Chapter One
Mick Shancheez was the kind of genius who treated reality like a cheap appliance he could kick back to life. He built impossible machines out of junkyard metal, stolen lab parts, and whatever else he could pry loose from a world that had long since given up trying to understand him. He was brilliant, disgusting, vain, and certain that every law of physics was basically a suggestion. His grandson Rorty, by contrast, was a trembling bundle of conscience in a worn-out hoodie, forever one panic attack away from running straight into traffic just to get away from family dinner.
The story opens with Mick dragging Rorty into the basement to see his newest masterpiece, the Doorway Engine, a cracked brass ring wired into a coffin-sized reactor that should not have been humming, glowing, or speaking in three languages at once. Mick claims it can punch holes between dimensions, harvest energy from collapsed timelines, and maybe, if the math behaves, make him a few million credits before the universe catches on. Rorty immediately notices the machine is leaking black frost, screaming in reverse, and attracting tiny glass insects that appear to be eating the air. Mick calls that progress. Rorty calls it a catastrophe with wiring.
When the Engine fires, it does not open a normal portal. It tears the kitchen wall into a corridor of alternate realities, each worse than the last. One dimension is a suburb where everyone has six eyes and a polite obsession with blood tax. Another is a planet-sized asylum run by shrimp-like bureaucrats who stamp your soul paperwork before letting you breathe. Another is a frozen city where time is stuck in a loop of one failed second, and every citizen has been repeating the same expression of terror for centuries. Mick, delighted by the spectacle, leaps through first. Rorty follows only because he is family, frightened, and too morally decent to leave the old bastard alone in a dimension full of impossible murder.
Their first stop is a market built on the bones of a dead moon, where alien merchants trade in stolen memories, predatory pets, and bottled childhoods. Mick casually steals a device from a vendor shaped like a singing tumor, then insults the entire species when they complain. Rorty tries to apologize and ends up being adopted by a translucent eel priest who believes his fear pheromones are holy incense. Before Rorty can even process that nightmare, Mick has triggered a chase involving plasma carts, collapsing stalls, and a pack of cybernetic gremlins with knives for hands. Mick finds it hilarious. Rorty nearly dies twice and starts asking the question that hangs over the whole journey. What exactly are they doing to all these worlds, and why does Mick never seem to care?
The answer, as usual, is complicated and ugly. Mick is not merely exploring. He is scavenging for the missing components of a machine he calls the Null Prism, a device capable of folding the multiverse into a shape he can control. He claims it is for science. He claims it is for freedom. He claims the universes are already broken, so he may as well profit from the wreckage. But Rorty begins to suspect something worse. Mick is not just trying to master reality. He is trying to outrun grief, age, and the one thing he cannot outbuild, the consequences of the life he has lived.
The deeper they travel, the more the story becomes a parade of disaster. They are ambushed by mirror versions of themselves, each one nastier, sadder, or more successful than the originals. They are arrested by interdimensional monks who worship failure as a sacred art. They fall through a wormhole into a world where gravity works on guilt, and Rorty can barely move because he carries too much of it. Mick, of course, weaponizes the guilt field and turns it into an escape route, laughing like a bastard the entire time. Rorty starts to understand that his grandfather’s genius is inseparable from his cruelty. Mick solves problems by breaking them harder.
As the dimensions pile up, so do the ethical costs. Worlds lose stability after Mick’s intrusions. Cities drift out of sync. People vanish from their own timelines. A child in one universe ceases to exist because Mick stole a battery from a machine that was secretly keeping that universe’s sun alive. Rorty confronts him, horrified. Mick shrugs and says the cosmos is a meat grinder, and if someone is going to survive, it might as well be them. Rorty snaps back that surviving by ruining everything else is not survival. It is just theft with better branding. For once, Mick has no joke ready. That silence hits harder than any explosion.
Chapter Two
The second half of the story turns darker and stranger. The search for the final Null Prism component leads them to a dead dimension where the sky is a cracked mirror and every sound arrives five seconds late, including fear. In the center of that world stands a city built around a black pit that hums like an engine breathing in its sleep. The locals, pale amphibian things with ceremonial scars and too many knees, call it the Mouth Between. They believe it is the wound left by the first inventor who tried to measure infinity and got measured back. Mick, naturally, wants to climb inside.
Rorty wants to go home. He is exhausted, filthy, and emotionally shredded. He has spent too long watching his grandfather turn every encounter into a joke and every tragedy into fuel. But he also knows Mick is terrified in his own way. Beneath the swagger, the filth, and the profanity is a man who cannot bear stillness because stillness means memory. The story lets that truth surface in fragments. Mick once had a family that depended on him. He lost them, or drove them away, or perhaps both. He does not talk about it, but he keeps building things that could erase regret. That is the real engine under all his chaos.
Inside the Mouth Between, reality becomes a knife fight. Time splits into competing versions of the same hour. One moment they are escaping alien guards. The next they are old men. The next they are children again, standing in a ruined yard while a future they have not earned burns overhead. Rorty sees countless possible lives. In some, Mick is dead. In some, Rorty is just as reckless and mean. In one especially upsetting branch, the two of them are the only survivors of a sterilized multiverse, sitting in silence while the last star dies. The vision breaks Rorty open. He realizes Mick has been using impossible travel not just to invent, but to deny responsibility for every catastrophe he ever made possible.
The climax comes when the Null Prism activates and begins pulling dimensions together like loose skin on a wound. Entire realities overlap. Alien empires collide with ruined earths. Duplicate people scream as their memories merge and reject each other. The black pit opens wider. The universe starts to sound like metal tearing. Mick finally admits the truth. He built the device because he wanted to become untouchable, to create a version of existence where he could never lose anyone again, where no mistake could stay dead long enough to matter. But in doing so, he has become exactly what he always pretended to hate, a man who treats other lives as acceptable collateral.
Rorty, shaking and furious, takes the controls. He refuses to let Mick finish the machine. He also refuses to let the multiverse collapse under his grandfather’s ego. In the ugliest, bravest moment of his life, Rorty sabotages the Null Prism from inside its core, risking being split across thousands of realities at once. He does it not because he is fearless, but because he is not. He does it anyway. That matters. Mick, for the first time, sees his grandson not as a burden, not as a passenger, but as a person. The recognition lands like a blow.
The ending is messy, which feels right. The collapse is stopped, but not cleanly. Some worlds are saved. Some are lost forever. A few survive in altered forms, carrying scars that will never fully heal. Mick and Rorty make it back to a version of home that is almost familiar, except for the extra moon and the neighbor who now speaks in weather patterns. Mick is alive, though humiliated. Rorty is alive, though changed. Their relationship is not repaired. It is worse than that and better than that. It is honest.
In the final moments, Mick starts building again, because of course he does. But he does it slower now. He asks Rorty for a wrench instead of taking one. He even listens when Rorty says a machine is ethically dubious, which for Mick counts as character development bordering on sainthood. Rorty does not trust the peace. He knows better. The multiverse is still out there. So are all its hungry, broken, absurd possibilities. But now he knows something he did not know before. Surviving Mick Shancheez is not the same as being consumed by him. Sometimes it means standing in the blast radius and refusing to become a monster just because the universe expects it.
The story ends with one last crackle from the unfinished machine, one last impossible shimmer at the edge of the garage wall, and one final joke from Mick that is equal parts obscene and sincere. Rorty laughs despite himself. Then he sees the doorway open. Somewhere beyond it, another reality waits, strange as hell and already in trouble. Mick grins like a man staring into God’s eyes and asking for a discount. Rorty sighs, swears under his breath, and follows his grandfather in anyway.
