The Resona Institute’s view from the monorail flashed by in the pouring rain, silver towers draped in pale mist. Inside, Riku Yamase ran a hand through his spiky black hair and checked his notebook: ‘Isolation tests, group stage four, Reify lab portal.’ He’d wanted to join Resona’s famed research group not for fame or fortune, but to search for his vanished brother, Gento Yamase. How far would you go for lost family?
Sachiko Akiba, project coder, slipped Riku a data pad while fixing her glasses. ‘Did you sleep last night?’ she asked, only half joking.
‘Not really,’ he muttered. ‘Had another dream about the old lab.’
Hiro Mastuda, experiment lead, cut the talk: ‘Today, we move the thing through the physical barrier. Serious observation only. We don’t know what happens if this interacts with live subjects.’ Sachiko grinned, jittery. ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’
Hiro glared. ‘We’re here to push science, but keep your fingerprints off the gene-splicer.’
In the main chamber, the star device—the Reify Engine—began to pulse, amber lines tracing concentric rings. Their target: shift matter, even reorder it. The twist? They wondered if this could pull not just objects, but people, through space—or even time. Would you step into the unknown if it promised answers? 
Early runs showed rubber balls shuddered and melted, reassembling as warped cups or sheared cubes. Moshi, Riku’s AI drone, chirped diagnostics: ‘Mass stable. No quantum flux.’ Hiro ordered data recording; Sachiko’s screen overflowed. Test four meant risk higher than before: a chicken’s cell sequence had failed, producing only shadowy beads clinging to glass.
After lunch, a last unexpected variable turned up. A power surge zapped a copper pipe, and bright screens flickered blue. Moshi’s alarms cut through the hush. ‘Unexpected agent inside system core.’
They froze as a voice broke in over the comms, distorted—just for a second, but enough for Riku. ‘Is that…Gento?’ he whispered.
The team faced a choice: pause the project (and maybe lose the breakthrough), or try channeling the new anomaly using the Reify Engine on human DNA. Hiro and Sachiko clashed—Hiro insisted on running safety sweeps till morning, Sachiko preferred hacking the node tonight and observing what happens. You’d expect science to have all the answers, but in this place, questions just kept piling up. Doesn’t every big leap come with risk?
The late-hour debate hit fever pitch. Riku found an old badge that wasn’t his among the cables: ‘Test Subject: G9.’ The serial matched his old memories of his brother’s Resona files. When Moshi continued detecting someone in the access network, Riku made up his mind—he would use his DNA to bait the anomaly, live, if needed. As the clock blinked close to midnight and the device hummed, Hiro’s voice cut in— ‘Stop him, or we’ll lose them both!’ 
The Reify Engine’s core opened, golden light flickering, drawing Riku toward the spindle. He placed his hand on the access plate. Lights warped, Sachiko screamed, code scrolled backward.
In the oily shimmer, across dimensions, he saw two shadowed figures watching him—one unmistakably matching Gento’s sharp eyes. Their voices reached through the rift: ‘Do you trust science? Or do you trust family more? Choose.’
The episode ends with a screen crack, the lab’s systems shutting down and alarms roaring. Did Riku bring back his brother or shift something worse into being? What would you have chosen?
