“A shocking turn at the tonight’s Kimberly Awards with the introduction of a new category, ‘The Best Movie of All Time’, being added mid-ceremony. Some are stating that Glass Tip executives have ‘lost the plot’ on what the awards stand for as a result of the drastic change to the over three century old formula. Despite the controversy about its introduction, few argue with the winner – ‘Son of the Son of the Mask’, a reboot of the old-Earth franchise. Boasting an incredible run time of sixteen hours, including an hour-long music sequence set to ‘Can't Take My Eyes Off You’ and a budget exceeding 590 billion utus, there were few disagreements with the decision. Godlin Ation, director of his recent movie, ‘Trapped Together: Revelations’, humbly accepted a close runner up position with grace.” – Jessie All-Ears, Host of YTE News, 2263. Recorded from inter-system news channels.

  The veil of night fell onto Nucleus as Elias walked back into his laboratory. He was ready to scratch an otherworldly itch, one that had been digging at him for quite some time. Lights off, he felt the stillness of the dark around him as he sashayed through the pitch-black halls leading to his lab. Everything undisturbed, unmoved, unchanging. He had survived both an encounter with a very needy Tylas, and a very angry supervisor, and was lucky to still be walking after both. Whilst Chel-Lin had been pacified easily enough, at the cost of feeling as though his soul had been sucked out through his cock, Lucian had been less satisfied.

  The corporate suit, with both his visible and subdermal implants practically vibrating from the seething anger streaming off him, had, in no simple terms, put Elias on thin ice. A single incident of any magnitude would be enough to have him removed from the IGS, regardless of his ties to his father. It appeared that despite his otherwise uncaring attitude towards their work, his desire to not ‘rock the boat’ was serious. It had been a long discussion about responsibility, and Elias’ role in the Symposium. He had used many terms to describe the younger Savage - ‘peacock’, ‘bait’, ‘mechanical hare’ had been thrown around, but were mostly just empty threats. Elias was plenty aware that just his presence at the IGS was enough to draw attention from the other corporations, and Lucian was likely afraid of losing his role following the fire. As such, despite all the shouting and screaming, it was for naught. Elias had a hunger for knowledge, and some fancy, half-borg spouting hollow coercions did little to supplicate his needs.

  When the supervisor finally let him go, leaving him to be escorted back to the centre of the second wing of Nucleus by a number of guards, Elias was more than ready to dig into what he had uncovered. Part of him was guilty for not having Chel-Lin join in, but her father had come to visit, not long after Elias had blown a load on her face, and decided to spend the evening in some good family bonding. Great, fantastic. Maybe if Elias saved a Titanlock orphanage from exploding then perhaps his father would accept him. Salty? No, Elias wasn’t sour over seeing someone in his exact position fix their paternal relationship. Why would he be- Ok, he was slightly stung by the fact he was somehow in a worse position than the overly religious xenophobic space jellyfish when it came to family matters.

  With a sigh, he pushed open the doors of the lab, feeling the chill in the air against his skin. He’d gone to see Lucian in casual clothes, and wanted the feel of a thick lab coat to get into the mood of late night work. Whistling a tune, he walked over to a locker, swung it open and…

  In the reflection of the mirror within, he saw a figure in the darkness standing on the other side of the lab. Elias spun in a whirl, hands raised in defence as he tried to make out the figure in better detail.

  “Whoa, easy, easy!” a soft, velvety voice echoed out.

  “Who’s there? Show yourself!” Elias shouted. Part of him wanted to immediately call out for EXCAL or Kurt, but fear of the stranger being provoked by the call for help strangled his voice. From the shadows, the figure approached slowly, hands raised in supplication.

  It was a round cheeked, stout man. Standing with weak posture, he wore a lab coat, not dissimilar to the type used around Nucleus, which hung unbuttoned and loose around his knees. He was bald, but the lack of hair was the least eye-grabbing aspect about his face. Eyes, the colour of ice deep in a crevasse, the purest blue of old-Earth’s skies stared out. They drew Elias in, like the glinting of a star in the nocturne expanse of space. With a strong jaw, betrayed only by the pudge of his jowls, he didn’t look old. No, at worst he was middle aged, but could’ve possibly been much younger. Blinking a few times, he shuffled forwards.

  “I did knock, but the door swung open,” the man said with all the confidence of an undergrad asking a professor a question for the first time. “I apologise. I thought you were already in, but then I heard you behind me and well…”

  Elias sighed. This was no assassin or trouble-maker; just a bumbling fool.

  “Well, turning on the lights would have been a nice warning,” Elias grumbled, walking over to the light switch and flicking it on. “Who are you?”

  “Ah, I’m Isaac,” the man said, his cheeks lifted by the smile on his lips.

  “Isaac…?” Elias said, baiting a surname. The man did not bite. “From one of the other wings? I think I might have seen you the other day. Y’know, during everything that went down in the fifth wing.”

  “Hmm? Oh, right. Yes. I’m from the sector over.”

  “Wing One?” Elias asked. “What are you working on?”

  “Oh, you know, this and that. Lots of things in the works.”

  Alright then, creepy bald dude who stumbled into the lab.

  Elias gestured his arms wide. “Alright, so, can I help you?”

  “Ah, maybe! I was looking for…” Isaac trailed off, hands behind his back as he walked around the lab. He didn’t look like he was searching for something, rude enough that idea was, but instead toddled about with his eyes closed. What sort of weirdo was he?

  Then, he stopped and turned his head sharply to the side. Wait, wasn’t that where- Oh shit!

  In a single motion he calmly opened a bench cabinet, pulled out the experimental S-Drive hidden behind a purposely placed wall of research journals and hefted it onto a workbench.

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  “Uh…” Elias expertly said.

  “Isn’t it great? Oh, my, look at what you have done with it! Is that a… yes. Yes it is.” Isaac ran a finger across a seam of the machine, a vacant smile on his face.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Elias discarded all sense of professionalism and courtesy. This was no longer funny, and the man was a clear threat.

  “Me? Just a fellow scientist, always looking for more answers.”

  “And… have you found anything you’re looking for?”

  “Perhaps.” There was hope in Isaac’s voice. “And the work with the Tylasian Bubble Field Manipulator?”

  There was no hiding from the invader. He had already shattered all defences Elias could muster, and it was taking everything he had not to run from the room. Would he make it? By the time he alerted EXCAL or Kurt or anyone, Elias felt he would be dead at the hands of the odd man.

  “I’m… working on it.” Honesty seemed like the best move against this stranger who apparently knew everything.

  “That’s good. Great, even! It means things are changing.”

  “Is change always good?” Elias said, not really focusing on his own words. He had put distance between him and the man by circling around to the side. He needed to keep him talking. If he was too busy talking, he was too busy to kill. At least, that was what Elias hoped.

  “Sometimes change is good. It can lead to new ideas, but sometimes a disastrous change option is exponentially worse than the status quo.” Isaac’s head snapped to Elias, smile faint. “Have you figured out the Beta S-Field yet?”

  “The… alternative frequencies?” Elias probed.

  “Yes! That’s right. Wasn’t too difficult, was it?”

  “Depends.” Elias was curious now. The trespasser hadn’t attacked him yet, which Elias hoped meant the man was more interested in talking than killing him. If Elias could learn anything, it might help figuring out his identity, or what the fuck was going on. “Does creating a new core for the S-Drive count as difficult?”

  “Ooh, indeed! But where do you go from now?”

  Fuckidy, fuck. Was this some trick question? Guess the correct theory that’s never been conceptualised by anyone else, as far as Elias knew, or get killed by a pudgy dude with no hair? Fuck his life.

  “Well…” Elias swallowed. “These Beta S-Fields… my current theory to test is that the BFM-“

  “The Bubble Field Manipulator?” Isaac cut him off, impatient sounding.

  “Y-yes. That. If we can use that to stabilise the S-Field, we might be able to use the Drive in a different way.”

  “Ah, and therein lies the widening gyre. A different way, but how?”

  Elias scowled, clenching a fist in his pocket so hard he felt the nails dig into his palm. Weakness would not suit him here. Elias was the best. He knew this.

  “I originally just expected less reliance on a QIS stabilising medium and improved waveform collapse efficiency – bigger S-Jump distance and the like. But now?”

  Elias took a deep breath and walked up to Isaac and the S-Drive, sick rising in his stomach. The look of the man was not what Elias expected a predator to look like, but there was a keenness in his eyes that betrayed any sort of innocence. With a shaking hand, Elias slotted in a power cord and activated the S-Drive.

  “I’m thinking it might affect this.” Elias stood back, praying to Jesus, God, Barald, Great Observer, whoever the fuck was out there to please, please give him some help. His theory, made up on the fly, was that whatever strange effect he had experienced during the fire was reliant on apparent danger around him. If Isaac was anything, he was the personification of the lizard brain instinct to jump back from touching something slimy, the urge to hold a spear at eyes in the dark, the need to have a bed facing the door.

  Fear.

  And… Elias felt nothing. No change, no shadowy adjustment of the world around him, nothing. He had hoped activating the machine would give him that strange sense of foresight as an advantage against the portly man, but there was no change. Whilst the dull sensation of a buzzing at the back of his brain was there, it was almost as if it had been smothered down, like a roaring engine’s output muted by a muffler.

  Isaac gave a warm smile, no teeth shown. It almost reached his eyes. “I am impressed. Truly. I hadn’t expected this development for quite some time, and yet here I am. My, oh my! At this rate, I feel as though I’m about to lose a race to a newcomer who started late. What a shame, though; I’m way in the lead since I already started long, long ago.”

  Elias felt blood rush to his cheeks. No, whoever the hell this man was, Elias would not go down without a fight. With one hand, he reached behind himself for the half-finished armature of a prototype harness he had been disassembling, intending to use it as a weapon.

  “S-so, what happens now?” Elias said, intending to throw the man off with a question as he grabbed the weapon.

  “Now?” Isaac said as Elias turned to grab the metal limb. “It’s rather late, I’m going to bed.”

  Shit! Gripper claw in his hand, Elias finished his spin and-

  Isaac was gone.

  He was not there. Elias looked left, right, up towards the skylight. But no, the man was gone.

  He wasted no time.

  “EXCAL! Kurt! Now!”

  Immediately, he felt the CAI’s cameras on him. All the auxiliary lights in the room turned on as the speaker crackled.

  “Elias! What’s going on?” the artificial intelligence came on.

  “An intruder! He was just… here.” Elias walked to the other side of the workbench. The only sign that Isaac had been there being a pair of footprints in the dust along the floor. That, and a message made written in chalk, the stick slowly rolling across the floor.

  “See you soon, Savage.”

  “Please, for the love of god, Kurt, tell me you got an ID match on him,” Elias pleaded.

  “Yeah, yeah, just a sec. You’re ok.” Kurt said.

  He frowned, his face a mass of twisted brows and sneering lips. He was not annoyed with Elias, that much was for certain. There was clear guilt written on his face at his lack of protection at the time. After EXCAL’s drones had rushed the lab, confirming its safety, Elias had rushed to the control room only to find an unconscious Kurt. Initially, the bodyguard had suspected himself of falling asleep, for which he had loudly berated himself for, but a quick look from Elias found something far more sinister.

  A quick whiff of Kurt’s cup of coffee gave away the cause of his lacklustre performance – a distinctive sedative, one Elias recognised his uncle as having used in his tea for whenever the insomniac needed a good sleep. It wasn’t a particularly strong sedative, but lacked a distinct taste. It was clear that the bodyguard’s drink had been tampered with, though Kurt denied the idea as he had the drink in his sight all night. The machine he had used to pour his caffeine recharge showed no signs of foul play, leaving everyone rather confused. However, when the footage from the lab was later pulled up, EXCAL tuning in to talk to the pair, it was made clear that drugged drinks were far from the strangest part of the whole event.

  The footage started minutes before Elias walked in. No movement, no change, nothing. Then, as Elias walked to the locker, a black patch of blocky dead pixels took up the corner of the video. It was where Isaac had been standing. As the stranger moved towards Elias, the past him on screen turning in shock, the mess of obscured data tracked Isaac’s path.

  When the time finally came for the man to speak…

  Nothing. Dead air. The video still recorded the ambience of the lab, the humming of the AC. But no voice from the man, no footsteps. Just a one-sided conversation of Elias talking to a swarm of unviewable pixels. It paused when Isaac had spoken, shuffled on the spot as he mused about topics no one else in the galaxy should, or fucking could, know, and expanded its area of dead pixels on screen whenever he moved his arms.

  And, as the footage rolled by, Elias feeling uneasy at rewatching the scene, he saw himself whirl about, preparing to grab the harness part. Between frames, the spot where 'Isaac' had stood turned from blotchy distortion to regular footage. As if he was never there.

  An un-echo of reality.

  Elias firmly requested additional guards that night from Rannos and he was not embarrassed to request Kurt’s physical attendance in his room when he tried to sleep that night.

  Elias and Chel-Lin had started to look into the abyss.

  And the abyss had looked back.