Cwej: SPACE Opera by Plum Pudding

11/23/2025

SPACE OPERA
WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED BY
PLUM PUDDING

Dave was a collector, although it didn’t actually amount to anything impressive. He had a shelf in his room which made him very happy, where he kept all of his CDs. It was a well organized shelf, each row a musical genre and then sorted alphabetically. The rest of Dave’s house was a wreck; he didn’t really care that much about organization usually. But the shelf. The shelf was important. An ex-girlfriend he’d had wasn’t a fan of the shelf. She cattily nicknamed it the virginity shelf. Hence, ex. It was funny though. At one point during their breakup, she whined at Dave and said something along the lines of: “You care about that shelf more than me!!” and all Dave could eventually say, looking at how much she hated something that he valued dearly, was a mild, “well, …yes.”

The shelf was a thing of importance. Music could take you to other worlds, even when you were just sitting there in your car. Music made Dave feel safe when even the worst was happening. So it wasn’t really that hard a decision. He just didn’t know why a shelf made one a social pariah. He had thought it made him cooler.

This morning, a handful of CDs were missing from his shelf. He could see the gaps in the collection, as plain as day. He blinked at first, hoping he had been astonishingly out of character last night and, god forbid, mislaid a disc. But no. They were gone.

Dave spent nearly the whole morning looking through his apartment frantically. He spent nearly the whole morning holding back tears.

Concurrently, a small orange Honda Element drives past Dave’s apartment building. Inside it, two passengers. Your average passerby, even if one happens to notice a bright orange car, will not anticipate these two passengers having a familiarity with righting wrongs and causing(?) wanton mayhem. However, they’ve stopped five semi-decent to large scale alien incursions on the most recent roadtrip, the fourth whilst picking up a soda at McDonalds.

These two legends are, incidentally, bored out of their minds.

Sang Mi, the first of the two passengers, has spent the past several nights in a motel room. (You know, because of the Targellan incident.) She has recently been introduced to the marvel of twenty-first century cable television. This has been, for the past few days, much of what she has been talking about. This fad will pass quickly.

Chris Cwej, the second of these two passengers, has spent the last several nights actually dealing with the Targellan incident, a situation far too bloody, interesting and devastating to bear mentioning further, except for the fact that it involved a rutabaga and a spaceship shaped like a spoon. He has, in fact, not been thinking about the marvel of twenty-first century cable television. He is not hopped up on sugar either.

“Last night, I watched The Good, the Bad and The Ugly,” Sang Mi explained. “I don’t actually think I’ve seen a western before, well, except for The Ranger of Dallaspex, and, um, wait no, actually, I’ve seen a lot of Westerns but it was a really good one, except for the part where it kept pausing to advertise detergent and insurance.”

“Those are commercials," Chris said, as Sang Mi barrelled further.

“Yeah, but I really liked it, except the old weird bits that I think were racist or something. Still. Great time. And I was thinking, I was just sort of thinking, maybe you’re like, the guy in the poncho to these people or something. Semi-modern poncho man. You’re the guy with no name, you come into town on your horse slash orange car thing, and you save the day, before vanishing off into the sunset. It’s like a whole thing!”

Chris considered the parallel carefully. “You know, I don’t quite see it. I mean, I have a name, and I tell people my name, and also you’re there. Aren’t cowboys sort of lonely and sad and friendless?”

“The cowboy has friends. I’m Tuco,” Sang Mi declared joyfully, in a statement that was hopefully a joke.

Chris didn’t know how to respond to that. Thankfully, he didn’t have to—they had just happened, once more, to run into something interesting.

There was a strange man in an utterly massive oversized trenchcoat, walking down the street, trying to hide (unsuccessfully) that he was carrying a large bag of various things.

“…Is that a burglar?” Chris asked out loud, a little surprised at the sight of a strange figure in broad daylight trying to hide a very large bag. It was certainly very weird. Chris pulled the car to a stop.

And then there was a strange note over the wind, like an odd flute, and like magic, the man on the street stepped into nothing. It was like he was never there, and not just in some kind of Invisible Man way, Chris could sense it. The figure had left this earth entirely… for parts unknown.

“Woah!” Sang Mi shouted, a bit too loudly. “What was that?”

Chris shrugged. His mind was already racing. He had absolutely no idea.

Dave did not understand what was happening. He had thought that he had seen a man try to leave his apartment, but it was hazy, leaving him this very moment, like he had dreamed the figure up in the first place.

Time felt wrong to Dave. There is no other way to describe that accurately. There is a feeling when one second follows the next—even if you have never noticed this feeling, because it has been there your entire life—and Dave was feeling something else. Like a headache, or when you’ve had too much water and your whole body feels like it’s swimming. And nothing like that. It was a bizarre thing.

He was in his room, looking at the shelf, and he was also outside, chasing that man. The man who was stepping into nothing, the man who wasn’t there. It hurt a little. Dave also saw the orange car. The orange car was important.

Dave put on his shoes, and began his trek down the stairs out towards the street, and where the orange car would be.

Chris and Sang Mi were still trying to figure out the next step of what precisely they should be doing when the next man approached them.

“Hi, I’m Dave,” Dave said, wearily. “Listen, do you guys know about a man, a weird man, possibly a CD stealer?”

“Just saw him, I believe,” Chris answered. “Weird overcoat, stepped into nothing…?”

“That’d be him, I think,” Dave said, feeling woozy again. “I had thought I’d imagined him.”

Sang Mi looked at Dave, concerned. It was the Delirium face. The face that Saki would sometimes make, when she was on Delirium. Those weird blissed out eyes… Yeah, drug city. Today wasn’t making sense. The unlikelihood of all of this. Another strange man. You usually don’t get two in a day. The coincidence felt bizarre, manufactured.

“Take this thing,” Dave said, handing Chris a CD.

“What is it? What are you going on about?” Chris asked, confused.

“A way, I think. In a direction,” Dave said, still not entirely there.

Music on the Honda’s stereo began to play of its own accord. And the car, entirely without Chris’s input, began to go. Chris and Sang Mi looked in wonderment as the music hit the air with a bizarre tone. Chris knew all about music. About its power. He had seen something almost like this before, but this… this was different.

Music can take you to other worlds.

And then, they were off. And for once, neither of them could even believe it.

2378
INITEC SPACE-CITY RR-ONE ORBITING RYTEL RIANA TROPOS

…What just happened exactly? Chris blinked to be sure. He certainly didn’t think he would ever be back here. His brain had sort of crossed the idea off. There was no conceivable way that he could possibly be on Rytel Riana Tropos, not after what had happened. Not after Glasst.

But here they were. An orange car, sitting right in the middle of the promenade on a space-station orbiting the finest resort planet in the cosmos.

Pity that the planet was going to die soon.

“Woah,” Sang Mi gasped. “Nice place. Finally, we get to the PRESENT.” She took it in stride. Chris grit his teeth. She didn’t know. She didn’t know how absolutely and magnificently wrong this all was. I mean, it surely seemed to her as normal as their other hops in time. She just didn’t know the rules.

The bustling station was perfectly and absolutely normal. Chris wildly glanced from place to place across the promenade. There was a view of space—which was perfectly normal, all the stars in the right place in the sky for these coordinates—there were little shops along the side, which again, were so utterly normal that Chris hardly noticed them. This was every space-station he had ever been on: silver and beige, glittering with bronze and muted colours that softened the idea of only living in space. All of those typical details he had learned to spot. The way people grew little saplings in pots to liven up all of this with some greenery, to stave off seasonal depression. This was space. How was this space?

Chris couldn’t begin to process exactly what was happening. He didn’t even have a theory. One moment, he had been on Earth, and now he was in orbit of a planet he knew would die, and everything was fine. Everything was simple.

And how had he gotten here? How was this even conceivable? Chris knew the jolt of time’s maelstrom, the strength of the bifrost. He had, under the Superiors, been to thousands of worlds under thousands of suns. Perhaps he understood what was normal, how it differed, how it didn’t, better than any other man.

He looked down. There was no CD in his hand. Dave had handed him nothing.

What was going on?

“Excuse me, you can’t park here,” said a supercilious looking non-binary parking attendant, who walked up to the car. “You’re blocking lots of people.”

“Apologies,” Chris said, trying to put on his most charming face. “But I’ve rather materialized without comprehending how this is physically possible. Could you please give us a minute?”

“That’s what they all say,” the Parking Attendant mumbled with a disappointed and condescending glare. “You should know that all materializations are to take place in sector seven, pylon G, and to have the requisite paperwork available.”

“Yes, but what if I don’t?” Chris spat, rather irritated that he was being attacked by bureaucracy for happening to have randomly broken every law of physics and time out there. His mind still racing, Chris examined the dashboard. He swore under his breath. There was no way the car could possibly have sustained a trip through the heart of the bifrost—it was a car. It couldn’t even sustain its own atmosphere—he and Sang Mi should have popped. Like balloons. Even if they had passed through some sort of anomalous field, some sort of hi-tech mitigator that could allow them to travel to this place, he would have sensed it. Those things were far from subtle.

“Could you please step out of the car, sir, madam, or variations thereupon,” the Parking Attendant intoned monotonously.

Chris sighed. Even if he was glad at the parking attendant’s inclusivity, this was looking to be a very long afternoon.

They can’t hold us for long, Chris told himself. They can’t hold us for long.

The cell, primarily a maroon room gilded with neon-blue force fields, wasn’t uncomfortable. Goddess knows he’d been in worse. But still, the existential dread was kicking in. Was he really here? Back here? Right before… and… and everything? How’d he get here? This had to be a trick.

Yes, a trick. That explained it. He must have been captured by an illusion-making species, such as the Morphiite, maybe he tripped into a Haunt manifest… It must be playing games with his guilt, his subconscious. Lots of creatures played games with open wounds like that…

“Gongen to Cwej,” Sang Mi announced, snapping her fingers a few times. “What’s going on, exactly? What makes this place such a big deal?”

Chris shrugged the question off. “We have to get out of here, we have very limited time.”

“Hey, we got time,” Sang Mi said gently. “We’re in a cell, aren’t we?”

“For parking evasion,” Chris said, mildly annoyed. “It’s not exactly grand theft larceny. We’ll be out shortly, and then—”

“Why does this place have you on edge?” Sang Mi asked him suddenly, and very astutely. Chris sighed. It was weird how she could just read him like a book. He could hardly finish a sentence these days.

The emotions around this place were strong, even coming through over the mist of memory. Sea surge. Music. Hyperspace. So many bodies. Chris tried to put the pain of the memories to the side, to focus. But he was around it again, it literally surrounded him. Because he was back here. He was a ghost…

“I don’t think I could ever… relay it to you. ” Chris said, quietly, showing no emotion. This was the only way he could manage. “I was on, well, training wheels. It went haywire. Planets blew up.” He stated, which sounded matter of fact, but wasn’t. Despite the clarity of his voice, he nearly didn’t go on. He cared, he just couldn’t process. The pause was heavier than what he was actually saying. “Can you begin to understand that? Entire planets. Life lost on such a scale…” He trailed off again. He was incredibly close to being a wreck. Sang Mi was surprised to see him this low.

“Hey, Chris,” Sang Mi feebly attempted. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. If it’s too hard, you—you don’t have to tell me. I can…”

“No, no,” said Cwej, forcing himself to be strong again once more. “You deserve to know. It affects you too, it’s important information for you… even the hardest bits. I lost a good friend out there, though I knew her only briefly.”

“Roz?” Sang Mi asked, trying to piece together what she had heard of Chris’s past. She felt horribly insensitive, even just asking about this.

“No.” Chris said, darkly. “No, someone else.”

Sang Mi did not know how to say the next thing she needed to say politely. The circumstances were too big and dour for words, and Sang Mi, while many wonderful things, was never exactly a poet.

“I’m sorry, man,” she said. She immediately cursed herself for not knowing to say anything better.

She did not ask about what bothered her most. If this other friend he met had died and wasn’t Roz… How many people had Chris lost over the years? How many people was he not mentioning? She didn’t want to ask. It was insensitive. But it felt like it almost applied to her too: The two of them working on borrowed time, and in a “profession” with a high mortality rate. Maybe she was in over her head or something.

Like that had ever stopped her before.

Something occurred to Sang Mi. “Wait, and despite the whole planets blowing up thing, you still got the job?”

Despite the sore topic, despite himself, Chris actually laughed at that. Not a big one, a quiet laugh, but it was funny, you know, and the alternative would be to cry.

A moment later, he was somber once more. He stared at the wall.

“I don’t know when it happens. Will happen. I don’t know the precise time. It’s close. Soon, my past will show up, down below. And the continents will burn. The whole planet will crack like an egg.

A synth approached the cell doors an hour later, looking at them with animated, bulging and fluorescent yellow eyes. He deactivated the force-fields, wordlessly. Sang Mi and Chris looked at him with surprise mixed with confusion. They didn’t move. This seemed to irritate the figure, who should rightly be emotionless. “Your debt has been deducted from your account. You are free to go.”

“Debt? What account?” Chris asked. He did not like the sound of this.

“Your debt has been deducted from your account. You are free to go,” the synth said, louder, assuming they had not heard him, which was additionally bizarre. It stalked out of the room at great speed, without bending its legs.

“You take me to the most normal places, you know that?” Sang Mi said, bewildered, but still finding room for sarcasm.

The promenade of the station was still as bustling as ever. It was a veritable Chinatown, a Little Italy of compression and maximalism, seeing how much one could put into a single place. There was hardly any area to stand thanks to the number of stalls and mini-buildings blocking the walking path Chris and Sang Mi took about, not even mentioning the probably hundreds of people, and that was just this floor. A few feet above them, through the literal glass ceiling, hundreds more people walked. The world smelled of sweat and also deodorant.

“There’s gotta be a manga shop somewhere around here,” Sang Mi said.

“We need to find out why we’re here, how this is all happening, where the car’s been moved. We have a litany of questions,” Chris said, though he didn’t want to once again spoil her mood.

“I’ve-been-very-good-lately,” Sang Mi said, speaking so fast she invented a new singular word.

For once though, they really couldn’t afford to waste time. This whole day had been an elaborate mystery, teasing Cwej with contradiction after contradiction. And Sang Mi had to admit, she was intrigued too. It’s just, when life’s mysteries were this vast and obtuse, she really liked to go shopping.

Ahead of them, down a “side street,” a difficult concept in a place where every inch of space had to be carefully accounted for and maximally utilized, the stepping man, (for that’s who he was—a man in lowercase…) the one who couldn’t be, sauntered vaguely upwards. His ballerina dance with no feet ascended steadily into the ceiling at a vertically diagonal angle, as if this was a reasonable path for a man. Though perhaps it was, as he stepped through the ceiling like anyone’s business. One supposes nobody ever told him the rules.

It was always difficult and intimidating, even for one as accomplished and heroic as Chris Cwej, to have to deal with the help-desk. A man in venomous green lipstick, every bit as sour as he looked, tapped his feet, glaring over half-moon hologlasses as Chris and Sang Mi approached. The man was certainly not pleased to see them, they could tell this instantly.

They could tell a lot about him instantly, really. He was the product of a union with a biosynthetic and a humanoid. The birds and the biorobot bees are, in this century, quite compatible. The nametag on his uniform stated his chosen name was Mr. Help Desk. Good taste was apparently not compatible this century.

“We’re looking for where our car is,” Chris said. “You see, it was sort of taken out of our hands when we showed up here.”

“You’re the guy [™] who managed to park in the middle of the prom…? Tsk, tisk,” said Mr. Help Desk.

“You aren’t supposed to actually say tsk, tsk, you’re just supposed to make the sound with your teeth.” Sang Mi said, and was instantly ignored.

“Well, yes, Mr. Cwej, is it?” Mr. Help Desk snipped, despite Chris never saying his name. “I believe your debt was deducted from your account.”

“We don’t have any debt, we don’t owe anyone anything” Chris said. “For that matter, I don’t think we even have money in your currency—”

“Well, yes, I know,” Mr. Help Desk said, again excessively unhelpfully. “It’s incredibly indecent of you. So, in the event of a lack of currency in your P@Y! account, your vehicle was claimed as collateral.”

“No!!” Sang Mi exclaimed. “Not the car!!”

“Yes, well, you shouldn’t have parked it illegally. It’s worth quite an amount of money too, I’m not quite sure why you did that.” Mr. Help Desk sighed melodramatically. “But your debt was thoroughly annihilated by such a venture. You’re lucky. 99.7% of illegal parkers [😭] are unable to pay their debts to the station.”

Chris felt himself getting remarkably angry at the injustice of it all. He wanted to do something serious, but for once, he couldn’t decide what that would even be. Sang Mi rubbed her forehead aggressively, trying to work out the knots of tension. Were people like this everywhere?

“The car went to the antiques place,” Mr. Help Desk said, helping for the first time in the last four years. “Maybe it’s still there?”

Sang Mi had hardly blinked before Chris was off like a dash.

The antiques place, Xotol Xoalaam’s Haberdashery and Antiquities, was one of the largest establishments on the station, amounting to around half the size of your average antiques store. Xotol had, like Dave, shelves himself. He took the same neurotic pride in their specificity as Dave did. But Dave was an amateur, a hobbyist with a narrow curated lens of things he collected, whereas Xotol was unmistakably a professional; a legend in his field. And Xotol would take anything.

“Please, please, step inside,” Xotol would say cheerfully. And they always would.

The shelves in Xotol’s storeroom weren’t quite dimensionally transcendent, though they came close. The human perspective would view Xotol’s work on the subject as something aligning the idea of a “shrink ray.” There are all sorts of laws of conversation of mass and everything against the idea of a Shrink Ray, but Xotol had figured it out, something only a few others had, and in his drawers lay dozens of vast vehicles, subdued down to the size of your average hot-wheels and light as a feather, their mass invisible. Far more advanced than simplistic tissue compression; Xotol’s matter compressor was the pinnacle of design. Inside one of his drawers there was a 23nd century United States Aircraft Carrier, just sitting there, waiting to be reinstated upon the request of the right customer. Next to it, Xotol placed his newest treasure.

This Honda Element was a magnificent little thing, a lovely creation, in pristine condition, though he had to clear out a few chip bags strewn about the back seat, and occasional other bits of detritus. But still—these cars usually had decayed to ruin in the years since their inception. It was a rare, exciting find. Most antiquity dealers would be more excited over 19th and 20th century Earth vehicles, but Xotol was happy to see anything at all.

Someone at the door.

“do you still take cds?” asked the stepping man, half of their body subsumed into invisibility. It was not the same half as before. the stepping man would have half a head or no right leg, or any combination of missing things. Xotol never paid it any mind.

the stepping man knew Xotol would want the CDs. There were very few in the galaxy who were interested in CDs the way Xotol was. They were certainly fixated upon a particular era. And in addition, this was the ritual. the stepping man believed in ritual. He was mostly composed of it.

Xotol enthusiastically nodded. “Yes, yes. I’d be glad to,” the stepping man always had great things for him, even though he was quite a fright to look at. This arrangement had been beneficial to them both. He even never questioned why the stepping man exclusively obtained antiques of musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first earth centuries, when there were many successful musicians in the twenty-third and fourth.
the stepping man reached into the air where his pocket should be and retrieved a pile of discs in compact cases, ordinary CDs, except for the fact that they came out of absolutely nothing, the stepping man’s undulating invisible half.

“Very good. Very good. Though I don’t take the Beatles,” Xotol clarified. “Everybody has all sorts of Beatles’ stuff, it’s not worth a thing. Same with the Swift stuff.”

the stepping man huffed. “they’re good artists.”

“It’s not about that, it’s about scarcity, as you well know,” said Xotol, examining the atomic structure of the case for damages with his Zerto-eye. He flipped through the cases discerningly. “No, no. I’ll take the Doors, Jethro Tull, Au Revoir Simone, Supertramp and, oh, Gwen Stefani, now this is delightfully rare. One of the finest artists of the initial human age!”

“i thought we were talking about scarcity,” the stepping man insisted. “not taste.”

“Oh, yes, yes, sorry,” Xotol said. “But you know, Glasst has been looking to do a Stefani cover in his classics suite. Same with Kendrick, if you have any of his.”

“i’ll pick him up next time,” the stepping man said, droll as anything, “though you know that for twenties’ artists, there was a vinyl resurgence. that costs more.”

Xotol nodded. He had always been a man ready to pay a high price. “One more thing —” he said, a perfunctory reference to an ancient program of historical import in this classical era: “Do you have any of the work of Austentacia Wicker?”

the stepping man shook his half-head. While most people have to exaggerate when they say this, Xotol had in fact been looking for ages.

Sang Mi was astonished at how boldly Chris now moved through the crowds of the station. Though it did make a sort of sense that a quickly moving armored man of his size made people get out of his way. Sang Mi had no such luck parting the sea, continually pushed back by the surging masses of people.

Sang Mi had seen Chris in several life-and-death situations before, plenty of ‘em, but she certainly hadn’t seen Chris this wired. It was this place, the bustle and bureaucracy of it, but also his memories. Even at its worst, the road trip had been a place of a sort of relaxation for Chris, a quest that was chosen. This place was thoroughly against his will. He had never wanted to come back here.

And he was still forging ahead, deeper into the white noise. Frantic thoughts filled her head in the large crowd. Was he seriously forgetting about her? Or, and she wasn’t sure which option was worse, did she just slow him down?

Chris sped along on his circuitous path to the antiquery, which he was certain was close, he just knew it. He could almost sense where it was. He was almost certainly going around in circles, but he was making progress. The storefronts were changing. He just kept looking at them. Looking at the people. Looking for, well, anything in particular.

But it was life overstimulating, a run on-sentence of distractions, the sheer variety of people was immense: a bald blue skinned woman in the uniform of a classical earth pirate, a man who looked almost human if not for latex-like forehead ridges, a tripedal cowlike but elfin figure carrying a babe in their arms, a mantis velkranoid, a wooden-fish like thing simply swimming through the atmosphere, a very attractive young man in a holographic cheerleader’s outfit extending a beckoning finger—and any other day, any other day, he would like to investigate it all. Especially that last one.

But he had to do the proper thing. He had to get the car back, understand what was going on, get Sang Mi and him back home. He couldn’t change history. There were rules regarding meta-time and dangerous people looking over his shoulder. His Superiors most of all. It was all so very dicey, him even being here. He kept thinking that, over and over—it was hard to pay attention to anything else.

Just when he nearly lost all track of where he was, he saw the antiquery on the side of the promenade. (He did not know this, but this is, of course, how one finds the antiquery.) Relieved at his bizarre luck, he approached the storefront.

The antiquery was a place of amber and copper. Orange and bronze and carved, grown, possibly of bioorganic material—he had seen many hive species build places like this, of alien honeycomb and precious metal, but it was stranger to see one in a predominantly human (or at the least post-human) settlement. Most hive species he knew didn’t make friends outside the hive, after all, they were never alone, so there was a deep loneliness in the hollow. He was initially unsure if this was the right place.
It was a small place, too. Wait, were those shelves dimensionally modified? That technology probably shouldn’t be here… maybe in an advanced INITEC starship, say, a hundred years from now, maybe they might have the prototypes, but not in an antiques store.

This whole mess was getting deeper and deeper.

“Good afternoon! Good afternoon! Good afternoon! Good afternoon!” Xotol said, rushing into the centre of the room. He was hyperactive, immensely pleased with himself.

Chris was, suffice it to say, a little baffled.

“All the pieces are here!” Xotol whispered, as if this whole thing was a gift from God. “All the pieces are here.”

Sang Mi, like a shipwreck victim, washed ashore, gasping for oxygen. The fullness of it, the mass. There were far too many people. Standing by the hydro-stairwell, she had the most miniscule moment for herself. She felt terrible. Like fish in a barrel. Lemmings. It was the sort of place that developed one’s claustrophobia.

Gongen wasn’t like this. It encouraged entirely normal nervous breakdowns; it never physically felt like she was being crushed in a vice. She didn’t like this place, she realized. It was a revelation. The fact that she did feel closer to home—it was soulcrushing. An ad appeared on the large screen across the way. Tourmaline Hawke blew a crimson kiss to the masses. “Cupkeen. The number one brand in seven systems. And I say so.”

People (and unpeoples) were starting to funnel towards Sang Mi again, her brief respite was coming to a close. Sang Mi began to feel terrible once more, and then she heard the bleak sound of a boy crying. Her soul steeled itself.

She could feel bad—that was fine—but someone else feeling miserable? Why, that was something of which she wouldn’t put up with! She rushed off to discover the source of the noise.

Which was how Sang Mi found the cubbyhole.

Stars smeared in bright lines, like one was travelling in warp, into the depths of Hyperspace. Flashes of bright garnet, magenta, cyan and other psychedelic colours blurred before Sang Mi’s eyes. It was the opposite of the arrival when they found themselves on the space station—Sang Mi felt flung with immense momentum, every impact of the travel. It was the opposite of walking across a room.

The boy is by the mountaintop’s point. A lonely peak, the tip of the world, or at least this part of it. It looks almost like Japan but the sky is a green-pink colour impossible for human minds to picture, the kind of colour that makes one’s nose bleed. It looks almost like Sri Lanka except it’s in technicolour, the grain of a classical 1960s picture. It’s almost like Switzerland except it’s far from neutral. The boy. He’s by the mountain’s peak and he’s crying. He looks terrible in his loneliness. Too young to be left alone at his home, at the Ice Cream stand, much less a solitary mountain. He wails. His parents aren’t coming back.

“It’s okay,” Sang Mi said, realizing very quickly that it isn’t as she looks at the despair in the boy’s eyes. It isn’t okay at all. The emotion of the boy seeps into her. “…I mean, it’s okay to cry.”

Chris had no clue what any of this was about, which was becoming a frustrating theme. “Slight question: have you been fooling with the fabric of spacetime lately?”

“The fabric of the universe is spongey, absorbent. It cleans up all sorts of things with the proper detergent!” Xotol said, not exactly beating the no-sense allegations.

“So… yes?” Chris asked.

“No,” Xotol answered sharply.

Xotol turned to the nicest shelf of his antiquery. The bronze light reflected unfortunately upon his lilac face. He was about to spurt some more bullshit: “There are all sorts of results of the last great time problem in not-hell. The absorby-worby thingy mc-thingies, mainly. There are things in the thing container. For instance, one could find themselves caught in the couch cushions. The wrong loose change! The wrong loose change.”

Chris subconsciously reached for his gun, perhaps out of fear, only to realize he didn’t have it. Ah. All the better, probably.

“One of the benefits of being a time-aware collector,” Xotol began, “is to have a variety of historical oddities. After all, it’s why I’m here on this station right now. The planet’s going bye-bye in a few hours, I doubt they’ll miss much.”

Xotol placed a brown shoebox on his pristine glass countertop. “What history are you in, Mr. Cwej?”

Chris hesitated. “I believe that’s probably too complicated a question to explain in as many words,” he said eventually.

“Exactly,” Xotol answered. “We are all subject to revision. It is a byproduct of the conflict that has been and will be. It makes my job as a completionist exceptionally difficult. Which is why I have this,” he said, pointing at the box. “Everything inside the box is unaffected by alterations to the timeline. You’d be amazed—”

“You’re an antiques dealer. You’re a time-travelling antiques dealer. You’re looking for old stuff.” Chris said, genuinely baffled as to why anyone would really do this on such a scale.

“Time-aware please, I’m not so gauche as to involve myself. Butterflies. Euugh. Dreadful business.” He trailed off. He tried to move for the door. Chris stopped him halfway there. This conversation wasn’t just going to be another loose end, Chris swore.

“But…” Chris struggled to find the right word. “Why old things exactly?”

“Prioritization,” Xotol said. “Everything gets old eventually.”

Sang Mi was back where she had been, like a dream. But the promenade was empty. Blank. None of the surplus of people that there had been before. It was bizarre, this emptiness. She began to wander. The station was blue midnight. She could begin to see a sort of seclusion to the place. More of that loneliness. She could still smell where she had been before – the sweat of the place, the hundreds of people, the impending heart disease. But there was no incoming coronary here. Just the still blue and the bizarre contradiction of that stillness. She half fancied that she would wake up any moment now and Saki would tell her that she had a bad batch of delirium or something. Anything would make more sense than today.

“preach, sister,” said the stepping man, who was not stepping, but sitting by a barstool. he was visibly depressed. In front of him was an enormous glacier of a window, half-opaque with discolouration.

Sang Mi had an unreasonable amount of questions, but she settled for “Hey, what the heck’s going on? Who are you? Where have you brought me, what’s your deal? What the—”

“it’s the ephemerality of it really. you can see out the window.” the stepping man said, even though Sang Mi really couldn’t. the stepping man drew a line in the condensation of the glass with his finger, rubbing open a miniscule viewport.

Looking out of the glass, Sang Mi saw the rubble of an asteroid field. So many billions of rocks. The annihilation of a planet. She could hardly begin to comprehend it. The vastness was unbelievable. Looking at it, she thought that it would be like this, exactly like this, if Gongen or Earth went. You think about the end of the world, but now she saw what that looked like.

“he told you it goes,” the stepping man said.

“I thought the station did too,” Sang Mi said, confused.

“in most possibilities,” the stepping man said, not elaborating-further. he did that very well. “besides, six billion casualties is probably enough.”

Sang Mi scowled. She could feel tears welling behind her eyes, but spitefully refused to cry. She wouldn't be able to put herself back together if she did. She carefully thought about what she should say next to get the most answers out of this imperious figure. She ran out of good ideas. “I hate to ask, do you have any water?”

the stepping man opened his un-coat and handed her a bottle of namebrand liquid, the kind that she had seen many times on earth. She uncapped the bottle and took a sip, nearly spitting it out.

It was hospital water, Sang Mi thought. The kind of water that they give you at hospitals. So cold that it’s nearly frozen, so cold that it puts you into a kind of state of mini-shock. Well, maybe more surprise than shock. She was never sure why hospitals had water like that, and she had thought that it was entirely a hospital invention, that it was one of those weird solitary things that Earth and Gongen had in common. Bizarre that this guy had his own bottles of it. This weird substance was so cold that it probably wasn’t water anymore, she joked to herself. But it was nothing but a joke. It was water. Very cold water.

“Thanks,” she said, so as not to seem unpleasant.

A terrible awkward pause passed as they observed the newly formed asteroid belt of oblivion in front of them.

“i think sometimes, what if that happened to a place i know?” the stepping man mused. “you know, a real place, that i was close to, not some place i hardly know. if i had a connection to it. like, a place that’s real to me because i understand it intimately, a hometown of sorts, if it happened to a place like that, then i might understand.” he paused. “i don’t really know what goes on in vancouver.”

Sang Mi didn’t know why he made the jump to that topic, but she doubted that this man was from Vancouver.

“whenever there’s war or death it always seems i’m far away. usually on business to be fair… but i do think sometimes, what if it happened to a place i know?”

“Everyone knows someplace,” Sang Mi said. “And don’t you know here?”

“yes.” the stepping man said, with more of that sense of realization. “i do know here. but there’s no connection. hm. bit odd, that.” he paused.

The two of them at the window, looking out there into the frost and oblivion. It was oddly striking, oddly beautiful, that there could still be condensation on glass. That in space, somebody could hear.

“i suppose i’m one of those people who’s just run out of empathy. shame…” the stepping man murmured. It seemed to be a major realization for him. “yeah, that’s really disappointing to think about. i should really fix that.”

“Who are you, exactly?” Sang Mi asked, now for the second time. She was still very frightened of him, even though he had been nothing but personable.

“i steal things usually. i go somewhere and i steal things and then i sell them and it’s usually for some big fancy time reason. i have employers, i think.”

“You think?”

“look at me,” the stepping man insisted. Sang Mi did, but she didn’t notice anything about him that was any different than it had been. He was still the same strange partially invisible figure. “i’m not the kind of man who knows things one way or another. if i am halfway, then my employers are more so.”

Sang Mi sighed. She clearly wasn’t getting anything definite out of him. They stood there, continuing to watch the horrible view. It was a terrible future. Standing there by the glass in the dark blue room, she hoped against hope that this was only a possibility or something. That someone would make a big important change.

Change. They definitely needed change.

The station was electric with people, as per usual. Mr. Help Desk was un-thinking, sitting there without any real cognizance of the hustle and bustle of the people around him. Mr. Help Desk was an automatic man. He was excellent at that and had 483 preprogrammed phrases. Not that he was entirely synthetic in his un-thinking. These were phrases that everyone said. He was normal, he told himself, and very proud of it.

Unfortunately, that evening, he began to actually think. My goodness, what on earth was going on with that Mr. Cwej fellow? It didn’t make a lick of sense—such things merit investigation, and really—why did we have to confiscate the man’s antique car? He seemed dreadfully cut up about it, and just because he didn’t know the rules—subsection B-D-841-BAGGAGE was very clear on the subject and there were no exceptions that were to be made, that was entirely important because the rules said so and he always had to refer to the rules, this was the glory of his position. The point of rules was that they were steadfast when people failed.

Myla Jessica Parker snapped xher fingers in Mr. Help Desk’s face. Xhe had been in front of Mr. Help Desk for quite some time and was getting remarkably impatient. As one of the richest bioforms in the eleven microspans, this was a big deal. “Hellooooo?” Xhe scowled. “Where exactly is my room? I’m meant to have a room on Substrata-B.”

“Apologies, madamex,” Mr. Help Desk said. “I was distracted.”

Myla Jessica Parker made a face. Xhe was very rich and very important and hadn’t been disrespected this much since that thing with the beeswax. “Distracted?” Xhe insisted with great indignation. “Distracted? Why, I never… You should have that head of yours checked for anomalous sentiment.”

Perhaps this was a very odd day or something, and he knew he absolutely should say, “Yes, my apologies, my apologies, my apologies,” but what he actually said was, “Please piss off, Myx. Parker, I am rather busy.”

And that did it. Xhe stomped off in remarkable indignation.

And Mr. Help Desk, having been unhelpful for the first time in all of his spans, had a moment to think.

Xotol sighed. “But now, I must be off,” he said. “I have very much enjoyed this place, but every good salesman’s gotta know when there’s too much heat on his back.”

Chris still did not budge. And Xotol realized, looking up to Chris’s full height, he would not be able to move past him. Chris was a brick wall of a man compared to weird little Xotol.

“You know what I know, and you never once thought about actually helping people?” Chris asked. “Everyone’s life is going to end and you’ve not done anything to help them?”

“Oh, no, no, any good time-aware has an excellent non-interference protocol,” Xotol babbled, and looking up at Chris’s uncaring expression on his face, completely changed tactics before whining: “Ah, c’mon man, I’m just a little guy, I ain’t done no wrong, I’m just a little guy, I’m just a little guy.”

Chris couldn’t believe the audacity of this uniquely terrible person. He could tell that Xotol was at least three-thousand—common for his species—and thusly he had been time aware for some time. How many atrocities had he done this little game with? Reverse-vulturing and picking at the scraps of a civilization before it even fell and then buggering off? How much death had this self proclaimed “little guy” seen?

Xotol put his shop into his bag, causing Chris to stumble as the entire building dissipated into a small cube which Xotol placed in his purse. And now in the bustle of the promenade, there were suddenly hundreds of people in all directions. Xotol made a break for it, and it all happened so fast even Chris couldn’t catch up. Damn it.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. They sat by the glass some more. “I can’t be here. I need to get back to Chris.” Sang Mi said. the stepping man nodded. “i can take you,” the stepping man said. They looked out the window at the fog in space and the desolation. The apocalyptic end of Ritel Ryana Tropos. And then they weren’t there anymore.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. They passed the store and picked up a copy of the Illiad, but it wasn’t how either of them remembered it. They pay for the walkman.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. Where they were before. At the top of the mountain in Japan or Sri Lanka the boy bounces up and down in excitement.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. They slow down. They have to not do as much, be careful and delicate with this, because Sang Mi’s only ever passed in his wake before, not touched the man itself. …the world in one day.

Sang Mi and the stepping men were still there. It’s nice of him to do so Sang Mi thinks, but I still don’t get it. The dead sun twirls. Gongen smiles, and Au Revoir Simone sings Another Likely Story. It's one of the few CDs he has on him.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. the stepping man saw she was confused about all of this, the things that didn’t make any sense, and he put on some music to comfort her.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. Where they were before. At the top of the mountain in Japan or Sri Lanka the boy bounces up and down in excitement. Nothing’s changed.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. In the stepping man’s invisible eyes, Sang Mi saw—no, not quite saw, that’s not really the right word—she sensed what was to come. What would happen for everyone, even a universe away, back home. Her body shook.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. The window is still so still and heartless and cold. Looking at the dead planet still makes Sang Mi’s heart ache. The longer they stay here, the less she can bear it. “When are we going to get going?” Sang Mi asked.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. Where they had always been. walked in the room in the old video just to know what the room was and what it felt like. Baby steps. You don’t change…

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. They were walking down the stepping man’s corridor, a place of unplaces, which wrinkled like a bag of potato chips. “i’m sorry, you know,” the stepping man said, although he never explained why.

The planet. An orb in space. A tiny Christmas tree bauble in blackness so vast that there are hardly words to describe it. So much lack of meaning and presence that people can only call it “space”. Something between things. So, the orb. From an outward view of the totality of existence, remarkably small. A pinprick, hardly visible to the naked eye, although the naked eye can hardly perceive all this everything anyway. In the vast blackness of eternity that covers everything, the planet reflects the light of its sun just right, so that from far enough of a distance, it looks a bit like a star itself. The matter of scale is important, because what causes the planet’s end is damn near microscopic, insubstantial. It’s almost like a joke.

Someone played the wrong song on their little tour. A resonant tune, which echoed and built and vibrated to such a strange degree that steadily, the planet began to shatter, like a wine glass when the lady hits the high note. It’s a remarkably ridiculous way to die normally, all the more so when your entire planet goes while you’re at it. But the song begins playing out of those speakers anyway.

Our dear performer was still yet to hit the crescendo, but the song began at that moment. And the world began to shake.

Xotol made a whew(!) noise, stepping into the Last Call’s cockpit. There were a few other time-awares on board, from Tourmaline Hawke, to Myla Jessica Parker, to anyone else rich enough to have first dibs intel on history.

The Last Call was always the safe haven for time-awares’ like he to make a swift exit just before the inevitable occurred. But still, Xotol felt unsatisfied. He still didn’t have an Austentacia Wicker. Regularly regarded as the finest artist to ever hit the Mutter’s Spiral, thoroughly unappreciated in her time. A copy of her work should be easy to find, but still, his holy grail was always out of reach. He thought the stepping man would have found it for once. But no luck.

But there would be other opportunities.

After all, just a few years from now, Gggeelpaxacorionalisvertadownaeretrograd VII would combust, and there was plenty to nab there before it did. And the stepping man would continue to make his shipments, no matter where he was. the stepping man was kind like that.

The shuttle attendant’s perky voice chirped over the intercom. He was home free. He relaxed into his seat. Tuned out her miserably cheerful voice. But then the mindless droll of the please fasten your seatbelts and our flight time today will be and our estimated time of arrival—all that was completely interrupted. Xotol couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Hello there. Sorry to interrupt your evening, all. Except I’m not really sorry. Nice to meet you all. My name’s Chris Cwej. And all of you are going nowhere.”

And then, as naturally as anything, just how they drove here from 2025 like it was nothing, Sang Mi stepped onto the station once more, the moment she left it.

In her arms, there was a walkman with Au Revoir Simone in it, and she was holding a copy of a new edition of Durarara!! which she had been meaning to pick up. She had no clue how she had gotten it. She squinted at the world in front of her, still reeling from the shock of everything that has happened to her today. Her throat was still exceptionally cold—like she swallowed ice or something.

“What?” She said out loud, although no one in particular was listening. She was in this state of stasis for about forty five seconds. She stared at the world, unblinking.

Then: “Chris!” she exclaimed. “Ohmigod, ohmigod, gotta go help Chris.”

The city in space was moving, faster than it ever had before. Not the station itself, that was thoroughly stationary, but the people at the heart of it, the city was moving even faster than the bustling crowds ever moved. Word had gotten out. None of them knew how it would happen, the actuality of Glasst’s influence, how this planet was going to go. But the news had hit. And thus the panic.

Mr. Help Desk watched the surge of terrified people beelining for shuttles and escape pods and transporters. It was worse than Galaxanioid Black Friday—people kicked and bit and did whatever they could to reach an exit. Chaos. People bumping into people, bumping into people. A lady shaking a sign with The End is Nigh scrawled on it.

Mr. Help Desk could not abide by this nonsense. “EVERYONE!” he yelled to the cacophonous crowd. “YOU MUST LISTEN TO ME!”

The crowd didn’t do so. They were all far too busy—yelling and fighting and shaking and crying and climbing and breaking glass and running as fast as they could.

Mr. Help Desk had been having a very difficult day of soul-searching up to this point, but a person can only change so much. He needed to do something. And he knew how to do one thing very well. He moved to action.

“You four, you four, and you three,” he pointed at groups in the crowd, “go to pylon twelve and board the G7 Gallant. You, you and you, go to Geraldine’s, get some coaxious-nitrade for the ship and bring it to cargo bay two, get on board there…”

He didn’t stop talking. He helped everyone he could. But everything still kept getting worse. The planet wasn’t even going to blow up yet, and fear was already breaking this place down.

The Last Call shook with outrage and indignation. Shrieking voices bounced around the cabin. “Just who does this fellow think he is?!” “Why, I’ve never been treated with such indignity!” “This Chris Cwej, I want all his assets liquidated, I want him sold into servitude at the inhumanities auction—” “What on Earth is happening here!? My darling, I need my beauty rest!” “He must be stopped!”

Chris sat back in the cabin, leaning back into the seat, just for a moment. When the chaos finally began to die down, just a bit, he clicked on the intercom again.

“I don’t think you understand where I’m coming from,” Chris said, dangerously. “I think it’s time you all listened up.” He tapped controls in the cockpit, guiding the ship slightly away from the station.

Xotol impishly tapped the man sitting next to him, Peter Vuulye, an important posthuman business magnate in a dark black suit considered decidedly retro. Peter Vuulye got the hint, especially as it appealed to his ego, and rose to his feet. Only he could possibly represent all of them at a time like this.

“Mr. Cwej,” Vuulye said, stepping forward. “I am sure you are aware of me, Peter Vuulye, CEO of—”

“I really don’t care,” Chris said, the harsh words surprising himself. “All of you have had the chance to save people, all of you have known what’s coming, and you’ve all done nothing.” He paused, trying not to get too angry. “We’re doing something.”

Chris was all the more surprised by himself now that he had actually said it. He hadn’t realized what he was doing until he said it out loud. He really hadn’t. The impact on a grand scale that could result from what he was doing.

He was going to change something.

“This is a matter of established history,” Vuulye insisted, not one to be put down. “We are little, blessed to be aware of our place in that history—and you should know it too, especially considering your Superiors and Their rules, Their laws, Their considerations,” Vuulye was so incensed that little bits of spittle were forming at his mouth.

An insectoid woman in pearls near the back clapped a little at Vuulye’s words. She stood to her feet. “It is a matter of established fact that Grigori Glasst’s suite is responsible for the destruction of this planet and several others. It cannot be altered, as it has already happened. You should know this. You were there, weren’t you?”

He could not deny they were well informed. But it didn’t matter. His heart was thinking now, not his head. He had to do his part. He couldn’t just choose inaction, silent observation of a horror like this. He could not go through that suffering again, as selfish as that sounded. Let people die for no reason other than his bosses’ random values. He had his morals, he had to live with himself—and that was more important than anything else.

The law was never more important than what was right.

“You’re right, I was,” Cwej said to her. “I know the laws. And I don’t give a damn.”

He clicked buttons in the cockpit, adjusting the ship’s course further. Every instinct in his body railed against it, but he knew it was necessary.

“You mustn't change history!” yelped Xotol from the cabin, figuring out what Cwej was about to do. “You mustn't!”

“Well, if the rest of you aren’t going to help me, I may as well change history as dramatically as possible,” Chris announced, aiming the ship carefully. He was about to do something incredibly stupid. He desperately hoped it would pay off. “What do you think will happen if I aim this ship at Glasst’s? Stop the signal destroying the planet at it’s source?! Maximum speed, collision course, disregard all safety protocol!” he declared, as manicly as he could manage. “Well?”

Fear gripped the cabin, exactly as Chris had hoped. “You can’t possibly be serious,” Vuulye declared. “You’d die horribly!”

“Eh, I’ve had a good innings,” Chris shrugged it off, hoping he was a good actor. “And hey, big heroic cause, great way to go.”

“His Superiors would just negate the paradox,” the insect woman said, trying desperately to smile and remain calm. “We will be perfectly fine, whatever happens, we—”

“Ever been a paradox, miss?” Chris asked rhetorically. “I don’t recommend it. You have to die and everything. You tend to remember that afterwards too. The pain of burning alive…”

“He’s—he’s insane!” Insect Lady declared. “Insane!” “He’s bluffing,” Vuulye insisted, as the ship increased rapidly in speed.

“Oh, you think so?” Chris said, as pleasantly as he could manage. “I’m a serious person. Think about it.”

The engines moved to a fever pitch. The ship’s cabin turned to red alert, little oxygen masks helpfully falling from the ceiling, for all it did the passengers.

Chris was really hoping he wouldn’t have to actually do this. He probably would, but he was really hoping he wouldn’t. Oh dear. He really probably would.

“Are you proud of your collection, Xotol?” Chris snarled. “Your historical research? Well, I’ve got a real piece of history coming up for you now. I hope you enjoy the culmination of your work. A rare piece, dying by explosive paradox. And lucky for you, today it’s 100% off!”

Xotol squealed. The passengers screamed, all of them. It was the end of the line. They were time-aware, well-informed people, and this was not how history went. They were outside the possibilities that they had thought defined their life, and they were for the first time, in truly serious danger. It was strikingly terrible.

“STOP THE SHIP!” Vuulye shrieked in fearful despair.

And just in time, Chris pulled the breaks to a stop. The cabin breathed a heavy sigh of relief in unison as the ship shuddered to a halt. There was silence. The anticipation and dread they felt was palpable. They had known of this man but thought him surrounded by myth and overabundant exaggeration. They looked up in fear at the loudspeaker relaying Chris’s voice.

“Now, we can try that again and see if my piloting skills get any better, or we could stop wasting time and actually help some people,” he said sternly.

There were no dissenting voices from the cabin. CEO and conman alike opened their phones and began to make call after call.

The Moonlight Sonata. Not actually the name of Beethoven's piece, he himself called it the grand and estimable title of Piano Sonata No. 14, which just rolls off the tongue. Some historians think it was actually, according to the original notes, entitled “Sonata in the manner of a fantasy,” which isn’t really an excellent title either. But in times since, it has become The Moonlight Sonata by popular reputation. There can be many Sonatas by all sorts of composers that are the fourteenth one they did. There is only one Moonlight Sonata, or at least only one that matters.

The Moonlight Sonata now plays over the end of the world. It’s fitting, somehow. The notes already hold that friction in them. You can hear it even if Glaast isn’t playing. And it’s special. Usually it’s Glasst’s personal arrangements that cause these Earth-shattering reactions. But The Moonlight Sonata…

It’s part of the Glasst repertoire at this stage, one of the finest examples of humanity’s musical work and thus preserved perfectly in the Sol Three tour, next to covers of Cher’s Walking in Memphis and some piece by Sinatra. But those aren’t what's actually playing right now during the end of the world. They passed harmlessly and unheard.

The people of the station can see through the great big windows on the promenade. They can see the fires of the planet below. The planet’s crust breaking. They see it. It makes them run. Mr. Help Desk has helped the best he can, but he’s got nothing to Beethoven. The panic has been fed to a fever pitch, chaos is consuming the station. And all the while, they hear it. They should feel so honored – it’s something Beethoven himself never did, at least not completely. But isn’t the deterioration appropriate? The Sonata—so loud—it makes the station shake with every gentle frantic note. It goes on and on. The acoustic sessions of the end.

And Sang Mi at the window. Not knowing how to help. Remembering the future she’s seen of that hollow shell of a planet below this, the dead promenade.

Sang Mi at the window.

“Chris is gonna come and get me. I know he’s gonna come. I know it.”

That single, crystalized moment of pure despair, and—Ships materialize out of the bifrost one by one. Like the Tholian Web, beams of light connect them in a lattice of lasers. A shield begins steadily to form around the space station.

It’s the Time-awares. The people on board the Last Call had their contacts. Of course they did. People who would do anything to make sure that Uncle Vuulye is okay, or someone who owed Insect Lady a favor. Word gets around when it doesn’t necessarily have to travel linearly. The lovers of paradox and the rebels of dissidence and various slug people and all of them come too, it’s not entirely done via the conniving self-preservation instincts of the CEOs.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s small. Infinitesimal on the grand scale of the universe. Except scales aren’t grand. To the people on the station weeping and shrieking and begging to their Gods, it’s everything.

The Superiors will probably be mad. If they actually hear about it. If this private act of rebellion actually makes waves across the grand cosmos of the universe. The motley crew coming out of spacetime for their own agendas are careful nobody hears about this due to fear of reprisal. Nobody needs to know, they keep saying.

Chris, still in the cockpit of the Last Call, looks at the planet below. It still burns. He sees the trail of Glasst’s ship going off to its next destination. For a moment he thinks he hasn’t changed anything. And then he reminds himself that he has changed things here. He’s saved people.

But it’s not enough.

He’s not the Superiors. He’s no God of Time, no grand Archon of important standing. He can’t sit in inaction.

Would that make him an egotist if he kept trying to change history? Save the people that mattered? Doesn’t everyone matter? He doesn’t want to be like the Superiors one day, in their golden and time-soaked ivory towers overseeing the only right form of history.

He keeps thinking about Fionara. He’s been thinking about her the whole day. Or trying not to. If he saves her, then he probably stops existing, doesn’t he? Crossing his own timeline? Does it go by Back to the Future rules or does it do something else? Will Time Pterodactyls show up or something? The time stuff is never really consistent, doesn’t make sense, not even to him.

His makeshift fleet is departing. They look at him with wary eyes as they go. He’s made a name for himself here. More than ever.

Goddess. He just wishes they could just keep going. They won’—he’s only managed this via mass CEO threat via spaceship. It’s just… it’s still so terrible. If only someday all of his mistakes didn’t show up.

When the Last Call re-docked at the station for Chris to depart, Sang Mi was waiting. Chris sort of stumbled his way out, tripping over his own feet for no real reason. He was visibly very down, Sang Mi thought.

“Oh,” he said, looking at the issue in her hand, “you found that manga shop.”

Sang Mi felt confused. “Yeah,” She said, eventually. They sat in awkward silence.

Behind Cwej, a little strange lime-green creature presented itself.

“Xotol,” Chris said, surprised.

Xotol handed Chris a vast shelf of CDs and of course, the car, still shrunk down to a measly hot-wheels sized level. “Please,” Xotol said. “Never interact with me again.”

After unshrinking the car to its usual size quotient at the local inflatomat, Chris sat in the front seat of the vehicle, still confused as to how they had even gotten here. It seemed so strange and… even felt a little bit irrelevant now. So much had happened.

Sang Mi sat in the seat beside him, placing her things in yet another bag on the floor. She was accumulating quite a few bags. “You alright, man?”

“Not satisfied…” Chris said eventually. “Don’t really think I’ll ever be satisfied.”

Sang Mi thought about this and shrugged. “Me neither.”

The words spilled out of Chris, suddenly, and without warning. “I just wish I could do more. I… I still don’t understand what makes helping people here different from helping people in 2025. I’ve dealt with all sorts of paradoxes my whole life, all sorts of stuff about fixed points in time and temporal wibble-wobble. But I don’t think I’ll ever understand what’s… right.”

Sang Mi nodded solemnly. “You saved this place. That was… like a no, no or something, right? Laws of time?”

“Yes,” Chris said, with some difficulty.

“Well, I mean, laws are laws. They’re sort of, like, made by the, uh, in charge people. You can’t follow them if they tell you to do something that’s wrong.” She shrugged. “Least that’s what I think.”

Chris thought about this. “Yeah,” he agreed. It had been what he needed to hear, even if he sort of knew it already. “What next?”

Sang Mi shrugged. “I don’t know how to get back.”

A moment passed of further bewilderment as they really thought over events. How this all happened.

“Well, we do what we can, I guess.”

Sang Mi slotted open the CD player in the car. She tentatively slid in the copy of Au Revoir Simone’s The Bird of Music into the player. Somebody Who began to softly play in the background.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Dunno.”

“Fionara,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“You asked me about her earlier. Who I’d lost here. Her name was Fionara.”

As the synth of the song surrounded them, it was happening again. Outside the car, the stepping man looked on in his world of lowercase. Half of his face was visible—far clearer than before in the open light of the station and not his typical shadowy hideaways. But whether that half-face looked like Chris, Sang Mi, Fionara, or even something else, no one could begin to say.

2025
The Road

Dave was a collector, but he was suddenly without a collection, really. He felt purposeless, confused and decaffeinated, although he had never really bothered with caffeine since his days at college. It was so weird. He was missing something now that the shelf was gone. He wasn’t one of those collectors that needed to constantly expand the shelf or he’d die—but not having the shelf there at all was its own little death. Days passed, two or three or something, of this sad and morose life. He drove to work everyday. He also drove back. There was hardly anything in between, great big swathes were just missing. But he was fine, really. Just a little emptier.

A girl came to his house on the fourth day or something. The girl. The same one from the car on the road with the second strange man. She apologized, as she stepped through the door, said that she just got back and everything.

“I’m Sang Mi,” she said. “Here’s my number. Let me know if anything else goes wrong.”
Dave nodded. It was, uh, fine. “Nice to see you,” he said. He didn’t expect anything.

She handed him the shelf. It took him a while to even understand. He went through the stacks, making sure it was complete, as it was. It was the very same shelf. It was impossible. There was absolutely no way. But it was absolute. There was the same crease on the inner sleeve of A Momentary Lapse of Reason. There was the same signed name on Raye Genesis. It was impossible!

Dave wept as the girl went. He didn’t understand, but he didn’t need to. There was proof of magic in the world, of good people.

Such a damn funny thing.

The girl—sorry, Sang Mi—excused herself to meet with the man, who was in the same spot as before, three or four days ago. It was exact. Even the car was on the exact same spot on the street as where it had been. Dave had stored the image of that car in his photographic memory, expecting never to see it again—he certainly didn’t give CDs away for free, but something had compelled him to. That last copy of The Bird of Music…

Such a damn funny thing! He laughed and laughed and thanked the lord.

But that copy of The Bird of Music wasn’t there. Figured, he thought, he had given it to her, but still. That wasn’t the odd bit. The last CD on the shelf was by somebody named Austentacia Wicker. An album called Living Halfway. Dave shrugged. It was strange, but it probably wasn’t important.

Next Stop:
THE SPACE BETWEEN DESTINATIONS
BY AIDAN MASON

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