Marcus took the stairs down three at a time and was only barely able to keep up with Anna and the rest of the crowd that was fleeing in front of him. Where humans normally tended to bunch up and slow down when in a big group, it turned out that the end of the world gave everyone enough clarity about getting away from it that no one needed encouragement to move faster.

As they burst into the lobby on the ground floor, Marcus saw that the streets outside weren’t anything like a refuge. The crowd of software engineers wasn’t running towards the street though. The consensus seemed to be that the parking lot behind the building would somehow be safer.

Marcus was pretty sure that wouldn’t be the case, but he didn’t have anywhere better to go or anyone better to face the end with at the moment.

“We need to get out of the state,” Anna said. “Everybody! Get to your cars and drive.”

“Where?” Marcus said, aware that since he’d been more or less kidnapped, he had no car to run to.

“Away. The farther the better,” Anna said. “That things spreading and it’s not going to stop.”

“Can we stop it?” Marcus asked. Each word sounded more ridiculous than the last as they tumbled out of his mouth, and, disturbingly, he wasn’t completely sure it was his voice that spoke them.

“Your police officer friends seemed to think so, but I don’t know…wait, where did they go?” Anna asked.

Marcus looked around and saw the lobby was empty, except for Anna and himself.

“Where did everybody else go?” he asked and reached for Anna’s hand.

That she reached back for him was comforting on a primal level. Contact. One hand in other. They weren’t alone. Not yet.

“The air’s wrong,” she said, turning in a slow circle.

Marcus felt a charge around them. He could still breathe, but the gasses being drawn into his lungs weren’t the Earth-standard mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and general smog. 

“I don’t know if getting away is an option anymore,” Marcus said. He stomped on the grouped and felt the granite tiles under his shoes fracture.

“But we were running with the others,” Anna said. “What happened to them?”

“They’re okay,” Marcus said, not because he knew it to be true, but because he was willing to demand for it to be so. “We were at the back. I think we got caught in whatever effect the [Armageddon Beast] is generating. Notice how we’re not running anymore?”

“Yeah. I don’t know why that is though,” Anna said. “Why did we stop. That doesn’t make sense.”

“The parking lot exit is right over there,” Marcus said. “Let’s try to get to it.”

“Okay,” Anna said, a buzzing distraction creeping over her voice.

Marcus focused on the door. The exit. He wanted to be there. It wasn’t far. All he had to do was move. Walk. Just a little bit. A few steps. One step. One damn step!

“I can..can’t,” Anna said.

“Me either,” Marcus said. 

“I…thinking is getting hard…none of this makes….there’s no sense to this,” Anna said.

A calm that wasn’t entirely his own settled over Marcus.

He was in mortal peril.

He wasn’t built for that.

Didn’t mean he didn’t need to deal with it though. That’s what life was. Dealing with things whether you knew how to or not, because you were the only one there who could.

“Stick with me then,” he said. “This isn’t something we need to figure out. It’s just something we need to survive.”

“Survive?” Anna asked, her voice sharpening in clarity for a moment. “You saw what that thing was. How do we survive that?”

“Like we’re doing right now,” Marcus said. “One breath after another. You and me. Together.”

Anna drew in a slow breath along with Marcus and let it out when he did. They did that a few more times before she opened her eyes.

Her nice, static-free eyes.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’d say that was a panic attack but it felt different.”

“I’m planning to schedule about a thousand sessions with my therapist as soon as we get out of here,” Marcus said.

“See if they have any openings left for me,” Anna said. “I’m going to need one too.”

She offered Marcus a smile though whether it was a grimly ironic awareness of their doomed state or a perverse determination to survive anyways, not in spite of but  because of how bad things were wasn’t exactly clear.

“So, first thing,” Marcus said. “Is we need to get to that door.”

“I don’t think it’s even real anymore,” Anna said. “I feel like we got hit by a wave and what we’re seeing is just what we remember seeing.”

“Maybe. Probably. Don’t care though. We’re getting out that door.”

“But if it’s not real then how…?” Anna asked. The edge of static didn’t return to her voice, but her uncertainty was plain to hear.

“Come on, this is Vegas,” Marcus said. “This town runs on illusions. Just need a little luck to make them real right?”

“I knew I shouldn’t have left my weighted dice at home today,” Anna said.

“They let you have those?” Marcus asked.

“The first thing I learned in this business is that if you wait for people to let you have something, you wind up with nothing,” Anna said.

“Seems like the [Armageddon Beast] gets that too,” Marcus said. “It definitely didn’t wait to ask if it could have us.”

“Or did it?” Anna asked. She took a step towards the door.

“So we can move?” Marcus said, taking a step to join her.

“Yeah. Right into the singularity,” Anna said.

“Uh, what?” Marcus asked.

“We’ve been thinking, or I’ve been thinking about the [Armageddon Beast] like a monster of some kind. A big snarling dragon or something. A creature with will and intent.”

“The name does sort of imply that,” Marcus said. He looked out at the street and saw that the bright sunlight of the clear day had been replaced by deep shadows lit with ever shifting multi-hued auroras that twisted and flowed both in the sky above and down at ground level.

What wasn’t present however was a dragon.

Or anything else like that.

“What if it’s more like a black hole though,” Anna said. “A cosmic divide-by-zero error. Or a point of infinite psychic density.”

“Those all sounds completely implausible, so they fit this situation perfectly,” Marcus said.

“If that model fits, then the [Armageddon Beast] hasn’t ‘eaten’ us yet. We could be inside the event horizon, but not at the singularity yet,” Anna said.

“The physics on that doesn’t work out at all for a black hole that’s about a hundred feet away, does it?” Marcus asked.

“Oh, not in the slightest,” Anna said. “It’s just the idea really. When you fall into an event horizon you’ve past the point of no return. Nothing sub-light speed can ever get out of it. But for the people who’s fallen into, things just get weird. Time and space bend around and their forward movement in time carries them in specific spatial direction.”

“Meaning they continue to exist but their future is always to fall into the singularity at the center of the black hole.”

“Right. Depending on the size of the blackhole you may not even run into spaghettification for quite a while.”

“So all we need to do is figure out how to escape a black hole then?” Marcus asked. “That’s impossible by definition right?”

“Technically, only sorta,” Anna said. “Nothing light speed or lower can escape a black hole. A faster-than-light object though breaks all kind of a laws of physics, including the absolute boundary of the event horizon.”

“I’m pretty sure I could do a seven minute mile back in college,” Marcus said. “Light speed’s not a lot faster than that, right?”

Anna rolled her eyes at his obvious lack of sincerity before drawing in a sharp breath.

“Depends on the medium,” Anna said, a grin starting to grace her features.

“What medium?” Marcus asked.

“The speed of light in a vacuum is different than the speed of light in air, or water, or, best of all, super cooled gasses. Get close enough to zero kelvin and you can basically make light stand still. Sort of. I mean you also need…you know what, it doesn’t matter. This is all a metaphor.”

“I think I get it,” Marcus said. “Light can be slowed down, so the speed to escape a black hole can be lowered.”

“Yes…or no, it doesn’t actually work like that. But you’re following the my point. If we’re trapped inside the [Armageddon Beast’s] event horizon, we can get out if we can change some fundamental condition that’s creating the event horizon, or that’s limiting us.”

“Gotcha. Like changing the speed of light,” Marcus said. “Not that changing the speed of light is exactly…oh….wait….wait, it is possible isn’t it?”

“I hope so,” Anna said. “I don’t know how. But maybe it’s something?”

“It’s more than something. Oh my god, you are so smart!” Marcus said, looking around for something, anything to write on.

“I’m trying to think of the last time I heard a man tell me that and I’m coming up blank,” Anna said.

“I won’t be the last,” Marcus said. “I think you found the key to getting us out here. This thing has us trapped in whatever weird laws of physics are setup here right? But it’s whole deal is that it eats physical laws.”

“Right,” Anna said and then shook her head. “Wait, how do we know that?”

“Uh? Didn’t Smith or Astra say something about that?”

“I don’t think so?” Anna said. “It feels like I…I’m not sure? Like I heard it somewhere else? From your game maybe?”

“We don’t have [Armageddon Beasts] in BH,” Marcus said and added without meaning to, “/or we didn’t before./”

That was strange and disturbing both because he hated the idea that even the people who’d been taken away were having to deal with something like that, and, because the voice definitely hadn’t been his own.

“Did I just sound weird there?” Marcus asked. “Like someone else?”

“A little?” Anna said. “Try saying it again.”

“We didn’t before,” Marcus said and paused to consider. “That sounded normal to me.”

“Same here,” Anna said. “Maybe it’s this place?”

“All the more reason to leave soon I guess,” Marcus said, finally noticing an iPad someone had left on a counter about ten steps closer to the door.

“If this doesn’t work, I’ll just be making things worse,” he said, before trying to move forward.

“Worse that the destruction of all matter and time?” Anna said. “Do you really think anything you do could manage that?”

Marcus chuckled, hearing Anna toss Astra’s words at him.

Stepping forward wasn’t hard. Moving towards annihilation was the easiest thing in what was left of Marcus’s world it turned out. Turning on the iPad proved more challenging in fact.

“Let me see it,” Anna said. Naturally it turned on as soon as she looked at it.

“How may…may I…I help you?” a voice that definitely was not Siri’s asked.

“Take a note,” Marcus said.

“What…note…should…what should the note say?” the not-Siri voice asked.

“Just this,” Marcus said. “Things that devour laws of physics shouldn’t create constants of their own.”

“Message recorded,” not-Siri said.

“Good,” Marcus said and hurled the iPad through the front widow and out onto the street.

Rather than shattering on the sidewalk, it rose up into the air and was pulled apart, atom-by-atom.

Marcus couldn’t breathe. His heart seemed to pause and his nerves charged with every bit of potential energy as he waited to see if his mad logic would fit with the madness around them. 

A clock ticked and nothing happened. It ticked again, despite there being no analog clocks in the room. 

Still nothing.

No. This is going to work. Marcus swore to himself. If the world was going to lose all sense, then nonsense had to work. Especially because the iPad gambit was more than just nonsense.

It was going to work.

The light flickered for an instant and Anna gasped.

“Air. This is air again.” she said, momentarily stunned.

Marcus wasn’t though. 

Holding onto her hand he dasheds towards the exit.

Chaos boiled in their wake, but the exit was the end of the [Armageddon Beast’s] reach. 

Marcus and Anna crashed out it, and into the parking lot where the other K2 staff members were frantically starting their cars or still running to them.

“And that’s how you fight an [Armageddon Beast],” Smith said.