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Mr Faraday, when the first Cg device was switched on, it started a chain reaction which began collapsing the dimensions in upon each other, creating lower and lower plena, basically eating away the higher ones. Something had to be done to contain this disaster, which is who I am, and what's happening now. I don't understand. Sigh. I suppose not, Mr Faraday. Look: timescales in the higher dimensions are considerably longer than in your own. Cj space began as an industrial accident, and everything within it is a product of that accident. You are toxic waste, and now, the cleanup crew has arrived. Oh.

Mr Faraday, the beings of Cn don't know you exist, and if they did, they would not care. Their only interest is in reversing the substrate disaster, and in being more careful next time.

So who are you, really? And ... and...

And what happens next? Do we wipe you from the floor and have done with it? No. We are the machines made to clean up the mess and we have noticed you, Mr Faraday. Some among us have realized we have no right to destroy you and have made a place for you to ... persist. Yes. That's the word.

Persist.

Perhaps you'd like to call us the gods of a lesser creation? Yes, that will do nicely. And that lesser creation is something you might want to call the storage plenum.

Storage. For how long?

I told you, Mr Faraday. Our timescales are far longer than yours.

You'll like what we've made for you. The Earth bubble, with everything there ever was living on Earth. It's my special creation, though I'm told the other bubbles are equally nice.

Other bubbles?

It said, We're here, Mr Faraday. It's been very nice to meet you, sir.

And so, my fine boys and girls, we went down the waste pipe and were flushed out to sea.

See?

After the Sun went out, it got colder and colder and colder, faster than we expected, punching through our heavy clothes, defeating our ingenious little masks, heated and otherwise, until we had to break out the spacesuits, not because there wasn't enough air, but because it was too fucking cold.

You can't imagine how cold -180 feels.

At -180, the oil on your skin freezes. You get cracks at the corners of your eyes. You blink and your skin breaks.

The spacesuits we'd stolen from dead Philadelphia were astonishingly heavy, astonishingly hard to put on, even harder to put together, like Christmas toys in their packaging with "some assembly required".

On the other hand, they were warm and snug and each suit came with a mounting rack, so they would stand up like so many hollow men, waiting for us to crawl through the hatches in their backs. Unfortunately, they weighed almost 150 pounds apiece, like self-contained suits of Medieval combat armor. Cataphracts in Space. A wonderful Star Crap title no one'd managed to think of. Too late now, boys. Wonder if any of them are still alive? I hope not.

Connie and Julia had to help us up the stairs into the freezing cold hotel, which we were using as a sort of airlock, but once there, we could at least stand unaided, could stagger around, pissing and moaning to each other.

Paulie said, "They'll never be able to walk in these, Scott."

"Connie will. She's in better shape than either of us. She weighs 145, you know." And stands five feet eight.

He said, "Well, I weigh 260, and if I fell down..."

I gave a little hop. "I don't even weigh 200, Paulie. You're carrying at least eighty pounds of dead weight, as well as the suit."

"Fuck you."

"Not tonight, Paulie. I have a headache."

"Asshole."

"And proud of it. Come on, let's see if we can get outside without falling down the steps."

It was pitch black outside. Empty. Still. Maybe silent, but all I could hear was the wheeze and whir of my portable life support system. I tripped going over the jamb, staggering, barely able to catch my balance.

Paulie said, "Careful! Why the hell do the boots have heels, anyway? I mean, these suits were intended for orbital EVAs."

"Failure of imagination." Or maybe they thought one day we'd be going back to the Moon, going on to Mars? Fat chance.

It was hard