Skipping Stone

The stars are too cruel out in the void. "Cruel" seems like the right word to you. Being in orbit is fine: with Earth taking up a good slice of the view, at least in orbit you have something to orient on. But out here, only ¼ of one degree along Earth’s orbit toward L5 home wouldn't be more than a blot in the black if you could see it. But to do that you'd have to go outside to look back past the bulk of your tiny ship, which you certainly do not want to do! ¼ of one degree doesn't sound very far, but you've done the math and it sucks.

You don’t want to keep on gazing out into the dark, but there's nothing else to do. Edwin sits at the helm, glaring out into the empty like a taut hawk poised to sink its beak into the entrails of some warm, squirming morsel. You're sat behind his shoulder at the navigator’s station, which is currently announcing in strident flashing letters that there isn't enough fuel to make it home, and you're going to die. Edwin had assured you he had a plan, and you'd believed him, but the red-bordered notices are eroding your confidence. You certainly hadn’t had the chance to bring a book or knitting on this strange errand, so there was nothing else to do but stare out the main canopy at the big empty. There is no shelter. The cosmos glares crushingly down at you, affirming that you're nothing but an insignificant blot. Less than, in fact.

You finally work up the nerve to interrupt Edwin's brood, and ask, “Should we um…”

“Hush, Kris.” he says, without taking his gaze off the vast empty. Dr. Edwin Haskell Rattleboot normally wasn’t so cold, at least not to you. He hangs his tablet in the air where you can see it. There's a countdown on the screen fast approaching zero. He continues with a more measured voice, “Please. Patience.”

You press, “I just thought we should prime the long-range sensors, if we’re to watch the Skipping Stone’s next blink?”

Edwin gawps one of his sudden, inward laughs. "Oooh, 'long-range.' Just you wait."

Seeing the Skipping Stone is why you're way out here, though Edwin's been short on details. The Skipping Stone had first been spotted weeks ago, hurtling through the Kuiper Belt at a little over 150km/s, faster than any comet or indeed any man-made object. It had whizzed past many of the larger objects out there, banking and slowing slightly in the tug of their gravity fields. Zippy as it was, it had had no energy signature. All the data mankind could get on it had showed it to be just another rock a few kilometers across, an extra-solar wanderer with a fair sight more oomph than any we’d recorded to date. A curiosity among astronomers, but not really a news item.

Then it had skipped out of existence and reappeared several billion kilometers inward, slipping into an aerobraking hyperbola through Neptune’s upper atmosphere. The whole world had started watching then, tracking as it blinked across the void to Uranus, aerobraking again, then skipping off to each planet in turn, changing course, bleeding off speed and then skipping right over the billions of kilometers of empty space between.

You push back against Edwin's brush-off. “I still don’t get how we’re going to see it skip to Mars any better from out here than all the people and fancy kit crowded out at L2.” You usually trust Edwin — he was way smarter than you, and you're no dunce — but this really made no sense. He’d grabbed you out of your cubby on ZenithTech’s orbital lab, wild-eyed and whispering about correlations and the rewards of risk. You'd followed him, skulking through the station, and taken one of the station’s in-system shuttles out of dock. You'd barely gotten strapped in when he'd fired up a full burn, hurling the shuttle far out of Earth Local and back along Earth’s orbit toward L5. That had been hours ago, and he still hadn't explained himself. So you press, “Really, if you want to see anything, we need to give the LRS time to—”

The timer hit zero.

Edwin made his hand into a finger-gun and pointed at a blot that had just appeared against the stars far ahead and shouted, “There!”

A split-second later your nav station lights up with proximity alerts. Your breath catches. One moment there was nothing but void. And now something's there. Big, dark, and coming at you.

Edwin crows, “Hah! If I could see those gobshites from the Frame Institute and the rest of the rabble at L2! We got the drop on them, Kris! We got the drop on them hard!”

“Wait,” you blurble. It's impossible, but it is, and it takes your brain a moment to accept the dissonance. “is-issat the Skipping Stone?” Scanner data pours across your screens: the object is several kilometers across its thickest point; velocity around 50km/s; composition mostly carbon, stone, metals. So the Skipping Stone definitely isn’t a Kuiper Belt native, which are primarily frozen volatiles. You gape at Edwin and say, “H-how? How'd you know? Everyone thought... But how'd you...?”

You can see the Skipping Stone now. you're the first people to visually examine the thing, and it's terrifying. It was shaped somewhat like a bedbug, a flattened lump with jagged black peaks jutting from its edge like teeth, and craggy ridges crossing its flanks.

“In a moment.” Edwin wedges his tablet in a crevice and starts toggling sliders on the control panel, warming up the engines. “First we need to grab a ride. Find us a cozy anchor site, would you? We'll be flying off-the-cuff, as it were, but a target would really help.” He spins our ship about and firs a burn to push us along parallel to the Skipping Stone's trajectory.

The words ring like static in your head. He meant to land? It's coming up fast, from behind that he's turned the shuttle about. You're anchored to your chair, accelleration weighing like a mountain on you. But even at maximum burn you'll never match velocity. The nav panel confirms; the Skipping Stone will still be going 10km/s faster than you when your courses intersect, unless you jettisoned some significant mass and burn the main thrusters dry. The last two hundred years of advancements in spaceflight have spacecraft design quite a ways, but not far enough to survive getting slapped with a mountain at 10 km/s relative velocity! The ship'll shatter like an egg! There are a million ways to die attempting to intercept that thing! On the other hand, there's not enough fuel to make it back home, and life suppot might not keep you alive long enough to drift and wait for a rescue.

“Kris!” Edwin bellows and he white-knuckles the controls through the hard burn that's shaking your tin can like a rock tumbler. “Find me a site!” He toggles a few more sliders on his screens. Hollow thuds ring through the hull, and the ship lurches like the end of the world. “I don’t fancy eenie-meenie-ing this one!”

You lunge forward, bashing Edwin aside and taking control of the console. He fights and curses, but you manage to steer the ship out of its intercepting trajectory, turn it back toward Earth and cut the burn. The Skipping Stone pulls ahead, a jagged leviathan rising from below, filling your field of view, and then dwindling.

Edwin shoves you off. I get back to your station, happy to still be alive. He turns his chair about, and you expect him to be angry. But instead he just looks mournful, face slack and stunned. his voice is so quiet as he says, “You fool. You’ve killed us.”

You shake your head, anger rising red and hot, and say, “We would have smashed to splinters against that thing. We weren’t nearly matching its—”

Edwin cuts you off. “We were a moment away from sync. I’d just dumped the hab and LRS modules. Lightened the load on the engines.

”You did what?” You look back through the rear port of the command module. The hatch was shut. Through the clear panes you see the edge of the aft boost ring. The shuttle is a modular tube with two bracelets: the fore and aft boost rings. you should be looking through the window back through the narrow passage of the long-range sensor and comms module into the hab module, which housed the bunks, full-service head, the majority of the rations, and the powerful life support. Instead you see the aft boost ring, where it's pulled forward to nestle agains the fore boost ring. And beyond that, the cruel stars in an empty void. You shudder and sort of wheeze. you know exactly how far the remaining fuel will take you, exactly how many days’ of stale rations are stored in the command module’s emergency kit, exactly how long a distress signal sent with the command module’s standard Earth-local grade systems would take to reach anyone, exactly how long the module's life support will hold out.

You know you are exactly dead.

You look at Edwin and try to say something. Nothing comes out. No words would be right. you looked past him to the big empty and the cruel stars, and wait.

You swipe all the warnings off the screen and bring up the scan data of the passing monster. Yuor stomach flips and churns under the pressure of this mad accelleration, but you force all those worries aside and focus. You think Need a crevasse, not a peak, so if we miss our grapple we might hitch up against the slope. You check the readouts, comparing relative velocity. You don't know where Edwin's found the thrust, but you're nearly matched, so hitching up might not destroy the shuttle. You thing, Also needed a high ferrous content for the mag-anchors to grab onto. We’d have bore-anchors if this were a mining rig, but ZT’s shuttles are just meant for ferrying about Earth-local, so why the bloody balls am I out here anyway?

Never mind. The choices dwindle, and you make your pick. A deep valley on the Skipping Stone’s back, ferrous mass in the floor, with an overhang or cave in the rear slope. Strange readings coming from the cave, but you feel good about the choice. Is it the scientist in me that's curious, or the cro-magnon that feels happy about shelter? The intercept solution's optimal, and you send the data to Edwin.

“Thanks,” he says. “Bringing us in.”

You relax, and the weight of thrust pushes you down into your chair, fingers clawing the arm-rests. Your task done, you're just a passenger for a moment, and finally have time to wonder how Edwin came up with the extra velocity. You remember the hollow thuds and calamatous lurching that shook the ship moments ago, and crane your neck to look back; the connecting hatch at the rear of the command module was sealed, and you see empty space framed by the boost rings, and the rising edge of one of the Skipping Stone’s ridges where the hab module should have been.

If this doesn't work, we're deader than dead. You succumb to the mania of the moment (a thin shield against anger and fear) and howl, “Hah-hah! You mad genius! You’d better not bung this up now!”

Knuckles white on the main controls, Edwin grits out, “Working on it!”

The crags rise higher to fore and aft, and you get the feeling of being swallowed whole. The shuttle bucks and shudders like an ill-maintained carnival ride from hell as Edwin giudes it down into the valley. your velociy and the Skipping Stone's are matched now, but each tiny correction as he dodges encroaching outcrops send up jets of volatiles boiled in the lash thruster exaust, bucking your ship off to the next collision course, ever downward. Proximity alarms pile up like rabid suitors as you near the bottom.

“Anchors!” shouts Edwin.

"Don't have to tell me twice!" you say. You fire four in sequence, long monofilament lines spooling out behind electromagnetic anchors that latch onto ferrous deposits. The lines grow taut as onboard motors level us out aft-down and draw the shuttle the last few meters down to touch skids to the anomalous asteroid.

The quiet is astounding.

Edwin powers down the flight systems, gives the silence an appropriate few moments to settle in, then turns about to cheer, “Bravely done!”

You say, “You’re off your tits,” but you're smiling, flushed with adrenaline.

Edwin scoffs. “Victory isn’t for the timid," he says. "Everyone else is still staring at Mars, wondering why it hasn’t turned up there. Wondering where their models went wrong. And here we’ve actually landed on the thing! Ooh!” He sets a vid recording and says, “'I, Dr. Edwin Haskell Rattleboot, along with Technician Kris Coppens, claim the Skipping Stone in the name of ZenithTech R&D. We got here first because we’re a damn sight smarter than you, so you can piss off!’” He sets that onto a repeat broadcast as far as our remaining comm gear can push it, so the message will precede us as we near Earth Local.

“I still don’t understand how you knew it would come here,” you say.

“Laborious deduction, dear Coppens. Everyone was studying the Stone every which way, so I looked where they weren’t.” He ticks points off his fingers as he professes his genius. “Firstly: every responsible scientist and agency was being so careful to treat this thing as a natural anomaly, soooo hesitant to even dare to whisper that there might be intelligence involved until we had evidence to back the claim. I tossed that out. I mean, look at its behaviors, its capabilities. The simplest, most logical explanation is that it’s not a coincidental wanderer, that it wants to come to Earth. Secondly: from its first turn about Neptune, we noted that its change in velocity couldn’t be accounted for by aerobraking and gravitational drag alone. But then it skipped and everyone myopically focused on that. I looked back at the worlds the Stone had passed over and looked for changes picked up by our probes. On each world I found a minute — really just very very tiny — increase in the rotational period, and a similarly teensy drop in the world’s gravitational pull. And do you know what I found?”

"You found a correlation?"

Edwin's eyes light up and he says, "Yes, Brilliant! I found a correlation! Two of them, in fact. The amount of energy needed for each respective rotational increase correlated perfectly to the velocity change (adjusted for aerobraking and all). It was the same ratio every time. And the loss of strength in the gravitational field when compared to the distance traveled in each subsequent skip also resulted in a constant ratio. You see; it’s transferring energy. I don’t know how, but it’s dumping its inertia into each planet, but then siphoning off the planet’s own gravitational field to power the next jump. I... That’s completely impossible I know. Maybe it’s sucking up all the heavy elements? I don’t know, but it’s there. Furthermore, there’s a direct correlation between time spent in orbit and the decrease in gravitational pull. Using those as constants, I calculated that the Skipping stone had spent enough time over Jupiter to power the skip to Mars days ago. So, getting back to my first supposition, I—“

You cut him off. “You assumed its destination was Earth. Its skips have thus far adhered to direct courses; it’s jumping along a direct line, not teleporting willy-nilly, so you knew it would be coming along this vector based on Jupiter’s position relative to us. You worked out a range of terminal skip-points, worked out that we could reach them in a shuttle, shanghaied me and set sail.”

Edwin clicks his teeth, finger-guns you and says, “Sharp as ever. That’s why I keep you a—”

You bark over him, “Putting us both in a position where if just one of your many ‘ifs’ had been wrong, we would have died.”

He looks at you like he's got a mouthful of soured wine. “We’d have still had the long-range to boost a distress call, and the rations and life support to wait out a rescue. But I wasn’t wrong, see?” He gestures to the inhospitable black crags looming outside. “Going at this clip, the Stone will enter Earth orbit in about forty hours. We’ve got rations aplenty, and time to get to know this curious thing before anyone else gets their grubbies all over it.”

His enthusiasm is catching but you're not ready to give into it quite yet. “That’s great, but if you could just acknowledge how insanely stupid and unethical it was to put my life on—”

“Hey, do you feel that?” He beams, his too-big teeth seeming to multiply to fill the grin that spreads across his face. He unbuckles, swings out of the chair and falls slowly to land on the bulkhead. “Feels like Lunar gravity. On a rock this small?” He opnes the EVA cubby. “Get your helm. We’re going outside!”

You sigh. He's such a brilliant polymath, but it's easy to see how he ended up booted in disgrace from his cush position at the Frame Foundation and banished to the slow death of small-scope-small-budget projects at beleaguered ZTR&D. And you're not afraid to tell him, "You're as impulsive as a squirrel on bath salts."

Outside, clam-shelled in your excursion kit, you watch the stars across the narrow band of sky and observe a moment of awe appropriate for being the first to visit in a strange new place. The Skipping Stone has a hard sort of beauty, with jagged planes and spires of crystalline stone vaulting up to pockmarked and scorched peaks. It had come through an awful lot of abuse on the way to Earth.

“Would you look at that,” coos Edwin. “You said it’s mostly carbonic, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So what’s blue in the crystalline metal deposits?” He plays his beam over broad zebra stripes of metallic material, composed of long faceted segments that ran vertically up the slopes. They are matte grey with a definite blue sheen.

You check your interface with the ship, which is still scanning. “I don’t know,” You say. “They’re really even, too. Same size, evenly spaced. That’s weird.”

Edwin swings his flashlight about and says, “Hey, there’s a cave!”

“Right!” You turn about, binging your own light to bear. “That’s why I chose…” You splutter out as your light traces the shape of the opening. The cave is twice the height of a man, three times as wide. The stone is rough and wild, but the overall opening is very rectangular. Right angles framing a deep darkness. “That um… Some minerals do cleave in right angles, so this could be…”

“Phah! Just like the rest of them!” Edwin angles his beam into the cave and ups the intensity. “Going to tell me that’s a natural formation, too?”

The back wall of the cave is vertical, rough at the edges, but polished smooth towards the center. There is an opening, a regular hexagon three meters high, with a triangular slab hanging from the lintel like a tooth. The wall around the entrance is covered in deep-carved symbols, roughly hexagonal clusters of pictograms or writing connected by sweeping spiral lines that radiate from the doorway.

The weight of the discovery settles in and you whisper, “Great God.”

“Yours,” says Edwin, “Or theirs?” He lets that hang in the air for a moment, then sweeps his hand toward the doorway and says, “Shall we?”

Edwin frowns in deep disappointment and says, "Oh come on! Keep up with me, Kris! You’re smarter than that! I found a correlation! Two of them, in fact. The amount of energy needed for each respective rotational increase correlated perfectly to the velocity change (adjusted for aerobraking and all). It was the same ratio every time. And the loss of strength in the gravitational field when compared to the distance traveled in each subsequent skip also resulted in a constant ratio. You see; it’s transferring energy. I don’t know how, but it’s dumping its inertia into each planet, but then siphoning off the planet’s own gravitational field to power the next jump. I... That’s completely impossible I know. Maybe it’s sucking up all the heavy elements? I don’t know, but it’s there. Furthermore, there’s a direct correlation between time spent in orbit and the decrease in gravitational pull. Using those as constants, I calculated that the Skipping stone had spent enough time over Jupiter to power the skip to Mars days ago. So, getting back to my first supposition, I—“

You cut him off. “You assumed its destination was Earth. Its skips have thus far adhered to direct courses; it’s jumping along a direct line, not teleporting willy-nilly, so you knew it would be coming along this vector based on Jupiter’s position relative to us. You worked out a range of terminal skip-points, worked out that we could reach them in a shuttle, shanghaied me and set sail.”

Edwin clicks his teeth, finger-guns you and says, “Sharp as ever. That’s why I keep you a—”

You bark over him, “Putting us both in a position where if just one of your many ‘ifs’ had been wrong, we would have died.”

He looks at you like he's got a mouthful of soured wine. “We’d have still had the long-range to boost a distress call, and the rations and life support to wait out a rescue. But I wasn’t wrong, see?” He gestures to the inhospitable black crags looming outside. “Going at this clip, the Stone will enter Earth orbit in about forty hours. We’ve got rations aplenty, and time to get to know this curious thing before anyone else gets their grubbies all over it.”

His enthusiasm is catching but you're not ready to give into it quite yet. “That’s great, but if you could just acknowledge how insanely stupid and unethical it was to put my life on—”

“Hey, do you feel that?” He beams, his too-big teeth seeming to multiply to fill the grin that spreads across his face. He unbuckles, swings out of the chair and falls slowly to land on the bulkhead. “Feels like Lunar gravity. On a rock this small?” He opnes the EVA cubby. “Get your helm. We’re going outside!”

You sigh. He's such a brilliant polymath, but it's easy to see how he ended up booted in disgrace from his cush position at the Frame Foundation and banished to the slow death of small-scope-small-budget projects at beleaguered ZTR&D. And you're not afraid to tell him, "You're as impulsive as a squirrel on bath salts."

Outside, clam-shelled in your excursion kit, you watch the stars across the narrow band of sky and observe a moment of awe appropriate for being the first to visit in a strange new place. The Skipping Stone has a hard sort of beauty, with jagged planes and spires of crystalline stone vaulting up to pockmarked and scorched peaks. It had come through an awful lot of abuse on the way to Earth.

“Would you look at that,” coos Edwin. “You said it’s mostly carbonic, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So what’s blue in the crystalline metal deposits?” He plays his beam over broad zebra stripes of metallic material, composed of long faceted segments that ran vertically up the slopes. They are matte grey with a definite blue sheen.

You check your interface with the ship, which is still scanning. “I don’t know,” You say. “They’re really even, too. Same size, evenly spaced. That’s weird.”

Edwin swings his flashlight about and says, “Hey, there’s a cave!”

“Right!” You turn about, binging your own light to bear. “That’s why I chose…” You splutter out as your light traces the shape of the opening. The cave is twice the height of a man, three times as wide. The stone is rough and wild, but the overall opening is very rectangular. Right angles framing a deep darkness. “That um… Some minerals do cleave in right angles, so this could be…”

“Phah! Just like the rest of them!” Edwin angles his beam into the cave and ups the intensity. “Going to tell me that’s a natural formation, too?”

The back wall of the cave is vertical, rough at the edges, but polished smooth towards the center. There is an opening, a regular hexagon three meters high, with a triangular slab hanging from the lintel like a tooth. The wall around the entrance is covered in deep-carved symbols, roughly hexagonal clusters of pictograms or writing connected by sweeping spiral lines that radiate from the doorway.

The weight of the discovery settles in and you whisper, “Great God.”

“Yours,” says Edwin, “Or theirs?” He lets that hang in the air for a moment, then sweeps his hand toward the doorway and says, “Shall we?”

You go inside, bobbing around the door’s awkward hanging lintel. A sourceless light fills the space beyond as you enter. The room is high-ceilinged and shaped like a flattened sphere. You name it the "lobby." More carved words, glyphs and schematics line the polished walls.

“Fans of spirals, aren’t they?” asks Edwin. Spirals figure heavily in the pictograms. Clockwise and counter-, single- or multi-limbed, clusters of spirals inter-locked, Spirals with limbs that branch like fractals, carvings like a child's drawing of a tornado, which you realize represents spirals seen from the side. The hexagonal motif is similarly prominent, not just in the shape of many of the glyphs, but also as a framing or organizational guide. Related passages or sentences or whatever are written together in hexagonal clusters. They use hexagons the way humans use rectangles. You think, Their printer paper's probably six-sided... if they have printers... if they even use paper. You doubt it.

The tablet on your forearm pings with green notices, and the display on my faceplate jiggles with atmospheric data. Atmosphere? you look back. The doorway is open to space, to empty vacuum. you can see the shuttle, not twenty paces away, anchored in hard vacuum. There hadn’t been a film, field, or any sense of a membrane as you passed through the threshold. But your suit detects a safe, breathable atmosphere.

You barely have time to muse, “That’s odd,” before Edwin pops his release toggles.

You shout something worried or insulting. Probably both at once. Edwin just gulps down a lungful and laughs as the segments of his helm tuck themselves away behind his head.

“Seriously?” You bang my helm. “You’re supposed to be the one in charge here!”

“Pssshhhhh…” Edwin waves your worries off and walks to the nearest wall. “This is a gift to us, Kris. It’s welcoming us in.” He touches a wall, gloved fingers tracing one of the lines of glyphs that branch spiral-wise from cluster to cluster. “It’s writing. Code of some sort. Come see.”

You move closer, but keep your helm sealed up tight. The line indeed looks like writing; each character’s shape is based off a hexagon or its internal intersections. Or a spiral. "These aliens have wrung their motif dry."

Edwin asks, “You're filming this, right?” His own helmet-cam is now perched over his shoulder, tracking wherever he looks.

“Of course," you say. "I want it documented when xenospores liquefy your repiratory system.”

He laughs and says, “You're such a grand friend!” He scratches his nose, then adds, "But c'mon, then. Open up. It's completely safe."

You shake your head, chopping one hand sideways for emphasis. “You volunteered to be the canary. I'm going to give it some more time, make sure you're still singing before I pop my own cork.”

“Fair enough. This way!” He cuts off across the room's shallow bowl of a floor. You follow, panning your suit-cam to document the place. There is a gallery above, lined with niches containing stone objects, big as suitcases. You don't see a way up to the gallery, but there's a doorway on your level dead ahead, and Edwin't making a beeline for it. This entrance is blessedly without a lintel-tooth. There is more writing and pictograms clustered in hex-blobs around the door. Lines of writing converge into a spiral galaxy over the entrance. You remember writing shape-poems as a child, fitting words into the shape of trees or or fish. But these guys never saw a tree or a fish, just spirals and hexes.

The room beyond is ovoid again, with bulges in the floor and ceiling that rise toward each other. The walls are beige stone and the sourceless light is honey-colored. It's like standing inside a giant throat lozenge. Two figures feature heavily in the writing on the walls: a yin-yang like glyph comprising two hexagons touching at one edge, one carved in negative space, the other in positive, each with their adjoining triangles reversed; the second symbol is two spiral-funnels of opposing chiralitya>, drawn at a three-quarters angle, their points intersecting at a hexagonal plane. These two glyphs repeated all around the room with minor variances, surrounded with clouds of other symbols.

There is a sculpture suspended between the floor and ceiling bulges; a carved vortex of obsidian on its side, terminating at an amber pane. It is a three-dimensional representation of the second symbol, but with only one spiral. You circle the object, panning your camera to sow tht there are no wires, no frame, nothing holding the object in mid-air.

“Astounding!” says Edwin. He steps up the low slope, reaching out, and you know he's going to touch it.

You say, “You really shouldn’t...’ but your heart isn't really in it at this point.

He nudges the spiral part, and it doesn't budge. “Come closer.”

You shrug in resignation, approach, and touch it yourself. The onyx spiral feels as solid as it looks, and holds its position as solidly as if it were embedded in amber. You zoom in on the levitating six-sided pane which intersects the spiral's tip. A triangular section between one edge and the center at the spiral's terminus is a much lighter shade than the rest of the pane.

You nudge the spiral again, harder, and there isn't the slightest give or wobble. You muse aloud, “Think it's some kind of focused maglev?”

Edwin shrugs. “Could be, but that's usually more slippery. Could be fine-tuned gravity manipulation. The Skipping Stone already showed a propensity for that sort of thing. But any guess we make is likely wrong at this point.” He pinches the pane. “Feels like solid glass. But there's some give. Oh!” He pushes the pane, and it slides along the length of the spiral. The center of the pane moves along the axis of the vortex as if it were a rail. The tubular, widening spiral passes through the pane like an illusion, though both parts are perfectly solid. There are no moving parts or obvious adjustment as the two objects move through each-other. The pane and the vortex just occupy the smae space without complaint. You gasp, eyes and camera riveted on the action, while Edwin giggles and pushes the pane all the way to the widest end of the spiral.

“Edwin, don't!” You try to stop him, but far too late. "Impulsive nit!"" The pane stops solidly at the end of the spiral. It's passed you, so you're seeing the other side of the pane. The hues areversed on this side: a dark amber triangle on a pale pane, and the triangle is distorted, stretching to where the spiral now intersects the pane.

Edwin tsks at my worry and says, “Stop being such a stick in the mud!”

“What if that's the throttle?” You're on the edge of shouting. “What if you've just shot us across the galaxy?”

Edwin smirks and says, “This was left out to be found. They wouldn't have built the throttle here.”

“And you're an expert on alien feng shui now?”

Edwin finger-guns you, clicking his cheek as he mock-cocks it. “You and me both. We’re both now the most experienced experts on alien life the human race has ever had. How’dya like that?”

“'Any guess we make is likely to be wrong!' That's the only reasonable thing you've said or done since you woke me up back on the station. You're honestly not taking this situation seriously enough!”

“Nonsense!” He laughs again. His ebullience is grating on your nerves. He turns for the exit, waving for you to follow. “Let's see what further wonders await!”

You hang back, trying to pull yourself together. You're genuinely pissed off and he's absolutely oblivious. You take a moment to get your nerves in check and steel yourself for whatever's next, since you're apparently responsible now for riding herd on a genius three-year-old. “Seriously, What's gotten into him?” Edwin's already out the door and out of sight, but you don't follow yet. Your head feels heavy and your guts are fluttering. You need something to lean on. You scientific training urges you not to touch anything, but your visceral self says Eff it, and you lean against the spiral.

Something glimmers in the corner of your eye, On the other side of the artifact where Edwin had been standing. You turn to look and see a diaphanous uncurling drape of blue-violet, wafting in the air like a silk scarf in the breeze. But it's all light, no solid form. It vanishes when you look directly at it, and for a moment you convince yourself it was only a light flare on your helm's visor. But then it appears again, a little closer, a little better defined. There are faint brilliances pulsing though empty air, defining a shape perhaps like a polyp, or perhaps like a vehicle's control yoke, made of lace and light. A hint of tubes trailing from a gauzy central mass. It's a shifting, amorphous thing, but it's definitely there, not two meters away and drifting closer.

You take one last look at the diaphanous thing and decide it's time to run. It's definitely time for basic instinctual reactions. You shove off the spiral and stagger down the awkward slop. Your vision swims, brain sloshes. You're disoriented and unhinged for a moment. Need food. Need to run away, get safe, get food, and have five minutes without anything weird happening. You get down to the level floor without face-planting, get upright and balanced, and bolt out of the Losenge Chamber shouting, “Edwin!” You stagger into the Lobby, find it empty, and turn about, scanning up and down for any sign of him, any sign of the weird light-ghost, desperate for something to run to, and not wanting to overlook anything you need to run from. “Edwin where are you?”

“Up here!” His voice echoes strangely, colored with a joyful excitement that clashes with your terror. “Up the ramp! This is astounding!”

“Ramp? What ramp?” You're just outside the lozenge chamber, looking back to check on the ghost: no sign of the thing. You scan the Lobby again. There'd been no ramps before. But now there they are, one to each side of the Lozenge chamber entrance, sweeping up to the gallery above. “Were these here before?”

“Just get up here!”

You hustle up the ramp to the right; they both terminate over the main entrance, at a shared landing that flows onto the gallery. The gallery runs the full circumference of the Lobby, is a couple of meters wide, and has no rail. Now that you're face-to-face with the niches lining the gallery, you see that the objects within are geodesic orbs with twelve or more sides of matte black material, floating unsupported. They're big enough to bear-hug, and each facet shines with cloud-like motes and whorls of grey and green as they rotate slowly. You reached out to touch one and it twitches, rotating half a turn on one axis, then another.

“Bollocks!” You pull your hand back, ashamed and embarassed. You run about the gallery, past the levitating faceted orbs to where Edwin waits, silhouetted in another doorway directly over the entrance to the Lozenge Chamber.

He says, “What took you so long?”

“I saw something,” You pant. “Something... a ghost.”

“A ghost?” He starts to laugh, then stops himself. “I hope you filmed it. I shouldn't laugh; I mean who knows what we'll find here? Just look at this!” He pulls you through the doorway. This room is round again, the walls covered in more writing. The floor and ceiling don't bulge like the losenge chamber below. There are two large statues at the far wall, situated at two and ten o'clock, facing each other. They are carved from black stone (or whatever), like the twitchy icosahedrons outside. One appears to be a bit of a svelte mushroom with jointed fern-bits that might ben arms and a jeweled eggbeater for a crown. The other looks a bit like someone trying to make a spider of their hand; many jointed limbs, with a general sense that they aren't in the right place. These are your first impressions, but statues' styles are more broad-stroke abstract than realistic

Each statue holds limbs upraised over our head-height. A blurred, buzzing arc connects their offering hands (not at all the right word), as if an item is jumping back-and-forth between them extremely quickly. As you watch from the threshold, the buzzing periodically slows and the objects resolves to the edge of visibility on one statue, or the other. It holds only for a moment, then resumes its blurred, high-speed connection.

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

You pan slowly to record everything. “What the hell is all this?”

Edwin pulls you forward. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

There is a pedestal just inside the entrance. Looks a bit like a bird bath or lingam, black with a blue resin or fluid in the basin, so still and lustrous it looks solid. The blue matter vaporizes as you pass, splattering both of you with tiny droplets. You visor mists blue. Edwin is closer than you, and jumps back with a shout, slamming into you just as you're flinching. You grab onto him by protective instinct and you both crash together against the wall. You slide down with him in your arms. The gunk on your visor globs together as you watch and begins to move, sending out pseuopods and questing across the clear pane. You swipe them away, chest tight with panic, and clear your vision in time to watch gobbets of blue sink into his pores, flood into his mouth and nose. They form into little flatworms and slide over his pupils and under his eyelids. You scream, pinned under him and utterly helpless as his body is invaded.

His breath stops. His body stills. Deadweight.

“Edwin,” You gasp. “Edwin!”

He shudders, breaths easily. His eyes open and focus on the far wall, and he laughs.

“Edwin!” You fear it's made him insine. Yuo wonder if he even exists anymore. “Edwin what’s wrong? What’s it done to you?”

“Time! Ha-hah!”

“What? What?” You struggle out from under him and hold him up, checking for... well, you don't even know where to begin.

“Time!” he repeats. He points at the far wall, at yet another spiral sigil. “The symbol! It starts at a single point and moves outward, branching onto different paths; it’s a representation of time and probability and it — I can read!” He shoves up off me and drops to his knees before the sigil, tracing his fingers over the surrounding cloud of writing as he reads.

You creep close to him, watching his eyes rove over the writing. “Um, Edwin,” you say. “Let's go back. You’ve just been—”

“I’m fine.” He waves you away. He really does look fine, not at all like he’d just had his integument breached by an alien substance. He's completely engrossed in the writing, not at all concerned with himself, which is a normal state for Edwin. He chatters as he reads. “Astounding, isn’t it? There was no way they could have known even the rough basics of our biology from across the millions of light years. Our psyche, physiology, neurology, even what we use for basic genetic structure! Yet they somehow created an agent adaptable enough to deliver their language into any sort of being.”

You sit back against the wall, resigned that he's going to stubbornly refuse to be worried about what just happened. “You’re really reading that?”

Edwin nods.

“What’s it say?”

He pauses, frowns, then shakes his head. “I understand it, in a way, but I… it’s written more like poetry. Verse for an alien mind. Translating won’t be easy. I'm still sorting out what direction to read it.”

“Are you really not going to stop for even a basic medscan, make sure there’s nothing growing inside you?”

"I'll have to crap in approximately 1.33 hours. I'll scan then.” His fingers settl on a glyph. “‘The soul opens the way.’”

You clunk your helmeted head back against the wall and mutter, “Mumbo-jumbo.” You slap his arm. “Look, this is amazing and all, but your lack of caution is pissing me off. Frightening me, to be honest. I don’t understand what’s come over you. You’re just accepting every little thing this place offers you like it’s a gift, a toy, without even a second thought.”

“And it’s working splendidly. See?” He turns away from the writing and smiles at me, a big, winning grin with his too-big teeth. “Still alive.”

“Have you seen even one space movie?”

“Oh, all of them! Popcorn fun, but think it through. What’s the point of being a monster or a warlord or whatever when you’re this advanced? Idiots fight. Intelligent beings communicate. The Skipping Stone is meant for us. It’s a message for Earth, and we get to read it first!” He grabs your helmet and plants a cartoony kiss on your visor, ending with a smacking mwah! “It's just so damn exiting I could burst! I only wish you would share the spirit of this moment with me.”

You sigh and lean your head back, looking up within your sealed helm as if you might find divine inspiration somewhere in the upper liner.

*****

You shift into your familiar support role for Edwin. You bring his tablets and other tools to record translations of the alien writing. His peculiarly exact excretory prognostication proves spot-on, and the two of you retreat to the shuttle. While there, you force him to drink water and eat some rations you've doped, and the two of you catch a few hours of much-needed sleep. He's up and anxious much too soon, and drags you back out the shuttle, through hard vacuum, through an invisible door that contains an atmosphere as if by magic, and back up into the statue chamber. He's rabid to learn the aliens' secrets before the Skipping Stone draws close to Earth, before others rush in. He wants to stake his claim, wants more than anything to ensure that he won't be shut out. And, given his history, you sympathize. So you organize his notes for him, match images with translations, build databases to house and link the growing body of knowledge, act as his sounding-board, and bring him rations. Somewhere along the way you decide to open our own helmet. Edwin's body cavity hasn't erupted with alien embryos, there have been no more apparitions, and you're sick enough of the stink of your own recycled air to throw caution to the wind. The air in the Skipping Stone is cool and a little floral.

What you learn of the Skipping Stone, its mission and creators can be boiled down to this:

• Time and space are not discreet. Here-and-now and then-and-there are all connected, related, and exist simultaneously. One can move through time as easily as space, just by will and perception. All just points on a moving spiral, and the self is always the central, starting point. One can slide up and down the spiral line, or jump loops altogether, and become the center of a new spiral of time/space.
• Crossing to other-thens and other-nows isn't even much harder, at least for them. That's what the branching spirals represent; intersections and inflection points.
• Matter, energy and all the forces of creation are a continuum, expressions of the same thing. Anything that is can be manipulated across that continuum to become anything else.
• Scale does not matter. Moving an asteroid or a few molecules of your own DNA, re-directing gravity or optimizing cognitive functions, all take equal will, understanding and power.

Perhaps you find this all a bit unsettling, but Edwin only grows more excited. The buzzing arc of high-speed motion connecting the two statues collapses whenever either of you draw near one statue or the other, trying to resolve into a solid object, then blurring again when you move away. In the spider-fingers' grip it takes on a shape that, while indistinct, seems to be something like a large black donut. In the fronds of the fractal-fungus statue, the blur tries to become something like an angular hand-weight. But it never fully resolves, and you start to think that what you're seeing is the same object, simultaneously existing in two states, stretched between to points in space. It gives you a headache.

"We have to choose."

You're so tired. You chew the bite of chalky ration bar and dream of fresh fruit. And those lips on your visor. You hate yourself for feeling this way — he's so insufferable, so irascible — but you wish you'd had your helmet off then. That moment has passed, though. Edwin has been engrossed with a section of writing near the spider-finger sculpture for so long, you don't even realize he's spoken for a minute. When you realize he's glaring at you, waiting for a response, you swig water to swallow and say, "What now?"

Edwin rolls his eyes and repeats, "We have to choose! Look here." He points to a cluster of writing near the spider-finger thing. "'Gateway-to/mastery-of the universe within.'" He gestures then to a similar passage by the other statue. "'Gateway-to/mastery-of the universe without.' The Stone was sent all the way here to offer us vessels of knowledge. The Torus" — he refused to call it a donut — "contains knowledge of how the will can master the micro, the universe within. Our cells, our selves, I mean in the psychological sense, our code and growth, even our locations within space and time. Those are all soveriegn to each self, and mutable. This vessel contains knowledge, steping stones to bring us forward in our mastery of our own selves! Think of it! Illness, gone. the limitations of mind and body, abolished. I mean if I'm reading this right even weirder stuff might be achievable. Running your own mind as a parallel processor with itself across time, stuff like that."

"Well, that's terrifying."

"But the rewards! Just stick with me. 'The Universe without.' The controller" — again his name. You see a hand-weight, he sees a game controller — "contains knowledge of the manipulation of matter and energy beyond the self. Big stuff. Like, like... like the forces that brought the Skipping Stone here! Controlling the state and time and place of that which is beyond the self! I mean interstellar travel! Can you imagine it?"

You want to ask him to bet on how long before mankind would weaponize that sort of knowledge, but can't bear to crush his enthusiasm.

"But we can only have one vessel," says Edwin.

You say, "Rubbish! Why would they make us choose?"

"Don't want to make it too easy." He shrugs. "What's a student learn if just given all the answers? Passes the exam, but so what? What can she do? Furthermore, everything's a continuum with these beings. It's all connected. If we travel the cosmos, we're bound to learn more about how to live better along the way. Or if we take the Torus, advance beyond sickness and infirmity, we'll make our own way to the stars, right? If we're wise enough, try hard enough, nothing's out of reach. They're just pulling us a few rungs up the ladder."

You wonder, "Why bother at all? Why offer us anything?"

Edwin drums his fingers on his tablet a moment, then posits: "Could just be lonely. Not likely for interstellar neighbors to occurr naturally, so perhaps they've sent out seeds to try and help their neighbors along? But what really matters is time is running out."

you say, "I really don't like the sound of that."

Edwin lip-farts. "Nothing's going to explode. But the writings are very clear. Uncharacteristically direct for them, even. If we don't choose before the Skipping Stone reaches Earth, it'll move on. It's a screening question: a species that can't make it this far into space isn't ready for a hand up, yet. So we have to chose, or miss this opportunity and, um... you're going to do it."

You drop your tablet. In the Skipping Stone's Lunar-esque gravity, you have time to catch it before it hits the floor.

Edwin holds up hands in warding and says, "Don't look at me like that, Kris! I know myself. I'm so just astoundingly brilliant, I know, I know but... well even I don't know if I'd hit this with an impulsive snap decision, or overthink it to the point I'd lose my way in my own head. I know I haven't shown it in the past few hours, been just too bloody excited and enthralled but, well, I appreciate your influence. You're my regulator, and I know it. The only good that's come from my meteorit fall out of the Fame Foundation and subsequent crash-landing in ZT's lap has been finally finding a good, effective partner. Someone who's both a moderato and an amplifier, in the rihgt measure, at the right time. And that's you."

You're struggle not to let it show how his sincerity makes you feel. This is probably the right time for a response, but you just can't find one.

Edwin carries on; "So you have to make the choice. A giant leap in medicine, bio-sciences, psychology and self-actualization? Or grand strides in the production, manipulation and mastery over the physical universe and the forces which drive creation? What will do mankind the most good right now?

In stunned silence, you look from one statue to the other, trying to weigh the benefits of the incomparible. You don't havenearly enough information to make this choice, but you must. Medicine or physics? Torus or Controller?

You've deliberated long enough. You walk to the spider-finger monstrosity. It's the more intimidating of the two statues, but bio-science isn't always pretty. Pretty isn't what matters. Cancer still exists, and dementia, immune disorders, irreversible nerve damage, schizophrenia, the ongoing march of pandemics, and a whole host of ailments humankind has only managed to treat. You remember your first lover, dying before reaching twenty. The Blurring arc collapses as you approach, codensing and resolving into a toroid shape. The details sharpen into reality the closer you get, until the light shines off the contours of the braided black strands that wind around and around to comprise the donut. Torus. The cords are a glossy black material, and the pattern of te interlocking braids acts like a compount eye; you see yourself reflected, warped, a thousand times over. The shadows of yhour fingers block out your reflections as you grasp the object and pull it down from the statue.

It's heavy. You hold it in two hands and turn around. "What um...? What happens now?"

Edwin steps closer, eyes wide with wonder, and lays ahand gently atop the Torus. He gasps. "You don't feel that? You don't hear it?" You shake your head. He gives you a sad smile as understanding dawns. "The blue stuff. Must be a linking medium, as well. Maybe there's some left? Oh, Kris, I wish you were with me right now. I mean in my head. The interface is so seamless. There's so much I already understand, and—"

The Skipping Stone lurches in traumatic acceleration, and you grasp each-other to keep your feet. The amber light fades to greens and greys, and the writing on the walls loses its sharp edges, sags in places.

You squueze Edwin's forearm and say, "What— What did I do?"

He stares white-eyed at the Torus and says, "What did I do?"

You shake him and ask, "What did you do?"

"Nothing! I swear! But, oh, Kris I feel them!"

You connect to the shuttle's sensors through your tablet and gape the readout. "We've sped way the hell up! Still heading to Earth but... Edwin we're not going into orbit at this speed!"

"But Kris I feel them! They're waking up!" He raises his hands as he says this, and hyou both watch as the Torus crawls over his hand, ropey cords twisting over and through each-other to propel itself. It settles into place about his wrist. Before you speak your horror he says, "Never mind that! That's fine. Did you hear me though?"

"I..." you chew over his words. The walls are sagging like rotten skin, stretching over a sub-structure of mammoth, scalloped rib-bones, pulsating lumps, things swelling like time-lapse fungus, other shapes shifting, rolling like things with bones, but fractured nerves. All draped in glistening grey decaying skin. You finally repeat what you don't want to think; "Th-the-they're w-w-waking... Who, Edwin?!"

He takes your hand and pulls you out of the room. "We have to go."

You run along the gallery, past the twitching, turning, black icosahedrons. They're pulsing now, bulging. The facets of one pull apart from each other as you pass it, and your instincts cry out Hatching! You don't think about it, just plant your feet and yank Edwin back by the arm. He cries out in shock and pain at his wrenched elbow, then shuts up as the black orb splits, loosing a gout of what looks like old engine oil and scrabled eggs, and a little monster launches through the air. It's screaming, and you get an impression of jagged limbs, a body like a polished crystal skull, black organs writhing within.

It would have landed on Edwin, that mouth of twelve hundred independently-articulated teeth would have gnashed through his suit and into him in a blink. But instead it falls shrieking to the Lobby floor below, where it splatters. Not dead, though. It gathers its ill-shaped limbs and crawls forward, trailing tubes like a gut-shot soldier.

Edwin gapes at it, then at you. "Y-you, you hadn—"

You seal your helm, then hit the toggle on Edwin's suit to seal his. The folded serments uncurl from his collar and envelope his head like crustacuan legs. A false sense of security, but welcome all the same. You say, "Faster!" and take the lead, pulling him along.

More of the faceted eggs hatch as you run along the gallery, birthing pretty much exactly what you expected all along. Most come out like the first, screaming fast. One gets hung up on its shell and spills right onto the floor in front of you. You kick it over the edge. You learn then that the trailing tubes aren't entrails or umbilicals, but tentacles — Of Course — as one lashes around your ankle, and the hanging horror turns about to haul itself up its own limb. The tentacle is newborn-weak and flaccid: you stomp it, yank your foot free, and let the monster fall. You and Edwin make the end of the gallery and turn down one of the ramps. Late-hatchers spill over the ledge above to rain down around you, slashing and grasping. You fend them off with your satchel of rations and tablets.

At the bottom of the ramp, near the entry to the Losenge chamber, Edwin pulls you to a stop. The floor of the chamber is littered with monstrosities, newborn adn pulling themselves together, mewling in rage, tentacles lashing, crystal skull-heads thrashing over teeth that writhe like piano-hammers. Some of them are broken, damaged. You watch some of them put their own pieces back together, like a toddler trying to fit a severed finger against the stump, but for these horrors it works.

Your suit-computer sirens notices: the Skipping Stone has entered Earth's upper atmosphere. The shuttle's idiot programs project imminent death upon collision but several possible survival options if you can get into the shuttle and blast from the Skipping Stone now, with the remaining fuel. It's that, or be devoured by the horrorshow gaining strength before you. If you run now, you can probably stomp through the disoriented newborns without getting your suit slashed open, make the shuttle and get away. So you're really pissed at Edwin holding you up.

He says, "A moment. Th-the Torus, it's giving me a c-connection. I-I think I could control them!"

"Control?!"

You give it a good hour, weighing over the pros and cons as best as you can with such a derth of real information. Medicine, or broader physical sciences? Well, the thought of what humans would do with immortalitty and gene-mods — especially at their current cognitive levels — is terrifying. But what humans, as they are, would do with interstellar travel, clean energy, and who-knew-what-else — quark tacos? — at their disposal? That's easier to concieve and predict. And you can hope that the vastness would finally give them the impetus to evolve. Or at least offer enough of a buffer to absorb human failings and wait out as the species finaly emerges from puberty to adulthood.

So you go to the fractal-fungus thing. It's prettier than the other statue, but makes you cringe. You finally realize that, in its fungal-cap form and the frozen posture of its curling, fern-like appendages, it reminds you of the ghost you saw in the chamber below.

Why does that scare you so much? Whatever it was, it had just... drifted. It was slow. It had approached, but not aggressively. The sense of menace, of danger, that's all just feelings. Animal reaction. You're a scientist. The unknown is not a source of fear for you; it's a source of work.

So you reach up, and the buzzing blur resolves into the crystalline dumbell shape in your hand. You take it down from the statue and turn to Edwin with it grasped in both hands. The connecting bar is comprised of hundreds of cubic segments, linked together in chains wrapping about each-other. Curved, organic form rendered in right-angle patterns. The end-pieces were icosahedrons of a dozen sides each. The whole thing was made of a rainbow-hued metal, like anodized titanium. Beads of light travel gracefully along the joins between facets.

You say, "Well, it's very pretty." You hand the Controller thingy to Edwin and ask, "So what now?"

You both notice the change happening together. It's gradual, at first, just the wallks shifting to a grayer hue. You look closer, and see tiny metallic crystals growing, rising through the stone. Not much bigger than grains of quinoa, but perfectly shaped. As they reach a certain size thier crystalline structure collapses and they flow to coat the walls. The carvings remain, but all around the structure of the room is being remade in high-lustre chrome. The spider-finger statue dissolves to vapor, then to nothing, while the fractal-fungus shifts from black stone to segments of metal and somthing like molded polymer. The cut-crystal apparati atop it emit light in several pleasing shades.

As you watch the trnasformations settle in, you say, "Guess we should see what's happening to the est of the place." You're already heading through the dorway to the upper gallery.

You're expecting a reply, so you're thrown when Edwin bellows out laughter. You turn back in the doorway to find him clutching the Controller and gazing into its surface. "Hah-HAH! Oh, I hope you like math! What?" He blinks and looks at you sheepishly. "What? Sorry? This thing's got so much data, it's like quicksand." He cathches up with you. "I'll need you to lead a team just to catalogue the thing!"

"It's communicating with you?" you ask.

He cocks and eyebrow. "It didn't for you? Sorry. But yes, it's..." He looks past you, and for a moment you both watch as the black icosahedrons shrivel and sink into the stone, and the stone of the Lobby transfigures into a gleaming playground of chrome, polymer and organized light. There's a ghost hovering to one side, amorphous tendrils wafting gently, as if in humble welcoming. Edwin takes you hand and says, "Oh, there's so much to do!"

What follows is a frantic year. The Skipping Stone slides into a stable orbit, and the center of the world shifts to it. ZenithTech ascends to prominence on your and Edwin's claim to dibs on the thing, and Edwin rises to new fame as the center of the research effort to unlock the Stone's secrets. He's the only one with direct access to the artifact's databases, through the Controller which has connected to his mind, so research institutions, corporations and nations curry his favor. You circumvent all their agendas by releasing all the data deciphered to the entire world as it's uncovered, gratis, which makes Edwin howl with laughter every single time.

Experts of every stripe arrive, organizing into research, development and support teams under Edwin's leadership. Using the Controller, he has the Skipping Stone build out terminals suited for humans, with interface ports compatible with human computer equipment. He had never shown as much patience for programming a you, but his neural interface with the Controller has somehow supercharged his capabilities; within a few days he has deployed a human-compatible translation GUI in the new terminals, allowing humans and human computers access to the Skipping Stone's databanks and nano-crystalline mechanisms. With a team kitted out and under his direction, and you at his side, Edwin dives into the Skipping Stones' secrets.

Before long, energy is as free as oxygen, and thrice as clean. Converting rubbish to energy is as easy as Javascript (so not easy, but accessible). Ten kinds of frictionless, contact-free vehicles are invented in the same week, all operating on different newfound principles of the universe, all equally effective. That's just one tiny exmple of the advances the Skipping stone's databases inspire. Wars over resources end, and wars over ideology lose steam because, really, it's hard to hate that group over there when your group over here, and everyone else, is fed and safe and healthy. And those are just the changes on Earth. Up on the Skipping Stone, you and Edwin chase down a way to break down the border between matter and energy, and unlock the gateway to the universe.

So much of what you dissemenate to the world is transformative, epoch-shifting, but the Skipping Stone itself remains a primary piece to this new age. Within its cubic miles of ultra-dense matter lay the pathways of a great machine, soomething that humans are — even by Edwin's cheeriest estimates — decades away from replicating. It's a mechanism that, primed with external power, can convert matter to energy, to code, and re-write that code elsewhere in the programming of the universe. Which is teleportation in shorthand. 'Skipping' in an even shorter hand. And, by extrapolation, teleportation is the gateway to the rest of the galaxy.

The ghosts are there for all of this, several of them, drifting and wafting their fronds. They make no sound, have no corporeal presence. Sometimes they're gone for days. They show up, drifting through the air or as tiny sprites across holo-screens, to drop clues and guide researchers to new breakthroughs.

*****

You wake up a little late on the morning of Trial 1. Edwin's already up and gone, didn't even bother to make his side of the bed. Probably never crossed his mind, you think as you get ready. All the Zero Trials had been exciting: teleporting a photon a few inches on Trial 0.0.1; skipping a grain of sand across a room in Trial 0.1.3; moving a spider's egg from one vial to another, then watching it hatch normal and healthy. And on and on. You and Edwin and the entire team had exhaustively proven the principles involved, and tested all the bugs out of the mechanism-control interface. Hundreds of Zero trials completed, with startnand end termini inside and outside the Skipping Stone, living and non-living targets. Scale and distance don't matter, it's just a matter of elementary adjustments to the process. Trial 1 is the first long-range, large-object teleportation trial. Of course Edwin's excited.

You think, Still, he could have at least tried to wake me. But maybe he had; you'd taken on many of the administrative leadership duties in the past year, herding Edwin and all his new underlings, overseeing payroll, scheduling and leave rotations, defraying all the petty squabbles along the way. It's been exhausting. You wouldn't be surprised if he'd tried everything from soft kisses to earthquake-shakes to wake you, and failed.

You check the time after you've dressed and eaten; still and time to spare before the launch of Trial 1. You've only slept through preliminaries that you would have wished to sleep through, had you been there.

You open the door to leave your and Edwins' quarters, scream and hurl the last of your coffee across the corridor. The steaming droplets sail through the shimmering, pastel form of the Ghost hovering in the hallway, and splatter onto the decking. The thing was waiting there, right outside your door, and you can't help but think the word 'lurking'. It doesn't do anything; it's just motes of light, like a hologram, etching out the shape of a mushroom cap, trailing fern-like appendages wafting in the air. It bobs slowly, and efervescent internal structures shimmer in sequence, sometimes rising beyond the boundaries of the mushroom-cap body, sometimes vanishing.

You swear loudly and creatively, and try to restore your composure. "What? Why are you here?" You want to leave, but it's blocking the doorway. Of course you could walk through it; most people did. But you hate doing that. There's no sensation, but still it makes you cringe. They seemed to have some sort of agency, but no-one's figured out if they are individuals with consciousness, or just projections from the Skipping Stone, a computer following programming to attempt to interface with users. Whatever they are, they creep you right the hell out. Viscerally. Others tease you about it, just like your friends always teased you about being the only one to freak out when a bee showed up while dining al fresco. If anyone had been around, you would have just added more fuel to the ribbing.

You leave your mug — no sense in carrying it around now that it's empty — and try to leave again. The ghost is still there. You say, "Shoo! Shove off, you hateful figment!" It doesn't react. No one had yet figured out if the ghosts heard or understood voices. They were just random, sometimes useful nuisances. You pantomime pushing it away, and the thing seems to get the message, drifting back and sinking out of the visible spectrum. Finally you're free and hurry through the corridor to join Edwin and the others in the Control Room.

A station has grown on the Skipping Stone. Habitat modules, laboratories, life-support systems, docking ports, and everything else needed to support a large team long-term have been built in the valley where you and Edwin first landed. The Stone's light artificial gravity extends up into the modules and connecting corridors, which is a welcome convenience. (There's an entire sub-team focused solely on figuring out how to replicate that.) The station is large enough that it takes you a few minutes to navigate the corridors from the habitat complex atop the ridge, down past tiers of labs and other work-stations, to the entrance to the Skipping Stone's Lobby, now called the Control Room. It's abuzz with excitement, scientists and technicians working away at the banks of human-suited consoles Edwin had had the Skipping Stone build for them. Giant holo-screens ring the entire room, providing a nearly-global simulation of the view outside, with schematics, data and vid-links overlaid.

And there are ghosts. A dozen or more, which puts you on edge. They're bad enough singly, and you've never seen them cluster like this. Most are scattered round the periphery, but a few hover high overhead or mingle among the humans. With so many gathered, you can see subtle differences in their coloring, proportions, movements. Individual traits. That alarms you and you can't even say why.

You stride through the hubbub to where Edwin stands at the nexus of it all, linked with the Controller. It, too has changed since you first took it down from the statue, influenced by Edwin's will. At first the knobs on the ends elongated like rounded horns, until the device really did look like a game controller, and fit comfortably in Edwin's hands. But it had never really been meant to serve as a manual interface. More recently the Controller's handles had extended further, curving, and now Edwin wore it like a laurel crown. His skin glowed where extended terminals touched at his temples and evenly-spaced points around his shaved head. You don't like this, either, though he assures you its harmless, and the neural interface is improved when he wears the thing.

He smiles and asks, "Had enough beauty sleep?"

You shrug off the greeting and ask, "Everything looking all right?"

"Of course. Projector's primed and ready. Energy output's at max, and reserves are topped up. We've cross-checked all the calculations." He points to the main display. " Jan cleared the final inspection, and they're moving the cargo into position. We're set to launch in a few minutes."

Up on the display, a tug is maneuvering a pressurized shipping container into position outside the Skipping Stone. If all goes well, the container will be skipped to a mining station out in the Asteroid Belt. The container is full of fresh produce, a gift to the miners who go through two-year rotations on nothing but dried rations. The Moon is bright in the background, almost silhouetting the shipping container.

You look around the room, then lean in closer to say softly, "And what about the audience you attracted?"

"Hm? Oh, the ghosts. I guess they're excited, too."

Despite your best efforts, you know you sound a bit pissy when you say, "'Guess?'"

He shakes his head. "You worry too much. You know they've been only helpful."

"They seem all too... anxious. Like they've got a stake in this Trial."

You can tell by the wrinkling between his brows that Edwin is starting to get annoyed. He says, "Well, maybe they do. We'll find out about them in due course; I know the answers are in the Stone's databanks, we just haven't found the right reference yet. There's years' worth of data to decipher. For now could you please just stop wingeing about them? It's about time."

He's always brushed off your misgivings about the ghosts. It pisses you off, but you check any reaction and sit at an unused terminal. He's right; they've been helpful, and have caused no harm. You're the only one who's so creeped out about them. And what reason do you have for that? None, really. What if they're really sentient beings? Hitchhikers on the Skipping Stone or some form of the relic's creators. Does that make you some kind of prejudiced, to hate them just because you don't understand them? Are you the first human speciest?

For a few minutes you review the staff rotation logs and scan the life support reports for deviations. Busy work. But the ghosts aren't the only thing bothering you. You never knew the Moon would be in view during the trial. It's not anywhere near, of course, but it seems too coincidental that it's nearly on a line-of-sight with the cargo. Why didnEdwin pick this time anyway? You bring up an orbital schematic and plot out the positions of Earth, the Moon, the Skipping Stone and the cargo. Edwin has a countdown running. There are only a few minutes until he ectivates the Stone's systems and launches Trial 1. You adjust your schematic for the launch time, and feel something cold settle in the pit of your stomach. The Projection Apparatus that Edwin had unlocked and run out from the flank of the Skipping Stone, the cargo, the Moon's center-of-mass. They were all three going to be perfectly aligned when Edwin fired Trial 1, when the Apparatus would unleash enough exotic power to transmute every particle of the cargo container and its contents to pure energy, and reconstitute them hundreds of millions of miles away.

You try to calm yourself. Of course Edwin knows about the alignment And of course it doesn't matter; the Moon itself is tens of thousands of miles away. He's designed the whole trial, and you helped him, and he really has calmed down over the past months, embraced scientific meticulouslness. There's nothing to worry about.

But you can't help but think that the ghosts, hovering in silent clusters, seem eager.

"Control how?" you ask.

"Their minds! I can hear them. And I... They can hear me, I think?" He grabs your arms, pulls you close so your helmet thunks against his. "They are nothing like us, Kris. They are born complete, their intellect pure and focused. But among them, I can feel it stitching their minds together... it's a Director!"

"How does this help us, Edwin?" Across the Lobby, outside the doorway, the light is changing, growing brigher. It looks like there's a red wind blowing. Your tablet confirms; the Skipping Stone is bruning through atmospheric entry. You should be rattling about like dice in a can, but the gravity and stability inside the Stone is unchanged. You wish you were on the shuttle, breaking away. The shuttle wasn't designed for re-entry, but you'd feel safer pitting human engineering against friction than standing here while monsters network themselves. "Do you have a plan? If not I'll—"

One of the beasts shrieks. You turn and see it hurtling at you, legs churning, a black missile of bone and gristle. Your animal brain quivers between fight and flight.

The beast stops half a pace away and shudders. It makes a confused sound and backs away. Edwin makes a strangled groan. His face is pale and sweaty behind his visor. The fingers of the hand wearing the Torus are tensed and twitching.

The other monsters get to their feet and close ranks. They seem to swell by the moment, chitin hardening, tentacles growing more muscular. They could tear you apart. Your space suit might as well be tissue paper. But they all keep several paces back from you and Edwin, as if he's raised a wall.

"There's no stopping the Stone." Edwin's voice is soft and pained, as if he's talking from beyond the grave. "She'll land, she'll burrow. She's shedding the Stone's skin. Our shuttle is gone." He nods to the entrance to the Losenge Chamber. "We'll survive the landing in there. I can... there's a gravity... net?"

Working the Torus seems to take all his will. He's hardly holding himself upright. You wrap your arms around him and drag him into the Losenge Chamber.

The wall transmutes from stone to suppurating dark-hued flesh as you pass through, and the doorway sphincters shut. Everything in the Skipping Stone is warping from mineral to a biological caricature of itself. Everything but the levitating apparatus, you note. Edwin collapses on the slope leading up to the strange device, and groans. "I can feel it emerging!"

You collapse next to him and hold him tight. "What? What's emerging?"

"The Director. It's a... a consciousness so far beyond ours. It will obliterate us!"

You grab the Torus and shake it. "Well kill it, then!"

"That's beyond me, yet. I can't undo the least of them. But already I feel the connections, I see the code, and I can reach it. I can't kill it... but I can change it!"

*****

You and Edwin shelter in the Losenge Chamber as the Skipping Stone plummets to New Delhi — a deliberate choice, as one of the world's densest population centers. It sheds its stony skin as it falls, molting into something like a gargantuan germ. The fragments soften the city for the monstrosity's arrival. It lands among fire and ruin and blood, begins to burrow, and disgorges its horde of seed-sowers. The creatures you watched hatch, the first iteration of the beings you would come to call the Muta. They reap through the panicked masses, growing larger as they devour the lucky ones. Those left behind, who were seeded by the creatures' barb-tipped tentacles in passing, mutate within hours into the second iteration of Muta.

You and Edwin flee in their wake, escaping the Skipping Stone-turned-nest before it buries itself in the rubble. He leads, avoiding the ravaging seed-sowers, guided by the Torus. The Sown rise from the heaps of torn dead, whole, skin splitting and bones creaking as they mutate before your very eyes. They rave and they come for you, and the terror bleaches your mind and freezes your body. Edwin is able to drive them off with the Torus — "I'm getting a sense of the Director's bio-network," he says. "I can sense their minds, alter their instincts and impulses, for a little while." — but you see that this clearly taxes him. You hold him up, sworn to his side, and the two of you find shelter in an abandoned warehouse.

As the armies of the world converge in a futile attempt to contain this new threat, you and Edwin set up a secret laboratory on the door step of ground zero. As scientists grapple to comprehend what they're facing, Edwin experiments with the Torus, re-designing the dna of fungi and plants around the warehouse into new species that ward off Muta with pheremones. As Muta infest neighboring cities you scour the ruins of New Delhi for provisions, supplies, all the practical needs for supporting Edwin's work. Within a few months the Muta are in every city across the sub-continent, and are spreading into Southeast Asia and the Cradle of Civilization. And Edwin's experiments with the Torus have afforded him a deeper understanding of the language of life, the key forces of genesis which give the Muta their power.

You pull your cart through the wreckage of New Delhi, scuttling home. You hate being away from Edwin. He keeps you safe. Yes, he has grown patches of mold on your cart and your coat which drive off the lurking Muta. But nothing is truly safe from the Muta, except for Edwin. He holds the Torus, and with it he controls monsters who draw near. Soon he'll unlock the last of its secrets, and destroy the Muta once and for all. Yes, that is what drives him, and so it drives you. You are afraid of these crumbling streets, the tumbledown stones and tumbledown bones, the fires and quiet and piercing screams, and the creatures which prowl. But you left the warehouse despite your fear, you have gathered many good things to help Edwin, and now you hurry home so that he might be pleased with what you bring him.

You turn up an alley between half-rubble buildings. The alley itself is choked with heaps of rubble you can barely get your cart past. But you would never clear the rubble, oh no. Your keen eyes recognize the strains of lichen and weeds growing on the detritus, more Muta deterrents. They reek like mayonnaise on hot asphalt, but your fear eases as the stink washes over you. No Muta here. The rubble and reek deter humans, too; the scavengers who creep the ruins of New Delhi and the parties of monster hunters who come seeking bounty from the source. Wouldn't want any of them to find Edwin's work.

"Oh, no. Not ready." You shake your head and mutter as you haul the cart along. "It's not ready yet. And they would not understand. But they will. They will!"

You pull the cart through the camoflaged door you've built (it makes you think of trap-door spiders, and you giggle) and into the "foyer" of the domicile/lab you and Edwin have constructed. You call out, "I'm back!" You don't see Edwin, though he doesn't spend much time in the front room, among the storage containers, tables and racks of supplies and sleeping pallets. Too much important work to do in the back. You narrate as you unload your day's haul. "Got some squashes! Cereal, filters, battery packs. Not the condensed liions like before, but I think I'll make them work. Oh! And I found some new boots at Leftover's Swap Shop."

Edwin's voice drifts from the back, distant and distracted. "What about my sample?"

"Got a real winner, I think! Just a moment, I'll have 'im back to you. Just all this other stuff on top at the moment." As you bustle the last of the provisions away, you say, "Was a new crew of hunters at Leftover's, kittin' up for a foray. Heavy gear, lots of swagger, seemed to think they'd take out all the Muta themselves. Leader's a girl dressed all in neon —" neon colors drive muta into a berzerker frenzy, which is puzzling for their apparent lack of functioning eyes. "— and she calls herself 'Bait.' The crew goes by 'Sulaco's Wrath,' if you believe that."

"Think they're clever, don't — Keep your tentacles to yourself!"

"You all right?" You hurry back into the lab and shriek.

The lab you and Edwin have built is in the cavernous main area of the abandoned warehouse. Bare concrete floors stained with oil, corrugated steel walls gone to rust and flaking paint, strapped to steel girders like ribs. A mobile hoist hangs near the roof, chains dangling. There are work-tables at the nearer wall, covered with notes and bins where fungi and other mutants grow. Bits of dissected Muta in jars. The main attaction are the pits. Whatever the warehouse had been, there are deep pits in the floor, big as rooms, accessed by ladders. You have learned to weld, and have built cages into the pits, roofing them with arrangements of rebar, car frames, whetever you've been able to scavenge over the past months. The nearer, smaller pit holds a live specimen of a common post-male Muta. It also currently holds Edwin.

You scream, "Are you mad?"

Edwin, nearer to you, standing calmly within the locked cage, raises a hand to silence you. "It's all right."

"It certainly isn't!" you say. There isn't more than twelve feet of empty air between him and the monster. The post-male Muta are the workforce of the invasion, and this one is a prime example of the most common morphology. It was once an adult human male. Now it is sexless, skin hardened and gray. The fingers and toes have elongated and sharpened. Bone-like jointed limbs grow from its knees and elbows, so that it scuttles about like a man-arachnid. An eyeless, wedge-shaped maw of interlocking teeth grows right from its shoulders, engulfing the defunct human head. It shifts restlessly, not charging for the kill. It clacks its teeth, leathery throat-pouch puffing from its lower jaw. As the teeth part, you can see the man's head still in there, eyes glassy, lolling like an obscene uvula, the jaw broken and splayed about the enlarged gullet. You've helped with dissections, you know the human brain is mostly gone, but you are still gripped with revulsion and pity, imagining unending suffering and terror.

You hiss at Edwin, "Get out of there. Slowly. Before I have to watch you die."

"I'm controlling it." He twitches a hand, a two-finger gesture. The Torus has unravelled, and tendrils spread down his hand and up his arm. Integrated. With his hand motion the Muta crouches, losing interest as if unable to percieve Edwin any longer. He whispers, "I've isolated the coding and structures of the network. The way they coordinate. As bestial as the Director is, the design of the network itself is astounding."

Flabbergasted, you splutter, "You've really mastered that beast? You can make them dormant like that?"

Edwin raises his hands in a gentle motion, and the Muta raises its own limbs, turns its claws inward, and drives them through its own belly. As the monster collapses, dead, Edwin turns to you and says, "I can do many things." He lets himself out of the cage, and as you help him up from the pit he says, "I've scaled a cliff in comprehension and ability. Now it is time to run." At the top of the ladder he composes himself, squeezes your shoulder warmly and adds, "The days of horror might soon be behind us. You've found a good sample? I have need of it."

You warm to the comfort of his touch, his attention. There really has been so much terror since you and he crawled from the Skipping Stone. Any affection, even a smile, is like sunlight after surviving a cave-in. You smile and say, "The very best, indeed!" You rush out and come back, hauling the cart. Beaming with pride, you throw back the tarp and sing "Tadaa!" with the revelation of the unconscious, malnourished, bound man inside. "Cased him for a few days, and I'm sure he was an engineer or somesuch. And he's got all the phenotypic markers you told me to look for!"

Edwin inspeccts him with the Torus; two of the device's strands uncoil and probe over the man's skin.

You carry on, "That dart you grew really did the trick. Bit of rose in the build of the needle? Toadstool in the venom?"

Edwin replies absently, "Mostly adder and nematocyst, for the functional mechanism. Based the venom off a wasp that got in." The strands of the Torus jab into the man, and he grunts awake, straining at his bonds. "Not strong enough to sleep through that, though." He withdraws the Torus, closes his eyes for a moment, and nods. "Ah, yes, ou did splendidly, Kris. Just the sort of sample I'd hoped for."

Edwin induces a spat of sleep-paralysis in the sample, giving the two of you a few minutes to maneuver him into the cage in the big pit. He lobs a fungus-ball into the cage, and the resulting cloud of spores stones the current occupants out of their gourds. You get the new sample secure with the others, then nibble some naan and chutney while waiting for the drugs to wear off.

bio:control monsters, land with stone. Manages to change the code to make the Director really stupid. Will take some time to re-develop sentience. Monsters rush the world. Edwin sets up a lab near the hive. Avoids the beasts with the torus. Does experiments on them and people. Kris is shattered and controllable, goes full-Igor. When Edwin is ready, they go into the Hive. He says to stop them, but then it turns out he wants to merge with the Director and re-elevate it, take full control. Choice-point: Enable or betray. (maybe there's monster-hunters targeting him, and Kris can assist them or stop them.)

Escape in the shuttle, land outside ground zero where stone lands and becomes hive. Witness storm of monsters. Time passes. They are monster hunters, Enclave protected with brute force and some weapons derived from the Torus. Edwin delivers statement, "No matter what, don't let the monsters get the Torus." They storm the hive for the final kill. He has learned enough about the thing to use it to kill the Director. The whole operation goes pear-shaped, Edwin is in the clutches of the Director. it's about to kill him. Kris has a shot to save him. Edwin throws him the Torus. Choice-point. Catch the thing or take the shot?

Kris doesn't interfere, is as curious and excited as Edwin, and cue Akbar because of course "It's a trap!" The apparatus converts the target cargo into energy, which it launches into the moon. The moon comes apart, most of its matter vanishing into an implosion, some scattered debris hurtling at the Skipping Stone and Earth. Abandon ship. Years pass, quickly evident that the event pulled earth off course and, now that the system is deprived of the moon's mass, it will settle into a wider orbit. Between that and the impact dust, Earth is already frozen, Ghosts rule the world and are building cities. Current action starts in a human holdout, Edwin in charge. they have some weapons derived from the Barbell that can stop ghosts. He's perfected small teleportation, though the energy cost is high. One shot, he and Rupert teleport up to use the losenge device to travel back in time. They are able to hide themselves from the ghosts (alter phasing) with the barbell. (do they both go back in time together? That'd be an interesting twist). Here we go: Edwin sees something wonderful the Ghosts have made, and is curious. Rupert thinks one of the beings sees them through the cloak. But the thing is really amazing. Choice-point: examine or run?

Rupert gets them to hold off (sabotage? Give Edwin food poisoning?), and is happy to see the ghosts disperse. Experiment proceeds a few hours later. Moon is away. But still... "it's a trap!" Without the moon to eat, the energy event creates a dense storm of antimatter in orbit. Abandon ship, yadda yadda, years later: the now-heavier Earth-Moon-antimatter-superfund site is drifting sunward, and it's fecking hot. Edwin and Rupert in exile. Ghosts aren't such a prob, cuz they hate the heat. But everyone hates Edwin. And some ghost have taken hosts. Edwin's onsessed with tearing that goddamn star down any way he can. Thinks he can do it from the Stone. Break into the last working spark plant, blacks out the continent to power their teleportation. (Rupert confronting self evil as they go, seeing signs of something off with Edwin. Clues that he's posessed.) Get to the Stone. Edwin acrivates teh controls. Rupert sees what looks liek a trajectory between the antimatter mess and the moon. Questions Edwin. This will destroy the black star, destroy them all, finally set us free! Choice is to allow him to proceed, or stop him.

Edwin merges with the queen thing, elevating monsters to higher level, or lowering himself. Torus fully engages, greater beasts flock the world, humanity dies.

Kris tries to stop Edwin. Scuffle and whatnot, and he gets thrown down into the losenge chamber (rotten structure). Back broken across the device, but sees it activate. single choice: activate it.

Grabs the Torus and runs, ashamed and heartbroken to leave Edwin to die. It tries to interface with him. He isn't familiar with it, but he can feel the monsters, the living structure of the hive. Thinks "don't see me don't see me" and it kinda works. Can't remember the way out, but hides in the losenge room. Nasty monster veins all wrapped around the machine, and he understands it, too, and reaches for the pane.

Takes the shot, stops the monster from killing Edwin, and he falls free. But the torus sails wide, and is caught by one of the beasts. It flees, already mutating, and the hive boils in rampant mutation all around them, monsters and spores and viruses engulfing the world.

Rupert grabs Edwin, compels him to drive them ten seconds back. REalize they were close to discovery, and they break for the time chamber and throw the switch together.

They are seen, captured, and watch as a rift is opened and an army of beings - ghosts' physical manifestations, long beyond their reach - pour through.

Rupert attacks Edwin. He's so, so strong. They fight, Edwin ruthless and strong, clearly posessed, until Rupert kills him. Heartbroken, terrified, he tries to stop the operation. Does something wrong, and the skipping stone accellerates for the antimatter. He's out of time, which thought makes him remember the strange device, and he thinks he understands.

Edwin decides to trust him, and he demolishes the moon. Siphons up the energy and uses it to transport the Skipping stone to Mars. There he opens a way, and corporeal ghosts emerge. "It's cold enough here. Cold enough for us. And the Earth is already coming closer. Soon we will be strong, and the world will be close enough, and cold enough, to take."

Rupert asks Edwin for a boost, jumps up from stirrupped hands to grab the middle of the blur and lands with something. "How stupid are we, to be presented only two choices and believe when we're told they're the only options? Do we really have so little imagination? The stone is here. We have it to stody. And you have the language, And now, at least, we have the knowledge tht we're not alone, that someone out there wants to communicate. That alone is gift enough."