Shadow of the Transition

Chapter 1

They took me right at the door of my apartment. Two strong men stepped out of nowhere, both from the right and from the left, grabbed me by my elbows and lifted me above the entrance mat laying on the concrete floor. But before we were decomposed into atoms, an odd thing happened. I felt... annoyed.

Scoundrels that they were! Couldn't they catch me on the street? Was it necessary for them to wait for me to go up to the ninth floor with all of my load on me? They didn't even let me bring the bags into my apartment! I was so surprised by this annoyance that I even twitched, trying to free myself, and glanced at my captors. Yeah, it was a good attempt: the world around us consisted of flickering gray pixels, and I could see or feel nothing: neither my arms, nor legs, nor anyone else around me. This is how it goes in the Transition.

Well, it's now that I'm so smart and I know what the Transition is, but at that time ... Actually, this is not true either: no one knows what it is, so you can only propose theories more or less corresponding to your ideas about this thing.

After it happened, scientists talked about the disembodiment of reality and the transition of living objects to its other layers. Fine words. Fanatics (what a surprise!) promised the retribution for sins, the Judgment of the Almighty, and sinners going to the Abode that they deserve. Their theory also sounded pretty nice. The military... The military didn't say anything, they just acted. They gathered all the scientists they could, and tried to manage the process in some way. They definitely succeeded in doing at least something. For example, they created the TP - the Transition Police.

The Transition Police, "Grey Divers", "Rats of the Almighty", "Twilight Phantoms", "Twilight Angels"... people invented hundreds of names for those guys who pull us civilians out when we fall into ... I don't know where. What is it – crazy Alice's rabbit holes? The Abode we deserve? Wormholes on the other side of the reality? Actually, the TP, this Twilight Police, does not always success in pulling us out, sometimes they disappear themselves. That's all we civilians know about them. Who are they? Where are they? How do they work? God knows. "Twilight Angels", in a word.

While my body was moving along the gloomy paths of the Transition into the middle of nowhere, I could neither see, nor hear, nor feel, only think. Think and recall. For example, I wondered why I perceived the moment of the Transition as if the world was broken into gray pixels. Was it an inevitable legacy of my profession – the long-defunct but still beloved profession of a network artist? How did others perceive it, in this case? No one ever talked about it; maybe they lacked words. Only once did I hear a shabby little man declaiming verses near the food distribution point.

"Oh, quiet world, a flickering gray shadow,

The moth's attraction to that flame, that light

Which calls it with its phantom power..."

Some people were listening to him with their mouths open; others began throwing stones at him and drove the poet away.

***

The feeling of a very strong clamp on my awkwardly upturned arms pulled me out of my memories. My arms were raised up, too high for my height, and the soles of my boots barely touched the floor; the shopping bag fell out of my right hand with a thump, and the keys to the front door fell out of my left, with a quiet tinkle. The air rushed into my lungs after a convulsive breath; it smelled sharply of plastic, concrete and something chemical. We, myself and my captors, stood in an empty room, in the middle of a circle drawn on the floor – an uneven strip of white paint. Through the transparent door we could see people running along the corridor.

"Chamber five! Chamber five!" I heard shouts muffled by the door, and – oh! – a lot of people ran into our room and stopped outside the circle.

"Whom did you bring here?" asked a lean, gray-haired military man in camouflage, with piercing eyes and an aquiline nose.

"Well..." said my kidnapper on the right, and his grip on my elbow became even tighter, and my arm twisted even more uncomfortably in my shoulder.

"Sir," said my kidnapper on the left, and lowered his arm slightly down, so that my posture started looking like a full-length portrait in the style of cubism, "but there was a tracker! And there was no one else within the radius of one hundred meters, in any direction!"

"Hmmm," a plump elderly man in a white coat rubbed his chin. "Well, let the lady go, both of you... I don't think she is going to attack us."

My guards released my arms synchronously, like military men do. I staggered unsteadily, and finally straightened up only to see that the rest of the crowd in camouflage, outside the circle, was aiming at me from machine guns. The next thing I felt before passing out was the strong smell of fish, and something cold gliding under my cheek. Apparently I got right upon my free ration of government-sponsored food that had fallen out of my shopping bag.