The Rift in the Desert

Nevada Quantum Research Institute, March 14, 2085, 2:17 AM

Eileen Carter's fingers traced a glowing arc on the holographic screen, causing the quantum computer's oscilloscope waveform to suddenly freeze.

"Max, come look at this." Her voice, as precise as a scalpel, sliced through the laboratory's silence.

Max White looked up from the coffee machine, burnt sugar granules clinging to his beard. His pupils contracted the moment he saw the data—on the screen, the neutrino detector's readings were repeating in an eerie pattern: 9.73 tera-electron volts, lasting 1.2 seconds, then returning to zero. The exact same waveform had appeared 37 times in a row, accurate to ten decimal places.

"Is our equipment malfunctioning?" Max tapped the control panel, and the desert starlight seeped through the radiation-proof window, casting a cold Milky Way on the titanium alloy floor.

"Malfunctions don't adhere to quantum tunneling probabilities." Eileen pulled up the past 72 hours of records; the waveform graphs overlapped like a DNA double helix. "They repeat every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds, with an error no greater than Planck time."

Max suddenly laughed, his laughter bouncing off the lead walls of the sealed laboratory, shattering into sharp metallic shards. "Are you suggesting... the Earth's rotation period?"

At that moment, the alarm screamed.

The two rushed into the observation chamber, where janitor Joe Martinez was huddled in a corner, trembling. This small man, who always hummed Mexican folk songs, now seemed to have had his spine removed. His pupils had expanded into two black holes, and his fingers had gouged bloody trenches into the floor. "It's back..." he croaked, "The truck... the blue truck... ran over my chest... the fourth time..."

Eileen knelt, pressing down on Joe's convulsing shoulder, smelling the burnt scent of ionized air. Beneath his work uniform collar, a fine pattern was spreading across his skin—a fractal-like capillary rupture, resembling a shattered Klein bottle.

"Take him to the medical chamber!" Max pressed the emergency button, but Joe suddenly broke free with surprising strength. He lunged at the observation window, his forehead hitting the glass with a muffled thud. "Look! The rift!"

Eileen followed his spasming finger.

At the edge of the desert, at the coordinates that once belonged to Scorpius θ, an invisible "rift" was suspended in the night sky. The quantum imager revealed its form: neither light nor matter, but a wrinkle in spacetime itself, like aluminum foil crumpled by an invisible hand. More terrifying was the data at the rift's edge—the time curvature fluctuation there exactly synchronized with the neutrino anomaly waveform.

"God doesn't play dice." Eileen recalled Einstein's derision, but at this moment, some entity far beyond humanity seemed to be repeatedly squeezing the entire planet between its fingers. Joe's scream suddenly stopped. He collapsed to the ground, his eyes rolled back, and his pupils reflected the holographic screen. There, Eileen's unclosed waveform graph showed 37 perfectly overlapping waves, like a coffin nailed to the timeline.

As the medical robot carried Joe away, Eileen noticed the electronic tattoo on his left arm—it was his daughter's birthday, March 17, 2085.

Yet, the institute's main control system displayed the date as March 14.