Inversion

What sound-minded people reported from the Manhatten shoreline is astonishing. However, as the military trucked my colleagues and me towards the anomaly in the back of a deuce and a half, I found myself trying to start a conversation, any conversation outside of our fields of study. As they dropped us off, barely staying long enough to let us unload our equipment, we watched the falling objects during the eighteen-mile boat ride to Long Island, waiting for the notions that made this more than just a frightful exploration mission. From the fog above, dark objects fell with no apparent pattern, but we barely caught the video of the ascension of a few things disappearing in such a way the Captain demanded double on the spot. If we couldn’t get the federal government to accompany us on THE research endeavor of Physics rewriting horror, this man would have to go down braver than any of us. Breaking through the dense fog that formed as the anomaly came to be, we realized our team may have been foolish. Our education spurred curiosities shedding light on human fears and would now be responsible for reporting on a dimension nightmare. Long Island now had a graciously settled twin mirrored island above, an inversion event but was the screaming of undoubtedly confused citizens, dropping, rising, or victims of some kind of rift exchange.

We gathered the government sent a team in before us, yet their records nor anyone we asked would or could confirm that it was the case. Communications have been spotted since the clouds thickened over the island, and flight 235 exploded mid-air early one Monday morning. They cleared all bridges severing them on the Long Island side in the night. This meant families on vacation or just simple folk living out their days with notable shaky existences sparking widespread questions that may have been the only reason we were allowed safe passage. We were as unofficial as it gets. More accurately, we weren’t pursued quite as hard for finding our own way there, and since Captain Harold would not return for a week at the earliest, we’d be finding our way back. With me, bringing their own expertise to the discoveries bound to change earth as we know it, are Dr. Luke Blonder, astrophysicist, and Dr. Hugh Fitzgerald, geophysicist, and astronomer. Also with us are Master Chemist Franky Adams and Victor Reese of the Aeronautical research facility, following the crash closely. I, Dr. Remy Mackenzie, and my Assistant studying Cosmology like myself, along with astrology (for some reason) Micha Richards, will hopefully return to explain the inversion event or bring some answers towards clarity at least. Although seeing it, feeling the gravitational alterations between losing and/or gaining pounds with each step, I wondered if we wouldn’t end up falling up.

The locals, as pleasant as they could be in the coastal town given their circumstances, couldn’t help but have mixed thoughts about our protective suits through the quarantine. Precautions were the CDC’s shrugged suggestion once we stated we weren’t ceasing this venture. Franky wouldn’t take it off until she ran every test she could on air quality, soil composition, and water from the seaside to bathroom faucets, and we were inclined to agree. Life went on, making their gazes towards us the only strangeness during the morning commute. We made the stop at a simple hotel before turning our attention to the Mayoral offices when Micha stopped me clutching my arm outside the hotel lobby. I encouraged her to walk and talk, but with her eyes trained upward without compromise, we all had to address it somehow. I gather none of us wanted to get the confirmation she stared in the face of, waving stiltedly.

“Hello, Doppelganger Remy,” I said to the speck wearing similar if not the same clothing, equally as dumbfounded, based on their confused mimicking of my movements. Quickly the question that swept us all into gazing up to drown amongst raining cluster headaches developing through the team, who is mimicking who?

Dropping the suits returned our humanity amongst the locals, at least enough to get one of them to laugh at our slack-jawed gawking. “You shouldn’t look up so much.” The little boy said. He looked to be on his way to school, backpack and all, and given the time of the year, it was nice to see they were maintaining an optimistic outlook.

“I’m starting to feel you’re right, little man. We’re here to look into this matter. If you or your family know of anything that might help, feel free to stop anyone of us as were walking about or have your parents call, day or night.” I handed him a business card with my cell number and tried my damnest not to gaze up.

“Okay. Why did you wear the clunking fat suits before?” he asked.

Franky needed a distraction from her evil self, as she put it and stepped in front of me. “No one knows what’s happening outside, and we wanted to take precautions before we started getting to the bottom of this. What’s your name?”

“Bradley. Are you with the last guys in suits? They fell.”

We gathered there was another team, but suddenly the notions of acrophobia reached our guts. “Does anything happen before they fall?” She asked.

He shrugged, and she let him go to the school bus amid their corner pick-up, holding up traffic around a block away. Suddenly, Luke was getting all of our attention upward. We couldn’t be absolutely sure the map of buildings and streets above was mirrored or upside down and impossibly lined up to a T due to the distance, but Bradley’s alternate above went across the road into a shop. There was no more time to waste getting to some form of leadership on the island but renting an SUV, surprisingly, driving to Brooklyn filming and along with stills and comparison.

Hitting the outskirts of Queens brought a dramatic shift in social tone from the quant-ish Garden city. It was clear the shutdown of passages inside and out so suddenly, done with brute force and scared violent tactics publically had affected those survivors who begrudgingly returned home to wonder how long the shutout would last. In a strange way, there was plenty of ‘end of days’ attitudes bringing irrational behavior visible in an attempted carjacking thwarted by Hugh and his handgun, but with a quick glance up, they backed away from the vehicle. It could almost be said the anomaly policed better as well as the gun in their face was. We kept moving through, keeping the windows up, not for the occasional drizzle that could be any type of liquid in theory but from seeing a fall up close. At the end of Parkway 908, a body, and I’m being immature for the purposes of accuracy, went splat falling far higher than the unconscionable fall of the height from our visual observations.

There weren’t many motorists out, but the few that drove past gave us the bird for wasting their time. Seeing the flattened skull responsible for the blood on their tires did nothing to their demeanor. Before taking any steps to record data (Result of following in Micha’s notes), we called the police for an ambulance. Overlapping voices made Victor’s call unbearable due to four people occupying the same call with interference. The operator gave up and ended the call prompting him to try again.

“Wait,” I paused, looking up for our places above, apparently arriving at the scene without a vehicle. There Victor was, holding his phone, waiting for me to give him the go-ahead to try again. “Let’s see who takes the reigns.” Looking a the speck of myself reaching into his pocket for a phone, my phone I said, “Okay, Victor. Try now.”

“Different operator.” He said, not realizing he had been connected with interference but fewer voices. While he explained his situation, getting some apathetic jargon in return. He did alert them we were on the way to meet Mayor Sinclair to study how to handle the growing severity of the situation. There would be no need to knock when we got there, and we were free to gather what we could. No one was coming.

“Hey, what just happened?” Hugh was looking up at our group, and while none of us stood out without our own signatures but he counted the moving dots. “I’m not there. Where did I go? all of you are around the body, and I’m nowhere up there. Did I fall?”

Franky left the stiff to calm him down, but she struggled not to glance up as she physically fought his neck to get some eye contact out of him. “Look at me. Just me. Listen, you’re here, be here. we can’t find out if you panic.”

*SPLAT*

It was in the distance, sure, but a skull fracture at terminal velocity on blacktop seems to feel awfully sharp in the ear canal. Franky couldn’t stop Hugh from heading back to the body practically split on the cement divider between east and westbound. Franky recognized his grey leather jacket as Hugh picked up an agonizing sprint on his arthritic knees. He leaned over the center, nearly assuming the same position just to see what was left of him, using his old military tattoo to verify what he knew. “It’s a through and through. I was shot.”

The Municipal Building in Brooklyn had been surrounded for days by angry citizens demanding something be done about the interference turning their cellular service into short wave walkie-talkies at best. Keeping the street blocked off seemed to be the only thing separating them from the far more chaos above, with police stretched thin. Stamina made plenty decide to go home and consider waiting for the inevitable crush based on some of the protest signs hitting us as we moved through the screaming crowds. Our equipment did more explaining of our unofficial credentials than the police really cared to do any deep diving while staving off frightened souls. Luke was grabbed at the edge of the barricade by a feisty reporter enthralled for a scoop.

“Excuse me, SIR. When are we going to get any word on when the skies will clear? Or could you shed some sort of peace of mind to the scared people confused feeling abandoned by the nation?”

“We’re not the government. Due to the nature of these freaks of nature with cosmic implications, we can only ask that you help be our eyes and ears the best you can. Take my card. We want to help, but no one on the planet has a clue, and truthfully, we’ve only started. You’ve been here the longest, making you the best source of information we have to work against what’s above.”

“Are you saying no one is coming to provide relief? Long Island has been in a communication blackout for over three weeks; food and supplies will dwindle soon if something isn’t done. When will we see or hear anything from anyone outside if it’s still there?”

“They are scared too. We need to work with what we have to show them they can cross without harm if we ever want to operate as part of the united states again. And since not much is getting out anyway, you need to show those out there that it is safe to come here again and that there are no infectious entities to note involved in this anomaly. Anything new you notice from now on, call any of the four numbers on the card this journalist will publicize, but we have to get to work getting caught up. We’ll do our best. I promise you that.”

As we entered Mayor Sinclair’s office, he was speaking to the governor, hearing a sentence that ended with, “And it took the whole God Damn police cruiser with them for crying out loud.”

“Well, those rumors are confirmed,” I said before introducing myself to Governor Seymore. Some trip to visit their inlaws this turned out to be. Comparing notes with the remanence of their scientific think tank, they managed to have very similar notes granted a few new pieces we provided connected some vague reassurances. The closest source of the intelligence from the outside suggested competing towers converging with signals slightly out of sync but well within Long Island’s frequency wavelengths. Within the island’s limits, the trick would be to not be glued to your other self. How the constant chattering ceased abruptly caught up to the conversation, they walked in on, stated simply as, “you don’t fall when you die, you’re ejected of this plain.”

“What did you learn from the tower?” I asked.

“You brave enough to go up there be my—”

“None of you, seriously? That would be the first thing I did.”

Each of Sinclair’s scientists looked in various broad directions avoiding eye contact with us. I had been excited, if not misreading my own fear, for this opportunity since I saw the above. Micha volunteered alongside Franky and Luke. Hugh felt he would continue searching for connecting events to link everything up there with what they have been recording and sharing before the above Sinclair stopped responding.

We took the quickest route there that wasn’t necessarily the shortest given the those who haven’t tired from constant raging. A long elevator ride coming closer to the tip tower’s needle made us sick. I’m genuinely sorry if I hit anyone with my puke. That was in no way my intention as the urge swept over the three of us as soon as the elevator doors opened for the mind-melting scenic view. Bravo to Franky, swallowing it just in time. Micha kept her eyes skyward as we set up equipment because the intense pulsating energy left us forgetting what we were doing every few minutes. “Did my heart skip a beat?” I asked to an audience who, at times, sported physical features that couldn’t have possibly happened in a blink or screwing in a bolt.

“Did anyone else see that?” Luke asked, double-checking his pulse. After getting everything powered up and clicking respectively. He asked Franky to check his pulse, and as she did, she approximated seventy beats per minute. Without warning, he grabbed her other hand and stuffed it under his shirt on his chest. The violation of her typically strict personal space policy fell to worrisome dizziness.

“Are you dying? Take a chill pill, guy? It’s like you’re sprinting from a tiger, but your wrist—” that’s when the vomit became unstoppable. “I’m sorry.”

“Good thing it’s not my favorite shirt,” he said as jovial as one can, recoiling from some pinkish, colorful bile.

Stepping away from the EMF meter going wild on margarita Mondays, I caught a glimpse of the mess promoting the tanktop to outerwear and exclaimed, slurred, for some reason, “What did you eat, woman? And—what’s that at your feet?”

While she was looking for something to clean off the little black plastic-looking chunk, Micha called me over to a spot on the far side of the roof near an industrial air conditioning unit. “Now, I’m not sure if I see what I see, but you’re trying to get you to call you.”

I grabbed a pair of binoculars, although trying to walk back to Micha looking through them had to be the drunkest decision I’ve ever made dry as a bone. “Do you feel any different, Micha?”

“Just call him,” she said, far more perturbed than I expected, given her calm demeanor.

It only then occurred to me that I’ve never dialed my own number before, but after a few rings, he—I answered. “Nice to meet me. Clichés over, we have a dimensional entanglement to sort out, and yes, I’ve been drinking. None of you can be up here much longer.”

“Is your temporal position further along on our timeline?” I asked

“Go over to Franky and Luke if he is still alive, and put me on speaker,” he said.

Once we were near the equipment, he launched with, “we’re two separate lines converging. Fortunately, it’s only loosely connected. The height puts us within merging distance, and it’s not easy to explain given our time constraints, but it’s brutal. Has Franky found the Flash drive?”

“I haven’t done that since the Guatemala deal,” Franky said.

“That’s what Franky Adams told me before they died. Watch it. But don’t come back up here for twenty-four hours so your bodies can reacclimate. If there is anything, you tell them outside the Long Island is—” the static was getting worse, and when we looked up, Micha was waving him to the elevator frantically. “Remy, it’s spreading. Manhatten I— GO!”

He dropped the phone and ran, and as drunk as I was and dizzy as Franky grew, we left the gear, following Micha as best as we could. She hit the elevator button while we carried Luke, struggling to breathe, constantly trying to confirm whether his heart was still in his chest. Our relief came with every floor, but it didn’t mean we could fully stand when the doors opened in the basement after an overcorrection.

“Sound off,” Franky stated after we arrived in the lobby.

“I feel great,” I added, “I never thought I’d feel the fuck drinking so vehemently. Is that blacked-out drunk? Is this real life?”

Micha stared menacingly when she said, “this, Remy, this is what makes you question your reality?”

“Luke, how are you? Say something.”

“I’m great. Maybe I was dying. Hey, take Victor next time.”

Retuning the city hall, I called for a closed-door meeting keeping extra government staff out of the room, consulting with Hugh and Victor to pick the more rational of the politicians in the room and the most open-minded astronomers not prone to panic. Seymore was out until he admitted to the people he was here, refusing to concede power to his vice governor. All his power pulling couldn’t hold if he couldn’t enforce them in front of the window. A talk show physicist had been less help than Seymore, and the bastard that recommended them lied on some crucial parts of his resume. This left Dr. Harper and Mayor Sinclair standing in front of Franky’s laptop, sifting through files until they came across the video at the bottom of the long list.

Micha appeared on screen angrily and began speaking relentlessly. “Dr. Richards, here. We don’t have a cause, but our United States government has discovered the spread potential, and lo and behold, they’re starting to check their destructive capabilities before I can get a quiet moment to my fucking self to work, so…. Anyway, our prospects are slim due to what you’re dealing with, and it’s probably what you’re avoiding because you guys look so peaceful by comparison. To our knowledge, there is no human cause, and until a Kardashev 3.5 or 4 comes on down and admits it’s an experiment faux pas, we’re on our own, and pieces of our Mahatten are on their way to you. Traffic in or out kills our timeline, so first, this is how we get to communicate across the water, and I leave the political semantics to your personal situation….”

She was a genius in a bathrobe, for some reason. A landline was the tricky part amongst the room of cell phones, but the following portions some jerry-rigging a telephone pole in Albany and a direct line to the white house hidden from the publically owned carriers. It had something to do with old spy lines meant to be occupied and recorded without cluing and the conversationalists confessing or demanding an extraction from a foreign nation. After that, however, Dr. Richards continued with the complicated bit.

“We have been exposed to Dimensional gunk as the opening continues to spread downward. I couldn’t tell you if it’s toxic to life because outside of the city above us, we can’t measure it outside the gravitational force disjointed with our own, meaning we now know of two things that could survive beyond the edges of the universe. And while life tends to be drastically deconstructed, and to a regretful oversimplification, rearranged cellular structure. Nothing else, like light, dark matter, time, gas, none has an effect on the ceiling of your and our sky. Nothing in my and any of your lives matter in this series of events; try not to look up unless you have to. There is no direct connection in past events from our end that we can find, so I suggest you spend the first twenty-four combing over the proof in the file Franklin Adams died for. Maybe you’ll find something in the next four days with that information before they demand and then force us to see a nuke or something through. Only come to the roof once a day, no more, and stay safe; we’re be hearing from each other soon.”

Luke and Hugh found sifting through the drive turned out to be the task they were most suited for and quickly got to work. I took one of his phone calls from a concerned citizen complaining about the excessive bodies coming down more frequently north of the city. We had no choice but to assume the lack of calls getting through over the cell towers jammed and just took the first vehicle available to north Queens. Micha, who still gleamed over her alternate self earning her doctorate, joined Victor and me on the drive as Sinclair got his people to walk on the communications lifeline.

For those outside the island, there must have been loads of devastating-looking footage of the human-shaped objects falling from the clouds and, in return, sporadically, firing up at a lesser rate, rising exponentially. And they would need to do slow-motion replays to catch them wiped from the ground in the poorly focused zoom, and those would be from the cheap seats near Stamford and Bridgeport. Manhatten residents as far as New Rochelle were being told to vacate their homes with promises that it wasn’t out of physical parole, but screams as trapped people screamed, dodging dropping corpses. They were probably still running the footage of the ambulance driver leaping from the vehicle that shot plunging upward into the clouds, never knowing why. Arrived where the rain drops had an average weight of a hundred-sixty-five pounds. We made it to the circumference of the falling identifying the cause as a mass exodus at the impending doom clarified by announcements to vacate the island despite reaching a more violent border crossing tactics than we faced three weeks ago. Their military finally had enough of people trying to flee at the coastline.

We were nearly hit by the machine gun spray aftermath, forcing us to stop, with a body hitting our hood front, flipping us on the roof. Crawling out of the window was not easy. Bruises persisted everywhere on me as I felt wearing a seatbelt during these bewildering times would bring my demise; however, Victor and Micha were helping me exit the vehicle. Truthfully something bothered me about their velocity as they fell that struck me as odder than odd, motivating me to ignore the busted lips, concussion, and whole body aches twisting my walk with every step. But I was too focused for that now.

“How—how are they falling this fast? 120 miles per hour, crushing heads into mush but increases in mass enough to accelerate. I’m missing something.”

“Tallest building on the island, 765 feet give or take,” Victor said. “Double that, and you’ll hit terminal velocity.”

“No question, but we just got flipped by a 110, 120 pound defrosted ground beef sack. These, these corpses—”

“—People, Remy, people,” Micha said.

“You’re right; however, the living stay grounded, so not quite accurate,” I added.

“A bit heartless,” Victor said.

“What do we have that the dead don’t? As soon as I touched earth here, I felt it. I got lighter and heavier at the same time, familiar anyone?” They both nodded. “Someone dies, their mass increases, but what’s reorienting their gravitational properties. Cellular rearranging vaguely starts us down that—”

Victor sprinted to the trunk amid my aimless pacing embracing some old-school youth logic of walking it off. Scrambling around the back of the police issue SUV, literally saying Eureka, when he found his somewhat holy grail. “Mass or acceleration, right?” Micha reluctantly spotted with her binoculars as Victor pointed the speed radar gun up, hoping to get another person before the falling stopped.

Finally, we got a dead one. “We can work with the speed after they reach our atmosphere.”

Victor could barely get a read, but when he did, “what—323. No human could reach that in street clothes he—” *Splat.*

The body landed on a concrete path in the park further away from the water due to wind, which still couldn’t be explained with any clarity. “Stay back and try to get in touch with Hugh or Luke. We need to know if they have tested their speed and what their reading was on a body’s ascension.” Victor and I approached the landing zone, where x marked more than just a spot. Bones from their ribs poked through their back, and there was a used Gallagher melon above his shoulders. “Any chance you could ballpark a weight before impact?”

“I don’t know. With his height and look, I’d guess 190 to 210, but didn’t you feel it?”

“I thought my bruised everything just made me hyper sensiti—” Victor interrupted me with a hand on my chest, pushing me back to a landscape view of the ground beneath. “Wow, it’s cratered, and—and craked, even at the fingertips. Would you say mass or speed did this?”

Micha arrived saying, “texts work better; they just take longer during inadvertent group text. Their speeds left no more than 123 or 125 kph. That’s a 240-mile-an-hour difference.”

“Being a bit concussed, that’s like Voyager 2 after rounding Jupiter, give or take.”

While the emergency room of Wyckoff Heights Medical Center had been full of hypochondriacs fearing the great ascension, the Governor’s appearance got us a private room to be examined. Seymore figured, after exuberant amounts of convincing, that if he wanted to save face for being missing in action for three weeks, he better come out with facts and figures. Hugh traveled with him flustered, holding an overstuffed briefcase to sell the ruse. The bandage around my fractured ribs took the longest, but I couldn’t prove that listening to the possible side effects of a severe concussion when combined with sleep. Seymore spoke a few words to the medical staff of comfort, boasting our findings so far, and retired us to a conference room where he could hear what it was.

“That does not live up to the promise I just made back there,” Seymore uttered upon dropping our theories on his lap.

“And whose government is doing very little in responding to our messages?” Hugh said.

“What do they plan to do then?” I started. “They aren’t responsible for this, are they?”

“What purpose would anyone have to do this and then pretend it’s not there to leave us to suffer. There’s fear, and then there is insanity,” Seymore said.

“I collected another of my doppelganger’s intoxication in close proximity to them. Look, we need something that proves it’s a treatable event, or both sides will be the radiation burn epicenter.”

“And can someone please consider the possibility that the nuclear winter of the entire eastern seaboard could be the lesser of the responses from this,” Micha said. “Our timelines may be synced, but who’s to say the continued dueled existence won’t wreak havoc on either of our respective spacetime continuums.”

“Can we go there? Make some changes, and push them into space with a propulsion system.”

“If it could move from its position, what’s holding it up? No, we need separation, a barricade—gravity leaks through—life doesn’t make it through, but the matter we’re made of—”

“What about bombarding everything that can’t break through our depleting membrane?”

“Jesus, Micha, it’s like the alley to fucking oop. Our radiation isn’t getting through, and the bodies fall faster as it compensates for our specific laws of physics. The phone call confused the hell of me, but—”

“If we can provide electromagnetic force against their side’s physics can’t cope with, they’d cancel out.”

“Without an exact list of variations in their set atoms, electrons, protons, we’re blind firing in the dark without the feel of the weapon in our hands. More likely, hopefully, it would at least keep our fabric tightly wound a bit longer.” I said, nearly shouting eureka to annoy Victor.

“You’re talking a magnetic field the size of Long Island that would have to run constantly and potentially fry every piece of technology in the process if we don’t acquire some kind of resonance balance between laws of physics slightly or drastically askew. Can I get a coffee, and if it’s not too much trouble, all the power in the country. Two sugars.” Luke’s sarcasm was thoroughly noted. However, shared looks back and forth across the table accompanied with shrugs of dwindling optimism gave him no other option but to humor the idea.

“Governor Seymore, try to get something through to the nation and turn that charm from earlier on before you do. Regardless of whether above they’re coming up with the same idea or not, we have to get going on this,” I started struggling to stand as the pain killers reached their gracious landing upon my frazzled brain.

We broke into teams dividing tasks with Seymore taking the reigns as damage control with the news camera rushing in with the scoop of a lifetime. There would be hours of collecting and building before we could speak with ourselves again if they could remain safe until then. Outside amongst the scared masses, we tried to hold smile-like expressions softening the doom. Ideas would sound amazing in the foreground of hysteria, leaving us a critical choice to speak up on something with or without the shopping list ahead impeded by limited time and resources to work with. Originally, I would have remained in Queens with Hugh on a material rampage, but that’s when ten-year-old Bradley called out of the blue. “Hey, kiddo, is everything alright?”

“Ah-huh, yeah, here he is.” His voice was in the distance from the microphone, apparently making the call on someone’s behalf.

“Listen, Remy, there is a tragedy a foot. You know where I am.”

My stunned look caught the attention of the other passengers in the SUV, prompting Hugh to ask, “someone rip the wind from your sails or something.”

“Yes, twice over. The good news is I finally know when I sound like on a clear phone call.”

…To be continued?