XCIII
The jumpsuit felt strange on my skin. The clothing was stiff, utilitarian, a far cry from the silver mini dress and white boots I'd worn just hours ago. It wasn't ugly, but it wasn't a style I was accustomed to. It was a uniform meant to erase individuality, to make everyone blend into the same muted silhouette. My whole life was individuality. This entire uniform rubbed me the wrong way.
I tied my hair into a ponytail, the elastic snapping lightly against my fingers. The hat‑man's cat form stayed rigid in my arms, every muscle tense as we were led down the halls. He wasn't afraid, he was assessing. Watching. His golden eyes flicked from soldier to soldier, tail twitching with irritation.
He'd never seen so many people who moved the same way.
Who dressed the same and breathed in sync like a single organism.
It was uncanny.
The escort led us down a stark hallway, the fluorescent lights humming overhead. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and machine oil. Every footstep echoed.
The room they brought us to was medium‑sized, shaped like a lecture hall with tiered seating, overhead projector humming, and a long table at the front. It looked like a place where people learned how to handle dangerous things.
Or how to interrogate them.
The soldiers filed in quietly, taking seats in the front rows. Their movements were synchronized, practiced, almost ritualistic. The captain stood at the head of the room, white hair catching the projector's glow like frost under a spotlight.
He didn't look like a fairy aristocrat. He looked like someone who had spent his life dealing with threats no one talked about.
A few more uniformed soldiers entered, their boots thudding softly against the floor. They carried tablets, folders, strange equipment I didn't recognize. No insignias. No names. No identifying marks.
The hat‑man pressed closer to my chest, fur bristling.
"Darling," he whispered, voice barely audible, "this is not a place for kittens."
You sat where they indicated a single chair near the front, separated from the soldiers by a few feet of empty space. Not restrained. Not trapped. But isolated.
The captain stepped forward, hands clasped behind his back.
"Thank you for cooperating," he said, voice steady. "We're going to begin shortly."
The projector flickered, casting geometric patterns across the wall, the same ones you'd seen on his phone. Pulsing. Shifting. Alive.
Every soldier watched. Just intensely, professionally focused.
Occasionally, they'd look at me. Like I was the anomaly they'd been trained their whole lives to understand. Or contain.
The hat‑man's claws flexed against your jumpsuit.
And I realized: This was organized, this was official, and very human.
They had been preparing for it long before I ever knew they existed.
The slide snapped onto the screen with a mechanical click, flooding the room with cold white light.
"This is extra-terrestrial anomaly one‑zero‑zero alpha," the captain said, voice steady, formal. "Designation: Space Worm."
A glowing image filled the projection wall. The entity was long, sinuous, almost serpentine, its body segmented like something that had never evolved on Earth. It drifted in the image as if suspended in liquid or vacuum, its surface shimmering with faint bioluminescent pulses.
And the moment I saw it a jolt went through me. I'd recognized this thing.
Deep in my chest, something tightened.
My breath hitched, reliving the trauma of that flight.
My fingers curled instinctively around the hat‑man's fur.
He stiffened, ears flattening, tail puffing in alarm.
The captain watched your reaction closely, too closely.
He wasn't looking at the slide.
He was looking at me.
The soldiers shifted in their seats, murmuring quietly, tablets lighting up as they recorded readings. The geometric patterns on the projector's secondary screen pulsed faster, syncing with something inside you.
The captain continued, voice calm but edged with tension.
"This organism was first detected three years ago," he said. "It moves through non‑Euclidean space. It appears during dimensional disturbances. And it reacts to… certain individuals."
His eyes flicked to the hat‑man, then back to you.
"We believe you've encountered it."
The hat‑man growled with low, vibrating sound that made the nearest soldier flinch.
My heart thudded once, hard.
Because the jolt of familiarity wasn't fading.
The image on the screen wasn't just familiar.
It felt like something that had seen me.
Something that had brushed against my reality.
The projector clicked again, and the next slide hit you like a physical blow.
"A small version of this entity disturbed Earth‑space," the captain said, voice steady but heavy, "and attacked and consumed Flight No. 1107 from Mallorca to mainland Spain."
The room didn't react. No gasps. No murmurs.
Just soldiers sitting in perfect stillness, watching.
But inside me? Something lurched.
The hat‑man's cat form went rigid in your arms, fur standing straight up, eyes glowing like molten gold. He didn't hiss. He didn't growl. He just stared at the slide with a look of ancient, murderous recognition.
The image on the screen pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.
The captain continued, unaware of the storm inside you.
"This organism created a localized dimensional rupture. The aircraft entered the disturbance and did not re‑emerge. No debris. No signal. No survivors detected."
The captain's eyes flicked to you, reading every micro‑expression.
"We believe the rupture was not random," he said. "We believe it was triggered."
The soldiers shifted slightly, tension rippling through the room.
"And we believe," he added quietly, "that you were involved."
The hat‑man let out a low, vibrating growl. Not loud, but enough to make the nearest soldier's hand twitch toward his holster.
The captain raised a calming hand.
"No one is accusing you," he said. "But the readings around you match the signature of the anomaly. Exactly."
The slide changed again, geometric patterns, pulsing in sync with a heartbeat.
A heartbeat that matched my heartbeat.
The captain stepped closer, voice softening.
"We're not here to punish you," he said. "We're here because Flight 1107 wasn't the first disturbance."
He paused.
"And it won't be the last."
The soldiers watched me with unnerving stillness, their faces unreadable behind identical uniforms and identical posture. The captain's white hair glowed under the projector, his expression calm but sharpened with interest.
He wasn't guessing. He wasn't speculating. He knew.
"You were on that flight," he said quietly. "Weren't you."
Just a statement of fact waiting for confirmation.
This was the human side of the event. They had been tracking anomalies.
The instruments had noticed the dimensional rupture, and they had recorded the plane vanish without a trace.
And now they were looking at me, the only person who had ever come back.
The captain stepped closer, voice low.
"We need to understand what happened on that aircraft."
The hat‑man's eyes glowed like molten gold.
To them I wasn't just a survivor. I was the missing piece in a puzzle the human world had been trying to solve for years.
And they weren't going to let me walk away until they had answers.
The words came out of you before you could stop them — raw, honest, impossible.
"I… I survived, sir. I was transported. It ate me, but it spat me out in a different time. I was in stone‑age times, probably in Europe."
The room didn't erupt. They listened.
"Johnson, keep a recording." The captain demanded. Johnson pressed a button on his laptop.
Every soldier in the front row leaned forward just slightly, the kind of movement trained into people who are used to hearing unbelievable things and treating them as data points, not delusions.
The captain's expression didn't change but something in his posture did. A subtle shift. A tightening. A recognition.
He had expected something strange.
He had not expected time displacement.
The projector hummed behind him, the image of the space worm pulsing faintly, as if reacting to your words.
The hat‑man's cat form pressed against my chest, trembling with a low, furious energy. He wasn't afraid, he was remembering. His claws flexed against your jumpsuit, anchoring himself to me.
The captain stepped closer, voice low, steady.
"Miss… you're telling me you experienced temporal displacement."
"Yes." I replied.
He nodded once, slowly and deliberately, and then turned to the soldiers.
"Got that?"
Tablets lit up instantly. Fingers flew across screens. Johnson typed quickly on his laptop. The geometric patterns on the secondary projector accelerated, syncing with my pulse again.
The captain looked back at me.
"Describe it," he said. "Everything you remember."
His tone wasn't interrogative.
It wasn't hostile.
It was clinical, but gentle, like a doctor asking a patient to recount trauma without pushing too hard.
I felt the memory rise. The horror and the tearing sensation, the impossible light, the crying, the way the world had folded around me like a mouth closing. The cold. The silence. The sudden crash into a world of stone tools, primitive fires, and humans who looked at you like a ghost.
The captain watched your face carefully.
"You weren't just transported," he said quietly. "You were selected."
The hat‑man growled a low, vibrating sound that made the nearest soldier stiffen.
The captain didn't flinch.
"That organism doesn't behave randomly," he continued. "It doesn't swallow entire planes unless something inside them draws its attention."
His eyes locked onto mine.
"And you survived what no one else has. You came back. You moved through dimensional space and re‑entered our timeline."
He paused. "That makes you the first documented human to return from a space‑worm event."
The room went still.
The memories didn't just return, they hit me, rushing up from the deepest part of my mind like a tide breaking through a dam.
Mammoths, huge, shaggy, impossibly alive. Their breath steaming in the glacial air, their tusks curved like crescent moons. I remembered the way the ground shook when they moved, the way their calls echoed across the ice fields like ancient horns.
Then the hunters. Long lean bodies, strong, wrapped in furs, their faces wind‑burned and determined. They moved with a purpose that modern humans had forgotten, every step deliberate, every gesture meaningful. They had looked at you with suspicion at first… then awe.
The shaman, I remembered her most vividly. The way they painted red ochre symbols on stones, the way she touched my forehead with ochre‑stained fingers, the way her eyes seemed to see through everything. She had known I wasn't from her world. She had known something had torn me out of my time and dropped me into his.
The horses — smaller, stockier, wild. Their manes tangled, their hooves sharp against the frozen earth. You remembered riding one, clinging to its back as it galloped across a plain of ice and snow, your breath burning in your lungs.
And him. The sweet man with the startling blue eyes, His eyes so bright they seemed impossible in that world of stone and ice. He had walked beside me, shared food with me, protected me from the cold. He had spoken in a language you didn't know, but somehow you understood him anyway, called me his Gal. His presence had been a lifeline in a world that wasn't mine.
The tribes, so many kinds of people, their hunger, their fear, their resilience.
The glacial ice, bitter and cold, endless, towering, ancient.
It all came back in a rush so strong you had to grip the edge of your chair to steady yourself. The hat‑man pressed against you, sensing the flood of memory, his fur bristling with protective tension.
The captain watched you with a stillness that wasn't cold, it was focused.
He didn't interrupt. Because this wasn't just a story to him.
It was data. Evidence. Proof.
I didn't just a survive Flight 1107.
I wasn't just someone who slipped through a dimensional tear. I had lived in a different time. I had walked with people who had no concept of planes or cities or governments.
Ihad returned with memories no human should have. And now, in this stark lecture room full of soldiers and glowing slides, I realized something:
I wasn't the anomaly because I survived. I was the anomaly because I came back changed, surviving an entity that could consume a star, carrying pieces of a world that shouldn't exist anymore.