a/n: A quick note before we begin.

Unlike most of my fics, I am uploading this before it is completely finished. I usually don't, for fear of letting people down when I lose interest and fail to finish. This time, though, I'm taking a different approach: upload now and force myself to finish, because I would be letting you down if I didn't.

Most of the main characters in this fic are original. Don't hate me for it; Daniel and Laurie are in hiding, essentially removing them from the plot. Rorschach is dead (though he posthumously manages to kick this chapter of the story into motion, as he does in the canon). Adrian is pretty much the only canon character who plays a large role. He's the only one left.

This story will be written from two angles. One, the first person view of one Adrian Veidt. The other view is third person, regarding a certain group of individuals who came together for a very dangerous reason…

----------Impact-Radius----------

"Nothing ever ends."

- Doctor Manhattan

"If you think about it, pi never ends. There's an infinite space between 3 and 4. It never ends, and that's weird."

- Rebecca Neet

"There's a beauty to pi that keeps us looking at it… The digits of pi are extremely random. They really have no pattern, and in mathematics that's really the same as saying they have every pattern."

- Peter Borwein

----------Prologue----------

April 1, 1986

"What you're asking is suicide." Five people in masks sat huddled around a box in a small, dimly lit room. The slightest of the forms was leaning away from the box, seemingly horrified by the contents, or perhaps just repelled by the smell.

"Maybe," conceded a young man wearing a rubber clown Halloween mask, "but it needs to be done."

"It'll be dangerous," growled another man to nobody in particular. He wore a more solemn black ski mask. "If the police don't try to kill us, Veidt will."

"We'd have to be fast," admitted Clown Mask, tipping the box to see the contents clearer, though he knew exactly what they were- he had acquired them himself. "But it won't take much. We just have to be seen by a few people-"

"Suicide!" The first speaker reiterated. She had a maroon scarf wrapped around her head, revealing only her narrowed hazel eyes.

"I'll do it, if nobody else will," volunteered the fourth, a man with a burlap sack over his head. Eye holes had been roughly cut into the fabric. Clown Mask and Scarf both sighed; the former out of resignation, the latter out of indignation.

"You're too slow," objected Ski Mask indifferently. It was a relatively polite way to decline him, Clown Mask thought. There was no way Ink could pull it off, anyway- not unless he lost about two hundred pounds of fat and muscle overnight, and his lungs magically restored themselves to the state they were in before he had started smoking. Sighing again, he turned to the fifth member of their party.

"What's your say, Doc?" Doc, whose face was hidden rather appropriately behind a surgeon's mask and cap, furrowed his brow.

"I'm not against it, but that's not saying much. Obviously, I won't be the one doing it either way. Not with my arthritis." Honest, at least.

"So it would have to be me, Vince, or Dana, then."

"I still have work to do on my project," Scarf- Dana- said coldly.

"Vince?" Clown Mask was staring at Ski Mask. Vince took a deep breath, hesitant to answer.

"…If there are no other options. I would need time, though. Before we do it."

"How long?"

"A month, maybe." Clown swore quietly, tapping the rim of the cardboard box with an anxious finger.

"Why can't you do it, Win? Afraid?" Dana scoffed.

"No, I have asthma. I'd be good for about a quarter mile, but that's it," Winston shot back, sweating like a pig under the rubber of his mask. "You can't be ready sooner?" Win asked Vince despairingly, one last time. The somber man shook his head.

"Then we'll have to wait a month," Doc declared with finality, slapping the box and disturbing its ominous contents. Inside, a battered fedora shifted, giving them all a glimpse of black on white before the box's lid was pushed back on, shrouding its secrets in darkness once more.