The Refracted Star filled the forward observation deck—a colossal, living equation burning in the vacuum of space.
Its light didn't just shine.It calculated.
Each pulse caused micro-quakes through Astra-9's hull, ripples of distorted gravity bending the stars behind it into mirrored arcs.
Orion could feel it in his bones.
Not heat.
Not radiation.
Recognition.
Lyra noticed it first.
"Orion… your heart rate—"
He staggered forward before she could finish. The Infinity mark seared inside his mind like molten metal. Pain lanced through his skull—and then—
The bridge vanished.
The Vision
Orion stood in a vast, silent plain of black glass.
Above him, the sky was shattered—fractured into floating triangular shards, each reflecting a different version of the stars. Strange constellations overlapped. Time itself seemed out of alignment, ticking in irregular pulses.
He wasn't on the bridge.
He wasn't even in space.
He was standing inside the Refracted Star's memory.
A voice reverberated through the fractured sky.
Not Seraxis.Not the Infinity Network.
Something older.
"You have returned sooner than expected."
Orion spun around.
Before him stood a figure made of faint starlight—humanoid in shape, but blurred, as though it existed in several time-states at once. Its face shifted subtly with each pulse of the broken sky: older, younger, wounded, reborn.
"Who are you?" Orion demanded.
The figure tilted its head.
"I am what remains of the Star's original guardian.""And of those who built Archive Zero."
Orion's blood ran cold.
"You helped create the experiment."
The figure's light dimmed.
"We sought to understand time. We believed understanding meant control.""We were wrong."
The black-glass plain fractured beneath their feet, revealing scrolling layers of past events:
Scientists lowering a core of impossible energy into a containment field
Spacetime folding inward
The first temporal echo bursting into existence
Infinity symbols cascading through the lab systems
Orion clenched his fists.
"You created the Unmaking."
A pause.
"No," the figure replied."We created its birth canal."
A chill passed through him.
The figure raised a luminous hand. The black-glass world dissolved into darkness—then reassembled into a new vision.
He saw Earth.
Not the present Earth.
A city skyline warped by gravitational distortions. Towers bent at impossible angles. The sky flickered between day and night like a broken screen.
Astra-9 lay in ruins across a fractured continent.
Humanity—scattered, hiding, fading.
And in the heavens above—
The Unmaking.
Not as a wave.
Not as a void.
But as a network of collapsing realities braided together like threads of black lightning.
Orion shook, voice breaking.
"That was the future you showed me before. Why are you showing it again?"
The guardian's voice softened.
"Because this time, it changes."
The sky rippled again.
The vision shifted.
Now Orion saw the same ruined Earth—but different.
Lyra was there.Older.Wounded—but alive.She stood beneath a shattered dome, looking up with tear-filled eyes at something descending from the torn sky.
And that something was him.
Not the Orion he was now.
A version of him wreathed in quantum fire, body woven from equations and light.
A being no longer fully human.
Lyra whispered in the vision:
"You promised you'd come back."
The future Orion looked down at her and said softly:
"This is as close as I can come."
The vision shattered violently.
Orion screamed—
Astra-9 — Bridge
Lyra caught him as his body convulsed forward. He collapsed against her, gasping for air.
"Orion! Orion—talk to me!"
His eyes were wide with terror.
"I saw it again," he whispered hoarsely. "The end. But it was… different this time."
Rhea moved beside them.
"What did you see?"
He swallowed, shaking.
"A future where we almost survive. And a future where I don't."
Silence spread across the bridge.
Kessler's voice came sharply:
"The Star is interacting with his temporal signature directly. It's projecting probability branches into his consciousness."
Vale stared at Orion with dark intensity.
"So the Star is testing him."
"Or warning him," Solven added.
Orion looked up slowly.
"I met the guardian of the Star."
Rhea stiffened.
"There's something alive in there?"
"Not alive," he whispered. "What's left behind."
Lyra's voice trembled.
"What did it tell you?"
Orion closed his eyes.
"That Archive Zero wasn't meant to destroy time."A breath."It was meant to open it."
Rhea's jaw tightened.
"And?"
"And the Star has shown me two possible endings."He looked at Lyra, grief heavy in his eyes."One where I remain human… and you die."
Lyra went pale.
"And the other?"
Orion's voice was barely audible.
"One where humanity survives… and I stop being human at all."
No one spoke for a long time.
Outside the observation deck, the Refracted Star pulsed—as if in confirmation.
The countdown flickered again:
09:22:20:14
The first vision had been given.
And the choices ahead were already splitting reality apart.