Hard Luck Hermit

For the first few days -or swaps, as Corey was forcing himself to refer to them- he found himself missing the hot water of a shower at home. After using it a few times, though, Corey found himself starting to enjoy the intense vibrations of the cleanser on the ship. At least when he didn’t have to share it with someone else. Considering how much time they had in every day -swap- it felt odd that he kept getting partners in nudity. He’d started waking up earlier to dodge the cleanser crowd, and that had solved the problem for now. Corey stepped out, got dressed, and headed for the cockpit to face the swap.

The Hard Luck Hermit had been in transit for about two swaps now, heading for a “Bang Gate”, whatever that was. Corey intended to clarify that right now. He made his way to the cockpit and found Kamak perusing something on his datapad.

“Hey, Kamak?”

“What’s up, Corey?”

“I had a question about how we’re traveling,” Corey said.

“Yeah, that tracks,” Kamak sighed.

“Sorry. I’m trying to space the questions out a little,” Corey said.

“Yeah yeah, you got a whole universe to catch up on, just- hold on a minute,” Kamak said. He glanced the far side of the common room and put his datapad down. “Tooley! What are you doing?”

Tooley stopped in place and sighed. She had a messy bundle of clothing tucked under her arm, and those were the only clothes on her person.

“I’m going to the cleanser, Kamak.”

“You know the rules,” Kamak snapped back. “You can be naked in the washroom and your bedroom, nowhere else!”

“I’m just walking from one place to the other!”

“Rules are rules!”

“Doprel’s naked all the time,” Tooley protested.

“Doprel has no external genitalia,” Kamak shouted. “I don’t want your exposed orifices all over my ship! Get back in your room and get dressed!”

Tooley put her thumb near her navel and then jerked it in Kamak’s direction, which was apparently a rude gesture in space, and then returned to her bedroom to put some pants on. Kamak sighed and returned his attention to Corey.

“Sorry about her, she’s a disaster of a sapient being,” Kamak said. “Anyway. You had a question?”

“Yeah, I, uh...hold on, I lost it,” Corey said. He had to shake a few bouncing blue body parts out of his head first. “Okay, I was wondering what ‘Bang Gates’ are. They actually go between galaxies?”

It had taken Corey a few conversations to pick up on the fact that intergalactic travel was actually a possibility. His head was still reeling from being able to travel between stars, much less galaxies. For Kamak and the others, though, it wasn’t even a notable point of conversation.

“Yeah. Pretty standard stuff, but I guess not to an Uncontacted like you,” Kamak said.

“How many galaxies are there?”

“Eh, I don’t know, two hundred and thirty or so? At least that got Bang Gates connected to them,” Kamak said. “Couple dozen more that don’t, I think.”

“Jesus.”

“I know spatially that’s kind of big, but when you break the numbers down, it ain’t much,” Kamak said. “Livable planets are pretty rare, kid, you get maybe four or five inhabitable planets per galaxy, and you’re lucky if even one or two of those actually develop sentient life.”

“Well, I’ve spent my entire life so far only knowing about the one,” Corey said. The fact there might be three to four other inhabitable planets in the Milky Way was mindblowing in it’s own way.

“Hah, right, you’re from a species of morons, I forget.”

“Yeah, alright,” Corey said. He didn’t even bother arguing in favor of human intelligence. "What about those Bang Gate things, though? They’re like some kind of fast travel tube between galaxies, or what?”

“Well...that’s a pretty complicated question. You got the ‘what’ right, they’re basically big tubes that go between galaxies, but as far as how...I’m not sure anybody without eighty-seven advanced physics qualifiers could actually explain it to you.”

“Well, just the basics will be fine, if you know them,” Corey said. Kamak shrugged.

“Alright, well, I don’t know how it works, but basically it’s like a little bit of time travel.”

“Time travel?”

“Yeah. Like some collection of big shot geniuses got together and realized that the everything in the universe was super close together right before the Big Bang, and then they did a lot of cosmic science bullshit to make these gateways so that either end exists in our time, but the middle bit exists in that moment before the Big Bang. So you’re going from point A to point B, but taking less time, since you’re traveling through a time period when A and B were closer together.”

“I don’t- how- that shouldn’t work, should it?”

“Fuck if I know, apparently it does,” Kamak said. “Well enough that universal society kind of depends on them. Intergalactic travel could take a long fucking time without Bang Gates.”

“I just can’t- is it safe?”

“Statistically speaking, it’s safer than just flying around like this,” Kamak said, gesturing to the beige blur of FTL travel outside their window. “Only about four accidents in all the centuries they’ve been running.”

“Wild,” Corey said.

“Yeah, do yourself a favor and try not to think about it too hard, you’ll melt your brain,” Kamak said. “End up like Tooley.”

“I heard that!”

“I know,” Kamak said. “But seriously, don’t worry about it. People a lot smarter than you or I will ever be worked this out a long time ago. It’ll be fine.”

“That doesn’t look fine.”

A few swaps later, the Hard Luck Hermit and her crew had made their way to the outskirts of the galaxy, to the Bang Gate that would lead them to their intergalactic destination. The circular construct dominated the view from their cockpit, and bathed the helm in a blood red glow. The interior of the warped portal was full to bursting with roiling primordial fire, as the energies of the ancient universe burned wild and untamed within the burgeoning cosmic inferno of the Big Bang.

“What do you mean? That’s totally normal,” Kamak said. A lance of ancient celestial fire belched forth from the gate and shot through the queue of ships waiting to pass through the Bang Gate.

“Perhaps his species has an innate fear of fire,” Farsus said.

“We don’t,” Corey said. “I mean, not any more than any other flammable species, I assume. I still don’t want to dive into a portal full of it.”

“Relax, Corey, it’s not actually fire, it just looks like it,” Tooley said. “It’s some kind of proto-energy plasma. Lukewarm, in a cosmic sense. Nothing the ship can’t handle.”

To be space-worthy, the Hard Luck Hermit had to be shielded against temperatures up to several thousand degrees. The universal primordial furnace was closer to a soup than a supernova in temperature, relatively speaking. The interior of the Bang Gates averaged out to an entirely tolerable (for a spaceship) three hundred degrees celsius.

“I’m still not really comfortable with this,” Corey said.

“Well you got a couple drops to get used to the idea,” Kamak sighed. “These queues take fucking forever sometimes.”

A long line of ships trailed out in front of the Bang Gate, each of them waiting their turn to fly through the fires of the past. As one might expect from a massive construct capable of warping space and time, Bang Gates were expensive and difficult to build, and the Galactic Council built very few of them. Their scarcity made for very long wait times for intergalactic travelers.

“Maybe I’ll just go get blackout drunk in my room,” Corey mumbled. “Can’t feel existential dread in a drunken coma.”

“Hey, don’t get drunk without me,” Tooley protested. The only thing she liked more than getting drunk was getting drunk with company.

“Focus on flying my ship, you alcoholic bitch,” Kamak scolded. “Just go to your room and stay there. We’ll get you when we’re on the other side.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Corey said. He stepped out of the cockpit for a second before poking his head back in. “And also, if anyone’s getting any bright ideas about tricking me into coming out of my room to freak me out: don’t.”

Tooley and Farsus retained a very deliberate yet conspiratorial silence. Kamak managed to keep a straight face, but only because he hadn’t thought of that prank yet.