The Crossing
The machine did not hum so much as breathe. A low vibration pressed into Anne McKeever’s bones as she stepped onto the platform in the Belfast Insta-Travel Terminal. White-coated technicians murmured to one another from behind glass, their faces pale in the sterile light.
“Just a routine hop,” one of them reassured her as though she were a nervous flyer. “You’ll be in Edinburgh before your tea’s cold.”
Anne smoothed her skirt, adjusted the silver cross at her neck, and nodded. She had rehearsed her speech all week, pacing her small manse until the floor creaked. The General Assembly would hear her plea this afternoon: that the Church would open its doors to LGBTQ ministers and laity more than the crack that was there now, not just in name but in actuality.
She whispered a prayer, half to God, half to herself, and the air filled with blinding white.
Douglas H. Kessler disliked the Transfer. He had seen the schematics, read the classified reports of “rare entanglement anomalies,” and distrusted anything he couldn’t shoot or take to bits, but protocol was protocol, and Alligator Alcatraz III would not inspect itself.
He barked into his earpiece, “I’ll be wheels-down in Louisiana in five minutes. Have the warden and the press ready.”
The technician asked him to remove his sidearm. Kessler scowled but complied, handing it over as though it were his own right hand. The Transfer chamber sealed around him, sterile white light swallowing the edges of the world.
“Make it quick,” he growled.
Anne expected a brief blankness, like blinking. Instead, she fell into nothing.
No sound. No body. Not even the comfort of darkness. Only an absence so total it pressed against her mind like deep water.
And then, someone else. A presence, tangled with hers. Hot, acrid, angry. A man’s voice thundered through her thoughts:
What the hell is this?
Anne gasped. Or thought she gasped, she had no lungs. Only the echo of her own mind, and now his, colliding.
Who are you? she whispered inside the void.
No answer. Only the roar of fury and confusion, and then
Collapse.
Light. Heat. The echo of polished shoes on marble. Anne stumbled, disoriented, into a cavernous hall she had never seen before.
Dozens of men in suits snapped to attention. Cameras clicked. The air smelled of varnish and aftershave.
“Mr. Secretary,” someone said crisply, “welcome to Louisiana.”
Anne looked down at her hands. Broad. Hairy-knuckled. Not hers. Her reflection in a glass panel glared back: a heavyset man with iron-gray hair and a jaw like stone.
She clutched her chest. No cross. No familiar clerical collar. A dark suit clung to her frame like armour.
She tried to speak, but the voice that came out was deep, American, authoritative. “I…” She stopped herself, stunned by the sound.
“Sir?” one of the aides prompted. “We’re late for the Press Conference.”
Anne swallowed hard. Oh God… what have they done to me?
Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Reverend Anne McKeever was announced to warm applause.
Except it wasn’t Anne.
Kessler blinked under the high arches of a Presbyterian Assembly Hall, his vision adjusting to the warm glow of stained glass and oak. Hundreds of delegates waited, expectant. A microphone gleamed before him.
On the screen behind: Beloved in Christ: Welcoming All.
He tried to curse, but the voice that left his throat was soft, lilting, unmistakably Northern Irish. A murmur of affection rose from the audience.
“Reverend McKeever,” the moderator smiled, “we are so very honoured to hear your words today.”
Kessler’s fists clenched around the edges of the lectern. He wanted his sidearm. He wanted his security detail. He wanted to wake up.
Instead, he saw the notes laid neatly before him in delicate handwriting. His, no, her speech.
The crowd leaned forward, waiting for their champion of inclusion to speak.
Kessler swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed in a throat not his own.
“This… this is a mistake,” he began, but the words came out in her voice, clear, ringing, filled with a gentleness he had never heard in himself.
The crowd mistook his hesitation for emotion. Applause swelled, warm and relentless.
Kessler’s stomach lurched. He wasn’t in America anymore. He was trapped in the body of some churchwoman. And judging by the applause, he was expected to lead them.
Anne was hustled down corridors lined with flags she only half-recognized. Secretaries thrust folders into her hands, aides whispered about a prison inspection, and someone pressed a glass of water into her fingers.
She stared at her reflection in the glass: the Homeland Secretary, America’s hawk, glaring back at her.
Her mind reeled. She was meant to speak of love and welcome this afternoon, to stand before her brothers and sisters and plead for compassion. Now she was in the skin of the man who had built camps to cage the very people she meant to defend.
And somewhere, she realized with a cold weight in her chest, that man was standing where she ought to be.
Strangers in Their Skins
Louisiana
Anne McKeever sat at the head of a long-polished table. Around her, generals, aides, and advisors snapped open files stamped CLASSIFIED. She barely dared to breathe.
A young aide leaned close and murmured, “Mr. Secretary, today’s agenda: inspection of Alligator Alcatraz III. The detainee situation has… escalated.”
Anne’s stomach dropped. Detainee?
The first general cleared his throat. “We’ve had riots, sir. Two deaths. The press is circling. We need a firm statement from you before we move.”
All eyes turned to her. Faces sharp, expectant , men accustomed to being obeyed.
Anne’s mind raced. What would this man say? What would God have her say?
She placed her borrowed hands flat on the table to stop them from trembling. “Gentlemen…” Her voice was deep, resonant, utterly alien to her own ears. “We’ll… review the facts carefully before we commit to further action. I don’t want another death on our conscience.”
A ripple of murmurs swept the room. Displeasure? Surprise? She couldn’t tell.
One aide leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Sir, with respect, that’s not the message we usually send.”
Anne forced a hard glare. “Then maybe it’s time the message changed.”
A general shifted in his chair, eyes narrowing slightly, a subtle crack in the armour of the room’s composure. Pens froze above paper. Someone coughed into his hand.
Anne’s heart hammered. She had no idea what game she was playing , only that it was deadly.
Edinburgh
Reverend Anne McKeever, or rather, Douglas Kessler trapped inside her skin, clutched the lectern as though it might shield him from the expectant crowd.
He squinted at the handwritten notes. Flowery words about compassion, unity, Christ’s love. Bile rose in his throat.
I can’t say this garbage.
Hundreds of faces leaned forward, waiting. Some smiled, some nodded, some wiped at eyes already brimming with hope.
Kessler’s hands shook. The pen strokes blurred. He opened his mouth, intending to sneer, but what came out was her voice: warm, lilting, Irish.
“My brothers and sisters…” he began, stiffly. The crowd erupted in gentle applause.
A bead of sweat trickled down his temple.
“I… I stand before you today to…” He clenched his fists, searching desperately for an escape. “…to remind you of the dangers facing our faith.”
A confused rustle swept the Assembly. This wasn’t what they expected.
Kessler smirked. Good. He would not let himself be used as a puppet for these… degenerates.
But then a young minister in the front row caught his eye barely thirty, fragile-looking, yet steady and hopeful.
Kessler faltered. The words he had prepared, words of scorn, dried in his mouth. He saw not weakness but hunger. Hunger for acceptance. For safety.
The hall waited.
Against his will, Anne’s voice carried out into the chamber: “To remind you… of the dangers… of turning away those Christ himself embraced.”
A wave of relief rippled through the crowd. The applause was thunderous, suffocating.
Kessler gripped the lectern so hard his knuckles whitened. He realized with a shiver that he wasn’t fully in control, her conviction, her faith, her very lungs seemed to insist on speaking through him.
Louisiana
Anne left the briefing with her heart hammering. Aides clustered around her like hawks, murmuring about flights, security, and optics.
She barely heard them.
Alligator Alcatraz III.
Detainees.
Deaths.
She now understood whose skin she wore: the man who built cages for the very people she fought to defend. And God, in His strange providence, had put her here.
The question burned in her mind as the motorcade carried her toward the airfield and then into the marshlands beyond Baton Rouge:
Was this punishment… or calling?
Edinburgh
Kessler had never been a man of quick improvisation. His instinct, when cornered, was to retreat, preferably with dignity intact. But at that moment, under the glare of the lights and the pressure of too many expectant eyes, “dignity” was elusive. He opted for the oldest trick in the book, feigned collapse. Unfortunately, instead of evoking tragic nobility, it came off with all the delicacy of a Victorian maiden catching sight of a naked banana.
The audience gasped. Two nearby reverends, both looking like they had been waiting for precisely this sort of scandal, hurried forward to bear him away. Kessler allowed himself to be half-dragged, half-wafted offstage, leaving behind a faint trail of misplaced pomposity.
Louisiana
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Anne was escorted to the new internment camp and led up to a makeshift stage in front of the main gate, on which someone had placed a handmade sign “Welcome, We will beat the Queer out of you”. Infront of her were the invited press, a quick scan showed that the audience was clearly swung to the right, Fox, Newsmax, OANN even the bombastic fool from GBNews was in attendance. She paused looking out at the expectant faces and felt the weight of her moment pressing down like a hot southern noon. If ever there was a time to summon Elijah, this was it. She squared her shoulders, girded her loins in spirit if not in linen, and stepped up to the microphone.
“I am closing the Alligator Alcatraz III,” she declared, voice steady and ringing, “because I have found a better, more Christian, way.”
For a breathless moment, the auditorium held its silence. The words seemed to hang in the humid air, shocking as a thunderclap, fragile as glass. Then, like an earthquake breaking through the earth’s crust, the questions erupted.
“What do you mean?”
“Is this permanent?”
“What about the queers?”
“Have you lost your mind?”
The noise swelled into a wall of sound. Cameras clicked. Pens scratched. Even the janitor paused mid-sweep to listen. Anne, resolute, did not flinch. Instead, she turned crisply on her heel and marched off the stage, her departure as sharp as the crack of a whip.
The storm she had unleashed was only just beginning.
Edinburgh
Backstage, Kessler came to with suspicious swiftness for a man who had “fainted.” The reverends, fussing over him with damp handkerchiefs and murmured prayers, seemed satisfied he was in no mortal peril.
“Ah, yes, thank you, brethren,” he said weakly, dabbing at his brow with the dramatic air of a man recovering from a duel at dawn. “A temporary malady. The spirit was willing, but the flesh, alas!”
They nodded, though one raised an eyebrow. Kessler sat upright, the gears already turning in his head. His escape had bought him minutes, no more. He would need a new tactic, something grander than swooning. Something that would seize control of the narrative before Anne’s reckless proclamation tore the whole edifice down.
Louisiana
Out front, the audience was still buzzing like a hornet’s nest that had been kicked. Anne’s declaration had split the hall. Some cheered faintly, sensing revolution. Others shouted questions about refunds, jobs, alligators, sodomy and souls. The press surged forward like a tide, notebooks and cameras bobbing.
Anne, though already halfway down the hall, could feel their eyes on her back. Each footstep echoed with the enormity of what she had just set in motion. There’s no going back now, she thought, heart pounding. The loins are girded, the Rubicon crossed, the alligators… well, we’ll see.
Edinburgh
Meanwhile, Kessler pressed his palms together, whispering, “Think, man, think.” He knew one thing for certain: Anne’s sudden righteousness threatened everything. His pride, his project, his delicate scaffolding of influence. If she was woke and leftie, then he would need to become something far more subtle, something serpentine.
And so, with a show of restored vitality, Kessler rose from his chair, adjusted his tie, and announced, “Gentlemen, I believe I must return to the fray.”
The reverends exchanged wary glances, but before they could stop him, Kessler was already striding toward the wings, face arranged into an expression of martyrdom touched with revelation.
He had no plan. But he did have flair and in moments like these, flair was the only currency that mattered.
Revelations
Louisiana
Anne gathered her small retinue into the side room where the air conditioner rattled and the smell of stale coffee lingered. Their faces were tight with worry, eyes darting toward the door as though scandal itself might burst through.
Anne clasped her hands before her, steady now, her voice low but carrying.
“Difference,” she said, “is not to be feared, not to be locked away, mocked, and tortured. It is to be understood. Cared for. Every creature, every soul, is God’s handiwork. Who am I to deny His craftsmanship? Did Christ not say, Blessed are the meek… blessed are the merciful… blessed are the pure in heart?”
Her retinue shifted uncomfortably. One of them, a young aide with a clipboard and sweat-darkened shirt, finally broke the silence.
“Sir, the boss is going to be livid you’re going this far off script.”
Anne’s mouth tightened into something between a smile and a line of steel. “My real boss,” she replied, “is far more important. And I try never to annoy Him.”
The room fell silent again, but this time it was different, charged, unsettled, something trembling on the edge of conviction.
Edinburgh
Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the atmosphere could not have been more different. Donald strode onto the stage of the General Assembly, a strange and almost theatrical figure. His clerical collar gleamed under the lights, a sliver cross swung on his chest, and the veins on his forehead throbbed with the force of restrained passion.
He stood behind the lectern, looked down at his neatly typed notes, and then, in a single violent gesture, crumpled them in his fist. The sound of paper tearing through expectation echoed through the vaulted hall.
“I had this speech written,” Donald thundered, his voice rising with almost Pentecostal fervour, “but to be honest, it does not cover what Jesus wants me to say!”
The audience froze. The General Assembly was a chamber of ritual, decorum, carefully measured words. Theatrics of this kind did not happen here. Yet here he stood, raw, unpredictable, electric, daring the Assembly itself to draw breath.
The silence stretched, expectant, perilous.
Donald leaned forward over the lectern, his face red with exertion, his breath catching like a furnace. He shook the crumpled notes at the crowd before tossing them aside.
“Difference is dangerous,” he spat, every syllable hitting the microphones like hammer blows. “It is God’s will that the fold remains pure, undefiled. Those who stray must be brought back, by prayer, by discipline, by AUTHORITY.”
His voice cracked on the word, and a bead of spit flew across the lectern. The Assembly sat motionless, some leaning back, others gripping the arms of their chairs.
Donald stabbed a finger toward the ceiling. “As Paul tells us in Romans 13: There is no authority except that which God has established. Whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted.”
He slammed his palm on the open Bible before him, the echo reverberating against the high stone walls. “This!” he roared. “This is our authority!”
Then, with sudden calculated shift, he softened his tone, almost to a whisper, yet the microphones carried every syllable. “And in 1 Timothy, chapter 2, verses 11 and 12, it is written: Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”
He straightened his shoulders, lifted his chin, and declared: “And so, as a woman, I will now do what I should have done long ago. I will be silent. I will leave this stage. I will cease being a minister as Scripture commands.”
He paused, just long enough to let the audience gasp, then added his final flourish:
“Make Presbyterianism great again!”
And with that, he marched briskly from the platform, the sound of his shoes drumming a final cadence on the blue carpet.
For a moment, silence reigned. The Assembly Hall, so often a place of order, procedure, and steady debate, had been stunned into stillness. The congregation stared at the stage, as though the very air had been knocked from their lungs.
Someone coughed.
Then, tentatively at first, came the applause, from the conservatives, sharp and approving. Others, their faces pale with shock, rose instead and filed out without a word.
In the vestibule, two clerics met in a knot of whispers. One shook his head, eyes wide.
“Sounds like the Northern Free Presbyterians have got to our Anne.”
Aftermath
Lousiana
Anne’s phone buzzed. The President’s number.
She took the call.
“Mr. Presiden….”
“Don’t Mr. President me, Donald. I’m sick of this circus. Get with the fucking plan and start dealing with those …. ”
What he said next was covered by the wet slap cut through the line. Something heavy, greasy and covered in ketchup hit a wall.
Anne winced.
“…. you still there?” he barked. “Well? Don’t just sit there like a stewed prick at a whores wedding, FIX IT! “
Anne could hear the implied “THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!” at the end
Sir, if you’ll just let me expl….”
Another splat. The dull thud of hamburger meeting drywall.
Then the line went dead.
Anne stared at the receiver for a long moment after the call cut off.
The silence hummed. A small gobbet of hamburger, or something that looked like it, was sliding down her mental image of the painting of Abraham Lincoln on the Oval Office wall.
Across the desk, her press secretary was already scribbling notes, face pale, tie slightly askew.
“Well,” he said finally, “that went… as expected.”
Anne massaged her temple. “You were taking notes?”
He nodded. “Of course. We’ll need a narrative. Something about initiative, about moral clarity. Maybe,” He hesitated, tapping his pen against the pad. “…maybe we lean into the ‘better way’ line.”
She looked up sharply. “What….?”
“The ‘better way,’” he said, eyes darting. “We could spin it as a kind of… therapy. You know, science-backed, compassionate, all that.”
Anne’s stomach turned. “Therapy?”
He was nodding now, too eagerly. “Sure. I’m sure we can find a scientist willing to stand by the idea that, oh, I don’t know, water-boarding cures gayness.”
Anne blinked. “Do we have a scientist that can do that?”
He smiled faintly, the way a man might when proposing a merger or a bribe.
“For the right presidential endowment…” He let the sentence hang, perfectly balanced between cynicism and opportunity.
Anne pushed back from the desk, eyes wide. “Oh, my Goodness!”
He shrugged. “But that is not my department Sandy does that”
Sandy nodded eagerly “I know just the chap in Pensacola Uni…” He pulled out his phone and started to make a call.
Anne looked at her phone, and the hum of the disconnected presidential call filled the room again. Somewhere in Washington, the President was still throwing hamburgers.
Edinburgh
The General Assembly offices in Edinburgh still smelled faintly of hymn books and floor polish. Donald was beaming, flushed, sleeves rolled, already rehearsing the interviews he’d give later. His team, however, sat in various stages of quiet despair.
The Moderator burst in, robes flapping. “What on earth, Anne! I knew you said you’d make waves, but you didn’t tell me it’d be a tsunami!”
Donald looked up from her chair, expression unreadable. She gave a small shrug.
“I changed my mind.”
The Moderator stared at her as though she’d just confessed to strangling the Episcopalian Archbishop of Canterbury.
“There’s changing your mind, Anne,” he said, voice quivering, “and then there’s having a mental breakdown! We’ve been working towards this for years. Years! Today was meant to be the day the Presbyterian Church moved from 1835 to 2031! We planned this, we prayed about this. The Assembly was ready to listen.” He threw his hands up. “Now the conservative evangelicals are all fired up again ….”
He paused, the weight of his own words sinking the air, his 30 years of pastoral work in Glasgow’s shipyards broke through as he said “..and it stinks, Anne. Like a post-curry fart in a lift.”
Doanld Grinned. The rest of the room pretended not to hear.
Donald met the Moderator’s eyes. He’d known her for decades, through parish squabbles, pastoral crises, budgets, funerals. Never had he seen her eyes like this: raw disgust, fury, something almost inhuman flickering behind them. It made him shiver.
One of the younger ministers, voice trembling, tried to fill the silence.
“We can still make this work,” he said. “If Anne were to tell the Assembly she’s retiring, the stress, the toll, that sort of thing. Then she could say she plans to write a book. A guide to prayerful contemplation on the challenges of the modern church. We could name Nigel as her successor. The delegates like Nigel, safe pair of hands, even if he’s a bit…” he hesitated, “…meek.”
The room considered it. The Moderator nodded grimly. Channelling his inner Jean-Luc Picard, because even the head of the Free Church of Scotland watched Star Trek , he said, “Make it so.”
Donal stood. All five foot one of her tried to stretch itself to six foot three. Her voice came out like thunder.
“NO, YOU FUCKING WON’T!”
Everyone froze. The air seemed to split with it, not just the words, but the force behind them. In all the Assembly’s long, pious history, no one had ever heard such a thing within those walls.
Silence. Then, somewhere near the back, the faint creak of a door opening.
Representations
The knock came first in Louisiana.
A polite, three-beat tap that sounded entirely out of place against the hum of cicadas and the drone of a window AC unit fighting for its life.
Two men in identical charcoal suits stepped inside before anyone answered. They looked like twins divided only by hairstyle: one slicked back, one shaved close. Both carried the faint air of people who never sweat, no matter how hot the room.
“Good morning, sir,” said the taller one. “We’re with Insta-Travel.”
Donald blinked. “The holiday people?”
“Inter-Temporal Spatial Transit Authority, technically,” said the other. “You used our service recently.”
He nodded uncertainly.
“Well,” the first man said, consulting a glass tablet that seemed to project something only he could see, “there’s been a small issue.”
“A what kind of issue?”
“An unexpected IQR” He paused, his audience looked at him blankly, “ …Inter-Corporeal Quantum Reassignment”. He said it as though reading the ingredients off a cereal box.
Donald frowned. “English, please.”
“It means your consciousness appears to have temporarily occupied another participant’s corporeal frame.”
The second man smiled, all reassurance and teeth. “Temporarily.”
They said it together, in perfect sync, like a chorus of lawyers.
Before Donald could ask more, four men in grey tactical suits appeared in the doorway, all polite menace and mirrored shades.
“If you’ll come with us, sir,” one of the representatives said. “We need to carry out a full quantum reconciliation protocol.”
The same scene, give or take a faint smell of old carpet and sanctity, unfolded in Edinburgh.
Anne was still standing, the echo of her outburst hanging like gunpowder in the Assembly chamber, when the door that had creaked open revealed them: the same two men, the same charcoal suits, only this time they carried briefcases that emitted a soft hum.
“Ma’am,” said the taller one, “there’s been an incident.”
The Moderator half-rose from his chair. “Who the devil are you?”
“Insta-Travel,” said the other. “We’re here to resolve a temporary IQR event.”
Anne’s eyes narrowed. “You mean I am…,” she gestured vaguely at herself “not quite myself?”
The men exchanged a professional smile. “It’s a transitory state,” said one. “No need for alarm. We’ll have you restored to baseline parameters shortly.”
“It is very Temporary,” the other added, firmly.
Moments later, four uniformed security personnel entered as if choreographed, flanking her with the solemn efficiency of undertakers.
Both Anne and Donald were whisked through side doors, bundled into sleek black cars, and driven wordlessly to waiting aircraft.
By nightfall they were in Greenland.
Cold Hearts
In a white walled lab in Insta-Travel’s Greenland HQ, Donald was doubled over, one hand gripping the metal edge of the lab bench.
“Mother of God,” he groaned.
Anne didn’t look up from the holographic readout she’d been pretending to understand.
“Oh, that’ll be your period starting,” she said evenly. “Don’t worry, it gets worse before it gets better.”
Donald blinked at her, face pale. “My what?”
“Your period,” Anne repeated. “Surely your wife has them. Cramps, mood swings, mild desire to destroy the world, ring any bells?”
He stared, jaw slack. “That’s… that’s impossible.”
“Quantum reassignment, remember?” She folded her arms. “Bodies swap, hormones follow. Welcome to womanhood, Reverend.”
Donald clutched his abdomen, swearing loudly and inventively enough to make a docker blush. When the pain finally eased, he straightened slowly, breathing hard.
“I never understood the fuss when Agnes took hers,” he muttered. “I just… avoided her for a few days.” He winced, then added quietly, “Now I see I should have been more… understanding.”
Anne arched an eyebrow. “Well at least we have progress at last.”
He staggered to the frosted window, looking out at the ice stretching to the horizon. “Why the fuck are we in Greenland?”
From the far side of the room, a man in a white lab coat looked up from his monitor. He held a clipboard and the air of someone who’d explained the same thing far too many times.
“We use quantum computers,” he said, tapping the screen. “They’re buried deep in the glacier. Generate a lot of heat, need the cooling. Back in the 20’s the U.S. government wanted to buy Greenland?” He gave a weary shrug. “Now you know why.”
The computer behind him beeped, flashing a pulsing amber light. The tech leaned in, frowned, then rose.
“The Boss is coming,” he said flatly. “I need to be somewhere else.”
Anne turned. “The boss?”
He nodded. “Mr. Pylon Rusk himself. Bit of advice don’t mention his cars. He’s… sensitive about that part of his history.”
With that, the technician vanished through a side door.
Moments later, the main doors hissed open.
An elderly man entered, shuffling slightly, his face a careful arrangement of cosmetic calm. He was followed by a nurse who looked like she’d been hired from a perfume advert, impossibly tall, silver heels clicking softly against the tile, clipboard in hand.
Anne blinked. For a moment, she was back in the 1970s, watching reruns of “Are You Being Served?” she wondered who was going to be Mrs.Slocumbe.
“Good morning,” the old man said, voice reedy but confident. “I’m Pylon Rusk, founder and visionary of Insta-Travel.”
The nurse leaned down toward him and whispered, “You’re doing very well, sir.”
He beamed up at her, then back at Anne and Donald. “So! How are we enjoying our little… inter-corporeal adventure?”
The Vision
Rusk eased himself into the chair the nurse pulled forward. The motion was slow but practiced, as if he’d rehearsed “sitting like a visionary” many times.
“Now then,” he said, hands folded, “let’s discuss what happened on your little trip.”
Donald and Anne exchanged a glance.
Rusk smiled, a paper-thin stretch of lips. “Insta-Travel was founded on one simple premise: people waste far too much time being where they are. Our technology allows clients to be where they should be. Faster. Leaner. Happier. When we invented the travel beams, we discovered there is a place where … “he searched for the right word, “… the soul is separated from the body”
He turned to the nurse. “Darling, show them the diagram.”
She tapped a control on her tablet; a glowing model appeared in the air: two human figures rotating slowly, threads of light twisting between them.
“This,” Rusk said, “is what we call an inter-corporeal exchange field. When we discovered it, I came up with the idea was to let travellers experience another life, another culture, another body, a way to build on life’s experiences, Unfortunately, your transit coincided with a calibration cycle in the quantum core. The exchange field… lingered.”
Anne frowned. “Lingering sounds rather more permanent than temporary”
Rusk chuckled softly, the laugh of a man who owned both the patent and the problem.
“Permanent is such a… inflexible term. We prefer open-ended. The quantum lattice will eventually re-align itself. Or it won’t. Hard to say. These things depend on resonance, mood, diet… avocados seem to be very important”
Donald gasped. “You mean I could be stuck like this?”
Rusk smiled again, eyes bright. “Perspective, Reverend. Think of it as divine opportunity. A rare chance to see through another’s eyes. Or uterus as the case may be”
Donald doubled over swearing as another cramp hit.
Anne folded her arms. “You’re experimenting on human beings.”
“Research participants,” corrected the nurse smoothly. “All terms agreed to in the user licence.”
Rusk nodded. “Indeed. A very generous licence. Hardly anyone reads it, but legally airtight. You clicked ‘Accept,’ Reverend. Too late to complain now!”
Donald tried to speak, found nothing suitable, and doubled over again with a groan
The nurse handing him a hot water bottle and a bar of chocolate which he ate with perhaps too much haste.
Rusk went on, undeterred. “Our mission is adventure through immersion. Imagine a world where no one can hate what they have already been, we will have beaten being “woke” because how can you be woke if there is nothing to fear. Unfortunately, the process has, let’s call them ‘teething troubles.’ A few personality crosscurrents. Some memories blending. Nothing catastrophic. Yet.”
Anne stepped closer to the hologram. The twin figures were beginning to blur together, their outlines dissolving into one.
“What happens,” she asked quietly, “if the lattice doesn’t realign?”
Rusk’s smile thinned. “Then you remain… integrated. Two souls, different bodies. Think of the theological implications!”
The nurse bent to his ear and murmured, “Time for your medication, sir.”
He nodded, accepting a small silver capsule, then looked up again with a grandfatherly twinkle.
“In any case, we’ll monitor you both closely. Should the resonance stabilise, we may even name the phenomenon after you. The Anne-Donald Bridge, perhaps. Very marketable.”
He rose, with surprising steadiness for his age.
“Welcome to the future of travel,” he said. “And possibly, of gender and identity.”
The nurse guided him out. The door sighed shut, leaving Anne and Donald alone with the humming machines and the slow, merging hologram.
Donald looked at her, pale. “Integrated? What does that mean for us?”
Anne stared at the fading light, voice low. “It means, Donald , that we’d better start getting along.”
Cross-currents
The humming in the lab changed pitch, settling into something almost like a heartbeat.
Anne and Donald sat opposite each other at the small metal table, both watching the pulse of blue light from the console wash across the room.
It was Donald who spoke first.
“Why do I keep thinking about curtains?” he said.
Anne blinked. “Curtains?”
“Lace ones. Pink. I can feel the dust in the folds. I’m allergic to pink lace.”
She rubbed her temple. “Those were in my old flat in Derry”
He looked up, alarmed. “How the hell would I know that?”
The lights flickered. For a moment, Anne tasted bourbon and fried catfish, then it was gone.
“Crosscurrents,” she murmured. “Our memories are bleeding.”
Donald frowned. “I think I just remembered giving birth to a sermon.”
“You mean writing one?”
“No,” he said. “I mean… giving birth. Screaming and everything. It had footnotes.”
Anne tried not to laugh, failed, and then felt a sudden pang of guilt that wasn’t hers. It was his: a pang shaped like a small wooden church and a woman standing at its door, waiting for him to come home.
He flinched. “That’s private.”
“I didn’t ask for it.”
The door hissed open. A technician entered, young, nervous, carrying a tray with two cups of something steaming.
“Hydration protocol,” he said quickly. “Just electrolytes.”
Anne eyed him. “Where’s your boss?”
“Mr. Rusk? Having his post-briefing nap. Said to keep you comfortable.”
She took one of the cups. “Comfortable,” she repeated, as if testing the word for irony.
Donald sipped his own, grimaced, then went pale again. “Anne,” he whispered, “I can feel you in my head.”
“I can feel you in mine,” she said. “You hum when you think.”
“I do not.”
“You do now.”
The technician cleared his throat nervously. “That’s… within parameters. Neural blending tends to precede stabilisation.”
“And if it doesn’t stabilise?” Anne asked.
He hesitated. “Then one consciousness tends to, um… dominate. Like a software update.”
Donald set down his cup. “Which of us is the update, then?”
The technician looked at his shoes. “Hard to say, sir.”
Anne stood. “Get Rusk back in here. Now.”
The technician bolted. The door sealed with a hiss.
For a long moment, they said nothing. Then Anne began to laugh, not her polite, pulpit laugh, but something deeper, almost feral.
“What’s funny?” Anne asked, uneasy.
She met his eyes, and for a moment her voice was two voices, layered and echoing.
“What’s funny, Reverend, is that I think I’m starting to like you.”
Outside the lab window, a faint red warning light began to pulse again, unnoticed.
Aftershocks
The world found out on a Tuesday.
Somebody leaked the internal memo from Insta-Travel to a Washington journalist, and by Wednesday morning the headlines were screaming:
CLERIC AND POLITICIAN IN BODY-SWAP ACCIDENT: GOVT-APPROVED QUANTUM PROGRAM UNDER FIRE
No one really understood what it meant, but that didn’t matter. The images of Anne and Donald, grim, confused, and very obviously not quite themselves, spread across the networks like wildfire.
United States
By Thursday, the country was burning with opinion.
Talk-show hosts, senators, retired generals, podcasters, and a newly re-activated AI version of Oprah all demanded answers. The President was silent, on his social media platform, “Public Truths” which was not only odd it made things worse.
On the university campuses, but students also poured into courtyards, holding up signs that read “We want our bodies back!” and “Stop privatizing the soul!” Professors who’d been quiet for years found themselves delivering spontaneous lectures on “quantum ethics” through megaphones.
In Boston, a small but determined group of engineers from MIT broke into the abandoned National Cryonics Repository. “Operation Reheat Bernie” trended within hours. The slogan “Let him finish the speech he started in 2025”, appeared on T-shirts, tote bags, and eventually, riot shields.
Within days, there were clashes outside Insta-Travel’s American offices. Protesters carried effigies of Rusk made from freezer parts and computer fans. Someone threw a milkshake at a senator on live TV. Stocks fell. Approval ratings collapsed.
United Kingdom
Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the Free Church was having the time of its life.
The Assembly Hall pulsed with a new and terrible energy. Preachers who had spent decades smiling politely through debates about inclusivity now roared from pulpits about sin and suffering, about the divine plan to “purify” the nation.
The congregations, frightened and fascinated, filled the pews. Spit flew. Organists played louder to drown out the shouting, but the brimstone smell won every time.
At Holyrood, questions were asked, then shouted. Westminster joined in, with one MP waving a battered King James Bible and yelling, “This country has lost its way and its gender!”
Then came Sebastian Cabbage, leader of the Reformed Party, a man who had built his brand on tweed and nostalgia. Standing before a sea of microphones, he declared:
“It is time,” he said, “to return to the Christian roots of our Anglo-Saxon forebears. To bring back a proper Jesus, white, modest, and terribly English. A Jesus for a people who drink warm beer and eat faggots rather than liberate them and know the difference between discipline and decadence!”
The crowd erupted in confused applause. Someone fainted. Someone else shouted for subtitles.
Behind the noise, in the quiet offices of Insta-Travel Greenland, two linked consciousnesses sat watching the chaos unfold on a flickering monitor.
Anne sighed. “You realise,” she said, “we’ve started a religious revival and a revolution.”
Donald winced. “And I still have cramps.”
The screen showed a split image: protesters waving flags in Boston; a preacher thumping a Bible in Glasgow. Between them, the world’s axis seemed to tilt just slightly off-centre.
Anne turned away from the monitor. “Rusk thinks he’s replacing empathy,” she murmured. “But what if this is something else entirely?”
Donald looked at her warily. “Like what?”
She stared at the humming servers beyond the glass. “Like the beginning of a reckoning.”
Fallout
Across every news network, Pylon Rusk’s face appeared, smooth, powdered, and haloed by the Insta-Travel logo. He smiled the way only a billionaire visionary can smile, as though he were blessing his shareholders.
“Friends of the future,” he began, “what we are witnessing is the end of confusion. The end of being woke and worried. Because how can you fear what you can be?
For just five thousand dollars, anyone can walk in another’s shoes, literally. Experience life, love, and labour from a brand-new perspective. Real empathy, real diversity, without all that messy debate.”
He leaned closer to the camera.
“And governments, take note: our technology offers the perfect solution to crime. Imagine a thief living in the body of his victim, a bigot inhabiting the skin of the person he despises. Restorative justice, quantum guaranteed.”
The nurse off-screen applauded softly.
Rusk beamed. “The world will be better when everyone has been everyone else. And, of course, our introductory package includes full travel insurance.”
The feed cut to the company logo and a cheerful slogan:
“Insta-Travel, Now Be Someone Better!”
Greenland
Donald didn’t see the broadcast.
He was in a darkened side room, curled on a narrow bed, hands pressed to his stomach.
Anne sat beside him, speaking in the calm, precise voice she used at funerals.
“Breathe through it. You can’t fight the pain; you must ride it.”
He gave a strangled laugh. “I was raised to fight pain.”
“I know,” she said gently. “That’s half your trouble.”
For a long while the only sound was the low hum of the cooling fans.
Then Anne spoke, voice cracked. “Donald, why do I hate them so much?”
“Who?”
“You know who. Gay People, the ones I was to preach about.”
Anne waited.
He stared at the ceiling. “My uncle was… different. When he told the family, everything went wrong. My father said awful things, blows where exchanged. There was shouting, things breaking. After that, my uncle left for Canada. Married. Has kids now, I think. I’ve never met them.”
He swallowed hard. “I was just a boy, but I learned what I was supposed to believe. I came to understand that wjay my father, my pastor, my friends said,. that he’d brought shame on us.”
Anne’s tone stayed steady. “But you never saw him hurt anyone, did you?”
Donald shook his head. “No. He just wanted to be himself and it was my father that hurt him with a leather belt, I remember the blood on the kitchen floor, the Uncle John told us he was marrying Simon, that was the day he left for Canada”
“Then the shame wasn’t his,” she said. “It was what your father taught you to carry. You can put it down now … just let it go”
The hum of the lattice deepened. For an instant Anne felt a flicker of someone else’s memory, a summer lake, a boy skipping stones with an uncle, a kind laugh that wasn’t hers, a tear formed in her eye.
Donald turned toward her, eyes glassy. “I think I just remembered your mother’s garden.”
“And I,” Anne whispered, “just remembered your uncle’s smile.”
They sat in the dim light, two souls beginning to untangle by knowing each other completely.
Outside, the aurora shimmered across the Greenland sky, and the warning light on the console began to pulse faster.
Chimeras
The warning light pulsed faster.
Anne rose, blinking away the shimmer in her vision. “Something’s happening,” she murmured.
The lattice hummed like a living thing, its faint geometry pulsing with light. Donald pressed a hand to his temple. “I can see you,” he whispered.
Before Anne could speak, the images came not visions exactly, but living memories spilling across the space between them.
He saw her under a grey Belfast sky, standing shoulder to shoulder with a line of friends beneath a rainbow banner. Laughter, rain, defiance. He felt her hands bandaging a boy’s broken face after an attack, her voice trembling with both rage and love. Then the church, her church, its doors flung open despite the shouted protests outside. He heard the voices of Ulster preachers calling her an abomination, a corrupter of children. Through it all, she held fast, knowing that to love openly was the only way to serve truth.
Anne gasped as the vision shifted, and now his life unfolded. A wedding photograph fading on a mantelpiece, a wife who smiled only for the cameras. Dinner tables gone quiet. Donald’s own voice, rising in speeches filled with fire and slogans, words he no longer recognized as his own. She saw his children, Sam and Alana, slipping from him like light through fingers. Alana’s wary distance. Sam’s eyes, dark with confusion and fear, a boy holding secrets close because he’d learned that truth could be dangerous. In one corner of the vision: a locked cabinet, a row of AR rifles gleaming.
Anne flinched. Donald turned toward her as though feeling her judgment, but instead of anger, there was only sorrow in her eyes.
In the control room, one of the technicians leaned over the console. “Sir, you should see this.”
Mr. Rusk stepped forward, the aurora reflected in his lenses. The twin waveforms on the monitor had begun to overlap, not just touching but folding into one another. He pursed his lips, almost reverently.
“It seems,” he said quietly, “we are creating chimeras today, Anne within Donald, and Donald within Anne.”
He watched the oscillating lines settle into a single rhythm, and then added, quoting Blase Pascal softly:
“What a chimera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?”
No one in the room answered.
Inside the lattice chamber, the light grew unbearably bright.
The brilliance swelled until the chamber’s edges dissolved, leaving only their two figures suspended in a haze of gold and violet.
Anne’s breath came shallow. “Donald …….”
Her voice fractured as the air itself began to vibrate.
He reached for her, not out of fear, but instinct, the same instinct that once made him pull his son close after a nightmare. Their hands met, and for a heartbeat the lattice went silent.
Then came a pulse, low and immense, like the ocean turning over in its sleep. The hum steadied, brightened, and something vast moved through them, not taking, not invading, but equalizing.
Memories aligned. His anger met her compassion; her endurance met his shame. The lattice spun faster, translating their contradictions into light.
Outside, Rusk’s technicians shouted readings, flux, coherence, overload, but he raised a hand for silence.
“Don’t shut it down,” he said softly. “They’ve crossed the midpoint.”
Inside, Anne saw through his eyes the first rally he ever led, the heat of the crowd, the intoxicating certainty. But now she felt what he had buried beneath it: the terror of being ordinary, the dread of his father’s disapproval reborn in every speech.
Donald, trembling, saw her as a girl on the Belfast streets, coat collar up against the rain, carrying a banner taller than she was. He felt her loneliness, the cost of standing in the open when the world was still half-shadow.
For a moment neither was separate. The boundary of self-dissolved.
And then ….
The light imploded. A soundless flash, the hum gone as if swallowed. Both fell to their knees in the sudden dark. Only the console’s amber glow remained, pulsing weakly like a dying heartbeat.
Anne’s hand brushed the floor. “We’re still here,” she whispered.
Donald lifted his head. His eyes were wet. “Yes,” he said, voice breaking, “but I think we’ve both been… rewritten.”
Behind the glass, Rusk exhaled through his teeth.
“Stabilize containment,” he ordered quietly. “Whatever they’ve become, we’ll need to ask the right questions.”
The aurora outside had turned red, a thin, restless shimmer across the Greenland night.
Anne and Donald collapsed into bunks exhausted … and dreamed.
A New Dawn
When Anne woke, the world felt thinner.
Light filtered through the observation window, the cold grey of an Arctic morning. The hum was gone. Only her own heartbeat filled the silence.
She turned her head. Donald sat against the far wall, knees drawn up, eyes fixed on the lattice frame now dark and inert. The glow had fled, leaving only the faint scent of ozone and something like rain after thunder.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
He looked over slowly, as though surfacing from deep water. “I keep hearing your choir,” he said. “Your church, the old organ, the candles. I know the words to hymns I’ve never sung.”
Anne’s hand trembled on the blanket. “And I can feel your son’s fear,” she whispered. “That moment before he knocks on your study door and loses the courage to speak. Donald, I felt it.”
He dropped his gaze. “Then you know what I’ve done.”
“I know what you’ve believed,” she said. “There’s a difference.”
The silence between them lengthened, full of everything they had seen.
“This machine …,” Donald said finally. “It should be a way to merge data, not… souls.”
Anne smiled faintly. “Maybe there isn’t a difference anymore.”
He rubbed his eyes, suddenly older. “I used to think the world was built on borders, lines you draw to keep chaos out. Now I don’t even know where I end.”
She leaned back against the wall. “Maybe that’s the beginning. If we can see each other completely and still stay… ourselves.”
Donald gave a small, hollow laugh. “I don’t know if I can go back to my old self, even if I wanted to.”
“You can’t,” she said gently. “None of us can, after truth.”
Through the glass, shadows moved, technicians resetting instruments, avoiding eye contact. For now, the chamber remained sealed.
Anne closed her eyes. Behind her lids, she could still see flashes of his life, threads of a man trying to be good in a world that rewarded certainty over compassion. And beneath it all, something new, a faint shared rhythm, like two hearts learning to beat in time.
Outside, the wind picked up. The aurora was fading, leaving streaks of silver across the horizon.
In the control room, Rusk watched them on the monitor, a thoughtful frown pulling at his mouth. “Entanglement sustained,” he murmured, steepling his fingers. “……Fascinating.”
He noted the readings, then hesitated before adding a final line in the log:
Subjective identities appear intertwined but stable. Emergent empathy observed.
He closed the file.
For the first time that night, he wondered what would happen if the world beyond those walls began to feel the same.
Debriefing
They gave them clothes, tea, and the illusion of privacy.
The observation cameras still blinked in the corners, but after what they’d just shared, neither Anne nor Donald cared who watched.
The small debrief room was warm, panelled in pale birch, the air faintly metallic. Anne sat by the window, watching the white horizon dissolve into mist. Donald stood at the sink, filling a paper cup with water he hadn’t yet drunk.
He cleared his throat. “I keep waiting for it to fade,” he said. “Your voice in my head. The way I know what you’d say before you speak.”
Anne turned toward him, hands folded. “It might not fade. Maybe we’ve been given a chance to know what empathy feels like without the filters.”
He looked at her, and there was no anger left, only weariness. “Empathy,” he repeated softly. “You make it sound like a cure. To me it feels like standing in the ruins of everything I thought was solid.”
She nodded. “That’s how truth usually starts.”
Donald sat across from her, elbows on his knees. “You saw everything, didn’t you? The speeches, the slogans, the way I …. ”
“I did.”
“And you don’t hate me for it?”
“No,” she said. “Because I saw why.”
The quiet stretched straining demanding it be filled. Outside, a snowfield shimmered in weak daylight, the aurora gone now, leaving a bruised-blue sky.
He rubbed his temples. “My son, Sam. I keep feeling his fear, like it’s still happening.”
Anne’s gaze softened. “Then you know what you need to do when you go home.”
He hesitated. “You think he’ll forgive me?”
“That’s not the point,” she said gently. “Forgiveness isn’t the goal. Understanding is.”
A long breath left him, shaky but real. “When this is over,” he said, “I don’t know what I’ll be.”
Anne smiled faintly. “Maybe the first version of yourself you’ve actually met.”
For a while they said nothing. The kettle on the counter clicked off. Anne poured the tea, strong, black, the way he used to like it before his wife told him it stained his teeth. She handed him a cup. Their fingers brushed, and a quiet current passed between them, not the lattice’s hum but something simpler, human.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For letting me see you. For not turning away.”
Anne looked out at the snow again. “We’ve both seen worse in each other than most people ever dare,” she said. “If we can stand that, maybe there’s hope.”
Donald followed her gaze to the horizon. Somewhere beyond it lay home, his wife, his children, a house full of words that would sound different now.
“I think,” he said slowly, “the lattice didn’t change who we are. It just took away the noise.”
Anne sipped her tea. “Then maybe it’s our job to live with the silence that’s left.”
… and the questions started, thousands of questions, most very personal.
Release
By the next morning, the sky had cleared to a hard, crystalline blue. The air outside the facility shimmered with cold so pure it seemed to hum.
They were told they were free to go. There would be more debriefs later, and reports, and “further evaluation of subjective effects.” For now, though, two insulated parkas, a satellite phone, and a waiting snowcat were all the ceremony of their release.
At the airlock door, Rusk met them. He looked tired, eyes shadowed from a night without sleep. “The readings stabilized,” he said quietly. “You’re both clear. But understand, the lattice wasn’t built for this. Whatever link you’ve formed, it’s… unprecedented.”
Anne zipped her parka. “You mean dangerous.”
Rusk hesitated. “Not necessarily. But unstable. You may continue to share flashes, dreams, impulses. If that happens, document everything.”
Donald gave a short, wry laugh. “You make it sound like we’re research subjects.”
Rusk met his gaze evenly. “You are.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Anne said, “Maybe we’re something else now, too.”
Rusk almost smiled. “Perhaps. Just remember, the beam lattice didn’t fail. It listened.”
He stepped back and pressed the release. The outer door opened with a hiss, and cold air flooded in like an ocean.
They stepped out together.
The horizon stretched endless, the Greenland ice sheet glinting under the pale sun. The aurora was gone, but a faint red echo shimmered on the edge of the horizon, as if some residue of the night still lingered in the upper air.
The snowcat’s engine was already running. Donald climbed in first, then turned to offer Anne his hand. She hesitated only a moment before taking it.
As the vehicle lurched into motion, the facility receded behind them, a low, silver complex against the white, already half-lost to distance.
Donald stared out the window. “I thought I’d feel relieved to leave,” he said. “But it’s like… part of me is still back there.”
Anne nodded. “Or maybe part of it’s still in us.”
For a long time, they rode without speaking, the treads grinding over frozen silence. Then, softly, Donald said, “I keep hearing a song. Your choir again.”
Anne smiled, looking toward the horizon. “Then you’ve still got some of my better parts.”
He turned to her, eyes tired but lighter than before. “And I can see my son’s face more clearly now. Not the way I imagined him, but as he is.”
The snowcat crested a rise, and below them the airstrip came into view, a single dark line across the ice. A small transport plane waited, its fuselage glinting like glass.
Anne exhaled. “Back to the world,” she said.
Donald nodded. “If it’s still the same one.”
The engine idled down. Outside, the wind picked up again, carrying a sound that might have been only snow against metal, or a whisper, soft and distant, like the lattice remembering their names.
Changes
Belfast
Rain again. Always rain.
Anne stood in the doorway of St. Brigid’s, watching it fall across the narrow street. The Sunday crowd was thinner than before, a few familiar faces, some newcomers drawn by curiosity more than faith.
She’d expected the absences: the old choir master who had called her “heretic,” the family that slipped away quietly after her sermon on inclusion. What she hadn’t expected was the peace.
The lattice hum still echoed faintly in her bones, not a sound but a resonance. At night she dreamed of light crossing through light, and sometimes, when she paused mid-sentence, she could almost feel him, a flicker of thought, a shift in breath that wasn’t her own.
She poured tea in the church kitchen, the scent of bergamot filling the air. On the radio, someone was arguing politics, the same brittle rhetoric she’d heard a hundred times before. For a moment, the voice wavered, and she felt Donald’s quiet recoil somewhere far away, as if he, too, were hearing it.
She smiled.
“Still with me,” she murmured, and carried the tray out to the parish hall.
As she passed the stained-glass window, sunlight broke through the clouds and caught on the coloured panes, scattering fragments of blue and gold across the floor. For an instant, the light looked like the lattice, two beams crossing, still holding each other’s pattern.
It was time for change.
Ashville, North Carolina
Donald sat on the edge of his son’s bed. The room smelled of solder and computer dust, half-finished circuitry spread across the desk. Sam stood by the window, arms folded, wary.
“I don’t want to talk politics,” Donald said quietly.
“Then what do you want to talk about?” Sam replied
Donald hesitated. The words he’d planned, apologies, explanations, suddenly felt like stones in his mouth. Instead, he said the first thing that came.
“I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.”
Sam turned, suspicious. “Like what?”
“Like thinking fear was strength. Or that love had to fit inside rules I didn’t make.”
For a long time, Sam said nothing. Then he crossed the room and sat beside him. “Mum said you were in some kind of accident.”
“Something like that,” Donald said. “But it was more… an awakening.” He smiled faintly. “A friend helped me see.”
Sam studied him, searching for the old edges. Finding fewer of them.
“Dad,” he said slowly, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
Donald’s heart thudded, but the fear he’d always felt at those words was gone.
“I know,” he said softly. “And it’s all right.”
Sam’s shoulders shook. Donald reached out, hesitant, then sure, and his son didn’t pull away.
Outside, rain began to fall, the first in weeks. He thought of Belfast, of a woman standing in a doorway, and felt her smile like warmth in the back of his mind.
That night, miles apart, they both dreamed of the same thing
a field of light over ice, two beams meeting, crossing,
and holding steady.
Six Months Later
The snow at Thule had long since melted, and the facility now lay under the summer fog a scatter of antennas and domes blinking through the grey. Deep inside, monitors still pulsed faintly with residual data.
Rusk stood before the main console, reviewing the long-term readings. The entanglement field that had once joined Anne and Donald was gone, at least in measurable terms. But there was something else in the data, a pattern, subtle and expanding.
“Temporal coherence between emotional waveforms?” one of the techs asked, baffled.
“Not quite,” Rusk murmured. “Call it resonance. It’s showing up in communications networks, crowd behaviour models, even linguistic drift. Empathy trending upward.”
He folded his hands behind his back. “As though two points of light crossed, and the crossing kept spreading.”
He closed the file and looked out at the sea. Somewhere, the beams were still working only now they ran through people.
Belfast
Anne’s new office was above a bakery; the walls lined with flyers and photographs. The Crossbeam Project, the sign read: Building Understanding Between the Others.
In the photos were faces, queer activists, immigrants, people of faith and none, climate refugees, a few wary police officers. She’d managed to get them talking, even breaking bread together.
Her phone buzzed.
Donald: “Just came off the floor. They clapped.”
Anne: “Of course they did. You were human.”
Donald: “Still strange hearing that as a compliment.”
Anne: “Get used to it.”
She laughed, then looked out the window. Across the street, a group of teenagers was chalking rainbows on the pavement. The rain hadn’t started yet, but she knew it would and they’d still keep drawing.
Washington DC
Donald stood outside the capital building, wind tugging at his coat. Reporters still lingered, waiting for a sound bite, but he had nothing rehearsed to give them.
His resignation speech had gone viral. He hadn’t planned that either. He’d simply spoken the truth: that fear had been his gospel, and empathy his salvation.
Now, he walked down the steps to where his family waited. His wife slipped her hand into his, and their children flanked them, both smiling in a way he hadn’t seen in years.
He paused, feeling that faint familiar tug, a whisper in the back of his thoughts, like distant singing in a language he almost knew. Anne, somewhere across the sea, thinking of him at the same time.
He smiled. Still crossing beams.
Thule Station
Night again. The aurora was pale tonight; more silver than green. Rusk watched it from the observation deck, recorder in hand.
“Experiment 7 complete. Subjective correlation persists between Participants A and B. Secondary data suggests field resonance beyond containment. Recommend no further testing until parameters understood.”
He clicked the recorder off, hesitated, then added quietly:
“Perhaps understanding is the test.”
Outside, the aurora shimmered, two ribbons of brilliance weaving together, parting, and joining again across the Arctic sky.
For a moment they formed a perfect heart, a crossing so bright it seemed to hold the world still.
Then the beams continued, widening, touching everything.
Epilogue
Some said it was coincidence, a softening of rhetoric, a sudden kindness in places long divided. Others swore the air itself felt different, as if something unseen had passed through and left the world fractionally clearer.
No one mentioned the lattice, or the night the beams crossed.
But sometimes, when strangers met eyes on a train and didn’t look away, or when an old hatred faltered before a simple act of understanding, a faint hum seemed to stir beneath the noise of the world, not machinery now, but memory.
Light meeting light.
Human seeing human.
And somewhere, far above the snow,
the beams still crossed.