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?