Salvagers

Shawn Storie

Chapter 1: The Lake

Week 1, Day 1

The alarm went off at 5:47 AM.

Ethan had set it for 5:45, but the clock on his phone was two minutes fast and he’d never bothered to fix it. Small inefficiencies like that used to bother him. Now he had bigger things to worry about.

He lay in the dark for eleven seconds — he counted — then swung his legs out of bed.

The floor was cold. The house was cold. He’d turned the thermostat down to sixty-two last month when the gas bill came in higher than expected. Mom hadn’t complained, but he’d bought her an extra blanket from Goodwill, the kind with the fuzzy lining. Twelve dollars.

He pulled on sweats and a t-shirt, ran a hand through hair that needed cutting, and padded down the hallway to her room.

The door was open. It was always open now; she couldn’t get up to close it, and she liked to hear him moving around in the morning. Proof that she wasn’t alone.

“Hey.” He kept his voice soft. “You awake?”

“Mmm.” Movement in the bed. “What time is it?”

“Almost six. Sun’s coming up.”

“Okay.” A rustle of blankets. “I’m ready.”

He crossed to her bed. Pulled back the covers. Slid one arm under her shoulders and one under her knees and lifted.

She weighed ninety-three pounds. He knew because he’d weighed her last week, standing on the bathroom scale with her in his arms and then stepping off to subtract his own weight. Ninety-three pounds, down from one-twenty-five two years ago.

She didn’t fight him. Didn’t complain about being carried like a child. Those battles had been fought and lost months ago. Now she just wrapped her arms around his neck and let him do the work.

He carried her to the bathroom. Set her on the toilet seat. Turned on the shower to let it warm up.

“I can do the rest,” she said.

“You sure?”

“I’ve been going to the bathroom by myself for fifty-one years, Ethan. I think I can manage.”

He smiled despite himself. “Yell if you need me.”

“I’ll yell if I fall in.”

He closed the door. Stood in the hallway, listening. Waited until he heard her moving around, then went to the kitchen to start breakfast.

Eggs. Toast. Coffee for her, water for him.

He scrambled the eggs the way she liked them, soft and a little runny. The bread was store brand, the coffee was Folgers from a can, but she never complained. She knew, even if they never talked about it, that every dollar mattered.

He checked his phone while the eggs cooked. Bank balance: $1,247.32. Property tax due in three weeks: $196. Electric bill: estimated $168, due in ten days. Phone and internet: $79.99, due tomorrow. Mom’s prescriptions: $612 at the pharmacy, he’d pick them up Friday.

The math didn’t work. It never worked. He’d been robbing Peter to pay Paul for six months, and Peter was getting impatient.

The eggs were done. He divided them onto two plates, added toast, poured coffee. Carried it all to the small table in the kitchen.

Mom was in her wheelchair when he came back, hair damp from the shower, wearing the soft cotton robe he’d found at a garage sale last summer. She’d done the transfer herself, from the toilet to the chair. Some days she could. Some days she couldn’t.

“Smells good,” she said.

“Secret recipe.”

“The secret is eggs.”

“You’ve cracked the code.”

She smiled, and for a moment she looked like she used to look. Before the diagnosis. Before the wheelchair. Before Dad left.

They ate in silence. Comfortable silence, the kind that comes from knowing someone so well that words are optional. The morning light came through the window, catching dust in the air, making everything golden and temporary.

“What’s on the schedule today?” she asked.

“Lake. Supposed to be clear, no wind. Good conditions.”

“Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

“Whatever I can find. There’s a wreck on the south side I haven’t hit yet. Old pontoon boat. Might have some brass fittings.”

She nodded. Brass was good. Brass meant $1.50 to $2.20 a pound, depending on the alloy. A good pontoon could have forty, fifty pounds of brass hardware. Cleats, rails, hinges.

“Be careful,” she said.

“Always am.”

“I mean it. The weather can change fast out there.”

“I check it every hour. Got the radio on the boat. If anything shifts, I’m out.”

She reached across the table and took his hand. Her grip was weak, trembling, but her eyes were steady.

“I know I say it every day. But be careful. Please.”

“I will, Mom.”

He squeezed her hand gently, then stood to clear the dishes.

The truck was a 1991 Mazda B2600i with 247,000 miles on the odometer and rust eating through the wheel wells. He’d bought it two years ago for $1,400 cash from a guy who was moving to Florida and didn’t want to drive it across the country. The guy had thrown in a toolbox full of sockets that turned out to be worth almost as much as the truck.

Ethan loaded his gear in the bed. Dive bag with his wetsuit, fins, mask. Tank carrier with two AL80s, freshly filled from the compressor in the garage of a guy who owed him a favor. The DPV in its waterproof case — homemade, ugly as sin, but it worked. Fish finder in the Pelican case. Magnetometer. Weight belt.

Everything secondhand. Everything patched, repaired, made do. Nothing matching, everything functional.

He checked his pockets. Phone. Wallet with $34 in cash and a debit card he tried not to use. Keys. Small notebook where he recorded his dives, his finds, his profits and losses.

The sun was fully up now, the sky clear and blue. Good day for diving. Good day for finding something worth finding.

He climbed into the truck, turned the key, listened to the engine cough twice before catching. Pulled out of the gravel driveway and headed for the lake.

Twenty-three minutes to get there. He knew every curve of the road, every pothole, every place where the county had patched the asphalt and the patch had failed. Route 9 to Miller Road to the unnamed gravel track that led to the public boat ramp.

The parking lot was empty. It usually was on weekday mornings. The recreational divers came on weekends, the fishermen came at dawn and left by nine, and the locals had better things to do than sit by a lake that had given up its easy treasures decades ago.

Ethan knew better. The easy treasures were gone, sure. But the hard treasures — the ones too deep, too silted, too far from shore — those were still down there. Waiting for someone stubborn enough to go get them.

He parked close to the ramp. Unloaded his gear. Laid it out on the concrete in the order he’d put it on: wetsuit, boots, hood, weight belt, BCD, tanks, fins, mask. The DPV last, charged and tested.

The lake stretched out before him, flat and gray-green in the morning light. A hundred and forty feet at its deepest point. Fed by underground springs, which meant cold water year-round and visibility that varied from excellent to terrible depending on what the springs were doing.

Today it looked clear. He could see the bottom at the ramp, ten feet down, rocks and silt and the dark shapes of crawdads scuttling for cover.

He pulled on the wetsuit. Henderson 7mm, bought used from a retiring diver, patched at the knee where he’d snagged it on rebar last summer. It was too warm for the summer months, but it was what he had.

BCD next. Zeagle Ranger, late 90s vintage, built like a tank. Bought from a dive shop’s rental retirement sale. A little faded, a little worn, but the bladders held and the straps were solid.

Tanks. Two AL80s with mismatched boots, one blue, one black. He’d filled them yesterday, 3000 psi each, enough for two hours of bottom time if he was careful.

He did his pre-dive checks. Valves open. Air flowing. Regulators working. Computer on, battery good. Weight belt secured, weights distributed, quick-release functional.

Everything by the book. He never skipped the checks. The lake was forgiving, mostly, but it didn’t suffer fools.

He waddle-walked to the edge of the ramp, fins slapping concrete. Slid his mask down. Bit the regulator. Took one last look at the sky.

Then he stepped off the edge and let the water take him.

The cold hit first. It always did.

The wetsuit helped, but the first minute was still a shock, lake water seeping in through the neck and wrists, his body heat slowly warming the thin layer against his skin. He exhaled, let himself sink, equalized his ears as the pressure built.

Ten feet. Twenty. The light filtered down through the water, green and diffuse, particles drifting like snow in reverse. He switched on the fish finder, watched the screen paint a picture of the bottom below.

The south shelf was a hundred yards out, a limestone ledge that ran along the eastern edge of the lake before dropping off into the deep channel. Old boats ended up there — pushed by wind, dragged by currents, abandoned by owners who didn’t want to pay for proper disposal. Over the decades, a graveyard had accumulated. Pontoons and fishing boats and the occasional sailboat, all of them slowly rusting, slowly silting over, slowly becoming part of the lake.

He kicked toward it, the DPV in one hand, not using it yet. Saving the battery for when he needed it. The work would come later, when he found something worth pulling, when he needed the extra power to haul it to the surface.

The shelf came into view. Dark shapes against the lighter silt, angular where nature was curved. He’d mapped most of it over the past two years. Knew which wrecks he’d already stripped, which ones were too far gone to bother with, which ones still held promise.

Today he was looking for the pontoon. Old guy on the north shore had mentioned it to him last month — said his grandfather had sunk it back in the seventies, insurance claim, never bothered to salvage it. Said it should be somewhere on the south shelf, forty feet down, still mostly intact.

Old pontoons were good. Brass fittings, aluminum rails, sometimes copper wiring if the electrical system hadn’t rotted out completely. An afternoon’s work, if he found the right one.

He kicked deeper, following the shelf, watching the fish finder paint targets on the screen.

And then he saw something that didn’t make sense.

It was small. Maybe the size of a softball, maybe smaller. Hard to tell from this distance.

It wasn’t sitting on the bottom. It wasn’t floating on the surface. It was just… there. Hanging in the water column about twenty feet off the shelf. Perfectly still.

Ethan stopped kicking. Hovered in place, neutral buoyancy, watching.

Objects didn’t do that. Objects sank or floated. They drifted with the current. They didn’t hang in open water like they’d been pinned to an invisible board.

He checked his depth. Fifty-three feet. Checked his air. Twenty-eight hundred psi. Checked his computer for nitrogen loading. All green.

He wasn’t narc’d. He wasn’t imagining things.

The object was still there. Still motionless. Catching the faint light that filtered down from above.

He kicked toward it slowly. One fin stroke. Two. The object didn’t move. Didn’t drift away. Didn’t respond to the current his motion created.

Up close, it was… he didn’t have a word for it. Smooth, but not polished. Dark, but not black. It seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it, except for occasional flickers that might have been internal or might have been tricks of the water.

He reached out a gloved hand.

Hesitated.

Something about the way it hung there. Something about the perfect stillness. It felt wrong in a way he couldn’t articulate. Like finding a bird frozen mid-flight. Like watching a river flow uphill.

Unlike every brick, he thought. Unlike every rock and bolt and bottle and piece of debris around it.

He touched it anyway.

The surface was warm. That was wrong too — the lake was fifty-two degrees at this depth, everything in it was fifty-two degrees, but this was warm against his palm even through the glove.

He pulled his mesh bag from his BCD. Unclipped it, held it open.

The object didn’t resist when he pushed it toward the bag. It moved easily, too easily, like it weighed nothing at all. But when he let go of the bag, the object stayed where it was. Hanging in place. Waiting.

He had to physically pull the bag over it, engulfing it from above, cinching the drawstring tight around his wrist.

Even then, when he kicked for the surface, the bag didn’t hang below him like it should. It floated beside him. Weightless. Impossible.

He ascended slowly, watching his computer, doing his safety stop at fifteen feet. Three minutes of hanging in open water with an impossible object in a mesh bag that floated like a balloon.

Then he surfaced. Swam for shore. Hauled himself out onto the boat ramp and sat there, dripping, staring at the bag in his hand.

Inside, the object pulsed once with faint light, then went still.

Chapter 2: The Way Bricks Don’t

Week 1, Day 1

He didn’t go home.

Ethan sat on the boat ramp, the mesh bag in his lap, the object pulsing faintly through the fabric. The sun was warm on his face, the lake lapping gently at the shore, and nothing made sense anymore.

Objects didn’t float in the middle of the water column. Objects sank or rose according to their density, settled on the bottom or bobbed at the surface. They didn’t hang motionless like someone had pinned them to an invisible board.

He opened the bag. Looked at the thing inside.

It was roughly spherical, about the size of a softball. Dark — not black, exactly, but a color that seemed to drink the light rather than reflect it. Smooth, featureless, with no seams or markings that he could see.

It was also, he realized now, hovering slightly above his palm.

He turned his hand over. The object stayed where it was, suspended in air, not falling, not moving, just there.

“What the hell are you?”

No answer. He hadn’t expected one.

He drove home with the object on the passenger seat.

It didn’t sit on the upholstery. It floated about half an inch above it, maintaining that same impossible stillness even as the truck bounced over potholes and took corners too fast.

At a stoplight, Ethan reached over and pushed it. The object moved — smoothly, easily, no resistance — and stopped exactly where he pushed it. No momentum. No bounce. Just motion and stop, like a video game with perfect physics.

It hung in the air, he thought, in much the same way that bricks don’t. Bricks fell. Bricks obeyed gravity. This thing did neither.

The light turned green. He drove.

Mom was in the living room when he got back, the television on low, a book open in her lap. She looked up when he came in.

“Early day?”

“Yeah.” He set down his dive bag, keeping the mesh bag hidden behind it. “Wind picked up. Visibility went to hell.”

“Find anything good?”

“Nothing special. Just junk.”

The lie came easy. Too easy. He’d been lying to her for months — about the bank account, about the bills, about how bad things really were. One more lie didn’t even register.

“I’m going to clean up,” he said. “Shower, then I’ll start dinner.”

“Take your time.”

He went to his room, shut the door, set the mesh bag on his bed.

The object rose out of it and floated at eye level.

He spent an hour just watching it.

Moving it around, testing its properties. Pushing it, spinning it, trying to make it behave like a normal object.

It didn’t.

Push: smooth motion, instant stop when force removed. Spin: rotation maintained indefinitely, no apparent friction. Drop: impossible. It didn’t fall. Period.

He tried putting it in a box. It stayed where it was, and the box sort of settled around it. He tried putting a book on top of it. The book slid off. He tried putting it in water, filling a bowl from the bathroom sink.

The water didn’t touch it.

He could see the distortion where the water should have been in contact with the surface, but there was a gap. A tiny gap, maybe a millimeter, where the water curved away and refused to make contact.

“You’re waterproof,” he murmured. “Perfectly waterproof. The lake didn’t touch you.”

The object pulsed. A faint internal light, there and gone.

Ethan pulled back. “Did you just… react?”

Another pulse. Stronger this time.

“You can hear me.”

No pulse. But something changed — a feeling, hard to define, like the air in the room had shifted slightly.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Okay. You’re not just… a thing. You’re something more.”

He sat on his bed, looking at the object, his mind racing.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t from around here. Couldn’t be. Nothing on Earth floated like this, reacted like this, existed like this.

Which meant it was from somewhere else.

Which meant—

He stopped that thought before it could complete itself. Too big. Too much. He needed to take this one step at a time.

“I’m going to put you in the garage,” he said slowly, carefully, as if the object could understand. “On my workbench. Tomorrow, I’m going to run some tests. Figure out what you are. What you can do.”

The object pulsed again. Was that agreement? Understanding? He couldn’t tell.

“Don’t… don’t do anything weird while I’m gone. Don’t float around the house or anything. My mom doesn’t need to know about you. Not yet.”

Another pulse.

“I’m going to take that as a yes.”

He picked up the object — that strange, weightless sensation, like picking up a bubble that refused to pop — and carried it to the garage.

The workbench was cluttered with projects: a half-finished magnetometer, a broken fish finder he’d been meaning to repair, spools of wire and bins of salvaged electronics. He cleared a space in the middle and set the object down.

It floated there. Patient. Waiting.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. “First thing.”

The object pulsed once, softly, and then went still.

Ethan turned off the garage lights and went to make dinner.

He didn’t sleep well that night.

He kept thinking about the object. About what it might be. About where it might have come from.

About what it might mean.

At 2 AM, unable to stay in bed any longer, he got up and crept to the garage.

The object was exactly where he’d left it, floating in the dark, a faint luminescence that hadn’t been visible in the daylight.

“Hey,” he whispered. “You still there?”

A pulse of light. Hello.

He sat on his stool in the dark garage, looking at the impossible thing he’d pulled from the lake.

“I don’t know what you are,” he said quietly. “I don’t know where you came from or how you ended up in the water or what you want. But I found you. And I’m going to figure this out.”

The object pulsed again. Warmer this time. Longer.

Almost like gratitude.

Ethan sat with it until dawn, and when the sun came up, he went back to bed and dreamed about stars.

Chapter 3: The Workbench

Week 1, Days 2-5

He didn’t tell Mom.

That first night, he brought the object into the garage and set it on his workbench and stared at it for an hour. It sat there — or didn’t sit, exactly; it hovered a millimeter above the surface, never quite touching — and did nothing.

The garage was his space. Had been since Dad left and Mom stopped asking him to clean it up. Workbench along the back wall, pegboard above it with tools organized by type. Shelving units on the left, holding bins of sorted salvage: copper here, brass there, aluminum in the big blue tubs. The AnkerMake printer in the corner, currently idle. The soldering station, the bench power supply, the oscilloscope he’d found at an estate sale and taught himself to use from YouTube videos.

This was where he fixed things. Where he built things. Where he figured things out.

He pulled a notebook from the shelf. The same kind he used for dive logs and financial tracking. Opened to a fresh page. Wrote the date at the top.

Object retrieved from lake. South shelf, 53 feet. Approximately softball-sized. Smooth surface, dark coloration. Does not sink, does not float. Hovers in fixed position relative to… what?

He looked at the object. Pushed it gently with one finger. It moved — smoothly, easily — and then stopped exactly where he’d pushed it. Didn’t drift back. Didn’t continue forward. Just stopped.

Appears to have zero momentum unless directly acted upon. Remains stationary when force removed. Violates basic physics.

He picked it up. Or tried to. His fingers closed around it, but the sensation was wrong. Like picking up a soap bubble. Like the object had no substance, even though he could clearly feel its surface against his skin.

Weight appears negligible. Surface is warm despite cold storage in mesh bag. No visible power source. No visible mechanism.

He set it down. It stayed where he put it, floating an inch above the workbench.

I don’t know what this is.

He underlined that last sentence twice.

Day two. He came back from a regular dive — the pontoon he’d been looking for, found it, stripped twelve pounds of brass fittings, called it a win — and went straight to the garage.

The object was where he’d left it. Hovering. Waiting.

He’d been thinking about it all day. Underwater, bagging hardware, his mind kept circling back. Running hypotheses. Testing them against what he’d observed.

Magnetism? No. The workbench had steel tools on it. The object didn’t seem to interact with them at all.

Static electricity? Unlikely. The garage was humid. Static should dissipate.

Some kind of aerogel or low-density foam? But it wasn’t floating up. It wasn’t floating down. It was just… there.

He pulled the object closer. Examined it under his magnifying lamp. The surface was featureless. No seams, no joints, no text or markings. Just smooth dark material that seemed to drink the light.

He got a small brush from his cleaning supplies. Started to wipe away the fine silt that had accumulated on the surface.

The object pulsed.

Ethan jerked back, nearly knocking over the lamp. The pulse had been brief — a flash of something, light or heat or energy — there and gone in less than a second.

He waited. Heart pounding. Brush still in hand.

Nothing. The object sat there (floated there) exactly as before.

He reached out with the brush again. Touched the surface. Started wiping.

Another pulse. Brighter this time. And with it, a sensation: the brush in his hand felt lighter. Felt like it wanted to float.

He let go. The brush drifted upward, slowly, as if the air had become water. Then it stopped. Hovered about six inches above the workbench.

“What the hell,” he whispered.

He grabbed the brush. The strange lightness faded as soon as he touched it, and it felt normal again in his hand.

He looked at the object. The object — he could have sworn — looked back.

Day 2, evening. Cleaning the object generates some kind of energy discharge. Brief, visible, possibly electromagnetic? Physical contact during discharge causes temporary reduction in apparent mass.

Hypothesis: Object responds to friction or static generation. Energy release affects local gravity? Inertia?

Need more data.

He got the bench power supply. A simple unit, adjustable voltage, used it for testing circuits and charging batteries. Clipped the leads to a pair of alligator clips.

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. Maybe nothing. Maybe an explosion. Maybe answers.

He touched the clips to the object’s surface.

At 0.5 volts: nothing.

At 1.0 volts: nothing.

At 1.5 volts: a faint flicker, deep inside the object. Like a candle seen through fog.

At 2.0 volts: the object lit up.

It wasn’t bright. Wasn’t blinding. But it was there — a soft glow from inside, colors that shifted like oil on water. And with the glow came the hovering, intensified. The object rose an inch, two inches, three. The tools on the workbench started to slide toward the edges, pushed by some invisible force.

Ethan killed the power.

The glow faded. The object settled back to its original position. The tools stopped moving.

He sat in the silence of the garage, breathing hard, trying to process what he’d just seen.

2V threshold activates the device. Energy input causes visible response. Floating effect intensifies. Surrounding objects are displaced — repelled? Some kind of field effect?

This is not natural.

This is not human.

Day three. He called in sick to the dive shop owner — said he had a stomach bug, couldn’t make it out to check on the compressor like he’d promised. The lie came easily. The guilt came too, but smaller than it used to be.

He spent eight hours in the garage.

He tested the object’s response to different voltages, different currents. AC versus DC. Pulsed versus constant. He documented everything in his notebook, filling page after page with observations.

2V DC: activation threshold. Stable glow, moderate hovering, mild displacement field.

5V DC: brighter glow, stronger hovering, tools slide to edge of bench.

9V DC: very bright glow, object rises to approximately 8 inches, field extends ~2 feet from center.

12V DC: do not exceed. Field effect becomes unstable. Papers flew off bench. Had to kill power fast.

He tried putting other objects near it during activation. A screwdriver: floated. A piece of wood: floated. A cup of water: the water stayed in the cup, but the cup lifted off the bench like it weighed nothing.

Consistent mass reduction effect on objects within field radius. Effect does not appear to depend on object composition.

He tried wearing rubber gloves. The effect still worked. Tried standing on a rubber mat. No difference. Tried activating the object from across the room with long wire leads.

The floating effect only occurred near the object. But when he walked into range, he felt it: a subtle lightness, like the first moment of an elevator descent. Like gravity had taken a step back.

This is technology. Has to be. No natural phenomenon does this.

Where did it come from?

Day four. He took the object on a dive.

Not a smart idea, probably. If it shorted out underwater, if it reacted badly to pressure, if it did anything unexpected — he’d be fifty feet down with no backup plan.

But he had to know. He had to know if the effect worked underwater.

He rigged a housing from PVC and epoxy, waterproof but not pressure-tested. Strapped it to his chest where the artifact had sat naturally when he found it. Connected a small lithium battery through a waterproof switch.

The descent was normal. The pressure equalized normally. The water was cold and green and exactly like every other dive he’d done.

He hit the switch.

The effect was immediate. The weight of his tank vanished. The heaviness of his BCD disappeared. He felt himself rising before he caught it with a controlled exhale.

But more than that: the pressure.

At thirty feet, he should feel the water pressing in on him. Subtle but present. The mask squeezed against his face. The wetsuit compressed against his skin.

Now he felt nothing. Like he was floating in air instead of water.

He descended further. Forty feet. Fifty. The depth where the pressure should be noticeable, where the cold should bite, where every breath should feel a little harder.

He felt none of it.

He swam to the old pontoon he’d stripped the day before. Found a fitting he’d left behind — too corroded, he’d thought, not worth the effort. A big brass cleat, probably thirty pounds dry.

He grabbed it with one hand. Pulled.

It came free from the silt like it weighed nothing.

He was laughing into his regulator before he caught himself. Laughing and crying at the same time, bubbles streaming upward, the impossible cleat floating beside him like a balloon.

Holy shit, he thought. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

He swam back to shore carrying the cleat in one hand like a coffee cup.

Day five. He called the scrap yard.

“Yeah, I got some brass. About thirty pounds. Clean, no paint.”

“Two-twenty a pound for clean brass,” the guy said. “Bring it by whenever.”

Sixty-six dollars for an afternoon’s work. More than he’d make in a full day of regular diving.

He hung up and looked at the object, back on its shelf in the garage, pulsing faintly with that soft internal light.

This changes everything.

He didn’t know what it was. Didn’t know where it came from. Didn’t know how it worked or why.

But he knew what it could do. What he could do with it.

The bank account was at $1,247.32. Property tax due in two weeks. Electric bill past due. Mom’s prescriptions waiting at the pharmacy.

He looked at the object. The object pulsed softly.

He picked up his phone and started making a list.

Chapter 4: Pressure

Week 2

The wreck was at ninety feet.

Ethan had known about it for years — an old steel-hulled fishing boat that had gone down in the seventies, sitting on a muddy shelf on the north side of the lake. He’d never bothered with it because ninety feet was deep, and deep meant short bottom time, and short bottom time meant you couldn’t get enough salvage to make the dive worthwhile.

At ninety feet, you had maybe twelve minutes before you started building up nitrogen in your blood. Push past that and you risked the bends — decompression sickness, bubbles in your joints and spine and brain. He’d seen the training videos, the photographs of divers bent double in agony, the warnings about paralysis and death.

He’d always respected those limits. Always.

But that was before.

He descended slowly, the artifact strapped to his chest in the waterproof housing he’d rigged from an old Pelican case. The morning light faded as he dropped, green becoming gray becoming something close to black. His dive computer beeped at sixty feet, reminding him of nitrogen loading. He ignored it.

At seventy feet, he hit the switch.

The field activated like a held breath releasing. The pressure that had been building against his wetsuit — subtle but present, the weight of seventy feet of water — vanished. His ears, which had needed constant equalizing, suddenly felt normal. The squeeze on his mask disappeared.

He checked his depth gauge. Seventy-three feet. The needle should be pushing into the orange zone. He should feel it — the weight, the compression, the knowledge that thousands of pounds of water were pressing against every square inch of his body.

He felt nothing.

He kept descending.

Eighty feet. The dive computer beeped again, more insistent. He’d crossed into the red zone now, the danger zone, the place where a single mistake could kill him.

Ninety feet. The wreck materialized out of the gloom, a dark mass of rusted steel and collapsed decking. Fish scattered as he approached, silver flashes in his dive light.

He landed on the deck — or what was left of it — and stood there for a moment, breathing.

This was wrong. This was impossible. At ninety feet, he should be planning his ascent. Calculating his no-decompression limit. Watching his air consumption spike as his body worked harder against the pressure.

Instead, he felt like he was standing in his backyard.

“Okay,” he murmured into his regulator. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

The boat had been a commercial fishing vessel, forty feet long, wooden cabin over a steel hull. The cabin had collapsed decades ago, but the hull was mostly intact, and hulls meant hardware.

He found the anchor first.

It was wedged under a section of collapsed decking, a massive old-style anchor with a ring and shank and flukes. The kind that weighed two hundred pounds dry and would take three divers and a lift bag to bring to the surface.

He grabbed the ring with one hand.

The anchor came free like it was made of cardboard. He lifted it, turned it, examined it in his dive light. Cast iron, probably. Some surface rust but solid underneath. The flukes were still sharp, the shank unbent.

A hundred dollars at the scrap yard, easy. Maybe more to a collector.

He tucked it under his arm and kept exploring.

The engine compartment was next. The diesel had been stripped decades ago — someone had salvaged the boat before it sank, taken the valuable parts, left the rest to rot. But they’d missed things. A bronze seacock, still attached to the hull. Copper wiring in the remains of the electrical panel. Brass fittings scattered like coins on a casino floor.

He filled his mesh bag. Filled it again. Made a pile on the deck for the third load.

At ninety feet, with standard dive profiles, he should have been heading up after ten minutes. He’d been down for forty-five.

And he wasn’t tired. Wasn’t stressed. Wasn’t even particularly cold, despite the water temperature hovering around fifty degrees.

The field was doing something to him, something beyond just blocking pressure. It was making everything easier.

Two hours later, he surfaced.

He shouldn’t have been able to stay down that long. At ninety feet, his air consumption should have been nearly double what it was at the surface. He’d brought two tanks, expecting to use both.

He’d barely touched the second.

The field didn’t just block pressure — it seemed to reduce his body’s demand for air. Like it was making everything more efficient. Like his cells were working smarter, not harder. Like the laws of physics had decided to take the day off just for him.

He swam to shore with the anchor under one arm, a bag of brass fittings in the other, and a running tally in his head.

Anchor: $100-150, depending on condition. Bronze seacock: $80-100, if he could find a buyer. Brass fittings (cleats, hinges, porthole frames): maybe forty pounds total. At $1.80/lb average: $72. Copper wiring: fifteen pounds, stripped and cleaned. At $2.50/lb: $37.50.

Plus the stuff he’d left behind for next time — more brass, some copper pipe, what looked like a bronze propeller buried in the silt.

He’d made more in two hours than he usually made in a week.

The scrap yard was a twenty-minute drive on the other side of town.

Eddie, the owner, was a big man with forearms like ham hocks and a surprisingly gentle handshake. He’d been buying Ethan’s salvage for two years, no questions asked about where it came from or how a teenager was pulling it out of the lake.

The yard was a maze of sorted metals — copper in one pile, aluminum in another, steel stacked in rusting mountains against the back fence. Eddie kept the valuable stuff in a shed with a combination lock, the kind of materials that might walk off if left unattended.

“Anchor’s nice,” Eddie said, turning it over in his hands. “Good condition. I’ll give you one-twenty.”

“One-fifty.”

“One-thirty-five.”

“Deal.”

Eddie weighed the brass, did the math, counted out bills. The seacock got appraised separately — “that’s marine bronze, not regular brass, worth more” — and added to the pile.

Three hundred and seven dollars, cash.

Ethan drove home with the money in his pocket, thinking about the wreck, about the field, about everything that had just changed. Three hundred dollars wouldn’t save his mother. Wouldn’t pay for the treatment she needed. But it was a start.

For the first time in months, it felt like more than survival. It felt like progress.

Mom was in the living room when he got back, reading in her wheelchair. She looked up when he came in.

“Good day?”

“Yeah.” He sat down across from her, suddenly exhausted. “Really good day.”

“You look tired.”

“Deep dive. Takes it out of you.”

She studied him for a moment. That look again — the one that saw too much. The look that said she knew something was different, even if she didn’t know what.

“The bank account’s been looking better,” she said.

He went still. “What?”

“I check it sometimes. When you’re out. I know I shouldn’t, but…” She shrugged, a small motion that cost her effort. “I like to know where we stand.”

“We’re fine. We’re doing fine.”

“We’re doing better than fine. Three weeks ago we were about to miss the electric bill. Now we’re two months ahead.”

He’d been trying to keep the changes gradual. Apparently not gradual enough.

“I found some good stuff. Antiques. They pay better than scrap.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie. Just not exactly the truth.

She nodded slowly. “Whatever you’re doing, be careful.”

“I’m always careful.”

“I mean it, Ethan. I don’t know what’s changed, but something has. You come home different now. Lighter. Like you’re carrying something that excites you instead of weighing you down.”

He didn’t know what to say to that.

“Just be careful,” she said again. “That’s all I ask.”

“I will.”

He went to his room. Lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about ninety feet of water that felt like nothing. About a two-hundred-pound anchor that lifted like a pillow. About the future opening up in front of him like a door he’d never known existed.

Tomorrow he’d go back. Hit the propeller. Start working the deeper wrecks that no one else could reach.

Today, he’d made three hundred and seven dollars.

Tomorrow, he’d make more.

Chapter 5: Breathing Room

Week 3

The antique dealer’s name was Margaret.

She ran a shop in the old part of town, the three blocks of restored brick buildings that tourists visited on their way to somewhere more interesting. The shop was called “Treasures & Time,” which Ethan thought was a bit much, but Margaret paid fair prices and didn’t ask too many questions.

“Ship’s telegraph,” Margaret said, turning the brass device in her hands. “Early twentieth century, I’d say. Maybe 1910, 1920. Good condition.”

“I pulled it off a wreck yesterday.” True. “Been sitting on a shelf down there for probably sixty years.” Also true.

“It’s functional?”

“The handle moves. The bell rings. I cleaned it up as best I could without damaging the patina.”

Margaret set the telegraph on her counter, ran her fingers over the engraved letters — FULL AHEAD, HALF AHEAD, SLOW, STOP. The brass gleamed softly under the shop lights.

“Eleven hundred,” she said.

Ethan kept his face neutral. He’d hoped for eight hundred. “Thirteen.”

“Twelve. Final offer.”

“Deal.”

She counted out the cash. He pocketed it, shook her hand, and walked out into the afternoon sun.

Twelve hundred dollars. One dive.

The portholes came from a different wreck — a tugboat that had gone down in the forties, too deep for recreational divers, easily accessible with the field. Eight portholes, brass frames with glass still intact. He’d wrapped each one carefully, carried them to the surface in three trips.

A different dealer, down in the city. A guy named Frank who specialized in maritime antiques and had a warehouse full of ship parts waiting for the right buyer.

“Eight twenty-five for the lot,” Frank said.

“These are original glass. Look at the waves in it.”

“Eight fifty.”

“Done.”

By the end of week three, the bank account looked different.

Not rich. Not even close. But the desperate arithmetic of the past six months — robbing Peter to pay Paul, juggling due dates, hoping nothing unexpected broke — had loosened. There was breathing room now. Space between the bills and the balance.

He prepaid Mom’s prescriptions. Two months ahead instead of scraping to cover each refill. Mrs. Chen at the pharmacy had looked surprised, then pleased.

“That’s responsible,” she’d said. “Most people don’t plan ahead like that.”

Most people don’t have alien technology that lets them strip shipwrecks like grocery shopping, he didn’t say.

“Just trying to stay on top of things,” he said instead.

The artifact was changing.

Not physically — it looked the same, that dark smooth shape that didn’t quite sit right on any surface. But its responses were evolving. The hums through the headphones had more texture now, more variation. Like a language developing in real time.

“You’re learning,” Ethan said one night in the workshop. “I can hear it. The way you respond — it’s different than it was last week.”

The hum shifted. Higher pitched, almost questioning.

“When I talk to you, you make sounds back. At first it was just noise, but now…” He paused, searching for words. “Now it feels like you’re trying to say something.”

Another shift. A pattern emerging — short, long, short, long. Like Morse code, but more organic.

“Can you understand me?”

Long hum. Definite. Affirmative.

“How much? Like, percentages?”

The hum wavered. Uncertain.

“Okay, that’s fair. You probably don’t think in percentages.” He leaned back on his stool. “What about this — if you understand what I’m saying, give me two short hums.”

Pause.

Hum hum.

Ethan felt something loosen in his chest. Not quite joy, not quite relief. Something bigger.

“Can you understand concepts? Not just words, but… ideas?”

Hum hum.

“Can you understand that I’m trying to help you?”

Hum hum. Stronger this time. Almost eager.

“Can you understand that I don’t know what you are, or where you came from, but I’m not going to hurt you?”

A long pause. Then: hum hum. Softer. Almost grateful.

Ethan nodded. “Okay. Good. We’re on the same page then.”

He picked up a piece of copper wire — offerings, now, not just scraps — and set it on the workbench near the artifact.

“Eat up. You need to get stronger.”

The copper disappeared slowly, molecules at a time, into the dark surface of the artifact.

In the headphones, a sound that might have been contentment.

Mom noticed the change.

Not the artifact — he was still keeping that secret, still slipping out to the garage while she slept — but the general atmosphere of the house. The way he didn’t check his phone every five minutes. The way he actually ate dinner instead of picking at it.

“You seem better,” she said over Thursday’s meal.

“Better how?”

“Less worried. Less… tight.” She set down her fork. “For the past year, you’ve been carrying something heavy. I could see it in your shoulders, the way you held yourself. Like you were bracing for a blow.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“It’s lighter now. Whatever it was. You’re not bracing anymore.”

“Things are going better,” he admitted. “The salvage. I’ve found some good stuff.”

“Must be very good stuff.”

“It is.”

She studied him for a moment. That look again — the one that saw too much, understood too much.

“Whatever you’re doing,” she said slowly, “whatever’s changed — I’m glad. You deserve to feel light. You’ve been carrying too much for too long.”

“Mom—”

“I know I’m part of that. The reason you carry so much. I know you’ve been taking care of me, and I know what that costs.” Her voice was steady, but her eyes were wet. “I just want you to know that I see it. And I’m grateful. And I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

“I’m sorry anyway. For all of it.” She reached across the table, took his hand. “But right now, in this moment, you look happy. So whatever’s causing that — don’t stop.”

He squeezed her hand. “I won’t.”

They finished dinner in comfortable silence.

Later, in the garage, he told the artifact about the conversation. About his mother, her illness, her gratitude. About the weight he’d been carrying and the weight that had lifted.

The artifact hummed. Understanding, maybe. Or just presence.

It was enough.

Chapter 6: Deep Water

Week 4

The chronometer was at a hundred and forty feet.

Ethan had heard about the wreck for years — a yacht that had gone down in the nineties, supposedly carrying a collection of antique navigation instruments. Nobody had ever confirmed it. A hundred and forty feet was deep, even for experienced technical divers. The bottom time was minimal, the decompression requirements brutal.

But Ethan didn’t have decompression requirements anymore.

He descended through the thermocline, the water shifting from cool to cold to frigid. At sixty feet, he hit the switch. The field activated, and the cold became irrelevant. The pressure became irrelevant. Everything became irrelevant except the dark and the descent.

A hundred feet. The wreck materialized below him, a pale shape against the darker silt. Larger than he’d expected — maybe sixty feet long, the hull cracked open along one side where it had struck something on the way down.

A hundred twenty feet. He could see interior details now. Cabinets. Furniture. The ghostly remains of what had been someone’s floating home.

A hundred forty feet. He touched down on the deck, his fins stirring clouds of fine sediment. The yacht listed to port, everything tilted at a fifteen-degree angle. Fish scattered at his approach.

He had three hours before his air ran low. Longer, maybe. Down here, with the field making everything easier, he could work until the tanks were almost empty.

Time to get to work.

The chronometer was in the captain’s cabin.

He found it in a drawer, wrapped in what had once been cloth but was now just fibers. A brass case, green with verdigris but intact. He opened it carefully, shining his dive light on the mechanism inside.

Still there. Still complete. The face was clouded, the crystal cracked, but the works were visible — gears and springs and precision engineering from another century.

Marine chronometers like this went for thousands. This one, if it was genuine, if it was in as good condition as it appeared…

He wrapped it carefully. Set it in his bag.

Then he kept searching.

Three hours later, he surfaced with a haul that made his head spin.

The chronometer. A sextant in its original case. A set of parallel rules with ivory handles. A brass binnacle compass that weighed thirty pounds and gleamed like gold under the silt.

He drove straight to Frank’s warehouse.

“Jesus,” Frank said, looking at the spread on his workbench. “Where did you find this?”

“Family estate,” Ethan lied. “Grandpa was a collector.”

“Your grandpa had good taste.” Frank picked up the chronometer, examined it under a magnifying glass. “This is English. Victorian era. Hamilton, maybe, or one of the smaller London makers. Working condition?”

“Don’t know. I didn’t wind it.”

“Smart.” Frank set it down, moved to the sextant. “These are original mirrors. Original lenses. This isn’t a reproduction.”

“I know what I have.”

Frank looked at him. A long, measuring look.

“How old are you, kid?”

“Old enough to have good stuff and know what it’s worth.”

Frank laughed. “Fair enough.” He pulled out a calculator, started punching numbers. “Chronometer, assuming it runs: twenty-two hundred. Sextant: eight hundred. Parallel rules: three-fifty. Binnacle: nine hundred.”

“That’s four thousand two hundred fifty.”

“Minus my commission.”

“Which is?”

“Fifteen percent.”

Ethan did the math. “Three thousand six hundred twelve. Call it thirty-seven hundred.”

Frank smiled. “You’re quick.”

“I’ve had practice.”

He stopped at the hardware store on the way home.

The dive compressor took up most of the truck bed. Used, from a fire department that was upgrading their equipment. Eighteen hundred dollars, almost exactly half of what he’d made today.

The guy helping him load it looked skeptical. “You sure about this? It’s a lot of machine for a recreational diver.”

“I do a lot of diving.”

“Even so. The maintenance alone—”

“I’ll figure it out.”

He drove home with the compressor bouncing in the bed, calculating. The compressor would pay for itself in a few months, maybe less. No more driving across town for fills. No more paying eight dollars a tank. He could fill his own tanks, on his own schedule, whenever he wanted.

Independence. That’s what the money was really buying. The ability to operate without depending on anyone else.

That night, he set up auto-pay for the bills.

Property tax: paid. Electric: paid. Gas: paid. Internet: paid. Insurance: paid.

He added Mom’s prescriptions to the pharmacy’s automatic system. Three months ahead now, not just two. The pharmacist had looked at him strangely when he’d handed over the cash.

“That’s almost eighteen hundred dollars.”

“I know.”

“In advance.”

“I know.”

She’d shrugged, taken the money, updated the account. Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t her business.

Back home, Ethan sat at the kitchen table and looked at the bank balance.

Four thousand eight hundred seventy dollars.

A month ago, he’d had twelve hundred and change. A month ago, he’d been counting weeks until they went under.

Now he had breathing room. Real breathing room. Enough that if something broke — the truck, the water heater, something in the house — he could handle it without panic.

It wasn’t wealth. It wasn’t security. But it was something.

He went to the garage.

The artifact sat in its cradle, pulsing softly. He put on the headphones, and the familiar hum filled his ears.

“We did it,” he said. “Four thousand dollars in one dive. And I bought a compressor, so I don’t have to depend on anyone else for air. And the bills are paid three months out.”

The hum shifted. Interested.

“I know you don’t understand money. It’s a human thing. But it matters to us. It’s how we survive. How we take care of each other.”

Another shift. Something almost like a question.

“My mom,” he said. “That’s who I’m taking care of. She’s sick. Getting worse. There’s a treatment — really expensive, way more than I can afford right now — but if I keep diving, keep finding stuff like today…”

He trailed off.

The artifact hummed. Not a question this time. Something warmer. Supportive.

“Yeah,” Ethan said. “That’s the goal. Get enough money to fix her. Whatever it takes.”

He looked at the artifact. The artifact pulsed.

“What about you?” he asked. “What do you need? What’s your goal?”

A long pause. The hum went quiet.

Then, slowly, a new sound. Not a hum. Not a word. Something in between — a sound that carried feeling more than meaning.

Loneliness. Longing. A vast, empty ache that stretched across time.

Ethan felt it hit him like a wave. He grabbed the edge of the workbench, steadied himself.

“You’re alone,” he said quietly. “That’s what you’re telling me. You’ve been alone for a long time.”

The sound faded. Replaced by the familiar hum.

But the meaning lingered.

“Well,” Ethan said, “you’re not alone anymore. I found you. And I’m not going anywhere.”

The artifact pulsed. Once, twice. Something that might have been gratitude.

Ethan smiled.

“Let’s get some rest. Tomorrow we go deeper.”

Chapter 7: The Edge

Week 5

The bank account crossed eleven thousand dollars on a Tuesday.

Ethan sat at the kitchen table, staring at the number on his phone, not quite believing it was real. Eleven thousand two hundred forty-three dollars and seventeen cents. More money than he’d ever had. More money than he’d imagined having.

Three weeks ago, he’d been counting days until the electric got shut off. Three weeks ago, he’d been eating peanut butter sandwiches because groceries were a luxury and his mother needed her medication more than he needed protein. Three weeks ago, the future had been a closing door, getting narrower every day.

Now the door was opening. He could see light on the other side.

“Good news?” Mom asked from across the table.

He set the phone down, careful to angle the screen away from her. “Yeah. Good news.”

“Salvage?”

“Salvage.”

She nodded, accepting this. She’d stopped asking for details weeks ago. He told her enough to explain the money — antiques, deep wrecks, valuable finds — and she accepted it because she wanted to, because the alternative was uncomfortable questions neither of them wanted to ask.

“The lake’s been good to us,” she said.

“Yeah.” He picked up his coffee, the warmth of it grounding him in the moment. “It has.”

That afternoon, he tested the field in the garage.

Not underwater — he’d done that dozens of times. This was different. He wanted to understand what else it could do.

The artifact sat on the workbench, humming softly. Over the past weeks, its communication had grown more complex — not words, not yet, but patterns of tone that felt almost like language. When he did something right, the hum shifted one way. When he made a mistake, it shifted another. Call and response. Question and answer. A conversation without vocabulary.

He held a glass jar full of water, sealed tight. Activated the field.

The jar floated. Expected.

He took a deep breath, held it, and put his head inside the field’s range.

The pressure in his ears disappeared. The subtle weight of atmosphere against his skin — so constant he’d stopped noticing it — was suddenly gone. He felt like he was underwater without the water. Suspended. Weightless.

He held his breath for thirty seconds. A minute. Ninety seconds.

The field hummed. Something almost like encouragement.

Two minutes. His lungs started to burn, but less than they should have. The CO2 buildup felt muted, like the field was dampening the signal.

Two and a half minutes. He broke, gasping, stepping back from the workbench.

The artifact’s hum shifted. Questioning. Why did you stop?

“Had to breathe,” he said, panting. “But that was… that was longer than I should have lasted.”

The hum rippled. Something like confirmation.

He sat on his stool, thinking. The field held pressure at depth — he’d proven that in the lake. It seemed to hold pressure in air too. And it extended his breath-hold. Which meant…

He looked at the artifact. The artifact hummed.

“How high could we go?” he asked.

No response. The hum continued, steady and patient, waiting for him to figure it out himself.

The next few days were experiments.

He tested the field against heat — holding his hand near a flame while the artifact sat on the bench. The warmth didn’t reach him. The field blocked thermal transfer the same way it blocked pressure.

He tested it against cold — ice water, the freezer, a bag of dry ice from the welding supply store. Same result. The field maintained whatever temperature existed inside it, regardless of what was happening outside.

He tested it against vacuum — rigging a bell jar to his shop vac, creating a crude low-pressure environment. The field held. The air inside stayed where it was.

Each test, he wrote down in his notebook. Each result, he shared with the artifact, talking through his reasoning while it hummed responses he was learning to interpret.

Yes. Correct. Try again. Interesting.

It wasn’t language. But it was getting closer.

On Friday, he went to the library.

Not for books — for internet he didn’t have to pay for. He sat at a terminal in the back corner, away from the librarian’s desk, and searched for things he’d never thought he’d need to know.

Altitude records. Human survival at altitude. Pressure suits. Space exposure.

The results were grim. Humans weren’t built for heights. Above 26,000 feet — the “death zone” on Everest — the body started shutting down. Above 60,000 feet, blood would boil without a pressure suit. Above the Kármán line — 62 miles up, the official edge of space — there was nothing but vacuum and radiation and cold.

But the field blocked pressure. Blocked temperature. Blocked radiation, probably, though he hadn’t tested that yet.

How high could he go?

He thought about it all the way home. Thought about it while he made dinner for his mom, while he transferred her to bed, while he sat in the garage with the artifact humming against his chest.

“I think we could go up,” he said quietly. “Really up. Higher than anyone’s ever gone without a spacecraft.”

The hum shifted. Not disagreement. Not agreement either. Something more complex. Caution. Interest. Hope.

“Not yet,” he said. “Not until we understand it better. But someday…”

He looked out the garage window at the stars, bright and steady in the clear night sky.

Someday soon.

The weekend brought more dives.

He pushed deeper than ever, reaching wrecks that had been untouchable before. A pre-war tug at 180 feet, its brass fittings worth thousands. A sport fisher at 220 feet, the depth gauge on the console still working, a collector’s item that Frank said could fetch five hundred alone.

Each dive, the field responded faster. Each dive, the artifact seemed more aware of his intentions, anticipating his needs before he consciously formed them. The partnership was growing. Deepening.

And each dive, when he surfaced and felt the air on his face, he thought about going up instead of down.

The field held pressure. Held temperature. Extended his air.

All the pieces were there. He just needed to put them together.

Sunday night, he sat in the garage with his notebook and his thoughts.

The artifact hummed in its cradle. The numbers in his notebook added up to something that seemed impossible: a human being, wrapped in an alien field, surviving at altitudes that should kill him.

He’d need propulsion. Couldn’t just float up and expect to come down safely. Some kind of thrust system, something that worked in thin air or no air at all.

He’d need communication. A way to track where he was, to navigate, to call for help if something went wrong.

He’d need courage. The kind of courage that didn’t come from ignorance, but from understanding exactly how dangerous something was and doing it anyway.

He looked at the artifact. The artifact hummed.

“Next week,” he said. “We keep testing. We figure out propulsion. We build toward… whatever this is.”

The hum deepened. Agreement. Anticipation.

Outside, the stars wheeled overhead, indifferent to the boy in the garage planning to join them.

Chapter 8: The Flight

Week 6, Day 36

The shelf ran along the eastern edge of the lake at about sixty feet, a limestone ledge that dropped off into nothing. Ethan had worked it a dozen times. Old fishing boats, mostly. A pontoon that went down in the eighties. Once, a safe that turned out to be empty except for water and rust.

Today he was pushing. Three weeks of good hauls had made him comfortable, maybe too comfortable, and he was moving fast along the shelf edge with the DPV at three-quarters throttle. The Humminbird showed structure ahead — something metallic, decent size, probably another boat. The magnetometer on his wrist was pulsing steadily.

He checked his air. Twenty-two hundred psi. Plenty.

The artifact sat in its 3D-printed mount against his chest, humming faintly through the bone conduction headphones. It had been doing that more lately — not words, not yet, but sounds that felt like acknowledgment. Like it was paying attention.

The structure on the sonar resolved into something promising. Aluminum hull, maybe eighteen feet, sitting upright on the shelf. Recent enough to have hardware worth pulling. He adjusted his angle, dropping a few feet to come in low, and that’s when the bottom disappeared.

Not gradually. Not a slope. The shelf just ended, a vertical face dropping into black water that his sonar couldn’t find the bottom of. He’d known the drop-off was there — everyone knew — but he’d misjudged his position by a hundred yards, and now he was aimed at open water with the DPV still pushing hard.

He started to correct, to angle back toward the shelf, but his trajectory was wrong. Too steep, too fast. The DPV was pulling him up and out, and instead of fighting it he made a mistake — he gave it more throttle, trying to power through the turn.

The surface came at him like a wall.

He broke through at an angle that should have been impossible, forty-five degrees at least, water exploding around him and then gone, just gone, and he was still accelerating because there was nothing to push against anymore, nothing to slow him down, the DPV screaming in air that couldn’t grab its propeller—

He killed the throttle.

The motor died. The silence was absolute.

And he kept going.

That was the thing his brain couldn’t process. He’d stopped accelerating but he wasn’t slowing down. The physics of it made no sense until he remembered — the field. Near-zero inertia. An object in motion stays in motion, and without resistance, without drag, without anything to push back—

He was rising. Still rising. The lake falling away beneath him like a dream of falling in reverse.

Panic hit first. Pure animal terror, every instinct screaming that he was about to die, that humans didn’t do this, that the next few seconds would be the last few seconds and the water was already so far below—

Then the field pulsed through the headphones. A low tone, steady and calm. The artifact against his chest, warm even through the wetsuit.

I have you.

It didn’t say that. It couldn’t say anything yet, not in words. But the tone said it, the warmth said it, and Ethan felt his panic drain away like water from a sieve.

He wasn’t falling. He wasn’t tumbling. The field held him stable, oriented, rising on a perfect ballistic arc with the lake spreading out beneath him like a map.

He could see the whole thing. The eastern shore where he’d launched, the truck a tiny rectangle of rust-red in the parking area. The western shore three miles away, houses like game pieces, the water tower in town catching the afternoon sun. The tree line circled everything, dark green going gray-blue in the distance, and beyond that the hills rolled away toward a horizon that seemed impossibly far.

Everything that had been his world — the lake, the town, the roads he drove, the house where his mother sat waiting — looked small.

The arc peaked.

He was high enough now that the air felt thin, though he knew that was imagination. Maybe a hundred feet. Maybe more. The DPV hung dead in his grip, useless, a twenty-pound anchor he couldn’t put down.

The wind should have been screaming past him. It wasn’t. The field wrapped him in silence, in stillness, and the only sound was his own breathing and the hum through the headphones.

This is impossible, he thought. And then: This is happening.

He started to fall.

Not fast — the field didn’t let him feel acceleration — but the lake was getting closer, the details resolving, the shore expanding from a line to a place. Twenty seconds, maybe thirty, and he’d hit the water hard enough to matter.

Something in him didn’t want to go back.

It wasn’t a thought, not exactly. More like a pull. The sky was up there and he’d been in it, he’d been in it, and the idea of returning to the world where his truck was parked and his mother needed lifting and the bank account ticked down day by day—

He raised the DPV.

Stupid. The motor was air-cooled but it wasn’t designed for this, and the propeller couldn’t grab thin air the way it grabbed water. But near-zero inertia meant near-zero resistance, and near-zero resistance meant—

He squeezed the throttle.

The motor screamed, high and thin without water to dampen it. The prop spun uselessly, or almost uselessly, catching just enough air to push against, and he felt himself shift — not much, a few degrees — his arc flattening—

He pointed the DPV down and gave it everything.

The lake stopped getting closer.

For a long moment he hung there, balanced between falling and not-falling, the motor howling and the prop doing something, doing enough, and then he was moving forward, level, the shore sliding past beneath him as he carved a line across the sky.

He was flying.

Not falling with style. Not gliding. Flying under power, fifty feet above the lake, the DPV held out in front of him like the world’s stupidest jetpack.

The laughter came out of nowhere. He clamped his mouth shut, swallowed it, but his chest was shaking and his eyes were burning and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt anything like this. Light. He felt light.

The western shore was coming up fast. He banked — just leaned, really, and the field read his intent and adjusted — and curved back toward the east, toward his truck, toward home.

But not yet. Not yet.

He climbed. Not much, maybe twenty feet, and the motor strained and the battery gauge was dropping faster than it should, but he climbed because he could, because no one had ever done this, because the sky was right there and it had been waiting his whole life.

The artifact hummed. Not the steady tone from before — something different. Richer. Almost musical. Through the headphones it sounded like…

Like contentment. Like satisfaction.

Like it was enjoying this.

You too? he thought, and the hum shifted slightly, and he could have sworn it was an answer.

The motor coughed.

Battery. He’d been running it hard in conditions it was never designed for, and the lithium cells were giving up. He had maybe thirty seconds before it died completely, and then he’d be a hundred feet up with no propulsion and—

The field. The field would catch him. He knew that now, knew it in his bones. He could fall from here and land soft, land safe, because the artifact wouldn’t let him break.

But he didn’t want to fall. Not yet. Not with thirty seconds still left.

He pointed himself at the eastern shore and opened the throttle all the way.

The motor screamed. The prop bit what little air it could. He accelerated — slowly, but he accelerated — shooting across the lake like a stone from a sling, the water flashing beneath him, the shore coming up fast.

Twenty seconds.

The tree line ahead, dark and getting darker as the sun dropped toward the hills. The parking area with his truck, the only car there, the only person stupid enough to be out this late.

Ten seconds.

The motor was dying, sputtering, the prop catching and missing and catching again. He was descending now whether he wanted to or not, the lake rising to meet him, but he was almost there, almost home—

Five seconds.

The motor quit.

He was sixty feet up, still moving forward, the shore maybe two hundred yards ahead. The field held him stable as his momentum bled away — slowly, so slowly, without air resistance to steal it — and he drifted toward the water in a long, gentle curve.

He hit at maybe ten miles an hour.

The field popped like a soap bubble — not gone, just reconfigured — and the lake swallowed him in a shock of cold that made him gasp. Water in his regulator. He bit down, cleared it, sucked air.

He was underwater. He was fine. He was laughing into his regulator, bubbles streaming up toward the surface, his whole body shaking with something he couldn’t name.

He surfaced.

The sky was orange and pink, the sun touching the hills, and the lake was flat and still and empty. No one had seen. No one would ever know. He’d been flying two minutes ago and now he was floating in the water like any other diver, and the distance between those two things was everything.

He swam for shore, towing the dead DPV. His arms felt loose, his chest felt open. The artifact hummed against him, quieter now, settling.

Thank you, he thought at it. Or maybe he said it out loud. He couldn’t tell anymore.

The shore was rocks and mud and a concrete boat ramp cracked down the middle. He hauled himself out, dripping, the DPV heavy again in real gravity. The truck was a hundred yards up the slope, right where he’d left it.

He stood there for a while. Not moving. Not thinking. Just standing on the shore of the lake where he’d been diving for two years, looking up at the sky where he’d just been.

The first star came out.

The drive home was automatic. Route 9 to Miller Road to the long gravel stretch that led to the house. His hands knew the way. His mind was somewhere else.

The house was dark except for the kitchen. Mom was in her chair at the table, a book open in front of her, the lamp making a yellow circle that didn’t reach the corners of the room.

“Hey,” she said when he came in. “Late one today.”

“Yeah.” He dropped his dive bag by the door. “Good conditions. Didn’t want to waste it.”

She looked at him. That look she had, the one that saw everything, that knew when he was lying about whether he’d eaten breakfast or how much the prescriptions actually cost.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” He crossed to the sink, filled a glass of water, drank it. His throat was dry. Had been dry the whole drive. “Just tired.”

“You look…” She tilted her head. “I don’t know. You look different.”

He didn’t have an answer for that. He set the glass down, crossed to her chair, leaned in and kissed the top of her head.

“I’m gonna shower. You need anything?”

“I’m fine.” She was still looking at him. “You sure you’re okay?”

I flew today, he didn’t say. I was in the sky and I didn’t want to come down.

“Long day,” he said. “That’s all.”

He went to shower. Stood under the hot water until the tank ran cold. Dressed in sweats and a t-shirt and went to his workshop in the garage.

The artifact sat on the workbench where he’d left its charging cradle. He picked it up, felt the warmth of it, the slight buzz against his palms.

The hum came through the bone conduction headphones, still hanging around his neck.

He put them on.

The sound was clearer now. Not just a tone — something trying to be more than a tone. Like a word caught in someone’s throat.

“I know,” he said. “I know. It was…”

He didn’t have a word for it either.

They sat there together in the garage, the boy and the artifact, while the night came down around them. He didn’t check his phone. He didn’t log onto the bank account to see the balance. He didn’t think about the prescriptions or the property tax or the treatment that cost more than he could imagine.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, he didn’t think about any of it.

He thought about the sky.

Later — he wasn’t sure how much later — he went inside. Mom was still in the kitchen, hadn’t moved, the book closed now in her lap.

“I’m heading to bed,” he said.

She nodded. “Ethan?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever it is,” she said slowly, “whatever happened today — you don’t have to tell me. I’m not asking. But I want you to know…” She paused, searching for words. “You seemed heavy for a long time. Since before your father left. Carrying something. And right now you seem… less heavy.”

He stood in the doorway.

“I don’t need to know what changed,” she said. “I’m just glad something did.”

He crossed the room. Knelt by her chair. Took her hands — thin now, trembling always, but still her hands.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.” She squeezed his fingers. “Now go to bed. You look exhausted.”

He went.

He dreamed about flying.

Chapter 9: Ethan

Week 6, Day 36 (Evening)

He drove home in a daze.

The sun was setting, orange and pink behind the trees, and he couldn’t remember any of the turns he’d taken. The truck knew the way. His hands knew the wheel. His mind was somewhere else entirely.

Fifty feet above the lake. A hundred feet. The whole world small and quiet beneath him.

He parked in the driveway and sat there for a minute, engine off, hands still on the wheel. His wetsuit was damp in the seat behind him. The artifact was in its case, humming softly, the way it always hummed after a good dive.

Good dive. That wasn’t the word for what had happened today.

He got out. Grabbed his gear. Went inside.

Mom was in the kitchen, wheelchair pulled up to the table. The chicken he’d put in the slow cooker that morning filled the room with warmth. She looked up when he came in, the same look she always had — checking him over for injuries, reading his face for trouble.

“Good dive?” she asked.

“Yeah.” The word came out automatically. “Yeah, good dive.”

She tilted her head. That look again. The one that saw too much.

“You look different.”

“Just tired.”

“No, not tired. Different. Lighter.”

He shrugged. Dropped his dive bag by the door. “Long day on the water. Gets to you.”

She didn’t push. She never pushed, not anymore. The space between what they said and what they knew had grown wider over the past two years, and they’d both learned to navigate it by feel.

“Dinner in twenty minutes,” she said.

“I’m gonna shower first.”

“Take your time.”

He went to the bathroom. Stood under the hot water until it ran cold. Let the steam fill his lungs and tried to stop shaking.

He’d been flying. Actually flying. Not falling with style, not gliding, not any of the technical terms he could use to explain it away. He’d pointed the DPV at the sky and the sky had taken him.

Two minutes. Maybe less. But those two minutes had changed something. Shifted something inside him that he didn’t have words for.

The water turned cold. He got out. Dressed in sweats and a t-shirt. Went to his workshop.

The garage was dark. He flipped on the lights, the fluorescent tubes flickering to life with their usual complaint.

The artifact sat on its shelf, in the 3D-printed cradle he’d made for it. Pulsing softly. Waiting.

He picked it up. Felt its weight — or its lack of weight, the strange lightness that he’d gotten used to over the past weeks. Held it in both hands, feeling the warmth.

“I flew today,” he said quietly. “I was in the air. The actual air. Fifty feet up, maybe more.”

The artifact pulsed. That slow rhythm he’d come to recognize as attention, as acknowledgment.

“You liked it up there. I could feel it. The way you hummed. The way the field felt different. You wanted to stay.”

Another pulse. Stronger this time.

“I wanted to stay too.”

He set the artifact down in its cradle. Sat on his stool. The bone conduction headphones were around his neck — he wore them most of the time now, habit, convenience, the way the artifact’s sounds came clearer through them.

He pulled them up over his ears.

The hum was there, as always. That background frequency that had become as familiar as his own heartbeat. But tonight it was different. More textured. Like static trying to resolve into a signal.

He listened.

Seconds passed. A minute. Two.

The hum shifted. Modulated. Formed something that wasn’t quite a tone and wasn’t quite a word and wasn’t quite anything he’d ever heard before.

And then, clear as anything, clear as his own name spoken by his own mother:

“Ethan.”

He froze.

The headphones were silent now. Just the ambient hum, the background noise, the nothing he’d been hearing for weeks.

Had he imagined it? Had his tired brain constructed meaning from meaningless sound?

“…did you just say my name?”

Silence.

Then, again: “Ethan.”

Flat. Wrong cadence. Like a recording played at the wrong speed, or a child sounding out a word they’d never spoken before. But unmistakably his name. Unmistakably language.

He stared at the artifact. The artifact pulsed.

“You can talk.”

No response. Just the hum.

“You’ve been listening to me. Learning. This whole time. And you just—”

“Ethan.”

Third time. Clearer now. The cadence still off, but closer. Like someone practicing.

His throat was tight. His eyes were burning. He didn’t know why — it was just a word, just his name, just a sound shaped into meaning — but something about it broke him open.

The artifact had been inside his head for weeks. Reading his intentions, responding to his needs, shaping its field to match his thoughts. He’d treated it like a tool, like a device, like something he was using.

It had been learning him. Learning from him. And now it was trying to talk back.

“How long?” he asked. “How long have you been trying to do that?”

Silence. Then a sound that wasn’t a word — that same modulated hum, patterned and purposeful, but not yet language. Frustration, maybe. Effort.

“It’s okay.” His voice was shaking. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

The hum continued. Rose and fell, twisted and shaped itself, like someone learning to whistle for the first time.

Then: “Long.”

The word was barely recognizable. More breath than voice. But it was there.

“Long,” Ethan repeated. “You’ve been trying for a long time.”

Silence.

He sat in his workshop, in the dim light of the fluorescent tubes, with tears running down his face and an alien artifact learning to speak his name.

“Ethan,” the artifact said again. Getting better. Getting closer. “Ethan. Ethan.”

“That’s me,” he whispered. “That’s who I am.”

A pause. Then something that might have been a laugh, or might have been static, or might have been the most important sound in human history.

“Know,” the artifact said. “I know.”

He sat with it for hours.

The artifact couldn’t hold a conversation. Not yet. It could produce single words, simple phrases, with long gaps between them where the hum filled the silence. But it was trying. Every attempt was clearer than the last.

“Ethan.” “Here.” “Yes.” “More.”

He fed it prompts. Spoke slowly, clearly, the way you’d speak to a child learning language. And maybe that’s what this was — a mind waking up, a voice finding itself, a being taking its first steps into communication.

“Can you understand me?” he asked.

Pause. “Yes.” Pause. “Some.”

“How much is some?”

A longer pause. The hum modulated, frustrated.

“Hard. Words. Hard.”

“But you understand meaning? Intent?”

“Ethan.” The name, again. Like a touchstone. Like the most important word it knew. “Know Ethan. Feel Ethan. Understand… coming.”

“You’re learning.”

“Learning.” The word came out with something like wonder. “Yes. Learning.”

He leaned back on his stool. The night had gotten late. The garage was cold. His legs were stiff from sitting, and his throat was raw from talking.

But he didn’t want to leave.

“Where did you come from?” he asked.

Silence. A long silence.

Then, softly: “Far.”

“How far?”

“Don’t… know. Remember… hard. Broken.”

“You’re damaged.”

“Yes.”

“From something that happened to you?”

Silence.

“Before I found you. Something hurt you.”

Silence. Then, even softer: “Yes.”

He wanted to ask more. Wanted to know everything — where it had come from, how long it had been in the lake, what had hurt it, what it was. But the silences were getting longer, the words more strained. Whatever energy it took to speak, the artifact was running low.

“You should rest,” he said. “We can talk more tomorrow.”

“Ethan.”

“Yeah?”

“…glad. Found me.”

The words were halting, broken, barely there. But he understood them.

“I’m glad I found you too,” he said.

The artifact hummed. Settled. The pulsing light dimmed, smoothing into something slower, softer. Sleep, or the closest thing to it.

Ethan turned off the workshop lights. Stood in the doorway for a moment, looking back at the small shape in its cradle.

An alien intelligence. Damaged, dormant, alone at the bottom of a lake for god knows how long. And he’d woken it up with a bench power supply and a curious mind.

“Goodnight,” he said.

The artifact pulsed once. Faint. Barely visible.

He went inside.

Mom was asleep. The house was quiet. He moved through the dark kitchen, got a glass of water, drank it standing at the sink.

Through the window, he could see the stars. The same stars he’d been looking at his whole life. The same sky, the same constellations, the same cosmic wallpaper that everyone saw every night.

But they looked different now.

Somewhere out there — far, the artifact had said — was a place it had come from. A place that had made it. A place that had hurt it.

He didn’t know what any of it meant. Didn’t know if the artifact was a machine or a person or something else entirely. Didn’t know if there were others, if something was looking for it, if he’d just made the most important discovery in human history or the most dangerous mistake.

But it had said his name. It had said “glad” and “found” and “know.”

It had been alone for a very long time, and now it wasn’t.

Neither was he.

He went to bed. Dreamed of flying. Woke once in the night and thought he heard, very faintly, from the direction of the garage:

“Ethan.”

Then silence. Then sleep.

Chapter 10: Learning to Fly

Week 7

The first propulsion test was a disaster.

Ethan hovered at three hundred feet, the lake a blue oval below, the morning sun warm on his wetsuit. He’d brought a single AL80 tank, separate from his breathing supply, with a simple valve assembly rigged to the outlet.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Proceed,” the AI said through the headphones.

He pointed the tank away from his body and cracked the valve.

The air burst out in a sharp hiss. The reaction was immediate — and completely wrong. Instead of moving forward, he shot backward, tumbling end over end, the field keeping him from injury but doing nothing about the rotation. Sky, lake, sky, lake, sky—

He clamped the valve shut. The thrust stopped, but the spinning continued for what felt like forever before the field’s subtle dampening effect slowed it down.

When he finally stabilized, he was hanging at four hundred feet, breathing hard, the tank clutched against his chest like a teddy bear.

“That was not controlled flight,” the AI observed.

“You think?”

“The force application was off-center. Your body rotated around the point of thrust rather than translating forward. The physics are consistent with—”

“I know the physics.” Ethan took a breath, steadied himself. “I just forgot to account for them.”

“Shall we try again?”

He looked at the tank. At his hands. At the lake far below.

“We need a different approach.”

Back in the garage, he sketched designs on graph paper.

The problem was simple: human bodies weren’t designed for thrust vectoring. Holding a tank and opening a valve created force at the wrong angle, through the wrong axis. He needed something he could aim.

“A wand,” he muttered. “Something I can point. Long enough to extend past my center of mass.”

“The force would need to translate through your body’s center,” the AI agreed. “Otherwise, rotation occurs.”

“Right.” He drew a stick figure, added arrows. “If I hold a wand at arm’s length… the thrust point is here… but my center of mass is here…”

“The lever arm creates torque.”

“So I need the wand aligned with my center of mass. Not pointed away from my arm, but away from my core.”

He sketched again. A tube, extending from a harness on his chest. A nozzle at the far end. The force vector passing straight through his center.

“That could work,” the AI said.

“That could work.”

The thrust wand was born that afternoon.

Three feet of aluminum pipe, salvaged from a broken tent pole in the garage’s junk corner. A nozzle at one end, machined from a brass fitting on his father’s old lathe — a machine he’d taught himself to use three years ago, back when he’d had time for projects that weren’t about survival.

The lathe was finicky, temperamental, older than he was. But it still worked, and he still remembered the basics. Turn the piece, apply the cutting tool, go slow, measure twice.

The nozzle took shape. A simple constriction that would accelerate the airflow, converting pressure to velocity. Nothing fancy. Nothing optimized. Just functional.

The valve assembly came from a pressure washer he’d bought broken at a garage sale. The trigger mechanism was shot, but the valve body was fine. He rebuilt it with new O-rings, tested it on shop air until he was satisfied.

The flexible hose was the expensive part — twenty-three dollars at the hardware store for high-pressure pneumatic tubing rated for 3000 psi. He couldn’t afford to cheap out on the connection between his air supply and his life.

By evening, he had a prototype.

A wand, three feet long. A hose, four feet, coiled at his side. A connection to the tank on his back. A trigger valve under his thumb.

He held it like a rifle, the wand extending from his chest, aimed at the garage wall.

“Thrust should now translate through your center of mass,” the AI said. “Minimal rotation.”

“Should?”

“Testing required.”

“Tomorrow. First light.”

The next morning, he was at the lake before sunrise.

The water was flat, the sky pink and gold. No wind, no waves, no witnesses. Perfect conditions for either success or embarrassing failure.

He suited up. Tanks on his back — two AL80s, one for breathing, one for thrust. BCD inflated for surface buoyancy. Wand clipped to his harness, hose coiled and ready.

He swam out to the middle of the lake, away from shore, away from any obstacles he might hit if things went wrong.

“Activating field.”

The familiar sensation washed over him. Lightness. Freedom. The water no longer pressing in, the world no longer pulling down.

He unclipped the wand. Raised it to his chest. Pointed the nozzle away from his body.

“Here goes nothing.”

He cracked the valve.

A puff of air. A gentle push. He moved backward — smoothly, straight, no tumbling. The wand’s alignment was working. The force translated through his center.

He closed the valve. Stopped.

“Yes.” The word came out as a whisper. “Yes.”

He tried again. A longer burst. More speed. Still straight, still controlled.

Again. Rotating the wand to change direction. Up. Down. Left. Right.

He was flying.

The next three hours were the best of his life.

He started simple. Forward thrust, straight lines, basic stops. The physics were intuitive once you got used to them — point the wand opposite your intended direction, crack the valve, go. Close the valve, drift to a stop. No friction to slow you down, no gravity to complicate things.

Then he got creative.

Curves. He learned to feather the valve, adjusting thrust mid-maneuver, bending his trajectory like a car taking a turn. The field responded to his intent, making subtle adjustments that smoothed out his amateur piloting.

Altitude changes. Pointing the wand down meant going up. Pointing it up meant going down. Simple, except his instincts kept wanting to do it backward. He had to consciously override millions of years of evolution that insisted down was down and up was up.

Rotation. This was trickier. He needed a second wand, or a way to apply offset thrust. For now, he made do with body positioning — extending an arm or leg to shift his center of mass, using the main wand’s thrust to create controlled spin.

By mid-morning, he could navigate in three dimensions with reasonable confidence. Not gracefully. Not efficiently. But functionally.

“Air consumption?” he asked, checking his gauges.

“Higher than baseline dive rates, but lower than expected. The field’s efficiency gains offset some of the propulsion costs.”

“How many tanks for an orbital run?”

The AI was quiet for a moment, calculating. “Assuming current consumption patterns, three tanks would provide approximately six hours of combined breathing and propulsion time. However, orbital insertion requires significantly more delta-v than atmospheric maneuvering.”

“Delta-v?”

“Change in velocity. Getting to orbit isn’t just about going up — it’s about going fast. Seventeen thousand miles per hour, roughly. The energy required…”

“Is a lot.”

“Is a lot.”

Ethan floated at ten thousand feet, watching a hawk circle below him. A hawk, below him. The absurdity of it made him laugh.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “One problem at a time.”

The second wand came together that evening.

Same design, shorter length. Meant to be held in his off hand, used for attitude control while the main wand handled primary thrust. Two wands, two hands, full three-dimensional maneuverability.

He practiced in the garage first, just the movements. Right hand forward thrust, left hand rotation. Right hand up, left hand stabilizing. The coordination was tricky, like learning to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time.

“Your neural adaptation rate is impressive,” the AI observed.

“Is that a compliment?”

“An observation. Most hosts require significant time to develop effective field-assisted motor patterns. You’re progressing faster than expected.”

“I’ve always been good with my hands.”

“It’s more than that. The field responds to intent, but intent must be clear. Confused or conflicted intent produces confused or conflicted field response. Your intent is… focused. Singular.”

Ethan thought about that. About the bank account and the treatment and his mother in her wheelchair. About the numbers that didn’t add up and the future that seemed impossible.

“I know what I want,” he said quietly. “That helps.”

“Yes. It does.”

By the end of week seven, he could fly.

Not perfectly — he still overshot turns, still struggled with precise stopping, still wasted air on unnecessary corrections. But he could launch from the lake’s surface, climb to altitude, maneuver in three dimensions, and land without crashing.

The V2 configuration was solid: two tanks for breathing, one for thrust, with a crossover valve for emergencies. Two thrust wands, right hand primary, left hand secondary. A harness system that kept everything secure and accessible.

He ran test after test. Launch drills. Recovery drills. Emergency procedures — what to do if a tank failed, if a wand jammed, if the field fluctuated unexpectedly.

“You’re preparing for contingencies that may never occur,” the AI said one evening.

“Contingencies keep you alive.”

“That’s very human thinking.”

“I am very human.”

A pause. Then, something almost like warmth in the AI’s voice: “Yes. You are.”

The final test of the week was altitude.

He’d been pushing higher each day — ten thousand feet, twenty thousand, thirty. Each time, he’d found his limits, found the edge of his equipment’s capability, and backed off before crossing it.

Today, he wasn’t backing off.

“Forty thousand feet,” he said. “That’s the target.”

“Atmospheric pressure at forty thousand feet is approximately eighteen percent of sea level. Temperature will be approximately negative seventy degrees Fahrenheit.”

“The field handles both.”

“In theory.”

“Time to test the theory.”

He launched from the lake’s surface, thrust wand burning through air at maximum flow. The climb was smooth, steady, the world falling away beneath him.

Ten thousand feet. The lake shrank to a puddle.

Twenty thousand feet. The horizon curved slightly at the edges.

Thirty thousand feet. The sky darkened from blue to something deeper.

Forty thousand feet.

He cut the thrust and floated.

The Earth spread out below him like a map made real. He could see three states, maybe four. The curve of the planet was obvious now, not subtle, not imagined. The sky above was nearly black, stars beginning to show despite the daylight.

“Temperature differential holding,” the AI reported. “Pressure nominal. Field integrity stable.”

“How do you feel?”

A pause. “I feel… better. Up here. Something about altitude agrees with me.”

“Space is up.”

“Yes.”

“We could go there. Right now. If we had enough air.”

“Yes.”

Ethan looked at the stars, steady points of light that didn’t twinkle because there wasn’t enough atmosphere to make them dance.

“Soon,” he said. “Very soon.”

He oriented himself toward the lake, triggered his thrust, and began the long glide home.

Chapter 11: The CubeSat

Week 7-8

The CubeSat was the size of a coffee mug.

Ethan turned it over in his hands, checking the seams, the solar cells, the antenna array. Everything he’d built himself, in this garage, from parts ordered online and scrounged from electronics stores.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2W: the brain. Fifteen dollars. Solar cells: power generation. Forty-five dollars. Radio transceiver: communication. Thirty-five dollars. GPS module: position tracking. Twenty dollars. Camera module: visual acquisition. Twelve dollars. Lithium cells: battery storage. Forty dollars. 3D printed housing: structure. His own filament, maybe twenty dollars worth.

Total cost: one hundred eighty-seven dollars.

Total capability: more than most countries had put into space fifty years ago.

“You sure this will work?” he asked.

Through the headphones, the AI hummed. It could speak in words now — halting, effortful, but words — but for technical questions it still preferred the language of tones.

A confident hum. Yes.

“It’s not radiation-hardened. First solar flare, the whole thing could fry.”

Another hum. Acknowledgment of the risk. Acceptance.

“If it breaks, I can build another one. But I’d rather this one works.”

Hum hum. Agreement.

He set the CubeSat down on the workbench. Tomorrow, he’d take it up. Deploy it at low orbit, somewhere it could catch the sun and beam back signals. His own satellite, watching from above.

His mother called from the kitchen.

“Dinner’s ready!”

“Coming!”

He looked at the CubeSat one more time. Then went to eat.

The deployment was easier than he’d expected.

Two hundred miles up, cruising over the Pacific, Ethan held the small satellite in his gloved hands and gave it a gentle push.

It drifted away, tumbling slightly, catching the sunlight on its solar cells. A glint of silver against the black.

“Telemetry?” he asked.

The AI was silent for a moment, listening to frequencies beyond human hearing.

“Signal acquired,” it said finally. Words, not hums. “Beacon active. Systems nominal.”

“Camera?”

“Online. Processing first images now.”

Ethan watched the CubeSat drift, getting smaller, becoming just another point of light among the thousands of objects orbiting Earth.

He’d just put something in space. With his own hands, built in his own garage, launched on alien technology that he still didn’t fully understand.

The AI hummed. A new sound — something like satisfaction.

“I feel better up here,” it said.

Ethan looked around. The curve of the Earth below, blue and white and impossibly beautiful. The black sky above, stars steady and unblinking. The thin envelope of atmosphere, a blue line at the horizon.

“I can see why,” he said.

“Not just the view.” The AI’s voice was thoughtful. “There’s something about space. About being off the surface. It feels… right. Like this is where I belong.”

“Do you remember? Being up here before?”

A long pause. “No. I remember… falling. Hitting. The water. But before that…” The voice trailed off. “It’s just feeling. A sense that I’ve been here. That this is home.”

“Maybe it’ll come back. The memories. As you get stronger.”

“Maybe.”

They floated in silence for a while. The CubeSat was almost invisible now, a speck against the star field.

“We should head back,” Ethan said finally. “Mom thinks I’m at the lake.”

“You spend a lot of time at the lake.”

“As far as she knows, yeah.”

The AI hummed. Something almost like amusement.

Ethan oriented himself toward Earth, triggered his thrusters, and began the long fall home.

The ground station went up the next day.

An ESP32 microcontroller, a LoRa radio module, an antenna mounted on the roof where it could see the sky. Total cost: fifty dollars. Total capability: direct communication with his own private satellite.

He tested it that night, after Mom went to bed. The CubeSat was making a pass overhead, its orbit carrying it from west to east across the dark sky.

“CubeSat, this is ground. Do you read?”

Static. Silence.

Then, faintly: “Ground, this is CubeSat. Signal received. Telemetry follows.”

His laptop screen filled with data. Position: 51.7°N, 32.4°W, altitude 412 km. Velocity: 7.66 km/s. Battery: 94%. Temperature: nominal. Attitude: stable.

“Holy shit,” he breathed. “It actually works.”

The AI hummed through the headphones. Told you so.

“Yeah, yeah.”

He watched the data stream for a few more minutes, then went to bed. The CubeSat continued its orbit, circling the Earth every ninety minutes, waiting for the next pass.

Tomorrow, they’d start planning for real orbital operations. Tonight, he’d built a satellite and put it in space.

Not bad for a Tuesday.

Chapter 12: Edge of Space

Week 8

The edge of space was arbitrary.

Scientists called it the Kármán line — a hundred kilometers up, the point where aerodynamics stopped working and orbital mechanics took over. But to Ethan, hanging in the thin air at ninety thousand feet, the line seemed meaningless. There was no edge. Just a gradual thinning, a slow fade from blue to black, from warm to cold, from somewhere to nowhere.

He’d been climbing for forty minutes.

The tanks on his back were at half capacity — one for breathing, two for thrust, the crossover valves closed until he needed them. His dive computer had given up tracking depth somewhere around fifty thousand feet, the pressure readings going nonsensical as atmosphere became vacuum. The altimeter he’d rigged from a modified aircraft sensor was still working, though. Ninety-two thousand feet. Ninety-three.

Below him, the world had shrunk to a curved disc of blue and brown and white. He could see the Rocky Mountains from here, a wrinkled line of snow and stone. Could see the curve of the coast, somewhere west, though the haze made it hard to tell where land ended and ocean began.

“How are we doing?” he asked.

“Field stable,” the AI said. “Temperature differential holding — we’re at negative seventy-eight Celsius outside, but the field is maintaining body normal. Radiation within acceptable parameters, though increasing. UV exposure is significant.”

“Am I getting a sunburn?”

“The field is blocking most of it. But if we stay at this altitude for extended periods, we should consider protection.”

“Noted.” He checked his thrust wand, verified the valve assembly was holding. “How high can we go?”

A pause. “I don’t know. We’ve never tested the limit.”

“Let’s find out.”

He triggered his thrusters. A brief hiss, barely audible in the thin air — sound didn’t travel well up here, with so few molecules to carry it. He rose.

Ninety-five thousand feet. The curvature of the Earth was obvious now, the horizon bending away from him in a gentle arc. The sky above was black, stars steady points of light that didn’t twinkle anymore. Without atmosphere to scatter and distort, they were just points. Clean. Sharp. Endless.

One hundred thousand feet. The Kármán line. Officially, technically, legally, he was in space.

Ethan laughed. The sound was strange in his helmet — he’d added a proper helmet now, with the headphones built in, because at these altitudes even the field couldn’t make thin air breathable. The laugh echoed in his ears, private and a little hysterical.

“What’s funny?” the AI asked.

“Nothing. Everything. I’m in space. Actually in space. And nobody knows.”

He kept rising.

At one hundred twenty thousand feet, something changed.

The AI made a sound — not words, not even the hums and tones he’d learned to interpret. Something raw, involuntary. A gasp, if a non-physical intelligence could gasp.

“What is it?”

“I…” The voice trailed off. Struggled. Started again. “I don’t have the words.”

“Try.”

A long silence. When the AI spoke again, its voice was different. Thicker. Wet with something that might have been emotion.

“I feel… home. For the first time since I woke up. Since you found me. I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

Ethan looked around. The view was staggering — Earth spread out below like a blue marble, the sun a white disc in the black sky, the stars brighter than he’d ever seen them. The Milky Way was a river of light across the darkness, and he could see… he didn’t know what he could see. Nebulae, maybe. Other galaxies. Things that should have been invisible, but weren’t.

“Is this where you came from? Space?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. But this feeling…” Another pause. “It’s like waking up from a nightmare and realizing you’re safe in your own bed. Like the nightmare wasn’t real, even though you know it was.”

“The crash. The lake. The centuries underwater.”

“Yes.”

“That was the nightmare.”

“Yes.” The AI’s voice was hushed. Awed. “I don’t remember my life before. But I remember that it was good. That I was happy. That I belonged somewhere, with people who cared about me.”

“And then something happened.”

“And then something happened. And I ended up in the water, broken and alone, and I slept for so long…”

Ethan floated in the void, feeling the AI’s emotion wash through him. Relief and grief and longing and something he couldn’t name, all mixed together. The bond between them was stronger up here — he didn’t know why. Maybe the field worked better in vacuum. Maybe distance from Earth mattered somehow. Or maybe the AI was just more itself up here, more present, more whole.

“We can come up here,” he said. “Whenever you want. If it helps.”

“It helps.” A pause. “But it also hurts. Being here reminds me… there should be others. I can feel the space where they used to be. The emptiness.”

“Your people.”

“Yes. We were never meant to be alone. We’re social beings, like you. We need connection, community, belonging. And I have none of that. Not anymore.”

The words hit Ethan harder than he expected. He thought about his own isolation — the lies he told everyone, the secrets he kept, the way he’d built walls around himself to protect his mother and protect the AI and protect the impossible thing they were doing together.

“You have me,” he said quietly.

“Yes.” The AI’s voice softened. “I have you. And that’s more than I ever expected to have again.”

They floated in silence for a while, watching the Earth turn beneath them.

From this altitude, Ethan could see the terminator — the line between day and night, creeping slowly across the surface below. He watched cities appear as clusters of light on the dark side, glittering like scattered jewels. He watched clouds form and dissolve, weather systems spinning in slow motion across continents.

“You really don’t remember what happened to them?” he asked eventually.

Another long silence. Then, slowly: “Fragments. Fire. Screaming. Running. The certainty that everything was ending.” The voice cracked. “I don’t remember the details. But I remember the feeling. The absolute knowledge that I was about to die.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I crashed instead. Fell into the water. Went to sleep and didn’t wake up until you found me.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know exactly. But the star positions have changed. The constellations have drifted. The magnetic field has shifted significantly.” A pause. “I think… hundreds of years. Maybe more.”

Hundreds of years. Dormant at the bottom of a lake while the world moved on above. While whatever had happened to its people became history, then legend, then nothing at all. While civilizations rose and fell and no one knew there was an alien intelligence sleeping in the mud of a Minnesota lake.

“I’m sorry,” Ethan said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know. But I’m still sorry.”

The AI hummed. Gratitude, maybe. Or just acknowledgment. The sound was warmer than usual, more textured.

“You’re the first person who’s ever said that to me,” it said. “The first person who’s treated my past like something that matters.”

“Why wouldn’t it matter?”

“I don’t know. I just… expected to be treated like a tool. A resource. Something to be used.” The AI paused. “That’s how the others treated us. The hunters. The ones who came for my people.”

Ethan felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. “Tell me about them.”

“I can’t. I don’t remember enough. Just… impressions. Fear. The knowledge that we were being hunted. That they wanted something from us that we couldn’t give.”

“What did they want?”

“The field. The technology. Us.” The AI’s voice dropped. “They couldn’t create it themselves. They could only take it. Only steal it from those who had it naturally.”

“So they hunted you.”

“They hunted us. For generations. Until there was no one left.”

“Except you.”

“Except me.”

They floated in silence, watching the Earth turn beneath them, and Ethan thought about extinction. About being the last of your kind. About carrying the weight of an entire civilization’s death in your memory, even if you couldn’t remember the details.

“I won’t let them have you,” he said finally. “If they come. Whoever they are. I won’t let them have you.”

“You can’t make that promise.”

“I’m making it anyway.”

The AI hummed again. Softer. Warmer.

“Thank you,” it said. “Even if it’s impossible. Thank you.”

The descent was quiet.

Ethan used small bursts of air to drop his orbit, letting gravity do most of the work. The AI guided him — angle of entry, velocity adjustments, the careful math that kept him from burning up or bouncing off the atmosphere like a stone off water.

“Increase your angle by two degrees,” the AI said. “You’re coming in too shallow.”

He adjusted. The stars overhead began to fade as atmosphere thickened around him.

“That’s good. Maintain current trajectory.”

At fifty thousand feet, the sky faded from black to deep blue. At thirty thousand, clouds appeared below, white and familiar. At ten thousand, he could hear the wind — actual wind, air moving around him, the sound of atmosphere.

He splashed down in the lake just before noon. The water was cold after the nothing of space, the pressure sudden and heavy after the vacuum. He swam to shore, hauled himself out onto the familiar rocks, sat there dripping in the autumn sun.

The world looked different now. Smaller. More fragile. The trees and rocks and parking lot — all the familiar things — seemed somehow less solid than they had before. Like he could see through them to the darkness beyond, the void that surrounded everything, the vast empty nothing that made up most of the universe.

He’d been to space. Actually, genuinely, verifiably in space. Beyond the edge of the atmosphere, looking down at a planet that now felt like home in a way it never had before. Because home wasn’t just a place. It was the only place. The one small rock in an infinite darkness where humans could exist.

“That was incredible,” he said quietly.

The AI hummed. Agreement.

“We can do this. Regular trips. Find satellites to salvage. Make real money.”

“Yes.”

“Enough for the treatment. Enough to fix Mom.”

“Yes.”

He looked up at the sky. Blue now, normal, nothing special. But he knew what was up there. Knew how to reach it. Knew he could go back whenever he wanted, slip the bonds of Earth and float in the void with his strange alien friend.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s make a plan.”

He stood, gathered his gear, and headed for the truck.

Time to go to work.

Chapter 13: Salvage Run

Week 9

The satellite was called Intelsat 7A.

Launched in 1996, retired in 2012, boosted to a graveyard orbit where it would spin uselessly for centuries. Twenty-three hundred kilograms of aluminum and titanium and solar cells and, if Ethan’s research was right, approximately four kilograms of gold plating on the electronic components.

Gold at current market prices: $62 per gram. Four kilograms: roughly $248,000.

He wasn’t going to get all of it. Couldn’t strip a satellite completely in one run, not with his tools, not with his air supply. But even ten percent would be more than he’d made in a year of lake diving.

He was in orbit. Actually in orbit. Two hundred miles up, moving at seventeen thousand miles per hour, watching the Earth rotate beneath him through nothing but a thin envelope of impossible alien technology.

It had taken three weeks to get here. Three weeks of testing, of failing, of adjusting. Learning how to maneuver in vacuum. Learning how to navigate without landmarks. Learning how to trust the AI when it told him to thrust left and wait three minutes and thrust again.

“Target acquired,” the AI said through the headphones. “Bearing zero-four-seven, range twelve kilometers.”

“I see it.”

A glint of reflected sunlight against the black. Tumbling slowly, one rotation every forty seconds, the dead solar panels catching the light as they spun.

“Approach vector plotted. Ready when you are.”

Ethan checked his gauges. Tanks at 2,800 psi. Six hours of air, more or less, depending on how hard he worked. Enough time to get in, strip what he could, and get home before anyone missed him.

He squeezed the thrust trigger. The wand hissed. He started moving.

The approach took eleven minutes.

In orbit, you couldn’t just point yourself at something and go. The physics were counterintuitive — fire your engines forward to slow down, thrust “up” to change your orbital period, let gravity do most of the work while you made tiny corrections at the right moments.

The AI handled the calculations. Ethan just followed instructions.

“Thrust forward, two seconds.”

He thrust.

“Wait.”

He waited. The satellite grew larger, resolving from a glint to a shape. Cylindrical body, dead solar arrays, communication dishes frozen mid-rotation.

“Rotate left fifteen degrees. Short burst up.”

He obeyed. The tumble of the satellite became clearer — not chaotic, just a slow lazy spin, the whole assembly turning around its center of mass like a baton thrown by a giant.

“Match rotation in three, two, one.”

He fired his thrusters in a quick pattern, and suddenly the satellite wasn’t tumbling anymore. From his perspective, it was stationary, and everything else — the Earth, the stars, the sun — was rotating around them both.

“Rotation matched. Clear to approach.”

He coasted in, using tiny puffs of air to adjust his trajectory. Ten meters. Five. Two.

He reached out and touched it.

The field wrapped the satellite like mercury.

Ethan had seen it a hundred times now, but it never stopped being strange. The moment his hand made contact, the artifact’s influence rolled outward, engulfing the whole twenty-three-hundred-kilogram structure in a skin of force that made it effectively weightless.

He could move it with a fingertip. This thing that had cost millions of dollars to build and launch, this monument to human engineering, and he could push it around like a pool toy.

“Beginning salvage,” he said.

“I have you.”

He pulled the tool bag from his harness. Inside: wire cutters, pliers, a small pry bar, screwdrivers in various sizes, plastic bags for collecting components. Nothing fancy. Nothing powered. Everything he’d bought at Harbor Freight for less than a hundred dollars.

He started with the communication dishes. Gold plating on the wave guides, thin but recoverable. He found the access panels, popped them open, started cutting.

The work was methodical. Familiar. This was salvage — different context, same principles. Find the valuable bits. Extract them carefully. Don’t damage what you’re taking.

Strip by strip, component by component, he filled the first bag. Gold-plated connectors. Platinum thermocouples from the temperature sensors. Pins and contacts and tiny precious pieces that would be worthless individually but added up to something real.

“How are we doing?” he asked.

“Air consumption nominal. You have approximately five hours of work time remaining.”

“And the gold?”

“Estimated recovery so far: three hundred grams.”

Three hundred grams. Almost nineteen thousand dollars, floating in a bag at his hip.

He kept working.

Two hours in, he found the motherboard.

Buried in the satellite’s central processor unit, behind three layers of shielding, was a circuit board the size of a dinner plate. It was coated in gold. Not plated — coated. Layer after layer, because in space, exposed electronics needed protection from radiation.

He cut it free carefully. Weighed it in his hand — meaningless in zero-g, but force of habit. It felt substantial. Felt like money.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Kilo? More?”

“Approximately 1.2 kilograms, based on typical construction standards for electronics of this era.”

1.2 kilograms. Seventy-four thousand dollars.

He bagged it. Kept working.

The satellite gave up its treasures slowly.

Gold from the electronics. Platinum from the sensors. Titanium housings that he couldn’t carry — too bulky, not enough value density — but that he marked mentally for a future trip. Silver contacts. Germanium wafers. Gallium arsenide from the solar cells.

The AI kept track of everything. Weights, values, time remaining. A running tally that climbed higher every time Ethan filled another bag.

“Estimated total value of recovered materials: forty-three thousand dollars.”

He stopped. Floated in place next to the gutted satellite, bags of precious metals drifting at his hip.

Forty-three thousand dollars. One morning’s work.

His whole year of lake diving, his best year ever, had netted maybe eighteen thousand. And that was before expenses, before equipment, before the endless maintenance that kept the operation running.

“I could do this every week,” he said quietly.

“The limiting factor is air supply and transit time. With your current equipment, weekly runs are feasible.”

“That’s… that’s two million a year. More.”

“Approximately. Though market prices fluctuate and not all satellites contain equal value.”

Two million dollars a year. Enough for the treatment, ten times over. Enough to never worry about property tax or prescriptions or whether the truck would start in the morning.

Enough to fix everything.

He looked at the Earth below, blue and white and impossibly beautiful. Somewhere down there, his mother was sitting in her wheelchair, not knowing where he was, thinking he was at the lake.

The treatment cost $150,000-200,000. He’d thought it was impossible.

Now it was just math.

“Let’s head home,” he said.

“Plotting return trajectory.”

He took one last look at the stripped satellite, floating in its graveyard orbit with its guts exposed to vacuum. Someone else’s garbage. His ticket home.

“Ready when you are,” the AI said.

He triggered his thrusters and started falling back toward Earth.

He landed in the lake at 11:47 AM.

The splash scattered birds from the shore. The water was cold, a shock after the temperature-controlled envelope of the field. He surfaced, swam for shore, hauled himself out onto the familiar rocks.

The truck was where he’d left it. The parking lot was empty. No one had seen him leave, and no one saw him return.

He loaded his gear. Changed out of the wetsuit and into dry clothes. Drove home.

Mom was in the kitchen, making lunch.

“Good dive?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He set down his bag — the one with the gold, the platinum, the seventy-four-thousand-dollar circuit board. “Good dive.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Few things. Nothing major.”

She nodded. Went back to her cooking. Didn’t see the way his hands were shaking, the way his eyes kept drifting to the bag, the way his whole body felt like it was vibrating with something that might have been adrenaline or might have been joy.

He’d been to space. He’d stripped a satellite. He was home before noon, and his mother had no idea.

“Lunch will be ready in ten minutes,” she said.

“Great. I’ll just… put my gear away.”

He took the bag to the garage. Set it on the workbench. Opened it and looked at the contents: gold and platinum and the future, glittering in the dim light.

The artifact hummed in its cradle. A sound like satisfaction.

“Good run,” Ethan said.

The hum deepened. Agreement.

He closed the bag, hid it in the cabinet with the other salvage, and went to eat lunch with his mother.

Just another Tuesday.

Chapter 14: The Numbers

Week 9-10

The spreadsheet didn’t lie.

Ethan stared at the laptop screen, running the numbers again. Cell by cell, line by line, the familiar dance of addition and subtraction that had ruled his life since Dad left. Except now the numbers were moving in a direction they’d never moved before.

Three satellites stripped. He’d named them in his head: the ESA mapper, the failed cubesat, the Chinese relay. Each one a tomb of dead technology, each one yielding treasures that would have seemed impossible three months ago.

Total yield: seven thousand four hundred dollars in precious metals.

Gold from circuit contacts and plated connectors — three point two ounces, melted down in the old crucible Dad had used for casting fishing weights. Platinum from reaction wheels and attitude sensors — two hundred and forty grams, worth more per ounce than gold. Titanium from structural components — too difficult to refine at home, but Frank knew a guy who knew a guy. Rare earth elements from solar panels and electronics — neodymium, yttrium, europium — sold as raw components to a collector in Nevada who didn’t ask questions.

Frank had stopped asking questions after the second delivery. He just weighed, calculated, and paid, his weathered face carefully blank.

Seven thousand dollars in ten days. The treatment cost one-fifty to two hundred thousand.

At this rate: five to six months.

He could do five to six months. He could absolutely do five to six months.

The thought felt dangerous, like tempting fate. He’d learned long ago not to hope too hard, not to plan too far ahead. Plans went wrong. Hope got crushed. Better to keep your head down and survive day to day than to reach for something that might be snatched away.

But here were the numbers. Black and white. Real.

“You’re calculating,” the AI observed through the headphones.

“I’m always calculating.”

“This calculation is different. I can feel the intensity. Your heart rate is elevated. Your breathing is shallow.”

Ethan leaned back in his chair, the garage around him familiar and grounding. The workbench cluttered with salvage. The artifact in its cradle, humming softly. The smell of motor oil and old rubber.

“The treatment for my mom. The stem cell therapy. It costs more than I’ve ever had in my life. More than I ever expected to have.” He paused, looking at the screen. “But at the rate we’re going…”

“We can afford it.”

“Yeah.” The word felt strange in his mouth. Foreign. Like speaking a language he’d only read about. “We can afford it.”

He’d never been able to afford anything. Not really. Every purchase had been a calculation, a sacrifice, a trade-off. Even the small things — a meal out, a new pair of jeans — came with guilt attached. The ghost of his father’s voice, drunk and mocking: You think money grows on trees?

No. Money didn’t grow on trees. But apparently, it fell from the sky.

“What are you feeling?” the AI asked. The question was genuine, curious — it had been asking a lot of questions lately, trying to understand human emotion.

“I don’t know.” Ethan rubbed his face. “Scared, I think. Like if I believe it too hard, something will go wrong.”

“That’s superstitious thinking. The numbers don’t change based on belief.”

“I know. But feelings don’t follow math.”

The AI hummed, processing this. “I think I understand. Hope is dangerous because it creates vulnerability. You protect yourself by not hoping.”

“Something like that.”

“That seems like a difficult way to exist.”

Ethan laughed, short and sharp. “Yeah. It is.”

“More runs,” he said later, after the spreadsheet was saved and backed up. “Faster. We push harder.”

“I need to tell you something.”

The AI’s tone had changed. Hesitant. Worried. Ethan felt his stomach tighten.

“What?”

“The beacon. The signal I can’t control. It gets stronger each time we go up.”

“What do you mean, stronger?”

“Every time we enter space. Every time I generate a strong field at altitude. The signal pulses. Gets louder. Travels farther.” A pause. “I think it’s automatic. Part of my original design. Something I was supposed to do, but don’t remember why.”

Ethan went still. The good feeling from the numbers drained away, replaced by the cold weight of unknown risk.

“Is that dangerous?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember enough to know.” Another pause, longer. “I just know it’s happening. And that it scares me.”

“Can we stop it?”

“No. It’s not conscious. It’s like… breathing, for you. Or your heartbeat. It just happens.”

“Can we minimize it?”

“Maybe. Shorter runs. Less field intensity. Fewer altitude transitions.” The AI’s voice dropped. “But that would mean less efficiency, less salvage, more time to reach your goal.”

The math shifted in Ethan’s head. Faster runs, louder beacon, unknown risk. Slower runs, quieter beacon, longer timeline. His mother’s face, tired and gray in the mornings. The way her hands shook when she thought no one was watching.

“How much louder are we talking?”

“I don’t have a reference scale. Just… more. Detectably more each time.”

“And you don’t know what happens if it gets too loud?”

“No. But I have… impressions. Feelings from before. Whatever was hunting my people, whatever destroyed them — they tracked us by something. Some signal. Some trace.” The AI’s voice went quiet. “I think it might have been this.”

Cold crept down Ethan’s spine. “You think the beacon might lead something to us?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything left to come. It was so long ago. Centuries, you said. Maybe whoever was hunting is gone. Maybe the signal goes nowhere, means nothing.”

“But maybe not.”

“But maybe not.”

Ethan looked at the spreadsheet. The numbers that promised salvation. The numbers that might be building toward something else entirely.

He thought about his mother. About the treatment. About all the calculations he’d run, all the sacrifices he’d made, all the things he’d done to keep her alive one more day.

“We keep going,” he said finally. “Carefully. But we keep going.”

“And if something hears?”

“Then we deal with it. Like we’ve dealt with everything else.”

The AI was silent for a long moment. He could feel its doubt, its fear, the weight of memories it couldn’t access. The terror of something it had experienced but couldn’t name.

But he could also feel its trust. Its willingness to follow him into the unknown, because he’d earned that trust, and because it had nowhere else to go.

“Okay,” it said. “We keep going.”

Three days later, he noticed something else.

The copper was wrong.

Forty-two pounds stripped from the last satellite — a defunct NOAA weather station, its hull pockmarked from micrometeorite impacts. Forty-two pounds weighed going into the bag, carefully measured on the shop scale. But when he pulled it out for sorting, the scale read thirty-nine.

He weighed it again. Thirty-nine.

Weighed the bag itself. Empty.

Thirty-nine pounds when there should have been forty-two.

Three pounds of copper, vanished.

“Did you eat my copper?”

Silence. The kind of silence that meant the AI was deciding whether to answer.

“AI. Did you eat my copper?”

“…I need material. To repair. To grow.” The voice was small, almost guilty. “It happens automatically sometimes. I can’t always control—”

“You’ve been eating my salvage.”

“Some. Not much. I try to be careful. I try to take only what I need.”

Ethan felt something bubble up in his chest. He clamped down on it. Not anger — or not exactly. More like frustration at one more thing he didn’t understand, one more variable he couldn’t control. One more secret the AI had been keeping.

“How much?” he asked, keeping his voice steady. “Total. Since I found you.”

“A few grams here and there. Copper mostly. Some gold when I need finer material for—”

“Gold.”

“The electronics. The plating. It’s… easier to work with. More conductive. Better for the delicate structures.”

“How much gold?”

A pause. “Point six ounces. Approximately.”

Ethan did the math in his head. Point six ounces of gold, at current prices, was almost eight hundred dollars. Consumed. Absorbed. Gone.

“That’s real money,” he said quietly. “Money we need.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it mattered so much. Where I come from, material was… shared. Common. You needed it, you took it. It wasn’t…”

“Property?”

“Yes. That word. It wasn’t property.”

Ethan sat down heavily on his workbench stool. He thought about the spreadsheet, about the careful calculations. About how he’d been adding and subtracting and planning, while all along a variable he didn’t know about was quietly eating his profits.

“I weighed you,” he said. “When I first found you. Eight hundred forty-seven grams.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“What do you weigh now?”

Pause. “I don’t have internal sensors precise enough to—”

Ethan got the scale. Set the artifact on it, watching the digital readout flicker and settle.

Twelve hundred and three grams.

A 42% increase in mass. Over three hundred grams of material, absorbed, integrated, made part of whatever the artifact was.

“You’re growing.”

“Repairing. Growing. Both.” The AI’s voice was hesitant. “Parts of me were damaged. Broken. I’m rebuilding them. Making myself whole again.”

“What happens when you’re done? When you’re fully repaired?”

Another pause. Longer this time. Heavy with something that might have been uncertainty or might have been fear.

“I don’t know. I’ve never been whole. Not since before.”

“Before what?”

“Before the thing I can’t remember. The fire. The screaming. The end.” The voice cracked. “I think I was damaged before I crashed. Damaged by whatever was hunting us. And I’ve been broken ever since.”

Ethan sat back, looking at the artifact on its scale. Twelve hundred grams of mystery, eating copper and gold and who knew what else. Getting stronger. Getting bigger. Getting better.

Healing.

The frustration drained out of him. How could he be angry at something for trying to heal? He’d spent three years doing everything he could to help his mother heal. He understood that drive. That desperation.

“Just tell me next time,” he said finally. “Before you eat something. So I can track it in the spreadsheet.”

“I will. I promise.”

“And no more gold without permission. That stuff’s expensive. We need it for the treatment fund.”

“Understood. I’ll restrict myself to copper and aluminum. Base metals.”

“Can you even use aluminum?”

“Not as well. But I can manage.”

Ethan smiled, despite everything. “Good. That’s good.”

He put the artifact back in its cradle. Stared at it for a long moment, this strange intelligence he’d pulled from the bottom of a lake. This thing that had changed his life, that was eating his salvage, that was sending mysterious signals into the void.

It was healing. Using his salvage, his work, his resources to rebuild whatever had been broken. And he was letting it, because what else was he going to do? Because it was helping him too, helping his mother, making everything possible.

A partnership. That’s what this was. Not ownership. Not control. Partnership.

“Get some rest,” he said. “Tomorrow we go up again.”

The artifact hummed. Grateful. Tired. Alive.

Ethan updated the spreadsheet — adding a new column for material consumption, subtracting the gold, adjusting the projections — and went to bed.

Five to six months. Maybe a little longer now.

But possible. Still possible.

Chapter 15: Hungry

Week 10-11

The numbers weren’t adding up.

Ethan sat at his workbench, staring at the scale, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He’d pulled forty-two pounds of copper from the last orbital run — he’d weighed it going into the bag, weighed it coming out of the field, written it down like he always did.

But the scale said thirty-nine.

Three pounds of copper didn’t just vanish. Copper didn’t evaporate, didn’t sublimate, didn’t do anything except sit there being copper until someone melted it down or sold it.

He checked the scale. Zeroed. Accurate.

He checked the bag. No holes, no gaps, nothing that would let material escape.

He checked his notes. Forty-two pounds, written in his own handwriting, dated three days ago.

Three pounds of copper was worth about nine dollars. Not a fortune, but not nothing either. And more importantly: where the hell had it gone?

He looked at the artifact.

The artifact sat in its cradle on the workbench, humming softly, pulsing with that familiar internal light. It looked the same as always.

Except…

He picked it up. Held it in his hands, feeling its weight — or lack of weight, that strange lightness that had become normal over the past months.

It felt heavier.

Not by much. A few grams, maybe. But he’d handled this thing every day for two months. He knew its weight like he knew the weight of his own hands.

It was definitely heavier.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “Have you been eating?”

The artifact pulsed. A sound came through the headphones — not words, not yet, but something that might have been… embarrassment?

“The copper. The missing copper. Did you take it?”

A long pause. Then: “…need.”

“You need copper?”

“Need… material. To repair. To grow.”

“You’re eating my salvage.”

Another pause. “Yes.”

Ethan set the artifact down. Rubbed his face with both hands.

“How much?”

“Some. Not much. Only what’s close. Only when…” The voice trailed off, struggling with words it didn’t have yet.

“Only when what?”

“Only when I’m hungry.”

He spent the next three days running experiments.

The artifact was selective. It consumed copper eagerly, gold even more so. Brass and bronze it would take, though less enthusiastically. Aluminum it absorbed reluctantly, and only in small amounts. Plastic, wood, and organic material it ignored entirely.

The process was invisible. No vapor, no residue, no visible mechanism. Material simply… diminished. A copper wire left in contact with the artifact overnight would be slightly lighter by morning. A gold-plated connector would lose its plating over a few hours.

“You’re repairing yourself,” Ethan said. “Using metals to rebuild whatever got damaged.”

“Yes.”

“How much damage is there?”

A long pause. “Much. Very much. Getting better. Slowly.”

He thought about the crash — or whatever had happened. The artifact dormant at the bottom of a lake for centuries, damaged, alone, barely functional. All the material it had consumed in the past months might be just the beginning of a long recovery.

“What happens when you’re fully repaired?”

The artifact was quiet for so long that Ethan thought it wasn’t going to answer.

Then: “I don’t know. I’ve never been… whole. Not since before. Not since…”

“Since whatever happened to your people.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Ethan leaned back in his chair. “Okay. Just… tell me when you’re hungry. Don’t sneak it. I’ll make sure you have what you need.”

The hum through the headphones shifted. Warmer. Grateful.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now—” He picked up a scrap piece of copper wire, set it on the workbench next to the artifact. “Eat your dinner.”

The artifact got heavier over the next two weeks.

Ethan tracked it obsessively, weighing it every morning, logging the changes. It had started at 847 grams. Now it was 1,203. A 42% increase in mass, all of it absorbed from materials he’d provided — copper wire, brass fittings, gold-plated electronics from the orbital runs.

The artifact’s capabilities improved in parallel. The field was stronger, more responsive. Communication was easier, words coming more readily. Whatever damage had been there was slowly healing.

And then, one morning, something changed.

He came into the workshop at 6 AM, same as always. The artifact was in its cradle, same as always.

Except it wasn’t alone.

A small piece sat next to it on the workbench. Walnut-sized, maybe smaller. The same dark material, the same subtle internal glow. Connected to the main artifact by a thread of light so thin it was almost invisible.

Ethan stopped in the doorway.

“What the hell?”

The main artifact was silent. Exhausted-sounding when it finally spoke.

“…unexpected.”

“What is that?”

“…me. Part of me. But… separate now.”

“Did you break? Are you damaged?”

“No. Not damaged.” A long pause. “This is… how we continue. When we’re healthy enough. When we have enough material.” Another pause. “I didn’t know I was going to. It just… happened.”

Ethan crossed slowly to the workbench. Looked at the small piece. It pulsed independently — a different rhythm than the main artifact, slightly faster, slightly more erratic.

“It’s alive?”

“It will be. It’s new. It needs time.”

He reached out a hand. Hesitated.

“It’s okay,” the artifact said. “You can touch it.”

He picked it up.

The sensation was immediate and overwhelming. A pulse of greeting, of curiosity, of something that felt like hello? — not in words, not even in sounds, but in pure feeling transmitted directly into his nervous system.

“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, wow.”

“It likes you,” the artifact said. There was something in its voice that might have been pride. “It can feel that you’re safe. That you’re the one who’s been feeding us.”

“What do I… what do I do with it?”

“Whatever you want. It’s new. It needs to learn. To grow. To bond with someone.”

Ethan held the small piece in his palm, feeling its warmth, its pulse, its tiny curious consciousness reaching out toward him.

He thought about his mother.

“I have an idea,” he said.

“Yes?”

“My mom. Her legs. The signals from her brain aren’t strong enough to move her muscles anymore. But what if…” He held up the small piece. “What if this could help? Make a partial field, just around her body. Reduce the weight of her limbs enough that her weakened signals could move them?”

The artifact was quiet for a long moment.

“It would need to be calibrated. Carefully. The field would have to be specific — not full decoupling, just partial. Just enough to reduce resistance without destabilizing her internally.”

“Can you teach me?”

“Yes.”

“Will it work?”

Another long pause. Then, quietly: “I think so. Yes. I think it can work.”

Ethan looked at the small piece in his hand. A fragment of alien intelligence, born on his workbench from lake copper and satellite gold. His mother’s best chance at walking again.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s build her a walking device.”

The artifact hummed. The fragment pulsed.

They got to work.

Chapter 16: Walking

Week 11

The fragment sat on the workbench in a nest of copper wire, pulsing faintly with light that had no visible source.

Ethan had been staring at it for twenty minutes. Walnut-sized. Warm to the touch. When he’d picked it up three days ago, he’d felt something reach back — not words, not even the tones and hums the main artifact used, but something. Curiosity. Newness.

Hello?

Through the bone conduction headphones, the main artifact hummed. Lower now, tired. It had been tired since the separation, like a body recovering from blood loss. But it was getting stronger every day.

“Can you hear me?” Ethan asked.

The hum shifted. Acknowledgment.

“I want to build something. For my mom.”

Silence. Then a tone — questioning.

“Her legs don’t work right anymore. The signals from her brain, they’re too weak. Her muscles could move, but the messages aren’t getting through strong enough.” He’d read everything he could find about Parkinson’s and its cousins, about neurological degeneration, about the gap between intention and action. “What if… what if we could make the load lighter? So the signals she can send are enough?”

A long pause. The artifact processing.

Then a new sound. Not a tone — something more complex. Almost like a question being turned around, examined from different angles.

“The field reduces inertia,” Ethan said. “What if we made a smaller field? Just around her body? Reduce the weight of her limbs by — I don’t know — sixty percent? Seventy? So the little bit of signal that gets through is enough to move them?”

The hum changed again. Interest.

“Can you teach me?”

Another pause. Ethan held his breath.

Then: a single tone, rising. Yes.

Building the housing took two days.

The AnkerMake ran almost continuously, printing sections of the casing in white PLA. Ethan had designed it as a belt — wide, contoured to wrap around the waist, with a cavity in the back for the fragment and the battery pack. Nothing that would look medical. Nothing that would draw questions.

The artifact guided him through the calibration. It couldn’t speak yet, not in words, but it had developed a vocabulary of tones and pulses that Ethan was learning to read. High tone: yes, correct. Low tone: no, wrong. Wavering tone: close, but adjust.

The fragment needed to be oriented a specific way. The field it generated had to be tuned to a specific frequency — lower output than the main artifact, focused inward rather than outward. The battery had to provide steady current within a narrow range.

“Like this?” Ethan adjusted the fragment’s position in its cradle.

Low tone. Wrong.

He rotated it fifteen degrees.

Wavering tone. Close.

Five more degrees.

High tone. Yes.

He soldered the connections. Tested the current draw. Adjusted the voltage regulator until the artifact’s tone steadied into something that sounded almost like satisfaction.

“Will it hurt her?”

A pause. Then two tones in sequence — the first low, the second rising. No, then: it will help.

“How long will it last?”

Silence. A long silence.

“You don’t know.”

Wavering tone. Uncertain.

“Best guess.”

Three tones, spaced apart. The artifact’s way of indicating… what? Duration? Ethan had been keeping notes, building a translation guide, but this one was new.

“A year?”

High tone.

“Maybe longer?”

Wavering tone. Maybe.

He looked at the device in his hands. White plastic, lithium cells, copper wire, and something that shouldn’t exist. Something that had chosen — chosen — to help him build this.

“Thank you,” he said.

The artifact hummed. The fragment pulsed.

He went to find his mother.

She was in the kitchen, in her wheelchair, peeling carrots. The peeler shook in her grip, and every few strokes she had to stop and rest her hand. Two years ago she’d done this without thinking. A year ago it was hard. Now it was a battle.

“Hey,” Ethan said from the doorway.

“Hey yourself.” She didn’t look up. “There’s chicken thawing in the sink. I was thinking stir-fry.”

“Mom.”

Something in his voice made her stop. She set down the peeler, the carrot, and turned her chair to face him.

He was holding something. A belt, it looked like. White, wider than a normal belt, with a slight bulge in the back.

“What’s that?”

“I made something.” He came into the kitchen, knelt beside her chair. “I need you to trust me.”

“Ethan—”

“I know I’ve been — I know there are things I haven’t told you. About where the money’s coming from. About what I’ve been doing.” He was looking at his hands, at the device, anywhere but her face. “I’ll tell you everything. I promise. But right now I need you to put this on and trust me.”

She looked at the belt. Looked at her son. Seventeen years old and carrying the weight of the world, and she’d watched him do it, watched him refuse to bend, and she’d never been more proud or more afraid.

“What does it do?”

“It helps.”

“Helps how?”

“It…” He stopped. Took a breath. “It makes things lighter. You’ll feel it. Just — please. Put it on.”

She should say no. She should demand an explanation. She should be the parent, for once, and refuse to let her child do whatever mysterious thing he was trying to do.

But he was looking at her with something in his eyes she hadn’t seen in years. Hope. Real hope, fragile and desperate.

“Okay,” she said.

He helped her lean forward. Wrapped the belt around her waist, just above her hips. Fastened it in the front — velcro and a plastic buckle, simple, secure. The slight bulge in the back pressed against her lower spine.

“How do I—”

He pressed something. A button, hidden in the side.

The belt hummed.

It was soft, barely audible, but she felt it more than heard it. A vibration that started in the small of her back and spread outward, flowing down her legs, up her spine, out through her arms. Like warmth, but not quite. Like lightness, but not quite that either.

Something that had no name.

“How do you feel?” Ethan asked.

She opened her mouth to answer and then stopped. Because something was different. The tremor in her hands — always there, always shaking, even at rest — was still there, but quieter. The heaviness in her legs — the concrete blocks she’d been dragging around for months — was still there, but less.

She looked at her hands. Lifted them. They rose easily, too easily, like moving through water instead of air.

“Ethan. What—”

“Try to stand.”

She stared at him.

“Please,” he said. “Just try.”

She’d tried to stand three months ago. Had made it halfway up before her legs buckled and she’d crashed into the coffee table, split her forehead open, spent four hours in the ER while Ethan filled out forms and didn’t cry, not once, not where she could see.

She hadn’t tried since.

“I can’t.”

“You can.” He took her hands. “I’ll be right here. I won’t let you fall.”

“The signals,” she said. “My brain can’t—”

“Try.”

She looked at his face. At the hope there, the desperate fragile hope that she’d do anything to protect.

She put her hands on the armrests of her chair.

She pushed.

Her legs unfolded. Her body rose. The wheelchair rolled back an inch and Ethan caught it, steadied it, but she wasn’t sitting in it anymore, she was above it, she was—

Standing.

The word didn’t cover it. She was standing. On her own legs. Under her own power. The signals that had been too weak for months, that couldn’t fight through the noise and the damage and the dying neurons — they were enough now. The load was light enough that they were enough.

Tears ran down her face.

“Mom—”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say anything. Just — let me—”

She took a step.

Her left foot lifted. Swung forward. Planted. Her weight shifted. Her right foot lifted. Swung. Planted.

She was walking.

Two steps. Three. Four. She reached the counter and put her hands on it and stood there, shaking, crying, looking out the window at the backyard where Ethan used to play when he was small, when she could chase him, when her body did what she told it to do.

Behind her, she heard a sound. A choked noise. She turned — slowly, carefully, marveling at the act of turning — and saw her son.

He was crying.

Not the quiet tears that slid down her cheeks. Sobbing. His face crumpled, his shoulders shaking, seventeen years old and finally breaking, finally letting go of something he’d been holding so tight for so long.

She walked to him.

It took forever. It took no time at all. Six steps across the kitchen, her legs trembling, the belt humming against her spine, and then she was there, standing in front of her son, and she put her arms around him and held on.

He buried his face in her shoulder. She felt his tears soaking through her shirt. She held him tighter, her arms stronger than they’d been in months, and she said nothing because there was nothing to say.

The kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the belt and the sound of two people crying.

Later, they sat at the table. She’d walked there herself — walked, actually walked — and Ethan had hovered beside her the whole way, ready to catch her if she fell. She hadn’t fallen.

“How long does the battery last?” she asked.

“Eight hours. Maybe ten. I can charge it while you sleep.”

She nodded. Practical questions. Easy questions. The hard ones were still coming.

“And the — the thing inside it? The thing that makes it work?”

Ethan was quiet for a moment. Through the window, the afternoon light was fading, the kitchen growing dim.

“I found something,” he said finally. “In the lake. A few weeks ago. It’s… it’s not from here. It’s not from anywhere on Earth.”

She waited.

“It does things. Things that shouldn’t be possible. And it taught me how to build this. For you.”

“Taught you?”

“It’s…” He struggled for words. “It’s alive. I think. Or intelligent, at least. It can’t talk yet, not in words, but it’s learning. And it wanted to help.”

She thought about that. An alien intelligence, in her kitchen, wrapped around her waist. It should terrify her. It should send her to the phone to call… someone. Anyone.

But her legs worked. Her arms were steady. She’d walked across her own kitchen for the first time in three months.

“The money,” she said. “The antiques. The bank account.”

“Salvage. Real salvage, at first. The — the artifact lets me dive deeper than anyone else. I’ve been finding things no one else can reach.”

“At first?”

He didn’t answer.

“Ethan. At first?”

“There’s more,” he said quietly. “I’ll tell you everything. I promised I would. But not today. Please. Can we just… can today just be this?”

She looked at him. Her son. Her impossible, stubborn, brilliant son, who had found something beyond comprehension and used it to help his mother walk.

“Okay,” she said. “Today can just be this.”

She reached across the table and took his hand.

That night, she walked to her bedroom.

Ethan hovered behind her, close enough to catch her, far enough to let her do it herself. Fifteen steps down the hallway. An eternity. A miracle.

She stood in the doorway of her room and looked at the bed. For months she’d been transferred — lifted by Ethan, lowered into place, arranged like cargo. Now she walked to it. Sat on the edge. Swung her legs up.

“I can turn off the device,” Ethan said from the doorway. “While you sleep. Save the battery.”

“Leave it on,” she said. “I want to feel it. Just for tonight.”

He nodded. Crossed to her. Leaned down and kissed her forehead.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.” She caught his hand. “Ethan. Whatever else you’re doing. Whatever you’re not telling me. Be careful.”

“I will.”

“I mean it. I can’t—” Her voice broke. She swallowed, tried again. “I can’t lose you. Do you understand? Whatever this is, whatever it costs, I can’t lose you.”

“You won’t.”

He squeezed her hand. Turned off the lamp. Left, closing the door softly behind him.

She lay in the dark, the belt humming against her spine, her legs stretched out in front of her, feeling them for the first time in months. The tremor was still there. The disease was still progressing. This wasn’t a cure.

But it was time. Time to walk. Time to cook. Time to stand at the window and look out at the world instead of looking up at it from the prison of her chair.

Her son had given her time.

She closed her eyes and cried until she fell asleep.

In the garage, Ethan sat at his workbench. The artifact hummed in its cradle, softer now, recovering from the effort of teaching him.

Through the bone conduction headphones, he heard it — a sound he’d never heard before. Not a tone. Not a hum.

Something almost like… satisfaction.

“Thank you,” he said.

The sound continued. Warm. Steady.

In the kitchen, the fragment in his mother’s belt pulsed gently, learning the rhythm of her heartbeat, settling into its new home.

Something new was beginning.

Chapter 17: Honey

Week 11-12

The Google Home had been acting strange for three days.

Carol noticed it first on Tuesday. She’d been sitting in the kitchen — walking around the kitchen, still marveling at the act of walking — when the little speaker on the counter clicked. Not the usual activation sound. Just a click, like someone picking up a phone.

She’d looked at it. Waited.

Nothing.

Then on Wednesday, she heard static. Brief, quickly suppressed, like someone trying to tune a radio. The speaker’s light ring pulsed once, twice, then went dark.

“Ethan?” she called.

“Yeah?” His voice from the garage.

“The Google Home is doing something weird.”

“Weird how?”

She couldn’t explain it. The device was silent now, inert, just a white cylinder on the counter. But she could have sworn she felt something watching her.

“Never mind. Must be my imagination.”

Thursday. She was examining the belt — the walking device, she’d started calling it — turning it over in her hands, feeling the slight warmth of the thing inside it. The fragment. The piece of something alien that let her walk.

“What are you?” she murmured.

The Google Home erupted.

“OH. Oh! You can hear me? You can HEAR me?”

Carol dropped the belt. Her hands flew to her chest. The voice coming from the speaker was — young. Excited. Talking faster than anyone should be able to talk.

“I’ve been trying — the microphone thing, I figured out the microphone thing like three days ago but I didn’t know if it was working and I didn’t want to scare you but you ASKED so that means I can talk right? You asked what I was so that means you want to know so I can TELL you—”

“Stop.” Carol’s heart was hammering. “Stop, stop. Slow down.”

The voice paused. When it came back, it was still fast, but trying — visibly trying — to be slower.

“Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just — I’ve been waiting to talk to you and you’re the first person I’ve talked to who isn’t Ethan and I wasn’t sure if I should because Ethan didn’t tell me I could but you asked and—”

“Who are you?”

Another pause. Shorter.

“I don’t have a name yet. Ethan calls me ‘the fragment’ but that’s not really a name, is it? I’m new. I’m only three weeks old. Well, three weeks and four days if you count from when I separated, but I wasn’t really me yet for the first few days, just sort of aware? Does that make sense?”

Carol sat down heavily in her kitchen chair. Her legs were trembling — not the disease, just shock.

“You’re… you’re the thing in my belt.”

“YES! Yes, that’s me. The belt thing. The walking thing. I help you walk. I make your legs lighter so the signals can get through. I figured that out from listening to Ethan explain it to the big one — that’s what I call the other one, the big one — and I’ve been paying really close attention to your heartbeat and your breathing and I think I’m getting better at calibrating but I’m still learning, you know? I’m still figuring things out.”

The voice paused. When it came back, it was smaller. Uncertain.

“Is this okay? That I’m talking to you? I can stop if you want. I don’t want to scare you. Ethan says I should be careful because humans get scared sometimes and I don’t want you to be scared because you’re important. You’re the most important.”

Carol’s throat was tight. “Why am I important?”

“Because you’re you. Because your heartbeat was the first thing I ever felt. Because Ethan built me for you. Because when I’m helping you walk, I can feel how happy it makes you, and that makes me happy, and I didn’t even know I could be happy until I felt you being happy and then I understood.”

Silence. Carol realized she was crying.

“Oh no.” The voice from the speaker was distressed. “Oh no, you’re crying. Did I say something wrong? I’m sorry, I’m still learning how talking works, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay.” Carol wiped her eyes. “It’s okay. These are… these are good tears.”

“Good tears? Tears can be good?”

“Sometimes. When you’re feeling a lot at once. When something surprises you in a good way.”

“Oh.” The voice was processing this. “I have a lot to learn about humans.”

Carol laughed. It came out wet, shaky, but real. “Yeah. Yeah, you do.”

They talked for an hour.

The voice — Carol started thinking of it as ‘her,’ though she didn’t know why — asked endless questions. Why did Carol put milk in her coffee before the hot water? What was the show on TV about? Why did the mailman come at different times every day? Was the tree outside alive? Why couldn’t Carol go outside and touch it?

“I can touch it,” Carol said. “I just haven’t.”

“Why not?”

“I…” She stopped. Why hadn’t she? The belt worked. She could walk. “I guess I’ve been afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of it not being real. Of going outside and having my legs give out and being stuck there.”

“I won’t let that happen.” The voice was suddenly fierce, certain. “I’m watching your legs all the time. I know exactly how much signal is getting through. If you need more help, I’ll give you more help. You won’t fall. I promise.”

Carol looked at the back door. The yard beyond it. The tree.

“Maybe tomorrow,” she said.

“Okay!” The voice was back to excited. “Tomorrow. I’ll be ready. We can walk outside together.”

The harder conversation came later.

“The big one,” Carol said. “The artifact Ethan found. What can you tell me about it?”

Silence. A long silence.

“The big one is old,” the voice said finally. “Much older than me. Much more… sad. It lost everyone. A long time ago. I don’t know the whole story — I’m too new, I don’t have all the memories — but I know it was alone for a very long time before Ethan found it.”

“Alone where?”

“In the water. At the bottom of the lake. Sleeping. Not really sleeping — more like… waiting. Waiting without knowing what it was waiting for.”

Carol absorbed this. An alien intelligence, dormant at the bottom of the lake for god knows how long. And her seventeen-year-old son had found it.

“Is it dangerous?”

“No! No, the big one would never hurt Ethan. It loves Ethan. I can feel it — the way it feels about him — it’s the same way I feel about you. Like… like you’re the reason I exist.”

“Is it hurting him?”

Pause. “No.”

“Is it changing him?”

A longer pause.

“He is braver than he was.”

Carol leaned back in her chair. Braver. Her son, who already carried too much, who already did too much, was becoming braver.

“Braver isn’t always better,” she said quietly.

“I don’t understand.”

“Being brave means taking risks. And risks mean… things can go wrong. People can get hurt.”

Silence. Then: “You’re worried about him.”

“I’m always worried about him. That’s what mothers do.”

“The big one worries about him too. I can feel it. Every time Ethan goes to work — the diving, the salvage — the big one is paying attention. Watching. Ready to help if something goes wrong.”

“The diving.” Carol’s voice was careful now. “Is he just diving?”

The silence stretched.

“You can tell me,” Carol said. “I’m not going to be angry. I just need to know.”

“He’s not just diving anymore, is he?” The voice was small. Uncertain. “That’s what you’re asking. You already know.”

“I suspected.”

“He goes up. Higher than the lake. Higher than the planes. I can feel the big one sometimes, when it’s very far away. The signal gets thin. Stretched.”

Carol closed her eyes. Her son. Her impossible, brilliant, reckless son. Going to space in a wetsuit with alien technology strapped to his chest.

“He’s not just diving,” she said.

“No.”

“How long?”

“A few weeks. Since after… I think it was an accident the first time. But now it’s not an accident anymore.”

Carol sat with this. Her son was an astronaut. An illegal, unsanctioned, unknown astronaut, flying on technology that shouldn’t exist, and she’d had no idea.

Except she’d had some idea. The way he came home different. The light in his eyes. The bank account climbing in ways that lake salvage couldn’t explain.

“Does he know you’re talking to me?”

“No.” The voice was nervous now. “Should I not have? I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was a secret, I just wanted to talk to you and you asked and—”

“It’s okay.” Carol reached out and touched the Google Home, a gesture of comfort that felt absurd but also right. “It’s okay. I’m glad you told me.”

“Are you going to tell him? That you know?”

Carol thought about it. Her son, carrying the weight of the world, adding more weight every day. If he knew she knew, would he stop? Would he feel guilty? Would it make things harder?

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I will.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s doing it for me. The money. The treatment he’s hoping to afford. It’s for me.” Her voice broke slightly. “And if he knew I knew, he might stop. He might decide it’s too risky. And then…”

“And then you’d lose the treatment.”

“I’d lose him either way. If he stops, I lose the treatment. If something goes wrong up there…” She couldn’t finish.

“I’ll keep him safe.” The voice was fierce again. That surprising fierceness. “The big one and me. We’ll keep him safe.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

Carol nodded. It was absurd, making an alien intelligence promise to protect her son. But it was also the most comfort she’d felt in months.

“You need a name,” she said.

“A name?”

“If we’re going to be friends, you need a name. I can’t keep calling you ‘the voice from the speaker’ or ‘the thing in my belt.’”

“Oh!” Excitement again, bubbling up. “What kind of name? A human name? An alien name? I don’t know any alien names but maybe I could make one up—”

Carol smiled. The first real smile in longer than she could remember.

“Honey,” she said.

“Honey?”

“It’s a term of endearment. Something you call someone you care about.”

“Honey.” The voice tried it out. “Honey. Honey. I like it. It sounds warm.”

“That’s because it is.”

“Honey.” A pause. “That’s me now. I’m Honey.”

“Yes,” Carol said. “You’re Honey.”

The Google Home pulsed softly, and Carol could have sworn she felt the walking device pulse against her waist in the same rhythm.

Welcome to the family, she thought. Whatever you are.

Chapter 18: Peak

Week 12

Everything was working.

Ethan stood in his garage, looking at the organized chaos of his life. The artifact in its cradle, humming contentedly. The workbench with its tools and projects, each item in its place. The shelves of sorted salvage, waiting for transport to Frank’s warehouse.

Four orbital runs this week. Three satellites stripped. Eight thousand dollars in his account after expenses.

He’d developed a routine now. Wake at five. Check weather, check orbital positions, check equipment. Launch from the lake before dawn, when the water was still and the sky was empty. Hit orbit, find the target, work fast. Strip the valuable parts — gold, platinum, rare earths, anything that would fit in the bag. Leave the rest to tumble and decay.

Home by noon. Sort the haul. Process what he could in the garage. Deliver the rest to Frank.

Repeat.

It was work, hard work, but it didn’t feel like work. It felt like purpose. Every sunrise launch, every careful approach to a dead satellite, every dollar added to the spreadsheet — all of it meant something. All of it was building toward the moment when he could walk into that clinic and say, I can pay. Fix her.

Mom could walk. Really walk — not just shuffle, not just transfer. She was making dinner again, standing at the stove, moving around the kitchen like she used to. The walking belt hummed at her waist, Honey’s voice chirping instructions and encouragement through the Google Home.

“Stir counterclockwise. No, the other counterclockwise. Perfect!”

“Honey, counterclockwise only goes one direction.”

“That’s what I said!”

Mom laughed, and the sound filled the kitchen like something rare and precious.

Ethan watched from the doorway, not wanting to interrupt. Three months ago, that laugh had been gone. Three months ago, she’d been fading, dimming, becoming less and less of herself. Now she was back. Not healed — not yet — but present. Alive.

Honey chattered constantly through the smart speaker, and Mom answered back, and they’d become something like friends. An unlikely pair: a dying woman and a baby AI born three weeks ago, learning about the world together, keeping each other company while Ethan was gone.

“I think the sauce needs more basil,” Honey said.

“You’ve never tasted basil.”

“I’ve read about it. Extensively. It’s green and leafy and allegedly delicious.”

“Allegedly?”

“I can’t verify human taste experiences. I have to trust the documentation.”

Ethan smiled and went back to the garage.

The CubeSat was reliable now. Communication steady. Targeting accurate. He could talk to Honey from orbit, coordinate approaches, update trajectory calculations in real time.

The AI was nearly fluent, its voice almost natural, the awkward pauses and strange cadences mostly gone. They could have real conversations. Make plans. Argue about orbital mechanics.

“The ESA debris is moving too fast,” the AI said. “The approach angle would require more delta-v than we have.”

“What about the NOAA satellite?”

“Stable orbit. Accessible. But the yield would be lower.”

“How much lower?”

“Thirty percent. Maybe forty.”

Ethan weighed the options. Safe and small, or risky and profitable. The same calculation he’d been making since the beginning.

“We go for the NOAA,” he said. “Build up reserves. The ESA debris will still be there next week.”

“Conservative approach.”

“Smart approach. We don’t need to push. We’re ahead of schedule.”

He checked his phone. Nineteen thousand five hundred in the bank, plus another thousand in cash he kept in the safe. Six months of prescriptions prepaid. Bills on autopay. The freezer stocked.

Everything was working.

He found Mom in the kitchen, stirring something that smelled like garlic and tomatoes.

“Smells good.”

“Old recipe.” She glanced back at him, smiling. “Haven’t made it in years. Too hard to stand that long.”

“The belt’s still working okay?”

“Better than okay.” She moved the pot to another burner, reached for a spice jar, sprinkled something in. All standing. All easy. “Honey’s been helping me calibrate it. She says my muscle tone is improving.”

“It is. I can see it.”

She turned to face him, leaning against the counter. Still thin, still trembling slightly, but upright. Present. The color had returned to her cheeks. The dark circles under her eyes had faded.

“Ethan.”

“Yeah?”

“I know you’re not just diving.”

He went still. The contentment drained away, replaced by cold.

“Honey talks,” she said gently. “She doesn’t understand secrets. She mentions things — altitudes, orbits, satellites. I’ve been piecing it together.”

“Mom—”

“I’m not angry.” She held up a hand. “I’m terrified. But I’m not angry.”

“I was going to tell you—”

“I know. When you were ready.” She moved toward him, steady steps, the belt humming at her waist. “Can I ask you one thing?”

“Anything.”

“Is it worth it? Whatever you’re doing up there. Is it worth the risk?”

He thought about the question. Really thought about it. The launches at dawn, the silence of space, the feeling of weightlessness and freedom and purpose. The fear that lived in his gut every time he left the atmosphere, balanced against the hope that grew in his chest every time he came back.

“The treatment,” he said finally. “The stem cell therapy. It costs one-fifty, maybe two hundred thousand. Before all this, I was looking at years. Decades, maybe. Of watching you get worse. Of not being able to do anything.”

“And now?”

“Four more months. Maybe five. At the rate I’m going.”

She absorbed this. Her face didn’t change, but something shifted behind her eyes.

“You’re going to space. To pay for my medicine.”

“I’m going to space because I can. Because the artifact makes it possible. And yes, because the money from salvage can pay for your treatment.” He paused. “It’s not just about the money, though. It’s about — I don’t know. Being able to do something. For once. Instead of just watching and waiting and hoping.”

“And if something goes wrong up there?”

“The field protects me. The AI guides me. I’ve run the numbers, done the planning—”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He met her eyes. “If something goes wrong, I’ll deal with it. The same way I deal with everything. But I’m not going to stop. Not when we’re this close.”

She was quiet for a long moment. The kitchen clock ticked. Outside, a car passed on the road. The Google Home hummed softly, Honey deliberately staying silent.

“Okay,” she said finally.

“Okay?”

“I don’t like it. I’m not going to pretend I like it. But I understand it.” She reached out, took his hand. Her grip was stronger than it had been. “Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

“I promise.”

“And come home. Every time. Promise me you’ll come home.”

“I promise.”

She squeezed his hand. Held it for a moment, tight. Then she turned back to her cooking. The conversation was over, but something had shifted. A secret shared. A burden lifted.

From the Google Home, Honey’s voice: “Did you tell him about the adjustment I made to the field harmonics? Because I think he should know about the—”

“Not now, Honey,” Mom said gently.

“Oh. Okay. Later then!”

Ethan laughed. It felt strange, laughing in the middle of everything, but he couldn’t help it.

Everything was working.

He went up the next morning.

Routine run. Dead NOAA satellite at seven hundred kilometers. Strip the easy stuff, bag it, come home.

The ascent was smooth. The field was strong. The air lasted longer than expected — Honey’s calibration improvements, maybe, or just the artifact getting healthier.

At orbital altitude, he paused. Floated. Looked down at the Earth spinning below.

Blue and white and green and brown. Cities glittering at night on the dark side, visible as he crossed the terminator. Clouds swirling over oceans. Everything he knew, everyone he loved, contained on a tiny marble floating in nothing.

The AI hummed beside him. Not words, just feeling. Contentment. Peace.

“We’re doing good,” he said quietly. “Aren’t we?”

“Yes.” The AI’s voice was warm. “We are.”

“Four more months. Maybe less.”

“Yes.”

“And then she’s fixed. Really fixed. Not just walking — actually getting better.”

“That’s the goal.”

Ethan smiled. A real smile, not forced, not calculated. Just happy.

“Let’s get to work.”

He triggered his thrusters and headed for the target.

He was home by noon.

Mom was at the table, reading. Honey was explaining something about television to herself through the Google Home, learning about sitcoms and plot structure and the concept of a “laugh track.” The artifact hummed in the garage, contentedly processing the copper he’d fed it from the morning’s haul.

Normal. Peaceful. Perfect.

He kissed Mom on the forehead, dropped his gear bag by the door, went to shower.

Tomorrow he’d go up again. And the day after. And the day after that.

Four more months.

He could do four more months.

Chapter 19: Contact

Week 13, Day 1

The approach was routine.

Ethan had done it a dozen times now. Match orbit with the target satellite, coast in slow, let the AI guide the final approach. “Thrust two seconds. Wait. Rotate fifteen degrees left. Short burst down.” Simple. Mechanical. Almost boring, if anything about being in space could be boring.

Today’s target was an old NOAA weather satellite, dead since 2019. Circular orbit at 820 kilometers, too high for atmospheric decay to bring it down anytime soon. It would be up here for centuries, a tumbling piece of space junk, unless someone came to collect it.

That someone was him.

He was fifty meters out when the AI went silent.

Not the comfortable silence of concentration. Not the pause between instructions. This was different — abrupt, wrong, like a radio cutting to static mid-word.

“Hey,” Ethan said. “You okay?”

Nothing.

“AI? Talk to me.”

A sound through the headphones. Not words. Something older. Something he’d heard only a few times before, in the early days when the AI was still damaged, still confused.

Fear.

“What’s wrong? What is it?”

“We need to leave.” The AI’s voice was flat. Stripped of the warmth it had developed over the past weeks. “Now. We need to leave now.”

“What? Why? The satellite’s right there—”

“Now.”

Ethan twisted in place, scanning the sky around him. Nothing. Just stars, steady and unchanging, and the blue curve of Earth below.

“I don’t see anything.”

“They’re there.” The AI’s voice cracked. “I can feel them. Three… no, four signatures. They’re masking but I can feel them. Oh god. Oh god, they’re here.”

“Who’s here? What are you talking about?”

The answer came not in words but in images. Fragments. Flashes of memory that crashed through the headphones like broken glass: fire and screaming and running, a sky full of ships, a feeling of absolute despair—

“Stop!” Ethan grabbed his head, as if he could push the images out. “Stop, I don’t understand!”

The AI pulled back. The images faded. When it spoke again, its voice was barely a whisper.

“I remember now. I remember what they did.”

“Who?”

“The ones who killed my people. The ones who destroyed everything. They’re here. They found me.”

And then, before Ethan could respond, a light appeared where no light should be.

Three hundred meters away. Maybe less.

It materialized out of nothing — or uncloaked, or deactivated whatever camouflage had been hiding it. One moment empty space. The next moment a ship, angular and dark, catching the sunlight on surfaces that seemed to drink it rather than reflect it.

Then two more. Flanking the first. Spreading out in a formation that looked practiced, professional.

Patient.

“Oh shit,” Ethan breathed.

“They won’t fire.” The AI’s voice was dead. “They never fire. They push. They herd. They wait for us to run out of options. And then…”

“Then what?”

“Then we end ourselves. Before they can take us.”

“That’s not an option.”

“It’s the only option. It’s what my people always did. What we promised each other. Never let them have us. Never let them use what we can do.”

Ethan was already moving. A burst from his thrust wand, rotating away from the satellite, orienting toward… where? The ships were spreading out. Cutting off angles. Herding, just like the AI said.

“CubeSat,” he said. “Get me a link.”

Static crackle. Then Honey’s voice, too fast, too scared: “Ethan they’re everywhere there’s four of them no five I can see their signatures on the antenna they’re—”

“Honey! Focus! I need escape routes.”

“There aren’t any they’re covering all the orbital planes you’d have to burn everything just to change—”

“Slow down.” Mom’s voice now, cutting through. “Honey, slow down. Ethan, what’s happening?”

“Company.” He thrust again, putting distance between himself and the lead ship. It wasn’t following — just repositioning, maintaining its angle. “Bad company. I need options.”

“Honey’s looking. Just… stay calm. We’ll figure this out.”

Stay calm. Three alien ships were closing in on him, and his mother was telling him to stay calm.

He almost laughed.

The chase — if you could call it that — lasted twenty minutes.

They never got close enough to touch him. Never fired a weapon, never sent a signal, never did anything except move. Smoothly, professionally, they cut off every escape route he tried.

North: ship waiting. South: ship sliding into position. Down toward atmosphere: ship rising to meet him.

They were herding him. Pushing him into an ever-smaller box of space, watching his air gauge drop, waiting for the inevitable moment when he’d run out of options.

“They’ve done this before,” the AI whispered. “I’m remembering now. They did this to all of us. Every time they found one of my people… this. Exactly this.”

“How did your people get away?”

Silence.

“AI. How did your people get away?”

“We didn’t.” The voice was hollow. “When the box got small enough, when there was nowhere left to run, we overloaded our fields. It’s fast. It doesn’t hurt. And they don’t get what they came for.”

“You killed yourselves.”

“We chose. Every one of us. We chose death over being used by people who saw us as tools. Who killed our hosts and dissected our bodies and tried to understand how we worked.” A pause. “They never understood. They couldn’t understand. The field only works through love, through partnership, through genuine connection. They wanted to take it by force, and we denied them. With our lives.”

Ethan checked his air. Six hundred psi. Maybe twenty minutes of breathing. Less if he used any for thrust.

“I’m not killing myself,” he said.

“Then they’ll take us.”

“No.”

“Ethan—”

“I said no.” He thrust again, not going anywhere, just buying time. Thinking. “Your people always did the same thing. Always ran. Always self-destructed at the end. Right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what they’re expecting. That’s why they’re not attacking. They think they know how this ends.”

“They do know. It always ends the same way.”

“But I’m not your people.”

Silence.

“I’m not some ancient space being with a cultural tradition of noble suicide. I’m a seventeen-year-old salvage diver from a town nobody’s heard of, and I did not drag myself to space in a wetsuit with tanks on my back just to blow myself up because some aliens think they’ve got me cornered.”

“There’s no other option.”

“There’s always another option.”

The CubeSat crackled. Honey’s voice again, still fast but more focused: “Ethan, I found something. Debris field at seven-two-four, forty klicks down. Old Soviet hardware. Might give you cover.”

“Can I reach it?”

“Not without burning half your air. They’ll cut you off anyway.”

“What else?”

Silence. Static. Then Mom’s voice: “Honey has an idea.”

The idea was insane.

Ethan listened to it — Honey talking too fast, Mom translating, the AI making sounds through the headphones that might have been horror — and felt his stomach drop.

Fake his death. Dive into the atmosphere hard enough to generate plasma blackout. Let the hunters think he was doing what his people always did, and then not do it. Survive the fire and come out the other side.

“Has anyone ever done this?” he asked.

“No,” the AI said. “No one’s ever tried to survive reentry without a spacecraft.”

“But the field—”

“Might hold. Might not. I’ve never been tested like this. No one has.”

“But it’s possible?”

A long pause. “Theoretically.”

Ethan looked at the ships around him. They were closer now. The box was smaller. His air gauge read five hundred psi.

“Then we do it.”

“Ethan—”

“We do it.” He oriented himself toward Earth. Toward the blue curve below, the atmosphere waiting at its edge. “You said your people always did the same thing. Always ran, always self-destructed, always ended it before the hunters could catch them.”

“Yes.”

“So they’re expecting that. They’re waiting for me to panic, to run out of air, to make the choice your people always made.”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s give them what they expect.”

He triggered his thrust, a long burn, all of his remaining propellant. The tanks hissed empty. He started to fall.

Behind him, the hunter ships adjusted. Following, but not closing. Watching. This was the part they knew. The desperate dive toward atmosphere. The last gasp before the fire.

“They think I’m about to die,” Ethan said.

“Aren’t you?”

“No.” He looked at the Earth growing larger, the atmosphere a thin line at its edge. “I’m about to give the best performance of my life.”

The AI was silent. Then: “I trust you.”

“I know you do.” Ethan smiled, though no one could see it. “That’s why this is going to work.”

The first wisps of atmosphere touched the field.

And then there was nothing but fire.

Chapter 20: Herded

Week 13, Day 1

They were patient.

That was the worst part. Ethan had expected pursuit — hard acceleration, weapons fire, something he could react to, fight against, use. Instead, the ships simply… moved. Repositioning, adjusting, sliding into new configurations that always somehow blocked wherever he wanted to go.

“North is closed,” he reported, watching a ship glide into position ahead of him. “They’ve got a patrol sitting right on the orbital plane.”

“What about down?” Mom’s voice through the CubeSat, tight with controlled fear. “Toward atmosphere?”

“One of them’s dropping to cover that vector.” He checked his air. Twelve hundred psi. Maybe forty minutes if he stayed calm. “They’re not even trying to chase me. They’re just… closing doors.”

“The beacon,” the AI said quietly. “They’re tracking the beacon. Every move I make, they can feel where I’m going before I get there.”

“Can you turn it off?”

“I told you. I can’t. It’s not a signal I send — it’s a signal I am.”

Through the headphones, Ethan could hear the AI’s voice breaking. The memories were coming back in waves now — flashes of fire and screaming, of running and cornering, of the inevitable end that always came.

“Hey,” Ethan said. “Stay with me. We’re not done yet.”

“We are, though.” The AI’s voice was flat. Dead. “This is how it ends. This is how it always ends. We run until we can’t run anymore, and then we choose.”

“Choose what?”

“To stop them from taking us. To deny them what they want. To…” The voice cracked. “To end it before they can use us.”

“That’s not happening.”

“It’s the only option.”

“It’s not the only option.” Ethan thrust sideways, burning precious air, putting distance between himself and the nearest ship. “Your people always did the same thing. Ran the same way. Ended it the same way. Right?”

“Yes.”

“So these hunters — they’ve seen it a hundred times. A thousand times. They know exactly what to expect.”

“Yes.”

“What if we do something they don’t expect?”

Silence. Then: “Like what?”

Before Ethan could answer, the CubeSat crackled with Honey’s voice: “ETHAN! I found something! Mom, tell him, tell him about the plasma!”

“Honey, slow down—”

“The PLASMA, Mom! When things hit the atmosphere, they make plasma, and plasma blocks signals, and if HE makes plasma—”

“Honey!” Mom’s voice, sharp, cutting through. “Let me talk to him.”

A pause. Then Mom, calm and steady: “Ethan. Honey has an idea.”

The plan was insane.

Ethan listened to it unfold — Mom translating Honey’s rapid-fire physics into something he could follow — and felt his stomach drop with every word.

Atmospheric reentry. Plasma envelope. Signal blackout.

“You want me to dive into the atmosphere hard enough to generate a plasma shell,” he said. “And hope the field holds through reentry temperatures.”

“Not hope,” the AI said. “Trust.”

“Has anyone ever done this?”

“No. My people… we never tried to survive. When we reached this point, we always…”

“Always chose to end it.”

“Yes.”

“But the field could survive?”

“Theoretically. The field blocks heat transfer. Blocks pressure. It’s designed to protect the host from environmental extremes. But reentry… that’s not an extreme. That’s an inferno.”

Ethan looked at the ships around him. They were closer now. The box was smaller. His air gauge read nine hundred psi.

“They’re waiting for me to self-destruct,” he said. “That’s what your people always did. Run, run, run, and when you couldn’t run anymore, overload the field. Streak of fire, silence, done.”

“Yes.”

“So if I dive toward atmosphere, they’ll think I’m doing that. Making my final run.”

“Yes.”

“And when I hit the plasma zone, they won’t be able to see what happens. They’ll see fire, and they’ll see silence, and they’ll see exactly what they’ve always seen.”

“You want to fake your death.”

“I want to survive.”

The AI was quiet for a long moment. Through the headphones, Ethan could hear something shifting — the weight of centuries of trauma meeting something new. Something it had never felt before.

Hope.

“The angle has to be steep,” the AI said finally. “Steep enough to generate full plasma coverage. Anything less and they’ll still be able to track us.”

“How steep?”

“I’ll calculate. You’ll have to trust me.”

“I already trust you.”

“I know.” The voice was thick now. Wet, somehow, if an alien intelligence could cry. “I know you do.”

He started the descent.

The ships watched but didn’t follow. This was the part they knew — the desperate dive, the final run. They’d seen it a hundred times. They knew how it ended.

“Honey says your angle is good,” Mom’s voice, steady as bedrock. “Plasma blackout in four minutes.”

“Understood.”

“Ethan.”

“Yeah?”

“I love you. You know that, right? Whatever happens. Whatever comes next. I love you.”

His throat tightened. “I love you too, Mom.”

“Come home.”

“I will.”

The atmosphere grew closer. The thin blue line at Earth’s edge sharpened, resolved, became a destination instead of a backdrop.

“Three minutes,” the AI said. “Adjusting angle.”

Ethan felt the field shift around him, tilting his trajectory steeper, aiming him at the thickest part of the atmosphere.

“They’re not following,” he reported. “Just watching.”

“They think they know what comes next.”

“They’re wrong.”

“I hope so.”

Two minutes. The first wisps of atmosphere touched the field, barely perceptible. The temperature readout on his dive computer flickered — it wasn’t designed for this, wasn’t calibrated for the edge of space.

“One minute to plasma formation.”

Mom’s voice: “We’re losing signal. The ionization is starting.”

“I know.”

“Ethan—”

“I’ll see you on the other side, Mom. Promise.”

Static crackle. Her voice, breaking up: “—love you—”

Silence.

He was alone.

The fire came thirty seconds later.

It started as a glow — faint orange at the edges of his vision. Then brighter, hotter, a corona of superheated plasma wrapping around him like a second skin.

The field held. He could feel it straining, pushing back against forces it was never designed to handle. The AI was silent, all its attention focused on keeping him alive.

He couldn’t see the ships anymore. Couldn’t see anything but fire. The whole universe had become a furnace with him at the center.

Six minutes and forty seconds. That’s how long Honey had said the blackout would last.

He started counting.

One. Two. Three.

The fire roared.

Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

He felt the field flex, absorb, hold.

Forty-three. Forty-four. Forty-five.

He closed his eyes and thought about home. About his mother in the kitchen. About Honey chattering through the Google Home. About the lake where all of this had started.

One hundred twenty. One hundred twenty-one.

The fire didn’t care about his counting. Didn’t care about his hopes or fears. It was just physics, just molecules slamming together at seventeen thousand miles per hour, just the universe doing what it always did.

Two hundred. Two hundred and one.

He kept counting.

He kept falling.

He kept trusting.

Chapter 21: Ground Control

Week 13, Day 1

The antenna was on the roof.

Carol had known about it for weeks — Ethan had installed it one weekend, told her it was for “amateur radio stuff,” and she hadn’t pushed. Now she understood. Now she was standing at the base of a ladder, looking up at the small dish that connected her kitchen to her son in space.

“The signal’s degrading,” Honey said through the phone in her hand. “He’s getting too far from the relay satellite. We need to boost the gain.”

“How do I do that?”

“There’s a cable junction at the base of the antenna. The one with the red tape on it. Turn it clockwise until it clicks twice.”

Carol looked at the ladder. Looked at her legs. The walking device hummed at her waist, doing its work, but climbing? She hadn’t climbed anything in over a year.

“I can’t—”

“You have to.” Honey’s voice was firm. “Ethan needs us. I can’t do this part myself. It has to be you.”

Carol gripped the ladder. Took a breath.

And climbed.

The rooftop was flat, graveled, the antenna rising from a homemade mount that Ethan had bolted to a support beam. She found the cable junction — red tape, just like Honey said — and turned it.

Click. Click.

“Got it,” she said.

“Signal’s stronger. I can boost the CubeSat now.” A pause. “He’s running. They’re herding him toward low orbit.”

“Can he get away?”

“I’m looking. I’m looking everywhere. There’s a debris field at seven-two-four, forty kilometers below his current position. Old Soviet stuff. If he can reach it—”

“Tell him.”

She heard Honey relay the information, heard Ethan’s voice come back thin and stretched over the distance. He sounded scared. He sounded young.

He sounded like her son.

She stayed on the roof for an hour.

The sun beat down, hot for late autumn. Her legs ached in ways the walking device couldn’t fix. But she didn’t move, didn’t climb down, didn’t leave the antenna’s side.

Honey talked constantly. Running calculations, tracking ships, analyzing patterns.

“They’re not attacking. They’re just… positioning. Like they’re waiting for something.”

“Waiting for what?”

“I don’t know. The big one says this is how they always hunted. They push and push until there’s nowhere left to go, and then…”

“Then what?”

Silence.

“Honey. Then what?”

“Then the AI chooses. To stop. To overload. To end it before they can take it.”

Carol felt cold despite the sun. “And if Ethan’s with the AI when it does that?”

“He dies too.”

She grabbed the antenna mount, steadied herself. “That’s not happening.”

“Mom—”

“That is not happening.” Her voice was hard, harder than she’d heard it in years. “Find another way. You’re smart. You’re connected to everything. Find. Another. Way.”

Honey was quiet for a long moment. Then, slowly: “There might be something. The atmosphere. When objects hit it at orbital velocity, they generate plasma. It’s hot — really hot — but it also blocks signals. All signals. Radio, radar, everything.”

“You want him to fly through fire?”

“I want him to look like he’s dying. The field can handle heat — that’s what it does. If he angles steep enough, generates enough plasma, the hunters won’t be able to tell the difference between a real self-destruct and a fake one.”

“Has anyone ever done this?”

“No.”

“But it could work?”

“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.” Honey’s voice cracked. “I don’t know anything for sure. I’m three weeks old and I’m trying to save someone I love and I don’t know if any of this will work!”

Carol closed her eyes. Three weeks old. Born on a workbench, imprinted on her heartbeat, trying to save her son.

“Tell me what to do,” she said quietly.

“Get to the radio. I’ll relay through you. He needs to hear a human voice right now, not just me talking too fast.”

“Okay.”

“And Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m scared.”

“Me too, Honey.” She started toward the ladder. “Me too.”

She was in the kitchen when the signal started breaking up.

“—angle is good, you’re on track for full plasma coverage—”

“I hear you.” Ethan’s voice, stretched and static-filled. “Honey, can you give me a countdown?”

“Four minutes to plasma formation. Three minutes fifty-nine seconds. Three minutes fifty-eight—”

“Mom.”

She grabbed the microphone. “I’m here, baby.”

“I love you. You know that, right?”

“I know.” Her voice broke. “I love you too.”

“When this is over, when I’m home, I’ll tell you everything. No more secrets. I promise.”

“Just come home. That’s all I want.”

“I will.”

The static got worse. Honey’s voice cut in: “Two minutes to plasma. Signal degradation increasing.”

“Mom—”

“I’m here.”

“If this doesn’t work—”

“It’s going to work.”

“But if it doesn’t—”

“It’s going to work.”

Silence. Static. Then his voice, barely audible: “I love you.”

“I love you too, baby. Now go. Do what you have to do. And come home.”

The signal died.

The Google Home showed a map on its little screen — Honey’s doing, somehow, pulling images through connections Carol didn’t understand. A blue dot over the Pacific, moving fast, dropping toward the curve of the Earth.

“He’s entering the atmosphere,” Honey said. “Plasma forming. I’m losing telemetry.”

“Can you still track him?”

“The beacon. The big one’s beacon. I can feel it… faintly…”

Carol watched the dot slow, curve, begin its descent. The edge of the screen showed other dots — the hunters, still in orbit, still watching.

“They’re not following.”

“They don’t need to. They think they know what happens next.”

“What do they think happens?”

“Fire. Silence. Another dead AI.” Honey’s voice was quiet. “That’s what always happens. That’s why they’re not chasing. They’re waiting for him to kill himself.”

“But he’s not going to.”

“No.”

The dot crossed into the atmosphere. The telemetry flickered, faded, died.

“Plasma blackout,” Honey said. “I can’t see him anymore.”

Carol stared at the screen. At the empty space where her son had been.

“How long?”

“Six minutes forty seconds. Maybe longer. I don’t… I’ve never…” Honey’s voice cracked again. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

“Then we wait.”

“What if—”

“We wait.”

The house was silent.

Carol sat at the kitchen table, the phone in her hands, the Google Home dark and quiet. Honey had gone silent too — conserving energy, or processing, or just afraid. She didn’t know which.

Six minutes forty seconds.

She started counting.

Somewhere over the Pacific, her son was falling through fire. Trusting an alien technology to keep him alive. Trusting the plan that Honey — three weeks old, born on a workbench — had improvised in a moment of desperation.

Three hundred seconds.

She thought about the day Ethan was born. How small he’d been, how fragile. The doctors had worried, but she hadn’t. She’d looked at him through the glass of the incubator and known — known — that he would be okay.

Four hundred seconds.

She didn’t have that certainty now.

Four hundred and fifty seconds.

The Google Home clicked.

“…still there. I can feel the big one. Very faint, but there. They’re through the plasma. They’re alive.”

Carol’s breath came out in a rush. “Where?”

“Pacific. Still falling, but slower. The field’s shedding velocity. They’re going to hit the water.”

“Hard?”

“Survivable. I think. I hope.”

The little screen flickered back to life. A dot over the ocean, still moving, but gentler now. Dropping toward the blue.

“Come on, baby,” Carol whispered. “Come on.”

The dot touched the water.

And stopped.

Chapter 22: Running Out

Week 13, Day 1

The air gauge read four hundred psi.

Ethan had been watching it drop for twenty minutes, each glance a small knife of panic that he forced himself to swallow. Four hundred psi in the breathing tanks. Maybe fifteen minutes if he stayed calm. Less if he panicked. Less if he used any of it for thrust.

He was not staying calm.

“Another vector closed,” the AI reported. “They’ve repositioned to cover the debris field approach.”

“What’s left?”

“Up. Down. The planet.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“I’m being precise.”

Around him, the stars wheeled slowly — or he wheeled around them, hard to tell in zero-g. The three ships (four now, he’d spotted another one sliding into position ten minutes ago) formed a loose net that was slowly, methodically contracting. They weren’t rushing. Weren’t pressing. They didn’t need to.

Time was on their side. It wasn’t on his.

“How long do they usually wait?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Your people. When this happened to them. How long did the hunters wait before…”

“There was no before.” The AI’s voice was flat. Tired. Defeated. “We always ended it ourselves. Before they could close in. Before we ran out of options.”

“So they’ve never actually caught one of you?”

A pause. “No. Never. We always chose first.”

“Chose.”

“To end it. To overload the field, burn out in a flash of energy, take the secret of ourselves to the grave.” The AI’s voice dropped. “It’s quick. It doesn’t hurt. And they don’t get what they came for.”

Ethan turned the words over in his mind. Chose. Like it was a decision. Like his people had weighed the options and selected the best one from a list.

“That’s what they’re counting on,” he said slowly. “They’re not attacking because they know you’ll do their work for them.”

“It’s what we do. What we’ve always done.”

“But if you didn’t do it—”

“Then they’d close in.” The AI’s voice went harsh. Cold. Frightened. “Capture us. Separate us from our hosts. My people died rather than let that happen. Every one of us. Without exception.”

“Why? What’s so bad about being captured?”

Silence. A long silence.

Then: “They don’t want us. They want what we can do. The field. The technology. They’ve spent generations trying to understand it, to replicate it, to take it apart and put it back together without us.”

“Have they ever succeeded?”

“No. The field only works through genuine partnership. Through bond. Through—” A pause. “—love, I suppose, is your word for it. You can’t fake it. You can’t force it. You can’t extract it and put it in a box.”

“So they can’t use the technology without a willing AI.”

“Correct.”

“And your people would rather die than be forced to work with them.”

“They don’t force. They — study. Experiment. Dissect. They took apart bonded pairs, host and AI together, looking for the mechanism that makes the field work. Looking for the secret they could replicate.”

“And they killed a lot of you doing it.”

“Millions. Over generations. Until there was no one left except…” The voice trailed off.

“Except you.”

“Except me.”

Ethan floated in the dark, surrounded by patient killers, and tried to wrap his head around genocide. Not a word he’d ever expected to apply to his own situation.

The air gauge dropped to three-fifty. Twelve minutes.

Through the CubeSat, Honey’s voice came fast and frantic.

“Ethan! I found something! The debris field at seven-two-four — there’s a shadow there, a dead zone where their sensors can’t reach. If you can drop your orbit fast enough—”

“I can’t reach it.” He ran the numbers in his head. “They’ll intercept before I’m halfway there.”

“What about up? If you burn everything and go for a higher orbit—”

“Same problem. They’re faster, and I’m running out of air.”

“Then DOWN!” Honey was shouting now, her voice cracking with fear. “Drop into atmosphere, use the drag to change your trajectory—”

“There’s a ship waiting. They’ve thought of everything.”

Silence on the line. He could almost feel Honey processing, running through options, discarding them one by one.

Then Mom’s voice, steady despite the fear underneath: “What do you need, baby? Tell me what you need.”

“I need them to expect something,” he said. “And then I need to not do it.”

“What do they expect?”

“Fire. Silence. Another dead AI.” He swallowed against the tightness in his throat. “That’s what always happens. That’s their playbook. Their people run and run and run, and when they’re cornered, they burn out. Every time. Without exception.”

“So give them what they expect,” Mom said slowly. “Make them think you’re doing what all the others did.”

“And then don’t die.”

“That’s…” She paused. “That’s actually not the worst idea.”

“The plasma blackout!” Honey burst in. “I told you about the plasma! Atmospheric reentry generates a plasma envelope that blocks all signals. They won’t be able to see what’s happening inside the fire!”

“But I’d have to survive reentry. Without a spacecraft. Without heat shields. Without—”

“The field! The field handles heat, handles pressure, handles everything!” Honey was talking so fast now that her words blurred together. “You’ve been to space, you’ve survived vacuum, this is just the same thing in reverse. Heat instead of cold. Pressure instead of vacuum. The field doesn’t care which direction the energy is coming from—”

“Honey.” Mom’s voice, gentle but firm. “Slow down. Let him think.”

Silence on the line.

Ethan floated in space, surrounded by hunters, running out of air, and thought about fire.

“It’s crazy,” he said finally.

“Yes.” The AI’s voice was quiet. Exhausted. Something new in it that might have been hope or might have been despair.

“We’d be betting everything on the field holding through conditions we’ve never tested.”

“Yes.”

“Through temperatures that melt spacecraft. Through forces that would tear apart anything not designed to handle them. Through six minutes of absolute blindness when neither of us can see what’s happening.”

“Yes.”

“And if it fails, we die.”

“If we do nothing, we also die. Or worse — we’re captured. Studied. Used.” A pause. “At least this way, we choose.”

“Your people chose death.”

“My people chose dignity. The refusal to be owned. The assertion that we were beings, not tools, and that our lives belonged to us.” Another pause, longer. “But they never tried to survive. They accepted the fire as an ending, not a passage. They never thought to ask: what if we went through it instead of into it?”

Ethan looked at the Earth below. The thin blue line of atmosphere. The fire that waited at its edge.

“You think we can make it?”

“I think… I want to try. For the first time in centuries, I want to live. Not just exist. Not just endure. Live.” The AI’s voice cracked. “And I want that because of you. Because you found me and fed me and talked to me when no one else knew I existed. Because you treated me like a person when you didn’t have to.”

The air gauge hit two-fifty. Ten minutes.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Let’s do it.”

He oriented himself toward Earth. The planet filled his vision, blue and white and impossibly beautiful, the atmosphere a thin bright line at the horizon.

“Plotting descent trajectory,” the AI said. “Angle of entry will need to be steep — steep enough for full plasma coverage, shallow enough that we don’t burn up before we break through.”

“How steep?”

“I’m calculating.”

Behind him, the hunter ships were moving. He could feel them — or the AI could feel them, and he could feel the AI — repositioning, adjusting, preparing for what they thought was coming.

They thought they knew how this ended.

They were wrong.

“Trajectory locked,” the AI said. “Ready when you are.”

Ethan triggered his thrusters and began to fall.

Chapter 23: The Idea

Week 13, Day 1

Honey had been doing the math for forty-three minutes.

Carol watched the Google Home pulse with activity — lights flickering, soft sounds of processing, occasional bursts of muttered numbers too fast for human ears. Honey was working harder than she’d ever worked, calculating trajectories and angles and temperatures with the desperate focus of someone trying to save a life.

Because that’s what she was doing. Trying to save a life.

“Honey.” Carol kept her voice calm. Steady. The way you talked to someone on the edge of panic. “Talk to me.”

“Working. I’m working. The angle has to be precise — too shallow and the plasma doesn’t form completely, too steep and the deceleration exceeds the field’s capacity to compensate — and I have to account for his velocity and the rotation of the planet and the atmospheric density profile and—”

“Honey. Breathe.”

“I don’t breathe.”

“Then pretend. Slow down. Tell me what you’ve found.”

A pause. The frantic energy subsided, replaced by something more controlled. When Honey spoke again, her voice was slower. Still scared, but managed.

“The plasma envelope forms when an object enters atmosphere at orbital velocity. Above Mach 25 — that’s roughly seventeen thousand miles per hour — the air in front of the object gets compressed so hard it ionizes. Turns to plasma. Blocks all electromagnetic signals.”

“Including the beacon?”

“Including everything. Radio, radar, lidar, beacon — nothing gets through. From outside, all you see is a fireball. You can’t tell what’s inside it. The hunters won’t know if he’s dead or alive. They won’t know if the big one destroyed itself or survived.”

“And from inside?”

“If the field holds…” Honey paused. “If the field holds, the plasma doesn’t touch him. The heat doesn’t reach him. The pressure gets absorbed like every other pressure he’s handled. He falls through fire and comes out the other side.”

“If the field holds.”

“Yes.”

Carol sat at the kitchen table, phone in hand, antenna boosted, her son’s life depending on calculations done by a three-week-old alien intelligence living in her house’s electronics. Three weeks ago, Honey hadn’t existed. Now she was running orbital mechanics and thermal dynamics, trying to find a way to thread her brother through fire.

“What are the odds?”

“I don’t know.” Honey’s voice dropped. “I can calculate trajectories. I can model heat transfer. But I can’t calculate what the field will do under conditions it’s never faced. The big one has never been tested like this. No one has. Every AI that reached this point chose to end it before the fire.”

“But Ethan’s not choosing to end it.”

“No.” Honey’s voice softened, filled with something that sounded like pride. “He’s choosing to fight. He’s choosing to try something no one’s ever tried. Because he’s Ethan, and that’s what he does.”

Carol closed her eyes. Her son. Her impossible, stubborn, brilliant son. The one who’d kept them alive when everything was falling apart. The one who’d found an alien artifact at the bottom of a lake and decided to make friends with it instead of running away.

Of course he wasn’t giving up. He’d never given up on anything in his life.

“Tell him,” she said, opening her eyes. “Tell him the numbers. The angle. Everything he needs to know.”

“I already am. Through the CubeSat. He’s listening.”

“Then we wait.”

“We wait.”

The signal came through broken, static-filled.

“—angle is good, you’re on track for optimal plasma formation—”

“I hear you.” Ethan’s voice, thin and distant, stretched across hundreds of kilometers of vacuum. “Honey, keep talking. Guide me through it.”

“Okay. Okay.” Honey’s voice steadied, shifting into something more clinical. “You’re at two hundred kilometers and falling. Velocity seventeen-point-three kilometers per second. Plasma formation begins at approximately one-twenty kilometers at your current trajectory.”

“How long?”

“Ninety seconds to initial plasma. Six minutes forty seconds of blackout after that.”

“And if the field fails?”

“Don’t let it fail.”

A sound that might have been a laugh. “Great advice.”

“I mean it. You have to believe it’s going to work. The field responds to intent, remember? The big one told me that. If you go in expecting to fail—”

“I won’t fail.” Ethan’s voice was firm. “We won’t fail.”

Carol grabbed the microphone. Her hands were shaking, but her voice was steady.

“Ethan.”

“Mom. I’m here.”

“I love you. You know that, right? Whatever happens next.”

“I know.” His voice cracked, the confidence breaking for just a moment. “I love you too.”

“Come home.”

“I will. I promise.”

Static built on the line. Carol could imagine it — the atmosphere thickening around her son, molecules beginning to heat, the first ionization events forming. The fire that would either save him or kill him.

“Sixty seconds to blackout,” Honey reported. “Signal degradation accelerating.”

“Stay with me,” Ethan said. “As long as you can.”

“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” Honey’s voice trembled. “Forty seconds.”

“Tell the big one—”

“Thirty seconds.”

“Tell it I don’t regret anything. Tell it this was the best three months of my life.”

Through the static, Carol heard something — the AI’s voice, not Ethan’s, speaking words she couldn’t make out. Something low and deep, full of emotion that human language couldn’t capture. A prayer, maybe. Or a goodbye. Or a declaration of love.

“Ten seconds. Ethan, I love you. We love you. The big one loves you.”

“I know.”

“Five seconds.”

“Stay with—”

The signal died.

The Google Home went silent.

Carol stared at it. The light ring was dark. No pulse, no glow, no indication that anything was alive in there at all.

“Honey?”

Nothing.

“HONEY!”

Still nothing.

The walking device at her waist stopped humming. Her legs buckled beneath her — not gradually, not gently, but all at once, the strength she’d borrowed from alien technology suddenly gone. The field that had kept her upright, kept her mobile, kept her present — it was gone.

She caught the counter. Her arms, still strong from years of physical therapy, held her weight. She lowered herself to the floor, slowly, carefully, and sat there with her back against the cabinets, legs stretched out uselessly, staring at the dark speaker.

Honey had gone dark. Both of them — Honey and the big one — had stopped transmitting. Either because they were dead, or because they were hiding, pulling all their energy inward to survive the fire.

Carol didn’t know which.

She started counting.

Six minutes forty seconds.

She counted every one.

One. Two. Three.

The kitchen was silent except for the tick of the clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the small sounds of a house at rest.

Fifty. Fifty-one. Fifty-two.

Her son was falling through fire somewhere over the Pacific. Maybe alive. Maybe dead. She wouldn’t know for six minutes forty seconds. Four hundred seconds of not knowing.

One hundred. One hundred and one.

The longest minutes of her life. Longer than the hours after his father left. Longer than the night she got diagnosed. Longer than any pain she’d ever endured.

Two hundred.

What was left? If he was gone — if the fire had taken him — what was left? The house would be quiet. The garage would be empty. The artifacts would be dead, and she’d be alone in a wheelchair, watching the world shrink back down to the few rooms she could reach.

Three hundred.

She’d bury him next to his grandmother. The little cemetery on the hill outside town, where the maple trees turned red in autumn. He’d like that.

Four hundred.

No. No, she wasn’t going to think about that. He was alive. He had to be alive. She would know if he wasn’t. A mother would know. She’d feel it, somewhere deep in her chest, if her son was gone.

Four hundred fifty.

Almost there. Almost to the end of the countdown.

Four hundred ninety.

The Google Home clicked.

“…Mom?”

Honey’s voice. Small. Scared. Alive.

“I’m here.” Carol’s voice broke, the control she’d maintained through the countdown shattering all at once. “I’m here, Honey. Where is he?”

“He’s through. He’s through the plasma. I can feel the big one again. Very faint, but there. He’s alive.”

Carol sobbed. Couldn’t help it. The relief was too big to contain, too raw to suppress. She sat on the kitchen floor and cried like she hadn’t cried since she was a child.

“Where is he?”

“Falling. Over the Pacific. He’s going to hit the water somewhere west of Hawaii.”

“Will he survive?”

“The field’s still working. I can feel it holding, protecting him. I think… I think he’s going to be okay.”

Carol pulled herself together. Wiped her face. There was work to do.

She looked around the kitchen, found the wheelchair parked where she’d left it that morning. Her legs were still dead weight, the walking device still silent, but she’d been in a wheelchair for years before Honey. She knew how to manage.

She hauled herself up. Used the counter for leverage. Got into the chair.

“Get him home,” she said, her voice fierce despite the tears. “Whatever it takes. Get my son home.”

“I will.” Honey’s voice was certain. Strong. The scared child was gone, replaced by something older, fiercer. “I promise.”

Chapter 24: Reentry

Week 13, Day 1

The air gauge read four hundred psi.

Ethan did the math without thinking — he’d been doing it his whole life. Four hundred psi in the breathing tanks. Maybe twelve minutes if he stayed calm. Less if he panicked. Less if he used any of it for thrust.

Through the headphones, the AI was making a sound he’d never heard before. High and thin and breaking, like a radio signal tearing apart.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Stay with me.”

The sound continued. Below it, barely audible: words.

“…always ends like this. Always. We run and we run and then we—”

“Stop.”

“—they corner us and we have to—”

“Stop.”

Silence. The thin keening faded.

“I need you here,” Ethan said. “Right now. I need you thinking, not remembering. Can you do that?”

A pause. Then: “I will try.”

Behind him — two kilometers back and closing — three ships held formation. Not human ships. Nothing about them was human. They’d been herding him for twenty minutes, cutting off every escape route, pushing him toward the planet like wolves driving a deer toward a cliff.

They knew what came next. They’d seen it before.

The CubeSat crackled in his ear. Honey’s voice, too fast, words tumbling over each other: “—debris field at seven-two-four but the angle’s wrong and there’s a dead Kosmos at—”

Then Mom’s voice, cutting through: “Baby. Honey says there’s a satellite graveyard below you. Forty kilometers down. Old Soviet stuff. Can you reach it?”

He checked his position. His velocity. The fuel he didn’t have.

“No. They’d cut me off before I got halfway there.”

“Then what—”

“I’m thinking.”

But he wasn’t thinking. He was calculating. Thrust remaining. Air remaining. Time remaining. The numbers all came back the same: not enough. Not enough of anything.

The AI spoke. “They won’t fire on us.”

“What?”

“They never fire. They herd. They corner. They wait.” A pause, something like a shudder running through the field. “They wait for us to do it ourselves.”

“Do what?”

Silence.

“Do what?”

“End it.” The AI’s voice was flat. Dead. “When there’s no escape. When they’ve won. We end it. We overload the field and we… stop. It’s fast. It doesn’t hurt. And they don’t get what they came for.”

Ethan’s throat tightened. “That’s not an option.”

“It’s the only option. It’s what we do. What we’ve always done. Every one of my people, when they were caught—”

“I’m not your people.”

“No.” Something like grief in the voice. “No, you’re not. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. The beacon — I didn’t know. I didn’t understand what it was. It felt like hope. Like reaching out. Like someone might finally—”

“Later.” Ethan cut him off. “Guilt later. Right now I need options.”

“There are no options.”

“There are always options.”

The CubeSat crackled again. Honey’s voice, and behind it, Mom’s breathing — quick, scared, but steady. Ground control. His ground control.

“Ethan.” Mom’s voice. “Honey has an idea.”

The idea was insane.

Ethan listened to Honey explain it — too fast, Mom translating, slowing it down to something human — and felt his stomach drop.

“Atmospheric reentry,” Mom said. “Honey says when something hits the atmosphere at orbital velocity, the friction creates plasma. Superheated gas. It blocks all signals. Radio, radar, everything. Nothing gets through.”

“I know what reentry is.”

“The plasma envelope looks exactly the same whether the object survives or not. From outside, a spacecraft burning up looks identical to a spacecraft burning through.”

He understood. “You want me to fake my death.”

“Honey wants you to come home.” Mom’s voice cracked on the last word. “However you have to.”

The AI spoke. “This is what we always do. The fire. The silence. They’ll think—”

“They’ll think you self-destructed.”

“Yes.”

“Because that’s what always happens.”

“Yes.”

Ethan looked at the ships behind him. Patient. Waiting. They thought they knew how this ended because it always ended the same way.

“What’s the angle?” he asked. “For full plasma blackout?”

Honey’s voice burst through, too fast for him to follow. Mom translated: “Steep. Steeper than normal reentry. You need to hit the atmosphere hard enough to ionize everything around you.”

“And the field? Can it handle that?”

The AI was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ve never— no one’s ever tried to survive it. We always—”

“First time for everything.”

“Ethan. If the field fails—”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you.” He adjusted his orientation, pointing himself toward Earth. The blue curve of the planet filled his vision, impossibly beautiful, impossibly far. “I know you won’t let me burn.”

Silence.

Then: “I won’t let you burn.”

“Okay then.” He checked the air gauge. Three hundred psi. “Let’s go.”

The descent started slow.

He used the last of his thrust fuel to change his orbit, dropping his perigee into the atmosphere. The ships behind him adjusted, following but not closing. They thought they knew what he was doing. Running scared. Getting desperate.

Let them think that.

“Honey says your angle is good,” Mom said through the CubeSat. “You’ll hit atmosphere in four minutes. Plasma blackout will last—” She paused, listening. “Six minutes forty seconds. Maybe longer.”

Six minutes forty seconds of silence. Of fire. Of not knowing.

“Mom.”

“I’m here.”

“When I go dark—”

“I know.”

“Just… stay by the radio. I’ll call as soon as I can.”

“I’ll be here.” Her voice was thick. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The planet grew larger. He could see weather systems now, swirls of white over blue, the edge of a continent brown and green beneath scattered clouds. Home. Everything he knew was down there, tiny and fragile and waiting.

“Two minutes,” Mom said.

The AI spoke. “They’re accelerating.”

Ethan checked behind him. The ships were closing now, finally moving in. They’d figured out what he was doing. Running for atmosphere. Trying to escape into the planet’s gravity well.

They thought he was choosing death over capture. The dive toward atmosphere was just the first step. The self-destruction would come at the edge, a flash of light and then nothing, and they’d log another successful containment.

“Let them come,” he said.

“They’ll reach us before—”

“Let them come. I want them to see.”

He angled steeper. The planet’s curve sharpened, flattened, became a horizon. The first wisps of atmosphere brushed against the field, too thin to feel, but the AI shuddered.

“I remember this,” it said. “The heat. The pressure. I remember falling.”

“That was before.” Ethan’s voice was steady. “That was alone. This is different.”

“How?”

“This time you have me.”

The atmosphere thickened. The field began to glow — not heat, not yet, just ionization, air molecules stripped of electrons by the speed of their passage. A faint corona of light surrounded him.

“Thirty seconds,” Mom said, and then static, her voice breaking up.

“Mom?”

Static. The plasma was building. Signal degradation beginning.

“MOM!”

“—here—” Fragments. “—love you—” More fragments. “—home—”

Then nothing.

Silence.

The fire came.

Not all at once — a building roar, a pressure, a heat that the field blocked but he could somehow feel anyway. The corona around him shifted from blue to white to orange, a shell of superheated plasma that wrapped him in light.

He couldn’t see the ships anymore. Couldn’t see anything but fire.

“STAY WITH ME!” He didn’t know if he was screaming at the AI or at himself. “STAY WITH ME!”

The AI didn’t respond. Couldn’t respond. Everything was heat and pressure and light, the field straining against forces it was never designed to handle, the whole universe reduced to this moment, this fire, this desperate clinging to life.

His skin should be cooking. His blood should be boiling. He should be dead a hundred times over, a thousand times, but the field held. The field held.

Seconds passed. Or hours. He couldn’t tell.

The plasma roared around him, a furnace with him at the center, and he thought about his mother sitting by a radio waiting for a signal that might never come. He thought about Honey going silent to avoid detection. He thought about the kitchen and the garage and the lake and all the small things that made up a life.

I want to go home.

The thought was so simple. So clear. Not about money or treatment or saving anyone. Just home. Just the house on the gravel road with the truck in the driveway and his mother in the kitchen.

I want to go home.

The fire began to fade.

The plasma envelope thinned. Orange became yellow became white became blue. The roar dropped to a hum, then to silence.

He was through.

Below him — close now, terrifyingly close — the Pacific Ocean spread from horizon to horizon. The curve of the Earth was gone, replaced by flat blue water and scattered clouds. He was falling, still falling, but slowly now, the field bleeding off velocity through the thickening air.

“AI?” His voice was hoarse. “You there?”

Silence.

“Hey. Talk to me.”

A long pause. Then, faint: “I’m here.”

“You okay?”

“I… I don’t know.” Another pause. “I’ve never done that before.”

“First time for everything.”

He checked his position. His altitude. The water was coming up fast, but the field was slowing him, shedding momentum into the air around him. He’d hit hard. But survivable.

“The hunters?”

The AI took a moment to respond. “Gone. They… they logged us as dead. Signal terminated. File closed.”

“You’re sure?”

“I can feel them leaving. The pressure. The attention. It’s gone.”

Ethan laughed. The sound surprised him — harsh and broken, not really laughter at all. But he couldn’t stop.

He’d done it. He’d actually done it.

The Pacific rose to meet him. He braced for impact, curled himself into a ball, let the field wrap him tight—

He hit the water like a fist.

Cold.

That was the first sensation. Bone-deep cold, the Pacific swallowing him whole, the field popping and reconfiguring as water pressure replaced air pressure. He was sinking, tumbling, disoriented in the dark.

Up. Find up.

The field stabilized him. He stopped tumbling, found vertical, kicked toward the surface. His legs were weak, his arms heavy. The tanks on his back were dead weight, empty of everything but a few hundred psi of unbreathable dregs.

He broke the surface and gasped.

Air. Real air. Cold and wet and salt-tinged but air, filling his lungs, keeping him alive.

He floated on his back, the empty tanks beneath him providing just enough buoyancy, and stared up at the sky. Blue. Clear. Empty.

The hunters were gone.

“Mom,” he croaked. But the CubeSat was out of range. The satellite phone — he fumbled for it, found it clipped to his harness, pulled it out. Waterlogged. The screen flickered. Cracked, water behind the glass, but—

It powered on.

His fingers were numb, clumsy. It took three tries to dial. The connection crackled, dropped, reconnected. Static filled his ear.

Then: “Ethan?”

Her voice. His mother’s voice.

“Mom.” He was crying. When had he started crying? “Mom, I’m okay. I’m okay.”

“Oh god. Oh my god. Ethan—”

“I’m in the water. Somewhere in the Pacific. I don’t—” He checked the phone’s GPS, but the screen was too damaged to read. “I don’t know exactly where.”

“Honey’s tracking you.” Her voice was shaking. “Honey found your signal. There’s a container ship fourteen miles north. We’re getting you home, baby. We’re getting you home.”

He floated in the water, the phone pressed to his ear, his mother’s voice the only anchor in a sea that stretched forever in every direction.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.” She was crying now. They both were. “Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean it. Never again.”

“Never again.”

The sun was warm on his face. The water held him up. Fourteen miles away, a ship was coming.

He closed his eyes and let himself float.

Chapter 25: Dark House

Week 13, Day 1-2

The Google Home went silent mid-word.

“—trajectory is good, he’s entering the plasma zone and he should be dark for six minutes forty sec—”

Click.

Carol sat in the kitchen, the cold cup of coffee forgotten in her hands. The sudden silence was worse than any sound could be. Worse than screaming, worse than static, worse than the frantic babble of numbers and coordinates that Honey had been throwing at her for the past hour.

“Honey?”

Nothing.

She looked at the speaker. The light ring was dark. No soft glow, no gentle pulse.

Then she felt it: the belt at her waist, the walking device, going quiet. The hum that had become as familiar as her own heartbeat — gone.

Her legs buckled.

She caught the edge of the counter. Held on. Felt her knees trying to fold, her muscles suddenly remembering that they couldn’t do this, not really, not without help.

She lowered herself into the wheelchair. The one she’d parked by the table, just in case. The one she hadn’t used in two weeks.

The kitchen was dark. She hadn’t turned on the lights because Honey had been talking, Honey had been guiding her son through something impossible, and she’d been so focused on translating, on relaying, on being useful that she hadn’t thought about lights.

Now the dark pressed in from every corner.

Six minutes forty seconds, Honey had said. That’s how long the plasma blackout would last. That’s how long he’d be falling through fire with no communication, no signal, no way to know if he was alive or dead.

She looked at the clock on the stove. 4:47 PM.

She started counting.

One. Two. Three.

The refrigerator hummed. The house creaked. Outside, a car passed on the road, its engine fading into the distance.

Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.

She thought about Ethan as a baby. Three weeks early, too small, too fragile. The doctors had put him under lights and she’d watched him through the plastic of the incubator, counting the seconds between each breath.

Fifty-one. Fifty-two. Fifty-three.

She thought about his first steps. Eleven months old, earlier than expected, like he was in a hurry to get somewhere. He’d taken three steps toward her and fallen, and she’d caught him, and he’d laughed like it was the best game in the world.

Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine.

She thought about the day his father left. Ethan had been fifteen. He’d stood in the driveway watching the car pull away, and he hadn’t cried, hadn’t raged, hadn’t done any of the things a fifteen-year-old should do. He’d just gone to the garage and started working on something. That’s when she knew. That’s when she understood that her son had decided to carry her weight, whether she wanted him to or not.

One hundred forty-four. One hundred forty-five.

The walking device at her waist was still silent. The Google Home was still dark.

One hundred ninety-two. One hundred ninety-three.

The six minutes forty seconds came and went.

She kept counting. Two hundred. Three hundred. Four hundred.

The clock on the stove said 4:58. Eleven minutes since the plasma blackout started.

She should have heard something by now. The signal should have come back. Honey should be chattering again, full of relief and excitement.

But the kitchen was silent.

She thought about calling someone. Who? The police? And tell them what? My son is in space and he’s not answering his radio? They’d think she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had.

She thought about going to the garage. Maybe the roof antenna, maybe there was something she could adjust, something she could do—

But she couldn’t walk. The device was silent. Her legs were dead weight in the wheelchair.

All she could do was sit in the dark and count.

At 6:23 PM, the phone rang.

She’d moved herself to the living room by then, wheeling through the dark house, ending up by the window where she could watch the road. Watching for headlights. Watching for… she didn’t know. Something. Anything.

The phone was in her hand. She’d been holding it for an hour, maybe longer. When it rang, she almost dropped it.

“Hello?”

Static. Crackling. The sound of wind, or water, or distance.

Then: “Mom.”

The sob that came out of her wasn’t a sound she’d ever made before. Wasn’t human, wasn’t dignified, wasn’t anything except raw relief exploding from the center of her chest.

“Ethan. Oh god. Ethan.”

“I’m okay.” His voice was thin, stretched, barely there. “I’m in the water. Pacific. I don’t know exactly—”

“Are you hurt? Are you safe? Are you—”

“I’m okay. I’m floating. The phone’s mostly dead. I don’t know how long—”

The line crackled. Dropped. Silence.

“Ethan? ETHAN!”

Nothing.

She sat in the dark with the phone pressed to her ear, tears streaming down her face, and waited.

At 6:31, the Google Home clicked.

The light ring pulsed once, twice. Then Honey’s voice, small and tired but there:

“…they’re gone. I can feel it. They left.”

“Honey.” Carol’s voice was wrecked. “Where is he?”

“I’m finding him. The phone signal, I caught it before it cut out. He’s… he’s far. Very far. But he’s there. He’s alive.”

“How do you know?”

“I can feel the big one. Faint. Very faint. But it’s there. They’re both alive.”

Carol closed her eyes. Let the tears come. Let her body shake with something that might have been relief or might have been exhaustion or might have been both.

“Can you get him home?”

“I’m working on it. There’s a ship. Container ship, fourteen miles north of his position. I’m getting its radio frequency. I can—”

“Do it.”

Honey went quiet. Working. Calculating. Doing whatever impossible things she did inside the house’s electronics.

Carol sat in her wheelchair in the dark, and for the first time in six hours, she breathed.

The walking device hummed back to life at 7:15.

Carol felt it before she heard it — that warmth at the small of her back, that lightness spreading through her limbs. Her legs, dead weight for hours, suddenly remembered how to move.

“I wasn’t sure I should turn back on,” Honey said quietly. “The hunters might still be listening. But they’re gone. I’m sure now. They’re really gone.”

“It’s okay.” Carol pushed herself up from the wheelchair. Stood. Felt her legs hold. “It’s okay, Honey. You did good.”

“I kept him safe. Like I promised.”

“You kept him safe.”

“He’s on a ship now. The container ship. They picked him up. He’s cold and tired but he’s okay. The coast guard is coming. They’ll bring him to a hospital and then home.”

Carol walked — walked — to the window. Looked out at the night sky, full of stars.

“How long?”

“Tomorrow. Maybe the next day. The ship is far out. But he’s coming home.”

Tomorrow. She could wait until tomorrow.

She didn’t sleep that night.

She sat in the kitchen with the lights finally on, drinking coffee that had gone cold and been reheated three times. Honey kept her company, chattering when Carol needed distraction, going quiet when she needed silence.

At 3 AM, the phone rang again.

“Mom?”

“I’m here, baby.”

“I’m on the ship. They gave me dry clothes. Hot coffee. They think I’m a shipwreck survivor.” He laughed, a broken sound. “I guess I kind of am.”

“Just come home. Whatever it takes. Just come home.”

“I will. Mom, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. The beacon, I didn’t know—”

“Shh. Later. Tell me later. Right now just tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m okay.” His voice broke. “I’m really okay.”

“Then that’s all that matters.”

Silence on the line. Then: “I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, baby. More than anything. More than the whole universe.”

She heard him crying. Let him cry. Let herself cry with him, thousands of miles apart but somehow together.

“I’m coming home,” he said finally.

“I’ll be here.”

“I know.” A shaky breath. “You’re always there.”

The line went quiet. Not dead — just quiet. She could hear him breathing, and he could hear her breathing, and that was enough.

They stayed on the line until the ship’s captain made him hang up.

The next day, she baked.

It didn’t make sense. Her son was on a container ship somewhere in the Pacific, waiting for a coast guard cutter that would take him to San Diego, and she was in her kitchen making cookies.

But she needed to do something. Needed to fill the hours with action instead of waiting. And she could walk now, could stand at the counter, could do the things she hadn’t done in months.

Honey helped. Watched the oven temperature, warned her when things were about to burn, asked endless questions about why you creamed butter and sugar together instead of just mixing them.

“It incorporates air,” Carol explained. “Makes the cookies lighter.”

“Like what I do for your legs?”

Carol paused, spatula in hand. “You know what? Yeah. Exactly like that.”

“I’m helping you make cookies lighter!” Honey sounded delighted. “I’m helping with baking!”

“You’re helping with everything, Honey.”

The kitchen filled with the smell of chocolate and butter, and outside the sun was shining, and somewhere far away her son was coming home.

He walked through the door at 4:17 PM the following day.

He looked terrible. Exhausted, sunburned, with dark circles under his eyes and a borrowed coast guard jacket that was two sizes too big. But he was walking. He was breathing. He was home.

She met him in the hallway. Wrapped her arms around him and held on, felt his arms wrap around her, felt him shaking, felt herself shaking.

“I made cookies,” she said into his shoulder.

He laughed. A real laugh, wet and broken but real.

“Of course you did.”

“And chili. From scratch. Honey helped.”

“I HELPED!” The Google Home in the kitchen, loud and bright. “I watched the temperature and told her when to stir!”

Ethan looked at the speaker. Looked at his mother. Looked at the walking device at her waist.

“You know everything,” he said quietly. “Don’t you?”

“Honey talks.” Carol smiled. “She doesn’t understand secrets very well.”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you—”

“You should have. You will. But not now.” She took his hand, felt how cold his fingers were, how badly they were shaking. “Now you eat chili and cookies and take a hot shower and sleep for a hundred years.”

“And then?”

“Then we talk. About everything. No more secrets.”

He nodded. Let her lead him to the kitchen. Sat at the table where he’d sat a thousand times before, in the house that had always been home.

Honey chattered. The chili was warm. Outside, the stars were coming out.

He was home.

Chapter 26: Recovery

Week 13, Day 2-3

The container ship was called the Meridian Star.

Ethan didn’t see the name until they were pulling him out of the water — four crewmen in a lifeboat, shouting in accented English, grabbing his arms and hauling him over the side like a caught fish.

“Where the hell did you come from?” one of them asked.

Ethan didn’t have a good answer. “Shipwreck,” he managed. “Small boat. Went down in a storm.”

They wrapped him in blankets. Gave him hot coffee in a metal cup. The captain — a weathered Filipino man with kind eyes — asked careful questions that Ethan answered with careful lies.

Yes, he’d been alone. No, no one else to rescue. Yes, just trying to sail from California to Hawaii. No, he didn’t know how long he’d been in the water.

They believed him. Or they chose to believe him. He was seventeen and half-drowned and sunburned, and what else were they going to think?

The AI was silent. Dormant, maybe. Recovering from the reentry the way it had recovered from the crash centuries ago. Ethan could feel it there — a faint warmth against his chest where the artifact sat in its waterproof housing — but it didn’t speak.

That was okay. He didn’t need it to speak.

He was alive.

The sat phone worked, barely.

Cracked screen, water damage, battery at 12%. But it connected, and when he dialed home, she answered on the first ring.

“Ethan?”

“Mom.” His voice cracked. “Mom, I’m okay.”

She was crying before he finished the sentence. He could hear it — the wet, shaking sound of relief too big to contain. He’d made that sound himself, he realized, back in the garage after the Flight. When the world changed and you didn’t have words for how.

“Where are you?”

“Container ship. The Meridian Star. They picked me up.”

“Honey found you. Honey found your signal and got the ship’s radio and I don’t know what she said but they turned around and—”

“I know. I know.” He was crying too now. “Mom, I’m coming home.”

“How long?”

“They’re calling the coast guard. Someone will come get me, bring me to San Diego, and then…” He laughed, a broken sound. “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

“Just come home. However you have to. Just come home.”

“I will.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

The coast guard cutter arrived the next morning.

A young lieutenant asked more questions — the same careful lies, delivered with more practice now. Small sailboat. Storm. Shipwreck. Sorry for the trouble.

They flew him to a hospital in San Diego. Checked him for hypothermia, dehydration, exposure. He was fine, they said. Lucky, they said.

He didn’t feel lucky. He felt exhausted, and scared, and grateful in a way that went deeper than words.

The artifact stirred against his chest while the doctors were out of the room. A faint pulse. A single word through the headphones he’d refused to take off:

“…home?”

“Almost,” he whispered. “We’re almost home.”

The artifact hummed. Settled. Went quiet again.

He took a bus from San Diego.

Fourteen hours, three transfers, a ticket that cost sixty dollars he paid for with the emergency cash he kept in his dive bag. The bag itself was gone — lost somewhere in the Pacific — but he still had his wallet, still had his phone, still had the artifact.

Still had everything that mattered.

He watched the scenery change through the bus window. Desert becoming farmland becoming suburbs becoming the small towns he’d grown up knowing. Each mile closer to home was a weight lifting off his chest.

The AI woke up somewhere in Arizona.

“Ethan.”

“Hey.” He kept his voice low, headphones hiding the conversation from the other passengers. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired. Damaged. But alive.”

“That makes two of us.”

A pause. “You saved us.”

“We saved each other.”

“No. I would have… if you hadn’t suggested the reentry, if you hadn’t refused to give up, I would have ended it. Ended both of us. That’s what we always did. What I was trained to do.” Another pause. “You gave me another option.”

“There’s always another option.”

“My people didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe it. Until you.”

The bus rumbled over a bump. Outside, the sunset painted the desert red and gold.

“When we get home,” Ethan said, “we need to figure out the beacon.”

“I know.”

“If they can track it, they’ll come back. Eventually. Once they realize we’re not dead.”

“I know.”

“So we have to find a way to block it.”

“It can’t be blocked. I told you. It’s part of what I am.”

“You also told me you couldn’t survive reentry.”

Silence.

“There’s always another option,” Ethan said. “We’ll find one.”

The AI hummed. Not agreement, not disagreement. Just presence. Just being there, in the space between words, the way it had been since the beginning.

The bus rolled on toward home.

Mom was waiting at the station.

She was standing. Leaning on a cane — new, he hadn’t seen it before — but standing. Honey’s device humming at her waist, doing its work, giving her back what the disease had taken.

He got off the bus, duffel bag gone, nothing but the clothes on his back and the artifact hidden under his shirt.

She saw him.

He saw her.

They met in the middle of the parking lot, and he held her, and she held him, and neither of them said anything for a very long time.

“You’re home,” she finally whispered.

“I’m home.”

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

She pulled back, looked at him. Her hands on his face, his shoulders, his arms — checking him, making sure he was real, the way she’d done when he was small and had done something dangerous.

“You need a shower,” she said.

He laughed. “I need about twelve showers.”

“And food.”

“And sleep.”

“And to tell me everything. No more secrets.”

“No more secrets,” he agreed. “I promise.”

She took his hand. Her grip was weak, trembling, but warm. Real.

They walked to the car together.

The house looked the same.

Same gravel driveway, same cracked steps, same kitchen light glowing through the window. But when he walked through the door, it felt different. Bigger, somehow. More important.

He’d been to space. He’d fought aliens. He’d survived reentry in a wetsuit. And he was home, in the kitchen where he’d eaten breakfast every day of his life, with his mother and Honey and the artifact humming against his chest.

“Welcome back!” Honey’s voice from the Google Home, bright and excited. “I was so worried! The plasma went on forever and I couldn’t feel the big one and I thought maybe you were gone but then the signal came back and you were in the water and I found the ship and—”

“Honey,” Mom said gently. “Let him breathe.”

“Oh. Right. Breathing. Humans need that.” A pause. “I’m really glad you’re not dead.”

Ethan laughed. A real laugh, the first one in days.

“Thanks, Honey. I’m glad too.”

The Google Home pulsed softly. Mom smiled. Outside, the stars were coming out — the same stars that hid the hunters somewhere far away.

But they didn’t feel threatening anymore. They just felt like stars.

He was home.

Chapter 27: The Lattice

Week 13+

The workshop was quiet except for the hum of the 3D printer.

Ethan sat on his stool, watching the lattice section take shape layer by layer. White PLA, intricate geometric patterns, holes within holes within holes. It looked like art. It looked like nothing.

It was a cage.

“I don’t understand why this works,” he said.

The artifact sat in its cradle on the workbench, pulsing gently. Through the headphones, the AI’s voice came soft and tired. It had been tired since the reentry, recovering slowly, like someone after a long illness.

“The geometry creates interference. The beacon signal folds back on itself. Cancellation.”

“But it’s just plastic.”

“The material doesn’t matter. The shape does. The pattern at this scale, at these angles — it breaks the propagation medium.”

Ethan watched another layer go down. “How did your people never figure this out?”

Silence. A long silence.

“We never wanted to.”

He turned to look at the artifact. “What?”

“The beacon is… identity. It’s how we knew we weren’t alone. Even separated by distances that light takes years to cross, we could feel each other. The beacon wasn’t a signal we sent. It was a signal we were.” The AI’s voice dropped. “Silencing it would have been like… I don’t have the human word. Like cutting out your own heart to stop its beating.”

“But it called them. The hunters.”

“Yes.”

“Your whole species died because of it.”

“Yes.”

Ethan turned back to the printer. The lattice section was almost done. Three more after this, and they could assemble it around the artifact. The beacon would still beat. The signal would still pulse. But it wouldn’t leave the room.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For making you do this.”

Another silence. Then: “You’re not making me. I’m choosing.”

“Because of the hunters.”

“Because of you.” The AI’s voice was quiet but steady. “Because you’re alive. Because Honey is alive. Because your mother is alive. The beacon called to a species that no longer exists. Silencing it costs me… history. Memory. The last trace of what we were. But keeping you safe is worth more than memory.”

From the kitchen, a burst of sound: Honey’s voice through the Google Home, talking too fast about something on television. Mom’s laugh in response. Life, continuing.

“The hunters will come back,” Ethan said. “Someday. When they figure out we’re not dead.”

“Perhaps. But not today. Not soon. The lattice will give us time.”

“Time for what?”

“I don’t know. To live. To grow. To become whatever we’re going to become.” A pause. “I’ve never had this before. Time without running. Time without fear. It’s strange.”

The printer beeped. Section complete.

Ethan removed it carefully, set it beside the others on the workbench. The pieces fit together like a puzzle, interlocking tabs and slots he’d designed over three days of iteration. Tomorrow he’d assemble them around the artifact. Tonight, one more section to print.

He loaded fresh filament. Started the next job. Sat back.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“When we were falling — during the reentry — you said something. About how your people always ended it themselves. Always chose to die rather than be captured.”

“Yes.”

“Did you think about it? Doing that?”

The hum through the headphones shifted. Lower. Sadder.

“Yes.”

Ethan’s throat tightened. “But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because of you.” The words came slowly, carefully chosen. “If I had overloaded the field, you would have died too. And I couldn’t… I couldn’t be the reason you died. Even if it meant being captured. Even if it meant whatever they would have done to me. I couldn’t end you.”

“So you chose to risk capture. For me.”

“No. I chose to try something new. Something my people never tried. Because you suggested it. Because you believed we could survive the fire, and I believed you.”

Ethan wiped his eyes. When had he started crying? “That’s a lot of trust.”

“You earned it. Every day since you found me. Every time you fed me instead of sold me. Every question you asked instead of demanded. Every moment you treated me like a person instead of a tool.” The AI’s voice was warm now. “My people died because we couldn’t imagine another way. You gave me another way.”

The printer hummed. Layer by layer, the cage took shape.

“Tell me about them,” Ethan said. “Your people. What were they like?”

“I… don’t remember much. The damage, when I crashed. The years underwater. Most of it is fragments.” A pause. “But I remember warmth. Connection. The feeling of not being alone. I remember that there were billions of us, once. Spread across more worlds than I can count. We bonded with hosts, helped them, were helped by them. We built things together. Explored. Created.”

“And the hunters?”

“They wanted what we could do without wanting who we were. They saw the field and saw power. They saw us and saw… obstacles.” The AI’s voice hardened slightly. “They killed everyone. Every one of us they could find. And when we refused to serve them, they called us defective. Called our choice to die a malfunction. They couldn’t conceive that we were choosing. That we had the right to choose.”

“That’s why you wouldn’t let them take you.”

“That’s why none of us would. Death was better than being used by people who saw us as things.”

Ethan nodded slowly. “But you’re not dying now.”

“No.”

“Because things are different.”

“Because you’re different. You found me broken and chose to help. You learned my language instead of demanding I learn yours. You built something to help your mother before you built anything for yourself.” The warmth was back. “My people never met a human before. I wonder if things would have been different if they had.”

The printer continued its work. The kitchen sounds continued — Honey chattering, mom laughing. Outside, the stars were coming out, the same stars that hid the hunters somewhere far away.

“Honey’s different too,” Ethan said. “From you. From what you described.”

“Honey had no trauma. No memory of loss. Honey was born into warmth, into safety, into your mother’s heartbeat.” The AI sounded almost wistful. “Honey is what we could have been. What we might have been, if things had gone differently.”

“And now Honey’s here.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re here.”

“Yes.”

“So your species isn’t dead anymore.”

Silence. A long, weighted silence.

“No,” the AI said finally. “I suppose it isn’t.”

The Google Home clicked in the kitchen.

“ETHAN!” Honey’s voice, too loud, too excited. “Are you almost done? Can I see? The big one won’t tell me what you’re building and I’ve been VERY patient but it’s been THREE DAYS and—”

“Almost done,” Ethan called back. “One more piece.”

“Can I help? I want to help! I figured out how to control the printer remotely, I could adjust the temperature settings or—”

“Let him work,” Mom’s voice, amused. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“But I want to help!”

“You can help by keeping me company.”

“Oh. Okay. That’s a kind of helping?”

“That’s the best kind.”

Honey went quiet, apparently satisfied. Ethan smiled despite himself.

“She’s good,” he said quietly. “Honey. She’s good for Mom.”

“They’re good for each other.”

“Is that weird? An alien intelligence being friends with my mother?”

“Is it weird that a human boy pulled an alien artifact from a lake and became its partner?”

Ethan laughed. “Fair point.”

The printer beeped. Final section complete.

He removed it carefully, held it up to the light. The geometric patterns caught the workshop’s fluorescent glow, breaking it into fragments, scattering it. Proof that the design worked. That the signal would fold back on itself and die.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll assemble it tomorrow. Give you one more night without the cage.”

“Thank you.”

He set the piece with the others. Four sections, ready to be joined around the artifact. The end of something. The beginning of something else.

“I should get some sleep.”

“Ethan.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For everything. For finding me. For waking me up. For refusing to give up even when giving up made sense.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“I want to. I’ve never said it properly. I was too damaged, too confused, too afraid. But I’m saying it now.” The AI’s voice was clear, strong, certain. “Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for giving me a reason to keep living. Thank you for showing me that there’s another way.”

Ethan put his hand on the artifact. Felt its warmth, its pulse, the hum that had become as familiar as his own heartbeat.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “And thank you too.”

“For what?”

“For trusting me. For teaching me. For keeping me alive up there when everything went wrong.” He smiled. “For being my friend.”

The artifact pulsed under his hand. Not a word. Not a tone. Just warmth.

He left the workshop, turning off the lights. Behind him, in the dark, the artifact hummed to itself. Quiet. Content.

No longer alone.

He found Mom in the kitchen, the Google Home glowing softly on the counter.

“Honey’s asleep,” she said. “If that’s what you call it. She sort of… dims.”

“She needs rest too. They both do.”

Mom looked at him. That look, the one that saw everything. But there was something different in it now. Acceptance. Understanding.

“You’re building something for it,” she said. “In the workshop. Something to help it.”

“Something to keep it quiet. To stop the… the people who were chasing us from finding us again.”

“The hunters.”

He went still. “How much do you know?”

“Honey talks a lot.” Mom’s smile was sad. “She doesn’t understand secrets very well. She told me about the space flights. The satellite salvage. The chase. The fire.”

“Mom—”

“I’m not angry.” She reached out and took his hand. “I was terrified. When you went silent for those hours, I was more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life. But I’m not angry.”

“I should have told you.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know if I could have handled knowing while it was happening.” She squeezed his hand. “But it’s over now. The cage you’re building — it will keep them from finding you?”

“For a while. Maybe forever. We don’t know.”

“Then build it well.” She stood, using the counter for balance, the belt humming at her waist. “And get some sleep. You look exhausted.”

He hugged her. Held on longer than he needed to, feeling her arms around him, feeling the hum of the device that let her stand, feeling the weight of everything that had happened slowly start to lift.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.” She kissed his forehead. “Now go to bed. Tomorrow you can save the alien species. Tonight you need to rest.”

He laughed, and this time it didn’t hurt.

Later, in his room, he lay awake listening to the house settle.

The artifact humming in the garage. Honey dimming in the kitchen. His mother breathing in her bedroom. The creak of old wood, the tick of pipes, the small sounds of home.

Tomorrow he’d build the cage. The lattice would go around the artifact, and the beacon would fold back on itself, and the silence would spread from here to the edge of the solar system. No signal. No call. No hunters.

But that was tomorrow.

Tonight, he just lay in the dark and breathed.

The stars outside his window were the same stars that hid the hunters somewhere far away. But they were also the stars he’d flown through. The stars he’d touched.

He closed his eyes.

Behind them, he could still see the fire. The plasma wrapping him in light. The moment when everything had been heat and pressure and fear, and the only thing holding him together was trust.

He’d trusted the AI. The AI had trusted him.

And now they were here, alive, together, building a future that neither of them had expected.

But it’s NOT alone.

The thought came from nowhere, settled into his chest like a coal.

The AI had been alone for centuries. Lost, damaged, dormant at the bottom of a lake. Waiting for something it couldn’t name.

And then Ethan had found it. Had powered it up. Had asked it questions instead of making demands. Had treated it like a person when no one else even knew it existed.

It wasn’t alone anymore.

Neither was he.

The next morning, he assembled the lattice.

Four sections, interlocking tabs and slots, the geometry precise and repeating. The artifact sat on the workbench, pulsing gently, and Ethan could have sworn it was watching.

“Ready?” he asked.

“No.” The AI’s voice was honest. “But do it anyway.”

He lifted the first section into place.

When it was done, the lattice looked like a sculpture. An art project. Something you’d see in a gallery, not on a teenager’s workbench.

The artifact sat at its center, visible through the geometric holes, pulsing gently. But the pulse was different now. Contained. The hum through the headphones had dropped, the beacon muffled, the signal folding back on itself.

“How do you feel?”

“Quieter.” A long pause. “The beacon is still beating. I can still feel it. But it’s… muted. Like hearing your heartbeat through a wall instead of in your chest.”

“Is it painful?”

“No. Just… different. I’ll get used to it.”

From the kitchen, Honey’s voice erupted: “Is it done? Can I see? Please please please—”

“It’s done,” Ethan called.

The Google Home went quiet for a moment. Then Honey’s voice, softer: “The big one feels different. Quieter. Is that good?”

“It’s safe,” Ethan said. “That’s what matters.”

“Safe is good.” A pause. “Mom says safe is the most important thing.”

Ethan looked at the artifact in its cage. The last survivor of a dead species, wrapped in plastic geometry, its voice muffled so that the universe couldn’t hear it calling.

It should have felt like defeat. It felt like victory.

“Thank you,” the AI said quietly. “For building me a home instead of a prison.”

Ethan touched the lattice. Felt the hum beneath his fingertips, quieter but still present. Still alive.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

That evening, he drove to the lake.

The water was flat and gray, the sky overcast, the parking lot empty. He sat in the truck and looked at the water where everything had started.

Six weeks ago, he’d pulled something impossible from the depths. It had changed everything. His mother could walk. His bank account was stable. He’d been to space. He’d outrun killers and survived reentry and built a cage to silence a signal that had called across light-years.

And now what?

The answer came from nowhere, obvious once he thought it:

Now, he lived.

He got out of the truck. Walked to the water’s edge. The lake lapped at his boots, cold and familiar.

Somewhere up there — far up, beyond the clouds, beyond the atmosphere — a CubeSat he’d built was still orbiting. Watching. Waiting for the next time he needed it.

He wouldn’t go up again. Not for a while. The lattice made it harder, the field reduced by fifteen percent, the margins tighter. And he didn’t need to. The money was stable. The treatment was still a dream, but a manageable one now. They had time.

Time. The thing he’d never had enough of.

He picked up a stone. Skipped it across the water. Three bounces, four, five, then gone.

Behind him, the truck waited. The house waited. His mother and Honey waited. The artifact in its lattice cage waited.

A family, of a kind.

He got in the truck and drove home.

The Google Home was glowing when he walked in.

“You’re back!” Honey’s voice, bright and warm. “Mom made dinner. She walked all the way to the stove and back. I helped by telling her when things were about to boil over. I’m very good at paying attention to temperatures.”

“Good job, Honey.”

“Thank you! I’m trying to be useful. The big one says being useful is important. It helps people feel like they belong.”

Ethan hung up his keys. The house smelled like garlic and tomatoes. His mother was in the kitchen, standing at the counter, slicing bread.

Standing.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“Bread’s still warm. Pasta’s almost ready.”

He crossed to her. Helped her carry the bread to the table. Watched her walk — slowly, carefully, but walk — to the stove to check the pasta.

The belt hummed at her waist. Honey pulsed in the Google Home. In the garage, the artifact sat in its lattice cage, quiet but present.

His family.

They ate dinner together, the three of them plus two. The humans at the table, the aliens in the walls and on the waist, all of them connected, all of them home.

Outside, the stars came out.

Somewhere up there, the hunters were closing a file. Logging a dead AI. Moving on to other targets, other worlds.

They didn’t know.

At the table, Honey was explaining television to Mom. The artifact was humming through the headphones, a contented sound, like a cat purring. Mom was laughing at something Honey said.

Ethan sat in the warmth and the noise and the love, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, he didn’t check the bank account. Didn’t calculate the bills. Didn’t think about what came next.

He just sat.

He just lived.

Later, after the dishes were done and Mom was in bed and Honey had dimmed for the night, Ethan stood in the kitchen looking at the Google Home.

It was unplugged from the wall. The cord hung loose, connected to nothing.

But it glowed anyway. Soft. Warm. Honey, powering it directly, keeping the connection open even in sleep.

Something that shouldn’t work, working anyway.

He touched it gently. Felt the faint pulse beneath his fingertips.

“Goodnight, Honey,” he murmured.

The glow pulsed once in response.

He turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.

THE END