She was, she knew, at a crisis point in her own life, no matter how miserable other lives might be. She was at an age when biological clocks ticked loudly, at an age when ease of career change was fading fast with each passing page on the calendar, when any move that could be made had to be made or the status quo would become unbreakable. At some point in nearly everybody’s life there came the time when one came to a cliff’s edge and saw a monstrous gap between oneself and the other side, a side that was nearly impossible to make out. She was up for tenure and possible promotion next year, and she’d not heard anything to indicate she wouldn’t get it, although one could never be sure. It was something she wanted, yet it also meant being here, on this side of the chasm, for the rest of her life.

Or she could break away and take real risks and, like most people who did so, fall into the chasm. But all the people who got what and where they wanted, the satisfied movers and shakers, had taken that same risk and made it to the other side. Not all of those people were happier than they’d been before, but many were. The trouble was, she was on the old side for making that leap. She was, after all, in this situation now because she craved stability, not earthquakes. Taking a risk in her personal life would mean saying yes to the first guy who proposed who wasn’t a geek or a pervert. And professionally, to take a risk would mean first having someplace to jump to, and the offers weren’t exactly pouring in, nor did risky opportunity just fall from the sky.

The vortex was never black; rather, it revealed the underside, the sinews, the crisscrossing lines of mathematical force that sustained and essentially stabilized the relevant parts of the universe. The Kraang examined those lines, noted the symmetry and precision, and, this time, noted the relay and junction points. Now, after all those millennia, the slight deviation the Kraang had been able to induce in the last reset had paid off; a line was being followed, not avoided as always before. The Watchman’s line, the focal point for probability itself, the emergency signal and warning beacon for the physics of the governable portions of the cosmos.