The war room beneath the Icelandic tundra was quiet, unnaturally so. After the events of New Cydonia and the blackout at the Arctic Array, Project Final Horizon's leadership found themselves walking on a knife's edge. Nova stood at the center of it all, cloaked in a silence that commanded more attention than any voice could.
He had read the data logs again—personally. The anomalies around the wormhole were escalating. The patterns were not random. Time was no longer a passive dimension—it was starting to fracture.
A holographic map hovered above the central table, flickering with overlapping timelines that shimmered like oil on water. A moment later, the door hissed open.
Chairman Mark Patro entered, eyes narrowed. "Explain to me why three quantum clocks across three continents are no longer in agreement."
Nova didn't look up. "Because time is bleeding, sir. And the wound is growing deeper."
*---------------------*
Patro leaned forward, voice low. "Are you telling me the wormhole is manipulating causality?"
"It's not manipulating it," Nova replied. "It's unraveling it."
Dr. Kyra Mein, head of temporal physics, interjected, "The singularity at the wormhole's throat—it's not a natural feature. It's shaped. Artificial. Almost...guided."
Patro straightened. "Guided by who?"
No one answered. The air was thick with the weight of implications.
*-------------------*
Later, Nova found himself alone in the Observatory Dome, high above the compound. Through the glass, the auroras danced violently—like signals trying to punch through the veil of Earth's sky.
He clenched his fist.
He remembered the child he once was. Not the prodigy, not the leader of scientific revolutions—but the broken boy beneath rubble, the one who watched his family dissolve into ash during the Patro Initiative's earliest experiments.
It was Patro who had saved him.
And it was Patro who had built the machine that had destroyed his home.
*---------------*
Nova's fingers trembled as he activated the hidden terminal beneath the observatory floor. The code he typed wasn't part of the sanctioned protocol.
He was searching for something beyond what Final Horizon had permitted.
And he found it: a folder labeled SINGULARITY_GHOST.
Encrypted. Restricted. A lock known only to Patro's highest echelon.
Nova bypassed it anyway.
Inside, the truth shattered him.
The wormhole wasn't Earth's first.
There had been others.
On Europa. On Titan. On the dark side of the Moon. All buried. All silenced.
The wormholes had not opened naturally—they had been triggered.
By Project Genesis: a failed prelude to Final Horizon, buried decades ago after catastrophic events that caused reality tears and paradox mutations in test subjects.
Patro knew.
*----------------------*
The next morning, Nova stood in Patro's office, folder in hand.
"You lied," Nova whispered.
Patro looked up from his desk slowly. "I protected the truth."
"No," Nova snapped. "You buried it."
Patro's voice was steel. "What would you have done, Nova? Told the world their reality could shatter with a thought? That time could splinter like glass?"
"I would've given them a choice."
Patro sighed, a sound of ancient regret. "Then you would've watched them destroy themselves."
Silence.
Then Nova said, "It's already happening. And the longer we hide, the fewer chances we have to survive."
Patro stood. "Then we face the consequences—together."
For a fleeting moment, Nova saw not a tyrant, but a weary man bound by the weight of too many sins.
*-------------------*
Nova gathered the Task Force.
"Everyone needs to hear this," he said.
He exposed Genesis. He explained the prior wormholes, the failed experiments, the reality breaches. He laid out the truth: the singularity was not a gate. It was a prison door slowly opening.
Inside it, something waited.
Something that understood time not as a line, but as a spiral—something that could see past, future, and present all at once.
Dr. Kyra Mein asked the question everyone feared.
"What happens if it gets out?"
Nova stared at the flickering map.
"Then time stops being a concept we understand."
*------------------------*
A storm hit the base that night.
Not a storm of clouds or rain—but a temporal storm. The sky turned black, then violet, then fractured like glass. One of the watchtowers collapsed—not from force, but from non-existence. Time had skipped over its foundation.
In the chaos, Nova ran toward the command terminal, issuing emergency lockdowns, but he knew it was already too late.
Reality was no longer linear.
A message pinged on his private neural HUD. Not from anyone alive.
It was from Dr. Ilaius—the man who died in Chapter 3.
> "It's not death you should fear, Nova. It's remembering things that haven't happened yet."
Nova dropped to his knees, blood trickling from his nose.
He saw his own corpse in the crater of New Cydonia.
He saw Patro with a gun, alone in a burning room.
He saw Earth… split in half.
Then it vanished.
*----------------------*
In the aftermath, Patro stood silently beside Nova at the edge of the facility.
"You saw it," Patro said.
Nova nodded.
"And now you understand."
Nova didn't reply.
Because he wasn't sure he did.
Only one thing was certain now.
They weren't preparing for war.
They were preparing for collapse.
*----------*