The night stretched on like an eternal veil of silence, blanketing the world in a brooding stillness. Above the Arctic Circle, the research station known only as Outpost Veil stood like a forgotten monument to human desperation. Snow whipped across the dome, each gust a whisper of the unseen, each flake a memory buried in the ice.
Inside, Nova stood motionless.
A blue-glow hologram flickered before him, decoding a fragment retrieved from the wormhole's emission flare. It wasn't a language. It wasn't even human.
It was a memory.
His pulse tightened as the waveform stabilized, revealing a pattern identical to the one hidden inside the encrypted data dump from Protocol Black Horizon.
It matched his mother's research—research she had buried before she died.
*-----------------------*
"How long have you known?" Nova's voice was low, hollow. It filled the empty corridor as Chairman Mark Patro entered behind him.
Mark's face was unreadable. "Known what, exactly?"
"That my mother never died in that lab fire. That the wormhole wasn't created—it was awakened. By her."
Mark stepped forward. "Careful, Nova. Some truths can never be returned to the bottle once uncorked."
"Then let them pour," Nova whispered, the words clinging to a pain he had kept buried for over a decade. "She left me to die. Left us to clean the fallout. All these years, you let me believe it was an accident."
Mark didn't respond immediately. Instead, he walked to the edge of the hologram display, hands behind his back, gazing into the reconstructed memory.
"I promised her I'd protect you. And that meant protecting the lie."
Nova's hands curled into fists.
"She crossed a line, Nova," Mark said. "She tampered with forces no human was meant to touch. And she wasn't alone."
A cold wind brushed down the corridor, although no doors had opened. Nova didn't flinch. He was used to this place breathing beneath his skin now.
"I found something else," Nova said, switching the projection.
The memory fractured again, this time forming a new geometry—pulsing, singing, alive.
"What is this?" Mark asked.
Nova's voice dropped. "It's not a transmission. It's a signal from the other side of the wormhole… like an echo. But this one's dated—time-stamped. Not from our present."
Mark turned, disbelief carved into every crease of his aging face. "You're saying it's… from the future?"
Nova nodded slowly. "A message… sent back through time. A warning."
*-------------------------*
The message came in fragments—symbols shaped like ancient runes, fused with digital decay. As Nova decrypted it, a voice synthesized behind the symbols.
A girl's voice.
His mother.
"Project Final Horizon is a lie. They will burn the sky to hide what they did. The wormhole is not the end. It's the door… to what comes after the end."
Mark moved fast, slamming the display down, cutting the feed.
"That's enough."
Nova stared at him. "Why are you silencing her?"
Mark's face tightened. "Because she's not your mother anymore. She became something else. Something that wanted to reshape the world in her image."
"You used to believe in her," Nova said bitterly. "She was your partner."
"She was my downfall," Mark said. "And she will be yours too, if you follow the path she left behind."
*-------------------------*
Later that night, Nova sat alone, replaying the transmission in silence. It repeated every 27 seconds. Each time, it ended the same way:
"…and when the stars fall, you must choose. Save the past—or secure the future."
Nova closed his eyes.
He remembered the night of the fire. The heat. The screams. His mother's silhouette through glass, fading as the lab exploded. He was eight. Mark had dragged him out of the burning ruins.
But he never saw a body.
Now he knew why.
She had gone through.
The wormhole wasn't just a doorway. It was a blade—splitting time, memory, reality.
And his mother had chosen to step through.
---------------
In the depths of Outpost Veil, beneath a floor marked as sealed since the Cold War, Nova entered a room that should not exist.
A suspended cryo-chamber hummed quietly. Inside it: a corpse, unidentifiable, half-human, half-charred into something... wrong.
Next to it, a data core—the same symbol as the wormhole transmission etched into the side.
He activated the core.
A new projection.
An image of his mother—older, gaunt, with silver streaks in her hair and void-like scars across her neck.
"Nova… if you're hearing this, it means I failed. They've corrupted the past. Final Horizon was supposed to be hope. But now, it's a weapon."
Her eyes looked into his, as though aware he would see her again one day.
"You have to go back. Find the point where it diverged. Stop me if you must."
Nova fell to his knees.
Mark had lied. But so had she.
There was no black or white. Only ruins of what might have been. And if time could fracture, so too could morality.
He stood slowly, whispering to the empty chamber.
"I'll go back. Not for you. Not for Mark. But for the truth."
*------------------------*
Back in the command center, Mark received an encrypted ping.
[SUBJECT NOVA ACCESSING RESTRICTED SECTOR 7A]
He sighed. "I was hoping you'd stay out of this, Nova."
Another voice came from the shadows. A tall woman in red uniform, eyes gleaming with artificial light. The insignia on her shoulder bore no flag. Only the number: 09.
"Should I eliminate him?" she asked coolly.
Mark shook his head. "No. Let him find it. Let him learn the cost."
The woman tilted her head. "And if he uncovers everything?"
Mark's gaze turned distant, heavy with memories unspoken. "Then it's already too late."
---------------
Nova stood before the wormhole terminal once more, the oscillating vortex whispering in waves of impossible geometry. The jump sequence was active. He had set the coordinates to EPOCH ZERO—the moment his mother triggered the first event.
The chamber around him shook.
One step forward, and he would fall into the past, into the truth, into the choice between erasing the lie… or preserving what little humanity remained.
He took a breath.
"I am not my mother."
The wormhole flared.
And Nova vanished into the light.