I was fixing a leaky toilet in the basement of O'Malley's Bar when the world went dark. Not your normal dark – this was like someone had painted shadows on top of shadows. Even my trusty Maglite couldn't cut through it. Then came the flash, bright as a thousand welding arcs, and suddenly I could see through walls.

My name's Dex Walsh, and I was having a pretty shit day even before reality decided to remix itself. Lost my plumbing business to bankruptcy that morning, got served divorce papers at lunch, and was doing cut-rate handyman work at my regular watering hole to pay off my tab. Then the Parallax Event hit, and personal problems started seeming real small compared to seeing the structural guts of every building in a three-block radius.

"Like some kind of quantum tunneling effect," my regular Thursday drinking buddy Willis tried explaining later. He's some hotshot physicist at the university, always going on about particles and waves and stuff I normally tune out. "The Event must have altered your visual cortex's ability to process..."

"Yeah, yeah," I cut him off, watching the maze of pipes and wiring pulsing behind the bar's walls. "What I want to know is why I'm seeing gas lines doing the mambo with electrical conduits that ain't even supposed to be there."

That's when I realized what I was really seeing – not just the present state of things, but all their possible states. Every repair that might happen, every renovation that could be made, every potential version of the infrastructure layered on top of each other like some kind of architectural fever dream.

The first week was hell. Try sleeping when you can see your neighbor's plumbing three buildings over. The migraines were brutal until I figured out how to dial it back, focus on just one layer of reality at a time. Started calling it my "blueprint vision" – easier than Willis's quantum whatever explanation.

That's when I noticed the other changes. The shadows that had marked the Event's beginning? They never fully went away. Most people stopped seeing them, but I caught glimpses in the corners of my vision. Sometimes they'd shift, revealing structures that hadn't been built yet. Or maybe would never be built. Willis said something about parallel timelines bleeding through, but he always looks worried when we talk about the shadows.

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I started doing odd jobs again, but different ones now. Building inspectors hired me under the table to check for structural issues no equipment could detect. Insurance companies wanted me to verify repair claims. Made more money than my old plumbing business ever did.

Then I found the anomalies.

It started with a routine inspection of an office building downtown. I was checking the foundation when I noticed something wrong with the shadows. They weren't showing potential futures or alternate presents – they were showing something that looked like architecture but wasn't. Angles that shouldn't work. Spaces that hurt to look at. Materials that didn't exist in our reality.

"Don't mess with those," Willis warned when I told him. He was three beers in, looking nervously at the bar's shadows. "The Event... it wasn't just about giving people powers. Something came through when reality cracked. Something that's still building."

"Building what?"

"Infrastructure." He drew equations on a napkin with trembling hands. "They're laying groundwork for... changes. Big ones. The kind that alter how reality functions."

I thought he was just drunk until I started seeing it everywhere. Hidden frameworks in the shadows of every city. Some kind of cosmic construction project using our world as a foundation. Most Parallaxers were too focused on their own powers to notice, but with my blueprint vision, I could see the larger plan taking shape.

Last week, I found a blueprint hidden in the shadows of an abandoned subway station. Not printed or drawn – more like it was encoded in the quantum structure of reality itself. Willis helped me decode parts of it. We both wish we hadn't.

They're not just building on our world. They're rebuilding it. Redesigning reality from the ground up.

The government's noticed too. Men in suits started showing up at my jobs, asking questions about structural anomalies. I feed them bullshit about asbestos violations and outdated wiring. Better than telling them I can see the universe being quietly renovated around us.

Willis says the changes are accelerating. The shadows are getting deeper, the anomalies more frequent. Sometimes I wake up and have to spend an hour remembering how normal buildings are supposed to work, because the new architecture is starting to look more real than our own.

Yesterday, I found another blueprint, this one bigger than anything we'd seen before. Willis took one look and started packing his bags. Said something about probability waves and cosmic reset buttons. He's hiding in his lab now, trying to prove what we both already know: the Parallax Event wasn't the change.

It was just the permit application.

The real construction's about to begin.