The Milky Way Birthmark

Scavenger Chen Chen survives by salvaging the wreckage of interstellar wars. During a routine scan of an unknown relic, he is struck by a mass of information that does not belong to this era. From then on, what his left eye sees is no longer light, but the patterns of the universe's underlying code: the primordial information field left behind by the Big Bang, the web of causality, the ledger of all things' births and deaths.

He thinks it was an accident. He thinks he can survive as long as he evades pursuit.

He's wrong.

Every faster-than-light jump and every extraction of vacuum energy leaves an irreparable crack in the universe's underlying structure. Those cracks are drawing the attention of the "cleaners" from higher-dimensional space: chaotic entities that feed on order. The galaxy's three great civilizations know this well. The Pan-Human Federation chooses to conceal the truth, the Zeta Consciousness chooses to stand aside, and the Weavers marshal their entire race to build a defensive web at the edge of the galaxy, all to delay the end.

That end is called Entropic Silence.