I’m A Park Ranger At Tower 9. My Partner Just Looked At Me With A Hollow Smile And Said, “it’s Beautiful Beneath The Ground.” I Don’t Think She’s Human Anymore.
*”There has to be another way,”*
Mitchell insisted.
*”We could evacuate the towns, establish a larger perimeter, wait for it to stabilize naturally.”*
*”And if it doesn’t stabilize?”*
I asked.
*”If it just keeps growing until it swallows half the state? Then we’ve sacrificed thousands of people for nothing.”*
Lawrence grabbed my hand.
*”What you’re doing is insane. You know that, right?”*
*”Yeah,”*
I agreed.
*”But someone has to do it. And apparently, I’m the only one crazy enough and resistant enough to even attempt it.”*
At 1800 hours, we loaded into vehicles and headed back toward the northwest sector. The exclusion zone had grown significantly now, almost 2 miles in radius, with the aperture itself visible even from a distance. The blue-white light had become a pillar reaching up into the sky, distorting the clouds and atmosphere around it.
We stopped at what was designated as the absolute minimum safe distance, about half a mile from the aperture’s current edge. Any closer and even the containment team’s protective equipment would start failing.
*”This is as far as we go,”*
Mills said.
*”From here, you’re on foot. The reality distortion gets stronger the closer you get to the epicenter. Try to stay focused on your objective. Don’t let the environment distract you. Don’t listen to any voices or singing. Don’t trust anything your senses tell you.”*
*”Great pep talk,”*
I muttered, but I was already moving, walking toward the pillar of light that dominated the landscape.
The first 100 yards were manageable. The forest looked strange: colors were a bit too vivid, and shadows fell in directions that didn’t quite match the sun’s position. But nothing was reality-breaking yet.
Then I crossed some invisible threshold and everything changed. The trees around me began to breathe, their trunks expanding and contracting in rhythm with a heartbeat I could feel in my bones.
The ground beneath my feet was simultaneously solid and liquid, supporting my weight while rippling like water with each step. The sky above had too many colors—shades that didn’t exist in normal human perception—and I could taste them on the back of my tongue.
*”Callahan, you’re approaching the primary contamination zone,”*
Mills’s voice crackled in my earpiece, but it sounded distant and distorted.
*”Heart rate elevated. Neural activity spiking. Try to stay calm.”*
*”Stay calm? Right.”*
I was walking through a forest that had been fundamentally rewritten by something from another dimension. I was heading toward a crack in reality that was literally unmaking the world around me. Staying calm seemed like a low priority compared to staying sane.
The singing started again. It was not the beautiful chorus from before, but something deeper and more fundamental. It wasn’t music; it was math.
Equations and theorems were expressing themselves through sound. Each note was a statement about the nature of reality that my brain tried desperately to comprehend and failed.
I could feel the presence in my mind growing stronger. It wasn’t trying to control me or corrupt me; it was curious. It wanted to know what I was, why I was here, and what made human consciousness different from its own existence.
That curiosity was itself a form of contamination, rewriting my neural patterns to facilitate communication.
*”Don’t engage!”*
Mills warned, somehow sensing what was happening.
*”Don’t try to communicate with it. Every interaction deepens the contamination.”*
But it was hard not to engage when the entity was literally inside my head. It was examining my memories and thoughts like someone flipping through a photo album. It was fascinated by emotion, by the concept of fear and hope and determination.
These were alien to it, perhaps not even concepts it could truly understand any more than I could truly understand existing as a living mathematical equation.
I pressed forward. The aperture was visible now, a massive tear in space roughly 50 feet across, pulsing with that blue-white light. Around it, reality had completely broken down.
Objects existed in multiple states simultaneously. The ground was both there and not there. Time moved in strange loops.
