Prologue: Absolute Velocity
Dick Primale learned who he was supposed to be from his phone.
It happened algorithmically. A reel here, a caption there. Inspirational before-and-after photos and podcasts promising new truths.
By twenty-nine, Dick had perfected the look. Lean, dry, always angled toward good light. A beard trimmed within an inch of its life. Tattoos that suggested something older and harder than his actual past.
He’d dropped out of business school, bored and quietly relieved. Classes had felt like stalling. Sitting. Waiting. Online, everything moved faster. Online, he could already be ahead.
He told his followers he trained every day. His meals arrived in recyclable containers—“clean,” “macro-balanced,” sponsored. He preached discipline while silencing delivery notifications.
Dick believed, sincerely, that humanity had evolved past weakness—and that he was the evidence.
So when the invitation arrived—sealed, official, flattering—it carried the logo of his old university. They weren't calling him back for his business acumen; they were calling him back for his reach. His alma mater needed a relevant voice, a "modern man" to bridge the gap between their enduring research and the culture of velocity. Dick didn't hesitate.
Chapter One: Legacy Energy
The research facility sat on the edge of a historic campus, glass and steel threaded through stone and bricks.
Walking through the quad now, the memory hit him—not of classes, but of dominance. The sun caught the same ivy-covered stones. The scent of cut grass and old library paper was the same.
He saw a trio of students huddled near a fountain, earnest and too skinny. They weren't looking at glowing screens; they were clutching thick, spine-cracked books.
A low, fond smile stretched his lips. He remembered the weight of a backpack slamming into a nerd's back, the startled oomph as they went sprawling. He remembered the satisfying splash as another hapless victim, walking too close to his path, ended up with his head under the cold spray of a water fountain.
Obsolete, he thought, staring at the books. Unoptimized.
"I wonder what those book nerds are up to now," he muttered to himself. He realized he’d been practicing the philosophy of velocity long before the caption existed. This place was where he had learned to move faster than the weak.
Dick pulled out his phone, shaking off the memory like water. Time to perform. He began his livestream, walking backward through the atrium, chest out, camera tilted just right.
“Crazy we still fund places like this,” he told the camera. “All this legacy energy.”
He spun on his heel, pointing the phone past the classical facade of the main building toward the shimmering glass structure rising nearby. “But now, we cut the old stone. Gotta keep moving. This way to the good stuff.”
The researchers tolerated him politely. They spoke about frequencies, stability, controlled observation. Dick nodded, half-listening, glancing at his reflection in polished surfaces. He interrupted when he could.
“Right, but isn’t stagnation the real danger?” he asked at one point. “Like—evolution favors velocity.”
No one answered that.
Chapter Two: The Absolute Boundary
The Lead Researcher, Dr. Stanley Grant, finally ushered him into the inner sanctum. Dick expected banks of supercomputers or flashing lights. Instead, the area was shielded by lead-lined walls and felt eerily muted, as if the air itself was heavier here.
"This is why the university reached out to you, Mr. Primale," Dr. Grant said, his voice low and sharp, "Not for your technical opinions, but for your ability to influence the narrative. We need this project to sound like progress."
He gestured to a discreet, hand-drawn sign tacked to a containment panel: Zero Disclosure Protocol.
"The distortion," he continued, "is inherently volatile. It defies all known laws of motion, time, and space. The moment the public knows about a localized point of absolute zero-acceleration, they'll demand an application—a source of infinite energy, transport, or maybe even a weapon. We simply can't give them that, not until we fully grasp its stability."
At the center of the lab was the device, a complex framework of brass and dark ceramic housing the anomaly. The rift itself was not dramatic. It was a shapeless blur of nothingness, contained within a softly humming field of blue light.
It had no color, no depth, and offered no reflection. It was a localized distortion, barely visible, like heat over asphalt seen in an airless room.
Dr. Grant spoke with hushed respect. "It's a point of zero-acceleration. An absolute boundary. We've been researching on this distortion and its containment for over twenty years. Full understanding still eludes our technological progress."
Dick found it boring. It looked slow.
"So it's just... old?" he asked, scoffing. "That's the big discovery? No offense, but that's not exactly 'Progress.' This is an R&D facility, right? What's the application? The next-gen energy source? The shortcut?"
Dr. Grant didn't look up from his readings. He warned him not to approach too closely. Something about gravimetric interference. About delicate equilibrium.
Dick waved it off.
“My watch regulates my stress cycles,” he said, lifting his wrist. “I’m optimized. I'm fast.”
He stepped closer anyway, angling for a shot. He needed the blur in the background, a subtle, almost-imperceptible texture of danger behind his triumphant pose.
As he lifted his arm, the complex electronics in his wrist—the multiple apps, the constant background data flowing from his phone and watch, the sheer noise of his personal velocity—overwhelmed the delicate containment field.
The distortion shuddered. The humming blue light flickered once, going dead black.
Someone shouted: "Mr. Primale! Step back! The frequency is collapsing!"
Dick felt a sudden pressure, like gravity misfiring. It wasn't a sudden stop; it was the opposite. The rift didn't pull him in; it accelerated everything around him. He felt the sheer velocity of the laboratory—the atoms, the air, the flow of time—all rushing past his fixed point.
His livestream cut mid-sentence. The phone dropped, striking the ground in a soundless instant. The world around him became an invisible, soundless smear. The floor, the walls, the ceiling—all of it vanished, Dick Primale, the man who believed in absolute velocity, realized he had just been outrun.
Chapter Three: Primal Reckoning
Dick tumbled out of the world and into cold mud. No gym flooring, no filtered air—just raw earth, dense forest, and a canopy that swallowed the sky—everything heavy, unhurried, indifferent.
His phone was gone. His watch blinked red, dying. He pushed himself up, legs shaking.
Then he saw the Neanderthal.
Thrall was stocky, dense, mid-hunt—spear loose in one hand, crouched over tracks in the soft earth. He hadn’t noticed the intrusion yet. He looked like he belonged here, the way stone belongs.
Dick’s hand twitched for a camera that wasn’t there.
He stepped forward, snapping a twig. Thrall’s head lifted slowly, dark eyes settling on him with mild curiosity. No alarm. Just acknowledgment.
That calm felt like disrespect.
Dick rolled his shoulders, leaning hard into his expertise: fifty thousand hours of MMA reels in 4K, plus the 2.5 comments he averaged on every video he watched. Enough to know how this ended.
He slid into a stance—knees bent, hands loose, weight forward—then shifted again, bouncing because stillness made him nervous.
Across from him, Thrall simply stood.
Low. Wide. Quiet.
“Let’s go, extinct boy,” Dick muttered. “Sapiens rule.”
He dropped levels and shot.
Arms reaching for the legs, head tucked, driving forward with everything he had. He expected movement. A sprawl. A scramble. Something to work with.
Instead, his forearms wrapped around pillars.
Thrall didn’t step back. Didn’t widen his base. Didn’t react.
Dick pushed harder, legs churning uselessly beneath him, calves burning, feet sliding. It was like trying to uproot a Doric column. The strength went nowhere and came back into him, folding him inward.
Panic flickered. He disengaged fast, stumbled back, heart pounding.
“Okay,” he said aloud, to himself. “Okay.”
He swung.
A clean right hand, practiced in mirrors and shadows. Knuckles cracked against Thrall’s cheekbone. There was a sound—dull, meaty—but no drama. Thrall’s head shifted an inch. Maybe two.
No stumble. No flare of anger. Just a blink, slow and assessing.
Thrall had been hit harder by siblings fighting over bone marrow. By elbows in cramped caves. By accidental headbutts in the dark. Pain registered, cataloged, dismissed.
Dick mistook the lack of reaction for dominance.
He stepped in again—and that’s when Thrall grabbed him.
The arms closed around Dick’s torso with frightening calm, forearm across his ribs, bicep crushing his side. The grip wasn’t tight at first. It didn’t need to be. It was certain.
Dick’s breath left him in a sharp, involuntary sound.
His feet lifted off the ground.
The world tilted, spun. His brain scrambled for techniques—elbows, knees, something—but there was no space. No leverage. His body had never been held like this. Never without rules. Never without an audience to stop it.
Thrall adjusted his grip the way you adjust a sack that’s slipping.
Then he threw him.
Dick hit the ground hard, mud filling his mouth, roots biting into his side. Before he could orient himself, he was airborne again—into a tree this time, bark scraping skin, air tearing out of him in a dry wheeze.
He tried to scramble up, hands slipping, legs useless. The ground wasn’t flat. It didn’t care. It pulled at him, twisted him, refused to help.
Desperation kicked in.
As Thrall closed again, Dick leapt—not forward, but up, arms snaking around the thick neck he could barely encircle. He locked his hands, squeezing with everything he had, trying to sink into a rear choke he’d watched a thousand times.
Nothing happened.
The neck beneath his forearm was dense—corded, immovable. Like trying to choke black ironwood. No give. No compression. Thrall’s breathing didn’t change.
One thick hand reached up, found Dick’s wrist, and peeled it away with slow, humiliating ease.
Then Thrall shrugged.
Dick slid off him and hit the ground again, this time harder. His vision blossomed with spots. His lungs burned. He slapped at Thrall’s arm, frantic, fast.
“Tap—tap—tap—okay—okay! Mercy, bro—!”
Thrall froze.
He looked down at the thing on the ground—soft, loud, moving wrong. It wasn’t fleeing. It wasn’t fighting. It wasn’t dying.
It was… asking?
Thrall tilted his head slightly, confused. The creature smelled strange. Wrong. Sour-sweet. Chemical. Its body was padded where it shouldn’t be, fragile where it mattered.
Not food. Not threat.
Just… noise.
After a moment, Thrall stepped back.
Lost interest.
Dick lay there gasping, face in the mud, shaking—not victorious, not enlightened, not even defeated in a way he could frame. His two past fighting experiences—shoving a nerd into a fountain and elbowing a stranger out of the way of a perfect angle at Coachella—felt like irrelevant, pathetic gestures.
Just ignored.
And that, more than the blows, broke him.
Epilogue: The Sound of Relevance.
Dick woke to the sound of birds chirping.
Not the modern tunes on reels—no layered audio, no upbeat rhythm. Just scattered calls echoing through trees that didn’t care if he noticed.
His body hurt in unfamiliar ways. Not sharp. Not cinematic. Just heavy. Slow.
He sat up. Mud caked his clothes. A bruise darkened along his ribs.
The forest moved at its own pace. Light shifted. Leaves fell. Somewhere nearby, something cracked bone and fed.
Dick stood, then stopped. There was no direction to move fast toward. No signal. No audience. No way to measure anything.
Nothing around him reacted to his presence.
