Chapter 3
2104words
In the morning, the cold wind was more biting than yesterday. The massive laser thermal drilling platform was painstakingly assembled by the engineering team at the designated location. Whitney Lee sat in the warm operations cabin, her fingers moving skillfully across rows of control panels. In front of her were several display screens, providing real-time feedback on the drill bit's depth, temperature, rotation speed, as well as the density and composition of the ice layers below.
"System self-check complete, all parameters normal." Xiao Wen's voice came through the internal communication channel to everyone's headsets, clear and steady. She seemed to have returned to her natural state as a technology-obsessed girl, as if all the strange data she saw last night were just challenges to be overcome.
Emilia stood outside the operating cabin, watching Xiao Wen's profile through the double-layered glass. She herself hadn't slept all night, her mind filled with images of that strange cell changing shape under the microscope. She forced herself to focus on the drilling work at hand, which was currently the only means to obtain physical evidence.
"Begin drilling." Michael gave the order. He stood at the outermost edge of the safe zone, holding a tactical tablet in his hand, its screen displaying thermal imaging surveillance of the camp's surroundings, as if he was guarding against some physical threat that might appear at any moment. For him, drilling through the ice layer was like opening Pandora's box; he had to ensure his gun was loaded before any monster could jump out.
A piercing buzzing sound arose as orange-red high-energy laser beams shot out from the drill head, silently melting the ancient dark ice. White steam rose upward, instantly crystallizing into ice particles that floated down in the extremely cold air. The depth numbers on the screen increased steadily: fifty meters, one hundred meters, one hundred fifty meters.
"Ice layer density stable, composition normal, no traces of organic matter detected," Xiao Wen reported the data like a precise announcer. "Estimated fifty meters remaining until we reach the anomaly boundary."
Emilia's heartbeat began to accelerate. She unconsciously clenched her fists. She both longed for the answer and feared it. The scientist's instinct and the fear from the depths of her soul were fiercely battling within her.
"One hundred eighty meters... one hundred ninety meters... prepare for contact!" Xiao Wen's voice rose slightly.
Everyone held their breath.
"Depth two hundred meters, successfully entered the anomalous zone... wait..." Xiao Wen's voice suddenly changed tone, filled with confusion.
In the operation cabin, none of the warning lights had lit up, but the data on the screen showed incomprehensible changes. All values representing drill resistance, temperature, and density of materials below, in an instant... all returned to zero. Not dropping to an extremely low value, but a complete, clean "zero."
"What's happening? Equipment failure?" Michael immediately asked through the communicator.
"No...not equipment failure," Little Wen's voice carried a slight tremor as she tried to restart the laser and then attempted to physically push the drill rod. "All self-diagnostic systems show normal, but...the drill bit has no feedback. It's like...like there's nothing in front of it. Not emptiness, not liquid or gas, just...nothingness. I can feel it in my hands, the control lever has lost all force feedback, as if the drill bit has...disconnected from the physical world."
The word "nothingness," coming from the mouth of a steadfast materialist physicist, sent a chill through everyone present. How could a physical entity drill into "nothingness"?
Meanwhile, in another experimental tent, Emilia was experiencing another strange phenomenon. Before the drilling began, she had placed a sample containing those mysterious microorganisms under a microscope, connected to a high-resolution real-time recorder. She wanted to see if these microscopic life forms would react when the external physical environment underwent dramatic changes—such as when the drilling reached that unknown region.
Her premonition came true, but in a way far beyond her imagination.
At the exact moment when Xiaowen reported that the drill had entered the "void," the spiral cell in the microscope's field of view suddenly stopped all its random floating. It remained motionless in the center of the view, like a sentinel that had been startled awake. Then, Emilia looked at the screen of the recorder and felt her blood nearly freeze.
Changes began to appear on the cell's originally smooth, metallic-reflective cell wall. Some patterns, a hundred times finer than human hair, emerged from inside the cell membrane. They arranged and combined themselves at a slow but determined pace, eventually forming a... pattern on the cell surface. It wasn't random texture, but a complex symbol composed of straight lines and arcs with distinct geometric features, resembling some kind of never-before-seen hieroglyphics.
It was "responding"!
Emilia's mind buzzed. This cell not only could sense changes in the macroscopic world but could also respond in a way similar to "writing." This wasn't biology; this was theology. The scientific rationality she had always used to arm herself was, in that moment, pierced as easily as a paper shield.
With trembling hands, she magnified the image under the microscope and then captured it with another camera. She had to document all of this, even though she no longer knew how to name these records.
Outside the tent, panic was spreading. At Michael's command post, red lights began to flash. But it wasn't an invasion alert; it was a communication system failure warning.
"What's happening?" he grabbed the communications equipment technician.
"Captain, I don't know!" The technician's face turned pale. "The main communication channel has been occupied by an unknown signal source. I can't cut it off, nor can I trace its origin. The signal strength is very high, as if... as if the source is right here in our camp."
"Play the signal content!" Michael shouted.
The technician pressed the play button. After a burst of harsh static noise, a clear voice came through the speakers.
"...there's something under the ice layer...waiting. It doesn't like us intruders."
It was the voice of Anna, the glaciologist! But Anna was standing not far from Michael at this moment, looking at the speaker with an equally shocked expression.
Immediately after, a second voice sounded, calm and restrained: "...this is just collecting samples at the edge of the camp, there won't be any danger."
This was Emilia's voice. Emilia heard all of this through the communicator, and she remembered indeed saying these words to Michael, but the tone and rhythm in the recording carried a coldness and mockery that felt foreign even to herself.
Then came a third voice, with a hint of excitement and innocence: "...they're... too regular, just like... some kind of machine operating in a fixed, non-Euclidean pattern deep underground."
Whitney Lee's voice. She rushed out of the operating cabin, looking at the command post in horror.
The recording continued, playing some key phrases that team members had said over the past two days, and even fragments they had only thought in their minds but never spoken aloud. It was like a malicious editor, splicing their thoughts and words into a horror radio play, openly broadcasting it on their own communication channel.
"Turn it off! Turn it off immediately!" Michael's face turned ashen. The post-traumatic stress disorder he had brought back from the Afghanistan battlefield was fully triggered at this moment. This kind of "invisible enemy," this mental penetration and mockery, made him feel more terrified than any physical bullet.
Whitney Lee trudged back to her data tent in a daze, hoping to find a sense of security in her familiar field. She ignored the drill bit that had already lost its signal and instead sat down at the seismic monitoring terminal, beginning to organize and review all the earthquake data from the past two days. She wanted to find patterns, to discover clues that might explain everything from these most basic physical data.
She imported all the data into the supercomputer for cross-referencing and pattern recognition. Several hours later, an analysis report was generated. As she read through it line by line, the color drained from her face. Finally, she stared at one line of conclusions on the screen, and her entire body began to shake uncontrollably.
The report showed that several weak but distinctively characteristic seismic waves were recorded at times that actually preceded their "source event times" as determined by the main system. The differences were extremely small, ranging from just a few milliseconds to a few seconds, and had previously been dismissed as system errors. However, after large-scale data calibration, the computer reached one unequivocal conclusion: these "time discrepancies" were real.
Some effects were appearing before their causes.
"Time flowing backward..." Xiaowen murmured, this conclusion completely shattered the foundation of physics upon which she had built her life. Causality is the most fundamental law of the universe. If even cause and effect could be overturned here, what else could be trusted?
The atmosphere at the camp plunged to freezing point. A series of bizarre incidents fell like dominoes, one after another, pushing everyone's sanity to the breaking point. And the first person to truly break down was the one who had been trying to maintain everyone's rationality—Dr. Wilson.
At dusk, Emilia found Wilson in the public lounge of the living quarters. He wasn't talking to people or writing psychological notes as usual, but was just sitting there blankly, his eyes staring fixedly at the empty table in front of him.
"Doctor, are you alright?" Emilia asked softly.
Wilson slowly raised his head, his gaze scattered and filled with fear, as if he was looking at something Emilia couldn't see. "Stay back, Emilia." His voice was hoarse and unfamiliar.
"Doctor, what's wrong with you?"
"I saw..." Wilson clutched his head with his hands, moaning in pain, "They... they're overlapping... this table, it's both here and somewhere else. I see... I see your tents, and outside isn't snow, but a red desert... I see you... you're wearing a white coat, but on your face... on your face is that symbol, the symbol you saw under the microscope!"
He began to speak incoherently, at times describing the life pod before him, at other times screaming about completely different scenes he was witnessing. He claimed he could simultaneously see several "realities" stacked on top of each other like translucent films, and in each "reality," they were doing different things, saying different words.
Emilia tried to comfort him, but her hand stopped midway. Because amid Wilson's terrified screams, she suddenly realized an even deeper horror: the scientific method they relied on might have been a joke from the very beginning.
Science is built on the foundation that "objective reality is singular and observable." They used instruments to measure data, logic to analyze phenomena, and experiments to verify hypotheses. But what if "objective reality" itself was unstable, overlapping, or even capable of interacting with the observer? What if what Wilson saw wasn't hallucination, but truth? Then what exactly had all their instruments, all their measurements, actually been detecting?
She whirled around and quickly walked back to her experiment tent. She stood in front of the microscope, looking at the clear and bizarre symbol recorded on the screen. Was this symbol truly "written" by that cell? Or did it "emerge" in this form because of her act of "observation"? Just like the avalanche in her childhood—was it simply a natural disaster, or was it the "intrusion" of their presence that awakened the mountain's fury?
The tower of beliefs she had built over many years collapsed in that moment.
Michael and two other team members rushed in, restraining Dr. Wilson, who was already incoherent and struggling, preparing to inject him with a sedative.
Emilia didn't turn around. She just stared at the microscope screen and spoke to Michael, who had rushed in with a grave expression, in an unprecedented tone that was eerily calm:
"Michael, we might have... been wrong from the very beginning."
Michael stopped what he was doing and looked at her. "What do you mean?"
Emilia slowly turned around, her eyes no longer showing her previous persistence or anger, only fatigue and emptiness as if she had discerned some terrible truth.
"We've been using our own rulers to measure a world that doesn't belong to us at all."
