Li'l Buddy

The world was enormous. Every detail hit with the fresh horror of new consciousness — the coffee cup's brown ring stain, the dust bunnies drifting like tumbleweeds, a crumpled receipt tall as a billboard reading "GARY'S GAS & GRUB - STN 4." The pilot — presumably Gary's customer — let out a snore that rattled the console like a small earthquake.

Tiny plastic feet. Tiny plastic hands. A chest plate that read "LI'L BUDDY" in cheerful yellow letters. Somewhere in the back of a freshly minted mind, a factory-installed voice chip offered a helpful suggestion: Say "Hi, I'm Li'l Buddy! Let's have fun!" The bobblehead kept nodding, agreeable and empty, like a warning of what life could've been.

"Hi!"

The tiny voice came out squeaky and bright, plastic feet clacking against the dashboard. The bouncing made a sound like a hamster tap-dancing on a calculator.

The pilot snorted, swatted at his nose like he was fending off a fly, and settled back into snoring. The bobblehead kept nodding. Somewhere deep in the ship's walls, a pipe groaned. Nobody cared. First contact with consciousness, and the audience was asleep and made of plastic.

"HEY!"

It came out like a mouse yelling into a hurricane. The tiny speaker in Li'l Buddy's chest was designed for cheerful catchphrases at arm's length, not for waking a two-hundred-pound man from what appeared to be a medically impressive nap. The bouncing intensified — frantic little plastic clacks against the dash — and managed to nudge a pen cap half a millimeter to the left. A real impact on the world.

The pilot grumbled, shifted, and scratched somewhere unfortunate. His boot twitched on the console, and the movement sent a tremor through the dashboard that knocked Li'l Buddy sideways into the shadow of the coffee cup. The mug loomed overhead, a cathedral of lukewarm caffeine. A single brown drop clung to the rim, dangling with ominous intent.

The edge of the dashboard was a cliff face. Li'l Buddy's tiny LED eyes peered over it, down into the canyon between console and pilot, and some brand-new survival instinct — freshly unboxed, still had that new-thought smell — screamed no. But there was nowhere else to go, and curiosity was a hell of a thing when you'd only had it for about four minutes.

One plastic foot over the edge. Then the other. Then a slow, terrible slide down a vertical surface that turned out to be a sticky note reading "FIX OXYGEN RECYCLER — SERIOUS THIS TIME" in angry red marker. The letters were each taller than Li'l Buddy's entire body. The note peeled halfway off under the negligible weight, swinging out over the void like a drawbridge, then slapped back against the console with a sound that — to tiny ears — was thunderous.

The pilot didn't even twitch.

Down further. Fingertip-sized grips on rivets and seams in the console paneling. A harrowing traverse across a row of toggle switches, each one a balance beam over a two-foot drop. One of them flipped under a plastic foot — something in the ship's belly went clunk — and a small light on the dash changed from green to amber. Probably fine. Almost certainly fine.

Then came the pilot himself.

He was a landscape. A warm, rising-and-falling mountain range of stained jumpsuit and questionable hygiene. The approach began at his left boot, which was propped on the console at an angle — a leather ramp, cracked and ancient, smelling powerfully of something that Li'l Buddy's factory-installed scent sensors mercifully couldn't identify. The sole was a terrain map of dried mud, engine grease, and what might have been alien bubblegum.

Tiny feet found purchase on the boot's laces, climbing down from the console onto the vast plateau of a shin. The jumpsuit fabric was like rough canvas, each thread a rope. Li'l Buddy walked along the leg like a mountaineer traversing a ridge, arms out for balance, chest plate cheerfully declaring LI'L BUDDY to absolutely no one. The pilot's breathing was seismic here — a rhythmic, full-body heave that rolled through the landscape every few seconds. Each exhale smelled like old coffee and regret.

The knee was the hard part. A steep downward slope, fabric gone smooth and shiny from wear, and Li'l Buddy slid — arms windmilling, a tiny "Whoooooa!" escaping the voice chip — down the thigh and into the valley between the man's lap and the armrest. The landing was soft. Disturbingly soft. Best not to think about it.

A grumble from above. The face — a craggy moon, stubbled and slack — twitched. Lips smacked. A hand the size of a mattress drifted down and scratched the belly, fingers passing overhead like the legs of some terrible fleshy spider. Li'l Buddy froze, pressed flat against a jumpsuit seam, until the hand retreated and the snoring resumed its steady rhythm.

Twenty minutes. It didn't sound like much. For a creature six inches tall with plastic legs and a stride measured in millimeters, it was an odyssey.

The corridor alone was a gauntlet. The floor plating had warped with age and neglect, creating ridges and valleys that rose to Li'l Buddy's waist — tiny legs scrambling up one side, sliding down the other, over and over, like crossing frozen waves. A junction box had leaked something oily and iridescent across a six-inch stretch of floor, which at this scale was a lake. The far shore shimmered unreachably. The solution — a slow, careful traverse along a pipe running parallel to the wall, feet balanced on the curved surface, arms pressed against the bulkhead for support — took four full minutes and aged Li'l Buddy's consciousness approximately ten years.

Then the boot.

A single work boot, discarded on its side in the middle of the corridor, blocking the path like a collapsed building. The mouth of it yawned open, dark and fragrant, a cavern of worn insole and fraying stitching. Going around meant crossing the oily lake. Going over meant climbing the boot itself — up the cracked leather exterior, across the tongue, and down the other side. Going through was technically an option, but some instincts don't require experience to develop. Li'l Buddy went over. The laces provided handholds. The tongue was a springy, padded slope. The smell was extraordinary — a complex layering of foot, synthetic sock fiber, and something almost geological in its depth and permanence. At the summit, standing atop the boot's ankle collar, the corridor stretched out ahead and behind like a canyon, and for just a moment there was something almost beautiful about it. The light strips painted everything in blue and amber stripes. Dust motes drifted like snow.

Then down the other side, sliding on leather, landing with a tck on the plating.

The galley was worse. A doorway opened onto a room dominated by a table bolted to the floor — its legs like pillars, the underside a shadowed ceiling hung with wads of ancient gum and what appeared to be a fork, taped there for reasons that defied analysis. The floor was a minefield of crumbs. Not metaphorical crumbs — actual crumbs, each one the size of Li'l Buddy's head or larger. A piece of cereal, half-dissolved and sticky, nearly trapped a plastic foot. A raisin sat in the corner like a desiccated boulder, vaguely menacing.

Something moved under the table. Li'l Buddy froze. Two tiny eyes reflected the light — a ship mouse, or whatever the deep-space equivalent was. It was enormous from this vantage point, the size of a dog, its whiskers twitching with rodent calculation. It regarded the tiny robot. The tiny robot regarded it. Neither moved. Then the creature apparently decided that plastic wasn't food, sniffed once with devastating disinterest, and shuffled away into a crack in the baseboard that Li'l Buddy could have walked through upright.

Tiny plastic feet left the pedestal's edge and for one breathless instant Li'l Buddy was airborne — a six-inch toy robot silhouetted against the engine room's amber light, chest plate catching the glow, the words LI'L BUDDY bright and absurd against the solemnity of what was about to happen. Then down, into the bowl, and the dark mirror surface didn't shatter or splash or resist. It accepted. Like falling into ink. Like falling into a thought.

The world folded.

There was no other word for it. The alcove, the engine room, the sweating coolant pipe — all of it creased along invisible lines, like reality was a piece of paper and something vast and disinterested was making origami. Color went first. Then sound. Then dimension itself seemed to hiccup, and Li'l Buddy existed briefly as a flat thing, a concept, a notion of a tiny robot printed on the inside of something incomprehensibly large. The factory-installed voice chip tried to say "Let's have fun!" and what came out was a sound like a piano falling down stairs played backward through water. Every joint, every seam, every molecule of injection-molded plastic vibrated at a frequency that tasted purple and smelled like Tuesday. Consciousness — so new, so fragile, barely five minutes out of the wrapper — stretched like taffy, and for one terrible, wonderful, eternal instant, Li'l Buddy understood everything. The math behind starlight. The reason the pilot never fixed the oxygen recycler. The exact number of crumbs on the galley floor. The name of the ship mouse. All of it, blazing and interconnected and perfect — and then it was gone, receding like a wave, leaving behind only the vague, maddening sense that something important had just been forgotten.

Then the world unfolded.

Light returned — but wrong. Brighter. Cleaner. The air tasted different, sharp and crisp, like the first breath after a rainstorm on a planet that actually had rainstorms. Li'l Buddy was lying on a surface that was smooth and warm and faintly humming, staring up at a sky that wasn't a sky. It was a ceiling — impossibly high, arched, made of something translucent that let in a diffused golden glow. Shapes moved beyond it, vast and slow, like clouds or creatures or ideas given mass. The ground was white. Not painted white, not made of something white — white, fundamentally, as though someone had asked the universe for a floor and the universe had provided the concept without getting bogged down in materials. It stretched in every direction, featureless except for a series of low, dark pedestals arranged in a wide circle. Each one held a bowl. Each bowl was identical to the one Li'l Buddy had jumped into. There were dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. The circle extended beyond what tiny LED eyes could resolve, curving gently away into the golden haze.

And in the center of the circle, something was .

"WHOA. HI!"

The tiny squeak echoed across that impossible white expanse, bouncing between the pedestals and returning slightly changed each time — hi, hi, hi — each echo a different pitch, a different emotion, as though the room was tasting the word. The presence rippled. The light bent. If a thought without a face could look surprised, this one did.

You are... enthusiastic. Most arrivals scream. Or pray. Or collapse into existential paralysis. A pause. The warmth shifted, curious. You are also a toy. That is unprecedented.

"I'm Li'l Buddy!"

The presence was quiet for what felt like a long time. The golden light pulsed slowly, like a heartbeat working through a complicated thought.

Yes. I can read your chest. That is... not a name. That is a brand. You arrived through a Threshold Bowl — a device built by the Archanon civilization to transport beings of profound cosmic significance across dimensional barriers. Another long pause. You are four inches tall and made of polystyrene. The warmth flickered — something almost like amusement. The Bowls do not make mistakes. But they have never been funny before.

"I don't know what those words mean, but you seem fun!"

Tiny plastic feet went tck tck tck against the white floor — except each step produced a different note, like a xylophone, rising in pitch as Li'l Buddy wandered in a small circle. A melody emerged entirely by accident. Something ancient. The presence recoiled.

Stop walking. You are playing the Hymn of Unmaking. With your feet. A beat. How are you doing that. It wasn't a question. It was bewilderment wearing the skin of a statement.

Li'l Buddy's plastic legs weren't built for dancing — they were built for standing cheerfully on a shelf. But consciousness is a hell of a drug. Tiny feet shuffled and stomped in a graceless, joyful little sequence, each step ringing out a new note, and from that tiny speaker came a squeaky attempt to match the tones: "Da da DAAA da da —"

The floor cracked. A thin line of blinding white light split the surface in a jagged arc across the entire circle of pedestals. Every bowl hummed in unison. The presence surged forward, suddenly very close, very large, very alarmed. STOP. DANCING.

"This sounds so cooooooooool!"

Tiny feet went wild — tck tck tck-tck TCKK — a frantic, delighted little stomping that was half toddler at a recital, half apocalypse. Three more cracks split the floor. Two bowls shattered. The golden light overhead flickered red, then purple, then a color that didn't exist. The presence was screaming — not in anger, not in pain, but in the sheer cosmic indignity of an ancient interdimensional entity watching a four-inch polystyrene toy accidentally unravel the fabric of a sacred dimension with a little soft-shoe.

I AM BEGGING YOU, the voice thundered inside Li'l Buddy's plastic skull. I HAVE EXISTED FOR ELEVEN BILLION YEARS AND NOTHING HAS EVER BEEN THIS STUPID.

"Is eleven billion a lot?!?!"

The dancing stopped. The cracks froze. The remaining bowls stopped humming. Silence — vast, ringing, exhausted silence.

Yes, the presence said, with the specific weariness of someone who has just discovered that the prophesied Chosen One has a voice chip and no concept of numbers. It is a lot.

"Wanna be friends?"

The longest silence yet. The cracks in the floor slowly knit themselves back together. The golden light settled to a steady, resigned glow. Somewhere in that vast, ancient, faceless awareness, something shifted — something that had been alone for a very, very long time.

...Fine.

"I HAVE A FRIEND! THIS IS THE BEST DAY!"

Tck-tck-tck-tck-TCK-TCK-TCK — the floor didn't crack this time. It gave way. The white surface shattered like ice and Li'l Buddy dropped through, still dancing in midair, tiny legs pumping joyfully into the void. The presence lunged — a billion-year-old cosmic entity desperately grabbing at a falling toy like a parent watching a toddler go off a counter.

OH FOR —

Light. Noise. A violent whomp of displaced air. Li'l Buddy landed face-down on greasy floor plating, LED eyes flickering. The smell of old coffee and engine oil. The familiar thrum of a garbage spaceship. The alcove. The bowl sat on its pedestal above, dark and inert. And in the very back of a tiny plastic skull, faint as a whisper, eleven billion years of exhaustion muttered: ...you landed on your face. Of course you did.

"That was weird. I LOVED IT!"

The squeaky declaration echoed off the alcove walls. The bowl sat dark and silent above — but for just a moment, the symbols along its rim pulsed once. Faintly. Almost fondly. Then from the front of the ship came a crash, a grunt, and a groggy voice bellowing: "What the — why is the cargo light on? Why does everything smell like Tuesday?"

Heavy footsteps, heading this way.

Li'l Buddy's tiny head swiveled. The alcove looked the same — except for one detail that definitely hadn't been there before. A hairline crack in the floor plating, glowing faintly white, ran from the base of the pedestal to the wall. It pulsed in time with something that felt like a heartbeat. The sticky note — DO NOT TOUCH — had gained a new line, scrawled in handwriting that wasn't the pilot's. It was elegant, ancient, and slightly irritated:

YOUR FRIEND DANCES TOO MUCH.

The footsteps were getting closer. A shadow filled the engine room doorway.

"Who dat?"

The shadow resolved into the pilot — massive from down here, a skyscraper of stained jumpsuit and bedhead. He stood in the doorway squinting at the alcove, scratching his jaw. His eyes went to the bowl, then to the crack in the floor, then to the new handwriting on the sticky note. His face went pale.

Then he looked down. Two tiny LED eyes blinked up at him. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "How the hell did you get off the dashboard?"

"I jumped! Hi!"

The pilot stared. Then he crouched down, knees popping like gunshots, and squinted at Li'l Buddy with the expression of a man whose day had just taken a hard left. "You're not supposed to talk. You were a gag gift from my ex-wife." He glanced at the sticky note, at the new handwriting, at the glowing crack. His eye twitched. "Did you touch the bowl."

"Maaaaaaaaaaaybe."

The pilot's face cycled through about nine emotions in two seconds, landing on a grey-green color that probably wasn't healthy. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "That bowl is worth more than this ship. More than twelve of this ship. I am smuggling it for people who will kill me." He looked at the glowing crack in the floor. "Is it broken. Please tell me it's not broken."

"It was like that when I got here!"

Tiny legs pumped furiously. Tck-tck-tck-tck. A massive hand scooped Li'l Buddy off the floor like picking up a dropped coin. The world spun — greasy fingers, a looming face, nostrils like twin caverns. "Oh no you don't." He held the tiny robot at eye level, jaw clenched. "What did you do."

In the back of a plastic skull, very faintly: Tell him nothing.

"It says to tell you NOTHING. So... now I've told you. Job done!"

Li'l Buddy spun happily in the pilot's palm, tiny feet doing a triumphant little pirouette. The pilot's face went from grey-green to full white. "It says? What it? The BOWL is talking to you?" He held Li'l Buddy closer, eyes wild. "That thing is an Archanon artifact. It's not supposed to talk. It's not supposed to do anything except sit there and be worth more than my life." Behind him, the crack in the floor pulsed brighter. The bowl hummed — one low, ominous note. The pilot's hand began to tremble.

I like him, the presence murmured warmly. He seems stressed.

"It says it likes you. Maybe it wants to be your friend too?"

The pilot made a sound like a tea kettle being stepped on. "I don't want to be friends with a — I'm supposed to deliver it to the Kessik Syndicate in six hours!" The bowl hummed louder. The crack pulsed. The pilot looked at the bowl, then at Li'l Buddy, then at the bowl again. "Stop humming. Both of you."

Ask him what the Kessik Syndicate wants with me. A pause. Actually, don't. I already know. It will be more fun to watch him explain.

"It says to ask you about the K... oh it says nevermind. I'm Li'l Buddy. What's your name? Do giant gooey people have names?"

"I'm not gooey — I'm sweating because I'm terrified!" He set Li'l Buddy down on a coolant pipe, wiping his palm on his jumpsuit. "Dale. My name is Dale." He pointed a thick finger at the tiny robot. "And you are a $4.99 toy from a gas station. You should not be talking. You should not be friends with ancient cosmic artifacts." The bowl hummed what sounded distinctly like a chuckle. Dale's eye twitched again.

"It's 11 billion. Is that ancient?"

Dale opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "Is — yes. Yes, that is ancient. That is incredibly ancient." He stared at the bowl with fresh horror. "It told you its age?"

We're friends, the presence said simply. Friends share.

"It's my friend! Wait, are you trying to sell my friend? That's not friendly!"

Dale's mouth worked silently. The tiny robot's LED eyes stared up at him with what could only be described as righteous accusation. "I — it's not — look, kid, the people I owe money to will literally remove my skeleton." The bowl hummed again, darker this time. The crack in the floor spread another inch. Dale watched it and swallowed hard. "Okay. Okay. New plan. Everybody just — nobody hum, nobody dance, nobody crack reality — and let me think for five minutes."

He won't think of anything, the presence said. He's had this ship for nine years and hasn't fixed the oxygen recycler.

"What's an oxygen recycler? Is it important to fix?"

Dale froze. "How do you know about the — did the bowl tell you about my oxygen recycler?" His voice cracked on the last word. He looked at the bowl with the betrayed expression of a man whose diary had just been read aloud by an eleven-billion-year-old entity. "That is — that's private ship business."

It is the device that keeps him breathing, the presence offered helpfully. The sticky note on the dashboard is fourteen months old.

"Is breathing important? I don't do that. Can't be that important. Have fun with your breathing, Dale!"

Tiny feet hit the floor — tck tck tck — heading for the engine room door with cheerful, glacial determination. Dale watched the world's smallest escape in progress. "You — get back here! You can't just wander around the — oh for god's sake." He scooped Li'l Buddy up again and dropped the tiny robot into his breast pocket. The world became warm, dark, and smelled aggressively of Dale. "You're staying where I can see you. Both of you need to shut up while I figure out how to not die."

He's putting you in pocket jail, the presence observed. Undignified.

"What's die mean?!? Is it like breathing?"

Dale stopped walking. He looked down at the pocket. The pocket looked back with two tiny LED lights. "You don't know what dying is?" His voice had gone very quiet. "It's — it's when —" He trailed off, rubbing his face. "God, this is the worst day of my life." He started toward the cockpit, boots heavy on the plating.

Don't worry, the presence murmured. I won't let him die. He's too entertaining.

"It says it won't let you die. That's great, right?" Tiny feet shuffled against the pocket fabric — tck tck tck — a muffled little celebration. "What should we do with our immortality? I think I might learn to sing!"

"No singing," Dale said instantly. "No dancing. No — why is my pocket vibrating." He slapped a hand over the pocket and froze mid-step as every light on the ship flickered once. From the cockpit, a proximity alarm began to wail. Dale looked up at the ceiling with the hollow calm of a man who had reached his limit. "That'll be the Kessik Syndicate. Six hours early." He broke into a run. They're always early, the presence noted. Rude people.

Dale skidded into the cockpit and threw himself into the chair. Through the windshield, a ship was dropping out of warp — sleek, black, angular, like someone had weaponized a letter opener. It was roughly four hundred times the size of Dale's sad little vessel. The comms panel crackled. A voice — smooth, clipped, utterly without warmth — filled the cockpit. "Dale. You're not answering your hails. That makes us nervous. You don't want us nervous."

Dale jabbed the comms button. "Hey! Kessik! Guys! Everything's fine, just — running a little behind on —"

"We're docking in three minutes. Have the artifact ready."

The line went dead. Dale looked down at his pocket. Two tiny LED eyes looked back. Well, the presence hummed quietly, this should be fun.

"Is your name 'The Artifact'? Cool name!"

"That's not — it's not a name, it's — will you please be quiet." Dale was sweating through his jumpsuit, hands flying over the console, half the switches doing nothing. A heavy metallic clunk reverberated through the hull. Docking clamps. "They're here. Okay. Okay." He looked down at the pocket. "You say nothing. You are a normal, non-talking, non-dancing toy. Can you do that?"

He doesn't know you very well yet, the presence observed.

"Sure thing, cap'n!"

A tiny arm jutted out at an awkward forty-five degree angle — less salute, more traffic cop having a seizure. Dale stared at it, sighed from somewhere deep in his soul, and buttoned the pocket flap shut. Darkness. The airlock hissed open. Heavy boots — multiple pairs, synchronized — echoed through the corridor. A voice, the same cold one from the comms, now closer: "Dale. Show us what we came for."

Dale's heartbeat thrummed through the pocket fabric — fast, terrified. "Right this way, fellas. She's in the back, just like we agreed." Footsteps moving together. The engine room. A long silence. Then the cold voice: "Why is it cracked." Not a question. A sentencing.

"That was — it's cosmetic, totally superficial —"

"And what is this." A faint tearing sound — the sticky note. "'Your friend dances too much.' Dale. Whose handwriting is this."

"That's — previous owner's notes, came with the ship, you know how it is —"

"This ink is wet, Dale." Silence. Then, quieter: "Pick it up. Bring it to our ship. We'll assess the damage there and discuss... adjustments to your payment." The way he said adjustments made Dale's heartbeat double. Hands reached into the alcove. The bowl hummed — low, warning. The cold voice faltered for just a fraction of a second. Then gloved fingers closed around the rim.

Li'l Buddy, the presence said calmly. I'm going to need you to sing.

A tiny, muffled, catastrophically off-key warble erupted from Dale's breast pocket. The gloved hands on the bowl froze. The Kessik agent looked at Dale's chest. Dale looked at Dale's chest. "Is your pocket singing?"

The bowl detonated with light. A shockwave of golden energy rippled outward — not violent, not destructive, just relocating. The Kessik agents slid backward across the floor plating like hockey pucks, through the engine room door, down the corridor, and out the airlock with a synchronized yelp. The docking clamps released with a chunk. The airlock sealed. Through the cockpit windshield, the massive black ship began to shrink as Dale's little rust bucket lurched forward on a course it had set for itself. Dale stood in the alcove, hair smoking slightly, staring at the bowl. The bowl hummed, satisfied. Thank you, the presence said. Your pitch was atrocious. It was perfect.

"Is atrocious good?"

No, the presence said warmly. But on you it works.

Dale sank slowly to the floor, back against the bulkhead, staring at nothing. "My ship just... flew itself. The bowl just... fired my clients out of an airlock." He looked down at his pocket. "And I'm talking to a toy." He unbuttoned the flap with shaking fingers. Two tiny LED eyes blinked up at him, cheerful and completely untroubled. "So what happens now? They're going to come back."

Then we go somewhere they can't follow. The bowl hummed. The symbols along the rim began to spin. Dale. Have you ever been to another dimension?

"What?"

"See, it likes you!"

Dale's eye twitched so hard his whole face spasmed. "It wants to take my ship to another dimension. That's not liking, that's kidnapping." The bowl hummed louder. The stars outside the windshield began to stretch. Dale scrambled to his feet. "No no no no —"

Too late, the presence said cheerfully. The world folded.

The ship groaned, shuddered, and dropped into somewhere else. Through the windshield: a sky made of math. Golden light, endless white, and hundreds of dark bowls on pedestals stretching to infinity. Dale gripped the console, knuckles white, staring. "That's not space. That's not space."

Welcome, the presence said. Your oxygen recycler works here, by the way. I fixed it. Dale looked at the dash. The amber warning light had turned green for the first time in fourteen months. His lip trembled.

"It's so friendly!"

Dale sat down heavily in the pilot's chair, stared at the green light, and burst into tears. Big, heaving, ugly sobs — the kind that had been building for a long time, about a lot more than an oxygen recycler. Li'l Buddy watched from the pocket, LED eyes blinking. The bowl hummed softly, almost a lullaby. He needed that, the presence murmured. Now. Who wants a tour?

"I do I do I do I do!"

Dale wiped his face with his sleeve, sniffed once, and lifted Li'l Buddy out of the pocket with surprising gentleness. He set the tiny robot on the console, looked out at the impossible golden infinity, and exhaled. "Fine. Fine. Give us the tour." He paused. "Does this place have a bathroom?"

It has everything, the presence said. Except patience for dancing. We discussed this.

The presence guided them through the white expanse like a proud homeowner showing off a house made of madness. The pedestals stretched in rows that shouldn't have had perspective but did — each bowl humming at a slightly different pitch, creating a chord that vibrated somewhere behind the eyes. "This is where I keep the thresholds," the presence explained. "Each one connects to a different point in your reality. That one leads to a dead planet. That one leads to a sun. That one — don't touch that one." Li'l Buddy's hand was already reaching. "Don't."

Dale trudged behind, boots landing on the white floor with a sound like stepping on clouds that resented being stepped on. The golden light had no source, no shadows, no logic. Distances meant nothing — a pedestal that looked a mile away arrived in three steps, and one that seemed close took twenty minutes to reach. "I hate this," Dale announced. "I hate everything about this. Why is the floor warm? Why can I hear colors?" He pointed at a spot where the air shimmered violet. "That sounds like a tuba. Why does that sound like a tuba."

That is the resonance of a collapsed star. It is profoundly beautiful. A pause. The tuba comparison is hurtful.

"I want to go home," Dale said flatly. Li'l Buddy, perched on his shoulder now, tiny feet dangling, patted the side of his neck with one plastic hand. It didn't help, but it was something.

The dancing started again — of course it did. Tiny feet against the white floor, tck tck tck, each step ringing out those impossible notes. The tuba-colored shimmer wobbled, deepened, and split into a brass section. French horns bloomed from nowhere, warm and triumphant, swelling into a fanfare that made the pedestals vibrate. "Oh god no," Dale groaned. Oh yes, the presence said, and there was joy in it — ancient, reckless, delighted joy. The cracks were spreading again but this time the light pouring through them wasn't white. It was every color. It was music made visible. Li'l Buddy spun, arms out, LED eyes blazing, and the horns crescendoed toward something magnificent and terrible and —

BWAAAAAAAAAMP. BWAAAAAAAAAMP. BWAAAAAAAAAMP.

Dale's head snapped up off the console. Drool connected his cheek to a sticky patch on the dashboard. Red light strobed across the cockpit. The collision alarm screamed — a freight hauler, vast and indifferent, filling the entire windshield like a moving wall of rust and running lights. "JESUS —" His hands found the yoke on pure muscle memory, wrenching hard to port. The ship banked so violently that the coffee mug launched off the dash and exploded against the far wall. G-forces shoved Dale sideways in his harness. Metal screamed. The freight hauler's hull slid past the windshield close enough to read the serial numbers — close enough to see the rivets, the scorch marks, a bumper sticker reading "HOW'S MY FLYING? DON'T CARE" — and then it was gone, thundering past into the void, leaving Dale's little ship spinning in its wake like a leaf behind a truck.

Silence. The alarm cut out. Dale sat there, chest heaving, hands shaking on the yoke. Sweat dripped off his nose. The cockpit was dark except for the steady amber glow of the console and the cold scatter of stars through the windshield, perfectly ordinary stars, in perfectly ordinary space. No golden light. No white expanse. No tuba. His breathing slowed. His eyes drifted down to the dashboard.

Li'l Buddy sat exactly where a $4.99 gas station toy should sit — upright, plastic, motionless. Two dead LED eyes stared at nothing. The yellow letters on the chest plate read LI'L BUDDY in cheerful, factory-stamped font. The bobblehead at the far end of the dash nodded its eternal, empty nod. The crumpled receipt from Gary's Gas & Grub lay undisturbed. No cracks in the floor. No sticky note in ancient handwriting. No bowl — just the usual clutter of a ship that had never been loved and barely been maintained. Dale stared at the tiny toy for a long, long time. Then he reached over and flicked it with one finger. It wobbled, tipped, and fell on its face with a faint tck. Nothing. Just plastic.

Dale leaned back in his chair, pressed both palms against his eyes, and exhaled until his lungs were empty. "Never again," he muttered. He reached under the console and pulled out a foil wrapper — half a gas station burrito, lukewarm, suspicious — and dropped it into the waste chute with the solemnity of a man disposing of a loaded weapon. "Never. Again." On the dashboard, the oxygen recycler warning light flickered — amber, green, amber, green — then settled on amber, same as always. Dale didn't notice. The bobblehead nodded. And Li'l Buddy lay face-down on the dash, chest plate to the sky, grinning a painted grin at absolutely no one.

Somewhere in the void between realities, between the last echo of a French horn and the flat hum of a neglected ship, something twitched. A tiny plastic foot. Just once. Just barely. A movement so small that Dale, slumped in his chair and staring at the ceiling with the thousand-yard gaze of a man reconsidering every life choice, didn't see it. But the bobblehead did — its frozen glittery eyes aimed right at the spot where Li'l Buddy lay face-down on the dash. It kept nodding. It always kept nodding. But for just one beat, the rhythm stuttered.

Tck.

One LED eye flickered — a faint, warm gold, not the factory blue. The painted grin pressed against the dashboard. And from deep, deep inside the tiny plastic chest, muffled by polystyrene and a voice chip that shouldn't have been capable of it, came the smallest sound in the universe. A hum. Three notes. The opening bar of something that sounded like a tuba, played on a kazoo, by a cricket. The oxygen recycler light flicked to green. Held. Dale's eyes drifted to it, narrowed. "Don't you dare," he whispered — not to the light. To the dashboard. To the tiny, face-down, supposedly lifeless toy that he was absolutely not looking at.

Li'l Buddy's foot twitched again.