Chapter 1

1

His blond hair had turned to grey, receding from his forehead in a way he tried to disguise. He could not remember when his hair had started to thin. It had not been truly noticeable until he was well into middle-age. If there was one thing he could have changed about his appearance, then his hairline would have been it.

It had the unfortunate side-effect of drawing attention to the other features of his face. He watched the eyes of others whilst in conversation as they regarded his high forehead, his watery eyes, his prominent Roman nose. No one said anything, of course. He hadn’t got where he had in life on the basis of his looks, after all, but he could sense the disappointment when he engaged with others, this sort of sadness, this sort of pity that he was not a more attractive man. Perhaps it was simply that he was more sensitive to such things as he grew older? Such matters had been of little consequence in his youth, but the older he got, the easier his pride was to wound, and the more he required the validation of approval from the young.

He let out a gentle huff of disappointment, reaching up instinctively to touch his thin, grey hair, and then pulled his hand back, churlishly chiding himself for the gesture, for this small act of vanity. Before him, both stereovision screens of his terminal were alight with information, detailed equations, digitised photographs, and antique illustrations of life on other worlds.

He sighed loudly and the sound filled the darkness of his office but left the floor beyond silent and shadowed. Thirty years and still he had nothing but these suggestions, these speculations. Once a younger man coasting on the success of his many academic merits, he had founded the Firmament Foundation with his then-wife, a similarly recognised scholar, in hopes of capitalising on the popularity and notoriety of his reputation and the excitement that surrounded his first radical paper on travel via Einstein–Rosen bridges between alternate black hole cosmological models.

Asmodeus Flight, he had called his new theory of travel, named after the reputation of a particularly nasty devil in Jewish myth that had possessed the means of lifting a man out of his skin and holding him in the sky so that he might see all the world around him. The actual science of transportation supposed that the whole galaxy as it was understood, was, itself, within a black hole, and that it was possible to bridge the distance between the realms via the complicated combination of a number of factors; firstly, the inducing of an altered state in the consciousness of a human traveller, often achieved by method of psychopharmaceutical substances and the carefully cultivated environment of an isolation tank, as per the work of John C. Lilly in 1954.

Next the consciousness of the human traveller would be transferred to a carefully prepared host body, in most cases, animal clones named homunculi, though recent breakthroughs in genetics had facilitated the use of more complex chimeras employing increasingly human traits.

It was impossible to use human bodies in such circumstances as no human body could withstand the rigours of the lengthy travel required to reach the frontier of those distant black holes, yet entire colonies of silent homunculi could be sent out into space to await the connection of human minds required for them to navigate those worlds beyond.

Thirty years to change the world; thirty years in which Doc Labyrinth and the Firmament Foundation had become household names, whilst homunculi were now employed in almost every plausible industry on Earth, often lacking a human pilot, instead equipped only with a rudimentary artificial intelligence of sorts to control their routines.

He should have been proud of himself. He should have been basking in glory; between Asmodeus Flight and the use of homunculi, the foundation had helped usher in a new era, and yet, despite it all, he still yearned for space, he yearned to know what lay across those bridges. Whilst homunculi were in common usage, space travel was not, as yet, anything but a loss-making venture that very few were willing to invest in. And so, instead of reaching out to other worlds, his spent all his time now monitoring those distant black holes for any signs that something beyond might be willing to cross the divide that he himself could not.

Outside, the sun had long since faded from the sky, replaced by the blanket of night, and despite the warmth of the season, the environment of the building remained cool and rewarding, the air conditioning a perfect approximation of an environment that had never existed on the small island he called home, a tiny spec of verdant green lost amidst the waves of the Pacific Ocean. Beyond the window, he thought he could hear the night calls of various nocturnal predators, and wondered how many of them were real birds, real animals, and how many were homunculi.