Meet the novella that inspired the sci-fi novel Mercury's Wake The Long Weekend. Follow the backstories of a few disillusioned strangers on the loose in Las Vegas, trying to make sense of the crazy world. Before Chaos offers insights into the characters in the Mercury's Wake series, expanding their relatable backstories with humor and tenderness.

Beginning with Covid lockdown, author Stephanie Vlahos realized that a character-driven book about people disillusioned by their world didn't speak to a zeitgeist rife with unrelenting human crises, apathy, anger, and fast technological advances. The updated narrative in Mercury's Wake–The Long Weekend addresses what we're living as a metaphysical sci-fi mystery saga walking us through four days of backstories and premonitions, murder, high stakes gambling, parallel universes, an alien prophesy, interdimensional travel, metaphor, and ordinary people compelled by the reflections of a fictitious character in a book found in an abandoned Cadillac just up from Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.

Mercury’s Wake freely explores alternate realities, universes, former lives, and karmic destinies as landscapes for its characters. But every story ever told is an alternate reality, a parallel universe, a former life, a future. Every parallel universe deserves its variations on a theme and every cloud has its silver lining.