He blew up the world with his notepad. Left an apology on the fridge that seemed to have survived the existential collapse, and went for a burger at the weirdly persistent fast food chain that was floating above the head of a Kant Iteration Personality Avatar, or Kipper for short.
No one could know anything – that was the message. It was not a message that a Reality Engineer was going to dig. Wexel stepped into the Triple Layer and ordered himself a burger and a burrito, or The Border Special as they liked to call it.
Wexel had been set here to dismantle this place because it had been causing a stability bleed in the neighbouring universes. Most of the denizens had been shunted through a Redirect Fold, but these guys seemed stuck here, and he couldn’t figure out why.
He smiled as the server brought over his meal, and then he asked him, what the secret ingredient was. He knew that the man he was speaking to would know exactly what he was talking about. He wasn’t disappointed.
‘We know who you are, Wexel Aley. We have been keeping tabs on you since you arrived here last month, and we’ve been running interference all that time.’
‘How?’
‘We have our own tame engineer of course; one who specialises in rebuild. And when you had left he was going to get to it. We have everyone’s spatiotemporal index logged, and we were going to pull them all back in.’
‘You care about this place that much?’
‘It’s our home, and we fought to keep it for a long time.’
‘Why are you telling me now? Why didn’t you just boot me from the structure?’
‘What good would that have done? You would have just fetched reinforcements and broke the walls down in a very short amount of time.’
‘Why didn’t anyone make the case for stabilising this place?’
‘The Headitor that you guys sent had a falling out with our representative, and the rep attacked his Bloop Hen – that was it for us.’
‘OK, give me the spatiotemporal indices; I’m going to fix this.’
‘You are?’
‘Sure, why not? We’re engineers, not demolition experts. I am going to plug a Reinvigoration Protocol in at the base level, run the current stressors through an avatar generation stress dispersal vector, and I’m going to build a wall around you in the form of a Pause To Edit Edict, that will allow everything to fix before it gets re-looked at. Once the payload is adequate it will activate a Boomerang Amnesia Protocol, and all the people who are running around elsewhere, will come back.’
‘So, what does that mean?’
‘You’re safe for the moment. Some strange meatspace tulpas may manifest and then disappear, but in the end your reality is going to reintegrate.’
‘Why, didn’t the first guy do all this?’
‘Who knows?’
‘The Border Special is on the house, by the way.’
‘Thank you.’