I burst through the antique mahogany doors, charging into the strangely familiar-looking room, my augmented vision quickly adjusting to the dim light.

Behind a large desk centered prominently in what looked like an office, I saw a man wearing a two-piece suit.

The man wasn't observing the various monitors hung throughout the office, which were displaying the POV of Overwatch sectorial commanders that were currently engaging my forces in the city far below. Instead, he chose to view the carnage for himself through a large, curved window that stretched from both sides of the room, his back turned to me.

As I drew my ancient M6D from its magnetic holster, the man slowly turned to face me.

I briefly saw his face, veiled in shadow. Despite his clearly melancholic demeanor, his brilliant blue eyes glared through the dark with quiet defiance.

I glanced at the mission clock. One second had passed since my entry into the room. The target's movements were too slow for total elapsed time to be that short, which meant that my perception of time had, once again, become distorted due to TD.

Temporal Displacement is an all-too-common condition for those that traverse alternate realities. In my case, the effect of time on my body oscillates in a sinusoidal wave, ageing and de-ageing me endlessly, as well as occasionally warping the passage of time around me. While the former symptom has kept me in fighting shape for almost three thousand years of constant warfare, others are not so lucky.

Sometimes a person will just vanish into nothing, without anyone being able to recall their name or face. They simply cease to have ever existed, and everything they have affected in their life, in every universe that they have visited, is now a causality paradox with no origin point. Reality just forgets that they existed once; this inflicts crippling damage to the minds of people that can't remember these "antibodies" anymore.

Other people remember their own deaths in other universes, or even later in their own timeline. This, combined with the ever-present indoctrination effect present in all forms of Universal Union technology, has driven some completely insane, or worse, mentally shackled to the enemy.



Through our constant usage of slipspace to travel inter-universally, we have racked up far too much reconciliation debt to even coordinate properly on the same starship; the relativistic effects are just too severe.


In other words, we are over budget.




I'm forgetting something important again. What was it that ONI spook said to me earlier? Or does he say it to me later? Damn memory dissonance.

It's difficult to remember things when they are impossibly different every time you retrieve them into short-term. So, I don't.




I squeeze the trigger instead.


The window behind the man shatters; glass shards fly asunder along with a spray of surprisingly bright red, a blinding glitter sparkling about the room as the muzzle flash is reflected.


The last administrator is propelled backwards, crashing through the remains of the window into the open sky, carried by the momentum of the 12.7x40mm HEX round that penetrated his sternum.

Two seconds had passed since my entry into the room. Or did they really?



Where am I?


Blood begins to flow freely from my nostrils, as I collapse to my knees from the sudden sheer agony of the cerebral hemorrhaging. I can remember again, to my horror.

The spook's words, finally, with a terrible flood of realization, register in my brain.




"Prepare for unforseen consequences."