Episode 013| Tremor on the Ice

Kaiyuan Year 1010 · Jan 1 · 10:58 · the Frozen Northern Reach, beyond the edge of signal marker S-17-R

Lika watched the percentage tick.

[Backup of Observer fragment: complete · 0.07%]
[Remaining progress: 99.93%]
[Estimated time to completion: ??:??:??]

Over four minutes it had crept from 0.04 to 0.07. An increment of 0.03.

In theory he could work out the total time from that increment — he nearly started doing the arithmetic — but he knew the calculation was meaningless. The estimated-completion field showed three question marks, and he suspected it wasn't because the system couldn't compute the answer. It was because the system had computed it and then chosen not to tell him.

He looked up at the bare patch of ground.

The bare patch held its original shape, the size of a ping-pong table, its edges clean. But within roughly ten meters of it, the snow —

The snow was moving.

Not blown by wind. The wind speed was unchanged at 32 knots — and wind-driven snow leaves directional streaks across the surface; this stretch had none.

The snow across that region was sliding, as one sheet, slowly toward the bare patch. Glacially slow — too slow to see any single flake move, yet the position of the whole snow-surface drew a millimeter nearer the edge every second.

---

Lika narrowed his eyes.

He switched his retinal interface to geographic sensing.

> map --target S-17-R --radius 50m --display drift_vector

A live dynamic map came back. Every meter on the map was tagged with a small arrow, each arrow representing the relative displacement of the ground at that point.

Every small arrow within the fifty-meter radius — thousands of them — pointed toward the center of the bare patch.

---

"Geographic-coordinate drift," he said softly.

Not an earthquake. An earthquake is the crust moving, the whole sheet shifting together, the arrows pointing toward a single shared direction extrapolated from the epicenter. This was more like the surrounding ground "caving in" toward the bare patch — except the bare patch itself wasn't growing larger.

It looked as if this ice field were being re-surveyed. The center of the re-survey was that bare patch. The method of the re-survey, perhaps, was to reassign the coordinates, drawing every inch of the surface slowly into alignment with the center.

The CV-1A gave a faint shudder.

---

Lika turned to look at the airship.

The airship's maglev turbines had auto-compensated — when the CV-1A stood, it relied on relative readings of surface and gravity, and if the surface coordinates drifted, the airship would recompute its gravitational balance on its own. That shudder a moment ago had been the instant the compensation kicked in.

To an ordinary passenger, a correction of that magnitude wouldn't even register.

But Lika knew — he'd set the CV-1A's compensation threshold himself — this correction had run more than 0.4 seconds, which meant the surface coordinates were drifting faster than the airship's maglev had been designed to expect.

---

The brain-chip interface threw up another prompt.

[Warning: current geographic coordinate no longer within original Spectra index]
[Original: the Frozen Northern Reach, 3 meters beyond the edge of S-17-R]
[Current: the Frozen Northern Reach, 2.76 meters beyond the edge of S-17-R]
[Drift rate: 0.001 meters / second · direction: toward center of the void]

---

One millimeter per second.

Slow, but steady.

Only now did Lika register one thing — over these last few minutes, this ice field was being written into the bare patch. One millimeter per second. He was standing on this ice field too. He was being written in too.

He took three steps back.

The brain-chip's coordinate tracked him in real time as he moved, and the "Drift rate" didn't change — after Lika's three steps back, that 0.001 meters per second of drift still held. Which meant stepping back was useless. The whole expanse was moving.

---

He looked down at the toes of his boots.

In the snow beneath his boot-tip was a hair-thin line running parallel to the edge of the sole — the mark the snow had taken when he'd first stepped down. But that line was sliding slowly toward the edge.

It wasn't him moving. It was the snow.

The snow was carrying his footprint toward the center of that bare patch, one millimeter a second.

---

"This isn't a rift, goddamn it," Lika said under his breath. "This is the world being rewritten."

A sentence surfaced in his head on its own. He didn't know which year of his life he'd read it, written it, or heard it —

"The Rift is not a hole torn in space. It is the entry point through which the world's base layer is rewritten."

Today he had seen it with his own eyes.

---

Across the Ice-Shadow Trench, in some underground lab pod beneath Saint Tranya, Morpheus's screen flashed the coordinate-drift alert for the third time.

"She's in position," he said.

The other end paused. "Do we let her begin?"

"Don't make contact with him directly," Morpheus said. "Let him see her on his own."

【Ch. 013 End · the Frozen Northern Reach, S-17-R】