THE STORY SO FAR: 1990 corporate consultant Jerry Staute is struggling to cope with memories of two separate abductions by bizarre characters, one only days past, which revealed another supposedly occurring in 1972. That earlier kidnapping is proving to be a fountain of incredible recollections of Staute apparently being imprisoned onboard a time-traveling vessel from 2483 AD, with its crew hoping he can help them find their way home-- as they believe him to be the original conceptual source regarding their main drive technologies. Staute now recalls a crew conference regarding his fate onboard.

When I tuned into the conference via my node, it appeared I was late; it'd already started. Later I discovered the crew only decided to include me after the meeting had already begun, and things had gotten contentious: things regarding me.

I scrambled mentally to catch up. I began catching random snippets from just about every member over the net...

*--still say we'll catch hell for abducting a past Realtime--*

*-- had no alternatives left. Would you have us become the third missing shifter crew?*

*-- native. We've set a precedent here and will suffer the consequences, if we ever make it back--*

*-- if he's right, and we took the wrong man?*

*-- I don't want to become a missing person any more than you, but--*

*-- ever get our bearings--*

*-- Arbitur says we can last indefinitely--*

*-- have important work I must finish. I cannot afford to float in this limbo forever--*

The net traffic was a bit confusing. How did the crew keep track of who was saying what? I guessed it helped to have been doing this sort of thing since childhood.

*-- should accommodate our guest by tailoring our discussion to better match his present grasp of the net,* Ling was saying. I appreciated her efforts on my behalf. But I also dreaded any more concentration on me than was already evident.

After another minute or so the discussion did indeed slow to a more coherent speed.

*-- and I've had Arbitur recheck the archives. The probability is 97.112 % that he is indeed the Signposts Staute,* came from Yamal.

97.112% probability? More like the other 3%! I thought to myself.

All this was getting my dander up. I couldn't speak for myself over the net because of my current node restriction. But unlike the crew, I could speak in another fashion. Old, that is; the venerable verbal way. And from my interaction with Ling I knew Arbitur could be set to automatically translate my verbal speech to shush net in realtime. I wondered if the crew had remembered to prohibit that little loophole? I could still talk to Arbitur directly via the net, if not the crew, because of basic safety and security policies. So I asked Arbitur to do his automatic translation thing for me, now. Heck: the worst that could happen was he said no, right?

To my delight he agreed. Apparently the loophole had been ignored!

Unable to find an opening in the net confab over the next couple of minutes, I finally just dived in and interrupted Jorgon.

"Excuse me," I interjected, sort of rudely (and Arbitur automatically broadcast over the net), "but why the hell did you people pick me up so early, when I supposedly wrote your fancy paper fifty years later? I mean, even if I did write it I might not know anything about the subject at this age! Why don't you pick up Einstein when he was six years old, and ask him about his Theory of Relativity?"

I had the advantage of surprise on my side here. Plus, the fact my voice was coming over Arbitur's channel rather than my own, which momentarily confused the crew and made them think (erroneously) that Arbitur himself gave sufficient weight to my words to break the censorship of my node. But really I was just exploiting the fact they hadn't ruled out this particular maneuver on my part. Heh, heh, heh.

I could tell I'd struck a nerve; my query reverberated throughout the net.

*We did not plan to 'pick you up' at all, Mr. Staute,* Jorgon said. Then he directed his thoughts to Arbitur.

*Arbitur, please present Mr. Staute with a brief summary of our actions since departing origin; list only items directly relevant to our esteemed guest and his possible contribution to our current effort.* Yay for me, I thought! I got the bastards to let me in!

Arbitur began his briefing: *The Pagnew made an uneventful launch from Origin Alpha Zero Zero Zero Zero on March 9, 2483 A.D. Destination was unknown, as is typical of I-D shifter missions.

*During the customary search pattern for Realtimes containing designated features of interest to the Council, we eventually found ourselves transported to Mr. Staute's own: Sol system, in the eighth decade of the twentieth century.

*This made us the first I-D shifter mission on record to arrive in what appears to be a Realtime other than origin of our own event line.

*Prior to this such an occurrence was considered to be virtually impossible. Despite this, the scenario was included in various Council contingency deliberations, and strict rules of procedure prescribed.

*For reference, I present the gist of these rules:

*One, Council rules prohibit any and all interaction with past Realtime phenomena.

*Two, Council rules prohibit the observation of events within a past Realtime, as that in itself may induce changes to those events.

*Three, Council rules prohibit any non-essential delays in exiting a past Realtime once entered, excepting only those cases where such an immediate exit in itself might have effects counter to the intent of the first rule.

*Upon our arrival in the twentieth century, we could not immediately establish our banned Realtime status. But it was soon evident we had reached a universe possibly related to Origin Alpha Zero Zero Zero Zero.

*We cautiously approached the possible nexus to our own upline in order to ascertain a more specific Realtime location and status.

*Within moments of having Earth in sensory range we were aware of our prohibited status, according to the aforementioned Council principles.

*Urgent mission abort-- or emergency return to origin-- was initiated per Council rules of non-engagement and immediate departure.

*In an anomaly as yet unexplained, when our shift power curve fell below the normal threshold required for the maintenance of extra-realtime positioning, we did not return to origin. Indeed, we were unable even to reach the interim phase of six-dimensional space.

*We repeated the requisite power cycling to the limits of our safe operating range, to no effect.

*Another extraordinary event of the time was a complete failure of all Heplinger bridge-based communications: a circumstance theoretically impossible where all related equipment onboard and at origin remain functional. As one result all contact with Origin Alpha Zero Zero Zero Zero has been impossible since our appearance in Mr. Staute's Realtime.

*If not for the concurrent, inexplicable failure of return procedures, the breakdown in communications with no discernible problem apparent in our own equipment would indicate an unprecedented calamity regarding Origin Alpha Zero Zero Zero Zero. My investigation into these incidents is on-going.

*Our options limited, we chose to use our ion engines to distance ourselves from Earth's possible detection, as well as inadvertent interference in the event line via our presence.

*We were unable to take any new and significant action. As extended use of our ion engines could possibly be detected from Earth, we could not remove ourselves completely from the solar system without perhaps attracting humanity's attention.

*Once relocated to a reasonably shielded location and secure distance from Earth, we were obliged to remain essentially dead in space for some indefinite time, as we pondered our next move.

*The duration of our stay eventually extended to years, as we sought to exhaust every reasonable avenue available to us for escaping the risk-filled Realtime, while minimizing potential damage to the event line.

*After a series of further failed attempts to resolve the matter, we scanned the archives specifically in search of data regarding the Realtime which might offer us fresh ideas in terms of possible solutions.

*Few viable options were found. All were deemed of potential grave consequence to events downline, as well as to ship and company.

*One possible course appeared to stand apart from the rest, in that the individual involved was marked by history as being a primary source of the very technology responsible for our predicament.

*It was theorized that perhaps our plight was the result of some anomaly related to this fact.

*In this extraordinary situation, clearly unanticipated in full measure by the Council, the final decision was left to me by the top executive officers aboard the Pagnew.

*My choice was to perform a surgical abduction and return of the individual in question, at a point in Realtime presenting minimal possibility of observation or interference.

*Though technically in violation of Council principles, my plan was approved by a majority of active crew and the top two executive officers.

*Though there was little in the form of theoretical support for the idea that abduction of the target might free us from our morass, archive references otherwise explaining our problems were similarly scarce.

*Therefore abduction of the target was essentially a measure of the dearth of alternatives available to us.

*The act did pass its first test: once the target was onboard we were able to successfully shift a test remote out of Realtime. After a delay of three weeks to monitor for undue changes in the event-line, we successfully shifted the ship entire from the Staute Realtime.

*Measured in subjective shipboard time, the time span from our entry to the anomalous Realtime to our exit from same was approximately eight years, seven months, and twenty days.

*During the target's stay aboard ship we are following extraordinary precautions to insure as few permanent physical changes to his form as possible. This should minimize any impact on his future actions, following his return to his native Realtime.

*To provide for minimum disruption of the timeline, we plan to return the target to the precise Realtime instance from which he was taken-- or as near it as proves feasible.

*A complete record of the target's memories were taken immediately after abduction and node installation. Upon his imminent return, his mind will be restored to its initial state, by re-writing his original memories over any and all in his possession by the end of his stay onboard.

*Though this procedure is imperfect, we expect its after-effects to fall well within the normal fluctuations of consciousness the target experiences in his native environment.

*To raise the probability of locating the target's Realtime again for return, we left three full scale shifting stations in the vicinity, all specially tuned as best could be calculated towards aiding our eventual return. One station was left orbiting the Sun directly opposite the Earth. All the stations are equipped to avoid detection by any likely Realtime probes which might pass through or near their respective locales, as well as armed for automatic self-destruction should anyone but we attempt to use them, or the contingency that we fail to return within a pre-set window on the target's origin.

*Let it be noted we were cognizant of the fact point-to-point I-D shifting has never been achieved before: that shifting stations tend to work only within a single Realtime and no more. But in this instance we project such stations may provide valuable markers if the target does manage to suitably expand our shifting flexibility as hoped.

*The target's memories and certain other characteristics were also applied to a contingency replacement.

*In the worst case scenario in which we are unable to return the target subject within the set window, the crew member Fields Weller, who has volunteered for this duty and been heavily modified for the task, will assume the target's identity. Weller has been physically altered to closely resemble the target, and equipped with all the knowledge, mannerisms, and memory we could transfer via nodes. Weller is equipped to fulfill the target's known historical role, falsifying his death at the proper time, and removing himself from the society, should all this become necessary. This measure should well protect the event line from undue modification if the Pagnew itself never manages to return the target to his origin.

*If Weller proves unable to accomplish his task, a dynamic software agent carrying a copy of the surviving remnants of the Signposts document from our origin will be deposited in the Earth networks. The agent's task will be to insure its cargo is distributed and stored throughout the Earth net in a pattern and of such quantity as has been calculated to reproduce as closely as possible the known events in which the document was discovered and utilized by humankind downline. Once the backup device has fulfilled its mission-- or should its task become unnecessary-- it will self-destruct. The addition of this factor to the overall plan should result in a probability of success of essentially unity, with minimum downside risks.

*I have continuously monitored all records in the archive post-dating the target abduction for any changes possibly resulting from our actions, since the moment the target was taken.

*Had any change been detected in the hours we remained in the target's Realtime, I would have aborted the mission and returned the subject immediately in order to minimize further damage.

*The subject has indirectly asked why we did not abduct him at a later date. The answer is simple: we could not. Not without waiting additional decades to take action, and therefore steadily increasing the risk of damage to the event line in the meantime. We possess no more means to drive linear event-line movement than the target himself. Like he, we too can only move unidirectionally and incrementally into the future in any reliable and predictable manner, by way of Planck time passage.

*The probability of our entering his Realtime at all was vanishingly small: zero to a trillion, trillion decimal places at most, according to all the parameters to which I have access.

*The probability of us ever purposely accessing the Realtime of his more mature self is far smaller than that.*

I was stunned. And speechless. They'd replaced me with a look-alike so that no one would miss me back home. Ever. Even if I never made it back.

It sounded like a death sentence. Ling had never told me about this.

My eyes welled with tears.

So far as my own people were concerned, I, the real me, here and now, no longer mattered. In so completely and carefully filling the void left by my abduction, the crew had stolen something from me. I knew this.

My only uncertainty lay in what exactly they had taken.

But it didn't matter; I resolved I'd get it back. And more.

Ling, Riki, and Arbitur all worked together to provide me with a crash course in shifting technology, as well as other aspects of the apparent knowledge existing in the head of the Signposts Staute at the time he did his thing.

There were a horrendous number of details and mathematical formulas involved, which I'm sure would have flew right over my head, if not for the superb educational techniques aboard the Pagnew.

Though daunted by the new knowledge being pumped into me, I kind of enjoyed it too. Because it was really weird stuff, man!

Apparently reality as we know it is really just a 3-D picture, and not much more. The picture is extremely high resolution-- so high that human beings can only discern its grossest aspects. Even the atoms known to us in 1972 are just tremendously big chunks of the picture. And things like quarks, the wiggling little groups which make up the constituent parts of atoms, are also fairly good size chunks of the picture.

If you compare reality resolution with that of a TV screen, a quark is itself a collection of pixels (not a single element!) making up the total image.

Nope: the ultimate unit of resolution (or pixel of reality) is a weird little thing called Planck spacetime.

And this Planck thingy is itself nothing more than a vibrating knot in a vast network resembling a spider web that undergirds everything we normally think of as real.

This big spider web consists of something that was-- or will be, rather-- called superstrings and/or M-branes by folks just a wee bit farther into the future than my own 1972.

Since our scientists were still missing some crucial data, they didn't quite hit the mark with the original superstring concept, and for a while it was replaced with a different idea about what the universe was made of.

But eventually a significantly revised version of superstrings/M-branes came back to take the prize.

Superstrings/M-branes are very strange dudes. According to Ling, there's a few hard core religious devotees left at her origin which worship the things as God's neural net. Oh well.

Serious studies of the superstrings/M-branes by Ling's origin sure enough are raising questions of possible signals stemming from some level of intrinsic consciousness there; but if there really is a consciousness within the string/brane net it looks awfully rudimentary: roughly equivalent to insect magnitude info processing, at best. So any self-respecting worshipper might bristle at the term 'God' being slapped onto such stuff.

The Heplinger Continuum Bridge (the basic technology behind shifting and instantaneous communication in Ling's time), seems to send its own vibrations along the strands of string/brane spiderweb.

Some theorists postulate this could mean humanity is creating and destroying infinite numbers of universes each and every time they use such devices. And that it's possible we could destroy our own universe someday, if we pluck the wrong strand with our transmissions(!).

Call me chicken if you want, but news like this is unsettling to me personally.

I asked Arbitur about it, and made it all worse. What was his answer?

*The chance of our technology unraveling our own event line is exceedingly remote; so remote as to rival the probability of our finding your own Realtime.*

Great! If I understood him correctly, we had as much chance of destroying the universe, as the Pagnew originally did of finding me! Well! I got news for Silicon Breath! The chance of finding me had ended up being 100%! 'Cause I was here! Did that mean the very next time we pushed the shifting button we'd blow up the whole universe?

But what could I do? Hellfire, the Pagnew wasn't even the only interdimensional shifter out here! There was also the Ulysses, and at least a half dozen more! Plus, Ling's folks used the damn Heplinger Bridge for everything! Back on Earth they'd zap packages (and themselves!) back and forth with it a zillion times a day!

Is mankind really getting smarter? Or just crazier?

According to my lessons there's a certain duality to the universe; like a coin, it has two sides. One side is four dimensional: the one we live in. The other side is six dimensional, and is the scaffolding behind the stage. For the six dimensional side is the string/brane spider web.

You can pass info from one side to the other by way of tiny holes in the coin, sometimes called Planck gates. These Planck gates are what the Heplinger Bridge process uses.

For interdimensional shifters the big deal is that the two-sided coin has an infinite number of possible faces on the four dimensional side (our natural-born side). Each of these different 4-D faces is an entire universe comparable to our own massive stomping grounds. And with enough power, once you're on the six-dimensional side you can pop back out into a four dimensional side universe that's different from the one you left.

The coin doesn't like this though, and tries to push you back to your proper place. Only a huge amount of power can hold off this push. A ship like the Pagnew has a magnitude of accessible power considered impossible in 1972.

One great thing about this is if you got stranded in a different Reality, you wouldn't need a shifter ship to get back-- the forces of the cosmic coin flip would naturally drag you back to where you came from. At least theoretically. The amount of empirical research performed in this area is limited but ongoing: ships like the Pagnew are the guinea pigs(!).

Weller, my pseudo-doppelganger on Earth, was held in place by one or more auxiliary power sources left by the Pagnew, designed to last long enough to hold his tiny mass-- plus that of his devices-- in place for my recorded lifespan and then quit, hopefully enabling his automatic return to origin.

Of course, since the Pagnew itself couldn't make it back, the crew (and Weller) weren't too thrilled with Weller's personal chances either.

However, based on everything which had gone wrong so far aboard the Pagnew, the value of the equipment left with Weller in terms of keeping him anchored in my Realtime was dubious at best. Leaving that equipment with him had basically been done in the hope and circumstance that either I might show the crew how to fix the Pagnew's dilemma, or somehow everything would simply start working as expected again, all on its own.

In truth, it appeared likely no anchoring power source was necessary; Weller would stay put no matter what, cosmically speaking. But there were so many uncertainties involved, the crew was taking all the precautions required for full-scale inter-dimensional missions and more. For one thing, the time-travel anomaly seemed related to the inter-dimensional travel phenomenon here. And since picking me up the Pagnew's shifting drives had started working again, but it was like they (or the Cosmos) couldn't remember where the ship had come from; the Pagnew had lost its figurative 'anchor' which should have automatically returned it to the proper universe and time period when the drives powered down. And no such anchoring force took hold for subsequent Realtimes visited, either. It was like the Pagnew's home reality no longer existed, and the universe wouldn't let the ship have another.

Talk about losing touch with your roots!

So anyway, two shift remotes-- each about the size of a 20th century automobile-- were placed on Earth in service to Weller. One hidden in a dormant volcanic rift at the bottom of the Pacific ocean, protected and enhanced by a suitable buffer field, and the second well disguised in order to remain in close proximity to Weller at all times. The rift remote was there solely as backup for the other, plus for Weller's disposal in emergency point-to-point transports on Earth. I.e., if Weller found himself trapped in a burning building and his mission in jeopardy, the nearby remote could instantly transport him to the deep sea remote for safety. The first remote would then re-locate to a suitable spot, and bring him back again.

I was shocked to learn the remote nearest to Weller had been re-modeled to look, feel, and act just like my own car Shadowfast-- when it wasn't being used for instant transportation or flying through the sky, that is (a Pagnew remote's usual duties). So Weller's amazing car-sized device from the 25th century could simply sit in my dorm parking lot, with no one the wiser.

So here was something else they'd taken from me: my car! Where was the real one now? I'd asked Arbitur.

*Your machine is in storage.*

*Storage? Where?*

*Onboard.*

I couldn't believe it! My car was actually here with me! I immediately notified the net I wanted to go see it, and was shifted away.

I next found myself in a large white room. At one end were a few small, muddy colored cubes of varying sizes. The biggest was comparable to a kitchen toaster in volume. My car was nowhere to be seen.

*Arbitur?*

*Yes?*

*I think the net's acting up. I wanted to see my car, and it shifted me to the wrong place.*

*This is the correct storage area.*

I laughed.

*No Arbitur, it's not. My car's a '69 Mustang. It's about fifteen feet long or so, and painted black. Flat black, all over. There's no chrome showing on the car anywhere-- that way it's hard for the cops to see at night. Please search your other storage areas for it.*

*There is no mistake. Your vehicle is the largest inanimate object in the room.*

I looked around again. Nothing had changed.

*Arbitur? Now you're worrying me; are you all right?*

*This is your vehicle.* A little white spotlight appeared out of nowhere. It seemed to come out of a blank wall, where there was no apparent source. It rested on the toaster-sized brown cube I'd noticed before.

I grinned. *Arbitur, Arbitur, Arbitur,* I was shaking my head. *I'm afraid you need a tune up, old boy,* I walked over to the cube indicated. *This is definitely not Shadowfast, the best damn car in the world in 1972.*

So I was exaggerating a little-- what was the harm? Though I was far from qualified to whip up a Signposts whatchamacallit, I had proven my ability to put together a superior automobile from the ground up. And I could show it off to Arbitur Big Brain as soon as we found Shadow. Somewhat pleased with myself, I lightly kicked the brown cube with my toe.

Goddamn! The damn thing was bolted to the floor! My kick felt like it'd sprained my toe-- if not my whole foot! Even despite my future clothes popping up their little balloons for protection.

"Goddamn, Arbitur! You could of at least warned me!" I barked out loud, bypassing the shush net in my surprise.

*Organics often surprise me with their actions. I did not realize you intended to challenge the object's location in the room.*

"Challenge? You need work, you son of a bitch!" I strangled out the words. My habitual disuse of my voice over past weeks made it tough to speak. I was now sitting precariously on the cube, rubbing my bare foot. The amazing shape-changing shoe bulb at the end of my pants leg had split apart and curled away once it realized my desire for access.

The cube was a bit too small to make for a comfortable seat. But it was the closest and most suitable perch available if I didn't want to sit directly on the floor.

*Where's my car?* I demanded via net node. *Or don't you know? The smartest damn box in the universe, and you don't even know what a car looks like!* Curse words over the shush net lacked the impact of verbal expression, coming out in the translation more like doodles sketched by school kids. Or a personal form of political cartoon, maybe? But for a 20th century college age male trapped with a bunch of future loons, they helped in blowing off steam.

The wall opposite me lit up with a life-sized image of my car, sitting in the dorm parking lot on Earth.

*Yeah! That's it! Where have you got it?* I asked with renewed anticipation. Just as wearing 20th century styled clothes had made me feel better before, sitting inside Shadow again seemed like it'd help relax me, too.

I looked forward to listening to my stereo, and reminiscing about 20th century Earth. Then Arbitur gave me his answer.

*Most items stored aboard the Pagnew are maintained in pure data form. Since your personal accessories may have unknown significance to our upline, an exception was made for them. They were stored both as data and the original constituent elements. The data is stored in the archives--* The picture of my car on the wall silently exploded into thousands of individual parts of varying sizes and complexity. Then all those parts changed from three dimensional looking objects to transparent wireframes similar to descriptions on blueprints, and after that the wireframes morphed into lots of independently moving fields of indecipherable numbers...*-- while the physical matter has been reconfigured for optimum storage efficiency.*

I was dumbfounded. I finally realized what Arbitur had been trying to tell me about my car...

Shadowfast had been crushed to the size of a toaster. The black paint wasn't even visible. The whole thing just looked like a brown rock, carved into a perfect cube.

I was paying sixty-nine bucks a month for a small brown metal block.

I just sat on the floor in the white room for a while, with one elbow resting on the only piece of my own reality that had accompanied me on this journey. Contemplating the brown block which had once sat looking so awesome in my parents' driveway, after I'd toiled for over a year to put it together.

I never asked Arbitur what the other brown cubes in the storage area were.

I didn't want to know.

One danger of inter-dimensional shifting (jumping through the cosmic coin to find another four-dimensional face) was the potential changes in the physical laws you might encounter.

The physics involved in a particular universe could usually be counted on to exist throughout that universe; no matter how far you traveled or where you went, the physical laws in a single universe tended to remain pretty much the same. Except around singularities, or within superluminal velocities, or inside certain extreme variations in time geometry, of course.

But such consistency didn't necessarily hold for traveling from one universe to another: the laws could change on you. And it didn't take much of a change to utterly destroy you, if your own make up began to synch up with that of an incompatible new reality.

Fortunately you didn't often find universes where the physics were different enough to ruin your joy ride. And even if you did, small differences in the physical nature of the place from your own origin would be compensated for somewhat by the cosmic Coin. The more different the place was from your own, the stronger the forces trying to push you back to where you belonged. So your shifter gear would have to work harder, and you'd notice the higher power levels, and you'd realize the place was a bit more dangerous than usual.

The shifter engines themselves also shielded you some from adverse environmental effects, as they tended to encapsulate the ship in a bubble subset of the universe you originated from. They couldn't do this forever of course. And the more hostile the new universe was to your own atoms, the smaller the safety margins and shorter time you could stay.

The worst possible case was if you entered a universe so utterly different to your own that it was all pure anti-matter to your matter. In that case there'd be no reprieve-- you'd simply be gone, in a titanic explosion. No warning, no nothing. No one knew if existing shifter technology could detect such a danger in time to prevent total annihilation of the ship. Anti-matter was sort of a special case in lots of respects.

But all the above mainly pertained to interdimensional shifting. Realtime shifting, such as we routinely did from room to room aboard the Pagnew, wasn't nearly so risky.

In Realtime shifting you just sort of jumped into the six dimensional side of the Coin and then back out again, never attempting to do the rotating door thing to find a different facet of the four dimensional face. The shifting stations located at your origin and destination points did the rest. Both represented your own four dimensional side of the Coin. But you entered the six dimensional side at the origin station, and exited from the destination station. As far as the rest of your 4-D universe was concerned, you'd never left.

One aspect of shifting I found particularly interesting was its relation to E.S.P., or extra-sensory-perception.

By Ling's origin E.S.P. was an accepted fact, though still largely considered too impractical to be of much use.

Most accounts of E.S.P. throughout history had been little more than plain fraud, of course. But a small portion was real, and found to consist of fragmentary communications being transmitted and received via the same medium tapped by the Helpinger Continuum Bridge: the string/brane web.

There seemed to be something about all this related to ghosts, too. Mostly it was small buildups of energy which were then set off by purpose or accident to act like something akin to 'psychic bombs'. Once detonated, these charges could have effects on people within the local area ranging from barely perceptible, to intense, horrifying, or ecstatic events.

And yes: I couldn't help but try to relate all this to my experiences with Bridget. Both before and after her death.

By Ling's origin, correlations were being drawn between such events and many important moments in human history, such as so-called religious miracles, puzzling turnabouts in important conflicts and battles, and sudden changes in perspective on the part of certain critical players at some junctures.

Science had some proof that occasionally people would experience an awareness of events future (or past) as little as seconds (or as long as years) away, and up to thousands of miles distant. But these instances were largely random, with only a few cases involving close friends or relatives in real distress-- and so usually of no value to the person experiencing them.

One theory was that impromptu networks of human minds (perhaps sometimes including animals) could on occasion interact via the web network in six-dimensional space-- and even possibly across generations-- to provide such insights across spacetime to the few living entities receptive to such signals.

The tendency of the human imagination to frivolously expand upon such things, or misinterpret what had been experienced-- as well as the absolute randomness of such events-- rendered such signals very nearly useless for any conscious purpose.

There were scientists studying all this in 2483, trying to find a way to usefully exploit it. But for all the time and effort expended since my own century, the mainstream status of the thing seemed not much different.

Possibly related to the above, but more grounded in Heplinger Bridge physics, was the natural flow of information between universes. Just barely discernible as something more than noise, a wealth-- no, a torrent!-- of information appeared to flow constantly between our universe and countless others, on the six dimensional side of the cosmic Coin. But we hadn't yet deciphered it by Ling's origin, and so couldn't do much with the knowledge.

One possible cause of the Pagnew's current problem could be accidental materialization within a black hole. That is, with an incredibly bad stroke of luck, you could reappear in four dimensional space within a black hole. In which case you were virtually guaranteed to have a bad day. Because singularities like black holes were similar to short circuits in the scheme of things, as far as the cosmic Coin was concerned. The number one rule of shifting, inter-dimensional or otherwise, was to avoid singularities, as they skewed probabilities in utterly unpredictable ways.

So maybe dumb ass Arbitur had popped the Pagnew into a black hole, and caused the problem in the first place. Yeah, I know I shouldn't blame Arbitur like this. According to the rules, no one can predict where you'll pop into Realtime, unless you're shooting for an established station, and launching from its specially matched twin. In the case of dimensional shifting there's no way to know, period. So Arbitur couldn't truly be at fault in this manner; I'm just still pissed at the way he mashed my car, is all.

Something else which could have screwed things up for the Pagnew was an external force shifting the ship at the precise moment the Pagnew was initiating its own internally generated shift event. This would create a bubble-within-a-bubble, totally screwing up all manner of complex calculations and other stuff by the crew. In such a case there was no telling where the hell you'd end up, or even if you'd end up at all! The result could be a grade of 'Incomplete', like I got once at Tech. Only in the Pagnew's case, it'd be far more dramatic. Like an eternal STOP button on the tape recorder of life. Everything onboard might simply cease to change, and remain frozen in place forever, or until someone with a long beard and winged guards fluttering about pushed the PLAY button again. Heck: Ling and the rest of them could be frozen like this for a billion years, then suddenly resume where they left off when the PLAY button was pushed, never knowing the difference. And neither would anyone else. Because with the weird paradoxes possible with shifters, it appeared now the Pagnew could as easily rematerialize in the past as anywhere else, once it resumed its destiny. In other words, Ling could have been two billion years old when I first met her, and we'd neither one know the difference.

Ling's previous comment about an 'old Chinese woman sharing my bed' suddenly flickered through my mind. She very well could be the oldest Chinese woman ever! In this or any other universe.

But eventually I'd learn something still more mind-boggling about her. Agh!

[Once again I find myself somehow barred from digging into whatever future revelations are being referred to here. Of course, random access to the memory log likely would make it easier for me to cross-reference things and uncover flaws in general. So it's little wonder my unknown Machiavelli chose not to offer me such a privilege. Well, this serial unraveling was transferring the information from my weird implanted memories to standardly configured brain cells. So eventually I should gain a much better handle on this stuff.]

One implication of the way shifting worked was that during transport, for some measure of Plancktime you were everywhere simultaneously. No one could pick a location where you weren't, in some mathematical sense. In Realtime shifting this meant for maybe the very briefest of instants you were like God; omnipresent throughout all Creation. There was good reason to believe this held true for inter-dimensional shifting too-- in other words, for an instant you'd exist in all universes everywhere.

Of course, all this existing everywhere at once crap was precisely what could cause some of the problems outlined before. Because after the everywhere instant was over, your bubble (or 'probabilistic wave front' as certain people here preferred to say) collapsed into a single location. And this location could just as easily be inside a black hole as anywhere else.

This collapse to a single location occurred all the time. It happened when we shifted from room to room in the Pagnew. It happened when the ship itself shifted, whether through Realtime or dimension-wise. There were ways this collapse itself could be screwed around with. In some cases interference of various kinds, slightly out-of-tune shift generators, or quite a few other things could make your wave front collapse in an abnormal fashion. One consequence could be you'd divide like an amoeba, and there'd be two of you. Two Pagnews, two crews, two wrong man Stautes. Or a thousand! There was no iron clad limit on the number of duplicates which could be created from a single shift gone awry. Wouldn't that be a great cosmic joke? Take one shift, get a thousand G.W. Stautes to screw up your universe!

In light of the Pagnew's unexpected appearance in the past at my origin, it occurred to me that perhaps the flip-side of the Plancktime thing was true as well: that during shift transport you likewise existed at all times throughout eternity, within a certain region of Planckspace. At least under some circumstances.

Of course, I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea here: Planckspace is the tiniest region of space which can possibly exist in a universe. And Plancktime is the shortest period of time which can exist; so brief that even God himself would be obliged to shape his actions around it (if He's an integral part of the universe like many believe; there might be a loophole if He's a completely separate entity).

Remember those shifter stations left by the Pagnew at my origin? They were absolutely worthless except as Realtime shifters. Completely ignoring the elephant-in-the-room time traveling issue for the moment-- this meant those shifter stations could only be used for my return home if the Pagnew could pop into the proper universe again, first. It didn't matter if they appeared a million galaxies away from Earth; as long as it was the same universe, they could next do a Realtime shift directly into Sol system.

The first real trick was finding my home universe again. The second would be determining some way to return us to the proper spot in the timeline of that universe.

And both those jobs would be up to me.

What a laugh! On Earth, I sure didn't have the best sense of direction. Steve, you could drop him blindfolded by parachute into some trackless jungle somewhere, with orders to go straight to Timbuktu (wherever that is), and he'd do it. He needed no map, no familiarity with the area, no help of any kind. He just magically found his way from point A to point B.

Man, could I have used his sense of direction here!

Ling had outlined the hellacious navigation miracle the crew expected of me: *That depends on you, Jerry Staute. Our plan is for you to supplement your Signposts document, in order that we may chart our return course home. The proof you have done so will come from the success you have in charting us towards your own return, first. In some ways you are a hostage of history, Jerry. The mark you left in the records is now our guarantee you will lead us home.*

But what made them so sure I could accomplish such a feat? I'd asked Arbitur once-- because I personally didn't see how I could improve on a document I couldn't create in the first place.

Arbitur said it wasn't that they were sure. But there was good reason to have hope it could be done. For studies had shown human minds of my century-type had been their most physically capable of breakthroughs during youth, but often lacked the critical mass of knowledge and experience to do so until much later, even as their physical sharpness waned. This had been due to an appallingly primitive educational system as well as a worsening global environment at the time. Environmental toxicity accelerated and amplified the normal intellectual deterioration of aging from one end, while poor or nearly non-existent schooling reduced the window of opportunity from the other.

I had to admit they seemed to hit the nail on the head there, based on my personal 20th century experience.

So anyway, they figured by cramming me in my youth with an entire lifetime's worth of education (actually better, due to info much updated and expanded since my native 20th century), I'd have a fair shot at going beyond matching the Signposts doc, to actually improving upon it.

It sounded like a plan which might have had a chance to work-- if only they'd captured the right guy to start with.

But what could I do? I was stuck here until I succeeded or died of old age, whichever came first.

Actually, I was sort of itching to do something that resembled work anyway. I hated feeling useless, or like I wasn't at least trying to accomplish something.

And what the hell? There was so much interesting stuff in this place I was somewhat eager to learn more anyway.

What happened next? Contact

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