“You have to close it,” the other Elena gasped, collapsing. “You’re not taking from empty worlds. You’re taking from our worlds. Every gate… every gate is a wound. And we… the rest of us… are bleeding out.”

At first, it was exploration. Teams of scientists and exo-biologists stepped through, returning with seeds that cured blight, crystals that stored a terawatt of power, and stories of breathtaking wonder. Then came the entrepreneurs. A mining corporation opened a gate to a planet whose “soil” was pure lithium. A pharmaceutical giant found a reef of organisms that excreted a perfect, non-addictive painkiller.

It was a fishing trawler in the Pacific that first reported it—a second boat, identical to theirs, passing through them like a ghost. A child in Mumbai woke up with a memory of a birthday party she never had, in a house that wasn't hers. People began glimpsing doppelgangers in reflections, walking just a step behind.

The first Incident was in the Buenos Aires hub. A woman stumbled through the gate, screaming. She looked exactly like Dr. Elena Vance, the lead physicist on duty—same face, same lab coat, same panicked eyes. But this Elena had a gash across her cheek and clutched a child’s hand. The child was crying in a language no one understood.

The Nexus scientists called it “quantum bleed.” Opening so many gates, they theorized, was thinning the membrane between all realities. Our world was becoming porous. And worse, something was leaking in .

The final day was not a war. It was a merger.