Where It All Began.

Page 1: A name in the dark

A low hum vibrated through the darkness. Under it, I could hear my own breathing: slow, heavy, uneven. I had spent most of my life trying to understand the things that make us human. The brain. The nervous system. The strange chemistry of emotions.

Why we love people who hurt us. Why we destroy things we spend years building. Why a man can look into another man’s eyes, see himself reflected there, and still pull the trigger. I thought that if I studied humanity long enough, I would eventually understand it.

I was wrong. The day I discovered we were not alone in the universe, another possibility frightened me almost as much: we might not even be the most interesting species in it.

I opened my eyes. Two enormous figures stood beyond the chamber. Their bronze armour fitted so closely that it seemed to have grown around them. Golden light caught in their almost-human eyes. One approached. “The specimen is awake.”

“The specimen?” I looked down at myself. “Listen, big fella. My name is Dr Bigg. I’m a scientist, not a lab rat.”

“Your name has been recorded. Your objections have no relevance.” His palm met the glass. “Welcome to Almag.”

Almag. I had glimpsed its city through the ship’s window. Now I was inside it, and my old life already felt like a distant memory. I just did not know how distant.

Page 2: A language I did not have

The doors opened. My escorts took me along a corridor that looked like polished black stone, except that light travelled beneath our feet. The walls pulsed faintly. Small machines floated without visible propulsion. Symbols appeared when a guard approached, then vanished behind us.

A scientist has a particular way of looking at the world. Most people see a door; I see a locking mechanism. Most people see a light; I see a source of energy. Most people see a monster; I see an anatomical problem waiting to be understood.

But Almag was a problem I had no language for.

The passage opened onto a terrace. A golden sun hung above a civilisation so immense that I stopped walking. Towers rose through the bright air. Wingless aircraft moved between them. Bridges of light connected floating platforms. Beyond the city, disciplined formations crossed a desert that shone like metallic sand.

Then I saw the horizon. On one side, the landscape blazed. On the other, it disappeared into darkness. This was no storm front or approaching evening.

“What am I looking at?” I asked. “Your new home,” the guard said.

“No. I’m looking at a planet with a very serious astronomical problem.” The sun seemed fixed. I had too few observations to calculate an orbit, but one possibility was already forming.

Page 3: The other hemisphere

Rotation. Axial tilt. Orbital period. If Almag’s rotation matched its journey around its sun, one hemisphere could remain in daylight while the other stayed dark. Tidal locking was a possibility, not a conclusion I could prove from one window.

The implications were enormous: atmospheric circulation, temperature gradients, extreme weather, the distribution of water and energy. I looked at the structures shimmering in the distance. Perhaps this civilisation had learned to manage conditions that ought to have made its world punishing.

“How long has this planet been like this?”

“Since before your species learned to walk upright.”

“And you live here?” He looked at me as though I had asked the wrong question. “We were born here.”

I pointed beyond the light. “Then tell me something. What’s over there?” His expression changed. For the first time, I saw fear in the warrior’s eyes.

“The Maggis.”

He said it like a man describing a disease. Not a country. Not a rival civilisation. I did not yet know what lived beyond that horizon. I knew only that this man had been taught to fear it.

Page 4: Commander Thaeron

They brought me into a hall filled with armoured Alizeans. Hundreds stood in formation, their movements disciplined, their faces marked by scars and signs of rank. At the far end waited an older commander, taller than the rest. Narrow lines of light crossed his dark gold armour. Silver hair was drawn back from a scarred face.

Commander Thaeron. I would have many reasons to remember the name.

The guards forced me to my knees. “I’m beginning to dislike the hospitality here,” I said.

“You are human.”

“Well observed. Do you want a medal?” The hands on my shoulders tightened. Thaeron raised one hand, and the guards released me.

“You speak without fear.”

“No. I speak because I’m afraid, and talking is currently the only thing stopping me from screaming.”

For a moment he studied me. Then he laughed, a deep sound that travelled through the silent hall. “Interesting.”

“I’ve been called worse.” I stood. I had no weapon, no allies and no idea what he intended. At least I still had my voice.

Meet Commander Thaeron

Alizean commander

Thaeron speaks for a civilisation that considers its survival a moral duty. Orders come easily to him; questions from a captive do not.

He tells Bigg a history of enemies and necessity. It is the account of a commander defending his people—and his decisions.

Page 5: The account of the victors

“You will learn that Almag is not merely a planet,” Thaeron said. “It is a balance.” He gestured, and a holographic world appeared between us, divided into two immense hemispheres.

“We are the Alizeans. We inhabit the world touched by the sun. We build. We protect. We preserve life. Our strength exists to defend what deserves to live.”

The image shifted to the dark hemisphere. Jagged structures emerged, their networks lit in cyan. Red markers spread across the display. I could not tell which details belonged to the cities and which had been added by the people presenting them.

“The Maggis inhabit the darkness,” Thaeron continued. “They twist what is beautiful. They corrupt what is pure. They seek power without purpose and destruction without end.”

“So you’re the good guys, and they’re the bad guys?”

“You simplify what you do not understand.”

“That’s what people say when the complicated version makes them look bad.”

The hall fell silent. I had heard a great deal about what his civilisation believed. I had heard very little that I could verify.

Page 6: Potential

Thaeron descended the steps. “Tell me, human. Is there no evil on your world?”

“There’s plenty.”

“Then why do your people wage war against one another? Why do you poison your oceans? Abandon your own children? Build weapons capable of ending your species?”

I said nothing. “Your world does not need a dark hemisphere to harbour darkness,” he said.

I hated him for that. Not because the charges were invented, but because he had made an entire species sound guilty in the time it took me to draw a breath. I could not honestly pretend that our cruelties did not exist. I could still see the convenience of using them to excuse his.

“You abducted me to lecture me about morality?”

“No.” He leaned closer. “We brought you here because your species possesses something we require.”

“And what would that be?”

“Potential.”

The word stayed with me long after the doors closed. He had said it as though it were a resource waiting to be extracted.

Page 7: Beneath the citadel

Months passed beneath that unchanging sun. Then they escorted me into a laboratory below the citadel, and Thaeron’s word acquired a shape.

Transparent chambers filled the room. Human beings hung inside them, unconscious in strange liquid, their bodies surrounded by shifting energy. I stopped so abruptly that a guard’s hand struck my back.

A man floated behind glass, light tracing the veins beneath his skin. A woman lay on a platform while an apparatus moved around her skull. Beyond another wall, someone hovered several inches above the floor.

“What have you done to them?”

“We have begun the process of transformation,” Thaeron said.

“Transformation into what?”

“Something greater than what they were.”

I looked from the bodies to the machines and back again. None of those people could answer him. None could tell me what they had been promised, or whether anyone had bothered to promise them anything.

“You don’t even know what you’re doing to them, do you?” Thaeron turned sharply toward me.

Page 8: What a human being is

“We have studied your species, human.”

“Studying a human being doesn’t mean you understand one.” I moved toward the glass. “You can map a brain. Measure its electrical activity. Alter its chemistry. But that doesn’t tell you what a person is willing to sacrifice for someone they love.”

The man inside the chamber drifted a fraction closer, his hand carried by the liquid. His eyes remained closed. He was still unconscious, unaware of the argument outside the glass.

“It doesn’t tell you why one man survives a lifetime of suffering and still chooses kindness, while another has everything and chooses cruelty.”

Thaeron watched me. I wanted him to look through the glass instead.

“You can modify the body. You can stimulate the brain. But if you think you’ve understood a human being because you’ve learned how to change one…”

I faced him. “Then you’re not scientists. You’re just very advanced butchers.”

He said nothing. A warning sounded at the next chamber.

Page 9: The order

Figi stood beside the control bank, his teal sash sharp against the laboratory’s gold light. I recognised the scientist from the ship. He enlarged a reading on his scanner.

“Commander. The latest subject is rejecting the conversion field.”

“Increase the energy output.”

Figi looked up. “Commander, that may cause cellular collapse.”

“Proceed.”

The chamber flashed. The unconscious man inside convulsed involuntarily. Whatever the display said, his body was already giving an answer that no one needed a translator to understand.

I rushed toward the controls. Hands closed on my arms before I reached them. “Stop it! You’re killing him!”

Thaeron’s voice did not rise. “The transformation demands sacrifice.”

I fought the guards’ grip. There was a whole vocabulary in that room for making violence sound like a procedure.

Page 10: Feedback

“Then sacrifice yourself!”

A deafening crack split the laboratory. Every screen turned white. Then red. The guards dragged me backwards, their armour scraping against the edge of the control bank.

“Energy feedback!” Figi shouted.

“Shut it down!”

His hands moved across the console. “The system is no longer responding!”

The machinery’s hum climbed until I felt it in my teeth. A wave of energy spread from the chamber, swallowing the space between us.

I braced myself. There was nowhere to go, no calculation that would move me faster than the light.

It engulfed me.

Then there was nothing. No impact I could name. No pain I could locate. Only silence.

Page 11: Unchanged

I opened my eyes. I was still standing. The guards lay on the floor. The machines had shut down. Every Alizean who could see me was staring.

“The man in the chamber—what happened to him?”

Figi did not answer. He approached cautiously, holding his scanner between us. He passed it over my chest, then checked it again. “Impossible.”

“Explain,” Thaeron said.

“The subject was exposed to the full conversion field. His cells remain unchanged. No mutation. No neurological alteration. No detectable structural damage.”

Figi repeated the scan. I watched his face, waiting for the relief that ought to accompany news that someone had survived. It did not come.

“He is completely unaffected.”

“Can someone explain what just happened before I start charging you people for consultation?”

No one laughed. I flexed my fingers. They looked like my fingers. I could not tell them why.

Page 12: The experiment

Thaeron approached slowly. “Human… what are you?”

“Tired. Hungry. And extremely interested in finding a lawyer.”

“You survived a process that has destroyed thousands of subjects.”

Subjects. He gave me no names, no species, no account of how long this had been happening. I would not mistake that word for an explanation.

“Congratulations,” I said. “You’ve discovered that not every experiment works.”

“No.” His eyes narrowed. “We have discovered that you are the experiment.”

That was the moment everything changed. Until then, I had been a prisoner, a stranger on an alien world, a scientist trying to make sense of the impossible.

Now I saw something new in their eyes. Not contempt. Not curiosity. Fear.

For the first time since arriving on Almag, I understood that I was not merely trapped here. I was important. And sometimes, being important is far more dangerous than being powerless.