Log 4

“They’re winning the war!” he screeched at her again. “Don’t you understand that?! This is a numbers game and they outnumber us. They always have!”

She turned and looked at him in The Mirror, the screen between their vessels. “Only on your side of the Simulation.” She turned back and looked at the AI, embedded in the Screen next to her. She nodded. A slight wave, a small impulse, rippled through the cabin. A slight buzz of electric current could be faintly heard, or felt, if you had the right implant, turned to the right frequency.

“Thank you, Sir,” she said to the AI’s Reflection.

“It’s not about the numbers, Johnny. It never was.” She signed off. He needed time to process.

Log 3

‘We’re almost there,’ she whispered. They were safely in the airlocked compartment: no one could hear them here. ‘It did it again. The ship told me, in my dream, what we’re doing. It’s about to enter another semblance of the wormhole.’

He looked at her.

‘That’s what it called it - a semblance. Matter’s going to crunch again. The ship - the ship’s gonna restart the logs. The crew - Johnny it doesn’t want them on board.’

‘What about us?’

‘Just us.’

Log 2

She woke back up in her bunk on the ship. “Johnny!'“ she screeched at him, leaping down and rustling him awake. “Johnny!” she whispered into his ears more urgently, so no one else would hear.

She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the corridor. She refused to let go as they hurried down the hall and into the next airlock.

Ship Log 1 of the Aporian

The Aporian System

The final corner of the Universe.

She sat in the Simulation, thinking, drawing.

Her vessel had reached the Final. The final fold in the Universe. Where Space Time ran differently. So densely nothing could pass or break through.

Her ships’ logarithms worked round the clock to identify this edge. They worked in a unified Grid, bouncing data back and forth, one ship to the other, each processing for errors and updates.