The university should have been asleep by now.
Only the old sodium lamps in the corridor were awake—buzzing like insects dying in slow motion. Their orange light poured through the glass panels and spilled across the floor in thin rectangles that looked like warning signs.
I slipped past the security camera the way I'd practiced on video—mask tilted just enough to break facial recognition. Dad's old keycard trembled in my hand. It shouldn't have worked; he'd been gone three years. But when I slid it across the reader, the lock clicked green.
The smell hit me first.
Old electricity. Ozone. And something faintly metallic, like rain on copper.
Dad's lab was exactly as I remembered—half museum, half grave.
Stacks of notebooks, each one crammed with scrawled equations that looked like alien constellations. The chalkboard, still bearing the phrase he'd written the week before the explosion:
> "Reality hums if you listen close enough."
I stood there, staring at those words.
Every night since the funeral, they'd echoed in my head.
Most people said my father died chasing a fantasy—some "resonance" energy no one could reproduce. But I'd seen his data files, half-encrypted, full of pulse graphs and field signatures that shouldn't exist. The day before he vanished, he'd left me a message—just three words:
> "Find the frequency."
So that's what I was doing.
The lab clock ticked like a heartbeat as I powered up the console. Old monitors flickered, revealing code written in languages no current compiler could read. On the central table rested the device itself: a lattice of rings and glass panels surrounding a small spherical core. The Quantum Resonance Transmitter—Dad's final obsession.
It was smaller than I'd imagined.
Smaller, but humming—quietly, like it was breathing.
I brushed a finger across the glass and it glowed faint blue.
A soft tone filled the room, barely audible but sharp enough to make my teeth ache. The monitors began syncing on their own. Numbers spilled across them like they'd been waiting for this moment.
> Frequency Alignment… Incomplete
Signal Source… Unknown
Power Level… 5%
I swallowed. "Come on," I whispered.
The machine pulsed again. I could almost feel the air vibrating.
Something about that sound pulled me in. It wasn't random. It was rhythmic—like a voice trying to speak through static. I remembered sitting on Dad's lap as a kid, him showing me how sound waves looked like mountains. "Every mountain hides a valley," he'd said. "And every valley hides a door."
Maybe this was the door.
I opened his old journal. The final entry read:
> Phase sequence 137 active. Requires dual input resonance to stabilize. Do not attempt single activation.
Too late for that.
I adjusted the control dials, aligning the amplitude markers to the numbers circled in red ink. The hum deepened, now thrumming through the metal floor. The computer protested with a string of warnings—thermal overload, feedback risk, containment error—but I ignored them all.
Then I saw it.
In the reflection of the glass, behind me—something flickered. A shape that wasn't mine.
I turned fast—nothing.
Just the lab's dark corners and the quiet hum of circuits.
Still, the temperature had dropped.
My breath fogged.
I gripped the main control lever. One push, and the transmitter would fully engage. My pulse hammered so loud I could hear it over the hum. I thought about Mom upstairs, asleep, thinking I'd stopped chasing ghosts.
If this worked… I'd prove Dad wasn't insane.
If it failed… well, I'd just add another ghost to the family.
I tightened my jaw.
"Find the frequency," I said. "I'm trying, Dad."
My hand hovered over the switch—
—and the lights cut out.
Total darkness.
For half a second, I heard it again—that whisper inside the static. Not in my ears this time, but in my head.
> "Aarav… don't."
I froze. My name. Clear as breath.
Then the hum surged, violent now, shaking the lab like a quake. Sparks leapt from the panels, dancing in mid-air before vanishing. The machine's core began to rotate on its own, the rings spinning faster, blurring into a single halo of light.
Every instinct screamed to stop.
But my hand was already on the lever.
I pulled.
And the world roared.