zero hour

Worlds Within Worlds Meta Structurally and Literally

Working Title: Mack's long-lost mind-melting MackNally-family MacGuffin Collection mysteriously arrives at her Office Desk

Subtitled: The story of how agent Agent MackNally becomes obsessed with a mysterious unsolved cold case, the unexplained disappearance of her Agency Mentor, and the events leading up to her own even more mysterious disappearance.

Expert From: "Book One: Zero Hour", Page: 1, Chapter: 1

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS...

The box, the two books, and the handwritten note folded into the strangely textured, strongly perfumed, roughhewn, antiquated parchment paper envelope made of hemp.

Her mind danced with shimmery echos of a hazy, half-forgotten memory, hyper-lucid deja vu flashback, acid-washed for the visual pun, all in good fun... And then just as abruptly, she was back to reality, at her desk, in her office, looking at a stack of things that should not possibly be there. Physically impossible for anyone to enter and deliver any kind of package without first being pre-processed and pre-approved for entry, screened digitally and physically before being granted entry, and having one's identifying likeness captured digitally on the TruSight Security Biometric Multi-Spectrum security video feed and also analogy on the old school back up direct to physical film video feed clone copy. Zero irregularities detected by systems analysis diagnostics means Zero Entry to her office.

And yet...

These three impossible objects just sat there. They all just sat there, on her desk... Staring back at her like sentient objects, each with a different chip on their anthropomorphized shoulders. Stacked on top of each other, impossibly in violation of all normal causality, they defied sanity.

Each item demanded her attention urgently. She had no idea with which to start.

The rough-hewn envelope containing the handwritten note she had already precognizantly seen that she knew she would recognize the unknown sender's handwriting, it felt heavy and wrong in between her fingers. She set that aside and picked up the other two items sitting on the file box's lid.

The first book as titled "Zero Hour"

This had the curious subtitle of "Subtitled: The story of how agent Agent McGee becomes obsessed with a mysteriously closed cold-case, and the events leading up to her own even more mysterious disappearance"

The second book was titled "Lilithiana Mack~nally reads a book called 'Forgiving Bobby McGee'". Agent Macknally couldn't believe her eyes. Chills were spilling up and down her spine.

No one knew the original spelling of her familial ancestral legacy middle name, and yet there it was in glossy book cover print. No one on earth besides herself, her dead mother, and her incapacitated father knew that obscure variation on the spelling of her otherwise already uncommon name. She was dead certain that there was no one alive, except her father... But he hadn't spoken, nor walked, nor wiped his own arse, let alone written any lengthy hand written family correspondence letters in over three decades, medically induced coma preventing such endeavors until such time his luxury medical staff declared conditions have been met for reanimation.

[She sat, stunned, unable to think, lost in sheer horror and amazement at the fact that she was reading about her own actual life details that few people outside of her extended family even know about.]

None of it made sense, at first.

All of it made her nauseated to the point of feeling faint. Mack had never before felt quite that close to losing all conscious control of her own mind and body before in her entire complicated and often traumatizing life... and yet here she was pale faced, perspiring profusely, shivering, and tasting copper in her mouth as the floor seemed to melt away beneath her feet.