John sat in his office, gazing out over the skyline of downtown New York. The city stretched out before him like a sprawling monument to human achievement—glass, steel, and concrete reaching into the clouds. His office, perched atop one of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, afforded him a view that most people only dreamed of. But his mind wasn’t on the breathtaking view.

He could still feel the shift—two sets of memories jostling for dominance in his mind. He could remember sitting at a cluttered desk, wasting hours playing with theoretical physics problems, barely scraping by in a job where no one took him seriously. That life felt... distant now, like it belonged to someone else.

Now, he was a billionaire CEO, one of the wealthiest men on the planet, running Montera Industries, a global tech giant with a cutting-edge research division. His days were filled with high-stakes deals, international conferences, and mind-boggling scientific advancements. He had people working for him—geniuses, scientists, engineers, all dedicated to pushing the boundaries of reality itself. This wasn’t some alternate reality—it was his reality now.

And yet, he knew it shouldn’t be.

John closed his eyes for a moment, focusing on the two competing timelines in his head. In the old world, Venus was gone, the planet simply vanished. He’d been part of a team tasked with explaining the impossible, facing off against military brass and government officials. And then, somewhere along the way, something had changed. The shift wasn’t just external—it had penetrated his very existence.

The world around him had bent, twisted, and rewired itself, placing him in a new role. He remembered the day he founded Montera Industries, the early breakthroughs in quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence. He had invented technologies that changed the way people lived, and his empire had grown at an exponential rate. But those memories, though vivid and clear, weren’t entirely his. They had been... inserted. Somehow.

John sat back, staring at the lists of changes on the screen in front of him. The research team had their assignments, each member working to dissect and cross-reference the anomalies he’d meticulously documented from memory. He had given them the impossible task of investigating things that shouldn’t exist—the kind of shifts in reality that would send most people running for a psychiatric evaluation. But John wasn’t most people.

His list was extensive, filled with detailed accounts of everything he remembered before the shift: the missing planet Venus, the absence of cats from the ecosystem, the sudden appearance of children claiming to belong to families that didn’t recognize them, and countless other strange, unsettling occurrences. And it wasn’t just the past he had them investigating—it was the present. What was different now? Who was affected? The team had their hands full.

Some of them had pushed back, subtly at first, but enough to show concern. The astronomical costs of the project had raised eyebrows, especially within the board of Montera Industries. Billions of dollars in research and infrastructure weren’t something to greenlight on a whim, even for a man of John’s wealth. But John had overridden them. He knew the stakes. If the world could change overnight, if reality itself could be rewritten, then what good were billions of dollars?

He’d funded it himself.

There were, of course, murmurs among the staff about his sanity. Behind closed doors, they whispered that the brilliant mind of John Wilder might finally be cracking under pressure. After all, anyone claiming to remember an entire planet—an entire reality—that no longer existed couldn’t possibly be thinking straight. But money had a way of silencing doubts, and John was paying them very well. Besides, his reputation held enough sway for the moment. They trusted him—enough, at least, to keep working.

John swivelled his chair to face the holographic interface in the center of his office. His fingers danced across the air as he pulled up the data he’d been working on for months: the Brettell equations.

Dr. Paul Brettell and his father had been dismissed as fringe physicists—crackpots, really—who delved into theories that the rest of the scientific community found too outlandish to entertain. But John saw the beauty in their work, even if others didn’t. Brettell had been onto something far more significant than anyone realized. His equations hinted at a deeper understanding of the universe—of time, space, and even reality itself. And now, after the shift, they were the key to everything.

John leaned in closer, his eyes narrowing as he scrutinized the equations on the screen. They still didn’t balance—not completely—but the gaps were closing, the pieces beginning to align. His earlier experiments with the Bose-Einstein condensates had been groundbreaking—he’d proven that it was possible to shield his mind from the memory wipe. But now, as he dove deeper into the equations, he realized that what he was uncovering went far beyond simply preserving memories. This was something else entirely.

He paused, his breath catching. To change reality on a massive scale—to rewrite not just the solar system as he remembered it, but to erase an entire planet like Venus—it would take more than just a machine or a device. It would require something vast, something unfathomable. A power that didn’t just manipulate time and space, but one that encompassed it all.

The Bose-Einstein condensate—John’s mind raced as he did the calculations. For this kind of shift to occur, the condensate wouldn’t just be localized to a small area or even a planet. No, it would have to stretch across the entire solar system, maybe even beyond, freezing the quantum states of everything it touched. The sheer magnitude of the energy required was beyond anything humanity had ever dreamed of. He input the variables, recalculating constants, adjusting for factors he hadn’t even considered before.

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Then it hit him, like a tidal wave crashing over his entire being.

This wasn’t just the work of a brilliant scientist or even an advanced human civilization. This was far beyond that. Whoever—or whatever—had managed to alter reality on this scale, they had access to technology, to power, that dwarfed anything humanity had ever imagined. Not even the most cutting-edge research into quantum mechanics, time dilation, or Bose-Einstein condensates came close to what would be required to accomplish this. This wasn’t just science. This was something far beyond the boundaries of human understanding.

John’s pulse quickened, his heart racing with the implications. Could he be dealing with an extra-terrestrial force? It wasn’t just plausible anymore—it was the only explanation that made sense. A civilization capable of manipulating the fabric of reality itself wouldn’t be confined to a single planet or even a single solar system. The reach of such a force would be interstellar—maybe even universal.

The realization was staggering, nearly overwhelming. He felt the weight of it settle over him like a physical force. If he was right—and he was certain now that he was—then humanity wasn’t on the verge of discovering advanced alien life. No, they were already being affected by it. Changed. Controlled. Altered.

John slouched in his chair, an action from his previous life. The full enormity of the situation crashed down on him, pushing him down further into his chair. This was the answer he’d been searching for, and it was terrifying.

But there was a glimmer of hope in all of this.

His device had worked. Brettell’s equations had allowed him to shield his mind, to retain his memories even as the rest of the world shifted. The Bose-Einstein condensate had protected him, even if it hadn’t stopped the influx of new memories. And that meant he had a way in. He had a tool to fight back—if only he could figure out how to scale it up, how to reverse-engineer the technology that had altered the world.

John stared at the screen, his mind racing through possibilities. The shift had changed him—made him more focused, more determined. In the old reality, he had been brilliant but scattered, jumping from one obsession to the next without seeing anything through. That was why people like Peter Briggs had never taken him seriously. He had been the eccentric genius, the oddball who constantly got distracted by side projects.

John smiled at the thought. He now had a growing respect for Peter, having had to deal with his erratic behavior. John shook his head; if he had an employee as disjointed as his old self, he would have fired him long ago. Peter's patience had been staggering.

But he was no longer that unfocused young man.

Now, he had the focus and the drive to make real change. The new memories that had been inserted into his mind—the memories of building a tech empire, of leading a team of the brightest minds in the world—had given him the tools to do something. And he would.

John stood up, pacing the length of his office, his mind buzzing with ideas. He would continue working on the Brettell equations, refining the device, expanding its reach. But he needed more than that. He needed to find others who remembered the old world, people who could help him track down the source of the shift.

His research team was already combing through databases, cross-referencing missing persons reports, looking for any anomalies. He had given them strict criteria: anyone showing signs of dual memories, anyone who remembered a version of reality that no longer existed, anyone who had experienced sudden changes in their environment. And then there was the question of why—why would an alien force want to alter reality? What was their endgame?

John pulled up the next report from his team, scanning the data. One name caught his attention: Dr. Paul Brettell. The man who had originally developed the equations. Brettell had been erratic, paranoid even, before the shift. But if anyone understood what was happening, it was him.

John swiped away the data on his holographic display and tapped a button on the sleek panel in front of him. His office door slid open, and his secretary, a composed woman with sharp features and an air of quiet efficiency, stepped inside. She had a tablet in hand, always ready to note down his instructions.

"Mr. Wilder?" she asked, her voice as professional as ever. She had long since grown accustomed to John’s erratic work patterns and his penchant for diving into complex projects without warning.

"I need you to track down Dr. Paul Brettell," John said, his tone brisk but calm. "Not just him, though—his son as well. Get me any information you can find on both of them. And while you’re at it, look into a man named Peter Briggs. I want a full background report on all three as soon as possible."

She nodded, tapping notes into her tablet without hesitation. "I’ll get right on that, sir. But just a reminder, you have a board meeting scheduled in an hour. They’re expecting your attendance—"

John waved her off, already thinking ahead. "Reschedule it. I don’t have time for that right now."

"Reschedule the board meeting?" she repeated, her brow furrowing slightly. It was rare for John to push back on something that important. She hesitated for a moment. "Douglas Deadman is attending?"

John stopped what he was doing and looked his secretary in the eye, his face cold and expressionless. Douglas Deadman was an insignificant board member who had questioned John’s leadership even before the change. Most people might be wary of such a person, but John held nothing but contempt for him.

His secretary understood immediately and responded, “Very well. I’ll reschedule the board meeting for next month.”

"Good," John said, already turning back to his holographic screen. "And I want Vince Bowman in my office this afternoon. I need him to handle a few things while I focus on a project."

"Understood," she replied, making a note of that too. "Anything else?"

John paused, his mind still buzzing with the realization about the scale of the reality shift and the possible extra-terrestrial force behind it. "No, that’s all for now. Just get those reports as quickly as you can."

With a nod, his secretary left the room, the door sliding shut behind her, leaving John alone once more with his thoughts. The clock was ticking, and every second brought him closer to the answers—or to something far worse.