Hackerboy is an observer who wants to keep the physical universe unspoiled and pristine. He wants to listen to the tree falling in the forest. He is the ultimate environmentalist!

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, if you want the scientific law. Or, more poetically, “Thou shalt not go superluminal!” FTL requires breaking into the Borderland, where the mysteries of reality will be revealed to “mortals.” FTL yields immortality! Those that contemplate breaking that barrier are sinners, as are any sentient creatures of their kind. So Hackerboy creates the Cluster to imprison the sinners, and enmesh their souls in the physical universe. The Cluster will keep them busy wasting resources on destruction and conquest. Hackerboy is counting on chaos to stop all the FTL advances.

Wildthings, demon friends of Hackerboy, maintain the Cluster by sabotaging FTL, killing FTL scientists, and doing evil things.

But Hackerboy does not understand mortals, he thinks they will stay put. He does not comprehend physical pain and pleasure. The masses are only interested in individual or family survival. They believe what they are told about spirituality. So Hackerboy thinks all the captured beings will succumb.

Hackerboy does not appear in Perturbations Of The Reality Field. He remains in the Outside. His name derives from the hypothesis that physical reality is a computer program in execution, and he is the meddler. His creation of the Cluster is also a violation of God’s grand design. He is the antagonist of the story. The Devil. Perhaps he is a piece of God’s personality, an evil thought. Selfishness personified in the unwillingness to share the cosmos with mortals.

Sebastian Travers Joseph, Joe to his friends, St. Joe when teased, is an average young man swept up in global/galactic/metaphysical events ... like the Butterfly effect acting on a person ... He is trapped by duty and honor, struggling against the whirlpool.

Since he is my hero, I see him as about 21 years old, 6'4", 195lbs. You are free to imagine him physically as you like.

His parents died in a car crash, leaving him on his own at the end of high school. Too young to work for Uber.... lives in Dennehy’s garage ... He worked many other jobs before driving the cab; strawberry picking, gas station attendant, grave digger, church sexton.

Cassidy was a Wildthing, part of the Resistance to Hackerboy. She is on the side of the “Angels.” She has enhanced the soul of one of the non-dominant species on Earth, a blue merle border collie, with one blue eye, and one brown eye. (C1) The duality is more than symbolic. Cassidy can see into both the physical and the spiritual universe.

Wildthings are limited in power by the physical bodies they inhabit. They feel pain, they hunger and thirst, and they can die. But they have the power of telepathy, allowing them to communicate with all the sentients in the Cluster. Like Hackerboy, but on a smaller scale, Wildthings can teleport matter, and they use this to power ghostships between the solar systems and planets of the Cluster.

Cassidy pretends to be an alien from beyond the Empire; the Humans would not believe her, otherwise, it would be distorted into traditional religions.

An eddy of situational gravity swirls around her. She gathers characters around her like the Cluster gathers stars. The Angels have determined that Katie Ray is the key, the FTL cause of Earth’s inclusion in the Cluster. A search was conducted to find a suitable Navigator (Cassidy needs local transportation and a human partner) and a Diplomat as well. Their souls were vetted and it was believed that Cassidy could handle them. A predictive subalgorithm of local reality was run for the four-body problem. The probability of finding them in proximity was calculated for a range of times (Joe drives a cab, Senator Huang needs a ride). The network graph of their friends and acquaintances yielded the Russian. It was Cassidy’s task to get Senator Huang to the Russian’s house.

Katie Ray is a feisty, red-headed, young girl. She is a physics and mathematical prodigy. She opens the door between physical and spiritual reality by developing the science of heaven and the formula for the soul.

“... Formulae swirled through her consciousness, returning on command, stopping for observation before spinning away. She never needed to write them down. (C12)”

Senator Carlos Huang is an old, unimportant looking, man in a brown raincoat and a tweed hat, returning from a depressing day of work in the city. At the station, instead of his regular driver, he meets Joe.

“Damn. I’m further on the path to enlightenment than I thought; even the cab company has forgotten me.” (C1)

Senator Huang was once more powerful. He ran a failed third-party campaign for President (C1). He he wanted to create an imperial U.N. to enforce peace on the world, a benevolent monarchy with princes from every country. His political ideas were unpopular in the U.S. (C1)