The air in the NovaSyne control room, a sterile cathedral of brushed steel buried a mile beneath the Nevada desert, tasted of recycled oxygen and ambition. Sergeant Dax Raoh stood at ease, a shadow in black tactical gear amidst the scientists' pristine white lab coats. His job was to be a ghost, a silent guardian for the moment he prayed would never arrive.
He stole a glance at his phone, the screen's glow cupped in his palm. A single message waited.
Sana: Almost there. See you on the other side, my hero. <3
Beneath it, a photo from their wedding day. Sana's smile was a supernova, eclipsing everything else in the frame. He was the leader of her security detail, a fact that filled him with a quiet, fierce pride. She was the genius who could unravel the universe's secrets; he was just the man tasked with keeping her safe while she did it.
"Final countdown initiated," a disembodied voice announced, crisp and sterile. "T-minus thirty seconds."
Dax pocketed his phone. Across the room, behind the reinforced plasteel of the forward observation post, he saw Sana. She gave him a small, confident nod. He returned it, his posture straightening, his senses sharpening into a razor's edge.
"Ten… nine… eight…"
The numbers scrolled down the main viewscreen, each a hammer blow against the humming silence.
"…three… two… one… particle collision engaged."
For a single, perfect second, everything was normal. The energy readings spiked into the green, just as predicted. A smattering of polite applause rippled through the room.
Then the humming began.
It wasn't a sound that came through the ears but a vibration that resonated deep in the bone, rattling his teeth. The lights flickered, died, and flared back to life, bathing the room in the hellish red of the emergency system. Alarms shrieked, a discordant symphony of catastrophic failure.
On the main screen, the image from the collision chamber didn't just flare—it shattered.
Reality tore open.
It wasn't an explosion of fire and force, but a silent, geometric wound. A jagged, black fissure ripped through the center of the viewscreen, a crack in the fabric of space-time itself. Through the tear, for seventeen agonizing seconds, they saw… something else. A vista of impossible angles, of shifting, crystalline structures that defied geometry, all bathed in the light of colors that had no name. At its heart pulsed a dead, black orb—a sun that was not a sun—webbed with veins of sickening violet light.
It was the Anomaly. And it was looking back.
A wave of exotic energy, visible as a ripple of pure distortion, erupted from the collider core, bypassing every shield, every layer of concrete and lead, as if they were nothing.
"SANA!" The name was ripped from Dax's throat.
His training, his entire being, screamed at him to move, to get to her. He took one step, his muscles seizing as the wave hit. It wasn't heat or force. It was pure, agonizing information, a universe of wrongness pouring into every cell of his body. The last thing he saw before the world dissolved into a blast of silent, white pain was the forward observation post. He saw Sana, her hand pressed against the plasteel, her mouth open in a scream he couldn't hear, as she and the entire structure disintegrated into a cloud of shimmering, fading motes of light.
As his consciousness spiraled into the abyss, a single, impossible thing appeared in his fading vision. It was a flicker of translucent blue light, clean and utterly out of place. It resolved into a line of perfect, sans-serif font.
[Welcome, User.]
Then, there was only darkness.