"Tell me more about the dangers you mentioned earlier," Melissa said. "What's going to happen?"
"You've used the rock too much in too short a time, period, Melissa, and you've changed things too much. You see, reality is elastic. When it's changed, it becomes unstable, 'stretched out' for a moment, but with time reality rights itself, and things become stable again, but different. Like elastic though, if reality is stretched too much too quickly, it can snap. Reality becomes permanently unstable, and then it collapses."
"Collapses?"
"Collapses. Reality will still exists; it's not as though this reality will fade out of existence. Not at first, at least. The pillars that keep this reality stable will crumble, though, and this reality will become chaos. Reality shifts of the sort you have brought about will begin occurring, unasked for and uncontrolled. People will start changing shape, changing gender, changing species, changing relationships; bodies will be switched, and minds will be altered, and the rules of the universe will be rewritten. It will start slowly at first, but will each successive change things will change more quickly... until finally reality is left so muddled that it wipes itself out."
Melissa took a deep breath, letting herself absorb the weight of all of this. "How long will it take? When will it start?"
Robbie shrugged. "I'm not sure. The process itself will be fairly slow... it may take weeks, or months, or years. At first the changes will also be slow. Perhaps one change every hour or so, but they'll speed up until, just before the final collapse, it will reach as many as thousands of changes a second. As for how long it takes, I..."
He turned to Melissa, then suddenly paused.
"What?" Melissa asked.
"They've begun."
"What?"
"Look in the rear view mirror."
Jon peered through the car at the rear view mirror. Nothing seemed different... then he saw it. His hair, which had been short only a moment before, was suddenly longer... shoulder length, just like her hair in the pictures in Seventeen.
"And that's it?"
"That's the first of the world's changes. It seems small, but it will get worse."
Jon ran a hand through her hair, then turned back to her grandfather. "What do we do, then?"
