Humans tend to have a specific blueprint of how reality is supposed to behave. They expect order to express itself through symmetry and balance, as if the universe has a sense for fairness. They assume changes happen gradually over time, with warning signs and transitions that allow one to adjust. Objects are believed to persist when not observed, continuing their existence quietly and faithfully until attention returns to them. Cause comes before effect, forming a chain of logic that allows one to predict outcomes and assign responsibility.
These assumptions are rarely questioned; they are reinforced by everyday experience. They are the invisible scaffolding that supports a sense of safety and comprehension that's fundamental to human existence.
Within the Warsaw Altered Reality Zone, none of them hold true.
"I had come to the Zone to search for my wife."
That sentence remained stable longer than anything else, along with my memory of her name, her face, the simple fact that she had existed. I repeated it like a mantra. The mind, it turns out, is sometimes more reliable than instruments at keeping the chaos of the Zone at bay.
I had been working in the Zone for six years. Or, at least, I was fairly sure that was the case. Even time had a way of becoming confused and losing its way here — blurring, doubling back on itself, quietly abandoning the rules it followed everywhere else. No one could track its passage with any reliability, despite the technology we built to stabilize and anchor our work and living spaces to what might generously be called real time and space. Generously, because no one is entirely certain which fragments of this tangled spacetime we are actually meant to belong to.
Maria had entered this tangle on her own. There was no dramatic argument, no sudden disappearance in the night. She told me where she was going and why, with the calm certainty of someone who believed they were finally making sense of the world. She had fallen in with a group she met online, a loose congregation that spoke in careful, reverent language about revelation and thresholds. They believed God resided within the Zone, not metaphorically, but literally.
At first, I assumed it was a phase, a coping mechanism. The Zone had been in the news for decades by then, framed alternately as a scientific anomaly, a geopolitical liability, and a miracle waiting to be claimed. It attracted people who wanted answers, and people who wanted meaning. My wife had always belonged to the second category, and after we lost so much, well, that craving for meaning intensified.
She filed the necessary documentation, passed the screening tests, and crossed the perimeter fully legally. Since then, I hadn't heard from her once. I was cleared to join a research team three years later.
The research itself was almost beside the point. We cataloged phenomena that refused to stay cataloged. We stabilized pockets of relative normalcy and called them labs. We ran experiments that produced different results depending on who was present to observe them, or who remembered them afterward. Papers were published, retracted, then published again under different author lists. All pointless and irrelevant. I focused on searching for patterns, anomalies in records. Eventually, I found something that aligned just enough to suggest a trail.
In one of the semi-stable border areas, explorers consistently reported the smell of flowers. Some of them even ventured a guess that they may have been peonies.
Maria's favorites.
The reports placed the phenomenon in what the maps called Area C-17, though that implied a stability that did not truly exist. It was a region where teams commonly lost orientation for minutes or days and returned convinced they had been somewhere else entirely. Still, it was passable often enough to be visited more than a few times, which meant there were logs, timestamps, witness statements. Enough paper to find a person in.
I volunteered for the next rotation without offering a reason. No one asked for one.
The transition into C-17 was uneventful, which in itself felt suspicious. The perimeter gates hummed, the pressure shift made my ears pop, and then the world resumed its shape. Asphalt. Sky. A line of ruined buildings leaning slightly out of alignment, as though they disagreed about where gravity ought to be. Normal enough.
The smell came an hour into the patrol.
It was faint at first, easily dismissed. Floral notes appeared often in reports, sometimes linked to other plant-related hallucinations or memory bleed-through. But this was different. Heavy. Sweet in the way peonies are, almost excessive.
I stopped walking.
The path behind me did not look the same as it had a moment earlier. That was not unusual — I checked my position with my instruments, and waited for the disorientation to pass. It did not. Instead, the scent strengthened. I realized that the other two members of the patrol I had joined were nowhere to be seen.
I called out their names. The sound was softer than usual, as if the air had decided my voice was no longer worth carrying. Training dictated I should mark the separation and attempt to reestablish contact for a fixed interval. I did neither. The instruments in my hands were still reporting data, still pretending there was a coherent environment to be measured, but my attention had narrowed to the smell. It was no longer ambient. It had direction.
I followed it.
The buildings grew denser, closer together, their angles subtly wrong. Windows repeated themselves across facades that should not have supported them. Doorways opened into shallow darkness and closed again when I passed, as if embarrassed. The scent of peonies thickened with every step, pressing at the back of my throat, stirring memories.