I woke up.

This was a bit of a surprise to me, and I laid there for a while, utterly still, eyes closed, trying to figure out if there'd been some kind of mistake and I'd somehow done something other than waking up after all. My mind...wasn't racing exactly, more sort of slogging through a painful, sticky marsh of dimly-remembered events.

Didn't help that my head hurt so, so much. The lights through my eyelids seemed to stab into my skull.

But I did remember being ready to die. That wasn't a sensation one quickly forgot, no matter how disoriented their last...however long that had been. It felt like hours, somehow. But that made no sense. I was going by suffocation, wasn't I? I was pretty fit, but hours was still a teensy bit beyond my grasp.

I tried to put it all together but things just didn't make sense. There was a missile. It'd been burning and sorta...flying next to me the whole time? Which meant I was either floating through the air as fast as a flying missile, or it was the world's slowest one. And, that put another harpoon in my recollection of it taking hours -- I remembered the missile clearly, it was a medium-range surface-to-air missile. It wouldn't have fuel to fly for more than a couple minutes.

Yet no matter how little sense it made, the memory wouldn't quit. I'd spent hours, slowly suffocating, moving from confusion to panic to incomprehension to acceptance. And here I was, still at acceptance. If it'd been a few seconds, I would almost certainly still be somewhere between confusion and panic, yeah?

Yeah.

So we had that all cleared up. It was pretty obvious to me by now that I knew nothing and that was pretty much it. Good talk.

Gingerly, I opened one eye to see if taking in my surroundings would help. I spent a few minutes carefully scrutinizing the area, puzzling out what I was seeing and what it all meant, what context it could give to the greater dilemma playing out in my mind. And by the end of it, I had reached the same conclusion again.

Closed my eyes, shut it down. I knew nothing. Good night.

I was determined to ignore what I saw out there because it confirmed what I felt like I already knew, that something in my head was terribly, terribly wrong.

Or, charitably, something outside was terribly, terribly wrong. I guess I could work with that. Seemed to me there was an explanation for that which I'd heard before, though I couldn't say I believed in it. Facing it as my new reality was kind of...unexpected. But hey.

I opened my eyes again and wondered if I'd actually not woken up, and this was what hell looked like. Not exactly what I expected, to be honest, but it sure as shit wasn't Earth.

The floor under me was aggressively, relentlessly flat. Sort of unnervingly so, in a way I didn't understand. It was like, no matter how I looked at it, I knew that it would stretch, perfectly horizontally, straight out to infinity. The horizon line of this shit wouldn't even be as flat as it was.

Not that there was one, because it ended only a few feet from me, as though the ink had just run out of whatever cosmic printer had been creating the stuff. It just faded away, more and more transparent until there was no floor, and sort of a semi-transparent geometric, almost-crystalline mess in between. How I could determine it's impressive flatness from just this, I didn't know.

And then there were walls. Most of them were simple, floating metal bars, just the suggestion of walls, but at the same time, fairly impassible looking. Like a fence more than a wall maybe. It was through those that I saw the flooring fading out to nothing. It was also through those that I saw the pipes, conduits, lines, tubes, and cables. Like someone had taken all the wiring and plumbing of a house and just hung 'em up in the air, threading in and out of the fence-walls.

To say nothing of the machines they connected. Brass. Lacquer. Polished wood. Golden things which spun, valves and gauges which flickered and bounced across value ranges completely unlabelled and unfathomable.

Oh, and while I was certainly anchored to the floor with what felt like perfectly ordinary gravity, a lot of these machines, pipes, cables, tubes, conduits, lines, and walls...they apparently were not. They drifted and bounced as though in zero-G, their hookups tethering them like leashes. Everywhere I looked, I found more and more impossible and bizarre things until my mind was completely satisfied that it had totally lost it.

And I just closed my eyes and sort of quietly pondered. Maybe, if this was hell, I was like, in Satan's boiler room or something. Hell was pretty hot, it'd make sense for him to...I dunno, run a TV off that latent energy or something. He probably got pretty bored dealing with the damned all day.

It was sad that this is what made the most sense to me at the time, but I think my mistake was in trying to make sense at all. It was obvious that sense and this place ran in different circles. I should just go crazy, and then it'd all be alright.

I smirked to myself as I sat up, despite the pounding in my head. When faced with something contrary to our reality, we either accept it or look away. Going crazy probably counted as the latter.

"Oh, you're up," a voice said, and I slowly, slowly turned my head to look in his direction. Sounded like a him, anyway, though in more of a backwards-upwards direction, which wasn't where 'him's typically hung out. But there he was, once I got over the aching making my vision swim with every time my blood pounded in my skull, above and behind me.

And by above, I mean literally standing on the ceiling. Perfectly ordinary-looking guy. Opposite gravity. Pushed his glasses up his nose just to show me how upside-down didn't work. Sure, why not.

I shivered. In everything else I'd taken in, I hadn't realized how cold it was out here.

He walked towards a doorway on the ceiling, and, upon passing through it, emerged through a door on my floor. I blinked at him, wondering a) how the hell that worked and b) how he'd crossed the fifty or so feet between the ceiling and floor in a single step.

And then mentally slapped myself again. I had to stop wondering at things. This made no sense, and I needed to accept that, or I really would go crazy.

"Hi," I said, rising, and holding my head. "Ow."

"Sorry," he apologized, and it sounded genuine somehow. He had a tablet in his hands which he clipped to a magnet on his waist, and a number of gadget-looking things on his wrists and ankles. Made me think of Karu a bit, how she liked to pack as much gear as she could into hanging off of her body. But while hers were obviously weapons or military-themed, his were more…

Well, some were unknowable. Many looked like just plain white boxes or panels, like they were supposed to be mounts for something or...or just buttons that existed for...I didn't know. I really had to stop wildly speculating.

But hey, he was wearing flannel and a lab coat. That was pretty normal.

"What are you apologizing for?" I asked.

"For your head injury. We could have gotten to you faster but...well...Aesa didn't think it was a priority. She wanted to secure the missile first. And I know why," he added, his voice pivoting from apologetic to defensive. "Rocket fuel doesn't just show up on your doorstep every day. And she knew you'd survive...and was right obviously…" He trailed off. "But, sorry."

"Uh. Thanks."

At no point did his explanation actually clear anything up, but I did get that there was more than one of them, and they had picked up the missile, and me. Of course, I didn't know where the missile and I had been, or where we were now. So that seemed like a good question to start with.

"Um, hard to say exactly," he said, checking a device on his wrist. "I could give you the serial dimension orientation, but that's pretty arbitrary. I could also tell you where in space but...again...I kinda doubt that your position in relation to the nearest pulsars would do much for you."

"So we're in space," I asked.

"Not...exactly, no. Space is what we might call it...if we were still in the same reality as Earth?"

"So we're in a different reality."

"...ah...no, not that either. Though, actually...let's just go with yes. Sure. Close enough."

"Okay. What do you call it?"

"A probability realm, maybe? I'm not exactly sure myself. We don't do a lot of talking. And I don't have to be an expert on it to live in it. Aesa understands it all, I think, but..."

I waited for him to trail back on again, but he didn't. "So, Aesa's the one who runs everything here, then?"

"Oh yes. Built the whole place. She's been trying to get it mobile for months now, but I think even she's reached her limits."

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"It."

"Yes. It. This. Where you currently stand."

"She built this?"

"Yes."

"This whole…" I looked around.

"Yes."

"Out of what?"

He shrugged. "Molecules. Cosmic radiation converted into mass. The occasional stop by Earth when nobody's looking."

"How does it...float...like that?" I asked, pointing at one of the machines now slightly spinning in the air.

"Oh. She built everything, even the gravity. I think she finds it convenient to have it going opposite ways sometimes. More things in the same room, with fewer need for portals."

I looked around again. I guess that made sense. Relative to everything else, anyway. I mean, it made zero sense, but that just kinda showed where everything else was. I decided to take a gamble and ask him another question.

"So...I'm not dead."

He smiled and laughed a little. "No, I'm afraid not. You were awfully close however. You were lucky to be stranded in such a slow and calm section of the void. Most of it would kill you instantly. Though you really should be dead, the radiation was rather intense, but you've not a burn or Geiger tick on you. You came from Earth, I assume?"

"Is there somewhere else I could come from?"

He shrugged. "Out here, can never be too sure. And with luck, your and my understanding of 'Earth' is the same, but you've already been lucky once, so--"

"Wait. The same? Meaning...possibly not the same? Meaning more than one Earth?"

"Well, not that we've encountered. But statistically, it's a certainty. Maybe just not around here, since we're still...well...again, hard to describe in terms even I understand but...let's just say this stretch of space is 'close' to Earth. It makes sense you wouldn't have gone too far. Hell, we don't go too far."

I just kind of boggled at him for a minute. How casually he could just talk about there being multiple copies of Earth with someone he'd just met. I guess that was probably the least interesting thing in the world, to someone who's floating space-home had multiple sets of gravity and portals in it. Did he even know how ridiculous he seemed to a normal person?

And wait, when did I start to qualify as a normal person again?

I also realized, neither of us knew each other's names, and if he was to be believed -- and this was by far the least unbelievable part of his story -- he'd saved my life.

"Um, so I'm Athan." I extended a hand, which he took and shook warmly. "Thanks for saving me, I think."

"Happy to do it. I'm Aledonis. Call me Al...and as I've mentioned, the other one is Aesa. She's working now, but if you stay a while longer, you can meet her, too. She probably won't be...thrilled...to have you aboard but…" he frowned. "Say, do you have any idea how you wound up here?"

I shook my head, and then held it until my blood calmed down. "Ow. Uh, no. I was just...I don't remember, things are such a mess in my head right now. I was...we were flying in a VTOL...I was talking to someone...that was Tem, I think…"

"Hmm," he said. "Just asking because, well, you're not the first we've found of late. Someone or something has started dumping people and things into the void. I was hoping you might have a clue."

"Others?" I asked.

"Most died," he said, his frown deepening. "But one or two lived...for a time. One was so badly...um...reconfigured, we had to euthanize him. It was horrid. But the other survived, we only sent him back a few days ago. Nice fellow. Lawyer."

Lawyer. The last word tripped memories which had been struggling to bubble up.

I blinked as the recent events lingered at the edges of the blackout I'd had. "God, it's...kinda...coming back. Exhuman. He kept saying...I am Justice."

"He's...Justice? Ominous." Al scratched his beard thoughtfully. Suddenly he stood up, as though hearing a dog whistle. "Sorry Athan, I've gotta skip off here, Aesa's calling. Um, feel free to rest here, or follow along--"

"I'll come."

"You sure? No rush. It'll be boring."

"No, it's cool. I need to...get my head straight."

He smiled warmly. "Well this isn't going to help with that at all, but here we go anyway."

He tapped a few buttons on his wrist and then I watched as a sky-blue egg, the edges of which seemed to be as solid as glass but as insubstantial as mist, like the edge of a rainbow on a waterfall, wrapped itself around him from the bottom. It wasn't until more entered my vision that I realized one had appeared under me as well, and I held my breath involuntarily as the shimmering, radiant blue consumed me.

Felt like nothing. Just the cold air of this place. I blinked a few times.

And then, as though I'd been taken somewhere else by Rito, it seemed the whole world was different around me. Another room, I figured out quickly. Darker here, more metal on the floor, more...uh...floating jellyfish-things swimming outside the walls. Exosuits, and a woman with a flaming red ponytail working on them.

"Number nine driver. Number two circuit. Fourteen two-point-two-two millimeter tri-head bolts. Six inches by twenty-two inches of synthetic weave. Eighty-two--"

She continued on, and Al began frantically scribbling himself notes on the tablet while rushing around the room, several times disappearing and reappearing on the walls or ceiling, or somewhere else entirely, possibly, while she just...kept going, her voice as flat and nonplussed as a computer. I waited several minutes for her to finish, and though Al kept dumping the parts she asked for on a metal cart near her, she seemed breathless as she went on.

Once the materials he'd brought reached some unknown critical mass, she began taking them and working, continuing her list all the while. At some point while she worked, he'd paused to put a jacket on her, her arms slipping through the sleeves without her work slowing in the least.

It was kind of insane. Like, you'd think that between AEGIS and Whitney working on computers and machines, or seeing Karu handling her weapons for maintenance and care, or hell, Lia's animation when she was on the phone with a friend, you'd think this wouldn't have been such a spectacle for me. But somehow, she just kept talking and working all at once, taking the parts exactly needed, putting them exactly in the needed places. I got in closer to watch, all memory of the pain in my head vanishing as I was captivated by the spectacle.

Her hands moved with precision and grace, never dropping a screw, never misaligning a driver, never struggling to press a component into place. And these components, they weren't like anything I'd ever seen. They were hand-made, each of them. So were the screws, I realized. So were the bolts, and plates, everything.

And I remembered what Al had just told me when I asked what she'd made this place out of. 'Molecules. Cosmic radiation converted into mass.' Somehow I'd understood that to mean the crazy sci-fi bullshit of this place was, not every fucking bolt.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little breathless. I'd been working alongside Whitney for long enough to develop an appreciation for craftsmanship and engineering, but this was just...well...perfect, almost. Just watching her work, seeing every part put into place and then secured with such precision, without a single wasted effort or stray movement, it was art. It made my body have a very literal visceral reaction I didn't quite understand. I found myself tense when she reached for something new, my stomach flipping when she finished with one part and I waited to see what would happen next. My mind burned electric with trying to understand what each piece was, what each meant, what the larger picture of this unbelievable engineering feat was that was unfolding in front of me.

There was a clang as she smacked a wrench into the chestplate and wheeled on me.

"Can you fucking not," she asked, her voice oozing revulsion.

"C-c-can I...what?" I stammered.

"Can you fucking not stand there mouth-breathing all over me like I'm some piece of meat for you to drool over?"

I tried to stammer a reply but my brain was stuck on engineering mode. I didn't understand her words, because I was an idiot. When I came here, I'd thought it hell. In watching, I'd somehow transcended to heaven. And now she was crashing me face-first into Earth.

"Oh, you're up," Al said, reentering the room through a sky-blue portal. "Aesa, please meet Athan, our guest."

"Ugh," she said, flipping her hair and throwing her wrench onto the metal cart, sending the carefully-lined up parts into disarray. My heart broke at seeing them go flying, and I took an involuntary step forward to bend down and pick up a stray screw before they lost it somewhere.

I met her gaze while rising, and wasn't sure I'd ever seen so much disgust in one place.

"Ugh," she repeated. "What are you standing there for? You think I owe you something because you picked up one of my pieces? Are you one of those white knights, who thinks every lady's just waiting to be saved from their own life?"

"W-no, I...just--"

"Let me be clear," she said, digging in her collar. I thought she was reaching for something in her cleavage, and that just made me even more confused, but instead she fished out a necklace with a ring hanging off of it. "I'm engaged. To Al. So that screw," she nodded towards the one trembling in my fingertips "is the only one you're gonna get from me."

I stood there, flummoxed and idiotic as she strode off, banging open a fridge, taking something, and then banging it shut again, before disappearing through a portal.

"She's really sweet once you get to know her," Al apologized. "She's just hungry. She's always crabby when she comes out of it. And um, you know. Women in engineering tend to face...a lot of...less-than-pleasant guys."

"It's cool," I said, putting the screw down, and once again picking up that I didn't understand the least thing here. "Whatever she thinks of me, the work she's doing here is just...wow. I have nothing but the highest respect for her, for that."

"She'll actually probably really like hearing that. Erm, once she...warms up a little more."

"To me?"

"...just in general. She's got a...temperature-dependent personality. It's...complicated."

I sighed. "Yeah it seems everything here is. Hey look, Al...I appreciate you saving me, and believe me, I just want to spend...well, a long time looking around and seeing everything...but I'm remembering that when I left Earth, it wasn't really in a good place. I think...I need to like...make a call or something and let them know I'm okay. Is there anywhere I can do that?"

He shook his head. "No. We can drop you off, but that's about it. And that's only when we converge with that probability, which Aesa's probably not going to want to do.

He jolted upright and checked his tablet with a frown. "Or...she wants to do it as soon as possible to get you out of here." He glanced up at me. "Lovely, accommodating girl, she is."

"Maybe I should. When would that be?"

"In a few hours. Maybe you'd like to join us for a meal until then?"

I realized I was starving. "Um, sure. If it's not too much trouble. Do you have...food…like...?

He laughed. "Yes, we have Earth food. One of the things we do have to swing by the planet to get. There was one time I thawed her out and she went on a rampage for fifteen minutes because we owned not a speck of chocolate in the whole place. Never made that mistake again."

"I can imagine. So um, do we eat here or…?"

"Let's give you and she another shot. I think you got off on the wrong foot." He smiled genially and...well...I can't say I disagreed with his conclusion, though I wasn't sure I was setting myself up for anything but a second wrong foot. But either way, another few hours and I'd be gone, so why not.

We set foot through the portal she'd disappeared into and into yet another realm of nonsense we went.