Earth has been ruled by an alien race called the Zaryans for over 100 years. Humans live under strict surveillance, divided into labor sectors. One young man, Athan, thirteen years old, dares to challenge the regime when he discovers a secret that could change everything.
The sky was never blue anymore.
Not since the Zaryans arrived.
Athan squinted past the smog-choked atmosphere, watching one of the massive floating citadels that hovered silently over Sector 12. Its metallic underbelly pulsed with pale blue lights, a quiet reminder of who truly controlled Earth now.
They came a hundred and six years ago, in ships larger than mountains. They didn't bother with diplomacy. Within weeks, the major governments were dismantled. Nuclear arsenals disarmed. Satellites hijacked. Humanity became livestock overnight.
The Zaryans weren't monsters—not in the way humans had imagined aliens in old films. They were tall, smooth-skinned beings with luminous eyes and sleek armor that hummed when they moved. Efficient. Cold. Always watching.
And they never spoke to humans directly.
Instead, they used the Vokari—modified humans, cybernetically enhanced and mentally linked to the Zaryan hivemind. Their eyes glowed silver, their voices lacked emotion, and their loyalty was absolute.
Athan had lived his entire life under their rule. He worked in the energy harvesting fields near the edge of the ruins, where old cities like Chicago lay buried under vines and ash. Every citizen wore a tracker on their neck—black, slim, and impossible to remove. No one could run away or commit a hideous crime with this. His mother had once tried. She died in the attempt.
But Athan was different. He remembered stories. His grandfather, one of the longest living men on Earth who had seen Earth before the Fall, whispered them to him at night. About how people once ruled themselves. About music that was not programmed. About skies that rained water, not acid.
He believed him.
And that belief made him dangerous.
"Sector alarms down again," whispered Tyen, Athan's best friend, hunched beside him as they climbed the back wall of the old reactor station. "That's the third time this week. You think it's sabotage?"
Athan didn't answer right away. His eyes scanned the horizon. A patrol drone zipped past, but its sensors were aimed downward. They were safe—for now.
"I think something's changing," he finally said. "The Zaryans don't make mistakes. If their systems are failing, it's because something is interfering."
Tyen's face tightened. "You think it's the Reclaimers?"
These were rivals, aimed to take over.
Athan nodded. The Reclaimers were a myth among laborers—rumored rebels who lived in the wild zones, plotting to overthrow the alien regime. Most believed they were just stories meant to inspire false hope.
But Athan had found something last week—a symbol scratched onto the underside of a maintenance panel. A human hand holding a burning star.
The Reclaimer mark.
"I need to find them," she said. "If there's any chance they're real… I have to know."
Then grabbed his wrist. "They'll kill you if you're caught."
"I know."
He slipped away.
It took Athan three nights to reach the forested zone past the old borderlines. Drones rarely patrolled here, and the land was overgrown and wild, like Earth trying to heal itself. He moved carefully, using the direction of the old stories his grandfather told him—how to read moss on trees, how to follow the stars, how to avoid sensors.
Then, on the fourth night, they found him.
Three masked humans dropped from the trees, silent as shadows. Before he could scream, a needle jabbed his neck.
Darkness.
He awoke in a dim cave, his wrists bound in glowing restraints. A tall woman with burn scars across her face crouched beside him, scanning him with a crude bio-scanner.
"You're not Vokari," she said after a moment. "Tracker's deactivated. That's clever."
Athan rasped, "I'm not your enemy. I want to join you. Please."
The woman studied him. Then finally, she whispered, "Welcome to the Reclaimers."
Over the next weeks, Athan trained with the Reclaimers. They lived in hidden bunkers and old subway systems. They had weapons—ancient human tech, cobbled together with stolen alien components. And they had a plan.
The Zaryans had one weakness: a central relay tower embedded deep beneath their largest floating citadel, known as Vael Thura. The relay controlled the mental link to the Vokari and powered most of their surveillance systems. Destroy it, and the network collapses. The Vokari would fall.
The Reclaimers had tried before. They always fail.
But Athan had something they didn't.
A way in.
Using his laborer credentials and a hacked tracker, Athan volunteered for a harvest rotation directly beneath Vael Thura. Posing as a tech engineer, he infiltrated the base's lower chambers. The deeper he went, the more alien the structure became—organic walls, pulsing lights, the constant hum of energy.
Then he saw it.
The Core.
A swirling, crystalline spire that throbbed like a living heart. At its base stood a console—a fusion of human tech and Zaryan design. Athan approached, palms sweating. If the code then gave him work, he could overload it.
He entered the first sequence.
An alarm blared.
The Vokari stormed in.
They seized him before he could finish.
One of them stepped forward—tall, silver-eyed, his voice like a broken wind chime.
"You seek freedom. Yet you understand nothing."
Athan spat, "We were free once. We can be together again."
Vokari tilted his head. Then, to his shock, he stepped back.
"You are not the only one who remembers. Look."
He pressed a finger to his forehead.
Visions exploded in his mind—images of humans and Zaryans working together centuries ago. The first contact was peaceful. The Zaryans were refugees, fleeing a dying galaxy. But human leaders betrayed them, tried to harvest their tech, kill them.
The invasion wasn't conquest.
It was vengeance.
Athan fell to his knees.
Everything he knew—shattered.
"You now carry the truth," Vokari said. "You can share it… or bury it. But the path you choose will shape your kind's fate."
He released him.
Athan fled, the weight of history crushing him. When he returned to the Reclaimers, he told them everything. Many were furious, others confused.
But he stood before them to declare it.
"We were not innocent. But that doesn't mean we deserve chains. If we want freedom, it must come not from destruction—but from understanding. We have to talk to them."
It was not the answer they wanted.
But it was the one they needed.
The scene before him soon vanished without a trace.
Athan felt his body stretch. His small hands grew larger. His arms filled with muscle. His chest was broad. He was not a boy anymore.
The floor under him changed. It was no longer a familiar environment. It was metal. Cold. Humming with power, seeming to belong to another world.
He looked up. Towers of glass and steel rose into the sky. Strange lights burned across the horizon. Symbols glowed on banners that moved without wind. It seemed like the scenes he has been seeing in Sci-fi movies.
Athan lowered his eyes to his hands. They were older now. Scarred. Strong. The hands of a man who had fought. The hands of a leader.
In the glass of a broken panel, he saw his face. Hard. He's now an adult.
He heard a voice, non-human.
"This is your future. This is what you must become. Or everything will end."
His vision extended.
There's more he has to see, a timeline he has to live though for a limited time.