Chapter 1 - Storm

I woke up to a loud wind storm outside my ship. I heard endless clinks as small pebbles and debris pelted its hull. The wind howled and I heard tree like organisms shaking, adding to the cacophony. Despite trusting in my craftsmanship, I couldn't help but worry if my ship could take this. This wasn't Earth, I had no clue how powerful wind storms could get here. It's not like there was some galactic federation or interplanetary network I could connect to to check. Most likely, this planet had been devoid of sentient life since its conception, and had never had a visitor, until me. I don't even know what universe I'm in.

I could not be bothered to learn the history of every star system and universe. I don't think it's even feasible. While I did posess teleportation, space travel, and universe hopping, it's not like I could time travel, or learn a language by asking around. I did, however, learn a bit about the universe I'm from, and by extension the universes closest to it. I've found nine alien races so far, each between 40 and 120 light years away from Earth.

Oh, and I should mention, I'm not from your Earth, but our universes are very similar, I was raised to call it Earth, so I'm going to continue to do so. The biggest difference is that mammals have 6 legs and humans have 4 legs, arranged in a square. Our thighs go up and out, and our calves go nearly straight down. Before you say I look strange... just remember, I feel the same way about you! I'm still baffled you guys don't constantly fall over. This part of the story, however, took place before I learned about your Earth.

A loud bang shook me out of my thoughts. I bolted upright and quickly got out of bed to assess the damage. Looking around the interior, I couldn't find anything out of the ordinary. I did a diagnostics check and I wasn't losing pressure, either. I suppose it's fine. Out of paranoia and an abundance of caution, I decided to check the external cameras. Darkness. Right. I turned on the light and panned the camera to look at the hull. Panning right, nothing. Maybe a few scrapes and chipped paint. Panning left, also nothing. I flipped through some of the other cameras. It really was nothing. Whatever rock hit the ship obviously didn't do any damage.

Satisfied, though a little disappointed in my waste of time, I went back to sleep. Sometimes something interferes with my dreams. There are 4 eldritch horrors I've found so far that I call "the corruptors". Occasionally they try to give me an encoded message through my dreams, it's always very disorienting, but those dreams are the only reason I came to this planet. The last one I had told me to come here.

In this night's dream, I was floating in space, orbiting a purple planet extremely quickly. After a minute or so, a claw with 3i+2 fingers came out of the planet and grabbed me. I don't know how it went from the size of a planet to the size of me so seamlessly, but that's the beauty of dreams. They don't have to make logical sense, they can be as impossible as an MC escher drawing. What does 3i+2 fingers look like? Couldn't tell you. As soon as I woke up I lost the visual. Then, I heard a voice as I got pulled in towards the planet.

Ugh, what? I think... I heard 4 voices talking at the same time, but no it was at separate times... somehow. Like, they were at the same time on one axis, but at different times along another. Seems the entity was talking along one axis so that I could follow, but put each message along the other. It was trying to be slick about me not knowing which entity it was, but it was fairly obvious. Only one of the 4 messed with planar and sometimes even volumetric time. They're one of the two I've never seen before, but I've nicknamed them Chronos, since it's kind of obsessed with time. And no, they aren't my favorite corruptor.

Chapter 2 - Red Spike

I woke up in a pool of sweat feeling super tired. I always felt this way after getting one of their dreams. This dream was the same as the one I got last week, except I think I caught a slight congratulation in there. Either way, I'm taking this as a good sign. I have successfully figured out what they wanted me to know. I'm so sick of the corruptors. I'm pretty sure they could wipe out the multiverse in an instant, but the only reason they don't is because that would be boring.

I made myself some coffee and tried not to think about my throbbing head ache. I rested for a good hour or so. Eventually, I decided to get out and do what I needed to. I put on my space suit, still feeling a little tired, and exited my craft. It was a nice day out on this planet, the two red dwarfs hung in the sky, and I spotted a small scaley critter with 6 legs going about its day. This planet looked a lot like Mars, but with life.

I pulled out my ghost busters esque device and scanned the area for any corruptors. I'm 99% sure they produce their strange particles so that I can find them. My device was basically a geiger counter, but it detects that strange particle they emit instead of gamma radiation. Nothing else in the universe creates that particle, it doesn't exist anywhere except being emanated from the corruptors at all times. Levels looked normal (zero) until I got a single click. I was going to do the math to figure out how far away one was when another few hundred clicks arrived, the device began to buzz and the graph showed a red spike. They're here.

I checked to make sure I had my visor down, and I did. The visor was rated for up to 8 watt lasers hitting my retina, and blocks out all UV and greater. I looked all around me and didn't see anything... until a 3 foot tall millipede unearthed itself and rose several feet into the air. It stretched its legs and shook them around, getting used to the lower resistance. After a second or so it looked down at me, the red sunlight reflecting off of its gold accents. The world around me changed, the flat infinite plane becoming an obvious sphere, maybe only half a mile in diameter. The red dusty soil transforming into blue and pink neon stripes, that moved outward from the line between me and the millipede. The clouds turned red and shifted into human faces, laughing at me.

I haven't come up with a name for this corruptor yet. I just call it the millipede. The millipede loved changing the space it's in, and was by far the most comprehensible of the 3 I've interacted with.

The millipede warmed up its mandibles, and spoke in a low, gravelly, voice. It seemed to have a reverb, like it was speaking from two sets of vocal chords. I remembered to take out my pen and notepad before it started talking. This thing is only fully understandable if I can re read what it said a few times.

"As like many times before, t has the property b. T is you and b is a positive intelligent adjective. Given that c had the task of d, I assumed you would lack the property u. C is the time corruptor and d was contacting you through the dream. U is the ability to take in information and process it in a meaningful way. We will do x in one m. X is that we are to execute g(e, f), where g is a function that gives the first input the property of the second. E is the Earth from reality X199F03630 and f is the state of burning. All h, which happen to have the property of l=2, will cease keeping their inside different from the outside. H are humans and l is the leg count of a creature. Finally, m is the length of time equal to 2,678,400 seconds. Y has not the property p, where p is the ability to change our effect on the multiverse and y is t. Clear variables in memory."

As per usual, when this stupid millipede started talking it took me a few minutes to fully parse what it was saying. Why does it have to talk like it's writing a math paper?! Basically, it was going to burn an Earth I had never heard of and complimented me for being able to understand Chronos. That's the gist of it. I blinked a few times, processing this. An entire planet of sentient people, charred to ashes. Hmm. Yeah, hard to think about but I wasn't going to let it happen.

The millipede vanished in a poof of black ash filled smoke and a few spiders rained down from where it was. The ground's colors and the sky returned to normal in less than a second, as if nothing had happened at all.

Hmm. I pondered another thing it said. "which happen to have the property of l=2". They have 2 legs huh? Wouldn't they just fall over all the time? Perhaps their feet extend backward a considerable distance to balance. Either way seems a little strange, why wouldn't they have 4 legs? Did they lose 2 when evolving or perhaps they came from a lineage of 4 limbed mammals? Were they even mammals? I was very curious about all of this.

I got back in my ship and powered up the universe hopper. Typing in the coordinates, I wondered about how 2 legs works on a human. After a short scan, stats appeared on the screen before me. Differ distance 7.128309 * 10^-12, ruleset was an exact match, contains an Earth, time to next travel 0.803784 days. Okay, pretty good, but I'll have to wait until tomorrow before I can hop universes again.

Chapter 3 - A Test of Patience

I fidgeted with my hands, considering what to do while I waited out the charge up. I think the solar panels need cleaning. I went out and did that, and came back 20 minutes later, annoyed that it hadn't taken much time at all. Today was going to be boring. What else could be done? I looked around my ship. It was a small craft, but still had living quarters. I decided to clean my room.

Okay, well, there was a lot of shit to clean up but now I'm bored again. I suppose I could fly the ship. The fuel for universe hopping is separate from the fuel for flying. I put in the key and pressed the button, and the whole flight panel lit up. Random pieces of tech beeped, LEDs blinked and OSes booted. I cracked my fingers and placed my hands over the HOTAS controls of the ship. With a smile I pressed the liftoff button. The craft rose into the air and I felt briefly heavier.

I pressed gently on the throttle and was pressed back into my seat, with a pull of the stick I was pointed skyward. I pushed the throttle further and further, I could hear the engines as I blasted higher and higher into the atmosphere. At this point I was at, I glanced at the readout panel in front of me, 3.2G. This is about the peak acceleration you'll feel on a roller coaster, but this was sustained. I was feeling crushed, lying in my chair feeling 3 times heavier than normal.

The sky went from a vibrant blue to the dark blackness of space and I could see the star, unfiltered by the atmosphere. I don't actually have any windows on this ship, it's all external cameras and monitors, so I didn't have to worry about radiation. I put the throttle to neutral and immediately felt weightless. It was a spooky feeling, imagine when you're on a roller coaster and you go down a tall drop. You know that sickening feeling you get in your stomach when that happens? That's called apparent weightlessness and your body evolved to recognize that as falling.

Wow. The view was simply breath taking. I had been to space countless times before, but it never stopped being cool. I unbuckled my seatbelt with a click and my inertia took over, slowly drifting me upwards out of my seat. My legs drifted around, instinctually splaying out looking for something to latch onto. I grabbed the sides of my control panel before I drifted too far, and spun myself by pulling in opposite directions with each hand.

There wasn't any logical reason for this, spinning is just fun. Weee! Okay. I'm gonna be sick. Stopping my rotation, my vestibular system tried to figure out how I was oriented. I felt myself still spinning for a second before my brain figured out what was happening and the fluids stopped moving. Using two legs I propelled myself towards the opposite end of the ship. My ship layout was very simple. At the back there was a bed, bolted to the floor and with a canopy over it of course. Then in the middle of my ship there was a table, and on either side shelves and storage. There was storage in the floor and ceiling too.

My ship was actually a fairly boring cuboid from the outside, save for the fuel saving wings. The wings also house the weaponry and defensive systems. And lastly, the front was where the controls were. It was a pretty small ship, just one room, but it was mine and it had taken me 4 years and thousands of dollars to build. The reason it was so cheap is that most of the parts were salvaged from a crashed UFO I had found when I was 14. That's how my technology is so much more advanced than the rest of humanity, I reverse engineered alien tech.

The last part of my ship to mention is that there was a small bathroom and fridge hidden behind my bed, only accessible through a hatch. Alright, ship tour over. I was quickly speeding through the air and stopped myself at the table. I decided to read a book. Mm, that no gravity thing is getting uncomfortable. I quickly floated back over to the control panel and activated the bottom thrusters and set the throttle to 1G. I also oriented the ship to not be on a collision course with the planet or the star. Don't want to make that mistake twice. I will not elaborate further.

Gravity is oncemore. I set a course for one of the gas giants in this system, maybe I can get some nice pictures of it. It would take almost 6 hours to reach it. Why so fast? Well along with the teleportation and universe hopping, the alien tech also had a system that I call "momentum scumming". The way it works is extremely complicated and involves quantum physics, but just know that it sets the velocity of my ship without needing acceleration. The way it works is kind of like save scumming in a video game, or when tetris bots wait for the right frame to get the RNG they want, so that's why I've called it momentum scumming. It takes exponentially more energy to go faster and faster, so 0.3c is basically the maximum. I'll be travelling at 0.12c. Even though I'm now travelling at the speed I want, I'll keep accelerating at 1G for gravity reasons. This will take a staggering full minute off my route.

I can't just teleport to the gas giant, teleporting has an inverse distance to fuel consumption ratio and uses the same fuel as universe hopping. I can teleport a minimum of 3.4807 light years with the current fuel I have, and then I'd have to wait a week to go to the new Earth.

I relaxed for the next few hours, reading books and playing games with the entertainment I had in storage. Quickly, boredom began to set in. And loneliness. I was all alone out here, in this inky black 3 dimensional ocean. There wasn't a single human or sapient alien in this system. It's so eerily quiet in the ship. I clicked through a menu and opened up the side camera, and just stared into the great abyss. The gas giant was now easily visible from where I was, and in fact my flight computer had already set my velocity back to zero, taking the same amount of energy it took to set my speed. I can see it as a small yellow and green murky sphere.

"Orbit successful. Navigation ended."

The computerized voice jolted me awake. I had fallen asleep, I guess. Only just now realizing. As my consciousness loaded back in I smiled, excited to see the gas giant. The pictures were great. Brilliant swirls of green and yellow, and the occasional blue storm. I had never seen a gas giant quite like it. I bet the yellow was from sulfur or something, but I have no idea what caused the green and blue. I admired the body for several minutes, and took some photos. There were 4 moons visible in the vicinity. Using spectroscopy, I determined that one of them had chemical compounds complex enough for life. It also had lots of methane in the atmosphere, which is a great sign.

I excitedly set the navigator towards the moon. I wonder if I'll meet someone there. I'm so curious what they look like, are they microbial? Terrestrial? Cambrean? So many questions! Going here doesn't have anything to do with my mission, in case that wasn't clear, I'm just waiting for my universe hopper to recharge.

This trip was a lot shorter, only a minute or so. Like IO, it was very very close to the gas giant, so the gas giant looked huge from here. Like 8x the size of the moon from Earth. It was like something out of a cheesy sci-fi movie. I was so eager to see the moon's surface. I spun the ship around so that I was upside down, and then I started accelerating downward. To me, this just felt like gravity turned on. Just a short burst and I was now in the atmosphere. The planet was shielded by thick cloud cover but I could see some surface details. Seemed there were oceans and continents, no idea about the ratio though.

I heard rushing wind get louder and louder as the ship collided with the atmosphere. My velocity was insanely high and the drag was burning the ship. Thankfully, I have a heat shield. Also god damn what was this, 5G? I could barely breathe under the crushing force. My ship was quite literally designed for this, so I would be alright. If I passed out, the nav computer would take over. I accelerated the ship opposite to my velocity and the ship began to cool down. But I was still very high up in the atmosphere. I felt weightless again, which my bones were very happy with after the 5G assault they had just experienced.

I put the thrust vector upwards and used the autopilot to counteract any velocity I still had. I slowly approached the ground and landed softly. Hell yeah. I took a moment to compose myself, deorbital moves were intense. Hearing all of this, some might question why go through all of this effort for a distraction? After all, this has nothing to do with my main mission. I should sit and wait instead of doing risky deorbital maneuvers. To that I say: "heh, nerd."

Hm, what is this gravity, like 1.2G? Readout says 1.26G, that's pretty close. I checked the charge, 9 hours, 42 minutes until it's charged enough for the hop. I was very excited to explore. I put on my EVA (extra vehicular activity) suit and cycled the airlock. I was now on an alien planet. Sorry, moon.

As I stepped out of the airlock I saw a brilliant landscape. There was black leaf like grass, and red clay like soil. There were birds singing, with a high pitched whale song sort of sound. Well, I couldn't see them, but they sounded sort of like birds. I noticed a 6 legged elephant like creature, with 3 thin arms that ended in pincers, eating black leaves off of a tree. Its face was fairly flat and it had 3 eyes, and a strange probuscus like mouth. Other than the lack of horns, it really looked like an elephant, with the almost trunk like appendage.