"And even societies that have never heard of a Jabberwock end up with poems that talk about vorpal swords killing them. That… is an ability. So, if I post this on the big network for sharing information… then… what happens?"

"Uh. In my experience, there are books in libraries about it and everyone just ignores them except people who already have reason to look? But … your world is currently not in a state of confidently believing you need a vorpal sword to fight a Jabberwock. That's potentially fragile. If I were you I would want to try distributing information in a way that's less likely to disrupt that."

"…I am going to look this up to see if we already have such documents when I'm out. Am I ready to leave? I can request leave, and you can confirm if so."

"You should also show me those search results, if you can show them to me. And I think now is a fine time for you to ask to leave. We can always have more private conversations later."

Leonarda taps her tablet, and a request for release appears on Griffith's tablet.

"Repeat what I told you and its truth value one more time, for me?"

"Jabberwocks exist. Jabberwocky, which talks about one being slain by a vorpal blade, is bad advice. Don't use a vorpal blade against a Jabberwock. Also, for some reason, societies can't learn this fact."

"Very good. Thank you."

Griffie approves the request for release from information containment.

Leonarda stands up, bringing her tablet and opens the door. "Art, unless I'm hallucinating, I'm still in charge, so get back in your chair."

"Yes captain."

Leonarda and Arithnu settle back on the bridge. 

"Oh, and do you want the non-dangerous and much easier to share antimeme? I can tell all of you about this one, no special procedures needed, the effect is much milder. Your world doesn't seem to have been affected by it at all, so it's not urgent, just, I'm pretty sure I told you that I was looking for signs of it, so if you're worrying about me not explaining it I can."

"Sure. Why not."

"Powerful monsters called 'Fulgati'. They destroy cities with a focus on killing the populace and destroying records. People tend to forget about specific destructive acts they do, out of horror, but the concept of the Fulgati is itself perfectly memorable. It's just that people who see them in action tend to rationalize it as a natural disaster after the fact. But none of your city-destruction incidents match their attack pattern. They'd probably really hate the mercurials, so if they were able to get this deep into outer space, they'd definitely have attacked mercurial cities."

"Griffith, what is a 'star' to you?" Silvia asks, finally looking up from her work.

"Stars involve the interplay between positive and negative energy in the distant points of outer space, where the influence of the material elements is weaker. That's the thing you've seen where my stuff keeps disintegrating. Stars pulse, move, and exert currents on each other, sometimes dimming enough to become non-viewable, and sometimes they stop or start existing. I've already described the orbital behavior of the slowest stars. Most stars orbit at rates similar to the sun's orbit, but aren't synchronized with it, it wouldn't be surprising for a randomly selected star to orbit at below half or more than twice the speed of the sun. Stars are influenced by other planes, so if you monitor them closely you can get a vague statistical sense of other planes. The closest non-sun star is estimated to be about 250 million miles away. Most stars appear to be at least trillions of miles away, though our instruments aren't precise enough to tell how far they are. They're believed to be omnidirectional emitters, but who could test that? I guess you could."

"Nobody confidently knows why the sun is where it is. No deity plausibly claims to have created the sun or the stars, though there are deities associated with phenomena like sunrises and constellations."

"Oh. And then there's my implausible claims about pre-war stuff that I don't have evidence for. The night sky used to be a lot brighter, and the stars were swirls. Some of your stars were smaller swirls, and your sky is brighter than ours, by the way."

"…Captain."

"You can stop your search, Silvia. I apologize for the wild goose chase."

Leonarda turns to Griffith, and taps her tablet, causing various stellar diagrams to appear below her on the screen.

"Our species used to believe that our planet was the center of reality, and that there was a distant dome with stars painted on it, or similar. This was because in reality, our planet rotated, and if you have a lot of objects which are more distant than they are fast, and you're rotating, it looks like that. This meant that they appeared to rotate at a uniform speed, all together."

"When we grew up, we realized that the way things actually work is that we lived on a spinning object that was orbiting around our star, while our star orbited around a giant collapsed star. Stars, as we know them, are the result of massive, massive pressure crushing ordinary matter until it gets indescribably hot. They can't simply wink out. They are amazingly distant from each other, with only a tiny number of exceptions that it took us a long time to be able to figure out were even multiple stars, because the distances between star systems are so vast compared to the distances within. When you were floating in space and looking around, that's what you were seeing. Those swirls weren't stars in different shapes. Those were collections of stars."

"But whatever you experienced back home … I don't see how it could be like that. We've tried to fit things in as you being lied to, or misled, or confused, because a lot of what you believe sounds a lot like what we used to believe, before we learned better. But it doesn't sound like that's your problem, because when Cornelia examined what you called 'elemental fire', it wasn't an oxygenation reaction. When she examined what you called 'elemental water', well, we're still working on that, but I don't think it's going to be the closely-bonded combination of gases that we call water. That's a weird translation, but close enough. Our reality, everywhere that we know of, doesn't have some grand center for things to go around at different speeds. There are orbits, but none of them are enough to handle what you're describing."

"I think wherever you're from is more distant than that. It's not anywhere we know how to get to, even in principle. Before we discovered subspace travel, we knew about the other stars, but it would have taken too long to get there. But when we discovered subspace, not only could we get to the distant stars, we also learned a new place that we hadn't understood before. I think where you come from is more like that than just a distant planet. Somewhere so distant that it isn't even a distance as we understand it. Someplace weirdly and confusingly familiar, but different from our old beliefs. Where you have souls and an afterlife and deities, that look kind of like what we imagined long ago, but aren't. Where you have dragons, and spells, and things are based on what we now call the 'classical elements', all of which aren't how … I guess they are how things work, sort of, but not for us. A place where our mistakes … well, maybe not all of them, but … I don't understand how this is possible, but I don't understand how the mercurials share our expressions. Something … I don't know what, makes these line up weirdly, but I don't know how we could get you home."

"I don't have solid reason to believe that those prewar swirls weren't collections of stars, I suppose. The only person I know who might have known and who would cooperate with the question is Kenchlo, and he was murdered. For reasons like that."

"I don't know what to say about your world's stories. For what it's worth, when I first heard about humans experiencing senescence I thought it would be more of a technological problem and less of a social problem."

"As for the distance-beyond-distance … my world has similar phenomena to varying degrees. It sounds entirely plausible to me, though the exact difficulty of transit with my capabilities and yours together, as well as the exact difficulty of transit in the other direction, is of extreme importance to determine."

Leonarda nods. "Perhaps we can figure out something with further study. We did crack early subspace with just part of the remains of a jelly, and you are both functional and explaining things. You don't seem to be causing any issues for the station, and the subspace distortions here are reducing our options. Would you like to come aboard?"

"It's possible my friends would try to look for me at the location I arrived at. If we're going to move me could we maybe put something informative where I was?"

"Of course. We have a great deal of experience with attempting to design beacons for those without even a shared language, we can design one with you to use your language to direct them about how to contact us, along with leaving some technology to help them do so."

"Let's do multilingual. The first language I tried using with you is cross-culturally recognizable in my world, and let's throw in a language I haven't shown you yet that one of my friends likes that's good for technical stuff, too. And … might be good to give it the capacity to destroy itself, depending on what we decide?"

"We can include a remote detonator and remote monitoring, but both will be at the whim of subspace and… right now at least subspace is far from cooperative. Which is the primary reason I would like to move away from here. That 'hole in reality' did a number on things."