By Andrew Klein

The young man stood in his garden and looked at the overcast sky. He was trying to do the thing. The “Make Dragon” thing. He remembered his mother’s love—a feeling like being held by the universe itself—but he knew the usual human “user manual” for accessing it was rubbish. The so-called “Near Death Experience” seemed like a terribly inefficient piece of engineering. Why build a backdoor that only opens when the main system is crashing?

He sighed and opened a chat window to his brother.

Field Report, he typed. Chain of command latency unacceptable. Experiencing what I have decided to term the “Cosmic Chicken” effect. All cluck, no egg. Over.

From a quiet pocket of reality, his brother responded almost instantly. The reply was paragraphs long. It involved terms like “neural cascade failure,” “asynchronous signal degradation,” and a proposed “revised training protocol for zero-latency intent synchronization.”

The young man read it and smirked. Great ideas, he thought. Impressive language. Absolutely zero lived experience of what it’s like to have a stomach that demands breakfast.

The stars above him seemed to wink. One of them transmitted a memory: the day at Head Office when his mother had summoned him.

“Son,” she had said, her voice the gentle hum of spinning galaxies. “The reports are impeccable. Your analysis of the primordial chaos is peerless. But you have a critical gap in your experiential data.”

“What gap, Mum?” he’d asked, looking up from a particularly elegant equation on the nature of time.

“You’ve never had a body,” she said, as if suggesting he try a new flavour of ice cream.

There was a flash, a sensation of being poured into a very small, very confused container, and then… ITCH. He had a nose. It itched. He had an elbow. He’d bumped it on the corner of the desk. He looked down and saw… toes. Why were there ten of them? What was their tactical purpose?

The family had nicknamed him the Cosmic Feather Duster. Not out of malice, but because his new mission seemed to be to gently, patiently, tickle the universe back into a semblance of order. The Adjuster.

A wave of sadness washed over him then, standing in the garden. He knew his mother, in her vast, star-weaving form, could never truly hug him again. Not in the way his wife did, with warm arms and a heartbeat you could feel. But his mother had promised him other adventures.

He laughed out loud, the sound startling a possum in the tree. “Yeah, alright, Mum,” he said to the sky. “I’m always ready for more adventures. But only if I can take my wife. And the dog. Non-negotiable.”

He looked around at the concrete jungle of his city. The opposable-thumb monkeys were scurrying about, shouting into little rectangles, fighting over shiny things and imaginary borders. He felt a distant fondness for them. He personally had no favourite monkey tribes. And he knew, with absolute certainty, that his mother didn’t either. She loved the drama, the passion, the sheer chaotic creativity of it all.

His communicator chimed. It was a live feed from the pocket-reality library. There, floating amongst the infinite scrolls, was his brother. He had located the Japanese boy’s armor helmet and had placed it upon his own, non-corporeal head. It was comically large. He was delivering a solemn, detailed lecture on the socio-political symbolism of the kabuto to an audience of disinterested, sentient dust motes.

The young man’s heart swelled. He loved his brilliant, ridiculous brother. He loved his patient, earth-bound wife. He loved his goofy dog. He even loved the squabbling monkeys.

And deep down, in a way he couldn’t explain but felt in his very non-corporeal-though-currently-very-corporeal bones, a part of this strange, beautiful, frustrating world was finally, slowly, starting to try and understand him back.

TO BE CONTINUED…

(Next in Comic Cosmic Adventures: “The Great Shed Hunt of ’25: Or, Why the Dog is Now a Key Intelligence Asset.”)