Excerpt: Nexus City

“All right,” he said with a sigh. “Let’s try it this way. Think of the world as a sheet of paper, and everything in the world as words printed on the page.”

He picked up the worn-out old Bible for illustration, opening it to ruffle through its pages. “Each page is overlapped by another page, and that page is overlapped by another, and on and on, like a book with no ending.”

“Like this story?” she asked.

Rather to her disappointment, the jab did nothing to ruffle his composure; he just went on speaking. At least his voice was easy to listen to, low and calm and steady. Almost hypnotic, really. “Now imagine that the text on each page is almost exactly like what's on the one before it, with just a small difference. Maybe only one word changed.”

She wasn't really sure how this was meant to explain anything, but something in the patient way he described it compelled her to prove that she wasn't too dumb to keep up. “So the changes accumulate the more pages you go through, right?”

He inclined his head toward her. “Just so.”

“No wonder the book never ends.”

“Don't get caught up on details,” he said. “It’s just an analogy.”

“Fine." She waved a hand impatiently. "Whatever.”

“Now,” he went on, “imagine that something has torn a hole through the whole stack of pages, and where the paper is torn, words sometimes slip off of the pages and into the hole.”

This analogy was getting a little ridiculous, she thought. “So you're saying that there’s an infinite number of worlds with a hole punched through them, and this city is the hole?”

His shoulders moved in a little shrug. “Or perhaps it is the accumulation of everything that’s slipped off into the hole,” he said. “Nobody really knows for sure. These are just educated guesses based on what we've been able to observe.”

She paused for a moment to eye him, watching his face for any sign that he was bullshitting her, but he only looked expectantly back at her, brows lifting a little, his handsome face perfectly serious. Maybe he just had a really good poker face. Did priests play poker? “Do you really expect me to believe this crap?” she asked him.

“I don’t think it really matters if you believe it or not,” he pointed out mildly. “You're here, either way.”

She couldn’t really argue the point, and settled for giving him a dirty look instead.