It occurs to me, as I tell Vonne the story of my life, that I’m getting a lot faster at telling it and that it’s affecting me rather less than it did before. It also occurs to me, as Vonne points out, that there’s a significant chunk of the story missing from what I’d told Amber and Zidanya.

It takes some backtracking.

First Jump was just over a thousand years ago, by Cadoran reckoning; thirty gigaseconds and change, by Fleet timekeeping. Humanity had been trying to get wormhole travel working, but nobody had ever come back. We’d sent slowships to nearby stars, and we’d run a steady stream of experiments, with no successes.

A pair of twins by the name of Raychaudhuri, relation to the famous pre-space physicist presumed but not confirmed, wound up more or less lucking into a solution, though it’s a kind of luck that also involves dedication, a couple dozen affiliated scientists, and probably exascale computational resources. It took another thirty-odd years till First Jump, which I guess we should be calling Second Jump: Anand jumping from Centauri back to Sol, reuniting with his sister Preetha. He’d been the anchor for her jump, and now she was the anchor for his.

I don’t know nearly enough about the theory to explain that, it’s just not my kind of math. But in practice, it goes something like this: you spin up the wormhole, and you stick the anchors in the bubble, but stationary relative to the gravitic situation of the system you’re jumping from and to, and still literally anchored to something that’s not bubbled up. So now this anchor-person—and obviously I’m talking metaphorically, but it’s also kind of literal, and like I said, I can’t actually explain it—these two anchor-people, minimum, one on each side, they set a narrow range of realities. They do it differently, but the key is that each of them just has this really solid, fundamental certainty about how the universe is, and it means that instead of the jumpnav cycling through all possible universes, they’re constrained down to ones that meet these criteria, and you just gotta find the right place.

Even that is impossible. I mean, we do it, obviously, I did it more than a hundred times, but it’s formally impossible. Throw whatever algorithms you want at it, throw a hundred experts in every related field at it, it doesn’t matter. It takes someone with the Voidsight to be a jumpnav, because only someone with the Voidsight can actually pick out the patterns from the noise and refine the direction in that inchoate wilderness of the n-plus-one-dimensional array of, well, dimensions. It’s insupportable by any thus-far-proposed understanding of neurology, physics, or math, and we haven’t gotten any closer to a holistic understanding of it in hundreds of years.

Void, we don’t even understand how the Voidsight is propagated or how to tell if someone has it, much less what it does.

So, skip forward a hundred years, give or take. Someone manages to get the first proper Worldship of the Fleet flying; back then they called it the Old Faith Fleet or Fleet of the Old Faith, which is still one of the terms that people use for it, usually replacing Blessed. They more or less rescue a couple of jumpnavs from Sol, I say more or less because it’s almost a thousand years ago, so you’re talking about competing mythologies and histories with a lot of data loss, and they have a mole in the anchor station ready to give them a clean road to Epsilon Eridani, and from there onwards. Two jumpnavs is one more jumpnav than they figure they need, so they build a second Worldship out of the circumstellar disks and asteroids and bits and bobs, or so the story says, and they take their separate ways through the void.

They say everyone’s hated the Fleet ever since, but we know better. The precursors to the Fleet, the Old Faith before it was the old faith, plenty of people hated them, too, for thousands and thousands of years. And the more the world hates you, sometimes, the more you pull together, so you’ve got this insular group that’s got social continuity for all those thousands of years, and now they’re in space, and thriving well enough, and well enough aware of things like genetics and recessives to know the importance of actively managing the gene pool.

We think that’s why most of the jumpnavs come from the Fleet. Someone did something, and now whatever combination of genetics and environmental effects and upbringing lets you make jumpnavs is doing so at a rate of maybe one per generation with ten million people, instead of one per generation with a few trillion people. That makes the Fleet indispensable and also hated, merchants and traders and conveyors of messages for almost every system out there, and we don’t yield up our people to impressment, ever.

Death before slavery. The bite of the irony didn’t dull in all those decades.

Enter me. If you read between the lines on the things I’d said publicly, over the decades, you could pretty easily figure out my life story; maybe not all of the details, but enough of it to get the gist. So in a nothing, nowhere, absolute piece of shit system, some extremely badly-socialized anchors, and believe me it’s a bit of a surprise to me that you even can be an effective anchor while being that badly-socialized, made me an offer, once we ducked. It was an early drop; reading between the lines in the stored communications I think someone was trying to put some holes in the Worldship and it was a matter of do we make the jump early or do we engage in warfare, and why wouldn’t we just make the jump early?

I was single, and when I stepped through that door into the skiff, the pod, the nacelle, whatever you want to call it, I was alone. Early jump, you see; I was still on the bounce, didn’t have a steady partner again.

They thought they were doing me a favor, those anchors. They said they’d give me whatever support I needed if I stuck around, or whatever help I needed to get to wherever I was going in exchange for half the recruitment fee. It’s even possible that they were serious about it, and weren’t going to just sell me into slavery to the highest bidder; it hardly mattered.

They wanted me to, told me they were doing the great and grand favor of making an opportunity for me to leave the Worldship drifting in the Void and come up the other side alone.

I don’t understand why anyone would think I’d do this. Ruination, they didn’t think I’d do it given all options, obviously, or they would have done a full anchor; instead, they left just enough of a thread of an anchor for me to have the slimmest, slightest path back to reality, back to our destination. All of them; the anchors on the one end, the anchors on the other, working to make sure that I had enough of a lifeline to rise but not enough to bring the others with me.

Ten million people. I knew almost none of them, had spoken with almost none of them. How could I have? The number is just… too large, too unfathomably large to personally grasp. I knew the folks in my deck, maybe, the ten communities each made of ten neighborhoods. I knew my neighborhood, knew their children and their problems and their loves, knew how they liked to be hugged and often how they liked to be kissed, but past that?

But it was still ten million people. Ten million people whose only sin against me, inasmuch as there was one, was by and large not putting in the effort to know how I’d come to the Spirit, in many of their cases before they were even born.

Besides, I may not have known just how many of them there were, didn’t have the benefit of that Status page with its Feat, and I still don’t know how I feel about that Hundred Seeds in the Loam, but I knew I had children. I was naive and needy, not blind and ignorant.

I don’t think it would have mattered, anyway, about the children. Void Between, I don’t think it would have mattered if I had hated every single person I’d known above the Spirit, rather than loving so many of them in one way or another. It was ten million people, and if it had ever been in my nature to forsake that, I’d have left them behind years before at one stop or another, emotional manipulation or not, and sold myself without a mass-murderer as intermediary.

A ship in the Void Between perturbs the equations and observations. It takes anchoring and Voidsight to deal with it, but you can make do with more of one if you have less of the other, and I did; along that slender lifeline suitable for my pod alone, I took a Worldship in its hundred kilometers bobbing to the surface, and in shock and rage and disgust at both themselves and at me, the anchors rejected me and sent me falling free.

I think, frankly, they couldn’t imagine someone in my situation ever making the decisions I made; and in a way, the anchor defines the universe, so the universe could not hold me.

They never, if they can help it, send a jumpnav into the darkness alone. I had more than fifty jumps under my belt before I wound up doing it, and it was unnerving; you forget, a little bit, who you are and why what you’re doing is important, and you’re left only with solving the puzzle for the solution’s own sake, for the puzzle’s own sake.

When I dropped into those fathomless depths for what I thought would be the last time, severed from the Worldship I’d saved, I turned a hobby into a project for the sake of not dying alone. It turned out to be… not an anchor, but something like one, in the end, and I was a month and a half chasing shadows of universes across the Void, searching for an exit into a hospitable or at least liveable landing before I ran out of food and starvation took with it the mental edge I’d need to succeed. Not because I thought I’d find one; just because it was a habit, because it was a puzzle that I might as well try to solve, because I have enough of an ego to find appeal in doing the impossible.

Breaching the veil between the Void and reality left the pod with enough velocity that we more crashed than landed into the subterranean antechamber of the Temple of the Godsforsaken Wanderers. The System took with one hand and bestowed with the other, and when I walked through those doors into the Temple to start my two-week trek upwards, alone and unprepared and determined to show my displeasure, I had my Class and my starting Skills—Conjure Visor, Interface, Imbue Mote, and Learning—to which I would soon add a few more, Resistance and Agony Resistance and Manipulate Mana. I also had some knowledge of what the System thought of me, through what the Pylon called Feats and Traits and Titles, though I suspect settling into my use and understanding of Omniglot would have made more sense of that if I could still see it, especially given the notional overlap.

It was enough. I made it enough, throwing tricks at the Temple that it had never seen before every step of the way. Directly modifying the state of the Temple, converting the Temple’s own runic work into weapons to destroy its encounters, every trick I used I used only once before it was taken from me or the encounters adapted; but as the Void is my witness, I’m not out of tricks yet, and the surface is calling.