Worlds in Transition is a set of three stories that explore the limits of reality and perception. In Parallax, two people discover strange messages in the detector of a scientific experiment deep under the mountains of Montana. In The End of the World, two survivors on an isolated Mars base investigate a strange dead region on the shores of an ancient Martian sea after an apocalyptic war on Earth. In One Way Ticket, an Earth anthropologist travels an impossible distance through space and time to study the first extraterrestrial species ever found. But what he finds is that the strangest species of all is the human species. From The End of the World: Liam Washington is possibly the last leader of any human group that will ever exist anywhere in the universe. Moments ago, he and a small group of astronauts watched a monitor as the government of the United States disappeared forever in a sea of nuclear fire. But as if this weren’t bad enough, Liam has been feeling a compulsion to investigate satellite data about a strange region on the shores of an ancient Martian sea that couldn’t possibly be right. As his colleagues begin to question his sanity as well as his leadership, Liam convinces a beautiful physicist that he might not be as crazy as everyone thinks.