The Parallel State

Major Robert Gaines, Gabriel Huian, is an astronaut who slips back to Earth from orbit only to wake up with no memory of the return and no clear sense of how much time has passed. He is soon released into the care of his family, appearing to be the same man, but with an unsettling calm and a faint, inexplicable air of detachment.

From the very start, small inconsistencies creep in and quietly unnerve everyone around him. His house bears a white picket fence that he does not recognize, even though his wife insists it was there when they bought the place. A photograph and his collar show him as a different rank than he believes himself to be: he knows himself as a Major, yet the insignia and a recent image suggest a Colonel. His wife Helen grows increasingly certain that something about him has shifted, and her instincts insist on truth even when words fail to explain it.

As the tension builds, ordinary routines feel charged with doubt. Helen tries to reach out to Gaines’s friend, a fellow officer, only to be cut off by Gaines himself, who seems to guard a secret he cannot name. A housekeeper named Maggie brings coffee, but Gaines stops her from adding sugar and, in that small moment, observers notice he is different—there is a rigidity, a distance, a sense that he is playing a role rather than living his life. Helen sees the change clearly but cannot articulate it; she only knows that something is wrong, and she cannot coax him back to the person he was.

With a growing sense of urgency, Gaines insists on medical examination. He clings to a startling belief: the President of the United States is John F. Kennedy, a name and figure that no one else around him recognizes. This assertion pushes him toward a staggering conclusion: he may have slipped into a parallel universe, a world with different memories and different rules. The people around him regard his claims as a nightmare or a crackpot theory, yet a mechanic later reveals that the space capsule he returned in is not a perfect match for the one that was sent out.

Gaines is summoned to inspect the capsule, and as he approaches, the boundary between his two realities begins to blur. He is drawn back toward the moment he departed, and when the craft lands, it seems to confirm a disturbing possibility rather than dispel it. Controllers on the ground are prepared to dismiss the incident as a dreadful dream, but then another transmission arrives, this time from Colonel Robert Gaines. The communication is cut off a few seconds later, and the Colonel vanishes from radar, leaving behind a ripple of uncertainty that unsettles everyone who witnessed it.

When Gaines returns home again, the aftermath feels almost tangible: his daughter recognizes him, but the world around him feels altered, and the white picket fence—so certain before—now appears to be gone. The story lingers on this quiet return, inviting us to question what is real, what memory preserves, and how identity can fray under the pressure of impossible possibilities. In its measured, restrained tone, the narrative keeps its focus on the emotional charge of an out-of-sync life, a man divided between two versions of the same moment, and a family that must decide how to move forward when the boundary between worlds has already shifted.

Last Updated: October 01, 2025 at 13:06