Elias stared at the screen, rereading Thorne’s reply twenty times. Chronoslide. You wrote the grant proposal yourself.
He opened his personal email archive, searching for any trace of the word Chronoslide before the current date. He searched through three years of correspondence with Thorne. Nothing. He searched his documents folder. Nothing. The digital records of his life refused to corroborate the new reality.
He began to shake, but his mind remained clinically sharp. If the change was real, it was absolute within this reality. Only his memory held the record of the previous one.
He decided to push further. He couldn’t trust the door, the file names, or even the taste of the coffee. He needed a familiar face.
He called Thorne’s private line. It rang once and was answered immediately.
“Thorne residence, this is Clara. May I ask who is calling?”
The voice was soft, slightly accented, and utterly foreign. Elias paused, the phone cold against his ear.
“This is Elias Vance. I need to speak to Dr. Thorne.”
“I’m afraid Dr. Thorne is unavailable,” Clara replied, her tone polite but firm. “He is currently hosting a meeting in the west wing laboratory. Who should I say called?”
Elias felt the floor drop out beneath him again, a phantom sensation echoing the dream. He had known Aris Thorne for twenty years. Thorne lived alone. Thorne had never employed a private receptionist. Thorne’s laboratory was in the East Wing, specifically room 402, which faced the river.
“Clara,” Elias said, forcing his voice to remain steady. “Can you tell me where the west wing laboratory is located?”
Clara gave him a precise address, a biomedical facility across town, completely separate from their university campus.
“Thank you,” Elias whispered, ending the call before she could ask another question.
He immediately called the university physics department office. The operator answered, her voice gratingly familiar. “Physics Department, how may I direct your call?”
“Dr. Aris Thorne, please.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Dr. Thorne retired five years ago. He moved to the coast. We have no forwarding information.”
Elias hung up. Two realities, separated by a half-second of falling, yet wildly divergent. In Reality Alpha, Thorne was his partner. In Reality Beta (this one), Thorne was either an unavailable guest at a private lab or retired and gone for half a decade.
His isolation was now complete. He was not only locked out of his home reality, but he had also lost his single point of reliable external validation.
He walked to the bookshelf, no longer looking at the precise symmetry, but at the titles. The books were identical in layout and cover, but now their authors were subtly different. One title he distinctly remembered being written by Hawking was now attributed to a woman named Anya Sharma. Another seminal work had a subtitle that negated its entire conclusion.
The Chronoslide was doing more than replacing constants; it was rewriting the very historical record, and Elias was the only one with the errata sheet.
The terror was quiet. It wasn’t the panic of being hunted, but the existential dread of being unanchored. He had died and moved on, but his life had not followed.
He looked back at the email from Thorne (the Thorne who knew Chronoslide). He realized the implication: if he slipped again, the next reality might be one where he had never known Thorne at all. The erasure was happening backward.
He needed to find a way to stop the fall, or at least predict the next point of impact. But first, he needed to know what had triggered the fall in the first place.