The fluorescent lights of Terminal 3 hummed overhead as Officer Ayesha scanned passports with practiced efficiency. It was just past 2 AM. A time when fatigue blurred the faces of countless travelers and routine was her only companion. That was until the man in the gray suit stepped forward.

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He handed her his passport with a courteous nod. Clean shaven, polite maybe in his late 40s he carried himself with quiet confidence. Nothing unusual until her eyes caught the name of the issuing country: Taured.

Ayesha blinked. Taured? She flipped back to the front page. The golden crest was embossed professionally. The document bore entry and exit stamps from France, Japan, and Brazil which were dated and coded accurately. The holograms passed UV checks. Everything looked real but Taured wasn’t real. Not on any map. Not in her memory. Not in any country database.

“Excuse me sir,” she said as calmly as possible “Could you confirm your country of origin?”

The man didn’t miss a beat. “Taured. It lies between France and Spain. A small principality. I have flown here several times before.” Ayesha’s fingers hovered over her keyboard. Her training urged her to call a supervisor. Her instincts told her this was no ordinary case. She signaled to Officer Faisal at the adjoining counter whispering quickly as she handed him the passport.

The traveler who identified himself as Jean Valen remained cooperative and calm. “Is there a problem officer?”

“Just a routine verification sir. Thank you for your patience.” In the airport’s back office officials clustered around the passport. Every test UV light, microprinting, watermark checks confirmed its authenticity. Yet the country did not exist. Even the United Nations database showed nothing for Taured. As the questioning began Valen remained unshaken.

“I am here on business,” he explained. “I represent a renewable energy firm based in Taured. We have long standing agreements with Japanese and French counterparts. I’m scheduled to meet a local agency regarding solar technology partnerships.”

He produced corporate documents, business cards, even receipts of hotel bookings in the city. All legitimate. But every attempt to call the numbers he provided led to dead ends. His firm had no presence online. The embassy he referenced? No such building existed.

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Ayesha was quietly stunned. She’d seen fakes, scammers, and smugglers before. But Valen didn’t fit any mold. He was courteous, precise, and strangely convincing. She wondered: Was he a time traveler? A parallel universe castaway? A hoax?

Hours passed. No definitive answers emerged. Yet Valen began to look tired. As if something had shifted within him. When asked to point to Taured on a map he stared at the blank space between France and Spain and frowned. “It should be here,” he whispered genuinely confused. “It’s always been here…”

“Sir,” Ayesha asked gently, “have you ever heard of something called the multiverse theory?” Valen looked up sharply. “Yes. But you don’t think—”

“What if,” she continued slowly, “your Taured exists just not in this version of reality?” Silence hung between them. A possibility too impossible to accept but too logical to ignore.

Ultimately higher authorities took over. Valen was neither detained nor deported. He was allowed to stay temporarily under strict observation. After all he hadn’t broken any law. Yet there was a quiet unease among the officials. A man with legal documents from a country that never existed what did that say about their world?

Ayesha couldn’t stop thinking about him. Over the next week she volunteered to assist with Valen’s stay. His conversations were filled with memories of cities that were oddly familiar but slightly different. He recalled events with small, haunting discrepancies a war that had ended differently, a singer who’d never become famous, a global treaty that didn’t exist here.

But Valen had a goal. “If I can understand what happened,” he said, “I may find a way back. Or accept this reality as my own.” That was the turning point for Ayesha. She no longer saw a puzzle. She saw a man caught between worlds, clinging to identity, to home, to meaning.

And so she helped him. Quietly. She accessed academic databases, reached out to fringe physicists, and even visited a reclusive scholar who believed in dimensional overlays. The world outside went on unaware that somewhere in a modest apartment near the airport,a man from a forgotten country searched for answers. And one immigration officer who was trained to question everything found herself believing.

Maybe not in Taured. But in the strange powerful truth that reality might be more fragile and far more wondrous than we think.

I would like to invite @eliany, @solperez and @memamun to join this contest and show up with their own fictional story.