Date: 1st of Thaw, 2026 GEC – 00:17
(72 hours until ATB confiscation)
The core pulsed in Jack's hands, a warm, rhythmic light that seemed to breathe. Cracks spiderwebbed across its crystalline surface, but the system's new analysis revealed their true nature:
Jack's apartment felt different with the core present. The air was clearer, the Sanctified Ground ward hummed at a purer frequency, and the ever-present grime of the city's mana pollution had retreated to the corners. Reality itself was bending slightly around the artifact, accommodating its presence.
"System, what's the minimum safe synchronization level to access basic schematics?"
Jack assembled an interface harness from scavenged parts: a neural headset from a broken immersion rig, mana-conductive gel, and a regulator cobbled together from his Glimmerstone calipers. It was crude, but the core seemed to recognize intent over craftsmanship.
When he made the first connection, the world dissolved into light.
Memory: A laboratory, all white surfaces and soft lighting. Alice Milstrom, younger than Jack remembered, her hair streaked with silver but her eyes bright. She held a different core—whole, radiant—in her hands.
"They want to weaponize it, Director," she said to a man in military dress. "The Anchors aren't tools. They're memories. Living records of how reality should be."
The director's face was stone. "Dr. Milstrom, the Eastern Breach widens every day. Demonkin pour through. If we can create localized reality bubbles where our physics apply and theirs don't—"
"—we become exactly what we're fighting. You're talking about unraveling the world to save it." Alice's hand tightened around the core. "There are rules. Even reality has rules."
Memory shifted. Same lab, but late. Emergency lighting. Alice working frantically at a console, her core—Jack's core—connected to systems. A warning flashed: MILITARY OVERRIDE ACTIVE. WEAPONIZATION PROTOCOLS INITIATED.
She made a decision. Jack felt it through the memory—the terrible, calculated choice. Her hands moved to the core, not to destroy it, but to…
"If I can't stop you from using it," she whispered, "I can make sure you only get the pieces."
A precise, expert application of force. The core cracked. Not shattered—fractured along designed fault lines. Release valves opened.
"Jack," she whispered, recording a final message into the core itself. "If you find this, don't let them open it fully. It remembers everything. And memory…"
The memory ended.
Jack gasped back to awareness. His nose was bleeding. The system showed new data:
The knowledge flowed into him. Not as information, but as *understanding*. He didn't learn how to craft; he remembered he already knew.
Anchors weren't tools. They were translators. They spoke reality's language—the deep, mathematical tongue of quantum fields and dimensional constants. Crafting, he now understood, was the crude act of shouting requests at an unhearing universe. Anchors whispered, and reality listened.
---
Hour 8 – 1st of Thaw, 05:42
(67 hours remaining)
His first synthesis attempt was instinctual. The core rested beside him, humming in sympathetic resonance. Jack didn't have the materials for a proper reality-stabilized battery, but he didn't need them. He had the core's language.
He placed his last chunk of raw Glimmerstone ore on the workbench. Then he simply… asked.
Not with words. With intent. With the patterns the core had shown him—the gentle, persuasive mathematics of how reality *preferred* to be arranged.
The ore softened. Not melted, but became pliable, eager. It reshaped itself into a perfect cylindrical battery, channels and conduits forming like veins growing. A void-black crystal formed at its center, drinking light.
It had taken fourteen minutes. No tools. No heat. Just conversation.
Jack installed it in his Echoing Void Locket. The effect was immediate. The locket's hum deepened, becoming almost inaudible. His presence in the room seemed to diminish, as if reality itself was helping him hide.
He was learning, but not fast enough. Rick's message confirmed it: *"City sensors picked up 'unusual compliance variations' in your sector. They're not calling it Anchor activity yet, but they've flagged it for Level 2 investigation."*
Level 2 meant specialized scanners. The kind that could see through his locket.
---
Hour 22 – 1st of Thaw, 19:15
(53 hours remaining)
The deeper synchronization was a choice born of desperation. The system warned him:
Jack lay on his pallet, the interface harness adjusted, the core glowing warmly beside him. "Do it."
This time, the memory was a flood.
Alice at a reality seam—a place where the air shimmered like heat haze, and the grass grew in non-Euclidean patterns. Her instruments sang with data.
"It's not a wound," she murmured to a colleague. "It's a joint. Where two layers of reality meet and move against each other."
Her research unfolded in Jack's mind:
- Reality is layered, like pages in a book
- Seams are where pages touch
- Most species only perceive their own page
-Anchors were created by a civilization that could read the whole book
- They built Anchors to stabilize their page as others rubbed against it
- The civilization fell, but the Anchors remained
- Alice found Theta-3 buried in ancient ruins
The military applications were obvious: Control seams, control which physics applied where. Make enemy territory uninhabitable by altering its fundamental constants. Make your own territory impregnable.
"We're children," Alice said in another memory, "poking a sleeping giant with sticks. The seams aren't anomalies. They're breathing."
Then the final memory, the truth:
Jack, age six, sick. Not normal sick—his very biology unraveling. Doctors called it "Reality Compliance Degradation." A one-in-a-million condition where a person's body disagreed with local physics.
Alice's solution: The experimental procedure. Anchor 7-Alpha—a damaged, incomplete Anchor core—integrated with her son's developing mind. To make him reality-compliant by giving him the tools to negotiate with reality itself.
"It was the only way to save you," her voice whispered through the memory. "I'm sorry, Jack. I turned you into something they'll hunt. But I gave you the keys to hide."
Jack woke sobbing.
The core pulsed gently against his chest where he'd pulled it close. It wasn't just his mother's life's work. It was her apology. Her confession.
---
Hour 34 – 2nd of Thaw, 07:03
(41 hours remaining)
The ATB's early movements were subtle but detectable. Unmarked vans parked two blocks away. A drone circled higher than commercial regulations allowed. They were setting up a perimeter.
Jack's plan formed with cold clarity. He couldn't outrun them. Couldn't outfight them. But he could make his apartment a place they couldn't—or wouldn't—enter.
The core provided the schematics: a "Localized Reality Anchor Field." Not a shield, but a suggestion to reality that this small space should play by slightly different rules. The effect would be subtle to anyone inside, but scanners would read it as a minor reality seam—unstable, dangerous, requiring quarantine protocols.
The materials were impossible: stabilized neutrinos, folded space filaments, compliant meta-materials.
"Or," Jack whispered, "I ask reality nicely."
He placed his hands on the core and the floor simultaneously. He didn't craft. He negotiated.
With one of his two remaining EX-Rank boosts fueling the effort, he spoke to the quantum foam beneath his apartment. He showed it a pattern, a possibility—a tiny bubble where gravity was 0.3% weaker, light traveled 0.1% slower, and the strong nuclear force had a slightly different constant.
Reality considered. Then, because Jack asked politely and understood the language, it agreed.
The generator wasn't a device. It was a standing agreement. Jack could feel it—a gentle tension in the air of his apartment, a willingness of physics to be flexible.
It would work. It would also drain the core. And when the field collapsed, the ATB would find him exhausted and the core weakened.
---
Hour 46 – 2nd of Thaw, 19:22
(29 hours remaining)
The knock was wrong. Too soft. Too hesitant.
Lena stood at his door, her usual composure cracked. "Marlow's gone. ATB picked him up three hours ago. They're asking about 'Anchor-related artifacts' and 'unregistered interfaces.'" She glanced past Jack into the apartment, her eyes widening slightly at the subtle wrongness in the air. "Kael's employer wants their thirty percent. Now."
Jack showed her the core. It glowed brighter now, almost alive.
Lena actually stepped back. "That's… not what they described. That's not a tool. That's…"
"A memory," Jack finished. "Tell them I need three hours. I'll have the data share ready."
"They want extraction. You and the core. Now."
"Tell them three hours."
She studied him, then nodded tightly. "Three. Then they come whether you're ready or not."
She left. Ten minutes later, Rick arrived, face pale.
"They're moving early. Confiscation team is prepping for 06:00 tomorrow. Veridian has observers on the team. They're not taking chances—they're bringing a Class 3 reality stabilizer to counteract any 'anomalies.'"
That changed everything. A Class 3 stabilizer could neutralize his field.
Jack made his choice.
"Rick, I need a distraction at 05:30. Something that draws the ATB team two blocks away for exactly seven minutes."
Rick swallowed. "What are you going to do?"
"Disappear."
"Jack…"
"Just the seven minutes. Then get clear."
Rick nodded, terrified but loyal. "Seven minutes."
Alone again, Jack faced the core. The final option. The dangerous one.
The core could do more than create a field. It could open a door. A tiny, temporary reality seam just large enough for him to step through—into the spaces between layers. The Between.
The system's warning was stark:
But it was his only move.
---
Hour 48 – 2nd of Thaw, 21:17
(27 hours remaining)
Synchronization: 89%.
The core blazed like a captured star. The apartment walls shimmered, reality gone soft at the edges. Jack saw glimpses of other layers—a world where the sky was purple, another where gravity flowed sideways, another where his mother still lived and smiled at him.
But those were just reflections. Echoes. He had to focus on his own layer.
He packed quickly: the core in its containment harness, his tools, the locket around his neck, the Cinder-1 sidearm. Everything else he left. It was just stuff.
At 89% synchronization, he understood completely. Anchors were bridges. Theta-3 was a bridge to other places. 7-Alpha—his system—was a bridge between human consciousness and reality itself. Together, they could go… between.
He activated the field early. The apartment groaned as local physics reluctantly bent. Light fractured. Time stuttered.
Outside, shouts. The ATB team wasn't waiting for 06:00.
Jack placed his hands on the core and asked for a door.
Not a tear. Not a wound. A joint. A place where two pages met.
A seam opened in the center of his room. It wasn't a void—it was a grey, shifting space where colors didn't quite exist and directions were suggestions.
The door exploded inward. ATB agents in containment suits burst through, reality stabilizers humming.
Jack stepped backward into the seam.
The last thing he saw from his world: Agents staring into a room that hurt their eyes to look at, gravity uncertain, light wrong. And no core. No Jack.
The seam closed.
---
Between Space – Time Differential Unstable
Grey. Not empty, but full of potential shapes that refused to settle. Up and down were matters of opinion. Time flowed like thick syrup, then like rushing water.
Jack floated—or stood—or existed in a space that didn't require posture. The core floated before him, the only constant, its light now a gentle silver.
He had eighteen hours here while less than two passed outside. Eighteen hours to learn, to plan, to become something more than prey.
The core pulsed, and understanding flowed: This space wasn't between realities. It was the glue that held them together. The blank margins between pages. And here, with an Anchor, you could write in the margins.
Jack reached out. The grey shifted. A workbench formed from nothingness—or from his expectation. Tools materialized. This was a place where will shaped substance directly.
For the first time since his awakening, Jack Milstrom smiled.
He had eighteen hours in a place where reality listened. And he had a lot to learn.
Date: Between Space – Subjective Hour 0
External: 2nd of Thaw, 21:23 (26.5 hours until ATB would have arrived)
Next: Chapter 8 - "The Margin Scribe"