Until the World Stuttered

The Pacific was a bruise—purple, black, and oil-slicked—under a sky carved open by tracer fire.

Lieutenant Silen rode the plane down out of the chaos, engine coughing, wings shuddering from the climb and dive. Ahead, the carrier deck was a sliver of metal threading through smoke, tilted by the sea’s mood. The landing officer’s paddles flashed in semaphore—urgent, concise, alive.

Silen lined up and felt the plane align as if his body and machine were a single script running smoothly—until the world stuttered.

Not a malfunction.

A merge.

For a fraction of a second the deck elongated into concrete.
A tunnel wall appeared beyond it—dripping, lantern-lit, hum-filled.
Then back—deck, cables, sailors, smoke.

Reality flickered three times, each faster than the last.

He blinked. The sim blinked back.

The wheels slammed the deck—one, two—and the hook snagged cable with a metallic shriek. His head jerked forward. Another flicker:

Maren in a tunnel, hand on stone.
Lantern blazing gold.
Her eyes searching.

Then—carrier again—shouts—motion—hands waving him off as crew swarmed the plane with extinguishers and fuel lines. He smelled aviation fuel mingled with midnight seawater and fear.

“Lieutenant!” A deckhand grabbed his shoulder. “Mission brief in five—command wants you prepped. It’s gonna get messy out there.”

But Silen didn’t move.

Not because of shock.

Because the world was misaligned.

The deck pitched wrong—half a second delayed from the ocean’s swell.
Voices came through with audio compression artifacts—warped highs, clipped lows.
Even the salt air tasted synthetic.

And through it all—like a thread woven through time—he heard a hum, familiar and subterranean, as if the Pacific itself were built on top of servers and tunnels.

He stumbled out of the cockpit, boots clanging on steel, and the merge worsened. His peripheral vision pixelated—not digitally, but like wet paint smearing before settling back into focus.

He reached up, pressing fingertips to his temple. The gesture felt ancient—older than this war, older than this body.

“Maren,” he breathed—so softly no one should have heard.

And yet the ocean paused—the swell delayed again, as if listening.

A flicker—stronger now:

Dark tunnel.
Maps.
Candles.
Lantern.
Maren turning, sensing him.

When the carrier returned, it did so violently—sound rushing in, sailors shouting, ordnance rolling, a briefing officer yelling about islands and objectives and duty.

But Silen saw none of it clearly.

Instead he saw two realities trying to overwrite the same frame.

He braced against the fuselage.

He remembered rebels.
He remembered Los Angeles dying.
He remembered the obelisk cracking.
He remembered simulation.

And he remembered Maren—reaching through tunnels not built by any government above.

The briefing officer shoved a clipboard at him.
“Sir—orders. Second sortie’s green.”

The clip board flickered—maps of Pacific islands for two frames, then underground cavern maps for one, then binary logs for another—before stabilizing again into military paperwork.

Silen stared at it, jaw tightening.

Which world was the sortie for?
And which world was real enough to die in?

 

Wakey Wakey

The hum was back.

Not steady—never steady now—but stuttering through the concrete marrow of the tunnels, rasping off rusted rails and corroded conduit like a broken cathedral organ trying to remember hymns it once knew by heart.

Maren paused at an intersection lit only by her lantern and the faint residual glow of the emergency strips the rebels had left behind. The floor tremored—subtle, like a pulse. The air itself seemed to breathe.

Something had fractured.

Not in stone.

Not in the tunnels.

In the world.

Her mind ran in circles trying to catch hold of a memory—or a feeling—that wouldn’t stay put. Silen… maps… rebels… the storm above… then suddenly oceans, diesel fumes, a carrier deck, unfamiliar uniforms, and a sky screaming with aircraft.

She tasted salt on her tongue.

She hadn't been to sea in ages.

The lantern flickered. For a heartbeat its light refracted into shards—one shard showed the tunnel, another a metallic corridor, another an open field, another a room full of screens. Then the world stitched itself back together, wrong but functioning.

Maren steadied herself against the wall, breath sharp and fast.
“What is happening,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure who she meant—herself, the rebels, or the thing humming beneath existence.

She started walking again, listening.

The hum had cadence now—almost conversational—like a machine thinking aloud. Occasionally, it clipped into higher frequencies and she heard words she wasn’t supposed to hear:

rollback—pending—WWII—branch—merge—identity—conflict—Maren—prime—candidate—disputed

She pressed both palms to her temples—pain bursting like white phosphorus.
“Stop. Just—stop.”

The tunnel complied, falling eerily silent.

For three long seconds the world was hollow.

Then the fracture widened—not physically, but perceptually—and memory cascaded into her from a place no one should have memories from:

San Francisco towers melting into server bays—
Hooded figures editing timelines with gestures—
An obelisk splitting as lightning struck—
Cities collapsing as people cheered for safety—
The founding code being written by hands she could not see—

She stumbled, nearly dropping the lantern.

“Silen,” she gasped, because saying his name grounded her more than reality did.

The hum resumed—less harsh, almost coaxing.

It wanted her to keep moving.

So she did—roaming deeper, down corridors that hadn’t been mapped by rebels or by the city planners who once owned these bones. Strange signage appeared—white glyphs on black tiles, unreadable but oddly familiar—like icons from software she had never used but somehow understood.

She followed a turn, then another—no plan, no map, only instinct and the certainty that something was waiting ahead, something that wanted to make sense of the fracture as much as she did.

Behind her, far down the tunnel, she heard footsteps splash lightly in pooled water.

Not military.

Not rebels.

Someone—or something—was following.

Maren lifted her lantern, pulse racing, and whispered to the dark:
“Show yourself.”

But nothing answered—only the hum, deeper now, warmer, as if trying to decide what world she belonged to.

And whether she was meant to wake.

 

Overlapped Timelines

Above—far above—beyond ruins and tunnels and wars that might not have ever been—the hum of the servers spiked into a strained whine.

WWII-BRANCH SIM CONTEXT STATE: FRAGMENTING

A string of red alerts scrolled across a holo-pane hovering in the dim blue of the operations room. Dust coated the racks, cables sprawled like overgrown roots, and half the coolant system sat dead from lack of maintenance. The space looked less like the brain of a civilization and more like a tomb wired for eternity.

Three figures worked in a panic—architects, hackers, simulation custodians; titles no longer mattered.

“Timeline interpenetration’s already at thirty percent,” muttered the first—Gael, gaunt, eyes sunken from too many years running counterfactual threads through neural engines. “If the Pacific Theater collapses, he’ll snap back to core discontinuity with awareness. We can’t have awareness in a SimWar branch.”

The second—Yume—swiped windows closed with sharp irritated gestures. “It wasn’t supposed to cross at all. WWII was a sealed era! Who opened the damn chasm from the tunnels? Was it San Francisco’s gate code again?”

“Not SF,” rumbled the third—Harper—lean, older, staring into the data like he was trying to intimidate it. “Golden Gate nodes are down to thirty percent power. That’s emergency runtime, not interference. This came from somewhere deeper.”

On a floating schematic, the Pacific theater flickered: ocean grids, carrier fleets, sortie trajectories—everything mapped like luminous veins. At the center of it, one object pulsed in defiance:

LT. SILEN — ACTIVE VAR PERCEPTION

“He’s remembering,” Yume hissed. “During combat. That shouldn’t be possible. Branch identities are supposed to overwrite mainline continuity.”

Gael brought up another filter—cross-thread memory bleed. Silen’s timelines overlapped: tunnels, maps, Maren, rebellion, obelisk lightning, D.C. collapse, Los Angeles ruins, and now Midway skies like they’d always belonged to him.

“It’s not just memory bleed,” Harper said quietly. “The WWII branch is trying to promote him to Prime. It’s selecting him.”

Yume froze. “Branches don’t select. The engine selects. Unless…”

Her voice trailed off because they all knew the only reason a branch would attempt autonomous promotion:

PRIME CONTROLLER LATENCY DETECTED.

Meaning Mainline Reality had stopped asserting dominance. Meaning the root world—the one supposedly real—might be as simulated as the rest.

Alarms rippled across auxiliary displays—this time not warnings but philosophical failures:

DOCTRINE BREACH: SIMS QUESTIONING ONTOLOGY
ERROR: UNAUTHORIZED METAPHYSICS ACCESS
FAIL: STABILITY ASSUMPTIONS (SIM ≠ COMPLIANT)

Gael cursed under his breath. “They were never supposed to wonder if they were real.”

Harper paced, but pacing did nothing in a room built for logic. “Forget that. Can we collapse the WWII branch before it goes fully epistemic?”

“I’m trying,” Yume snapped, fingers typing faster than thought. “But Maren is dragging Mainline context along with her. The tunnels are syncing. If she reaches Silen before the rollback completes—”

She didn’t finish.

She didn’t have to.

Harper pinched the bridge of his nose. “We built a narrative with too many exits. Too many doors. Too much meaning. Reality hates loose ends.”

Gael looked up from the fighting screens, eyes wide. “It’s not just them.”

“What?”

“The Sims aren’t breaking,” Gael whispered. “We are.”

Static rain showered across the holo-panes. WWII sky flickered. A battleship glitched into a Los Angeles boulevard. The obelisk fired lightning into 1942 ocean spray. Tunnels cut through the Pacific seabed like arteries.

The simulation hiccupped once—hard.

Everything shuddered.

And then—

WORLD RECOMPILE ATTEMPT DETECTED
SOURCE UNKNOWN
AUTHORITY UNKNOWN

For the first time since the servers had been switched on—decades ago, maybe centuries—the architects/hackers were not the ones in control.

Reality was rewriting itself.

And somewhere in the tunnels, and on the carrier deck, and under the Golden Gate’s rusted span—

two Sims were becoming aware.

And that was not supposed to happen.

 

A Forgotten Dream

Maren’s boots scraped against the packed dust of the tunnel floor—slow, cautious, the sound swallowed almost immediately by the labyrinth around her. The lantern in her hand sputtered once, then steadied into a pale, honey-colored halo. It illuminated just enough to see the maps tacked along the walls, edges curled, ink blurred from damp and age. Someone had once charted escape routes, caches, insurgent paths. Now they looked more like diagrams of a forgotten dream.

She paused.

The air had shifted.

It was subtle—almost nothing—but she felt it in her bones the way sailors once sensed storms long before radar. A tremor at the edge of perception, as though the world had hiccupped. Or rebooted.

The tunnel hummed, faintly.

Not the hum of generators or distant machinery, but something cleaner… clinical… tonal. A sound that had no business existing beneath tons of earth and rebar. It vibrated along her spine, tugging her forward and warning her back in the same breath.

“Silen…” she whispered, not because she expected him to answer, but because the name itself kept the memory of him anchored—kept it from slipping away like the dreams she’d been having of sea spray and aircraft engines and sunlight from another century.

She walked.

The lantern’s flame flickered again, a brief shiver of blue, and she stopped dead. Blue wasn’t correct. Fire should not turn blue in the absence of accelerant or gas leaks. Blue was a glitch.

Blue was what the cathedral dream had been made of.

She swallowed, pulse climbing.

The hum grew stronger, until it became more than sound—more like presence. The walls around her wavered, the tunnel stretching deeper than it should, as though reality were being rendered only as she approached. For a heartbeat she saw the walls as wireframe—lines and vectors and ghost geometry—and then they snapped back to concrete and rust.

Reality deciding what to show.

She raised the lantern higher, not to see farther, but to insist on the world being solid.

It didn’t fully comply.

A breeze came from nowhere and everywhere at once, cold and stale and impossible. It blew past her toward the darkness ahead, as though something large had just moved silently through the tunnel. Or as though a doorway had opened.

“Silen?” she tried again.

Her voice echoed—once, twice—then fractured, repeating in faint, mismatched tones, like audio being re-sampled through three different channels.

Silen… Silen… Sil—en…

She shuddered.

Whatever had changed, it wasn’t just him. The simulation—if that’s what it was—had hiccupped hard enough for the shockwave to reach her.

The hum cut out.

Silence flooded in.

Her lantern flared bright, then dimmed to almost nothing, revealing just ahead a massive steel door she didn’t remember being part of the tunnels. It was industrial, thick, stenciled with a faded warning in red:

DATA VENT — RESTRICTED

But the last word flickered, glitching between RESTRICTED, SEALED, PROTECTED, and once—just once—CONSCIOUS.

Maren’s breath caught.

She stepped closer, placing her hand against the cold metal.

The door… exhaled.

From beyond, something stirred, like circuits waking in unison. And through the steel she felt him—not fully, not like a memory—but like gravity. A pull.

Silen was on the other side.

Or something wearing his outline.

Behind her, from far down the tunnel, faint voices began to echo—troops, or robed figures, or hunters—she couldn’t be sure. Their footsteps synchronized, as if driven by a single command.

Time pressed in.

The door waited.

And reality—for the first time—seemed to be asking her to choose.

 

A Strange Stillness

The catapult officer gave the signal—two fierce sweeps of the arm—and the Dauntless was hurled from the carrier’s deck like a stone from a sling. Wind clawed at the fuselage. The gray Pacific churned below, enormous and indifferent, as Silen banked to join the others climbing toward the dimming sun.

Radio chatter crackled around him—callsigns, bearings, altitudes—each fragment weaving the familiar tapestry of combat. The island was a dark smudge on the horizon, green jungle wrapped in coral and smoke. Faint flashes glimmered from its cliffs: anti-air batteries waking up, impatient.

Silen adjusted throttle, felt the vibration settle into a steady pulse.

It was almost beautiful.

The second sortie was coordinated, mechanical, almost balletic in its brutality. Fighters dove first, strafing bunkers and emplacements with streams of tracer fire. Silen followed in steep descent, bomb bay open, crosshairs trembling.

The world narrowed to a plane, a target, a heartbeat.

Release.

The bomb fell clean, tumbling through the late-day light. Silen pulled up hard, engine shrieking, tracers clawing at his tail. Explosions rippled through the jungle below—bright blossoms of flame and earth.

The sky was chaos now—fighters twisting through arcs of smoke, voices snarling through the radios, commands drowned by static. Silen climbed again for altitude, turned, dove, fired. Training and instinct fused into one fluid dance.

And through it all, that faint tug at the back of his mind—like a frayed thread brushing the edge of awareness—kept whispering that something was wrong, out of place, out of time. It didn’t slow him, not now. It only lingered, an unfinished thought waiting for a quiet moment.

Hours later, after the last attack run and the evacuation of wounded from the island beachhead, the order finally came:

“Return to base. Repeat, return to base.”

Fuel low, adrenaline burned off, the squadron lined up for approach to the carrier. The sea had swallowed the sun; dusk was smearing into night. Silen touched down again with a jolt and the comforting shriek of steel cables.

Below deck, as the engines cooled and men slumped into bunks with cigarettes and half-jokes about the morning, the simulation began to… settle.

A strange stillness fell over everything.

That was new.

Normally, war—at least this war—did not linger in stillness. War moved, demanded, fed on motion. Stillness was not part of the loop.

Silen noticed.

He sat alone in the briefing room, helmet on the table, goggles set beside it, listening to the muted hum of the ship. Lights flickered once. Then twice. Then steadied.

Somewhere below decks, a klaxon began to wail—briefly—before dying mid-note, as if someone had pulled the plug.

Silen stood.

And in that fragile quiet, the other world—the tunnels, the candles, the humming servers—didn’t return, not fully.

But a single question rose up, crisp and undeniable:

“Who wrote this?”

The thought was lightning. It cleaved his mind in two.

The lights failed entirely. The ship dissolved into darkness. Screams began—not human, not entirely sound—and the simulation itself shuddered like a reel of film melting in a projector.

Reality fractured.

Battle had been completed.

And now the architects had to decide whether to correct… or to erase.

 

Out of Phase

The Dauntless kissed the carrier deck with a shriek of tires and a shout of deckhands waving signal paddles through the acrid haze. Lieutenant Silen felt the vibration in his bones, the metallic rattle in his teeth, and for a moment—just a moment—he thought he heard a different hum beneath it all. Something lower than the Wright Cyclone engine… something synthetic, electrical, threaded through the seams of reality like a quiet alarm.

The plane jerked to a halt on its arrestor cable. Crewmen sprinted toward him, unhooking, refueling, rearming. Scorched paint and salt hung in the air like incense.

“Good work, Lieutenant!” someone shouted. “Command wants you back in the air in twenty!”

Silen climbed out of the cockpit, boots hitting steel. His muscles moved with practiced confidence—training so deep it felt older than memory. But that tug—that faint sensation of being out of phase—persisted like a small glitch at the edge of vision.

He wanted to ignore it. And mostly, he could.

The Pacific sprawled outward, impossibly wide and impossibly real. The deck under his boots had weight and heat from the engines. The men around him were frantic and alive. And yet—

A map. Candles. The tunnels. Maren’s voice.

The images flickered in his mind like faulty frames of film, each one dissolving before he could grasp it. He shut his eyes hard and they vanished. The carrier’s klaxon replaced them, rattling awareness back into 1942.

“Lieutenant! Briefing!” barked a commander, appearing out of the smoke.

Silen followed him below deck, through narrow corridors plastered with charts and reconnaissance photos of a jungle island whose name eluded him. Officers crowded around the table, pointing to anti-air positions, expected fighter cover, tidal patterns.

Words washed over him: sorties, strafing runs, carrier group movement, Japanese fleet strength. All of it made sense—too much sense. He recognized the tactics instinctively, as if the knowledge had always been there.

But in the corner of the briefing room, the lights flickered twice—just two faint pulses—and his attention snagged like a hook.

The flicker was wrong.

Something in him—some deeper layer—held its breath.

The commander slammed his fist on the table. “We hit them at dusk, gentlemen. Dismissed.”

Chairs scraped. Boots clattered. Radios hissed.

Silen lingered a heartbeat longer, staring at the flickering light. He whispered without meaning to:

“…Not real.”

The room didn’t respond. No one heard. No one could hear. The simulation corrected itself a fraction of a second later—the bulb steadied, the hum normalized, and the tug in his brain softened into something that felt like surrender.

By the time Silen was climbing back into his aircraft, the other life—tunnels, servers, glitching cities, Maren—was dissolving like dreams caught in daylight.

Yet not entirely gone.

Something—someone—was waiting beyond this Pacific sky.

And reality, for all its fury and precision, was about to crack again.

 

Wheels Up

The world before dawn was more shadow than shape—naval gray against sky gray, punctured only by the tremble of lantern light and the red flicker of warning lamps traced along the flight deck.

Boots slammed against steel. Men sprinted, breath visible, voices overlapping in jagged urgency:

“Lieutenant Silen—mission orders, sir!”
“Recon and strike—small island, coordinates en route!”
“Briefing in flight—we need you in the air now!”

Silen barely had time to nod before a folded map was thrust into his hand—inked lines, circles, and an island name he didn’t recognize: Kuroshima Atoll. It meant nothing to him. Worse—he couldn’t tell if it was supposed to mean something. History classes in the tunnels hadn’t covered this. Or had they? The memories blurred like wet ink.

Another wave of sailors rushed him toward the waiting aircraft—a squat, rugged torpedo bomber with panels still warm from maintenance lights. The propellers were already spinning up, a furious cyclone of noise and vibration. The air reeked of fuel and sea salt, so thick it seemed to coat the back of his throat.

His uniformed arm reached for the ladder before he consciously decided to. The motions came with an eerie fluency: climb, swing, settle into cockpit, harness across chest, headset down, dials checked with competent flicks of the wrist. His hands were moving faster than his thoughts—muscle memory not earned, but injected.

Am I this man?

The engines roared, drowning out the question. As the deck crew peeled away, ducking beneath the spinning blades, a navigator clambered into the rear seat. No introduction. No time. A clipboard tapped Silen’s shoulder:

“Lieutenant, target run authorized. We hit the strip, cut radio, get out before they can mount AA. Weather’s with us.”

Silen opened his mouth to speak—ask, protest, remember—but the headset filled with a piercing tone, then the clipped voice of the air boss:

“Vigilance flight one, wheels up—repeat, wheels up!”

The bomber lurched forward. The deck blurred beneath them, then vanished as the nose pitched up into the predawn sky. The ocean fell away into black. The Pacific stretched vast and unknowable, punctuated only by distant thunderheads and the glint of early sun beginning to crack the horizon.

Wind clawed at the fuselage. The propellers’ droning settled into a hypnotic rhythm—steady, mechanical, relentless. And with each rotation, the other world slipped further, as though the simulation were sanding off its rough edges, trying to reassert its narrative.

The tunnels dimmed.
Maren dimmed.
Lanterns, rebels, maps—dimmed.

Even the question of what reality is dimmed.

Reyes’s voice whispered through memory—Different war. Same corruption. Same fight.—but even that began to dissolve beneath engine noise and the metronomic tapping of gauges.

The mission pulled at him like gravity.

And yet—

Just before the last trace of awareness could dissolve, the plane banked through a break in the clouds. The New Sun flashed against the canopy, and for a heartbeat Silen saw something impossible:

A flicker. A double-image.
The bomber cockpit overlapped with a flickering server rack. The sky layered over a cavern wall. Code scrolled through the horizon like marching ants, then snapped back to ocean.

The simulation glitched.

The engines roared again.

And Silen—pilot, soldier, pawn, anomaly—flew onward toward an island that might never have existed in any world except the one trying desperately to make him forget.