worlds (archive)

W◯RLDS 2017/199X

Siobhan and their brother Henry are reaching that age where the pressure of nigh adulthood is staring them down. The stress of whatever life awaits after university graduation, though, is thrown wayside by a new friendship and the revelation that their fathers — Faruk Mustafa and Donovan Ventris — seem to have vanished without a trace... possibly almost a year ago, as the twins sit down together and finally shuffle through their memories. How is that something someone just doesn't notice?

Rifling through Donovan and Faruk's effects raises more questions than it answers — what is 'cryptophysicality'? — and Vonny and Henry do not return to campus in the winter to finish their degrees. Instead they set themselves to the task of digging up anything and anyone that might make some sense of their fathers' apparent secret lives, determined to figure out the circumstances of their disappearance.

What they find with their fathers' colleagues — truths going back both to the strange events following their fathers' meeting 25 years ago in graduate school, and to inconceivably earlier — answers far, far more than they ever thought to ask. And what to do with the unfolding realization that their fathers' absence may be only the first event in a much more catastrophic process...?