The Propagation

What is reality like outside the flow of time? A speculative fiction piece somewhere between a short story and a novella.

 

 

            Jacob Devries stuffed some papers into the manila envelope and left his cubicle. On his way to Dan’s desk, he remembered what a stickler for details the accounting department was so he checked back through the last few sheets to be sure that he’d initialed all the final figures.

            Wendy Reynolds really had to go to the bathroom. She transferred a call in to Mr. Dietrich, hung up the phone, and noticed with relief that no other lines were blinking. She snatched her make-up case from the second drawer and took off at a brisk pace. She began digging through the small bag to be sure that she hadn’t left her lipstick in her purse still in the desk drawer.

            Jacob Devries and Wendy Reynolds passed literally through each other. Their wrists caught and they were both spun around. Jacob’s file spun out of his hand and papers splashed to the floor. Wendy’s make-up clutch also dropped, spilling its contents all over the carpet.

            “Aw, geez, Wendy, I’m sorry,” Jake said with his most charming grin. “My cufflink must’ve snagged your sleeve.” He raised both of their arms to see what the problem was.

            When Wendy saw it, she screamed.

            Their wrists were fused together, imbedded into each other like a cross.

            Wendy clapped her free hand over her mouth.

            Jake stared, trying hard to focus and stay calm. “Okay, um, look… does it hurt? It’s not hurting me, does it hurt you?”

            “Oh my god.”

            “It’s okay, Wendy, is it hurting you?”

            “How could this happen? It can’t happen, Jake. This isn’t happening.”

            “Are you hurt?”

            “Our arms, Jake… my god, look at our arms. How could this…”

            “Wendy calm down. Just tell me if it hurts.”

            “No but Jake, my god.”

            “It’s okay, Wendy, all right? If it doesn’t hurt than it’s okay, right?”

            “But Jake.”

            He brought the fused wrists up where he could inspect them closely. He touched them cautiously with his index finger. His skin was more pale, but beyond that, the flesh covering their arms appeared to be continuous. While Jacob examined it, Wendy tried hard not to look. Her eyes darted around the office, trying to find something else to focus on. She instead found another strange phenomenon taking place.

            “Jacob…” she moaned, “ what is happening here?”

            Jake looked up and his mouth dropped open.

            Everywhere their coworkers walked, they left tracings of themselves in the air. A half dozen human shaped tunnels were being carved through the room as they hurried about their administrative tasks. No one else noticed what was going on. The light and color was slowly fading from the people themselves, while the tracings grew a progressively darker shade of gray.

            Wendy moaned. “Jaaake… I don’t liiiike this.”

            Jake shuddered, closed his eyes and tried to stay in control. “It’s okay, Wendy. Everything is still okay.”  He swallowed hard, then felt a tug on his fused arm.

            “Jake!”

            He opened his and eyes. He saw Marlene, their two hundred pound receptionist, coming straight for them. Jake and Wendy each tried to move in a different direction and went nowhere. Marlene, or rather a dim and nearly colorless version of Marlene, passed right through their arms without seeing them

            They felt nothing. Before they could recover from the shock, yet another phenomenon began to occur. Shafts of a dark anti-light came out of nowhere, creating a dotted outline of a human figure two feet tall. More shafts followed, filling in the silhouette. A tracing was being formed before their very eyes, but there was no body.

            Jake looked through Marlene’s fog at Wendy. “I don’t think I want to see any more.”

            Her pale, slack face nodded in nervous agreement. Jake stepped through Marlene’s fading tunnel and pulled Wendy away from the newest, dream-like development. At the main entrance to the office suite, they passed through the Smith brothers, probably coming in for an appointment. They stepped into the hall and Jake pulled her toward the elevators.

            The hall was densely packed with the smoky, human-shaped tunnels in various shades of gray. Jake simply ignored it and dragged Wendy straight ahead.

            “Jake, where are we gonna go?”

            “I’m thinking ‘doctor’.”

            “Oh God. Maybe we better think ‘psychiatrist’.”

            “Better yet.”

            “But Jake, what if they’re like everybody else?”

            “Then… I don’t know.”

            They were nearly to the elevators when they heard a small voice calling to them in a foreign accent. Jake could not place the accent but didn’t care. He stepped up the walnut-trimmed elevator and punched the down button.

            “You guys, wait up… Wait for me, I’ve got to talk to you.”

            “Jake somebody’s coming.”

            “I’m not interested in any more surprises.” He punched the button five times rapidly.

            “Hey you two, where’d you go?… Oh, there you are.” A tiny man in a snowy-white body suit stepped through the tracings in the hallway. He had chubby features and a thick mass of curly red hair on top of his baby-sized head. Jake glanced at him briefly, surprised but not surprised, then looked back at the wood-paneled double doors.

            “Hey guys, look, I’m real sorry about what happened. I’m not sure why it happened but I know how much of a shock it must be. Upsilon’s gonna be here any minute, he’ll be able to straighten this out. Oh man is he gonna be mad at me. Nothing like this has ever happened on our shift. Oh geez, what am I gonna tell him? I don’t have a clue how this happened. You two shouldn’t worry, though, you’re not in any trouble.”

            Jake turned and looked sharply at the little man. “Could you please tell us what the hell is going on?”

            “Well, I don’t know, really, something just kind of… slipped.  But it was only for a second. You two were the only ones affected. Everything else is okay.”

“Excuse me, but nothing is ‘okay’ everything’s wrong, man, everyone is just ‘wrong’.”

            “Um, yeah. I’m sure it must seem that way to you. But it’s okay, really. I mean, besides the fact that you two were just yanked out of the propagation.”

            “What propagation?”

            “If anyone had been looking, they would have just seen you two pop out of existence, getting snagged and all, but I don’t think anyone was. They all went on as usual.”

            “Usual?”

            “Ah, good. Upsilon is phasing in. Oh man, what am I gonna tell him.”

            More shafts of anti-light, another two-foot tall human silhouette, and this time, a lighted figure appeared and strode to the end of the tunnel. He stopped with his tiny hands on his hips, and the light and tracing faded.

            “Theta, what is the meaning of this?” The little man was almost identical to the first, but had a yellow mop of hair and a golden armband around his right biceps.

            “Oh, Upsilon, hi… uh, well, like I was just telling these two, I don’t know what happened. One minute I’m running the strands and the next, 'pow', these two snag on each other and get yanked right off the propagation.”

            “Were you paying attention?”

            “Of course, Upsilon, I’m dedicated to this honorable distinction, you know that.”

            “Uh-huh. So you weren’t fantasizing about advancement or metamorphosis?”

            “No, Upsilon, jeez…”

            “You watch your language.”

            “Okay, I’m sorry. And anyway, even if I hadn’t been following my strands close enough, how could two people get snagged? Two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time, it’s against the laws of nature.”

            “Obviously one of them wasn’t on the same time, you fool.”

            “But Upsilon, the propagation in my sector’s been completely healthy the whole shift, you know that.”

            “Oh, so we have our first incident and automatically the propagation’s flawed, is that it? You have little imagination, Theta. And you wonder why you haven’t been appointed.”

            “Well what else could it be? I was following my strands, Upsilon, I swear to you.”

            “Did I say I didn’t believe you?”

            “Well what, then?”

            “Think, Theta. Remember your lessons.”

            The little man bit his lower lip and tapped his oversized forehead with a tiny finger. Jake grew tired of scenes from Alice in Wonderland and turned angrily back to the elevator. He punched the down button more than ten times.

            Finally Theta came up with another possibility. “A ripple?”

            “Yeah, sure took you long enough to figure out. Is this where they were knocked from the propagation?”

            “No.”

            “Show me.”

            Theta and Upsilon turned into the fog of tracings and disappeared within moments. Wendy watched them go with strain building on her face.

            “Jake, maybe we should go with them.”

            “Forget it, Wendy, we’re going to find something normal.”

            “But Jake, the one little man said the other little man could help us.”

            “Yeah? Well I’ll bet that involves things getting weirder than they already are.”

            “But Jake…”

            “No way, Wendy, I’m not buying into it.”

            “But…”

            “We’re not following them, and that’s final.”

            Anger erupted in her eyes and she jerked on their joined arms. Jake was pulled toward her, and Wendy tugged harder, trying to drag him toward their office. Jake stubbornly resisted which began an angry tug-of-war over the limbs they shared. With her element of surprise, Wendy had pulled Jake several steps away from the elevator. Then his superior strength began to swing the tide in his favor.

            Then somebody else stepped up to the elevator. They couldn’t tell who it was; the actual people were fading within their tracings. Reduced to a wan human outline, the figure stepped into the elevator shaft and rose, leaving his tracing trailing him in an upwards arc. Jake stared with a furrowed brow – not only had the elevator not arrived, but the doors had never opened.

            Confused and distracted, Jake let his newly conjoined twin drag him back to the office suite.

            They found the two white clad dwarves studying a flowing thread hanging in mid-air.

            “So what the hell is this?” Jake asked.

            Theta answered without taking his attention from the wavy silver line. “It’s the path of a ripple worm. It passes right through your tracings at about the moment you got snagged.”

            “Uh-huh, so what, a worm caused this damned nightmare?”

            Theta looked at him and blinked. “Yeah… umm…”

            “Let me,” said Upsilon, stepping around the red-haired man. “Look, I know everything must seem very strange to you. I’m sorry for that. The reason is, is that you’re no longer aboard the propagation of time with the rest of your race. You crossed through the distortion caused by the ripple worms passing and one of you, the girl as far as I can tell, ‘reverberated’. That’s when you fluctuate back and forth, microseconds into the future, microseconds into the past, and so on. Anyway, as she reverberated, your wrists passed through the same space, and just as she passed through the same time, you got stuck: on each other and in time. The propagation has passed on without you.”

            “So what are you saying?” Jake glared at the little man. “We’re frozen in a moment of time?”

            “No. You can move around if you wish. But you’ll never be able to rejoin the propagation.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because you’ve lost your positions, your not a fixed part of the wave.”

            “What the hell are you talking about? You just said we can time-travel or whatever, why can’t we travel to the present?”

            “Because you’re under your own power now. Time’s moving on like a wave and everyone else is surfing on the crest, the propagation’s moving them forward. You’ll have to swim.”

            “So I’ll catch up to the wave and get on my surfboard.”

            “No, no, no. You don’t get it… look, here’s a better metaphor, the human race is riding on an elevator, you got off on this floor. Now you’ve changed your mind and want to get back on but it won’t stop for you. So you take the stairs. Now you get about equal to it, but only approximately. As the elevator rises, you’ll have to keep climbing the stairs, speeding up or slowing down to stay even with it, but no matter how hard to try, the fact remains, you’re not on the elevator.”

            “Whoa…” Theta said. “That’s a good one, Upsilon, I’m gonna remember that. You nailed the propagation perfectly.”

            “Can it, Theta. I’m not interested in your butt-kissing.”

            “I’m not kissing your butt, Upsilon, geez.”

            “Hey, didn’t I just warn you about your language?”

            “What? It was a good metaphor, what’d I say wrong?”

            “You know what you said.”

            As the two diminutive figures began arguing again, Jake stared at them blankly. His face grew longer and sadder and his eyes glazed over. He asked in a quiet voice, “So what’re we supposed to do?”

            It managed to get both of their attentions.

            Upsilon shifted uncomfortably. “Well, it’s not all bad, really. You’ll never get tired or hungry, you’ll never age… you can see the past or the future if you like.”

            “We’ll just never have a life again.”

            Upsilon nodded solemnly. “We are so sorry. It was a freak accident, you know. These ripple worms, man, you never know where their gonna turn up. There’s like a one in a hundred-trillionths of a chance that they could actually breech a propagation. They’re interdimensional creatures so when they cross through here, it’s like they’re moving sideways in time, only there’s so much history and future, it’s nearly impossible for them to hit a propagation. It was just dumb luck, man. I’m sorry it had to happen to you.”

            Jake nodded and looked at his feet.

            Then Wendy spoke up for the first time. “So… who are you guys, anyway?”

            “Us? Well…” Upsilon looked at Theta, “He’s sort of the ‘elevator maintenance man’ for this, uh, building, and, uh, I’m the boss over all the ‘elevator maintenance men’ in like, the whole city. Does that make any sense?”

            Wendy nodded and fired off another question. “How come people are leaving these smoke tunnels behind them?”

            “Okay, the figures are the actual souls still on the propagation. Their tunnels, or ‘tracings’ as we call them, are the space the souls have occupied between this moment and the propagation. See, if space were like a wire, time would be like a spark moving along that wire. Souls are like that too. For each soul there is a human shaped tunnel, starting at birth, travelling through all the space their body ending at their death. The soul moves through this tunnel as it rides the wave of the propagation of time. For us, though, outside of the propagation, we can see where the soul has been between the moment we arrived and up to the propagation. Do you see?”

            “Not really, but never-mind. What about our arms?”

            “Oh, that. It’s simple. Your arms remain in the same space only because you two remain in the same time. As soon as one of you leaves this moment, you’ll be free.”

            Jake suddenly became interested in the conversation again. “How do I do that?” He snapped.

            Upsilon shrugged. “You just do it. It’s as instinctive as walking. I suppose you’d have to concentrate on it the first time you did it, though… okay, here’s what you could do, step into someone’s tracing and start walking. If you tell yourself that you’re gonna catch up to the person, without dwelling on what you think are the boundaries of time, you should actually find yourself moving forward in time. You’ll literally ‘catch-up’ to the person, not to mention the propagation. By then you should be able to see what I mean by ‘just doing it’.”

            “Alright.” Jake looked away and began walking. Puzzled, Wendy stumbled after him.

            “Wait.”

            He strode into Marlene’s tracing, walked a short ways, then phased out the way Upsilon had phased in.

            They all stared at Wendy’s free arm in surprise.

            Upsilon shook his head. “What’s he doing? He didn’t even give me a chance to warn him. Damn it. Now I’m gonna have to try to find him.”

            “Uh, Upsilon, your language?”

            He glared at Theta. “Shut up.”

            Then he too phased out.

            “Well that’s just great.” Theta stamped his little foot. “Leaving me here without any instructions. What am I supposed to do now?”

            “What am I supposed to do?” Wendy demanded.

            Theta threw his hands up. “Heck if I know. I just work here.”
            “Well what did he mean by ‘warning’ Jake?”

            “I don’t know. It sounds like he was planning on you guys just being free to wander through time. Probably wanted to warn you about Followers and ripple worms and things.”

            “So you do it.”

            “Me? Oh no, I don’t think so. I’m really not qualified.”

            “Come on, Theta, you want me to start moving through time without being ‘warned’?”

            “Uh, no. I really think you should stay here and wait for Upsilon to get back. I really should be catching up to my strands before something else happens.”

            “Are you seriously going to leave me alone, stuck in a moment of time, with no idea what could happen if I start moving?”

            “Well, no, but I’ve got duties…”

            “You leave, I leave.”

            “No. Look, lady, you should really wait for Upsilon.”

            “Uh-uh. I’m not staying here by myself, it’s too creepy.”

            “But you have to, Upsilon…”

            “I mean it, Theta, you leave, I leave.”

            “All right, fine. I can’t stay here, though, I’ve got to stay with the propagation. What I will do is tell you what I know. First of all, the ripple worms. Because they travel through dimensions the way bookworms eat through books, you’re gonna be tempted to follow their tracings and see what goes on outside of this reality. Don’t. Ripple worms put pinholes in the pages of space-time and if you follow them, you’ll be punching much larger holes. You’ll be more than a ripple worm, you’ll be a ‘ripple cow’.”

            Wendy’s back stiffened and her eyes narrowed.

            “Uh, sorry, I meant it figuratively. Anyway, also beware of the Followers, they’re parasites.”

            “Who are the ‘Followers’?”

            “They’re demons. They’re worse than demons. They travel in small groups, on eddies of the true propagation, more like ‘mini-propagations’ really. Anyway, they live behind you in time, living in your houses, driving your cars, eating your food.”

            “That doesn’t sound so evil.”

            “Trust me lady, it gets worse. Just avoid their ‘mini-propagations’, all right? They can’t get you as long as you’re not trying to keep pace with their eddy, know what I mean?”

            “No, not really.”

            “Look, you can pass through their waves safely, just don’t try to surf them, okay?”

            “Okay.”

            “Good. Those are really the only two things you have to worry about besides losing your mind from boredom. Take it from me, there’s a reason time propagates.”

            “Theta, I don’t get what you’re trying to tell me.”

            “I’m telling you to keep moving, you’ll go crazy if you don’t. See, matter and space can only change at the point of the propagation. If you spend too much time in frozen moments like this, you go stark raving mad. I mean it. It happens fast. Maybe because it’s so unnatural to live outside of the propagation, I don’t know. But I can tell you, beings like us, and now you, who live outside of time, we tend to not stay sane a heck of a long time, excuse my French. We’ve got to find something to occupy our minds, or we lose them. So maybe now you can relate to why I’m so anxious to get back to my work.”

            “Oh let me come with you, Theta. I don’t want to be alone, and I’d love to see what you do.”

            “Absolutely not. It’s forbidden.”

            “Please, Theta, I don’t know what else to do.”

            “Sorry lady, coming with me’s about the only thing you can’t do. Look, why don’t you go find someone you care about, follow their tracing, see their future.”

            Wendy gasped. “Sam! I’d forgotten. Oh my God, what’s gonna happen to Sam?”

            She hurried into the nearest tracing, belonging to Rita from the mailroom.

            “Hey, wait. Upsilon should be right back.”

            She ignored him and began hurrying through the human-shaped tunnel.

            “Lady, listen to me…”

            Shafts of anti-light formed before her, and Wendy Reynolds phased out.

            “S**t.”

 

 

           

            He wasn’t much into religion, but he did believe in Armageddon. And beyond that, an afterlife. His goal was to find the end of time, and with it, hopefully, his mother.

Like Upsilon promised, Jake had gotten the hang of moving through time rather quickly. It was instinctive, but not like walking. It was more like swimming; he moved through the sludge of years through willpower and forcing his body forward. How he moved wasn’t so important as the conscious decision to move forward. The city changed rapidly around him. Buildings melted like wax only to be replaced by other, more futuristic structures, pushing their way out of the ground like flowers and blossoming into things grand and beautiful. He walked slowly through the streets, but rapidly in time, each step crossing the years as surely as they crossed pavement, then metal, then a polymer which was spongy yet durable.

            All around him were the fog of tracings: lives that hadn’t yet been lived. They swirled together, covering every surface and filling every building. As he strolled through the generations, Jacob knew that the swirling mass of smoke he was seeing was changing of the tracings form one set of peoples lives, then their children’s, then their grandchildren’s, then their distant descendant’s. He was literally seeing every space that every soul would occupy in all of the years to come.  Although there were no other souls present, Jacob was struck profoundly by how alive and dynamic the planet Earth really was.

            Then the flowers stopped blossoming.

            The architecture of the city had become like a pile of mammoth, geodesic shapes, lumped atop one another with no apparent plan or reason. Roads were no more. Instead, clear, sinuous tubing snaked between the jumble of structures, forming a tangled mass of umbilicals that joined the structures in a chaotic, but rather eye-pleasing way. Unfortunately, with each step he took, the decay became more and more apparent. The carefree structures still melted like wax, but no new ones rose from the ashes to take their place. The umbilicals were the first to disappear. Jake walked across mounds of shattered glass staring into the gaping sockets where they had once connected. He noticed the fog of men’s lives thinning, and then the skin peeled from the geodesic shapes, leaving skeletal frameworks of brittle girders.

            Jake turned another corner and reached his goal.

            The end of time.

            He knew it was Armageddon because all the tracings ended here at a blue-gray curtain stretching from the sky and both horizons like a partition across the universe.

            He stopped moving for a moment, in time and in space. He inspected the wall from a distance. It hung over the city in gradual curves, seeming otherwise smooth like ice. Beyond the places where the tracings entered the wall there seemed to be lights. Pale blue shapes moved slowly beyond the screen, giving Jake the impression that it was either not totally opaque or that it was some kind of giant, rippling television screen with the brightness turned almost all the way down. Cautiously, he moved himself one baby step into the future – and the wall slammed into him with enough force to flatten him to his back and knock the air from his lungs. 

            He rolled over on the ground and caught his breath. ‘This must be the place.' He thought to himself.

            He pulled himself up to his knees and laid his hands on the blank surface. It was smooth as glass, yet slightly warm to the touch. Beyond the wall, a dim blue shape drifted in front of him and paused.

            Jacob felt a chill and yanked his hands off the wall. The formless mass moved on and Jake shuddered – he had definitely felt a presence.

            It had scared him.

            He forcefully pushed the contact out of his mind and rose to his feet. A few yards to his left one of the tracings entered the curtain. Breathing hard and shaking slightly, Jacob went to inspect it.

            From outside, it appeared to simply end at the smooth surface, so Jacob waded into the tracing for a closer look. It was difficult to see inside the fog, and Jake knew that he’d have to touch the wall again. His hand, however, refused to go near it.

            Jake stood inside the tracing with his fists clenched, trying to conjure the nerve to touch the wall. He finally forced himself to move his hand before he had a chance to stop it.

            It was smooth and unyielding – and suddenly there was a voice in his head.

            “You are not he for whom I wait.” 

            Jacob yelled and jerked his hand free. He rushed out of the tracing and saw a blue shape following him from beyond the wall.

            He stopped running and the shape stopped. He backed away from the wall but the shape stayed across from him. He moved a few steps to the right, and the shape moved to the right. Jacob halted and the shape halted.

            Jacob ran his hand through his hair and tried desperately to think. He ran his other hand through his hair and suddenly bent over double, tugging at twin fistfuls and groaning. Then he stood up and took a deep breath.

            “I came here for answers.” He whispered to himself.

            Jacob strode right up to the formless blue glow and laid his hands on the wall. The voice in his head was back at once.

            “How is it that you are here and not he for whom I wait?”

            “What are you.” He shouted at the wall.

            “I am a finished soul. What art thou?”

            “I’m an unfinished soul. I fell off the propagation.”

            “So time hath not arrived?”

            What time?”

            “Time has not yet reached this point?”

            “No. It’s a long way off.”

            “Perhaps you knew Nguyet in another incarnation?”

            “Not that I know of. Is my mother on the other side.”

            “That I could not say.”

            “Her name is Gladys. Gladys DeVries.”

            “Even so. I could not say.”

            “’Can’t’ as in, ‘you don’t know’, or ‘you’re not allowed’ to say?”

            “There are other aspects.”

            Without warning, the light faded from the wall and the figure was gone.

            “Wait. I’ve got so much to ask you.”

            There was no response.

            Jacob pounded his fists on the wall. “Damn it!”

            “You really should watch your language.”

            This time the voice was not in his head. Jacob spun and looked in the direction from which it came. Upsilon stood a little ways off, shaking his tiny, curly-haired head.

            “Why did you come here?” The little man asked.

            Jacob sniffed and straightened his tie. “Answers. What else?”

            “You’re not going to find any answers here, only more questions.”

            “Well since you seem to know so much, why don’t you tell me where my mother is.”

            “I take it your mother’s dead.”

            “Bingo.”

            “Well she might be in there, but it’s not very likely. Soul's have to endure a lot before they reach the end of time.”

            “Yeah, so I’m finding out.”

            “Look, do you realize fully where you’re at?”

            Jake took in the massive barrier between himself and the answers. “Armageddon.”

            Upsilon laughed. “Yeah, it’s Armageddon, superficially at least. But it’s not just the end of your world; it’s the end of time. It’s the end of reality. You were right in thinking that those are souls on the other side of that wall, but the rest – you’re just not ready for it.”

            “Look, all I know is, I communicated with something beyond that wall. So what if it’s some horrible bogey man from beyond reality, if my mother is over there, it means I could communicate with her.”

            “Trust me. If your mother was over there, she wouldn’t be your mother.”

            The finality of that statement was something Jake could not refute. Somehow, he knew Upsilon was right, human qualities didn’t exist beyond the barrier, at least not in the way Jake needed.

            “Upsilon… I love my mother. That’s all I came here to say.”

            “I understand,” said the tiny man, nodding his head, “Why don’t you let me take you someplace a little more pleasant?”

 

 

 

 

 

            She was gaining on him. Sam had been to her office, then the police station, and more recently, to her uncle’s apartment, Wendy stayed in his tracing with a burning focus to catch up to her brother, but so far, the propagation was well ahead of her.

            Judging from his actions, Wendy was sure that he’d received the news of her disappearance by now. After leaving her uncle’s, where he’d spent a fair amount of time on the couch across from their closest living relative, Sam had gone to a bar. There the tracing began to take on a lighter shade of gray. Vague, glowing outlines of bodies in the bar told her that the propagation wasn’t too far ahead.

            She was almost there.

            Her heart began to beat faster as she followed the Sam-shaped tunnel out the door and across the street. He’d entered the park where they’d gone to talk on the night he’d dropped out of college. She followed the tracing to the fountain and saw a dim, ghostly figure sitting on the very bench where he’d sworn to make something out of himself. As she approached, the man took on brightness and color. It was definitely him.

            He was sitting hunched over, a bottle in one hand and his face buried in the other.

            He was sobbing.

            Wendy came up behind him and reached out to touch his shoulder. Her hand passed right through – he didn’t notice her. She choked back the tears that were ready to burst forth and tried to concentrate on what Upsilon had told her.

            The propagation was an elevator. She was climbing stairs. In her mind, she swam forward until Sam had no visible tracing. She reached out again, but smoke formed where Sam’s back would be when he lurched into the next sob. She was slightly ahead of the propagation. She cursed inwardly and tried to slow herself down a hair. When Sam sobbed, a faint shadow stayed behind him.

            She drew her hand away and tried to focus. She blocked out the sadness and frustration forcefully. Once her head cleared, she was left with the mental image of a second hand, sweeping around the face of a clock with a constant, steady speed. She suddenly found that if she left a part of her conscious mind on that second hand, concentrating and imagining it’s speed correctly, she could just barely keep pace with the propagation.

            She carefully divided her mind into focusing on two things at once. Then she moved deliberately around the bench and stood before the only person left that she truly cared about. There were no tracings about him whatsoever, neither in front of nor behind him, so she carefully and calmly spoke his name.

            “Sam.”

            He looked up with red-rimmed eyes but he was too late. Speaking had divided her concentration just enough to fall behind the propagation.

            “Wendy?” Sam’s gaze darted around, probing the quiet darkness.

            Wendy bit her lower lip and nudged the second hand ahead.

            And then he saw her.

            “I’m here Sam.”

            His eyes locked onto hers and for a brief second, shone with compassion and hope. Then they filled with fear.

            “No!” He cried. “You’re dead!” He scrambled sideways off the end of the bench, and fell.

            Wendy’s concentration faltered. From his expression, she could tell that he’d just seen her phase out. She stemmed the tide of rising emotion and forced herself to phase back in.

            “Sam, please don’t be frightened, I have to tell you something.”

            “There’s a not a such a thing as ghosts.” He cried as he tried to get back to his feet.

            “Please, Sam, I can’t do this for very long.”

            He weaved when he stood and blinked stupidly as she phased out. “Go way Wennedy!”

            When she phased back in, he threw the rum bottle at her with all of his drunken might. “I said go ‘way!” He sobbed. “My sisser’s dead!”

            The throw was pathetic. The bottle landed in the grass and it’s content’s began gurgling out.

            Wendy redoubled her mental efforts. She fell behind again briefly, but with sheer willpower, was able to get back in synch despite the emotions that were threatening to spill free.

            “Sam, you’ve got to listen to me. I love you Sam, but you’ve got to quit drinking.”

            Sam covered his ears with his hands and clamped his eyes shut. “Wenny’s not here. La-la-la-la-la. There’s no such thing as goss’s. La-la-la-la-la.”

Wendy stormed toward the swaying man. She knew that she only had seconds left before she totally lost it and was consumed. This would be her last chance. She grabbed him by the collars of his leather jacket and shook him with all of her strength. His eyes snapped open and fixed on hers, wide with terror. “Quit! Drinking! You! Big! Dumb! Jerk! You hear me? Quit drinking! And Live! Your! LIFE!”

            She suddenly threw her arms around him and hugged him fiercely, then she lost it.

            Sam sank to the grass and stared around the dimly lit park in bewilderment. Kneeling before him yet invisible, Wendy finally cried for him.

            She could only watch as he crawled toward the bottle, through her.

            The blank look was still on his face when he reached it and held it up to the streetlight. It’s beam distorted as it shone through the few clear mouthfuls left in the bottom. The blankness on his face turned to bliss as Sam upended the bottle and emptied it down his throat.

Wendy leapt to her feet and screamed, but he did not hear her.

            So she ran far away.

            As far away as she could get.

            Back through time.

 

 

 

 

 

            Jake felt funny holding Upsilon’s hand. He knew they must look like a father and a three-year-old taking a walk together, but that’s what Upsilon said they had to do in order to stay together on their journey. As soon as he’d taken hold of the chubby hand, Upsilon had taken off, blasting them backward through time.

            It wasn’t like Jake had done it earlier. In fact, they didn’t move – They stood in one place, and Upsilon moved space and time around them. Reality curled up at the horizon in every direction, leaving the two in a bowl. More land appeared at the rim as the world folded inwards in sort of a giant pucker. The bowl deepened and became an inverted cone, then a tapered cylinder, and finally, a long tunnel with no end in sight. Then it began sliding rapidly past them. Jake knew it was the universe moving and not him because he felt no sensation of motion.

            At first, he could make out details in the curved wall around him. The geodesic buildings that had surrounded him were the first to drop away beneath him. The geodesics behind those slid down next. Then the next, and the next, all gaining in speed until the walls around them were just a flickering, silvery-gray blur. Still they accelerated. Silver faded into smooth gray, then the gray faded into translucence, and Jake was able to see dark objects passing by outside of the tunnel.

            Their tunnel was no longer straight, either. It curved drastically, above them, over and over, without warning and with no discernable clue as to which direction it would curve next. The further they went, the faster they traveled, and the more Jacob could see through the walls to what was outside their tunnel – outside their reality.

            The dark shapes were other tunnels, a great many of them, twisting around each other and theirs in a thick tangle of realities. Jake suddenly realized that he was travelling through a thread in a huge, chaotic knot. Before he could puzzle out what this meant, Upsilon reversed the whole process even more swiftly.

            Like a bug hitting a windshield, reality suddenly splattered flat around them.

            Jake looked around, and almost immediately recognized his new location.

            “What the hell is this?”

            Upsilon smiled up at him. “It’s where Americans go to be happy.”

            “It’s Cartoon-Land.”

            Jacob let go of the small hand in disgust – now they were a father and toddler at an amusement park.

            Upsilon’s smile faded. “What’s the matter, you don’t like Cartoon-Land?”

            Jake shook his head. “No. I love Cartoon-Land. Cartoon-Land’s wonderful. I’m just not in the mood for a holiday.”

            “Well, you’re gonna have to find some way to entertain yourself. Like it or not, you’re living outside the propagation and you’ll have to stay this way until Armageddon. The good Lord knows I can’t stick around to entertain you, I’ve got work to do.” 

            The words stung Jacob. Knowing they were true made it worse. He could not come up with a reply. 

            “Look, I’ve brought you in just ahead of the propagation. You have to kind of stay close to it if you really want to see anything happening, you know? If you get too far ahead or too far behind, all you can see are the tracings and it’s kind of hard to tell what they’re doing.” 

            Jake nodded absently as he avoided looking at Upsilon. The smoky, human-shaped tunnels around him were becoming noticeably shorter, and faint, flickering body shapes began appearing in them.

            “Now listen, if you’re gonna be wandering around on your own through space and time, there’s a few ground rules you’re gonna have to live by. The first is, ‘Don’t mess with the propagation’. If you want to see what’s happening in the real world, stay just in front of it or just behind it. If you try to keep pace with the propagation, people might be able to see you. Because of the obvious confusion this creates, messing with the propagation is THE cardinal no-no. Secondly, if you see any more ripple worm threads, stay well away from them. Their pinholes make the fabric of reality unstable, and if you were to start messing around with them, you could cause some serious damage – real serious damage. And finally, for your own safety, avoid the followers. They follow you in time on smaller versions of the true propagation, and if they see you, they will most likely kill you on sight. Even if they don’t kill you, there’s worse things they could do, okay? Just stay away from them.”

            Jake nodded, still watching the figures around him take on substance.

            “Well, that’s pretty much all I can tell you. Unless you have any questions, I should be getting back to work.”

            Jake looked at him finally. “I do have a question. What’s that thing you did, curling the world up around us and all?”

            Upsilon smiled. “The world didn’t really curl up, Jacob, is was an abstraction used for navigation. I’m really not supposed to discuss this with you. Suffice it to say that it’s a part of what we seraphim do.”

            Jake was startled. There was a taste of something in that exchange – a taste of meanings and truths, ultimate truths. He formed his next question the moment Upsilon began to phase out.

            “Good luck, Jake. See you around.” The tiny body came apart in dark shafts of anti-light that flamed down an Upsilon-shaped tunnel, and then he was gone.

            Disappointed, Jake sat down on the pavement to think. The people around him were starting to take on color and the details of their faces and clothing emerged. Judging from the way things had happened at his office, the propagation could only be minutes away. Jacob sighed and rested his chin on his fists. 

Apparently there was more to creation than he would have believed. Ripple worms, life tracings, time propagations, seraphim, souls finished and unfinished, and other realities wrapped around this one. He didn’t have any of it figured out just yet, but it was obvious that there was some great and wonderful system under which creation functioned, and his reality was only a small thread of it. He knew that if he sat and pondered it long enough, he’d probably be able to grasp some of it, but then again, what did it matter?

            The propagation was nearly upon him. 

All the people looked completely normal except for the fact that they walked through shadowy, fog-like tunnels. He saw almost exclusively couples and families; attractive young couples, leisurely old couples, black families, white families, Asian families, families with toddlers, and families with teenagers. Besides the fact that they were all on vacation, the smiles these people wore were due to only one thing – they were with someone they loved.

            Jacob could spend all eternity studying the mysteries of creation and be perfectly content, yet why bother? No matter how fantastic the meaning turned out to be, there was no one he could tell.                     

            The propagation finally reached Jacob’s frozen movement. For one brief, fleeting instant, he saw the world he was no longer a member of, without the shadowed clutter of tracings. Warm sun, birds singing, children laughing… And then the tracing began again as time marched on without Jacob DeVries. The couples, the children, the parents, and the people they each loved, all smiled together as they carved their dark tunnels away from him.

            “Screw this!” Jacob yelled, jumping to his feet, “I didn’t ask to get snagged on….” He panted. There was one person left he could talk to – if he could locate her in all of space and time.

 

 

 

            It had been a day, at least, as the mind measures time. Her body remained frozen in the instant she was yanked off the propagation, so she hadn’t aged and she was neither hungry nor tired. She could only assume that the way she felt physically would remain constantly the same until the end of time. Emotionally, though, she’d spent the last day on the proverbial roller coaster. Despite that, she’d learned a few tricks since the moment she’d left Sam.

            It seemed that, as far as physics were concerned, living outside of the propagation had its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, without the powerful flow of time, mental energy was the governing force. Just like it was a trick of the mind to move around in time, Wendy discovered that will alone could move her around in space. All she had to do was to visualize her destination, will herself to be there and the place would rush towards her without her having to take a step

            On the negative side; without the powerful flow of time, it was impossible to move inanimate objects. She had bent once to pluck a dandelion, but all of the strength in her body had not been enough to even budge the plant. It was then that she learned her second trick. On an impulse, she nudged herself forward in time as she picked the flower, and it came free as easily as any other had before. Walking away with it was another matter. At the end of Wendy’s ‘time-nudge’, the dandelion stubbornly froze in mid-air, and was once more impossible to move. This was how Wendy learned that in order to affect or change anything outside of the propagation, she had to lay hands on it and propel herself forward in time for as long as she wished to manipulate the object. It was damned inconvenient, and only the clothes on her back were immune to this phenomenon.

            She’d wandered aimlessly all this time, driven only by the swings of her mood. Somehow she’d ended up on a west coast pier a few moments after an Earthquake. Nearby, a cliff face had toppled over a strip of beach and into the ocean. Although the pier was thick with the tracings of many lives, she was completely alone. There were no people, no seagulls, and no color – in the sun or in the many shops lining the boardwalk. Even the sea was completely still: waves frozen in a moment of time. If it hadn’t been for her clear perception of depth, Wendy could’ve sworn she was looking at a black and white photograph. 

As she leaned on the railing overlooking the seashore, she moved herself back through the earthquake over and over again. The tremors suited her mood and there was something symbolic in the toppling cliff. Hundreds of tons of normally steadfast rock suddenly letting go of the mountain, then sliding away beneath the waves. All that remained to mark its passing once the foam and churn settled was a new mound of rubble stretched across the narrow strip of beach like a corpse. Wendy finally pulled herself back to witness the spectacle yet again, this time in slow motion. She let herself crawl forward in time ever so slowly, and felt satisfaction in the wall of rock’s slow demise. Hundreds of tons of Earth seemed to float down and slip forever away beneath the ocean. Then, once it was still, Wendy eased back in time again. Even after the massive rocks leapt out of the ocean and stuck to the cliff, Wendy continued backward. To make it more interesting, this time she planned on travelling back to maybe fifteen or twenty minutes before the earthquake. Then she’d go for a walk on the seashore and this time, be surprised when the earthquake came.

            When it felt like she’d gone far enough backwards, she stopped herself. Then she physically turned and began walking down the pier towards the boardwalk and it’s shops. As she moved, she once again devoted a small portion of her mind to picturing the second hand. Dark gray waves began crashing on a light gray shore, wind blew, and, for Wendy, time was passing somewhat normally. She approached the stores which, when the true propagation had swept through, were brightly colored, yet were now merely dull shades of gray.

            Suddenly there was a flickering.

            Colors appeared in a few places, and then were gone.

            More flickering, actual sunlight, and colors appeared in new places. She heard distorted fragments of sound coming from the cluster of shops, then everything was gray again.

            Wendy was surprised to find herself eager for something new. After all the gray and the profound loneliness, she hurried towards the strange flashes of sound and color. Once she’d reached the boardwalk between the rows of shops, the world suddenly exploded into bright colors and vibrant sounds. This time it was no flicker. There were still, however, random patches of dead gray popping in and out of the liveliness around her, but aside from that, she could almost believe that she’d returned to the land of the living.

            The occupants of this pocket of life, though, were not remotely human.

            About ten of the creatures were engaged in a murderous brawl barely fifty meters away. No two were alike. Most of them were misshapen, disproportionate and had various strange appendages whose purposes Wendy could not begin to fathom. Some had horns, or tusks, or talons, too many eyes, too many legs, too much hair, or not enough skin. A winged, one-eyed creature with three stubby legs soared in circles above the melee; screeching and diving once in a while to gore one of the combatants with it’s wickedly curved beak. Another creature, a charred marshmallow man riding a huge, harley-ish street-bike, ripped down the boardwalk and blasted through the crowd, mangling several of the already hideous monsters. Two of the survivors began a snarling tug-of-war over the severed torso and legs of one of the victims. Neither of them noticed the smaller creature jumping up to rip away huge mouthfuls of the hindquarters.

            Still more creatures were busy within the shops. Wendy could hear them, howling, grunting, and growling as they smashed windows, ripped down racks of merchandise, clawed at the walls, and began more battles amongst themselves.

            Wendy instantly recognized them as the ‘parasites’ Theta had told her about. Electricity ran through her limbs and her heart began beating wildly. None of the Followers had noticed her yet, so she immediately withdrew from them by stopping her second hand. Their strange pocket of time moved on without her, and after a few more of the ‘flickers’ she’d noticed earlier, the boardwalk was once more lonely and gray.

            She sagged with relief and leaned against a nearby lamppost. Then she noticed that, interestingly enough, the Followers hadn’t left tracings of themselves. The destruction they’d caused, though, was still in evidence. Wendy suspected that if she now moved herself forward in time, she would find the vandalism and the results of the reckless violence more and more complete. She wasn’t about to do that, though. She planned on staying well away from their little ‘propagational eddy’ from now on. The safest, most logical place for her to go to now was the past.

            Just as she was about to will herself away, a sudden voice from behind made her just about leap through her skin.

            “Hey you.”

            Wendy spun and faced the speaker.

            It was Jacob!

            “You’re not a Follower, are you?”

            Although she found the question odd, Wendy was overjoyed at the sight of her co-worker. “Oh, Jake, my god… I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you.”

            “Yes, Jake. It is Jake.” As Wendy walked towards him with her arms spread wide for a welcome embrace, she noticed a strange emptiness in his eyes that hadn’t been there the last time she saw him. It was queer enough to make her freeze in her tracks.

            “No, don’t stop. Come closer, come closer to Jake. You are safe with Jake.”

            Wendy lowered her arms. Some instinct caused her to shift her weight and get ready to run.

            “Jake, what’s going on? You’re kind of freaking me out here.”

            “Don’t let Jake freak you out here, Jake is nice. Jake is safe, come closer to Jake.”

            “Screw that.” Wendy said, getting a creepy feeling all over, “Something’s not right here.” She took a half a step backward.

            “No, don’t leave Jake. Do you not like safe and nice Jake?”

            Wendy did not answer. She started backing away slowly. If this was really Jake, there was something seriously wrong with him.

            “Jake frightens you? Maybe this one will make you feel safer and nicer.” He started walking towards her. As he did so, a ripple passed through his face and body. It was no longer Jake walking towards her.

            “My god, Sam?”

            “Yes, Sam. It is Sam.”

            Now she knew for sure that it was neither of them. She backed into a storefront and stopped, panic rising in her chest.

            “You’re a Follower!”

            The creature stopped. His vacant eyes suddenly filled with a lunatic hatred. “You’re a preceeder. We hate you!” He spit a drooling wad of phlegm onto the boardwalk. It sizzled where it struck, and a black tendril of acrid smoke rose into the air.

            “This reality was created solely for you, and we are stuck in your wake, rotting and feeding on your garbage!”

            The Follower raised his arm and a ripple passed through it. It became a thick blue tentacle covered with wedge-shaped razors. He began coming slowly towards her with a wicked grin. “I am going to be the first to devour preceeder flesh.”

            With a burst of adrenaline, Wendy launched herself backward in time. She didn’t know how far – and she didn’t care. Without pausing, she formed an image of a place in her mind, the first location she could think of. Scenery began flashing past her at an incredibly surreal speed, halting suddenly near a scenic lake. She was in her hometown, a few blocks from her parent’s house. It had to be many years before her birth, though; the bike path and the war memorial were not yet in place. Thankfully the benches facing the lake were. She slumped gratefully into one and propped her head in her hands. She took a deep breath and tried to soothe the fluttering sensations in her chest.

            “That was too close,” she said out loud, “from now on, I’m gonna stay in the future.”

            She closed her eyes and continued to breathe for several minutes. Once she had managed to finally calm herself, she leaned back on the bench and looked out over Crystal Lake.

            A figure was coming towards her from the beach.

            “I’ve been in your mind, Preceeder”, he called to her, “I have your scent.”

            The fear was instantly back upon her. She leapt to her feet. The creature had changed again. It approached her still on Sam’s legs and lower torso, but the shoulders were huge, rounded, and shaggy. A pair of slender, insectoid limbs sprouted from the shoulders and ended in hawk-like talons. The apparition was topped off by a large, bloated, lumpy version of Sam’s head.

            “You can’t leave your eddy!” She cried out, “Theta said!”

            The grotesque mouth curled into a mockery of a smile. “Seraphim do not understand us as well as they think they do.”

            Wendy suddenly turned and began running. As she did so, she moved herself rapidly through time, back and forth at random. Her mind raced as she fled. She needed a place to hide. No, the Follower could find her, she was sure. She had to stop him somehow. She needed a weapon. Something tough.

            Being in her hometown gave her an idea. When she was a child, her Uncle Bruce had owned a gun shop in the town’s square. A small video store occupied the building in modern times, but in his day, Bruce had had a reputation as a firepower fanatic. Wendy sprinted left on Pine Street, and leapt forward in time.

            She flew down the few blocks remaining before Pine Street became Main Street and would form the western border of town square. Although she was progressing rapidly in time, the large homes she passed changed little. Nearly every house on this end of Pine had been declared an historic landmark and were therefore not torn down or crowded by more modern structures. The only way she could tell she was moving forward in time was the falling of the leaves and subsequent regrowing in one-minute cycles. Then the cracked sidewalk was replaced with newer, neat squares of cement, and Wendy knew she had reached the time of her childhood.

            She entered town square and ran left under the long awning the row of storefronts shared. Three doors later, she was inside ‘Bruce’s Hunting Supplies’. Her eyes quickly scanned the small, dim shop and came to rest on a familiar vision from her past. There, obscured by the tracings of years of customers, was the wood and glass-cased counter. On top was an old, grayish, mechanical cash register, and behind it, a thick shadowy tracing where her uncle had stood for much of his life. She darted around the counter and reached into the shelf below the cash register. It had been strictly forbidden to the Wendy of the past, but the Wendy who lived outside of time produced her uncle’s anti-theft insurance: a sawed-off, double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun, loaded as always.

            She crawled slowly forward in time, enough to lift the weapon, aim at the spot in the front door where the creature’s knees would hopefully be, and slide the safety off. Then she became even more cautious. She pictured an hourglass, one grain dropping in incredibly slow motion. She put pressure on the trigger. The grain floated down slower than a falling feather, and the trigger gave way a fraction of a millimeter at a time. When it neared the rear of the guard, she felt something within the mechanism suddenly free up, and knew the firing pin was advancing.

            Wendy abruptly halted time. She tentatively released her grip on the weapon and stepped back, letting it hang in the air. She realized, with relief, that the shotgun was aimed properly and already fired at the place the monster would surely be. She darted around the counter and to the rear of the store. She placed her hand on the knob of the back door, and waited.

            Literally no time passed. Her heart thundered in her chest, over and over and over. Every muscle in her body was tensed and quivering in anticipation of bolting for her very life, and still no time passed.

            Suddenly he was there.

            The tall, misshapen, nightmare Sam glided through the open door and stopped. Sam’s eyes bore hatefully into her from stretched, too-red sockets.

            “This chase only makes me more hungry, Preceeder, come here and let me bite into your skull.”

            A ripple passed over the lower half of the already elongated face, and huge, twisting, saber-like teeth filled the gaping snout. Wendy responded by rolling time forward. The shotgun exploded with sound and flipped into the shelves behind the counter. The plate glass in the front door shattered and splinters of wood were ripped out of the jamb. Even before the debris could settle, Wendy saw that the Follower was unhurt.

            The toothy maw curled into a grin.

            Wendy burst through the back door and immediately began shifting again. Sights raced past her as she flipped herself forward and backwards in time. Her mind flew as well.

            Somehow, the shotgun had missed him completely. It had been aimed straight at him, though. The only answer she could come up with was that it had fired into a different time. Probably microseconds before the Follower had moved forward. So she had moved forward in time, then the shotgun fired, but the creature was still behind them in time. So technically, he wasn’t occupying that space yet. Obviously the main problem was that the shotgun was too quick to catch the Follower. What she needed was a slower devastation, like an erupting volcano – or a landslide.

 

 

 

            The beach was wide. Far to the north and south, it had plenty of room for people to set up blankets and umbrellas, or to play volleyball.

            There was only one short stretch where a lonely hill approached the ocean, leaving only a meager strip of sand between the water and it’s face, already eroded into a respectable cliff.

            From viewing the earthquake multiple times earlier, Wendy had learned that the falling rock would devour the narrow strip of beach only as far as a lifeguard’s chair on the far side. That was where she would wait for the Follower.

            As she approached her destination, Wendy tried to think the situation through carefully. She didn’t want to miss like she had with the shotgun – if this didn’t work, she was out of weapons.

            First of all, there shouldn’t be any way for the Follower to know about the earthquake or landslide. Although this was where she’d encountered their mini-propagation, she’d met him before the earthquake, technically, then drawn him backward in time. It should take him by surprise, but what if it were too slow to actually hit him? She’d have to get him to stand there through the quake, then the landslide itself, well over one full minute. He’d have plenty of time to dodge it.

            Suddenly the answer occurred to her. It was so simple. She was preparing a trap, with her as the bait. The full minute could pass in the blink of an eye if she were able to get the predator to pursue the prey through time.

            Wendy positioned herself a few steps within the far side of the danger zone, then turned to wait. She actually hoped the follower would hurry because, as soon as she faced the still, black and white landscape, she knew she only had precious few moments of courage. Already the urge to flee was upon her, and she would soon be overwhelmed by the panic.

            “Steady.” She told herself. “Steady.” She hugged herself tightly and tried to take deep breaths. The need to run became a palpable itch. Her heart fluttered and she took two steps backward.

            The follower phased in suddenly – right in the middle of the kill zone. His jaw unhinged in a serpentine threat, and several more rows of needles popped out through his gums.

            Her breath quickened even as she nudged herself forward in time. The monster phased out, then immediately phased back in as he joined her in the next moment. He stood his ground, though, and issued a hungry hiss in her direction. She moved forward again, a little further this time, and the creature followed. She had felt the first tremor during that slide but the follower seemed not to notice.

            It was time to go for broke.

            The follower raised his elongated arms with their dangling claws, took one step forward, and then phased out as Wendy raced a full minute into the future.

            The Earthquake felt like a bumpy road in a speeding car as she flew through it, then rock, boulders, and waves of dirt cascaded down in the blink of an eye. Wendy stopped and stared. Where there had been beach sand a moment before there was now a house-sized mound of rubble and debris. Her heart continued to hammer, she continued to gasp for breath, and now she wanted to run more than ever.

            She forced herself to stay. She had to know if she’d killed the follower or if he’d continue to pursue her through every moment of history. She had to stay and see if – if what?

            She didn’t know how she could tell one way or the other.

            And in the next moment she did.

            The follower phased in atop the mound of rock and laughed at her.  His voice was as beastly and glutteral as it could possibly be and still form words.

            “You don’t understand how these things work, preceeder. Stop trying. Let me kill you.”

            Wendy gave in and let herself run.

 

 

 

 

            Jake was puzzled.

            The moment after they’d left the office, the glowing thread of the ripple worm suddenly swelled to the size of a barrel.

            After searching endlessly for Wendy, throughout the world and all of time, Jake had realized that the odds were impossible of just stumbling across her. His only hope was that she’d come looking for him and come to the same conclusion he had – the office.

            He waited for her in the time and place where their troubles had first begun. He’d sat in his chair in his cubicle and tried to sleep; he wasn’t tired. He went to the lounge and tried to read a magazine. He found that he had to manipulate time in order to turn the pages, this brought him further away from his expected rendezvous so again he gave up. It was then, upon returning to the main office, that he’d noticed the change in the ripple worm’s trail.

            It had been there when he’d first departed for the end of time, a single, glowing thread hanging knee-high in mid-air and stretching ten feet across the room. Here, a few moments later in time, it had become a cone. It was still a thread at one end, yet within a few feet, there was a sudden bell-shaped bulge and the line became a wide cone. He examined the larger end from a safe distance, and discovered that it was not flat where it terminated. Instead, short, feathery spikes of silver-white light thrust out toward the wall and dissipated in a thinning cloud of fairy-dust.

            Remembering what little Upsilon had told him about ripple worms, Jake could only guess that sometime after they’d all left the office, someone had tried to follow the ripple worm’s trail into whatever dimension was beside this one.

            Jake made another curious observation: the wall a few feet from where the cone seemed to be pointing bowed inwardly with a slight, dark pucker in the center. He stepped sideways to get a better look at it. The pucker was more of a textured swirl as if the wall were being slowly forced down a flushing toilet. Even as he watched, several flecks of paint chipped off from the pattern and skittered into the dark point. This was a frozen moment of time. The inanimate should not be able to move unless time moved.

            Whatever was happening was not good.

            On an impulse, he decided to go backwards a little, in time, to see if he could find the cause. He watched the trail as he propelled himself several moments into the past, and saw it shrink back to a thread, and then disappear. This was where he and Wendy had last left tracings of themselves. He stopped and began to creep forward again, this time more slowly.

            The Wendy shadow and the Jake shadow approached each other, the silver thread suddenly burned across the office like a laser, then their tracings hit it and halted – forever. A moment later, the thread suddenly bulged for no apparent reason. No other tracings had approached it. Jacob figured that whoever had entered the thread must not leave tracings behind, like him and Wendy, and was immune to the mechanics of the propagation.

            He continued forward.

            The bulge flattened into a football shape, and then a cone as the far end of the thread widened to accommodate its passenger. He kept moving forward, past the point in which he’d noticed the change. The cone continued to wide, yet its point now slid down the thread towards the wall. Once enough of the base of the cone disappeared into the next dimension, the circle began to shrink. The closer the point of the cone came to the wall, the more its base shrunk, until finally, it was just a thread again. Then that too disappeared, as if it had been sucked into the dark point of the swirl.

            Jake shook his head to clear it. This was all far too weird for him, and probably way beyond his understanding. It was fascinating, however. For lack of anything better to do, Jake decided to go back and watch it all again, to see if he could notice anything new. To his great shock – and no small pleasure – Wendy was waiting for him back in ‘the moment’.

            She saw him and screamed.

            “Wendy, what? What is it?” He moved towards her and she backed away.

            “Wendy?”

            “Jake? Is that really you?”

            “Is this really me? What are you talking about?” He thought about it for a second. “Hell, I don’t know. This whole deal’s got me so screwed up, maybe I’m not really me anymore. Am I turning green or something?”

            With a sob of relief, Wendy rushed into his arms and hugged him tightly, pressing her face into his neck.

            “Oh Jake I’m so glad I found you. I don’t know what to do. This thing is chasing me and I’ve tried everything I can think of but he just keeps coming and I don’t know how to stop him.”

            “It’s okay, Wendy, just slow down.” Jake couldn’t help noticing how good she felt in his arms. “Now, what’s chasing you?”

            “A follower. You left before they could warn you…”

            “Upsilon caught up with me. But I thought he told me they couldn’t leave their little time-wave things.”

            “They can, Jake, Upsilon and Theta were wrong. This thing’s chased me back and forth through time and all over the country and there’s nothing I can do to stop him. I tried shooting him with a shotgun and then trapping him in a landslide but somehow he can avoid all of that. He’s like a bloodhound, Jake. He’s got my scent or something and no matter where I go he’s still after me. He says he’s going to eat me and he’s probably going to be here any minute now.”

            “So… wait. I don’t get it. You tried to shoot him and you tried to trap him in a landslide?”

            “Yes but I don’t have time to tell you the whole story right now. I’m sure he’ll be here any minute, Jake, there’s just no way to stop him.”

            “All right, now just hold on. Let me think about this…”

            “Jake, there’s no time.”

            “Now, wait. Maybe there’s no conventional way of stopping it. You know? Like shooting him or doing whatever we’d do to kill something in the real propagation – but there might be another way.”

            “Like what, Jake, a nuclear explosion?”

            “The ripple worm thread?”

            “What, how?”

            “I’m not sure how. But something tells me whatever we figure out will work. Let me ask you this – does the follower leave tracings of itself like people on the propagation?”

            “No.”
            “All right then. I think all we have to do is get him to trip through he thread, and he’ll be sucked into the next dimension.”

            “What makes you so sure?”

            Jake released their embrace and looked into her frightened eyes. “Lets just say I’ve seen the future.”

            He took her by the arm and led her out of the office and down the hallway past the elevators.

            “Jake, what are we doing?”

            “Simple. When he shows up, we run. Hopefully he’ll chase us down the hallway and when we get to the office, he’ll be moving too fast to notice the thread. We’ll leap over it, and he’ll get caught in it.”

            Panic filled her voice. “It’s not gonna work, Jake! Oh my God, it’s not gonna work!”

            “What? Why?”

            “Look!”

            Jake turned around.

            Directly in front of the elevators, between them and the office, stood the seven-foot tall monster. He chuckled evilly and pointed a long, bony, clawed finger with too many joints.

            “Two preceeders. How nice. I shan’t be hungry for a long time.”

            “C’mon Jake! Run!”

            She grabbed his hand and dragged him down the hallway. “Damn, he looks like your brother.”

            “They shapeshift, Jake, now run faster!”

            She was about to move through time but somehow Jake sensed it and yelled at her to stop. “Wendy, No! We’ve got to try to stay in the same moment as the thread. We can only do that as a last resort.”

            “He’s gonna catch us, Jake, we’re cut off from the office!”

            “Maybe not… c’mon.”

            He jerked suddenly on her arm, barreling through the open door of Langley, McGhan, Devowe and Smith Law Offices. He led her on a collision course toward the receptionist’s counter, then yelled for her to jump as he clambered over it. She followed a bit more slowly, then they tucked themselves inside the leg areas where the secretaries sat.

            “Oh, I don’t like this, Jake. This is a bad idea.”

            “Shhh!”

            Suddenly they heard a loud thump above them. The follower was on top of the counter.

            “I hope preceeders do not taste as pathetic as they act. You know I have your scent, do not try to hide from me.”

            They scrambled out from under the counter as bony spikes burst through and impaled the floor. The monster chuckled as they raced around the counter and towards the door. He jerked the spike his arm had become out of the floor, a ripple passed through it, and it became a long snake-like whip. It snapped toward Jake just as he was looking over his shoulder.

            Wendy heard the loud ‘crack’, saw a single spray of blood, and then Jacob slammed face-first into the door jam. He spun to the floor, then continued to try to scramble away in a half crawl, holding one hand over the side of his neck. Wendy screamed and darted through the doorway just as the tentacle slammed into the wall behind her. She spun around the doorframe, then clutched hold of Jake’s collar, dragging him through the doorway, to his feet, and down the hallway.

            Her heart hammered wildly as she dragged him back towards their office, but Jake resisted slightly, holding his neck and wincing.

            “Faster, Jake, c’mon!”

            Two steps ahead of them, the follower began to phase in. Wendy lurched to the side with a yelp of fear, but Jake’s reflexes were too slow. He crashed through the creature just as it was taking on substance – and became imbedded.

            Jake’s head and hands stuck out of the creature’s back, almost like a feudal peasant in stocks. His back and lower belly hung out of the creature’s belly, and Wendy thought she was going to be sick. The follower seemed to be pleasantly surprised to find his prey trapped within his own body, screaming.

            It made an animalistic chuckling noise, then grinned evilly. He raised his right forearm and a row of dagger-like quills unfolded, pointing at Jake’s spine. Wendy’s heart stopped. She watched in horror as Jake struggled weakly. The muscle’s in the follower’s arm tensed. He raised it in preparation of a wicked blow. It began to descend.

            Jake phased out.

            The follower stabbed himself in the gut.

It’s shocked eyes locked onto Wendy’s. They stared at each other for an endless moment, Wendy too frozen in fear and surprise and the creature apparently trying to decide how to react. Suddenly Wendy’s feet were moving. She hadn’t made a conscious decision to run, but as soon as the process had started, Wendy poured on every ounce of speed she possessed, panic fueling her flight.

            Behind her the follower cut loose an insane, howling, shriek of rage. It continued to scream as its heavy footfalls began to slam down the corridor in pursuit.

            Wendy just ran. She did not look back. She flew past the elevators, realizing the thudding footsteps were getting closer. The temptation to shift through time was overwhelming. The door to her office suite still loomed ahead, yet she was sure it was out of reach. The follower still got closer. There was no way she could reach the glowing, silver finish line before his row of quills tore through her back.

            She was four steps from the door and two steps from shifting when she noticed Jake. He was inside the suite, sitting on the floor with his upper body slumped against the seat of an office couch. He wasn’t moving – but he was on the far side of the ripple worm’s thread. Wendy dredged up another ounce of strength from some reserve she hadn’t known she’d possessed. She found herself running faster then she’d ever run in her life; faster than she’d thought was humanly possible.

            She came upon the thread and leaped.

            In mid-air, a sudden pain exploded across her back. She heard the sharp crack, and knew that the follower had gotten close enough to whip her with his tentacle.

            The added force of the blow knocked her far more forward than she’d intended. She came down on her hands and knees then plowed immediately into Jake. He doubled up around her and both of them flipped into a knotted tangle of limbs. The moment she came to rest, she pushed the pain away and hurriedly looked around to see the follower.

            It was caught in the thread.

            The ripple worm’s trail had swollen to engulf the seven-foot-tall monster in its silvery-blue aura. It was obviously screaming in overwhelming pain, yet no sound emerged from the thread’s bubble. The cause of the pain was the fact that the follower was being disassembled bit-by-bit. Small chunks of the creature were slipping off from its body, radiant light burst from the wounds, and the pieces slid down the thread and disappeared into the next dimension somewhere beyond the office wall. The creature flailed uselessly with the stumps of its arms as the melting process intensified. The details and features of its body blurred into silvery goo and dripped down the thread. The formless puddles spread all over the remains of its still struggling body until all she could see was roughly torso-shaped blob. This, too, was eaten away, shrinking in diameter, drop-by-drop, until all that remained of the follower was a football bulge in the thread. Finally, within only a few moments, the ripple worm’s trail was flat and straight – as if the follower had never been.

            Jake said, “Damn.”

            Wendy raised herself a little to look at his face. He was awake, and had apparently seen the whole thing.

            “Jake, my God. How bad are you hurt?”

            “Oh, a little here, a little there. Not too bad. You?”

            “I hurt, but I don’t think there’s any real damage. When I saw you I thought you were unconscious.”

            “No. My neck hurts like hell but I think the bleeding’s already stopped. My ribs are killing me, too, only the ones you broke when you crashed into me, though.”

            “Oh, Jake, I’m so sorry. Do you really think they’re broken?”

            “No. I just wanted sympathy.”

            She laughed and slapped his shoulder. “You’re a jerk.”

            Jake smiled and looked at her for a long moment. “You know, since we’re stuck here for all eternity or whatever, I think we should kind of stick together.”

            “Yeah… eternity would probably be pretty dull spending it alone.”

            “That’s just what I was thinking.”

            “And now we know first hand why we should avoid followers and ripple worms.”

            Jake shuddered. Eternity and immortality could get to be pretty dull even with a beautiful woman like Wendy by his side. Someday they may have to get followers after them just for something new. He looked around the black and white office, taking in it’s frozen timelessness and the strangeness of the shadowy tunnels souls had left in their passing. “So… what do you want to do?”

            “I don’t know. There’s not much to do, is there?”

            “Nope. Not too much.”

 

 

 

 

 

            Theta floated down a tunnel choked with snaking tendrils of light. Here and there he grabbed hold of them, swinging his body like a miniature trapeze artist. Sometimes the tendrils he touched would snap, other times they would bow until they joined another. Already they were divided and joined in all directions, in all different angles, like the canopy of a forest, and although the changes he made amidst the chaos would seem pointless and random to an outsider, they were all performed in precise accord with the doctrine of the pattern.

            He liked his job. He twirled and flipped happily down the corridor, shaping history, and soothing the monstrous beast of time.

            Another strand snapped.

            ‘Justice is served.’

            One rejoined a larger trunk.

            ‘Your offspring will prosper.’

            He stretched one to twice its length.

            ‘Too young to die.’

            Another one he bent and twisted into a knot.

            ‘Just to make life more interesting.’

            “Theta!”

            ‘Aww, crap.’

            “Over here, Upsilon.”

            The dark-haired seraphim appeared from behind a tangled mass of tendrils looking red-faced and irate.

            “Theta, what are you doing?”

            “Running my strands like I’m supposed to.”

            “Well… just what kind of abstraction is this?”

            “A fun one.”

            Upsilon snorted. “Well I don’t like it. It’s too untidy – too wild. Events could be missed.”

            “How? I’m travelling down a tunnel here, nice and linear-like.”

            “Still it’s inefficient. Why can’t you use a grid like everybody else?”

            “Grids are boring, Upsilon. This is fun. It’s not a sin to have fun doing your job, is it?”

            “No, but…”

            “No, in fact, our last inservice was on creativity and finding new ways to get the job done. It sounded to me like we were being encouraged to experiment.”

            “Well, yeah, but don’t you think this is taking it a little too far?”

            “I don’t know, Upsilon, what do you think? You’re the boss. Why don’t you order me to do it your way?”

            “I can’t tell you how to do your job, Theta, just be careful, all right? We don’t want any more ‘incidents’.”

            “Oh… now look, you know that wasn’t my fault, I just…”

            “Yes, I know. I’m not blaming you. In fact, I’m here because there’s been an incident in home sector.”

            “You’re joking.”

            “I wish I was. A rebirth has gone extremely astray.”

            “Astray?”

            “We lost it.”

            Theta grinned. “No way. And all this time I thought the higher-ups were the perfect heavenly host.”

            “Can it, Theta, this is bad. The soul left the garden and flew off on a weird vector. It didn’t even come close to the propagation, God only knows where it got to.”

            “Then why don’t you ask him?”

            “Cute, Theta.”

            “Thank-you, I thought so.”

            “Anyway, we know it still has to be in the four dimensions because it isn’t a higher order soul, so at least we have that bracket around it. It was seen coming in this direction so it could be in a few of these sectors. You and I have to go through your strands for this epoch and see if we can find it.”

            “Uh, Upsilon? A reborn soul, headed away from the propagation, in this sector – you know what that sounds like to me?”

            “No. What?”

            “Do you think we should check on our two dislodged friends?”

            “Why?”

            “Geez, man, think about it.”

            “You better watch your…” Upsilon suddenly gasped.

            Theta chuckled and nodded. “Oh yeah, now he’s catching on.”

            “Holy crap!”

            “What kind of crap? Maybe you oughta watch your language.”

            “Shut up.” Upsilon snapped. He grabbed Theta’s hand and dragged him towards the nearest trunk of tendrils, phasing them away as he did so.

 

 

 

 

 

            Jake and Wendy weren’t surprised when the two tiny men phased in.

            The four of them stood looking at each other for a long moment, Upsilon agitated, Theta amused, and Jake and Wendy seeming uncomfortable.

            Wendy tried a weak smile. “Hi Theta… Upsilon.”

            “So,” Theta said, “watcha been up to?”

            Jake and Wendy looked guiltily at each other. Wendy shrugged. “I don’t know… just trying to make the most of the situation, I guess.”

            “Oh, that’s nice. So I take it you’ve found something you enjoy doing?”

            “Can it, Theta. I want to know if you two saw anything unusual. We’re looking for this sort of smear of light, it’s got a glowing sphere at one end and a long, snake-like tail.”

            “Well…” Jake began, then stopped. He looked over at Wendy.

            “Actually… uh, Upsilon…” She shook her head and looked at Jake.

            “Hey Upsilon, check out the wall.” Theta pointed.

            The swirl of paint where the ripple worm’s trail terminated had grown to four feet across. The hole in the center was large enough for a man to stick his fist through and small chunks of plaster were breaking free, and bouncing through the spiraling pattern to disappear in the small black void. No one was shifting time.

            Upsilon clenched his fists and growled, “What in God’s name have you two been up to? Huh? What is that?”

            “Well, don’t be mad, Upsilon, see, Wendy had a run in with a follower and he chased her through time…”

            “They can shift time, too, Upsilon, I know you didn’t think so…”

            “But she couldn’t get away from him so she came here and told me, and this was all my idea.”

            “What was your idea?”

            “This. To trap him, you know?”

            “We didn’t know how else to stop him.”

            “Trap him how? What did you do?”

            “Well, we kind of got him to chase us, then we lured him through here, he was killing us, you know? He sliced open the side of my neck and got Wendy in the back…”

            “What happened to the follower?”

            “He just, sort of… he chased us and ran right through the thread.”

            “It tore him apart and sucked him through the wall, or into the next dimension or whatever.”

            Upsilon sighed heavily and tried to regain his composure. He stared at the floor and said in an even voice, “What you’ve done is punched a rather large hole in the wall between dimensions. This reality will bleed over into the next reality, causing a stricture in their space, and a void in yours. These will continue to worsen, until the past in your reality is completely eroded away, and theirs bursts. This will take us some time to repair. Now would you care to tell me where the streak of light went?”

            Meaningfully, Wendy laid a hand on her abdomen.

            “That’s what I was afraid of. Do you realize that a baby cannot be born outside of the propagation? That soul is trapped in there for all eternity.”

            Wendy and Jake both stared at him, shocked.

            “I can’t deal with this. This is beyond my authority.”

            Theta seemed alarmed. “What are you talking about? You’re the boss.”

            “I’m your boss, Theta, and speaking of which, I want you to be quiet.”

            “What are you gonna do?”

            “I’m not gonna do anything. This is way over my head. I’m passing this one on up the chain of command.”

            “What, home sector?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Them?”

            “Yes.”

            Theta raised his eyebrows and sighed. The two seraphim became silent.

            Wendy and Jake weren’t sure of what to do or say. They stood uncomfortably, looking at each other and the strange little white-clad men, and wondering what had just transpired.

            Jake’s discomfort finally goaded him into breaking the tense silence. “Sooo… Are we going to be… punished? Or something?”

            Theta shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it. You really can’t have any kind of life outside of the propagation, but if you go into the garden, your lives are over. On the other hand, you’re in the garden – home base. That’s where all souls are trying to go anyway. When Upsilon…”

            “That’s enough, Theta.” Upsilon snapped. “You’re dismissed.”

            For once the little man knew better than to argue. “Okay. I’ll be getting back to my strands, then.”

            He looked from Jake to Wendy and nodded. Softly, he said, “Congratulations guys – or ‘good luck’… whichever.”

            Theta phased out.

            Upsilon stood quietly for a moment, then took a deep breath. He raised his arms. “Well, we should get going, too. Take my hands, please.”

            Jake and Wendy slowly reached down and took hold of the chubby little appendages, wordlessly, Upsilon began folding the space around them.

            The ceiling of the office suite seemed to rise away above them. Adjacent offices rolled sideways over the top of the walls. Their entire building was laid out in cross-section in the shaft above them, then the street out front and the buildings on either side formed a band high above them. More of the surrounding city piled on top of them, pushing the ceiling higher and higher until it was lost in the distance.

            Then they began to rise: or the shaft slid down past them, it was hard to tell which. Like before, they accelerated rapidly until they colors flying past them blended together in a flickering gray. As the gray smoothed to transparency, the shaft began twisting and turning above them, switching them around faster than the most dizzying roller coaster. Again Jake saw the other tunnels wrapped around theirs, and knew that they were travelling through a thread in a huge, tangled knot of realities. This time, though, their destination was apparent.

            They were travelling towards the massive, bluish-white, spherical hub from which the threads of all realities emerged to give birth to the matted briar bush that was all of creation.

            The walls of the hub were just like the curtain-wall he’d found draped across the end of time. Unlike then, this time he was destined through it.

            He thought of the bulky shape moving behind the curtain. He thought of his mother. He thought of souls finished and unfinished. He thought of the soul trapped in Wendy’s belly, and then his own immortal soul.

            He wondered if he’d see the face of God.