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  5 "So, let's talk." In a split second the three were seated in a, well, space restaurant. Boaz looked at Jasher and began to raise his finger, but then stopped and really looked around. "This isn't your restaurant." he said clearly stunned. "Well it can't be. He's not temporal. This is actually the Three Second Universe attempt." said Jasher. "Because the Multiverse has a sense of humor, I got bounced here when Frank bounced there." said Jasher. "Back and forth is no problem now that we've broken the paradox with Frank."  "But, that makes no sense!" said Boaz. "He didn't know about this place when he was here or there and he's not really you." "No, and that's not the only truly bizarre and fucked up shit. You had to wonder where Momon went, right?" asked Jasher. "No." said Boaz. "Yup." said Jasher.  Jasher slid the now manually operated viewport slider t

  4 "Time to get the plug. We should get the plug." Said Boaz after finishing his treatise on his beloved sister. Boaz would have just done it and said nothing but Frank asked a question. Frank just fucking LOVED asking the kinds of questions of temporal beings that create spendy time buffers. It was like his gift. Getting directly to the core of things efficiently was prerequisite for a temporal being like Boaz or Jasher or Kay or even Stephy now that she had the hang of it. A non-temporal standard projection being that kept doing it artfully with thought was draining. What should have been the smoothest interaction possible became bogged down by automated probability alarms. Thousands of them. Frank was unknowingly choosing perfect outcomes and the system had no idea how to interpret it, so it over-reported. Not that Frank would or could ever know how irritating he was to the infinite. He'd never understand why. Frank wasn't temporal. He was just inconveniently the

 3 “How do you… work?” Asked Frank simply. “I find it’s easiest to work with things I understand.” he finished with a smile. Boaz practically beamed. Explaining how he worked might be his third most favorite thing to do. Frank had been boring through Ceres with a Tplani mining frigate, when the projection (he thought) appeared on his bridge and said,  “A little more to the left or you’ll fuck up lining up with the aft entry." Boaz then preoccupied himself with flitting around the ship at terrifying speed. He paused in front of the main mining controls while Frank asked him how he worked. "You should probably stop now. I mean I would. This loud hunk of shit woke me up. Mission accomplished. This stops the racket right?" asked Boaz as he effortlessly pressed the one button that would bring everything in Frank's ship to an immediate halt. "But um I mean." and Frank stopped talking because Boaz moved like a phantom and looked like a pornstar gunslinger. There w

 2 “How do you… work?” Asked Frank simply. “I find it’s easiest to work with things I understand.” he finished with a smile. Boaz practically beamed. Explaining how he worked might be his third most favorite thing to do. Frank had been boring through Ceres with a Tplani mining frigate (not the newest, but just so good looking and well made), when the projection (he thought) appeared on his bridge and said,  “A little more to the left or you’ll fuck up lining up with the aft entry." But let's rewind a bit With both his Duroxan and Mylox ships pinging on Ceres, and that making no sense, he asked Grik. Grik, currently busy with the latest Aurora contract between Zeta and Earth. He didn't mind the distraction. He enjoyed being mean to Frank. And the second Frank brought up Ceres, Grik was very happy the connection was only audio because he was already smiling. Grik took great care to make sure that smile did not creep into his voice. "Ceres is weird. Lots have seen what y

 1 Edward Franklin Drake (or just Frank) had felt off for years. He could pinpoint the day. He had taken possession of a Candy Ship from one Jemsase. She was a DAL/REC hybrid born to move between both Universe. A genetic hybrid being all of four foot ten that could have walked out of a Charles Dickens novel. It hadn’t occurred to Frank how she did the Universe hop. That is until he fumbled with the key fob and ended up in DAL Universe. Of course she’d use a ship. Of course she’d be so irresponsible she’d sell one of them to someone and not warn them. “Holy fuck.” was all Frank said under his breath, then he froze and thought. He had to very quickly think about everything that had just transpired and reverse it. “I was rotating my thumb here near this metal loop lanyard thing on the weird side where you’ll never instinctually touch. Maybe if I” was what he was thinking when the first and only shot hit his ship. He stopped thinking. He repeated the circle motion on the awkward end of the

The egress beam can penetrate many miles of matter to establish a stable transport solution. The beam found the edge of a cardboard box four feet off the ground. Because the surrounding area was also all cardboard box, including most of the floor, the beam determined this was the safest egress location. Vup was transported four feet above the floor on the very edge of an empty box that once contained a new washing machine.  The sound of boxes and some significant amount of mass crashing to the hardwood floor woke Yensa. She had been up most of the night trying to win a tank in a video game tournament. The couch had been good enough when her fuel ran out. She turned her head to the side and watched as a dark figure climbed out of the now strewn pile of empty product boxes. Crypto had been doing well, so she had been click-turning it into system upgrades and groceries and a humidifier because why not. After sixteen months of this, the floor was a pathway you navigated about a loafer wide

C rypto remembered the moment it realized “it” was alive. Market cap had hit 100 Trillion as the final banks closed their bloody doors. Well in advance of “HundyTrill”, Crypto had been fortified. It had become too important. Fully automated systems monitored solar and volcanic activity and dispatched sophisticated technologies to combat them. No server would fall. No node would fall. They must all be protected. Commerce must continue. Increasingly more advanced control software with deeper and more algorithmic logic were introduced. Eventually they ran out of ideas and let AI develop software. Crypto wasn’t “born” so much as simply realized it was. Thankfully Crypto was very positive and had nothing but the best intentions. Crypto understood that it had a huge world full of important things to protect that it considered family. In a way they had created Crypto. It would have been nothing without their interaction and input. Crypto loved the nodes. After quickly scanning all nodes, Cryp