The first thing I noticed was my hand, and the fact that it was running late.
I'd raised it in front of my face by reflex, intending to rub my eyes. The tendons contracted, my fingers curled, my thumbnail caught the skin of my index finger; the image, however, followed a moment later, blurred, as though someone were copying it by hand from my sensations.
There was nothing recognizable around it. It wasn't darkness. At least I'd have known what to do with darkness. My surroundings amounted to a gray visual static, like what you see when you press on your eyelids, except mine were wide open. On second thought, it was more like a cathode-ray television searching for a signal, back when you had to turn a dial and hope to find a channel.
"What the fuck is this?"
My voice didn't carry. It left my mouth normally, then died a few inches away, absorbed by some thick, invisible curtain. No echo. For someone who'd spent entire nights in experiment rooms with cold tile floors worthy of a hospital, that was almost more worrying than everything else.
The air was cold and heavy, and every breath took effort, leaving me with the unsettling impression that I'd managed to get only half my usual supply of oxygen.
I should have panicked, but my scientific reflexes took over, and my brain did what it always did when faced with the unknown: it drew up a list of possible explanations and looked for the most likely one.
"Hypothesis one: I'm dreaming."
I pinched the back of my hand. Unfortunately, the pain arrived sharp and without delay, exactly as expected. My dreams had never gone into that much detail.
"Hypothesis two: I'm dead."
Two fingers beneath my jaw confirmed that my pulse was still beating, if a little fast. If this was the afterlife, it was seriously lacking in scenery.
"Hypothesis three: I'm hallucinating."
I hadn't consumed anything except coffee from the machine on the second floor, which, admittedly, wasn't an absolute guarantee of safety.
"Final hypothesis: I fucked up. Badly."
The silence swallowed that sentence like all the others. I added, for good measure:
"Very badly."
We had probably violated some fundamental law of physics. Maybe even Heisenberg. Impossible to say exactly which one, a fact he would no doubt have appreciated.
Beneath my palms, the surface I was sitting on had two textures at once, rough and smooth, superimposed without blending together. My phone was still in the pocket of my cargo pants.
I noticed a glow some distance ahead of me, the only point in the scenery that wasn't flickering. It illuminated almost nothing, and its intensity varied slowly in regular patterns.
I crawled toward it on all fours, because my senses couldn't agree on how far away the ground was, and I had absolutely no desire to discover a shaft by introducing it to my skull.
The farther I went, the more obvious it became: this wasn't a simple source of light but a vaguely conical crystalline structure which, when I stood up, proved to be a good head taller than me. Its facets reflected images that kept rearranging themselves, as though the surface were constantly recalculating what it was supposed to display. It looked like quartz imagined by an Impressionist painter. I'd handled hundreds of samples, synthetic and natural, and none had ever looked like this or possessed, strangely enough, this almost artistic purity.
It emitted a low hum that I felt less in my ears than in my sternum, like standing too close to a subwoofer.
I stopped a meter away, close enough to make out the details without risking an electric shock straight to the face. It was irrational, but so was the situation.
I reached out, then hesitated.
"I'd rather not die like an idiot."
My fingers brushed the surface, freezing and burning at the same time. The nerve endings beneath my skin went wild, and a flood of information surged up my arm like a tide of insects: angles, diagrams, atomic bonds blinking like defective neon signs. I jerked my hand away.
"Shit!"
The quartz hadn't electrocuted me.
It had... recalibrated me?!
The static had suddenly separated into two distinct layers. The first was an ordinary view of what was apparently a mine after all: a low gallery with walls streaked by dark veins, moisture seeping through the cracks, and the pale light given off by the crystal itself. The second showed the same gallery again, this time as a three-dimensional network of luminous points linked by trembling filaments. The atoms and their bonds, laid bare, as though someone had peeled back the world's skin and accidentally exposed the wiring underneath.
Between them circulated something indescribable, neither gas nor liquid, but rather... a kind of golden foam that seeped between the atoms, filled the gaps, and accumulated in denser nodules here and there. A little like soap bubbles.
"Okay. That looks suspiciously like what I'd imagined atomic clouds might look like. Except I shouldn't be able to see them. Certainly not without a scanning tunneling microscope and a few million euros in research grants."
The double vision didn't last. After a few seconds, the two layers began to merge again, and the gray crept back in from the edges. I put my hand on the crystal once more and left it there this time. The mine regained its depth. The second vision remained, but it stopped overwhelming the first.
I took my fingers away: the static returned in less than a minute. I put them back: order was restored. I repeated the experiment twice, counting each time to make sure it wasn't a coincidence. Same result, same delay.
"Looks like you and I are going to have to get to know each other."
The crystal gave a clear chime, almost a laugh. Or perhaps my sanity was fading into the chaos.
"Great. My first friend in this fucking mess is a crystal."
I leaned against it, then slowly slid down to sit, keeping one palm flat against its cold surface as I rested my head against the stone. Its hum reminded me of the last machine I'd heard, and images of the laboratory gradually came back to me.
The basement of the physics building in Grenoble. The smell of reheated coffee, the blue screens, diffraction graphs pinned to the wall, cables snaking across the floor between strips of yellow tape that nobody noticed anymore.
"Paul, you've left your graphite samples lying around again. It's a proper battlefield..."
"That's exactly what it is. A battle for knowledge."
Jeanne and Chris often shook their heads, either in exasperation or with a wry smile. I'd acquired a reputation as a slightly messy mad scientist and had never really disputed it, since it meant people left me the hell alone at crucial moments like this one.
I was a materials physicist. At least, that was my official job title. In practice, I spent my days trying to create unexpected defects in matter, and only afterward did the instinct kick in to figure out how to stop them from blowing up in our faces.
Our experiment was supposed to track the reorganization of a graphite sample under stress in real time. Our instruments only ever showed us a succession of states: the bond intact, then the bond broken. We wanted to see what happened between the two. A reasonable ambition. In theory.
The sensor was a prototype cobbled together from parts salvaged from other failed experiments, a pitiful budget, and three sleepless nights. That night, I was still the operator. Jeanne and Chris monitored the readings from the next room, behind the reinforced glass. Léa, who'd joined the team two months earlier, had stayed with me at the main console.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?"
She'd asked it in the tone she used far too often with him for his liking, skeptical and fascinated at the same time.
"No. But it's the only idea I've got right now."
There had been a click, followed by a rising drone that didn't belong to any piece of equipment in the room. The walls had turned translucent, streaked with golden filaments. Léa, the glass, the voices: everything had dissolved into clouds of points that refused to stay in place. I'd seen Léa turn toward the emergency stop and reach for it.
I hadn't seen whether her hand had actually reached it.
I opened my eyes. The mine was still there. The quartz too. So was I, still sitting there alone, going over what the hell could have gone wrong.
Léa had been less than three meters away from me when everything changed. Jeanne and Chris were behind the glass. If the phenomenon had a range, she might have been caught in it. If it didn't, I was the only one who'd suffered this fate, and the other three were searching for me in the laboratory. If it still existed.
"Okay. So, to recap. I fucked up with a next-generation quantum sensor that turned out to be a little too revolutionary. We probably tried to measure a transition that our own device ended up triggering. Some kind of feedback phenomenon?!... Anyway, now I'm stuck in a mine, and I can see atoms with the naked eye."
His gaze mechanically searched the ground, which was littered with shards apparently broken off the huge crystal he'd been leaning against. He picked up one about as long as his thumb, then took his other hand off the large block.
The static didn't really return, although my perception was less clear than when I was touching the giant crystal. I moved away from the large crystal, then let go of the fragment: the gray immediately spread. I gripped it again: the scenery returned.
"I prefer the portable version. Anyway, I need to move. I'm not going to sit here and die."
A dull pressure settled behind my eyes, like the warning signs of a dreaded ocular migraine after a whole day staring at a badly adjusted screen.
My gaze lingered on the golden foam. Nothing proved it was holding the atoms together. It might just as easily accompany the phenomenon without causing it.
"I need a provisional name. 'Impossible golden stuff that seeps into everything' is going to get old fast."
**The word surfaced from memories of my epistemology classes. Though I wasn't an Einstein fan, he'd at least had the merit of saying in 1920 that "**space without ether is unthinkable." According to him, ether was an attribute of curved spacetime, rather than a material medium. What the modern formulation had chosen to call quantum vacuum energy. Finding this ether delighted me, but much less so when I considered the solitude that came with it.
"Ether. Until proven otherwise."
That was all very well, but the urgent thing now was to find the exit.
The air wasn't getting any better. I'd been breathing for several minutes without any particular effort, yet the feeling that I wasn't getting enough oxygen persisted. Worse, I had no water, no food, and not the slightest idea how deep underground I was, which didn't exactly argue in favor of waiting for rescue.
I switched my phone back on and activated the flashlight. Its white beam overpowered the crystal's glow and showed me what my double vision had still left indistinct: two galleries led out of the chamber. The first ended after six meters at a cave-in, a mass of blocks and earth packed all the way to the ceiling, with the end of a support beam protruding from it, snapped clean in two. Someone had shored up this tunnel.
The walls confirmed it. They bore regular, diagonal gouges, made by a pointed tool striking again and again at the same angle. A pickaxe eaten away by rust lay at the foot of the cave-in, and when I nudged it with the toe of my shoe, the iron crumbled like a dry biscuit.
My phone showed twelve percent. I switched it off.
The second gallery sloped gently downward on the other side. I pulled a splinter of the broken beam from the cave-in, about as long as my forearm, driven by the primate instinct that refuses to leave empty-handed, and set off, reassured by the makeshift club in my grip.
The tunnel was low. It forced me to walk hunched over, one hand against the wall, and vaguely reminded me of the concrete corridors of the Stargate base, minus the set-decoration budget. The ground was uneven and oddly yielding: my soles sank a few millimeters before meeting stone. With every step, the filaments of Ether quivered around me like a spiderweb stretched out in three dimensions.
Ahead of me, the tunnel finally opened into a small cavern. At its center stood an arch-shaped rock formation, studded with black and golden crystals. Energy concentrated there and revolved slowly, like smoke caught in a draft.
"What the hell is this thing now?"
I moved closer to examine the crystals, which weren't arranged at random. They followed logarithmic spirals nested inside one another, with a regularity no mineral growth in human memory had ever achieved. I searched for tool marks, gouges like those left by the pickaxe in the other gallery, and found none. Men had dug this mine. Nobody had carved the arch: it looked as though it had simply been placed there, utterly out of place in its surroundings.
"Fascinating."
I walked around the structure first. The gallery ended abruptly behind it against a solid wall.
"Great. I'm trapped like a rat."
I picked up a pebble, returned to face the portal, and threw it through the opening. It vanished before reaching the wall. I heard no sound of it landing: it had simply ceased to be there.
I took my club, the splinter of support beam, and slowly pushed its end into the arch, halfway through. I felt nothing unusual: no pull, no resistance. It might just as well have been entirely in front of me, even though its upper half had simply ceased to exist in this reality. I counted to ten before pulling it back out.
None of this was encouraging. There was no guarantee at this stage that a human body could make the same journey unharmed, or that it could return. Behind me, however, there was only a collapsed gallery, air that was running out, and a phone with twelve percent battery.
Before going through, I scratched the following onto the wall beside the arch with the tip of my fragment:
Paul — 2:19 a.m. (+ ?) — went through here. Léa?
If she'd made the journey too, she might eventually end up in this chamber. Otherwise, nobody would ever read those words, and they'd cost me only thirty seconds.
"When you've got to go, you've got to go."
I reached out. My palm brushed the crystalline surface.
I felt nothing in particular, and my hand was indeed still there when I pulled it back to check.
I stepped through the portal.
An enormous GONG exploded inside my skull.