*Twelve Years Ago* Aiden- The reactor was there one minute and the next...it wasn't. A lozenge-shaped hunk of the main reactor was simply gone - and thankfully it had taken the reaction mass with it or else that would've been the end of [[WSS Meriwether Lewis]]. The whole ship rattled and groaned, and klaxons were sounding. _It's a good thing it didn't take the hull,_ you thought to yourself as you hurriedly pulled on your suit, _or else it would've been the end of me, too._ Once you get the suit on and the comms connected, you try to raise the rest of the crew. "Jackson? Mitch?". Static. "Wei?" Nothing. You pull your way out of the engineering compartment and up through the spindle towards the crew compartment. At one point you see a strange warping of space, a sort of lens pass across the spindle, leaving clean holes in the hull on either side of the hall. Another shudder passes through the ship. "Aiden?" Wei's soft voice crackles over the comms. He sounds delirious, maybe a blow to the head. "Wei? We need to light the engine, we need to climb out of orbit." There's a long silence. You continue to push your way through the spindle towards the bulkhead at the far end. "Wei?" "Yeah...yeah Aiden. I got it. I think the reactor scrammed." "The reactor's gone, Wei. Just light the cone and get us moving." "Okay...okay." You finally make it to the bulkhead. The indicator shows the galley on the other side is exposed to space, so you trigger the release and push through. And you find Jackson. The man is floating in the middle of the room, one of the lenses has...decomposed...his head. It's like there's a magnifying glass poked into the man's skull, and you can see...everything. You feel that you can zoom in and out and see the whole of the universe and the atomic structure of Jackson's brain. Later, you'll wonder if one of the lenses passed through you as well, because you can't quite explain how you saw what you saw, but you saw it. The patterns of the human mind, from the atomic, to the cellular, to the structural complexity from which consciousness emerges. It's odd that in this time of crisis, when the ship is in danger and you're not sure how you'll ever cross the twenty light-years to home, the only thing you can think about in that moment is, "So _that's_ how it works...I bet I can build something to read that..." And then the mains fire. Everything in the galley, including you and Jackson, fall to the deck. The numerous little lenses zip downwards and out, leaving numerous holes in the hull and Jackson in two messy halves. You climb out of [[Solace]]'s well and put the [[WSS Meriwether Lewis|Lewis]] in a safe orbit around the star. Wei took a good knock to the head, but was otherwise unharmed. You never find Mitch. You assume he went out when the anomalies turned the hull into Swiss cheese, or perhaps was simply swallowed whole by one of the larger ones. The ship's advanced suite of sensors recorded a wealth of data that didn't make any sense. An entire constellation of little holes in time and space, millions of them, surrounded Solace. Each warping spacetime more acutely than a black hole. The [[WSS Meriwether Lewis|Lewis]] had descended into a veritable river of the things and had been riddled with thousands of perfect holes. The two of you run the book. Thankfully, the skip drone came through completely undamaged, and you release it to start its trek back to [[Helena]]. You and Wei button up the ship as best you can, repairing what remains of the power systems, and then you hit the freezers to wait out a rescue. But you can't stop thinking about it. You saw it. You saw the thing that biologists and neuroscientists and geneticists and hell, even theologians have been looking for. You saw how a conscious thought is formed. You saw the mechanics of it. You saw how to predict it, to read it, and maybe even to write it. You knew without a doubt that you'd seen what would become your life's work. As you settle into the claustrophobic CryoPod and the drugs start pulling at your consciousness, you ponder all of the amazing practical applications of such knowledge. It's nothing short of the next phase of human evolution. _Or_, you think with a shudder, _the end of us all._