In the final moment, standing in a park where the grass was simultaneously green, blue, and the memory of a supernova, Aris made one last, pure desire.

He realized the true terror then. The HFZ Universal Activator wasn't a tool. It was a mirror . It didn't activate the object. It activated the observer's relationship to the object. He wasn't changing reality. He was just making reality confess that it had been improvising all along.

The seam glowed a deep, infra-red violet.

The world around them began to stutter.

The Activator, obligingly, broadcast all of those frequencies.

Lena was pale. "What did you do?"

And the duck pond, for just a second, remembered it was once a star.

He dropped the Activator. The singing stopped. The cup was just a cup again.