The Gary Dead Zone — a 12-kilometer radius exclusion area surrounding the ruins of the Gary industrial complex — has been restricted since the detonation event of 2174. Within the zone, physical constants are unreliable. This is not news. What is news is what happens to objects removed from the zone and then returned to it.

Arcturus research teams have catalogued forty-seven objects recovered from the zone's periphery over the past three years. Outside the zone, the objects behave normally — a steel bolt weighs what a steel bolt should weigh, a glass fragment refracts light at the expected angles, a chunk of concrete has the expected density and thermal conductivity. Inside the zone, the same objects exhibit properties that should not be possible. The steel bolt exerts a measurable gravitational pull on nearby objects. The glass fragment refracts light into wavelengths that do not exist on the visible spectrum. The concrete sample maintains a surface temperature exactly 7 degrees below ambient, regardless of ambient temperature, indefinitely.

The changes are not gradual. They onset at the zone boundary — a line that is not geological, not chemical, and not marked by any physical feature. Step across it with a bolt in your hand and the bolt begins pulling. Step back and it stops. The boundary is precise to within 3 centimeters, which we have determined by moving the bolt back and forth through the transition point approximately three hundred times. Three centimeters. Not a meter. Not ten meters. Three centimeters between normal physics and whatever the Gary Dead Zone runs on.

We have not determined what the detonation event of 2174 actually was. The official record says industrial accident. The zone says otherwise. Industrial accidents do not create regions where physical law becomes optional. Something happened in Gary that broke a piece of reality, and the broken piece is still broken, and the things that sit inside it learn to be broken too.