Chapter 1: 1-3: 122,300
Chapter 1: The Fabricated Breach
The front glass door chimed, and Rebecca slipped inside, breathless and clutching her bag tightly to her chest. Wayne caught her eye from behind the counter, his brow furrowed in a mix of relief and frustration. He gave a sharp shake of his head toward the back of the store, signaling that the manager was near, then turned to face the clipboard hanging on the wall.
Lowering his voice to a steady murmur, Wayne spoke without looking away from the paper. “I told the boss you were outside helping a client,” he lied smoothly, finally meeting her gaze with a weary sigh as he tapped a ballpoint pen against his palm. “That’s three this week, Rebecca. You’re cutting it dangerously close.”
Rebecca flashed a tired but conspiratorial grin, slipping behind the counter to pull out her apron. “You’re a lifesaver, Wayne,” she murmured, nudging his elbow with her hip. “Buy you dinner later, promise.”
Wayne chuckled, shaking his head as he neatly stacked a row of tablets. “You always say that, but fine. Just don’t make it a habit.”
Rebecca froze, her eyes widening as a spark of pure excitement hit her. “That’s it!” she gasped, whirling to face him. “Wayne, you’re a genius! You need to come over tonight. I need to show you the demonstration.”
Heavy footsteps creaked behind them as Mr. Henderson stepped out from the storeroom, his eyes narrow. “Anything I should know about the commotion?” he barked.
Rebecca spun around, feigning a look of exasperation. “Just a completely unsatisfied customer,” she sighed, smoothing her apron. “He didn’t like the tech support advice, got agitated, and drove off, leaving me in the parking lot for a few minutes.”
Mr. Henderson grunted, his gaze lingering on Rebecca before he turned back toward his office.
The bustling college cafeteria was alive with chatter, but Rebecca and Professor Vance sat in a quiet corner, their trays barely touched. Leaning forward, Rebecca tapped a folder on the table, her eyes gleaming with intensity. “Professor,” she began, her voice a low hum, “the quantum signature I mentioned is finally stable. I need you there tonight to see it.”
Professor Vance leaned back, a flicker of sharp interest crossing his weathered features as he adjusted his glasses. “Stable signatures this early?” he questioned, a wry smile touching the corners of his mouth. “You always did aim for the impossible, Rebecca. Consider my curiosity thoroughly piqued.”
Rebecca traced the edge of her napkin, her face tightening with focus. “It’s not just energy spikes, Professor. Each time I trigger the device, the quantum signatures are wildly different. Sometimes it’s a stable wave, other times it’s a fractured, unrecognizable pattern.” She leaned in, lowering her voice. “It’s certainly a gateway, maybe a localized wormhole, but I’m not sure where it leads.”
Professor Vance leaned forward, peering at her notes over his glasses, his eyes narrowed in intense concentration. “Varying signatures could suggest multiple dimensions,” he mused, tapping his knuckles against the tabletop. “Are you saying you’re peering into the multiverse itself? This isn’t just physics, Rebecca, this is metaphysics in its purest form.” He looked up at her, a glimmer of excitement finally breaking through his calm demeanor. “We need to test the frequency stability immediately.”
Rebecca nodded firmly, tapping the table with her fingertip. “Six o’clock sharp, Professor. Don’t be late.”
Another sharp knock resonated against the thin wood of the apartment door. Wayne stepped over, unlocked the deadbolt, and pulled it open to reveal Professor Vance standing in the hall, clutching a worn leather satchel.
“Professor, come on in,” Wayne said, stepping aside to make room in the entry. “I’m Wayne. I work with Rebecca over at the shop, and I help out with her hardware setups.”
Professor Vance’s brow furrowed for a moment before clearing into a nod of recognition. “Ah, yes, Wayne. I recall seeing you at the electronics store. Good to see you again.”
Wayne gestured toward the back of the apartment. “Right this way. We’ve turned the back bedroom into a full command center.”
He led the professor down the narrow hallway, pointing toward the open door. As they approached, the air grew noticeably warmer, thick with the steady hum of industrial server fans, the low drone of cooling pumps, and the sharp tang of ozone and heated solder. Inside, heavy rack-mounted servers lined the walls, their blue and amber LEDs blinking in rapid, erratic sequences across the darkened room. Thick bundles of copper-shielded cabling snaked across the floorboards, taped down in makeshift channels leading toward a cleared space in the center.
“You’ve truly built a marvel here, Rebecca,” Vance murmured, stepping inside and looking around in awe.
Rebecca looked up from the main workbench, her face lighting up with a mix of fatigue and high-strung excitement. “Professor, thank you for coming. I needed you to see the actual quantum signatures in real time.”
She gestured for him to join her at the primary monitor, which displayed a shifting three-dimensional grid of wave patterns. “Look at these resonance harmonics,” Rebecca explained, pointing to a spiking sine wave on the display. “Every time we charge the array, the field doesn’t just expand, it warps localized space along these specific frequency bands.”
Vance leaned in close, adjusting his glasses as his eyes scanned the scrolling data streams. “Remarkable. The theoretical output alone should be tripping every breaker in the city block, yet your dampeners are keeping the loop insulated.”
Wayne stood near the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest. He watched the two of them exchange rapid-fire technical observations, their shared enthusiasm growing with every second, while a lingering sense of dread settled heavy in his gut.
Stepping back from the console, Professor Vance turned to face her, his tone turning serious. “The telemetry is astonishing, Rebecca, but theoretical calculations can only carry us so far. Tell me, are you truly ready for a live demonstration?”
“I am,” Rebecca said without hesitation.
She reached down to the workbench and lifted a custom controller. The foundation of the device was a standard commercial tablet, but it was almost unrecognizable beneath layers of heavy modifications. External circuit boards were glued directly to its chassis, reinforced with small steel brackets, bolts, and heavy-duty zip ties. Ribbons of multicolored wire connected custom toggle switches and digital potentiometers to the tablet’s side ports, forming a crude, Frankenstein-like interface built specifically to manually override and throttle the main power grid.
“I had to build a hardwired bypass controller,” Rebecca explained, adjusting the nylon hand straps secured to the back of the casing. “Standard touchscreen response times are too slow to catch the quantum fluctuations. This rig connects straight into the tablet’s bus, giving me millisecond control over the entire field generator.”
Vance inspected the modified pad, nodding slowly in appreciation of the raw, practical engineering. “Crude, but brilliant. It keeps the feedback loop completely in your hands.”
“Alright,” Rebecca said, taking a deep breath as she stepped back into the open space facing the far wall. “Initializing secondary power banks now.”
She began typing rapidly on her custom keypad, triggering a sequence of heavy mechanical relays that clicked into place around the room. In the far corner of the bedroom, a tall, exposed Tesla coil began to hum, its deep vibration rattling the glass beakers on the workbench.
The low hum rapidly built into a sharp, piercing screech as high-voltage current surged into the primary emitters. A whine filled the air, so intense that Wayne had to cover his ears. The air grew dense and prickled with static, making the tiny hairs on their arms stand on end.
With a violent crackle of static electricity, the air in the center of the room seemed to tear open.
Several feet away, a shimmering, translucent portal burst into existence. The rift hovered silently in midair, a swirling tear in space roughly five feet wide. Bright, iridescent light poured from its core, shifting through vibrant hues of deep violet, electric blue, and brilliant emerald green as the edges of the gateway flickered against the dim lighting of the bedroom.
Professor Vance stepped forward, shielding his eyes from the vibrant glow. He looked back and forth between the swirling portal and the live diagnostic screens on the main desk, watching the sensor readings spike into uncharted territory.
“Astounding,” Vance whispered.
Reaching onto the desk beside him, he grabbed a sheet of scrap paper, rapidly crumpled it into a tight ball, and tossed it into the center of the shimmering light. The paper sphere passed through the threshold without a sound, instantly vanishing as the vibrant colors rippled around the point of entry.
Vance turned back to the computer console, tapping his finger against the screen as he analyzed the instantaneous mass drop recorded by the sensors.
“Look at these mass displacement metrics,” Vance said, his voice trembling with shock and awe. “The mass vanished instantly, without any energy residue or disintegration artifacts. It was displaced entirely out of our localized continuum.”
He turned to face Rebecca and Wayne, his expression grave yet triumphant. “It is confirmed, Rebecca. You have successfully opened a one hundred percent stable interdimensional gateway. But where it leads, or what lies on the other side, that is anyone’s guess.”
The room vibrated with the continuous, high-pitched screech of high-voltage current, but beneath that familiar drone, a new frequency began to bleed into the air: a deep, subsonic thrum that vibrated through the floorboards and directly into the soles of Wayne’s shoes. He stepped closer to the primary diagnostic screen, his brow furrowed as he stared at the real-time wave readouts.
While Professor Vance and Rebecca remained transfixed by the brilliant, swirling aperture hovering in the center of the room, Wayne’s eyes caught a jagged, red anomaly tearing through the smooth sinusoidal baseline on the telemetry monitor.
“Rebecca,” Wayne called out, his voice tense over the roar of the Tesla coil. “What is this? Look at the sub-harmonic baseline.”
Rebecca blinked, tearing her gaze away from the shimmering portal. She stepped beside him, her Frankenstein control tablet clutched tightly in her hands. She adjusted one of the custom potentiometers, trying to calibrate the signal, but the screen flickered erratically.
“I’m not sure,” Rebecca said, her confidence momentarily faltering as she stared at the rising needle on the power draw gauge. “The dampeners should be absorbing any localized feedback. It might just be secondary harmonic interference from the coil.”
“No, this isn’t interference,” Wayne insisted, his instincts as a technician screaming at him. The spike wasn’t receding, it was compounding, doubling in amplitude with every passing pulse. “The power draw is cascading. It’s drawing directly from the secondary grid, and the dampener loop is saturating.”
“Don’t touch the main bus override,” Rebecca warned, reaching for the console. “If you break the synchronization phase right now.”
“If I don’t bleed off this surge, the whole transformer bank is going to blow,” Wayne interjected.
Driven by urgent necessity, Wayne reached past her and slammed a rapid sequence of keystrokes into the primary terminal, executing an emergency bypass script to reroute the excess voltage into the dummy load arrays.
He didn’t realize that the custom firmware Rebecca had flashed onto the main system bypassed the standard fail-safes. Instead of dumping the excess energy, his override command forced the field generators to lock into an inverted phase lock.
A deafening, metallic screech echoed through the apartment as the exposed Tesla coil in the corner erupted in a cascade of brilliant blue arc lightning. The air instantly ionized, filling the room with the suffocating smell of scorched copper and intense ozone. On the floor, the heavy bundles of shielded cabling writhed like living serpents under the sudden surge of power.
“Wayne, no! You’ve inverted the field matrix!” Rebecca screamed, scrambling to hit the manual kill switch on her modified pad, but the Frankenstein rig’s LEDs flared blindingly bright and went dark as its internal microcontrollers fried under the localized electromagnetic pulse.
“I can’t abort it! The console’s locked out!” Wayne yelled back, desperately striking keys as the terminal screen turned into a waterfall of red error codes.
The portal in the center of the room changed violently. The smooth, five-foot tear in space suddenly expanded, surging outward with an explosive burst of force that shattered the glass beakers on the workbench and blew loose papers into a frantic vortex. The vibrant violet and emerald colors warped into a blinding, pitch-black void fringed by jagged, electric-white arcs of raw energy. The gravitational gradient around the rift inverted; instead of holding its position in midair, the portal began to physically drift forward, its event horizon widening to swallow the entire width of the back bedroom.
Just as the chaos reached a fever pitch, a heavy, rapid knock echoed from the front of the apartment, followed immediately by the apartment door swinging open.
A door-to-door insurance salesman, wearing a sharp gray suit and clutching a leather binder, stepped into the entryway, completely unaware of what was happening in the back room. “Hello? Miss Collins? I’m here regarding the revised policy coverage for.”
The salesman froze mid-sentence, his jaw dropping in absolute terror as he looked down the narrow hallway. The walls were buckling, light fixtures were popping in sparks, and a terrifying, swirling tear in reality was gliding down the corridor directly toward him.
“What in the name of God,” the salesman choked out, dropping his binder as he backed away in sheer panic, but it was far too late.
The expanded rift surged forward like a tidal wave of light and vacuum. It caught Wayne first, sweeping over the console and engulfing him in a silent, blinding flash of white light. In the same split second, the gravity beneath Rebecca and Professor Vance completely evaporated, pulling them off their feet and sucking them headfirst into the swirling vortex.
The salesman let out a terrified scream that was instantly cut short as the edge of the portal swept over the doorway, consuming him entirely.
With a final, thunderous implosion, the portal collapsed back in on itself, snapping out of existence. The back bedroom fell into complete, dead silence. The hum of the servers, the screech of the coils, and the four people who had been standing there a moment before were all gone, leaving behind only scorched floorboards, shattered glass, and an empty, quiet apartment.
Wayne stepped closer to the primary diagnostic console, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the scrolling data streams. His hand rested lightly on the back of Rebecca’s chair. Amid the steady, uniform pulse of the field’s harmonic sine waves, a jagged, erratic spike flared on the telemetry screen. It lasted only a fraction of a second before flattening, but it was impossible to miss.
“Rebecca,” Wayne said, his voice tense as he pointed a finger toward the monitor. “Look at that readout. What was that spike?”
Rebecca leaned in, her eyes darting across the diagnostic arrays. Her fingers hovered over the Frankenstein controller strapped to her arm, resting near the physical bypass switches. “I’m not sure,” she admitted, her voice tight with concern. She tapped a sequence into the tablet to pull up the power distribution logs. “It looks like a localized feedback surge in the containment loop, but the dampeners should have smoothed that out automatically.”
“Should have, or did?” Wayne asked, looking back at the glowing rift. The edges of the portal flickered violently, a brief flutter like a candle caught in a draft, accompanied by a sharp, metallic popping noise.
Professor Vance stepped up beside them, his eyes wide behind his thick spectacles. “The field resonance is shifting,” he murmured, taking notes on a small pad. “The frequency isn’t holding static, it’s modulating on its own. Look at the amplitude, Rebecca.”
“I’m looking,” Rebecca said, her tone sharp with rising panic. “The primary coils are drawing twenty percent more current than the ceiling limit. The power draw is spiking.”
Wayne couldn’t just stand there and watch the system overload. He leaned over Rebecca’s shoulder and reached for the main mechanical keyboard. “Let me clear the primary bus buffer,” he said, tapping a series of quick commands to attempt a manual flush of the system memory. “If we dump the overload into the secondary grounded capacitors, we can stabilize the loop.”
“Wayne, wait! Don’t clear the bus while the bypass is engaged!” Rebecca yelled, reaching out to stop him.
It was too late. As Wayne’s fingers struck the terminal key, a harsh, synthesized warning chime sounded from the speakers. Instead of dumping the excess current, the command triggered a cascading logic error through the custom-built firmware. The Frankenstein tablet flashed red, displaying an unhandled exception error before its screen went completely blank.
In the corner of the room, the Tesla coil let out a deafening, metallic screech. Blue arcs of lightning leaped from its crown, snapping across the air to strike the structural frame of the server racks. The smell of burning insulation and heavy ozone flooded the small room in an instant.
“What did you do?” Vance shouted, backing away as the floorboards began to vibrate violently beneath their feet.
“The logic bridge crashed!” Wayne yelled back, his hands flying over the keyboard in a desperate attempt to regain control. “The system isn’t taking commands. It’s feeding back into the emitter array!”
The portal in the center of the room shuddered. The five-foot oval suddenly expanded, ballooning to eight feet wide as a low, sub-audible thrum shook the walls. Pictures on the adjacent hallway wall rattled against their nails, and loose sheets of paper on the workbench were sucked toward the rift, vanishing instantly into the shimmering void. The vibrant colors scrambled into a blinding, white-hot maelstrom of raw, unregulated energy.
At that exact moment, a crisp, rhythmic double-knock echoed from the front door down the hall, followed by the sound of the latch clicking open.
“Hello? Anyone home?” a bright, professional voice called out from the living room. “It’s Arthur from Apex Mutual Insurance. I noticed your front door was unlocked, and I was hoping we could finish discussing your umbrella policy updates.”
Arthur stepped into the narrow hallway leading toward the back bedroom, holding a thick leather clipboard and a shiny promotional pen. He stopped dead in his tracks. The hair on his arms stood straight up as the electrostatic charge in the hallway surged. The room ahead was glowing with blinding, multicolored light, and the deafening screech of overloaded machinery echoed off the walls.
“What in the world,” Arthur stammered, taking an uncertain step backward.
Before he could turn around, the portal crested its critical threshold. With a sound like a thunderclap detonating indoors, the containment field fully collapsed. The glowing rift didn’t just expand, it exploded outward in a massive, sweeping wave of distorted space.
“Hold on to something!” Rebecca screamed, reaching out for Wayne.
The spatial anomaly swept through the room like a physical wave. It swallowed the workbench, the primary console, and the server racks in a fraction of a second. Professor Vance was engulfed first, his form stretching and distorting as the light folded around him, snatching him into the vortex without a trace.
Wayne grabbed Rebecca’s hand, pulling her back, but the force of the expanding field was irresistible. The wave surged forward, sweeping up Rebecca and Wayne together, their desperate shouts swallowed by the overwhelming roar of folding spacetime.
The sweeping edge of the portal burst out of the bedroom doorway and surged down the narrow hallway, catching Arthur mid-stride. His jaw dropped, his clipboard slipping from his fingers as the iridescent wall of light crashed over him.
In a single, violent flash of white light, the apartment went deathly silent.
The hum of the servers, the screech of the Tesla coil, and the blinding glow vanished entirely. The back bedroom lay completely empty, the servers gone, the workbench bare, and all four figures swept clean from the world, leaving behind only the faint, lingering scent of ozone hanging in the quiet air.
Inside the portal, there was no floor, ceiling, or direction. Only an endless tunnel of fractured light. Ribbons of violet, emerald, and electric blue twisted around them like enormous streams of liquid energy, constantly forming and dissolving into impossible shapes. Within the swirling chaos, fleeting images began to appear and vanish in the blink of an eye.
Rebecca saw unfamiliar cities with towering, impossible spires that seemed to touch distant stars, while Wayne was mesmerized by glimpses of strange, bioluminescent landscapes that pulsed in rhythm with the light.
Professor Vance stared in awe, pressing his hands against the invisible currents as complex equations and geometric patterns briefly shimmered across the darkness: a language of pure knowledge. Beneath them, countless doors floated through the void, each one opening silently onto a different reality.
Rebecca felt an overwhelming sense of weightlessness, her senses heightened, while Wayne desperately reached for something solid that simply did not exist. He tried to ground himself, but the shifting light offered no resistance. The portal suddenly stabilized, the screeching roar fading into a low, constant hum.
Rebecca found herself standing, along with Wayne, Professor Vance, and the bewildered insurance salesman, in a strange corridor of shifting, swirling light. They were all intact, able to see and hear each other clearly, confirming they were unharmed. Professor Vance grasped the situation immediately, noting that the portal was no longer drawing them inward, but pushing them forward. Rebecca clutched the damaged controller, her mind racing to find a way to deactivate the gateway. Wayne, ever practical even in the impossible, asked the obvious question: “Where are we going?”
Before anyone could answer, the wall of swirling light dissolved behind them with a faint, barely audible sound.
They were flying through the space between the universe and time.
Chapter 2: The Between
The vortex didn’t spit them out so much as it forgot to hold on.
One moment, Rebecca’s stomach was somewhere in her throat, her fingers locked around the nylon straps of the Frankenstein controller with a grip that had turned her knuckles bone-white. The next, the swirling tunnel of fractured light simply released them like a hand opening, and she was falling through a darkness so complete it felt solid.
She couldn’t hear her own scream. The vacuum swallowed sound whole.
Her body tumbled end over end, limbs flailing against nothing. No air resistance. No gravity. Just the sickening lurch of her inner ear trying to find an up that didn’t exist. The controller straps dug into her forearm, the only anchor keeping her tethered to something real.
Then the light returned. Not the gentle glow of a sunrise or the harsh flicker of fluorescent bulbs. This was violent, a detonation of violet and emerald that seared across her retinas and left afterimages burned into her vision like camera flash wounds.
Energy arcs snapped wildly through the space around her, jagged bolts of white-hot electricity that crackled past her face close enough to make her skin prickle. The air, when it finally rushed back into her lungs, tasted thick and metallic. Ozone. Burnt copper. The ghost of every soldering iron she’d ever scorched.
A screech of machinery split the chaos. It wasn’t mechanical, exactly. More like the sound of reality itself being dragged across sandpaper. The noise drilled into her skull, rattling her teeth in their sockets.
Sparks rained down from everywhere and nowhere, tiny pinpricks of orange and gold that spiraled past her in lazy arcs before vanishing into the void below. She tried to track them, to find some sense of direction, but there was no below. No above. Just endless, churning color and the constant, bone-deep hum of something ancient and wrong.
The controller screen flickered against her wrist. Countdown timer. Top left corner.
00:47.
Forty-seven seconds until what? She’d programmed that fail-safe herself, a dead man’s switch designed to collapse the portal if she lost manual control. But she wasn’t in the apartment anymore. She wasn’t anywhere.
“Wayne!” Her voice came out wrong. Stretched, like someone had slowed her words down and played them back through a broken speaker. The sound echoed back at her from a dozen directions, each repetition slightly different, slightly warped. Wayne, Wayne, Wayne.
No response. Just the scream of dying machinery and the crackle of energy that seemed to be getting closer.
Gravity inverted without warning.
One second she was floating, suspended in the cosmic washing machine. The next, something yanked her sideways with enough force to wrench her shoulder. Her body slammed into Wayne’s, their limbs tangling as they tumbled together through the swirling chaos.
His arms wrapped around her instinctively, one hand finding the back of her head and pressing her face into his chest. She could feel his heart hammering against her cheek, rapid and fierce, and she realized with a jolt that he was trying to shield her from something.
“What the hell is happening?” Wayne shouted. His voice had that same distorted quality, echoing and fracturing, but she could still understand him. Still cling to the familiar rumble of his tone.
“I don’t know!” she shouted back. “The field collapsed. We’re not in Kansas anymore!”
“Was that a Wizard of Oz reference? Now?”
“Shut up and hold on!”
They spun through the vortex together, a tangle of limbs and desperation. Rebecca caught glimpses of the others through the chaos. Professor Vance tumbled past, his tweed jacket flapping like wounded wings, his wire-rimmed spectacles somehow still perched on his nose despite the cosmic maelstrom. He was shouting something, but the words dissolved into the hum before they could reach her.
And then there was Arthur.
The insurance salesman was not doing well.
He’d lost his clipboard somewhere in the transit, and his silk tie had come completely undone, flapping behind him like a sad, striped banner. His carefully parted hair was now a disaster, sticking up in wild tufts that made him look like he’d survived a wind tunnel. His mouth was open in what might have been a scream, but no sound came out. Just a silent, horrified gaping that perfectly captured how Rebecca felt on the inside.
Their eyes met across the void. Arthur’s expression shifted from terror to something almost accusatory, like this was somehow her fault.
Which, technically, it was.
“Sorry!” she yelled, though she doubted he could hear her.
The vortex twisted again, a violent corkscrew that sent them spiraling in opposite directions. Wayne’s grip tightened on her, refusing to let go, and she felt his boots clip something solid. A fragment of debris. A piece of her apartment that had been dragged through with them. The server rack, half of it, twisted and sparking, its components spilling into the void like mechanical entrails.
The colors around them intensified. Violet deepened to a bruised purple. Emerald brightened to something radioactive. The hum built to a crescendo that vibrated through her bones, through her teeth, through the spaces between her atoms.
Words echoed around them. Fragments of conversations. Pieces of sound that didn’t belong here.
“...quantum signature is finally stable.”
Her own voice. From before. The portal was replaying them, she realized. Recording and repeating, like a corrupted audio file stuck on loop.
“...don’t touch the main bus override.”
Wayne’s warning, thrown back at them by the universe itself.
“...Apex Mutual Insurance.”
Arthur’s professional greeting, now distorted into something almost menacing.
The void stretched endlessly in every direction, a canvas of nothing painted over with colors that shouldn’t exist. Rebecca felt time losing meaning, seconds stretching into hours, hours compressing into instants. She couldn’t tell if they’d been falling for minutes or years.
Existence fractured into pieces around her.
She saw her apartment. The scorched floorboards. The shattered beakers. Then it was gone, replaced by a desert landscape with two suns. Then that vanished too, swallowed by an ocean of liquid light. Then a city skyline she didn’t recognize, towers reaching up like grasping fingers.
Each image lasted less than a heartbeat. Each reality flickered and died before she could process it.
“Rebecca!” Wayne’s voice cut through the chaos. “Your controller! The timer!”
She looked down. The screen was cracked but still functional.
00:12.
Twelve seconds.
“I can’t stop it!” she shouted. “The controls are locked out!”
“Then we ride it out!”
00:08.
The vortex convulsed. A sound like tearing metal split the air, and suddenly they were plunging downward. Actually downward. Gravity had returned with a vengeance, yanking them toward a point of absolute darkness below.
Rebecca saw the others falling too. Vance, his arms pinwheeling. Arthur, curled into a fetal position with his hands over his head. They were all being pulled toward the same point, a singularity of black that absorbed the light around it.
00:03.
“Brace yourselves!” Wayne roared.
00:02.
Rebecca clutched the controller to her chest and squeezed her eyes shut.
00:01.
The darkness swallowed them whole.
Silence.
Complete. Absolute. The kind of silence that pressed against your eardrums and made you wonder if you’d gone deaf.
Rebecca floated in nothing. Not the chaotic nothing of the vortex, but a peaceful nothing. A holding pattern. She could feel her heartbeat, slow and steady, and the warmth of Wayne’s arms still wrapped around her.
She opened her eyes.
Darkness. Pure and unbroken.
“Everyone alive?” she called out. Her voice sounded normal now. No echo. No distortion. Just her words, hanging in the void.
“I’m here.” Wayne’s voice, close to her ear. His breath stirred her hair.
“Present.” Professor Vance, somewhere to her left. He sounded remarkably calm for a man who’d just been dragged through a dimensional rift.
“Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.” Arthur, somewhere below. His voice cracked on every word.
“Arthur, breathe,” Rebecca said. “You’re okay. We’re all okay.”
“Okay? I was selling insurance! I had a quota! And now I’m... I’m...” He trailed off, apparently unable to articulate what exactly he was.
“Floating in existential darkness?” Vance offered helpfully.
“I was going to say ‘screwed,’ but sure, that works.”
Rebecca almost laughed. The absurdity of it all was catching up to her, a delayed reaction that made her chest tight and her eyes sting. She’d done it. She’d actually done it. Opened a portal. Traveled through dimensions.
And now they were lost in the void with no way home.
The controller beeped against her wrist. She looked down. The screen flickered, displaying a single line of text:
DESTINATION LOCKED. ARRIVAL IMMINENT.
“What does that mean?” Wayne asked, peering over her shoulder.
Before she could answer, the darkness began to brighten. Slowly at first, then faster. Colors bled back into existence around them, muted at first, then growing more vibrant. The silence gave way to a low hum, different from before. Warmer. Almost welcoming.
“I think we’re about to find out,” Rebecca said.
The light intensified, and she felt a strange sensation, like being pulled through a narrow tube. Her body stretched, compressed, twisted. Then, with a soft pop that she felt more than heard, they were through.
Gravity returned in a rush that sent all four of them tumbling to solid ground.
Rebecca landed hard on her back, the air knocked out of her lungs in a single whoosh. Above her, a sky the color of deep amethyst stretched endlessly, dotted with clouds that glowed faintly gold. Two moons hung in the distance, one large and pale, the other small and crimson.
She sat up slowly, every muscle protesting.
They were in a field of tall grass that shimmered with an iridescent sheen, each blade catching the strange light and throwing it back in prismatic bursts. The air smelled sweet, like honey and wildflowers, with an undertone of something electric.
Wayne was already on his feet, scanning their surroundings with the alert posture of someone who expected trouble. His utility vest was torn at the shoulder, and a bruise was forming on his jaw, but he looked otherwise intact.
Professor Vance sat a few feet away, methodically patting himself down and checking for injuries with the calm precision of a man who’d survived worse.
Arthur lay face-down in the grass, his shoulders shaking.
“I’m not dead,” he mumbled into the dirt. “I’m not dead. I’m not dead.”
“Not yet, anyway,” Wayne said. He turned to Rebecca, his expression unreadable. “Where are we?”
She looked at the controller. The screen displayed a single word: UNKNOWN.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said.
Professor Vance rose to his feet, brushing grass from his tweed jacket. He adjusted his spectacles and took in their surroundings with the careful attention of a scholar cataloging a new specimen.
“The atmospheric composition appears breathable,” he observed. “Gravity feels approximately Earth-normal. And those celestial bodies...” He pointed at the twin moons. “We’re a long way from home.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Arthur muttered, finally pushing himself up. His suit was ruined, covered in grass stains and dirt. His tie hung limply around his neck. “Where’s the exit? There has to be an exit, right? You built a portal, so you can build another one and get us back.”
Rebecca shook her head, her fingers finding the edge of the controller, tapping against it in a nervous rhythm. “The portal collapsed behind us. I don’t know if I can open a direct portal back home.”
“Which is currently, where, exactly?”
“Another dimension. Maybe another universe. I don’t know.”
Arthur’s face went pale. “So we’re stuck here. Stranded. In the middle of nowhere. With no way home.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it.”
“I’m saying we need to figure out where we are first. Then we can figure out how to get back.”
Wayne stepped between them, his voice calm but firm. “Fighting isn’t going to solve anything. Rebecca’s right. We need to get our bearings, find shelter, assess our resources.” He looked at Arthur, his expression softening slightly. “We’ll figure this out. But panicking won’t help.”
Arthur took a shaky breath. “I’m not panicking. I’m processing.”
“Process faster.”
Rebecca stood, testing her legs. They held. She checked the controller again. The countdown timer was gone, replaced by a new display: a pulsing dot that seemed to be tracking something. A signal.
The grass whispered against Rebecca’s cargo pants as she pushed through the field, each blade releasing a faint shimmer of prismatic dust that clung to the fabric like glitter. The air tasted sweet and strange, honey mixed with something sharper underneath, ozone maybe, or the metallic tang of a battery left too long in a forgotten device.
Wayne walked point, his steel-toed boots crushing a path through the iridescent stalks. His head swiveled constantly, scanning the horizon with the focused intensity of someone who’d spent years navigating sketchy neighborhoods and darker parking lots. The bruise on his jaw had deepened to an ugly purple, but he hadn’t mentioned it once.
Professor Vance brought up the rear, his leather satchel clutched against his chest like a shield. Every few steps, he paused to examine something: a blade of grass, a pebble, the way the light bent around his fingers. Rebecca had to resist the urge to physically drag him forward.
Arthur stumbled along beside her, his ruined dress shoes catching on every root and hidden divot. He’d stopped muttering “I’m not dead” about ten minutes ago, which somehow made Rebecca more nervous than the constant repetition had.
The controller screen flickered against her wrist. Countdown timer, top left corner.
4:08:22.
The field of iridescent grass ended at a ridge that dropped into a valley Rebecca didn’t recognize. Except she did. The shape of it. The way the land folded into itself, cradling something in the center like a protective hand.
She stopped walking. Her sneakers skidded on the loose shale at the ridge’s edge, sending a cascade of pebbles tumbling into the void below.
“What the hell,” Wayne breathed beside her.
The apartment building stood in the center of the valley.
Not a building like it. Not a building that resembled it. The same building. Same brick facade, faded and crumbling in places, but unmistakable. The same cracked concrete steps leading to the same glass front door. The same row of windows on the third floor, one of them still bearing the faded remnants of a “Live Laugh Love” decal that had been there when Rebecca moved in two years ago.
The moon, the big one, the pale one, hung directly above it, casting silver light across the rooftops.
Arthur made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Is that your apartment?”
“I don’t know.” Rebecca’s voice came out thin. She was already moving, sliding down the ridge in a controlled stumble, her cargo pants collecting dust and small stones. “I don’t know what this is.”
“Rebecca, wait.” Wayne scrambled after her, boots sliding on the loose rock. “We don’t know what’s down there.”
“We know exactly what’s down there. That’s the point.”
She hit the valley floor running. The grass here was different. Shorter. Duller. The iridescent shimmer faded the closer she got to the building, replaced by something grayer. Something tired.
The parking lot was empty.
Not empty like everyone was at work. Empty like everyone had been gone for a very long time. Weeds pushed through cracks in the asphalt, some of them waist-high, their leaves coated in a fine layer of dust that muffled their color. A shopping cart sat overturned near the bike rack, rust eating through its metal frame in orange-brown patches.
The bike rack itself was still there, still holding three bikes, all of them rusted solid, chains fused to the gears, tires flat and cracked.
Wayne caught up to her, his hand finding her elbow. “Slow down. We need to.”
“Look at the door.” Rebecca pointed.
The glass front door was intact. No cracks. No shattered panes. But it was wrong. The reflection in it was wrong. Instead of showing the parking lot behind them, it showed the inside of the building. A lobby. Empty. Dark.
But the angle was impossible. They were standing directly in front of it, and the reflection was showing them something they couldn’t possibly see from this position. Like looking through a window instead of at a mirror.
Professor Vance arrived, breathing hard, his satchel clutched against his chest. He stared at the door for a long moment, his spectacles catching the silver moonlight.
“That’s not a reflection,” he said quietly. “That’s a window into the interior. The glass has been inverted. Somehow.”
“Inverted.” Arthur’s voice cracked. “What does that even mean?”
“It means the physics here don’t work the way they should.” Rebecca reached for the door handle. Cold metal bit into her palm. “Which tracks, considering we just traveled through a dimensional rift.”
She pulled.
The door opened with a groan that echoed through the empty lobby like a dying animal. The smell hit them immediately. Old. Stale. Dust and decay and something underneath, something chemical, the ghost of cleaning products that had long since evaporated.
Rebecca stepped inside.
The lobby was exactly as she remembered it. Same cracked tile floor. Same flickering fluorescent light that had never been fixed, except now it wasn’t flickering. It was dead. Same row of mailboxes along the left wall, each one tarnished and dull. Same elevator at the far end, its doors hanging open.
Except the elevator shaft was wrong.
She approached slowly, her footsteps echoing in the silence. The elevator car was gone. Not broken. Gone. The doors opened onto a vertical shaft that descended into absolute darkness, the walls lined with maintenance ladders that disappeared into the void below. But there was light down there. Faint. Pulsing. Like the walls themselves were breathing.
“Okay,” Wayne said behind her. “That’s definitely not up to code.”
Arthur made a strangled sound. “Up to code? We’re in another dimension and you’re worried about building codes?”
“It’s a coping mechanism. Let me have it.”
Rebecca turned away from the shaft. Her fingers found the edge of the controller, tapping against the cracked screen. The countdown timer still ticked in the corner. Three hours, forty-seven minutes. But there was something else now. A new icon. A small house symbol that pulsed in sync with the light from the elevator shaft.
She didn’t know what it meant. She didn’t want to guess.
“This way,” she said, heading for the stairwell.
The stairwell door was propped open with a brick, the same brick that had been there for as long as Rebecca could remember, holding the door so it wouldn’t lock behind tenants carrying groceries. Someone had written “FLOOR 3 4EVER” on it in Sharpie years ago. The ink was still there. Faded, but legible.
She started up the stairs.
The first floor landing was covered in dust. Not the thin layer that accumulated over a few days. Thick. Gray. Disturbed only by a single set of footprints leading up.
Rebecca’s footprints.
Her sneakers. Her tread pattern. The little worn spot on the right heel from the way she always scuffed it when she walked.
She stopped. Stared.
“Those are yours,” Wayne said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
Professor Vance knelt beside the prints, studying them with the intensity of a man examining a crime scene. “These are fresh. Hours old at most. But the dust around them suggests decades of accumulation. This is contradictory.”
“Everything here is contradictory,” Arthur muttered. He was gripping his leather binder with both hands now, holding it against his chest like a shield. “That’s the theme. Contradiction.”
Rebecca forced herself to keep moving. One flight. Two. The dust thickened as they climbed, the silence pressing in around them like a physical weight. No sounds from other apartments. No televisions. No arguments. No barking dogs. Just the creak of the stairs beneath their feet and the distant, rhythmic pulse from somewhere deep in the building.
The third floor hallway stretched out before them, identical to the one in Rebecca’s memory. Same faded carpet. Same water stain on the ceiling from the leak that had never been fixed. Same flickering light outside apartment 3B.
Except the light wasn’t flickering. It was on. Steady. Bright.
“That’s my apartment,” Rebecca whispered.
3B. The same brass numbers, tarnished but polished by years of fingers. The same welcome mat, frayed at the edges, that said “Come Back With A Warrant” in curly script.
The door was closed.
Wayne moved ahead of her, his body blocking the hallway. His hand went to the deadbolt, testing it. Locked. He tried the handle. It didn’t budge.
“Deadbolt’s engaged,” he said. “From the inside.”
“That’s impossible.” Rebecca pushed past him, her hands finding the door, pressing against the wood. Solid. Real. “I locked it when we left. With my keys. From the outside.”
“Then how is it locked from the inside?”
“I don’t know!”
Her voice echoed down the hallway, bouncing off walls that shouldn’t exist, in a building that couldn’t be here, in a dimension that defied every law of physics she understood.
Arthur’s voice came from behind them, small and trembling. “Where are the people?”
Everyone stopped.
The question hung in the air, more terrifying than anything else they’d encountered.
“Where are the people?” Arthur repeated. His eyes were wide, darting from door to door. “This is an apartment building. There should be people. Tenants. Families. Someone. Where did they all go?”
Professor Vance moved to the nearest apartment door, 3A. He knocked. The sound echoed through the hallway like a gunshot in a library.
Nothing.
He tried the handle. It turned. The door swung open.
The apartment beyond was frozen.
Furniture covered in white sheets. Boxes stacked against the walls. A single chair in the center of the living room, positioned to face the window. On the chair, a newspaper. Rebecca stepped closer, squinting at the date.
April 17, 1998.
“That’s not possible,” she said. “This building was built in 2011.”
Wayne moved past her into the apartment, his boots leaving prints in the dust. He checked the kitchen. The bathroom. The bedroom. Everything was the same. Sheets. Boxes. Dust. Decades of it.
“No signs of struggle,” he reported, coming back. “No blood. No damage. Just abandoned.”
“Abandoned implies people left,” Vance said. “This doesn’t look like leaving. It looks like stopping.”
The controller buzzed against Rebecca’s wrist. She looked down. The house icon had changed. Now it was a door. And beneath it, a single line of text: FOLLOW.
“What does this mean?” Arthur asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You keep saying that!”
“Because I don’t know!”
Wayne stepped between them, his voice low and steady. “Fighting isn’t helping. Rebecca, is there another way into your apartment? A fire escape? A window?”
She nodded slowly. “The fire escape. If it’s still there.”
It was.
The window at the end of the hallway opened onto a narrow metal platform that overlooked the back of the building. The fire escape ladder descended into darkness, but they didn’t need to go down. They needed to go sideways.
Rebecca’s bedroom window was three feet away.
She climbed out first, her sneakers slipping on the rusted grate, her fingers finding the window frame. The glass was intact. The window was unlocked.
She pushed it open.
The smell hit her immediately. Ozone. Burnt circuitry. The familiar, comforting scent of her own space.
She climbed inside.
The apartment was exactly as she’d left it.
The servers hummed in the corner, their LEDs blinking in steady rhythm. The workbench was covered in the same scattered tools, the same half-eaten energy bar, the same coffee mug that never seemed to empty. The whiteboard still displayed her frantic equations, the handwriting so messy she could barely read it herself.
But there was dust everywhere.
Not thick. Not decades old. Thin. Fresh. A layer that suggested weeks rather than years.
And on the bed, a figure.
Wayne came through the window behind her, his body tense, ready for a fight. He saw the figure and froze.
“Rebecca...”
She was already moving. Crossing the room. Her knees hit the floor beside the bed. Her hand reached out, trembling.
The figure on the bed was her.
Same age, same everything. It was her, but it wasn’t her.
And she was breathing.
The woman’s eyes opened. Hazel. Intense. Focused. They found Rebecca’s face and held it, and for a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Then the woman smiled.
The same slight crook at the left corner, the same flash of teeth before it faded into something more guarded. But her eyes held a depth that Rebecca’s didn’t. A hollowness carved by years of something terrible.
“You’re real,” the woman whispered. Her voice was hoarse, cracked from disuse. “I stopped believing anything was real a long time ago.”
Wayne’s hand found Rebecca’s shoulder, pulling her back a step. His other hand hovered near his belt, where a heavy-duty flashlight hung like a weapon. “Rebecca, back up. We don’t know what this is.”
“It’s me,” Rebecca said. The words came out strange. Flat. “She’s me.”
“Alternate timeline,” Professor Vance breathed from the window. He’d climbed through behind them, his satchel clutched against his chest. His eyes were wide behind his spectacles, drinking in every detail. “Fascinating. The quantum signature must have locked onto a variant of your own existence. A parallel self.”
Arthur’s head appeared in the window frame, his face pale and sweating. “Can someone help me? I’m stuck on the fire escape.”
No one moved to help him.
The woman on the bed, the other Rebecca, pushed herself up slowly. Her arms trembled with the effort. She was thinner than Rebecca, her cheeks hollowed out, her collarbones sharp beneath the collar of a faded gray shirt. The same shirt Rebecca had worn three years ago, before it had fallen apart in the wash.
“How long have you been here?” Rebecca asked.
The woman laughed. It was a dry, humorless sound. “Here? In this apartment? Eight years. Give or take. I stopped counting after the first thousand days.”
“Eight years.” Wayne’s voice was flat. Disbelieving. “You’ve been alone here for eight years?”
“Alone.” The woman swung her legs over the side of the bed, her bare feet finding the floor with a wince. Her ankles were swollen. Malnourished. “That’s a word for it. There are others. Isolated. Abandoned. Forgotten.” She looked up at Rebecca, and something flickered in her eyes. Something hungry. “Lucky.”
Professor Vance stepped forward, his academic curiosity overriding his caution. “What happened here? What caused this devastation?”
The woman, Becca, Rebecca decided to call her, to keep them separate in her mind, stood slowly. She moved like someone carrying invisible weights, each step deliberate, careful. She crossed to the window and looked out at the dead city beyond.
“What year is it?” Becca asked. “Your year. Wherever you came from.”
“2047,” Rebecca said.
Becca nodded slowly. “I was twenty. Same as you. Working on the prototype in my apartment. Same equations. Same dreams.” She turned back to face them, her expression unreadable. “Then the second moon appeared.”
“The second moon?” Arthur had finally managed to climb through the window. He stood near the door, his ruined suit covered in rust stains from the fire escape. “What do you mean, the second moon?”
Becca pointed at the sky beyond the window. The small, crimson orb still hung there, visible through the grimy glass. “That. It just appeared one night. No warning. No explanation. One moon, then two. The new one was smaller. Darker. Dead.”
“The gravitational effects,” Professor Vance murmured. His fingers were tapping against his satchel, a nervous habit Rebecca recognized from her own lectures. “Two moons would create tidal forces beyond anything Earth could handle.”
“Tides rose thirty feet in some places,” Becca said. “Coastal cities drowned within hours. Billions dead before anyone could evacuate. Then the earthquakes started.”
She moved to the workbench, her fingers trailing across the dusty surface. The same workbench Rebecca had built two years ago, covered in the same tools, the same half-finished projects. But everything here was older. Worn. Used.
“The tectonic plates shifted. Fractured. Cities collapsed into sinkholes. Infrastructure crumbled. Power grids failed. Communication networks went dark.” Becca’s voice was monotone. Reciting facts. Detached. “Humanity tried to hold on. We lasted about six months before the virus hit.”
“Virus?” Wayne’s jaw tightened.
“Something dormant. Frozen in the permafrost. When the earthquakes hit Siberia, it released. Airborne. Highly contagious. Almost universally fatal.” Becca picked up a coffee mug from the workbench, Rebecca’s coffee mug, the one that never seemed to empty, and stared into its depths. “It spread through the remaining population like wildfire. There was no cure. No vaccine. Just death.”
The room went silent. Even Arthur stopped fidgeting.
Rebecca’s mind raced, trying to process the scale of it. Billions dead. Civilizations collapsed. Everything she knew, everyone she’d ever met, gone in another timeline. Another version of reality where she’d been alone.
“How did you survive?” she asked.
Becca set the mug down. “I was already isolated. Working on the prototype. I’d sealed myself in the apartment to focus on the equations. By the time I came up for air, everyone I knew was dead.” She smiled again, that hollow, broken smile. “Turns out social isolation has its perks.”
Professor Vance cleared his throat. “And you’ve been trying to reactivate the portal ever since?”
“I’ve been trying to do a lot of things.” Becca gestured at the whiteboard, covered in equations Rebecca recognized as her own handwriting. But the equations were wrong. Twisted. Scratched out and rewritten dozens of times. “The portal was my only hope. If I could open it, maybe I could go somewhere else. Somewhere alive. But the machine...” She shook her head. “It refuses to spark.”
Rebecca crossed to the workbench, her fingers finding the familiar controls. The console was different here. Older. More battered. But the core architecture was the same. She could see her own design in the circuitry, her own logic in the wiring.
“What happens when you try to power it up?”
“Circuits burn out. Every time. The batteries drain completely within seconds. I’ve replaced them a dozen times. Rebuilt the entire array from scratch. Nothing works.” Becca’s voice cracked. “I’ve spent eight years trying to fix this machine. Eight years of failure. Eight years of watching dust settle on everything I used to care about.”
Rebecca’s fingers were already moving, tracing the connections, checking the power flow. The controller on her wrist buzzed, the cracked screen flickering as it interfaced with the local system. Diagnostics scrolled past, error codes and system logs, and she felt her heart sink.
“This isn’t a power problem,” she said slowly. “The dimensional field is destabilized. The fabric of reality here is too thin. Too damaged. Every time you try to open a portal, the energy bleeds into the surrounding space instead of focusing into a coherent beam.”
Becca stared at her. “What does that mean?”
“It means the world itself is broken.” Rebecca tapped the console, pulling up a three-dimensional grid of wave patterns. The resonance harmonics were chaotic, jagged spikes of interference scattered across every frequency band. “The second moon. The earthquakes. The virus. They didn’t just kill people. They damaged the underlying structure of spacetime. This dimension is wounded.”
Wayne moved to stand beside her, his presence solid and grounding. “Can we fix it?”
Rebecca looked at the data. At the chaotic spikes. At the empty spaces where there should have been stable waveforms. “I don’t know. Maybe. If we can stabilize the field, even temporarily, we might be able to open a portal.”
“Might?” Arthur’s voice was thin. “We traveled through a dimensional rift and landed in a dead world, and the best we’ve got is might?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Arthur opened his mouth, closed it, and slumped against the wall. “No. No, I don’t.”
Becca stepped closer, her eyes fixed on Rebecca’s controller. “That device. You built it? In your timeline?”
“Yeah.” Rebecca held up her arm, showing the Frankenstein rig in all its battered, jury-rigged glory. “Custom interface. Millisecond control over the field generator. It’s what let me open the original portal.”
Becca reached out, her fingers hovering over the controller but not touching. “I never thought of that. I was trying to use the tablet’s native controls. I never thought to...” She trailed off, her eyes bright with something Rebecca recognized. Hope. Fragile and desperate and barely holding on.
“Maybe together,” Becca whispered. “Maybe together we can.”
The lights flickered.
Everyone froze.
The flicker came again, followed by a low, sub-audible rumble that vibrated through the floorboards. Dust rained down from the ceiling. The servers in the corner whined, their LEDs stuttering.
“What was that?” Wayne was already moving, his body positioned between the group and the door.
Becca’s face had gone pale. Paler than before. “That’s not possible.”
“What isn’t possible?”
“That.” Becca pointed at the window. “The ruins. The city. Everything out there has been dead for eight years. Nothing moves. Nothing makes noise. There’s nothing alive to make noise.”
The rumble came again, louder this time. The building shook. A crack spiderwebbed across the ceiling, dust and plaster raining down in a fine mist.
Rebecca grabbed the edge of the workbench, steadying herself. Her controller buzzed against her wrist, the screen flashing with warnings. The digital readout on the power draw gauge was spiking. Something was drawing energy. Massive amounts of it. From nearby.
“Rebecca.” Wayne’s voice was tight. “Your controller. What’s it detecting?”
She looked down. The screen displayed a new icon. A pulsing red dot, moving slowly across the grid. Something was out there. Something big. Something that radiated the same chaotic energy as the damaged dimension itself.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s coming this way.”
The rumble built to a roar. The windows rattled in their frames. Outside, in the dead city, something shifted. Something moved.
The rumble wasn’t just a sound. It was a physical pressure, a deep bass note that vibrated through the floorboards, up through the soles of Rebecca’s scuffed sneakers, and into her teeth.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.