A Devil's Dictionary

CRASH DIVE-2

ELTON JOHN ONCE SANG, “And all this science, I don’t understand. It’s just my job five days a week.” That’s how it is when you’re a Crash Diver: you don’t need to understand blue holes or how they differ from wormholes and black holes or what a mobius mirror does—only that it must work, every time—because, at the end of the day, that isn’t your job. Your job is to be a guinea pig: to be shot into the vortex at near light speed and experience what effect blue hole-assisted mirror travel has on the human body and psyche. Your job is to penetrate to whatever depth they’ve set the mirror—and, if you’re lucky, to enter that mirror and get bounced back.

It hasn’t always been like this. Before there was Zebra Station—with its luxurious gravity centrifuge and its row of black and yellow delta divers hanging like bats from the launch jib—there was Blue One, a sparsely-manned outpost which had sent the first human souls into the maw of the blue hole, men who had come back white-haired and emaciated, debilitated—mentally and physically—mad.

The Crash Diver Program changed all that. From now on only specially-trained pilots would be sent into the Hole, pilots who had the benefit of the first men’s experiences as well as spacecraft designed specifically for the task. A lot was learned in a very short time—one of these things was that men who entered the vortex experienced a series of hallucinations, or Dive Visions, in which they briefly felt they had become someone or something else: a soldier in the Holy Roman Army, say, or a person of the opposite s*x. Some even purported to have become animals or alien lifeforms—it was the latter which had apparently driven the men of Blue One clinically insane.

Another lesson was the fact that the farther a mirror was projected into the vortex the farther it could “cast” to its attendant portal; meaning the Hole might well hold the key to intergalactic space travel. This more than anything had accounted for the program’s generous funding, not to mention its exhaustive launch table, which sometimes saw us drop as many as three times in a week. The chief problem, however, remained—and that was that the deeper one dropped, the more acute the hallucinations; hence, the missions had become increasingly volatile, increasingly dangerous.

Regardless, a decision had been made to make the next drop the deepest yet: all the way through the ergosphere—right up to the outer event horizon. By which they meant right up to the point of no return, even by mirror refraction.

And I was the one who drew the unlucky straw.

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* * * *

IT IS RAINING. THAT’S the first thing I notice, the first thing that tells me I am no longer in the cockpit. The second is that I’m bleeding—bleeding from the leg, which is making it difficult to press the attack. The third is that I’m dying—as is my opponent—dying beneath a blood red sky.

“It is finished,” he says, stumbling forward and back—his blood flowing freely, his hair matted in sweat. “Look at you! Your broadsword is shattered. Your armor is compromised. Why is it you continue?”

But I do not know why I continue—only that I was a Crash Diver once and will be so again, and so must face the vision, endure its consequences. Endure them so that future generations may bridge the gulf of galaxies!

At last I say: “Are you better off? We die together, Sir Aglovere. Surely you—”

But I am baffled by my own voice, so familiar and yet strange, and by my own words, which have materialized from nowhere.

And then he is charging, hacking at me wildly, and I am forced back along the hedgerow: until I lose my footing over a protruding root and topple headlong into the mud and bramble—whereupon my opponent falls on what’s left of my sword and is promptly run through, his entrails unspooling like loops of linked sausage and his eyes turning to empty glass.

At length he says, “We kill ourselves,” and laughs, even as I push him off me.

And then we just lay there, staring at the sky, neither of us saying anything, as our blood pools together and spirals down the slope. As the clouds continue to rumble—pouring rain into our dying eyes.

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* * * *

THE DIVER TREMBLES violently as I shake the vision off.

... repeat, Zebra One to Diver 7, are you all right?

I feel my leg through my flight suit, half expecting it to be flayed wide open—but I am unharmed, of course.

Roger that, Zebra One. However I am experiencing turbulence I cannot account for—what can you tell me?

There is a long pause which is pregnant with static, after which Zebra One responds, choppily, Diver 7 ... Zebra One. Be advised ... some kind of anomaly. We are working ... before it effects the mirrors. Please ...

And then they are gone.

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