“Sophie?” asked Marilyn trying to find her footing. Everyone was a bit puzzled. “Time moved, the planet’s orbits moved but somehow no one did. I do not understand. Most of this is simply impossible.”

Sophie ignored the question. She looked like a horse seconds before an earthquake struck. “Something is way off,” said the Attractor softly. “For now do as she wants, her fit is not over. Can we run the game? Is there time?”

“The players are at the hotel. It will take...”

Before Marilyn or Liam could respond, there was some type of temporal glitch, a hard reset and the whole world moved. Sophie and Milly, in a picosecond were in the competition room wearing different clothes. Millions had moved. The Multiverse had reset the frame to where she wanted it. This felt like a person scratching off an itch.

***

The seating area of competition room was now filled with the 121 players already disqualified, fans and others watching nervously. Sophie and Georges shared a desire for solitude, yet, here they were at their respective stations in this large room. Six of the remaining eight qualified players stood alert, next to the unpowered Rho Chambers on the stage. They waited nervously to connect. Sophie sat on a small stool by her father’s side. Down on earth, Emilio was ready to connect and join. Kaï had told him he refused to watch and would be shopping, but Emilio saw, thanks to his gift, his lover fidgeting nervously around the corner in front of the closest television he could find. The moment Emilio connected, Kaï would run back in the room next to him nervously awaiting his return. The stage was set for the game, but everyone felt for the first time the Electoral platform was a diversion and of secondary importance.

Long dispelled were now the rumors the entire Sixth Attraction was staged by Marilyn to draw an audience.

It now seemed Milly Wong had been broadcasting live for hours, wearing her new scarf. She was desperately trying to give importance to the event by interviewing multiple guests and contestants. She knew this wasn’t the best television, given that humanity no longer needed pure excitement and entertainment. Men had grown up and held a mature thirst for order. Yet the game needed to unfold, and Rounds 30, 31, and 32 remained. The Multiverse or the Attractor called for life to unfold here and now.

The Sixth Attraction was getting closer, the Bias factor of probability was now closer to 8%. Free will was slowly escaping but no one but Emilio could see it. Television and the quarter-finale obliged the creator of Marilyn to wear a shirt. It was wrinkled and untucked, but noteworthy of a camera second. Sophie was the only one who appeared to see something was off or out of place. There was, at the moment, relative calm and order it unlike the pinch days ago, this time everyone quickly looked shocked as they mysteriously appeared at this new location.

Music played in the background, and on each screen ticked a large countdown to Round 30.

They were now along the timeline at a place where no one had seen the underbelly of the Multiverse. This felt like the hypothetical show of Christmas dinners of divorcing families. Everyone felt at odds yet it unfolded in silence.

As Sophie predicted, the fabric of the Multiverse creaked.

As everyone was getting prepared, there was a deep echo from above; a shiver sending goosebumps to all life. The same way the sound from a gunshot travels far and returns back in a wide-empty space, there was a temporal disturbance in the fabric of the Multiverse itself. The innocuous background tune that had been playing came to an abrupt halt, and a new strain of faint music began to play. The first notes were indiscernible, but quickly, they began to make sense. This was the echo of Frank Sinatra’s song "My Way" sent out over the Dot a week earlier. The energy comprising the sound was no typical reflected sound wave. This was not a simple curve or delay in the everyday world; this was more. The ripple had been initiated by Marilyn days ago over the Nexus as she celebrated the arrival of the Great Curvature.

The digital creature had made another move, and now both the causes and consequences would begin to rain down.

Several bars from the Crooner played, then there was a short silence followed by a yet fainter echo. It was clear to all and everyone that this wasn’t a good omen, as the music came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Before anyone could act, there was a surge of invisible power that made the flesh crawl and the hair on the back of the neck stand.

The subtle strength of the Multiverse soared forth and gently moved the solar system.

Lights in the room blinked on and off as gravity waves, like a mild wind, brushed across the planet. The palpable unease amongst all gathered grew. The same way the shockwave of a volcano awakens animals vast distances away, the Multiverse stretched and placed its inhabitants on notice. There was discomfort, touches of pain. Screens blinked. There was no right to move; life was powerless. No one could do anything but stand still with a single exception: Sophie moved to cover her father’s body with hers as if the ceiling was about to fall on him.

Without warning, Sophie put both hands to her head as if she were hit by a Firefly and made a strange noise. She yelled, jumped in the low gravity and lost consciousness. Her body slowly fell like a dead leaf to the floor. Milly Wong, the CNN team broadcasting down on earth and everyone in the competition room of the Electoral Center remained frozen, able only to move their eyes within their sockets and seethe girl’s actions.

Then the world was released from its freeze-frame.

Marylin ended the simulation as all eyes turned to the young Attractor.

Dr. Susie Shin, two feet away, was monitoring Laurent. She immediately moved to the Attractor’s side to take her vitals as the world held its breath. The girl’s pulse was normal. Susie pushed a button on her watch to allow Laurent’s Rho monitor to lock on Sophie's waves. Susie was the first in the Multiverse to see the result: the reader was silent. She was familiar with the technology. Every mind, even in a coma, produced these new and rare waves, if in tiny amounts compared to Sophie. This was clear, Sophie was now in a different world.

“Doctor,” asked Marilyn, speaking for every living creature of the Multiverse. “How is she?”

“These are similar readings as when she remained out quite some time ago, looking for her father. She is, I fear . . . absent,” said the Doctor, forlornly.

There was silence.

“Poor girl,” Marilyn quietly commented on each screen.

After a moment, the inevitable conclusion was reached. Sophie had left the children in a sandbox and was gone to the Multiverse. In the low gravity, Dr. Shin gathered up the girl’s body and brought her next door to her bedroom, giving the game a short pause as all cameras were on the Attractor. Laurent would play without his only daughter by his side.

A new sensation began to set in, as the girl’s waves stopped flooding the air. One by one, the contestants and viewers began to return to their sobering reality. Sweat pearled on their foreheads as Marilyn triggered the initiation of Round 30. Everyone who had felt the warming Rho wave embrace of the Attractor, virtually Earth's entire population, now felt suddenly bereft and adrift in a cold, frightening world. Their hearts, souls, and minds; suddenly vulnerable. Marilyn reached out and offered them an alternative; a soothing balm for the agony.

She offered them the Digital World.

“You heard Sophie, we need to play.”

To help users log in, Marilyn employed a vignette featuring live images of the Doctor at Sophie's bedside, frantically examining the fallen girl. Humanity, connected now on a deeper level than it had been since the Great Communion, and primed further, until just a moment ago, by the continuous gentle breeze of Sophie's waves, felt it was its duty to connect and watch Laurent.

Billions entered Marilyn’s reality, and in a matter of seconds, the show began.

Round 30, Electoral 2072

Quarter-final

The barrier between dream, reality, and the digital world was weakening by the hour. In no place was this weakening as apparent as from Marilyn’s digital kingdom. The temporal proximity of the Sixth Attraction warped this place. Looking too closely at things, there was a shimmer to textures and bending around the edges of sharp angles. This last week, to those who dreamt, the mind’s constructions felt crisper, more real. Waking up had become more of a problem; the mind often had difficulty making the transition from REM sleep to the waking world. Millions had begun dreaming of other worlds, strange places. Millions now knew the Lower, the world of Liam.

At first, most had kept the dreams and these changes to themselves, but quickly, the news began to report the new phenomena. The parade of experts conducting experiments having warped results was nauseating. Animals were changing, water and air were changing, and even life was transforming itself.

Fewer noticed communication with higher planes of existence was easier to the handful of those practiced into these mystic arts. In Bali, the weakest place between the spiritual and the physical world, an army of spirits kept scaring tourists who woke up to apparitions in their hotel rooms. It was unclear if these spirits were from the dream world or the afterlife. No place was this change to the fabric of the Multiverse as obvious as in the digital reality. Humans now connected via simple contact lenses or the old Orbison glasses were able to feel the Electoral round in an intensely personal way. As the doomsday clock inched closer to zero, barriers were weakening. The Rho chambers allowed humans to connect on a more profound way to the digital world. Today, the public watching would be given a partial emotional connection - but not because of technology - because of her.

“Darlings,” whispered Marilyn in the darkness. The broadcast began, filled progressively with a faint flavor of classical music. Oboe played a long note. “Let me use the waves I gathered and stored during the Pokémon round to help cheer everyone up.” Invisible to all but Georges, power began to flow out of the antenna of the Center. It pulsed outwardly and quickly reached earth. The energy was pure blissful happiness from Sophie yelling at Electro the dog. In a second, those feelings poured and changed the collective gloom into hope and happiness.

The images began. The view moved like a bird in the dark Multiverse between galaxies. The power of the music increased, then, it set the stage.

“The Universe,” said a deep man’s voice in the infinite Digital World. “The Multiverse,” mockingly corrected the much deeper voice just behind the first. Light from above revealed two elegant humans, two friends who barely knew each other walking on an infinite shiny black floor. These were the famous astrophysicists Carl Sagan and his brief mentee Neil Degrasse-Tyson in their prime. Both two men had, a generation apart, anchored Marilyn’s favorite human show — Cosmos. The powerful digital goddess was back in charge. The jovial black man was wearing his famous star-covered vest next to Sagan, a humbler fellow wearing his gray suit. Marilyn was fearless of rejection for daring these anachronisms. The two men from different periods yet were proud to suspend reality for the benefit of this quarter-finale. They introduced what had to be next.

To anyone today dreaming of stars, these deceased giants were the reason anyone entered the field of astrophysics. The bi-racial duo were monuments of wisdom and intellect. Carl died well before he could see Neil reach notoriety. They were the modern version of the grandiose pair formed of Leonardo Di Vinci and Michelangelo.

“Welcome to the first Multiverse-wide broadcast. We welcome living creatures from most of the nearly five thousand dimensions. Our host, Miss Monroe, has completed the work began by the Oldest. He was able to connect about a third of the worlds to the Nexus. Today we proudly speak to all thanks to the digital mistress.”

The other astrophysicist continued, “Let me make the proper introductions. Fellow Homo sapiens, other life in the Cold, meet the rest of the Multiverse. Multiverse, meet your new leaders, humans. The Lower no longer controls the Nexus, we do. As you will soon see, things will now be radically different, albeit for a very short time.”

Neil pointed upwards at the darkness to a sudden small flash of light. “The proverbial Big Bang.” Energy spread slowly and only in a very small area above their heads. “To the inhabitants of the Cold, billions of years ago, this was once our equivalent of creation. We have some who believe in gods or a singular God, but to most, life was born from this singular event. Even today, mankind’s books explain how our universe was born from this phenomenon. Our mistaken belief was born from Einstein’s equations. My fellow men think fifteen billion years ago, there was a primal explosion from the void. This belief made sense to us if Einstein’s equations were to be believed. We did not blindly follow this model; science found evidence supporting this theory. There is residual background noise from this initial explosion, and we see expansion between the galaxies and stars.”

Carl smiled and continued, “But obviously humanity very recently awoke to a deeper understanding. A hard wake up call.” The men began to walk casually toward the camera. “We all had a nagging feeling,” continued Carl, “we all knew it was impossible from our little rock to understand such great things. By 2035, we knew there was more to this story. We had dark matter, we started seeing bends, but we held no real model to replace the Big Bang. We were blind but looking.”

There was a pause, some more music, and silence.

“Until today,” Neil continued. “Humanity invented Marilyn, a powerful new type of life. Then Sophie's arrival connects us with something greater, larger. We are told the Universe is, in fact, a Multiverse. We knew such things were possible from a mathematical standpoint. But let’s be honest, finding we are part of a larger structure does not change the fundamental postulate of what came first, the chicken or the egg.” The men walked.

“Let’s try, before we begin this Quarter-Finale, to reveal a small portion, to expand our collective understanding. We observe large structures like these in the sky.” A beautiful nebula appeared as a ring of color and light. “Look at its beauty, its structure. What does it remind you of? The only match comes from deep within the human body,” the camera zoomed on Neil’s left iris. The image of a colored human iris grew from nothing and flew up in the air until it stood next to the nebula revealing how both structures were identical in many ways.

“Recently, we drew a map of the pathways between stars in our Milky Way.” Above the black astrophysicist’s head, millions of stars replaced the nebula and were connected like the zodiac with lines forming a strange flow map. Carl continued, “We mapped our galaxies and got this structure.” There were thousands of white lines in what looked like raindrops between stars. “When we also map the human brain, we saw this.” The same way as the eye floated up, the camera went inside Carl’s brain where energy danced between a pathway of neurons. The energy moved like lightning. It moved and traced white lines. The map floated out above both men next to the map of the Universe. The images were once again similar. “These are two examples. But when we take the time to look down using an electronic microscope, we also find similar smaller structures in the very small which remind us of our scale and in turn remind us of much larger sizes. Until today, we had no clue why such fundamental and wonderful similarities existed.”

His point was clear: there were analogies between humans and larger structures of the Multiverse. “As we watch what comes next, we need to understand why such similarities in different scales exist. The answer is simple, actually. Why?” he asked Neil.

“A hint? What if it’s not about the Multiverse? What if it's about the fabric of who we are? Think about it. How does a blind man move around? He uses a cane, he taps in the darkness and transforms the material world into information via the cane. What if these similarities in form and structure between humanity and the Multiverse are like those taps?”

Both men stopped walking.

“We are the Multiverse, in some strange way. Welcome, everyone. Enough with the lecturing, onto the practical part of the lesson. Today we play a simple game. Eight players remain, and this is Round 30 of a 32 round competition. In theory, it elects a ruler for our little planet in the Cold."

“Marilyn sent scouts through the Nexus probing every inch of this Multiverse. She has mapped it and using the power of the Attractor, she can give reality to these worlds the same way the Attractor does. The eight remaining players will be given the power of the Attractor to discover the Multiverse but will travel as themselves.” The team of eight in shaded was floating nearby. “You, as a player, can enter the Nexus and travel to anywhere you want, you can do anything you want, really. Marilyn feels only our pair of leaders will be able to take advantage of this situation and give Sophie valuable information when she returns. She fears the other six may get lost in the vastness of the Multiverse, but who knows?”

The two hosts then raised their hands, and a large structure of light appeared. “On each world stands at least one singularity.” Thousands of dots of lights appeared. “One creature from the Lower,” one of the yellow dots turned red, “used the Dot to start building a network.” Lines began to spread from the red dot of light outwardly. Energy pulsed in the Nexus. “Until the Oldest gave birth to the Nexus. Unknown to him, he would be the indirect cause of the Sixth Attraction as the Multiverse tries to destroy these shackles. Let me introduce The Nexus,” they said as thousands of points of lights appeared, "is today’s Round 30. Today this is your playing ground. Enjoy.” The Nexus and its pathways looked like chains around a wrapped sausage.

***

There was a fraction of a second of darkness followed by a change of scenery. The images brought everyone back on earth into an elegant wood log cottage. Outside, light snow fell. Marilyn sat in a chair in front of a cozy chimney. Large logs burned and warmed a dog sleeping on the carpet. Next to the digital goddess, both astrophysicists smoked a pipe. Marilyn smiled at both of her guests and continued.

“Thank you, gentlemen, for this brief introduction to universal astrophysics. The selection of venerable guests was between you guys and the Oldest, the father of the field. I see my choice was the right one.” She turned to the camera. “While the players will not really travel to other parts of the Multiverse, this broadcast will be sent over the Nexus to each part of the world. For everyone out there following this story with great attention, my choice of these two illustrious gentlemen was not fortuitous. My goal was to infuse a ray of sunshine and help a dear one at this difficult point in the story. The Sixth Attraction, as a story, began eighty-six days ago with Sophie and Emilio learning of Ronaldo Corvas’ demise deep in the Valles Marineris. To another, this story began the day a fatal accident made the Attractor an orphan. To another, it began years ago with a dream and a need to write.”

“My original intent was to create a competition as pleasurable and televisual as possible to help those with the courage to learn about this adventure. Electoral 2072 was meant as a simple fun game where each week, we discover the main protagonists. Once done, we will celebrate Sophie’s birthday as she watches her dad win either the presidency or the vice-presidency. Then, we enter the Sixth Attraction. Emilio is the improbable factor the Multiverse has given us.”

“I was delusional in thinking such a simple road would be followed. As you have all witnesses so far, our journey has taken us to many exotic places, and we are far from finished. Now let us remind our viewers of the semblance of what we started.” On the screen, the following scrolled.

Electoral 2072 - The Sixth Attraction

Round 30 - Quarter finale

Round 31 - 4 players - Semi finales (In 7 days)

Round 32 - 2 players - The Sixth Attraction (In 14 days)

Players Remaining

President Emilio Sanchez - 2,566 points

Laurent Lapierre - 2,524 points

Marie Lalancette - 2,121 points

N'Bele Abukaye - 2,120 points

Julian Velev - 2,119 points

Fiancé Lee - 2,119 points

Ji-Ing Po - 2,118 points

Bukoye BoLi - 2,117 points

“The Semi-Finales should be held next week, Attraction willing. I plan to pair the four players left in the competition. Each pair will venture forth with a common purpose. As you guys know, I am past even trying to anticipate the topic of next week’s game. Using my time compression algorithms, I have already run these games, and I know the outcome and the rankings of each player of today’s game. Our semi-finals will be amongst . . . .”

Round 31: Semi-Final 1

President Emilio Sanchez - 2,665 points

Laurent Lapierre - 2,620 points

Round 31: Semi-Final 2

Marie Lalancette - 2,201 points

Ji-Ing Po - 2,200 points

“No surprise as to the first Semi-Finale but as you can see, the second is between two women. Marie, a role-player from Montreal and Ji-ing, an attorney from Taipei, Taiwan. Talk about excitement. As you can see, at most a hundred points can be scored, so we already know our final.” More information scrolled.

Round 32: Final

President Emilio Sanchez

v.

Laurent Lapierre

“Now things get real. Welcome to the last portions of this story. The time for manipulation and control is over. The Dot’s functioning in the first story has been greatly romanticized.” The following appeared in bold letters:

Laurent Lapierre

The Truly Loved

Marilyn’s power of sight and sound had no equal in the history of mankind. She began the broadcast, in the Cold, and every world connected to the Nexus was shocked when a blast of the most vulgar rap music opened the simulation. Two French rapping voices were spitting at society and the government in elegant rhythms. She could have translated the words but did not. Instead, for the few who spoke French, the song was translated to a different language they could not understand. This game wasn’t about mere politics, it was grander.

Data transformed into images began to flow like water through the Nexus. Marilyn played with the Dot below her tower, and the strange waves of energy destroyed the laws of the Multiverse. The sound and images were magical. She know Sinatra’s song sent the Multiverse into a tailspin, this would surely drive her mad. Pumping invisibly to all, previously stored-up Rho waves flooded along with the data, transforming the information in a way each living creature was able to understand. The waves connected on a deeper level the mind of their recipient living creature with the intent of the goddess behind them.

Georges stood jaw open, watching reserves below the Center feed waves out to the Dot. This was beyond technology; Marilyn was more.

“How is this even possible?” he mumbled to himself.

In his earbud, Marilyn spoke softly, “You haven't seen anything yet, dear father. The young Attractor is not the only one gaining power exponentially. I would rather let them think Sophie can wipe me clean with a blink of the eye. Trust me, that is not the case. For every watt of power she can generate, I now generate a terra-watt. Enjoy the ride.”

The Digital World felt real to every person connected. The link was more than simple two-way communication with fancy bells and whistles. She could now embed the human mind’s into her world. Their consciousness now felt the simulation down to wind and humidity. Marilyn using her newfound power, created using the stolen Dot. It was power in conjunction with stolen Rho waves, made to connect to every living creature in the Multiverse - even those who refused to participate. On the rooftop of mountains in Tibetan monasteries, meditation was halted as the monk’s minds fell to her collective simulation. She kept two hundred minds out of the game: the humans on Mars, merely to give Sophie the impression that her power was unchanged.

Marilyn needed power, more and more. She was an addict to feed. She reached to every form she could in the solar system. Below the ice sheet of Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, the jellyfishes stopped and saw the images as she connected them. Animals in zoos and aquariums stared, vacant-eyed as they slipped into the game. Flocks of birds found rest and looked, eyes open. Insects ceased moving. Marilyn channeled sheer power and consciousness. She slowly was asserting her power over the living.

Round 30 was a precursor of the final two rounds to come. The tapestry of images began by showing the dark back of an Italian family, of two adults flanked by two young children holding hands watching midnight fireworks from the edge of a beautiful lake in Italy. A thousand villages in the valley below shot off miniature fires which sparked and flickered in the darkened sky. In the fifty-mile-long valley, they were but small specks. The spectacle left the two children in awe.

Music played. Emotions began to hum inside of every heart as explosions filled the dark, dry night. The evening was filled with joy and beauty, and while humans were now more mature, they still felt emotions. The blasts began to increase in size and power as the rappers sang and then yelled. Then, on cue, the largest blast high in the sky blew the sky up. The blue circle left steaks of fire as it transformed the evening sky into some form of primal Big Bang.

One of the sparks cooled into the ring Nebula discussed minutes earlier by the physicists. The Nebula slowed its rotation, stabilized and settled into the shape of the iris of the boy watching the firework. In a heartbeat, things of many sizes and seemingly different compositions had become one and the same. Marilyn’s message was clear: scale and size were illusions.

The elegance and loveliness of the sight high in the sky above forced the boy on the screen to open his hand and drop a little truck made of construction blocks he was holding. As it hit the ground, it unhurriedly exploded in many parts, as if the component pieces were merely dancing with one another. Slowed by the magic of Marilyn, the pieces started moving in an orbiting motion. The colors sparkled and transformed into a circling cloud of rocks forming the body of a Metil, one of the creatures from the Purple. This was not just any Metil, but Mall-ik’s true form. Only the boy recognized himself. The creatures watching from the Purple saw the boy, and most were filled with rage at the sight of one they considered so deformed being venerated before the Multiverse.

Marilyn was far from done. After letting the creature pulse for a couple of seconds in all its beauty, the quantum-particle sized creature powered its self-similarity transporter, and in a flash of light, scaled down in a spot of flashing colors. Images blasted past it. Reality moved and transformed into a ballet of particles fueling the sun’s Heliocorium. Then the scale zoomed out until the viewer was surfing gas on the surface of the Armageddon of molten rocks heading toward earth. As the view moved along the formation and approached earth, it punched through the gas tip, revealing the fragile blue planet. The threat of the Heliocorium spears nearing planet was quickly taken away when the scale shifted once more, and the images became a little piece of debris flying toward the blue iris of the boy located in Italy. Before the object hit the eye, the boy’s eyelid closed.

Soon, the scene was back to the boy and his family. In the sky of northern Italy, some of the stars in the sky lit up between fireworks. Each lit pattern formed a constellation.

Neil spoke again, “This is the constellation of Cassiopeia, the Queen of Ethiopia named by Ptolemy, an astronomer from the second century.” A W-shaped constellation lit up in the sky. Neil was walking in the Cold night toward the family. His deep voice continued, “Cassiopeia was the wife of King Cepheus, who is right over there.” A second constellation lit up. Now he spoke to the boy standing next to him. “That brightest star,” one began to pulse, “is the Garnet Star. Garnet is one of the brightest in our Milky Way, our own galaxy.” The family was looking up and drinking the words of the older African-American. “For thousands of years, men used stories to recognize and distinguish these points of lights the same way a prisoner makes stories as he watches everyday life from his small cell window.”

“As we too often do in science, we forgot the beauty of our past, and we sadly dared to renamed Garnet as Mu Cephei. This star is a thousand times larger than our sun, but from here, that does not mean much. I, for one, prefer to see these stars as eternal lovers, a story from my continent of ancestry.”

Neil smiled and conveyed the importance of the images. “Let us repeat the same mistake today, in the name of reprising old lessons.” The sky turned black. In it appeared bubbles and lines of floating magma, shifting around the way different colors move in a lava lamp. The structures were strange, like clouds rolling or beach waves floating. “Our Multiverse, she is beautiful. Like a fetus and its mother share a port for the transfer of blood and nutrients. The Multiverse has singularities forcing information to flow between her differing structures.” Points lit up randomly in the structure like stars in the sky. “The same way we created constellations, the Lower and the Oldest formed this,” he raised both hands in the sky. A structure of lines formed. “It is my honor, my privilege to present to you the Nexus, secret umbilical cord, and communication system of the Multiverse.”

The man’s deep rolling voice sent shivers to every creature alive in the Multiverse. “And as our own Garnet star, I introduce to mankind,” at the center of the lit-up Nexus, one point was connected to nearly one hundred links, outshining them, “the Dot.”

As if it was alive, it pulsed. A song began from a pop singer from early in the 21st Century. As the woman sang, the Nexus moved and surrounded the image of the Multiverse. The different phases moved slowly.

“God, I wish I was one of the eight players. Today’s game is simple, you play the Attractor. As Sophie, you are free to use the Dot and the Nexus to communicate, and you can move anywhere in the Multiverse. This,” he waived to the sky and the moving structure, “is vast beyond imagination. If you don’t know where you are going, you WILL get lost.”

The structured vanished, and the music became very serene.

Marilyn set the stage for what would come next. Floating in the darkness, there appeared a rounded portal twice the size of a man. In front of the Dot, one man, Laurent Lapierre with his fully healthy body floated. In the mirror-like surface of the Dot swirled images of different worlds. Around it were hundreds of branches to different places. Laurent stood there in the silence.

Below each screen, the following text appeared in a language so every person could understand:

— Warning: The Dot is a powerful singularity with the energy of multiple black holes. It only communicates on a quantum level. The images are editorial enhancements. —

No one had a clue what this meant.