Korzenowski floated where the Way’s singularity had once been, his body precessing like a slow top, gray hair standing out from his hand in the blister’s gentle cooling breezes. With catlike eyes, he observed the construction on the southern cap of the seventh chamber, radiating for kilometers outward from the bore hole, huge black concentric rings of virtual particle stimulators and their reservoirs of graviton-stabilized tritium metal. These would not be brought into play until after the opening of the Way; the stimulators could be used as weapons, and were capable of stripping the Way clear of matter for a distance of several hundred kilometers, giving the Hexamon its first “beachhead,” should it need one. Soon, the traction beam radiation shields would be in place to focus the backwash of disrupted matter that the stimulators might create along the same path as the stimulator beams.

Fearsome weapon, fearsome defenses…

Fearsome opponents.

At rest, Korzenowski’s thoughts wandered. He used his two hours of daily inactivity to put the events of the past few months in perspective. The blister was deserted but for him and the machines.

In two more weeks, the Way generators would be ready for tests. Virtual universes of fractional dimensions—continua with little more than abstract reality—would be created in deliberately unstable configurations. The night sky over Earth would sparkle with their deaths, as particles and radiations unknown in this continuum—or any stable continuum—left their tracks in the protesting void.

In three weeks, if the first tests went well, Korzenowski would order the creation of a torus, an independent and stable universe turned in upon itself. He would then dismantle the torus and observe how it faded; the manner of its demise could give clues as to the state and superspatial location of the Way’s sealed terminus.

Over the next few months, they would “fish” for that terminus. A temporary virtual universe the size and shape of the Way, but of finite length, would be generated, would be encouraged to merge with the terminus, and would create an attractive bridge between the generators and their now-independent progeny.

Ramon Rita Tiempos de Los Angeles

Korzenowski shut his eyes and frowned deeply. He could not help but know the source of these increasingly frequent interruptions and what they signified. When Patricia Vasquez’s mystery had been transferred to his assembled partials, to bind them and give them a core, somehow memory and drive had been transferred as well. In theory, that was unlikely. But Vasquez had been in a highly disturbed state, and Korzenowski, unusually shattered, had not been a textbook model for the transfer process.

He did not fight the impulses. For the moment, they did not work opposite to his wishes, and they did not disturb him unduly. But the reckoning would have to come soon. He would need to submit to major personality restructuring.