March 12, 1947 Los Angeles

Valerie Cross put the photograph on my desk and looked at me with eyes that said: I know you are going to think I am crazy, and you would be right, but I am not.

"I found this in a pile of props from the old MGM lot," she said. "It has no thickness."

I picked up the photograph. It was a standard eight-by-ten glossy from the late thirties, showing a film crew on a soundstage, a director shouting through a megaphone, actors standing around in period costumes, a boom microphone visible in the upper left corner. It was a real photograph, taken at a real studio, with real people in it.

But when I tried to measure it with the ruler on my desk, the numbers made no sense. Length: eight inches. Width: ten inches. Thickness: zero.

I held it up to the light. I could see through it, not because it was transparent but because it had no depth to obstruct the light. It was a photograph of a three-dimensional scene, but the photograph itself was not three-dimensional. It was flat in a way that no photograph should be flat.

"Are you sure you are not joking with me?" I asked.

"If I were joking, I would not have come to you."

I am Detective "Deck" Deckard, thirty-eight years old, former reconnaissance soldier in the Pacific theater, currently a private investigator who spends his days tracking adulterous husbands and recovering stolen jewelry for people who pay too much for things that were never that valuable in the first place. I do not deal in weird science. I deal in cash and lies and the spaces between them.

But the photograph was weird, and it was real, and I had nothing better to do.

March 18, 1947

Six people had disappeared in the past three months. Not moved, not died in a hospital or a morgue. Disappeared, in the specific sense that their physical substance had been reduced to nothing, as though someone had taken a pencil and erased them from the three-dimensional world.

The first was a studio executive named Harold Voss, found dead in his office at Universal, his body a flat image on the floor, still wearing his suit but with no depth, like a cutout from a magazine.

The second was a stage actor who vanished from his dressing room at the Shubert Theatre, his clothes left behind in a perfect flat circle on the floor.

Three, four, five: a politician's aide, a nightclub owner, a studio secretary. All found in the same condition: alive for approximately four seconds after the event, then flat, then dead, their bodies compressed into two-dimensional surfaces that retained all the detail of the original three-dimensional form but had no depth whatsoever.

I filed the reports under "mysterious deaths" and nobody questioned them because in 1947 Los Angeles, mysterious was just another word for Tuesday.

March 25, 1947

Mr. Wallace lived in a house on the cliffs above Santa Monica, a white concrete box designed in the Bauhaus style that looked like it had been dropped from the sky and assembled by people who had never seen a house before. The walls were white and bare, the furniture was minimal and angular, and the man who lived there wore grey suits and spoke like a professor.

Wallace was forty-five, tall and thin, with dark hair and intelligent eyes that did not match the cold flatness of his house. He was a businessman, he told me, dealing in "novelty items and collectibles." That was the cover. The real business was in a room at the back of the house, a windowless vault with a steel door.

He opened the door and led me into a room the size of a walk-in closet. On a pedestal in the center of the room was an object about the size of a playing card, black as a black hole, flat as a sheet of paper.

"This is what killed Harold Voss," Wallace said. "This is what killed the other five people. It is not a weapon. It is a tool. A dimensional tool."

He picked it up. It was thinner than a sheet of glass, lighter than a feather, and when he held it up to the light, the light went through it as though it were not there.

"It reduces three-dimensional objects to two dimensions," Wallace said. "Compresses them along one axis until that axis reaches zero. The object retains all its surface detail but has no depth. Everything inside the original three-dimensional form is compressed into the two-dimensional surface. It is not destruction. It is translation."

"What is it?" I asked.

He looked at me with those cold, intelligent eyes. "We call it the Second Vector. The first vector is the direction something moves in space. The second vector is the direction it moves in dimension. This thing moves things along the second vector. From three dimensions to two."

"Why are you selling it?"

"Because I am afraid of it. And because somebody wants it bad enough to pay a quarter of a million dollars for one use."

April 2, 1947

Sam Rourke came to my office at noon and closed the door. Sam is forty-two, a detective in the LAPD homicide division, and we went to prep school together in Pasadena before both of us decided that school was a waste of time and joined the army instead. He was a sergeant in the Pacific when I was a private, and he has not let me forget it.

"Deck, I need you to stop."

"I cannot."

"You can. And you should. There are people in this town who have more power than the governor and more money than the studio heads, and they are not going to let you walk around asking questions about dimensional weapons."

"It is not a weapon. It is a tool."

"Everything that reduces people to flat pictures is a weapon." He lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. "I am not your enemy, Deck. But this goes higher than you think. The people who want the Second Vector are not criminals. They are the people who run this town. The studio heads. The politicians. The men who write checks and sign laws."

"Then what are they going to use it for?"

Sam looked at me with an expression I could not read. "I don't know. But I know that the man who bought it from Wallace is not a buyer in the usual sense. He is something else. Something that Wallace is afraid of."

"Who is it?"

Sam shook his head. "That is what you are going to find out. Or that is what is going to find you out."

April 10, 1947

The standoff was at the end of Santa Monica Pier, where the wood meets the ocean and the neon lights from the amusement park reflect off the wet planks in patches of red and blue and white like a child's painting of a city at night.

Rain had been falling since dusk, a light steady drizzle that turned the world to glass and neon and shadow. I stood at the end of the pier, the ocean below me black and cold and moving, and Wallace stood ten feet away, holding the Second Vector in his hand.

He looked different from when I had seen him in his white house. Smaller. Older. The grey suit hung on him as though he had lost weight, and his face was grey and drawn, his eyes wide and unblinking.

"Give it to me, Wallace."

"I cannot." His voice was steady but his hand was shaking. "You don't understand what this is. It is not a thing. It is a process. Once it starts, it cannot be stopped. It compresses. It flattens. It takes the world and it makes it flat."

"I understand perfectly."

"No, you don't. You think it is a gun. It is not a gun. A gun kills you. This takes you apart. It takes every atom of your body and it spreads it across a two-dimensional surface. You would be alive for those four seconds, Deck. You would be conscious. You would feel yourself flattening. You would feel every part of your body moving toward the plane at the same time, compressing, shrinking, becoming flat."

Rain ran down his face. The neon lights flickered. The ocean moved below us.

"Who sent you?" I asked.

"Nobody sent me. I sent myself. I am the buyer, Deck. I am the man Wallace is afraid of. And I am the man who is going to use the Second Vector on himself."

He held it up. The black rectangle caught the neon light and drank it.

"Why?"

"Because I am tired of being three-dimensional." He smiled, and it was the saddest smile I have ever seen. "The world is too heavy, Deck. Three dimensions is too much weight. I want to be flat. I want to be a photograph. I want to stop moving and just be."

He reached toward himself with the Second Vector.

I did not think. I moved. I hit him hard in the chest, and he fell backward off the pier, the Second Vector flying from his hand, and he hit the water with a splash that was swallowed by the sound of the waves.

I stood at the edge of the pier, looking down at the black water. The Second Vector was not in the water. It was gone.

April 11, 1947

I found it in the morning, lying on the beach below the pier, half-buried in the sand. The black rectangle, wet with seawater but intact, its surface as smooth and flat as ever.

I picked it up. It was cold, colder than ice, colder than anything that had been in the ocean overnight should have been cold. It absorbed the morning light like a black hole.

I walked down the beach, the Second Vector in my pocket, the ocean to my right, the empty beach to my left, the city behind me waking up to another day of sunshine and dreams and lies.

I do not know what I am going to do with it. I do not know if I should destroy it or keep it or give it to Sam or throw it into the Pacific and walk away.

I know only this: the world is heavier than it used to be. Three dimensions is a lot of weight to carry. And sometimes, in the quiet moments before sleep, I think I hear the Second Vector humming in my pocket, a low steady vibration like the sound of a star being turned off.

I keep walking. I keep carrying it. I do not know where this is going.

But I know that whatever happens next, it will not be three-dimensional.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- OTMES-v2 Objective Tensor Code ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Code: OTMES-v2-E5A1C7D2-081-M7-315-0.92N110K088-2F65 E_total: 17.8 Dominant Mode: M7 Direction Angle: 315° Tensor Rank: 81 Dominance Ratio: 0.82 Irreversibility: 0.92 M Vector (10 modes): [M1:0.78,M2:0.38,M3:0.52,M4:0.42,M5:0.82,M6:0.75,M7:0.78,M8:0.68,M9:0.45,M10:0.65] N Vector (active/passive): [0.75, 0.25] K Vector (sensitive/rational): [0.88, 0.72]