You swallow hard, sit back and settle in in your seat, opting to trust in the ICT and the tunnels, and the countless more advanced lifeforms that have been using this means of transport for many, many years. Despite the chaos around you, you will let the ship take over and have things play out where they may. These are your last thoughts as your ship plunges into the center of Quasar Alpha, with the cockpit windows showing an ever-narrowing vision until you can only see a single point ahead of you, a strong white, impossibly bright point of light, and then, suddenly, all black.

Within an instant, it is as if someone has turned the lights back on. All the lights. Images fly by the outside of your ship that are like nothing you have ever seen. You are flying through what looks like an endless array of interconnected tunnels, all lit up in fluorescent blue and green hues -- the ICT -- and you are doing it fast. At first it seems as if your ship is traversing the ICT on its own, according to a pre-set path as it leaves one tube at an intersection point and enters another one heading off in a different direction. But as you watch, and as your brain gets more comfortable taking it what it is seeing, you realize that your first impression was actually not right. You are controlling the ship, through the connections made directly into your brain from the ship's central computer. Even though you have no idea where exactly you are going, it is actually your subconscious that has been determining the ship's seemingly random passage through the tunnels of the ICT, and you find that with a lot of concentration, you can decide which tunnels to turn into and which to pass up for later opportunities at exploration.

As you and your ship's computer are able to analyze more and more of the tunnel map you are in, you begin to notice some general patterns. Most of the intersection points are just between two tunnels, the one you are currently in and one new one branching off. As you fly away, you can see an entire network of smaller tunnels stemming in different directions from each branch you pass up. In some places, however, several tunnels seem to come together in some sort of giant cosmic intersection, where larger tunnels veer off in various directions to carry what you suspect to be higher volumes of ship traffic to the far reaches of the universe. It is almost like neighborhoods on a city map -- the main highways take you quickly from the center towards the outskirts, and then split off to smaller tunnels to service those local areas once you have decided on the general neighborhood you are looking to explore. With a little practice, you find that you can in fact control which type of tunnel to select, and ultimately how far away from the center of this new quadrant of the universe you want to go.

Do you want to stick close to the center, take the next local tunnel, and try to figure out exactly where you are before traveling any further through the ICT?

OR

Do you prefer instead to stay on the main highway tunnel a bit longer, travel further from the center of this new corner of the universe, and branch off later?