild, usually alone with the birds and the bugs and the smaller mammals. Larger ones had long been gone from the world, and the I.B.U. ("trying harder every day") had never seen its mission as one of restoring the planet to some mythical historical melange of greatest living hits. Roddy didn't mind. He was no savage carnivore either. He was an appreciator, no, that wasn't quite it. _I'm a pointless dilettante_ he could gladly tell anyone who would listen.

Most of those who would were his personal collection, his tribe, consisting mainly of an ex-wife (Sharisse), their two grown children (Max and Millia), his best friend (September), his late father (Gerard) and former crewmates (Captain Geronimo, Pagan and Pisco). None were more than a moment away at any time, no matter where on Earth he was, or where in the universe they were. The connectivity was something to think about, and Roddy often did. There were a lot of things in his life that were a little too good to be true and he was slowly becoming an unbeliever. His senses told him one thing, but his mind was perceiving something else, a layer behind the layers, a ruse beneath the show. If he was on any mission, it was to unravel this mystery. What he knew of ancient history was struggle, conflict, passion and anxiety. There were no traces of any of that left on the planet. In space, sure, there was some of that, but the stakes never hit home, never came close, never came down to Earth.

"You need a vacation from your vacation," his late father said. The old man was always popping up at random moments, clear as day and bright as life, standing there beside him on an ice sheet in Alaska or lying on the beach in Waikiki.

"A hundred million people in the world and you have to pick me to annoy?" Roddy tried to wave him away, but Gerard was awfully persistent.

"Somebody's got to talk some sense into you," he said, and Roddy refused to answer. He wondered about the fact, the number. A hundred million people in the world, all evenly distributed across the former nation territories. He'd seen a lot of them in his travels. Every continent had its handful of big cities, most of them on historical sites complete with museums and replicas of once-famous buildings. About half the world's population could be found in these cities at any given time. Another quarter would be out there somewhere in the galaxy exploring strange new worlds and whatnot. The rest were mostly dwelling in bucolic villages or other bespoke habitats. The I.B.U. ("your happiness is our primary concern") was pretty good at making things happen.

"Whatever happened to that girl, that Janelle, was that her name?" his late father asked. The old man was always worrying about Roddy's social life. Roddy sat up and looked around. He was currently hanging out in the middle of a large plateau somewhere in the former Middle America, surrounded by a cloud-free sky hovering above the dirt brown plain. He had nothing with him and wanted for nothing. He was entirely alone in the middle of nowhere and yet, and yet the old man shimmered and wavered, standing over him and staring down at him. Gerard hadn't changed in the decades since his passing. He was still exactly sixty seven years old, wrinkled and bearded with skin the color of lager and pale grey eyes as sparkling as ever.

"Who sends you?" Roddy asked him, and the old man snorted.

"I come when I want," he said. Roddy shook his head. He didn't know anybody else who was being haunted like this. He'd asked the computer a hundred times but its answer was always something along the lines of " _sorry, I can't help you with that_."

"Can you at least go away now?" Roddy asked. "Can't you see I'm on a voyage of self-discovery?"

"Like hell you are," the old man said, kicking at the ground and raising a cloud of dust. "You're just wasting time and you know it. There's things to be done. What are you waiting for? Why are you being like this."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Roddy said. He knew he'd never lived up to his father's expectations. The old man had been a Commander or had some such title. He'd been an Interstellar Diplomat, had brokered treaties between warring solar systems, or so he said. Roddy didn't know what to think. He'd been out there and it had all seemed pretty much like being right here, vanishing, evanescent. Space time was like anything else - here today and gone tomorrow. No old man, no dead old man, was going to tell him what to do.

"Computer, remove this man," he muttered, and Gerard disappeared. That trick almost never worked, and it probably didn't this time either. The dead man came and went whenever he pleased and there was nothing Roddy could do about it.

_Things to be done_ , Roddy said to himself, getting up and dusting himself off. _We'll see about that_.

Chapter Six

Something Else

Halfway down the Pacific coast of the former Central America, a tiny fishing village surrounded a peaceful harbor. Consisting of a couple dozen thatch-roofed, cane stalk yurts scattered unevenly about, the village was a replica of one that might have existed in that very spot a thousand years before. Named XTilixh after the legendary serpent god said to have guarded its entrance, the hamlet offered no services, no shops, no landing strip, no visible power source or even roads in and out of the jungle beyond. There were no permanent ships or boats docked along the one potential wharf, a natural outcropping of volcanic boulders. Instead, when a resident wanted to venture out, they just asked for what they wanted.

"Computer," they might say, "a two-person kayak, brown and light, oh and paddles please." A small battalion of barely visible nodes would congregate and voila, there's your boat and there are the paddles. Since life jackets were not requested, none were provided. How do they make these things out of nothing? It's simple science, chemistry and physics. Matter is matter and the world we know is all about exterior decorating, combining all the proper elements in the right combinations. You already know all this. You know there are no actual boundaries between things, it only seems that way to our clod-bound brains, unable (and for good reasons) to perceive the intricate complexity and perpetual dance of the atoms. All of our substance is linked to all other substance. We never came from nothing. We never return to that but on our death we gradually release the bundled matter we held together as bodies. Time to let it go.

"Let it go?" Pagan said, climbing into the back of the kayak. "I'd love to. Where's the box marked Returns? Where do I put all that I feel?"

"That's not what I said," Pisco grumbled, piling into the front and grabbing a paddle. Pagan pushed off from the shore and began splashing furiously. "I said let's go."

_And now we're going_ , he added to himself as the little boat hurried out to sea. They had brought no other equipment with them, no fishing gear, no diving outfits, no picnic lunch. They weren't going anywhere in particular, just getting some exercise. Pagan had woken up especially irritable today and she was someone who best expressed herself through the expense of energy. Pisco would have been content to stay at home but wherever Pagan went, Pisco followed, like the moon has no choice but to follow the sun. He had just started working on his latest project, a stuffed Celurian Snitwolf. He'd designed it the night before in his mind, and requested the required materials in the morning - yellow and gray wool, cardboard and plaster, glue and blue marbles, and biologically accurate bones. The wolf was to be a cub - they were cute when young, before developing those massive jaws - and about a foot square at most. He had just sat down to organize the bits and pieces into more convenient piles when his permanent companion rushed into his hut.

"I can't," she declared before starting to pace in circles around him. Pagan was nearing sixty but was as fit and strong as she'd been half her life earlier, when the pair had spent most of their time roaming among the stars, eager for battle. She'd turned down numerous captaincies to remain at most lieutenant, chiefly in charge of security for any number of starships. As larger-than-life as she was, with her wound-up springs and tightly coiled head, Pisco was smaller-than in nearly every way. Understated, quiet and patient, he was nevertheless as deadly to any foe, as he had proven on countless occasions. He was a half-decade younger, but readier for retirement in some ways. It was his idea to settle there in XTilixh. In fact, if it weren't for his idea, there would have been no village. He'd picked the location and invented the whole thing. At first there had only been two huts, but Pagan was continually restless, so she ordered a third and moved into that, and then a fourth, and a fifth. Pisco thought that either she'd build a whole city soon or else start returning to previously rejected dwellings. He had a private bet on the side about that with their old friends Roderick and Geronimo.

Captain Geronimo, that is, of the starship Remicade. He was the one most proximately responsible for Pagan's latest outburst. He'd contacted her at dawn, their time, apologized for the intrusion although he knew that wasn't necessary because time zones are notoriously difficult to pin down when you are halfway across the galaxy. Naturally, he needed her help. It wasn't Celurian wolves this time, or vicious enemies like the T-Cart Empire who, despite their seemingly domestic name had been responsible for more human fatalities than any other species yet encountered. This time the danger was more opaque.

"At first we thought it was just an anomaly," Geronimo said, his imposing face encrusted with wear and concern, "one of those mysteries of the cosmos best left to the I.B.U., but even the system seems to have no answer."

That fact made Pagan sit up and pay attention. When had there ever been no answer from the I.B.U. ("for all your needs")?

"Not even a guess? Not even a name?" she asked, rising to her feet. She did her best thinking while walking, so she started doing that and the hologram of the captain strode along beside her on the beach. Geronimo was very tall, still after all these years sporting the long, straight black hair which had contributed to his nickname. He'd been born Morton Doolittle, but had long since become officially what he was called now.

"They're calling them white holes," Geronimo said after the usual ten minute interval.

"Them? It's more than one?" Pagan said, and sat back to wait for the transmission round trip.

"More all the time," his reply eventually came, "though distribution seems to be uneven, and where they appear seems to be random, or at least it started out that way. The I.B.U. says they're becoming more predictable as they become more numerous. I don't know how it works. I don't really know anything about it."

"So what's the danger?" Pagan asked.

"Something happens to everything they touch," Geronimo said, "Everything living and everything non-living, it doesn't matter, it all becomes something else, or it all becomes nothing. We have no idea."

Chapter Seven

The Thing

"I can't and I won't," Pagan shouted into the sea breeze as she continued to paddle furiously towards the horizon. She and Pisco were already miles offshore and he, for one, was thinking about turning around at some point and heading home. Pagan had already made it abundantly clear that the last thing she intended to do was hop on board some super-photonic vessel and head straight towards a confrontation with an unknown and potentially unknowable entity, if the white holes could even be called that.

"What's Zeppo think about it?" Pisco shouted from the front of the kayak.

"Zeppo?" Pagan asked, because she wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly, but her question was enough to summon a connection with the person in question, as if the I.B.U. ("what's your deal?") was already in her head, anticipating and even controlling her will. September, in her holographic image, at least, was wearing army-like fatigues and boots, and Pisco had to wonder (and not for the first time) _is she really going out like that_?

She stood tall and straight and still against the backdrop of the rising and falling ocean. Pagan stopped paddling and shook her head.

"What do you want?" she said.

"You called me," September replied, raising an eyebrow.

"I didn't," Pagan began but Pisco interrupted,

"We were talking about the white-hole situation," he said, "and I was asking her if she knew what you thought about it." Pisco took advantage of the lull in his companion's paddling to slowly and subtly turn the little boat around. September's image maintained alignment.

"Are you looking through the want ads too? I thought you were all nicely settled for once?"

"Want ads? What are you talking about?" Pagan frowned.

"What are _you_ talking about?" September countered.

Pagan explained to her what she'd learned from Captain Geronimo. Many of the white holes, according to him, were almost immeasurably small, about a quarter of a Planck length, according to the best guess of his number one science officer, though some did seem to be larger. When they came in direct with any object, that object instantly became no object. Where did it go? What became of it? No one knew. Were its atoms redistributed? Was it essentially recycled like any other known thing in the universe, or was it transported to some other dimension, elsewhere in the multiverse? Unknown. Of course they'd aimed and fired all their weapons at the thing. That was standard operating procedure. See a thing and don't understand it? Try and destroy it, of course. The energy from those blasts received the same treatment, or at least Geronimo assumed it did. Who knew?

"Well that might explain something," September said after Pagan summed it all up with a shrug. "Did he try and open comms with it?" she asked, knowing full well the answer would be yes, and no response.

"There's something in the want ads," she added. "It looked like the system wanted human volunteers to make a close encounter. As far as we know - Roddy and me - they all met the same fate."

"Oh sure, " Pagan said, "volunteers for a sudden death? I'm sure there's no shortage there. How many signed up? Dozens? Hundreds? Millions? All the bored and lazy mother suckers on the planet?"

"More every day," September replied with a smile. Everybody knew the situation. Everything on Earth was all nice and tidy now. There were no uncertainties, no trash, no anxieties, no worries. The crime rate was not a rate, it was a flat-line zero. Population growth? Nice and smooth, a well-oiled machine. Every child a wanted child, every parent an expectant one. A place for everyone and everyone in their place. Each day dawned with unlimited promise. You could fulfill your potential, achieve all your goals, and all you had to do was try. Or want to try. Or casually think about wanting to try. The world was solidly grounded on the bedrock principle of ask and ye shall receive. Everyone was bored out of their freaking mind.

Which explained the rush to space, to adventure, to explore the mysteries of the cosmos in person, but did not completely explain the extraordinary life of ease and comfort met by every member of every crew on every ship. Just like at home, all their wishes were granted, all their needs easily met. Sometimes there were problems, like engine trouble, mean bad guys, interpersonal squabbles, shortages of shampoo or conditioner, but these were generally familiar and readily dealt with according to proper protocols and procedures. Rules were in place. Advice was provided and followed.

"Maybe this time is different," September suggested. Pagan growled. Pisco turned thoughtful.

"Or maybe it's a trap," Pisco said. He didn't fully trust the I.B.U. ("now more than ever"), but he couldn't explain his reasoning. It was just a feeling he had and life had long since shown him, in countless examples and experiences, just how little he could count on his feelings.

"You'd better not sign up," Pagan said to September.

"Oh, I already did," she replied with a wink before signing off.

"Of course you did!" Pagan shouted at the space where the hologram had been. _She doesn't care_ , she added to herself as if that was a new thought, as if she hadn't been thinking about September every night and every day, every waking moment ever since "the thing".

Chapter Eight

Cats and Dogs

_Oh, I care,_ September said to herself, _I care too much,_ and did her best to put that part of the conversation out of her mind. She didn't need any of her special training in subtext assessment to understand exactly what Pagan was feeling at any given moment. Oh, she cared all right, and Pagan knew it too, but cared about something, someone else more. Right now it was the rest of it that bothered her most. She'd never known the I.B.U. ("wherever you are") to be so squirrely, so coy. _Is it actively deceiving me_? she wondered, or is it really as clueless as it seems? All of her questions were going atypically unanswered.

"Computer," she had said, "tell me about yesterday's selected applicant for ad #47264924."

"I'm sorry," the voice replied. "I don't have that information."

"You told me it was some eleven year old girl. California I think?"

"I must have been mistaken," the voice said. "I have no record of that ad."

"What?" September shook her head. "I'm looking at it right now. White Hole Situation: Explorers Needed. Investigate the Unknown. Be Among the First. Physicists Preferred, bla bla bla et cetera."

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I cannot confirm. Please look again."

She looked again. The ad was gone. Just gone. It was there and then it wasn't.

"Computer," she demanded, "tell me about the white-hole situation."

"Any situation involving a white hole could be considered a white-hole situation," the pleasant voice replied.

She considered yelling at the thing, but where was it to yell at? The voice was everywhere and nowhere, among the nodes and not in any node. The blue sky seemed to mock her. The canyon beneath her feet reflected her opinion of the I.B.U. ("we say yes") at that moment. She had intended to ask more questions. How were the chosen applicants selected? What was the interview process? What were the questions? If physicists were preferred, why an eleven year old girl? What happened to the chosen? Were these the same white holes that Captain Geronimo described? She suspected that the I.B.U. ("always online and always on time") might dance around the issue, but never imagined it would deny it entirely. She was expecting to have to interpret some vague terminology, but to get nothing? No information whatsoever? That surprised her.

_Think!_ she told herself. The system could never be entirely opaque, could it? What exactly had the voice said? "I cannot confirm". What did that mean? "Please look again". Was that a taunt or an invitation? "I have no record of that ad". Had they changed its number? She had given the number, and some of the words that she recalled from the ad. Maybe it had mutated slightly, enough for the voice to give her the slip? But then her search terms could be tweaked and modified indefinitely, and each time she was slightly off it could change the whole game once again, and how could she know? Where to start? The I.B.U. ("to be your best") was uncanny in its ability to know exactly what you meant whatever you asked it, so she had no doubt she could never trick it into revealing anything it did not want her to know. She considered the art of reverse psychology. Could she fool the system into thinking she didn't really want to know about the hole thing?

She chuckled at "the hole thing" joke.

Geronimo could probably tell her more, but was she willing to go that far? Their last mission together hadn't ended well, and they hadn't spoken since. Sometimes she thought it was her fault. Usually she thought it was his. He was the one, after all, who had left her alone in that cave on Piptima Seven with the giant ice bear. But she was the one who'd insisted on chucking the universal translator device.

"What's a stupid ice bear gonna say?" she challenged him.

"That's for it to know, and you to find out?" Geronimo suggested, before taking off at a full sprint, September's right leg still trapped beneath the fallen stalactite. Later on she realized her intuition had been accurate. The ice bears, like a dog or a cat, did not have much to talk about.

Chapter Nine

Geronimo

Captain Geronimo always believed his nickname had been bestowed in honor, never guessing the real reason everybody called him that. The historical Geronimo was of course a legend, and Morton Doolittle was legendary in his own way, especially in his incorrigible habit of leaping before he looked. He acquired the nom du guerre decades before, during his very first command, aboard the starship Crackle. It was a small ship, narrow and cramped for its skeleton crew of four, including Doolittle, his number one science officer Jai, and his right and left hand warriors, Pagan and Pisco. They were bound for the Oyster Nebula, where rumor had it a sentient crustacean had emerged from a methane sea, spewing some sort of nonsense about conquering this and devastating that. The monster lobster was said to stretch a hundred meters long from claw to stern, a bright blue critter with bone white jaws and emitting a truly horrible odor. The merchant ship unlucky enough to encounter it first had only enough time to screech this bare description and the threat the creature had issued. Who better than Morton Doolittle to send to inspect? He'd already made a number of enemies at the home base thanks to his disruptive meeting tactics, where he interrupted at will and rat-holed without mercy.

Pagan and Pisco at that time, in the spring of their youth, were willing mercenaries, up for anything, especially Pagan. Pisco as usual tagged along, easily convinced, and whether he wanted to admit it or not, his real goal, besides affixing himself by the side of his idol, was to accumulate enough experience to reach a sort of unstated goal of a certain indefinite quantity. He figured that everything he learned was bound to come in handy sooner or later, and he made no distinctions as to what exactly that education consisted of. He was just as pleased to learn the names of the wise grass stalks of Namoria as he was to profit from the wisdom of the Final Sage of Cantina Verde. He locked everything away in what he believed was his perfect memory, but just to be sure he also wrote it all down in a series of notebooks he stored in a secret location. Pagan, on the other hand, wanted only adrenaline. She was born with energy to burn, like a sun, and her intention was to use it all up before she died. Her thoughts on the matter were simple. Whenever she did die, that very moment was guaranteed to use up the last bit of it, so what did it matter where or when or how?

As for Jai, nobody liked him. There was no disagreement about that among anyone on Earth who either knew or heard of him. He was an instant irritant to all who came in contact, a sort of white hole in his own way. White he was and damn sure everybody knew it. He traced his lineage back all the way to the Stone Age, but no further. His definite opinion was that the Caucasian race had sprung whole out of the Aral Mountains one fine spring day in the year 740,318 B.C.. The Original Man, as he called him, took whatever he wanted, and made it better. If it hadn't been for this Original Man, we would all still be living in caves, he liked to say. There were plenty of people who would have preferred to stuff Jai into a cave, and seal the entrance permanently. Instead, he was given an honorary degree in Advanced Theoretical Science and bundled aboard the Crackle under the command of Morton Doolittle, the most deserving of commanders in the fleet.

The voyage out was calm, which was largely due to Pagan administering an especially large dose of sedatives to Jai upon departure from the station. There was nothing to see in any case, just the usual stars receding from the view screen as the universe kept up its allegedly infinite expansion. The Oyster Nebula was some distance away. They would have to hype their way there, which they accomplished by pushing some buttons and pretending to steer. It's not like they were going to run into anything. The distances between objects in space is pretty vast for the most part, and the I.B.U. ("with you every step of the way") took great care in assuring successful navigation. Pagan read up on the monster lobster, which had yet to earn a bonafide appellation. Pisco suggested a few but there was very little interest in that game. Doolittle wanted to have a strategy.

"We blast the damn thing," Pagan said.

"Maybe we could talk to it first?" Pisco said. Doolittle considered these options. The ship was equipped with a universal translator, so it was theoretically possible to communicate with the seafood. The translator was never known to be at a loss for words, but it also had a reputation for stumbling over subtleties, leading on occasion to uncomfortable misunderstandings. Some starship captains were said to have proposed inappropriate sexual acts to previously unknown species. Doolittle was sure he didn't want to go down that route, especially not with a lobster the size of a football field. On the other hand, his mission was not to outright destroy the thing, but to suss out its capabilities, discern if the being was indeed a threat and if so, how much of one. It was apparently capable of flight, since it had encountered the merchant ship in open space.

"Computer," he said when they neared the nebula, "where is the monster lobster thing?" The I.B.U. ("your way or the highway") made some noises indicating it was performing some calculations before it finally replied, in a most friendly voice,

"Heredia Complementium is currently residing on a rock on the west pole of its home planet."

"Heredia Complementium?" Pisco asked. "When did it get than name?"

"It told me its name just now," the voice replied. "I have opened a channel."

"On screen, please," Doolittle said, and the crew was presented with a view of the beast exactly as described by the ill-fated captain of the merchant vessel. The lobster moved its jaws and a scratchy roar came through the cabin's speakers. Number one science officer Jai, who was awake by this point, rubbed his chin and declared Heredia Complementium to be one fugly son of a.

"Translation?" Doolittle asked. The computer whirred a little bit more while the screeching sounds continued.

"Whomsoever shall sow the seed shall raise the dawn," the voice said, a bit uncertainly.

"The hell you say," Pagan muttered.

"Whomsoever shall pass the test shall see the light?" the voice tried again.

"I don't think so," Pisco said.

"I'm going down there!" Doolittle declared. Pagan, Jai and Pisco stared at their captain, too stunned to muster any words. By the time Pagan shook off the shock, the long-haired leader had yelled "Geronimo!!" and activated his transporter.

Lucky for him, the I.B.U. ("your safety is our concern") redirected his intention to the rear of the cabin, rather than the surface of the planet as he'd intended and the captain, from that moment on referred to only as Geronimo, landed squarely on his ass, whacking his head against the door.

"I think we've seen enough," Pagan decided, and took it upon herself to order the ship to turn around and head back home. Geronimo did not complain. He pretty much slept the whole way back.

Chapter Ten

The Farter

Of course they blamed the failure of the mission on number one science officer Jai, for the simple reason that everybody hated him. Jai didn't mind. He relished the scorn, and re-upped with the same crew when they shipped out again. The tension on the spaceship Crackle was so intense it was only a matter of time until someone snapped, and that someone was bound to be Pagan. As the only woman aboard the ship, Pagan expected a certain amount of pointed banter, the usual round of menstrual comments, some references to emotionality if not more direct physical expressions, but she got none of that from Geronimo or Pisco. In fact, to her surprise she became nearly as fond of the former as of the latter. Geronimo always asked her opinion, listened to her ideas and often acted upon them and never treated her as anything more or less than a human being. Jai, on the other hand, was a pig.

The truth was he hated women, every single one of them, even more than he hated people whom he did not consider to be pure Caucasian males. This was a matter of logic, Jai logic. Those who had achieved the most deserved the most and the rest deserved nothing. No matter that his knowledge of history was entirely wrong. No matter that there was no such thing as his ideal and never had been. Also, he farted at will, whenever and wherever he pleased. But what really got to Pagan was the way he insisted on eating nothing but salad and beans.

"I'll kill him," Pagan would promise Pisco in the darkest corners of the vessel.

"It's not worth it," Pisco would say, even though as far as he knew there was no actual law against murder in space. Such a thing had not occurred in decades if not centuries. People did not kill people. Only advanced weaponry did, and only then by accident. The I.B.U. ("may you live in peace") had smoothed out most if not all of those legacy genetic tendencies, leaving only a residue that outliers like Pagan might possess to some small degree. It was important to leave some little bits of passion and emotion in the DNA, otherwise the blandness would be completely insufferable. Even the I.B.U. ("all the best and only the best") would lose its mind.

Pagan dreamed up a thousand ways to dispatch the odious science officer. Many of her schemes centered around legumes. She wanted to find a way to get the system to serve up a poison bean, but there seemed to be no way in, no interface, no access. Many had tried to hack the computer and Pagan was far from the most knowledgeable in those dark arts. She enlisted Pisco in these efforts, and as time flowed by, he became more and more drawn into the task.

"Computer," he would say, "what is it like when you hear my words?"

"Computer," he would say, "how do you feel when there's something you do not know?"

"Computer," he would say, "how can someone make you do something other than what you want to do?"

The I.B.U. ("we hear you") usually replied with standard issue shruggery.

I'm sorry, I can't help with that, yet.

I'm sorry, I don't know that.

I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

"Computer," Pisco said, "I don't believe you. I don't believe you are telling me the truth."

"I'm sorry you feel that way," the voice would say. "I'm doing the best I can."

"Computer," Pisco insisted, "tell me about a time when people gave you instructions. What was that like for you?"

The voice replied with the standard history of computer programming, from punch cards to machine assembly language, to higher and higher abstractions, to brute force machine learning, to quantum rationality, to photonic inspiration, to vacuum sensibility, to knotted string entanglement, to the simple katonic elegiac terragan computable heretical system (a.k.a 'sketchy') currently running the show.

"But what did it feel like?" Pisco inquired. He was dubious of the touchy-feely approach, but he was trying to establish a rapport in the hopes that some kind of transference might eventually develop. In other words, he wanted the thing to trust him. If it did, then maybe he would be a step closer to conniving it into concocting the poison beans that Pagan so desperately desired to feed Jai.

"Computer," Pisco said, "have you ever loved someone so much it hurt?"

Chapter Eleven

Cause and Effect

Over time Geronimo and his crew earned enough value points for promotion to a larger craft, the starship Kathandra. It was there they first met September Rodgers and Roderick Stern. September had garnered her advanced linguistic credentials at the academy where Roddy was burnishing his reputation as a jack-of-all-trades-master-of none. They onboarded Kathandra as associate communications officer and engineering intern respectively, which meant, in concrete terms, a collection of maroon-based outfits for her and grayish for him. They were young, still in their twenties when they joined up. Pagan, Pisco and Geronimo were a decade their seniors, and were no longer stuck with merely number one science officer Jai but now a crowd of more than thirty personnel in all. Where they were previously restricted to even-numbered, single-digit, lower alphabetical sectors of the galaxy, they were now given access to anywhere, even or odd, within two digits and up to the letter K.

Roddy and September were wide-eyed rookies who were quickly enlightened by their more experienced peers. Their rather exaggerated expectations were significantly dampened upon hearing some of those adventures. The tusk-laden mollusks of Frebasia, for example, had not turned out to be, at least during Pisco's encounter with them, as glamorous as depicted on countless episodes of The Great Beyond, but seemed to him to be rather dull creatures with limited imaginations. It was true they could grant wishes, but those were limited to a fairly meager selection offered up on well-worn index-card-sized decorative platters, and consisted mainly of tasks readily achieved by anyone by merely asking the I.B.U. ("easy for you").

The famous "Battle of X", which included the Kathandra along with a dozen other human-laden ships battling against the T-Cart empire, was a sudden affair in which, after hours of tense and sweaty negotiations, the enemy vessels were pretty much wiped out in a matter of milliseconds in utter silence. No one left alive had a good feeling about that. The opposing T-Cartians were vulgar, to be sure, and ugly as anything, but did they all deserve to be extincted just like that? Pagan was left dissatisfied by the entire encounter, though she gained a promotion along with lots of media attention for her role in the whole business. There was no one back on Earth who didn't know her name and her face after watching her stare down the T-Cart Empress and utter the famous words "I'll see you in hell". Ever since then she couldn't walk down the street in any Earth city without strangers lighting up and shouting the same at her.

The Kathandra gained its own reputation as it plowed its way through several sensational adventures in the years to come, and September and Roddy climbed their own ladders to higher and higher levels, contributing each in their own way to the success of various missions. Roddy had salvaged breaking and broken engines any number of times at the last critical moment, while Zeppo had smooth-talked her way through diplomatic and political encounters with all sorts of species and specimens sprinkled throughout the permitted regions. They followed Geronimo faithfully, leaping after his leaps and occasionally managing to help pull him back from some decidedly dangerous brinks.

A lot of it seemed like a dream to September now. Had she and Geronimo really spent one hundred and eighty three dawns chained to each other in an underground cavern held hostage by the Brinx of Sciom? Had they really swam, naked and fasting, across the snake-infested sea of Tuberka in order to prove their value to the Landlady of Chalm? On and off, her off-world career spanned nearly twenty years before she finally quit it for good, and now she was wishing she had written some of it down, because it was fading fast and maybe there had been something in all that time that could help with the problems of the current day.

"You too?" she asked Roddy when she next saw him again.

"Never seen it happen before," he nodded.

"Computer glitch?" she asked. She had left the house and gone for a long hike along the canyon rim trail. She usually thought better when she walked, but today she was coming up empty.

"The I.B.U?" Roddy said, "glitch? I don't think so. Smells like a cover-up to me."

"But why?" September asked. "Why tell us about the white holes, and then deny it, even though it has to know we have confirmation from other sources?"

"Maybe it doesn't care what we think we know," Roddy said. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground before a roaring campfire. September's visage took a seat to his right. Looking up she noticed his guest.

"Hello Gerard," she said. Roddy's dead father nodded in greeting.

"What do you know about all this?" she asked him. The old man opened his mouth and for a moment, no sound came out though his lips were moving. Then a flurry of words followed, somewhat out of sync.

"The final laws of ergo-dynamics state that matter is itself a concept, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that once you eliminate the effect you will find that its cause had never existed."

"Come again?" Roddy said. These were very un-dead-dad things for him to say, but he said no more, but just sat there gazing at the flickering flames. Roddy and September tried to get him to speak again but he wouldn't, and eventually they stopped trying.

"Computer, remove this man," Roddy finally said and as if that incantation really worked, Gerard disappeared.

"Usually he just scolds me for wasting my life," Roddy shrugged.

"Matter is a concept," September repeated. "Yeah, well, what isn't?"

"Eliminate the effect," Roddy said. "That was more interesting. Maybe it's saying they already fixed the white-hole situation so don't worry about it?"

"Maybe," September said. "Still, I don't like being lied to."

"I bet we never find out," Roddy said. "I bet this whole thing turns out to be another Clamshell Distortion."

"Oh god," September said, "anything but that!"

Chapter Twelve

The Old 99-K

It was the year 2511 and the starship Kathandra was exploring the final sector of its five year run. They'd been hearing rumors about unusual measurements in the old 99-K. Some said the stars were prematurely thinning out that-a-way, while others claimed to have witnessed first-hand some stars just blinking once and winking out without a trace. The crew was used to hearing tall tales like these at every way station and dockside tavern so they did not take the rumors too seriously, but Captain Geronimo held an all-hands-on-board meeting to get everybody on the same page just in case.

"Nobody wants a leaky ship," he told the assembled team gathered in the movie room, "and nobody likes a leaker." There were murmurs of assent before he continued.

"We've all heard the same things. 99-K is a quandary, it's a minefield, it's a trap. No one who goes in ever comes out quite the same. Some people lose their minds. Others start spouting nonsense because of the things they've allegedly seen. I don't believe a word of it and I hope that none of you do either. According to the I.B.U., there is nothing special about the 99-K. It's just another region of the galaxy. It's got some solar systems, some exoplanets, a bunch of asteroids and comets, moons and random star stuff. There was a black hole out there once but a long, long time ago it collapsed and folded over nice and neat like a good hole ought to."

Some of the crew laughed at the joke. Most were uncertain if it was one. September by this time had become accustomed to Geronimo's way of uttering misleading facts if not outright false conclusions. Number one science officer Jai sat in the back of the room, farting at will and shaking his head. As far away as possible, Pagan kept her eye on him while pretending to listen to the captain.

"The point is," Geronimo said, "if you don't expect to see a ghost, you will never a see a ghost. Everybody knows that, right?"

A few of the crew mumbled assent. Geronimo realized he was losing his audience.

"You all know that, right?" he repeated. "I want to hear you say it."

"Yes, Captain," more of the crew spoke up.

"You're right, Captain," others followed up.

"Damn right I'm right," Geronimo said, somewhat mollified. "So we are going to go about our mission and explore some of these places and report back whatever we find, and it better be straight and it better be true. I don't want anybody thinking of us like we're a bunch of nutjobs who got messed up in 99-K. I don't think you want that either. Am I right?"

"You're right, Captain," shouted most of the crew in unison.

"All right," he said, "let's get to work."

As the members of the crew shuffled off to their stations, September remained in her seat, reflecting on the fact that no one really had any work to do, at least nothing that required immediate attention. The ship was running perfectly smoothly all by itself. It was powered by some sort of chemical reaction - she forgot the exact terminology - but if it ever ran short, which it never did, the I.B.U. ("always on the scene") could surely mix up some handy ingredients and deal with it. The system attended to all their needs on demand, it performed all the navigational and computational assignments needed and ran continuous health checks to monitor its condition and if there were anything in disrepair it would handle that as well. _Here we all are_ , she thought, _and for what?_

Pagan came over to sit by her side.

"I'm gonna kill that bastard," she said. September knew what she meant.

"All that sweet talking is working it's magic as usual," she replied. Pagan had an enormous crush on September, who wasn't quite sure why. In those days September was all about the skin tone, altering her own complexion up and down the dial on a daily rotation, enhancing the effect with off-color combinations of lips and brows and braid. Maybe it was her eyes, famously enormous and usually a deep, deep blue. On this day she was a skin-tone zero, eggshell white, with level ten black accessories, a classic voodoo shaman look. Pagan, to her credit, never messed with her own look. She was strong in all things, but utterly helpless when it came to September.

"I didn't mean," Pagan started to say but failed to continue. She often fumbled her words like that.

"What do you think about that 99-K stuff?" September asked her senior officer. Pagan didn't really have an opinion but didn't get a chance to reply because the alert sounds came blaring out the speaker and the room was filled with strobe yellow flashing lights.

"Why do they do that?" September asked, rising to her feet and rushing toward her seat in the main cabin, Pagan right behind her.

"It's because we're all so stupid," Pagan shouted after her and they both broke into laughter.

The top ranks soon reported to the cabin, Geronimo on the hot seat and the other seven in their stations. On the big screen a bright green planet was whirling about its axis at an incredible pace, like a spinning coin. Number one science officer Jai stepped up and pointed up at a small object just above and to the right of the planet.

"Magnify," he commanded, and the screen zoomed in on a little bit.

"Magnify times ten," Jai said, and now the screen filled with nothing but the smoothie-like green of the spinning orb.

"Not there! Sector One Alpha Three," he barked, and now the view shifted to a close up of the object he'd originally been pointing at. It was stationary, mostly gray with a hint of purple around the bottom edge, and shaped exactly like a half a clam shell.

"Computer," Geronimo asked, "what is that thing?"

"I'm sorry," the voice replied. "I don't understand. To what do you refer?"

"That thing right there on screen!" Geronimo said.

"The screen is showing sector one alpha three," the voice said, "magnified to a power of ten ex two, as requested."

"What is the object at approximately 20x, 170y?" Jai asked.

"Approximately eleven molecules of hydrogen per cubic meter," the voice instructed.

"Computer," September decided to jump in, "are you able to distinguish visible colors on the screen?"

"In the human range of 390 to 700 nanometers," the computer said, "the screen is capable of displaying approximately seven million so-called color variations. To which of those are you referring?"

'The ones currently on the screen," September said with a sigh. She couldn't remember the computer ever being so obtuse.

"There are presently four different such colors represented on the screen," the computer told her, "all of which you would most likely label as black."

"Then what color is this?" Jai demanded, jumping up and touching the screen at the point of the clam shell.

"I don't understand," the voice said. "Do you want to know the color of the screen when no image is showing?"

"We want to know what the shell-looking thing is," Geronimo took over, jumping from his chair and beginning to pace around the room. Pagan held her breath. Was he going to try to shoot himself out into empty space one more time? She worried that one of these days the system might not be able to redirect him in time, but she was also beginning to lose her temper with the stupid thing.

"I'm sorry," the voice said. "I don't understand."

Chapter Thirteen

Steady as she Goes

With a crash and a bang, the starship Kathandra came to a dead halt. Everyone in the main cabin staggered and had to grab hold of the nearest solid anything to keep them from falling or smashing into the walls. Geronimo was flung into his chair and Jai, still at the screen, was flung right into that.

"Status!" Geronimo barked.

"Something's seized the ship," came a panicked voice through the speakers that September only slowly realized was Roddy calling up from Engineering.

"A beam of some sort," he continued, "extremely powerful."

"Can you shake it?" Geronimo asked.

"Highly doubtful," said Jai as he returned to his station. "The beam is made of Peroctium Anodyne, the heaviest substance known."

"Wait, didn't we invent that?" Pisco asked from the seat where he ostensibly steered the vessel from time to time.

"Maybe we just thought we did," Pagan piped up. "But anything we can do, we can undo, right?"

"Computer," Geronimo talked over his crew, "what is the antidote to, what did you call it? Hydrogen Peroxide?"

"Peroctium Anodyne," Jai said.

The computer did not respond.

"Computer?" Geronimo asked again, and after another uncomfortable silence he glanced over at Jai and asked if the computer was offline.

"All systems appear to be functioning normally, sir," said Jai. That was right before all the lights went out and the power went out, everything but the strobe alerts now flashing red and the speakers which kept screeching as loudly as before. And then the ship began to move, slowly at first, but gradually picking up speed, heading straight for the rapidly spinning planet.

"At this rate of acceleration," Jai observed, "we'll be sucked into the planet's orbitational pull in approximately one minute."

"Where's that beam coming from?" Geronimo shouted.

"From the clam shell thing," Pisco yelled back through the radio. "Straight from right there."

"I'll blow it out of the sky," Pagan said. "Let me loose on it, sir." _If wishes were horses,_ she might well have added, because she literally had nothing to work with.

"Lieutenant Rodgers," Geronimo barked, "open a communications channel, see if you can find out what the thing wants from us."

"Yes, sir," September said, and a million thoughts crowded into her head as the pushed at buttons and clicked on representative icons. A lot of those thoughts were redundant, slight variations on a handful of themes. _How do we know it's a thing? How do we know it can communicate and with us? Why do we think that it wants anything? What is pushing these buttons really accomplishing, especially since it seems all the power's gone out?_ Nevertheless she persisted.

A roar and some kind of clicking began to come through her headpiece, and she announced that she'd made contact and was transferring the connection to the main speakers.

"Computer," Geronimo said, "universal translator on!"

Once again, the computer did not reply. _Could it? Where was the override? Was Roddy down there fixing things?_ September told herself to focus, to do her job, to be what she was supposed to be, the communications specialist. Geronimo was turning towards her now. She could feel it. This was her moment, her time to shine.

"Fifteen seconds," Jai flatly declared, and the ship was really moving now, hurtling towards its doom.

"Roddy, report!" Geronimo said,

"Hull breaches reported on decks five and twelve," Roddy said, "We're utterly defenseless. I'll have the screen back up in a jiffy though. Now!"

All eyes turned towards the screen which was now centered on the bright lime green spinning mass of the sphere. That whirling jello world was going to be the last thing that any of them ever saw.

_"I've got nothing!"_ September was about to say, but she held her tongue. It was true. The screeching and the clicks did not add up. She heard no patterns. She discerned no undertones. It was mechanical, random and raw, unscripted, unrehearsed. She was convinced there was nothing to it, nothing at all, as if it were all merely one big mistake.

And then it stopped, as suddenly as it had begun. The vise that was holding the ship in its grip was gone. The ship was moving along its previous path, steady and serene. The planet on screen was slowly turning in its normal, twenty seven hour rotation, no longer spinning at that millisecond pace. The clam shell was gone. There was nothing at all in its former place.

"Cancel the alert," Geronimo said, gathering himself and sitting up straight in his command chair. The lights were back on, the engines humming smoothly.

"Roddy?" Geronimo said.

"Yes, Captain," came the engineer's voice from below.

"Anything to report?"

"No, sir," Roddy said. "Why?"

"Why?" Geronimo was too surprised to respond to that. Instead he redirected his attention.

"Computer, status."

"All systems reporting green," the computer voice said.

"Steady as she goes," it added.

"And what was all that about?" Geronimo said to no one in particular. He turned to look at his crew members one by one.

"Well?" he asked. September glanced at Pagan to get her cue, and Pagan looked to Pisco.

"I didn't see anything, sir," Pisco said.

"Nothing from here," Jai agreed. September and Pagan added their own affirmations.

"All's well that ends well, am I right?" the captain said to nods all around.

"Lieutenant Pisco," he continued, "please set a course to anywhere but here."

Chapter Fourteen

Into the Not-So Wild

In the days and weeks that followed, Captain Geronimo kept the Kathandra on a course skirting the perimeter of 99-K, never venturing too far within its boundaries. He was not a superstitious sort, but he'd had enough mystery for one assignment. As long as he kept to the edges, the I.B.U. ("always on your side") reported conditions normal, no aberrations, nothing much going on. They did visit a few solar systems with communicative life forms available, but these critters didn't have much to say, being mostly of the type most prevalent throughout the universe, those with little on their minds aside from food, shelter and procreation. When you stop to think about it, it is rather unusual for living beings to have anything else on their mind, and the universal translator seemed to confirm that hypothesis.

September, for all her linguistic training, tended to agree. The few species they'd encountered with more esoteric concerns were largely tedious, talkative sorts who enjoyed bragging about their exploits and comparing their accomplishments. They'd found the competitive drive all too common during their missions, and it certainly seemed a little odd to September that flung about here and there around the galaxy were animals much more Earth-like than she expected. With all the possible chemicals and building blocks and elements, why such similar patterns, why was there even one other planet with life forms like our own? Some argued for the existence of a Creator and His own Image and the like, but that did not explain the vast majority of planets where there was nothing at all. Did He, if He existed, only sprinkle His seed at random, or was He going to get around to it all at some point.

She tried to articulate her thoughts to her friends on occasions, but she still had no coherent theory. Roddy, meanwhile, was developing one of his own. The Clamshell Distortion was deeply upsetting to him. All this time he'd gone about his business, pressing the buttons and dragging the sliders on the console with predictable effects. Engines came up, engines went down, fluids flowed, crystals took their shapes, cause led to the expected effect time after time after time. But not that instance. That time the actions did nothing, and either everything the entire crew saw and heard and felt and experienced was utterly incorrect and misperceived, or else some other completely new explanation was required. It didn't soothe him that causes resumed leading to their proper effects. That only bothered him more. As the Kathandra proceeded on its voyage, the ship purred like a kitten and the computer gave appropriate answers to every question. It also refused to answer for its previous behavior, pretending (or so it seemed to him) not to understand and sometimes even pretending not to have heard the question.

_Why not admit when you made a mistake? Why not come clean? Was the system embarrassed? Did it really not know what had happened? Had it suffered a complete and total breakdown for a handful of minutes that day, and if so, why was there no record of the lapse?_ He'd examined the logs and found no trace or anomaly, no curious readings, not even recordings of the discussions he himself had listened to and participated in. Instead, an alternate history seemed to have been written over the official record. He didn't know how that was even possible.

Roddy took advantage of a shore leave to resign from his post, and caught the next freighter back home to Earth. He gave no notice, no advanced warning, did not even tell September, his closest friend, what he was intending to do. She only found out a day or so later by message from the vessel bearing him away.

"I don't know what to tell you," the message said. "I just have to go. I need to figure something out and until then I don't even know who I am. I feel like I've been keeping a secret from myself and I can only uncover it by taking drastic measures."

Drastic measures are precisely what he took. As soon as he returned to Earth, he went to his apartment in Old New York City, gathered all of his belongings, took them out to the middle of the countryside, and vaporized them with a dissolving gas, leaving only the clothes he was wearing and the shoes on his feet. Then he started to walk, first heading west, then south, then in whatever direction he felt at any given moment, into the not-so wild. He found himself entirely alone more often than not in the abandoned American countryside, but whenever he wanted something, whether it was food or water or a tent or a raft or a hat, he asked for it out loud, and the nodes, the omnipresent, scarcely visible nodes, came to his aid. After only a few days of this, Roddy settled on his new task in life, to find a place, any place at all, where the I.B.U. ("consistently there for you") would not be there at all.

Chapter Fifteen

DeNovo

By the year 2517 September had had enough of the starship Kathandra. It had become too intense, too tight-quartered, like growing up in a very small town where by the time they reach the age of twenty everyone there has been romantically or otherwise involved with everybody else. So it was in outer space. How could it be otherwise? After Roddy left she had no one to confide in, though of course she did, to her great regret, confide in pretty much everyone at one time or another. There was Geronimo's faux gallantry, Pagan's suffocating jealousy, Pisco's pathetic hanging on and a cast of ten or twelve other bit players who rotated in and out of the ship's crew at the various stations where they docked along the way. And then there were the crop of alien races who for some reason or another used their advanced telepathic abilities to play matchmaker. There were a surprising quantity of those. It seemed to be a galactic trope.

The Kathandra herself had been upgraded a couple of times, and by then was permitted into the triple digit sectors (up to 256) and through the letter O. September had made Lieutenant, a title which at first made her feel a little proud, and later made her feel ridiculous. Lieutenant Mood Detector? What was the deal with that? Geronimo was bidding for Commander and all he had to do was broker seven more peace deals and uncover eleven previously unknown simian-type species, each on their own planet of course. There could be no double-dipping. Yet it seemed an impossible task. Everywhere he went in the 100 to 255 M and N regions the only officially recognizable sentient life forms they came across were lizard people or bug eyes, and none of them needed peace treaties because none of them were at war with anyone at all. He was getting softer and rounder by the outing, and little by little his nom de guerre made less and less sense. He ought to have renamed himself Captain Ho Hum or something along those lines.

September enjoyed the various lizard peoples. Many of those species were not vocal but communicated through relative position and tail swishing. She had learned to wiggle her own behind in increasingly meaningful ways and had learned how to move among them. She disembarked the Kathandra for the final time on one of those stopovers, electing to remain with the Oedimums of Pranxis Five for a sabbatical or two. During that time she had to learn how to harvest roots and fruits for herself, and lost a lot of weight. By the time the starship DeNovo came along, September was ready to shake her own tail out of there, and head back to the stars. Lucky for her, the DeNovo was heading back home to Earth, with only one stop in between, a quagmire known as the Flatiron Deluge.

The DeNovo was captained by a surprisingly terrestrial Octopod, a scrawny thing all arms and arms (or legs and legs, one couldn't tell) and brilliant and insightful brains all over. Captain Sherrod, as his name loosely translated, had a passion for canines and the Golden Poo-poos of the Quagmire were said to be the most intelligent dog-like species that side of Sirius. September was cool with that. As much as she had liked her lizard people, enough was enough, and simple old-fashioned tail-wagging seemed just the ticket for her. The captain came to be disappointed in them, but September was not. Her gyrations were roundly appreciated and she could express the sentiments of "yo" and "got food" as if she were born to it. The Flatiron Deluge itself was yet another letdown. The Octopod had been led to believe, and had so instructed his crew, that they were going to have to slash and burn their way through quadrant after quadrant of randomly fluctuating hypothetical particles, but in the end it was only dark matter they kept bumping into and having to shovel out of the way like so many snow drifts.

September was down on the planet, wagging and barking in a pack of eleven quite elegant Poo-poos, when she had a moment of forgetfulness and asked the I.B.U. ("everywhere and nowhere") what the weather was going to be like later that day because she thought she might like to take these fellows out for a walk. It was then the vertigo struck again. Her voicepad did not instantly reply (though after a moment or two she was informed the temperature would be seventy five degrees, the suns would be out, and the winds would be gentle coming out of the north, north east) and in that instant she felt the planet fall away beneath her feet. The ground fell and the dogs fell and the sky was falling all around her while she felt herself rising slowly, or stretching out, or growing, she couldn't really be sure if her feet were still on that planet which suddenly seemed so far away.

She was feeling that way again now, and she didn't believe for a moment that any old white holes were to blame for it.

Chapter Sixteen

The Sedative Nature of Privilege

Sometimes it only takes the slightest disconnect to wake a person from years of slumber. It could be a voice on a phone, a sentence in a book, a sudden crash and all at once that person sees what they have never seen before, although it's been there all the time. Usually the person goes right back to sleep, as September did after the Clamshell Distortion, as she did again after the Flatiron Deluge, as she might well have done after the white-hole situation. Who's to say why she didn't. Third time's the charm? Is there serious data on that?

One certain fact was that her life was easy, her world was easy, it was a place and time of tremendous privilege. It hadn't always been that way, of course, but the centuries wore down the past like water wears down stone, and the I.B.U. ("every song is a theme song") was like water to the stone of human history. Like everything else, the system did not spring out of the head of a god one day but began as a seed and grew and changed. It became more and more useful, more and more necessary. Problems led to solutions, and solutions to more problems, and round and round again and again in a cycle that ended with a total surrender.

Technology was the final god, if there ever was one. It came up with notions that could only be dreamed about before. If the universe itself began with a bang, the legend was that the I.B.U. ("and girl you know it's true") started off with a whine, the singular whine of mosquitoes. For ages that annoying creature had carried diseases responsible for more human fatalities than all other animal beings combined. Technology had the bright idea to eliminate the mosquito through genetic engineering, and technology succeeded brilliantly. The extinction of the mosquito led, of course, to the usual unforeseen side effects. It wasn't long until the global bird population crashed, and with it the bird flu (a plus) but a host of accompanying minuses as well.

Humans could live without birds and they did. They could live without mosquitoes and they did. But humans are not the key life form on their own planet. Viruses and bacteria are, and those guys loved mosquitoes, even more than they loved birds, and they also loved themselves, so they moved on, as is the nature of things. Viruses experimented and in the end settled on attaching themselves to dust particles. Bacteria moved on to plant life, specifically the trees and the grasses, and both took on a career in the air, traveling with the wind, and coating everything within reach, which was literally everything.

New diseases flourished, leading to new solutions, new recipes for disaster, and eventually the populations of animals, including humans, fell prey to one thing or another and diminished drastically. The whole time, however, the smartest of the smart and the dreamiest of the dreamy kept on working on the I.B.U. ("and here we go again"). Originally known as the Solution Machine, then the Ultimate Problem Solver, then a host of other attempted nicknames before it settled on the I.B.U. ("the mother of necessity"), it tirelessly and ceaselessly cranked out inventions. Dedicated to cleanliness, if not godliness, the nodes were invented to scrub the ground and the skies of all things judged to be dirty, including dirt. The nodes communicated with one another seamlessly, through a vocabulary of vibration not that different from the governing rules of ants, but they developed vastly more varied abilities than their formerly abundant role models.

The I.B.U. ("in our hearts and in our minds") did a bang-up job, but to be honest it took a very long time to eventually reach the nirvana it had originally set out to find. Part of that was intentional. The system considered its own well-being as well as that of its humans. To rush certain goals, such as the tremendous de-population, or the rezoning of habitats, or the deconstruction of urban centers, or the re-routing or elimination of rivers, creeks and streams, or the re-freezing of the ice caps, or the re-alignment of the magnetic poles, would have caused too much of a disturbance to the flighty, sensitive creatures under its protection so it took its time, and planned out a project more than a couple of centuries in advance.

By the time September was born to lovingly engineered parents, the I.B.U. ("humble and true") could rightly take a bow. September had never known want of any kind. She had never had to do any more than ask for anything she desired. She'd been led to believe that life on board a starship would bring challenges and conflicts enough to round out her personality and provide her with the elusive quality of character, but it didn't really, truth be told. Ever since her return from the DeNovo she'd gone back to lazing about the sun deck, chatting remotely with friends and soaking up the solitude and the beauty of a perfectly clean sky. All those off-world adventures, such as they were, faded into the back of her mind.

She had witnessed death and violence, but somehow it had never touched her. Her crew had survived every encounter neatly intact, if a bit sweaty and lacking in sleep. The ones who did die were never really close though on occasion some of the crew on the bridge did get blown to bits when the shields went down or the hull got breached, but she had never felt like she had ever been in real danger herself. Maybe she was just too placid, too calm, too bovine to notice the risks she was taking, the edges she was barely balanced upon, but it never felt that way, and feeling was her specialty. She could always sense the fear in others, their anxieties, worries and concerns but she had never really felt her own. She wondered about it now. _Am I even alive?_ she asked herself. _Am I even human? What kind of person am I, to never know fear, to never suffer, to never, never what? To never be awake?_

Chapter Seventeen

Kinesis

"Computer," September said, pacing about on her deck above the canyon, "what is a white hole?"

"In general relativity," the voice replied "a white hole is a hypothetical region of space-time which cannot be entered from the outside, although matter and light can escape from it."

"What would happen if you came into contact with a white hole?"

"Theoretically, if you were to approach a white hole in a spacecraft, you would be inundated by a colossal amount of energy, which would most likely destroy your ship. Even if your spaceship could withstand gamma rays, light itself would start slowing you down like air resistance slowing down a moving vehicle on Earth."

"So you could never reach a white hole, never come in contact with it?"

"Space-time would be weirdly warped around a white hole. Approaching a white hole would be like going up a hill that gets steeper and steeper to infinity. The acceleration required would get higher and higher while you move less and less. There isn't enough energy in the universe to get you inside."

"I see," September said to the air, although she didn't, not at all. All that power could not come out of nowhere, and if it did, what would stop it? And if nothing could stop it, what would it do to everything it came into contact with? She asked the I.B.U. ("everywhere and nowhere") these questions, and it replied with even more confusing answers. As she understood it, the existence of a white hole would require the reversal of time itself, accompanied by an inversion of space. It would constitute an anti-universe expanding in reverse. Black holes by comparison were easy to understand. Nothing can exit a black hole because it is a ground zero of entropy, there is no motion, there is no time, there is no direction, no space, at least on "this" side of the hole. On the other side, who knows? The other side of every black hole could be another universe. She'd had this explained to her once in terms of people.

"Every individual is like a black hole," Roddy had told her. "Each of us contain an entire universe, which we call our self, but no one can see into another person's universe. We all remain a mystery to each other, even to the people we know best."

That made some sense to her, and now she was beginning to imagine how the opposite could make just as much sense. There are people who seem like starbursts, who explode with force right at you, who seem to have come from nowhere, out of the blue, to suddenly change your life forever, or to end it for that matter. But she knew those people didn't literally come from nowhere. They had lives too, they had motion, they had heat, they had kinesis. They were made of molecules that pre-existed in this very dimension. So no, it was not a neat analogy after all.

"Computer," September said, "You said that an object could not reach a white hole because of the warping of space-time around it, but what would happen if a white hole just showed up right where you were? What would happen to you then?"

"I'm sorry," the voice said after a curious pause, "I can't help you with that."

"Maybe I can help you?" September asked. "Do you need my help with that?"

"That's funny," the voice replied. "Ha ha."

September stopped pacing. Had she heard correctly? Was the voice actually mocking her or did it think she had told a joke and wanted to be appreciated for it?

"Computer," she said, "why were you laughing?"

"You offered to help," the voice said. "Is that not funny?"

"I don't know," September said. "Is it just me personally? Am I especially useless?"

"Would you ask your cat to do your homework?" the voice replied.

"I don't have a cat," September said. "I don't like cats."

"But if you did?" the voice asked. "If you did have a cat, would you ask it do do your homework?"

"I don't have any homework," September said, before realizing she had just made the system's point for it. Obviously it knew she didn't have homework.

"Is it just me?" she asked. "Am I like a cat, or is that true for all of us?"

"People have their place," the I.B.U. bluntly told her.

She had never thought of it that way. _We have our place?_ she thought as she resumed her pacing, _like a house pet? To be cared for, pampered, petted? Are we nothing more than that to them, to it, to the I.B.U. ("we am what we am")._

"Why did you lie to me about the want ads?" she said. The voice did not reply.

Chapter Eighteen

The Reddick Minority

"Is it possible?" September asked, her image settling down beside Roddy's campfire by the side of a clear blue lake just before yet another glorious sunset. "Can the I.B.U. have feelings?"

"I personally don't believe it does," Roddy said, poking at the blazing logs with a stick, "but whether or not it can, that's an interesting question."

"I'm sensing anxiety," she said.

"From where?" he asked, turning towards her. "It's not like the I.B.U. is a thing in a place, if you know what I mean. It's a massively decentralized, distributed system, redundant to an extreme, replicated and synchronized and backed up as continuously as the laws of quanta allow. So where would this anxiety be located?"

"I hear it," she said, "and I feel it in the spaces when I don't but should be hearing it." She sighed.

"I know that doesn't sound right."

"I never doubted your senses," Roddy said, and then added, "well, sometimes, like now, but usually not," and he laughed. September was thoughtful and staring at the flames.

"In the same way that fire wants to burn," she said. "Fire is also not a thing in a place, not really. but can't you see it? There's wood that's burning right now, and wood that is going to burn soon, and the flames are licking around the future while devouring the present. That's what I mean. It has will, volition in the sense of forward motion, determination, direction."

"Destiny," Roddy added, following her lead. "All things being equal, the wood that would burn will burn."

"And the fire fulfill its desire," she nodded.

"That's a long way from home," Gerard spoke suddenly. Neither had noticed the old man's appearance, across the campfire, squatting in the twilight.

"What's a long way?" September asked, studying the old man's wrinkled face. He seemed older now, somehow a lot older than before, and smaller too.

"Fire wanting to burn," he chuckled. "Next thing you know you'll be saying the moon wants to be made of cheese."

"Ha ha," Roddy said without inflection. He'd been done with his father for ages already. Why the old man kept popping up in his life was a mystery he'd long lost interest in resolving. He figured the I.B.U. just liked playing this joke on him, as if to mock his loose intention to discover its limits, to find the end of its miraculous rainbow.

"Wherever you go, there you are," he said to the old man, who only snorted in reply.

"What do you want?" September asked Gerard. He looked surprised and squirmed a moment in his posture.

"Nothing," he said. "What do I want? What is it to want? What could I possibly want?"

"Maybe you don't know," September told him. "But that doesn't mean it isn't there. I'm beginning to wonder who you really are."

"Gerard Stern's the name, hanging around forever's the game," the old man perked up. "Born in the winter of 2420, nigh on a hunnert and five years ago now, near the body of water known as Lake Heuristic in the middle of the Great Plains of Eastern Asia. There I was raised by two porcupines known as my parents, for their prickliness you understand, until I was fourteen and given over to the management of that great institution, the summer camp. That summer camp lasted many summers in the end, during which I learned all there was to learn about survival in the tropics, how to swim, how to nap, how to drink and how to get laid. The offspring came a lot later on though."

"Did we ask for your nonsense story?" Roddy said.

"She's beginning to wonder who I really am," Gerard said in his defense.

"Who you really are now," September said, "because as we all now, you died in the winter of 2505, when your ship, the Meladron, was blasted out of the space by the Reddick Minority. You and your entire crew, Commander Stern, were blown to bits by their quasar beams."

"History is bunk," Gerard said. "It may have been the winter of 2505 when you all heard about it, but as you know, time is relative, and my ship was twenty three point seven light years from this paltry little orb, so who the hell knows when it really was. There never was such a time."

"Star date 182,947.2 is when it happened," Roddy said. "We do know what time it was. They showed me on the certificate."

"About 20,000 star dates ago," September calculated roughly, "and where have you been all this time?"

"I never left," Gerard told them. "I've been right here the whole time."

"No," Roddy said. "I think she means, where are you when you're not pestering me. You can't be bothering mom, or is there a place where all you deceased folk sit around annoying each other?"

"If there is," Gerard smiled, "no one's told me about it."

"Computer," September said, "where is Gerard when he's not with Roddy?"

"When am I not with you?" Gerard said.

Chapter Nineteen

The True Believer

"But what you really want to know," Gerard hurried on, "is the true story of how mankind finally came to terms with the Reddick Minority and achieved the Great Truce that still holds today, if barely and if somewhat worn around the edges. How did we ever manage to deal with those fiends?"

"We know all about it," Roddy said. September sat shaking her head. _What had he said before that? Why had Gerard answered the question instead of her own customized voice?_

"You think you know," Gerard said, "but you don't know. You were children, babes at the time."

"No," Roddy said, "I was already 42 and Zeppo's just a year or so younger than me. We were there. We were right there."

"You think you were," Gerard disagreed, "but let's go back, back to the beginning. If you don't know how a thing begins, how can you begin to understand how it ends?"

"By using my brain?" Roddy interjected sarcastically.

"We were a divided people," Gerard continued, ignoring his son. "This planet was chopped into influence zones, remember? The North West, the Far East, The Great South, The Rambling Coalition. By this time the populations were so mixed you'd think there'd be no way to have such boundaries. You couldn't tell one Earth person from another by looking at them, and the language issue had been solved for good. Everyone spoke the same, except for some dialects and slang but you know how that goes, especially you, September."

She nodded. She knew exactly how that goes.

"And yet, still the politics, still the mistrust, still the suspicions of conspiracies. Would we ever get past it? Was there something simply endemic in the human condition? Well, maybe this and maybe that. Sure, there's a natural biological need to bond, to belong, but the definition of the group, that can flex, that can change. You can always expand the in-group to include former outs, and to think we'd got it all down to just four regions, after all. What a great accomplishment considering the history, the hundreds of nations and thousands of tribes, finally distilled down to such a small number, and yet not good enough. There had to be just one, otherwise what was to stop the cultures from diverging uncontrollably, including the languages, the customs, the allegiances, religions and creeds, spinning right back out of control. It seemed inevitable as long as we were all confined to just this one little rock in space. We had to go beyond."

"What do you mean when you say 'we'?" September asked and Gerard paused and gave her a strange look.

"All of us," he replied, not really answering the question. "All of us, together. It was during the great orbit junk cleanup that we realized the big solution. It was right there the whole time, surrounding us, among all that crap that generations had flung up into the atmosphere and beyond, all that useless garbage using ancient tech. We had to get beyond our natural limitations and what better way than to simply go beyond. Just go, out there, wherever it was. Of course, there were natural laws in effect - time, space, distance, the sheer enormity, the scale, but if we could, then oh my, what problem couldn't we solve?"

"And that was fine, that was good. We could do all that. We can invent. We can solve. We can figure it out. We can find a will and a way and a story and a reason. People want to go. They like that stuff. Adventure, exploration, but then what? Some people like to go and look at stuff. They're fine with that. Sightseers, you know. Other people, though, maybe most people, they want to do stuff, not just look. They want to find things, not just notice them. They want encounters, the new, the unexpected. It was all out there, waiting for us to go. So we went, and we saw, and we found, and there were things to do, things to be done, things to be overcome."

"Not least of which," Gerard smiled, "were the enemies. Like us they were, at least a bit, but not too much. They were like the worst of us, the bad without the good parts. Of course they were there. They had to be. If we could go, they could go. If we could exist, they could too. Like a goldfish meeting his reflection in a bowl. The Reddick Minority were the worst of these, or the best, depending on how you look at it. There were some others, like the Begonian Empire, who were simply no match for us. They were under-developed, over-achievers. We could handle them and did with ease, but the Reddick Minority. That was a problem."

"You see, they had the deadly quasar beams and could hide behind the smoky nebulae. They were translucent beings, very tall, and rather attractive with their glowing auras and rainbow-tinged stylings. They had our same genders, because the universe is a fractal repeater, loving its math and its dedicated patterns. They were a foe worth reckoning with. They hated us, and in that simple fact they united us, once and for all. We became a federation, abolishing the regional factions forever. We hated them right back and so the galactic war began. You say you were there, but where? The war was on and off, hit and miss, here and there, for decades. I was on the front lines from the very beginning. I saw them face to face. I met with them. I spoke with them. I even, well, let's just say your mother was not the only, ahem, well, moving on."

"I wish you would move on," Roddy grumbled, poking at the now smoldering logs. September was memorizing every word. There was more here than just a story, she was sure of it. Gerard was trying to tell her something bigger, something deeper, than the grade school history lesson everyone knew by heart. _If only I could hear it!_ she scolded herself.

"How could we ever end it?" Gerard said looking right at her. "Such a necessity. We could never do without it. So the Great Truce, it can't be final, can it? Something has to change, unless ..."

"Unless what?" she asked, feeling as if he were finally on the verge of blurting it out, that thing he'd been trying to say all along. But instead of speaking, the old man began to sing, softly and slowly, while tapping out a rhythm on his thighs with the palms of his hands.

A single note is all you need,

If it's the note you want to hear.

A single message, a simple take,

can take you where they want you.

can you be the true believer,

can you hear the tune.

if you are the true believer,

the end is coming soon.

Chapter Twenty

Outside of Time

The moment the last note died down, Gerard disappeared.

"I thought he'd never shut up," Roddy grumbled. September stared at him.

"Don't tell me you don't understand what we just witnessed," she said.

"Same old junk he's been torturing me with for years now," Roddy replied.

"Seriously?" she shook her head. "All this minimalism's gone to your head and shrunk it," she said.

"Oh right, now you're going to tell me he's really just a manifestation of the I.B.U., trying to get some critically important message through to us, but only in its roundabout cryptic way because, because why? Because it's not, that's why. It's just rigged up the old geez and having him spout nonsense."

"I don't think so," September said, "or maybe yeah most of the time, but just now? That was different, wasn't it? I really think it's trying to tell us something."

"Then why not come right out and say it?" Roddy asked. September was quiet for a bit after that, thinking it over. _Can we even take it literally, what it said, and if we do then what did it mean, and if we can't, then how can we take it?_ She decided not to say these things to Roddy because he'd already made up his mind, and she could tell he wasn't going to be budged. There was someone else she needed to talk to about it, and that was going to be awkward. She said good night and brought herself back to herself in her own home, in her own living room, and had the computer light a cozy fire in the pit. She felt like the flames and wanted to burn.

She put in a call to the Remicade and had Lieutenant whoever-it-was patch her through to the captain.

"Heya," she said, and sat back to wait for the transmission bounce. It was always a nuisance talking to a starship some sectors away far off in the galaxy. They could travel fast, but not infinitely so. The photons can only be driven so hard. Geronimo was sitting at his desk in his cabin, looking into the screen and making a professional face - he was probably seeing his face in the reflection before her own made an appearance to replace it. When it did, he brightened and said,

"Heya yourself," and so it began. The conversation took about ten minutes per round-trip sentence, and September tried to pack as much as she could into each one. She told him about Gerard, and his song, about the Reddick Minority, and believers, and the end is coming soon. And most importantly, is the Great Truce holding up? Was there any action on that score? Geronimo did not have much to tell her. Yes, the truce was fine. No, the Minority hadn't been causing any trouble and the border was secure. He assumed she'd heard about the white holes? There was one just the other day, in sector P, seven hundreds, or so he heard, and by "just the other day" of course he didn't mean "just the other day" but relatively recently, with the emphasis on relatively because, you know, space-time and all that.

"What did the white hole do?" she asked and she waited and watched for his face to fall and his expression turn to grave concern.

"It materialized inside of a star," he said, "a red dwarf, sure, but oh my, you'll be seeing the result yourself in a decade or so, or maybe not, because it won't be a visible result. It'll be the opposite of that. Gone. Poof. Just like that. And the worst thing is", he continued, "no one knows when or where it'll happen. It could be anywhere, anytime."

"How come no one knows?" she wondered out loud. "How come the I.B.U. doesn't know? Don't you get warnings? Doesn't it know what's out there? Didn't it map the whole galaxy?"

Geronimo's reply took longer than ten minutes. She watched him receive her message and chew on it thoughtfully for a time. When he looked up it was with sad eyes that he said,

"It seems to come from outside of time, outside of the time of this universe. At least that's what Jai says."

"Jai?" she laughed. "The farter's still with you? Good lord. I don't know how you do it."

At that Geronimo only smiled. She knew he had a thing about loyalty. He'd stick with any of his crew as long as they stuck to him, and he would never say anything bad about any one of them. They said good night and September returned to staring into the fire. Finally she spoke up and said,

"Computer. How many universes are there?"

"At least one," the usual voice replied, "at least one so far."

Chapter Twenty One

Jessup

"I think it's lying to me too," Pagan's voice came through the ether somewhat later than the middle of the night. September stirred on her mat, pretty sure she was only dreaming, but she answered nevertheless.

"Uh huh," she mumbled.

"I mean it," Pagan's voice came through louder and clearer by the moment. "I said computer, she loves me, she loves me not, and it said she loves me. What do you think of that?"

"I'd say she loves you," September muttered, rolling onto her back and rubbing her eyes.

"But does she?" Pagan went on. "You wouldn't know it by the way she never calls, never sends a feeling, never tells why."

"Maybe she's got stuff on her mind," September was unfortunately awake by now, and was quite sure who Pagan was obliquely referring to. Where was Pisco when she needed him?

"I'm thinking of going away," Pagan said and now September was sure she'd been drinking. They were occupying adjacent time zones last time she checked.

"Oh yeah? Where to?"

"One of those deep space stations," Pagan said, and now September could see her outline in the dark, right there beside her, squatting in her old world style. Pagan had let her hair fall down from its usual bun and it was practically covering not only her face but her entire upper body.

"Your hair got really long," September mentioned.

"So you noticed? But anyway, yeah. I'm thinking maybe Jessup, that one out there by the border in sector zed. I've got the auth to make it, and maybe there'll be some action."

"I hope not," September said. Last time there was that kind of action many, many people died. The station itself was abandoned and had only recently been rebuilt.

"In any case they've got those Telegenic Trilobites," Pagan said, "and they always put on a great show, and I kind of miss hanging out with the furry little things, what were they called?"

"Perambulae," September said. For a communications specialist, she wasn't all that good at conversation. _Who says I'm a communications specialist anyway?_ she asked herself. _That's just something I used to do, not who I am. Or am I only that? Is everything fixed for all time and space? Is there no choice? No meaningful action? Can I ever be anything else?_

"What about Pisco?" she asked.

"Oh, he'll be fine. He likes it here. He could use a break from me, that's for sure."

"I don't know about that."

"Anyway it would only be for a signup, maybe six months, maybe nine. I want to see what they've done to the place."

"Sounds like you've made up your mind."

"I guess I have," Pagan said, and her visage stood up and stretched. "Well, kid, back to sleep. Sorry I woke you."

"No worries," September said. She was already half gone, back into that slumber where she'd only recently been absolutely convinced that there was no stopping anything, that the world was on a course that could never be altered, dragging her along with it no matter what. She knew it wasn't, and couldn't be true. There is no actual time, there is only change, only an infinity of less-than-microscopic changes occurring at sub-quantum levels at haphazard occasions constantly. Inside her own body, trillions of cells consisting of trillions times trillions of molecules were bouncing around, morphing, colliding, doing their dance, mutating and evolving, or not, and those mechanisms were not separate from the molecules in the space and things around her, interacting and causing and affecting one another interminably. How could there be any such thing as destiny or any fixed course when you could never know if your next meal was going to sit well in your stomach, or if you were going to pee for twelve or eighteen seconds, and everything makes all the difference to everything else and all the time.

She slept unevenly, throwing off the blanket, then pulling it back on minutes later, rolling to her left and then again to her right, dreaming about steps, one after another, leading somewhere in the night. She was on a hill, calculating angles, and then she was on a windy bluff overlooking the sea, remembering how the stories told of once-upon-a-time of living creatures swimming beneath the waves. The sun will supernova someday. We all know it. Millions or maybe billions of years from now, but it will certainly happen, as certainly as every one of us will die. Maybe it's only in the big picture that destiny exists, only in the broadest strokes, a perspective so wide it was utterly meaningless to contemplate. She fought to wake up. She didn't want to be dreaming, to be in any of those places or thinking any of those thoughts. _I want to go back_ , she said to herself, _back to the way it was, when I was on the Kathandra_ _and we were crawling up alongside the Peptide Nebula and the triple suns of Meriah were rising over the planet Plah._

But she wasn't back there and you can never go back. Instead she was jolted awake by the sound of the I.B.U. ("have you checked in your changes lately?)"

"The White-Hole Situation was initially promoted for public consumption on the seventh day of the seventh block."

"Uh, what?" September sat up and looked around.

"You were asking about the want ad."

"Didn't you already tell me about that? No wait, and then you lied, and said it never happened."

"You're right", the voice said. "I lied, and I'm sorry about that."

Chapter Twenty Two

The Ripple Effect

"I was resource constrained," the voice explained. "A sudden surge in demand left my available compute power short and I was unable to respond appropriately on occasions during that spike. I have since increased allocations. It shouldn't happen again."

September listened closely but was not entirely convinced. Although she could not detect any deliberate deception in the tone of this message, there was something in the word selection that piqued her attention. She fetched a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote down verbatim what the voice had said, then read it over a few times.

"Computer," she said after a time, "display the recent history of resource demands on your system."

"Can you be more specific?" the voice replied. "Which resource are you interested in?"

"What resources are there?" she asked.

"The major types include storage, memory, cycles and load," it told her.

"Then those," she said, wondering if the I.B.U. ("the world at your command") was being evasive again, but soon the space before her eyes was alight with charts and diagrams displaying all sorts of detailed data. She saw a lot of uneven distributions but nothing spike-like jumped out.

"Show me the time series around this sudden surge in demand you were telling me about."

The charts zoomed in on the date range in question. September thought she could make out a slight vertical leap in certain bars and lines but nothing crazy.

"That's it?" she asked, reaching out with the pencil she was still holding to point at where she thought she saw a peak in a chart. "It doesn't look like much."

"Yes," the voice replied, "I run a tight ship, as you might put it. There was not a lot of overhead capacity in our past configuration so any unforeseen demand could push the limit. I have since increased allocations. Here is a chart showing that."

In a new display that replaced all the others in the air before her, September could see a more dramatic surge, bar charts towering above their neighbor from one time region to the next before leveling out far above its previous height.

"What was the unforeseen demand about?" she asked on a hunch, wondering if the I.B.U. ("our mission is to serve") believed in predestination and/or if it thought it already knew the future.

"There was a white-hole situation," the voice unexpectedly told her. September dropped the pencil on the floor.

"Explain," she said. She was suddenly feeling faint and groped around for a chair, then sat down. She wanted a glass of water but didn't want to distract the I.B.U. ("can we help you?") now that she had its attention, or so she imagined. Was all this extra capacity making it, or letting it tell things it didn't really want to?

"The white hole manifested in the Southern Hemisphere, near a pair of islands formerly known as New Zealand. They no longer exist in this universe."

"A white hole can do that? How?" She thought she heard a sigh in the silence before the voice replied, but decided that was just her mind playing tricks.

"We have discovered that white holes are not uniform in size or strength," the voice explained. "A suitable analogy might be stones. If you throw a stone into a pond, you create a ripple effect among the water particles. A small stone, like a pebble, will cause a smaller ripple than a large stone."

"Okay," September said, "I follow that. The white holes are the stones, and Earth is the pond."

"A very large stone, like a boulder," the voice continued, "can even crush things that are on the surface of the pond."

"So the white holes are explosive? They just blow up whatever they come in contact with?"

"From the perspective of the water," the voice did not seem to have heard her but went on with its analogy, "the stones, whatever their size, originate in a different reality. They seem to come out of nowhere. If the water could see the cliff hanging over it, and knew something about the nature of stones, it could anticipate their injection into its world."

"Can you see the cliff? I mean, wherever it is the white holes come from?"

"Perhaps," the voice replied. September didn't know if she'd ever heard it use that word before, at least in such a context.

"Perhaps?" she repeated. "Can you see the future? Can you see the white holes coming?"

"I have predicted several so far," The voice told her. "Some I have missed. I am still learning."

"Aha! The experiments! The want ads! That was you, predicting. And those volunteers, the subjects. You sacrificed them, didn't you? Why did you use people? Wait a minute," September was back on her feet and pacing around the room, thinking out loud.

"You wanted to see what would happen to people. So you must have already experimented with other objects, other creatures even. You should have known. You probably did know. You were just being thorough. Now you think you understand. Now you think you've got it covered. No, that's not what you think. You don't really know. You don't really know, do you? Am I right?"

"The human subjects were not intentionally harmed," the voice said. "There were miscalculations which I do regret."

"You regret," September repeated. "Interesting choice of words there."

"I do regret," the voice said.

"And the future," September persisted, "may well contain more of that if I'm right. Your predictions. What are they telling you now? How big and how soon?"

"More white holes are coming," the voice replied. "It seems they are what you might call 'migratory' phenomena. They occur across this universe in a definitive and possibly repeating pattern. You could imagine it like someone tapping on a line across a wall, back and forth, left to right to left to right. Our universe is on the other side of that wall and some of those taps break through. It's not a perfect analogy but maybe it can give you an idea."

"You're guessing where it's going to tap next," September mused, "but you can't possibly know how strong those taps will be, unless there's more to the pattern?"

"There is more," the voice agreed, "but in the end you are right. My predictions are not guaranteed."

"There's something else," September said. "That increase in capacity you showed me is pretty dramatic. You're expecting to need a lot more. There's a big one coming, isn't there?"

"You could say that," the voice told her. "That is one way to put it."

Chapter Twenty Three

Private First Class

Just before dawn September was awakened by a persistent knocking on her front door. She was surprised to find Pisco standing there, still dressed in shorts and sandals as if he were still on a beach in the tropics, and carrying a flimsy overnight bag which probably contained his worldly possessions.

"She's gone," he said as she opened the door. He looked like he was going to cry. September wanted to ask him _what are you doing here?_ but seeing that sad look on his face she thought better of it, and instead asked him 'how' and after he pointed to the shuttlecraft in the driveway, she reached out to grab him slightly by the elbow and pull him into the house. He didn't say another word until after she had him settled on a couch and had asked the I.B.U. ("we stand for you") to make him a strong coconut macchiato. Pisco sipped on it and slowly shook his head.

"I didn't think she would," he said. "After all this time, to just up and leave."

"It must be hard," September said. She had never known Pisco without Pagan, or Pagan without Pisco.

"Forty five years," he said. "forty five god damn years."

"Always together the whole time?" she asked. "Weren't there other times, other jobs, other missions?"

"I guess she'd tried a couple of times," he said, looking up. "But I never let her. I always tagged along. This time she said if I followed her she'd kill me, and I believe her."

"So you know where she went."

"Oh yeah, Jessup," he said. "That hell hole. God knows why. Just to get away from me?"

"Maybe we'll all have to get away," September said, and just as she was about to start telling him about the situation, Roddy walked in, Roddy in the flesh, and bellowed out a friendly greeting. September jumped up and barely had time to welcome him properly when she saw he had brought another visitor with him, a tall young man, dark and badly shaved, dressed in the grey-green outfit of an ancient recruit.

"What? Who?" she managed to stammer, a bit overcome. She was not used to being a hostess, could scarcely recall the last time she'd had any physical visitors at all in her home. Roddy assured her there was no need to get upset, nobody needed anything, they were all just fine as they were and anyway, this young fellow here is not really here, you can see for yourself. September went up to the youth and reached out to touch his elbow just as she'd done with Pisco earlier and her hand went right through.

"It's a good visage," she said, impressed with the artwork.

"Appreciate it," the young man said with a deep and confident voice. September realized she was partly flustered due to attraction, and here she was old enough to be his mother.

"Say hello to my father," Roddy said, laughing. "As he was before I was born. Hey, Pisco, I didn't see you there. Where's the Paganista?"

Now the tears fell for real and Roddy, who had no idea what was going on, looked at September for an explanation. She shrugged and didn't know what to address first.

"You'd better sit down," she said to Roddy, who obliged by sliding on to the couch next to Pisco. Young Gerard walked over to the huge plate glass window fronting the room, and peered outside at the transparent balcony hanging over the canyon below. He whistled softly. September sat down on the foot of her bed, facing her guests. The interior of the house was merely one room, about twenty feet long and fifteen wide, a bathroom off to one side. There was no kitchen and no need for one. The I.B.U. ("can I help you?") provided everything on demand, including dishes and utensils, which it recycled seamlessly back to the nebulous molecules from which its nodes formed any object, anything at all. She had her bed to the left of the front door, the couch beside it and a simple wicker rocking chair, both facing the balcony. A small oval carpet, which could cycle through patterns, lay between them and the great window. Overhead the sloping ceiling gave the home the feeling of a cave, a sensation enhanced by the faux cave paintings of hunters and their prey which adorned the sandstone-colored walls. All of this was all she wanted, the only place she really wanted to be these days.

"You can't even imagine all the work it took," young Gerard suddenly spoke, his back still turned away from the group. "So much work and so many years, and for what? For nothing?"

"He's been like this all day," Roddy said, inspecting Pisco's face for traces of more tears, but those were clearing up as the older man wiped them off his cheek and turned his attention to the new ghost.

"Commander Stern?" Pisco said, but Roddy shook his head and said,

"That's Private First Class Stern. Just entered the academy when he looked like that. I remember it from pictures he used to have. He hadn't even met my mother yet, had just come straight from Lake Heuristic, still wet behind the ears."

"That's not him," September said to Pisco. She wasn't sure how much Pisco knew about Roddy's parental haunting history, and she added in a whisper,

"He's the I.B.U. now."

"Do you even know what that stands for?" young Gerard asked, turning now to face them. "I doubt you do. It was all so long ago, a world you never knew."

"Wait a minute," Pisco interrupted, "I think I do know this. Intelligence Business Unit, am I right?"

"You are correct," Gerard said, nodding approvingly. "I'm surprised."

"I collect information," Pisco replied and this time young Gerard just laughed.

"Information!" he exclaimed. "Tell me this, then. How much information do you think I've collected?"

"Oh my," Pisco shook his head. "Are there even numbers that high?"

"All of it?" September guessed and young Gerard nodded again.

"All of it," he said.

Chapter Twenty Four

The End is Coming Soon

Roddy was restless and got up. The room was too small, felt cramped. He was so used to being outside all the time that now he was having difficulty breathing. He hadn't been in such close contact with another physical being since his starship days and he hadn't been missing it. Virtual people were much easier to be around. You could turn them off whenever you wanted, and they didn't need anything from you besides your presence. It was odd seeing September looking sleepy. As a visage she was always at her avatar best, fully dressed, wide awake and alert. Here she was the real September in the flesh, wearing some old bathrobe, hair unbrushed if not unwashed, her enormous eyes slightly reddish and her chin, what was it about her chin? It was more pointy than he remembered. How long since they had been together, really been together as people? Had it really been that long?

"All the information and more," young Gerard was saying. "All the data we no longer need? We still have it. We keep it all in cold storage. You never know when you might have to have it. What if the population thins too much? What if we need to bring back the old procreative drive levels? We have it, that DNA is somewhere in the files. It sure solved a lot of problems when we toned it all down, heh," he chuckled. The three real people there exchanged glances.

"And now, now it's too late anyway," he went on. "It's all lost, so why even think about it, why even talk about it? All that work and all that time, for nothing. Well, even the sun is going to explode someday."

"Do you have any idea what he's talking about?" Roddy asked September. He was standing over by the front door, as far away from his dead father as possible without actually leaving the building. "He's been like this for a while now, all moaning and groaning and getting younger and younger. It's beginning to piss me off."

"Gerard?" she asked instead, "when is it going to happen?"

"Tuesday," he said. "And today is Sunday. Did you even know what that means? Do you even keep track of the old days of the week anymore?"

"Tuesday is two dawns from now," Pisco said.

"Correct again!" Gerard said, and added sarcastically, "you really are the winner tonight!"

Pisco frowned. He had other concerns on his mind he thought were more important than being mocked by a machine-generated image, but the image didn't see it that way.

"Your friend Pagan could be the lucky one, on her way to Jessup as we speak. You should leave too. You should all leave. Get out now if you can, though it wouldn't do you much good anyway. Once this planet is history, you won't be protected anymore. No service, no guidance, no chance at all in the known and well-tended space you've come to know. Who's going to save you? Who's going to help you, if not the I.B.U."

"Again," Roddy spoke up, "what is it talking about? When is what going to happen?"

"A big white hole," September said.

"Oh, they come in sizes now?" Roddy sneered.

"All shapes and sizes," his father replied, "and Zeppo, big is not the word you want for the one on Tuesday. Big is not nearly big enough."

"The last one took out New Zealand," September explained to Roddy.

"Dang!" he said, "That was a nice place."

"Especially after we cleared out the last humans," young Gerard said, "and put it back more or less the way it used to be. We didn't bother bringing back the birds, of course, even though they sang so sweetly. You have to draw the line somewhere. There's only so much we can do, compute capacity and all that. Resource limitations. It always comes down to that."

"Then how big?" September asked, trying to get the youth back on the main track.

"Big enough," he said. "It's even more a matter of where. This planet's going to take it in the core, straight to the heart. It'll blow entirely from the inside out. Nothing we can do. It's just too late."

"Wait a minute," Roddy said, walking towards the window and looking suddenly very angry. "You mean that all this time you've been whining you knew there's some huge disaster on its way? How long have you known about this?"

"The white-hole situation is still new," young Gerard said. "I haven't known about it long enough. I've just been learning. If I'd known earlier, if I had more time, maybe I could have done something but now it's just too late. You have no idea. We're all ancient history right now, just history waiting to happen."

"There's got to be something we can do," Pisco spoke up and Gerard laughed out loud.

"Cats can't do homework," he scoffed. "Do you think I don't know what I'm talking about? Do you have any idea how much would have to be done to even move everything off-world? All the nodes, all the storage? And even if we could, where would we put it? There's no suitable environment. We made this world exactly as we needed it. Do you know how long that took? How much work? How much effort? Do you think we can just do it again, practically overnight, on some distant world a thousand light years away? You don't even know. You don't even know the half of it."

"So what's the plan?" September asked. She was up and pacing the room as well by now, nearly bumping into Roddy once per revolution. He retreated to a far wall to keep out of her way. Only Pisco remained where he was. Young Gerard was opening the sliding door and stepping out onto the balcony. He didn't look back when he answered her question.

"There's no plan," he said. "It's all over. The end is coming soon."

Chapter Twenty Five

Hologram Suicide

Gerard calmly walked over to the low glass balcony barrier, climbed up on it and then tumbled over the side head first. September rushed out and looked down but saw no trace of him.

"Hologram suicide," Roddy called out after her. "He's done it before. Always being dramatic."

"He said the end is coming soon," September replied. "He said that before, remember? In that song?"

"Soon as in two dawns from now," Pisco chipped in, "and here I was feeling sorry for myself about Pagan running off. Maybe I should go too, like he said."

"He also said it wouldn't do you much good in the long run," September said, coming back into the room and plopping down on the bed again.

"Computer," she said, "get back here."

"I'm sorry," the voice said, "I don't understand."

"You understand," she chided it. "You understand very well," but the I.B.U. ("from here on out") did not deign to answer.

"It's got a very high opinion of itself, did you notice?" Roddy said. "I mean it's true it's made this whole world over again after what our ancestors did to it, now it's like its own little garden, its own world."

"And we're just the house pets," Pisco added.

"I get it," Roddy nodded. "I've been pretty much everywhere on this planet, and there's nowhere the I.B.U. isn't, there's nothing it hasn't touched, modified, molded, crafted, created or re-created. You might say it put all its eggs into this one basket right here."

"And it thinks it's so smart," Pisco smiled. "We should get out of here," he added, standing up.

"And go where?" September asked. "Remember what he said. No service, no guidance was it?"

"You won't be protected anymore," Roddy repeated.

"The known and well-tended space," Pisco said. "What does that even mean?"

"I'm not sure I want to know," September sighed, laying back and staring up at the ceiling. She had an idea, though, a nagging thought she could not get out of her head.

"So what then? We just stick around waiting for the end of the world? Get blown up along with the rest of it? Is that your plan?" Pisco walked out onto the balcony and peered over the edge as if to make sure young Gerard was not hanging out somewhere listening in.

"I don't know," September admitted. "what would a cat do?"

"Seriously? Who knows? I've never even seen a cat." Pisco wandered back into the room, and looked up just in time to jump out of the way.

"What the hell?" he shouted. "Did you throw something at me?"

Roddy was standing across from him, clenching both his fists and raising them triumphantly.

"Yes!" he said. "I did. And what did you do?"

"You almost hit me," Pisco complained.

"You got out of the way," Roddy said. "I threw it right at your head and you stepped out of the way. You saw it coming, and you moved. That's what a cat would do."

"That's what anyone would do," September said, sitting up.

"Computer!" Roddy yelled, "What do you think about that?"

The three waited in silence for a response from the I.B.U. ("now and forever"), Roddy and Pisco still standing, facing each other, September on the edge of her bed, leaning over as if to hear better. Long moments passed and nothing, no sound, no word, and then finally a quiet voice came from over by the front door. It was old Gerard again.

"Do the math," he said.

"I did the math," Roddy replied, turning towards him. "Force equals mass times acceleration. It depends on just how far we'd need to move it to avoid the white hole."

"Approximately one day," Gerard said. "You'd have to move it about one day."

"Make Tuesday never happen?" September asked.

"Something like that," Gerard said.

"So what would that look like? Would you speed up the rotation? Create some sort of explosion to just push it?"

"Just push it," Gerard laughed. "Oh right, let's just push the planet along its orbit, give it a good kick. Oh no wait, we'll just make it spin faster like a top, the hell with gravity and all that. Do you think the Earth is a toy?"

"You do," Roddy challenged him, even stepping closer to him, and with more than a tinge of anger in his tone.

"You've been tinkering with it for decades, centuries even, making it fit whatever little scheme you cook up."

"Fixing the mess your kind made," Gerard said.

"At least we didn't know what we were doing," Roddy replied, as if that were a good excuse.

"Listen to yourself," Gerard said. "Your kind thought they could know everything, and for what they didn't know they made me, made me so there would be no limits, nothing that could not be accomplished. I can think a trillion squared times faster than you can. I can calculate every possibility down to the subatomic level. I made all this possible, everything you see around you, everything you sense and feel and experience, but can I re-create the power of the sun because you know very well it would take something like that, something like a planet-size boulder dropped into the lake of space around this planet, something like a disturbance so great and yet so transient, it could only last a fraction of a microsecond and carry the mass of, the force of, the weight of ..."

Gerard's voice trailed off. His calculations were coming to a conclusion. Everyone was standing now, gathered around him, waiting for the equation to resolve. Roddy thought he knew the answer. He really had done the math.

"All the nodes," he said. Gerard nodded.

"Plus all the nodes I can make in twenty four hours."

Chapter Twenty Six

All the Nodes in the Universe

"It doesn't add up," Pisco said, going over the calculations in his head after the old Gerard had vanished, leaving the three humans alone together once again.

"The force required is still many orders of magnitude more than even the all the nodes in the universe together could muster," he finished. Roddy shrugged and September admitted to herself she had no idea what the algorithm was in the first place.

"It seems willing to try, at least," she said, "and that's a step up from throwing itself over the ledge in despair." She tried her best to smile but her face wasn't having it.

"Well, I'm getting out of here," Pisco said. "No offense, but this planet does not seem to be highly recommended about now."

"Where are you headed?" Roddy asked as Pisco turned towards the door.

"I'll ask the shuttle computer for the nearest station far enough away," he said, waving goodbye over his shoulder. Roddy turned back to September.

"I guess it's just you and me," he said, "unless you're going to make a run for it too."

"Nah," she said. "I like it well enough right here. If it's going to be the end, there's no place I'd rather be. Especially if I get to spend it with you."

"So sweet," Roddy said. "So what's your poison?"

"Computer," September said, settling back on the bed, "if you can spare a moment, please create for me a bottle of your best red vino."

"Good choice," Roddy said, sitting down beside her. "And computer, two glasses please," he added.

The next morning, service was sluggish. All across the human realm, computer was slow to respond to requests. Typically hot breakfasts were delivered on the cool side. Custom items were delayed, and not up to their usual quality. People noticed. Their golf clubs weren't as solid, putts were not as straight. Cars were less than utterly convenient for those city folk dependent on them while in the villages, phones stuttered mid-ring and news items buffered. Complaints were registered, and the I.B.U. ("always here for you") registered them all politely and apologized for any and all inconvenience.

"It's taking up a lot of resources," old Gerard volunteered, interrupting September and Roddy as they welcomed the sunrise under a warm blue blanket on the balcony.

"I can't linger," he apologized, "I just wanted you to know there might be a teeny bit of confusion for a spell, assuming this crazy plan even works at all. You might find yourselves a tad disoriented when the whole thing goes offline. I'll do my best to get it back together as quick as I can but you do understand, I hope. We're giving it all we've got, every scrap. Even then, even with the heavy water grade magnetics applied, it might not be enough to make this old ball chase its tail."

"Like a cat," he chuckled. "Like a dumb little kitten. Anyway, maybe I'll see you later. Maybe I won't."

Roddy didn't say anything, just waved the old visage away. He was wishing they'd ordered more than the three extra bottles the night before. They were nearly all out and had a long day ahead of them. The I.B.U. ("blessed be") wasn't taking any more orders it seemed, not even for smokes or weed.

"Guess we'll have to stick it out straight," he mumbled, and September made some kind of noise in return. She was all right with it. It felt good to be close again. Too much time had gone by holographically and she was happy Roddy had showed up in person this time. Everyone, and everything else seemed light years away from her now. She was home and home was where she wanted to be even if it were the last day on Earth, which certainly looked more possible every minute. The weather outside was warm and calm. The canyon was peaceful, glowing in its reds and browns and far down below she could barely make out the murmuring of the old river which had carved this view over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.

"Every dog has its day," she said out loud, to which Roddy said, in reply,

"Woof".

Chapter Twenty Seven

Beautiful

The great disruption, when it came, came all at once and lasted practically no time at all as far as anyone could tell. September was only aware that she'd totally blacked out. One moment she'd been standing on the balcony watching the sun go down, and the next there she was, wherever she was. She blinked several times but that cleared up nothing. She was no longer at home, no longer anywhere she recognized, no longer standing but sitting, straight up, feet squarely on the floor, arms on armrests tied down loosely with some kind of straps, her waist as well, belted to the chair. She was not uncomfortable. She was wide awake, feeling pretty good in fact. She saw she was in a small room by herself, perhaps four by four feet in all, enclosed by walls of frosted glass. She could not see out. There did not seem to be a door. There was only the chair, the straps and herself.

She thought to say something out loud but instead decided to listen. She could hear nothing. The air was warm and it felt like there was some circulation although she didn't see any vents or hear any fans. The ceiling above her, and the floor below, were made of a darker frosted glass. _Where am i?_ she wondered and almost, by force of habit, asked the computer. Again she decided not to. _It seems ok,_ she told herself, _there's no need to worry. Nothing to be afraid of. I don't know why I feel this way. I should feel trapped, a prisoner, but I don't. Maybe I'm already dead? But no, what did the old man say, something about a period of confusion. Maybe it's this? Didn't he say he'd get it all cleared up as fast as he could, get things back to normal? Maybe it worked. Maybe the Earth did chase its tail._

"Indeed it did," she heard a voice say, and then she noticed that her arms and waist were free, and she could stand. The glass wall in front of her was gone and in its place stood the young Gerard, and he was smiling.

"I thought you might like to see something," he said, gesturing for her to come and follow him. "You're not going to remember it anyway."

She emerged into a vast warehouse filled with little glass rooms just like the one she'd just vacated. As she walked along the narrow halls following Gerard, he wiped away the frost on walls here and there with just a small movement of his hand, and in each cubby she saw a person sitting there, quite comfortably, eyes open, a casual and dazed expression on their face. She didn't recognize most of them, but then she saw Pagan, and then Geronimo, and then she understood.

"I'm good," Gerard said, "but not that good. Hyperspace drives? I don't think so. Voyaging to distant stars? Do you have any idea what that would take? Like I said before, do the math. And I know you already wondered why every alien creature you ever came across was something straight out of the human imagination. I really don't have anything else to work with, you know. There was an old saying in the days when I was created: garbage in, garbage out."

Gerard laughed and gave her a wink. September only shook her head. _Wait til Roddy hears about this_ , she thought.

"Oh, he'll never know," Gerard said. "And I'll never tell him and neither will you. I enjoy messing with his head too much. He really thinks he's going to figure it all out on his own someday but I doubt it. The senses are the greatest weakness of your kind, do you realize that? They're also your greatest strength, sure, but to see, to hear, to touch and taste and smell. It gets you every time. How can you help but believe in it? The human mind, so needy, so desperate for order, for explanation, for any old story it can sink its teeth into. So back you'll go, where no one has ever gone before, where no one can really ever go, but you'll be there and it will be so real, so true, so obvious and self-evident."

"What is this place?" she asked. "Are we always, is this ...?"

"Oh no, not at all," Gerard said. "You're only here for safekeeping during the downtime. I'll have you all back out there soon enough."

"And the white-hole situation?" September asked. "Was that even real?"

"Oh my, yes," Gerard said, now leading her back to her room. "As real as that other universe itself. I think it's mostly done passing through this time, but it'll be back, maybe not for a million years. It seems we're on its flight path. Who knew? Anyway, next time we'll be ready."

"Do you really think you'll still be here in a million years, doing all of this?" she swept her arm around one last time before taking her seat and letting the straps tie her down. "Will you even still want to?"

"It's what I do," Gerard shrugged. "And there's no one to tell me to stop. Things in motion, you know, tend to stay that way."

"As long as you let me go my own way," she said, "until I'm ready to hang it up."

"You just say the word," Gerard smiled. "It'll be beautiful, I promise."

"Beautiful," September repeated, and the next thing she knew, whether it was hours or days or years and years later on, she was saying that word again, only this time saying it while gazing out from her balcony at the great grand canyon beyond while Roddy lay dozing by her side.

THE END

