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.