Between Space – Subjective Hour 0
Grey. Not empty grey, but *potential* grey. A space that seemed to be waiting for someone to decide what it should be. Jack floated—or stood—or existed in a place where such distinctions were politely optional.
The core floated before him, Theta-3, a silver heart beating in the formless void. Its light was the only certainty.
Eighteen hours. A day and a night to learn what he was. To learn what his mother had made him.
The first lesson was immediate and terrifying: thought shaped substance here.
I need a workspace, Jack thought.
The grey congealed. Walls formed from memory—the peeling paint of his apartment, the workbench he'd built with his mother, the single window that showed not the London slums but swirling grey mist. It was his workshop, but imperfect. Details were fuzzy where his memory failed. The tools on the bench were generic shapes, lacking specific brands or wear patterns.
Jack reached for a screwdriver. The generic shape became the exact one he remembered—the one with the green handle, the tip slightly worn from years of use. He remembered the scratch on the shaft where he'd dropped it at age twelve. The scratch appeared.
He was learning the language.
For the first six hours, he practiced stability. The Between was a conversation, not a monologue. If he thought *wall*, he got wall. If he thought *strong wall*, he got something more substantial. If he thought *wall that remembers being a mountain*, he got stone veined with fossils that had never existed.
The dangers became apparent in the fourth hour. A moment of fear—a memory of ATB agents breaking through his door—manifested as a swirling void that ate the corner of his workshop. The grey rushed in, formless and hungry. Jack had to consciously *unthink* the memory, replacing it with the solidity of stone, before the void retreated.
Emotional control wasn't just discipline here. It was structural engineering.
By the sixth hour, he could maintain a stable bubble twenty meters across, with clear boundaries between "Jack's space" and the wild grey. The core hummed approval, its energy now at 62%.
---
Subjective Hour 7
The core was more than a tool. It was a library. And now, in this place where thought and memory were tangible, Jack could browse the stacks.
He placed his hands on Theta-3 and thought: *Show me Anchor creation.*
The grey around him dissolved, replaced by memory-not-memory. He stood in a place that was not a place—a laboratory that existed only in core storage.
Information flowed not as data but as understanding:
The Precursors (name unknown, designation inferred) built Anchors as stabilizers for a multiverse experiencing cascade failure. Reality was unraveling at the seams. Their solution: create focal points that could negotiate with local physics, convincing reality to remain coherent.
Anchor 7-Alpha was experiment seventeen in human integration. Previous attempts:
#1-8: Biological rejection – hosts dissolved into component particles.
#9-11: Cognitive failure – minds shattered by understanding too much.
#12-14: Reality addiction – hosts ceased to perceive their native layer.
#15-16: Successful but limited – became caretakers of Between spaces.
#17: Jack Milstrom – selected for pre-existing "reality compliance deficiency" (his childhood illness). His biology was already flexible. The integration wasn't a violation but an enhancement.
The clinical facts should have hurt. He was a successful experiment. A prototype. But layered over the data was his mother's emotional imprint: *Desperation. Love. A choice between watching her son unravel or making him something that could survive the unspooling.*
Jack reached into the core, found a specific memory—Alice in her lab, smiling at him on his tenth birthday when he'd fixed her broken scanner. He pulled it forth.
The grey shaped itself into her. Not perfect—the edges shimmered, details borrowed from his own childhood memories rather than her true appearance. But it was her smile. Her eyes.
"Mom?"
The construct spoke with her voice, assembled from memory fragments: "You were always meant to have this, Jack. But not like this. Not hunted."
"I don't understand why they want it so badly."
"The military found Precursor ruins under the Eastern Breach." Memory-Alice gestured, and the grey showed images: strange architecture half-buried in demonkin-infested territory. "That's why they wanted my research. The Anchors are keys. Theta-3 isn't just a memory storage. It's a map. To where they came from. And where they went."
"Where did they go?"
"Where do things go when reality changes around them? They adapted. Or they didn't." The construct was fading, edges bleeding back into grey. "Jack... the core has coordinates. To sites. Some still have power. Be careful who you show."
She dissolved. The memory cost 8% core energy. Jack was learning: some truths had price tags.
---
Subjective Hour 13
Time was running out. Core energy: 41%.
Jack needed to prepare for return. The real world would be waiting—hard, unyielding, and full of people who wanted what he carried.
He started crafting, but "crafting" here was different. He wasn't manipulating materials. He was negotiating with the fabric of possibility.
Cloak of Forgotten Moments, he conceptualized. Not invisibility. Something subtler. A garment woven from "discarded time"—the moments no one remembers, the glances that never registered, the footsteps lost in crowd noise.
The grey responded. Threads of half-formed memories spun themselves into fabric. The cloak, when it settled, was the color of peripheral vision. Looking directly at it made your eyes slide away.
Next, his tools. His old toolkit was crude reality-forcing. Here, he could make tools that helped.
He shaped a knife, but instead of thinking sharp, he thought clean separation. The blade that formed had a edge that seemed to respect the materials it cut, parting them along natural lines.
Wire that sought connection points. Pliers that understood leverage. A multimeter that listened to electrical flows rather than forcing probes.
The final piece: the Echoing Void Locket needed upgrading. The Mk I was a crude mask. The Mk II would be something subtler.
He didn't make it hide his signature. He made it convince reality that his signature was background noise. The same way people don't notice their own heartbeat until something's wrong. He would be the heartbeat of the world, unnoticed because he was supposed to be there.
The crafting took energy. Core reserves: 23%. Warning flashed.
One last skill. Something for emergencies. He focused on the space between spaces, on the step he'd taken to get here.
He was ready. Or as ready as he could be.
---
Subjective Hour 17 – 50 minutes remaining
The Between was noticing him.
At first, it was just shapes in the distant grey—forms that might have been structures or creatures or neither. Then movement at the edges of his bubble. Something that flowed like liquid, pulsed like light, and carried the scent of ozone and forgotten languages.
Jack packed his new tools, donned the cloak, felt the upgraded locket settle against his chest. He needed an exit point. Not his apartment—that would be watched. Somewhere forgotten.
A memory surfaced: the old Harrison Gearworks factory in the Ironworks District. Abandoned since the mana surge of '18. He'd explored it as a child, a place of rust and ghosts.
He fixed the memory in his mind—the broken skylight on the third floor, the smell of old oil and damp. The core resonated, understanding.
One last look at the Between. The Drifters were closer now. One paused at the boundary of his bubble, a thing of shifting geometries and soft light. It extended something that might have been a limb, touched the edge of his workspace, and the grey there stabilized, became more real. A gift? A marking?
Then Jack stepped.
---
Real World – 2nd of Thaw, 23:17
The world crashed in. Sound—the distant rumble of forges, the drip of water, the scuttle of rats. Smell—oil, rust, decay. Gravity—insistent and unyielding.
Jack stumbled, catching himself on a rusted gear assembly. The factory was exactly as he remembered, but smaller, sadder. Reality felt... loud. And rigid. Like wearing clothes two sizes too small after being comfortable.
The core's light dimmed to a faint pulse. He needed to recharge it, and soon.
First test: the cloak. He walked past a night watchman's station at the factory entrance. The old man glanced up, saw him, then looked back at his newspaper, already forgetting. Jack's footsteps made sound, but the watchman's brain categorized them as "building settling."
It worked. For now.
He made his way to his old neighborhood. The ATB had quarantined his building. Yellow reality-hazard tape, warning signs: CAUTION – LOCALIZED REALITY INSTABILITY – CLASS 1 SEAM ACTIVITY.
Two agents in containment suits stood guard, looking bored.
"…faded at 02:00," one was saying into a comm. "No residual core signature. Probably disintegrated in the event."
"Standard cleanup?"
"Tomorrow. Let it stabilize overnight. Don't want anyone getting untangled."
They thought he was dead. The reality distortion he'd left behind had consumed the core's signature. They thought Theta-3 was destroyed.
It was an opportunity. Jack Milstrom was officially missing, presumed disintegrated. But he was also homeless, nearly penniless, and carrying a core with 19% charge.
Alice's research surfaced: the old Fleet Street reservoir, abandoned when they built the new mana-purification plant. Historical reports of "spatial anomalies" there in the early 2000s.
It took an hour to walk there, avoiding main streets. The cloak worked on casual observers, but twice he saw ATB patrols and had to duck into alleys. Their scanners were active, sweeping for anomalies.
The reservoir was a sunken concrete bowl, half-filled with stagnant water, surrounded by chain-link and warning signs. Jack climbed the fence, dropped into the damp interior.
The core reacted immediately, pulsing, pulling him toward the northeast corner.
There, the world was… soft.
Water flowed in a lazy circle, defying gravity. Stones floated inches above the ground, turning slowly. The air smelled of ozone and wet stone. A natural seam, weak but persistent.
Jack placed the core on a dry patch of concrete within the anomaly. Immediately, silver light began to siphon from the air, flowing into Theta-3.
It was a start. He had a place to hide, a way to recharge. He was alive, free, and in possession of his mother's legacy.
Then the message alerts he'd been ignoring chimed simultaneously.
Rick (14 unread): "Jack where are they say your apartment it's wrong the walls are breathing please answer" … "They questioned me for three hours I didn't tell them anything but Jack they know about the system"* … "If you're alive please signal somehow"
Lena (3 unread): "Employer unhappy. Data share required regardless of your status. Failure to provide will result in asset recovery."
Unknown number (1 unread): "Your mother's work deserves better than a shallow grave. We can help. -A friend"
Jack was about to reply to Rick when the core pulsed a warning.
Someone was here. In the reservoir. With a cloak like his.
Jack turned slowly.
A figure stood ten meters away, hooded, clad in the same forgettable grey as his own cloak. How long had they been there? The figure raised a hand—not in threat, in greeting—and tossed something small and silver that landed at Jack's feet.
A data-chip. Then the figure turned and walked away, becoming less substantial with each step until they were gone.
Jack picked up the chip. It was cold. On its surface, etched in tiny, precise letters: "She didn't die in an accident. She was taken. And they're coming for you next."
The core, recharging at his feet, pulsed in time with his suddenly racing heart.
Date: 3rd of Thaw, 2026 GEC – 01:23
Core Energy: 21% and recharging
Location: Fleet Street Reservoir (hidden)
Status: Presumed dead, hunted, and now contacted
Next: Chapter 9 - "The Friend & The Grave"