Silence.
Not quiet—silence. A pure, weighted absence of sound, as if the universe's background track had been suddenly severed.
Emily's first thought was that she had gone deaf. A second ago, the library had its usual afternoon sounds—the quiet murmur of students studying, the hum of air conditioning, distant footsteps in the hallway, and beneath it all, the campus background noise filtering through the windows. That familiar soundscape of a university afternoon—students chatting outside, doors opening and closing, the occasional bicycle bell. Now, all of it had been cut off by an invisible hand.
The vacuum-like silence lasted perhaps two or three seconds, then new sounds began to seep in—but wrong somehow. Muffled. Unfamiliar. She couldn't place what had changed, only that something fundamental had shifted.
Emily gripped the conference table and pulled herself to her feet, dizzy. The third-floor library seminar room looked like it had been shaken violently. Emergency lights flickered in one corner of the ceiling. Several books had fallen from the shelves onto the dusty floor. One corner of the projection screen had torn away from the ceiling and dangled loose. A crack ran from top to bottom across the floor-to-ceiling window beside her.
She stumbled to that cracked window and gripped its cold frame. Cool air seeped through the fissure—carrying scents and sounds that didn't belong. Something wild. Ancient.
She forced herself to look outside.
Then her breath stopped. Her heart felt as if an icy hand had seized it and squeezed.
She could see familiar buildings with their gray tiles. The path where students usually gathered between classes, now eerily empty.
But they shouldn't be here.
These familiar buildings of twenty-first-century civilization sat like misplaced artifacts in a landscape that belonged to another age. Where the city should have stretched beyond the campus boundaries, dense forest pressed in—unfamiliar trees tangled together in primordial chaos. Where other university buildings and city streets should have continued, she saw only wilderness. No buildings, no roads, no signs of human presence beyond their transported fragment of campus.
The entire university campus—or rather, part of it: the library, several dormitories and classroom buildings—looked like an irregular circular patch that had been surgically excised by divine hands from a modern city map and carelessly pasted onto a chart of some prehistoric landscape.
The impossible sight triggered her memory of the last normal minutes before everything changed.
The memory began with the Q&A session. She'd shot her hand up first, as always: "Professor Zhang Xiaoyu (William), your multiverse theory—is there any way we could actually test it? Any way at all?"
Professor Zhang had given her that familiar academic smile—she'd seen it in his courses before. "Well, multiverse theory remains purely hypothetical. Perhaps your generation will find a way to verify it."
The disappointment had been sharp but familiar. The most beautiful ideas always seemed locked away behind that word: hypothetical. She sat down, frustrated by the patronizing answer.
After Emily, Ahmed raised his hand and asked his question in English about whether sci-fi helped real science. While other students continued asking their questions, Ahmed leaned over and whispered to Emily, showing her his phone screen. "Emily, are you familiar with Professor Zhang? I just found his blog—he's published quite a few sci-fi book reviews. I'd really like to get to know him. Could you introduce me?"
Emily looked at the blog, scrolling through a few posts. "Sort of familiar," she said with a slight frown. "I've taken several of his courses, but we're not really close—just the usual student-teacher relationship."
She paused, then brightened. "But actually, I heard he has another seminar tomorrow about sci-fi history and physics development. We could volunteer to help him organize materials. That would give us a chance to talk with him properly."
"Perfect," Ahmed nodded, pocketing his phone as Zhang answered another student's question.
Ten minutes later, after fielding more questions, Zhang wrapped up: "Alright, that's all for today. Happy anniversary celebration everyone!"
Students began filing out, chatting about which exhibits to visit next. Emily and Ahmed stayed in their seats, waiting. When the lecture hall had mostly emptied, leaving just the three of them, Emily pulled Ahmed along toward the podium where Zhang was packing his materials.
"Professor Zhang," Emily said quickly, "you have that seminar tomorrow about sci-fi history and physics development, right? My friend and I would like to help you prepare materials. What do you think?"
Zhang looked up from his papers, recognizing Emily. "Oh, you're in my courses—Emily, right?" He glanced at Ahmed, taking in his scholarly appearance. "And your friend is...?"
Ahmed stepped forward. "Ahmed Gadeed, Egyptian anthropologist. Very pleased to meet you, Professor Zhang."
"Well, this is perfect timing," Zhang said, shaking Ahmed's hand. "I was just thinking I needed help organizing materials. Thank you both."
The memory then shifted to the library's third floor, where they'd commandeered a corner table, books already piling up between them like fortification.
"Alright," Professor Zhang had said, clearly pleased to have eager assistants. "I need passages from these 17th to 20th century sci-fi works that show how authors imagined physics might evolve." He'd handed them a printed list.
Ahmed looked over the list. "I've read about a third of these—The Time Machine, Foundation, Star Maker. I can find the relevant passages from memory."
"Show-off," Emily muttered, but she was smiling. "I've read maybe a fifth. Let me start with the ones I know."
The worn pages of Wells's book had felt reassuringly solid under her fingers, but her mind kept circling back. "Professor Zhang," she'd said suddenly, "if physical laws really could be different in other universes—like, fundamentally different—then somewhere out there, time travel isn't just possible, it's easy, right? Somewhere, the impossible is normal?"
Zhang had looked up from his own book, and for a moment, his academic mask had slipped. "You know, Emily, that's exactly the kind of thinking that got me into physics. And science fiction." He'd paused. "But we're still stuck in this universe, with these laws."
"Unfortunately," she'd sighed.
That's when Ahmed had leaned back in his chair with that look—the one he got when he was about to say something he thought was profound. "Careful what you wish for, Em."
"Oh god, not this again."
"I'm serious!" But his eyes had been laughing. "The universe has a twisted sense of humor. You keep asking for the impossible, one day it might just..." He'd snapped his fingers.
"Right," Emily had said, throwing a pencil at him. "And I suppose you've got some mystical connection to the cosmos that warns you about these things?"
"Maybe I do." He'd caught the pencil, grinning. "Maybe I'm trying to save you from your own curiosity."
"Too late for that," she'd laughed, looking out at the disgustingly normal afternoon beyond the window—students on the lawn, the city skyline hazed with pollution, everything exactly where it was supposed to be. "God, I wish something would just happen. Just once. Just to prove it's possible."
The moment those words left her lips—
Deputy Mayor Li Wei (Michael) smoothed the edge of his speech cards. Three minutes ahead of schedule. Perfect.
A doctoral student's cursor hovered over the backup button. Three months of simulation data. Just one more minute to finish this calculation first.
Oil bubbling at 375 degrees. Soup pots at full boil. Prep for 3,000 dinners, right on schedule.
"This is the last one, no more after this." Wang Li (Lily) released her daughter's hand. Xiaoxiao ran laughing toward the souvenir stand.
Professor Liu tilted the beaker. "And when we add the catalyst—" The clear solution began to change color.
The basketball arced through the air. Perfect trajectory. Nothing but net.
Just a boundary marker for the event space. Xiaoxiao's sandal touched it—
The world skipped.
There was no other word for it. Like reality itself had hiccupped.
For Emily, mid-laugh at her own joke, it felt like someone had yanked the universe sideways. Her inner ear screamed conflicting information—falling, spinning, perfectly still—all at once. The book in her hands seemed to weigh nothing, then everything, then nothing again.
For Michael, the podium microphone shrieked—a millisecond of feedback that shouldn't have been possible with the digital system. His next word died in his throat as his body insisted, impossibly, that gravity had changed direction for a fraction of a heartbeat.
For Wang Li, the ground simply wasn't where it should be. Her foot came down on solid pavement that felt momentarily liquid, then too solid, like stepping through dimensions.
Less than a second. That's all. Less time than it takes to blink.
But in that fraction of a second, something fundamental had broken. Some cosmic editor had lifted their pen from reality's page, and when they set it down again, it was on different paper entirely.
Emily blinked hard, the memory releasing her back to the impossible present. Her hands were still gripping the window frame so tightly her knuckles had gone white. Outside, a bird she didn't recognize—too large, wrong colors, wrong song—perched on what had been a campus bench.
Behind her, she heard Ahmed's sharp intake of breath. Then the scrape of a chair as Professor Zhang sat down heavily.
"Emily." Ahmed's voice cracked on her name. She turned to find him staring at her with an expression she'd never seen before—all his confidence, his humor, his mystical pretensions stripped away, leaving only naked incomprehension. "Your wish..."
"Don't." Her own voice sounded strange, too high.
"You wished for something to happen. You literally said—" He laughed, but it came out wrong, edged with hysteria. "Jesus Christ, Emily. You asked the universe to prove the impossible was possible, and it... it actually listened."
Professor Zhang hadn't moved from his chair. He was staring at his hands as if he'd never seen them before, whispering under his breath—equations, Emily realized. "F equals ma, E equals mc squared, entropy equals k log W..." He was reciting fundamental physics laws like prayers, as if confirming they still existed.
From somewhere outside—from the displaced buildings—came the sound of screaming.
The screaming was coming from everywhere.
Emily forced herself to let go of the window frame. Her knuckles were white, her hands shaking. "We need to see what's happening out there."
"Emily, wait." Ahmed was already standing, but his voice carried a new gravity. "Whatever's out there, we go together."
Professor Zhang closed his laptop with deliberate care. "The scientific method applies to survival situations too. Observe first. Hypothesize second. Test carefully."
They moved toward the door together. The building around them was alive with noise—running footsteps, slamming doors, voices calling out in multiple languages. The controlled urgency of people who couldn't quite believe what they were seeing.
The stairwell was a river of confused movement. Students emerged from study rooms clutching laptops that no longer worked. Faculty members stood in doorways, their faces pale. A maintenance worker rushed past carrying a toolbox, muttering something about "the main breaker" in Chinese.
"Professor Zhang!" A graduate student appeared at Zhang's elbow, his face flushed with exertion. "The lab equipment—everything connected to the grid just stopped. But the backup battery systems are still—"
"Later," Zhang cut him off, not unkindly. "First we see what we're dealing with."
They reached the ground floor as the first emergency alarm began to wail—something local, high-pitched and urgent. Through the library's glass doors, Emily could see people streaming out of buildings across the campus. Moving quickly, following disaster protocols they'd never expected to use.
The air outside hit them like a physical force. Not hot—cooler than it should be for September in Donghai. And wrong somehow. Cleaner. Emily's nose picked up traces she couldn't identify: unfamiliar vegetation, something earthy and ancient.
"The power grid's completely down," Zhang said, his voice tight with concentration. He was looking at the emergency lights that should have kicked in. "But look—" He pointed to the fountain in the campus's central plaza. "Gravity works. The sun's the same color. If this is a different universe, it operates on familiar physics."
"Familiar physics don't explain that," Ahmed said quietly.
He was pointing beyond the displaced campus buildings. Where the city of Donghai should stretch to the horizon, there was only forest. Not suburban development slowly giving way to green space, but dense, ancient trees that looked like they'd been growing undisturbed for centuries.
"Dear God," Emily whispered.
It wasn't just the trees. She could see other displaced campus buildings scattered across the landscape like pieces from a child's game, each surrounded by its own pocket of familiar pavement and landscaping. The engineering complex sat about 200 meters away, its parking lot ending abruptly at the edge of grassland.
"Look," Zhang said, pointing toward various spots across the campus. "People everywhere."
Emily could see scattered groups—some in formal clothes from the anniversary event, others in casual wear. They weren't gathering or organizing, just standing in confused clusters or wandering aimlessly. Some sat on the ground in shock. A few were shouting names, looking for people.
"I think I see someone I know," Zhang said, spotting a figure in a suit among the confusion. "We should try to help somehow."
They began walking across the campus plaza, joining a stream of others moving in the same direction. The conversations around them were a babel of languages—Chinese, English, Arabic, what sounded like German. Emily caught fragments:
"—no cell service, landlines are dead—" "—told my wife I'd be home by seven—" "—physics department, do you know what—"
"Professor Zhang!"
The voice came from ahead. Zhang's eyes lit up with recognition as a figure broke away from the anniversary guest group and hurried toward them.
"Old Li!" Zhang called out. "Michael!"
The man approaching them looked disheveled despite his formal suit. His face was pale, and Emily could see his hands trembling slightly as he reached them.
"Old Zhang!" Michael grabbed Zhang's arm. "What the hell is happening? Where are we? This isn't Donghai anymore, is it?" The words came out in rapid Chinese.
Zhang shook his head helplessly. "I don't know any more than you do. This is Emily, my student, and Dr. Ahmed Gadeed, an Egyptian anthropologist. They were just helping me prepare materials for tomorrow's seminar when this happened."
"Deputy Mayor?" Emily said quietly in surprise when she heard Michael's title.
Michael managed to shake their hands despite his obvious distress. "Li Wei, Deputy Mayor of Donghai," he said. He pulled out his phone with shaking fingers, showing the dead signal. "Nothing works. No calls, no GPS. How do we even get help?"
"We need to think," Zhang said carefully. "Look around—we have students, guests, people with no survival experience. If someone wanders off into that forest..."
Michael pressed his palms against his eyes briefly. "Right. We should organize people somehow. Get them together." His voice steadied slightly as he focused on practical matters. "But there's no protocol for this."
"Maybe start by gathering everyone?" Zhang suggested. "Get people to one place at least."
Michael looked lost for a moment, then seemed to notice another familiar face approaching—a distinguished-looking older man who carried himself with the bearing of someone used to authority.
"Dr. Zhao," Michael called out, relief visible in his voice. "This is Professor Zhang from Physics. Dr. Zhao Ming (Martin) ran the Third Affiliated Hospital."
Dr. Zhao nodded grimly as he joined them. "I was attending the medical innovation talk when..." He gestured helplessly at their surroundings. "Is this what I think it is? Like those web novels everyone reads?"
"Those novels assume people want to time travel," Emily interjected in Chinese, her pronunciation clear and natural. "Nobody wants this."
Michael did a double-take, surprised by the fluent Chinese coming from the foreign student.
"Don't," Michael said to Dr. Zhao, recovering. "This isn't some story where we become heroes. If this is really..." He couldn't finish the sentence.
Zhang and Dr. Zhao exchanged a look.
"People are looking for leadership," Dr. Zhao said quietly. "They're scared. They want someone to tell them it's going to be okay."
"And do we?" Michael asked. "Know it's going to be okay?"
"No," Dr. Zhao said bluntly. "But they don't need to know that yet."
They discussed briefly—the library plaza as a central gathering point, needing to account for everyone, basic organization.
Michael looked at Emily and Ahmed. "Can you two help Professor Zhang notify people to gather at the library plaza?"
"Of course," Emily said immediately.
"I can help too," Ahmed added in accented but clear Chinese.
Michael nodded, clearly pleased to have more people who could communicate.
"Good," Michael said. He looked at Dr. Zhao. "You find any medical personnel. I'll find the other officials, see what we have to work with."
Zhang turned to Emily and Ahmed. "We need to split up to cover more ground. I'll head to the campus broadcast room—if the backup power is working, I can make an announcement to reach everyone at once."
They walked together toward the central part of campus, then paused at an intersection where they could see both dormitory complexes.
"Emily, you take the main Chinese student dormitories over there," Zhang pointed to the larger complex of several six-story buildings. "That's where most of our undergraduates and domestic graduate students live. Probably eight hundred people if they're all there."
"Ahmed, can you handle the international residence?" Zhang indicated the newer, smaller building to their left. "It has the foreign students, visiting scholars, some senior doctoral candidates. Maybe a hundred and fifty people total, but they'll need information in English. The facilities are better there, but people are more isolated—single rooms, less community."
Ahmed nodded. "I'll manage. My Chinese is good enough for the Chinese researchers there."
"After you've notified people, meet at the library plaza," Zhang said, already heading toward the administrative building where the broadcast room was located. "I should be able to get at least one announcement out if the emergency power is working."
As they split up, Emily could hear Michael still organizing with Dr. Zhao behind them. Around them, the campus remained in chaos—but at least they were starting to act.
Emily headed toward the main dormitory complex, already hearing the sounds of confusion and distress from the open windows. Ahmed walked toward the international residence, its modern facade looking surreal against the primeval forest beyond.
They had a long task ahead of them, trying to gather scattered, terrified people who still couldn't believe what had happened. But at least they were starting to try.