It began with a sound no human ear should have been able to hear—like glass shattering in the vacuum of space.
Dr. Kael Myles stood frozen on the rooftop of the Helix Quantum Institute, staring into the night sky where a fracture shimmered like a crack in the stars. It was faint at first—just a thread of distortion—but it pulsed with an eerie, otherworldly light that rippled across the cosmos.
A storm brewed in the upper atmosphere, defying meteorological logic. Lightning danced horizontally. Planes rerouted. Satellites blinked out like dying fireflies. Then the news feeds lit up: Unidentified phenomenon spotted in multiple hemispheres. Global anomaly confirmed.
Kael didn't wait. He bolted down the stairwell and into the institute's sublevel, his badge clattering against his chest. The main lab glowed an ominous shade of blue. His experimental quantum stabilizer—Project ORBITAL—was still active, its core vibrating at a frequency he'd never programmed. The machine wasn't just detecting the disturbance—it was responding to it.
"You're not supposed to be doing that," he muttered, palms flying over the control console. Readouts flickered: spatial vectors, energy signatures, dimensional flux values. Everything screamed wrong.
His assistant, Reeva, burst in, breathless. "Kael. It's not just up there. Look."
She held up her tablet. The screen showed grainy security footage from downtown Manhattan. A man walked through a concrete wall as if it were smoke. A woman blinked out mid-stride and reappeared twenty feet away—then again, and again, faster each time until she vanished.
"It's starting," Kael said, a chill crawling down his spine.
Reeva looked up. "Starting what?"
Kael hesitated. For months, he'd theorized the existence of a multiversal convergence—a point where quantum threads might intersect under immense cosmic pressure. A theoretical event. Nothing more. Until now.
"The Veil is tearing," he whispered. "And our reality isn't the only one bleeding."
Suddenly, alarms blared. ORBITAL's containment field was collapsing. Kael sprinted to the emergency cutoff, but before he could touch it, the air twisted.
A figure emerged from the machine—tall, armored, face obscured by a cracked, silver mask. Not a hologram. Not a projection. A man. Real. And yet… not.
Kael froze. Reeva backed away, heart pounding.
The figure spoke, voice distorted as if layered by a thousand echoes. "You're not ready. None of you are."
Kael found his voice. "Who are you?"
The man tilted his head. "You, Kael. From a world that no longer exists."
Then he collapsed.
Silence followed.
Reeva rushed forward. "He's still breathing."
Kael stared at the broken mask. His own eyes stared back.
His own face.
Different scars. Older. Harder.
Another me. Another world.
Kael swallowed hard. "Prep the quantum drive. We need answers."
Outside, the crack in the sky widened—thin at first, then spiderwebbing, reality unraveling like silk threads.
The multiverse had just blinked.
And Earth had been noticed.