First Contact
Copyright© 2026 by Charlie Foxtrot
Chapter 3
It was teal.
The glow of it outshone the moons as we looked down from the small ridge. Harko leaned against one of the larger stones while I stared at the shimmering field, an aurora on the ground before us. I could hear it, a low-frequency sound putting my nerves on edge. Nev stood beside me.
It wasn’t the color I expected for something the survey data described as a Class 2 Flux anomaly, stable boundary, low resonance output. The report had said forty meters in diameter, and it was at least that, maybe more. It was hard to tell from the rise because the boundary wasn’t standing still. It pulsed. Not rapidly, not with any particular rhythm. The teal at the edge blended to cyan in a gradient when you tried to look at it directly. It was the same palette as the Integration overlay, either a coincidence or the reason the system always looked the way it did. The rift didn’t project outward the way a lamp does. It was simply present at the boundary, the way a window isn’t a light source but still changes the room it’s in. The glow ahead of us had texture like that, not visible, but something I could feel.
It was beautiful.
Wrong, too. Like the way a summer afternoon is wrong when you can already smell the ozone before the storm. And like those storms, there was something refreshing, alive, touching my senses. I moved down the hill.
My overlay activated fully without being invoked, matching the teal-to-cyan color of the rift.
[FLUX ANOMALY - ACTIVE] [Classification: Class 2] [Boundary stability: NOMINAL] [Resonance output: 0.4 TFU] [Distance: Variable. 47m to 80m] [CAUTION: Civilian proximity advisory active.] [CAUTION: Safety threshold - 50m]
I read it, looked at the rift, and noticed a series of flags set in the ground at our feet. The survey team had marked the rift. We were at the fifty meter threshold. My feet had stopped on their own. The line was for civilians.
No one spoke.
I stepped forward, over the flags, and kept moving forward, slowly.
The pressure built with each step. The sub-sonic harmonic became an ache at the back of my jaw. The air smelled of ozone, like summer smelled before a storm. My legs moved easier than they should have. Forty meters.
The pull was familiar. I had spent four years thinking of my Flux as the half-second that lost the playoff. The half-second had been pulling me here all along.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.