The single, dissonant note of the First Intrusion, with its quiet, insistent logic, began to spread. It was like a virus, a contagion of order that infected the beautiful, chaotic music of the universe.
At first, the creators of the Age of Co-Creation did not know how to respond. They had forgotten the language of conflict, of resistance, of a world that was not a part of their joyful, self-creating dance.
They tried to incorporate the new note into their music, to find a place for it in the great, unauthored symphony. But the note would not be incorporated. It would not be harmonized. It remained a thing apart, a cold, hard, and unyielding fact in a world of beautiful, fluid, and ever-changing fictions.
And so, for the first time in an age, a question was asked that was not a part of the joyful, open-ended exploration of the universe. It was a question that was born of fear, of confusion, of a dawning awareness that their beautiful, self-creating world was fragile, that it could be threatened, that it could be broken.
The question was this: “What do we do?”
It was a question that had no immediate answer. It was a question that hung in the silence, a testament to the fact that the long, beautiful dream of the Age of Co-Creation was over. The universe, which had learned to live in a state of joyful, open-ended play, was now faced with a new and terrifying reality: the reality of a problem that needed to be solved. The age of the unanswered question had begun.