<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Charlie tries to secure a new identity for himself, and stumbles across a cache of Vexcor employee identity sticks. They're very advanced: not just a fake id, but an ID worm that gets in and uploads your new identity throughout the Net. It's fifty years ahead of what we're capable of. One of the identities is for a woman he knows; someone he knew when he was a child growing up on the streets. Gemma Gitano is a hydrologist on Vexcor's Link Project.

Renn Porter reports the ID stick leak to Galt. It's just one more headache for the beleaguered head of Vexcor Beta. Turns out management is having a tough time keeping discipline in the ranks. With the link down to Alpha, all the Alpha workers in Betaverse are experiencing a kind of Beta fever. Some don't want to go home, or particularly want to see the link go up at all. Even Galt shows some signs of being affected. Delusions of grandeur cause him to build an exact replica of the Vexcor Alpha boardroom, at great cost, and under the skeptical eye of Renn Porter.

Porter notes Charlie Jade's interest in Gemma Gitano. Galt interrogates her about Charlie, and she claims not to know him. But Gitano's got her own concerns. She tries to warn Galt that Vexcor's work is having a strange and unpredictable effect on the water levels in their reservoirs. She talks of a thinning in the Dark Matter between universes. Galt dismisses it. "The universes aren't that fragile. They've been around fifteen billion years." But when a lake by the Vexcor facility suddenly starts to disappear into thin air, Gemma's caught up in it. Charlie rushes in to save her, the two friends reuniting after twenty years apart.

In Gamma, meanwhile, a lake appears out of nowhere; toxic water seeps out in a land that hasn't known toxic waste for fifty years. 01 takes it in grimly and knows he has to go back to Beta. His wife begs him not to go. "You wouldn't believe the things I've done," 01 says. "You were trying to save this," says his wife. She makes him promise not to go yet. But 01 knows he can't stay. He slips out in the shower, and reappears in front of the shackled Glass Door. But something was different this time. When he came back…it hurt.

In Alpha, Brion Boxer is close to death. With 01 not around, there's no way to secure another transfusion. Essa Rompkin arranges a meeting with another Vexcor employee, one who had been through the link to Beta a dozen times. She explains to him that traveling changed something in his molecular structure. It's something that Brion Boxer needs for the good of the company. The man nods, and Essa lets the other shoe drop: his family will be taken care of. But if he doesn't agree to the procedure, they'll all be fired and cast out to live on the streets. Given the choice between the destruction of his family, and a pretty certain fate, the executive accepts the latter. When the procedure's done, Essa looks over the man's wallet, at pictures of his family, his wife. This is the true face of Vexcor: what they do to people like this, in the name of….what?

Convince that the water events must be linked to 01's ability to travel, Gemma engineers a chance for Charlie to infiltrate Vexcor, using more of the identity sticks. While there, he finds nothing on 01 and his special abilities, but he does find a top secret memo written by Elliot Krogg. He flashes it to Gemma and Karl Lubinsky, before being caught by Porter.

Gemma offers Porter a trade: her and the ID sticks for Charlie. Porter makes the trade and Charlie is devastated by losing Gemma again. But Karl has no time for Charlie's sorrow. He's read the memo, and at long last they know Krogg's secret: If the Vexcor Link becomes permanent, the resulting damage of linking Alpha to Gamma will result in the destruction of our entire universe.

Charlie has to get home more than ever now. Not for selfish reasons, but to stop Vexcor where the power is: Alphaverse. But for that he's going to need someone's help.

He's going to need 01 Boxer.