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 been working in the Zone for two months. Or, at least, I was fairly sure that was the case. Time had a way of becoming confused and losing its way there — 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.
In the world I belong in, the Zone manifested in October 1944. Shortly after the Warsaw Uprising fell, a section of the city — the ruined Old Town — simply failed to agree with the rest of reality. It has been theorized that it was because of the sheer mass of despair gathered in the city that day; a sort of culmination of the decades of suffering wrought by the Nazis in the first part of the 20th century. We do not know if that's true; we do know that the Zone swallowed hundreds of occupants, innocent civilians and former insurgents — not caring for morality. The war ended soon after, and an international council was formed in order to investigate and explain the inexplicable.
The council failed at explanation, of course. That failure was its first shared certainty.
They called it the Altered Reality Zone because naming it after what it did proved impossible, and naming it after what it was felt presumptuous. The Zone did not behave like a wound in space, or a temporal anomaly, or a psychological phenomenon, though it borrowed traits from all three when convenient. Reality outside insisted on continuity, causality, persistence. Inside, those concepts were optional, sometimes negotiable, occasionally offensive.
At first, no one entered willingly. The survivors who emerged in the early years did so by accident, displaced like debris after a flood. Their accounts were contradictory, often self-invalidating, like a poorly remembered dream, but they insisted their memory was fully accurate. The council, by interviewing each survivor, slowly built up a base of higher-level knowledge about the Zone.
By the time I arrived, voluntary entry had become routine, though never casual. We trained for months on procedures that assumed the procedures would fail. Anchors were drilled into stable geometry where possible, and into human habits where it was not. Names. Schedules. Repetition. The mind, it turned out, was sometimes more reliable than instruments, provided it was given enough structure to cling to.
I kept a notebook, though I could not swear it always remained the same notebook. Writing helped, when memory could not be trusted to cohere on its own. Dates were useless, but descriptions held. Patterns, when they appeared, were fragile and temporary, but even a temporary rule was better than none.
This entry, at least, I was— am confident about writing.
"Something in the Old Town has begun to exhibit symmetry."