 
*

STRANGE PASSAGE

Book One

ACCLIMATION

Erik J. Avalon

*

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Erik J. Avalon (pen name of M. Erik Strouss)

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### This work I hereby dedicate to the following:

### Stephen King, China Miéville, and Chuck Palahniuk;

### Sue, Becky, Kelly, Smokey, Jeff, and the Furkas family;

### Mom, Andrea, and yes, even you, Craig;

### and though I knew you not

### when the work began,

### this book is

### still mostly

### for you,

### Kurt.

###

## *

# Remembered Folly

The last thing he could remember was dying.

It had been a Friday night late in the first month of 2007, and that winter's mild norm had brought no snow, just an easily forgettable chill to the air. Business had been busy for most of the night – rush out the door, slow down just enough to carefully place orders levelly in the backseat, speed out of the lot and down Main Street without attracting the attention of any potentially waiting local cops or Sheriffs, hand the food over and collect the money and give back change in less than five seconds and run back to the car to get back to the store to shoulder between cooks and other drivers to get to orders and figure out which ones might go together, then rush out to do it all again – but finally slowed down around nine. At the station next door, gas was still back over two bucks, but Andy held onto the hope that it would dip back down again any day now.

Andy was an evening-shift driver for Pappas Pizza, and though the job had cost him one car and made him borrow money to get another, he still liked the work. He even liked most of his coworkers.

The owners were a Greek couple, related in one way or another to the proprietors of the thirteen other Pappas restaurants in the Greater Cincinnati Area. Gino was the will that drove the employees to do their best day in and day out, though he had a tendency to lose all patience during the busier hours and vent his frustrations on whomever was nearest, whether or not they had made a mistake. Serina had a cooler head and was much better liked by customers and employees alike, but anyone with the misfortune to cross her soon learned who at Pappas Pizza in Batavia was the real one to fear.

Since it was a Friday, both Gino and Serina were present, so even though things had slowed down and the phones were silent, the cooks and drivers were all on edge.

Ohio's smoking ban, contested and obscure as it was, had recently gone into effect. Though it seemed that small businesses could be exempt from the ban, Serina - much to Gino's dismay - had decided to apply it in her establishment anyway.

Thus, this particular night found two cooks and a driver out by the rear public entrance, sitting on the edge of the handicap-accessible ramp, puffing away. The driver, Andy, was trying to quit because he could no longer afford to buy ciggs - thank the demands of his job and curse his inability to maintain a car, say thankya - but the stress of the boss constantly rushing him out the door with deliveries had driven him to bum a smoke.

The sky was a bitterly crisp, cloudy gray that would not deliver on the flurries it seemed to promise. The remains of the second serious snowfall of the season, just a few days past, could still be seen over most of the town, but here in the parking lot shared by Pappas Pizza, the UDF station, and a small bread store set into the building with the convenience store, only the temperature told the season.

Andy sat with Louisa and Frida, long-time friends whose friendship was strained by the fact they could barely stand to work together. The two middle-aged women shared managerial duties, though Gino had been reluctant to proclaim either one officially a manager. Frida was a lioness as ferocious in her way as Gino could be, but her rage was tempered by a common sense the boss man mostly lacked. Louisa was an early grandmother whose children brought endless drama into her life, but Andy respected how strong she was to love and live with them anyway. This had been one of those rare nights Frida and Louisa had gotten along all shift, at least so far, and Andy liked them both far, far more when they were civil and not practically at each other's throats.

Louisa had just crushed out her cigarette when Frida unexpectedly cackled. Andy had been staring up at the crescent moon, absently thinking about bills and what he was currently reading and when his rent was due and how his new car was running and why his best friend - a recent addition to the Pappas pool of drivers - had gotten the day driver to cover for him and when he had last gotten laid and how he hoped to be done with this job inside the year when Frida's sudden, almost hyena-like laugh startled him. He took a quick hit off his own cigarette, then gazed to where Frida was pointing and nearly dropped the smoking stick in his hand.

At first, he just thought that his coworker was pointing out that the short young woman pumping gas into her beat-up old van was smoking at the pump, not only ignoring the signs at every pump advising against smoking there, but also being too stupid to realize the danger she was putting herself in.

Then, Andy realized what else the girl was doing wrong and covered his face, trying not to burst into hysterics. Louisa was speechless, but Frida was babbling on about how her ex-husband would be stupid enough to do something like that.

The pump had clicked off, indicating a full tank, but the pink-haired chick was not getting the message. Though the pump stopped her every two or three cents, she kept pouring gas into her now overfilling tank.

Andy only did not laugh because he had done the same thing just a few days earlier. Not realizing how truly small the gas tank was on his "new" 1997 Geo Metro, he had prepaid ten dollars and tried to pump the gas as usual. When it stopped pumping around $9.50, he kept going. He had never completely filled the larger tank on his old car, and at that moment was not aware his new tank would not even hold ten gallons of gas. Around $9.75, he had finally realized why the pump kept cutting him off, but by the time he pulled the nozzle out, it was too late. Gas had gushed out all over his shoe, the tire, the side of the car, and the ground.

Now, the same scene played out in UDF's parking lot, and Andy could not help feeling like he was living in a Stephen King novel; coincidence canceled, and all that.

The post-punk girl dropped the nozzle to the ground, stomped her feet in an amusingly childish fashion, and swore under her breath, as if she honestly thought she could still avoid attracting attention to herself.

An attendant had come outside to investigate – gawk, rather – and was standing in the open glass doorway, mouth agape. The woman clearly could not believe the stupidity she was seeing.

Andy and his coworkers – while he was quiet, Frida and Louisa were now having a lively discussion on the subject – thought that was the end of it. The girl would go inside, collect her change if she had prepaid or pay cash now if she had not prepaid, and then drive away, leaving the mess for someone in the gas station to worry about.

Then, Andy's attention zeroed in on the girl's hand and the two-inch long object precariously balanced between two fingers on that hand, which was waving through the air. The young woman seemed willing to rant and rave all night.

She was just not willing to do so there in the tri-business lot.

As the driver, the cooks, and the UDF woman watched, the pink-haired girl got back into the van and tossed her cigarette out the window. The station attendant, unmoving, yelped across the lot. Andy might have thought the girl had not yet paid, but even if that were the case, he doubted that was why the UDF employee was raising her voice at that moment.

As the girl turned the key and screamed in frustration when it would not start, the cigarette landed in the spilt gas. Instantly, the little puddle under the still-open tank port burst into flames.

Frida and Louisa shut up and gasped in unison, but neither they nor the UDF woman moved to do anything about the horror playing out before them.

Incredibly, Andy found himself unfrozen by shock, undeterred by nerves, and already halfway across the lot before he was even aware he meant to stand up.

He was yelling at the girl in the van, who seemed deaf as she kept trying in vain to start her vehicle, but he knew not what he cried. His voice seemed to be controlled by forces outside him, his feet propelled by their own will. Andy was reduced to a witness in his own body.

He yanked the driver's door open and tried to pull the girl out, whom now turned her frustrated tirade on him even as he attempted to help her, but she had had just enough sense to buckle her belt. Top off the tank and flick a smoking butt in flammable liquid, sure, but cannot forget to buckle up!

Andy suppressed the urge to slap the screaming girl upside the head.

Frida was yelling something from far behind him, but he had no time to worry what she might want. He had to get this idiotic girl out of harm's way.

He reached over and unbuckled her belt, withstanding fierce blows from the girl's small fists all the while. She tried to bite him, but he ducked easily out of her mouth's reach.

With the belt no longer an obstacle, he yanked her out of the seat and quickly pointed to the spillage and flames. While his eyes were on the girl, hers saw the climbing flames and she realized what she had done, and fainted into Andy's arms.

"Andy!"

As he slowly turned to yell back at Frida, his gaze was caught by the action at the back of the van. While he had been distracted, the flames had found their way up the tire, the side of the van, and were now running through the uncovered port and down into the tank itself.

He began to drop the girl, overcome by a panicked, animal instinct of self-preservation, and would have run to safety, but it was already too late for them both.

The tank exploded, flames engulfed the idiot stranger and Andy completely, and then the world fell away.

## **

# Andy in the Dark

Though his family was full to bursting of devout Christians and they had done their best to raise Andy in the nondenominational church, he turned out to be a half-hearted believer. He had given the act of having faith his best shot in his pre-teens, but in his heart and further down, it could not set roots deeper than his bottomless, curious doubt. He supposed the Bible might be mostly true, and that all men and women were held accountable for their sins by some higher power, but that understanding never stopped him from committing "sins" that, had they ever been suspected, would have gotten him disowned in a heartbeat.

In the moment before the tank went, Andy had just enough time to reflect on what his relations – and he himself, were he still pretending to himself first and others second that he was more devoted to the church's teachings – would see as his most heinous sins.

With those memories playing through his mind, his life was snuffed out, his body burnt to a crisp, his soul set free to meet whatever fate awaited him.

Yet somehow this was not the end.

At least, it was not the ending Andy had been taught to expect, or even thought in his own imaginings was possible.

The body of Roland Edward Chambers, Andy to his friends, died that night in the parking lot between UDF and Pappas Pizza Batavia.

His mind, however, did not.

The next stage of his existence began with the simple, silent, stimuli-less realization that he still existed.

I am.

A short thought in a bodiless darkness, and suddenly Andy understood that he was there, though he could not comprehend where "there" might actually be.

Am I dead? Is this what being dead feels like?

Wait.

What just happened? Where am I?

Wasn't I just at work?

Yeah...

I bummed a smoke off Louisa, no, it was Frida. Yeah. I bummed one off her and we went out and Louisa was already outside smoking.

So I was at work. Then what?

Am I asleep?

No, I don't remember even going home.

So I'm not dreaming.

Then what the fuck is this!

We were out back smoking, and...

Oh, fuck.

That stupid pink-haired bitch was smoking at the pump, and...

And...

He tried to stop his wandering mind, not wanting to relive the last event of his former existence, but found himself unable to stop his mind's eye from seeing it all over again.

The spilled gas.

The childish stomping.

The aghast spectators; his memory was crystal clear of the event, yet as if it were a dream rather than a true recollection, scores of ephemeral others had been inserted all along the sidewalk that fronted the bread store and the UDF, and every single customer of Pappas Pizza was somehow squeezed in behind him and Frida and Louisa, all chanting different recriminations against the pink-haired girl that somehow formed a low thumping harmony, a chorus to the singing beat he was not sure he had really been aware of feeling in his heart at the time, but which he remember-felt now.

The dropped cigarette.

The initial flames.

The stupidly heroic intervention.

The ungrateful bitch hitting him.

No!

I don't want to know any more!

The unbuckling of the belt.

Fuck, stop this!

Pulling her out.

Stop.

She faints.

Oh, God, please.

He turns and sees the flames' progression too late and tries to move, tries to get away, tries to live, but it is just too late and the tank explodes and...

I'm dead.

I died... didn't I?

But if I did, what's this?

I'm still... here!

Oh, fuck, wait.

Like a brick wall toppling onto him, another possibility hit him, one that paradoxically seemed both incredibly better and intolerably worse than the idea that he had died.

Oh fuck, please God no.

I'm not dead.

Nope, not dead.

Just burned beyond recognition and trapped in my own skull, stuck in a MOTHER-FUCKING COMA I MAY NEVER WAKE FROM!

Oh, God...

This idea brought Andy dread he never believed he could experience. His greatest fear was complete paralysis, and this bodiless limbo suggested to him that even if he did "wake up" someday, all he had to look forward to was bedpans, hospital food, and fucking useless TV for the rest of his miserable, immobile life.

Stop it, Andy.

Stop jumping to conclusions.

Maybe the whole thing was a dream.

Maybe you're just still dreaming.

Thin as the hope of it was, he latched onto this. He told himself that, yes, somehow, everything he thought he remembered leading up to his explosive and overdramatic death scene was only a dream, and nothing more.

All a dream.

Thank God!

He laughed at himself for that, and reminded himself to figure out whether or not he actually believed in God.

When I wake up, I'll know.

If he had had a body, he would have cringed at that thought, for it seemed to come from outside his consciousness somehow.

Then, he felt what might have been a slight cramp. He thought it was in his foot or calf, and then silently rejoiced that he was feeling anything at all.

Okay, so admit it.

I didn't dream it.

Also, I seem to NOT be dead.

So... what do I wanna do.

Eternal darkness, torturing myself with endless possibilities?

Or do I wanna find out what shape I'm in after that... boom.

He quieted again, carefully weighing the short lists of pros against the long lists of cons for each choice.

When Andy had a particularly boring or to-anyone-but-him frightening dream, in which he had at some point become aware he was dreaming, he years ago discovered he could force himself awake at will. It usually took a minute or two, but it never failed.

Whatever this state of mind Andy now found himself in might be, he had an idea that he could "wake" himself from it about as easily as he ever escaped a dream.

After less than a minute of internal – inside what, he yet had no clue – deliberation, Andy decided to take his chances "outside" this dimension of complete sensory deprivation.

He mustered his will power, directed himself to AWAKEN, braced himself against whatever physical agony his dormant body might hold waiting for his mind, told himself again to WAKE UP, and finally began to rise.

## ***

# Andy's Awakening

He opened his eyes, and his entire sense of reality was shattered.

If it had all occurred just as it seemed to have in his memory, then he expected to wake in a hospital room. He would be heavily bandaged, and most likely overcome by pain.

This was not the case.

If it had all been a severely realistic, detailed dream, and nothing more, then he would wake in his bedroom and breathe a sigh of relief, then maybe laugh at his own gullibility that a dream could scare him at this point in his life, let alone make him think he had died.

While he did awake in his own bed, with all the furnishings of his room around him, Andy knew that this was not truly his apartment in Withamsville.

It was supposed to look like his bedroom, and everything appeared at first glance to be in its right place, but the walls were the wrong shade of white and this room was slightly larger than his own. There was just too much empty space on the carpet between his bed and the dresser, and the desk was at least five inches further away from him than it should have been.

And there were no doors. The closet stood exposed, and the doorway to the left of it held no door, simply showed Andy a hallway that seemed too bright as well as too wide. He could even see into the hallway storage closet, mostly empty, and was disturbed by the dim quality of the reflection in the bureau mirror propped against that closet's back wall.

He flung the thick quilt to the end of his bed – two mattresses set upon the floor, since he had never bothered trying to acquire a frame – and stood up beside it. After stretching his arms over his head, he looked and found his glasses on the left side of his old-bills-and-junk-mail cluttered desk. Everything in its right place, indeed.

The lamp rising over the papers and envelopes was his, though he had long ago forgotten when or where it had come into his possession, but something about the quality of its light disturbed him.

The bulb looks the same. Is it brighter?

Dismissing the half-formed observation, he lifted his glasses and inspected them. At least they were the same. The lenses were years outdated, but he could not afford a new prescription. The frame was from cheap sunglasses, and served to keep him a legal driver after the old frame had broken.

With his enhanced vision restored, he looked down and wondered at his nudity. He had once tried sleeping in the buff, but found the experience uncomfortable and so always kept on at least a pair of briefs when he hit the sack.

His current lack of clothing unnerved him.

"Okay," he muttered, speaking aloud for the first time in this place. "What the fuck's going on?"

## ****

# The Legend of the Dark One

Once upon a time there was a world full of miracles. War and disease were mere words, the facts they once represented long since annihilated by the benevolent unification of all factions. Cooperation and internal exploration made the peoples of this world free.

The wonders of science and mysteries called magick were unified, as well. The joint pursuit of these seemingly opposing intellectual paths brought those that walked the surface of this world higher than natural evolution would have taken them. They became, as some cultures would see it, gods of their own reality, and as such began to reshape their world so that it might suit them more properly.

For a time, peace and growth reigned supreme. None had more or less than they desired, and none were higher or lower than any other member of their kind. It seemed to be paradise, and all the things once feared fell away, barely even remembered in fairy tales.

Such was the fate of religious doctrine. Over the centuries, the great churches and spiritual disciplines of the world crumbled under the weight of what was believed to be truer enlightenment. While the end of even the prospect of holy wars was a benefit absolutely none could deny, there were still a few that detested the course their world was sailing.

Deep into the second millennium of this world's last bright age, a man rose to unify those whom opposed the status quo. He questioned a future that he claimed could only dim if things did not change, since the landscape of the present was lit poisonously too brightly.

This man taught that the light of Unified Pursuit blinded the masses to the horrors they were witness to, or perpetrator of, each day. He took hold of one truth – that desire had supplanted need on society's collective list of priorities – and spun such fine layers of propaganda and prophecy around it that all who heard him doubted what they thought they had known. Within a few decades, his followers had become zealots, and their numbers had grown to nearly a tenth of the population of their world.

Finally, when he was confident of his chances, the Dark One – called thus for his defiance of the misleading light of Unified Pursuit – led his armies to seize control of every former nation of their world by simultaneously assassinating every high-ranking member of the planetary government.

In a single day, that shining age so detested by the outsiders was extinguished. Technology and mysticism were once again separated, and all traces of their long crossover were destroyed.

The new order of the world only lasted for a quarter of a century, but that was time enough for the seeds of doom to spread, sink roots beneath the world, and bloom into monstrous ruin that would run unstoppable unto the end of the planet entire.

But even that was not the end of the Dark One's story, or of his people.

No, unfortunately, far from the end.

## *****

# The Apartment

When Andy had been very small – back before he learned his mother had named him after what he would come to think of as a bad main character for a book, and decided he would never let people call him that again – he tried to read C. S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. While the idea of secret passage into a fantastic, otherworldly setting was fascinating to the boy, the story was too complex for his little mind to follow, and so he had set the book aside.

Though he never picked that volume up again for more than the turning of a page or two every few years, the idea of the wardrobe never left his mind. For years, he would open closets with a bit of expectation, be they in relatives' houses or hotel rooms or classrooms, always hoping to find a way through. He never expected to find Narnia, for that was only a story for children, but the notion itself of other worlds somehow rang true.

As he grew older and still found no escape form his mediocre, middle-class life, he slowly set aside the dream of strange passage and let himself forget the belief in worlds beyond the one he could see and feel.

Only now, upon the event of his stupidly heroic death, he had found that which his heart had longed for all along. His mind was having obvious trouble coping with it, but his heart was rejoicing.

The child in him only wished this closet that was supposed to be his had doors, that he might fling them open and experience that moment of excited expectation once again. The child mind did not even care that it could plainly see why such expectation would be for naught; it yearned for that moment, nonetheless.

Since this closet had no doors, sliding like his own true closet's set or of any other kind, Andy reached in without hesitation – or hope – and pulled out a white plastic hanger on which was hung a pair of blue jeans. His jeans.

He had no doubt that if he were to step to the right side of the doorless closet and riffle through the shirts, he would find hanging clean there every shirt he owned, though almost all his clothes had been left dirty when he had gone to work for the last time.

"So, what, this mean I won't have to do my own laundry anymore?" he spoke aloud as he stepped into the pants, the hanger dropped and already forgotten. "Is that what this means?"

Not bothering to check the dresser on the other side of the room – beside his bed and beneath the closed window blinds – for socks, and content to go commando, Andy left the bedroom, turned left down the short hallway, and walked out into a kitchen that seemed to be the size it should be.

Not much else about it was right at all.

The tiled floor was shiny and clean, whereas Andy's had been dingy and unmopped. The stovetop to his right was clean, as were the pots and pans upon it, though Andy had not used his own cooking utensils in months and had not even bothered to clean them from their last random uses. Over half of the dishes in his true place had been dirty in the sink, and the counter to Andy's left and the left of the here-empty sink should have been littered with plastic utensils, paper plates and cups, and Styrofoam bowls, but instead it was perfectly bare. Opening the cabinets above the sink, bare counter to the left, and microwave to the right, Andy found his dishes neatly stacked as he would do on those few occasions since he had moved out on his own that he had felt the urge to actually wash all his dirty dishes.

He glanced fleetingly at the fridge – also impeccably clean, but here sans any of the few magnets he had collected – but had no appetite just now and so chose not to open it and explore its contents, which would all no doubt be nowhere near their expiration dates. Hell, they probably would not even have such things.

Disturbed, he looked out through the hollow between cabinets above and countertops below that showed into the combined living room and intended dining room space, though the latter he had turned into a sort of office. He breathed a shocked sigh of relief, for at least here it seemed that nothing at all was out of place.

Along the left-hand wall were two tall bookshelves, the first holding novels he had mostly never read, the second holding stacks and stacks of comic books he read too much. In the far corner on that side, his twenty-inch TV sat upon a low, open stand that contained his collection of TV shows on DVD, and to either side of this were miniature cabinets holding all his DVD movies. The doors remained on these white faux-wood twins, and this delighted him in an odd way.

"Least you couldn't take all the doors," he murmured, not knowing or caring whom he addressed.

A short black coffee table was set a foot and a half before the television, holding three remote controls, a long-stale container of chocolate-covered nuts, a few recently-purchased DVDs still in their annoying security wrappers, and little else. Against the wall to the right of this was a slightly taller end table, a little black lamp the only thing upon it. Though no chair of any kind was next to it, this had been Andy's favorite place to sit and read.

He had no couch or chairs at all. Though he had rarely finished any Stephen King book he happened to try his patience on, he had watched some of the man's movies, and something the bad guy in The Stand said at one point had stuck with Andy. The character had proclaimed that liars sat in chairs, while truth-tellers just sort of hunkered down. Somehow, this had become a part of how Andy lived his life.

Suddenly thinking this part of his not-quite-real apartment was too good to be true, he rushed around the partition and expected to find his office space totally bare, his most precious possessions – far more important than the bulk of his DVD and comics collections combined – gone. The floor space from the counter where anyone else would have set barstools to the spot where a normal person would have a couch, that space would be utterly blank and he would tear his eyes out in mind-blown horror.

Instead, he raised a fist behind his head and brought the bottom of it down hard against the base of his skull, his personal what-an-idiot-am-I gesture, and frequent form of self-punishment when no one else was looking.

Against the wall before him and about five feet to the right of the reading lamp, a four-foot-tall file cabinet stood closed. Andy would have opened each of its four drawers, but a quiet certainty stole over him that his old poems and older song lyrics and failed attempts at short stories were still all piled within, just as they should be.

A closed laptop computer sat upon a short metal tray on the floor under the counter. Its power cord snaked down behind it and over to the outlet in the wall by the file cabinet. Andy fell to his knees and raised the screen panel, causing the laptop to hum. Within moments, the screen was lighting up and the hourglass cursor at its center was showing Andy that his OS would be up and running momentarily.

While Andy was a driver by trade, his true passion was for music. He did not have the patience or resources growing up to learn an instrument, but since he got the laptop, that was becoming less and less of an obstacle to his dream.

His tools were here, really here, and no matter what was going on, he would be all right. So long as he was able to make music, he could go on.

But music would have to wait.

Strong as the urge to capture his emotions in a new track was, Andy forced himself to look away from the screen and stand up. He walked back out into the kitchen, pulled a small mug out of one of the cabinets, and filled it with water from the tap. After inspecting the liquid with his eyes and nose, he downed it in one swallow. The water was clean, even a little sweet, and he realized that though he had not noticed it before, his throat had been dry.

After two more mugfuls, he set the cup down in the sink and turned the faucet off.

"Enough," he whispered, hands on the counter on either side of the sink, head down, eyes closed. "Time to get ready."

## ******

# Darkness' Prisoners

Creation exists in layers, almost like an onion. The myriad dimensions it encompasses include those known of on earth, those hypothesized by scientists and science fictionauts alike, and a greater many that the minds of humanity might never be able to grasp.

Before he woke to a home not quite his own, Andy was caught in one of them, a dark place seemingly between life and death. Andy could see and feel nothing there, and though he did not wonder on the fact, he had been alone there.

In a dimension mere layers away, so close he could have tasted it and shifted to it were he anything more than a man, there was no such loneliness.

Darkness, sure, but full to bursting with separate consciousnesses. No sensation, no stimuli, and long ago, not even the comfort of contact with each other, though the comfort they drew from contact did not last long.

These bodiless minds had been caught in this non-place for ages unknown and unguessable. There were no spinning globes or even burning orbs to tell time by, so time itself did not exist to them. They laughed at and hated the very concept of time.

Eventually, though, after contact had been made and celebrated and grown boring, they realized that they could unite their disparate, desperate wills to breach the veil between dimensions.

Instinct told them escape was not possible this way, but at least the viewing gave them something to focus on outside their endless torment.

Through their disconnected wandering, their inter-dimensional voyeurism, they discovered a startling truth that otherwise would never have occurred to them. While the worlds that existed outside their dark prison had many beings, multitudes upon multitudes, those beings were separated from each other.

Contact had robbed the darkness' prisoners of their own individuality. Their minds had suddenly been so open to each other that thoughts and memories were exchanged among them like money or germs on earth. No one of them felt alone, but none of them had a sense of self anymore, either. Each could recall that brief period of despair after they had first woken and realized their situation in this dark non-place, but that recollection was tainted by the shared similar experiences of all they had so eagerly opened themselves to upon the discovery simply that they could do such a thing.

And so was born a powerfully terrible notion in their immaterial brains: the state of individuality itself was imperfect, and so their entire imprisonment had been a mechanism both to free them from that disgraceful form of being and raise them to a higher, more significant way of thinking, of experiencing, of knowing.

So was born their hatred of individual thought, and their desire to set about finding a way to end its fowl occurrence across all dimensions.

Thus, the viewing became a tool in their search to truly breach the veil that held them back from all physical worlds, and in that search, their eyeless sight had been drawn to the very place Andy awoke to find himself in.

They watched, and waited for the mistake to be made that would open the way for them to come through. When that time came, they could begin their quest to unite all worthy minds with their own, that the tainted state of being called individuality might be eradicated and, eventually, forgotten.

If all minds that be could not, or would not, be united, then the dark bodiless watchers would settle for annihilation. They told themselves that the total erosion of all dimensions and forced ceasing of creation itself was not their primary goal, or even something they wanted, but they could not get the idea out of their minds.

If they could be said to have hoped at all for anything, it would be for the success of their ambition to unite all minds they encountered, and all that existed even beyond their reach.

Unity, or annihilation.

Either way, it was something to do.

## *******

# The Welcomer

The water ran down his body, over his muscles, between his legs, and somehow felt as sweet to his naked skin as it had tasted going down his throat.

When he had turned from the kitchen sink, shower in mind, he had nearly gasped. The short hallway before him \- comprised of storage closet on the left, bathroom dead ahead, bedroom to the right, and linen closet between bed- and bathrooms, all doorless - was now exactly the size it should have been, and no longer dreamily too big. As he walked out of the kitchen, passing the apartment's front (and now only) door on his left and open entry to the spacious (for a one-bedroom apartment) living room on his right, he also noticed that the walls' color was now truly a match for what he remembered of home, as well. A quick glance told him the bedroom had shrunk also, though perhaps the whole business of there seeming to be too much room in there had been a trick of the eye due to his disturbed awakening.

He had wanted to doubt that explanation, but could not discredit it offhand.

The linen closet had held all his towels, clean and just a little more neatly folded and stacked than he would have left them. At the sight of this cursory tidiness, he had felt a burst of violated rage rising within him, welling up from the pit of his stomach and crawling down his arms to turn his hands into bitter claws, then tight fists.

His dishes done and stacked away was one thing, for he hardly used them anyway and had grown accustomed to ignoring them whether they be clean or in the sink dirty, but this was another matter altogether. These were his God-damned towels, the things he put against his skin to wipe away the beads that meant he was clean again, he was fit for the world again, and some fucking damn stranger had taken it upon her- or himself to put them away.

The fact that that same unknown entity had also probably neatly folded his socks and underwear and put those items in their rightful place, the top drawer of the dresser by his bed, never crossed his mind. It probably would not have mattered half as much to Andy, since he did go commando rather more than half the time.

Sniffing them as he pulled them out, he had assured himself they were truly clean and set two large towels down on the closed toilet seat. Then he had placed one hand towel on top of them, and another over the end of the shower curtain rod.

This he now pulled down to rub dry his eyes after rinsing his long, dark brown hair. He was about to fold it back over the rod when a single knock resounded through his doorless nigh-true apartment. He turned back toward the streaming jets of sweet, refreshing, cleansing water and tried to tell himself the sound meant nothing, had probably just been a nerves-induced light auditory hallucination or something, but then the knocking sound came again, this time thrice in rapid succession.

"Just a minute!" he cried out absurdly, not sure why he should answer at all.

A light tap at the front door told him the knocker had heard him, and would wait patiently for him to come.

"Nice," Andy whispered as he bent to shut off the water. "Right when I'm wet an' naked the greeting party decides to show up. Least I wasn't masturbating."

At that thought his cock stiffened a little, but he forced the urge away by picturing death and torture and ruin, all things that excited him creatively, but put a quick damper on sexual impulses.

He dried off quickly, wrapped one towel around his waist after throwing the other up over the rod, ran the second hand towel through his hair a few times before setting that on the rod as well, and then slowly made his way to the door.

"Word of warning," he spoke through it as he turned the lock and started to pull the door open. "I'm not decent."

"How could you be?" a cheerful, disarmingly masculine voice answered him. "You ended up here, didn't you?"

The unassuming smile on the face of the knocker instantly calmed Andy's nerves. The young man was around his own age, early twenties, and had short blond hair. His bright gray eyes and narrow, sharp features made Andy think of the leading lady on Nip/Tuck, but there was nothing feminine about the guy. He was dressed in faded blue jeans with worn-through knees, but it was the guy's shirt that really caught Andy's attention. It was a red tee with the logo and name of a pizza place printed over the chest.

"Uh," Andy began, flummoxed. "I didn't order anything."

"How could you have?" the friendly stranger retorted, walking past Andy and into the apartment as if he was an often and welcome guest. "You just got here."

Andy's jaw dropped, but he snapped it shut as he closed the door and followed his visitor into the couch-less living room.

"Nice set-up ya got here. Could use a chair or two, but still homey. I guess."

"Why are you here?" Andy posed only a little crossly, and without voicing the next question on his mind.

For that matter, why am I here?

"I came for the view," the blond guy smirked, eying Andy's towel.

"Hey, I didn't invite anyone over, so why should I be dressed for company?"

"Touché. Guess you could call me part of the welcoming committee. Name's Walter, by the way."

When Walter offered his hand with another genuine smile, Andy shook it and sighed, smiling in return in spite of himself.

"I'm Andy," he said, leaning back against the countertop jutting out over his laptop and music-making area. "What is this place?"

"That's getting a bit ahead," Walter said, rolling his eyes. "What I'm mainly here to tell you is that you're working here," he paused to point at the emblem on his shirt, "as a driver now."

"Wait, what?"

"Take a look," Walter said, looking back over his shoulder at the closed blinds on the far side of the room, past the coffee table and over the long, low electric heater.

Andy walked over to the window and peered out between two blinds, then gasped. The view was from two or three floors higher than his third floor place in Withamsville was, and looked down upon a much larger and more fully-packed parking lot. Still, he was able to spot what Walter wanted him to see with no trouble at all.

"That's my car," he murmured as he turned back to face his welcomer.

"You really surprised to see it out there? All your other crap's here, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is," Andy responded numbly.

"Buddy, we've all been through it."

"Through what," Andy intoned without inflection. Then, he shook his head and asked, "We all who?"

"Answer number one is that sense of violated, surreal dislocation you're feeling. Trust me, you're just about past the worst of it now. As to number two, I mean all of us. Everyone here."

"Here WHERE!" Andy snarled.

When Walter just rolled his eyes again, Andy raised the knuckles of his left fist to his lips and looked down at the floor. He did not know how he could be sure, but it still seemed evident that whatever was happening, Walter was responsible for absolutely none of it.

"Sorry," he blurted after a minute, looking up soberly.

"All fine," Walter replied, smiling brightly. "You're taking it better than I did. I put my fist through about three or four walls before my welcomer came knockin', and then I almost wanted to hit her, too."

Andy chuckled at that image, finding it hard to believe this cool and collected individual had a temper like he was hinting at.

Then, something occurred to him and he spun on his heels to peek between the blinds again.

"Not the season you were expecting?"

Andy barely registered that Walter had spoken. All he could see was the utter absence of snow, and the bright colors of the trees and flowers lining the parking lot.

"Andy?"

"Yeah," he said, spinning again. "How'd you know?"

"Let's just say it's a common part of the... transition."

"You aren't makin' a damn bit of sense."

Grinning goofishly, Walter chirped, "Good!"

Andy could not help smiling, his worry and confusion set aside effortlessly.

Almost unwillingly.

"So I work with you now, huh," Andy said, pointing at Walter's shirt.

"Yeah. Everyone here, whatever their job was before, in their old life, that's what they do here. You were a delivery guy, and we're currently in need of a new one, so..."

"Their old life," Andy mused, turning his eyes away.

"Pretty much. This isn't a bad place, man, but a lot of people have tried to escape anyway. Only reason I didn't is because when I realized the situation, it made me WANT to stay. Though, honestly, its never been as exciting as I thought it would be."

"It's an enclosed environment, isn't it," Andy sighed, looking soberly at Walter. "There is no way out."

"You got it," Water replied, eyes bright, but cautious. "Usually it takes a while for newcomers to understand that."

"I like science fiction," Andy stated evenly. "I guess that just gives me a better logic set for sitches like this."

"Sitches," Walter muttered, shaking his head and smiling. "Look, since it's your first day in, you'll just be riding around with me to get your bearings."

"That's not necessary. I learn quick."

"Policy, man," Walter said with a shrug.

"Fine. When?"

"Well, whenever you're ready," the blond guy answered, glancing briefly again at the towel barely covering Andy's nudity.

"Oh. Oh, shit! Man, and you just let me stand here like this..." he trailed off, blushing a little. "Ass."

"You can show me that later," Walter jabbed, sticking his tongue out as Andy clutched the towel and rushed out of the living room. "Don't take forever getting dressed! Excuse me. Decent."

"Decent," Andy whispered in the bedroom as he dropped the towel into the white plastic hamper on top of the jeans he had briefly worn earlier.

Grinning in spite of everything, he grabbed a pair of boxer briefs and socks out of the dresser, slipped into them, and then ran across to the closet. Settling on a faded pair of black jeans, he yanked them up over his legs just as Walter poked his head around the corner from the outer room. Andy glared at him, but Walter just waved and smiled mockingly.

"You ready yet?"

"Look like I am?"

"Just grab a work shirt and let's book. You can put it on in the car, and you won't need to bring anything else with you tonight."

Rolling his eyes at Andy's indignation, Walter disappeared around the corner again. Andy glanced at his wallet on the desk, then pulled a blue shirt off one of the hangers and held it up so his eyes could train on the image printed on it.

Everything else in this closet was his own, and there were the right number of work shirts hanging in the middle – seven red, two blue – but instead of the Pappas Pizza Batavia logo, these shirts had various sizes of the emblem on Walter's shirt. Apparently, Andy now worked for Quality Pizzeria, but nowhere on any of the shirts was a town listed.

Setting the question this raised aside for later consideration, Andy flipped the blue shirt over his shoulder and ventured out into the shor'hall.

Looking down as he rounded the corner into the outer room, Andy spotted his keys on the floor by the nearer of the bookshelves against this wall. Snatching them up quickly, he waved for Walter to follow him and stepped to the unlocked door.

"Ready now?" Walter chirruped, real impatience finally creeping into his voice.

"Sure," Andy replied, slipping into the lace-less black shoes that had been waiting for him by the door, just where they should be.

"I think you'll like it here," Walter said as they stepped out into the hall beyond.

"We'll see," Andy murmured softly as he locked the door.

Slipping his keys – one for the apartment, one for a mailbox he did not know the location of here, and one for his car – into his pocket, Andy turned and gawked at the long hallway that stretched out before him. His place had been situated at about the exact middle of the building, and a set of twenty-four doors ran down each wall before him. Glancing sideways, he noticed there was no door directly across from his, and that this was the only gap wider than a few inches between any of the shut doors he could see.

"How the hell?" he put to Walter, his face twisted in bewilderment.

"Tesseracts," Walter answered simply, flashing that charming smile again.

"Ah," Andy almost moaned, remembering the way that term had once been used in an issue of the Fantastic Four.

While he had never known if this was a true definition of the term or if the comic's writer had just taken liberties, he remembered that a tesseract had been described as an infinitely expandable cube on its interior, since it was something outside the laws of time and space, while its outer surface remained ever unchanged.

Apparently, the constructors of this apartment complex had used tesseracts to maximize the number of units available while minimizing the actual, unmalleable space the building would occupy, though Andy doubted this technique had only been used here.

"Is this place all tesseracts?"

Chuckling as he began to walk down the hall, Walter replied, "No, mostly just the apartments. Close to everything else is normal construction, but this way, everybody's home is the way they left it, and people can even add on extra rooms and levels if they like."

Following Walter past the disorientingly closely-set doors, Andy began to wonder who could have built such things as a town with no exits and tenant housings chock full of science fiction rooms, but set the queries aside. Walter clearly would not know the answers, seeing as how his job was just to deliver pizzas.

Or is it?

Andy shook that doubt away as they neared the door at the end of the hallway. Though he had just met Walter, he already felt that he could trust the guy. He even had the sense they would be good friends.

A pang of remorse ran through his heart at that thought, which made him think about the best friend he had unintentionally – and wholly unwillingly – left behind.

And then something else came to him.

Grabbing the other boy's shoulder just as Walter reached for the knob, Andy asked, "Was I really resurrected?"

Walter turned suddenly and stared at Andy in stunned silence. After a moment, he returned, "Resurrected? Just what was the last thing you remember happening to you before you woke up here?"

Swallowing hard, Andy Chambers ran his fingers back through his hair and stammered, "Never mind. I, uh, just... never mind. It's nothing. Mind's befuddled. Never mind."

"Befuddled," Walter mouthed almost silently, genuine concern etched on his face. Speaking up, he relented, "All fine, Andy. I'll give it up for now, but you are gonna tell me just what the hell you were talking about. Not tonight, but soon. Okay?"

Andy nodded.

"Okay. Let's book."

## ********

# The Truth

Following Walter out of the building, the first thing Andy had noticed as they stepped outside was how clear the air was. Inside, he had just assumed good air conditioning and given the quality of the air not another thought, but out of the building, walking across the parking lot and between the spotless vehicles, Andy could not help but realize he had never breathed so freely in his life. His lungs had never taken in such pure, sweet oxygen before.

It made him a little light-headed, and he had nearly fallen to his knees. Luckily, Walter had looked over his shoulder just at that moment and moved quick enough to grab the newcomer's arm and help him stay on his feet.

Then, a dozen or so steps later, Walter pointed out the car they would be riding in to work together. It was a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera S, and Andy had no doubt it had been manufactured in that year so obscure in his memory, 1993. It was identical to the car he had so recently lost, save for that this one had no rust around the edges or at the bottoms of the doors, the antenna was still intact, and the interior mirror was even in place. In short, it looked the way his own had on the day he first saw it.

Time and space seemed to swim around Andy, and then a bittersweet darkness rose to envelop him. He saw himself falling to his knees at last, and collapsing further still toward the pavement, but these images came to him through a thickening gray gauze, and he felt nothing.

Blissful, beautiful nothing.

Oh, sweet Nothing, come take all away.

Floating formless deep in the darkness of unconsciousness, he struggled to remember what he was supposed to do, where he was supposed to be, who he was supposed to believe he was, but then he realized that he did not care about any of those things anymore. The darkness that held him had more vital information to bestow.

A face began to form in the black.

"I'll remember," he moaned against glass, not aware of his surroundings. "I'll kill her."

"Whoa, buddy," Walter called from the driver seat, though he sounded miles away to Andy. "If you can mutter, you can wake up."

When his passenger remained slumped against the door on that side of the car, Walter reached over and thumped the newcomer's knee.

"Hey," Andy gasped slowly, looking groggily over at the driver. "Ugh, what?"

They were now in the Olds, belts buckled, and buildings were drifting by through the windows. The day was still bright, but Andy could see no sun anywhere in what was visible of the blue, perfectly cloudless sky.

"You passed out," Walter explained patiently, as if he had done this a thousand times. "It happens to a lot of the newbies their first day in town. We had to get moving and I couldn't wait for you to come to, so I dragged you over and tossed you in the car. Even buckled you in."

"Yeah, I see," Andy replied, his voice more clear. "So where we going?"

Walter would not respond, merely glanced sideways with a little contempt – good-natured but genuine – in his eyes.

"Okay, okay, I know. Work."

Nodding, the driver looked back to the road ahead. They were pulling up to an intersection, and when Walter slowed and then stopped the vehicle, Andy read the street signs. The Cutlass was on West Third Street, which became East Third on the other side of the road Walter was signaling he intended to turn left onto. Perpendicular to West/East Third was, of course, the Main Street of this as-of-yet unnamed town.

Andy remained silent as they turned and rode a block-and-a-half down Main, then turned again, this time into a wide alley between two buildings on the right side of the road. To the left of the alley was an office building of some sort, and on the right was Quality Pizzeria.

When they pulled into a space in the parking lot behind the restaurant – the lot walled in by the sides and back ends of other structures, all brick – Walter shut the car off and moved to get out, but Andy stopped him with a tentative tap on the elbow.

Facing back into the car, but with his hand still on the door's handle, Walter intoned, "What is it, Andy? I kinda wanna see if they're busy in there."

"It's mid-afternoon, how busy could they be?" Andy remarked offhandedly. "I just..." he trailed off then, suddenly unsure.

"Just what?"

Walter was trying not to be impatient, but he also hated sitting here in the damn lot when he could be clocking in. Andy could see all this on the other man's face, but still made him wait.

"Well?" Walter pressed, opening his door a few inches.

"I hate this mysterious crap," Andy sighed, leaning his head back against the low headrest and staring upward.

"Oh," Walter said, pulling the door shut. "I get it. You really think you're ready to hear this? Most people kinda like being eased into the reality of this place."

"I've already done the fainting thing," Andy said, rolling his head on the rest to look at Walter. "I don't think it'll kill me to know a little more about... 'this place'."

"Point taken," Walter whispered, but remained silent for a few minutes.

Andy did his best not to scream.

"Okay. The truth about 'this place'," Walter began, raising his hands and hooking down two fingers of each to emphasize the quote, "or at least, the truth as I know it. As any of us knows it."

Andy sat, listening, eyes back on the cloth ceiling.

"Originally, every person in Complaisance was a newcomer, just like you. The town is called Complaisance, and that's just about the best term to describe the general feel of it. Once they get used to the idea that they've been uprooted from their old lives, people just kinda start wanting to do their part. They acclimate. Everyone does, eventually, though most people do it pretty quick. No one's without a place, because there's only a new newcomer when a job opens."

Andy's eyes widened at that, but he did not move.

"That's why you're here, Andy. Quality Pizzeria needed a new driver, and then here you are, a driver with an okay driving record and a pretty good resumé. That's how the town's alerted to newcomers. Whatever records or reports or files are required to get hired on somewhere, they just appear one day, along with the new address here in town. The next day, an employee – me in this instance – of the company where the papers showed up comes knocking, and... well, you know the rest of that story."

"So nobody knows who's behind this."

"Nope."

"Or how newcomers arrive, naked in their own damned beds, surrounded by all their own damn worldly possessions."

"No," Walter answered carefully, noticing with some alarm that Andy's hands had balled into fists on his knees.

"What happened."

"When?" Walter asked, baffled. Then, he had a thought, and elaborated, "To who?"

"Why do jobs open up here if there's already a place for everyone. Did the guy, or chick, or whatever, die? Were they killed? Is there even crime here?"

"Andy, I still think you're getting ahead of yourself with this. Just try to learn the lay of the land, and–"

"What if I don't want to," Andy cut him off, finally looking into Walter's eyes again. "What if I refuse. What if I tried to leave. To escape."

"There's no way."

Andy was crushed by what he heard in Walter's voice, what he saw in Walter's eyes. There was no contempt there now, nor triumph. Also, no disapproval or ill will of any kind. Instead, Andy saw concern, pity, and mostly, that Walter was simply speaking the immutable truth.

There was no way out of Complaisance.

Like it or not, this was his new life.

"Okay," he said, hands gripping his knees, eyes on his shoes. "Just tell me one thing. Did the other driver die? The one I'm here to replace?"

"No," Walter responded, and got out of the car.

## *********

# A Poisonous Will, Glimpsed

Two days prior to Roland Chambers' arrival in Complaisance, an interesting thing happened. In a town where crime is indeed minimal, almost nonexistent, and murder is beyond unthinkable, Andy's predecessor was killed.

And no one even suspected she was dead.

In Complaisance, there is truly a place for every woman and every man. There are jobs to be done, and so qualified and experienced individuals have been drawn to do them. Their purpose seems simply to be to keep the self-sufficient town running smoothly.

What Walter purposefully neglected to tell Andy was that there is a second purpose, one all the citizens share, and it is to the fulfillment of this task that every person is eventually taken. No one in the town knows what that secondary reason for their abduction might be, for none return to bare witness to the operations behind the town.

In Complaisance, nobody dies. It varies from person to person, but usually near the end of a citizen's second decade on the transplanted job, they simply disappear.

There one day, gone the next.

No sign, no warning, and all their belongings go with them. Their home vanishes from whichever building it was placed in, and the door that led into it remains gone from the wall it once stood in until a replacement newcomer has arrived, and a new apartment set within that tesseract slot.

The frequency of citizen vanishments – or "sudden retirements," as the phenomenon has come to be called by some within the town, mostly those running or reading the more reputable papers – used to be steady, at an average of thirty disappearances and replacements each year.

Then, the turnover rate began to rise.

The former shape of what had become Andy's apartment was about as modest, but much more sparse in terms of furnishings. Chelsea Mandrake had believed the human animal did not need too many confining possessions, and so all she had owned were a few set of clothes, the blankets she slept on the empty bedroom's floor under, her paints, her brushes, and her canvasses. She did not sell her work, for she loved it too much and also despised the industry art had seemed to become in the world in which she previously resided, but she did from time to time gift it away.

If she had not needed money to purchase art supplies, nor been given a car by her disapproving but loving father, she would never have been a delivery driver in the first place, and so might never have been drawn to Complaisance.

On the last night of her citizenship, Chelsea had gone to sleep early, her latest painting still unfinished, but she was too tired from work to care about completing it. She had no reason to think she would not simply be able to finish it later.

As she dozed in the darkness of her room, the shadows in one corner suddenly began to thicken. The air moved as if disturbed by a light breeze, and there was a soft, barely-audible popping noise.

Chelsea coughed and turned over, unperturbed and determined to remain asleep.

A shape had risen in the shadowy corner, raised its gleaming eyes to spy the blinds so opportunely shut over the window in the far wall, and flashed perfectly white teeth in a quick, satisfied grin.

Chelsea dozed on, all unaware as that shape slowly, carefully stepped toward her. She dreamed on as a stranger's hand brought out a long, thin, bitterly sharp object. She sighed in her sleep and never heard the footfalls or the quick, low breaths of the poisonous will that would end her life.

## **********

# One Night at Werebach's

His first week on the job seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. Andy rode with Walter on the first night, and quickly grew familiar with the town enough that he could find every address on his own the next night. Once he saw the huge, laminated map of Complaisance on one wall inside the restaurant – larger than the Batavia map that had been in Pappas, and much more accurate and detailed – he realized the town was basically a grid. Though the town's population was greater than that of his old hometown, its size was about the same as only the strict "in-town," or downtown, part of Batavia, so there was not enough of it to get lost in.

Complaisance consisted of five "theme" streets – Garden, Service, Main, Market, and Leisure – intersected by four residential streets that changed from West to East over Main Street. There were alleys on every block and between and behind most of the buildings, but Andy was rapidly growing familiar with the intricacies of the town. He supposed his time spent delivering back in America – for he had no doubt Complaisance was nowhere in his homeland, possibly not even on the earth – had prepared him well for learning any townscape.

Like Pappas Pizza, Quality Pizzeria's work day was divided into two shifts. Unlike Pappas, Quality's cooks worked both shifts, while the drivers were only there from five to close. Where Pappas had one day driver, Quality had none, and closing time was midnight every night of the week, not only on the weekend nights. If Andy had not already been a night owl, he might have had trouble adjusting to that, but as his sleep schedule was not affected, it was no problem for him.

It had been a chilly Friday night when an exploding van ejected Andy from his world, but he had awakened in Complaisance on a Monday. After his fifth night on the job, and fourth behind the wheel of his own car, Walter stopped him in the parking lot just as everyone else was getting in their own vehicles and driving away. The shift had been typically busy for a Friday at any pizza place, which meant Quality's four drivers had barely seen each other all night, and between Andy and Walter, not a word had passed. Now, it seemed that Andy's welcomer meant to make up for that.

"You should come out tonight, man."

"What?"

"Come on," Walter prodded, favoring Andy with a knowing grin. "You're no night sleeper. Your resumé told everyone here you used to work third shift at some factory, so don't bull shit me saying you need to get home to sleep. That sad little frameless bed of yours can wait."

"But–"

"And so can the laptop."

Andy did not know whether to be mad or amused. He knew his "papers" had been left for Quality's management by the town's invisible controller(s), but he had not known that Walter or any of his other new coworkers had had access to that information.

In his old life, he would have been pissed speechless and driven off fuming, but there behind the Pizzeria, he just slapped Walter's arm and smiled.

"Fine, but since you invited, you're driving."

Walter barked laughter, then rebutted, "Oh, no, I'm not getting cut off that easy. I've been waiting all week to get plastered. I'll drive us over to Leisure Street, all fine, but Gina will be the one taking you home, and then I'm going home with her."

With that, he tipped Andy a wink and walked over to his Olds. As Andy went to the passenger side, Walter fell into the driver's seat, playing as if he were already drunk.

"You can fucking stop that," Andy laughed, getting in and shutting his door as Walter closed the driver's. "You'll have plenty of time to trip over yourself and look like an idiot later. When you're really drunk. After we get to Leisure Street. And who's Gina, anyway? Your AA sponsor?"

Walter almost laughed, then faltered and just stared blankly at the steering wheel for a few seconds. Just as Andy began to fear he had stepped in it deep and before he could apologize for doing so, Walter punched him playfully in the knee, and his grin resurfaced.

"Good one," Walter murmured through a smile that looked a little strained, and then he slid the key into the ignition and turned it over.

"Okay, tell me about Gina," Andy tried, suddenly desperate to get his coworker and potential friend back into a genuinely good mood. "She hot?"

"Gorgeous," Walter sighed, his eyes on the rearview as they backed up.

"Ah," Andy returned, relieved to see a sort of dreamy look in the driver's eyes now. "You love her. That's cool."

"Yeah, she is. I think you'll like her, man. Hell, I haven't met the guy yet who doesn't, at least not a straight one."

Then, the car stopped with a jolt and Walter shot a cautious, harshly curious glance at his passenger.

"You're not racist, are you, Andy?"

He almost laughed the suggestion off, but sensed that would not go over too well with Walter, and so held a straight face and answered in as even a voice as he could manage.

"Walter, I haven't known too many black people, or honestly, people of any other ethnicity – 'cept for my best friend back in Fairfield who was a Native American, but we were kids and I moved away so I guess it doesn't count – but trust me, I've never judged or disliked anyone 'cause of the color of their skin."

Looking relieved, Walter backed the rest of the way out of the spot and guided the car over into the alley that would lead them to Main Street.

"That's good to hear, even though Gina probably would've enjoyed turning you if you were a bigot."

"Turning me?"

"She likes to pick at people's dumb misconceptions and shit, no matter how pig-headed or unpleasant they are."

"I like her already," Andy said, thinking it would be nice to have a black female friend again, this time in person rather than strictly through online channels.

"Don't try anything, though, man. I'm insanely jealous."

Walter gave Andy a hateful and possessive look, and then had to stop the car again when they both burst out laughing.

"Yeah," Andy responded when he could finally speak again, "I can see you as that type."

"Really," Walter replied softly, completing the turn onto Main that their hysterics had interrupted. "I so am."

They rolled south along Main Street and turned left, onto East Second, in relative silence. Andy almost reached to turn on the Olds' radio, but then remembered Walter's odd warning that he should stick to listening to his iPod, linked to the radio in his own car through a cassette adaptor, rather than any of the stations in Complaisance.

He wondered for a moment about that, and almost turned on the radio anyway, but then dismissed the idea.

Effortlessly.

Almost unwillingly.

As they passed over Market Street, a question occurred to Andy, and when the car stopped a block later and Walter signaled his intention to turn right onto Leisure Street, it simply popped out.

"What if she's already drinking?"

Walter turned his head, the road temporarily forgotten, and gave Andy a confused look.

"Gina. I assume she's already... wherever we're going. Right?"

"Yeah."

"Did she know she was gonna be the designated driver?"

"Well, no."

"Even aware I was coming along?"

"No, we just had a date tonight anyway, but I thought you could use a night out."

"Wait, you two had a date set, but no DD?"

"She lives a block from the club. We usually just walk to her place."

"Ah. But tonight..."

"Fuck," Walter sighed, banging his forehead down on the steering wheel between his clenched-on hands.

A car pulled up behind the Olds, but neither of them noticed it.

"Yeah, man," Andy broke the short silence. "So if she's already there, at this club, she might already be drinking. I dunno how it runs in Complaisance, but back in America–"

"No one drives drunk here," Walter stated matter-of-factly without raising his head.

"Really."

"Really."

"How's that work? Back home, I knew plenty of guys said they never would, but let 'em tip enough back, they'd think they could drive out to fuckin' California, no prob."

"No one here can afford to be that stupid."

The car behind them flashed its brights, but was still ignored.

"See, Andy, here in Complaisance, if you drive drunk, you don't get a ticket or suspended license or anything like that. Do it once, and you're simply never allowed to drink again."

Andy's jaw dropped, but his lips twitched at the edges, wanting to smile at the harsh beauty of such a policy. Andy hated alcohol, and though he let himself drink from time to time, he would not have lost any sleep had all alcoholic beverages simply ceased to exist.

"The Suits always catch it. Nothing escapes them. What would be a simple DUI or DWI back in America is called Alcohol-Induced Irresponsibility. Get an AII, and no store will ever sell you beer again, no single damn establishment on Leisure will even let you in the doors. Well, no, wait... yeah, you'll get in, but what's the point if they won't serve you?"

Andy might have asked who exactly The Suits were, but instead his mind locked onto another point.

"What if the drunk wrecks before he's caught?"

"I dunno," Walter said, and might have elaborated on how he had wondered about that himself a time or two, but then the driver behind them finally laid on the horn and Walter's head shot up from the wheel.

"Shit!" Andy barked, looking back.

Without a word, Walter guided his car out onto Leisure Street – luckily, there was a break in the steady traffic just then – and let the subject of drunks and policies and possibilities and – tangentially – The Suits drop altogether.

Andy's own interest in the matter had been fractured by the blat of the horn.

A few moments and most of a block later, Walter turned into the last alley on the left-hand side before East Third Street. Before they quit the road and its ceaseless traffic, Andy saw that the large, squat building on the corner was a night club called Werebach's. The building was, like just about everything else Andy had seen in the town, a brick structure. Its windows were thin and spaced several feet apart, at first impression seeming to affect the style – or at least the shape – of those in ancient castles back on earth, but these had tinted glass and were surrounded by bright neon tubes glowing either green or magenta. The sign proclaiming the club's name was done in a dizzying combination of the same two colors.

Walter pulled around into a small lot behind the club, where not a single vehicle was parked. A long row of darkly tinted fluorescent lights hung high up along the exterior rear wall of the club provided the only lighting. A short, balding man in a red vest, white tee, and gray slacks walked toward the Olds as it slowed and then stopped.

Andy watched the driver get out and hand something to the valet and then opened his own door and stepped out onto the pavement. The valet slipped in behind the wheel and guided the car to the back of the lot and through the dark, open entry of what looked like a small brick shack. That wide emptiness shimmered briefly around the Cutlass, and then the car was simply gone. The small structure had swallowed it, and the valet, whole.

"Tesseract?" he put to Walter as he followed the blond boy toward the rear entrance to the club, which was nothing more than a plain black door.

Walter paused, gave Andy a you-should-know-better-by-now-than-to-even-ask look, and then continued forward. He reached to grasp the obsidian knob, but Andy stopped him with a tap on the shoulder.

"Uh, in our work shirts?"

At this, Walter bent over and cackled.

"What!"

"I..." Walter tried, his eyes a little wet. "It's just, hah, I honestly forgot about that. But I guess it doesn't matter. It's usually pretty hot in there and I end up taking my shirt off sooner or later anyway, so we can just leave 'em with... ah, here he comes now."

Walter had turned slowly around as he spoke, and now he pointed back toward the shed. Andy turned to follow his stare and spotted the valet walking back across the lot and toward them.

"Hey," Walter called to the guy, peeling his red logo-emblazoned tee up over his stomach and chest.

"Yes, sir?" the short man inquired in a bored but undisturbed voice.

Holding his wadded-up shirt out to the man, Walter asked, "Can you put this in my car? Oh, and my friend's, too."

The valet took the small bundle and then looked patiently at Andy. When Walter tipped his head slightly sideways, Andy rolled his eyes overdramatically, grinned, and stripped his blue work shirt off.

Handing it over, he said nothing.

As the parking attendant made a return trip into the space-defying garage, Andy followed Walter under the bleak light of the thin fluorescent bulbs overhead, into the club.

In his old life, Roland Chambers had avoided "scenes" like this with a stubbornness that had irritated all his friends. He had grown up a lonely misfit and though he quickly grew out of that phase during high school, he never had gotten over the sickening, senseless fear of large crowds of strange people. He supposed watching too many flicks like Carrie had traumatized him, made him wary of such throngs as would be found in any too-public setting, but he had never been willing enough to even try to overcome it.

Two things compelled him to brave Werebach's that night. Firstly, he had grown to like Walter Stein a great deal, even trust the guy whom had welcomed him to Complaisance when trust was something Andy hardly allowed with anyone, and he had not wanted to disappoint or inadvertently hurt Walter by rejecting his offer of simple company and social interaction. Secondly, he had come quickly to accept that his old life was over, thus it was time to put his old insecurities and antisocial habits to rest.

What harm could a night out do him?

Andy almost wondered why there had been no one outside to check IDs, nor anyone inside to perform that task, but then realized such a concern was unnecessary for Werebach's. Since he had been in Complaisance, Andy had not seen or heard of any citizen under the age of about twenty. The town had no underage inhabitants, thus there was no reason to card anyone.

The back entrance had opened on a short, dimly lit hallway. Ahead was the club proper, at that moment only a vague smear of bodies under constantly pulsing lights of shifting colors. To the right was a large square hole in the black wall, behind which stood another man in a red vest. This one was taller then the valet, plumper, and wore gray slacks with no shirt under his vest. Andy took him to be the coat check man, and was not mistaken.

"Anything to deposit?" the guy voiced in a tone even more detached than his bored expression made him appear.

"Nope," Walter answered without looking at the clerk, simply striding on past.

Andy let the door close behind them and hurried to catch up to Walter, wondering again how anyone working at a place like this could be bored.

When he stepped out under those dancing lights, all thought seemed to evaporate from his mind. His eyes widened and rose and he gaped at the darkness shred by upright writhing bodies and the strobing, multi-colored lights. He would have thought the loud music would nigh deafen him, but instead the beat – electronic and rich and cascading – washed over his ears like white water over the edges of a tipping raft. There were no words in the song, but some definitely intelligent voice, if not entirely human, was drawling on incomprehensibly behind that steady-unsteady beat.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, looked down at it, and then looked up into Walter's face. His friend was standing there beside him, concern etched into his features, marring his usually unworried face.

"You okay, man?"

"Yeah, fine," Andy lied, not wanting to freak the other guy out by saying he could not really see anything clearly that was before them. "Just great."

"All fine," Walter sighed, smiling, and turned to step out into the throng on the dance floor. Pointing vaguely to their left, he said, "Drinks over there."

Just before Walter could disappear into the shifting mass, though, someone grabbed his elbow and he swung to his right. A man in his early thirties had stopped Walter, and when they began to talk, Andy turned away, not being much for eavesdropping.

Then, almost without thinking, Andy went back to the coat check man and handed over his glasses, giving only his first name when asked.

As he walked out of the back entrance hall the second time, he realized he did not care that the scene was distorted and rippling and unclear. For once, he supposed the whole world around him was for everyone there just as indecipherable at a distance as all places were to Andy all the time, or at least when he was not wearing his damnable eyeglasses.

Passing Walter and the other guy, no one Andy had seen before, he could not help overhearing part of their conversation.

"Come on," Walter was saying in an amused, but somehow frustrated, tone. "You can't tell me you believe that bull crap."

"Maybe I do, maybe I don't," the other guy replied, raising first one hand palm up, then the other, "but you gotta know there are those that do believe it, pizza boy. There are people in this town that are especially careful how they handle the water, and they tell me we can't trust what we think we remember pre-awakening. It's–"

And stepping into the throng, Andy lost the thread of their speech. If he had heard that voice – or any – uttering those words under any other circumstances, he would have moved to confront the speaker and pressed him or her to elaborate.

That night, though, he was in Werebach's, and so his mind was prepared to latch onto exactly nothing at all. He wandered forth among the glistening, twisting female forms and the mostly shirtless, mostly his-age men they danced with.

None of them mattered, nor did the way they moved, for there was no pattern or rhythm to unite them all, or at least none that Andy could see.

Then, the music crashed over him again, and this time it swept him away. It was ghostly fire coursing through his veins, there and yet not, and it burned what was left of that shy kid he had been right out of his nerves. He stopped seeing the mob on the floor as a mass of strangers and began to feel a deep, animal fellowship with them. The music owned them all, and in its thrall, they were all reduced and raised to equals.

As the pulsing lights and beat carried him up out of his own skin, the eyes of a stranger passed over him and were caught like fabric dragged over a nail. Those eyes lost sight of Andy for a few seconds, their view first disrupted and then obstructed by walls of bodies, but then found him again and led their owner toward him.

All unaware that he was being watched, Andy danced. For the first time in his life, Roland Chambers truly relaxed and relinquished his strict self-control, allowing the music to command his body. He let drop all his carefully set defenses, and found a joy in that release that he had never suspected he could feel.

Just as he was coming to love this sense of defenselessness, which made him feel both weightless and immeasurably comfortable among other human beings, two hands closed on his arm and spun Andy to face the eyes that had been drawn to him. His own eyes had no time to take in the person before him before lithe arms wrapped around his body, pulled him close to a slim but powerful stranger, and that stranger's lips locked onto Andy's own in a fiercely passionate kiss.

Then, the arms of the stranger dropped and the young woman pushed herself back from Andy, her eyes dismayed.

"You're not you," she murmured, her fingers rising to touch her bottom lip, which was trembling.

"Excuse me?" Andy said in a small, thunderstruck voice that was drowned out by a sudden crashing rise in the song playing over the dance floor.

The stranger was a dark-skinned young woman that looked to be about Andy's age. Her face was strong and delicate, slightly contorted by a mixture of confusion, disappointment, and dawning embarrassment. Her hair was a wild mop of black streaks that protruded from her scalp and over her eyes in truly chaotic fashion, trailing down to a much closer cut around and behind her ears. She wore a black strapless dress with red piping that began under her arms and sank down over her thighs, then ended at the hemline just below her knees.

Andy realized he was gawking a bit and jerked his gaze back up to her face, then almost laughed when he saw her do the same thing.

At that precise moment, something occurred that would simultaneously doom Andy and bring him unspeakable hope.

His eyes and hers locked, and he understood that, somehow, impossibly, though they had only just met – so far as Andy knew, at least – this gorgeous woman was already in love with him.

And then Walter strode casually into view, turned the girl's face to the side, and planted a loving kiss on her cheek.

"All fine!" Walter cried out happily over the music, his face beaming. "Andy, I guess you've met Gina. Gina, baby, this is the new driver I told you about."

Okay, Andy. Don't blow this.

Before he could decide how best to react, Andy saw Gina's expression transform from hurt confusion to a happy-to-meet-you, any-friend-of-his grin, and that showed him just how he must play this.

His mouth opened, the edges curled up just enough to be convincing under the club's lighting, and he said, "You weren't kidding, Walter." Tipping a wink at the couple as he turned away, he continued, "I was just about to steal her from you. Damn your timing."

And with that, he wove through the throng, the music momentarily forgotten, all his thought now bent on getting wasted and trying to erase the memory of that damned hungry look in her eyes, that awful recognition that begged him to recognize her though she was a stranger to him.

It would have been easier had he been able to tell himself that she had been a little drunk, but he could still taste her lips and that sweet, clean breathe. There had been not even a trace of alcohol's lingering stench about her.

The bar came into sight ahead, but a strong hand closed around Andy's wrist and he thought that if he had to face that intoxicating beauty again he would simply fall to his knees, Walter and the club-goers be damned.

Instead, he found Walter himself had followed to stop him.

"You okay, buddy?"

"What? Yeah, I'm, I'm fine."

"Because I didn't think there was gonna be a problem, but if–"

"Walter," Andy cut his friend off dryly, giving the other Quality employee an amused, you-have-got-to-be-kidding look.

"Good," Walter sighed, heavily relieved. "Then why'd you take off?"

"Thought I might check out the bar. I haven't had a drink since I... came to Complaisance."

I almost said abducted, he kept to himself, smiling a bit crookedly. Could that be what happened to me? To all of us?

"Good, 'cause I was just heading that way myself. Gina hasn't been drinking, by the way, so now you won't have to worry about passing out in the street or vomiting on the sidewalk trying to walk home."

"Good to hear," Andy replied, trying to hide that he knew this already because he had tasted the sobriety on Gina's lips.

They made their way to the crowded bar then. Once they were able to attract the dumpy-looking bartender's attention, Walter ordered a whiskey sour on the rocks, and Andy asked for a Bailey's straight. He had not so much as thought about a drink since arriving in town, but now that he was in the club and things had gone screwy so quickly, that smooth, sweet flavor of Irish cream was all he could think about.

Walter and Andy took their drinks, paid the man, and skirted the dance floor to get to the less-crowded area at the front of the building. There, little round tables stood surrounded by groups of three or four chairs, all this wiry metal furniture painted a sleek black.

They sat to sip their drinks, and Andy took a few moments to look beyond the crowd, to finally take in the whole interior of the packed club.

Now to his right was the bar, a long glass counter over black marble, lit from above by hanging banks of short fluorescent bulbs. He now saw there were three tenders behind that counter, two mousy brunettes some feet away from the dumpy fellow, on either side of him. All three were busy taking drink orders, pulling and pouring from and replacing bottles from the shelves behind them, mixing and handing out drinks, and taking money without handing back change. Andy tipped his glass back, swallowed, and wished tips were always that unspoken and regular on his job.

He noted the absence of stools at the bar, then turned his eyes upward.

Hanging form the exact center of the ceiling was a wire mesh cage surrounded by rows of small speakers. Within the cage was a complicated terminal, before which stood a shadowy figure Andy took to be Werebach's Friday night DJ. A suspended metal walkway connected the sound cage to a thin staircase rising up the wall to Andy's far left. That wall – as well as all the others, the ceiling, and the floor – was a deep black that seemed to absorb the cascading light rather than reflect it to the eye, and this created within the club the illusion of endless space, which would be dizzying had there been nothing at all up against those surfaces.

Setting his glass down half-emptied, Andy glanced over the table at Walter just as Walter's eyes, which had been absently roaming over the throng, stumbled upon an unexpected sight. He looked amused or confused, Andy could not tell exactly which under the club's lights and without his glasses.

"What's up?"

Unstartled, his eyes still pointing out to a specific location on the floor, Walter replied, "Out there. You see that guy in the black pants with the silver cross hanging down over his chest? The pale guy with the mussed black hair. I dunno why he even wears that chain around his throat..."

As his coworker trailed off, Andy followed his gaze and did spot the young man Walter was talking about. A second later, he noticed who the guy was dancing with and realized why Walter might think it strange for the pale boy to be wearing a Christian icon.

"What, you never heard of a gay Christian?" he posed sardonically, watching his friend's face as closely as he could with his unaided eyes.

"Actually have," Walter answered curtly, turning his gaze upon Andy, "but that's Cross Mooney, one of The Suits, and everyone knows he's atheist or agnostic or something."

"Atheist or agnostic," Andy repeated, expressionless. "Or something."

"Hell, I dunno for sure, man. I've just heard he was raised Catholic, but left the Church around the time he became a cop. In his old life."

"That kid was a cop?"

"He's older than he looks. And yeah, he used to go undercover to catch Internet predators. He said to me once, when I had to deliver a pizza to him, that that job made him kinda glad he never looked like he got far past puberty."

"Ah."

Andy looked back out at the pale-skinned man that looked like a teenager, with respect and a little admiration in his eyes. One of his oldest pet peeves was the fact that pedophiles had been so insidiously prevalent in America, and though he had never had much use for police in general, Andy held those that went after child molesters in high regard.

Then, something in his head clicked.

"The Suits," he murmured, eyes back on Walter. "You mentioned them before. Who are they?"

Walter simply stared at Andy, waiting.

"And... where are the cops? I hadn't even thought about it till you said that Mooney guy was one 'in his old life,' but I haven't seen a single patrol car or beat cop on any of my deliveries."

Walter remained silent, giving Andy a chance to connect the dots for himself, but as events played out, he would not need to.

At the precise millisecond Andy's brain was about to fit the pieces together, Gina burst into view and fell into Walter's lap She kissed him full on the mouth, her arms around her beau's neck, as if she was unaware anyone else was seated at the small table. Then, she grinned devilishly over her shoulder at Roland.

"You don't mind public displays, do you?"

"Not at all," Andy said, bringing his glass up to his lips, his eyes inspecting the crowd again so he would not have to look at her.

"What're you doing up here in... what do you call it?" Walter put to her, pulling her close so he could nibble on her earlobe. "The Lazy Lounge? Henh. Thought you'd wanna stay on the floor 'least two more hours."

"Would," she replied, biting at the end of Walter's nose playfully, "but there's this weird out in the middle. I've spotted him there a few times already, right under the Jay's box. Guy hasn't moved, just keeps lookin' up an' about."

"You should've tried dancing with him. Guy's probably just shy and lost."

"Lost?" Andy sputtered, breaking into their conversation unexpectedly, even to himself. "It's not a maze out there, just people."

Gina and Walter each opened their mouths to reply to that, but then the music died suddenly and a large silence dropped heavily over the club.

For a second, Andy thought he could not breathe.

"FIRE!" a shrieking voice rang out, and then was joined and echoed as more eyes discovered what was happening above.

Andy, Walter, and Gina looked to where the rising hands were pointing and their hearts all skipped a beat together.

Within the wire mesh sound cage, the mixing terminal was ablaze. The DJ had quit the box and was dashing across the hanging walkway, making for the stairs.

Below this, the throng was spreading out away from the middle of the floor, as if they feared the flames could descend to engulf them at any moment. All backed from the space save one man, a lank, too-tall fellow with straw-like hair down to his shoulders and darting blue eyes. He wore a faded black shirt with sleeves that stretched out over his clenched fists, and gray jeans. Whoever he was, he was turning this way and that, but would not leave his place directly beneath the deserted cage.

A few backwards-advancing patrons lost their balance and fell, but the panic was slow spreading and enough sense remained in the club-goers' heads that they helped each other up.

Andy was glad to see one guy help another back up to his feet among the tightly packed bodies, but had a feeling that soon no one would be looking out for their fellow woman or man, and if anyone fell once the crowd passed that point, they were shit out of luck.

As all eyes fell from the frightening sight of the fire in the cage to the confusing, disturbing sight of the revolving man, their movements slowed and then stopped.

"THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!" he cried out hoarsely, and then waved his hands toward the main entrance at the rear of the building and the secondary exit at the front.

Simultaneously, the interior ends of each shor'hall were blocked by rising walls of dancing, unnatural flames.

There were a few screams and a crush of movement as the throng, now a dense ring wide around the revolving man, tightened where it was closest to the exit halls as people backed away from those mesmerizing, terrifying flames.

"I JUST LOVE A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE," the madman bellowed, seeming to address no one but himself, though he was screaming.

Before the lank fellow could cry out another word, someone pressed through the interior ring of bodies to confront him, and once Andy recognized the interrupting young man, he finally realized what role The Suits filled in Complaisance.

Pale but boyishly handsome Cross Mooney stepped toward the revolving man and the guy stopped in mid-turn. Mooney was speaking to the taller man, but at a sane man's volume, so Andy and the couple with him could not make the words themselves out. The general, uneasy silence of the club let them catch a hint of his calming tone, but that was all.

Infuriated that anyone would dare to try to stop him, especially the pansy Suit before him, the madman flung a hand in Mooney's direction and a wall of fire sprang up between the two men. It rolled slowly outward along the floor, forcing Cross back toward the unmoving mob, and then stopped and spread back at both ends to become a circular cell around its master.

From within that flaming shelter, the man shrieked, "YOU DARE NOT TRUST THESE MEN! THEY SERVE OUR PRISON, AND OUR PRISON THIS TOWN LIES!"

"Oh, fuckin' hell," Gina moaned.

When Andy glanced briefly at the black beauty still seated in his friend's lap, Walter expounded, "He's one of the nuts that thinks we're 'slaves to the machine,' the machine being Complaisance. Those types don't even believe their own memories 'pre-awakening,' as they call it. You know, of their old lives."

Slightly less confused, Andy turned his attention back to the drama at the middle of the stilled dance floor. Movement to the right, though, made him whip his head back in that direction. He was now looking at the black wall over the open liquor cabinets behind the bar. He told himself he must be mistaken, he could not have glimpsed motion from there, but then he saw it again.

Almost imperceptible upon that deep black surface, a grainy, less pure blackness was flowing up and over the wall, like a reverse leak of shadows rather than liquid. Andy saw it as more a shift in color than as anything truly substantial, and remembered briefly an old Next Generation episode where the Enterprise had been caught in the flow of two-dimensional beings.

Before he could postulate any further on what may or may not have been climbing the wall over the bar, the pre-awakening disbeliever screamed, "DON'T TRY ANY OF YOUR DAMN WATER TRICKS, PRETTY BOY!"

Andy returned his gaze to the area under the sound cage, shifting position in his seat to get a clearer view through the dense throng of taut bodies.

He sensed that if something was not done quickly to resolve this situation, panic would overtake the patrons and this night would turn bloody in a heartbeat.

Standing just outside the pulsing wall of flame surrounding the revolving man, Cross Mooney was holding his hands up and out to show he meant to do no harm. Andy could not see the madman's face, but doubted he cared what the Suit's intentions were.

No terrorist ever trusted a cop.

When Andy had first awakened, his distorted perceptions of his new home had made this place seem like some truly surreal setting from an Arthur C. Clarke or H. P. Lovecraft story. As the week had worn on, though, the eventless hours at work and the lack of extraordinary strangeness among the delivery customers had drained Complaisance of any air of science-fictionality, and Andy had begun to think of it as just another normal community.

Now that he was faced with the fact of pyrokinetic crime and Complaisance's alternative to law enforcement, all sense of normality was dashed and he felt once again like an unwitting player in a wild fiction.

And things were about to get even wilder.

As Mooney and the slow-spinning, barely visible madman stood in an apparent stalemate, the sound of a door slamming shut rang out from the rear shor'hall. Andy thought it was probably someone coming out of the men's room he had seen directly across from the coat check counter.

The flame wall that had been barring the eastern avenue of escape suddenly sputtered and was blown out by a nonexistent wind. Through the space where it had stood stormed a man in his late twenties wearing a black, one-piece skin suit with golden flames climbing from his right hip up to his left shoulder. His angry stride made the pattern seem to shimmer over his body, and his face was moving as he rapidly took in all the details of what was going on before him.

"Another Suit?" Andy asked softly, without moving his eyes.

"Gil Crane," Gina answered breathlessly.

"They call him Firestopper," Walter added.

Crane was at least six foot one, had broad shoulders and short, shaggy blond hair, and his eyes were burning in their sockets as he made his way toward the club's would-be hijacker.

The throng opened to let him pass, seemingly in awe of the man, as if he were a messiah rather than simply an enforcer of law.

Then, Andy realized Crane was not simply anything.

Nor, probably, was Mooney.

Somehow, Crane had put out the flames blocking him from the club through will alone. The madman had cried something at Mooney about water tricks, and Andy now thought that perhaps the pale Suit's talent was manipulation of water. If one could will a fire out and another bring rain, where did their power come from, and what incredible weapons might the other Suits wield in place of guns and billy clubs?

Now Gil Crane was standing directly beside Cross Mooney. Mooney was staring fixedly at the floor to his side, as if the answer to this dilemma were at his feet. Crane, meanwhile, was staring through the flames with his arms crossed. The circling wall went out, leaving the madman defenseless.

The fire in the cage above went out, leaving the terminal smoking.

The flames dancing over the front exit vanished, and the madman recoiled from the Suits as if slapped.

Gil had not moved.

The madman muttered something, gestured at the walls, and Cross looked toward the bar, aghast.

Small columns of flame burst out from the blotches of discoloration Andy had spotted earlier, and a few people - as many men as women - screamed and ran for the nearest route out of this slow-turning nightmare.

And still Gil Crane would not move.

Under the steady, relentless gaze of the taller Suit, the madman hunched his shoulders, dropped his head, and waved a hand.

The pointless wall-flames blew out and the somehow wrong points of dull black fell down the surface of the wall, disappearing around the edges of the cabinets.

Those whom had run stopped dead in their tracks, some to look wonderingly at the wall over the bar or at Crane himself, others to glare at the no-longer-revolving man, and a few people actually laughed.

The laughter somehow made all this seem more real to Andy, more substantial.

He restrained the urge to pinch himself.

The throng slowly began to dissipate as patrons made their ways out through either shor'hall, many pausing to inspect the singed floor where flames had mysteriously sprung into being. Eventually, the Suits led the defeated fellow toward the front of the building.

Andy remembered the glass in his hand and downed the remainder of his drink in a single gulp. Setting the empty cup down, he watched the three performers in the night's impromptu drama pass by on their way out of the club.

He heard Crane chastise, "You'd better feel damn lucky no one was hurt! If we'd had to call in Retro..."

The rest of Gil's speech was cut off as, absurdly, the madman began to shriek uncontrollable, ear-splitting laughter.

He was still cackling as Mooney and Crane dragged him out of Werebach's.

Though the dance floor was being deserted, its sole purpose taken away by the absence of music, a lot of people were still standing around talking, and some were advancing on the bar.

Andy grabbed up his empty glass and stood to follow their example, Walter and Gina at his heel. All three proceeded to drink their tension away, hardly a word passing among them the rest of the night.

When closing time finally came, Walter left his car in the tesseract garage and followed Gina to her place, and Andy walked home alone. He only stopped to vomit behind some bushes once, and counted it a victory that he found his way to his building at all.

If he had stayed at the table instead of immediately rushing to the bar, Andy might have asked Walter what happened to criminals apprehended in Complaisance. As it went, the Irish cream – and, later, whiskey – drove all such thoughts from his mind, but the question would return to him eventually.

The question itself was a key, and opening the door it would lead him to would not only save Andy's life, but set him free.

## ***********

# Poisoned Revolution

When Rictor Stanleyson first woke to Complaisance, his experience was like that of most anyone coming into the town. He noticed nothing unusual about his home, save that he had been still miles away from it and in his car only moments before. He let himself assume he had been dreaming of the ride home from work – as any sane man would do to maintain his sanity in an insane situation – got out of bed, showered, dressed, and stepped out the front door.

It was in this moment of stepping outside for the first time that disorientation overrode panic for the average transplanted citizen, and Ric's reaction was no different. He had been almost comically puzzled to find himself in the hallway of a strangely compacted apartment building, one where there were far too many doors and far too little wall space between them, when he should have been on the front porch of the modest house he had been raised in and where his parents had so recently departed, leaving him alone.

Rushing back inside, he flung open the curtains over each of his windows to find that all of them impossibly gave on the same view; he now overlooked a car-littered parking lot from the second or third floor of whatever structure his home had been absorbed into while he slept.

He knew by this point, though – and could no longer delude himself otherwise – that he had not been sleeping at all.

Closing his front door quietly, he went to the rear door of the house and opened it, after taking a slow, deep breath to try to calm himself but which only served to tighten his nerves even further into knotty vines threatening to snap. He almost fainted when he saw that this doorway, clear on the other side of his house, gave entry to the same spot along the same weird hall that had first showed him something was wretchedly amiss in his world.

Over the course of the next hour, he inspected every nook and cranny of his home. He went through all the closets and rooms, rummaging through chests and boxes and desks and bureaus until he was satisfied that everything he owned – and all the things his witless mother and tiresome father left to him, which he had been meaning to toss out for weeks – was in its place.

Stanleyson concluded this hurriedly careful tour by climbing the stairs from the second floor to an attic he no longer believed would be there. When he pushed the square panel door up and it clapped noisily back against the naked boards, he jerked and nearly fell. He only peaked over the edge of the frame briefly, glimpsed all the familiar dark shapes in all the correct alignments and positions, and then pulled the panel shut.

As he descended the stairs and began to acknowledge the very tangible possibility that he was losing his mind, the sound of knocking came to him from the front door.

He wondered briefly why that knocking was not being echoed from the back door, then slowly moved to receive his welcomer.

Over time, Stanleyson acclimated himself to the conditions of his new life. He had been taken out of the world he knew, but the parts of it that truly mattered to him were still there, in Complaisance. His home was a fabrication, but a copy so exact that he could not mind the fallacy. The people he had grown accustomed to and learned to get along with at work, they were forever gone from his life, but now there were new coworkers to get to know, new policies and facilities to learn, and new challenges to enjoy and overcome.

And now no chance of repercussions from that awful disaster, so he finally felt like he could breathe again.

Life in Complaisance set Stanleyson at ease, and he began to see a future for himself again. He would never rise much higher than he was in his career, he would never move to a bigger city like he had always secretly desired, he would never take a vacation to some exotic port or locale, but he was still content.

At first.

Stanleyson had been a program director at a classical music station in Chicago, and so he was again in Complaisance. Here, though, the library of classics was expanded hugely. At first he just thought the back-up track files were being counted, but when he discovered the truth about why the station's playlist was so much larger than it should have been – as well as packed with just as many unfamiliar pieces as ones he did know – his mind was blown.

That was when he first became weary of the cheerful, perfect façade of the town without a world.

Still, Stanleyson got up each day, went to work on time, did his job to the best of his ability and enjoyed every minute of it, and tried to put out of his mind questions that he simply could never hope to answer.

They would not leave his mind.

The questions were as simple as they were monstrous. Why was he brought there? Why was anyone drawn to Complaisance? Why did the town exist? What was outside the town? Where could such a place be, and who would, or could, possibly construct and orchestrate the operations of such a miniature metropolis?

He dwelled on the questions as little as he could manage, drowning himself in work, the exploration of the depth of strange new (to him) music, and the alternate histories the unknown classics wordlessly told of.

What had at first astounded Rictor was somehow made commonplace by the very fact of Complaisance and its richly diverse citizenry.

Beyond the world and reality Stanleyson had known in his old life, there were innumerable divergent timelines of the earth. Such a concept was not wholly alien to him, but its truth and implications were still staggering.

Almost no two people in Complaisance were originally from the same earth.

That took a little more time getting used to.

Before he had begun to comprehend what was common knowledge among his peers and neighbors, Stanleyson had been baffled by how many people he met remembered certain historical events "incorrectly," or believed the President was this person or that nobody or that America indeed no longer even had such a unilateral figurehead as a President.

When the truth of such disagreements came clear to him and sank in, he felt hollow. Nothing seemed real, work did not matter, he did not matter, and Complaisance was revealed in his mind as being a flimsy, pale, twisted, sickeningly sweet joke.

But everyone else accepted it!

Everyone.

So it seemed.

This knowledge was so crushing because it only amplified the questions already plaguing his mind. The technology that made the compacted, fabricated living quarters possible was clearly not of the earth he had known, or any he could learn of through his coworkers, at least not from the time he or any of them had come from.

Were they in some deep future? Were they on some vastly different version of the earth than any of them had known or could imagine? Was this an experiment being performed by wholly alien entities? Godlike humans? Demonic beasts evolved from humankind?

The questions drove Rictor Stanleyson out of his home and onto Leisure Street, where his lips met the mouths of many bottles, but he never found peace.

He did, however, find companionship.

One night after work, halfway to wasted and hardly able to believe his ears, Stanleyson overheard two men discussing the very questions that had for so briefly in some contexts and so long to his own senses terrified and captivated him. Then, he heard one of them pose a query that had never occurred to him before, exactly, but which made perfect sense to ask, and as he echoed the question in his own mind, it sealed his fate.

What if everything we think we remember from our so-called "old lives" is a lie?

Stanleyson butted rudely into this conversation and soon came to befriend the two men, who then introduced him into a loose fellowship of transplanted citizens that wanted nothing to do with Complaisance, and were willing to trust none of its "obvious truths" as what they seemed to be.

Their core sentiment, that pre-awakening memories were bogus, called into question everything else that was taken for granted in the town without a world.

The prevailing theory among them was that these false pasts, as fabricated as the tesseract apartments, were a device to both distract the populace from the truths being withheld, and to cover the true origins of this encompassed humanity.

The absence of children seemed to indicate that they did not truly come into being in the fashion they "remembered" learning about as children themselves on their respective earths, if such places even existed at all, which most of the dissidents doubted.

The infertility explained away as merely a side effect of the transfer from earth to Complaisance lent much credit to the theories that whatever force was behind the town was actually malevolent, or at least coldly withdrawn and wholly unsympathetic to the plight of misguided mankind.

The water was the linchpin.

Early on in the developing days of the movement, it had been discovered that by boiling all water before consuming or bathing in it, the questions that put the town's operations in a much harsher and more scrutinizing light came easier and were far less likely to be set aside or forgotten, as the average citizen was wont to do.

Complaisance's water supply was tainted with a chemical agent that made people complaisant and complacent, and whatever its actual intention might have been, its existence alone was proof enough that the town was not to be trusted.

If humanity were to prosper and evolve and simply survive, then all the captive men and women in the town would have to be forced to face the questions that what passed for common sense in Complaisance seemed to nullify.

The status quo would have to be broken.

Time, though, was never on the side of the Dissenters.

For one thing, by the time a scheme to awaken the populace or even grab their attention was devised, key members of the underground organization would vanish. Even the Dissenters could not cry fowl play; this was simply the phenomenon that maintained the cultural equilibrium in the town that death itself had maintained on earth (if an earth there had even ever been).

For another, there were The Suits to worry about. The Suits wore garb that gave them authority though they were not elected by the people, and power beyond what pre-awakening memory told even elected officials should have. They were people who believed they had been cops and fire fighters and counselors and rescue workers before the time of their drawing, and so they were as innocent as anyone else in the town.

Yet they served the interests and laws of Complaisance, and enforced them, and so were monumental obstacles to the Dissenters.

The freedom of the future of mankind was at stake, and though they persevered, their numbers never grew by any appreciable margin, and their actions never affected the collective consciousness of their fellow citizens in any lasting way.

Into this organization Rictor Stanleyson was unceremoniously inducted, and for this group he utilized illegal nanotechnology – bought from a source the face of whom no Dissenter had ever seen – to reign fiery, albeit short-lived, terror upon Werebach's.

The passion of his fellow Dissenters had ignited his own desperation to reach into the minds of the sheep around him and flip the switch that would let them see the true face of Complaisance, as he and his fellows saw it.

A micro-city built on lies, using false memories to drive forced labor under the guise of merely transferred occupations, to serve a hidden purpose no one could fathom only because no one was wondering...

Oh, to be so catastrophically blind!

So, in conviction and in desperation, Stanleyson had seized the attentions of all present in the club on the corner of East Third and Leisure Streets, but the presence of not one but two Suits thwarted him before he could even begin to articulate his frustrations and observations.

The questions.

Could none of them be wondering what he was wondering? Were they all so numbed by the water that even if directly confronted with the possibility hiding in plain sight beneath the skin of Complaisance, they would discount it as lunacy and nothing more?

In a broken, blasted, wholly defeated frame of mind – masqued by a sudden desire to make himself appear to actually be a lunatic, as little as that made sense – Stanleyson was led from Werebach's, never to return.

There were no prison cells in Complaisance, or at least no place that was exclusively designated toward the purpose of jailing. Crime was an infrequent occurrence to the point that the town seemed a utopia of peace and law-abiding people only, but The Suits would not have been half as necessary had there been absolutely no need for them.

In cases like that of Stanleyson, a punishment of simply being barred from Werebach's and other such establishments was not enough. Thus, Rictor's home was made into a sort of prison for him. Nothing within was altered, but the two doors that let him out of his apartmentalized house were sealed. He could look out upon his one repeated view through any of the windows, and his fridge would be restocked while he slept so he would not starve, but he was not permit the freedom or opportunity to leave his home.

Since no one had been harmed by his brief stint as a terrorist – he might have called himself an activist or even a revolutionary – and property damage was minimal, his imprisonment was scheduled for only one month.

His first week off the job was hellish.

He had thought his new life had set him free from the burdens of his past, but once his freedom to simply go outside was stripped away, all he had left to do was reflect on what he had done.

While reflection was the point of the punishment, The Suits had believed Stanleyson would be contemplating his crimes against Complaisance.

Instead, he found himself analyzing again and again the events surrounding the deaths of his father and mother.

Growing up, Rictor had desperately wanted to idolize Mr. Stanleyson, but his father was a constant let down. The man was content in his factory position, had no great ambitions for his life or that of his only begotten son, and wasted his free time solving useless crossword puzzles or watching old Star Trek reruns. Mr. Stanleyson loved his wife and their child, and provided for their basic needs and comforts, but his mind seemed dried up somehow to Rictor. When the boy began to grow into his own manhood, Mr. Stanleyson had been more buddy than parental figure, and this too had frustrated Stanleyson the younger.

Mrs. Stanleyson had made things even more difficult. The woman, short and flabby and dour, ever clutched her tiny purse in one hand and her Bible in the other. She went to church three times a week, alone, and cried herself to sleep each night at that spiritual divide between herself and her family. Never once, though, did she try to make her son or her husband attend services with her. She would often ask, always with a heartbreaking hope in her voice and in her eyes, but neither would ever go.

And so she had been asking when it finally came to Stanleyson.

His parents were idiotic, insignificant, and only held him back from the richer, truer, more free life he should have been leading. For this mindless crime against their child, the father and the mother would simply have to be taken out of the equation.

He had to be smart about it, though.

Jail time was unacceptable.

Stanleyson waited, and researched, and finally, after months seething inwardly that fate had not simply stepped in and saved him from this fowl work – was it too much to hope for that a bus could run them over in the street? – he prepared to cut the ties that bound him.

Mr. Stanleyson had had a heart attack the previous year, and so it was simplicity itself to make it look like the old man's heart had finally given up for good.

In this one regard – the question of how best to end her life – his mother had finally presented a true, almost interesting challenge to him. Her health was not exceptional, but she was nowhere as near death's door as her spouse.

Rictor knew he would have to take extra care with her.

It was a Sunday when it all came together. Mrs. Stanleyson came home late from morning services, having agreed to go out to lunch with a few of the chattier hens that thought themselves her friends, though she considered them hellbound for their liberal ways. She stepped into the house, heard no sound whatsoever, and her own heart stopped, though not permanently or quite completely literally, just yet. In the space of that moment, light streaming in through the open door behind her, she knew her husband of nearly half a century was gone.

Not prone to panic, she shut the door carefully and then climbed the steps to the second story and walked to her bedroom, where the door was open a crack. She entered the room and sighed at the sight of Mr. Stanleyson in their bed, utterly still. The covers obscured his body, which was in a peaceful pose, so it seemed he had at least gone in his sleep.

Stanleyson watched his mother make this silent assumption from around the corner at the bottom of the stairs to the attic. When she moved to go back downstairs, presumably to alert the proper authorities to her husband's passing, Rictor leapt out and pressed both his gloved hands against her wide shoulders. She went over the topmost step and toppled down, flipping awkwardly, her neck crunching sickeningly when her head was caught at a bad angle against a rising before her falling body continued down and then thumped finally onto the floor at the bottom.

Stanleyson stood at the top for a moment, contemplating his handiwork, and then rushed to the bathroom to vomit. He could hardly believe the effect this act was having on him.

Remorse!

What a ludicrous idea, that he could possibly be so affected by the simple overcoming of the first and greatest obstacles to his independence.

Sitting at the top of those same stairs where he had murdered his mother, but in the fabrication of his parents' house that served as both his home and now his prison in Complaisance, Rictor Stanleyson scoffed at his foolishness.

How could he feel remorse for parents he had probably never loved? How could he be bothered to care one way or another here, now, since he was keenly aware that all he remembered from his life in Chicago was most likely a lie?

The Dissenters had opened his eyes to that possibility, and now it tormented him that he could still be hurt by memories that were not his own, of events that had never transpired.

His stomach clenched, threatening to eject its contents.

Suddenly, a powerful kick from behind sent Stanleyson sprawling out into the air, and then he was tumbling down the stairs. He tried to protect his head, but the rest of his body was unshielded, and when he landed at the bottom, both of his legs were broken.

Through the searing pain, he heard someone walking down the steps. Unfortunately, he had landed on his stomach, and he could not muster the strength to roll over, so he could not see who had invaded his space and attacked him.

"Oh, it all happened, Stanleyson," a soft, mocking female voice addressed him, speaking as if she had been listening to his thoughts.

Whoever or whatever she was, she kicked him in the head. Before he passed out, Stanleyson, through a thickening mental gauze, heard her utter another short burst of words, and he stupidly wondered if she was a secret part of his sentence, here to further punish him for his pathetic cry for attention at Werebach's.

"It just didn't happen to you."

## ************

# To Reject or Embrace

Looking back on it later, Andy would see that the trouble started with his insomnia. It had not affected him at first, and it seemed a side effect of his transfer was freedom from it, but once he began to think how nice it was to be able to count on a full, good night's rest again, his sleeping problems surfaced, as if summoned by the very thought of being free of them.

He had stayed up late the previous night working at his laptop. Andy was loathe to admit it, but his love for creating synth music was now doubled because when he was deeply entrenched in the program, listening to a new track take shape and transcend the aural plan he had had in mind, he felt like he was truly home again. He could forget about Complaisance and pretend he was still on earth, and imagine that someday he would learn to play a real instrument and form a band and make it big.

He was dreaming of that forever diverted possibility four hours later in his bed when he realized that he was awake and would not be falling asleep anytime soon. Daylight – he could not properly call it sunlight as there was no proper Sun or even an approximation thereof, just an ever-blue sky that shined during daytime – streamed through the blinds over his head and filled the room. He wanted to stay where he was, but his body would not let him remain there in peace.

After less than ten minutes refusing to move, his body's terrible drive to get up and do something-everything-anything overpowered his mind's desire to slip back into sleep, and he climbed out of bed.

A shower and shave later, his nakedness covered by jeans and a simple black tee, Andy slipped the iPod into his pocket, its ear buds into his ears, and left the apartment without his keys.

He did not want to drive, and he was not worried about thieves. In his old life, he never left his home unlocked for fear of burglars and in ignorance of the honesty or dishonesty of his neighbors. Here, though all the apartment doors had locks, the doorways would not allow anyone but the tenant into the rooms without a key. A prospective thief could try his hand at twenty such doors he had knowledge would be unlocked and not get even one to open.

Listening to the current version of his latest track-in-progress, Andy walked across the car lot – more than half the residents' vehicles missing due to the hour and their status, in Andy's vernacular, as day shift people – and out onto the sidewalk beyond.

He turned east and walked past many identical lots adjoining apartment buildings clonely alike to his own, save in the precise shading of the brick façade. Crossing the street carefully at the intersection, he went north up Service Street, packed from end to end with nearly every service-minded enterprise imaginable. There were restaurants, of course, but also repair shops, specialty clothing stores, theme cafés, et cetera.

On his way to work each day, Andy's eyes had been momentarily drawn from the road by a particularly fascinating outdoor eatery on the eastern side of the street on this block. He had not had time to check it out more closely then, for obvious reasons, but the morning his sleep troubles returned, he could think of nothing else to do but explore it.

The plot where some other entrepreneur might have erected a building was here simply a grassy field, trimmed neatly. Andy found that the menu consisted entirely of cold items that one could, if he or she so chose, heat up in cordless microwaves on a table at the rear of the park. Two women worked the registers at either end of the warm-up table, and the food came forth from coolers on either side of them.

Andy chose a chicken salad croissant and accepted a complimentary blanket from the clerk, a plump, pleasant-faced woman in a loose red-and-green waitress' uniform.

When he turned to find an empty space of land on which to spread that blanket and hunker down to enjoy the food and breezy air, he nearly dropped his sandwich.

A woman was standing just inside the open gate dividing the unconventional restaurant from the street beyond, and though the distance between them should have made it hard for him to be certain, Andy knew that her eyes were on him.

Her skin was fine chocolate under the almost too realistic daylight. Her hair was combed back from her forehead, taking most of the wildness out of her appearance that Andy had seen in her before. She was dressed in dull gray slacks and an unfeminine button-down shirt of matching neutral tone, which had to be her work attire. One hand was pulling at the collar of her uniform shirt, as if it were too tight.

As she began to walk toward him between the picnickers, Andy let himself finally name her, recognize her fully, and his heart thudded in his chest.

"Gina," he whispered while she was still out of earshot, his mind frantically seeking some excuse to escape.

He did not have to wonder why he suddenly wanted to get out of Field of Delights and as far from Gina as possible, as quickly as possible.

Andy did not trust himself around his coworker's – his new friend's, he corrected himself with a mental wince he hoped did not show on his face – girlfriend.

She was gorgeous, just as Walter had claimed, but there was something else about her that made their proximity now dangerous to his friendship with her lover.

He did not want to remember his sighting of it in the club, but he could not help seeing it again at that moment in her eyes.

She was trying to hide it, possibly to fight it, but there was love there.

He was a stranger to her, and yet Gina loved him.

"Hello, Andy," she said, her voice rich and unconsciously sensuous and though he held onto the sandwich, Andy suddenly had no more appetite for it.

"Hi... Gina."

"I was heading to work. Thought I saw you come in here, so I doubled back. Don't even know why I was looking back at all, but..."

She shut her mouth, chewing on her bottom lip and obviously wanting to look away but refusing to give in to that weak impulse, and Andy watched her thinking on how to continue.

"Come on," she commanded, turning and, without looking back to see if he would follow, walking over to a wide space under a free-standing umbrella on a ten-foot pole.

She waited with her arms crossed and then, when Andy shook out and laid down the faded yellow blanket, sat Indian style upon the ground. Andy followed suit, then was surprised by an angry growl from his unfed stomach, and tore into the croissant as if he were alone.

He supposed, swallowing the last bite less than a minute later, that he had wanted to forget he had company, or at least who his unexpected companion happened to be, and how he knew her boyfriend.

"Listen, Gina," he sighed, not meeting her eyes. "I don't think it's such–"

"Rollie, shut up."

At that, his head jerked up and his mouth dropped open. He gazed at her in stupefied wonder, for no one here could possibly have known about that nickname. They had access to all his work records, probably even his permanent records from every school he had attended growing up, but only his grandmother had ever called him by that secret monicker, and no one else in the world had known about it.

No one, at least, in his old world.

His own world.

Andy was quickly learning his way around the purely physical aspect of the town, but it was costing him a little more time and effort in comprehending the rest.

The first hints had come during his first days on the job. His coworkers kept referencing movies he had never heard of, but that alone did not get his attention, since he never really had kept up on all the latest new releases. The money, though, had been harder to ignore.

At nearly every home or business he delivered to, Andy found the currency changed, in degrees and minor details. The faces would be in slightly different positions, or belong to historical figures he had never heard of, or the color of the bills themselves would be all wrong. Some alien instinct spoke then, telling him to accept all of it anyway, that none of the constantly differing money was at all counterfeit.

When he finally asked Walter about it, an answer that astounded and bewildered most only made Andy feel infinitely stupid for not having realized it himself.

In Complaisance, there was no mint to create new money for circulation. The economy depended on the cash new citizens had in their possession when brought to town, and the money they had in bank accounts from their old lives, which was automatically transferred into new accounts in one of the banks in Complaisance.

The money circulating through the town was as diverse as its human population because it, and its unwitting bringers, originated on not one earth, but many.

Andy had long suspected the existence of alternate timelines, even came close to believing in them, if he could be said to have firmly believed in anything at all, but he had not guessed that Complaisance took its citizenry from several of them instead of from only one earth.

At first, the notion of living around people whose entire universes were divergent from the one that had made him intrigued Andy, but he had not stopped to consider the more horrible aspect of that condition. In a town chock full of strangers to him, there might be those to whom he was not a stranger in any way, men and women who knew him personally, maybe even intimately.

At least, they had known some other version of Roland Edward Chambers, and so they would think that they knew this one.

"I wanted to apologize. When I saw you in the club, I thought you were my Andy. I shouldn't've thrown myself at you."

"No, it's all right," Andy replied stiffly, staring forward and not quite directly at Walter's girlfriend.

His girlfriend.

No, she's a stranger!

And yet, in another time and place, she had been his.

And he had been hers.

"Understandable mistake," he muttered, barely aware he spoke.

"I should go now."

"No, wait. Did he call himself Rollie?"

"No," she laughed, and it tore at Andy's heart how much that sound, and the way her face looked when she made it, almost made him want to love her. "It's just what his gramm called him. Guess you know that. You are him. But, you aren't, too."

"Yeah, I guess I'm not," he sighed, and then let his eyes look into hers as he realized something. "Fuck, this must be hard for you, me being here now and not knowing you at all. Especially since I'm working with the guy you're with now."

"It's not an ideal sitch," she allowed, and her casual usage of his old word made his heart ache.

"I'm sorry," he said, feeling ineffectual.

"It's not your fault!" she burst, taking his hands into her own and then dropping them quickly. Looking away, she went on, "Sorry, but you can't take on any responsibility for my pain now. I know you want to. Don't. It's this place. I like my life here. Most do. It's not right, though. It's nice and cozy and clean and bright, but there's nothing right about this town. Nothing right at all."

With a start, Andy realized that she was struggling to hold back ears. Desperate to comfort her, but unwilling to jeopardize anyone's relationship by touching her, he instead changed the subject.

"So, Gina, where do you work?"

She closed her eyes, rattled her head, tore her hands back through her hair, and then turned a strained, yet sincere, smile on Andy.

"A dry cleaner about a block up from here. You know, I pass this place a lot, walking to work, but never ate here." She stood then, and said, "Already late, so I can't try the menu just now."

"A dry cleaner?" he asked, looking up at her with a disbelieving face.

"Boring, I know. It helps me think."

Apparently not trusting herself one moment longer in the presence of her first love's exact duplicate, Gina spun on her heels and quickly made her way to and out through the gate.

In seconds, she was out of sight.

Andy sat there under the beige umbrella a few moments longer, watching the passing pedestrians and trucks and cars. Not for the first time, he realized how oddly hollow this whole blasted town seemed without the sound of any birds.

After a while he stood and returned the sheet to the plump cashier.

"You all right, honey?" she pressed, too much concern on her face.

His face reddened a little. She had been watching the scene unfold under the shadow of the umbrella, might even have been straining to hear their conversation.

Struggling to push that overactive rage back down into his gut, Andy nodded and asked for a bottle of water.

Refusing to say another word, he paid and left Field of Delights, intending never to return. The place had been tainted for him by the ruined remains of a love that was not his, yet still threatened the fragile foundations of the life he was beginning to build for himself in Complaisance.

He also intended to avoid Walter's girlfriend at all costs, and was weirdly comforted by the idea that she would be avoiding him as well. Andy did not know how well they would be able to manage that, since Walter seemed hellbent on becoming Andy's best friend, but he hoped that the mutual avoidance could work for at least a little while.

As he meandered alongside the street, unconsciously avoiding the other pedestrians and with no destination in mind whatsoever, Andy wondered who else in Complaisance might have known him.

If he sought them out, how many different versions of himself might he learn of? How many varying paths might he have gone down? What better choices, or worse mistakes, had those ephemeral other Rolands made? Was his the best possible form of his personal timeline? Was his earth the best of all possible worlds?

He scoffed at that idea. Surely the best and purest earth would never have experienced war, let alone fallen to the brink of a fifth World War, as his had been close to when he left it.

Correction. Was taken from it.

But Complaisance DIDN'T take me from it, he reminded himself. I died there.

He stopped, unaware of his immediate surroundings, in the middle of the road as he crossed along the eastern side of the intersection between Service and West Third Streets. A few people paused to stare at him, but none tried to alert him to his puzzling position, and all merely continued on their respective ways.

I died, he thought again, for the first time in over a week. So how am I here?

An insistent wind came down then, knocking him back several feet. As he thumped back on his haunches, the base of his spine grazing against the edge of the concrete corner he had just stepped off from, a loud metallic crunch brought him back to his senses.

When the driven air had moved Andy, a car rolling toward the intersection from the east did not stop at the sign. Gaping at the boy invisibly shoved to the side of the road, the green coupe's driver momentarily forgot where he was and slid forward into the path of a southbound truck. Luckily for all, that truck was going slowly through the intersection, so only the vehicles were damaged.

Standing and cursing himself for causing the wreck, Andy was baffled when the two men stepped out into the road and merely began to talk. Neither raised his voice or fist, neither seemed too concerned with examining the damage done, and most surprising of all, neither even glanced Andy's way now that the collision was done.

Then a shadow fell over Andy, and he gazed faux-skyward. At first he could only make out the descending silhouette of a slim woman in a billowing dress, her hair streaming up from her head as if she were underwater instead of defying gravity in the open air. What he mistook for a dress came clear as actually being a long white cloak over a tight black one-piece bathing suit with a gold lightning bolt down the middle. As her bare feet touched down lightly upon the pavement, her scarlet hair drifted down around her face in lazy curls. She smiled sweetly at him and his heart rose in his throat.

"You're a Suit," he said stupidly.

"Josephine," she volunteered, offering a hand which Andy shook and then released too quickly. "Haven't been in town long, have you?"

When she tilted her head slightly and looked at him like maybe she thought he was mildly retarded, he swallowed his nerves and answered, "Little over a week. I saw two of you at Werebach's Friday night, but had no idea Suits could fly, too."

"Oh, we can't all," she giggled, and then turned from him to survey the accident. "You're lucky I spotted you down here. If you'd stayed in that spot a moment longer, not even Sophia could've helped you."

"Thanks," he sighed, stepping up beside the redhead.

He found himself studying the profile of her face, even the freckles on her cheeks and over her nose, and forced his eyes away.

"You see this?" Josephine spoke not to Andy, confusing him because no one else was immediately near them.

She nodded as if someone had spoken, and Andy down-fisted the back of his neck. Pyrokinesis, manipulation of wind, and purported water mastery had all been shown as powers these Suits were capable of, so it was no stretch to imagine another, somewhere else in Complaisance, might have been granted telepathy.

"Good, Link," Josephine sounded to no one in sight again. "No injuries, thank God. Just call over a couple tow trucks and all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well." She grinned, and finished, "You're welcome to vacate the premises, my Fearless."

Satisfied that her responsibilities on this scene were fulfilled, the Suit turned and looked Andy up and down.

"I wasn't too rough, was I?"

"What?"

"When I blew you to safety, dummy," she explained, smiling slyly.

"Oh. Not at all."

"Good!" Then she hooked an arm through one of Andy's and led him north, back the way he had come, and proclaimed, "Since you're still kinda new in town, I wanna show you one of my favorite places to eat."

As they neared the low metal fence at the front edge of Field of Delights, Andy tensed, but she did not lead him in through that gate. Instead, they walked on by, and Andy sighed.

"Don't worry, not there," Josephine said, responding to his physically expressed disquiet. "If I want the air, I'll fly. No, this place is on the next corner."

Andy went along willingly enough, though he knew not why this bright young woman wanted to spend time with him. She was an important person in the town – something akin to a goddess or a superhero, though it was hard for Andy to think of her in those fanciful terms when the flesh-and-bone reality of her was so close to him – and he was just a pizza delivery boy.

They crossed at the next street and stepped into Oinks, a restaurant where every item on the menu consisted in one way or another of ham. Josephine hung her cloak on a hook by the door and marched up to the counter, ordering an open-faced sandwich drenched in brown sugar syrup. When Andy ordered nothing, she shrugged, paid the clerk behind the counter, and carried her plate to a window-side booth. Andy sat across from her and said nothing as she devoured the meat and bread.

"Sorry," she murmured halfway through her meal, wiping sauce off her lips with a napkin from the silver dispenser on their table. "I get hungry when I use the wind like that. What really wears me out is the precision, making sure I move someone out of harm's way without knocking them through a wall or into other people or something. Doesn't take much to call a wind. Being careful with it's a whole other matter. You okay? You sure you don't want anything to eat? It'll be my treat, really. Order something! The ham is great."

Laughing at her own joke, she picked up her fork and knife and returned to the task of unabashedly scarfing down her sandwich.

Watching her eat, Andy realized this was an opportunity for him to make a choice. He could either continue being the outsider that gawks at every strange thing long-term citizens take for granted as the norm, or he could accept the fantastic aspects of his new reality and become a part of Complaisance, rather than just a soul set adrift within the town by forces unknown, a hapless victim of circumstance.

"So, Josephine," he began, smiling over the table at her, "I know The Suits are supposed to be the law enforcement here, but why'd you take off after that wreck? You didn't talk to either of those men, didn't take any kind of report, so how's anyone gonna know what really happened?"

"Hold on," she mumbled around a mouthful of food, swallowed, and giggled. "I did make a report. If we Suits were cops, Link would be our Captain, I guess. Actually, most of us were police or whatever back on earth, but that's beside the point. Anyway, Link's Suit makes him a psychic, so he can see through our eyes, pick up on our thoughts, and organize all that jumbled information into the boring reports none of the rest of us wanna deal with. We'd rather be out here, 'keeping the peace,' as it were, and so... no paperwork on scene."

"Does he take mental reports from citizens, too? Like those drivers?"

"No! Barging into the mind of a Suit's one thing, but Link can't read civilians. No, those guys will just have to apply for vehicle repairs or replacements at the BDG over on Main Street."

"BDG?"

"Bureau of Damaged Goods. When we do our job right, Suits keep property damage to a minimum, but we all make mistakes, like I did today – kinda," she interrupted herself, reaching up unconsciously to flip a handful or two of strands of hair back over her ear, "I guess – so the Bureau's set up to financially take care of that stuff for us."

"Bet that place is swamped with phony claims. How can they–"

"Phony claims?" Josephine interrupted him, incredulous. "Boy, you really are new. First off, the Bureau automatically checks all claims against recent Suit activity reports. If there's no match, then they check the town's automated surveillance system. No one lies about what goes on in a public place because all public places are being taped, twenty-four seven."

"Oh." Andy swallowed hard, then pressed on, "Isn't that kind of invasive?"

"Kind of? Hell, I think it's totally invasive! There isn't anything we can do about it, though. The Suits don't run Complaisance; we just work here, just like everybody else."

"Heh," Andy snorted. "Not everybody can wave flames out of existence or fly, though."

"True, but those are just the tools of our trade. We didn't apply for this job any more than you applied for yours. I just... woke up here one day. I was never a cop or anything. I volunteered after Katrina, tried to help with the disaster relief when the government didn't do their share, and when Daddy died and left me everything, I carved up most of my inheritance and gave it to people who'd lost their homes and jobs and everything. I just wanted to help people, and so I do that here, too. It's kinda fortunate this place took me when it did. The money was drying up and I was just starting to realize I'd forgotten to set any aside for myself."

Seeing her passion for what she had been doing with her old life, and her determination to make the most out of this displaced one, Andy felt bad for thinking The Suits were any more responsible for the situation in Complaisance than anyone else in town.

He also found himself wanting to kiss her. Instead of looking shyly away, he kept his eyes level with her intense gaze, and grinned.

"So you can really be happy here."

"Yes, I can." Reaching over the table to grasp his hand, Josephine went on, "And so can you. I just realized I don't know your name. I saved your life and I think you're cute and I want to know who you are."

"You think I'm cute, huh," Andy smirked.

"Yeah," she replied, unflappable. "So, who are you? And what do you do?"

"I'm the Anti-Suit," he whispered, his face straight as he leaned across the table. "I'm here to undermine The Suits and liberate the slaves of Complaisance."

At that, Josephine's eyes did widen and she withdrew her hand with a jerk.

When she said nothing, Andy thought she might be conferring with Link, so he leaned back in his seat and laughed.

"Damn, I was joking, Josephine!"

Her face turned red for a moment, her lips compressing, then her expression became serious for a moment, and then she, too, laughed.

"My Fearless wants me to tell you that wasn't funny." Leaning toward him and speaking in a confidential tone, she said, "You were at Werebach's, so you've got to have some idea what kind of nutballs we have to deal with. Well, we've had reason to think they might actually be trying to cobble together an 'Anti-Suit,' using illegal technology."

"Oh," Andy said, feeling like an idiot. "I'm sorry. Didn't mean to scare you."

"Good, and don't do it again. I like you. It was horrible thinking you were one of them, even for a second. Now, your name?"

"Andy Chambers," he told her, "and I work at Quality Pizzeria, over on Main. I'm a driver."

"A pizza boy. Hm."

She folded her arms, glanced out the window, and started chewing on her lip, suddenly seeming to regret spending any amount of time with this fool. Andy slumped in the booth and frowned at the empty place on his side of the table, wishing he had ordered at least a drink, so he could have had something to do in this awkward moment.

When her toes pushed up his pant leg and the side of her foot grazed his calf, Andy nearly jumped, and his eyes bulged comically.

She laughed, of course, and it was his turn to turn red.

"Don't get like that," she sighed, and then swallowed the last bite off her fork, keeping the utensil in her mouth a moment longer to flick her tongue around it as her eyes commanded Andy's full attention. "You had that coming."

"Guess I did," he replied in a low voice after gulping. Wanting to seem like more than just a sex-crazed male animal, Andy altered the course of their conversation by asking, "So, does the BDG only clean up the Suits' messes?"

"No!" Josephine yelped, grinning in spite of the accusatory aspect of the question. "Tax money – a part of it, anyway – funds them so they can pay to repair any accidental damage in Complaisance, and replace the stuff that's too broken to fix. Car crashes, accidental fires, stuff like that, the Bureau takes care of it so people can get on with their lives here."

"And they do this for everyone?"

"Yes."

"No regular charges? It's just paid for with tax money?"

"You got it."

"Guess that explains why I didn't have to get car insurance after I started driving for Quality."

"You're cute when you're slow," she teased, twirling her fork between her fingers.

"Hey!" he barked, but with no true reproach in his voice or mind.

"Kidding, kidding," she said softly, dropping her hands to the table.

The fork remained spinning in the air, suspended and manipulated by soft, minute winds that Andy could feel the barest edges of over his arms and against his cheeks.

Then he felt a more insistent press of air around his crotch, and gasped.

Josephine began to giggle.

"You know," he rasped, struggling for a normal tone, "you're pretty direct for a chick that still looks like a bratty pre-teen."

The pleasant sound died in her throat, the fork dropped noisily, and the hurt dawning on Josephine's face made Andy wish she had let him be struck.

"Josephine, I'm sorry," he said, reaching over to tentatively grasp her hands.

She looked down at their interlocking fingers, raised her gaze to Andy's eyes, and her face lit up.

In that moment, as Josephine's beauty shone clearly to Andy like a Biblical revelation, he realized that with the choice to be a part of the town without a world made, another decision followed that had to be considered, needed to be addressed, demanded that Andy go one way or the other and move on.

As a citizen of Complaisance, the reality of multiple dimensions was to be simply a given. Andy had thought that fact accepted by his head, but he had never considered how his heart would feel about the matter. Gina's revelation had opened his eyes to staggering, terrifying possibilities, and yet there was an easy way for Andy to prevent fear from ruling him.

All he had to do was stop shutting strangers out, and start letting new friends in.

New friends, and possible lovers.

He could avoid Gina, as he had meant to do when departing the outdoor eatery, and then begin to watch for others whom had known some form of him or another in their respective former universes, and avoid them as well.

On the other hand, he could accept Gina into his life, as well as any other alternate reality past acquaintances, and use their knowledge of his unwalked paths to better judge his own past and decide the course of his future.

He could learn from them, and grow through the process of unifying the disparate threads of himself gleaned through their fractured views of Roland Edward Chambers.

Andy realized Josephine was watching him closely, and released her hands.

"Seemed like you were thinking hard there for a minute."

Again that light brush of air over his genitals, through his pants, this time more playful than pressing or alluring.

"I was. About a choice I have to make."

"Oh?"

"I think I know how to stop worrying about it."

"How will you manage that," she crooned, laughter beneath the words. "You strike me as a born worrier."

"I was, but everything's different now."

"There's an understatement," she giggled, glancing at her fork and sending more tiny breezes to lift it and make it dance.

"Wanna know my insidious plan?"

"Sure."

"I'm gonna live my life, here, in this most insane and impossibly well-mannered society. And I'm gonna start seeing someone."

"Anyone I know?"

"Maybe. Just this flighty redhead with superpowers. Way she keeps throwing herself at me, I figure it'd be cruel not to at least throw her a bone."

He half-expected a snide comeback, but instead Josephine's mouth spread open in an inviting, knowing grin.

He was lost in her smile.

And she was doomed.

## *************

# The Man Whom Would be the Dark One

In the far-flung future of an earth where conflict and strife had been forgotten, a man stood at the window of his high-rise loft, overlooking a cityscape that had already subtly shifted dozens of times in the mere days he had been upon this world.

He was tall, but his features were obscured by the darkness he preferred. No artificial light had illuminated his new temporary home, and dusk was already falling into full night, so the man seemed made of shadow itself.

Until recently, he had been a willing prisoner in a place where crime barely existed, the enforcers of a law not written by men could fly, and no one had any ambitions to drive them to become more than they already were.

Cataclysm had torn the wool from over his eyes, but it had also provided him the window through which he had been able to escape.

Understanding that there had been no home for him to be returned to, the man had let fate decide his destination, and it had brought him to a world in even worse shape – in terms of evolution and personal growth among the peoples – than the town without a world.

He had free access to all his body's desires, from the apartment he never lit and had not furnished to false-flesh approximations of any woman – or man, if he was so inclined, which he happened not to be – he had ever known or could imagine. They claimed the miraculous techno-magick that truly ruled this world could fulfill all one's heart's desires, but he knew that was a lie. He could not blame its tellers for it, though, since it seemed this earth had been like this for centuries; the true criminals responsible for this world's fall from grace were long dead and thus beyond reproach.

The man standing at the window, watching as a building several streets over began to grow new storeys, wondered briefly if the mystically-amplified tech of this future earth had anything to do with his previous home. He dismissed the question quickly.

The origin of the problem was insignificant.

He could only see one way to achieve the result his heart truly yearned for. Once his complaisance had been removed, he had wanted to do something similar for the contained community, but that place and all its unfortunate citizens had been damned. This world, however, had a chance.

It had been falsely perfect for a long, long time, but it was vast and populated enough for the displaced man to believe there were others like him on it. Somewhere, people lived with a soft disquiet they could not explain, an unspeakable revulsion at Unified Pursuit itself that would be as laughable to their peers as the belief in a round world had been to the ancients. These like minds were as diamonds in the rough, and if he were to have any chance at awakening this humanity to its forgotten potential and restore them to their long-lost glory, he would have to find those precious few.

Find them, and bring forth a new unity to smash to shards the old one.

He would start with the despicable fate of the elderly. No one in this time thought anything of it, but that was no surprise. Modern humans had grown up with the knowledge that once you passed a certain age, your mind was simply worn out and no longer worthy of being acknowledged, all its desires answered and so it should ask for no more. Thus, such aged individuals were ejected from the brightly lit cities where dreams were a mere verbal command away, left to the neglected wildernesses between civilized human hubs, where they would starve and return to the earth through decay, or be killed and eaten by wild beasts.

He would begin to teach that this practice was abominable, and plant the seeds of his revolution in many sympathetic hearts.

From there, he could only imagine how easy it would be to topple the lethargic, self-serving planetary government, and raise the awareness of the people so that they might shudder at their long complacency, then wonder how to change it.

And so a man from Complaisance brought evolution back to the dominant species of a world not his own, content with the fact that at least he had an entire world to affect instead of only a model of a society.

What he failed to consider in his planning was that the vastness of his new philosophical playground would present variables he could never foresee, which would interact with the changes his actions would cause to produce effects no one would appreciate.

In short, in attempting to improve a world that was already free of war and thus a sort of paradise, the man would force this shade of humanity through a long, painful transformation that would only begin with the end of their world.

That journey would plunge them into a darkness so pure no light could ever hope to pierce it, or endure its unyielding campaign.

## **************

# Sorrow of the Eidolons

In the summer of her nineteenth year, Rosemary Angela Chambers broke with her faith once, and regretted her actions that night for the rest of her life. When she discovered her pregnancy weeks later, her parents pressured her to name the father and convinced her that the young man must have raped her. Surely their daughter would never have willingly submit to the touch of a man she was not the wife of. She knew the truth, but kept the secret and watched silently as her first lover was tried and convicted.

The day their son was born, though, Rosemary admit the lie, the wrongly accused boy was released, and the Chambers clan cast the sinful girl from their midst.

She struggled to support herself and her child until he was a toddler. Then, she met the man she would marry, Barry Lucas Claremont. After the wedding, Barry adopted little Roland as his son, but the boy's last name was not changed.

Though Andy had always known that Barry was not his father, the man had been a good enough substitute. Barry had embraced and loved his wife's bastard child like his own, and had tried his best to be a good Christian role model for the boy as he grew toward manhood.

Andy had been surprised, when he left the Church, that Barry was not disappointed or angry. Instead, while Rosemary fumed and refused to speak lest she disown her own son, Mr. Claremont told his adopted son that he would always be there when the boy needed him, no matter how their personal beliefs might differ.

That simple acceptance and unconditional love had made it bearable for Andy to go on following a path he knew was breaking his mother's heart. He would rather hurt her by being true to himself than try to live according to her wishes and go back to lying to everyone and himself by pretending to be a believer.

Also, there was still a part of him that resented the woman for withholding the identity of his birth father. That part of him had never accepted Barry, and had quietly rejoiced at Rosemary's suffering due to her child's rejection of her entire belief system.

The Andy that had worked at Pappas Pizza had long since stopped wondering about his biological father. Growing up, he had pestered bits and pieces of the truth out of various relatives – though most of them never forgave his mother for her transgression, they suffered her presence so they could be in the life of the boy, whom they could not help but love – but not one of them had given him even the first name of his real father. They endlessly reminded him that in God's eyes, Barry Claremont was Andy's dad, and he should leave it at that.

Working toward the fulfillment of his musical goals while delivering pizzas in Batavia, Andy had finally followed their advice.

The Andy of Quality Pizzeria was finding it a little more difficult to get the awful fact of his ignorance out of his head.

As a child, he had especially feared the death of his mother, for she would take his father's name to her grave.

Now, Andy found himself in a place where all hope of discovering his unknown heritage was lost. His mother was not in Complaisance, nor her family that might tell the secret someday, nor some old friend of Rosemary whom might spill the beans if you got them drunk enough.

Still, impossible as its answering had become, the question worried at him.

It burned within him.

A salve came to him in the form of one of the enigmatic Suits. Josephine Hope, known more popularly in the town as Zephyr for her weather powers as well as for her bright attitude, had literally swept Andy off his feet. She blew into his life like an unexpected but pleasant spring rain, set her talons upon his heart like an owl catching up prey from the field, and helped him immensely by distracting his mind from its renewed habit of self-torment. Not even an hour after their first meeting at the site of the collision, the two strangers became lovers, and decided they would meet each day at Oinks, at least until their tongues grew tired of ham.

They were sneaking out of the unisex bathroom in the middle of their third date – they had been so suddenly overcome by desire that they had left their meals barely touched – when their plan to keep their relationship a secret from their friends and coworkers, for the time being, was dashed.

At their table, her open-faced sandwich and his ham steaks lay cold, only a few small bites taken out of each. Their drinks stood untouched where the waitress had set them, their forks where they dropped them when they thought no one would notice and dashed for the restroom.

Sitting at the booth just past theirs were Walter Stein and Gina Clayne, the girl with her back to them. Walter spotted Andy right away and pointed, saying something to his girlfriend. Gina turned around with a reserved expression, then smiled.

At the same instant, Andy realized that Josephine's hand had tensed in his grip. Looking at her, he saw she was staring wide-eyed at a short young woman with reddish brown hair, whom was just stepping into the restaurant. From her black shirt, black slacks, and gold boots and gloves, Andy guessed the stranger was another Suit, and wished he and Josephine could be anywhere but Oinks in that moment.

The dark redhead seemed on the edge of tears until she sighted Josephine, and then she brightened instantly. As the two Suits walked toward each other across the floor, Andy slumped down at their booth.

"'Bout time!" Walter said as he slid into Josephine's side of the booth.

Andy pulled her plate to his side of the table and said nothing.

"Come over here," Walter said over his shoulder. "Let's barge in and make the new couple as uncomfortable as we can."

When Walter tipped a wink his way, Andy felt like strangling his welcomer, but restrained the urge as Gina plopped down beside her man.

Before any of them could speak, Josephine tapped Andy's shoulder, he scooted over, and she sat down. The dark redhead pulled a chair over from one of the free-standing tables in the middle of the restaurant and joined the group, the distress Andy had thought he had seen in her face before now gone.

"So how long... have you two been seeing each other?" Gina posed, trying to sound casual, but Andy heard the pause no one else seemed to notice and knew she was the only person being made uncomfortable by this situation.

Besides himself, anyway.

Josephine, meanwhile, was delighted.

"Just a few days," she answered happily, turning eyes with too much affection in them on her lover, "but it's been great. He's been great. Even though he had to just about get himself killed to get my attention – I'm sure now that was intentional – he's great."

Josephine and Walter shared a laugh while Gina and Andy merely rolled their eyes. The dark redhead looked confused.

"Oh. Andy, this is Ariel Velvetine. Ariel, this is Andy Chambers. He's the boy I had to blow out of the road the other day, when I caused that accident. Remember, the green car and the white truck?"

"You never said you were dating him," Ariel said, unease creeping into her voice and expression.

Oblivious, Josephine retorted, "Well, we weren't at the time. That's how we met."

"Oh, I see how it is," Walter interjected, reaching over the table to punch Andy in the arm. "You're so desperate you had to make a play for a Suit's attention? Lucky thing Pretty Boy wasn't in the neighborhood."

"Hey!" Josephine barked.

A small but strong, concentrated wind struck Walter in the face, knocking him back a few inches and rippling through his hair.

Laughing, he threw his hands up and cried, "I was joking! Joking! I swear."

"Yeah, you better only joke about it," Gina said, glaring at him. Then, she pecked at his cheek and turned to Josephine to say, "He's lucky he's good-looking, or I'd never put up with his mouth."

A husky Oriental woman with her black hair pulled tightly back from her forehead came over and looked down at each of them over Ariel's shoulder.

Her eyes on Andy, she asked quickly, "You leave a mess?"

"Excuse me?" he coughed, bewildered.

"In my bathroom. I manager in daytime, so I have to clean it. You and big shot lady friend leave a mess in there? I don't care what you do, long as you leave no mess."

"No!" Andy squawked, his cheeks red.

Satisfied, the manager turned to Gina and Walter.

"You two ready to order?"

"In a bit," Gina answered for them both.

"I know what you want," the manager said to Ariel, and then shuffled off.

Josephine started to giggle at once.

"In the bathroom?" Ariel hissed, trying not to laugh.

Having no restraint of his own, Walter rolled his head back and cackled. He would have gone on until his throat hurt, but Gina pounded a fist down on his thigh, mere inches from his crotch, and he sobered up instantly.

That relieved some of Andy's embarrassment, but his cheeks still felt hot. He glanced toward the front of the establishment and through the windows there to avoid his companions' faces. His eyes locked with those of a tall man going along on the sidewalk outside, and for a second the outsider looked vaguely familiar.

Then, his attention was abruptly ripped back to his immediate surroundings as Ariel, whom had just been on the verge of hysterics, burst into inexplicable tears.

Josephine instantly had an arm around her friend's shoulders, and Gina and Walter seemed concerned as well.

"It's too much," Ariel rasped between choking sobs. "Too much."

"What is?" Andy pried, dumbfounded.

"She's their empath," Gina explained gently to him, visibly struggling to avoid anger at his insistent ignorance. "She's called Sorrow. I'd heard it started as a joke, but looks like it's true enough now."

"When did you start feeling this?" Josephine asked the short crimsonette. "Can you tell who the source is?"

"Weeks ago," Ariel gasped, the sobs beginning to abate. "It started out so weak, so low, that I thought it was someone, too, but it's not. It's not a person I'm feeling."

"I don't get you," Walter whispered.

"It's... God, how do I put it. Collective unconscious? Yeah. It's the whole undermind of the town that's causing this, feeling this, making me feel this. It's been growing worse almost steadily, like this huge ocean of despair is spilling over into the combined subconsciousness of everyone in town, and I'm only the first to feel it."

"Spilling over from where?" Andy wondered, staring down at his cold food.

"I don't know," Ariel sighed, no longer trembling. "I don't know how to stop it. If it doesn't stop on its own, though, I don't know how it'll affect Complaisance... or if I'll be able to survive it once it starts being felt directly by everyone."

"We'll figure something out," Josephine assured Ariel, but her quick sideways glance told Andy that his lover had no idea if there was any way to deal with this force that was wrecking such havoc on Sorrow.

If it could ravage the empath so relentlessly when it only had one proverbial foot in the door, what would it do to the townsfolk once it had fully come into Complaisance?

The vague possibilities troubled Andy deeply, but he had no further time to worry on the subject.

His eyes had wandered back toward the front of the restaurant, and there they snagged upon the tall man whom Andy had only moments earlier seen walking by outside. He was now crossing over the threshold into Oinks and coming right toward their table.

Andy's nerves were suddenly crawling beneath his skin. His fingers flexed, clenched, and then flexed again. He noticed his lungs were having a little trouble taking in air. His eyes seemed to be throbbing, and his lips were dry.

"Josephine," he stumbled, "please, I need... can you get up for a sec? Gotta hit the bathroom."

She glared at him, stunned, her arm still around her somber friend.

"Alone."

Josephine mouthed her understanding and stood up. Andy slid past her and began to walk quickly back toward the restroom, trying to keep from breaking into a run.

He needed something. Not to urinate, as he had hinted at the table, but to inhale something. Somehow, air was not enough to satisfy his lungs, or his nerves.

For the life of him, Andy could not name the thing his body was screaming for.

A hand came down on his shoulder and he tensed. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, shrugged the hand off, let the air out of his mouth slowly, opened his eyes wide, and spun around.

It was the stranger that had just entered the restaurant. Andy had never seen the man before that day, but well recognized the look in the taller man's eyes.

Something like it had been in Gina's when first they met.

This stranger was almost a full head taller than Andy, and about twenty years older. His hair was long, straight, and darker than Andy's own. The man's skin was a little dark, too, suggesting Native American heritage. His eyes, though, were what held Chambers' attention.

Andy had studied his own mostly-brown hazel eyes in mirrors all his life, and knew every detail of their irises and lids.

The eyes of the tall stranger were identical to the pair in Andy's head.

He felt like breathing had become too difficult a task to accomplish, and yet his lungs worked to drag in air anyway.

"Roland," the stranger exhaled in a small but deep voice, and enfolded the younger man in his arms. "I can't believe it."

Standing rigid in the man's grip, Andy saw Josephine on her feet next to Ariel. His girlfriend looked only confused, while Sorrow was weeping in borrowed joy. Walter was looking uncomfortably away. Gina was chewing on her lip, and when she spotted Andy's eyes peering over the tall man's shoulder, she too glanced away.

"Roland?"

The stranger stepped back from Andy, and his hands moved to hold the boy's shoulders. The strong, firm grip of those fingers caused goosebumps to rise up Andy's back.

"Son, don't you know me?"

Those loving eyes searched the boy's face for any sign of recognition. Finding none, the taller man tightened his grip and glared down between his feet, swearing under his breath.

Frustration and hurt made the man's grip on him painful, but Andy endured it. He could imagine the horror the stranger was going through.

Stranger?

Andy now studied the man's face as he had used to study his own reflection and saw similarities between them. The features that made the taller man unique were echoed in the visage Andy knew so well to be his own, and to finally see what physical aspects of himself had come from his father was simultaneously staggering and wonderful.

This man, whomever he was, had to be the father of an Andy from another world, and thus a double of the father Andy himself had never known. He had called Andy by his full first name, so he and the Roland Chambers of his earth were at least acquainted, if not as close as any father and son that ever lived had been.

And now the man loosened his grip, but did not fully release Andy, as he realized the son he had found was not truly his own.

Merely a counterpart.

Tears brimmed in his eyes.

Andy felt tears welling behind his own, but forced them back and tried to speak clearly, tried to keep his voice level.

He was lucky his words could be heard at all.

"Can you tell me your name?"

The nigh-father looked into the eyes of the son and past them, trying to see the boy he knew. His face was troubled, his eyes shined, and his mouth worked silently as he tried to decide if he was making a mistake.

For reasons neither man knew, Andy's father had never been a part of his son's life, and the man that called his son Roland wondered if it might not be better simply to turn and depart and never see this boy again.

"Stefano Wallace Ross," the nigh-father said, "but everyone calls me Wallace."

"Wallace," Andy whispered.

"Yes, Roland."

"Andy."

"What?"

"Everyone calls me Andy. I hate Roland. Terrible lead, even for a King book."

"Oh," Wallace said, swallowing a chuckle. "I always thought that myself..."

The taller man wiped at his eyes, then pulled Andy into another tight, warm hug.

Andy exhaled sharply and laid his head against the flannel cloth covering his nigh-father's thick shoulder. He had not been this aggrieved when a hurricane swept across Florida, laying waste to the town of Sebring and killing his maternal grandparents, and he felt foolish for shedding tears at gaining a relative when he had not after losing two, but still he wept. He cried for the Wallace Ross of his reality, whom he would never meet. He cried for the Roland of this Wallace's world, whom would never see his father again, and whose father would never see him again. Mostly, he cried against the sheer relentless insanity of Complaisance, plucking people from their lives and rightful earths only because it needed menial laborers.

For the first time in his life, he wept in public, and yet he was not embarrassed.

He finally knew the embrace of his father, or at least a highly reasonable facsimile thereof, and the strength he felt around him brought a queer sense of security that helped him to entirely stop caring what onlookers might think.

After a few short moments of physical closeness that felt much longer – each breath Andy took seemed to stretch out for years – Wallace released him and both men dried their sockets on the sleeves of their shirts.

Immediately, Andy became aware that all the eyes at his table were upon him, but no one else in Oinks seemed the least bit interested. Patrons ate, cooks prepared food, the manager cashed out a satisfied customer, and none of them even glanced at the two men that had embraced.

A chill ran down Andy's spine at the strangers' lack of curiosity, and though he would have abhorred the attention one could only expect when one engaged in public displays of affection back on earth, he now wished for it here.

The lack of it brought home the alienness of his surroundings, and he realized what he had been craving just before his nigh-father confronted him. He also realized that he had not thought about having one even once since awakening in the town without a world, nor had he seen anyone smoking one anywhere.

A cigarette.

How the fuck have I not needed one?

Wallace derailed his train of thought by patting his arm and suggesting, "Introduce me to your friends."

They walked over to the table where sat Andy's companions.

"This is Josephine, my–" he began, but as Zephyr of The Suits raised her hand in greeting, Wallace looked at Gina and gasped, cutting Andy off between words.

"Gina," Wallace said softly, stepping around Ariel's chair, his eyes never leaving the black beauty's face.

Andy was suddenly very uncomfortable.

"Yes," Gina replied gently, not surprised.

"How do you know my girlfriend?" Walter interjected, more than a little warning and accusation in his voice.

"In my world," Wallace uttered, in awe of the young woman sitting before him, "Gina was my son's wife."

"How'd she go?" Gina asked.

"Giving birth to my grandson."

Walter glared at Andy before he could think to stop himself, then rolled his eyes and looked back to Wallace Ross.

"I have to go," Ariel sighed in a rush, a hand over her face as she rose to her feet and brushed past Wallace on her way to the exit. "Sorry, Josephine, some other time."

"She all right?" Andy inquired of his lover, who said nothing and simply stared up at him. "Okay, okay, nevermind."

"She's troubled by the emotional currents of this whole town, Roland. Ours couldn't have been pleasant for her on top of that."

Andy looked at Wallace and wanted to be annoyed by the fatherly tone in the stranger's voice, but instead smiled.

"Whatever you say. Dad."

Wallace smiled in return and then took Ariel's place at the table. Josephine scooted over and Andy sat next to her.

"I'm Walter," Andy's coworker introduced himself, reaching over the table to offer his hand. As Wallace shook it, Walter said, "So, you're this guy's dad, right?"

"In a way. Yes."

"Was he any brighter on your world than this model here?"

Wallace grinned, Gina elbowed Walter, and then they all began to laugh, Andy included. Josephine's fingers had found their way into Andy's lap, and the pressure of her touch against his thigh confirmed it for him.

Whatever else Complaisance might do, or be, it had brought these people together around him, and for that he could only be grateful.

He might have begun to contemplate his absent nicotine cravings, but he was swept into the group's discussion of Andy's job and how well he was acclimating to the town. It did not cross his mind that in no store on any street had he seen cigarettes for sale.

He might have worried that Walter would begin to suspect the Gina he was dating had known another Roland Chambers in her old life as Wallace had fathered one in his own, but the conversation turned toward the burgeoning relationship between himself and Josephine Hope, his lady savior, and he saw that there was no need to worry about such things just yet.

He should have wondered how long Ariel had been plagued by the vague threat on the undermind of the townspeople, and what it might mean for the future they all shared, but such weighty, serious thoughts were beyond him at that table.

The Andy of Pappas Pizza would have fought tooth and nail to discover the answers to all the questions that went through his mind during his first days resurrected, and let nothing distract him from that course.

The Andy of Quality Pizzeria was quickly becoming a true citizen of Complaisance, happy to accept his unexplained circumstances and never think to question another thing.

I'm becoming a Complaisant, he thought for no reason, and was not at all disturbed or distressed.

I can be happy here.

## ***************

# The He

Before their eyeless sight stumbled upon and was captivated by the town sans a world, the bodiless prisoners of a hollowed-out universe viewed and disregarded many possible avenues of escape. Their attentions became as fleeting as those of human children with Attention Deficit Disorder, and the myriad pathways of creation were reduced in their deindividualized minds to the status of television channels on earth.

Complaisance, though, was far from the first set of scenes that would hold their dark interest for an almost measurable span of time, thought time itself had seemingly lost all meaning to the viewers.

They were as one in countless ways, and would never be completely divided one from the rest ever again, but they had organized a soft sort of division to expedite their search. They formed specific points through which dimensions physically beyond them could be vicariously accessed, and each point moved along a different random course across realities. Clustered around each viewpoint were scores of the ethereal minds, watching and considering and debating and wordlessly discussing and, inevitably, moving on from each world their sight touched upon.

They would pause the world-surfing to distantly witness scenes of savage devastation, be it on a small or vast scale. They envied the other-dimensional beings their mobility and surroundings and lives, and so reveled in every chance they had to see humans and other similar life forms suffer.

Often, the groupings would become focused on finding specific types of disasters across the worlds. While one stopped at the instances of sudden automobile wrecks, another would follow the exploits of a man or woman on a killing spree. Yet more of the viewpoint throngs paused upon suicides, terrorist attacks of all varieties, plane crashes, hurricanes, floods, rape, vengeance, even neglect could be enough to satiate their need for distraction, if only for short bursts of nigh-time.

They were unhinged from time itself, though, able to slow or speed up or replay what they were viewing, as if all these events had been recorded with their sick tastes in mind.

And so they watched, and remained trapped, unable to escape to or even remotely affect the myriad realities they viewed, and learned nothing.

They felt no sympathy, no compassion, no remorse. Never once did the notion of intervening to save lives, had they the power to cross through the viewpoints, cross any of their congealing minds.

Only their dark purpose – their uncompromising intent to unify all consciousness into one cluster that might then become literally one mind, one Thought to cover all of creation – mattered. All else was little more than distraction, and only briefly even that.

They had a rare opportunity in that darkness, caught in that sphere uncoupled from the flows of time. The viewpoints could have given them access to all the secrets of all the worlds that ever were or could have been, had they the patience or benevolent ambition to enlighten themselves on such matters.

Sadly, they had not.

The conditions of their imprisonment and the nature of their interconnecting psyches lent credit to their darker assumptions and impulses, what could have been called their more animal sides had they any fleshly forms to speak of. No hope could flourish among them, nor any trait of good and just intellects.

All they knew was suffering.

All they had was their connectivity; their bastard unity.

All they wanted was nothingness.

No, they would tell themselves in many throatless voices.

The Great Nothing is not our ultimate goal.

We seek unity.

We desire oneness.

We despise separateness.

But we have seen it!

The Hungry Dark is coming!

It matters not what we desire.

The Dark consumes all.

No.

We consume all.

We shall touch all unlike minds.

And make them like us.

We shall join all disjointed wills.

And make one Will to bend the stars.

Break the stars.

On and on they would ramble in the great distanceless voids between viewpoints, until their uncertain numbers were once again moved, split, drawn by the pull like gravity of the various viewed disasters.

They were caught in the sway of a denial too vast for them to see, and too deeply rooted in their wretched world-less society for them to escape.

All they could do was watch.

View.

Unlearning.

And yet, in a way, they were being educated, for the numerous variations of every form of horror they fell distantly upon enlightened them in the ways of physical suffering.

Two sets of eyes beheld them in this state, but from widely different angles and positions. One, once human and now something else, felt a voyeuristic and unspeakable glee at the dark turn these post-flesh beings were taking in their group evolution. The other shed a single dimension-searing tear for them, but knew they could not be interfered with, coerced toward one path or another.

More was at stake than the nearly immediate cataclysm soon to occur.

The former set of eyes, that horrid faceless interloper, knew that the other dare not move to stop him. Through means iridescent and indistinct and irrelevant, he reached across dimensions to change the course of one of the viewpoints through which the bodiless ones watched.

They knew nothing of the interference, and sensed no outside presence.

What they viewed slid fluidly from a replay of a World War on some earth where the Axis Powers were about to win to a scene deeply disturbing even to them. It was set in a universe that held a ruined earth, but what they saw could not be said to have been taking place, for it was a static image.

What they saw, though, was moving forward in relative real time.

There was a darker shape buried in a crystalline structure that seemed to have flowed over the floor specifically to encase it, for the light-obscuring substance was set solid over every inch of ground space and also covered every other surface in the surrounding chamber, making it impossible to tell if what they saw was in a room, a hut, or a cavern. Dimming light glinted off the reformed crystal-ice, but they could not see its source.

Captivated by the possibility thrust into the path of their attentions, the current cluster of them around that particular viewpoint pressed in with their wills, causing the image to focus in on the deeper shadow and then pass beneath the outer shell of its prison to reveal what they suspected to be there.

It was a man, as helpless in his airless solid prison as they were in their lightless, painless limbo hell. His features were completely obscured by the closeness of his crystal cell, but still they could see him for what he was. Where they envied or simply felt contempt for all other life forms, however, the singularly devastating similarity of this man's situation to their own inspired something as close to sympathy as they were capable of feeling.

The sensation brought them close to panic.

Like us!

Could we share a captor with this?

With him?

Might he escape?

The He can show us how it is to be done.

But not like us.

Nothing like us!

Sack of meat.

Weakness.

Holds him prisoner where we would not be held.

They bantered and bickered and rationalized, never wondering why they should be brought to this man's plight, and probably incapable of caring about the implications of any answer to a question such as that.

Feeling the weight of terrible eyeless stares from out of nowhere, he opened his eyes within the solidified, once-molten mineral substance and, for the barest fraction of an instant, saw them.

His seeing of them shocked and mollified each and all, and they quickly pressed the viewpoint on toward other realms.

## ###

About the author

Erik J. Avalon is the pen name of M. Erik Strouss. Strange Passage, Book One: Acclimation is his first completed, published work. He lives in a small town outside Cincinnati, Ohio with his partner, their three cats, a friend, and the friend's five year old son.

Connect to Erik

Smashwords author page: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ejavalon

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/e.j.avalon

Furthermore

Acclimation is only the beginning for Andy and the friends he's made in Complaisance. To learn more about the town without a world, its people, its protectorate, and follow Andy's continuing journey, look for Strange Passage, Book Two: Conflict, coming soon on Smashwords.
