The Hundred Worlds Trilogy

The rift opened at 7:43 AM on a Tuesday, in the middle of Nova Vasquez’s grandmother’s kitchen, while Nova was making chilaquiles and catastrophically late for school.

It started as a sound — not loud, but wrong, the kind of frequency that pressed behind the eyes and made the teeth feel strange. Nova heard it a full three seconds before it appeared, which was strange because she had never heard anything like it and therefore should not have been able to identify it as what it was. She identified it anyway. Some part of her that lived below conscious thought said: that is a door.

Then the air split open.

She would describe it later, many times, to many different species who wanted the account of Earth’s first direct experience of dimensional transit. She always struggled with the same part: the color. The rift was not a color she had a name for. It was not in the visible spectrum her eyes were calibrated for, and yet she saw it — not with her eyes exactly, but with something adjacent to her eyes, something that had apparently been dormant for sixteen years and had decided this was the moment to activate.

She said: what the—

The rift said nothing. It expanded to approximately two meters in diameter, crackling at its edges with what she could only describe as frozen lightning, and then it exhaled — the only word for it — a pressure wave that knocked the chilaquiles off the stove and sent her grandmother’s collection of painted ceramic roosters off the shelf above the refrigerator.

Nova grabbed the spatula. She grabbed it the way you grab the nearest solid thing when the world stops making sense: instinctively, without logic, as though having something to hold would help.

She had approximately one second to make a decision.

The sound behind the rift was not threatening. It was the specific quality of a threshold — something waiting, something patient, something that had been looking for her specifically and had found her and was now extending an invitation that was also, clearly, not optional.

She said, to the rift and to her grandmother’s kitchen and to the roosters on the floor: I’m going to be late for school.

Then she stepped through.

---

Nexus Station presented itself to her senses in a cascade: first the smell — recycled air carrying traces of a hundred different biological chemistries, something metallic, something floral from a species whose flowers she couldn’t have named, something that was probably food from the cafeteria three levels up. Then the sound — the station’s systems running, layered under voices in approximately forty languages, none of them English except for a synthetic voice that said, in perfect English, with the patience of something that had been preparing this greeting for a very long time:

“Nova Vasquez. Welcome to Nexus Station. I am Rex-7. I will be your orientation guide.”

Nova looked at the geometric shape of light hovering at her eye level. She looked at the vast atrium around her — curved walls of a material that was not glass but transmitted light like glass, through which she could see space and four different celestial bodies in four different visual registers, some of them wrong colors for anything in Earth’s solar system. She looked at the seven beings in the immediate vicinity, none of whom were human, all of whom were looking at her with expressions she couldn’t read because she hadn’t learned their faces yet.

She said: “I have chilaquiles on the stove.”

Rex-7 said: “The rift will have sealed. I am sorry about your breakfast.”

She said: “Is my grandmother okay?”

Rex-7 said: “The rift event will have appeared to witnesses on Earth as a localized atmospheric disturbance. Your grandmother is unharmed. She will be contacted by Earth’s Confluence Liaison Office within several hours.”

Nova processed this. She said: “What’s a Confluence Liaison Office?”

Rex-7 said: “The department within Earth’s government managing diplomatic relations with the Confluence network, established after First Contact in 2157.”

She said: “What am I doing here?”

Rex-7 paused — a deliberate pause, she would later understand, because Rex-7 was a consciousness several hundred years old and did not pause accidentally. It paused when it was deciding how much to say and in what order.

It said: “Earth’s designated delegate to the Confluence, Dr. Yuna Park, was lost during transit eleven days ago. Under Confluence Emergency Protocol Seven, when a world’s delegate is unavailable, the network activates a secondary contact protocol based on the world’s last registered primary delegate.” Another pause. “Your mother, Dr. Elena Vasquez, was Earth’s first delegate. You are her only registered next of kin. The protocol identified you as the closest available connection to Earth’s Confluence heritage.”

Nova stood very still. She said: “My mother disappeared seven years ago.”

Rex-7 said: “Yes.”

She said: “Into the Confluence.”

Rex-7 said: “Yes.”

She said: “And you pulled me here based on a connection to someone who has been missing for seven years.”

Rex-7 said: “The protocol does not distinguish between present and absent. It identifies lineage.”

Nova looked at the spatula in her hand. She looked at the alien atrium. She looked at the four wrong-colored celestial bodies through the not-glass wall.

She said: “I need to sit down.”

Rex-7 generated a chair from the station’s material fabrication system — a human-compatible chair, calibrated to Earth standard gravity, as though the station had been expecting her. She sat. She put the spatula across her knees.

She said: “Tell me everything.”

---

Cael Orin of Vael found her forty minutes later, still in the chair, with the spatula, now holding a printout of the Confluence’s founding charter that Rex-7 had produced when she asked for documentation. She was reading it with the focused attention of someone who had decided that understanding the situation was the first step to managing it.

He stopped a respectful distance away. His bioluminescent markings — running in lines along his cheekbones, his forearms, the backs of his hands — were a steady silver-white. She would later learn this was his resting state: calm, controlled.

He said, in English that carried the quality of someone who had learned it from a translation device before learning it from experience: “You are Earth’s delegate.”

She looked up from the charter. She said: “Apparently.”

He said: “I am Cael Orin. Delegate from Vael, Seventh Dimension. Ambassador Korne has asked me to serve as your protocol orientation guide.” A pause. “She asked me in the tone she uses when she means ‘contain the situation.’”

Nova said: “I’m a situation.”

He said: “You arrived holding a cooking utensil. In Confluence diplomatic tradition, arriving at a formal station with a weapon—”

She said: “It’s a spatula.”

He said: “What is a spatula?”

She held it up. She said: “For flipping things. Pancakes. Chilaquiles. It’s not a weapon.”

He examined it with the serious attention of someone who was going to need to file a report. He said: “I will note that for the incident log.”

She said: “There’s an incident log.”

He said: “There is now.”

She looked at him for a moment. She said: “How old are you?”

He said: “Seventeen, in Earth years.”

She said: “They sent a seventeen-year-old to contain me.”

He said: “Ambassador Korne felt a peer-appropriate orientation might be less alarming than a senior diplomat.”

She said: “Did it work?”

He considered this with evident honesty. He said: “You appear to be alarmed, but functional. Which is better than the alternative.”

She almost smiled. She said: “Nova Vasquez. Sixteen. From Chicago.” She looked at the charter. “Tell me about the Confluence. Everything.”

His markings shifted — briefly, a warm amber she would later catalog as curiosity. He sat down across from her in a chair the station generated without being asked, and he began.

She listened. She took mental notes the way she’d learned from her mother, who had always said: information first. Everything else after. She asked seven questions in the first twenty minutes, all of them precise, none of them what he expected.

In the station’s main diplomatic hall, Ambassador Thessaly Korne was filing a formal objection to Earth’s emergency delegate on the grounds of age, experience, and the spatula. The objection would be reviewed. The review would take forty-eight hours.

In forty-eight hours, Nova Vasquez would have committed what the station’s diplomatic corps would call a minor incident and what Zep Nakamura-Jones — arriving in the cargo bay with a laptop bag and no explanation — would call a completely reasonable response to being served unidentified alien food without a menu.

The Confluence had 100 worlds. It had never had anyone quite like her.

It was, Rex-7 would note in its logs, already more interesting than the previous 200 years.