Once again I found myself standing on a familiar shore line. I could smell moss and evergreens. I was back at the lake house. I was home.

I took a deep breath of the crisp Döbian mountain air. Something important had just happened but I couldn't remember what it was. Why couldn't I remember? Why was my heart racing? I rubbed my temples and tried to think back to how I had ended up here but all I got was static. I started walking back toward the lake house.

Predictably Gershwin Prime was there waiting for me. He sat in his chair smoking a cigar as he looked out over the lake. "It's truly beautiful out here, isn't it?" He asked.

"It is." I admitted as I took a seat next to him. "I was supposed to do something. I think it was urgent but I can't remember what it was or why it was so important."

Gershwin Prime shrugged. "I'm sure you will figure it out, eventually." He said before taking a slow puff of his long thin cigar. The smoke curled at the corners of his mouth before being blown away by a gust of mountain wind.

We sat there in silence for a while. "Do you remember what we talked about the last time I was here?" I asked.

"Yes of course. You left before you could finish this." My father handed me a bottle of his homebrewed beer. It was still cold from the lake, just like it had been when I left it.

I took a sip, the hops and malt sparked a memory. "You know, I ate ham tostadas and drank beers with you earlier today. It was nice." My mind was fuzzy, but I could remember that much. So what had happened after? I felt like it was something bad. It must have been bad to bring me here.

"You smoked a joint too." He remarked. "I believe it was your way of letting go."

"Letting go?" I asked.

"You went to meet the Bone Syndicate thinking that you were going to meet your end. I think that if you believed you had a chance of survival you would have decided to keep your wits about you." He shrugged again. "Maybe you wanted to die."

"Am I… dead?" I asked hesitantly. I remembered it now. The black furred Katzen clinging to Kasha's body. The explosion. The darkness.

"No, of course not." Gershwin Prime assured me as he reached out and grasped my hand. He gave it a good squeeze before letting go. "The explosion just rang your bell really hard. But you're strong. In fact you're already mostly healed."

I stood up from my chair. "I have to get back."

"You will, eventually." My father said, "But first I need to explain some things."

"I don't have time!" I shouted, feeling the anxiety and uncertainty beginning to rise. "There are two dozen Bone Syndicate soldiers about to rip me to shreds. I have to get back. I have to fight!"

He shook his head. "You don't understand. Time flows differently here. We could live a lifetime in a minute if we wanted to."

I blinked in confusion. "What? How?"

"Come. Walk with me. I'll show you." My father stood up and patted me on the shoulder before heading out toward the shoreline. I followed behind him because I had no idea what else to do.

"Time is relative." He explained as he walked. "An hour talking to your sweetheart can seem like moments and a minute sitting on a hot stove feels like hours. But there's more to it than that."

He reached for a stick and began to write out an equation in the sand. It was simple multiplication and division but the numbers involved were all at least six digits long. "What's the answer?" He asked.

I looked at the paragraph worth of numbers and felt an answer come to me. "Seven thousand, five hundred and sixteen point thirty three repeating." I answered, suddenly understanding both the math and the lesson it was intended to teach. "So, the Gravekeeper is lending us processing power."

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"Exactly." He said proudly. "The quicker we think the more we can do in the same amount of time. We can condense years of learning into mere moments. Live lifetimes in minutes." He stomped on the equation with his sandals, erasing it forever. "All of life is math, and we are existing in this moment inside of the greatest calculator ever built."

"Fascinating." I said as I picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the lake. I admired how the ripples cascaded into one another. I wasn't sure if they were more or less beautiful for being artificial. "So we really do have time."

My father nodded. "Yes. What was taken from us has been returned. But that's not what I need to talk to you about."

He turned to face me. "When I was alive I believed that humans were using us and our world to perform some kind of experiment. I still don't know their motives but I have at least learned how they did it."

My mind was flooded with images and feelings as Gershwin Prime shared what he had found. Here we didn't have to rely on anything as primitive as language. We could share raw understanding.

I saw a thriving world with a backdrop of a billion stars behind it. I saw a spacecraft streak toward the sun and disappear, creating a tear in the fabric of spacetime. In an instant the sun and planet vanished leaving the solar system dark and devoid of life.

Then I saw the planet again, still orbiting the sun but they were alone in the night sky except for a single barren moon. There were no other stars anymore. I got the sense that time was moving forward rapidly. The once thriving civilization that had inhabited the planet was dead by now, their monuments falling into ruin, their people torn apart or driven mad by unprotected transit through the warp.

The continents continued to shift revealing the familiar coastlines of my homeworld. Life began to evolve again, boosted by the presence of plants, simple bacteria, and algae. Then strangers appeared in a silver spaceship. It was the humans. Humans had come back for their prize.

Their ship was long and thin like a needle with two massive engines as if it were made to more easily pierce the fabric between dimensions. The humans knocked down what few monuments or signs of civilization remained. They seeded the planet with plant and animal life. Then they left.

Once again time accelerated. Life evolved and spread over the planet. Forests covered the globe. Then back came the humans. This time it was different. They stayed for longer. They built a space station hidden from view. Then they left.

On the third visit the humans brought something special, us. Or what would one day evolve to become us. They settled the hunds on one continent and the katzen on another. They put an ocean between us to keep our species separate as we finished our evolution. Then once again, they left.

I watched as tribes gave rise to nations. Our populations grew. We advanced. Then the humans returned. They had brought raw materials to expand their space station and crews to man it. Bit by bit humans began to make themselves known to those below. They came pretending to be lost explorers and accidental travelers. They told us that their world was like ours, alone in a black void.

They didn't tell us of the stars or the wonders of the universe. Instead they kept us caged on a planet with a blank night sky. They gave us technology, guided our advancement, molded us into what we were today. But it was all a lie.

I opened my eyes and found myself standing with my father back on the shore. His expression was somber as he spoke. "So now you know what the humans did to us. Now you know why we have to find a way to break free of them if we want our people to have a chance at surviving, of being free."

"Yes." I said, finally understanding what was at stake. If the humans chose to, they could wipe us out in the blink of an eye and start over again. But how could we defeat demons that stole entire stars and locked them away in pocket dimensions? How could we fight that?

"It's time to go." Gershwin Prime announced. "Your body is healed enough to fight and you know what you need to know, for now."

I contemplated my situation. There were a dozen pack bound enforcers and a dozen grunts waiting for me when I woke up. I could copy myself into the ones with wetware but that wouldn't stop them from killing me. The imprint wouldn't take hold for at least a week. But maybe I could take them out of the fight? I told my father what I needed.

"Interesting. I think I can make that work." He said as he peered into my eyes like he was looking past them directly into my mind itself. I felt something click in my wetware as my programming was updated. "Yes, that should do the trick."

I looked around the lake. It was peaceful here, quiet. I wouldn't mind returning to a place like this when the fighting was done. I turned back to my father. He wore the sad smile of a parent who was both incredibly proud of his child and terrified of what might happen to them.

"It's alright, there's no rush." I said as I patted him on the shoulder. "Let's take another walk around the lake before I go."

"I would like that very much." He said. "We have to steal these precious moments when we can."

So we walked and talked about nothing in particular until we had circled back to where we started. "Auf wiedersehen." I said as I hugged my father.

"Bis zum nächsten mal." He replied. "We will see each other again, my son."