Kill Your Darlings
The Director looked down on me exactly like the condescending deity he fancied himself to be. “Wherever you came from, you are now part of my universe,” he said. “And through occupying my spacetime, you have exerted a deleterious causal influence on my project. Therefore, I must sever you from my universe in the most efficient way I know how.”
Immediately, everything went quiet, cutting off the last breath of the Director’s sentence. My own breath cut off, too, as I involuntarily exhaled and found myself unable to take in another breath. My eyes fizzled, and I felt a pressure all over my body, as if I were getting squeezed by a giant fist. That’s when I realized.
The Director had removed all the air around me. I was in a vacuum, and I had only a few seconds before I lost consciousness.
I used the last gasp of oxygen running through my veins to sprint away, down the narrow alley between two bookshelves. A flicker in the space around me told me either my vision was failing or—as I suspected—the vacuum bubble was moving with me. The passage ended ahead of me in a T. If I zigged while the Director’s death bubble zagged…
I dodged to the right as my vision tunneled, and everything went black.
Except I didn’t dodge to the right, and by the time the Director caught up with my causal influence, fresh air rushed into my lungs. A second later, a deafening thunderclap split the air as the vacuum bubble collapsed, throwing me into a bookshelf at my side. A shower of books rained down on me, one of the books landing open, face-up.
I blinked away the shockwave, the words in the book staring up at me through the ringing silence plugging my ears.
I tore the bottom of the page free and shredded it to pieces.
The Director, still perched on the balcony above me, betrayed a hint of confusion. “How…”
“Your problem,” I explained, “is this library of yours, and your reliance on it. You think it contains all quantum states of our shared reality, and by mastering this library, you may exert influence on whatever universe Kelly came down from. You thought Kelly’s universe was the only universe above ours. But I bet you didn’t even know about the resets.”
“Resets?”
“I thought you were behind them at first, rewinding time by a few seconds, or pushing me into a parallel timeline, or whatever it is you do. But it seems like I was the only one aware of them. Not even Kelly knew when they’d happened. Which means someone was influencing him without receiving influence in return.”
“You don’t mean—”
“Yes,” I said. “There is a higher reality than even Kelly’s.”
