The white flash woke me up as it often did, with the scream of a million deaths.

I sat up, too suddenly, the ulcers in my gut announcing their irritation with my shenanigans, but despite the pain, I could not get the searing white flashes out of my mind.

I laid down gently and found my pillow soaked with sweat. I had to stop doing this, had to stop having these nightmares. I was a zombie through the day, my colleagues were beginning to question my health. For a week and a half, I'd been waking like this, at dreams so real it felt like I was living them.

Or, more accurately, dying in them. I shivered and turned my pillow over, freezing already beneath my blanket. It felt so very vivid, so realistic, like nothing I'd ever experienced...aside from life, I supposed. But even my own life never seemed so...visceral. Probably because mine was spent behind a desk instead of being shot at. But even so...aside from the faint foggy, hazy edges of my vision, it felt so...there.

It was hard to put into words, but I tried regardless, logging the time and my recollection in a notebook beside my bed. I drank water and another of the pills which may as well have been a placebo for all the effect they were having on my nightmares, and then rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. Tried not to think about the falling of bombs and ominous portents of doom.

It wasn't hard to figure out the source of my anxiety. As I ate breakfast the next morning, the news was all but a few bombs away from the vision in my nightmare -- the protracted war with China continued to drag on, more men sent into the meat grinder, all over some economic nonsense dressed in nationalism. Some trade conflict blowing up, and then as arguments tended to do, growing a hundred heads as every single grievance the two nations had ever disputed came to bear. Second-world sovereignty, cyber attacks, intellectual property rights, counterfeiting, criminal harboring...it seemed so stupid and insignificant compared to the deaths.

It had been two years now, and the victory for American virtue we'd all been promised seemed like a forgotten ghost, as we found ourselves embroiled in another damn Vietnam instead. Troops kept coming and going, ours and theirs dying alike, and the world had transformed from one of cold animosity to one of cold hostility. The war was just another perpetual headline, and it felt like no amount of outrage over protestors being brutalized or imprisoned ever led to anything. We were just a continuously outraged populace now, eating our cereal as we watched the news.

I frowned as I muted the TV, watching scenes of some bombing attack somewhere. Fires and black-stained remains of a structure, the roof collapsed in. Very few deaths, as ever. Because death was bad for business, I thought cynically. Someone being paid to build that bomb, build the new roof for that building, replace all the parts in it, that was the economy. The people who died in the blast? That was a tragedy -- that there was no money in it for anyone.

Though, who was I to talk? I was a well-paid defense contractor. I was part of the problem, sitting in my big house, safe from danger, on a Thursday morning.

The worst I had to deal with was the nightmares, others were actually dying out there, no matter how 'cold' the war allegedly was. Still, it was hard not to focus on my own problems; the hazy vision of the bombs falling, so vivid in my mind, it felt like I was seeing them even now. Seeing them always. Ever since I turned that damn machine on.

I sighed and packed up for the day ahead, trying not to see the mushroom clouds reflecting in my dishes as I washed them.

I'd first found the curious creatures I'd come to call 'muses' years ago, when surveilling the dimensions through a device not entirely unlike a very quantum telescope. To say I found them is perhaps an overstatement -- they were here, all around us, superimposed upon our dimension within their own. Ephemeral little things, and harmless, invisible, passing by and through our world, our bodies, our solar system and galaxy without ever brushing against it.

Except, I noticed, at very specific times. Very specific things, concepts, jumped out across the dimensional distance to the muses, and excited them in a blush of what my sensors detected as a burst of black fire, a reaction that was unseeable in itself, yet writhed like flame. A fascinating conundrum, to a fascinating observation.

And as they say, great science rarely begins with a 'eureka!' but rather with a 'huh, that's strange.'

I had named them 'muses' because in my testing, each reacted to a different concept, just as the muses of mythology each had a domain of art over which they presided: poetry, music, dance, and so forth. My muses did not stop at the arts, however.

I remembered the first time I drew one out. I'd been comparing their excited reactions to fire, and had a small burner beside my monitor, to look between the two, to gauge -- in the most unscientific way possible -- how accurate my description of looking like fire actually held up. And I noticed, every time I glanced at the fire, took special notice of its shape, its color, any of the characteristics particular to fire, one of the muses I was observing lit right up, as though it were on fire itself.

I spent hours courting that invisible thing floating around somewhere in my lab or...on the planet...or beyond, perhaps. It took an embarrassingly long amount of time to discover that it was reacting to my thoughts, and specifically, my thoughts about fire. Whenever I went to take notes on the muse itself, it lost interest, but by focusing on the flame, by filling my mind with visions of that, the muse flickered away in excitement.

I began to experiment with other objects, and found that such a descriptor was insufficient. 'Concepts' was more apt -- most were less bound to specific physical things, and instead grew enthralled by broader ideas. Things like pride, strength, or even the act of hiding. I found the same muse reacted to the same concept no matter the person, though the thoughts of each person needn't be consistent to excite them; my idea of strength was of a bodybuilder flexing, while an assistant got the same reaction by envisioning a lion. And strangely, the image of a lion in my mind did little for the muse.

So far this had all been revolutionary, incredible, but without practical merit. The colonel overseeing our work urged me to drop the research and focus instead on repurposing my observation tools to be able to spy on the Chinese through other dimensions. He seemed unamused when I laughed and told him that was impossible, that my tools didn't see at any distance, just through realms.

But the pressure was there. A need to prove that our research was worth sustaining. Even getting just this far had been incredibly expensive, but we were at the cusp of something unbelievable, something beyond any war, no matter how all-consuming. I was on the very verge of contacting a legitimate alien species, dimensional jellyfish, drifting in the currents of the aether.

Pulling myself from my thoughts for a moment, I paused to scratch my head as I remembered the painful memories. Perhaps describing them as 'dimensional jellyfish' hadn't been such a great idea. I wanted to portray the muses as wispy and mysterious, unthreatening travellers who were ubiquitous and harmless in our lives.

But the generals didn't want unthreatening or harmless. They wanted something dangerous and weaponized, the more, the better. I was told to sit down, as one of them patiently informed me that I was on the cusp of being the next Einstein, if I could turn this 'dimensional-stuff' into the next atomic bomb. But as it was, with jellyfish, they would be seeing to it that my next evaluation would be made to suffer, and with it, my funding.

That had driven me to it, to flip the switch. To the visions that I still didn't understand. It wasn't supposed to be like this, and yet, here I was. Seeing death in the corners of my mind, no matter where I looked. My eyes wandered over the mismatched parts and the poor welding job I'd done in building the instruments, consumed with something beyond them.

There had been one muse in particular I'd liked. I'd concluded it was a muse of 'thought' itself, and it was ever-present. When the others went silent as I made my notes or took careful study, those were the moments when it lit up. I named it Aoede, named for one of the very first mythological muses ever recorded, one of voice, which I had hoped to achieve in this experiment.

But something had gone wrong. Aoede had no voice, or not a voice I could hear. Instead, she'd become...attached to me, somehow. Perhaps I had spent too long, focused on her concept in her presence, and that had somehow bound her to me...but it hadn't been until I'd flipped the switch that this had happened. The machine that was supposed to interpret between us had linked us instead, and I had no idea what that meant...for either of us.

Except for the nightmares, I supposed. And I had been neglecting to document that in any formal capacity out of fear that the military would begin weaponizing these poor creatures to haunt the dreams of the Chinese.

I'd made revisions, and I hoped it was not too late. For days now, Aoede and I had been stuck together, closer together than ever before, according to my instruments, with her reacting to my every thought, and no longer just the relevant ones, and with her no longer drifting at random, but rather moving...every time I did. The implications were clear, I just didn't want to accept them.

Again, I flipped the switch. The machine thrummed to life, and over several minutes, I checked the baseline levels, ran various calibrations and background filters, ensured that pressures and currents and energies were all at nominal values.

And then I tuned it to focus on Aoede, almost muscle-memory by now. She was so easy to find relative to the others, a little pulsating black flame within me. Ever consistent, never drifting. A companion, if not for the fact that all her presence brought me was sleepless nights and terrors.

I amplified the signal, sending her the synthesized neural function that pattern-matched my concept of 'thought', and as she always did, she lit up. She loved 'thought'. She veritably glowed with excitement when I thought, and seemed to very nearly purr when I thought about thinking.

She twitched upwards, and I turned the device off. When she drifted back down, I turned it on again. It was difficult, the time resolution on my monitor wasn't accurate enough that I was sure I was even successful in what I was attempting, to say nothing about how possible this task may be in the first place.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Yet I persisted. For hours, until my sleep-addled head grew heavy, and the thrumming of the machine beside me seemed like a lullaby.

I turned it off, frustrated. I knew it wouldn't be easy, but after days of this, I wasn't sure we were making progress at all.

I needed to communicate with it, or to know if it was even capable of communicating. Assuming it had the intelligence of even an insect, I tried to get through to it in the simplest way, the only way I knew. It wanted my thoughts, and it could move -- this was almost literally the extent of my knowledge of the muse's physiology. So I did with that what I could.

When it moved up, I gave it what it wanted. When it went any other way, I gave it nothing. And yet still, nothing. Training it seemed completely pointless. Perhaps this alien species just wasn't smart enough to understand causality...and, hell, what would a space jellyfish have need to understand such a thing? Or perhaps it just didn't care. Or...maybe they weren't even sentient, just little thought-parasites that nibbled at ideas and drifted on.

I didn't know. I was tired and my head was heavy. I needed sleep, even if it was pocked with nuclear blasts. I shuffled over to my computer and rested my eyes for a moment.

The moment my eyes closed, I found myself awake, alert. Myself, surprisingly.

But also very much not myself. More. So much more. My head felt a different kind of heavy, burdened with ideas. Thoughts I could not have possibly thought, chasing down threads I could not have possibly followed, all rushing forward at the speed of thought, as though my brain had become lightning incarnate.

I reeled at the enormity of my expanding consciousness, and my reeling overwhelmed me. When I took a step back to be amazed, my brain sprinted a marathon back, contemplating every life decision I'd ever made which had taken me to this point, and all the infinite possibilities of all the other options I had never made in my life seemed to spiral out endlessly before me, in an instant, in a thought.

In one potential universe, I hadn't fumbled over my words when asking Jessica to prom. The two of us would have gone out happily for two weeks before I would realize she was a very boring person, and then we would remain unhappily attached for another year before she finally dumped me.

If I had not accepted the defense contract, I'd be struggling in my own private work, still pursuing the glimmer of the muses, but without the resources to adequately do so. I would live an equally unhappy life, second-guessing other decisions that led me to that impotence, rather than the ones which worried me now. I would live a long but underwhelming life, before dying in a freak accident in fourteen years, stabbed during the would-be escape of a petty thief whose life had spiraled beyond his own capability of handling it.

I frowned, the muscles of my face feeling very disconnected from the rest of me, or...whatever passed for me in this state. How would I know that I'd get stabbed? That made no sense, that was just soothsaying, fortune-telling. Fiction.

Except it wasn't. That young man was already in an unhealthy lifestyle, spending more money than he was capable of bringing in, thinking that his relatively decent income was a promise that his life would always remain such. He'd never suffered before, not really, and so when suffering did visit him, the first time he had credit card statements printed in red, when banks began calling, he wouldn't know what to do. He had always just lived his life, and it was only logical, only natural, that given who he was and what he had been shaped to be, he would freak out. A lifetime of what felt like his memories rushed past me, of all the times that someone had been there to rescue him from himself, of all the inadequacies of his creation and formation.

But they weren't memories, I realized, through the power of my enormous, universe-defying brain. They were deductions, conclusions drawn from my own observations of the world, a puzzle piece that must exist in exactly his shape in order for the world to be exactly as it was. He moved the way he did, and existed the way he was, because it was impossible for him to be any different and still have the universe exist.

As my thoughts turned from him, I found myself still at my desk, still incredibly overwhelmed, still processing all of the information in creation, a perfect recreation of the entire universe exploring itself in my mind.

And I realized, with very little outside help, that this was communication. This was thought itself. This was Aoede, talking to me, in the only way that muses knew how to. She was the muse of thought, and thought in our reality was all she could touch. But she could do more than just consume the idea of it, she could provoke it. She could inject me with thought. She could drown me with thought, until I had no choice but to contemplate thought and nothing else, for all eternity.

I turned and read the monitor, and saw her roiling with pleasure. She was no mere flame, she was an eruption of black light, ringed with wispy white, like black smoke pouring off a white flame in inverse.

I was wrong. They aren't jellyfish at all. They are farmers, and we are the pigs for the slaughter.

As though laughing at me, even this thought gave her sustenance, and she burned ever brighter.

I spent an eternity of thought in the next few seconds, considering and evaluating everything I could think of, which was now a nearly infinite amount. I looked forward and back through all of the inferred reality, and all of the branches I had crossed, and would cross,

And I noticed, many potentials simply...ended. The world didn't terminate, it wasn't a limitation of my mind or processing...simply...I could not see past a point anymore. Nothing prohibited it, it was just unknown, like all the regular thoughts I used to have, just something I didn't know the answer to.

I figured that one out, too. Those were the timelines where I continued my research here. In each of them, I began to refine the process I had unwittingly unleashed on myself, opened the door to more muses bonding with more people...and just as soon as I came into contact with another similarly-bonded person in that potential future...

Poof. I had no idea what would happen. The thought of not knowing something was suddenly terrifying, an abrupt end of all things, like bringing two bonded-people together was like merging matter and antimatter.

I gave it another few seconds of thought before another idea struck me. Half curiosity, half-dread, I went forward, far forward, as far forward as my mind could predict, events well beyond my lifetime, or the lifetimes of my children or grandchildren, if I had any.

There were numerous timelines where I did, I noticed. I also noticed that in none of them did I or my family seem particularly happy. That hurt more than it should have.

But I pushed forward, a hundred years, a hundred-fifty, two hundred--

In two-hundred, twenty-four years, the world would end in fire.

Exactly as I'd seen, hundreds of times now, except instead of a vision, I could trace every single footprint that led to the end. The every-increasing costs of an endless war. The constant agitation on both sides for a peace neither was willing to give. The first-strike capabilities the Chinese would discover, while America instead delved into AI development, outfitting drones to supplement the production of a diminished humanity...even then, trying to pretend like the war didn't exist, finding ways to circumvent it instead of end it.

And then total eradication. Dirty bombs, megatons of them. It wasn't done just to end the war, it wasn't a conquest of territory or economics or ideologies at that point. After two-hundred some-odd years of pathetic, half-assed hostilities, China wanted to annihilate their adversary, and they did it, completely.

The world after that continued on, but I cared little. Everything after my country was utterly obliterated seemed ashen and greyscale, as though my thoughts couldn't fully commit to my having them. What China and the rest of the world did to face the fallout, the sudden attack, the repercussions of an entire continent gone, that was so much less important than averting it.

I went back and explored possibilities. Options where I warned everyone, where I armed the US to defeat China, where I'd gone rogue and acted as a provocateur, everything I could think of...and they all ended in fire.

It seemed impossible, that I could have infinite knowledge and be so powerless. But potential future after potential future whipped through my thoughts, and with every blast I saw, I realized, I hadn't been seeing the same blast all this time. I'd been seeing all of them, all of these different versions of Earth ending, helpless to do a damn thing about any of it.

It had been, maybe a minute, and I collapsed back in myself, in my seat, completely exhausted as though I'd just lived all those thousands of lives. I stared at the billowing black flames of Aoede, not sure if she was a gift or a curse at this point.

"I misnamed you," I apologized. "If you are named for Greek myth, you should be Cassandra." I shook my head. "I can't believe there's nothing I can do. That seems impossible. I know I'm only one man, I know what they think of me, say about me...I know...well, you know. But still."

She burned bright. And I sat down to think again, in my own thoughts, as much as I could now.

I was so powerful, so capable, I could do pretty much anything I wanted. But in all the futures I'd seen, I'd realized that no matter how capable one person was, they couldn't change everything. There were two whole nations out there who had been at war for a few years, who were ready to continue warring for another two-hundred of them. What was one man against that?

The answer, I found, was a matter of perspective. I couldn't stop them. In the future, this world would burn, and I would be seeing and feeling every single death of every single person who ever would be up until then.

But this world had never been my true calling, had it? I'd spent my life so detached from the pursuits of it. I'd always been more interested in what was beyond, and with this capability, the beyond was closer than ever. Maybe I couldn't save this world, but I could potentially save another. And if I did -- and this was pure speculation, because my powers didn't extend beyond what I could observe -- maybe the me in that world could save another. And they in that, another. Until all the worlds in all realities could be spared, save my own. What I could not achieve alone, an infinite army of myself from across dimensions could do.

It sounded insane. But compared to myself from a few minutes ago, I was insane, I knew. Bonding with Aoede had made me into something more than human, Parahuman, or greater. Everything about me was insane now, but that didn't change the fact that this was me, this was what I now was.

Another million potential futures flashed through me, all the different times and ways I could be found out, experimented on, used as a template for a new breed of super-soldier. I had to be careful. They wouldn't understand, they would be closed-minded, selfish, prejudicial, would see me as less than human, when now, I was so much more.

I turned back to my work, finding focusing on that all the more enjoyable when I could let my mind loose without the pain of finding and feeling others within it. I had this, at least. I could build, I could focus on things beyond this world, places I couldn't see, places I couldn't know the death of everyone I knew, or loved, or met, or never even heard of.

I could shut them out. Shut myself in. Dedicate myself to the work. The work is all that mattered. The work was all that would keep the screaming at bay.

I giggled at the thought. I'd never been so excited to work before. Though I had a dark realization that threatened to cut through my mood. I'd still have to talk to others to get parts, still have to beg for my funding, still have to look into the eyes of those who were just corpses to me now, and envision their deaths with every word they spoke.

I needed separation. An intermediary. But I couldn't use anyone, they would all die, even the grad students...whether in eighty years or ten was insubstantial to me at this point. They would all die, and I needed to escape that.

Unless there was something that didn't die. Something that never lived. Something I could build.

In my memories of the future, I began to dig through the plans the Americans had drawn up for their AI, two-hundred years from now: sentient, autonomous, enduring.

Immortal.

My fingers flowed across the keyboard like they were the ones possessed, not me. I began to compile lists of parts, began to copy down fragments of code that I glimpsed through the future. It would come together, a steward, not of my work, but of me.

I hit save, as I always did by reflex, and a text box popped up, prompting me for a name of my project. I spent a moment blinking at the cursor that blinked back at me.

"You will guard the gates of hell," I told my computer.

I named the project CERBERUS, and my fingers flew across the keys.