Asset Compatibility
Dani walked like someone who knew the layout of places that didn't exist anymore.
She didn't pause when the orchard shifted again—when the trees began to hum, when their bark shimmered with sigils too old to belong to any written language. She just tightened her grip on the grenade launcher, shifted her lunchbox on her shoulder, and kept moving.
Her path curved in a way real roads didn't. But Dani had learned a long time ago not to trust angles.
The glyph detector clicked softly in her coat.
Quiet. Too quiet.
She muttered, "No anchor, no static pulse. Either that's good news, or it's about to get biblical."
She stopped beside a clearing.
There was a monolith in the center. No markings. No sound. Just wrong.
Wrong in a way her bones remembered.
Dani frowned.
The Division—The Division of Conceptual Anomalies—had a phrase for this.
"Residual Harmonics: Points of Reality Degradation where human cognition becomes unreliable."
Translation: if something looked normal but made your blood pressure spike and your gums itch, it was probably a relic of a broken law of physics—or a conceptual leak still hissing in the seams of the world.
Dani opened the lunchbox.
Metal creaked. The compartments inside unfolded mechanically, one by one—spilling cold light and little plumes of frost from a canister marked "O5.3-N" in black marker.
She selected a jar. Shook it once.
The thing inside—a white slug coiled around a silver nail—stirred.
She held it near the monolith.
The slug didn't react.
Dani blinked. "Huh. Not a breach point. Not a memory pocket. So what the hell are you?"
The monolith pulsed. Once.
And then—just for a moment—
It turned into a doorway.
Old and wooden.
Splintered.
And familiar.
Dani didn't move. She didn't breathe.
The doorway was not supposed to be here.
It was an exact match to a house she'd burned down. Years ago. On purpose. With the thing still inside.
Back before she had a clearance level.
Back when she still thought names were stronger than anomalies.
A memory flashed:
Blood on her shoulder.
A woman—blurred.
Screaming.
She'd locked the door from the outside.
That moment passed.
Dani set the jar back down. Carefully. Calmly.
Then pulled the briefcase.
She popped it open, and fired a sigil shell directly at the monolith.
Boom.
The reality shimmered, cracked, and reset—like it had never offered her anything at all.
Dani lowered the weapon.
"Not today."
She re-holstered the case and moved on.
The Division of Conceptual Anomalies—DCA for short—had a simple mission: contain and neutralize events, objects, or phenomena that broke the logic scaffolding of reality.
But "simple" didn't mean "effective."
Most agents didn't last long. The ones who did?
They weren't really agents anymore.
They were Instruments.
Not quite people.
Not quite weapons.
Dani didn't talk about that part.
She moved faster now.
Just ahead, a sleeper node beacon glowed faintly behind a twisted arch of branches. Old DCA tech—abandoned years ago. She scanned it. Still functional. Power source degraded but pinging.
As she approached, it flickered to life.
:: INSTRUMENT RECOGNIZED — 7V-K ::
:: STATUS: UNSTABLE COMPATIBILITY. THREAT INDEX UNAVAILABLE. ::
:: WARNING — INCOMPLETE DEACTIVATION. ::
Dani stepped back.
"You've got to be kidding me."
The light blinked again.
:: DANIELA VEGA — ACCESS LOGGED ::
She stared.
No one had called her that since—no. She didn't remember.
Didn't want to.
The beacon's next message stuttered.
:: Do you remember what you left behind? ::
The voice wasn't synthetic this time.
It was hers.
Her old voice. Human. Before whatever happened during Operation Glassmouth.
She crushed the beacon under her boot.
Hard.
It sparked once. Died.
The orchard grew darker.
Dani adjusted her coat and tapped her glyph detector again.
No ping.
But she didn't believe it.
She muttered: "Still think I can shoot my way out of this."
Her voice was steady.
The lie was solid.
But the place behind her still smelled like burnt lemons and static.
And her fingers were twitching.
Dani didn't hear it approach.
Because it didn't approach.
It just was.
One moment: orchard.
The next: corridor.
White tiles, institutional. A long hallway with sealed steel doors and faded red emergency lights pulsing above.
She exhaled sharply. The hallway was familiar.
Division training facility?
No.
Too narrow. Wrong proportions.
Too... deliberate.
Her fingers brushed her lunchbox.
"Not real," she muttered.
She tapped the briefcase open. Loaded an adhesive sigil shell into the chamber—an anti-manifestation round from Project RIFTWALK. Fired once, dead center.
Boom.
The hallway trembled.
Tiles rippled. Lights shattered.
But the hallway snapped back like a rubber band. Same as it was. Like she'd never pulled the trigger.
Then—
A voice behind her.
"You missed."
Dani turned.
There was someone there.
Faceless.
Shapeless.
But present—like the idea of a person, scribbled hastily in the margins of reality.
She raised the grenade launcher this time.
"I don't miss," she said. And fired again.
The round left the barrel.
But the explosion didn't happen.
The smoke curled midair, folded in on itself—reversing.
Dani blinked.
The grenade round was back in the launcher.
Still unfired.
Still loaded.
"No," it said gently. "You never pulled the trigger."
She scanned its form.
No consistent outline.
It flickered between silhouettes—agent, child, mirror. One flicker was even her own shape.
She opened the lunchbox fast.
Grabbed the space-eater slug.
Shook it.
It writhed violently—then liquefied in her palm.
Melted like an idea that had never made sense.
She dropped it.
"There's no space here," the anomaly whispered. "Space isn't real when I'm known. You brought that thing into a lie."
Her breath was too loud now.
She took two steps back—then three forward. Trying to break the loop. Reset herself. Like training taught.
The hallway stayed the same.
She pressed her palm to the wall.
It felt soft.
Not fleshy.
Not warm.
Just... uncommitted. Like it hadn't decided what texture to be yet.
"You saw me," the anomaly said again. "And that's what hurt you. You recognized me. And that makes me real."
"I didn't recognize shit," Dani spat.
The hallway reformed behind her again.
And the anomaly stepped forward—no steps, just closer.
"Yes, you did. That room. The house. The hallway. You've been here before."
"No."
"You were never cleared for Sublevel 3, but you peeked. You weren't supposed to look. But you did."
Photographs appeared—brief flashes.
Dani. In a hallway.
Leaning into a sealed door.
Holding a clipboard.
Looking through a narrow viewing slit.
Something on the other side looked back.
She gasped—then it was gone.
"And now I'm real," it said.
Dani opened her coat.
Final backup plan.
The blue mason jar.
A sealed wormhole loop. Meant to collapse local conceptual damage.
She unlatched it.
Air howled in—reality buckled.
But the anomaly laughed.
"This never happened."
The jar vanished.
Like it was never made.
The coat closed by itself.
Dani stumbled back.
"No weapon's working—nothing. You're not... You're not causal. You're—"
"I'm proofed. Because you proved me."
It cocked its nonexistent head.
"But you can't unprove me."
"What?"
"Forget me."
"I.. I can't."
"Then I grow."
A flicker of orchard branches overhead.
She was back.
Still standing.
The slug was gone. The grenade launcher, unfired. The briefcase closed. Her hands trembling.
A small burn mark on her wrist—proof something had happened. Even if everything else denied it.
She turned and ran.
Not tactically. Not with precision.
Just—fast.
She wasn't sure what she'd seen. Or remembered.
But she knew it knew her.
And that was the worst part.