The low thrumming intensified, vibrating the metal plates under Elias’s feet. The spectroscopy unit was running. Elias kicked open the fire door marked “EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY,” ignoring the blaring alarm that immediately echoed through the sterile hallway.
He burst into the West Wing laboratory.
The room was vast, cooled, and filled with gleaming, unfamiliar equipment. In the center, beside a massive, shielded spectroscopy unit, stood Dr. Aris Thorne.
This Thorne was thinner, his hair greyer, and his eyes were sharp and cold, devoid of the easy humor Elias remembered. He wore thick lead-lined gloves and stared with fury at Elias, the tattered man in the stolen jacket.
“Security is en route,” Thorne hissed, not asking who Elias was, but immediately recognizing him as an intruder. “You’ve vandalized a secure facility.”
“The Anchor Mass,” Elias gasped, ignoring the threat. “Where is it? I need to see it.”
Thorne’s face hardened. He glanced down at the spectroscopy unit, then back at Elias. “I don’t know what psychosis you’re suffering, but the Anchor Mass is proprietary. It’s the key to the Chronoslide reversal theory. And you will not touch it.”
Elias took a step forward, driven by the urgency of self-preservation. “Aris, I know you. Project Sigma Prime. You know who I am. I am the Chronoslide.”
Thorne laughed – a dry, hacking sound. “You’re a poor thief, Vance. Elias Vance. Deceased, Reality 4. We found the residual signature from your first slide years ago. You’re a ghost, a temporal residual. And you’re contaminating my work.”
Thorne moved quickly toward a large, shielded storage locker built into the wall.
“No!” Elias shouted. Thorne was not going to analyze the mass; he was going to secure it, possibly move it somewhere completely inaccessible.
Elias sprinted across the lab, ignoring the pain in his ribs. He tackled Thorne just as the doctor reached the locker door. They crashed onto the cool, tiled floor, lead-lined gloves scratching Elias’s face.
Elias fought with the desperate strength of a man fighting for his soul. He wrestled Thorne’s hands away from the locker handle. Thorne struggled, his scientific mind temporarily replaced by raw panic.
“It belongs here! It stabilizes the timeline!” Thorne yelled.
Elias managed to shove Thorne back, crawling toward the locker. He tore the locker door open. Inside, illuminated by a small LED lamp, sat the Anchor Mass.
It wasn’t a dust mote. It wasn’t a particle.
It was Elias’s wedding ring.
It was dull platinum, worn smooth on the inside from twenty years of marriage to a wife who, in this reality, might have never existed. It was the only object of pure personal memory that had traveled with him. It was small, mundane, and perfect.
Elias snatched the ring, the metal cold against his palm. The moment his fingers closed around the ring, a wave of profound certainty washed over him. The Anchor Mass didn’t stabilize the timeline; it stabilized him within the timeline.
He was still holding the useless key to Apartment 34A. He looked at the ring. It was proof that his past life was real.
Thorne, gasping for breath, scrambled back. “Security is here. You’ve killed the research! You’ll slide again!”
Elias looked at the ring, then at Thorne, whose face was a mixture of scientific rage and terror. He had his proof. He had his anchor. But he was now a wanted criminal, and he had confirmed that the next slide was inevitable.
He turned and smashed the shielded spectrometer unit with the hammer he still carried from the break-in. Sparks flew, alarms shrieked, and the heavy, low thrumming instantly ceased.
Elias ran toward the door he had entered, the small, cold weight of the ring his only shield against the collapsing reality.