Elias spun around. His lab was empty, but on his screen, the woman was reaching out toward her own monitor. As she touched the glass, the ".7z" file on Elias’s desktop began to unpack itself again, but this time, it wasn't extracting data. It was extracting space .

The air in the lab began to fold. The triple underscores in the filename weren't placeholders; they were coordinates for a three-dimensional tear. The "pSCA" stood for Point-Source-Compression-Anomaly .

"You're late," she said. Her voice didn't come from the speakers; it came from the air behind him.

The screen showed a room that looked exactly like Elias’s lab, but cleaner, newer. Sitting in his chair was a woman wearing his same headset. She froze, looking directly into her camera—directly at him.