It was just a button.

Barry Pries had expected something grander – a lever that went BEEEEOOOOooooowwwwwmmmmm, an intricate series of keys to be turned in a specific pattern, a throttle bar. Alas, no…

The initiation sequence that would drop the experimental craft he was piloting out of this universe and into a neighboring one was just a simple round button. No yellow and black striped cover to flip up. No warning placards. Hell, it wasn’t even red or big.

It was just a simple, circular, white button.

“Science flotilla, go,” his radio crackled in his ear. Base One repeated the go code back.

Pries found himself drifting off with his thoughts. There were still about twenty or so check-ins and confirmations to get through before they’d be ready to test the Slipship and all the anticipation he’d felt leading up to this moment seemed to dissipate as the hours in the cockpit rolled on. Test after test, checklist after checklist. Pries yawned and his thoughts drifted to man he’d replaced on this mission, and the circumstances surrounding that man’s departure from the program on short notice.

Pries exhaled a bit more deeply than he had been, and his visor fogged slightly as he peered forward into the void. Only it wasn’t a void. The space before the cockpit was full of stars, and he found it difficult to find an area not packed with points of light. Even in the dark spots, stars would peak through if you looked at them long enough.

“Base One to Scuabtuinne, it looks like you’ve rotated about twenty degrees, can you adjust?”

Pries had been just an alternate until a day ago. Malcolm Hunt was the original captain on the mission and had been preparing for it for at least a decade. Hunt had already been through three scrubbed missions with the same Slipship, and so it was a real shame that the fourth mission appeared to be on target to launch, and Hunt was off it.

“Negative, Base One,” Pries replied. “Malcolm was trained on final adjustment. I was not.”

Pries closed his eyes and tried to shut out the vision of Hunt that haunted him. If he could close his ears, he would, but the phantom sound of Hunt’s final forced breath didn’t need Pries’s ears to be heard. The sound was now a permanent fixture in his most easily retrievable memories. It was a grunt, a wheeze, the sound an overinflated bagpipe would make if a 300 lb man suddenly fell on it. It was a deep, honking cough like a seven year old with bronchitis would deliver open mouthed in the produce section of a grocery store, except this was a forty-three year old man expelling his last lungfuls of breath as a jet ski slammed into his back.

“Base One to Scuabtuinne, no worries. Hold position and we’ll adjust to match final disposition.”

It was ironic. Hunt had flown everything from vintage Cessna 150s to the latest planet hoppers that required full crash couches and cocktails to keep the pilot alive through hard burns. Hunt had died in a jon boat on a calm, artificial lake in Central Texas. Barry Pries had been there, too. Barry Pries had watched the jet ski cutting wide turns through the many inlets along the lake. He recognized that the kid was probably going to hit a submerged log or rock before too long. Pries even recognized that he probably could have waved the kid away from the inlet where Malcolm Hunt was posing for photos for the press crew that was on the shore, there to interview him before the big day. But Pries just watched, with about as vacant a stare as he gave the stars outside the cockpit. What had killed Hunt wasn’t the impact with the jet ski – it was the impact with the dock that Pries was standing on that broke Hunt’s skull open.

Pries hadn’t seen Hunt’s death because he was staring at the space where Hunt had been posing when Hunt hit the dock. He didn’t remember not looking into that space for a long time as he sensed a swarm of people crowding the dock to haul Hunt’s broken body to the shore. The sound just hung there, a final cough, a final wet expulsion of air through a tightened trachea that wasn’t expecting it.

The press had a photo of the event that they published more than the others. It wasn’t the big guys that had got the pic this time, but one of the local stations – KWTX probably, Pries couldn’t remember. It had been a day since the accident and already the pic was everywhere. It showed Hunt in mid-air, heading for the dock that killed him, the dumb kid and his jet ski nearly upside down in the frame, and also mid-air, and it showed Barry Pries… fucking smiling. That same shot of Pries was used by all the news outlets to show the world who was going to take Malcolm Hunt’s place on the Scuabtuinne, the first successful slipship of the Global Federation’s Expeditionary Space Force.

“Base One, go,” the radio crackled. “Captain Pries, go/no-go for final sequence.”

Captain.

Pries tilted his head, looking at the console’s bank of green lights.

They hadn’t even had the funeral. They couldn’t possibly scrub the mission. Trillions of dollars. Hundreds of trillions of dollars on the line.

“Pries, go for final sequence,” he said in a monotone voice.

In the space around the massive ship, about a hundred drones pulled away from the Scuabtuinne. The Scuab just sat there looking like a white brick. Nothing fancy here – no painted flames or teeth, no spoilers, no fins. It was minimalist and boring.

It was just a button.

When Pries pressed it, he imagined the wet, final honk of the man who should have pressed it.

***

Pries had no reason to think he was dead. He was obviously in some space, and still able to sense his environment. He could feel the suit around him. He could feel his own hot breath bouncing back at him in the helmet he wore. After a few seconds of disorienting silence and darkness, Pries heard the air pump start circulating more clean air into his suit.

Reaching his hand out, Pries found the console that should have been lit up with lights, screens that should have been showing the area outside of the ship. There should have been alarms going off, red flashing lights, not silence, not darkness.

“Hello?” Pries spoke aloud. There was no click that would indicate his suit’s comms were on and listening. Quickly, he fumbled around for the release that would free him from the chair’s straps, and eventually found it. Pulling it sharply, he expected to begin to float out of the chair, but the straps popped… and fell. Gravity.

Pries had to push himself out of his seat and found the sensation unnerving for a moment. His body and mind had been prepared for zero gravity, and this wasn’t it.

“Base One,” he called out. “Am I still in Earth orbit?”

No response. Comms dead for sure.

The darkness was a problem. There were plenty of switches and buttons and levers that Pries could accidentally hit and trigger possibly catastrophic results, so he took a moment to orient himself on the console and find the switch that would open the shield over the front view of the ship. The switch did nothing.

Cursing, Pries slowly maneuvered around the console, hand over hand, measuring distance until he reached it’s edge. He then carefully reached out ahead of him and let go of the console, moving through empty space for a second before contacting the wall where a manual crank was located.

As soon as he leaned against the wall, the ship shifted. There was a deep groan of metal and the ship dropped about a foot to the side where Pries was standing. Balancing himself against the wall, he froze. In the area around the ship, outside, heard a strange crackling, and rattling echoing away for a long times. After a minute or so, he heard similar cascading cracks and rattles, though they sounded further away. There was another sound, intermittently from what seemed like different directions, that sounded like fabric ripping.

“What the hell is that?” Pries asked himself. Moving his hands blindly over the wall, he found the handle to the manual crank. Popping the door to it open, he began to crank open the shield. Slowly, surely, the massive metallic shielding slats pulled back over themselves and revealed the area outside the ship.

Darkness.

No, a faint light. Enough to slightly illuminate the edges of something outside. Rocks?

Pries moved along the wall toward the forward glass where he could see better.

Not rocks. Furniture. Wooden furniture. Chairs, tables, desks, wardrobes.

“What in the fuck…”

Pries held up his hands to either side of his face and pressed against the glass to see better. There was a definite light source, but it was dim and about hundred feet or more above the area where the ship was.

And the ship was, apparently, sitting on a massive pile of wooden furniture.

As Pries’s eyes adjusted, he realized the furniture stretched away as far as the light shown in every direction.

Pries pulled away from the glass and stood still for a moment. He exhaled deeply as his mind struggled to find something to latch on to in the situation presented to him.

Turning back to the cockpit, he tried to calculate where the back wall and door to the middle of the ship would be. Confidently, he strode forward without aid and slammed his knee into the captain’s chair. Kneeling for a moment in pain, Pries quickly pushed past it and felt his way to the back wall and the door out. He checked it quickly, and surmising it was also dead, he popped the door to the manual crank and opened it. Only darkness met him on the other side.

Sidestepping twice to the left, Pries ran his hand along the wall until he found the supply hatch. He opened it and dug around blindly for an LED torch. Gripping it tightly, he switched it on.

The ship seemed fine, just dead. The corridor leading from the cockpit was empty, as it should be, but there was no power at all to any systems within. Walking down the hall, Pries diverted at the first T junction and ran his torch over the airlock before him. There were no lights to indicate the state of the room on the other side, but Pries risked it regardless.

The door hissed open under reserved pressure. It was equalized inside.

Moving across the airlock to the hatch to the outside, Pries peered through the small window just over the hatch wheel. Darkness.

Shining his torch through the window, he illuminated wood – more furniture against the hatch.

Not sure what to expect, but bracing himself, Pries tugged at the wheel until it gave. There was no pop, no hiss, no rush of air… the airlock was equalized to both inside and outside.

“Well, that doesn’t make sense,” Pries said to himself.

The hatch, once unsealed, shifted inwards to the track that allowed it to be slid to the side for egress. As it did so, there was the crack and clatter of wooden furniture against it. With difficulty, Pries managed to slide the hatch to the side and as he did so, an avalanche of furniture began to pour in. Some broken, some intact, the airlock was soon littered with a slope of chairs, tables, magazines racks. The pile was as high as the hatch, but Pries could see open space a few feet above through the forest of chair and table legs.

Pries, confused and in a state of total bewilderment, began to pull at the furniture, attempting to clear the hatch and gain access to the space outside where he could get his bearings. After the first end table clattered into the airlock, the ship shifted again. This time the crackle and clattering was louder because it was right where Pries was. The gap to the open space suddenly disappeared as the ship dropped about three feet.

Pries froze. The echoing clatter of millions of pieces of furniture continued on for several minutes. Very carefully, Pries began to work at the mass at the airlock again, being careful to move slowly and deliberately, choosing pieces that wouldn’t cause a cascade. He began to think to himself, wondering how big the pile was that he was on. For it to support the weight of the Scuab, it had to be massive.

Pries worked for around forty-five minutes before he’d cleared a small indention into the mass of furniture, and secured what he thought was a sturdy enough climb to the top of the mass. Shining his light back inside the airlock one more time, Pries set his foot timidly on the first thick table leg he’d maneuvered to act as a step, and began his climb out.

Pries struggled for several minutes to reach the top, and when he did, it was difficult to find a comfortable, balanced position to stand on the massive hoard.

What he saw defied logic.

For miles in every direction, piles – mountains and valleys, not just of furniture, but various other debris. Boxes, papers, trash. Pries even spotted a plush toy clown leering at him from the depths of a stack of school desks. Turning around, Pries could see the Scuabtuinne sitting slightly askew on top of a giant pile.

Shifting a bit to take in the scene, Pries lost his footing and his leg dropped, knee slamming against a cross post of a large dining table. The pile quaked and shifted, and the table Pries was on suddenly dropped a few feet. The displacement cause several chairs to topple on top of Pries. As he struggled to free himself, the Scuab shifted againt, and this time everything moved. The table began to drop as furniture broke underneath it. More furniture filled the gap the table left by falling inward over it.

Pries panicked and clambered up whatever foot and hand holds he could find even as more furniture began to pile on top of him. A bookcase tipped over and slammed against his head, knocking him senseless for a moment. Behind him, he heard the scraping of metal as the ship began to sink into the massive pile further. As more furniture shifted, Pries position eventually cleared as some sturdier pieces held in a tor of sorts. Stars exploded in his head from the bookcase strike as he made his way to the top of the remaining hill.

He paused and looked back at the ship. Only the cockpit was visible now, and the cracking continued from beneath the mass. Pries began to worry that the ship would pull everything down eventually. It was impossible to tell if there was a bottom to this pit of miscellaneous debris he was in.

Pries was able to take a few deep breaths and had calmed himself somewhat when the furniture tor he was on collapsed.

The top of the pile held together, and so, like a felled tree, it tipped over intact with Pries clinging to it. The impact against another pile knocked Pries out cold, and a cascade of more furniture began to pile on top of him.

***

Pries grunted awake, feeling the pressure of what seemed like tons of furniture on his back. Shifting his head, he felt something sharp in his helmet scrape against his cheek. His visor was shattered!

Pries gasped suddenly, expecting to pull in nothing, or something unbreathable, but instead found he could breath like normal. Normal being a relative term, because with the mass on him, he found it quite difficult. His left hand was free, so he cleared away the remains of his visor and the splinters of wood that had found their way into his helmet. He considered taking the helmet off, but quickly realized it offered him some protection for his head in case something fell on him.

The clattering echoes were now fairly constant and coming from all angles around him. He had no way of telling where in relation to his ship he’d fallen. His flashlight was now a permanent part of the hoard somewhere.

Shifting under the weight, Pries realized a rather large coffee table had created a pocket, and the edge of the table was the weight he felt on his back. The tables legs appeared braced, so it appeared if Pries just pulled himself up a bit, the table edge would release him and still leave a gap and not collapse. Pries struggled to make this adjustment, but soon pulled free.

From his pocket, he looked up – up based on the direction everything was falling down – and could barely make out the dim light and the open space about ten feet up from his position through a fairly dense pile. Surprised that he wasn’t buried deeper, he began to inch his way out of the pocket, shifting through what small passages he could find, trending up as he could.

The passage of time was slow through this process and the density of the pile made it difficult to make any progress. After about two hours, Pries had only moved about four feet from the pocket he’d started from.

Frustrated, he slumped against the large pool table he’d worked his way on top of. Resting, he noticed that the pool table had one of its leg lodged in an intersection of broken timbers. To Pries’s surprise, the timbers appeared to be fastened together with other random pieces of furniture, all held together with nails and braces, suggesting a structure constructed from the pile purposefully.

Moving over to it, he shook it slightly. It was sturdy, much sturdier than the rest of the pile. Angling his head around the legs of chairs and table above him, Pries identified that it was actually a rather large structure he was against, all connected.

This good news was erased almost instantly as a deep groan sounded beneath the pool table. After a beat, there was a loud, thundering crack and the pool table dropped from underneath Pries. Desperately, he held onto the structure he’d found with both arms wrapped around a thick board. The entire pile gave way then, and a cascade of furniture scraped down the structure as the pool table disappeared into a maelstrom of wood. Large pieces threatened to tear Pries offer the structure he clung to, but he managed to keep his position while still taking punishment from the pieces scraping down his body and slamming into him.

After two minutes or so, Pries opened his eyes and looked behind him. The pile had fallen around fifty feet and Pries now hung on the side of a wall constructed of random debris. Looking up, he could see a ledge, and looking to either side he could make out that the structure was like a cliff, it’s edge in waves up and down, similar to a roller coaster structure.

Pries could see the ship’s cockpit in the debris below him. Even as he watched, the ship shifted again, and the entire pile swallowed it.

Clinging to the structure, Pries gauged he could probably scale the side directly up to the ledge. Slowly, methodically, he worked his way up, noting the craftsmanship as he went. Someone had taken time to build this structure to last. He began to wonder again exactly where he was, how he’d got there, and how’d he’d get back to where he was supposed to be.

“Did I jump? Is this some other dimension?” he queried himself. “Why all the furniture and where does it come from?”

As if in answer, there was a bizarre sizzling, ripping sound behind him in the distance. Pries turned to the source of the sound and witnessed a giant mass of furniture, trash, metal, and boxes suddenly appear in mid-air and drop into the pile he’d just emerged from. As the mass broke apart in mid-air, Pries made out a 1992 Grand Marquis in the collection. When the car hit the pile it kept going, creating a void that was soon filled with more trash following it. He then realized this was happening all over the massive hoard, as far as his eyes could see. That was the ripping sound he’d heard earlier in the ship.

Moving quickly up the structure in case trash suddenly popped in above him, Pries made the ledge and pulled himself up. The ledge itself was actually about ten feet wide, and like a road, with boards laid out specifically in one direction, it led off in two directions. One into darkness and more piles of debris, the other led up a small incline in the distance to a large shack. About a hundred feet above this shed, the dim lights Pries had seen hung in mid-air.

As Pries approached, he noticed that the shack was also an amalgam of furniture scraps, metal sheets, and other debris from the piles. The windows had no glass panes in them, but a warm light shone from within the shack. Pries made his way toward the shack carefully and quietly, on guard for any new surprises. All around him the place echoed with the shifting and collapsing of piles as more and more junk was dropped in suddenly every few moments. It was a strange sea of debris Pries found himself in the middle of.

Nearing the shack, Pries noticed that a ladder rose from the top of the shed extending upward to where the lights hung, but he could discern no structure that this ladder could be leading to. The ladder disappeared into the light emitted there.

At the door to the shack, Pries hesitated, wondering if he should knock. He listened closely but could hear no sounds coming from within. Without further hesitation, Pries opened the door and stepped in.

The smell hit him right way. Urine and feces, maybe old coffee and cigarettes, too. Pries couldn’t smell much else under the assault of the urine and feces. The main room was small and filled to the ceilings with trash – food wrappers, cans, paper plates and cutlery. None of the brand names rung a bell with Pries, and some even looked to be in a language he’d never seen before. The only other room in the shack was the bathroom. From where Pries stood near the door, he could see the piles of what appeared to be adult diapers and toilet paper piled high. The filth seemed to be dripping from all walls.

There was only a narrow path to traverse through the shack, with a veritable wall of trash on either side. The path led from the door to three places, one appeared to be one tiny end of a couch where a nasty darkness stained it where it appeared someone had sat for a very long time. There was a corner of an end table there that held a massive mountain of cigarette butts overflowing an ashtray, and a futuristic looking pad device, slightly covered with cigarettes as well. Another path led to the bathroom, and a third led to a ladder, presumably the same one that Pries saw rising from the shed.

Curiosity getting the better of him, Pries held his breath and carefully tiptoed through the canyon path to the ladder. There were no bugs or rodents in the hoarded shed, but Pries felt like there should be. Grasping a rung on the ladder, Pries wished he hadn’t. It was slimy with filth. Looking up, Pries saw the hole where the ladder went through the roof and kept going. Squinting his eyes, he could just almost make out a hatch in the middle of those lights floating above.

“Maybe a way out,” Pries told himself. Giving the shack one last glance, he quickly but carefully made his way up the ladder. Breaching the top, he noticed the roof was covered with the same flavor of debris as the inside, including a few adult diapers. The filth was less on the rungs as he went up, and about halfway to the hatch – now clearly visible above him – the rungs were clean.

Desperate to get somewhere away from the bizarre realm he found himself in, he quickly traversed the rest of the ladder, and turning the handle of the hatch, he quickly went through it into a brightly lit, very clean room.

Seated at a desk with several monitors showing diagrams of star systems and galaxies sat a man with a long white beard in a bathrobe. The man was eating Cap’n Crunch cereal out of an orange bowl.

Upon seeing Pries enter the room, the man promptly spat out his mouthful of cereal all over his desk and monitors and stood up.

“Who the hell are you?!” the man demanded, his robe fluttering open to reveal only an adult diaper.

Automatically, Pries answered, “Captain Pries, GloFed Expeditionary–“

The man held a hand up to stop him and shook his head, “I know who you’re with, god dammit, I mean who the hell are you? You’re not supposed to be here!”

Pries, at a loss, only queried back, “How do you know who I’m with? Where is this place?”

The man put his bowl aside and strode over to Pries. The stench of urine and cigarettes followed him. The man grabbed the nametag of Pries’s suit and read it aloud, “Pries alright.” Shaking his head, “Well, god dammit all to hell that bungs up the whole shebang…” Looking up to stare Pries in the eye, he barked, “Where’s Malcolm Hunt?”

Pries’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “Wait, how do you know Malcolm Hunt?”

Without responding, the old man’s eyes went wide. “This is too soon.” Running back over to this monitors, the man typed impossibly fast on several keyboards strewn about while looking at about six or so screens in rapid succession. “Yes, yes… I knew that ripple would hit static resonance. Shit!”

Pries, still lost, circled back to the question originally asked. “Malcolm Hunt is dead. He died yesterday in a freak boating accident.”

The old man froze for a moment, then rubbed his eyes wearily. “Static resonance.” He then collapsed in his chair, dejected. “Well, god dammit all. Another sixteen thousand years at least.”

Pries stepped forward, “Listen, what’s going on here? Who are you?’

The old man turned and looked up at Pries. “I used to be somebody back when this place had other somebodies.”

“That doesn’t answer my—“

The old man stood abruptly and lifted the desk, tipping all the monitors off it to the floor. The cereal bowl went as well as the many keyboards in a massive clattering tumult of sparks and milk and crunchberries.

Sitting heavily back down in his chair, the old man exhaled and farted – perhaps even shat himself. “I knew Malcolm was the weak thread and I pulled it anyway, god dammit…”

“Listen, I just want to know where I am and figure out how to get home. My ship has sunk deep in that–“

Faster than his visible frailty suggested, the man was in Pries face, practically climbing his suit. “She’s here?! You brought her with you!? Well, why didn’t you say so?”

Pushing off from Pries, the man stuck his head through the still open hatch and looked around below. After a moment, Pries heard him shout, “There she is! And she might just be in perfect position!”

Pulling himself back up, the man was back in Pries’s face, blowing his rotten breath at him as he talked, “How’d you come in? Flat? Level? It wasn’t level was it? She needs to go in ass or face first.”

Pries, at his limit, suddenly grabbed the man. “Stop. Now, tell me what the fuck is going on here.”

The old man started laughing, softly at first then rising to a maniacal squeal. “The god damned END, my boy!” The god damned END of it all!”

The man twitched suddenly and looked around him, then at his robe and diapers, as if suddenly coming to after a long slumber. “My god, I must apologize, my boy. Pries, you said?” Seeming suddenly modest, he wrapped the bathrobe tight around him and swept a pile of cigarettes off a table nearby into a wastebasket that was already full of them. Looking around, he spotted an empty office chair and rolled it over the Pries. “Please sit.” The man then pushed a button that didn’t seem to do anything.

Pries sat cautiously, half expecting the chair to collapse, but it held.

“My name is … ” he hesitated, and Pries caught it. The man was about to say one thing and changed his mind. “…Atomos. This place is the last vestige of Verse One.”

“What’s Verse One?” Pries calmly queried.

Atomos blew air out his mouth and shook his head. “Way to much to explain here, but I’ll keep it simple. Man-made universe. A pocket universe if you will, it originally only had one planet and one star. And there was this massive sphere complex around it that kept it contained… full infinite universe, mind you, stuffed into a pocket sphere the size of a blue giant star. Anyway, experiments went awry, and the sphere was abandoned. Now I live here.” Gesturing to the clean room, “This is what’s left of the containment complex.” Gesturing to the hatch, “And that is the universe. Verse One”

As Atomos spoke, Pries realized why the room was so clean. A tiny swarm of nanobots was methodically tidying the room as they spoke. Piles of cigarettes vanished, and the desk and monitors righted themselves

Noticing Pries watching the swarms, Atomos waved them away. “Nuisances, leftovers from the program.” One swarm began to move toward the hatch and Atomos sprung into action, slamming it shut just before they made it there. “Christ, that would have been a disaster.”

Pries tried piecing it all together. “Are you saying the Scuabtuinne jumped into a pocket universe?”

“Is that what they called it?” Atomos asked, his face one of disappointment. “What a stupid name.”

“It’s from Irish folklore, there was a Sea God named–“

“I know where it comes from and it’s a bad name regardless.” Returning to his desk, Atomos began typing on several keyboards again. “To answer your question, yes, the ship jumped into Verse One and landed on my hoard. You’re damned lucky nothing much changed with the old switcheroo, or you could have ended up on Planet One.”

“Would that have been bad?” Pries asked.

“You’d be dead,” Atomos stated matter of factly. “This hoard encompasses the entire planet. It’s crushing it even. At some point, a few million years ago the hoard gained enough gravity to eat Star One! You’d have been instantly crushed to atoms!”

“You mean to say that hoard out there ate a star?” Pries pressed incredulously.

Atomos smiled and nodded. “Took some damn fine ingenuity to create the hoard in the first place, but creating a perfect canal straight to the core for the star to be pulled directly in without upsetting the hoard… well, that was my magnum opus.” Nodding to the hatch, “Yep, nothing down there now but the hoard.”

Pries looked down at the hatch. “How big is it?”

“Ask how big Verse One is,” the old man countered. “I guess I should know since I filled it. Billions? Trillions of light years across?” Atomos shrugged. “Filling it was easy. The tough part was finding that damn hatch. It was hidden you know. Took me eons.”

Pries shook his head. “This is ridiculous.”

Atomos shook his head back at him. “No it isn’t. There’s no such thing as ‘nothing’ and that means there’s only everything and that means it’s just everything forever in all directions. Easy. Now, imagine that whole everything as a bubble in a cluster of other bubbles, all containing infinite everythings. Got it? Now imagine those bubbles as laid out in sheets, and the sheets are pressed against each other like the layers of an onion, but the onion is infinite.”

Pries nods, almost keeping up.

“At some point, someone created a new bubble. One too many in fact. That’s Verse One. You know those sheets of packing bubble wrap? The ones that annoying people like to pop?”

Pries acknowledged he was familiar.

“Well, sometimes when you go to pop one, it just overinflates one next to it, and you have to press both of them down to pop them. The multiverse and the infiniverse are both like that. Crush one, and another gets inflated. Most of the time there’s a balance, but to keep that balance an equal number of universes and multiverse have to be collapsing as there are ones that are expanding, and at equal rates both ways.”

Atomos paused for dramatic effect.

“Verse One broke that balance. And I’m trying to restore it,” Atomos held his hands out, indicating the explanation had ended.

Pries just breathed for a beat or two. “How?”

“Creating Verse One created something else: a pocket void. Suddenly, there’s this gap between all the universes and multiverses, a sub-layer. The same sub-layer that your scientists figured out how to exploit to get here. All I have to do is collapse Verse One in such a way that it pulls in the sub-layer. That’s why I need your ship.”

Pries stood slowly. “I need my ship. That’s the only way I can get back home.”

Atomos stood slowly. “Your ship doesn’t work here. It’s useless. Verse One is a customized universe and doesn’t play with the same physical rules your universe does. Your ship is dead.”

“If it’s dead, how does that help you?” Pries pressed.

“The drive, my boy. Once that ship sinks to the core, it ignites that core and THEN it jumps into the sub-layer, pulling Verse One and this massive hoard with it. The sub-layer then pops and dissipates. Easy.”

“What about me?” Pries asked, desperation rising in his voice. “I’m stuck here?”

Atomos smiled and nodded. “Yep.”

Pries collapsed back into his chair.

“Would it help you to know that you’ve been afforded a certain amount of immortality passing through to Verse One? Again, different rules.” Atomos winked.

“Not really, no. What about the complex around Verse One. Is it in another normal universe? Can I just go out there and live?”

Atomos clicked his tongue. “I don’t think you want to do that. This universe was corrupted a long time ago. It’s a hellscape of eldritch horrors out there. In fact, they’ve been trying to get in for millennia.”

Pries looked down at his feet. One thing still didn’t sit right. “The hoard. Where does it come from?”

“Everywhere,” Atomos replied. Every universe finds its way to this backdoor to multiversal travel. Eventually, they stop sending ships because none ever make the return trip. That gives them an idea… a trash chute. This hoard is the trash of every universe. I’m the Trash Man, so to speak.”

As Atomos said this, the complex began to quake. His eyes wide, Atomos ran over to the hatch and opened it. The hoard was shifting at a massive scale. “She’s nearing the core!”

Pries stood and looked down the hatch. Even as he watched, the shack collapsed and the ladder fell away as the hoard began to collapse in on itself.

“Not long now!” Atomos shouted over the rising cacophony. “She’ll hit that core and–” he made a gross sucking sound and then a pop with his mouth.

As Atomos watched the collapse, Pries made his way over to the desk. Perusing the monitors.

Just as suddenly as it started, it all stopped. Atomos, hanging out of the hatch looked around and shouted, “God dammit it all, she came in level didn’t she? She’s stuck! I knew Malcolm was the only way…” Rising back up from the hatch, Atomos was about to blame Pries, saying he fucked it all up by coming instead of Malcolm, but Pries’s boot didn’t allow it.

Kicked squarely in the face Atomos tumbled from the hatch, screaming as he fell towards the hoard, now many thousands of feet below the hatch. As he fell he screamed, “GOD DAMMIT!!!”

Pries didn’t even feel the smile on his face. He hadn’t felt it on his face when Malcolm had given his last wet death honk either.

Captain Pries walked calmly over to a button on the desk, just a simple round button – the same that Atomos had pressed earlier. No yellow and black striped cover to flip up. No warning placards. Hell, it wasn’t even red or big. Pries pushed the button and walked back to the hatch pulling a chair with. For a long while, he watched swarm after swarm of nanobots dive into the hole and head for the hoard.