Redshift
By E.M. Thomben
"The bus only comes for those it remembers. And Red’s been waiting a very long time."
At a crumbling bench on a forgotten roadside, an old man named Red waits for a bus no one else believes in. Locals think he’s just another eccentric relic, lost in time. But when a curious young woman named Maya stops to ask why he’s there, the truth begins to unspool—across decades, dimensions, and destinies.
Red isn’t just an old man. He’s a genetically designed sentinel from a broken timeline, the last survivor of a multiversal failsafe known as the Redshift Protocol. As he boards a shimmering craft from beyond the stars, Maya is drawn into a story that spans Cold War Berlin, cybernetic cults in 1999 Tokyo, collapsing realities, and the ghosted remains of a world that never was.
With the help of Kestrel, a quirky AI-conductor with secrets of its own, Red must recover his fractured memories and reassemble the Pale Key—an entropy seed disguised as a weapon of mass salvation. But each jump through time threatens to erase something vital, and the predators who feed on reality’s stability—the