Miracles

Jinx floated in deep vacuum. Her body had stopped metabolizing oxygen a few minutes ago.

She watched Peter as he floated in the void. Her mind had reached out to him, and recoiled as she felt the vast amounts of information flowing through his consciousness.

He was in a trance, a deep one. Two glowing balls of matter formed near him.

Matter and anti-matter. He was sorting virtual particles.

She was not scared by the void that surrounded them. She watched his mind, felt it racing, and rejoiced.

Something was happening.

She couldn't follow what he was doing, but she knew.

She watched him, felt around the edges of his mind -- and felt fear.

Her mind was powerful, a dreadful thing of parts that devoured souls. She could read a mind like a billboard, and a community of minds like a book. She had seen, contemplated, and done things that would break the strongest minds.

She watched something impossible. His mind was like a machine, a terrible all-consuming mechanism, a fever dream apparatus that grew twisting, turning, pulsing, and grinding until it consumed all of reality.

He was gambling with the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, and winning handily. From nothing, there was something.

Ever increasing amounts of something condensed from nothingness.

She felt a thrill when he began synthesizing strangelets.

Dopants for a weak-force band-gap, they were the basis for neutrino circuitry.

Hours passed.

The anti-matter cloud collapsed. He has pressed it into a geometric point, constructing a tiny black hole that sputtered with decay radiation as he used it to stress the vacuum to create ever stranger constructs.

The structure beside it was no longer a cloud. Her suspicions were correct -- a spade-shaped starship took form next to the proton-sized gravitational singularity. The pieces fell into place.

The singularity boiled away, and the copy of the Nightstalker remained. He seemed to waken from his trance, and floated into the ship.

It approached her, and the outer door of an airlock opened.

She thought, "Stupid powerful." He had re-created what he had lost, when he could have made anything. The phrase seemed to fit.

She drifted into the ship, and the outer door closed. She braced for impact, and absorbed the impact of the drifting vessel.

Systems where slowly coming on-line. The inner door opened to a darkened corridor, but the lights turned on after she walked a few meters.

She readjusted to breathing, and approached the bridge.

The door opened automatically.

He was sitting in the command chair, and turned to face her.

"Welcome aboard." His voice was tired. He looked exhausted. "What do you want to call it?"

She very briefly considered saying something sarcastic. Part of her wanted to cut him down to size, reject the impossible thing she had just experienced.

"I-- I don't know." She thought for a moment. "The Black Watch?"

He smiled. "All right. I've generated a new key-pair. We'll be on-line in a few minutes. Wanna take helm?"

The banality of his request shocked her a little, but she had to admit that she was looking forward to piloting a copy of the Nightstalker.

She sat down at her station, and turned to him.

"You know -- if you're just going to make a copy of your old ship, you should do something to make it different. Like a different color or something."

His eyes narrowed. "Hmm. It is a pirate copy..."

He snapped his fingers. The hull turned black, except for a skull motif on the blade of the spade.

Jinx giggled.

Peter dead-panned, "It was that or flames."

They laughed for a few moments, and as they quieted down again, Peter slumped in the command chair.

Jinx became serious.

"So, what do we do now?"

Peter looked like he was about to fall asleep.

"Now?"

He paused for a beat.

"We find this god person and kick his ass."