The Anomaly

Maren pressed her palm against the cold glass of the detector array. The numbers on the readout made no sense. Consciousness, the instrument insisted, had mass.

She ran the calibration sequence again. Same result. 0.00031 grams — roughly the weight of a small snowflake — and it flickered every time she shifted her attention from the screen.

She had been a physicist for twenty-two years. She had never believed in anything she could not measure. Now she was not sure which fact frightened her more: that the instrument was broken, or that it was not.