Static. Just static — that thin, persistent crackle of an open line holding its breath.
Tham Ming sat on the walkway bench, spine rigid. The smell of rain mixed with wet earth pressed in through the open air, heavy enough to feel in his chest.
"...What do you want?" The impatience in his voice came out cleanly, without effort.
He glanced at his watch without thinking.
January 26, 2026. 1:06 PM.
His pupils contracted.
Thirteen hours.
In Massachusetts, it would be January 25th right now. 12:06 AM.
The times lined up.
That makes no sense. I wasn't running the experiment. I was just monitoring.
He scrubbed both hands hard down his face, trying to push back the pressure building behind his eyes. It didn't work. The harder he pushed, the worse it got — like something skittering just under the surface of his skull, restless, with nowhere to go.
Then a thought surfaced, and he went with it.
"There's a blizzard hitting you right now. Isn't there."
A beat of silence from the Boston end.
"The fact that you asked me that," Norde said — and underneath the practiced smoothness, something was trembling, just barely contained — "tells me you never actually let it go." Another pause. "Ming. Do me a favor. Go check whatever data you just collected."
"I don't need to." Tham Ming cut him off flat. "It's already on my screen. Perfect coincident curves. Missing data. Identical to that winter night."
Both ends of the line went quiet at the same time.
Just the crackle of twelve thousand miles of cable between them, carrying nothing.
Not a coincidence.
They'd spent years chasing this pattern. And then reality had cut them off at the knees.
"Ming." When Norde spoke again, something had shifted — the lightness was gone, replaced by something quieter and more direct. "Do you want to pick up where we left off? Come back. We work together again."
The fingers wrapped around the phone pressed in.
Of course he wanted to. He'd never stopped wanting to.
But the answer came out of him before he'd finished the thought. "No. If I go back to the States, we end up right back where we were."
A long silence.
"Surveilled. Monitored. Having to file a report just to breathe."
He hung up.
Beep.
The rain kept falling.
He closed the laptop. Stood there. Something that had been compressed inside him for three years was pushing outward again, and he couldn't quite get it back into its container.
"Damn it," he said quietly.
The old days came back uninvited.
Cage inside a cage. Maybe there was never any real escape — just one form of confinement trading places with another.
After the night of January 25th, 2014 — after they'd confirmed, between themselves, that it hadn't been a hallucination — they fell into something that didn't have a clean name for it. Something past obsession, into a territory closer to pathology.
The lab ran twenty-four hours.
Formulas went up on the whiteboard and came back down and went up again. Coffee, pot after pot. Pizza boxes stacking up in the corner like they always did.
They pulled every experiment log they had and took it apart completely — resequencing, renumbering, cross-referencing everything. Once is a chance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern. They weren't chasing the result anymore. They were chasing the mechanism. Why had the timestamp been overwritten? Why was there only blank space where the data before the overwrite should have been?
First theory: equipment. They swapped out the samplers, the power supplies, the shielding layers. They rewired the entire underground lab's electrical system from scratch.
The data stayed cold. Unchanged.
Second theory: external interference. They sent the experimental data to multiple institutions for independent cross-validation, broke the timestamp module into isolated components, added three separate redundant recording programs to capture data across independent dimensions.
The data might as well have been laughing at them.
You can't find me.
What made it most unbearable wasn't the instability. The anomaly wasn't unstable — it was pristine. It appeared in perfect form, and then disappeared without disturbing a single surrounding data point, like a ghost from some adjacent layer that existed in parallel without touching anything in this one.
And the thing that actually drove them over the edge: across all the anomalous events they'd documented, there was no consistent trigger. No pattern. Nothing to lock a clock to.
Tham Ming remembered that period clearly.
Every morning, the first thing he did was open the logs and scan for ERROR and WARNING flags — and the blank spaces that sometimes followed them. There were nights he jolted awake at 3 AM, first instinct not water but: get back to the lab, check whether the server left anything new. They started living like gamblers. Waiting for the next sync.
Once, Norde planted himself on the floor in front of the monitoring screen and didn't move for sixteen consecutive hours. At the end of it he had a wrecked back, red-rimmed eyes, and nothing to show for any of it. He picked up the keyboard and put it straight into the wall.
"Why nothing?!"
"Two events — and it still looks completely random?!"
"If this thing exists, there has to be a trigger condition — there has to be!"
Nobody in the lab said a word, because everyone could see he was close to the edge.
Tham Ming was in the same place. He was just better at keeping the lid on it.
Then, one day.
Running on roughly three hours of sleep across the last several days, he was going through old backup logs — routine, mechanical, the kind of task you give your hands when your brain is too worn down to do anything that requires actual thought — when he stopped.
Two auto-archived error files on the screen, sitting there quietly:
6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAo2iETb5d5
6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡySVWjYC3BA
TS-LOG_20130125_QCOR_ERR.bak TS-LOG_20140125_QCOR_ERR.bak
He'd almost clicked past them. But something made him open the first one.
And his hand stopped.
Time.
For the first time, he was actually looking at time — not runtime, not experiment duration.
The date.
6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMYTsNaNSR7
6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡR1JMNCDfUJ
2013-01-25 00:05:01.060
His pupils shrank.
He pulled up the second file.
6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFYIqePkEwZ
6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡyrKVG89DGZ
2014-01-25 00:05:01.061
His breathing went ragged. His body was shaking before he could tell it to stop. The fingers on the mouse had gone white at the knuckles.
Every anomalous event. Every single one.
Same date. Same time. 00:05.
Zero seconds of deviation — as if it had been calculated. As if something had been set.
That was the moment Tham Ming felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Boston winter.
It was the feeling of something — deep inside time, below the level of events — waking up. On schedule.
The digital clock on the wall kept ticking.
December 25, 2014. 00:43.
Nobody spoke.
He raised his head slowly.
Thirty-one days until the next sync.
The rain was still coming down.
He shoved his phone into his pocket, jammed the laptop into his backpack, grabbed his briefcase, held it over his head, and ran.
The rain soaked through his clothes in seconds. He barely noticed — just kept moving, straight toward the lab, mind already three steps ahead of his body, the implications assembling themselves faster than he could consciously track.
Had they actually managed to—
He looked ridiculous. He knew that.
But there was something moving through him underneath all of it — something that had been dormant long enough that he'd almost forgotten what it felt like.
A heat that had nothing to do with the weather.
Students who hadn't left campus yet stopped and stared.
"What happened to the professor? Did he forget to bring in his laundry?"
Laughing, they ran into the rain after him — chasing each other through it, the way people do when they're still young enough that getting soaked feels like freedom rather than a nuisance. Maybe for the last time, that specific kind of chaos.
Compared to the lab they'd run in Massachusetts — the kind of budget where equipment cost was an afterthought — Tham Ming's current space at USM was spare to the point of austerity. The university provided standard maintenance and nothing more. No extra furniture, no graduate students orbiting the workbenches. One modest blackboard on the far wall, its permanent header reading: Interference-Driven Evolution of Topological Phases.
In the eyes of the USM physics department, Tham Ming was an anomaly. Every other professor was aggressively scaling up — squeezing PhD students for paper output, collecting graduate advisees like research currency. Tham Ming turned them all away. The problem he was working on was one he hadn't cracked himself, which meant attaching students to it would only waste their time, not advance theirs. So he worked alone, which also meant he calibrated his own instruments and swept his own floor.
He pushed through the lab door.
The AC held its usual cold. His wet clothes clung to his skin and the chill went straight through.
He dropped the briefcase on the desk, put the backpack on the chair, walked to the sink and ran the tap. He splashed water over his face and worked it into his skin — rain mixing with tap water, all of it draining away together. The mirror showed him exactly what he expected: someone who had just sprinted through a tropical downpour.
He stared at his reflection for a couple of seconds. Changed out of the soaked shirt. Sat back down at the computer.
He pulled up the data from that afternoon alongside the warning log and started working through them.
Standard practice for him. Except today there was nothing standard about the quality of attention he was bringing to it. He fell into the work fast — deep enough that time stopped having meaningful shape around him.
"Surface readings — no different from normal." He scrolled to the 1 PM data, talking to no one, the way he always did when working alone for too long. Silence had a way of swallowing the thread of an idea if you didn't keep it tethered to sound. "Same forced recalibration..."
"One of the conditions for coming back to Malaysia was that I couldn't continue any research related to that line of work..."
"And I've held to that. For three years I've held to that. So why — without running that experiment — am I collecting this data?"
He moved the cursor across the coherence experiment readings. "Right here in this dataset — comparing against the wavelengths from a few minutes earlier — where there should be negative phase feedback, there's a positive feedback instead. A double hump, like a camel's back." He said it quietly, not quite believing it. "That's not possible under standard wave mechanics. This level of constructive interference shouldn't—" He stopped. "Why is the instrument showing an overload?"
One hand went into his hair. The other dropped the mouse and reached for paper and a pencil, and started moving fast.
...
"In that case, there should be at least one qubit in my ion trap that hasn't interacted with any microparticles." He kept talking, the logic assembling itself as it came out. "And that qubit has a very high probability of originating from Norde's lab. Otherwise he wouldn't have called."
A pause.
"That bastard. All that misdirection on the phone. He really went to the trouble."
He set the pencil down. Pressed his fingers against the corners of his eyes. Stretched, long and slow, until something in his back released.
"This level of constructive interference has no business existing inside the Standard Model. Unless the interference isn't occurring in three-dimensional space. Unless it's occurring in—"
"Or," said a voice from just outside the workstation, carrying the specific energy of someone who has been sitting quietly for a while and has found exactly the right moment to surface, "you're just hungry."
Tham Ming's head came up fast.
A girl was sitting in the chair tucked against the far corner — half-hidden by the stacks of draft pages spread across the adjacent desk. She was holding a plastic carry bag. Inside: two bowls of Penang laksa, still steaming. The smell hit the room immediately and expanded without asking permission — fermented shrimp paste, lemongrass, the dense, layered signature of the dish forcing itself into every cubic inch of the climate-controlled, twenty-four-degree air that had belonged, until thirty seconds ago, to quiet and instruments.
Joey.
The one student in this year's graduating cohort who, after having her thesis outline taken apart by Tham Ming with the kind of systematic thoroughness that typically silenced people for a week, had come back the next day smiling, ready to argue about it.
ns216.73.216.23da2
and then Add to home screen.