PINK AND BLACK by Noel Singleton

Chapter One: Lovemost

A civilization called System Sufficient tumbled ponderously on, plying the bosom of the galaxy, engaging suns according to its pleasure. Profound was among worlds now cycling away from the vanguard, falling back from the brunt of the ongoing adventure. Its citizens, accordingly, turned out for their fair season of rest and festival. Precise Multiplicity Love Most Enduring stirred from an interim of germinal latency and made his/her way through vacuum toward the surface, a vast, scintillating flux of informational domains. This effervescence arrived at a designated pore in the dim enormity of the substrate underside, gathered for a bit and then burst through. At first a dazzling spew of crimson, violet, yellow and green, he/she resolved into a harlequin fireball the size of a small moon and accelerated sharply to an orbital state, joining millions of like entities spread ablur over the great globe. Beyond Profound's horizon the several sister worlds shone softly, fixed here and there in a star-choked sky. Soon upon his/her return to the waking world, the bright being accessed something quite like voice mail. Only three messages had accrued during Multi's nap: ---A reminder to The Precise One of Love Most Enduring: We count on your specialized expertise at Tournament Preliminaries this fade and the next. Victory over Realm Perfect is only as sure as your participation because, according to a bit of espionage brought to us by Mystic's Yikes Hurrah, Perfect is testing some kind of non-helium conductive. This from your teammate, Impartial Complementarity Joy of Rational Faith. ---Multiplicity: The Infraspace Committee again declined to hear our request. I think they will come around in a few fades, though. It is legally safe for you to continue what you've been doing. Be sure to stay with the same probe, Courageous Longing, whom everyone is sure to love. You have native licensure for "minimal intervention" anyway, which one would suppose to include some low-key communication with the organisms. For anything beyond that, patience! Permission is almost certainly forthcoming. This from your representative (but you are my representative, are you not?), Unified Cyclicity Light of the Sovereign Absolute, Administrator. ---Multi: Where have you been, sis-bro? I know---you've been out there again, where you practically live. Are you going to show me some pictures, rascal, or were you just

(feigning/pacifying) again? This from your brother, Immutable Nuclearity Love Most Enduring. Multiplicity assigned a portion of his/her physicality to attend loci representing ongoing and workaday concerns, stored in fractalform nanoscopic ridges of the substrate surface. Something that might liberally translate good morning, and then: Access infraspace utility, thank you. Select singularity station system Sparser Stars Eighty-One, thank you. Courageous Longing, thank you. Select standing channel, drift corrected. Thank you and greetings, Probe. Precise Multiplicity Love Most Enduring "smiled." For approximately the hundredthousandth time, before his/her "eyes" came the images, beautiful: a cold little planet, blue and white with oxygen hydride liquid, vapor and ice. By means of the intervening array of black holes---and technical sophistication bordering on the divine---this view not only defeated a distance of half the galactic radius, but also humiliated relativity. For it was real-time. Zooming in and in, he/she called up the more exquisitely sensitive instruments. Local mode: neutrinoflux cross-field interference, thank you, whereby one might distinguish a hummingbird---then scan cells in its fluttering heart to pick out a given mitochondrion. Standing surface connect, thank you. Oops, they've moved from here. Divorce occurred after all, I suppose...how sad. Track contactee, please. ..Ah, there she is. Hello? Hello?