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.