"…he's finally woken up."
The words pulled me from somewhere dark and empty, dragging consciousness back into a body that felt foreign and heavy. My eyelids were sealed shut with something thicker than sleep—something that spoke of time passing, of seasons changing while I'd been... where had I been?
When I finally pried my eyes open, the world that greeted me made no sense.
Above me stretched a ceiling that defied every assumption I had about how buildings should work. Veins of pale, pulsing light threaded through smooth metal in organic patterns, casting shadows that seemed to move independently of their sources. The illumination wasn't harsh fluorescent light—this was something else entirely, something that made my teeth ache and my vision blur at the edges.
'Cough.' The sound escaped my throat without permission, raw and painful. How long since I'd used my voice?
I tried to sit up and immediately wished I hadn't. My head felt stuffed with cotton, and every muscle in my body screamed in protest. The bed beneath me was too firm, too precisely contoured—nothing like the sagging mattress in my childhood bedroom at Grandma and Grandpa's farm.
The walls around me hummed with an energy that crawled under my skin. Not the familiar drone of electricity, but something deeper, more complex. Living, almost. Panels on the far wall shifted through displays of symbols that hurt to look at directly—geometric patterns that seemed to fold in on themselves, rearranging according to mathematics my brain couldn't follow.
"Where—" My voice cracked, unused. I swallowed, tasting copper and something medicinal. "Where am I?"
The room didn't answer. Only that alien humming, punctuated by soft beeps from machines I couldn't identify.
This wasn't my grandparents' farmhouse with its creaking floors and faded wallpaper. This wasn't anywhere that should exist. The air itself tasted wrong—too clean, too processed, like it had been scrubbed of everything that made it natural.
As if summoned by my confusion, the seamless door across from me whispered open.
The woman who entered changed the entire atmosphere of the room.
She was tall—easily six feet—and moved with the kind of predatory precision that spoke of either extensive training or natural hunting instincts. Her dark hair was pulled back in a severe bun that emphasized the sharp angles of her face, and her charcoal suit was cut with such geometric perfection it looked like armor disguised as business attire.
Everything about her radiated controlled lethality. From the measured cadence of her steps to the way her pale gray eyes catalogued every detail of the room—and me—with calculating intensity.
She didn't smile. Didn't pause to assess my condition or offer comfort. She simply positioned herself at the foot of my bed like a general surveying a battlefield, and waited for my complete attention.
"You're awake." Her voice was smooth as polished steel, each consonant precisely enunciated. "We can begin."
The words should have been neutral, even reassuring. Instead, they felt weighted with implications that made my skin crawl.
"What is your name?" she asked, and somehow that simple question felt like an interrogation.
My mouth opened, but no sound came. The name was there—I knew it was—but saying it felt dangerous in ways I couldn't articulate. Like giving her this information would hand her power over me that I couldn't take back.
Her expression didn't change, but something flickered behind those pale eyes. Impatience, maybe. Or calculation.
"I'll ask again," she said, each word carrying more weight than the last. "What is your name? What were you doing in the underground cave system? And what, exactly, did you touch?"
'Cave.'
The word detonated in my skull like a flash-bang grenade, shattering the fog that had been clouding my thoughts since I'd awakened. Memory crashed into me in a torrent of jagged, interconnected fragments:
'Summer heat pressing down on the orchard behind Grandma's house, the air heavy with the smell of overripe apples rotting on the ground. I'd been helping Grandpa repair the old barn—or was it the chicken coop? The memory felt slippery, incomplete.'
'The gap between two ancient oak trees that I'd noticed during my morning walks but never really examined. Something about it had always seemed... wrong. Like a doorway that shouldn't exist. The morning I'd finally worked up the courage to investigate, the air around it had been cool despite the summer heat, carrying the damp, mineral scent of deep earth.'
'My phone's flashlight cutting through absolute darkness, revealing walls that wept mineral tears in patient, eternal drops. The passage had been narrow at first—barely wide enough for my shoulders—but it had opened gradually as I'd gone deeper into the earth's belly.'
'The chamber.'
Even now, thinking about it made my chest seize with an emotion I couldn't name. The space had been vast—cathedral vast—with a ceiling that disappeared into shadows no light could penetrate. But it was what waited in the center that had stopped my heart cold.
'A crystal.'
'White as fresh bone but alive with inner fire that had nothing to do with reflected light. Smooth as still water but solid as the bedrock beneath my feet. It had stood there like an altar waiting for worship, like it had been expecting me specifically.'
'I'd known—known with every fiber of my being—that I shouldn't touch it. Every survival instinct I possessed had been screaming warnings. But there had been something else, something that pulled at me with magnetic inevitability.'
'When my fingertips finally brushed its surface, the world had exploded into brilliant white silence. The sensation of being unmade and remade in the space between heartbeats. Of becoming something other than what I had been.'
'And then—nothing. Darkness deeper than the cave, silence more complete than death.'
I dragged myself back to the present, my heart hammering against my ribs. When I spoke, my voice came out as a croak.
"Karl." The name felt strange on my tongue, like it belonged to someone else. "My name is Karl."
Something shifted in her expression—not satisfaction, exactly, but acknowledgment. Like I'd passed the first part of a test I didn't know I was taking.
"Good. And do you know where you are, Karl?"
I looked around the impossible room again, taking in the humming walls and the displays showing symbols that seemed to exist in more dimensions than my eyes could process. My throat tightened.
"No."
"The Federal Bureau of Supernatural Defense," she said, letting each word settle like a physical weight. "The FBSD."
The acronym felt foreign, like a language I'd never learned. "Federal Bureau of... what?"
Her eyebrows rose fractionally—the first genuine emotion she'd shown since entering. "You truly don't know."
It wasn't a question, but I answered anyway. "My memories are... broken. Fragmented. There are pieces missing." I pressed my palms against my temples, trying to ease the pressure building behind my eyes. "How long was I unconscious?"
'Pause.' A heartbeat of silence that stretched too long.
"Unconscious?" She studied me with renewed intensity, as if seeing me for the first time. "Karl, what year do you think it is?"
The question hit me like ice water. "It's... it's 2024. June 2024. I was helping my grandparents with the farm for the summer. I found the cave on..." The memory felt slippery. "Tuesday morning? Wednesday?"
Her face went carefully blank—the expression of someone who'd just received information that changed everything.
"Karl," she said quietly, "it's 2055. You've been missing for thirty-one years."
The words didn't make sense. They bounced off my consciousness like stones off water, refusing to sink in.
"That's not possible," I whispered.
"The world you remember ended in the summer of 2024," she continued, her voice gentle but implacable. "What we call the Collapse. Reality itself became... unstable. The laws of physics that had governed our universe for billions of years suddenly became suggestions rather than absolutes."
She gestured toward the humming walls around us. "Some humans survived the transition. Many developed what we now call Authorities—abilities that shouldn't exist according to any scientific framework we previously understood. Every living creature has an essence within them now, though not all can access or manipulate it."
'Sigh.' The sound escaped me unbidden as the implications crashed over me like a wave.
Thirty-one years. The grandparents I remembered were probably dead. The world I'd known was gone. I was a relic from a time before reality had broken and rebuilt itself around impossible rules.
"The cave where you were found shows evidence of temporal displacement," she continued. "Our theory is that the crystal you touched was some kind of... stasis field. A bubble of frozen time that preserved you while the world transformed around you."
I stared at her, trying to process information that felt too large for human comprehension. "And now?"
"Now you're awake in a world where the impossible is routine. Where some people can manipulate fire with their thoughts, where gravity is negotiable, where the dead sometimes answer when called." She clasped her hands behind her back, a lecturer addressing a particularly slow student. "Someone had to maintain order in this chaos. Someone had to stand between the transformed world and what remained of human civilization."
"That's you," I said. It wasn't a question.
"That's us. The FBSD exists to catalog, control, and when necessary, contain the supernatural forces that emerged from the Collapse. We are the reason there's still a functioning government, still cities with power and running water, still hope for humanity's future."
As she spoke, I noticed details I'd missed before. The way she held herself suggested combat training. The subtle bulge under her left arm indicated a shoulder holster. And pinned to the lapel of her immaculate jacket was a badge I hadn't seen earlier—brushed metal with precise lettering that caught the alien light.
'SLOANE MERRITT. FBSD.'
She hadn't meant for me to see it. The angle was wrong, the placement too subtle for casual observation. But in positioning herself to deliver her explanation, she'd given me something crucial: her name.
Director Sloane Merritt. The woman who held my fate in her carefully manicured hands.
"What happens to me now?" I asked.
Her smile was winter frost on broken glass. "Now we find out what thirty-one years in temporal stasis has done to your essence. What that crystal changed you into. And what that means for everyone involved."
She moved toward the door, then paused at the threshold. "Karl, you need to understand something. The world you're waking up to isn't the one you remember. The rules have changed. The stakes are higher. And your very existence here raises questions that could threaten the stability we've fought three decades to build."
Her pale eyes met mine across the sterile room. "I hope, for all our sakes, that you're worth the trouble."
The door sealed behind her with a soft *hiss', leaving me alone with the humming walls and the growing understanding that I wasn't just a person out of time.
I was a potential threat to whatever order had emerged from the ashes of the world I'd once known.
And Director Sloane Merritt was going to find out exactly what kind of threat I might be.