Bailey Base is a joke. A rumor. It’s what we whisper about when the long-haul comms go static. Officially, it’s a decommissioned research outpost on the edge of the Sagittarius Arm. Unofficially? It’s where the rules stop working .
I shouldn’t be writing this. MyGF (My Geospatial Frames) is supposed to auto-redact anything above a Level-4 clearance. But the system keeps spitting back my entries with a single, strange note: “Bailey Base – DTF -23.08.”
The strangest part? MyGF updated just now. A new coordinate blinked under the redacted lines:
Here’s a short, intriguing story based on the elements you provided. The Bailey Base Anomaly
DTF, in our field, doesn’t mean what it means dirtside. It stands for . And -23.08 is the worst kind of number.
“I saw a transmission,” she said. “From me . From a version of me that’s been inside the Base for three years. She says the flux can be reversed. That we can be together without the drift.”
“That’s not a message,” I told her. “That’s a trap. Bailey Base doesn’t send help. It sends echoes.”
Yesterday, my girlfriend—let’s call her Lina, because the GF in MyGF also stands for something I’m not ready to say—hacked our nav system. She rerouted us toward Bailey Base. I caught her in the server room, her hands trembling over the console, eyes flickering like old screens.
Check your chronometer. If it’s ticking backward, don’t come find me.
But she just smiled. The same smile from our first date. Only now, it was 0.3 seconds out of sync with her voice.
Unless you want to get lost together.
I don’t know if I’m writing this as a warning or an invitation. Maybe by the time you read this, I’ll be two versions of myself: one running away, and one already waiting for you at the Base.
Let me explain. When a ship crosses a DTF threshold, time doesn’t slow down—it splinters . At -23.08, every second here is 23.08 seconds there . But it’s not consistent. A crew member might age a day while their partner blinks once and loses a week. Love becomes a liability. Attachments break like ice.
