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going, deeper and deeper, vanishing into subatomic space?

    No. She knew that her dataset didn’t include anything smaller than a satellite.

    Unless her drug-addled brain kept going without data, making up smaller and smaller particles while her body gibbered in some mental hospital…

    A stiff, gritty breeze began to push at her, chilling her skin and making her blink. She was falling through the Oort cloud, the thin sphere of cold gas and chunks of ice that surrounded the sun out to a distance of two light-years … twice her own current height.

    The Oort surrounded her for a long time, as she shrank from a light-year to a light-month in height, her progress continuing to slow. Even at only one light-month tall she was still a hundred times bigger than the orbit of Neptune, the outermost of the true planets. There was an awful lot of mostly empty space in the solar system.

    She was a comet now, falling inward from the Oort. Would she leave a tail behind herself as she approached the sun?

    The solar system itself began to come into view before her now, the orbit of Neptune a skinny blue ellipse no longer than the palm of her hand. The ellipse only existed in the simulation, of course; the planet itself was far, far too small to be seen. Smaller ellipses just visible within Neptune’s orbit were the orbits of Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter; Earth’s orbit was indistinguishable from the sun at this scale. She continued to decelerate, though still moving at an apparent speed that would certainly kill her if she slammed into a solid object with her physical body. And she was heading right for Earth.

    She had to do something before then. But what?

    Dana was now about the same size as the orbit of Neptune … about eight light-hours tall. Still falling at a speed impossible for any physical object. Still slowing. The chill wind of the Oort cloud had faded away to nothing; she was now near enough to the sun that the spaces between the planets were blown clear by the solar wind. The solar wind itself, nothing more than charged particles, was too tenuous to be felt even by her drug-heightened and computer-stimulated senses.

    The ellipses of the solar system continued to swell before her, the orbits of the inner solar system planets now becoming distinct from the sun. The planets themselves were still invisible, not even specks … she was perhaps one light-hour tall now, a bit bigger than the diameter of Mars’s orbit, and even mighty Jupiter was less than a hundredth of one percent of that.

    As the inner solar system expanded, she realized that the sun had begun to shift to one side. She was no longer falling directly toward it; she was now falling toward the Earth. She always had been, of course, though the distinction had not been apparent until now. The planet itself, far too small to see, was indicated by a blinking point on the ellipse of its orbit. Dead ahead.

    Time passed, as she drifted down through the vast emptiness of the solar system. She seemed to be merely hanging in space now, the stars through which she had plummeted so rapidly now standing completely still, the orbits of the inner planets expanding slowly ahead of her. But she knew she was still moving at a physically impossible speed. She’d shrunk from one light-hour to ten light-minutes tall in less than ten seconds … that meant that she was approaching the Earth at more than three hundred times the speed of light. It still felt like a crawl, with no nearby objects to compare herself to.

    Dana could no longer see all of Earth’s orbit at once, and the other inner planets’ orbits were too far to the sides now for her to see without turning her head. Ahead, the blinking point that represented the Earth began to expand into a visible circle, but soon she realized it was not the planet itself but the orbit of the Moon.

    Although Dana’s fall was still slowing, the appearance of a visible feature made it seem terribly fast again. The Moon’s orbit