Lost Between Layers

The room shook. Around the center of the room stood a massive, cylindrical apparatus. Its edges gleamed in the artificial light. Coils of wire snaked from its base to the walls and ceiling. It produced an incessant hum that almost made one insane.

Dr. Elara Mitchell, dressed in a white lab coat stained with various chemicals, circled the machine erratically. Monitors showed a rapid spike in energy levels as if an external force was trying to communicate through the machine.

“Sebastian!” she shouted, beckoning to her assistant on the other side of the glass-paneled observation deck. “Cut the power. It’s going to overload.”

Sebastian hesitated, his hand hovering above the large red button. “But the data. We might never get another spike like this.”

“This is bigger than the data. Do it,” she snapped.

He slammed his palm down. The room plunged into darkness. The hum stopped abruptly, leaving a ringing silence in its wake.

The emergency lights flickered on, and Elara rushed to the machine’s core. Embedded within was a clear chamber, designed to harness and amplify signals from deep space. Their mission was to detect signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Within the chamber, instead of the expected void, there was a ghostly figure, vaguely human but distorted. It floated, its features contorting in anguish.

“What have we done?”

Sebastian approached the chamber, hand outstretched, fingertips brushing against the cool glass. The figure’s face turned towards him, eyes pleading.

“We’ve bridged a gap. Not between planets, but between dimensions,” she replied.

They both stared at the entity. “It’s trapped. It’s here, but not entirely. Like... a ghost in a dream,” Sebastian replied.

“Then we need to send it back. We’ve tampered with forces we don’t understand,” she said.

Working tirelessly, they recalibrated the machine. Time compressed hours into what felt like minutes, and just as exhaustion threatened to take over, the machine hummed back to life. The figure in the chamber flickered, its form growing fainter.

Suddenly, a bright flash engulfed the room, and the entity vanished from the chamber. The lab settled into its normal rhythm, the only evidence of the day’s events being the erratic data readings and the deep sense of wonder in the hearts of the two scientists.

Later, Elara and Sebastian sat in the dim glow of their lab. “It’s a big universe, but maybe dimensions, not planets, are the real frontier,” Sebastian said.

Elara didn’t respond but merely stared off into space.

A few nights later, on the eve of Halloween, the lab’s machines hummed back to life.

Elara worked late on some notes and suddenly a cold hand grazed her shoulder. She spun around and saw no one, but the temperature kept dropping.

“Sebastian, is that you?” There was only silence.

Sebastian strolled through the lab entrance, holding two mugs of steaming coffee. “Thought you might want some,” he said. He squinted, shivering as he clung to the mugs. “It’s freezing in here,” he added.

Elara gave a half smile and quickly returned her gaze to the chamber. A mist from the inside slowly expanded, a silhouette forming.

“Sebastian, look,” she whispered, pointing at the chamber.

The ghostly figure stared back at them, its eyes no longer pleading but angry, glowing blue.

“What does it want?”

It mouthed a few words, something they couldn’t make out.

Suddenly, the lights flickered, and all the equipment powered on.

They turned toward each other. “We need to find a way to send it back,” Sebastian said.

Elara adjusted the machine, desperately trying to recreate the conditions that had initially brought the entity. Sebastian hurried to enter the same codes from the previous night.

The room shook violently, the noise reaching an unbearable pitch. The entity motioned its limbs in different directions. Each time, several pieces of equipment sparked and caught fire.

“Synchronize the machine’s pulse with the entity’s frequency,” Elara shouted.

Sebastian adjusted the controls. The display showed a line representing both numbers slowly converging. As the the machine’s signal matched that of the entity, a portal-like rift appeared above the chamber. The ghostly figure, now surrounded by a swirling vortex of energy, slowly floated towards it.

The lab equipment echoed one last screech. The entity rushed into the portal, which then snapped shut.

Elara and Sebastian exhaled. The posture relaxed.

“We did it,” Sebastian said.

“Which was what, exactly?”

She hesitated for a moment. “Sometimes, even in science, some mysteries are best left unsolved.”