The universe updated its software, but my underground lab was shielded. Now the reality bubble is collapsing. PART 3

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CHAPTER 3

LOG ENTRY: DAY 215 (3)

There is a very specific, primal terror that comes from looking at a piece of transparent plastic, knowing it is the only thing standing between you and 10,000 tons of crushing, freezing liquid.

I stared at the three-foot spiderweb fracture in the acrylic wall of my living quarters. It hadn't breached the inner surface yet—no water was leaking in—but it had severely compromised the structural integrity.

Have you ever seen that episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Hal goes to change a single burnt-out lightbulb, realizes the shelf is wobbly, goes to get a screwdriver to fix it, realizes the drawer is squeaking, goes to get WD-40, and somehow ends up covered in grease underneath his car?

That is my life now. Welcome to the Deep-Ice Decoherence Project, where stopping the universe from boiling your house means you accidentally break your own windows.

I couldn't just slap duct tape on it. In linear elastic fracture mechanics, a crack in a pressurized vessel is a ticking time bomb. The stress doesn't distribute evenly across the material anymore; it concentrates infinitely at the microscopically sharp tips of the crack.

The stress intensity factor, $K$, is defined by the equation:

$$K = Y \sigma \sqrt{\pi a}$$

Where $\sigma$ is the applied stress, $a$ is the crack length, and $Y$ is a geometric factor. Because the tip of a crack has a radius approaching zero, the stress approaches infinity. If the pressure in the tank fluctuates even slightly, those tiny, sharp points will tear right through the rest of the two-foot-thick acrylic like a zipper.

To fix it, I had to do something completely counterintuitive. I had to intentionally damage the wall even more.

I needed to drill "stop holes."

By drilling a perfectly round hole at the absolute ends of the fracture, you eliminate the sharp, microscopic point. You force the stress to distribute evenly around the circumference of the drilled circle, dropping the stress concentration by orders of magnitude.

I jogged over to the tool bench and grabbed my 18-volt cordless power drill and a half-inch diamond-tipped masonry bit. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the battery pack twice before getting it clicked into the handle.

I walked up to the wall. The heavy water on the other side of the acrylic was murky and dark, still roiling slightly from the liquid nitrogen flash-freeze.

"Okay," I whispered. "Just a little light carpentry at the bottom of the ocean."

I pressed the tip of the drill bit against the exact end of the highest crack. I squeezed the trigger.

The high-pitched screeeee of diamond grinding into dense acrylic echoed through the small room. It sounded like a dying banshee. Small, white ribbons of plastic shaved off the wall and fell to the floor. I pushed gently, letting the bit do the work. If I pushed too hard, I could shatter the wall myself. If I went too deep and breached the outer layer, the water pressure would blast the drill back into my chest like a cannonball.

It was the most stressful quick-time event of my life, and I was playing it on Permadeath mode.

Clunk. The drill bit punched through the stress point, stopping about two inches deep. I reversed the drill, pulled it out, and let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.

I repeated the process at the bottom tip of the fracture. Two holes. The crack was mathematically arrested.

I grabbed a tube of industrial, two-part marine epoxy from my emergency repair kit, mixed the noxious-smelling resin on a scrap piece of cardboard, and quickly packed it into the stop holes and smeared a thick layer over the entire fracture line.

"Take that, linear fracture mechanics," I muttered, wiping my hands on my jumpsuit.

I collapsed back into my command chair, thoroughly exhausted. The adrenaline crash was hitting me hard. I glanced at the primary telemetry monitor. The heavy water pressure was stabilized at an entirely manageable 18 psi. The temperature was holding at a frosty 3°C.

I finally had a moment to think about the actual problem: the reality-overwrite wave.

According to my LEGO sensor array, the collapse boundary was currently suspended exactly 1.4 meters from the outer edge of the heavy water tank. It was moving inward at 4.2 centimeters an hour.

I pulled up the Hamiltonian equations from my earlier, deeply traumatic trip to alternate-reality Montreal. To push the wave back, I needed to generate a localized decoherence field. Essentially, I needed to broadcast a wave of "my" reality loud enough to cancel out the incoming wave of "their" reality.

My lab is surrounded by highly sensitive photomultiplier tubes—massive, bulbous sensors designed to detect the microscopic flash of light created when a neutrino collides with a proton in the heavy water. They are essentially giant, hypersensitive eyeballs.

But if I reversed their polarity and fed an alternating current through the primary cathode array, I could theoretically turn the "eyeballs" into "flashlights." I could pulse a quantum-entangled energy wave directly into the heavy water, creating a feedback loop that would push the reality boundary back.

It was brilliant. It was elegant.

It would also require roughly three megawatts of power.

My lab's standard operational draw is about 400 kilowatts. To get three megawatts, I would have to route the entire localized feed from the Creighton Mine's surface substation directly into my sensory array, bypassing all the safety governors.

I started rapidly typing out the power-routing script on my terminal. "Okay, so I just redirect the main feed from the elevator shafts, shut down the surface-level ventilation scrubbers, and—"

THUNK.

The lab plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness.

The humming of the ventilation system died. The whir of the liquid nitrogen pumps ceased. The monitors went black.

"You have got to be kidding me," I said to the dark.

Three seconds later, the dull, sickly yellow glow of the emergency battery lighting flickered on.

My primary console rebooted in Safe Mode, the screen casting a pale light across the control room. I scrambled to the keyboard and pulled up the mine's power schematic.

The surface feed was gone. Completely severed.

I checked the depth sensors. The reality-overwrite wave on the surface had reached the mine's main power conduit. The invading timeline didn't have a Deep-Ice Decoherence Project. In their reality, this section of the mine was probably abandoned decades ago. The moment their timeline touched the main cables, the copper wiring was overwritten into rust and empty space.

I was officially cut off from the surface grid.

ALERT: PRIMARY POWER LOSS.

SWITCHING TO LOCAL BATTERY BACKUP.

ESTIMATED BATTERY LIFE: 11 HOURS, 42 MINUTES.

Eleven hours.

Without power, my ventilation system dies. The CO2 scrubbers shut down. And most importantly, my plan to build a reality-pushing decoherence machine was completely dead in the water.

I buried my face in my hands. The universe wasn't just being a dick anymore. It was actively hunting me.

"Think, Elliot. Think," I whispered. I forced myself to visualize the architectural blueprints of the Creighton Mine.

This deep underground, the mining company didn't rely solely on surface power. There was a fail-safe. In the event of a total shaft collapse, there was an emergency geothermal generator located in Sub-Level 6, designed to keep the emergency elevators running so miners could escape.

Sub-Level 6 was roughly four hundred meters down a service tunnel connected to my airlock.

If I could reach that generator and run a heavy-duty physical cable from its output directly into my lab, I would have my three megawatts. I could power the decoherence array and save my timeline.

I pulled up the environmental sensors for the service tunnel outside my lab.

TUNNEL STATUS: FLOODED.

WATER TEMPERATURE: 4°C.

AMBIENT RADIATION: NOMINAL.

Of course it was flooded. The pumps had been off for months in that sector.

To save the universe, I was going to have to put on a wetsuit, leave the heavily armored safety of my tin can, and swim a quarter-mile through a freezing, pitch-black, flooded mine shaft to manually jump-start a geothermal reactor.

It was exactly like a survival-horror video game. I was suddenly profoundly regretful of every hour I had ever spent playing Resident Evil or Subnautica. I knew exactly what happened to the guy who goes swimming in the dark infrastructure tunnels. He gets eaten by something horrible, or he drowns because he missed a quick-time event.

"Tabarnak," I said, the word lacking its usual punch. I sounded tired.

I stood up and walked over to the equipment locker. I bypassed the standard tools and opened the large, yellow bin labeled EMERGENCY EGRESS. Inside was a heavy-duty, reinforced neoprene drysuit, a twin-tank rebreather system, and a high-lumen dive helmet.

I had exactly eleven hours of battery life to keep my home alive, and 90 hours before the reality bubble crushed me entirely.

I started stripping off my flight suit. It was time to go for a swim.

CHAPTER 4 (comming soon)

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