"We have a disturbance!"
Artie's voice boomed down from the second floor. Steve and Claudia turned toward the doorway, holding their collective breath. They waited for the sound of heavy footfalls to come pelting down the stairs, for Artie's face to appear, and enlightenment to be bestowed. Nothing followed. Claudia nibbled the ends of her nails, glancing furtively at Steve.
"Come. Here." Artie roared.
Steve pushed out his chair and headed for the stairs, and Claudia leapt up to follow him. "Not sure why I expected any different," Steve grumbled.
Claudia couldn't help but let a smirk slither across her mouth. They took the stairs two at a time, steps creaking violently under their feet, until coming upon Artie in the room Claudia had awoken in. There wasn't enough of a doorframe for two leaning bodies, so she perched on the edge of a dresser, panting, and embarrassed by her own apparent stagnancy.
"Good. Now, I want you to watch this."
Artie pointed his torchlight device at the bed, and flicked it on. Instead of white light, red light poured out into the room, catching on dancing dust particles in the air. A phantom body appeared in the path of the light, curled up in the blankets on the bed. Its image flickered visibly, like something on a digital screen, and it turned over in its sleep.
"Holy wan-Kenobi." Claudia whispered.
"It's a durational spectrometer. It reads the afterimage of a specified area and projects the events of the previous five hours onto the space. This is you, or, presumably you, five hours ago."
Artie turned the knob on the device, and the image jittered rapidly, like a fast-forwarded film. Hologram-Claudia rolled back and forth, frequently throwing off the blankets, and pulling them back on, then rubbing her face agitatedly.
"We've got to fix the heater in this house." Steve muttered.
"Shhh!" Artie held his fingers steady on the knob, brows furrowed, staring intently at the holographic image. Suddenly, he flicked the knob in the opposite direction, and the image froze. "There."
Claudia slid silently off the dresser as Steve inched forward, the two of them squinting through the red haze of the spectrometer. Artie turned the device back and forth, letting the light fall across the length of the bed and most of the other half of the room.
"Artie…" Steve began slowly, "What are we seeing?"
The phantom Claudia was on the bed, curled up under the blankets as in most other frames of the feedback. There was nothing striking about her in this particular frame, she had not moved from her position during the previous minute of fast-forwarding - fast asleep, and not at all the point of contention in the image.
It was the space around her that dug the furrow in Artie's brows.
The entire space around Claudia's sleeping form was distorted in either one of two ways. Toward the direction of the headboard, beginning very close to the back of her head, yet not intersecting with her, the entire image was pinched. That is, the area was squeezed, such that an image including the headboard, the wall, and even space beyond the wall in the hallway were all compressed into the area between her hair and the headboard. When Artie passed the spectrometer over the headboard, the image came from further and further away, until the image that appeared where the wall should have been, was a compressed image of the yard outside.
Toward her feet was a different distortion, a distinct stretching of space, such that the edge of her bed extended far beyond where it should have ended, all the way toward where the opposite wall should have appeared.
"This happened at roughly 6am this morning. Just two hours before I sent Leena in here to check on Claudia. It lasts," Artie twisted the knob forward, "For no more a split second."
"It's a glitch." Steve offered.
"This device does not glitch." Artie clicked the spectrometer off and placed it back in the carpet bag. "We're dealing with a quantifiable, physical anomaly in Claudia's bed that completely enveloped her."
"Now that just sounds insulting." she muttered dryly.
"And your wit is returning to you," Artie said, dismissing the content of the quip. "You're acting more and more like the Claudia we know, as if slipping into her shedded skin."
"And now I'm reptilian."
Steve grinned, and this time it stuck.
The way he'd spoken on her behalf before and how he'd navigated around her unique situation, came off as a kind of brotherly protectiveness. Combined with the begrudging, father-like concern from Artie, and Claudia was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the investment these people had in her well-being. They were to her, still strangers, yet the Good Samaritan types, or the kindly neighbors one introduces herself to upon moving in, yet unintentionally spends the entire afternoon chatting and eating in their company. The most perturbing aspect of the situation, though, was the reciprocating feeling that had started to bud in her chest. She was a familiar person, but off by the smallest degree, and this familiar-yet-strange component of her existence might be considerably more disorienting to them.
"Artie, right? Short for Arthur?"
Artie peered over his glasses. "That's my name, yes."
"Where do we go from here?"
"We go," Artie said, gathering up his bag, "to the Warehouse."