the story: CHAPTER 4
lab notes
AZIMUTH LAB
October 3, 2040
I can’t discount that what happened tonight may have been a dream.
We prepped OMNI, dropped the needle on the record, and laid down in the bubble of sound.
As the record played, we felt the earth tremor beneath our bodies. A powerful jolt should have shaken us, yet we lied undisturbed in the bubble. Then in a breath, the floor and walls of the lab fell away, and we found ourselves swimming through a dense and heavy darkness.
Slowly, pinpoints of light became visible stars emerging from the void. Then, the rim of a new galaxy with two suns at its center. The Valley of Mercury.
We descended to a soft blue planet without friction and found ourselves on a cliff overlooking the rhythmic waves of a foreign sea. The land before us green and bowing.
The suns rose and from behind us an old forest echoed with new bird song.
Artist sketch: The Valley of Mercury
We woke up in the lab when the record ended, static popping through the speakers. Night had come but we were aglow.
Artist photograph: Time lapse of test subject during OMNI session
AZIMUTH LAB
January 10, 2041
We’re building an army in another world.
So far we’ve ferried almost one hundred people to the Valley of Mercury. Drop by drop, person by person, we’ve been freeing them from this collapse. I run them myself to the Azimuth Lab and then through OMNI. My sister waits on the other side welcoming them to the Valley.
You never expect to find yourself in charge of building an actual new world, but here we are. Gods.
We’re working against the clock. Either the portal closes when the planets go out of phase or GEIGER finds out what we’ve discovered and pulls the plug.
We needed to reach as many people as possible. To shake users awake, I designed a hack that targeted a specific kind of user distress signal. The plan was simple: crash their devices, force a hard-reset, and on restart (before the CONTACT goes up on GEIGER’S network), load the escape route map, journey prep instructions, and a dead-simple call to action:
We found a new world. Join us. THE GEMINI.
