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interstellar medium was hard vacuum, compared to Earth’s atmosphere — but they seemed to vibrate with drug-induced intensity, their light reaching out to claw at her eyes.

    She searched frantically for the control panel, feeling all around the place it had vanished, reaching as far as she could … but again and again her invisible fingers found nothing. Her heart pounded in her throat and she fought down panic. It was getting harder and harder to remember that this was a simulation. Her primitive monkey brain insisted she was plummeting to her death.

    She fell into the strand of clusters, galaxies flashing by on either side. Each galaxy was now hubcap-sized … she must have shrunk to only a million light-years tall. The galaxies were beautiful and terrible, shimmering glowing confections, spirals and disks and strange elongated commas. Most had a thick bulge in the center, a dense conglomeration of stars … the heat of the nearby ones felt like a burning road flare, and their gravity tugged at her stomach as she fell past. A barred spiral galaxy smashed itself to bits against her invisible leg as she passed, feeling like a hot buzz-saw of stars on her calf. She cried out from the pain. Another galaxy, this one an irregular elliptical giant almost half as big as she was, came rushing up at her and she curled up in terror, but it just missed her.

    What if the galactic core, with its super-massive black hole, had hit her? Could she die in the simulation? There were supposed to be safeguards … but the HVF was no ordinary sim, and between software bugs and experimental drugs she might be beyond its parameters.

    She looked around, fighting down nausea as her invisible, simulated head spun. After that last near-miss she seemed to have fallen into another empty area, this time a space between galaxies within a galaxy cluster. Based on how large that last galaxy had been, she must be about a hundred thousand light-years tall now, and the average distance between galaxies in a cluster was a few million light-years. She might be safe.

    But as she looked down, she realized she was not safe. She was falling toward the center of the simulation, and that center was Earth. The spiraling disk of the Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy, grew and grew before her, looming with broad flat inevitability. It was like driving at full speed into a solid wall of headlights.

    Dana’s headlong rush seemed to slow as the Milky Way expanded to fill her view and more, spiral arms resolving themselves into broad rivers of individual stars, but she was still going to hit it hard. She angled herself forward, held her arms ahead of her like a diver, and held her breath.

    The galaxy had grown to about a hundred times as wide as her height, so she was perhaps a thousand light-years tall, when she smacked into one spiral arm. Stars and nebulae and interstellar gas battered her extended arms and face, but by now she was moving slowly enough that the blow was more like a sudden hailstorm than slamming into a wall. She gasped from the rough, scouring impact, but she didn’t think she’d broken anything.

    Stunned, she fell into the galaxy as though it were a mighty ocean. The shock of her body passing through the interstellar medium made new stars spring into life, crackling like popcorn on her leading edges.

    She was still shrinking. The hail of stars rapidly thinned to a hot drizzle. Soon she was mostly falling between them, with only the occasional searing impact. She must be about ten light-years tall now; the stars were about as far apart as the length of her leg. Each individual star was too small to be anything other than a blazing-hot bright point.

    She fell through near-emptiness for a long time before one star began to distinguish itself from the rest, directly ahead, as she knew it must. The Earth’s sun.

    How much longer could this game go on? Would she slam into the Earth, her body breaking open from the impact? Or would she keep