Over the years, humanity adapted, developed, and cooperated; finally, all wars, all conflicts, all resentments faded into a mere wild memory. Religion was burned down, the control of gods cast aside in this era.
In the year 2225, humanity reached its long-cherished goal. By harnessing the entirety of Earth's resources, technology soared: super soldiers emerged, almost all disease and illness were erased, and humans could now self-sustain their own nutrients by technology alone.
Civilization entered a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. Scientists probed the unknown elements of other planets across the Solar System through robotic missions, their self-directed ships dancing at the edge of known science.
In space, a few astronauts rode aboard a colossal vessel, the UWSS-The Explorer — a famous ship, revered for rescuing abandoned vessels and stranded astronauts alike. Countless lives depended on this ship's reputation and its fearless exploration.
Among them was Miguel — a top-tier researcher, explorer, engineer — holder of awards for inventing flawless teleportation devices: a transportation pad, a portal gun, and, most notably, the architect of The Explorer itself.
He sat quietly in his quarters, reading a battered old science fiction novel: Path Towards Transcendence by an obscure author named Roberto. Despite knowing that religion and its scriptures had been scoured from Earth, Miguel was drawn to stories of forgotten gods and alien mythologies.
Suddenly, the ship shuddered.
A deep, shaking alert ran through the vessel.
They had crossed beyond the Heliosphere — past the Sun's charged bubble, past the Oort Cloud, sailing unassigned and unauthorized into Interstellar Space.
Miguel and the crew, baffled, rushed to their stations. Commands were shouted, overrides were tried. But it was too late.
The ship would not respond.
Fate — no, Chance — had turned its hidden gears, and they were no longer within the hands of man.
Suddenly, screams echoed through the ship.
Miguel heard his crewmates' voices — but they were not calling for help.
They were chanting.
"All hail the dark ones… all hail the great old ones… all hail the gods beyond worlds…"
Miguel's chest tightened with dread. His hands shook.
He lifted his gaze — and saw it.
A giant beast.
No… an abomination.
The size of an asteroid, its flesh coiled and spinning, its every tentacle, every limb, its impossible shape riddled with pale, sunken eyes.
Miguel whispered, voice cracking:
"Who… who are you?"
The abomination twitched.
A cluster of eyes — lidless, unblinking — settled on him.
Then came the voice.
Not through air.
Not through sound.
But piercing directly into his thought, sharp as a blade sliding into his mind.
"I am Velthash."
Miguel's pulse thundered.
He had never heard that name.
No record. No myth. No whisper from Earth's burned archives. Yet the name settled into him as if it had always been there — buried deep in the marrow of the cosmos, older than knowing.
"I am the Sleepless.
I am the Wanderer in Ash.
I am the Small God of the Star-Barren Paths."
Miguel tried to rise, but his knees buckled.
Around him, the control room flickered with red warning lights. His crew — where were they? Had they ever been there?
Velthash's voice slid deeper.
"You have crossed beyond the border of man. You have seen the universe in its natural, boundless complexion.
You have gazed upon a dark one… without madness."
Miguel could neither move nor cry out.
He could only think.
He could only see.
"If you continue your path… and you must, for Fate and Chance have already cast the lots…
you are free. But know this: if the Demiurge detects one of its creations surviving the sight of what lies beyond, then this world — and your world — shall reset, as it has for the 998th centillion time."
And then Velthash opened something. It was not a portal through space, nor a passage through higher dimensions, nor a slit across infinite or absolute infinities.
It was a rupture in the Beyond — where no measure holds, where no name binds, where shape, time, size, order, and even the idea of infinity collapse into the Uncounted.
Like a cut made not through fabric, but through the absence of fabric. Like a cube slicing not through a square, but through the absence of lines.
Miguel could not move. He could not scream. His body trembled in the pilot's seat, his breath caught in his throat, his knuckles white on the armrests. But then — something stirred inside his mind.
It was not an out-of-body drift, not a tearing away of soul or thought. Miguel remained fully present, inside the UWSS-The Explorer, inside his human body.
Yet a strand of his perception — a thread of thought, delicate as silk — was pulled, stretched, expanded.
Velthash.
The Sleepless.
The Wanderer in Ash.
It touched his mind without pulling him apart, without tearing him from flesh, but enhancing what was already there.
And suddenly, Miguel saw — not with his eyes, not through the camera feeds, not through the ship's telescopes or scans, but with understanding.
He saw the vastness of space: the stars, the scatterings of galaxies, the thin veils of gas, the roaming wanderers of dark matter. He felt the spin of neutron stars, the hunger of black holes, the fragile drift of planetary orbits.
He understood the quiet murmur of radiation,
the dance of magnetic fields,
the faint whisper of cosmic rays
across the dusted backdrop of the universe.
His body stayed fixed, trembling, his crew collapsed or gone.
But his mind — his mind now swam through the observable universe with an awareness no human had ever held.
Miguel understood, in a flash, that the stars were not mere lights in the dark. They were engines, living furnaces, scattered across a sea of unimaginable size — each moving, pulsing, decaying, over spans of time too wide for human scales.
Velthash's voice slid like silk through his thoughts:
"You remain within the borders of your world, Miguel,
but you see now its true shape. Its patterns. Its quiet heartbeats. You sail no longer as a blind child in the dark — you sail now as one who hears the songs of the stars."
Miguel shuddered. He did not speak, but he felt his thoughts surge, spilling outward, grasping at the edges of this new, terrible clarity.
The ship, the mission, the malfunction — they seemed so small now. Not meaningless, but tiny, against the canvas of cosmic distances, against the restless pulse of the universe itself.
The voice of Velthash faded — not like a sound withdrawing, but like the final ripple in a pond that had grown still.
Miguel sat in silence.
The UWSS-The Explorer was dark now. Its reactors had failed. Its lights dimmed to amber. The soft hum of life-support fell to a faint whisper, then to nothing.
He drifted, alone, the last survivor, in a dead ship beyond the Oort Cloud, beyond the Heliosphere, beyond the scattered reach of human touch.
And yet — Miguel was not afraid.
He understood now. He saw the universe not as a cold, empty waste, but as a vast living pattern — immense, yes, but no longer alien.
He touched the controls — dead.
No response.
No power.
His breath came slow and steady.
He knew the ship's reserves would keep him alive — for a time. But beyond that, he would need more.
Miguel's hand slid over the edge of his Type 1 suit.
It was a marvel, a triumph of Earth's science — but now, it was only a foundation. "I can build better, he thought.
I can rebuild, if I have the resources."
He had invented the teleportation pad, the portal gun, the Explorer itself. He knew materials, energy flows, nanomachinery.
He had time.
He would drift into the unknown — and when the chance came, when he encountered the right resources, the right elements, he would upgrade. Not just the ship — his suit, his self, everything.
He would survive.
He would record.
He would become something more, not by god's will, not by Velthash's touch, but by the will of a human mind, burning against the dark.
Miguel leaned back, watching the stars drift by. He whispered softly, more to himself than to any god or beast: "I will explore. I will see all of it. And I will bring it back — for us."
The UWSS-The Explorer floated, a tiny speck in a sea of infinite black, carrying a single man who had seen the universe unveiled and chosen not to collapse but to rise.
Miguel did not know how long it had been.
Days? Months? Years?
Time slipped away when the clocks were dead, when the ship floated powerless, when the only ticking was the slow metronome of his thoughts.
At first, he slept.
At first, he waited.
But as the months passed, Miguel began working.
The Type 1 astronaut suit
— a marvel of Earth technology —
wasn't meant for eternity.
But Miguel wasn't an ordinary man.
He was the inventor of the Explorer.
He had built the teleport pads, designed the self-repairing nanocircuitry, written the blueprints for adaptive alloy skins.
Inside the ship, he cannibalized everything.
The broken engines.
The life-support systems.
The raw metals from the ship's core.
Micrometeorite catchers.
Old test modules.
Everything.
He rewove the suit's lining,
weaving in self-repairing fibers.
He stripped old processors, slipping them into the suit's neural core. He harvested tiny reserves of antimatter cells, channeling them into a slow-drip power feed.
Bit by bit, piece by piece, the Type 1 suit evolved.
It no longer needed an external supply.
It no longer ran out of oxygen.
It fed on the void — gathering stray particles, turning micro-impacts into energy, balancing radiation levels through dynamic shields.
Miguel had become something Earth never planned.
Not post-human.
Not trans-human.
Not a god.
But an engineer at the edge of existence, crafting his survival against the raw face of the universe.
Sometimes, he floated outside the Explorer, watching its broken shell like a memory of a past life.
He spoke aloud, recording his thoughts, his findings, his observations. "The stars are constant. Space is no void; it is a sea of light, of windless currents, of unseen particles. I thought we knew the universe. But I know now we had only guessed."
The years passed. He felt them, though his body no longer aged. The suit's systems kept his cells in perfect balance, repairing every microscopic damage, holding hunger and thirst as background processes. Miguel worked tirelessly. He mapped star clusters, designed new upgrades, and imagined faster-than-light drives, wormhole hooks, dimensional scrapers — all theoretical, all possible, if only he could gather the right materials.
The darkness whispered sometimes, but Miguel no longer feared it. He had seen Velthash. He had seen the edge. And now, he was determined to chart every corner of the observable universe — not as a worshiper, not as a godhunter, but as a scientist.
He floated in the dark, tethered no longer to the old limitations of man or machine. The Explorer, once proud, was now his silent companion — a drifting carcass of a vessel, its once-bright hull scorched, its communication arrays dangling like withered limbs. Miguel had hollowed it, worked it, gutted it for every part, every useful wire, every reservoir. Inside his suit, his mind was a quiet hum of focus.
In year one (or so he guessed), he learned to reroute his neural link, merging his suit's interface with what remained of the Explorer's core logs. He recompiled its fragmented star maps and recalibrated his sensors to detect the smallest of particle drifts — exotic particles, dark matter ripples, gravitational shears. By year three (or ten?), he reinforced the suit's outer plating with an alloy made from micrometeorite debris fused under controlled laser fields.
He modified the exo-frame to self-adjust, shifting between strength modes and agility modes as needed. He discovered that the ship's remaining antimatter reserves, if channeled through a focused emitter, could act as a long-range pulse — not a weapon, but perhaps, one day, a tool.
By year… unknown, Miguel no longer counted. The stars spun slowly, far slower than the ticking of his mind. He recorded. He studied. He spoke into the void: "This is Miguel Alvarez, researcher, explorer, survivor. I have seen the edge. I have seen the darkness beyond the Oort clouds, and I remain. This universe… it is more vast, more layered, more terrible in its quiet than we ever knew. And I will chart it. Even if no one hears."
Sometimes, he wondered if Earth still existed. If the sun still burned. If humanity still advanced, or if the mere brush of Velthash's presence had rewritten the board as the dark one had hinted. He didn't know. And yet, he was alive. Alive and improving. Drifting past the scattered husks of comets, past the ancient ice, past unlit debris, he gathered and scavenged. Somewhere, out in the dark, he knew there would be something: a derelict probe, a fragment of alien metal, a cosmic anomaly.
He was patient. He had all the time the universe would give. And with every adjustment, every patch, every line of code rewritten inside the suit, Miguel became a little less the man who had left Earth, and a little more the man who would explore it all. Not because he had to. Not because he was ordered to. But because he could. And perhaps, one day, if he solved the equations right, if he gathered the right materials, if he built the impossible, he would not just drift… he would fly.
Miguel sat cross-legged inside the cold husk of the Explorer's bridge, the soft blue glow of his upgraded visor casting shifting lines across the dead consoles.
He was nearly finished.
His hands — or rather, the dexterous mech-arms attached to his suit's gauntlets — worked silently, attaching the last power cell into the reinforced chest array.
The new suit was no longer a Type-1.
No, this was something beyond military spec, beyond anything Earth Command had ever dreamed.
It was a hybrid of salvaged tech, quantum rewiring, and fragments of knowledge Miguel barely understood himself.
As he worked, his mind flickered back.
Velthash.
The dark one.
The thing with too many eyes and no face, whose whisper had slid between his neurons like cold mist.
Miguel's breath tightened.
He remembered the words.
They hadn't left him — not after all these drifting years, not after all the silence.
"If the Demiurge sees one of its creations glimpse beyond… the world shall reset, as it has for the 998th centillion time."
The Demiurge.
Miguel didn't know the word when he first heard it.
It wasn't in any of Earth's databases, not in any astrophysics brief, not in any cultural archive.
But it sat in his memory now, heavy, buzzing, as if Velthash had left a seed there.
He stared out the viewport.
A field of unknown stars stretched before him — a cold silver wilderness, no familiar constellations, no sun, no home.
If this "Demiurge" existed, it was out here.
Somewhere. A thing, an entity, maybe a presence woven into the very laws of the universe itself. And Miguel knew — knew with the sharp certainty only long isolation can bring — he would find it.
He finished locking the final stabilizer. The suit's internal systems surged to life, quiet but strong, humming in sync with his thoughts. A small voice pinged in his ear — his own AI module, rebuilt, upgraded, now sleek and responsive.
"All systems green, Commander Alvarez."
Miguel gave a small, dry smile. He rose slowly, feeling the perfect balance of the reinforced exo-frame.
"Mark the log," he murmured.
"Personal mission directive: Seek the Demiurge."
He took one last look at the ruined Explorer.
The ship that had carried him here.
The ship that had died saving him.
"Thank you," he whispered softly, hand brushing the cold metal.
Then he turned.
Out there — beyond the drifting ice, beyond the black rivers
of interstellar dust, the universe waited.
Somewhere, hidden deep in its bones, was the truth Velthash had only hinted at.
The maker behind the makers.
The mind behind the code.
The Demiurge.
Miguel flexed his gauntlets, engaged his propulsion array, and took his first step forward — not as a stranded astronaut, but as a seeker. And in the dark, alone, he smiled.
The dexterous mech-arms extending from his suit's spine moved with delicate precision, weaving together the last filaments of his new creation.
Before him floated a sphere, no larger than his own helmet, yet infinitely more advanced than anything humankind had ever conceived. It pulsed faintly, not with electricity, not with heat, but with something more subtle: a controlled tension of warped space, a potential well coiled within itself, waiting to unfurl.
Miguel exhaled softly, watching a faint puff of vapor drift inside his visor. "Final checks," he murmured. "Stabilizers… aligned. Containment field… holding. Neural sync… clean." He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the data flood his mind. Years — or decades, or centuries — of design and theory converged in this moment.
This was no engine. No weapon. No probe. This was a gateway. Not a crude wormhole generator, not a quantum leap device, but something entirely new: a controlled interface with the Beyond — the same unfathomable rift Velthash had once opened before him, that Miguel had only barely survived.
He did not intend to call the dark god again. No. He intended to step through — not as a servant, not as a sacrifice, but as an explorer. Miguel opened his eyes. "I will not die out here," he whispered. "I will not be forgotten."
He reached forward and touched the sphere. It shimmered, flickered, then snapped into focus — a perfect surface, bending light in impossible ways. His mind flared with calculation.
Every atom in his body, every circuit in his suit, every thread of energy was now tuned to one goal: survival through the threshold.
Velthash had warned of the Demiurge, of resets, of cosmic cycles. Miguel knew the risks. But he also knew one truth more powerful than fear: to be human is to reach beyond.
He straightened, the suit's internal gyros humming softly as they balanced him. Outside, the stars drifted. Inside, the gateway pulsed. Miguel Alvarez — last son of Earth, last engineer of the Explorer, last mind in a dead ship — smiled faintly beneath his helmet. And then, with steady steps, he walked forward.