The Lightbridge Prototype Incident

The year 2369. Humanity, for all its expansion across the solar system, remained tethered by the ghost of Einstein. The speed of light was not a law; it was a cage. The Lightbridge Prototype was the key to that cage. Moored at Europa, in the great dockyards of Europa-Main-Station, it was less a ship and more a cathedral of ambition, a 500-meter-long needle of polished composites and esoteric hardware. Its official purpose was to test the next generation of ITT-buffering technology. Its unofficial, whispered purpose was to punch a hole straight through the light barrier. The ship’s systems had underwent the necessary tests on their flight outwards to Nova Arcis station, where it awaited the experiment.

The mission was born of failure. A dozen unmanned probes, sent to test the limits of the new drives, had met spectacular ends. Some had their data cores wiped clean by forces unknown. Others simply vanished, their tracking signals ceasing as if they had been erased from existence. One probe’s wreckage, recovered near Jupiter, showed a hull not breached, but seemingly dissolved from the inside out. The consensus among the project’s advisors, a council that included the formidable Dr. Elara Kovacycy herself, was blunt: the machines couldn’t report on what was killing them. As the final report stated, “We need human interaction for a report.” The risks were astronomical, but the potential prize was the universe. “This is the heart of the experiment - the human element. Before the technology fails, we must believe in the people. “

The Crew

The seven souls chosen for the Lightbridge Prototype were not merely a collection of experts; they were a single, meticulously engineered organism. The selection process had lasted two years, delving far beyond résumés and mission logs. It was a deep dive into psychological profiling, stress simulations, and what the project heads called “psych-compatibility matrices.” The goal was to assemble a team whose individual strengths would not just add up but multiply, whose cognitive and emotional frameworks were so complementary that their collective decision-making under extreme duress would approach perfection. They were trained for every conceivable disaster, but more importantly, they were chosen for their innate ability to trust one another implicitly. This was a bond forged for survival, intended to be stronger than family, more reliable than friendship. And it would soon be tested to its absolute limit.

Two hours before the launch, they gathered in the sterile white of Briefing Room 3 aboard Nova Arcis. The air was thick with the scent of recycled air, strong coffee, and palpable anticipation.

Captain Eva Rostova stood before a holographic display of their flight path, a shimmering ribbon of light stretching into an abstract void. A veteran of the long, lonely sub-light missions to the Oort Cloud, she possessed a stillness that calmed rooms. Her hair was pulled back in a severe, practical knot, and her eyes, the colour of a winter sky, missed nothing. She had earned her command through a legendary composure, having once guided a crippled freighter through a meteoroid strike while calmly talking a panicked rookie through a manual life-support reboot. She looked at the faces around the table, her crew, her responsibility.

“Alright,” she began, her voice low and even. “One last time. We know the mission. We know the risks. We know the prize.” She turned her gaze to her Chief Engineer. “Jian. You feel good about our engine?”

Jian Li bounced his knee under the table, a coiled spring of brilliant, restless energy. “She’s more than good, Captain. She’s a work of art. The buffer arrays are tuned to a nanosecond. Archie has triple-checked every line of code.” He glanced across the table at his professional foil. “Even the ones Marcus flagged as ‘creatively ambitious.’”

IT Observer Marcus Cole, a quiet, methodical man from Europa’s University, allowed himself a thin smile. He took a slow sip of his tea. “My job, Jian, is to ensure your ‘creative ambition’ doesn’t tear a hole in reality. The ship’s primary AI, ‘Archimedes,’ is performing within 99.98% efficiency of safety protocols.” He paused, looking directly at Jian. “That remaining 0.02% is where you live.”

“It’s where the magic happens, Marcus,” Jian shot back with a grin, a familiar refrain in their constant, friendly rivalry. It was a well-worn dance: Jian the innovator, Marcus the guardian. Each man’s nature was the perfect counterbalance to the other’s.

Eva’s eyes moved to her navigator. Kenji Tanaka was tracing the holographic flight path with his finger, his expression serene. A master of celestial mechanics, Kenji saw the universe not as a set of problems to be solved, but as a symphony to be understood. He saw the beauty in the math. He noticed the youngest member of their crew, Ben Carter, nervously tapping his data pad.

“Breathe, Ben,” Kenji said, his voice soft. “The numbers are just a story. Our job is to read it well.”

Ben Carter, the ITT-Drive Specialist, looked up, startled. At 28, he was a prodigy, the theorist whose papers on buffer harmonics were now the physical reality humming in the ship’s core. This was the moment his entire life had been leading to, and the pressure was immense. Kenji’s calm words were a lifeline. Ben gave a grateful nod, taking a deep, steadying breath.

In a corner of the room, Dr. Shama Vìchvách was observing them all. Her medical console was active, displaying the crew’s baseline vitals, but her focus was on the human dynamics. She saw Jian’s elevated heart rate - pure, unadulterated excitement. She saw Ben’s - a nervous flutter of adrenaline. She saw Eva’s, as slow and steady as a ship’s chronometer. She was their physician, but also their silent psychological anchor. Her job was to be the firewall between their ambition and their fragile biology. She exchanged a knowing glance with Lena Petrova, the Communications Officer. Lena was the calm centre of the storm, the one who would translate their complex data and their human anxieties into a clear stream back to Nova Arcis. She was their voice, their connection to a billion souls holding their breath.

“Alright,” Eva said, her eyes sweeping across each member of her team one last time. “The simulations are over. The training is done. This is real.” She looked at each of them, the unspoken trust passing between them like an electric current. “Let’s go make history.”

The walk to the bridge of the Lightbridge was conducted in a focused silence. Each crew member moved with a practiced economy of motion, a silent acknowledgment of the immense task ahead. As they strapped into their stations on the command deck, the ship around them felt alive, a gentle thrum-roll vibrating through the floor plates.

“Archie, final status report,” Eva commanded.

“All systems are green, Captain,” the ship’s AI replied, its synthesized voice calm and devoid of emotion, a perfect counterpoint to the human tension on the bridge. “Energy core is stable. Life support is optimal. And I have, metaphorically speaking, consumed my morning coffee.”

A ripple of amusement went through the crew, a small release of the immense pressure. The AI’s programmed quirks were a familiar comfort.

“Very good, Archie,” Eva said, a faint smile touching her lips as she placed her hand on the command console, the cool metal a familiar anchor.

Kenji’s console lit up, a flowing ballet of star-charts and gravitational vectors. Jian was already muttering to his engine readouts, a lover whispering to his muse. Marcus had his hands poised over the safety overrides, the ever-watchful sentinel. Ben Carter simply stared at the main viewport, at the endless black dotted with the distant promise of stars, his expression one of pure awe.

They were seven humans and one machine, a single, perfectly calibrated instrument of exploration. A bond forged in months of training, designed for the rigors of the unknown, and trusting each other beyond the confines of friendship or family. They were ready. They had no idea that the chaos they were about to willingly embrace would test that bond not just to its breaking point, but beyond the very definition of what it meant to be.

The Dream and the Danger

The flight plan for the Lightbridge Prototype was a masterpiece of caution, a thousand-page document detailing every acceleration gate, every system check, every possible contingency. For the first leg of their journey, they were simply following a meticulously tested script, each member of the crew a performer in a well-rehearsed play.

“All stations, report readiness for Phase One acceleration,” Captain Rostova’s voice cut through the background whispers of the bridge. One by one, the acknowledgements came in, a crisp chorus of professionalism. “Comm-lock with Nova Arcis is green,” Lena Petrova confirmed. “Medical is green. All baseline vitals are stable,” Dr. Vìchvách reported from her station. “Navigation is green. Course plotted and locked,” said Kenji. “Engineering is green. The engine is purring, Captain,” Jian added, unable to resist a flourish. “ITT systems are green. Buffers are primed,” Ben Carter’s voice was tight with anticipation. “And all AI sub-routines are nominal,” Marcus Cole concluded, his tone as dry as ever. “Archie is behaving.”

“Very good,” Rostova said. “Initiate primary drive sequence. Take us out, Mr. Tanaka.”

The Lightbridge did not roar to life; it simply… shifted. There was no sense of inertia, no physical push. Instead, a low, resonant hum filled the deck, a vibration that felt less heard and more perceived directly in the bones. Outside the main viewport, the distant stars did not streak into lines as they would have on an old chemical rocket. They began to stretch, their light pulling like taffy as the ITT-buffers spooled up, warping the very fabric of spacetime around the vessel. It was a silent, beautiful, and profoundly unnatural sight.

“Thirty percent of light-speed,” Kenji announced, his voice a calm anchor in the strange new reality. “Course is steady. All systems nominal.” “Buffer integrity at one hundred percent,” Jian added, a hint of pride in his tone. “No fluctuations.”

Inside the ship, the crew felt the subtle dislocation of near-light travel. A pen floating in the zero-g of the bridge seemed to hang for an impossibly long moment before drifting down. The light from their consoles seemed to have a faint, rainbow-hued after-image, a visual echo that lingered a microsecond too long. This was the dream and the danger made manifest. The dream was to cross the void between stars in a human lifetime. The danger was what the universe might do to a fragile piece of biology that dared to move so fast. They all knew the stories of the unmanned probes - the wiped data cores, the dissolved hulls. They were flying into the same storm, armed only with their wits and their faith in Jian’s engine.

The ship climbed through the acceleration gates, following the rigid flight plan. At each gate - 0.5c, 0.6c, 0.7c - they would hold for a full hour, running a battery of checks, a meticulous dance of protocols. The conversation on the bridge became a clipped, efficient litany of data.

“Holding at point-seven-c,” Rostova announced. “Jian, report.” “Reactor output is stable. Buffer energy draw is within 0.1% of projections. She’s running cool.” “Marcus, how is Archie handling the data stream?” “Processing flawlessly, Captain. No anomalies in the sensor feedback loops.”

The resonant thrum of the buffers deepened into a constant, resonant chord, the ship’s song of speed. They were a manned flying data centre, the most complex machine ever built, its advanced AI processing petabytes of information every second, constantly adjusting the delicate energy fields that kept reality from tearing itself apart at the seams.

At 0.8c, they entered the final, discretionary phase of the mission. The script was over. From here on, they were writing the story themselves. “Eighty-five percent,” Kenji called out, a new, sharper edge to his voice. “We are entering uncharted territory.”

Now the true mission began. The atmosphere on the bridge shifted. The movements became more deliberate, the voices quieter, more focused. Every crew member was listening, not just with their ears, but with their entire bodies, trying to feel the subtle strains on the ship. They were listening for the scratches of relativity on the hull.

“Buffer integrity holding at ninety-eight percent,” Jian reported, his earlier pride replaced with a focused intensity. “I’m seeing some minor power fluctuations in the aft grid, but Archie is correcting.” “Stay on it, Jian,” Rostova ordered, her eyes never leaving the warped starfield on the main screen. “Dr. Vìchvách, any physiological effects?” “Heart rates are elevated across the board, but that’s to be expected,” Shama’s voice was a calm counterpoint to the tension. “No other anomalous readings. We’re holding up.” “Mr. Carter, your thoughts?” Rostova asked. “You wrote the theory on this.”

Ben Carter leaned forward, his face illuminated by the cascading data on his console. His earlier nervousness had been burned away, replaced by the pure focus of a scientist witnessing his hypothesis proven. “The theory holds, Captain,” he said, his voice filled with a quiet awe. “The buffer harmonics are resonating exactly as my models predicted. We can push it. We can see what’s on the other side.”

There it was. The invitation. The moment they had all trained for, the reason they had crossed half the solar system to be here. This was the point of no return, the moment where they agreed, as one, to step off the map.

Eva Rostova looked at each of her crew members in turn. She saw no fear, only a shared, silent resolve. She saw the dream in their eyes. This was why they were here. Not just to break a record, but to break a cage.

“Archie,” she said, her voice a low command. “Confirm all mission parameters for a push to point-nine-five-c.” “Parameters confirmed, Captain,” the AI replied. “Safety protocols are at their operational limit. The probability of catastrophic failure increases by seventeen percent.” Eva nodded, accepting the cold, calculated risk. “Alright then,” she said, her voice resonating with a quiet, historic finality. “Take us to the edge.”

The Unravelling

The Lightbridge crossed the 0.9c threshold, and a profound, electric silence fell over the command deck. The casual chatter of the earlier mission phases evaporated. The crew was now a single, hyper-focused organism, their professionalism a thin, hardened shell against the howling void. They were a bomber crew deep in enemy territory, listening not for fighters, but for the universe itself to fight back.

At 0.93c, they shattered every speed record humanity had ever achieved. A single, sharp cheer broke from Ben Carter’s station - “Yes!” - and Lena Petrova’s fingers flew across her console, relaying the milestone back across the light-minutes to a jubilant mission control. It was a fleeting, human moment, immediately swallowed by the immense, focused tension.

Jian Li was not celebrating. His dark eyes were narrowed, fixed on a cascading waterfall of data. A tiny frown line, one Eva Rostova knew to be a sign of deep trouble, appeared between his brows. “Buffer fluctuations increasing, Captain,” he said, his voice clipped, devoid of its usual flair. “Grid seven is drawing anomalous power.” Across the bridge, Marcus Cole’s hands were already moving. “Protocol corrections online. Archie is attempting to re-route power and stabilize the harmonic frequency.” “Buffers adjusted,” Jian confirmed a moment later, his eyes never leaving the screen. His jaw was tight. “It’s fighting us. The resonance isn’t clean.”

From her medical station, Dr. Vìchvách monitored their biometrics. The numbers told a story of extreme stress, held in check by discipline. Heart rates were a steady drumbeat of controlled adrenaline. Cortisol levels were high but stable. They were professionals, running on training and sheer will, their bodies screaming while their minds remained locked on their tasks. She saw Eva’s heart rate, a slow, steady 70 bpm, and felt a flicker of reassurance.

“Hold steady, Jian,” Rostova said, her command voice a rock in the rising tide of anxiety. She trusted her engineer’s instincts, but the mission objective was clear. “We’re on the edge. Let’s see what it looks like.” She gave a curt nod. “Take us to point-nine-five.”

The low, resonant thrum of the drive deepened, the vibration no longer just a feeling in the soles of their boots but a tangible pressure in their chests, a deep bass note played on the very structure of the ship. Then, a new sound began to weave itself into the powerful drone. It wasn’t loud, but it was utterly, terrifyingly wrong.

It was a sharp, crystalline whine that seemed to come from everywhere at once, like the resonant frequency of glass just before it shatters. It was a high-pitched, metallic shearing sound, as if a thousand microscopic razors were being dragged across the ship’s hull, not from the outside, but from within the metal itself. It was the sound of atoms complaining, of molecular bonds being stretched to their absolute limit. It was the sound of reality’s fabric fraying at the seams.

“WARNING,” Archimedes’ synthesized voice suddenly blared, losing its placid tone for the first time. It was sharp, panicked. “STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY ANOMALY DETECTED. TEMPORAL SHEAR EXCEEDING PREDICTED PARAMETERS. THE SWING DECKS ARE BEHAVING STRANGE.”

“What does that even mean, ‘behaving strange’?” Ben Carter asked, his earlier elation completely gone, replaced by a cold dread.

On the main screen, the stretched starlight outside began to flicker, to boil. The ship’s external mass-detectors, their “radar-eyes,” began to ghost, showing phantom objects that would appear and vanish in a microsecond.

“Ninety-four,” Kenji Tanaka counted, his voice suddenly tight with alarm, his serene composure cracking. “Captain, we’re not stabilizing. We’re accelerating.”

“Jian, shut it down! Now!” Rostova’s order was a whip-crack.

Jian’s hands were a blur across his console, but the red alerts were cascading faster than he could react. “I can’t!” he yelled back, a tremor of genuine fear in his voice. “The power regulation is offline! The drive is running away from us!”

“Ninety-five!” Kenji shouted, his knuckles white on his console. “Ninety-six!”

A violent, sickening lurch threw them against their restraints. It wasn’t a push or a pull; it was a twist. The very geometry of the bridge seemed to warp for an instant. A gut-wrenching, spiralling sensation, something no one had experienced in the era of artificial gravity, washed over them. It was a feeling from the ancient, water-bound past: sea-sickness.

“Ninety-nine,” Kenji whispered, his face ashen.

Then, for a single, horrifying second that stretched into an eternity, the universe went utterly silent. The hum, the screaming, the alarms - all gone. The lights didn’t flicker; they simply ceased to exist. They were plunged into absolute blackness and a silence so profound it felt like the death of sound itself.

The silence was shattered by a deafening series of concussive bangs that sounded less like explosions and more like the universe snapping back into place around them. Emergency lights flared to life, casting the bridge in a hellish, strobing red glow. The ship was tumbling violently, a toy in a giant’s hand. Unsecured data pads flew across the bridge. Sparks rained down from the overloaded ceiling panels.

“We lost the main grid!” Jian screamed over the cacophony.

A new alarm, the one they had trained for but prayed they would never hear, began to blare - a frantic, high-pitched shriek. “HULL BREACH. HULL BREACH.”

“EVACUATE!” The command came from two mouths at once - the calm, authoritative voice of the AI and the strained, powerful shout of Eva Rostova, a perfect, terrifying unison. “HULL BREACH IN SECTORS THREE AND FIVE. ATMOSPHERE FAILURE IMMINENT.”

“Another breach in section four!” Marcus Cole’s voice was a strained gasp, fighting to be heard over the roaring wind of escaping air. He was clutching his arm, the bone clearly broken. “Life support failing!”

The Lightbridge Prototype, humanity’s greatest creation, the key to the stars, was being torn apart around them, a catastrophic unravelling at the very edge of reality.

The Lifeboat

Chaos descended, not as a wave, but as an instantaneous state change. The world of focused professionalism vanished, replaced by a primal, desperate fight for survival. The air itself became a screaming enemy, a roaring gale tearing through the breached bridge as it vented into the void. The scent was a nauseating mixture of ozone from fried electronics, the sharp, metallic tang of super-heated ceramics, and the acrid smell of burning insulation.

They were no longer a crew; they were seven bodies in a metal shell that was actively trying to kill them. An explosion in the engineering section, muffled by the escaping atmosphere, sent a percussive shockwave through the deck plating. The blast threw Lena Petrova from her station, her body slamming into a bulkhead with a sickening thud. Ben Carter, his face a mask of blood from a deep gash above his eye, scrambled to her side. He didn’t ask if she was okay; there was no time. He simply grabbed the front of her suit and hauled her to her feet, his actions driven by pure, adrenaline-fueled training.

“To the lifeboat! We are losing atmosphere!” Rostova’s voice, raw and strained but still radiating absolute command, cut through the pandemonium. It was their North Star in the hellscape.

The journey from the bridge to the emergency corridor was a nightmare obstacle course. The ship was groaning, a symphony of tortured metal. A deep, resonant BOOM echoed from below as a support strut gave way. A hairline fracture, glowing with a faint, malevolent red light, raced across the far wall like a spiderweb of doom, the composite materials of the hull visibly rippling under stresses they were never designed to withstand. They stumbled through the corridor, their magnetic boots struggling for purchase on the shuddering deck. The emergency lights flickered erratically, casting long, distorted shadows that danced with the strobing red of the alarm klaxons.

They reached the lifeboat’s airlock, a frantic scramble of seven souls shoving their way into the cramped, utilitarian space. Kenji, dazed, fumbled with the inner hatch control. Jian, his face pale with shock but his movements still precise, pushed him aside and slapped the panel. The heavy door hissed shut, sealing them in. Just as the final lock engaged, a deep, final THUMP shuddered through the entire structure, a sound so profound it felt like the ship’s last heartbeat. The main drive had gone critical. The subsequent explosion, rather than consuming them, was a final, desperate act of physics. It acted as a cosmic shove, a kick from a dying giant that sent the lifeboat, the Vesper, tumbling out into the empty, silent void.

Inside the cramped lifeboat, the world was a spinning nightmare. The tumbling motion was sickening, a relentless, disorienting spin that made the small cabin a torture chamber. Eva Rostova, the unflappable captain, the woman who had guided ships through meteoroid fields, tried to speak, but her body betrayed her. She vomited violently, the convulsions wracking her frame as she fought against her restraints.

“In… to… the… chairs,” she gasped, wiping her mouth with the back of her glove.

“You’re bleeding,” Dr. Vìchvách’s voice cut through the chaos, her medical training a shield against panic. A piece of shrapnel had torn through the sleeve of Eva’s suit, leaving a shallow but messy laceration on her arm. Shama ignored everything else. Triage. She shoved Eva hard into the command chair, her hands moving with practiced speed to secure the five-point harness, her movements a stark contrast to the captain’s weakened state.

She turned to the others. It was a tableau of human wreckage. Kenji and Ben were utterly lost, their eyes wide and unfocused, their bodies slack in their seats like dreamers trapped in a waking nightmare. They were physically present but mentally gone, their consciousness shattered by the trauma. Marcus Cole was cradling his broken arm, his face a white mask of pain, his teeth gritted against a scream. Lena was conscious but dazed, a large bruise already forming on her temple.

“Are we clear?” Eva managed to ask, her voice a raw whisper.

Shama was the only one fully functional. She scrambled to the last seat, her own head pounding. “Wait, it’s just me,” she shouted, more to herself than to the others, as she yanked the harness down and locked it into place. The final click echoed in the small cabin. “Now!”

Eva’s shaking hand found the primary console. Her fingers, slick with her own blood, stabbed at the ignition sequence for the lifeboat’s drive. The retro-thrusters fired with a deafening roar, a violent contrast to the silence outside. Massive g-forces, raw and brutal, pressed them deep into their chairs, pinning them, stealing their breath. For a long, agonizing minute, the only sound was the roar of the engines fighting their spin and the ragged, desperate gasps of the crew. Slowly, with a groaning of stressed metal, the violent tumble began to slow. The spinning subsided.

They were adrift, but they were stable. They were alive, surrounded by the ghosts of what had just happened, in a tiny metal sanctuary floating in an endless sea of black.

Temporal Dissonance

For a long while, the only sound in the Vesper was the soft, rhythmic hiss of the life support and the ragged breathing of its seven survivors. The violent adrenaline of their escape had subsided, leaving behind a deep, cellular exhaustion. The immediate danger had passed, but a new, more insidious horror began to seep into the silence of the cabin, a creeping dread that was far more terrifying than any hull breach.

It started with Marcus Cole. His eyes, which had been glazed with pain from his broken arm, suddenly cleared. He blinked slowly, his gaze sweeping across the cramped, grey interior of the lifeboat. A look of profound, almost childlike confusion crossed his face. “Why is the grass green?” he asked, his voice a soft, wondering murmur.

Shama Vìchvách, who was preparing a hypo-spray with a powerful analgesic, froze. “Marcus, what are you talking about? There’s no grass here.” He shook his head, as if trying to clear water from his ears. “No, I just… I was standing in my mother’s garden. On Europa. Under the dome. I could smell the damp soil after the sprinklers.” He looked down at his own hands, turning them over as if they were alien objects. “It was so real.”

Before Shama could process this, Ben Carter, who had been sitting in a near-catatonic state, suddenly flinched. He let out a small, choked gasp. “Ben? What is it?” Lena asked, her own voice trembling slightly. “Nothing… I don’t know,” he stammered, his eyes wide. “A woman. On a beach. Red hair… laughing. She was calling a name… Leo. It wasn’t me. I’ve never seen her before in my life.” He clutched his head. “But I felt the sun on my skin.”

It was a contagion. One by one, they were ambushed by these sensory phantoms, these echoes of lives not their own. Kenji, the stoic navigator, suddenly shivered, though the cabin temperature was stable. “Rain,” he whispered. “I felt rain on my face. Cold.” Eva, her body still weak from the violent nausea, tasted something sharp and distinct on her tongue. Salt. The ghost of an ocean she had only ever seen in historical archives.

These weren’t memories; they were fragments of experience, untethered from time or personhood, now washing through their minds like debris from a shipwreck. It was as if reality, in the moment it had torn apart, had splashed them with its raw, unprocessed data. They were experiencing the shards of other lives, other places, other moments.

Jian Li, ever the engineer, tried to find a metaphor. He sat clutching his head, his eyes squeezed shut, rocking slowly in his seat. “It was like a nail,” he rasped, his voice a strained whisper. “A nail hammered through a wall. You think it just makes a hole. But it doesn’t. It splinters everything. The nail, the wall, the air around it… everything splits into fragments. We’re… we’re covered in the splinters.”

Shama, her own mind reeling, tried desperately to cling to a medical explanation. “It’s the drive,” she said, her voice a fragile bastion of reason in the rising tide of the surreal. “The ITT field collapse must have induced a state of temporary psychosis. A neuro-electrical cascade. It’s a side effect. It will pass.” But even as she said the words, she didn’t believe them. This felt deeper, more fundamental.

A placid, synthesized voice suddenly cut through the confusion, a jarring intrusion of cold logic into their psychological nightmare. “S O S,” the lifeboat’s navigation AI, whom the crew had nicknamed ‘Plato,’ pinged. “Signal sent and confirmed. Rescue mission will arrive in approximately six days and twenty-four hours.”

A collective, shuddering sigh of relief filled the cabin. A timeline. A rescue. A tether back to the real world. The number was an anchor. For a few precious minutes, the shared terror subsided into a weary, fragile hope.

But the reprieve was short-lived. Eva, her captain’s mind always analysing, always questioning, exchanged a deeply concerned look with Shama across the small cabin. Six days and twenty-four hours? The number was too perfect, too round. Rescue ETAs from Nova Arcis were always calculated down to the minute, based on the rescue tug’s launch window and travel time. It was a small detail, but in their heightened state, it felt like a discordant note in a symphony.

Five minutes later, Plato spoke again, its voice just as calm, just as placid. “Correction. Previous ETA contained a temporal calculation error. Re-calibrating based on confirmed chronometer sync with rescue vessel Stalwart. New ETA confirmed. Rescue will arrive in six days, twenty-two hours, and thirty-four minutes.”

The silence that followed this announcement was heavier and colder than any g-force had been. It was the silence of absolute, existential dread.

Shama felt a cold knot form in her stomach. Kenji’s eyes widened in dawning horror. It wasn’t that the first message had been wrong. It was that the AI, Plato, had made a mistake. A temporal one. The lifeboat’s hardened, shielded, logic-based artificial intelligence - the one part of their world that was supposed to be immune to the fragile, biological chaos they were experiencing - had been affected. For a moment, the AI had been just as lost, just as adrift in the dissonant tide of spacetime as they were.

The second message, so precise and correct, was not a comfort. It was the terrifying proof. It was the AI-machine admitting that it, too, had experienced the splintering of reality. Their lifeboat, their sanctuary, was not a stable island in the void. Its very consciousness had been touched by the same surreal madness.

The machine was as haunted as its human cargo. Eva leaned over and was sick again, the sound a raw, hopeless punctuation mark in the horrifying silence. They were not just stranded in space; they were stranded in reality itself.

The Aftermath

For six days and what felt like twenty-two hours, the Vesper was a tiny, sealed universe of quiet desperation. The world for Dr. Shama Vìchvách shrank to the size of the lifeboat’s cramped cabin. She did not sleep, not in any meaningful sense. She existed in a state of hyper-functional exhaustion, moving with the relentless, unthinking precision of a machine. She was the soul of the lifeboat, its functioning consciousness, and she had no time for her own fear.

Her first priority was Marcus. She administered a nerve block for the pain and expertly set his broken arm, immobilizing it with a rigid medical polymer that hissed as it hardened. Next were the burns on Lena’s hands from a shorted-out console, treated with a thick layer of regenerative gel. Then came the endless, patient work of coaxing Kenji and Ben back from the brink of their temporal shock. They were like lucid dreamers lost in a waking world, their eyes tracking things that weren’t there, occasionally muttering names and places that had no context. Shama would sit with each of them in turn, her voice a low, calm monotone, asking them to name their crewmates, to state the mission objective, to recite prime numbers - anything to tether their splintered minds back to a shared, linear reality.

“What is my name, Ben?” she would ask, holding his gaze. “Shama,” he would eventually whisper, his eyes slowly focusing. “Your name is Shama.” “Good. What is the Captain’s name?” A long pause. “Eva.” Each correct answer was a small, hard-won victory against the encroaching chaos.

But her deepest, most gnawing worry was for her captain. Eva Rostova, the rock upon which they all stood, was being ravaged by a sickness that had no name. The constant, violent vomiting left her dangerously dehydrated, her formidable strength sapped away. Shama ran every diagnostic in her arsenal, but the readings were maddeningly normal. There was no pathogen, no toxin, no neurological imbalance she could detect. It was a sickness of the soul, a physical rebellion against an experience the human body was never meant to endure. Shama could only manage the symptoms, pushing fluids and anti-emetics, watching her captain fade before her eyes. On the fifth day, as silently as it began, the sickness stopped. Eva sat up, pale and gaunt, but her eyes were clear for the first time. The storm within her had passed.

When the rescue tug, the Tug Stalwart Rescue, finally appeared on their proximity sensors, it felt less like a ship and more like a divine intervention. Its docking lights, cutting through the endless night, were the most beautiful things Shama had ever seen. The transition from the claustrophobic, scent-filled lifeboat to the clean, spacious corridors of the tug was a jarring, almost violent, return to normalcy. Battered, bruised, and emotionally shattered, they were finally, truly safe.

The official inquiry was held at a secure science-facility orbiting Jupiter, far from the prying eyes of the general public. It was a quiet, clinical affair. The seven survivors gave their testimony, their eyewitness reports a chorus of controlled professionalism, yet haunted by the surreal nature of what they had endured. The goal was not to assign blame, but to understand.

From the de-briefing transcripts of Captain Eva Rostova:

“All flight procedures were followed to the letter up to the 0.8c acceleration gate. The decision to push to 0.95c was made with the unanimous, unspoken consent of the command crew. We understood the risks. The failure was not a single event, but a cascade. The primary sensation was one of… unreality. The ship felt as though it was being pulled through a medium it was not designed for, like a boat being dragged through thick mud. The final moments were not a physical tearing, but a geometric one. It felt like our space was being folded incorrectly.”

From Chief Engineer Jian Li:

“The engine didn’t fail. That’s the part the inquiry board doesn’t seem to understand. It performed too well. The buffer arrays couldn’t dissipate the temporal shear - the drag. It built up until the feedback loop went critical. It’s like we revved a car engine to a million RPMs. The engine worked perfectly, but it shook the entire car to pieces around it. The sound… it was the sound of physics breaking.”

From Dr. Shama Vìchvách:

“The physical trauma was predictable. The psychological and temporal phenomena were not. The shared, cross-personal memory fragments suggest that at the moment of the drive’s critical failure, the normal boundaries of individual consciousness were momentarily dissolved by the ITT field. We weren’t just in the same boat; for a fraction of a second, we were all sharing the same mind. Captain Rostova’s persistent nausea, in my opinion, was a severe case of temporal vertigo - her inner ear, her entire sense of balance, was trying to reconcile a journey that took place in a timeframe that our biology simply cannot process.”

The final report assigned no human error. Its conclusion was colder, and far more profound. It determined that the Lightbridge Prototype did not fail due to a flaw in its design, but because it had successfully reached the point where known physics breaks down. The vessel, operating exactly within the mission’s designated experimental parameters, was the first to encounter a previously unmodeled physical phenomenon: a “catastrophic temporal shear” that occurs when an ITT-buffered field approaches beyond 0.9c. The crew did not make a mistake; they had simply, bravely, flown their ship to the edge of the map and discovered a monster waiting there.

The disaster of the Lightbridge Prototype thus became a turning point. The fragmented memories, the temporal dissonance, Eva’s sickness - it was the human report, the data the probes could never send back. The simple fact, that the lifeboat’s AI had been affected. Many answers for the un-explained and many more questions. Their suffering provided the missing variables. Dr. Elara Kovacycy and her team pored over the medical logs, the garbled sensor readings, and the crew’s haunted testimonies.

They realized the ship hadn’t just been moving through space; it had been dragging a piece of time-space/spacetime with it. The violent breakdown was the result of this “Einstein-Varna-Drag,” and the crew’s sickness was a physical manifestation of temporal whiplash. The solution, Kovacycy controversially proposed, was not to fight the drag, but to manage it - to incorporate the concepts of “negative time” and “negative space,” concepts hinted at in Amara Varna’s original papers, to create an opposing, stabilizing force.

The lessons were learned, paid for in trauma and terror. The survivors of the Lightbridge would carry the scars, both seen and unseen, for the rest of their lives. But their sacrifice, their terrifying journey to the brink, had finally, truly unlocked the cage. It paved the way for the first stable faster-than-light drive, ensuring that humanity’s next great leap would be a journey not into doomed chaos, but into the stars.