Below that, a diagram. It depicted her own apartment, her own desk, and the very page she held—but from an angle that shouldn't exist, as if seen from outside the observable universe. A dotted line connected the center of the diagram to a small footnote: “The observer is the observed. Turn to page 92 to collapse the waveform.”
Her phone buzzed. A text from a number she didn’t recognize: “Don’t. Some pages keep the stars in place.”
To understand the book, one must first understand the man behind it. Dallas Thompson was not a career academic or a tenured professor of archaeology. Instead, he fit the archetype of the "independent researcher" or the "rogue scholar." Thompson was a former teacher and law enforcement officer who dedicated his later life to investigating historical anomalies that mainstream science often dismissed or ignored.