James Malone patted his mustache and pulled up the colr of his coat as he stepped into the cold rain. His destination, as always, was the same. His point of departure and exact route, as always, was completely different. Tonight, he’d begun with a 12-minute drive from a Voss Sanitation office in midtown to a parking structure a short walk away from his actual destination. Of course, he wouldn’t go straight there. Too obvious. He instead opted for a walk around the block first, just long enough to ensure he was not being surveilled. The walk, accounting for the use of his cane, would take him 27 minutes, leaving him three minutes spare to improvise in the event that he were pursued. Nestled deep in both of his ears, a pair of cleverly disguised in-ear headphones–imperceptible unless you were specifically looking for them–buzzed away. In his left ear, a market report from Quebec droned on in French. In his right ear, tonight’s presidential debate between Jim Bell and George W. Bush was underway. Fish prices were down. Bell was up. The sounds of rain and city traffic filled the rare moments of silence between these two dialogues. As Malone approached a blind alley, he caught another sound, the muffled threats and demands of a mugger.

  The mugger had pinned a young man against a wall and was brandishing a knife as he fished through the man’s pockets for his wallet and any loose change or other items of value. The young man, smartly, was silent and compliant. The mugger, less smartly, had left his back to the alley entrance. Malone pulled up the hood of a jacket under his overcoat. The hood covered his gray hair, and with the dim lighting of the alley, dark shadows would adequately conceal his wrinkled face. He adjusted his posture as he entered the alley. Nothing about the way he now carried himself betrayed his 60-some years of age. His cane was no longer a means of support, but a weapon with which he could now visualize at least a dozen means of neutralizing his target. Several would leave the mugger sprawled out, unconscious on the pavement, but ultimately at no risk of permanent injury. Some would inflict more long-term damage. A limp. A lost eye. Perhaps a broken back. A few, without immediate medical treatment, would be lethal. Good thing the hospital was less than a block away.

  Using the curved end of his cane, Malone hooked the mugger’s knife arm and tugged him away from the man on the wall, then sharply jabbed the same end of the cane into his diaphragm, cracking a few ribs, knocking the wind out of his lungs, and more importantly, the weapon out of his hand. Malone quickly pinned the mugger against the wall by the throat with his cane, before delivering a knee to his groin.

  “Run,” commanded Malone, in a gruff voice. The man on the wall uttered a quick word of thanks and ran out of the alley. Malone stepped back, allowing the mugger to double over in pain, then threw the man headfirst against the opposite wall, knocking him out with an audible crack. Malone bent down to feel the now-unconscious mugger’s neck. Nothing broken, pulse present. He’d live. Malone pulled out his flip phone, dialed 911, and put on a phony New Jersey accent.

  “Yo, police?” said Malone to the responder, “A cape-wearin’ psycho just beat the shit outta some guy in an alley! Right outside Empire General! …Bck suit, bck cape, bck… helmet-mask… thing! Hell no, I ain’t stayin’ on the line! I’m gettin’ the hell outta here!” Malone hung up the phone and proceeded around the corner of the block. This diversion had cost him a full minute. The remaining 21 minutes of his walk passed without incident.

  After passing the metal detector at the entrance, Malone proceeded to the second floor of Empire City General Hospital and signed in with reception.

  “Your cousin is in room 203, Mr. Malone,” said the nurse at reception.

  “I remember,” said Malone. “Thanks.” He ambled toward room 203, where a comatose man y in a hospital bed, hooked up to several tubes. Quietly closing the door behind him, he walked over to the bed and examined the clipboard hanging at its foot. A bearded man in a white b coat entered the room as silently as possible.

  “Dr. Malik,” said Malone, noticing his presence.

  “Mr. Malone,” replied the doctor. “I’m sorry to say there’s been no improvement in your… cousin’s condition.” The man in the bed, Desmond Knight, bore a striking resembnce to James Malone, as if Malone had been the very same person only two decades prior. It was obvious to Dr. Malik that Malone and Knight were, biologically speaking, closer than cousins, but he kept up the charade in deference to Malone’s wishes.

  “I know,” responded Malone, holding up the clipboard. “I read his chart.”

  “Mr. Malone, you know I appreciate your donations to this hospital… and the personal favors you’ve done for me and my family, but perhaps a phone call might have sufficed? I do have other patients, and all this cloak-and-dagger is hard to schedule around.”

  “And the other thing we discussed? Any progress there?”

  Dr. Malik leaned closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. “The introduction of foreign memories to your cousin’s brain has shown activation of the expected areas, but without him actually being awake, there is simply no way to know whether this activation is incidental or conscious.”

  “My own research has shown conscious minds reject foreign memories.” Malone paused for a moment. “Start preparing to scale up.”

  “But Mr. Malone, we’ve yet to verify the long-term effects of isoted foreign memories. It’s possible that introducing these memories to your cousin’s brain has done irreparable damage. There’s no telling what kind of damage adding an entire virtual mind would do.”

  “My cousin is in a coma. I’ve read your prognoses. Conventional medicine will never succeed in waking him. So we’ll try it my way. How long do you need to prepare to scale up?”

  “I have no idea. This procedure has no medical precident.”

  “Ballpark, then.”

  Malik thought for a moment before replying. “30 days at least, maybe longer.”

  Malone’s phone buzzed in his pocket. A text message. Based on the timing, he guessed it was from Houston. He said nothing, but simply set down the clipboard and left room 203. As Malone returned to his car, he removed his false mustache and checked the text message. “Guest awake. -H”

  Charlie Sincir sat silently in his editor’s apartment. He was Mr. Vanyck’s first appointment of the day. Vanyck was running a small beeping gadget over his desk, checking for listening devices. Charlie had become accustomed to this quirk, this obsession with operational security. As Vanyck had expined it, a while before he met Charlie, a rival publisher had allegedly stolen a draft for a science fiction novel that had been faxed to him. Since then, Vanyck had his fax machine disconnected and began regurly sweeping his office for bugs. He was the only editor in Empire City who insisted on hand-delivery for manuscripts, and very few writers were willing to work with him. With fewer clients, he was eventually forced to sell his office space and work out of his apartment.

  Vanyck finished his bug sweep and sat down. Charlie opened his backpack and took out a few typed pages. Vanyck took them and pced them in front of himself. For the next few minutes, he silently read through them, occasionally turning over a page. Finally, he finished and broke the silence.

  “Unbelievable.”

  Charlie smiled, which Vanyck picked up on and continued.

  “No, I mean your story is literally unbelievable. I don’t believe it. These men chasing your Detective Mercer, are they professionals or amateurs? They speak of previous jobs, so they obviously have experience, but then this one tries to show off with a long-distance pistol shot and they start chasing after him and firing off guns in public in broad daylight, instead of simply walking up casually and blowing him away. This garbage truck comes out of literally nowhere, and don’t get me started on Mercer’s contrived escape. I mean, a loan shark the hitman happens to owe money to just happens to be in the exact area and decides to work him over when he’s in the middle of a job?” Vanyck handed the manuscript back to Charlie, who was no longer smiling.

  “Charlie, what is this?”

  “Well, see,” Charlie stammered, “I-I was trying to put a little action in my scripts, like you said.”

  “This is too much, too fast, Charlie. A car chase or a fist fight is one thing, but this is over the top, and it’s clearly not your style. You write mystery comics, not John Woo action movies.”

  A long-haired man in a bck suit burst into Vanyck’s apartment, leveled his silenced pistol at Charlie, and fired. Charlie just barely dodged out of the way in time to avoid being shot, and dove out the window to get away. As he nded on the street, a pale green Chevy tried to run him down, only for him to roll out of the way. He ran away from the scene, and began noticing everyone on the street was one of two men in bck suits, all trying to shoot him. As he rounded the corner, the open maw of a gigantic shark swallowed a city bus whole and began bearing down on him.

  Charlie awoke with a start, finding himself in a hospital bed with electrodes stuck to his forehead and bare chest. He was not in a hospital room, but some kind of study or home library. Charlie’s shirt was hung up on the back of a chair in front of a writing desk, on top of which were a typewriter, a file folder, and a cassette pyer. Charlie sat up on the hospital bed slowly, and looked around. There was nobody else in the room, only one door, no windows, and a camera in the corner of the room. Charlie pulled the electrodes off of his chest and forehead and got up from the bed, watching the camera, which seemed to follow his movements. Charlie walked over to the desk and put his shirt on. The cassette pyer caught his eye, as the words “py me” were handwritten on a piece of tape on top of it. Charlie looked around with a quizzical expression, then pressed the py button on the cassette pyer.

  “Charles Sincir,” began the low-pitched, clearly modified voice of the person on the recording. “You have abilities that may assist in our mission, and so you have been brought here for recruitment.”

  Charlie went to the door and tried the knob. Locked. The voice on the tape continued.

  “Directly in front of you, you will notice a typewriter. To the right of that, a folder. Open it.”

  Charlie went back to the desk and hesitated for a moment, then picked up the folder and opened it. Inside was a photocopied page from a comic book, which he recognized as Strange Mysteries #13, the first comic book story he ever had published. This particur page depicted the grisly scene of a mass murder apparently perpetrated by a Satanic cult, in which the severed legs of at least three victims were arranged in a circle around the head of a lion. Opposite the page was a photograph from an identically staged crime scene. The photograph had been taken in Las Vegas, two days after the issue’s publishing date, according to the sticky note that had been stuck to it in the file.

  “Now you understand,” said the voice on the tape. “The effects of your abilities are apparent—the Cult of Buer murders…” Charlie turned the page. Another photocopied comic book page, opposite a newspaper clipping with highlighted text.

  “The drug-smugglers’ stash hidden inside a dead octopus…” Charlie turned the page. “The rainy day killer…” Charlie turned the page. “And of course, your test encounter with the men in bck.” This st page consisted of excerpts from Charlie’s unpublished manuscript, with surveilnce photographs of the men in bck suits Charlie had encountered earlier.

  “Art imitates life,” continued the voice. “Life imitates art. Your particur art appears to influence life in a more literal sense. We’d like to test the limits of that. Consider this an entrance exam: Escape from this room using only the materials provided. We have every confidence you will succeed. A room full of chimpanzees on typewriters will eventually succeed in typing the first lines of Hamlet, so it should not be beyond your abilities to write your way out of this room. Good luck.” The tape clicked off.

  “Hey!” Charlie cried out, the reality of his situation setting in. He banged on the door of his bookshelf-lined prison. “There’s been a mistake! I’m a comic book writer! I don’t know anything about this! Hey! Let me out!” If anyone heard his pleas for freedom, they remained unanswered. If anyone watched him through the cold mechanical eye in the corner of the room, his outburst left them unphased.

  The man in the bck suit tumbled across the eons and between the attoseconds. He watched the entire lifespan of the universe py out in the blink of an eye. He had, of course, been briefed on the potential risks of traveling with a damaged Pocketwatch. However, moments—or possibly ages—ago, those risks seemed significantly more survivable than the alternative. He hadn’t meant to kill X, but that hardly mattered. Expining himself to the Department higher-ups would not be an option.

  Presently—if the present could be said to exist as a separate entity, distinct from past and future—the man was reassessing his earlier (ter?) cost-benefit analysis. Every particle in his body was being torn in a different direction, lengthwise across time, and terally, also across time. Within moments, or possibly never, or possibly always, he would cease to exist as a known quantity anywhere or at any time, his form spyed out imperceptibly across eternity. He was already beginning to question his own existence. Who was he before he began falling through time? Why was he in this situation?

  He screamed. It was a scream within which was his entire identity. It was the only sound he knew how to make. A sound that communicated the agony of a man in the process of being unmade. A sound which carried the plea of a man desperate to be heard, to matter at all to anyone else at all in the entirety of time and space. A sound so short that it fell through the tiniest measurable periods of time and went unheard, and at the same time so long that it became part of the background noise of the cosmos, and was completely ignored. The sound of time itself breaking like a sheet of gss as a bullet runs through it. The Pocketwatch fell away from his hand—or perhaps slipped through his fingers, which were beginning to dissolve—and disappeared through the timestream. The man continued to fall through time, a sve to inertia, a hapless victim of Newton’s First Law, hoping the sudden stop would end his suffering, hoping beyond hope that there would be a stop at all.

  Charlie was at his wit’s end. He had pulled open every drawer in the writing desk, all empty, except for the lowest one in the left side, which held only a sheaf of 8.5 x 11” writing stock paper. The floor was littered with books Charlie had pulled off the shelves to check—in vain—for a key. He had thrown a vase against the wall, empty. He’d attempted to kick through the wood-paneled walls, but found them unyielding, possibly reinforced from the other side.

  Through it all, the camera in the corner of the room had watched his rampage, and Charlie was beginning to get sick of it mocking him. He picked up the typewriter from the desk. It was heavy. He hoisted it over his head and turned toward the camera, preparing to hurl it, then… he stopped. Why had his captors given him a typewriter, told him to “write his way out”, and left him in a locked room, with apparently no key? Yes, it was an insane thing to do, but he knew about metahumans. Was it really such a stretch to believe that he might be one? What was the harm in pying along and attempting to write his escape? Charlie gently set the typewriter back on the desk, retrieved a piece of paper from the sheaf in the lowest drawer on the left-hand side of the desk, installed it in the typewriter, and sat down and began to type.

  On November 22, 1969, a minor static discharge near a grassy knoll in Dals, Texas caused a middle-aged woman to gnce toward the picket fence, behind which a man in a bck suit stood waiting, cigarette in mouth, to “correct” the man in the limousine about to pass below. A puff of smoke alerted the woman to the man’s presence, but she thought nothing of it at the time.

  On December 21, 2012, a stable electrical field formed in the middle of the Oval Office for exactly 30 seconds before dissipating. Two minutes and 37 seconds ter, the lights went out. Everything in the president’s office was pulled approximately 2 millimeters toward the phenomenon, though nobody noticed this at the time.

  On an unknown date, approximately 3.5 billion years before the dawn of humanity, a bolt of lightning struck the surface of the ocean. This particur bolt would have been utterly indistinguishable from any other occurring at the time, and at any rate, nothing on the pnet at the time was capable of noticing its occurrence.

  As Charlie finished typing, the room began to shake. Charlie took cover under the writing desk as the lock on the door was vaporized by a ball of lightning which suddenly materialized around it, then just as quickly disappeared. After the shaking stopped, Charlie cautiously got out from beneath the desk and observed the state of the door. A perfectly circur hole had been cut through the door and part of the adjacent wall, and the edges of the hole were charred. Charlie put his hand near the edge of the hole and felt warmth. Using his long shirt sleeve as a barrier between his hand and the heat, Charlie gripped the door by the smoldering edge and pulled it open, tentatively looking out into the empty hallway outside, then stepping through.

  A masculine voice echoed through an intercom system, different from the low-pitched, altered voice that had addressed him on the tape. The cadence was simir. Perhaps the speaker had recorded the tape. “Will Mr. Charles Sincir please report to the sitting room? As you leave the study, take a left. At the intersection, turn right. From there, simply listen for the sound of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1.”

  Charlie examined the halls he found himself in. He guessed that he must be in some kind of mansion, based on his best estimate of the size of the building and the interior decor. The hallway off of the study where he had previously been detained extended about 80 feet to his left and 40 feet to his right. Ornately carved wood paneling came up to about halfway up the walls, and the floor was covered with burgundy carpet. Beautifully sculpted silvery metal lighting fixtures hung from the walls at even intervals of about five feet. Every so often, the wall was broken up by a decorative shield or tapestry hanging above the wood paneling, a wooden door, or an alcove holding either a fancy vase or a marble bust of someone Charlie didn’t recognize.

  Counter to the intercom’s instructions, Charlie opted to check the near end of the hallway first. At the end of the hallway was a window, covered with a curtain, which Charlie moved aside. It was too dark for Charlie to see anything resembling a public road. To his left, a gate blocked off access to a stairway, descending one flight to a nding, then turning left to descend further. Charlie figured the stairway gate would be locked to prevent him from simply descending to the first floor and walking out the main entrance, but he tried—to no avail—to pull open the gate anyway. His suspicions confirmed, he decided to head for the intersection.

  The intersection was equidistant from the ends of the hallway Charlie was currently in—about 60 feet from either side. As he approached it, Charlie began to hear the muffled sound of a distant cello to his right. Turning to the left, Charlie saw that this secondary hallway was much shorter—the intersection was about 10 feet from the end of the hall to Charlie’s left and 50 feet from the end of the hall to his right. This is the hallway that runs from the front to the back of the top floor of the house, Charlie reasoned. And I’m at the back.

  As he moved towards the front of the house, Charlie passed three doors on his way to the room the cello music was issuing from. The first was locked. The second led to a bathroom. The third door—on which hung a sign in handwritten kanji: “鮫子”—opened to a room with a granite floor centered around a swimming pool. Charlie didn’t know any Chinese and only a little bit of Japanese that he’d researched for an issue of Strange Mysteries, so he didn’t recognize these exact characters. From context, he guessed they must mean “swimming pool” but he was completely confused as to the reasons behind the rough, almost childlike, handwriting with which they’d been written. Additionally, the writing seemed completely out of context here, in this very western-style manor, where his host had him locked in a study among such works as Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo and Shakespeare’s Tempest and issued instructions to him in fluent English without a trace of any foreign accent Charlie could pce. Charlie decided to ponder the mystery further, after meeting with his abductor.

  Charlie approached his destination, fairly confident he had not been kidnapped to be killed. Thinking back, if his kidnapper had wanted to murder him, it would have been easiest to do so when he had injected him with the sedatives back in that alley. He would not have gone to these lengths to capture and imprison him and set up this test of his “so-called” abilities if his ultimate intention was to end his life. But there were still things Charlie couldn’t account for. Surely the men who had pursued him that morning hadn’t actually walked off the pages of his manuscript, and yet one had perished before his eyes. Were the men in bck in the employ of his current jailer, hired to funnel him toward the alley where he had been sedated and spirited away from the scene? What of the beast who had taken a bite out of one of them? Was it, too, part of his captor’s designs? If he had been willing to sacrifice human lives—including the life of one of his own associates—to bring him in… exactly what mission was Charlie being recruited for? Who were these people? Charlie slowly put his hand on the doorknob and turned it, pulling the door outward.

  Just inside the room Charlie had been directed to, a vinyl record was spinning away in a pyer, out of which came the unmistakable sounds of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. The room was well-lit and furnished with three comfortable-looking armchairs and a sofa, arranged in a circle around the center of the room, where a rge, only vaguely humanoid figure y on her stomach. She—Charlie assumed the figure was female based on its hips and chest—was at least six feet long and blue on her back, with a lighter blue-gray coloration on her front. She had no hair on her head—in fact, Charlie believed her entire body, under the white tank top, slit halfway up the middle, and the indigo shorts she wore, might be naturally hairless. Instead, triangur fins, like one might see on the back of a shark, protruded from the top of the figure’s head, as well as her back, through the slit in her tank top, and out the sides of her lower legs, which she occasionally lifted off the floor in a slow, gentle motion, before lowering it back down.

  She did not notice Charlie when he came in. She appeared to be absorbed in what she was reading. At first, Charlie thought it was some bck-and-white comic book, but as he looked more closely, the artstyle and lettering told him it was a Japanese manga, one of the ones in the romance genre written for young women, if he wasn’t mistaken. Charlie recognized her as the monster he’d seen very briefly earlier that morning. Her height, figure, and coloration were very familiar. But she clearly wasn’t a monster now. She was lying on the floor, reading a romance manga and kicking her feet in the air, rather like a child might do. Charlie thought back to the handwritten kanji on the door of the pool room, before a low rhythmic purring and the feeling of something rubbing against his left leg broke his focus.

  Charlie looked down and saw yet another strange creature, rubbing its head against his leg. This one appeared to consist entirely of a glowing yellow-green skeleton and darker-colored internal organs and blood vessels, all wrapped up in a transparent skin, a mildly sickening sight, yet it behaved like a normal house cat. Charlie reached down to pet it. He felt soft fur, which must have been invisible. It was then that he noticed the girl with shark fins had sat up and was looking at him with pure bck eyes. On the front of her tank top was a familiar character, 鮫, though this was not written in the same rough hand as the sign on the pool room door had been. The girl was making hand gestures, some kind of sign nguage. Charlie didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t ASL, at least not completely.

  “Sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying,” Charlie said sincerely. “Uh… gomen-nasai, wakarimasen.”

  “She says,” uttered a familiar masculine voice—the voice Charlie had heard on the intercom, “Roentgen seems to like you.” The voice belonged to a man with a receding hairline, in his te forties or fifties, physically fit, but not athletic. He wore a tuxedo and a monocle, and carried a brown paper bag.

  “You,” said Charlie, addressing the monocled man, “Why did you bring me here? Who are you?”

  “My name is Henry Oliver Silverton, III. But you may call me Houston. And you are mistaken, Mr. Sincir. I am not the one who brought you here. I merely act on his behalf. Once he has arrived, he will expin everything. Until then…” Houston held up the brown paper bag. “Perhaps you’d care to eat something.”

  Charlie took the bag from Houston and looked inside. “Are these hamburgers?”

  “Veggie burgers, Mr. Sincir. It is not my intention to feed a vegetarian ground beef.”

  “How did you know—?” Charlie began to ask, but Houston had already left the room. The girl with shark fins had retrieved a notepad and pen and was writing something. She turned the notepad around and showed it to Charlie with a smile.

  “Hi,” read the girl’s rough handwriting. “My name is Sameko.”

  Charlie smiled back. “I’m Charlie.” Sameko wrote something, then showed Charlie the notepad once more.

  “Daddy back soon,” it read.

  “Your dad,” asked Charlie. “Is he the one who brought me here?”

  Sameko nodded yes.

  “Houston said I’m being recruited for a mission. Do you know anything about it?”

  Sameko thought for a moment, then began writing again. After a moment, she turned the notepad back around.

  “‘Save the world?’ From what?”