Before something is found, it lives a life in the shadows,
…waiting to be summoned into myth.
Case File: INB-0888
Found: one dense, unidentifiable mass inside a sealed box of Toasted O’s.
Condition: structurally aggressive.
The following is a speculative reconstruction of its time in The In-Between…
No one talks about the Fifth Ingredient.
The box lists toasted oats, sugar, optimism, and a cartoon ring with a face. But anyone who’s worked the night shift at the Toasted O’s factory knows there’s something else. It doesn’t go into the cereal. It just… happens.
They call it floor bloom.
It starts as a sticky sheen near the extruders, where oats are blasted into perfect little halos and sent skating down chrome chutes. Sugar dust drifts like snowfall. Steam rises. Gravity does the rest. By hour three of a double shift, the factory floor becomes a living surface — part cereal, part glue, part regret.
Earl noticed it first, because Earl notices everything bad first.
“Gary,” he said, peeling his boot off the floor with a sound like a kiss gone wrong, “my shoe is growing a crust.”
Gary squinted.
“That ain’t crust,” he said calmly. “That’s accumulation.”
Earl froze.
“Floor bloom?”
Gary gave the slightest nod, the way a priest might confirm a miracle without wanting to oversell it.
Earl was new. Gary had worked here long enough to know the tradition. The veterans claimed the first bloom was a rite of passage. Some claimed it delivered a sugar high so violent it bordered on spiritual. Others said it tasted like childhood if childhood had been caramelized. Either way, Earl had been waiting months.
The grooves in Earl’s boots were packed solid with the stuff — oats, syrup, oil, lint, heat, pressure, time. Floor bloom wasn’t officially acknowledged by management, but every night-shift worker knew about it. It was a byproduct of friction and gravity and repetition. A compressed relic of labour. A ceremonial secretion of the plant itself.
“You don’t try someone else’s bloom,” they’d told Earl when he first hired on. “Has to be your own. First one’s special.”
Earl had even marked the calendar in his locker once, jokingly. Roughly estimating when his bloom would be ripe for picking given the tales his work mates shared of their own sweet firsts.
Like a child ordained by prophecy and loosed upon Christmas morning, Earl breathed, “It’s time,” and drove a screwdriver beneath the sacred mass fused to his sole.
It came free with a wet snap and landed on the concrete between them.
It sat there, its shadow arriving a fraction late.
Gary didn’t bother to notice. He had worked here long enough to see dozens of first blooms. The excitement never varied. The reverence. The stupidity.
“This is it,” Earl said, almost tenderly. “My first.”
Gary gave in and rolled his eyes towards Earl just in time to see him deposit it into his mouth. Suddenly Gary felt something tighten — not in his chest, he didn’t have one in the strict biological sense — but in the place where anticipation calcifies after decades of waiting.
Because floor bloom was always yellow.
But Earl’s bloom wasn’t yellow.
It wasn’t any colour the factory produced.
What happened next would not be felt here — but elsewhere, something went dark.
The chunk hit the concrete with a wet thud and sat there, proud and defiant.
“Christ,” Earl muttered, wiping his lip with the back of his hand. “Tasted like Toasted O’s in their larval stage.”
Gary didn’t laugh.
Because floor bloom was supposed to taste sweet.
Unless — after all this time — it wasn’t bloom at all.
It was darker than bloom should be. Not quite brown — but absence. It swallowed the fluorescent light instead of reflecting it. The brightness above it thinned and trembled, as if gravity had briefly reconsidered its loyalties. He had seen light behave that way only once before — under a sky with too many moons.
Gary was not, strictly speaking, local. “Alien” wasn’t quite right. Nor was human. Nor anything this planet had vocabulary for. Gary existed slightly out of alignment — more displaced in time than space. A footnote in chronology. A smudge in causality.
And he had been hunting something.
A stellar tear is not a rock. Not a mineral. Not even matter in the strictest sense. It is a wound — a microscopic rupture where time folds improperly and a fragment of elsewhere leaks through. It does not respect proportion. It may enter as something magnificent. Often it does not. It may arrive as something as simple as residue on the bottom of a shoe. In the wrong hands it could power empires, unmake histories, erase extinctions, rewrite first mistakes.
Gary had spent what, to a human, would equal a century tracking one.
He had tried brute force first — blinking into suspected coordinates at predicted micro-collapses. He overshot by decades. Undershot by seconds. Sometimes he arrived before buildings existed. Sometimes after the species had changed.
Eventually he understood: the tear could not be taken.
It had to be lived into.
Some force beyond his comprehension refused him shortcuts. If he wanted the tear, he would have to inhabit the long corridor of days leading to it. Punch clocks. Endure meetings. Develop calluses. Wait.
So he waited.
Years. Shifts. Promotions declined. Friendships tolerated. Lunches eaten alone beside conveyor belts.
All to stand in a second he had no proof would ever exist.
“Don’t touch that,” Gary said sharply. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Yeah right,” Earl smirked. “I had it in my mouth. As if you’re gonna touch it.”
And there was the complication.
Folding time in the presence of a stellar tear is impossible. It resists manipulation. It anchors itself to the moment. It cannot be seized — only surrendered. Gary could not blink backward. Could not freeze the second. Could not tear it from Earl’s tacky fingers without risking the shard’s annihilation.
He needed Earl to let go.
But Earl, who had already been reprimanded twice and whose foreman was openly shopping for a third strike, made a different calculation.
Eating off the line was a write-up. Standing idle was insubordination. Pocketing product was termination. And he had no interest in finding out how flexible the word “product” could become.
He glanced toward the security camera. Toward the open hopper of outbound golden o’s.
“You can tell everyone you got your laugh,” Earl said. “But I’m not getting fired over this.”
And before Gary could negotiate, manipulate, or plead —
Earl flicked the shard into the torrent.
It vanished into a cascading ocean of toasted halos.
The line ran smooth. Too smooth.
Trillions of identical rings swallowed the only thing in existence that wasn’t identical to anything.
Earl was gone before the week was out. Three strikes. Exit interview.
In it he had tried to save his ass by casting shade at Gary.
In the fluorescent purgatory of HR — beneath posters about synergy and beside a ficus that had given up — Earl attempted to redirect their attention to a matter he hoped they’d deem more concerning than his unsanctioned snacking.
“You’re worried about me?” he said, gesturing with both hands as though presenting evidence to a jury of the mildly interested. “You might wanna check how much time Gary’s spending in outbound. Guy practically lives down there. I don’t know what he’s fixing, but it sure as hell ain’t broken that often.”
It was not entirely a lie.
Gary was permitted in outbound. Floor techs often were. Belts misaligned. Bearings failed. Sensors blinked out of rhythm. But Gary had been lingering. Standing waist-deep in a drifting sea of toasted halos, listening. Waiting. Sifting with gloved hands through warm cascades of cereal as though panning for gold in a river run dry.
Suspicious, Earl implied. Unsanitary, even.
HR nodded in the way HR does when they are writing something down that will not save you.
It didn’t work.
Earl was gone by Friday.
Gary received his first strike. A procedural reprimand. A small red mark in a system built to track lateness and misuse of safety goggles. It meant almost nothing. A mosquito bite on a being who had outlived dynasties.
What mattered was the outbound.
For a week Gary remained. Longer than pride would advise. Longer than probability suggested was rational.
He waded through the endless procession of O’s. He shut down sections under the pretense of recalibration. He dismantled panels that did not need dismantling. All the while straining for it — for the distortion, the hush beneath the machinery, the thin gravitational itch that had guided him across decades.
Sometimes he thought he felt it.
A whisper beneath the roar.
A pressure at the edge of perception.
Not a sound, exactly — more a memory of one.
As if the tear, dispersed now among the identical, was amused.
As if it were teaching him something about scale.
By then, statistically, it was already gone. Poured. Sealed. Palletized. Shipped. Absorbed into the anonymous distribution of breakfast.
Lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place. And when it does, it rarely waits for the same fool.
Gary understood odds. He had spent a century calculating them.
He also understood obsession.
There are pursuits that begin as strategy and end as identity. At some point the object ceases to matter. The hunt becomes the architecture of the hunter. Men have chased whales into madness. Empires have chased immortality into ruin. Gary had chased a wound in time into a cereal plant in the industrial outskirts of a forgettable city.
He could leave.
Blink forward. Blink back. Invest another lifetime in another corridor of days. Punch another century of clocks.
Or he could stay, in this cathedral of extruders and sugar dust, waiting for the universe to make the same mistake twice.
The machines ran. The halos poured. The floor bloomed.
And Gary, footnote in chronology, stood waist-deep in infinity, deciding whether devotion is noble — or just another word for not knowing how to stop.
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