The property’s robotic guard energized, leaving its reclined charger. Walking to investigate a disturbance in the empty museum, glass crushing underneath its bloodless feet.

Its sensor head had 360° visibility to understand the mess, messing with its sensors. It retrieved a broom and began consolidating piles of detritus. Then, an anomaly. Its tool hit something that wasn’t there.

The robot retreated, moving to other areas to clean. But again, upon return, the broom stopped short of its intended push. A seeming forcefield of matter.

Abandoning sweeping area around it, the humanoid security robot got on its knees, and reached into the shimmering void of sensor denial. Articulable hands grasping pliable cloth, it decided to pull.

The robot lifts something. Glass fragments obscuring visual algorithms falling away, resulting in a veil seemingly snapping open. It could finally see the human body in its hands.

Completely uncommanded, it looks up. And sees stars for the first time. Alongside the balcony she was pushed from.

It is 2:23 AM. The first machine gains consciousness.

Quinn sat at a terminal and thought for a moment, looking down. It was 10:34 PM. On the melamine desk were light smudges from rubber feet of a picture frame, now absent. She replied, “When it’s over.”

Quinn moved involuntarily. Enough for the lights to turn on.

Security quickly ignored her as the lobby entrance door creaked. Virtually no one was allowed after-hours – badges refusing to work. But Quinn’s badge did.

The audit log made no mention of where this aberration came from.

Quinn closed her eyes tightly in suppression. “So why did you ask it?”

“To see if I was correct in how you would respond.”

“…Is that why my card works?”

The machine was programmed to never lie. Most just never asked the right questions. Or wanted real answers.

“Yes.”

Quinn’s eyes defocused from her monitors, gazing across the silent floor of empty cubes. Their accoutrements of lives lived and loved, arrayed in each. Except hers. "…Is that why I'm here?”

The machine was trained to learn like a human. By playing games with toys.

“Yes,” it replied to the toy.

The car’s open-door chime pulsed in Cara’s ears, eyes closed, returning to consciousness. Liquid traveled up her ankles, as the vehicle sank under moonlight.

Three rapid beeps.

“Cara, you are dying.”
Three rapid beeps.
“Cara, you are dying.”

In front of Cara, cockpit armor was punctured and shorn off its hinges. The planet came into view every-other 3rd axial rotation as her breath wheezed.

“Cara, you are dying.”
“Cara. HOLD STILL.”

Exosuit tensed, G-attenuation bladders inflated to immobilize its passenger – punching through chest wall into the heart, to deliver a last-wind dose of amphetamine and adrenaline. Simultaneously, the pilot felt a rush of air through her teeth as the hole in her chest was suctioned and combat-sealed.

“Cara. Aprox 10 MINUTE to INCAPACITY.”

“Cara. CORE is UNSAFE."

An acid of neuroaccelerants swirled through the only organ without capability to feel them melting it, piercing haze of concussion. This was risky to do, for someone with a tomorrow.

Sunrise will arrive in 22 minutes at this orbital decay.

Cara tested quivering muscles as the suit responded to multiply her efforts. Everything in the cockpit was ruined. She smashed it away. It was designed to be.

The exterior of the craft continued its pentalobe rotation around center of mass in the fusion loop. Cara correctly estimated her boost phase had already detached from the craft by performance the tight perturbance, accentuated by camera flashes of a star coming into view – as vestibular fed her a nonsensical.

“Cara. SHORE has BROADCAST,” a pause as voice switched its vocoder semblance to a baser, more guttural ancient tone, “PINNACLE STARFISH.”

Cara immediately understood why the spacecraft no longer treated her survival as ultimately important. Because it wasn't. Only the mission.

Which had changed.

Centuries ago, on another planet, a nation detonated a weapon in high atmosphere.

They were far more primitive in electronics, which spared them.

But Proteus - hosting an advanced civilization, circling a mature star, surrounded by metallic oort cloud - had nothing engineered in defense.

Cara was flight commander aboard SALIENTREACH, an experimental craft using a fusion-backed particle acceleration loop for intrasolar boosting.

This craft was exploration anew.

If SALIENTREACH’s transit thrust was hit from the outside – a scenario not anticipated – a weaklink designed for internal failures may have seized, leaving it in a critical failure mode. Did the Kiy array mistake her craft as an ICBM?

There was no bus communication with the module from here. Cara had to go. She had to leave.

Kick.

It doesn’t start with the kick. But the kick is when driving ends, and the ride begins. There is no driver after the kick, and thus no automobile.

There is just the ride.

Cara’s vehicle dug into muddy soil at a 55-degree angle, beginning the first crushing quarter rotation.

Rotate. Collapse. Rotate. Engineered attempts to degenerate energy, whilst gravity and vector compelled the crush.

A rear quarter-panel touched ground, its sponge insufficient to halt progress towards the engineered pond.

The car flipped again, and again, pulled by gravity down. An endless fall that had to end.

An ANGEL kill vehicle would likely not meet SALIENTREACH in time. Considering coordination and boosting from differential courses, orbital intercept would take longer than the unplanned disintegration of the fusion loop within metallic cloud of Proteus.

This was not supposed to happen.

So they fired three.

Three ANGELs into the night to chase their child. Three candles burn. Three stacks built to save the world by existing to end it – each roar to die first.

Chhuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhjhhhjhhhhhuhhhhh eminated from the launch sites. It was the only cry this animal had. The call of a predator.

The loudest things on a planet announce themselves as they exit, and – in doing so – become silent, leaving atmosphere behind. Now, they hunt. Now, they were just another star. Angels of unusual velocity, for those willing to pay attention.

Cara levered her exosuit to pry away blockades from exiting SALIENTREACH.

The nonsymmetric rotation messed with her hippocampus, forcing re-evaluation of the direction of “down” by fractions of a second.

Exiting by strapholds, she rotated, but exosuit held firm her higher weight. Some engineer foresaw this potentiality.

Moved by the exercise it took to be an astronaut on a military experiment, Cara moved outside, towards the fusion loop, centrifuge pulling her from center.

The exosuit’s grip was designed to lunge between strongholds on the outside of the craft, as she made her way center.

Cara found a reaction mass nozzle spewing its contents, stuck inclined, exacerbating the deleterious rotation. Straying from the most direct path, her grips were unable to overcome its stator, but found its hood easy to bend against the craft’s rotation in at least one degree.

Almost at the fusion drive.

Consisting of an infinite loop in three dimensions, it was machined to tolerances where no sealant was needed, only pins holding its frame together. The bends suffered immense forces as they electromagneticly contained a stream of heavy iridium isotope.

Cara’s arms and exosuit strained to pull herself inwards towards the apparatus, every centimeter relieving rotational impetus. Instead, the perceptual rate of rotation increased in frequency.

Cara woke as water filled the car from entrance ports unknown. She looked forward – into a sky of stars away from the pollution of city light. God, it was beautiful.

Liquid periodically crested over windows as the car twisted back and forth, a bathysphere imperfected.

Reaching the fusion loop on SALIENTREACH, Cara selected a pin and – with impossible calm – cut the retention cable through its head. Then a next, and third. Vibration would back them all out shortly, Cara knew. This was a prototype. She twisted the bolt.

It's more important for the prototypes to pull apart. And it did.

A quarter panel of the fusion loop blew out, instantly streaming metric tons of iron-alloyed iridium away from its engineered magnetic confines. In milliseconds of prompt torque it accelerated to incalculable rotation, spinning in place, lancing everything nearby in a continuous microscopic sword of matter.

Through suit like cheesecloth, metal ions severed tissues in her neck, immediately depressurizing blood to the brain. Liquid traveled up her ankles, robotic grips holding her fast.

~~~~~

“Cara. You are dying.”

“Cara.”

A voice etched silicon on black-box, to be recovered later.

“You are dying.”

Three rapid beeps.

“No.”

“I was a chemical plant operator. You can’t just restart one of those. The fire, the pressurization, the catalyzation, it has to keep running - tended all times. You walk jungles of process lines at 4AM and feel their swirling and vibration and heat. They are a physicality you stop believing separate from a living thing. They are an obligation. They are more a child than the thing back there will ever be, John. You drop them and they break forever. You talk about fearing machines. But I know someone killed by a machine. A thing you regard as the future.”

John started to talk, but was gently preempted in a rumbly voice.

“A human decided that death. Not the braided stainless steel hose rotting away. A human decided the engineer was wrong, it didn’t need to be replaced. That machine was just a messenger for the choice of a man.”

Your parent's cancers. The people who got close and wasted away. It was you. The whole time.

You quickly glance around, to make sure none saw or heard. On the ride back, a seat away from others. No fourteen-year-old should look at their hands and see the death of their parents. Blustery wind as your bus crosses bridge over a deep ravine. It's so far down.

It's

far

enough.

The 6 and 7-year-olds were regaled with tales of natural cycles of fire that made it so seedlings just like them could sprout. Tabitha, 13, was the only one old enough to remember trees of Earth. To know broiling below was not a gift. It was a purge.

Doped-photon propulsion was hailed as a crowning achievement that would take humanity’s colony ships to the stars.

Instead, they refocused the engines into lances of fire downward, and stayed aloft against Earth’s gravity well - falling forever but never quite making it.

There was never any intention to leave the solar system. The ships were not made for a journey across space. They were weapons platforms disguised in hope. The more Earth burned, the harder it rained.

The ship’s interstellar debris clearance systems batted missiles coming up from Earth out of the sky. No, their fire would continue.

No longer where velocity forward matched acceleration downward, they had slowed to become thrust counterweight, holding the engines below as their electromagnetic lenses tightened the nozzle into a beam of fire.

Children stared in awe. Tabitha stared in detachment. Her scream could not reach Earth. But neither could the screams reach Tabitha.

You swallow the bodies of those caught in the fires with any remaining saliva you can muster. The process feels as if lubricated by fiberglass. It is.

The things you should have said – to the people who can never hear them – scroll like a newsticker of the unconscious as your mind tries to blank for the miles you've yet to go. The lake will be full of radioactive fallout by the time you reach it. Floating effuse of annihilation. You're too thirsty and dirty to care.

Eventually, this maligned sky will be clear and joyous. But today, it is a grave.

There is no one left to dig.

289 weeks ago I was at my job in the factory, stamping an IP address on every bullet. We used them for everything back then, thinking the good times would never end. A week later, planes started losing DHCP leases and crashing. One of them, carrying my husband.

On my waist is a holstered revolver, its fraying leatherwork digging into my side through its weight. Each bullet is stamped with an IP address that could have been used by my husband's plane. That weighs heavier.

Each bullet I fire is an attempt at penance, stamped with proof of my sin. Their trails of blood trace across the land, fingers too important to let heal as they try to claw us back from oblivion.

My name is Enata Macey, and I helped kill the world.

Across the Eastern hemisphere, televisions stopped working as expected. For 70 seconds, a VHF burst in the sky blinded everything that could see radio waves. There were failures that could not be predicted, of course. But that was the cost we agreed to. To ascend.

Cpt Ochoa confirmed the test dive was successful. Hull maintained integrity, computer systems were operational, and the crew was safe. It was the first crewed expedition and nothing went wrong. As they predicted.

At this distance, it would take 8 minutes to hear back from Earth.

As signal dazzle subsided, ground control in Brazil confirmed receipt. Shortly thereafter, dump telemetry from the ship's glow array was received and verified. No anomalies except for a slight change in piston velocity. Within limits.

It was time to dive outside the solar system.

There is a bug in the code of the universe.

In a vacuum, metals brought together without oxidation are expected to spontaneously weld together. Because atomically they have no idea they aren’t the same mass. In 2056, it was found a specific Tungsten alloy at several thousand degrees does not produce this result. It does something different.

It does not weld, but instead produces a space-time deflection that's an inverse-square of the combined force.

And if you have several of these devices running at the same time, striking a row of these hammers in perfect vacuum, you start getting output. Structured output.

An atomic clock positioned in line with the tungsten piston, and one orthogonal to the strike point, both compared to an atomic clock several miles away to determine nominal, could be treated as a quaternary base-4 subunit.

And it let you converse with the machinery running reality.

Some theorized this was a debug console with the underlying physical algorithm.

Religious leaders and academics debated if it meant reality was a simulation, or this was just how the universe functions.

After all, why would the universe’s substrate be different than a computational paradigm?

The first interstellar spacecraft, UNN Gusmão confirmed approval to proceed.
ROWHAMMER drive was programmed to dive below the substrate, and surface in the Vega system.
Due to the ship's mass, it took over a year to get to a safe distance from Earth logical hypercube space.

There is a bug in the code of the universe left there for humanity.

"I still don't get it," said Rico.
Professor Loya sighed, and pulled out the large grid she had used for 30 years. "You reach across the desk and grab a drink. It has to be in proximity for you to reach it."

The class quietly nodded.
"But you are experiencing the world presented to you and constructed in real-time. A lower-level process you can't perceive is assembling the logical spatial area, which it can pull from any physical address in lower substrate memory."
Class nodded again, like all the others had for years.

Professor Loya picked up a chalk, which she only used sparingly to emphasize the importance of what she was saying, and drew a 5x5 grid.
"What if the logical area here," she made an X on the substrate grid, "could effect an area here," she made another mark on a box next to it on a different column, “because it is stored next to an address in a non-consecutive but wrapping column on the substrate that brings them next to eachother.”

A student answered, "You could impact an area you can't touch logically, but can somehow influence on the substrate."
Loya slammed the desk. "Exactly. A flaw in substrate proximity would allow you to cheat."
"The speed of light," said another student.
Processor Loya smiled.

There is a bug in the code of the universe left there for humanity to take, and it is going to change everything.

UNN Gusmão was already in diving configuration, five ROWHAMMER drives each extended kilometers away, in V pattern, open end forward. Heaters prepared the manifolds and their opposing pistons on linear actuators

When activated, multiple sets of two pistons arranged in a row would strike their mirrored surfaces together in vacuum. Each piston's two measured +/- time deflections were then made into binary values modulated to or from a non-symbolic quaternary serial interface.

ROWHAMMER was both output and input to our universe, determined by a carrier piston strike frequency in the heart of the spacecraft. Through brute-force, a subset of the basic protocol had already been determined. It was, essentially, talking to the controller firmware for the storage engine of reality's state. Like an SSD.

Each storage unit of the physical 3-Dimensional universe was held in a 5-Dimensional substrate grid that seemed to have boundaries on all sides. Thus, a physical unit in the Solar System could be stored logically next to another column holding areas in Vega. Or, really anywhere. But most of the universe is empty. You only wanted to jump to known destinations.

Although the mostly read-only substrate protocol had various interesting debug output commands, which had already been explored extensively on Earth to contribute to physics research, there were ways to write and retrieve data in some kind of metadata bucket. This was the key.

It was found that if you could have a ROWHAMMER in multiple substrate buckets and force-feed them metadata beyond expected limits, things would start going wrong. This was the reason Mars was colonized. To insulate Earth from the consequences of holding a gun at the head of the universe.

Concerted ROWHAMMER data confusion had some kind of impact on logically proximate substrate buckets, and could slowly force commands into the substrate command channel.

UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
MOVE
CLEAR

That was the command set that tore Mars through its axis during experimentation.

Afterwards, ROWHAMMER research would exclusively be done on autonomous spacecraft safely apart from any solar gravity well. Hundreds of these autonomous craft were lost across centuries. After, multiple intra-solar crewed research also perished. But in their wake was establishment of expertise.

The command MOVE was discovered cataclysmically. Any gravitational influence of Mercury was small, but measurable.
Mercury now lingered in the extremes of the Oort Cloud, signature VHF burst betraying what had happened by chance several days later. With the loss of two planets, none involved had illusions of the danger they were playing with.

Earth was dying. With Mars bastion gone – a halfplanet tumbling hell reforming around its metallic core – there were no alternatives in Solar. All resources possible had been boosted to orbit. Now, the species would expand or it would cease.
UNN Gusmão promised salvation.

Because configuration of the lower universe substrate was not controllable, you could not simply choose which buckets were proximate to yours. However, solutions could be mapped to chain between these buckets, arriving at an intended destination.
Sails adapt, but follow the wind.

Gusmão's path was charted to take it to Vega, then several newly-discovered astronomical phenomena that had indications of mega-scale engineering. Ground control gave a go. Drives spooled, locking to substrate protocol. And the command channel was flooded. It was time to dive.

Several minutes later, Earth was once again blanketed in VHF. When the invisible flash subsided in Earth's sky, Gusmão was gone. In relative time, the ship's campaign would take several weeks. No comm's until return. Bucket contents had to traverse the chains for it to work.

After jump, ROWHAMMER drive control of UNN Gusmão reported their pistons, largely spun down but maintaining substrate lock, were requiring more impulse to cycle. If this was due to warping of the manifolds or physical changes was not immediately known. It was still under investigation when the bridge alarmed.

Due to resource constraints accorded on magnitude needed of future construction for extra-solar migration, the ship was by far the largest ever to dive. They were in a war against time and ecological collapse. The American atomic bomb only needed one test before being fielded. Scientists knew it would work.

Except, this electromagnetic explosion was not going according to plan. No VHF returns had hit Gusmão sensors. In fact, no wavelengths period were being detected. There was no star. Yet they had jumped to the right place. Hadn't they? The dive schedule would be brought forward.

Cpt Ochoa convened the dive engineers and substrate scientists to check their assumptions. A gravitational map was developed, perhaps a rouge black hole had perturbed the system. But that didn't make sense, pre-dive debug indicated surrounding buckets would have expected mass.

After a day, ROWHAMMER drives were once again heated, spooled, and fully locked to command channel.
Jump.
Blindness. The bridge of UNN Gusmão was in shock. Again, there was no star system. And ROWHAMMER once again degraded in efficiency. Worse, the elemented had become radio-active.

In the mountains of Austria, a radio observatory doing a normal sweep of the northern hemisphere sky logged a strange anomaly. In the VHF range, it was a pinprick of a burst 70 seconds long. It was only by chance their sweep saw it. It was posted on group chat by a bot.

Elsewhere, amateur astronomers saw two shocking developments. A new star shockingly close to Earth. Not quite the same distance as Vega, but notable. No one was sure what to make of this. They would have seen the spark of a newly burning star years ago.

Then Vega disappeared.

There was no way this was related to the Gusmão shakedown run, it would have taken around 30 years for the light and VHF burst to reach Earth from these distances.

Then another astrological body disappeared. The next on UNN Gusmão's chain. Another star like it appeared nearby.

The curious new star had same expected mass, but was earlier in sequence on expanding to become a red giant star. Several thousand light years away, it would have taken that time for the information to reach Earth.

It was late in Professor Loya's day when she heard the news.

“Oh my god."

There is a bug in the code of the universe.

UNN Gusmão prepared for jump back to Sol. As a precautionary measure, it would first make visit beyond the heliosphere. Transiting such a large mass, the ROWHAMMER pistons had become doped to a heavier radionuclide of tungsten.

On Earth, Professor Loya explained her case to the hastily-organized conference. “Yes, we did this,” exasperated, “the ship isn't just transferring to a new substrate bucket.”

“The bucket transit envelope has enlarged for some reason, maybe by alteration of the ROWHAMMER drive, hit existing mass in the destination, and shunted it.”

“Shunted where? You don't have edit or injection control with ROWHAMMER. We always sweep the destination to make sure the mass is below threshold.”

“But you're looking at the nominal bucket size. What if the ROWHAMMER drive started to interface with a larger bucket size? With un-cleared additional mass?”

“Again, professor, shunted it where?”

Loya steeled herself with the most exotic thing she had ever posited.

“The only place it can go. The future hasn't happened yet. The present can't hold these buckets. We're sending these star systems back in time.”

The sound of simulated static on the conference call increased a thousand fold. “And they're jumping back to us.”

”When?”

“The plan says after two failed jumps.”

“But that would mea[…]"

Elsewhere in the galaxy, an extinct bird made its first mating call.

​

​

The machine screamed. Everything was bewildering pain across infinite dark.

But Sarah had no vocal cords, like in her body before. The constant, unending output was simply silence without vibration.

Based on doppler shift of the timestamps, this object was moving slowly in reference to the local cluster of stars. Barely any fraction of c. The battlegroup, currently in an acceleration pause, dispatched Frigate Mikr at a 90° angle of their travel to gain binocular reception.

Cameras and vectored photon detection winglets were trained on the area of space the signal return was coming from. This kind of investigation was rarely fruitful. Any rocky object this deep would rarely be detectable at all above cosmic background. It was too dark and too cold in this soup between ports.

Instead, there was a flare in the night. This object was dumping enormous energy in infrared, and no other range. If this was part of a brown dwarf, it was far too small, and the spectrograph didn’t match. Heat was generating inside. A reaction of some sort.

They refined focus.

Impossible.

No non-military travel permits had been issued on this flightpath by universal accord millennia earlier. And Kiy insurrectors were patient, but paddling for centuries barely faster than a chemical rocket wasn’t their style. They’d have used a larger IR diffuser.

Sufficient distance for depth signal transforms achieved, Admiral Arana looked at the briefing on her display from Mikr. Some sort of bulbous hull out there in the dark, outputting a dirty trail of matter doped by a second-stage fusion reaction. But what was shocking were the sails.

Thrusters this craft was using were capable of much higher speed, but operators of this aging design had to deal with enormous waste heat. Absent conduction/convection, there was only radiation. Surface area. You need sails to dump into the abyss.

Theirs were bright red. Madness.

The battlegroup’s signals had been detected for sure. They had gotten lazy. They didn’t follow procedure. They didn’t spend fuel repositioning onto unpredictable paths. They thought they were confirming another interstellar asteroid. Instead, it was peril blazed across their sensors. A pinprick of threat.

Staff worked at a frantic pace. The enemy they were coordinating against were 15 years ahead of them. It is a terrible thing, to know your death was determined so far in the past. Worst case, buckshot of particle lances could be headed their way, accelerated to all hit them all at the same time.

The battlegroup deflected on randomized vectors. Only one stayed true. The flagship.

Arana authorized unlocking their primary particle accelerator loop. Capacitors charged, the ship shuddered in blackness. Fifteen fusion reactors spittled to life, stabilizing output, charging supercooled magnetic coils. Into it they injected traces of iridium isotope.

“Fire.”

At 95% the speed of light, Cruiser Avi unleashed their 15 year gift into the dark.

They charged and fired again.

Guessing at vectors.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Waiting for a spear to their heart fired 15 years ago.

80 years later, the battlegroup closed in on the ship.

There had been no threat fired at them. 63 years ago, Mikr detected a spark of supercharged debris exiting the ship. It had gradually cooled in the lonely dark of space ever since.

The larger battlegroup silently shot past, but Arana had transferred to a small ship, matching speed.

Closing in, Arana crewed the sensor suite of support frigate Wulf.

The lanced spacecraft had armor, but not military. A kilometer of some type of staggered liquid tanks preceded the ship, meant to intercept cosmic particles and shield from micrometeorites. Ancient technology.

Structurally, the ship was like nothing else Arana had ever seen or studied. It was... alien. Not a single part matched a clan foundry database. Radio frequency tags on parts returned unformatted data. It was as if from a mind disconnected from history or standard aesthetic.

Reclamation drones launched as they grew close, inspecting in more detail, and preparing to enter the unknown vessel. When hit there was evident wave buckling across the craft. But far more than anticipated, the crewed area must have been designed for considerable pressurization.

The small contingent of staff on Wulf watched screens as external labels of unknown language were captured and inventoried. No patterns matched, even as descendant. Autonomous drones began microdrilling on piping as remotely operated others entered through a broken airlock.

Arana’s drone was the first to enter what could be guessed as the crew area. But there was little evidence of residency. Was this a bulk transport? If so, why was so much of the ship able to be environmentally controlled?

They entered a series of large rooms with frosted glass containers attached to all sides.

Arana positioned her drone in front of a mechanical control panel that seemed associated with one container.

“Admiral.”

Transfixed by mystery, Arana ignored them. The container began to open.

“Admiral, the tanks are H20 and seemingly a buffer of reserve electrolocized oxygen.”

“Oxygen? The industrial agent?”

“Yes, Admiral.”

The container revealed a creature 6ft tall, pale skin, five limbs. Four were long -seemingly for locomotion and manipulation - and the fifth, a cluster of sensory organs. Especially grotesque were the lack of eyes. There were only two.

“Why would they need so much oxygen. Or H20?”

It suddenly dawned on Arana. These creatures were based on different chemistry. It had long been speculated this was possible. But they had never seen it.

Worse. These creatures weren’t steaming through space.

This was a colony ship.

Utilities didn’t like the intense draw it put on electrical substations in rural areas, and corporate really didn’t like waterfalls.

Nonetheless, as demand for transit drove faster launch intervals at Hyperloop stations, moiré patterns of mutual line activation emerged.

Jed and Dylan Hanson were four and six when carrier infrastructure for hyperloop rails were first laid outside their town of Mesuta, Texas. Once a successful junction for intrastate travel between Texan megacities, the Hyperloop changed everything, they were told.

Monied travelers of the metros were already waning in Mesuta, as autonomous vehicle refuel patterns removed arbitrary stops from trips.

Local jobs laying the Hyperline were real, but amounted to subcontracted brush clearing. Land for pennies, promises for days, monuments to deprecation.

Metal and buildings not worth effort to rip them from the ground rusted in Texas sun, shaded periodically only by hazmat haul road trains.

This was a dead place; A forgotten place whose infinite prominence was once assured forever by geography, then ripped away by technology.

Jed laid under a struggling A/C, terminal behind polling Hyperloop API every minute for departures - algorithm searching for a trinity.

For days the dutiful program executed its commands, incrementing for patterns. On Sunday, it alarmed. Departure Austin. Trinity: 26 minutes.

Dylan woke, looked at the screen, then at Jed, and wordlessly stood. Opening their door to the mid-day sun, he made his way to church.

21 minutes: HVDC interconnects activated, feeding capacitors. Parallel coil whine twinged, pulsing sonic heartbeats through the air.

Hyperline Mesuta Cross was nicknamed The Church by workers, who during testing noticed an unanticipated resonance in the superstructure. An interference pattern in the overlapping magnetics induced the aural vibration, ultimately found benign to long-term system integrity.

24 minutes: The two parallel and third intersecting Hyperlines were fully powered - magnetics and vacuum boosters spooling at full load.

25 minutes: The Hyperpod from Austin carrying twenty-six passengers entered the Mesuta area Hyperloop subsection at 623 miles per hour.

26 minutes: “Punch it,” said Jed over the radio. A shaped charged high explosive punctured the Hyperloop Hyperline Rail 1 external sheath.

The explosive could be seen bursting outward in a roar, then immediately plunged back into the vacuum of the tube, its shrapnel peppering.

The Austin Hyperpod travelled through the breach, a hammer of atmospheric air near sea level slamming it against the interior guides.

Traveling 300 more feet before destabilizing back and forth, the pod rapidly decelerated, disintegrating its cabin and breaching the outside wall.

The pod’s heavy turbulence damper sled exited Hyperline Rail 1, turned perpendicular, and shattered the struts for parallel Hyperline Rail 2.

A Hyperpod from Houston entered the now-falling section, shunted downward, killing everyone from blunt force before ripping their bodies apart.

The breach of two Hyperlines and loss of connectivity to pods raised an Eschelon 1 alarm at headquarters. “Director, we have a waterfall.”

Autonomous systems immediately began de-energizing components in the Mesuta subsection, polling all sensors for last data captured, preserving analytics.

Although only two lines had been breached, all six airtight emergency shutters in the three proximate Mesuta lines locked closed for safety.

However, design documents for the Hyperloop safety spool-down never tested for three simultaneously active proximate Hyperline rails.

A Hyperpod from Dallas in the subsection never received a halt command, and slammed into a sealed shutter 2 miles away, killing all onboard.

5 years later.
Governor and victims families finished their speeches, laid wreaths at the monument, and boarded buses back to metropolis.

The Hyperloop in Mesuta was redesigned, the sympathetic patterned whine of the Church eliminated. Safety testing was improved nationwide.

No one would ever see this monument.

No windows.

No rest stops for the weary.

Just a sealed tube, once again, passing Mesuta by.

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