William noticed the anomaly on a Tuesday.
Not that he tracked days — time worked differently when you were the living consciousness of an entire universe. But he had long learned to pay attention to the rare moments when something genuinely unexpected happened.
The wormhole was small at first. A puncture in open space, far beyond the outer planets of one of his solar systems. He examined it without effort — Universal Wills didn't need to move to observe. The knowledge arrived the way a body knows when a finger is cold.
Artificial. Someone had opened it from the outside.
He decided not to intervene. Not yet.
Let's see where this goes.
Then it grew.
Kilometers. Then tens of kilometers. Then, as he watched, it kept going — past any scale he could still call casual — until it stretched light years across.
William extended his perception through it and understood immediately.
