The air in the mobile lab tasted of ozone and hot dust. Dr. Hollis Grant leaned so close to the holographic display that its green light turned the silver streaks in her hair to glowing wires. She was watching a soul decay in real-time, and it looked disappointingly like a bad EKG. A single, jagged line of light pulsed across the dark, a waveform generated by the unstable bridge between two worlds. It was the signature of the Julian-Garran link, a ghost she had learned to read.
Rory Phelan sat in the corner, meticulously cleaning the contacts on a pre-corporate signal booster with a rag and a bottle of foul-smelling solvent. He was a man who trusted physical things, things with weight and texture. The ghosts in Grant’s machines were her problem, until they became his. He worked with a focused patience, the scrape of his tools a counter-rhythm to the lab’s electronic hum.
— Rory, get over here, — Grant said, not looking away from the screen. Her voice was flat, the tone of a mechanic who has found a crack in an engine block.
He grunted, set his tools down with a quiet click, and ambled over. He squinted at the display, a shimmering green line that pulsed with a steady, hypnotic beat. It was the heartbeat of their shared problem.
— It’s still beating. That’s good, right? — he asked, his voice a low rasp.
— It’s speeding up, — she corrected. She tapped the glass, and a series of numbers appeared next to the waveform. — The time between swaps is decreasing. The decay is exponential. We’re seeing a reduction in the interval of about eight percent per cycle.
Rory crossed his arms. He was a tall, gaunt man who looked like he was held together by wire and suspicion.
— So the schedule’s slipping. They knew the risks. The Custody Protocol was always a prayer, not a guarantee.
— This isn’t a slip, — Grant said, her focus absolute. She manipulated the display, the waveform stretching, becoming thinner. — This is a collapse. The universal law, the Offset, it’s trying to resolve the paradox faster. The system is getting better at finding them.
She zoomed in on a single peak of the wave. The clean green line dissolved into a fuzzy, chaotic mess of smaller, overlapping signals. It looked like a frayed rope. A flicker of visual noise, a STATIC_GLITCH, ran through the data like a shiver.
— What’s that? — Rory asked, leaning closer despite himself.
— That’s the problem, — Grant said. She pointed to the tangled threads of light. — I’m calling it a shared memory cache. Their minds are bleeding into each other. It’s not just a connection anymore; it’s a merger. Subject integrity is down fifteen percent from the initial swap.
She looked at him then, her eyes wide with a kind of horrified awe.
— Think of it like two songs playing on the same speaker. At first, you can hear both melodies. But as you turn up the volume, it all just turns into noise. They’re becoming noise, Rory.
The clinical fascination in her voice was gone. It was replaced by something else, something cold and sharp. Fear. Rory saw it, and the comfortable distance he kept from her theoretical problems vanished. This was no longer data. This was about his people.
— They’re building a shared cache, — she said, the words coming faster now. — The swaps are getting faster. Identity bleed is accelerating.
— So, what does that mean? In plain terms, Hollis.
— It means soon there won’t be a Julian and a Garran. There will just be a screaming paradox in two bodies, and the universe will correct that. Permanently.
Rory was already moving, turning his back on the glowing screen and its terrible truths. He crossed the cramped lab to his own console, a chaotic nest of scavenged parts and glowing vacuum tubes. He sat down, his movements suddenly sharp and efficient.
— I have to warn them.
— It won’t matter, — Grant said, her voice returning to a weary monotone. — This isn’t a problem they can solve. It’s a condition.
He ignored her, his fingers flying across a keyboard that was older than he was. He was composing a compressed data-burst, a digital needle he would try to thread through the storm of two dimensions. It was a risky broadcast, a flare that could draw the wrong kind of attention. He didn’t care. The bill for freedom, he’d once told Julian, always comes due. He was just trying to postpone the collection.
Miles and realities away, Julian Hale sat by a hidden spring, the cool water a balm on his sunburnt skin. He felt a sudden, inexplicable spike of anxiety, a cold dread that had no source in the peaceful basin. A string of numbers flashed behind his eyes, meaningless and sharp. The world shimmered for a second, the familiar, hated grid of the Grid overlaid on the rocks and ferns. A STATIC_GLITCH. It was a message, but the language was corrupted, translated by his own fraying mind into pure, abstract fear. He understood only one thing: the hurricane was getting closer.
Back in the lab, Rory leaned back from his console, the transmission sent.
— Did it get through? — he asked, not looking at Grant.
— Forty percent fidelity, maybe, — she said, staring at the numbers on her screen. — He’ll feel it more than he’ll understand it. A ghost of a warning.
Rory ran a hand over his tired face.
— How long do they have?
Grant didn’t answer immediately. She ran the final projection, the lines of code scrolling down the screen, the numbers converging on a single, brutal answer. She looked at the final output, the system’s best guess.
— Three to five cycles, — she said, her voice barely a whisper. — Total failure of the Custody Protocol. After that… well, the model stops. There’s no more data to predict.
The hum of the signal analyzer filled the silence, a steady, indifferent sound. The air was thick with the smell of hot metal and the coming storm.
