At a remote military research installation in the American Southwest, the perimeter sensors are beginning to fail.
Ethan Ward has spent enough time on patrol to know how the desert distorts distance. Heat, glare and faulty equipment can explain almost anything, until he sees a human-shaped figure beside the fence and something else moving across the open ground in a way no animal should.
In the nearby town, reporter Maya Ward is following a pattern no one wants connected: brownouts, midnight convoys, trembling windows, delayed supplies and witnesses who describe black vehicles disappearing from empty roads. Her editor wants proof. The installation offers silence. The town keeps finding ordinary explanations.
Inside the facility, systems analyst Dr Adrian Hale is rewarded for solving problems he is not cleared to understand. Every correction stabilises another fragment. Every successful integration feeds a structure whose full purpose remains hidden from him.
Three people encounter separate pieces of the same disturbance. None of them knows what the others have seen. Around them, military procedure, newsroom caution and scientific compartmentalisation continue to turn contradiction into routine.
The facility remains secure.
The town remains calm.
The system insists it is working.
But the anomalies are no longer isolated, and the closer each of them looks, the harder it becomes to believe that nothing has already crossed the boundary.
Prior Condition is Book One of The Open Gate, a slow-burn science-fiction horror series combining dimensional science fiction, institutional suspense, psychological unease and the consequences of secret experimentation.
