Entangled

Vladimir had a signal — an artifact, somewhere in the Freya system. I jumped in and picked up something else alongside it: a distress call from a research facility on the third moon. Equipment failure. Crew status unknown.

I went down.

Research Station Nishina had a security intercom at the entrance and a very skeptical voice on the other end of it. They weren’t expecting anyone. They hadn’t called for help — as far as they knew. I mentioned an explosion in the high energy research lab and the voice went quiet for a moment, then let me in. Just me. Whatever was happening inside, they weren’t ready to open the doors wide.

Hughes met me in the entryway — head of security, the kind of man who assesses a situation by walking into it with his hand near his weapon and his face giving nothing away. He was taking me to the Director’s office. That was the plan.

Then the world went sideways.

One moment I was walking a corridor in a functioning research station. The next I was in the same corridor — same walls, same layout — except the walls were wrong. Cracked. Overgrown, biological matter threading through the gaps, something that had been spreading through the structure for months. And there were things in it, local fauna that had decided this building was theirs now. They made that argument with teeth and I made my counterargument with whatever I had on me, and then I was back. Same corridor. Functioning station. Hughes with his weapon out, telling me to calm down.

I wasn’t the one who needed to calm down.

It kept happening. Every crossing brought me back into the overgrown version — fighting off whatever had moved into that section of hallway — and then back again mid-step into the version where Hughes was trying very hard to keep it together. We made it to the Director’s office the long way.

The other version of the facility had Rafael in it.

I found him on one of the phases — hunkered down in the mess hall behind a counter, surviving on whatever he’d been able to find for what had apparently been months. He looked like a man who had stopped expecting to be found. We couldn’t stay in contact long before I phased back, but enough to understand: he was alive over there, alone, in a facility that the rest of the universe believed had been a near-miss.

The Director told me what the near-miss actually was.

There had been an incident in the high energy research lab. A problem with the experiment — something involving an artifact they’d been studying, something with unusual gravitational properties they hadn’t fully accounted for. Rafael had gotten to the controls and shut the system down before anything catastrophic occurred. It had cost him his life. He was dead, in her version of events. A footnote in what would have been a contained incident.

The phasing, once we more-or-less understood it, had rules. Specific energy fields in the facility triggered the crossover — controllable, once you knew where they were. The task was clear enough: get to the high energy research lab, shut off the machine. The machine that was, as it turned out, still running, still experimenting on the artifact at the center of all of this.

I asked the Director what happened to the people on the other side if I shut it down from this one.

She was quiet for a moment. She said that most likely, I couldn’t save both. That given the choice — if it were just her — she’d trade places with Rafael without hesitation. But it wasn’t just her. She had people. People who were alive and who deserved to stay that way.

Hughes’ people had robots to deal with — security systems that had gone autonomous when the incident hit. Rafael’s version had the fauna. Neither was gentle. I moved between them as the energy fields allowed, fighting one reality’s problems and then the other’s, working my way toward the test chamber.

I’m standing at the entrance to it now. The machine is still running. The artifact is inside.

I don’t know yet what I’m going to do.

Rafael needed saving. I saved him.

The artifact was in the test chamber. I took it.

Rafael stared at me in disbelief, thankful to be alive and free to leave the facility. I offered him a ride back to civilization.

We walked to the Naginata.

I really need to turn off this Lamp...