A weak signal had tried to flash through from time to time. At first, I didn’t notice, then it seemed like an anomaly, but soon it became insistent.

A beeping sound interfering with work I had set out to accomplish, or with my resting later on in the evening. It also woke me in the night. I checked all my devices but it wasn’t coming from there. I checked the locks, smoke alarm, appliances, nothing. The beep was accompanied by a brief flash, and I thought it was the cause of a sort of interfering visual glitch, were data on a screen seemed to bleed through reality, but in an instantaneous non-repeatable flash. I was bothered by this and didn’t know if I should ask for help or not.

Just when it had become truly annoying, I saw a code listing in my dossier. “Flashing and beeping” was part of the troubleshooting list. I looked in the next column of the chart and it had a code number. Looked like an HQ remote call number to me, so I used the phone that came in the dossier package for the first time in this mission. A response popped up immediately – it was a street address. I knew how this worked. I was to go to that spot and register my complaint directly in person.

“Finally,” said the contact. “Standing outside a shop window at 10 isn’t my idea of a great evening. Walk with me.”

No time for introductions or small talk, she took me over to the cafe a block away. It was a very noisy place where music blared and echoed off the windows, black and white tile floor and bright white walls. Not a sound absorber in place. We walked through to the back of the Cafe Gerard, and slipped through the kitchen on our way downstairs. There was a little bedsit down there. All the mod cons. And it was quiet. Dead quiet.

“What is all this?”I asked. “Why the secrecy?”

“You won’t be subject to the beeps or flashes down here, it’s solid.”

I checked my phone. She was right. No reception. “Okay,” I said, “So?”

The cafe owner knocked, then burst in, bringing two cups of au lait with sweet biscuits on a tray. Setting down the tray on the coffee table, she stood, checked me out, nodded approvingly and went back upstairs, firmly closing the door behind her.

“I’m getting very tired of these ridiculous spy games and mystery dead ends.”

“We know. But we have to test you abilities. Once you go we won’t be able to vouch for you, and we need you to be safe.”

“It was you, wasn’t it? You planted the beeps and flashes.”

She nodded. “Yep, caught again.” She feigned an ingenuous smile.

I turned away. I’d learned enough to know not to touch the coffee and biscuits, even though they were tempting. She sat back, sipping hers without any side effects, but I just couldn’t trust it and didn’t want to have another blackout like I did with the archivist.

She looked at me while talking, telling about the work of moving the vital pysical molecules to one side and allowing a new space to have a place for an instant.

“Right now it’s only in code, but we anticipate it will be common knowledge in the next few months. These weeks before that are crucial. And yes, to answer your question, this does have a lot to do with Project Wunderkabinett. There are ancient energy generators and filters that are somewhere in our warehouse of cabinet contents, and we believe they can rapidly convert code into symbolic objects that would then be useful in opening or expanding space, allowing us to work more efficiently with access to at least two worlds at the same time.”

She went on to say, “We saw a drawing that looked like there were three such devices placed on the floor at specific thresholds opening from world to world. A bird flew through all three worlds, and there were transformations shown by three wiggly lines, one on top of the other.”

I was dumbfounded. This sounded too much like scifi fantasy to be believed. Yet here I sat on the edge of a sitting bed, afraid to drink a beautiful cafe au lait while a complete stranger told me about portals between worlds as if this was the most normal topic of conversation to have in a bunker below a restaurant. I understood why the cafe was so noisy. It was a better way to hide any sound that might come from the downstairs room.

“Now what?” I asked her. “What do you need from me?” I’d thought the whole thing had been set up to test me, but soon realized it was actually to recruit me. My role in Project Wunderkabinett could be to find the energy devices. But if so, why not just ask me? What possible reason was there for this dramatic subterfuge?

I decided it was a convincing dream, nothing more.