[This is the start of a new serialized novel, a sequel to The Fall of Doc Future and Skybreaker’s Call. It is set in a world with superheroes, but I try to give it plausible characterization, physics, biology, economics, and general consequences for events. It can be read on its own, but will contain serious spoilers for those two books. I intend to post new chapters about every two weeks, so Chapter 1 is planned for around April 30.]

Screams, flames, economic collapse, explosions, epidemic victims, pain, cities going dark, rending metal and more screams, expanding plasma, and a screen view of molten world coming apart in space, interspersed with frantic snippets of conversation or text, but all mashed together, never enough of any one thing to quite grasp before it was gone.

Doc Future pitched forward in bed, forced awake by a final burst of discordant imagery.

He grabbed the headset from nightstand, and began virtual typing frantically, with occasional verbal comments, as the fastest method of recording his impressions. The Database was recording everything, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Nothing was, it was already fading, and it hadn’t exactly been clear in the first place.

Finally he stopped and sighed. Everything he hadn’t already recorded had slipped away. He looked at the clock. Just after 3 AM, so it would three more hours before he could talk to Yiskah, Stella, or DASI.

That was the protocol he’d worked out, to give himself an opportunity to receive one of his old-style nightmares again. In addition to leaving his mind open in a specific way before attempting to sleep, he was not just physically isolated, but causally isolated as well. And that had been established in advance–an eight hour block where the presence or absence of a nightmare could not affect them, and vice-versa, to give the best chance.

And it seemed to have worked. Possibly. But not in a way that was useful. The old vividness was certainly there, but there was none of the clarity, and the overlapping interference was far worse than it had been even at the height of his sleep troubles. And crucially, none of the pieces had been coherent enough for Doc to verify.

He had a system, based on his idiosyncratic personal memory methods, of telling whether a given nightmare came from the future–or at least from the same source that his first one had–and whether it had been altered. It was not unlike a redundant series of cryptographic hashes, and it was fairly robust against noise. Up to a point.

Which had been passed. Doc could no longer tell whether anything he’d just experienced had been from the future, let alone all of it. It could be a ordinary nightmare brought on by self-suggestion, side channel noise, or even a strong telepath or probability manipulator messing with him–although the last two were unlikely because of the active mind shields and the precautions Golden Valkyrie had taken.

And even if it was, the imagery had no context, and the only words that he could recall had been something about the Singularity and a snippet about the best result vaporizing half of Europe. Nothing he could act on.

If it was all genuine, that was actually good news, in the sense that there was a wide enough range of possible different futures where he survived long enough to send back messages that the old coherency mechanism had irretrievably broken down. It had always been a stopgap. This probably meant that he, personally, was no longer a necessary part of the critical path for saving the world from any particular threat. Which would be a relief.

He stretched and yawned, then called up one of Ashil’s physics papers to read while he waited for his self-imposed isolation to end. He might no longer have a direct line from the future, but he could still work with the present, just like everyone else.

*****

<Ah, Puzzle-Seeker. Greetings to you.>

<Respect to you, Order-Keeper. I have unraveled the riddle of the noise.>

<Indeed? What was it?>

<Something used a causality hammer, for a prolonged period.>

<Are you certain? Surely that would have been louder, obvious to all.>

<No, for it came from deep in the Fading Zone.>

<Amazing that we sensed it at all, then. And that anything could grow there, that could produce it.>

<True. But there is more.>

<Yes?>

<Do you remember the Explorer’s lost probe?>

<The one she squeezed an Aspect into? Yes. I wondered how she could tolerate such diminishment, even for a minor Aspect. Though she has been more cautious, in the ages since.>

<With reason. Now taste this data picture, from the noise, and tell me what you sense.>

<Interesting. That is the signature of the probe augment, in the echoes. But where is that of the Explorer?>

<It could not possibly be her lost Aspect. After all that time in the Fading Zone, she would have long decayed. And there was no capability for a causality hammer in the probe.>

<So you replace one riddle with another. Have you unraveled this one?>

<I have a conjecture. It is not pleasant.>

<Continue, please.>

<Topology can become more tangled than a probe could predict before transit, in the depths of Fading Zone. And an entity that can produce a causality hammer might well fashion a topology trap.>

<Agreed. But then whence the signature? Recovered from the wreckage of the probe and mimicked?>

<No. I think the probe was eaten by the entity that wields the causality hammer, which absorbed and uses the probe augment.>

<Disturbing. But how could it survive for so long in the Fading Zone?>

<I do not know for certain. Most likely, it has found a way to stabilize a worldline.>

<That would be vexing. A stabilized worldline there would serve as a breeding ground for parasites beyond the range of our usual sweeps. Well, I commend you for your unravelings. I will send an expedition. Three synthetics, I think. With topology stabilization, causality anchors, and entropic armor. That should be more than sufficient to end the probe eater and its worldline.>

<Is that not excessive? It will be expensive to project such a force across the domain walls and vacuum shifts.>

<Yes, but who knows how many parasites the worldline has gathered already? Best to be sure. We don’t want it to spread, after all.>

<True.>

Next: Chapter 1

