Dizzy and the others stood and listened as Basil, then Dana explained things — about the Vampire Nation, the various Covens, the Fa?ade, and now, the Civil War — with Mystikite occasionally interrupting them in order to explain how something pertained to either his or Jetta’s role, the topic of which seemed to greatly unnerve Jetta. The more they discussed it, the more uncomfortable she looked . . . and the more she seemed relieved that at least her role in things was over; she had brought the Chosen One into existence, and now Basil — and the others — presumed that Mystikite was the “Champion” spoken of in Les Orogrü-Nathr?ks’ Prophecy. Nonetheless, there came a point where she raised her and and asked what Mystikite thought was a really good question.

  “How do you guys know that he’s the Champion?” she asked. “I mean, for certain.”

  “Er, how do you mean?” asked Basil.

  “How do you know for sure that he’s the right guy? I mean, yeah, you have that analysis by your computer that points to me . . . but I could go and sire someone else in five years, or in ten minutes, and they could be the Champion who leads you forward. It doesn’t have to be Mystikite, here. It could be any Vampire that I Made, now or in the future, or that some other Covenless sired. Hell, I could pounce on Dizzy here — oh relax Diz, I’m not going to — and change her into a Vampire right now, and then she could be your Champion. Who knows, she might even do a better job of it.”

  “Gee thanks,” said Mystikite, rolling his eyes. “I feel so validated right now.”

  “And I feel really uneasy,” said Dizzy.”

  “I try, I really do,” said Jetta.

  “No,” said Basil, shaking his head. “I don’t — er, no. I don’t think that’s the case. You might scoff, but there is a reason it’s too late for that. You see, first of all, Mystikite fits the general parameters laid down by the Prophecy. That in itself makes him a candidate. But, think about those words: Chosen. One. Chosen — but by whom? By God, by Fate, by what, exactly? Ah, by us, eventually. You’re the one who fit the parameters closely enough whom we just happened to bump into at the right place and at the right time, and since we did, we — or perhaps Fate — ‘chose’ you. In other words, we’re now locked into a sequence of events that stars Mystikite as the Champion, even if originally, he was one of only several possibilities. For all intents and purposes, he has become — and now, always has been — the Champion, just as you have always been the Chosen One, the only one who can fulfill that destiny.”

  “Okay, that’s fucked up,” said Mystikite.

  “You can say that again,” said Jetta.

  “Okay, that’s fucked up.” He grinned at her.

  “Don’t make me smack you,” said Elphion, rolling her eyes.

  “Well, this is all very fascinating,” interjected Dizzy, “but what I don’t understand is what, exactly, you need from us. And speaking of which — speaking of us, both the people and the pronoun — Mystikite, listen: You need to decide if you’re on or off my special team. You can still be on it, if you want; you can split your time between that and your new Vampire allies, if you wanna. Or you can quit, save me a hundred grand a year, and go off and wander the World of Darkness with these guys and gals, if you wanna. But c’mon. Dude, money. To do what you love doing. Plus you get to do whatever you want with all of Mjolnir Propulsion’s cool computer science toys. Your decision, though, yo.”

  “C’mon dude,” said Gadget. “Don’t quit the team. Say you’ll stick around. For my sake, okay?”

  Mystikite started to respond, but then promptly closed his mouth, and instead sat and thought about things for a moment. What did he want to do? Nobody knew how long Vampires lived. Jetta had told him that. So had Basil. So no one knew if they lived forever, or not. All that anyone knew was that they lived a very long time, unless they die from some unnatural cause. So, there was that. What did you do when you had an eternity in which to do it? Maybe you did a lot of things. Being a hacker and a software engineer did bring him happiness; there was almost nothing he loved more than to dive into program code and immerse himself in logic and software objects, commands, stacks, and variables, to force the innards of the machine to make sense to one another, to forge a working system that did something productive from out of the chaos of interfaces and libraries buried in the development kits that came with a machine’s default operating system. No, there was little in life he loved more than that . . . unless, perhaps, it was leading a party of adventurers through a dungeon he or someone else had meticulously designed, one filled with traps, interlocking mysteries, artifacts, and creatures he had carefully selected and set up in advance, with non-player characters hiding behind certain doors and props, waiting to interact with the unsuspecting players. And of course, up until now, there had only been one other thing he had loved more than that . . . and that was Zoe. Buffy.

  He supposed he should’ve gone for that ordained minister she’d brought up earlier the night before. They could’ve been married by now, if he’d only done as she’d asked. Boy would things have been different if he’d simply done that, done what she’d wanted most from him. But that was all gone, now. She sat only about seven feet from him, on the room’s other bed . . . but it felt as though she sat a million lightyears away — unreachable, untouchable. So what did he want to do with eternity, now that the one person he had always wanted to spend it with wouldn’t be by his side for all of it? Was he just going to be a gray-hat hacker forever? Could he still work with Zoe, side-by-side, and not go apeshit crazy with simultaneous grief and desire? He cast his gaze up at Dizzy. He wanted to reply to her, but his mouth had gone dry. He swallowed, and licked his lips to wet them.

  “Is there — ” he began, but his voice cracked. He cleared his throat, frustrated. “Is there any way I can get back to you on that, Diz? Soon, I promise, but not just yet?”

  “I think you should go for it,” said Elphion, sitting next to him. “But it’s up to you.”

  “Um, sure,” said Dizzy. “But now back to my original question — Basil, what is it you need from me? From us? What sort of help can we be to a bunch of Vampires who’re stuck in some crazy civil war with their own kind? And besides — why should we help Vampires do anything? They basically see us as nothing but a food source to prey on. So why the frak should we help you? And yeah, there’s that bit about our two species being symbiotic, but I’m not sure I entirely buy that bit. No offense, but I kinda like being one of the living.”

  “Oh gee, thanks, none taken,” said Jetta, rolling her eyes.

  “The Simulacyrica,” said Mystikite, standing up from where he sat, ”create new Vampires by injecting our ‘new recruits’ with blood taken from pairs or threesomes of existing members, sort of like parents or genetic donors. They spend their un-lives taking a drug that reduces their need to feed, and they take another drug that keeps them immune to sunlight. When we do feed, we try to feed on animals, and if we ever do take a Human life, we try to make it some faceless evildoer who won’t be missed anyway. But we can do better than that. If, that is, Buffy can help us perfect the drug that controls the Thirst.”

  “What?” said Buffy. She pointed to herself. “Me?”

  “Yes, you,” said Basil. “Mystikite tells me you’re quite the biochemist.”

  “Well, I — ” She blushed. “I dabble.”

  “If you can do that,” he said, “then we can — all of us, or most of us — come to feed on synthetic blood . . . which Buffy can also help with, as her Physion Bio-Printer can be tuned to manufacture it. It won’t be a perfect solution, but it will help. Some. There will, of course, be those who balk at the very idea. I can look at your faces — ” He eyed Trazeal and Dana, standing behind hm. “ — And I can tell that some of you will never go for that. Because some of you relish the hunt, and you’ll want to go on killing regardless. Well, I can’t stop you; not all of you. But I can give those who want one an alternative to killing. Dizzy, Misto, Gadget — I’ll need your help with something else. We’ve explained that the Coven called Les Orogrü-Nathr?ks worship this thing, this ‘Eidolon’ whose ‘essence’ is somehow tangled up with the Earth’s. The Simulacyrica have built Coven Les Orogrü-Nathr?ks technology that allows them to actually commune with this . . . this thing. It’s — ”

  “Another of the Eidolon,” said Viktor. He shuddered. “Weatherspark, this can’t be a coincidence. The Eidolon are the race of creatures that Ravenkroft has contacted, the ones he is playing against the Zarcturean invaders. They’re what he’s trying to bring across from another dimension, to let loose upon the Earth! I’ve seen these creatures with my own eyes. In the NeuroScape. Ravenkroft showed me. That’s how he’s letting them into our universe . . . by way of subatomic, Planck-length dimensional portals in the Positronic Metacognitive Processor’s circuitry.”

  “Yes, hmm, troubling,” said Dizzy, nodding. “And if it is just a coincidence, Viktor, it’s a darned curious one, I’ll admit.”

  “Yes, and I cannot impart to you just how horribly dangerous what you’ve done is,” said Darmok, who had remained quiet throughout Basil and Dana’s lengthly exposition. “What this Ravenkroft person is doing is bad enough. And he must be stopped, yes. That is imperative. Especially since he carries within him the Zarcturean invader, and the Eidolon and Zarcturean are in league. But you — Dana Zulfridge — and your Covenspeople — long ago made a grave error of monumental proportions when you first decided to commune with this abomination . . . one that could affect the entirety of your world. One that could destroy you, and all life on this planet. What you’ve done, the ‘holy’ traditions you have built, must be undone, torn down, and I mean at once.”

  “But — but — “ began Dana, “Orogrü-Nathr?k . . . he watches over us! His dreams are the key to our future . . . we have been diligent in seeing that he is cared for — !”

  “You have been lucky!” said Darmok, her tone crisp and sharp. “That thing your worship is not a god! Do you hear me? It is not a god! It is an alien being, one that your Earth religion of Gnosticism calls the Demiurge, the False Creator, master of the material world and the chief antagonist against all that is purely spiritual. It is evil. You name it correctly, though — it is an Eidolon, a monster from beyond the rim of the material universe. My kind has fought against their influence in the Cosmos for many lifetimes now, many thousands of years, and I’ve come to this world seeking a member of one of the Eidolons’ child-races, a scout for an invasion fleet that, even now, is here, among us, even as we speak. It’s inside this Ravenkroft person, like I just said a second ago. And we must stop him from doing what he plans to do.”

  “Well,” said Mystikite, “what I was going to say was that Dizzy, Misto, Gadget — we need your help figuring out how to channel the power of Orogrü-Nathr?k without waking him. Basil’s built a device that we think will reach across dimensions and tap into the Elder God’s power, but there’s the danger that it will wake Him, and if it does . . .” He turned to Basil. “If it does, aren’t we all sort of screwed?”

  Basil started to answer but Viktor cut him off. “You have no idea. The short answer is ‘yes.’ The long answer is, ‘You have no idea what you will unleash on this planet.’ Right now, the Elder God known as Moolwrath-Akr?tosh is trapped within the human-hybrid form that calls itself Morganymuae, which used to be my darling Alicia. She is limited in what she can do. But Orogrü-Nathr?k is in his native form, if I understand what Darmok and Dana are saying. If he is unleashed in our four-dimensional universe . . . then dear God, the consequences . . . it doesn’t even bear thinking about! There won’t be a world left to save from the Zarctureans if that happens!”

  “Jeeze. The fun just never stops,” said Dizzy. “So if we take out Ravenkroft and thus the Zarcturean . . .”

  “Well, yes,” said Viktor. “If we take out Ravenkroft. If. But according to you and your friends, he’s now more powerful than ever.”

  “Let me worry about that,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “As you know, I have scores to settle with Ravenkroft. And I plan on settling them. With extreme prejudice. If we succeed in our mission, he won’t be able to bring over any Elder Gods. Because he won’t be alive to do so. But, anyway. Basil. A question. What will you do with the power of . . . uh, whatever-his-name-is . . . once you can channel it without waking him up? I mean, after all: You guys are Vampires. We’re Humans. In any sane universe, you’re the bad guys. Your kind kills our kind. Well, maybe not you, Mystikite . . . we know you, and stuff. But the rest of you? Oh hells yeah . . . your motives are totally suspect as frak. Thus, the question: What’re you gonna do with all that power? Nothing that helps Humans, I’d wager.”

  “We want to end this messy, costly Civil War that’s arisen within our ranks,” said Basil. “That’s what we do with it. We want to use it to wipe out Vynovich and the Coven Leaders who’ve joined his New Cabal. If we can do that, perhaps we can talk some sense into those who follow them, the Covens themselves . . . perhaps we can talk them into peace.”

  “Yeah,” said Buffy, standing up from where she sat, “and what happens then? What happens to us Humans once you — and all the other Vampires — have that kind of power on your side?”

  Basil was silent for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “I don’t know. I suppose we could agree to destroy the Gauntlet — and thus our access to said power — once we win the War. That would also destroy any access your friend Ravenkroft has to it, as well.”

  “He’s not our ‘friend,’” said Dizzy and Viktor at the same time. They exchanged a puzzled glance at one another and blinked at each other in surprise.

  “But you created one once,” said Gadget. “You could create one again. Right? And if you figured out how, someone else can, too.”

  “Now wait just one damn minute,” said Dana. “We would all have to agree to such a condition, and I’m not sure the rest of us are prepared to do that, Basil. We would have to confer. Call a Convocation.”

  “I agree,” said Trazeal. “The Gauntlet is a powerful technological artifact, one that would give us a way of keeping the other Covens in check if they agree to surrender to the rule of law and abandon their Civil War against us. We can’t just give it up for the sake of . . . Human insecurity.”

  “You’re forgetting,” said Misto, “that you need Dizzy’s help to maybe safely harness said power. Without her help, you can’t access the Gauntlet’s power without waking up the Elder God, who would wreak havoc on the planet — and on you, too. So there’s a solution, right there: Keep the Gauntlet, but leave the keys to it with us. Or with just Dizzy. Or, if you prefer, with just Mystikite. Let us keep the key to the Gauntlet’s power in escrow for you. That would satisfy everyone, wouldn’t it?”

  “It is a possible solution,” said Giova, folding her arms across her chest. “But how do we know we can trust you? I mean, after all — you people are Humans.” She gave a wry half-smile. “In any sane universe, you’re the bad guys. Your kind kills our kind. So, your motives are also suspect.”

  “Look, we have to start trusting each other at some point,” said Jetta. “We have to, or else we’re deadlocked. Basil, Dana, Trazeal. Listen. I don’t know about other Humans. But, trust me, these guys? Not your typical Humans. Not your enemies. In fact, if there’ve ever been any Humans who I’d trust with the secret that is the general weirdness of the truth about Vampires — the truth behind your whole ‘Facade’ thing — it’d be this group.”

  “And out of curiosity,” said Basil, arching an eyebrow at her, “why is that?”

  Jetta shrugged, and smiled at him. “Because when it comes to Humans, they’re as weird as it gets. Believe me.” She glanced at the others, smiled, and then said, in a fake New York accent and in her best “blackface” voice, “I’ve only been with the company for a couple of weeks . . . but I gotta tell ya . . . these things are real. Since I joined these men, I have seen shit that'll turn you white.”

  Gadget, Misto, and Mystikite cracked up laughing despite themselves. Dizzy grinned. Three of the vampires smiled as well. Buffy pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head. Mystikite chanced a look at Buffy, over by the other bed. She caught his glance, and stared back at him for a moment or two, their eyes lingering on each other. What had Gadget done to them a minute ago, exactly? He wasn’t sure. He knew that he had felt, for a few minutes, an enormous feeling of peace, love, and understanding, as though her heart had opened up to him completely, and he had, for just a brief moment, truly comprehended her every thought and emotion, every fiber of her being, of who she was as a person. And not just that . . . but how she felt about him, how she saw their relationship . . . Everything. And for that brief moment, he had understood it. Now, though, the knowledge was fading as quickly as it had come, and he found himself wondering: Had it even been real? He had also felt Elphion’s feelings: A raging torrent of hormones, and lust, and confused but sincere feelings of desire and curiosity, and an insatiable desire to understand him, to know him, and a longing so deep that it ached in her bones.

  “Speaking of the Gauntlet,” said Dana, turning to Basil, “where are Balthazar an Ripley? Shouldn’t they have at least checked in, or be on their way back, by now?”

  “Hmm, yes,” said Basil. “Good point. Let us see.” He took out his cell-phone, and dialed Ripley’s number. It rang. And rang. And rang. Basil frowned. “Uh oh. This . . . isn’t good. Dana, Trazeal — come with me. Quickly. Mystikite — will you and your friends be here, when we return?”

  Mystikite shot Dizzy a look. “Will we?”

  “Gee, will you?” said Gadget, his tone dripping sarcasm as he glared at him. Mystikite supposed he deserved that.

  Dizzy nodded. “We should be. We need to formulate a strategy for dealing with Ravenkroft and the alien, once and for all. And since Darmok is the one among us with the most alien-hunting experience and she had access to the best tech — I mean, hello, she’s an alien who’s fought these other aliens for a while now, and she has a whole ship full of tech we don’t have anything even close to — I thought we’d start by asking her what to do. Y’know, sort of a ’confer with an expert in the field’ kind of thing.”

  “Right, right,” said Mystikite. He turned to Basil. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re coming with us?” asked Basil. “But what about your friends?

  “I’m coming too,” said Elphion. She stood up and followed behind Mystikite. He thought he could feel the shift in the room’s temperature as Buffy rolled her eyes, even though she sat seven feet away.

  Basil grabbed the hotel room door by the handle, turned it, and pulled it open . . . only to discover — to everyone’s surprise — Balthazar, Vivacia, and Ripley, standing there on the other side, looking bloody and beaten, with Balthazar leaning on Vivacia for support, and with Ripley limping on one leg. Vivacia didn’t look any better. A small crowd of costumed con-goers — a guy in a T-rex costume, another guy in a Doctor Strange get-up, his arm around a Furry dressed as a vivacious fox, and two women, one dressed as Marvel’s Squirrel Girl and the other as Captain Marvel — stood clustered around the Vampires, as Vivacia tried to support Balthazar’s body weight. Ripley lurched into the room limping, barely able to help Vivacia support Balthazar’s bulk. Basil and Mystikite and Trazeal all moved to help; the two of them grabbed Balthazar and laid him out on the bed, and Dana and Trazeal saw to Ripley. She had a swollen black eye, a huge bleeding gash on her forehead, and bruises all up and down her face and arms; blood ran from her nose and a busted lip. Balthazar and Vivacia weren’t in any better shape. Balthazar’s face was cut in three places, as were his hands in several spots. He had bruises on his face, and his double-breasted suit was torn in places, with bruises and cuts showing beneath. Blood ran from Vivacia’s mouth and nose; her teeth looked bloody, as did her swollen eye, and blood ran from her scalp. She carried a cardboard box under her arm; it had blood spattered on it.

  “Jesus,” said Buffy, approaching them from the other side of the room. “What happened to them? Mystikite — Mystikite — go grab my med-kit. They need immediate attention.”

  “No, no time,” said Balthazar, almost choking, coughing and spitting blood. He rolled onto his side and spat out some more of it. “There is no time; I will be fine. We will be okay; we Vampires . . . heal very rapidly. Already, my scalp re-knits itself . . . back together. We were . . . ambushed. On our way back. Basil. Dana. Giova. They have it. They got the Gauntlet. They . . . they have it now.”

  “And Gnarl?” asked Giova. “What happened to him?”

  Ripley sat on the bed where Balthazar lay, wincing in pain. “He’s dead. They took him apart; he never had a chance. And Basil, they — ”

  “Damn them!” said Balthazar, as he grasped at a pain in his side. “Gnarl was a damned fine secretary. Impossible to replace! Oh, I’ll have their balls for this . . . those goddamn ruffians . . .”

  “What is it, Ripley?” asked Basil. “They — what?”

  “They have their own Geist-Verst?rkers. Their own psionic devices. Like ours. That’s how they managed to get the drop on us and hurt us so bad.”

  “Impossible,” said Basil. “There’s no way! Not this quickly! Someone must have stolen our design!”

  “I managed . . .” said Balthazar, “to save these.” He laid his hand on the cardboard box. Basil opened it, to find ten of the Geist-Verst?rker units, some with blood on them. “They had someone . . . and something . . . with them. A man in some sort of . . . mechanical suit — like that one — ” He gestured toward Dizzy. “Only with mechanical tentacles coming out of it. And a woman — or what used to be a woman — with him. She can fly. Or at least float. She has wings, and can do things, terrible things, with only her mind . . .”

  “Alicia,” breathed Viktor. “She’s here . . . with him . . .”

  “Ravenkroft,” said Dizzy under her breath.

  “The Zarcturean Visitor,” added Darmok. “Yep. They’re here. And apparently they have ties with this ‘New Cabal’ of Vampires. That’s a whole new level of disturbing.”

  “A-yup. I feel ya, soul-sistah,” said Dizzy.

  “So what’ll we do?” asked Gadget.

  “The only thing we can do,” said Dizzy, “is to go out that door, and track down Ravenkroft and the alien . . . Because apparently, if we do that, we also get our hands on Vampire enemies numerous-uno — Comrade Vynovich and his bloodsucking cronies. Things come to a sudden boil, we help get you guys your Conjuring Gauntlet back, you guys channel the power of Orogrü-Nathr?k — with a little help from moi and mis amigos aqui — and ka-pow, just like magic, bada-bing, bada-boom, you walk away with a Viktory for a united Vampire Nation and it’s Civil War mischief, managed. And hopefully, we rid ourselves of the Visitor and Ravenkroft in the process. If we can come up with a way to do that latter part. Here’s the deal, though, Dr. Wrothisbane: If we help you with your problem, you gotta help us with ours. The alien. We’ll need all the help we can get if we’re going to defeat it.”

  “Right,” said Mystikite, nodding. “I’ll be in the closet, cowering in fear. I will note that this is not an indicator of penis size. None whatsoever. In fact, it’s inversely related.”

  “We can use this to find them,” said Basil, handing Dizzy the Khaototronometer. “And you have my full support.”

  “Whoa, sweet!” exclaimed Dizzy after fiddling with the controls for a moment. “A genuine synchronicity sniffer! I so want a look at the blueprints later. May I?”

  “But of course,” said Basil. “Provided we survive all of this, that is.” He turned to his fellow Vampires. “And any objections? If she helps us, do we help her?”

  Trazeal exchanged lingering glances with Ripley and Dana, and Balthazar. He nodded at Trazeal, and the others nodded to him, as well. Balthazar turned to Basil. “Yes. Agreed. What exactly is involved in defeating this alien, though? Surely, physical prowess alone can’t overcome such a creature.”

  “Right you are,” said Dizzy. She sucked in a deep breath. “Which is why I’ve been thinking . . . we need a clear plan of attack. And I think I’ve come up with a real killer of an idea. To start with, we’ll need ourselves some parts. We’ll — ”

  Before she could begin, there came another knock at the door. Silence fell, and all eyes turned in that direction. Dizzy and Misto exchanged troubled glances, as did Basil and Dana, Mystikite and Gadget. Buffy and Jetta, as well. Buffy hefted the gravity-pulse weapon that Dizzy had given her earlier, her trigger-finger twitching. Viktor clutched his Lightning Gun close to his chest, and Jetta drew her Antimatter Gun and held it up and at the ready, creeping along the wall adjacent to the door. She looked at Dizzy as if for a “go” signal, but Dizzy held up her hand as though telling her, “No, not yet.” Gadget put two fingers near his temple and focused his eyes on the door in front of him. Basil, the closest, crept closer to the door, his eyes asking Dizzy what she wanted to do. The knock came again. Three knocks, in quick succession. Then shave-and-a-haircut.

  Curious, thought Mystikite. Everybody we know is already here. So who the hell could it be? Dizzy nodded to Basil, as though telling him “go for it.” Basil approached, grasped the door-handle, hesitated, then turned it and flung open the door.

  “What the blue blazes!” cried Viktor, his eyes wide, as he stared at what lay on the other side of the door.

  Basil and the others could only gape at what they saw. There, on the other side of the door, stood another Misto — in Human form, now — and another Dizzy. Gadget and Jetta did a double-take, and then a triple-take. Dizzy — the one in the hotel room, whom Basil had just spoken with — arched an eyebrow and frowned perplexedly at this new arrival, as did Misto — the tall, blue, furry one in the hotel room, with the muscles and wolfen features, not the Human one with chocolate-colored skin and wire-rim spectacles, who stood out in the hallway. The Dizzy in the hallway looked slightly older than the one in the hotel room, and she appeared to stand on two good legs as well, without need of the Evangeliojaeger. She wore a pair of black combat boots, grass-stained camouflage pants, a likewise-camouflaged halter-top, a black flak jacket, sunglasses, and a dark green beret. She had a pair of Interphase Pistols strapped across her hips, in the same manner as a gunslinger in an old western might’ve worn a pair of six-guns. Beside her, this version of Misto also looked a bit worse-for-the-wear. He wore a pair of ripped, stone-washed XXL blue-jeans and a blue chambray shirt, and had lost a lot of weight — and put on muscle in its place. His afro, the hairs in it a bit taller and longer, frizzier, had grey shoots running through it, and his wire-rimmed spectacles had gotten a tad thicker in the lenses department. Age-lines stood out on his face, sharper crows’-feet at the corners of his eyes. All in all, he seemed more sober and serious a man than their version of Misto did, a man with grave concerns on his mind. He carried a large, black duffel bag that clanked and clinked inside. Basil simply stood there, gawking at them, holding the door open, almost unable to process what he saw.

  “If my calculations are correct,” said the Other Misto, the one on the hallway side of the door, “then this is a bad time for us to show up. But it’s probably the absolute best time we could’ve picked, all things considered. A crucial, critical moment.”

  “True dat,” said the Other Dizzy. “Magna-flux it and stick me to it, even. Hello Basil. How’s it hangin’? Please don’t say ‘short, shriveled, and a little to the left.’”

  “Er, I — uh — ah — ” began Basil, the look he knew he must’ve worn on his face made of equal parts confusion and bewilderment. “How . . .”

  “Time travel, babe,” said the Other Dizzy. She lowered her sunglasses and winked at him. “That’s how. Courtesy of technology that Viktor here has shared with us . . . Thanks, Vic. Your alliance with us paid off in ways we never expected.”

  “Er, you’re . . . welcome?” said Viktor. He raised an eyebrow. “Though I’m curious . . . How the blazes did you manage to perfect physical time travel? My machine only shuttled consciousness, and — ”

  “Never mind that just now,” said Future-Dizzy. “We have work to do.”

  “Where — no, when — the frak did you come from?” asked Now-Dizzy, the one in the hotel room already, stepping forward. “Are you from the Future? I mean, I guess you’d have to be, right? I see I — we — got my — er, our — legs back under me — I mean, er, us — at some point.”

  “Yes, we did — but I’ve no time to explain how.” Future-Dizzy shook her head and spoke in a hurried, pressured fashion as she and Future-Misto stepped into the room. “Listen to me, all of you. I’m from what is, for you, one possible Future, one that gets more likely every second that I’m here and things don’t change. I know what’s about to happen. There’s a reason I picked this specific date and time to journey back to. In the Future I’m from, the plan Dizzy is about to describe doesn’t work. You don’t destroy the alien tonight when you go up against it; the giant experiment you’re about to attempt fails. The Zarcturean mother ship arrives in several hours, and the invasion begins. There’s no early warning. No envoy, no vanguard; they just come at us, full-force in their warships, and set about colonizing the place as fast as they can blast the world’s governments and infrastructure into ruins, setting the whole planet back about two hundred years in one day. Ten years from now — that’s when we’re from — there is a resistance movement . . . but it’s not going well. There’s precious little hope left, and not much left worth fighting for. I’m the leader of our cell — or what’s left of our cell — because, to be honest, some of you . . . some of you don’t make it. I won’t say who does or doesn’t. That’d just demoralize you. It’d freak you all out, bring you down, and that’s the last thing any of you — any of us — need right now. I’ve come back in time only as a last-ditch effort to try and help us defeat the invasion before it can happen, and I’ve brought some things I think might help. Granted, there are no guarantees that any of this will work — at all. You could go out there and the alien could still cause Gadget’s brain to blow like a hamster in a microwave. But hey — I at least had to try, right? I had to at least try.”

  Now-Dizzy and the others just stood there looking gobsmacked for a moment. Gadget didn’t blame them. He himself was fairly gobsmacked. Actual time-travel. His boyhood dream come true at last. He had so many questions he wanted to ask them both. So much he wanted to know. But from what she had said, it seemed the future was a less-than-hospitable place. But what about the past? If it was possible to change the past, then he could use their technology go back . . . and save his father. Or — wait — why stop there? So many tragedies of the twentieth century could be avoided, completely side-stepped. So many wrong turns in history could be set right, so many horrible calamities averted. The Holocaust, the Cold War, slavery, Apartheid, Nine-Eleven, Rwanda . . . the list went on and on. And they were using it — wasting it — on this? This seemed so minor by comparison, so late in the game to be changing things. It almost made him angry with them. They had an opportunity here to fundamentally alter the human paradigm away from atrocity and cruelty and mistake after mistake, and they were blowing it on intervening in this late-in-the-game sort of change. How could they?

  Then again . . . from their Future’s perspective, this was where it had all gone wrong. This was the moment, they had probably calculated, when things had truly gone to shit. So if they could journey back here, to this one moment and change the way things played out, maybe their future still stood a chance of being a happy one. It was an enormous risk to take . . . but no bigger a risk to take than traveling back and killing Hitler, he supposed.

  “So what’s in the bag?” asked Now-Misto. “I’m thoroughly confused as to how whatever’s in there is not going to just disappear in a puff of logic as soon as you two disappear in a puff of logic as soon as you successfully influence history and we thus find out for sure if we win or not before we actually do.”

  “That would be my question as well,” said Gadget.

  “I second that question,” said Viktor. “My own efforts at changing history were always unsuccessful. As if there existed a ‘history defending force’ in the universe that stood against my efforts, blocking me somehow from changing anything.”

  "Goddamn it,” said Mystikite. “I hate time travel. Hate. It. Especially whenever they mess with it on Star Trek, like they did on Deep Space Nine all the time. And that thing they did on Babylon 5, where they stole Babylon 4 and sent it back a thousand years into the past . . . and Sinclair turned into you-know-who. That made my head hurt. A lot. Now we get to wrestle with the same exact conundrums as they did, and lots of weird verb tenses and awkward grammatical constructions, too. Just fucking perfect.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Ah, the Six-Demon Bags!” annunciated Future-Dizzy. She hoisted the large duffle that Future-Misto carried onto the unoccupied bed, and unzipped it, reached inside, and for her first trick, produced what looked like a large, leather-bound sketchbook about roughly four hundred pages thick. On the front cover, someone had glued together several metal pieces in order to form the symbol for the “Deathly Hallows” — one of the plot MacGuffins from the seventh Harry Potter novel, a circle inscribed inside a triangle, with a line drawn down the middle — but had gone an extra mile and had inscribed what looked like tiny mechanical parts into the circle, as well as beneath the triangular part. Future-Dizzy handed the weighty tome to Gadget. “Here,” she said, slamming it up against his chest. “Gadget dear, meet your future magnum opus: ‘Another Philosophy of Time Travel & Bridges To Alternate Realities,’ by Terry Anders, Ph.D.”

  “Say what . . . ?” replied Gadget, and opened the book and flipped through the pages. It was all his handwriting, alright; no doubt about that. Pages upon pages of dense mathematical notation and electronic schematics; some even featured symbols he didn’t recognize. He saw where his future-self had scribbled notes in the margins, and had written paragraphs of text littered with exclamation points and coffee-cup stains. His future-self had also put little yellow Post-It notes beneath several of the geometric figures he’d sketched, some of them featuring tiny illustrations of their own. Arrow-headed lines ran to and fro in the text, linking one part to another, and sometimes, it looked as if someone had torn out pieces of graph paper or college-ruled paper from some other notebook and had pasted them into this one. It was a mess; it could only have come from him. He licked his lips, and said, thinking carefully, “So. I write this. In the future.”

  “Fascinating,” said Viktor. “An ontological paradox.”

  “Right,” said Future-Dizzy. “About five years from now, after the invasion, you write this, Gadget. Go on — read my mind. You have my permission. In fact, share what you find there with everyone here. Go on, go for it.”

  “Uh, okay . . .” Gadget concentrated, and put two fingers to each of his temples, narrowing his eyes and focusing only on Dizzy, and trying to concentrate on the idea of everyone around him seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt. Then, it happened. Buffy sucked in a tense breath, as did Darmok and Misto, and he — and they, presumably — began to see images form in their minds’ eyes: A whole world of sights, sounds, and smells unfolded before them . . . and they weren’t good ones. He and the others all saw the Federal Building in downtown Boston shattered and in flames; lines of abandoned, burnt-out husks of cars scattered along the side of cracked, abandoned highways; they smelled the smoke and the burnt rubber, felt the heat of the flames and felt the desolate wind on their faces. People, ragged and in handcuffs chained with arcs of light, their heads bowed, their faces dirty, lining up before factories, the smokestacks belching out pungent, green smoke. And the ships . . . dear gods . . . the starships of the alien creatures, hanging there in the clouds like massive daggers of blackened crystal dotted with shards of bright, violet light. Shadows of tentacles crawled across demolished brick walls; children cried for their parents as tentacles wrapped around their arms and drug them away. And images of . . . Dizzy, and Misto, and . . . Mystikite? And . . . himself? Gadget blinked in surprise; he almost didn’t recognize himself; the version of him in this vision looked . . . well, older than he should have, judging by Future-Dizzy’s apparent age. Hardened, with a nasty battle-scar running down his face from just below his left eye. It was night; the moon shined brightly in the sky, the flickering streetlamp above cast them all in sharp relief. He and the others were all dressed in ragtag clothing and bits of camouflage, armed with Dizzy’s Interphase Pistols, all charging at three of the aliens down an alleyway. Dizzy shouted something; it sounded like “Banzai!” One of the Zarcturean grabbed Buffy in its tentacles. She screamed, and then —

  The images before him and the others dissolved, and reality reasserted itself. Gadget swayed on his feet as the two Dizzys and Mistos all came back into focus. Buffy grabbed and steadied him, grasping the edge of the bed to avoid falling. His stomach lurched, and he felt sick for a moment. Dear gods, if that was the future . . . what was even the point of living through this? What was the point of even trying?

  “Relax,” said the Future-Dizzy. “What you just saw in my head . . . It doesn’t have to happen that way. In fact, that’s why I’m here. To make sure my whole timeline gets rewritten.”

  “But — the history-defending force — ” began Viktor. “It will stop you. It’s — ”

  “Is a myth,” said Dizzy. “It doesn’t exist. Your were unsuccessful because of your method of time travel. Shunting your consciousness back and forth along your own worldline is doomed to fail because you always replace yourself and foul up your own memory stream. Always ruins causality.”

  “But doesn’t your bringing the book . . . back to me now . . .” said Gadget, “doesn’t that sort of raise the question of ‘where the fuck did it actually come from?’ Because if you’re giving it to me now, but I’m not supposed to write it until later on, then who’s to say that when the time comes, I don’t just hand this copy of it right back to you, and then you bring it right back through time and then give it right back to me again. Thus, it has no beginning or end. It has no origin point in spacetime. It becomes a complex, intelligence-requiring loop that just . . . sort of . . . ‘happened’ . . . all on its own.”

  “Because that’s not actually what happens,” said Now-Misto, piping up. “I’ve studied time-like curves, manifold time-structures like this one . . . only in theory up ’til now, but still . . . The version of the time continuum wherein Dizzy gives you the book, and then you give it back later on, and then she gives it to you all over again, ad nausea . . . all that takes place in a separate, self-contained, temporal M?bius causality-loop that branches off the spacetime continuum after the point at which the book was initially, actually created, and that merges back into the spacetime continuum after the circle is first complete, but that also remains tangent to our universe, lived-out again and again forever by the versions of ourselves trapped inside it . . . though they never know the difference, because to them, their conscious experience always escapes the loop after the first cycle is over. From their point of view, they always become us eventually.”

  “Y’see?” said Mystikite, running his hands through his hair. “This kind of shit is exactly why I said I fucking hate time travel! This kinda thing, right here! I should not have to think this hard about anything! It’s not natural, I tell you! goddamn it, it’s just not natural!”

  “But it is natural,” said Viktor. “Time travel is a built-in feature of the universe. If it didn’t allow for it, space and time would not work the way they naturally do. It’s our minds that are limited. It’s us that aren’t meant to travel in time, not the natural order of the universe. We’re the limited ones, not the universe itself.”

  “I had a feeling you’ll need this book,” said Future-Dizzy. “Not just for this epic battle, but in the future beyond it — whatever that may bring — as well. I mean, hey, it can’t hurt, right? And oh yeah — you’re basically holding the roughest of rough-drafts of what eventually became your doctoral thesis, G-man. So be careful and don’t lose any of it; you’ll need it when the time comes! Now, then. Listen up, all of you. Here’s the plan. Here’s how you defeat the Zarcturean, as well as the Elder Gods that Ravenkroft plans on releasing from their crystal, interdimensional prison.

  “First, you need this.” She reached into the bag she’d brought, and pulled out what looked like a large plastic case. She opened it and unfolded it to either side, revealing what looked like a multi-piece toolkit, its various, strange-looking pieces stuck in several receptacles and recesses. Next to that, she sat down another plastic case, and lifted off its lid. It was full of parts — they looked vaguely like electronics parts, only like nothing Basil had ever seen on Earth before — some of which glowed and pulsed with an eerie, otherworldly light. Finally, she took out a NeuroBand headset, and set that beside the other two cases. “This,” she said, “is what you need in order to take the Twizion Particle Emission System from Darmok’s Thought-Transilience Transmission-Amplification Device — which is part of her space helmet — and integrate it into Gadget’s Mind-Weirding Helm, along with this NeuroBand headset, the temporal-lobe oscillators of which you need to integrate — specifically — into the temporal longitudinal wave-injectors of the Helm.”

  “Okay, question,” said Gadget. “What the hell are Twizion Particles?”

  “Seconded,” said Now-Misto, raising his hand.

  “Twizion particles,” began Darmok, “are difficult to explain. The Emission System works like this: It contains a rare crystalline substance called Twiziontonium — which, if you shoot a stream of intermediate vector-bosons into it — produce lots of these things called Twizion particles. They’re short-lived particles that can’t be found in normal Baryonic matter. They’re only found in something you’d probably call — to use your species’ scientific nomenclature — exotic ‘strange’ energy. Not normal, everyday ‘strange energy’ . . . but ‘exotic strange energy.’ They’re the only particle in the Standard Model — well, the Shyphtorilaen Standard Model, at least; your species isn’t quite there yet — that mediates the property we call ’reality.’ That is, they’re like what you call bosons: like your gluons, photons, or gravitons . . . but they don’t mediate a physical force. Instead, in a fashion similar to the particle you call the Higgs boson, and its endowment of the property you call mass, Twizion particles mediate the transitive property of realness, of being-thereness, of a thing’s reality, in and of itself. They’re what make reality real. And what’s even more exciting is that the living consciousness of sapient beings affects their properties! Just take a step back and let that sink in for a minute, there, Mr. Nobel-Prize-winning physicist. My Thought-Transilience Transmission-Amplification Device is unstable because it injects Twizion particles directly into the brain, enabling me to control the four fundamental forces — and therefore the fabric of spacetime — and therefore the quantum vacuum — within a certain radius of my body and for a limited amount of time. One must use it sparingly, though . . . ‘cause the only trouble is, one day it’ll kill you if you keep using on it. And no, I don’t know how long, nor how many more injections I’ve got . . . so don’t bother asking, Misto.”

  “So using it could also kill Gadget,” said Buffy. “You admit that’s a risk.” She turned to Future-Dizzy. “Right?”

  “Well, my plan only involves him using them once,” said Future-Dizzy. “Anyway. As I was about to say. The book I gave Gadget — Another Philosophy of Time Travel — contains the blueprints and instructions on how to integrate the Twizion Particle system into Gadget’s Mind-Weirding Helm. After that, you have to track down Ravenkroft to wherever he and the alien are hiding-out. Then you — Gadget — find a way to mind-meld with him, using the Helm. Once you have a telepathic connection, your Helm — which you’ll wire to Dizzy’s Electro-Mesmeric Guitar; again, the circuits are described in the book — will do the rest, so long as Dizzy plays the right chords . . . which will cause the Visitor’s mind to open itself to the telepathic network that connects it, instantaneously, to all the other Zarctureans, anywhere and everywhere in the universe. Then, Dizzy will further use the Guitar to shred the fabric of their minds. All of them. All at once, obliterating their entire species. It will be genocide, yes, but it will work, and it will save the Earth. Doing this will also kill the alien that’s taken up residence inside Ravenkroft. And when it dies, chances are, the shock to his system will kill him, as well. So there go several problems, all solved all at once. He can’t release any more of the Eidolon if he’s dead.”

  “Dizzy, I dunno,” said Gadget, hesitating, weighing his words. “I mean . . . genocide? That’s a bit . . . out there, isn’t it? I mean — really? Is that really necessary?”

  “Yeah, I second that,” said Jetta. “Genocide. Is that really what we’re about, now? Wiping out an entire species?”

  “I’m — I’m sorry,” said Buffy, shaking her head. “But I can’t be a part of that. No way. I just . . . I can’t.”

  “No, you can and you will,” said Mystikite.

  “Excuse me?” said Buffy. “Did you just fucking order me to do something? I think fucking not!”

  “Oh, this is not good,” muttered Viktor.

  “Look,” said Mystikite, “let’s be real here. They’re a space-faring, conquering civilization. They have technology that outstrips ours by a thousand years or more. Maybe even ten thousand. And they’re on their way here, to rip the planet out from under us and turn us into their slaves. All of us, no exceptions. And kill the rest of us, or anyone who fights back. And we’ve got one chance — one chance — of stopping them! Just one! And it involves killing all of them, or none of them. I say we line ‘em up in our crosshairs and take the fucking shot. While we can. You’ve got a better idea? Put it on the fucking table. But for right now — this is the plan. And we’re the only ones who can implement it, because we’re the only ones who know that it’s real, and that it’s actually happening.”

  “I hate to say it, Buffy,” said Elphion, “but — “

  “You can shut your little cake-hole!” said Buffy. “Right now!”

  “Hey now,” said Mystikite. “That wasn’t called for. She just said — ”

  “I know what she ‘just said.’ Didn’t take you very long to find someone who’d ‘just say,’ either, did it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know goddamn good and well what it means.”

  “Could everybody PLEASE just shut the fuck up!” cried Gadget, putting his hands over his ears, his face scrunched into a pained grimace. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Everyone did, and then they all turned and looked at him. “Guys, please!” he yelled. “C’mon! Social anxiety sufferer, here! Too much input! Too much stress! Stop! Please, just stop! We’re getting nowhere here! Obviously, there are strong opinions on both sides of this issue . . . but can’t we just calm down and be reasonable with each other?”

  “I don’t see how sitting here singing ‘Kumbaya’ is going to save our asses,” said Mystikite, folding his arms in front of him, his chest puffed out a bit. “We need to do this. We need to kill them — all of them. Now.”

  “I’m with him,” said Darmok. “You have no idea how deeply the Zarctureans — and the Eidolon — do not share your preoccupation with the preciousness of life. They really don’t. They really . . . really . . . don’t. Take it from me. The Children of the Eidolon serve cruel masters, and they themselves are twisted inside, so much so that even their souls have sharp points.”

  “And what then?” asked Buffy. “What happens after we murder an entire alien race? Do we just go on living our lives with that weighing on our conscience?”

  “I dunno about you, but if I shot somebody while they tried to take my home away from me,” said Now-Misto, “then my conscience would be pretty damned clean. I suggest we take a vote. Whoever says we should wipe out the Zarctureans — all of them, everywhere — raise your hands.”

  Now- and Future-Misto, Now- and Future-Dizzy, Darmok, Mystikite, Gadget, Basil, Giova, Ripley, Trazeal, Balthazar, and Viktor all raised their hands. Buffy and Jetta did not. Vivacia raised her hand, as did Razor and Bryce. Gnarl did not.

  “It’s decided, then,” said Viktor, suddenly piping up. “We destroy the aliens, all of them all at once. And we kill Ravenkroft in the bargain. Two birds, one stone. I can’t speak for everyone, but my conscience, at least, will be clear.”

  “Dude, Viktor,” said Mystikite. “Don’t make me have stuff in common with you. It’s not cool. But yeah. It looks like we’re decided. We end the aliens.”

  “I won’t participate,” said Buffy.

  “And if she doesn’t,” said Jetta. “I won’t.”

  “Well then you’re fired, both of you,” said Now-Dizzy, her face grim and serious — a look that Mystikite had to admit he had never seen her wear before. “You’re off the team,” she said. “Gimme back my Gravity-Pulse Cannon and Antimatter Gun, submit for immediate Neuralization, and then you can leave the room. If that’s what you want.“ She stepped closer to Buffy, until the two of them were almost nose-to-nose, their eyes locked, both of them red in the face and each with their eyes locked onto the other’s. “Is that what you want, Zoe?”

  “I want,” said Zoe, “for you to listen to me. How do we know the Zarctureans are all like what she says they are?” She gestured toward Darmok. “How do you know there aren’t poets and scholars and brilliant engineers among them? How do you know that they wouldn’t want to share their ten thousand years’ worth of technological advances with us, if only we could convince them that we’re worth sharing with? How do you know we couldn’t peacefully accommodate settlers from their world, without the need for them to stage an invasion? Diplomacy is always a better option than the brutality of straight-up murder, Dizzy.”

  “Fools!” said Darmok. “Diplomatic fools! You know nothing of these . . . these monsters! I have an idea. Gadget. Your Mind-Weirding Helm. It will allow you to share what you experience telepathically with others, right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “Tell you what,” said Darmok. “Try this. I hate to ask you to do such an unpleasant thing, but . . . reach out with your mind and see if you can touch the mind of the Ravenkroft-Zarcturean hybrid . . . look into its memories, its emotions, its thoughts . . . and see if you can share what you find there with your friends Buffy and Jetta, here.”

  “Um, okay,” he said. “Here, Buffy. Jetta. I think this will help.” He extended his hands.

  Buffy took one, squared her shoulders, and held her nose in the air. “Alright, fine. After all — if I’m right, I’ve got nothing to be afraid of. We’ll just see who’s correct, here; centuries of alien prejudice, or an open, Human mind. You may proceed when ready, Gadget.”

  Jetta took his other hand. “Sign me up, too. I may be a Vampire, but that doesn’t mean I can’t protest the idea of wiping out an entire civilization. Let’s do this.”

  Zoe closed her eyes as she held hands with Gadget, and felt a tingling where their skin touched. Behind her eyelids, splotches of color exploded and cascaded here and there, the after-image impressions of the room around her gradually fading into incoherent blobs of light and shadow as there, in her mind’s eye, she saw it — the alien, the Zarcturean — alive and inside Ravenkroft. It lifted its head, sensing her nearness, her presence.

  As it cast the gaze of its compound eyes upon her, she felt something happen . . . In the pit of her stomach, a feeling of dread and despair began to gnaw at her, as though all hope and light had suddenly started to bleed out of her in squirting, swirling clouds of black ink that threatened to instantly drown her if she inhaled any of it . . . but it flowed all around her, suffusing whatever aether she found herself struggling to swim through. It felt sticky, smooth, and thick, this aether, like swimming through syrup; the inky clouds of blood leaking from her — draining away all happiness or any thought or memory of joy — floated in the aether like sculptures made of smoke, as the alien creature drifted closer to her, its feelers and tentacles reaching toward her.

  In that instant, she knew that if it touched her, she would die; it would put its feelers on her skin, and at their touch, her skin would slough off her bones and muscles like that of a leper, exposing the blood and sinew beneath, and she would scream . . . and when she screamed, she would inhale the inky clouds, the aether around her, and drown in them. She began to panic as it grew closer. And closer. And closer still, its gaze still fixed on her. And then, she chanced a look around herself, to see that it wasn’t alone. It slithered all around her, everywhere, a thousand clones of the alien — no, a hundred thousand of its clones — all heading straight toward her, ready to welcome her with their deadly embrace. She tried to swim away, but they came at her from all sides, relentless. And just as one of them reached out for her with its feelers, less than inches away —

  She blinked, and the scene changed: Now, she floated in space, above the Earth. And there, appearing in orbit around the Earth, she saw one of their ships: A saucer-shaped craft with plasma-filament-lighted hemispheres glued to its top and bottom. At first, it sat there alone. Then, another came. And then, two more. Then three and four more. Soon, the ships surrounded the planet, these magnificent, silvery saucers from an alien world. And creeping up behind the Earth, to overshadow all of these ships — and the Arctic Circle of the planet itself — came the big one, the Mothership.

  Over three thousand miles wide — so enormous that it had its own gravitational field; it began ripping up chunks of the ice below it as it came into view — it loomed over the planet like a tremendous female spider tending to one large egg containing a countless number of young. The ship looked much like a large umbrella or tree, with a large dome of black, reflective material stretching over a bulbous, cylindrical center piece, which exploded into tentacle-like “roots” of metal as it progressed along its own length. Lights dotted its surface, and a barrage of explosive lightning bolts arced between the ends of the root-like nodes, no doubt part of its reactionless propulsion system.

  Zoe’s head suddenly filled with pictures and scenes, as though cut together from a horror film: A scene of Human beings — their heads hung low, their spirits broken, tattooed numbers on their faces and arms — dressed in gray prison garb and marching under the watchful compound eyes of Zarcturean guards. Another scene: Women, men, even small children whipped with long leather thongs by their Zarcturean masters, the bloody gashes on their backs testament to the regularity of the beatings.

  A disgusting shudder of joy — from the mind of the Zarcturean as it thought of this and the thought passed to Buffy, making her feel sick to her stomach — and then came another scene: An old man, sitting in an interrogation room, chained to a wooden chair, with an alien interrogator standing before him, his eyes bloodshot and his head bent backward as he grimaced in pain, while the silent alien interrogator touched its tentacle-like fingers to his temple — Mind-Rape, pure Psychotronic Warfare. Blood issued from Gadget’s nose and he cried out in agony, his back arched.

  Buffy started to run to him, to comfort him, but the scene dissolved, and she saw a new one: A little girl, covered in ashes and blood, sitting in a fetal position in a corner, her eyes wide, wild, and feral, rocking back and forth as someone injected her with something from a med-kit, the shadows on the wall behind them leaping with tentacle-shapes.

  The scene dissolved, and she saw things from a new vantage point, atop the roof of a tall building, overlooking the devastated wasteland of what was once New York City. Crumbling buildings against a crimson sky and a deep scarlet horizon; plumes of flame reaching toward the sky; the burned out husks of decimated skyscrapers, the abandoned ruins of thousands of cars packing the streets; the bodies lying everywhere, all over the place, smelling of rot and putrid lividity; the shapes of those evil saucers, floating in the sky and slowly spinning, as Zarcturean forces patrolled the streets, looking for surviving Humans that they could round-up, capture, and enslave. She felt the Zarcturean’s overweening pride in itself, its pride in its heritage, its pride in their accomplishments, and its excitement at the prospect of a new home for his race, his people’s conquest of these “savages” and his smug, superior arrogance at how the “apes’ primitive technology” had been no help to them during the “war,“ which had truly only lasted about fourteen minutes once their ships had arrived.

  Buffy felt sick again and almost vomited as the alien’s memories and its thoughts about the “weakling” Human race and its own race’s “genetic superiority” washed over her and as it thought of how “Ravenkroft Ravenkroft, that singularly useful Human, would’ve appreciated the skill with which their scientists managed to keep the specimens alive even while extracting their most useful internal organs.”

  Dammit, it appeared Misto and Mystikite were right.

  Fuck these alien assholes.

  Zoe and Jetta let go of Gadget’s hands. Zoe just stood there for a moment, trembling and breathing heavily, as the room reintegrated itself around her. Her eyes grew wide and her face drooped in an expression that conveyed an empty, hollowed-out feeling of pain and torment. Jetta looked the same, her face contorted into a grimace of confusion and horror. Zoe just shook her head, and turned to Darmok and Now-Dizzy.

  “Okay, so I was wrong,” said Buffy. “Kick the fucking crap out of them. And yes, I’ll help.”

  Jetta nodded. “Agreed. I didn’t think . . . then again, I didn’t know. They are irredeemable. We don’t have a choice.”

  “No,” said Future-Misto, “we don’t. We have to kill them all. Their invasion fleet will be here in less than a couple of hours. If we don’t strike at all of them, all at once, Earth doesn’t stand a chance. And as far as the Elder Gods go . . . yeah, those fuckers need to all be taken out, if you ask me. Or at least sealed-off from our four dimensions, so they can never come back.”

  “Thank the gods someone listens to me!” said Viktor. “Thank you, Michaelson!”

  “I have other gifts for the rest of you,” said Future-Dizzy. “Things that will help ensure that you’re Viktorious. Here.” She reached into the duffle bag and pulled out a small contraption that looked like a center-pin fishing reel connected to a spool of white, stringy material. “This is basically Spiderman webbing. Web-shooter stuff. Web-material. You get the idea. It has the tensile strength of reinforced steel, but the lightness of aluminum foil. And it’s sticky. You point it like so — ” She held it with the reel-wheel pointed to the side. “And push this button — ” She showed them the red switch on the side of the reel. “And viola!” The thing shot out a blast of sticky, gooey string that hit the wall and stuck there, and dangled between the wall and the reel. She then flicked the switch the other way, and the reel cut the string in two. It fell to the floor. “Whew,” she said. “Housecleaning is gonna have a bitch of a time cleaning that up.” She set the reel down on the bed, and reached into the duffle bag again, and this time pulled out a small black rectangular device that looked very much like —

  “A hard drive?” asked Mystikite.

  “Yep,” said Future-Dizzy. “An SSD, filled with calculations and notes, designs and ideas, and a whole new paradigm in NeuroScape software, designed to plug into the NeuroBand Headset once you’ve integrated one into Gadget’s Mind-Weirding Helm, along with the new Twizion Particle system. I can’t say much more without ruining it, except to say that it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever programmed. Its your piece de la resistance. Your masterpiece. The crowning achievement of your life as a hacker. It took you ten years to create what’s on this drive, and if it winds up working . . . doing what it’s supposed to do . . . well . . . it’ll not only change future history, it’ll change the world from this point on in other ways, too.”

  “Gee,” said Mystikite, “thanks . . . i guess. I wonder, though — could you possibly be more vague?”

  “I could,” said Future-Dizzy, “but I prefer to remain at my current level of ambitious but unspecific description.

  “Ah,” said Mystikite. “I see. Carry on, then.”

  “I just love her sense of humor,” said Now-Dizzy. “It’s just so . . . me.”

  “Well, that’s really about it,” said Future-Dizzy. “I’ve given you the plan — now you lot have to implement it. Make it happen. It’s up to you to — ”

  “But what about Basil and the Vampires?” asked Mystikite.

  “Say what?” said Future-Dizzy.

  “What about Basil,” said Mystikite, “and me and Elphion, here? And the Vampire Nation? What happens to that in the Future you’re from? How does that all work out?”

  Future-Dizzy regarded him a pained expression of sympathy. “It doesn’t, Mystikite. In my future, you’re one of the last free Vampires on Earth. All the others have been either killed, or the Zarctureans and Eidolon have rounded them up and caged them.”

  “Dear God!” breathed Basil. The others exchanged worried looks. “All of us?”

  “Well, not all of you,” said Future-Dizzy. “Some — “

  “But how?” asked Trazeal.

  “What about the rest?” asked Balthazar.

  “They’re kept as . . . well, as pets and lab animals,” said Future-Dizzy, “and allow them to feed only to control the human population. I’m sorry, but that’s how it’s worked out, where I’m from.”

  “Jesus,” whispered Ripley. She turned to face Basil and gripped his arm. “Basil, we have to help them stop this future from happening. We have to.”

  “I know,” he said, and put his hand over hers. “And we will.”

  “Originally,” said Future-Dizzy, “Ravenkroft wanted to put one of those Elder God things — the Eidolon — into me. We stopped him from doing that. But. The one your friend Basil here is up against — this Vynovich, that’s his name, right? — well — he got hold of this thing you call the Conjuring Gauntlet, and in the early days of the Invasion, he used it. He awoke the Eidolon known as Orogrü-Nathr?k. The shit hit the fan pretty hard after that. We found ourselves facing the destruction of Cambridge . . . then Boston . . . and soon after that, New York. Then New York state. It only got worse from there, when the Zarctureans arrived and attacked, and when Ravenkroft found . . .” Her eyes strayed over to where Buffy stood. “Another suitable host for the Eidolon he’d originally planned for me.”

  “Whoa, no way,” said Mystikite, stepping back, moving away from her. He put up a hand, as though to ward off her words. “No. Just . . . no. Please God, no.” He turned to Basil. “Okay. We have to win this, now. We simply have to. There’s no other choice in it, now, no other option. We must win this fight.”

  Basil sighed. “Agreed, my friend.” He pulled out his cell-phone, and dialed a number, then put it to his ear. “Hello — Bryce? Yes, it’s me, Basil. Listen. You, and the others — please come down to Room 217, on the second floor. We have some . . . new allies I’d like you to meet. Bring the full supply of Geist-Verst?rker units with you. Watch yourselves, though, and don’t hesitate to actually wear two of the units or to use them to defend yourselves. We have a . . . new priority we need to attend to, if we’re to defeat Vynovich and his New Cabal. Please tell the others. Yes. Uh-huh. Yes, I see. I understand. See you then.” He hung up the call and put the cell-phone back in his pocket. He turned to face Mystikite and the two Dizzys. “The others will arrive in a few moments. We can move out then, if you wish, Dizzy. Er, the one of you that’s from . . . now, that is.”

  “Damn do I ever fucking hate time travel,” said Mystikite, shaking his head. “No offense, Diz from the Future. I mean, thanks for the heads-up and the gifts, without which we probably would’ve perished, but, y’know. It’s time travel. Which always makes a mess of things.”

  “I sympathize,” said Now-Dizzy, nodding. “If it helps any, causality violations tend to break my noggin, as well.”

  “No offense, Diz, but your noggin,” said Mystikite, “has probably been broken for a very long time.”

  “Well, true,” she admitted, and shrugged. “Can’t deny that very readily. Tell me, Future Me — what are the right chords? The ones that will open the mind of the Zarcturean to its entire species’ psychic network, I mean.”

  “Ah, the Me of the Past. An excellent question,” said Future-Dizzy. “I have, in fact, figured out the musical piece most likely to kill the Zarcturean Visitor — and all its relatives elsewhere in the cosmos — when played on the Electro-Mesmeric guitar. You originally tried to use the Karaoke version of Meat Loaf’s 2001 hit single, I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That), playing along with the vocal melody on the guitar. But it didn’t work. Well, I did some lab work on this with a dead Zarcturean that we shot-up in a fire-fight one day, and I soon figured it out: The song was loud, overwrought, and bombastic, enough to suitably excite the Zarcturean’s emotional centers — and thus its telepathic circuits — to the point of giving it an aneurism, but it wasn’t loud, overwrought, and bombastic enough to overload its brain and cause it to blast the signal out across the star-ways via telepathic quantum entanglement, and thus destroy all its Zarcturean relatives. So, you need music that’s even louder, even more overwrought, and even more bombastic than that song. A tall order. But, I think I’ve found something that fits the bill pretty well.” She rummaged around in the duffle bag, and pulled out a CD in a jewel-case. “Behold! I bring you the Karaoke version of the 2015 album Ghostlights, by a band called Avantasia, with singer-songwriter Tobias Sammet. It’s loud, it’s overwrought, and bombastic as frak, and it’s perfect. The opening track, Mystery Of A Blood Red Rose, is a beautiful, big, four-minute orchestral fusion of rock, opera, and metal. Positively gorgeous stuff. The Zarcturean Visitor’s brain . . . even already-dead and only running on some DC current, responded to the chord progressions on the piano part quite negatively! It’s as if that which causes joy and satisfaction to resonate in human brains . . . causes these creatures physical and mental anguish. It’s as if they evolved . . . specifically to hate everything we love. There’s a creepy kind of symmetry in that, somewhere.”

  “Maybe not intelligent design,” said Now-Dizzy, “but maybe a seemingly intuitive anthropic principle at work, due to a cosmic strange loop that also obeys Novikov’s principle of self-consistency?”

  “Could be, maybe,” said Future-Dizzy. “Or it could just be a giant coincidence. No way to know for sure without directly observing whether said strange loop takes the form of a spacetime manifold in the shape of a M?bius loop.”

  “Does anybody understand a single word they’re saying?” said Mystikite. “Because I got lost after our Dizzy said ‘Maybe.’”

  “I’m amazed you can tell them apart,” said Buffy. “Other than by their clothes, that is.”

  “Anyway,” said Future-Dizzy. “Here, I also brought you the chords and sheet music for the song, just in case.” She handed Now-Dizzy the CD, with a small, folded set of papers taped to its backside. “Practice it for a bit. Listen to it once or twice, at least. You’ve got to perform the entire vocal track of all four minutes of the song on the Electro-Mesmeric guitar, even the repeats and choruses and whatnot. Don’t be afraid to improvise and jazz it up a bit, but remember to hit the notes that’re already there, too.” Now-Dizzy took the CD case and papers from Future-Dizzy, reaching out to take them from her hesitantly.

  “Er, just curious, but . . . what happens if I accidentally touch you?” asked Now-Dizzy.

  “You really don’t wanna know,” said the other Dizzy. “Trust me on that. Oh, and here.” She reached into the duffle bag again, and retrieved a small, square box, about a foot-and-a-half tall and wide, and about eight inches deep. It was a guitar amplifier. “This will amplify the guitar signal and process it accordingly, before channeling the signal into Gadget’s Helm, delivering it into the psychic transaction with the alien’s brainwaves. Then — ”

  “Wait a second,” said Gadget, approaching her. “What happens to you, now that you’ve come back here and helped us?” He turned to Future-Misto. “Do you guys . . . I mean . . . don’t you, like, cease to exist, or something horrible like that?”

  Future-Dizzy reached up and cupped his cheek in her hand. “Poor Gadget,” she said. “Always trying so hard to protect me from the inevitable. I’d say it was cute, if it wasn’t so tragic. The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’ . . . and at the same time, too. Call me ‘Schr?dinger’s Girlfriend.’”

  “When we travel back,” said Future-Misto, “we won’t go back to the future we departed from originally. Instead, we’ll arrive in a future, a different one than the one we left . . . a future where our lives took a different course: The one plotted out after the events that take place tonight and afterward . . . We’ll get rewritten, our memories forming us into the people whom you will one day become after tonight’s events take place. Our entire lives will get reshaped. The universe abhors a temporal paradox . . . so all of this will happen in a brand new alternate universe, one divorced from the old time continuum that existed before we traveled back. The CD, the sheet music, the book, the webbing, and everything else we’ve given you? Well, those things will remain real and extant here, in the past, with you. They won’t get erased when our timeline gets rewritten. Our leaving them here in the past with you severs their world-lines, cuts off their light-cones and begins them anew. So long as they stay relative to you in your frame of reference, they’ll still exist, and you can still use them. They’ll remain real.”

  “At least that’s the theory,” said Future-Dizzy.

  “I have an enormous fucking headache in my eye,” groaned Mystikite.

  “Glad I could help,” said Future-Dizzy, and patted him on the shoulder. “I’m a helper.”

  “It was a pleasure to meet you,” said Darmok, shaking hands with Future-Dizzy. “I would say ‘come back any time,’ but that’d sound like a bad pun.”

  “Bad puns,” said Future-Misto, “are part of the cerebral infrastructure upon which all of Geek Culture is built, madam.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Darmok, “I’ve got a question. For you, this time, Mr. Misto From the Future.”

  “Me?” he asked, pointing a finger at himself.

  “Yes, you,” said Darmok.

  “Okay, sure. Shoot.”

  “What’s happened to me in this future that you’re from?”

  Misto stood silent for a moment, and frowned. “I — I don’t . . . really think that’s . . . well . . . that is . . .”

  “Am I dead?” asked Darmok.

  “Well, er, no,” said Misto. His eyes darted over to where Jetta stood, her arms folded across her chest. “Not really, no . . . You’re, uh . . . well, that is, me and you, we’re . . .”

  “Yeah?” said Darmok, smiling from one cat-like ear to the other. “We’re what?”

  “Never mind,” said Future-Misto — and damn, thought Mystikite, is it me, or did he just blush?

  “Er, yeah, at any rate,” said Future-Dizzy, clearing her throat loudly, “I know, right? Totally insane, us people from the future! Anyway. Time for us to hit the road.” With one last, warm smile at Gadget and the others, she licked her lips and then said in a more somber tone: “Goodbye, everyone. It was really good seeing all of you alive, and . . . whole again. I don’t think I ever . . . really got the chance to say to the lot of you just how frakkin’ much you all truly mean to me. You started out as strangers to me, but . . . somewhere along the line, somehow . . . you became more. A weird sort of family, I guess. I do miss the early days, these days, those times when we first got to know each other . . . the days you’re just now getting ready to go through. It’s gonna be a wild ride. You’ll love it. Take my advice, though, ladies and germs — savor the little moments, ‘cause they never last long enough. And savor the big moments, too, ‘cause there’s never enough of them. Even the weird ones that scare you, that terrify you. Treasure those the most, because they show you who you really are.” And with that, Future-Dizzy turned around, and headed for the door, as did Future-Misto. He turned the door handle and held it open for Future-Dizzy, who then turned around one last time. “Oh, and Gadget. Remember: It’s not just a Crystal Sword . . . it’s also a beam-focusing lens. Your future self wanted me to remind you of that . . . whatever that means. He wouldn’t tell me.”

  ‘Uh, right, yeah,” said Gadget. That unnerved him a little. Did his future self, five years from now, still remember the dreams he’d had lately? The dreams of the Fortress of Darkness, the wiseman and the Sorceress — who was really Dizzy? What were the ultimate consequences of those dreams? Where in life had they ultimately led him? What had they built toward? And had he told Dizzy about them? She didn’t know the significance of the Crystal Sword, so his Future Self probably hadn’t told her, for whatever reason. Still, his Future Self had a reason for telling him this, for reminding him of it. What could it be, though? He supposed he would find out soon enough . . . though something told him he probably wouldn’t like the answer . . .

  “Catch you all on the flip-side . . . of history,” said Future-Misto. He grinned at them, saluted them, and then slipped out the door.

  “Good luck. We’re all counting on you,” said Future-Dizzy. “But no pressure, right? Right!” And then she too exited the room. The door clicked closed behind her.

  Now-Dizzy — who was now the only Dizzy in the room — clapped her hands together, raised her eyebrows and smiled at everyone else there assembled. “Well now! That was sure as shiznit somethin’ that doesn't happen everyday, now wasn’t it! So — gang — it would appear we’ve got some work to do on Gadget’s Mind-Weirding Helm . . . and that he has some reading to do, and that I have a piece of music to practice. It’s about one-ish now . . . so, let’s say we order ourselves some pepperoni pizza and make our move in, say, . . . a little over six hours?”

  “I say ‘Autocons, roll out,’” said Misto. He started to roll-up his sleeves, or what seemed like it . . . and then looked chagrined, and stopped; he must’ve realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  “Yeah,” said Mystikite. “Gadget-man, let’s get down to some serious hardware hacking.”

  “Aye-aye, Cap’n,” said Gadget, and grinned. “Let’s bounce some graviton particle-beams off the main deflector dish.”