The Ghost in the Data
The click of the front door's deadbolt was the starting pistol.
Aris sat in his desk chair, listening to the rumble of his father's old truck fading down the street. He was alone.
On his desk, the sugar cube pyramid—a perfect 1:47 scale model of the Pyramid of Khufu, complete with an internal chamber—sat next to his keyboard. A decoy.
He cracked his knuckles, the sound sharp in the quiet room. Time for his real work.
He opened the browser. The homepage was a generic news feed, the date stamped in the top corner: October 26, 2034.
He bypassed the news and went straight to the university library databases he'd... acquired... access to. His fingers flew.
Search: "Dr. Aris Thorne" + "Physics"
No results found.
His stomach tightened. Not with fear, but with a cold, electric thrill. He broadened the search.
Search: "Aris Thorne"
No results found.
Search: "Nobel Prize in Physics" + "2025"
He held his breath. He remembered the weight of the medal. The winners, according to this world's data, were a trio of Japanese physicists for their work on neutrino oscillations. Not him.
He was a ghost. He had never existed here.
He leaned back, the cheap office chair creaking in protest. So. It's true.
He was, in the absurd parlance of the cheap, pulp fiction he used to see on his old-world internet, isekaied.
A dry, humorless chuckle escaped him. He remembered the absurdities his old-lab colleagues would sometimes share. Japanese cartoons with protagonists reincarnated as spiders or slime. Novels about "cultivators" who could shatter mountains, or heroes who were greeted by blue-haired goddesses and a glowing blue "System Status" screen.
He stopped. He looked at his own hand. A pale, thin, 13-year-old hand.
Just for the data, he told himself.
He held his hand out, palm up, in the quiet of his suburban bedroom.
"Status," he said, his voice flat.
Nothing.
He closed his eyes. He reached... not with his hands, but with his mind. He searched for... what? Mana? Qi? A "life force"?
He felt... his own pulse. The faint itch of his t-shirt tag. The rumble of the house's air conditioning.
He opened his eyes. Nothing.
Of course.
"Of all the infinite realities," he muttered to the monitor, "I get the boring one."
No magic. No cultivation. No superpowers. Just Earth 2.0, with marginally better pot roast and a father who refused to oil a hinge.
The irony was, he had been "cleansed." He had been "inserted." This was not a random event. This was a design. And an experiment, by definition, must have a variable. If the variable wasn't magic, it had to be something... subtler.
He turned back to the computer. The variable must be classified.
He spent the next three hours in a controlled dive. He searched for anomalous energy readings, classified geological surveys, reports of "miracle" technologies. He hit wall after wall of government firewalls and .mil security.
It was exactly as he expected. He couldn't find the anomaly from the outside. The public-facing data was clean.
This wasn't a failure. It was a confirmation.
He needed better tools. He needed access. He needed to be on the inside.
Aris closed the browser. He opened a fresh, blank document. He typed:
A. Cole.
He deleted it. He typed:
Aris Cole.
He stared at the name. It was the uniform. It was the key. He would use their own "Einstein" to get in their door.
He typed a title beneath it.
A Unified Field Theory: Reconciling Gravity and Quantum Mechanics at the Planck Scale.
He smiled. It was the theory that should have won him his second Nobel. To get the keys to this world's secrets, he would have to play the part they expected: Aris Cole, the boy genius, presenting his brilliant "science fair project."
His hunt had truly begun.