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Incursion Synopsis, 1,500 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, even if acting will reveal himself to the public.

In the course of preventing the genocide, he finds in the woods something that seems 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.

Over the course of months, 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.

He joins Katherine at a café and, when he steps away, a man appears—JOSEPH—claiming she wants to fuck him. Appearing deeply confused when his approach results only in Katherine’s annoyance, Joseph moves on to another woman, who leaves with him. The interaction is so bizarre it leaves Katherine almost entirely perplexed.

As Darren tries to remake the world, he is plagued by a parasite, the carcass of a would-be god, that sharpens his depression. Appearing as a PREACHER, it taunts him and makes him forget, several times. Early on, Darren is consoled by a BUSKER, who identifies himself as an opponent of the preacher. He tells Darren he would help if only he was asked… but to ask means nothing if Darren does not understand.

Darren tells the busker he won’t forget, for he will burn the memory into his mind by doing something that doesn’t make sense, the nonsense of which will nag at his mind. Noticing the busker has no cap, he takes a coin and tosses it to where a cap might be. Moments later he stares at both his hand and the coin, puzzled by his actions, the busker now vanished and forgotten.

When the United States claims he is the vanguard of an alien armada, Darren is confused, given he has seen pictures of his birth to very human parents.

At age nineteen, Darren had been attacked by a gang of thieves and, beaten bloody, saw a tiny metal ball fall out of his nose and burn up, and from then his powers developed. Discovering one inside Katherine’s brain, he removes it at her insistence, and she begins to develop similar abilities… and far quicker.

Despite neither of them knowing before, Katherine is the same thing as Darren, whatever that is.

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

The US discovered it, and misrepresented what they knew, to turn the world against him.

Ship tells 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.

Taking the remains of the first universe—soiled with the bodies of Makers and Unmakers alike—the Makers fashioned our own, and cast the Unmakers into its Underworld.

Darren is convinced the malevolence came from these Unmakers, trying to get out. But the Makers without cannot help, for any attempt to enter our patchwork universe would tear it apart at the literal seams.

Ship also found evidence of another faction at work, and takes Darren and Katherine into space to find it.

On a heavily-damaged craft adrift in deep space, they discover PERTA, who claims she and they are hybrids, the Chosen of the Makers: human blessed with some of the Makers’ power, tasked with preventing the Unmakers from finding any agents and killing any that appear.

All hybrids were modified in utero and “harvested” at about sixteen weeks, but both Darren and Katherine proved impossible to remove. Given this might imply that the Makers were fallible, Perta kept their existence secret from the rest of her people—who are now in a civil war, a third of their number siding with the Unmakers themselves, Perta’s own craft near-destroyed by the three other hybrids who had been on board.

Darren, Katherine, and Ship soon realise that the “Makers” Perta speaks of (with religious fervour) are penitent Unmakers—the Exiles—so full of self-regard they made a plan they thought was good that involved them being worshipped.

The trio return to Earth to plan a defence.

Months ago, Nathan broke up with his girlfriend Siobhan for “cheating” on him. Now, he reveals to Darren that she gave the excuse that she “didn’t mean to.” With this and other clues, Darren realises it likely involved the man Katherine encountered at the café (Joseph), that Siobhan may have been mind-controlled, and that the man might be the Unmaker agent he’s been looked for.

But no-one, including Nathan, has figured out that this is also the same man who has been following and testing Nathan from a distance, for Nathan did not think they were connected and so did not say. While Darren and Katherine wait in Joseph’s home, Joseph attacks Nathan and tries to make of him a “conduit”—but Nathan fights him off, showing strength he wasn’t aware he had.

Darren realises in hindsight that the choices he made, that led to him meeting and befriending Katherine and Nathan (earlier seen in flashbacks), had been whims he now sees as signs of some unknown force manipulating his life. Given his own power, that terrifies him.

Hours later, Darren finds Joseph. With the Unmakers doing strange things in Joseph’s brain, Darren is forced to kill him. Becoming a “murderer,” to him, is the final “proof” he is a monster. Katherine helps him out of the hole he falls into. A salve, not a fix.

But Joseph had another candidate for his purposes, who he visited after attacking Nathan.

That candidate was a man now eyeless, animated by a throwaway thought of an Unmaker. Days after Joseph’s death, he 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 her.

The preacher taunts Darren as he writhes in agony, until Darren notices a coin on the ground. This leads his thoughts back to the coin he once threw to nothing, and helps him realise the incongruity in his memory. Pulling upon that thread of ideas, he remembers, and understands.

He sees that the parasite is an Unmaker, killed in the first war, its corpse ground into reality. This would also make his opponent, the busker, a dead Maker. One who offered to help, if only he were to be asked…

Darren calls out to him; he appears and removes the parasite from Darren. The busker tells an exhausted Darren 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.

No Maker could enter our universe from without. But one, perhaps, could be written within it as it was made. He reaches out to the hidden places, where the rest of him is waiting. After a brief display of his might, 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, that brings with it some malleability, and history might be tweaked just a little. And now, and only now, the Unmakers might be beaten.

As the traitor fleet arrives, Darren tries to save Katherine. But his body, already taxed to extremes, fails him, and he collapses from the strain before he is finished. There is a light in the sky.

He wakes in the Overworld. An Exile tells him Katherine lives. Stranded there, he sets out to work against the Unmakers. His first task? Altering the past, in order to have made a Ship.