Chapter 179: The Other Side

Claire's preserved email forced Vale's institute into a legal fight over records.

Investigators obtained a court order.

The resulting data seizure produced terabytes of research material.

Most was irrelevant.

A small portion was not.

Vale had continued studying unexplained Crosswind packets for years after leaving the company.

He called their source "the other side."

Freya disliked the theatrical phrase.

His notes were more cautious.

He never claimed another universe.

Possible explanations included corrupted routing, hidden networks, experimental systems, malicious injection, and unknown infrastructure.

But one feature fascinated him.

Some incoming text described people who existed in Crosswind's world but with different biographies.

A Louis.

A Serena.

A Freya.

The names appeared in fiction, comments, and metadata.

Vale hypothesized that narrative structures might act as matching keys between unrelated information environments.

Freya read the summary twice.

Claire's Gentle Devotion may have matched something on Freya's side because the story contained identities recognizable to both datasets.

No one knew why.

No one knew how.

But Vale had attempted to strengthen the connection.

WAKE was part of that effort.

The most disturbing experiment occurred shortly before Freya's death.

Vale sent Gentle Devotion repeatedly toward the unknown endpoint while prioritizing a branch condition.

IF FREYA REMEMBERS ANOTHER WORLD.

The same condition Bailey had tested.

Eliza's branch had given Vale the idea.

Freya went cold.

"So he sent the novel to me."

Mercer corrected gently.

"He may have increased the probability that the file reached whatever system you used. We still cannot prove the endpoint was your world."

Freya nodded.

Precision mattered.

The records contained no evidence that Vale caused her death.

No evidence that WAKE could transfer consciousness.

No evidence that he intentionally brought Freya here.

What they showed was narrower.

Vale deliberately pushed information through an unexplained connection without consent.

Then Freya died and awakened here.

The timing was impossible to ignore.

Louis looked furious.

Freya felt something stranger.

Relief.

Not because the mystery was solved.

It wasn't.

But for the first time, her reading Gentle Devotion no longer looked completely random.

Someone had been trying to make the story reach a Freya.

Perhaps it reached her.

Eliza requested another call.

This time she apologized.

She had spent years believing her branch experiments caused the wake event.

That guilt was why she followed Freya's life after discovering her.

"How did you discover me?"

Eliza hesitated.

Then she admitted she had retained access to one old WAKE monitor.

After Freya awakened, the unknown endpoint went silent.

At the same moment, a new local pattern appeared around Freya Stone.

Eliza believed the connection had moved.

Freya did not know what that meant.

Neither did Eliza.

The other side had stopped answering.

But according to Eliza, something on this side had begun.

Freya asked whether the other-side packets contained dates matching her previous world's calendar. Some did, but conversion was uncertain because server clocks and metadata formats differed. The researchers refused to force a neat timeline where none could be proven. Freya approved.

Freya recorded the facts separately from her assumptions and continued with the next practical step. That habit had become one of the strongest protections she possessed. A dramatic explanation could wait; evidence could not. Louis understood the difference, and together they refused to let uncertainty turn ordinary decisions into reactions to a story neither of them had chosen.

Freya recorded the facts separately from her assumptions and continued with the next practical step. That habit had become one of the strongest protections she possessed. A dramatic explanation could wait; evidence could not. Louis understood the difference, and together they refused to let uncertainty turn ordinary decisions into reactions to a story neither of them had chosen.