# The Weight of Unopened Things

## Part 1: The Static

Mara felt the storm before she heard it.

It built in the pressure behind her eyes, a dull, thumping ache that usually signaled a drop in barometric pressure or simpler things, like dehydration. But tonight, the air in the old Victorian house felt thick, charged with a static electricity that made the fine hairs on her arms stand up.

She stood in the center of the attic, a clipboard in hand, surrounded by the carefully cataloged detritus of three generations. To anyone else, this room was a fire hazard; to Mara, it was a finely tuned ecosystem of memory. Her job as a restoration archivist for the town museum meant she spent her days breathing in dust mites and mold spores, saving other people’s history. Her nights, apparently, were spent doing the same for herself.

"Box 42," she muttered, checking the label on a rusted tin biscuit container. "Grandfather’s war letters. Damp damage likely."

She noted it down. The house was too big for one person, especially one who lived as quietly as Mara. At thirty-two, she had cultivated a life of safe, beige predictability. She drank Earl Grey tea because coffee made her jittery. She dated a man named Thomas for three years because he was kind and reliable, even if he kissed like he was filing a tax return. She broke up with him three months ago because she realized reliable wasn't enough to drown out the silence in the evenings.

Now, there was only the house, the storm, and the boxes.

Thunder cracked, close and violent, shaking the floorboards beneath her feet. The single bare bulb swaying overhead flickered, buzzing like an angry hornet.

"Great," she sighed. "Just great."

She moved to the window, wiping a circle in the condensation. Outside, the world was a wash of gray and charcoal. Rain lashed against the glass, distorting the streetlights into smudged yellow stars. It was a torrential downpour, the kind that flooded basements and washed away careful plans.

Behind her, something hummed.

It wasn't the lightbulb. This sound was deeper, a resonance that she felt in her teeth. It was a low, melodic thrum, like a cello bow drawn slowly across a slack string.

Mara turned.

The attic was deep, shadows stretching long fingers into the corners where the light didn't reach. The sound seemed to be coming from the far end, near the small, triangular window that looked out over the back garden.

She walked towards it, her footsteps creaking on the wood. The humming grew louder. It wasn't mechanical; it sounded... alive. Organic. A purr.

She pushed aside a garment rack draped in plastic-covered winter coats. There, sitting on top of an old steamer trunk, was a box she didn't recognize.

It was small, maybe six inches square, wrapped in paper that had yellowed to the color of old parchment. The twine binding it was frayed. There was no dust on it. In a room where dust was the primary geological layer, the box was pristine.

Mara shone her phone’s flashlight on the tag.

*To Mara,*

*For your 10th Birthday.*

*Love, Gran.*

Mara’s breath hitched. Gran. Elara Vance. The town eccentric, the retired physics professor who claimed to understand why toast always landed butter-side down. She had died two days before Mara’s tenth birthday.

Mara remembered the funeral. She remembered the rain—just like tonight. She didn't remember a gift.

"I never got this," she whispered to the empty room.

As she reached out, the humming spiked in pitch. The air around the box rippled, like heat haze on asphalt.

Mara snatched her hand back. "Okay. Tired. Hallucinating. Time for tea."

She turned to leave, but the sound changed. It wasn't just a hum anymore. It was a chorus. A thousand tiny whispers overlapping, voices murmuring just below the threshold of comprehension.

*Open me.*

*Take me.*

*Remember.*

She looked back. The box was glowing. Not reflecting light, but emitting it—a soft, bioluminescent blue that pulsed in time with the thrumming beat. The shadows in the corner of the attic recoiled from it, as if the light was physically pushing them back.

Curiosity, that fatal flaw of every Vance woman, overrode her preservation instinct. Mara reached out again.

Her finger brushed the rough texture of the wrapping paper.

The world dropped out from under her.

It wasn't a fall, exactly. It was a violent reorientation of perspective. One moment, up was the rafters and down was the floor. The next, gravity was a suggestion she had foolishly agreed to.

The attic dissolved. The smell of cedar and mothballs vanished, replaced by the sharp, metallic tang of ozone and... cinnamon?

Mara tumbled through a kaleidoscope of color—fractal spirals of gold and indigo—before slamming onto a hard, cold surface.

She gasped, scrambling to her hands and knees, expecting the rough wood of the attic floor. instead, her palms met polished obsidian.

She looked up.

She wasn't in her house. She wasn't in her town. She wasn't anywhere she had ever seen on a map.

She was standing on a walkway suspended in an endless void. Above, below, and to all sides stretched a cavernous space so vast it defied depth perception. And filling this space, rising like skyscrapers, were shelves.

Endless, impossibly high shelves.

And on the shelves were boxes.

Millions of them.

Some were wrapped in festive red paper with gold bows. Others were plain cardboard. Some were wooden creates, ancient and bound in iron. There were clay pots sealed with wax, futuristic metallic spheres, rough bundles of cloth.

Every single one of them was humming.

The sound here was deafening, a symphony of anticipation. The air shimmered with it. And floating around the shelves like fireflies were motes of light—blue, amber, furious red, soft pink.

Mara stood up, her legs trembling. "Where..."

"Row 9, Section K, Subsection: Regret," a voice boomed.

Mara spun around.

Floating a few feet of the ground was... something. It looked like a geometric shape trying to decide what to be. A shifting polyhedron of glass and light, constantly folding in on itself.

"You are unauthorized," the voice said, though the object didn't have a mouth. The sound vibrated directly in her skull. "Visitors are strictly prohibited by Article 4 of the Quantum Preservation Act. Please vacate the premises."

"I... I fell," Mara managed to squeak. "My grandmother's box... it hummed."

The shape paused its rotation. "Elara Vance?"

"Yes."

The object seemed to consider this. It descended, hovering at eye level. "Ah. The Prime Observer. You are the descendent."

"I'm Mara. Where am I?"

"You are in the Archive," the entity said, as if this explained everything. "The Repository of Unopened Potential. The library of things meant to be given, but never received."

Mara looked out at the endless canyon of shelves. "These are... presents?"

"Gifts. Offerings. Bribes. Tokens of affection. Apologies," the entity listed. "Any object transferred with intent but never completed. The wave function of the transaction was never collapsed. So, it is stored here."

Mara stepped closer to the edge of the walkway. A small, blue box floated past her face, pursued by a drift of soft, golden light motes. She felt a sudden wave of warmth washes over her—love, pure and unadulterated.

"They have... feelings?"

"Emotions are energy," the entity clipped. "The 'giver' imprints the object with anticipation. When the gift is unopened, that energy has nowhere to go. We store it."

"Who is 'we'?"

"I am the Curator. I maintain the Archive."

Mara looked back at the vastness. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. "Why? Why keep them?"

"Because," the Curator said, drifting closer, "an unopened gift is a universe of possibility. Until the box is opened, the cat is both dead and alive. until the letter is read, the lover is both forgiven and rejected. We study the potential. The 'what if'."

The words struck Mara like a physical blow. *What if.* The two words that haunted her 3 AM thoughts. What if she had applied to that art school in Paris? What if she hadn't broken up with Thomas? What if she had been deeper? Braver?

"My grandmother," Mara said, her voice steadying. "She sent me here?"

"She left a beacon," the Curator corrected. "The box in your attic. It was... highly irregular. It should have been collected decades ago. But it anchored itself to your timeline. It wanted to be found."

"Where is it?"

"It has returned to its slot," the Curator said, spinning a section of its body to point down into the abyss. "Row 42, Level 7. The causality loop is closed."

"I want it back," Mara said. The desire was sudden and fierce. That box was hers. Gran had left it for her.

The Curator flickered a warning red. "That is unadvisable. To open a gift in the Archive is not like opening a gift in the linear world. Here, the potential energy is critical. Opening it releases the timeline."

"Releases the timeline?"

"You grasp the concept of the multiverse, yes? Every choice creates a branch. An unopened gift is a held breath—a branch that never grew. If you open it here, you do not just see the object. You experience the reality where you received it."

Mara stared at him. "You mean... if I open that box... I see what would have happened?"

"You live it," the Curator said. "But be warned, Mara Vance. The Archive is sensitive. It is built on the tension of unfulfillment. Satisfaction... satisfaction breaks us. If you begin collapsing wave functions, you risk destabilizing the entire structure."

Mara looked down into the glowing depths. Somewhere down there was a reality where she wasn't standing in a drafty attic feeling sorry for herself. A reality where Gran hadn't died, or where she had left a different legacy.

"Take me to it," Mara said.

The Curator spun silently for a long moment. Then, with a sound like a sigh, it began to descend.

"Very well. But do not say you were not warned. Assessing the weight of unopened things is a heavy burden for a linear being."

They drifted down, the walkway extending beneath Mara's feet like magic. They passed shelves of wonders. Mara saw a bouquet of dried roses that radiated a heartbreaking sorrow—a rejected proposal, she guessed. She saw a toy soldier that marched in place, buzzing with childish excitement. She saw a pristine 1920s flapper dress that felt like nervous anticipation—a party never attended.

Finally, they stopped.

The shelf here was quiet. Dustier. The lights were dimmer.

"Here," the Curator said.

There it sat. The small box wrapped in yellowed paper. *To Mara.*

It hummed, a low, steady thrum that seemed to sync with her heartbeat.

Mara reached out. Her hand trembled.

"Remember," the Curator’s voice echoed in the vastness. "Once you open it, you cannot un-know the path not taken."

Mara didn't look back. She hooked her finger under the frayed twine.

She pulled.

The knot gave way.

The paper fell away.

And the Archive exploded into light.

## Part 2: The Path Not Taken

Light didn’t just fill the room; it rewrote it.

The obsidian shelves, the Curator, the cavernous silence of the Archive—they didn’t fade. They were scrubbed from existence, replaced instantly by the smell of wood smoke, wet wool, and hot cocoa.

Mara blinked. She wasn’t standing on a floating walkway anymore. She was sitting cross-legged on a braided rug. The floorboards beneath her were warm.

"Well?" a voice asked. "Are you going to open it, or just stare at it until you're eleven?"

Mara looked up.

Sitting in the wingback armrest chair, looking vibrant and fiercely alive, was Elara Vance. She wasn’t the pale, frail figure from the hospital bed that haunted Mara’s memories. She was robust, her silver hair pulled back in a messy bun secured with a pencil, her eyes sharp and twinkling behind oversized glasses.

"Gran?" Mara whispered. The word felt like a stone in her throat.

"Don't 'Gran' me," Elara teased, leaning forward. "Open it. I've been hiding it in the laundry hamper for three weeks. Do you know how hard it is to hide things from you? You have eyes like a hawk."

Mara looked down at her hands. She was holding the box. The same box. But the paper was crisp, the twine new. Her hands... they were small. Unlined. No ink stain on the middle finger from hours of cataloging. She looked at her wrist; she was wearing her childhood watch with the scratch on the face.

She was ten years old.

The memory of the Archive, of the storm, of her thirty-two-year-old self fading into a beige background—it felt like a dream she was waking up from. *This* felt real. The heat of the fire, the scratchy wool of her sweater, the way the light hit the dust motes dancing in the afternoon sun.

"Go on," Gran urged.

Mara tore the paper.

Inside was a wooden box, polished to a deep shine. She lifted the lid.

It wasn't a doll. It wasn't a book.

It was a lens. A brass-encased magnifying lens, heavy and intricate, with dials along the rim and a handle wrapped in leather.

"It's an Aether-Scope," Gran said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Standard issue for field researchers of the liminal sciences and fringe geology. Or, you know, for looking at bugs in the backyard. Whichever you prefer."

Mara lifted it. It was heavy. When she looked through the glass, the room didn't just get bigger; it got *brighter*. She saw the weave of the rug in impossible detail, but she also saw... something else. Tiny sparks of light dancing in the air.

"What is this?" young Mara breathed.

"A way to see the world as it really is," Gran said. "Not just the surface, Mara. The undercurrents. The magic hidden in the cracks." She reached out and cupped Mara’s cheek. "You have a gift, little one. You notice things. You’re quiet, yes, but you’re observing. This... this is to remind you that looking is an active verb. Don't just watch. *See*."

The scene shifted.

It wasn't a cut; it was a fast-forward, a blur of motion like a tape spinning.

Mara was sixteen. She was on a rooftop in London, the Aether-Scope in her hand, looking at the gargoyles of a cathedral. Through the lens, she saw they were sleeping stone beasts, breathing slowly. She was sketching them, her notebook filled not with restoration notes, but with wild, beautiful theories. She wasn't afraid of the height. She felt electric.

Shift.

Twenty-two. A jungle in Peru. She was muddy, sweating, laughing as she pulled a tarpaulin off a stone marker. A team of researchers behind her were cheering. She wasn’t the quiet archivist; she was the lead xenolinguist. She was loud. She was arguing with a professor about the translation of a glyph, waving her hands, confident in her brilliance.

Shift.

Twenty-eight. A gallery opening. *Her* gallery. Her photographs of "The Hidden World"—shots taken through the Aether-Scope—lined the walls. Critics were calling it "haunting" and "revelatory." A man walked up to her. Not Thomas. This man had paint on his jeans and eyes that laughed. He handed her a glass of champagne. "To the woman who sees ghosts," he toasted. She kissed him, and it wasn't safe or reliable. It was fireworks.

Shift.

Thirty-two. Today. But not the beige house. Not the silence.

She was in a study, surrounded by books, maps, and artifacts. The Aether-Scope sat on her desk, battered and well-loved. The man with the paint-stained jeans—Julian—was asleep on the couch. There was a baby monitor on the desk, soft static coming from it.

She was happy.

God, she was so happy. It wasn't the absence of sadness; it was the presence of *life*. It was messy and loud and colorful. She felt full. She felt like she had used every minute of those twenty-two years since the gift.

Gran was there, in a framed photo on the desk. She had lived to be ninety in this timeline. She had seen Mara’s first expedition. She had held the baby.

Mara picked up the Aether-Scope in this reality. She held it to her eye, looking out the window at the rain.

But instead of the hidden magic, she saw a crack.

A jagged, black fissure running through the sky.

She lowered the lens. The crack was gone.

She raised it again. The crack was wider. And through it, she saw... obsidian shelves.

"No," Mara whispered.

The world shuddered. The warmth of the study flickered. The smell of old books was momentarily replaced by ozone.

"Mara?" Julian stirred on the couch. But his voice sounded tinny, like audio played through a bad speaker. "Did you hear that hum?"

"The hum," Mara said, panic rising in her chest.

She looked at her research notes. The handwriting was hers, but the words were sliding off the page. The ink was running, pooling into black droplets that floated upward, defying gravity.

"It’s not real," a voice boomed. Not Julian’s. *The Curator.*

"It is real!" Mara shouted back, clutching the desk. "I lived it! I remember the jungle! I remember the gallery!"

"You remember the *potential*," the Curator’s voice resonated, vibrating the floorboards. "You are consuming the energy of the timeline. But the timeline was never anchored. It is a ghost narrative. And you... you are too heavy for it. You are breaking the simulation."

The crack in the sky tore open. A chunk of the ceiling—plaster and lath—dissolved into digital noise, revealing the dark, endless void of the Archive above.

Julian sat up, but his face was blurring, his features washing away like watercolor in the rain. "Mara? What's happening?"

"I don't want to leave!" she screamed at the void. "This is my life! This is the life I was supposed to have!"

"It is the life you *could* have had," the Curator corrected. "If the box had been opened. But it was not. You are a visitor here, Mara Vance. And your visa has expired."

The floor beneath her began to dissolve. The rug turned into mist. The desk crumbled into dust.

Mara grabbed the Aether-Scope. It was the only thing that felt solid. The anchor.

"If I keep it..." she desperate thought. "If I keep the gift, I keep the timeline."

"To keep the gift is to overwrite the observer," the Curator warned. "If you stay, the Mara who entered the Archive ceases to exist. You become this version. You forget the restoration archivist. You forget the silence. You forget the lesson."

"What lesson?" Mara cried, tears streaming down her face—the face of a happy, fulfilled woman. "That safety is misery? I learned that! I don't want to go back to the beige!"

"The lesson," the Curator said, "is that the choice gives the gift value. A life unlived is perfect because it is untouched by compromise. To make it real... you must accept the flaws."

The study was gone. Julian was gone.

Mara was floating in a white void, clutching the brass lens. Below her, the beige Victorian house waited. Above her, the vibrant, chaotic life she had just tasted tempted her with color.

"Choose," the Curator whispered. "The Archive collapses in ten seconds."

"I can't," Mara sobbed. "I can't lose him again. I can't lose *her*."

"Eight seconds. The structural integrity of Sector 7 is critical."

The white void began to fill with the "fireflies"—the emotions of other unopened gifts. They swirled around her, a hurricane of other people’s lost chances. A toy train that wanted to be played with. A letter that wanted to be read.

They were all screaming. *Let us out. Let us happen.*

"If I stay," Mara asked the void, "what happens to the other me?"

"She is overwritten. erased. She never stepped into the attic. She simply... becomes you. But she—you—will never know you made the choice. You will simply *be*."

"And if I go back?"

"You keep the memory of this. You keep the 'what if'. But you return to the silence."

Mara looked at the lens. In the reflection of the glass, she saw herself. Not the confident explorer, but the tired archivist with the messy bun and the sad eyes.

Did that woman deserve to be erased? Was she just a mistake to be corrected?

"Five seconds."

The humming was a roar now. The Archive was shaking apart.

Mara gripped the handle of the Aether-Scope until her knuckles turned white.

"I choose..."

## Part 3: The Fracture

Mara hesitated.

And in the quantum mechanics of the Archive, hesitation was a physical force.

The "five seconds" the Curator had promised stretched and snapped. The white void didn't hold. The floor—what was left of it—gave way completely.

Mara didn't fall down. She fell *sideways*.

She was yanked by gravity that pulled in three directions at once. The Aether-Scope slipped from her grasp, tumbling away into the kaleidoscope chaos.

"No!" she screamed, reaching for it.

But her hand didn't grab brass. It grabbed... wool.

Rough, wet, grey wool.

The white void was gone. The smell of ozone was gone.

She was cold. Bone-deep, shivering cold. The air smelled of mud, cordite, and unwashed bodies.

"Keep your head down, private!"

Mara was slammed into the mud. Rain—not the gentle English rain of her attic, but a hard, sleeting misery—pounded against a metal helmet she was wearing. She wasn't Mara Vance. She was... Thomas? No, not her Thomas. A man. A soldier.

She *was* him. She felt the stubble on his chin, the ache in his rotting boots. And she felt the weight in his breast pocket.

A letter.

*My Dearest James...*

In the "real" timeline—the one recorded in history books—Private James Miller never opened the letter. He was afraid it was a "Dear John." afraid she had left him. He died in a trench three hours later, clutching the unopened envelope, convinced he was unloved.

But here, in the Archive's fracture, Mara-as-James tore it open with shaking, muddy fingers.

*...I was wrong. I was so angry when you left, but I was wrong. I love you. I’m waiting. Come home to us.*

The relief was a physical agony. Tears cut tracks through the mud on his face. He wasn't alone. He was loved.

"I have to get home," he whispered.

He stood up. He didn't cower in the trench. He had a reason to move. He ran. He dodged the mortar fire that, in the other timeline, had buried him. He ran with the strength of a man who knew he was forgiven.

The scene shattered.

Glass breaking.

Mara gasped, her lungs filling with smoke.

She was in a kitchen. It was 1954. She was a housewife in a floral apron. There was a box on the table. A birthday gift from her husband. She knew—with the omniscience of the timeline—that in the primary reality, she never opened it. She had left it on the table during their final argument, walked out the door, and drove her car off the bridge in the storm.

Here, she opened it.

A locket. Inside, a picture of a baby. An ultrasound.

"We can try again," the note said.

She dropped to her knees, sobbing. She didn't leave the house. She didn't drive the car. She walked into the living room and hugged the man who was weeping on the sofa. The crash never happened. The tragedy was averted.

Scene after scene. Life after life.

Mara was a CEO who opened a resignation letter she’d ignored, realizing her company was unethical, and dismantled it to save a rainforest.

She was a child who opened a box of paints and became a master instead of an accountant.

She was an old man who finally opened the DNA results and found the daughter he thought he’d lost.

It was a torrent of joy. A waterfall of "fixed" things.

So why did it feel so wrong?

Mara tumbled through the visions, a ghost in the machine. Every time a gift was opened, the timeline healed, yes—but the Archive screamed.

With every "happy ending" accessed, the structure around her fractured further. The shelves in the distance were crumbling. The "fireflies"—the raw potential energy—were burning out.

She landed hard on a platform of drifting stone.

The Curator was there. It—he—looked damaged. The geometric shapes were jagged, spinning erratically.

"You see?" the Curator’s voice ground out, sounding like grinding tectonic plates. "You see what you are doing?"

"I'm fixing them!" Mara shouted, scrambling up. "Look at them! The soldier lived! The woman didn't crash! How can you hoard this? How can you keep these happy endings locked in boxes?"

"We do not hoard," the Curator roared, expanding until he blocked out the chaotic sky. "We *balance*!"

He gestured with a jagged arm of light.

"Look closer, Mara Vance. Look past the happy ending."

Mara looked back at the soldier. James Miller. He survived. He went home to his wife.

But because he survived, he wasn't there to push the young sergeant out of the way of the grenade. The sergeant died.

The sergeant who, in the original timeline, went on to father the man who discovered the cure for a chaotic plague in 2040.

Mara watched in horror as the plague swept across the vision, wiping out millions.

She looked at the housewife. She didn't crash. She had the baby.

But because she didn't crash, the bridge wasn't repaired. A school bus crossed it two weeks later. The collapse killed thirty children.

"Potentiality is a web," the Curator said, his voice shrinking back to a sombre thrum. "You cannot pull one thread without shaking the whole. We store the 'unopened' because the timeline *chose* to leave them unopened. To force them open is to re-roll the dice of the universe."

"But they're sad," Mara whispered. "They're so sad."

"Sorrow is structural," the Curator said gently. "Regret is the mortar that holds history together. If everyone got what they wanted... if every gift was opened... the world would be chaos. It would be a story with no conflict. A song with no silence."

Mara fell to her knees on the floating stone.

She understood.

The Archive wasn't a prison. It was a dam. It held back the infinite flood of "what ifs" so that the one stream of "what is" could flow.

"And my box?" she asked, her voice trembling. "My happy ending? Does it kill someone? Does my gallery opening cause a war?"

The Curator hovered closer. "No. Yours is... smaller. You are not a nexus point, Mara. You are civilians in the war of causality. If you choose the timeline where you are the explorer... the world does not end."

"Then why stop me?"

"I did not stop you. I warned you. The world does not end. But *you* do."

The Curator projected an image.

It was the "Restoration Mara." The beige Mara.

She was sitting in her attic, staring at the empty spot where the box had been. She looked tired. She was alone.

But then, without the box to fix her life, she stood up. She walked downstairs. She called her mother. She quit her job the next day—not because a magic box told her to, but because she was tired of the dust.

She bought a plane ticket. Economy class. To Peru.

She didn't lead an expedition. She took a tour. She met Julian—not at a gallery, but at a hostel bar. It was awkward. It wasn't fireworks. It was a slow burn.

"This is the timeline where you leave the box closed," the Curator said. "It is harder. It is slower. It is not perfect. You struggle. You cry. You fail."

"But it's *mine*," Mara whispered.

"In the simulation," the Curator said, gesturing to the other vision—the glamorous, successful Mara with the Aether-Scope, "you are happy because the gift *made* you happy. You were given the path. The box opened the door."

"In the other one..." Mara watched the beige Mara struggling with a heavy backpack, laughing as she tripped. "I opened the door myself."

The Archive was groaning. The shelves were turning to dust.

"The time is up, Mara," the Curator said. "The collapse is critical. You must return to your anchor point and make the observations final. Once you leave, the Archive resets. The forgotten presents are forgotten again."

"And the soldier? The housewife?"

"They return to their rest. Their potential remains potential. Possibility, not reality."

Mara stood up. The Aether-Scope was suddenly in her hand again—the manifestation of her choice.

"Take me back to the study," she said.

"To choose the timeline?"

"No," Mara said, gripping the brass handle. "To say goodbye."

## Part 4: The Empty Shelf

The study reassembled itself around her, but it felt thin. The books on the shelves no longer had titles, just blurred lines of color. The rain against the window made no sound.

Julian was still sitting on the couch, looking at her with confused, pixelated eyes.

"Mara?" he asked again. The loop had reset. "Did you hear that hum?"

Mara walked over to him. In this reality—this beautiful, fragile bubble—they had been together for six years. She knew how he took his coffee. She knew the scar on his knee from a hiking trip in Patagonia. She knew he snored when he was stressed.

She reached out and touched his face. It felt like warm static.

"It's okay," she said, her voice thick. "It's just the house settling."

"You look sad," Julian said, creating a new line of dialogue that the simulation desperately generated to fit the input. "Why are you crying? Did the grant application get rejected?"

Mara laughed, a wet, choked sound. "No. The grant was approved. Everything was approved. That's the problem."

She sat down beside him. She wanted to memorize him. Not the data of him—not the height and weight and eye color—but the *feeling* of being loved by him.

"Julian," she said. "I have to go."

"Go?" He frowned. "To the store? In this weather?"

"Further than that." She took his hand. "I going to find you. The real you. Or... someone like you. I'm going to take the trip, and I'm going to be messy, and I'm probably going to get lost."

"You're not making sense, Mara."

"I know." She leaned in and kissed him. It tasted like ozone and memory. "Thank you for the preview."

She stood up.

On the desk, the Aether-Scope sat in its open box. It was the anchor. The source of the signal.

To leave, she didn't need to click her heels. She just needed to close the loop.

She walked to the desk. She looked at the photo of Gran one last time. In the photo, Gran was winking.

"You knew," Mara whispered to the picture. "You didn't send me this so I could keep it. You sent it so I could see what I was missing."

She placed the brass lens back into the velvet lining of the box.

The humming began to rise, a crescendo of strings that vibrated in her marrow. The room began to shake.

Julian stood up, panic finally breaking the loop. "Mara! What are you doing?"

"I'm opening the door," Mara said.

She reached for the lid.

"I love you!" the simulation shouted.

"I know," Mara said.

She slammed the lid shut.

***

Darkness.

Silence.

Gravity returned with a vengeance, slamming into her like a physical weight.

Mara gasped, inhaling dust. She was on her knees. The floorboards were hard and cold.

She opened her eyes.

The attic was dark, lit only by the grey moonlight filtering through the rain-streaked window. The storm had passed, leaving only a steady, rhythmic drizzle.

There was no humming. No bioluminescent light. No Curator.

Mara looked down.

On the steamer trunk in front of her, there was a square of dust-free wood. A clean outline where a box had been.

But the box was gone.

"Collected," she whispered. The Curator had done his job. The loop was closed. The potential energy had been cataloged.

She was alone. She was thirty-two. She was a restoration archivist who lived in a beige house and drank Earl Grey tea.

Mara squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the crushing weight of regret to flatten her. She waited to mourn the loss of the gallery, the fame, the husband.

But it didn't come.

Instead, she felt... light.

She stood up. Her legs were cramped, but they held her. She walked to the window and looked out at the street. It was the same street. The same puddles reflecting the same streetlamps.

But she wasn't the same.

She looked at her reflection in the glass. It was faint, ghostly. She didn't see the tired woman anymore. She saw the glint of the Aether-Scope in her eyes. She saw the woman who had walked through a quantum hurricane and told a god of regret to go to hell.

"Okay," she said aloud. Her voice sounded rusty, but strong.

She turned away from the window. She didn't look back at the empty spot on the trunk. She walked to the pile of restoration work she had brought up—the "Box 42" of grandfather's dampened letters.

She picked up the clipboard.

She snapped the pencil in half.

She dropped the clipboard on the floor. It clattered loudly in the silence.

Mara walked to the trapdoor stairs. She climbed down, leaving the attic darkness behind.

She went to her kitchen. She poured the lukewarm Earl Grey down the sink. She opened the cupboard, found the jar of instant coffee she kept for guests, and made herself a cup. It was bitter. It was sludge. It was delicious.

She sat at her kitchen table and opened her laptop.

She typed *flights to Lima* into the search bar.

The prices were exorbitant. The travel time was twenty hours with a layover in Houston. She didn't speak Spanish. She didn't have a grant. She didn't have an Aether-Scope.

She booked it.

Then she went to her closet. She pulled out the beige cardigans, the sensible slacks, the museum-grade cotton gloves. She shoved them into a trash bag.

At the back of the closet, buried under a pile of linens, she found an old denim jacket she hadn't worn since college. She put it on. It was tight in the shoulders, but it felt like armor.

She walked into her living room. It was too clean. Too quiet.

"Alexa," she said to the dormant speaker. "Play... play something loud."

The speaker hesitated, then blasted a 90s grunge track she hadn't listened to in a decade.

Mara stood in the center of her living room, the coffee burning her tongue, the music shaking the walls.

She thought of the Archive. The miles of shelves. The millions of unopened gifts, each one a universe of "what if" trapped in amber.

She thought of James Miller, the soldier. She thought of the housewife. She thought of the peace of the unlived life, safe and perfect and dead.

"Keep it," she whispered to the invisible Curator. "Keep it all. I don't need the potential."

She took a sip of the bitter coffee. She grabbed her phone to call her mother. She started to plan.

She had a lot of packing to do. And for the first time in her life, she wasn't packing to preserve the past.

She was packing to open the future.

The box was gone. But looking around the messy, loud, imperfect room, Mara realized the truth.

The gift wasn't the Aether-Scope. The gift wasn't the magic lens or the alternate timeline.

The gift was the hunger.

And she was finally, terrifyingly, wonderfully starving.

She took a deep breath, and for a moment, just for a second, she swore she heard a hum. Not from the attic. But from inside her own chest.

Mara smiled.

"Open," she said.

And she began.

## The End

(c) 2024 by James Hunter, All Rights Reserved