The Edge

What lies at the edge? A troubled man named Michael is about to tell the tale, and Dr. Listener has his pen in hand.

"It's ok to relax now, Michael. May I call you Michael?"
The slumped figure in the hard metal chair before me swallowed the unease that had stuck in
his throat and slowly dropped his head in a single nod. Over his shoulders was draped a ragged robe. One that had, once upon a time, been white.
"Thank you, Michael. My name is Doctor Listner." I waited for a response, but none came.
"You don't have anything to worry about, ok? I just want to ask you a few questions." He spared me a quick and nervous glance before his eyes darted back to the floor. "Is there anything I can get for you, perhaps, before I begin my questions? A juice-box, a piece of fruit, water maybe?" Michael took a deep breath in and softly let it out in shudders. "All right," I said. "We'll begin." I flipped open the front page of my note pad. Scattered about on the lined paper was a conglomeration of personal notes; to-do's, groceries, and reminders. I muttered a little to myself as I flipped through the pages till I found one that was blank. "Ah, here we go." I fished a pen from the inside pocket of my jacket and clicked the top. "Your name is Michael Fenton, is that correct?"
He let out a soft, "yes" without taking his eyes from the small crack in the linoleum on the
floor.
"And you recently returned from a very long trip, is that correct?"
His breathing paused for a few seconds. Then he raised his eyes to me, and I saw the
redness within and the dark circles of sleeplessness around them. 'He probably hasn't rested or stopped thinking since he's been back,' I thought. "Yes." He said.
"Could you tell me about it?"
"Could I have an orange?"
I looked up from the date I had written in the top corner of my paper, a bit surprised. "Of
course." I didn't want him to sense my impatience. I flagged down one of the passing orderlies and had him fetch the requested fruit. We sat till he returned in silence. When he did, I had him give me the fruit so that I could pass it on to Michael. He took it and began to remove the peel.
"You, no doubt, recall," he began, "the information that was gathered from the Sigma probes
Zero and Three."
"I remember that it was flawed, that it didn't make sense."
Michael snapped up from his focus on his half peeled orange. "It wasn't flawed!" I could tell he
was angry and I checked my position. Juice dripped from his hand which was now clenched around the fruit. He seemed to remember himself, and brought his attention back, more relaxed. "But that doesn't mean it was supposed to make any sense." He shook his head slowly. "Ro. What did you do, Ro?"
"Why don't you begin, Michael, by telling me about what happened to Aurora Lane."
"That would make even less sense to you." He sighed. "When the Sigma Probes came back,
out from that hole we sent them into, the readings were thought to be mistaken. They thought the pictures that had been taken were obstructed; skewed or affected by some sort of electromagnetic fields produced by the wormhole. The same thing was thought of the devises' spatial positioning relays. They seemed to blink out of existence when they entered the hole and just pop back when they came back out. With no information of any location during the time they were gone. They were just...gone."
I scribbled my pen across my paper as he spoke. I turned the page. "And that's when they
decided to send a maned expedition through, that is to say, after they concluded that the probes were undamaged by the journey. Is that correct?"
"It is."
"And you and Dr. Lane volunteered for this?"
"We did." His orange was completely peeled now. The peel I had noticed was still all in one
piece, twisted in a spiral, which he had laid on the top of his leg. He pulled a slice from the whole and ate it. "Traveling through the wormhole was going to teach us so much about our universe and give us a new sense of placement in all of it."
"Please," I asked him, "tell me."
"We first saw it as we crowned Jupiter's horizon." He removed another slice and placed it in
his mouth. "And it was

* * *

Beautiful. It is hard to find the words to best describe it, so 'beautiful' will have to do. The way
we approached the anomaly made it look like some intensely backward sunrise. It rose over Jupiter's rusty surface, a ring of blue and violet fire infused with a web of violent white lightning.
"Beautiful." Aurora Lane shifted in her chair and leaned forward. "Never before has anyone
ever seen anything like this, Michael. I mean, the pictures sent back by our satellites are one thing, but this? This is...real." For a moment she just continued to stare. I sat in awed silence as well. Only the deep thrum of our plasma burners cut through the heavy noiselessness that enveloped us.
After a short time I spoke up. I checked my instruments and took note of our fluid levels.
"Systems are looking good, Doc. You ready to head on inside?"
Aurora settled back into her chair. "I've had a couple months to sit here and wait. If I'm not
ready now I don't think I'd ever be." She turned her head to look at me. "Take us into it, Mike."
The small spacecraft slipped over the massive gas planet's curve and sliced through the
aether toward the wormhole beyond. As we closed the distance the ship began to jolt. "This is it, Ro." We started to shake turbulently without intermissions. "We better lockdown just in case the gyrations rattle something loose." She nodded and together we donned and sealed our helmets. We were very close now and the jostling felt almost unbearable. We had belted ourselves into our chairs and the straps bruised our thrashing bodies. I saw through the tumult arcs of white lightning, like alien fingers, reach out from the wormhole and grasp our ship. The electric tendrils scattered about all the inboard components, causing them to billow smoke. I felt a hand clasp mine. Then all of a sudden everything was calm. We drifted, tumbling softly one end over the other. Complete blackness surrounded us. No sign of stars or of the portal we had passed through.
"Check the chart. Where are we, Mike?"
I was already searching. But either my instruments were malfunctioning or..."we're nowhere."
We looked at each other. "Ro, I can't place us anywhere in the known universe, and with no stars out there for me to map I have no reference for anything. We're nowhere."
"How can we be nowhere?" She unbelted herself and pushed back toward the spatial viewer.
The device whirred as it scanned the surrounding space. She stopped. "What's that?"
"What's what?" I asked
"Those two lights there."
"Where?"
"Right in front of us. Look."
I looked, and I saw them; very faint and very soft orbs of light, whose distance I could not
determine. "I'll direct my course toward them."
We moved slowly ahead until Aurora shouted, "hold up, wait."
I did as she asked. "What is it?"
"I'm going out there." She said.
"Why? What's wrong?" I asked.
"I don't know. Just wait here for me." The cabin hissed as she depressurized it. Then she
opened the latch and started out the doorway.
"Hey!" I yelled out. "Don't forget your tether."
She snatched a line from the spool and jumped. In a few seconds I saw her drift past the bow
of the ship heading for the lights.
"What are you doing, Ro?" She didn't answer me. Instead, she kept moving forward. She
stopped.
"What the hell." I could hear her over the radio. "Mike, hit the emergency lights."
I did as she said. The space around our craft lit up with the light from all its outboard
luminescence. In normal space, everything would have appeared no more lighter than before. "Ro?" I tried to keep the sound of fear out of my voice. "What happened to us?" All around us was some kind of semi transparent barrier. Our lights reflected of its surface and bathed us in daylight. It was a sphere and it seemed to be shrinking. Slowly but clearly shrinking.
I could see Aurora clearly now far ahead of me. She turned to look back. "I'm not sure," she
said "but I think I saw something earlier. Can you kill the lights again, Michael?"
"Aurora?"
"Please, Mike."
I did as she asked and once again we were plunged deep into darkness, with only our flight
lights dimly reflecting off the inside of the sphere in front of us.
"Oh God, Mike."
"What is it?"
"It..." She paused, just staring out away from me. "It's everything."
"What?"
"It's everything, Michael. It's color and light. Life and energy all tied up in a web of galaxies
and nebulas."
"Aurora...what? Ro, you're not making..." I saw the tether slip out of her left hand and drift
lazily away. "Ro! You didn't fix it!" She didn't respond.
"It's so beautiful, Michael. It...it's so tiny."
"Aurora, your lifeline!" I watched and the barrier slowly begun to pass through her. "Ro!" I
pushed out of my chair toward the doorway, but it was to late. The ship started to lurch. Sparks of the brightest white engulfed the panels and the console array. I was struck by the back of the cabin and thrown forward. I looked out the flight window just as Aurora Lane passed out of sight. I cried out one last time as my ship was thrown backwards; back through the wormhole and back to reality.

* * *

"Aurora was gone.
The large gas giant loomed before my eyes filling the flight window with the color of rust. Off
in the distance behind it lay a tiny speck of light named Sol, and somewhere spinning around that, a microscopic mote called home."

The slumped figure sitting in the metal chair before me finished his story and my pen
scratched out its final notes. He stared down at the crack in the linoleum floor and popped the last slice of orange in his mouth.