I made it to the edge of the Void after several days of laying low and slowly exploring around Wilson's den. I needed time to grow into moving inside the drone's body and to fully understand its capabilities. Up until this point I had just been running and stumbling as fast as I could from one hiding spot to the next.

Additionally, though harder to admit to myself, I think the main reason why I decided to take it slow was the fact that the loneliness and fear of death was dragging me down. I got into a funk after a stray thought had hit me in the face. The offending thought had come to me when I had finally climbed to the outer top of Wilson's den for the first time and had a clear view of the vast surroundings outside.

I was alone and lost an infinite distance away from my friends and family. I wasn't even a galaxy away, no, I wasn't even in my home dimension.

I can't say that I was proud of how lost I got inside my head, but I knew that I needed to hit bottom before I would start to see the light again.

I felt, exactly like Wilson's name implied, like a castaway lost at sea.

It is funny how the mind works in times of stress. Mine tended to try to break things down into simpler concepts so that I could see each piece clearly. The drone's mind had a different feature that my ordinary human mind hadn't possessed. Where I had a gifted imagination, the drone's mind had amazing abilities of calculation and permanence of memories.

What can a mind do that has permanent memories? Well, it can keep what I can imagine without me needing to think of it. Apparently forever.

I learned this strange fact when I happened to imagine a Rubik's cube just for fun. There was a herd of slow-moving vacuum creatures that I was studying and I wished that I had something to fiddle with while I watched them pass. I jokingly imagined a Rubik's cube and imagined how I would try to work it with my new drone hands. I started with a clean cube, all six sides each having their own color, and played catch a couple of times before starting. It felt oddly real, at least more real than just imaging it as I touched it with my segmented claws inside my mind. The sides rotated smoothly and I had to pinch the main body of the cube to rotate a side with my other clawed hand nudging the free edge in the way it needed to go. Working the cube was clunky like this and I found that it was much faster to just let go of the cube and quickly grabbed it again from a different direction before it could fall. My clawed limbs blurred inside my mind as I would release and snatch the cube repeatedly before it could even begin to fall.

I didn't think that the drone could physically move that fast but it was an easy way to mentally manipulate the toy with how angular my hands were shaped. I played with it a bit more before putting it out of my mind and going back to watching the strange creatures pass by in the distance. They each wandered back and forth in their invisible lanes, sucking up anything and everything that their wide mouth would come in contact with. Their mouths were their main feature and I learned how they maintained cohesion of form after watching them as they passed by. They each ground everything up inside their hollow bellies and mainly focused on absorbing the released liquid energy from the creatures that happened to have the misfortune of not being able to get out of their way.

What they left behind in their wake was a scene from a zombie horror film, just tons of mindless creatures standing around as their body’s shells healed back to health. Hundreds of creatures without their minds. It was so bizarre to see. I had to hide quickly after that when a swarm of symbiotic mutant feasters followed in the wake of the earlier monsters. These creatures were like badly formed horrors from a mental patient's nightmares. They all were made of random parts of various creatures that they had eaten. Some moved fast while others were showing signs of reaching a threshold of instability after they had absorbed too many random features from zombified creatures and were beginning to lose the ability of movement.

One such creature had become a permanent feature of the valley a couple of miles away. It had managed to get itself lodged between two bits of rock after it had feasted on the remains of a razor slug, only to grow slimy sharp limbs that stopped it from being able to free itself.

"Sucks to be you buddy." I mentally said to the creature as I hid upside down on the ceiling of Wilson's entranceway. I knew from what I had observed that the creature would be attacked soon by new arrivals. Sure enough, other creatures did soon arrive and try to attack the mired freak. Surprisingly, they all ran into a fascinating problem that stopped each and every one of them from making an easy meal of the stuck monster. Besides being covered in random limbs, barbs, and blades it was now covered in slime, which made any attack against it or by it quite ineffective. Sure, it could get injured but there was enough time between being damaged and it healing itself that the attacks didn't matter in the end. It was saved by the same thing that trapped it.

I decided that I would keep an eye on it because I was curious about what would happen to it if it didn't keep going deeper. It was out in the open here and that never seemed to turn out well for any creature.

Normally, dashing into a cave to get away from crazed horrors would have made me discard any memory of the Rubik's cube from my mind. The funny thing was, when I got back into the depths of Wilson's den I found that the cube was still inside my mind, exactly where I had left it and in the same configuration that I had set its pattern in.

This led me to the realization that Nurse had my mind copied perfectly. So she knew what I would do, for the most part anyway.

She knew that I would head to the easiest and safest place available to me.

Upwards toward the Void.

I just needed to get there to set up a sign for her to see so that she could rescue me.

This, finally, was the return of hope that I had been looking for and it spurred me to action again.

"Hey, Wilson, I hope you don't mind, but I am going to need to borrow that grain of gold you are sitting on for a little bit.” I mentally said to my larger guardian. I needed to use it to grow my drone’s body before I traveled further upward.

This was how I found myself to be quite a bit larger, about the size of a tic-tac and sitting at the edge of Nurse’s dimension.

At the edge of the craziest horizons that I had ever seen in my entire life.

---

“Regeth, have you seen the news recently?” Elaya’s mother asked her father as they rode together inside their private network carriage. Today was a family day and they all had made it a thing to head to the shopping district to look for more mods and upgrades for their new home. Her father had gotten a new secret security job after he had revealed his part in the recent disaster. It seemed that the higher-ups wanted to keep an eye on him for some reason and to learn as much as they could about the incident, either from him or anyone that he had come into contact with, namely the entity known as Kevin.

“What news mom?” Elaya asked, hearing something interesting in her mother’s tone that usually wasn’t there. It was only there when her mother would talk about how close they had come to losing their father in the recent tragedy. This perked Elaya’s ears up, wondering if it would have anything to do with Kevin.

She still wanted to see him and was still upset that his AI had rebuffed her demands to give her a ride to his personal habitat. She knew that Kevin’s AI was different, just having it say no to her was something entirely new. George had almost seemed… real.

“There seems to be another event happening in a solar system not too far from the Incident.” Elaya’s mother replied as she shared the streams that she had discovered. “The Incident” was what the Citizens of Tela were calling the total loss of Magus the Second’s Core. For a race that had previously thought their technology to be invincible, having something happen so fast and with such finality, was enough to send them all into a state of shock.

“What kind of event?” Elaya muttered to herself as she took in the reports and detailed map overlays. Something was indeed happening around a Blue Dwarf star. Pings reported strange masses forming outside the star and the common consensus was that whatever it was, it was growing.

“Is that you Kevin?” Elaya whispered as she traced a line between the destroyed Core and the Jterg Science Family Core where she had run into his AI. It was a straight shot, the Blue Dwarf was on the way.

“Hey, Dad, can I borrow our family Remote key?” She asked her parents after debating her options in silence for a while. She was old enough to drive and use a personal habitat and while she didn't have enough yet to buy her own, she knew that no one tended to use the one that they had in storage.

Her mother and father both looked at each other for a long while, sharing a private VR chat before returning to the shared space with their daughter. Her mother looked like she had been crying and her father had a look of guilt that he only had on his face whenever Kevin was mentioned.

“Yes, but your mother and I would ask that you backup a copy of yourself before you go.” He answered after a short pregnant pause.

Backups were a messy affair and it made Elaya’s danger sense tingle as she realized what sort of conversation he and her mother had just had. They weren’t going to stop her, but they wanted assurances that if and when something went badly wrong with her, they could either reset her or recover her if she happened to get corrupted.

“Okay...” She said as she brought up the request for a backup to be made, adding her own memory backup secretly just in case her parents decided to wipe her when she returned. She trusted her parents but didn’t want to lose any memories that she made with Kevin.

She sent her mom over her backup and secured her secret memory storage in a remote location.

Her mother checked it over before nodding to her father, signaling him to release their private Remote key into her possession.

Since they were Tela, Elaya didn't need to pack anything to simply command the habitat to be on its way. She didn't even need to transfer herself onto it until it came within range of the system. It was, for all intents and purposes, a placeholder for her to get her presence to the system.

“Don't worry mom, there is nothing to stress about. I am just going to spend some time with an alien boy that I like.” Elaya said as she flopped her tentacle arms on the seat armrests in exasperation.

“I know my little klerp, it is just that, aliens, even alien boys will never truly be Tela or to know what it means to be Tela.”

Elaya’s mother gazed intently at her daughter before turning back to her screen to continue to plan their shopping trip. Elaya’s borrowed ride was speeding to the remote star system and wouldn’t arrive for another fourteen days of real-time. She still had time to show their daughter the error of her ways. How falling for an alien would never work. It was just like falling for your AI or some other common thing.

Regeth glanced between the two females in his life before guiltily looking away. Kevin had saved his life when he had every reason to leave him in his neverending torment. He owed a debt to an alien. A life debt and he was going to fight to respect and honor Kevin regardless of him being an outsider.

Unnoticed by the two parents, Elaya whispered to herself as she crossed her tentacles, hiding the fact that she liked to transform them into human hands when her parents were unaware or away.

“But what if I don’t want to know anymore what it means to be Tela? What if, instead, I want to know what it means to be like Kevin; a human?”

---

“General, the third base has been set up around the star as you ordered. We have managed to secure enough of the new raw cr to ramp up harvesting as well as to secure something that you won't believe” The scientist said as he linked the General a feed to the second base.

“What am I looking at?” General Magus asked as he watched a small substance was growing before his eyes on the display.

“It appears to be a tiny piece of a limb from a creature originating inside the star sir.” The scientist said as they both watched with fascination. “It was caught up in the debris of our last pass through the inner layer of the sun. What came out was only a fragment of what you see how. So far this, thing, has grown almost…” The scientist stopped as the limb formed a larger section and began branching out.

“Is… is it regrowing its body from a limb?” The General asked in fascination as what he said appeared to be taking place. Tela scientists probed the limb and studied it as section after section of the creature reformed.

"Yes, and I have already tried to halt the growth by covering it with traditional cr but it doesn't seem to do anything. It just keeps growing, as though the Tela's cr was soft and malleable in its presence."

"What about the new cr?" The General asked.

"I don't know sir. We have more drills and blades being formed in base one but I haven't had time to bring any over yet to test it. I brought this to you as soon as I noticed it growing in the samples that I had gathered." The scientist said as the sample vibrated for some reason.

“Prepare to blast it back into the sun if it breaks free!” The General said as the rest of the scientists were notified of the development.

“What is going on here?” Jebzzbej interjected as her avatar materialized next to the General.

“An entity?” She asked as she replayed all the gathered data while watching the screen. The General had divided the scientists into teams and he hadn’t given her authority over any area but gathering more rare cr. She was beginning to think that he didn’t trust her.

“I would impede its growth by placing a solid object here, inside the body before it can finish forming.” She advised, pointing out a cavity inside the main body of forming creature, as she watched in frustration.

"Also! Don't let anyone take any samples! If this thing is capable of regenerating from a sliver then we don't want it to spread and double itself!"

She was sure that another incident was moments away from occurring and deeply regretted being unable to send all of her research back to her primary.

The General tapped his many feet for a second while thinking before ordering the scientist to do as she had suggested. A thick cr rod was thrust into the body before it could finish forming, forcing the creature to heal around the object. They watched as the rest of the oddly strange limbs grew rapidly around the creature, revealing a monster that looked like its sole purpose in life was to suck the life out of others.

Its front half was formed into jagged spikes and tubes while its radial limbs looked like they were only good for burrowing and locking themselves in place. Jagged barbs on the short length of its body only allowed for it to move in one direction, wherever its tube-like mouths were aiming.

“It looks deadly, whatever it is.” The General commented as his leftmost eye watched the readings. The system would kick the creature out the instant that it started to attack.

A few minutes passed and nothing happened. The creature seemed alive and dead at the same time. It wasn't breathing, but they could see pulsations in the tube-like mouths that made them believe that it was trying to continually suck at whatever it could.

“Why was it able to reform its body and yet not be able to move?” A question was whispered into the air as the gathering scientists created avatars both on the General’s ship as well as on the orbiting base holding the creature.

No one had an answer as they all continued to wait, watching their personal displays as each took readings regarding their unique field of study.

“Rip all of its secrets from its body. I want to know how it lives, eats, and dies. Test the new cr on it and check the drill for damage.” The General said as he rapidly grew bored with the spectacle. He was secretly hoping that the creature would have proven to be a challenge, not an empty husk like the one that sat before them.

“I want a progress report in twelve hours. We need to move up production and gathering. I want a weapon that can rip through stars by the end of the year.” He said before turning back to his star chart.

“Yes, General.” Was the only thing that the scientists could say.

They were highly limited with what they could say, yes, but there was more that they could secretly do.

This was what Jebzzbej thought as she jettisoned another waste product out of her base after she returned and verified that no one was monitoring her actions. This waste product, as well as several others she had managed to create, contained hidden old-fashioned transmitters and receivers that would recombine once they were out of range. She had made sure to aim her waste product disposal path towards several distant Tela systems.

She had to get her data out by any means, time was not an issue. She was just a copy after all and she knew that her existence was a limited event.

---

It looked like rain. The Void looked like oily darkness that was raining down towards me… and yet trying to suck my soul out at the same time. The fascinating part was that the rain always seemed to stop at an invisible line, just vanishing from sight.

That was the only way that I could describe the Void in any ration way.

I wished, for the hundredth time, that I had a video camera to point at the void so that I could watch the replay later on a screen. There was just something about looking directly at it that caused the mind to blank out, as though thoughts were being sucked out of the mind. I was only able to get the image of rain if I considered the Void from an angle, looking around at the edge that I had found at the very end of my travels.

That was all that I could definitively say, being as close as I was. That and the pain. The pain was considerable if you got locked in looking at it from right at the edge.

I had made it, all the way to the top. There was a distinct boundary between the Depths and the Void, it was a white beach that led upwards and just stopped at an invisible line.

At least I was bigger than anything else at this level. I had thought about taking the grain of gold with me but decided against it when I realized just how big of a target it would paint on my back if any other creature felt its superior energy. I would have been mugged by every creature in range in less than an hour. It was just that potent, like the scent of blood in the water.

I left it securely stuck back under Wilson’s large butt.

I thought it was funny at the time but he didn’t seem to notice or care. He didn't even notice when I left, jumping over his little pheromone trap on my way out. I wished he would have at least waved at me or something.

My mind...

Anyways, the Void was something else.

I think I lost a few hours by accidentally looking upwards once I reached the edge between the Void and the Depths.

Looking at the Void just drew you in and locked you in place until you could fight it off and look away.

Needless to say, I spent most of my time facing the Depths after it happened a few times. I would blink, fighting off the pull amidst the searing pain, and find that all of the infant creatures that had rolled out of the edge of the Void had already learned how to jiggle their way away from the edge.

Yes, I said jiggle because every creature that was formed from the edge of the Void was blank and without form. They all only possessed one common trait though, a fear of the Void.

This caused them to struggle and to continually work to get away from it. They all ended up looking like tiny rippling pancakes after a couple of hours of labor, slowly making their way down the beach and towards whatever was laying in their way. Like a layer of dust that moved.

The second thing that they seemed to all learn was hunger as they tasted the slowly increasing energy the farther they got away from the dead edge where the land suddenly transitioned to darkness.

You could look at the Void sideways if you kept your head down and slowly followed the curve of the land. If you did you would get the rain effect that I was talking about earlier, like darkness raining from an infinite distance away. Looking straight on any closer to the boundary was a bad idea, the pain became quite intense while getting lost in its depths.

Painful yet time and time again I found the will to break my eyes away and to get back to work.

My head and my mind...

The work that I was doing was simple, to write the same word over and over again using pieces of debris that I would drag from the nearby Depths.

I could have spent more time using Wilson’s grain of gold but after a while, I found that it was taking longer and longer to increase my size. I didn’t know how the Tela or my swarm had learned to pull #!&^^ energy from the matter that made up this dimension.

That fact was something that made me sick to my stomach, just how easy things would have been for me if I had that bit of information. I could have grown to be huge and invulnerable to any creature at this level.

But no, I was limited to doing what every other creature did here, to hug the ground and slowly absorb the energy released.

So here I was, running up and down a beach to write the words “Help me” over and over again down a never-ending expanse of sand-like particles that ran in both directions next to the Void.

For all I knew, I had a million miles to go before I wrote a message big enough to catch Nurse’s attention when and if she managed to make it up here. It all depended on where she entered in the Depths and where her path brought her up to the Void.

Those were the thoughts that I was thinking when the first monolith came into view.

A relic, here on the beach.

“Whoa…” Was all I could think as I studied the huge white thorn that curved towards the Depths before hooking back towards the Void. It looked like a massive bone hook attempting to pierce the darkness yet just stopping short.

The next thing that I noticed as I dropped what I was carrying to launch myself closer was that the entire surface was riddled with pockmark holes, the size of golf balls. These spheres weren't invisible however, they were pitch black, exactly like the void. Lucky for me, I don't suffer from trypophobia, otherwise looking at this huge structure might have caused me some discomfort.

I made my way down the beach and over some dunes before finally arriving at the base of the thorn relic. It was massive. If I had to guess it could have been as tall as a three-story building back on earth. How I had missed it while on the beach, I didn't know. It might have been due to the way the land curved or something.

"Who am I kidding, there could be anything hidden along the beach and I wouldn't be able to see it. It is all because of that dang Void and how it grabs the eye and sucks at your mind."

The sand around its base seemed to vibrate noiselessly from the presence of the structure, making me wonder what it was doing and how it was doing it. The surface of the thorn was pitted and rough, allowing me to easily climb up to one of the nearby black spheres.

"Ha! I was right! You are spheres!" I celebrated as I got closer to the lowest one. Being up close allowed me to see the outline of the orbs extending from the side of the hook. They almost looked like they were barely locked in place in the side of the structure.

"So, if the clear ones are what brings me here... does that mean that black ones can take me back?" I wondered as I climbed right up to the edge of one. It was so strange to be able to see something that had been completely unseeable in my dimension.

I reached out with my front right claw, intent to see if it was the orbs that were, in fact, vibrating or not. When my claw touched the orb I didn't feel resistance at all and I expected my hand to have passed inside the darkness.

Instead, something frightening happened.

My clawed hand smooshed against the darkness like soft candle wax.

"Ahhh!!!" I screamed as I pulled my hand away, nearly losing my grip and falling from the side of the structure. Sure enough, my hand was now just a rippling mass of compressed cells. I hadn't felt anything, no pain or heat at all when it happened. My hand had just been melted and compressed in that instant.

"Man. That is unfortunate. At least I have plenty of energy stored so that I can regenerate fast."

I considered the useless stump of a limb for several seconds before launching myself down to the beach. This next part was not going to be fun at all but I had to do it if I was going to get the use of my limb back.

"Ok, Kevin, you can do this. You can do this. Don't worry, it will grow back fine in just a few moments, the pain will only last a moment." I said to myself as I coached my mind for what was about to happen.

I placed the morphed limb between my mandibles, further down from the melted stump, and slowly counted down from five while keeping my eyes closed.

This was going to hurt.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One!

---

"Tutor! I need to talk to you." Tutor heard Invicta cry out as she stood and watched the procession of swarm disappear into the heart of the sun. It had been days since they had started sending empowered drones into Nurse's dimension and Tutor hadn't seen Invicta the whole time. The tiny AI had been sitting in one place ever since she had recovered Kevin's Alpha Cube from the hollowed-out hideout where he had left it. It was her last piece of him and she had gotten lost simply cradling it in her lap while talking to it.

She, out of all of the AI, was having the hardest time dealing with the odds that he might be dead. That they might never see him again.

"Now!"

The fact that Invicta was screaming broke Tutor's concentration and she tapped Meditati so that one of her duplicates would take over her job in making sure that the drone's kept a tight and straight path through the heart of the sun. Any deviation would shred the enlarged drones if they touched the edge of the black opening.

"Yes, Invicta?" Tutor asked as she manifested a body at Invicta's location. When she arrived she took in the hollowed-out mega structure in an instant and the little platform that held Kevin's Alpha cube.

The swarm hadn't been given any guidance as to how to build a hideout for Kevin so they had left a lone platform to hold the cube in place with thin tendrils of gold cr acting as braces off into the depths of the formerly solid sunspot. It looked oddly organic, as though this one disk of gold cr was held in place by hundreds of webs in the air. All to hold one small cube.

Invicta sat cradling the Alpha cube with a look of panic on her face as she repeatedly send Tutor requests for an ultra-secure encrypted environment in VR.

"What? No one ever needs that much encryption..." Tutor began to say as her eyes fell on the Alpha cube.

It was active.

The cube had started to do something.

"Meditati! I need you to wake up your brother and to bring him into this instance of VR that I am making." She said, making sure to erase any trace of emotion from her voice.

Everything depended on Nurse not realizing what was happening.

If what Tutor thought was happening turned out to be true, then Kevin, if he was still alive, might be abandoned the moment that the cube finished its process.

Hives tended to kill extra Queens if they didn't escape quickly enough. The same might happen if there happened to be two Kevins in existence. Tutor had no way of knowing and she didn't want to risk making a mistake.