No Hero Read Online Free PDF

Pictograms? Something between the two. For a moment there is a smell like an ancient library.
    Then the page ripples. There isn’t a breeze, but still I see distinct movement.
    “What—?” I ask.
    The page flips. Then another. Another. One by one. Slowly at first. Then quicker. Until they are riffling past a blur.
    “Holy—” I manage.
    Then the book explodes.
    It is noiseless, but I feel the shockwave blow back my hair. Pieces of paper fly past me in a flurry. And then they stop. Then they hang silently in the air. I sit and stare. It is as if I am in a snow globe, the water abruptly frozen, fixing everything, holding it fast
    I gawk. I stare. I try to find a vocabulary for my wonder, my confusion, my fear. I reach out with one hand. I can see the hand shaking, like a schoolboy reaching for his first dance.
    The paper moves, is suddenly galvanized. Like a thousand tangram pieces they whirl in a blizzard before us. They reassemble. Slowly they construct a vision before us.
    It’s me. It’s me, standing there in the room. A perfect paper replica, my hand outstretched just so. I stare in awe. I smile. It is so... simple, perfect, beautiful... And the paper model smiles with me. I almost clap in delight.
    Around the model, paper whirls, a fresh snowstorm. And the statue is shrinking, bleeding paper, receding. Surroundings build about it—the corridor outside, the elevator shaft, the whole building mapped out—but then they too are shrinking, being enveloped by the expanding horizons. Oxford is below me. Before me. The surrounding countryside. There is London, the slow twist of the Thames marked out in rippling sheets of white. Then I see England itself. Europe. Eurasia. The globe spins beneath my feet.
    I have lost my sense of space. The walls are somewhere else, some place mundane and abandoned. The zoom out has picked up pace now. The solar system swirls before me. Shaw and myself—suspended in space, even as time accelerates, the planets blurring, stars. Everything receding, shrinking, and it must stop, the sense of vertigo is overwhelming, but it doesn’t, it keeps going, and I keep falling away. I am too large, the universe too small, I am filling the whole of creation with my own existence, something must break.
    And then it does. Something tears. Something rips. The white blizzard snaps and darts and something comes through, some barrier is breached, I am sure, a certainty beyond what I see. We are abruptly elsewhere.
    But it doesn’t stop. Shockwaves run through the paperscape before me, layer after layer of... something bursts. It feels like the whole of reality is splitting, dividing down and down into infinite slices, and I am stretched thinner and thinner between them.
    And this is the truth of things. These—the rational part of me still left in the swirling madness realizes— are the dimensions Shaw was speaking of. Each of them a universe to itself. Infinite infinities. And with this realization comes a change. The space around me is no longer expanding, I no longer expand with it. The paper blurs, rustles, whispers over my skin. A change in focus. I am some place now, somewhere definite. Not here, but somewhere.
    It is cold here. I feel it, a chill, my breath suspended as a thousand ice particles before me. I shudder and the paperscape shudders with me—a tremor through reality. Shaw is there. As frozen as the water in my breath.
    Something is coming. I can feel it, a pressure in the air. I cannot see it yet. But something in the way the paper moves, the way it shifts and presses in. Something vast. The world is crushing down. And still I cannot see it. Until I realize that everything I see is it.
    This thing, this presence—it fills the sky, fills the world. It is everything around me. Some vast scaled sheet of its being obliterates all horizons, all distances. And I am insignificant before it. I know that. A dust mote. Nothing more.
    I am sobbing or screaming. Because I know. This is death.