Phase Shift (4 of 6)
Theorem
Mira spent hours on her laptop throughout the day, shushing Theo every time he tried to interrupt. By the fifth time, she finally turned to him.
“Theo,” she said. “Let’s say I almost believe your story. You’ve made some claims—that my work, maybe not the stuff I’m doing right now, but the long-term research—creates a spacetime anomaly near Earth. One big enough to change history. Erase people from existence. And only a handful of people—half of whom might be crazy—can even tell something changed.”
“That’s pretty succi—”
She held up a hand.
“You’ve said you’re not a scientist, but you can point me in the right direction. Which you have. Okay? Nod if you understand.”
He nodded.
“I’m working on the math. I need silence. Complete silence.”
“How long?”
“Until I’m done. I don’t know how long.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding again. “I understand. Can I take a shower? And do you have a spare toothbrush?”
“Of course. Just don’t pull another ‘oh no, I’m wet and need to parade around naked’ thing, okay? There are towels in there. And yes, you’ll find a basket on the shelf left of the shower—full of hotel freebies I’ve stolen over the years. Mini soaps, shampoos, toothpaste, toothbrushes, floss. Everything. Probably no razors, except mine—and don’t use that.”
“I won’t. The beard’s fine. I just don’t want to smell bad.”
“I think we’d both prefer that.”
She glanced at the window.
“The storm’s breaking up, as you can see. It’ll clear before nightfall, but we’re stuck here until at least Tuesday. No way the Jeep’s getting through this. So yeah—we’ve got a couple more days. Minimum. But I need peace and quiet so I can think.”
Theo nodded.
“I’m modeling your feedback loop—71 Hz asymmetry against spacetime curvature. If it scales exponentially, I’ll see it. So stay quiet until I prove you wrong—or right.”
He smiled and disappeared into the bathroom.
When he came back, he let out a long, satisfied sigh. He didn’t say a word, but Mira knew exactly what it meant: I feel way better after that shower.
She moved from station to station, tracking the steady 71 Hz pulse of the pulsar. She muttered to herself about asymmetry, side carriers, and localized perturbations—terms Theo didn’t fully understand, but didn’t interrupt.
At 1 p.m., he placed a lunch beside her: toasted BLT, potato chips, an apple sliced with absurd neatness, and a glass of lemonade. He said nothing, even when she looked up and said:
“Thank you.”
He just nodded.
He spent the afternoon reading her well-worn copy of Murder on the Orient Express. Around 3, he suited up and went outside, shovel in hand, and began clearing the walkway and the small parking area. He dug her Jeep out of a drift.
Mira occasionally glanced out the window between flashes of insight. Between modeling simulations and muttering about data entropy, she’d find herself watching him.
Always returning to the work.
Theo, meanwhile, moved from chore to chore without comment. He washed the dishes. Tidied up the place. Sorted extra equipment into crates and labeled them neatly. Wound up patch cables and power cords. Found a spray bottle under the sink and wiped down every surface, one by one. He even took out the trash and replaced the liners.
By 6 p.m., he was back at the stove, and the chamber filled with wonderful smells.
Mira looked up from her screen.
“What are you cooking?”
He didn’t turn.
“Shhh,” he said. “I need to concentrate on my work.”
It was the first thing he’d said in hours.
Mira smiled. She closed her laptop and padded over to the stove.
“You had frozen meatballs,” he said. “But I prefer real ones.”
Using a pair of tongs, he turned the dozen meatballs one by one, then cracked black pepper over them with deliberate care. His other hand hovered over a bubbling pot to the left.
“Ah,” he muttered. “Water boils quicker at this altitude. Throws off the timing a bit.”
Mira folded her arms, watching him.
“Is this your thing? Cooking? You move around a kitchen better than I do.”
“I used to cook more,” he said. He paused, a faraway look in his eyes. “At least, I think so.”
“You think so?”
Theo shrugged slightly. “It’s a post-cog thing. There was someone I used to cook for. Someone who—”
He stirred the sauce gently. “In my time, no longer exists.”
Mira stared at him, caught off guard.
Mira stepped closer, arms crossed, noticing the blench of his jaw. “Wait. Were you married?”
“In one reality,” he said quietly, “I think I must’ve been.”
She stood frozen, the steam from the pot swirling between them.
“So if we change the timeline—" he said.
“She’d be back,” she continued the thought, voice sharp. “And what else? Half the world stays, half vanishes—how do I calculate who? What’s the cost if I stop?”
Theo didn’t answer.
She stared at him through the steam. “But you can’t go back,” Mira said.
"No," he said. "I can't."
He stirred the pasta. Slowly. Carefully. Like it was the only thing keeping him tethered.
She watched him cook for another minute, saying nothing, and then grabbed a beer from the fridge.
"Want one?" she asked.
"I'm good," he said. "I'll have one when this is done. Thank you."
She grabbed her notebook, a pen, and her laptop and returned to the futon, feeling her stomach growl a little, unsure of whether she was truly hungry, or if the smells he was creating with his pasta sauce were creating a Pavlov effect.
Mira shook her head, scribbling causality loops on a notepad, her pen pausing as she glanced at him. It meant personal stakes beyond the world—likely this one person, a wife lost to time. Yet he’d said he fell in love with her at fifteen. Maybe he felt that in every timeline, but only in this one—where the world didn’t end in silence—did he find a way to reach her.
If he was right, not just psychotic, then his sacrifice—giving up his life for a wife erased in another timeline—meant this was the only path left. Heartbreakingly romantic and horrifying—she’d kissed that birthmark, felt his warmth, and now wondered if it belonged to another’s memory in a timeline she might erase.
She frowned, testing the logic against his “silent world” claim, then turned back to her laptop, fingers hovering, jaw set. She looked through her equations again, looking for errors. Finding none, she went back to the beginning and reconstructed them from scratch without looking at the old version. Then, she compared them side-by-side.
They gave the same answer.
She muttered, “71 Hz steady, but if that side carrier’s a distortion echo…" She typed a final simulation, assuming collectors spaced along the equator wherever there was land to house them. She tried them at different densities and then ran a final simulation with densities overlaid, watching the slow curve grow exponentially over decades. "Damn it, he might be right.”
She closed her notebook and stared out at the darkening sky. Only a few flakes drifted lazily as the snow finally gave up the fight.
Theo set a plate and a bowl in front of her. Spaghetti and meatballs and a salad.
"I'm assuming your preference is French dressing? It's the bottle that seems most used."
"Yep," she said, smiling. "Feasting like a princess with you around."
"Well, I mean—" He paused, then met her eyes. "You kind of are a princess… to me anyway."
She laughed, but he didn't join her in the mirth, which caused her to look back from her plate where she caught his gaze again.
She caught her breath. He was serious, and it unnerved her.
"I need another beer," she said, getting up from the couch. "Want one?"
"One's good," he said. "But if you want to get me a glass of water?"
"Sure," she said.
The break gave her a chance to change the subject back to the world's impending doom.
"So, I ran some simulations."
"And?"
"When I said it was impossible, I was wrong."
He nodded.
"It could happen, if you had a high-density array sufficiently placed around the planet, and you used the side carrier distortion echo to enhance the collection. Then it projects as possible. But it requires a specific set of events to set it into motion. If you have arrays across fifty sites, amplifying the echo over a century. The distortion scales exponentially."
"Those specific set of events must have happened," Theo said. "All of them."
"But now that we know it," she said. "It would just be a rule. Now that we know the risks, we won’t use the echo—it’s unstable. I’ll document it in the whitepaper: no distortion amplification, period. But—"
She paused looking at him.
"But what?" he asked.
"The only way to know is to test it—turn on my collector, measure the echo’s effect, prove it’s unstable," she said. "Then others can replicate it, build consensus, and it’s settled."
"It's highly risky," Theo said. "Highly risky. Greed creeps in. People start second-guessing. Trying a little bit of the distortion echo. I mean, how bad can it be, really? Nothing happens. You keep using it, and then Bam!—a century goes by and there were things that happened, but no one noticed because that's how timelines work unless you've got a post-cog that notices and doesn't get thrown into an insane asylum."
"I think we can control it," Mira said stubbornly. "Nuclear power doesn't have to become the atomic bomb."
"But it did," Theo said, his eyes dropping to the pasta, voice low.
She looked at him, nodding in agreement, but she felt better about today's progress. At least they had some direction.
Around ten, Mira said, "I'm tired. Too much thinking today. It's time for bed."
"Okay," Theo said.
"Not sleeping in my clothes though," she said. "Unlike you, I'm prepared for staying here. Be back in a bit. Shower first though—I need a clear head."
After her shower, which ran longer than normal, she changed into her pajamas in the bathroom. She looked in the mirror, cozy in her soft pajamas—perfect for sleep, not seduction. For a fleeting moment, she wished for something less warm, more daring, then shook her head and pushed the thought from her mind, brushed her teeth, gargled mouthwash, and brushed her hair.
She paused before she left the bathroom, wondering why her heart was racing.
But she didn't fool herself at all.
She had slept with Theo the prior night and, despite her initial misgivings, she had loved the closeness. She'd loved his warmth, and the feel of his skin, and the strange feeling of power she sensed within him.
She looked in the mirror again.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked her reflection.
“No,” she answered, “but I’m doing it anyway—this and the collector.”
“Okay,” she nodded. “We’re in it together.”
Then, noticing her pajamas again, she unbuttoned the top button, turned side to side, bent slightly, and then stood up again. She paused, looking at herself. Then, she unbuttoned the second button, didn't look back, and left the bathroom.
When she walked back toward the futon, she may have swung her hips just a little bit more than in her normal walk. She may have floated just a little bit more. She may have been more graceful, as if a dancer moving on her toes.
Her hands trembled as she got close to the futon.
And then she heard a slight snore to her left, where Theo was already curled up on the floor, back to the running equipment, asleep.
She stopped and looked at him, put her hands on her hips, and sighed. She stared for a moment and then returned to the futon, tugged the blanket over herself, and stared at the ceiling.
If he didn’t want her again, fine—she wouldn’t beg. But waking with her legs tangled in his had been indescribable, a first in her life.
As she lay there, she hatched a devious plan to bring him closer. She crossed to the thermostat, smirked at his sleeping form, and turned it down a few degrees before slipping back under the Denali blanket.
She stared at the ceiling anyway, toying with the third button on her pajamas.
Why does this even bother me? I wasn’t really going to sleep with him.
But it was no surprise to her when, sometime later in the night, she felt him gently slide onto the futon with her. Nor was it a mistake that she’d undone the third button while she waited for him.
She felt his arm slide under her, another go over the top of her, his hand landing dangerously close to the third button area, his hips snuggled into hers.
His skin was cool, but it didn't take long for their shared heat to warm him up. She eased back, shifting her shoulder to press closer, subtle, gentle—like a ninja.
“Wha’ are you doin’?” he mumbled, voice thick with sleep.
Mira’s eyes snapped open, breath catching. For all her ninja subtlety, she might’ve been blatantly obvious. She pressed a hand to her face, half-laughing, half-ready to cry at her own absurdity.
“Just getting comfortable,” she said, smirking into the dark.
"Sorry, I got a little cold," he said.
“Really?” she said, mock surprise in her voice. “Want me to turn the heat up?”
"No. This is very good right here. Just like this."
"Is it?"
"Mmmmhmmm," he said, squeezing her just a little bit.
She moved again, then froze—had she just wiggled her butt against him? Without meaning to?
They lay like that for many minutes until he started breathing more deeply. Sleep was the furthest thing from Mira's mind, but she enjoyed the coziness of the moment.
Then she felt his hand drop into the opening of her pajamas, landing on very sensitive skin, and she shivered.
"You okay?" he asked groggily.
"Yeah," she whispered. "I'm okay."
He moved his hand upward, from the warm crevasse where it lay, up across her collarbone, across her throat, up the side of her neck, to her jawline and then her ear and finally the back of her head, sending shivers through her.
Then he pulled her back the back of her head toward him. She turned slightly toward him as he held her by the back of her head. Both gentle and strong somehow.
"You know what?" he whispered.
"What," she replied softly.
"I admired you and loved your heat from afar for so long. But I didn't know—I didn't expect—"
He lay quietly, still holding her.
"Didn't expect what?"
She heard him swallow.
"I didn't expect you to be so beautiful." His voice was a little shaky. "It shocked me."
Somehow their lips found each other in the dark, sending her mind into a spin. She became deliciously, hopelessly lost in mere moments, and where she might have expected fear, there was never an inkling of that—only joy. The last little bits of analytical thought wondered how it could be possible to both know and not know that the moment was there.
Mira's world changed as if it had come to fruition through her own will. Not because the timeline was broken, but because her desire to surrender to a lover—that thing she had written about from her heart— happened in the most beautiful way she could ever have hoped for.
The night was perfect, and she remembered it all of her days.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.