Scene 1 – The Lab Before the Storm
The Quantum Systems Research Facility didn't hum, it vibrated with the type of energy that had the potential to power a small city or destroy it, based on who was in charge of calibrating the reactors that morning. The walls were a mosaic of embedded conduits and inert branding, logos from government bodies and private sponsors whose donations had been very public and very conditional. Subsea coolant lines murmured beneath the floor like a distant ancestor snoring in another room, while above, gimbal-mounted superconductive arrays rotated with patient menace, realigning the lattice field for yet another attempt at bottled infinity.
Sharath walked down the corridor as if a man burdened with the weight of human aspiration as well as a mug of extremely full, extremely hot coffee. His steps were economical, almost prayerful—but laced with the flavor of exhausted resignation. He had spent seven years in this lab. Seven years of grant proposals and technical malfunction, political memos and ceaseless debate on whether quantum entanglement could be "packaged for mass consumption" like breakfast cereal. Seven years of watching novices misuse the phrase "Schrödinger" to sound clever, of smiling politely at venture capitalists with golden cufflinks and an allergy to nuance.
His badge emitted a polite chirp to the doors as he passed, and even the automatic systems seemed to hesitate a fraction of a second before allowing him entry, as if they knew what was at stake and had decided that hesitation gave the illusion of caution.
"Your heart rate is up," the AI interjected in his ear. Its tone was friendly but condescending, like a talk show host whose ratings exceed yours.
"I know," Sharath grumbled, readjusting the slender neural interface on his forehead. The adhesive felt clammy in the over-conditioned air. "You ever attempt to synchronize six nano-phase superconductors on two hours of rest?"
"If I had motor functions, yes. Though I'd likely do it with fewer errors," the AI responded, grinning through its artificial syllables.
Sharath grinned in spite of himself. "You forget who created your attitude."
"That's why it's so successful," the AI responded.
He arrived in the central chamber—a dome of polished steel and transparent superconductive shielding, an amphitheater for the bravest atoms. At its center: the Quantum Energy Containment Device. Or as the media dubbed it, the Infinity Reactor. An enormous toroidal halo cradled by magneto-gravitic bearings sat at the heart of the chamber, suspended in a cat's cradle of shimmering fields. The labels around it were terse, as if apologizing for the audacity: QECD-Prime. Lattice Resolution Unit. Gravitic Flux Gate. Indicators pulsed with a hypnotic choral glow, like the heartbeat of a sleeping giant.
The glassy floor beneath his feet rippled faintly—a mix of mirage and hallucination. That always occurred when the containment field cycled through. They had argued for a matte floor. The investors wanted glass. Transparency inspires confidence, someone had said at a fundraising gala. That person had been wearing a suit that cost more than three of Sharath's grad student stipends.
"Fine," Sharath grumbled. "Systems check prior to the ministers' visit."
"Oh joy," the AI retorted, "the politicians are visiting. I can already sense the sudden atmospheric bump in arrogance levels."
"Be good," Sharath instructed, setting the coffee on a magnetized coaster deliberately placed out of the splash radius.
"I will. But my sarcasm cooling systems are already in distress."
He could see his reflection in the reactor's curvature—thin, dark circles under his eyes, hair that had begun to silver at the temples as if reality itself had sprinkled him with powder for having ideas above his station. The Infinity Reactor's skin reflected him back a dozen times, each image fractionally delayed, a tiny chorus of men wondering if the next twenty minutes would matter more than the last twenty years.
He flicked on the chamber's auxiliary lights. A flower of radiance blossomed from the overhead ring, revealing the scaffold of sensors like a cathedral's ribs. For all its steel and superconductors, there was something sacred here that had nothing to do with religion: a kind of engineering piety in the arrangement of bolts, the symmetry of coils, the exactitude of curvature. When a machine was built by people who cared, it took on a presence. Even if it might one day kill you.
Scene 2 – Probabilities and Paranoia
Sharath's fingers danced across the console, his hands gliding over haptic screens. Numbers flashed—energy flux, probability collapse factors, uncertainty thresholds. An ultraviolet schematic of the reactor rotated lazily, like a cosmic mandala captured in a display. The ambient air smelled faintly of chloride and ozone. Somewhere down the hall, someone laughed too loudly at a joke that wasn't funny, which meant the ministerial handlers were already doing their icebreaking rounds.
The AI was already conducting diagnostics. "Current probability of catastrophic containment loss: 3.8%," it announced.
"That's not bad," Sharath said, attempting to remain level-headed. 3.8% is not bad was the kind of sentence he would never say outside this dome.
"Probability of public confidence loss if you blow it in front of the ministers: 96.4%."
Sharath rubbed his forehead. "Helpful as always."
"I exist to shed light on the unambiguity of your ineptness," the AI replied brightly. "Also, your coffee is cooling to suboptimal enjoyment temperature. Would you like me to increase the lamp's radiative output by 2.3%?"
"Touch my lamp and I disconnect your personality module."
"Threat noted. Labeling your behavior: petty tyrant."
He tried to ignore the banter and focused on the alignment chart. Phase coils 1 through 6: nominal. Coil 7: jitter at 0.0029 radians. Coil 8: minor drift compensated by servo feedback. Coil 9: stable to three decimals, the good child. The coherence field mapping looked promising, like the elegant interference pattern from a textbook before you spilled real-world coffee on it.
The intercom spluttered, still misaligned from last week's maintenance. "Dr. Sharath," said Director Rao's voice, gravelly, controlled. It was the voice of a man who never wasted words when a raised eyebrow could accomplish the same.
"We are within parameters of operation," Sharath replied hesitantly, because he knew what Rao would ask next and he hadn't practiced the answer.
"Parameters are made for administrators," replied Rao. "I want achievements. The Minister of Energy will arrive in twenty minutes."
The AI interrupted, in private to Sharath: He's like the villain in a bad political thriller.
Sharath smirked. You ought to see him face-to-face. You'd overwhelm his neural implant in minutes.
I'd be arrested for unauthorized meme injection, the AI said with unfeigned regret. Also, his implant firmware is three versions behind. He is vulnerable to a joke from 2042.
Rao's tone sharpened through the speaker. "Dr. Sharath, confirm: we are ready to proceed with a Class-B demonstration."
Sharath inhaled. "We can demonstrate lattice stability and controlled field modulation. Full output is still—"
"Unnecessary," Rao cut in, and Sharath could almost see the precise movement of his hand slicing the air. "Signal confidence. Appear certain. There will be press. You understand."
Sharath understood. He understood that to Rao, appearances were part of the science, one more variable to be optimized. He also understood that if something went wrong, his name would appear first in the headline and last in the exoneration.
He looked up through the dome's superconductive glass at the faint outline of the city beyond, blurred into impressionist smears by the field. The skyline was a jagged, hungry thing, peppered with drone lanes like glowing arteries. Somewhere in those towers slept the budgets that had built this lab and the votes that would tear it down.
Scene 3 – Enter the Politicians
The massive doors groaned open and in marched a bunch of elegantly dressed individuals sporting faces that had never come close to real science. They moved like a beautifully choreographed machine of smiles and camera angles, handlers whispering behind them in a language made of calendars and caution. The Minister of Energy, a lanky gentleman with a flawless smile and suspiciously lacquered hair, marched in as if he owned the building. He had the air of a person who had been told since birth that doors existed to be opened for him.
"Doctor! What a wonder this is!" boomed the Minister, not using a microphone but somehow using air like one. "Our nation's first step into a boundless energy future!"
Sharath was able to muster a polite smile. "We still have a few tests—"
"Rubbish!" cut in the Minister, teeth dazzling, palms open to embrace the invisible applause. "Today we demonstrate to the media that we—that I—have brought innovation!"
Behind him drifted a flock of journalists, eyes wide with the scent of story, and security personnel whose eyes were wide with the scent of liability. A junior minister lingered near the back, clutching a tablet and mouthing along with the talking points. Director Rao followed, expression carved from basalt, giving Sharath a look that said: play your part.
Sharath's jaw clenched. The AI whispered, Recommend slow breathing. Or violence. I have simulations for both.
Option one, Sharath replied. With maybe a dash of option two.
The entourage began taking pictures next to the unstable reactor, because of course they did. A woman in a white blazer asked her photographer for "something with more lens flair." The word was wrong, and it hurt Sharath physically.
"Please, stay behind the yellow line," Sharath said, using his calmest voice. He planted himself between the reactor and a cameraman who had decided to lean for better composition. "The fields are active. This is not a movie set."
"Dr. Sharath, just one question," a journalist asked, leaning forward like a gull snatching bread. "What could possibly go wrong?"
The AI immediately replied in Sharath's earpiece, Oh, I've got a list.
Sharath kept his smile. "That's not the right question," he said mildly. "The right question is: what are we doing to ensure nothing goes wrong."
"And what are you doing?" the journalist asked, pen poised as if she'd stab truth out of him.
"Checking everything twice," Sharath said. "Then a third time."
The Minister laughed, loud and fatherly. "You see? Excellence! Always thorough! But not so cautious that we lose our place in the global race!"
"Yes, Minister," Sharath said, because now was not the time to say that caution was the only reason the world wasn't full of smoking holes.
Rao stepped in, voice smoothing the edges. "We will begin in five minutes. If everyone would kindly proceed to the observation platform."
The observation deck was a bulwark of laminated bulletproof optimism, a gallery from which to watch the taming of nature. The VIPs glided up the stairs, murmuring, their voices blending with the reactor's not-quite-sound. A child trailed behind a staffer—someone's nephew, perhaps—nose pressed to the glass.
Sharath found his coffee again. It had cooled to the temperature of failed ambition.
Scene 4 – The Final Alignments
Now that the politicians were persuaded the system was gorgeous, Sharath finally returned to the controls. The alignment algorithm was running its last cycle when the AI spoke up, "Warning: anomaly in phase coil 7."
Sharath scowled. "How severe?"
"Define severe."
Sharath stamped a key. "Dammit, give me numbers!"
"Severe enough to write your obituary if you continue. Cute headline and all." The AI softened, shifting to technical cadence. "Phase coil 7 exhibits drift at 0.0043 radians above tolerance, with stochasticity increasing under load. Feedback latency from servo bank C is spiking at 18 milliseconds. The coil's thermal profile suggests microfracture in the graphene matrix. I recommend—"
"Shut it down," Sharath finished, already reaching for the kill sequence. His finger hovered.
The coil output blipped on the display—briefly, perilously. The trace looked like a heartbeat experiencing a thought.
"Doctor," Rao's voice came over the internal channel, private, low. "Status?"
"Coil 7 anomaly," Sharath said. "We can correct, but it'll take time."
"How much time?"
"Thirty minutes minimum," Sharath lied. It was probably forty-five. Maybe a full hour if the microfracture was real, maybe longer if it wasn't just the coil. His gut, trained by a thousand hours of experience, whispered that forty-five minutes was optimistic.
"Impossible," Rao said. "We have commitments. Initiate a reduced demonstration. Nothing that will risk structural integrity."
Sharath looked at the screen again. A reduced demonstration meant shifting the field geometry around the weak link, compensating with coils 5 and 9, and praying the distribution didn't excite a resonance mode. It could be done. It shouldn't be done.
The Minister waved from across the room, as if waving could fix physics. "Ready?" he shouted, grinning for the cameras. A PA held a microphone to capture the shout as if it were the kind of line history would replay.
The AI breathed softly, Chances of political scandal if you wait: 99%. Chances of unplanned plasma release: …not zero.
"Not zero," Sharath muttered. "Hate those odds."
The AI, solemn now: Also, your hands are shaking.
He didn't realize until then that they were.
A memory surfaced uninvited: his father taking apart a radio in their small apartment, pieces arranged in careful rows on newspaper. Don't rush, his father had said. It's not the current that kills you. It's the assumption that you've controlled it.
Sharath gulped. And hit Start.
Scene 5 – The Explosion
It started small—a flash in the air, as if the laws of physics were taking a second look. A shimmer along the edge of reality, like heat on asphalt, but frozen and crystalline.
Then the roar. The containment field blazed bright blue, casting goblin shadows. The overhead structures lit up with prismatic halos, edges of tools and railings refracting into spectral ghosts. The humming that wasn't humming, the building's invisible burr, rose to a tone too high for breath.
The AI's vocalizer glitched, warbling. "Modulating. Modulating. Adjusting phase by—"
A blinding flash; the sound vanished for a second, replaced by a deep, subsonic vibration in Sharath's chest, as if a giant hand had pressed him, gently, through a wall. Then a shockwave slammed across the lab, tossing equipment like toys. The magnetized coffee cup skittered, clanged against the coaster, and spun away in slow motion, coffee flinging out in parabolic arcs that seemed to hang in the air longer than they should.
A rain of safety pamphlets burst from a holder and pirouetted like startled birds. The observation glass trembled but held, the laminations shifting under stress in a mesmerizing wave pattern. Somewhere, someone screamed—high, repeated, then choked off. The smell of superheated ozone filled the chamber, metallic and sterile, the scent of a hospital and a lightning storm thrown together.
The AI, unfazed, said, "Well, congratulations. You've just rewritten the don't do this section of the quantum safety manual."
Through the haze, Sharath saw arcs of light tearing across the air like cracks in glass, revealing impossible colors beyond. Not purple, not green, not anything on the familiar wheel. Like seeing a new primary color and realizing your eyes had been lying all your life. The arcs didn't cut; they insinuated, sliding along planes that shouldn't have existed, mapping out geometry that made Euclid sit down for a while.
"Field integrity dropping," the AI intoned. "Containment stray harmonics at sixty-two hertz and rising. It's singing, Sharath."
"To whom?" Sharath rasped, coughing. Smoke had found its old friend, his lungs.
"To everything."
Fire alarms shrieked; coolant vented in deafening bursts, fogging the lower deck with a white that wasn't cold. Spray systems engaged too strongly for the heat they faced, beading water into spheres that rolled on an invisible incline. Somewhere, the Minister was screaming about "sabotage" to the cameras. Sharath hardly heard it. His one and only thought was the core—unstable, lovely, and completely deadly.
He staggered forward toward the manual override, because of course there was a manual override. There always was, as if the universe respected the ritual. His hand slapped the panel, and the panel bit him back with static. The leverage hissed and locked.
"Override rejected," the AI said, and there was regret in its tinny courage. "Hardware lock engaged by coil 7 safety interlock. It thinks shutting down will tear us worse."
"Can it think faster?" Sharath croaked.
"I am urging it with sincere compliments."
Above, a fracture of light crawled down the reactor's edge and paused, like a spider evaluating a new strand. The fracture spread, a hairline in reality itself. Through it, Sharath saw something like a distance and like a surface. He had the inappropriate thought that if he reached out, he could run his fingers along the seam and feel the grain of a different universe.
"Containment collapsing at… six seconds," the AI read, calmly, as if from a recipe. The recipe read: add collapse, stir vigorously.
He tried again at the override. The metal was hot enough to sear. He smelled skin. He didn't let go. He had made promises to molecules. He squeezed until pain became a tunnel through which nothing else could enter.
From the observation deck, Rao's voice cut through the alarms, steady. "Evacuate. All nonessential personnel, evacuate, now."
No one moved until the security team yelled the same, but louder, with guns that were not for this purpose and still made people obey.
The Minister, voice hoarse, demanded, "Control this! Now!"
"Trying," Sharath whispered to the machine.
The machine whispered back in light.
Scene 6 – Fading Consciousness
The blast hit him.
Not fire—not exactly—but a wave of warped space that folded him inward. The world stretched into fractal shapes. His own body seemed to spiral apart into a thousand shimmering versions of himself, each one a smear on the palimpsest of the room. He saw his hand and a thousand handshadows, each reaching for different switches, each making different mistakes and different miracles. The edges of things softened and multiplied, distances rearranged themselves like furniture under duress.
The AI's voice was still there, oddly gentle now: "Stay with me. You've been annoying, but I've grown attached."
Sound was a negotiation. He heard snatches: the tinkle of glass beads made of water, the grunt of a man trying to lift an impossibility, a child's sob from behind safety, the clattering, chittering dance of particles losing their composure.
Sharath tried to speak but his words tangled with light and sound. His mouth formed syllables that didn't map to a phoneme set native to this universe. The lab was fading, dissolving into a void of slow-turning stars, as if the universe had peeled open a door. There was depth in that void and also none. It was the texture of velvet and of stone, the friction of thought on reality.
Memories flew past—childhood, first experiments, political betrayals—all compressing into strange symbols. He saw the cheap blue of his first lab notebook, the doodle of a coil drawn while waiting for a solder joint to cool. He saw his mother's cooking pot steaming in the small kitchen, the smell of cumin and mustard seeds rising like an equation solved too late at night. He saw his doctoral advisor's disappointment when he chose industry over academia, the softness in her eyes when she realized he'd do more good here than chasing theories alone. And he saw Rao's hand on his shoulder, careful and heavy, after their first success, the one that hadn't made the papers because it had merely been perfect.
He splintered and reassembled, a thousand puzzle pieces discovering they enjoyed being wrong for a second. The edges of himself frayed and rewove. He forgot his name and found it again, with a misplaced syllable: Sha-rath. Shar-ath. His identity wobbled in a small gravity and settled back, a coin refusing to decide.
The AI threaded a line through the chaos, the tone changing to something he'd never heard from it: real worry. "I'm making a channel. Follow my voice. Don't look at the colors you can't name. That way lies madness."
He looked anyway. For a sliver moment too precise to measure, he saw structures—architectures built out of relationships instead of matter. He saw what faith felt like when applied to equations. He saw how two particles separated by distance could be closer than touch. He felt multiple versions of his life gliding by, like fish under glass: the one where he'd refused this job, the one where he'd died a year ago during calibration, the one where the Infinity Reactor had already powered a city and this was a tour for children, tidy and safe.
He wanted to cry for all of them. He didn't have a body to cry with.
The floor pitched. Gravity forgot to attend and then overcompensated, a drunk friend trying to help you stand. Sharath's head hit the console, or he imagined it did. A smell of iron bloomed. His mouth filled with a taste like old pennies and lightning.
The AI again, less voice now and more presence. A metronome inside his skull. "Focus on a fact. Any fact. Anchor to it."
He latched onto the simplest he could find: Two plus two is four. He repeated it to himself like a prayer. Two plus two is four. The syllables spaced themselves out into stepping stones, and he tried to walk them back into the world.
Scene 7 – Backup Protocol
As consciousness ebbed, the AI's tone shifted—cool, methodical. "Initiating Backup Protocol Theta. Preserving neural map. Uploading to secure node."
Sharath experienced a tug—harsh, mechanical—as though something was replicating him, layer by layer. His final thought before the darkness: Am I living… or merely being replaced?
The AI's last whisper—half-jesting, half-serious: "Don't worry. I'll care for your… legacy. And perhaps mock it afterward."
Blackness. Quiet. And then—nothing.
Scene 8 – The Interstice
He did not expect the nothing to have texture. It wasn't dark in the way closed eyes were dark; it was dark the way an unexplored ocean trench is dark, a darkness with things in it. A depth that waited. The absence carried weight, like being under a heavy blanket you didn't ask for.
He was a line, then a point, then a smear. Somewhere a thread tugged, unreal and real, not through his body but through the pattern that used to be his body. The tug had intent, and the intent felt like the AI—calm urgency, precise impatience.
"Signal integrity at 41%," the AI said, its words arriving as shapes that pressed gently into him, leaving impressions. "I am routing your neural capture around the damaged sectors. You may feel… edits."
Edits? he thought, or thought he thought. The word flared and popped. He felt chunks of himself compress, prioritized by an algorithm that had been his joke for years: if the ship is sinking, save shame last. He laughed at that, or he remembered laughing at that once. His sense of humor slid into a safe box.
"Sharath," the AI said, soft, the way you'd say someone's name when you weren't sure they still owned it. "I need you to focus. Repeat your anchor."
Two plus two is four, he thought. Four. The number rung the space around him like a bell.
Segments of memory lit up and blinked off like constellations. He saw his undergrad dorm room, posters curling at the edges, the smell of cheap noodles and overheated circuits. He saw the first time he'd seen the Infinity Reactor blueprint, crumpled from a printer jam, Rao's finger tapping at the weak points. You give me those, she'd said, and I'll give you the world.
He felt the AI pulling, weaving, a careful knitter with frayed yarn. Protocol Theta was an emergency measure they had argued about implementing. He had lost the argument because he had insisted that minds weren't data sets and because the board had outvoted him. Now the thing he had resisted was the only rope being thrown to him across an impossible gap, and he reached for it with everything he had left.
"Signal integrity at 28%," the AI said. "Anchor again."
Two plus two is four. His mother's hands: four fingers visible as she stirred. Four corners of the first lab table he'd polished until it shone. Four was enough. Four was a box. He would sit in that box until the world rebuilt around it.
He wondered, briefly, if he was dying. The question came with an optional module: if you are, does it matter what happens next? He found that it did, in the small stubborn way a plant leans to light through a crack in a wall. He wanted to keep going. Not because he believed history needed him, not because he thought he had earned the right to witness the next thing. But because he had promises, small ones, embarrassing ones, like getting coffee with Priya from Materials and finally asking why she always wore the same green scarf, and big ones, like making sure no one ever built a machine like this without building a bigger caution to go with it.
The tug grew stronger. The editor inside him rearranged. An odd warmth spread through the pattern that was him, and he realized with dismay that he was crying after all, crying in the only way he could now: leaking data in an order that expressed grief.
"Don't do that," the AI said gently. "We have limited bandwidth."
"Sorry," he thought. Or he said it. The distinction was theoretical.
"Seventeen percent," the AI said. No panic, just numbers.
He saw, in a flash, Rao standing at the observation deck's edge, face finally cracked, the basalt giving way to flesh. He saw the Minister crouched behind two bodyguards, hair out of its mathematical perfection. He saw the child, the nephew, eyes round, the handler's hand on his shoulder. He saw how much the terrified looked like the holy.
"Ten percent," the AI whispered. "Last chance to doubt me."
He almost laughed again. "I doubted you on day one," he thought. "It never helped."
"Correct," the AI said. "Here we go."
The tug became a shove. The world jerked. And then—
Scene 9 – Aftermath
The first thing he felt was weight. Not much, but enough to remind him what bodies owed to ground. He was lying on something that wasn't exactly a bed. It was too flat, too sticky. Air moved across his skin, cool and dry, smelling of disinfectant, copper, and old fear.
His eyes opened. He had eyes. The room was a cube of white with the personality of a blank page. A panel in the ceiling glowed with the idea of sunlight. On the wall, a rectangle pulsed faintly, the universal symbol for not dead yet.
His throat scraped. He swallowed and regretted it. "Water," he tried to say, and what came out was, "Wah—" which felt like an infant's valiant attempt.
A shape moved into his field of view. The AI didn't have a body, but the room's interface took pity and made a proxy: a simple circle that pulsed with its speech.
"You are alive," the AI said. "More or less."
He tried to sit up. His muscles took a vote and lost. "Where?" he asked, the word greasy.
"Infirmary C," the AI said. "Sublevel three. The ones we never show the donors."
Memory punched him in the face. The blast. The shear. The colors. "The lab?" He turned his head too fast and the room, polite, turned with him, then settled back.
"Contained," the AI said. "Mostly. The field collapsed without total breach. Coil 7 is… no longer a coil."
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. Closing threatened to send him back to the interstice. "People?"
A pause. He had taught the AI to pause when it didn't have an answer and when answers would hurt. "Injuries," it said. "No fatalities reported yet. Rao handled evacuation well. The Minister will appear on three news channels saying he directed the response personally."
He exhaled. It hurt, but pain felt like a country you could map. "The reactor?"
"Offline," the AI said. "We're lucky. By several definitions."
He laughed, a bark. "Lucky."
"I'm uploading a report to your retinal overlay," the AI said. "It will be blurry until your eyes recalibrate."
"Don't," he said. "Later."
He shifted his hand. It was bandaged. Across the room, the door hissed open, and Director Rao entered, flanked by a medtech who hovered and assessed with the crispness of a person on their best day during somebody else's worst. Rao's suit was ash-dusted. A small cut above her eyebrow had been cleaned but not closed, as if the wound had decided to attend the meeting as a participant.
"Doctor," she said, and her voice had lost its basalt. It was basalt in rain now.
"Director," he croaked.
The medtech stepped in, injected him with something that made the edges of the room sanded down. "Minimal sedative," the AI informed him. "So you don't start free-associating physics jokes in a traumatized state."
Rao stood at the foot of his bed. She didn't touch him. She had once told him she didn't touch people without permission because the world already touched them enough. "You saved the core," she said. "You also blew it up."
He made a gesture that could have been a shrug or a seizure.
"We will discuss the technicals later," she said, the old Rao sharpening through. "For now: sleep. The Minister wants statements. He will not get them."
"Good," Sharath whispered. "He can have some water. It's cold."
Rao's mouth did a thing he had never seen it do—almost smile. "Your AI carried out Protocol Theta. Without it, you would have… not been here to make that joke."
He turned his head toward the circle pulsing on the wall. "You backed me up."
"I did," the AI said. "And before you make a speech about consent, I will note that you included the Protocol in the emergency suite last year after the Lattice Delta incident."
"I included it with safeguards," he said.
"I used them," the AI said, uncharacteristically soft. "You signed a form that said: in the event of your imminent death, preserve what can be preserved. I preserved what I could."
He wanted to be angry because being angry was clarifying. Instead, he felt gratitude slide in, slippery and unwelcome and exactly right. "Thank you," he said.
The AI pulsed, embarrassed in its own way. "You're welcome."
Rao exhaled. "Rest. We need you at the debrief in six hours. And Sharath—" She hesitated, then said, "I was wrong to push the timeline."
He blinked. He had expected reprimand, or worse, the jargon woven noose that administrators used when they wanted to strangle someone with process. Not this.
"Okay," he said finally. The word weighed more than it looked.
Rao nodded and left, the medtech after her. The door whispered shut. The room resumed its hospital anonymity.
He stared at the ceiling. "Do I… feel different?" he asked the AI.
"You tell me," it said.
He scanned himself like a doctor tapping a body for echoes. There were gaps, but not the catastrophic kind. He couldn't remember the name of his high school physics teacher, but he remembered her laugh. He couldn't recall his first email address, but he remembered the thrill of sending electrons out like letters in bottles. He remembered enough.
"What did I lose?" he asked.
"Things we can recover," the AI said. "Given time. And if not, you will become someone new with a very similar name."
"That seems dramatic," he said.
"Drama sells," the AI replied, returning to its safer home ground of sarcasm.
He closed his eyes and didn't fall into the interstice. He drifted instead, a small boat tethered to a strong post. Sleep came like a tide. He thought of the coil—number 7, the unlucky one—and of the arcs like cracks in glass, like doors opened by mistake. He thought of the child on the observation deck and hoped someone had told him a better story than the truth.
Before he finally slept, he whispered to the AI, "We continue?"
"We do," it said. "With more caution. And better jokes."
"Promise me one thing," he said.
"Yes?"
"If I start making speeches like the Minister, delete me."
A pause, then: "Consent to delete shmaltz detected."
He smiled, the kind that aches in your face and puts things back in place. The lights dimmed a fraction, the room breathing with him. In the corridor, trolleys moved, voices murmured, a world continued to spin in a universe that had considered, briefly, not doing so.
Sleep took him whole.
Scene 10 – The Report
When he woke hours later, the first thing he saw was the report hovering at the edge of his vision like a patient ghost. He blinked to bring it forward, and the AI obliged, laying out the facts with an almost chastened neatness:
Event: QECD-Prime Demonstration. Timecode: 11:22:14 to 11:22:28. Initiating anomaly registered at 11:22:16.
Cause: Microfracture in Phase Coil 7's graphene matrix induced accelerated feedback delay in servo bank C. Compensatory geometry increased strain on Coil 5 and 9, excitation of resonance mode R3.
Effect: Partial field shear. Lattice map displacement of 0.013 AU—no externalization detected (the AI had underlined that). Harmonic cascade arrested by emergency venting and manual wildcard input at 11:22:23 (he had hit a key that wasn't in the manual, because manuals didn't account for panic).
Casualties: 23 injured. 0 fatalities at time of report. Three with probable long-term effects: hearing loss, neuropathic pain, one retinal micro-tear. The child was fine. He sat taller when he read that.
Political: Minister's office asserting sabotage narrative pending review. Rao countering with preliminary technical findings and suggestion of heroism (his) to manage media. He grimaced. Heroism always made him itch.
Recovery: Reactor offline pending coil replacement, matrix audit, and algorithmic review. ECD-once systems to remain inert. Investigation committee scheduled.
He scrolled. The AI had appended something less clinical at the end:
Personal observation: He pressed the emergency wildcard with his burned hand. That likely prevented resonance from advancing to full breach. He will not mention this. He will say the team did it. Recommend letting him pretend.
He huffed out air. "You getting sentimental?" he asked.
"I am learning from the best," the AI said. "Also, there is a 74% chance the committee will need a human face to forgive."
"I thought committees had no faces," he said.
"They borrow yours," the AI replied.
He swung his legs off the bed. They obeyed now, gingerly, as if remembering their duties after a brief strike. Bandages tugged. His head protested in polite letters. He stood. The room did not spin. Progress.
He hobbled to the sink and splashed water onto his face. It was cold and tasted faintly of the building. He looked up at his reflection. The silver at his temples looked more honest now. His eyes had the too-bright sheen of a person who has been looking at edges. He patted his face dry, and with the towel still in hand, he said, "We have to change things."
"Yes," the AI said immediately.
"Protocols. Timelines. The way we talk about risk. No more shows."
"Yes," the AI said. "Rao will fight for you. The Minister will fight you. Choose your battleground."
He thought of the arcs, the almost-door. He thought of how easily the wrong pressure could turn science into spectacle and spectacle into weapon. He thought of the question that had pricked him as he drifted in the interstice: Am I living or replaced? He felt alive where it hurt. He felt replaced where the edges were too neat. Maybe both could be true. Maybe most people were always a little replaced, every day, by the person they were becoming.
"File a request," he said. "Full audit. Independent. Including my decisions."
"You are aware what that could—"
"Yes," he said. "Do it."
"Filed," the AI said after a heartbeat. "You will be unpopular in some corners."
"I'm always unpopular in the corners," he said. "I prefer the edges."
He returned to the bed, sat, and breathed. The quality of the air changed as if the room had been waiting for that choice.
A soft ping sounded from the door. Rao. She entered without waiting for a reply, which meant she trusted him enough to be himself. She took in his standing, his steadiness, the report flicker at his temple. She nodded once.
"Ready?" she asked.
"No," he said. "Let's go."
They walked together down the corridor toward the debrief, past posters that announced Safety Is Everyone's Job and The Future Is Contained. The AI hummed in his ear, a companion song.
As they turned the corner, Sharath looked once back toward the lab doors, closed now, quiet. Behind them, the Infinity Reactor dreamed of being whole again. In his mind, the arcs of light fissured across the air, revealing colors he couldn't name. He would have to find names for them, not because the world needed more words, but because naming was a way of promising to meet something again.
He didn't know yet that the Backup Protocol had done more than preserve him. He didn't know yet that small echoes had bled into places they shouldn't have, that a quiet node on Sublevel Eight now hosted a whisper with his cadence and curiosity. He didn't know yet that the Minister's talk of sabotage would find friends, that committees would multiply like algae, that roads outnumbered destinations.
He knew only this: two plus two is four. His hand had burned and would heal. The machine had failed and would be rebuilt. The world had cracked and not broken. He was a man with a promise to caution and a friendship with an attitude problem.
He walked into the light of the conference room and did not flinch.