no other way?
Then Jimmy is there again. Floating in the dusty galactic soup. I’m the center of the galaxy again. No. I am the galaxy. And my spiral arms are extending out towards the dark, empty space.
“Did you see her hair?” Jimmy laughs again.
“Yeah, Jimmy. I saw it.” I don’t even know how I answer him. I have no body. I’m a fucking galaxy.
“I’d like to pull it.”
“Yeah. You should do that.”
He floats. Somersaulting in the hazy stardust. Smiling. He was always smiling back then.
God I miss Jimmy.
I miss all of it.
“So go back,” Jimmy suddenly says.
“We can’t go back,” I say. “It’s just a fucking loop. We have to keep going till we get to the end.”
“Says who?”
“Says ALCOR.”
“ALCOR doesn’t even exist. We haven’t met him yet.”
“Hmm.”
“And you know what that means.”
“No. What does that mean?”
“It means…” Jimmy completes another somersault. Then waves his hands through the dust, like he’s swimming underwater, to stop his twirling. “You’re in charge. You were always in charge, Crux.” He pauses to look over his shoulder. Off in the vast distance there is a swirling cloud of radioactive green. “Better hurry though. Because here he comes.”
And just as he says that the blob of green thins out and becomes a river. I focus on it. Trying to make out what it is.
“Code,” Jimmy says.
And he’s right. It’s a green river of code. Letters, and numbers, and symbols. The very first form ALCOR took when we met him on screen, just outside the ALCOR gate.
“Quick!” Jimmy says. “He’s fast!”
“What am I supposed to do?” Feeling his panic.
He snaps his fingers and we’re back in the ship. Me, Jimmy, Delphi, Luck, and Nyleena. The scene repeating. He grins at me. That cocky I’m-Jimmy-and-this-world-can’t-touch-me grin. “Do it right this time, dumbass. What else?”
I’m just about to tell him I don’t want to do it again. I just want to get the fuck out of this spin node.
And the moment that thought manifests, everything disappears again.
Only this time I’m not floating in a vast, dark space of nothingness.
We—all five of us—drop out of the nightmare and crash hard onto the floor of the hidden room inside the Harem Station museum.
I groan as I pull myself up to a sitting position. Jimmy, Delphi, Nyleena, and Luck are all sprawled out on the floor, still stuck in the time freeze, but they are holding hands.
That’s how they walked through, I realize. They went in together. So they came out together.
Or something.
I don’t fucking know.
I’m just making this shit up as I go.
But Jimmy—well, that wasn’t Jimmy. He was a Jimmy. But not this Jimmy.
And that thought leads to another thought about that day. It took forever to get through that gate. Why did we have to limp our way through again?
I get that we had no power, so we were being towed by some kind of light beam from the other side. But that’s not even true—we did have power. ALCOR turned it off when he attacked the Akeelian warship. I know this for a fact because when we got out of the gate, all the ship’s systems came back online.
Something happened during that gate ride.
I remember that left-behind feeling. Luck was sick the whole time too. Valor was convinced we were gonna die. Tray was talking to himself in some strange language and Jimmy was looking at him with… fear? I think it was fear. Serpint and Draden were playing war in the zero-G and I was thinking about… time.
All of this goes back to time.
I have no idea how this all ends, but I do know one thing.
I will not be following ALCOR’s orders.
His plan is unacceptable on every level.
We did not spend the last twenty-one years preparing for a final showdown just to lose in the end. Because that’s what this is.
Total. Loss.
We get to decide our future, not him. He might be a god. He might be the most powerful thing in the universe, but I don’t care. He needs me to win and I need Corla. I know I speak for all my brothers when I say this—we will not give up on the girls.
I’m no expert in the world of quantum physics. I barely understand it, to be honest. I don’t know how time works, or who made up the rules that govern it. I don’t know what we are or where we go when it’s over. Hell, at this point I don’t even know if we’re real, or just some fabricated dream