On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 256, of 266 so far.

Non-local

“What do you know about the company, if I may ask?”

The woman’s tone was pleasant enough, but it was clear that she expected the very answer Harlow was about to give her.

“To be honest, virtually nothing,” he replied truthfully. “Over the last few decades you’ve become one of the most valuable corporations on the planet, but you’re privately owned, not publicly traded, and no-one really knows what you do. So you can imagine that I’m at something of a loss as to why you invited me here.”

The woman nodded and smiled sympathetically. “Of course. Well, allow me to explain.”

Harlow straightened in his exceptionally comfortable chair. The woman’s office was enormous, but that was nothing unusual these days. He had no idea whether he was in the original room or not; there wasn’t any reliable way to know if a given chamber was strictly local.

He was a structural engineer, in his mid-forties and fairly recently divorced. His daughter was at university in China, and he had an externally modest semi-detached home in a commuter village a little way outside of the city of Aberdeen. Today, however, he was in a Zurich satellite office of the most mysterious company in the world: Distributed Holdings International. They had sent the invitation three days earlier, and a private jet just that morning. The up-front fee for just the meeting, without commitment, was equivalent to about eight months’ consultancy fees. The extensive non-disclosure agreement had been waiting on the jet.

Harlow didn’t expect the woman’s next words to be an answer to his earlier idle thought.

“This entire office is local,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the vaulted, airy space around them. The decor was starkly modern, all in whites and light greys, with suitably angular and featureless furniture. It looked serious, clean, professional, but also sterile and even a little severe.

Harlow’s eyebrows lifted slightly, and he gave a small nod of appreciation. “Impressive,” he said, and he meant it.

Non-locality had been invented almost thirty years earlier, and had quickly transformed the developed world. Previously the stuff of fantasy, advanced physics had delivered the holy grail of an increasingly concentrated society with skyrocketing urban property values: arbitrary amounts of internal space, without increasing a building’s physical footprint, height, or foundation depth.

Space came at a cost, of course, proportional to how much you wanted, but almost all city dwellings were now physically the size of a broom closet; hundreds of homes packed into edifices that a century earlier would have housed only a few dozen families. Step into a given dwelling, however, and you would regularly find fifty or a hundred times as much room as the physical boundaries would allow. The former science fiction of bigger on the inside had been a daily reality for a generation.

With the tiniest city apartment potentially a suburban mansion, the property market had undergone a radical and turbulent shift. Governments had stepped in to take full control, stabilising and subsidising in an ever-delicate balance, and both retail and industry had been quick to capitalise on the same technology. Public transport was ubiquitous, and humanity saw the dawn of the first billion-person megacities, all without a commensurate increase in urban sprawl.

A physical space described as local meant that it existed in its actual dimensions and location, unaugmented with non-locality. Such places had become the domain of either the eccentric, or the super-rich. Harlow presumed that the building he now sat in was squarely in the latter category.

“Since you’re not going to ask, I’ll answer your other question too,” the woman said, folding her hands on the desk surface that separated them. “Our company’s business is real estate.”

Harlow frowned. “But… there’s no money in real estate anymore,” he said. “How do you mean?”

The woman nodded again. “Our holdings are mostly geological in nature. We have over seventy thousand sites around the world now. The vast majority are substantially subterranean.”

“You mean fuel reserves? Or valuable minerals?”

She shook her head. “Definitely not. All of our property is of negligible intrinsic value, by design.”

Harlow was beginning to get a headache. “I’m afraid I really don’t understand, then,” he said.

The woman sat back, contemplating him for a moment, and then she smiled again. There was a secretive quality to it. When she spoke, he noticed that she had instinctively lowered her voice, despite the two of them being quite alone in the huge room.

“This is the part you signed the confidentiality agreement for,” she said. “We’re… landlords, if you like. We’re everyone’s landlords. We provide the interior space that non-locally augments almost every human-built structure in the modern world.”

Harlow was dumbstruck. Schoolchildren were taught that non-locality was a clever trick of physics, its exact nature classified for safety reasons, but involving some kind of quantum manipulation of a given physical area to redistribute a vast amount of intra-molecular space into the inter-molecular environment.

“Put simply, all non-local augmented space physically exists within one of our many subterranean facilities. Usually within a rock matrix. I can tell you, for example, that your own home’s six additional rooms are actually located mostly within a section of the substrate of an area of southern Kazakhstan, about a kilometre beneath a decommissioned coal mine. We relocate the physical space while preserving the surrounding material’s structure. Every government in the world pays us for the privilege of providing, monitoring, and maintaining that system.”

Harlow was silent for more than a minute as he considered the implications. The sudden realisation was like a flare going off in his mind.

“The Mass Anomaly?”

The woman, for her part, looked delighted with him. She nodded enthusiastically. In a moment of insight, Harlow knew that she was relieved to be discussing the matter with someone outside of her company.

The Mass Anomaly had perturbed and fascinated physicists ever since the invention of non-locality. Every street of every city was lined with buildings containing hundreds or even thousands of chambers. Each of those chambers contained far, far more space than their physical footprint would allow, and thus contained correspondingly more mass — entire mansions existed within formerly one-bedroom apartments, complete with people, furniture, and so on — but it had quickly been discovered that non-local spaces don’t contribute to the local load upon a building’s structure. The question as to how or where all of that mass distributes the “missing” force that gravity requires was one of the great intellectual challenges of the age. Except that, for Harlow, it had now been solved.

“How bad is it?” he asked, in a quiet voice.

“You’re a structural engineer, so you probably have at least a very vague idea,” the woman replied. “Our sites are deliberately dispersed, as I said, and we can distribute even a single target block of non-local space between any number of physical locations. All the same, it adds up. Our end-user clients are the entire population of the Earth. The problem we’d like some help with is what we call the remote mass exposure for a particular location in Australia that we own.”

“Again, how bad is it?” Harlow asked, aware that his hands had begun to shake slightly.

The woman’s expression grew more serious. “Without an innovative reinforcement solution, we estimate a partial localised collapse of a small area of the planet’s mantle within the next fifteen years. We also expect similar problems in other areas in due course. And there’s an additional wrinkle to consider.”

“Which is?”

“If a collapse should occur, our testing shows that there’s a virtually guaranteed reversion of all intra-molecular space to a wholly local physical location.”

Harlow’s hands stopped shaking. “You… what you’re saying is that…”

The woman nodded twice, waiting only a few moments for him to complete the thought before she instead finished it herself.

“All borrowed space would return to the source geological matrix, dispersing any contained objects — including people, of course — within what’s mostly solid rock.”

This time, Harlow’s silence lasted much less than a minute, and his voice was even quieter than before when he spoke.

“When do I start?”

“Today would be preferable,” the woman said kindly. “There’s a more detailed briefing in an hour where you’ll also meet your team, and there are refreshments just outside my office. All your questions will be answered, I assure you, and we look forward to working with you. In the meantime, is there anything I can get for you right now?”

Harlow stood up, slightly unsteady on his feet, and looked around the ominously empty-looking room.

“I think I need a smaller house,” he said.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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