Part 2

PART TWO — OPENER

The Architecture of the Void

An AI-Assisted Illustrative Fiction

———

NOTICE: AI-assisted fiction, clearly labeled. Not presented as prophecy or historical record. Staff Sergeant Marcus Hale is a fictional composite. The theology is drawn directly from Scripture. The fiction is the vehicle. The warning is real.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE VOID

An AI-Assisted Illustrative Fiction

Part Two Opener — before the theological chapters

NOTICE TO THE READER AND PUBLISHER:

What follows is a work of AI-assisted FICTION, clearly labeled as such.

It is NOT presented as prophecy, fact, or historical record.

It is imagination in service of theology — a dramatization of Revelation 6, 11, 13, 16, and Daniel 7.

Staff Sergeant Marcus Hale is a fictional character. His story is not historical.

The theology it dramatizes is drawn directly from Scripture.

The fiction is the vehicle. The warning is real.

PART ONE: THE MAN

Staff Sergeant Marcus Hale had never believed in any of it.

Not God. Not the Bible. Not Israel and its claims of divine election. He had constructed his atheism not from philosophy books or university debates but from the raw, unprocessed wreckage of his own life, and it had served him the way a callus serves a working hand — not beautiful, but functional. It kept him moving when softer men would have stopped.

His parents had died instantly on the interstate when he was seventeen — a drunk driver, a head-on collision, a phone call that arrived while he was at a friend's house. He had knelt in the rain behind the funeral home two days later and prayed — really prayed, the only time in his life — begging whatever was up there for something. A sign. A comfort. A whisper that it meant something. That they had mattered. That he was not alone.

The silence that answered him was so complete and so cold that he had made a decision in that rain and never revisited it. There was no God. And if there was, He was worse than nothing — He was indifferent. He was a warden who watched the cells burn and considered it beneath his notice.

His sister had gone the other way. Pills first, then heroin, then whatever she could find. He had fought for her across years of rehab cycles and court hearings and late-night phone calls from numbers he didn't recognize, and the system had failed her at every turn. Waiting lists. Indifferent counselors. Officers who locked her up and spat her back out worse. He didn't know if she was alive. He had stopped knowing a long time ago. She had written him a letter from a rehab center once — she had found Jesus there, she said. He had read it twice and put it in the bottom of his duffle bag. He never answered it.

He hated Israel. Not the people individually — a distinction he made less and less reliably as years passed — but the arrangement. The obligation. The way American policy organized itself around the protection of a patch of desert that various groups of people believed God had promised them. He joined the Army for the paycheck and the structure. He rose to Staff Sergeant on competence alone. When the final deployment orders came — the entire world uniting against Israel in what the briefers carefully declined to call Armageddon — Marcus had laughed. A short, humorless sound. "Of course," he had said. "Of course it ends here."

He didn't understand the full scope of what was coming. No one did.

PART TWO: THE VALLEY

The first bowl had poured three hours ago.

He had seen it happen in real time — had watched the sky tear open with a sound like industrial fabric being ripped apart by giant hands, and had seen the liquid, golden, almost beautiful, catching the light as it cascaded, hit the earth and the men who stood upon it. He had watched from his position beneath the burning Abrams tank as the soldiers nearest to him began to change.

Not burn. Not bleed. Change.

Private First Class Miller — twenty-two years old, from Spokane, who had a girlfriend he showed photographs of to anyone who would look — had been crouched behind a section of destroyed wall forty yards away when the first bowl hit him. Marcus watched Miller stand up. He watched Miller look at his hands. He watched what happened next.

The skin of Miller's palms began to move. Not blister. Move. As though something beneath the dermis was alive and trying to get out. The surface of his skin developed a topography — ridges and valleys appearing, deepening, the color shifting from pink to gray to the deep, infected purple of a bruise that had gone septic. Then the skin began to separate from the muscle underneath, peeling away in long, continuous sheets, the way a label separates from a wet bottle — with that same terrible ease, that same sense of something that was supposed to be permanent revealing itself as temporary.

Miller did not scream immediately. For three or four seconds he simply stared at his own hands, at the raw, glistening meat beneath the peeling skin, at the exposed tendons that twitched with every movement of his fingers. Then the pain reached whatever part of his brain processed pain, and the sound he made was not a human scream. It was something lower and more fundamental. An animal registering something it had no category for.

The sores that followed were not like burns or wounds. They were like invasions. They erupted from beneath the exposed muscle, black-rimmed and weeping a fluid that was not blood — thicker than blood, luminescent with a sick green-gold iridescence, smoking faintly where it touched the ground.

The bowl's liquid had not touched Marcus directly. But proximity was apparently enough. He felt it arrive on his exposed forearm as a sensation that had no good analogy. The closest he could manage was the feeling of his cells being individually informed that they were no longer wanted. His skin did not peel. It dissolved. A small patch simply ceased to be skin. Beneath it, the muscle glistened wet and raw. The radial nerve — he could see it, an actual nerve, hanging exposed and twitching like a thread pulled from wet cloth — responded to the open air with a signal that traveled up his arm, through his shoulder, and into his brain with the clarifying specificity of a dental drill hitting a live nerve.

He had made a sound. He was not proud of it. But he had made it.

And then he had looked at the sky and said: "That the best you got?"

Because he was Marcus Hale, and he would not give this — whatever this was — the satisfaction.

The second bowl transformed the sea. He could not see the Mediterranean from his position on the valley floor, but he could see the horizon shift and the color of the sky above the coast change — a deep arterial red that spread inland like a bruise, and he could smell what followed. The wind shifted, and the new air that rolled across the valley from the west was thick with the smell of death at industrial scale. Not fresh death. Not battlefield death. Old death. The deep, sweet-rot corruption of things that had been dead for a very long time.

The rivers and springs ran red. He saw it happen to the irrigation channel fifty yards to his right — water that had been brown and muddy going suddenly, definitively dark, the color changing in a visible wave moving upstream as if something had upended an enormous vessel somewhere at the source. Corporal Hernandez — a quiet man who had never once complained about anything in the eight months Marcus had known him — had just filled his canteen. He looked at the red liquid inside it. He looked at it for a long time. Then, because he was dying of thirst and this was all there was, he drank it. The sound he made afterward — the choking, the gagging, the sound of a body desperately trying to reject what it had taken in — stayed with Marcus for the remainder of his conscious life, and beyond.

The sun became a weapon. Not atmospheric heat — targeted. Personal. It felt like the sun had noticed you specifically. The temperature spiked so fast that Marcus felt the moisture leave his body in what seemed like a single breath — his mouth going from dry to cracked to bleeding in the space of minutes, his tongue becoming something thick and alien he was afraid to move because he didn't trust it not to tear.

The fifth bowl brought darkness like nothing Marcus had ever experienced — not nighttime, not blackout. This was darkness with intent. Darkness that pressed. Darkness that had mass and agenda and temperature, a cold that coexisted with the heat in a way that should have been physically impossible, so that simultaneously his burned skin was searing and his bones were freezing. The darkness was a diagnostician. It showed him exactly what was broken.

And in the darkness, he heard Chaplain Rivera.

PART THREE: THE CHAPLAIN

Chaplain Elias Rivera had been crawling toward Marcus for what felt like an hour. His own wounds were severe. He dragged himself through the gore on one arm and his chin, leaving a trail of his own blood across men he had prayed with, men he had held as they died, men whose names he would carry in his chest for the rest of his life — which, he understood, was not going to be long.

He had seen the vision. Not in metaphor. Not in symbol. In the clinical, unambiguous clarity of a man watching a film. The souls of the fallen — every soldier who had died without repentance in this valley — were suspended in a gray, lightless void. Black hooks of fire tore into them without pause or mercy. Skin peeled away in long, wet sheets and regenerated only to be ripped off again. The uncoiling of intestines through mouths stretched beyond human limit. The bursting of eyes that reformed only to burst again. The swelling of tongues until they exploded and the tissue knit itself back and swelled again. Not once. Not as punishment. As condition. As permanent, unalterable state.

He had heard the voice like grinding stone declare over and over: "It is finished. Your names were never written in the Lamb's Book of Life. There is no more time."

Rivera had vomited blood and wept until weeping became impossible, and then he had started crawling toward Marcus Hale, because Marcus was the man he had been trying to reach for the entire deployment, and this was the last chance. He understood that with a certainty that superseded his theology and his training and his pain. He understood it the way he understood that he was breathing.

He reached Marcus. Grabbed his bloody arm with both hands.

"Marcus." Rivera's voice was hoarse. Wrecked. Still somehow warm in a way that Marcus found infuriating. "I know you can hear me."

"I can hear you," Marcus said. "I'm choosing not to listen. There's a difference."

"Marcus, please —"

"Save it." Blood in his throat. He swallowed it. "I've heard the pitch. Not interested. If your God is real, He's the one who did this." He gestured with his one movable arm at the burning, blood-soaked, darkness-swallowed valley around them. "I don't want anything from something that made this."

"He didn't make this," Rivera said. "We made this. Mankind made this. Every choice —"

"Rivera." Marcus's voice was flat and final. "I watched Miller's skin slide off his body. I watched Hernandez drink blood because it was all there was. That's not mankind's work. That's a deity with anger issues, and I don't worship what I don't respect, and I sure as hell don't beg for the mercy of something that stands by and watches this and calls it justice."

Rivera was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was smaller. "He's not asking you to understand it. He's asking you to trust Him."

"Trust Him." Marcus laughed. The laugh tore something in his chest. He felt it go — a small, wet ripping sensation. More blood. "Trust the God who let my parents die at seventeen. Trust the God who watched my sister destroy herself. Trust the God who sent me here to die for a country I hate. Yeah. I'll get right on that."

Rivera kept trying. Even as meteors fell and the ground shook, he stayed right there beside Marcus, begging for his soul with everything he had left. He was fully exposed, kneeling in the open, ignoring the chaos, completely focused on trying to pull one more soul back from the edge.

The mortar round came out of the darkness with no warning. It landed ten feet away.

The explosion was deafening. The blast wave slammed into them like a freight train. Shrapnel tore through the air. Marcus felt hot metal slice across his already ruined leg. But Rivera took the primary impact — a large fragment punched through his chest from the right side and exited through his left shoulder blade in a spray of blood and torn tissue.

Rivera collapsed half across Marcus. His mouth opened and closed twice. His eyes were wide and very clear.

"Marcus," he managed. "Jesus." A pause. A breath that rattled with finality. "Still." Another breath. "Loves."

His body went still. Warm blood poured from the wound in his chest onto Marcus's neck and shoulder.

Marcus lay in it. He did not look away from the chaplain's dead eyes.

He laughed. A wet, broken, terrible sound that tore something in his chest and he didn't care.

"See?" he rasped. "You died right here. Trying to save me. And nothing came. No angel. No voice. No hand of God. Just another unanswered prayer. Just another body." He looked up at the ruined sky. "That's your answer. That's what you are. Silence. Every time. Silence."

The silence did not answer.

But something else did.

PART FOUR: THE DRAGON

The sky darkened in a way that had nothing to do with weather or smoke.

It darkened the way a room darkens when something enters it — a displacement, a change in the quality of the air, a sense of presence that arrived before the presence itself.

Then the Dragon appeared.

It filled the sky above the valley — a colossal form whose dimensions the human eye kept failing to resolve, scales the color of fresh arterial blood, seven heads on necks that moved with terrible independent intelligence, ten horns crowning the largest head. Its wings, leathery, veined with pulsing black fire, beat slowly, each stroke sending hurricane-force winds across the battlefield. The downdraft drove dirt and blood and the fine particulate matter of vaporized men deep into Marcus's open wounds.

The Dragon lowered one of its heads toward the valley. The eyes were the color of burning coals, the size of truck tires, narrowed with a specific and personal attention.

When it opened its maw, the heat arrived first — a wave so intense Marcus's skin tightened and blistered before the sound reached him. Then the roar came. Not a sound. A physical force. It slammed into his collapsed chest like a sledgehammer, driving more blood up his throat. The roar was layered — deep bass that vibrated his shattered bones, high shrieking that drilled into his ears, and beneath both, audible only when he focused, the trapped and suffering voices of multitudes.

Sulfur and burning brimstone poured from its nostrils in thick yellow clouds. Marcus tasted it — rotten eggs and hot metal fused with the copper of his own blood. The tail swept across the sky with a crack like the world splitting and burning meteors tore loose, trailing black smoke. They landed throughout the valley with impacts that vaporized everything within fifty yards.

The Beast walked through the carnage below the Dragon. Seven heads. Ten horns dripping blood. Its body was the nightmare described in the ancient text — like a leopard, with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion, stitched together from the matter of human empire and animated by the Dragon's authority. One of its heads had been destroyed by coalition fire earlier; Marcus watched it regenerate in real time — shredded meat bubbling, bone cracking back into alignment, veins snaking across wounds with wet pulsing sounds — and soldiers all around him dropped to their knees.

Those with the mark received healing. Those without were executed.

The Dragon descended until one of its heads was directly above Marcus — close enough that the heat from its breath was cooking the exposed tissue on his arm. Its eyes found him with a recognition that was worse than any wound.

"You never believed," the voice said. Not heard. Felt. Vibrating in the marrow of his bones and the matter of his thoughts. "You hated this land. You hated its people. You rejected every warning. You prayed once in the rain and when the silence answered you decided the silence was God's nature rather than your own distance from Him."

Marcus said nothing. He gathered what remained.

"The God of Israel wars against you with fire and blood and wrath. The door you refused to enter has closed. Take the mark. Serve the Beast. The pain will lessen for a time. Or refuse — and join the ones your chaplain saw falling."

Marcus looked up into the burning eyes above him. The pain was beyond anything the human nervous system was designed to process. The chaplain's blood was cooling on his neck. His own body was failing at every level simultaneously.

He found, to his surprise, that he still had something left.

Through cracked and bleeding lips, in a voice barely above a whisper, he forced the words out:

"I... still... refuse you."

The Dragon's laughter shook the valley like the final earthquake. New thorns erupted from the blood-soaked ground and drove upward into Marcus's sides, piercing through muscle and intestine and organ. Fire rained from above. The sun scorched. The earth kept shaking. The Beast marched forward.

Marcus Hale's heart shuddered.

And stopped.

PART FIVE: THE VERDICT

What happened next did not happen in the valley.

The first sensation of the after was not darkness or light or heat or cold. It was the terrifying, vertiginous recognition that sensation was still happening. That he was still experiencing. That the thing he had been most confident of — that death was the end of experience, that the lights would simply go out and there would be no one home to notice — had turned out to be wrong.

He existed. He was not in the valley. He was not anywhere with coordinates. He was in a space that defied geometry the way a nightmare defies logic — internally consistent in a way that felt real, spatially impossible in a way that kept revealing itself the longer he tried to map it.

And ahead of him was the Something.

He had been afraid of the Dragon. He had not been afraid — not in the deepest, cellular sense — of anything since his parents died. That fear had died in the rain outside the funeral home when he was seventeen, had died with his one unanswered prayer, and had not come back.

It came back now.

What stood before him was not a man and not a king and not an old man on a throne. What existed before him was Light in a form that had never been adequately described because no one who had fully experienced it had been able to carry the description back. It was not bright in the way that the sun was bright. It was true in the way that mathematics is true — utterly without concession to preference, utterly indifferent to whether you found it comfortable, utterly itself and nothing else.

It was holy.

Marcus understood holiness for the first time in his life in that moment. He understood it as the most extreme form of otherness imaginable — something categorically different from everything that had ever existed in the valley, in his own chest, in his own constructed identity. Different in a way that made his own existence feel, by contrast, like a thumbprint on a lens.

He tried to summon the posture and expression of a man who had made his choices deliberately and was prepared to stand behind them.

The light saw through this immediately. The light saw through everything immediately. It did not examine him. It simply knew him, and the knowing was total and surgical and there was nowhere to put his hands.

He saw himself as the light saw him. He saw every moment of his life not as he had lived it — from the inside, rationalized and contextualized and softened by self-knowledge — but from outside. From the perspective of something that had been watching without agenda, recording without editorializing. He saw the drinking and the bitterness and the cruelties. He saw the letter from his sister at the bottom of the duffle bag. He saw the chaplain's hand, outstretched, and his own face as he had turned away from it. He saw every offered exit from his own misery that he had refused, not out of strength but out of pride so entrenched it had become indistinguishable from identity.

He saw the moment after the crash, in the rain, when he had prayed.

He saw the answer that had come. Not silence. An answer. He saw it as clearly as he had ever seen anything — a warmth, a presence, a response to his grief that had been real and present and that he had rejected because accepting it would have meant accepting that something existed beyond himself. And that was too much to concede, even in the worst night of his life.

He had turned away.

Not because it wasn't there. Because it was.

The light spoke. The words were not sound. They were inscribed directly onto the substance of his soul with a precision that made language seem like a rough approximation.

I NEVER KNEW YOU.

Not an accusation. A statement of fact. A recognition of the reality he had built. He had spent thirty-two years building a self that was sealed against this light, calloused against it, armored against it. He had built so thoroughly that there was no version of Marcus Hale that this Presence recognized as someone who had ever genuinely sought it, ever sincerely opened the door.

He wanted to argue. He wanted to say: wait, I prayed, once, in the rain, I did it, I tried. But the light saw that memory too and showed him what it had actually been — the calculation underneath the prayer, the hedge-your-bets utility of it rather than genuine surrender. And he could not argue because the light was not arguing. The light was simply accurate.

DEPART FROM ME.

The expulsion was physical in the way that nothing physical had ever been. The warmth — and he was aware now that there had been warmth in this presence, a warmth he had not noticed because he had been too busy being afraid, a warmth that was the most real thing he had ever been near — the warmth withdrew. All at once. Completely. The contrast between what had been there and what remained was so absolute that he understood with clinical clarity that everything he had ever called warmth in his thirty-two years had been a pale, diluted, secondhand version of this, and now this was gone, and what remained was the first true cold he had ever felt.

He fell.

PART SIX: THE DESCENT

The fall was not through space. It was through himself.

He fell through the moment he had not answered his sister's letter. Through the evening he had chosen contempt over conversation with a chaplain on a transport plane. Through every night when a bottle had been easier than thinking about what had happened and what it meant. Through the seventeen years since his parents died, the years he had spent converting grief into anger and anger into philosophy and philosophy into an identity so hardened that it had become its own kind of death — a death that preceded the physical one by decades.

He fell for what felt like ten thousand years and what occupied no measurable time at all simultaneously.

He hit bottom.

The floor of this place was not solid in the physical sense. It was the terminus of descent, the furthest possible point from the warmth above. It was made of something that was to obsidian what obsidian was to mist — dense beyond comprehension, dark beyond darkness, cold in a way that was not temperature but meaning.

He was not alone on this floor.

There were millions here. He could feel them without seeing them — the press of consciousness, the particular weight of minds that had made his same choice or choices close enough to arrive at the same place. Some were ancient. Some were recent. Some were from the valley.

He could hear them. Not voices, exactly. More like the tone of a voice — the frequency that carries emotion beneath language. What he heard from the millions around him was a single sustained note of regret so profound it had become its own element, a substance you breathed in the air of this place, something that accumulated on the surfaces of whatever you still were and did not evaporate.

And then, in the architecture of this vast and terrible space, he saw the Dragon.

Not approaching. Already there. Already present as the defining characteristic of the space. This was his domain. These were his conditions. These were his terms, and every soul on the floor of this place had agreed to them — not recently, not at death, but across a lifetime of choices that had pointed consistently in this direction.

The Dragon's seven heads regarded Marcus with something that was not warmth but was also not hatred. It was closer to satisfaction. The satisfaction of watching a mechanism work exactly as designed.

"Marcus," the Dragon said. "Look around you."

He looked. He saw the millions, made visible. They were all, in their various ways, him. Different ages, different nations, different languages and cultures and specific sins — but underneath all that variation, the same fundamental choice. The same fundamental sealing of the self against the warmth.

"This is not a punishment imposed from outside," the Dragon said. "What you are experiencing is the accurate consequence of what you chose. Every brick of this place was laid by a human hand. Every chain here was forged above and carried down willingly. I did not build this. I merely manage it."

"You're lying," Marcus said.

"I am a liar," the Dragon agreed. "But even a liar tells the truth occasionally, because truth is more useful than comfort. And what I have just told you is true."

And this was when the regret came.

Not guilt. Not shame. Those were emotions that still functioned within a framework where change was possible. What came now was purely different. It was the recognition, with complete certainty and in the context of complete permanence, of everything that had been possible and was no longer.

I should have listened.

The thought arrived not as an abstract cognition but as a physical reality, as something that entered him and became part of his substance. Not believed as an intellectual exercise. Not believed the way he might have believed a proposition he found logically compelling. He understood now — the kind of understanding that comes only from the perspective of permanent consequence — that this was all that had ever been asked of him. Not certainty. Not proof. Trust. The willingness to open the door, even a crack, even once.

He had never done it.

"I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know it was real. I would have — if I had known —"

"You didn't want to know," the Dragon said, without cruelty, without any inflection at all. "There is a difference."

And this was true. This was the thing the light had shown him in the moment before the expulsion — the thing underneath the atheism, the thing underneath the anger, the thing underneath the grief and the system's failure and his parents' blood on the interstate and his sister's track marks. Underneath all of it, at the foundation, was a choice not to know. A decision, made early and reinforced daily, that the cost of believing — the surrender of self-sovereignty, the acknowledgment of something larger, the terrible vulnerability of loving something he had not built and could not control — was too high.

He had never paid the cost of belief.

He was paying a different cost now.

"I want to go back," he said. Without expectation. Without the energy for hope. He said it as a statement of fact about the state of his want.

"There is no back," the Dragon said. "There is only here. There is only now. And the 'now' you are in has no end."

Not one trillion years. Not ten trillion. Not a number of years at all, because years implied time, and time implied change, and change was the thing that had been taken from him along with everything else.

Marcus looked up. Through the darkness, through the weight of the place, through the millions of presences surrounding him, he looked upward and he could see — impossibly far away, impossibly faint — a point of light. Not bright. Not close. But present. Irrefutably present.

He understood, with the horrible clarity that was apparently the only kind of clarity available in this place, that the distance between himself and that light was not spatial. It was structural. It was built into his substance. It was the distance of every choice he had made, laid end to end.

And there was no way across it.

He opened his mouth to scream. The scream that came out joined the millions of others that were already present, the sustained note of regret that filled the air of this place, and it was absorbed into them without causing a ripple, without any particular response from the darkness, without reaching the light.

The worm began.

Not a creature. His own mind — his own memory, now stripped of the mercy of forgetting, of perspective, of the softening that living people apply automatically to their own histories. His memories replayed without those mercies. He felt his sister's letter in his hands and he read it with perfect recall — every word, the handwriting uncertain and hopeful, the faith in the words fragile and genuine, the invitation real, the love real — and he felt himself not answering it.

Again. And again. And again.

Each iteration identical. Each one as fresh as the first. Each one as painful as if he were experiencing it for the first time, because in this place he always was — there was no accumulation of familiarity, no dulling through repetition. He could not grow numb here. Numbness was a mercy of the flesh, and he was no longer flesh.

This was what eternity meant.

Not duration. Not a very long time. Eternity meant the permanent present. Eternity meant that the moment he was in — this moment, this specific experience of regret and loss and wrong-choice consequence — was his permanent address. There was no future moment when this would be over. There was no time-based escape. He was here. He would be here. He would always be here.

Just this.

Just the note of regret and the distant impossible light and the Dragon's satisfaction and the worm eating its endless meal and the millions of other voices adding their own notes to the chord and the darkness pressing in from every direction with its weight and meaning.

Just this.

Marcus Hale, Staff Sergeant, United States Army, atheist, orphan, failed brother, bitter man who had prayed once in the rain and turned away from the answer — Marcus Hale sank into the floor of the abyss, the darkness closing over him, and understood that the silence he had spent his life demanding had finally, completely, and eternally answered him.

It said yes.

Yes, you can have it.

Yes, forever.

Yes.

The darkness closed. The light remained where it had always been. And the distance between them did not change.

Not now. Not ever. Not in a duration that the living, with their clocks and calendars and borrowed time, did not have the cognitive architecture to hold — a duration that made the age of the universe look like the first syllable of the first word of a sentence that would never end.

Marcus Hale was home.

He had built it himself.

Brick by bitter brick.

The valley burned on without him. The Dragon moved to the next. The bowls continued pouring. The war continued dying. And in the Jezreel, among the blood and the diesel and the broken machines of human hubris, the body of a Staff Sergeant lay still beneath the tread of a ruined tank, and Rivera's cooling hand was still outstretched toward it, fingers still open, still offering — even now, even in death — what had always been available.

What had always been refused.

"And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him,

whose names are not written in the book of life

of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."

— Revelation 13:8

The theology that follows is not fiction.