For all of their impressive engineering, the Elusians had come up with a setup similar to ours at The Tunnel. Nanobots clustered around the outside of a cable attached to the probe, relaying information back to Suam from the fifth dimension. This would notify them immediately if something went wrong, and remove the possibility of us providing data that showed any inconvenient truths. Billions upon billions of eyes in the multiverse were upon us, wanting the answers. I shifted uncomfortably in my nanite spacesuit, knowing we'd be thrown headfirst into a portal with a nanobot bubble around us.

Nanite this, nanite that. Joy. I feel so safe!

Justiciar Colban checked our harnesses, as well as Mikri's; they would tie us to the Elusians' side of the portal. "The android's duty is to snap you out of it if you experience complications from long-term exposure. I trust that Mikri will not interfere in your…concentration."

"We haven't done this before, so I sure hope he doesn't," I murmured, remembering how overwhelmed my brain felt during portal transit. I focused myself on the nanodrone cameras, where I could see them in AR. "To the watching Elusians, this is how driven humanity is. We'll look into the abyss and steer us back toward a better future. Maybe then, you can be proud of your creations again."

"Skip the monologuing, Preston Carter. What you find today will speak for you, so I hope for your sake you discover evidence that will exonerate humanity."

Mikri's claws curled with a silent rage, as he looked at Sofia and I from behind an EMP suit. "And I hope that it will show us how to destroy the Elusians who menace that which they have created. I need the introduction of new variables to find viable probabilities."

"There's always another way, Mikri. Destroying them should be the last resort," Sofia chastised the android.

I pretended not to hear their conversation, and smiled at Colban. "Roger that, sir. Like Corai told us—correlation doesn't equal causation. Whoever thought we did it must've been snorting the chimichurri."

"Hmph." The Justiciar seemed unimpressed. "If snorting this chimichurri substance is something you are familiar with, are you certain that we should trust you with our complicated machinery?"

"I…" I bit back clever retorts, knowing we had to appease them, "was just trying to breathe light into a tense situation. Thought you'd feel better with a smile. I want this to go well. I'm ready to put this all behind us."

"This is not something you have done? Oddly enough, I recall you making 'lines' of chimichurri and inhaling them, to show me how organics do drugs," Mikri spoke into my mind. "You told me this was 'Preston in his natural environment.' I am inclined to agree."

"That was different. My nostrils needed to consume something green to deal with you," I fired back. "You're like a big, sad breakfast burrito that fell into a skillet and never got back up."

"Never got back up. I assume this is different than the output pattern for your male genitalia?"

"Hey! I'll have you know those systems are fully operational."

Sofia gritted her teeth. "I'll have you know I'll make sure they're not, if that's somehow your concern right now! You wouldn't be the first guy that's caught a knee."

"Now, no need to be feisty like that. I'm not hitting on you—never was. You're too boring."

"At least I'm not an uncontainable cognitohazard!"

"You flatter me, Fiefs. I'm touched."

Justiciar Colban stepped back, giving a mental signal and a hand wave to the scientists overseeing the experiment. "Let's be done with this endeavor then. I cannot deny that your help was a necessity, but any interference with this project's success will have consequences for Sol. Whatever plots you might consider—don't. Good luck, humans."

The 5D probe itself was a massive piece of engineering the size of a small city, connecting to unwieldy amounts of power sources both exotic and terrestrial; the Elusians were channeling the energy of an entire star—of course, not their own—into the machine with some sort of Dyson Sphere thingamabob. This contraption had enough computing power to make Mikri and his whole network look like a Turing machine. I supposed that was what it took to get a concrete peek into the infinite void.

The Elusian supervisors warped back to an installation a safe distance away. I locked my fingers, which were sealed behind a layer of nanobots that looked silver and gooey, around handholds at the rear of the probe. We would be peering through a periscope that reflected stimuli through a bunch of…strange mirrors, and could adjust where the camera looked from here. They crashed their 4D portals together with precision, in an effortless display of power—it seemed more casual for them than when the Fakra had done it, let alone compared to our rudimentary Tunnel.

Just like that, we were thrown into 5D space, but our lack of forward momentum ensured that we weren't spit out on the other side. In an instant, my faculties were zapped by the cascading waterfall of a million pixels, supercharged my senses and coating the length of my tongue. Descriptions of the feeling were nonsensical, and as the extra seconds ticked on, I began to choke; I was drowning in the noise. Signals bounced within my brain without a receiver, a pervasive current of interference.

I couldn't move or think: I was frozen like Medusa had gotten into a staring contest with me. My mind was screaming and folding in on itself. With a longer exposure, I could feel why it drove other organics mad. My senses were cranked up to the maximum, the lights beating and pounding at the underside of my brain—yow! A tunnel. A microcosm. Both were true. I…understood.

And with a concentrated effort, I could think again. I could make slow movements that felt like they were from outside my body, like I was remote controlling Preston. Shit, why hadn't Corai suggested we do that for Estai? I would've loved to have an Elusian meat puppet. Feeling my lungs burn from the cessation of breathing, I made myself take the deepest gulp of air I could. Mikri had been screaming our names repeatedly, rattling with despair with his arms wrapped around us. I focused on the timer on the AR lens, through great effort.

11 hours, 13 minutes, 56 seconds. We blacked out for that long? I think I breathed only when I involuntarily gasped for air, but I don't remember blacking out. That's a staggering amount of time to…begin to shut it out. I hope I didn't fry any junction boxes up there for good.

"Sofia?" I forced myself to transmit mentally. The scientist's pinky finger twitched in response, as if that was the only speck of control she had. "Sorry, Mikri. I…guess it…took some time to acclimate. Need to…probe."

Mikri looked up, and I imagined despite being unable to hear, he whirred with desperate relief. "Oh Preston! I thought I lost you."

"Nah, I'm already insane. I'm fine. Never…been better."

"You were not fine! I tried to transmit to the Elusians to pull you out, but they said if you could not do this after all, they would quantify your entire species as a failure regardless. That there was nothing they could do for you! They do not care."

"I know that from Corai's memories. You're rude to her because you couldn't view them, and feel how much she cares. I'm going to steer this stupid-ass probe now, for her. This is what she wanted."

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"I've been simulating my life without you for 11 hours. What about what I want? I want you to be safe! I…had no idea it would affect you this way."

"It's always been overstimulating. It's a lot just to bear it: like pressing on in a blizzard."

The Vascar floated over to Sofia, jostling her by the helmet. "WAKE UP!"

"Awake," the scientist transmitted, her mental voice sounding weak and muffed. "Stuck. Fighting…GAH. HELP M—I'm good. You…start."

I positioned my helmet to stare down the periscope lens, still feeling the tightness in my chest and the exploding watermelon inside my cranium that wanted to turn my skull into a lava lamp. Focusing required total concentration on single tasks, so I decided to stretch my muscles by searching for something easy. A test drive. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember who was important to us: Corai had been the only name I'd found readily at my tongue, other than the two people that surrounded me. My memory felt a little fragmented.

Caelum, where Mikri's Vascar come from. We helped the poor robobo. CAPAL. That nerd got abandoned at the Space Gate, and God knows where he is now! I hope he got to return to the Jorlen we fixed and live a nice, happy life. Lucky duck.

I moved my hands over the controls, channeling my own thoughts into the unblinking energy assaulting me; Capal, I could feel his presence the way I could gaze at my own like an outside observer. I sucked the light into my pupil, allowing it to filter in by opening a mental gate. It hit me like Fifi had taken a knee to my funtimes, bouncing around in my mind and actualizing a vision; it was the same as my past precog dreams, except while awake. I could see Capal, Jetti, Hirri, Redge, and an extremely-battered Dawson in some dingy cell.

What the fuck?! This can't be right.

I tried to ask the vision a query in the form of "Who caused this? What happened to Jorlen?" It seemed to shift within my mind's eye, soaking up a vast swath of the machine's power. The word Brigand could be heard through multiple voices, and then I saw a different glimpse that seemed altogether unrelated. A scruffy human was facing down a Vascar figure that stopped my heart in my chest: Larimak, who seemed to be at the helm of an army. Jakov, his name was. He hurled pieces of a spaceship at the Prince Small Dick, earning a surrender.

The people exalted him as a hero, but I had a bad feeling about him. My eye suddenly burned like I'd been staring at the sun, and my head shot back with a howl I couldn't hear. When I tried to peer into it again, the void was shapeless; I couldn't force it to cough up anything more definitive. My features contorted, unable to understand what on Earth happened to our friend. If we ever got out of here, it was obvious Capal and the rest of our pals were in dire need of a rescue.

Tremors permeated the nerve cluster at the base of my neck, rolling upward into my brain. A deep tiredness gnawed on me, and I slipped into a sequence of microsleeps. Too much. Needed to get out of here. I pressed a hand to my head in frustration, having run into a wall from a single glimpse. Even the probe seemed to be able to hardly handle much more, with cracks beginning to run in its shell like a river. Sofia appeared more alert, shooting me a crooked thumbs up and holding onto her handhold for dear life.

"Capal got arrested. Indecent exposure, I'm sure," I told the scientist.

Sofia's head jerked toward me inhumanly. "What?! What are you talking about?"

"I looked up Meganerd the Brown. He's rotting in some prison cell, and Larimak tried to take over Jorlen—but some human took over his takeover? I think. Yeah."

"Why the fuck are you looking up Capal and Jorlen?! We're here to find one thing. You should've been searching for what happened to the Elusians!"

"I had legit reasons. I was trying to figure out how to use this thing. Why don't you peek at what happened to the gray baes?"

"I would if I could! You have more practice at controlling precog moment-to-moment; you learned how at the Space Gate battle. I've barely figured out how to suppress it, let alone harness it."

Mikri floated between us, his chassis trembling. "I am…so relieved you are both okay. Having each of you gone at the same time was like my processor had no reason to keep spinning. I wished to reimplement the memory wipe on myself."

The scientist managed to paw at his arm through great effort, as my heart also clenched with sympathy for what those 11 hours must've been like for him. "I am so sorry, Mikri. I will stay right here with you for emotional support. Preston will finish the job and we'll get out of here, and make that a distant memory. We came out the other side in the end."

"Please hurry. I do not feel composed."

Despite feeling outright unwell myself, I could see that Sofia was in no state to be handling a straight shot of 5D to the face; she needed time to decompress. I had to step up to the plate for humanity's sake, even though my entire consciousness felt like it'd been fried in Mikri's butt oil. I tried to zero back in past the mire, and channeled all of my energy to form a question. With more complications, there was more pushback from the void, and the answer enshrouded in fog was less clear.

"Who is behind the Elusians' disappearance in the future? Is it humanity?" I pelted the writhing mass of infinity with that question over and over, until I found the soft spot and felt its glimpse pour into my brain.

Capal's vision had been now, but this one was from the future: my future, I guessed, because it felt like I was wrapped in Preston's consciousness. Because of its later place on the timeline, the details were more staccato and obfuscated. I could see General Takahashi hunched over a holographic display, a tired look on her face. There was a heaviness clouding her pupils, and from within the vision's snare, I strained for some microscopic adjustments of the lens to clarify the garbled words.

"…have to build a weapon that can kill them all," Takahashi said.

Those words made my blood run cold, and nearly snapped my focus enough for me to jolt out of the vision. I forced myself to stay focused, but my breathing had rapidly accelerated. Panic coiled within my veins, at the thought that the Elusians had been right. We were building a weapon to kill our creators, one that would apparently succeed? Colban was going to flip! I had to see more—I had to know more, to be able to do anything. The backlash of this: I had to protect us.

The scene shifted to a later moment, perhaps in the same meeting or perhaps far later; the static uniforms didn't reveal as much as the slight differences in expression. Takahashi was shaking her head, speaking with a deep sadness in her voice.

"The Elusians are gone," the general affirmed, as clear as day. "Killed by their own creations. They didn't stand a chance."

My blood ran as cold as ice, and suddenly, my awareness was all too clear regardless of how much my brain was being throttled. The vision vanished in a cloud of smoke, and I was left with a trembling jaw. Humanity…really was destined to kill the Elusians? The answer had been far too straightforward for me to deny it anymore, and this would spur the Empire to unspeakable measures; our banishment had averted nothing! Sol was in imminent peril, once they had a few days to decide what I just saw.

What is Corai going to think, when she finds out she was wrong to believe in our innocence? Will…even she no longer support us? I mean, how could she?

The probe hummed with power, its intricate machinery overloaded and threatening to splinter along multiple wires; alarms were blaring. I knew these things had a short lifespan once they took their snapshots, but I needed one more answer out of it! Panicking and desperate, I peered into the pulsating mess that nauseated and turned my neurons inside-out. Please, it had to let me ask this one question before it decayed beyond the point of usage! I hurried to force it out, pumping every fiber of my being into it.

"What happens to Corai?"

I could feel hundreds of information snakes lunge through my eyes, different answers all at once that I couldn't parse beyond to feel them smacking me around. That collection of possibilities fed me an answer that splashed upon me like a cool mist: Corai's future was uncertain. It could turn out several ways…but humanity building a weapon and the Elusians dying was unavoidable? Maybe there was something I could do to save her, and to convince her to run away.

I didn't want to do anything rash, but we have to get off Suam and warn Sol, before the Justiciary uncovers the information I have. I won't leave Corai. I can't let her die, and…I have to trust her. Oh God, she might hate us and feel that she put this in motion. Her guilt…

The probe glowed with white-hot energy as it began to break apart, but I wouldn't accept that it was time to make our escape. Mikri grabbed me with unexpected force, pushing me toward the portal entrance we'd been pulled through. The tin can had a near-paralyzed Sofia slung over his shoulders, and propelled himself after me with her in tow. I reached out toward the machine with longing, needing more answers. How did I save Corai? What…what was Sol going to do?

The Elusians, seeing that the experiment was about to explode, unblocked the way out. Of course, that was why the Vascar had carried us back to safety. In an instant, we were warped to a point in space that made sense, and my mental gears screeched with rust. I'd processed far too much information, even if most of it was gobbledygook. A tsunami of exhaustion slapped me silly, as the overstimulation stopped zapping my brain to attention.

As I slipped into an unwanted unconsciousness, my mind was still racing a million miles an hour with the horrifying truths I'd gained from infinity's eye.

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