3.1 Root Directory Closed
Case #283-Ø-[∆I.∞]
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Inside the Interstice – November 2024
Smooth jazz played in the background. Novaire was momentarily enthralled. Dim booths, velvet walls, the chandelier above slightly swaying as if breathing, as if it were alive. He bumped into a bar he hadn’t noticed.
The bartender, barely distinct, slid a napkin and a drink across to him.
“On the house,” he said. “Looks like you’re having a rough night.”
The words reverberated through the room as darkness descended upon Novaire. Sconces emerged from the dark, flames twisting sideways, neither illuminating the space nor casting any visible shadows. In the corner of his eye, one of the sconces blinked. When he turned, it had multiplied. Three now hovered, forming a triangle where the door had been.
The door itself was gone.
Novaire stepped down a staircase that hadn’t been there a second ago. He walked down until he reached an overlook. New York, or at least a warped version of it, unwrapped itself around him. Cathedrals with dozens of towers rose in front of him, each with clocks indicating a different time. Multi-level highways connected by suspension bridges formed a path to nowhere. Corinthian columns floated in midair like someone blended familiar elements but recombined it incorrectly.
The scene was a theater. Novaire, swept up in it, didn’t see the figure approach until it was close enough to breathe his air.
He startled and fell to the floor.
Now there was only stillness. No walls. Just the floor beneath him, the flickering sconces above, a darkness stretching around him without edge or end.
“Ah yes,” said a cold, measured but familiar voice. “That famous overconfidence. Your desire to control. Your gambles, your impulses when you feel control slip away. It will get you in trouble one day.”
“Let him be, Veldrik,” said another in a lighter and distinctly amused temper. “He came all this way. Let’s see if he’s ready to learn… or if he’ll keep talking to himself.”
Two silhouettes emerged. One stood still; hands folded behind his back. The other leaned and twirled, always slightly moving, like a leaf in water.
#REF!
The sconces hissed gently above. Novaire stood up, dusted himself off, and looked at the two figures flanking him.
Veldrik stepped forward, his shoes making no sound. “You were doing fine,” he said. “Until you weren’t.”
Novaire shrugged, “This wasn’t a mistake. Elian’s equation—”
“—was incomplete,” Veldrik interrupted. “You rushed. You mapped what he saw, not what it meant. Under pressure, you are so disappointingly human. Reckless. Gone is the strategy. Gone is being measured. Gone is the reason I chose to give you the artifact in the first place.”
Novaire exhaled, steadying himself. “And you just let it happen?”
“Of course.” Veldrik’s voice didn’t change. “That is how you learn. I wouldn’t be a good teacher if I constantly intervened.”
“Aha. That’s what you do, right?” Novaire snapped sarcastically. “You wait. You never act. You let Evelyn and Jimmy suffer in this place. It took me one second to help them… once I knew.”
A pause. The only sound was the eerie hissing and stretching of the flames from the sconces above.
“Because patience,” Veldrik replied, “…is power.”
“And yet nothing dies of patience like meaning,” the other muttered. “You and your beautiful little loops.”
Novaire looked between them. “You’re not with them,” he said. “The Order.”
The second figure clapped slowly. “Bravo. Correct. I’m with higher beings. They’re called ‘consequences.’ You’ve met them.”
Veldrik gestured, “Meet my Counterpart, Novaire.”
Novaire didn’t speak. He studied the figure. Fluid, flamboyant, almost playful. There was something familiar about the way he moved, like watching your own reflection distorted in water.
The Echo and the Wheel
The space shifted. Walls formed and dissolved around them. They walked through endless corridors, each one blinking into a new shape, from an opulent train station, past a Gothic cathedral, to a museum of statues with missing faces.
“You said I’m reckless,” Novaire stated, not to either figure in particular, “and you brought me here. Why?”
“We didn’t bring you,” Veldrik said. “You followed noise. You mistook it for an opportunity.”
“He means the Order,” said The Counterpart, tone pitching upward. “Pity, really. Such flair. But still just another faction. They might shape the world, but we invite you to think bigger, think about the frame that holds reality in place.”
Novaire stopped, turning toward The Counterpart. “You’re saying they don’t matter?”
“I’m saying they think they do. But I’ve seen what’s beyond them.”
“What could possibly be beyond them? They can shape reality. They’ve already changed quite a few things, as I understand it.” He turned back to Veldrik. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Veldrik didn’t answer.
“Was I so slow in the pickup?” The Counterpart asked sharply, “They experiment with reality… Elevate yourself, decide if the play continues.”
There was a pause. The corridor flickered. Paintings gone, then returned.
The Counterpart tilted his head, voice suddenly softer: “You have the artifact… but why would you assume this is the only one?”
Novaire opened his mouth to ask, but the Counterpart raised a single finger. “Shh. Just… think about what might be possible when all the pieces are combined.”
He smiled, but the grin didn’t reach his eyes. “A single spotlight illuminates the stage, but when you turn all the lights on…” He trailed off. “…you stop seeing the set. You start seeing the cage.”
The space around them shifted again, settling into a long corridor lined to the ceiling on both sides with paintings, photographs, and delicate charcoal sketches. They didn’t flicker like the Order’s staged broadcast. They didn’t feel curated.
The Counterpart twirled once and leaned close, gesturing with a sweep. “Beautifully done, don’t you think? All those images, the gentle whispers… If only you could see them in the colors they were meant to be observed in. If the interstice is a stage, they know how to light it.”
Novaire slowed his pace. A photo of Sarah and Sloane caught his eye first. Standing at a train station he didn’t recognize, locked in eye contact. Just past it hung a watercolor of a classroom, and there was Evelyn writing letters on the board while children took notes. Further down, a black-and-white snapshot: Jimmy, alone in a subway car, a wrench in one hand, his other resting protectively on a red toolbox.
Then Novaire saw something that stopped him cold… A painting of himself, older, gray at the temples, standing before a gleaming obelisk in what looked like Central Park. It didn’t exist. Not in this version of the world.
“I’ve heard of this before,” Novaire murmured. “Liminal spaces. Echoes.”
“No,” the Counterpart said. “Not echoes… iterations.”
“It’s a multi…”
“Not a multiverse,” the Counterpart cut in. “Iterations of the same reality.” His voice dropped, tone reverent. “You know reality is adjustable. You’ve done so yourself, again and again. So, what if I told you this has all happened before… and will happen again… until you do something about it?”
Novaire took a step back, his eyes tracing the endless rows of frames, portraits, landscapes, moments both intimate and abstract. Some he recognized. Most he didn’t.
“But none of it lasts,” he said quietly. “If they’re just iterations… then what’s the point?”
“That is exactly my point.” The Counterpart’s grin sharpened.
“What is real if you don’t remember it? What is the value of something repeated a million times with no end?”
He darted ahead suddenly, danced on an invisible ledge, arms wide, calling back:
“If you truly want to influence, to optimize, you must allow forward momentum. Everything must end so that something new can begin. Why not now? Why not step out of the rat race that you know, or The Order’s golden cage, and see what comes next?”
Veldrik stepped to Novaire’s other side, calm as ever. “It’s not because no one heard the tree fall in the forest that it didn’t happen. And what if you could make the tree grow taller next time? Isn’t that your idea of optimization, Novaire?”
The Counterpart scoffed. “Small changes mean more control. You think. But if the loop repeats, you just reset again. A nicer wheel is still a wheel.”
They passed a monumental entrance into one of the Gothic buildings, the door swung open, and inside, the sconces split into two directions, two paths.
The Counterpart stopped at the threshold. “The choice waits. A chance to refine… or a chance to see what comes next.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “If this is all constructed, all rehearsed… why would the choice be mine?”
He turned to face them. “You said I’m impulsive under pressure, and now you want me to slow down, just to choose on behalf of everyone?”
His voice cracked slightly, honest. “This is not just deciding to stop the Order and face the consequences, this is several orders of magnitude bigger… It’s incomprehensible what this choice even means.”
He looked down. “Maybe you’ve both seen too much. Perhaps this is a test, another game where the rules aren’t explained in advance. I only know that I’ve seen just enough to know I shouldn’t be the one to decide.”
Veldrik tilted his head, not in disapproval, but almost fondly, and looked at The Counterpart. “At least he doubts the theater… and didn’t ask to see God,” he said quietly. “We’ve skipped the religious stage.”
Choices & Consequences
Veldrik placed a hand behind his back. The Counterpart tilted his head.
“Sadly for you, Novaire, you are asked to make a choice regardless.”
Novaire looked ahead again, the fork in the road had reassembled itself into a singular path. He snickered.
Veldrik declared, “There is no escape. There is no waiting. And not choosing lands us back here soon enough.”
Novaire didn’t listen. He quietly stepped forward. One foot, then another.
But both figures watched him go, and behind him, the sconces blinked out. One by one.
Track 61 - one week later
The tunnel beneath the Waldorf Astoria was quiet, mostly abandoned since the 1940s. A rusted track ran along the floor. Crates stacked in corners, dust thick on every surface.
The smell of ozone filled the tunnels. A faint violet ripple appeared in the air.
It stretched. Split. Novaire stumbled out of it, coat torn, eyes unreadable.
Carter stepped forward from the shadows. Sarah, Evelyn, Sloane, and Jimmy all behind him. Carter squinted. “You alright?”
Novaire stared for a long second, “You came.”
Sarah nodded, “Of course.”
He looked at each of them, Carter, Sloane, Evelyn, Jimmy, and back at Sarah.
For a moment, the silence between them felt like warmth.
Novaire exhaled. Not relief. But something close.
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