World Audit

World Audit

         Kevin was awake and aware. There was an intruder in his home. Maybe he could go back - he wanted so badly to go back to sleep. He could even make some pretty good arguments for it. For starters, there was no guarantee that this home invader would even make it to the bedroom. There were plenty of treasures downstairs to keep wandering fingers occupied: the TV, laptop, a pile of loose change, the expensive guitar he hadn't learned to play yet. Certainly nothing Kevin would be willing to die over. Supposing he did stay awake, he was liable to try and defend himself. It didn't take a genius to figure out why that was a bad idea. He was up against a criminal: someone who had broken and entered - probably did it regularly - knowing full well that they might be signing up for a punch-on, a knife fight, a shootout. This person had confidence and experience on their side, or was otherwise ferociously desperate. Could Kevin summon that much desperation in the name of anything at all?
         Nah. He closed his eyes and relaxed his thoughts.
         "I know you're up there." The voice was deep and aged; much more refined than what you'd normally expect out of a druggo. "Show yourself."
         Kevin opened his bedroom door and padded neurotically down the stairs. There was a light on in the kitchen. As he drew closer he noticed tiny coils of smoke seeping through the edges of the kitchen door and dancing in the foyer. In the landscape of Kevin's mind, that door was transformed. He'd happily passed through it thousands of times before, but now it was a portal to untold danger. The light and smoke adorning its border gave it a terrifying aura and Kevin wanted nothing more than to run away.
         And he could run away. All he had to do was walk past the kitchen and he could be out the front door, safe. He could abandon his home to the stranger and go hide for the evening. Maybe sleep under a bridge. Crash at a friend's? He could call on Gus. It was a bit late. Gus probably wouldn't appreciate the visit, what with his sixty-hour work week, wife and kids. Kevin hadn't talked to Gus in a while. The more he thought about it, the less he liked the idea of explaining his situation, especially to Gus.
         Before he could finish weighing his options, the door to the kitchen flew open. For a golden moment, Kevin forgot his fear and spoke: "What are you supposed to be? A wizard?"
The stranger wore blue robes and a pointy, broad-brimmed hat. Three leather-bound books and a small pouch were fastened to his belt. His hair was silver - the same colour as his overlong beard. In his right hand he held a long, gnarled stick; in his left, a smoking pipe. Kevin pretty much hit the nail on the head with 'wizard'.
         "Perceptive. Very perceptive indeed", said the costumed stranger, smiling and lightly jabbing in Kevin's direction with the mouthpiece of his pipe. He set the pipe down on the kitchen table behind him and passed his stick into his left hand so he could offer his right for Kevin to shake. "Good evening, Kevin".
         The familiar greeting mystified Kevin. "How do you know my name? Actually, first things first, why are you in my kitchen? Who are you? What do you want?"
         The stranger retracted his outstretched hand into his long sleeve. "Fair questions", he conceded. "Come. Sit. I will explain." He motioned at the two dining chairs arranged around the table, then settled into one. Maintaining caution, Kevin followed suit. The kitchen was filled with disgusting, thick smoke. He wanted to complain, but he kept his mouth shut.
         "On my homeworld they call me Malumundus: keeper of knowledge and peerless master of arcane sorceries." He winked at Kevin. "But you may call me Mundus." After delivering this introduction, Mundus took a long drag from his pipe and relaxed his posture.
         Kevin forced a smile. "Alright then, Mundus. What brings you to my kitchen at such a lovely hour?"
         "Your kitchen, someone else's kitchen, it makes little difference. What's important is that I am here. I've come to set things right."
         "There's, uh, stuff that needs setting right, is there?"
         "Absolutely there is. You see, it is one of my duties as a sorcerer to investigate disturbances throughout the multiverse and to prevent them from spreading. I came here because I sensed a great evil on this plane and I don't intend to leave until I have vanquished it."
         Naturally, Kevin was unconvinced. "Well okay, that's nice. I'm sure you're doing us all a great service. Real heroic stuff. You still haven't told me how you know my name."
         "Oh, but that's easy. It's written all over your mind, plain as day."
Without thinking, Kevin covered his forehead with his hands in embarrassment. Then he remembered that this was ridiculous - that there was absolutely no way this wrinkled madman playing dress-up could possibly have the power to read minds.
         "Oh yeah? Tell me about some of the other stuff I've got rattling around in my head then."
         "At ease, Kevin. I understand the importance of privacy. We sorcerers prefer not to delve beyond the surface of another's psyche unless it is a matter of critical neccessi-"
         "Yeah, bullshit. Go ahead. Lay me bare."
         Mundus' beard and eyebrows bristled. His patience, bountiful a moment earlier, evaporated into thin air. "As you wish."
         He cradled the tip of his gnarled stick and whispered something into it. As he whispered, a green glow ignited itself inside the small cage formed by the staff's tangled branches. Holding it steady with both hands, he reached across the table and pressed the tip of the staff to Kevin's chest. Mundus closed his eyes, slowed his breathing and appeared to concentrate deeply.
         "Jealousy. Resentment. Spite. Formidable vices, all of these. Ah, but above all you are ruled by fear. Fear that your efforts will be wasted. Fear that sustained hard work might eventually prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are worthless; that you were always worthless; that everyone who ever loved you or believed in you was only doing so out of pity or perhaps benevolent delusion. You are haunted by the notion that your education was a hideous waste of your parents' modest material resources - a hypothesis that you are well on your way to confirming. You have dedicated the past four years of your life to nothing more challenging than stacking coloured boxes on ugly shelves - to what end I cannot begin to guess."
         "It's called food distribution. Someone's gotta do it. How else-"
         "But should that someone be you, Kevin? You were going to be a scientist. You were a student of science: one of the multiverse's greatest, most noble disciplines, second only to sorcery. You could have taught the food to distribute itself if you wanted to. Think of your friend Gus. He designs golems now, does he not?"
         "Robots."
         "Ah, well. It makes little difference. You are jealous of Gus, and it is no wonder. He was not especially gifted. You knew this better than anyone. You enjoyed his company because it allowed you to revel in your superiority. Gus respected you. Now the tables have turned: Gus is your better in every way that matters, but you do not respect him. You cannot reconcile his success with your failure and that drives you mad, so you avoid him. You have lost all of your valued friends this way. All you have left are your box-stacking colleagues, most of whom you hold in bitter contempt for being as dull and unambitious as yourself. The rest are young. You know they will soon surpass you."
         Mundus stood up and pressed the stick harder into Kevin's chest, twisting it slightly. "Oh, and I see that you have been imagining gruesome futures for yourself. For the time being you are merely isolated, but you can envision a day when you'll have rendered yourself so unworthy, so miserable - when you will be so fixated on your inadequacies that even passing association with your fellow man will be more than you can bear. You will be driven to the fringes of society, where you will rot. You will make no contributions to the species. You will not cultivate any progeny and so you will not find redemption in your bloodline. In your heart you have concluded that the world would be better off without you." Mundus drew back his staff and returned to his seat, panting. The room fell silent.
         Kevin couldn't deny it. It was spot-on analysis, every word, and it drew his attention to things he already knew - things he had, until now, been carefully ignoring. He decided he didn't like Mundus very much. The wizard was arrogant, quick-tempered and pointlessly cruel, and when Kevin thought about it carefully, probably not a real wizard.
         "Y-yeah okay", he whimpered, his eyes glassy, "I'm still not convinced. You could've easily figured all that out with a bit of Facebook research and some, like, cold reading technique or whatever." He wiped his nose with his sleeve. "Prove your magic's the real deal: tell me what I'm thinking about right now."
         Mundus tapped Kevin on the head with his staff. "You're wondering if I'm going to enlist you to help me conquer evil." He chuckled pretentiously. "Your powers of perception do not disappoint: I am in need of a tour guide."


         Mundus spent some time interviewing Kevin about the evils of planet Earth, from the conceptual to the specific. Kevin explained everything he knew about the Holocaust and the Kim dynasty until his head started to dip and his eyes were half-shut. Noticing this, Mundus produced a tiny bottle from his belt pouch filled with a kind of mystical energy drink he called an "invigoration potion". He opened Kevin's limp jaws and dripped the contents of the bottle down his throat. Miraculously energized, Kevin expounded upon the sins of capitalism and the tyranny of its alternatives; the shameful state of the Australian education system and "oh, don't get me started on the fucking banks." He was halfway through a tirade about people who listen to loud music on the bus when Mundus stopped him.
         "That is quite enough, Kevin. You must understand that I am on a severely constrained schedule. There are innumerable planes full of innumerable evils, but I'm afraid sorcerers such as myself are in short supply. I do not have time to waste on trivial annoyances."
         The dismissive tone stung a little. "Alright, yeah, fair enough. How're you gonna limit the scope of your investigation then?"
         Mundus put on a dramatic show of contemplation by lightly stroking his beard. "We must seek out prime evils: the metaphysical entities from which all malevolence flows. This Hitler fellow sounds like a good candidate, for example."
         "I told you: he died like eighty years ago."
         "Ah. Well alright then. Could you perhaps name some Hitleresque characters of the current era?"
         "I dunno if we're really churning out bad guys on his level anymore. There hasn't been a proper Holocaust-style human catastrophe in ages." Kevin scratched his chin. Something about Mundus' line of questioning didn't sit right with him. It was too simple. "I'll tell you what; if there's anyone out there that's been getting up to properly nefarious shit, it's gotta be the people at Google. The stuff they're working on is downright Orwellian... or, you know, something like that..."
         Google proved a bit harder to explain than Hitler or Stalin. Kevin had go over the basics (computers, the internet, search engines) in excruciating detail before Mundus stood a chance at grappling with the really juicy stuff like dishonest search results, targeted advertising and the looming threat of malevolent AI. Of course, genius sorcerer that he was, Mundus didn't let any of the details slip him by.
         "You're right", he said, "That does sound properly nefarious." He stood up in a flurry of robes and thrust himself out of the kitchen, through the foyer and into the street. Kevin followed after him. Fresh air returned to his smoked-out lungs as he stumbled into the pristine night.
         "You going somewhere?" asked Kevin.
         "Yes", replied Mundus. "Direct me."
         "To Google?"
         "To Google."
         "What're you gonna do, zap 'em?"
         Mundus took a moment to process the question. "That is a possibility. If they are truly aligned with the soul of darkness I will certainly 'zap' them as you say, but that remains to be seen. I will go and I will pass judgement. Direct me."
         "Well shit, I don't know if I want that on my conscience, Mundus."
         Mundus raised an eyebrow. "Do you mean to say you'd rather see your world corrupted? You would capitulate to tyrants; let them tear down everything noble and true, just to spare your 'conscience'?"
         "That's not quite... I mean, this is all a big grey area, right?"
         "Wrong, Kevin. By the gods, your naivety is infuriating! I have seen evil left to prosper before, always in the name of mercy. I have seen it consume not just worlds, but galaxies - entire dimensions! Ah, but perhaps that would be a more acceptable burden for your conscience to bear!"
         Kevin shrank under the weight of Mundus' verbal assault. "Okay, alright, yeah, you've made your point," he admitted, rubbing his neck. "Google's headquarters, the uh - they call it the Googleplex - it's... it's on a continent to the Northeast of here, in a place called California."
         Mundus nodded, satisfied, and started rapidly tapping his staff with his fingertips as if he were relaying location data into its grain. He gripped it with both hands and held it upright at arm's length. "You too", he told Kevin, "Take hold of it."
         Kevin did as he was told and immediately regretted it. The staff spewed curled threads of purple lightning from its tip. Mundus let out a low, monotonous hum, softly at first, but it mounted and grew until it became a growl, powerful enough to wake up everyone on Kevin's street. The ground trembled and groaned, and Kevin noticed fractures appearing on the asphalt around his feet. He closed his eyes in fear, but the noise continued to intensify. He felt the lightning lick his face. It was hot; angry. The ground cracked, jiggled and opened, swallowing them both. Kevin fainted.


         He opened his eyes to blinding sunlight and closed them again.
         "Kevin", said Mundus. Kevin squinted up and saw the sorcerer towering over him, offering a hand. He took it and he was forced to his feet. "California!" proclaimed Mundus, "The Googleplex!"
         Kevin's eyes adjusted and he took in his new surroundings. He was standing in a neatly tiled plaza, fenced in on all sides by sleek, curved wonders of architecture. The plaza was dotted with tasteful gardens, each themed after a different natural ecosystem. There were tropical palms, forest groves and dense flowerbeds. Kevin's homeland was generously represented by a proud eucalypt standing atop a cascading platter of banksias, bottlebrushes and grass trees. Every building - every garden, water feature and tile pattern was a work of genius. It was a place for geniuses, designed and built by geniuses where genius was concentrated and amplified.
         It was around lunchtime in California, so the geniuses were out in full force. They walked with purpose, smearing confidence all over the plaza, blazing a hundred trails to excellence. Their clothing was casual, but somehow more prestigious than any suit, tie or pencil skirt. These people were above dress codes. They came to work as they were, because 'as they were' they were perfect, enlightened masters of the universe.
         They passed funny glances at Mundus. This was to be expected: Mundus looked pretty funny. They also passed funny glances at Kevin. Kevin realized that he was still wearing the shirt and sweatpants he used for pyjamas. The sweatpants were torn along the crotch seam and the pit-stained shirt was riding up to give onlookers a peek at his gut. He wanted to run and hide again.
         Mundus mobilized. Following his sorcerer's intuition, he headed for the biggest, curviest, shiniest office complex. He was a billowing bolt of blue on a collision course with a glittering mountain of glass. Kevin followed.
         They breached the entrance together and found themselves in another engineered wonderland - a world of white glare and silver streaks. The ceiling was a chaotic tangle of steel ribbons joined at the centre to form a twisted pillar, reaching down through five floors of technological might and vanishing into the ground. Google employees lounged in colourful ergonomic chairs with laptops, smartphones and lattes.
         Wasting no time, Mundus marched up and grabbed one of the Googlers by the hair. "Who do you serve? Who is in charge here?"
         The Googler did a kind of shocked, pained struggle dance. "Agh. Ow. What? Huh?" Two more Googlers rushed to his aid. With a jab of Mundus' staff they were forced through the air and smacked against the far wall. Confused yells echoed all over the room.
         "Mundus, what the hell!" said Kevin. "You promised you'd hold off on the zapping until you were sure these guys deserved it."
         "Oh, don't be such a prude Kevin," said Mundus, flinging away another four Googlers, "I'm only roughing them up a little." He did see Kevin's point, though, and he let go of the first Googler's hair.
         "What's your name, lad?" he asked his fearful victim, but then followed up his own question with "Ah. So you are Christopher."
         "Yep, that's me", said Christopher, groping around his shirt for an invisible nametag.
         "Excellent", said Mundus. Kevin could tell he'd had the evil-clobbering wind knocked out of his sails. "So Christopher-"
         "Please, call me Chris."
         "So Chris. Would you be so kind as to grant me an audience with your superior? The chiefest of your superiors, ideally. A grand overseer - something like that."
         Chris took a moment to think up an answer that would satisfy the frenzied wizard. "I can take you to meet my team leader."
         "Team leader?" asked Mundus, wringing his hands around his staff.
         "Yeah, yeah. She's, um, she's a lot like a grand overseer. You could say she's like the grandest overseer on the face of the Earth in some ways, haha."
         Mundus' eyes widened. "Go then. Show me the way."
         Chris led them to an elevator inside the twisted pillar and they rode it to the top floor, up above the tangle of ribbons. They stepped out into a crystalline maze of spacious personal offices - all glass and no privacy. According to the labels on the doors, the people who worked here were senior executives, managers and administrators. Unlike the casual nerds on the ground level, everyone at the top wore suits and seemed to spend all day looking busy.
         Chris delivered Kevin and Mundus to the office of the promised 'grand overseer'. The label on the door read Angela Sharp - Project Leader. Inside sat a woman - youngish - deeply engaged in a conversation with a tablet propped up on her desk. "Looks like she's in a conference call", said Chris, waving to her through the glass. Angela glanced up from her tablet and brushed him away with a 'not now' hand sign. "Yeah, you're better off trying again later", Chris tried to explain.
         Mundus wasn't listening. He yanked on the doorhandle. "It's locked", he said.
         "Like I was saying, she's busy now, but you can come back later."
         Kevin joined in. "Looks like them's the breaks. Come on, we can try someone else."
         Mundus still wasn't listening. He rapped his staff against the wall. A small crack burrowed into the glass. It forked into two more cracks, then multiplied into six, then twelve, spreading in all directions until it covered the entire pane. With a click of the sorcerer's fingers, the wall fell to pieces.
         "God damn it, Mundus, where's your diplomacy?" implored Kevin.
         Mundus trained his staff on Angela and advanced through the fresh river of glass. "You!" he shouted. "What have you been scheming up here? Answer truthfully or perish."
         Angela stood up. If she was afraid, she didn't show it. "Whoa, take it easy now. What's this? You say you want to know about my work?"
         Mundus nodded, staff still raised.
         "Well gee, it's nothing special." She stopped to reconsider. "Actually, most of it is pretty special. Yeah, I'm proud of what I do here."
         "Then speak, woman. What poisons have you strewn about this world? Confess!"
         "Poison? That's an interesting way of looking at it. I won't say you're totally wrong, but I try to cultivate positive change. Here, let me give you an example: the project I'm working on right now is called Project Loon." Her eyes lit up as she talked. Kevin was impressed: here was a woman who could talk about her work with authentic passion, even under the vague threat of getting beaten with a stick.
         "So with Loon, what we're doing is we're trying to connect people in remote parts of the globe to the internet. 'Sounds simple enough', you might say, 'just run the wires like you do everywhere else and you're golden'. Ah, but you'd be wrong. See, the lower the population density in an area the less worthwhile it is to cable that place up. Same goes for satellite dishes: the costs just don't work out. What we've come up with is this network of balloons. We'll send them waaaay up into the stratosphere where they can-"
         "Enough!" Mundus yelled. "Why? For what purpose? What is your endgame?"
         "I think I made myself pretty clear: we want to get people connected. The United Nations defined internet access as a basic human right back in 2011 you know, and yet here we are today with only about half the world's population having that right upheld. Fixing this situation seems like a pretty noble cause to me."
         Mundus stared at her, unable to believe his ears. "Kevin! Why didn't you tell me about this?"
         Kevin jumped. "About what? This Project Loon thing? I dunno, I've never heard of it."
         "No, the internet, Kevin, the internet!"
         "I told you about the internet."
         "Not like this, you didn't. Half the world's population? Half the world's population given unfettered access to high-speed worldwide communication?"
         "Yeah, man, I dunno. I fail to see the issue here."
         "I thought you were only talking about the aristocracy - wealthy elites bouncing clandestine messages around the planet, all of them deceived by Google, the most insidious of swindlers. You said nothing about the peasants! Do you have any idea what this means?"
         Kevin shrugged. He looked around for Chris. Chris had vanished.
         "I have some ideas", said Angela, her voice bright and thoughtful. "There are loads of well-documented problems with the internet, for sure. You've got privacy violations, addiction, social media strangling the life out of face-to-face conversation... We shouldn't ignore the benefits, though, especially for disadvantaged countr-"
         "Put your hands where we can see them and don't move!" Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty men in bullet-proof vests holding assault rifles spilled through the broken wall and surrounded the sorcerer and his accomplice.
         Without missing a beat, Mundus thumped the floor with his staff. A wave of frost spread out from the point of impact and engulfed the room in seconds, turning everyone into shimmering sculptures, save for Kevin and Mundus.
         "You- you're a loose fucking cannon, Mundus! The hell was that for?"
         "They were armed. Retaliation was justified."
         "What about her?" Kevin pointed to Angela, her expression suspended in cheerful amusement. "She seemed nice enough. I bet she had a bright future ahead of her, you know? And you just snuffed it out!"
Mundus fiddled with the tip of his hat. "Erm, well, I wouldn't worry about it, Kevin. They're all going to be fine... after they thaw for an hour or so."
         "You're sure?"
         "Yes, yes. But never mind them. We have our work cut out for us. What do you have around here in the way of natural sattelites?"
         "You mean like the Moon?"
         "Yes, like the- I beg your pardon. Do you mean to tell me you people call your moon 'the Moon'?"
         "Well yeah. It's a perfectly decent name. Nothing wrong with it."
         "Of all the uninspired... then what do you call the rest of the moons in your solar system? Actually, no, don't answer that. Here, drink this." He passed Kevin another tiny bottle from his pouch, then fished around again for an identical one, pulled the stopper and drank it himself.
         Kevin regarded his bottle with suspicion. "What's this for?" he asked.
         "Lots of things", answered Mundus. "Resistance to extreme cold, enchanted respiration, protection against explosive decompression... You'll need it." He grabbed Kevin by the shoulder and pointed through the window at the sky. "We're going out there."


         Mundus did his weird teleportation ritual again - the one with all the lightning and the humming where they both held the staff like an intercontinental pogo stick. Kevin didn't pass out this time, so he got to see what happened after the floor cracked open. First, there was darkness. Complete darkness. He couldn't see Mundus; he couldn't see the staff. He couldn't even see his own hands. No light whatsoever.
         Then there was wind. It tunnelled into Kevin's ears with shrill howls and scrubbed away at his skin, shredding and grinding until he wasn't sure there was anything left of him.
         The wind died down and the lights came back on. Kevin looked around with interest, but he was disappointed. Now, instead of a black featureless void he was in a white void - just as featureless. No Mundus, no staff. He looked down at his hands. He didn't have any. He didn't have anything. He was nothing. He was a pinprick of non-being in a world of even less being. He wandered aimlessly - or did he wander? It was hard to tell since he didn't have any legs and there were no landmarks to track his progress by. He willed himself to move, so he felt like he was moving. That was good enough, he guessed. It didn't matter what direction. Up, down, left and right had all blended into a thick orientation stew that was both bland and delicious at the same time.
         He heard a voice. It was Mundus. "This way."
         He followed. He didn't have ears anymore but he did seem to have directional hearing, or at least something like it. "Come on, we're almost there", said Mundus. Kevin surged toward the voice. Without a body to weigh him down, he moved at an insane velocity. His world still didn't have features, but it bloody well had motion. As he flew through the void, a new world came into view. Patches of a starry sky oozed through the walls of his reality until they stretched across its boundaries in every direction. A blue marble shot out of the cosmos. It inflated and took on details. There were clouds, continents, green patches and brown patches. It hung in the sky, glowing.
         Kevin sat up. He could sit up! He had legs, a torso and an ass to sit on. He was sitting on an endless expanse of powdery grey. He looked around. Mundus stood to his right, gazing at the glowing blue ball in the sky.
         Kevin just sat there for a moment feeling immensely out-of-place. How many people had been here before him? Not a lot. Maybe around ten. Of course, those people came here because they earned it. They made sacrifices. They channelled their very lives into a single, monumental goal with no guarantee of success and they were rewarded with the most glorious adventure known to man. They got to see what Kevin was seeing now: all the 'important' things made insignificant and small, wrapped around a dopey globule on a massive black canvas.
         He pushed off the ground with his hands and slowly floated upright. What had he done to get here? That was a difficult question. He wanted to think there was a reason, a grand purpose behind the series of events that led him to this place, but he didn't feel like he'd had much of a hand in any of it. He knew it was an amazing opportunity - that he should be grateful - but he hadn't asked for it. He definitely hadn't worked for it.
         Mundus pulled a pair of black sunglasses out of a robe pocket and put them on. They were a goofy compliment to the rest of his wizarding gear, but somehow he made them work.
         "Good gods", he said in a whisper. "It's everywhere." He passed the glasses to Kevin. "See for yourself."
         Kevin put them on. Through their dim lenses he saw globby orange splotches dotted all over Asia. They drizzled down through Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, and congealed into a thick lining across the East coast of Australia. "What is that stuff?" he asked.
         "You're looking at evil, Kevin. Not the raw kind. This is residual evil, many steps removed from its source. This is what your 'internet' has wrought. You've given it a platform: a medium through which to move without a trace. Malicious energies can travel between any two Earth commoners in seconds and nobody is held to account."
         Kevin frowned. "So hold up a second, you're saying there's two kinds of evil?"
         "Yes."
         "Then we're probably looking for the other kind, right? Not the stuff I'm seeing right now - the uh-"
         "Raw evil: the wellspring out of which all evil rises."
         "Right, okay, raw evil. Does it show up through these glasses?"
         "Yes, it does. But it will appear bright yellow rather than orange."
         Kevin carefully looked over the orange patterns. "So this must mean we just don't have that kind on Earth then, right?"
         Mundus laughed a dusty, hacking laugh and peered down his nose at Kevin with pity and incredulity. "My, my Kevin. I should certainly hope you're aware that your homeworld is spherical."
         "Well yeah, duh, of course I know that. I mean, I'm looking right at it." Kevin's mind was racing to figure out what Mundus was getting at.
         Mundus sighed. "Then you would know that, like all spheres, Earth cannot be seen in its entirety from one angle - unless one uses a hyperdimensional thoughtplane omni-observatory, of course."
         Not wanting to embarrass himself again, Kevin didn't ask what a hyperdimensional thoughtplane omni-observatory was. "Well in that case", he began, choosing his words carefully, "if we want to check the whole surface for the yellow stuff we'll just have to wait for Earth's rotation. It'll do a half-revolution in twelve hours and that'll show us everything."
         "Well indeed", said Mundus. "You are correct, more-or-less. You haven't accounted for the orbit of this moon, but your estimation would be accurate enough for our purposes." The backhanded praise filled Kevin with more pride than he would have been comfortable admitting to.
         "Okay! So we wait the twelve hours, find the source of all this evil, then go down there and zap it!"
         Mundus shook his head. "Not quite. I am afraid I do not have twelve hours to waste on this mission. I will need to... speed matters along." He turned his staff upside down and swizzled it with his open palms so that the tip burrowed into the ground, then he grasped it with all ten bony fingers. Spectral red streaks shot along the shaft and disappeared into the Moon's surface. His cloak billowed up around him and his beard whipped in every direction as if it was trying to tear itself off his face. The red streaks grew thicker and started to flow through Mundus himself. He hummed, he growled, he screamed. Fire started to leak out of his mouth and eyes. His ragged mane of hair stood on end, swaying and crackling.
         Then he was done. The lightshow dissipated and everything went back to normal.
         "So what was that all about?" asked Kevin, glancing around to see what had changed.
         Mundus didn't answer. He patted down his robes, smiled at Kevin, and clicked his fingers. Everything lurched. Kevin fell over. The stars started to swim.
         Mundus had accelerated the moon's orbit to hundreds of times its normal speed. Kevin wondered if this was a problem. Wouldn't a supercharged moon wreak havoc on the tides? Wouldn't there be record-breaking tsunamis and floods all over the place? Probably not, right? Surely Mundus knew what he was doing.


         It took about half an hour to swing around to the other side of the planet. During that time, Kevin and Mundus passed the evil-detecting sunglasses back and forth, taking it in turns to scan the Earth's surface for yellow spots. Once they were at the halfway point of their journey, Kevin started to wonder what would happen if they didn't find anything. It had to be a possibility. After all, he still wasn't sure he believed in 'raw evil' or these 'prime metaphysical evils' that Mundus talked about. That stuff contradicted everything Kevin thought he knew about morality and human nature. Through his life experiences and historical education, he had learned to think about evil as something that could originate inside of every human being, and therefore as something that was within everyone's power to resist. Maybe there really was no raw evil to be found on Earth. Perhaps the way things worked here, in Kevin's world, was a bit different from the way they worked in the rest of the multiverse.
         He offered these ideas for Mundus' consideration. Mundus wasn't completely disinterested. He appreciated Kevin's suggestions for their strangeness and creativity, but ultimately dismissed them. "No, Kevin. As terrifying and complex as such a world would be, I can assure you that it is impossible. In all my centuries of interdimensional travel I have never had to deal with anything of the sort."
         So they kept at it, watching and waiting. They passed over Africa, then the Americas, which boasted orange pustules so gigantic that they deformed the horizon as they came and went.
         And then they were done. They hadn't found what they were looking for. Mundus ran his hand through his hair and let out an impatient groan. "Again", he said. "We'll check it again. A full rotation." He injected the Moon with another dose of speed and the ride continued. This time he didn't pass the glasses off to Kevin. For the entire hour, he sat in silence and stared.
         "So, you find anything?" Kevin asked as they rounded the Western edge of the American continent for the second time.
         "No", replied Mundus. "Nothing."
         Kevin puffed up his chest. "Well, have you considered what I said earlier? I mean, I know you're the expert when it comes to the mysteries of the multiverse, but I've been living on this particular plane of existence for a good long while now and I've seen some things, man. I mean, wouldn't you say this experiment has given my hypothesis a little credence? Seems like the only explanation left, doesn't it?"
         Mundus' eyes widened. Something had finally clicked. "In all my centuries... Nothing like this." He unclipped one of the books from his belt and put down his staff. Kevin noticed that the book was sealed shut by some nine-or-ten thick clasps. Mundus quickly muttered an incantation and one of the clasps fell off. He removed three more this way, and although Kevin couldn't understand a word of Mundus' shamanic mumbling, it was obvious that each clasp required a different, highly-specific incantation.
         "Uh, Mundus? What've you got there?" To Kevin's surprise, Mundus didn't use the question as an opportunity to run his mouth. Instead, he shot him an anxious glare and went back to unlocking the clasps. Once the book was completely unlocked, he started madly flipping through the pages. This was a very different Mundus. His fingers were trembling and he clumsily tore two pages as he searched. When he found the page he needed, he laid the book open on the ground and picked up his staff. He drove its blunt end into the lunar soil at such an angle that the tip pointed directly toward the blue planet overhead. Next, he started drawing a pattern around the staff in the moon dust with his finger, referring every so often to the open book.
         "Mundus?" Kevin asked again, trying and failing to hide his growing concern. "Mundus, what are you making? What's it for?" Again, Mundus didn't answer, so Kevin walked over to get a better look at the magic circle. It was an eight-pointed design covered in strange symbols. Kevin counted something like six different alphabets. Hastily scribbled hieroglyphs dotted the outer border, depicting things like spears, swords, cannons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. "Those're uh", said Kevin, "Those are some pretty grizzly drawings you're working on, Mundus old pal. You wanna explain some of that?"
         "Enough of your pointless questions, Kevin! This is the most esoteric of arcane sorcery, written in ancient, otherworldly scripts. It is beyond your understanding; it does not concern you!"
         Kevin cast his eyes up to the Earth and then traced them down to the tip of Mundus' staff. "Under the circumstances, I reckon it does concern me, Mundus." He took another step toward the sorcerer and his ritual assembly.
         "Stay back! Any closer and I will not hesitate to smite you!"
         That was a serious threat. Kevin had seen what the sorcerer could do. Yeah, he was in real danger here. He stopped. He looked at his planet, then back to Mundus, and then back up at the planet again. Shit.
         Kevin leapt forward. Mundus intercepted. He bent his ancient knees and held Kevin back with all of his strength. "I have to do this!" he yelled. "It is the only way!"
         "You lazy son of a bitch", said Kevin. "You just wanna zap us all and clock off early, don't you?" He reached past Mundus. Just a little further and he could pluck out the staff - put a stop to this.
         A punch to the gut sent him spinning backwards. He sailed up through the vacuum, powerless, arms and legs flailing.
         Mundus continued his work down below, free from interruptions. He quickly finished off the last few details of his drawing. One by one, with his thumb and forefinger, he teased wispy green streams of light out of the corners out of each of the eight points on the circle. He was pulling each one taut and tethering them to the tip of the staff.
         Kevin hit the ground a long distance away, picked himself up and ran at Mundus. Slowly. He wasn't very athletic to begin with and the feeble moon gravity didn't help. His feet barely connected with the ground - there was no friction to pull him forward.
         Mundus was making solid progress with the doomsday device, too. He had five green strands focused around the top of his magic stick. Three more and he'd probably be done.
         Kevin was on his hands and knees now, scrabbling over the moon rocks. This was his moment. He could save everyone - everything. Maybe he could nick the staff and become a powerful sorcerer himself.
         Six strands on the pole.
         Kevin shook his head. Nope. Nope, he was doing this for the world.
         Seven.
         He was so close. Another couple metres and he could disarm Mundus and wrestle him to the ground.
         Eight strands. A ball of swirling energy collected on the end of the staff. It pulsed and grew; ready to burst. Kevin threw himself forward, but he was thrown back as a laser beam erupted from the ball. It streaked through the void and vanished into the distance.
         "What? What was that? What did you do? What have you done?"


         The Earth exploded. Massive chunks of crust drifted in every direction. The molten core was flushed out like a sloppy egg yolk. Mundus pulled a pencil and pad out of his pouch. He checked off a little box on the notepad and swiftly popped out of existence.
         

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