A Day Outside Reality (And Somehow Still Office Hours)

I should have known better than to relax after yesterday.

You’d think “possible invasion threat from an unknown reality” would earn me at least a day off. A quiet breakfast. Maybe a second coffee. Maybe even a third, because frankly, if the multiverse is collapsing, I deserve it.

Instead, Clovis called.

Not called, actually. Clovis doesn’t call. It notices you.

And then the door appears.

There’s a quiet shift when you cross into Clovis HQ. Not dramatic, not overwhelming… just a subtle correction, like your mind is being guided away from questions that wouldn’t survive the answers.

Clovis was founded in 1884. Not in one place, but in all of them—simultaneously. The same organization, coming into existence across worlds and timelines at once, as if reality agreed, just for a moment, to let something exist everywhere before it had the chance to exist anywhere.

It doesn’t occupy a place you can point to. It exists where laws overlap—where science, ritual, and something older than both briefly agree on how things should function.

If I had to describe it: it feels like stepping into something that was always there, quietly waiting for you to notice it at the right moment.

That’s Clovis.

The entrance in Lviv isn’t hidden or shifting. It’s constant. A simple door, always in the same place—ignored by everyone, until it decides you’re allowed to see it.

Typical.

They assigned me to “review anomalies related to potential incursion signatures.”

Translation: sit in the cafeteria and archives until your soul leaves your body out of boredom.

The cafeteria, at least, was pleasant.

Soft teal panels, sunlight that didn’t belong to any star, and coffee that tasted like it remembered being grown on at least three different planets.

I spent hours there.

Not working, mind you. Considering working.

At one point I watched a cup refill itself because I had not yet decided whether I wanted more. That’s the kind of place it is. It doesn’t wait for you. It waits for your intention.

Unfortunately, my intention was “I’d rather be literally anywhere else.”

Eventually, I made my way to the archives.

Now that is a dangerous place.

Not because of what’s inside, but because of what’s missing.

You don’t search the archives. You ask them.

And they decide whether your question deserves an answer.

I asked about the invasion threat.

The shelves shifted. Entire sections rotated like slow tectonic plates of knowledge. Books blinked in and out of existence. One of them tried to whisper to me in a language I used to know but haven’t remembered yet.

And the result?

Nothing.

No record. No pattern. No precedent.

Which is worse than finding something, if you think about it.

Because when Clovis has nothing, it usually means one of two things:

1. It hasn’t happened yet.
2. It shouldn’t happen at all.

Neither is comforting.

By late afternoon (a concept Clovis generously simulates for people like me), I was dismissed.

No conclusions. No action items. No dramatic warnings.

Just… “you may go.”

I stepped back through the door and found myself in Lviv again, as if I had only been gone for a cigarette break instead of a full existential workday.

I went straight to the Ibis.

Sat on the bed.

Stared at the wall.

And decided that if Clovis was going to waste my time, I was at least going to take something from it.

So I did.

Before leaving HQ, I stopped in one of the quieter corridors. The kind that doesn’t exist unless you slow down enough to notice it.

That’s where I found the cat.

Or more precisely, that’s where it decided I had found it.

A Cheshire. Half there, half amused, fully aware of everything I wasn’t.

It watched me for a while, then stretched in that impossible way they do, like its spine briefly belonged to a different geometry.

We reached an understanding without speaking.

I have an apartment inside Clovis HQ. Small, quiet, anchored just enough to remain mine. I don’t use it often.

This time, I opened the door and let the cat walk in.

It didn’t walk, exactly. More like it arrived inside.

I named it Nothing. It seems appropriate.

Good enough.

Then I left.

So now I have a pet that may or may not exist at any given moment, a non-answer about a possible invasion, and a lingering headache from thinking too hard in a place that doesn’t like being understood.

All in all, a perfectly productive day.

Tomorrow, I might try something radical.

Like ignoring Clovis.

Though, knowing them, the door will already be waiting.

— Marco