Mall-ik was in shock; he was resonating on all seven layers of his being. His rocks were animated by parasite spins and off-axis vibrations. This was how the Metils handled extreme stress. He needed to calm himself. The encounter went too fast, he spoke, saw and he was back, floating alone in the Purple. The rift behind was closed, and his link with the alien girl severed. The one called Sophie was back in her strange but astonishing world.

His encounter with Sophie was no figment of his imagination; he had the battle scars to prove it and the memories stored in his databanks. A sizable portion of his seventh layer was gone; vaporized by a single word pronounced by the invisible human creature. He was now lost in space. His locator, a deep space compass normally intertwined into the rocks of his seventh layer was now cinder.

He should be worried about standing in the path of the second predicted rift, but he had more pressing matters. He looked around in time to see the last zexs to pour into his zone. He flew closer to the zexs; they appeared different, smaller. They looked like modest green glass pebbles. The zexs had shrunk, or his size had increased a thousandfold. Both made no sense, but the latter was more probable. Changing size, called scaling, was entirely possible in the Purple. Scaling was a gift to the Metils. When upward scaling was attempted, it was deadly, but smaller scaling was possible. Somehow his contact with the rift had made him larger. Much larger.

Any other day, his size difference would be a significant worry, but not now. The gaping holes in his layers and the stress was too much for anyone to endure without medical intervention. He was in danger, and his survival had to be his priority. Most of the rocks forming his seventh, outer shell were missing. About a hundred rocks from his sixth shell were also missing. His government issued armor that served as an eighth layer was long gone. Luckily, he was wearing the armor before the encounter. Without it, he surely would not be there. The girl's voice alone had reduced both what he called peripheral constituents and his field equipment to powder.

He looked inwardly between his rocks like a human uses a tongue to check for broken teeth after a punch to the face. Both of his spin defects were still inside of him; that was awful luck. If only the pro hac amputation could have ripped those off. The first inversion was difficult to see in layer one; the second moved as part of layer four.

He needed to calm down.

The vibrations were making him bleed energy, and he was getting weaker. He had only moments before he would lose consciousness. He no longer felt Sophie; their link had vanished. Deep within himself, he knew she was back with her father and that reassured him. How he wished he had a father, she was so lucky. Hers was called Laurent, he wanted to know him. What an honor it would be to take care of him.

"Sophie?" he said out loud to confirm his suspicions. There was silence. He was alone. His mind was still overwhelmed. In the Purple, the visitor had no material body. She was pure thought. Thinking about it, he was also immaterial in Sophie's incredible world. The place she called Wonderland was filled with colors alien to him. In her world, Sophie had a body, while he did not. He knew she was the creature around the large table with the white dress. Her body was strange; it had no moving rocks. She really was nice.

How would they ever believe him at the reporting station? Sophie was no illusion. He looked inside his fifth layer, the mental bridge was still working. The device was a black box recording every moment of his life.

Alone in deep space, Mall-ik lost consciousness.

---

Time passed.

---

Slowly, his orbiting rocks slowed almost to a point where they stopped vibrating altogether. When he awoke, the new rift still wasn't there. There was silence in the Purple where he floated. His pain had deepened and intensified, but he was still alive. His vibrating stress was gone, replaced by weakness. He was no longer bleeding energy. He would die unless he could recharge, and he was in no shape to travel to the closest deeper purple energetic area. Home was too far away. He was ready to die.

He waited.

But pain quickly undermined his resolve to play the martyr. There was a way, in theory. His streamer still worked, and by using it, he could attempt a space jump. He knew once back at his base, the Group would interrogate him endlessly, as was their habit. They were sure to dismantle him, either because of his two spin inversions, or his disregard of the mission. He deserved whatever reprimand was coming his way. The Group's answer to any problem was almost universally death.

He had discovered life on the other side of the rift, which had to be worth something. As his mind merged with Sophie's, he saw images from the Cold. Her world was so different, the empathic link between their minds allowed him to understand part of what he witnessed. Hopefully, the information from his recording box was incomprehensible if he was dismantled. Maybe he could negotiate for his life. But who was he kidding, the Group was awful.

Mall-ik's immediate survival depended on his capacity to find a stream that moved in the direction of the capital, use the technology to jump on it and transport himself to safety. He was new to using streams; his plan was a mere step from suicide. Even under calm conditions, using the technology was dangerous. There was simply no other option available to him, he reasoned.

Using his mind, he dismissed the pain and concentrated. Rocks moved. He pulled the rocks forming the streaming device orbiting from within himself. By some miracle, the box was intact. He knew he wasn't ready, but he had to attempt the jump. Hours of preparation were normally required, but he had only minutes. He ran part of the mental checklist before he attempted to energize the device. Any misuse of the Streamer would mean death.

Streaming itself was old technology; not the streamer he was about to use. Thousands had paid dearly to develop it. It took decades before one of the prisoners condemned into streaming survived to tell his story. Because of the importance of teleportation, the cost in Metil life was ignored, and testing on streaming continued. Today streaming, in the best of conditions, was deadly more than two percent of the time. Mall-ik's conditions were unquestionably not ideal.

The technology could be imagined as some form of teleportation. A Metil energized the device and in the blink of the mind reappeared leagues away from where the device was powered.

Mathematicians discovered one day that the Universe or at least the Purple dimension had what was called natural scales. Everything in the universe existed within itself at multiple different scales, or sizes. This principle, on earth, is called self-similarity. It is, in itself, far from intuitive. Theory teaches us a curved coastline is identical in shape when looked from a high altitude, or when using a microscope, finding the identical portion was the problem. The similarity in shape between a large object and a small one is not coincidental: it is a natural property of the Universe. While both scale versions look the same, fractal mathematics tells us they are not the same. In the Purple, that is not the case.

The Metils mathematicians found that self-similarity comes in two types. The Universe not only creates identical patterns at different scales, but some of the rare matches can be linked at the hip, as two sides of a coin. In fact, the theory says everything and everyone exists simultaneously at multiple different scales. The coastline from 20,000 feet has multiple, identical, fractal copies at different scales, but a handful of scales are streams.

Metil children are taught that scaling is like being able to find a microscopic map of the world around you and being able to move the smaller version of yourself on that map. By reducing yourself to nearly the size of the copy on the map, your smaller twin version grows larger. As the pair gets closer to one another other, they are pinched in a precise direction on their respective maps.

Scientists believe not only is there a smaller version of anything, but logically there have to be larger versions at larger scales. Each time upwards scaling has been attempted, the result has always been death. Since streaming, or pinching, is associated with movement in one precise direction in space, traveling in any direction would require additional research.

Because of their shapes, the Metils were uniquely adapted to stream. With training, they can extend themselves, or inflate themselves to nearly double their size. At normal size, the streaming device always finds one single stream in one direction but rarely the desired direction. The best Metil streamers have mastered expansion techniques. This allows them to increase the number of available scales at any given time. A Metil at ten percent additional expansion will find a new second scale, hopefully in the needed direction of travel.

Mall-ik had no physical capacity to expand himself to help his streamer find multiple scales and be able to scale in the right direction. But he could look for the basic scale. Maybe the first offered scale would be right and lead home.

He also was a novice streamer. After years of practice on the simulators, he was authorized for the first time to use the streamer moments before he reached the rift. He activated the machine. The first step was simple. Mall-ik pushed a shining red rock, and an image of himself was stored in the memory. Hurt, with chunks missing, he was nearly twenty percent easier to model. He initially did not enter an expansion variable, he was in no shape to push his size. The pain would be too much.

The device returned no viable scale.

He increased his expansion coefficient to five percent. That could be possible. The machine found a single stream, to the north-east. The direction was away from where he needed to go. He increased his maximum expansion to ten percent and finally fifteen. Nothing. Only once he increased the expansion to twenty percent did he find one. It led directly to his deep purple. There was no way he could expand as much. Healthy, he could maybe expand by thirty percent. He had no time to wait; he had no choice.

He slid a block and energized the device. It sparkled. The pieces forming the streamer stopped turning within his sixth layer. The rest of his body was still orbiting. His own rocks touched the machine; there was an orange jolt of power in the device. The energy jumped between the rocks, like a Tasmanian Devil of electricity. At least the machine was working. It kept warming up, then the program executed.

He now had to expand himself. He took a deep pause and slowly began to push. Like a person taking a deep breath, he let himself grow, pushing every rock apart from his center. The pain was blinding. Each rock had to distance itself from its neighbors in the same proportion. He was only at five percent growth, and there was no way he could do more. His larger rocks began to vibrate; this was not stress vibration, it was different. He ignored the pain and pushed on. As each of his rocks parted from the others, the pain doubled. He was a human with broken legs trying to stand up. With supermetil effort, his expansion increased and passed eight percent. He had to continue. The pain was debilitating.

He really had to find a reason why he should push past the pain. If he failed, would they send someone else to the next opening of the rift? Would that person be as kind as he was? He wanted to see Sophie, yet he was returning home. He knew his mind was not making much sense.

He pushed. His expansion was now at ten percent, then fifteen, and finally twenty percent. At some point, the pain was so great, he no longer felt his body. Once wide enough, the screen on the device blinked. It now read twenty-one and a half. Without hesitation, he let one of his spinning layers touch the orange energy. Like a child's toy, the machine expanded and the rocks forming it placed themselves in a close orbit over his round body. The little points began to rotate very fast forming an orange color sphere around him.

Then, the world around him collapsed.

He was gone.

Streaming was no walk in the park. He needed to concentrate, almost meditate. His mind had to run a complex gymnastic sequence. He needed to find the focal point. None of what he expected happened. Instead, he fell into nothingness; a pit of darkness. He knew streaming, and this was not it.

An instant later, he appeared in a much deeper color part of the Purple. He looked around. He was at the doorstep of his final destination. He had committed yet another mortal violation. Streaming this close to a city was forbidden. Anyone in a close vicinity of where he arrived would die. Further, streaming was imprecise.

Mall-ik was dying; he did not care. Other Metils around him began to yell and panic. Within seconds, a citywide alarm sounded. He obviously was the source of the commotion. But something else was wrong. He was in the middle of his capital city. Millions of small shiny rock danced forming this city. Hundreds of Metils were phasing out of their houses, passing like ghosts through the walls. Each made of crystal-like popcorn, with kernels bouncing off each other. This world was beautiful. Seas of energetic rocks, in small groups, were spinning around in clockwise fashion.

The world felt smaller than normal. Each of his orbiting rocks was larger. Each rock was bigger, stronger. This was impossible. Expanding to scale was pushing rocks apart, not making them bigger. It was as if he'd drank Alice's growth potion from Wonderland. He was about twice the size of the others in the city. He had no clue as to how he'd scaled to this size. In this larger form, he would be harder to destroy.

There was a lot of commotion, but no one spoke to him directly. In this world, communication was a series of clicking sounds generated by the caresses of the spinning rocks orbiting each other. Putting the pain aside, he felt like a giant. This made no real sense. In the Purple, creatures did not grow in size. His current predicament was technically and scientifically impossible. After his encounter in the Cold, nothing could really shock him today. He was wounded, and he needed help, that was obvious.

Slowly he made his way to the large doors of the of the Group's headquarters. The tall building looked like millions of blue glass cubes, each with rounded tips and vibrating edges. Energy flowed in every direction. The Metils could, like a comb through hair, slide themselves through what appeared to be solid.

Finally, as he reached the large doors of the place he needed to go, Metils working as medical staff came to help. There was universal kindness about doctors. The larger patient was still able to maneuver through the crystals, he passed the door, but as he did so, he did break a few formations.

"I need to report," said Mall-ik to the doctor.

"We must repair."

"No time," said a rude voice inside the structure. The Chancellor was already barking orders. "Bring him in. Lock him up!"

Mall-ik floated, with difficulty, to the high inner chamber. Here there were fewer crystals, and he could see the others. He quickly was surrounded. Regeneration modules, also made of spinning particles tried in vain to hook themselves to his oversized body; he would have to stay injured. What had happened to him was not natural. The questions began.

"Chancellor Rik, he has two inversions," observed the medic.

"Silence. You will speak when asked." There was no kindness in this place. "Debris," began the Chancellor speaking now to the larger sized Mall-ik. "Tell me what happened; you have moments before we dismantle you!"

The Metils were capable of imprinting. This technology was a merger of minds and included forceful data sharing. It ordinarily was reserved for reproduction ceremonies. Forcing imprinting upon another was tantamount to rape on Earth. The technology allowed one to read another's mind the same way Mall-ik had read Sophie's.

Mall-ik's size was a problem. Mall-ik knew if the medical equipment could not connect, the mental reading devices would also be unable to pry open his mind. "There is little time, I must warn you, I was attacked by a creature from the other side of the breach."

"From the other side of the rift you guarded?"

"Yes."

"We sent another to your post. The second pulse has just begun, but it will stop soon."

"I saw the other side of it, a different world. The Cold." Mall-ik felt hiding the truth was pointless and could only endanger Sophie and her father. "I flew into the rift. There I saw a creature. We talked. She followed me home and attacked with using only words." He needed to mitigate what he'd just said; it was not the entire truth. "She is not dangerous, she is kind. The pain was uneven...."

"Shut-up!" interrupted another Metil. "You use the term 'attacked,' please explain." Slowly the large hall was filling with hundreds of Metils phasing in through the walls.

Mall-ik tried his best to describe the events as they transpired. His larger size helped get their attention. He did keep the personal attraction to Sophie and her father to himself. He liked the girl, they would not. He knew better than to lie or deceive the Group, but they could figure some things out by themselves. He explained she was a child, brave and scared, living in a ship traveling in the space of their world. He had close contact to the anomaly, seen the lights, and then connected with a light pattern. Of course, Mall-ik left out what was unknown to him. He did not know the girl slept and he had somehow fallen into her dreams. He described to the Metils Sophie's world as Wonderland.

"So life exists in The Cold?"

"Most definitely."

"Are they belligerent?"

"I cannot say, but the one I contacted was not. A child, like me. Scared."

"Yet she hurt you, crossed between worlds. None of this is possible. What you describe is fiction. You survived in the tale because of your cowardice. Your actions were idiotic and reckless. What you say is impossible and illogical, yet you stand here. She would have returned. Masters of the Nexus are clear, nothing or no one can cross between worlds."

Another voice spoke. "We must assume he uncovered a new life. It is doubtful you found a second Nexus or a new singularity. The tale is impossible. He did not cross and open the way for this powerful creature." The voice was not pleasant. "We have been misled."

"Enough!" said a different and deeper voice from a corner. "We will have time to debate and analyze after the rifts close. For the moment, careful observation and data collection are prime." It was right. "The rift will stay open only a fixed period of time. We need more information." The next words were for Mall-ik. "Bastard, you will accompany us in restraint as a prisoner." He was still weak. "You were given simple instructions to stay at a safe distance and report. You violated your orders, and we do not know if this foolhardy attempt must be rewarded or punished. You are placed on probation and suspension. You are losing energy. If you die, we will take the data from your memory. Your death is of no consequence."

Mall-ik was hurt, but he was no longer dying. The young creature was fine with the punishment, he'd expected worse. A much larger streaming device was brought into the room. An expert operated it. In a blink, the entire delegation made of hundreds of Metils shifted to an area close to the rupture in space. There in space was the second rift. It was like the first but only bigger.

"What magic?!" yelled the leader. The Metil army next to the rift was impressive. One soldier was floating closer to the rift. The edges of the flat plate from which zexs poured appeared to be unstable. The light and edge changed size from a square to a rectangle. This second rift appeared to Mall-ik to be equally inviting.

"Bastard! Was the anomaly moving this way when you last saw it?" The mirror was advancing in space.

"I do not recall."

"Useless group of deformed particles," murmured the creature to itself.

"Sorry. I don't recall."

"Silence!"

The soldier in the distance was instructed to advanced slowly, avoiding the zexs and entering the rift.

"Boy, where you when you entered?" asked the army leader.

"I don't..." he began.

"I will dismantle you myself." The Group was losing patience with him.

A second soldier was instructed to float closer to the rift, the first guard was a speck between the zexs. This was suicidal. Then, in a flash, the first volunteer was pulverized by a zex shot out of the rift. An instant later there was an explosion, a small shockwave. The wave spread out through the Purple, pelting them all. Loose rocks were pushed from some of the Metils. Apparently, Mall-ik had been lucky to survive.

Mall-ik felt like this shockwave was his only chance to escape his captors. He needed to be reunited with Sophie. No one would follow him to the rift. The restraints were not really adapted to hold his larger body, and with a push, he slid out of them.

He felt some urgency, a gut feeling. If he stayed here, he would die. They would never believe him. The rift was about to close. He felt like he needed to go back to the ship. He did the only thing he could do: he moved to the only place in the galaxy where these people would not follow. He ran to the rift. The army watched in horror as he did.

In seconds, Mall-ik was gone.

As he passed the veil between worlds, an impossible task, there was a strange feeling of homecoming.

He cried.