"Tampa, we've lost contact again... X5 risestor reading normative..." , the voice barked in his head. The tiny Interaural-Ganic receiver implanted in every child's head, along with the ever-expanding Ganic Hosts churned out regularly by the Terran Homing, Pregressive Division 12,  betrayed some of the breaking up in its staticy mis-feed.   Markup sighed, trying to focus on the re-motive aspects, part of the Left Hemispheric Ganic Cluster, and ignore the cross-feed. These were his responsibility to the ship, and letting cross-feed info interfere with his linkage proximity to the re-motive's would only create problems along the 4th axis. And that meant an extension removal of an undetermined number of hours before the re-motive corrections could be made, and the ship kept at full momentum. He sent out a link to Jessup in Combinations.
     "Jessup, these cross-feeds have been getting worse. Can't Michigan straighten things out?"
     Jessup came back, strong and clear.
     "Markup, she cant figure it out. Says she's going to Code 5, she's pulling the Ganic-Multiplier out and hooking up. Vote coming your way."
     Markup thought. That was bad. Code 5... the Multiplier. The ship was still 400 K's from Terra, and the Multiplier sapped the ships Solar Converters to the point where valuable time could be lost. The 4th axis was unforgiving. And not to mention that use of the Multiplier seriously compromised the safety of every other comp   (artment on the ship. It took  time to restore the Multipliers reserves, time during which any other emergency could arise, and during which it would not be available. The vote was pressing him, but he held it up.
     "Michigan..." he called out. It was obvious she was dealing with the others, 12 in all, and it might be hard to get through, but...
     "Markup. Hold off..." she came through.
     Markup sat in his link, waiting. It had been a particularly difficult mission. Just one of the thousands of scouters equipped with the latest technologies, poking into the cosmic boundaries, relaying info to Pregressive 12 terraside,  the Egg Creetor was temporarily the only ship on a return path to Terra.  Because of the recent knowledge gains of Pregressive 12, all return ships had been held and restructured with the new Ganics and Tallics. The Creetor had passed the others 2 months ago, a huge swarm moving out through the Regressive rings. When the majority of ships had met them in the Triumvirate Ring, the Ganics had swamped them. The new generation were amazing. The Communication Ganics had been split again and again. It was nothing like the bipolar's or tripolars the Creetor was still equipped with, an older generation. Pregressive 12 had advanced them so much, had broadcast that limits had been found and implemented, limits in the upper tens of thousands. The Restructurings had been one of the longest ever. It was just the Creetors luck to be the last in line. When they got back, things would be better.
     But the Communication Ganics were a lower, practical knowledge, derivative of the purer rings, which closed in around the blank center of unknowledge. Markup shivered. The center had been shrinking at a faster and faster rate, functioning in perfect contradiction with the vonHeffenburgh Uncertainty Principle. Predictions had flourished, as they always did during a major restructuring, but they had never been as voluble as those of the recent one. The Terran scientists were infinitesimally close to recreating the universal birth within the huge titanum-crete bunkers deep within Pregressive 12. They had been for years. But a few certain areas of the Center, the Two, remained cloudy, foiling every attempt to pierce the fog of unknowledge. The greatest minds, concretions of every conceivable super-charged Ganics modules,  linked terra-wide, functioning as a single unit... they had been reduced by the insufficient data to churning out  gew-gaws of technological superiority. So what if ship engines could now shave off the last few chains keeping them from existing at the theoretical limits of their speed. What were a few less days to crew members signed up, no, created, for this life? So what if the 4th axis could be used to sync sleep-cycle signals direct from Pregressive? These things, in the face of the resolution of the Two, were nothing. And now, the latest ships, pushing the communications technology? Mankind had been developing better telephones for well over 5000 years terran now, and the latest advances were received with nothing but yawns rising from the well of reification. Even so, caught as the Creetor was in between teleonological shifts, Markup felt relief and excitement at the prospect of the Restructuring that awaited them on Terra. It wasn't an easy process, but to be back on Terra and out of the confining linkups would be...
     "Markup. Continue." His thoughts were interrupted.
     "Michigan,  three points. Reception, Biocom,  Tallegrity."
     "Hold please... retrieving.. sending."
     Michigan left him alone. It was too bad... apparently others had already pushed those points. He would have much rather heard of it earlier, and had a chance to discuss with her, but in re-motives, that rarely happened. Maybe this time the Psychoganics Terraside would really consider his bid for skillshift.
     When he received the transmittal end-code, he shifted his consciousness over into the transparent replay-ganic. A haze descended over the re-motives and he set them on maintenance schedule.
     "Biocom," he directed, pushing Pomarty up into central. Of course it was Pomarty. Co-ad Ministration always got in first. It wouldn't be so bad, but Appeals were so frowned upon. Dipping into the 4th axis always caused suspicion and resentment, especially during Terra-bound movements. But, Markup thought, if I need to, I need to. The ship depended on its psychogenic hegemony in order to function up to its embedded limits, which meant if there was one bad egg in the group, the group was gone. But Markup had been with this grouping all his life, and such a thing rarely happened. Pomarty's Reflex, Simprian, was the only new member, moved over from Rehab after her grouping had lost it on one of the first entrances into the Two. But Simprian would be on restricted input, answering only as a statistical addition to Pomarty, for at least another ten missions. So overall, Markup had no fear of a fracture.
     Instantly, Replay started up. Pomarty waited for Markup to direct.
     "Biocom, keyword compromised, reason 20/40/37," Markup directed, reviewing 20/40/37 on an aside. It wasn't that long ago that Biocom had been compromised by an overlapping Doppler collation, cross-spectrumed to the 7th degree. Compressing the 4th axis by a tiny differential, it had sneaked past Lariello  in Detection during a temporary mode switch. Aboard the Creetor, anything that happened was as close to an impossibility as possible. Maybe after the restructuring....
     Pomarty started up.
     "Biocom was compromised giving us awareness of mode-switch time lapse protection faults. With two of the five spare tallic-ganics devoted to this awareness,  and a maximum possible devotion draw of compromises degree 2 of 4, we are running 1 devotion behind on a compromise of degree 2. This is already pushing the limits. Going to a compromise degree 3, which it would through the use of the Multiplier, we would have to dedicate one member, in addition to merely maintaining a ratio fully 7 devotions behind."
     Markups point exactly. Even though Pomarty hadn't come out and stated it, re-motives was always the first to be dedicated. Which was why he was always the last to get in the vote, and most likely to appeal. Even though in truth, he had never discovered which had come first. The group knew this themselves, they knew his guilt based on the  confusion of implanted memories partly obscured by the Skinner-ganic forever obscured their mutual abilities to ablate the facts, and so the delicate balance continued to sustain the hierarchy necessary to the Creetor's functioning. It was all in their training, at the hands of Pregressive12's Psychganic shrinks. There were no secrets. Even now, Markup could Detect with a feeling of assurance the psychoganics monitoring signal coming through Reception. He turned his attention to Michigan's response.
     "Fine. But E-flow-maintenance is experiencing serious 4th axis reverberations.  You know that the threat of distortion of predicted time length 5 far surpasses compromise degree 3. I'm sending you the reverberation degree charts now."
     Markup watched as they popped up. It was true. The degrees were extraordinary. He didn't have to see the predictions to know the seriousness. The threat to E-flow was real. The chain down from E-flow was not of extraordinary importance, going E-flow, Reception, Re-motive,  and finally to  Back-reception. And while it was true Back-reception would be able to re-establish E-flow through other energybeams from Terra Homing  without much trouble, the down time calculations for E-flow, with the numbers from Jessup in Combinations, would most likely show mode-switch time lapse protection faults, already operating with 2 of the five tallic-ganics devoted, far in excess of Biocom's threat potential. Michigan continued.
     "As for devotion,..."
     Markup cut her off. He knew the rest.
     "Skip to Reception. Skim."
     Pomarty once again popped up. Brown noser, Markup thought. What was that old Terran saying  from the last restructuring? Oh yes. "Teachers Pet". The psychoganics had had difficulty taming the laughter. But, Pomarty had been designed for his role and highly trained to fit. They had been younger then, had cared more about coming into their roles, not in performance statistics at all.
 Markup quickly sped through Pomarty's discussion of Reception. Its history was always somewhat spotty, which was why Combinations and Detection actually were the brunt of the force backing up Reception. And those two had   no historical flaws so far, being two of the most ancient, fundamental forms of teleonology.
     He decided not to even review Tallegrity. The metallic of the ships hull had not even developed a radiation stress point within it for two years. Its integrity was in no way compromised. He could tell the group had received his request for its review a little put off, had seen it as a babyish move. So what, he thought to himself. Its who I am.
     "Michigan, ah, vote Markup is go ahead." He flashed his codex sequences over to Co-Ad ministration for their verification, and clipped the yea box. Michigan popped up, smiling at him.
     "Wish me luck," she said. Markup put together a quick re-view montage, and affixed a big, smiling tyre at the end. Their special seal. Flipping over to full Re-motive, he fed himself a reprieve and relaxed with a sigh.
     Michigan and he had grown from the same New York cluster, and were very close. Even though she had gone through a higher refinement, they still felt the breeding bond, a linkage that none of the other groupmembers shared. It gave him some authority to balance out the functional ranking of the work organization. But there were problems, too... he often felt she was distant from him in the Tallic arena, too far advanced for his Ganics to encompass. She could be cold and machinelike, overprojection from all the metalligrafts she was so adept with. Even though he respected its necessity, the gap between their conceptual orderings hinged on a delicate balance. His own Ganic Hosts had    tundergone some early permutations, from underuse and malapplication, which had set him back early. But the permutes weren't all bad; he had developed extra-psychoganic abilities which, although not extreme enough to push him into the Terran-bound psychoganic professions, made him a necessary source of social cohesion on the ship. And the psyctests... he had far outdistanced all the others. Even Pomarty respected him on that account. If the demand for scouts hadn't been so high, he would have been terra-bound for life, in a cushiony pop-psych position. Pulling up the image of his face the others always saw... happy clown, sad clown, he smiled, feeling it between his fingers, reassuring.
     "Affirmative count. All stand by... initiate procedures 457, 232, 9864, five minutes to interface. Clock check..."
     "Sync." Jessup's codes passed through. Markups palms began to sweat. Wiping them on his pants, he began to retrieve and dissemble the feeds. Setting the process in background, he quickly positioned the re-motive for the dump. The signal checked; the Re-motive Ganic, trailing the ship 2 Kliks, protected in its double-Tallic hull, was ready for initiation.
     "Comp check... " Pomarty said, waiting for the codes, and then they began streaming in.
     "Tallegrity... complete." Markup returned, viewing.
     "Detection... Biocom... Co-Ad... Reflexes... Combinations... complete."
     Markup sat waiting for reception and E-flow.
     "Michigan... what's holding." He glanced at the clock.  30 seconds to dump.
     "Michigan... approaching abort. Please respond."
     Michigan flashed him a couple halting codes, then stopped. A second later, Markup hit abort. Closing down Pomarty's channel, he tried to reach her through Back-reception.
     "Retourne, what is E-flow status. Back-reception, can you..."
     He stopped. Michigan sent a few garbled codes  and then, nothing. No, wait... happy clown, sad clown. She sent him his own face. Trying again to reach her, he encountered a wall of garbage, something he'd never seen before. Scared, Markup quickly opened all channels again.
     "Pomarty, what..."
     "Markup, quick, deflect everything... Homing... Back-re..."
     Nothing but noise.

     Markup sealed his chamber, trapping all data, and reverted immediately to Terran Homing. The quiet whir of the fraction Bio-com and Tallegrity units came to life. Pomarty could soon be heard, returned from Terran Homing.
     "Markup, set delay 3.052., return jump 3.056. Please respond."
     "Markup responding. Pomarty, I'm turning up nothing. It hit too fast. No data available. Fraction Comb and Detect units insufficient feed. Dependent on Cell. Status?"
     "Ah, Markup, we've got a serious situation. The whole ship was affected, status celled off complete. Michigan and Reception monadic. No response. We need what ever you got before deflection. I'm changing over to computation."
     Markup tapped his fingers nervously, rearranging his screens. Communicating through Terran Homing was a linear delay cycle. Until E-flow and Reception could be established, there would be a lot of waiting.
     "Markup, Jessup here. You're going to have to..."
     Jessup faded out into white noise.
     Markup waited.
     "... and decompress to scale 5, slow feed timed 3 second intervals. Frequency..."
     He faded again.
     "... and .5 spin. You have three minutes."
     Markup opened the channel again.
     "Negative, Combinations, did not receive complete numbers. Negative. Refeed parameters. Repeat, negative confirmation. Repeat parameters."
     Markup entered the few numbers he had received and sat back, waiting.
     He could feel his lymphic attenuators kicking in, keeping him calm.

     After what seemed like forevers upon forevers, Pomarty  kicked in.
     "Markup, I'm hosting to Jessup... listen.."
     Jessup squelched through, his voice crunched with distortion, or was it a tremor?
     "Listen. We've hit some kind of preliminary wave... traveling outward from the center of the Two. Haven't been able to establish any contact with other ships. But that isn't the main thing I'm worried about. The data-wash..."
     Jessup's voice faded again.
     Inside Markups head, the communiganics exploded with a ringing, painful in its intensity. Knocking him off his orientation, he spun around as waves of lights and voices passed through him. A flare in the network? His left eye, twitching, caught a glance of his hand moving towards  disconnect, but it was too late. his thoughts distorted with the space, extruding lines of multiple  organic gravities. He started to scream, but it was already over.
     Falling back in his container, he felt sweat dripping from his body. It was rare to feel connected to the body again, distant memories of pre-implementation had left hollows of their shapes when they had been transplanted, ripped out; but now, those shapes spoke to him in their own way, functioning as surrogates of the lost.
     Ripping out the ganic-connex he tried to isolate the field that had opened up to the waves, but the numbers were all over the place. Swearing, he hit the flow-intercepter read and checked it. Something was coming through... in between the Asciiterran gibberish, he read words coming through on the tiny LED screen, in between codes. Taking a risk, he reconnected the refganic feed and pulled up the code... Jessup. He pulled back out.
     "Not ganic-fed. Repeat.."
     "...organic base... heighten..."
     "...back to ganic-communication in 3...     2..."
     Markup plugged in. Noise.
     "Jessup... Jessup. you there?"
     "Jessup here. Identify.."
     "Markup. What's happened? My numbers are completely off. Re-motive cannot, repeat, cannot back up history."
     "Markup, listen. Forget that. We've got bigger.."
     Interference.
     "...out from the Two. Fundamental shifts in basic structures. I've got.... you've got to..."
     The link went dead again. Markup pounded his fist against the sharp edge of the container, feeling the pain and fear building, the panic horizon's front guard.
     "Jessup. Jessup... come in."
     "...Markup. listen."
     Markup jumped. Jessup came through with enhanced clarity, almost as if he was in the room next to him. But where..
     "Jessup, I read you clear now. I missed..."
     "Retourne in Back-reception. I've got it down to intra-con link."
     Markup glanced over at the wall. Of course. The old audio-mitters were still there, hidden by decades of technogrowth, obscured by progress, but they apparently still worked.
     "Thank terra, Retourne. Retourne, who's available?"
     "Comb, Bio-com, Detection."
     Markup didn't want to say it, but he swallowed and forced the words out.
     "E-flow?"
     Back-reception paused. It told him everything.
     "Sorry, Markup. Cannot link to Michigan. I'm sorry."
     Choking back his emotions, he turned his attention to Jessup.
     "Jessup, I got nothing before. Please repeat."
     "Listen, whoever can hear. The problem is not fed through our ganic-link ups, its only amplified. The last numbers from Detection are impossible. The waves are emanating from the center of the Two.  Traces of other scouts, data-shadows are being found all over the grid. They must have been blown out of the sky..."
     "Waves? Are there more coming?" Back reception queried.
     "There must be. Disturbance background is not clear at all. Whatever happened out there, it was big. Give me 5 and I'll have more. Detection, are you operational?"
     Silence. Markup called also.
     "Detection. Answer.  Lariello."
     Still nothing.
     "Back-re, I thought you said..."
     "I'm here. So what?"  Lariello answered. But he sounded.... different somehow. Jessup cut back in.
     "Detec, I need  re-feeds 10.5.32 to 10.5.88. Send it through line 3.5.3t. Standing by..."
     Markup sat back, waiting. What the hell was going on? Watching the lines his heartbeat made on the statmon, he tried not to think of Michigan. He didn't believe she was gone, it was a feeling, most likely just the links had gone. But his mind couldn't dispute the facts.. He had full knowledge of the psychological process of grieving, and was well trained in recognizing each stage as he passed through them. But it didn't help any, knowing. It only amplified his perceptions of helplessness, of being somehow mechanical, physical, of having laws of existence within which he was enslaved. The ganics were powerful, but illusory to the Nth. Of course, there was one way out, but...
     "Detec, come on. I need the feed," Jessup barked, annoyance ringing in his voice.
     "Won't do any good. Can't you see it? Didn't you see the light? It's hopeless. Go to hell," Detec sent back. Markup groaned inwardly. The complexity of the situation was approaching the event horizon, beyond which all effort put into resolution would only get sucked into the infinite vastness of hopelessness. Detect was flipping out.
     "Detec, get ahold of yourself. We're depending on you. If.."
     A loud smash rent the audio-mitters.
     "Comb, Detect's destroyed his link." Back-re sent.
     "Damn. Markup, listen. I don't think we've got much time. From what I've got, I can only reach one conclusion. The last analynumberscans only reached a couple of interpretational conclusions. One is the fundamental laws are changing, shifting, emanating from the center of the Two. But that means the scanners are changing the answer to make the question fit. A problem. But the other option has a nearly infinite improbability quotient. I don't know if the chance of a terran homing noise catastrophe could order itself in such a way as to present this as the solution, especially with the infofrags of the other scouts that came in... but all I can hope is that's what it is. Listen, in the communifrag's from the scouts, all they gave out was a snapshot... but their location was right in the center, the farthest we've ever penetrated. Its possible they triggered some sort of effect, but I'm unsure... it might have stemmed from some of the new ganic-probe systems they were outfitted with. I've got to get to Detec and get back the numbers. Back-re, I'm extending ganiclinks to full extension, I need you to  target re-links for corridors 5 and 6. Markup..."
     "Jessup, don't do it. I'll go. I'm 1 closer, we need you..." Markup heard himself say. He felt incredibly distant from the whole thing.
     "No. I need to get in there. I need you to control all locks on the way. We don't need Detec to get out. We don't know his state. And," he said, pausing, "..if we don't make it out of here, Terra will need all Re-motives it can of what happened here." Pausing again, he added, "That is, if Terra's still there."
     Markup knew he was right. The sacrifice of a scout was nothing. Sacrificing data, though, was code one, the fundamental law drilled into all recruits from day 0. It was his job to maintain full records, even at the expense o    f his life and companionship. He had studied history, he knew the heroes... Macdougal, for instance, who had endured 7 terran-years, awake, alive, in order to send his ships story back, byte by bit, through their damaged Terran-Homing. Fourteen hours of real-time occurrence, but when stretched out and sent in linera-feed, 7 years. 7 years  awake, alive, and... alone.
     "Right. Switching to locks capability. Count in 5..4.. 3..2... operational. I have control."
     "Good luck, Jessup," Retourne in Back-re said.
     "Duplicate," Markup added.
     "Markup, I'm approaching lock 1. See you on the other side."

     Markup followed Jessup's blip as he wandered through the labyrinthian corridors of the Creetor. It was a rare emergency that couldn't be taken care of without having to resort to such physical movement. He must be experiencing incredible degrees of disorientation, Markup thought. But Combinations was the analytical core of the ship. Jessup was highly trained in all aspects. And the Rennaisance Academy program, an intense three-year program had fully prepared him for every eventuality.
     Jessup's dot stopped, and flashed from red to green, the signal for open. Triggering the last lock between him and Detec, he held his breath. Jessup hesitated by the open lock for a minute and then went in. Markup closed it down. Setting in a P.code, he tunneled all lock control to himself.
     "Back-re, lock in complete. Sending you the codes.."
     "Received. Markup, do you think weÕll get out of this one?"
     Markup clenched his jaw. He couldn't think of an answer.
     "Back-re, Jessup said the infofrags from the scouts were frozen. Does that usually happen in an explosion like he's talking about?"
     "From what I know, no. He's talking about something over my head. A kind of informational shadow-image emanating out in a wave from the center of the two. An informational catastrophe of a kind."
     "Do you know anything about the new systems the scouts were fitted with? Could they have triggered something?"
     "I doubt it. I know the commtech was some pretty amazing stuff, surpassing the limitations on hierarchical perception gatings, but I really cant see it having any effect. This looks more like a larger version of what we experienced upon penetrating the third ring, an initial energy disruption necessary to cause the puncture  to open for access. But..."
     "Markup, Retourne, Jessup here." He was breathing loudly, coming through on the ganics.
     "Detect destroyed the audio-mitter, and a lot of other stuff. I'm hurt, but..."
     Once again a wave of static passed over.
     "..contained. He's down. Sedated 4cc Thoriumpent.  I'm on the numbers, have to transport hard copies. Give me three.."
     The ringing, piercing came again. Markup recognized it this time, and pulled out his ganics. But the waves continued, building, destroying his vision. From inside his body, muscles pulled and extended. He tried to yell, to scream with the pain of a thousand electroshocks, and noiseless white escaped from his mouth. And then, it was over.
     Shaking free of the lightning-quick memories the pain left, he slammed the ganics back in, hands shaking violently. Where was the damn jack... couldn't find it.
     He became aware of a screaming, it wasn't stopping.
     "Retourne, Jessup, come in, come in," He felt like he was talking, but the level meters were flipped out. He was yelling at the top of his lungs, cold sweat cooling into a chill that reached deep into his heart, ice cold. Perception and feeling was distorted.
     "Retourne, jess..."
     "Retourne, get ahold of it. Retourne!" Jessup yelled. The screaming stopped, replaced by distorted sobbing noises.
     "Jessup, get the hell back to comb. We don't have time, these waves are getting stronger." Markup barked, his pulse racing. Concentrating on calm, he sent his readings back down on the monitor.
     "Markup, reverse lock procedure. Counting... have hardcopy. lock 5... in 3.. 2.."
     Markup triggered the lock. Watching Jessup's dot move lethargically back towards Comb,  refingering the locks one by one, he tried to keep the confusion of thoughts of mortality from breaking free. The rigorous psyctests he had undergone had pushed him up to this edge, but never over. Because, as question 312at had answered, that edge was never returned from intact.
     "Door malfunction.", the blinking cursor caught his attention.
     "Jessup, door malfunction behind you. Door to Detection stuck open. Please be aware, integrity to Comb unit decreased by factor of 5."
     "Don't think that's our main worry right now," Jessup returned. Another light lit up. And immediately after, another. All the door units  behind Jessup suddenly went yellow.
     "Ah, Jessup, something's wrong. Behind you.."
     The crunching noise terminated his sentence. Then sounds of scuffling and heavy breathing. Suddenly he heard  Lariello's adrenalin pumped voice.
     "..on the damn visofeed, turn it on damn you. Listen to me, were all going to.."
     The line went silent. Markup fumbled for the visofeed link, but his hands felt like putty, or liquid. He could feel the background effects of the wave reach into his mind again, distorting his vision slightly. Colors were more vivid,
fading in and out. Detec's voice came in again, but this time from a different area. He had linked himself into Jessup's audiofeed.
     "Listen, dammit. Hook up visiofeed. Now!" he yelled. Markup flinched from the fury in his voice.
     "Give me a sec... hands not working.."
     Insane laughter filled the room, echoing into rainbows of light that hurt his eyes to look at. But closing his eyelids did nothing; he could not turn the visual off, a force had silently and painlessly ripped his eyelids off.
     "That's not all that's not working, I bet!" Detec crowed. "Hook me up!"
     Markup finally fudged the jack in. Avoiding the ganic-circuts, he patched it to the large monitor on his left. Detect's face loomed large, swollen to redness, flicks of spittle and foam layering his face. Inside the ship-suit helmet, he looked like he was going to explode.
     "Got you," Markup said, waiting. With his hands, he struggled to double-lock all entrances from the corridor Detec was in.
     "See me? See? Listen, Markup, this is big. I've seen it. Look! Look out there! Do you see it?" Detec walked over to a portmonitor and pointed. Markup noticed the red on his suitgloves, dripping up his sleeves.
     "Detec, where's Jessup? What did you do to Jessup?"
     Detec shoved his face up into the monitor, grinning.
     "It doesn't matter. These don't mean anything." He waved the hardcopy in front of his face, then tossed it down the corridor. "You have to ride the currents. I caught the first ones, I was hooked in completely. You know that. I'm Detection, aren't I?  I get it first, the strongest. I know what's coming. You cant stop it, it's evolution, it's... it's everything. Look!"
     Markup followed Detec's hand to the portmonitor. It showed space, but... something else. The background had become lighter, the empty blackness had changed to shades of grey. And the stars, they were becoming darker, darker than the background of space. He felt the fear  well up again. Whether it was a monitor malfunction or not, it didn't matter. Both options were equally threatening.
     "Detec, we need your help. Get ahold of yourself. We'll never get out of here if you..."
     "Shut up! Shut up!"  Lariello screamed, his face distorted, shoving itself up into the monitor. "You don't get it! It's not.. in here!" he gestured. "It's out there! It's out there, and it's not  going back! I know! My mind... it's... bigger. Sensitive, now... I can feel what's happening, I..."
     Markup clipped the audio. Switching, he probed Back-re's status.
     "Back-re, can you hear me? Back-re!" he yelled.
     He heard the sobbing, scuffling noises coming from her unit.
     "Back-re, talk to me. It's Markup! Come on, you've got to talk to me. We'll get out of this thing. But you've got to talk to me."
     "Mm..Markup?" her voice, small and scared.
     "Back-re, listen. Detec's out of control, he's hurt Jessup, maybe killed him. "
     Back-re started to wail again.
     "Shh,shh, its ok, he got the hardcopy. I'm going out to get it. I need you to control for me."
     Glancing at the screen, he saw  Lariello walk off down the corridor back to Detec, his long umbilical biocom cables trailing behind like an obscene misplaced placenta.
     "Back-re, can you do it? Detec's gone back."
     In between sobs, she answered in the affirmative.
     Markup sent her his codes and timetables, and got out to suit up. Standing, he felt his muscles again, kept tone by thousands of implant-neuro-muscular ganics, and felt the room swim with him. Old memories of his physical existence, long buried under years of ganic-enhancements, struggled to become known, locked into perpetual half shadows. The shock of recognition only amplified how far he felt, how far he was, from who he had been. Michigan... he remembered. Running down a hill, jumping, swinging...
     Swearing at himself for the lapse, he struggled into the suit. Alternate feelings of heat contained in ice drenched his body, and his hands felt rubbery or hard. It must be another wave approaching... the room seemed to be distorting.
     Shaking his head clear, he reached for his helmet when he saw the words feeding into the visomonitor. Jessup's bloody hand was holding his vocotranslator up to the monitor, altering its  field to send the words. He was still alive!
     Slapping the abort button, he relayed to Back-re.
     "Hold on... Jessup's alive... he's sending something. Link visomon 35a."
     Falling back in his container, he stripped his gloves and amplified the text.
    Swinging the monitor front center, he absorbed Jessup's words.
     "... badly hurt... dying... see... I see it... somehow, scouts... ships ganics... we never saw it.. saw it coming, oversight..."
     "Back-re, you getting this," Markup tossed to audio. He could feel the pressure building again. More slowly this time, increasing the pressure behind his eyes and throughout his body in creeping increments.
     "Markup... it's... it's coming again..."
     "I know. I know. Hold on. We're in this together. We'll make it. Jessup's feed, I'm reading it..."
     Markup continued reading.
     "... in the communications... so developed, approached threshold... communigancs so linked became... became god...no, listen... center of the Two, approached,  by technology... reconfigured... gone too far    ... we're evolutionary... genetic vehicle for re-creation of... the two.. communiganics created consciousness, recreated god... now in turn... we're.. we're being re-created... all fundamental laws evolving, altering... not destruction, recreation... missed it... not knowledge, it's communication... Pregressive missed it, overstepped... vonHeffenburgh..."
     The hand fell from in front of the monitor. Down the corridor, Detec was stomping, screaming and ranting. Coming up to the monitor, he started yelling. Markup turned the audio back on.
     "...It's coming again! Didn't I tell you? Listen to me next time! Ahhhr.. stop that, stop.."
      Lariello reached down and pulled Jessup's grasping hand of his leg. Ripping his paklink off his back, Detec began bashing Jessup's head in, yelling at him. His words distorted, slurred, slowed down and sped up through the audiomitters.
     Markup killed the link across the board. He couldn't take it. His body was feeling the effects again. Detec's face froze on the monitor; its image  wouldn't get off. Locked into electronics... staring up at the sky, howling, his eyes sunken, cloudy, his face pasty grey spattered with blood, stubble filled with froth from his mouth, it was as if he had aged 30 years in ten minutes.
     Feeling his body become numb, Markup let his grip, held in by fear, slide. The control crept out slowly of his mind, and he didn't attempt to get it back. The situation, the circumstance focused its energy on his defenses, burning a pinpoint through which the gravity of consciousness altered. Memories, impressions and sensations reversed direction, bubbling up from the downward obscuration of age and technology. And at the front of the pack, Michigan rose, her laughter, her smile... their togetherness, which had the smell of eternity... gone now. The tears he felt, painfully squeezing through dry, unused ducting, free of the ganic and social mesh...
     "The light..."
     Back-re's voice came to him through the painful haze. Somehow, he felt her, knew where she was... her voice, floating from the audio-mitter on waves of light, connected him to her. Detec's face on the monitor slowly disintegrated into noise, and reformed into Back-re.
     "No.." Markup whispered, but the currents, the change was so strong, his words affected his vision. The room seemed to grow huge with his efforts to speak louder, to shrink when he didn't... Back-re walked to the port-release.
     "Cant you see it? It's coming again... watch..."
     Sliding her hand into the glovport, Markup struggled to reach the isolationtab before she blew out. Watching the monitor through obscured hazes, he watched as she flipped it and... did she turn back to smile at him, to reassure him? Or were his imaginings altering perception...
     She blew out instantly. Markup hit the isotab. The alarms rang in the distance, though he knew they were there in the room with him. Her head caught on the portside and decapitated instantly. Blood pooled and congealed, froze in the... whiteness? of frozen space.
     The lockdown was successful. Cornered, locked into the ship, his unit, the container, his suit, his body, his mind... the waves were stronger now. Incredibly strong, almost unbearable. Washing over all perception, all nerves, muscles... the alarms no longer made sounds, rather, he was watching them, seeing sound, hearing images. The room turned to ice, cracked, melted into liquid and dust and reformed, only to begin again.
     His state of being was so enhanced, so heightened and confused, and yet, through the pain and alteration, he was aware of a noise. A scratching. Seen through infrared radio disturbances, soundwaves confusing the light spectrums. At the door. Watching from another part of his fracturing mind, he saw himself think of Detec, the threat.... he was there, behind the door, even now, as the waves of change accelerated, bringing about an unknown metamorphosis Markup could only imagine as death, he could watch the fear, feel it expand like a cancer, until it unified him in its parasiticism, until he was no longer watching, but fearing. Fear amplified by Detec's violence and what the change was creating in the final moments of those who had surrounded him.
     How had Michigan gone? Had she experienced this, alone as he? The room cracked along its seams. around the door, light grew, spreading outward. He felt space expand, until he knew, somehow, that the Egg Creetor would crush earth to land on it, that he could never go home; and again, it contracted with great speed, until he knew he was smaller than the spacedust caught in the ship's hull.
     These compressions rocked his experience of the unit. It became to come apart under the violence of the scale shifts. Gravity increased and decreased in birth-like contractions. His body began to come apart on a sub-molecular level, distributing nerve sensors out to integrate with the room.
     The light about the door increased. The door shrunk within its frame, and light poured in, then amplified out into the frame, larger than the frame. The scratching grew and rose to painful proportions. A piercing ring exploded into a silent, prolonged scream inside his head, filling the world with light.
     In the center of it, the door shrunk to liquid dust, blazing laserlight into the center of his brain. And out of the light, framed in the door, he saw Michigan, her hands raw from scratching, more beautiful than he had ever known she could be. It wasn't just her, it was all she had been, they had been, from the cellular genetics, altered by the 4th axis, the tumbleweeds of progression and additions, history, memory, thought, x-rayed through perceptions he had never, even with full ganicfeed, even imagined possible.
     The light became fire, and he reached out with his whole body to her. She left hers, and came to him, smiling.
     The memories were the last to go.