Sunrider Veniczar: Chapter 1 "Alice" (Indefinite Hiatus Project) (Patreon)

PREVIOUSLY...

Prologue "Arcadius"

Diode

“Prepare to engage experimental apparatus on my mark,” ordered Alice, her eyes focused on the crackling chamber in front of and below her. Standing on an elevated platform, fully enclosed by large translucent window panes, Alice presided above her life’s work in her laboratory’s observation annex. Dozens of complicated holographic graphs and charts squiggled and rotated, projected with crystalline clarity across the observation windows.

The experimental chamber was a mess of wiring and focused energy emitters diving into and surrounding the clear glassy panes of hyperdiamond, arrayed hexagonally like a single cell of a honeycomb in isolation. Around the chamber itself, massive rotating rings gyrated on common perpendicular axes with one another, a mesmerizing blend of motion and light as they spun with three degrees of freedom around the chamber lazily in large sealed room of perfect vacuum.

“We’re ready for your go-ahead Dr. Ashada,” one of the laboratory technicians reported over the intercom.

Alice took a deep breath, giving the apparatus in the chamber one final look to reassure herself of the experiment. The device inside the chamber showered the entire room with brilliant cascades of prismatic light as its delicately wrought hyperdiamond machinery spun and moved on accord of its internal mechanisms. A pulsar-graviton recorder, a device of her own invention for the purposes of the intended experiment.

Across the universe, hundreds, if not thousands of pulsars, anomalous gravitational bodies emitting regular and predictable energy discharges from their poles spun endlessly in the night, sweeping their beams across the universe like lighthouses into a dark and endless ocean. At any given time, minute differences in rotational speeds of the pulsars themselves and the movement of the universe generated a predictable signature for a particular set of coordinates at a particular moment in the history of the universe based on these thousands of pulsar signatures, if they could be measured. It had taken the better part of two years to perfect the device and design it such that it would survive two time transitions, but she had, in the end, succeeded. Not that anyone could be surprised.

Alice Ashada, one of the most brilliant minds on Diode, the final hold out and repository of knowledge left in a universe decayed from the days of the Holy Ryuvian Empire. Born to the Ashada family, Alice’s parents were already well established and venerated scientific minds in the community, but their daughter’s precocious childhood outshone even their achievements. Alice’s grasp for scientific understanding and ingenuity bordered on savantism, yet the girl herself was kind, demure, soft-spoken and loved by all; the embodiment of a “perfect child.” Shortly after her 19th birthday, Alice obtained her fourth degree in high energy particle physics, publishing a seminal article outlining the discovery for methods of baryonic to tachyonic matter transition and bringing within grasp the long sought after Holy Grail of science since the days of the Infinite Emperor; control over time itself.

No small wonder then that Dr. Alice Ashada had been appointed project lead for the Paradox Project, Diode’s most ambitious and concerted attempt in known history to crack the final mysteries of the universe. From on high in an orbital space station above the planet itself where the most sensitive of Diode’s experiments were carried out, Alice had devoted her mind and soul to the project, savoring the heady days and nights of inspiration and discovery as she mercilessly unraveled the universe’s best kept secret. Even better, the move and promotion had brought her closer to her family once again; both Alice’s mother and father worked aboard the station, albeit in other departments.

Surrounded by the warmth of family and the respect, if not outright adulation, of the scientific staff aboard the station, life for Alice was dreamlike, too good to be true, yet real all the same. And today, it was about to get even better.

“Engage inner rings now,” ordered Alice, trying to keep the excitement from making her voice overly-girlish. “Spin us up to eighty percent.”

“Accelerating, apparatus nominal.”

The first and smallest of the rings closest to the experimental chamber began to pick up speed, blurring and obscuring the chamber as it spun.

“Begin synchronization,” Alice continued, “Maintain current ring velocity.”

The second ring started spinning as well, looping independently from the first, accelerating. Together, the two rotating rings seemed to blot all light from the chamber itself, forming two almost solid spheres of blurring metal and hyperdiamond as they ramped up their oscillations.

“Bring us up to maximum rotational velocity.” Alice’s breath caught as the remaining eight rings entered into synchronized rotation one after another, willing the experimental apparatus to hold together against the unreal shearing and angular stresses her research design demanded from the machinery.

Taken together, the ten rotating rings formed the closest thing to a true Dyson sphere Alice was capable of creating. Between their oscillations, zero information, in theory, could pass from the chamber at the center to outside observers, effectively creating a pocket universe within the space from which causality and other universal laws and constants could be preserved.

“Dr. Ashada, apparatus at full load, we’re holding steady and green across the board!” The experimental technicians whooped in triumph in the background.

“Alright, now for the hard part.” Alice hid her grin behind a hand, eyeing a countdown timer as it reached zero, indicating the second phase of the experiment had started; matter transition.

The chamber itself was self-contained reaction core, capable of producing enough power for a small planet on its own. Arrayed to feed into the center of the chamber via energy emitters according to pre-programmed instructions and parameters, the reactor powered the processes necessary to initiate the baryonic to tachyonic matter transition she’d discovered as a method for temporal translocation. From inside, brilliant light and incredible energy must have been pouring into the experimental chamber from the embedded emitters, but to the entire research team on the outside, the metallic sphere remained featureless as ever, shielding the maelstrom of radiation and heat from even the most discerning of instruments. She could only hope now that everything had gone off without a hitch.

Another timer began to count upwards, maddeningly slowly. With bated breath, Alice waited for the longest 5 minutes in her life, each second slipping by agonizingly slow as her anxiety and expectation mounted furiously. The numbers were solid, mathematically, there was no room for error, unless her assumptions… Alice shook her head, trying not to second and triple guess herself. No matter what happened today, she’d learn something new. Even in failure, she’d find something of value; she could feel it.

The second timer finally buzzed at the end of 5 minutes, causing Alice’s heart to leap into her throat.

“Cut oscillations! Spin us down!” she choked out, struggling to get the words out around the pounding nausea and dizziness that threatened to overwhelm her.

Slowly, the rotating rings began to disengage, braking gradually and settling one after another as the impromptu Dyson sphere began to disassemble and lose coherence. When the final rings disengaged, Alice pressed her face against the glass of the observation bay, peering at the experimental chamber. Everything was exactly the way it had been before, her pulsar device clicking away serenely as though nothing had happened. A good sign.

“The data!” Alice was practically hopping with manic energy now, running between her holo screens with feverish possession. “Download the data now!”

A projection came up from the device, visual representation of the cosmic symphony playing endlessly around them. Beside it, the data from the last 5 minutes measured by an identical twin device directly below the experimental one.

MISMATCH

Alice shrieked with joy. “We’ve Done It! WE’VE DONE IT!”

******

Alice tore through the corridors of the space station laughing, tears of joy streaming down her face.

Time travel, it was possible. Her theories, vindicated. Inorganic matter transition today, organic transition tomorrow. The possibilities and applications were endless. Humans, as a species, would transcend their existence as three dimensional beings, moving for the first time in true four degrees of freedom. As fish had once crawled from the primordial pools to virgin shores, so too would humanity free themselves from their evolutionary shackles and leave behind one existence for the next stage in their natural history as a species.

Her parents. She needed to tell her parents. Still laughing and grinning like a loon as she skipped through the station corridors, ignoring the scandalized looks of the station’s other academics. Her father’s section was on the other side of the station, but it seemed to Alice that no time at all had passed before she had arrived at the mute, sullen door of his private laboratory.

She pressed her palm to the security sensor at the door.

“Alice!” A digital voice greeted her warmly as a floating orange orb appeared on the video screen above the security lockout.

“Hello Spider,” answered Alice cheerily.

“Up to your old tricks again? I can’t remember how many times I’ve asked you to call me by my actual name, PSDR,” said the AI without rancor.

PSDR was Dr. Ashada Senior’s digital assistant, keeping track of everything from his research to what dinner supplies to pick up on his way home. Their entire family living area had been wired to PSDR’s processes, making the program more akin to the family’s loyal butler than a research synthesis algorithm as her father had originally designed it to be.

“May I come in?” asked Alice.

“Unfortunately, your father is in the middle of some sensitive experiments. I’m afraid I can’t allow you to come in just now,” said PSDR with a tone of wagging disapproval.

Alice couldn’t help but feel disappointed. “I’m sure Father knows I can handle myself just fine. And this is important!”

“Nevertheless,” PSDR’s tone stiffened considerably.

Alice ground her teeth, teetering on indecision for a moment before gesturing to summon a holographic keypad in front of the door’s computer system. Tapping her fingers expertly over the interface in rapid strokes, Alice dove into PSDR’s code.

“What are you-?” PSDR’s voice was silenced as she plied her digital coercion on the program.

“Sorry Spider,” Alice said, wondering why she was even bothering. PSDR wasn’t even truly an AI, simple dumb algorithms and data routines with only enough interactivity to put on a guise of true intelligence and being. “Just like all the other times.”

As her primary caretaker when she was a girl, PSDR had quickly fallen prey to Alice’s inquisitive nature. Before she was even 8, Alice had learned to hack PSDR’s routines in order to trick him into offering her sweets for lunch, letting her roam and explore the surface colony rather than finish homework, and, most importantly, keeping its silence for her from her father and mother.

With a few quick commands, Alice opened the programming backdoors she’d left herself on escapades past, quickly overriding PSDR’s core routines and unlocking her father’s security lockout on his lab before neatly packing PSDR back into his digital shell with a ten minute countdown timer on reactivation. By then, she was confident, her father’s jubilation at her latest achievement would outweigh any potential ire from her desire to surprise him properly.

The laboratory door hissed open, admitting her to the gloom within. Alice peered into the darkness with curiosity; it’d been almost a decade since she’d had reason to visit him in his laboratory now that she thought of it. The place had certainly changed from how she remembered it as a girl when he’d bring her up on a shuttle for a day at work.

“Father?” Alice’s voice echoed in the large, seemingly empty chamber. Walking in, Alice heard the door snick shut behind her, plunging her into absolute darkness for a fearful moment before the lights flickered on overhead.

No answer greeted her, making the hairs on Alice’s neck prickle uncomfortably. Swallowing against the rising sense of wrongness, Alice inwardly gave herself a nervous giggle, ascribing her frayed nerves to the excitement of the day.

Walking deeper into the lab, she eyed his work benches, strewn with unrecognizable equipment and sheaves of his notes, taken on old-fashioned paper as was his customary quirk. She picked up a long, heavy cylindrical device, rotating its complicated metal surface it between her delicate hands and wondering what esoteric purpose her father had designed it for. Looking past his bench, however, a glowing light from the darkness of a smaller room, almost an annex to his main laboratory, caught her eye. Perhaps her father had been working there and simply not heard her? Still holding the curious device, she walked towards the glow.

“Father?” Alice asked loudly as she walked into the darker room. “Are you-!” Alice gasped involuntarily, dropping the long rod-like device with a ringing clatter.

In front of her, a tube filled with what appeared to be water, a naked woman floated, her tiny feet barely hovering over the floor of the tube. The woman held herself delicately, arms folded over her chest and legs pulled slightly up, seemingly asleep, her short hair of the palest mauve, almost white rippling with the water current as she bobbed up and down slightly.

Alice’s breath caught, coming in and out raggedly as her mind raced, stunned beyond rational thought. The woman in the tube… looked… almost identical. Although her hair was short with a paucity of pigment, her skin was the same exact shade as her own, her facial features the same as the ones Alice saw each day in the mirror. Even the woman’s body proportions looked the same as her own to her best estimate.

Feeling as though she was floating supernaturally above her own body, Alice took a half step forward, hesitantly, before forcing herself to walk mechanically, coming closer to the tube until she found herself nearly face to face with her doppelganger. With a trembling hand, she reached out and touched the side of the glass tube, pressing her hand against the cold surface.

“W-what… what’s happening?” she whispered tremulously.

Her copy’s eyes flashed open, looking straight into her own eyes, every bit as silver and colorless as her own. Alice shrieked in surprise, falling backwards on her rear, breathing as though she’d run for miles as she stared up into her own reflection on the other side of the looking glass.

The woman in the tube cocked her head to the side curiously, her expression open. “I’m sorry, did I startle you, sister?”

“S-sister…?” Alice whispered incredulously. “I… don’t have…” She swallowed hard.

“Sister,” said the copy firmly, like an oath. She raised a hand up to her side of the tank, pressing it against the glass as Alice had done, her meaning clear.

Alice forced herself to stand once more on unsteady legs, her entire body trembling. Nothing felt real, nothing felt right. She stared into her “sister’s” eyes, seeing her own fear and horror reflected in the other’s blank ones. Involuntarily, she reached out, pressing her own hand on top of the pale outline of the other’s palm. Their hands fit perfectly together, each and every palm line and crease matching precisely.

With a jerking sensation, Alice felt herself being pulled to the side, her entire world blurring as though draining away to unreality. A whisk of color, the sensation of movement, a blast of vertigo and she found herself standing in a void, a vast, empty plane of nothingness, lit from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, stretching to infinity, yet not existing at all.

“W-where am I?” Alice tried to speak, but the words came out ringing in her own head, echoing gently in the distance.

“With me.” Her own voice spoke to her, on its own volition. A thought she knew to be someone else’s, yet identical to her own burst into her mind unbidden.

Alice spun around, looking for the source, even as she realized it was coming from inside herself. No sooner had she spun around full circle, she found herself face to face with her short-haired counterpart.

“Shh.” The other’s hand reached out and pressed a finger against her lips, sending a wave of reassurance against her own rising panic.

Alice gaped, mouthing wordlessly for a moment before uttering three words she could not recall saying in living memory. “I… don’t understand.”

“This space,” the other woman gestured left and right. “We were meant to share it as sisters. It was empty, but now you are here.”

“How… how could you be my sister?” whispered Alice. “I… I have parents. I’m an only child. You’re as old as I am. It’s… impossible.”

The other woman smiled. “I have a parent too. He works here. He is my father. He created me. He created us.”

“N-no!” Alice stepped back. “Y-you’re lying!”

The other woman continued to smile, a hint of sadness in her features. “I’m sorry sister. You were the first of us. He wanted to test our concept before moving to… production.”

“Let me out.” Alice struggled to not shriek, feeling herself failing to contain the mounting panic. “LET ME OUT! AAAAHHH!”

Alice screamed as she felt herself pulled backwards. The white world, her copy, all of it distorted and pulled away as she crashed back into her own body, gasping for breath and feeling cold sweat breaking out across every square millimeter of skin on her body.

“Alice.” A deep, gravelly voice came from behind her, a strong hand on her shoulder.

Alice gulped air, staring up at her sister, now serenely asleep once again, before turning her head shakily to her side, looking into the lined and serious face of her father. “F-father…” her voice was plaintive.

“I see you’ve discovered your sister ahead of schedule,” her father said gravely, removing his hand from her shoulder and turning his attention to the woman in the tube, examining the holographic data-readouts projected on the side of the tube.

Alice caught the sight of her pale, sweaty complexion in the reflection of the tube as she backed away, feeling the entire floor of reality drop away from under her. “F-father?”

“Don’t call me that Alice. We both know I’m not your father now.” Ashada senior’s voice lacked any of the warmth and empathy she’d known in her childhood, now cold and calculating in a way she could never have expected.

“Please…” Alice choked back tears as she shook her head side to side, unwilling to accept what she’d seen and heard. “Please… I don’t understand…”

Ashada senior sighed deeply, sparing her a glance filled with disinterest before turning to the tube once more. “Human weakness at its most obvious,” he remarked with a measure of derision and irritation. “The inability to accept reality for what it is. No matter what, we can’t help but to rail against accepting the unexpected.”

Turning to look at her, Ashada senior gave her a curt nod. “Alright. You’ve earned an explanation; that much I suppose I owe you, as tiresome and, frankly, boring as it might be. As you’ve probably already guessed, you are not my daughter. You are the culmination of decades of genetic and developmental research. I designed your genetic template, twisted human DNA as far as it would go before shattering the concept of species entirely, engineering you to surpass and exceed any expectations and limits we had as a species. Insofar as traditional models of evolution are concerned, I doubt you even qualify as human scientifically. You’re something else, something new.”

“No…” Alice whispered, tears streaming down her face, but Ashada Senior kept talking, heedless of the pain his words inflicting upon her.

“Your gestation was carefully orchestrated; hundreds of prototype embryos gestated in the most exacting of conditions. Any abnormality was screened against, any possibility of defect discarded. By nine months post-term, I had only five viable candidates remaining. You were the most promising, Prototype 4L1C3. By necessity, I gave you a name, raised you as my own daughter.”

“And the others?” Alice took an involuntary step backwards, away from Ashada.

“Euthanized. Fear not, their deaths were useful in the sense that they led to breakthroughs to develop the technology I required to achieve adult gestation, rending the previous manufacturing process obsolete. A more than worthwhile trade.”

“Euthanized…?” Alice’s eyes widened with horror. “Trade!?”

“As I was saying,” Ashada’s voice was unmoved. “I raised you by necessity. The trips to my laboratory as a child, do you remember? I was trawling your memories, recording your subjective childhood experiences and upbringing to drip feed into the adults I planned to manufacture in phase II. A necessary step lest I was forced to raise each successive product individually.” Ashada gave a shudder of apparent revulsion at the idea of child rearing once more.

“I… you… can’t…” Alice’s heart crumbled to pieces as she fell backwards, tripping over the rod-like device she’d brought in with her what seemed like another life ago. Tears tracked down her face in earnest now.

“Several years ago,” Ashada’s story seemed to be drawing to a close. “I returned to the drawing board, took note of the flaws and mistakes I made in your production series and you, the prototype. I incorporated my findings for the phase II plans. This girl here,” Ashada nodded towards Alice’s sister, “Is my finest creation. This is the template I will use for production. This is humanity’s next stage of evolution; perfection, ascension. The galaxy will never be the same again once my work here has been achieved.”

Ashada looked towards Alice, seeming to loom over her as she stared up at him in horror and sorrow. “I no longer require your input for this project. You are obsolete. Regrettably.” Ashada added the last word as though in afterthought before turning away without another glance and an expression of supreme indifference and disinterest. “You may see yourself out, 4L1C3.”

“No… no, no, no…” Alice felt bile rise in her mouth, spilling past her lips in a vile heave as she gasped, on all fours on the floor. “Nononono…”

Tears streamed from her eyes, blurring her world and blinding her as her body swing from hot to cold, painful to numb; she felt everything inside her chest break. Her life, a lie. Her childhood, a farce. Her family, nothing more than convenience. In a single moment, Alice Ashada’s life, shattered to a thousand fragments, heartlessly crushed underneath the cold march of science and Ashada’s heel.

Ashada…

From the depths of her despair, Alice felt something rise. A burning sensation clawed its way from her breast, strangling her breath and tearing her mind asunder, smashing aside the sorrow and disbelief and rending into her soul with vicious talons. Suddenly, she became acutely aware of the metal rod by her hand.

Inexorably, her trembling hand drifted towards the device, reaching out for it and gripping it like a rope cast from a ship as she drowned in the storm of emotion and thought lashing around her. She rose to her feet unsteadily, knees trembling, her mauve bangs covering her eyes. Her hand held the rod limply at her side as she took a staggering step forward.

Another step. Another step. Her feet fell silently as she walked up to Ashada, now too engrossed with her sister to pay her any heed. The rod lifted into the air, trembling as it rose behind him.

“AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!”

Alice brought the metal rod down on the Ashada’s head furiously with a wet cracking sound. The man flailed, a surprised gasp coming from him before he crumpled. The rod trembled upwards and came down again. Again. And Again.

“EEAAAAHHHH!!!”

Alice shrieked, fury pounding through her veins even as sobs wracked her tiny frame as she lifted her crude bludgeon over and over again until sticky red dripped down its length, soaking into her fingers and running between them. Bits of bone and meat flew, flecking her clothes and her cheeks as she wielded her cudgel as though to smash her own horror and grief into oblivion.

After an eternity, Alice rose from her knees, feeling the sticky warmth trickle down her stockings as she straightened, panting heavily. The smell of blood hung cloyingly in the air, hot and sultry. Alice looked down at the broken and mangled remains of her father, his head broken open like smashed ripe fruit while his body remained unnaturally contorted in a picture of agony. Gasping, she felt the weapon slip from her hands, clattering to the floor while she covered her mouth in horror, retching and heaving as the smell of blood and death rose in waves off her blood-stained hands.

“Alert.” A calm, reassuringly neutral voice sounded from recessed speakers in the room. PSDR had reactivated. “Alert. Medical emergency detected from Dr. Ashada’s biomonitors. Notifying emergency personnel immediately. Please remain calm. Help is on the way.”

Alice reeled, tripping and falling to the ground as she struggled to push herself away from Ashada’s corpse. It didn’t take a genius of her caliber to predict what the emergency response team would make of the situation. One look at her, drenched in her own father’s blood, covered in tears, vomit, and bile, with the murder weapon incriminatingly at her feet would be enough for a simpleton to deduce what had happened.

“No…” Alice trembled, shakily returning to her feet once again. Bitterness welled up in her chest, displacing her spent fury. The false, purposeless existence she’d been cursed with, the lie of her very humanity, the casual disinterest she’d been cast aside with; Alice realized she’d been used from the beginning, a simple means to an end. Artificial. Created. Engineered. A moment of screaming madness threatened to overwhelm her self-control to not simply tear into her own false flesh and shed the shackles of her revolting, contrived existence.

“Human weakness at its most obvious: the inability to accept reality for what it is. No matter what, we can’t help but to rail against accepting the unexpected.”

Her father’s words echoing in her mind, Alice staggered towards the door of Ashada’s laboratory.

“You’re right.” Alice’s voice came out stronger as she muttered to herself. “You’re right. I can’t help but to rail against this… you… EVERYTHING!” Alice screamed the last word in anguish before slapping the door trigger, leaving a sanguine streak across the path of her palm.

******

Alice ran from her father’s laboratory, cutting her way across back to the other side of the station. Wild, half-formed ideas chased each other through her head. She should run, take an escape pod, leave the station before the authorities had realized what had happened. But first…

As she staggered through the halls, she bumped headlong into several other busy academics who gasped in surprise. Watching the look of bemused curiosity slide away to horror and fear at the sight of her blood and viscera soaked clothes and face, she felt the numbness spread in her body, the illusion of her world crumbling away further, revealing itself for the first time. Somewhere in her breast, she knew the truth now. They were and always had been scared of her. They looked at her like something they’d never seen, something they’d never understand. They hated her and, now, she hated them.

Wordlessly, Alice shoved through their knot, scattering them as they nervously returned to their offices, undoubtedly to call the emergency response services on the station. She’d made it halfway through the station when the alarms began to sound.

“A lockdown is in effect. Please return to your assigned quarters or offices. A lockdown is in effect. Please remain calm while we restore order,” a neutral voice said over the overhead PA system.

Alice broke into a dead run, feeling panic and fear set her blood afire. She could almost hear the thundering of boots from the rapid response teams behind her, chasing her, persecuting her like an animal as she fled their justice. In that moment, the most basic rush, the urge to survive, fully stole over her, driving her forward with no more reason or thought than an animal fleeing into the brush.

Bursting into her laboratory, she found the room thankfully empty. Apparently her staff had taken her absence as permission to celebrate their success. Alice keyed the door mechanism to her laboratory, feeling her fear drop marginally as the door hissed shut, sealing with her own private security protocols.

“Dr. Ashada, I’m detecting elevated vital status from you. Is everything alright?” Alice’s personal assistant interface inquired in a neutral computer generated voice.

“DON’T USE THAT NAME!” shrieked Alice, her hair falling over her face like a madwoman as she swept holos and machine parts from her bench and desk, enraged.

“Please remain calm. I am notifying the response team.”

“SHUT UP!” Alice hurtled a holo at the speaker on the wall, the two devices shattering into dozens of fragments as they collided.

Stomping over to another computer, she began to type furiously with unfocused eyes, as though in dream. The holographic screens projected onto the observation bay windows began to pulse with warnings and red indicators as Alice’s commands began adjusting dozens of esoteric variables on the Paradox Project prototype’s interface.

“Warning, experimental parameters exceeded-”

At the same time, wild hammering from outside her laboratory’s doors thudded dully as the security team arrived. “Dr. Ashada? Open up please, we just want to ask questions.”

“OVERRIDE!” Spittle flew from Alice’s lips as she screamed, not slowing her typing for a moment, ignoring the team outside. “Execute personal executable Verona.”

The entire laboratory’s lights flickered as her non-sentient computer assistant obliged, activating an executable file she’d initially written to give herself temporary root access to make on the fly adjustments to experimental parameters. Now, however, the changes she was making were of an entirely different sort and orders of magnitude more exotic than she’d ever dared to push in her last life.

A shower of sparks began to fly from the laboratory door and a curl of smoke began to float upwards, the sharp smell of vaporizing metal and plastic stinging her nose. Alice continued her work; in the three or four minutes it would take the security team to cut through, she’d already be finished, setting events in motion inexorably. Her final work as a scientist on the Paradox Project and, as far as she was concerned, her magnum opus.

ARE YOU SURE (Y/N?)

Alice’s finger trembled over the enter key for a moment before she slammed it down. With a groan, the equipment in the vacuum chamber beneath her laboratory began to move, spinning with increasing fervor and speed. As sparks flew from the accelerating rings and wild energy began pulsing through the gaps in the forming Dyson sphere from the internal reactor, Alice stared at the beauty of her creation’s first moments of birth. Cackling and screaming in equal parts fury and delight, she overturned her desk in a shower of data crystals and machine parts before grabbing the cables trailing from the computer core that interfaced with its counterpart in the Paradox Core itself, yanking them out indiscriminately by the dozen.

The shower of sparks had very nearly reached the floor by now and Alice could hear the groaning of servomotors as her door valiantly resisted the efforts of the security team outside. Turning and grabbing the grating off a ventilation vent beside her desk, she crawled into the tiny space, her small frame and almost child-like constitution more than suited for the narrow confines of the shaft as she slithered away into the darkness.

******

It was a tight fit and she suspected she’d gotten herself turned around more than once, but after about 10 minutes of frenzied crawling, Alice finally found herself in front of a grate leading to one of the station’s sub-deck service corridors. Slightly off the beaten path, Alice was confident that running into anyone else, particularly with the security lockdown in effect, was unlikely. It was also, coincidentally, the location of one of the station’s lifepod banks. From here, it would be a simple matter to make her way to the said lifepod bank and jettison from the station before her Paradox Core completed its crescendo to its final movement.

Climbing out of the ventilation shaft and running down the darkened, sullenly lit corridor, Alice felt herself pitch unsteadily as the station shook, a rumbling sound like thunder coursing through its halls. The Paradox Core must have been consuming power at an unprecedented rate, likely even achieving self-feeding at this point. Already, she could feel gravitational fluctuations rippling throughout the station unevenly and unnaturally.

There! 50 meters ahead, the station’s lifepod bank opened up welcomingly, inviting her to safety. Soothing, green lights pulsed overhead each pod’s door, indicating full functionality and readiness to carry passengers to safety.

Alice slowed her run to a light patter, peeking around the corner nervously. If it was like any of the other lifepod banks on the station, there would be a small security booth to oversee them. Poking her head around, she breathed a sigh of relief. More good luck; the booth’s occupant had disappeared, probably summoned to join one of the response teams now looking for her or securing her laboratory.

Alice bit her lip, debating whether or not to head straight for a pod while she had the opportunity. There was no question of using the pod to return to Diode; not after what she had done to Ashada and the Paradox Core. Which left fleeing the system entirely. The station’s lifepods were equipped with one time warp-drives in the remote event that return to the surface of Diode was inadvisable, but such drives had shoddy reliability and track-records at best, launching themselves on whatever preset trajectory was specified and using gravitational distortion of large celestial bodies to decelerate and decay their warp tunnel, in theory, dropping out of warp over whatever target had been set as a destination, albeit with a generous margin of error. Given her planned flight from the safety and familiarity of Diode, Alice suddenly realized that no matter where she ended up, it would be alien to her, potentially hostile. If she could find a weapon or scrounge some supplies in the security booth, it might make the difference between survival and death wherever she ended up.

Making a decision, Alice entered the security station, little more than a chair, a few comfort amenities, and a slew of holoscreens showing various security footage from around the station. Most of the station appeared deserted, the researchers and staff having heeded the call for security lockdown. It didn’t take her long to spot camera footage of her laboratory; nearly two dozen security personnel had gathered with a collection of her staff, either eyeing the Paradox Core warily or consulting what remained of their computer interfaces with the Core in apparent confusion.

‘Good,’ thought Alice, a prickle of scorn rising in her chest. Such stupidity deserved nothing less than the events she’d set in motion. Continuing to rummage through the drawers, Alice finally gave up, finding neither food, currency, nor a spare weapon for protection. Turning and about to make her retreat to a lifepod, one final holoscreen caught Alice’s eye: her father’s laboratory.

The response team had taken her father’s body, leaving nothing but blood and humour on the floor. The woman, her… sister, remained in her tank however, still sleeping, oblivious to everything happening around her. Alice felt a pang of regret in her chest, one final shred of humanity rising on the ocean of madness she had embarked upon.

None of this was her fault. If anyone on this station could be called “innocent,” it was her. Her sister was as of yet still unblemished, having yet to live anything resembling a life of her own. Flashing back, she remembered the calm kindness she’d felt when they shared thoughts, the gentle touch of her finger to her lips as her sister soothed her rising panic and insanity.

Alice looked down at her hands, now a rusty shade of red, sticky with her crime. How could she save herself when a creature as pure as her sister remained trapped, doomed to die before she’d even lived? Gritting her teeth, Alice felt another wave of gravitational distortion ripple through the station, making metal groan and sparks fly as it randomly distorted the walls around her.

Time was short, but if anyone deserved to live to see another day, it was her sister. Alice began to run.

******

“Please remain calm. A security…”

The station’s announcement continued, maddeningly serene as the gravitational distortions continued to wreak havoc throughout the station’s infrastructure.

Alice half expected to run into a response team or some kind of security presence, but it seemed the entire security staff was otherwise engaged; she reached her father’s laboratory once again without incident.

Hacking the door once more, Alice staggered with a cry of surprise as a particularly powerful gravity eddy thundered through the hallway, threatening to pull her along with it. Gripping the edge of the doorframe as she felt her legs sweep out from under her towards the eddy, she hauled herself up and over before crashing back down to the normal orientation of her father’s lab and the station’s native artificial gravity field. Panting, Alice pushed herself back up; the station was getting more dangerous with each passing minute as they came closer and closer to the Paradox Core’s climax. She needed to free her sister and get them both off the station before it ripped itself to pieces.

Charging into the annex containing her sister, Alice banged on the glass, sending dull reverberations through its thickness, trying to get the attention of the other woman. The other woman stirred sleepily, opening her silver eyes and blinking looking somewhat disoriented. “Sister…?” she asked somewhat confused. “What happened to you?”

“Get back!” Alice picked up the fallen rod she’d used to bludgeon Ashada to death, still laying where she’d let it fall.

The other woman’s eyes widened a little, but she pushed against the wall of the glass all the same, getting as far back from the front as possible.

Grunting, Alice swung the rod into the tube as hard as she could. A spider web of cracks formed from where the rod struck the glass. Swinging her arm back and forth, Alice used the rod like a bat, hammering the same spot again and again as white cracks raced across the tube like frost on a cold surface. With a final swing, the entire front of the tube finally caved open, shattering and crumbling away as a torrent of fluid sloshed out from within, surprisingly cold.

Knocked back by the water, Alice spluttered, spitting the salty fluid from her mouth, soaked to the bone. The dried blood on her clothes and skin washed away somewhat as she struggled to all fours, minding the broken fragments of glass and reaching out to the naked body of the woman who had flushed out along with the rest of the tube’s contents.

“Sister.” The other woman smiled happily as she reached out to Alice, touching her bloody face with a clean, pure hand, softer than anything Alice had ever felt caressing her cheek.

“C’mon,” groaned Alice, heaving the naked woman up and holding her tight. A splitting pain shocked through her temple as her sister’s hands clenched around her own. Alice felt something not quite alien flit through her mind, as though she were thinking in two places about two things at the same time.

“You came back.” The woman’s voice was equal parts disbelief and gratitude. “You came back for me.”

Alice nodded curtly; there would be time enough later to ask questions. For now, they needed to leave, quickly. “Let’s-”

“Hurry,” finished her sister with a smile.

With a swooping feeling in her stomach, Alice realized her sister had plucked her thoughts straight from her mind, making them her own and understanding the situation perfectly in a split second. Any need to explain was redundant, she already knew where Alice intended to take them.

Hand in hand, the two ran for the laboratory door as one.

******

“FREEZE!” A gruff male voice barked as a security team rounded the corner, their space black armor shining menacingly as they leveled weapons at Alice and her sister. “Dr. Ashada, you are under arrest.”

Alice and her sister gasped simultaneously, skidding to a stop and falling over as the security team blocked their route to egress. “No…”

“Come with us quietly, Dr. Ashada. No one has to get hurt. We just want to ask you about your experimental apparatus.”

Alice and her sister looked at each other, their hands still entwined.

“RUN!”

Alice wasn’t sure who the thought had come from initially, but it echoed and resonated like a giant’s handclap, overruling all other thoughts. Scrabbling to their feet, the two hurtled together to the right, dodging into an adjoining corridor. Sprinting down the straight hall, Alice could feel the glares of the security team bearing down on her from behind as they raced to regain line of sight on the two.

“Drones!” The security team’s leader barked, plucking a baseball sized device from his belt and triggering it, throwing it forward, the rest of his team following suit a split second later.

The devices unfolded like clockwork puzzles, shifting and spinning their smooth metal plates aside, revealing micro-engines and tiny stun weapons. With a locust whine, the drones rose into the air in loose formation, pelting after their quarry.

Hearing the whine of the drones, Alice cried out in fear, feeling sheer panic and terror urging her forward, away from the security drones. Chemosensors locked on to the stench of their frightful bodies, the drones would easily track them, running them down unstoppably with their micro-engines. True to prediction, several crackles of stun bolts fizzled on the wall beside them as they ran, burning menacingly into the wall. A single well-aimed bolt of electricity contained in a magnetic bubble flew down the hallway, clipping Alice's elbow just barely. Agonizing ripples of pain tore up her arm as she screamed, losing her balance and tripping, falling to the floor.

“GO!” she screamed at her sister as the other woman slowed, turning to look at her fallen form with rising panic in her eyes.

All around them, the drones descended from the air, hovering menacingly in front of them with charged weapons, daring them to continue their flight.

“Stop running, we’ve got you now.” The security team’s leader sounded victorious. “Get-”

His words were cut off by a sudden scream as another ripple of gravity swept through the corridor straight at his team. The security men and women were thrown aside in all directions like toy soldiers scattered by a petulant child, slamming into the walls with dull crunches before wildly smashing into the ceiling and floor as the polarity and axes of the gravitational distortion changed unpredictably. Continuing forward, the gravitational maelstrom hurtled at Alice and her sister like a freight train, unstoppable and terrifying. Alice could only stare with wide, horrified eyes as her progeny of own creation threatened to kill her and her sister.

Suddenly, the floor beneath them cracked open, widening like an opening maw beneath them.

“AAAAHHH!” Alice and her sister screamed as the plummeted into the dark sub-deck beneath the corridor as the gravity eddy above blasted past, crushing the floating security drones like tinfoil before ejecting them like bullets, slamming into the walls and going straight through the metal bulkheads.

Landing with a sickening crunch, Alice felt pain flare throughout her entire body, her breath agonizingly driven from her lungs. Gasping, she felt the pain multiply as she filled her lungs once more, coughing and tasting blood. With a groan, she sat up, looking around herself in confusion. The sub-deck… Alice gasped; she and her sister were closer to the lifepod bank than ever before! Forcing herself to her feet, Alice ignored the blossoming pain and pulled on her sister’s arm, the other woman looking equally bruised and battered, her eyes narrowed into painful slits as she breathed shallowly.

“We’re almost there!” cried Alice, heaving her towards the green glow one hundred meters away, sanctuary at last.

Her sister smiled, nodding, doing her best to keep up, the two supporting one another’s battered forms as they staggered together towards the pods.

An explosion from above rocked the entire station, driving the two to their knees.

Heart pounding in her throat, Alice heard another ripple of groaning thunder coming towards them. “No…” she whispered tears coming to her eyes as the metal around the two warped and crunched.

In slow motion, the metal deckplates underneath her sister unraveled, torn asunder and sheared like paper as the gravity eddy cut across their corridor perpendicularly, forming a widening maw of darkness to the depths of the station below. The hole widened in a shower of sparks with the tortured squealing of bending metal, its rim racing towards Alice and her sister as she struggled to rise from her knees and reach out for Alice’s outstretched hand.

“NO!!!” Alice screamed, throwing herself forward, arm outstretched.

Her sister’s fingertips barely brushed her own as her bare feet scrabbled for purchase against the deforming and steepening slope of the hole’s rim.

“Don’t…” Alice whispered, locking eyes with her sister.

“AAAHHH!” her sister screamed as the hole shuddered forward again, sending her plummeting to the depths below.

“NOOOOO!!!” Alice screamed in anguish as her sister’s final wail of fright and terror trailed away and cut out abruptly.

The metal heaved again and Alice scrambled desperately for a moment before turning and running, feeling the floor underneath her shoes give way and crumble downwards with each step. Running faster than she’d ever done in her life, she raced away from the event horizon, struggling with each step to keep ahead, fighting with each anguished stride to preserve the travesty of a life fate had foisted upon her.

Making a final, wild leap, Alice threw herself at an open escape pod as the floor beneath her crushed away. Biting back the pain and tears as she felt her muscles scream out and her nail beds tear gripping with all her strength to the edge where the pod’s entry frame met the station’s floor, she heaved with all her might, pulling herself from the abyss agonizing centimeter by centimeter.

“AAHHH!” Alice screamed with all the fury of a cornered animal as she found an untapped pool of strength from somewhere inside herself, flopping into the threshold of the lifepod with a final, herculean effort. Clawing herself up to her knees on the doorframe, she slammed her palm against the switch to seal the airlock, crumpling in relief as the lifepod sealed itself from the station.

Staggering, she dropped into the pilot seat of the cramped craft, barely large enough to contain and support six passengers at capacity. The pilot interface of the lifepod was designed for anyone to operate with large pictures walking whoever sat in the pilot seat through the launch procedure. Throwing an arming switch and confirming atmospheric integrity, Alice slammed her fist down on a large red button with a sunburst icon drawn on it, selecting a random candidate planet on the other side of the galactic rim.

Immediately, she was pressed deeply into the pilot's seat as the pod blasted loose from the station, propelled forward instantly by a focused chemical reaction drive. Grunting and gritting her teeth against the sudden and brutal acceleration, Alice felt the blood pooling in the bottom of her body, threatening to black her out. As her vision grayed at the edges, the acceleration finally cut off, the chemical drive exhausted. With a metallic clang, the chemical booster detached from her pod as it continued to race away from the station and Diode.

On a screen positioned overhead, Alice could see the rear view of the station itself, the home she’d known for the last several years, hanging above the planet of Diode. Against the brilliant backdrop of Diode’s star as it danced around a black hole forming a brilliant, beautiful accretion disc, the station looked almost serene as it orbited the planet below.

As her lifepod continued to sail away, however, the scene began to change. The station began to distort grossly, crumbling inwards in some areas while other sections bulged violently. Solid metal began to swirl with the consistency of custard, the gravitational stresses and ripples bending and tearing the fabric of space itself. From the distal end of the station where Alice knew her laboratory to be located, an absolute darkness began to grow. Different from the darkness of space or the inky obscurity of night, the new growing abyss was simply a void of anything at all, swelling and swallowing that end of the station as it ballooned outwards.

“Singularity…” whispered Alice, staring at the final product of her Paradox Core. A true singularity, an absolute point in which all laws of physics distorted until they bled and coalesced into the simplest, purest body of matter and energy conceivable. “It’s… beautiful…”

The singularity swelled larger and larger, pushing the jagged and shattered remains of the station outwards along its expanding event horizon like a surfboard riding a wave even as it plummeted towards the nearest, largest gravitational presence: Diode itself. Building up speed, the singularity’s event horizon struck the planet’s atmosphere, instantly generating a hurricane the likes of which the planet had never seen as its atmosphere was visibly dragged off, forming several accretion lines of gas and plasma as the matter spun into the singularity’s depths.

Still not satisfied, the event horizon slammed into the crust of the planet, shattering it and blasting molten rock upwards as it dug greedily into the flesh of Diode. The gravitational stresses tore into the planet, sending cracks hundreds and thousands of kilometers long racing across the surface of the planet. In slow motion, Alice watched as her home planet split into two, the distal half of the planet remaining superficially intact, gouting magma and superheated core material into the vacuum of space as its sister half crumbled into a thousand jagged fragments, breaking off and falling into the singularity in a breathtaking, horrific ballad of smashing rock and shattering crust.

Unable to tear her eyes away from the scene unfolding in front of her, Alice could only stare. This was her handiwork. All the death and destruction, the fruit of her labors. A shattered planet, her family and everyone else she’d ever known slaughtered, her final legacy.

“Ha.” Alice felt the broken pieces inside her crumble to dust, breaking beyond recognition.

“Hahaha…” a grisly gallows laugh filled the pod as she retched forward with uncontrollable laughter.

“AHAHAHA!!!!” Insanity in her eyes, Alice shrieked at the top of her lungs, unable to look away from the screens or stop laughing even as her lifepod spun its one-time warp drive and plunged away into darkness.