[ WP ] After several successful manned trials of the prototypical FTL jump-drive , the ship 's science officer makes a startling discovery . Each jump is actually carrying them into an almost identical parallel universe , and the differences are becoming frightening ...

Spiders have eight legs. 
 
 I know they used to have ten. No one agrees with me. Wikipedia says eight, National Geographic says eight. 
 
 But I know they had ten. 
 
 Two months ago we ran the first test of Kolsky's engine, the first ever working Alcubierre drive. 
 
 We strapped the ungainly hunk of rare earth metals and glowing fiber on to the military surplus patrol rocket, and connected the leads. Then we carefully wedged ourselves into the tiny, cramped cockpit: Taaka, Kolsky, Webber. The dedicated team who had brought Alcubierre's dream to reality. And me, the VR driver, fastest neural linkage in the country. The bay robot swung the cradle over to the launching gantry, and with the slightest of taps we were out of the airlock. 
 
 I plugged in to the VR drive interface and brought up the navigation systems, gesturing and flicking in that overexaggerated style you see everywhere now. 
 
 The drive came to life, the gravity shielding unfolding, the singularity whispering and now roaring in my earbuds. I could feel the drive latch on to the fabric of the space-time continuum: I felt the tugging, clenching, pricking, undulating waves of gravimetric interference build up around me -- around the shuttle -- around our linked minds, one of sentient carbon neurons, one of unconscious silicon qubits. 
 
 I concentrated on the drive, gloved hands bringing up power in a practiced maestro's upbeat. I paused -- the boards were all green, the drive had been modeled as extensively as modern computing allowed, but there's always that hidden moment before the action when it seems as though the universe holds its breath -- and then, with a decisive downstroke, released the singularity and activated the engine. 
 
 I blacked out, almost instantaneously. 
 
 There was a roaring in my ears, a whipping, rushing sensation, like I was riding a roller coaster through the upper levels of a city of skyscrapers. As sight and color and comprehension slowly ebbed in, I blinked and looked around. Everyone was staring at their readouts tensely. Every readout was blank. The one window was blanked out as well, meaning whatever was outside was far too bright to view with the unaided eye. 
 
 Breathless, tense minutes crept by. My job was done, at least until the automated sequence finished and the drive sealed itself. Far too dangerous to leave my mind linked to the machine while traveling faster than light. 
 
 With a click, then a barely perceptible thunk, the cabin was awash in a glow of green light as all our readouts and instruments sprang to life. The window flickered, then cleared -- 
 
 The cabin erupted in cheers. We were staring at the cold, merciless beauty of Neptune, perched a hundred thousand miles from its upper atmosphere. A 10 year voyage from Earth's moon, shortened to 10 incredible minutes. 
 
 We took our readings, snapped some selfies, and checked the drive over meticulously. Then we re-entered our course in reverse, and took off home. 
 
 We were heroes, of course. The selfie we took in front of Neptune, with Taaka's bright green eyes filled with tears of joy, was on the cover every magazine, every newspaper, every blog. 
 
 I finally made it home, and my parents were waiting to congratulate me. The neighbors were all there, my sister and her wife, even my college professors had come out of the woodwork. I drank, I'll admit, quite a lot. 
 
 When I stumbled downstairs the next morning my mother was already up, coffee and pancakes in the warmer. I had noticed her new haircut the night before: an uncharacteristically short pixie cut, but I had n't said anything at the time, being then engrossed in describing Neptune's otherworldly beauty yet again to a crowd of admirers. 
 
 I mumbled `` breakfast,'' or something similar. Poured a cup of coffee. Grabbed a stack of pancakes, doused them with syrup, and set to. 
 
 `` Nice haircut, mom,'' I said around a mouthful. 
 
 She looked at me strangely, cocked her head, and replied, `` Hon, I've worn this for a couple of months now... Do n't you remember commenting when I visited you at your lab back in March?'' 
 
 I rocked my chair back. Had I missed it? A relatively inconsequential change but still, pretty big in my mom's universe. But the past six months were a blur, as we had scrambled to finish the drive before our mercurial patron wandered elsewhere financially. I chalked it up to inattention and went on with breakfast. 
 
 A week later the team was reassembled in the lunar lab. We'd analyzed the data, the techs had deconstructed and reconstructed the engine, and we were ready to plan the next flight. 
 
 One year later, we had taken selfies with Pluto, Jupiter, Saturn, and had gathered samples of rock from the asteroid belt. We had been out to the Oort cloud, we had seen the heliosheath first hand. 
 
 We were all spending too much time at work. Lovers, families drifted away. We were all having a hard time relating to the outside world, even our own lab techs. I'd noticed that my parents seemed more and more distant, as though we had less and less in common. None of us followed politics, or sports, or fashion, so the outside world was just an incomprehensible roar. 
 
 Everything seemed right and normal in our little bubble as we ran test after test, exploring the solar system. The goal, as always, was to make it to Alpha Centauri, to explore the origin of the distorted but clearly extraterrestrial radio signals. 
 
 I had a bizarre encounter with one of my colleagues from JPL, when he answered a call and refused to transmit their lab's weekly report, saying we did n't have clearance. I stared at him for a long moment before breaking the connection. I dashed off an email to the project head -- who had also been oddly distant and incommunicative lately, and headed in to the launch bay. 
 
 Our tenth jump: we were finally to go extraterrestrial. Alpha Centauri. We loaded up the shuttle, swung out in to free space, and warped out of existence. 
 
 When the viewport cleared we saw the insane image of two stars, one as bright as the Sun seen from Earth, the other an attenuated disk, as the Sun looks from Mars orbit. A planet hove in to view -- the right size, the right distance -- this must be it -- and -- 
 
 The dark side of the planet was covered with twinkling, reddish, clearly artificial light sources. Radio clicked and chattered incomprehensibly around us. Kolsky stared, shook himself, and initiated the launch sequence for the greetings pod. The plan was to drop a pod, then warp back home as quickly as possible before the singularity collapsed, and then revisit in six months, after they had had time to review and analyze the pod. 
 
 We snapped one impossible picture -- and jumped home. 
 
 We were heroes again. This time the world tour was strange -- we had been spending a lot of time in space, and on the moon, but I figured we would have heard about South America unifying. 
 
 Our last jump -- that's where we ran in to trouble. We popped out of our spacetime bubble and we sat in stunned silence. 
 
 ( Continued in Comments )
