You know this is obviously very important, but that very importance makes you want to be sure about what you are doing before you just plow into unchartered territory never visited before by human beings, and start snooping around and asking questions of life forms you know nothing about, in setting you have never seen or even imagined. You tell Thaun that you wish to begin immediately learning everything his species has learned about the Free Zone. Who lives there? What are they like? What is the setting like? Thaun seems concerned about your unwillingness to depart immediately, but he agrees to make his scientists' lifetimes of findings available to you right away, and you begin having the information sent directly into your brain by Thaun's telepathic technologies.

You spend the next several days in a state of medically induced sleep, overseen by Thaun in the ICT's medical facility, with the accumulated knowledge of Thaun's species about the Free Zone being pumped into your head. By the time Thaun awakens you at the end of the data dump, nearly a month has passed, but you now know more about the Free Zone than any single other creature alive in the universe. You know exactly where to head to get to the center of control over the Free Zone, and you managed to come across a couple of very useful bits of information that you are confident will allow you to secure the agreement of the leaders of the Free Zone to provide technology that you believe will help save at least many of the species whose lives will be directly threatened by the beginning of contraction of the universe. You immediately set a course for the closest wormhole, and using a ship provided by Thaun, you set out immedaitely for the control center of the Free Zone.

After another month of travel, you are nearing the black hole that will enter you back into the older portions of the ICT and should direct you instantaneously into the Free Zone's system. Just as you are preparing to make your descent into the center of the wormhole, a light on your ship's control panel begins to flash indicating a warning, and then another, and another. Within minutes your entire system is going haywire, and you are unable to tell what is happening, either in your ship or outside of it. All power and all systems on your ship blink off for a few moments, come back on line, but then they are gone. As you watch through the windows of Thaun's ship, suddenly the wormhole you thought you were heading towards shifts dramatically in your view, and you realize, shocked, that it is not just your systems, but the actual wormhole that has moved, likely by thousands of light years in just a few seconds. With horror it occurs to you that what you are seeing are in fact the effects of the universe already beginning its contraction. Your time spent studying in the ICT with Thaun has cost you dearly, and your chances of ever reaching the Free Zone that you now know so much about have dwindled to zero.

With your ship disabled and no path to the Free Zone, you are left to drift in space, freezing and quickly losing oxygen, until you and everything else in the ship shuts down for good. Not only is this the end for you, but the rest of humankind and much other life in the universe as you know it.

The End