Vanish

Jiejie stood at the kitchen window with her coffee going cold in her hand, looking at the same view she had been looking at for the better part of a decade and hating it a little more each time. When she first moved out there, it had been trees. Actual woods, thick enough that she could not see her nearest neighbor's roofline, quiet enough at night that she had forgotten what silence sounded like until she had it back. She had left the city for exactly this—space, distance, the particular kind of peace that came from not being able to hear someone else's television through the wall. Then the developers came. They had cleared it fast—whole acres down in weeks, stumps ground flat, the promise of a "luxury community" staked into the dirt with a sign that had long since faded and cracked. Then the money ran out, or the permits stalled, and what she had now, on almost every corner, was framing. Skeleton houses. Plywood going gray. Tarps flapping loose. Weeds growing up through unfinished foundations like the land was trying to take itself back and losing. No trees. No privacy. Just the ugly, unfinished bones of somebody's failed investment, visible from nearly every window. She and Vinja had been circling the idea of moving back to the city for months, every conversation ending at the same question: Would the Portal move with them, or was it tied to this house specifically? That morning, watching a sheet of plastic snap in the wind over a house that would probably never get walls, Jiejie decided it was time to actually find out.

The only thing that had kept them from simply making the decision was the television. Years of it being exactly what it was—a door, a Portal, a rule-bound thing that had once pulled her through a broken screen and had been opening onto drama worlds ever since—made the question more than an ordinary logistics problem. Did it need this house? This room? The black wall where it had hung all these years? Or did it need her, wherever she was, whatever screen happened to be nearby? Neither of them wanted to commit to buying somewhere new and discover that they had left the only working door behind. So they had agreed to test it at Ma’s early that morning, before Vinja’s flight. Because the television was sixty inches and neither of them was foolish enough to pretend Jiejie could quietly wrestle it off the wall by herself at dawn, they had handled everything the night before. Vinja disconnected the cables while Jiejie steadied the screen. Together, they lifted it from the mounting bracket, wrapped it in a thick moving blanket, and carried it directly to the garage. They folded the iX’s rear seats down and slid the television carefully across the flattened row. Vinja secured it upright with moving straps, tightening each one twice before testing the screen with both hands to make certain it could not shift. The blanket protected the glass, but it was not strapped separately. Its loose ends were tucked beneath the television and folded across the top. By the time they went back inside, the black wall was bare, the television was already in the car, and there would be nothing left for Jiejie to lift or load in the morning. All she had to do was drive. Vinja was still asleep when she left. There was no ceremony. No dramatic music. No glowing screen. Jiejie filled her YETI from the fresh pot, carried it out to the garage, and checked the television through the open rear door before climbing behind the wheel. The straps were still tight. The moving blanket still covered the screen. She closed the door, set her YETI in the cupholder, and pulled out of the driveway. Twenty minutes was not long enough to justify finishing the coffee before she arrived. If the Portal worked away from its usual place, then moving would not cost them anything. That was the whole test. Nothing playing. Nothing pressed. The remote rested untouched in the passenger seat. Behind her, the television rode quietly beneath the blanket.

Traffic was light. The radio was on low. Jiejie checked the television in the rearview mirror every few minutes, watching for any sign that the straps had loosened. At first, nothing changed. Then she turned onto a wider stretch of road, and a sharp gust pushed against the side of the iX. The vehicle shifted slightly beneath her before settling back into the lane. Something moved behind her. One corner of the moving blanket lifted from the top of the television. Jiejie glanced into the mirror. The fabric slipped another inch. Then another. Before she could decide whether she needed to pull over and fix it, the blanket slid completely free of the glass and collapsed across the cargo floor behind the front seats. The television remained upright, held firmly by its straps. Its exposed screen was dark. “Of course,” Jiejie muttered. She would stop and recover the blanket once she found a safe place. The television was secure, and there was no reason to panic over a piece of fabric. Then, somewhere past the second stoplight, the screen was not dark anymore. She had not touched anything. The remote was still lying in the passenger seat. No pause button. No angry commentary. No drama she had been watching. No reason at all that she could see. The television simply turned on by itself. Color and sound flooded the back of the car where a moment earlier there had been nothing. Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace. Jiejie recognized it instantly, even in the mirror—a garden scene, someone pale and still on a stone bench. “I didn’t—” Her voice caught in her throat. “I didn’t press anything.” The picture disappeared. For half a second, the screen went perfectly black. Then stark white letters appeared. TRIGGER DETECTED. Jiejie’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. “What trigger?” A second message replaced the first. ACCESS EVALUATED. “No. Absolutely not.” The light beneath the words deepened, no longer flat illumination but luminous distance, as though the black glass had opened into somewhere far beyond the back seat. Jiejie checked the lane beside her. A sedan was passing on the left. The shoulder ahead was narrow but clear. The screen changed again. ELEVATION ACCESS GRANTED. “Not while I’m driving!” The Portal did not answer. It never answered. The air inside the car compressed. The radio dissolved into static. The dashboard flickered. Light spilled from the exposed television and poured forward through the cabin, brighter than any screen had a right to be. Jiejie hit the hazard lights. She signaled, checked her mirror again, and began guiding the iX toward the shoulder. "Give me ten seconds," she snapped. "You can be rude after I stop the car." The steering wheel vibrated under her hands. The lane markings blurred. The Portal took hold. Jiejie felt the first violent pull in her chest, the same volumetric force that had always turned the living room into panic and flying objects. But there was no sofa to brace against, no Vinja beside her reaching for his notebook, no cape within grabbing distance. Only the wheel. Only the road. She fought to keep both hands in place. The right tires crossed the white line and struck the rumble strip. The car shuddered beneath her. "Wait!" Her body twisted toward the light before her mind could stop it. One hand tore away from the wheel, reaching backward toward something that was not a passenger, not a door handle, not anything that belonged inside a moving car. The iX lurched farther onto the shoulder. Then Jiejie's fingers disappeared into brightness. The rest of her followed.

The system did exactly what it had been built to do. The instant Jiejie's weight vanished from the driver's seat, the pressure sensor read zero while the seatbelt buckle remained latched. The driver-monitoring camera registered no face where a face should have been. The steering wheel's light strip snapped from calm to urgent red. An alert chime rang through a cabin with no one left to hear it. The vehicle assumed the worst: a medical emergency, a driver no longer capable of controlling the car. Emergency Stop Assistant took over. The system stabilized the wheel before the iX could drift farther across the shoulder. Hazards continued flashing. The car scanned the lane beside it, confirmed that it was clear, corrected its angle, and guided itself completely off the active roadway. It slowed under its own power until it came to a precisely centered stop. The moment it reached zero, the transmission shifted into Park. The electronic parking brake tightened with a low mechanical whine. The glass roof lost power and turned softly opaque, sealing the empty cabin in dim, frosted white. On the curved display, a countdown had already begun. Ten seconds. Five. Then a calm, disembodied voice filled the silent vehicle. "BMW Emergency. We detected an anomalous vehicle shutdown. Are you okay? Please respond." Nothing answered except the faint hum of the battery cooling system and the steady, patient blink of hazard lights on an empty stretch of road.

Vinja woke about an hour later than usual, the way travel days sometimes went when a body knew it had time to spare. His suitcase had been packed the night before. His passport was already in the outer pocket where he could reach it without thinking. He came downstairs expecting coffee, a rushed goodbye, and Jiejie complaining that early flights were an unnatural crime against the human body. He did not expect an empty living room. The television was gone. Not off. Gone. The full black wall stood bare except for the empty mounting bracket, the dark metal arms exposed where the screen should have been. The cables had been neatly coiled and secured beside it because Vinja had done that himself the night before. The furniture dolly was gone from the entryway. The coffee pot was still warm, half a cup missing. "Jiejie?" No answer. He glanced toward the entryway out of habit. The cape hung exactly where it always hung, undisturbed. He was not confused about why the television was gone. They had agreed on the test. He had helped prepare for it. He was confused by the silence. "She should've been at Ma's by now." He said it aloud, mostly to Iggy22, who had appeared on the arm of the sofa. Vinja tried Jiejie's bedroom anyway, more from instinct than expectation. The bed was made, which told him nothing. Jiejie made her bed with the discipline of someone who had never once considered leaving it untidy an acceptable option. He came back into the living room and stared again at the empty wall bracket. Iggy22 tilted his head in a way Vinja had learned to read as obviously.

Vinja tried Jiejie's phone three times. Straight to voicemail each time. It did not ring out. She did not decline the call. There was only the flat, immediate silence of a phone that had lost its signal entirely or was no longer anywhere a signal could reach it. He called Ma next, mostly to eliminate the ordinary possibilities. "Vinja, baby." Her voice came through warm and easy. "You headed to the airport already?" "I was going to be. Ma, is Jiejie there with you?" "With me? No." A pause. Then Ma's voice turned lighter, teasing. "She was supposed to come by early this morning. Never showed, never called either. I figured y'all had ditched me for Viki and Chill. Said they're probably three episodes deep into something and forgot old people exist." She laughed. Vinja closed his eyes. "Ma. She never made it to your house." The laughter stopped. "What do you mean she never made it?" "I don't know yet. I'm going to check."

Vinja hung up and opened the My BMW app before he had fully finished standing. Jiejie had added him as a secondary driver years ago. When he was home, they used whichever vehicle made sense and refused to make ordinary life more complicated than it needed to be. He had never once needed the app for anything like this. Vehicle Finder loaded a map. A single pin blinked on a stretch of highway shoulder along the route to Ma's. Beneath it sat a notification he had not triggered. Emergency Stop Assistant Activated—Vehicle Secured. He stared at it for one long second. Then he grabbed his keys and went to find out what an empty car could tell him.

The iX sat exactly where the map said it would. Its hazards blinked in a slow, patient rhythm. The vehicle appeared undamaged, parked with almost eerie precision along the shoulder line, as though it had selected the safest position itself. As Vinja approached, the car woke gently to meet him. The Digital Key recognized his phone. The locks gave a soft, welcoming chirp before he reached for the handle. Polite. Ordinary. Exactly the greeting the car gave him every other time. It did nothing to settle the dread pressing against his chest. The cabin lights rose dimly when he opened the driver's door. Everything looked wrong in a way that had nothing to do with damage. The seatbelt remained buckled, pulled in a clean diagonal across an empty seat. Vinja left it exactly as he found it, unwilling to disturb the impossible outline of where Jiejie had been. The center display was still lit. The navigation route ended abruptly on the highway, the destination unmistakably Ma's address. Beneath it, a media screen remained frozen on the song that had been playing when the sound cut out. Jiejie's phone sat in the wireless charging tray beneath the console. Its screen lit weakly, showing Vinja's three missed calls stacked across the lock screen. Vinja stood there for a long moment with one hand on the open door, looking at a car that had done everything right and still could not tell him the one thing he needed to know. Wherever Jiejie was, she had not left that vehicle by any ordinary means. And she was not coming back the way she had gone. He picked up her phone and slipped it into his pocket. Then he looked through the gap between the front seats. The television remained secured across the folded rear row, perfectly upright, every strap still tight. The moving blanket lay crumpled against the cargo floor where it had fallen. The screen itself was dark, bare glass reflecting nothing back at him. Vinja closed the driver's door. "Okay," he said quietly, to no one. "Korea can wait."