Thousand+ Words for Nov. 10, 2026

Belinda Groaned, Blinked her Dry Eyes against the Harsh Early Daylight, and Turned...

Belinda groaned, blinked her dry eyes against the harsh early daylight, and turned over in bed. She raised her hand to bring her watch close to her face: 8:08 AM.

“Oh, God,” she muttered. She cleared her throat. “Driscoll! Go four hours back!”

The computer registered her command with a chime, and then there was the familiar odd vibration, like a dog shaking the water off itself at some distance, and the darkness of night settled over her and she was back asleep almost immediately.

Belinda’s command was executed as a batch call along with the others coming in through time-travel service subscriptions around the world—nearly half a million in the last half second—and in Artois Driscoll Split-World Facility 686, buried deep within a granite mountain in Porto, Portugal, the four monopole top-spin hyperbolic black holes which made this possible groaned under the strain. In the facility’s control room, four human technicians watched a series of monitors and dials while four Scissiars mindlessly transited the circumference of their containment vessels and mediated the division of universes.

Each technician on shift that afternoon wore a conspicuous plastic-ensconced badge on his front. The one wearing Badge B raised his head from his panel. “What’s the temperature on number two, please?”

The other three technicians, each at his own station some distance away, heard B, but they all ignored him and continued to work their own panels.

B stood up and tried again, louder: “I say, does anybody have a temperature on number two?”

Again, there was a period of silence and then R spoke without raising his own head. “You can look up the temperature on number two same as I can.”

This comment was answered by a chorus of yeahs from the other two technicians.

“Well, I just thought that with number three at idle that one of you would be able to—”

R cut him off. “Idle or no, you can look up temperatures. You’ve been here six months already.”

The other technicians snickered at this. “He doesn’t look up the temperature becaause he can’t look up the temperature,” one of them said mockingly.

B knew it was X’s voice, and he felt his face redden. “Can’t you handle the panel?” the fourth technician, T, added, his voice rising in the way that one would address a child. The others laughed.

B stepped around his console and moved toward the door. “I’m going to go check on the Scissiars,” he said. “One of you can check on number two yourself.” He pushed through and the snickers from his colleagues faded into the distance as the door closed behind him and he proceeded down the stairs to the lower levels of the facility.

Several stories down, the staircase opened onto the large hangar-like bottom portion of the facility. Housed on the concrete floor were four large circular torus structures, like giant chain-link wire doughnuts standing 20 feet tall and eight feet around. Inside each of the doughnuts, something was moving, orbiting inside them at a speed high sufficient to make it impossible to tell what they were. B strode past them without a look and continued on to an unmarked, nondescript door, which he opened. He stepped inside and stood just inside, cushioning the closing door with his hand so that it would not clang shut.

Inside the room, a woman in a motorized wheelchair activated a control with her mouth and the chair turned to see who was coming in. As she got all the way around, an attendant emerged from a cloth-like structure and took his place behind her. “The Duchess thanks you for not slamming the door,” he said.

“Of course,” B responded. He stepped forward and then knelt down so that his face was level with hers. “Good afternoon, Your Highness,” he said.

Her face contorted and then the attendant spoke. “Good afternoon to you, B,” he said. “What are you doing all the way down here on a Wednesday afternoon?”

B didn’t look at the attendant as he was speaking, nor when he responded; his gaze remained firmly on the Duchess. “The other attendants, Ma’am, they—” He paused, glanced up at the attendant, and then back down at the Duchess. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. There was a problem with number two, the pressure seemed high, and I thought the temperature might be causing it, and—”

The Duchess contorted again and the attendant spoke. “The temperature on number two is normal, B,” he said. “We noted the pressure increase. It’s because two is getting a little too heavy.”

“Too heavy?” B repeated, his own face screwing up. “How could it be too heavy all of a sudden.”

The Duchess manipulated the control with her mouth and the chair started moving forward. The attendant stepped around her and deftly opened the door that B had just come through. He pulled it open, held it, and then spoke as the Duchess wheeled herself toward the opening. “Come with me. I want you to take a look at something.”

B followed as the Duchess maneuvered her chair out of the room and onto the hangar floor. She motored up to and past the first wire doughnut and then turned to position herself in between the first doughnut and the second. Inside both, the gyrating bodies of the Scissiars continued to chase themselves at high speed, as they had done day and night since they were first teleported into the toruses—how long ago was it now? B couldn’t remember if it was 11 years or 12.

The chair came to a halt and the attendant turned and gestured toward the one on the left. “You see the problem in there?” he said.
“No, Ma’am, I’m afraid I don’t. I can’t see anything in there.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” the attendant said. The Duchess’ face contorted again and the whirling creatures inside the doughnuts slowed down—all of them slowed down—until they could be seen to be nearly floating in the space inside the doughnuts, moving, but only barely so. B had seen lots of photographs and drawings of Scissiar exterior anatomy and knew exactly what he was looking at, but the creatures were still so odd that it took him a moment to quite work how how they managed to fly so quickly in such a confined space. “I’ve slowed them down for you. Now, look at the young in there, do you see it?”

B stepped around the torus to get a better perspective. He stepped right up to the wire and studied the closest Scissiar as it slowly moved past him, rotating as it did so. “No, I’m afraid I don’t see anything. I’m not much of an expert on Scissiar.”

“They’re dying,” the attendant said. “The whole lot of them are sick, and the weaker ones, the younger ones, are not going to make it much longer.”

###