I've had the dream for as long as I can remember. A light above me, forming shadows shaped like people. Metal against my back, and always the same words from the shadows.

"He isn't ready. Send him back."

And then I wake up. Only this time, the words are different, and they go on.

"He's ready. Pull him out."

"Now? Already? Are you sure it will be enough to protect him? What if he just clings to it instead?"

"We can't be sure of anything right now. The mind is a strange and delicate thing. Even his."

"He almost made it before. We haven't made fundamental changes. He's still—"

"—no. Not true. A foundation is the entire point. He—"

I am swimming. Swimming toward the light, away from the dream, only I'm confused about which direction the dream is in. Is it upward? Downward? Which one is sleep?

My whole body convulses, banging the back of my head on something hard and barely warmed by my body heat. No pillow. No mattress. No weight of covers, no snoring wife. Not alone, though. There's the light, and those must be the voices.

"What—" I try for the word, but it's inaccessible over miles of dusty, scaled-over throat. Water flows, and I cough, because now I feel the tube, hooked into a dry cheek. Still I swallow as much as I can. It hurts. It's a relief. I sit up, bend over, cough some of it out. There's a little blood. I'm wearing something made of paper. Not like a hospital gown, more crude than that. Yellowish, undyed, not much softness to it, spattered now with fresh red from my coughing.

I close my eyes, breathe in, breathe out, gasp back in again.

There are two people standing to either side of this metal table. One man, one woman. Both extensively scarred, faces and arms bearing marks of strangely intricate violence.

"Hello, Mr. Sézary," the man says. "Welcome back to the world."

I feel my fists curl up against the metal, making it harder to support myself. I bend forward, wondering at the feel of the cold surface. It isn't smooth, like the stainless steel you'd find in a laboratory or even morgue. More like scrap metal. I continue to sit up, realizing that I might be angry but I'm not actually up for any violence, yet.

"What do you mean?" I rasp. This time the words do come, even if they have to be dragged over sandpaper. "You stole me from my bed. My home. Kidnapped me."

"No," the woman says, and she sounds almost unutterably sad. "That place no longer exists, nor anything like it. Hasn't for a time, too long a time."

I shake my head. "It was real, it was..." but it's already fleeing, moving away from my memory's easy grasp and growing smaller in the distance. I don't even remember my wife's name. I open my mouth, trying to tell them, but I don't know myself.

"You've been under a sort of hypnosis. We made sure the memories weren't too deeply implanted. We wanted the stability they'd bring, not the memories themselves, the attachments."

Attachments. I want those. I want to hold on. I shake my head, it's all slipping away, it was a good life, it was, it was

it was

it wasn't real. I know that now, and much too fast. A whole life shouldn't be able to simply escape the mind like that. But it was just a wrapping, a wallpaper. It's being torn down in every direction. I close my eyes.

"I am Alfred Sézary, and I survived the Passage Veil."

The man slowly nods. "Yes," he says. He sounds as profoundly relieved as the woman was sad. "That's who you are, that's what you've done. Do you know where you are?"

"Underground," I say. "I must be. Or in some very secure building. It wouldn't be safe to guard an unconscious man anywhere else, not for as long as you must have done."

The woman gives me a small straining smile. "Yes. You're in what we believe to be the largest bunker of full survivors on the continent. Canada, where the Jabberwalkers sometimes freeze, and the Laughing Eyes can't always see through the rising fog. There are other advantages too. We'll have to fully brief you. Before—"

Before? Before what? Before, before, oh no, oh no.

"Wait," I say, fighting down the swirling surge of panic now tugging the inside of my chest, "why were you doing all this? What do you mean by stability? What do you want with me, you can't, you can't mean..." I trail off, looking at both of them in turn, trying to let my eyes do the pleading.

The man has to look away. Perhaps there are tears under that burn-wrinkled eyelid. The woman puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. It's missing the middle finger. "Yes, Mr. Sézary. We're going to send you out. There's something we need to you to do. You walked the surface and survived with your sanity still intact longer than any other human known."

"Mostly intact," I whisper. "Just mostly."

Her eyes are blue, and full of pity, but without any yielding at all. "Mr. Sézary," she says, "that's going to have to be enough."

I argue, but it's a half-hearted thing, because I already know. Several Jabberwalkers have stumbled into the entrance in the past few months, and though they didn't seem to recognize what it was you never know when they'll have some random flash of brilliance. Or explode. Or grow special acid-glands and protruding diamantine teeth and decide metal is their new favorite food. Now that the door is found, it's probably only a matter of time.

Besides, there are are worse and brighter things roaming up there, and if one of them decides to eat or incorporate a loitering Jabberwalker it might also decide to take a look at the door. And then...who knows? Begin grinding away at it? Put out an invitation to its friends-and-relations? Any number of things, but with one common consequence, that we'd be trapped, that we'd be at their mercy. No way to escape but death.

And it'd have to be death. They'd have a failsafe, something to burn us all to ash, maybe, some kind of heat that could penetrate the skull so that nothing of the brain could be recovered and made to think new and terrible Thoughts Unending. I'd seen those, during wandering-time, before I found this place. Felt them, too, sometimes, reaching out, desperate if they weren't too far gone. I always spared them what mercy I could, if they weren't under guard by the Silver Things or incorporated into something I must not tangle with.

Sometimes they were simply on the ground, having grown pseudopods and new eyes. Sometimes they had voices. Those were the worst. Those I burned, if I could. And I never ate them, even when I was hungry. Flesh is nourishing, but some things linger now, and I didn't need more awful memories.

I come back to the present. They're staring at me. Not the man and woman, I think they've gone to bed. The quartermaster, and what passes for a shrink in this survivor's huddle. And another person, robed, eyeless so that no one can see into them. The Dreamer, the only person in the bunker not put to sleep with deadening drugs. She knows what we need, what I need to get. She's seen it, and not only her but both her predecessors too. She won't last much longer, from what they tell me. Soon she'll feed the rest of the bunker, and her brain will be incinerated.

The woman who was there when I woke up, she's apparently volunteered to be the next Dreamer. She'll keep an eye on me up there, reach out if she can.

The quartermaster is speaking. I smile apologetically at him. "You'll have to repeat that, I have a lot on my mind.

He inclines his head, his one good eye squinting in acknowledgement. "Of course you do. Look, you've got three magazines, all we can spare. Rounds are coated in fresh Earth-iron from deposits deeper down in the bunker. Tips have reservoirs of cerebrospinal fluid. Should take out a Jabberwalker if you aim for the brain, center-mass. Don't bother with the head, it just splits open and screams, you don't want to attract that kind of attention."

I nod my understanding. I'm grateful. Before, I never had a weapon that could do much. I just survived. Mostly. The briefing goes on and on, until I'm tired and hungry and then I eat and sleep and it continues. Continues the next day? Who knows. Clocks don't work anymore, and no one here has seen the sun for, well, we don't know that either.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Two more sleeps, lots of tests, lots of lectures, lots of silence on my end. I have too many thoughts to speak any of them, but everyone seems to understand. Finally the moment comes.

I stand before the door. It's huge and thick and irregular in shape, built to fit a shadowed alcove in the cavern wall. I remember knocking on it, all that time ago that might not have been much time at all.

I breathe in, and turn the crank.

Shrouded daylight through the widening crack.

It's time.

I look back at the little farewell party gathered behind me. Just three people, no one really wants to be this close to the surface but they can't have me just head out alone either. Partly for my morale, I suppose, but mostly to ensure that when I go out, nothing else gets in. Two of them have guns; the other, just behind me, carries one of the backbone blades we've all taken to calling Vorpal Swords. I have one too, on my hip. I'm much better armed than I ever was last time I was up there.

I'm not sure how much it will help, in the end. Before, I survived by creeping cleverness, never confronting anything more dangerous than the man I ate when I realized his wounds were mortal. No, no, don't worry, I threw the brain into one of the Red Fissures and then thoroughly scrubbed out the skull, which I also refrained from boiling in the soup-stock, instead I kept it so I would have something to scoop other brains up with so I could grant them what mercy I could even when that mercy was the final silence of their synapses.

The door has opened enough now for me to slip through. I do. And then I sprint, as quietly as I can, away from the stone face that hides the entrance, knowing it should whisper shut behind me. I spun, down on one knee in a firing position, still breathing hard from my mad dash, scanning the now seamless expanse of rock through my rifle's holographic sight.

Nothing. Not right now. But I can already hear the slow permeating wails on the air, just within range of the human ear, or perhaps the human mind, it's never been clear to me which. I tune them out, letting long intricate formulas take their place in the channels running thought through my head, remembering the physics of a saner universe.

I will never get my doctorate now. I nearly laugh aloud at the thought, so pointless and out of place, but of course I can't, not here. Instead I follow the vectors trawling the relentless logic of their symbols through my brain.

scalar function f assigning a real number to every point p in this space, it's a function, a function of the coordinates

that's how a real universe works

that's how a good one should function

with the function

I use a function of my own to plot a course to the Five-Sided Pyramid, and start walking. I know this city, or this contorted knot in spacetime that used to be a city, the city I grew up in, the city I wandered year after unraveling year after the Passage Veil came and pulled all the threads into new and impossible patterns.

Except that the Passage Veil hadn't come at all, we had come to it. Our little planet had trespassed through whatever little sanity-hole it had nested itself in, out in the deepest darkest reaches of space. "Little" being a relative term, of course; for an instant in time, the whole of the Solar System lay within the Veil's heartbeat-radius. It's a mercy that the speed of things like planets and stars are so near-incomprehensible, a longer stay and it's unlikely anything recognizable would have survived.

I glance up at the Gemini-Sun, watching its bulbous semi-separated spheres spin madly in the sky, shining green in a wide corona of utter black. A small mercy, maybe, but no one ever asked us. We were still here, willing or not. I mean, some of us were. Some more than others.

I meet one of those others after a short time walking. Not a Jabberwalker, not fully sunk down into itself like that. Himself? Herself? Almost always impossible to know, without some hint in the endless stream of things they half-gargled from the mostly-mouth monstrosity that made up their heads. Not good to listen, though, or to look them in the eye, any of them, any of the spectrum of iris-colors that circled their heads like a crown, under the mouth and the feeding-fingers.

Anyway, no. Not a Jabberwalker. A he, even, I think, that much can still be guessed at.

"You won't get there," he croaks at me. He rears up on his hind legs, still mostly human in shape. "You won't get there, I won't let you, I made a promise, I can live forever, you see, you see?" He touches his head, bulging and jagged with the press of broken skull-bones. The skin is torn in places, showing pulsing matter that maybe once was grey and now has found new colors.

Some kinds of life aren't really living, I don't tell him. I might be mostly whole myself, but wasn't sure what I'd call my existence now. Anyway there wasn't time to argue about bad-faith promises and worse rewards. He puts up a fight, raking with the filed-down ends of his finger-bones, but my Vorpal Sword takes his head right off. It gibbers and rants without air, and I crack it open, burn the throbbing thing inside. It has its own eyes and they plead, but I only glance once before they burst from the heat and I feel its safe to move on.

So I do.

I have to kill a pair of Jabberwalkers before I get there. Center mass, right in the braincase, like they said. Don't have to burn them, Jabberwalkers are too far gone for that to be a mercy in my opinion, all the human's been leeched out for a while. Anyway it's easy enough, and I curse myself for the thought, I only have so many rounds, a thousand other things could go wrong with the rifle.

They don't. The rifle is fine, but now there's the fog, and the Strolling Things. They always come together, and no one knows what's up there beyond the veil of foul-smelling mists. There's only ever the long slender legs, almost graceful except for the piercing sucking needle-hooves at the end, spearing whatever they can and then jabbing again and again to siphon and drain. Hard to tell which set of legs might belong to the same creature, or if that concept even applies.

I walk between them. Beneath whatever might be up there in the high fog. I can hear low wavering noises that are almost like voices or calls, and I think they're coming from above but it's not good to listen close up here in the new surface world, not to nearly anything, and so I don't. I hum, in my brain not my voice-box, and I go over my formulas and functions.

I see an almost-rabbit stabbed and drained nearly dry as I creep through the forest of maybe-legs. I catch its eye, bloodshot and desperate while the rest of it is siphoned and still. I try not to remember.

The fog lifts, the Strolling Things are gone.

I walk on. I see the pyramid, I think, light doesn't travel properly around it, but that has the advantage that I can count all the sides from a single direction. It's tall and silver and full of angles but there's not much else to tell, not that I should.

The pyramid sits astride a spiral, you can't walk straight toward it or you'll slide and likely fall, the currents of twisted space are too strong. I circle it, I circle it, and things circle overhead too, the smiling recent descendants of ancient vultures, carrion dinosaurs that survived first a meteor and then the Passage Veil. They are full of bloodied hopes. I do my best to ignore them.

The walk goes on. As I near, the pyramid sides begin to look properly flat. I recite hallowed formulas from the ancient days of grade-school geometry, from when the world was, if not right, at least…

I slow my walk. It's catching up, it's all catching up. Why now? This is not a worse place than the others I've passed through to get here, but it's all gathering storm in my head and so I hunch down, make myself small, and breathe.

I see you. You are close, you are near what we need. You can press on. You must. I almost envy you. You will see hope before any of us. I will not be able to watch again until you return.

I know the voice. It's the Dreamer, the new one, the woman who woke me. I can't truly understand what this must cost her, but I know a little. I hope she lasts long enough for me to thank her on my return.

My return. I'm thinking in hopeful terms. I latch on to the order still clinging along the edges of my mind, stand, and walk. Stand, and walk. That's all I have to do. So close. So close.

The entrance is small and wooden, like a crude shack shoved into the imposing stone slope. Its door will not open. Some of the wood-grain has eyes. I fumble the hammer and nails I brought for just this purpose out of my pack. I hammer a nail into each eye, one by one. They bleed. The door shudders, then opens.

A hallway, lit by dripping moss. The steady spatter of its luminescent waste is almost a comfort, because it distracts from the thoughts that bombard me from every angle. It's the shelves, floor-to-ceiling on both sides, pulsing and crawling with discarded minds, distorted and distorting lumps of glistening grey-and-pink. Some have audible moans. Some dangle their eyes over the edge on frayed nerves.

All of them sing, and only the endless march of symbols in sequence keep the songs from washing out my skull. Function, function, conjoin your junction. I can see the curves, the elegant lines along axes and planes. The songs are getting louder, they have achieved a biting harmony. The minds here, deeper in, they have teeth, some literal, all gnashing.

I break into a run. It's dangerous, but I must. Center, center, go to the center. It's nearly a maze, but I know the way, I turn into the pain, I follow the gradient of mental anguish.

Another door. I won't have time for unlocking. I unload an entire precious magazine of rifle-rounds into its unblinking central eye, then kick it as hard as I can.

I stumble in. A room. Vast, nearly square, even in the midst of this five-pointed place. Shifting, maybe, I can sense the slow reformation.

In the center, a perfect stone cube rises up from the floor, a solid to make Pythagoras weep. I rush forward, there is no time. I see what lies atop the cube. This is where they're keeping it, the endless minds-beyond that press in on this New Earth, keeping it here, surrounded by corrupting thoughts, but still the room the room is changing, and YES.

I pick it up. It's heavy, the Steel Codex is, a perfect circle of carbon-treated iron. I gaze at its engraved laws, shot into space by one of the Visionaries who sensed what was about to be lost, back before the Passage Veil. Come back uncorrupted, a terror to the deeply changed, sequestered here, now in my hands. I read the laws, the functions, the formulae, turning the disk in my hands.

The pyramid shudders around me. I run, again, pushing the limits of my lungs, and I don't look back when I hear crashing behind. Something strikes my left shoulder blade and there is breaking and blood, so I tuck the Codex under my arm to carry it in one arm as the other dangles. The spiral is unwinding, and I can run nearly straight. Finally I fall, roll, pant in a ball wrapped round the cold metal. I recite its engravings, as much as I can manage in the quick sharp exhalations. That should keep them back.

After my lungs slow their burning, I stand, speaking slowly now as I walk forward, reciting. It should be enough for safe passage. I don't need to look at the Codex anymore, its surface is burned in my memory.

I make the long walk home, and the hope-writ-in-steel I carry pours forth from my bloodied lips.