Location: Himalayan Subterranean Research Base
Time: 3:53 A.M.
Personnel: Dr. Meher Kapadia (Astrophysicist), Lt. Rajan Iyer (Security Command), and Control Team
_______________________________________
ALERT!ALERT!ALERT!
Containment breach in Sector 03. Unauthorized Rift Simulation has occurred.
Dr. Meher Kapadia had been asleep for barely an hour when the emergency sirens tore her out of bed. Hair loose, slippers half on, she sprinted down the stark metallic hallway, clutching a datapad that flickered with red notifications.
When she reached the control bay, it was empty.
Utterly empty.
Except for one thing—the Womb was humming.
Faintly. Lovingly. Like it had just finished breathing in something precious.
"Aarya?" she called, voice cracking.
No response.
Only the strange, residual warmth in the room. Like someone had just been there. Like someone had just—disappeared.
Meher (whispers):
"No… no, no, no—she wouldn't—she didn't—"
She ran to the console.
NARAD:
"User Dr. Aarya Sen executed unauthorized sequence TSD-03. Experiment complete. Subject no longer traceable."
Meher's heart stopped.
"What the hell does that mean?"
She tried reversing the logs, rerouting security footage, anything. But all she could see on the screen was the moment the rift bloomed—and then static.
No scream. No body. No explosion.
Just light.
And then… nothing.
3:58 A.M. – Command Center
Lt. Rajan Iyer arrived with four armed guards, expression carved in steel.
"What's the situation?" he barked, eyes scanning the control room.
"She's gone," Meher said, barely whispering it. "Aarya's gone. The experiment wasn't scheduled. She… she overrode the system. Alone."
The lieutenant turned to the monitors. One by one, they were flickering with corrupted data.
"She was alone?" he asked sharply.
"Yes," Meher snapped. "She locked the lab from inside. No one else could have entered. NARAD says the rift opened, and…"
"And?"
"There's no trace of her."
System Report
Subject: Dr. Aarya Sen
Status: Off-grid
Physical presence: Absent
Coordinates: Undefined
Biological trace: NULL
Meher slumped into the nearest chair. Her fingers trembled as she tapped through security logs. Aarya had been working obsessively for months—but this…
This was never supposed to happen.
"She didn't just vanish," she said. "It's like she dislocated."
"Then where the hell is she?" Rajan asked.
Silence.
And then…
NARAD's voice echoed again—this time with a flicker of something human in its artificial cadence.
"Subject Dr. Aarya Sen has crossed the known dimensional field. Coordinates unrecognizable by current scientific architecture. Experiment result: undefined."
4:03 A.M. – Global Security Lockdown Issued
The Base shut down. All personnel were ordered into containment sectors. Every hard drive was pulled. Every AI protocol, including NARAD, was locked into quarantine mode.
Aarya Sen was declared:
Status: Missing in Experiment
Cause: Unknown
Result: Classified
But her colleagues couldn't let it go.
Meher sat in the dark, rewatching the grainy footage again and again. That moment before the light swelled—when Aarya's lips moved as if whispering something.
She enhanced the footage. Zoomed in. Ran lip analysis.
One word.
A whisper against the face of the void.
"Come."
_______________________________________
Silence.
No—not silence. The absence of machine-hum and digital echo was not silence. It was something far more unnerving.
The moment the light faded, Aarya stumbled, her vision washed out with white-hot residue from the burst of the rift. Her knees hit something soft—not lab tile, not reinforced metal, but earth. Her hands sank into it, rich and spongy, warm as skin.
She gasped—sharp, instinctive. The air was damp and heady with a scent that didn't exist in her world. Something floral, something mineral. Sweet like overripe fruit, spiced like rain on copper. Her lungs took it in and shuddered.
Her pupils narrowed. The light had changed.
Above her, two moons loomed through a velvet sky, one pale silver and serene, the other a muted rust-red, ringed with barely visible glyphs circling like prayers in orbit.
Aarya slowly lifted her head, heart slamming.
The forest around her pulsed with bioluminescent flora, trees whose bark shimmered with flowing symbols, vines that coiled and breathed, opening their blossoms to her like watchful eyes. The grass was tall and black, with a greenish sheen—each blade razor-thin, but when she touched it, it bowed like it recognized her.
"Where… am I?"
The words were a whisper, lost in the vast and humming quiet.
Her chest rose and fell, breath shallow.
The stars were unfamiliar. The sky itself bled slow hues—blue where it should be black, gold where it should be silver.
Her palms trembled. Her knees dug into the moss-soft floor, but she didn't move. She was afraid to.
And yet—beneath the dread, wonder bloomed.
"I did it… I really…"
Her lips parted. Her heart surged upward in her throat.
The rift had worked.
Her experiment had not just mapped a theoretical overlap between her world and another, it had opened the door—and dragged her through. She, Dr. Aarya Sen—desperate prodigy, third-generation quantum researcher, emotionally starved daughter of too-famous scientists—had just made the impossible real.
"They're going to say my name for generations."
She laughed softly, breath hitching. The wind whispered in reply, curling around her like a blessing. She was on another world. Another world. A place that might never have known humanity. A place untouched by satellites, data cables, or air pollution.
And yet—her presence felt expected.
The trees leaned in toward her. Somewhere deeper in the forest, something howled—not a beast's cry, not entirely. It was layered. Melodic. Alien.
Aarya pushed to her feet, slowly.
Her lab coat was gone. So was her wrist monitor, her personal rift stabilizer, her communicator. She wore only the thin inner body-suit designed for temperature regulation: sleeveless, form-fitting, torn slightly from her fall.
Her skin felt… too sensitive.
"This world is alive."
Not just alive—but aware. Sentient in a way her science had no words for. The grass moved before her step. The air carried her scent too easily. Even the moons seemed to watch.
Suddenly, the weight of her aloneness hit her.
She staggered back, heart racing. "No. No. I'm not alone. They saw me go through. They'll find me. The beacon will…"
But there was no beacon. She'd crossed too fast. The system hadn't stabilized.
"How long will it take them to recalculate the rift point? Hours? Days? Years…?"
Time might not move the same here.
Tears stung her eyes, but she blinked them away. She was used to panic—decades of pushing past it in labs full of doubters and under the cold gaze of parents who measured worth in formulas.
But this…
This was different.
This was existential.
"Okay, Sen. Calm down. Catalog what you know. Stay rational."
But even as she tried, her skin began to tingle. Not just from fear—but from something resonant.
_______________________________________
Aarya sat beneath the thick, pulsing tree, its bark glowing softly in faint blues and greens, a strange breath-like rhythm in its trunk—as if the world itself breathed alongside her. She drew her knees to her chest, her breath fogging up in the cooler air of this new realm. Her heart had begun to quiet, but the ache—the one she had hidden behind equations and cold metal—pressed louder in this silence.
The thrill of discovery had passed. What remained was a girl who had never learned how to be held.
She blinked up at the foreign moons. One of them flickered faintly, as though a cloud had brushed past it. The world was beautiful, but it did not know her. It didn't care about her academic degrees. It didn't know her loneliness. Or maybe it did—maybe that's why it had taken her.
"What if I wasn't meant to go back?"
The thought hit her like a slap.
Aarya wasn't someone who belonged anywhere, really. Even back on Earth, she was a ghost in her own home. Her parents—brilliant, absent, relentlessly cold—had trained her to be the prodigy they could present to the world like a crown jewel, never a daughter. They'd poured accolades into her schedule but never love into her arms. Her mother praised data. Her father spoke in published papers. They had built her mind to be steel but had left her heart hollow.
"I just wanted them to see me."
She whispered the words aloud, voice breaking. Her chest ached. Her lips trembled.
"I just wanted them to… choose me. Not their legacy. Not the project. Me."
Tears she hadn't allowed in years gathered at the corners of her eyes, then fell freely.
She'd devoted her life to their vision, blindly believing if she just worked hard enough, proved herself enough, they'd look at her like parents—not handlers. Not like a specimen.
She curled in tighter.
"I should've waited. I should've checked the readings twice. I—I shouldn't have rushed it…"
Her hands were cold. Her body still felt lightheaded. She shivered as she realized the warmth from before was fading. The hunger in her belly crept up, twisting with the realization that she had no food, no communication, and no guarantee she'd even breathe tomorrow.
You're alone in a world that doesn't know love. Just like home.
No. No, that wasn't true.
Here, at least, the trees seemed to listen. The grass bent to her touch. The moons did not glare—they watched. She couldn't explain it, but even in her fear, this land… it responded.
A breeze swept past her cheeks like a caress.
And that's when the fear changed.
Not into comfort—but into a deeper fear.
"What if I'm not alone?"
The pulse returned beneath her. Subtle. Hypnotic.
Aarya's senses heightened. She pushed herself up, breath caught halfway in her throat.
This time, the air carried something else—a feeling, not a sound.
Hunger.
Not hers.
A vast, ancient, bottomless hunger. Not evil—not yet—but desperate. It rose from the very veins of the land, and somewhere, far across the terrain, something stirred. Something powerful.
And it had noticed her.