Red awoke with a start, ABBA’s “Knowing Me Knowing You” echoing discordantly through Bismuth’s lab as Red pulled themself off the smooth tiled floor. For a few moments she was horribly disorientated, the dim flickering light and reverberating noise overloaded their waking senses.

They had stayed up late into the night, first to argue with Bismuth over the sacrifice of 50% efficiency just to remove a 0.0001% failure chance, and then having subsequently lost said argument to enjoy the quiet solitary calm of mapping the subtle oscillations of the vortex after xe had headed to bed.

Red’s head thrummed with pain as she assessed the stack of loose drawings that they had spent the moonlit hours sketching out. The multiple diagrams an attempt to solve a problem that was at odds with her need to map things out accurately.

Ultimately the problem was the vortex, which (more so than even the street itself) was a warped bit of physics; the geometry broken in ways a human eye could barely follow. As Red had watched, the light had fractured, twisted, shattered, and recombined each, state lasting a fraction of a second before changing fundamentally. A new shifted version visible before Red had finished tracing the prior.

All in all, it had been an engrossing challenge capable of catching Red’s attention in its entirety. Completely engrossed the hours had raced by until she had passed out from exhaustion, sleeping on the cold floor of the lab till she awoke hours later.

She picked her phone out of her pocket as it began a second rendition of Al’s caller tone and answered with a grimace as the cool cracked glass pressed against her bruised face.

“Hiya buddy! How are you doing tonight!”

There was a notable pause from the other end of the line as Al processed the cheerful obliviousness in Red’s voice before it responded.

“Well Red, I was planning on meeting up with a friend of mine who had asked me to build her a suit capable of going into a vacuum, but for some reason she appears to have not bothered showing up. So, I guess I’m just going help myself to some snacks in their house instead.”

Red covertly opened the calendar on their phone and confirmed that they were indeed the person who was meant be meeting with Al.

“Oh, ah shit. I’ll head right to you! – I just need to collect up these new maps!”

She grabbed her assorted notepads and packed them away slotting each into the bag in-order before cramming last night’s twenty-centimetre-thick wedge of sketches into the “pending collation” pocket of the bag.

Her eyes swept the room one last time as they slung the bag over one shoulder and stealthily made her way through the reception area.

As they made her way to the door, they saw it, the sinister warping darkness behind the glass panes of the reception window. The ever-present space behind the walls of the street. The incomprehensible blurry darkness which had captured Red’s imagination from the moment they saw it. Was it a physical space, an endless void? Could it be mapped with star charts and gravity topography diagrams? Initial tests had proven inconclusive.

But Red hoped so, anything that could be mapped could be understood, and anything that could be understood was safe. Currently behind every window was an unknown, a question with no answer unmapped and dangerous. But not after tonight, tonight Red and Al would alleviate that danger, take the first steps towards complete knowledge by exploring the oxygen deprived void behind the street.

But first, they needed to meet up with Al. With that thought she stepped out into the street and for a moment she stood in the midnight twilight outside the lab, and they considered the sky. Most people she knew just picked a single marker from the twilight sky to follow, but not Red.

Red took the time to study the sky assessing the location of the eleven key points intrinsically linked the topography of the street. Of course, you could find your way around the street with a single point of reference, but only in a vague, imprecise, and deeply unsatisfying way.

For Red, the safety of precision was a requirement they had refined down to an exact science, merely taking a few minutes of analysis and study. Tonight, the sky indicated that the street was in a lesser variant of type Beta_16q, a particularly unstable configuration which she hoped to prove was linked to the appearance of new buildings on the street.

Crucially they knew that it would take her exactly twenty-three minutes and twelve seconds to walk from Bismuth’s lab to Red’s quaint household. As she walked, they made mental note of the buildings on either side of the street, the aged shells on civilisation on the verge of collapse, sustained by forces Red lacked the tools to quantify.

A few had been explored of course, the type-A ones which seemed to have safe physics gradually picked clean by Charlie and Sai on their endless quest for extra-universal media. It was curious what those two were willing to risk their lives for. But, as per their blue backed notepads, regular adventure seemed to be a crucial part of the duo’s mental health.

As expected 23 minutes later Red arrived at her front door, the familiar plastic painted a vivid scarlet in defiance of the once-rental property. With effort she resisted the perverse urge to knock and instead pushed open the door in search of the irritated enby within.

It was not hard to find, Al sat in the dining room, its worn trainers propped up against the table as it scrolled idly on its phone. As Red entered it didn’t move, oblivious as it perused the endless memes the internet provided.

Uninformed of her friend’s ignorance Red moved into the room and swung her heavy bag onto the table with an enormous THUNK. At which Al shrieked and fell out of its chair.

Fortunately, it recovered quickly, and jammed its phone into its jeans as it pulled itself off the floor to greet them.

“Oh hi Red, so nice of you meet me here and so nice of you to be so punctual. You only left me wait for, ooh, almost three hours this time, which I suppose is technically an improvement....”

Red stood stock still, staring at Al’s face as they tried to figure out if it was joking or genuinely upset with her. A few tense seconds of processing later she relaxed as they realised that the look on its face was of mild amusement rather than genuine annoyance.

Al smiled back at them confirming her assessment and gestured nonchalantly at the pile of thick shiny material laid out on the table.

“As requested, one airtight vacuum suit sewn from a delightful heat resistant plastic weave, complete with rubber inner seals and assorted harness points to make sure you don’t float adrift.”

Al reached over and pointed at the various hooks and harness points on the suit, before continuing.

“Obviously the suit is made to the measurements you sent me, and I took the liberty of adding a few extra pockets for your notepads and pens as well as giving the shoes and gloves a rough outer lining so you can hopefully get a grip on whatever’s out there.”

Red pulled out an iridescent notepad and flicked to the first page as she examined the suit, each join and stitch was as she had requested. Ever button, seam and pocket placed perfectly in line, it was exactly as she had sketched out with only Al’s thoughtful additions missing from the sketched design.

A few quick motions of a pen later and the differences were added, leaving Red with a perfect diagram of the newly made suit. A suit she knew every centimetre of. A piece of equipment they could unequivocally trust. After a final examination, she turned away from the suit and back towards the awaiting Al.

“It’s perfect Al, you really have outdone yourself!”

Al nodded back, suddenly awkward it never-the-less managed to stutter back a response.

“Ah, well not quite. But.. Yeah its, its pretty good I think – Err…so, you wanna give it a go tonight since I’m here to help an all?”

A thought struck Red as they nodded her agreement.

"Have you really been waiting here for three hours?"

Al shuffled its feet awkwardly.

"Well, no… not as such. I mean, you have literally never been less that two hours late to meet me, so I just left late and phoned when you arrived, so I really just waited the half hour it took you to get here. "

"You mean the 23 mins"

Al wore a look that Red was 90% sure was confusion so they clarified.

"The walk from the lab to my house when the street is in configuration Beta_16q is exactly 23mins and 12 seconds not half an hour."

Al shrugged at the clarification as Red rooted through her bag to find the notepad which covered Beta_16q, flipped it open to the seventh page and thrust it under Al’s nose.

"You see here, the street twists these two sections together and losses this bit and thus you get a 23min 12s walk. "

Al nodded barely glancing at the notepad before responding.

"Sure, I guess? Sounds good, now, did we have a specific window in mind? Which do you think would be a good jumping in point?”

Red just grinned and beckoned the tailor upstairs.

They led Al through to the second door on the left to reveal the chosen spot. Which was revealed to not be a window at all, but rather a great broken hole in the wall of the master bedroom. The room had been stripped of furniture and filled instead with sledgehammers, axes, saws, and the scattered rubble of the room’s rear wall.

Red glanced at Al as it shuddered at the sight of the un-shielded oily blackness of the far wall.

“Oh if you’re cold this is the best place to be! The blurred void averages a temperature of forty degrees centigrade so it’s actually rather warm!”

Al grabbed her arm carefully, guiding the two of them out of the room and back into the hallway.

“You know what Red, whilst that sounds great. I think you should put the suit on before you show me anymore.”

Red acquiesced, rapidly strapping the suit on over her shirt and coat tails as Al checked each seal was properly closed before handing Red the last piece. A scuba mask and tank modified to provide the oxygen Red would need for her exploration.

Red smiled what she hoped was a confident, pleased smile and added a double thumbs up for added confirmation as they strode past Al and back into the dismantled room.

She paused briefly to allow Al to hook the safety cable to the back of the suit and reluctantly agreed that she would tug the cable to signal if she was in danger or otherwise needed Al to pull them back out.

Ground rules established Red moved across the destroyed room and stepped through the cracked wall, into the pulsating blurry darkness.

The blurred void was warm, heavy, and completely absent of gravity. A clove scented darkness that roiled and clung to Red’s suit as she pushed off drifting away from the shattered wall of her home.

As the faint light of the room faded the reality struck her. She was stuck in a place without markers, a place of roiling mercurial darkness and a single slack cable trailing behind them.

She had hoped to see things inside the darkness, some clue or thread which when pulled would unravel the mystery. Something. Anything which would make the darkness behind the street mappable.

Instead, endless, near unmappable darkness paired with a creeping sense of dread. Panic tore through Red and they snapped her eyes shut and pulled sharply on the cable.

She felt the slack cable tighten in response as it began to pull her back, speeding them through the darkness towards the well mapped familiarity of home.

A stretched eternity later, she was back in the safety of the house. Their eyes able to take in the familiar, safe sight of the wrecked bedroom. Beyond that, grey faced and panting, was Al, fixated on the empty space behind Red.

Red turned her head to follow its gaze towards the broken wall. To the place where the darkness of the blurred void had changed.

The void rippled and spilled over the edge as Red and Al watched, each thin tendril crystalising into hair like strands of silver wire as it slid over the threshold.

Red and Al shared a concerned look as the wires sparked and writhed amongst the rubble.

It seemed the darkness of the Blurred Void was not as empty as everyone had assumed.