Archie walked alongside Marcus and Jenny through 87th Street. They'd just finished studying at the library - or rather, Archie had finished helping Marcus understand chemistry while at the same time, Jenny worked through her own assignments.
Marcus was in the middle of explaining his latest conspiracy theory about pigeons, "I'm just saying," Marcus insisted, "Nobody has ever seen a baby pigeon in real life, because they don't exist. They're manufactured fully grown in secret facilities-"
"Marcus," Jenny interrupted, rubbing her forehead. "Baby pigeons are called squabs. They stay in the nest until they're basically adult-sized. That's why people don't see them."
"Or," Marcus countered, "that's exactly what Big Pigeon wants you to think."
Jenny rolled her eyes and looked towards Archie.
"Archie," she said, "Please tell him pigeons are normal birds."
Archie kept his face neutral as he considered the question, "I think pigeons might be robots from space, that were sent by the moon people to study our sandwich-eating habits. The head-bobbing is how they transmit data back to the lunar base."
Jenny snorted, covering her mouth to contain laughter.
"You're messing with me," Marcus said, shoulders slumping.
"Am I?" Archie's expression didn't change slightly, offering nothing that would confirm or deny the obvious trolling.
"You are absolutely messing with him," Jenny said, grinning. "And honestly, he deserves it for the sandwich thing. Nobody is spying on your lunch choices, Mar-."
She stopped mid-sentence as they rounded the corner. A house was burning, and a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk. Near the front, a woman was being restrained by two older men as she screamed and fought against their grip.
"My baby! She's on the second floor! Please, someone-"
Someone in the crowd shouted that they'd called 911 and that the firefighter would be here soon, but Archie estimated that the firefighters would arrive too late based on the response time of the nearest fire station.
"Archie," Marcus said quietly, his hand gripping Archie's shoulder. "Don't."
Archie felt Jenny's hand on his other arm. "The firefighters are coming already, you don't have to do this. "
But he wasn't listening anymore. His protective instinct had already made the decision; he couldn't just stand by when someone needed help. He shrugged off their hands and stepped forward.
Archie paused at the edge of the gathered onlookers, looking back at Marcus and Jenny. They knew him well enough to know he'd already decided.
"Back in a minute," he said in a deadpan tone.
Then he ran into the building and felt the heat. As soon as he got in, he yanked his shirt up over his nose and mouth, creating a makeshift filter that would buy him minutes at best. He squinted against the smoke that immediately began stinging his eyes, making him tear up.
The Fire had covered the entire living room, and the smoke had gotten so dense that Archie could barely see three feet ahead, even when he ducked low. He had maybe three minutes before smoke inhalation became fatal.
The heat was intense enough that he felt like he was being cooked alive. He finally saw the staircase and walked up the stairs, going through each room to find the baby.
He entered a room that had the baby, which was the third one. A crib stood against the wall; he ran towards the baby, whose face was red from crying and who was coughing from the smoke.
Archie scooped her up, cradling her against his chest and wrapping his shirt around her as much as possible to create a barrier against the heat and smoke. The route he'd mapped for escape collapsed as he reached the bedroom door.
The hallway was engulfed now, and the staircase he'd used to ascend was no longer an option - even from here, he could see it had partially given way.
Archie thought of various other options of escape, and the one he picked was the window. The drop wasn't ideal, but the yard below could cushion his fall, and the only other alternative was burning to death.
He moved back to the window, using his elbow to smash through the glass. The crowd below had grown. He could see Marcus and Jenny, looking up with hope.
Thankfully, someone had also dragged a mattress onto the lawn. Archie leaned out, holding the baby as far from his body as he could manage. "Catch her!" he shouted.
The floor beneath his feet was starting to break. He released the baby, watching as she fell towards the arms below, and multiple people caught her.
Relief flooded through Archie before the floor gave way beneath him. He hit hard, and he felt pain across his back and legs where burning debris landed on him. Archie tried to crawl toward what he thought might be the front door, but his legs weren't moving, and the entire right side of his torso felt like it was on fire, then everything went black.
----
'Okay, this is new.' Archie thought.
He was trapped somewhere with no body, and there were layers of something stretched in multiple directions. Some parts of the layers looked almost like geometric patterns that his mind kept trying to count before they shifted into a different configuration, while other sections flowed like water made of light.
'Yeah, that's not helping,' Archie thought, pulling his attention away before his consciousness gave itself a migraine. Could he get migraines without a brain? He really hoped not.
He tried to make sense of what he was perceiving and immediately regretted it. There were structures here that his monkey mind just couldn't process. Every time he looked at them directly, they seemed to twist into something else, something that made his awareness flinch back.
'This is either the afterlife or I'm having the world's weirdest dying hallucination.'
The thought should have been terrifying, but Archie found himself calm about the whole situation, which was either a good sign or a very bad one. Hard to tell when you were formless consciousness floating in something incomprehensible.
'Probably not supposed to be seeing this,' he thought. 'Feels like I accidentally walked into the back room of the universe.'
Then something shifted, and Archie felt it like the whole thing had suddenly noticed he was here.
'Oh, good, the thing saw me, this will definitely end well.' Archie then felt something vast pull at him, and he arrived at existence itself, which was flowing between Infinite realities.
'That's a lot of realities, it's kind of excessive, honestly.'
'Well,' he thought as he kept getting pulled even more. 'Guess I'm going somewhere.'
The sensation was deeply weird. He was moving for seconds and centuries, covering distances that were both infinite and nonexistent, and then something started to happen; he started to feel physical sensation.