This is probably a good time to explain what the Cheshire was even doing out in space, hanging on a Lagrange point in Earth’s solar system. She was a state-of-the-art spacecraft, the good ship Cheshire. In fact, she earned her name because she could materialize at any point in the multiverse, almost like teleporting. She would vaporize into thin air (or space) and then immediately appear at its desired destination in pieces, assembling together until it was complete on the other end, like Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat would do with a smile. She went in over her head gravitationally lensing on the black hole’s awesome gravity to propel the Cheshire crew unto the very outskirts of our known realities, but of course had been singed in the process.

Now, she was relegated to the relative space about planet Earth and Her solar system… to languish. It was punishment, or penance for the Captain and Her crew’s carelessness, but it wasn’t first presented to them that way.

Enter Danny V. The rather rotund Mr. V. was a galactic government official for the Universal Union of Planets and Galaxies (UU) appointed as our handler. Omniscient was the old man that he knew of all things occurring within the known multiverse (or so he thought), which made him the perfect public servant to assign operations—mainly tagging checkpoints within the many realities. To see Mr. V. at the helm of his multi-screened mainframe was a spectacle. Impressive. Imagine an octopus simultaneously operating several keyboards, responding to a multitude of occurrences all at once. If something happened, Danny V. knew about it. This is how he came to manage the Cheshire’s government-sanctioned missions.

There are several tagging services in the Akashic. Among an infinity of enterprises dancing about the stratosphere, like an urban Milky Way of LED lights, these salient businesses are distinguished by one infallible credo—they’re in the business of information, and information only. They tag for the intel. They DO NOT interfere in their subjects’ spacetime, whatsoever.

Collateral damage eventually crept up like a rash. There were ripple effects. That’s when they had to send in the Thunderbirds. To “de-ripple” the wake from these salient businesses. I mean, their collective corporate or governmental presence held about the same weight that a black hole loses in event horizon evaporation, but the scent was still there. Slight course corrections had to be made.

The Thunderbirds were pretty good at uncovering new tagging destinations too. They weren’t wired like those corporate service guys (looking at you, Danny V.); they drifted outside of the lines sometimes. They do have influence over spacetime. But only to clean up the trail left by those salient businesses.

Despite its residue, the tagging initiative had quite an artistic and noble purpose. Its aim: to chronicle the discoveries of new reality. Infinities grew in complexity. In fact, inhabitants on the ground of these planets would live and die; whole generations would come to pass; civilizations would rise, fall, and fade away forgotten forever by all future plebeians in the time it took to detect even one of these infinities. Their complexity grew more sophisticated from there. And it took those distinguished chronicling services to keep track of all that progress—reality-leaping through the multiverse—to understand the boundaries of limiting infinities, and ultimately expand outside those lines. Delicately.

The Thunderbirds were usually the first to break through.

***

The SS Cheshire—where SS stands for spaceship, not steamship—had been in the business of tagging realities already. It was almost as adept as those divine of the Thunderbird Order themselves. Its ludicrously precise internal oscillator—capable of harnessing incredible power for trans-dimensional leaps—was the Cadillac of all hyperdrives. That said, perhaps too much was asked of her.

As the Cheshire crew’s assigned case worker, Danny V. issued them tagging missions to capture specific moments along the multiverse. These gigs were beneath them, but that’s how community service goes in the multiverse. Danny V. would never let them complete their sentence; the Cheshire was too good at what she did for him to let her go.

It was then that I found my footing within the Cheshire crew, and seized my opportunity to be accepted. We had gone on enough missions by Mr. V. at this point to know that there was no end in sight to this sentence. Whenever the Captain would inquire as to how many more multiversal excursions She’d have to subject Her ship and crew, Danny V. would invariably respond with what the next assignment entailed. And God forbid we didn’t log the debriefing data from each completed mission. It only supplied more fodder for the clever V. to dodge any indication of our time being served.

Each mission would end the same way. The Captain would inquire as to how many more tagging assignments, and Mr. V. would respond:

“OK, did you log that jump point in the ledger?” he’d say over the phone. If the answer was anything other than yes, we’d hear, “Well, what good are ya to me then?”

***

UP NEXT: Bill attends the crew’s mission appointed my Mr. V. He experiences a flashback from prior Thunderbird days, training him how to surf by expert skateboarders. Then, he figures out how to transcend dimensions in space to expand his meager digs within the closet, into a much bigger Drop, where he eventually achieves zen (the second trial). The Drop is Bill’s universe.

***