Daegnon lay on his back beneath a metal table, a strange tool gripped in one hand. It looked like a two-pronged fork, but the prongs weren’t sharp—instead, they ended in smooth open circles. When he pressed a button on the shaft, faint sparks flickered inside each ring.
Hoshi had shown him what to do. He touched one of the circular ends to a frayed wire. Immediately, the damaged metal began to reconstruct itself, the strands writhing like tiny snakes, reaching for the other end. When he brought the second prong to meet it, the sparks leapt across, and the wire sealed itself with a faint snap.
“Like magic… well... not magic. Tek-nol-ogy.” He sounded out the word that Hoshi and Cyrus had used before, then muttered, “All seem kind of same to me.”
But Hoshi had explained it to him anyway.
“A wire is a small tube made of insulating material. Held within it are monofilaments which allow the flow of current, data, or radiation—depending on the type—from one point to another.”
Daegnon didn’t understand all the big words, but he got the idea. Energy flowed through the wires. Fix them, and the ship came back to life.
As he continued reattaching the small cords, his mind slowly began piecing the definitions together. The words had sounded like gibberish when the metallic voice first spoke them, but now, through repetition and hands-on work, they were starting to take shape—gaining meaning bit by bit.
It wasn’t just matching the colors, either. He had to make sure the wires weren’t too worn or brittle. If they were, they had to be replaced entirely—a much more tedious job, requiring a different set of tools that weren’t nearly as user-friendly.
He had just finished the last reattachment at the panel when a loud, sharp noise rang out through the room. The sudden sound startled him so badly he sat bolt upright—and smacked his head on the underside of the metal table.
Pain lanced through his skull, and he groaned, disoriented and thoroughly annoyed.
The noise didn’t stop after the first blast—it blared again and again, rapidly oscillating between low and high pitches. The lights in the room shifted abruptly to a sinister red, casting eerie shadows and filling the space with a growing sense of danger.
“Hoshi, what happened?!” Daegnon shouted, clutching his head as he scrambled out from under the workstation.
The voice that answered wasn’t Hoshi’s usual tone—it was clipped, robotic, and almost alien in its urgency. “Graviton storm detected. Prepare for impact.”
“What is—” he started, but the ship lurched violently before he could finish. The floor dropped out from under him, and he spun as he slid across the room, slamming into the far wall with a painful thud.
Then the voice changed. It shifted back to Grubnash’s familiar timbre, no longer echoing from everywhere at once, but instead coming from a single, focused point. It was the AI’s usual voice—but now there was something in it Daegnon wasn’t used to hearing: fear.
“Daegnon, there is no time to explain. I need you to act immediately. What I’m about to ask is critical—if it isn’t done quickly, we will all perish.”
Daegnon’s eyes were still refocusing. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear both his vision and his thoughts. “What I need do?” he asked, his curiosity momentarily overridden by the urgency in the AI’s voice.
Across the room, a small door slid open near the floor. It looked barely big enough for him to squeeze through. Inside, just past a tangled mass of bundled wires, a faint glow pulsed in the dark. The light was soft and rhythmic—yet at its center, something darker flickered like a flaw in the pulse.
“You must override the safety relay,” Hoshi said, their voice returning to its usual measured tone, though the pace was slightly faster than normal. “The task will be challenging, but time is limited. Your recent repair reactivated the gravimetric detectors, which allowed me to identify the Graviton storm. Now, we must initiate emergency protocols to avoid further exposure. Completion of this override is essential for survival.”
The face of Grubnash appeared above the open hatch, and a mostly transparent green hand extended from the wall, beckoning him forward with urgency.
Glix had been working at a station that controlled the induction of dark-matter radiation into the sensor-input translators. Hoshi had shown her how to use her fingers to direct the images across the glassy tabletop.
“The gravimetric sensors were just restored,” Hoshi told her. “Please modify the routing of available energy from the subspace scanners to the quantum gravimeters.”
As Glix did so, the calming green hues that normally filled the display morphed into an angry crimson. In the next moment, a siren began to blare. A heartbeat later, the entire engineering bay was flooded in the same urgent red light, casting jagged shadows across the machinery.
Then the voice came—not Hoshi’s usual tone, but something sharper and stripped down, flat and mechanical, devoid of emotion. “Graviton storm detected. Prepare for impact,” it announced, the words reverberating off the towering structures and tangled conduits.
Before Glix could respond, the voice narrowed—no longer echoing, but coming from a single speaker at her station. “Hold on, Glix!”
She barely had time to think before the entire ship tilted violently.
Her feet lifted from the floor, and her body lurched sideways. She clung to the edge of the workstation as inertia dragged her outward. Her arms trembled, grip slipping, legs flailing—and for one long second, she was certain she would lose her hold.
Then, just as suddenly, the ship righted itself. Gravity slammed back into place, and Glix lost her grip. She crashed to the floor, landing hard. Pain shot through her ankle and she let out a sharp breath as she grabbed at it.
“What was that?” Glix asked, panting through the pain in her ankle but unable to suppress her curiosity.
“I am sorry, Glix—there is no time for a full explanation,” Hoshi said, their tone clipped but focused. “Your companion Raknak is still inside the Dark-Matter Cyclotron Core, where he was performing maintenance. You must reach him before he is disintegrated.”
“The what?” Glix asked, unfamiliar with the name of that particular system.
Instead of responding, the image of Grubnash reappeared at another workstation. A holographic hand extended, pointing toward the massive spherical object with its tangle of intricate machinery at the far end of the bay.
“Get moving,” Hoshi commanded, their voice commanding, allowing no room for questions.
Gritting her teeth, Glix took the hint and began hobbling as best she could toward the far end of the engineering bay—toward the Dark-Matter Cyclotron Core.
“Ahhh…” Raknak sighed as the warm yellow fluid exited his bladder. He leaned back and enjoyed the release. He hadn’t necessarily been holding it in for long, but the sheer quantity exiting his bladder was still deeply satisfying.
“What dat?” he muttered, ears twitching as they picked up a strange sound coming from somewhere outside the metal tube he was in.
It wasn’t a voice or anything else he recognized—it fluctuated unnaturally, rising high then dropping low—definitely not sounding like anything alive.
He shrugged. Whatever it was, it sounded like something for the others to worry about.
Then he reached down to shake off the last few drops—just as the entire tube pitched sideways without warning.
Suddenly, the floor was no longer beneath his feet—it was to his left.
So instead of standing on the floor like he had been, he was now standing on the wall.
But standing didn’t last long.
His feet slipped, his body lurched, and he went sideways.
Raknak slammed into the curved wall with a heavy thud—followed immediately by the rest of his bladder’s contents as they went airborne in a chaotic golden spray, splattering across both him and the surrounding metal.
The mess coated everything, turning the smooth surface into a slick, treacherous slide. And slide he did. His momentum wasn’t great, but the curve of the wall—and the fresh layer of warm, glistening pee—ensured almost no resistance.
Limbs flailing, Raknak skidded along the now-angled tunnel as warm droplets splashed back onto him with every bounce and twist.
Drenched in his own urine, he zipped along the curved section of the half-torus-shaped tube, a mix of whooshing, squelching, and splashing sounds following in his wake and echoing off the metallic walls.
The tube narrowed and inclined ahead, and Raknak braced himself, assuming he was about to wedge into the bottleneck like a hairy, Goblin-shaped cork.
But then gravity flipped again.
With a violent lurch, he was yanked backward toward the center of the tunnel, momentum and slickness combining into a full-body spin.
And then something strange happened.
As he twisted and tumbled through the tube—bounced, bruised, and absolutely soaked—the slick coating beneath him transformed the ordeal from a painful crash into an unexpected thrill ride.
He spun with surprising speed, the metallic surface offering almost no friction, and each twist or bounce off the wall only added to the exhilarating sensation.
The smell—and occasional taste—of his own mess were hard to ignore, but quickly forgotten in the sheer, bizarre excitement of the moment.
It felt like an impromptu water slide—disgusting, ridiculous… and kind of fun.
To his chagrin, the ride came to an abrupt end as he hit a dry section where the pee hadn’t spread, skidding to a stop with a final, wet thwomp.
He lay there on his back, head pointed toward the center of the tunnel, soaked, breathless, and with his loincloth hanging off one foot.
A huge grin spread across his face.
“I not know what happen, but dat was Farqing fun!” he said, chuckling.
Cyrus sighed as the timer reset to twenty. He had utterly failed his first attempt at navigating the course.
Hoshi was still nowhere to be seen, but Cyrus suspected that was intentional. The way he’d had to learn to sense the differences in the nebulae—and now to move the ship as if it were part of his own body—wasn’t something that could be easily explained.
Even if the people who had built this ship—a question that still lingered in the back of his mind—had somehow described the process to the AI, relaying feelings and sensations to someone like him was a whole other challenge.
It was like trying to describe a taste. You could talk around it—sweet, salty, bitter—but you couldn’t make someone know it unless they experienced it themselves. Learning to push the ship forward with his mind felt the same way. Even if another person were capable of flying the Cosmic Sentinel, Cyrus wasn’t sure he’d be able to explain how.
No, this was something he had to learn on his own—and he was almost certain that was why Hoshi wasn’t around.
Before attempting the run a second time, Cyrus brought the ship’s window back into focus. He spun it, zoomed in, studied every surface, making sure he knew exactly where everything was. Last time, he had used his virtual hands to activate the thrusters, but he could tell now—that was just a starting point. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t enough.
He needed to feel the ship. Not as an object to control, but as part of himself. He had to become the ship—so that activating the engines was no longer a choice, but a reflex.
Taking a deep breath—only simulating the action in this disembodied state—Cyrus cleared his mind and tried to immerse himself in the ship’s systems. He knew the ship wasn’t fully functional yet, that this was a simulation built from available data, a facsimile of the Cosmic Sentinel in working order.
And honestly, that was a relief.
If this was how it should feel, he could only imagine how the ship felt in its current, broken state.
A vast array of unfamiliar systems—thrusters, sensors, generators, stabilizers, and countless other components he didn’t even have names for—pressed against his awareness. Their presence was overwhelming, but he knew he’d have to learn them, merge with them, sync with their signals, even if many of those signals would be dull or missing once the real ship came online.
A wave of apprehension washed over him.
Then came the surge of determination.
He had to do this. If he couldn’t figure it out—if he couldn’t complete this integration—they would be stuck here. The ship wouldn’t move. They wouldn’t escape. They wouldn’t find supplies.
They would starve.
He visualized the ship as an extension of his own body, focusing on the connection between his mind and the vessel—its sensors, both internal and external, its multi-layered systems, and its power source—feeling the energy flow throughout everything like blood through a body’s circulatory system.
He’d been taught a few meditation techniques by Mrs. Norris. He’d never been very good at them, but one exercise came to mind now as he tried to merge with the ship.
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Instead of emptying his mind, this method required him to open it—to listen and feel. He let the sensory input wash over him, trying to pick out the many signals coming at once: sensors, drones, system diagnostics, energy pulses, and a thousand other things all vying for attention. He focused on one, then moved to the next, while still holding the first in his awareness.
It was too much. Too many things. Too many kinds of stimulation. But that, he realized, was the point.
And then something clicked.
He knew his brain shouldn’t be able to handle all of this—not even in a sensory-deprived environment like this one. But the SCANT was active, silently working in the background, forming new pathways, connecting neurons in ways he couldn’t consciously follow. Yet he could almost feel the tingle of the nanites shifting inside his skull, sculpting his mind to adapt.
Slowly, he began to filter.
The systems that weren’t immediate—the ones that could wait—faded into the background. The ones demanding attention stayed in focus.
Slowly, he began to feel the hum of the engines. The steady pulse of power flowing through the conduits. The subtle vibration of space brushing against the ship’s outer hull. He sensed the ship’s interior, its empty corridors and glowing monitors, the dormant potential within its life-support systems.
Even though he was alone in this simulation, he could feel the vessel’s readiness—its desire to support a crew.
When he finally reopened his mental eyes and refocused on the window holding the three-dimensional image of the ship, something had changed.
There was a newfound sense of unity.
The overlay he’d once imagined—of the ship mapped onto a human figure—was gone. It had evolved. The human body had stretched, morphed, and dissolved, its form absorbed and reshaped until it no longer sat beneath the ship’s structure, but within it.
The ship wasn’t a machine he operated. It was his body.
His mind no longer tried to connect to the vessel—it had already fused. A new divide formed in his awareness, a partition between two distinct selves: the ship-body, massive and intricate, and the human-body, small and distant. His consciousness had expanded to encompass both. And though his physical form still existed somewhere in that chair, its input was faint, its sensations distant—like background noise compared to the vivid flood of data pouring in from the ship.
This wasn’t what he had imagined, nor was it anything like what Hoshi had implied. This was more.
He wasn’t just piloting the Cosmic Sentinel.
He was the Cosmic Sentinel.
With the connection between man and ship still fresh in his mind, Cyrus minimized the ship’s image and brought the short course back into focus, mentally preparing for his second attempt.
He paused, centering himself—giving himself a mental shake. It felt like loosening muscles before a jog. (Even though he’d never actually jogged before.)
Then, once focused on this new form, he moved.
It wasn’t with his hands or some kind of simulated gesture, but with pure intention. He willed the ship forward, feeling the thrusters engage like flexing limbs that weren’t entirely his yet—a little stiff, a little slow, but responsive nonetheless.
The ship surged ahead, and Cyrus quickly began testing what he could do. He adjusted pitch—nudging the front end upward, then dipping into a smooth downward glide. The ship reacted with a slight delay, as if thinking about his commands before obeying.
Next came yaw—he veered the ship left, then right, trying to gauge how quickly he could shift direction. It wasn’t graceful. Each correction required something like a second impulse of thought, and the vessel overcompensated once or twice before finally stabilizing.
It was a bumpy ride—but he was still moving.
Midway through the course, he pulsed the forward thrusters to slow down ahead of a tight bend. The deceleration was jarring, and the fine motor control needed for smooth flight took some adjusting to. Still, he managed to round the curve, then braced himself for the next challenge—the barrel roll.
He took a mental breath and initiated the spin, willing the Cosmic Sentinel into a full rotation. The maneuver wasn’t elegant—he wobbled halfway through and had to correct mid-roll—but the ship responded. Not perfectly. But well enough.
The timer continued to tick down.
Three… two…
Cyrus spotted the glowing end marker ahead, but he knew he wouldn’t reach it in time—not at this speed. Still, everything had shifted since his first try. His movements were no longer being forced through a simulacrum—they were his. He was syncing. His instincts were sharpening. The ship wasn’t fully his yet… but it was getting there.
One. Zero.
He didn’t finish the course this time.
But now he knew he could.
The simulation reset. He was instantly placed back at the beginning, the course laid out before him once more. He ran a quick check on his senses, mentally preparing for the final run.
‘This time, he thought. This time I’ve got it. All I have to do is—’
“Graviton storm detected. Prepare for impact.”
The unfamiliar voice slammed into his awareness, shattering his focus. The simulation blinked out, replaced by a shifting, colorless void.
Then the unpleasant sensation hit.
Cyrus felt both his physical body and disembodied mind lurch—a gut-twisting, impossible kind of movement that made no sense. The simulation shattered like glass in his mind. A sharp pain ripped through his skull as the headset was yanked violently away.
Disoriented, he tumbled from the chair, limbs flailing uselessly as gravity shifted sideways. His muscles were unresponsive, turned to jelly—his body limp, like a helpless wet noodle.
Before he could process what was happening, he slammed into something solid with a bone-jarring crunch. The impact knocked the wind from his lungs, and the sharp tink of shattering glass pierced through his awareness.
Then gravity shifted again—back. The room twisted violently as his body was yanked in the opposite direction, the sudden reversal slamming him to the floor with brutal force. Pain exploded across his side, and waves of color burst behind his eyes.
His mind scrambled to catch up, still tangled in the fading threads of the simulation. Everything felt disjointed, like his body and consciousness weren’t fully synced.
‘Cyrus!’
Hoshi’s apparition flared into his vision, their voice sharp with concern as it echoed inside his mind.
‘Are you alright?’
The words rang strangely, distorted by lingering disorientation, as if muffled underwater.
It took a few seconds—his brain finally catching up and realizing where he was—before he managed to answer. “Uhh… no?” he croaked through gasping breaths, groaning as he tried to push himself up from the floor.
The pilot’s chamber was bathed in flashing red light. Sirens screamed around him, stabbing into his ears and making his head throb even harder.
“What’s going on?” he managed to ask.
‘Cyrus, I’m sorry for the delay in explanation, but you must get us away from here as quickly as possible. You need to re-sync with the Exo-Pilot terminal. We are all in grave danger,’ said the once-again kimono-clad image of Hoshi, their tone tight with urgency, one hand gesturing frantically toward the chair.
“Danger? What? But I still have to…” Cyrus trailed off as he stood, the entire room seeming to tilt and spin around him.
‘I know a rapid exit from the mindscape can be extremely disorienting—but there is no time to waste. Returning to the virtual environment will stabilize your senses… for now,’ Hoshi added, their voice dropping into an almost-whisper.
Cyrus staggered toward the chair like someone who’d had three too many drinks. He practically collapsed into it, catching himself with trembling arms. A wave of nausea rolled through him—sharp and sudden—but nothing came up. He wasn’t sure if that was a relief or if vomiting might’ve actually helped.
Fumbling with the headset, he eventually managed to drag it over his head once more. That now-familiar sensation returned—his body faded, replaced by the disembodied awareness of the mindscape. As odd as it still felt, it was far more tolerable than the dizziness, nausea, and pounding pain his physical form was enduring.
Hoshi’s image reappeared within the mindscape, still clad in the same flight suit as before—but their expression had changed. Gone was the calm, encouraging look. Now, their face was tight, brows drawn together with visible concern.
“You must complete the integration as swiftly as possible,” Hoshi said. “There is a comprehensive tutorial protocol typically required before piloting the Cosmic Sentinel—but due to current circumstances, we have no time. It must be bypassed.”
Cyrus didn’t know what exactly was happening or why moving the ship was suddenly so urgent, but the tension in Hoshi’s voice made the stakes clear enough. This was bad.
“The integration handshake is initiating now,” Hoshi added, their voice briefly flattening into a more robotic cadence.
Before Cyrus could fully sync back into the ship’s systems, the twenty-second countdown timer reappeared in his vision—blinking to life like a starting gun, ready to fire.
‘Farq me!’ Cyrus mentally cursed as the countdown began. Half a second slipped away as he wondered why he couldn’t swear properly, even in his own mindscape.
Eighteen seconds.
He snapped back to focus and hurled himself—his ship-body—forward. The movement surged through him, a full-body lurch he both caused and felt.
‘Faster!’ he shouted inwardly, straining to push harder, to become the thrusters. His mind worked frantically to merge two identities—himself and the ship. He’d nearly done it during his last attempt, but being violently ripped from the simulation and thrown back in, paired with Hoshi’s clear anxiety, made it harder to regain the delicate sync he’d almost achieved before.
The ship responded sluggishly. Still too slow.
He pushed again—engines, systems, sensors, everything—finally catching and responding like they should.
He raced along the track of glowing markers, his speed and control sharpening with every microsecond.
Ten seconds. He spotted the finish ahead, just beyond the last twist.
Eight. His view tilted, spun, reoriented—his instincts syncing with the ship’s orientation, his control tightening.
Five. The division between his human self and the ship’s structure was almost gone. His consciousness now threaded through metal, circuits, gravimetric balance. He was where the ship was.
Two. The finish line loomed just ahead.
With a final surge, Cyrus hurled himself forward, crossing the threshold. In that instant, the last barrier between man and machine vanished.
He wasn’t just the pilot of the Cosmic Sentinel, not like he had thought.
He was the ship.
Neuro-integration Complete!
A sensation unlike anything Cyrus had ever experienced washed through him.
Not only had he completed the course and synchronized his brainwaves with the ship’s systems—he had fully integrated. His consciousness was no longer simply aligned with the Cosmic Sentinel—it was merged.
The realization crept over him in stages. He understood that he was no longer merely human. Not entirely. He now existed as something else—something with two bodies, two minds, and two overlapping identities.
He had once believed in the soul. His parents had raised him to imagine an afterlife—a place filled with lush gardens, flowing rivers, and endless delights, where the spirit would journey after death and remain in paradise. But those beliefs had died with them.
Since then, anything resembling faith or higher purpose had felt like simple superstition—stories for people too afraid to accept life for what it was, or unwilling to trust in the science that explained the universe.
And yet, this…
This wasn’t just physical. It reached beyond neurons and data streams. It was less tangible than a heartbeat, stronger than emotion, and it touched something deeper. Something intimate. It felt like a part of him had been split, shared, and reshaped—left raw, exposed, and vulnerable. It wasn’t pain, exactly. It was awe. It was fear and excitement, rage and stillness. It was something that felt profound, even if he no longer believed in mysticism.
He wouldn’t call it sacred. But whatever it was, it had changed him.
The sensation lasted only seconds, but he knew—deep in both of his selves—it would never leave him.
“Cyrus! You need to move us out of the Graviton storm!” Hoshi’s voice shattered the afterglow he’d been basking in.
Cyrus opened his eyes—though now, he realized, he wasn’t seeing through the simulation anymore. He was fully integrated with the actual ship. This was no longer a training construct. Everything was different now. Dimmer. Heavier. Real.
The systems he’d grown used to—the clarity, the responsiveness—were gone. What had once felt like flying with thought now felt sluggish, like swimming through fog. The ship was broken. He could feel it.
He conducted a quick internal scan, and the truth became clear: the Cosmic Sentinel was in worse shape than he’d realized. The sensors, so vibrant in the simulation, now felt like trying to peer through frosted glass—clouded and pale in comparison.
His body ached, though he couldn’t tell whether the pain was coming from his own battered form or from the ship’s damaged systems. One of them was phantom, but he couldn’t determine which.
Still, he forced himself to focus. He drew on the data he could access and located their position relative to the space around them. The ship floated in a turbulent mess of gravitational fields, electromagnetic waves, and strange hues of energy and matter—some of which he couldn’t even name. The ship interpreted them, filtered them through his mind, translating them into sensations he could almost grasp but not fully comprehend. These were concepts he could nearly feel, taste, or touch—though he wasn’t sure which sensation belonged to which sense.
Before him, the Graviton storm manifested as a swirling vortex of intense gravitational waves, laced with pulsating streams of radiant energy. Its chaotic beauty was mesmerizing—spirals of electromagnetic spectra wove through warped pockets of space, twisting and tearing at the fabric of reality itself.
Words and definitions flooded his mind, each concept translated into something tangible. He could almost touch the gravitational currents, feel the snap of electromagnetic fluctuations, and sense the pressure of unseen forces pressing in around him.
As the ship, he perceived the storm in all its terrifying splendor. The gravitational waves weren’t just mesmerizing—they were dangerously close, threatening to shear the ship apart. Pulses of electromagnetic energy surged with destructive intent, and invisible pressures gnawed at the hull, testing its limits with every breath of turbulence.
“Cyrus, hold off as long as possible!” Hoshi’s voice pierced through the chaos—urgent, focused, and completely contradictory to what they had said only moments earlier.
Panic flared in his thoughts but was quickly suppressed beneath the weight of the ship’s situation. He could feel the very frame of the vessel straining under immense gravitational anomalies, the invisible forces of the storm tugging, twisting, and threatening to tear both ship and occupants apart. Every moment they delayed increased the risk of catastrophic failure.
Cyrus steadied his thoughts and cautiously engaged the engines, mentally reaching out and willing them to life. The response was sluggish. Unlike in the simulation, where everything had operated flawlessly, here he could feel the disrepair—multiple systems groaning, damaged, or incomplete. The power reserves were dangerously low, stretched thin across failing subsystems and emergency protocols.
He pushed all the available power to the reverse thrusters.
Only a trickle of energy responded.
Not even close to enough.
Then… something brushed against his senses. A subtle hum—power, vast and untapped, lingering just beyond reach. It buzzed at the edge of his awareness, like a pressure behind his eyes. It was outside the ship. The storm.
But even with that energy so close, he couldn’t reach it. Not yet.
He knew what had to happen. He had to use the JUMP engine. That was the only way to escape.
His mind shifted toward the Cyclotron Core—only for that hope to collapse into horror.
Someone was inside.
‘Raknak was performing maintenance in the core itself,’ Hoshi’s voice whispered into Cyrus’s mind, unusually distracted. ‘Preparing the JUMP drive for emergencies like… this one.’
The explanation downloaded into Cyrus’s brain like a compressed file opening all at once. The Cosmic Sentinel’s energy system ran like a circulatory network, dark-matter radiation collected from space by Quantum Collectors at the front of the ship. Those particles were drawn inward and circulated through the ship’s systems, supplying power.
At the center of that network was the Cyclotron Core—the heart. The core spun the particles in controlled spirals, much like a particle accelerator, breaking them down into high-energy radiation and quantum fragments. These were then routed into the ship’s systems—including the JUMP matrix.
The matrix itself was something else entirely: a web of quantum processors and anti-gravity field generators that calculated every subatomic variable in the ship’s immediate space and created a precise anti-mass bubble.
Inside the bubble, normal physics didn’t apply. This allowed the ship the ability to slip outside the bounds of reality—travel vast distances by sidestepping space entirely.
But it required absolute precision. And for that precision, an enormous amount of power was required.
Power that he realized he had access to—the graviton storm was filling the Collectors with dark-matter particles rapidly. But the core, the very place the dark-matter had to be cycled and processed, was currently unusable.
Because Raknak was still in it.
“Glix is on her way to remove him,” Hoshi added, their tone unusually terse. “And no, you absolutely cannot open the core while he’s in there. The dark-matter wouldn’t turn him into the Hulk—it would disintegrate him instantly.”
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