Scratch was fast asleep when the alarm went off.

When you made a lot of solo long-haul trips through space, that wasn't always a bad thing. Because while the auto-pilot didn't ever really have an abundance of decisions to make, every new and then there was an obstacle that hadn't been picked up by long range scanners. So “space debris ahead” was one of the alarms. A gentle sort of boop that got louder in urgency the closer the obstacle got. The ship had once gotten within a hair's length of a floating shipwreck after Scratch had spent ten minutes trying to snooze her bedside clock.

The low fuel alarm was a little more insistent, because you could survive solar flares, and scrapes with pirates, and even a bit of space debris that you didn't wake up in time for, but if you ran out of fuel in the middle of nowhere, you were pretty much fucked.

It was possible of course, to call for help. Every ship pilot was required to have a rescue beacon installed, with much more stringent rules for commercial vessels. Once you paid the remote location fee, the recharge fee, the tow fee, and the “you dragged me away from a really good book I was in the middle of” fee, it was far more convenient to just starve to death.

Scratch generally tried not to run out of fuel. She had set the alarm to go off when it was sitting at a quarter, because she knew if she left it any longer, she'd forget. There was nothing worse then dismissing a convenient fill-up spot because you couldn't be bothered stopping, and then not being able to find another one until you were running on fumes. Metaphorical fumes, that was.

For what felt like the first time in her life, Scratch had Planned. It wasn't a complicated plan, but it got her to a place where she could recharge the ship right before she had to take it through an interdimensional wormhole.

Not one of the big wormholes, that took you to the other side of the galaxy. At most these ones went about a hundred parsecs, and some enterprising young galactic explorer with no fucking creativity had called them inch-holes.

This particular inch-hole was bigger than Scratch thought it was going to be. To be fair, she had seen some tiny inch-holes. Rips in the space-time continuum that led to a shortcut through space, they only had to be big enough to fit the smallest part of your spaceship, and the rest got sucked up like the fourteenth jello shot of the night at a stranger's birthday party.

Scratch sort of felt like she'd spent the night at someone's birthday party. She wasn't hungover, but she had slept horribly, and the dry, circulating air in the ship had made her very thirsty.

The ship in question was small as far as beaters went. It could fit one person comfortably, two cozily, and four if you didn't need to maintain a good relationship with any of them. It was unnervingly easy to get away with murder in the middle of space.

Doubly so, on the other side of the inch-hole. Scratch had heard many stories of people and ships that had straight up disappeared in the fourth dimension. The going theory amongst travellers was that there were some higher dimensional beings that lived there. Whether it actually was the fourth dimension, she had no idea, but it was easier to say that than “weird, fucked up liminal space that makes it possible to travel long distances, and also maybe aliens are there.” The fourth dimension was difficult to navigate at the best of times, and Scratch was sure it would have been easier if the ship had a fully functioning navigation system. Or if she had graduated flight school. Both of those options would have been real helpful.

As it was, Scratch had to rely on some seat-of-the-pants flying, and more than once, she had taken the wrong exit and had to loop around another twenty-five thousand light years or so. This time she'd picked up a third-party mod for the system that had promised to make things a little easier. This would be its first field test.

This inch-hole was about half a parsec across, and could have taken the entire Ceres Empire Fleet through it without even coming close to hitting the sides. In fact, if it weren't in such a bad spot otherwise, Scratch was sure there would have been some kind of base in this system. There were no planets, and therefore nothing to colonise, so the only stellar infrastructure was about a half dozen driver-reviver stations. Well, pilot-reviver stations, but that didn't rhyme and was therefore also a terrible name.

The closest station was automated, for which Scratch was grateful. She had no interest in talking to anyone right now, because it was about the last true alone time she would get for months. Plus, there was always the risk of blowing your cover when you talked to people. Instead, she hooked her ship up to the energy generator, just for a top up. She didn't know a goddamn thing about the science of it, but apparently it pulled a kitchen sink of sources from the surrounding space, and converted it into…something. It kept her going, anyway, and that was the important thing. To get a full charge, the ship would have to stay plugged in for about twelve hours, which meant that Scratch had some time to kill.

The name on the ID she used to check in to the station was Vivalda Lee. Not her actual name, of course, but that name had been wiped from every record in existence, courtesy of a tech whiz

friend that Scratch had never actually met in person.

Fania had been responsible for saving Scratch's ass on a multitude of occasions, and all she asked in return was a series of abstract and increasingly bizarre favours. Last year, Scratch had filled out a series of surveys under several different aliases, and she still had absolutely no idea why. When Scratch pictured Fania, she usually pictured some cool badass sitting behind a bay of holographic monitors in a room with impractically poor lighting.

In the driver-reviver station, there was a small kitchen, a bathroom, and a couple of sleeping capsules. The kitchen wasn't as big as the one that Scratch had on the Theseus, but looked like it was in much better condition. Less likely to cause explosive decompression in any case. Scratch had only had the oven for a couple of years, but she'd gotten it from an estate sale of someone who had died in mysterious circumstances, and there was still the off chance that it might kill her.

While the kitchen itself was nice, the food stores were woefully inadequate. Based on the maintenance schedule, the last time it had been restocked was almost a year ago. Not a lot of people visited this particular station apparently.

Scratch brought over a few things from her own galley. Salt and pepper at the very least. Salt and pepper lasted forever, and there was zero indication that there had ever even been any at the station. A crime against the very essence of culinary appreciation in her opinion. She had been purposefully running her own supplies low; planets like Serendipity liked to squeeze as much money as they could out of people who couldn't work the system. Read: people who couldn't afford to bribe their way out of the problem. The last thing Scratch needed was to get charged import tariffs on a fully stocked pantry.

Cacio a pepe would not have been her first choice for a space-cooked meal, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

At the very least, the view was nice. the station had a large bay window looking out over the inch. hole, a great, swirling purple thing that was a door into the unknown. The backdrop was a sea of mostly black with scattered points of white. This part of the galaxy was a little lacking in landmarks.

There was a great loneliness to the whole thing. But, Scratch had found, you could be just as lonely in a bustling city, people all rushing to no place in particular, or on a packed space station in the heart of the empire, a melting pot of all the history that had come before it.

Sometimes you needed company, if only for a night.

In lieu of company, Scratch opted for souffle. She'd had no luck with it on previous attempts, but she knew that her oven was wildly inconsistent when it came to temperature. There was no guarantee that a driver-reviver oven would be any better, but at least it probably hadn't come from an estate sale.

So. Melt butter. Temper egg yolks. Whip egg whites. Beat in sugar. Fold in egg and butter mixture. Watch it all collapse in the oven.

Scratch swore. She didn't even bother to eat this failure. It was no longer about the desire to eat souffle she would conquer this stupid fucking dish if it killed her. How dare all those online recipe blogs call it foolproof.

Once she had cleaned up after herself, Scratch checked out the sleeping capsules. Once again, the pods were smaller, but nicer than the ones she was used to. They had full light blocking, and optional ambient noise, and even adjustable gravity for all these people who were used to low-g conditions or wanted to check off an item on their bucket list.

Given how badly she had slept the last night, tonight's sleep should have been supremely restful, and yet Scratch was hounded by dreams that she could not remember when she woke up. It wasn't uncommon, after spending months alone in space. There was a reason that the Ceres Empire Health Guidelines for interstellar travel recommended at least two crew members at all times, but ideally three or more. Scratch was lucky she hadn't started hallucinating.

On the other side of the inch-hole, she would have to give JD a call, or failing that, literally anyone who might feasibly pick up the comm. Heck, she'd even pretend to think about setting new hydroponic lights installed just to talk to Reggie.

At about eleven in the morning (Scratch's body clock standard time), the ship finished charging. She'd showered, and brushed her teeth, and even left a review in the "How Did We Do" comment box on a tablet by the airlock door.

She sort of wished she hadn't given it four and a half stars and a smiley face after finding out that the entire experience had cost her almost five hundred stilbits. About four-fifty of that was to charge the ship, so it wasn't as outrageous as it could have been, but it was the principle of the thing. There was a reason that so many people could never afford to leave the planet they were born on. Space was mostly filled with the well-off, and the people that had managed to find off-world jobs. Service jobs and manual labour jobs mostly. The eighty percent that couldn't be taken over by machines and were thus instead given to people that were considered expendable.

That was one of the reasons, at least, why the other driver-reviver stations had employees. The other reason was so that there was someone around to call the cops.

Scratch had tried to dine-and-dash a driver-reviver station a grand total of once, and had spent seventeen days in a shitty asteroid jail cell as a result. Not the first time, and definitely not the last, but these days she at least remembered to use an alias. 

In any case, she wasn't doing all that badly, financially, on account of the Galaster heist. It was a heist that should have left her a millionaire, but since the person that knew the fence had gotten straight up incinerated by the laser grid, Scratch had offloaded the loot as quickly as humanly possible. She had then also made a few ill-advised bets to turn her measly hundred thousand into something more substantial, and ended up losing most of that, too. The few thousand that was left would be more than enough to get her to Serendipity to pick up the next paycheck.

Scratch couldn't deny the relief she felt at seeing five green bars on the energy meter of the dashboard. To run out of gas in the fourth dimension would be Bad News.

The inch-hole pulsed invitingly, and wow, Scratch really could have picked a better way to phrase that in her head. She wasn't sure if it was her imagination or not, but the pitch of it seemed to change. Like if it were singing it would have been in a different key.

Probably fine. Space did weird shit all the time, and it usually didn't kill you. Scratch had definitely gotten caught in her fair share of space-time anomalies. It was just something that came with the territory of being on the frontier of space exploration.

Even if this did turn out to be something that was going to kill her, it would probably be quick.

Scratch engaged the manual navigation and took the ship forward. Once she was in there, she would let the ship find the right exit. Hopefully that third-party mod was worth the money.

She didn't notice the problem right away. On her first time through an inch-hole, Scratch had been in awe. As a grubby, poor kid living in the slums of Karsis City, she never could have imagined setting foot in a spaceship, let alone a higher dimension.

The dimension itself was mostly imperceivable by human eyes. JD had tried explaining it to her once, but the experience had left Scratch even more confused and frustrated. If there was a reason then, for the multitude of shapes cutting in and out of the path ahead of her, then, she didn't know what it was. Probably something complicated and sciencey.

The idea was, an experienced pilot could expertly navigate through the labyrinth of flying shapes to the inch-hole on the other side. Really, spaceship technology had improved enough in recent years that the navigation system could find the right exit point, and even mediocre pilots like Scratch (as well as automated shuttles, etc) could make their way through. Sometimes your navigation system had been hit by so many viruses that you needed a third-party mod.

That was how it was supposed to go, at least.

The ship was moving slowly enough that she had gotten out her comm screen, and it wasn't until Scratch looked up from her shitty fruit-collecting game that she realised she was not in a fourth dimensional tunnel of miniature wormholes, but rather in an endless sea of white, not an exit in sight.

'Well, fuck,’ she said.

Scratch threw the ship into reverse and gunned the engine, which was just about the worst possible thing that she could have done. In fact, Scratch was sure that it was one of the first sentences in the Pilot's Handbook: "Do not attempt to reverse out of a space-time anomaly, you will fuck up your ship."

She couldn't check if that were true, though, on account of the fact that she had lost her Pilot's Handbook while doing a barrel roll over an active volcano on Tarsus. Moral of the story, don't keep the windows down if there's even the slightest chance of getting chased by the people that wanted to kill you. In any case, she had fucked up the ship so many times already that another engine replacement would just be a typical Tuesday.

Unsurprisingly, the engine spluttered and died. It was very nearly a short-circuit, but Scratch was pretty sure that it had just stalled. In any case, she didn't try again, because regardless of how common it was, she definitely couldn't actually afford it.

Instead, she looked out over that endless sea. Definitely not what it was supposed to look like, and there definitely weren't any inch-holes that led to the other side of the galaxy. 

In short, she was fucked.

It wouldn't even be a fast death. There was enough food and water on the ship that she could stay alive for almost a month before wasting away, even if she would mostly be eating eggs for that time. The bigger problem, now that she thought about it, was life support. If there was no breathable atmosphere out there, then she had about four days before she would suffocate, since the ship's life support system didn't function properly unless the engine was running. On the whole, not ideal. Scratch had too many things she wanted to do in life to die here.

She wanted to see the Night Market on Ebos, a city on a tidally locked planet that never saw daylight. They had some of the best street food in the galaxy according to about six of the food blogs that Scratch followed, and there was really only a thirty percent chance of coming down with Night Madness. Plus, there was the thousand stilbit a plate restaurant at the top of one of the Everlight Towers in the spiralling cities of Arkanda. It was three hundred stilbits even just to go to the lookout, being that the Everlight Towers (and the Spiralling Cities) were built on floating platforms just above the raging storms of gas giants. The views were reportedly spectacular, and it was one of the only restaurants in the galaxy to have five Michelin Thruster Stars.

A grilled cheese also wouldn't have gone astray.

Scratch would get none of these things if she didn't get out of this place, and she wouldn't get out of this place without figuring out what was going on, and that wouldn't happen unless she went outside and took a look.

So there was a plan, of sorts. Not a great plan, but a plan nonetheless.

First things first, check the "will this place kill me?" screen. It was the most basic model, after all what was the point of a whole bunch of scientific data that she didn't understand. All she needed was a ''sure go for it" or a "only if you want to die horribly". The third option was "might be okay if you put on a survival suit", but any place where she needed a survival suit was not one that Scratch wanted to fuck with. What if she tripped and shattered her helmet?

Today, the screen said "sure, go for it," which was a pleasant surprise. Maybe there was someone looking out for her after all. The Patron Saint of Wrong Turns, or something like that.

It was the Patron Saint of "Getting off Your Ass and Doing Something," though, that got Scratch out the airlock door. Not always a patron saint that was on her side, but they were there when it counted.

The ground was solid. The fact that there ever was a ground to stand on was unexpected. It certainly wasn't something that she had come across in this dimension before. Normally, solid ground would have been a huge problem, what with ships flying through there all the time.

Maybe this was a different dimension altogether, beyond the fourth dimension. Maybe she had died in her sleep at the reviver station and was actually on her way to the afterlife. Hopefully not, though, because this place looked boring as shit.

Boring, but still possibly incredibly dangerous. Who knew what kinds of three-dimensional objects were going to appear out of nowhere. She was pretty sure that was how it worked. Or, hell, maybe even fifth-dimensional shapes encroaching into the fourth-dimension. That would have been something to write home about.

Or her way out the door, Scratch had grabbed her gun from the little nook by the airlock that also had her spacesuit, and her wallet, and her vape pen. She didn't think she'd need the wallet, but the gun was always a good precaution to take. She didn't like to use it on the ship, because of space, but it was always handy to have on the ground, even just to win a game of chicken. It had only gotten her shot once before, which felt like pretty good odds.

Scratch had never played chicken with a whole other dimension before, but there was a first time for everything.

'Hello?' she called out, and felt like the galaxy's biggest dumbass for doing it. It wasn't like this was a birthday party, with all of her closest friends and family waiting behind a tesseract to surprise her. It would have been a very disappointing birthday party for anyone. Still probably more fun than Scratch's last birthday, her thirtieth, which she had spent being hung upside down by her ankles, and not even for recreational purposes.

There was, as suspected, no-one waiting behind fourth dimensional objects to surprise her. If there had been cameras anywhere, she might have considered that someone was trying to humiliate her for their Deep Star channel. 

Something flashed in the corner of her eye. Something enormous and serpentine. She turned to see it properly, and there was a split second where she couldn't see anything at all, and then, the field of whiteness seemed to resolve into something she could not even describe, let alone comprehend.

The only thing that came to mind was that it was like getting a hole drilled into the skull, which wasn't exactly a visual sensation at all. Fortunately, Scratch had never been on the receiving end of a drill to the skull, but she was certain that there were no shortage of people out there that would relish the opportunity.

A god-awful, mind-breaking screech rent the air. Scratch's eardrums burst, and her head throbbed, and blood gushed from her eyes and nose. But, just as quickly as it began, it stopped. Hands shaking, she raised her gun and aimed it at the sea of nothing. She wiped the blood from her eyes, swearing. Still nothing. Part of her wanted to loose a couple of shots just to relieve her frustrations. Or hell, there might have been some creature standing there that was invisible, or outside of the visible spectrum. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the serpentine flash again, and this time fired without looking.

Nothing happened. Whether or not Scratch had even hit her target, she had no idea. If she hadn't, it probably wasn't the gun's fault. The gun hadn't been cheap, because the thing about being in outer space was that when fifteen centimetres of hull was between you and explosive decompression, you really didn't want a bullet to go those fifteen centimetres. Of course, she could have just bought an energy based weapon, but this was so much more satisfying, assuming you had something to shoot at.

There was a loud rumbling sound, and a pillar burst into empty space. Trigger finger still far too itchy, Scratch fired again, and the bullet missed the pillar by a very wide margin from a very short distance. Okay, so she wasn't a very good shot.

The specific contraption that evolved onto the pillar was not one that Scratch had ever seen before, but she assumed it was some kind of telephone. There was a receiver with a spiral cord, and a keypad with physical buttons. Physical buttons was one of those customisation options that were ungodly expensive but most people opted for anyway, because you only had to crash your ship into an asteroid once while changing a radio station to never want to do it again.

In lieu of any other option, Scratch picked up the receiver and held it to her ear. She'd watched enough historical dramas to know how to do that much. The voice in her ear was a woman's, and Scratch recognised it almost immediately. It was the same automated voice that they used in the elevators on Praxis Station, telling you what level you were on. Probably other elevators, too, Scratch figured, but Praxis was the only place with elevators that Scratch had spent a considerable amount of time at.

‘...we apologise for the delay, one of our operators will be with you shortly. While you wait, why not explore what our holding room has to offer.’ Scratch hung up. She had no desire to be on hold for four hours waiting for someone to help her find a way out of here.

The holding room, as far as she could tell, had a whole lot of nothing to offer. There was the pillar, there was the shitty broken down ship that Scratch had flown in on, and then a single door that materialised out of nowhere in much the same way that the pillar had, as though something was reading her mind.

Scratch was about fifty-fifty on the outcomes of opening strange doors. On the one hand, she'd once found an unlocked door in Karsis City that led to the security room of a local storage place. The storage unit that she subsequently broke into had nothing but old rugs in it, but that was her own fault for not picking a good key. On the other hand, she had also once walked in on a poker game being run by some local mobsters, and had almost gotten a bullet to the back of the head in an alleyway for her trouble. Like it was her fault that she was on the shitlist of half the gangs in this quadrant.

More than anything else, Scratch opened this door because there wasn't exactly much else to do. Other than sit around and twiddle her thumbs until the extra-dimensional aliens got bored. There was nothing on the other side. Just a great, empty whiteness again.

Until there wasn't.

It started as a point of orange light in the distance, the air (was there even air here?) surprisingly warm all of a sudden. The orange light exploded tenfold, and Scratch fell backwards, landing square on her ass. ‘Fuck,’ she said. There was very little padding there, and she would almost certainly have a bruise by the following morning. The orange glow faded to black, a deep, inky nothingness that was slightly more comfortable than the white. It wasn't until Scratch saw the pinpricks of light popping up that Scratch realised what she was looking at. She shut the door. Today was not the day for forced existential crises.

Nothing else appeared in the sea of whiteness. The phone was still there on the pillar though, so Scratch went over and picked up the receiver again. '...please be assured that your call is important to us…’

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She hung up the phone.

Okay, so maybe she could watch the beginning of the universe a little longer while she waited. Maybe she had to hang around and watch until something important happened. It wasn't like she had anything else to do, except maybe go through the pantry and find all the out-of-date food. It was something she had been meaning to do for a while; there was definitely some stuff in there that had expired in 3073.

Scratch opened the door again, but this time, it didn't look out into empty space. Wherever this was, it was planetside, and the sun was shining. Two suns, actually, which narrowed the options down somewhat. Of course, Scratch didn't need the sunsto narrow it down, which was fortunate, because she was godawful at planetary navigation and geography. Without star charts and guidance systems pinging off of the closest nexus points, she would have accidentally flown right into a black hole by now, or driven into the wrong neighbourhood. It was not a particularly helpful habit.

Once, Scratch had gotten caught in a geomagnetic storm and spent the next two weeks looking for any recognisable spacemark. In any case, all of that was moot, because Scratch actually recognised the place with two suns. It wasn't the quality of the suns that stood out to her, even though both were beautiful in their own starry way. No, she recognised the place that the suns were shining down on. It was an enormous arena, looking down onto a racetrack. You couldn't tell from this vantage point, but the crowds would be filled with people dressed to the nines, all in their fanciest hats.

The Dragonsburg Racecourse. Scratch had been (and been kicked out of) there several times. This was a place where all of the food had been imported from Amarand. No shitty synthesiser food for these trillionaires. Pâté, and caviar, and free-flowing ten-thousand stilbit a bottle champagne which were frustratingly difficult to steal. Any single horse racing at this particular course would have cost five million minimum just to purchase and no small amount to bring it up to racing standard. Scratch had lost a lot of money at this racecourse, and many similar ones besides. She had lost a lot of money gambling in general, really, but the system worked, and one day she would come out on top.

There was something a little weird about this whole situation though. Well, weird beyond the idea that she had opened a random door on a pillar in the fourth dimension and it was showing something many hundreds of light years away. Though it sounded like a radio not quite tuned to the right station, and also wrapped in a blanket three or four rooms over, Scratch could just about hear the commentary. She hoped this wasn't some puzzle that these interdimensional creatures needed her to solve, because they would be waiting a long time for her hearing to magically restore itself. As it was, she caught about one in six words.

“Race” was of course an easy one, and "jockey”, and as much as she hated to admit it,”scratch” came up a couple of times as well. It was always a bit of a dickpunch when the horse you'd put all your money on got scratched. It wasn't where the name had come from, but it had happened often enough to be ironic in a very painful sort of way.

The sound clarified all of a sudden, though Scratch could still only hear it in one ear. “...a beautiful day here at Dragonsburg, watchers and punters alike very excited to see the race debut of celebrated scion Jigsaw.”

Scratch's heart skipped a beat. Jigsaw, scion of Duchess, had been born…two weeks ago. Less, even. Scratch had lost about a thousands stilbits by picking the wrong date. The horse wouldn't be ready to race for at least another two years. Now this was a door she could get behind. If only she could figure out the date, and stick around long enough to see the placing, in two or three years, she could make millions.

The door slammed shut. 'Oh, come on!’ Scratch said. ‘Really? You make me spend ten minutes watching the birth of the universe, but I'm not allowed to see one race?’ At best, she could maybe put a bet on Jigsaw's first race being at Dragonsburg, but there was hardly likely to be any real money in that kind of bet. First races being at Dragonsburg was something of a tradition, even if it was just one of the regular weekly races where no-one bothered to wear a fancy hat. Scratch hadn't noticed the attire of the crowd, she had gotten a door slammed in her face before she'd thought to pick up on those details.

What the fuck kind of good was getting detained by interdimensional beings if they weren't even going to let you take advantage of the future? Place a few bets, make enough money to buy all the fancy hats she could have ever wanted. But no, apparently that wasn't what these micromanagers wanted.

Starting to get very annoyed by the whole situation, Scratch returned to the phone. She was determined to give the voice on the other end a piece of her mind. Even if it in no way helped the situation, it would be very cathartic.

‘…we are experiencing a high call volume, please accept our apologies for any unforeseen delays. One of our operators will be with you shortly.'

‘How about someone pick up now?’ Scratch said, her voice almost on the edge of a yell. She almost immediately regretted it. She'd never been a yeller (well at least not in day to day circumstances) and frankly, it felt uncomfortable. In her experience, there were very few situations in which yelling helped, and a great deal many where it made things actively worse. And yeah, okay, maybe she'd also had some bad experiences with yelling.

There was no response. Scratch sighed, and hung up. Well, maybe it was third time lucky with the door. Maybe she would open it, and it would lead out to a very nice jazz bar complete with an ungodly expensive cocktail menu and enough cigar smoke that you could have been in a chimney factory. Maybe there would be an attractive older woman there who adored jazz, and was familiar enough with the saxophone to have very dexterous fingers. One could only dream. 

Unfortunately, Scratch had no such luck. It was space again, she thought, but the kind of space you got sometimes when you came out the wrong inch-hole and were smack dab in the middle of the gap between two galaxies. Just an utterly desolate, empty dark a few million light years wide. Not to mention, it was fucking freezing.

Somewhere, Scratch had a very nice pea coat that she had thrifted from a rich, lonely widow's wardrobe. Not her proudest moment in life, if she were to bother ranking them. Actually probably somewhere in the bottom five between “stole a girl scout's cookie money” and “tried to con some impressionable youths into joining a fake cult.” She liked to think that her crimes were slightly less assholeish these days, or, at the very least, she was stealing from people that probably deserved it. ln any case, the coat was probably back on the ship, maybe hiding at the back of the closet, or in a storage trunk in the cargo bay. Either way, not much use to her here.

The end of the universe held about as much appeal as the beginning did. Scratch would be long dead by the time that happened, a billion and whatever years in the future. Not her problem and therefore something she did not care about. She shut the door, and returned to the phone. The definition of insanity, she had heard, was to do the same thing over and over expecting different results. This was of course nothing like that, because Scratch was at least getting slightly varied outcomes with each thing that she did. At least she wasn't stuck in a time loop, thank god.

The message, this time, was a little different. The voice was no longer automated-still a recorded message, but baby steps. Its options were unlike anything that Scratch had ever heard on a call centre line before.

'For the meaning of life, please press one. For absolute knowledge, please press two. If you would like to opt out of this experience, please press three.’

Faster than she had ever done anything in her life. Scratch pressed “three.” She was sure there were people out there that would have pressed one or two, but not her. If there had been an option for tips and tricks in making a souffle that didn't collapse, she might have picked that, but otherwise, all she cared about was getting the fuck out of here. She had places to be, and people to do.

It wasn't until it stopped, suddenly, that Scratch realised that there had been a buzzing in the back of her head. She was so used to the constant tinnitus that the absence of that noise was far more noticeable than the noise itself.

She clicked her fingers next to her left ear. It made a sound, but it was a muted sound, which was normal, on account of the fact that her left ear was fucked. The right ear seemed fine.

The receiver, still in Scratch's hand, seemed to grow soft. She dropped it, and watched as the entire ensemble transformed into a person. A woman at least twenty years older that Scratch, with dyed green hair with about six weeks worth of greying roots, wearing skintight jeans and a leather jacket. Her hand, which, thirty seconds ago had been a phone receiver, was holding a clipboard. Maybe she was about to get her hot cougar after all. The woman was unfamiliar to Scratch, and, while objectively attractive, didn't give off the Vibe. The outfit was too nice to be someone she had grown up with, and Scratch tried to keep her distance from people carrying clipboards as much as possible. She didn't have the time, the patience, or the money to talk about the environment with anyone.

‘Uh,’ she said. 'No offence, but who are you and what the fuck is going on here?’

So maybe that was a little bit rude, but frankly, Scratch felt that it was justified. She'd been taken here against her will, and then put in the waiting room for half an hour.

‘It's been less than fifteen minutes,’ the clipboard woman said. She seemed to be writing something on the clipboard, but in the way someone would if they had never actually used one before - holding it horizontally, and just drawing straight lines. ‘Our scans indicate that this is a person that is important to you.’

‘Well, your scans are wrong, I've never seen this person in my life.’ The whole "reading her thoughts” thing was another matter altogether, and Scratch didn't want to argue about it, because she suspected that an argument would keep her here a lot longer.

The woman said nothing, but all of a sudden, the creepy white waiting room got sucked away like someone had an industrial, planet-sized vacuum cleaner. Scratch tried to close her eyes, but found that she couldn't, and in the corner of them, the fucked-up interdimensional wormserpent(?) burst through the changing scenery.

And then everything stopped. 

Scratch was sitting down, even though she knew that it hadn't been her own doing. The chair was hard, and metal, and very familiar.

She was in Karsis City. in what could have generously been called a food court. There were a couple of shitty old synthesisers on the walls with fingerprint locks on them that had long since been jailbroken. Not allowing people to get more than one fifth of their daily food requirements from synthesisers in this part of town just ended up with people starving. One of the many reasons that Scratch had gotten out of there as quickly as possible, and hadn't been back in over ten years.

If that hadn't been enough to tell Scratch that she was experiencing a simulation, then the fact that she was sitting across from her younger self certainly would have.

Twenty-year-old Scratch was still harbouring under the delusion that she had a chance in either the culinary or the criminal industry, not knowing she would crash out of both. Twenty-year-old Scratch wore her long black hair in a braid instead of a half-ponytail, and her flat nose had only been broken once.

Twenty-year-old Scratch also still went by her real name, and never, under any circumstances, would have eaten something like buttered toast at a Karsis City food court. Maybe in the privacy of her own shoebox, but never here.

That would have been an indicator on its own, but the fact that this fake Scratch was using a knife and fork (badly) to eat said toast really drove the point home.

'Can you pretend to be someone else please?' she said. Then, looking around, 'And maybe be in a fake place that's a little less miserable?’

The bar was not particularly high. Scratch was almost impressed, then, when the scenery changed, and she was instead sitting in a rather fancy looking sitting room. Antique furniture, expensive out lining the walls, the whole shebang. Instead of toast, the figure was now going to town on cucumber sandwiches, and had taken on the form of an old woman that Scratch had once tried to swindle.

"Tried" being the operative word there. Scratch had spent sir months trying to convince Daphne Featherstone that she had a long-lost grand-daughter that looked nothing like her, only to chicken out at the last second and almost get the shit kicked out of her by a pensioner. Not Scratch's proudest moment; cane bruises were nothing to fuck with.

She had thought she was free and clear of the people she knew being aware of her most embarrassing moments, but apparently there were aliens (??) watching at all times.

'Okay, this is worse,’ Scratch said. ‘Why are you only looking at the worst parts of my life? Can't we go back to the racecourse?’ The racecourse that was totally only chock full of really positive, happy memories. She had definitely never bet her entire savings on a horse that gassed out half a klick in, why would anyone think that?

'Our scans indicate that this is a formative moment in your life on which you reminisce frequently.’ The words sounded strange coming out of Daphne's mouth, but not nearly as strange as the fact that she was drinking tea without her pinky finger sticking out.

'Reliving my top ten most humiliating experiences before bedtime is not "reminiscing",' Scratch told the alien, a little exasperated. ‘Think quality over quantity.’ Someone needed to give these guys some refresher courses on human psychology.

‘I see.' Fake Daphne brought out the clipboard again. 'Previous subjects have not indicated this. I will now attempt to locate a high quality memory.’

Scratch had no idea who their "previous subjects” had been, but wow, they really had to work on their hiring diversity if it was all arrogant, square-jawed, space hero types that had never had an embarrassing moment in their lives. Or like…the humiliating moment when they realised that their skin was too clear, or their eyes too blue. Terrible.

In any case, the invasive, interdimensional alien stared at her, and Scratch knew that her memories were being scanned again. She wasn't exactly pleased about it, but it wasn't as though she could stop an all-powerful, all-knowing, advanced lifeform from doing whatever the fuck they wanted. She couldn't even get the people she was friends with to do what she asked them to do.

The old woman gave a satisfied sort of smile. Hopefully she had found a happy memory, or at the very least not an actively unpleasant one.

Colour swirl, scene change, etcetera, etcetera. This time Scratch was in the dining cart of a train, with a very attractive older woman sitting across from her. Wavy red hair, and deep brown skin, and a smile that almost could have been described as "mysterious." While this very much was the Vibe, Scratch couldn't remember this encounter, so chances were it was one of the many encounters she'd had that proved to be not particularly memorable. When you shot your shot as often as she did, it happened.

Regardless, Scratch did not think that she would get the reciprocation she was looking for. Y'know, given that this was apparently just an approximation of her own memory.

'This setting appears to be more to your liking,' the woman said, and Scratch was sure she could have gotten lost in that voice. Somehow husky and smooth at the same time. Definitely a smoker. The accent, she couldn't quite place, which wasn't unusual. The galaxy was a big place, filled with planets that Scratch had never visited, and it was easy enough to get to them once you'd left atmosphere. It was the "leaving atmosphere” bit that was difficult for most people.

'Yeah,' Scratch said. 'Ten out of ten, no notes.’ It would be weird to flirt with an alien wearing a stranger's image, right?

Instead, she took a long sip of the whiskey cocktail in front of her. It tasted like water. Okay fuck this, she would be making a very strongly worded Yelp review. "Got dragged here against my will, hosts brought up embarrassing details from my past, no alcohol. Do not recommend.”

‘Do you have a name?’

The woman said, ‘My name is unfortunately imperceivable by human ears, but you can call me Elizabeth.’ Elizabeth held out a hand for Scratch to shake, and Scratch eyed it warily.

Finally, she shook it. It wasn't as though the day could get any weirder. The hand was a little colder than it should have been, probably because it was an illusion. No blood running through those veins. Hell, maybe interdimensional aliens didn't even need a physical form, maybe they just existed as pure light. Or, maybe like the name, their true form was unable to be perceived by human senses. Was that what she kept seeing in the corner of her eye?

'I'm just conducting a brief survey,' the woman said. 'Would you mind explaining why you aren't interested in the meaning of life or absolute knowledge? Usually that's a surefire way to get people interested.’

'Uh,' Scratch said. If she'd realised there was going to be a test, she might have thought about it harder. 'I just don't really give a shit about that sort of thing, I guess. I dunno, man, I'm just living my life. I've got other things to do.’ As soon as she said it, it felt like a very weak response. Not the sort of answer that would have gotten her a call back in a job interview (not that she had ever really had many honest job interviews).

'Oh, that's a very emotionally healthy response,' Elizabeth said. 'But unfortunately not quite what we're looking for.’ Scratch had no idea who "we" was, or what role she was apparently unsuitable for.

She had never been particularly good at job interviews, and the last job she'd gotten had literally been thanks to Fania hacking a server and ticking a box that had previously been unticked. When the system was set up to make you fail, sometimes you need to buy two-hundred and seventy stilbits worth of chocolate bars and ask someone else to break the system for you.

‘O...kay,' Scratch said, thoroughly confused, but well aware that this was the sort of situation where it didn't seem like she would get an answer. 'Can I go now, then?’

'I just have a few more questions if that's okay. See, we've never had anyone fail the test so early, usually they'll at least get to the third or fourth stage. You're the first person that didn't even pass the preliminary stages.’

Scratch had no idea how to take that. Like…“Congratulations, you're the worst we've ever seen.” She wasn't sure if she was really in a position to say no to their questions, like, if she wasn't at least a little helpful, then there were a few really terrible ways that this could go.

For one, they could send her back to that landing pad where her ship was, and she could slowly starve to death. Starving to death in space would be one thing (scratch had definitely come close on at least one occasion), but starving to death here would be boring. She probably couldn't even get WiFi.

Another option was that they send her to some horrifying interdimensional prison, and sentence her from crimes that she couldn't even comprehend.

All of the times that Scratch had been to prison in her life she had well and truly deserved it, but this felt like a stretch. Even the Ceres Empire usually bothered to tell you what you were being imprisoned for. Not to say that they didn't have a habit at trumping up charges for people that didn't deserve it, but at the very least all of the trumped up charges were for crimes that existed.

‘I'd really rather not,’ Scratch said. The whole scene dissolved, even the chair that she was sitting on, and she fell on her ass once again. Great. Awesome. Totally glad that no-one except the aliens saw that.

‘Well we're sorry to have bothered you,’ Elizabeth said, having very patiently waited for Scratch to get to her knees, and then her feet. The alien flipped the clipboard over to face Scratch, and handed her a pen (all very archaic). 'If you'll sign here-it's just your basic consent to have your memory erased. All standard procedure, you know. make sure to read the fine-Oh, okay, you've already signed.’

'Sorry, what?' Out of habit, Scratch had signed using the illegible scribble that she defaulted to when not using an alias. Really, that was one of the funner parts of pretending to be other people so often - coming up with fun signatures and backstories. Vivalda Lee, her driver-reviver persona, used to be in the circus until she'd had a terrible injury, and had a very elaborate signature with lots of swirly bits.

'Never mind.’ The pen and the clipboard both vanished. 'We apologise for the inconvenience, however if you return to your ship, we can have you off in a jiffy.’

'Sure thing,’ Scratch said. Whatever was going on here, she wanted no part of it. Her life was complicated enough already, and really, who wanted to get the secrets of the universe from people who didn't even really live there?

Elizabeth turned to walk away, and a thought hit Scratch. She wasn't interested in the meaning of life, but there was still at least one answer she could get out of all this.

'Hey wait,' Scratch called out after her. The older woman (or the all-knowing inter-dimensional creature that was pretending to be an older woman) stopped.

'Do you know how I can stop my souffles from collapsing?'

Elizabeth stared at her, eyes flashing an ethereal sort of white. Finally: 'Try not baking it for so long. They're collapsing because they're too dry.'

Scratch nodded. She wished she had some way to write all of this down. She also had some questions about croissants.

Before she could do anything like that, though, Elizabeth too, dematerialised, leaving Scratch with her many hundreds of questions about pastries. They were always the thing that she struggled with the most.

The adrenaline hit her all at once when she sat down in the pilot's seat. It had been a nice seat once upon a time. Ergonomic, designed to be sat in for days at a time. The thing was third-hand when Scratch had bought it, and she'd put in a hundred or so hours of manual flight time since.

Now, she'd just survived an encounter with... she was still unclear on who or what she had just survived an encounter with. Probably those rumoured higher dimensional beings. Her heart seemed to think that she had just run a marathon, or she had climbed the ladder into the galley slightly too quickly. Both similar levels of exhaustion according to her lung capacity.

It took Scratch several minutes to calm down. Unbidden, her hands went through the start-up procedure, even though the ship was still parked in that endless sea of white.

The moment the engine kicked into gear, all of that fell away. Though the ship didn't move, the sudden change in visuals threw her into a hypnic jerk, like the whole ship was going bungee jumping.

Scratch blinked. She was looking out into a sea of swirling colours. A kaleidoscope of gateways to other parts of the galaxy rotating around like it was a game of whack-a-mole. The moment you saw the gate you needed, it disappeared again.

It would take some careful piloting to…why did her head hurt so much?

Scratch rubbed at her eyes, and was surprised to see her fingers come away covered in blood.

Hey, what the fuck?

A second ago, she'd been in normal space, minding her own business, and now, she was in the fourth dimension, covered in blood.

A quick scan from the ship's computer showed no concerning medical issues. There was the usual laundry list of minor stuff: low vitamin D, low muscle mass, etc, plus the constant reminders to consider consultation for hearing restoration cybernetics. As she always did, Scratch ignored these. She didn't need a computer giving her advice that she didn't ask for.

The ship's computer also showed that she had entered the fourth dimension twenty-six minutes ago. Weird, but ultimately not her problem. It wouldn't have been the first time that she'd passed out in space. The computer said that she wasn't going to drop dead, so she just had to trust in that.

It took fourteen minutes to find the door on the other side. Pretty much all of the doors actually looked the same, but thankfully, that third-party mod was apparently worth the eight hundred stilbits she had paid for it, and could detect which was the right exit. It seemed to take a little longer than usual, but that was probably just her imagination. A good pilot could do all of this by intuition and feel, and Scratch was…well, she was okay. Better than she used to be at any rate.

When she was clear of the fourth dimension, back out in real space, Scratch set the ship to autopilot, and went to take a shower. She had to do something about this mysteriously appearing blood. At top speed, she was a couple of days out from Lightport. A better ship could manage it in a third of the time, but she had spent most of her upgrade money on things that did not impact performance.

What did it matter if it only took twelve hours if she couldn't cook with gas. It all came from Neltra, so it wasn't even like the environmentalists had a leg to stand on when they campaigned against it. Didn't stop them from trying, though.

The blood was still wet, and washed off without too much scrubbing. There were no open wounds anywhere on Scratch's face, so it was still a mystery as to where any of it had come from. Her head still ached, so it might have just been a weird pressure thing. Probably wouldn't hurt to get the ship serviced just in case. Would probably have to wait until after she'd been paid, though.

Regardless, given how much time she had until Lightport, Scratch had a hankering to bake something. She had always preferred cooking to baking. There was just something about the rigidity, the control of baking that turned her off. Maybe it was just because she didn't like being told what to do. Well.... most of the time, anyway. Sometimes she really liked it.

Hmm... Maybe she could give the souffle another go. Scratch went to the cold box to get the eggs.

She stopped in her tracks.

No.

Fuck souffle. She hated making it, it never worked, and it didn't even taste that good anyway. No, lemon curd tarts, that was the way to go.

They were nicer, far easier to make, and JD liked them enough to take a dozen or so off of Scratch's hands the next time they met up. Failed souffle would just have Scratch eating another dry, eggy mess. At least if she fucked up the tarts there would be curd, which was great on anything.

Actually, she still needed eggs though, which made the dramatic stop a little less meaningful. It was the metaphor of it all, or whatever.

Once she'd gotten the eggs, and the cream and the butter from the cold box, Scratch dug through the pantry, and found flour and sugar and salt. There was a jar of cinnamon in there that was almost two years old, which she promptly threw into the waste chute. It wouldn't get as much mileage as sugar did when it burned, but it was a hell of a lot easier than having to lug her waste out to one of the dumping zones to get shot off into a star.

She had just finished rolling out the tart shell when her pocket buzzed. The screen read "Aunt Sally” which was a security measure more than anything. If Scratch were arrested, or kidnapped by people she owed money to, she didn't want them to know who she was talking to.”Aunt Sally” was JD, who had the privilege of having been in Scratch's contact list the longest. Long enough at least to remember what her name had been before “Scratch.”

Scratch pressed the "accept call" button, and then flashed the image up on the bulkhead opposite her prep bench, just above the small dining table. She was entirely unsurprised to see that, in spite of the fact that JD had initiated the call, she had since gotten distracted, and was about three metres away from the screen. 

JD was three months older and twenty centimetres taller than Scratch. She had the look of someone that was perpetually exhausted, and even though she was barely thirty-one, her hair was fully grey at the temples.

She had her back to Scratch currently, doing something at the tiny desk on the other side of the room. It wasn't a room that Scratch recognised, which was normal. As a private investigator, JD often worked for a variety of clients on a variety of different planets. and the working conditions ranged from a literal shoebox to marble-topped desks in grand conservatories. That one had been some guy trying to find his lost dog. In the end, it turned out to have been kidnapped for ransom, and JD had saved the guy from having to pay out ten million stibits. She had then gone and put the hundred thousand stilbit fee into her retirement account. Very responsible. Couldn't have been Scratch.

'Is that a shuttle?' Scratch called out, loud enough to pull JD from her hyperfocus. Scratch was pretty sure she could see the distinctive door to the dreaded shower-toilet-kitchenette cubicle that was standard on budget shuttles. Scratch refused to use them; even if she didn't have her own (terrible) ship, she at least needed something with a waterfall head. Something that wasn't a wetroom.

JD turned around, having the wherewithal to wait until her mouth was visible on camera before starting to speak. Most people didn't and as a result Scratch had to spend a lot of her time pretending she knew exactly what was going on when she had missed half the conversation. JD was wearing her old brown leather jacket, and her old stab proof pants. Scratch would never go so far as to wear stab-proof pants, and she had been stabbed far more often than JD. It was the blended fabrics. Scratch couldn't bring herself to wear them.

'I got a job in Lightport,' JD told her, in lieu of a "hello," but to be fair, Scratch hadn't said hello either. They had known each other for over twenty years, and knew far more about each other than anyone else did. The greeting was implied. 'Want to catch up?’

'Yeah, I feel like I could clear my schedule,' Scratch said. Her schedule so far was: 1. Dock the ship. 2. Check into her very nice hotel, order some room service, maybe check out the spa, and 3. spend the next three months on board a billionaire's yacht pretending to be his private chef.

Well, okay, she wasn't exactly pretending to be a chef, she would actually be the chef, but at the very least she would be pretending to be an upstanding and respectable citizen, which was something she was working on. Hopefully nobody on board was a superhuman lie detector or anything.

'Hey, have you ever had anything weird happen to you while going through worm space?' Scratch asked. It was an abrupt change of subject, but if she didn't ask now, she would forget.

'Not that I'm aware of,' JD said. 'But I'm not a pilot. I mostly take shuttles.'

"Pilot" was a very strong word to describe Scratch's capability. She was a pilot in the same way that someone who had failed their licence test four times was a racecar driver. Scratch had failed her pilot's licence six times, and in the end had gotten Fania to hack the simulation to make the test slightly easier. Yet another thing that Scratch was not entirely proud of.

But, JD's point remained, in that most shuttles, being entirely automated and thus one of the cheaper options for intra-galactic travel, did not always have windows. That was two hundred stilbits extra. You could go through seventeen extra dimensions in a basic shuttle, and the only indication might have been some extra turbulence. You could meet God in a basic shuttle and never be any the wiser.

'Hmm,' Scratch said. 'Interesting.’

‘Anything I should know about?' JD asked. There was very little emotion to her voice, but that was normal. JD was utilitarian to the last, and Scratch had known her long enough to know that lack of emotion didn't mean lack of care.

'Nah.' Scratch was unbothered. If it was going to be a problem, then there wasn't a goddamn thing that she could do about it. ‘Let me know where you'll be on the planet of the oligarchs and we can buy a single, over-priced drink while fantasising about what life would have been like if we'd grown up with gold-plated dummies.’ The comment earned her the smallest of smirks from JD, which Scratch knew was the equivalent of uproarious laughter.  She could literally go on a killing spree and JD wouldn't even bat an eye. A smirk was huge.

They bid their goodbyes, with a promise to meet up at the most affordable bar in Lightport. It didn't really narrow it down much, since none of them were affordable. Even if they couldn't afford drinks, Scratch would make damn sure that they had pie.

There were no lemons aboard the Theseus, but they were easy enough to synthesise. Scratch made enough of everything else by hand that she never really came close to hitting her synthesis allotment. She would conquer the field of baking one day, but probably not today.

The great thing about this recipe was, apart from the time it took to blind bake the shell, it actually only needed to be in the oven for a few minutes. The oven took up far more of the ship's power than Scratch was comfortable with, but sometimes you just needed to roast a pork shoulder for four hours to feel better about yourself.

By the time the tarts had finished baking, resting and cooling, Theseus was entering the Tarcon system, of which Serendipity was the fourth planet, and Lightport its only major settlement. In any other circumstances, the docking authorities would have laughed her out of the system if she had requested permission to land.

Like its namesake, Scratch's ship had been totalled and repaired so many times that there was very little of the original ship remaining. To the naked eye, it looked like a rust bucket that had been duct-taped together, and on closer inspection it was even worse.

The docking authority would have sooner given landing clearance to a flying tin can, were it not for the fact that Scratch had an employment contract with her. Fania had been responsible for recoding the ship's ID log to match the contract, or rather, she had walked Scratch through the needlessly complex process over speakerphone. Scratch had complained almost the entire time, but she couldn't fault the results.

Apparently the Ceres Empire didn't like people trying to circumvent their invasive population tracking methods. Go figure.

If she had the money, she would have upgraded. For what she had paid to install the kitchen, and the training pod, and the planning room, and the hydroponics, she could have gotten a newer ship in much better condition, albeit one that didn't use water recycling to keep the plants growing. On a ship like that, She would have to do all of her cooking in a microwave. Unacceptable.

Of course, Scratch probably could have afforded something nice if she hadn't spent a good portion of her last pay cheque trying to win back the celebratory fifty-thousand stilbit bet she'd immediately lost on.

The painting she'd fenced might have been one of the most famous ones in the galaxy, but none of that mattered if you couldn't offload it to the right people. For the moment, she'd be better off not making any bets more expensive than the cost of a scratch ticket, no puns intended.

That was one great thing about the nickname. People liked to be funny. Any time someone bought her a gift, they threw in a couple of scratch tickets. She also had far more back-scratchers than she knew what to do with.

Hmm... she should probably just throw those away.

Though she had only been awake for a few hours, Scratch felt like she hadn't slept in days. Her body ached, and her head throbbed, and she wanted nothing more than to sink into a blisteringly hot bath and relax for a bit. Unfortunately, even if she did have enough water for that sort of thing, She definitely didn't have anything suitable to actually turn into a bath. Fortunately, in less than seventy-two hours, she would be in one of the bougiest, fanciest cities in the galaxy, where even the cheapest hotels would have extravagant bathing facilities. “Cheapest” in this context meant five hundred stilbits a night for a basic room, but she was pretty sure her employer was springing for something nicer than that.

She was really looking forward to a pocket-spring mattress.

Finally, after several hours of tossing and turning, Scratch drifted off. She had thought that she might be lucky enough to get through the night without any weird dreams, but apparently like on so many other occasions, the odds were not in her favour.

It started like any normal dream, on the surface of an inhospitable alien world, attending a bachelorette party for a complete stranger. The worst part of it was, none of the food was even remotely appropriate. Who served spaghetti at a cocktail party? Just completely incomprehensible.

In the dream, her ears rang, and her nose bled, and a great serpent burst through the magma and swallowed the bachelorette party.

Scratch rolled over in her sleep. She'd had far too many weird dreams for this to bother her too much.

It was probably nothing.