Took a picture from the Viteză Furie, pointing the camera out into the blackness beyond my new home world. Kept the ship in the shadow of the Gas Giant, I call it Skrimsil. My new home world is simply that. Home. We stayed there for a week in that pure black of the void, the camera open, hoping for any stray photon of light. Each dot in the image is a single photon, correlated directly to a universe born out there in the void.
In truth. All the signals we picked up are explainable away as static in the electronic signal. According to the other sensors. The nearest universe to where I am, is more than a hundred trillion trillion trillion Yotta-lightyears. It might actually be more, that's just an estimate based on the gravity wave signal. So I had a dot added to the image where the gravity sensor net said a universe exists out there.
I have continued to monitor the forms moving around out there in the void. I am now convinced that they are real, and that they are some kind of life form. Though I don't know what, they are. You cannot see them. They are fast. Capable of moving through space at fantastic, seemingly faster than light speeds. But they are something new, and something I have redesigned a a gravity probe to study. They really need to be studied. Living out there in the vast voids between universes.
As my ability to see into the void increases, thanks to the other me's work in building the spherical telescope, I have come to realize that the void is the majority of what is out there. Sure, to something as small as I am, a universe, even one as small as Trost, is massive on scales that can be hard to grasp. Universes like the one I came from are even larger by powers of magnitude I care not to contemplate. Yet... The void. The space between universe. It is so vast that you could fit all of the universes that I have thus far detected in the space, in the void, between my new home and the nearest Universe, and still have room to spare.
Without the ARC drive created by CT, I would have no hope of ever reaching beyond this world. Then again. I would have never found this world. I would still be back there, living in a tiny room, working whatever job I could find just to cover the rent, food, and maybe a sweet every so often. The testing I took that got me this job. It paid nearly a years pay, and I admit to blowing a good half of it on amazingly irresponsible things. Another quarter on things that were not necessarily irresponsible, but things I didn't really need. The rest I saved, a full quarter of it. Not as much as I should have, but it gave me a buffer that I wouldn't have ever had otherwise. It was all worth it. Sometimes the memories are worth more.
I have been here for three years. I have a home built to my liking, and a full 3D printer factory. I have made trips back to Trost and other places to get more friends for my companions, as well as other animals and plants. I could live here comfortably if I so wished. It would be a nice, comfortable life here.
Yet, I keep finding myself staring out into the void during the long nights. It is time I got back out there. I've expanded the telescope created by the other me. Studied the void life as much as I can with what I have. I finished the programming of the 3D printer interface software. It is good work, and is what let me re-design a probe/satellite file into something that I could use to watch and study the void life.
But it is time to head back out again. Not as a hop back to Trost, or a quick jaunt over to the rocky world here where my mining set up is to pick up what has been built up. I have an automated shuttle that does that now. No... It is time to make the jump and make my way to the signal. It is still there. flickering in the void like some tantalizing lure for the unsuspecting, and even so, I feel drawn to it. 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, repeat.
It is time to get back to work. Even my companions, Kotth and Lurr, seem ready to go again. They eagerly run aboard whenever I step on board the Viteză Furie for something. Looking at me expectantly.