The darkness was more absolute than anything Leon Chapman had ever seen. A blackness that filled all, leaving no light, no shape, or anything for the eye to latch on. Only sound existed. The small, tiny, lapping of minuscule waves generated by the rubber dinghy which he shared with his guide.

  A tiny, brief burst of faint light streaked to his left, gone before he could turn his head to watch it directly.

  “There. Did you see it?” Kairi Hatfield said.

  “I did.”

  After a small pause, he added his next question.

  “Does that happen often?”

  “No. You have billions of neutrinos streaking across every cubic inch of your body every second, and trillions crossing this detector… and you get one every nine-to-ten seconds or so.”

  “Yea. I know, one light-year of lead if you want to catch them all, like Pokémon.”

  The light laughter came across the darkness, the dinghy barely moving.

  “It’s a slight exaggeration, but yes. No electromagnetic interactions mean they don’t do anything until they happen to exactly hit the nucleus of an atom or the electron around it. And an atom is mostly empty. Tons of chlorine to catch one from time to time.”

  Another streak of light briefly spurted to the left again.

  “It’s kind of funny to see those, though.”

  “Enjoy. Because we’re in maintenance mode, we can get in and see for ourselves. Otherwise, you’d get pictures taken from the last maintenance and watch dry monitor screens.”

  A brief burst to the front this time.

  “It’s a bit too fast, though. Or it could be wishing time on a shooting star,” Leon commented.

  “I like the comparison. We do wish a lot here, after all,” Kairi replied.

  A burst to the right and nearly immediately another to his left again registered on his eyes.

  “Double bang.”

  “It’s mostly random, so you’re bound to get some from time to time.”

  Another streak of light to the front was followed half a second later by another to his right.

  “Another double. Well, nearly double.”

  “Statistics is a fickle thing,” she answered.

  A flash to the right, followed by another. Then, a heartbeat later, another.

  “The spectacle is getting better,” Leon commented.

  “Lucky day…” she replied slowly.

  A double burst started, then another to the side. And then another a second later.

  “It seems it’s picked up? Is that normal? I mean, statistics, right?”

  “It’s proportional to the flux. Variation is expected since it is random, but…” She stopped as three flashes appeared next to each other on the right side.

  The flashes were occurring in small bursts every second or two now. Almost regularly.

  “Fuck,” she said, surprising him.

  “What?”

  “There shouldn’t be any visible increase in events. Chance be buggered.”

  Blinding light slammed into Leon’s eyes, and he covered them. Big projectors, mounted all around the huge underground tank of chlorinated water, were pouring light.

  “You could have warned me!” he exclaimed.

  “Excursion time’s over. Let’s head to the control room,” she only replied as she grabbed the paddles, held one to him, and started to row the dinghy toward the side entrance.

  Leon started paddling as well to keep the small embarkation straight. Kairi redoubled her own as soon as he picked the rhythm.

  He was following her closely when she burst out into the control room for the Neutrino Measurement Facility – NeuMeas or “Newmeass” as they called it.

  “Frank. What does it look like?”

  “What? What does what look like?”

  She bent over the man’s shoulder and hit the keyboard, bringing the monitors out of economy mode. Leon could see a slowly scrolling set of vertical bars, a large number displaying “3.13368” and an even slower scrolling line tilted upward in its own sub-window. As he watched, the number got updated to “3.13499”.

  “Wait, what’s that?” the man – Frank – asked.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “You tell me.”

  The number updated again to “3.13889”, as Leon waited for the right moment to ask a question. Sensing his peeking over her own shoulder, Kairi explained spontaneously.

  “That’s the detector base monitoring. You get a more complete statistic suite somewhere in the software, which is only useful when we’re in normal mode, but this counts the average frequency over the last ten minutes or so.”

  “The hole in the graph?”

  “Disabled counting when I turned on the lights.”

  Frank was using his mouse to shrink the rising line.

  “Okay. When you started visiting, we were at a steady detection per six seconds average. Now, we’re at 3.16 neutrino interaction per second? Detectors busted?”

  “No. We were seeing the flashes when we were down in the tank area. Definitely too fast,” she said.

  Frank tugged at his nose, flustered.

  “Anything that can cause that?” Leon asked.

  “Neutrinos are generated by nuclear reactions. There are even monitors built to check nuclear reactors for that. But at this depth, we’re too far from any source. We’re only there to provide a baseline for more sensitive detectors anyway.”

  “So… nuclear fusion? Lots of them?” Leon asked nervously.

  Kairi dismissed his concerns immediately.

  “What? No, if there were a nuclear war on top, then yes, you’d get a few more neutrino bursts from whatever explosion is close by. Not a continuously increasing regular amount,” she said, looking at the 3.48 number, which kept climbing faster.

  “Yeah, the only source that’s steady is the Sun…” Frank started.

  There was a clatter from behind, and Leon turned to see a man’s bulging eyes, a cafeteria tray at his feet with food spilled all over.

  “What? There’s no way it’s the Sun,” Frank immediately started.

  “If we’re at twenty times neutrino flux, that means the fusion in the core is that much faster. Can’t happen otherwise,” the man said, pale.

  Leon looked at the three scientists, trying to keep up with the unspoken parts of the argument.

  “There’s no way the fusion speeds up that much in minutes, Dan. That might occur at the end stage of fusion, prior to a Nova reaction, but the sun is a G-type small yellow star. Wrong mass, wrong density, wrong age, wrong everything. Can’t go Nova,” Kairi said to the man.

  Leon had to ask the age-old question.

  “If theory says one thing… and experimental data says another… who is right?”

  The man – Dan? – rushed to the console to look at the steadily climbing counter. It had reached 3.8 while Leon hadn’t watched, and if the average was calculated over ten minutes… it was probably even higher at the moment. He would not bet on it leveling off abruptly.

  “Light and heat take millennia to percolate from the core, but if fusion is speeding up, then. It. Will. Blow. Up,” Dan said.

  “Wait a minute. Maybe there’s an alternate explanation for the increased detection rate instead of source change?” Frank countered.

  “Any bright idea? Neutrino oscillation change for more detectable neutrinos? That’d be a change in physics itself.”

  Both Kairi and Frank winced at Dan’s suggestion. Leon could only agree with the sentiment; the idea that physics could change would be an anathema to any scientist. Besides, if physics changed, odds would be that all of them would be dead of something, given how life was adapted to its state, or so all the scientists he’d interviewed in his still-short career said.

  “And even if that was the case, it’s still too many neutrinos anyway,” Dan pointed out as the number of detected neutrinos inched over 4.

  Leon could only imagine the spectacle in the darkened water tank, with streaks of light all over if you had four per second happening.

  Kairi slammed her hand on the desk.

  “Get me the neutrino line facilities. They should be detecting that shit as well.”

  “If it’s real.”

  “I was starting to see the bursts occurring in the detector tank with my own eyes. No, it’s not a detector failure or some prankster hack,” she insisted.

  Leon half expected the man to pull out his phone, but of course, this deep, there was no reception whatsoever. He turned and pulled a triangular dome looking like some sci-fi model, complete with a logo brand that Leon recognized, although he didn’t think about it when thinking about phones.

  The other facilities must have been on speed dial as the speakers on the dome’s legs started doing the usual ringtone in seconds. Kairi waited nearly ten seconds, finger drumming, before the ringtone stopped, and another woman’s voice came up.

  “NeuMeas?”

  “Yep. We’re in maintenance mode, but we’re picking… anomalous rea…”

  “Massive flux increase?”

  “Okay, you’re seeing it as well, so we’re not going crazy with hallucinations from gas infiltration.”

  “Started fifteen minutes ago, as far as we can tell. We’re trying to bounce explanations, but none hold up. So far,” the woman at the other facility said.

  “Any other facilities reported, Matilda?” Kairi asked.

  “We got on the phone with the rest. Well, except South Ice, the phone keeps ringing. It’s the middle of the night there, but someone should be at the console and answer. Probably. We were going to call you next, seeing as I know you’re not supposed to be fully online and operational.”

  “So… widespread. And no nuclear war,” Kairi said.

  Matilda snorted in aborted laughter at the end of the line.

  “At this continuous level, we’d probably have enough thermonuclear explosions going on to split open the Earth’s crust every second. Ernest said you’d need a few thousand times the total nuclear arsenal of the Cold War to get that burst, and you’d probably be too short. And that’s been going on for twenty minutes or more.”

  Leon looked back to see at what level the display was, which is why he caught the event.

  A line of black appeared just behind Frank. It split open, making an oval blackness that was comparable to the depths he’d experienced in the tank despite the control room being in full light.

  Cables whipped out, wrapping themselves around Frank’s arms, legs, torso, everywhere. Leon only had a fleeting impression of them. They looked like segmented wires of metal but simultaneously conveyed an organic impression as if they were tentacles of some sort of abyssal beast rather than some technological constructs.

  Then the wires tightened and dragged Frank into the oval darkness, and it slammed shut, leaving no trace.

  There hadn’t been a sound. Even Frank seemed to have had no time to say or shout anything, so fast it had been. Leon gasped, making his own startled noise.

  “What?” Kairi turned to ask.

  Leon pointed at the now empty chair and console desk.

  “Wait, where’s Frank?”

  “He was there… and something grabbed him,” Leon replied.

  “Some…thing?”

  “It was a hole, a hole in space. And things came out, grabbed him, and dragged him away before it closed.”

  Kairi looked at him blankly.

  “Okay. Just calm down. We’re going to get to the surface now, and it will all be good. Okay?”

  “No. I mean… it happened,” Leon insisted.

  Dan had almost reached him, trying to place his hand on his shoulder for comfort, when Leon’s peripheral vision spotted the change. But this time, both Kairi and him were quick enough to see the afterimage of the black oval, the wire-tentacles pulling, and Dan’s disappearing form as the hole in reality closed.

  “That is what happened,” Leon said.

  “Fuck. Fuckkity fuck. Sideways,” she replied.

  “Reality changing?” Leon theorized.

  “What? No. If it was forces of nature tearing apart… you’d get swallowed, grabbed by forces or something. Not… that’s machine-looking stuff,” she countered.

  “So what?”

  Leon’s only warning was Kairi’s eyes dilating in surprise. Then he felt a painful squeeze at his forehead, neck, armpits, wrists, everywhere. Then, there was a massive tug, like he’d imagined feeling while being caught in a car accident, with the safety belt triggering to protect him from being ejected in a tumble or something.

  The last thing he saw was Kairi’s wide-open mouth while a black oval started to open just behind her.