Anton had expected the vast emptiness of space. Not really space, but the celestial aether of the multiverse. Light-less, colorless, breath-holding silence that whispered lazily for eons between each glittering universe. A disorienting nothingness navigable only through decades of meticulous research. Instead his tracking and communications display had exploded into chattering activity the moment the worm-hole closed behind him. His scanners were reporting an overwhelming 4,096 vessels; he was being hailed simultaneously on 256 channels. These numbers, he realized while silencing alerts and proximity alarms, were the upper limits of his ship's software. They couldn't be accurate - had to be some kind of error.

Once the molesting beeps and shrieks of the vessel hailing alarms and new track identified notices had been silenced, Anton sucked air between his teeth and sat staring at the tiny cockpit around him. His console flashed in silent protest. This was not right at all.

Anton's mission was not complicated, but it had been coined the most critical endeavor in the history of humanity. He had run through it a hundred times in the simulator: First, enter the celestial aether and identify the worm-hole radiating an EG7845 signature, then aim the ship at the anomaly with surgical precision using an array of bow and aft stabilizers, and finally engage New Hope's main thruster to send the vessel careening towards its objective. The main thruster could achieve only a single nuclear reaction lasting a quarter-second. Navigational errors were not an option. The flight time would be two years, but once the course was set all that was required of him was to eat, sleep, evacuate his bowels and coast silently towards his goal while battling the gnaw of solitude.

After the ultimate effects of genetically modified foods (GMO) had been discovered, the Unified World State's government had poured every available and unavailable resource into finding a solution. The consumption of GMO caused sterility in a subject's offspring three generations down the line. By the time an Austrian researcher uncovered the truth about GMO, widespread infertility had already surfaced in developing states with shorter generations. In thirty years babies would be a thing of the past. The human population would simply get old and die.

The solution was as bizarre as it was necessary. Time travel. Someone had to be sent back in time to issue a warning before GMO swept into each and every World State as a heaven-sent solution to pandemic poverty. With the success of the LISA project and the ratification of the multiverse theorems it seemed conceptually sound. If the umbilical cord-like string connecting the universe to its multiverse cluster could be found, a ship could be prodded into the aether separating universes. By reentering an instance of its own universe in one of its past-states, it could potentially influence the universe's future states.

Anton's heart was racing. Cool, salty sweat collected in his armpits. If the celestial aether was indeed crowded with vessels - or any debris - setting a beeline course to EG7845 would be impossible. Having powered the huge, white spotlights affixed to his ship, he touched a switch to raise the opaque radiation shield from his cockpit. The shield rose in a slow yawn, revealing an infinite field of vessels identical to his own. They were separated by no more then a few meters. Each twinkled serenely in the others' bright, white lights.

When Anton touched "open channel" on his communications panel, his own face blinked onto the display screen. With calculated speed he switched to another channel and then another. Each bore his likeness in varying nonlinear stages of despair: laughing, crying, sitting motionless or staring emptily to one side. Some were dead. Some bones.

For a moment everything was unreal, dreamlike. Anton was gripped with a panic, a wondering panic that quickly transformed into a gray sinking; an unbearable aching to wake up. He closed his eyes and reopened them, scanned more communications channels, pinched his arm with ferocity.

But this was reality. Caustic and indifferent. The universe, the multiverse, the celestial aether, all things. A whirling, infinite, incomprehensible interaction of energy and matter. Inhuman and uncaring. An inexorably calculating mathematical machine, endlessly clacking and whirring. And this -- infinite Antons from infinite universes conducting infinite world saving missions -- was a sort of technical oversight, an operator error.

Anton closed his eyes against the panic, took a deep breath as if forcing all the world's troubles down into his lungs. All of this, he thought, the entirety of human aspirations... is really nothing more than an emergent inanity, like a cloud that for a moment looks like a rabbit, then a dragon, and then just a cloud again.

Anton pictured New Hope's research and development team. He imagined, in detail, their reaction to this phenomena. Their being bowled over. Wildly disappointed. Keenly interested. He swallowed, then, shut off the blinding white spotlights mounted on his ship, and flipped the switch to lower New Hope's opaque radiation shield.