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[1st page]















NON-FICTION!













People died so I could write this. I'd appreciate it if you could spare a few minutes to read it.





































[2nd page]





Let's start with MIRANDA. There are three things you need to know about MIRANDA: she was tall, she was dazzlingly charismatic and she was more stubborn than gravity. Nobody else could even imagine this mission, but she could. They said it was impossible, and she showed them it might not be. They said it could never be made to work, and she put together a plan that showed them how to do it. They said it would be dangerous, and she just laughed.



MIRANDA led this mission before there was a mission. When it came time to assign a team leader, she chose herself. No one had put more into the project, no one knew more about the project. Still, there were those that spoke out against her.

"She's too inexperienced in the field," they said.

"She's too valuable to the core unit," they said.

"She's too domineering to lead a small team," they said. The rumour mill told a different story. It said that if she'd been straighter, more male and less black that she'd have got the job with no resistance. Of course no one was saying that, but they were not saying it very pointedly.

What do you think she said to that? Not a damn thing. She didn't need to tell them they were wrong. She showed them. They stopped saying that.



Three months after she got the project signed off everything was ready, faster than any reasonable timeline. There were already plans drawn up for a manned craft and soon we had a shiny new ship in the hanger. We had a fully reconditioned latent-space portal because the second-generation portals had always been designed with manned missions in mind. We had a team: every one of us a volunteer, every one hand-picked from across the Foundation. We weren't the best in our fields but MIRANDA saw in us the parts of something more. She made us into that something.





[3rd page]





We sat in that cockpit, staring into that portal, wondering if humans could survive on the other side. All the science gave it a very promising maybe. Electromagnetic waves don't propagate so well out there so once we went through we'd be on our own. MIRANDA brought the engines up and eased us through, careful, but confident.



Things went fine for a while. It was nothing but smooth sailing through empty skies and a deluge of data flowing from the instruments to the databanks. We saw more kinds of nothing than there are words for in any language I know. Then we saw the nullity transition layer closing in around us. If this place had weather, then this would be the storm — angry nothing whipping around in complex curves and hard, pointed angles. MIRANDA dialled up the stabilisation field. It wrapped around us in a gently not-humming aura of thing-ness that kept reality in and everything else out. She pointed our bow straight into the layer and told us to strap in.



We should have been fine, but we weren't. The layer started seeping through the outer fields in an every-colour fog and the hull began rattling like a castanet. The instruments stopped responding and stayed solidly in the green, ignoring the obvious danger. MIRANDA took just a single moment to think about it before turning the ship around and leaving her dream behind. That was one of the things that made her a good leader: she always put people before dreams. She yelled at us to get back into the centre of the ship, nearer to the field generator while she stayed up front to get us lined up on the portal. We left, out of the bridge, back past the crew quarters and into the mess room. We only stopped once we were right in the centre of the ship, above the field generator where its effects were strongest.



MIRANDA's updates from the cockpit lasted for a little while, crackling to us over the internal comms. Then they stopped making sense. Then they stopped.



That was MIRANDA. She was always pushing forwards, always at the front. That meant she was often alone, especially at the end.





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Next was DIMO. DIMO was as big as two men and careful. He built the ship's engines by hand. Then he broke them down and built them a second time because he wanted to make sure he hadn't missed anything. He never did things the easy way if it was the wrong way.



DIMO was careful when he talked too. You can tell that he'd thought about every word before he said it. Some people take fifty words to make their point. DIMO didn't. He'd pause and think and then he'd say three words, but they'd be the right words.



The fog took a while to get back to the mess room, but inch by inch it did. DIMO stood in the doorway watching it approach with an unreadable expression and said, "Not enough time." He dialled up the field generator and then paused for a second, thinking. Then he nodded to himself and turned the dial a click farther.



Fifteen minutes later the lights started flickering and the mist started creeping closer again. DIMO's eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. He stared down at the floor for a moment and then sighed, shoulders dropping by just the tiniest fraction. "I'll repair this," he said. He left.



Another fifteen minutes later the lights stabilised and the mist retreated from the edges of the room. We didn't hear from DIMO again. Just whispering over the internal comms. Nothing clear, just the shapes of words. "…my family…" I think. Then nothing.



That was DIMO. When he was wrong, he did it the right way, even if it was the hard way.





[5th page]





The third member of the team was ETISHA. She was the smart one, the smartest person I ever met. Some people are so intelligent that they seem to be talking another language, but ETISHA wasn't like that. She made you feel smarter just by being around her. I never did work out how.



ETISHA figured out what had happened to the others, or at least she said she had and I wasn't nearly clever enough to argue. "I think they've been subsumed into the local immateria." She saw my uncertain look and tried again. "They're part of all this nothing. They don't exist any more. Maybe they never did now. Or maybe the field is containing what's left of them?" She stopped speaking and I could see the idea turning in her like a key in a clock. "So can we get them back?" I asked. ETISHA gave ME one of those looks that said she wasn't going to answer soon and when she did I wouldn't understand.



We got a few hours closer to home before the atmosphere system gave out. The obvious solution was the suits. Problem was, the suits weren't in the mess room with us and everything outside the room was filled with all kinds of nothing. ETISHA got creative. She built an oxygen generator out of the guts of a lighting panel, a water jug and some indigestion tablets and converted the toilet into a makeshift breathing tent. It smelled bad enough to bring tears to our eyes but it was better than suffocating, for a while.





[6th page]





It wasn't enough. Once it was clear that we wouldn't be able to last all the way back on toilet air, we decided we'd have to get the suits. That meant walking into the miasma that had done whatever it had done to MIRANDA and DIMO. We decided to play rock-paper-scissors for it. I don't know if she threw it on purpose. I don't know if I tried to win, but I did, and she left.



What came back out of the fog wasn't really ETISHA any more. It had her shape, her face, her voice, but it wasn't her. She was like a painting of herself — like if she turned too quickly she'd disappear behind her edges. She carried a bundle of fabric under one arm that seemed more substantial than she did. "I brought. This. For you." She dropped the bundle at my feet. It was just a suit.



There was a smile on her face. It was warm but hollow. I could see the bulkhead through the back of it. "And. This." She put a notepad on the table. "You only. Need. To plant a. Seed." She winked at ME and then she just… wasn't, anymore.



That was ETISHA. She was always helping you, but you could never quite figure out how she'd done it.









[7th page]





Lastly, there was ME. I'm ca I'm out of time. Please get us home.































































[Original discovery classification]

Spontaneous, handwritten fiction found on the mess room table of unmanned Latent-Space Exploratory Vessel Audre on its return to real-space. Other paraphernalia associated with the fictional crew was also found, such as clothing, food items and toothbrushes.







