You are an astronaut, strapping in for your first transport between galaxies. The black holes sitting at the center of most galaxies have been used for travel from one quadrant of the universe to the other for centuries now, but in minutes you will become the first human ever to enter the tunnel system at the entrance in the middle of the Milky Way and emerge on the other side.

Since no earthling has ever done this before, no one is really totally sure where exactly your ship will arrive when it exits the intergalactic transport system (ITS, as it has become known on Earth), but scientists on Earth assure you that you will in fact emerge safely out of one of the tubes connecting our galaxy to the others that are part of the system. You have been travelling through space for more than three years, dodging stars and space rocks in your tiny ship at several times the speed of light toward the center of the Milky Way, and have finally stationed on Koveno, a tiny, dry planet base just outside the gravitational pull of Quasar Alpha, the black hole right at the galactic center which marks the local entrance into the ITS. Just a couple of seconds from now, you will push off from Koveno and soon be locked into the pull of Quasar Alpha, leaving your home galaxy and this entire quadrant of the universe, maybe forever. Although in theory you should be able to return to the Milky Way via the ITS, there is no telling if or when that would ever happen. You have prepared for this for most of your adult life, trained for it, and at this point, you are eager to get out and explore the unknown on behalf of all humankind.

This is it! 10-9-8 counts down the automatic launch timer, and in moments you are off. Although the crush of liftoff on your body is expected and something you are quite used to after hundreds of launches in your time as an astronaut, you are not prepared for the immediacy or the strength with which Quasar Alpha locks onto your ship and drags you in her at increasing speeds. Before you know it, all you can see is a rainbow of colors out the cockpit of your ship as you plunge into the depths of the black hole, spinning ever faster and faster until everything is a whirlwind of color and no colors, black and white, nothing and everything.

Nothing you do, no buttons you push on the bridge control panel, are of any effect, and your sensors quickly indicate that your ship is in danger of overheating and breaking apart from the intense gravitational pull. The main alarm sounds shrilly, and you can see sparks dancing outside the cockpit as the ship's hull begins to give way. You might be able to abort the mission and turn around now by activating the emergency retro thrusters, but in truth you may very well be too far into the Quasar Alpha's grasp that there is no escape at this point. Either way, you need to make a decision fast, as your ship appears very close to complete disintegration.

Do you activate the retro thrusters and see if you can save the ship?

OR

Do you sit tight and full speed ahead into Quasar Alpha?

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?

You immediately activate the retro thrusters, diverting all power to your ship's emergency engines to give maximum chance to escape the incredible pull of Quasar Alpha before it is too late. At first the ship begins to turn around, giving you some hope to break out of the lock into the singularity of the black hole. But then suddenly the entire cabin lurches forward, yanking you up from your seat against the belts hholding you tight over your shoulders, and a sickening scraping sound can be felt, emanating from what seems like every metal surface of the ship. It sounds like the ship is grinding itself apart as the force from the powerful super giant black hole competes with the emergency thrusters. Unfortunately, this is a fight that your thrusters cannot win, and your ship completes its spin forwards and begins to tumble, over and over again in the air as it hurtles towards the center of the black hole. You quickly realize that there is no way to avoid the pull of Quasar Alpha, but your ship bounces violently around at what seems like hundrds of revolutions per minute, and before long all the jostling and extreme pressure on the ship cause you to black out. You drift into unconsciousness with only the desperate hope in your mind that you might survive the trip through the ICT, even with your ship this unstable and unsteady heading into the tunnels, and that someone on the other side might be able to help you to repair your ship.


When you awake some time later, your head hurts badly, and it takes a few moments to remember where you are, and what happened to your ship. Your ship! As far as you can tell, you are not in it. What happened to your ship? And where are you?
You look down and realize you are hovering over a table that looks like glass, but which has countless dials and measurements on it, some of which you recognize and many you do not, and from the looks of some of the connections between the table and various parts of your body, you assume that you are in some sort of medical chamber. Could someone have found your ship after entry into the ICT and tried to nurse you back to health? And again, where is your ship?

Do you want to call out, to try to find who has put you here?

OR

Do you try to get up and explore your surroundings on your own without alerting anyone?

You slowly start to disconnect the various wires and interfaces connecting you to the glass table beneath you, and as you pull out some of the plugs, portions of the glass screen change color, and some go dark entirely as the readings of your various vital statistics stop being fed into the system. You find that with a little effort, you are able to get used to the lack of gravity in this room, and you are able to use your table, and then eventually various other pieces of machinery nearby, to hoist yourself down and then propel yourself over to the entryway nearest your medical bay.

As you enter the next room, you recognize many of the same sorts of monitors as had been attached to you previously, and then over at the last table in the corner you see one of the strangest looking life forms you could ever conceive of. The being working by that table most closely resembles a slug among all the animals you are used to seeing on Earth, although this one is far larger, probably the size of two of you. Perhaps the most offsetting thing about this lifeform, though, is the lack of any eyes, or any sensory organs at all to speak of. Where you would have expected the head to be, in its place is simply a greenish blob, setting off an eerie glow against the black backdrop of the room.

As you ponder your next move, the being flinches, and suddenly in your head you experience the phrase Welcome, earthling. This is not something that you hear, like with your ears, but rather you simply experience it, directly into the center of your brain. Before you can react, the "talking" inside your head continues.

I am Thaun-of-Marichol. I have called you here because I need you. We need you -- all of life needs you. We need you to save the universe.

"Who, me?" you ask, more than a little taken aback. You volunteered for an exploration mission, not any kind of hero's work. "And what do you mean you called me here? I volunteered for this mission, as brought forth by my system's representative to the Milky Way Federation."

Thaun's voice in your head continues. The planetary system where I come from is far more technologically advanced than Earth, and our scientists have recently discovered that the universe, which has been expanding nonstop ever since what you earthlings call The Big Bang, as finally reached the end of its blowout phase. The universe as we all know it is on the cusp of major change, and our scientists predict that within just weeks, the expansion of the universe will have reached its maximum, and like the pulling of a rubber band, once the expansion ends, the necessary consequence in the universe will be a strong attraction back towards the center. After 15 billion years of unrelented growth, the universe will begin to fall back within itself, and the space between everything will begin to shrink. In a cosmic sense, the switch will happen slowly, but the effects of the change from universal expansion to contraction will be swift and disastrous, in a cosmic sense. My planet's life forms took it upon ourselves to notify all known galactic federations and to ask them to provide volunteers to help fight the inevitable.

You are stunned that you could have been played in this way, that you could have been used so thoroughly. "How would this be Disastrous?" is all you can manage to ask.

In an innumerable number of ways, many of which will mean the end of life as we know it in many corners of the known universe. When the universe begins to contract, the first signs may be little things, temporary effects on gravitational strength in many planets, an occasional irregular planetary or galactic orbit, etc. But once the snapback is complete and the universe is in full-on contraction mode, most everyday facts of science, history and other common knowledge will likely cease to exist. Our science shows that once contraction starts, all galaxies, all stars, and all planets orbiting those stars, will reverse their patterns of both revolution and rotation. Planets like your Earth will begin to spin in the opposite direction, as will your Sun, and the entire Milky Way galaxy. And the effects of this mass switchover throughout the universe will be swift and forceful. A planet like Earth, so delicately held in balance between the heat of your Sun and its distance away, will be thrown off. Earth, with its atmosphere suddenly shifted from East to West instead of West to East, will see almost immediate climate change throughout the planet, most of which is likely to become unusable desert as the heat of the Sun will be directly concentrated on much more of the planet than has ever been seen before. Moreover, the sun's switch in polarity will cause solar flares to shoot out, many overtaking Earth completely, and within days of the switchover, all life on Earth will cease as you know it. Given your proximity to the center of the known universe, the entire quadrant in which Earth's system resides today is expected to completely break down within a matter of weeks, with the millions of suns in the Milky Way either quickly burning themselves up or spinning violently into new orbital patterns, their planets each spinning out into their own random paths towards new systems, and new stars. Although no one will be alive on Earth to experience it, the planet will spend its last billions of years in a frozen state, drifitng between stars until it either collides with another planet or star in a colossal space collision, or worse yet, simply spinning out, dead and alone, until the universe's collapse back to a single point in space is complete. Either way, your world and those of many others just like it will be gone, and any chance of the delicate balance that is required for life to exist as we know it will be eradicated.

This is all too much for you to take. You did not sign up for this. "How much time?" you ask. "And what can be done?"

Although this has not happened for some 15 billion years, my species is one of the oldest forms of life in the known universe, which is why we have stationed ourselves here, within the ICT, to govern the travels of those other species who come to know of the existence of this method of inter-galactic transportation. Our scientists have compiled a trove of research and data, dating back almost to the Big Bang itself, and unfortunately the forces at work are so large, far too large for anyone to be able to do even the slightest thing to stop them. The expansion of the universe will be completed within a matter of days, and within a couple of weeks of Earth time, the ill effects of universal contraction will already be being felt on your and many other planets among the universe. However, there is one area, out on the fringes of the known universe, known as the Free Zone, that our science indicates is likely exempt from most effects of universal expansion and contraction. Due to the presence of excessive dark matter and negative energy in the Free Zone, the universe seems to expand and contract right around this area, leaving the Free Zone basically untouched and unaffected as the rest of the universe swells and shrinks around it. Historical evidence we have been able to obtain in our millenia of study show that most of the Free Zone has been intact for nearly 100 billion years, far longer than the current cycle of universal expansion, and far pre-dating the Big Bang. The Free Zone, it seems, has been existence literally forever, since the very first Big Bang that started it all.

It is to the Free Zone that you must go, and you must do so immediately. Find out the Free Zone's secrets, and perhaps you can share them with the universe in enough time to salvage some of the miraculous life that has blossomed throughout over the ages. Maybe there is a way to move some of the civilizations that have sprung up across the depths of space to the Free Zone to survive the switchover from universal expansion to universal contraction. Or perhaps we can mimic the qualities of the Free Zone that make it impervious to universal contraction, and save some of the universe's life in that way. But if you do not act now, mostly all life in the universe will almost surely be destroyed.

You are shocked. Amazed. Appalled. And most of all, scared. Scared of not knowing where you are, scared of being stranded a trillion light years from any place you have ever called home. Scared of jetting off to some unknown area of the universe, where so little is known about who (or what) may reside there. But most all, scared for Life. For human, sure, but from what this sounds like, this is about so much more than just the human race. This is about the end of all races of life as we know it. But you do not know anything about the Free Zone. Wouldn't it make more sense for you to take some time to study Thaun's research and the research of his species about the Free Zone? Pore through his species's data, review everything there is to know about the Free Zone and the systems contained within it? You know that Thaun has made things sound quite dire, but it is hard to imagine how a few extra days now could jeopardize the entire mission to save life from universal extinction.

Should you get moving to the Free Zone right away? Take what information and assistance Thaun can give you now, strap yourself in for another trip through the ICT, and get jetting?

OR

Do you stay within the ICT and study the Free Zone, looking for any and every clue you might find to help you come up with a solution to give Life a path to survival?

You call out, "Hello? Is anybody here? I need help!"

No answer. You think you hear a clanging sort of sound in the distance, but the noise disappears as quickly as it appears, and you are left to ponder what to do, not having a clue about where you are, or even what universe you are currently in.  Did your ship manage to pass through the center of Quasar Alpha before it was ripped apart?  Which side of the supermassive black hole are you on right now?  And who found you and put you here?  And what have they done with your ship?

Your ship is gone.  You did not say this, and no one said it to you, but you hear it just the same, loud and clear, smack in the middle of your head.  Again, you hear the faint clanging sounds, like the creaking of some old piece of heavy machinery, long in use.  What is going on here?

The graivtational pull of the ICT system ripped your ship apart molecule-by-molecule.  There it is again -- a thought emanating directly into your own head, although you certainly did not willingly put that thought there.  You suspect that the being that must have saved your life after your ship disintegrated is speaking directly into your brain.  Earth is full of stories of other life forms capable of amazing feats of technology, physical prowess or mental thought, and telepathy has long been suspected of being possible for higher developed life forms, although precious few on earth seem able to tap into the rarely-used portions of their brains to access such abilities.  It seems you are now able to comfirm what Earth-bound scientists have long suspected about the existence of such extra sensory perceptions.

You crane your head around to see if you might be able to see who is speaking with you, but all you see is the room you are currently in, and fuzzy blackness through the entryways on either side.  "Who are you?" you ask out loud, to no one in particular.  The voice responds, directly inside your head again -- My specific identity is not important.  For your purposes, all you need to know is that I am one of the Caretakers.

"The Caretakers"? you ask, again aloud, "What does that mean?  Caretakers of what?"

Of the ICT.  We spend our days within the vast tunnel network connecting various planes of the universe to one another through wormholes, like the one you tried to travel through to get here.  Observing, learning, and of coruse maintaining the tunnels to the extent needed to keep the lines of transport open.  Your ship broke apart while passing through the wormhole from your world, and right now you lie in the middle of two planes of the universe, not fully remaining in your world anymore, but not yet fully a part of the new, either.

You are suddenly very curious.  "Who else uses these tunnels so much that they require full-time on-site maintenance?"

Oh, many different lifeforms, comes the response directly into the middle of your brain.  You realize you are starting to develop a serious headache from all of this direct thought-contact.

Your brain is not ready for this degree of direct communication just now.  Sleep for a bit, and when you awake, we can drop you via a maintenance shuttle either at Maxoni, a nearby system where you should be able to find another starship that can return you to your galaxy, or to Omega-Emlot, considered by most to be the leading world in this galaxy, where you can expect to see and learn things you never would have dreamed of where you come from.

As the thudding pain in your head increases, you feel yourself drawn closer and closer to sleep, until you cannot possibly fight it off any longer.  You drift, dreaming of your two choices as far as what to do next.



Shall you choose Maxoni, aiming to get a new ship so that you will not be stranded here forever, trillions of light years away from home?

OR


Or do you prefer Omega-Emlot, to try to find out as much as you can about this new quadrant of the universe?

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

Garden State Parkway -- Best Gas Prices as of June 17, 2011

If you're driving down to the Jersey shore this weekend along the Garden State Parkway along with 100,000 of your closest friends, you're not likely to see many relatively cheap gas prices along the way as places jack up the prices near the highway in anticipation of the weekend rush.

But, if you read NJGas, you will know those few gems right off the highway where you can still be treated like a valued customer who has other options. You're not going to find cheap gas anywhere along the GSP until you hit South Jersey, but if you're on your way to the beach, why not stop of at Singin, at 1215 Lakewood Road in Toms River. $3.55 for regular, and $3.79 for premium. This is just north of Exit 82A on the GSP, and it will save you a good 5-10 cents over most other comparable stations in the area.

If you don't make the stop up in Tom's River but are heading your way down to the lower parts of the Jersey Shore, your next and last best bet for good gas prices will be in New Gretna, at Sunoco at 5695 US-9. Again, $3.55 for regular as of the time of this post. This station is just north of Exit 50 on the GSP.