Protagonists#

• Short, Lance - Agent Myra - Foreign Service Officer (John)
• Tucker, Jamal - Agent Sentinel - U.S. Secret Service - Personal Protective Detail Division (Panagiotis)
• Veronica Mare - Agent Artemis - Professor of Anthropology (Tasos)
• Bennet, Wendy - Agent Locke - Criminal Intelligence Analyst / Assistant Professor of Criminology (Konstantina)
• Coniglio, Heath - Agent Blacktail - FBI Intelligence Case Officer (Istvan)

Heading Into Boston – Friday, October 25th, 2019#

The agents agree to the following plan:

• Agent Locke walks into the bubble.
• The rest of them will drive into it at the same time.

Cool’s Forgotten Office#

Blacktail, Myra and Sentinel notice nothing strange as they drive through the bubble. Artemis and Locke were dropped off earlier before, sent to pursue “other leads” according to plan. The remaining agents decide to head to MIT.

Sentinel is admitted to the hospital for his injuries, while Blacktail manages to gain access to Cool’s office after speaking with the HR department. They are clearly confused as to why Cool is still on the payroll, despite not having taught any classes for what appears to be years.

Myra arrives just in time to see Blacktail entering the office inside the Mathematics Building.

Cool’s World#

Artemis and Locke find themselves suddenly seated inside a passenger train. They sit on the red carpet of a car trimmed in wood, with faux-leather seats. It looks classy enough to be a smoking lounge. A few passengers in contemporary dress are scattered throughout the car.

Outside the windows, they see a different Boston skyline: a city with a high-speed elevated rail system, sparse traffic, no street performers, and an erased homeless population.

They change trains and head toward MIT. Along the way, they notice that time on clocks does not advance unless they are actively observing it.

Despite this, newspapers feature headlines about mass shootings and the Israel–Palestine conflict. The President is the same. Global warming continues.

At MIT, they seek Dr. Wesley Cool. Agent Artemis, who studied here, notices several clear changes:

• Hayden Library is now named The Library of Discovery. A life-sized marble statue of Cool stands outside the front entrance, arms spread in a Christ-like pose.
• There is no Department of Mathematics or Theoretical Physics. The study of “Prerevelatory Physics” has been relegated to the History Department.
• Every student has PICKY EATER installed on their phone.

When they inquire about Cool, everyone directs them to the Offices of the Revealer.

Offices of the Revealer#

Located on the second floor of Building 2. Inside a humble windowless room, the Agents find Cool’s administrative assistant, Vicky King. She looks maybe eighteen. She sits at attention, her posture and smile caught in a sort of rictus. “Hi! Welcome to the Office of Pre-Revelatory Mathematics and Theoretical Physics! I’m Vicki, one of Dr. Cool’s students. How may this Office of the Revealer serve you today?”

The shock causes Agent Locke to vanish in thin air.

Cool’s Research#

Agent Locke appears inside the office Myra and Blacktail were searching for evidence of Cool’s electronic devices. She shares her experience with them.

The monitor, keyboard, and mouse all sit on the desk. The PC tower is still on the floor beside the wastebasket. Nothing can be powered on. The interior of the tower, the plastic casing is empty. The power cords and wires are dead-end inside a plastic case without internal components.

Cool’s scribbled notes are scattered everywhere across his desk and bookshelves. Journal pages, strange photocopies, and printouts of problems that he found easier to solve by hand.

The three of them – and later joined by Sentinel - spend hours to go through the documents and notes:

• Cool’s research attempts to unify physics, consciousness, mathematics, and cosmology, treating consciousness as an active force capable of reshaping reality rather than a passive observer.
• His work evolves from misguided interpretations of quantum theory into a deliberate effort to mechanically channel consciousness to reconstruct reality at its most fundamental level.
• He develops a belief system in which reality is a mathematical construct, consciousness is a core variable, and multiple psychic and physical dimensions coexist within a fluid multiverse.
• Cool theorizes interconnected systems of consciousness across infinite realities, culminating in a supreme “God algorithm” that determines all events across time through perfect calculation.
• He becomes obsessed with Greco-Egyptian and related ancient traditions, especially the mythical Book of Thoth and its associations with divination, divine knowledge, and mediation between worlds.
• Cool traces a syncretic lineage linking Thoth, Hermes, Pan, Set, and other ancient figures, interpreting them as symbolic frameworks for controlling hidden knowledge of the underworld and reality’s foundations.
• He interprets ancient myths as evidence that gods are constructs or functions of the human mind, with the universe shaped by mental forms imposed upon an underlying void.
• Central to his worldview is a primordial abyss: an undifferentiated nothingness from which all realities emerge and which must be approached without annihilating the self.
• Cool believes access to this abyss requires a nonhuman Guide, an ancient, immortal entity described in forbidden texts as the guardian of gateways between worlds.
• He concludes that reality itself is the unconscious dream of Yog-Sothoth, an alien intelligence lacking agency, and identifies this absence of will as an exploitable flaw.
• To exploit it, Cool combines ancient spells and modern technology into a mediator designed to reverse the relationship between thought and action, allowing human consciousness to reshape existence.
• His ultimate objective is not the creation of isolated realities but access to a deeper, underlying “system between systems,” a primal source of all possible truths.
• Achieving this requires locating and appeasing the Guide at the threshold between realities and following an obscure, multi-stage process to descend ever closer to raw creation itself.

The False King#

Agent Artemis converses with Vicky King. She thanks Agent for flattering the department with the notion that the Revealer would still work there.

This room is a historical site that presents artifacts of important thought before the great Revelation, and a public relations office. Cool works in the new High Building at the center of campus. Of course, sometimes requests for his consultation around the globe pull him away, but the High Building is where he does his real research.

Asked about Cool himself, she can do nothing but heap praise upon him. Dr. Cool showed humanity the world, the universe, infinite worlds and realities. He revealed the infinite connections that every person has with versions of themselves. He revealed the immortality that comes with that awareness, with being able to extend consciousness beyond physical form. Who is more rightly revered than one who knows the ultimate truth and shares it with others? He is the Revealer of the Way.

Agent Blacktail appears in the office, after willing himself through the bubble.

They both manage to convince False Vicky to lead them to the High Building.

The Nuclear Reactor Lab#

Agents Locke, Myra, and Sentinel break into the IT Department building. Locke finds no evidence of PICKY EATER on servers or computer systems. Both she and Myra will themselves through the bubble into Cool’s world.

Agent Sentinel makes his way into the Nuclear Reactor Lab, managing to avoid the campus police and responding law enforcement. He succeeds by squeezing himself into the ventilation system, using the massage oil he always carries with him.

The Zann Aetherophone#

The High Building is an immense white tower that glitters with glass windows. It’s nestled between layers of gardens at the center of campus. As the Agents walk towards it, they pass statues of Wes Cool along the approaching promenade. Entire families pause at their favorites to gaze with wistful admiration or take photos. Security at the building seems draconian for an academic institution, but the eyes of the guards barely even track the students passing by, and the students themselves move as if extras in a film. No one takes any actions to impede the Agents headed towards the office on the top floor.

Inside, Agents find the most nicely furnished office and library they’ve ever seen. The bookshelves along the walls creep up three stories, latticed with beautiful wood balconies for perusal.

On a grand table in the center of the room rests the massive Zann Aetherophone, a coffin-sized contraption of bronze and iron with gold gears, copper wiring, and giant crystals. Calipers mounted to a gyroscope clutch a large prism located at the center of the device. A metal hand crank extends from one end.

Agent Myra slowly turns the crank.

The All-Is-One#

As the music of the abyss fades from the mind, vision returns. Light of no assignable color filters down from the sky, leaking into the eye from baffling, contradictory directions. The glow plays on stone and mist as if intelligent, as if alive.

Fog stirs a ground of unidentifiable stone shoals and impossibly large, shallow pools. Great masses of towering rock are disposed according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry. Their faces are carved in alien and incomprehensible designs.

Dr. Wesley Cool sits before another Zann Aetherophone. He stares dumbly at his hand on the crank, and it’s clear he stopped playing in unison with the song that brought the Agents. He looks confused, blinking slowly as if in a fugue or waking coma. On the other side of the golden contraption lays a tangle of gutted computer components. Uncountable motherboards and processors have fused with tidal rock. Wires weave over the surface like moss. They sink through cracks in the stone and run beneath the waterline, burying themselves into the black sands of the shallow salt sea.

Before Cool manages to utter a word, Agent Blacktail shoots him in the head, instantly killing him.

The Agents start destroying the computers and machines, until another figure appears atop one of the stone towers, standing on a gigantic hieroglyphed pedestal more hexagonal than otherwise. The figure takes shape slowly: a dim mist gathering at the peak, thickening into a sourceless shadow that darkens and softens rhythmically, an indistinct shape resolving into a dim figure in robes. The legs beneath a flowing garment stir to life and pick their way down the rockface, as graceful as a mountain goat or spider. It descends and sails towards the Agents, like a ship on the becalmed puddle that stretches towards every horizon.

The figure moves with head bowed. The five thick points rising from its ceremonial headdress seem to cleave air around them, leaving streaks of unnamable color behind their passage. There’s a shady hole where head would meet hood, and it might obscure a face. Otherwise, further anatomy is impossible to guess. The ill-defined shape implied beneath the folds of beige cloth leaves little certain.

The Choice#

The Shape intones in a voice that is not a voice, in words that have no form in the air and mist, that take shape in the mind.

“I am the Prolonged of Life, the Ancient One, the Watcher on High. I am He as a spark is the Sun that spawns all that burns.”

Agent Artemis#

Q: “Hunters and prey. Servants and nourishment. Slaves to a One that found the hunger of eternity. Have you come to glimpse, for a dying instant, the timeless scope of creation?” A:

Q: “Do you come then as a creature of Truth?” A: Yes.

Q: “Seek you then the freedom of a hunt never ending?” A: Yes.

Outcome: A World of Fangs

Agent Blacktail#

Q: “Flickering entities. Have you come to glimpse, for a dying instant, the timeless scope of creation?” A: No.

Q: “Creatures unknown to the Truth must strive betwixt madness and evil, lest they be ruled by twin tyrants. But where lies the border between madness and evil? It is madness to cross the threshold. It is evil not to seek the threshold. Which do you choose?” A: Madness

Outcome: The Shape reveals its true form. Yog-Sothoth.

Agent Locke#

Q: “Hunters and prey. Servants and nourishment. Slaves to a One that found the hunger of eternity. Have you come to glimpse, for a dying instant, the timeless scope of creation?” A:

Q: “Do you come then as a creature of Truth?” A: Yes.

Q: “Seek you then the freedom of a hunt never ending?” A: No, if freedom means a new master.

Q: What do you seek? A: Return to the reality I was born in.

Outcome: Return Home

Agent Myra#

Q: “Hunters and prey. Servants and nourishment. Slaves to a One that found the hunger of eternity. Have you come to glimpse, for a dying instant, the timeless scope of creation?” A: No.

Q: “Creatures unknown to the Truth must strive betwixt madness and evil, lest they be ruled by twin tyrants. But where lies the border between madness and evil? It is madness to cross the threshold. It is evil not to seek the threshold. Which do you choose?” A: Evil.

Q: “Perhaps this is a creature of Truth, after all. Seek you then the freedom of a hunt never ending?” A: Yes.

Outcome: A World of Fangs

Aftermath#

Agent Locke returns to her reality. She finds Agent Sentinel inside the Nuclear Reactor Lab building.

The app deletes itself from every device. Every piece of tainted hardware burns out and never works again. The same goes for any people or items dragged across bubbles. Circuits undiscovered by Agents disappear as if never installed in the first place.

Agent Blacktail sees the Guide awaken to its own ultimate, animating essence. Something older than the Shape it occupied, older than Earth, older than reality itself. The Gate to every world and the Key to every gate. His mind shatters and scatters across the infinities that is Yog-Sothoth.

Agents Artemis and Myra awaken in a world choking on the reek of meat, as if the ground itself were a grill sizzling all who cross it. The campus of MIT appears initially unchanged, but news stories playing on flat screens in the building lobbies and student union are bizarre and otherworldly. Big networks excitedly report on the latest research into the entropic predator that lurks unseen within the models of theoretical physics. “Experts” have named the force Bast, after the protective goddess of ancient Egypt. A yellow chyron reminds viewers that Bast acts upon causality through a so-called “Bast particle” in order to feed upon certain patterns of energy.

A screen within a screen shows split-second footage of some blurred ocean island with the title “Point Nemo Awakenings.” A tracker counts global suicides in the millions next to daily weather reports.

A baby cries somewhere. Under a faintly luminous mauve sky a billboard proclaims, “The First to Bast, the Rest to You.” A black collection truck is painted with icons, thin bald sexless people in black suits, sporting clawlike fingernails and smiling around sharp teeth: “Our Protectors.”

Boston proper is now hollowed out by a new lake. From its center rises a ziggurat where the firstborns are forged into new Teeth, isolated so few need hear their screams.

A passing woman, visibly pregnant, shudders at the sight. “I only hope it’ll be one of the Called,” she says quietly, a hand on her belly. “Not just bait.”

The Teeth have never felt more fulfilled or sated. They never return home.