Chapter 4
1903words
The first fracture in this veneer appeared with Whitney Lee.
She sat in her data tent, staring at two radically different geological models displayed on adjacent screens, fighting waves of vertigo. The first—completed at 1500 hours yesterday—showed the massive symmetrical void two hundred meters beneath the camp. The second—generated from an identical scan she'd run just this morning—showed completely intact ice strata with no anomalies whatsoever.
"This isn't possible," she whispered, fingers trembling over her keyboard. "Everyone saw this cavity yesterday. We had an emergency briefing specifically about it."
She pushed away from her workstation and hurried outside, spotting Jenkins calibrating the backup generator. "Tom," she called, trying to keep her voice steady, "you remember yesterday's emergency meeting about the subsurface anomaly, right?"
Jenkins looked up, his expression one of genuine confusion. "Meeting? Yesterday afternoon? We were all assembling the meteorological array until nearly midnight. There wasn't any meeting." He frowned. "What subsurface anomaly?"
Whitney's stomach dropped. She tracked down two other scientists who had attended the briefing, only to receive nearly identical responses. In their recollections, the entire previous day had been devoted to equipment setup and calibration. None remembered any emergency meeting or subsurface cavity. To them, yesterday had been entirely routine—busy but uneventful.
"You're all..." Whitney's voice cracked slightly, "You seriously don't remember? Emilia's anomalous microorganism? Smith's discovery of those massive footprints? Anna's micro-climate fluctuations? We spent hours discussing these findings!"
They exchanged concerned glances, regarding her with the cautious sympathy reserved for colleagues experiencing stress-induced delusions.
"Dr. Lee." Smith's voice came from behind her as he returned from morning patrol. "You seem agitated. Yesterday's operations proceeded without incident. There were no anomalous findings reported." His tone softened slightly. "Perhaps you should consider some rest."
Whitney's reality tilted sideways. She remembered every detail with crystalline clarity: the 3D renderings on the main display, Emilia's ashen face, Smith's fist pounding the table for emphasis. These memories carried the unmistakable weight of lived experience—how could they possibly be fabrications? If her recollections were accurate, then... had everyone else's memories been somehow altered? Or was she the one whose mind had been tampered with?
She stumbled back to her workstation in a daze, staring at the geological model showing "normal ice formations." A profound existential terror gripped her. She had always trusted data as the ultimate arbiter of truth, but if "yesterday" itself existed in contradictory versions, what foundation remained for empirical certainty?
Meanwhile, in her laboratory module, Emilia was experiencing her own reality fracture.
She was organizing her lab notes from the previous night's work. She'd spent hours meticulously documenting the morphological shifts of the anomalous microorganism under varying observational conditions. She distinctly remembered using her black felt-tip pen, her handwriting growing increasingly messy as excitement and fatigue took their toll.
But when she opened her notebook, she froze.
The content concerned the same microorganism—the observations and measurements matched her recollections—but the handwriting was entirely unfamiliar. The notes were recorded in a precise, almost fastidious script using blue ballpoint ink. Each entry was meticulously formatted with clinical detachment. What sent ice through her veins was the footer on each page: a date stamp indicating these notes had been completed three days earlier, accompanied by a signature she didn't recognize—Katherine Underwood.
"No... that's not possible." Emilia's fingers traced the alien handwriting, a chill spreading from her fingertips up her arm. She knew with absolute certainty that this notebook had been blank until last night when she'd personally recorded the first observations. Now it contained comprehensive documentation in someone else's hand—someone who apparently didn't exist.
Could someone be playing an elaborate prank? Impossible—the laboratory's access logs would show any entry, and she'd been the only authorized user. Was she experiencing some psychotic break? She examined her own handwriting on a nearby requisition form, comparing it to the notebook's meticulous script. They weren't remotely similar.
The fortress of scientific rationality she'd constructed within herself began to fracture. That same overwhelming loss of control she'd experienced during the childhood avalanche engulfed her again. The avalanche had been an objectively real disaster—but now, the very concept of "objectivity" itself seemed suspect. The empirical facts she'd documented had been seamlessly overwritten, as if reality itself were merely a document being casually edited by some unseen hand.
"What exactly... is real?" she whispered, gripping the edge of the lab bench as the room seemed to tilt around her.
Beyond the camp perimeter, Smith was experiencing something far more viscerally disturbing.
He was completing his standard security sweep. As his snowmobile rounded an ice formation on the western perimeter, he slammed the vehicle to a halt.
Approximately one hundred meters ahead stood a figure in an identical polar suit to his own, crouched beside an identical snowmobile, examining something on the ground. Smith immediately raised his tactical binoculars.
When the figure's features came into focus, Smith felt as if an icy fist had closed around his heart.
The man was himself.
Through the binoculars, the other "Smith" was kneeling in the snow, carefully scraping away ice with his tactical knife—the exact procedure Smith himself had performed yesterday when examining those impossible footprints. Every gesture, every movement, was a perfect mirror of his own habits and training.
Yet in Smith's memory, those footprints had been completely obscured by drifting snow by yesterday afternoon.
"Base, this is Smith." He keyed his radio, his voice unnaturally tight. "Confirm current personnel deployment. Is anyone else authorized for exterior patrol at this time?"
"Negative, Captain," came the immediate reply. "Tracking system shows you as the only personnel beyond the perimeter. All other team members accounted for inside the safe zone. Is there a situation?"
"Standby." Smith lowered the radio, his eyes never leaving his doppelgänger.
At that moment, the other "Smith" seemed to sense his observation. He slowly straightened, turned his head, and looked directly toward Smith's position. Even across that distance, Smith could feel the weight of the other's gaze—those same steel-blue eyes, carrying the same vigilant intensity he saw every morning in the mirror.
Two identical men faced each other across the pristine Antarctic snowfield. One anchored in "today," the other seemingly operating in "yesterday."
Smith felt the familiar precursors of a PTSD episode building—the tightness in his chest, the tunnel vision beginning to close in. In Afghanistan, he'd faced hidden snipers and navigated minefields, but nothing had prepared him for confronting another version of himself—a living, breathing duplicate performing tasks he himself had completed twenty-four hours earlier. Reality had become like damaged footage, with temporal fragments haphazardly spliced together.
He wrenched the snowmobile around and accelerated to maximum speed, fleeing as though pursued by the ghosts of his past—or perhaps the specters of alternate presents.
When the three senior team members convened in the common area, their ashen faces and haunted expressions told a story before they'd spoken a word. The expedition's collective grip on reality was unraveling. Whitney insisted her memories of yesterday's discoveries and emergency meeting were accurate, while others gently suggested she might be experiencing stress-induced confabulation. Emilia produced her inexplicably altered lab notebook but had no explanation for its impossible contents. Smith remained uncharacteristically silent, unable to articulate his encounter with himself—an experience that seemed more like psychotic delusion than anything the others had reported.
Accusations, defensive denials, and barely contained hysteria quickly filled the confined space.
"ENOUGH!"
A single word, delivered with quiet authority, silenced the room. Anna Volkov sat in the corner, her normally reserved demeanor unchanged. Unlike the others' expressions of panic or confusion, her eyes held only a profound, knowing sadness.
"This arguing serves no purpose," she said, her accent more pronounced than usual. "Because all of you may be correct."
Every eye in the room turned to her.
"When I was child," Anna's voice carried the weight of long-buried memory, "my family lived in remote village in eastern Siberia. One winter, something... similar... happened there. People's memories began to contradict each other. One would claim to have visited another yesterday, while that person would swear they never left their home. My father returned from hunting to find our food stores half-empty, though my mother had filled them completely just hours before."
She paused, her eyes focused on something distant. "Most frightening was the river. One morning, it reversed direction completely—flowing uphill, against gravity. The entire village witnessed this. By next day, it flowed normally again, as if nothing had happened." Her voice dropped lower. "Village shaman said 'the foundations of world have come loose.' The reality we inhabited had become... unstable."
Her words landed with the weight of lived experience, not theoretical speculation, sending ripples of primal fear through the already fragile group.
"What happened to your village?" Emilia asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
"After that... many went mad," Anna replied, her gaze hollow. "They could not accept that everything they believed was collapsing. Only those who embraced new understanding survived. Understanding that 'reality' is not singular but layered, like onion. And we..." she gestured vaguely at the space around them, "have fallen between layers."
As the final word left her lips, an inhuman shriek erupted from across the room.
They spun to see Dr. Wilson collapsed in the corner, his body contorted as he clutched his head between white-knuckled hands. His eyes were impossibly wide, pupils dilated to black pools, his face a mask of pure, primal terror.
"I SEE IT! I SEE EVERYTHING!" he shrieked, his voice distorted into something barely human. "They're all superimposed—every possibility exists simultaneously! Smith, you're both standing here and frozen dead in your vehicle! Clark, your notebook is blank and filled and burned to ash! All versions—all realities—occupying the same space!"
His arms began tracing complex patterns through the air while his mouth produced sounds no human vocal cords should generate—clicking consonants and multi-tonal harmonics that seemed to vibrate the very air. His fingers sketched impossible geometries that seemed to leave momentary afterimages hanging in space.
The team's psychological anchor—the man tasked with maintaining everyone else's sanity—had become the first casualty of whatever truth lay beneath the ice. His mind had shattered completely.
Smith reacted with military precision, signaling two security team members. They pinned the thrashing psychologist while the medical officer administered a powerful sedative. Once unconscious, they transferred Wilson to an isolation unit in the medical module.
Emilia stood at the observation window, watching Wilson's sedated form. Even in unconsciousness, his fingers continued their subtle, precise movements—still tracing those geometries that human minds weren't equipped to comprehend.
Anna's matter-of-fact account combined with Wilson's terrifying breakdown had demolished Emilia's remaining psychological defenses. She'd spent her life believing she was systematically studying a comprehensible universe. Now it seemed they were merely adrift on a fragile raft above depths of chaotic reality that could swallow them at any moment.
She turned away from the window, her gaze drawn to the seemingly eternal white expanse beyond the camp. For the first time, she considered that perhaps the avalanche that claimed her parents hadn't been an ending, but rather the first warning sign of a much larger collapse—one that had been unfolding her entire life.
