FSE

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ISOLATION SPACE

"Show me solar wind." I croaked, staring through the half-metre thick, tri-layered blend of aluminium and fused silica glass window. My vocal cords were still raw, and the words came out soft and pitiful. I ran a paw absently over my throat, massaging gently, willing the membranous tissue back to life. It was my own fault really, I'd been awake for days now, I should have been doing vocal warmups and drinking lemon-butter tinctures.

"At your behest, Mister S." The ship said. Before my dry and sticky eyes, the smartline glass came alive as purple and teal lines were etched over it, tracing distant solar winds that were estimated to hit our sails sometime in the next few months. In space, everything is big, and big things move slowly, it's that simple. Adjusting oneself to think in a timescale of weeks and months, rather than hours, is one of the first things you're taught pre-departure.

Presently, I sneered at the omniscient AI.

"Stop that, fuckin' Ruger..." I gasped the words, each word a serrated blade down my throat, teasing me into a painful cough. It's what I got for being lazy. Ruger always liked the syntactic machine to be more formal with him; personally I found it creepy. "Informal language... please Cassie."

"Easily done Kyle!" It chirped. "Solar wind telemetry now showing, colour-coded by decreasing orders of magnitude. How are you feeling today?" Cassie's tone was cheerful, and fake or not hearing the familiar voice was nice. Yanking myself out of the gunky existence that hyper-sleep created always took a few days. The body simply wasn't built for it. The exsanguination may seem archaic to you, but the classical practice of cryostasis (simply freezing the body) found sleepers' blood going bad; they'd wake decades or centuries later, only for a fifth of their number to go through sudden cardiac arrest, with another third statistically likely to suffer the same fate within the year. Nowadays, you want to travel through interstellar space, you get drained before you go sub-zero.

"Like crap." I replied to Cassie, or tried to. It was funny because while I felt I 'knew' Ruger, I'd never met - or even seen - the guy. The Cambridge has been in flight for a few centuries now, with nine engineers currently staffed. We keep this train running. You wake up, do some maintenance, basic repairs, check the SIPs, and then you lie back in the sterile coffin you got out of. The good ship'll autoexsanguinate you for hyper-sleep, even as the next guy is pumped back to life.

The architects of the project had strict rules that we were not allowed any crossover between shifts. It seemed cruel, and waking the very first time was indeed horrific, I was alone and in agony as my body was artificially re-inflated, but the decision came to make sense eventually. Waking to a friendly face - only to promptly lose it for the next four subjective years - would be far worse in the long term than simply not knowing any better. Better to have loved and lost my ass, Shakespeare can suck an egg.

We were never given the chance to meet our fellow engineers pre-flight, and so our only form of communication was the remnants of each shift. I learned much about Ruger by waking up and studying the state he left things in; he was meticulous and detail orientated, I think. Aside from that I found protocol-dictated impersonal text logs, detailing issues or articles I may need to follow up on.

I digress. Coming back always hurts. Feeling blood pump through your veins for the first time in roughly three decades, atrophied muscles struggling to move, even despite the smart proteins swimming through it. I'm on day five now, and things are finally going. I'm pissing and shitting as normal, and my fur is starting to lose that bristly quality it takes during hyper-sleep. It's a good thing too, since according to Cassie's gentle reminders, one of the exterior sails is having a breaker malfunction, and if I leave it any longer, we could see a loss of the entire fold. The Cambridge has a refinery on board that's more than capable of constructing another sail, but it could slow us down considerably, or worse - use up valuable resources we may need later.

"Can..." I paused, setting my coffee mug aside and coughing viciously into a clenched paw. I hacked up old phlegm and dust, my tail twitching with each shudder of pain. "Can I see ship diagnostics for the northern hemisphere Cass?"

"Of course!" Cassandra beeped cheerily, her merry staccato voice somehow even more isolating than silence. I think the pre-planners to this damn trip thought she'd be pleasant company, but honestly I wish they'd just budgeted for two engineers on at once. Her voice is hollow; it doesn't carry the same warmth or cadence, or even the same volume a living thing of flesh might. It emanated from all around, a god-machine that my body registered more as internal than external. I was thankful at least for her customisation options, I'd lose my fucking mind if I had to deal with something that sounded like an ancient text-to-speech bot.

Ignoring the circuit malfunction in the sails, ship diagnostics were all normal, which was good to see. As standard we're moving with a slightly-less-than-comfortable 1.2 gees of thrust, the ship feeling to me like a massive concentric tower moving ever-upwards. Movies always had people walking lengthways along ships this big, but the engines are at the back, and as they sustain thrust the ground pushes up on us. It's still not really gravity, but it's a damned close approximation.

I just wish my voice would come back, everything else is nearly there and I'm in a mood for singing. I even jerked off last night - it's just these old strings that won't quite tune up.

"Did Ruger leave everything where I like it?" I ask, forcing the words out, knowing that if I can just push my chords through that uncomfortable itch, it'll start to ebb. If only someone told them that too. Cooperate you bastards.

"So far as I can tell, he followed through with all your requests."

"Thank the galaxy for small mercies." I whispered, running a paw over my head, the fur there still coarse, not unlike the head of a broom. "I'm gonna take the EVA out and get a proper look at this sail... can you put on my jazz playlist?"

"Of course Kyle, coming right..." The AI paused, and I could practically hear some interior pinwheel going as it froze momentarily.

"Er, Cass?" I pressed, looking around the silver-sterile room as I waited impatiently. I used to think the aesthetic was cool, but I'd long exhausted my tolerance of the slick, soft-futurist look The Cambridge was decked in.

"My apologies sir..." It paused, the first words slower than usual, and the following ones significantly faster, as if it was trying to make certain the sentences occupied the same amount of time they normally would despite the distortion. "I'm sorry Kyle! The memory bank that stored your playlist file has suffered neutrino corruption." I blinked slowly, barely comprehending how that was possible. Something else to look into then, spectacular.

"Okay... damn it. Just put on whatever Ruger listened to the most then. I'll make do." I think it's getting easier to talk. Cassie agrees, but by the time the music finally starts up I'm halfway to the EVA launch bay. Ruger was a fan of some weird acoustic folk apparently, played seemingly exclusively with drums and xylophones. It doesn't hurt my ears though, so I attempt to hum along amicably as I tug on the suit's sleeves, do up the valves across my waist, and stuff my tail into the rear pouch. All the tools I need are already strapped to the belt or implanted in the EVA limbs, and as I slide the elongated oval helmet over my face, the breath from the end of my snout clouds the front. After a few exhales I'm basically blind, but some scrounging around on my arm flips the oxygen switch and we're golden, the vaguely-gold mask clearing. Cassie vents the airlock and a few seconds later I'm outside.

You'd maybe imagine it like stepping outside an aeroplane, but an EVA walk is nothing like that. The gees generated by The Cambridge's thrust are still as present and powerful on the outside of the ship, and I haven't slowed down, but there's also no wind resistance in space to create drag, so it's simply as if the floor has been removed. To what feels like beneath me is the rear of the ship, while above me is the nose, a three-point-seven-kilometre-tall tower, at least from where I'm floating. The EVA suit is a bulky bitch, jam-packed with omnidirectional ion thrusters that let me manoeuvre myself in a mimicry of zero-g. It made me laugh - simulated weightlessness within simulated gravity. It's vital though, for in order to be able to effectively maintain and repair the ship an engineer has to be able to access every inch of it, from whatever direction the job calls for. For larger works I'd use an EMU shuttle, but for little fixes like this the EVA was just fine. Those aforementioned ion thrusters keep me moving in the ship's wake, but if I were to simply wait outside untethered, eventually she'd leave me behind.

Thinking on this, I absently run my fingers over the telescopic harpoon mounted on my shoulder; a tiny turret capable of firing a magnetically charged bolt into the hull at a moment's notice. Simultaneously_The Cambridge's_ surface is equipped with dozens of grappling hooks capable of catching me in case of both thruster and harpoon failure. I'm pretty sure either one catching you would shatter most of your bones, but you'd be alive. No one has ever drifted away in The Cambridge's history, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible.

I can't imagine anything worse than dying alone in the middle of space.

After properly orientating myself, I push on up towards the sails. The Cambridge is immense, and I always find myself in awe when on the outside of it; a huge whale of a thing, mostly flat and segmented along what an observer would think of as the 'top', if there is such a thing out here. The sides are similarly angular, long vectoring lines of nanocarbon reinforcements, the distant starlight glinting off the many metallic vertices. Below the main body are long spherical extrusions, mostly containing the SIPs, which is what I call our sleepers - short for 'Super Important Passengers'. Behind all that are the Behemoth Drives, antimatter-matter reaction fuelled engines, creating a sustained explosion that keeps us ever propelled through space at this tremendous, relativity bending speed. The Cambridge is one-way, and once we reach our destination the SIPs will be the builders and leaders and livers of the new colony, situated more than a thousand light-years from Earth.

With Newtonian mechanics, our constant acceleration should technically result in us eventually hitting and then surpassing light-speed (c). But as any good physicist knows, when you start approaching that kind of velocity in-vacuum, general relativity steps in and says travel no further. Ergo, we move consistently at about ninety-three percent of c. Still very fucking fast, mind you, fast enough that it'll take us close to a year to fully decelerate, once we get within spitting distance of the Pentaghast System.

Using the EVA thrusters, I push on up towards the sails. They resemble those you might find on an old eighteenth-century pirate ship, massive shimmering sheets, appearing to my eyes as a mixture of deep cerulean and heliotrope, the occasional canary yellow cascading across it. They are _truly_beautiful, and at roughly two-thirds of a kilometre tall and three times as long they're hard to miss. If I were to get closer I'd see the surface of them as an interconnecting web of tiny octagonal plates, bending and flexing as they work to absorb the celestial energies that ever-travel the cosmos. I'm staying away from the surface today however, putting my attention into the little concentric band-aids that secure them, blister shaped locks that honestly could have used a smidge more money spent on them. As I get closer the yellow-black panels drift into view, shadows dancing at the edges of my vision. Things are flickering, and I make a mental note to get my retinas checked later. Filing the thought aside, I begin work on the securements, cracking open the panels and manipulating their circuits there within. It's pretty regular work, and my mind wanders as I tinker, since I'm doing little more than adjusting computer scale metrics, coupled with some light welding and cutting. Getting back into my regular routine feels good though, makes me feel more normal.

"Kyle, are you there?" Cassie chimes right into my god-damned ear. I cry out in shock, reflexively letting go of my cutter and nearly severing a finger in the process. A cable keeps it secured to me, and I hastily switch the burner off, frowning at the echoic voice. It's so surprising, because AI don't usually initiate conversation unless there's a serious problem. She sounded relaxed though, so I doubt there's an emergency.

"Yeah Cass, you scared the hell outta me. Whaddya want?" Talking is getting easier, though I still sound like someone who just got over an old flu.

"Ruger left you a voice message. It was set to release exactly five days after you woke, presumably so you'd have time to adjust before receiving it. It has just unlocked now, should I play it for you?" I hesitated, glancing at what I was doing. It was just reinforcing some old circuit breakers, and the bulk of the finicky work was complete. I'd done it a thousand times before; a simple audio log wasn't going to distract me.

It _could_wait though, with a five-day time lock it couldn't be urgent. But on the other hand... I'd never heard Ruger's voice before, this was highly unorthodox and probably forbidden. Everything I knew about him so far was a guess. Much as my professional side wanted to ignore it, if I'm honest my mind clawed at the audiolog; I was suddenly desperate, practically frothing at the mouth for it, craving any taste of another sentient being interacting with me.

"Play it Cass." I said, turning back to the circuits.

It began with some static, light clicking, and then - as I'd long suspected - a reptilian voice, lisping the esses and drawing out the 'e' sounds.

"Hello there, Kyle Serdona, I hope you are well." It paused, awkwardly. "I know protocol expressly forbids this kind of communique, but... I didn't want you to have to read this in a text log. It is big, er, quite so." I went still, realising that Ruger would have had to deep-dive into the syntactic drives programming in order to force them to show me this. Cassie's standard protocols wouldn't have allowed it. My interest piqued. "I don't know if you're aware yet, but the space in this quadrant has a much higher neutrino saturation than any previously traversed. I was worried they might affect the Behemoth Drives, but not to stress - it does not so far as I can tell, though curiously it does seem to corrupt certain parts of Cassandra's memory." I nodded, recalling my lost playlist.

"I'm rambling, apologies. The source of these errant sub-atomics is a nearby neutron star, estimated to cross our horizon in one subjective years' time, as of this recording." My eyes widened. Neutron stars weren't the fascinating anomalies we'd once thought, but they were still rare and dangerous enough that no one had been close enough to see one with a naked eye. My jaw fell slightly, and I was suddenly excited at the prospect.

Life on The Cambridge is dull, and like I said, slow. I don't hate it, but the prospect of something foreign and new, especially something as novel as a dying star, potentially filled with the ancient mutated quark-constructs of strange matter... I'd like to compare it to something, but I don't what I could. Maybe a wedding day, but it's still a hilariously asymmetrical comparison.

No... it's more like seeing the stars for the first time with your own eyes, after a life spent planet-locked.

"I know, this is..." Ruger paused, and I imagined concern on the reptile's face. "Auspicious. Please take all the records you are able. But there is something else, and I fear that in this regard I am a coward. The neutron star is only a precursor, for just beyond it lies - to all intents and purposes - a living, operable wormhole. I can imagine your shock, so I hope you are sitting down for this. You see why I wanted to tell you this, in my own words." I dropped my cutter again, sitting down on The Cambridge hull, the magnets in my ass securing me. I was shaking, it felt like someone had just yanked out my bones.

"Ruger, you son of a bitch." I said, just to say something, to feel any connection with the lizard.

"I sent a shuttle to investigate. If you check the logs you'll see. Kyle... I hope I can call you that, I sent it through and it pinged me. From the Pentaghast System."

"Fuck you." I said aloud, pointing at nothing. "Fuck you, fuck you, no it didn't." The Pentaghast System was our destination, plain and simple. A binary star system, with three liveable exoplanets that telescopic survation had tagged two of as likely candidates for a colony. The Sirius, Epsilon Eridani, and Alpha Centauri systems had all been busts; their respective planet's gravity and atmosphere just fine, but the surfaces rocky and beyond unforgiving. People had died, and our society had remained trapped in the Solar system. So we'd looked far, far beyond anything previous, to Pentaghast Alpha. Several other interstellar arks had been deployed to similarly distant systems, though The Cambridge mission was by and far the largest in every way imaginable. These planets we sought were green, warm and oceanic, welcoming even. We'd build a new Earth, one safe from what we did to the last one.

Wormholes were not supposed to exist. They had never been observed, unicorns in the world of theoretical spacetime. Folds in reality that could allow a vessel to cross immense stretches of space in instants. If what Ruger said was true, that wormhole hiding behind the neutron star led right to our new home. On our current course we had centuries before we touched Pentaghast's edge - now I could see that happen without even one more drain. I could see other people again; I could see the new world. The life-extension tech in my body meant it was likely I would anyway, but I'd still be an old man by then, two-hundred and eighty-ish years old by subjective time. Vastly more if you count the sleeps.

This could not be real. Again, my vision blurred at the edges, shadows playing at me, haunting imaginary figures almost watching me. I waved them away. A fearful thought occurred to me, but space madness simply did not strike that fast, so I quickly ruled it out.

"What did you do?" I asked the audiolog.

"Kyle, listen." Ruger's voice continued, ignoring my questions. "If this is true, if... well I do not need to spell it out. We have a decision to make, and in my cowardice... you have a decision to make. If we risk it, there is less time for accidents, less time asleep, less time to die." I nodded solemnly, we'd already lost six engineers, and two hundred SIPs so far. It didn't matter that we had six thousand sleepers, that was two hundred adult creatures dead. It hurt, their survival was our entire life. "So I leave it to you. I will tell no other of this discovery, and by the time your shift ends and another is there, the neutron star will be too far behind us for much interest beyond cursory. Nobody will ever know. We have no idea the danger, but my shuttle arrived unscathed by all telemetry. I do not know what to do. If you wish to steer us into that... thing... I understand. Maybe I want it even. If you choose not to, to stay the course, and do what we signed on for... I understand that also. I'm not here to judge you. But either way, I should like to shake your claw one day. Or perhaps you have a paw. I would shake that too. I hope you decide well; you have one year. First Class Engineer Ruger, out." The audiolog continued, followed by a soft, "I am sorry." Then it cut out.

I fell back, out of breath. I'm both angry and elated Ruger left this to me, as it's a responsibility of such massive proportions I can barely wrap my head around it - the entire fate of the voyage rests on my shoulders.

But someone else might screw it up.

It took me two months before I fully committed, and there was never really a question of if. Presuming Ruger's information was correct, I was always going to change course, and we both knew it. I spent that time furiously working, doing my best to uphold the ship maintenance while also researching this fucking wormhole. I checked the logs, I sacrificed empty shuttles, I barely slept at all in the name of this project.

It was true. There's no point drawing it out, Ruger was right. So far as I can tell, it's an actual wormhole. Capable of bringing us to Pentaghast before my shift is even over. The deceleration would be a bitch, and we might have to orbit the system several times before stopping, but that was nothing in the big picture.

It took another two months to properly crack into the nav system, and a week to make sense of it. The system usually allows for the engineers to make minor adjustments, increases or decreases in thrust by one-percent increments, tiny course corrections in case of tremendous celestial bodies materialising in our way (space is extremely large though, the chances of something as comparatively small as The Cambridge hitting anything was functionally zero). But, said system wasn't designed to allow for a full realignment like I was attempting - turning a ship this long at close to full acceleration is risky work, since doing it too fast could easily cause the ship to rip in half. It was also designed to prevent some space-sick engineer from turning the whole damn thing around and setting course for home. Galactic delirium does weird shit to people.

That was just getting access.

_Comprehending_the navigational system and its tri-axis three-dimensional nonsense was another matter entirely. It wasn't displayed like any ordinary map, since unlike a road, space goes in every direction. On top of this, the physical separation between destinations is mind-bendingly colossal, and then there's the movements and machinations of heavenly bodies to take into consideration. Planets and gravitational forces, black holes, neutron stars, comets - interstellar space is a busy thing, it's just devoid of life. There's a lot of data to sift through, but eventually I manage to make heads of it, gently coaxing Cassie's navigational sibling into cooperating with me. Selma wasn't intended to be as personable as Cass, but with another two hundred and twenty hours under my belt I got her to play ball.

I had to disable the nav's safety locks too, so it would even consider allowing us to cruise that near to something as dangerous as the neutron star; which I had tentatively named Enenra. It came with some ancient, twenty-first century designation, but I couldn't be bothered memorising the thirteen-digit string it had once been known as - especially since anyone who cared about that was long dead.

Like I said, we had long tired of our fascination with dying stars.

The first time I began to really comprehend the ghost was a month after that. I don't know how long exactly, maybe a week of subjective time, maybe a bit more... it all blends together without a sun or company. The shadows I had first perceived on the outer hull grew in definition with every passing day. They seemed to mimic my movements, almost mocking me. I saw features in that darkness, but every time I turned to look deeper they vanished. I was beginning to suspect my retinas were detaching, or some similar issue when suddenly; Cassie interacted with it. She opened a door, that's all, but it was enough. No AI is capable of perceiving mental apparitions; it simply isn't possible. I was fiddling with the fireproofing network down with the SIPs, when a narrow hatch slid open and the shadow walked through. He didn't react to me, stepping through the room and examining each of the sleeper pods as I would - as I had just fifteen minutes prior -, the deflated yet precious sacks of furry flesh within glaring up with ghoulish dried eyes, eyelids left open, their souls put on hold.

What came next wasn't like linear progression, but more my mind catching up with the circumstance. It happened over a few minutes, too slow and erratic for me to accurately pinpoint exactly when I knew, or when the process of knowing had even begun. But I eventually came to the realisation that standing before me now, tapping away at a SIP readout -

Was me.

He - the other me - realised it at a similar moment, and we stared at one another for longer than felt comfortable. For an identical twin, when they view their genetic double, there was knowledge in the old part of their brain that said; "this is another person, separate from myself". When I looked at my doppelganger however, that same area of my consciousness said "this is me". It was like looking in a reflection too rebellious to follow your movement. He had my same brown eyes, my angular wolfish head, that deep gunmetal neck fur that almost looked like a cobalt blue in the right lighting. I cannot describe it accurately, but my mind was not tolerating this well.

"Can I help you?" He asked, voice like a socks on a too-rarely polished concrete floor.

"Can you?" I replied, not knowing what else I could say. And then he was gone. He didn't flash out of existence, or recede theatrically into the darkness, he simply was and then he was not. So much so it was difficult for my brain to realise he had ever been there, retroactively trying to correct my memories the same way it cut out blinking. I refused it. I had felt my... his presence. His validity was as much my own, and to deny him was to deny myself.

And the ship felt him too.

The next time I saw him in earnest was three months out from Enenra. The neutron star was a piercing white light in the dark shroud of the galaxy, the only remainder of a once gargantuan supernova, the last dying spasms of a billions year old star. Comparing it to Earth's own hydrogen and helium star Sol, Enenra was a thing of startlingly little volume, inhabiting a 28km radius, yet containing over eleven solar masses within. For reference, Sol has a radius of 695,510km, with a mass of 1.989 - 10^30 kg (the final result of that equation being a 2, followed by 30 zeroes). The math was mind boggling, and for a creature such as myself to survive standing on it's surface? Wholly inconceivable. The surface gravity is so strong I or anyone else would be crushed within an instant of even approaching it. A mere pebble made of neutron star would weigh more than a hundred million tons metric. For this reason, much of my time with the nav system (Selma) had been spent working on brand-new safeguards; path-finding algorithms that would allow us travel close enough so as to make the wormhole event horizon, ideally without being consumed by Enenra.

These things occupied my mind endlessly, and so when I sat up from a routine URAM replacement in the bridge hubmind, I was not adequately prepared to come face to face with my flesh and bone reflection.

We both screamed.

"You're here." He said, after we had both recovered from the shock, splayed across the ground a few metres from one another. His vocal chords had fully healed now, as had mine, and he sounded as I normally did - though a few octaves higher in pitch. Is that what others hear from me? He licked his lips, the tip of his tail twitching, anxiety-induced mannerisms I recognised all too well.

"I'd sort of put you down to an anomaly of spacetime. Or maybe a dream." I said, remaining slack jawed. He got to his feet first, coming over and offering me a paw up. I won't lie - it frightened me. I was imagining countless depictions of ghosts from films. "Can I even touch you?" I asked. I didn't vocalise my other thoughts, but I didn't need to. They were in his head already.

"I think so." I said, or rather other me said. He said. It was unusually difficult to think of him as anything but me. It was like hearing a thought externalised. Surreal is the only word that begins to explain the feeling.

"This is gonna sound dumb," I began, blushing. "But what if we create a black hole? You know, rip apart reality?"

He laughed. Fuck that's weird. "Then we'll die instantly I guess." We both shrugged in unison. If a person were somehow able to reach faster than light speeds, and thus - potentially - propel themselves into the past, many theories propose that touching your historic self would do such a thing. Obliterate spacetime by creating a physical transgression too deep to rectify.

"But you're not from the future, right?" I asked. He nodded, and I accepted the paw. I felt a nervous jolt run up my arm, but nothing else. No dimensional bending, no chemical lightshow, just another guy helping me off my ass.

"I've always hated quantum mechanics." He said, and I nodded in time with him. As an engineer on a ship like this, a certain rudimentary understanding of quantum theory, especially in relation to relativistic physics, is in the job description. But I've always found them fucky. Atoms acting as standing waves, able to simultaneously exist in multiple places and states at once, their behaviour changing even under nonintrusive observation. I resented studying dark matter; the invisible fuel that fed the massive hyper-explosion used by our Behemoth Drives, ergo quantum entanglement was strictly above my pay-grade. "No doubt it has something to do with this." He added, narrowing my eyes.

The biggest problem was that quantum mechanics and general relativity were two of the biggest building blocks of the universe's laws, yet they often acted in direct contradiction with one another. It hurt to think about too much, so I had always stuck to general relativity - at least that was real.

"I don't think we share atoms." I said slowly, reaching out and touching my... his_chest. He was certainly real, and the connection didn't feel like a violation of personal space. If anyone I knew in my former life had done that to me unprompted, I would have shirked away simply on instinct; I was not a person who enjoyed touch, simple as that. But my doppelganger, my _other me, he stayed perfectly still, curiously tilting his head at my paw. He was thinking the same thing. "Otherwise would this be possible?"

"I... don't know." I/he admitted, shrugging. "The wormhole? Or even Enenra, maybe it's tugged our strings down a level, into simultaneous space?" I frowned.

String theory has been the golden child of physics models for centuries, the queerest feature of it being that ten dimensions, instead of three, are required of spacetime in order to maintain mathematical consistency. Four-dimensional perception has been imitated, but it was jury-rigged at best. Supersymmetric string theory - _very_loosely speaking - attempts to explain all particles and fundamental forces of reality in one unified model, modelling everything as vibrations of one-dimensional strings. The endless war of physics is the attempt at unifying general relativity (which deals primarily with large areas of spacetime) with quantum mechanics (which deals with the things on the atomic scale), marrying the two together into an acceptable model of observable reality. Unfortunately, we have yet to reach that marriage, as mixing the two in one equation - which is required when studying black holes - produces incomprehensible answers that contain imaginary distances and less-than-one dimensions.

It's a mind fuck.

"But if Enenra and the wormhole have pulled our strings taught, and dragged both our realities to this level together, so to speak..." I began.

"Then The Cambridge would have collided with itself and we'd be dead already." I agreed. He agreed. Damn it. I crossed my arms and leaned against a wall, watching while my doppelganger paced, my paws in his pockets.

"I don't understand how this is possible." He muttered. The latter half of the sentence went unsaid, but I could practically hear it in my own mind.

"Do we share a string?" I said aloud. "Maybe our Cambridge's share one but we don't - hence it merged with itself and we're left separate." My quantum ghost stopped, shaking his head.

"But why are only we out of sync?" He asked, gesticulating wildly. "I mean I assume_you're the shadow I've been seeing for the last nine months, but you've never once appeared where I _am. You're usually where I'm going to be."

"Our realities neighbour then." I said, running my tongue over my teeth.

"Do you think I'm stuck here?" He asked.

"Or am I stuck here?" We chuckled.

"Actually, I'm starting to think we're not in_either_ reality, not absolutely." He replied. "I think we've generated our own space in which to inhabit, isolated from everything else. It could even be conforming to different physical laws, in which case we're fucked because nothing makes sense."

"Creating dimensions can't be that easy." I argued, playing devil's advocate with myself. It was the same way I'd deduce something internally.

"Why not? We only had to find a reality-defying artefact." We both laughed. He paused. "No one has ever been this close to a neutron star, only machines. You're right I think, our realities must neighbour, but it makes me wonder if there are other versions of us that we do share string with, that have been dragged into isolation space with us, and we just... subsumed them." I stared at the floor; I found the thought oddly unsettling. Had I quantum-devoured other manifestations of myself? Or could there be a third ghost hiding somewhere aboard the ship? If I looked out to space would I see another _Cambridge_coasting nearby?

"Perhaps the gravitons are having an unforeseen effect." I hazarded, talking slowly as I formed theories in front of my words, my linguistic grasp of the situation too poor to properly articulate my thoughts. "Maybe we've always been in the same physical space, entangled on a quantum level, but now that we're this close to Enenra, our particles are being brute-forced into a shared band; creating an entirely new dimension, with our waves vibrational frequency slaved to Enenra."

"I don't think reality is like a radio." My doppelganger replied tersely. "And neither do you."

"No, but it's a close enough analogy. None of this makes any sense, following known physical laws." I admitted.

"Fucking quantum mechanics."

"Fucking quantum mechanics."

We stopped, massaging our temples and groaning in unison. Maybe we had always inhabited the same physical space, but only now that these errant gravitons were brute-forcing our cooperation could we truly distinguish one another. Had I always been here?

"You know the weirdest part." I said. Other me said. Not me, him, fuck. The language for this doesn't exist. I raised an eyebrow, conscious of my movements, trying not to naturally mimic myself. "I don't feel the slightest awkwardness." I blinked, realising I felt the same. Like with the paw on his chest, only to a broader extent. I was never a sociable person before, often unsettled by merely occupying the same room as another, even to the point friends had caused minor unease. I didn't understand people and it had always put me on edge. But not now.

"You're right." I replied, grinning. "I guess I'm right."

"I can't help thinking of you as me." He said, coming closer, eyes narrowing. "I just... don't feel any different. Are you real?"

"I'm real." I said. "I don't think this is madness." Early signs were hallucinations and paranoia, but usually of earth related things, plants, open water. "Cassie, how have my mental logs been trending?"

"Cassie?" My quantum ghost asked. "Your ship syntactic isn't Chelsea?"

"No!" I replied, suddenly fascinated. The first real diversion in our circumstance! Cassie obediently chirped back at me however, as cheerily as always.

"Your trends have all been well within the desirable threshold Kyle, I've seen no reason for concern." Her chthonic voice informed us.

"I suppose that resolves which reality we're in." Other-me said. I saw the darker furs at his neck bristle slightly, remembering how I habitually tensed them when stressed. It was fair; I wouldn't want to be stuck in another dimension either.

"That's not a given, nothing about this is proceeding under operational standards. This has never happened before, far as we know." I argued.

"I suppose." He admitted, following with, "Chelsea, how have my mental logs been trending?" There was a moment of tense silence, before Cassie / Chelsea replied - in the exact same tone -

"Your mental logs have been optimal Kyle. I noticed a minor decline in the last three weeks, but the sleep deprivation is certainly a contributing factor."

"Chelsea is less concise." I added. "Amazing."

"Mhmm." He looked up, as if trying to see the AI. "Do they both exist simultaneously?"

"They must." I said. "I don't know if investigating it is a good idea though, it'll probably just lead to more frustration."

"I guess. It's... bizarre though."

"It's good to talk to another person though." I said, my throat tightening. "It's been a while, and it's easier than I expected."

"I... had been trying not to think about it."

"I know." I liked to pretend I didn't mind the loneliness of The Cambridge, but I'm a pack animal - it's not natural to spend decades alone. We continued to chat along this route, sitting in the bridge for hours and comparing lives. Our courses seemed roughly the same, with only minoring differences here or there, tiny insignificant details that held very little change in the end.

It was fascinating, and we ended up sitting across from one another, close enough to touch, laughing and joking. We easily bridged difficult memories, since we'd both lived them we understood the inexplicable minutia of circumstance, that subjective comprehension that you can never quite seem to convey to others. It was refreshing. And a fear began to grow in me as the hours stretched, that this connection ran so intrinsically deep that I'd forever want for it.

We did not broach the topic of the wormhole. We didn't consider, or didn't want to consider, that maybe we might again be split upon exiting the spacetime aberration. Maybe it was egocentric, but myself or not it was a relief to chat to something alive. Conversely, in this I saw the wisdom of refusing the engineers shift crossover. Speaking with my doppelganger opened wounds I didn't know I had. Old social scabs that had melded over during the first ten months of my virgin shift, when I was originally adjusting to the isolation. I'd had twenty-seven years of normal human interaction to erase, a few girlfriends, a few good friends here and there, but nothing important really. My parents died when I was a teenager, and I had gotten used to being alone - even in a crowd. I thought I could take it. And in a way I did, in a way I adjusted to the crushing silence, to the hollow chirpiness of Cassie's commentary. But this experience reminded me of what I lost, and what I gave up. Forgetting even the conversation, it was the passive interaction; the indescribable comfort of being in the same room as another breathing person, with nothing needing to be said. We spent plenty of the hours sitting, gazing out the nearby screens we requested Cassie / Chelsea spin up.

Eventually I led him to a room near mine, unused since the last death in our engineering crew. He already knew where it was, but the ceremony of proffering a bed, the voila-ing of paws and 'here you are sir', was a familiar routine we both indulged in.

We slept in our own rooms, dreaming of our other self. When I woke however the fears became real; he was gone, and I sobbed despondently.

I didn't see my ghost for another two weeks, and then he came for good. Every ship-night we broke our conversation off reluctantly, laying down in our beds unsure if we'd wake to company, or loneliness. I tried not to dwell, knowing it'd hurt. The smell of husky, my own scent, permeated everything twofold now. There was twice as much fur around for Cassie / Chelsea's drones to sweep. There was laughter too, noise outside my own mutterings and playlists. Would the smell remain if we returned to our realities? I hoped so, but it seemed unlikely.

The first time we went to bed together was natural. I'd never been in a situation so intimate with another man, but we both sort of knew it would happen. I... or other me, simply didn't break off to a separate room when we retired. We went to one bed, stripped down to our underwear and slipped beneath the covers. I felt my paw slip around my waist, tails intertwined, a soft growling in my throat as I nuzzled my own back.

And we slept.

And woke, together.

The wormhole was in eyesight now, The Cambridge cruising at a week out from breaking the event horizon. We tweaked the Behemoth Drives, and counteracted the thrust, allowing the ship to drop down to a comfy .9 gees. Each day we would begin with coffee and breakfast in the bridge, sitting in raised chairs before a five-by-five metre screen Cassie / Chelsea printed weeks prior. Enenra was mesmerising up close, but the wormhole was something else entirely. We came to refer to it as Yokai. Yokai existed in open defiance to the universe; it held the same angle no matter where our drones viewed it from, like some giant optical illusion. We could never determine exactly what dimension we perceived it in, the edges twisting and expanding, but the diameter somehow forever remaining an_exact_ five kilometres - I don't need to tell you how rare exact measurements are in nature. In fact, much of Yokai's geometry was similarly perfect; absolute spherical rims, interior dimensions that added up and divided into digits of pi, all sorts of mathematical anomalies that were never found naturally grouped together. In terms of visual physicality, it's difficult to explain. Imagine looking into the bottom of a glass bottle, frosted at the edges but transparent, the centre continually dipping ever inward, reality melting down like a whirlpool. We perceived the centre space being tugged like a rope, drifting away eternally, tiny glimpses of Pentaghast's twin stars peeking through every other day. The previously mentioned 'frosted edges' spun concentrically, a mesmerising fractal pattern that was both still and ever moving, consuming the vacuum around it. The thing was bizarre, and we could spend all day staring at it.

Our intimacy was a natural progression. It was the night when Cassie told us Yokai lay only five standard ship-days away. When we retired to our bed, the underwear came off with everything else. We slipped under the sheets as normal, bodies pressed against one another. I felt my paw press over my stomach, then drift lower. I initiated it, cupping my ghost's - my own, it was getting harder to distinguish ourselves - sheath, feeling him harden. I let out a heady sigh, and he ground himself against me. He moaned deeply as I stroked his sheath, allowing his cock to harden, precum dripping onto my paw as it exposed itself. Perhaps it is narcissistic to have sex with one's own quantum doppelganger, but we had neither concerns nor hesitation. He rolled over, his fully erect dick meeting my own, both slick. He took them, I took them, in a single paw, massaging slowly, thrusting our hips in time, moaning. We kissed. I kissed myself, tongues meeting and dancing, chests heaving. His cock slipped under my balls, thrusting between my furred legs, both of us sighing loudly. Then I rolled onto my stomach, and no words were required. It's an odd kind of love I think, but one we understood. Maybe you don't, but I've learned not to care.

He hefted himself over me, biting lightly into my neck, a pawful of saliva smeared across my tailhole. He whispered for me to say if it hurt, before the head of his cock slipped inside me. I'd never thought of myself as beautiful, but in that moment I thought of him that way. I growled as he drove harder, pushing me open as he filled me. It was comforting, that warmth, sliding firmly deeper, his balls tapping against my rear. He groaned, biting again as he pulled back, sliding inside again. He kept going, thrusting, picking up speed. I felt ecstatic, and safe. I moved my hips best I could, trying to angle myself to best accept my own cock.

Then I felt it. His breathing had turned to guttural grunts, a sound I recognised with crystal clarity. His knot pushed at my entrance, and I moaned. I stopped him there, squirming out from under him and rolling onto my back. Again I held our cocks together in a paw, squeezing, the precum dripping and warm, his mouth drooling from lust and want. After a second I pulled my legs up, and let him slide into me again.

The knot hurt, I won't lie. It took us a good fifteen minutes to stretch me out, bit-by-bit, stopping and starting. I was patient though, never rushing. Finally, I begged to keep going. I grunted and hissed from the pain, my tailhole burning with almost agony - but not so much I was forced to stop. And then it happened.

The knot slipped inside me, he gasped as it did, and I froze in elation. All my pain drifted away as I felt a fullness in myself I'd never experienced before. A sort of distant euphoria as his cock, my own cock, rubbed deep against a place I didn't know I had. I heard my own voice whisper in my ear that I was cumming. I felt a slight jolt of heat inside, but that was all, as he pressed himself as far into me as possible and groaned rhythmically. A second later my own dick was at the tipping point, my ghost's paw around it, squeezing in all the right places.

"Ah, I'm gonna..." I said, but he shushed me. Still, I couldn't resist. "Ah, oh... fuck." I sighed, as three, four, five ropes of cum spiralled out, drenching both our stomachs. He fell on me in earnest, both panting, laughing at the absurdity of the situation. I'd long given up trying to think of other me as a separate person, giving into my compounded pack mentality. He was me, I was him. This was the most intimate thing I could do with myself, and it felt right. It felt like love.

"I think our superstring vibrations are in sync now." He said, and I laughed, because I'd been thinking it too.

"Quantum mechanics can go fuck itself." I muttered, and we snickered together, leaning in to kiss, his paw gently cupping my chin, fingers tenderly stroking my fur. His knot kept us tied, and we laid like that for some time, always awake, just staring. We almost didn't need to speak, our minds and souls so in tune with one another.

The next night I came in his mouth, and the one after that I tied him. We had Chelsea / Cassie up the heat of the ship, so we could spend the day padding in just our fur, paws and tails ever intertwined, regularly stopping for kisses and cuddling. It was silly, childish even, but I had never felt anything like it.

"Perhaps we should stay." I said once, as we lay on the floor of the bridge, paws dancing across our heads.

"Stay?" I asked, knowing already what was implied. "In orbit of Enenra?"

"We could abandon the SIPs. Even send them through if we wanted. There's no way to know what's on the other side for us."

"We're entangled now..." I said, fingers intertwining together. "Fused in isolation space, general relativity be damned."

"I don't want to go."

"Me neither."

"But we can't abandon them. And I don't think the Selma AI would even allow it."

"I know... but it's a nice thought." I said sombrely, tears in my eyes. We spent hours that way, hearing our own breath, revelling in the totally unique experience we shared. We alone in the universe had done this, and done it without annihilating spacetime. It changed things, I thought.

But maybe not.

And then we hit the wormhole. The closer we drifted to Yokai's maw, the more time was dilated, the gravitons near both Yokai_and _Enenra so powerful they attempted to drag even time to their will. It began with Cassie / Chelsea saying we were thirty hours out, and then fifty hours later she said we were ten out. Seventeen minutes and thirty-two seconds after that we broke the membrane, the ethereal surface tension rippling over Yokai's face. From the bridge we watched the nose pierce through, the front end of the ship seeming to bend downward and become a liquid, splitting wide and flip-flopping along its sides. Yokai slowly devoured us, inch by inch, every second another metre of ship lost to its strange mechanics.

"I don't wanna go." I said desperately, clutching my husky tight, suddenly wracked with panic. Our fingers ran across our chests, digging painfully. "Don't make me."

"I can't lose you, not after everything." We cried, tears staining the fur of our cheeks, heads pressed together. "Maybe nothing will happen, maybe we're stuck here."

"No!" I demanded impotently of the wormhole, as the room began to shake. The windows became ichorous, the entire structure around us melting and reshaping, bending to the mindless whims of Yokai. Impossibly strong forces ripped apart atoms, folded supermassive stretches of reality and punched us right through at unfelt breakneck speeds. I felt crushing gees strain on me, and three bones in my paw broke as my eyes began to bleed. When I looked to my doppelganger, a similar effect was being had on him. We couldn't move, as if frozen in a nightmare, trying to crawl on a bed of slick oil. I wanted nothing more than to get to him, to feel him one more time, but he was impossibly far away, and as I raised my arm the limb went on for kilometres and it still was not enough. His features were shadowed to me, the edges of my vision shaded and tendril-like, a hungry beast devouring my happiness.

I don't know how long it lasted, because at some point I lost consciousness. I eventually came to standing in the bridge, paws covered in blood, my body shaking. I instantly fell to my knees, exhausted.

Looking around, I saw nobody.

Reality was reality, nothing moving in a state it shouldn't be, the tri-layered glass of the bridge's window stable and obedient. I looked to my paws, they were empty, my grey fur stained rust red.

"Hello?" I cried, to nobody. There was no other me, I was alone.

Cradling my shattered paw, I hobbled over to the front of the bridge. Whatever galaxy lay outside it was different to Enenra's system, that much was evident. No matter the final destination, The Cambridge had gone somewhere.

"Chelsea?" I called, hoping.

"Do you mean me Kyle?" Cassie's voice asked. I sighed, that was her prompt if an incorrect name was used in the right tone.

"Yes." I said mutedly, wiping at my eyes and sniffing. "Where are we? Give me some readouts."

"It seems unlikely Kyle, but I have-"

"No personality." I ordered, waving my good paw. "Just facts."

"Preliminary reports place us three AU from_Pentaghast Alpha_: binary star system confirmed, three exoplanets of three within goldilocks range of the central star - two colony prospects. Pentaghast Alpha is an A0MA1 VA spectral-type star, with one-point-five solar masses. Exoplanet names are as follows in order of decreasing range: Armano-3, Armano-2, Armano-1. Armano one-through-two are considered ideal prospects for colonisation." She spoke quickly and methodically, but I ignored the rest of the information. Eventually I told her to commune with Selma, and prep us for deceleration towards Armano-2. She was also to pump up the landing crew and prep The Cambridge for colony deployment.

I attempted my best to busy myself with the mechanics of slowing this bitch of a ship, never far from sobbing. I knew that if I stopped and thought about what I'd lost; I'd go mad from it. I'd start screaming, maybe even space myself out an airlock. So I ignored it. I worked. I was a good little husky engineer.

The importance of my role quickly diminished however, as people were woken up. I told no one of Yokai, and what I had done would not be discovered for nearly two years, just before colony deployment. I would be slapped on the wrist by the Captain, and receive a light nod from Ruger, who eventually became a friend, but nothing serious ever came of it; no one could deny the results. Many distrusted me after though, and most save Ruger kept away - I was perfectly happy with this outcome, I wanted nothing from them. The landing and pilot crew viewed us engineers as little more than janitors, the dogs that swept up after their royal bloodlines while they did all the real work. We gave our lives to give them new ones, and got little thanks for it.

Armano-2_was discovered to unfortunately have almost no magnetosphere, frequently doused with super-intense radiation from _Pentaghast Alpha's vicious flares. Armano-1 however had no such issue, and turned out to be a lovely, if less-than-green kind of planet. It would be hard to colonise, but not as hard as Europa had been. The entire process of landing took two and a half subjective years from system entry to boots on planetside. Another year was spent slowly waking and deploying the SIPs, time spent assigning them roles and getting everyone used to the .9 gees of Armano-1, which colloquially became Armano.

I lived a comfortable life on Armano. Didn't have to work, it was always part of our contract that the engineers would be free and permanently supported after landing. Free to do whatever I wanted.

Except what I wanted, or who I wanted, was trapped in the stars. Separated by only a single dimensional veil, so close yet eons away.

I told no one of my experience around Enenra, because who would believe it wasn't a grand act of galactic delirium? And even if they did, how could I ever properly explain falling in love with myself, without sounding - at best - a completely self-obsessed psychopath? In my thirteen years on Armano, I had come to realise it was not self-obsession in the slightest, but others would reach that conclusion. It was love though, simply in a form I hadn't ever imagined before.

On my sixty-second birthday I travelled north, taking a common pilgrimage that many colonists made at least once during their life. The de-aging technology installed prior to The Cambridge's voyage meant I was physically forty-two, and I found little challenge in the gentle pilgrimage. Armano was home to a large, centralised city now, and I put it to my back as I travelled. The colony and subsequent outskirts had shops, hobbies, mines, jobs, lives. It had people. Colourful species ran amok, and eventually kits and pups followed. My pilgrimage was far from that, taking my tired feet to the colony's first landing site. The Cambridge had been of a sort of drop-ship design, the Behemoth Drives intended to remain abandoned in orbit, in case of any required further use. Much of the kilometres-long ship separated upon stable orbit, turning into tiny one-use landing crafts that could deposit the crew and SIPs safely planetside. It took me ten months at the site to covertly reassemble the old ruins into something that could reach escape velocity, but I got there eventually.

Stepping into the bones of The Cambridge was surreal, like visiting a graveyard. Everything of value had been stripped, and only tiny quadrants of the ship still held atmosphere. But it was_usable; it had been designed that way, the Drives too precious to simply discard or destroy. Perhaps I was selfish, first I endangered them all by throwing us into the jaws of _Yokai, and now this... but I didn't care. They used me, threw me away, forgot what I risked, if they had ever cared. So I'd use them.

Forging an access pass so the ship would even respond to me was easier than I expected, but I guess the architects of our mission never anticipated this would be a problem. Some basic readouts gave me telemetry stating that indeed Yokai still existed. I tried not to get excited. I'd gone through it before and survived, and though a chunk of me had been ripped away, I'd lived - there was no guarantee of that happening again.

"K... K-Kyle? H-hello K-Kyle. Hello." Cassie's voice coughed into life, as I spun up her inner matrix and reactivated old protocols.

No, this wasn't wrong, it was fair. Armano didn't need the Behemoth Drives, and the only thing I could imagine them using antimatter for was warfare - nobody needed that again. It was a safe, placid planet, and after a century or two of terraforming it would be equally, if not more, habitable than Earth had ever been.

"Long time no see Cass." I said, chuckling as I settled into the bridge. "Selma's dead, so we're gonna need to jury rig this shit-show into gear together."

"I'm s-sorry Kyle... my... memory banks are suffering from heavy neutrino corruption. I do not understand your requests." She said, voice stuttering and glitching. I smiled, nodding. I knew this would be much harder than last time, I wasn't going to be simply maintaining a predesignated course - I was going to be piloting it.

"Cassie, my friend... it's very simple." I began, flicking dials and warming up the old antimatter-matter reactions.

"It is?"

"Yes. I need you to take me somewhere."