Vanished in Section Nine

The air in the Control Hub was sterile, tinged with the ever-present scent of ozone from the humming machinery. Deep beneath the surface of the Earth, buried inside the government's most classified research facility, lay Section Nine — a place few entered, and none ever left.

Agent Mara Quinn stood before the sealed blast doors of Section Nine, her pulse steady, though her eyes betrayed a flicker of doubt. The case had come to her a week ago: three operatives missing in the same location, all last seen entering this very chamber. There had been no signs of struggle, no distress calls — only silence, as if they had simply vanished into the air.

“Last chance to back out,” said Dr. Elijah Trent, the facility’s lead quantum physicist, a gaunt man with trembling hands. “Section Nine isn't like the rest of the lab. It's... different.”

Mara fixed him with a sharp look. “Different how?”

He hesitated. “Experimental time-space research. We were working on folding space — not quite teleportation, but close. We made a breakthrough. But then things… went wrong.”

The doors slid open with a hiss.

Inside, Section Nine was unremarkable — a sterile white room with banks of dormant servers and a circular platform in the center. But the moment Mara stepped through the threshold, she felt a strange pull, as if the gravity around her shifted subtly, like a dream that didn't quite add up.

She crossed the room and examined the platform. Embedded in the floor was a symbol, a rotating helix etched in silver. Her hand brushed the surface.

A flash.

The room blurred — no, twisted — around her. Sound dropped away. Lights exploded behind her eyes.

And then silence.

Mara blinked. She was no longer in the lab. The white room had vanished. In its place stretched a corridor of endless black mirrors, reflecting her in warped and impossible angles. The reflections moved independently, mocking her with impossible gestures and empty grins.

She reached for her comm. Dead. No signal.

“Mara Quinn,” a voice echoed — hers, but layered, fragmented, as if spoken by a thousand versions of herself. “Welcome to the fold.”

A figure stepped from one of the mirrors — tall, with Mara’s face, but her eyes were pitch-black. This doppelgänger walked like a marionette, smooth and unnatural.

“You shouldn’t have come,” the other Mara said. “They never told you the truth.”

“What is this place?” Mara demanded, her hand on her sidearm.

“Not what — when.” The reflection tilted her head. “You’re in a fold between possibilities. Every step forward fractures reality. You’ve already split five times. Can’t you feel it?”

Mara backed away, but the mirror corridors shifted with her. Her own breath fogged in the air. Cold seeped into her bones.

“This is where the others vanished?” she asked.

“They didn’t vanish,” the reflection said. “They became us.”

The mirrors rippled. More figures emerged — versions of her, of the other missing agents, each subtly wrong: one with a mechanical arm, one with burns across half his face, another whispering nonsense in reverse.

They were trapped — reflections of their own choices, condemned to echo in this in-between forever.

Mara felt her mind stretch thin.

“No. I’m not staying,” she muttered.

The reflection smiled. “They all said that.”

But Mara noticed something — a flicker of light, faint and rhythmic, reflected in the glass. Morse code.

S.O.S.

She followed it, running now, mirrors cracking underfoot. Behind her, the reflections screamed.

She burst through a pane and landed hard on the ground.

Lights above.

She was back in the lab.

Alarms blared. Scientists shouted. The air was thick with smoke.

“Mara!” Dr. Trent rushed over. “You were gone for hours!”

“I was there for minutes,” she gasped.

His face drained of color. “That’s not possible. The fold… time dilation, it's worse than we thought.”

“Shut it down,” she ordered. “Seal Section Nine. No one else goes in.”

He nodded, but she could see the hunger in his eyes — the need to understand, to peer further.

As Mara limped toward the exit, she passed a reflective panel.

And for a split second, her reflection didn’t follow.