Giving birth to a star was always such a pain in the ass.

Zoe Herriot was plugged directly into the Incubator's system, immersed in its virtual world. She had designed the Incubators years ago in order to help fund some of her more esoteric research projects in the Rippleverses. She had cobbled together three of the Incubator devices and sold them off to one of the larger corporations and had more or less forgotten about them.

That had been twenty years ago. A lifetime. Well, several in fact. Her last partner had warned her about the dangers of cloning and cellular regeneration but there was so much work that needed to do and only one of her so something had been done. But that was a story for another time and indeed an entire series on a rather low-rated interstellar vid network set in the Weberlands.

Now, as Zoe scanned equations and dove into the flotsam and jetsam of code that she had written so long ago - some of which was familiar while others were so complex and foreign that she couldn't believe that she'd ever written them - she was more than a little concerned.

The fact that the Incubator's systems had gained some degree of sentience was fine, almost comforting in fact. She'd allowed for that and build in redundancies to ensure that should this happen, it could actually help the performance of the birthing systems. The Incubator had sent an avatar to help her, visualizing itself as a small butterfly that flitted about beside her in puterspace. It was courteous, shy had introduced itself as Tony and unfortunately was not in any way the problem.

Zoe somewhat missed dealing with malignant artificial intelligences bent on universal devastation. Those were easy.

This was something quite different.

The company had purchased her stellar manipulator system to do the usual, if somewhat repugnant, things corporations did: claimed that they were doing advanced scientific research to create patents but in reality just pumping out stars in order to build designer asterisms for the purpose of advertising, like spelling out the motto 'Drink Flurgg and Feel Fine'. While somewhat annoyed at the marketing executives, as long as no one was in anyway harmed in the process, Zoe honestly didn't give a flying flurgg one way or the other what they did with her tech.

She'd only agreed to come back and help troubleshoot the system because what the Incubator was doing now was far more interesting.

If somewhat alarming.

Any idiot could build a star, Zoe had always maintained during meeting with the corporations executives, despite the odd looks she'd get. You just needed hydrogen. Admittedly, a great deal of it, but hydrogen was not only incredibly cheap but also very easy to make. Then simply throw in some helium and trace elements for seasoning. Once thermonuclear fusion kicked in, drop the mike you're done. You could pretty much walk away and then just keep your fingers crossed they just faded away in a degenerate way, and not the exploding supernovae way.

The tricky part is simply the time it takes for the hydrogen to reach critical mass to begin conversion to helium. So Zoe had just cobbled together a few chronosleds and slapped them onto the Incubators in order to accelerate the initial 'bang' as it were. Easy as 3.141592653… and so on.

Now, however, the Incubator was birthing suns that contained a quite peculiar coronae harmonics and she couldn't figure out why she was unable shut the damn thing off…

The corporation was understandably a bit concerned that the Incubators were now churning out approximately two hundred thousand stars every hour. Not only could Zoe not work out where the hydrogen was coming from, the resultant mass was starting to do very peculiar things to localized space.

And then of course, there was the question of just exactly where the stars were going… even now as she watched on the virtual display with Tony floating by her side, she could see the masses of stars dropping out of existence.

Zoe had a nasty feeling that this was not in any way a good thing.