Chapter 4 Shadow #2
And fuck, I nearly bound up those stairs as soon as the thought splinters my head, a mental image of smashing Fallon’s drivel-spewing face through the window.
I blink back the intrusive thought. Tap my fingers in a rhythmic beat against my helmet. Blink twice more before starting the count on my right hand—
When she chances another look my way, I halt. She lifts the umbrella in a small wave, a faint smile curving the delicate seam of her mouth, and despite myself, my lips twitch.
While it wasn’t my intention to frighten her before, it’s unavoidable. Keeping my mouth shut is the best policy. Once those dark filaments strangle my mind, I barely have enough willpower to filter what leaves my mouth.
“I’m trying to help you,” Leo says, breaking into my thoughts. His hand almost lands on my shoulder before he realizes, dropping it with a frown.
“You’re trying to help yourself look better to your donors,” I counter, meeting his eyes with a cool stare.
“Yes, because that’s how it’s done. They want to know where their money went.
Like the new HPC expansions—” he ticks off on his fingers “—the fluid chambers. The quantum sensors. All the research expenses you’re too paranoid to explain.
I have to reassure them we’ll have something to show, preferably by the symposium, but I fear it won’t be enough—”
“It has to be enough,” I mutter, my hungry gaze slipping over Collins. Little hits, stolen glances, feeding the craving—it has to be enough.
Because it can’t ever be more.
A sharp pain slices behind my sternum, and I press a hand to my chest. It’s like the first time I looked through a telescope and saw the light of a binary star explode into view, reshaping everything I thought I knew.
The aching awe of witnessing something so beautiful, so utterly ineffable, and yet knowing you can only ever admire it from afar.
A rumble of thunder sounds in the distance. The meager light fades farther into the shadows as the storm batters the stained-glass windows. I rub a gloved hand over my jaw, letting my gaze linger on Collins until she disappears up the staircase, taking the last of the light with her.
The void within senses the absence, darkening my thoughts.
Leo has gone quiet. He watches me with a guarded expression, a sheen to his forehead, like he’s suddenly aware of the shift. “If you refuse counseling,” he says, voice strained now, “I’ll be forced to concede to the board.”
Tired of his games, I dip my head close. “I know the counseling isn’t mandatory,” I say, lowering my voice to a lethal decibel. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion of what Leo actually intends for me.
If he wants to push me out, he’ll have to try a hell of a lot harder.
His mouth falls open, but he’s smart enough to close it before another lie spills out.
“Don’t bother me with Dr. Holbrook again. I’m not interested in therapy or eye candy, Leo.” A sudden throb of pain assaults my skull, and I rub my gloved fingers along the side of my forehead. Pushing off the pillar, I tell him, “See you at the unveiling.”
When I reach the observatory, the air is thick with the hum of equipment and an undercurrent of tension. A number of gazes lift as I maneuver through the workstations, passing fluid chambers and arrays of quantum sensors. Some of what Leo is so concerned about.
My sonic black hole.
The cylinder filled with circulating water creates an acoustic horizon, simulating the behavior of a Kerr black hole. Observing how sound waves interact with a fluid vortex is useful to my research, and nearly expensive enough to satisfy investors. A front for what lies deeper.
Prescott’s eyes narrow on me as I pass, and I allow a slow smirk to twist my mouth. For the sake of the upcoming particle accelerator reveal, I’ve been advised to keep my distance. Not such an easy feat when he’s been trying to steal my research.
I climb the spiral staircase, feeling his eyes drill into my back until I reach the dome.
The chamber is lit by the console lights, the large shutter above sealed. I drop my helmet on the desk and strip off my leather jacket, quickly changing out of my damp clothes before I slide my glasses into place. Each action uncoiling a layer of tension.
I settle behind the desk and wake the monitors.
My system is air-gapped from the main facility.
In the hidden sub-level beneath the observatory, I’ve built my own quantum computing array.
Superconducting qubits housed inside an industrial-cooled cryostat, protected behind layers of encryption and a biometric lock.
I’m the only one with access.
Even if someone managed to gain entry, they’d never make sense of the photonic resonance simulations, let alone the quantum gravity models.
Up here in the dome, I’ve mirrored just enough of the system to verify celestial alignments and run theoretical particle interactions.
A curated overview meant to satisfy any curious, prying eyes.
But the heart of my obsession reaches into far darker regions—ones where quantum theory and gravity collide.
Where existence meets its singularity.
The question that haunts me, whispering at that unseen boundary.
When consciousness collapses, its pattern doesn’t simply vanish. It’s imprinted into quantum entanglement; encoded signatures that linger like Hawking radiation, preserved at the very threshold of annihilation.
An imprint of existence.
An echo of identity.
Memory—captured at the event horizon, forever caught in the liminal space between oblivion and eternity.
It’s an impossible thing, when trying to explain something you can barely grasp yourself. And I know, the science feels heartless. Cold and sterile compared to its origin.
I glance at the telescope—my Hand of God—where I once gazed into nebulae and stellar nurseries, consumed with the beauty of the universe. Those memories being overwritten like code that can’t be copied or stored in quantum.
The moment this theory came to me, as I lay beneath a starry night, my body broken, my skull cracked, gazing up at the hunter in the sky—I realized in this shattered state that, if the fabric of spacetime could ripple, it could also rip.
A violent tear right through my life.
For everything beautiful in the universe, there exists a terrifying symmetry. What is luminous and breathtakingly full of wonder is mirrored by its opposite. Shadows that are desolate and horrifying, brimming with destruction and decay.
When a star dies, its core collapses under its own gravity. Once it burns through its nuclear fuel, the heart becomes so heavy, so dense, it’s crushed, unleashing a stellar explosion.
In its final beats, a star’s life is beautiful, brilliant. Immensely powerful. It’s also destructive, violently imploding as its energy is cut short before it darkens into a black hole.
It was once thought this ravenous void devoured everything irrevocably, leaving nothing behind. But through the dark regions of my research, I’ve glimpsed an impossible truth, where echoes of memory are never lost, preserved indefinitely at the darkest boundary.
Before me, a wall of screens displays three feeds.
On the first, an intricate celestial map tracking cosmic events and alignments.
On the second, curated data fed into the algorithm—police reports, medical histories, psychological evaluations, demographic lifestyle tracking; even scraped social media and dating app data.
And on the third, a graph labeled Quantum Entanglement Entropy.
Just to check the system, I highlight a node: Annihilation 8, Jake Marlow
Age: 64
DOB: October 26 (Scorpio)
Terminal Prognosis: 6 months
Criminal Profile: Serial rape / homicide
Entanglement Entropy at Death: 54.2% resonance
Correlating Cosmic Events: Neutron Star Merger GW261023 (Gravitational waves detected by LIGO/Virgo) & U Scorpii Outburst (Recurrent Nova)
A linked article shows Marlow’s censored body arranged as the Scorpius constellation. The instant his consciousness collapsed, gravitational waves from a distant neutron-star merger rippled through space, coinciding with the stellar outburst of U Scorpii.
These extreme celestial alignments time echoes at the boundary. Patterns I can capture, decode.
Symmetry is crucial.
A ritual that has to replicate the exact conditions of that night.
Fingers hovering over the keyboard, I hesitate, waiting to feel the slightest twinge of guilt. That visceral twist in my gut which used to plague me in the early days of my research.
Now, nothing.
Resigned, I initiate the search. It scours databases. It cross-references criminal profiles against predicted astronomical alignments. It’s what Leo and the board are so desperate to get their hands on.
My quantum algorithm.
I strip off my gloves and rake a hand through my hair, tension gathering at the base of my neck.
Obsession is physical, something I feel in my flesh like a fever, a madness infecting my cells.
And yet, for a brief moment as I stood at the base of the staircase, gaze cast on her—the only light on this drab fucking rock—I felt like I could breathe.
I switch on the monitor to my left, toggling through the security feeds until she appears on the screen. And hell, there it is again, that blissful disruption.
An immediate rush that feeds the craving.
Her presence resonates with a hypnotic melody. A vibrating current that strums against my skin, softens the battering tide in my head.
Over the past week, I’ve watched her, lured closer as if by a receding tide.
And I savor this feeling until she disappears from the screen.
Even after she’s faded away, her lingering notes remain, a haunting echo of a tune.
It’s stirring and melancholic, and it’s the reason I lost myself when I first glimpsed her in my lecture hall, rocked by the force of that first powerfully struck chord.
It’s been years since I’ve been able to hear any music.
Removing my glasses, I push away from the desk and stalk toward the controls. The shutters groan open, revealing the panoramic view of the ocean.
Over five years ago, my algorithm identified the coming solar eclipse as the thirteenth celestial event, with Shorehaven directly in the path of totality. It will align with a cosmic event so violent and powerful, I’ll be able to capture echoes beyond anything I’ve recorded.
I glance back at the screen, where names flicker too quickly to register. My algorithm has been searching all this time, filtering, recalculating.
And I’m still waiting for one final name.
A ray of sunlight appears past the stormy horizon, and I inhale deeply, bracing myself for the cycle to begin again. As each celestial event draws nearer, the pull intensifies—stronger, more urgent—until the tidal force is inescapable, stripping away more of my will.
I have no choice but to surrender.
It started as a shadow, a lurking silhouette at the edge of my awareness—yet with every alignment, every kill, the shadow darkens, forming a dense umbra at my core.
It’s the interplay between life and annihilation, radiance and void, where matter and its absence converge. A gravitational wound punched into the universe.
You have to look beyond what can be seen, past the horizon.
To even comprehend it, you have to abandon the comfort of known physics. You have to reach into the unknown, into the void itself, and fucking hope some semblance of humanity survives.