As the Waste-REL and its comet's-tail of space junk crossed into the fuzzynavel, it fell off the mission control LASAR scanners. It disappeared.
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This made Edgley very happy.
But he couldn't show it.
"Oh no," he gasped. "What happened? Did it blow up?" He could barely restrain his glee.
"No," said the guy in charge of the LASAR. "It ceased to read on the LASAR. It's gone, no debris, nothing."
"Bermuda triangle," croaked someone drinking coffee at the back of the room. Everyone ignored him.
"Well," said Edgley. "Keep scanning."
Edgley nearly skipped out of the control room. He patted the mission manager on the shoulder as he left, making the mission manager feel ever so slimy.
The board of directors was gathered in the boardroom, watching a wall full of data with no data in it.
"Where'd it go?" asked the Senator as Edgley entered.
"They're scanning for it now," said Edgley. "I sure hope they're okay." Then he smiled. "I'm sure everything's okay."
All eyes returned to the display. Where the Waste-REL had been, space was empty.
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The Waste-REL was flying at 21,504 kilometers per second, or 1.2 million kilometers per hour when it went through the fuzzynavel. There was no gas, or meteor bits or anything in the last few seconds before they went through the fuzzynavel, we know this because the Waste-REL would have been blown to pieces if it had hit a hydrogen atom at this speed. When they came out on the other side of the fuzzynavel, 8 hours earlier on the other side of the galaxy, they traveled into another particularly clean vacuum of space, which was more by design than merely serendipitous as they were to later learn.
Unfortunately, they were also followed by 170 tons of space junk, also flying at 1.2 million kilometers per hour. This had not been predicted by the alien being who organized the voyage of the Waste-REL through the fuzzynavel because, though he/she/it could scan across the cosmos, the fuzzynavel was 8 hours behind Earth time in this particular section of the galaxy. This was normally considered to be a mere technicality, but it did mean that every so often this kind of fuzzynavel could present you with a surprise. In this case the surprise was that, although they had a very good way to safely slow down the Waste-REL as it entered the region, they had no way to stop 170 tons of space junk from flying into the planet at 1.2 million kilometers per hour. Mostly because the process was automatic and one minute the planet was there and the next minute it was shattered by 170 tons of Earth space junk. It is useless to speculate as to whether or not the sole inhabitant of this delicate little planet, the person who attracted the Waste-REL through the fuzzynavel, meant to commit suicide, as so many have suggested in the ensuing years. His computer told us that he knew the risks and chose to contact Earth anyway, so there's no reason to feel all guilty about the death of "the visitor". It just happened as these things sometimes do.
It was disappointing, though, since this was "first contact" and we'd managed to kill him/her/it before we ever got a chance to say "hi" or anything.
However, the visitor's computer was still floating about in orbit around the remains of the planet because it was the device that had been waiting to slow down the Waste-REL but neglected to stop the space junk.
However, before discussing what happened when the crew of the Waste-REL met the computer that belonged to the Visitor who was killed by the space junk, we need to review what happened to the crew in the transformation/conversion fuzzynavel.
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They experienced what can only be called a high-colonic of their existence. They went in a bunch of messed up humans and they came out unmessed up. This is because the spotty dimensions can only be described as mess-free or mess-proof or mess resistant or however you want to interpret it; but the point is, you come out the other end of the fuzzynavel in the form you were meant to be in, based on the blueprint of, for lack of a better word, your soul. That meant that for Lyle and Donny and Verna-- they lost weight. This was one of the more immediately detectable differences. Lyle's skin cleared up too. Verna's eyes returned to normal but she walked into the wall afterward because she was still wearing the goggles. There were few detectable differences in Portia, Mickey or Ayame -- it's not like Mickey got a haircut or something. But there were differences, and those differences were based on their individual experiences inside the spotty dimensions.
Lyle had the most fun. He was bouncing around in a warm dark place for quite a while before he opened his eyes, or the equivalent of opening your eyes in the spotty dimensions. Then he realized that he was bouncing in a world full of big, billowy breasts. It was warm and loving and soft and pleasant and he just bounced around on these two and three-story-high breasts for the longest time. The universe was breasts no matter where you bounced, and it was just a really nice place to be and Lyle was glad that he was there and he really didn't care if he ever left, but if he did leave, he didn't care about that either. It was fun to bounce and flip and squoosh into all these lovely warm soft breasts. And then he was Lyle again, except he was on the other side of the galaxy, and he liked Lyle and he wasn't afraid.
The others had similar experiences, although they were utterly different. Mickey sat in a room. The room had only one chair. On the other side of the room sat an old man, but not a Boomer -- much older than that -- maybe 500 or 2000 years-old. The man sat naked on a cushion with only his long, white beard covering his private parts. He said, "hello, Mickey. I am your father."
Mickey looked at the man, and he did look a little like his father, but as if his father had aged dramatically --something his father had always tried desperately not to do.
Mickey's father was an actor; Jason Hummer was his stage name. His father and his mother had been poor when Mickey was a boy. There was no work for actors because live actors had all been replaced in movies, television and the Web by 3-dimensional characters, especially in porn. These were not sophisticated sapients like Jules. They had no intelligence of their own and only did what their masters programmed them to do, which was to look handsome and fight virtual bad-guys who were programmed to be bad. The stories were just as shallow and ham-fisted as always, but the audiences loved their favorite characters who never aged. The most famous of them all was Ray Tracing, the movie star whose programmers made billions from his series of noirish detective thrillers.
But one day Ray Tracing disappeared, the victim of a stealth computer virus designed by some sick and jealous actor who moonlighted as a computer programmer. If you've ever met a flesh and blood actor you know that this must have been a very badly deluded computer programmer and not an actual actor as programming activity is inherently time consuming and would have greatly interfered with mirror-time.
Nevertheless, someone made a killer virus that erased all variations of Ray Tracing from existence. This led to the making of the movie "Who Killed Ray Tracing" which, ironically, starred only real human actors since all the cyber-actors were in hiding. This meant that Mickey's father finally got work, playing the character of Ray Tracing. This made him a big star and Mickey's father did what every actor does when he makes it big as a movie or television star -- he left Mickey's mother smothered in debt and moved to Beverly Hills. It took her six years to get her ex-lover to admit paternity and that was only after her lawyer hired a guy to shoot Mickey's father with a blow-dart attached to a long string, extracting sufficient DNA to prove paternity. Only then did Mickey's kajillionaire father agree to buy the kid a pair of Keds once a year.
Worst of all, in order to distinguish themselves from artificial actors, human actors had to do the one thing that they could do better -- overact. Over the top, emotional, beyond-the-valley-of-the-soap-opera acting was the norm for these flesh and blood performers and over time it became impossible for these people to behave normally when the cameras were gone, especially since hidden security cameras were somewhat ubiquitous in this era, especially in public washrooms.
When Mickey's father finally tried to have a relationship with Mickey, he came into Mickey's life with such a demonstrative excess of passion that he was clearly full of bullfeathers and Mickey was too embarrassed to be seen with the guy. This was normal teen behavior but that was something Mickey's father didn't know, not really being a father but only playing one on the ‘Net.
This personal history had been fairly damaging to Mickey's psyche and although his mother had worked very hard to take care of him, and had loved him dearly (despite the fact that he was the spitting image of his movie-star father), Mickey had become a pheely geek. His mother had despaired of ever seeing Mickey make a life for himself. However, once Mickey turned 18, she felt she'd met her obligation and got hitched to a nice ob/gyn who really didn't want the teenager added to his condo. Hence, Mickey ended up in Donny's basement.
In order to get Mickey's personality to overcome this personal history of abandonment and reckless disregard for his own health or self-worth, Mickey would have needed a nearly infinite amount of therapy. But thanks to the marvelous healing power of the fuzzynavel, Mickey was able to experience an infinite amount of therapy in approximately seven seconds. Later he would swear it was much longer -- like eighteen seconds.
There is no way to explain what transpired between Mickey and the old man without filling up a couple more books and even that would only be an executive-summary. Suffice it to say that Mickey went from being a nice guy with a lot of problems to being a nice guy. This made his transformation almost undetectable to everyone else -- except Mickey. Mickey couldn't rightly remember what exactly transpired in the fuzzynavel himself, except to say that he had a change of heart towards a number of things and most importantly, unlike the rest of his generation, he stopped hating his parents or, for that matter, anyone else.
Verna's time in the fuzzynavel was spent punching people. She punched every kid she ever went to school with. She punched her mother, her father, her sister, her dog. She punched every astronaut she ever flew with. She punched the entire crew of the Waste-REL. She punched everybody she ever met and then punched them again for good luck. She got tired after a couple of months of punching and sat down, feeling much better and not a bit better at the same time. Then, for no reason she could clearly give you, she started kissing everyone she ever met and then, when she got to Lyle, about 20,000 kisses after she started, she stopped and kept on kissing. Lyle's kisses were very very very good and Verna decided that if she ever got out of the fuzzynavel she'd never ever stop kissing Lyle - and then she got out of the fuzzynavel, went looking for Lyle, walked into the wall and knocked herself out.
Portia, as an individual who had her act together, had always had an inordinate fear of not having her act together. Some of this was because her father was distanced and indifferent and some of it was because her mother was overbearing and hostile, but that was a perfectly normal upbringing in Portia's generation and she would have been an outcast among her peers if circumstances had been different.
Portia's main problem came not from her reaction to what was outside of her, but in how repulsed she was by what was inside of her. Portia spent a good deal of her time studying, working and sleeping trying to forget that she was Portia Summers. Portia Summers was lazy and full of anger and selfish and a spoiled brat and she didn’t want to have anything to do with Portia Summers. Unfortunately, everywhere Portia went, there she was being Portia. It could get you down.
Portia decided early on that if she was going to persist in being Portia Summers despite all attempts to become something else, she was darn sure going to be the absolute best Portia Summers that Portia Summers could be. She took aptitude tests that told her she'd be a good psychologist and that she'd thrive in a Human Resources Department because she was a people person, despite the fact that Human Resources departments treat people as if they were, you know, resources. So Portia became what the tests told her she'd be good at and, low and behold, she was good at it and this was the beginning of her adult life, same as the old life but with a paycheck and a condo and a fiancée who turned out to be gay. It's not like she was prejudiced or anything, it's just that this would be where she'd have drawn the line if she'd known.
Anyway, Portia's skinny, naked, stick body stood in front of a long mirror that expanded and contracted like a slowly beating heart. There was a low hum accompanying the slow mutation of the mirror as it changed Portia's reflection from skinny to chubby to skinny to pregnant to big-headed to big-feeted to big butted and back again. As Portia looked at the mirror, she realized that she wasn't really looking at Portia, just a reflection of something that didn't really represent who or what she was. As her body changed dimensions, it changed attire in the same slow rhythm. She was in a pants suit from work, blue jeans with no top, a bikini (pathetic, oo not so pathetic, pathetic, yuk, ooo), a prom dress, a bridal gown, another dress suit, cut-off shorts and a T-shirt -- each time she looked like a different person, each time she seemed somehow a different Portia. After what felt like many years of changes in which she started to morph into different trees and rock formations and planets and pebbles and hamsters, Portia began to feel quite good about Portia Summers and less bad about Portia Summers in the universe. She had a nice talk with a little elf woman named Heidi who took her to a wishing-well and gave her a bucket of water and they talked about what a nice day it was and how lucky they were to be able to throw snowballs and then "poof", she came out of the fuzzynavel. Portia felt like she'd been gone a very long time and that she was very very old. She glanced down to a reflective surface on the computer console and realized that she was Portia again and she was very glad because she had a great deal of nostalgia for being Portia.
Despite the fact that everyone has a different experience each time they go through the fuzzynavel, few if any beings ever undergo notably unique experiences in the fuzzynavel. Ayame and Donny's experience of the fuzzynavel was so unusual that it became news, or the equivalent of gossip in most of the galaxies that contained advanced sentient species. Ayame and Donny shared the Conversion/Transformation dream together. It was not known whether anyone had ever experienced anything of the sort before. Donny and Ayame could see, reach out and touch each other; experience sensation together. It's just that Donny couldn't figure out where he started and Ayame ended and neither could Ayame. For a very long time they didn't care because it felt so very, very good. Ayame was inside Donny. Donny was inside Ayame. Their hearts beat together. They thought the same thoughts. They were DonnyAyame or AyameDonny. They were more than just Donny Plus or Ayame Extra, they were DonnyAyameDonameAyonnyDayOnnAmey. It was as if they somehow held the key to what was missing in the other. Ayame had been crazed with ambition as a youth, demanding and unloving, seeking only her one true love: space flight and the adulation that would come from being among the best of the best. But achieving so much required her to be completely selfish, unaware of the needs of others and proud. Of course, the Japanese didn't have any Boomers, exactly, which made life for Ayame much easier than it was for her crewmates.
Donny had been loving but sensitive, capable but easily bruised. Donny was crushed by the exploitive cruelty of his teachers in engineering school, unwilling to make the grade in a competitive environment where the Boomers had all the jobs and even getting the chance to intern was based on violently aggressive kissing up. Donny wanted only to be left alone in lazy peace. Where Donny was weak, Ayame had been vital. Where Ayame was negligent, Donny was inspired. That which ate away at their spirits dissolved in the fuzzynavel and was replaced with that which nourished each other's life force. In the future, when Donny and Ayame made love, (which was what both of them would live for throughout the rest of their lives), they were transported back to the eternal seven seconds when they were one complete mind and spirit and gave each other the bliss of knowing no pain.
Next: The Alien
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