The Shift

The city was dark and hollow, a vast grey fossil of an extinct civilization. A permanent dusk shadowed the Earth, the sun smothered by thick clouds of ash and gas. Bustling city life had withered and died years ago when the radio storm began.

Sparks sat on the edge of a concrete bridge, overhanging the river. Her bulky plastic boots dangled above the inky black water that shimmered and rippled along with the tide. A thin layer of oil covered the entire surface of the river, having leaked from one sunken ship or another, perhaps a destroyed oil platform off the coast. Her airtight plastic suit was heavy, and ten sizes too big for her, but she felt the warmth embrace her as she baked in the direct sunlight. She longed to feel the light gently kiss her skin, but she couldn't take the suit off, not yet.

She shifted her gaze regularly from a large sundial on the banks of the river to the swirling rips on the slick waterbed, panting heavily, and scrunching up her nose as prickles of sweat itched her skin and stung her eyes. It wouldn't be long now. A hissing, cracking sound became audible as the sky fractured, the phase shift was beginning. She watched carefully, waiting for the colours to come. The clouds were low, she would have little warning, and would have to be quick if she was to live through the shift. Flashes of purple and teal broke through the clouds, gaining intensity, punctuated by orange beams like lasers tearing angularly across the sky in angry bursts. Sparks stood up awkwardly in her big plastic suit and shuffled close to the edge of the concrete bridge, still watching.

The clouds began to glow a burnt orange color, and she knew there would be only a few seconds. She braced herself around the chest. Then it happened. The entire sky shimmered as the shift raced earthward, the clouds turning from puffy grey cotton balls into harsh, blood-red wisps. Sparks took one last breath, held it, and stepped off the bridge.

She had timed it well. The shift ripped through her as she dropped past the halfway mark. The water below her flashed brilliantly as the shift penetrated it, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. Sparks felt the burning sensation of plastic fusing with her skin but could only gasp and choke through the pain as she fell, a drop that should only last for a moment.

The bright grey world snapped away from her and she hung in empty black space. She was weightless here, as if still falling, but there was no sense of motion. Sparks lifted one hand to her visor, and peered curiously at the blur it made, a yellow smear representing the path her hand followed. While she felt her hand in front of her face, there was only the barest notion of it being there, a ghost hand, just a suggestion of existence and nothing more. Sparks wondered how she could see her hand at all. There was no source of light, and the black void appeared infinite. The more she looked around, however, the quicker the infinite blackness began to fade. There were just shapes at first, but they grew more defined, and more terrifying. Morphing into nearly human shape, only with grotesque proportions. Long, apelike arms, sunken chests, spiney midsections and warped legs with backwards joints. Sparks felt a surge of terror. She had been here before, and the same demons had come then as well. She wanted to scream but no sound came out. Sparks twisted and jerked, but there was no surface beneath her feet and nothing to grab on to. She was in freefall. Tears pooled without gravity to pull them downwards, and her eyes began to burn. She shut them tightly and whipped her head around, trying to fling the tears away. Blinded by her own terror.

She felt that the demons closing in, reaching out to pull her into the abyss, then suddenly a cold, powerful force gripped her body, as she gasped foul water spilled inside and choked her.

She thrashed desperately in the foaming river water, ejecting pink geysers above her. She struggled to swim in the muck, feeling skin tear from her body in hundreds of tiny patches where it had contacted the plastic suit.

She blocked out the pain, before a calm came over her, and she allowed her body to float, reaching out blindly, she felt for the hard steel bar where she’d expected it, and it gave her comfort. She dragged herself through the foam, and hoisted her body up a few ladder rungs, onto a concrete platform.

She tore at the rubber seal around her neck, and ripped the head piece free, gasping at the cool, damp air that flooded in. Her pain transforming to anger, as she cursed and spat and thumped the concrete with her fists until she had expended all her rage, then flopped onto her back on the platform. The patches of skin where the plastic had fused would heal in a week, but in another forty days, she'd have to do it all again.

There was no formal scientific explanation of the shift, mostly because there was no formal science anymore. She had read scattered articles of news which claimed to have clues to the nature of the shift, citing physics terms and properties of matter that she did not fully understand. This gave little comfort to Sparks, who had spent three days naked with the soles of her feet welded to her bathroom floor before she'd torn herself free.

Sparks waddled herself back to the top on the bridge, spent the next hour or so carefully and painfully peeling off the big rubber suit and stuffing it into the storage bag that had slightly fused to the concrete during the shift, she was able to peel it off with ease. Some materials shifted harder than others. Plastic wasn't so bad. Steel and concrete shifted much harder. Organic matter, animals, plain old dusty earth shifted the hardest. Some objects, bonded so solidly to another surface that they couldn't be moved, slowly sinking further and further with each shift. A nearby car, which had been stopped on the bridge when the radio storm began, was sunk nearly a meter deep into the concrete. Engine and all, Sparks wondered how many more shifts it would be until the car finally shifted right through the bridge and dropped into the river.

Her thoughts turned to friends from the past, who had been shifted into the ground just like that car, kept alive for months by the sympathy of those around them, shifting ever deeper into the earth until they finally stopped living. A chill raced down her spine.

Sparks began the short journey back to camp, but along the way she noticed something glistening in the sun a head of her, as she got closer, she realised in was a human hand withered and rotted, holding up a golden locket. She bent down, gently removing the trinket. Opening the locket and expecting the find the portrait of a loved one, she was shocked to find the words “we are in hell”

Before the shifts began Sparks would have dismissed this claim as madness, but now, in this new world, she found herself questioning the fabric of her own perceived reality and what might be waiting beyond the void, within the shift? Was the entire history of the earth a marvelous work and a wonder of creation, or beautifully terrible accident? either concept seemed equally terrifying, but one thing was for certain, Armageddon had come and gone, leaving only ghost in its wake. If there was a god, they had forgotten us, and we had forgotten them long ago. All that remained now was the shift.