'Chime.'
A sharp, melodic tone cut through the heavy silence in the room, its pitch so precisely calibrated it seemed designed to command immediate attention. The sound came from everywhere and nowhere—embedded in the walls themselves, perhaps, or transmitted through frequencies I couldn't detect.
Sloane's reaction was instantaneous. Her hand moved to the small device nestled against her ear with the fluid precision of someone who'd performed the gesture thousands of times. The motion was so practiced it seemed involuntary, muscle memory overriding conscious thought.
I watched her face as she listened to whatever voice whispered against the room's electronic hum. The words were too low for me to catch, but I could see their effect in the subtle shifts of her expression. Her jaw tightened fractionally. Her eyes narrowed. Her shoulders squared in a way that suggested she was receiving orders rather than information.
The conversation lasted exactly fifteen seconds. I counted.
When it ended, she removed her hand from the device and turned that cold, analytical gaze back to me. But something had changed. The careful patience she'd shown during our initial interaction was gone, replaced by the brisk efficiency of someone whose time had suddenly become valuable.
"My assistant will handle your processing from this point forward," she said, each word delivered with scalpel precision. "You'll be prepared for Academy transfer within the next forty-eight hours."
'Processing.' The clinical term sat heavy between us, reducing me to a logistical problem that needed to be solved efficiently. I wasn't a person who'd just learned his entire world had vanished while he slept for thirty-one years—I was cargo that needed to be moved through their system.
"Don't mistake my absence for an opportunity," she continued, her voice carrying a weight of authority that seemed to press against the walls themselves. "You remain in Bureau custody, Karl. That status won't change until we determine what three decades of dimensional exposure has done to you and what threat you might pose."
She turned toward the door, her charcoal coat swirling with the sharp efficiency of her movement. But at the threshold, she paused. When she looked back at me, her expression held something I hadn't seen before—not quite curiosity, but a kind of predatory interest that made my skin crawl.
"The Academy has... extensive experience... with unusual manifestations of essence," she said quietly. "I suggest you cooperate fully with whatever they require of you. The alternatives are significantly less comfortable."
The threat was delivered with the same matter-of-fact tone she'd used to explain the thirty-one-year gap in my life. Just another piece of information for me to process, another variable in an equation I didn't understand.
'Hiss.'
The door whispered shut behind her with mechanical finality, sealing me back into the humming silence of the room. But the air felt different now—lighter without her intimidating presence, but somehow more dangerous. Like the moment after lightning strikes when you know the thunder is still coming.
I sat on the edge of the bed, trying to process what had just happened. Thirty-one years. Everyone I'd known, gone. The world rebuilt around impossible rules by people who treated the supernatural like a bureaucratic inconvenience. And me—apparently some kind of dimensional anomaly who needed to be 'processed' before being shipped off to something called the Academy.
'The Academy.' Another institution I'd never heard of, another piece of this impossible puzzle I'd somehow become the center of. Sloane's tone when she'd mentioned it suggested it wasn't a place anyone went voluntarily.
'Extensive experience with unusual manifestations of essence.' The phrase echoed in my head, bringing with it images I tried not to examine too closely. What kind of experience? What defined an 'unusual manifestation' in a world where the impossible had become mundane?
Five minutes passed. Ten. The silence stretched until I began to wonder if I'd been forgotten, left to sit in this sterile room until someone remembered to come back for me. But just as I was beginning to consider testing whether the door would open for me, it hissed apart once again.
'Footsteps.'
The woman who entered couldn't have been more different from Sloane if she'd been deliberately designed as a contrast.
Where Sloane had been all sharp edges and controlled aggression, this woman moved with an easy, almost distracted grace. She was younger—probably in her late twenties—with auburn hair that escaped from a messy bun in soft wisps that caught the strange light. Her Bureau jacket hung slightly too large on her frame, sleeves pushed up past her elbows in a way that suggested she'd been working with her hands recently.
Most importantly, when her eyes met mine, I didn't feel like a specimen under a microscope. She looked at me like I was a person—confused, probably frightened, definitely in need of help, but still human.
"Hi," she said, and even that simple greeting carried more warmth than anything I'd heard since waking up in this place. Her voice was softer than Sloane's, with a slight rasp that suggested either stress or too many late nights. "You're Karl, right? I'm Lena. I'll be getting you through the next steps."
She shifted the tablet she carried from one hip to the other, a casual gesture that somehow made the entire interaction feel less formal. Where Sloane had commanded the room through sheer force of personality, Lena simply inhabited it, making herself at home in the sterile environment.
"Yes," I said carefully, unsure how much trust to extend. "Karl."
Something flickered across her face—sympathy, maybe, or recognition. She'd done this before, I realized. Handled confused, frightened people who'd been swept up in the Bureau's machinery. The thought was somehow both comforting and deeply unsettling.
"Come on," she said, gesturing toward the door with her tablet. "The sooner we get started, the sooner this all starts making sense. Hopefully."
That last word carried a note of uncertainty that was almost reassuring. At least she wasn't pretending to have all the answers.
I stood, testing legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. Thirty-one years of dimensional stasis had apparently taken its toll—every movement felt slightly off, like I was operating a body I'd forgotten how to use properly. The simple act of standing sent small waves of dizziness through my head, but I managed to stay upright.
As we left the room together, one thought crystallized with uncomfortable clarity: I wasn't being escorted. I wasn't being guided or helped or protected. I was being moved through a system, transferred from one handler to another like a package that needed to reach its destination intact.
The corridor that swallowed us was a testament to engineering that bordered on the impossible.
It stretched in both directions farther than the building should have been able to accommodate, the walls lined with those same pulsing light-veins I'd seen in my room. But here they formed more complex patterns—networks that branched and merged like neural pathways, carrying information in pulses of color that moved too quickly for my eyes to follow.
The air itself felt charged, tasting sharp and metallic on my tongue. Every breath made my teeth ache slightly, as if the atmosphere contained particles that didn't belong in human lungs. The scent was clinical but somehow organic—like a hospital built inside a living creature.
People moved past us with purpose and precision. Some wore Sloane's severe business attire, their faces set in expressions of professional neutrality. Others sported uniforms I couldn't identify—dark fabrics with insignia that seemed to shift when I looked at them directly. A few carried devices that hummed with barely contained energy, instruments that occupied the uncomfortable space between tool and weapon.
None of them looked at me directly, but I felt their attention like physical weight. Sideways glances, momentary pauses in conversation, the subtle way bodies adjusted their trajectory to give us a wider berth. Whatever I was, whatever I represented, it made them nervous.
"This place," I said, watching a woman stride past with what looked like a rifle made of crystallized light slung across her shoulder, "it's bigger than it should be, isn't it?"
Lena glanced back at me, a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "Bigger on the inside than the outside? Yeah, that's pretty much standard operating procedure around here. The architecture department has some very creative interpretations of spatial relationships."
The casual way she delivered that impossible statement was somehow more unsettling than if she'd treated it as miraculous. This was normal for her. Routine. Buildings that defied geometry were just another Tuesday at the Federal Bureau of Supernatural Defense.
"How long have you worked here?" I asked.
"Four years, give or take." She adjusted her grip on the tablet, fingers dancing across its surface in practiced patterns. "Started right after college. Turns out a degree in applied dimensional theory is surprisingly useful when reality stops making sense."
"And you're okay with... all of this?" I gestured at the impossible corridor, at the people carrying weapons that shouldn't exist, at the very air that hummed with energies I couldn't name.
She was quiet for a moment, long enough that I thought she might not answer. When she finally spoke, her voice carried a weight of consideration that suggested she'd thought about this question before.
"I was eighteen when the dimensional barriers started failing," she said. "Old enough to remember what the world was like before, young enough to adapt to what it became. One day I'm worried about college applications and whether the boy in my physics class likes me back, the next day I'm watching my neighbor's dog phase through solid matter because its essence had been exposed to trans-dimensional radiation."
She paused at an intersection, checking her tablet before leading us down another corridor that seemed to curve in directions that didn't quite make geometric sense.
"You adapt," she continued. "You find ways to process the impossible because the alternative is going insane. The Bureau... they're not perfect, but they're trying to hold things together. Someone has to catalog the new rules, train people to handle the dangerous manifestations, keep civilization from completely falling apart."
"And the people they can't figure out?" I asked quietly. "The unusual cases? What happens to them?"
Her step faltered almost imperceptibly. "You'll understand more soon enough."
We stopped before a door that looked identical to every other door we'd passed—smooth silver metal with no visible handle or lock mechanism. Lena touched her tablet to its surface, and the door dissolved into the wall with mechanical precision that was becoming disturbingly familiar.
'Mechanical whir.'
The room beyond made every instinct I possessed scream warnings.
If my recovery room had been sterile and clinical, this space was something altogether more threatening. Machines lined the walls like sleeping predators, their surfaces shifting with patterns of light that seemed to respond to my presence. Complex arrays of sensors and scanning equipment hung from articulated arms that reminded me uncomfortably of spider legs.
At the center of it all sat a chair that was clearly the room's focal point. It rose from the floor like a technological throne, constructed from materials that seemed to shift between metal and glass depending on the angle of observation. Cables emerged from its base in organic curves, and the seat itself pulsed with soft blue light that made my skin crawl.
But it was the feeling of the room that truly disturbed me. The air here was different—thicker, charged with an energy that made my teeth ache and my vision blur slightly at the edges. Whatever this place was designed to do, it was going to do it to me.
"This is where we map your essence signature," Lena explained, but I caught the tension in her voice that hadn't been there in the corridor. She was nervous about this, too. "The diagnostic process might feel strange, but it's not designed to hurt you. We just need to understand what thirty-one years of dimensional exposure has done to your fundamental essence patterns."
'What thirty-one years of dimensional exposure has done.' As if the three decades I'd lost were a burden I'd picked up, something foreign that had attached itself to my essential nature. The phrasing suggested I wasn't the same person who'd walked into that cave so long ago.
"What exactly will it do?" I asked, staring at the chair with growing unease.
"It reads the energy patterns that all living things carry within them," she said, consulting her tablet. "Everyone who's been changed by dimensional exposure carries a unique signature—like a fingerprint, but for essence manifestation. The chair maps that signature and helps us determine what category your abilities might fall into."
She moved to a console beside the door, her fingers dancing across controls that responded to her touch with soft chimes and flickers of light. "Elemental manipulation, kinetic projection, enhanced physical attributes, precognitive abilities, dimensional interfacing—there are dozens of documented categories, and new ones get discovered every few months."
"And if I don't fit into any of the categories?"
The question seemed to hang in the air longer than it should have. Lena's hands stilled over her controls, and when she looked back at me, something had shifted in her expression.
"Everyone fits somewhere," she said, but the words carried less conviction than her earlier explanations. "The system is comprehensive. It has to be."
I nodded, but privately wondered what happened to the people who proved that assumption wrong. What protocols existed for handling cases that broke the system designed to contain them?
"The sooner we get this done, the sooner you can get some real answers," Lena continued, gesturing toward the chair. "I know it looks intimidating, but I've run hundreds of these scans. Most people just experience mild disorientation afterward."
'Most people.' Another qualifier that suggested I might not fall into that comfortable majority.
I approached the chair slowly, every step feeling like I was walking toward the edge of a cliff. The closer I got, the more the air around it seemed to thicken with potential energy. By the time I was close enough to touch it, my skin was crawling with static electricity and my mouth tasted of copper and ozone.
"Just sit normally," Lena instructed from her console. "The chair will adjust to you automatically. Try to stay relaxed."
'Sigh.'
Relaxed. Right. I lowered myself into the seat, and immediately understood why she'd felt the need to mention that the process wasn't designed to hurt. The chair's surface flowed around me like liquid metal, conforming to my body with an intimacy that felt almost invasive. Within seconds, I wasn't sitting in the chair so much as being held by it, embraced by technology that seemed more alive than mechanical.
"Initiating baseline scan," Lena announced, her voice taking on a more professional tone. "Vitals look good. Essence resonance... interesting. Heart rate elevated but within normal parameters for first-time subjects."
The humming in the walls intensified, and the blue light in the chair's surface began to climb up its back in slow, measured waves. When the first band of light reached the level of my chest, I felt it—a sensation like being touched by invisible hands, probed by fingers made of electricity and mathematics.
It wasn't painful, exactly, but it was deeply unsettling. The light seemed to penetrate beyond my skin, reaching into spaces that shouldn't be accessible to external forces. I gripped the chair's armrests and tried to stay still as the scanning process continued.
"Essence signature mapping in progress," Lena murmured, her attention divided between multiple readouts. "Dimensional exposure markers are... significant. Karl, are you feeling any unusual sensations?"
"Define unusual," I managed through gritted teeth. The invisible probing had intensified, and now I could feel it in my bones, in the spaces between my thoughts. Like being dissected by someone who understood anatomy better than I understood my own body.
"Tingling, pressure, nausea, temporal displacement, anything like that?"
"All of the above," I said. "Plus some things I don't have words for."
She tapped something on her tablet, and the intensity decreased slightly. "Sorry. Sometimes the system needs calibration for subjects with extended dimensional exposure. How's that?"
Better, but not by much. The chair continued its work, mapping whatever essence patterns I carried, cataloging abilities I didn't know I possessed. Minutes passed in uncomfortable silence, broken only by the soft sounds of Lena's equipment and her occasional murmurs of professional interest.
"Resonance patterns are... unusual," she muttered, frowning at her readouts. "Essence flow seems to be—"
Then something changed.
The blue light that had been climbing the chair's back suddenly shifted to a deeper, more ominous hue. The gentle humming became a grinding whine, like gears stripping their teeth under unexpected stress. I felt the change in my body as well—the invisible probing becoming more aggressive, more desperate, as if the system was searching for something it couldn't find.
"That's... not normal," Lena said, but her tone suggested 'not normal' was a significant understatement.
The grinding sound intensified, and I smelled something burning. Sparks began to arc from the cables at the chair's base, and several of the wall-mounted displays flickered between normal readouts and screens full of error messages.
"Lena," I said, trying to keep my voice steady despite the growing wrongness in the air around us, "I think something's going wrong."
But she was already moving, her fingers flying over emergency controls as alarms began to sound somewhere in the walls around us. The professional calm she'd maintained throughout the procedure was cracking, replaced by something that looked suspiciously like panic.
"The system's not reading your essence correctly," she said, her voice tight with concentration. "It's like... it's like there's nothing there to read."
The chair shuddered beneath me, its lights strobing in patterns that made my vision blur and my stomach clench. Whatever was happening, it was building toward something catastrophic. I could feel it in the air around us, in the way the very walls seemed to vibrate with potential energy seeking an outlet.
'Electronic screech.'
And then, with a sound like reality tearing at the seams, everything went wrong at once.
The red light snapped to brilliant white, so bright it burned afterimages into my retinas even through my closed eyelids. The mechanical shrieking peaked and then cut off abruptly, replaced by a silence so complete it felt like deafness.
For one impossible moment, I felt the system finally find what it had been searching for—and recoil in horror.
Then every display in the room went black.
When they flickered back to life a heartbeat later, they all showed the same thing: a single word in block letters that seemed to burn against the darkness of the screens.
[NULL]