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.

*”I’m asking you to save 15,000 people. Maybe more. If this aperture isn’t closed, if it continues expanding at this rate, we’re looking at a regional catastrophe. Multiple exclusion zones. Millions of people displaced. And each person who gets contaminated becomes a vector for new apertures. This could be the beginning of a cascade failure that spreads across the entire continent.”*

I looked at the monitor, watching the bright anomaly grow. Somewhere in that expanding circle were animals, plants, and possibly even people who hadn’t evacuated in time. All of them were being unmade, their reality rewritten according to rules that made no sense in our universe.

*”What would I need to do?”*

Mills pulled up a series of diagrams that looked like architectural blueprints drawn by someone who’d never seen architecture.

*”Based on our theoretical models, apertures are maintained by what we call anchor points. Stable nodes of reality distortion that keep the breach open. Think of them like tent poles. Remove the poles and the tent collapses.”*

*”You’d need to locate the primary anchor point and disrupt it. We have a device that should do the job.”*

He produced what looked like a modified hand grenade.

*”Quantum dispersal charge. Detonates at a specific frequency that causes reality distortion to cascade and neutralize itself. You’d need to get within 10 feet of the anchor point, activate the charge, and hope you can make it back through the aperture before it collapses.”*

*”And if I can’t make it back?”*

*”Then you’d be trapped on the other side permanently. We have no idea what that would mean for you long-term. Maybe you’d adapt to their reality. Maybe you’d cease to exist in any meaningful sense. We don’t know.”*

Lawrence stepped forward.

*”I should go. I’m already showing Stage 1 symptoms. If someone’s going to be sacrificed, it might as well be someone who’s already compromised.”*

*”Your contamination makes you more vulnerable, not less,”*

Mills said gently.

*”You’d be compromised before you made it 10 feet through the threshold. We need someone who can resist the infection long enough to complete the mission.”*

*”How long would that be?”*

I asked.

*”Best estimate: 5 minutes. Maybe 10 if you’re lucky.”*

Five minutes in a reality where the laws of physics were optional. Five minutes surrounded by entities that existed as living concepts, all of them trying to rewrite my consciousness to serve their purposes.

Five minutes to find an anchor point I wouldn’t recognize using equipment I barely understood and hope the quantum charge actually worked.

*”When would we do this?”*

Mills checked his watch.

*”The aperture will reach Route 89 in 7 hours. We’d need to move within the next 3 to 4 hours to have any chance of success.”*

I thought about my parents living three states away, completely unaware that their daughter was about to walk into a hole in reality on a suicide mission. I thought about the 15,000 people who’d wake up tomorrow morning and go about their lives, never knowing how close they came to being consumed by something from outside our universe.

I thought about Denise smiling her empty smile in some containment facility, forever lost to whatever had infected her.

*”I’ll do it.”*

The preparation took 2 hours. They fitted me with a specialized suit that was supposed to provide minimal protection against reality distortion. “Minimal” being the key word.

The quantum dispersal charge was attached to my belt along with a camera that would feed live video back to the operations center.

*”If the feed cuts out, we’ll know you’ve gone too deep,”*

Mills explained.

*”Reality on the other side might not support electromagnetic transmission. Or you might have moved into a region where the concept of information transmission doesn’t exist. Either way, you’ll be on your own.”*

They gave me a crash course on what to look for. Anchor points apparently manifested as geometric structures that appeared mathematically impossible. They had angles that added up to more than 360 degrees, surfaces that were simultaneously concave and convex, and objects that existed in more than three spatial dimensions.

*”You’ll know it when you see it,”*

The technician assured me, which was not reassuring at all. Mitchell and Lawrence both tried to talk me out of it.