The morning sun hit the brick façade of the McKay Physics Building with a violence that made Ethan squint.
He stood on the edge of the quad, a cardboard tray of coffees balancing precariously in one hand, watching the students flow around him like a fluid dynamic simulation. They moved in currents and eddies, governed by the invisible forces of class schedules and social gravity. To Ethan, standing still in the middle of the stream, they felt alien.
He hadn't slept. Not really. After the incident with the clock—the three seconds of non-time that had swallowed the room—he had gone home to his apartment, stared at the ceiling for four hours, and then showered in water that never seemed quite hot enough to wash away the cold sensation clinging to his skin.
The world looked the same. The oak trees were shedding their October leaves in drifts of russet and gold. The air smelled of exhaust and damp earth. But the texture of reality felt thin to him now, like a piece of fabric that had been washed too many times, worn threadbare until you could see the light shining through the weave.
"Dr. Maddox!"
The voice boomed across the quad, cutting through the morning haze. Ethan flinched, nearly crushing the coffee cups. He turned to see Dr. Arthur Hargreaves, the Department Head, marching toward him. Hargreaves was a large man who wore tweed with an aggressive lack of irony. He moved with the momentum of a man who had tenure and wasn't afraid to use it.
"Arthur," Ethan said, adjusting his grip on the tray. "Good morning."
"Is it?" Hargreaves stopped in front of him, blocking out the sun. He smelled of expensive cologne and disappointment. "I just got off the phone with Facilities. apparently, there was a power surge in the sub-basement last night. A significant one. Enough to trip the breakers in the Geology department next door."
Ethan kept his face neutral, a mask of tired confusion he had perfected over the years. "Old wiring, Arthur. You know the grid in McKay is held together by duct tape and prayers. We get surges all the time."
"This wasn't a surge, Ethan. It was a draw." Hargreaves lowered his voice, stepping closer. "A massive, localized draw. Centered on your lab. Are you running the generator again?"
"I'm running diagnostics," Ethan lied. It was a partial truth, the best kind. "Calibrating the sensors. Sometimes the startup sequence pulls a little heavy."
"A little heavy?" Hargreaves scoffed. "You pulled enough amps to light up Fenway Park. Listen to me, Ethan. The Dean is looking for budget cuts. Don't give him a reason to look at the Theoretical Physics department. We deal in chalk and blackboards, not industrial power consumption. Keep it low profile. Or I will pull the plug myself."
Hargreaves didn't wait for a response. He turned and marched away, his wake disrupting the flow of students.
Ethan watched him go, a cold knot tightening in his stomach. It was a draw. He hadn't initiated a draw last night. He had just been watching the monitor. If the equipment had pulled power, it had done so on its own. Or something had pulled it through the equipment.
He turned and walked toward the building, his grip on the stone chip in his pocket tightening until it hurt.
The lab was a sanctuary of controlled chaos.
Compared to the sterile, polished hallways of the upper floors, the sub-basement was a cave. There were no windows here, only the hum of the ventilation and the blue-white glare of fluorescent tubes. It was a space dominated by The Machine—the Quantum Field Generator.
It sat in the center of the room, a monstrosity of quartz, copper, and steel that Ethan had spent the last three years building with his own hands. It looked less like a scientific instrument and more like the engine of a very confused spaceship. Cables snaked across the floor in thick black bundles, feeding into a central core that was currently dormant, a sleeping giant waiting to be poked.
Lily was already there, kneeling on the floor by a junction box, a multimeter in her hand. She looked up as Ethan entered, her expression grim.
"You're late," she said. "And Rao from the particle physics lab stopped by. He wanted to know why his electron microscope started singing opera last night."
"Opera?" Ethan set the coffees down on a clear patch of bench.
"Harmonic resonance," Lily corrected, standing up and dusting off her jeans. "He said the magnetic fields went haywire for about ten seconds. Exactly at 3:14 AM."
Ethan froze. He hadn't told Lily about the clock. He hadn't told anyone.
"3:14?" he asked, his voice carefully casual.
"Yeah. Weird, right? That's exactly when the power spike hit the logs." She walked over to the main console and tapped a few keys. A graph appeared on the large wall-mounted monitor. It was a jagged red line that spiked vertical, plateaued for three seconds, and then dropped back to zero.
"Look at the shape of the wave, Professor," Lily said, pointing with a screwdriver. "That's not a power surge. A surge is messy. It's jagged. This... this is a square wave. It's perfectly flat at the top. It turned on, held exactly at the maximum load the breakers could handle without blowing, and then turned off."
Ethan stared at the red line. It looked like a doorway. A doorway punched into the data.
"It's a signal," he whispered.
"It's a malfunction," Lily countered, though she didn't sound convinced. She picked up her coffee, blowing on the steam. "Or it's a hack. Someone messing with the grid."
"No hacker can manipulate the magnetic field of an electron microscope in the building next door," Ethan said. He walked over to the generator, running his hand along the cold copper coils. He could feel a faint vibration, a residual hum that shouldn't have been there. The machine was off, disconnected from the mains, yet it felt... awake. "We need to run the test. The full sequence."
Lily choked on her coffee. "Professor, did you not hear what I said about the breakers? If we run the full sequence, we'll blow the transformer for the whole block. Hargreaves will have your tenure on a platter."
"We bypass the main grid," Ethan said, his mind already racing, connecting the dots, building the schematic in his head. "We tie into the auxiliary capacitors. We use the emergency backup generator for the initial kick, then bleed the excess heat into the water main."
"That's... that's incredibly dangerous," Lily said, her eyes wide. "And probably illegal. Definitely against fire code."
"It's necessary," Ethan said, turning to her. His eyes were burning with a feverish intensity that made Lily take a half-step back. "Lily, look at the data. Something is trying to push through. That spike last night? That was a knock. If we don't open the door, it might just break it down."
Lily looked at him, really looked at him. She saw the dark circles under his eyes, the tremor in his hands, the way he kept touching his pocket as if checking for a weapon. She should have said no. She should have called Hargreaves. But she was a scientist too, and the curiosity was a contagion.
"Okay," she said, letting out a long, defeated sigh. "But if we burn the building down, I'm telling the fire marshal you forced me."