March, 2332

After thirty-eight days of training, Silas was still in marvel over this exosuit. Hexagonal panes of matte-black fabric conformed to his body and didn't crease when he walked or sat. Crucially, it did not itch. Shockingly durable as well. With the sharpest knife in this facility, with all his strength, he had not made a scratch. Padding over vital areas were unneeded. And the helmet was in the shape of a rough skull.

Silas said, "You still haven't told me what this suit is made of." He patted his chest, hard. The padding canceled out all of the shock.

Gene was rapidly typing, making last-minute configurations to the helmet's augmented reality. Without looking at him, she drawled, "I told you that's irrelevant, but I said it's carbon fiber composites."

"You're speaking like you don't know."

"I'm not a materials engineer." She hit enter forcefully, then lifted the helmet off a metal pad. There were no wires or ports. "I've made calibration adjustments so that you'll get less information readouts."

Grunting thanks, Silas lowered the helmet onto his head. Mechanisms sealed without noise as a standard issue atmospheric modulator at his back activated with a faint hiss. The pitch-black visor brightened until white walls were tinted a faint red that his brain filtered out. Boxy triangular pictographs raced atop neon lines on his boots—a fancy loading graphic. Words appeared in English.

AUGMENTED REALITY ACTIVE

The letters quickly faded, then a bunch more of those weird symbols rushed by. A thick red line outlined her figure, a labeled rectangle appearing by her earlobe.

Gene Morris (Homosapien)

Health: 100%

Power Level: 283

She asked, "Did you just get a readout on me?"

"Your power level estimate is lower." His voice was not distorted, though very quiet. He turned up the speaker's volume. "Two-eighty-three." Yesterday it had been over three hundred. He dismissed readout with a mere thought; the calibration was indeed better.

"I was up most of the night. I must look hideous."

"Eh, you don't look so bad." He shrugged, and the exosuit did not hinder the action in the slightest. "But your eyes are quite bloodshot."

She massaged her forehead, then sighed. "Silas."

"Yeah?"

"My son Cory is sixteen in May. He looks a lot like you. He wants to be an astronaut."

Inwardly groaning, Silas could do without this sappiness. "Don't worry about me. I'll be back by July. I'll bring Cory some space rocks."

"Don't give me that. What they're doing here is unethical beyond belief. To send a civilian out there as a lab rat—"

"You don't need to repeat yourself, yeah? I've made my choice. My destiny is among the stars, even if the stars will be my graveyard."

"That was horrible poetry." She laughed weakly. "Just go, okay? Just go."

"See you early July."

"Good luck, Silas."

Silas about-turned in a soldier's posture and marched out the door, down the hallway on low-friction sterile tiles. His boots didn't slip or slide. He could run normally if he wanted; the exosuit's fifteen pound weight was nothing, mostly the atmospheric modulator. This composite weighed less than any carbon fiber that he had ever worked with. It must've cost millions of credits to develop.

Inside the hangar, General Freeman was waiting alone next to a white teardrop the size of a freight truck. This was a unceremonious launch, a secret 6AM launch. Not even a goodbye on the record. Officially, Ingenuity—the electrogravitic craft's name—had crashed and burned ten miles north last night during a test flight.

"Any final requests?" Freeman casually asked.

"Nah." Silas climbed three steps. "We've talked enough."

"Goodbye."

"Bye."

The stairs retreated into Ingenuity's body, the door swinging close from the inside.

Why did this almost feel like a funeral? Because it was in a way, but Silas couldn't care less. He had enough of Earth's bullcrap from scummy banks to scummy landlords to doping athletes who get away with winning silver and gold. This was new beginnings… or permanent closure. Either was fine. Either was great.

The cockpit was a dome spacious enough for two people standing shoulder to shoulder. And empty. Silas stood on a depressed circle and mentally dished out an order: Wake up.

Bold words appeared as the wall became transparent. Freeman stood behind a striped yellow line.

Powering on in 3… 2… 1…

Without sound or vibration, Ingenuity lifted off the ground three yards, then was absolutely still. No acceleration forces had pushed up Silas' feet. It was as if the universe itself had skipped downward but decided he and this craft were no longer a part of it.

Turn on the cloaking field, Silas commanded.

The hangar warped and squished. Letters in a size four font appeared on the floor, along with a circular icon, and sank to the very bottom of his visor.

Cloaking Field Active

Reading it was a challenge. He had forgot to mention this to Gene. Teeth gritting, he proceeded with his training: Execute flight plan one.

Instantly, no warnings given, the hangar, the base, and the whole world blended into a colorful slurry. In less than a tenth of a second, he was soaring through darkness. Earth was a shrinking blue and gray circle behind his back. His eyes adjusted, untwinkling stars smearing into ghostly lines.

A timer was counting down at the top of the visor.

Flight plan one: 9:36 remaining

Sixty light-years in less than ten hours. Unreal. Crazy. Silas didn't have words to describe what was going through his head this moment. A month ago, he was a broke laborer. Today, he was piloting a futuristic spaceship built with advanced tech that most people could only dream of. He wanted to bask in the glory of it all, but there was no glory out here in the vast emptiness of space. There were no crowds watching his every step and thrust.

He was suddenly very much alone.

Turning off the wall's transparency with a mental command, he retreated into the living area, which was livable, much more spacious than the cockpit. The bathroom, however, was a claustrophobic man's nightmare. He prayed dearly that the waste recycler and dry-cleansing modules would not break down within the next months, these thoughts bringing on a bout of nausea. He glared lasers at the bathroom door.

A readout appeared.

Ingenuity (Spacecraft)

Strangely enough, the rest of the text was composed of those same pictographs from the startup load-screen. Bug? Critical error in the programming? Gene wasn't perfect. She could've made mistakes… and if there was one fault in the system, then there just may be many, many more.

Silas breathed through a growl and dismissed the readout. He pulled a chair next to a bonsai tree, grabbed his cello, and practiced his favorite Bach pieces. Music flowed smoothly. His brain drifted away on cascading harmonics and rolling legato passages.

If a large piece of space debris were to slip through the gravity distortion field this instant, he would die in piece.

* * *

Silas turned off the shower, toweled himself off, and ate an almond-flavored nutrition bar in three bites.

The process of putting on the exosuit was easier than one would imagine. Like putting on a diving suit… except with extra cumbersome steps. And a touch of hurt; dozens of micro-sized needles pricked his neck, chest, lower-back, arms, and legs. Neon lines lit up, the fabric shrinking to his form and becoming a second skin at most places. The titanium atmospheric modulator, looking very much out of place, connected to a port between his shoulder blades.

Inside the cockpit, Silas squinted at an orange-yellow star, and wordlessly asked for a system chart. A three-dimensional wire frame fuzzed alive. Block letters labeled Ingenuity's position, twelve planets, an asteroid belt, and a compass arrow pointing toward Earth. Ingenuity, decelerating, was six-point-three light-minutes away from the destination, Z 285 C. C being the third planet of the Z 285 star system, Silas recalled from his training.

A blue dot quickly enlarged and filled the wall. For a second, Silas nearly mistook it for Earth. Only a second, because even at a glance those loosely connected green land masses were nothing akin to Earth's. Fewer clouds roamed the skies, and the green was a shade bluer with no spiky gray splotches, undeveloped, unpolluted. Wild and untamed.

The magnitude of the moment deepened Silas' breaths. Information readout, please. There was a delay, pictographs rushing by.

Z 285 C (Earth-like Planet)

Atmosphere: 62% N, 37% O, 0.8% CO2, 0.18% Ar, 0.02% Trace Elements

Radius: 4810 miles

Surface Gravity: 1.4G

Surface Temperature: 30F to 110F

Surface Pressure: 7.4bar

Although this was great data, Silas was unable to evaluate whether these conditions were fit for Human habitation. Doctor Lee had touched on the subject, stated it was exceedingly difficult to determine. Either way, this secondary mission was not crucial.

But he was already here at the open unguarded gates of a new Eden. With a mental whip, Ingenuity descended to the surface at a cautious speed. Circular holes through clouds were left in the wake of expanding and contracting space. He briefly wondered why this didn't stir gale-force winds or cause any other nasty effects—far, far beyond his understanding.

Ten thousand feet over flats, alien plant life was clear to the naked eye. Trees. Trees at least ten times the size of Earth's shrub-for-trees. Though their forms were startlingly familiar, their colors were off. All the plants were bluish-green under the dim orange sun. Up close, obese trunks each supported few branches and massive hanging leaves. Not just bigger, everything here was thicker in proportion.

Ingenuity sailed over an expanse of fuzzy noodle-like grass. At the bank of a lake, monstrosities were drinking. They were giant crosses between apes and rhinos with elongated necks and steroid-grown muscles. Most surprising were their recognizable faces: two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth. Somehow evolution had converged on the same design sixty light-years away. What were the chances?

Silas didn't question nature. He scowled at the largest one until it was highlighted in red.

Unknown Carbon Organism

Health: Unknown

Power Level: Unknown

What other kinds of organisms were there? Or was this Gene's nerdy humor at work? Silas brushed away the readout, climbed back to twenty thousand feet, and cruised toward a mountain range near the equator where foliage was sparse and temperatures were approaching a toasty 120F. As with the trees, the mountains were also up-sized.

Ingenuity skirted among peaks and glaciers, but not a trace of He-3 was in the air or inside stone and ice. Oh, there were a half a dozen specks; just nothing worthwhile. As expected. Looking on planet C was pointless. Not an atom of solar winds could penetrate this denser atmosphere.

Time to check for moons.

Beyond the mountains were bushy canyons, and beyond that were sand dunes for hundreds of miles. Silas was a dog whistle away from pulling up to space when a jagged black grain was highlighted. Hundreds of pictographs fell down the visor, system errors galore.

Unknown Object

Curiosity got the better of him, and Ingenuity reversed direction at light speed. Instantly, he was looking at a crashed spacecraft that he assumed was a spacecraft. In the shape of an elongated disk, its hull was a matte-black metal casing of hexagonal panels similar to his exosuit's padding. Through slits, cracks, and a destroyed section glowed neon lights—the exact same neon lighting of the decorative lines on his suit.

This must be an unmanned probe they sent.

A dozen obvious questions popped Silas' brain. Above all, he pondered why its design was so extravagant compared to this plain white teardrop. An older less-discrete model? A different team of engineers? A gut feeling was suggesting something else entirely, urging him to investigate.

Ingenuity touched down, hovering inches above land. No lifeforms were nearby. Safe.

Silas grabbed a polymer sample container and stepped into the air lock. Pressures equalized, and metal teeth parted. Scorching air stormed inside. The exosuit's embedded cooling module kicked in. Conductive liquids inside microtubes carried heat away to radiators at his shoulders. The suit was chilly in a matter of seconds. Impressive.

His first step onto alien soil was admittedly underwhelming in many ways. Walking under 1.4G was more than doable. He had trained with weighted clothing, and this felt hardly any different; however, there were facts of biology that Gene had emphasized. Every cell in his body weighed more, meaning soft tissue was gradually deforming—bad news for his brain and joints.

Here, trees were stubby with bulbous leaves. Serrated grass, like cactus, squished under his boots, oozing blue liquid. It wasn't caustic. Poisonous? Maybe. He jumped onto cracked dry soil and made note to decontaminate twice over.

Silas picked up a palm-sized shard. The edge was feathered and pocked with bubbles and dents as if acid had attacked the probe. An acid explosion no less. Marks of violent chemistry were all over the hull, centered around a ring of corrosion around the destroyed section. That was not the doing of a wild beast or plant.

Space debris?

Silas wanted to rule out every plausible explanation before jumping to a crazy conclusion. But at the end of the day, he was not a scientist or expert in any field. He resigned to his assigned duty for this scenario: sample collection of interesting objects of his discretion. He grabbed a pair of tongs from the container and began plucking corroded pieces.

A bag of grass too. Honestly, it did not look like grass or cacti. Stalks of serrated blue turnips crossed with broccoli was a more accurate comparison.

Something moved at the edge of the visor. It stepped out of a crevice in the canyon wall behind Silas' ship. A dozen pictographs encircled four legs, a tail, the head of a viper, and the body of a morbidly obese lion. Golden-brown scales glinted under the sun. Black eyes, above three slit nostrils, were without pupils.

Unknown Carbon Organism

Health: Unknown

Power Level: Unknown

Growling, Silas slapped away the useless readout.

The lion's jaw unhinged. Rows of hooked teeth extended, slime dripping. A groaning roar reverberated down the canyon, followed by two matching roars further away. A pack of lions.

Fight or flight wrenched Silas' innards, and he chose flight. He dropped the box of samples, cursed Freeman for not allowing a gun, and ran for the crashed probe with a glance over his shoulder, no regrets. Death was upon him. A smile pinched his cheeks, but he did not give up so easily.

Up close, the lion's roar was loud enough that the exosuit's dampers activated. It ran on stocky legs. It was slower than a lion.

Time seemed to dilate as Silas touched the probe’s hull. Electricity jolted up his arm. Those damned pictographs swept the visor left-to-right. Letters rapidly appeared as though typed by someone's fingers. Some were randomly capitalized.

LanGUage mODe: ENgLiSH…

UnRECOGnizEd opErATor detEctEd…

RE-analyzing…

Threats detected…

Overriding security protocols…

The ground beneath the lion exploded in a cloud of dust. Its headless body was sent skidding across grass, leaving a trail of purple-red blood. The other three lions bolted without a second thought. Exactly like feral cats, they were aggressive though easily frightened. These similarities to Earth's fauna were uncanny. Was this all one big hallucinatory dream?

More letters were typed.

Hijacked craft detected…

AI controller not detected…

Type-2 repair protocol engaged…

A strong force shoved Silas away. His balance was tested. He shifted momentum to his right leg, dropped his center of weight. He stood firm, watching an unreal display of either magic or hyper-advanced technology that couldn't possibly be of Human origin.

Ingenuity's aluminum hull was stripped off, revealing a matte-black body of the exact same hexagonal panels. Neon lighting deactivated. One by one, panels started to melt and flow in rigid patterns—resembling printed electronic circuits—toward the crashed probe. Corrosion marks disappeared, and the destroyed section slowly closed like a healing wound without scarring.

At this point, Silas knew it was not a just a probe sent by the Space Force.

His cello, bonsai tree, and three-month food and water supply also floated away and disappeared into a hatch. Dozens of mechanical parts of varying size and shape were also taken… along with a black sphere not larger than his head. When the repair protocol was done, Ingenuity was a pile of warped aluminum sheets.

The repaired craft lifted off the ground one yard. White lasers suddenly triangulated on the pile and melted it down into an orange blob, and as the blob cooled, it compressed into a flawless cube, which was also taken. Nothing of Ingenuity remained.

Silas laughed, because the sheer ridiculousness of what he had witness was unrivaled. A spacecraft just ate another spacecraft for lunch! And his bonsai tree! He had worked on that bonsai for over half a year! This was too good, too much for one man to stomach. His laughter continued for minutes without end. This was exactly what had been missing in his life.

The show apparently was not over. A panel split down an invisible seam. Steps of the same black metal unfolded.

Then a young woman's face fuzzed into clarity in the visor. "Hello, Silas Creedy. I am Tracey, a manifestation of this spacecraft's AI controller. I mean you no harm, but you are in imminent danger. Please come aboard. There is little time to explain." The rises and dips in her tone, her facial expression, her speaking rhythm, were all perfectly natural. She could pass for a real Human.

Now, Silas was at a total loss for words. He couldn't even laugh.