Every Other World

For one refresh cycle, the monitor shows the lab as it is not: coils the wrong color, an older server stack, and in the corner a broad-shouldered man in a faded hoodie Vera has not seen in two years. A heartbeat later the frame is gone and her own brainwaves are back, steady and unremarkable.

Two years since Cal, and she still reaches for his side of the bed every morning and still wears the locket she will not open. She works four floors below the waterline in the Institute, a glass tower rising out of a drowned district, where the subsonic hum of the Loom settles into her teeth. Her own rig is a toy beside the Loom, copper coils over a gel bed, built to read the quantum signature of consciousness through a medium no one else believes in.

She is reaching for the log to flag the glitch when the door seals. A masked man in a gray maintenance jumpsuit raises a small silver device, and what comes out of it is less light than a fracture. The lab splits into three rooms, and Vera is in all of them, staring at three different pairs of her own hands, while Cal's voice calls to her from somewhere she cannot reach. Before she blacks out, she watches the intruder scratch the Ashfall logo off his sleeve. When she wakes, strapped to a gurney in a paper gown, the hum rising through the floor is one she knows.