EVENT HORIZON
VI

 
The fluorescent lights above Dr. Elara Voss buzzed ceaselessly. They were both flies trapped within a jar shaped roughly like a lab. She stood proudly beside the machine, an ontological stabilizer, built from proprietary alloys, rare earth metals, and blinking lights. It hummed with purpose, exhaling ventilation like an endless, stifled breath. It had taken years to reach this point—to pierce the veil of spacetime and drag the unknown kicking and screaming into their reality. Years of work, great sacrifices, and countless compromises, all of it, culminating in one of the greatest scientific achievements of mankind.
Elara often caught herself watching the machine as it worked, silently, to preserve reality in even the harshest of conditions. The stabilizer itself did not look any different when it was running. Elara just appreciated knowing it still existed, and continued to provide the Agency with invaluable function and continued security. Just thinking about it made the woman's mouth curl into a thin smile.  
She hadn’t always been the cold, calculating scientist her colleagues knew. Years ago, she’d been a young astrophysicist with stars in her eyes, dreaming of unraveling the universe’s greatest mysteries. Her work in mapping the topology of quantum singularities had earned her a place at the Agency's prestigious Omega Institute, but her ambition came at a cost.
She’d lost contact with her family and friends along the way—her daughter, Cassie, barely remembered her as more than a distant voice on the phone. “When will you come home, Mom?” Cassie had once asked, her small voice tinged with longing. Elara had promised it would only be a few more months. That was five years ago.
The Rift had given Elara purpose but also guilt. She told herself her work was for the greater good, a chance to ensure Cassie—and humanity—had a future. As time passed, however, Elara had begun to question to what extent she was truly a positive force in the world.
"Elara, they're calling another meeting," Dr. Malik said, leaning against the lab’s shielded glass observation deck. His usual calm was replaced with something closer to dread. "The brass upstairs wants an update
 again."
"Of course they do," Elara muttered, not looking up from the console. "Results. They always want results, new breakthroughs, solutions to grand questions. And yet, everyone needs repeat studies, but no one wants to bankroll them. Do you think they’ll care if we explain that the stabilization protocol isn’t calibrated for safe operation just yet? "
"Do I think the same people who built a bunker complex under Western Washington to prepare for a theoretical apocalypse care about safety margins? No. No, I do not." Malik’s sarcasm was a weak shield against his growing unease.
The Agency had begun as a government initiative to prevent the unthinkable. Decades ago, intelligence briefings hinted at something catastrophic lurking in the far reaches of space and time. Satellites picked up fragments of data that didn’t make sense: gravitational ripples where none should be, energy signatures that defied natural laws.
But now, there were tangible threats that needed to be defeated, logistical hurdles that needed to be overcome. The Rift was both of these.
It appeared in the town square of Jasper's Wake, in a blinding flash of gamma radiation and exotic particles. A small fracture in spacetime, a cosmological defect created by two universes whose outer membranes wore down over time so they could one day intersect. The Rift was not safe for human entry on its own, though an ontological stabilizer could be used to flatten the topology of the points in spacetime where the torn fabric of reality met its counterpart, creating a fully-transferrable, non-flat, simply-connected spacetime fold. e.g. a wormhole.
Accessing the other side of the Rift was never the primary concern, however. The primary concern was that the Rift appeared to be growing in size, and with it, the Agency’s internal fractures grew as well. A bureaucracy designed to keep secrets had fractured into cliques, each one pulling in its own direction, each one feeding into the chaos. Some sought to control the Rift, others to contain it. But all of them had overlooked one undeniable truth: the Rift could not be stopped, not permanently.  
The stabilizer had been conceived as a countermeasure to the growing concern over the growing tear in spacetime, the crown jewel of their desperate efforts, approved across the board in a rare moment of consensus. If they could understand the fundamental nature of the Rift—and what lies beyond it—they could prevent them. Or so the theory went.
"Tell them it’s not ready," Elara said, rubbing her temples. "Tell them
 I don’t know. Tell them it hummed ominously and we need another three months to figure out why."
Malik snorted, but his humor faded quickly. "They’re not patient, Elara. The stabilizer
 It’s more than an experiment now. They want tools. Containment fields. Reality anchors. Weapons." He paused. "They’re calling it the Rift Suppression Initiative."
The words hit like a punch to the gut. Suppression? Was that what they thought they were doing? Elara swallowed hard. "It’s not suppression. It’s
"
"Inviting disaster? Playing god? Take your pick," Malik said, his voice uncharacteristically sharp.
The Rift Suppression Initiative wasn’t without its dissenting voices. Within the Agency, a small faction of scientists had begun raising concerns. Dr. Naima Cho, a theoretical physicist, was one of them. She confronted Elara in the lab one evening, her voice low but urgent.
“You know this isn’t about containment,” Naima said, her dark eyes flashing. “The higher-ups want to weaponize the Rift. They’re planning to use it as a deterrent—something bigger than nuclear arms, more tactical than guerilla warfare. They want supremacy.”
Elara frowned, her hands tightening on the console. “That’s just speculation.”
Naima shook her head. “You’ve seen their list of high-profile artifacts, Elara. Do you really think they’ll stop at studying them? They’re already running covert experiments. If we keep going, we’ll hand them a weapon they can’t control.”
Elara didn’t respond. She couldn’t. Because deep down, she knew Naima was right. 
The stabilizer’s initial experiments had been cautious. The goal was simple: create a controlled manifold on one side of the Rift and observe its properties. But even the first trial had yielded strange results. 
The Rift was not a mere hole in the fabric of reality, after all. It was a window, and, as Elara would quickly find out, the window was always open on the other side. When the Rift stabilized, artifacts spilled through from worlds unknown. Sometimes, they were mostly inert—like a glass sphere that absorbed sound.
Other times, they were quite active, they were unpredictable, and worse, uncontrollable. 
Such as the gun.
The weapon was a sleek, glossy black, cold to the touch. Its surface shimmered faintly with an inner light. Strange, intricate glyphs etched along its frame glowed with otherworldly energy, defying translation, defying transcription. Elara couldn’t shake the feeling that the weapon wasn’t forged—it was grown, harvested by beings far older and more advanced than humanity. The air around it felt somber, charged, as if the object was tethered to some unseen power, a grim fragment possessing gravitas that was explicit and unspoken. When Elara held it, she felt something primal gnawing at the edges of her mind. The Agency’s field operatives had taken it immediately, assigning it to a classified testing program. They hadn’t even bothered to ask for her analysis.
She didn’t argue. Some things were better left unstudied. Even so, The Agency had the gun for about an hour before it vanished. Elara wasn't sure they even had a chance to see what it does when fired, but that's probably for the best.
The gun wasn’t the only dangerous artifact to emerge from the Rift. The most unsettling anomaly Elara encountered was an antique mirror—a small reflective surface that showed more than mere reflections. When Elara looked into it, she saw herself, but not as she was. Her hair was longer, streaked with silver, and her eyes held a haunted look. Through the window behind her reflection, the sky was a swirling gyre of blood-red clouds and pale smoke. Unnerved, Elara had thrown a sheet over the mirror at that point and refused to check it again, though she saw her older self pounding on the glass when she did so.
Elara did not mention her experience with the mirror to anyone, not even Malik. She feared giving the reflection credence by acknowledging it, in the event entertaining such things cement them as an inevitability. A tad superstitious, perhaps, though Elara preferred to not take any chances, given her line of work.
That night, Elara sat in her quarters, reviewing the latest anomaly logs. The footage showed the stabilizer in action: a shimmering tear floating off the ground, its edges crackling with energy as the machine reshaped the jagged tear into a perfect oval. She raised the volume, leaning closer to the speaker. The faint voice emanated from the rift, growing louder as the machine continued to repair the ripped mesh in real-time. 
The Rift had been growing more unstable while not being actively stabilized, a task which could not be performed around-the-clock, given the machine's extremely demanding and cost-prohibitive energy requirements. Even if it could, the machine was already struggling to stabilize the Rift at its current size.
Reviewing the footage, Elara watched as, during a routine calibration test, the stabilizer shook, faltered, and briefly malfunctioned, necessitating a manual restart. In the twenty-ish-second window between power down and full capacity, the Rift expanded rapidly, sending a pulse of energy through the temporary lab assembled in the center of Jasper's Wake. Elara and Malik barely managed to activate the emergency shielding as the Rift violently lashed out, crackling energy arcing throughout the room, growing in intensity.
“Why isn't it stabilizing?” Malik shouted, his hands flying over the controls.
The Elara present in the footage did not respond. Instead, she was frozen in place, eyes fixed on the Rift. Within its swirling depths, she had glimpsed something—a indistinct, shadowy shape, its form shifting as though watching them.
Observing Elara stripped the audio from the recording, opening it in a separate program. She applied noise reduction filters and interpolation methods to isolate the voice, which caused her heart to skip a beat. 
The voice was hers.
"Don’t proceed," it said, distorted but unmistakable. "[It’s] already too late."
Elara’s hands shook as she replayed the clip in disbelief, hoping to wake from her delusion to realize the voice bared no resemblance at all.
She did not sleep well that night.

***

The next morning, she approached Malik with the recording. "The Rift isn't empty. And the people inside are trying to tell us something," she said. "Listen to this."
He frowned but humored her, playing the clip. As the distorted whispers filled the lab, his expression shifted from skepticism to unease. "But
 that’s your voice."
"Not me. Another version of me," she said, matter-of-factly. "From another timeline. Another reality."
Malik gave her a long, searching look. "Even if that’s true, what do we do about it? Permanently shut down the stabilizer? You know the Agency won’t allow that. It would be your head on the chopping block if you tried to do it yourself. We don't even know when or how this supposed disaster will occur. I think you'll have a tough time selling that to the administration.
"Then we don’t tell them," Elara said, her voice lowering to a whisper. "We run one last test. If I can make contact with
 with her, maybe we can figure out how to stop this. 
The lab was nearly deserted when they began the test. Only Elara, Malik, and a skeleton crew of technicians remained. The stabilizer roared to life, the Rift glowing brighter than ever before in response. Elara felt the weight of the moment bearing down on her as the rift opened further than it ever had, extending through the ceiling of the temporary lab space, instantly vaporizing the material. Strange colors swirled within its depths, casting eerie shadows across the lab. The air buzzed with static as a murky image of a world turned the color of blood, white shards sticking from the pink and red ground. Elara realized she was looking at bones, impaling a world of biomass and sickening homogeny.
As the Rift widened further, so too did Elara's eyes, more and more of the ruined landscape coming into view. The entire structure shook violently, Elara stumbling and grabbing onto a nearby table as the lesser-paid lab techs moved to evacuate.
“Elara!” Malik shouted, snapping her back to reality. “We have to shut it down!”
She looked at him, then at the stabilizer, its monitors flashing critical system warnings. She knew what she had to do.
“Get out,” she said, her voice firm.
Malik froze. “What? No. I’m not leaving you.”
The remaining ceiling panels began to dislodge and crash to the ground. The entire lab would soon be a pile of debris.
“Go!” Elara barked, her eyes fierce. “I'll-- I'll be okay. I just have to do something first.”
After some insistence, Malik obeyed, retreating from the building as Elara approached the failing stabilizer. The console’s lights bathed her in an eerie glow as she began typing commands, the stabilizer growing continuously louder in response. 
"Elara," a voice said, clearer and crisp. "Are you ending this?"
She looked up to see the woman from the mirror in front of her, stepping through the riling energy field, undeterred. 
Elara stepped away from the console. "Yes I am. Will it help you? Your world, my world?" she asked, her voice trembling.
The older Elara sighed, expression uncertain. 

"I am only a potentiality of what you could become. Your work will fracture reality. The Agency will twist it into a weapon, and their actions will summon the apocalypse you sought to avert. Whether or not this happens to both our worlds will not be up to you." She pointed to the towering Rift as it grew larger in all directions. "You can stop this eventuality, for now at least."
The older Elara returned to the portal without another word, perhaps sensing her limited window closing. Elara stood before a wall of radiant energy, swallowing hard.
An arc of white-hot energy shot out from the ripped mesh, bouncing throughout the room. One struck her arm, searing her skin, the limb screaming in pain but going numb moments later. Still, she didn’t falter. 
“You won’t take this world,” she whispered to the erratic and jagged tear of energy in front of her, her voice unwavering, though she dare not look at her arm to assess the damage.
As the stabilizer reached critical capacity, another arc formed between the two opposing forces, the Stablr rebounding the excess energy as a final attempt for ontological and the Rift imploded, collapsing in on itself with a deafening roar. The lab was consumed in a blinding light, and Elara felt herself pulled into the void as the force destroyed the lab, along with her life's work.

***

When Malik was allowed to return to the site, the lab was a smoking ruin. The stabilizer was gone, reduced to twisted metal and ash. Of Elara, there was no trace. The Agency’s official report blamed the catastrophe on a "containment failure." But Malik knew better. 
Months later, he stood in a new lab, staring at a new stabilizer. It was sleeker, more advanced, but it carried the same ominous hum. The Agency was determined to continue their experiments, despite the cost.
He often thought of Elara. She’d sacrificed everything to stop the Rift, but her warnings had been ignored. Sometimes, late at night, he swore he could hear her voice in the lab’s silence, a faint whisper that sent chills down his spine.
“It’s not over,” the voice would say.
And Malik knew she was right.
The stabilizer's new parameters shimmered with promise, but in the quiet moments, Malik couldn't shake the feeling that its newfound 'perfection' might be an omen of what's to come. They called it progress. Malik called it a mistake.
This was because, in addition to new benchmarks of stabilization, which were magnitudes higher than the previous model, the Agency had built something else too. 
Something that did the opposite. 
And the list of concerns grew The Catalyst, once thought to be a simple agricultural experiment, had mutated into something far darker, something far more dangerous. It was sentient, aware of its power, and its influence had begun to bleed into the margins, into everything. The living Earth, the land that had grown hostile, sentient, was one of the generated Rifts' many offspring—its boundaries fluid as the anomalies it birthed. 
No one could say exactly how any of the anomalies worked, how they evolved, or why they attacked with such savage unpredictability.
Some rules had begun to emerge, however. The anomalies could not be contained by conventional means—bullets, explosives, fire—were useless against them. They were immune to time, on a scale that was advantageous to humans, anyway. They were immune to space, to anything humanity could muster. In fact, the anomalies seemed to feed on the chaos that resulted from human intervention, growing stronger the we attempted to control them. Weapons built for war were now little more than toys in the face of an evolving consciousness that lived and breathed anomalous. The rules were clear: there were no rules.
The Rifts had come to stay.
 
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