Aden moved toward the central control panel—a control nexus, part altar and part machine—set dead-center in the lab. Even from a distance the instruments rotated in a slow, hypnotic ballet; a halo of iridescent lights painted the room in impossible shades. No documentary could have captured the way the scene felt in person: immediate, alive. As he closed the distance, the industrial din folded into a single, insistent tone: Ommm… — the low resonance he had only ever heard on recordings labeled "space ambience." In the lab it was different: solemn, uncanny, as if the sound itself held a secret.
The control room was a forest of small screens—fifty at least—each scrolling surveillance, diagnostics, and readouts. A holographic console rose in the center, and around it the ZX-90 and a swarm of maintenance automatons drifted with the efficiency of bees. Their hurried circling suggested urgency; they were trying to fix something.
Aden called out before he could stop himself. "What's going on? Is there an issue?"
ZX-90 turned its head with a faint servo whir. Its voice was blunt and clinical. "Aden — you've arrived. Nuclear fusion is feeding the warp drive. Systems are online and sustaining. The problem: the drive cannot perfectly sync the fusion output to the required spacetime interaction frequency."
Aden inhaled slow and steady, letting a brief lift of relief edge out the fear. This was what he had worked for. "That isn't the worst," he said. "I was more worried that the warp drive wouldn't run at all. We've got it running. Now we need a precise frequency lock — something inside the calibration range I solved days ago. We just have to find the exact value."
What followed was a litany of small victories: adjustments, corrective nudges, and the silent choreography of metal hands. Hours blurred. They pushed warp RPMs, trimmed phase offsets, fed minute corrections. Aden watched the glass panel that showed the drive's throat and felt his pulse fall into the machine's rhythm.
Then, quicker than a blink, he saw it: a tiny, fickle disorder at the edge of reality itself—like a heat shimmer on the horizon. He shouted, half-laughing and half-praying, "It's working! Look—there's a fluctuation on the far side of the drive!"
The automatons looked up. Their faces did not change, but their visual arrays flickered in a way that read like astonishment. ZX-90 barked orders. "Everyone, focus. We're close." Tools moved with renewed urgency.
After more coaxing, the Ommm… swelled until it pressed every other sound into silence. The terminal feed shifted: where there had been measured chaos, there opened an absence—a black aperture, a controlled tear in the fabric of space-time. Aden stared, small and mute; years of calculations and sleepless nights condensed into that single, impossible aperture. The wormhole measured already nearly fifty centimeters wide.
Relief struck like a physical weight lifting. His knees felt hollowed of burdens he'd carried for twenty years. Rosy's voice came through the comm speaker, trembling and wet with tears. "Aden… you… you have finally done it." She sobbed.
He answered quickly, trying to steady himself. "Not me. All of us. Everyone who worked for this—this is ours."
The celebration fractured. A booming concussion rolled through the compound—from outside the lab—and red alarms spiked. The speakers blared a cold, practiced announcement: "Code Black. Code Black. Enemy attack on base. Evacuate immediately. Repeat: Code Black."
Rosy's voice cut back through the comm speaker, raw with panic. "What the hell is happening?"
"Sabotage," Aden said, the word sharp, clinical, yet weighted with dread. He barked orders to the room while thinking faster than he sounded. "As per protocol: if we cannot secure the experiment data from enemy capture, transmit the data publicly. Contract the security command center—" His words were interrupted as the lights died. The nuclear fusion reaction still fed the warp drive, but all other systems shut down; the lab ran now on emergency reserves.
He whispered to himself, furious and cold. Someone had sabotaged the lab from within.
ZX-90's voice—normally steady—cracked through the dim. "We have lost control of the fusion core. Energy output is rising and feeding the warp drive. If it continues, the reaction could cascade. There is potential for catastrophic detonation—perhaps even on a planetary scale."
Aden's heart froze. For a long moment he was certain he would vomit his own name. He thought, unbearably, of his parents and their legacy—of how their work might be remembered as the greatest triumph or the greatest catastrophe.
"What can we do?" he demanded.
ZX-90 paused, calculating. "The only option is to destroy the nuclear reactor. That will cause a large detonation."
"How large?" Aden asked, the question scraping his throat.
"Approximately three to four kilometers. It will encompass the entire lab site," ZX-90 replied. "Radiation leakage is unlikely—the reactor is designed for emergency containment—but the blast itself is significant."
Aden understood the calculus in an instant. The wormhole already measured roughly fifty centimeters across; letting it grow risked unknown consequences to Earth. The choice was brutal but simple: sacrifice the facility and themselves to prevent the wormhole from widening.
He thought of Rosy and, for a second, of his own survival odds. By now, she should have already evacuated beyond the blast radius. Then he did the grim math: detonation in five minutes, a three-kilometer radius, and only dead lifts and stairwells between him and the surface. Escape was impossible. He forced the thought away. "Do it," he said at last, voice flat and solemn. "But first: secure the experiment data in a container that can survive the detonation. Write a full report explaining the situation."
"We have an emergency containment suitcase designed to survive detonation," ZX-90 said. "We can also copy backups to the automatons' drives and attempt remote sync with external servers. Revival is probable within twenty-four to seventy-two hours depending on sync."
"That will do." Aden let himself accept a sliver of relief; if there was a chance to preserve the work, then something of the legacy might live.
"How do we shut down the reactor?" he asked.
"All electronics are down," ZX-90 replied. "We cannot perform an electronic shutdown from here. Manual intervention in the reactor chamber is required. I can proceed if you authorize opening the reactor room door."
"But how—" Aden began. "The facility is in blackout."
"There is an emergency access system in the backup control room," ZX-90 answered. "It runs on the fusion system itself and can open the door."
"Alright," Aden said. He readied himself to move. ZX-90's voice called after him in a tone that carried something like regret. "Aden, you may not survive. After you authorize the reactor room, you will have approximately five minutes before detonation. Use the emergency exits. Your survival is vital for humanity."
He did not wait to reply. Three to four kilometers in five minutes was impossible; lifts would be dead; only stairs remained. Still, he moved. Survival was one thing; duty was another.
The backup control room felt ancient, its consoles older by a decade or more, paint chipped and keys dulled by time. Yet against all odds, the system hummed to life when Aden pressed his palm to the scanner. The screen blinked green: "[Access accepted.]"
Somewhere deep below, heavy locks disengaged with a groan, and the reactor room door eased open. The sound reverberated through the silence like a death knell.
Aden lingered in the doorway, suddenly aware of the weight in his chest. This was it—the point of no return. He forced his legs to carry him inside, past the stale smell of dust and machine oil.
There was an office chair shoved in the corner, fabric worn and half-torn, a relic from another era of the lab. He sat down heavily, not because he needed rest but because his body demanded a moment to reckon. If this was truly the end, then this—an old chair, an empty room, and the echo of his parents' dream—would be the stage for his last act.
He leaned back, exhaustion washing through him like a tide. For a fleeting second he allowed himself the thought: Maybe this is the last time I'll ever sit down.
Then he heard a voice—faint, ragged: "Help…."
His blood turned to liquid lead. That voice could be no one else. Rosy should have been already out of range. He leapt to his feet and ran toward the sound, snatching up a metal rod from the corner as a crude weapon.
The scene he stumbled into was a wound carved into the lab itself. Sparks still hissed from torn wiring, shadows pulsed with the emergency glow, and in the center of it stood the patched, half-broken robot Rosy had been suspicious of that very morning. Its posture was wrong—predatory, waiting.
Then Aden's eyes fell to the floor, and the breath left him. Rosy lay sprawled on the sterile tiles, her coat darkened as blood spread outward, staining the sterile floor with merciless precision. A knife jutted from her stomach, obscene in its simplicity, as if someone had tried to erase her with one brutal stroke.
For a heartbeat Aden couldn't move. The sight was too much, a collision of fear, rage, and disbelief. The air itself felt colder, heavier, as though the lab had turned traitor around him.
Aden felt something primeval wake inside him. Rage sharpened his movements into impossible strength. He swung the metal rod once. It connected with a sickening crack. The robot's head tore free and flew; circuitry and hydraulic fluid sprayed the air. The force of the blow would have surprised any neutral observer—Aden surprised himself.
His hand trembled as it held hers. "Rosy! Stay with me! We're getting out… together… you hear me?."
Her eyes opened, pain and surprise folding her features. "Aden…?" she breathed.
"I'm here," he said, voice breaking. "I'm not leaving you."
She pushed a weak, bloody laugh out of herself. "No, Aden. You have to leave. Go. Live… be happy for me."
A ghost of a smile tugged at his mouth. "You can't escape me in the afterlife. I'm coming with you." He tried to laugh, but the lab was collapsing into a simple arithmetic of seconds.
Rosy reached up and clutched his sleeve. Her voice was quieter now, each word a precious pill. "I love you. I love you so much. I wish we had more time."
"I love you too," Aden said. Regret came like a cleansing rain. "I wished for the same. I've been running after my parents' work—"
"Don't blame yourself," she interrupted, tears tracing clean lines through the blood. "You did what you had to. The past was not your fault."
He stammered, the confession surfacing as if it had been waiting for this moment. "Don't—don't blame yourself. I know you were there after that sudden crash. It wasn't your fault, but I've always thought it was because of me. I made them go to my college graduation that day… and that accident—" His voice broke on the word.
Hearing him speak it aloud loosened something that had coiled tight inside him for twenty years. Tears started to fall; the invisible burden he'd carried since then lightened, just enough that he could breathe. For a sliver of a moment he allowed himself to imagine a life that might have been—small, ordinary, forgiving—and felt, absurdly and wonderfully, more at peace with the idea of what came next.
The Ommm… that had been constant began to die away. There was no time left. Aden leaned down and kissed her, the world narrowing to the heat of that last contact.
The lab answered with a sound that would live in memory: a distant, growing roar that became the world's last syllable. The detonation hit with the force of collapsing stars, an ending written in physics and fire.
"Boom—"
The explosion took them.