The diagnostic chair had become a predator, and I was its prey.
What had started as gentle, almost clinical probing had transformed into something far more aggressive. The blue light racing up the chair's surface now pulsed with an angry intensity that made my eyes water, and the mechanical humming had devolved into a grinding shriek that seemed to come from the walls themselves.
I could feel the system's desperation in my bones—the way it pushed deeper, searched harder, like a blind man frantically patting down every surface in a room, looking for something that should be there but wasn't. The invisible fingers of energy that had been mapping my supposed essence patterns now clawed at me with increasing frustration, probing spaces that felt too intimate, too fundamental to be examined by external forces.
"Karl, try to stay calm," Lena called from her console, but her voice carried a note of barely controlled panic that did nothing to reassure me. Her fingers danced across emergency controls that responded with increasingly urgent chimes and warning tones. "The system's having trouble calibrating to your specific essence signature. Extended dimensional exposure can sometimes—"
'Crack!'
She was cut off as the chair lurched beneath me, its surface rippling like disturbed water. The cables emerging from its base began to spark more violently, filling the air with the acrid smell of burning electronics and something else—something organic, like heated metal pressed against living tissue.
The wall displays that had been showing neat rows of diagnostic data now flickered between normal readouts and cascading error messages in languages I didn't recognize. Some of the symbols hurt to look at directly, twisting in ways that suggested they existed in more dimensions than my eyes were equipped to process.
"Lena," I managed through gritted teeth, "something's really wrong here."
But I could see she already knew that. The professional composure she'd maintained throughout the procedure was cracking like ice under pressure. Her auburn hair had come loose from its bun, framing a face that had gone pale with genuine alarm.
"I'm reading massive fluctuations in the essence resonance field," she muttered, more to herself than to me. "Dimensional displacement markers are off the charts. It's like the system is trying to measure something that doesn't exist in normal space-time."
The grinding sound intensified, and now I could see physical damage manifesting in the equipment around us. Hairline cracks appeared in the smooth walls, spreading outward from the points where diagnostic sensors were mounted. Several of the articulated arms that held scanning equipment began to smoke, their joints seizing as internal mechanisms failed under stresses they weren't designed to handle.
'Electrical fizzing.'
And through it all, the chair continued its increasingly frantic examination of whatever I'd become.
The sensation was indescribable. Imagine being turned inside out by invisible hands that couldn't quite grasp what they were manipulating. Every nerve ending in my body felt raw and oversensitive, as if the scanning process was stripping away layers of protection I didn't know I possessed. My vision blurred at the edges, and I could taste copper and ozone so strongly it made me gag.
"I need to shut it down," Lena said, her voice tight with decision. "This isn't normal dimensional exposure response. This isn't even close to normal."
But when her fingers found the emergency stop controls, nothing happened. The system ignored her commands, trapped in its own feedback loop of escalating confusion. If anything, the scanning intensity increased, as if my resistance to its probing had triggered some kind of fail-safe protocol designed to break through any possible interference.
"The emergency stops aren't responding," she said, and now real fear crept into her voice. "Karl, I need you to try to get out of the chair. Can you move?"
I tried. God, how I tried. But the chair's surface had molded around me so completely that I felt like I was trapped in hardened amber. Every time I attempted to shift my weight or push against the armrests, the material simply flowed with my movements, maintaining its grip while absorbing my efforts to escape.
'Grunt of effort.'
"I'm stuck," I gasped. "It won't let me go."
The blue light climbing the chair's surface suddenly shifted to an ominous red that reminded me of warning lights in disaster movies. But this wasn't a movie—this was my life, and I was trapped in a machine that seemed intent on tearing me apart at the quantum level to understand what I was made of.
The grinding sound reached a crescendo that made my teeth ache and my vision flash white at the edges. I could feel something building in the air around us—not heat, but something more fundamental. Like the space itself was being stressed beyond its capacity to maintain structural integrity.
'Warning klaxon.'
Alarms began wailing throughout the facility, their sound cutting through even the chair's mechanical shrieking. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the sound of running footsteps and shouted orders as Bureau personnel responded to whatever crisis my essence reading had triggered.
And then, with a sound like reality hiccupping, everything went catastrophically wrong.
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 absolute 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]
'Heavy breathing.'
The alarms that had been building in the walls suddenly exploded into full-throated warnings. Red emergency lights bathed everything in the color of arterial blood, and somewhere in the distance I could hear the sound of running footsteps and shouted orders as Bureau personnel responded to whatever catastrophe my diagnostic had triggered.
The chair released me all at once, its surface going from liquid embrace to rigid rejection in the span of a single breath. I tumbled forward, my legs too weak to support my weight, and hit the floor hard enough to see stars. Every muscle in my body felt like it had been wrung out by invisible hands, and my skin crawled with residual static electricity that made my hair stand on end.
"Get up!" Lena's voice cut through the chaos as she hauled me to my feet with surprising strength. "We need to get you away from the chair before—"
She was interrupted by a sound I'd never heard before and never wanted to hear again. The diagnostic chair, still pulsing with those angry red lights, began to tear itself apart. Not mechanically—this was something more fundamental. The very materials it was constructed from seemed to be forgetting how to exist in the same space, creating gaps and distortions that hurt to look at directly.
'Reality tearing sound.'
"Before that," Lena finished grimly, pulling me toward the door with urgency that brooked no argument.
But we were too late.
'Hydraulic hiss.'
The door burst open, and Sloane Merritt strode into the chaos like a storm front given human form. She took in the scene with a single sweeping glance—the failing equipment, the emergency lights, the word [NULL] burning on every functional display, and me, standing in the center of it all with my hair still crackling with residual energy.
The alarms cut off the moment she entered, as if the building itself recognized her authority and didn't dare continue making noise in her presence.
Her gray eyes locked onto mine with laser intensity. This wasn't the clinical interest she'd shown during our first meeting, or even the predatory calculation I'd seen when she'd left me with Lena. This was something else entirely—the focused attention of an apex predator that had just realized it might be looking at something even more dangerous than itself.
"Report," she said, her voice cutting through the residual electronic whining like a blade.
Lena swallowed hard, glancing between me and her superior with the expression of someone caught between competing impossibilities. "Complete system failure, Director. Null reading across all parameters. Extended dimensional exposure markers, but no coherent essence signature. I've never seen anything like it."
"Null reading." Sloane repeated the words like they were a foreign phrase she was trying to translate. "Explain in terms I can understand."
"The diagnostic system couldn't map his essence patterns," Lena said, gesturing helplessly at the displays still showing that single, damning word. "Thirty-one years of dimensional exposure should have created massive essence fluctuations, clear Authority manifestations, something we could categorize and contain. But it's like... like he's not there at all, from the system's perspective."
'Sharp intake of breath.'
Sloane's attention shifted back to me, and I felt the weight of her evaluation like physical pressure against my skin. She was reassessing everything she thought she knew about my case, recalibrating her approach based on data that apparently made no sense within her understanding of how the world worked.
"That's impossible," she said finally, but her tone suggested she was trying to convince herself as much as us. "Every living being has an essence signature. Every individual exposed to dimensional energies develops detectable patterns. We've tested thousands of subjects over three decades, documented hundreds of different manifestation types. The system works because it has to work."
She moved closer to one of the displays, studying the word [NULL] as if staring at it long enough might reveal hidden meaning. "What were his vital signs during the scan?"
Lena consulted her tablet, scrolling through data that flickered with occasional corruption artifacts from the system failure. "Elevated heart rate and blood pressure, consistent with stress response. Brain activity showed increased theta wave patterns, which is normal for essence mapping. But then..." She trailed off, her brow furrowing.
"Then what?"
"His readings just... stopped making sense. Neural activity spiked beyond anything I've seen before, but not in any pattern that corresponds to known Authority types. And his bioelectric field..." She shook her head in disbelief. "Director, according to these readings, he shouldn't exist. The numbers don't add up to a living human being."
The implications of that statement settled over the room like a blanket of ice. I was standing there, breathing, talking, clearly alive—and yet their most sophisticated equipment insisted I was somehow absent from reality itself.
'Finger drumming.'
Sloane was quiet for a long moment, her fingers drumming against her crossed arms in the only external sign of agitation she'd shown since I'd met her. When she finally spoke, her words were measured and precise, but they carried undertones that made my blood run cold.
"Contact the Academy directly," she ordered. "Bypass standard protocols. Priority Alpha classification. I want him transferred tonight."
"Director," Lena said carefully, "Priority Alpha is for existential threat scenarios. Perhaps we should run additional diagnostics first. Try different equipment, maybe consult with—"
"The Academy," Sloane repeated, her voice carrying the kind of finality that ended discussions before they could become arguments, "has resources we don't possess here. Equipment designed to handle... unprecedented situations."
She turned back to me, and something in her expression made me take an involuntary step backward. "You break our most advanced diagnostic systems. You register as null on every scan we can perform. You exist in a way that violates everything we understand about how essence-based beings interact with reality."
She paused, letting that sink in. "That makes you either the most dangerous individual we've ever encountered, or potentially the most valuable. Either way, you require containment protocols beyond what this facility can provide."
The word 'dangerous' hung in the air between us like a threat. Not dangerous in the sense that I might hurt someone—dangerous in the sense that my very existence challenged the fundamental assumptions their entire organization was built upon.
"What happens at the Academy?" I asked, surprised by how steady my voice sounded despite the fear that was making my hands shake.
Sloane's smile was winter frost on glass. "You'll find out soon enough."
She turned to Lena, all business once again. "Full documentation of everything that happened here. I want detailed reports on my desk within the hour. Classification level Seven—need to know only. And Lena?" She paused at the door. "This incident never happened. As far as the official record is concerned, the subject's diagnostic was inconclusive due to equipment malfunction."
'Door sealing.'
The door sealed behind her with mechanical finality, leaving Lena and me alone among the wreckage of failed diagnostics and impossible readings.
For several minutes, neither of us spoke. The emergency lights had dimmed to a less urgent glow, but the displays still pulsed with that single word: [NULL]. The diagnostic chair sat in the center of the room like a dead thing, its surface dark and lifeless, surrounded by the twisted remains of equipment that had tried to understand me and failed catastrophically.
Finally, Lena broke the silence. "Karl," she said quietly, "I need you to understand something. The Academy isn't a school. It's not even really a research facility, despite what they call it officially."
I looked at her, seeing genuine concern in her brown eyes. "What is it?"
She glanced at the door, as if checking to make sure Sloane was really gone, then moved closer so she could speak without raising her voice.
"It's where they send the problems they can't solve," she whispered. "The cases that don't fit into any existing category. People who break the system just by existing."
The confirmation of my growing suspicions hit like a physical blow. "And what happens to them there?"
'Long pause.'
Lena was quiet for so long I thought she wouldn't answer. When she finally did, her voice was barely audible above the room's residual electronic humming.
"I don't know. No one does. The Academy doesn't publish reports. Doesn't share research data. People go there, and..." She shrugged helplessly. "They just disappear from all the databases."
I stared at the displays still showing [NULL] in burning letters, and understood with crystalline clarity that I wasn't being sent to find answers about what I'd become.
I was being sent to disappear.
The Academy wasn't a destination. It was an ending.
And I had less than twenty-four hours to figure out what that meant for whatever was left of my life.
'Electronic hum fading.'
As the last of the diagnostic equipment powered down around us, leaving us in the relative quiet of the recovery room's normal systems, I felt the weight of my situation settle over me like a burial shroud. Thirty-one years lost, everyone I'd known gone, and now I was being classified as an existential threat and shipped off to a facility designed to make problems disappear.
But I was still Karl Morrison. Still the same person who'd been curious enough to explore that cave, stubborn enough to touch something that screamed danger, and apparently resilient enough to survive three decades of dimensional exposure.
If they thought I was going to disappear quietly into their files, they were about to learn just how wrong their diagnostic systems could be.