While everything on Earth was shifting through an epoch of unprecedented transformation, Liam remained completely detached from the passage of local time, lost in the cold, silent vacuum of space.
He was trapped in an endless, agonizing rhythm of mental transit, jumping his consciousness from one solar-system-wide entropy law gear to the next.
He had long since lost track of how many stellar wheels he had traversed. Because of the absolute, unyielding monotony of the void, the journey felt as though it had stretched on for an eternity. Every gear looked identical in its structural essence—massive, ancient, and spinning with a relentless momentum that maintained the decay of its local system.
Liam had no precise metric to calculate how many more solar gears lay before him, nor could he guess how many galactic networks he would eventually need to cross. But he never entertained the thought of stopping.
