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Avar-Tek Event #3
Cohesion Lost
Avar-Tek #3: For Alexander Sevik, providing for his family is hard enough without losing grip on reality. His dreams are real. One night, he lives the entire life of a deckhand on a Spanish galleon. The next night, it’s life as an ancient Roman senator. Next, he is a cyborg on a space cruiser. When he wakes, he sometimes forgets who he is. His hands tingle for no reason, and the strange man who is following him talks about aliens. When he discovers the key to his dreams, he uncovers a national threat. And he has to choose between his own sanity or saving lives.
Cohesion Lost is a is a long short story at 14,000 words. It is the third short story in the Avar-Tek Series.
Cohesion Lost is a is a long short story at 14,000 words. It is the third short story in the Avar-Tek Series.
ebook
First published May 24, 2012
9 people want to read
About the author
Justin Tyme
9 books12 followersBorn in Simi Valley, California, Darrell attended 12 different schools until he finally got it right and was graduated from a high school in Cyprus. No, not Cypress, California, but Cyprus the island in the Mediterranean.
The Cypriots soon realized it was in their national interest to ship Darrell back to the US. He meandered through college until the administration bribed him to leave with two apparently contradictory degrees: Theology and Electrical Engineering. He is currently working as an electrical engineer, robotics programmer, landlord, and father of seven. Sometimes he even writes a thing or two.
Darrell Newton is the author of Avar-Tek Events, speculative science fiction short stories based on current research in science and engineering. The Avar-Tek Events provide technical background for Historical Science Fiction novels.
The Cypriots soon realized it was in their national interest to ship Darrell back to the US. He meandered through college until the administration bribed him to leave with two apparently contradictory degrees: Theology and Electrical Engineering. He is currently working as an electrical engineer, robotics programmer, landlord, and father of seven. Sometimes he even writes a thing or two.
Darrell Newton is the author of Avar-Tek Events, speculative science fiction short stories based on current research in science and engineering. The Avar-Tek Events provide technical background for Historical Science Fiction novels.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 26, 2025
In Cohesion Lost, the Avar-Tek world undergoes what can best be described as a conceptual detonation. Whether Justin Tyme is indeed the author or simply the architect behind the scenes, the sensibility is unmistakable: the Avar-Tek universe continues its descent—or ascent—into philosophical fragmentation.
If the first book opened the door, and the second stepped through a hallway of shifting geometry, this third work takes a sledgehammer to the hallway altogether and invites the debris to speak.
The notion of “cohesion” here is more than narrative unity. It’s the glue that holds perception together, the force that persuades individuals that continuity exists between moments.
This book asks:
1) What happens when that glue thins?
2) When does identity behave like vapour?
3) When the universe itself undergoes conceptual liquefaction?
The result is a text that reads like a dispatch from a collapsing ontology.
The postmodernism is unrestrained but never ornamental. Every fracture serves a purpose. Characters appear slightly altered from earlier volumes—not because of inconsistency, but because the universe keeps reinterpreting them. It is as if each consciousness is being run through a cosmic prism, splitting into multiple interpretive rays.
Tyme (or the unnamed author) uses this mechanic not for cheap surrealism but to explore the terrifying freedom of a world where cause and effect have begun divorce proceedings.
The structure resembles a mosaic shattered, then reassembled according to new rules of pattern recognition. Chapters bleed into one another through thematic echoes rather than linear progression.
The result is a texture that feels musical—atonal at first, then strangely harmonious as the reader adapts to its wavelength. This is not a book one reads for narrative certainty but for experiential immersion.
The language is denser, almost ritualistic, compared to the previous volumes. Sentences carry the weight of philosophical propositions disguised as imagery.
There are moments where the prose becomes so compressed that it feels like a neutron star of meaning—small, dark, but exerting tremendous gravity. Yet, paradoxically, the overall effect is airy, as though the story is narrated from the inside of a dissolving thought.
Emotion remains the grounding agent. Despite the book’s experimental structure, the characters’ anxieties are palpable. They are not afraid of monsters or machines but of conceptual displacement—of slipping into versions of themselves they don’t recognise.
This creates a new emotional register for the series: not longing, not loneliness, but dislocation. The text hints that identity itself may be a provisional agreement the universe can revoke.
Thematically, Cohesion Lost interrogates the limits of continuity. Not only narrative continuity but existential continuity. The book whispers that stability may be the greatest illusion of all, and yet it does so without despair. Instead, it treats fragmentation as an evolutionary step, a painful but necessary adaptation to a universe expanding in directions thought and language can barely track.
The philosophical undercurrent is unmistakable: the universe is not breaking down; it is revealing its true shape. This shift in perspective transforms what might have been a bleak metaphysical crisis into something almost hopeful. If cohesion can be lost, perhaps it can be remade—differently, unexpectedly, with new rules.
By the end, the book achieves something remarkable: it collapses the narrative without collapsing the experience. You do not walk away with answers but with the sense that you’ve glimpsed the machinery behind perception itself.
The Avar-Tek series here becomes not a saga but a meditation, an exploration of what remains when story, identity, and time loosen their grip.
If the first book opened the door, and the second stepped through a hallway of shifting geometry, this third work takes a sledgehammer to the hallway altogether and invites the debris to speak.
The notion of “cohesion” here is more than narrative unity. It’s the glue that holds perception together, the force that persuades individuals that continuity exists between moments.
This book asks:
1) What happens when that glue thins?
2) When does identity behave like vapour?
3) When the universe itself undergoes conceptual liquefaction?
The result is a text that reads like a dispatch from a collapsing ontology.
The postmodernism is unrestrained but never ornamental. Every fracture serves a purpose. Characters appear slightly altered from earlier volumes—not because of inconsistency, but because the universe keeps reinterpreting them. It is as if each consciousness is being run through a cosmic prism, splitting into multiple interpretive rays.
Tyme (or the unnamed author) uses this mechanic not for cheap surrealism but to explore the terrifying freedom of a world where cause and effect have begun divorce proceedings.
The structure resembles a mosaic shattered, then reassembled according to new rules of pattern recognition. Chapters bleed into one another through thematic echoes rather than linear progression.
The result is a texture that feels musical—atonal at first, then strangely harmonious as the reader adapts to its wavelength. This is not a book one reads for narrative certainty but for experiential immersion.
The language is denser, almost ritualistic, compared to the previous volumes. Sentences carry the weight of philosophical propositions disguised as imagery.
There are moments where the prose becomes so compressed that it feels like a neutron star of meaning—small, dark, but exerting tremendous gravity. Yet, paradoxically, the overall effect is airy, as though the story is narrated from the inside of a dissolving thought.
Emotion remains the grounding agent. Despite the book’s experimental structure, the characters’ anxieties are palpable. They are not afraid of monsters or machines but of conceptual displacement—of slipping into versions of themselves they don’t recognise.
This creates a new emotional register for the series: not longing, not loneliness, but dislocation. The text hints that identity itself may be a provisional agreement the universe can revoke.
Thematically, Cohesion Lost interrogates the limits of continuity. Not only narrative continuity but existential continuity. The book whispers that stability may be the greatest illusion of all, and yet it does so without despair. Instead, it treats fragmentation as an evolutionary step, a painful but necessary adaptation to a universe expanding in directions thought and language can barely track.
The philosophical undercurrent is unmistakable: the universe is not breaking down; it is revealing its true shape. This shift in perspective transforms what might have been a bleak metaphysical crisis into something almost hopeful. If cohesion can be lost, perhaps it can be remade—differently, unexpectedly, with new rules.
By the end, the book achieves something remarkable: it collapses the narrative without collapsing the experience. You do not walk away with answers but with the sense that you’ve glimpsed the machinery behind perception itself.
The Avar-Tek series here becomes not a saga but a meditation, an exploration of what remains when story, identity, and time loosen their grip.
June 4, 2012
This is the third short story from this author, and I have enjoyed each one: A Taste of Earth, Death Has No Shadow, and this one. Each story involves a new point of view on possible new technology. In this one, Alexander Sevik is struggling to make ends meet for his family. He is a brilliant man with a promising new program, but he is haunted by dreams that are to real, memory loss, and loss of feeling in his fingers. I really enjoyed the mystery of what was happening to Alex and how it all folds out. Wish I could say more, but it would spoil the major plot twist.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews