Parallel Fall

The fracture appeared at 2:17 a.m.

To most of the world, it looked like a ripple in the sky—barely perceptible, like heat rising from asphalt. But to the few who were attuned to such anomalies, it was a death knell.

Dr. Mara Elric had seen it in her dreams for weeks. A shimmering seam between two worlds, stitched too tightly by time and now fraying. She jolted awake in her tiny Chicago apartment, heart racing. The same vision again—two cities stacked atop one another, bleeding through. One bright and glistening. The other shadowed and broken.

She raced to her lab at the Institute of Dimensional Physics, a place once considered fringe science but now government-sanctioned, thanks to her research. The sky over the lake was already distorted. Small things—traffic lights flickering the wrong color, birds flying in strange loops, the sudden taste of salt in the air.

Mara didn’t need confirmation. The Veil was weakening.

By 3:30 a.m., she was joined by the others—Kwan, her lead technician; Dr. Luis Calderon, the philosopher-physicist who once claimed realities could remember each other; and Tom Avery, the military liaison assigned to monitor her work.

“This is it, isn’t it?” Tom said grimly.

Mara nodded, eyes glued to the growing shimmer outside the observatory window. “Reality’s folding in on itself. Our world... and the Echo.”

The Echo had been theoretical. Another version of Earth—nearly identical but shaped by different choices. In the Echo, the Cold War had turned hot. In the Echo, global warming had never been addressed. In the Echo, humanity had survived, but only just. For years, Mara's team had detected its pulse beneath the skin of spacetime. Now, it was pushing through.

“How long do we have?” Kwan asked.

“Hours. Maybe less.”

Tom stepped forward. “What happens when the collision completes?”

Luis answered. “Either we merge... or one of us is overwritten. Like a hard drive. Only one reality can survive intact.”

“Which one?” Kwan asked quietly.

No one answered.

At 4:12 a.m., the first crossover happened.

A woman appeared in the courtyard—barefoot, ragged, eyes wide with terror. She looked around, disoriented, then vanished in a flicker of static. A glitch in the weave. They all watched it in silence.

“We need to stabilize the Veil,” Mara said. “If we can’t keep the realities apart... we won’t have a choice which one lives.”

“What about the people?” Tom asked. “Billions of lives. In both worlds.”

“Maybe,” Mara said, “we can find a third option.”

They worked without rest. Power surged through the lab’s mainframe as they activated the Quantum Synchronizer, a machine that had never been tested on a live fracture. Outside, the world changed with every passing second. Buildings flickered between glass and steel, then rust and ruin. The skyline wavered like a memory being rewritten in real time.

At 5:47 a.m., another crossover. This time, a group—a family, huddled and confused, holding onto each other. A child looked up at Mara and whispered, “We don’t belong here.”

She knew the truth. Neither did they.

Then came the surge.

The lab went dark. The Synchronizer screamed with energy, and the Veil split wide open.

For a moment, Mara stood in both worlds.

In the Echo, the air was thick and bitter. Fires burned in distant hills. A broken version of herself stood across from her, scarred and older, holding a tablet displaying collapsing simulations.

“You did this,” the Echo-Mara said, voice hoarse. “You opened the door.”

“I was trying to keep it shut.”

“It doesn’t matter now. We’re linked. You can’t stop it.”

“We still have time.”

The other Mara stepped forward. “Listen to me. My world is dying. Yours can survive, but only if we cut the thread.”

“You want me to seal it?”

“No. I want you to sever it. Burn the bridge. Sacrifice both of us if needed. Just don’t let them merge. If they do... it’ll be worse than extinction. It’ll be madness.”

The connection broke.

Back in the lab, Mara collapsed to her knees.

“We can’t save both worlds,” she said. “But we can stop the collapse.”

Luis looked up. “You mean destroy the connection completely?”

Mara nodded. “We overload the Synchronizer. Turn it into a dimensional EMP. Everything caught in the flux—gone. We reset reality before the merge finalizes.”

Kwan paled. “But what if we miscalculate? We could erase everything.”

“I know.”

Tom looked at her, his voice low. “You’re willing to take that risk?”

She looked out the window, where two moons now hung in the sky—one familiar, one red and cracked.

“I’m not willing to let everything become nothing.”

They made the preparations. Set the machine to self-terminate once the pulse reached peak intensity. There was no guarantee it would work. There was no guarantee they would survive it.

As the final countdown began, Mara recorded a message.

“If you’re hearing this... one world survived. Maybe not ours. Maybe not even yours. But someone made it. That’s what matters.”

Ten seconds.

She reached for the switch.

Five.

Luis whispered a prayer.

Three.

Kwan closed her eyes.

One.

The light consumed them all.

At 7:00 a.m., the sun rose over a quiet city. The sky was whole. The buildings were still. Birds flew straight.

Mara opened her eyes.

She didn’t know which world had survived.

But it was beautiful.