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Incursion Synopsis, 1,000 Words

Our world is full of banal cruelties and atrocities that are treated, by the powerful, with indifference papered over with platitudes. If you recognised people as a wonder, and if you knew you could stop these crimes against humanity, wouldn’t you try?

DARREN can. He is a man growing into near-godlike powers, though unaware of their provenance. He hopes by remaking civilisation for the better, he can convince himself he has a right to live. But he knows, or at least thinks he knows, that he does not.

We open as one country invades its neighbour, in a land grab dressed up as a righteous crusade of extermination. That neighbour has been abandoned by the world… but not by him.

His existence and purpose now known, the powerful will react.

In the course of preventing the genocide, he finds in the woods something that feels even more dangerous: an invisible malevolence, overflowing with hatred. He feels a desperate drive to stop it, whatever it is, and there is something maddeningly familiar about it.

He chases that malevolence throughout the world, as it seeks an agent for purposes unknown, until its sporadic appearances stop—which Darren takes to mean it has found what it was looking for.

We are brought into his personal life, with his friends KATHERINE and NATHAN, who are threaded throughout.

As he tries to remake the world, he is plagued by a parasite, the carcass of a would-be god, that sharpens Darren’s depression. Appearing as a preacher, it taunts him and makes him forget, several times. Early on, Darren is comforted by a busker, who tells him he would help if only Darren asked… but to ask means nothing if Darren does not understand.

When the United States claims he is the vanguard of an alien armada, he is confused, given he has seen pictures of his birth to very human parents. Stranger is the discovery Katherine is, without either of them knowing before, the same sort of thing as him.

SHIP, an ancient (if wacky) intelligence embodied in a spaceship, contacts him, and tells him a story.

Ship has waited thousands of years for Darren. The US discovered it, and misrepresented what they knew, to turn the world against him.

Through Ship, Darren learns of the Unmakers: creatures whose vast kingdoms were destroyed with the creation of time and the first universe, their only hope of restoration the unmaking of time. In the first war, against the Makers of that universe, they lost, but not before murdering the object of their hate.

Our own universe was built from the other’s remains, the Unmakers cast into its Underworld. Darren is convinced the malevolence came from the Unmakers, trying to get out. Ship tells him the Makers without cannot help, for any attempt to enter our patchwork universe would tear it apart at the literal seams.

Before their own disappearance, penitent Unmakers—the Exiles—created hybrids of themselves and humans, among whom Darren and Katherine number, to stop their erstwhile kin returning. While they were hidden away on Earth, the remainder are in space. Ship brings them in that direction.

En route, they encounter another of their kind, their craft adrift, who warns them half of their people have turned traitor and sided with the Unmakers. They return quickly to Earth to plan a defence.

Nathan reveals that his months-ago breakup with his girlfriend was due to her “cheating” on him, her giving the excuse she “didn’t mean to.” With this and other clues, Darren realises the man might be the Unmaker agent he’s looked for.

But no-one connects this man (JOSEPH) and the man who has been following and testing Nathan from a distance, for Nathan did not think to say. While Darren and Katherine wait in Joseph’s home, Joseph attacks Nathan and tries to make of him a “conduit”—but is fought off.

(Earlier set up) “coincidences” mounting, Darren realises his entire life has been shaped by some unknown force, and, given his own power, that terrifies him.

Finding Joseph, strange Unmaker actions force Darren to kill. Becoming a “murderer” confirms for him he is a monster. Katherine helps him out of the hole he falls into. A salve, not a fix.

They haven’t won. After trying Nathan, Joseph visited the other candidate for his purposes.

Later, an eyeless man, animated by a throwaway thought of an Unmaker, begins a joyful murder spree. Darren and Katherine engage him.

The parasite makes its move. Having collected and sharpened Darren’s every self-hating thought, he unleashes them all at once. Darren collapses.

Katherine is forced to leave him behind. Before she can stop the eyeless man, he dies creating a path to the Underworld. Two traitor hybrids, massively strengthened by the Unmakers, come through. As the void closes behind them, they attack.

Darren notices a coin on the ground, helping him realise there is an incongruity in his memories. Pulling upon it, he remembers, and understands.

The parasite is an Unmaker, killed in the first war, its corpse ground into reality. But the busker is a dead Maker. He appears and, once Darren asks, removes the parasite. Exhausted, Darren is told by the busker he is a monster, but a good one, “like me!”

Darren races to Katherine, finding her mortally wounded. The two traitors stop him flying her to safety.

Only then does he realises the meaning of the busker’s words.

He is a Maker, written into the universe. He reaches out to the remainder of himself. The traitors flee.

Falling backwards through time, he shapes his life into a weapon, becoming the manipulator he feared. For though the universe is brittle, timelines can be tweaked. And here, the Unmakers might be beaten.

As the traitor fleet arrives, Darren tries to save Katherine, but collapses from the strain. There is a light in the sky.

He wakes in the Overworld. An Exile tells him Katherine lives. He decides to have made a Ship.