Science Fiction

What Falls Between

By Camille Mussman

Summary

In the aftermath of the Helix Experiment—a catastrophic attempt to manipulate gravitational fields—the laws of physics have fundamentally changed. Gravity no longer pulls objects toward Earth's center, but toward the locations of significant emotional events. A dropped glass falls toward the corner where someone once received devastating news. Rain drifts sideways toward a park bench where a proposal happened. The world has become an invisible map of human feeling.

Zhen Kairae is a grief counselor in Neo-Seattle, one of the few people trained to read these new gravitational patterns and guide clients through their losses. Quiet and unassuming, she's spent her life being overlooked—the daughter who stayed in the background, the professional whose insights are attributed to louder colleagues, the woman people describe as "sweet" and "harmless." But Zhen possesses an extraordinary gift: she can sense gravitational memories with unprecedented clarity, feeling the pull of emotions others can't perceive.

When Zhen discovers that gravitational memories can be manipulated—and that changing them rewrites the actual past—she uncovers a conspiracy that threatens the fabric of reality itself. A shadowy organization is systematically erasing painful memories from the world's gravitational field, creating a sanitized history that never happened. Each erasure creates fractures in spacetime, and the cumulative damage is building toward a collapse that could unmake existence.

Forced into a role she never sought, Zhen must embrace the power she's always possessed but never acknowledged. With the help of a rogue physicist haunted by his role in the original experiment and a street-smart gravity mapper who sees what Zhen could become, she embarks on a mission to stop the erasures. But doing so means preserving humanity's pain—the very thing she's spent her career helping people release.

As Zhen races to prevent catastrophe, she learns that true strength isn't about being loud or forceful. It's about standing firm when the world wants you to bend, about protecting difficult truths when everyone else seeks comfort, and about recognizing that the quiet voice inside her has always been the most powerful force in the room.

Chapter One: The Weight of Grief

The coffee cup fell sideways.

Zhen Kairae watched it slip from her client's trembling fingers, expecting the familiar downward arc. Instead, the ceramic mug drifted left, pulling toward the east-facing window of her office as if drawn by invisible strings. It shattered against the wall three feet above the floor, coffee spreading in a grotesque brown bloom across the pale surface.

Her client, Daxen Vyre, didn't seem to notice. His eyes remained fixed on the middle distance, his neural implant flickering with a faint blue pulse at his temple—the telltale sign of someone replaying memories through their internal augmentation. Seeing something Zhen couldn't.

"That's where I told her," he whispered. "Right there. Through that window, you can see the corner of the MediSpire."

Zhen felt it then—the pull. A gentle tug in her sternum, directional and insistent, like a compass needle swinging toward magnetic north. Except this wasn't north. This was grief, dense and heavy, its gravitational signature warping the space around Daxen’s body. She'd felt thousands of these pulls in the three years since the Helix Experiment changed everything, but this one had texture: metallic, cold, the flavor of words that couldn't be unsaid.

"You were standing here when you got the call," Zhen said softly. She didn't phrase it as a question.

Daxen’s jaw tightened, his subcutaneous monitor briefly visible beneath his skin as his stress levels spiked. "How did you—" He stopped, remembering. "Right. The gravity thing."

The gravity thing. That's what most people called it, as if reducing the fundamental restructuring of physics to a casual phrase made it manageable. Zhen had heard every variation: the Gravity Shift, the Helix Effect, the Memory Field. The scientific community preferred "Spatiotemporal Emotional Resonance," but that never caught on outside academic journals and the quantum feeds.

What mattered was simple: gravity remembered. And Zhen could read what it remembered better than anyone.

"May I?" She gestured toward the window.

Daxen nodded, still lost in his memories, his fingers unconsciously tracing the edge of his wrist interface.

Zhen crossed the office, her footsteps silent on the thermoadaptive flooring that shifted from warm copper to cool blue as she moved through different emotional zones. She felt the pull strengthen with each step. By the time she reached the window, it was almost overwhelming—a gravitational well of loss centered exactly where Daxen had been standing eighteen months ago when the MediSpire's AI system had transmitted directly to his neural link: his wife hadn't survived the cellular reconstruction procedure. Every object in this corner of the room wanted to fall toward this spot. Coffee cups, pens, holographic data tablets, rain—all of it drew inward, marking the geography of a moment when Daxen's world had ended.

She pressed her palm against the smart-glass, feeling the vibration of the memory encoded in spacetime itself. The window's surface rippled slightly at her touch, displaying a faint overlay of air quality metrics and transit routes before going clear again. Most grief counselors used gravitational readers—sleek handheld devices that displayed emotional signatures as colored heat maps projected into their visual cortex via retinal implants. Zhen had never needed one. She could feel it directly, the way some people claimed to sense oncoming storms in their joints.

"It helps," she said, still facing the window, "to mark these places. To acknowledge them."

"Does it?" Daxen's voice carried an edge she recognized. Anger, beginning to surface beneath the numbness. Good. Anger meant progress.

"The world has become a museum of our feelings," Zhen continued. Below, she could see the traffic lanes—autonomous vehicles gliding on magnetically suspended rails, their paths slightly warped by the gravitational memories embedded throughout the city. Neo-Seattle was a topographical map of human emotion now, its physics bent by three years of collective experience. "Every significant moment writes itself into physics now. You can't escape that. But you can learn to walk through the museum without living in it."

"That's very poetic, Ms. Kairae." The edge sharpened. "Do you have any advice that actually helps?"

Another counselor might have bristled. Zhen's colleague, Dr. Rashid, certainly would have. He had a whole speech about respecting therapeutic boundaries, which he'd no doubt uploaded to his memory cloud and could recite with perfect fidelity. But Zhen understood that anger wasn't personal—it was just another form of gravity, pulling at everything nearby.

"Yes," she said, turning to face Daxen. "Stop standing where it happened."

He blinked, his implant's pulse quickening. "What?"

"You come to this window every day. Sometimes multiple times." Zhen walked back to her chair, feeling the gravitational landscape of the office shift around her. Every room had its own topography now, invisible hills and valleys of emotion. Her biometric chair adjusted automatically to her weight and posture, but she barely noticed. "You're strengthening the memory each time. Making the gravitational well deeper."

"I'm not trying to—" Daxen started.

"I know." Zhen sat down, folding her hands in her lap. She knew she looked young for thirty-two, knew her slight frame and soft voice made people underestimate her. Even now, Daxen was readjusting his posture, the way people did when they realized they'd been sharp with someone they perceived as fragile. His biosensors probably told him her heart rate hadn't even elevated. "You're not trying to hurt yourself. You're trying to stay connected to the moment before everything changed. The last time your wife was alive, even if you didn't know it yet."

Daxen's face crumpled. "Yes."

"But she's not there, Daxen. That moment isn't a doorway to her. It's just a moment. And every time you return to it, you're choosing to fall into the same gravity well instead of finding new ground."

For a long moment, Daxen said nothing. Then: "You make it sound easy."

"It's not easy," Zhen said. "It's the hardest thing you'll ever do. But you can do hard things. I've been watching you. You think you're barely surviving, but you're here. You keep showing up. That's not weakness."

"Then what is it?"

"Gravity." Zhen smiled slightly. "You're still being pulled. But you're learning to walk against it."

Daxen studied her with an expression she'd seen before—the look people got when they suddenly realized she was more than the quiet woman who nodded sympathetically. He leaned forward, his interface glowing softly.

"Has anyone ever told you that you're surprisingly intense?"

"Once or twice," Zhen said. That was a lie. No one ever said that. They said she was sweet. Kind. A good listener. Harmless.

Her comm unit chimed—an incoming priority message, the kind that bypassed all her filters and projected directly into her peripheral vision. Zhen glanced at the glowing text suspended in the air beside her and felt her stomach drop. Dr. Sato Helix. The man who'd broken the world. The last person she wanted to hear from.

"I need to take this," she said, standing. The message pulsed urgently, its encryption signature indicating maximum security protocol. "Same time next week?"

Daxen rose as well, his bio-readings steadier than when he'd arrived—she could see the subtle shift in his aura through her own minimal augmentation, the basic empathy overlay most counselors had installed. "Yeah. And Ms. Kairae? Thank you. You're really good at this."

Zhen smiled her professional smile, the one that made her disappear into the background even as she was being thanked. "I'm glad I could help."

She waited until Daxen left, the door's privacy field shimmering back into place behind him, before expanding the message in her full field of vision. Three words appeared, glowing in urgent red:

They're erasing memories.

Zhen stared at the text, feeling a new kind of gravity take hold—not grief or loss, but something darker. Anticipation. Fear. The sense that the ground beneath her was about to give way entirely.

She didn't know it yet, but this was the moment her life would pivot. This was the emotional event that would write itself into spacetime, the place where gravity would remember that Zhen Kairae stopped being invisible.

Outside her window, rain began to fall. But it didn't fall down.

It fell toward tomorrow.

And somewhere in the quantum substrate of Neo-Seattle's memory field, something was learning to forget.