In the past, Poole joins Berg on the Friend vessel shortly before the Qax emerges, having travelled aboard his ship, "Hermit Crab", from the Oort Cloud. He is accompanied by a Virtual of his father, Harry. Together they elude the control of the Friends, whose project fails under the bombardment of the Spline's starbreaker beam. Miriam Berg commandeers the singularity cannon used to sculpt Jupiter and fires a pair of black holes into the Spline, which merge and disable it. Meanwhile, aided by Jasoft Parz's internal sabotage, Poole succeeds in ramming the "Hermit Crab" into the second Spline, killing the sapience of the vessel and the entangled Qax, second Governor of Earth, with it. Harry takes over in lieu of the higher intelligence and, at the direction of Poole, steers it back into the wormhole: when inside, Poole intends to activate the hyperdrive, shattering the fragile dimensional warping of the wormhole, and of all wormholes connecting to it, thus saving humanity from further interference by the future.