Ethan Anderson
(Aurora Earth or Higher 4D Earth, 2433 AD)
I’m upside-down and laughing when the sky breaks.
The air above Aurora Earth is velvet blue, dusted with the glow of twin moons. My ship banks hard over the crystalline cliffs of Sorya’s Edge, engines humming like a song I’ve known since childhood. The controls respond to my touch like a dance partner—fluid, trusting, free.
Freedom. That’s the word. I’ve always chased it.
Flying here—above Aurora Earth, with her shimmering oceans and wild starlit skies—isn’t just a job. It’s a promise kept. A life lived on my own terms, away from the burdens of expectation. No legacy, no prophecy, no fate. Just sky and speed.
I glance down at the console. A photochip is wedged beside the throttle—a snapshot of my sister Lyra, grinning with grease on her face and goggles perched lopsided. She’d kill me for showing it around, but I keep it close. She’s one of the reasons I fly.
Once, when we were kids, she told me the sky was where truth lived. “The stars don’t lie,” she said. “They just burn. Bright and honest. Like we should.”
That stuck with me.
And so I became a pilot—not for glory, but to be weightless. To feel the kind of quiet you can only hear when you’re soaring above a world that understands you.
This world understands me. Aurora Earth—fluid and free. No fences. No concrete cages. No simulations.
At least, I thought so.
“Echo Nine to Base—pulling a loop over the west ridge, just because I can.”
“Copy, Echo Nine,” comes the dry response through my comm. “Try not to wake the tectonic plates while you’re at it.”
I grin. “Where’s the fun in that?”
The ship twists in a graceful arc, dipping low over the ocean’s edge. Sunlight bounces off mirror-like waves. My heart feels weightless—like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
And then the world… ripples.
Not just the sky. Everything.
The console blinks. Lights flash red. Warning tones scream.
“Unstable anomaly detected,” the AI stammers. “Temporal fracture at 0.32 distance. Course correction—”
“Override!” I shout, trying to yank the yoke hard left. But I’m not flying anymore. I’m falling.
The air tears itself open—a spiraling vortex of light and distortion, like reality just blinked wrong. My ship spirals into it, hull rattling, alarms howling. Time bends, stretches, shatters.
Then silence.
And black.
************
Time doesn’t pass in the vortex. It stretches and folds, a thousand memories played backward through a kaleidoscope. My vision fractures into shards—fractal spirals of light, impossible geometries, echoes of things I’ve never lived.
I see Lyra—but she’s older, and her face is wrong, fading like data loss. I see a child holding a glowing feather. I see her—the girl from the dream, standing in a mirror made of stars, eyes full of sorrow and fire.
But this time, something new breaks through the spiral.
A heartbeat.
Golden light curls around me like a ribbon, slow and weightless. I’m not in the cockpit anymore. I’m standing barefoot on a surface made of starlight. Before me, a figure takes shape—hazy, radiant. A girl. Hair like night. Eyes like gravity. She reaches for me but never touches.
Her lips move.
A whisper.
“Remember me.”
Then the light shatters, and the sky splits open.
My body spins inside out. Gravity forgets how to work. My thoughts are dragged across space and time like paint over shattered glass. There’s a sound—distant, roaring, like the universe trying to scream through its own skin.
And just before everything breaks—
A voice.
Faint. Female. Not mechanical.
“Find her.”
Then, a sudden snap—
Like being ejected from a dream you didn’t know you were having.
I crash through the atmosphere of a different world, falling fast.
************
I come to coughing, face-down in dust and shattered glass.
My head throbs. Vision swims. For a long moment, I can’t tell if I’m alive or dreaming—or if I’ve landed in some unfinished simulation from a forgotten training program.
I roll onto my back, groaning as every joint complains. The sky—if you can call it that—is a bruised steel gray. The light has a sickly tint, and the air tastes like rust and ozone.
Forcing myself upright, I stumble toward the wreckage.
The ship is still crackling, the hull split along the side, one wing bent like a broken feather. I press my hand against the exterior, hoping some part of her—some part of me—is still functional.
I find the emergency panel and wrench it open. Inside: a med patch, a cracked rations pack, and a portable energy coil, half-charged. I jam the coil into the gauntlet. It sputters but stabilizes—barely.
The AI stirs weakly. “Reboot sequence initiated. Local interface corrupted. Core memory compromised.”
“Welcome back,” I mutter. “You look terrible.”
I salvage what I can—a beacon flare, a compact toolblade, a data ring with one blinking indicator. I thumb it open and a small hologram flickers to life: my sister again. Lyra, laughing. A message she recorded last cycle but never sent.
I close it before it can play. I can’t hear her voice right now.
For a moment, I let the silence hold me.
And I remember.
Lyra was the first to teach me how to fly—not with manuals, but with instinct. She used to sneak me into the old hangars and make me sit in the simulators until I could navigate an asteroid belt blindfolded. “Flight isn’t about control,” she’d say. “It’s about surrendering to the motion. Let the ship be your breath.”
I think about the last time I saw her. She’d grabbed my shoulders, fierce and protective. “If you ever end up outside the timeline,” she told me, “don’t forget who you are. Don’t let the silence name you.”
I exhale, slow.
“I won’t,” I whisper. “Not ever.”
What I can do is survive.
I scan the area—no movement, no welcoming party. Just static in the air and the low mechanical whine of this dying world. My ship is a wreck of sparking panels and twisted metal, buried nose-first in the middle of an abandoned thoroughfare.
This isn’t Aurora Earth.
The sky is wrong. The air is thick with ash and static. Towering structures loom around me like skeletal remains—half-built, half-decayed. Screens flicker with broken code. And in the far distance, something glows red—like a dying eye watching the world rot.
“Where…?” I whisper, voice hoarse.
I pull myself to my feet, wincing. My gauntlet—standard issue from the Aurora Flight Corps—blinks dimly on my wrist. Barely holding charge.
“No signal,” I mutter. “No net, no orientation fix, no home.”
My ship’s AI flickers weakly. “Environmental index: severely degraded. Oxygen levels minimal. Radiation low but rising. You are not advised to remain.”
“Yeah, I got that,” I mutter, scanning for shelter.
Then I hear it.
A scream.
Close.
I bolt.
************
A narrow alley, bathed in harsh red light from an overhead drone. A figure—young, ragged, cornered by two metallic enforcers that hiss commands in a clipped synthetic tone.
“Identify. Comply. Submit.”
The kid shakes their head, trembling. “I don’t—please, I don’t have a tag!”
My body moves before my brain catches up.
I slide between the enforcers and the kid, raising my left arm. The gauntlet flashes weakly—just enough for a pulse.
A shockwave ripples out, shorting one bot instantly. The other jolts, recalibrates, and lunges.
I twist, duck, grab a pipe from the ground and slam it into the bot’s side. Sparks fly. I press the gauntlet against its core and let it drain the last of its energy into one final blast.
The enforcer collapses, twitching.
The kid stares up at me like I’m made of stardust.
“Who… what are you?” they whisper.
I offer my hand.
“Lost,” I say. “But not dangerous. You okay?”
They hesitate, eyes darting to the broken bots, then back to me. “No one’s ever stopped them before,” they whisper. “Not like that.”
“I’m not from here,” I admit. “Guess I don’t know the rules.”
The kid shivers. Their clothes are threadbare, their shoes two sizes too big. They can’t be older than twelve. “You’re gonna get erased,” they say. “That’s what happens to anomalies. Especially ones that fight back.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
For a second, I think they’re going to run again. But then they take a step closer.
“You should hide,” the kid says. “Down past Sector F. There’s cracks in the signal down there—blind spots.”
I nod. “Thanks. What’s your name?”
They hesitate. “People don’t use names anymore. Just numbers.”
“But you remember yours, don’t you?”
A pause. Then, barely audible: “Mira.”
“Well, Mira—thanks for the save.”
They blink. “You saved me.”
I smile. “Yeah. But now I’ve got coordinates. That counts for something.”
Mira glances up at the drones. “Go. Before they send the white masks.”
She hesitates, then pulls something from her coat pocket and presses it into my hand—a small shard of glass, no bigger than my palm, edged in soft blue circuitry.
“It came from the sky,” she says. “I found it in the ruins outside the west gate. It sings when I sleep.”
I turn it over carefully. It’s not from Net Earth. The architecture, the energy lattice—Aurora tech.
“You sure you want me to take this?”
Mira shrugs. “It never worked for me. Maybe it’s waiting for you.”
Before I can ask anything more, she’s gone—vanished into the shadow of a collapsed archway like she was never there at all.
I glance up. The drones are still circling. My stunt’s probably on half the surveillance feeds in the city.
I move.
************
I don’t run far. Not yet. I need to disappear—blend into this fractured world and figure out what the hell is happening. I slip between crumbling buildings, duck beneath fallen skywalks, move like a shadow through the bones of a city that forgot how to breathe.
A shattered metro station looms ahead, its glass roof jagged with rust and time. I slip inside.
The air is cooler here, but it stinks of ozone and mold. Vines grow through old ticket machines, and the walls are plastered with faded posters: UNITY THROUGH ORDER… OBEDIENCE IS PEACE… REPORT ALL NON-COMPLIANCE.
I crouch behind a toppled bench and catch my breath.
A speaker crackles to life above me—barely functioning, its voice fractured by static.
“…attention, citizens… Daegel Protocol 7-B is now in effect… all surveillance units maintain scan grid… unauthorized variables to be neutralized…”
I freeze.
Daegel.
That name—etched into the tone like a codeword. It means something, even if I don’t know what yet. Whoever this Daegel is, they have authority. Reach. Presence. And the power to name anomalies.
A screen flickers near the entrance. Glitched out, looping an image of a man in silhouette—tall, angular, face obscured by data static. But there’s something familiar in the outline, the voice behind the distortion:
“Maintain temporal stability. Purge deviation. The system will hold.”
I shiver.
Whoever this is—they don’t just control the drones.
They control the narrative.
Somewhere above, a loudspeaker blares static and garbled instructions. A surveillance drone buzzes past, scanning with mechanical precision. I stay perfectly still until it vanishes into the clouds of smog.
On the far wall, someone’s scrawled a message in glowing ink:
THE DREAMERS REMEMBER.
It pulses faintly, like it knows I’m here.
I brush my fingers across it. The ink is warm.
Who are the Dreamers?
I keep moving, taking the underground route until it spills me out into a corridor of collapsed pillars and sunken stone. Here, the wind whistles through broken windows, carrying the distant echo of sirens.
And then I see her.
Just for a moment.
She’s walking through the crowd like she doesn’t belong to it—like the world flows around her, not the other way around…—everything looks abandoned, but I can feel the eyes behind every shutter, every screen. Signs glitch with outdated slogans. Garbage skitters across cracked pavement. I duck into shadows, trying to keep my head down.
And then I see her.
Just for a moment.
She’s walking through the crowd like she doesn’t belong to it—like the world flows around her, not the other way around. Black hair, pulled back. Brown eyes full of questions. Seventeen, maybe. But her presence is… radiant.
I’ve seen her before.
Not in this world.
In the dream.
I take a step forward. Her eyes flick toward me—and hold.
Recognition. Sharp and sudden.
Like gravity just shifted.
The world narrows to a breath. The ruined city fades. All I see is her.
The girl from the vortex.
She tilts her head, just slightly. Her expression doesn’t show fear or surprise—it shows knowing. Like she’s been waiting for this moment, even if she doesn’t understand why.
A flicker of gold dances in the corner of my vision—just for a blink—and I swear the air between us shimmers. I’m not hallucinating. This is real. She’s real.
I open my mouth to speak—
But before I can move—
A blaring sound cuts the air.
“All sectors: anomaly detected. Unauthorized arrival. Male. Twenty-two years old. Blue eyes. Blond hair. Armed. Proceed with capture.”
My face flashes on a screen overhead.
I curse.
And run.
Dedication
For the lovers, the dreamers, the stargazers, and the wanderers who believe in spirit, science, stardust, and magic.
Copyright
Text Copyright © 2025 by Iris Starshine
All Rights Reserved
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and
incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
Source
Starshine, Iris. Timelines Convergence. Aurora Earth Saga, Book 1. 2025. Digital.