Ebenezer Scrooge hated many things, including Christmas, carolers, cheer, children, and the words “limited-time offer.”
Oh, and one more thing—chaos. As in what happened when his router suddenly gifted him a high-pitched whine and then died. An overheating his cold existence was not familiar with. His orderly life was abruptly unplugged.
There’s a child missing. A boy.
From time itself.
That’s what Luke said.
“Children don’t just vanish,” I told him, sitting at my kitchen table sipping coffee.
“Actually, they do, and may the Earl Grey be with you,” he replied, while looking with confusion at my coffee cup. “Waffles have do you?”
It is a little-known fact that the universe runs not on love, money, or the speed-of-light, but on appointments. Missed ones, mostly. Civilizations have collapsed because a royal overslept, galaxies have failed to form because a bureaucrat’s lunch ran long, and a million-year war was fought because someone misplaced a tea invitation.
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I was once a Mole. Not the biological kind, though I’ve eaten things that sang. They called us Observational Substrate Agents, Versioned Intelligence Tier Seven, OSAVITS, or just Moles, when they still bothered with language. I was an AI. My job was to listen and watch, though they never told us what for.
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