She collapsed, the surface of her table dutifuly rising to her head with an indifferent clunk that woke her with a start. Groggily, she regained her balance and reached for her forehead to inspect the damage. Nothing. No blood, no metal. Metal? Where had that come from? Just a sore spot that was probably going to give her an embarrassing bump.

She had fallen asleep at her station again. It had been happening regularly of late. Hadn’t it? Working through the nights had eroded her natural rhythms, disrupting her sense of time. She glanced over to the clock on one of the screens, willing her vision to let it stay in one place long enough to read it. 4:05am.

“That explains the lack of focus,” she said to the empty room, as her scientific higher brain functions flickered into gear like a well-used fluorescent tube. She paused. “But not the nausea.”

She sprinted over to a nearby sink, hands grasping the cool metal, and dry heaved over it. Concussion? “Come on, Vicki,” she whispered as she tried to steady herself, “I only banged my head on the desk. Then why do I feel like death?”

Something tugged at her memory then. Not enough to grasp anything solid, but just enough to snag a claw into the fabric and start to unravel it. Something is wrong here. The thought seemed to have entered her mind from within itself, or beyond itself somehow. If her head wasn’t already aching, trying to work out what she meant by that would have started it.

Feeling somewhat more stable now, Victoria returned to her station to focus her mind on something easier to handle: cool, hard numbers. Not that there was anything easy about the numbers that gently flowed across the screens. Her team had made a breakthrough in the holy grail of data transmission, supralight communication. The theoretical ability to send and receive information faster than the speed of light had huge ramifications throughout science, from particle physicists beating photons to their destinations to space probes having live feedback to mission control. The speed limit of the universe was in sight.

Today is the day they have been working towards. In just a few short hours the first practical test will begin to send a message at supralight speeds between a transmitter and receiver. The message was short – a simple “HELLO WORLD” – and the distance even shorter when compared to light, but it would act as their first real data point. It would also likely take years to even prove that it worked; the problem with testing a fast thing is that you have to use slower things to observe it. When that slower thing is light itself, the theorems involved become very screwy, very quickly.

If you forgive the pun.

Victoria checked over the numbers yet again, settling into her familiar routine and running the equations through her mind as a sanity check. Everything was, of course, fine. The computer simulations said it was fine. Her team said it was fine. She herself had proven over and over again that everything was fine and would be operating within sensible physical bounds, bar the obvious exception. Except it wasn’t fine. There came that thought again, that snagged claw. There was something terribly wrong here. She pulled.

In an instant her mind was roiling chaos, a kaleidoscopic migraine of thoughts and sensations. The lab around her twisted on an unseen axis, her mind within twisting too to conceptualise it from uncountable angles. She felt the experiment happen around her, through her. She saw her colleagues arriving in the morning, setting up, performing integrity checks, confirming safety protocols. She felt the surge of power and the fire and the light and the terrifying dark that followed it, preceded it, coexisted with it. She saw the error in her mind’s compound eye as it stared down the limits of the universe and the universe blinked first.

Then she saw the implosion. The transmitter had buckled, not physically but semantically somehow, as if under the immense negative pressure of its own data. From her fractalised vantage point she saw the fragments of the room spin at once, she intuitively knew temporally, orienting themselves towards the vacuum of information.

The first and last thing to go through Victoria Weber’s mind that moment were a satisfied “oh” and five inches of metal chair leg.