CHAPTER 1

Spacetime is doomed. I can’t escape the thought, as intrusive and ominous as a solar eclipse, as I dab up the last of my ketchup with the last of my fries. The Hogfather diner claims via their motto that they’ll ‘make you a meal you can’t refuse’ but, if they weren’t the only place in Stonestead that did burgers, pizza, and hot dogs, I very easily could.

It also might not be the best place for a covert meeting but, hey, you have to take what you’re offered. Funny, that.

It’s the day after we saved the world and no one in the diner seems to realize it—not the waitresses, not the customers, not Mister Backflip the old golden retriever. No, I don’t think he can actually do a backflip, or more than one backflip if he pushes himself. But if you spend too much time around Stonestead, the concept of an astoundingly acrobatic arthritic dog becomes the kind of thing that is positively reassuring.

I close my eyes and think again about what I’m about to do. If I were to get up in the middle of the diner and tell everyone the events of the past few months, I’d be thrown out on my ass at best and hurled into an asylum at worst. If not for everything that’d happened, if not for the fact I knew it was real, that the inevitable collapse of everything clung to the crevices of my brain like psychic napalm, I’d just get it over with, save everyone else the trouble, and check myself in.

That’s why I’m meeting with the only person who I think might understand. I look down and check my shirt. No little red dots yet. That’s the kind of person I’m dealing with, even if they might be the only person on the planet to hear me out. Even so, I’m not sure whether he’ll arrest me or ask for my autograph. Especially when he figures out I've damned him, too.

The door opens, and there he is. He’s not a big guy. Maybe an inch or two over five foot six, and with a fair amount of weight in his gut. He’s wearing the simple drab business suit of public servants anywhere. He casts his gaze around the diner, spots me, and makes his way over.

“There you are,” Fletcher says. He has a voice that suggests he gargles gravel in his spare time. His eyes suggest he’ll introduce you to his hobby if you piss him off.

He settles into the booth opposite me. We don’t shake hands. I’m not sure what to say to him, how to begin. Luckily, a waitress comes by to take his order. “What’s good here?” Fletcher asks me.

“Not much of it,” I reply.

“Just a coffee then,” he tells the waitress, and she heads off.

“Safe choice,” I say. “But I think it’s left over from when they’d pour it on rioting peasants.”

Fletcher doesn’t laugh. I feel like his craggy face has forgotten how to react to even the thought of a smile. “The last time we met, Cross, I said I wanted the truth—the whole truth.”

“And you’ll get it.”

“Now.”

I shake my head. “Once you’ve got your coffee.”

“Is that so.”

“You’ll see.”

Hogfather’s keeps its condiments on the table. Fletcher will add two teaspoons of sugar to his coffee. I know this like I know his name is William Matthew Fletcher, that he’s got a Glock 19 strapped under his jacket (9x19mm caliber, fifteen bullet magazine, 855g loaded, he’s never fired it and doesn’t want to fire it but he has posed with it in front of his mirror and growled make my day, punk on fourteen different occasions) and that he’s here to listen to me because he’s seen things he can’t explain, too.

I glance at the bowl of sugar, focus on it for just a second, and look away. There’s a slight resonance, a single pluck of the cosmic strings, and it is done. But even that draws out a headache, and I have to raise the napkin to my nose to stop the dribble of blood. A simple trick, really. One of the first I learned. But with everything that’s happened just a day ago, even such a newbie move like that is pushing myself too far, too hard.

Limits.

“You okay?” Fletcher asks.

“Fine,” I mutter, and the waitress sets the coffee before him. Without looking, he grabs a spoonful of sugar—or what he thinks is a spoonful of sugar. “Wait,” I say.

“Hmm?”

“You think that’s sugar you’re holding now?”

In my head, I imagined saying it like Morpheus, and I wasn’t holding a napkin to my bleeding nose. But, well, as I said—you take what you can get. Fletcher looks down and sees that, on his spoon, there isn’t sugar, but salt. A simple trick. A quick invocation of the Second Semblance of Matter. A minor application of the First Order principality.

Fletcher glances at his spoon, frowns, then looks back at me.

“How’d you do that?” he asks. “What’d you do?”

“Nothing. I’ve been sitting here the whole time.”

Fletcher grunts. Decides on what he’s going to believe instead.

“So what, you swapped it out before I got here.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“Do you really think, after everything you’ve seen and heard, I’d stake it all on some stupid parlor trick?” The headache is making me grumpy but, hey, screw it. “Do you really think I can’t swap something so simple? It’s basic fucking transmutation.”

“Transmutation, huh. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, Cross.”

I lean back into the booth. Fletcher, for his part, does not add the salt to his coffee. He might not believe what I can do, but he’s not brazen enough to mock me, either. “Extraordinary evidence, huh.”

There’re ways to do it. I could very easily blow his mind. Expose him to the glory and horrors of the Pax Systematica. To the apocalypses you find beyond the event horizon. But one of our first rules were not to use our abilities on innocents. But it’s Bill Fletcher. Not exactly innocent, at this point. The others will understand.

I hope.

I look at Fletcher, letting my eyes settle on him and then—with what feels like a jerk in my neck—look through him, past him, into the infinite gaps between him. I’m still lucid—or, at least, reasonably so—and still synchronized to the symbiote. I draw on the Third Order, the Second Semblance of Chronos, intertwine it with the Second Semblance of Mind, and lay open Fletcher’s mind in the present and all of his minds in the past.

I might as well have jabbed an ice pick behind my eyes.

Reality, or the most conventional idea of reality, the one I’d grown up with for eighteen years, returns to me when the tabletop crashes against my forehead. I’m glad I never let go of the napkin. I’m sweating, trembling. I can feel the symbiote lashing about, threatening beyondic disentanglement. If this doesn’t work, I’m out of tricks.

“You were born in Langone Hospital at 4:32AM,” I tell him. “When you were six, your parents had to move all the way to Arizona to live on a cattle farm. You coped with it by standing out under the stars, shining your flashlight to try and speak to aliens. You never met any, so, you had an invisible friend from Alpha Centauri named Thaddeus McGee instead, and you were always a little bit annoyed that your brain invented a little green man instead of a little green woman. You think I’m crazy, yeah, but you’re also really tired of Chester McLaine calling you Fox Mulder like he doesn’t know X-Files has been off the TV for seven years and you want me to be right.

“Well, here’s the thing, Special Agent William Fletcher—they may not be little, but green men and women do exist, and that’s just where the rabbit hole starts.”

Fletcher takes a long, slow sip from his coffee. I’m not sure what else I expected him to do.

“You could’ve looked some of that up,” he says.

I draw the napkin away from my face. “If you’re going to call me a liar, then why did you even come? Tell me you weren’t born at that place at that time. Tell me that Thaddeus wasn’t your invisible friend. Tell me you don’t know Chester McLaine.”

“I didn’t call you a liar. But I’m very curious as to how you knew all that.”

I’m not sure what to do with the bloody napkin, so, I just ball it up in my hands. “The same way I turned the sugar into salt. An insane form of quantum physics. Black holes and singularities and the things that lurk Beyond. You know what they say, about thinking about what happens beyond an event horizon?”

Fletcher shakes his head.

“‘Decent people shouldn’t think too much about that.’”

Fletcher look again at his coffee, then sets it down before him.

“Okay, Cross,” he says. “I’m listening.”

“This is your last chance,” I tell him. “I’m showing you the door and as much as I came here to tell you about it, I’m really not sure if you should walk through it. Because the ramifictions of what you’ll see on the other side, and what that means for everything you’ve ever known...” My mind travels back to Kharaak, him lying before me, his alien face splitting in an anguished smile. Of how maybe, in another life, we’d have been allies, if not friends. Of how fucked up everything was, and was going to be.

“It’s not something you can ever take back. You can’t close your eyes to it again. Can’t ever go back to your old user interface where things like realism and locality are taken for granted, hardcoded into the substrate. Just like me, you won’t be able to stop until you understand. But you’ll be the first human being to know the truth.”

Fletcher asks, “And you’re not?”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“Fine. Then what’s this truth?”

“That spacetime itself, William, is doomed.”

To that apocalyptic statement, Fletcher just nods. And why wouldn’t he? He doesn’t understand what I’m saying, what it all means. Not yet. There’s a part of me that envies him. Because the difference between me and him at this point, is that he’ll get to choose it, instead of being chosen for him.

“That’s a big claim,” the FBI agent tells me. “Look, I’m not much of a scientist, Caleb. How about you start from the beginning, and we take it from there? I don’t have anywhere I need to be.”

The beginning? Where is that? When is that? I wipe at my brow, call the waitress over for a glass of water, and try to piece it together. There is no beginning, and there is no end. There’s no time where things began, because they simply are, were, and will be. Was it when Master Taal smuggled his secret hope to our little planet? Was it before that, with the rise of the Warlock-King and his Eternal Imperium and the fall of the Star League? Or before even that, with the creation of the Pax Systematica, when the first Other slipped into our substrate?

It was all of those things, and none of them.

“It was back at the end of August,” I tell Fletcher. “The first party of senior year. We were all there. Max, Emma, and me. It’s funny because I didn’t want to go in the first place. If I knew what’d happen, maybe I’d have locked myself in my room and played Halo until I passed out.”

“And why’s that, Caleb?”

“Because a few hours after getting to that party, all three of us would be dead.”

Fletcher says nothing. I shake my head, aware of how I sound. Of course, had I done that, neither of us would be sitting here to have this surreal conversation. Maybe the Hogfather was the right place for this meeting, after all—you take what you’re offered.

Fletcher pulls something out of his jacket pocket. A little spiral notepad and a pen. “I get the feeling I’m going to need this,” he says.

“If you think it’ll help,” I say. “Last chance, Bill.”

I focus on Special Agent William Fletcher. The tesseract unfolds out of him, through him, and reveals to me the next secret step along the Path of the Incarnate.

QUEST The Truth is Out There GOAL Acquire the loyalty of The Agent REWARD 5XP, Arche recharge CONFIRM? Y/N

He clicks his pen, jots something down. I take that as consent to have his worldview shattered like a cheap plate. Well, I muse in his general direction, as I think confirm to the tesseract, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

“It’s just...” I say.

Fletcher nods slowly. “It’s just?”

It’s just...

It’s just...

It’s just-