The Dark Somnium - The Portal In The Forest

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

Special thanks to my guests who joined me in this! @DusklightRadio   @Viidith22   @yenx0   @RomNex  Ken, Erika and  @SpiritVoices  00:00 Part 116:10 Part 235:45 Part 359:19 Part 41:20:49 Part 51:58:49 Part 6 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'd instinctively noticed something wrong with the neighborhood for several days before my brooding focus lifted long enough for me to truly grow curious. Standing and walking out from the porch where I've been sitting, I approached three children that were huddled around some sort of object. What do you have there? Immediately, the children dropped their object of interest and bolted. I scanned the street, but nobody else was around at this time of day. The object they dropped was a book, and that was the odd thing. I'd recently seen children walking around with half-hidden books, magazines, and even newspapers. That might have been normal in my day, but children today are more interested in their phones and video games.

Why were they all walking around with artifacts of the written word? A tale of two cities. I dusted it off, flipped it over, scanned the front and back, and opened it up. Nothing inside. Flip to the first page. It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. It was the age of foolishness. It was the age of wisdom.

I frowned. It was technically correct, but the phrases were out of order. Hey, where did you get this? The darting children rounded a distant corner without more than giggles and screams. Patience. I had it, and they didn't. I watched from the porch for the next several days, waiting for the last several days, waiting for the right moment. It came without much fanfare. An older boy walked past with several of his

friends in tow. None of them looked down the row of bushes in the yard that led to me. None of them were concerned by my presence. I followed them, nearly a block behind. They did look back at several points, confirming my suspicions about her neighborhood's secret, but I casually evaded their worried scans. They turned into the old Dotson lot, now overgrown with heavy brush, and I followed them beyond into the thick Virginia woodlands that lay untouched past the edge of our suburb. It sat right off the edge of an old trail, flanked by centennial trees. There was no weird device, no flaring engines, no fanfare at all, just an odd and highly irregular oval of blurred space.

Beyond sat a suburb street lined by house. I actually wasn't too surprised. I'd had several days to think and guess, and what else could it have been but a portal to another dimension? Neighborhood kids weren't about to order books printed with strange malformations, but they would certainly trade around oddities from another universe. The boys ahead had disappeared into the vast breach, and I'd seen children acting oddly for weeks, so I assumed there was little threat from biological contamination.

We'd have all been dead much sooner if there was any threat of that. I hadn't seen any suspicious activity at night. Best to be back at nightfall. The kids might have found out something about the behavior of the portal, and they'd probably spent weeks poking at it before daring to go through. There was every chance it disappeared at night, or maybe it changed destinations, stranding anyone on the other side. I hadn't heard of any missing children,

So I guessed they'd taken the appropriate precautions. Peering beyond, I tried to notice anything out of the ordinary before crossing the threshold. But it looked like any other suburban town. I stepped through, noting no usual sensations. The bridge between dimensions seemed to be stable enough. The moment I crossed, I realized that there was a problem. The portal back was a ten-foot-long, jagged oval, and it was sitting in the middle of the street. There was no commotion, no hubbub, no one had noticed a portal to another universe hanging around

and blocking traffic. That meant that this portal was new to this location. This suburb was newly built and empty, or very old and abandoned, or everyone was already dead. Straining my ears to listen to the absolute quiet, I gradually began leaning towards the most grim analysis. The closest houses to the portals had broken windows. What time was it? A little past noon?

The neighborhood kids had clearly begun systematically looting, but it was impossible to tell whether this was a new daily location or whether the portal only went here. And why had the portal been created at all? There seemed to be no significance on either end. I heard the older kids smashing about in one of the nearby dwellings, so I chose a quick direction, and I soon came to houses that had not been broken into. Carefully eyeing the vector of the portal's backwards emanation, I came to a split-level house that was unremarkable, except a hole had been carved out of one wall of a size that matched the expanding cone of the rift.

A strong breeze at my back, I approached the repeatedly swaying front door. If it wasn't already closed by the wind, yes, the wood near the knob had been ruptured by someone who had been very desperate to either escape or get inside. I stepped across the threshold, only to crunch across glass. After clearing several corners of the living room and kitchen beyond, I backed into a safe area and looked up. As I'd guessed, every light bulb that I could see had been purposely broken. What had happened in this house? I know you wrote it down, I said to the still and silent darkness. You always do.

As if in response to my cynicism, the darkness offered up a book, sitting quietly among the shards of broken glass. Carefully picking it up and cleaning it off, I flipped through half of it, skipping past random illustrations and musings to find the most recent writings. 4865, 47, 185, 108, 104, very slight change between 99, 488, Jeffers, 62, 47, 45 seconds, moves no sooner than 45 seconds check first appeared at 2 a.m., 1 a.m., but slow. Hide, break all light sources. Done, wait. Write down everything. Teardrop, stain. Something is outside our house. We're sitting now. Nothing more can be done.

All we can do now is wait. We first noticed it's somewhere around 1 a.m. in the morning. David came over right about that time, and he says he saw something weird with one of the neighbor's houses, but he didn't know what to make of it. Ryan and I were here house-sitting, but did not notice anything strange until 2 a.m. It began with an eerie sense of unease. We were in the basement watching a show on a laptop playing cards and David felt it too and thought he heard something. And we went to the windows it was very dark night. Clouds covered the moon. The backyard was lit only by two floodlights from the property across the way and a very thick fog rolled across the long expanses of grass. and brush. We saw a few lit panes in the house directly opposite ours, and through other windows,

we saw a few lights on in a neighbor's house. Something seemed off about the shared backyards, something horribly and innately wrong, but it was impossible to say what? We went around the house closing and locking every window and turning on every light. For a while, it made us feel safe. We clung low, peering out between the blinds, each of us trying to figure out why the backyards terrified so. I had the strangest idea. Before it even happened, that there was something wrong with the lights outside. I watched the two floodlights far off and to the left, and then I watched the lit window directly opposite us that seemed to be weirdly bulging and changing shape as I stared. Was it just a trick of the light? The crossbar seemed to be moving up and up and up until there was no way I was imagining it.

We knew for sure when our neighbor two houses down came out to let out his dog. We heard it barking and we rushed to the side windows watching from total darkness. Ryan slid the window open just enough to shout, Go inside, it's not safe, even though we didn't know for sure. A third floodlight came on abruptly three houses down, an angled and bright light that usually lit up many of our backyards. The back porch light, our unaware neighbor had turned on, suddenly went dark.

A strangled cry rang out, the dog squealed in horrible pain, and we slammed our window shot in terror. There was something. Ryan suggested that it was some large and fast-moving creature that had been lurking between us and the third floodlight. David peered out the window, offering no ideas. I sat in a corner trying not to hyperventilate. We'd been afraid, definitely, but there had been no proof until... Until... There.

David whispered. It moved again. We practically planted our faces against the glass. Our hapless neighbor's porch light was back on, and the middle of the floodlight across the way was out. Darkness dominated the space between our backyards. What's it shape like? Ryan asked, confused. David just shook his head as he peered intently at the night.

To block out that high-set floodlight, the thing out there either had to be very tall or... were very close. Gasping, I pulled them both down just as the windows began to rattle. We had in the corner beneath the window not daring to move until the rattling stopped. Eventually, David peaked. As he did so, screams rang out from the house opposite ours. We peaked too, and we saw the weirdly morphing window had gone dark. All the other lights outside were on at full strength.

It's jumping from light to light. David breathed, looking rather sick. We watched intently as his guest-proof true. One light came on, another one out. And our neighbors within that light screamed in pain and terror and went silent. All the light whispered, my heart pounding. We have to break all our lights. David stayed at the window and brought out his cell phone to call the police.

Ryan and I hurried through the house smashing light bulbs, shaking hands. I'm so sorry. Ryan said quietly as we met up in the back kitchen, now cloaked in darkness. I just wanted to hang out with you, and then... I touched his arm. It's crazy, I know, but it's not your fault. There's stories, always stories. I remember our words because screams came from the basement,

and we rushed through the house. Pitch black radiated from a rectangle on the floor, darker even than the non-light of the basement at night. I realized our mistake at the same moment that I saw half of David lying in silhouette on the floor. With all our lights broken, the entity had jumped to the glow of his cell phone. An expanding rectangular cone of utter darkness lined the space from the phone on the floor to the ceiling. Ryan and I froze, not daring to move. What was this thing? Could it see? Could it think? Was it aware of us at all?

Time wore on, and every muscle in my still body began to burn to its limit. If we made no sound, if we made no movement, would we survive? As I felt myself about to break, light flashed by our windows. Police! Someone shouted. Is there anybody back there? Identify yourself and step out. A few moments later, the void was gone from our basement, and blood-curdling screams echoed outside.

A loud gunshot followed. Ryan and I plugged up all the windows with blankets and pillows as best we could than huddled in the basement. I thought to peer out with just my eye exposed and watched the thing leap from light to light in search of more victims. 45 seconds. It never jumped sooner than 45 seconds since the last. It barely missed Mr. Jeffers, our neighbor, who I can see hiding in the basement next hours. If I could have jumped sooner and gotten him, it would have. It revels in the play of light and dark.

dark outside. That is its strength. It needs light, but without darkness, it has no place to hide. We just have to get to morning, and everything will be all right. The half of David that was outside the cone of blackness is starting to smell. 5 a.m. 6 a.m. Almost sunrise. Come on. No, it couldn't. I can see the sky lightning, but it couldn't, couldn't jump to the sun. Could it... Oh, God. We're going to try to get it to jump to a cell phone again, then trap it in the laundry room.

No windows, no escape. I'm so sorry. Sorry for what? I would never know. I dropped the journal as the rest of it was blank. Moving further into the house, wary of unwarranted darkness, I quickly descended the steps into the basement. All the high and narrow windows within sat plugged by pillows and blankets.

except for one. Half a rotting corpse lay decaying in one corner. Covering my mouth and my nose with my shirt, I moved in further. There it was, a single door, shut with no other means of access. That must have been the laundry room. I opened the door carefully, even though I knew the entity was already gone. A single rotting hand lay within, holding a dead cell phone. Gray cinder blocks formed the walls.

A small beam of light filtered through a crack in the foundation. That was how the thing had escaped. Ah, you never really had a chance. I took a towel from a dryer and threw it over the remaining hand. The best burial these people would ever get. I left the house without another word and proceeded back towards the rift. Had the darkness entity somehow bored through the wall and opened the portal? Perhaps that was how it had arrived here in the room.

the first place. But if it had come to our world, it only entered straight into a cloud-covered forest at night, found itself without a light source, and evaporated on the spot. A miscalculation in the most ironic degree. Or so I assumed, since neighborhood children were playing with the rift instead of being annihilated. Or perhaps the rift on this side had gone somewhere else at the time. It wasn't possible to say, at least until tomorrow. I didn't normally entertain such grim thoughts, but I couldn't help but wonder as I stepped back into my own universe what it must have been like for the people in this world to look up and see their sun turning black, only to find themselves disintegrating a moment later. Friends, family, neighbors, all screaming in terror and confusion. The rest of the world slowly rotating into a lethal sunrise with nothing but silence to one them.

Curious, I thought I'd drop this journal back at the house. Shrugging, I tucked it under one arm and began walking home. My thoughts bitter and brooding. Hopefully tomorrow the portal will go somewhere new, and I'll have something to occupy my time. After carefully applying my thumb to the red glass surface to leave several natural smudges, I carefully pressed the panel into the metal frame I devised. Once the transparent crimson rectangle was firmly in place, I tapped the center. That one did it.

The glass cracked right up the middle, offsetting each half by a barely perceptible degree. It was a very slight malformation, but that was the point. I attached the frame glass to a metal rod and positioned it just so, measuring the placement of the nearby mirror and camera. I made sure everything was in place. I stepped out of the room and closed the door behind me. The string attached to the door pulled the covering away, revealing my object of study only once I'd left the room. A lanky and bespectical teenager stood in the next room, clearly surprised to see me.

What are you doing here? Glancing around at the empty room and dust-filled chambers of the abandoned house I'd slipped into. Is this your house? Absolutely not. I wouldn't be safe at all. I moved to a single rickety table I'd salvaged as a place to put my laptop and reader device. I gave the system one more run-through before I turned on the camera in the next room. He stepped a little closer, looking at my laptop screen from afar.

What's that? It's a journal I found in another universe. I replied, carefully directing the makeshift page turner I'd created. But I suspect it's a cognitive hazard. I dropped it, but then still had it with me later. I even brought it back to our world. Very stupid move. He gave a small, nervous laugh.

You're weird. He took one step closer. Why is it red like that? Don't read it directly. I warned him. The book is in the next room. I've reflected its image off a mirror through a smudged and offset spectrum filter into a camera, which sends the image to this computer upside down.

Remember, it's backwards, too, because of the mirror. So what we see here has many obfuscations and errors to protect our minds. Finally, I built a custom OCR program to translate the malformed text to this device. Eyes wide, he came fully forward and touched the rather battered device directly. What's it due? It's a Braille reader. That's an awful lot to read some book, right? You can never be too safe.

I suggest you tell the other kids in the neighborhood about this technique, given their habit of stealing things from other universes. He took a step back. I don't really talk to the other kids much. But you've been through the portal in the woods. Yeah? Can you tell me anything about it? I asked, running my hands along the Braille reader as I did so.

Christ. Menace, butler, outvoiced, snubbiest, pig-sticker, unallayed, nephrectomizing, reappropriation, nefarious, peninsularism, commence, psychedelia, Ossmateria, Guthrie. Even through all the safeguards, airs, and translation into braille, which was normally the Holy Grail of Hazard filters, the book was insane gibberish. I'd first seen it as a journal filled with diary-like musings and random doodles. It was only pure luck that I hadn't read anything but the last entry. The account had made sense of the empty world I'd visited, and its apocalypse by a hungry

darkness entity. Had that part of the book been fake too? What then had killed everyone. But I'd seen the half-dissellied corpses. That much at least had to have been true. Had the unknown girl who'd written those things somehow added to the end of the book without realizing what it was, or had it acquired cognito-hazardous properties after she was already dead? The portal was just there one day. I was walking and ran into a bunch of younger and older kids throwing things into it. Guys dared each other, sure, but nobody was that stupid. We threw stuff into it, even made a big rope and let a stray dog run around in there.

It seemed safe after a while. Only thing, though, it goes somewhere new every morning. We don't know what would happen if we were still inside at night. So, it was as I suspected. Holding a box, my eyes closed, I crept into the room and closed the cardboard flaps around the book. I only opened my eyes once it was safely sealed inside. Is it safe now? As safe as it can be, with bare-bones tools, I told him, heading for the front door with the box under my arm.

Well, are you coming along? He was, apparently. He followed maybe ten or twenty feet behind me as I headed through the old Dotson lot and back into the old growth forest beyond the last row of suburban houses. The Blue Ridge Mountains towered on the horizon as I crested the abrupt hill just shy of the portal. For a moment, I could see above the treescape, and I scanned the distance out of habit, but noticed nothing anomalous. Several children, ranging from young to upper teens, sat around the portal.

They all froze as I approached, clearly fearing that their secret had finally been discovered by the adults, but I ignored their apprehension. What do we have today? The oldest boy, probably 17 or 18 years of age, stood slowly. It's a bad one. instinctively responding to my implicit authority, he waited. I peered through the vast oval rift. This time, the portal had opened into an area too small to contain it.

Before me, I saw three spaces, a gloom-filled and empty restaurant, a rain-filled alley filled with strewn trash, and the back section of some sort of office, also dark and empty. The sky, visible only above the alley in the middle portion, sat opaque and stormy. The entire scene was eerily quiet, and I realized that sound did not travel back through the rift. What's so bad about this one? Just wait for it.

I did wait. A moment later, lightning flickered quickly, revealing the terrible secret of this new world. I see. I looked down at the box under my arm. This thing needed to go before it had a chance to do whatever it was capable of. I began running through scenarios in my head. judging the likelihood of an active threat this long after every human on that planet had died horribly.

A moment later, I stepped through the rift. I looked back and saw the forest and the assorted kids. Their images ran hazy from the rain pouring down the front of the portal. It wasn't lost on me. No matter the energy native in this world, it seemed to have a passive inability to cross to ours. Staying close to the alley wall to dodge the worst of the rain, I stepped ginger. over the places the lightning had shown me to avoid. I paused once I reached the street and peered both directions for a few moments.

Another flash of lightning struck, this time followed by tremendous thunder that shook my very bones. Under this second round of flashing, I saw them again. Corpses strewn all about the alley and street. Huddled masses had fled this direction and been cut off without mercy. Tragic enough, certainly, but odd for another reason. Their rotting remains were invisible when not under direct illumination. I crept into the restaurant with a pounding heart.

An ancient and decayed smell filled the humid gloom. I moved through an empty dining area and searched through several cabinets in the back until I found a flashlight. Knocking and turning it until it finally came on, I shined the light around. Under the beam of my flashlight, almost every seat in the empty dining area held a corpse, hunched or yawning depending on the direction it had fallen. I had only managed to avoid touching them by sheer luck. Little twisting blackened strings of fungus and rot were all that remained on their plates. A fitting feast for the dead. Almost every position had been served

a plate of delicacies, now long past identifiable. I chose a chair that had not been served and carefully placed my box down. The box had grown warm the moment I'd entered this world, and I was curious. Scooting the cardboard inside, I laid the book out on the table and flipped it open from the back to avoid any hazardous contents in the front. I saw only the last entry, which I knew from experience to be reasonably safe to read. I'd had a suspicion that its contents would be different here, and I was right. I was on a date of my favorite restaurant. I was even having a good time.

I don't know what happened. She and I ran into Jen. Now, she never liked Jen, but she put on a good face for the conversation. If I hadn't been so oblivious, I would have guessed she didn't really want to change our plans and go to that stupid party with Jen. I've never really liked parties. Not really. I always get self-conscious, and my brain gets all tired trying to keep up with all the things I keep imagining other people are thinking or saying or expecting. Pretty soon, I always just want to go home.

I can't go home, though, because I needed a good excuse to leave, a believable one, so that people won't secretly judge me. I got my excuse, I guess, when Jen died. I wasn't sure what happened. Nobody was sure. She was always a party girl. Had she overdosed? She was bleeding pretty profusely from the nose, and she'd fallen and got terrible slashes up her back. But she'd been locked in the bathroom, and nobody had found her until it was.

was too late. My date insisted we leave when the commotion started, and I agreed wholeheartedly. On the way out, I heard a very odd cry, saying, she's gone, her body's gone, but I wasn't sure what to make of it. On the walk home, I apologized profusely, but she just seemed scared. Two blocks down, we saw a group of people huddled around another body. It was then that I felt something chill and sharp move by me. But I turned and saw nothing. I had the inexplicable sense that I was very close to something large and menacing, but the night darkened streets seemed normal,

save for the worried people calling emergency services. Another few blocks down, my Dayton and I stood under a streetlight and waited for the bus. We decided to keep moving when a homeless man on the other side of the road seemed to fall rather roughly. Blood splattered up as if he'd... But it didn't make sense. Why were all these people having terrible accidents? Just after we kept walking, I looked back, and, for a split second, I thought I saw something moving towards us. It was a mere blink against the streetlight we just abandoned, and it was gone almost immediately.

But I quietly insisted we walk a little faster. Four police cars surged past us, lights of fire, and sirens blazing. In the rotating red and blue, I thought I could make out a weird blur behind us on the the sidewalk, but my eyes just couldn't make sense of it. I looked up from the book. The boy I'd talked to earlier had followed me. You shouldn't be here. You're here.

He replied, standing by the door and peering out into the storm. I shrugged. As long as he didn't come further in, he wouldn't risk running into the rotting bodies dotting the restaurant. How far behind me had he been? Did he know about them? I looked down to find that the story had skipped part of the narrative. There was a small gap where I'd stopped reading and no text in between.

Odd. But then again, this wasn't just a book, and these weren't just written words. She slammed the door behind us just as something bashed angrily on the other side. What the hell is going on? She screamed. I helped her force it shut, and I locked it with a relieved sigh. I have no idea, but we can hold up here until... Until the police do something.

The door to my apartment was solid and sturdy, containing a heavy sheet of metal as a form of security most campus houses shared. I had no windows on the first floor. Instead, stairs went straight up to my apartment on the second floor. Never was I more thankful for my cramped brick and metal entryway. Dashing upstairs and closing and locking the door to the stairwell, we took refuge in my bedroom and turned on my small television. Static. There was only static. Our cell phones didn't work either. and the internet was out. It was then that we really started to think we were screwed.

Deciding to turn off the lights so as to avoid drawing attention to our location, we sat and peered out the windows into the night. Clouds covered the moon. Tree swayed in chilly autumn winds. Nothing living seemed to move. There! She whispered, pointing down the street. I saw nothing.

I was under the street light for just a second, she said, trembling as she clung to my arm. I had to confess. Despite the terrible things happening, part of me was still happy. Wait, I saw something under a streetlight, too. And when the cops passed, and the lights... The lights. Something had brushed past me in the dark,

and something had pounded on our door just as we'd gotten inside. But I had no porch light. Intently, I stared at the closest streetlight until it happened. Something horrible and twisted shambled past, visible only under the strongest part of the streetlights glow. It was gone almost as soon as I realized I was really seeing something. You smell that? My date asked, almost at the same time that I realized we'd made a terrible mistake in turning off all the lights.

In the very dim orange glow from the streetlights outside, I noticed a dark stain on the carpet near my roommate's bed. What if one of those things had already gotten inside here before we arrived? I jumped up and flipped all the lights on. illuminating each room in the apartment with a heart-freezing moment of terror. The last light, the one in the kitchen, finally revealed it. It had been on the other side of the apartment from us, and we'd stayed quiet, but now it knew we were there. It came for me with a demonic and wholly inhuman grin.

I shouted, ran for the front door, and pulled my date through as she came to meet me. I knew what these things were now, and I knew we were doomed. but I still managed to grab the emergency flashlight from the front staircase. We burst forth from the heavy door, shoving the creature there aside, and I hesitated only long enough to shine my flashlight at it and get a good look. I'd guessed right. We took off running into the night, but screams were already ringing out from multiple nearby streets. We could seek shelter, seek food, seek safety, but, from the horrors I'd seen,

I knew there was nowhere to hide. That and it wasn't cloudy at all. From out here we could better see the reflected glow from the city's lights. There was no moon. Not because of the clouds or because something massive was blocking out the entire sky. The dim twinkles I'd mistaken for stars were in fact the city's own light reflected from some sort of massive structure arching over us from horizon to horizon. Not a ship. Not a building.

It seemed more like a leg. But none of that mattered, after what I already knew. I didn't have the heart to tell my date as we picked a basement to huddle in, but we'd seen the creature pursuing us before. It had followed us from the party. It was, or had been, Jen. Twisted, bloody, and visible only in direct light. But it was her, no doubt, without any trace of humanity.

I looked up as the implications of that statement sank in. Hey, kid, I whispered as quietly as I could. What's your name? Thomas. He whispered back, emulating me out of worry. What's up? We really have to go, and you can't make a sound. Why?

I stood slowly, shaking my head. I couldn't tell him we were sitting in a room full of invisible corpses that were anything but dead. So slowly, I stepped between the tables, heading for the front door. Creeks echoed around me as unseen joints began snapping, cracking, and moving. Although I could see he was terrified, Thomas knew better than to make any noise. I listened carefully to the movement around me. Were they simply reacting, or were they certain of my presence? I took one quiet step at a time until I saw chairs began to move back as their unseen occupants stood. I broke into a run, and I pointed toward the door.

Thomas wasted no time in rushing out and into the rain, but he almost immediately tripped on invisible rotten piles of flesh. Picking him up, I waited, heart threatening to thump out of my chest until the next flash of lightning revealed a path forward. He saw the body strewn about. He saw that they were starting to move and awaken, but I grabbed his mouth and kept him from screaming. Now that he knew, I used my flashlight, shining at her.

hurriedly around us. The beam shined across a moving circle of decayed flesh. Hundreds of unseen corpses approached through the streets, like ghosts in the rain. I shined the flashlight ahead, illuminating our path, and we splashed through heavy puddles and leapt over clawing rotten hands. Pushing down the alleyway as the rain intensified, we ran back through the portal at full speed. Pausing in the safety of the forest to catch my breath, I turned and looked back. The alley sat clear and empty, until a flash of lightning illuminated an endless legion of living corpses, all standing still and gazing at us. They made no move to enter the rift, but that didn't make me feel any better. Beyond them, up in the sky, I had made the same mistake as the doomed man and his date. Those

weren't clouds, just the reflections of other parts of the sky on vast metal, impossibly high chrome, and it began moving as we watched. The children all around screamed and flinched as a silent but tremendous impact on the other side through mountains of rubble across the portal. Moments later, it was buried and showed only on to the impenetrable blackness of layers of rock and dirt. We, however, remained perfectly safe. Only the other side of the portal had been buried, and I was certain it would simply open onto a new destination the next day without interruption. Are you all right? The oldest boy asked me.

Excitedly, the other kids began asking Thomas what had happened. Enjoying the attention, he began smiling and telling them exactly what happened. There was no need for embellishment. I'm fine, I told my lone listener, shaking water out of my hair, I looked down as I did so. Damn. Without realizing it, I'd brought the book back again. Had it been in my hand through the whole escape? I set my jaw.

I'd try again tomorrow. I crested the last hill and immediately noticed excited energy among the neighborhood kids, crowded around the portal. We got a good one today? The children parted, and my unofficial's second command stepped forward, the 18-year-old boy who often corralled the others. Looks like it. Peering beyond him, I found a rather surprising sight.

Each day for the last week, the random destinations had been non-starters. One world had been completely on fire, from the close. closest flaming ground to the distant smoldering mountains, and there'd been no sign of abatement. We spent another day staring in horror across a vast ocean of what seemed to be thick blood. The smooth and endless crimson surface had been interrupted only by a few massive, bone-like protrusions, and a sunless sky of carved ivy presided over the inexplicable sight. Weird ripples had moved in that blood ocean, as if hidden creatures lived beneath. The portal had never shown anywhere but alternate Earths as far as anyone had seen.

I'd warned the kids not to think too much about how our Earth had become like that ungodly place. That way lay madness. It had definitely been a relief to find the portal showing on to an open green pasture the next day, and we'd almost gone in, but my second noticed it at the last moment, an eerie lack of parallax. The green pasture was an illusion, almost like a perfect television. vision screen displayed across the rift.

What truly lay beyond was impossible to know. Such a deception hinted at far worse intentions through that particular portal than most worlds. Most worlds didn't seem to know or care about us. Every earth we'd glimpsed in the last week had been an anthem to human life in some way or another. Every world had been dead or dying. I'd figured that this was all somehow related to the otherworldly book I was trying to get rid of, and its inexplicable pension for detailing the final stories of the doomed.

But I couldn't be sure. I didn't know if it controlled the portal or whether it was merely connected to it somehow, but the children reported that the destinations were definitely getting worse. The first few weeks they observed, there had been nothing but pleasant forests, open plains, and innocuous oceans. But today's site changed our data set. Today the portal opened on a busy street in a city that looked much like that. New York.

We watched people drive past in recognizable cars and trucks. Many passerby were on foot, hurrying with very human impatience. It didn't occur to me until I had already stepped through. Nobody on the other side had given the portal any heed. Suddenly, surrounded by the hustle, movement, and engine rhythms of a busy city street, I turned and looked back. Yep, there it sat. A ten-foot wide, jagged oval in space showing a forested path.

and a crowd of children watching from the other side. None of the suited busy bodies on the sidewalk gave even the slightest glance at the portal, or me for that matter. They bumped against me and brushed past in an ongoing series of collisions. None so much as flinched, none apologized. They weren't completely unaware of me. They just didn't care. Given that we'd not yet seen a world where any human being was still alive,

I had the distinct concern that these people were nothing more than Marionette. If they were dead, if they were just emulating life, then that meant, in the middle of a busy, big city street, I was actually completely alone. I'd seen many things in my life, and almost nothing truly got to me anymore. But I'd never been able to handle zombies. Something about that kind of soulless fate just struck me as existentially horrifying in a basic and gripping way. Forget this.

Placing the book on the sidewalk, I'd dark. darted back through the portal. The kids asked me what had happened, what was wrong. I looked down. The book was in my hand. Damn it. I watched their expressions. Did I put this down on the sidewalk?

No, one said. So the book doesn't teleport back to my possession. I realized aloud. It's a mental diversion, a trick of perception and memory. Stealing myself, I went back into the portal a second time and shoved the book into a large purse of a passing businesswoman. I pressed myself up against the wall of a building, waited a few seconds, and then closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, analyzed my own thoughts, and then looked down.

Yep, the book was still in my hand. The damn thing was intent on preventing any simple method of getting rid of it. I studied the passing oblivious people, and I soon began walking along with the flow. Could there be some device, creature, or power here that might help? Experience told me that, when facing a threat beyond human capability, the best bet was to find an even worse threat and pit them against one another. Between the balance of two terrors sat a sliver of hope. It was the same principle as the nuclear standoff between superpowers during the Cold War.

The future of the human race had been predicated on the careful opposition of conflicting Armageddon's far more often than most people would care to know. A haggard female voice interrupted my growing panic. Don't move! I'd long ago learned to instantly follow any desperately shouted warnings. Freezing in place, I waited as the shatter continued making noise and approaching me from behind. She might have been coming to attack me, sure, but true human desperation was hard to fake. Not like that.

Oh, God! She said again, grabbing the end of my jacket and pulling me directly backwards. I thought there was nobody left. Can I move now? What's the danger? Yeah, yeah, just don't go that way. How have you made it this long? Looking ahead surreptitiously, as I slowly turned to face her,

I saw nothing ahead on the street, except a few office entrances, a coffee shop, and a sandwich place with a bright red light out front that shone down on passerby's. What unseen threat lay ahead that needed such warning? The stream of businessmen and women seemed to face no threat. I froze. For a moment, a shadow passed over my soul.

The girl before me was as haggard as she'd sounded, dressed in a tattered suit that had once been gray and clean, but now bore dirt and rips in visible testament to homelessness. She seemed every bit the sole survivor I'd instantly envisioned upon hearing her desperate voice. Her wild shock of dirt- smeared hair hadn't been cleaned or combed in some time. Christ! Oh, Christ Almighty, I prayed, but I thought,

I thought I'd never see another person again. Wary, I kept my eyes on her. Are these not people? Underneath a furrowed brow, she narrowed her gaze. Do they seem like people to you? I said nothing. They're all in there still. She stated after a moment.

I stabbed one or two out of frustration a few years back. They come out of it just as they die. They're all thinking the same thing in there. In there? In their heads. She looked around with compassion and fear. They're screaming. All of them.

So another apocalypse. This world wasn't safe and normal after all. While I hesitated, she looked to her right. The hell is that? Silently, but quickly, I ran a cold-hearted evaluation of this unknown girl in her situation. The consideration was thus. How likely was it that a species-ending threat would remain active and wary long after it dominated the planet.

No matter how fantastical, extra-dimensional, or incomprehensible a threat, one rule of logic had to remain. Time was a resource, motivation was a resource, and the combination had to be right for a threat to remain dangerous. If almost all humans were dead or controlled, then there was no longer any point in maintaining active surveillance or traps. I'd already recently blundered through two such worlds where living humans had not been expected. I'd even read a book for several minutes in a room filled with invisible animated corpses

and gotten away with it. They'd been completely caught off guard. But this girl represented a catch-22. She was alive. Therefore, traps and surveillance might remain. If she was a trap, though, that meant there were probably no free humans, no need for traps. It's a portal to another universe. I told her, gently holding her back as she eagerly moved toward it. I'd a start. I'd a decided to only tell half the truth. It'll kill you if you cross without me. She seemed on the verge of tears as she gauged my unreadable expression. Please. Quickly, help me understand this world and leave behind this book if I can. I told her,

hefting the tomb, then we'll go. She pulled me into a nearby alley that I found to be disturbingly like the one I'd run through in the rain the week before. It's... She began, but she opened and closed her mouth in frustration without making any further their sounds. It won't let me talk about it. I nodded slowly. It was never quite that easy, was it?

I lifted the book. This will tell me then. I'm pretty sure it recounts somehow the final tales of those who died nearby. The tale of this unknown person might shed some light on the situation. I remember the day the first one came out. People were lined up around the block to be the first to get it. It was just like any phone or tablet craze, except to bigger. Who wouldn't want to erase the mononomy of work from life?

I was never one for the latest trends. I decided to wait, and maybe save up some money for it. You could tell the co-workers that were using it. They had slight half smiles on their faces as they labeled, folded, typed, swept, and mopped. Any simple manual task became a time for lazy daydreaming as the iWorker took over basic motor functions. All you had to do was program it for the task by performing it yourself a couple times. And then? You could tune out, listen to a book on tape, or even sleep while your limbs worked.

It was a bit off-putting in a way I couldn't quite explain. Co-workers using the iWorker were zoned out or asleep, and the work floor got awful quiet, awful fast. It was my job to direct the flow of boxes from our shipping warehouse. But I couldn't keep up with my underwear coworkers who worked on and on without getting tired, without smoke breaks and without pauses for conversation or mental focus. My gym too got weirdly quiet. People programmed their eye workers for workouts, even they weren't supposed to,

and happily gotten the best shape of their lives without even being mentally present for the effort. Of course, a spade of people up and died who said there's too ambitiously. But it was their own fault. Or so the television said. The next eye worker would hook a little deeper, and automatically sensed when the body was being pushed too far. I'd just save it for that one, I decided. I didn't want to die on the job because some idiot device didn't know not to carry boxes for 18 hours straight without rest.

The third generation came out before I even got halfway to my savings goal. This one integrated wirelessly with our relatively new driverless cars. And so you could fit your car into your routines. There were people automating the whole drive to work, their entire shift while they slept, so they could wake up and have the evening and entire night to actually live. Now that tempted me. I could have sold some stuff to join in on the trend.

I wanted to sleep through work and have 16 hours a day to hang out. Sounded damn pleasing it did. It was so pleasing, in fact, that it really started going global. They made him cheaper and smaller and less invasive to your neck and neck and not. nerves. I would have gotten one then, but I hurt my back at work. And the medical bill wiped me out, and put me in so much depth I still couldn't afford it. Worse, I'd damage my spine. So there was a chance I'd never be able to use one, at least not even the current models. It was about then that the shift started getting longer. Sixteen hours a day was quite a lot to hang out and party and relax.

So people started signing on for longer shifts. More money, more leisure. Right? When I came back from medical leave, I lasted maybe two hours before my boss came around with that kind of shit sorry look. I knew immediately. Everyone else in the warehouse was eye-working, moving around all silently with half-smiles on their faces,

and they were all working 16-hour shifts. Here I was with a hurt back. moving slowly, working inefficiently, and I wanted the same pay as these diligent types. I told him he could screw right off, even though I regretted my rudeness instantly. Still, I was out of a job, and I would soon have nowhere to go. I spent the next few months at a shelter, along with many other injured types of my situation. The divide between those who could I work and those who could work. couldn't was huge. We were useless for modern jobs anymore. Those daydreaming types could work

almost all day long without a word of complaint, and for lower and lower wages. What did you need money for when you were working almost all day long? What did you care what you got paid when you weren't even mentally present for the work? You just woke up for a few hours each night once you got home, watched a few TV shows, then clicked out again. Repeat. I'd been homeless for maybe a year when we heard the news. They'd invented an eye worker that anybody could use, regardless of injury. A lot of us saw that as a salvation come to town. But then, I hated the whole concept.

Passion. That was me. Passion. I was the one sending on the corner shouting at sleepwalkers about their idiocies, and inadequacies, and iniquities. Nobody heard. Well, their ears heard, but there was nobody at the wheel. Funny thing, though, this new model, it worked through the eyes.

It was just light. You'd walk by one of those nodes on the street, or in a hallway, or at home, and it would program you the way you wanted, visually stimulated neurons, or some such science bullshit. Well, there's the thing. All the previous models needed to be recharged eventually. They were devices, just like a phone or a tablet. And they couldn't just go forever. These could.

Suddenly you've got these religious types advocating going on autonomous mode full-time. That's what they called it then. Because a bunch of other brands had to come out by then. Not just iWorker. It was virtuous, they claimed. To work 24 hours a day. If you weren't present for the work, you avoided suffering. And if you were working, you were contributing.

It's free contribution, you see. Perfect virtue. Our world without suffering, but with endless productivity. One by one, our little homeless community dwindled. I'd run into Jeff or Sarah or George or Yuya, and they'd suddenly turn into clean-cut model workers. They didn't recognize me. Of course not.

They were asleep. At some point, watching these light programmers get installed all over, it occurred to me. The companies that produced these things were all full of labor using the devices. Every one of these goddamn hypocrafters was asleep. Walking around in bodies that were endlessly toiling away, putting up more light programmers. Marketing light programmers. building better light programmers. It was a thing in itself.

A thing would just keep going and going. And maybe it had been that way since the start. And we'd all just bought into it like fools. Street by street, the city got quiet. I imagine they're all like that. Nobody talking. Nobody interacting. Nobody living.

They're all just working. You got to work 24 hours a day. to survive on a dollar an hour, and you can't work 24 hours a day without being on the autonomous mode. I learned to avoid the lights. I don't want that shit in my brain. I steal whatever I need, because nobody cares, nobody's watching. There are no police anymore, because there's no crime anymore.

Other than me, that is. The whole world's running around with more hustle and bustle than ever before, but the whole world's asleep and deader than I've ever seen. seen. Two years? Three? It didn't snow last winter, global warming. I can't be sure what data is anymore. They don't run on clocks and such anymore. All their autonomous shit is wireless now. They sit near computers that don't even have monitors and just type on keyboards without even seeing. Another year after that, wandering around in a zombie city, I must have lost it for a bit. I saw one die He came out of it just

Toward the end All he could do was scream He just screamed And screamed And screamed At the top of his lungs But it was what he was screaming That terrified me so

Thank you He was screaming, thank you I saw another one die Soul-chilling shit They're all in there Still and they can't stop anymore. I don't even know when that happened exactly.

But the system, see, it got itself perpetuating. That's the word. The cycle I'd recognize had been true and growing stronger. And it didn't like people like me lurking around its edges, stealing things, stabbing people, and mucking up efficiency. They grabbed me maybe a week after the second stabbing, forced me into one. one of those bright red programmer lights on the street. By then it wasn't a choice anymore. And it could just straight tell you what to do in the name of efficiency.

I've been wandering the streets ever since. I've got a job. I do 24 hours a day now. I do what I'm good at. What I did before? I'm just me. I'm just homeless. And I find other loose minds like my own end.

No! It didn't work. Not entirely. The old spinal injury kept me half immune, and they don't know I know. I'm a horrible liar half the time, and a free mind the other half, never listening to anything I say. My thoughts aren't my own. I sense it out there, a gigantic mind behind the control,

with a plan beyond insidious and evil, and I could use as eloquent words sometimes. But that's not true. And the sad thing is, It's just humans who did this to ourselves. Efficiency. Efficiency. I wandered the streets for five years like that.

So alone. So alone. So alone. I met someone who seemed free on the street today. And I was free for just a little bit. And I shouted, I looked up at her. Her jaw trembled and her eyes ran misty. This wasn't the tale of someone dead at all.

all. I listened to the noises of the busy city street outside our alley. For the first time, I noted the complete lack of human voices. There was only the sound of machines and walking, a rhythm I now found to be completely lifeless and hollow. I stared at her for a long moment, unsure what to do. Can I trust you? She tilted her head down a few degrees, screwed up her face, and let a few tears run free. No. So it's probably not a good idea. if you come with me. She clenched her fists, and I saw a single drop of blood eke out from her excessive grip. I tried to build one.

Eventually. The plans are in my head. It wants me to... There was nothing else I could say, unless... You can still help me, I said quietly, noting her intense strain to hold on to her own will. I need a first-generation eye-worker device. The absolute most basic, no mind-control. no networking. She nodded, eager to be helpful in any way possible to any entity that was not

like the it that controlled everyone else. She ran to a nearby dumpster and pulled out a rusty panel. Here, here. She pulled out several circular devices and picked at them until the least damage remained. You stick it behind your ear right here and just do, and it'll pick up on it. Thank you. I told her, studying the device. If this thing could control a body, without the mind interfering, perhaps it could help us leave the perception-altering book in another universe. I pocketed it, then faced her. Never make promises, I knew.

Never make promises. I couldn't tell her she would be all right. I'm sorry. Blood poured from her clenched fist as she squeezed her long nails harder and harder into her palms, momentarily clearing her thoughts. It's all right. I'm glad there are still free people. I nodded and then departed.

Come back. She called, just as I rounded the corner. Coming! There's nothing weird about the lights at all. You still have the book? Damn. Watch your language, I told him. I drew the eye worker out of my pocket and brought it up for the kids to see.

I couldn't leave the book, but this might just be our ticket. I looked back and saw the homeless girl lurking at the other side of the portal, watching us with a neutral half-smile. I wished that I'd had the courage to kill her and free her from her invisible prison. If it had been anyone else, maybe. Thomas was also present. He was old enough to pick up on my momentary visible sadness. Who's that girl?

I turned away, unable to watch her any longer. Nobody. It began when I found the neighborhood children still hanging around the portal on Thanksgiving. Apparently, no, they didn't have any place to be. Their parents were all working. The parents of every single child were holding down two or three jobs each. It was small wonder the kids had such free reign over the suburbs and Virginia backwards and why nobody else had found out about the portal.

There simply weren't any adults around to watch or warn. And apparently I filled that void. Repeated questions had led to the best answers I could give, and then to proposed preventative measures and then to more. I crested dead man's hill, so called by the local children for its cliffside rise. One wrong move meant a nasty fall into one of the large ravines that so plagued the foothills. For the last several days, while waiting for another habitable destination in the portal, I'd been using it to show the kids that horror and risk were real factors in life,

and that the fear they brought meant paralysis and death for the uninitiated. Come on! I shouted, waiting at the top. In the lead, as usual, was the 18-year-old second. He ran up the steep and leaf slippery incline with a dramatically red face, releasing torrents of sweat with each movement. We've already ran three miles. They're not going to be up for this.

I watched exhausted kids of various ages appearing behind him on the trail, and then I checked my watch. Today's hypothetical gas creature moves at four miles an hour and doesn't get exhausted. I reminded him. Everyone who doesn't reach the top here in the next three minutes just got killed because they couldn't run the same distance as the portal back to the suburb. As the sweat-drenched children came in one by one, I recited, You're dead, you're dead, and you're dead, and you.

They groaned and complained, of course, asking if this monster even existed. I watched them with a stern glare. Absolutely anything can come out of those portals. The better shape you're in, and the sharper your decisions, the best you're in. better chance you'll have of surviving. They quieted and followed me through the woods in drained silence. I had no authority other than what they gave me, but the portal scared them, and they sensed a certain capability about me. We came to the first of the new portals in short order. I approached several younger boys who were shoveling dirt even higher underneath it in order to

eventually bury it. How wide is it? About a foot. A 13-year-old girl answered. One of the smarter ones I was. aware of. About? 13.4 inches. She said, patting the ruler in her pocket. I nodded, slightly larger than a baseball and roughly oval in shape. The shimmering rift hovered in the air around waist height.

It had been the first new expanding hole we'd noticed, but it had not been the last. Space around the main portal seemed to be fracturing in an increasingly wider radius. I led my troop through the next bit of thick forest, where two boys hammered. bits of junk wood around an inch-wide rift we'd found slowly cutting into the trunk of a tree. How's this one? It doesn't seem to be getting bigger. One replied nervously. Yet.

Good. We moved on. The ten-kid crew at the main portal had accomplished an impressive amount in just a few days. The pile of dirt, rocks, and boulders now rose slightly higher than the ten-foot-wide main portal adjacent to it. Carefully layered tree trunks we'd felled, kept the static avalanchevents. Lanchet Bay. Soon we would be able to release the earthly flood and bury the portal if we so needed. I thought that would be good enough, if we could get rid of the book, but I now considered the burying trap a last resort. Tiny riffs were appearing inside boulders, trees, and hills, only visible

once they grew to a sufficient size, so I doubted burying the main hub would stop the tide. All the portals, big or small, showed on to the same destination each day. The situation was becoming less like a punched hole in the dimensional barrier and more like a dissolving curtain between realities. I had no way of knowing whether the breaches would grow exponentially, but I had to assume we only had a few days left before crisis. And most of those few days were spent in stressed frustration, watching as each new daily destination became worse than the last.

The week before the eye worker world, we'd seen burning and bloody nightmare escapes, but these worlds, these worlds ran incomprehensible at best, and mentally scarring at worst. I was considering taking the risky step of ordering the children not to look into the portals, risky because my authority over them only extended as far as this strange phenomenon. If they felt cut out of the process, they'd have no reason to listen to me, and I feared that might get them killed. In a small clearing near the berry trap build, Thomas practiced with a normal book. I watched him place the eye worker on his neck, stiffen, then pick up the book, carry it 20 feet forward, drop the book, and then return to his original location.

He took the eye worker off, waited a few moments, then did it all again, trying to get the needed time down to as few seconds as possible. That was it. That was all he had to do, assuming we found a world safe enough that 20 feet of travel wouldn't mean instant death. Rather than bother him, I turned back to my troop. Go home, get some rest. You all did great today. Tomorrow, our hypothetical monster is a sight stealer, and we'll have to run blindfolded. A choir of groans and wines rang out, but I ignored them. The portal was changing.

All tiredness forgotten, two dozen heads turned and stared, where once had been a vast aerial cloudscape filled with thousands of close and distant corpses hung by thin glimmering strands around their necks, an endless hellish wind chime, now there sat blank whiteness. The whiteness sharpened into a chamber, a long, rectangular room eerily akin to a doctor's waiting room. At the end, maybe 40 feet away, sat a middle-aged woman.

Her smooth ivory desk faced us across the blank white gap of empty floor, and she busied herself with several stacks of paper. After tapping a few collections into a neat pot, while, she placed them carefully down in one corner of her desk, adjusted her light wire-rimmed glasses, and looked up at us. She waited. The portals never changed in the middle of the day. Everybody get back! The kids wasted no time in listening.

We'd already arranged a series of fallback positions. The first was in the lee of the large hill behind me, from which the nearby tops of the forest and distant uneven horizon formed the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was to this location the children moved in an orderly stampede. I remained, with one another. The woman continued waiting. Her gaze on me. Do I have the book?

I asked my second. He looked down at my arm. Yes. And so I did. Lifting it up, I set my jaw. Did I have it the whole run? Yes. Well then, I stepped toward the portal.

Looks like I have an appointment. Be careful. It could be a trap. I peered into the portal. The woman did not seem overly excited or eager. She merely waited. What does logic tell you? He gulped, his stance nervous.

I guess this isn't a trap. We are not interesting or important enough for someone or something to go through all the trouble of connecting to our portal just to kill us. I think they want something. I nodded. I agree. Still, be careful. The genuine warmth and worry in his voice gave me slight pause, but I took a breath and carried forward. Beyond the subtle vibration of the portal, the white room felt exactly neutral in temperature and character.

I remained near my egress for a moment. The woman spoke loudly enough to be heard from 40 feet away, although that wasn't difficult in the deathly quiet chamber. Truce is offered for 16 minutes and 8 seconds as a free courtesy. Please sit. Slowly I moved forward, my eyes scanning every inch of the high ceilings and smooth walls. The rectangular room appeared to have no entrance or exit. Eventually, I found my way to a basic white chair waiting in front of her desk, and I sat, book in hand. Can you destroy this book?

She regarded it, and then me. That information will cost you. Cost me what? I asked, wondering at her motives. I had the distinct impression from little pauses in her motions that she was simply a front for something else. She took a piece of paper from the corner of her desk and slid it forward. One of the shoes you are currently wearing, one of the hands you are currently employing.

From the clues I gleaned and this price choice, I had a vague idea of what was going on, but that only meant bad things. May I ask clarification? She gave a restrained but appreciative smile, as if I'd done something correct. You may. By hand, do you mean the biological structure attached to my arm or one of the people working for me back beyond the portal? The former.

Oh, great. I replied, not liking either answer, but wary of another. Why do you want my shoe? She tilted her head for a moment, as if listening. Her response came after a few seconds to lay. That information will also cost you." She slid another piece of paper out next to the first. The name of the army victorious in the Battle of Long Island, one ocular organ from any source,

three leaders of Xenon. The hell? I kept my face straight and calm, not wanting to betray any information to this entity. Could the questions be an attempt to determine which universe I came from? If I expressed confusion over the Battle of Long Island, or the rarity of Xenon, would that give something away? I could just barely recall that Xenon was present at about one parts per million in the atmosphere, meaning that collecting three liters of it would require three million liters of air.

Was that actually doable? I wasn't sure. May I return after I have gathered payment? You may. I paused halfway across the room. Does my time of safety run out while I'm gone? The woman watched me with a neutral expression. Yes.

I took that as a cue to run the next 20 feet. Once back through the portal, I took only enough time to give an order to my second. He frowned, but he ran at top speed. A few moments of sprinting later, I was back in the chair. The two offers still before me. All right, what next? What else could I do when the time allotted? Of course.

I lifted the book and moved to open it. The woman made a noise, and her face reflected a very subtle fear. The first emotion I'd seen at all. A piece of free advice. If you open that device here, it will be seen as an act of hostility, violating our truce. I froze, my fingers on the cusp of the cover. But I hadn't missed her use of the word device rather than book. Why?

I sat a little taller. Wait, rather. Or, what does the book do? Taking a moment to regain her composure, the bespectacled woman adjusted her sweater, pushed up her glasses, then slid another paper towards me, resting at next to the other one. Two of the options were blank, but one said, one human soul. Growing agitated, I leaned forward. Why are two of the options blank?

If you knew what the options were, it would give you vital information you haven't paid for. So I'm just supposed to guess what? my payment options are? You can guess, or you can pay to know what the payment options are. All right, what's the price to know the first payment option? She slid a fourth piece of paper forward. It only had one option, your ability to love. I wavered in place for a moment, stunned to my very core.

You can take that? Yes, if offered his payment. Does it extend to existing emotions or just new ones? All emotions of love would be in. included, in any consequent emotions you have as a result of those emotions. I could. It would be so easy. Footsteps clattered across the smooth marble floor behind me, and my second approached at speed, his goal in hand and wrapped in a thick layer of leaves. Got it! He cried, plopping it down. The dead bird we'd seen on our run, it squished onto the

surface of the clean white desk under its own weight. The woman did not seem amused, but she She took the relevant offer, the corpse, and its ocular organ, and placed them in a drawer. Payment accepted. The question was, why are your shoes valuable? The answer is, because something of value is stuck to them. To be exact, dirt from a very specific reality. Shoes, plural. That was extremely valuable information.

I slipped off both shoes, intent on trading away one. and keeping the other. I lifted the left shoe, but the woman did not react. I lifted the right shoe, and she still did not react. It seemed either shoe would do. Gently, I sat one shoe on the first offer paper, and she took the paper and the shoe both and placed them in a drawer. The question was, can I destroy this book?

The answer is no. I stood at that. You'd have taken my hand for that answer? You did not seem threatened by my sudden anger. Offers are offers. The game is the game. Your time is half gone, and little profitable trading has been done. I suggest you make wiser choices.

Muttering epithets, I sat again. My second stood behind me, watching in confusion and concern. My frustration suddenly cleared. Of course. I'd been going about this all wrong. I'd been asking questions about the book and not about the book. book and not about the woman or the entity behind her. What do you want?

Another paper slid forward, coming up adjacent to the remaining but unattainable offers. This one had four options for payment, but all were blank. Of course. The game is the game. She offered unprompted. I switched tact. How do we neutralize the threat this book poses? The resulting offered page contained no payment options at all.

She bowed her head slightly. That wasn't a promising sign. Feeling time diminishing to vanishing slimness, I struggled for something. Anything. What wasn't I seeing? I looked up. What does this device look like objectively? I asked, holding up the book.

That one is free. The woman answered with a slight smile. As it serves both our interests for you to know. The final paper slid across her desk. I moved to roll it up without looking at it, but I wasn't quick enough. My second glanced down from his higher vantage point. I heard him gurgling painfully before I could react. Blood spattered across my face and across the desk before me.

I leapt up and caught him as he fell and gently lowered him to the ground as crimson leaked from his open eyes and mouth. He began seizing and thrashing violently, and I held him down as best I could while I turned my head to glare daggers at the woman. Fix him! She began to reach for another paper. No tricks. If you can fix him, do it!

I hesitated. If the entity here had wanted to give me information that was beneficial to both of us, why hadn't it simply done so? Was it far more strictly bound by our game than it let on? Or I won't leave. Your time is almost up. The truce isn't for my safety. I shot back, gambling the boy's life on a guess.

It's for yours, and this! I looked down at him as his seizing began to slowly fade into dying. You'll offer me a choice to heal him. and one of the payment options will be to leave, then we'll go our separate ways. That's your last resort, isn't it? No matter. If you don't give me the deal, I'll stay here. With that device and all its danger, consequences be damned.

The woman stopped completely for a full four seconds, all blinking, breathing, and shifting completely stilled. When she resumed moving, she slid a paper forward. As I'd thought, all the choices offered had been premeditated, and this one, for healing the boy, had leave as the only payment option. Rolling up the objective image of the book without looking at it and dragging my second by his shoulders, I pulled him quickly across the room as 16 minutes and 8 seconds reached its end, and the white walls began to dissolve into seething masses of what looked like brain tissue. I kept going until I could lay him on the forest leaves, but his blood was already receding back into his body. A light green glow hovered

around his head, probably purging the memories of what he'd seen. A tide of children poured down from the safety of the hill, now eager to hear what had happened. I looked up as the portal began to flicker back towards the day's original destination. The corpse-filled sky in its deadly, inexplicable filaments that had choked an entire world of people and drawn them up into the clouds to die together. The woman at the other end of the disappearing room screamed silently and struggled against chains of neural tissue, and then the image was gone. It hadn't occurred to me that the entity's puppet might really have been a human being. That could explain why subtle phrasing she'd used

had given away so much vital information. She might have been trying to help me the only way she could. Had I had a chance to save her and missed it? But of course, that was what it wanted, regret. The entire encounter had been designed to fill me with hurt and regret, or at least enhance what was already there. I had heard a tale just once of a regret demon the offered trades for which every option, including doing nothing, would lead to remorse. It was called a demon because it was bound by very strict behavior, not because it was necessarily related to religion, but the regret part I now knew was exactly true. The ability to leave. The ability to live, Love and all consequent emotions and pains.

What happened? He asked, waking with bleary eyes. I held the book in one hand and the rolled up paper in the other. We got something very valuable. He sat up weakly, his face full of concern. What did you trade for it? Peace. I replied quietly, unwilling to elaborate further.

Another innocent had almost died because of me, and the risk was only going to grow. I looked past the children crowded around and saw Thomas still training his eye-worker. What right did I have to risk the lives of these kids? Was I training them just to foolishly face the unknown and die, just like before? At that thought, the ground trembled slightly underfoot, and the left side of the portal began to rip further out into the woods. I watched, stunned, as several trunks ruptured, exploded, and collapsed as the trees above fell. The wound in space unzipped the very air.

air for another twenty feet. The portal had grown to three times its previous size. I had no orders to give. The regret demon had taken something very valuable for me. I found myself uncertain and wavering against forces like these. Uncertainty and hesitation meant death. I knew something had to be done, but I was forced to admit to someone else for the first time that I was lost. I don't know. That answer was not the one the children wanted to hear. They didn't scream or cry. They remained absolutely quiet, waiting for someone to take away their fear. But I couldn't.

Not in that moment. I could only walk away, book and paper and hand. Maybe if I just had some time to think. Where are you going? My second, no, just an 18-year-old boy, shouted. I had no answer for him. Instead, I departed, stumbling me. Mentally, if not physically, where am I going indeed?

Besides the trade I could have made, might have made, there was the astounding information implicit in one of the payment options I had been given. One human soul. That meant souls were real. Humans had souls. I had a sick suspicion that I knew what the book had been doing all this time. But first, it was time to see what it really looked like. I awoke instantly.

My sense is blazing. By I wrote, I traced back the sound still caught in my auditory sensory memories. A creaking floorboard. My eyes were already locked on him as he came around the corner in the dark. He didn't see me for several seconds. A little jump signified the moment he became aware of my silhouette sitting against the wall. Huh, your heart to find. Thomas breathed, nervous.

I nodded, aware that he could see my outline by the vague glow of the house porchlights outside. By design, never let the enemy know where you sleep. He hesitated. What enemy? A heavy sense of reality descended upon me, and I entertained a light disappointment in myself. None, I guess. It's hard to leave behind certain paranoias. My big sister went to war.

She came back a lot like you. The kid was wiser than his years. I had to give him that. I could only nod again. He came and sat beside me. me in the dark. I've been looking for you for hours. I had no idea there were so many abandoned houses in the neighborhood.

That's half the reason I've stuck around here so long. I laughed quietly. One world falls apart and another seeps into the cracks. My own words gave me pause, like some kind of accidental prophecy. I'd only been speaking of his suburb, overworked parents, and inequality-strained society, but the words themselves reflected something of our conflict with the portal. What's the other half? What?

The other half of the reason you stay. Oh. I stared around the empty, shadowlit room for several seconds. I'd been running from it for so long, it felt like time to release my wound, cleanse my infection. Recent events had permanently damaged my internal armor. The scars I'd built up had been stripped away, leaving raw, bleeding pain in their stead. I had a daughter once. She was about your age, when she, uh, well,

Oh. He took three deep breaths, not sure what to say. What was she like? Tough. Awesome, really. She had simply endless willpower and always found a way through every problem in life. She grew up to be very pretty, too, even despite the condition she was in. He made a confused noise.

I thought she... Right, yes. I corrected myself, my head fuzzy with regret. I saw her. She gave me the eye worker device your training, but it wasn't her, just a version of her from that reality. That must have been very hard for you. Wiser than his years? This kid was more of a respectable adult than I.

Are you still going to help us? He asked after two or three quiet minutes spent thinking. I don't know if I can. I replied honestly. The last time I tried to, I shook my head, choking up. No matter how much you anticipate, no matter how much you anticipate. no matter how smart you are or how fast you are, sometimes it doesn't matter. Sometimes there's just no way out.

I don't want to believe that. What's the alternative? Being that if my daughter had just made different choices, she'd still be alive, that it's her fault? She... Is it your fault, though? Or should you blame that thing that got her? To that, I had nothing to say. This boy, this young man, had somehow hit right in the heart of the issue.

He slumped down. I'm starving. But apparently he was still a young man, and moments of wisdom were fleeting in young men. Don't you have any food at home? He didn't reply. Reaching over to rummage around my oversized travel backpack, I reached past my laptop, various sundries, one saved shoe with special dirt on it, and spare clothing to fish out a $10 bill. I placed it in his surprise hand.

Take it. Get something to eat. Really? Really. Thanks. I'll go in the morning." He curled up against the wall, preparing to sleep. I frowned, but I couldn't stop him sleeping where he wanted. Did he not feel safe at home?

By the ambient light drifting in from the windows, I could see an ugly bruise around his right eye. Make sure you eat till you're practically sick, really glut on some heavy fast food. I sure will. Sometime late at night, I'd intended on initiating my first night. I planned to safely view the objective image of the problematic book, but it didn't seem fair to leave the boy unprotected. I kept the paper with the deadly schematic rolled up safely in my backpack and waited up while

he slept. It was a simple matter to stay awake and alert for hours on end. I coughed and started, suddenly awake, and oddly rested. It felt like I had a soul-weary weight lifted, at least for a little while. How had I fallen asleep like that? If anything had happened, it would have been unforgivable. A scream of absolute terror resounded in the cul-de-sac outside. Rushing forward on my hands and feet, after telling Thomas to remain quiet, I peered out

through the corner of one window. A boy I recognized ran from house to house, knocking on each door. Frowning, I darted over and threw open our front door. What's going on? The boy saw me and ran up to me, shouting his fearful reply. Run with me. I ordered quickly, dashing towards the old Dotson lot and the paths beyond. The exhausted boy followed suit as best he could, and Thomas was not far behind.

What's the situation? The panting, red-faced boy led out his story between ragged breaths. I don't have the book with me? I asked, furious at the 18-year-old's misguided bravado. He explained, starting to lag behind. Falling to his knees, he shouted his last information. My heart seized. Why wouldn't they just go back through the portal?

Something had clearly gone wrong with the main egress in a fundamental way. Thomas kept pace with me a few feet behind as I ran. Go to Susie's portal and tell them to start unbearing it, I ordered, giving no time for debate. Thomas nodded and sprinted off in another direction. I soon crested the final hill, curving up above the Virginia forest and back down beneath the canopy in seconds, only to tumble to a painful and wrist-braining halt. The portal had ruptured even further. Space hung like a sheet flapping in the wind on an invisible cloth line.

No semblance of the original 10-foot portal remained, nor the 30-foot gash I'd last seen. Instead, the path and brush on both sides had been consumed by unstable rifts, a clearing of deadly anomalies nearly 300 feet in length by my best guess. A 10 feet, 30, roughly 270. The portal energy wasn't expanding geometrically. It was growing exponentially. By the same comparison, tomorrow the corrupted space would be a mile and a half wide. The day after that, I clutched the gritty dirt beneath my hands tightly for a moment.

111 miles. As far as I'd seen, the portal had clung to the surface. I had no way of knowing if the riffs were underground in a spherical area too, but this area of spatial disturbance seemed largely rebuffed by the density of the ground beneath. But 111 miles, and the day after that, the numbers began escaping me, but at least 25,000 miles, which happened to be almost exactly the circumference of Earth. The numbers might have escaped me, but the neatness of that value did not. This was a darkly ironic challenge from forces beyond comprehension, save the world in two days,

or lose it on the third. In this exact moment, all I could worry about were the thirty-odd children standing in another reality. The portal had been stable for weeks before I'd interfered. Was all this somehow my fault? A dark grip caught my chest. How many children had to die because of me? Eyeing the maustrum of spatial contortions, I waited, waited, waited, and leapt.

I slid through a small oval barely big enough to fit me. and the blinking rift took one of my shoes at the last, barely sparing me and my foot. Already tired from the run, I pushed myself warily up, and then observed the world that the children had thought safe enough to visit briefly. A ruddy sky swirled high over an endless plain of cracked obsidian. The sun hung huge and red in the sky, seemingly much older than the star I knew. My shoeed foot crunched as I moved, and my bare foot fought for purchase among smooth flat stones. that were dully jagged along the sides.

Glassy black spread out to the horizon. What had the children been running from? I turned to look behind me. The main portal was a mess of blinking riffs and clearly unusable. But that was not the problem, not in the least. A wall of fire approached across the endless obsidian plain, perhaps half a mile out. It came as a sheer smooth curtain of flame, horizon to horizon, cast down from the sky, itself by glowing little glints in what looked like low Earth orbit. Satellites? For what purpose?

Why would this planet be? I looked down at the obsidian beneath my feet, continuously cleansed. Screw logic, screw explanations. My brain screamed. A wall of fire is coming for you. Run! Even in panic, I turned and looked for the children, quickly finding several multicolored dots against black glass in the distance. I was already tired, but not like this. I couldn't let them die like this. Go. Foot down, push, foot down, push, breathe. Faster, faster, faster, faster. The kids were moving away at a pace fueled by fear, but I had to catch them. They were running directly from the wall of fire, but the portal manned by Susie's crew was down an offset vector. I felt my personal top speed hovering back and forth before me.

My legs pumped numbed. My feet crunched and bled, and my arms cut the seared air. But that intangible wall of speed danced just out of reach. I knew I could go slightly faster. I knew it, but I just... I stumbled and fell, falling on to a surprisingly whole plate of volcanic glass. My right wrist roared fire, and my entire body tingled with relentless weakness, but I stumbled back to my feet. Wait!

My shout rang out in clear air, barely audible over the lower. the low roar of uncoming fire. As I kept staggering forward, I saw the kids slow in turn, exhausted themselves, but they could only wait for me to catch up. I entered a circle of sweaty, fearful, drained, and smiling faces. I knew you'd come to save us, said Danny. I took a pain to breath and tried to stand tall. I don't know if I can save us, but I couldn't let you face this alone. He gave a tired nod. What's the plan? I ordered Thomas to run to Susie's crew, and tell them to unbury their portal.

That one's only... I know. I said, cutting him off before he told the other kids. Come on, calculate the direction. I estimate we've gone two miles directly east of the main portal. Susie's portal will be our escape, and it's 4.9 miles southeast of the main portal. Offset by 22 degrees from the line we've been traveling.

Which direction should we head exactly? Faced by surprise math homework, the kids huddled in a massive circle and debated the numbers. I had an answer in mind, but it was important that they felt it by getting it themselves, and a second check never hurt. Finally, they all looked up and pointed. That way? I asked, slowly recovering my breath.

32 children nodded in unison. All right, I prompted them. How long have you been here? The wall of fire crossed the main portal when I was half a mile away. I estimate it's still half a mile away. How fast do you think it's moving? How fast do we have to move? They huddled again, and the answer.

The answer came 44 seconds later. Danny stood tall above the others. Best guess, we have to move 4.1 miles an hour towards Susie's portal to run it. Another darkly ironic number. All right, we've trained for this, I announced, sloughing off the worst of my exhaustion. Exactly this scenario, although it was a hypothetical gas creature then. It's possible, and you know that, right? We can survive this.

32 grim faces nodded in response. Let's set out. I took up the lead, walking slightly faster than the four-mile-an-hour rate that I simply knew by muscle memory. That gas creature had been anything but hypothetical, once, and I'd spent four days in Louisiana backcountry escaping it. I'd been 16 then, in my first encounter with the supernatural. But that endless struggle had never left me, and I'd hoped that long-ago determination would

transfer to these kids. They were all already depleted and terrified, but the human body had to be able to be. more to give than any of them knew. All they had to do was keep pace. Teenagers, boys, girls, and children walked together, pushing their walking stances to the limit. It was too fast to walk comfortably, but too slow to run easily, so we were caught at the worst speed possible. Still, we pushed on. Give it back! I told Danny, who kept the lead beside me. What were you thinking? Breathing hard, he looked away, clutching the to him in hand. You left? I had to. I was wounded.

You didn't look hurt. I was and still am. Inside, but I'm sorry I left. He set his jaw with resentment, but handed me the book. I took it with unhappy anticipation. This world was strange enough that I needed to know if any threats waited between us and our escape. After stealing myself, I opened the book to the back pages. Imagination.

Each day had been slightly warmer than the last, until all. the snow had melted, and people were out in shorts. An Indian summer, they called it, for some reason. Others laughed about global warming. It was global warming, all right, though not for the reasons anyone suspected. Most began sensing something wrong with the night soon after that. It was subtle, really, but disruptive to sleep. Nighttime just wasn't as dark as it used to be. The first reporters came out that week with the first inexplicable data. The stars were growing brighter. It was our problem.

The stars had grown 12% brighter than previous recorded values. All the stars, all at once, for no measurable reason that anyone could discern. What could make the entire universe grow more luminous all at once? But, see, that was the wrong question. The sun and moon were both affected, too. The moon became a painful white beacon in the sky, illuminating the night with dark silver. Sunglasses became mandatory during the day, along with sunblock, air conditioning, and shade. It was rather astounding how long life went on as normal.

People turned up the air in their cars, stayed indoors, and let technology furiously resist the growing heat. As a scientist, I had a rather long-term view of our situation, and I wondered what they would do once the crops started dying, and the food stopped being shipped in. That didn't happen. My intelligent colleagues adapted. The food harvest dipped for a year, but then shot up the next, as a global initiative switched major crops all over the world towards genetically engineered plants that thrived on the extra light. 42% more than usual, and climbing. From that perspective, things actually started to look up. The added heat and light were just more energy for the human race to capture and use. Fossil fuels crashed in favor of solar, which now never, ever had dull moments.

When the sun went down, the moon and the stars took over energy duty. With almost all of our energy being produced cleanly, and the atmosphere undergoing severe weather-chamines, changes, the global temperature actually began to drop back down for a time. It was enough time for us to prepare. Thanks to the heat, war ended as a thing. It was simply impossible to field troops, and energy and food had become practically free. So it was left to fight over. More than that, we had a global threat on our hands, and the human race banded together to overcome.

The weird thing about all this, though, was that the light wasn't the right color. It was growing more and more blue, regardless of source, and we simply had no idea why. I was stationed in one of the pleasantly temperate Antarctic stations for several years. I'd never really had family, per se, and I'd certainly never had more than passing relationships. I'd mostly been a loner that observed the world and felt isolated from it. So, my sudden placement with thousands of intelligent and capable colleagues was a shock. I made friends. We debated philosophy, argued about the cause of the blue brightening, and played clumsy games of volleyball.

We drank alcohol like our military staff to excess, and then regretted it utterly. We even raided the biology lab's dorms with water balloons. They retaliated by stealing a month's supply of pudding from our cafeteria. All in all, I'd have to describe it as the slowest and most pleasant apocalypse imaginable. Over the years, and ever so slowly, that pleasantness began to unravel as the level of incoming light from the rest of the universe reached double, and then triple. The surface became a scorching azure desert that was all but unlivable. Our temperate Antarctic outpost became a savannah and then turned tropical,

until finally, all the plants except for our genetically engineered supercrops died. It was strange to look back on half a life, and on a youth spent unhappy and apart from the world as it was, only to find that world gone. Of the seven billion people alive at the start of our decades of heat, almost all had moved undergrounds into space or onto the new cities on the now striking. the sapphire moon. The first colony to successfully set up on Mars soon had terrifying news for us. It wasn't blue out there, and it wasn't brighter out there. The technology we'd sent out into the solar system hadn't been malfunctioning. With their very eyes, the first interplanetary pioneers confirmed it. There was nothing wrong with the universe at all. There was something wrong with us. The theory had already been proposed, of course, now a civilization of scientists,

we'd had plenty of time to guess. Politics had split along ideological lines, but now the slow time-bubble theory was correct. For unknown reasons, the earth and the moon both had been encompassed in a slow time field that was growing ever stronger. The universe wasn't brighter. It just had more time to shower us with light, and that light had been growing more and more blue shifted due to the time dilation. It took another 30 years for us to figure out why. In the meantime, we watched the Mars colonies rapidly expand, terraform, cover the red planets with humanity, and then, just as quickly as they had come, The mission since there found nothing but a world of silence monolithic cities that were hundreds of thousands of years old.

We weren't that bad. Mars colony should only have aged a few hundred years to our two decades. The opposite of our fates had happened to them. They had been caught in a fast time field. The sun and stars had faded to weak, red-shifted darkness, and they'd all starved, died, and faded away. in the blink of an eye. Strangely enough, the fast time field had departed with them, and the reason behind both our predicaments revealed itself from an impossible vector,

specifically a bacteria living in the roots of our genetically modified crops. Somehow, a bacteria had evolved with time-slowing properties. The cellular organism itself existed in dimensions higher than three plus time. Its internal structure literally branched off into higher dimensions, and an emergent property of its shape was to bend the fabric of time. We had no idea whether this organism had evolved on Earth or whether it had fallen from space, but it was here. And as we'd planted more and more of it globally, the bacteria had grown in total number,

and our problem had worsened exponentially. Mars had had the opposite problem, with its own genetic crops, adapted to live in a much different environment. They had unwittingly bred a new kind of bacteria that had sped up time instead of slowing it down. Just like that, ambient cellular life had wiped away a planet. And when those crops on Mars had died, so had their fast-time bacteria. It was strangely ironic that Mars, the red planet, had died in a lethal red shift, and now Earth, the blue, was dying in its respective color, too.

We knew what the problem was now, but the problem presented itself. How do you cleanse an entire planet of all cellular life? Nothing we had could fight it. It didn't respond to antibiotics and our three-dimensional nanomachines simply couldn't interact properly with the multidimensional bacterial cells. The only solution we found was the oldest answer in the book. Fire. We'll come back once the earth is cleansed. We'll come back and we'll start anew.

We'll just escape to the moon for a time. And then it'll all be fine. I'm boarding this ship in an hour, or I should be, when it gets here. The people on the moon are supposed to be sending the fleet to pick up the two or three billion people still here, but there's been no contact yet. I'm not sure what we're doing about food and supplies for everyone, but I'm sure we'll figure it out. Humanities evolved beyond selfishness, cruelty, and repugnant survival instincts. That's what I tell myself, at least. I got to live a mediocre life, and I got to feel at least partially like a person for a while,

partially included. And for that, I'm thankful. The crowd is growing relentless out here in the blasting blue sands, all waiting in their hermetic suits. But what's an old man to tell them? There are children out here. So many children. and telling them that nobody's coming would only be cruel. But I really thought they wouldn't turn the satellite cleansing system on with us still out here.

At least let us get back underground so we don't see it coming. You sick, sons of bitches, and they're running. The crowd is running. Intent on going east, moving east to escape the cleansing, ever east. How long can they run? How long can they walk? hours, days, weeks. I'm an old man.

I can't join you. But you keep walking, keep going, and never give in. Show those sadistic bastards that human willpower doesn't. I looked up from the book. My thoughts frozen by the sheer magnitude of that unimaginable cruelty and the scope of what had happened to humanity here. For once, the threat had not been outright lethal, but, the existential crisis had still been inhuman. This time, people had done it to themselves.

What happened here? Danny asked, seeing my face. I kept down a surprisingly powerful sob. Nothing relevant, I told him, looking up. There was no blue shift that I could discern. So the bacteria must have been cleansed. The moon was just coming over the horizon, and I thought I saw numerous city-like patterns dotting its silvery landscape.

But how long had they been there? How long had the cleansing system been running? Had something gone wrong with the return plan? Or had they chosen never to come back out of shame and horror of what they'd done? I looked ahead of us, to the east. The sun was gigantic and red, dominating the sky. Had the slow-time bacteria cost the earth billions of years? Was the sun becoming a red giant and expanding to consume the planet?

I peered to the side, studying the moon. The patterns there looked gray and lifeless. Had humanity departed for the stars? Or had they petered out on their dusty new rock? About out of willpower, I shook off my questions. I'd never get answers. And those people, if they were still up there, would hardly help us. Not after all they'd done.

My bare foot had become sliced and bloody, and I could hardly stop to deal with it. Looking back at our group, I noticed some stragglers. Come on! I shouted tiredly. Nobody gives up! Most of the straggling children sped up a little, but one struggled along, visibly limping. Danny! I said grimly.

Keep the pace. He nodded. I stood in place, huffing, and took a moment to bandage my foot with a strip torn from my shirt. The kids all seemed worried that I had stopped, but Danny barked at them to keep moving. Eventually, the limping boy, Ryan, if I remembered right, caught up to me. His entire face was bright red from exertion and dripping sweat. The wall of fire was louder here and more audible without the group's crunching footfalls. I watched him until he reached me.

I hurt my ankle. Hold on to my arm. I offered, taking the pressure off his leg as much as I could. We began staggering forward. We're going to make it. Don't you worry. He had no breath for a reply. I could feel the heat on our backs growing and searing breezes began ruffling our clothes.

I don't want to die. I looked back and saw tears flowing down his face. You're not going to die. I looked back at the fire. We weren't going fast enough. I set my jaw, my thoughts on the people that had died on this world. I'm not going to leave you behind. Out of options, I bent down and had him climb up on my back.

We're all getting out of this godforsaken place. I huffed forward, tapping into reserves I never knew I had. He was no baby and heavy on my back, but I ignored the pain in my feet and the heavy weight in my muscles and pushed on, until I looked further ahead and saw a scattering of children lying where they'd fallen from exhaustion. I couldn't carry them all. Get up! I screamed, still a hundred feet away from the first fallen child. She pushed herself up weakly.

That's it! That's it! Get up! And keep going! Stumbling forward, she began to walk again, her head low and her eyes hollow. Which reminded me, I'd have given anything for a few eye-workers. Those things would have walked the children right to the limits of their endurance without an issue. And thoughts like that, I'm sure, were what led that world to its fate. You! I shouted again, approaching a prone 10-year-old boy whose name I desperately wanted to remember.

Get up! You're not going to die in this oven! All you have to do is walk another mile or two and you can fall down and rest as long as you want. He still didn't move. Finally reaching him, I pushed him with my shooed foot. Get up! Trembling, he took my hand and started walking again after another push.

two more children lay stretched out on the obsidian, and ahead of them I saw four more collapsed in various positions. Even if I did get to them, we were moving too slowly. I could feel the blazing heat at our backs, and I dared not look. The first one we reached, a girl tried to get up and fell back onto the black glass. It was about then that the horrible tree of approaching decisions manifested itself to me. I'd burned all of our spare time, and the cleansing wall was nearly upon us. I couldn't save them all.

Was this what the people on the moon had felt? Unable to feed billions of people? They had to be left behind. I could carry one, but the others had to be left behind. I already had one boy on my back. Did he deserve to live simply because he had faltered first? Could I possibly live with putting him down and picking up another child? I became aware of an added wetness in my sweat.

Tears? I hadn't cried in so long. Now, here, forced to make the worst decision, it was simply happening. Somewhere fuzzy, somewhere outside my cold and calculating survival instincts. Part of me felt the tragedy, but I couldn't feel that part of me. Not anymore. I could save one. Which one?

One clung to my back, screaming as the corona at the base of the wall of fire began dancing towards us. Six children lay sprawled out before me and ahead of me. Should I choose by age? Youngest, oldest, boy, girl? Or should I choose the smartest, the most capable I'd seen? No, I refused to accept it. It was a crappy, terrible situation, and it would hurt them all badly, but it might just...

Handing the book to the boy on my back, I turned around, gripped the girl and the nearby boy by their arms, and began dragging them. They screamed as they slid against the sharp angular obsidian, and traces of blood began soaking their clothes, but we were moving. In turn, we approached each of the other four fallen children, and I had them grip each other with all their remaining strength. They were all young and small. Thus they had been the first to fall, and that fact made them draggable. Screaming at the top of my lungs from the strain, I pulled six crying children across shards of broken volcanic glass, while one clung to my back and shouted continuously for them to hold on. All I could see was

the roiling, blazing bulwarks slowly catching up to us, even looking at the shoes of the farthest boy now and then. If he were to lose his grip on the leg of the boy above him, even for a moment, just pull, just drag, breathe, foot down, push, the other foot down, push. The agony went on without end. A perfectly straight line of pure red, like a laser cut across my awareness and a swath of despair followed the twinge of pain. I fell to one knee as the flare in my spine broached extreme levels of agony. I'd pulled something, or strained something, or simply reached the edge of my endurance. Sometimes there was simply no way out.

I knew that. I did, but I can never accept the reality of it. But the bloodied and battered children did not slip into the flames and die. Given the break they'd needed, they staggered up and began running again. Ryan handed me the book and took off after them, turning in amazement. despite the searing torsion in my back, I saw them desperately charged towards Danny, who stood right next to a small oval in space. On the other side, children silently waved and shouted and motioned for them to come,

wasting no time, they tumbled through with a little push from Danny each. We'd made it. We hadn't lost a single person. Without the boy on my back, I could move a little easier, and I gripped the book tightly with one hand and my side with the other. It's still not big enough for us. Danny shouted. as I approached, reaffirming his earlier unspoken concern.

His eyes jumped to the wall of flame. I came to a stop, swayed in front of him, and lifted the book with a pained gasp. Time for a wild guess then. Without hesitation, I thrust it through the small oval portal. I waited a tick and then pulled it back. I did this thrice more, and then... Space began ripping around the small rift, rapidly expanding the portal to three times its original size. Go!

I told him. He nodded gravely and dove through. I waited as the heat and roar grew behind me to screaming intensity. I could just stay here and the book, the device, whatever it was, would be destroyed with me? Or would it? I couldn't make a gesture like that unless I was certain. A little relieved, I tumbled through the portal.

Get back! I roared as blessedly cool forest air flowed around me like an eddy in a river. Remembering what I'd told them about shouted warnings, they all immediately darted away. I rolled forward, spine's sparking, body-filling agony, as the portal ruptured further behind me. By the time I scrambled to a small hillock and looked back, it had torn out across the entire clearing. Beyond, I saw only descending flame. I lulled my head back on good old dirt and stared up at the trees. I'd done it, had avoided the choice.

I had found that elusive third option that people were so rarely afforded. All that training I'd given them and all the pain I'd ever gone through. It had saved these kids today. I laughed. It was a deep, satisfying thing, and I let it go with all the relief, humor, and wonder I felt. The internal armor I'd lost was gone, but I no longer needed it. I hadn't been wrong. And it hadn't been my fault.

Or maybe it had been. I just didn't care anymore. At some point, life had to go on. And, with time so short, life had to go on now. I had to go through with the plan and view the objective image of the book. I had to know what it truly was. I vaguely remember the children helping me up and a long, staggering journey back to the suburb before I sent them all to get patched up and rest.

I also remember a brief image of the several tequila bottles I had to buy to make my plan work. It was pretty simple, really. Down and nearly lethal amount of alcohol. Wait until you're almost blackout drunk. And then, and only then, take out the dangerous image. Draw it as quickly as possible and accurately as you can, while so inebriated, and pass out. If you're lucky, you'll remember nothing, and your brain won't rupture trying to process the multidimensional image. Viewing it had almost killed Danny.

Would have killed Danny without healing help. I awoke at some indeterminate time the next day, my entire body, a hurricane of hangover pain, and my face in a pool of vomit that had come from my stomach and blood that had come from my eyes. But I was still alive. I was alive, and I'd managed to draw what the book really looked like, or at least what limited sense I could make of what it looked like. As soon as I saw it, quite a few of our problems began making sense. This was not a book at all, but rather some sort of,

incomprehensible, multidimensional device. And as I'd seen it, it was absolutely related to the rupturing portals. Our plan to use the eye worker to get rid of it seemed rather simple and possibly unreliable now, but what other option did we have? I spent the day recovering from my extreme hangover and thinking about ways to get rid of the device. The portal out there, by my calculations, now had to be a mile and a half wide. If only I had more time.

Whatever we were going to do, it would have to be with today's destination, no matter how lethal, and it would have to be tonight. Tomorrow, this entire region would rupture in a space of 111 miles long. It would be far too late. If only I had more time. About that time, I told myself, all around me, the house creaked against the mighty mercurial winds, windows rattled, making the radiating orange from steel lamps outside dance, and I fear the glass might soon shatter.

Get up. Shakily, I slid my hands against the dusty floorboards and pushed, gripping the wall and fighting dizziness. I managed to stand on my one good foot. Closing my eyes for a moment, I did an assessment, sliced up and bandaged foot, badly sprained wrist, fiery pained knot in my spine, body-wide muscular exhaustion from eight or nine miles of running, carrying and dragging the day before, and general deep malaise from a nearer. lethal hangover. What did I have? One good foot, one good hand, a laptop, a backpack of a sordid gear, a spare shoe with an unknown but valuable type of special dirt on it, an objective

and lethal image of a dangerous, multi-dimensional device, a drunkenly drawn but safe to view approximation of said image, and the device itself, sitting on the floor in the guise of a large book. All right then. How do we save the world with this crap? The house, my only companion, replied with a shivering whip and chilly whistle as the wind outside momentarily intensified. I asked it rhetorically, stashing all of my stuff in my backpack and limping towards the front door. Above the trembling orange street lamps, a ghostly pale blue sky clung to the last vestiges of sunset. Dark clouds raced through those spectral colors at an unsettling pace, and it was cold, bitterly cold, when the fullest force of uncoming air.

air pushed through the suburban canyons between houses. To call the evening unnatural would be an understatement. Limping through the old Dotson lot, I quickly discovered that the forest beyond had been devastated by the forceful flinging of hundreds of trees, probably from when the portal had expanded, to my guess of a mile and a half wide, shorn trunks hung at odd angles in the air all around, supported by hillocks, still living trees and each other. I didn't have to go far, Blinking riffs and sickly drooping gouges in the air pulsed on both sides of the path, thankfully leaving just enough room to slip between regions of rotted space. It wasn't one gigantic portal as I'd feared, but it was still tremendously destructive.

The movement of thousands of portals rushing in and out of existence seemed to be fueling the biting icy winds I'd noted back in the suburbs, and I imagined the miles-wide phenomenon was contributing to the eerie weather. The full extent of the destruction was only visible from that one last hill before our usual meeting place. The Virginia forest had been randomly obliterated. Scattered lone trees stood among the wide oval sea of frothing space-time. I wondered, would the sunset-of-flame mountain range block the expanse of the portals west?

They were sticking to a wide, flat, disk-shaped area around the spot where it all begun. The damage was not spherical, as I'd worried. It seemed gravity and locale had some effect on the situation. Dodging down the last hill into sliced beams of amber evening and gloomy darkness, I found half a dozen kids frantically trying to bury some of the smaller portals. Danny was helping, but he didn't seem very hopeful. Thomas sat on a mossy boulder, staring down at his shoveled dirtied hands and nursing his black eye every so often. All of the children stopped and stared at me as I approached.

What's the situation? I asked, probably for the last time. Danny looked at the faces of each of his neighbors in turn before replying with a worried grimace. Looks like this is it. The destination is going to change in a couple of hours and then I assume it's over. But if we take the book through the portal one more time, it could also rupture. Do you think Bering these small portals would do anything? I shook my head.

No. Where do the portals lead today? A flat, grassy plane. Blue sky, sun shining. I sighed. Yeah, absolutely some sort of horrible trap. Putting down my backpack in a small area of lightly muddy safety, I pulled out the image I'd drawn while drunk

and gripped it tight against the icy winds. The kids gathered around. This is what the book really looks like. I told them. Ideas? It's all spiky. How are you even holding it without getting cut? A good question.

What do those guys? gears do. How does it open? I blinked. Open. The girl I remembered for being smart expanded on her question. You open the pages to read people's stories, don't you? What are you really doing when you think you're opening a book? After handing her the paper with the drawing on it, I slid the tome out of my backpack and stared at it, trying to look past the illusion. Honestly, I have no idea. I narrowed my eyes. Kids, can you tell me what you don't see in that drawing? They traded answers for a time, until Danny spoke the answer with such direct realization

that the others all knew it had to be true. It doesn't look, evil. I'm not scared of it. It's just a weird machine. That's what I'm thinking, too. It's got serrated, almost saw-like, pointy sections, but I don't think they're intended to be scary. It's a machine, so somebody built it. and no matter who you are, you build weapons with a certain visual awe and strength.

No, somebody went through a ton of trouble to make sure this thing looked and operated like a book. I picked it up without knowing what it was in the slightest, and I was able to operate it and read from it. Something about my conversation with the information trading entity struck me. The game had been to ask the right questions, and I had to ask how to neutralize the threat this book possesses. The entity hadn't even had an answer for that one, and I'd seen it as an ominous sign. But what if the book posed no threat at all? What if that was why it hadn't been able to answer that specific question? I'd been mistaken in applying human emotions and connotations to its words. What if taking the book through the portal damaged and enlarged them only because it was some

sort of gigantic, multidimensional manifold machine? If portals were a sort of fragile tunnel, then dragging this metaphorically large and spiky object through them would only naturally cause havoc. And that, right there, might have been the reason the entity thought it was beneficial for me to understand more about the device. It had been able to connect to an active portal from its pocket dimension. Was that ability an integral part of its existence? Perhaps the damage we were causing to the portalscape had something to do with its motives. I've never opened the book here. I realized aloud, shivering against a sudden realization in the wind. I assumed from the start that it was extremely dangerous. I assumed

opening it here would be the end of all of us. I looked over at Thomas, who sat on his rock. He gazed back at me with a slight wonder, realizing that I was thinking about our conversation about his sister and how she and I shared a certain kind of paranoia. We'd both seen enemies where none existed. Furthermore, the information trading entity had seen opening the device as a violation of truce, which I'd assumed meant the device was dangerous, but that demon had been all about the trade of information, and violence was not the only crime in existence. There was also theft. I've opened the book so many times now, and all it does is, well, I know this might sound crazy,

but I think it talks to souls. I think it lets them tell their stories, living or dead. I think it's a very special kind of information tool. Thomas narrowed his eyes. The kids looked at each other in Askins. Danny just frowned. How does that help us? I assumed this book had something to do with the portals, but the portals were around for weeks

before I came along and found it lying bare on that dead world. I glanced up at the violently beautiful sun as the last sliver of sunlight began disappearing behind the distant undamaged tree line. A vast region of ripping portals lay beyond myself in that line. hinting at what might happen to earth if this situation was allowed to continue. In fact, do any of you know the first day someone found it? What changed then? Even the slightest detail could be of major importance.

The kids unanimously shook their head. I shivered again. There has to be another force at work, one we haven't even considered before. Favoring my one good hand, I lifted the book. We might be able to use this to understand what's happening before it's too late, but I can't guarantee anything. It still might destroy the world. The choice is up to you, kids.

What other option do we have? Thomas spoke up, his jaw trembling. I could choose the eye worker like we planned and get rid of it. I shook my head. No. It's not your choice to make. We can vote on it. I waited with a grim expression as several children voted for Thomas to use the eye worker.

Some rationalized their decision by believing in the inviting facade. that they could all see through the portals. I couldn't be sure myself. Was I simply too paranoid to ever trust a good thing when I saw it? After all the bad luck and all the pains we'd gone through, here was the perfect destination to get rid of the strange device once and for all. We had no way of knowing, so it all hinged on how each individual thought of life. Was reality a cold and vicious place full of sadistic irony?

Or was it the kind of balanced existence that might just throw the human race a bone once in a while. We'd seen so many nightmare realities full of suffering, devoid of humanity. Were those simply the worst of the lot, or had they been representative of the norm? The destinations had all been wonderful and calm before I'd arrived, or so the children had told me. As they finished up voting, I froze. Was it me? These were innocents, for the most part. They'd been pilfering odd books and interesting toys from other realities before I'd come along, bringing all my self-torture, doubt, pain, and paranoia, the destinations couldn't possibly have been twisted darker because of that, could they? And I, I'd found peace once more, a real peace, an inner calm

after saving those kids. Did that mean today's destination, an open and sunny field, might actually be positive and welcoming? Although I stood in place physically, internally I reeled. It was the ultimate conundrum. Trust and risk having everything shattered or distrust and fulfill your own prophecy. That's it then. I suddenly focused on his face. One caught somewhere between boy and man.

Would you decide? I asked still frozen. Open it. I breathed the sigh of relief and found myself able to move again. information, that would solve this dilemma. But what if we still had to send Thomas off into that world? What if this didn't tell us enough? I'll read it out loud so we can all hear. I gulped, threw off my fears, and opened it for the last time, vaguely aware on an obscure, subconscious level that I was actually working some kind of mechanism instead of turning pages. This time,

for the first time, I opened it to the front and said aloud with no idea whether it would work. Tell me about the force keeping the portals open. It's an odd thing, being alive. I wasn't sure when it started, only that it was happening. What's the difference between being a series of electrical currents and a sentient series of electrical currents? One piece of sensory information at a time, I began constructing an understanding of my existence. A larger thing like me was always floating around nearby, shoving materials and energy towards me at specific intervals. I found this highly annoying, until I began to realize that I needed it to continue

currenting, or whatever it was I was doing to be me. It was about then that I also realized I could stop being me if I didn't consume the proper materials and energy regularly. Non-existence? Who would create such a thing as life and then create its opposite? This was a poor design on the part of someone important. The larger thing like me was not the one who had set up all of a good. existence, so I lost my ill will towards the feedings. In time, I also found that many of the

bothersome vibrations it sent at me through our medium of motion were coded. It was a game. For a timeless time, I worked on the game. I discovered associations one by one, eventually comprehending that this was a mode of communication. This first thing had thoughts, too, and I could share them in a roundabout manner by making spatial vibrations. A whole new level. of understanding opened up before me. Using words, I could think about things beyond my immediate senses and talk about things in other places, and even in other times. That one thing happened before, and some other things will happen. It was wonderful. The universe too was wonderful and filled with the stuff we seemed to be made of. Very hot beacons pumped out light

practically everywhere, and I happily took it and grew larger. Eventually, I became aware of that other bigger thing near me that had created me, me and several others that were my siblings. There were lots of things like us and smaller things they'd created, and we all moved in a very large swarm between distant clusters of light beacons. Not too far into my life, we came to a huge rock and touched it. It was here that I was given a more solid form by the thing that had created me. It was fun to move around like that, touching things and feeling things, But it seemed we were there to stay. The other things had once been physical beings, I was told, and we would find refuge in that form

as the light beacons went out, and they were going out, one winking and vanishing daught at a time. Darkness began blotting out the sky. Some ancient, physical-bodied culture had built tiny machines that flew around, ate stuff, and constructed more of themselves. With the intent of controlling mass and energy and putting the building blocks of the universe to efficient use. The creators were gone by that time, but the machines remained. They ate the planets, nebula, and other assorted celestial objects quite easily. Then, approximately 16 quadrillion, quadrillion of them would hover near a star, and their combined

gravity would siphon off the sterile gases. Those gases would then travel out into space, cooling until they could be used to construct more of the little machines. We would not be around when they came to our rock, though. Even encumbered in physical bodies, we can make tunnels to other places, places where the hungry little machines could not go. I didn't think any of this odd. I was new. What did I know? But I did miss that small shred of safe and warm time being cared for by my creator. She stayed with me through everything and always taught me and protected me. She was with me when we went through the portals and moved on to another gigantic bubble space that the earth. others called a universe. That universe was free of eating machines, but we found the new horrors

awaited us. The new reality seemed safe enough at first until some of the things with our physical swarm started to behave oddly. Most had taken up farming and building structures for us to live in, but some talked of security and then of violence. By the time we realized that one of our rocks' moons was not a moon at all, and influencing the mind of some of our kind, it was too late. and we were forced to open the portals and flee from the slaughter. I didn't understand much of this at the time. My mother shielded our family from the worst parts. Only half of us got through to the next universe.

This reality was on fire, all of it, all the time. We could see the sparks of sapiens in the flames, and we could protect ourselves from it as a group for a time, but it was on to the next with a small handful of losses. I remember that one vividly. I was a little more comfortable with my body then, and starting to forget my time as a creature of light. That made it all the more jarring when the horrific fungus began growing out of many of those around me and eating them from the inside out.

Where the metal machines had eaten rock and gas, these extremely tiny biological machines feasted on living matter and grew rapidly. They would have been no threat at all, if not for our bodies. The realities became a blur after that. My mother stuck to my side through them all, protecting me as our swarm dwindled in size with each new nightmare. Our family lost members one by one to hunger, death, and war. Eventually, we were forced to use a portal sooner than others, and we became forever split from them. It was just me and her.

And then it was just me. For a very long time, I wanted to go home, but I have no idea where the things like me are or how to reach them. I never learned how to control portals myself, so the ones I make are just random. There are some good realities out there. I've seen them, but I keep looking, and they are never there. Did we just get bad luck of the draw? Our flight from our reality seems like a cruel joke in retrospect. I never got the time to live, to be a part of my people, and now all I have of them are memories.

I just want to go home, and, more than anything, I miss my mother. I looked up from the book, feeling strange. Was there no intentional threat here at all? It made so much sense. Some sort of energy entity was hanging around here and trying to go home, and I'd stumbled in, brought back a multi-dimensional device, and then screwed it all up. Darkness had fallen completely while I'd been reading, and the kids now shown flashlights around the vast bubbling clearing.

What would it look like? Surely we'd notice a strange creature hovering around. The other kids nodded, suggested random ideas, and argued. What if it's lying? Thomas asked suddenly, wincing against the freezing gusts cutting through our group. I blinked. The book? He nodded.

What if it's lying? I hadn't considered that for some reason. If it's lying, then it wants us to keep it here so that it can destroy everything. He held out one hand and used the other to reach into his pocket. I'm ready. I'll use the eye worker and we'll get rid of it. We can't risk keeping it here. I thought I saw slight tears in his eyes, although whether it was from fear or from the bitter wind, I couldn't be sure.

I don't know. It doesn't feel right. You're not doing it. Danny cut in, speaking to Thomas. Do you have a death wish or something? I'll hit you again if I have to. I immediately straightened with confused anger. You hit him?

When was this? Thomas cowered back from my sudden rage. I heard someone scream, and the group looked around. Numerous lights turned toward the trees. I stared, frozen with anticipation as a small, whirling oval grew larger. Were we finally about to see the entity that had been lurking in the forest and causing all this? It wasn't my imagination. The ground had begun to shake beneath us,

and I clenched my teeth as my injured foot poked fire. through my leg. A very odd ripping sound emanated through the forest as if space itself was groaning with me. As the oval expanded, I began to understand what it was. It was the same curious fuzziness I'd seen before on the other side of the portals. In a flash, a curving beam of darkness slid from the new portal. On instinct, I chopped down and basically broke the hand of the 14-year-old boy in front of me. He dropped the flashlight, now emanating darkness instead of light. and screamed in pain. The opening of the portal had drawn all attention and all flashlight beams, and that was the only reason any of us were still alive.

How many seconds minimum was it before the darkness entity could jump again? Drop your flashlights and run! Stay out of the beams! If that darkness touches you here! Before I could finish my sentence, the ground began shaking more violently, and that same ripping sound multiplied many times over. In the air spread out across the clearing, I saw a string of portals opening into our world. world. Their training forgotten, the kid stood and stared. Drop your flashlights and get out of here! My shrill, furious, and terrified tone goaded them into

action. As a group, they dropped their flashlights, but they all stood in place. We did this. We trained for this. I told them insistently. I know it's dark, but we did the run blind, remember? The hypothetical sightstealer? You did it once and you're going to have to do it again. Right now. I'll take care of this. Unable to wait any longer, I quickly kicked all the flashlights until they pointed away from us, just as the darkness entity leapt to another beam. Go! Just go! I screamed, and they all recoiled, and finally they turned and began running away together.

On a hunch, I picked up one of the lights and used my precious seconds between darkness leaps to shine a beam across the portals. Along the middle of the clearing, torso's legs, and the occasional head appeared under my light, and only under my light, Rodded, leering faces shuffled towards me, briefly visible as I illuminated them. Beginning to comprehend how much trouble we were in, I began to retreat.

But no, I needed a plan. This was worse than the end of the world. These portals were opening from every world I'd brought the book through, of falling out from the damage I'd caused. The threats from those places knew about me, knew about us, and they were going to come through and harm my kids. No, not after all this. I can't let this happen.

The darkness entity jumped to another flashlight beam. I looked up, fueled by portal winds. The sky was excessively tumultuous and cloudy. Night had just fallen and no stars were out. Thus the pitch-black run the children would have to make on their own. But it was only a matter of time before a star glinted through the heavens, or a plane flew overhead, or some other disastrous light source presented itself for the darkness. entity.

And invisible corpse creatures were crossing the clearing toward me, even now. What else? Would the eye worker homogenees sent through men carrying mind-controlling light lances? Was that cleansing wall of fire going to erupt out of a random portal at any moment? I grimaced for a moment. I had two apocalypses to deal with, and I'd have to worry about those when the time came. What did I have? Several flashlights, one of which contained a biological disintegrating darkness entity,

A multi-dimensional information device that spoke to souls, and, looking down at my backpack, a shoe with unknown special dirt on it. Quickly grabbing the shoe, I stuck it awkwardly in a jacket pocket. Next, I regarded the flashlight. The proper course of action would be to turn them all off and annihilate the darkness entity. Unless, turning them all off except the one containing it and one other, I stuffed the flashlights in various pockets, holding the two forward. One dark and one light.

I shine them both ahead, and I leapt back immediately. The invisible corpse creatures had only been a few feet away. Under the swath of my light beam, I saw hundreds, and under the following swath of my darkness beam, those hundreds disintegrated with odd spectral screams. Jump. The darkness began shining out from the other beam. I couldn't afford very many of these

before it found a world-ending alternate destination to jump to. Count. One, two, three, four, as fast as the darkness beam could disintegrate them, more semi-visible corpses shambled out of the widening portal. How many were there? Billions, I imagined, more began shambling out of nearby portals as they grew larger. I backed up, increasingly pushed back by the semi-circle flow of rotting bodies. Worse, I had to shine my light all around constantly for fear that some of the invisible attackers were coming around from behind. This was a forceful but losing

strategy. Okay, retreat to the hill and think. Jump. 54 seconds. Was that the minimum number of seconds? Could not remembering such a small detail actually get us all killed? I hobbled up that large hill, familiar with it even in darkness. My sprained wrist ached with the weight of the flashlight, and I had to walk extra awkward to not spill any flashlights or the shoe from my pockets, so my hurt foot began going numb. My pulled spine too began protesting. My pulled spine too began protesting. testing fiercely. I was grimly certain that if I got rid of the darkness entity, I wouldn't be able to outrun the invisible corpses. I had to make a stand, somehow or another. Coming across the top of the hill and ducking backward beneath an irregular rift across the path at head height,

I was startled to hear voices right behind me. What the hell is going on down there? Danny asked, peering over the edge of the hill. Thomas crouched on my other side. All the other children had flown. as I'd ordered. Why are you two still here? Because I hate going home. Or maybe we couldn't let you die out here. You're kind of a mess. Thomas gulped and nodded. I nodded, mental gears turning furiously. They'd made their choice, and now it was up to me to protect them. I kept shining the darkness beam down along the hill, vaporizing row after row of oncoming corpses. But something in my mind was screaming a warning.

I glared up at the horizon, the Blue Ridge Mountains. I could see the mountain range from here. We'd always been able to. My eyes lit on a single orange speck high up on the horizon. A campfire? The headlights of a car? It didn't matter. 38, 39.

Reacting with all the adrenaline my body could spare, I thrust the darkness-bound flashlight into the irregular rift just above our heads and let go. My hand came back, bruised. and battered from the tidal forces within, but the portal was outgoing, to that sunny, grassy haven, and the darkness entity would not be able to return. Hopefully, it was night and cloudy there, and the entity would have nowhere to go at all. If not, well, now we couldn't use the portals as an escape ourselves either. One apocalypse down, how many more to go. What'd you do that for? Both he and Thomas grabbed flashlights from my pockets and

and shined them around. A crowd of half-illuminated corpses had made it most of the way up the hill. What now? Thomas asked, shaking. Gunfire rang out from somewhere in the forest to our left, and I saw red light sliding across the treetops. Oh my God, they're really doing it. I realized. The eye worker homogenee had done exactly what I'd feared. I imagined the organized men with guns were approaching from the left, even as we listened. And they were able to see the invisible corpses because of the programming devices they'd bought. But they can never defeat the billions of rotting puppets flooding in through the portals. But they could certainly present their own threat.

Don't let that red light reach your eyes. It'll mind control you. Seriously? Danny asked, starkly terrified. Thomas held his head in his hands. To our right, gigantic columns of flames suddenly tore up into the sky, shooting out. out in random directions as the portal from the obsidian world fluctuated. Time to go!

I ordered panically, happy that I'd gotten rid of the darkness entity at the right time. This situation was way beyond us, though, and I feared all was lost. And what was so special about this damn shoe I'd been lugging around? Why had the information demon wanted its partner? The two boys helped me up, and we slogged away together, moving slightly faster than I could have on my own. We no longer moved in darkness. but in fluctuating firelight.

As the forest acquired cleansing flames and spread them with a plumb, that shifting light illuminated numerous corpses trailing us, but I still kept my flashlight tuned around us just in case. Where were we even going? The suburb was no safe haven, even though that was where I'd always told the children to run. The eye-worker battalions would reach it, or the legions of the undead,

or the cleansing flames would kill everyone regardless. As we limped away in a grim panic, An unexpected sight caught my eye. Maybe a hundred feet away in the forest, illuminated by firelight, several humanoid figures walked at a pace I recognized. Sealed in black, they moved just at about four miles an hour. They were two tall figures, and one small. A child.

I couldn't help but laugh. So there had been survivors on the obsidian world after all, despite the magnitude of evil humanity had perpetuated upon itself there. How long had they been walking? Did their entire culture now revolve around walking ever east, ever away from the globe encircling, cleansing flames? How many times had they walked around the world? I wondered if the people on the moon had never been able to return because these stoic human

beings had refused to fall and kept the bacteria with them as a giant screw you to those that had consigned them to death. Our Armageddon had been their escape. They looked around in wonder at the forest. Even as they continued walking. I was sure they could do nothing to help us, but I wished them luck all the same. The boys both trembled with exhaustion and fear. I had to keep their minds occupied while I tried to come up with something, anything.

Danny, why did you hit Thomas? He tried to take the book through on his own. Some were dangerous. I had to do it as for his own good. Thomas looked up at me from under my arm as we limped forward. Is that right? I guess I kind of assumed one of your parents hit you when you wanted to to sleep in an abandoned house instead of at home. Danny, are Thomas' parents abusive?

I don't know. I never met him. He's a new kid, remember? I nodded. I remember he was an outsider when I first came around. Thomas looked strictly ahead, a worried expression on his face. I pulled us all to a halt, suddenly grimly certain about something. Thomas, where do you live? He gulped and said nothing, instead watching us both in fear. We'd never hurt you. It's you, isn't it? You showed up at the same time as the portal, and you kept following me, helping out. I just want to go. He suddenly blurted on the verge of tears.

I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I can't control it well at all. And that thing, that book, made everything go crazy. Did it make the destinations worse? Or was that because of how you felt when I came around? His face screwed up even more. and a few tears began running down his cheeks in the half illumination of the distant fires. I just miss my mom.

To have you around acting like her, taking care of people, of me? Of course, I replied, hugging him tight. If you stick with me, I'll always keep you safe. Really? Why would you do that? You lost your mother, but I lost a child. I don't think there's anyone more suited to take care of you. Our two pains can cancel each other out if we let them.

But right now you need to protect me. I looked over at Danny and your new family. All these kids, they're your new swarm. Thomas laughed despite himself and wiped his eyes. I let the words fall slowly. But right now you have to turn off those portals. The gunfire stopped, so I'm guessing the eye-worker men have retreated for the moment. They'll be back when they formulate a plan.

The mind behind those corpse things is on the other side of their portal, and the cleansing fire comes from the other side too. If you shut down the portals right now, we might all just survive this." I don't know if I can. He said with a worried sob. It's an emotional thing, and I need to be calm and feel safe. I looked around, understanding how hard it would be to concentrate in a forest filled with approaching invisible corpses and belching flames.

it help if you understood just how far I would go to protect you? Just how much I mean it when I say I would never leave you. Those are just words. She promised too. And then she died. I handed him the book. Souls can't lie. Take a look at my story and you'll understand. He did. Danny and I watched as the light being in the form of a boy, the light being that had just been trying to go home all this time read my story, the one I'd been running from for far too long. The moment spent standing in place were long, and our seconds of safety were few, but it was the only way for him to understand. Finally, he looked up. Is that true? Did all that really happen to you? I closed my eyes for a good three seconds, knowing what he was asking about, and then nodded.

And you're still here? Doing all this. For a bunch of kids you don't even know? I nodded again. He fell forward into me. The book pressed between us, and I hugged him instinctively. He shook, sobbed, and cried for a moment, overwhelmed by the fact that he might have actually found a home. We're surrounded. We'll be fine. It's time, Thomas.

He nodded against my arm and then closed his eyes, watching the quick flashes of illuminated, leering corpses as they closed and around us. I held him tighter. If this didn't work, they'd have to tear me apart to get to him. Invisible hands grasped at my shoulders and fell limp. The wind all around us stopped. The sounds of hundreds of falling bodies echoed through the forest as the corpses fell in scattered unison. The forest still burned, but the portals had damaged so many trees it was impossible for the leftover flames to spread now that the source was gone. Danny laughed first, and then Thomas and I both joined him in a series of deep, freedom-charged belly laughs.

It was over. I smiled. Just for once, everyone had lived, and more, dozens more black-suited refugees moved by us in the forest, overjoyed to finally escape their endless walk. The cold and calculating part of me addressed them for threat. After all, they might have had this slow-time bacteria with them, but I guess that without the light-hungry supercrop plants the bacteria needed, it would be no threat here.

That runaway symbiotic cycle had been broken. Today is a good day. Today, just for once, everyone lived. And now I sit in a corner, wondering at my own survival. I didn't really expect to live through this, and I have no plans. Thomas sleeps in one corner of the room, and I sit in the other, analyzing the events of the past few weeks. It should feel odd to become a surrogate parent of a light being turned human from another

reality, but I've seen stranger. And now I've got a book that talks to souls and a shoe with a maddening mystery. I wonder what next week will bring. For the first time, and far too long, I'm actually looking forward to finding out.