Aug 27th, 2419
Richard glared at the drive like it had personally insulted him—which, to be fair, it sort of had. It had been forty years since they cracked the alien's communication lattice… and understood the station’s purpose as a faster-than-light system. Magnus and Brenda had both tried, repeatedly, to explain that it wasn’t really FTL — more like shifting the universe’s reference frame around the traveler — but the distinction only irritated Richard more.
He’d been using mental interfaces since 2090, back when the Halo was still a prototype stuck together with hope and questionable adhesives. Four centuries of thinking at machines, getting clean feedback loops, negotiating with Janice and JANKIs like they were co-workers instead of code. Four centuries of systems that made sense — or at least argued with him. More importantly he, roughly, knew how they worked.
And after all that, the pinnacle of alien engineering wanted him to… visualize a destination.
No console.
No controls.
No coordinates.
Just “think really hard.”
He wasn’t religious — hadn’t been since age nine, when he was allowed to say “no thanks” — but this damn drive had him praying at the sacred altar of Please Get Me There. The problem was it supposedly didn’t work unless you believed in it, and he couldn’t believe in it unless it actually worked.
It felt like the same new-age wishcasting bullshit that exploded in popularity back in the early twenty-first century, except now it was coming from a device powerful enough to shred his atoms if he sneezed wrong.
He exhaled hard. “I’m being reckless,” he admitted to himself, knowing he had no intention to change course. "But hell, it’s been centuries since I’ve felt anything new."
And—fine—he wanted to name the damn thing. Everyone kept trying to slap their own label on the drive, as if naming new tech wasn’t his jurisdiction by centuries of precedent. He called it the Fracture Drive, and he was damn well going to make sure that name stuck. Easiest way to do that?
Be the first lunatic to make the bastard go.
For the nineteenth time, he was pretty sure he’d cracked it. Or at least cracked something.
He applied the juice and listened as rows of successively larger transformers powered up.
It would most likely do nothing, same as before.
And if it killed him? Well… four hundred years was more than enough overtime for any one man.
The ship was spherical, but not because aliens had a fetish for geometry or because Brenda’s half-baked physics lecture said it needed to be. The ship was spherical… It was spherical because the hull was a single closed molecule, an alien mega-structure so far outside human manufacturing sanity that the only way to build it was by following the alien formula atom-by-atom like idiots copying sacred runes. The material wasn’t glass; “transparent” didn’t remotely do it justice. It was a perfectly ordered lattice with strength numbers that made every human material scientist want to lie down and cry.
Brenda had tried to explain the transparency — refractive invariance, zero interaction coefficient, phase-stable whatever-the-hell — but he’d caught the little quiver in her voice that meant she was guessing. Which meant he was sitting inside a seamless, one-molecule, spherical bubble of alien miracle-stuff they did not understand, betting his existence that it wouldn’t decide to unzip itself under stress.
Perfect. Just absolutely perfect. Maybe there was some truth to Janice's assertion that he had a death wish.
And because the molecule was a single closed shape, the only modification they could make was the “cork,” as Richard insisted on calling it — a removable entry portal that wasn’t really attached so much as held in place by pressure differential until you got somewhere calm enough to pull it out. Flawless, provided nothing went wrong. Which, naturally, meant no emergency backup plan whatsoever.
So the one piece of alien design they couldn’t change was the one thing that made him feel like he was perpetually in freefall. Hilarious, considering they’d changed almost everything else to make the damn thing run.
The interior machinery — every piece fashioned out of real, physical, human-made components because programmable matter might get weird around the alien fields — sat clustered in the center of the sphere. Nothing could actually be attached to the hull, not even paint to mark which way was up, so the flooring and equipment were all gyro-stabilized islands floating in a perfect bubble. It thankfully blocked part of his view, because staring at raw vacuum through a material that didn’t admit it existed was testing the limits of his sanity.
The cabin was quiet except for the soft whine of stage upon stage of internal transformers charging. That sound had promised miracles before, always collapsing into humiliating silence, and he didn’t trust it for a second. He leaned back, exhaled, and forced himself to picture the destination. Not imagine—force. Shove the thought into shape like bending a steel bar with bare hands.
His complete inability to believe in any of this was, unfortunately, part of the problem.
He pictured The Farm, then nudged the image a few light-seconds toward Earth—belt-and-suspenders navigation, just in case the universe was feeling vindictive.
Then the starfield.
Then the rough coordinates.
Then the mental sketch of the region as Brenda had drilled into him.
He hated that this required belief—or anything even orbiting belief. He trusted buttons. Levers. Consoles. Machines built by people who actually obeyed physics instead of trying to reverse-engineer whatever extrapolated, humanized, hopefully-correctly-interpreted alien scribblings they’d extracted.
But he needed this thing to work.
He clenched his jaw, shoved the destination into the front of his mind, and waited while energies capable of tearing space itself apart built to critical. If they folded inward instead of outward, at least he would never know.
He felt the release crack through the relays, the whole system dumping its charge in one decisive punch. No pathetic fizzle this time — the main drive actually engaged, a sensation he’d never felt before, sharp and indescribable.
Then reality twitched.
A soft click.
A rising hum.
A static charge that lifted every hair on his body.
Then—
Everything inverted.
Not exploded. Not imploded.
The universe folded inward like a collapsing snapshot, reducing to a single null point that contained no space at all. The moment was smaller than a blink, smaller than cognition — tight enough to be indivisible.
And Richard’s mind shattered like a mirror dropped from a great height.
He wasn’t thrown out of himself. He was dissolved across all possibility-space like dust in a hurricane.
There were versions of him that weren’t versions at all—just absence where he should be, blank silences that ate at him like cold teeth. The majority of possibilities. Dead space. Un-being. He felt them as a hole inside himself, an ache shaped like all the lives that were never lived.
Some selves were alien—not monstrous, just wrong.
Some of him were gaseous, a consciousness diffusing through pressure gradients, thoughts that refused to stay put.
Many were mechanical—pulsed, logical, a clockwork mind ticking diagnostic pings through self-modifying circuitry, emotionless but still unmistakably him.
A crystalline version parsed reality as vibration, hearing colors and tasting time.
Fluidic Richards lay suspended in voids where gravity behaved like a rumor.
Some Richards knew exactly what was happening.
Some were screaming.
Some were bored.
A few were laughing hysterically.
And all of them happened inside his skull at once.
A thousand contradictory anatomies tried to occupy one identity—thoughts that weren’t his but still felt like home, instincts that contradicted themselves, alien fears, alien joys, alien stillness.
He existed everywhere and nowhere.
Then—
The separation.
The universes peeled apart like wet pages.
The not-hims thinned.
The ones that had never been him faded first.
Then the alien ones.
Then the terrified ones.
Then the curious ones.
Until only a handful remained — the versions almost identical to him but shaped by different turns of fate. Even they dissolved like a memory of a dream interrupted by an alarm.
One of them had a perfect life — a quiet home, a loving wife, a simple existence as a Craterist. He clung to that Richard as hard as he could.
Then Richard snapped back into himself like a fuse blowing.
But reintegration wasn’t clean.
He was everyone for a moment—each self hanging in his mind like ghosts refusing to leave. They flickered, jittered, crossfaded with his own thoughts. He felt emotions that weren’t his: desperation from a version that didn’t want to die, contentment from one that lived a simpler life, icy detachment from the mechanical him, crystalline peace, liquid dread, diffused confusion.
Some were grotesquely compelling—lives that felt richer than his own.
He reached for them.
They slipped through his fingers and vanished.
His muscles seized.
His body arced against the safety restraints in a full, helpless spasm as the last remnants of the others bled away. His breath came in sharp stutters. His heart hammered like it was trying to restart itself after being unplugged. His hands shook with the after-logic of alien anatomy - as if part of him still remembered other shapes, other structures, and wasn’t entirely sure which one he belonged in. A larger, louder part of him rebelled outright at being forced back into a fixed form at all.
Then...
Silence.
He gasped once.
Twice.
Then dragged air back into lungs that felt newly invented.
He blinked, cleared his vision, forced his senses into alignment.
He was alone in his head.
Finally.
He sagged back into the seat, shaking, sweat running down his temple, nerves buzzing like broken wires. Long minutes passed while his mind relearned the basics — where his limbs were, how breathing worked, which sensations belonged to him again — all while clawing its way back into a single shape, discarding the ghost instincts of bodies he’d never actually had.
And only then did the thought break through:
The drive had worked.
He swallowed, lifted his head, and looked out.
No stars he recognized.
No landmarks.
No reference frames.
Just a vast, unwelcoming stretch of space he had never seen in his life.
He hadn’t held the destination clearly enough.
He had no idea where he’d brought himself.
Richard let out a shaky breath.
“Shit.”