\ Carpe Futurum \

A wave of frosty air passed over Marsia and Skyler as they entered the amber-lit chamber. It was an airlock of sorts, sturdy metal guarding either side of the doors—its confined nature led Marsia to guess it had once been some kind of bunker. Maybe it still was, but that clearly wasn’t its main purpose anymore.

The first room had very little of note; only a locker and some loose lab gear lined the wall. The smell of cleaning chemicals lingered faintly in the air, tangy and bitter. Skyler, eager to learn the truth, instantly tried the next door, but found it unbudging. They wiggled its handle helplessly.

“It’s locked,” they reported. “That sucks.”

Marsia rolled her eyes. “If Locri were here, she’d just kick it down. But we’ll have to find another way around it for now.”

“We will see them again, right? Arufa and Locri?”

“Yes, I promise.”

She bent over and eyed the lab gear. Goggles, rubber gloves, and a hazmat suit laid in the pile, all recently used from the looks of it. She wasn’t sure it was safe to touch.

Moving on to the locker, she examined the dial lock and pulled on the frame to no avail. Locks were not her area of expertise—she called Skyler over to take a look. “You were a criminal. Tell me how to open this,” she said.

They crossed their arms and leaned against the glossy steel wall. “Oh, I get it. Just ‘cause I was a criminal means I would know–”

“Do you?”

“Yeah. It’s really easy.”

Giving up the attitude, Skyler kneeled before the large box and began twisting the dial. They took their other hand and pulled lightly on the latch as they spun it, quickly but carefully. They quickly stopped it after a moment and muttered to themselves.

“Three plus five is eight… so the first digit is eight.”

“You’re doing maths now?”

“Trust the process, princess.”

Marsia watched as they quickly spun it around twice and landed on ‘8’. Then they began to move the dial more slowly in the other direction, maintaining the same shackle pressure. She saw their face twist in confusion when the lock stopped on ‘8’ again.

“It’s two of the same digit in a row. That’s rare,” they muttered, fiddling with it some more. They set it back to zero and slowly brought it around again—it looked like witchcraft to Marsia.

“How do you know it’s the same one? And what are you even doing with it now?”

“Two… twelve… twenty-eight… thirty-two. So the last number is twenty-eight.”

“You’re pulling numbers out of your arse now!”

The moment she said that, Skyler pulled the lock off and opened the metallic door and laughed. “Aahh. Brings back memories. Literally.”

Marsia reached inside and sifted through the array of unorganized papers. In an upper compartment, she found a diary—she brought it down. Its title, written in pen, read ‘NDE Development: The Savior of the World’. Confused, she peeked inside.

Each page was headed with the same words: NDE Research Log, then a date. The most recent entry was dated ‘7.14.57’, but clearly the project had been going on for several years beforehand. It was all in very strict, proper handwriting, as if the author—likely Dr. White—had used a template.

She let the pages fly back until she noticed a change. The handwriting became less formal, more natural. The titles were drawn in bubbly fonts, the margins covered in doodles. She’d even used several pen colors to add variety into her notes. It was… a departure from the Dr. White that Marsia had met. It unsettled her.

“Selfish. Let me read it!” Skyler grumbled.

“No. Go figure out the door.”

“Jeez. Rude.”

What could have caused this change? From bright and cheerful to drab and monotonous… Intrigued, she flipped to just before the big change and read a couple lines:

“Quick deviation from the NDE for a sec. Blondie and I got a volunteer on board for the Many-Worlds Project! They’ve been a great friend since I started working here, so there was no way they’d say no to an opportunity like this. If we can get it to work, we might just change the world forever! Can’t wait!”

She flipped the page—the color faded into grayscale.

“Morals need to be sacrificed for a project like this. The shock that killed our volunteer is the only reason we managed to breach the parallel. Ghiles hasn’t been handling it well, but eventually I think he’ll understand. Rest in peace, Dr. Everly.”

Marsia blinked and reread the page. Everly was… Skyler? And they died…? Deciding it would be best for them not to read it, she set it back—but not before taking the ID card its author had left as a bookmark.

“Skyler. Any luck with the door?”

They sighed, throwing up their hands. “Nope. It says it needs a Nock Labs ID card.”

“Like this?” she asked, flicking the card towards them with her wrist.

After a short fumble, they caught it and pressed it to the door’s receptacle. “Yeah, like that. Thanks.”

The LED light above the door flashed green, and the subjects crossed through the doorway into a much busier room. Orange monitors flickered all around, filing cabinets stood high to either side. Microscopes, mechanical interfaces, and a massive machine sat in the back.

Most interestingly, a small capsule laid in the center of the room, billowing steam out onto the floor in similar fashion to the Transversal. Marsia realized it would probably be in bad taste to touch it considering the hazmat suit outside.

“Goddamn!” Skyler yelped, running over to the looming machine. It was covered in small ports and wires, with a glass screen and glove holes. “Do you know what this is?”

“No…?”

“This is a CRISPR machine! These things are expensive as hell. Whatever they’re doing down here must have something to do with genetics.”

“Skyler, you’ve got too much random knowledge in that brain of yours. Were you a psychologist and a genetic scientist?”

“Neither,” Skyler said. “That’s what’s weird. White said I was a psychologist, but… I don’t remember that at all. All I remember is growing up on the streets. How could I be sixteen and a psychologist?”

“You don’t look sixteen, for what that’s worth. You look thirty.”

“I didn’t in X2, though! And if that was all just our thoughts, then that means my consciousness is sixteen. So why is my body different?”

Marsia held her tongue about the diary. “I don’t know. Maybe we can figure it out.”

“Alright. Did that diary say anything about it?”

She again chose not to tell them what she saw. “It mentioned something called the NDE. The front cover said it was the savior of the world.”

“That’s a start.”

The two of them began scouring the chamber, searching for clues. While they sorted through drawers of charts and graphs, they began some idle chatter.

“Y’know, I used to dream about blue skies and seafoam,” Skyler said.

“In X2 or real life?”

“Both, I think. I know I lived in a city, so I probably didn’t see many of either. But I loved looking at them on TV. I was in a lot of dangerous shit there, so seeing nice stuff like that always calmed me down.”

“What kind of ‘dangerous shit’?”

“Gangs. I remember we had to wear our clothes a certain way or we’d get killed. I think I remember someone getting shot over it. Maybe I shot them, maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. What about you?”

Marsia opened another cabinet and sorted through files, barely looking at them. “In X2, I had this recurring dream about getting swallowed in the sands of a desert. It was a little scary, to be frank, but I think that’s what my life was like.”

“Getting swallowed by sand? Hot.”

“No—shut up, that’s stupid. I meant I lived in a desert. I remember a grand city on the horizon, but it was nothing like X2. It was all… less modern. I don’t remember having technology. All the houses were made of sandstone. They had a massive border wall to keep out scavengers… I think I was one of them.”

“You don’t look like a scavenger at all.”

“And you don’t look like a gang member,” she shot back.

“Touché.”

The file search proved mostly useless—it was information, sure, but Marsia couldn’t make anything valuable of it. So she kept pretending to be busy while Skyler did the heavy lifting.

“Marsia, I know we didn’t really know each other in X2,” Skyler said, “but if we end up getting taken back, I think we’ll be friends.”

“I’d be in Underside, yes? What’s it like down there?”

“Oh, it’s awful. No one has any money and we’re all scrapping for food. Arufa and I went a month without eating once. Which… maybe should have been an indication it was fake, but we didn’t pick up on that.”

“You’ll… miss her, right?”

Skyler pursed their lips. “I won’t be able to. I’ll never remember her at all.”

“But if you could, would you miss her?”

“Yeah. I know it was all simulated, but she made everything easier. She’s so strong and confident.”

“Actually, she’s not,” Marsia said, laughing a little in pity. “Not the real her, anyway. She’s a big scaredy-cat, is what she is.”

“I don’t care how she is now, that’s not who Arufa is to me,” said Skyler.

“Eh?”

“She’s fearless and she’ll always make the right choice. And if any of that’s changed, it doesn’t matter, because that’s the Arufa I remember.”

“But it was all simulated. It wasn’t real.”

“You’re right, X2 wasn’t real. But my memories are. They’re just as real as anything else in this whole goddamn world. That’s why I’m not scared of who I used to be—because I have these new memories now. I’m a new Skyler.”

She turned her robotic red eyes to the ground. “I wish I had that mentality.”

“Marsia, I barely know you at all. But when it was all crashing and burning, you made the right choice. And I know you will again.”

“You really think a murderer can change?”

Skyler closed the last cabinet and pulled out a couple of papers. “Anyone can change, for better or for worse. Dr. White’s made that really clear. She used to be a lot nicer, you know.”

Marsia slowly looked up. “How do you know that?”

They smiled. “I’m starting to remember. We were coworkers.”

“What?! How– hold on, explain yourself! You said you were a gang member! You said you were sixteen!”

“I was,” they said. “But I was also a thirty-one year old psychologist at Nock Laboratories.”

Marsia, freaking out, slammed her hand on the table. “Those things are opposites! How can you be both?”

Skyler breathed a small sigh and looked up at the monitors. A faint glow of remembrance lingered in their grey eyes.

“Have you ever heard the word dialetheia?”

“No…?”

“It means something and its opposite are both true. I talked about it with Arufa once, before everything went out of whack.”

“…” Marsia awaited an answer.

“I remember being a gangster, but I also remember being a scientist. I have two sets of memories. And if I had to take a guess… I think we all do.”

She couldn’t ignore the conflicting information in her head. She remembered the laboratory, the surgery table, but also the hot sands of the desert. Two sets of memories, never intersecting.

Marsia turned towards the monitors, standing beside Skyler. “But why…?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But I remember when Dr. White asked me to work on this project.”

“And?”

“She was always really soft-spoken and kind. I connected with her the day she started working at Nock, so she told me a lot. She told me how much she wished she could change the past.

“Apparently, she lost a relative when she was younger, someone who was really important to her. And she told me the Many-Worlds Project was going to bring them back somehow.

“It’s not time travel. That’s not possible. But I know she was a genius. She must have figured out some way to bring that person back, but I suspect… it hasn’t gone the way she wanted. Which might be why she’s so deranged now.”

They held up a small slip of paper whose title in bold read ‘The New Dawn Experiment’. It appeared to be a summary of whatever this room was meant for—the NDE Marsia had seen in the diary before.

“Speaking of deranged, holy shit,” Skyler began. “This is insane! That’s what she’s using this machine for? Oh my God. There’s no way they’re funding this.”

“What?” Marsia asked. “What is it?”

“It’s a plan to save the planet. Apparently hunger and pollution have gotten really bad this decade, but… this is terrible. I never thought she would stoop this low.”

“Skyler!”

“Marsia, this thing is a–”

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Blood colored the glowing orange monitors a hellish crimson.

Dr. White blew the smoke off her gun from the other side of the room. Marsia convulsed in visceral distress at the sight of Skyler’s corpse, a hole right through the back of their head.

“They remembered too much,” she said casually, spinning the pistol before holstering it. “They always saw the good in everyone, even when there wasn’t any.”

“…”

“Let me guess, they said some cheesy bullshit like ‘you’ll do the right thing when the time comes’? Classic Everly. You’re lucky I got here now, or I would’ve had to kill you both.”

“You fucking bastard!!” Marsia screeched. Her voice cracked under the weight of sheer despair. “Don’t you feel anything?!”

“I do. I feel pissed off,” the scientist said. “This experiment is a failure because of you. Six years all for nothing, because you couldn’t keep your damn voice down in the vents.”

“What are you talking about?!”

“Come with me. I’m going to find a way to fix this mess.”