Chapter 2: Airborne

  Commonwealth Unified Time Sector 12: S12-CUT 202.3.27380.74

  ‘Earth date—March 16th 2244 CE’

  I woke early—too early—but the tight pull in my chest and restlessness of my being had been building all night. Sleep never really took. It had felt like my body had already been launched upwards, even if I hadn’t left the bed yet. There was no hesitation. No second thoughts. Just motion. I was up. Dressed. Focused. And alive.

  Breakfast never crossed my mind. I was wired with something stronger than hunger or coffee could muster—something deeper. The kind of energy that comes when you know you’re standing on the edge of everything.

  I threw my duffel over one shoulder—regulation-issue, olive drab, worn soft from three years of hard use. It wasn’t heavy. Most of what I own could fit inside. It was most of what I’d ever owned, in all honesty.

  The uniform was new, though. Fresh, clean and well-tailored.

  Smart grey, high-collared, shoulders padded just enough to suggest structure—not armour. The lines were sharp, confident, but not aggressive. Something made for peacekeepers who might still be called to war.

  Stitched to the uniform’s chest on the left side, shining in starlight. The Helion Vanguard crests was elegant—an atomic nucleus at its centre, its orbital rings traced by tiny stars, each marking the founding worlds. The nucleus glowed faintly silver under the light, stitched with Graviton curves that hinted at Fold resonance. It wasn’t just a symbol. It was the equation that changed history—worn like a vow. It caught the morning light when I shifted, fracturing into star points—subtle, but unmistakable. I’d stared at it the night before, tracing the border with my thumb.

  Not for vanity. For proof. That I had made it this far.

  The sun had just crested the hills when I stepped out into the stillness of campus. The air was brisk, touched with the salt of San Francisco Bay. I paused at the top of the stairs outside my now old dormitory and looked out across the expansive grounds—wide, trimmed, and gold-lit in the slanting light. A garden framed the old redwood quad: green, fragrant, organized in clean spirals of native plants and imported blooms from distant sectors.

  I had never really stopped to take it all in before. I never really gave it the time.

  Groundskeepers were already at work, moving slow and steady through the beds. One of them—an older man with grey in his beard and dirt on his knees—looked up and gave me a nod. I returned it silently, unsure why the gesture hit me so hard. Maybe it was the calm in his face, the kindness in his eyes. Or the way he didn’t ask where I was going. As if he already knew. Either way, it filled me with saudade—a quiet nostalgia for what I was leaving behind, and a yearning for what lay ahead. I felt the push of my past and the tug of my future, sharpening my sense of resolve. Earth had shaped me in ways I continually tried to forget—but couldn’t. It was the place I had survived, and now, the place I was finally ready to leave behind.

  I walked slower than I meant to at first. Letting my boots crunch over the gravel path listening to its sound. I would miss it in some ways, and I want to remember some of the smaller details. Letting the scent of early roses and sun-warmed pine rise into me. Letting myself feel it.

  This place had been home, even if I hadn’t called it that. Not out loud.

  And now I was leaving it.

  The Solari Academy had always been pristine. Designed to impress, to inspire all who visited. Tall white marble structures stood in perfect symmetry, all polished stone and sharp corners. A testament to human ability and precision with a hand and chisel. The walkways were quiet, the air was clean. Statues lined the courtyards: explorers, scientists, officers whose names were etched into metal and marble like prayers. Some were human, some were not. That was not a distinction made here, we all stood in unity. But for humanity, at the centre stood the most prominent:

  Dr. Professor. Elia Voss.

  The nuclear physicist who uncovered the Architect Schematic—the equation and blueprint for building machines capable of generating gravitational wells. Bending spacetime.

  A way to create and harness the power of gravity.

  And eventually, the means to bend the fabric of reality itself.

  It was written into the bones of all matter and scattered across the universe like starlight. A calling card—a literal encoded signal inside the heart of every atom. Some called it an echo—a deaths rattle across dimensions. Sent by something older, greater. A higher species pulling on the threads of the lesser, just to say:

  If you can see this. We were here.

  And we existed.

  The discovery of the Architects Schematic, a 'morse-code' of data hidden inside every atom in the universe, was the existential suicide of all Earth’s religions. The undoing of millennia of human philosophy. For theologians, it was a death knell. For philosophers, a rebirth. The new universal constant was in its own, a genesis.

  It gave the instructions to create a new technology. Blueprints to build a machine.

  Humanity stopped—every eye fixed on the headlines in 2043 coming out of CERN in Geneva, as we learned to see it for the first time. We screamed in horror when the prototype machine—Alcubierre Alpha—first bent spacetime in 2046, rotating a scar the size of Manhattan deep into the Earth crust—killing five hundred of the world’s leading scientists, including Voss. We watched the sky in esoteric awe as the first ship, Honoring Voss, launched in 2051. It was set and crewed for a fifteen-month voyage. It Folded to Jupiter in thirty-seven hours. It came back in six seconds. We travelled to our nearest wormhole—Gaia BH1 (The Reach)—1,560 light-years away and a thirty-six-hour journey—holding our collective breath in 2089 when another, Genesis VI, Folded into the blackened beasts’ heart of churning spacetime and vanished.

  And in 2090, seven-thousand years of silence falling upon humanity finally broke.

  The cosmos had spoken once again. We were not alone.

  On the other side there were twenty other species—entire civilizations we’d only dreamed of—there, waiting for us to come. Entire worlds, terraformed sectors and interconnected societies with an unfathomable level of technological advancement: the cure of cancer—ways to reverse human-induced climate change on Earth—the blueprints for a starship. They welcomed us into the Common Celestial Highway—an interconnected network of wormholes across galaxies—not with weapons, but with open hands, claws, and wings, inviting us not just into their systems… but into their collective arms.

  Fermi's paradox was a correct hypothesis, just waiting for the alternative answer.

  No god had spoken to humanity. But the Universe did. The scientific articles of a new revelation redefined everything. A purpose. An identity. And in the silence between us that followed—where uncertainty once lived—humanity found something else: unity.

  World peace didn’t come from treaties. It came from the Earth and the Sky.

  An encoded signal, buried in the fundamental particles of all matter. A repeating binary code of irrational numbers folded into every atom; crying out to anyone who could hear it—again and again, and again—since the Big Bang and into eternity. A message you could only see and hear if you knew how to look. When your planet, your species, were ready. Not a prime directive, but a simple test.

  The discovery of the Architect Schematic and the graviton particle was only the beginning. Harnessing it into a Faster-Than-Light engine—the Alcubierre Array—soon followed. Impulse Fold technology and the antiquation of fossil fuels. Artificial gravity. Unlimited clean energy. This was a gateway—for any species capable of listening. A message from the cosmos written by a higher being in the universal language for all species—mathematics. A gift to the developed, the worthy. And the discovery of the Helion Commonwealth—for all species throughout the universe who were star born—and had the ability to listen and see what was sitting in plain sight all along.

  Humanity didn’t invent gravity.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  We just found out how to Fold it.

  And the Universe came to us.

  Her likeness was captured like folded silk with precise detail into shining brass—one hand lifted mid-gesture, the other cradling a single piece of paper, frozen in the moment everything changed. Her gaze was cast upward, toward stars she never lived to see.

  The plaque at her feet read:

  “For the First who knew how to listen. When the Universe spoke to us.”

  I used to pass it every day.

  I never stopped. Not really. Not until now.

  Because for me, the Academy never felt like it was built for me. I walked these paths like a ghost—half-seen, never quite welcome. First an outsider. Unworthy to be, even in the shadow of Voss. I wasn’t a cadet with clean boots and a father’s legacy on the honors list. I didn’t grow up in embassies or prep schools or a caring home. I came from nowhere. A destroyed childhood. A dead mother. A name I’d had to earn for myself, piece by piece.

  I didn’t rise through the ranks of this Academy. I clawed my way up them—buried, bloodied, and breathless. And I got good at it. Real good.

  But even now, with the stars in my reach, the voice inside still whispered the same thing: You don’t belong.

  And maybe that’s why I kept walking all those times. Not to admire the statues, not to honor the past—But to run from the part of me that still felt like I was trespassing on someone else’s future.

  And still—this morning, for the first time—I let myself lift my head up high to her.

  The walk to the main transporter hangar was longer than it needed to be. I could’ve cut across the commons, but I didn’t. I let the moment stretch. Let myself imprint the place on memory. The rising sunbathed the white marble a vibrant gold now. My shadow stretched out before me, tall and sure across the flagstones.

  By the time I reached the hangar, my pulse had steadied—but not calmed. It was the stillness before a leap. The silence before my future, folded into motion.

  The pilot was waiting. Tall. Still. Anonymous in his flight suit. The kind of man who’d flown too many times to count and didn’t need to speak to say “ready.” He gave me a nod, barely perceptible. That was all. It was enough.

  I stepped onto the shuttle beside him.

  No ceremony. No fanfare.

  Just the low hum of the Fold array spinning up beneath our feet.

  A shimmer of blue through the viewport. A twist behind the eyes.

  The shuttle climbed fast—straight and clean over the Bay. I leaned forward toward the viewport, breath fogging the glass at the edges.

  Below, the world began to fall away. And hopefully with it, some of those darker memories from my younger self. A broken past, that I wrestled into this promising future.

  Bridges curled over dark water—the newer San Francisco Bay Bridge, leading a stream of early morning vehicles running on graviton clean-energy. Skyscrapers turned gold in the morning light. Streets lit up like veins of fire. It was beautiful, and like I was seeing it for the first time.

  Earth itself had changed since the Schematic. Cities now folded upward in gravity-defiant towers. Trains surfed silent graviton rails at Mach speeds. Atmospheric scrapers filtered pollution in real-time, not that much was emitted anymore. But some things hadn’t changed. People still walked gardens, knees dirty with soil under their fingernails. Still looked up. Still wondered.

  And in that moment—looking down on it all—I didn’t feel fear or remorse. Not regret, either. Only a sense of purpose and release.

  This wasn’t goodbye. This was destiny.

  I had waited for this moment all my life—not to escape Earth, but to escape everything that Earth had been to me.

  The shuttle creaked softly as the sky deepened—from blue, to indigo, to black. A slow, holy dark that opened itself beckoning with every second. Then stars—sharp and unblinking—punched through the void.

  I had seen this view before—we had some low-gravity training exercises on the Academy’s lunar complex.

  But this time was different., I wasn’t just visiting.

  This time, I wasn’t coming back.

  I was leaving.

  The shuttle hummed beneath me like my heartbeat—steady, subtle, thrumming with quiet anticipation. Outside the viewport, space now stretched like a canvas of obsidian silk, flecked with distant fires. Far off nebulae burned like ghost light pastels, the kind you only saw in the outer sectors or the dreams of children.

  With a slight shake of the fuselage, we crested Earth's upper orbit, and I saw her.

  My eyes flicked forward, catching my first glimpse from the shuttle’s forward bay just as sunlight crested the Earth’s horizon, casting radiant gold across her hull. A long arch of bold black letters revealed her name and Helion Commonwealth Ship registry number.

  HCS Resolute 6867-Earth

  The light moved like silk, tracing the ship’s forward hull—a long, narrow spearhead tapering toward a blunt, armored prow. Twin stabilizer fins jutted from either side like swept wings, angling downward in a design meant more for graviton dispersal than atmospheric flight. Below, the ship’s spine flared into the segmented engine section and Voss’s legacy—twin Alcubierre Arrays—hexagonal emitters glowing with Fold-ready intensity. A dorsal ridge of sensor pylons ran the length of her back, bristling like vertebrae. No unnecessary curves. No aesthetic flourishes. She looked powerful—extending through the void poised like a spear tip. She looked built for purpose. Hardened. Fast.

  It was like watching a ship in a bottle emerge from shadow into fire. The breath caught in my throat. My face opened into a smile of wonder.

  Awe doesn't visit often in this line of work, you get used to it. You see it every day on the news, in every book at school and during my time in the Academy. But it did then. The light kissed every contour of her scaled armor, and she gleamed as if freshly forged.

  The Resolute wasn’t the only Vanguard ship out there. Hundreds of others patrolled the far systems, escorted diplomatic missions through new Gates, or ran deep-range scans along the perimeter sectors. But something about her—her silhouette, her name, her mission—spoke to me.

  My mouth went dry. A thousand things I’d trained for, imagined, dreamed of—all distilled into this single vision. And it’s here.

  She didn’t just float in orbit above Earth’s far side—she loomed. Sleek and brutal in posture, every hard line of her Vanguard Interceptor-class frame whispered purpose: not grace, but aggression. The frames of her twined engines swept front to back like poised talons now. The port Alcubierre Array was powered down, but the starboard was a glowing orange strip of energy running its length, powering the ship.

  Her paneled hull gleamed a gunmetal grey—scarred and matte, like well-worn armor. Not from battle, but from lightyears flown. She’d missed the Viren War, commissioned too late to join the fight. But you’d never guess it by looking at her. For twenty years she served in science and survey roles, her weapon systems dulled, neglected, left to gather dust in favor of long-range sensors and planetary mappers. But now… those elevated mounts above her twin Alcubierre Arrays were being gutted and replaced. Impulse drivers rebuilt. Graviton dampers refitted. Rocket bays expanded. Combat logic rerouted through newer, nastier cores—designed not just to think faster, but to hit harder. Even in peacetime.

  They weren’t just restoring her bite. They were sharpening it.

  She wasn’t just being retrofitted. She was being reborn. A prototype for something new. Not a relic of war—but a vessel with purpose. With reach.

  And today, she was my home.

  My name is Kalen Varr.

  The name of my mother.

  At the Academy I was the best my instructors had seen in years. Top of my class in tactical combat simulations and exercises in Norway. First in low-G maneuverability at the Vanguard’s Luna Training Facility. First in planetary survival scenarios. I never missed a beat, never missed a lesson. Never said no to an opportunity.

  I had been called intuitive, efficient, relentless. A “natural,” they said—the kind of cadet who didn’t fold inward when the pressure turned up. A cadet who thrived on it. But I knew the truth, the distinction. I didn’t just rise under pressure. I needed it.

  Chaos felt honest. Clean. My instincts weren’t just fast—they were carved by something older. A hunger to prove I belonged, after years of feeling worthless. To escape the weight of where I came from. To escape the regrets of my past.

  No legacy. No money.

  No father who stayed.

  I clawed my way into and up the walls of that Academy with nothing but borrowed shoes and a bruised jaw from the last kid who called me a gutter ghost. They called it talent, determination and grit. I called it survival. I walked with some confidence now. Maybe too much of it. The kind that made the by-the-book types flinch. But it didn’t matter. My record stood on its own. What I lacked in outward humility, I made up for in results. Confidence was just another wall I built to keep the past out.

  Still, the moment I saw the Resolute, all that swagger melted just a little.

  She filled the viewport like a leviathan. A machine built for hard things.

  The weight of her presence pressed against me, even from kilometers away.

  The silence of space. The distant stars. The sheer mass of her.

  I wonder if she could see me now. Would she be proud?

  I sometimes still hear her voice when things go quiet. Not words—just the shape of them. An echo of a childhood memory I can’t hold still. Like a veiled breath trapped behind the watered tempered glass. Gone before you can touch it.

  Before you can say goodbye.

  Before I could say, I was sorry.

  — Failure, a 21st Century band.

  Watch the sun rise, you still feel your phantom head.

  Full of phantom thoughts you never had, never said.

  Careful what you dream, the ground is full of gardens cold.

  Just like Jesus, the loser with the heart of gold.

  Don't you worry.

  There's nobody.

  Don't feel sorry.

  There's no one.

  Watch yourself now, bouncing off the future past.

  All alone not a soul to love, a code to crack.

  Be careful who you want, the screen is full, the pool is cold.

  You're just a stranger, a loser with a heart of gold.

  Scan over binary

  Strokes over thought

  We can't let go

  Soft as you can speak

  Of constant wants

  To free us all

  We'll never point it back

  We're just a stop

  On the way