The small object which was leading us continued to skip through hyperspace as soon as we neared it. Every time, it would send a short, focused transmission to us and then vanish. I was certainly glad that our transmitter was working well; if we'd missed one of them there'd be no making it up.
It became apparent, after about half an hour of this, that we weren't going to get to our destination anytime soon. I was exhausted; most of my day had been taken up by Lane travel and the added excitement of a rushed evacuation of an entire station had done little to help me conserve my energy. I gave Jenny the watch and fell asleep.
She personally came back and woke me up several hours later. "I think we're there." she said to me gravely.
The viewscreen, when I'd wandered back to the pilot's chair and cleared my eyes out enough to see it, had centered in it a large vessel, apparently derelict. I knew better than to believe anything I saw when it came to derelict vessels, though. My (new and updated!) maps showed us to be on the outskirts of nowhere, in an area that remained undeveloped simply because there was nothing much of note there. They were wrong.
It wasn't the vessel that got my attention, it was the minefield of miniature Yotian anomalies. It almost made me physically ill to watch them, and I noticed Jenny was looking away from the viewscreen altogether. There had to be hundreds out there, and I found myself wondering how much of a grip on sanity Sann had retained. Clearly, if he was leaving this sort of permanent mark upon his local area, things couldn't exactly be all right.
The small metallic probe was leading us toward the derelict ship which, as I had suspected, was not as infirm as it had appeared. It began transmitting us landing instructions, which I was determined to follow extremely carefully. There appeared to be a rather wide lane for ships to approach, but I didn't want to take the chance of accidentally drifting into one of the anomalies.
The Resonation, as it identified itself to us, had apparently been designed to carry other, smaller ships, as it had a docking bay rather than docking arms. A fully lit and pressurized bay, by the time we were settled in. I was first through the airlock, fully armed and with some actual working FAST units I'd grabbed from the ship. I know Sann had sent for us, but I felt like taking no chances. Jenny followed afterward with no extra equipment. She didn't need it, her suit came equipped with nearly the entire technological expertise of her species. No matter what happened, she'd have something built in to deal with the situation.
Our host, apparently, was the same metal probe we'd been following. It was somewhat larger than my height, nearly perfectly spherical, and was apparently using the built-in gravity controls of the ship to keep itself aloft. Not for the first time, I wondered what we'd gotten ourselves involved in.
The sphere started moving away from us, down a corridor, then stopped as we watched it go. I took a step forward and it floated forward. It didn't take a member of the Last Great Race to figure this one out, and indeed Jenny was already making her way down the corridor, chiding me on my slowness and paranoia.
The sphere lead into a laboratory where there were more, this time smaller, tears in reality. Each one appeared smaller than the last, until they lead to where the big sphere had finally stopped its floating.
A holo unit at the front of the room kicked on. Sann once more stood before us. I'd only had the briefest of looks before when he'd told us to follow him, so it was only now that I'd seen how poorly he'd aged. It'd only been thirty years, but he looked close to his death bed. He had been younger than me during the project but I suppose, given the scenery outside, his life had been a bit more stressful.
"Hey everyone. If you're seeing this, then my project worked, or I'm dead. Probably it worked, though. Anything in this line of work that would kill me would blow up the Resonation, too.
"This recording was set up to play whenever any one of the team made contact at Reil station. The big sphere there has been stealthed, waiting, and polling the job boards in that system ever since I got it working. As for the light show, that's simple. I got our baby working.
"I hope you're all here for this. Dr. Fallon, Jenny, I'm sorry to say that I'm still not sure why this thing works. The Ulix told us it was a power supply at first, and it definitely generates some power, but that's not its primary function. It seems to let an entirely different sort of space leak through into reality. It's a very high-energy space, so tapping that gives us quite a bit of power to deal with. I figured that part of it out shortly after the team disbanded. Alan, I'm sure you'll understand - I couldn't let it go. I brought the research data out with me, moved out here with an old ship of mind, and started right where we left off. The minefield outside is the result of my earlier experiments. Tapping into the void-space is the easy part, we managed that back when we were active, after all. Containing it is something else. It wants to pull normal space into itself. It turns out that can be used against it. The details are in the schematics available on the panel over there - feel free to download them, Alan I know you'll probably want to see how it all works. The tendency of the voidspace to collapse everything around it can be changed so that it collapses itself. When that happens, everything that was in it is restored. My sphere there is capable of opening up a gateway the size of Reil station and then - the important part - closing it nearly instantaneously. Nobody would be hurt, if they were caught in it they'd be spat out upon collapse without even a memory of what had happened.
"That's the real function of the Resonator: Storage. Not for ordinary things, though, for people. I discovered it by accident when I was developing the containers that you see around the laboratory keeping the smaller of my accidents from getting any larger. It was late, and I was tired - I didn't have a night or day here, I had nothing to set my internal cycles, I'd stay up for days at a time and nearly fall into a coma of exhaustion afterward. I was about to do exactly that when I tripped, and my arm brushed one of the smaller anomalies.
"Quite frankly, I thought I was dead. There was a darkness, and I thought that was it, that's how I would spend the rest of eternity, just a disconnected mind floating in the darkness.
"Then I hit the floor. It felt like I'd spent a good several minutes in that nothingness, but when I reviewed the security tape of the room, it just showed me falling and nothing else. My hand had passed through the anomaly with no adverse effects. That's when I started testing with laboratory animals."
The holo changed from Sann standing there to old surveillance footage of the room. It showed a device whose apparent design was to lower something into one of the anomalies and pull it out. The footage then switched back to an exhausted-looking Sann.
"A most interesting thing happened. Any animal which was only partially put into the anomaly emerged well, but any which submerged totally vanished into the nothingness. It was around that time as well that I stumbled - not literally this time - upon the secret to changing their size on demand. The machinery, I realized, probably still existed somewhere, even within the voidspace. I created a resonator which would overload like all the last ones, then use the limiting tendencies I'd been experimenting with previous to my accident to re-contain the void-space. I'd never tried it before, as I assumed that the machinery was destroyed upon being enveloped. This time, however..."
The holo changed again to surveillance footage, this time featuring a small metal sphere which looked oddly like the Resonator of legend bursting, as I'd seen them do countless of times, into the no-space with which our lab had become nearly filled. Then it did something I'd only seen once before, and that just yesterday: It slowly collapsed back into the metallic shell which had spawned it.
"You can imagine how excited I was. We hadn't been on the wrong track! We had instead been right all along! The Resonator was supposed to work this way. Either that or I'd discovered an entirely different principle, but either way our work had been leading somewhere.
"I resumed the experiments with the animals, with the same results I'd had before. Any animal who hadn't been entirely inside when the field expanded was fine when it collapsed again. Any who had been completely enveloped never came out. Only that wasn't entirely true. I kept noticing that whenever I'd completely submerge something in the void and then partially submerge something else, that something else usually had a very short lifespan. It acted extremely erraticly for the rest of its life, I could never really get a fix on it until I had an unbelievably stupid idea. As you can tell from the scenery, I've no shortage of those and no qualms about working on them. That's why I found such an out of the way place, so nobody would get hurt.
"I did an experiment; I taught a rat to run a maze, then put it completely in the void. I partially exposed another rat that I'd just bought and had no clue how to run the maze. Only it did, once it touched the void.
"Dr. Fallon, Jenny, I think the Ulix use the Resonator as a storage for their minds. It beats even the deep-sleep, just pull your mind out at the beginning of your journey, wile the time away with deep thoughts and such, and then emerge millenia later none the worse for the wear. They'd need volunteers to put their minds back into, granted, but they could just keep them in hibernation or, hell, grow them or something.
"Allen, Dr. Fallon, the two of you can probably tell how badly I've aged out here. I've lived an unhealthy few decades. The rest of you will probably notice that I look quite a bit different. I don't think I'm long for this world, is the point I'm trying to get to. So I've got this crazy idea that I can use my fake Resonator here to do what the Ulix have been doing for who knows how long and who knows why. That's why you're seeing this holo instead of the real thing; I tried it. It's either worked, in which case any of you can touch the sphere and meet me, or it hasn't, in which case touching that sphere will momentarily put you in the same darkness that I was in a while back to no ill effect."
The hologram of Sann vanished with that announcement, and the strange silence of the ship rushed in to replace his speech. I'd never known him to be a talkative man, it was quite possible that he'd said more in that single speech than he ever had when we were working together. Then again, I suppose, it was possible that having nobody around to talk to made any outlet look like a good one. In any case, the sphere was there in the corner, humming lightly.
"It's your call." Jenny said quietly. She hadn't really known Sann, I don't know that they'd exchanged any words at all. She was right; I was the only person who had been even remotely close to him. It was my call.
I took a deep breath, stepped over to the sphere, and placed my palm on it.
Now, I don't mean to be overly dramatic, since it's obvious that I got back to the ship to make this journal entry and therefore must have survived. Still, it was strange.
At first, I didn't think anything had actually happened at all. I was still in the lab, the microfractures in space and time were still eerily floating in their containers, the sphere still hummed its puzzling tune. Jenny, however, was gone. I paused momentarily to wonder if somehow she'd touched the sphere and vanished while I watched despite what I remembered happening a few moments ago. Then I noticed I wasn't alone in the room.
"Alan Ledford. Somehow, I knew it would be you."
Sann's voice was cracked from disuse. I turned to see him, and found him looking just as disheveled and in as bad a state as he'd seemed on the holo. He looked like a man posessed and then worked into the ground, but his eyes burned with alertness and his mouth smiled with wonder.
His experiment had worked?
When I voiced this question, the smile dropped from his face and he shook his head sadly. "No, no no. It worked in that it kept me alive, if that's what you can call this. This laboratory around you is a figment of my imagination. If you were to leave it, you'd probably find the ship; that's usually what I find when I wander out. Further out I've found planet surfaces, lakes, space stations, species never thought of by man and terrors my memory has been kind enough to make me forget. I spent a lot of time exploring, and I spent a lot of time sleeping. I don't think our species was meant to use something like this. The Ulix, they've mastered it, they can even go beyond, but us? It's not for us."
He was trapped here? That question was immediately followed by the next logical step: Was I trapped here?
"I have a way out, thanks to you. If my theories are correct, I could come back with you when you leave. It would be the both of our minds in your body, though, and I don't think either of us is sane enough to withstand that for long. I'll spare you the indignity. You may leave anytime you wish, simply by touching the sphere again. I'd like to talk to you before that, though."
I'd never known him to be this chatty, but I wasn't going to tell him to shut up now.
"That's kind of you, but we're not exactly talking. The internals of the Resonator are a place of thought. We're no more speaking to each other than we are in my lab.
"Alan, this isn't an area of research that will lead to good things for our species. It pains me to say this. I used to think along the same lines as Jenny, that any research had an upside. I've been thinking a little more practically lately. You've seen the scenery outside...."
With this, he gestured toward the panel on the wall, and it obediently showed the view I'd seen upon approach to the ship. In this view, there were far more of the anomalies than I'd been able to spot previously. Thousands stretched as far as the eye could see.
"This is what I see our space looking like. The Ulix, they know what they're doing with this technology. They store themselves off and put themselves back somehow. Me, I'm just stuck here. I can't even really control what I experience in here, I don't have that kind of mental discipline; I don't think any of us do. Given time, I suppose you could say I'd learn, but I'd estimate I've already been here a few years. Haven't learned a thing so far. Controlling what the sphere does outside is way beyond me, even though I left the machinery with the ability to do exactly that. Everything you saw it do was pre-programmed.
"That minefield out there is nothing compared to what people would do given this sort of weapon. Because that's what they'd make it; unable to use it for its real purpose, they'd put it to use destructively."
Our people had tried that once, or had he forgotten losing his homeworld?
"If we'd had more than just the one, if we'd had ones we could control as exactly as I can control these - and keep in mind I really only have the slightest idea what I'm doing with these, so imagine what some really talented minds could do - do you think we'd have suffered the same punishment? Or do you think that we'd have simply threatened to destroy the entire sectors of civilizations that threatened us? It's that sort of weapon, Alan. Whoever had it would dominate everything else, tribunal be damned. When someone else finally did get it, well that's when I see all of space and time as we know it being torn apart by the conflict."
Sann looked utterly despirited. His entire life, it seemed, had lead up to the point of recreating the Resonator, and he'd finally done it, only to come to the conclusion that it'd just be misused and end up killing everyone.
"I've got a request, Alan. This prototype can't be let out. Hell, this ship alone has enough information on it to create who knows how much havoc. When you leave here, I want you to destroy it."
I didn't particularly like that idea, given that he seemed to be on the ship. I could take his sphere with-
"No!" he objected loudly. "That's the whole point, see? If you take the sphere you'll be taking a working prototype. I was hoping to have control of it from within here, but I don't, really, so if someone got ahold of it all they'd do it tear it apart to find out how it worked, and I'd be just as dead. They'll find it someday, Alan. That minefield out there is going to attract a whole lot of attention once someone stumbles upon it. I need you to take care of this, Alan. Fix the damage we've done."
I felt it my obligation to mention that the original one was still out there somewhere.
"It doesn't matter, nobody can get to it. Since the Ulix went turtle thirty years ago they've been keeping everyone out of the area."
I wasn't sure where to begin there. Jenny had said the Ulix were still around, and here Sann was agreeing with her?
"Of course they're still around. They're in their resonator, waiting out the current problems. Once a few hundred years go by, they'll be back - or at least as back as they were to begin with. It's my theory that they've got a whole lot more control over their Resonator than we do over ours, and it's got quite a few more features. They're a far older race, and chances are they're quite a bit more evolved. I don't think any of us have actually seen a real live Ulix; we've seen some sort of projection. Whether it's psychic or just a really good holo, I don't know. It just occurs to me that, in all our time with Junior on our team, did any of us ever shake his hand? When we went and got a drink, would he drink one up as well? He didn't... I never saw him interact with any physical object. My memory's very good in this place here, Alan, and though I didn't spend as much time with the Ulix as you had, I don't think I'd ever seen any of them ever physically handle anything. The merchants had their wares on display and a place to put your pane for ownership and funds transfer, but they never handed anything over; they had a delivery service handle it, or expected you to pick it up. Junior never touched us. Senior, even at his most irate, never so much as picked up a pencil to gesture angrily with. They don't even have their own ships, Alan! I did a bit of searching, nobody's ever seen an actual Ulix vessel. I don't think such a thing exists. Ever get ahold of an Ulix translator, Alan? Neither has anyone else. The most advanced translation technology ever, so much so that it appears as though the user is speaking the client's native language fluently without aid - I don't think they ever had translators! They're talking right into our head. It's all a projection. So they're hiding out, probably until the fallout of the failure at Yotia settles, and then one day they'll drop that barrier of theirs and everything will be fine again. Right now, though, nobody can get to that original."
That was the second thing I'd wanted to mention to him. I'd seen the original. And if the Ulix had been willing to let me in on the assumption that I'd keep working on their device, who else might they let in?
Sann turned nearly ashen. "They let you in? They must be more desperate than I thought. I think their Resonator is breaking down... with so many of their people stored in it, it's wearing out faster than they'd like. Even they might not know exactly how it works anymore, so they found some expendable outsiders they could use to make them a new one. Expendable because mistakes were bound to be made, outsiders because they wouldn't want any one Ulix to have an advantage over the others. It makes sense. So even with my research gone, they'll just find some other patsy to do their dirty work." He sighed.
It occurred to me then; if I'd gotten in once, couldn't I get in again?
Sann shrugged in response. "I don't know how developed their talents are. If they can construct a border like theirs which implants the idea of turning back into the minds of trespassers, what's to prevent them from reading that same mind and seeing its motivations?"
I didn't think that was the case; the impression I'd got from approaching the border had been one of impartiality toward the trespasser. It wanted him out, and that was it. They could likely turn it on or off for select people, and that was it.
Sann sighed again. "If, if if... we know too little, Alan, we always did. I liked working on this with you; when I went off to continue it on my own, it took me a long time because I didn't have the insights you did. Even then, though, we knew too little. We're lucky we didn't get ourselves killed.
"It's up to you, Alan. Just destroy this place when you leave, that's all I'll ask you to do."
He wasn't saying anything else; there wasn't anything else to say, after all. I turned and touched the sphere.