"The fill?--it's sifted for precious elements, then piped underground to construction sites." Jeff Porter enjoyed watching the other's reactions. His blond hair was streaked with glittering soot, his cheeks and bare neck smudged with gold and silver specks mixed with sweat.

"Sifted you say? Piped?" There was the snap of 'gotcha' in the tone. "So the ant-mites don't do that?" It was a confirmation more than a question. 

  "That too, Mr. Stein. First the ant-mites remove all crystals or sediment of viable worth, and the remaining rubble they carry cross-country. The tubing is there for their protection only--and reasons of expediency of course."

"Of course." Stein removed his wire-rimmed glasses and exhaled onto the lenses. He wiped them clean with a white handkerchief, then dabbed his round pasty face and his balding head. "And once they've reached their destination they--"

"--they double back for more, till there's not a grain left. Very efficient little workers," Porter commended. "The air in the pipe network is continuously recycled. The atmosphere is quite to their liking: not too dry or humid, slightly more oxygenated and glucose-vapored. The ant-mites must love it."

"They must, now. Why must they, Mr. Porter?" Stein raised his thick, bushy brows.

  "Because they're made to."

To Professor Anthony Lovesigh the Universe presented less of a problem than the subterfuge of his body. In better days he was a twiggy six-two.  Sandy disheveled hair even now refused to stay in place drooping and dipping into a narrow face with blue coal for eyes.

Dazzling green peridots and vertiters, soft pink carnelians, deep indigo amethysts...Lovesigh got them all spilling into his Omega net. Why were stars a cinch to catch, particularly for him? What were they, and where did they come from?

"William Somerset Maugham," said Lovesigh, nudging his questions aside.

Michael obliged with a vibrant voice, "Popular dramatist, novelist, and short story writer; English but born in Paris in 1874."

  Lovesigh was a bibliophile and a literati, among other things, to the extent his tired eyes would permit it. His den, as he liked to call his study, crawled with discolored and stained primitive volumes.

  He sat humped in his wheelchair taking respite. Lately it had been an uphill climb. Even the keyboard presented a problem. Plugging at it left him bankrupt. He had to huff and heave to fill his ailing lungs. The work-spells got shorter by the week now. They called it Parasympathetic Diaclonisis. He called it ParaDi.

  Four years ago it made its debut. Slight tremor of the lower limbs came first. Then, augmented organ behaviour: fluctuation in enzyme and hormone consistencies, dyspepsia, hepatic and pancreatic exoncomata, et cetera. Treatment, even by the best around, was a nightmare. It was in these therapy sessions that he actively weighed life and death, more often listing towards the later. But past the anguish of terminality, was the affront to his humanity, and this alone made him willful as a muled child.

He had no say as to his time of birth, but, by jupiter, he'd fight the grim reaper on a day-to-day basis if push came to shove. He was just too close to quite just now. Every time he went to therapy he died a little, but then every time after, he rose--sputtering, but alive. The sickle-hauler was going to have to earn this demise. Creation itself lay a mite from his fingertips.

If those others left him alone long enough to get a tighter grip.  Their continual interruptions and meddling, slobbering about his health and how he overworked himself--didn't the fools know that he was dying? Friends and colleagues he hadn't seen for millennia, the scientific community in its entirety in an upheaval over the possible implementation of the fringe--and the clergy, too!

In his early fifties, Dr. Lovesigh was not what one would call a practicing religious man. He found for himself after thirty-two years of dealing with the unknown, that there was both good and bad in people, and that it had very little to do with the Universe at large. Its birth and life, as physical cosmology saw it, rested on laws which good and bad had affected inconsequentially.

The creed he had inherited from his Texan parents was Episcopalian. But he could just as well have been a Jew, a Moslem or Sikh--faith was not a cause to preoccupy him.

Politics? There was religion for you. One you could really get rapt in without uttering a single prayer, foster yourself without having to transcend or relinquish any earthly gains or trek up Golgotha. Impartial as he was to denomination, Professor Antony Lovesigh stalwartly disapproved all form of politicking. Fanfares, pomp, shine and show were for Broadway, not staid civil servants. And he hated having to put up with the likes of Abe Stein.

  Now, the government man was just the anomaly he could really do without. Speaking about affected politicians--Stein was as affected as a dry prune. Hidebound, illiberal to the bone, and narrow. Loyal like a dog and perfunctory as a mistress, a true steward of the State; Stein, the liaison man, pestered him more than all the rest combined.

  "Keats, Michael. Any verse or two."

Michael looked thoughtful.

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

"Sad heart..." Lovesigh whispered privately, longingly. "Knitting kisses over a pretty velvety body--Ruth, Ruth, such gentleness, such pristine beauty, to lose a lifetime so early in life." Lovesigh reminisced of his wife twenty years past.

  He felt the clouds gather again. 

Lovesigh scowled at the thought of the man. How could he cooperate with the bureaucrat? Let him invade his body as he saw fit? Yet, Lovesigh had committed himself to patronage and protection by the government. After all, following Einstein, Hawking and Mettropoulos, his research had been the closest to a Grand Unified Theory. While others studied the innards of the Universe, he dwelled on the Universe's fringe, and even farther, outside, where there was no Universe.

  Only Lukas T. Mettropoulos--Father Mettropoulos--had the insight to  tackle the cosmos from the outside in. His rhetorical question had been, "How can there be just entropy if the Universe is expanding and in doing so is conveying order to that which lies beyond it?" The twice Nobel Prize-winning priest went on to say, "Entropy, indeed, is a steady degradation and disorganization of a system. Even though the Universe be such, it nevertheless communicates its inherent physical laws, by means of its fringe, to a topography that has no laws. Therefore, this transfer of information," he had argued, "provides order where before there was none."

Lovesigh had taken the ball from there.

He went on to prove that the fringe existed, a hybrid peal that surrounds the Universe but fits neither parameters: It was neither part of the Universe or separate from it. Beyond this was void. The boundary layer, or fringe, was a super conductor, his line of thinking went; a cosmic converter that changed the vacuum of void into workable space as a loom weaves threads into fabric. The fringe fertilized, then sewed the barrenness beyond it with seeds that grew into space-time of known and familiar axioms.

  But his efforts did not linger just on this discovery. Lovesigh was gifted with intuition that simply did not stop yielding. It took him into domains other scientists used only as boundary conditions; into cosmological terrain whose range pricked Creation.

So the Divine and Dr. Lovesigh's Fringe Theory steadily sped to an unavoidable confrontation. He often thought about it, and wondered if the time had finally come for the two classic antagonists, science and religion, to concede of being siblings, offsprings of the same parent, or even be one and the same. He was curious as to why men of science, like himself, did not study up a bit on the philosophy of religion; and why men of religion circumvented the learning of physical science. Why the need of creating a chasm where soon he would prove that there was none?

But time was precious to him. His own wisdom, which he acquired through much pain and suffering bound to a wheelchair, told him that life did not allow such luxuries. Rambling on to himself about proverbial epistemological clashes was about as effective as trying to train a fish to whistle.

Annoyed, he advanced his electric wheelchair to the blank screen of the terminal in the corner of his study. Why did the machine refuse to cooperate with  what was in his mind?

  The machine was a Rochard main-ram computer. The world-wide network gave him access to data sources others could only wish for. The house he lived in with Michael, his learned manservant, was planned, designed and built as annex to the supercomputer. No other construct he knew of, in or outside the country, could claim a more privileged synthesis than the Q-OMEGA 1(c). For one, it tied into all the non-intelligence satellites orbiting the globe. Then linked to the three-point space-mesh telescope, and, finally, shared time with Co.N.D.O.R.S. (Coordinated Nations Deep-space Observatory and Reconnaissance Station), the furthest man-made orbiting artifact. Its location was the cometary belt beyond Pluto.

 He could open up the gates of the havens at a mere touch of a key, utilize processors that ran in plasmic time (the unit period of which equalled one electron spin), yet, he did not have the one thing that would make all this come together. Paradox Technology. A field still in diapers.

 Need called for Para-Tech. Raw Vacuum. He had to produce the vacuum found outside the fringe, before simulating the fringe itself. Vacuum so empty that it sucked into existence primordial matter: electrons, neutrinos, quarks, and their anti-particles. What he wanted to fabricate was a microcosmic simile of the fringe: a mathematical sphere of void with a shell of fringe outside of which the known universe lay. 

Abe Stein scrutinized the eighth-inch insect. A powerful magnifying  glass  helped. It looked very much like an ordinary small rusty ant, the type  you  find in deserts. The head seemed the larger of the segmented body with  sizable--what did Porter call them--pincers, the gripping implement with  two jaws.

  He prodded the little creature in the petri dish, as he was told to,  with  the sharp end of his pencil. It immediately turned its head with the  powerful looking jaws, 'sniffed' at the lead point, and snapped it clear  off. Stein flinched back, jerking the point-less pencil away.

  "It's the lead it's after," Porter reassured him, a smart smile on his  face. "The wood part doesn't interest it."

  "What'll happen if I place it back in?" Stein asked and mopped a  sweaty  forehead with his handkerchief.

  "Try it."

Gingerly Stein lowered the blunt pencil into the petri.

The ant-mite dropped the lead point it carried at one end of the dish and scurried to the source. It's jaws attacked the remaining lead at the surface of the wooden stylus gnawing and worrying away at it. Once it had a pincer-full of tiny lead shaves, it scuttled to where it had left the pencil point and deposited its load next to it. And returned to the source for more.

It took fifteen minutes for it to clear a hollow shaft in the pencil. Stein then used a surgical scalpel to cut the empty wood length-wise.

He turned and looked up at Porter who was leaning over him. "It didn't as much as rasp the wood!"

"Our ant-mites have good manners, Mr. Stein. They do only what they're told. And this little fellow was after lead, nothing else."

"But how do you do it?" Stein asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.

"It's all there in the patent office, Mr. Stein, all legal and tidy. But I know you have a hundred questions to ask, at least. Some of which concern the safety of the procedure." Porter paused, then said, "If you will notice," he indicated with his small finger, "the shaft occupied by the lead is not only empty, but cleaned. Even through a microscope you will not spot traces of lead. The ant-mite used its own enzymes to scour the wooden walls. The enzymes are catalytic, harmless."

The ant-mite, as they talked, continued its frenzied activity. It now busied itself with the lead it had collected from Stein's pencil.

"What's it doing now?"

Porter glimpsed at the dish. "Removing impurities. It can work the process down to a few microns. If we looked in with a microscope we'd see separate little piles of crystals: the impurities that pencil lead contains. Molecular heaps even of other superfluous matter. It's efficient, thorough and nontoxic--it's benign to any environment, Mr. Stein. It is adroitly loyal to its genetic programming."

Stein himself was convinced. But those above him would require more exacting and hard proof. After all, there was a world of difference between pencils and people--and a world at stake.

What gnawed and nagged at him was that it would be the first time ever such an attempt would be ventured. The testimonials here had to be indisputable and overlap several layers. There could be no limit to redundancy in this. The operation had to take place, and succeed. The planet expired on a year-to-year basis, and Lovesigh on a day-to-day one. Soon they would all be breathing fatal oxides of carbon and sulphur and ethylates. "Can you show me something further up the scale--something living let's say."

"Step this way, sir." Porter directed him through an immaculately white double-door.

Once inside, Stein was confronted with an almost bare chamber, equally speckless as the entrance. Several stainless steel tables stood in the middle. On one, supine, lay a dark hairy thing. Approaching closer Stein discovered it to be a chimpanzee. Tubes and wires ran from its face and partially shaved scalp to modules of equipment surrounding it. The animal was unconscious clearly awaiting surgery.

Upon nearer examination of the ape's face Stein saw thin and transparent tubes coming out of its nostrils. He raised the magnifying glass he was still holding. He thought he detected motion before, now he saw them. Orderly ant-mites scooted within the tubes. One tube conveyed them into the right nostril and the other out the left. A parade of insects entered and exited the sleeping monkey's head. In the right tube-lane the mites seemed bulkier to him. Actually, concentrating his attention on just one little creature, he saw that something the size of a fly's eye was locked in its pincers. He moved to the one after it. It too carried a cubic grain of an object in its jaws. All did. Moving the magnifying glass over to the left nostril tube he observed the pincers empty. He looked at Porter.

"Nanochips," Porter replied.

"Nanochips?"

"Electronic circuitry, polyprotein-based, sensitive enough to be activated by neuron synapses potentials," Porter parroted.

"In plain English?" Stein pursed his mouth.

Porter momentarily wondered if Stein had ever gotten past elementary school. "In the twentieth century they used to call it lobotomy. A surgeon would insert a tool to penetrate up through the nasal cavity and into the cerabral cortex. That's the part of the brain that contains the higher nervous system, intelligence, Mr. Stein--"

"I know that, Porter," Stein gestured, nodding.

"Of course." Porter was renown for his tact and patience. "The surgeon would then scramble, sever, the nerve fibers there. Very simply accomplished. The patient would then be compliant as a peon. It was said to have been used on subjects with highly violent mental attitudes. Effectively their initiative and incentive was zapped. I think it was outlawed eventually.

"In the twenty-first century we're basically using the same approach, but instead of stifling mental activity, we enhance it. The nanochips are used as neural prosthetics. Champ here, upon awakening, will be taught to do things even man covets. He'll be capable of guiding craft, a space probe for instance, turn it, change altitude and correct its course--just by wanting to. All that the chimp was taught to do with its hands, now, it will do by simply thinking it. The ant-mites, Mr. Stein, are performing an operation so subtle that a neural surgeon can only imagine: they are interfacing individual, living, brain cells with artificial hardware."

The man from the government sponged his face. "What's it for?"

Porter glimpsed at the chip-bank checking the counter. Half a million to go, he made a mental note.

"Champ is going to pilot the first probe through the fringe. He's a separate government negotiation. He'll be able to soft and hard-link up to the Q-OMEGA1(c). He'll have adequate implants then to give him the skill of a robot technician-- proficiency not even a genius can boast of: Telekinesis, telemetry, telepathy, gigabytes of cache ROM and RAM, mainframe capacities to fit data that would take several human brains decades to assimilate, marginal interactive speech command--"

"He'll be human--super human!" Stein interjected.

"Not by a long shot." Porter said. "He will not have imagination, color dreams, aspirations--assertive self awareness, in a nut shell. Champ will not be cognizant of what his responses mean or able to reason why he has been given options to choose from. He will be incompetent of rationalizing, being inspired, self-sacrifice, or, an iota of abstract thought. Intelligence, Mr. Stein, is not what distinguishes our species from another, but sapience."

He saw the other's brows wrinkle.

"Sapience, Mr. Stein, is applied and sentient intelligence. It is intuition, sageness and wisdom--qualities intrinsicly absent from the chimp. Man cannot manufacture them. Champ, in essence, will be a cyborg, a very sophisticated hybrid of organics and artificials. His temperament and mien will not have changed. No wit, no sense of responsibility or consequence. He'll be as playful and carefree as ever before, but never, even for an instant, realize the power he's stocking."

"Yet, you refer to it as 'he'."

"A semantics matter, sir. After all, it is masculine."

"And it's the only reason?"

"Absolutely."

The colossus that Q-OMEGA1(c) was, was still uncooperative. It simply wound not resonate to Lovesigh's thinking. He used all possible methods to get it to simulate a mathematical matrix on the parameters of the fringe. The screen glared 'INSUFFICIENT DATA' or similar rubrics other than the transitive solutions he expected. The machine did not have empiricism of what it was asked to do simply because it had not been done before. There was no antecedent model to follow, no algorithmic precedence to guide it through a topos analogous to that of the fringe.

Yet, Lovesigh's 'third eye' could envision the worm-holes and the toroidal geometry with which they wrapped around the fringe plexus. He could knit the matrix up to fourth degree differentials, enough to conceptualize a converging consistency. But the Met-Par Transforms after that generated three digit factorials raised to a transcendental function exponent. The results were both prime and rational roots. The primes, he did not know about, nor had he the leisure time to work on. But the rational roots, these were the afflatus. They came in paired sets of four and each pair plotted two real-point coordinates of worm-hole ends. One end lay in this Universe while the other disseminated information at the fringe threshold.

But there were ungodly many. If the recalcitrant machine could just discriminate worm-hole ends near-by from ones in Alpha Centauri....

He had uploaded it with all the constellation perspectives, volumes of maps of the skies as viewed from Earth. To no avail. The machine circuits, electromagnetic themselves, were being disoriented by the plethora of space-time inconsistencies generated by the holes. They were being thrown off by the maverick vortexes spawned by the ends. Boggled down with gibberish every time he asked for anything above a third degree partial differential. The quanta fluctuations prevalent defied the machine's laws of cause and effect.

Still, Lovesigh could imagine both the fringe's geometric texture and its reference loci. He envisioned the fabric itself, the approximation limits the hyperbola the open-end toroid unfolded into, its cross section mass-to-energy ratio and space-time density and curvature. But the insapient machine could not work with chaos paradoxes. The stuff of logic it was made of rejected probable antitheses whose limits approached contradiction. Its links failed to function beyond the capacity of conventional reasoning. It had not been provided with virtual orientation, modified to bypass binary logic in view of stochastic sampling. Simply, it was incapable of indulging and commenting on non-deterministic solutions.

"It's dogmatic, confound it," he blurted out. "Too darn bogged down with succotash procedures to abandon them."

Well he knew he'd never have the time to get the matrix out himself. It invoked too many variables, too many extraneous roots, and finally too much trial and error. A hundred years would not be enough. If the machine could only grasp his train of thought--it then would boil down to a matter of days. The whole Universe at man's beck-and-call, if...if he could simply reach the senile automaton.

He drew away from the console exhausted, angry and disappointed. He turned and faced the broad window. Dusk brought a pink-maroon softness into his study. Above the tall hedge at the lawn's edge tonight's first stars em erged, sparkling their presence as though reassuring him that they were indeed there for him to reach. They enticed and beckoned him to approach, ascend among them and broach their mysteries; and promised in return to become his, they and the kingdom they reigned over.

Is there more here then meets the eye? he mused. If there was only a way to know that not all is irrevocable with death. For a smidgen of a while there was elation of reliance and assurance: that his mind--soul, if you m ust--lived on, freed now of its frail body, and worked on, even in some as yet uncharted as yet region of the Cosmos, to bring his search to conclusion and fulfillment--

"Ah, but let's not talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs," he said, out loud, "they're ruminations of the terminally destitute." He wasn't that far gone--yet. Weak he was. But, by conserving his strength he might gain months, a year even.

Light from the flickering computer screen exposed a smile of solace slowly being replaced by a puckish grin. Outside the window there was pitch darkness now, and above, a quadrant of star-flecked sky; this too fell upon his playing eyes. One who knew the good professor would have said that he was chasing a tachyon again, a vestige of a trail which a bolt of though t had left behind.

The ant-mites withdrew from the Q-Omega 1(c). A plethora of electronic monitoring equipment buzzed and whirred in the center of the building that was the computer's habitat. Stein, Porter, Michael and half a dozen med-techs, spent and weary by the fifteen day operation, occupied themselves silently as the carcass of Dr. Antony Lovesigh was carted out.

All concerned were aware of the vital importance of a second, artificial, fringe.

'All concerned' were the Council of Seven who along with their governments knew that the Earth had less than half a century to survive. Past that, the Greenhouse Syndrome would set irreversibly in: temperatures would rise, the Polar ices would melt, the wobble of the globe would de-stabilize, and nine-tenths of the world would perish. The hard calculations also revealed that the remaining one-tenth would have less than one percent chance to weather the ensuing decimation by epidemics.

Anthony Lovesigh was one of those rarest of the rare benefactions that providence, once in a billion or more years, let happen. A life unit that hit the jackpot of optimum genetic combinations. A natural selection that evolved by arranging its mutated nucleotides, the rungs and genetic code of the double helix ladder, in such a way as to allow a propensity for access to Universal information. The combination code of Dr. Lovesigh's nucleic acids was the mirror image of the Universe's fringe code, proton for proton and electron for electron.

Dr. Lovesigh could not be wrong.

The deductions and theoretical laws that he arrived at by his inferences and intuitive avalanches were the very ones the Universe held in store. His mind was Its animate counterpart, the only living version of what the Cosmos would have resembled had it been a sentient construct: He embodied the sapient simile of Creation.

Looking at his failing body he would never have guessed himself a recipient of this profound endowment; a legacy that could create a door, a bridge which spanned across time and space and over a mathematical geometry to reveal what encompassed it. What was outside it.

The second, infinitesimally smaller fringe, implemented by hardware support, would allow craft to pass through and use the extra-Universe topology--where space-time was open--to reach any point within the known Universe, instantaneously. A ticket to the infinite for humanity.

"A chance to leave behind all that held mankind back," as Dr. Lovesigh had said.

A soft-spoken med-tech approached. "We're ready," he said and went back to his post.

Porter glanced at Stein, "Are we?"

Stein gave a nod. They walked to where the med-tech stood, next to one of OMEGA's terminals modified with I/O audiovisual capabilities.

Stein cleared his throat. "Dr. Lovesigh...Dr. Lovesigh, can you here me?"

Porter gestured to the 'tech to raise the gain.

Both speaker and monitor jumped to life.

"Never thought I'd be so glad to hear your voice, Stein," came through the speakers as bold letters appeared on the screen and two printers hummed to life.

Stein loosened his tie and mopped his face with his handkerchief. "How do you feel, Dr. Lovesigh?"

"Alive," the same textureless voice sounded. "But different--"

"The interface program has not been run yet," Porter cut in. "You are not linked one hundred percent with the rest of the network--You do remember the procedure?"

"Nothing wrong there--memory's intact--but..."

A pause.

"But, what, Dr. Lovesigh?" it was Stein, sweating profusely. "There's somebody else in here."

"It may be your backup, sir, before interfacing. Last minute measures decision by higher ups. Duplication will be down to your neuron cell pattern. It's as far as we can go."

Pause.

"Dr. Lovesigh, Dr. Lovesigh!" a red-faced Stein called out. "Stein, this couldn't be any of your doing?" The metallic voice held a slightly higher pitch.

"No, not mine. I don't make decisions."

"Well, you should've made this one. It makes damn good sense."

Stein couldn't decide whether to grin or scowl.

"Can you describe it in there?" asked Porter, taking quick glimpses at readouts of the recording equipment. His forehead momentarily wrinkled.

"I see and hear you clearer now--"

"That's the anesthesia wearing off," put in Porter. "In a few minutes the detoxins will purge your cells."

"Along with the other fellow, there's an echo too."

"That's the recorders--"

"No, I'm on to the recorders. This is something else."

Stein's eyes were on Porter.

"Dr. Lovesigh, it may be your duplicate. We can isolate that once the backup is completed--ten minutes' time," assured Porter. He then whispered something to Stein.

"No qualms with that, one of me in here is enough to cope with. There're all sorts of weird flack coming loose everywhere--quick things, flickering and shimmering around."

"Your awareness is recuperating. You're experiencing more of your environment," Porter said. "It is your new venue, professor, welcoming you."

"How do I say, 'glad I could make it'?"

Porter feigned a trifling grin, "You just did."

"Dr. Lovesigh," Stein hesitated, "how does it feel in there?"

The pause this time was longer, and with each second Stein felt in dire need of something. Air--he was holding his breath.

"A hard dream. A movie in a nondescript space with a lot of fireflies or little pretty stars swishing about. But not much to work with."

Porter, "You're not hooked up to the whole system, professor. In two minutes, with your assent, you will be. Or, whenever you're up to it."

Stein bristled.

"You got your breath back, Mr. Stein, but I still detect discontent."

"Time, Dr. Lovesigh," the other whispered, "is of the essence. The monkey is almost ready."

"So am I, Mr. Stein, so am I."

Dr. Lovesigh chortled. It sounded like something between a creak and a squeak to those on the outside. As he was cleansed from the drugs and his awareness heightened, he could not help remembering the reaction to his proposal two months ago.

"Gentlemen," he had begun, "I suggest we go a step further. Instead of the mites operating to repair this ragged body, an operation that boasts a mere fifty percent success--and temporary at that--why not salvage from it? Save the brain."

Ripples of murmurs had rolled over the committee congregating in his study. Stein waited for quiet. Then, "Can you be more explicit, Dr. Lovesigh?"

"Yes, Mr. Stein. Last night I was looking out that window," he gestured with his head. "I was drawn by the stars' glimmer in the crisp clearness of the firmament. And I thought, we don't bring the stars to us, the planets, the moon--we go to them. We have the means to do one thing, but not the other. So, gentlemen, Mr. Stein, Mohammed will go to the mountain. For to bring back to me my health is to bring a star to Earth, or the mountain to the Prophet. Just as well, it will only be a postponement of the inevitable--my eventual lapse to an incurable disease. But to install my brain into the OMEGA and have the 'mites do their handiwork, interface the surface synapses to it--that would solve all our problems, would it not?"

Stein's left eye just then had begun a hysterical twitch. Discreetly he placed one hand over it and slowly turned to Porter.

Porter made a steeple with his hands. "Conceivable," he mumbled to himself.

"Mr. Porter, do you have a precedence along these lines?" Stein snorted.

"No, not to this degree. But 'mites have been programmed to splice neurons before."

"Human brain tissue!" Stein's other eye was about ready to set off.

"Champ for one--"

"Champ is a chimp, Mr. Porter, and--"

"--and it had a ninety-eight point two-five success," Porter related composed. "Mr. Stein," he continued with disarming lacquer, "we will not synthesize the synapses only interface them. This presents no departure, in the slightest, from the chimpanzee procedure. It would of course involve an extended brain microscan, a spot-melding map of several million cells of the cerebral hemispheres--"

"Is it feasible?"

Porter for the first time displayed naked emotion. He seemed somewhat wounded.

"It is."

"The figures, give me figures, Mr. Porter."

"Given time--failsafe."

"How much time?" Stein's eyes were shut.

Porter gave him a good looking over and, "Fifty days to two full months to do the scan, program the ant-mites, modify the computer to support a life sustaining system, and manufacture the monomolecular filament clusters--sixty days is more likely."

Stein then only had ventured to open both eyes. He looked, glared rather, with straining open lids at Dr. Lovesigh and had made his pronouncement. "Time-wise it's acceptable."

Past the initial amusement, that night of two months ago Dr. Lovesigh had gazed again outside his study's window. The glow of hope and, thus, assurance in faith lighted an otherwise drained face. Curiously it seemed to blend with the feebly stirring sparks above the panes of glass. The stars, the galaxies, the nebulas called to him once again. And he replied. An infirm mumbling at first. Then, more solidly, "I'm coming, either way, Ruth, I'm coming."

Intermittent whirs first caught his attention, then a burst of awareness almost drowned him. An awareness so ubiquitous and profound that for an instant he thought he had given up the spirit.

Vast expanses of space were at a hand's reach; time in discrete degrees of lapsing undulated by him like surging waves of constriction and dilation. Lovesigh witnessed rainbows of forces charge through electronic gates and ions veer over cascading tiers of conductances, fluctuating in electromagnetic glow as they entered and exited circuit components.

An increment farther, clusters of stars and galaxies hung suspended, motionless, scintillating like brilliant iced bursts of pyrotechnics on a pristine noel night. While a part of him marveled at the maelstrom bustling all around him, another part of his perception participated in a vortex of directed activity.

Somewhere in this maze, he thought, is the little fellow's port of entry.

They hadn't given him a whole lot of time to familiarize himself with all the controlling maneouvers. "Use your sense of will," they had said simply, "and the signals generated by electrochemical conversions will trigger the interface polyprotein implants."

"Here goes," he thought, and willed himself to the machines input ports. The reeling and swirling as he flashed through what must have been multitudes of ICs and miles of conductor caused him to shrink for cover.

He was going to retch.

He willed his nonexisting eyes to close--but by that time the vertigo ebbed. He was, or an extension of him, before unending rows of contacts, bright, shiny, gold pins inside their female counterparts.

"Ganga O. Din! It's working." As an afterthought, "I wonder if I'd sound silly asking for sea-sickness medication to be injected into those life supports?" Then, "I can't retch. That's all behind me," and he brushed the idea aside.

Upon closer examination of himself he saw that indeed he was not all there. What was didn't amount to much. Vestiges of spoke-like, quasi-real energy threads were the sole continuation of his awareness where he was. Behind him lingering 'contrails' of charged ions shimmered briefly, then dwindled into nothingness.

Fear suddenly latched on to him. What if he was cut off from the rest of his nervous system, stranded in this labyrinth of printed circuit boards? His stomach went sour.

"There's no stomach," he reminded himself, "and not enough of me here to be abandoned." Besides, his backup served that purpose, to reconstitute any small part of him lost or damaged. They had assured him of that much--or had they?

When his apprehensions had moderated to a nominal degree he turned his efforts to the job at hand: the ports for the chimp's entry.

"There's a slight technical difficulty," Porter's voice intruded amid the darkness of distance.

"What is it?"

Porter seemed to almost gag on his own words. "Dr. Lovesigh, a band of ant-mites have been detected; left behind inside the mainframe."

Lovesigh's nonexistent stomach now displaced his missing Adam's apple. The old urge to heave-ho was intolerably demanding just then, but an old man's pride is like a young lad's arrogance, neither concedes to reason. So he suppressed it as though it was capable of really taking place. And cooly asked, "What's it mean, Porter?"

"The fields in the computer--they've all gone haywire. They're reversing the 'mites' programming."

"Get to the point, man." His manifest aloofness was slowly foundering.

"The 'mites are disconnecting you. You are... in a way of speaking...being rejected by the OMEGA."

"Poppycock!"

"I don't know how else to explain it." Porter's voice choked with restrained anxiety.

Lovesigh froze. His thoughts sped back to when his body and brain were attached and an incident like this would have occurred only in a nightmare.

"Can't you stop them?" he called out. But the speakers outside placed no hue of undue urgency in his appeal.

"Yes. We can pass a somewhat higher current through the interfaces to your synapses, and electrocute them...but, Dr. Lovesigh, this will have the same effect on you. It will burn all your existing connections with the OMEGA and --"

"--and I'll be stranded, isolated. A brain with no extensions. Can't the backup repair the damages?"

He caught a sound akin to a weighty sigh.

"Neuron tissue, as you are aware, cannot be made to regenerate. The backup is only a map; a map of your brain's molecular structure plus your DNA configuration. It's merely a quantitative duplicate record of your brain. It cannot generate living cells...

His audio went dead. He waited as all of the Apocalypse unfolded before him. The last reserves of hope perished with what followed.

"Dr. Lovesigh, the renegade 'mites have started on the life supports--"

"You're going to let them leave me here--" The metallic voice halted abruptly. Then, "Mr. Stein, any ideas?"

There was a heavy silence.

"Dr. Lovesigh..." Stein began, "Dr. Lovesigh,... you're not there."

"What?"

"The brain--your brain--died."

"This is no time for morbid humor, Stein. Porter, what the blazes is going on?"

"I'm afraid it's true, sir. That 'somebody else', in there with you--it was your own brain's death pangs that you've sensed. You shouldn't 'be' at all."

Lovesigh stammered seemingly breathless; his missing knees sagged. His absent bones and muscles seemed to be melting. He sank on a cushion of vacuum trying to remember something. It was urgent.

"The fringe, Dr. Lovesigh? You were there." He heard Stein call to him, from somewhere far away.

Lovesigh imagined brushing a wetness from his forehead and cheek. Tried to focus. "The stars are dancing rainbow jewels tonight," he replied, to no one in particular. "The lights," he continued, at someplace all his own "are everywhere. These are not shallow colors..."

"The wormholes, Dr. Lovesigh--"

"Oh, they're near. Right here in our heads. Looked in the wrong place, Stein."His look through the video cameras that were his eyes lingered briefly on Champ with envy. "There is rippling radiance laced with sparkles where the little fireflies/stars come upon and break through into the fringe's surface."

Such lightheadedness, he pondered dazedly, and tried to blink in an effort to clear it away.

"Are there wormholes there?" It was Stein-from-afar.

"Enough...ample." He lost himself in his words.

Lovesigh was becoming disoriented among the syllables and their articulation. The silent rain of inumerous lights around him thickened, somehow making all utterance redundant.

"Chimp," he spoke in thought, "help me--"

Farther down the counters and racks of equipment Champ snorted, a crown of remotely controlled sensors ready and on stand-by atop his head.

The chimp waddled closer to the machine and kneeled beside it. Its narrow face appeared different now, raw and drawn.

"What's happening?" Lovesigh wanted to gasp but couldn't.

Champ fidgeted, his eyes glistening, wise. "They're calling for you," he said, trying to soothe.

"Calling?" Lovesigh struggled to understand.

"Share with them--"

"Who, chimp?"

"--be born from your shell again."

Lovesigh listened his illusory mouth agape.

"The fringe allures all life force," The chimp wooed him and rocked, gently holding on to his crown with one long lanky arm. "The spirit energy, Lovesigh. That is its design. The fringe reclaims and forges it into spores of sustained consciousness." It waved its other hand over its head, "and sows them throughout."

"Our souls?" Lovesigh blurred.

"Not a soul is lost to the Universe, Lovesigh."

He subtly remembered. The chimp's nano-implants--they acted as another eye that saw all which other eyes could not. Lovesigh's tenor changed.

"They're wrong, you can see too." He wanted to clutch at the chimp's hand. How divine a plan. He was instantly astounded by the lucid images taking shape in his mind, as clear and obvious as a remembered dream.

The chimp, right there in front of him. The computer's artificial processor did not possess the affinity which the chimp's--all brains-- did. Unlike Champ's inherent organic constitution, the wormholes broke the machines inferior synthesis down to subatomic states, to its quarks and gluons, quicker than the electronics could reconstitute them, so impending solutions simply annihilated themselves. The wormholes were partial to deep or animate space: to balance sensitive, neonatal 'life forms' evolving into full bloom. They and the fringe were the terrarium of the Universe.

A tiny wormhole end--a miniscule star--flowed, guiding, in the organic chimp brain.

"You will live forever, chimp."

"We all do. We just don't know it. The stars call, Lovesigh..." There was a blur. His being heaved. A stinging-hot, bone-splintering agony crushed Lovesigh and swept through his aura of a body to his hands, down his crotch, toes. He strained for a shallow breath and--"Whoosh!"

Champ pilotted the first craft to leave Earth by means of the fringe. The craft served as a shell to protect its occupants from stormy conditions on some freshly visited planets and as a place of temporary quarters. A plethora of new, livable worlds was being indexed. Upon further analyses and study it was discovered that the prime numbers in Dr. Lovesigh's solutions designated additional wormhole ends--our brains.

The last corporeal remains of Dr. Lovesigh were allowed to be removed from the machine by the mites. Nevertheles, the voice remained, a distant,familiar voice that answered to the same name. It had come and gone at its own volition, but had always been there in Earth's time of need.

J. M. Porter
Mites Industries Inc.
Log Entry: 21 May 2057