Continuation: Mark Morrison - Fifty Years Ago
3.7 seconds. Exactly like I'd predicted.
The portal began to convulse. Warning lights painted every console in hellish red. The electromagnetic containment wasn't failing—something was pushing back from the other side. Something that didn't appreciate visitors.
Nausea clawed up my throat like acid. I'd warned them. I'd shown them the math. None of it mattered now. I bolted from my chair so fast that it crashed into the console behind me. James turned, his celebration dying as he saw the horror written across my face.
"Mark!" James screamed after me. "Mark, what the—"
The room exploded into panic as everyone else saw their screens. Dr. Brennan was bellowing orders over the growing chaos. Scientists scrambled to abort the sequence. But the cascade had already begun, and physics doesn't accept apologies.
I slammed into the security door and pressed my keycard to the scanner. Nothing. Red lights. The lockdown protocols had been activated. I was sealed inside with everyone else, trapped with the disaster I'd helped create.
On the other side of the reinforced glass, a soldier stood guard. I'd seen him around during the briefings and the cafeteria. Tall, blonde, and packed with muscle. The kind of guy who made me feel like a soft desk jockey, even though I wasn't exactly small myself. We'd arrived at the facility around the same time and gone through orientation together. I never caught his name.
He'd tried to start conversations a few times during our first weeks here. Normal stuff—where I was from, what I thought about the project, and whether I wanted to grab a drink after the shift.
I'd shut him down every time. It wasn't that I disliked him. Hell, under normal circumstances, I might have been interested.
The guy was attractive, and I'd been with men before. But I could tell he was looking for more than conversation, and I wasn't in the headspace for hookups or whatever he had in mind. Not when I was spending every sleepless night running calculations, trying to find some way to prove myself wrong about the coming disaster. James was different.
James was my bunkmate, which meant I couldn't avoid him. Somehow, that accidental intimacy had worn down my defenses. The soldier had stopped trying to connect with me after the third week. Now he just nodded when we passed in the halls. But I'd caught him watching me sometimes, like he was trying to figure out what made me tick. And now he was my last hope.
"We need to run," I said, not caring if he could lip-read. "We need to get the fuck out of here!"
The pure terror on my face must have been pretty obvious as I pressed against the glass, mouthing the words he couldn't possibly hear over the growing roar of the portal going haywire.
Behind me, the light was getting brighter and angrier. Something was coming through that portal. Something that definitely wasn't the geothermal energy we'd been expecting.
The soldier didn't waste time asking questions. He looked at me, then through the glass at the absolute chaos happening behind me. His eyes met mine, and whatever he saw in them was enough. He didn't hesitate. His keycard beeped once before the heavy door bolts disengaged with a solid thud.
The second the seal broke, a wall of sound hit us. It was the sound of reality tearing itself apart, a high-pitched scream tangled with the groan of dying machinery and the frantic blare of every alarm in the facility. The soldier hauled me through the opening so fast my feet stumbled. The door slammed behind us, its locking mechanism hissing as it sealed the control room. Sealed our colleagues inside.
"Move," he ordered. We ran.
We ran through the emergency exit route, boots pounding against metal grating. The corridors were in chaos. Soldiers, engineers, and scientists who'd been stationed outside the main room were sprinting between computer terminals lining the laboratory walls, frantically trying to execute manual shutdown procedures on the core. Their faces were pale with desperation, fingers flying over keyboards.
I knew what they were doing wouldn't stop what was coming.
"How long until that thing blows?" the soldier shouted over the blaring alarms as we rounded a corner.
"Eight minutes, maybe less!" I yelled back, my voice cracking.
His face went grim. "We won't have time to reach the surface. There's a reinforced bunker two levels down. It might hold."
We changed direction, following emergency signs toward the shelter. Other people had the same idea. A handful of survivors were crowding through the heavy bunker door when we arrived. The soldier and I were the last ones to make it.
"Wait!" the soldier screamed as they started to seal the entrance. "Wait for us!"
We dove through as the massive door began to close. The locks engaged with a series of mechanical thuds that sounded like a coffin being nailed shut.
Seconds later, the explosion hit.
It felt like being torn apart from the inside. The bunker shook so violently I thought my bones would shatter. Everyone was on the floor, holding their heads, screaming. The sound wasn't noise. It was reality itself breaking apart, waves of dimensional energy cascading through everything.
The soldier tried to reach me but failed the first few times, the shaking too violent. Even though we were only feet apart, it felt impossible. Finally, he managed to throw himself over me, trying to shield me from whatever was happening above us.
The waves kept coming. I lost track of time. Minutes, hours, I couldn't tell.
When the shaking finally stopped, nobody moved for a long time. We all just lay there in the dark, listening to our own breathing, waiting for the next wave to hit. The soldier was still covering me, his weight heavy and warm. I could feel his heart hammering against his ribs.
"Is it over?" someone whispered in the darkness.
Nobody answered because nobody knew. The emergency lighting kicked in about ten minutes later, bathing everything in hellish red. That's when we saw the damage. Hairline cracks spider-webbed across the concrete walls. Water was seeping through the ceiling in three different places. The air tasted like metal and fear. I counted the survivors. Twelve of us. Out of hundreds.
Everyone lay there breathing hard, trying to process what had happened. Then a woman near the door started screaming. She ran toward the exit, pounding on the metal.
"Open it! Open the door! We have to get out!"
Some of the soldiers caught in here with us tried to calm her down. The soldier stood up from where he'd been crouching beside me.
"Don't open it," I said weakly from the floor. "We don't know what's out there."
As if responding to my words, a screen on the bunker wall flickered to life. Green text scrolled across it: RADIATION LEVELS SAFE. EXIT CLEARANCE APPROVED.
"Wait," I grabbed the soldier's arm before he could step toward the opening. He moved to a wall panel I hadn't noticed before and pulled out two respirator masks.
"Radiation might be clear, but we don't know what we're gonna see out there," he said. He handed me one of the masks, the rubber and plastic feeling heavy in my hands. "The air's still toxic shit, and after what just happened…" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
I strapped the mask over my face, the seal tight against my skin. The soldier did the same, both of us preparing for whatever was left. Through the clear plastic, his eyes looked as scared as I felt.
"Ready?" he asked, his words muffled by the respirator.
I nodded, knowing that nothing could really prepare us for what we might find. Or what might be gone forever.
The door began to open with a mechanical whir.
At first, the light was too bright. It shouldn't have been possible since we were supposed to be underground. The soldier and I squinted, throwing our arms up to protect our eyes.
When our vision finally adjusted, we saw what was left. At first, my brain couldn't process it. I kept looking around, expecting to see something familiar. A wall, a piece of equipment, anything that proved this place had existed.
Nothing.
The soldier took a few steps forward, then stopped. "Where's the facility?"
I wanted to tell him it was right here, right where we were standing. But there was nothing here except snow. Pristine, untouched snow that looked like it had been falling for centuries.
"It's gone," I said, my words barely audible through the respirator. "It's all gone."
That's when it hit me. James was dead. Everyone up there was dead.
We had to climb over the snow drifts to get our bearings. My legs felt like water, and the soldier had to help me up the slope. When we reached what should have been the facility's center, I saw it.
A giant, shimmering oval hung in the air, maybe fifty feet above where the core had been.
"What is that thing?" the soldier asked.
"A dimensional fracture," I said. "A permanent wound where we broke reality."
Help was already coming. Helicopters appeared on the horizon, rescue teams dispatched to assess the disaster.
And it would all come back to my name. This was my fault. I was the one who'd pressed the button. James had believed until the very end. He'd died thinking we were saving everyone, never knowing we'd doomed them instead.
I turned to the soldier, the only person who'd seen what really happened. The only witness to my cowardice.
"My name is James," I lied. "James Tanner."
The world would remember the name Mark Morrison as the one who doomed us all. But Mark Morrison was already gone.
The soldier looked at me, and I could see in his eyes that he understood exactly what I was trying to do.
"James Tanner," he echoed, like he was testing how the name sounded. Then he paused, studying my face. "There's a place you can go. Is there anything left for you back there? Anyone waiting?"
I thought about Sarah, about the letter I'd never sent, about the life that was already over the moment I'd pressed that button. "No," I said. "There's nothing left."
The soldier nodded slowly. "If you ever feel lost, if you need somewhere to go, ask for Eden. Just Eden. Someone will know what you mean."