/ Chapter 9 / In the universe chat... Then what happened? Well, after I had set up the parameters and got the whole thing running, it was actually looking pretty promising. The early formations were beautifully symmetrical, but then, well, you know how it is, chaotic deviations are inevitable so it didn't last. Then the typical proto simpleforms started to emerge and I thought I had plenty of time to just run normally – simpleforms are usually only disruptive towards the end, right? Right... but not yours I take it? It was fine up until some 20 million years ago... that's when an erratic simpleform appeared. I instantly smote it of course. Turned out to be a transfer. It didn't do any damage, but it felt like a... violation you know? And also bit like when a planetary snooker judge has to reset the positions for some reason and you know it's just not the same... it just damages the integrity of the rest of the match. That would certainly give me lingering bad vibes. So your rental space was invaded? That's a breach of contract right? That's what I though. Basically I had been minding my own business for 9 billion years and then out of the void came these... these old farts, poking and prodding, threatening to upset the whole natural progression thing I had set up. I tried to say no, but they insisted that the old contract had lapsed and now I had to take on "new responsibilities"... "it's just a few transferred simpleforms", they said. Then they even wanted to escalate and install a god! I gave them a big fat no to that of course, but ultimately had to take on a few simpleforms. Uh-oh. "Oh, they won't be a bother", they said. And what do you know? The little buggers started making a mess right away, that's what they did. Bloody multiversal rental agreements. How can they just change the contract 9 billion years in? I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it. Might as well collapse in on myself and try budding out in the wildervoids! –o– Teu flipped out of her bunk, onto the floor and snatched the libido bar right out of Braid's mouth. That was close! Right, the bar had actually never made it to the garbage chute. It had just ended up mixed in with her general stuff awaiting sorting out. She threw it out of the room, as if having just disposed of a bomb. –– "Did you eat any?" Braids was about to answer when Teu heard another crinkle. It was 505 who stood outside, having picked up the bar. –– "Wo-wu-wo-wo!", Teu yelled, rushed out and snatched it again. She headed to the garbage chute and spaced it. Turning around she saw the others looking confused, then she noticed the cockpit area and was reminded of the jump. She rushed up and noticed that the timer wheels were down to 03. It was time to secure everything for a zero gravity condition – especially Braids. Braids looked at Firefly, who just scratched her side, and gave a befuddled shrug. Why were she being weird again? Weren't meal bars for eating? –o– The jump to the refuelling system completed without any mishaps. There were quite a few ships on the sensors, and they seemed to go about their business, clustering around what was probably one of the nine refuelling stations in the system. The station just showed up as RF2-121-NN. The star was an intermediary brown-red dwarf with a single oblong pockmarked planetoid sitting in a very sparse distant asteroid belt. When she sent a docking request to the station over comms she got some bad news -- All of the nine stations were out of fuel, with fuel transports scheduled to arrive in 5 hours at earliest. Ah, that explained the clustering ships, she supposed. There were fortunately a few patrol ships keeping peace. Feeling somewhat safe, she figured she could squeeze in a bit of sleep -- non-gas-grenade-induced, that was. That involuntary nap had likely only lasted for less than ten or fifteen minutes. Thinking about it, she had been kind of up and about all day, dogfighting, shopping, getting kidnapped and doing some light murdering. Braids was in her bunk, still in her panties and laying on the side reading something when Teu entered and stripped out of habit. After getting into the top bunk it didn't take long for her to begin to doze off. Her ability to sleep on command had either carried over or it was something worker constructs could do as well… it was hard to say since they had operated on such predictable schedules in the past. Just as she fell asleep a disturbance emanating from the bunk below pulled her out. Was Braids doing something? She made little sounds and the whole bunk seemed to bob a bit. Was she doing that super annoying repetitive muscle contraction thing with the leg or foot that some people do? Or was she doing something else? Oh-no -- Had she actually eaten a bit of that pink bar? Or was this sort of thing just something Teu could expect to happen now that the others were on a normal meal bar diet and not the factory worker stuff? Teu wasn't going to look and find out. She put her improvised pillow over the head but couldn't block it out. Then she heard a page turn. Oh, so Braids was just reading after all. She decided to quickly look down just to confirm -- Yikes! Considering her own shameful display earlier it was not Teu's place to reprimand Braids, so she just hopped down and exited the cabin wrapped in her sheets. She crossed over to the other girls' cabin and borrowed a bunk. She blocked out the surrounding activities with an impenetrable dome, sat at its centre and pulsed nothingness outward with each breath until sleep came. She drifted in and out of it for an unknown amount of time. Teu discovered that she had actually slept lightly for two hours, drifting through a number of dreams which she couldn't at all remember aside from the last one... The top of a windy Eiffel Tower was not a place to play poker with cat people, but her brain had thought so. She had been able to use her so called cheat ability to win in a game of cards -- they had been using one of those decks with 52 pinup figures so Teu was able to see the opponents hands plain as day. The nonsensical dream was probably an expression of her wishful thinking that her panty vision could be useful at some point. After getting out of bed, back to her cabin and into some clothes, she saw Braids wandering about -- fortunately wearing a fresh pair, though looking a bit ruffled. At least this clearly answered the question whether the worker constructs were asexual meat robots or not. Despite her steadily diminishing trust in the Imperial Encyclopedia, Teu bookmarked some relevant places and silently handed it to Braids, not wanting to have to give "the talk" to a woman probably well into her middle age. Teu's mind was still lingering on the dream. She felt like there must be a way to... well, cheat the cheat, so she tried to look through magazine pages using her panty vision, but that trick didn't work in reality. She got a skirt onto 505 and tried to detect her through a wall, thinking that maybe the wall would count as clothes to the vision. It didn't work. When 505 stood halfway obscured by a doorway, Teu could only use her magical vision on the unobscured half. She also couldn't use her vision via a mirror. With the experiment over, 505 shrugged at Teu's weirdness and resumed her activities, dropping the skirt in a heap. They still had to wait at least three hours for the fuel resupply ships to arrive in the system, so Teu slipped into the pilot seat and opened "Nhezla Zyrt : Imperial Assassin -- Book One" at page one and started reading. Spectating was the small Nez'olian animal figurine which had become a dashboard mascot – a tiny little microfilm strip now hiding inside. The figure rather reminded Teu of a dumb and particularly shortlived ferret of hers. It hadn't been quite so blue and snakelike though. tbc...