Anomaly

(POV – Protagonist)

A new week had arrived, bringing with it another wave of cold. This time, the temperatures had dropped to levels roughly twice as low as those recorded the previous week. Even more concerning was the fact that the sensation of cold seemed to follow the drop on the thermometers, making the weather not only more intense, but increasingly difficult to simply ignore.

Considering that even wearing coats had already been proving less and less effective last week, the current situation said a lot about how quickly things were getting worse. During my outings over the past week, I noticed that most of the agents, while showing a quiet curiosity about the steadily falling temperatures, still treated it as something relatively normal.

Many of them continued talking about their plans for the end of the year, discussing trips, family gatherings, and other things that seemed completely mundane given the current situation. Now, however, the atmosphere inside the facility had changed. Almost everyone seemed considerably less relaxed than they had been the week before.

Conversations about the holidays had become less frequent, replaced by increasingly common remarks about the cold and how long this situation might continue. Many no longer regarded the cold snap as nothing more than a temporary inconvenience. It had started to feel strange. And perhaps more concerningly, some of the agents were already beginning to seriously consider the possibility that this wasn't simply a natural phenomenon.

Fortunately, none of what was happening had really affected either me or my sisters. Charlotte, for example, had stopped turning off her... thermal fluctuation, or whatever the correct name for it was, the moment it became uncomfortable enough that even wearing coats wasn't helping.

After all, there wasn't much point in wearing multiple layers of clothing when she could maintain a comfortable temperature around her body herself. However, from the conversations I'd been having with her recently, it was easy to tell that this whole situation was beginning to weigh heavily on her.

Mostly because her parents were resorting to increasingly desperate measures, or, as I preferred to call them, downright pathetic ones, to protect themselves from the cold. And that seemed to bother Charlotte far more than she let on.

She tried to act normally whenever she was with me and my other little sisters, but the moment the subject turned to her family, that uneasiness returned. Sometimes, I could tell she was distracted, as if part of her attention was constantly focused on home. Perhaps that was precisely why Charlotte could never completely relax when she was with us.

She could smile, talk, and even enjoy herself while we spent time together, but there was always that faint anxiety hidden in her eyes. The anticipation of the next weekend. The moment when she could finally go home and see for herself whether her parents were okay.

Personally, I couldn't blame Charlotte for wanting to see her parents, considering everything that was happening. After everything we'd been through, I'd probably do the same if I were in her position. Besides, even with the cold growing worse by the day, I still hadn't heard anything that could point to a possible cause for this abnormal drop in temperature.

During Laura's visits, I'd tried asking her about it a few times, but all I ever got were short, discouraged answers. From what I could tell, neither she nor Emily had the slightest idea what might be causing it. And speaking of Emily... I practically never saw her anywhere except in her office inside the facility.

I had no idea why she was so holed up in that room. Whenever I passed by, the door was either open or slightly ajar, and I could almost always see her surrounded by reports, screens, and who knew how many documents.

She seemed to be working nonstop. But considering that the temperatures kept dropping day after day, I imagined Emily was putting a great deal of effort into figuring out what was causing it.

Actually, it would have been strange if she still believed these low temperatures had some natural explanation. Maybe, at first, it had been possible to chalk it up to some unusual weather phenomenon. But the more time passed and the further the temperature plummeted, the harder it became to maintain that hypothesis.

***

(POV – Emily Parker)

There were two things Emily absolutely hated. The first? A mortal enemy she shared with practically every salaried office worker on the planet: paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork. Reports to fill out, documents to review, data to organize, forms that seemed to multiply overnight, and stacks of files that simply refused to get any smaller no matter how long she spent working.

The second thing Emily hated? Any kind of disaster involving anomalies. Unfortunately, the two things tended to go hand in hand. When the weather first began cooling down abnormally, Emily hadn't initially imagined that it could be related to an anomaly.

The phenomenon seemed strange, of course, but nothing that immediately justified mobilizing a team or launching an investigation. So, she'd simply decided to ignore it. Today, Emily hated herself a little for that decision.

To make matters worse, the absurd amount of paperwork piling up day after day wasn't helping either. Every morning, new projects landed on her desk. New data had to be analyzed, new reports had to be written, and inevitably, someone would show up with yet another battery of tests that needed to be carried out.

It was an apparently endless cycle. And, to be fair to herself, Emily didn't believe it would ever truly end. How could it? Anomalies were simply like that. The more you thought you understood them, the more they found a completely new way to surprise you.

To give a practical example, a relatively recent discovery involving an ordinary camera had left the scientists quite excited about the new possibilities surrounding the anomaly in question. At first glance, the object didn’t appear to be anything special. It was just a regular camera, without any features that could distinguish it from a conventional model.

The phenomenon only became apparent when someone used it to photograph a person who had suffered some kind of physical injury. The resulting photograph still showed exactly what had been captured by the lens; the wound remained visible in the image, perfectly preserved as part of the photograph.

The person’s actual body, however, was a different story. The instant the flash went off, the injury was completely healed. Initially, the researchers believed it was simply some kind of restorative effect. But after a series of experiments, they discovered something far more interesting.

The camera’s flash apparently caused a localized temporal distortion in the photographed injury. In extremely simplified terms, it was as though that small region of the body were temporarily “returned” to an earlier state, reverting to the moment immediately before the damage occurred.

In other words, it wasn’t simply a camera capable of healing injuries. It was an anomalous object capable of directly interfering with the temporal progression of a specific physical state. And it was precisely that detail that fascinated the researchers so much.

The object’s apparent function, healing a person by photographing them, was merely the surface. Once they began examining the implications behind the phenomenon, the possibilities became much deeper and, in a way, even frightening.

In any case, the camera was just one of countless examples that ended up on Emily’s desk practically every day. To an outsider, it might have been difficult to understand how something as simple as a camera capable of healing injuries could be considered an extraordinary discovery. To Emily, however, it was almost routine by now.

In the end, Emily could only sigh at the thought of it all. She had merely been trying to distract herself from the recent problems that kept landing on her desk, one after another, without giving her so much as a moment to breathe. Yet no matter how hard she tried to focus on anything else, this particular situation kept returning to the forefront of her mind.

Emily could no longer believe that the temperature drops occurring lately were simply the result of the weather deciding to go crazy right at the end of the year. The city didn’t even normally experience temperatures this low. She would have to be incredibly naive to believe this had nothing to do with an anomaly. And, much to her own annoyance, that was exactly what she had been until recently.

She had ignored the first signs, convincing herself that it was nothing more than an unusual change in the weather. Then, when the temperatures continued to drop without any plausible explanation, she started looking for other justifications, practically praying that it would turn out to be anything, absolutely anything, other than an anomaly.

Now, however, there was no longer any way to escape reality. Emily rested her face against one hand and stared at the reports scattered across her desk: “Of course it had to be an anomaly...” she muttered, letting out another sigh. As if she didn’t already have enough problems to deal with.

In the end, Victor’s strange ability to apparently sense danger had been right. Not that it had helped much. All Victor had managed to say was that there was something strange in the air. Nothing more. No explanation, no concrete clue, no detail that could indicate exactly what was causing the sensation.

Even so, Emily had taken his words seriously. After all, when it came to anomalies, Victor was one of the people she trusted the most. If he said something was wrong, then there probably really was something wrong. The problem was figuring out what.

Emily hadn’t been able to find any plausible reason to mobilize an entire squad, much less launch a formal investigation. Up until this point, all the data pointed to something perfectly ordinary. It was just snow.

At least, that was what the data said. Emily had requested new temperature readings from the area, along with more detailed analyses of the snow itself. The results showed absolutely nothing anomalous.

Its composition was normal, its physical properties were within the expected parameters, and although the temperatures were dropping at an unusual rate, there was no concrete evidence that it had anything to do with an anomaly.

And that was precisely what bothered her. Emily couldn’t figure out what was causing the temperature drops. The more she searched, the less she found. In the end, as she stared at the reports scattered across her desk, only one face came to mind.

A delicate, adorable face that could easily have been mistaken for that of a slightly taller-than-average little girl. That is, of course, if it weren’t for the golden eyes, which looked like two tiny candles shining in the darkness, and skin so pale that it almost seemed translucent, giving her an oddly ghostly appearance.