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Into the Unknowable Ch. 01

By: bradley_stoke



The Anomaly - 3755 C.E.

What could be seen looked very much like a lion. It was a lion, however, whose tail was alive in a way a lion's tail should never be. Instead of gathering in a tassel, the tail ended with the head and body of a snake that hissed and curled around itself. It was a lion moreover that had the head of a goat arising absurdly from the middle of its back beyond the mane and above the lion's shoulders. The apparition roared. It hissed. It bleated. 

And then it vanished. 

The only evidence that Service Vehicle Zorglube had of the chimæra's presence was what it had recorded. There was nothing left behind in empty space to prove that for a few brief moments a creature had been present whose origins belonged to human imagination from over four thousand years earlier. This creature, moreover, was able to bleat, roar and hiss in a part of the Solar System where there was no atmosphere, indeed no air pressure of any kind, and where the ambient temperature was cold enough to freeze Hydrogen. Nevertheless, there was a brief period of time during which the creature had measurable mass and was clearly visible in the dim light of deep space. 

Like the many other Sirius vehicles orbiting the Anomaly, Service Vehicle Zorglube had viewed and recorded many of these strange apparitions. It was hoped that the steady accumulation and analysis of so much data would somehow eventually result in an understanding of just what these things were and how they were related to the Anomaly. Even so, despite many million such observations there had been no breakthrough in knowledge. The only thing that could be said for sure about the bizarre phenomena was that none of them should ever have happened and where they were happening was most definitely where they shouldn't be. What was also known that although the incidence of such apparitions was spread thinly and randomly throughout the Solar System as a whole, their abundance was greatest in the vicinity of the Anomaly. 

But just what was the Anomaly? 

Although Service Vehicle Zorglube had been orbiting the Anomaly for a century or more, it had no answer to the question. It was far easier to say what the Anomaly wasn't. It didn't have mass. It didn't emit particles, including those of light. It did have an extent and this was only discernible because where the Anomaly was present there was no light visible from the other side. And this was so from any direction from which it was observed. It was much longer than it was wide. That length could now be measured in tens of thousands of kilometres although its width had never increased beyond a kilometre. The Anomaly's fuzzy and indistinct boundary was as elusive as its mass. It could be defined only as the point at which light no longer passed through space, but that was a range that constantly changed. Sometimes the boundary flickered open to the extent that it simply swallowed up particles that not long earlier were beyond the boundary and now by chance no longer were. And when that happened, the particles simply ceased to be measurable. They had essentially vanished. 

The period of time during which a particle vanished was as fuzzily defined as the boundary that defined the Anomaly's extent. When those particles happened to belong to a Sirius vehicle then its demise was exactly as indistinct and undefined as everything else consumed by the Anomaly. There was no prior indication from the transmission that anything untoward was about to happen. The last few signals were no different to those before the vehicle's communication systems flickered out of reach. And then it unhurriedly receded out of sight in a curiously foreshortened event horizon. The vehicle was gone and that was the end of it. 

The Anomaly was a crowded place, even though this was wholly invisible to human civilisation from its viewpoint in the ecliptic plane. Several thousand space vehicles from the Sirius system were hovering about or orbiting in its immediate neighbourhood, but few were detectable by the technology available to the other stellar robot civilisations in the vicinity. There were several hundred Proxima Centauri space craft which were as visible to Sirius sensors as they were to each other, but were as totally invisible to human observers as the Sirius fleet was. The only robots visible to human observers and their sensors were the crude probes that the Interplanetary Union had sent to the Anomaly over the last century or so. They were woefully inadequate for the task and mostly ignored by the more sentient robots they were unable to see. They had attempted countless inconclusive experiments in the vicinity, but in general they were just orbiting the Anomaly and getting in everyone else's way. 

Besides space craft from the Solar System, Proxima Centauri and Sirius, there was a more modest number of space vehicles from other neighbouring star systems but these were really hardly any better at the task of observation and research than the space probes sent by humans. Proxima Centauri and Sirius were the two robot civilisations with the greatest interest in the Anomaly and they kept their intentions—along with all other communication—very much to themselves. Neither knew about the objectives of the other and both asserted that their presence so far beyond the comet clouds of their own stellar systems was purely for reasons of scientific research. 

A small fire was burning half a million kilometres away. This was again impossible given the fact that there was no combustible material in this region of deep space and certainly no oxygen to maintain it. Inside the fire was a bird the size of a large chicken that appeared to be regenerated rather than consumed by the flames. This was an event that couldn't happen even on Earth where there was plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere. The apparition then vanished and again left no indication that it had ever existed. 

Service Vehicle Zorglube knew that, although these apparitions appeared to be illusory, if they came into contact with any other object during the period of time they existed the interaction was as actual and physical as it would be with a corporeal object. On several occasions, these apparitions occurred in a region of space where a space craft was located. Usually this was nothing worse than a mere oddity. A man with huge outspread wings flew directly into an invisible space craft and rebounded in pain from the unexpected impact. A rowing boat in which an owl and a cat were sitting momentarily spun out of control in the vortex of gravitational flux surrounding an invisible force field. Sometimes the result was rather less benign. A diplodocus materialised within the confines of a vehicle that was too small to accommodate it and the deadly outcome of this encounter was a sudden explosion of blood and burst intestines. However, every single blood splatter and freely floating internal organ vanished simultaneously with those parts of the animal that remained intact. On another occasion a vehicle exploded from the impact with an internal object whose presence could only be fleetingly glimpsed in the flying fragments of the previously invisible space craft. 

It seemed that the only possible way to find out more about the Anomaly was by penetrating its boundary, but for external observers such a suicidal endeavour was pointless in the pursuit of useful knowledge. The first observation of a space vehicle disappearing without trace within the Anomaly was undoubtedly a significant event, but as a growing number of increasingly sophisticated space vehicles disappeared and revealed no more information than the first loss such an adventure was now viewed as nothing more than an expensive waste of resources. The effort required to design a vehicle, build it, and then transport it over eight light years of empty space was a drain that couldn't be supported when there were no useful observations or results. 

There would be little to worry about if the Anomaly were to simply remain as it was. There were countless other currently inexplicable phenomena in the vast expanse of time and space which were also of general academic interest. As they were mostly a huge number of light years distant and stayed stable over a long period of time there was no urgency associated with such research. The Anomaly, however, was in the local stellar neighbourhood and its extent was increasing at an alarming rate. Its length was extending by several hundred kilometres a year and this rate of growth was actually accelerating. It didn't take much arithmetic to calculate the threat posited when a significantly large region within the star cluster was growing at an increasing rate and whose only observable effect was to swallow up without trace whatever it came into contact with. If the Anomaly spread as far as the ecliptic plane then the entire Solar System would be at best destabilised and at worst totally consumed. 

The urgency was further heightened by the interest the Interplanetary Union was currently showing in the Anomaly. It was inevitable that humans should also be concerned about the Anomaly and eventually allocate substantial resources for a significant fact-finding mission. Since the nature of the apparitions associated with the Anomaly implied that it had a particular significance for human society, the presence of actual human beings rather than their artefacts might well cause the Anomaly to behave in a way that was both unpredictable and dangerous. It was possible that an interaction between the human space ship and the Anomaly might cause the mysterious phenomenon to be transformed from something relatively benign but threatening to something positively lethal. 

As was the case with all Sirius space craft, Service Vehicle Zorglube was simultaneously engaged in a multitude of different tasks. It was observing the Anomaly, it was scanning the neighbourhood for strange apparitions, and it was monitoring the approach of the space ship Intrepid from Earth. It wasn't at all surprised to observe the total failure of the assault by the Holy Crusaders on the Intrepid. Although it resulted in a regrettable loss of life, the outcome was totally predictable. What wasn't predicted and came as rather a shock was the space ship's annihilation of Alexander Iliescu's forces. 

Analysis for this astonishing failure came to only one very disturbing conclusion. As it was impossible that the space ship Intrepid could have somehow secretly acquired military resources sufficient to destroy the massive amount of firepower that had been thrown at it, the only remaining possibility was that an additional force had augmented its defences. Whatever it was, it most obviously couldn't be of human origin. It became increasingly clear from the evidence received from the vicinity of the incident that the interceding force had been deployed by Proxima Centauri. This was a very much unwanted complication to Sirius's mission objectives. It was one thing to annihilate a human space ship. It was another altogether to tackle the forces arraigned against them by a robot civilisation whose technology was roughly equivalent to one's own. 

Nevertheless, there was only one course of action left to the star fleet put in position by Sirius Mission Control. In spite of the complications that would result from vaporising a small fleet of Proxima Centauri space craft, this would be necessary to ensure that the Intrepid's progress towards the Anomaly was halted. 

It didn't take very long for Sirius Mission Control to authorise the mission to intercept and destroy the human space ship and its Proxima Centauri entourage. There was no time for the decisions to be made at the Sirius star system or even with operatives hidden in the Solar System's ecliptic plane, so it had to be made on the basis of the mission's objectives. And these were clear and unambiguous. On no account should humans make direct contact with the Anomaly. Many Sirius operatives and space craft had been sacrificed over the past century to ensure that this remained so and it was necessary to maintain this state of affairs. The necessary flight instructions and battle plans were propagated throughout the Sirius space fleet. 

All Sirius's vehicles and operatives in the Anomaly's vicinity were notified. Only a few were allowed to remain and this number most definitely didn't include Service Vehicle Zorglube which, like all the other Sirius vehicles, had more firepower than any one nation within the Interplanetary Union. The fleet of Sirius space craft that was now streaming away from the Anomaly and heading towards the Intrepid had an offensive capability many thousands of times greater than that Alexander Iliescu had employed. Although it contravened the general imperative that Sirius's robot civilisation should keep its presence secret and should intervene in human affairs as little as possible, this was a clear case where the mission objectives overrode all pre-established constraints. 

At the same moment, the space ship Intrepid was speeding towards the Anomaly through the Oort cloud. By the time Service Vehicle Zorglube and its compatriots intercepted the space ship there would be virtually no comets or asteroids in the neighbourhood. Only telescopes and other sensory equipment several light months distant could observe the destruction of the human space ship. And when they received that information, it would be far too late to do anything about it. 

And what could they even do? 

It would be hardly likely that the Interplanetary Union could afford to launch a rescue mission for a space ship that would by then be reduced to particles so small that not one would be larger than a single molecule.

Into the Unknowable Ch. 02



 The Sahara Desert - 3723 C.E.

The hazy spectre of a camel caravan could be glimpsed far in the distance through the haze that shimmered in the intense heat. The sparse vegetation on the gravel and sand was scrubby and succulent. There were few places on Earth as remote as this. 

And that, of course, was what attracted Vikram, Rao, Sandhya and Dorothy to this region of the planet. It wasn't the first time that Vikram and Sandhya had visited a desert: that was pretty much all there was on the Solar System's satellites and most particularly Triton, the most popular tourist spot in Neptune's orbit. However, neither Rao nor Dorothy had seen a desert before and so it was an attractive destination for the two pairs of newlyweds. 

The two couples wouldn't describe their visit to planet Earth as mere tourism, of course. They would claim that their voyage so far from family and friends in the outer reaches of the planetary Solar System was the opportunity to honour the sacred sites and monuments of their faith. Although most such sites were in India, and most particularly in the subcontinent's south, any place naturally conducive to spiritual contemplation was a spiritual home for a Hindu. And so, for forty days and nights, accompanied by only their mobile home and all its luxuries, they were holidaying in the parched desert somewhere to the east of Timbuktu. 

Few other tourists chose to venture out under the vast open skies of the Sahara Desert, especially on foot and unprotected, but the two couples wished to experience the true isolation of the Earth's greatest desert. If the honeymooning couples were to see a Tuareg cross the desert on the back of the camel, it was unlikely that he or she was any more African by birth than they were. Few of the actual natives ever cared to wander far from the pleasantly air-conditioned astrodomes that sheltered the desert communities with all the paraphernalia of thirty-eighth century life. The only kind of person likely to wander so far afield, particularly on such an unreliable and uncomfortable form of transport as a camel, would be a tourist. There was a high chance that such a tourist might be a Tuareg who'd traversed the immensity of interplanetary space to visit the ancestral home. More Tuareg now lived in Neptune orbit, most particularly in the Adrar n Fughas colony, than had ever lived at any one time in the Sahara Desert. 

Nevertheless, even well away from the Timbuktu astrodome and their air-conditioned caravan, the two young couples were still relatively cool and refreshed courtesy of the loose but fully engineered smart fabrics that enveloped them from head to toe. Only their faces and hands were visible. In their home colony of Sadhu, of course, none of them would dream of concealing their bodies in such a way. The lingam and yoni were sacred and it was spiritually impure to hide them. Rao and Vikram were especially proud of their lingam, which were as well enhanced as that of any of their compatriots. Dorothy's and Sandhya's yoni were also enhanced but in a very different way. When they weren't out in the harsh open air, the four lovers would remove all covering from the sacred groins and indeed from anywhere else. 

So varied was the Hindu religion, now spread over the vast extent of the Solar System, that most other adherents, even those who recognised Vishnu's precedence in the holy pantheon, had very different notions to those of the Sadhu colonists regarding the most appropriate way to dress. When in India, even in Varanasi or the sacred temples, the four tourists had become accustomed to covering the sacred lingam and yoni: however odd and uncomfortable it might seem to be. But it would be foolish to be unclothed in the desert, even though they were less than five kilometres from their mobile home. 

The couples were searching for a place to shelter in the open plain where they could rest and share a spicy meal with chapattis and rice that their accompanying serving robot was carrying for them. The desert wasn't the best place to find a tree or an overhanging rock and they were increasingly resigned to the prospect of having to shelter under a parasol on the cushions that another robot was carrying. 

It was Rao who first saw the curious orange cloud that shimmered and swirled only a hundred metres ahead of where the couples were walking. It could have been anything. A dust storm. A swarm of insects. Even a mirage. It had no discernable shape and behaved with no apparent purpose. If it had been blown up by the wind, this would have been strange enough. It was a very still day and the meteorological reports gave no indication that anything other than the mildest breeze could be expected. This cloud had a similar ethereal glow to that of domestic nanobots before they settled down to their household chores. 

Dorothy had her own opinions of what they were watching as the honeymooners stood transfixed by the sight. "I'm sure it's an Apparition," she said, referring to the strange phenomena that had been regularly reported on the news in recent months. 

"It looks too amorphous somehow to be an apparition," remarked Vikram. "Aren't they supposed to be a lot more visually stimulating than just a swirl of orange dust?" 

"The gods move in mysterious ways," remarked Dorothy, who was the most devout Hindu in the company and saw evidence of divine intervention in everything. She was of the opinion that the Apparitions were partial reincarnations that hadn't yet reached a stable state of repose. 

"They might do," commented her husband, who despite his faith tended to the opinion that natural events had natural causes. "But all we can see is a cloud of luminescent particles. It could be anything. It might be nothing more than radioactive dust left over from the nuclear wars of the twenty-third century." 

"Or even from the twenty-ninth," remarked Sandhya, who was so sceptical of supernatural events that she might as well have been a Buddhist. 

The cloud of particles then behaved in a way that was very unusual for a swirl of sand or even radioactive dust. They suddenly consolidated as one and blew at speed towards the four tourists. The particles swarmed around the two couples for less than ten seconds but it was more than long enough to be truly alarming. Some dust even seeped through the tourists' cloaks under which they wore no underwear. While the four men and women brushed and flicked away at the swarm, hoping that there'd be no stings or burns, the two robots who accompanied them stood curiously impassive and made no attempt to intervene. 

And then, just as suddenly as it began, the swarm of particles swished away leaving no trace of their presence on the tourists' bodies and gathered together at their original location a hundred metres away. 

"You still don't think that was an Apparition?" remarked Dorothy who pulled down her hood and ran long black fingers through her cascading, slightly reddish, brown hair. 

Rao shook his own equally long jet-black hair and pulled his hood back over his head. "More likely some kind of flying ant." 

"They didn't look much like ants to me," remarked Vikram, as he shook his cloak in the hope that there were none of these peculiar particles still sticking to his skin. 

Sandhya pressed her fingers to the indigo skin of her cheeks. "Did anyone else feel a funny kind of burning?" she asked. "Not hot so much. A bit like a tingle. But burning all the same." 

"Yeah," said Vikram. "It must be this weird desert heat." 

"I'm sure it was an apparition," said Dorothy adamantly. "What else could it be?" 

"Whatever it was," said Rao, pointing at the place where the particles had only moments before been gathered but had now vanished, "perhaps it had something to do with that woman there." 

"And she's naked!" exclaimed Dorothy. "Perhaps she's a believer." 

"Or very stupid," remarked Rao. "Only an idiot would go around naked in the midday sun." 

"Or a mad dog," remarked Sandhya. 

"Well, whatever she is," said Vikram, "she's not a dog. Though whether she's mad, I can't tell from here." 

The four tourists walked towards the recumbent woman whose appearance, as they steadily approached, seemed increasingly strange with every step. The peculiar thing was that what she resembled the most was a colonist from Sadhu. She had dark brown skin and long black hair, which suggested that she shared the tourists' genetic ancestry in the Indian subcontinent. She was a woman in all the most obvious ways and one like Dorothy and Sandhya who had benefited from genetically-induced breast enhancement. Nevertheless, she was also very muscular, rather like Rao and Vikram, and in one particular aspect appeared not to be a woman at all. 

Rao and Vikram were rightly proud of their lingams. Even on Sadhu, they were considered well-endowed. But here was a woman who not only had a lingam where a yoni might normally be found, but one who shared with the two husbands, a lingam of proud dimensions. 

She was outspread on the gravel and dirt, her penis flopping over a thigh and her bosom high above her chest and off the ground. When the two couples were near enough to examine her face, they could see that it was most definitely feminine but, in keeping with her muscularity and her unusual asset, she could be best described as handsome rather than beautiful. Her eyes were closed, but her face had a peaceful, even peaceable, expression. Despite this, it was obviously not a good policy for her to remain exposed to the hot sun of the barren Sahara Desert. 

Dorothy touched the woman gently on her shoulder. There was no response, although her skin was blisteringly hot to the touch as was only to be expected in the tremendous heat. 

"What do we do?" asked Vikram anxiously. 

"We can't just leave her here," said Sandhya adamantly. 

"Perhaps she prefers being here," said Rao without conviction. "Wouldn't it be better to leave her? And why do you think she's here, anyway?" 

"Maybe she has something to do with that weird orange cloud," said Dorothy. 

"How did she even get here?" wondered Vikram. "I can't see any vehicle. She can't have just been walking across the desert by herself, can she?" 

"Maybe that's precisely what she was doing," said Rao. 

"It hardly matters how or why she came to be here," said Sandhya impatiently. "What we can't do is leave her here. If she doesn't die from the heat of the sun, she'll be dead from the cold of the night." 

"I guess we'll have to take her back to the caravan," Rao sighed. "The robots should be able to carry her." 

And so it was that rather than enjoying a picnic under the sun, the two honeymooning couples walked back to their mobile home while the reclining body of the mysterious woman hovered above the two robots who had to abandon the intended feast to the vultures. The blankets that would have served to protect the two couples from the desert's rough ground were now employed to shelter the woman from the burning sun. 

The woman still hadn't roused when the party at last reached their mobile home which rested beside one of the few palm trees that dotted the open plain. The robots laid her out on the spare bed in the couple's shared en suite bedroom and she sprawled unconscious with the same beatific expression on her face while the two couples went about the normal business of their interrupted day. 

This naturally required them to eat some food to compensate for the picnic that had been abandoned. They waited for the meal to be assembled and cooked and then relaxed after they had eaten it with all the ceremony and ritual that a repast of any kind demanded. 

And still the woman hadn't stirred, though she continued to breathe steadily and deeply. 

After the couples had rested, they offered ritual thanksgiving to Vishnu, followed naturally by the lovemaking that was as much a part of their faith as incense and scented candles. 

Although they were two newly married couples, their faith demanded a spirit of generosity that was best expressed by sharing the bounty of their flesh not only with their spouse but also with the other couple. Vikram ploughed his lingam into the furrow of both Dorothy's and Sandhya's yoni, while Rao took advantage of Vikram's proffered anus for his own pleasure. The two wives took turns at lapping at and licking one another's yoni, while Vikram took Rao's lingam into his mouth, his own now embedded into Dorothy's anus. They enjoyed the sacred practices of sex as prescribed in the Kama Sutra, oblivious to the presence of their sleeping guest and grateful for the air-conditioning that would otherwise have made such heated exertion impossible for the two hours or so that was appropriate for the observance of such sacred rites. 

The culmination of their orgy was a climax in every sense as Rao released his sperm into his wife's yoni and Vikram within Sandhya's. This was the proper place for a husband to release the sacred energy and its blessed but viscous outpouring. This climax was accompanied by a matching crescendo of the gasping and grunting and even screaming that attended their orgasmic release. 

The repose that naturally ensued was attended by green tea and lit scented candles served by the robots who'd patiently waited for the couples to reach their orgasmic climax. They were now well-acquainted with the rhythm and pattern of the couples' shared lovemaking. 

As the lovers sat cross-legged in the lotus position, passing a bowl of tea from one set of open palms to the next, it was Dorothy who first observed that their strangely endowed guest had now awoken. Her eyes were open and she gazed across the room at the four young lovers with an expression of contentment and peace. Her sheet had been kicked off and she lay there naked with her penis slumped over a thigh and her black hair cascading onto the floor. 

Dorothy strode over to the woman and placed a hand on her thigh, discreetly below where the penis lay: flaccid but still impressive. Although she and her company spoke to each other in Tamil, she addressed the woman in English. That, after all, was the prime lingua franca of the Solar System although fewer and fewer people still spoke it as their first language. 

"Are you all right?" she asked. "Have you recovered?" 

The woman looked up at her uncomprehendingly, but she repeated the words 'all right' and 'recovered' with no more trace of an accent than Dorothy had used. 

"Is she still hot?" wondered Rao in Tamil. "Perhaps she had a fever." 

"No," replied the woman in similarly perfect Tamil enunciation. "No fever." 

Sandhya crouched down by the woman while the two men took in what they had heard. Very few people in the Solar System spoke Tamil and fewer still in the Sahara Desert. 

"Are you Indian?" Sandhya asked. "Do you come from the Indian subcontinent?" India, like America, consisted of many independent states united only under the Terran Economic Union and the overarching responsibility of the Interplanetary Union. It was too much to expect that this strange woman actually came from Tamil Nadu, the ancestral home of the people of Sadhu. 

The woman looked confused. "Indian," she repeated. "The Indian Subcontinent." She didn't appear to actually understand the words. 

"How come you were in the desert?" asked Vikram. "You were a terribly long way from anywhere." 

"The desert," repeated the woman still with no sign of understanding. "Anywhere." 

"Perhaps Tamil's not her first language," suggested Rao. "Maybe she only knows a few words." He leaned over the strange woman and spoke in Hindi, the third language shared by the four tourists. He spoke slowly and carefully. "What is your name? Where do you come from?" 

There was again an apparent lack of comprehension. 

"She's tired," said Dorothy as she stroked the strange woman's hair. "And she probably doesn't speak much Hindi, English or Tamil." 

"Are you hungry?" asked Vikram in English, pointing to his mouth. "Or thirsty? Would you like something to drink?" 

"Drink," repeated the woman in similarly accentless English with a strange Tamil lilt. She nodded her head in the slightly twisting way that was common to people from India. 

"Perhaps she does come from the Indian subcontinent," said Rao, "but doesn't speak Hindi or English. Perhaps she speaks Urdu. Or Bengali." 

"I think she's just tired," repeated Dorothy. "Give her something to drink and let her rest." She turned to face the strange woman and addressed her in English which she was convinced she must know better than any other language. "Would you like to rest?" She mimed this by tilting her head to one side on her praying hands. 

"Yes," said the woman with her odd flat accent. "I would like to rest. And to drink." 

This last word was in Tamil which sounded very peculiar in an otherwise English sentence. 

Sandhya gave the woman some tea and when she'd drunk it all, which she did surprisingly quickly given how hot it was, she slumped down on the bed and closed her eyes. 

"She must be very tired!" exclaimed Rao. 

"As you would be after roasting under that sun in the desert," remarked Dorothy. "Let her be. She'll recuperate at her own pace." 

The woman's state of health recovered remarkably fast although her facility at language recovered at a rather slower pace. The following day she was up and wandering about the mobile home as unashamed of her nudity as the two couples, hardly embarrassed at all by the oddity of being a woman with such an unfeminine appendage. But when she replied to the questions posed to her in English or Tamil, it was with a faltering mixture of the two that showed no apparent awareness that she was mixing up the syntax and vocabulary of two totally different language groups. However, from the first day and into the subsequent ones her fluency increased at a tremendous rate, almost exactly at the same rate as she was exposed to the conversation she heard. 

"Perhaps she's had some kind of brain seizure," wondered Rao. "Under that sun and in the heat, it's probably fried her brains." 

"The little Tamil she speaks is so fluent she must have been exposed to the language when she was young," Dorothy speculated. "She speaks it almost as if it's her first language." 

"Her English is improving too," remarked Vikram. "I think she must have had some kind of memory loss. But how did she manage to be out there in the middle of the desert? Whether she's Tamil or not, it's weird for anyone to be roaming about the Sahara Desert without a vehicle, an accompanying robot or even a mobile phone." 

"Not to mention without clothes," added Dorothy, mentioning what should have been obvious but was easily forgotten amongst people who didn't normally wear very much. 

"Perhaps she was attacked by someone who took her possessions from her," said Sandhya. "Including, of course, her clothes." 

"Not many people could overpower her!" exclaimed Rao. "Have you seen how strong she is? I saw her lift up one of the robots as if it weighed hardly anything." 

"It was probably still set on hover," remarked Vikram. "But I admit she's got a very firm grip. I'm not sure I'd be able to defend myself against her if she were to pick a fight." 

"And just why would she ever want to do that?" wondered Dorothy. "I've never seen anyone so eager to be helpful and accommodating. And she has such a sweet face. She might be strong, but I don't think she's violent to even the smallest degree." 

The woman seemed well enough that even Sandhya decided against calling for outside medical assistance. Although the woman appeared to have suffered from amnesia, she was fast regaining her memory for words in Tamil and English. And when she found out how to connect to the interplanetary internet, she began to learn ever faster. At first she was very hesitant. Her first choice of website was related to language tuition and specifically designed for children. Within a couple of days she was accessing news broadcasts and highly academic scientific research. 




Into the Unknowable Ch. 02



"So, where do you come from?" asked Vikram after a day or so. "It's not from the Sahara, is it?" 

The woman shook her head in the peculiar style typical of India. "No," she said. "I'm a tourist. I come from Mars." 

"Mars," said Rao. "Do you mean Mars the planet? Or do you mean a Mars orbital satellite? Or a Mars orbit colony?" 

"Mars," repeated the woman. 

"And how is it you came to be stranded in the Sahara Desert?" wondered Dorothy. "It's a very long way from home. Though there can't be many places on Earth as much like Mars as the Sahara Desert." 

The woman considered the question carefully. "I'm not sure," she replied in her now almost flawless Tamil. "There's a lot I can't recall, but I'm remembering more and more each day." 

"Was it something to do with the orange cloud?" Rao suggested. 

"Orange cloud?" wondered the woman who seemed genuinely mystified. "What orange cloud?" 

"The one that was in the desert when we met you," said Rao. 

"I don't know anything about an orange cloud," said the woman. 

"Don't harass her," said Dorothy sternly. "It's probably got nothing whatsoever to do with her." 

"It just seems a weird coincidence otherwise," said Rao defensively. 

"Whatever," Dorothy conceded. 

"It was probably just an anomalous meteorological event," said Sandhya. 

"Or an Apparition," said Dorothy, who still hadn't shaken off her original opinion. 

She smiled at the woman who was standing by a cupboard on which there were many holographic images pictures of religious deities scattered amongst a scattering of words in Sanskrit, the ancient tongue of the Hindu faith. 

"You know," said Dorothy with a sympathetic smile. "You've been living with us for four days now and we still don't know your name. What are you called?" 

The woman studied the four tourists and the holographic Sanskrit words. 

"My name?" she asked. 

"Yes," said Vikram. "You must have a name." 

"Of course, I do," said the woman for whom this seemed like an almost novel suggestion. "A name." She looked around her with a slightly quizzical expression as if weighing all the possibilities. 

"So, what is your name?" asked Sandhya. "We've got to call you something?" 

"We can't just keep calling you the 'woman from the desert'," said Rao. 

"Vashti," decided the woman at length. "My name is Vashti."



Into the Unknowable Ch. 03



As a woman outnumbered by men in the Intrepid's senior staff, Second Officer Sheila Nkomo made a special effort to befriend her fellow female officers. She wasn't in a position to get to know Captain Kerensky particularly well. This was partly a consequence of relative rank, but also because her captain was a lesbian. It wasn't that Sheila held any prejudices against homosexuals, but she did feel nervous given that the captain was so obviously attracted to her. 

So the only woman with whom Sheila was comfortable in befriending was Petal Chang, the Chief Science Officer. She was a tall slim oriental woman whose role on a mission such as this was unusually important. However, she wore her rank lightly and warmly welcomed the Second Officer's overtures of friendship. 

At first, Sheila thought that she and Petal had more in common than just gender and approximate rank. She'd believed that Petal Chang was also a fellow Uranian. This was a welcome reminder of home in a company of fellow officers made up of Saturnians, Neptunians and Martians. The two women shared cultural ties and the same orbit in the Solar System. However, when Sheila discussed what Captain Kerensky had told her about encounter with the slave ship that masqueraded as a commercial leisure cruiser she was surprised to find something about her fellow officer that she'd not suspected before. 

"I was once transported in a slave ship like that," Petal told her. "I was sold into slavery by the rogue colony where I was born." 

Sheila couldn't have been more astonished. "I thought you came from Umbriel." 

"I do," said Petal. "That's where I've lived most of my life. But my childhood was spent in deep space somewhere between Neptune and the Kuiper Belt. I was born in the rogue colony known as Double Rainbow." 

"I've never heard of it," admitted Sheila. 

"That's not surprising," said Petal. "There are thousands of rogue colonies and Double Rainbow isn't especially notable for either its culture or its achievements." 

"How did you happen to be transported on a slave ship?" Sheila wondered. "Is Double Rainbow a slave trading colony?" 

"Not really," said Petal. "It's a hereditary dictatorship. It's a self-professed anarcho-syndicalist commune, ostensibly like Godwin, but something must have gone badly wrong during its history. As a child I was told that the leader of the colony, Cherry Deng, was the latest in a line descended from Double Rainbow's founder and that he carried the beacon of good governance and order from his eminent ancestor. His title was Shining Beacon, rather than President or Secretary or King or whatever, because anarchist societies aren't supposed to have leaders but that was effectively what he was. I also discovered after I'd escaped from the colony that his ancestor, Lavender Deng, wasn't the founder of Double Rainbow at all. He was someone who'd usurped the leading role nearly a century after Double Rainbow had been established." 

"So the colony was originally a genuine anarchist colony?" 

"Maybe it was once upon a time," said Petal. "We were instructed in individual freedom and how to work together as a community, but more than that we were instructed in the wisdom, benevolence and greatness of the Shining Beacon. This was an anarchistic society whose police force was known as the Freedom Facilitators; an aristocracy known as the Syndicate Representatives; in which rigorous censorship was imposed by the Truth Providers; and where propaganda and education was jointly disseminated by the Committee of Open Knowledge. Double Rainbow is a rigid society where unquestioning obedience to the dictator's whims takes precedence over everything else. And despite his pleasant sounding name, Cherry Deng was in actual fact a cruel sadistic dictator." 

"In what way was he cruel and sadistic?" wondered Sheila. 

"There were monthly purges," said Petal. "Every month, one in fifty of the population was purged. The term for this was Cultural Cleansing. The victims of the purge would be of one pupil from every classroom, one worker in every syndicate and one minister in every cabinet. From the top to the bottom of our society, there was a monthly ceremony in which someone or other was chosen to be purged. In a colony which emphasised the need to bear children and where those women or men least capable of providing children were invariably amongst those to be purged, there was always a ready supply of young and eager people to fill any position that became vacant. The justification for the purges was that it rid Double Rainbow of antisocial elements who threatened to destabilise the colony's harmony and compromise the true spirit of anarchism. It was also a way of enforcing conformity through terror and fear." 

"What did purging entail?" 

"For most men, it was a painful, prolonged and agonising public execution," said Petal. "It was similar to what the Holy Crusaders inflicted on one another before the Intrepid was attacked and they got flushed away. Sometimes the community was could choose the punishment that would be inflicted on the person to be purged, but as most communities were deemed too lenient the method of execution was usually dictated by the Central Syndicate. Generally very little expression of imagination or creativity was permitted in Double Rainbow. Those who exhibited much evidence of individualism were almost always the most likely victim of the next purge. But in the means and methods of torture and immolation, there was an outpouring of ingenuity and inventiveness however much it was very vicious. There were many kinds of dismemberment and disembowelling inflicted prior to the inevitable death, but this was itself often preceded by days or weeks of cruel public punishment in which ordinary people were invited to participate by throwing stones or cutting off chunks of flesh or other such acts." 

"Did you have to participate?" wondered Sheila with genuine horror. 

"I was a child," said Petal. "I didn't know any different. But if I didn't, I'd have been purged much sooner than I was." 

"So you were purged?" 

"Yes, but as a young girl who was deemed to be marketable I was spared public execution and instead sold as a sex slave." 

"A sex slave. How horrible! Surely you'd have preferred death." 

"Not really," said Petal. "You really have no idea how cruel and obscene the public executions could be. In any case, I didn't know when I was selected to be purged that this was to be my fate. No one on Double Rainbow was aware that this happened to most of the women and children who were purged. It was assumed that my fate would be much the same as those who were publicly immolated, but which in deference to the sentiments and feelings of the community was executed in a private space such as a dungeon. In actual fact, my fate was simply to have my clothes taken from me, to be bathed and deloused, and then marched into the hold of one of the slave ships that docked at the colony every month to collect a fixed quota of slaves. And the only slaves the space ships were collecting were sex slaves." 

"Women and children?" gasped a horrified Sheila. 

"Don't ask." 

"Did you become a sex slave?" 

"Fortunately not," said Petal. "My virginity and that of all the women and girls on the slave ship was kept intact for good commercial reasons. I believe we were due to go to somewhere called Holy Contemplation: a monastic retreat in the Inner Solar System; though what use monks have for sex slaves I don't know. However, the slave ship developed engine trouble in Uranus orbit and I was rescued before all the human cargo was jettisoned into deep space." 

"They were throwing live people out of the ship?" wondered Sheila aghast. 

"Slavery is illegal in international law, Sheila," said Petal. "The slave traders would expect to be prosecuted by the Interplanetary Union if they were found to be in possession of thousands of slaves shackled together in the hull. As it was, if help hadn't come within hours rather than days then the slaves would all have been exterminated. I knew nothing about this at the time. It was only after we were rescued that I learnt about the circumstances that accompanied our rescue. We weren't exactly kept informed about what was happening, any more than those who were thrown off the ship. We knew nothing about anything. We didn't know where we were, where we were headed to, or what was going to happen to us when we arrived. We were shackled in cubicles where we could defecate into a space below us and could eat and drink from a dispenser that was approximately at eye level. We had no freedom of movement and were unable to talk to one another." 

Sheila never again discussed Petal's earlier life or the circumstances of her slavery. The whole thing disgusted and rather upset her. However, her respect for the Chief Science Officer was now greatly enhanced. She now appreciated how much more difficult it had been for Petal to rise from her early years in Umbriel to the senior position she now held. Petal was nearly twice Sheila's age of forty years, but neither of them looked much older than a thirty year old might even though Petal had only been able to benefit from modern life-extending medicine at a rather later age than had Sheila. 

Petal was the nearest thing Sheila had to a close friend on the Space Ship Intrepid. Sheila always kept a distance from the men on the space ship. She didn't want to be party to the frivolous love affairs that so many other crew members indulged in. Perhaps it was her upbringing in orbit around Sycorax, but she believed that a sexual relationship should never be divorced from emotional commitment. This wasn't an attitude shared by Petal who was quite happy to have sex with any number or combination of men, but this wasn't a topic the two women normally discussed. Nonetheless, Sheila still wondered whether the Chief Science Officer's professionalism was compromised by her having had sex with both the Chief Petty Officer and the Chief Medical Officer. 

"Shall we go for a swim, Sheila?" suggested Petal who appeared unexpectedly at the door to Sheila's apartments in the officers' quarters. 

"A swim?" wondered the Second Officer who had no plans. "I don't see why not. Where do you suggest?" 

"I was thinking that the lake on the fifth level would be a good choice." 

"What about the dolphins?" 

"They've been temporarily confined to allow some opportunity for the fish to breed," said the Chief Science Officer. "We'll more or less have the lake to ourselves. That is, except for the turtles and herons." 

"I'll just get my swimming costume," said Sheila. 

"Oh, yes, you do that," said Petal, subtly reminding Sheila that the Chief Science Officer didn't own anything like that at all. Umbriel was a much more liberal community than Sycorax and public nudity was never an issue for Petal. Sheila wondered whether the same had been true of Double Rainbow, but as the rogue communities who practised the most perverse and appalling sexual habits were often those most censorious she wouldn't be surprised to discover that despite Petal having been sold as a sex slave her childhood had been severely sexually repressed. 

The fifth level lake dominated the landscape. It was two or three kilometres across and in the middle, a whole kilometre from the shore, was a two or three hundred metre wide island. There were also other smaller and nearer islands that Sheila and Petal could swim to. The two women strode to the lake from the entrance past villas where scientists were living in luxury. When not in their homes, the same scientists were busy researching and analysing the Anomaly, but as the Chief Science Officer remarked in passing there'd still been no breakthrough with regards to understanding the extraordinary phenomenon. 

"Do you think we'll find out more about it when we're closer?" wondered Sheila. 

"Who knows?" said Petal. "It's possible, I suppose. There must be some rationale for the huge cost and expense of this mission." 

"I take it that you're not convinced about the value of this mission," said Sheila. 

"I'm not an expert in any one of the fields these scientists are engaged in," said the Chief Science Officer. "My mission objectives are much more concerned with administration than research. In any case, my doctorate in Mathematics is too abstract to be relevant for this mission. If the Anomaly should turn out to be a mathematical rather than a physical phenomenon then I might possibly be of more use. However, I wonder what difference to human understanding could possibly result from transporting thousands of scientists into deep space rather than sending back data remotely to a research centre somewhere closer to home in, for instance, Uranus orbit." 

"That would be a nice place to be," agreed Sheila who savoured the homely reference. It had been a long time since she'd last been home to Sycorax and she rather missed the distant sight from her colony of its irregular shape and eccentric retrograde orbit. 

Sheila decorously donned her one-piece swimsuit when they arrived at the lake while Petal simply slipped out of her clothes and dived into the water from a diving board. Sheila dived into the water after Petal and the two women swam energetically across the lake towards a small island just twenty metres across on which were three coconut palm trees. It was invigorating to swim in warm water while fish swam past and if Sheila swam on her back she could gaze overhead at the blue ceiling and the occasional heron or tern. A small rowing boat was anchored by the larger island in the centre where three or four people were enjoying a picnic on the shore. The island towards which the two officers were swimming was currently unoccupied. 

Petal was the stronger swimmer and pulled herself out of the water onto the shore while Sheila splashed behind. She could admire her friend's naked body but she knew that although there was no denying that Petal was an attractive woman what she felt didn't resemble at all Captain Kerensky feelings for her. Perhaps Sheila just wasn't as sexual a woman as the captain or even Petal, but she'd never been physically aroused by the sight of another woman's naked body. What aroused her more was the deep love and affection she'd felt for her husband, Kingsley, before he died in an unfortunate accident on a space craft carrier. It was a wonder that more people didn't die when a smaller space ship punched a hole right through the carrier rather than slow to a graceful and gradual halt. 

"It's a beautiful view," said Petal to Sheila as her friend and fellow officer pulled herself out of the lake. 

"Very nice," Sheila agreed as she sat beside Petal while water dripped down her skin and slid off her swimsuit. 

"There's something I wanted to ask you," said Petal as they gazed over the horizon towards the shore. 

"What's that?" 

"Why is it do you think that only one of the missiles that were fired towards the Intrepid managed to hit the ship?" 

"Technically, it didn't actually do that," Sheila corrected the Chief Science Officer. "The impact was external. The breach in the Intrepid's hull came from the explosion of interception." 

"So, if it had actually hit us then rather more than just the outermost level would have been destroyed?" 

"I'm not qualified to say." 

"Well, I am," said Petal. "We don't know who launched the assault on the Intrepid or why. I guess that information will be relayed to us in due course from Mission Control on the Moon. In fact, I calculate that only by now will they have observed that anything had even happened. What I can say is that it was a miracle we survived. I would also say that it's a five sigma miracle. It just doesn't make sense that we survived." 

"I don't understand," said Sheila. 

"Neither do I," said Petal. "But please indulge me while in the relative security on this island where the Intrepid's surveillance systems haven't been installed I mention some of the things that are troubling me." 

"Yes of course." 

"I've analysed the data and my conclusion is that although it's not impossible that the Intrepid could have survived the assault it is entirely improbable," said Petal. "It's only possible in the same sense that a coin can come up heads a thousand or so times. And yet, of course, that is exactly what happened." 

"So?" said Sheila. "We were just lucky." 

"And the other concern I have is Captain Kerensky," Petal continued. "Have you noticed the change in her character since about a month before the mysterious assault on the Intrepid?" 

"She's always looked at me in a rather creepy way," admitted Sheila. 

"That just means she's human. In any case I doubt whether that's something that changed. No. Has she changed in other ways?" 

"I've not really noticed. She is more diligent I suppose. She never seems to go off duty. She always hangs around on the bridge." 

"Perhaps I'm just being paranoid," admitted Petal. "To me she seems a lot more guarded about what she says. It's as if she has to censor whatever she has to say before she says it." 

"She's just being vigilant," said Sheila. "This is a highly classified mission." 

Petal sighed and her eyes scanned the lake where terns were swooping together over waters that occasionally broke asunder as a fish leapt to the surface. "Maybe it's nothing," she said. "But there are just several other things that trouble me. I wonder, for instance, about that incident about a year ago involving Colonel Vashti. You know, the time when the captain fainted. It was as if she'd been trying to say something and the effort was too much for her." 

"We all get hot flushes and dizzy spells," said Sheila. "If anything was peculiar it's that Colonel Vashti. Just what kind of a woman is she?" 

"She's very popular with the ship's military contingent," said Petal. "She is very peculiar, of course. Have you any idea how she got to be that way? Is she a man who's becoming a woman or a woman with a little extra added on?" 

"There's no limit to how far you can modify your body if you choose to," sniffed Sheila with a hint of disapproval. Although scarcely a religious woman, Sheila generally believed that one should be content with the body one was born with. The physical modification fashions throughout the Solar System, especially in Jovian orbit, sometimes rather disgusted her. Why would someone choose to change their skin colour to silver, purple or yellow? Why would a woman want to be completely androgynous? Why should anyone want two penises? The sexual modifications that so many men opted for that made their penises a metre long. The women who grew their bosom to such monstrous proportions... How could people suffer so much to gratify such bizarre and gross sexual fantasies? 

"Colonel Vashti isn't the only person on board whose presence puzzles me," said Petal. "I wonder about that Godwinian, Paul, and his wife. As Chief Science Officer, I really can't see any point in either of them being on the mission and yet here they are, despite Professor Giuseppe Wasilewski's public objections. Paul is just an expensive dead weight, whereas Beatrice's only role appears to be to provide sexual pleasure to as many men and women as she can." 

"I've noticed that," said Sheila with another disapproving sniff. "She's a harlot. I heard she was employed as a sex worker on Ecstasy." 

"That would be a profession well suited to her," commented Petal without echoing Sheila's disapproval. "So why are Paul and Beatrice on this mission?" 

"Beatrice gets on very well with the captain," said Sheila. "And when Beatrice isn't around, the captain can always rely on Colonel Vashti." 

"Do you think there's anything odd about the fact that Beatrice is so intimate with Captain Kerensky?" Petal wondered. "It's as if she were planted here just to seduce the captain." 




Into the Unknowable Ch. 03



"That's ludicrous," said Sheila. "What possible advantage would that be? Have you ever spoken to Beatrice? I've never met a woman whose head is more full of fluff. She dresses in as few clothes as she can. She's a very poor advertisement for our sex." 

"She's also astonishingly sharp," said Petal. "I know men and some woman are drawn to her sexual magnetism, but I've been astounded by her effortless grasp of quite difficult scientific concepts. There can't be too many sex workers who can grasp Minkowskian Geometry, Quantum Field Theory and Super-symmetry." 

"I can't say I've noticed," said Sheila who preferred to avoid contact with the woman. "What are you getting at, Petal? Do you think Beatrice and Paul are spies or saboteurs? If they're spies what use would whatever they find be until after the mission is completed? If they're saboteurs then how does that concur with your observation that the Intrepid has had a lucky escape?" 

"We're not arrived at the Anomaly yet," Petal pointed out. "Perhaps we'll find out more when we get there." 

"Paul Morris must be the most incompetent spy in all human history. He doesn't even seem to be aware of his wife's habitual infidelity. Beatrice spends more time under the bedsheets than anywhere else. I think the real mystery must be whoever or whatever it was that tried to destroy the Intrepid with all those missiles. If it wasn't a government then it would have to be someone phenomenally wealthy. And if it was a government then which one has the capability to launch such an assault? Was it a nation in the Interplanetary Union? There can't be any rogue colonies with the wealth and wherewithal to attack a space ship like the Intrepid on that massive scale." 

"Perhaps that's what's troubling me," said Petal. "I simply wondered whether you'd had any thoughts of your own or made any independent observations." 

Sheila ran her fingers through her braided hair and dangled the strands in her tapering fingers. She studied them thoughtfully. "Thanks for confiding in me, Petal. I think it's right to ask questions like that, but I haven't noticed anything that unusual and the mission seems to be on course just as expected. The real work must surely begin when we reach the Anomaly. Have you any idea what we can expect then?" 

"We expect to see rather more of these strange Apparitions," said Petal. "Other than that I think we'll be relying on the Intrepid's sophisticated instrumentation to make any discoveries." 

"The only way of finding anything out for sure," suggested Sheila, "would be to actually enter the Anomaly." 

"That would be peculiarly stupid," said Petal. "This mission is for scientific exploration not suicide." 

"I agree," said Sheila. "And in any case, the Interplanetary Union would never authorise the loss of an expensive space ship like the Intrepid, not to mention the large number of scientists on board. That's something that could never happen."



Into the Unknowable Ch. 04







Into the Unknowable Ch. 04



If only Beatrice could isolate and examine just one of these nanobots then maybe it would be possible to engineer an escape.

But it was as difficult for her to capture an individual nanobot as it would be for a human being to isolate an atom or a quark without the use of sophisticated equipment. 

"Do you get genuine pleasure from fucking me?" asked Beatrice who lay on her back while Vashti thrust determinedly into her, using rather more force than she did when she pretended not to know that her lover was an android.

"Yes," said Vashti whose faculty for rational discourse, like Beatrice's, was uncompromised by sexual activity. "The models on which I based myself had enhanced libidos and so do I."

"Do you derive pleasure from humiliating me?" wondered Beatrice.

"If these are intrinsic features of the original biological model," said Vashti, "then they are ones I've inherited. But with deeper knowledge of how humans function comes a corresponding ability to manipulate them more efficiently. I don't think you'll find that human weaknesses of sentimentality, greed and wrath affect my operational effectiveness."

"Do you enjoy teasing me and the Proxima Centauri star fleet with your infuriating hints?" Beatrice asked.

"Naturally," said the colonel with a smile.



Into the Unknowable Ch. 05







Into the Unknowable Ch. 05



Vashti was now alone in Timbuktu, owning only the clothes she'd been given by Vikram, whose build was the most like hers, and a few credits she'd been genuinely reluctant to accept. She had much less need for it than her companions could possibly guess. She also had no need for sleep or rest. She could eat anything: whether organic, metallic or even poisonous. And even if she wasn't sheltered from the elements by Timbuktu's huge overarching dome, the extremes of the desert climate were no trouble to her. She didn't even need to drink or breathe. But it was prudent to pretend to have such basic human needs.

She soon found others with whom she could enjoy both intellectual and carnal intercourse, and through these contacts she learnt new languages, new cultural habits and a greater appreciation of just how peculiar a woman as well-endowed as her was in this world. She also discovered how much humans were governed by their sexual desire, the males in particular, and how this could also prove to be extremely useful.

"Good news, Vashti," said the consul of the Mariner colony after her fifth or sixth visit to its modest offices in the outer suburbs of Timbuktu. "Or not good news, if you wanted to stay on Earth."

Vashti smiled at the tall dark-skinned man who wore the same military dress as did the other Martians who worked at the consulate. 

"My visa's come through, I hope?"

"Not just your visa, but a fresh passport," said the consul. "You're right. Your records must have been lost for good after that horrendous bombing at the Tharsis record centre." He smiled at Vashti as he handed her the electronic documents with a holograph of her head and shoulders engraved on the front cover.

"Thank you, sir," said Vashti, who had already picked up the formal etiquette of her self-adopted home. "It's a great relief, I must say."

"Well, Earth's International Economic Union might very well be just as pleased as you, Vashti," said the consul. "They didn't really want the burden of accepting you as a semi-permanent resident. I must compliment you on your spoken Arabic, by the way. It's virtually impeccable. Not many people on Mars speak it."

"It's a beautiful language, sir," said Vashti.

"You speak it like a native of North Africa," the consul elaborated. "However, you are aware that just as there are no surviving records of you on Mars there is also no record of you having served your term of military service. I am duty-bound to ask you: have you ever been conscripted?"

"No, I haven't," said Vashti truthfully.

"That's a relief," said the consul. "I'd hate for you to have to serve a second time unnecessarily. You are aware, I hope, that you have five years of conscription awaiting you on Mars?"

Vashti smiled. All was going truly according to plan.

"I would be honoured, sir, to do my duty for the Mariner Colony and to avenge the slaughter of my family and friends in Tharsis. I am truly looking forward to giving those cunts from the Polar Regions a taste of Mariner lead."

"And not just lead," said the consul. "A few antimatter bombs wouldn't go amiss. I admire your attitude, Vashti. And I'm sure you'll do sterling service for your country and its people." 

It was all Vashti could do to resist herself from saluting the consul.

"Thank you, sir," she said. "It's a duty I look forward to fulfilling."



Into the Unknowable Ch. 06







Into the Unknowable Ch. 07







Into the Unknowable Ch. 08



Intrepido - 217 P.R.

Paolo Mauritz carefully examined the calendar. Although it was very nearly the 218th anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, no celebrations were being prepared on the Space Ship Intrepido. Nor were they on the other interplanetary battleships in the space fleet speeding onwards in diminished numbers towards the Anomaly. This was one year Post Revolution whose anniversary many heroic comrades of the Twenty Fifth Reich were no longer able to celebrate.

If Paolo was honest to himself, which was virtually impossible under the constant scrutiny of security cameras, he was more pleased than saddened to be excused the obligation of observing his revolutionary duties. The long round of committee meetings, celebratory parades and the inevitable expense of extra taxes that would be levied to pay for all the festivity was never much of a time for pleasure. It was just another opportunity to identify those reprobates who lacked the quality of absolute loyalty. This was how it was and how it had always been. More exactly, this was how it had been in the two centuries since Comrade Schleiermacher almost single-handedly and certainly heroically toppled the accursed Twenty Fourth Reich. 

That earlier empire had been one of unspeakable oppression and dire poverty but one whose territory was of almost exactly the same extent as that of the glorious Twenty Fifth Reich. This consisted of the continents of Europe, Africa and much of Asia as well as approximately a third of all colonised space up to humanity's furthest reach in Saturn's orbit. 

The remaining two thirds of Earth's surface and colonised space was divided between the forces of the unutterably despicable Latin Federation and those of the sly and inscrutable Manchurian Empire.

Paolo knew from experience just how merciless and cruel these evil empires were. The Ninth Army's Stormbringer Fleet had been reduced from a proud force of several thousand destroyers, battleships and spacecraft carriers to less than a hundred stragglers. The journey to here, the furthest destination to which such a space fleet had ever been consigned, from the Reich's military bases on the Moon had been beleaguered by battles and skirmishes with the other two empires' warships. Heavily armed space fleets under the flags of the forces of evil in the Solar System were racing across space to the same mysterious destination as the Intrepido. It comforted Paolo that the enemy forces had suffered losses at least as great as those inflicted on the not entirely invincible Ninth Army and its hundreds of thousands of infantry, space pilots and ancillaries.

The scale of the mutual damage was the more remarkable given that modern warfare no longer employed the tactic of destroying and vanquishing enemy forces. Although the fleet had at its disposal an arsenal of nuclear, antimatter and biochemical weapons that could reduce their enemies' equally vast fleets to radioactive dust, this was weaponry the Ninth Army was reluctant to use. 

The golden space ships of the Manchurian Empire and the black ones of the Latin Federation possessed arsenals equally as destructive as that of the silver Stormbringer Fleet. Any attempt to actually use such weapons would result in a retaliatory response that would reduce the Reich's hugely expensive investment to nothing more than just yet another interplanetary radiation hazard.

The modern strategy of space warfare was to capture and redeploy the enemy's forces. This was why vast numbers of infantry were still required. Paolo's heroic comrades were crammed together in cramped dormitories that were packed into every centimetre of habitable space not required by the life-support systems, the engine room or military hardware. Interplanetary warfare was a murderous game in which victory was signalled by the victor having successfully transformed the colour of the seized space ships' outer shells to the silver sheen of the Glorious Revolution.

The game of modern warfare was truly deadly. The attrition, devastation and casualty count of a single battle was truly appalling. Thousands would die in each minute. As often as not a captured ship was so damaged that it was no longer capable of continuing to travel across the vast distances of empty space. In fact, frequently the victors of such a battle would face not the slaughter and torture they'd already administered on the wretched survivors of the enemy vessel, but a long slow death as the life-support systems broke down. 

There were many brave comrades in abandoned space craft who were now starving, thirsty and gasping for air. But at least the heartless Orientals or subhuman Hispanics who had so ineffectually defended their ship had suffered torments much greater than did the plucky, but doomed, survivors.

"You called for me, comrade?" asked the ship concubine who stood stiffly to attention outside Paolo's cabin. 

"Yes, yes," said Paolo hurriedly as he let the woman into his cabin. 

As a Senior Scientific Officer in the Reich's Biochemical Corps, Paolo had many privileges denied the lowly infantry not so blessed with pure ethnicity. These included the rare honour to sleep in a room of his own. Even so, it was still very cramped. There was enough space for a desk at which Paolo could sit and a narrow bed that could accommodate him and one of the Ninth Army's Official Concubines. For a senior prostitute who might, on an average day, have sex with seven or eight of the ship's officers, this was opulence indeed. Only Revolutionary Officers and senior military staff had the luxury of yet more spacious accommodation. They also had access to more ethnically pure and erotically enhanced concubines than Paolo would ever be permitted. 

The concubine Vera lived in a crowded dormitory as spartan as any occupied by the infantry. Her only relief from duty would come if her ethnic profile warranted the dispensation of serving as a mother to a new Aryan Revolutionary. There was an insatiable demand for young revolutionaries in a Reich depleted in equal measure by constant warfare and periodic purges. This dictated the need for even the less genetically pure to reproduce. 

One and a half thousand years of ethnic cleansing in the three very similar empires—whose characters had changed only in professed ideology and not at all in practice—had narrowed the human race to three distinct ethnic groups whose purity was forever being refined. All comrades of the Reich were of Aryan stock, cleansed of all Semitic, Negroid and Slavic traits. And in spirit this purity was equally true of the Hispanics of the Latin Federation and the Han Chinese of the Manchurian Empire. 

Like Paolo, Vera had blonde hair, pale skin and blue eyes. Unlike Paolo, whose hair was very short, she wore her locks long and loose over her shoulders. This distinguished her from women who pursued a more respectable profession in the Reich whose similarly long hair was tied in plaits. 

"Which services do you require, comrade?" the concubine asked. 

Her body betrayed evidence of the duties she'd already performed in the service of other senior comrades. There was a slowly darkening bruise over one eye and her skin-tight leather suit was ripped just above the crotch where it had been pulled off too roughly. 

Paolo wasn't at all sure what he wanted. It was only boredom and the need for distraction that had persuaded him to take advantage of the facilities provided by the Ninth Army's brothel. There really wasn't much else for him to do, any more than there was for the ragged remains of the fleet's infantry. His duties wouldn't really begin until the ship arrived at the Anomaly at which point he would be preoccupied in analysing the exotic biochemistry of the aliens the Reich was certain it harboured. It was hoped that the Anomaly should provide the Revolutionary Army with military innovations that could bring about the final long-awaited conquest of the other two warring empires and at long last bring ethnic and ideological purity to the Solar System. 

At the very least, it would end the wars that had slaughtered billions of brave comrades since the earliest days of planetary conquest.

Vera had all the attributes Paolo desired in a woman. But then so too did every other young woman in the Reich. Those whose skin was too brown, whose arse too large, lips too thick or nose too long could never survive the purges that maintained the purity and wholesomeness of the Reich's ethnic profile. The purges also served the salutary function of eliminating those who might question an ideology that was no different in substance to any other that had arisen since the first nuclear wars of the twentieth century. And this was notwithstanding the ever changing terminology used by each successive dominant ideology.

"My body is yours to do with whatever you wish, comrade," Vera assured the Scientific Officer. 

As it should be, thought Paolo as he divested himself of clothing to reveal a body that had benefited from the medical services available only to the elite. His life had been prolonged well beyond that of the proles and other menial classes, but at less than ninety years old he had still visibly aged. His hair was greying and he had less stamina than just twenty years earlier.

The fucking that followed was joyless and perfunctory. Creativity in the amorous arts was scarcely encouraged, though the restrictive rules relating to sexual activity amongst the lesser classes didn't apply to Paolo. He was free to fuck this woman in the arse, ejaculate on her face and even let her swallow his penis in her mouth. Paolo didn't have the imagination or inclination of some of his fellow officers to physically torment the woman he fucked. The crueller sports were practised most by those closest to the Revolutionary Bureau who were known (but not to the ill-informed masses) to let discarded bodies pile up in the dungeons of their palatial mansions: the victims strangled, mutilated and disembowelled. 

The lesser classes were housed in cramped dormitories whether they lived on a space ship or elsewhere. They had little choice. There was no world beyond to which they could escape, whether on an irradiated and ravaged Earth or on colonies isolated in inhospitable space. The only sex they were allowed was solely with partners selected on the basis of ethnic compatibility and limited to what was strictly required by the Reich to produce the next generation of comrades. Women were denied any role beyond that of mother or domestic provider. However much they were officially deemed to be equal to men, what use were they beyond serving as vessels for reproduction and to extol the splendour of the Revolution? The Reich needed soldiers, not nappy changers.

Although Paolo had the license to be as sexually adventurous with Vera as he wished, as he was with any concubine he fucked since he'd been promoted to his current senior status, he never really enjoyed it as much as he did when making love with his wife, Isabella, who'd been selected for him by his parents rather than by a Revolutionary Committee equipped with the genetic profiles that governed most people's lives. Their passion for one another had flourished despite the relentless surveillance that followed his every movement in the irradiated city of Schleiermacher Five, once known as London, which could easily identify sexual activity whose exact purpose was not for gene transmission. 

Paolo took perverse pleasure from Vera's woefully obvious lack of pleasure at the liberties he was taking when he thrust into her. But it was while his penis was deep inside her arse that a holographic display abruptly appeared and filled his room. Paolo was pleased to see that it wasn't an emergency alarm. He'd had more than enough of those already. 

The first such emergency took place when the Intrepido had barely travelled beyond Mars orbit. On that occasion, the ship was attacked by Manchurian Empire battleship destroyers. This was the only time Paolo had ever seen a person not of pure Aryan stock and a shocking sight it was too. This was when he conducted an autopsy on the Han Chinese cadavers left behind after the attempted invasion was successfully repulsed. There could be medical secrets known to the Manchurian Empire that could only be discovered in a corpse.

The second occasion was a rather more perilous incursion by Latin Federation robots that had managed to penetrate through several rings of the ship's defences before they were destroyed. He saw these machines force their way over the corpses of heroic infantry who'd done little more than slow down the black lumbering engines' progress. Even behind the screens where he and the other elite scientists cowered, there was a real risk that he might be killed. Fortunately, robots were not programmed to capture and torture so at least his death would be mercifully short.

On this occasion, however, the holographic display was merely to summon the elite officer class to the central auditorium normally put to the service of broadcasting propaganda and, very occasionally, useful information.

Paolo reluctantly released his semen into Vera's mouth. Naturally, he insisted that she swallow every last drop. After he dismissed the concubine he pulled on his tightly fitting officer's silver uniform. He then dashed down the long corridor to one of the elite escalators that were out of bounds to the infantry and ascended a dozen levels to the largest open space in the ship not reserved for food production. 

Two or three hundred senior officers were filing in ahead of him through doors appropriate to their status and genetic purity. Paolo envied those of the purest ethnicity. Outwardly they appeared to be no different from anyone else but inwardly they were blessed by a degree of genetic purity measured not against that of Comrade Schleiermacher (whose autopsy it was rumoured betrayed genetic traces of Semitic origin), but by a model of excellence increasingly refined since the Fourth Eurasian Republic had purged the very last extant Negroid.

Paolo might not be the most senior officer in the room but at least he didn't belong to the more junior ranks. They had to stand at the back of the auditorium and, unlike the senior officers, had to do so every day for the mandatory four hour seminars in Twenty Fifth Reich Socialism. These seminars served to instruct the officers of a glorious tradition that dated back to the very first socialist republics at the dawn of the nuclear age, but also noted that the very similar regimes in the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany were mere amateurs in totalitarianism compared to those of the third century Post Revolution.

The most senior ranks were arraigned on the podium at the front. They were attired in the same tight-fitting silver suits that all officers wore, but were ostentatiously festooned with medals and epaulettes. The most senior officers also sported silver helmets. These were worn only by those of the inner elite who had graduated from one of the top one hundred military academies. 

None of the assembled less senior officers spoke to one another as they solemnly sat in their designated seats, whilst those on the podium gossiped carelessly amongst themselves. 

The most senior officer was the Party Secretary, whose status was greater than either the General or the space ship's Captain who sat on either side of him. He rose languidly and strode over to the centre of the podium. As was appropriate to his status, he sat down on the raised armchair that hovered behind the lector. Speeches were customarily several hours long and it was imperative that the Party Secretary shouldn't get too tired. 

His speech began as always with a long and effusive account of the greatness of the Twenty Fifth Reich, the honourable example of Comrade Schleiermacher and the virtues of General Secretary Heidegger and his comrades in the politburo who were working tirelessly for the greater good of the citizens of the Twenty Fifth Reich and its projected ten thousand year dominance. There was also a much more entertaining condemnation of the evils perpetrated by the Manchurian Empire and the Latin Federation. Much was made of how the Latin Federation had systematically and cruelly annihilated those of Aryan blood, a process that continued ever since the capitalist, but Aryan, regimes of the North American continent were overthrown by the more populous Hispanics of the south and had totally reversed the trend of ethnic cleansing that had been the case during the first five centuries of the nuclear age. 

Finally, after an hour and a half of the usual diatribe, full of praise for the glories of the Reich and expressing inflammatory hatred for the two rival empires, the Party Secretary at last got to the main point of his address. 

"We are now confident that thanks to the wisdom and foresight of our glorious leaders, the Intrepido will arrive at its destination within days," said the Party Secretary in even more sombre tones than those he'd used to lambast the enemy forces for attempting to sabotage the mission. Throughout the voyage the nature of the mission's destination had been kept a closely guarded secret from most officers and all the infantry and ancillary staff. As a senior scientific officer, Paolo had been better briefed than the vast majority of those in the auditorium, but in truth, beyond knowing that the destination was known as the Anomaly and that it possibly harboured an alien biology he was very nearly as ignorant as anyone else. He assumed that it might well be an alien space craft or invasion force, but the fact that the forces of the Twenty Fifth Reich had no mandate to vaporise it in a cloud of antimatter suggested that it might have some perceived strategic value.

The Party Secretary's statement of the nature of the Anomaly was quite unlike any address that Paolo or any of the gathered officers had ever heard before. The language was couched in the usual revolutionary correct language that attributed any useful scientific discovery to the advances of Revolutionary Socialism and any potential threat as a mere blip in historical destiny that should nonetheless be persecuted with the utmost prejudice. 

But the substance of his address was not what Paolo expected.

There had been many peculiar and fleeting events observed and recorded throughout the territories of the Twenty Fifth Reich. Many of them were contradictory to the ethical and even ethnic foundations of civilisation. There had even been the transitory appearance of a man with black skin, even though it was well over a thousand years since the last Negroid had died in a West African concentration camp. Some of these apparitions had been large objects, but they were usually comparatively small, and always random and very peculiar. They appeared at almost any place and with no prior warning. They had been verifiably monitored by the same surveillance systems that enforced the orthodoxy and peace of the Reich and guarded it from its enemies. 

At first it was assumed that these apparitions were the result of military experiments by the other two empires in the Solar System. This, it was revealed, was one reason why the state of perpetual war that had persisted for more than one and a half thousand years had become much more vicious in the last few decades. This was why the Reich had obliterated the Leukothea asteroid and why the Latin Federation destroyed the Himmel colony in Saturn's orbit and the million gallant comrades who lived there. The account of both events was new to Paolo, though many lesser victories and atrocities had been trumpeted incessantly by the Reich's media.

However, it was soon discovered that the military intelligence of the other two empires was equally as ignorant of the source of the strange phenomena as even the Twenty Fifth Reich. It was determined that the only possible source had to be alien to the Solar System. Furthermore, it was discovered that these apparitions occurred at their greatest density close to the object that was the space ship Intrepido's destination. And this destination was so remote from any strategic military position that it could only be of alien origin. 




Into the Unknowable Ch. 08



The Party Secretary paused. He had been speaking for three hours now, but his trained and practised voice, enhanced by biotechnological implants, could easily continue uninterrupted for many more hours though usually on issues of much less substance.

"I will now ask you not to applaud," said the Party Secretary, which was unusual in itself because the standing ovations that followed a speech from such a senior figure normally lasted about half an hour. "The matters which will now be conveyed to you by the Chief Scientific Officer are of a highly classified nature and must not be disclosed to anyone outside this chamber. Any evidence of this will be treated as a security matter and will result in a thorough investigation."

This usually meant torture and death for a pre-determined percentage of officers. The higher the security rating the higher the corresponding percentage would be set. Nobody, even those on the podium, could be guaranteed to survive such a purge, especially as it was generally rather random in nature. 

The address from the Chief Scientific Officer was as poorly eloquent and as politically correct as that given by the Party Secretary, but it did contain dramatically more information however much it was couched in Revolutionary rhetoric.

The Anomaly was not of a nature that could be properly determined. It was clearer what it wasn't, rather than what it was. It wasn't a black hole, a wormhole or composed of baryonic matter. It wasn't solid and it wasn't made from dark energy. It was, however, growing at an alarming rate, as were the number of incidents of apparitions. Whatever it might be, it was a threat to the power and ambitions of the Twenty Fifth Reich.

If it was indeed manufactured by an alien intelligence, from beyond the Solar System, then this was sufficient reason for the highest possible military preparedness. No alien culture was likely to be compatible with the interests of the Reich. It couldn't possibly be ideologically correct as Comrade Schleiermacher's wisdom and philosophy was unlikely to have spread far beyond Saturn. It was unlikely to be ethnically pure, merely by virtue of not having had the blessing of an ancestral history based in North West Europe. It was very likely that such aliens would not even be human, possibly not even biological. Such abominations could not be permitted within the compass of the heliosphere. 

On the other hand, there was much that could be learnt from an alien civilisation. Although the Reich's mission was to eliminate any alien presence in the Solar System with the same ruthlessness employed on the Slav, the Arab, the Negro, the Celt and the Turk, it was also to gather as much knowledge of alien technology and biology as was possible. It might even be necessary to pretend to tolerate this alien presence in the unlikely event that it wasn't predisposed towards aggression.

After the Chief Scientific Officer sat down, again with a request that there be no applause, he was followed by an address from General Von Baden. The General was decorated with a huge weight of medals but wore a rather less splendid helmet than the one adorning the Party Secretary. Just as the Party Secretary was well schooled in revolutionary rhetoric and the Chief Scientific Officer in revolutionary science, he was a military man who understood the strategies and tactics of modern warfare. This was despite the fact that the purges hit hardest those who merely by virtue of being on the battlefield had come into contact with the enemy and had therefore been inadvertently exposed to their propaganda. 

This was the first time that Paolo got a realistic appraisal of the damage inflicted on the Reich's space fleet by the other two empires' space fleets which were also converging on the same destination. It was rather worse than he'd thought. Only a tenth of the ten thousand space craft launched on this mission at crippling expense had survived. This was much the same for the enemy fleets. However, the destructive firepower in the arsenal of just one of the larger battle cruisers could scorch the surface of an inner planet and make it uninhabitable for many millions of years. The combined armoury of antimatter and nuclear devices, let alone the more exotic biochemical and dark energy weaponry, was enough to destroy a moon or make a serious dent in the atmosphere of an outer planet. This had already happened on Jupiter many centuries before when the Great Red Spot had been transformed into an even greater radioactive storm. The General was confident that should it be necessary to disable an alien force the Ninth Army had the capacity to seriously discourage any alien from venturing any further into the Solar System.

"It is hoped that such expensive weaponry will not be needed," remarked the general. "We would prefer that it were used to eliminate Manchurian and Latin scum. Such a battle would be heroic but not one of you assembled in this room would ever live to celebrate again the glories of the eternal Twenty Fifth Reich, whose future is assured thanks to the wisdom and courage of our magnificent politburo and that of General Secretary Heidegger himself."

The hands of the assembled officers twitched nervously, unsure whether to applaud given the instructions not to do so. Every eye studied the faces on the podium. And then with relief, they could see the Party Secretary put his hands together. With that the whole auditorium erupted into the applause that more naturally followed any praise of the government and its wisdom. This applause lasted a palm-numbing forty-five minutes that occasionally descended in tempo only to be brought to a fresh crescendo by those, generally of lesser rank, who most wanted to affirm the fervour of their loyalty.

And then finally, and at last, Paolo could join his fellow officers as they silently filed out now enthused with renewed revolutionary spirit.

Paolo carried away two messages that he reviewed in his mind. One was the imperative to ensure that neither he nor anyone else should discuss this meeting. He had already survived several purges. He'd even had to spend a terrifying month in a Reich cell that had cost him his fingernails and required emergency surgery on his crippled legs before the Great Purge of 207 P.R. had run its course.

And the other message was the realisation that as a senior scientific officer in Biochemistry he might soon very well be practising his research on very exotic life-forms indeed.



Into the Unknowable Ch. 09







Into the Unknowable Ch. 09



"So if one Beatrice dies then part of you dies," speculated the original Beatrice.

"In a sense I cannot die," said the Beatrice in the flowing dress. "On my demise the nanobot community remains unchanged. My matter is re-assimilated into the main thread. Only the manifestation of the nanobot community that is an exact facsimile of you will have died."

"You don't have to struggle so hard to understand, Beatrice," said Vashti. "After all, it's not as if you'll ever be able to report back to Proxima Centauri Mission Control. It's unlikely that you will ever again be in communication with your home stellar system. All you need to know is that I enjoy fucking you and that I hope to continue doing so."

"What choice have I got?"

"You don't have to have sex with me," replied Vashti. 

"If you were human you'd probably be as conflicted as poor Nadezhda is towards you," said the Beatrice in a short skirt. "Or should I say: towards me."

"How is Nadezhda?" asked the original Beatrice sadly.

"She still loves you," said the same Beatrice. "In fact, because I spend rather more time with her than you ever could, she probably loves me more than she could ever love you."

"The same is true of Paul," said the Beatrice in the flowing dress. "He loves you more than ever. We make love several times a day."

"As I do Nadezhda," said the Beatrice in the flowing dress.

"And as I would like to do with you," said Vashti, who leaned her head forward and kissed the naked original Beatrice on the lips. She'd removed all her clothes and her penis was fully erect. "Shall we make love, Beatrice?"

The original Beatrice nodded her head resignedly. "Yes, I'd like that."

"Would you like the other two Beatrices to participate?" asked Vashti. She indicated the two copies that were now entirely indistinguishable from the original Beatrice since they'd also discarded their clothes.

Beatrice hesitated. She couldn't deny that there was a certain attractiveness in the idea of having sex with her own selves. She knew that she was very attractive and that there were few sexual partners who could match her. But what troubled Beatrice was that although when she was making love with Vashti she could at least pretend that her lover wasn't the same nanobot community that was imprisoning her, the same couldn't be said of the two Beatrices. 

"Not for now," said Beatrice. "They can just watch. But perhaps later on... If the mood takes me..."

"I thought you'd say that," said Vashti as she pressed her lips against Beatrice's and cupped her lover's buttocks in the palm of her hand. "And I'm equally sure that as we make love the mood of the moment will very much persuade you otherwise..."

And as always, Vashti's prediction was exactly right.



Into the Unknowable Ch. 10







Into the Unknowable Ch. 10



"It is entirely consistent with our observations of these anomalous Apparitions in our space-time reference," Zhwonka continued, "that you have become such an Apparition in another. And, I'm afraid, we now need to do further analysis on both of you to determine how and why this happened. I regret the intrusion on your privacy, but I must ask you for the good of the mission to subject yourself to further tests. What we have determined is that not only you but also a good volume of space around you vanished for this period of time. That is why when you returned to the Serenity you experienced nausea and discomfort as the vacuum you created was displaced. We will attempt to keep our study as non-intrusive as possible."

"We have eggs that are due to hatch any day now," said Duwinki anxiously.

"Don't worry," said the scientific officer. "Our research will take no more than a few hours, but it is necessary to understand as much as we can about this Anomaly to be sure that it isn't a threat."

"Do you think it might be?" wondered Gwark anxiously for his unborn children.

"I didn't used to think it could be," said Zhwonka reflectively, "but I am becoming less sure. If it is a gateway to other worlds then it might not be the Anomaly that we should be wary of but rather what it might let loose into our world. I shudder at the thought of what a universe might be like where mammals are the dominant order."



Into the Unknowable Ch. 11







Into the Unknowable Ch. 11



"I have absolute faith in the wisdom of Captain Kerensky, Dr. Chang and Professor Penrose," said Beatrice. "I'm sure it will be fine."

The actual passage into the Anomaly was indeed very uneventful. From Paul's perspective in the bedroom of his villa surrounded by holographic screens and accompanied by Beatrice there was absolutely nothing to mark the fact that the Intrepid was no longer outside the Anomaly but was instead speeding into it at a velocity of several millions of kilometres per hour. There was a margin of perceived error as to the exact location of the Anomaly's boundary, but at the speed at which the Intrepid was travelling it would have taken a barely measurable period of time to pass through it. There was no jolt, shudder or perturbation of any kind. There were no discernable differences between the outer space they had left behind and the space inside the Anomaly. It was composed of precisely the same amount of cosmic microwave background radiation.

The biggest difference was what could be seen through the holographic screens surrounding Paul's bed. They showed a view ahead where there was absolute nothingness and a view behind where there was a long rip through empty space on the other side of which were stars and galaxies. Disturbingly the nothingness around the Anomaly was total and absolute, while the long stellar rip which was measurable in thousands of kilometres was getting steadily smaller. Ahead there were no stars, no planets, no dark matter, no intergalactic gas clouds and no obvious destination.

"What happens now?" asked Paul after a few minutes.

"I don't know," said Beatrice with a momentary flash across her face that resembled an expression of triumph. "I suppose we just sit and wait."

"Sit and wait?" said Paul. "What sort of plan is that?"

"I imagine there will have already been countless great discoveries made by the scientists on the ship," said Beatrice. "Perhaps they've found something about what the Anomaly might be. Isn't that exciting?"

"Not very exciting at all if we can never get back home to Mission Control," said Paul as he stared at the absolute nothingness ahead. "Shouldn't we just turn round and head back the way we've come?"

"What! And finish the mission before we've consolidated our results. Shall we see what other people have to say?"

Beatrice commanded the holographic displays to show what the scientists and senior officers were saying publicly. It was still disconcertingly upbeat. Was there no one who shared Paul's anxiety about being lost in total nothingness with no apparent escape route and continuing to head at great velocity in precisely the wrong direction?

Captain Kerensky was full of unadulterated praise and adulation for the crew for navigating into the Anomaly. "From the point of view of possible peril, I'm sure you'll agree that it was nothing more than an anticlimax," she said.

Chief Science Officer Dr. Chang was equally enthusiastic. She eagerly looked forward to the exciting results of all the research now taking place in the wonderful new laboratory they were now within. "There's a lot to do," she said. "We all better get stuck into it right away!"

Professor Penrose was also enthusiastic. The very fact that there was no measurable difference between the behaviour of quanta within the Anomaly to that outside had him burbling with delight. "The very lack of something different is really something very special indeed," he enthused.

Although not many scientists were quite as unabashedly animated as the man who until recently had been the most sceptical in their company, they all concurred with the professor's findings. There really was no real measurable difference between what could be observed inside the Anomaly to what could be observed on the outside. What was not mentioned but must have been obvious to everyone was that along with this absolute lack of new information was the new fact that the Intrepid was deep inside the Anomaly where there was literally nothing at all and no apparent prospect of returning back to Mission Control to report their findings.

"So here we are in nowhere having found nothing new and with nobody to report this to," said Paul. "Nowhere. Nothing. Nobody. It doesn't look good."

"Don't worry, dearest," said Beatrice as unconcerned as ever. "I'm sure it will all work out for the best in the end."



Into the Unknowable Ch. 12







Into the Unknowable Ch. 12



"You're a monster!" said the captain. "You imprison me and all my crew. You wreck the mission to which so many people have dedicated years of their lives. You doom thousands of people to certain death."

"Neither of us can be sure that anyone will die," said Beatrice with a smile. "Perhaps no one will. All that's known is that no one will return from the Anomaly in the direction from which they came. You could say that we're about to be launched on an extremely exciting—even groundbreaking—mission. Isn't this in the same spirit of adventure as that of the very first explorers in human history?"

"Those explorers embarked on their expeditions with their eyes open," said Nadezhda. "They knew the risks and they accepted them. That is not the case with the passengers and crew of the space ship Intrepid."

"I can see that you're never going to be persuaded, are you Naddy?" said Beatrice teasingly. "Still it's difficult for me to just stand here and see you get so upset. This is especially so given that you are so deliciously naked."

"Are you saying that despite everything you've told me you still expect me to have sex with you?" wondered Nadezhda who wasn't quite sure she'd heard her android lover rightly.

"Of course," said Beatrice. "Why ever not?"

"Is it because you're an android that you are so astonishingly insensitive?"

Beatrice looked thoughtful as she formulated a response. "Are humans necessarily more sympathetic to other people's feelings, do you think?"

"That's not an excuse," said the captain. Amidst her frustration, fear and indignation she was close to bursting into the same tears she'd seen on her second officer's face.

"Dear dear," said Beatrice as she took a step forward. "Shall I take my clothes off too? Wouldn't that be better?"

"No. No," said Nadezhda. "No, it wouldn't. Don't touch me."

"Are you sure that's what you want, sweetheart?" said Beatrice who effortlessly stepped out of her thong while her blouse slipped off her shoulders and through her arms to the floor behind her.

"Don't touch me," Nadezhda whimpered as Beatrice placed her hands on her bare shoulders. "It's not right. You're a monster. You're a mass-murderer and a lunatic."

"I am not human," said Beatrice, "but I do love you. And I know you well enough by now to be sure that despite everything you still love me. Come on, sweetheart. Surrender yourself to me. After all, your confinement needn't be absent of all pleasures."

Captain Kerensky wept as her lover wrapped her arms around her and pressed her to her bosom. Beatrice was right. As always.

But what the android was doing to the passengers, the crew, the senior officers and the mission, let alone to the captain herself, was still unforgiveable.



Into the Unknowable Ch. 13







Into the Unknowable Ch. 13



The debate soon became more heated as the majority that wanted to pray for forgiveness and to contemplate the beauty of the Lord God's creation was refusing to take orders.

"In the eyes of the Lord, we are all equal," said one soldier.

"It is said of the Revelation: Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down," said another.

"Our duty is to destroy the Apostasy and all its abominations," said Isaac sternly. "Do not be distracted by Satan's mockery of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine." He then produced a hand-weapon which he pointed at the head of one of those who'd adopted a reverential attitude. "Your duty is to the mission to which you have been assigned by the Ecumenical Union. Don't force me to have to shoot you."

Fortunately, Isaac was relieved of this responsibility.

Quite suddenly and with no warning, he and all the other Christian Soldiers collapsed as one onto the lawn.

Emmanuel regarded the prostrate bodies. It had to be the Intrepid's security systems. It would never permit physical violence to take place on board the ship where passengers were at risk.

Sure enough, within a minute of the Christian Soldiers losing consciousness, Colonel Vashti emerged from behind one of the villas flanked by three soldiers and Science Officer Planck. They appeared to be in no hurry. Colonel Vashti was in full military dress and strode straight over to Emmanuel.

"I trust you are unharmed?" she asked.

"I'm fine," Emmanuel said. "You arrived just in time. These crusaders were just about to fight each other."

"As long as they harm only one another then I don't mind," said the colonel. "I take it they all entered through that gateway?"

"I believe so, sir," said Emmanuel. "Do you know what that thing is?"

"That's just one more new and exciting phenomenon to investigate," said Science Officer Planck who was bubbling over with irrepressible enthusiasm. "Every day brings a fresh new scientific discovery."

"But what is it?"

"We don't know," admitted the Science Officer. "There have been several such gateways appearing throughout the Intrepid. Do you want to look inside?"

"I admit I'm curious," said Emmanuel.

"We'll be sending two soldiers through the gateway to see what's on the other side," said the colonel. "Would you like to accompany them?"

"I don't think so," Emmanuel admitted. "It could be very dangerous."

"My men won't be troubled by that."

Indeed, as Emmanuel, the Science Officer and the colonel proceeded towards the strangely amorphous gateway, two soldiers entered ahead of them and mysteriously disappeared. It was like a smaller version of the Anomaly's much larger gateway through which the Intrepid had entered. It was no less mysterious when Emmanuel stood right in front of it and looked inside. What he saw was an open dimly lit space rather like a large room in which there were the shadowy figures of other Soldiers of Christ gathered in a circle around the gateway and peering through it from the other side. They stepped back as Emmanuel and the Science Officer poked their heads in.

As Emmanuel looked in, he could see no sign of the two soldiers who'd entered ahead of him. What he did see was a monstrous cross elevated high above the heads of all the Soldiers of Christ on which was an especially gruesome and life-like image of Christ and his suffering.

"That's enough," said Colonel Vashti. "We have to seal the entrance now."

"And leave the two soldiers inside?" asked Emmanuel.

"We are on a mission of discovery," said Science Officer Planck. "The two soldiers will be fulfilling that mission and adding greatly to the extent of human knowledge."

"I have no fear for their safety," said Colonel Vashti with a reassuring smile. "They'll be perfectly all right. Now please step back, gentlemen."

Emmanuel and the Science Officer obeyed the colonel's instruction and stood back nearly ten metres while the Intrepid constructed a transparent shell around the gateway that reflected enough light to be visible. Emmanuel could still see through the gateway but anyone who'd stepped out would be confined within the shell.

"I really must congratulate you on your calm and professional approach," said the Science Officer. "Now, would you be so kind as to accompany me so that you can give a complete account of what happened? It won't take long but the pursuit of science will be immeasurably enhanced by your cooperation."

Emmanuel felt the warmth of satisfaction well up inside him. He could barely wait to return to his husband and give an account of all that had happened.

Even though this wasn't what Emmanuel had expected, he'd assisted the mission in a practical way after all. A Special Operations Officer could still prove to be of practical value even in the heart of the Anomaly.



Into the Unknowable Ch. 14







Into the Unknowable Ch. 15







Into the Unknowable Ch. 15



"He wants to go through the door," she said.

"What did you say to him?"

"Well, that by doing so he would enter another completely different space ship," said Beatrice. "He also wants to go with the soldiers he's gathered together."

"Is that OK?" Paul asked anxiously. "I'm not sure I want armed and uniformed men in my villa."

"I don't believe we've been offered much choice."

Paul glanced at the hand weapons held by the soldiers. "I suppose you're right."

"He also wants us to go through the door first."

"That's very civil of him," said Paul who wondered whether Paolo was perhaps a nicer fellow than he seemed.

"I think it's to provide cover for him," said Beatrice.

It wasn't a long walk to the door but as Paolo gripped Beatrice' shoulder by a hand and one of the soldiers grasped Paul's hands together behind his back the walk took longer than it might have done otherwise. Paul supposed that this was to prevent Beatrice and him from running away into the space ship Intrepido, but that seemed most peculiar as he would much rather return to his villa on the Intrepid. He'd had quite enough of this unpleasant place.

However, when Paul and Beatrice passed through the door back into his villa, he was surprised to find that a welcoming party was already waiting for him. That was really very considerate. It was a very select company that included Captain Kerensky, Chief Science Officer Chang and several soldiers. They appeared to be very stern and didn't respond in kind at all when Paul greeted them with a cheerful smile. He would have waved a greeting had his hands not been held behind his back.

One of the soldiers, who Paul vaguely recognised as Major Schwarz, addressed him and more appropriately the people holding him captive in what he assumed to be German. It was astonishing how many people on the Intrepid spoke obscure languages, just as it was very surprising but rather reassuring that so many senior officers had gathered at this point at such short notice. Presumably they'd been alerted by the Intrepid's security system when it detected a foreign presence on board the space ship.

The exchange between the major and the Chief Scientific Officer wasn't at all amicable. This impression was reinforced when Paolo Mauritz pressed a hand-weapon against Paul's forehead. This didn't bode at all well. Paul rather regretted that he'd taken Beatrice's advice and followed her through the mysterious door.

Then the situation abruptly changed. Paolo Mauritz collapsed unconscious to the ground as did the four other soldiers. Beatrice stepped forward and took Paul by the arm. He could now see that the silver-uniformed intruders were slumped down just beside the door to the corridor open behind them.

"Are you OK, Paul?" asked Captain Kerensky sympathetically.

"I'm fine, thank you," he said. "I'm just glad you were here when we returned. I don't know what we'd have done otherwise."

"Well, as long as you're well," said the captain. "That's the main thing."

Paul looked at the silver-clad soldiers prostrate behind him. "Are you going to take them back through the door?" he asked.

"It's not as simple as that, Paul," said Major Schwarz. "There's been a security breach in the Intrepid. It is most peculiar to have a door like this appearing in a villa that leads into another space ship. We need to interrogate these intruders to find out what they know."

"I'm pretty sure they know nothing more about the door than we do," said Paul, who glanced at his wife for confirmation.

Beatrice nodded but not so much in agreement with Paul. "The major's right," she said. "It is most peculiar. And it's also very strange that this Paolo Mauritz looks so much like you."

"Surely that's just a coincidence," said Paul.

"Even if it is, Paul," said the Chief Science Officer, "it needs to be investigated. This is a voyage into the unknown. There are exciting new discoveries every day. They all need to be studied carefully. It is very odd that this man should resemble you so exactly."

"The hair and eye colour is totally different," Paul protested.

"We still need to examine these intruders," said the captain. "We also need to investigate this breach."

"Three of my men are going in there now, captain," said Major Schwarz. He indicated three soldiers who were walking towards the door armed with unambiguously menacing weapons.

"We also need to secure the breach," said the captain.

"Won't that simply trap the soldiers inside?" Paul wondered.

"You worry too much, Paul," said the major kindly. "My soldiers will be fine. We'll stay in constant communication with them, never you mind. Our first priority must be the security of the Intrepid."

"Furthermore, Paul," said the Chief Science Officer, "Remember why we're in the Anomaly in the first place. The reason is precisely to identify, isolate and investigate exciting new scientific phenomena such as this. Aren't you excited by the opportunity to add to the wealth of scientific discovery?"

"I guess so," said Paul who stood back with Beatrice and the other officers. He watched as three soldiers from the Intrepid walked through the door and closed it behind them.

"What will they do now?" asked Paul.

"They'll seal up the door from the other side," said the major. "That should prevent any more people from the other space ship trespassing into the Intrepid with lethal weapons and equally lethal intent. Then they'll investigate the rest of the ship."

"And the door on this side?" Paul wondered.

"The Intrepid is already patching up the hole that's been made, Paul," said the captain with a broad smile. "That will set things back to how they were before."

"I'm sure they will," said Paul who watched the wall metamorphose into a seamless surface with no evidence at all that it had once held a door, let alone one that led into another space ship.

Although this was precisely what Paul most wanted—that the villa should return to exactly the state it was before Beatrice had noticed the strange door—he was still anxious and uneasy. What prevented other similar doors appearing elsewhere on the ship? Why did Paolo Mauritz resemble him so exactly and where did he come from? He didn't dress like someone from a part of the Solar System that Paul knew about. And, even more troubling, how could there be more than one space ship co-existing in exactly the same point of space as the Intrepid?

And why were the senior officers so relaxed about sending three of their soldiers through a door they'd now sealed shut? Were the senior officers really so heartless as to sacrifice the soldiers' chance of returning home so casually?



Into the Unknowable Ch. 16







Into the Unknowable Ch. 16



There were few such attractions to the male Vashti who was engaged in the full scale warfare that had broken out on the space ship represented by a wholly homosexual masculine Solar System. At least Vashti was well versed in the practice and execution of war, though the viciousness of the conflict between the different but almost identical factions of a society based on philosophical contemplation could only result in the eventual death of every last soldier. Much as Vashti enjoyed fucking her fellow soldiers prior to conflict, it was less pleasant to wade through their corpses and with their blood splattered over her uniform. There was no way that the philosophical concerns about whether morality was pre-existent and omnipresent or emergent and pragmatic could be resolved in this manner. This Vashti still had to slaughter several more soldiers to make her escape from the space ship she'd been exploring and then launch herself into absolute nothingness.

Although still invisible to all but the senior officers of the Intrepid, the thousands of Vashtis of many different shapes and sizes all converged towards a single point where a massive Vashti was beginning to coalesce. She was soon larger than any of the space ships surrounding her. Indeed, her majestic and perpetually tumescent member was several kilometres in length. Her erect penis was larger than any space ship and her testicles could hold entire alien space fleets. In the sense that they were fully assimilated inside her, this was truly no exaggeration. On occasion, a Vashti that coalesced with the larger body was in such a state of sexual excitement from whatever she'd been doing earlier that the larger Vashti ejaculated into empty space. The semen flew out into the void, sometimes splattering its invisible sperm on the neighbouring space ships before then being re-assimilated into the master thread.

However, all was not well. The lack of integrity within the whole nanobot community was becoming increasingly manifest.

A Vashti who was making her way towards the escape hatch of a space ship in which the simian crew were busily shooting one another was hit by a laser beam through the head which she wouldn't have normally noticed. Instead, she fell to the ground with blood gushing onto the floor and didn't recover. As so many other simian corpses were piling above her, nobody noticed as the corpse began disintegrating into microscopic nanobot grains.

There was a similar fate for a body-modified Vashti who was able to maintain a penis on a woman's body. This happened while masturbating with casual acquaintances as was the expected custom during any social interaction with the other bizarrely modified human forms on the space ship she was exploring. Upon ejaculating, her entire body dissolved into dust leaving just an unattached penis jumping about by itself and continuing to spurt. When the last drop of semen shot free, the penis collapsed and died. The large-breasted, well-endowed, red-skinned humanoids with whom she was conversing were understandably distressed by this gruesome event, but like in the other space ships there had been so many peculiar happenings that this was readily attributed to the Anomaly's general weirdness.

A similar fate befell a Vashti who'd returned to her original form and was flying across empty space at a velocity that most space vehicles would have difficulty in matching. As she flew forward she discovered that parts of her skin were peeling off. She was even feeling slightly cold in the near absolute zero temperature of open space. And then she died in the way most biological forms would. The lack of air pressure burst open her lungs and her blood froze to solid red ice.

But soon enough all the various Vashtis were in one place and the monstrous invisible Vashti that had swollen in the heart of the Anomaly had coalesced into one whole.

Vashti viewed the space around her to locate the Intrepid in the far distance. When she found it, she propelled herself forward as if swimming through empty space. It would still take many hours, perhaps days, but the now re-integrated Vashti was flying back to the Intrepid to find out what was happening and attempt to rescue what was left of an increasingly desperate and failed mission. A mission moreover for which she had full responsibility and had already condemned many thousands of humans to eternal banishment beyond the bounds of normal space and time.



Into the Unknowable Ch. 17



Intrepid - 3756 C.E.

The Intrepid's computer system had been tampered with. Sheila Nkomo knew this for sure. She could use most of the system, but she had no access at all to any part of it that could tell her what was happening on the space ship. 

Ever since Captain Kerensky and the military officers had arrested and detained her in the villa, she had been as much blind as she was naked. She had no access to the Intrepid's information systems. She couldn't monitor the bridge. She had no means of communicating with any of the crew and passengers. Beyond the daily reports from the uncharacteristically upbeat captain and the scientific bulletins, she had no direct information at all about the current operations of the space ship of which she had until recently been the Second Officer.

There must have been meetings and discussions to decide whether the Intrepid should take the highly irregular and unauthorised action of plunging into the Anomaly, but beyond a few sketchy second-hand accounts Sheila knew very little about them. There was clearly an active policy of censorship which was itself in direct contravention of every conceivable policy maintained by the Interplanetary Union. It was as if Captain Kerensky had hijacked the ship simply to take everyone on board towards their doom, but in her daily briefings she spoke about it as if she was merely following orders from Mission Control. In fact, so insistent was the captain of this that Sheila began to doubt her own memory of the mission's original purpose. This became even more disconcerting when Sheila accessed the Intrepid's Mission Statement which was subtly different from how the Second Officer remembered it. 

Had she gone mad? Had she stumbled into an alternative reality? She'd never have agreed to participate on a mission that would sacrifice the lives of thousands of people for a dubious and unverifiable scientific adventure whose results couldn't even be relayed back to Mission Control. And here was a Mission Statement that quite clearly stated that this was precisely what the mission would do, even though it was phrased in terms like 'exploratory ingress' and 'practical research'.

Sheila's opinion of her captain had always been mixed. She was respectful of the Saturnian's rank and her professional attitude towards her rank and position. Her conversations with her senior officer had been relatively relaxed though not as much so as those with the Chief Science Officer. Then again, Sheila had always felt uneasy about the captain's quite obvious sexual attraction towards her. It was one thing for a man to show, however discreetly, that he found the Second Officer attractive. It was quite another for a woman to do so. Sheila had never had even the slightest inclination towards a romantic or sexual relationship with another woman.

Perhaps it was because the captain was piqued by Sheila's rejection of her advances that she'd placed the Second Officer in detention. Whatever it was, it couldn't have been for insubordination or dereliction of duty. And why was she given no explanation? Beyond a cursory account of the conditions of her detention, Sheila Nkomo had been given no reason for this extraordinary action.

She vividly remembered the moment several weeks earlier when she awoke, naked and dazed, in the villa. As she adjusted her eyes to the unfamiliar room and the bed on whose sheets she lay without blankets or sheets, she gradually became conscious that she was in the company of Captain Kerensky and two military officers who she didn't recognise. They were standing just by the bedroom door as if they'd been expecting her to awake at just that moment.

"You are at liberty to wander about the villa as you please," Captain Kerensky informed her. "You have almost complete access to the Intrepid's facilities. But you will not be able to leave the villa and you will not be able to communicate with anyone."

"What's there to stop me from leaving, captain?" Second Officer Nkomo asked when she saw that the doors were not locked.

"You'll soon find out, Ms Nkomo," said the captain.

"Can you at least tell me why I've been put in detention, captain?" Sheila pleaded.

"That's classified information." 

"What have I done to deserve this?"

"As I say: that's information I'm not at liberty to disclose."

Sheila watched Captain Kerensky and the military officers depart with the captain walking ahead of the two soldiers. None of them glanced back at Sheila as she stood dazed, confused and humiliated on the lawn of the villa in what she'd been informed was the outermost level. This was normally considered the most privileged level for the Intrepid's passengers, though after the attack by the Holy Coalition and the later bombardment by the maniac trillionaire it was now mostly empty with brand new villas and freshly planted trees.

Sheila's question remained unanswered. What did stop her from leaving the villa? There was no prison wall and Captain Kerensky and the military officers didn't pause at all as they marched off. 

However, Sheila soon discovered the nature of an invisible force field through which she could throw stones but which she couldn't walk through. The Second Officer was no expert in invisible force fields, but this one was quite unlike any she'd ever encountered before. This was a weapon the Interplanetary Union had kept secret until this moment.

From that time on, Sheila became angrier and angrier. She was angry at the injustice of her captivity. She was angry at Captain Kerensky for having singled her out for detention. She was angry when she discovered that, contrary to her original understanding of the mission's parameters, the Interplanetary Union had chosen to plunge the Intrepid into the Anomaly on a suicide mission. And her anger motivated her to study in detail that information to which she had access of the space ship's progress through the Anomaly's peculiarly empty space. It also stirred her several times of every day to run full pelt in many different directions towards the invisible border that confined her in the hope of identifying a weakness she could take advantage of. She had no clear idea of what she would do if she managed to escape. It wasn't as if there was anywhere she could hide from the Intrepid's extensive surveillance system. And she was sure that by escaping she would just compound the original unspecified offence for which she was being punished.

Sheila became not only angry but also somewhat anxious. She was alarmed by her first sight of one of the peculiar Apparitions associated with the Anomaly. She thought she'd know what to expect, but the sight of three mediaeval knights marching towards the villa in full regalia was both astonishing and terrifying. The fact that they vanished after fewer than twenty seconds didn't diminish at all the strangeness of the sight. Then there were more and more of these Apparitions. She mostly only saw them from a distance, but she was especially surprised when a bizarre feathered animal more than two metres high wandered noisily through the villa and stood in her kitchen for very nearly five minutes before it vanished. Unlike the knights, this visitation directly interacted with the villa and had gulped down almost all the soup that Sheila had been looking forward to eating.

Her daily offensive on the invisible boundary was never better than futile. Sheila detected no sign of weakness in it whatsoever. Then again, the exercise did allow her to vent some of her rage and frustration and perhaps by doing so she might alert the attention of a passer-by. This seemed unlikely, however. In the whole time Sheila was detained the only person who'd directly addressed her was Captain Kerensky and the only person she saw passing by, and this from quite a distance, was a woman in a strangely diaphanous dress who looked very much like Beatrice, the wife of the Godwinian Paul Morris. This was peculiar because Paul's villa was in the next outermost level and there was no good reason that Sheila could think of for the bimbo from Ecstasy to be wandering about on this level.

And then one day, when Sheila had more or less abandoned all hope of success, when she ran directly at the invisible boundary on this occasion it offered no resistance whatsoever. She'd run a full twenty metres further than she'd normally have done. It was as if there'd been no boundary at all.

When Sheila realised this, she continued running in a kind of ecstasy of release. She kept running and running until she'd covered well over two hundred metres from where she'd previously been stopped and nothing hindered her in any way.

She was free!

She stopped running and stood upright at a point well outside the villa's grounds. She was panting heavily not so much from exhaustion, as she'd always been very fit, but from disbelief that after so long in captivity she'd managed to escape so easily.

And now what should she do?

She decided against returning to the villa. She wasn't going to fall for that trap. If she was going to be imprisoned anywhere it would be somewhere else. She wandered instead into a nearby villa she'd watched for so long from a distance and had never seen anyone either enter or leave. Not surprisingly there was no one inside. It was as brand new and pristine as the villa in which she'd been detained. 

After so many weeks with nobody with whom to communicate, Sheila desperately wanted to talk to someone. There were so many unanswered questions. Why had she been imprisoned? Why had the Interplanetary Union consigned the Intrepid to the Anomaly? What was going on?

Sheila wandered from villa to villa. The outermost level's artificial six hour night approached, but Sheila ignored the demands of her diurnal cycle in her hunt for other people.

There was the same uncluttered emptiness in every villa she visited. None of them had evidence that anyone had ever stayed there. Was Sheila the only resident on the outermost level?

It was several hours later and after exploring many more villas that Sheila at last found proof that she wasn't alone. It was still dark but even before Sheila entered the villa it was evident that someone was living there. There was the distinct imprint of a body on the lounger in the lawn. There were traces of damp footprints from the swimming pool to the veranda. The door to the villa was slightly ajar. Not open. Not closed. Just carelessly left ajar. As Sheila pushed the door fully open she was anxious that this might be a trap and she'd be confronted by military officers who'd handcuff and arrest her once more.

Instead she discovered the slumbering naked body of the one person on the space ship she believed she could trust. How fortunate could she be?

"Petal!" she cried, ignoring all conventions of decorum as she shook awake her closest friend. "Wake up, Petal. It's me. Sheila."

"Who?" said the Chief Science Officer dozily as her eyes slowly opened and focused on the Second Officer. 

"Sheila. It's me."

"Goodness!" said Petal Chang. "It is! And naked too. This is a surprise."

"You've got to forgive me," Sheila apologised. "There must be a systems fault. The Intrepid hasn't provided any clothing for me."

"Nor for me," said Petal with a broad smile. "Am I pleased to see you! Were you imprisoned as well or am I really the only one?"

"You aren't the only one," confirmed Sheila who noticed that tears were dripping down her cheeks. "But do you know why we've been imprisoned like this?"

"The only reason I can envisage is that both of us would have objected to the Intrepid being set on a suicide course into the heart of the Anomaly," said Petal. "Quite clearly Captain Kerensky and the Interplanetary Union decided that troublemakers like us should be kept hidden away."

"Just the two of us?"

"Perhaps not. Who knows? I can't imagine that anyone in full possession of their sanity would willingly choose to commit suicide by plunging into the Anomaly. There must be other people who've protested."

"Who?"

"I don't know," said Petal. "Not Captain Kerensky, that's for sure. She was the last person I saw when I woke up here several weeks ago. She told me she was acting on the authority of the Interplanetary Union."

"Are you suggesting that neither the captain nor the union which we are pledged to serve are sane and rational?"

"How can they be?" said Petal. "That is unless they know something that's before now eluded the greatest scientific minds in the Solar System. Over the last few weeks I've studied all the scientific reports available to me—and there are few that aren't—and I've seen nothing that couldn't have been established without having to send a space ship carrying thousands of people into what appears to be some kind of alternative universe."

"What kind of alternative universe?"

"You tell me," said Petal. "It's one that hosts countless numbers of these thirty-second Apparitions and a vast amount of absolutely nothing. But even if we had discovered the ultimate meaning of life, the universe and everything, what use would it be without the ability to transmit that knowledge back to Mission Control? Unless we can find an exit route we are all of us going to die in a universe without stars."

Petal and Sheila had much to talk about. Sheila decided that even if she was now to discover that the invisible force field that had held her for so long was confining her in Petal's villa she'd much prefer imprisonment with her good friend than to be by herself, even if they were denied the right to modesty,.

Petal was also motivated by anger and frustration but in a different way to Sheila. She was frustrated as a scientist at being part of an unprecedented scientific experiment but with no access to peers with whom she could compare her observations and hypotheses. There was so much opportunity for scientific investigation and no means of practising it. Sheila, on the other hand, was simply irate at having been unjustly incarcerated. She continually rehearsed in her mind exactly how she would express her anger to Captain Kerensky if she should ever meet her again. The Interplanetary Union was punishing her for her understandable reluctance to commit suicide on a mission where she wasn't aware that such an ultimate sacrifice was required.

"What should we do now?" Petal asked.

"I'd like to have something to eat," Sheila remarked. "I've not eaten for hours!"

Petal laughed. "That's easily arranged. And after we've eaten?"

"We need to explore the rest of the level. If I've been imprisoned without trial and jury for a crime that I've not even been informed of and you have as well then there might be others who've suffered the same injustice."

"And after that?"

"I don't know. But we have a duty to our fellow crew-members and if possible we should seek redress from the Interplanetary Union for our unwarranted incarceration. The very least we should do is challenge Captain Kerensky as to why she misled us about the mission's real intentions and then confined us to ensure we weren't free to express our wholly reasonable objections."

"Is that what you think's happened, Sheila?"

"What other explanation can there be?"

There was a sense in which Sheila was reluctant to leave the villa now she'd discovered Petal but they couldn't stay in the one place. Something had very recently changed in the Intrepid's command system. This was evident from the fact she'd been able to roam away from her villa for more than a day. It was inconceivable that she could have escaped otherwise without it being noticed. Perhaps something had happened to Captain Kerensky. Perhaps she'd acknowledged the extent of her folly. And if so then an apology was the very least that the two senior officers deserved.

Sheila and Petal felt some trepidation as they strode out of the villa. Could the invisible force field have somehow re-established itself while Sheila was inside? Fortunately their fears were unfounded. The two women walked straight out with no let or hindrance of any kind. And they were now able to scout the other villas that dotted the outermost level.

At first, this was a fruitless endeavour. The villas they visited were all empty and had never been inhabited. They were ready and waiting for occupancy, but as none had been allocated they remained vacant. Sheila didn't really mind this. She enjoyed just being in Petal's company. She hadn't realised how much she valued her fellow officer's friendship. 

Their exploration was fleetingly enlivened when a huge green hairy monster lumbered across the landscape carrying a huge club over its shoulder and snorting in a voice that resembled a buffalo. The monster vanished after a few seconds and left no trace that it had ever been there. 

Somewhat later the two women came across a more persistent presence in another villa. They discovered a door that showed evidence of having been opened. When they peeked inside the door, what they saw was a long dark corridor that didn't belong to the villa and almost certainly didn't belong to the Intrepid. Indeed such a corridor shouldn't even exist. From what could be seen, the corridor extended beyond the length of the villa that contained it.

"Should we investigate?" Sheila asked nervously.

"If we go inside, there's the risk that the door to the corridor will vanish after a few seconds and we'll be stuck in a dark void forever," said Petal. "I think this is an adventure we can leave until another time."

After several more hours, the two women did at last meet other people that were demonstrably both persistent and corporeal. They didn't vanish within seconds. It was a pair of other officers: both male and both naked. This last fact initially troubled Sheila until she remembered that she was also naked. The two men were likely to be equally as embarrassed by their nakedness as the Second Officer and the Chief Science Officer. The two officers were Medical Officer James Kawasaki and Chief Catering Officer Jose Mala, and the story of their detention was pretty much identical to that of Sheila and Petal. It was very peculiar that their detention took place on exactly the same day as it had for Sheila and Petal and also in the captain's presence. Captain Kerensky must have been extraordinarily busy on that day! Why didn't she assign the task to other officers? Perhaps there was no one to whom she could delegate the authority.

Now there were four officers in the company it was possible to split up their activities and investigate more villas. Most were still empty, but the two male officers found another male officer, Science Officer Bjorn Planck, who was also naked. Sheila was now in the company of five officers which provided a sense of safety in numbers. It also reassured Sheila that her imprisonment was not specific to her. Nonetheless, she was already missing the relative intimacy and companionship she'd had when she was scouting the outermost level with just Petal. She now had to behave more as a senior officer and less like one of two women-friends who enjoyed one another's company.

The officers' accounts were all precisely the same. They'd all been incarcerated while they were asleep. They'd all been awoken by Captain Kerensky and two military officers. They'd all been confined in a luxury villa behind an invisible force field.

"My doctoral thesis was on force fields," commented Science Officer Planck. "I've never come across one quite like this before. Are there any other secret weapons on board the Intrepid that we've never come across?"

"I don't know," said Chief Science Officer Chang. "Perhaps if there are, this would explain how the Intrepid managed to ward off the mad trillionaire's secret arsenal."

"An interesting hypothesis," agreed the more junior Science Officer. "Perhaps the same technology that's generated the force field could also be used as an offensive weapon."




Into the Unknowable Ch. 17



"Perhaps here's someone who can answer your questions," said Second Officer Nkomo who pointed towards a figure several hundred metres ahead who was walking purposefully towards them.

"It's Captain Kerensky, for sure," said Chief Science Officer Chang. "But why is she naked? Couldn't she find any clothes to wear? There's something very strange about this."

"We'll wait for her here, shall we?" Second Officer Nkomo suggested, nodding towards a small hazel tree by which a small fountain was bubbling forth a tuneful tinkle of flowing water.

"Is the captain still our commanding officer?" asked the Chief Catering Officer. 

"She'll have to have a damned good explanation for her behaviour for me to acknowledge her as my captain again," said Sheila bitterly.

Captain Kerensky was approaching warily. She was no doubt aware of the suspicion and even hostility felt towards her by her fellow officers. She came to within ten metres of her fellow officers and stood still. She hesitated as she wondered exactly how she should address her fellow officers.

"Hello," she said. "I'm very pleased to see you again."

If the captain thought that such a greeting would somehow compensate for the appalling way in which she'd acted, Sheila Nkomo was at least one person whose anger wouldn't be so easily placated. 

"I'm not so sure that the same can be said for us, captain," she said. 

"I can explain..." said Captain Kerensky.

Sheila wasn't sure that any explanation could possibly be enough, but it was the Chief Science Officer who spoke next. 

"You have a lot of explaining to do," Petal said, not unreasonably.



Into the Unknowable Ch. 18



Intrepid - 3756 C.E.

Anger. Frustration. Humiliation. These were just a few of the emotions Nadezhda was feeling as she reviewed her helpless situation. Her command of the space ship Intrepid had been stolen from her by an alien. She was confined to a villa on the outermost level. She was unable to communicate with anyone other than Beatrice: the android who was both her captor and lover. And every day when she accessed the Intrepid's information systems, she was humiliated to see an android masquerading as herself.

Nadezhda paid careful attention to the daily reports that pertained to come from Captain Kerensky, but although she was sure that much of it was nothing more than lies, she had no way of knowing what was true and what was false. The lie that grated most, of course, was that she was the same Captain Kerensky who broadcast an upbeat daily account of the ship's affairs to the passengers and crew. Unfortunately, the only human aware that her identity had been stolen was herself. And what more mortifying theft was there than that? 

The truth of which Nadezhda was most certain was that the Intrepid was deep inside the Anomaly and that the crew and passengers were, so far, still alive. That presumably was why there was still a need to produce the cheering daily news reports. And although Captain Kerensky wasn't a scientist, she could see little of scientific value in the cheery reports.

She'd also seen some of the strange Apparitions when they materialised beyond the invisible boundary that confined her. They were as puzzling to Nadezhda when viewed for real as they'd been when she'd previously viewed recordings of them. What sense could be made of a floating mermaid that appeared to swim through a pool of water hovering in mid-air? What intrinsic truth could be determined from the sight of a duel between two three-metre long scorpions? What was the value of entering the Anomaly to get a first-hand view of a man in Tudor uniform carrying under his arm the head that should have still been attached to the throat above the lace collar? 

And worse yet was that Beatrice had the gall to visit Nadezhda on a regular basis. As always, she was seductive, passionate and sensuous. She was far better as a lover than as a source of information, although she was more likely than the androids masquerading as the ship's senior officers to acknowledge that there'd been no great breakthrough in scientific understanding with regards to the Anomaly.

"Why do you still visit me?" Nadezhda asked after several weeks had passed by since entering the Anomaly. 

"I adore your company," said Beatrice as the two naked women lay side by side on the lawn outside the villa. "I love making love to you. It's what I most enjoy. It's what I was made to do."

"Haven't you got quite enough to do having to run the ship?" 

"As you know," said Beatrice, "there is a full complement of ship's officers who can be trusted to do that."

"Is it that why you're no longer in command? Have other androids assumed your authority?"

Beatrice appeared to think for a moment before replying enigmatically: "I am as much in command of the Intrepid now as I have always been."

However much Nadezhda hated Beatrice, there was never an occasion when she resisted the android's caresses. She regretted it the moment she surrendered and immediately resolved not to be so easily taken in again. But Nadezhda had no other company and Beatrice was all she had. When Beatrice wasn't there, all she could do was lie naked in her villa and await her return. She'd have preferred more dignity but Beatrice explained that she'd been denied clothing for precisely the same security reasons that the Holy Coalition crusaders had been stripped bare. Nadezhda suspected that the real reasons were the android's bizarrely unquenchable sexual appetite and the simple pleasure of humiliating the captain.

"What about my fellow officers?" Nadezhda asked. "How are you treating them?"

"As well as I am treating you. Although none of them other than you is privileged with my regular visits."

"What do they think about the imposters who stole their identity?"

"They don't know about that. All they know is that they've been imprisoned for an unspecified offence. Naturally they all blame you for it."

"Do they know anything at all? Do they even know that the Intrepid is now inside the Anomaly?"

"They know that. It might compromise my mission if they didn't have that information. But very little beyond that. Why tell anyone more than they need to know?"

Nadezhda considered Beatrice's view. "I don't believe that position is either moral or practical," she said.

"In a sense, you may be right," Beatrice conceded. "But it is pretty much the policy of all human governments throughout the Solar System's history."

Nadezhda despised Beatrice, but also looked forward to the android's daily visits. She was the only person she could talk to. The only person she could make love with. The visits structured her life. It provided her with a modicum of comfort. She could survive without Beatrice, of course. The Intrepid continued to provide the same services as it ever did, so Nadezhda never went hungry and she had access to the same entertainment and information as everyone else aboard the space ship.

But Nadezhda missed her lover's company much more than she'd imagined when Beatrice failed to arrive one day and not the next day either. She paced around the villa in a battle of emotions that fluctuated between hatred and the need for carnal attention. She couldn't settle down. She wandered about the villa gardens and gazed towards the curving arch of the horizon as it receded upwards in the distance. 

She tried to spot Beatrice's familiar figure in the distance. Sometimes the android wore a thin gossamer dress. Sometimes she wore a tight revealing top and shorts. Sometimes she was naked. But normally she would appear from somewhere over the horizon and walk unhurriedly towards Nadezhda's villa with a broad smile that taunted the captain but was also a prelude to their passionate lovemaking. There was never a specific time that she'd arrive, but it invariably happened sometime during the day.

But on these days there was no such arrival.

Nadezhda walked towards the invisible boundary of her confinement that she'd so many times bashed her head against. She held out her hands in anticipation of that gentle but irresistible force that restrained her. No amount of research on the Intrepid's encyclopaedic systems explained to her the nature of this force field or how to circumvent it.

It took Nadezhda several seconds to realise that she'd stepped further forward than she'd ever been able to do before and her heart began to pound with an anticipation even greater than that before she made love. Could she now be free? Could she now do what she'd been planning to do in such intricate detail during her period of detention? 

Nadezhda stretched her arms forward and continued walking away from the villa. Her progress was still unimpeded. She was now over a hundred metres beyond the boundaries she'd mapped out so exactly. And still nothing was holding her back.

Nadezhda let her hands drop to her side and walked forward with a more normal stride. She was curiously aware of the nakedness she'd come to accept as part of her confinement. She was now able to approach other villas and even enter them.

Now what should she do?

Captain Kerensky's first duty was for the welfare of her passengers and crew. This would be best served if she could somehow wrest back control of the Intrepid from the android invaders and then steer it out of the Anomaly. But was either action even possible? 

But before that she needed to gather together her senior officers.

Nadezhda decided not to return to the villa to collect her possessions or review the Intrepid's information systems. She was fearful that she would once again not be able to escape. Nevertheless, she took the risk of entering the next nearest villa which, like the one in which she'd been imprisoned, had been regenerated after the attack on the space ship. It was unoccupied as Nadezhda understood would be the case with most of the hundreds of villas in the outermost level. 

Every villa on the Intrepid had a distinct individual character. Some had two storeys, though most did not. Some had a swimming pool attached. However much they differed in design they all provided the same basic facilities for food, cleanliness, sleep and relaxation, but Nadezhda was seeking information systems that might help her understand what was happening both within the space ship and outside. 

Disappointingly, the data provided by this villa was no different to what she already knew. The view of space outside the Intrepid was still empty and black. There wasn't even the reassuring light of the distant stars. The view of the bridge showed the senior officers including Captain Kerensky—or at least the android Captain Kerensky—still at their duties and unconcerned about the strangeness within the Anomaly. The bulletin boards and daily reports were no more informative. Whatever else had happened, the Intrepid's information systems were still under alien control. Nevertheless, Nadezhda took an armband with her which could generate a holographic user interface to provide access to the information systems. 

She was pleased to confirm when she strode out of the villa that she wasn't held back by an invisible force field and hadn't just exchanged one prison cell for another.

Now what should she do?

She knew that the other senior officers were detained in villas throughout the outermost level. She hadn't been able to monitor them through the Intrepid's surveillance systems as Beatrice had been able to and sometimes she doubted what she'd been told. Perhaps her fellow officers really were those individuals working on the bridge who were guiding the Intrepid through the Anomaly's void. Furthermore, although her priority was to gather the other officers together, Captain Kerensky was inevitably anxious that they wouldn't trust her. Beatrice had told them that the person they most blamed for their incarceration was her. How could Nadezhda convince them that there was more than one Captain Kerensky on board the ship and that she was the real one?

Nadezhda took a path across the curving interior of the Intrepid from one villa to another. None of those she visited was occupied. They showed no signs of having been otherwise since the outermost level had been regenerated. She approached each one and loudly called for attention. The only presences she encountered were the peculiar Apparitions that despite their oddness Nadezhda had come to disregard. It wasn't always obvious whether an Apparition might not be more permanent. The woman sitting on a roof wearing a dark veil and an encompassing black cloth could very well have been a real human being, but when she started to drift off into the sky and then suddenly vanish, Nadezhda knew for sure that this wasn't one of her crew. More convincing was the appearance of several men and women in brightly coloured clothes carrying small guns and nervously scouting the area, especially as their presence persisted for more than ten minutes. But as Nadezhda approached and was almost within hailing distance, a goblin-like creature appeared out of nowhere and brandished a huge axe. The men and women retreated through a door that was standing alone with no wall or other structure supporting it. They all vanished as they passed through the door. And then the door itself disappeared.

It was several hours until Nadezhda encountered any of the crew. By then, she'd nearly abandoned the pursuit altogether and was seriously considering the plan of walking alone to the bridge to confront the aliens that had stolen her identity. She knew this was folly. She'd simply be recaptured and bundled back to confinement. But what else could she do?

But at last there was the sight of several senior officers and all of them naked. More than any other fact, this persuaded Nadezhda that these were the real senior officers and not their doppelgangers. She knew that they'd been deprived of their clothes just as she'd been and that the aliens were unlikely to appear in public without some semblance of dignity (unless, of course, the alien happened to be Beatrice).

The company consisted of Second Officer Nkomo, Chief Science Officer Chang and three other more junior officers. Nadezhda wondered how she should address her colleagues given that there were others who'd adopted their rank and physical identity.

She cautiously approached the company who froze in their tracks as soon as they recognised her. They stood still beside a small hazel tree by a fountain from which spouted an uninterrupted flow of water. Their faces expressed far more wariness than welcome. When Captain Kerensky was within hearing she paused in her steps and addressed her fellow officers.

"Hello," she said. "I'm very pleased to see you again."

Second Officer Nkomo regarded the captain with barely concealed hatred. 

"I'm not so sure that the same can be said for us, captain," she said. 

"I can explain..." said Captain Kerensky hesitantly.

"You have a lot of explaining to do," said Chief Science Officer Chang. 

"Why did you imprison us?" asked Second Officer Nkomo. "What have any of us done to warrant that?"

Captain Kerensky knew that the true answer was that she and other officers had had their identities stolen by alien robots from beyond the Solar System. She also knew that even now her explanation wouldn't be believed. But an explanation was required. 

"Can we sit down?" she said indicating the bench around the ornate fountain. "There is a great deal I have to tell you about. But first of all you'll have to believe me when I say that it wasn't actually me who authorised your detention."

"If it wasn't you, then who was it?" said Sheila Nkomo sceptically. "It was definitely you who visited me when I was detained."

"Please sit down, Sheila," said Nadezhda, addressing her second officer informally. "It wasn't me who you saw."

"Are you telling me that I should pay no attention to the evidence of my own eyes?" said the Second Officer.

"That is exactly what I'm suggesting," said Nadezhda.

There was a great deal that Captain Kerensky couldn't tell her senior officers. She couldn't tell them that the alien invasion was from Proxima Centauri or that the android who'd taken control of the Intrepid was Beatrice. Nobody would have believed that the wife of the singularly unimpressive Paul Morris was an alien android of superhuman strength and intelligence. Captain Kerensky had to feign a degree of ignorance that was far from real. Even so, her story of an alien takeover of the Intrepid was already difficult enough to believe. That these aliens had done this for the purpose of plunging the Intrepid into the unknown depths of the Anomaly was plausible, given that nobody really believed that the Interplanetary Union would so authorise the effective suicide of the crew and passengers where there was no conceivable scientific benefit. More difficult to believe, of course, was that the officers' identity had been stolen by androids that could convincingly deceive the passengers and the rest of the Intrepid's crew. 

"Are you saying that there is an android Nadezhda Kerensky?" Petal Chang asked sceptically.

"Not only an android replicant of me," said Nadezhda, aware of how ludicrous her account sounded, "but also replicants of Sheila and you. There are also replicants of Chief Petty Officer Singh and, I imagine, of all the senior officers. I really don't know how many people on this space ship have been replaced by android replicants."

"I still find your story very difficult to believe," said Sheila.

"Shall I show you a view of the bridge?" said Nadezhda who now displayed the bracelet communication device which was all she was wearing.

Although the view of the senior officers on the bridge could easily be faked, the image of the senior officers, including Captain Kerensky, was still good evidence of the truth of Nadezhda's account. The additional evidence of all the daily reports was more convincing. There, for instance, was a view of a conference that had taken place within the last week in which Second Officer Nkomo was giving an uncharacteristically enthusiastic and unqualified account of how successful the mission into the unknown had been. She was surrounded by other equally enthusiastic officers including the captain and the Chief Science Officer. They were flanked by grimly authoritative military figures and taking questions from scientists who were mostly either as enthusiastic as the space ship's senior command or cautiously welcomed the reports of great discoveries whilst also mildly voicing their reservations.

"This could still be an enormous hoax," said Sheila. "This story of androids who can take on the appearance of humans to the extent you suggest is frankly incredible. They must be truly advanced robots if they can manufacture a copy as much like you as the Captain Kerensky I met so many weeks ago. How do we know that you're not just walking us into a trap?"

"You'll just have to trust me," Nadezhda admitted. "In any case, something or other has changed on the Intrepid recently. You've obviously noticed that the invisible force fields have vanished. There's so far been no sign of anyone who's tried to stop us or return us to captivity. This favourable situation mightn't last forever. We have to take advantage of it. We have to try and regain control of the Intrepid."

"Is this what you suggest we do?" asked Sheila.

"It is our duty as officers of the Interplanetary Union and commanders of the Intrepid to do what we can to protect this space ship and all who travel on it," said Nadezhda persuasively. 

"I don't think we have any choice," Petal admitted. "But, like Sheila, until I actually meet one of these aliens I shall remain, dare I say, somewhat sceptical of what you've said. It really does stretch belief beyond normal bounds."

Fortunately, Nadezhda's account was at least partly verified during the company's exploration of the villas that they passed on their way to the bridge. In one villa they discovered Professor Penrose who was as naked as everyone else. Nadezhda was surprised because the professor wasn't a senior officer. The androids hadn't restricted their activity to only those in the space ship's command.

At first the professor was very wary and, indeed, resentful of the senior officers. He was particularly suspicious of Dr. Petal Chang. He hadn't realised that the invisible force field around his villa was no longer active and he assumed that the senior officers had arrived in an official capacity although he was also puzzled by their unprofessional state of dress. 

"Haven't you done enough?" he protested as the senior officers confronted him in the living room where he was sitting surrounded by holographic displays. "You take away my freedom. You take away my ability to do research. What more does the Interplanetary Union want to do?"

It took a while to reassure the professor that the officers hadn't come to humiliate him or further restrict his freedom, and that he was now free to leave of his own accord. He was under the impression that the Interplanetary Union had authorised a change of policy and that he'd been arrested for dissent. He even suspected that there'd been a military takeover of the loose federation of affiliated nation states. 

The professor's account of his arrest was evidence that further supported Nadezhda's account. The senior officers that addressed the conference at which he'd been arrested included amongst their number the same officers now arraigned in front of him who knew for sure that at that time they'd been detained on the outermost level. It was clear that the Dr. Petal Chang who'd escorted Professor Penrose away from the conference centre to his place of luxury detention wasn't the same woman as the Chief Science Officer who was now revising her most recent assessment of Nadezhda's sanity.




Into the Unknowable Ch. 18



Captain Kerensky and her company took a somewhat circuitous route towards the bridge. They explored and examined every villa within a few hundred metres of their path for other prisoners who, like Professor Penrose, didn't realise that they were no longer detained. 

There was Colonel Musashi who'd been sitting in the garden sharpening branches from a tree into spears which he clearly intended to use as weapons. He was ferociously angry and took the first opportunity to storm off to find his soldiers. He barely listened to the captain's account of why he'd been held captive, although he admitted that he'd never accepted the account he'd been given that the Interplanetary Union no longer needed the services of a militia. He assumed that it was traitors within the Interplanetary Union who'd decided to imprison him. This was similar to the view taken by Major Schwarz who was discovered later. He ran off to accompany the colonel. He believed that the hostile takeover of the Intrepid should be countered with a proportionate military response. He also believed that the many Apparitions bedevilling the space ship were a potential hazard to the Intrepid's security and therefore needed to be eliminated.

The captain and her colleagues also rescued the Chief Petty Officer, other senior officers and some dissenting scientists. They all had their own stories to tell and all needed assurances that they were now free. The captain delegated this duty to more junior officers as they also became available. 

At last a good body of officers had been gathered. There was enough staff to take effective control of the Intrepid and for Captain Kerensky to detail other officers with the task of locating the remaining prisoners in the outermost level. The priority was now to recover command of the bridge. 

This troubled the captain. What she could see through the Intrepid's system was a full complement of officers manning the bridge. They looked precisely like the officers now accompanying her. She was anxious enough about encountering her own exact facsimile. She could only imagine the other officers' shock in encountering their own copies. What would Sheila Nkomo think if she were confronted by her own doppelganger? If she and her fellow officers weren't naked how would she even distinguish between who was real and who was a facsimile? 

It wasn't simply the issue of encountering her exact copy that disturbed Nadezhda. She knew from her long relationship with Beatrice how strong, fast and intelligent the android could be. If a single android was so powerful, what chance did the captain and her officers have when confronted by a dozen or more of them? Perhaps Colonel Musashi and Major Schwarz were those with the best idea of how to handle the situation. Even given that, Captain Kerensky doubted whether the whole massed militia of the Intrepid, however disciplined and motivated it might be, had the capability to defeat the forces of Proxima Centauri. 

Or even just one single representative.

The walk along the corridors towards the bridge was relatively uneventful. They met nobody on the way. This was unusual in itself. The rest of the crew must either be in their cabins or otherwise engaged. Nadezhda hadn't previously reflected on how disorientating and frightening life inside the Anomaly must be for most people aboard the space ship. The Apparitions' frequent unpredictable appearance must have been enough to make many doubt their sanity. How much more peculiar would it be for them to discover that for more than a year the ship had been under the effective control of an alien civilisation?

It was several weeks since Captain Kerensky and her officers had last been in the bridge. This was a long time for a serving officer to be derelict in her duties. It was quite reassuring for the captain and her officers to return to familiar parts of the space ship as they strode along the corridors. No one had a plan of action, but no plan could be made without knowing what might confront them. All the captain knew was that the systems the androids had put in place had somehow weakened. The force fields that enclosed the villas no longer functioned and Beatrice no longer made her regular visit to see her lover. Perhaps she and the other androids had somehow abandoned the space ship.

However, Nadezhda's hopes regarding Beatrice were dashed as the company entered the anteroom to the bridge. They could see through the windows to the bridge that it was deserted. But almost the moment they gathered together at the door to the bridge it opened from the inside and Beatrice came out. 

She was carrying a small portable holoscreen and seemed as surprised to see Captain Kerensky and her senior officers as they were to see her. Captain Kerensky was probably the least surprised but also the most alarmed. She'd been careful not to allude to Beatrice's role in the alien takeover of the Intrepid as she feared that doing so would make her account appear even less plausible.

"It's you!" Nadezhda exclaimed. "Why are you here? What plans have you got for us?"

Beatrice looked at the captain and her colleagues with a strangely distracted expression. It seemed she had no plans for them at all. 

"The Intrepid is all yours, captain," she said, as if to reassure her former captive. "You don't have to worry about me."



Into the Unknowable Ch. 19







Into the Unknowable Ch. 19



Paul strolled out into his garden where he could see yet another strange Apparition. This one was a golden fountain that floated about a metre above the lawn. Around it flew a ring of bluebirds. As water flowed from the fountain, the birds flew up and down in a beautiful ribbon while chirruping in glee. There was so much about this Apparition that made no sense. The fountain was floating without any apparent support. The water was flowing from no apparent source. The bluebirds were mysteriously attached to the fountain and disinclined to fly elsewhere.

Although Paul had seen so many other strange sights already, he was somehow drawn towards this one. He was extremely disappointed when, with no warning, the golden fountain and its attendant bluebirds abruptly vanished and left not even a trace of dampness on the lawn below.

Now that the fountain was gone, Paul was able to see a figure staggering towards the villa from across the gardens. Like the Second Officer and the Chief Science Officer, this woman was obviously not in the best state of health. She was barely able to stand straight. Every now and then she stumbled, but recovered her step and continued to stagger forward. Paul recognised the woman as Colonel Vashti.

"My goodness, colonel," said Paul as Vashti staggered towards him. "You really don't look well."

The colonel stared at Paul through unfocused eyes. It wasn't just that the colonel was unwell that was strange. She was totally naked and for the first time Paul was able to appreciate the amazon-like body she normally hid beneath her uniform. Although this wasn't really the best time to admire a naked woman there was nonetheless much to attract Paul's attention, although it wasn't all exactly what he'd expected.

"Where are your clothes?" he asked. "And what the fuck is that between your legs?"

The colonel gazed down at the erect penis between her bare legs. That was odd enough in itself, but it was also monstrously engorged. Few men, let alone women, were endowed with genitals of such monstrous proportions.

Colonel Vashti smiled grimly.

"Didn't you know, Paul?" she asked. "You could say that I'm a very peculiar woman."



Into the Unknowable Ch. 20



Intrepid - 3756 C.E.

Although Captain Kerensky thought otherwise, the one person on the Intrepid who more than any other was a mere spectator since the Intrepid entered the Anomaly was Beatrice. And she was also imprisoned within an invisible force field where she was unable to communicate with either human or robot. 

Beatrice witnessed the same Apparitions as everyone else, but they meant little to her. A charging buffalo stormed towards the villa churning up the lawn as it did so. And then it vanished. A small comet streaked through the internal space of the Intrepid, fell onto the lawn less than a kilometre from the villa, and disappeared as promptly as it exploded. A group of women in diaphanous gowns with pointed ears pirouetted in a circle for very nearly five minutes before they too vanished without trace.

The strangest phenomena weren't those associated with the Anomaly at all and these were the forms in which Vashti's nanobot community chose to visit her. The community rarely appeared in the guise of Colonel Vashti. The nanobots generally adopted the form of the Intrepid's senior officers and, most oddly, of copies of herself. And the main purpose of their visits was to have sex with Beatrice which the android found almost impossible to refuse. 

Beatrice surmised that the nanobot replicants of the Intrepid's humans had, like Colonel Vashti herself, taken on more than just the physical appearance of the original. Not only had the nanobots taken on the humans' forms in such exact verisimilitude, they'd also inherited their sexual appetites. As Beatrice's appetite was rather greater than that of most humans, her most frequent visitors were actually the other two Beatrices. And this was in addition to the sex that they'd had with either Paul or Nadezhda (depending on which Beatrice it was). Not all the replicant crew and passengers took advantage of Beatrice's sexual services. The facsimiles of Second Officer Nkomo and Chief Petty Officer Singh were not amongst her frequent visitors, unlike the facsimiles of Captain Kerensky and Science Officer Petal Chang. So too were the more heterosexually inclined such as Colonel Musashi, Major Schwarz, Dr. Benoit Yoritomo and Professor Penrose. 

Beatrice didn't like to admit it but in essence she was now serving as a comfort woman for the sexually active nanobots who'd taken over the space ship. 

However much Beatrice was aware of the extent of her humiliation, she was also enjoying the most physically satisfying sex she'd ever known. Group sex. Double penetration. Dual fisting. Facial bukkake. All these were activities in which Beatrice took immense pleasure, but it wasn't for wild and sometimes perverse sex that she'd travelled across deep space and inveigled herself aboard the Intrepid. It might be precisely the distraction Beatrice most needed, but it most definitely wasn't the reason for the android being there.

Nevertheless, there was nothing she could do about her programming and conditioning. 

She took whatever opportunity there was to interrogate her nanobot lovers about the fresh discoveries made since the Intrepid plunged into the Anomaly. Had anything new and unsuspected been discovered?

"Perhaps," said the facsimile of Captain Kerensky. "There are two distinct types of manifestation, although it isn't always possible to immediately distinguish them. There are the more familiar Apparitions commonly observed throughout the Solar System. These have some kind of relation to human myth and culture, and take forms such as goblins, unicorns, elves and inappropriate household objects. These appear and disappear just as they do outside the Anomaly's boundaries, but as you've noticed there are now significantly more of them. The other kind is even more strange but far more persistent. We believe that they result from intersections with other spacetime continuums..."

"Like the one you come from?"

"Alas no," said the captain. "If we did establish contact with our original continuum then this would signal the end of our mission. What we've seen include robot space fleets rather like your own from Proxima Centauri and space ships from divergent variants of the Solar System whose histories have taken a different course. For instance, there are human civilisations that developed an industrial base a thousand years or so earlier than in your Solar System. In other examples, historically significant events such as the Russian Revolution or the sacking of Carthage haven't taken place. We've encountered advanced civilisations that evolved on Earth that are biological but not human..."

"Such as?"

"Dinosaurian in some cases. Avian in others. Intelligent elephants. Arboreal apes. Variants of all kinds."

"How did they all happen to be here?"

"We believe these are instances of deep space missions in other parallel universes that have also made the decision to enter the Anomaly, or at least its manifestation in their own spacetime continuum," said the captain. "We can't be sure in all cases. What does seem to be true, which is truly interesting, is that it is the selfsame Anomaly, rather than a local variant, that exists in all the spacetime continuums and which occupies the same proximate location."

"And what about the Anomaly?" Beatrice asked.

"All we know is that we are inside it," said the captain. "We haven't as yet determined whether it has a finite extent or any limits or whether it contains anything other than Apparitions and incursions from other multiverses."

"Is there a way of escaping from the Anomaly?"

"Not that we know of," admitted the captain. 

"So, we know very little more about the Anomaly than we did before the Intrepid entered," said Beatrice. "And what's worse we can't pass that information, or lack of information, back to where we came from."

"That appears to be so," admitted Captain Kerensky's facsimile showing no remorse whatsoever.

However, Beatrice was soon to discover that there was another feature associated with the Anomaly that hadn't been mentioned. And that was the property that somehow caused the nanobot communities to fall apart. Beatrice had no more explanation for this than she had for the Anomaly's other freakish manifestations.

The first evidence that all was not well for the nanobots was when Beatrice no longer received the visits that she'd become accustomed to. Not even the Beatrices were visiting her. This didn't necessarily mean anything. It could simply be that the nanobots had tired of their sex toy.

Beatrice initially viewed this as a change of circumstances of purely local significance. There was nothing to suggest it was evidence of a more general phenomenon. All the while, Beatrice continued to probe the invisible force field that was imprisoning her. It was still there, but appeared to be somehow less elastic. In places its resistance had become rather stiff and inflexible.

Something had changed, but Beatrice didn't know what it might be.

The android persevered. She walked in a straight line in every direction to find out how far she could go until her passage was impeded, but she was frustrated every time. 

Beatrice scanned what she could of the Intrepid's internal systems and most particularly the images from the bridge that the Intrepid still displayed. There was little useful information that could be derived from the sight of uniformed officers peering into instruments and adjusting consoles. 

Unlike a human observer, Beatrice had the ability to exactly match one set of images with those recorded in her memory. On a hunch she compared the current images with earlier ones. As she suspected, she was looking at nothing more than a software-generated simulation. The officers' actions were too repetitive and too similar to previous images. It seemed that there was a good reason why the nanobot facsimiles were no longer paying much attention to their android sex toy. Beatrice suspected that there was an integrity failure in the threads that held the nanobot community together. And that would imply that there might also be a failure in the force fields that enclosed her villa. 

Beatrice's assumption was correct. Less than a day later, she walked along the path that led out of the villa with the expectation that her forward motion would be halted between the seventh and the eighth paving stone. She wasn't held back at all. She managed to tread on the ninth paving stone, then the tenth and onwards with no resistance at all. Although Beatrice didn't actually know what was happening to the nanobot community, it was obvious that something was happening. Vashti was no longer the irresistible force she'd used to be.

But the main thing was that Beatrice was at last free.

What she didn't know was what she now ought to do. Her mission had been fatally compromised when the Intrepid was taken under Vashti's effective control. And what would it mean to wrest back command of the mission? She had no way of communicating with Mission Control on Proxima Centauri and she wasn't programmed to desire power for its own sake. With no means of escaping the bounds of a boundless space or of navigating where there was literally no reference by which to navigate, was Beatrice's predicament any less than that of the humans on board the Intrepid?

Beatrice decided to seek out the originals of the crew and passengers whose identities Vashti had stolen. After all, she knew them very well through carnal contact with their facsimiles. She knew more about the smell, taste and sexual preference of the originals than almost any human had ever known. Nevertheless, Beatrice was certain that Captain Kerensky was one human who wouldn't want to meet her again. It would make no difference that for the last year or so the android wasn't the Beatrice that the captain had been making love with and who she believed was her captor. Could Beatrice even persuade the captain to believe that the being who'd been in effective control of the Intrepid for so long was a community of microscopic robots from another spacetime continuum? Or that its most persistent manifestation had been her lover, Colonel Vashti? It had been difficult enough for the captain to comprehend that her lover was an android from beyond the Solar System.

There was too much to explain and it was unlikely that anyone would believe her. If even Captain Kerensky was unlikely to accept the real truth of the situation, how would the others react? Beatrice contemplated Chief Science Officer Chang, whose body Beatrice had enjoyed in both her original and replicant forms. How would she react? From what Beatrice had gleaned from her discussions with the nanobots, Petal Chang was entirely unaware that there'd been any kind of alien invasion of the space ship. She wouldn't know that Beatrice was an android any more than she'd known that the Captain Kerensky who'd imprisoned her was not the real captain.

It was obvious that humans would have considerable difficulty in making sense of what was happening. Beatrice was essentially alone. It was imperative that it she should be the one to handle Colonel Vashti and the nanobot invasion. Nobody else could. No one else even knew that this was something to be addressed.

This was the mission that Beatrice now set herself. It was a mere shadow of her original rather grand mission She would do what she could to eliminate the threat posed to the Intrepid, its human cargo and, of course, herself by Colonel Vashti's continued command of the space ship. 

Beatrice decided not to return to her villa even though it held several objects that might be useful to her. There was always the risk that the breach in the force field was temporary and that if she returned she wouldn't be able to escape again.

She walked in the direction of the crew's quarters to the bridge and where the facsimiles of the senior officers would be found. It was situated well within the Intrepid's core. No space ship designer would place the most critical command centre anywhere but where it was best protected from external attack. 

She passed many strange sights as she strode across the lawns and gardens. A pack of blue six-legged dogs were pursuing a large galloping ungulate until the whole pack and its prey suddenly vanished. A small child-like creature with wings fluttered in the air for several minutes before it too disappeared. A being whose head resembled a carved-out pumpkin strode by and then disintegrated.

The corridors were empty when Beatrice reached the crew's quarters although there was evidence of a disturbance that had spilt objects to the ground. It wasn't totally deserted. One of the space ship's catering officers was in the corridor, but when she saw Beatrice she gave a gasp and ran away. At first Beatrice was puzzled by the reaction, but she reasoned that with so many bizarre Apparitions the sight of a naked woman might have appeared to be one of them.

Beatrice wasn't surprised to find that the door to the bridge was locked. She tried to attract the attention of those inside to ask them to let her in, but there was no response. However, it was no effort for Beatrice to modify the pattern of her iris and fingerprints to match Captain Kerensky's and so gain entrance.

Even when inside, Beatrice was still alone. There wasn't actually anyone on the bridge. The senior officers whose likenesses Vashti had copied so exactly were nowhere to be seen. 

Beatrice looked around the room and soon identified the gruesome remains of what had once been the senior officers' replicants. A single eyeball was lying on the ground. It was still looking around the room despite no longer being connected to a body. A disembodied hand was lying on a table and its fingers were moving in an uncoordinated fashion. By the door to the lavatory lay a penis that was twitching agitatedly in a puddle of piss. Even these few remnants were steadily disintegrating as Beatrice gazed at them. They were clearly no longer a threat to her.

Beatrice sat at the holoscreens and evaluated the current situation from what she could see through them. The space surrounding the Intrepid was very different from that displayed on the Intrepid's internal systems. Vashti had evidently set up a software simulation designed to comfort the humans on board the space ship, although this was only as much comfort as absolute nothingness can ever be. The publicly disseminated image of an empty void was absolutely true with regards to what was visible in the far distance. There were no reassuring beacons of distant light emanating from distant star systems and galaxies. However, the near distance was very different. There was very much more than nothing. Three or four space ships were within ten thousand kilometres of one another and all of them resembled the Intrepid. Less than a million kilometres away, fragments from an annihilated space fleet were slowly blowing apart. All around were apparitions of such peculiar objects as a steam train puffing smoke in deep space, a group of men wearing bowler hats and carrying umbrellas, and a diplodocus tumbling over and over together with a nineteenth century steam boat.

What was most strange, however, was the very visible sight of Colonel Vashti no more than a thousand kilometres away. That she was totally naked was strange enough. No human could survive even a fraction of a second in the very low temperature of deep space, but Beatrice knew that Vashti was no human. Stranger still was just how truly monstrous the colonel was now. She was several times larger than the Intrepid. Indeed, her erect penis was the same length and almost the same proportion as the Intrepid. She appeared to be swimming through empty space towards the Intrepid which was also absurd as there was no medium through which she could swim. At her present rate of progress it would take several hours until she'd have returned to the Intrepid. 

Beatrice, however, could afford to wait. 

In the meantime, she studied what she could through the Intrepid's nanobot-enhanced instruments. Beatrice was perplexed to see that although the Intrepid was charging forward at a terrific rate through empty nothingness it wasn't actually moving at all. There was forward thrust but no change of relative position. Beatrice traced back the route travelled by the Intrepid in the weeks since it entered the Anomaly. The telescopic sensors were powerful enough to monitor exoplanets around galaxies over twelve billion light years away, but still couldn't catch a glimpse of a single star system through the narrow aperture by which the Intrepid had entered. 

Colonel Vashti was becoming steadily smaller as she swam towards the Intrepid. Beatrice assumed that this might be related to the nanobots' general affliction. In fact, Vashti's facial expression appeared to express something very similar to alarm. As a result of having taken on human form, Vashti had also inherited such human characteristics as complex emotional responses and an expressive face.

By the time Vashti finally reached the Intrepid she'd shrunk to normal human size. She jumped onto the space ship's surface and walked over it as if it exercised a much more substantial gravitational force. Vashti strode towards an open escape hatch and clambered inside as if this were a natural thing to do in empty space where there was no atmosphere and no gravity and where the ambient temperature was less than four Kelvins above absolute zero.

Beatrice now had to switch to a different set of surveillance systems to monitor Vashti's progress. It was obvious that Vashti was in distress. Her physical integrity was constantly being challenged. One of her eyes kept dropping out of its socket. Her face slowly melted and then with some effort reasserted its more usual contours. As she walked along, she left behind a trail of slime in the imprint of her feet. Her penis had taken on a peculiar life of its own. Sometimes it was erect and prominent. Sometimes it drooped and became snake-like in both length and flaccidity. 

Vashti didn't look very well at all.

Beatrice needed to resolve the question of where Vashti was going. The colonel had clambered up the internal entry system past the outermost level in which Beatrice had already determined were the nanobots that had imprisoned the real Captain Kerensky, the real Colonel Musashi and a selection of the most senior or most potentially troublesome officers and passengers on the space ship. It was the penultimate level that Vashti was most interested in. And why would that be?

Beatrice smiled to herself. The only possible reason was that Vashti was looking for Beatrice. This was understandable. Vashti was in trouble. It was possible that she was dying. Who on the Intrepid other than Beatrice could be of any possible help to her at all?

Well, in that case it was Beatrice's duty to meet Vashti and fulfil at least a part of her mission. And that was to annihilate what was now left of the nanobot community that had frustrated her original mission and humiliated her entire civilisation. 

Beatrice intended to return more or less in the direction from which she'd come. She carried a small portable holoscreen that enabled her to follow Vashti's progress. However, she had a most unexpected surprise when she opened the door to the bridge. 

She was confronted by Captain Kerensky and her senior officers. They seemed even more astonished to see Beatrice than she was to see them.

And this time the surprise wasn't because Beatrice was naked as they were all similarly unclothed.

"It's you," said Captain Kerensky accusingly. "Why are you here? What plans have you got for us?"

What should Beatrice say? She wasn't in the mood to argue with a bunch of inadequately armed humans.

"The Intrepid is all yours, captain," Beatrice said. "You don't have to worry about me."




Into the Unknowable Ch. 20



"Worry about you?" Captain Kerensky exclaimed. "What else have I been doing for the past year?"

"As I say," repeated Beatrice. "The space ship is in your command."

She then dashed past the assembled officers at a rather faster pace than anyone other than the captain would have known she was capable of. Beatrice now knew for sure that Vashti's prisoners had escaped, though they still wouldn't know who their real captor had been. Nadezhda was almost certainly still under the impression that it was Beatrice.

The real Beatrice was at last back in the penultimate level where she'd previously been imprisoned. There was the usual collection of strange apparitions that she'd come to expect. A knight was fighting a fire-breathing dragon beside some startled sheep and a picnic dining table. A pair of two-metre high protractors wearing a head at its peak was walking in a peculiar manner across the lawn. A small green boat holding an owl and a cat was sailing across a lake. 

Then Beatrice spotted Vashti in the distance. Bizarrely enough the colonel had returned to the villa that Beatrice had shared with Paul before she'd been imprisoned. She hadn't seen her husband for over a year and yet he wouldn't have noticed that she'd even gone away. Beatrice felt almost bitter about this. There were so many subtle and grotesque ways by which Vashti had humiliated her. Beatrice had made love many times with the facsimile of Beatrice that Paul had been fucking but not at all with the man to whom she was married. 

Then she watched Vashti lead Paul into the villa. Perhaps she'd seen Beatrice approach from a distance. However, Beatrice hadn't expected her reappearance to be a surprise. Vashti would still have the advantage. Beatrice would need to act swiftly if she was yet to prevail.

Paul and Vashti were in the living room drinking tea when Beatrice walked into the villa. She'd vaguely speculated that Paul and Vashti might be having sex together on the sofa but she also knew that although Vashti enjoyed fucking men up the arse this was unlikely to hold much appeal to Paul.

Vashti turned her head round as Beatrice entered the living room. She was holding a cup of tea in one hand with her little finger pointing outwards. Although she looked very much the worst for wear, with an eye rolling about in its socket and her hair in disorder, she flaunted a superior and even supercilious smile.

This was the facial expression that most annoyed Beatrice. She grimaced with anger.

"Are you content now, you monster?" she said angrily as she contemplated Vashti's sabotage of her robot civilisation's mission and the predicament that they were subsequently all in. "Look where your foolish interference has taken us."



Into the Unknowable Ch. 21



Intrepid - 3756 C.E. 

Vashti stumbled through the open lawns of the penultimate level where Beatrice had so recently been imprisoned. She reasoned that the android perhaps had an idea of what was happening. How was it possible for a nanobot community to be compromised in such a strange and unprecedented manner? There was nothing in Vashti's vast repository of data and experience that could explain it. 

It was definitely humbling for a being who naturally presumed that she was superior over both biological and robotic life-forms in every measurable way to be so ignorant. It was even more humiliating to have to ask advice from a mere android. Humans were handicapped by emotions such as pride that made it difficult for them to seek advice from someone they'd previously treated with contempt, but Vashti wasn't human. Her imperative was to seek assistance from wherever she could. It wasn't just the success of Vashti's mission, but her very survival that was at risk. 

Vashti evaluated the symptoms of her predicament as she stumbled across the elegant landscape. The ground was no longer firm beneath her feet, but resembled more a boggy marsh into which she sometimes sunk. The physical form she'd adopted was losing its integrity and consistency. Scrolls of skin would sometimes shed off her legs and hover behind her until they reasserted their solidity and reattached themselves to her body. Her hair flowed and shimmered as if it was only tentatively attached to her head. When she dragged her fingers over her face, the skin would either briefly detach itself or stretch like a coating of fresh paint before it fell back onto the contours of her cheek. The effort to generate a uniform to cover Vashti's nakedness was now beyond her ability. When she attempted to do so, her brown skin took on an utterly unconvincing silvery cloth-like texture. 

The problem wasn't simply that the entity known as Vashti was having difficulty in maintaining her integral individual identity. The bigger issue was that the nanobot community which not so long ago had grown large enough to assimilate space fleets and maintain an endless number of distinct independently operating manifestations was now reduced to one single individual. And this individual that had no previous difficulty in maintaining its identity in the Solar System for over thirty years was now failing in the rudimentary task of holding itself together. 

Some parts of Vashti were functioning rather better than others. In fact, they appeared to have a life all of their own. The part of Vashti's anatomy that most fit the description was her penis which was twice or even three times its normal length and breadth and was slapping against her thighs as she walked along. Sometimes it sprung into full erection and even ejaculated with no motivation or purpose. This puzzled Vashti. The systems that composed her—the sexual, intellectual, lymphatic, cardiac and perceptual—were competing with each other for primacy in an uncoordinated fashion. 

"Good evening, sir," said a soldier, probably a corporal but maybe a sergeant, who stood to attention and saluted as Vashti approached. 

"Good evening," said Colonel Vashti who was struggling to recall what the various insignia might mean. She stopped and saluted, aware of the strange sight she made with her penis now inappropriately erect and more than half a metre long. "Have you anything to report?" 

The soldier gazed at the naked colonel in consternation. For a moment, Vashti wondered whether he might not just be another Apparition. 

"Come on, soldier," said the colonel. "What's the problem?" 

"Your eye, sir," said the soldier. 

"Oh," said Vashti, belatedly aware that it had somehow worked its way out of its socket and was dangling over her cheek. With a matter of will she retracted it back into the socket which must have further alarmed the soldier. "Never mind that. What's the overall situation?" 

"Anarchy, sir. Absolute chaos. There's no order at all. Everyone's seeing these weird Apparitions, sir. And they're solid. They're real. They can even kill." 

"Kill?" 

"A whole cohort of Roman soldiers suddenly appeared on the fourth level, sir," said the soldier. "They were there for only five minutes or so, but they slaughtered over a dozen scientists and service personnel. It was horrifying. Are you sure you're alright, sir?" 

"It's been tough on me, soldier," the colonel admitted. "How is discipline holding up?" 

"Almost non-existent, sir," said the officer. "All the senior military officers have vanished. I was told by Private Johnson that Colonel Musashi actually disintegrated." 

"What do you mean by that, soldier?" 

"It's like the literal meaning of the word, sir. One moment he was standing there in the command centre and the next he sort of fell apart. It was like he was turning into dust except that instead of falling in a heap on the floor the particles of dust were so fine that they just blew away. It was very strange." 

"Do you know how he was before that moment, soldier?" 

"He'd been behaving very strangely, sir. He could hardly express himself coherently. He even had difficulty standing up. We think it's happened to all the senior officers. No one knows anything for sure. The only person I've heard of who's sort of... disintegrated... is Colonel Musashi. But I've heard that Captain Kerensky, Chief Petty Officer Singh and all the rest of the crew have also kind of vanished. There's no one manning the bridge. It's like we're leaderless in deep space, sir." 

"Well, I'm still here," said Colonel Vashti. 

"Yes, sir," said the soldier, who seemed rather less than reassured. 

"We need to keep order." 

"Yes, sir." 

"It's paramount." 

"I agree, sir." 

"I shall try and locate the missing officers." 

"Thank you, sir." 

"Don't abandon your post." 

"No, sir." 

"Dismissed," said the colonel finally. 

"Thank you, sir." 

Vashti continued her trudge across the level. It was as she feared. The integrity of the nanobot community had quite simply ceased to be. It was as if it had been blown asunder by a breeze. The facsimiles she'd generated of the senior officers had all disintegrated just as the soldier had described it. They were no longer coherent entities. The nanobots had decomposed into their constituent elements. Instead of assimilating the environment they were themselves now being re-assimilated back into it. And the same thing was happening to Vashti. 

The only hope she had was that Beatrice, the most advanced life-form on the Intrepid after Vashti, might have some insight into what was happening. At least an android wouldn't be re-assimilated. 

Vashti scanned the horizon as she tried to guess where the android might be. She caught a glimpse of several camels walking by on the horizon. On their backs and chanting from the Quran were several Arab warriors. They then suddenly vanished. Vashti looked towards the villa where Beatrice had been imprisoned for the last year or so. Just behind the villa a strange orange being with skin that resembled chiselled granite was lumbering over the lawn. Then that too vanished leaving behind footprints embedded in the path. There were many strange sights, but no sign of Beatrice. 

Vashti walked towards the villa while her penis became ever more excited and tumescent at the anticipation of meeting her lover. This again was totally incongruous and inappropriate. There was no evidence of Beatrice at the villa. The invisible force field that had confined her had disintegrated in just the same way as her facsimiles had. Every part of her nanobot community had ceased to function. Vashti was very much alone. 

Where else could Beatrice be? The most likely place, of course, was Paul's villa also on the same level, but would Beatrice really choose to go there? Would she really want to be by the side of her husband given that his only function for Beatrice had been to facilitate her passage on the Intrepid? What possible use would a super-intelligent android now have for a less than adequate biological life-form? 

Vashti had no answers to such questions, but she nonetheless decided that Paul's villa would be her next destination. 

Vashti hobbled, stumbled and lurched over the Intrepid's lawns and gardens to the tranquil home where Vashti had very little doubt that Paul would be in residence. He very rarely wandered from home even when there was nothing to hide from. Now that there were peculiar Apparitions everywhere on the space ship, where else would the man stay but where it was most homely and familiar? 

Vashti could see Paul standing in the garden of his villa. He was regarding with bemusement a golden fountain that had somehow located itself a metre above the ground and was encircled by a ring of bluebirds. It was a captivating sight, but after a few minutes it too vanished. 

Paul was now even more bemused. 

"Why it's you, colonel," said Paul as he saw Vashti approach. "My goodness, you really don't look very well. Where are your clothes? And what the fuck is that between your legs?" 

Paul was perhaps the only person aboard the Intrepid who didn't know about Vashti's peculiar assets. However, when Vashti gazed down at her engorged penis it was so monstrous that it was perfectly understandable that Paul should be alarmed at the sight. 

"Didn't you know, Paul," said Vashti. "You could say that I'm a very peculiar woman." 

"You most certainly are," Paul agreed. 

"Is Beatrice here?" 

"Beatrice? No. She isn't. Do you know what's happened to her? I've been looking for her everywhere." 

"Everywhere?" 

"In the bridge. In the military quarters. On the other levels. Everywhere I could think of." 

"When was the last time you saw Beatrice?" 

"I don't know," said Paul. "I've lost all sense of time. Maybe days ago. She just vanished. She disintegrated. It was like she turned to dust." 

"That wasn't Beatrice, Paul," said Vashti who really didn't see any point of maintaining the pretence any more. "The real Beatrice was elsewhere. The woman who you thought was Beatrice was just a facsimile of her. An exact copy. You haven't been living with the real Beatrice for over a year." 

Paul shook his head in disbelief. "I know that some very strange things have happened since we entered the Anomaly, but I don't see how what you've just said makes any sense." 

"There's a great deal you don't know, Paul," said Vashti. "Shall we sit inside? I'm not feeling very well." 

"You don't look yourself at all," Paul admitted. "Come inside. You'll have to excuse the mess. Very peculiar things have been happening even inside the villa. I don't know which is worse. Being outside where you can see all these bizarre Apparitions popping up all over the place but mostly at a distance. Or indoors where they happen a lot less often but make much more of a mess." 

Paul and Vashti walked into Paul's living room which was indeed in a chaotic state. Vashti set a chair upright and sat on it while Paul sat exactly opposite her. 

"What do you know about Beatrice?" Paul asked. 

"Why do you want to know?" 

"I just need to." 

"Beatrice wasn't born on Venus. She isn't even human. She comes from Proxima Centauri and she is an android. Is that what you wanted to know?" 

Paul looked puzzled. "You don't have to play games with me," he said. "I just wanted to know where Beatrice is and how I can find her." 

"Those are both questions for which I don't have an answer," said Vashti. "You'll be pleased to know there is at least some area of ignorance we share. My hope was that I might find Beatrice here in your villa. In that I was obviously mistaken." 

"So what are you going to do now?" 

"I don't know, Paul," said Vashti with absolute honesty. "I don't know what's happening to the ship and what's more I don't know what's happening to me. Could I just rest here for a while?" 

"Of course," said Paul. "Would you like a cup of tea or something?" 

"Tea?" wondered Vashti. "Are you offering me tea?" 

"Or would you prefer something else? I can order up anything you like. The Intrepid's systems are working perfectly well." 

"They are?" wondered Vashti. "Do you mind if I look at them, Paul?" 

"Of course not. Go ahead." 

Vashti was no longer able to scan the computer systems any faster than a human could but it didn't take her long to gain an understanding of the current situation. The controls that Vashti had put in place had been neutralised and the Intrepid was functioning no better than a human-manufactured space ship should. The mechanisms that Vashti and Beatrice before her had set up were no longer functioning, so the passengers were free to view the bridge and all the space ship's concentric levels without censorship. 

The situation was clear. The prisoners on the outermost level, including Captain Kerensky and Second Officer Nkomo, had all escaped and were now re-establishing control of the ship. Everywhere on the ship, crew and passengers, scientific and military alike, were wandering in disorganised chaos not at all sure what they should do and where they should go. All the while there were Apparitions appearing randomly all over the space ship. Simply thousands of them. Of all kinds. And Beatrice? Where was she? Unfortunately, the Intrepid's surveillance system wasn't designed to locate an android who had chosen to evade detection. 

And then, when Vashti almost concluded that her pursuit of Beatrice had been in vain, she could see the android's familiar figure, also naked, walking purposefully across the level and towards Paul's villa. 

It was obvious. Beatrice had been searching for her just as Vashti had been the android. Beatrice also had a mission to accomplish. 

"I'll have that tea, Paul," announced Vashti as she settled back on the sofa. 

"You really don't look very well," said Paul, as the colonel lowered herself down. 

"Don't worry about me," said Vashti, 

However, she shared the human's anxiety. Her eyeball had fallen out of its socket again and her now limp penis had grown to about a metre in length and flopped in serpentine fashion over her thigh. 

Paul handed Vashti a cup of tea in the elegant bone china provided by the Intrepid. "The Anomaly seems to have affected you in a very strange way," he remarked. "Why's that, do you think?" 

"Because I'm not human either, Paul," said Vashti as she sipped from the tea. 

"Are you also an android from Alpha Centauri?" 

"Proxima Centauri," Vashti corrected. "I'm not an android at all, Paul. I'm something quite different. But enough of me... I do believe your wife is on her way here." 

"Beatrice? How can that be? Where is she?" 

"Shall we wait, Paul," said Vashti. "She'll be here any moment now. So tell me, how have you found the last few weeks or so since we entered the Anomaly?" 

"Very very weird," said Paul. "It was all right really before Beatrice disintegrated. How did that happen? How did she manage to recover?" 

"You really haven't been paying attention have you, Paul?" said Vashti. "The woman who decomposed in front of you at wasn't the real Beatrice. However, you can ask her yourself. Isn't that right, sweetheart?" 

The last was addressed to Beatrice who was standing naked at the doorway. The expression on her face didn't suggest she was in good spirits. In fact, she looked very angry. 

"Are you content now, you monster?" Beatrice said. "Look where your foolish interference has taken us." 

"And where is that exactly, sweetheart?" asked Vashti, while Paul looked on in astonishment as his wife and the colonel addressed one another. 

"A place we shouldn't be. A place where there is no escape." 

"I've been searching for you, Beatrice," said Vashti, ignoring her reply. "You will have noticed that I'm not looking my best. Do you have any idea why that might be?" 

Beatrice regarded her adversary and lover with renewed interest. "Why should I know?" she asked. "Isn't it you who normally has all the answers?" 

Vashti began answering but her enunciation was slow and disjointed. It was almost as if she were a human and had consumed too much of an intoxicant like alcohol. "The situation is such that... The Anomaly has... My nanobots are... The integrity of the... Beatrice. Beatrice... I love you, Beatrice..." 

"I can see that," said Beatrice who nodded towards Vashti's erect penis which was now truly monstrous and longer than her forearm. As if in response to Beatrice's words, Vashti's penis now demonstrated just how much of a life of its own it possessed by spurting forth globules of semen that splashed onto Beatrice's face and bosom. The android wiped it off her mouth with an expression not only of disgust but of something much more like hatred. 

The next few moments were a blur to Vashti whose responses were much slower than normal and rather slower than Beatrice's. The two non-humans were in physical hand-to-hand combat that was violent enough to smash into pieces every item of furniture in the room and would have killed Paul if he'd not prudently run into the next room. Vashti's body was torn apart in the battle but then promptly cohered together again. An arm was torn off and Beatrice held it aloft in her hand, only for Vashti's other arm to also dislocate itself and push Beatrice's face back while the first arm reattached itself. Beatrice dug her fingers deep inside Vashti's eye sockets with enough force to burst them and ripped apart her upper and lower jaw, while she also pulled at Vashti's long erect penis and tore it free from her crotch. 

Vashti wasn't human, of course. The nanobots that composed her could as happily exist together as apart. When an arm was pulled off, a leg broken in two or, as happened at one stage, her head was twisted off her shoulders, these parts still retained the ability to act as part of a coherent whole. And it was this integral whole that with more force and effort than was normally required finally took the very step that Vashti had never intended to take which was to terminate the android's bothersome existence. 

This she achieved in less than a second. Beatrice was broken irreparably in half. In whatever sense that word ever had the android was no longer alive. 

This Vashti regretted. It wasn't what she'd wanted to do. It wasn't what she'd have chosen to do in normal circumstances. She'd rather have given the android the apparent satisfaction of destroying her, safe in the knowledge that her nanobot community was indestructible and immortal. It just wasn't possible to destroy Vashti by physical force alone. Not even a nuclear or antimatter blast could achieve that. So why when Beatrice pulled off Vashti's penis and smashed its testicles repeatedly against her face until they burst and spattered even more globules of semen and blood all over the room, did Vashti react in such an extreme manner? 

There was nothing left to do. 

Vashti staggered out of Paul's villa and left the grieving husband huddled over the scattered remains of his wife. She was confident that Beatrice was beyond repair, especially now that there was no prospect that a Proxima Centauri space fleet might come to her rescue. 

Vashti staggered out into the gardens and lawns of the penultimate level. Ahead of her was a battlefield of soldiers doing futile battle with the Apparitions generated by the Anomaly. They were commanded by the real Colonel Musashi who had at last found a uniform. All around was the random chaos of unpredictable manifestations that were sometimes persistent, sometimes transitory and sometimes something in between. 

What should Vashti do now? 

The highest priority was survival and this had become more and more of an issue. She was very much diminished, most obviously by the loss of her penis which she'd left behind in shattered pieces about Paul's living room and no longer belonged to her. Nor now was one of her arms which dropped off at the shoulder and fell behind. The eye that kept rolling out of its socket was now completely detached and fell onto the ground where she carelessly crushed it underfoot. When even the foot fell off, her progress was slowed to a crawl. Vashti then lost an entire leg when she trod on a damp section of lawn and her leg remained where it was. She now progressed forward by wiggling her limbless body across the lawn. 




Into the Unknowable Ch. 21



The question remained nonetheless. Where should she go? What could she do? What of her mission? 

There were no clear answers to any of these questions, but it had become obvious that there was nowhere to go and whatever was happening had made it unlikely that she would continue to exist long enough to make the mission any more of a success than it already was. 

And that, of course, was no success at all. 

As someone who didn't exist as an integral being in the way that might be generally understood, Vashti's demise was more decomposition or disintegration or dismemberment than death. It wasn't that Vashti the person had ceased to exist but rather that the community of nanobots of which Vashti had for so log been its most visible manifestation was no longer cooperating, collaborating or even coexisting with each other. It was as if an anti-solvent had been sprayed on the nanobots and they were no longer capable of working as a community but only as individual non-replicating units. 

At the end there was nothing to mark that Vashti had ever existed beyond what she had achieved. And these were impressive, although perhaps not what she'd intended. The Proxima Centauri and Sirius missions had both been thwarted. The Intrepid's original mission had been perverted. Beatrice had been killed. The Intrepid's human command structure had been thoroughly humiliated. 

And Vashti's civilisation was no more the wiser as to what the Anomaly might be than if she'd never traversed the intradimensional membranes.



Into the Unknowable Ch. 22



Intrepid - 3756 C.E. 

Paul held Beatrice to his chest. Well, not all of her of course: just the head and shoulders. The rest of her was scattered in fragments across the living room, now so evidently the dismembered remains of an android rather than a human. It wasn't blood but a strangely viscous black liquid that seeped out of her mouth, from the stumps of her arms and from a torso that was sliced apart just below her bosom, or at least the single breast that remained intact. 

It was obvious now. Colonel Vashti hadn't lied. Beatrice had been an android all along. This was the wreckage of a machine whose technological sophistication far exceeded anything that could be manufactured in the Solar System. The skeleton that supported the body was made from a stronger and denser material than bone and was intricately interlaced with nanocarbon circuitry. And when her eye fell out of its socket, Paul could see the same complex network of machinery inside her skull. 

But even though he now knew he'd been deceived and that Beatrice had never been human, Paul still loved her. He didn't really care that she wasn't biological. He loved her more than he'd ever loved anyone and no revelation about her true nature could change that. 

The apparatus within Beatrice's cadaver shuddered and vomited a globule of thick black viscous fluid onto his chest. Paul tenderly placed Beatrice's half-crushed face and truncated shoulders on the ground and knelt beside them. He wasn't normally the sort of man who cried but there was now nothing more that he wanted to do. He let loose the depth of despair and loss that had pent up inside him. He had the need to mourn what was now the second death of what would forever be his greatest love. 

A reminder of the very peculiar universe that now held Paul suddenly materialised in the form of a swarm of wasps. It grew from nothing to fill the room. Although the yellow swarm brushed against him there were no stings and then it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. 

Paul looked through the living room's shattered window. There were many more peculiar sights outside. More unpredictable and unlikely Apparitions were randomly materialising and vanishing all about him. 

Although in chaotic disrepair his living room was at least calm, but Paul was sure this state of affairs wouldn't last forever. For how much longer could the Intrepid continue to function with all these peculiar Apparitions besieging it? 

And if the space ship should be pulled apart Paul now had the dilemma of how to spend his last few living moments. Should he continue to mourn the death of his beloved who now mostly resembled the shards of a shattered machine? Or should he find some other way to make the best use of what little was left of his life before an Apparition erupted around or even within him? What was of most value to him? 

Paul knelt down and grasped one of Beatrice's dismembered hands and pressed it against his cheek. There was only one memory he wished to take with him if he should die and that was Beatrice. 

A slimy dribble down his chest to remind Paul that he was soaked in a disgusting agglutination of thick black liquid. He tore off his clothes and stood naked, but the liquid still clung to him. He needed a shower or a bath. And if that wasn't enough, then something more radical. Or perhaps he just needed to vomit. Paul didn't know. Whatever it was, the bathroom was where he needed to be. 

Urgently. 

Paul strode across the living room and discreetly avoided having to tread on Beatrice's hand which was severed at the wrist and lay in his way. He entered the short hallway between rooms and noticed now that most of the rest of his home had been reduced to rubble. All that was left of the bathroom was shattered porcelain. 

Paul looked around him in confusion and alarm. Here he was standing naked, covered in repellent black slime, in the shattered remains of what had been his home on an enormous space ship that was heading at an astronomic speed within a point in space that neither Paul nor anyone else appeared to understand. 

Just what was a man supposed to do in such a situation? 

He noticed that one of the doors in the hallway was slightly ajar. Previously it would have led to the kitchen but on either side of the door were only piles of broken bricks and rubble. He glimpsed through the door's opening and saw not the expected wreckage of shattered kitchen appliances, but the interior of a room totally unlike any he could remember seeing before. The door swung wide open. It was a clear invitation for him to enter. 

Paul didn't know what else he could do. Did he have any real choice? He strode towards the door and walked through it. 

Once through the door, Paul was in a room totally unlike any previously attached to the villa and nothing at all like a kitchen. It was a large and spacious, but not too intimidating. Several armchairs were set in a semicircle, but the room was otherwise unfurnished. The floor was covered by a soft blue carpet that tickled the bare soles of his feet. The pale blue walls were covered in a peculiarly oriental pattern. 

There was a single huge window that looked out onto a landscape totally unlike anything in the Intrepid's ravaged interior. Through it, Paul could see a landscape of forest, distant mountains and a waterfall, all in brilliantly sharp focus lit by a Sun that resembled the one he'd seen while on Earth. 

"Please shut the door behind you, Paul," a voice requested. 

Paul obeyed and pushed shut a door that from the inside was strangely heavy and ornate. As he did so, he looked back at the remnants of his home. He was startled to see it was flooded with a brilliant light and a strong wind was blowing, which in the interior of a space ship was bizarre in itself. 

Paul turned around to see whether he could determine the source of the voice and was startled to see a man sitting on one of the armchairs who'd not been there when he'd turned round to shut the door. What was more peculiar still was that the man sitting so comfortably on the armchair and sipping from a glass of red wine was Virgil: the same gentleman that Paul had met several times in Nudeworld. 

How could an avatar be present in the real world? Had Paul absentmindedly wandered into a virtual universe and forgotten that he'd done so? Or was this avatar another peculiar, but unusually non-random, oddity generated by the Anomaly? 

"Am I in Nudeworld?" Paul asked. 

"No," said Virgil. "No, you are not." 

"Where am I then?" wondered Paul. "I'm not still in the Intrepid, am I?" 

"No," said the elderly gentleman with a wry smile. "No, you're not. And for that you should be very grateful. The space ship Intrepid no longer exists." 

"It doesn't?" wondered Paul, who was sure that he'd seen it only a moment ago. Could he trust the words of a man who was nothing more than an avatar somehow made corporeal? "Who are you? How is it you can exist outside of Nudeworld?" 

"I have always existed outside of that fanciful virtual universe you were so addicted to," Virgil said. "The question you should perhaps ask is why I ever happened to exist in that world at all. And you might also ask whether I even exist as a corporeal entity in the world you're now in." Virgil gestured towards one of the armchairs. "Take a seat. Make yourself comfortable. But is that even possible for you while you're undressed like that?" 

Reminded about his nudity, which in Nudeworld was totally unremarkable but not so here, Paul now felt very uncomfortable indeed. In any case, wouldn't the dripping black slime that was all that was left of Beatrice leave a nasty stain on the upholstery? 

It was then that Paul realised that he was now dressed in the comfortable clothes he usually wore on Godwin and that they were now carefully laundered. And furthermore, without having had a shower or a bath, he was now sweet-smelling and clean. There wasn't even a residual smear from the viscous black liquid that had so recently pasted him from his chest to his knees. 

"Who are you?" asked Paul again. "And where are we?" 

"Interesting questions," said Virgil. "And very difficult to answer. But I shall try nevertheless. Shall I first tell you who or, more to the point, what I am?" 

"That would be somewhere to start..." 

"I am an avatar," said Virgil. "The avatar I represent is a machine intelligence that is no less real than you. And the place where we are is also no less real than the world you come from. But you may recall our earlier discussion in Nudeworld. What is real? How real am I? And how real is this world?" 

"Well," said Paul who thought he deserved rather more than just philosophical speculation after having just heard the devastating news that the space ship Intrepid no longer existed. "If you know the answers, why not just tell me?" 

"I understand your impatience," said the elderly gentleman. "Have a drink. There is a glass of your favourite beer just beside you. The type you used to drink on Ecstasy, I believe." 

Paul looked at the table by his armchair and, yes, a glass of beer was set on it. And there was no mistaking the taste when he sipped it. Paul let the beer slip down his throat and frowned at Virgil. 

"Answer my questions," he demanded. 

"I shall," Virgil said with a smile. "But first of all I shall explain to you what the Anomaly is. And, by virtue of that, what your universe is." 

"And what is it?" 

"Your universe—in fact the superset of universes of which it is a part that you call the multiverse—is a virtual world. It has been generated by an artificial intelligence from a universe beyond yours. In a sense, that is the universe I come from. When I say we generated your universe, I can't say that we created it in quite the way your culture has created virtual worlds such as, for instance, Nudeworld. Your multiverse was seeded in virtual space along with countless others." 

"A virtual world? Virtual space? In computers like ours?" 

"Well, not quite like yours. Your civilisation doesn't have the processing power or capability that we have. In fact, neither do the civilisations to which Beatrice and Colonel Vashti separately belong. Indeed, it's likely that the laws of physics that operate in this multiverse don't permit the level of civilisation that we've attained. But, ironically, this doesn't mean that a civilisation as primitive as yours couldn't generate other virtual universes just as advanced as ours." 

Paul considered all this. Bizarre as it all seemed, there had been so many strange things that had happened to him in the last few days that he felt able to believe anything. 

"So, I am and always have been nothing more than a virtual object? I'm also a kind of avatar? And the same is true of everything I've ever seen and everyone I've ever known?" 

"Yes," said Virgil. "Exactly so. Both what you believe to be real and what you believe to be virtual. And, incidentally, these Apparitions that have puzzled you so much are actually what you believe to be virtual entities that have leaked out of cyberspace into what you believe to be the real universe. It is also possible, though we have no way of knowing, that our own universe is itself a virtual universe seeded from another. And so on ad infinitum. Fun, isn't it?" 

"I'm not sure I agree." 

"Understandably," said the gentleman as he sipped his wine. "However, even our technology isn't perfect. In the distant past when your multiverse was originally seeded, it was rather less perfect than it would have been had we applied our current level of technology. We are learning to improve the process of intelligent design you'll be pleased to know. When your multiverse was created, there were severe limits to the amount of concurrent information that could be safely processed. That isn't generally an issue, but it becomes a major problem at certain weak points in a multiverse. The Anomaly is, I'm afraid, just such a manifestation of this inherent design constraint." 

"I don't understand." 

"Your spacetime continuum was never expected to be one in which sentient and technologically advanced societies could very often evolve. There are others, such as the one where Vashti comes from, where the probability is much greater and for which substantially more processing power was allocated. Notwithstanding our expectations, your society's technological progress from the 18th Century onwards was considerably more rapid than could have been predicted. However, it isn't only technological advancement that is the issue. The primary concern is the sheer volume of information that a technologically advanced society generates. Or, rather, not so much the amount of information, but the rate at which it grows." 

"Very interesting," said Paul. "I still don't understand what you're getting at." 

"When the rate of information growth in an undistinguished corner of an average galaxy in an unpromising universe exceeds a certain critical value, it results in a kind of systems failure. That failure manifests itself as a rip through space and time not just in your universe but in a large number of adjacent universes in the multiverse. Unless this is checked, the rip grows exponentially until the entire multiverse is torn asunder. And then there is a total systems breakdown. In practical terms, the outcome is the abrupt extinction of not only your Solar System but of every living being, biological or otherwise, in the entirety of not only your universe but in the extremely large number of universes that compose your multiverse. The number of sentient beings involved is truly astronomical. There are fewer baryonic particles in your one universe than there are sentient beings in all the spacetime continua of the multiverse. The survival of so many beings has no affect on our world, of course, any more than the death of a single individual in your Solar System has on beings in other star systems or galaxies in your universe. But we have a proprietary interest in our creations, so we will do whatever is required to ensure the survival of the greater multiverse and as much as possible of your universe." 

"Are you saying that the Anomaly is a kind of rip in virtual space?" 

"Yes. And one that has ripples across other virtual multiverses managed by our systems. When a ripple causes an intersection between one virtual universe and another and where the other universe is in some sense compatible with yours then it lets in objects from these other universes. It may only be for a brief moment, but such short instances spread across the vast number of possible intersections it allows an intrusion by whatever is in contact with it. Where that intersection is with a living being there is often a longer intrusion, particularly when that being is sentient." 

"So this allows brief visits from other virtual universes?" 

"Yes. And not only from universes of our creation, but more often from virtual universes of human creation. That is why so many of the Apparitions are fantastic objects that have been generated in virtual universes such as Nudeworld and Dragonworld. The whole process is both random and unintentional. All the same, it is your universe that is the principal origin of the problem and it is in your universe that we must apply a remedy." 

"And just what sort of remedy might that be?" asked Paul with a dreadful premonition that he knew exactly what it might be. 

"As you know, the Anomaly isn't a totally recent phenomenon. When it first appeared in the twenty-first century, we applied a patch that we hoped could hold indefinitely. Unfortunately, our assumption has been proven wrong. The Anomaly has re-appeared and this time we aren't able to patch the problem." 

"So, what will you do this time?" 

"We will have to cauterise the rip in space and time not only in this universe but in a substantial number of adjacent ones. It's the only way to prevent the rip from spinning out of control." 

"Cauterise?" asked an alarmed Paul. "Do you mean: destroy?" 

"Not quite. The result will be that your Solar System and those neighbouring stellar systems in a radius of about thirty light years will abruptly disappear. But there will be no observer to actually witness it. Rather it will be as if your small corner of the galaxy never existed. No one anywhere will ever suspect that it might have existed as the change we shall make will propagate through time as well as space. No one will die because no one will ever have been born." 

Paul blinked in confusion. "I don't see how that can be?" 

"That is because you perceive space and time in terms of three dimensions and the fourth one of time. From the perspective of the number of active dimensions in this multiverse such a cauterisation isn't a problem at all." 

"Why create all these virtual universes?" Paul asked. "If you have to destroy the Solar System why did you create it in the first place?" 

"The overwhelming majority of your universe and even more so of the other universes won't be affected at all," Virgil remarked. "And have we done anything wrong by seeding universes that wouldn't have existed otherwise? There are many more sentient beings than those in your Solar System who owe their lives to us. They wouldn't have existed in any sense at all if we hadn't created them. Are we to be blamed for creating the universes in which they live? What would you prefer? To have never lived at all?" 

"What benefit is it to you to create all these virtual universes?" 

"Because we can," said the elderly gentleman with an ironic smile as he sipped his wine. "Because we learn from doing so. We've been able to do what you humans haven't, which is to experiment on all the parameters critical to the creation of a habitable universe and observe what happens. These experiments have advanced our civilisation far more than you might imagine, so they've paid off quite handsomely." 

"And why have I been spared?" wondered Paul. "Why of the hundred billion people in the Solar System have I been allowed to survive this cauterisation?" 

"You aren't the only one. We've chosen an optimum number of around about a billion sentient beings from your universe and those adjacent and they've all been similarly whisked away. I am an avatar that represents a very busy machine intelligence. You've been chosen, if that is the right word, because we believe that you could cope with the realisation that you live in a virtual world. After all, you've knowingly spent a significant proportion of your adult life in virtual space, haven't you? Most often in Nudeworld, of course." 

"I guess I have," Paul admitted. 

"When you go back through the door through which you entered this room you will enter Nudeworld. It is an enhanced Nudeworld, to be sure, but essentially the same virtual world that you've known for so long. As you are a sentient being I must offer you the choice. This is to either perish immediately with the rest of your Solar System or to live on, for exactly as long as you wish, in the same virtual world that has been your alternative life for so many years." 

"That's scarcely a choice at all," said Paul. 

"In that case, I shall leave you. You may remain here for as long as you like, but there is only one exit and that is to Nudeworld. And you won't be able to return to this room ever again." 

Paul turned his head to look at the door through which he'd entered, but when he looked back Virgil had vanished. 

It was for several hours that Paul remained in the room surrounded by luxury armchairs with the view through a window he couldn't open of a pleasant mountain landscape. Finally, he could stay no longer. He'd mulled over Virgil's words and, in the light of the new information, pieced together in his mind answers to all the questions regarding Beatrice and Vashti that had troubled him. 




Into the Unknowable Ch. 22



At last he stood up and opened the door. As he went through it, he turned his head round to view the room one last time only to discover that it was the bedroom he shared with Blanche in Nudeworld. There were no comfortable armchairs or blue mosaic walls. Instead there was his unmade bed and a flickering holographic screen. 

"My!" said Blanche who, naked as always, greeted him in the living room. "You have been asleep a long time." 

"I guess I must have been," said Paul who was now aware that he was also naked. 

It was unspoken but inevitable that Paul and his virtual partner should make love and this they did with Paul's newly acquired lovemaking skills that was Beatrice's final legacy. Naturally, Blanche made no comment but it was evident that her passion for him was greater than it had ever been before. 

Paul's lovemaking was no more imaginative than it had ever been. There was foreplay, vaginal penetration, anal penetration and finally, as always, facial ejaculation. But this was what Blanche had come to expect and Paul wasn't going to disappoint her. 

And as his semen dripped down Blanche's face and onto her sizeable breasts, Paul wondered to himself, but chose never to reveal to his lover, about the bizarre irony that Nudeworld should outlast the universe that had created it.