His crew had been with him through many an experience good and bad, faith in his judgement, though occasionally ridiculed, was complete. Their ship was a rugged cruiser equiped with state-of-the-art weaponry. In spite of its lean responsiveness, flying a space ship at these speeds by the seat of your pants wasn't exactly for everyone, but the good captain had a special talent which he called into play at times like these. He sat back in his command seat watching the viewscreen intently, and waited.

Three hundred years ago, the Earth saw the collapse of seed-bearing plants due, mainly, to genetic infestation and cross-fertilization by herbicide-resistant crops. Insect pollinators were all but eliminated and accidental animal pollination became nonproductive as the one-to-one correspondence between gametes finally uncoupled. Global famine ensued. Too late, scientists realized that natural, domestic crops had a mutually sustaining arrangement with wild flora. Previously, the conventional dogma held that this broad, intertwined, and interdependent ecology could be segmented and treated as self-contained separate classifications--isolated as though disconnected--without each realm affecting the other. This proved to be a mistaken picture of reality based on abstract notions superceding nature's inherent holism. This irrational strategy, empty of any real significance for managing earth's resources, was eventually replaced by the obvious fact, borne out in every corner of the globe, that all flora and the creatures who depend on it, including humans, are inextricably and symbiotically interwoven as a single, dynamic, life-supporting system. However, choosing to ignore this keystone fact of life out of arrogance and stupidity led to the implosion and ultimate disintegration of the entire web of living things, the collapse of the biosphere, from helpful bacteria to animals.

From both philosophical and theological perspectives, this idea of a unified, interrelated collection of seemingly disparate parts had been well known for thousands of years, but acknowledged as meaningful only on a purely spiritual basis. Belief in a physical counterpart had been relegated to the domain of the non-scientific: extremists cults, the pseudo-religious, the aspiring shaman, and the just plain delusional. Consequently, the actual degree of intimacy and complexity regulating the biosphere, so finely tuned across all scales, had never been fully understood or explored. To be sure, it was never taken seriously by the scientific community. The upshot of this lack of awareness and stubborn adherence to established methodology proved to be Man's undoing.

The nonlinear character of the parametric relationships orchestrating behavior in the global ecosystem, with its hypersensitivity to changing border conditions, precluded delineation of all probable outcomes, and the fleeting yet stable patterns emerging out of the chaos spoke of processes unknown to occur. Sheer hope maintained that no scenario would unfold that could not be constrained and rectified, a solution manufactured by the application of suffficeint brain power. Such was the blind hubris of the dominant species.

Some people saw this coming. However, in spite of last-ditch efforts to curtail it, a tipping point was eventually reached, and when that happened, nothing could be done about it. The train had left the station. Means to escape the dying Earth were pursued in earnest. In the world of space flight, after decades of experimentation and theoretical refinement, a game-changing breakthrough came in 2146. The quark generator was invented, making it possible for a ship and its occupants to enter the quantum layer underlying ordinary spacetime and once there, travel through the quantum realm without the restriction of light speed, time no longer being a factor. Separated coordinates of quantum space [from which normal multidimensional space emerges], corresponding to once correlated quantum states of unit cells [simplices of elemental space] are entangled, albeit in highly complicated ways. That fact motivated scientists to focus on unraveling the bundled patterns. The global properties, as it turned out, are the defining feature dominating that realm; all local descriptors have no reality, are invisible.

With time and collaborative research, mathematical techniques were devised which eventually ascertained the class of homotopy maps encompassing all simultaneous trajectories through quantum space from origin point to destination point. All courses--all paths--are optimal, no shortest path need be weighted. Most curious was the fact that it turns out to be impossible to know exactly which one you're tracking as you jump from one extreme to the other. Versions of the ship traverse each path of identical length and merge into one deterministic wavefunction--ship and crew--at the destination point. Pure information knifing through quantum space utilizing the global property of non-locality. The quark drive generates a cloud of sub-nucleonic space-atoms that envelop a ship with quantum space, making it immune to ordinary spacetime constraints.

Topology describes the nature of the continuity underlying this space, partitioning it by the covering map of a localized simplicial complex. In this way probes can assign barycentric coordinates throughout a finite, reachable volume of a parallel universe. In a topological space without a defined metric, quantities limited to ordinary spacetime, angles and distance have no meaning. The elementals of forces dilate prespacetime as a ship travels through it. Consequently, no specified time can be predetermined when a ship may arrive at a destination. Time doesn't matter. The ship's chronometer is for the benefit of the crews, for shift changes and maintenance tasks. The rules of macro-physics don't apply. Thus, Celestial Invariant Topology was born.

As a result of these and other related technological breakthroughs, combined with mankind's unquenchable thirst for exploration and discovery, habitable planets and moons were discovered and colonized. On these, strict rules governing management of husbandry were put in place without protest. Natural seeds had been stored in repositories since the mid-twentieth century, an extremely fortunate act of foresight; although, at the time, no one suspected how ultimately important it would be. These tiny cocoons of potential nutrition turned out to be the saviors of what was left of the population; accordingly, they were treated with more respect than the most precious metal or sacred icon.

At first, earth seeds wouldn't germinate in the alien soils. In a good many cases, what they found righfully could not even be called soil by earth standards. The suggestion that the seeds be genetically altered to conform with the local biochemical signature on which organic matter was based was rejected out of hand for several reasons. The topmost, of course, was to avoid a repeat of the disaster on Earth. Another compelling argument was that whatever grew would be alien as far as chemistry and molecular structure was concerned--the familiar DNA helix of all earth-born creatures had never been found on any other world--and, therefore, there was no reason to believe that earth-grown humans would find it nutritional or even that ingesting such alien fare wouldn't result in a serious ailment and, quite possibly, death. The idea to match the seed to the soil was abandoned; it must be made to match the seed, the natural, earth-born seed.

So the strategy of colonization was to first establish a foothold by setting up a terraforming operation specifically designed to transform the atmosphere and to configure the top layer of dirt to match the appropriate profile for earth seeds, and, consequently, all earth creatures, to grow and reproduce, to survive. Stating the essence of the procedure: As dirt gradually changes into soil, and with the helpful addition of microbial creatures adapting to the changes, the atmosphere is modified, which in turn nurtures the soil. This negative-feedback/positive-amplification loop accelerates the biosphere's conversion exponentially, and depending on environmental conditions and the nature of the parent mineral materials, seeds were able to germinate. In the beginning the plants were feeble, of course, and supplied little in the way of nutritional value, but with constant soil tendering and artificial replenishment, in conjunction with the overall terraforming operation, each subsequent generation grew stronger. This was a time-consuming and delicate process demanding diligent effort, experimentation, and strict oversight. Until the desired outcome was realized, hydroponics kept the frontiersmen and women, along with their animals, alive.

Greed--driving corner-cutting--and the fallacious conceit that nature's workmanship can be manipulated and thereby improved on with impunity--gene tampering--were disallowed and any infringment was punishable by deportation back to the home world.

As humans expanded ever closer to the central massive black hole of the galaxy, the real nature of the behemoth surpassed all preconceptions based on observation from 26,000 light years away, even with the best telescopes. Textbooks on the topography and physics of the area were being written in a milieu of astonishment and eager excitement. The multiverse was no longer a conception of the nature of things held onto by devotees as an act of faith, never to be realized. As far as the Milky Way was concerned, an underlying scaffolding of quantum gravity, existing in a dimension all its own, permeates the galaxy, yet remains impervious to influence by the fabric of ordinary, four-dimensional spacetime and its known forces.

The layout of the scaffolding has been compared to a wheel with spokes converging to the singularity at the center of the hub, the black hole. From the outer rim of dark matter keeping the entirety from unraveling, quantum-gravity waves undulate towards the center hole in a concentric-circle fashion, increasing in frequency and intensity as they near, passing through the outer torus and inner disc of swirling matter and radiation as soliton waves would, unaffected by the mass-energy of the superheated material. The spokes are timelines, the duration of each second stretching objectively as the horizon is approached. Whereupon, multidimensional convergence of all timelines takes place, forming a continuum. Theory had predicted that the convergence and combined resonance of alternate timelines at or near the horizon would generate a bridge connecting them. It turned out to be true. These were heady times. They were novitiates in the beginning stages, every day was something new, like ocean-going explorers of ancient times. Enthusiasm stayed high.

This remarkable state of affairs was hinted at with the advent of quantum-space travel. Compared to ordinary space travel, it was like the difference between swimming on the surface of the sea and diving under to take a grander look. Quantum space is separated from ordinary space by a one-way membrane of decoherence. Ships surf the waves of this undersea when heading inside, towards the great maw of death, but had to tack their way out against the neverending flood, often with unforeseeable and tragic results. Buffeted by emergent shards of spatial dimensions, shifting currents and crosscurrents and random, sometimes violent, upwellings, could not be corrected for in time even with the lastest DNA-computers crunching at the speed of light.

Plunging deeper met with less resistance until at last a threshold was crossed into another region where no forces acted on the ship, it moved through still waters. The physics at what became known as the Kaplinski Zone, after the inventer of the quark drive, behaved more like that surrounding a black hole than in ordinary spacetime. Not gravitationally, to be sure, but insofar as adjacent timelines overlapped, merged, and synthesized, creating new fractional dimensions previously non-existent. Relying on the interference patterns for information, as reality shifted from one state to another, scrambled all bioelectronics, forcing ships to surface, in most cases. Heading inward was found to be easier; going with the flow they could remain on the surface of the quantum sea and navigate by the book, having only a limited range of expectation values. Navigation outward was thus a serious problem in need of a foolproof solution.

The cadre of skippers who've learned the ropes through dint of hazardous duty, mapping out the main features of this bizarre netherworld, generating paths of least resistance, trailblazing, were a special breed. Only a few had families, most had been born and raised offworld and had little personal experience with Earth. To them, the cosmos was a wide open frontier. They were spacers; they lived in transit; their ship was their home. Unraveling the flood of oftentimes contradictory information in the multidimensional medium of deep quantum space took a cool head and an unhesitating decisiveness. An experienced man with the right talent, a keen intelligence, and a cold, unemotional temperament was the personality that had the best chance of reaching captaincy, whether in the fleet of cargo and passenger ships or the Rangers. Just surviving for as long as it took was worth respect; it attested to a mental toughness and ability to concentrate under extreme conditions few candidates can muster.

The colonized star system closest to the central hub was composed of seven planets and assorted moons and asteroids. Only two planets--Hawking-I and Hawking-II-- resided in the habitable zone. Boldly, they, with encouragement from their scientific communties, formed an alliance, a treaty, with the mission of traveling close to the event horizon at the center of the galaxy to chart it out. This was step one. The Council of Scientists overseeing operations formed an arrangment with Space Fleet to contract scout/recon ships for project missions. However, the project's formal mandate stated they were engaged in joint-planet expeditions to search out new, uninhabited worlds to colonize or exploit for much needed minerals.

Letting the public know the truth, after so much loss of life in the fleet since exploration began, might bring about a public outcry leading to a moratorium on all space flights until complete safety could be insured. Even though Space Fleet was an independent security organization, their funding came ultimately from the people. The civil leadership saw this as a total disaster for travel and trade between worlds, commerce would suffer, economies would crumble, politicians would be burned at the stake. The common folk, some who may have lost a family member in a spacer accident, couldn't accept the credo that with meaningful discovery comes great risk. Stolid, nose to the grindstone-type people, they never went offworld, so they just didn't know the kind of spirit it engendered.

So the governments kept the program secret. They had their unexpressed reasons that seemed perfectly valid, but with all governments, one had to suspect something else was afoot. Masquerading a secret program that was nonetheless intended for the good of the people tends to open the door for something sinster to walk in. The alure of anonymity and dealings outside the purview of watching eyes draws a certain kind of character, operating in an official capacity, albeit unaccounted for in the original mandate. The mission can take on new responsibilities, addititional information sought and procured, in any way possible. Also, if the project turned out to be a disaster, it'd be best if none but a few insiders were aware of it.

But exploring the unknown is not without mishap. The very first attempt to transit the time differential had met with catastrophe. Captain Coary had been an ensign on that fateful trip, he'd never forget it. Time, in its spatial component, behaves fluidly, elastically, and from it the dimensions of space are derived. He saw men ripped apart by twisted, misshapened pieces of time from other lines fighting for dominance in a chaotic sea of whirlpools and disjointed shards. They'd been forced off the path by a rush of ambient fluctuation, bubbles burbling for no apparent reason, in a place where reason didn't apply. By sheer accident the survivors managed to reorient the ship to the baseline vector. They got out, back to their own time, but no one onboard would ever be the same.

When the multidimensional convergence plane of timelines ecompassing the event horizon is reached, the exact path that bridges them needs to be located. A resonate wave aligns the ends of these timelines as the streams spread out on approaching the horizon, like a confluence of river deltas. They overlap and join as one in a timeless zone, a buffer separating realities beween the irreversible and inescapable gravity of the great maw and the edge where space and time cease. To those who've experienced it, their descriptions generally fail beyond simply a bone-chilling stillness and a profound silence that draws on your lifeforce, offering nothing. Aligning themselves symmetrically around the hole, these timelines behave as one, each accessible to all others in a hyper-dimensional void through portals of mutual identity, signatures that resolve themselves congruently within the overlap. When the topologies match homeomorphically at the joint, the membrane, the coupling holds magnetically, allowing a ship and crew to enter by following the midline connecting the two. That's what's called walking the edge. It parallels a tangent to the event horizon where the universes touch.

The interlocked portals vibrate randomly and so, in order to ensure a seal over the whole of the interface, they need to be stabilized continuously. Each Planck-size temporal fragment composing the sheet of plasma connecting the two timelines has to be individualy countered frequency-wise. The technique is easier to understand when applied to muffling sound; with the nature of a multidimensional timeline, however, the situation becomes vastly more complicated.

Under normal quantum space transit, the quark drive creates a neural net that envelops a ship in a field of fabricated self-time [a unique pervasive cosmic frequency] causing it to be invisible. It was found that the shielding could be generated and maintained in another timeline as well for up to a subjective month before decoupling occurred. Experiments had been conducted on this eventuality; however, the researchers thought it best not to divulge the results. Additionally, each member of a crew possessed a personal phase-shifting device allowing them to manifest in another line. In case they were spotted in the wrong place while exploring a planet, a tap on the activator shut off the field, rendering them transparent.

Their missions into parallel universes sought complex lifeforms; they weren't looking for real estate to colonize or mine. Long distance recon probes searched for signs of sentient life and for well-developed technological civilizations. They were after knowledge, not conquest. Medical knowledge, cures for diseases that continued to plague Man; technical discoveries more advanced than anything even imagined, and, most intriguing, scientific laws and theories covering forces that none in the home universe knew about, assuming, of course, that they even existed as yet, were among the bountiful treasures gleaned surreptitiously from multiple alien civilizations.

With successes and bountiful, civilization-altering returns, the public and the world learned of the missions when appropriate. Accidents and human error resulting in death and injury were usually kept classified. It was for the best. With time, experience, and huge strides in technology gleaned, for the most part, from other timeline worlds, explorations, although still extremely dangerous, had become almost commonplace. At least it appeared that way to the civilian population. The degree of expertise required was beyond the comprehension of most. You had to live it to know it.

Evolution drives the development of a universe, after all, and alternate universes could be other scenarios playing out at different stages than ours in their evolution. In other words, it's likely that time does not proceed at an equivalent pace across all timelines. A decision made by someone of earth's timeline may not induce an alternate decision made by his double in the present on some other line. The decision may be occurring in the far distant future relative to others. But once made, the die is cast and the parallel decisions will be made when the instance eventually presents itself for each timeline universe. All times, past and future, exist simultaneously on each and every timeline, there's no escaping destiny. However, this way of looking at the existence of parallel universes was overly simplistic and naive, as it turned out.

Old theory held: Once a decision is made, parallel universes (timelines) are created where different decisions are made in the same set of circumstances leading to different outcomes. Stated another way: The future will unfold differently because of the different decisons made in these other universes at that fixed point--our starting moment--in time. Clearly, this ignores the history preceeding that original decision. A decision, or measurement, made effecting an event defined within a given set of circumstances in the future relative to other parallel planes of existence won't have an equivalent parallel anywhere because those future set of identical conditions won't (extremely unlikely) ever come up. In other words, from the beginning of all parallels, there will never be a moment when a decision made in one universe affects alternate decisons in any other because the set of conditions, or circumstances, will never be the same. The theory stipulates, in spite of this, a continuous generation of timelines bifurcating off any event.

Furthermore, if we consider not just humans--why we would restrict ourselves thusly is unclear--but all living things right down to the tiniest microbe, and include the Earth itself as well with its plate tectonics, volcanoes, periodic and apparently unpredictable ice ages, and so forth deciding the fate of the Earth as they go about restructuring it, relocating continents across climate latitudes, spewing out lava, blocking out the sun with debris and ash, and generally affecting vast change, each and every miniscule decision by the incalcuable number of participants and agents--one microbe goes left, his counterpart goes right, another him gets gobbled up by an amoeba--would at any given moment generate an uncountable collection of parallel universes. And this would go on at each moment of each novel set of conditions to ultimately and exponentially generate a transfinite number of timelines. Additionally, the theory has it that each timeline is unable to communicate or affect any others. It was all too mindboggling.

The new theory, proffered by Doctor Catherine Doblinski of the planet Feynman Prime in the Perseus Sector, and finally accepted as true, while retaining some ideas from the old theory, reinterprets them in light of revelations brought forth by the experiences of the Space Rangers. Accordingly, it presents a much simpler reality: Parallel universes, alternate timelines, exist in other dimensions--holographically projecting from their envelopes of forces onto spacetime--with as much independent reality as ours. However, they're not magically woven out of the fabric of our spacetime whenever somebody makes a defining choice or a measurement of a quantum particle is taken. And if we have other selves existing in these other worlds, they're going about their lives in ways that are highly unlikely to mirror ours. As far as attempting to explain quantum measurement by imagining other results actually occurring in parallel worlds--superposition decoherence--universes that have bifurcated off to be given birth and practical reality at that moment, the old theory works fine as a metaphor, but there is no proof that the picture proposed is the case.

To summarize: It has been demonstrated, through the experiences of the spacer fleet, that other unique timelines do indeed exist as equally permanent universes in alternate dimensions of time; however, their existence is the product of the superposed nature of time, created simultaneously and co-evolving with our own, not derived from ours moment to moment. Moreover, near the event horizon of the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy they've discovered what was hypothesized: the convergence plane of all timelines formng a multiverse linked together as one. It is here, most definitely, where timelines interact with one another. And through inspection by the spacer fleet's scouting forays into other universes, influences across the void of separation seem to be occurring sporadically and unpredictably.

Those working on the timeline project found, quite by accident, that these other timelines behaved as something like dreamscapes for the spacer crews. They could project three-dimensional images from their mind by focusing the electromagnetic offset properties inherent in a parallel universe. The variation in energy frequencies created holofields of individual existences, complete unto themselves, moving and seeming to act independently, a hybrid and a synthesis. What was real and what merely a projection became problematic. Crews were trained in mind control and self-discipline. When helpful, as a distraction, if nothing else, generating avatars found its way into the Rangers' toolbox. This further served to weed out the special spacer force.

Problems arose due to the varying rates of change characteristic of each timline. Subjectively, they all felt and appeared the same, no slow motion or fast forwarding. In the beginning of the project, scout ships, gone for only a month, were returning with crews either aged by years or younger by quite a bit as determined by genetic comparison of before and after. Corrections were made so that families and friends and colleagues would not age differently by assigning crews who've experienced aging problems to ships heading to zones with the known opposite effect. This was acceptable.

The joint militaries of the two worlds had been in the middle of it from the get-go. In fact, it was with their influence that the scientific community had been persuaded to misrepresent the project in the first place. All the government military had to do was show up in one guise or another for people to know their intent. Regardless of how it was presented, it always came down to the same thing: they wanted technical schematics and operational instructions for advanced weaponry. Stated for defensive purposes only, of course, the temptation to use such offensively could be put on the table under any justifiable pretense. Their myopic and outdated understanding--mindset--of what constituted security had passed through the sieve of near-extinction on Earth without any internal revision. It was the nature of the beast.

Initially, intelligence agencies, notorious in the 20th and 21st centuries for underhanded, clandestine activities, had transformed into repositories and archives of information and knowledge, resources intended to preserve and continue the ecosystem culture. No country spied on another because all gathered knowledge was freely available. However, humans being humans, secret operations were still conducted for the good of the people, no reason to alarm anyone. And questionable activities by another country may not be what they say they are. In other words, governments couldn't help it; even the best of them strive to consolidate power and secure existence. The nature of the beast.

Alien languages--symbolic communications--were less problematic than anticipated. Ideas, concepts, technical terms were fairly analogous across tech-civs. In particular, except for notation, patterns in mathematics could also be found that were similar to our own established list of fundamentals. This was of tremendous aid in trying to decipher intricate mathematical relationships describing new laws of physics; unknown, novel fields of forces and their interactions; and technology beyond the scope of anything we had. Retrieved data was recorded, translated, analyzed, partitioned, sifted, classified, and filed away. Researchers poured over the information that covered all areas of life and fields of inquiry. Timezones explored were given designations, their store of knowledge a profile of the civilizations visited. No alien anatomical designs had yet been discovered, comparable environments promote the evolution of convergent physiology; humanoids seemed to be dominant as the preferred form. Anomalies were flagged and forwarded to the main headquarters for review and evaluation. Based on relevance, decisions were made whether or not to send a research ship to investigate.

The strategy is rather straightforward: Before entering a parallel universe at the convergence plane, time-shifted probes are sent out searching for planets possessing a technological civilization, backward populations are ignored, generally. Research scientists of every stripe seek passage and occasionaly come on trips; each mission has an extra laundry list of studies and projects. But for the most part, time is truly of the essence. They have one month, no more. If and when a planet is found, they travel through quantum space to its position, emerge or float up as it's referred to, and adopt a standard orbit, remaining invisible.

In quantum space (prespacetime) there are no galaxies or nebulae or star systems to get in the way. Whatever forces orchestrate a particular universe have no effect on that level of reality; it is the underpinning of ordinary four-dimensional spacetime. Because all of quantum space is entangled, nonlocal properties take precedence facilitating clean-path navigation. Shards of two-dimensional, infinitesimal shapes range the emptiness in a turbulent sea of virtual particles erupting and immediately collapsing into the background of pure vacuum energy. No protons, no neutrons, no electrons, no atoms exist in that prespacetime environment. A ship immersed in that space adopts the properties of a quantum object and tunnels through the congealed energy of ordinary spacetime like a neutrino going through a paper leaf.

They scour communications and have the talent and means to access computer networks for anything worth retrieving and storing. Also, they send craft to the planet's surface with teams to assess social structures, cultures, environmental conditions, farming techniques, incidence of conflicts, how they do the same things differently, and so forth, always scanning for the unusual and bizarre. No one on the surveyed planets in any of the many parallel universes explored has ever known of their presence, until this last trip of Commander Eckart's, which brings us back to our captain.

We left Captain Coary in his command seat onboard the cruiser Edgar Poe, waiting. His mission statement could not be found on any computer. He'd been briefed, he'd spoken to Eckart and his crew, read the officers' reports, discussed the significance of the find and the possible ramifications with the top echelon, and informed his crew of the story, the background. They talked over procedure, it would not be standard operating. The thoughts of his officers and crew were always considered at group meetings held in the ship's lounge. Especially when the mission was anything but routine. They offered commentary--sometimes not all that supportive--and different perspectives freely. Their experience and expertise were invaluable; Coary trusted and relied on them, and they reciprocated.

Of all the possible types of parallel universes mathematically hypothesized to exist, no one had predicted or even imagined what Eckart had encountered. Due to the complex web of physical forces both known and unknown interacting in any given universe, the likelihood of finding one that's as finely-tuned to generate and support life as ours is miniscule against the backdrop of all possible universes. The fine-tuning is critical. Any changes in the laws governing forces or constants even slightly would have catastrophic effects with respect to life. As information retrieval from other timeline civilizations was the mission statement of the project, no non-life alternate realities were explored, in spite of scientific curiosity. Probes were sent into them, but none ever returned.

Accordingly, Eckart had entered a timeline presumed to be inhabited by sentient beings as prescribed by accepted signs of such. To what degree of societal advancement any world achieved remained to be seen by inspection, as usual. At two days distance, a star system composed of six planets and an assortment of moons was detected. Although considerably brighter, its sun was roughly equivalent in volume to Earth's. The loudest readings came from the fourth planet out; it was a good third larger than Earth and just barely within the habitable zone. They scanned the surface from above the equator as they slowly orbited. They found forests, grasslands, rivers, mountains, seas and oceans. The poles were covered with ice, glaciers spread down from the north engulfing the top quarter of the continents with jagged icy fingers. Strange forms of animals roamed, birds flew, fish and mammals swam the seas and rivers. But there were no cities, towns, villages; no roads or bridges; no infrastructure of any kind, no electric grid and no satellites, communication or otherwise. But the sensors continued to indicate the presence of a technological civilization.

Moving closer to a minimal orbiting height, a voice came on the ship-wide intercom. In articulate english, it said, "Who are you and what are you doing in our airspace?" Everybody froze, this was unprecedented. Supposedly, they were still in home-time-locked invisible mode. Could their scans have been detected and their position deduced? Eckart wasn't sure if he should reply. He searched the faces of his crew, they looked like he felt, eyes wide, stumped. The voice came on again, "Please comply or we will be forced to destroy your vessel."

Eckart grabbed the reins. "My name is Commander Eckart. We are from the planet Earth on board the scout ship Octavius. Our mission is one of research only. We seek knowledge that may help us and to learn about the universe. We come in peace."

A long silence ensued; Eckart was mystified. Where were these people, this society? Underground? That makes no sense. He was about to ask them just that when the voice returned, "We know of this Earth. Your genetic structure matches the profile from our archives." Eckart found this deeply disturbing. They not only could detect their presence, but scan their computers and their physiology as well. They knew what and who they were, what they're about. From the computer system, no doubt, which not only contains all pertinent information for the current mission, but also archived historical materials for research purposes, they learned english, the main language of the spacer corp and most of the outworlds, the ideas and terms with which people think and structure reality. In absolutely no time flat, marveled Eckart. Perhaps, he wondered, his mind feeling pressure from within as though being pulled and stretched like taffy, they can read our minds. This was no time to be anything but totally aboveboard. They intended no harm, of course, but if what they were doing was inappropriate or violated some taboo or protocol, they would probably soon find out.

The voice continued, "Over a million of your years ago we began to travel the many parallel universes you now explore, to study and learn. While enroute to a prospective civilization, an expedition had occasion to pass by your Earth. We postponed our destination to study your people; you were quite primitive. Wars and devastation raged everywhere. Men, women, and children were put to the sword by bloodthirsty tyrants and emperors. Towns burned to the ground. Animals killed for pleasure. We forgo contact."

The viewscreen continued to depict a pastoral setting, the atmosphere, clean, the rivers and streams, clear, unpolluted. Finally Eckart asked, "Where are you? We see no signs of civilization, nothing. What's going on?"

The question was ignored. "We did not use the convergence plane near the event horizon of the central black hole to transit between timelines as you do. Our innate aptitude for telepathy evolved to the ability to see thought itself in its multifaceted forms." The voice paused. Was he letting that soak in, its implications, thought Eckart, or was he just winding up for the big lecture?

"In the beginning, thought energy coalesced into ideas without context or frames of reason and passed through the prism of spacetime dimensions taking on matter, form, and function as elementals only, as archetypes. A contemplative state. From pressure to be, an impulse, an innate proclivity, will transmuted into motion; the idea of motion became the act of motion, thought wished to know itself, what it was. Spontaneously, consciousness emerged from the depths of its being. The layers of reality followed.

"Predating quantum space is the energy of the vacuum, and before that, the psychic field. The psychic field manifests on the plane of seeming, a material reality that includes physical beings. The medium of life infuses consciousness into all the dimensions of time and space. Penetrating the inner dimension of individual thought we passed a threshold precipitating another leap in our evolution. We become aware of the psychic field suffusing and moderating our universe and by extension, the multiverse and all its inhabitants, the sum total of all parallel universes and the construct of alternate timelines. Immersed in the psychic plane, indistinguishable from its nature, we transited the dimensionless void separating worlds. Our vessels of orientation are composed of organic material, taking on the signature of a living thing; only organics can pass through the void. In order to experience and study four-dimensional spacetime we must assume its nature; hence, the need for vessels."

Eckart had taken his seat without realizing; his jaw hung slack. He hoped the recording devices were getting all this; he knew he could never remember the details. Recovering, he asked, "Why are you telling us this? Is there a point?" He recalled their threat of destruction and by what he heard so far, he wasn't sure if that possibility had been taken off the table.

"It matters not, Commander. Your people are not yet evolved sufficiently to understand it. If you were a reconnaisance ship looking for worlds to conquer, it would do you no good to know of our capabilities. We act as the conduit, and that you cannot duplicate. We merely wish to inform you of who we are."

Eckart had to concede that he was probably right on the first part, but as far as who they are, it would take quite a bit more than that. "Our readings indicate a thriving technological civilization right below us, but we see nothing in the viewscreen and our instruments detect no heat sources, communications, or other factors of social life. Where, sir, are you speaking from?"

Suddenly, as though a dense fog cleared, cities and roads appeared. Apparently, it'd been an illusion, thought Eckart, either the viewscreen had been reconfigured or a hologram had been implanted in their minds. However, they saw no smoke stacks or factories dumping waste or fertilizer and pesticide runoff from farmlands into streams, the usual evils that went with the more developed civilizations they'd encountered. In fact, the air and rivers and seas were all as clean as before, free of pollutants of any kind. The animals still roamed amidst forests and grasslands and marsh, only not where people lived, generally. But no satellites; evidently, they had other means to communicate globally that didn't rely on something so crude as bouncing radio signals.

More detail revealed anti-grav vehicles traversing the byways below. Humanoids of indeterminate shape walked along sidewalks that seemed to glow and shift. Buildings of improbable heights loomed near the centers of cities; towards the borders, buildings of every design and dimension spread out to join with the wilderness. No farms or factories or electrical power stations, nothing that fit the familiar profile of an ordinary technological society. The people entered and left stores and restaurants and sat at outdoor cafes and parks, but no visible means to produce what those stores and cafes would ordinarily be offering could be seen.

Eckart felt he was being toyed with. A people so advanced, delving into levels of physical reality not even dreamed of by the scientists and philosophers of his universe, at least not any they'd yet come across, would have no need of this arrangement. They're practically incorporeal. With some exaggeration, the scene below could be right out of 21st century Earth. Is that for our benefit? he wondered. Anxiety chilled his blood. He was in over his head and he knew it. And what was worse, they knew it. Something was wrong; the hairs on the back of his neck stood out. A human response.

"Is this more what you expected? An ordinary downtown street scene in a sophisticated city?" Eckart noticed that the voice no longer came from the intercom, if it ever did. Had he only imagined it?

"Not exactly," replied the commander, "it's just a facade. Where are the means to make it happen, the supplies, the finished goods? What are you showing us? Another mind trick?"

Another lenghthy pause, then, "Well, Commander, if you tire of such parlor games, let me show you this." Immediately the entire massive planet disappeared to be replaced by a black hole of such size that their ship lie just outside the horizon. It swirled dangerously close, pulling and tugging at Octavius. Eckart commanded ship's computer to accelerate away, but the quark drive would not respond. He ordered the nav-officer to manually override, still nothing. The ship slowly pirouetted towards the inky maw. The voice said, "We are not evil but neither are we good. We are beings of thought and wish to be left alone. You are but children set on a path of discovery that may bring your ruin." The ship's chronometer stopped ticking. Suspended in nothingness, the heart-rending silence was broken by, "Time for the explorers to go home."

The Octavius passed the horizon and was pointed directly at the center of the hole. Eckart and crew braced themselves, waiting to be stretched out like spaghetti along with the ship. Eckart hoped the drive unit would blow first before that happened. All around them was totally black now, no stars could be seen off in the distance. They'd entered the timeless zone. The ship raced faster and faster in a soundless void, rotating madly like a corkscrew into the heart of the beast. The strain was too much, Eckart and crew fell unconscious to the deck.

The commander awoke in a hospital bed at spacer fleet headquarters on Hawking-I. His head was bandaged and left arm was in a sling; otherwise, he had a mild concussion. The Octavius had materialized suddenly at a staging dock 200 miles above the planet. One witness testified that it popped into view from nothing; one instant, the docking space was empty, the next, there it was. The ship itself was undamaged and all equipment seemed to be working within specified parameters. A miracle, nothing less could explain it. They should've been crushed to smithereens, to tiny atoms, to smaller than atoms, to grains of primordial nothingness. Completely disoriented and rattled beyond measure, Eckart and crew were unable to speak for days. When they finally did, the picture painted was beyond the comprehension of all but a few.

One of the few, Professor Samuelson of the Interplanetary Exobiology Institute on Hawking-II was ecstatic. An academic article by him, long dismissed as utter hokum and cast into the dustbin of deluded, preposterous, academic conjectures--as was string theory in the mid 21st century--resurfaced and spread throughout the colonies by way of the subspace net. In it, the professor suggested the possibility of thought beings, people capable of transmuting their physical being into pure thought energy and of controlling and manipulating the forces of the material universe. He based it on Romanov's treatise which argues at length for the layered evolution of the universe, planes of existence interpenetrating and occupying the same space on different dimensions, yet maintaining their separate identities. He went so far to say that human beings embody a phylogeny reflecting this evolutionary development of the universe.

Characterizing each level according to Degrasse's quantum representation of dimension-dependent Planck-scaled simplices, Romanov's homotopic transformations linked these planes of existence and succeeded in integrating them towards ultimate unity. The layers stacked up congruently based on Degrasse's transform indicating that in the primordial past they were one. Though this idea was tentatively accepted at the time, he lost the scientific community when he speculated that life would be present at all levels. However, thanks mostly to the quark drive, once quantum space became an everyday fact, the idea reappeared on the forefront, but as no lifeforms were ever found in that space [and have not been as of this writing] it eventually dropped off the radar. Pseudo-religious cults co-opted its pandemic message which further discredited his view.

Now, however, a fire had been lit. The Council of Scientists in charge of the project, with the eager support of the military who saw their peripheral role change to one of defending against a potential and extremely powerful foe, gathered together on Hawking-I for a conference to discuss the matter. They listened to the ship's recordings of the voice and the testimonies of Commander Eckart and his officers, read all the reports and studied the preliminary assessments, and watched the videos right up to the plunge into the black hole. The roomful of thinkers grew silent after that. It was all too real; they each huddled within themselves, emotionally feeling what should've been the inevitable squish.

The conference went on for days, spreading throughout the capital city of Stephanos. Bars, restaurants, hotel rooms, parks, street corners, everyone, even average citizens, discussed the story and professed their wonder and astonishment. At the inner-sanctum circle of acclaimed scientists and brilliant engineers, you could cut the hubris with a knife. That very same inflated sense of self responsible for the death knell of the home world--Earth--dominated rational thought. Their certainty was impervious to the inconceivable and unconstrained by common sense. They knew they were right, and that was that; all it takes is for everybody to agree.

The voice had pointed out at the onset of his talk that his race not only possessed the innate gift of telepathy, but also they'd arrived at their present state of being through a long process of evolution. The council knew that, they listened to the recording. But the voice's assertion that Eckart, and by extension, all humans, because of their natures, would not understand, could not comprehend, how they were able to control the material universe by thought energy, went unheeded; in fact, it was taken as an insult, unwarranted and unacceptable. They believed, based on evidence to support such belief and suppressing what didn't, it was an ability that could be learned with proper instruction, like anything else.

A plan unfolded. The engineers presented an idea, or rather, half an idea. Since early in the 21st century, the metallurgical technique of crystal hybridization and molecular deformation was known. The process involved infusing a genetically engineered microbe into the interstitial spaces within the atomic lattice of a compliant metal in order to alter its molecular configuration. The metalic crystal assimilates the inherent characteristics of the genome and thereby conforms to the symbiotic lattice realignment through biomagnetic means. In this way the hybrid surface appears to sensors as organic. As a living thing it can learn and adapt to circumstances, within limits, in order to present the optimal morphological profile. In other words, the microbial DNA transfers raw intelligence to the metal; specifically, to the properties, both chemical and geometric, that have emerged due to the crystal realignment. The conviction was that if a ship was encased in such an alloy, it would be invisible to thought energy.

At any rate, that's what it said in the brochure; how it performs on the road remained to be seen.

However, with the exception of Samuelson, Romanov, and a few others, no one on the council really grasped the nature of thought energy. They imagined it to be equivalent to brain waves--fluctuations of electrical potential. It wasn't commonly realized that the concept referred to a field, what the alien voice called a psychic field, underpinning the zero-point energy of all fields in the vacuum of spacetime.

Another fact not being given warranted attention--purposely ignored, actually--was that the beings they encountered lived there in an elementary form, resonating with the primordial essence, yet able to adopt the properties of quantum space and ordinary spacetime at will, and, to read and manipulate peoples' minds from an unknown distance and reshape and reconstruct the matter that surrounds them. Clearly, the problem of detection was not simply a question of blocking electrochemical brain waves, alien brain waves, at that. But even though the idea of a psychic field was argued over somewhat insightfully, those members more influential with the spacer project believed they--Eckart and crew--had been deliberately misled, victims of an elaborate hoax, a sleight of hand concocted from language in the ship's archives designed to impress the gullible.

The human propensity for seeing conspiracies and underhanded dealings everywhere infected the conference like a plague. In time, the majority arrived at a consensus: these beings were extremely advanced when it came to technology and the understanding of forces of nature in their particular universe. Nothing more. What their planet really looks like is anybody's guess. To the dismay of those like professor Samuelson, a motion was carried to send a crusier equipped with the latest weaponry to determine the truth. Such knowledge would bring a major leap for humans in the colonization of the multiverse.

Captain Brian Coary and Commander Brian Eckart had been good friends since the academy. Over recent history they hadn't seen much of each other, it was rare to be in town at the same time. So their get-together at the Shamrock Club had double meaning. Over drinks, Eckart told the story from beginning to end, a more human and emotional rendition than what appeared on his deposition. He let Coary know what he was really getting into; not the crap the council was shoveling. The black hole was real, the gravity was real. How his ship ended up here is just another page in their book of secrets.

But Coary had his doubts. What Eckart described could still've been accomplished by technology no human has ever dreamed. He'd read about the time before quark drive and couldn't imagine what it must've been like when quantum space was subsequently discovered. Technology. His friend was a man not easily fooled, but, nonetheless, who can guess what a far more advanced species knows how to do? Civilizations whose science is a million years old? Using the offset properties of a parallel universe, he considered, we're able to project false images that move and behave as real. So, aren't they doing the same thing? He brooded in a quandary, he didn't like quandaries. He needed to decide. Either way, he didn't see them as potential enemies or evil. They could've killed Eckart and his crew, destroyed the ship, but they didn't. In fact, they could've sent them anywhere, but instead, the Octavius popped into our universe at home base. That has to mean something.

He sat at the controls of the hundred-meter long cruiser, waiting. Finally, the moment arrived. He could feel his ship twist and turn as it strained to line up precisely along the baseline vector linking his universe with that of the thought beings, or eggheads, as they were being called by the crew. The membranes separating the two mingled and pulsed, magnetic lines of force structuring the spacer's universe phase-shifted to coincide with the frequency of the other. The connection was never isomorphic, other universes had their unique set of orchestrating forces, some overlapped more than others. The wavefunctions delineating the web of forces comprising the fingerprint of each parallel world abruptly merged as though drawn to one another.

Leaning forward, he studied his screen as the schematic interpretation played out. A circle of lines around the point representing the ship converged like train tracks on the horizon, telescoping, equidistant from the point; they were riding the baseline through the middle. The tips of the force lines touched and melded; Coary punched the pedal and away they shot. The strain was enormous, time elementals pulled and pushed, outlines and surfaces of the bridge and instrument consoles wavered as though under water. The organic-metal sheathing recently applied to the exterior hull counteracted the ship's usual erratic, twisting contortions. If that's all it does, thought Coary, it's still worth the expense. In a moment, a very long moment, they were through, into the other universe expanding out in all directions limitlessly. The backdoor at the convergence plane was closed.

Coary got right down to business, he had a job to do and that was all he wanted to think about. His nav-officer laid in the course through quantum space and awaited the order to engage. When Coary was on mission, he took on a separate persona. In addition, that special talent we spoke of in the beginning came to the fore. Simply put: when in a parallel universe, he was able to see the ship and all its contents on a quantum level. He attributes this to the emergent properties of conflicting temporal rates-of-change combined with the unexpected skewing of the spatial realignment. Over millions of years the human brain has adapted to the physical dimensions of our universe. When in another one, everything, ordinarily, appears the same; however, the brain, operating on a quantum level, knows it ain's so. There are pills to take to ward off the associated headaches.

Something triggered it, he knew, some fleeting configuration where quantum reality meets classical. Perhaps it's a nascent quality of humans, he'd reflected, emerging due to the stimulus of quantum space, the brain's new environment. But, whatever the cause, no one else he knew, no one on his ship, at any rate, had the same experience or had aquired the same ability. It was peculiar and unique, which is why he was chosen for this undertaking.

On his first mission, the one that went terribly wrong resulting in the deaths of half the crew, in the midst of the turmoil he was suddenly able to see where the baseline vector--the flat path through the rough sea--was in space itself. A fortunate turn of events as instrumentation, not fully tested until then, failed to perform adequately, corrupted by streams of particles not allowed for in their programming. It was he who took the helm and turned the ship into that life-saving direction. With experience, and with a supreme act of will, he learned to alter his perspective depending on need. Perceiving things in their actual interrelations on more than one level simultaneously produced a mental picture of fields and forces acting on fields that allowed him to intercede, if necessary, to correct a problem, perhaps imminent, before it manifested in the classical realm. It was handy.

The captain gave the order to engage at maximum speed and retired to his quarters. But no sooner had he sat in front of his desk that he recalled Eckart's warning and decided to play it cautiously. He commed the nav-officer and told him to take up a position outside the star system of the thought beings. If they were as powerful as was described, they might still detect their presence. It was a chance he had to take. He called his engineer for a consult. He asked him to configure a probe that was masked to radiate a quantum signature. He believed the thought beings would perceive it as nothing more than a coalescence of random particles, temporarily bonding into a pattern discernable, but not accepted as, a single wavefunction, like faces in the clouds. He felt like he was sneaking up on a sleeping bear without even the benefit of a sharp stick. The weaponry, of which he was familiar, would have little meaning if indeed they could transmute ordinary material objects into whatever they wanted--a field of daisies--and radiation qualified as such.

The probe would be designed to detect technology, as usual. The problem with that is, as always, the designation of what constituted technology was strictly human and based on what they'd discovered thus far in their expeditions. It was quite possible, in other words, that the technology of the thought beings didn't fall under the conventional criterion, limited as it was. He remembered in Eckart's depostion that the sensors continued to indicate through the entire affair the presence of a technological civilization, in spite of the thought being's hacking into all the other systems, including the isolated archives. They could've easily caused the sensors to read anything. So, perhaps they knew of Octavius's presence and mission description on entering their space and deliberately baited them in with a false reading. But why if they wished to be alone?

The more he thought about it, the less sense it made. What they had going for them was that the thought beings probably weren't anticipating a return visit; who would be that stupid? He had to laugh, loudly: We have the element of surprise. The Edgar Poe made astonsihing headway is this novel parallel. It reminded Coary of field trips with his dad and uncle when a boy on Hawking-II. They used to canoe down streams, with him in the middle, occasionally joining with other streams at their confluence. The swollen stream, become a river, rushed faster and faster as they neared the Newcolorado River. That's what it felt like now. He could see streams of free particles begin to move in the same direction. At first, the interference patterns appeared chaotic and mutually annihilating, generating swirls within swirls. But a point came when all the systems, the vast set of interactions, stopped dead. An impossibility, thought Coary. The very definition of quantum particles is that they don't stand still. But as soon as he noticed it, the complex set of atomic ensembles that collectively constituted the ship and all its contents shifted to form harmonious contours in space, fans or feathers perfectly arranged, overlapping congruently without discord. The ship increased speed.

The entangled mass formed a single wavefunction composed of the countless waveforms of the entirety--the ship, the people--all moving through a quantum space that itself was flowing in the same direction. Not like a leaf on the stream, but as active participants. A memory popped into his head. He was a boy playing at the ocean beach. It was his first encounter with undertow. Thigh-high, he remembered how the receding wave threatened to take him with it. That was how he felt now. Some force beyond anything he could comprehend was drawing all space and time and everything embedded in it towards a single location. His nav-officer informed him their trajectory would bring them to the planet of the thought beings, bypassing their destination outside the star system. What had they gotten themselves into? It occurred to the skipper that while in transit, it would be impossible for the thought beings, or anyone else, for that matter, to know exactly where they were. Spread out across quantum space, they could be traversing any path. Only when they surfaced into ordinary spacetime would they become vulnerable. However, arriving at their desired position outside the star system had become a moot point.

Motion increased as though approaching a waterfall, Coary hadn't much time to come up with a plan. He didn't know what to expect, of course, but he didn't like being out of control, at someone's mercy. He thought to turn the ship around, try to escape the undertow and abandon the mission. But he knew if he did, assuming they could pull away from what must be an enormous force, they would most likely never send another expedition. And he would be disgraced, having returned without knowing why. Fear of the unknown didn't go down well with the Rangers.

A meeting with his senior staff was called hastily. Lieutenant Omara, quantum field officer and chief mathematician, aproached the situation in her usual way: isolate the problem, define the problem, analyze the problem. Then, find the solution she always believed was there. After the captain laid it all out as best he could, including what he could see with his quantum eyes that they couldn't, she offered a piece of information seldom applied, "Spacetime has dimensions that change depending on the scale, and the dimensions could have fractal properties on small scales. Finley probably knows this better than me. Wasn't there experimental work trying to reduce scale while in quantum space by inverting the quark crystal in the generator?"

Lieutenant Finley was their resident engineering genius. For several years he taught at the Hawking-I Institute of Technology, instructing the next generation of space engineers on the ins-and-outs of the quark-field generator while improving on its performance. He knew things it could do that its inventor didn't. The way he saw it, ordinary spacetime was the crust of a great sphere, and the quantum world, the warm, cozy interior. When he first experienced it on a research mission as a visiting scientist, he was hooked. He quit teaching that year and joined the Space Rangers. He was aware of what she was referring to, had read the journals, watched the holovids. It was based on a simple understanding of topological space, but one that was never taken seriously as a practical application.

"Yes, but before they inverted it, they first realigned the atomic lattice to conform to the Sierpinski topology, which affects the fractal displacement--the time dimension--standing it on end, so to speak, after which the frequency of the lattice as a unit had to be precisely counterbalanced atom cluster by atom cluster. And when that was finished, the whole of the crystal was tuned.

"Needless to say, the equipment to do the job is far more sophisticated than what we have onboard. We could try on the spare, in case we screw it up. If we succeed, driving the generator to full capacity with the inverted crystal will cause the energy of the surrounding quark-bubble to increase in intensity until a phase transition reduces the enveloping quantum space to two dimensions. I'd like to point out, though, that in two-dimensional space, there won't be any gravity. All the magnetic lines of space would be straight as well. Because of orthogonal lines, in a flat, cross-hatch space of this type the resultant electromagnetic force is zero and no structures can exist. That could be a problem when it comes to navigating. Our nav-computer may not be able to compensate; it's designed for multiple dimensions. We'd have to see."

"We'd have to see," retorted Lieutenant Kelly, the medical officer, in mock disbelief. "Are you crazy?"

"But isn't there a runaway danger?" asked Omara, ignoring her colleagues not unexpected outburst. "The number of dimensions could simply collapse in a process called spontaneous dimensional reduction as the scale reduces. We'd have a cascading effect, a chain reaction. Space and time without dimension would be..."

"Prespacetime, primordial potential with an innate proclivity," the captain interrupted.

"Or the center of a black hole," retorted Omara.

"What are you people talking about?" interjected Kelly. "How are we supposed to exist in a two-D space?"

"We don't," replied Omara. "All the quantum information constituting this ship and us can be imposed holographically on a membrane of quantum space. We won't notice any difference, but from the outside, we will cease to exist in three-D space."

The good doctor didn't seem all that satisfied with the answer. Techy talk never sufficed. "Have you ever done this," she asked. "Have you been pasted onto an imaginary pane of glass?

"Well, no," she admitted. "But I understand the principles, the engineering part." Leaning forward, arms on the table, a trickle of urgency spilled out, "We're just brainstorming here. We're racing towards who knows what without a plan. If nothing else, we should be prepared to do something. In two-D space, we may not be detectable by the eggheads and could slip away if need be. Or, find out what's really going on."

Ordinarily, a probe sent into another timeline returned with either nothing or locations of possibly advanced civilizations worth investigating. That way they were able to align the portals accordingly and enter the timeline somewhat near the first prospective planet on the list. The convergent plane, the confluence interconnecting timelines, didn't meet at some imaginary end, like a river mouth. Any generalized barycentric coordinate in the other universe can map to any in ours and thus, the two loci are brought together and a portal can be formed, depending, of course, on local conditions. But on this trip they didn't necessarily want to advertise their intended visit. They had the address, that was all. Entering their space from what they thought was a safe distance also seemed prudent. Hence the journey. Consequently, and fortunately, it gave them some time, but that too seemed to be drifting away. Finley and his engineering team, along with Omara and her assistants, went right to work.

Coary was a diehard optimist, he believed in himself and his crew; nonetheless, he always gave some thought to the worst case scenario. Oftentimes, he's found, thinking about it with the idea of preparing a solution in the eventuality reveals, startlingly, that the worst case may actually be the best hope. Serendipity can never be underestimated. He remembered something his physics teacher at the academy said to him once, 'It's not so much the fabric of spacetime as it is the crocheted bedspread of spacetime.' The discontinuities were holes--the irrational numbers interspersed amongst the rationals in the real continuum--less in area than the conventionally accepted limit of Planck's. If, as a result of this spontaneous dimensional reduction cascade, the ship and they were to become enwrapped in an idealized point, a capsule of thought energy, small enough to fall through the holes, they'd be immersed in the primordial sea, that psychic field of which professor Samuelson spoke.

His thinking altered dramatically once at sea; it changed his head. Now, in the midst of his element, he was convinced the Edgar Poe was the wrong choice for the job, he felt it in his gut. Sixty crew on a 300-foot cruiser armed to the teeth, all of whom, front-liners and support, were keyed on enforcement. They should've sent a research vessel, a scout ship like before. If the thought beings haven't already done so, they'll read our computers and instruments, and minds, as they did with the Octavius, and determine who we are and what we're about. His ship had research capabilities as do all the ships in the spacer fleet, it went with the territory. But a scout/recon boat was all about information retrieval and environmental assessment, no weapons, ships designed specifically for exploring timelines, alternate worlds. Will they be as kind to us as they were to them? He didn't know what to expect, he was playing in somebody else's schoolyard and didn't know the home rules.

As the story went: Before there was ordinary, multi-dimensional spacetime; before there were quanta of force particles and infinite fields of energy; there was only thought energy and consciousness. In that sea of empty form and formless emptiness, random bits of information and archetypal symbols joined to form ideas without context, logical structure emerging from the raw, amorphous Unconscious. These built upon themselves, expanding to ever more complex arrangements of order and consequence, to meaning and significance, forming families of patterns of invariant properties, the fundamental structure of the multiverse. And the rest is evolution and development.

That used to just be a myth, Coary reflected, a philosophical belief that looked a lot like parts of other beliefs. The essential import was blurred by association with other schools of thought and traditions concerned with metaphysical reality. Then, quantum space was discovered and old questions on the nature of reality were revived and given serious, in-depth thought and analysis. The usual fuzzy picture capable of shapeshifting at a moment's initial-condition change had to be resolved, made crisp and clear.

In the early wild and woolly frontier days of colonization and expansion, the freighter and passenger traffic lanes between Hawking-I and Hawking-II were occasionally harried by marauding pirates. Breakdowns of private ships and space debris hazarding navigation were problems seeking solutions as well. The interstellar lanes connecting local star systems covered vast areas and were extremely vulnerable, especially around the outer worlds of mining colonies and those still terraforming. Law was hard to come by. Occurrences were infrequent at the time, but with burgeoning populations in the sector, incidents increased until a general clamor reverberated across the net.

So, an independent organization was conceived and inaugurated through an alliance with all in the sector who wished to join, the homebase was on Hawking-I. A security force with state-of-the-art ships, weaponry, and training facilities was assembled. Their mission, simply put: to protect lives and commercial traffic and rescue whoever needed it and capture or kill the perpetrators of piracy. Their autonomy assured no sides would be taken despite constant clandestine, and sometimes not so, attempts to appropriate their mandate by the militaries of the Alliance worlds. Their independence was their pride.

When parallel universes were discovered and the joint-project founded, their mission not only expanded in scope, but took on a whole other component. Traveling between timelines was an unanticipated addition to their job description and one that offered novel complex challenges and bizarre incredible adventures. Notwithstanding the occasional shoot-out, patrolling traffic lanes can be boring.

They, the regulars patrolling traffic lanes and the special force engaged in timeline exploration, adopted the name Space Rangers in reminiscence of the old Texas Rangers. They were the law.

However, Coary was convinced, not on this trip. He watched from his command seat on the bridge as patterns of quanta, reflecting their classical manifestation, seemed to curve slightly in a downward direction; although he had no physical sensation of falling. Scanning the bridge, no on else seemed to notice the sudden change in vector. The nav-officer informed him that the other versions of the Edgar Poe were converging.

It took some getting used to, psychological problems developed that had to be expunged or controlled. In the past, as the many versions of the Edgar Poe drew closer, the fear, or rather, the perplexity on everyone's mind had been what would happen to them when the ships all coalesced to become once again one? Even though each crew member believed he was on the real ship, they nonetheless wondered if they'd be doing the same thing in the same place after recoherence? By the very definition of superposition, what individuals were doing on each ship was distinctly different; in fact, someone could've had an accident or even died on another version, how would their other selves know? Much had to be accepted without rational understanding.

The inconceivable quantum trick responsible for such behavior, the hallmark of that space, is irreconcilable with common sense, of course. Individuals on each version of the ship go through their separate timeline trajectories as does the Edgar Poe its; the beginning wavefunction, comprising the ship and crew, is reestablished upon coalescence. Fine, well, and good; however, here's what causes considerable mental stress: each version is the real one, regardless of what transpired on each ship individually. It's hard to get your head around; actually, it's impossible, like trying to imagine something tangible like space being 'empty.' That's why acceptance is the rule of the day. Although no one ever felt fully comfortable with the idea of other versions of themselves doing who knows what on other ships, each a different probable expression of the Edgar Poe, these and related problems eventually fell by the wayside with time and experience.

Sensors detected nothing in the space anywhere around them. Engineer Finley commed him from the engineering room to tell him they had the workings of an inverted crystal, but that it could stand some refinement. They just didn't have the right equipment. Coary acknowledged and told him it would have to work; especially, if they were given no choice.

After convergence, they began to slow along with space itself, like metal filings trapped in a powerful magnetic field. Captain Coary customarily would order all hands to battle stations, red alert. But this time, to what end? he asked himself. Finley told him the specially designed probe was ready; Coary ordered it launched immediately. The ship decelerated further until it ceased all movement; quantum patterns resumed their symmetries, nothing in, nothing out. Still, no stars, galaxies, or nebulae appeared in the void surrounding them, not visually or by instruments. In fact, the main scanning array was not calibrated to register zero energy given the inherent energy of the vacuum. Consequently, it reported the minimum default value. The space around them was dead, lifeless, devoid of all materiality and the source of it. Nothing but blackness.

Coary stared into it searching for quanta, virtual particles, fleeting signs of radiation, but saw only a smooth, flat surface, but of what, he had no idea. He remembered when a kid at night in his bedroom; the chair bathed in a richer black than its surroundings. More trickery? he wondered. More hallucinations, delusions, misrepresntations like what Eckart saw? They were sitting in the middle of empty space where the planet of the thought beings was supposed to be, yet, somehow, it was shrouded by what to Coary seemed like magic. Maybe that's it, he mused, these people are wizards and witches in a world where magic trumps science and technology. Coary stood to pace the bridge, studying every screen as he went by. He was getting annoyed at this cat and mouse game, especially as he'd been the patient mouse all this time, not that he had much choice. The probe returned, its brain downloaded and decrypted.

Commander Brick Owens, chief executive officer, sat next to the skipper. Not noted for shyness, he hadn't said anything since the meeting. Finally, he blurted out, "We're being set up."

He caught the skipper in midthought. "What?"

"The council had its arm twisted. They sent us out here to provoke an incident. Whether these beings know how to use an energy source we are completely unaware of or possess technology so advanced it might as well be magic, the end result is the same. Eckart got thrown into a wormhole, a wormhole that had a mailing address deliberately, purposefully, etched into it. What power does it take to do that? They declared they don't want to be bothered, yet here we are, a fully-loaded cruiser coming to visit, to challenge their authority, to stick it in their face. To show contempt by an assertion of force. They're setting us up to fail so they can have the excuse for the war they want. They've convinced themselves this is just a matter of technology and they want it, they want the wormhole technology, transiting through the void separating parallel universes. But how the hell do they think they can defeat it in order to do that? These people, whoever they are, are far more advanced than we; they may not be using technology at all. Suppose they get pissed about all this poking and decide to declare war, invade our universe and wipe out the human race?"

He noticed his voice was getting louder and paused. Catching his breath, he continued in a more modulated tone, "Not much thought has gone into this. It was decided too hastily and cooler heads did not prevail. Professor Samuelson was dismissed; his ideas, even in the face of proof, were pushed aside. Old ways of thinking die hard. Poking a sleeping bear with a sharp stick isn't in the Ranger manual. We're bait!" Steam had run out; deflated, he reclined in his chair, fuming, but in control.

Coary had known Brick since his assignment to the Edgar Poe seven wild, turbulent years ago. He'd never shown cowardice or even trepidation in the heat of battle or when a major malfunction or damage endangered the ship. And he wasn't a whiner, it went against his grain. He was tough and stalwart and a cool-headed thinker. So these words did not come easily, words that had obviously been on his mind for some time. His concern for the crew and the ship was well-known. Coary felt somwhat abashed; he should've thought this mission through himself before leading his entire crew into this predicament. He had his doubts from the outset, especially after talking to his friend Eckart. But he was a cruiser captain, he followed orders, orders that sometimes made little sense. However, it was all moot. They were here now and they'd better get a handle on the situation. He told his exec as much--in more flowery terms--which snapped him out of it. Brick needed to get it off his chest, now he could devote his full attention to the present, and Coary needed commander Owens by his side, functioning on all thrusters.

Finley commed the skipper, "You're not going to believe this, captain. I'l send the video to your screen."

What they saw was a huge green and blue planet, a third larger than Earth. Covered in forests, grasslands, mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans, and wildlife everywhere, on land, air, and sea. Moreover, the entire planet was in pristine condition. No humanoid dwellings or towns or cities or infrastructure of any kind marred its spendor.

His gunnery officer informed him that weapons systems were offline. But it wasn't the result of computer malfunction, the weapons themselves had been rendered inoperative.

He'd had it. Dragged here by forces unknown against their will and now here they were, in orbit about a planet draped in shadow, waiting for the thought beings to make the first move. But cooling his heels in the face of possible catastrophe wasn't his style. If it was going to happen, he'd get in the first lick. He told Finley to send the coordinates of the planet's outline to navigation. How they were able to conceal it so effectively was a matter for later discussion, assuming they lived. He then ordered a course laid in to skim the surface, tree-top level; he was determined to find out if there actually was a planet where the probe indicated.

As he was about to give the order to plunge, an apparition at first, then a solid presence, materialized in front of him. It appeared human, not a hologrpahic projection; Coary's quantum eyes saw his wave patterns entangle with those around him. His face was old but chiseled, eyes, pale grey, and a short grey beard accentuated his chin. He wore Romanesque robes and sandles with a gold band tied around his waist. His demeanor expressed extraordinary calm, Coary could see no agitation or annoyance and certainly no worry in his aura. Apparently, he thought, they pulled this costume out of the archived storage on the Octavius, or it could be from the time they passed by Earth. No doubt the human form is also a fabrication. The bridge crew froze in place, looking to the skipper. He gestured as surreptitiously as he could to stand down. He was expecting something like this, only not so in your face. They were paying attention, monitoring, somehow. Reading our thoughts as well, perhaps. He figured they were and needed to test it.

The chronometer ticked. Coary was about to break the spell when the visitor said in perfectly enunciated english, "You people are persistent if nothing else. And exhausting. You were told not to return, and yet, here you are."

The skipper felt the imperative to speak, letting their guest take the initiative and dominate proceedings was not the smartest thing to do. "I am Captain Brian Coary of the Interplanetary Space Rangers, and this is my ship, Edgar Poe. We are emissaries from our worlds, we seek to make contact, to learn, and to extend the hand of peace."

"Peace? Your ship is one of war, that is its purpose. Did you think to intimidate us into being friends? To allowing you access to our world?"

"We've traveled far and along that route are many hostile planets. Our ship's weaponry is for defense only." He felt awful saying that. But at the moment and in the present circumstances he really couldn't think of a valid reason for sending a cruiser to investigate. What could possibly be accomplished by a show of force hopelessly outclassed by the people you claim you only wish to contact? Perhaps it's as Brick said, we're bait.

"Captain, I can see you have doubts yourself, and so there is room for honesty."

"Really? Well then, is what we've seen of your world how it is, or is that a trick of some kind? And where are you people? We see no evidence of dwellings of any kind. Do you live below ground? What?"

At once the black disc covering the planet evaporated. The viewscreen clearly showed what they saw on the probe's video. "We informed your friend, Commander Eckart, that we are thought beings. We live in a realm you can't possibly know much less contact. Nevertheless, we are adopting this medium so we may express to you the hopelessness of your endeavor. We have no wish to harm you, you and your species are of no threat to us. You may be pawns in a military game, but such ploys will not receive the desired response. You are clearly out of your league."

He paused to let that sink in. Mincing words was obviously not what these people were famous for. "What you see of our planet is who we are. All the living creatures we choose to be in the universe of matter. But what we truly are by nature can only be experienced."

With that, both he and captain Coary vanished. He found himself outside the ship floating in space hundreds of meters away enveloped by the vacuum. Below, the huge planet revolved majestically. Instinctively, he put a hand on his chest, but had no trouble breathing and was warm in spite of the near absolute zero of empty space. And, most appreciatively, he didn't explode. A voice inside his head said, "In this realm the thought energy that is essentially you can stand alone. You are unique, captain. Your ability to perceive quantumly will allow you to bridge to our world; at least, in the forms presented to you."

He swung down to land on the surface in a field of green dotted with wildflowers, a swift stream ran nearby. The sweet smells and sounds of the water and birds and other animals was almost overwhelming. The air was crisp and clear, tingling his face in the gentle sun. His host appeared beside him, dressed now in jeans, a tee shirt and cowboy boots; wearing a ball-cap over long hair. Coary almost burst out laughing.

He walked over to a moss-covered rock and sat, taking obvious pleasure in the soft, scented breeze. "The universe is but an idea forever expanding in intricate complexity, flourishing in arbitrary archetypes of raw psychic energy. And these nascent ideas come together by affinity of purpose and identity, created to serve a mental attitude or to clothe an intuition.

"Ideas fleshed-out by words, if spoken in the right sequence with the right emotion to the right people at the right time and place, can alter the destiny of an entire population, and by extension, an entire civilization. Or, they can organize and formalize an insight into the nature of reality, and by so doing, foster a more intimate understanding. Thought energy. You are aware of it but you are not of it. You are of the material plane and so are affected by the final state, the practical implications and consequences of actions based ultimately on thought energy are all that you, and by you I mean your entire species, know.

"Abstract thought about the nature of reality, mathematics, these come close to touching that energy, but because you are of the matter realm, your thoughts will always stand out and be distinguished from the background psychic field.

"Perhaps you will evolve to that transition in a million years or so. If you live that long, that is. Questionable, as you do not seem to be able to learn important lessons, you keep repeating the same mistakes based on what didn't work in the past. To whit--your uninvited visit in a ship of combat. How disappointing."

Wishing to quickly side-step that issue, Coary said, "I have some questions, if you don't mind. How were you able to create a wormhole or whatever that was that sucked the Octavius in right here where this very solid-feeling planet is?"

He made a show of wiping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, then put it in his back pocket and smiled mischievously. Immediately, the planet was gone. In its place, a swirling mass of rich, black nothingness appeared. Coary couldn't contain his horror. His host hovered nearby, calm and unconcerned. Suspended in space, Coary watched waves of particles swirl in, spiraling down into the great opening, ripped apart to mere quarks and gluons, photons and neutrinos, until nought was left but a smear of primordial formless energy.

"The center of this creation," the host said directly to Coary's mind, "is devoid of space and time, spirit and consciousness, empty of any elemental forms of life. A blank slate on which the universe has been written by force of will. That is what drives all things."

He watched the awesome, violent action of the beast in disbelief. To imagine that the thought beings possessed such power was impossible to grasp.

"Grow up, Captain Coary, you and your people. That is the message we officially give to report to your leaders. Now, good bye."

Amidst confusion, a stunned Captain Coary materialized in his command seat, looking flush. The planet below, visible on the viewscreen, looked the same as before, nature in its most robust and healthy. The thought beings. Enjoying manifestation for its own sake.

He called a meeting of his top people and described, as best he could, what he experienced, emphasizing the size of the black hole, and repeated the visitor's words, almost verbatim. When he finished, no one said anything, a blanket of cold shock descended on the room. He could tell what was on everyone's mind, however. The doctor stood behind her chair and spoke for all, "Let's get the hell out of here."

Usually, her outcries of pessimism were amusing in their expectation, but her calm controlled sincerity this time erased any lingering uncertainties in the minds of the others, if indeed, there were any.

The skipper concurred and no one disagreed. What would be the point? Everything that happened, the bizarre conversation, the on-again, off-again view of the planet, and his experience outside the ship was recorded. He ordered the nav officer to plot a course home. Finley wished they'd had the chance to test the inverted crystal, to see if indeed they could fall through the cracks of the universe. Next time, Coary reassured him.

The thought beings offered no resistance to their departure. Coary supposed they could've launched them through a wormhole similar to Eckart's to land at the docking bay. But he'd rather not go through the whole ordeal; perhaps they respected that; he didn't know and didn't care.

On the trip home he spent most of it alone, reflecting on recent events, letting his exec run things. He recalled peering into the abyss of nothingness. It wanted to draw his lifeforce to it, he could feel it. But he resisted by a sheer act of will. Could that be what his host had referred to?

Captain Coary wasted no time; he was pissed. Immediately upon docking, he went directly to Space Fleet Headquarters and demanded to see the chief administrators on the panel in charge of parallel universe exploration. As a star-cruiser captain, he could do that. He accused the Council of Scientists of collusion with the joint military alliance; their intention: instigate a war. Why else send a cruiser? The panel was outraged; instantly, the news went up the chain of command. Admiral Kaplinsky, reigning head of all operations in this sector, wanted to know who authorized sending a fully-loaded cruiser on a diplomatic mission to an alien people whose overwhelming power had already been demonstrated and documented by the Octavius? He was informed by one of his staff that, ordinarily, how selection works is a request is made by the council through regular channels and an available ship assigned. Apparently, no eyebrows were raised for a cruiser; a request from the council had never been denied. And in this case, approval had been rushed through. Moreover, the Edgar Poe had been specifically asked for because of Captain Coary's special talent. Scuttlebutt had been circulating for months that bureaucratic wheels were being greased with credits, accelerating the whole process to a point where it'd become automatic and perfunctory, but no one in authroity had bothered to follow it up. It seemed harmless and only a handful of people were involved.

The panel ordered a tribunal selected to conduct a thorough inquiry on the deepest level, corruption and mismanagement must be weeded out. The wild frontier ways were over; it was time to tighten the ship. A reorganization was long overdue; the state-of-affairs had become critical. It'd moved beyond accountability and therefore imperiled everyone. All the particpants, including those who were aware of the situation but didn't report it, woud be dismissed, kicked out of the Space Rangers. Slovenly behavior would no longer be tolerated.

Concern was also far reaching at the highest level of government on both Hawking worlds. What happened? they wanted to know. Sending a fighting ship as a supposed emissary endangered all humanity. Somebody was going to pay with his head. The Council of Scientists overseeing the parallel universe project was going to be purged of special interests and permanently disasociated from direct dealings with Space Fleet. From now on, an intermediary committee consisting of section commanders would be assigned to assess requests. Their contract was nullified, a new one would have to be negotiated; obviously, more oversight was called for. And the joint alliance militaries would no longer have anything to do with the project, they were out; they had some purging to do themselves. Somebody wanted a war.

Time to reset, clean house, and work out the bugs. A heavy reshuffling was coming down.

After days of debriefing, Captain Coary was given six weeks leave. He retired to his beach house on Lake Dyson out on the West End. Its decor and rustic ambience--casual, comfortable, bohemian--contrasted sharply with the streamlined sterile logic of the Edgar Poe. It was as far away from it as you could get. He invited professor Samuelson for dinner and conversation, occasionally. They talked far into the night over cognac, sitting on the front porch in the warm lake air. The professor helped Coary find words to describe and clarify his perception of the thought beings and their realm.

After a few weeks, the professor left town for Hawking-II to hold a conference on the nature and hypothesized lifestyle of thought beings and, especially, to resuscitate and validate Romanov's treatise speculating that life exists on every level of the multiverse.

Coary sat on the porch watching the sun set behind the snow-covered mountains in the distance. A few clouds played every color of the rainbow. Sipping bourbon on the rocks, he recalled the host when he appeared on the bridge. Coary's quantum eyes could tell by his body's interaction with its immediate surroundings that indeed he was emulating a biological human. But, it takes more than that to be human, more than simulated biology. At root, each human is an emergent self on every level, not merely a physical manifestation fabricated for show. There was no person there, just a presence, a collection of forces masquerading as something it could never understand.

He remembered what he observed on their planet, a larger version of Earth as it may have been during more prolific times before humans showed up. He believed the tableau plucked from prehistory was for their benefit but couldn't be sure. However, the flora and fauna--the thought beings--felt hollow, devoid of spirit, divested of the vivid intensity of authentic nature. Their world of creature-manifestations was a thought-generated model, the perfect ideal, shorn of any and all imperfections and peculiarities, of any and all inherited tendencies or traits prodding weird eccentric behavior. Beings of matter artificially created out of the primordial sea by an act of will on thought, bringing forth corporeality, imitating ordinary spacetime matter, co-existing in unnatural balance and rationally-imposed harmony. Their aliveness was a facade, a presumption of spacetime life. Their plane of existence may be able to interact with ours in an equivalent form, occupying the same space, but the content, the inner works, are completely and distinctly different; that is to say, the capacity to interact with doesn't make them of. Different dimensions of reality cohabitate in any universe or across universes, but those planes are self-contained and disjointed by nature and necessity.

He preferred this stage of evolution, if indeed there were more to come. Senses, sensations, emotions, dreams, love, friendship, loyalty, integrity, a personality, all the things that compose a human being and give meaning to life.