Six months had passed since the events of Mori Island. Six months of peace and quiet, with absolutely no crazy monsters to kill, and no crazy reality hacks that turned me into a super soldier.

If I’m being honest, I missed it.

The first week back in the real world with my kids, Seth and Lorelei, reminded me of exactly what I fought for. Not just to survive, to see them again, but to make sure this world was still here for them when they got old and crotchety like me.

Whatever EDGE Force did to me as part of their reality hack, they took it from me before sending me home. I wasn’t a buff killing machine with sick shotgun and axe skills anymore.

I was back to just being me: JD Rideout, washed-up writer, part-time Dad. Well, I guess I was a full-time Dad now that Kaiser lived with me, but that German Shephard was so smart that he didn’t really need me. As time went on, it started to feel the other way around.

Every day eventually bled into the next, with changes of pace on the weeks Seth and Lorelei came home to my place. The energy of the whole house changed when they were here. I smiled more, laughed more, and Kaiser even felt the same.

We’d come up with a fancy new way for Kaiser to be able to communicate. Not only could he understand English, but he could speak it too, as long as I gave him the right tools.

I bought a whole bunch of programmable buttons from Amazon that you could record a word into, and when those buttons were pressed, they said the word.

Kaiser’s vocabulary was larger than the number of buttons I’d bought, but 250 different words gave us enough flexibility to communicate what we needed to.

I stood in the kitchen and poured myself a cup of coffee. The house was filled with the aroma of the fresh brew, and I was glad I’d sprung for the more expensive auto-brewing percolator. Fresh coffee, the moment I woke up! The future rules just as much as it sucks.

Want Seth, Kaiser said through the buttons.

“I know, buddy. He’s not here for another 3 days, okay? Emily will drop him off on Sunday morning, just like always.”

Long long long time, Kaiser said.

I laughed. “Come on, you’ve been here long enough to know the routine.”

Miss Seth. We go park. See Seth.

Emily and I still lived in the same suburb, and sometimes when Kaiser and I went on walks we’d see them at the big park down at the foreshore.

“Emily will still be fighting Seth to get out of bed, and then she’ll be dropping him off at school. It’s Thursday, so he won’t be at the park.”

Sad.

The bond Kaiser had forged with Seth was endearing. I’d never been able to get a dog. Emily was allergic to them, especially those with long hair and undercoats like Kaiser had. I’d always regretted that Seth wouldn’t grow up with a dog, but that had all changed now.

“I know, but I’ve got some leads I want to chase down today.”

Kaiser whined.

Chasing leads meant spending hours on the computer, trying to find more information about what Mnemtech were up to.

That was one thread from the events of Mori Island that I couldn’t leave hanging. Mnemtech supposedly had another source of anima, which is why they pulled out of Mori Island to continue their research elsewhere.

Why would they put up with a control freak cult leader who drip-fed them a substance that let them reprogram reality if they didn’t need to?

It had also been six months since I’d seen Miranda Cullen. She was the daughter of the cult leader, and technically the daughter of an otherworldly entity called Altrighus. It’s a long story. Miranda had a pendant carved from her mother’s blood, the essence of Altrighus, which let her open doorways into her own memories.

The essence, otherwise known as anima, worked differently for different people. Miranda could enter her memories. Kaiser could use it to open portals to go somewhere he remembered. I used it to travel into my creative nexus, which was an utterly bizarre home to all of the various worlds I’d written about in my long career.

The anima also let me bring things from those worlds through to this one.

For Miranda’s father, the deceased cult leader Arthur Cullen, the anima allowed him to bring his nightmarish vision of weaponised humans into this reality.

I don’t know why it worked differently for all of us. Now that Miranda was gone without a trace, I had no way of accessing that power again.

EDGE Force hadn’t made contact for six months, but that didn’t mean I was going to give up the fight against Mnemtech.

I took my coffee into my study and unlocked my computer. The wall directly next to my desk had a map of the world hanging in the centre. Many different printouts of news stories from around the world were blu-tacked around the map, with little red strings connecting them with places marked on the map.

An old story from the Daily Mercury about the collapse of the Fellowship of Cosmic Truth from 15 years ago was connected to an empty spot in the Whitsunday Islands, just off the coast of Mackay. The island officially didn’t exist. It was inside a RAZ, or Reality Annexed Zone, if you’re not caught up on the acronyms.

Why the hell did clandestine organisations have such a hard-on for acronyms?

And yet, I’d been there. I saw the results of the cult’s work and Mnemtech’s experiments.

If Mnemtech were up to no good there, but pulled out of the island ten years ago, then they still had to be up to no good now. They’d just changed location.

The problem was that Mnemtech had research facilities all over the planet. They were leaders in brain/computer interfaces, doing great work on helping those in need. For example, their mobility exosuits were cutting edge and helped those who had lost bodily function to regain some sense of normality. They’d pioneered brain powered prosthetic limbs and were even prototyping some that could send signals back to the brain, like touch, heat and cold.

It was only a matter of time until the technology became sophisticated enough to replace an entire limb with zero loss of sensation or function.

They were doing so much good that nobody was taking notice of what shady shit they might be up to. Finding their name associated with anything that was ethically questionable was almost impossible.

Either they distanced themselves so well from any nefarious business that it was impossible to link them to it, or they were in bed with someone who could conceal it.

Hell, if EDGE Force could annex an entire island from reality, then what limits were there?

Even so, I couldn’t let it go.

I had two constant reminders that the events of Mori Island were real. Kaiser was one, and the vitality infusion Miranda gave me was the other.

I’m sure she didn’t mean to do what she did. It was probably just an unintended side effect. To gain the upper hand in my battle against her father, she supercharged my internal anima battery.

Apparently every human on the planet has an anima engine inside them. That’s where our life energy comes from. I know, it sounds absolutely bonkers, but so did gravity and electricity until we figured out how to measure and understand them.

Miranda said that she could see auras, and those aren’t what people think they are either. Auras are the anima affinity that people give off, and those who can see it are just more in tune with the anima flow of the world around us.

Miranda gave my anima engine a performance boost back on Mori Island, jacking up its output by about 25%.

When EDGE Force removed their reality hack, they didn’t take the anima boost. Either they couldn’t, or they didn’t know it was there at all. I’m not sure which.

As a result, I felt like the Energizer bunny. My metabolism was moving like I was in my early 20s rather than looking down the barrel of 40.

That’s the official start of middle age, right?

The little beer belly I’d been slowly cultivating since the end of my marriage was gone. A gosh-darned six-pack sat in its place, looking as smug as a Melbourne barista that’s just told you their café doesn’t lower itself by using flavoured syrups.

I wasn’t eating any better, and I damn sure wasn’t drinking any less.

There was something I was doing a lot more of, though: Writing.

I’d made promises to some of my fictional characters after arriving in their little microcosms within my creative nexus, and I intended to keep them. I told the denizens of Midnight Beach that I’d finish their wereshark trilogy of novels, and I’d already kept one-third of that promise.

The first book, Blood in the Water, was already in the hands of my agent, JoAnn Halinen, and she said that it was the best damn thing I’d written in years. Now I know she has to say that because she’s the one who has to sell it, but I quietly agreed with her.

Book two, Black Tide, was coming along nicely. Jo was already talking about shopping around a screenplay, which was utter insanity.

It was getting so much easier to get into the zone these days. I’d never much believed in the existence of a muse, and I still didn’t, but damn everything just came to me so much easier after Miranda supercharged my anima flow. I had more energy of pretty much every kind.

Maybe I should pitch an article to Buzzfeed.

Supercharge your creative output with this one weird trick!

Spoilers, you just need the daughter of an Old God to fundamentally change you from the inside out!

Simples.

Thinking about Miranda made me sad, then I got angry. I’d risked my life to save her at the behest of EDGE Force, yet in six months, neither had tried to reach out to me.

I hoped that Miranda wasn’t being kept in a cage somewhere. I wanted to believe that EDGE Force wasn’t one of those kinds of organisations, but what they did to me wasn’t really all that much different, was it?

The cage they kept me in was my need to get back to my family. Without my kids, there were so many times in my life when I could have just given up. After Lorelei came along, that was it. I had a purpose in life, and that part of me that always wanted to give up when things got hard had to shut the fuck up.

I still had more research to do before jumping back into the Midnight Beach trilogy, so I got to it.

An hour and a fresh cup of coffee later, I found something that piqued my interest. I’d finished looking at all of the current Mnemtech research sites and moved on to historical, abandoned sites. Starting from the beginning seemed like a logical thing to do, so I went back to the founding of Mnemtech.

Roger Forge was the man who started it all. The whole beginning of the company’s history was pretty dull. It was mostly government funded studies of different methods of measuring brain activity. I even found some of those old research papers and flicked through them, but I honestly didn’t understand a lot of what I read. I was looking out for clues that might link Mnemtech’s origins to anything extranormal.

I couldn’t find a thing.

But when I started looking into Roger Forge’s history, something very interesting come out of left field.

Forge was a Harvard graduate, graduating with a degree in biomedical engineering. It wasn’t until I dug into Forge’s social circles that I found something that made me clap my hand over my mouth and recoil from the computer screen.

There was a photo of Roger Forge sitting across from a man I recognised instantly: Arthur Cullen, the now-deceased leader of the Fellowship of Cosmic Truth. They were accompanied by another woman I didn’t recognise called Madeline Cato. From their comfortable postures and the sly grins on their faces, it was obvious that all three of them were friends.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Cullen knew Forge. Went to college with him.”

Arthur Cullen was Australian, but when I went to check Harvard’s graduate list for that year, he was undoubtedly on there. Not for biomedical engineering, though. Cullen studied History and Literature, so he would have been in a completely different set of classes and still found some way to be friends with Robert Forge.

So was this Cato woman, but I had no idea what her involvement with anything was. It could have been nothing. But when I checked her academic history, I became even more confused. She graduated with a degree in Folklore and Mythology, which I guess might have somehow crossed over with Cullen’s studies.

They seemed to be a strange assortment of people to find sitting together like old friends, but two of them had gone on to do things that reverberated through the planes of reality.

I wheeled myself back into the desk, furiously typed out some notes, and copied the URLs from the pages that I’d have to delve into later. This was exactly the connection that I needed to explore.

A twinge of pain ran up my shoulder. I’d been sitting hunched over my keyboard for far too long. I stood from my desk and went to put my dirty mug into the dishwasher, feeling like I needed to put some space between myself and the bombshell that I’d just stumbled upon.

I never made it to the kitchen.