Some of the hardest stories to write are those where every plot element turns out to be a deception, part of a vast conspiracy, wheels within wheels within wheels.

The news was playing on mute on the steering screen. Norman Colari stared blankly at a segment about the proposed world constitution.
Behind the car window, everything looked peaceful in the morning light. Leaves whispered in the quiet suburban street beside a warehouse and an empty loading dock.
   Unable to move to any significant degree, Norman found his life had changed beyond recognition. The man behind him controlled his entire future, or at least the rest of today.

   He had been abducted from the polar habitat module he shared with five other engineers, and was smuggled off the base sometime after local midnight. Then there was a gap. Norman had been forced to wear an absurd fat suit and a plastex face mask that irritated his skin. A catheter had been inserted for his convenience, though he couldn't feel anything down there.
He never considered resisting. His abductors had a terrifying sense of purpose.
First, he'd longed for explanations. Now he just wanted to forget.
Norman wore LucIm goggles and full joint controls. In the back of the car, an impassive face stared back.
   The agent known as Kyle began to calmly disassemble Norman's understanding of reality.
Strapped inside his safety harness, in a vehicle that appeared to be a subcompact car but weighed three tons, Norman listened like a tourist preparing for his first Mars walk.
Kyle explained his organization wielded more power than the mainstream could imagine. Cells operated in every country, controlling officials and opinion leaders in all governments.
Norman's only choice was to cooperate. Kyle suggested he would be well rewarded if he did as he was told.

   Norman's defenses took over. He would have to earn back his freedom. Start by looking around.
   The interior was bare, as if it had been assembled yesterday. Norman's seat could spin and rotate inside a framework that filled the small cabin. A full VR setup.
   The control screens still overwhelmed him. The feedback tattoos on Norman's forearms itched, and the transducer implanted in his transparent left eye lit up (he had lost the original in a childhood accident).
He wanted to test the remotes, and felt the stir of optronic connectors reaching out. Definitely a top of the line system.
   It was impossible to see inside the car from outside. Kyle assured him the laws against tinted windows would not be enforced today.
   "Why me?" Norman asked.
   Kyle might be in his mid-forties. He exuded indifference, as if he had already simulated every battle in advance. Norman wanted to keep him talking, even though he wasn't really here.
   Kyle slid forward through the framework. "Sorry to keep you from your life's work," he said, "but what you were doing was unimportant. Nothing matters except your mission today. You'll see for yourself."
   Each second of this explanation had to cost thousands of dollars.
"Humanity is about to face its greatest challenge. At some point during the past decade, we're not sure when or by whom, the Theory Of Everything was discovered at last."
   "You're talking physics?" Norman asked. Telerobotics geniuses had little time for other fields.
   He knew the Theory Of Everything, or TOE, was the final goal of physics. Once it was found, there was no need for further fundamental research. Scientists could then focus their energies on chemistry, biology, and engineering.
   Kyle said, "there have been many events that can't be explained otherwise, unless you believe in magic or advanced aliens."
   "And you decided to keep them secret," Norman said.
   Kyle shrugged. "Dozens of inexplicable break-ins, rare isotopes stolen from Sandria and CERN, data retrieved from inaccessible servers. Someone can penetrate our deepest bunkers without leaving a trace. This entity can alter known laws of physics. We think they're using their TOE to 'reprogram' quantum action potentials in their vicinity."
   Kyle sighed. "Even so, it took a lot of persuasion to make our leaders see the light." Norman thought Kyle had done much of the persuading himself.
   "This enemy is immensely powerful," Kyle went on. "I can only assume their intentions are hostile. Some said we could never beat them. They forgot we have no choice."
   "Won't they destroy the planet rather than let us win?" Norman wondered.
   "There are technical limits, but we don't know them yet. Be alert for certain signs. If you see strange flying objects, or the light changes suddenly, follow my instructions exactly."
   Norman experienced a profound absence, not even a numbness. No response could be adequate.
"Tell me about this Theory Of Everything," he said.
   Kyle showed no irritation, but spoke faster. "We believe the TOE involves boundary membranes. We know of only four forces of nature, but there's no limit to their number. Each force is a quantum distortion of the universal force 'Supergravity', made by the sea of virtual particles surrounding the few real particles that keep us anchored in reality. By accelerating different real particles in different ways, virtual particles also generate mass and the various charges. Our adversary has a machine that can 'amplify' faint forces into existence by stabilizing virtual particle pairs. This device creates an instantaneous bubble where the additional laws apply. I expect they're always looking for new effects to add to their repertoire. Immense energy is required for the new forces to form. When the power is switched off, the bubble rapidly diffuses. The effect follows the path of least resistance: it's easy to create large bubbles in outer space, much harder on Earth."
   Norman wouldn't remember much of what Kyle told him, but vivid images filled his head.
He studied Kyle's hologram. The stare was extraordinarily lifelike. He should have been stuck in the passenger door, but took up a dimension of his own. Behind Kyle's shoulder he saw someone rushing past, both near and far away. Norman's eyes stung from the bifocal illusion.
   This conversation was a test. "Tell me the worst," Norman said.
   "You probably won't have to face the worst," Kyle said. "The bubbles form elastic force fields, flexible but very hard to penetrate. They emit ultravelocity sliverknives. It doesn't take much energy to slice through most common objects."
He had learned the human body was surprisingly resistant to disruptions that broke machinery. One unexpected threat was sound waves. Low-energy lightning tubes to the upper atmosphere could cause a worldwide hum that would drive everyone crazy.
   There was a hierarchy of nightmares. Could they design enzyme templates to form viruses in midair? Sanity and perception weapons? Pain bombs? No one could ever relax again.
All these speculations, almost comforting when they hadn't come true, were suddenly irrelevant.
   "This matter falls under Executive Order 21040-B, a classified decree signed by President LaBoeuf and authorized by the Supreme Court in only its fourth secret session ever," he explained. "Some governments, I'm sorry to say also our traditional allies, have already surrendered in spirit. They wish to appease whoever has this much power. Not everyone agrees with them. In the past year, a new criminal organization was allowed to take form. It exists for two reasons: to justify increased law enforcement spending, and to help you complete your mission today."
   Norman remembered reading about a new generation of super-hackers.
   "You're the boss of that outfit," Norman guessed. This man was no longer under anyone's control. Things could hardly get much worse.
   "Deep undercover," Kyle acknowledged. "The enemy has tracers on our top politicians and CEOs. My best operatives' bodies were never recovered. Others started panicking, so I had to remotivate them."
   "I like my odds," Norman said.
   "It ends today," Kyle said. "I believe the enemy has developed a new tool that can control human minds. People who should be on my side have betrayed me. If we don't act now, we may not even know we were defeated."
   Norman thought they better get started, or he might be unable to function.
"I want a super-weapon too," he said.
   "Our opponent has infiltrated several tech companies, including Xoft and Kandunga, and reorganized them for his own purposes. We intercepted plans for a strange device that we embedded in your car. We don't know exactly what it does. Field trials show it may be . . . helpful."
He gestured at the empty lot and the tree-shrouded landscape beyond. Not too far away, forty newly-deputized US Marshals were waiting with blank warrants, ready to knock down any door.
"This area is what we call a Node. We outnumber the enemy a hundred to one, but we need your unique skills. We flew in your robots before you were conscripted, which is why you had most of the week off. We can only guess the battle plan, but I'll guide you every step of the way. Until then: meet your new assistant." He blinked out of existence.
   The right door opened, and someone fell into the narrow seat. Norman's eyes widened. The thin man had already stopped moving and was staring straight ahead. An animated statue, with not a hair out of place. He could be a mannequin - white male in his mid-thirties, not actually alive.
   "Say hello to the first humanoid robot," Kyle spoke.
   "You have droids!" Norman exclaimed.
After a century of research, Artificial Intelligence remained a tantalizing mystery. He studied the realistic mask-face. There had been breakthroughs in control interfaces and telemechanics. He could see the cable in its neck, under the fake-looking hair.
   "You're not surprised," Kyle noted. "We both work on the cutting edge. This machine is only slightly more advanced."
   "You should have built an attractive female. The uncannyness would have been less noticeable."
"And less unobtrusive."
In his old life, Norman had been commander of a robot fleet exploring Lake Styx under the Antarctic ice shelf. The lake was trapped between a plain of volcanic rock and a kilometer-thick ice ceiling. The largest sealed body of water on the planet was a small world in its own right.
Norman's robots had explored the lake's many ice caves. When they collapsed, the debris tumbled upward. There were gas pockets and unearthly bacteria colonies. The robots had stabilized the ice ceiling, excavated side tunnels, and laid enough nanofiber to reach the other pole.
No one would ever visit the lake in person. He supervised operations from his customized recliner in the control room on Mount Orexys. He was intimately familiar with the touch and feel of ice, but had never felt the cold.
   The lake would become a quarantine chamber to develop and test new drugs and biotech entities. It might even be safe to conduct nanotechnology experiments there: the ice was an impregnable barrier to the tiny machines.
   In the past two years, his robots had transformed the hidden lake, making it ready for its future occupants.
"I can do this," he said. He felt his skin patches come alive.

   Standing in the center of the control room, Kyle felt slightly better about Norman's prospects. After months of preparation, he was ready to fight. The main display showed Norman's diminutive car entering the highway. He looked around the crowded room in an abandoned shopping mall.
He needed to get outside.
   His car rolled out of the empty mall's main entrance onto a parking lot which was being converted into a parklike forest.
Kyle felt destiny flow through him, the best feeling in the world. He would decide its next configuration.
The car jerked and developed a mind of its own as it joined the four-lane traffic through enemy territory. He scrolled through the observation screens, half-expecting God's TOE to descend from the sky and stub him out.
Anomalies could appear anywhere, and were easy to miss.
   Most people simply ignored strange matter deposits, or the faint rings of ash associated with AFS's (asynchronous force spheroids). Those who did investigate too closely were not heard from again.
   Kyle considered his faceless enemy. If they hadn't been insane to begin with, having the Power had made them so.
   The Edge City was efficiently planned but it tended to repeat itself, a civilization without a center.
Behind an artificial hill in an old landfill loomed an upright cylinder: the magnetic container. If they were lucky, the captured enemy would be imprisoned inside this device. Flown in by cargo airship and assembled onsite, it was officially a methane generator.
A very long shot. Kyle expected nothing.
   Crossing an overpass, he glimpsed Norman's car. This would be their only contact.

   Mounted in every lightpole and cable pylon were the cameras of Traffic Control. Norman could access them all. An endless succession of street scenes rolled over his monitors as he followed the repairperson's truck down the Coast Range highway, always keeping several cars between them. The truck was part of a small fleet circling the exurbs, about one vehicle every twenty square kilometers. Norman was never truly alone.
   The strangeness felt irrevocable. The deceptively human android sitting next to him was no help.
   After the first hour, he began to feel more cheerful. Before the day was out, they would visit a dozen telecommuting centers, where employees spent six-hour shifts inside "Job Pods". The repairperson in the truck would deal with the customers. Norman wouldn't even leave his car.
   They rolled into the shade of another parking garage, with doorways to office suites on every level. Norman parked and adjusted his goggles. He would monitor Borley the repairperson through cameras on his head. Borley didn't talk much. No one questioned his cover as he wandered among the cubicles.
   Their covers were elegantly simple: Norman and Borley were network security experts. Many companies had become extremely paranoid about industrial spies (they might have Kyle to thank for that). There were even reports of eavesdropping house robots.
   So far Borley had assumed three different identities, going through as many uniform changes. He'd even delivered a grocery parcel.
The android next to Norman awaited its orders. Its skin was made of a realistic rubberlike plastic, and it even appeared to breathe steadily. Despite its lifelike appearance, no one would be fooled up close. Norman hadn't realized the importance of small expressions and gestures. Humans tended to be nervous and unstable, always fidgeting. This android moved with perfect efficiency, except when it was sitting motionless like right now.
Receiving some signal from Borley, it opened the door and was gone. Norman leaned forward as the android's cameras came online. In his 3D goggles, Norman watched the android's powerful hands untwist the last screw and lift the panel. It peered into dark space.
   Wearing a generic uniform, it could climb through any access shaft and navigate narrow cable conduits. It had already checked two servers at their previous stops, and found a small hardware anomaly. A Skeon JY-6765 databus had partially rewired itself, its main board covered with a tangle of microscopic filaments. It looked messy, but the new arrangement worked better than before.
   That was the purpose of their mission. Modern chips could rewire themselves like human brains to adapt to given tasks. In this coastal area, that happened more than anywhere on Earth. The chips were responding to unseen distortions in the environment. Norman and Borley would measure the distortions, and a pattern would emerge, hopefully with a clear center.
   Maybe humans sensed these mysterious forces too. Norman thought he felt something himself, an alarm bell in his mind.
Quite unbothered, the android crawled down the narrow shaft at constant speed. Norman looked beyond the concrete pillars at the dark clouds on the horizon.
   He distracted himself by testing the big robot in Borley's truck, newly delivered from the South Pole. Norman liked to claim the Workman series could do almost anything a human could do, only ten times better.
   Its power and speed would put the android to shame. There was comfort in having advanced tools. Not even the TOE-master could match this.
   Suddenly, the android was back in its seat, and Borley started his truck ten stalls away. Norman felt his car pull back, and belatedly grabbed the wheel.
No need for that. Kyle would drive him to their next stop. Ironically, Norman disliked being moved by remote control.
At least his traffic and data screens still gave him the illusion of being in the loop.
   The day dragged on, a road show of moving fenders and reflecting windshields. Highways wound between the hills, in and out of three more parking structures. The sun slid behind the clouds.
No time to break for lunch. Norman swallowed a packet of power pills. They might contain illegal ingredients; he suddenly felt very alert. The contrast increased and colors sharpened. His ergonomic seat was very comfortable. The ice robot was fully charged, ready to spring into action.
As the danger seemed to fade, it occurred to him he should be paid for this.

   They entered a vast daytime shadow. In the past ten years, the first Citadels had risen in the open spaces between the suburbs.
Thirty thousand residents lived, worked and shopped in a huge building covered with terraces and hanging gardens. Norman and Borley drove under a thirty-story cone-shaped tower surrounded by a tiered base extending a kilometer. Every meter of the semi-covered, tree-lined boulevard was manicured. From the top floors, the ocean was visible.
A toll was deducted from their traffic accounts for "heat pollution".
   By early afternoon, Norman began to feel vulnerable again. Whoever they were hunting hadn't made a mistake yet. Norman wondered if the counterattack had begun. He scanned the horizon.

   The first reality check was Borley's sudden elimination. Norman never saw the attack.
His mind had begun to drift, and he didn't notice Borley's fake radio chatter had stopped. Then he saw the skidmarks. The wheel was pulled from his grasp as Kyle took full control.
   The image was frozen in his mind. Tracks of rubber, a gap in the roadside barrier, black smoke rising from beyond the incline.
   Luckily Borley's truck had drifted far ahead.
   Kyle never slowed the car. The smoke climbed in Norman's rearview as he pulled over a hill. Cars going in the other direction stopped.
   Checking his remotes, Norman saw the ice robot in Borley's truck remained functional. In the smoke, it took him a moment to realize he was upside down. Then he was in control, ripping through the bent back doors and out into the daylight.
He stood at the bottom of a ravine dotted with burning sagebrush. The fire in the overturned truck was already going out.
Outlined in frozen blue light, Borley's floating corpse rotated slowly in midair. There were no shadows from the smoke overhead.
Norman felt his life up to now had been a dream.
   Kyle's control voice spoke in his ear. "We anticipated this," he said. "Sorry I couldn't warn you. We made sure Borley's route could be tracked so they would reveal themselves. Borley's cover as a tabloid freelancer goes back five years."
   Norman realized the robot he was controlling was an older Russian model, mostly used by media organizations in civil war zones.
Apparently, the enemy was ready to go public. Kyle had prepared some news releases to further provoke him.
"Should I switch cars?" Norman asked.
   "No. As we speak your vehicle is changing color and configuration."
   Norman heard a whir as the windshield moved forward. That explained the car's jury-rigged interior. He realized how expendable he was. Kyle was probably hiding in a bunker somewhere.
   "Borley was a nuisance to them, not a threat," Kyle said. "He spent a few days interviewing telecommuters about 'software ghosts', circling his target. Now we have our first measured TOE event."
   A replacement truck appeared ahead. The driver of the movers' van never looked down.
Norman's hands trembled. He wiped sweat from his forehead.
Shock was stronger than fear. "I'm gonna puke," he said, but he couldn't. Kyle laughed heartily.
   Another fifteen minutes, another parking garage. In the afternoon light it took Norman a moment to realize they had been here before.
Normal life had never seemed so remote, decades' worth of changes in a day.
   The second driver, whose name he hadn't learned, entered a small lobby. Once again Norman was startled when the android leaped out. Before he could turn, the door had already slammed shut. He caught a glimpse of the thing turning a corner.
   "Goodbye," Norman said, and began to doze off.
   His eyes opened an instant later. Maps were scrolling over the dashboard, red lights flashing all over. The battle had begun. The adrenaline rush was both good and bad.
   He saw an open access shaft, a panel leaning against the wall. The android jumped out of the dark onto the cement floor, and ran past a group of startled commuters. It was carrying a transparent box.
Entering the light, its shouldercam stabilized, and Norman saw it was carrying an optronic CPU, the disconnected brains of some unfortunate web domain.
The android passed Norman's car without slowing, and jumped over a barrier onto the flowerbeds below. It crossed the lawn at high speed, the box perfectly balanced.
   "We're at war," Kyle said. The hybrid engine started, vigorously pulling Norman against his restraints.
   Kyle explained that Borley had earlier scanned the CPU the android was carrying. The latest attack had changed its configuration, forming a virtual roadmap to the enemy.
   Belatedly, Norman took control of the second robot in the movers' truck. He heard the quadraphonic whine as its systems powered up, spiderlegs and arms unfolding. It lowered itself onto the pavement. Norman turned to see it walk past. This unit had been repainted in an urban camouflage scheme, the concealment effect nullified by flashing strobes. Its tool kit was replaced by a spare fuel cell - or a bomb?
   Kyle spoke again, sounding flat, with the rapid pauses of digital static. "Our relays are being jammed. You will have to follow the android yourself. We can't control it."
   Even as he spoke, Norman's car swung around, pushing him back as it headed for the exit. It crunched against another car, and Norman understood the reason for the harness.
"Careful now," he said.
   "Antenna problems. Your controls have a weighted response. Override my errors."
   The movers' truck rolled past. The ice bot could never keep up with the vehicles, but the android couldn't run much faster than a human.

Four machines fanned out from the parking garage.
   Several wrong turns canceled out, and Norman found himself beside the main road, trying to interpret the android's shouldercam while controlling the ice bot through the rising static. The traffic cams were also down.
The ice bot's joints felt loose. Its cylinder plugs normally shrank in the cold. He compensated for the errors better than anyone he knew could have done.
The shouldercam went dark. Reaching an overpass, he saw scooters zooming past. An expanse of sidewalk stretched almost to the horizon. He shifted in his seat. Then a click, and he felt himself going up.
   "I entered the ramp to the elevated high-speed track," he said.
   A new voice spoke with admirable competence. "We're clearing the tracks."
Signs came on: CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE.
   A manhole popped open on the receding ground, the lid flipping before landing, and the android emerged. It had attached a new probe to the CPU, and now wore active-camouflage fatigues that made it hard to see against the grass.
Norman watched it surveying the area, even glancing at his car before freezing.
Kyle explained the android's software had locked onto the enemy target. Picking up speed, it began to run in a straight line, its legs moving in an artificial way.
   "Staying on course," Norman said. There were clicks as his car started to accelerate, the wheels locked in frictionless speed rails.
To his surprise, the android was running alongside the elevated tracks, almost keeping up with him. Norman was going too slow for the speed tracks.
He could see far from here - hilly forests punctuated by distant Citadels. A snowcapped peak reminded him of Antarctica.
He realized he was absurdly exposed. The android seemed almost suicidal. He began to hate it.
   The competent man spoke. "Turnoff in two hundred meters . . . android heading . . ."
   "Say again," Norman said, staring ahead like a senior stuck on a rollercoaster.
   Awaiting the reply, he found himself joining an instant traffic jam. Dozens of cars were lined up before the exit ramp. More confusion on the radio.
   ". . . losing channels," Kyle said. "Watch for . . ."
   Strange things were happening now. There was something to his right, a presence like a hand on his face. When he turned he saw only the side barrier.
   Norman reviewed the cam footage. Scrolling through menus, he saw images of himself, the past hour replayed in a blur.
There it was. Studying the frames, he thought he saw ghostly shapes, millisecond appearances in the sky. Not compression artifacts.
   The side barrier was too close. He would have welcomed the company of the android right now. Glancing at the sky, he thought he saw more afterimages. TOE probes blinking out of existence?
   The central barrier descended obligingly, and the other cars parted onto the oncoming track. Norman rolled ahead, horns honking as he entered the offramp. The engine surged as he bumped over a lowered crash barrier, and he was back on the street.

   The landscape assumed a new clarity. Norman felt he could see every fiber, every atom in the grass and trees. Oddly, he couldn't quite read the highway signs.
   He couldn't focus right. Something was coalescing ahead, about where the running android should be. Curtains were closing.
   Moments ago the sun had been out. Cars were still moving, the occasional pedestrian strolling along with insane courage. Couldn't they sense the coming darkness?
They were somehow being prevented from seeing. Kyle's hidden device made the effects apparent for him.
   He managed to override the controls, and rolled one block north.
Now it felt as if it was raining. No, sparks were dancing over the hood. The blurring deepened, until he was almost driving blind. The headlights didn't help.
   The fog lifted so slowly he couldn't tell when it had gone. He didn't want to go through that again.
Time to check the map. He was back on track, but no sign of the android.
Kyle's voice returned. ". . . keep going . . . passing through interference."
   This was a high-income neighborhood with parklike sidewalks. Up ahead he saw people stumbling, others frozen in place. They had felt it too.
He reacquired the android's signal after pulling over. His tireless servant was still carrying its deadly box. It splashed through a pond and the mist of a fountain without slowing. Rollerboarding kids started to follow the running statue. Norman doubted they would keep up.
   For a moment he felt intensely alive. He hadn't known this feeling was even possible. Then darkness fell again, as a great hand grasped his car. Norman might have screamed.
   It was only the ice bot, stepping over his car on its long legs. His handlers must have reprogrammed it. Now he was the center of attention. Ignoring the stares and cameras from a nearby parking lot, he made the robot stagger away.
   Kyle's voice was weak. ". . . almost time for you . . ."
   The watched feeling returned. For a moment he thought he glimpsed a phantom controller out of the corner of his eye, floating in a lotus position. When he turned the car, wheels spinning in opposite directions, it rotated away.
   Kyle shouted. "Ignore any illusions!"
   The movers' truck slid past in the wrong lane. Norman didn't think it was under the driver's control anymore.
Everyone could see reality breaking down. Still no breaking news. Kyle had to be tampering with the Net.
   It was not unlike falling asleep. Norman couldn't trust his perceptions anymore. There were waves of ancient recollections, absurd concepts that seemed meaningful, a catalog of forgotten dreams that almost made sense.
   With supreme effort, he cleared his mind. The sunlight was the last thing to return. He could fight back if he tried, even if everyone outside was knocked out.
   Remembering what had happened to Borley, he would continue to avoid the truck. He sent the bot ahead to the next road, where he thought the android would emerge.
   The bot trotted over a fence and stumbled to a halt, cameras and antennas twirling in the breeze. The road ended among low dunes.
Ahead, the sky met the ocean, an almost motionless succession of incoming waves below the horizon.
The android was nowhere to be seen, but its abandoned CPU-box blinked at the edge of the saw grass.
The building that blocked the bot's view looked less like a factory than a vast greenhouse. Nearby, the waves broke against a rocky precipice, the intake valves hidden under the surf.
Norman read the sign: "Timothy Leary Desalination and Sea Mining Plant"
   "Brilliant cover," Kyle said. "This thing consumes eighty million kilowatt-hours per year. I actually suspected he hid the device in the State Capitol."

   Lightning flashed in Norman's virtual retinas. It was only sunlight reflecting off the greenhouse, but it came from the wrong direction.
The bot looked up at a spherical mirror in the sky, curving into a silver disk.
   "Calmly drive away," Kyle ordered.
   Norman lifted his goggles, and saw the top of the object from his own vantage point three streets away. A great silver eye was sliding toward the facility's roof.
He felt wild glee as the car reversed. Kyle said something about controlling the local traffic.
   Despite its reflectiveness (not a speck of dirt would cling to the sphere), the ball was obviously rolling toward Norman.
   It passed behind a stand of oaks. A puff of smoke rose skyward.
He was sure the whole world could now watch the object.
   With a final turn, he accelerated onto the Coastal Highway. Behind him he imagined crashing sounds and screams.
   "We recharged your power cells on the elevated track," Kyle said.
   The ball broke onto the highway in a mass of smoke and debris. A truck overturned.
Something like a giant bell tolled.
   The bulk drew closer, devouring vehicles in its path. He had no idea if it functioned more like a hovercraft, a tornado, or a black hole. The sphere was flattened at the base, its surface rippling like canvas.
   Norman changed lanes, outracing his destiny. His rearview became a double reflection, the back of his car approaching steadily, the interior framework hidden behind mirrored glass.
   The sphere slid past, eclipsing the sun. Its shadowed half seemed too dark for such a perfect mirror. Light poles toppled in a row.
   As planned, the sphere was heading directly for the movers' truck, which had made an illegal turn onto the oncoming lane. Norman's car drifted sideways with the displaced air before correcting.
The sphere looked awesome from up close, but its optics left something to be desired, or it might have noticed that a third and smaller ice robot was now holding onto Norman's car as if it belonged there. Its claw reached out.
   Suddenly reversing direction, the sphere used air displacement to topple the movers' truck. Apparently it didn't want to touch it. The truck skidded and overturned in the breakdown lane. Another car veered out of control and slid along the crash barrier.
Wherever debris hit it, the sphere rippled.
Norman finally accepted that Kyle intended him to encounter the sphere. Telepresence would only go so far.
He rolled onto the central embankment through a gap in the dividing wall, past the stalled traffic. Now the sphere was trying to avoid him.
   There was no way to prepare for total oblivion, except to let go of everything.
A sense of being accelerated to impossible speeds . . . Then everything changed.

   He was falling through a strange region. He recognized an electronic chime as the car's small maneuvering thrusters came on. From all sides he heard puffs of gas, holding the vehicle steady. A discarded piece of plastic floated through the cabin.
Red light strained his eyes. Perhaps the darkness was his mind speeding up, less light for every unit of perception. Norman would have to think fast.
   Kyle's voice spoke, a recording to keep him functional. "Ignore everything but the object at the center."
   Slowly, his new universe began to make sense. The shapes swirling around his car were distorted images of the outside world. He could ignore them.
The car maneuvered with the dignified precision of a spacecraft. There was no gravity here, but the external microphones picked up faint sounds, so the sphere was semi-permeable.
   There it was! The equipment racks and thorium power cell were an island of calm in the chaos. Norman slid closer, his wheels no longer touching anything.
   For a few seconds, Norman saw the machine created to harness the Theory Of Everything. It was just long enough to be disappointed. There was no majesty here, just messy racks of off-the-shelf components, mostly capacitors and interlocking electrodes. Cameras stared in all directions. He saw globs of solder, no, transparent nanofoam.
No dramatic force concentrations. In the middle was a nested array of metallic hoops like a gyroscope.
Somehow, he missed seeing the operator.
   A thought occurred to him. Could this all be the work of one person? That was ridiculous.
   As if in slow motion, the bot's arm reached for an equipment rack. It receded strangely, like through an underwater air pocket, but managed to grab a support strut.

   Through a camera on the overturned truck, Kyle watched the rolling sphere. For years he had dreamed of capturing a TOE machine intact.
There was a great ripple as Norman's car pushed through the mirror surface and returned to normal space, the sphere distorting as if it was giving birth.
The software must have been miscalibrated, because the car fell over two meters. That was not why Kyle cursed: the ice robot's claw was empty.

   A hard landing on the grass embankment. Norman's car flattened a small tree, but the armor, shock absorbers, and brakes held together.
He must have traveled a good distance inside the sphere. There was an impression of the sky changing color. The red light had played tricks on his eyes.
   After crashing through a distant row of trees, the sphere seemed to shrink.
Norman leaned back and exhaled, checked the robot's systems, and began the bumpy drive back to the highway. Only then did it occur to him to check the claw.
   Along the road, drivers were waiting beside their cars. Calls were going out, the first emergency chopper would soon be here.
   This was Revelation Day.
For all he knew, the sphere could violate charge conservation. Inverting the charge of all of Earth's electrons would eradicate all large structures up to the Andromeda Galaxy.
   Norman's eyes fixed on his navigation readout, which showed his car heading due west at 1068.8 km/h. He stared as he performed calculations in his head.
Exactly as he'd thought. The Earth's rotation had been stopped. The GPS satellites high overhead were not affected, and continued in their normal orbits. Airliners would soon start landing in the wrong countries.
He did another calculation: because of its spin, the Earth wasn't perfectly round. It bulged nearly 20 kilometers at the equator, and was depressed a similar amount at the poles.
   Once it stopped spinning, the Earth would become a more perfect sphere. If the land suddenly rose up ten kilometers, would that be bad?
   The landslides would bury the continents. It would leave an equatorial ridge like on Iapetus . . .
He checked his coordinates again. At this latitude, the planet's diameter would remain unchanged. What a coincidence! He would be one of the few people to survive the cataclysm.
No, the shockwaves would be devastating. Not to mention the tsunamis, which might be at their worst here.
   "Cool it," Kyle said. "You were thinking out loud."
   Norman finally realized the GPS readout had frozen when it had reached its strange value. The rotational pause had only lasted an instant. Only astronomers would notice the effects.

   Kyle explained while Norman maneuvered past the halted cars.
   "They haven't solved every TOE equation yet," Kyle said. "Gravity is especially tricky. At the moment, all they can do is manipulate the spin of nuclear particles, which can only have a few discrete values. They found a way to make boson/fermion spins have any value. Such free-spinning particles tend to 'steal' spin from their unaffected neighbors. The chain reaction spreads at the speed of light."
   "They briefly suspended the earth's rotation by redistributing the planet's angular momentum among its atomic nuclei, making them spin slightly faster. The planetary rotation was hidden inside every particle on Earth."
That seemed like a lot of trouble just to snatch back their equipment from Norman's robot claw. He saw a distant flash of lightning.
   The road looked narrower as the horizon receded before him. Even the android's empty seat looked warped.
Kyle's voice faded in and out. "By selectively reversing the process, they can also move matter. That's how they make things appear to float. It lets them twist and stretch objects by adjusting the space between particles."
   That explained why computer chips in the area kept rebuilding themselves, and the way his car was currently being run through a wringer.
This bothered Norman: assuming the stretched objects weren't heated far beyond their melting points, they should suffer massive chemical changes. His highly redundant body with all its identical cells should be thoroughly scrambled.
The distortions were passing through him, but Norman felt only a slight tingle (even that should be enough to kill him). Other forces had to be involved. The robot on his roof was even less affected.
   The world was being subtly kneaded as strange waves emanated from the general direction of the coastline. Norman wondered how he could even see them.
The other drivers, some of them returning to their cars to join the apocalyptic traffic jam, hardly seemed to notice.

   He figured it out at last. The reason he alone could see this effect was because he was different. Everything in and on his car (and probably the car itself) had come from Antarctica, including Norman. Lake Styx was just 85 kilometers from the South Pole. The spin experiments had been going on for months, affecting every particle on Earth, but not to the same extent. Without much rotational energy to begin with, Norman and his equipment had accumulated far fewer spin changes.
   Norman hadn't been selected for his unique talents, adequate as they might be. He'd simply been in the right place at the right time. He felt used.
   That was why the TOE-master couldn't see him clearly. His car and robot were almost invisible to their spin devices.
But to the other people on the road, it now appeared that only his vehicle was being squeezed and stretched! The distortions had to be relativistic in nature, in a way he couldn't begin to understand.
   He tried to delay the inevitable as the wave compressions worsened, trapped inside an elongating tunnel with oddly pitched sounds and glitters of shattered sunlight.
   In a timespan too short to measure, the normal laws of nature reasserted themselves.
His wheels lifted in slow-motion, the chassis groaning. The earth slammed sideways, sparks flying behind his window. Somehow, the bottom-heavy car managed to right itself, and the batteries didn't blow up. Norman felt momentary gratitude for a certain consumer advocate.
   As he slid toward the dividing barrier in a cloud of smoke, the controls failed. The automatic brakes sputtered, the tires shredded, and he slammed to a standstill.
An ambulance zoomed past as a chopper thundered overhead.
   "We're winning!" Kyle said.
   "You used me as a diversion," Norman guessed.
   "The TOE-master just had the surprise of his life. It took us a while to figure out where he lives. He likes to hide in the in-between spaces, 'out of phase', like dark matter. I expect he owns a pressurized living module, perhaps a converted airliner, orbiting inside the earth, unable to interact with normal matter."
"All we've done is increase his phase shift. He's on his own now, spread out evenly throughout our planet, less than nothing," Kyle chuckled.
Norman had experienced a somewhat similar sensation in the past hour.
   Kyle continued. "Whenever he modified the quantum spin of distant particles, he also disturbed the Earth's magnetic field. We detected ultrashort bursts, up to a Teragauss in the millimeter band. Your role was to provoke him into using his power."
"We deployed a network of detectors to precisely measure the velocity effects of his final spin change, thereby increasing his Heisenberg uncertainty to roughly the earth's diameter."
   Norman tried to understand the incomprehensible. "You mean, if you hadn't made the measurement, nothing would have happened? You only measured faint radio signals, you didn't interact with him in any way."
   "That's how it works," Kyle explained.
   "It might have been less trouble to break off the Ross ice shelf to decalibrate his sensors."
   "In all seriousness, he could literally have flipped the poles," Kyle said wistfully. "I almost understand him now. He was in over his head, like you."
   Norman was shaking badly. Wiping the sweat from his face, he envisioned the TOE-master's unreachable darkness. It hardly mattered anymore.
   He looked around. An amateur journalist was filming his car as flashing lights approached. Soon they would cut through his door. Better hurry.
   Norman toggled through the options, and found one of Kyle's hidden cameras.
   Two paramedics were lifting the android onto a rolling stretcher, adjusting the IV in its arm.
He was still shocked to see his suspicions confirmed. It wasn't an android at all, but a zombie. This creature had once been human, and was now controlled by Kyle. He supposed there might be bionic components . . . Why would anyone volunteer to be converted like that?
As he leaned forward, the view through the windshield went black. The dashboard screens went next, then his VR goggles.
   "You are free to go," Kyle said as the hatch cracked open, revealing the empty Virtual Reality Chamber in Point Argosy, Antarctica.

Norman felt his greatest disorientation yet. He had really allowed himself to be swayed by Kyle's illusions.
   Then he remembered the mental disruptions during the car chase, the sudden accelerations, the timeless interval of weightlessness. Those were far from standard VR features. If Norman had been 15,000 kilometers away the whole time, how could the spin interactions have changed his perceptions? And what about the radio interference?
Norman understood then. Kyle already had the TOE technology, and had used it to defeat his final rival. All was lost.

   Alone at last, Kyle found it relaxing to talk to the "android". Unbothered by mundane concerns, it was a great listener. He double-checked the intravenous tubes that kept it alive. All vital signs were back to normal.
He leaned closer. To think the mind behind this blank face was responsible for the greatest physics breakthrough of all time, arguably more brilliant than Newton and Einstein combined. Too bad his partner had refused to surrender too. Today he'd paid the ultimate price for his arrogance.
   The android didn't mind. All annoying traits had been erased when it had been converted, or "perfected", as Kyle thought of it.
   "Ever hear of quantum magic?" Kyle asked. "That's what you should have worked on, instead of those spin decouplers."
He looked at the long racks of gleaming new optronics. They rather resembled the equipment in the sphere, but instead of a gyroscope there was something else at the core. Something that was hard to look at. Fundamentally uncertain.
"It's a Transaction Globe," Kyle explained. "It creates a self-strengthening interaction between the present and the future, a feedback cycle if you will. Soon, I'll figure out how to make it work. Or it will figure it out for me."
His eyes shone. "Of all the possible futures, only One can become the reality. But which One? That is up to me!"
   "In every possible future, I will take a detailed survey. The One future I like the most will automatically create a self-reinforcing transaction with the past, erasing all others as if they never existed. A bit like how you were erased."
   His experiment with Norman had succeeded spectacularly.
Norman couldn't be allowed to remember his triumph, of course.
   "You see," Kyle said, "it only works if there is one Transaction Box."
   But there would be many, many androids.

TO BE CONTINUED?


Soon to be a major motion picture . . .

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The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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