Splashing one’s face with cold water wasn’t the most pleasant way to wake up, but it was among the quickest. Richie turned the creaking handles to the off position with a bit more wrist torque than the rusty damn things should have required. The overhead droning lights of the public washroom in one of the city's many isolated green parks was irritating to his tired eyes, but that was fine. Whatever thickened a clear divide between fantasy and reality was welcome by Richie’s book. He wasn’t even sure anymore. Maybe he’d gone crazy, that was a distinct possibility. Who would he go to? Who could he go to? Images of locked wards and padded white rooms flashed through his mind, offering the same devil’s temptation his stay in the jailhouse had - three hots and a cot, for the low admission price of your freedom, even whether or not to have antipsychotics jammed down your delusional throat. Was that a better or worse offer than continually risking brushing hips with the supernatural residents of that abandoned complex? If indeed there even were any supernatural residents, and it was not the aforementioned distinct possibility of psychosis. That was the real gamble, wasn’t it? If Richie was just crazy, then the hallucinations couldn’t actually touch him, and he could cope with the stress of seeing them once he’d settled into his new home and acclimated to running his own foodstock eventually. He lost nothing but a few nights’ peace of mind that way. If he turned himself in off the streets under the full admission that he had gone paranoid schizophrenic, they’d lock him up and dope him up into a mindless stupor for the rest of his life, or worse, it would further cast him in suspicious light in connection with the murders he’d already been dropped charges of. Why rush back into that hornets’ nest? The big risk though was the off-chance that he wasn’t crazy at all, and that the things he’d seen were both very real, and very dangerous. They knew him now, they would recognize him by scent. For all Richie knew, they might already be looking for him. He was all but sure the clawed serial killer was.
Competition. If that slash-happy psychopath, whoever he was, was one of these contestants, Richie didn’t feel great about his odds of victory. Not that he would have played, had the choice been his. He had his mysterious cloaked benefactor to thank for that honor.
Trudging out of the washroom onto the green sloping hill of the park, he looked out over the valley-nestled thicket of trees to the crowded city skyline outside the reserve gate. Tall chrome spires pierced the sky, like the teeth of some futuristic mechanized metropolis biting into the atmosphere that once blanketed the world that birthed them. He felt uneasy, looking at them, like mankind was somehow meddling with something they didn’t understand. And it wasn’t greenhouse gasses, or genetic engineering that would be the cause of the planet’s inevitable downfall. No, somehow, a thousand instances of fire and brimstone sermons flashed through his mind, of the fatal flaw of man’s hubris and overreach into the stars beyond their comprehension. Richie stumbled, unaware of where this sudden mordant sentiment had come from. As of the dragons tugging him into the tunnels, and of his speaking on instinct to a shadowy figure he had no business doing anything but running from, he wasn’t sure if even his will was his own anymore.
“Yep, I’m absolutely going crazy, that’s the only explanation.” Richie hung his head, sighing.
His skin crawled for some reason, as if he were under the gaze of some ill-intentioned spectator, hidden somewhere in the vast unknown. He looked up, and thought he might have pinpointed the subconscious source of his brief lapse into self-deprecation of human arrogance. Between two equal and opposite towers, acting like a bridge between them, a giant globe was melded into the corners at top and bottom, looking like a huge disco ball that blindingly reflected the sun in harsh spears of light that nearly bored right through pupils. Neither of the towers, cylindrical Richie now saw rather than the rectangular norm he had expected to see, had any visible windows upon them either. The tri-part building was unmarked, and though Richie had not been in the city long, he chillingly could not recall having seen such a distinct and ominous-looking building as this at any point since arrival. It was like it was just there one day, and no one exactly knew why.
He stared at it for a good long while, the way dogs stare at doors behind which they sense the tread of a would-be home invader. He almost felt like giving a low growl.
Had he seen this out of place building in his peripheral vision, and stoked his inner god-fearing prophet for its intrusion into his headspace?
“What the?” Richie blinked, drawn out of his protracted glare at the strange building as his peripheral caught another disturbance, this time one that could pass itself off as being a product of mother nature - an eerie fog bank clinging to the streets, sifting through the alleyways and spaces between buildings, and congregating somewhere obscured by the woods between Richie’s viewing place and its destination. Another sinking feeling in Richie’s gut though told him that this was no child of Earth. The fog blew against the wind, and writhed and pulsed like a tendriled blobby creature, its filaments grasping and seeking things to touch and taste.
-
Richie had no way of knowing that at the same time he had locked eyes with the globe-like structure between the towers, someone on the other side of that wall had looked his way as well. There were no viewing ports between them, and the woman in the lab coat and virtual reality assistance goggles had no cue but instinct either to look that way, seeming to stare right through the wall. Neither of them would ever find out they shared a sixth sense eye contact with each other. Shaking the strange feeling, the woman returned to her work about the omnidirectional interactive computer screen that was the interior of the whole globe, save for the floor from which rose a podium-like fixture on an extendible crane. There was a chair at either branch of this structure, and upon them sat the woman and her coworker, identical in uniform and appearance save for a bob cut where the first woman wore her hair long. They furiously pounded at keyboards in an advanced coding language whose means and ends meant nothing to anyone with an IQ under 300. Their optic-enhanced gazes swept the screens, locking down red blips that scrambled across the monitor like cockroaches scampering to conceal themselves in the dark under-shadows of a lightless kitchen.
“Another breach is occurring at Sector D11.” the woman said in a robotic voice.
“Heavy concentrations of Ether Fog are growing at an accelerating rate.” her twin echoed.
At the foot of the podium crane, a man in a sharp business suit, eyes concealed by double-mirrored dark shades, looked up with a stoic expression, his mouth drawn to a thin line. “Trace it. I want all information on what’s going down inside the cloud. Deploy ground advance scouts to secure the area and make an exclusion zone of the perimeter. As far as the civilians are to be aware, we are merely putting evacuation protocol in place to deal with a dangerous poison gas leak sprung from an underground pocket. I want everyone out of the Ether Fog’s vicinity, pronto.”
“Roger that.”
“Tracer deployed, acquiring lock-on to target.”
The man nodded, quickly integrating the information. “Confirm or deny that any foreign bodies have yet materialized within the cloud layer overlapping with ours. What’s the status on that tracer?”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
A red wheel icon glided across the screen, the entire display of which was divided into uniform squares of a few pixels each, each square representing a numbered section of the city and surrounding area. The icon fixated on the D11 square, and displayed a loading bar as it began to contract in size.
“20%. 30%. 40%.” the short-haired woman counted off.
“Any glimpse of the foreign bodies? Have they crawled up out of the dimensional flux yet?” the man asked, clinical and focused.
“Negative, foreign bodies have not yet materialized. We’re sending Telescope Dragonflies to get eyes in the cloud. Survival rate of the drones is-”
“Never mind the statistics on this one, just do it. They’ll get eyes inside the pocket or they won’t, no sense twiddling our thumbs.” the man said.
“Roger that, sir.”
The fog bank had clung to one area in particular, most heavily concentrated in a high-traffic intersection. The stoplights and all electronic appliances within range of the area were going haywire, sparking huge arcs of electricity that leaped yards across. Lights flickered between green and red at far faster speeds than they should have even been capable of. One car had already been run off the road and over a sidewalk curb by the chaos caused by the malfunctions. Once determined to be mostly uninjured, he and everyone else were quickly and efficiently herded away from the exclusion zone.
“This area is very dangerous, stand back! The city is experiencing a catastrophic toxic natural gas leak, you need to vacate the premises at once!” a commanding officer broadcast over megaphone. A miniaturized air-raid siren had been set to blare an accompanying warning to drive the point home, as well as scare away any would-be rubberneckers sticking their noses where they don’t belong. A small bug that looked like an ordinary dragonfly silently clicked as its micro-computerized brain processed the information, and gauged when it would be safest to attempt a dive into the cloud, and into the temporary altered space within its deepest part.
The soldiers at the inner fog circle’s rim began to hear the phantom echoes of a struggle deep within, and below, like a titanic battle was occurring in the core of the earth at the bottom of an open shaft through which the men peered. Otherworldly shadows stretching up from that chasm and refracting through the ambient fog pulsed and struggled all around them.
The cyborg insect device clicked and beeped. Its time had come, and it dove into the wall of the fog core, and dove down, deep into the layer between realities at the same time the fog plumed skyward like a column of churning vapor.
“Tracer locked on, sir!” one of the women alerted their director.
“Tell me.” he said.
“Two foreign bodies detected, energy signatures read hostile intent - ferals.” she said.
“The Telescope Dragonfly, did it successfully infiltrate the cloud?” he asked.
“We’ll know in a second.”
-
Picture this. You’re a simple creature, short of single-cell organisms you’re about as simple as lifeforms get. You’re an insect, a dragonfly to be specific. You go about your dragonfly life, buzzing around, seeking tiny prey, mating, and making what merry your primitive brain can comprehend as enjoyable beyond mere survival instinct and automatic reflex. Your many-paned eyes look about a world that is immense and incomprehensible, but you digest what you can through an optical lens as natural to you as the binocular vision of the hairless bipeds who rule this strange world is alien to you, and vice versa. You dodge their attempts to swat you here and there, either for their blind bug-phobic panic, or from overblown fear of the nonexistent threat you present being spread by old wives’ tales near and far. It doesn’t concern you, you just like flying and enjoying the pleasant warmth of the morning sun. One day you die, not because that particularly-persistent cat finally pounced upon and ate you, or because someone finally smacked you down with their bright yellow-framed electric fly swatter. You die for the same reason all organic bodies die - wear and tear accumulated by old age, and the point of no return on having sufficient energy to continue your core essential metabolic processes. Your brain activity shuts down - as you know it - for good, and you transition from being a living organism to being empty flesh, a shell that once contained a mysterious thing called life. Your corpse gathers dust, waiting to decompose and become the fuel for even smaller, more insignificant microbes to continue this microcosm of the unknowable cycle linking everything and all lives since the dawn of time. Then suddenly, you crash back into awareness. You don’t remember who or what you are, if indeed you even comprehended being a simple dragonfly to begin with. Your body has been carefully preserved, and using microscopic, remote-guided nanotechnology to perform an autopsy to confirm your brain’s hardware is still operable, that same revolutionary science goes on to perform a surgery on the vacant vehicle that is your body. Your tiny dragonfly brain is merged with the complex interlocking parts required to manually stimulate your greymatter before it can deteriorate past the point of no return. This new cybernetic-organic brain acts like a receiver following instructions from a central computer, using an incorporeal AI system to translate the input from your new human masters into your physical output. You fly again, a changed being. You are now part of a hive mind, the likes of which your counterparts among the bees and wasps could never conceive of. You see and hear and feel things in brand new dimensions you never thought possible. You want for nothing. You no longer need food, because you are a machine. Mating no longer matters to you, the instinct-bound impulse to procreate and improve upon an ever-changing form to fit your niche environment gone dead and numb. It perished with your organic life. You don’t need to make more of yourself, because the Institute already does that. You don’t need to struggle to preserve your existence, because you are part of something bigger now, part of the AI, part of the network. Their goals are your goals. All you are now is a high-tech camera, whose one and only purpose is to do what living beings - in this case the workers of the Institution - have failed to do so far, outside of the select few neither of you know about yet. That task is to penetrate the barrier between the known and the unknown, made physical by the thick wall of fog you now orbit and approach. You aren’t aware of the isolated connections to the dimensional tunnels others, like the unmet boy with the dragon markings, have encountered twice now, or that they can only appear under circumstances that cannot be measured outside the paradigm of Schrodinger’s Cat. You know these disturbances only as the Ether Spills, or the Breaches, which the public at large can see and hear all too clearly. But they can only see the effects of its presence, not whatever occurs within the confines of that veil of mist. Trying to enter is akin to playing Russian roulette with a kind of rotating door whose patterns are impossible to discern with any accuracy, and for which the consequences of guessing wrong are unthinkable.
Even when computers and simulation programs are able to create data on when these gates become approachable with the lowest possible risk of danger, the numbers are fudged by a side effect increasingly correlated only to sentient beings - humans, primarily, and thinking creatures with similar styles of cognition, like other apes, but also elephants, dolphins, and dogs and cats. Emotion-driven animals, animals with varying capacities to think and reflect, and possibly have some measure of self-awareness. Everything you aren’t, and never were. Thinking creatures have high risks of going irrevocably insane, or dying of shock on impact while trying to breach the barrier. Yet, standard cameras and drones cannot withstand an equal effect to the detriment of modern technology, as the storm of glitches ravaging the street intersection demonstrates vividly. Therein, the narrow gap in which information can both go into, and come back from the slip, seems to be in entities that retain awareness while not being either influenced by their thought, or by their absence of it. As an artificial zombie that thinks of and wants nothing for itself, a machine retrofitted from a deceased insect, you are the gray place between these ends.
So, you dive inside.
This is what you see: