Chapter 84: Warped

I flicked a glance behind me, worried, for one horrible instant, that I wouldn’t see anyone else. The rest of the team remained right behind me, though.

Lena had just said something that got Donica glaring at her, and was enjoying the reaction. That left only Zhizhi looking my way. Her eyes narrowed when she saw my expression.

I turned ahead and lowered my voice. “Erin, could you run the tape and see how many aisles we passed on the way back?”

Erin’s voice crackled in my headset. “Do you think you overshot?”

Since we were all in a group call, I don’t know why I imagined I could keep my worries to myself.

“Check it, okay,” I said.

While she did, I waved my light over the wall ahead. Another five aisles of nothing, then a door frame. Maybe we really had just overshot.

“That’s weird,” Erin said. “Really weird.”

All of a sudden, Donica was paying Lena no mind. She surged forward and got in my face. “What’s weird?”

I had no answer, so it was a good thing Erin provided one. “It looks as though you passed more aisles on the way back. I don’t mean you overshot. There seem to have been more in total. Your prints were even present in one but missing from the next.”

Donica’s eyes flashed. “What the hell does that mean?”

It meant we couldn’t trust our sense of space, for one. That would’ve been true if the aisles just seemed wider coming back than they had going forward. If new ones were actually appearing, though, that seemed like more than just warped space, it was like the environment was actually transforming around us.

I imagined us walking past row after row of shelves forever, never reaching the door we came through. Even the one I could see at the edge of the light would remain just as far no matter how long we walked toward it, or would turn out to be one of those fake doors like in the hallways. Even if we ran, it wouldn’t help.

Was there even a way out? Or had we stumbled into some kind of closed space, completely separate from the outside world?

I noticed Donica staring at my face. My horror reflected in hers.

For some reason, realizing I was making it worse for her made it easier to calm myself down.

“I’m sure there’s some kind of way out,” I said. “We’ve passed doors on the way back.”

“You’re sure? Why would you even bring that up as a question?” Her phone’s light flicked around wildly, and even the light clipped to her safety vest made weird shadows on the walls around us.

“There’s certainly a way out,” Erin said calmly.

Donica sucked in a breath.

Lena and Zhizhi caught up to us.

“How do you figure?” the former asked.

“Several reasons, in fact,” Erin said. “What we’re seeing is obviously – I’m going to say supernatural, but I’m still prepared to accept there’s some scientific explanation we just don’t yet understand. Perhaps something to do with spaces overlapping in four-dimensional geometry?”

“What does that even mean?” Zhizhi asked.

Erin chuckled. “It means I read more cheesy science fiction than I do fantasy.”

“Hah!” Zhizhi glanced down the nearest aisle. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re convinced we’re not trapped in here.”

“Perhaps one of you should try the door you can see,” Miguel said.

“Good call.” Lena trotted forward. I kept pace with her, and heard the other two sticking close behind me.

“I’m confident because your signal is coming through,” Erin said. “Clearly, you still have a connection to us out here, and to the cellular network. Despite the dropped frames, there doesn’t even seem to be all that much interference.”

“Which is all fine and well,” Donica said, “but we’re not exactly traveling at the speed of light.”

We were, at least, traveling a lot faster than we had been. We could see the doorframe clearly through the gloom, now. When I pointed my phone at it, the handle gleamed invitingly through Third Eye.

“For another thing,” Erin continued, “it’s extremely likely you and Cam experienced the same thing last time and just didn’t notice it. As unpleasant as that experience was for you, you got through it just fine. In fact, manipulating this weird space may actually be the way to open the elevator doors.”

I hesitated just before I reached the doorframe.

Open the elevator doors. Which we wanted to do. Of course. That was part of what we’d come back here to try to accomplish, right?

It should’ve been easy to dwell on what could go wrong if we had, but Erin and Miguel’s calm voices in my ear made my catastrophizing feel as absurd as I knew it was.

Lena pushed on the door.

It swung open.

None of us exhaled, but I knew we all wanted to.

“Same shop we came in through,” Lena said. This time, she held it open instead of dashing through. No more breaking line of sight.

“How many aisles was that, total?” I asked.

“I counted twenty two going in, twenty eight on the way out,” Erin said.

“It looked the same to me,” Miguel said.

I shook my head. “Bizarre.”

Weird, frightening, but as with our last trip, it didn’t seem to have harmed us. Perhaps there was a path up and down the aisles that could leave someone hopelessly stranded, but this sure hadn’t been it.

As long as the elevator hadn’t opened.

Or as long as we got a good look inside and it turned out to be just a weird elevator, and the way it made my stomach churn reflected another spatial oddity. Just four-dimensional geometry. Basically harmless.

We pushed through the swinging door together and rounded the now empty – in or out of Third Eye – display table.

Stolen novel; please report.

I could see the elevator doors from inside the shop.

All three sets remained closed.

“The discontinuities seem to be dropping as you get further out,” Erin said.

“Let’s talk about it outside,” I said.

Lena glanced at me. “We’re coming back in, though, right?”

“Sure.” I forced a smile.

Lena reached over her shoulder and scratched Bernie’s neck. “Can you believe this scaredy-cat? We’re seeing all this weird shit, and you just know it’s gonna get better if we go deeper. I’m still hoping to get you a little brother with spacetime powers.”

I wasn’t sure how to interpret Bernie’s gurgle, and Lena didn’t seem to be, either, because she forced her grin wider instead of letting it remain natural.

“We still have yet to see anything that represents a clear danger,” Erin said.

“We’ve hardly seen anything at all,” Zhizhi said. “Although I guess those aisles will show up on my footage, at least. Of course, if I try to show them off, people will just say it’s a camera trick.”

“Look on the bright side,” Lena said. “They’ll think you’re a good editor.”

“Which helps me right up until they find out I’m kinda shit at it,” Zhizhi said.

Donica clenched her phone so hard I thought she might crack it. I supposed it had better build quality than mine or Lena’s. “Can we just get out already?”

Lena sighed. “Fiiine.”

And we could! We walked across the lobby just like you would in a normal building, and Erin said, “I’m not seeing any frames dropped at all now,” even when we passed the elevator doors, and we reached the front door, and we saw Miguel waving at us from where he leaned against the Yukon’s hood.

I pushed the door open, held it, waved back to him.

We piled out of the construction site.

A wave of cold hit my face. Then Lena was at my side and I hardly felt it. She didn’t have an immediate solution to the slush of snow and gravel we had to stomp through to reach the vehicle, though I thought it melted faster at her feet than anyone else’s.

Miguel clapped both of us on the shoulders. “Congratulations on a successful expedition.”

“Eh,” Lena said. “Save it for when we find something cooler.”

Erin joined us in the snow. “Oh, but this is already so cool! I thought it was just spatial distortion, but if it’s adding whole artificial structures in ordered patterns, I think that must be tied into the same mechanism by which the game manifests objects.”

We all looked at her.

She smiled sheepishly and pushed up her glasses. “Admittedly, I have no clue what that might be.”

“At least we have some data to start figuring it out,” Donica said. She and Zhizhi trudged up beside us. They tilted away from Miguel’s open arms, and he shrugged and lit up another cigarette.

“The next step will be to figure out how it ties into lost time.” Erin seemed to be talking as much to herself as to us. “When I thought it was just compression, I wondered if perhaps there was some sort of trade-off. The more expansive the space, the more compressed the time? But it’s probably not that simple.”

“That’s simple?” Zhizhi said.

“It’s technobabble 101,” Lena said. “You gotta call it a space-time anomaly, though.”

“I’ll remember that for next time,” Erin murmured. “Unless we figure out what it actually is, at least.”

Lena gave her a thumbs up. Her eyes widened and she turned to me. “You think it’ll work in reverse? Like, we compress the space and get a haste spell out of it?”

When we played games that had time manipulation magic, she was always trying to wheedle extra turns out of the system.

“It would be pretty sweet,” I said. “Of course, right now, we don’t know if we’ll be able to do any of this. We’ve only got circumstantial evidence it’s a Third Eye effect, much less a power we can wield.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but you just know it’s gonna turn out that way.”

“I think it is,” I said.

“Maybe it works on the power of belief! We should try to believe it is extra hard, just in case. So we can cast haste?”

“You know,” I said, “in some games, casting haste unnaturally ages the user.”

Lena frowned. She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Still worth.”

I thought about ways we could use the effect, even if all we could do was map it rather than generate it ourselves. Big project coming up tomorrow? Find a patch where you get extra time. Appointment you’re nervous about? Pop into a space like the warehouse where more time passes outside.

Hell, what if you were waiting for an organ transplant or something? Doubling the amount of time that passed in the outside world relative to what you experienced might save your life.

I imagined a hospital built in with Erin’s four-dimensional geometry, where patients never had to experience a wait for care and triage units could treat critical injuries after subjective hours. Even days!

Then I imagined how much such a hospital would charge.

Fingers crossed we’d just learn healing spells, instead.

“The first step,” Erin said, “is to figure out just how time is changing for you. Assuming that really is what’s happening, and it’s not altering your perception.”

“Nothing else seems to be,” I said.

She lowered her eyes. “I’m just trying to be thorough.”

“Which is the right call.” I checked my phone. “Compare times?”

We did, but they matched and Erin shook her head. “I don’t think that will help. As long as your phone has a connection, it will try to synchronize with an atomic clock. I don’t suppose anyone has a watch?”

I shook my head. I knew Lena didn’t wear one, either. She’d owned an Evangelion-branded one when she moved, but she Ebayed it for half the price of her current video card. Even then, she’d left it in its case.

Donica and Zhizhi didn’t wear one, either. I figured Miguel was our best hope. It seemed like the kind of affectation he might go for.

Nope. He gave a sad tap of his cigarette. “I fear they are a rare commodity.”

“Hm.” Erin pressed her fingers together. “Oh! I don’t know if he can make it over tonight, but I know someone who has one.”

She took her phone out and tapped to Discord.

I followed along.

NugsFan15: @CannibalHalfling, do you still have your pocket watch?

CannibalHalfling: You want to measure the amount of time the team is losing on that construction site?

NugsFan15: Mmhm.

CannibalHalfling: Does that strike you as the best response to learning that time is being lost?

I started to scroll up the chat window. It looked like CannibalHalfling had posted more tonight than in the entire time Lena and I had been members of Erin’s server. The conversation moved too fast, though, dragging my window down to the new messages.

NugsFan15: It hasn’t seemed harmful. Surely we should measure it as best we can. Do you think counting the dropped frames is enough?

ShakeProtocol: It’s not precise. We have to compensate for actual interference and slowdown on the devices, and the video is only recording at 30fps to begin with.

Ashbird: Gross. Give me 60fps or give me death!

I glanced at Lena. She raised her eyebrows. “Tell me I’m wrong?”

I couldn’t. A lot of games at lower frame rates gave me nausea.

NugsFan15: There you have it.

CannibalHalfling: That I do.

A pause.

CannibalHalfling: It will take me about twenty minutes to get to you.

NugsFan15: Thanks!

ShakeProtocol: In the meantime, I’ll process the video files we already have.

NugsFan15: Thanks to you, too, of course.

ShakeProtocol: My pleasure.

Erin sent a smiling emoji in response and smiled up at me.

I nodded to her. Getting a watch to help us collect data would be cool. Better, we could meet the mysterious CannibalHalfling.

Donica, who seemed to know him already, looked less enthused. But then, “unenthused” seemed to be her default state when she wasn’t forcing herself to return to a construction site that terrified her.

“So.” Zhizhi set her camera on the Yukon’s hood and blew on her fingers. “What are we supposed to do for twenty minutes?”

“We could check a couple more of those little shops,” Lena said.

“Or,” Donica said, “we could wait out here.”

And hope CannibalHalfling persuades us not to go back in, I wondered?

“It should be fine to do short jaunts into the shops,” I said. “It’s okay if you need a break, Donica. Lena, Zhizhi and I can go. We’ll be in and out before anything can get too weird. If we find a Reactant, we’ll save it for you.”

Erin and Zhizhi nodded along.

Donica, on the other hand, kept frowning. Miguel took a long, disapproving drag.

And to my surprise, Lena looked aghast.