The line of passengers shuffled sleepily toward the gate, a quiet procession punctuated by the occasional trill of the ticket scanner.

  Fourteen meters away, a young man’s knee bounces as he pretends to read a paperback. His nascent Qi flutters and flips, tinged a cascade of nervous yellows and queasy greens. A deeper look: hindbrain aflame, body flush with stale adrenaline. Deeper: synaptic fireworks outline frantically re-examined short term memories, coalesce into digestible images: the text confirming that the feds were raiding the house, his hazy recollection of the wall safe, his present insecurity (did he lock it? Did he remember? Did he hide it well enough?). His glance darts from the page to the open concourse, his imagination conjuring up flashes of approaching authorities, phantom SWAT teams.

  The line plodded ahead. A woman apologized as she struggled to locate the boarding pass in her bag.

  Another quick look, two meters ahead: the pass is folded in the bottom-left corner, trapped beneath her wallet and a pair of tampons. The woman’s hands brush old receipts and straw wrappers. Inside the bag, free-floating, is a miniature polaroid of a cat.

  Attention jerked away, four meters up and five meters to the right: a sparrow hops through the rafters. The sparrow has a minor fracture in one of its right phalanges, is locomoting via little jumps to avoid painful flight. A peek into the bird’s memories: much of what would be expected. Dim recollections of predator and safety, revolving around the centerpiece of this bird’s former world: a birdfeeder dangling from a 2nd story apartment. Curious digging reveals why the bird came to be here, in the Colombo Bandaranaike International Airport. Ah. Chased by a territorial blue magpie, the bird had ducked through an open door and become immediately confused by the maze of terminals and unending fluorescent daytime.

  The line had dwindled to its very end, and only one person remained, a man with a far-away look to his eyes, who swayed gently before the increasingly bemused gate attendant.

  Thirty-four meters back, twenty-eight meters to the right, deep down, on an exponentially smaller scale, a rare parasite lays eggs within the upper colon of a businessman. The parasite, a mid-sized tapeworm, was more adapted to live in asian carp, and would normally have been dissolved at its larval stage by a mammalian immune system, but a mutation to a gene on its second chromosome seems to have rendered it hardy enough to weather these assaults and grow to reproductive age. It lays its microscopic eggs in a spiraling fractal pattern, disgorging them with the neat efficiency of a frosting piper. At a glance, 76% of these eggs contain the same mutation. The worm’s exertions dislodge a pocket of gas, and the man burps.

  “Sir?” prodded the gate agent. “Sir, your boarding pass?”

  Sixty meters away, twenty-eight meters to the left, at the edges of awareness, a man fidgets with his wedding ring. It’s new. A dive into his hippocampus reveals just how new: one week. A further dive, why not, to explain the oxytocin flooding his system: his memory of the proposal, at the boardwalk. The fireflies. How his growing despair that she might decline immediately solidified into relief, joy, bashfulness at his worries. Folded within these memories were dimmer, more distant ones, wrapped up by association. The jeers from the boys at school. The distance from his father, the cruel implications of his mother, the defiant support of his sisters. The woman, the wife now, the first date, the first night, the first fight. The band, a basic gold alloy, slides beneath his fingers as he rotates it. He wonders if-

  “Sir? Please, your boarding pass?” The woman paused, shot her coworker a nervous look, only to see that he had left to usher things along in the bridge. She turned back to the near-catatonic man and sighed as she realized she’d have to handle this herself. The man didn’t look threatening: he was clean, on the smaller side, with a shaved head and the beginnings of smile lines garlanding each eye. But he was clearly in some sort of trance, and that freaked her out. She stepped forward and, after a second of deliberation, gently touched the man’s shoulder. “Sir?”

  Pema snapped from his observations and came to, self-consciousness returning in a flush of sensations and emotions that even after so many years of practice had a tendency to stun him a bit. “Oh, oh my, my apologies, dear. Was I…” Pema waved his fingers in front of his face, made an expression of exaggerated, comic vacancy.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Uh,” chuckled the woman, already a little relieved that this seemed to be resolving itself, “yes, sir, I think so.”

  “Ah. So sorry, that can be troubling to witness, I know. I have a condition.” Pema smiled, amused by the woman’s concern.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” A moment of befuddled silence. “Your boarding pass?”

  Pema nodded sagely, knowing full well that he didn’t have a boarding pass and had no real means to acquire one. After spending the better part of the last decade suspended, semi-catatonic, above a hydrothermal vent thousands of feet below the surface of the Indian Ocean, the man wasn’t exactly flush with cash.

  Which was of no concern to him. He’d always resented money, and luckily he had been blessed with plenty of ways to procure goods and services without resorting to anything so painfully boring as notes and coins. He took a quick peek into the woman’s limbic system, then her long-term memory, rooted through hundreds of vignettes in the time it took to blink, and settled on one he felt he could make use of. He enhanced the memory, replayed it for himself, used a knack for deduction sharpened by billions of second-hand experiences. Before the woman had time to worry that he’d lapsed into another trance, he’d solved one of her life’s greatest riddles.

  “The car accident, back in 2015, it really wasn’t your fault.”

  The woman blinked. “Excuse me?” The tangent was such a jarring, sudden swing, that she hadn’t managed to understand what he’d said.

  “When you hit the little boy? You’d only been driving a year, so you thought it was your doing, that you weren’t a good enough driver and you’d killed someone because of it. Well, good news, it really wasn’t your fault.”

  “I don’t…” The words were beginning to register to her. She made a little gulping noise and took a reflexive step back, suddenly afraid of the smiling little man again.

  “He ran onto the road, and the time that elapsed between the moment you saw him and the moment you moved to hit the brakes was barely over three tenths of a second, which is about as quickly as anybody can be expected to react to anything, let alone at night, as a child, in a stressful situation. And the brakes! Do you remember how, right before the impact, the car shook? A sort of, brrrr, a shudder?”

  The woman was hyperventilating now, and nodded, rendered childishly compliant by her shock. Pema felt a pang of guilt for putting her through this, but he knew the absolution to come would make the agony of reliving the memory worth it.

  “Your brother’s car, it had warped brake rotors. Now, I don’t blame the boy, he was scarcely older than you, and these issues don’t make themselves very obvious, but he hadn’t properly cared for the brakes, and that worsened their efficiency.” Pema stepped forward and grabbed the woman’s shaking right hand, clasped it in both of his. “There was nothing you could’ve done differently. And, besides, I don’t think the boy died.”

  “You don’t-” the woman hiccuped. “How could you possibly-”

  “I don’t know that one for sure, I wouldn’t be able to tell unless he was here with us, and, well, if he was here with us it wouldn’t need telling, I guess,” Pema chuckled. “But I’ve seen plenty of head injuries, even in children, and from the angle he hit the ground at, at the speed you were going, I doubt he suffered much worse than a concussion. Now, his mother had every reason to be upset, and I’m sure she would’ve contacted you to tell you if she’d been able, but, alas, it was a scary situation, and it follows that neither of you took the time to exchange information before she rushed her child to the hospital.”

  “I can’t believe-” the woman was blubbering a little now, eyes swimming and unfocused. “You really think-”

  “I know,” Pema rubbed the woman’s arm, tried to look reassuring. “You can let go of the shame, dear. It was never yours to begin with.”

  The woman collapsed into sobs. Pema stayed with her for a moment, rubbed her back, and then proceeded onto the plane.

  He took a quick inventory of the plane’s occupants and zeroed in on a seat on the back that would almost doubtless remain vacant for the rest of the flight. He settled in quickly, as he had no baggage.

  Around him, light and sound and Qi and knowledge buzzed. Little scenes beckoned, jostled for his witness. Pema took a few meditative breaths, and focused instead on the distant, goliath pull of the Qi leakage emanating from across the globe, nestled somewhere in America’s heartland.

  He knew why it was pulling on him. He knew who else would heed its call. He knew the risks he was undertaking by venturing into such an obvious honey trap.

  He also knew what he could stand to gain, if he could just wait the rest of the competition out. His vision, already so perfectly granular, could be made to expand, maybe encompassing a country, a continent, the globe. Every square foot of the planet, Pema knew better than anyone, was a canvas painted with the pigment of dozens of brilliant, perfect little narratives. Pema was hopelessly addicted to the constant drama, and he craved more, more, always more.

  In the interim, there was plenty to keep his attention even within his roughly 40-meter radius. Pema sifted through potential points of interest near him now: a woman gestating triplets three rows ahead, a rare snake being transported in the cargo bay, a luggage carrier outside who was halfway through a mild hallucinogenic trip. It would be a long flight, first to Los Angeles and then another to Minneapolis, but luckily it appeared he would have plenty of entertainment. He could still sense the sobs of the poor, aggrieved gate attendant, and figured it would be best for the other passengers if he kept his findings to himself for the duration, this time.

  He made it nearly thirty minutes before he turned to the man sitting behind him and informed him that the mole on his ankle was indeed cancerous, and that he should get it checked by a doctor.