Interstellar space already contained dozens of advanced human probes during that strange minute when the alien starship raced through our solar system at five thousand times the speed of light on its way to more important business.
ExVa-22 imaged the alien traveler from slightly over two billion kilometers away for less than a millisecond. That was long enough to determine that it was decelerating, and would come to a complete standstill somewhere near the center of Galaxy 189640628066.
The scientists soon decided it was an illusionary motion, a transfer wave created at the dawn of time, like an endless row of monkeys throwing balls at each other at almost the same instant.
In reality the ship had already passed through long ago, influencing everything that had happened since.

Seventy lightyears from Earth, a second alien vessel was approaching on the same course as the first, but this one was moving at slightly below the speed of light, giving humanity time to prepare a close encounter, using a newly built high-speed MOND ship.
The alien ship's suspected origin was an intergalactic void more than a million lightyears away. Its course would also take it through our galaxy's exact center of mass, about six thousand lightyears from the core (not that there was much to see there).
Whatever virtual matter the ship (if it was a ship) was made from kept its mass within manageable limits, else its induced gravity would have already deflected our dust probes.
Long-range radar showed no meaningful length contraction or time distortion.

Half a billion kilometers away, the bow shock wave became visible to our short-range scopes; mostly high gammas and exotic matter.
The edgeship was merely passing through our universe, moving between regions with far stranger physics.
In half an hour, we would pass within twenty kilometers of the object, and we would be able to study it for leisurely microseconds.
After the flyby, the contents of our minds would be transmitted back to Earthspace.
We knew nothing about the alien motives or purposes, but in the final week before the encounter, a strange insight had begun to take hold among the crew with unshakeable fervor.
The flyby was a singularity, a cosmic nexus: the temporary focus of the evolution of all the matter and energy in this portion of the universe.
The future had shrunk almost to a point. Would it expand again on the other side?



The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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