"How do you find a needle in a haystack the size of the universe."

"Correction, how do you find a needle in a haystack the size of the universe when you don't know what the needle looks like."

"Way to make it sound worse." Ramirez muttered, and Adam shrugged lightly from where he stood on the ship's command platform. It had taken them some time to learn, but it turned out the pilot wasn't required to be active to power the ship. As long as Adam was present and touching some part of the ship he acted as its main power source. This was not something Ramirez or any f the others besides lord Cele could do, seeing as their human constructs prevented them from shedding the right amount of power.

They had talked with Krill extensively on weather or not they should continue preforming the anima surgery. Eventually they had come to an agreement that he would preform it on a request by request basis, but only after some more preparation and testing. Preforming the surgery on Adam made krill realize there were some significant holes in his knowledge that he wished to fill before performing any other risky surgeries.

All in all powering the ship was not an unpleasant sensation if not a little strange, a sort of thrumming that ran deep through his bones . In a way it was almost soothing . If there was one thing with the empyrean that he found lacking was the sound. Back on the omen and the harbinger, he had been used to a certain atmosphere, the distant thrumming of engines and working machine parts which could be heard pulsing through the walls and the floors, but the empyrean.

She was almost silent.

If not for a sort of ambient hum, or the soft rushing of air through the decks she was almost completely silent. It was a strange feeling.

The empyrean had no real engines in the way they would be understood by humans. Narobi could explain it better than he could but he didn't even want to try. Something to do with mass energy conversion or soemthing something whichwas amazing astonishing and soemthing something else that he didn't catch because he had zoned out.

Adam loved science, but sometimes he didn't understand it much.

Correction.

He actually understood science very well now. Since the changes to his brain, things had gotten a lot easier. He hadn't mentioned it to anyone yet, but since the chance he was capable of doing orbital calculations in his head without the aid of a calculator. When Narobi talked about her engines, he could visualize what she was talking about, and while part of that was the fact that he could see into her head, another part of it was his own mind running hotter than it had ever run before.

He wasn't sure how to feel about all that worried that maybe the surgery had profoundly changed him in ways that made him a fundamentally different person.

"So how does one find an unknown object in a haystack the size of the universe." Adam jumped a bit not realizing he had faded off for a minute there.

"Well.... The void isn't known for picking up after itself when they visit, so with a little help from the science nerds and others we have developed a sort of interstellar photodetection that can detect the specific values often found in void emanating light. We aren't sure if it is going to work, but we at least have to try." He turned his head to glance out the window, "I have my own personal theory on the subject.

"Oh?" Ramirez said rising an eyebrow.

"I think the void is on the edge of the universe."

"Bold of you to assume the universe has an edge." Adam opened his mouth to argue but Ramirez made a pretty good counterpoint depending on which theory you subscribed to the universe was either a flat plane or an ever-expanding bubble. In both cases the universe didn't really have an edge because having an edge implies that the objects exists within a three dimensional space that continues outward past the boundaries of wherever. Now in the globe theory of the universe, the object is round and universe only exists inside the bubble, there is no end because it simply goes in a circle. It would be like trying to walk to the edge of the earth, you just can't do it because there is no edge. In the end you just end up walking back around to where you started.

He rubbed his temples. It was all rather complicated, but somehow, he had a feeling that the void would exist within a pocket of space that resembled what came before the universe. He had no idea what that looked like as it implied a space where atoms and matter and time does not exist and even thinking of that was making his entire brain hurt all the way down to his toes, and that was even with his new and improved mind

In fact, the fact he could think more in depth on the subject simply made his own thought process that much harder to reconcile.

"Admiral."

He lifted his head towards the sound of the voice. High above him in one of the bridge chairs, sat a woman in a white and grey uniform. The edges of the uniform were lit in streaks of golden light. As long as she walked on board the ship she was part of the ship, and its inner workings. This was how the Empyrean's AI monitored all of her people. Saying AI was a bit of a misnomer as it wasn't an intentionally constructed artificial intelligence. Whatever the empyrean was she had grown naturally out of the ships own digital functions her primary interest being taking care of the people on her crew.

In this way she monitored each and every one of them, location, heartrate, health. This was information which she openly supplied to krill, who , she made no attempt to hide, that she liked the most

"shoot." Adam said gently kicking off the platform and allowing the empyrean's gravity modulation to carry him into the air so he could better see her holographic screen.

"We have a hit.'

Adam's eyebrows shot up in surprise. He now recognized her as the crew member responsible for monitoring the void photoscope.

"Really, already. The universe is big, so I didn't expect us to get so lucky so soon?"

The grimace on her face made it quite clear that this news was not particularly good news, "Yes, but that's not the problem, sir."

He shook his head, "I don't like where this is going."

She made no move to dissuade his worries simply leaning forward to point at the screen, "The problem is not weather we will be able to find the void, the problem is picking which of the void sites we want to start with first There are hundreds of then,."

Adam felt his heart sink. That was not an issue he was anticipating, but it was certainly almost as bad as finding to little.

"Alright..... why don't we start with our own patter? We don't have to visit every void site. We just just have to follow the general clusters like a trail, and if the cluster is big enough, we pick the ones furthest away from us. If this is the case I suggest conducting our search by way of exponential spiral."

She frowned at him, "Why a spiral."

He shrugged, "If you are looking for some deeper meaning, I promise there is none, it just sounded good."

She shrugged but nodded. They were flying mostly blind here, so picking a direction and moving was a good enough reason to go anywhere.

"if we plot out your spiral, that would place the first and closest void site.... Here."

Ramirez had joined him some time during his examination kicking off the floor and floating into the air to join him, "Still within Andromeda." Ramirez pointed out

"It's a good place to start, and besides, the more we know the more clues there might be."

Ramirez made no argument floating along with Adam as he raised his hands into the air readying them for warp . He gave only a cursory warning as most of the crew would have no real way of knowing they had warped at all. The ship was equipped with some serious warp dampening suppression. Adam was probably the only one who could feel it at all, and only because the energy surge required for a warp tok an immense amount of energy significantly draining him for a moment.

One moment they were there and the next moment they were gone.

Adam had closed his eyes to focus better.

And when the warp was over, he was greeted by the gasps of his crewmembers and a soft muttering. Adam opened his eyes slowly. The bride of the Empyrean was naturally dark which both he and the crew preferred. Of course there was some ambient golden light which shone up from the strips in the floors and along the walls, but otherwise the room was kept to a near dim,

But when he opened his eyes, adam found the room bathed in a gentle blue light not dissimilar to the sort of light you might expect to find when peering through an underwater window. But it was not, in fact, water that got in their way.

"Is that, some sort of megastructure." Ramirez asked

He glanced over to one of the bridge scientists who was squinting at the thing in front of him, "No..... it certainly seems more organic than that."

Adam would have had to agree.

Out through the front viewing window the massive ice structure glowed with a distant and ethereal blue light. It a way it reminded him of those half dome climbing structures you see in playgrounds primarily made of interlocking triangles, but instead of metal and plastic, this structure was made of what appeared to be ice or some other material. He supposed it could have been glass, and that thought made him even more uncomfortable. But even that realization did not top his attempted comprehension at the sheer size of the structure. Out in space with no reference to compare it against, it was difficult to put the thing into perspective, but just staring at the monolith was enough to make him feel small.

"How.... How big is."

"A lightyear wide." Someone muttered

"Holy shit." He muttered

"Some of those pillars must be..... thicker than earth or even Jupiter."

Ramirez reached out a hand to jab a finger at the structure "Someone want to tell me why that thing hasn't collapsed in on itself yet. Isn't that how gravity works on things of this size."

Adam frowned, his face bathed in a wash of blue light as he stepped forward running his eyes along the unintentional geometric patterns produced by the strange latus of ice or glass or whatever it was.

"I don't..... I don't think its solid."

"What do you mean?'

"I don't think its as heavy as it looks. I also don't think its one structure."

His first hypothesis couldn't be proven just yet, but his second became clear as their ship moved in a short parabola around the megastructure, which turned out to be a series of structures separated by many billions of miles. The overall structure looked so big because there were thousands of smaller structures which had made up the entire cluster from a distance.

A hush had fallen over the room as Adam maneuvered them towards the nearest structure . The closer they got the more they could see that the structure itself was comprised of many smaller pillars in the same configuration that made up the larger set and so on and s forth until Adam realized that the entire piece was constructed that way reminding him of the way marrow exists inside a bone.

It didn't occur to him until hours later that ha had been up for almost seventy two hours straight. Even then he was only reminded when Sunny came to retrieve him as he was looking through the data with the scientists who were busy analyzing the chemical makeup of the thing in front of them.

He almost jumped as she dropped a hand onto his shoulder, "Rest." She ordered.

"but."

"Argue with me and I will toss you over my shoulder and carry you."

He found that idea both intriguing and mildly embarrassing at the same time, so opted to follow her of his own fruition back through the corridors of the empyrean and down to the captain's quarters, which were big enough for an entire apartment on the front of the ship and had the best view , they went to be d under the blue light of the "Apparatus." Soothed gently to sleep by the strange reflection of color.

He drifted in dreams for a long while, rocked into dreams by his own mind.

Only to wake up in the middle of the night drenched in a cold sweat and one thought running through his head.

Deus

The thought, wasn't his , and didn't belong to anyone he knew.