The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

GENE DOUCETTE Schrödinger’s Catastrophe

Things began to go badly for the crew of the USFS Erwin around the time Dr. Marchere’s coffee mug spontaneously reassembled itself.

Dr. Louis Marchere was not, at that moment, conducting some manner of experiment. Well, he was, only not on entropy and the nature of time. He was running several other tests, of the kind that make perfect sense on a scientific vessel such as the Erwin. About half of them were biological in nature, concerning how small samples of cellular material react to certain deep-space factors. Other tests were more at home in the general field of astrophysics. But—​again, as this is important—​he was not conducting a test on entropy.

He just dropped his coffee mug. More exactly, he elbowed it from the corner of the table, while he was concentrating on things unrelated to the nature of falling objects. The mug fell onto the hard, ferrous metal of a lab floor, shattered, and sent his coffee—​which was already disappointingly lukewarm—​everywhere.

Louis Marchere was pretty upset about this. He’d been on dozens of deep-space scientific missions over the years, and this mug—​a white mug with a black swan—​had made it through all of them. It was a gift from his daughter.

But things break. No use dwelling.

Then, while Marchere was fetching a towel and a broom, the shattered pieces of the mug re-formed, rose up, and settled back on the corner of the table.

The spilled coffee remained where it was, either because it had decided that it wanted no part in whatever nonsense the mug had going on, or so as to verify—​for Dr. Marchere’s sake—​that what he witnessed had actually happened.

Which, of course, it had not. Shattered mugs don’t simply decide to reassemble themselves. They don’t decide to do anything, because they’re inanimate objects with no agency, subject to the whims of the same laws of physics as everyone and everything else in Louis Marchere’s laboratory, including Louis Marchere.

This was true irrespective of where that laboratory happened to be located. It had to be.

In this particular instance, the lab was in the middle of a ship that was in the middle of deep space, in a previously unexplored quadrant. The part about it being unexplored was unusual, but only a little unusual. The quadrant in question—​C17-A387614-X.21, but everyone called it Brenda—​was right in the center of a fully explored space grid. There had been many exploratory missions to all the other cubes on that grid, but nobody had bothered to check out Quadrant Brenda.

Probably, this was because Quadrant Brenda looked incredibly boring. There didn’t appear to be anything in Brenda—​no stars, planets, or moons. Comets showed no interest in visiting, and asteroids kept their distance. In a universe that could be defined as “enormous patches of nothing, with occasional, albeit incredibly rare, bits of something mixed in here and there,” Quadrant Brenda somehow managed to contain even more nothing. This was probably why nobody had bothered to explore it before. It was definitely why the USFS Erwin was there, as this much nothing might mean something.

So far, two days into the quadrant, Dr. Marchere could confirm that it was just as boring on the inside as it looked from the outside. Three thousand different sensors on and outside the ship confirmed that sometimes a quadrant full of nothing is just a quadrant full of nothing.

And then the second law of thermodynamics—​which was both extremely important and incredibly reliable—​stopped working.

Dr. Marchere knew that wasn’t what really happened; a dozen better explanations were surely available. He just had to find one of them.

First, he checked on the lab’s artificial gravity, which he did by going to the wall panel and examining the settings, rather than by jumping up and verifying that after having done so, he also fell down.

The control panel confirmed that he had artificial gravity, and that nothing anomalous had transpired recently, either near the coffee mug or in any other part of the lab.

Louis returned to the table and picked up the coffee mug, half expecting it to fall apart in his hands. It did not; the mug appeared intact, with no indication it had been in seven pieces quite recently.

“How did you manage that?” he asked the mug, which didn’t respond.

Dr. Marchere held the mug over the floor and considered a practical but possibly irreversible test. Would the mug reassemble itself a second time? If so, the anomaly could be pinned down to something peculiar about the black swan mug his daughter gave him some years back. Perhaps it was even a trick of some kind, just waiting for the day he dropped it. She bought this trick mug based on certain assumptions about her father: that he was naturally clumsy, or vindictive about mugs, and would have shattered it before now, revealing the gag.

But that hardly seemed possible. It would require that self-healing mug technology existed, which it did not. And if it had, there was still the problem of the mug also returning to the tabletop.

He decided that this was a scientific problem, while wanting to keep the mug intact was an emotional problem. But he’d already reconciled with having broken the mug his daughter gave him, and felt confident that, if she were there, she’d understand.

He let go. The mug fell, broke into five pieces . . . and remained broken.

Of course it did. How could he have expected otherwise?

He fetched the towel and the broom, cleaned up the mess, and made an appointment with the medical wing. One of the twelve remaining possible explanations to consider, before upturning the second law of thermodynamics, was that he was going mad, and that was information that couldn’t wait.

Dr. Louis Marchere didn’t make it to the medical wing for his checkup.

“Final approach,” the computer announced, in a cheerful singsong.

Corporal Alice Aste was in the rear portion of the shuttle at the time of the announcement, performing some light calisthenics to get the blood moving in preparation for . . . well, something. There was no telling what she was headed into, but there was an excellent chance that it would require her to be limber. This was an old combat-readiness technique that had less applicability now, in peaceful times, but she knew of more than one soldier who didn’t live to become an ex-soldier due to a pulled hamstring.

She climbed back to the front of the cabin to get a look at the side of the vessel through the front windshield. The United Space Federation Science Vessel Erwin was right where Alice expected it to be, free-floating in the middle of Quadrant C17-A387614-X.21-slash-Brenda and doing absolutely nothing.

She opened up the comms.

“USFS Erwin, this is Corporal Aste of the USF Security Force. I’m on approach, and intend to dock. Please respond.”

No answer.

“Again, Erwin, this is USFSF Corporal Alice Aste, on approach, requesting dock. Please open bay doors. Respond, Erwin.”

She waited for a few seconds, in case someone over there felt chatty, then left the line open and went back to the rear of the cabin to get ready.

In any normal circumstance, Alice would be speaking with a hangar tech now, working out the details on how and where she’d be parking her shuttle. These weren’t normal circumstances. What she expected from the Erwin was continued radio silence, just like when Alice sent a transmission from the base ship—​the Rosen, parked at the edge of the quadrant—​and just like the same radio silence the science vessel had been honoring for a little more than six weeks.

The last official transmission from the Erwin was recorded forty-seven days ago. It was from Captain Hadder, and it read: We aren’t here again today. It was received, as were all of the science vessel communiqués, at the research station relay hub and then forwarded to the main cluster, where it sat for several days before anyone actually looked at it. And then, the only reason they did was that no subsequent communications came through and somebody thought that was notable.

Protocol was for a twice-daily check-in. Granted, the “day” these transmissions were sent and the “day” they were received were hardly ever the same, given the vast distances the signals had to cross, even when using the FTL ports. Still, ships like the Erwin had to transmit on a prearranged schedule, even if that transmission was nothing more than a not much, what’s up with you?

Self-evidently, something was now up with the Erwin.

Once it became clear that the cryptic message had no obvious, direct meaning, it was handed off to a linguistics team, and run through some databases. It received a partial hit on an old Earth song by the Zombies, and an even older poem by Hughes Mearns. Neither made sense in the context of deep-space communications from science vessels.

A message was sent back, asking for clarification, but no clarification arrived. Someone got a linguist involved, who decided that in order to get a proper response from the Erwin, base had to answer in kind. He offered several suggestions, such as: If you are not there, where are you? and Are you here again now?

When that didn’t do the trick either, somebody dug up the Zombies’ song and broadcast that, to see if it triggered a response, and then tried reading back both the annotated and full versions of the Mearns poem.

Still nothing.

By then, one of the network’s orbital satellites got an angle on the ship, and sent back a video feed. The USFS cognoscenti were able to determine that: (1) the Erwin wasn’t moving, (2) it had a heat signature, strongly implying the ship still had power, and (3) there was no evidence of outgassing, so it either still had atmosphere, or all of the atmosphere had escaped already.

All that was left to try was a crewed mission, which was how the USFSF Rosen ended up at the edge of the Brenda quadrant, and how Alice ended up on the shuttle.

The shuttle’s autopilot sounded a gentle alert.

“Bay doors remain closed,” it said.

“Computer, transmit bay door override to the Erwin, on my authority.”

“Transmitting,” it said calmly. Then, “No response. Collision imminent. Course correction strongly recommended.”

Sometime in the past twenty years, the people in charge of these things at the USF standardized the vocal communications from all Space Federation computers, and it was decided the voice they used should be, above all, serene. It worked fine in most situations, but came off as ridiculous to the point of self-parody in high-stress circumstances. Phrases like explosive decompression in five seconds aren’t meant to be heard in a voice meant to soothe unruly children.

“All right, keep your pants dry, computer,” Alice said.

“This computer has no pants.”

“Pull up from the current course and bring us alongside the hull. I’ll go in the side door.”

“Course corrected. Would you like to hear about the explosive charges inventory?”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

The computer navigated the shuttle right up next to the Erwin, about twenty yards from the rear hatch. The hatch’s functional intent was to allow someone from inside to get outside, to make repairs on the hull or to unjam the bay doors, clean a filter, touch up the paint job, or whatever. It wasn’t meant to be used to get in from the outside, and almost never was used that way. Despite that, hatches like this were called pirate doors.

The good thing about pirate doors, and what made them so useful in times like this, was that there was an airlock on the other side, so if she had to blow the door with one of the many explosive charges on inventory she wouldn’t be breaching the entire deck.

After gowning up for the spacewalk, Alice stuffed a few charges in a bag—​like her, the bag was a veteran of combat, and came with a steel panel that doubled as a piece of armor in a pinch—​added a couple of blasters, and headed across on an umbilical. She expected to have to blow the door, but it opened easily after a few turns of the hatch’s wheel.

Alice unhooked the umbilical, ordered the shuttle to hold position, stepped in, and sealed the hatch from the inside. The wall panel indicated the ship had power, so she pressurized the airlock and let herself into the inner door.

Then, theoretically, she was free to take off her helmet.

“Computer, run a check for airborne pathogens,” she said.

The computer—​the one built into the suit this time—​blinked a silent confirmation on her visor.

“Negative results,” it said, after checking. “Atmosphere breathable.”

Alice was standing at one end of a modest hangar, with two parked shuttles exactly like the one outside and room for two more.

“Then where is everybody?” she asked, as she appeared to be alone.

“Please be more specific,” the computer said. “Whom would you like to locate?”

“Never mind.”

“Never minding.”

Alice took the helmet off.

The air smelled like the standard filtered air she’d been breathing for most of her adult life, and the gravity that held her to the floor of the bay felt like Earth-standard. Both good things. Yet even if the crew of the Erwin wasn’t expecting a visitor, there should have been someone in the shuttle hangar, if only to ask her what the hell she was doing there.

“Hello?” she shouted. She heard her voice echo back, resonating with a slightly metallic hum. No doors opened, and nobody came running.

A quick inspection of the bay confirmed only that there weren’t any bodies lying around.

“Is anybody here?” she shouted.

Nothing.

The Flying Dutchman, she thought, referencing an old Earth maritime ghost story she remembered liking as a child. It wasn’t, of course, but that was what always sprang to mind in situations like this.

Alice had investigated her share of wrecks in her day, but usually the explanation was self-evident, and she was just there on the off chance someone managed to survive whatever drastic event had killed their ship. Hardly anyone ever did, because spaceships were surrounded by the vacuum of space, which was actively hostile toward human beings.

This time, there was no obvious explanation. The ship seemed to be working fine, albeit on reserve power—​she could tell from the feel of the floor that the Erwin’s engines were definitely offline—​it was just that everyone was somewhere else for some reason.

So where do I begin?

The USFS Erwin had five decks total. The captain’s bridge was on the top deck at the front of the ship, which was the farthest point from the hangar. Alice felt obligated to start there—​if for no other reason than to announce her arrival to the person who was supposed to have already authorized that arrival. At the same time, it was pretty far away; surely, she could find someone closer to her current location, who could fill her in on why the entire vessel was running silent. Or rather, drifting silent.

Alice found the door that led to the rest of the ship, and hesitated.

“Computer,” she said, addressing her suit, “synchronize with the ship’s computer.”

“Synchronizing,” the computer said, in the tone of voice waitresses used when asking children what flavor ice cream they wanted. “Synchronization complete.”

“Computer, report life signs, total. Human only.”

The synchronization allowed Alice to leverage all the ship’s systems for her inquiry. It was supposed to help clear things up. It did not.

“No life signs detected,” the computer said.

This was obviously incorrect. Aside from the fact that the Erwin had a complement of eighty-five, Alice was herself alive. Anything less than one was an error.

“Computer, recheck life signs, human only.”

“Rechecking.”

Alice pressed her face up against the window of the door she was about to go through. The hallway on the other side was well lit, and entirely empty. It ran the length of the lower deck, and—​if she recalled the vessel’s specs correctly—​was home to about 60 percent of the crew. There should have been somebody around.

“Two hundred and six life signs detected,” the computer said.

“No . . . no, that’s not the right answer either,” Alice said.

“What is the right answer?” the computer asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“What is the right answer?” the computer repeated.

“Computer, I’m asking for an exact life sign count of all the humans on board this ship. I don’t know the answer, but I know it’s a whole number that one arrives at by actually counting those life signs.”

“Understood. What is your expectation?”

“I don’t know the right answer, or I wouldn’t have asked, but I would expect it to be anywhere between one and eighty-six.”

“Rechecking,” the computer said. Then, “Seventy-two life signs detected.”

“Is that the real count, computer?”

“As requested, the total is between one and eighty-six. Is this acceptable?”

“If it’s the actual count, yes.”

“The actual count is seventy-two.”

Alice was pretty sure the computer didn’t perform anything like an actual count, which was a minor problem masking a much more serious one. Clearly, something was wrong with the Erwin’s computer; counting things wasn’t a difficult task.

“Computer, run a full internal diagnostic.”

“Running diagnostic.”

“Let me know what you find,” she said. Then she pressed the override code for the door and left the hangar for the crew’s living quarters corridor.

“Hello?” she shouted. “Is anyone here?”

Nobody responded.

All the doors were closed. Alice’s override code could open any one of them, but—​and this was a decidedly odd but undeniable truth—​she was afraid to do it.

Alice Aste had been working with the USF Security Force for fifteen years, and before that she’d been a veteran of five interplanetary conflicts. She’d once spent two months adrift and alone in a disabled life raft, rescued by chance some fifteen hours before her oxygen ran out. Before that, she’d suffered a childhood of privation during her waking hours, and nightmares when she slept. She came to grips with her own mortality when she was ten. She did not get afraid, or rather, she wasn’t afraid of the unknown. (Fear of the known, on the other hand, was quite sensible.)

And yet, on an impossibly empty vessel adrift in an unusually empty deep-space quadrant, Alice had to admit that she was one loud noise from freaking the hell out.

“Anybody?” she asked. She hesitated at the first door.

Just plug in the code and ask whoever’s on the other side what’s going on here.

She didn’t plug in the code. Her pulse was up, and her breathing was shallow. She wondered if this was what a panic attack felt like.

“Calm down,” she said to herself. “Just go straight for the bridge. You can see the stars from the bridge.”

That was one of the tricks she picked up when she was ten; there is comfort in the vast emptiness of space. At least for her.

“Diagnostic complete,” the computer said. Alice jumped two feet in the air.

“Computer, report results,” she said, once she got her heart started again.

“Results are terrific,” the computer said.

“. . . computer, please repeat.”

“Terrific. Self-diagnostic reports computer is terrific. Perfect score. Computer would report a thumbs-up if computer had thumbs.”

The Erwin’s computer had evidently lost its mind. This was, of course, just as impossible as the constantly adjusting life sign count. Computers had no minds to lose.

“Are you certain, computer?” she asked.

“Computer is certain. Computer has no thumbs.”

Alice wondered if a full reboot of the ship’s computer was in order. She’d have to do that from the bridge, but that was where she was heading anyway. It might take a while, but if there really was nobody on this vessel aside from her, she’d need to interrogate the ship’s logs. For that to work, a sane and rational computer would be important.

She headed down the hall at a normal walking pace that quickly devolved into a jog. A door might open and that, she decided, would be bad.

There’s no such thing as irrational fear, she thought, recalling the wisdom of one of her academy trainers. Your instincts know why they’re afraid; you just gotta catch up.

She made it to the other end of the hall, to the elevator, punched the button for the top deck, and checked the corridor behind her twelve times while waiting for the elevator to arrive.

It did. She jumped in, and the doors swished closed reassuringly. Up she went.

And up, and up. The elevator should have taken less than thirty seconds to reach the bridge. After well over a minute, Alice became concerned that maybe deck one wasn’t where they were headed, except there was no further point to travel to while still remaining on the Erwin.

“Computer, are we going to deck one?”

“Confirmed, deck one.”

“What’s taking so long?”

“Traveling from deck five to deck one takes a nontrivial amount of time,” the computer said, “and time is a construct.”

“That isn’t a helpful answer.”

“Would you like to try a different narration?”

“A what? No, I just want to go to deck one.”

“Deck one, coming up.”

Alice sighed.

“When?” she asked.

“I cannot provide an exact time,” the computer said.

“All right. Computer, if I stopped the elevator right now, where would I be? What deck.”

“Would you like to stop the elevator right now?”

“No, just tell me where I would be if I did.”

“You would be on deck one and five-eighths.”

“Computer, this ship has no deck one and five-eighths.”

“That is incorrect,” the computer said. “There are multiple fractional decks.”

“How many?”

“Unclear. How many would you like for there to be?”

“Never mind. Is it a finite amount?”

“This computer infers that the amount must be finite, as otherwise, deck one would be unattainable. It is coming up shortly, and is therefore not unattainable.”

Alice had an unkind response for that, but then the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened.

“Arrived, deck one,” the computer said.

Alice stepped out onto the bridge. For a vessel of this type, the bridge was really very small—​especially as compared to the military ships to which she was accustomed. It had two seats at the front, a raised seat in the middle for the captain, and two seats in the back, with instrumentation spread throughout.

Captain Matthew Hadder—​unshaven, in dirty clothing, looking tired, and shorter than she expected—​was in the chair, and an ensign she didn’t know was at the console to her left.

“You’ve shot Ensign Anson,” Hadder said, which was an interesting thing to say given that Alice hadn’t done anything of the kind.

But then the ensign fell over dead, having indeed been shot by a blaster. Still more interesting, it was only then that Alice drew her blaster from its holster and fired it. It struck Ensign Anson directly in the chest two seconds prior to being fired.

“What?” Alice said.

“Ensign Anson has been shot,” Hadder said. “By your blaster, which you used to shoot him with.”

“But I didn’t shoot him.”

“He was shot, and then you did it. Don’t worry, it wasn’t your fault. It was, because if you hadn’t run in with a gun, Ensign Anson would not be shot, but the shot came faster than the blaster off your hip. Don’t worry, it’s been happening all day. He’s dead, but only now. He wasn’t earlier, and may not be later. Who are you and what are you doing on my ship?”

“I’m . . . I don’t understand. How could I fire my blaster before I fired my blaster?”

“It happened before you decided to do it, but if you want to know why you decided before you decided, I can’t provide you with that. He may have been about to shoot, with a gun he both had and did not have. He does not right now have a gun, but may have had one before you decided to shoot.”

“He’s unarmed. I shot an unarmed ensign.”

“I can testify to Ensign Anson being both armed and unarmed at once, if it comes to that. Also, the ship’s cause-and-effect has been acting up all day. But enough about the dead ensign; once more, who are you and what are you doing on my ship?”

“I’m Corporal Alice Aste, USFSF. I’ve been sent here to find out what happened to this ship.”

“Quite a lot! We just lost an ensign, and the rest of my command deck crew have reported nonexistent. But what’s the rush!”

“Your last communication was over six weeks ago, and you’ve been adrift since. I’m here to find out what kind of assistance is needed, and then to get that assistance for you.”

“That’s hardly possible,” he said. “I sent a message just yesterday.”

“None have been received.”

“No, no, no, I would’ve remembered if I had sent silence. I didn’t. I sent a message that went like this: Please stay away.”

“That wasn’t it. What we received was, We aren’t here again today,” Alice said. “Do you remember sending that?”

“Ahhh.” Captain Hadder clapped his hands on the side of his head. “I got it wrong, I meant to say, I wish, I wish you’d stay away.”

Captain Hadder had been going in and out of rhyme for the entire conversation. At first, she thought it was just an accident of word choice. Now she was thinking he was doing it on purpose, and also that he’d begun to lose his mind, just like his ship’s computer. Unless she was losing her mind. She’d just shot a crew member, but if asked to explain how that happened, the best she could come up with was that the shot was fired before she pulled the trigger.

“Why did you want us to stay away?” Alice asked. “You seem in need of rescue.”

“Rescue! It’s only been a day.”

“Again, it’s been more than six weeks, Captain.”

“Computer, how long has it been?”

“It has been a day, Captain,” the computer said.

“There, you see?” Hadder said. “If you received that message six weeks ago, that’s hardly my fault. I sent it yesterday; you should be receiving it now.”

“Captain Hadder, you know there’s something wrong with your ship’s computer, don’t you?” Alice asked. “It’s been providing me with inaccurate information since I boarded.”

“Not at all! It’s adjusted quite well. You must have been asking it the wrong questions.”

“Computer,” she said, “how many life signs are there aboard the ship?”

“There are between one and eighty-six,” the computer said, “or zero, or two hundred and six.”

“There,” Alice said. “See? That’s an unacceptable response.”

“Why, it’s a ridiculous question!” Hadder said. “The answer is clearly variable from moment to moment. You should expect to have a different answer every time. Now where is Ensign Anson?”

“Isn’t he the one I shot?”

“Yes, yes, but he should be back by now.”

Ensign Anson was still lying dead on the floor, and Captain Hadder was clearly insane. Alice put her hand on her blaster, reflexively. It was probably a bad idea, given she’d only just not-shot-but-also-shot Anson, but instincts existed for a reason.

“Once again, Captain, why did you send the stay away message? Did something happen here? An accident maybe?”

“Nothing is the matter,” he said, which was clearly untrue.

“Then why did you send that message?”

“Because nothing is the matter! Ask Anson; he can explain it better.”

“Maybe I should ask someone else from the crew,” Alice said slowly. She’d begun to talk more slowly and deliberately with Captain Hadder, the way one might talk to a person in a bomb vest. “Captain, can you tell me where everyone else is?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But if you didn’t see them on your way to the bridge, they’re probably in their quarters.”

“All right. Don’t you need them in order to work the ship? Maybe you can find your own way out of this quadrant, with a little help. One of the engineers?”

“Ensign Anson and I can handle the bridge ourselves,” he said. “Little to do when you’re adrift.”

“My point is that you don’t need to be adrift. Some members of the crew could be enacting repairs.”

“I see your reasoning, but about the engines, there’s nothing to be done. They work perfectly, or they would; it’s the physics that are wrong.”

“Then someone should fix . . . the physics?”

He was surely speaking nonliterally. Alice remembered a particularly sarcastic first officer who—​in the middle of a war—​would say things like, “Barring some change in the laws of physics, this next torpedo will be a direct hit; brace for impact.” Captain Hadder’s delivery was wanting, but she felt certain that he was aiming for the same sort of droll wit.

“They’re not broken, they’re wrong,” he said. “I’m amazed you’ve survived on board the ship for this long, Corporal.”

“I haven’t . . . Captain. Just tell me where the rest of the crew is, and I’ll go find someone who can help.”

“As I said, they could be in their quarters. Computer, are the crew in their quarters?”

“The crew may or may not be in quarters, Captain.”

“There, see?” he said. “They may be there.”

“Then should we go down and check?” she asked. “I passed the quarters on my way.”

“Oh, goodness no, don’t do that. Imagine the consequences.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Corporal, it’s really very simple. I don’t know if they’re alive or not. If I check, I will definitely know. Who wants that on their conscience?”

“They’re either alive or they’re not alive,” Alice said.

“The computer confirmed, they are both. Have you ever seen a person who was both alive and dead?”

“Of course not. Those are binary states.”

“Neither have I. Therefore, if they are currently both alive and dead, and one of us were to go down to see which one it was, and we have never seen a person who was both alive and dead, then by checking, we will ensure that they are either one or the other, and I want no part of that! Neither should you, after what happened to poor Ensign Anson. Already enough blood on your hands.”

About 95 percent of Alice thought this was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. The 5 percent that didn’t was the same 5 percent that was in charge when she ran down the corridor in deck five, in the midst of something like a panic attack. She didn’t want to open those doors either, even before having her intelligence assaulted by Captain Hadder’s nonsense.

“How about if we just open a comm line, right now?” she asked. “We can hail the Rosen.”

“Oh no, that’s impossible. Nothing on the bridge works right now.”

She looked around. The panels were lit, which wasn’t an expectation on a nonworking bridge.

“You have power. It all looks like it’s working.”

“It’s not,” he said. “Hasn’t been since yesterday. And even though we clearly do have power, the engine isn’t providing it. Couldn’t tell you what is.”

She pointed to one of the chairs at the front of the deck. “May I?” she asked.

Captain Hadder stepped aside and waved her through.

She sat down at what was—​if she remembered the ship design specs accurately—​the helmsman’s chair. It had all the navigational instrumentation, and the communications matrix.

All the ships in the USF communicated locally by sending concentrated radioelectric bursts in tight, targeted beams. A similar approach was used for long-range communications, only the local transmission was sent to a relay, which repeated the information through an FTL tunnel.

The Rosen was just at the edge of Quadrant Brenda. In a rational universe, the Erwin would already know the Rosen was there, either because the Rosen pinged it when it was in range—​which it did, as part of the ongoing effort to establish communication—​or because the midrange sensors have only one job, which is to detect nearby objects and keep track of them.

Possibly, the Erwin was no longer a participant in a rational universe.

She asked the ship to perform a full sensor sweep, and while there was some good news—​it did pick up the Rosen, and her shuttle—​according to the survey, there was nothing on the starboard side.

Not just nothing, as in, space is pretty much a lot of nothing anyway nothing. This was a nothingness that far exceeded any previously recorded nothing, on a scale that made it quite a remarkable something. There were no quantum fluctuations popping in virtual particles, or the evidence of gravitational force acting at a distance to warp the fabric of space-time, or microscopic space debris. There were no solar winds. There was just nothing.

Alice was reminded of the ancient Earth maps: those two-dimensional rectangles meant to approximate a portion of a spherical object. The early ones weren’t large enough to encompass the entire planet, so when one drew a line to the edge of the map, it wasn’t an expectation that the line would pick up again on the opposite side. There was nothing else there because the mapmaker had stopped drawing what came next.

This is the end of the map, she thought. Here be dragons.

“No, that can’t be right,” she said. “It must be a sensor malfunction.”

“Sensors operating at full capacity,” the computer said, helpfully.

Alice stood up and leaned, to get a look at that side of the ship. If she didn’t know better, she’d have said someone was out there hanging a gigantic piece of nonreflective fabric over that part of space. Maybe they were.

“Oh no, don’t do that,” Hadder said.

“Do what?”

“Stare at the Void. Never a good idea.”

“You know about this?”

“Of course I do. It’s why the ship isn’t moving.”

“Great, now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me what it is, and then maybe we can work up a strategy to get away from it.”

“It’s nothing. You read the sensors. I don’t know why you’re acting so surprised, I told you what the problem was already.”

“You didn’t mention the giant Void in space,” she said. “I would have remembered that.”

“I said nothing was the matter with the ship. That’s very clear.”

She sighed, and resisted the urge to draw her blaster again.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I can still see the Rosen. I’ll hail them, set up a tow.”

“Best of luck!”

She opened a channel.

“USFSF Rosen, this is Corporal Aste, on the USFS Erwin. Please respond.”

The transmission came from the radar array at the highest point on the top of the Erwin, with secondary and tertiary arrays on the underbelly in the event of damage from space debris or an act of violence. When Alice sent the transmission, the signal was transmitted by all three.

Alice already knew this was how local communication worked, but this time she got a dramatic demonstration of it, because for some reason the radio signal she sent out became visible for five full seconds, before falling apart.

It was hard to get a total count on the number of things that were wrong with this. Radio waves weren’t supposed to be a part of the visible spectrum, so that was a big problem right there. Also, before the signals dissolved (or whatever that was), those beams of impossible-but-true visible light slowed down.

Alice checked the communications array to confirm that the frequency she chose to send the signal on was a normal, nonvisible-spectrum frequency. It was.

“Don’t try the laser,” Hadder said. He meant the high-burst pulse communicator, which was meant for long-range emergency signaling. “Unless you dislike the Rosen.”

“You tried it already?”

“It was like birthing a sun. Very beautiful! Given its speed and direction, I’m afraid that beam may be well on its way to annihilating everyone who lives in the Podolsky System. First Officer Hart worked that out.”

This was the first time Hadder mentioned a member of the bridge crew other than the departed Ensign Anson. She thought that was a significant thing.

“First Officer Regina Hart?” she said. “Where is she now? In her quarters?”

“I’m afraid not. She’s left.”

“L . . . left. Left the bridge? Left the ship?”

“She’s in the Anthropene Principality now. I’ll see her soon, I’m sure.”

“Where is that?” Alice asked. It wasn’t a place she’d ever heard of before. Not that it mattered if she had; it was impossible to walk off a ship in deep space and visit much of anywhere, and there was a full complement of shuttles in the hangar. Wherever it was, First Officer Hart wasn’t actually there.

Hadder laughed, and gestured vaguely at the expanse of space. Oh, you know, the gesture said. Let’s not be silly.

Exasperated, Alice sat back down in the helm chair and rubbed her head. She could feel a headache coming on.

“I wonder,” she said, “if one of you—​captain or computer—​can tell me what actually happened, or why, or even when?”

Hadder laughed again.

“Why, I’m not sure!” he said. “What an excellent question. I know what we can do. Computer?”

“Yes, Captain,” the computer said.

“Switch to narrative mode.”

“Narrative mode?” Alice asked. “That’s not even . . .”

The computer began speaking again, only this time in a deeper voice that wasn’t precisely the same as the singsongy soothing one all the USF ships were stuck with.

“Things began to go badly for the crew of the USFS Erwin around the time Dr. Marchere’s coffee mug spontaneously reassembled itself.

“Dr. Louis Marchere was not, at that moment, conducting some manner of experiment. Well, he was, only not on entropy and the nature of time. He was running several other tests, of the kind that make perfect sense on a scientific vessel such as the Erwin. About half of them were biological in nature, concerning how small samples of cellular material react to certain deep-space factors. Other tests were more at home in the general field of astrophysics. But—​again, as this is important—​he was not conducting a test on entropy.”

“Computer, stop,” Hadder said. “There, that was helpful, wasn’t it?”

“What the hell was that?” Alice asked. “And why is the computer doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“It said Alice asked, when I was talking, and the same thing when you were talking.”

“It’s narrative mode. Useful! Now we know it all began with Dr. Marchere.”

Alice was deeply confused. She’d never heard of narrative mode before, and was nearly positive Hadder was playing some sort of elaborate joke.

“It’s not a joke!” Hadder said.

“I didn’t say it was!”

“The narrative did.”

“Turn it off,” Alice said. “I KNOW I SAID THAT, YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL ME I SAID THAT.”

“Computer, end narrative mode.”

“Ending narrative mode,” the computer said.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “All right, so, Dr. Louis Marchere. Where is he? Or did he go to the . . . whatever-you-said place?”

“No, I believe he’s still aboard,” Hadder said. “We were just speaking. Deck three, in the research lab.”

“Great. Let’s go.”

She headed for the elevator. Hadder remained where he was.

“Well, come on,” she said. “You’re the only survivor I’ve found so far; I think we should stick together, don’t you?”

“It’s . . . um, no. No, I think my place is on the bridge,” he said. “It’s safer.”

“Captain Hadder, I don’t think any part of this ship is safe. Our best option here is to find out what Marchere knows; if he doesn’t have a way to save the Erwin, we need to get to my shuttle.”

“Find out what you can,” he said, in a tone that sounded like an order, “and keep me updated! Much to do up here.”

He sat down in the captain’s chair, as if this settled things.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll, ah, I’ll let you know. Computer, deck three.”

“Deck three,” the computer confirmed.

As the doors closed, Alice could have sworn she saw Ensign Anson standing next to Captain Hadder.

But of course, she didn’t. That would be impossible.

It took twice as long to get to the third deck from the first as it did to get to the first deck from the fifth. Alice was quite certain there was no mechanism in existence capable of adding fractional decks to the ship, and so was chalking this up to another aspect of the ongoing computer malfunction. She supposed a way to validate this was to ask that the elevator stop at, say, deck two and five-sixteenths, but she also didn’t want to encourage the computer’s departures from reality any more than necessary.

Find the problem, she thought. Find the problem, work the problem, solve the problem.

The reason Corporal Alice Aste was an ideal rescue mission envoy was that, over the course of a fairly extensive career, she’d worked in just about every part of a starship, from engine to helm. She was a problem-solving universal tool, a one-person away team. If a disabled ship was disabled because there was nobody aboard with the expertise to re-enable the vessel, the likelihood was fairly high that Alice had the gap-filling skill set.

But this? Whatever was going on aboard the USFS Erwin, she wasn’t equipped to deal with it. Maybe nobody human was.

“The subjective mind is objectively flawed,” she said aloud. It was one of the philosophical-slash-practical mottos she lived by. She couldn’t recall who said it to her originally—​probably one of her academy professors—​but she’d found it incredibly useful over the years. There were some things the human mind was simply bad at grasping, observationally or intuitively, which was why flawed humans created machines to objectively interrogate the world for them.

That was what the computer was supposed to be doing. Since it was malfunctioning, Alice had no way to determine how much of what she was experiencing was even real.

And that was terrifying.

“Deck three,” the computer announced, finally.

The door slid open, revealing a corridor with glass-walled rooms on both sides.

Scientific research was the Erwin’s central function, which was why the third deck was its widest and tallest. (Looked at from the front, the Erwin looked like a wide oval or, if you were hungry, like an overstuffed sandwich; deck three was where all the meat was located.) It was also where most of the vessel’s funding went.

There was a dizzying amount of experimentational activity taking place in both of the glassed-in rooms, nearly all of it mechanized. If quizzed, Alice could definitively identify maybe a third of the experiments, and perhaps half of the equipment.

The ship’s supercollider—​one of only a half dozen off-planet supercolliders in existence—​was running some kind of test on the far wall on her left, while on her right a laser tube designed to detect gravitational waves was humming along. A little farther along, a hologram of a Möbius strip was rotating slowly beside a bank of computer screens displaying rapidly evolving fractals.

Those were just the most obvious, macroscopic things. There were also cultured cells somewhere, having things done to them, and top-secret genetic splicing research, and plants being taught to grow in zero gravity chambers, and much more, but she couldn’t see any of that.

She kept walking down the corridor, absorbing the maelstrom of activity on both sides, wondering exactly where all the power for this was coming from. The supercollider alone was supposed to take up enough of the energy from the Erwin’s fusion engine that the vessel couldn’t run the FTL drive as long as it was also going. (The energy issue wasn’t the only problem. Nobody was sure what would happen if a supercollider ran while on a ship traveling faster-than-light speed, but the consensus was: nothing good.)

The point was, everything running at once had to be an enormous drain, and yet the captain insisted the ship’s engine wasn’t even running. Either he was wrong—​he was crazy, so it was probably that—​or the Erwin was surviving on battery power. The batteries on a ship like this supplied just about enough power to keep life support going, plus the communications array, and maybe some impulse power for basic maneuverability, for about thirty days. It couldn’t do all that and also provide a city’s worth of energy to the research deck.

And yet, that appeared to be what was happening. Unless Hadder was wrong.

“Computer,” she said, “give me a read on the ship’s engine output?”

“The engine is not running,” the computer said.

“Not the propulsion. I know we aren’t moving. The base-level output.”

“The engine is not running.”

“Computer, the ship has power, does it not? Otherwise, you and I wouldn’t be talking and I wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

“Confirmed, the ship has power.”

“Then what’s the engine’s baseline output?”

“The engine is not running.”

“Fine,” Alice said. “Computer, what is the source of the ship’s power, if not the engine? Is it the auxiliary batteries, or something else?”

“What is the answer you are expecting?” the computer asked.

“The right answer would be great.”

“The batteries are providing the ship with power.”

“Did you just say that because you thought that was what I wanted to hear?”

“The batteries are providing the ship with power.”

“Sure.”

“Would you like to switch to narrative mode?”

“No. What is it with you and narrative mode?”

“Narrative mode has been proven to reveal information not otherwise available to this computer.”

“No, thank you.”

She stopped short of asking the computer what other modes it had available, both because this was yet another ridiculous conversation she had no time for, and because she could see someone moving in the last part of the lab on the right.

The man had on a lead vest, with goggles and a face shield dangling loosely around his neck. He was also wearing thick leather gloves, brown coveralls of the sort Alice recognized as standard for the engineers, and heavy mag-spiked boots. His hair was pointed in five different directions, and he was holding something that looked like a blowtorch in one hand.

He could have been just about anyone in the crew. Nonetheless, she felt certain that this was Dr. Marchere.

Alice walked up to the nearest door, and when it wouldn’t open, tried her override code. That didn’t work either, so she knocked.

She startled him; he nearly dropped the torch, which would have been very bad had it been lit.

“Dr. Marchere?” she shouted.

He waved, put down the torch, waddled over, and opened the door.

“Very sorry, I’m extremely busy, can you come back later?” he asked.

“I really can’t,” she said. “I’m here to rescue the ship.”

“I . . . see. And you are?”

“Corporal Alice Aste. I’m with the Security Force, and—”

“All right, all right, come in. Rescue! Ha-ha. Yes. That would be something.”

She stepped into the room, which was awash in an atonal cacophony of pings, whirrs, and clangs. He took off his gloves and led her to a table in the center of all of it. On the table was a coffee mug, a cold pot of coffee, and a plate of doughnuts.

“I would offer you something other than doughnuts,” he said, “but the food replicator can only make these, and only if one asks for bicarbonate of soda. I haven’t worked out what one is supposed to request in order to get other foods, so this is what I have. Now, you’ve exactly seventeen minutes, and then I’ll have to get back. I’m running thirty-eight experiments, and as you can see, all of my colleagues have already left.”

“Where did they go?”

“They left, as I said. You’re not from the Erwin, is that right?”

“The Rosen is nearby. If we can’t get the Erwin’s engine running, we’ll have to get the Rosen here for a tow. I can’t hail them for . . . some reason, but I can try calling them from my shuttle. I just need to understand what’s happening here, first. The computer . . . I’m sorry, this will sound insane, but in narrative mode, whatever that is, the computer said that this all began when Dr. Louis Marchere dropped a coffee mug. You are Dr. Louis Marchere, aren’t you?”

“I am! And that is amazing.”

“Which part?”

“All of it! I’m amazed you’ve lasted this long. Have you come across anyone else?”

“The captain and I had a long conversation that made no sense and confused everything much more.”

“Oh excellent, the captain is still here. I was sure I was the last one left.”

“He said he thinks the crew might be in their quarters, but is afraid to check, because he thinks if he does so, they might be dead and it will be his fault.” She laughed then, to see if Marchere was inspired to laugh as well. He was not.

“Yes, that’s eminently reasonable on his part,” he said. “Narrative mode, you say? That’s a new one. I accidentally stumbled upon theatrical mode yesterday, which was odd enough.”

“Switching to theatrical mode,” the computer said.

Marchere: No, I didn’t mean for that. Oh well, here we are. Welcome to theatrical mode.

Alice: Oh, this is very strange.

Marchere: Yes, well, now we’re here. It’s not terrible. I enjoyed it during a soliloquy, but after became quite frustrated.

(Marchere takes a bite of a doughnut.)

Marchere: There, you see, it’s exhausting, having your own actions read back to you. I became obsessed with the question of whether the computer was describing what I was doing, or if I was doing what the computer instructed me to do. Did I just bite this doughnut because that was what the stage business described, or did the stage business capture my actions?

(Alice looks confused.)

Alice: Weird, it’s in present tense. And the computer keeps announcing who’s speaking, like we don’t already know. It was doing that before too, in narrative mode, only not every time.

Marchere: The fact that it’s in present tense is what makes it so confounding. That would argue in favor of it dictating my actions instead of the other way around, which would contravene the concept of free will entirely, and that’s terribly frustrating.

Alice: I shot a man on the bridge before pulling the trigger on my blaster. Captain Hadder said it was because cause-and-effect had been malfunctioning all day. That sounds like a similar problem. Can we . . . turn this off?

Marchere: Computer, end theatrical mode.

“Ending theatrical mode,” the computer said.

“Thank you,” Alice said. “Now can you please explain what’s happened here? Where did everyone go, why are you running all of these experiments, where are you even getting the power to run all of these experiments?”

“Do you want for me to answer all of those at the same time, or is there a particular order you’d like for me to honor?”

“Start with what’s going on. I guess.”

“All right. Do you know what scientific theory states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good, because there isn’t one. We’ve always just assumed it to be so, because it did us no good to assume otherwise. It was a poor assumption.”

“You’re saying the laws of physics don’t apply to this quadrant?”

“I mean the Void we’re next to, primarily, but as you must have worked out, there have been local alterations. We’re right on the event horizon of a portion of space in which nothing we’ve previously proven to be true is necessarily still true. That’s why I’m running all these experiments. I’m trying to work out what is true in this particular region of space.”

“That sounds ridiculous.”

“Oh, absolutely. It’s magnificently ridiculous. Yesterday, I positively identified a particle’s exact location and velocity. This morning, I tested the wave function collapse of light, but it refused to collapse. Later, I managed to measure the speed of light from a moving object compared to the speed of light from a stationary one, and discovered the one from the moving object was faster. I’ve also discovered electrons a half-quanta apart, and a few hours ago the supercollider detected an element between carbon and nitrogen, and a neutron with a negative charge. And this morning, for five seconds, all the oxygen in the other room—​thankfully, I was in this one—​gathered in one corner. These are all impossible, ridiculous things.”

“But that can’t be right. It’s only a computer malfunction.”

“The computer on this ship is working perfectly,” he said, “in that it’s describing an objective reality we cannot grasp. My equipment is working perfectly as well. It’s our perception that’s having trouble catching up. Now, I have to get back to my work before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what, Doctor?” she asked. “What exactly happened to your coworkers? Where is everyone else?”

“Ah. They don’t exist any longer.”

“You mean, they’re dead?”

“I prefer it the way I said it. Are you familiar with the anthropic principle?”

“I heard something like that. The captain said his bridge crew went to the Anthropene Principality. Is that the same thing?”

“More or less. Hadder’s head’s all jumbled. The anthropic principle is a logical point stemming from the observation that everything in our universe has to be just so, in order to allow for our existence. From Planck’s Constant to the charge of an electron, the weight of atomic particles, and so on and so forth, all of it carries a value which allows, as an aggregate, for a universe to exist which contains intelligent life. None of these values had to be what they were. It’s a little circular, because one could easily argue that the only reason the universe’s aggregation of values exists to allow intelligent life is because this is the only permutation that allowed for intelligent life to develop in order to make that observation. Other universes—​assuming multiple universes—​evolved differently, and have no intelligent life to note that their universe failed to evolve in such a way to allow for them to exist.”

“All right,” she said. “That does sound odd.”

“I bring it up because the part of the universe we’re standing at the edge of, right now, is a part where the laws do not allow for us to exist. It’s the converse point of the anthropic principle. We’re composed of the laws on which our universe was built. The slightest change in the strong nuclear charge and the atoms that make up your body could fly apart or collapse into themselves. Your brain evolved to communicate via neural electrical charges; a change in the electromagnetic force, and it stops working. These are facile examples, but you understand. If the laws change, we won’t be around to measure them. At least, not for long. We’re still here because neither of us have had the misfortune to happen upon a patch of altered laws that will undo us, and in fact right now we’re alive because I’ve been taking advantage of the alteration. You asked before what’s powering us. The answer is, when the engine failed, I hooked up the auxiliary batteries together. They’re now charging one another and the ship.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Evidently not here! The laws of this patch of universe allow for perpetual motion machines, so we may as well get some use out of it.”

“So . . . you’re saying the rest of the crew has been . . . unmade?”

“I’ve yet to witness this happening to anyone, but yes, I think so. I’m afraid to leave this level. You say you came from the hangar, and visited the bridge; it’s good to know those places still exist.”

“According to the computer there are fractional decks being added all the time,” she said.

He laughed.

“Fascinating,” he said. “I only hope I’m around to find an explanation for that.”

“Now that I’m here with a shuttle, you don’t have to think like that, Doctor,” she said. “I can take you—​and the captain, if he’s willing to leave the bridge—​and whatever research you have. The Erwin is clearly a hostile living environment.”

“An excellent suggestion, but no, I think I had better stay. You have a good point, however, in that I have no way to communicate my findings. My hope was to record as much as I could and jettison it toward the hub, but in truth I came upon that idea when I thought I’d reach the end of my studies. It seems the deeper I dig, the more strangeness I find. But here.”

He placed a memory tab on the table.

“This is everything I’ve measured up to about an hour ago. I hope.”

“You hope?”

“I hope it’s only been an hour. The passage of time has been curious.”

She picked up the tab.

“It has,” she said, “the captain said it had only been a day, but it’s been . . .”

Alice looked up from the table to find she was speaking to an empty room.

“Dr. Marchere?”

He’d been standing two meters away, and now he wasn’t. The experiments in the room were still running, and the doughnut he’d taken a bite from remained bitten from, but he wasn’t there to continue the experiments or finish the doughnut.

“Computer, can you locate Dr. Marchere?”

“There is no Dr. Marchere.”

“Dr. Louis Marchere,” she clarified.

“There is no Dr. Louis Marchere.”

“He was just right here, computer.”

“Would you like to try a different narration?”

“No, I . . . I don’t know what I want.”

He’s in the Anthropene Principality now, she thought.

“I need to get off this ship,” she decided. “Computer, what’s the fastest way to the hangar?”

“The hangar is located on deck five,” the computer said.

“Is there still a deck five?”

“There’s still a deck five, but portions appear missing. Haste is recommended.”

Alice opened the door to the lab and ran to the elevator, as things in both glass-walled rooms began to go somewhat more haywire than before. The holographic Möbius strip had developed a second side, the fractals on the computer screens began flashing random Greek letters for some reason, and it looked like a black hole was forming in the center of the supercollider. An amoeba the size of her head popped into existence on the glass a few feet from her face, and then popped back out of existence again before she had a chance to scream. It began to rain.

She reached the elevator door and pushed the button. Then she opened up her bag and retrieved her helmet. If the atmosphere decided to collect in one corner of the ship again, she’d rather she was breathing her own supply.

The ship started groaning before the elevator even made it to the fourth deck.

“Computer, what made that sound?” Alice asked.

“Unclear.”

Alice remembered visiting the extinct-Earth-animals exhibit as a child, and being transfixed by the elephant in particular. The noises the ship was making sounded like an elephant being squeezed like an exhaust bladder.

Then the elevator shuddered, and stopped.

“Computer, what’s going on?”

“Unclear.”

“Can you tell me where I’ve stopped?”

“You’ve stopped at deck three and eleven-sixteenths. Would you like to get out here?”

“That depends. Will the elevator be moving again anytime soon?”

“Define soon.”

“Before the ship blows up, implodes, or otherwise ceases to exist?”

“Unable to predict those outcomes at this time.”

Alice wondered if maybe she should have gone up instead, back to the bridge. She could have collected Captain Hadder and gone out the topside hatch, and called the shuttle from there.

Then Alice started floating: the gravity had cut out.

If I can get into the shaft, I can reach the command deck on my own, she thought.

“Computer, can you hail Captain Hadder?” she asked.

“There is no Captain Hadder.”

“Computer, can you hail the bridge?”

“There is no bridge.”

“Deck one, computer. Open a channel to deck one.”

“There is no deck one.”

Crap.

“Computer, does deck five still exist?”

“Deck five continues to exist.”

“But deck one is missing.”

“The USFS Erwin does not have a deck one.”

“All right, never mind. Open doors, please. Let’s see what deck three and eleven-sixteenths looks like.”

The doors slid open on a level that looked weirdly out of focus. Alice’s first thought was that some kind of viscous fluid had gotten on her helmet, distorting the view of the universe on the other side. But the helmet was clean.

The walls were partly transparent and partly solid, because deck four’s walls were opaque, while deck three’s floors had glass walls. Deck three and eleven-sixteenths was trying to have both at once.

Since the gravity was out, Alice activated the mag-spikes on her boots and attached herself to the floor, then stepped off the elevator onto a blurry level that somehow managed to be solid.

“Computer, where is the nearest maintenance shaft on this deck?” she asked.

If the ship behaved for long enough, she’d be able to access the fifth deck by way of a maintenance shaft.

“Twenty-five meters.”

“In which direction?”

“All directions.”

The computer was not going to help.

Relying on the deck layout of one of the levels that was actually supposed to exist, Alice headed straight down the blurry corridor between the blurry rooms on both sides. In a slightly more ideal circumstance, she’d run, but because the artificial gravity generator had decided it was done (or ceased to exist, or whatever), she had to keep one boot on the ground.

About fifteen steps in, the boots stopped working. Actually, what it felt like was that the magnets holding her in place switched poles spontaneously, and repelled her from the floor. She began drifting to the ceiling.

Then came an explosion, somewhere aboard the ship. Alice felt it tremble through the belly of the vessel, rocking the walls and putting her into a gentle spin.

“Computer, what was that?”

“That was an explosion,” the computer said, not at all helpfully.

“Right, thanks.”

There was another tremble, and a shudder, and then a loud screech that didn’t sound like much of anything Alice had ever heard before: not the noise a machine makes when it’s broken, or a sound approximating that of an extinct elephant getting squeezed, or the cacophony a ship makes when its hull is torn open. It was not, in other words, on the short list of bad noises in her mental catalog of things to be alarmed about. She was nevertheless extremely alarmed, because what it did sound like was a creature that her lizard brain told her to run from. This was even though that portion of her brain also didn’t know what she was hearing.

Then, directly beneath her and along the corridor floor, a thing ran past.

There were a tremendous number of wrong things that were wrong with this thing, the most arresting being that it was somehow in a higher definition than the rest of the deck, including Alice herself. It was a bright shade of blue, and green, almond, and a color of purple she was pretty sure was ultraviolet, which she was also pretty sure she shouldn’t have been able to see. There were other colors she didn’t even have a name for, because they didn’t exist in the universe she was familiar with.

It was perhaps a giant bat, perhaps a snake, and perhaps a horse. It galloped and hissed, shrieked and chortled, and swung its long, clawed fingers through the walls on either side as if they weren’t there. The walls, in turn, acted as if the creature wasn’t there, showing no damage.

Here be dragons, she thought.

With a great flap of its enormous wings, it soared ahead, and vanished at the far end of the corridor.

“All right, I’ve had enough,” Alice said. “Computer, what’s the fastest way off this ship? I don’t care how, just as long as it puts me on the other side of the hull.”

“Unable to calculate,” the computer said.

“Why is that?”

“The concept of other side of the hull is too variable to allow for a precise calculation. There are several places where the hull has ceased to exist, but sensors indicate nothing exists on the other side of where the hull no longer is.”

“That’s great.”

The vessel shuddered again. Alice waited for a new nightmare creature to show up, but none did. It was probably just another part of the Erwin getting unwritten from the universe.

“Computer, how close am I to the maintenance shaft now?”

“Twenty-five meters.”

“That’s how far I was when I got off the broken elevator. I must have gotten closer since.”

“Understood. However, the distance remains twenty-five meters.”

She sighed.

“I really need to understand what’s happening to the entire ship right now, computer,” Alice said, “or I’m never getting off of it. I don’t even know what questions to ask you. Can you provide me with an integrity assessment?”

“Not in this mode.”

A hole opened up in the floor, which should have been good news, because that was the direction she wanted to go. But there was nothing on the other side of the hole. Either decks four and five were missing now, or the hole just went to someplace different.

“What the hell,” Alice said. “Computer, switch to narrative mode.”

Something quite extraordinary was happening to the USFS Erwin.

It was difficult to tell, from more or less any angle, whether the ship had been drawing closer to the Void on its starboard, or if the Void was moving closer to the ship, but what was definitely the case was that their positions relative to one another had been changing since the Erwin first encountered the strange section of space. Now—​after either two days or six weeks—​the two things were colliding.

The Void was having a devastating effect on the Erwin. (The same could not be said of the Erwin’s impact on the Void, which appeared to be weathering things just fine.) There were certain expectations regarding how most space-based threats could damage a man-made starship. Incredibly dense objects, like neutron stars or black holes, could tear apart such a ship if it ventured too close, by literally ripping parts of the vessel off of other parts of the vessel, and/or drawing it into an inescapable gravitational well. Highly radioactive objects could bombard the ship with levels of gamma radiation so severe as to overwhelm the shielding and cook whoever was unfortunate enough to be inside. Rogue objects like asteroids could blow through a hull with a direct hit.

And so on.

None of those things were happening to the Erwin. Instead, it looked as if someone had produced a very realistic three-dimensional artistic rendering of the ship and then, deciding they disliked it, began erasing the artwork. Starting on the starboard side, large chunks of solid material were being turned into tiny bits of particulate matter—​eraser crumbs, perhaps—​after which the tiny bits of particulate matter glistened with internal light and then vanished.

It’s fair to say that however beautiful this might have looked to a neutral (and presumably distant) observer, its impact on the contents of the vessel was very bad indeed. Under optimal circumstances, a hull breach was dealt with by the ship’s integrity shields: short-term force fields that plugged up holes before all of the atmosphere in the breached cell leaked into space. But the integrity shields only worked in circumstances where there was more hull than breach, and anyway they needed power in order to function. Unfortunately, the entirely impossible perpetual motion machine Dr. Marchere assembled had begun to break down.

All of this would be very bad news for anyone still alive aboard the USFS Erwin. It was good news, then—​if such a thing deserved to be called good news—​that there was nobody left alive on the Erwin. All except for Corporal Alice Aste, desperately shuffling along deck three and eleven-sixteenths in a quixotic attempt to get back to her shuttle before she too was unmade.

“Hey!” Alice said. “There’s no need for that.”

The deck floor was mostly gone now, as was the starboard side of the hull, which she could see through the blurry office wall: the Void was on two sides. But the ceiling remained intact, and since there was no such thing as up or down in space—​especially without the artificial gravity—​she was doing okay with her mag-spiked boots. Shortly, though, she was going to run out of places to move.

“Computer, if you could just stop being so long-winded and give me something I can use, that would be great,” she said.

“The nature and pace of the narrative isn’t under the computer’s control,” the computer said, annoyingly.

Alice grumbled an insult under her breath and kept going. Very shortly, none of this would matter. The portside hull was weakening already, not so much from direct contact with the Void as a consequence of having its structural integrity challenged thanks to half of it no longer existing. The hull’s metal shell was wrinkling . . .

“Hang on, go back,” Alice said. “Repeat that last part.”

Alice grumbled an insult . . .

“After that.”

Already, the portside hull was weakening . . .

“Computer, end narrative mode.”

“Ending narrative mode.”

Alice put her hand on the blurry med lab wall on the port side. It felt firm, because it was a wall, but at the same time it also didn’t feel that firm. She pushed . . . and her hand went through it.

“Okay, that probably shouldn’t have worked,” she said.

She kicked her leg through, and then her other arm, and soon she’d gotten her whole body on the other side. Now in a room that was trying very hard to be both Marchere’s supercollider lab and a medical examination room, she mag-walked across the ceiling to the outer hull.

The pushing-her-hand-through-something-that-was-supposed-to-be-solid trick didn’t work a second time; the hull was firm, although she could hear it starting to fail. Waiting for that to happen seemed like a bad bet, and she didn’t have to; not as long as she was carrying explosive charges.

She pulled one out, set the digital timer to thirty seconds, said a quiet prayer that she was in a part of the ship where chemical explosives and digital clocks still worked like they were supposed to, and then disengaged the mag-clips from the ceiling and pushed herself to the far end of the room.

The charge went off, exposing all of deck three and eleven-sixteenths to outer space. The atmosphere blew out of the hole, and sucked Alice out with it. In seconds, she was drifting on a free trajectory a significant distance from the Erwin.

“Now unsynchronized with USFS Erwin’s computer,” her suit’s computer announced, which Alice thought was great news.

“Call the shuttle to my position,” Alice said.

“Unable to locate shuttle,” the computer said.

Alice twisted around until she was facing the wreckage of the Erwin. She could see the shuttle all right, but it was now embedded in the side of the larger ship. It looked like the Erwin was giving birth to it, only in reverse.

“That’s great,” she said.

The Void was just about done with the Erwin. Like the narrative said, it was hard to tell whether the ship had been drifting into the Void or whether the Void was expanding to consume the ship. Either way, she couldn’t afford to drift into it herself, nor could she ask the Rosen to get that close to it just to pick her up.

But, she wasn’t out of options. There were two more charges in her bag, and the bag had armor shielding.

She pulled it off her back and got out the two remaining charges.

“Computer, locate the Rosen,” she said. Then she held her breath. If the computer said unable to locate or worse, the USFSF Rosen does not exist, Alice was out of luck. It said neither.

“Rosen located.”

“Target on helmet view.”

The computer pinpointed the ship for her.

Now’s the fun part, she thought. She set the timer for both charges at thirty seconds, put them back in the bag, and then tried to crouch until her whole body—​feet-first so her legs would absorb the worst of it—​was behind the steel plate in the bag. Then she tried to maneuver herself so that she was between the impending explosion and the USFSF Rosen.

“Computer, activate emergency beacon,” she said.

“Emergency beacon activated.”

“Thanks. Sure hope this works.”

The charges blew. She felt her right leg shatter, and then she blacked out.

She woke up in the Rosen’s med lab, with a doctor she didn’t know standing over her.

“There you are,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks,” she said. Her mouth was dry and her vision blurry.

How long have I been out? she wondered.

She tried to sit up, but it felt like the Rosen’s gravity was set at a much higher force level than it was supposed to be.

“Here, let me help,” the doctor said, pushing a button that got her bed into an upright position. “I’m Dr. Maxwell, and you are lucky to be alive.”

“You wouldn’t be the first doctor to tell me that,” she said, trying out a smile. “What’s the damage?”

“Broken right leg, shattered left kneecap, broken left elbow, torn muscles in your right shoulder, and your oxygen ran out three minutes before we got to you, so you’re probably missing a few brain cells. There were a couple of other things, but that’s the worst of it.”

“I need to speak to the captain,” she said.

“I’m sure. I’ll let him know you’re awake; he’ll want to speak to you too. They’ve been going over the information you retrieved from the Erwin; I guess there are a lot of questions that need answering.”

“How long . . . ?”

“How long have you been out?” he asked. “Depends on where you’d like to start counting. We believe you were adrift for a couple of days, but you’d been on board the Erwin for more than a week. Your trip computer recorded only a few hours, though. I think this is one of the questions the captain has. You do need some rest first, so if you’d like for me to delay him, I can certainly do so.”

“No,” she said. “It’s okay. The sooner the better.”

“Good,” he said with a paternal smile. “I’ll let him know. Meanwhile, if you’re thirsty, there’s a glass of water on your right. I’ll be right back.”

He left. Alice sat still for a few minutes, trying to compose her thoughts. It was going to be impossible to explain everything without sounding insane, but she didn’t really care about coming off as sane anymore. What happened, happened. They’d have to take the data from Dr. Marchere, and her accounting, and figure out what to do with it. Hopefully, one of the things they would decide to do would be to bar all travel through Quadrant Brenda.

After a few minutes with her thoughts, Alice realized she was fantastically thirsty. She turned and reached for the glass, not entirely anticipating how weak her right arm was. What began as a straightforward reach for a nearby object became an awkward flail that resulted in her knocking the glass off the edge of the counter.

She heard it shatter on the floor.

“Great,” she said. “You gave me an actual glass. Very smart, Dr. Maxwell.”

Alice was deciding whether to call a nurse to clean up the glass or to try to do it herself—​despite the cast on her leg—​when the drinking glass reassembled itself and returned to the counter.

She blinked a couple of times, thinking it would be best if she pretended that hadn’t just happened, while knowing that pretending this wouldn’t make a difference.

“Computer,” she said.

“Yes, Corporal Aste,” the Rosen’s computer said.

“This is going to sound crazy, but do you have a narrative mode?”