Henry and John arrive at the hospital, where McKee disables a final assailant, dressed up in black, with a gas mask, and wearing a strange heat-beam wrist-blaster. Beneath the mask is another mind-controlled zombie.
Pauline,unhooks Egg from the monitors, lifts him from the bed, and steps into a wormhole in the wall. When the others arrive to check on him, they find him gone, and the smell of Ozone.
Egg sleeps, and finds himself in a fancy Oriental-style parlour. He pumps Pauline for info ("milk! milk!"). Pauline tells him that the good news is that he can fly (they step outside to expirience this).The bad news is that none of this is real... She brings him "out" of that "reality", and he finds himself on his back in a big cave.

Meanwhile, the others have been busy. They have taken their own wormhole (which they stashed in McKee's apartment behind a closet - forgot to mention this last recap...), the telepathic component, and with a lot of luck, wizardry and powers, they create another portal. Stepping through, they find themselves floating hundreds of meters above a mountain gorge.

Henry grabs them, and they fly around, homing in on the cave where Pauline and Egg are located.

Pauline explains to them all that their "real world" was an elaborate virtual reality. They were placed there in order to protect them. They are actually infected with hyper-advanced quantum-level femtotech, of alien origin, just like the NSA told them.

She tells them that the galaxy is networked with wormhole portals. The wormholes spread across the galaxy at sub-light speeds, carried by nanotech or particle-sized probes. Travel through the wormholes is instantenous. On Earth, there is a "loop-back" wormhole path that leads to the future, to the year 2050, where Earth has been devestated by the reckless use of all this advanced alien technology.

They don't buy the "virtual reality" story, so she says she can send them there. She touches McKee's forhead and he freezes - and finds himself in New York. Egg and Henry follow, and then John - who leaves "15% of his mind" behind to monitor his body.

They walk around the subway and go up to a taco stand.