St Johns

You hurry through Oxford to St Johns, the device clutched in your hands under a coat. As you are nearly felled by a cyclist crossing to St Giles, a trio of strange people surround you. A large man with an evil grin and daemonic eyes, a small figure with enthusiastic hair and the smile of a killer, and a tall, worried looking man. The smaller one pulls your coat aside and regards the device with relief.

"You are the One who will be," he says, then smiles, looking impressed. "Prophecy not usually Tom's skill."

They begin to guide you through the crowds.

"We will help you to St John's."

"But who are you?" You ask, bewildered by events.

"We are OUSFG. We are among the last of the un-transcended ones."

The 'untranscended ones' of 'OUSFG' have lead you into St Johns, through a maze of architecture and gardens to an empty, smooth walled place.

"This is Garden Quad", one notes. "It isn't really here, you see. It was destroyed by Anarch when she was born, and they replaced the Quad, and its occupants, with CGI replicas in the hope that no one would realise what had gone so horribly wrong."

You are about to ask who OUSFG mean by they when they force you into a central quadrangle and the tall, worried one operates some switches. The whole immediate surroundings reduce to a wire-frame model which twists and devolves into a rectangular cage, outlined in grey against an endless, terrible, blue infinity.

"Where are we?"

"Where we were. Where all those who pass through Garden Quad are for the duration of their stay there. In the only undamaged relic of the old Quad. A college computer, in the one place where no one, not even a multidimensional near omnipotent monster like Anarch would dare tread. We are inside Microsoft Windows.

"What!" You almost explode in fear and anger. "But if it crashes while we're inside..."

"We know the dangers," the evilest of them smiles, "but it is only for a brief time, and this is the only safe place."

"Why did that message tell me to come here?"

"That message came from Alex and Archie, who have now gone beyond mortality."

"You mean they're dead?"

"They are OUSFG. It was the crazed physics experiments of one of our number that brought Anarch into being, and Alex and Archie hunted her down across time and space to save the cosmos itself. Unfortunately, when they finally cornered her in the basement of HMV in Oxford, they realised suddenly that they had absolutely no idea of what they were going to do with her when they caught her. They were... transcended. It was fate, perhaps, or the machinations of time itself that brought you to us."

"It was Anarch! Some damn moron thought I should challenge her." You glare at them.

"None the less, you are our last and only hope. Before they transcended, the committee believed the answer lay in the future. They travelled there, to a space station in the Earth year 2260. We don't know what they found, except that if they found the answer then they failed to use it. All we can tell you is that you must trust those who bear the mark of the dragon."

"But why?"

"They are, as we are. OUSFG." There is a flickering and Garden Quad reforms about you. You look up into the sky. Red gouts of flame are licking the horizon.

"What's happening?"

"Anarch is destroying the world. Now, quickly, press the button and go!"