The Universe That Wasn’t

The experiment was supposed to last eleven seconds.It did. Commander Adrian Bell watched the Peregrine’s coherence lattice open a door between two realities, hold it, and close it on schedule. Ten crew, one intact ship, every instrument aboard reporting a clean run.Then a star goes missing from the navigation database.A crew member remembers a conversation that never happened. A piece of equipment carries a serial format retired before anyone aboard was born. And the personnel system, which has never once been wrong, reports eleven biometric profiles for ten people.When Earth finally answers, Mission Control tells them the Peregrine never came back.Adrian has built a career on the belief that enough evidence settles anything. Then a second Peregrine answers the hail. Same registry, same mission, same ten people, and exactly as much proof of being the original as his own crew has. Their commander is a decent man running the same arithmetic on the other side of the same door, and he has reached the same conclusion Adrian has.Neither of them is lying. That’s the problem.Something is holding both realities open. There is a number that measures it, it has climbed every day since the test, and nobody has found the thing that stops it. One of these universes will not survive what happens when it arrives.There is a way to save them both. Adrian works it out on paper, the way he has worked out everything in his life, and the arithmetic is clean, and the answer is a price he will have to ask ten people to pay.How do you prove which reality is yours when the other one has your face, your record, and every reason you have?