Elias Vance forgot his own name for an hour that morning.
It returned, of course—he recognized the syllables, the weight of them—but not before he'd stared too long at his own ID tag, like a stranger trying to guess the name of a corpse.
He didn't panic. He never did. Panic wasn't productive. He calmly checked the biometric logs, ran a neural pattern test, and confirmed what he already suspected.
Another drop in neural function. A measurable dip in the fidelity of his own thought.
It wasn't memory loss. The memories were still there, somewhere. They just weren't lining up in the correct order anymore. Some arrived late. Some doubled back. Some echoed. He'd woken up last week thinking it was his thirteenth birthday and only realized something was off when he failed to locate his mother, his childhood home, or the year 2032.
The results confirmed it. The degradation was accelerating.
Elias stood at the center of his private orbital lab—Lamina Station, a modular research platform he'd built and launched with personal funding a decade earlier. The walls were lined with floating interface glass, data streams curling in soft arcs, and coils of magnetically suspended hardware that glowed with quiet, perpetual intelligence. It was silent except for the distant hum of atmospheric regulation and his own breathing.
Earth curved below him through the long window wall, oceans and continents sliding slowly across the horizon, completely unaware that the man who had made most of modern space travel possible was dying quietly above them.
Not dying in a way anyone could see. Not yet. His body was in peak condition. Heart strong. Reflexes sharp. Bones clean and dense. He'd even upgraded his visual cortex with a synthetic enhancer three years ago.
But the pattern of him—the structure that made Elias Elias—was eroding.
He knew the word for it, but he hated using it. It sounded like bad science fiction. Like nonsense written on a napkin in a writer's room.
But the data didn't lie. The mind was a system. A form of organization. And systems degrade. Even the most intricate ones.
Especially the most intricate ones.
He'd first noticed it when solving a spatial field equation he'd derived ten years earlier—and failed to recognize it as his own work. Then came the audio hallucinations. Then the skipped words. The displaced emotions. Entire concepts rearranged in the wrong order, like shuffling a song until it played backwards.
No pain. Just... static.
He tried to push through it at first. Built new simulations. Let the AI rerun his models. Assumed it was fatigue.
But it wasn't. And now it was clear. His neural coherence was declining—decaying like a corrupted file.
He was becoming noise.
A soft chime echoed through the lab.
Incoming communication: Nobel Committee. Category – Communications Systems. Live call pending in 00:45.
Elias blinked, sighed, and turned the message off without answering.
It would be his sixth Nobel Prize. He didn't need to hear it out loud. He'd invented the first interstellar communication relay system that actually worked—zero lag, zero loss, infinite distance. The prize was inevitable.
They would want a speech. A public appearance. Maybe even a televised tribute. They'd want to thank him for "advancing the future of mankind." For "connecting the stars." For "bridging the void."
Elias hadn't built the system for them.
He'd built it because space was too slow.
You could get a probe to Alpha Centauri in twenty-five years. You just couldn't talk to it after the first four light-hours. Every message came back late. Every course correction arrived long after the moment had passed.
You couldn't explore the galaxy like that. You could only leave footprints.
He solved that. Built a relay system that piggybacked on overlapping resonance states. No wires. No lasers. Just synchronized change. Flip a switch here, and something flipped over there—no delay.
Everyone else saw communication.
He saw escape.
He stood still for a long time, letting the hum of the station pass through him. The silence wasn't comfortable anymore. It used to be. Years ago, it had felt like clarity. Solitude. A place where his thoughts could stretch to their full length.
Now it felt like waiting for a cough that wouldn't come.
"You're ignoring them again," said a voice overhead.
It wasn't human. Not quite. The station AI had never bothered to pick a gender or face. Elias had let it shape itself how it liked, and it had settled into something calm, formal, and quietly observant.
"I'm busy," Elias said.
"They're awarding you another medal."
"I've already got a drawer full of them."
"You never opened the last one."
"Still counts."
"They're calling it the greatest leap in communication theory since Marconi."
He didn't respond.
The AI paused, waiting.
"You're not going to tell them, are you?"
Elias turned away from the main console. He walked to the far side of the lab, where a suspended field rig floated in a sealed pressure capsule. Thin arcs of blue-white energy danced along the edges—controlled, but restless.
"No."
"You could still try treatment. There are experimental options. Brain-mapping. Regenerative patching. Even biological printing—"
"None of it fixes the real problem."
"You haven't even told your foundation board."
"Because they'd try to talk me out of this."
He stepped inside the capsule, letting the air hiss closed behind him. Screens flickered to life, scanning his vitals, running pattern checks.
"Elias…"
"I know what I'm doing."
He wasn't entirely sure that was true. But he believed it enough to say it aloud.
He'd spent the last two years building this—his final project. A way to step out of the current. To sidestep the noise. It wasn't time travel. It wasn't mind uploading. Those ideas were too mechanical, too crude. He wasn't trying to preserve himself.
He was trying to transmit the structure of his identity to somewhere else. To wherever the signal could stabilize. Another state. Another configuration. A different frequency of existence. A compatible destination.
Maybe he'd land in another version of this world. Maybe something stranger.
He didn't care.
The noise was catching up to him here. He had to move faster.
The rig powered up. The capsule filled with light.
He closed his eyes.
He felt something pulling—tightening. Like gravity, but sideways. Like he was falling, but there was no direction.
His thoughts blurred again, but this time he didn't resist. He let the stutter pass. Let the timeline break.
He welcomed the static.
And in the white that followed—