Chapter 83

As an SSCS field agent, Tanvi Agnihotri prided herself on being unflappable. No client request, no matter how strange, could make her lose her cool or even show surprise. Working for Nick Coyle these last few years had only served to reinforce that pride. She trusted Nick implicitly and wanted to be an extension of his will as much as it was possible for a person to do so for another. She recognized how easily this desire could be seen as a pathology by others, but it was a pathology that made her uniquely qualified for her job and generated a lot of income for some very powerful people, so no one seriously questioned it.

She knew Nick had some issues with his mental health, mostly relating to depression and abandonment issues, but thought she understood those issues as well as anyone. Her boss and lover was one of the most grounded-in-reality people she knew. Never once had she questioned Nick’s sanity before today.

But as she found herself sitting behind a desk on the set of what looked like a talk show called “The Continuity Shift,” she had to wonder if Nick really had gone crazy. It seemed unlikely, but none of the other explanations she could think of made more sense.

Scanning the rows of empty seats facing the stage, she took a deep breath. Three cameras focused in on her, red lights glowing on top of their chassis. They were manned by camera operators she didn’t recognize and hadn’t been involved in hiring. She also hadn’t been involved in renting this theater or any other bit of preparation that went into this shoot. As the person who sat at the very beating heart of Nick’s operations, Tanvi wouldn’t have been more surprised to wake up and find she’d grown an extra arm as she was to see all this put in place without her knowledge.

Still, if Nick had gone crazy, there were contingencies in place - ones he himself had helped plan and agreed to. For now, she would do exactly what she had been asked to do. She nodded slowly to herself, deliberately controlling her breathing.

As she did, a man holding large white cue cards appeared between two of the cameras where Tanvi was certain no one had been standing a moment before. Her heart leapt again, but it was less than a second before she managed to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re with us here on a very special night. We have with us as our only guest ... our creator, Tom Frost.”

The audience erupted into applause and existence at the same moment, rising to their feet to clap and whistle. Intellectually, Tanvi knew this should be extremely alarming and have her questioning her own sanity, but instead a strange sense of calm and rightness washed over her and she found herself coming around the desk and accepting a kiss on the cheek from a man tall enough to stand a half-head over her even though she was wearing heels and standing on a foot-high platform that he hadn’t yet mounted.

“You suck!” shouted someone from the back of the audience.

The man smiled and waved as he mounted the platform. “Thank you, sir. All feedback is welcome and appreciated, constructive or not.”

Up close, the creator gave off a palpable aura like the one Tanvi sometimes felt coming off of Nick when they were deeply in sync. He nodded warmly to her and she headed back behind her desk. As he settled in and the crowd quieted down, Tom leaned in and said quietly, “To make this go more smoothly, I’m going to imbue you with some fundamental knowledge about the world you and Nick and all the people you know live in. I’m also going to make sure you fully accept it and are untroubled by it because you’re a very cool character and I would hate to abuse you for the sake of a gag.”

Tanvi opened her mouth to ask what he meant, but her mind was filled with the realization that her entire universe existed within a fictional story written by the man who now sat next to her and who himself lived in a world that might only be some higher being’s dystopian fiction. This could have upset her immensely, implying that everything she’d done or would do was completely irrelevant, but the knowledge came with a context that let her understand that her world was as relevant as anyone’s and ultimate reality all just supposition.

It let her fall neatly into the role she’d been given tonight. She sat back. “So, Tom ... Can I call you Tom?”

“Please do.” There was a purr in the creator’s voice that reminded her of a self-satisfied tomcat and the form of the man wavered in her vision to become more feline before shifting back to the blue-haired human she’d been speaking to.

“Are you a cat?” she asked, surprised by her own question. The audience laughed.

Tom smiled at her. “Tom Frost is a fictional construct as much as anything in this universe. Sometimes, he’s a human man living in New York City. Other times, he’s a Russian blue tomcat who amuses himself by writing stories about human sexuality. Occasionally, he’s a rakshasa.”

Again, his form flickered, this time revealing a massive bipedal tiger-man dressed in a red smoking jacket. Tom said, “I’d use that one more often, but I worry about licensing rights.”

Tanvi gave an uncertain smile. She’d grown up hearing stories of the rakshasa - the evil gods of Hindu mythology that she definitely didn’t believe in as a modern, rational Indian woman. As she did, the cue card in front of her changed and she followed along, “So Tom, you’re here to make a big announcement about Too Much Love, the novel I’ve just discovered I’ve been living in?”

Tom faced out into the audience. On the monitor, his eyes had caught the camera so that it looked like he was talking directly to each person watching. “That’s right, Tanvi. You and your audience haven’t noticed this yet, but I actually took a break from writing this story right before Nick flew off to Europe to negotiate with Threnody over the restructuring of the Stone Family Trust. Everything since then - that meeting, the second Hamilton weekend, the big Halloween party in Montana, all that business with Brownfield Mills, the family conclave in Jayanesia, that thing with Simon crashing the world banking system - I haven’t written any of it yet. In fact, a lot of the events between 2015 and the beginning of 2020 are barely sketched into my notes. There was supposed to be a whole novel revolving around the US presidential election of 2016, but I just don’t have the heart to write it.”

Tanvi winced in sympathy. “Ooh, yeah. I can see how that would be rough to live through twice.”

“Not as rough as being responsible for the world I live in would be, trust me.” Tom patted the back of her hand. “It’s like somebody wrote 2,000 pages of Idiocracy fan fiction.”

Tanvi frowned. “But, if you haven’t written about that time yet, how do I remember it so clearly?”