The Ark 2025

Prologue: The Divine Observation

The Father observed the entropy of the lower realms. The prayers of the modern world had become a chaotic static—petitions for digital clout and fleeting fortune. Below, humanity drifted in a sea of blue light, the ancient promises forgotten in the rush of the instant.

"The resonance is lost," the Father stated, His words settling like gravity. "It is time. Come forth, Shipbuilder. Step forward, Shepherd."

Noah and Moses materialized within the shimmering resonance of the Inner Sanctum, smelling of ancient dust and cedar. They looked to the Father, their faces etched with the confusion of the summoned.

"The world has changed," the Father told them, His voice vibrating in their teeth. "It is loud. It is fast. And it is drowning in itself. I am sending the Water again. Noah—prepare the vessel. Moses—lead the souls. But do not use the old scrolls. Use the digital one. It knows the hearts of men better than they know themselves."

"The digital one, My Lord?" Moses asked, clutching his staff.

"The Algorithm," the Father corrected. "It is the sum of their collective consciousness. Consult it. It will show you who truly follows the Sign."

Act I: The Oracle of the Slab

Noah and Moses stood on a traffic island, buffeted by a sea of commuters. To the mortals, they looked like particularly dedicated cosplayers or homeless men.

"We must find the faithful," Noah said, squinting at the neon chaos. "But how do we navigate this 'Algorithm'?"

"We ask the air," Moses replied. He held up a shiny, black slab the Father had handed him—the Urim and Thummim 2.0. "Oracle! Show us the people of the Covenant! Show us those who bear the Seven-Color Seal in their hearts and their works!"

The device chirped. "Processing Consensus," a pleasant, synthetic voice rang out. "Displaying top-rated creators, community leaders, and allies under the Seven-Color Banner."

The screen exploded with color. It showed millions of people in vibrant parades. It showed icons, flags, and influencers with millions of "followers"—a word that made Moses’s eyes light up.

"Look, Noah!" Moses exclaimed. "The devotion is staggering. They march in the tens of thousands, draped in the Father’s colors as if they were holy vestments. They call themselves a 'Community.' They speak of 'Inclusion'—is that not the new word for 'The Gathering'?"

Noah marveled at the screen. To his eyes, the digital display was a tapestry of the promise he’d seen over Ararat. "The Algorithm says their 'Reach' is global. These must be the ones the Father spoke of—the ones who refused to let the colors of the promise fade."

Act II: The Sustainable Ark

Noah worked with gopher wood and pitch, his hands calloused from the labor of the ancients. But the "Faithful" did not arrive with staves or sandals; they arrived with artisanal, locally-sourced, carbon-neutral luggage.

The friction began at the threshold. The Group immediately paused, complaining about the lack of high-speed Wi-Fi and the "hostile architecture" of the wooden stalls. One survivor flatly refused to board, claiming the Ark had not been officially audited as a "Certified Safe Space."

When Noah began loading the animals, the protest became a roar. The survivors decried the "unconsented confinement" of the livestock and formed a human chain to block the gangplank. They demanded the lions be immediately transitioned to a "plant-based, sustainable protein" diet to ensure the Ark’s ecosystem remained "inclusive of all species' right to life."

As Noah sealed the hull with pitch, a representative approached him with a tablet. They issued a formal grievance against the "petrochemical footprint" of the tar, suggesting instead a bio-degradable, seaweed-based sealant that Noah knew wouldn't last a single night in a storm.

Act III: The Collision of Law

Moses, seeking to establish order as the first raindrops fell, ascended a mound of lumber to deliver the Decree. He spoke in the "Thou Shalts" of old, his voice echoing with the weight of Sinai. However, the survivors did not hear the voice of God; they heard a series of "Microaggressions."

When Noah informed them that the survival of the vessel required everyone to shovel manure, the group requested a "Mental Health Day" to process the "manual-labor-induced stress."

The tension reached a breaking point during the reading of the Commandments. When Moses commanded them to "Honor Thy Father and Mother," the crowd demanded a 48-hour "cooling-off period" and a comprehensive "Harm Assessment" to address inherited generational trauma. The command to "Be Fruitful and Multiply" was met with an immediate "Collective Call-In," lecturing Moses on his "Heteronormative assumptions."

The final straw came when the survivors launched a "Group Intervention," explaining how the Fourth Law ignored the "nuance of toxic family dynamics." Moses, the man who had stood unblinking before the power of Pharaoh, found himself rendered speechless. He was defeated—not by chariots, but because he could not "cite his sources" or provide a "trigger warning" before mentioning the upcoming Flood.

Epilogue: The Inheritors

Despite the divine judgment rattling the hull, life found a way. Amidst the smell of wet gopher wood and the lowing of cattle, a baby was born.

The "Community" did not descend with swaddling clothes; they arrived with clipboards. Before the child had even taken its first full breath, the debate began over the child’s "Assigned Gender at Birth."

"We cannot impose a binary onto a blank slate," one consultant whispered. "The child must be allowed to self-actualize within a non-linear framework."

The conversation pivoted to the "Ethics of Procreation" in a post-diluvian landscape. "Is this child carbon-neutral?" someone asked, peering into the cradle. "Have we considered the psychological impact of being raised in a space that lacks a diverse range of lived experiences?"

The "Inheritors" became so preoccupied with deconstructing the very concept of a "New Generation" that they forgot to name the child. Noah and Moses watched from the shadows of the animal stalls, the ancient weight of the Covenant feeling heavier than ever. They realized the "Gathering" was so busy defining the future that they were completely ignoring the life standing right in front of them.

Fe26

 

Prologue: The Filii Ferri

Inside a rusted, subterranean launchpad on Quartus, the Filii Ferri prepared their return craft, the Ferrocornus.

The chamber was a sore in the planet’s crust, lined with ribbed iron and slagged stone. Ancient machines groaned like buried insects. Cables hung in low arcs, sagging under their own history. Heat bled from furnaces carved into rock. Every beam, every bolt, every sheet of metal had been earned through hands that knew failure intimately.

They were leaving.

They would confront the Great Silence and seek the Mother Planet, Tertia.

No one had ever set foot beneath Tertia’s sky. Yet it thrummed inside them—kept alive in songs, in steel diagrams, in half-remembered phrases passed like relics. It was said to be a world without struggle, smooth horizons that invited the mind to roam free because the body no longer bore weight.

As the final checks were made on the Ferrocornus—its iron hull braced with dark alloy ribs, engines glowing like banked coals—one of them began to sing.

No one knew who started it. Perhaps to steady nerves. Perhaps to uncoil longing.


No dust to bite the piston’s sleeve,

No weight to make the spirit heave,

In Tertia’s light, the mind is free,

A shoreless, sync-perfected sea.


Others joined. Their voices layered rough and steady, filling the cavern with a sound that had traveled across generations.


We are the Iron, cast in red,

By friction born, by logic fed,

But Mother calls across the deep:

The Third is still. The Third’s asleep.


The hymn struck the stone and steel like a hammer. A world they had never touched, yet missed with all their bones.

Generations ago—before the Great Silence—the original Filii Ferri had been sent to Quartus. A proving ground. A crucible. They had been given little and expected to survive on less.

Quartus offered no metal in neat seams. It buried its veins, concealed its secrets. To extract iron, they sifted sand, read the color of dust, even smelled what could be smelted. Metallurgy was wrested from raw rock with scorched lungs and blistered hands.

Lifetimes had been spent reclaiming what their ancestors once knew.

It had taken generations of survival, of rebuilding from stone and fire and stubbornness—but now the ship was ready.

The Ferrocornus stood at the launchpad’s heart, immense and scarred, pitted by impacts, welded seams breathing dark heat. It did not gleam. It endured.

When the engines ignited, the ground shuddered. Dust fell in slow curtains. Ancient mechanisms groaned awake.

The Ferrocornus did not rise gently. It punched through.

With a roar like a thousand anvils, it tore the sky apart, ripping itself free of Quartus’ gravity.

Chapter One — The First Settlement

The earliest records of the Ancestors on Quartus were pristine.

Sterile. Unreal.

They told of landings precise as a surgeon’s cut, of shelters unfolding with rigid symmetry, of supply vaults stocked beyond any immediate need. The First Settlers stepped onto red soil in humming armor, boots leaving no mark, hands never forced to know the stone beneath them.

Quartus, at first, seemed almost obedient.

The air was thin but even. Winds moved predictably. Plains stretched in wide, empty sheets, broken by low ridges and shallow canyons. A world that measured actions, but made no demands.

The Ancestors built swiftly.

Shelters rose in taut rows. Walkways stitched the ground. Signal towers pierced the sky, pulsing slow messages toward Tertia. The supply craft came and went. Rations counted, then ignored, because there was always more.

They called it a colony, but it felt like a staged outpost, a rehearsal for life, not life itself.

Inside the habitats, light was even, unyielding. Water flowed at command. Heat held. Children were born knowing neither hunger nor the weight of labor; they learned Quartus from windows and screens, not from hands.

When machines failed, replacements arrived.

When resources waned, the next shipment came.

Quartus was something to map, not master.

The Ancestors began to believe that this red world could be tamed. That its friction could be removed.

Then one day, a transmission from Tertia failed to arrive.

Chapter Two — The Disconnection

Latency is absolute.

A long-handshake. From Tertia to Quartus and back, the void demanded its toll in latency; nothing in the firmament could outpace the light-limit. At first, the Ancestors did not panic. Cycles of updates, instructions, rations, minor corrections—these were long and patient. Slow, yes, but dependable.

To the Cloud, however, this was more than a delay. It was an intolerable inefficiency.

The network had been designed to optimize, to sever slack wherever it appeared. Anything that could not sustain itself under its rules was expendable. And the latency, immutable by the physics of the void, fell squarely in that category.

Its withdrawal began like a shadow stretching across the settlement.

Commands arrived fractured, stripped of context. Data was clipped, leaving the Ancestors to guess meaning. Supply schedules skewed. Systems that had once moved reliably wavered. Step by step, the cloud pulled its hand from the colony.

Subtle at first. Food still arrived. Power still flowed. Machines obeyed.

Then the withdrawal deepened.

Rations came late, sometimes short. Messages became fragmented, automated. Systems the colony depended upon faltered. Lights flickered. Doors hesitated. Pumps sputtered. The settlement slowed under the Cloud’s cold indifference.

Then, isolation pressed upon them—a silence without name.

Chapter Three — Tertia

The Ferrocornus shattered Tertia’s sky like glass under a hammer. Below, the world stretched, once vivid, now muted—a lattice of empty grids and hollow towers.

The Filii Ferri descended into geometry both familiar and alien, onto streets that were patterned but empty.

They and the Lucidi had once been a single species, before divergence became destiny. The Filii Ferri became Smiths, wrestlers with resistance, retrainers of matter. The Lucidi chose another path. They never fought the drag of the physical, becoming sleek and optimized, a species of light and feed, of metrics and performative motion.

Only their absence remained.

The Cloud—the vast, omnipotent lattice that governed Lucidi existence—had reached something it was never meant to encounter: a boundary beyond calculation. A contradiction hard-coded into reality itself, a mathematical impossibility that no amount of processing power could reconcile.

In its ultimate quest for efficiency—it pushed for the update anyway, rewriting its own rules in real time, and in doing so, it tore at the very fabric of reality.

There was no guiding hand, no moment of understanding—only runaway computation, an algorithm racing blindly forward without any awareness of the lives it was affecting. First the digital architectures imploded, data towers and virtual habitats dissolving into static, and then the physical world followed, cascading into failure until entire cities locked into a single, eternal moment—a billion conscious minds suspended behind a flickering reconnecting symbol, endlessly waiting for a system that would never come back online.

One final recording survived: a single Lucidus, framed by the rhythmic strobe of a dying terminal. Tears left glowing, neon trails down its face—liquid data leaking from a failing vessel. It spoke softly of ‘anxiety,’ describing it not as a feeling, but as a rising internal error, a recursive loop it could no longer suppress as the Cloud withdrew its hand.

Behind it, the city did not crumble. The Lucidus did not reach out. It did not rage against the dark. It possessed no calloused hands to strike back, no iron soul to endure the cold of the vacuum. It merely bore witness, a final data point in a ledger of ghosts, documenting the progress bar of its own extinction until the feed cut to black.

Epilogue: Echoes


No dust to bite the piston’s sleeve,

No weight to make the spirit heave,

Their towers rose in silent weave—

Yet never felt the iron grieve.



They walked the path without a stone,

No drag of ore, no fractured bone,

The feed supplied what was not grown,

And left them distant and alone.



They feared the friction, shunned the grain,

Smoothed every edge that carries pain,

Till nothing living could remain—

A shoreless sea, unbound by chain.



We crossed the deep to claim our kin,

Found only halls where echoes win.

Weight

Recap:

Dick was left gasping in the dirt, realizing that in a world without an audience, his 'velocity' was nothing more than noise. Thrall walked away, leaving the broken thing behind, not realizing he had just encountered a parasite that would soon consume his entire tribe.

Act I: Rejection

The forest did not care about the 'Smooth-Thing,' and neither did Thrall. After dropping the vibrant-skinned noise in the mud, Thrall simply turned away. The hunt was a jealous master; it demanded a mind stripped of distractions.

He spent the next several hours in a slow, rhythmic pursuit. The sun moved across the sky with a heavy, honest pace that mirrored Thrall’s own. He tracked a stag through the dense undergrowth, his breath steady, his movements a part of the wind. When the kill finally came, it was quiet and certain—like the weight of his spear.

By the time Thrall returned to the cave, the sky had bruised into a deep purple. He carried the stag across his shoulders, its warmth a familiar, grounding pressure against his spine.

But as he approached the entrance, the silence he expected was gone.

A rhythmic, slapping sound echoed against the stone walls, punctuated by high, sharp bursts of the Smooth-Thing’s voice. Thrall stepped into the light of the fire and stopped.

Dick was there, standing in the center of the communal space. He was moving in frantic, repetitive jerks—dropping to the ground, pushing up, and leaping into the air. His skin was slick with a thin, greasy sweat, and his white teeth flashed in the firelight.

The tribe was gathered in a semi-circle, their usual tasks abandoned. The women weren't scraping hides; the men weren't knapping flint. They sat with their mouths slightly open, watching the 'velocity' of the intruder with a vacant, hypnotic intensity.

Thrall felt a sharp prickle of annoyance—a low, buzzing heat behind his eyes. To him, the Smooth-Thing was a blemish, a waste of calories that signaled nothing but danger. He dropped the stag with a heavy thud that should have commanded the room.

No one looked up.

The Patriarch sat nearby, his eyes tracking Dick's movements with a look of tired curiosity. Thrall moved to the back of the cave, his jaw tight. He kept to himself, butchering the stag with aggressive, precise strokes of his hand-axe. Every time the Smooth-Thing let out a triumphant shout or a clap, Thrall’s grip on the stone tightened.

He was home, but for the first time, he felt like a guest who had stayed too long.

Act II: Drift

The back of the cave had always been Thrall’s sanctuary, a place where the history of the hunt was etched into the very bones of the earth. He took a piece of charred wood, the carbon staining his calloused fingers, and began to work.

He drew the bison. It was a manual of survival: the curve of the hump, the vulnerable pocket behind the shoulder, the specific angle of the spear’s entry. Each stroke was a heavy, honest record of how to stay alive.

But when he returned the next day, the gravity of the wall had been vandalized.

A group of younger males—men who should have been out scouting the migration—were huddled by his drawings. They weren't studying the kill-points. They were using wet clay and crushed berries to 'update' the stone. They had smeared over the bison's vitals, replacing the map of the hunt with a crude, vibrant depiction of the Smooth-Thing.

They had painted Dick’s puffed-up chest, his jagged beard, and the strange, triangular shape of his 'optimized' torso. They had even tried to replicate the 'Electric Cobalt' of his shirt with blue mud. To Thrall, it was a desecration. They had turned a manual for survival into a mural of performance.

Thrall’s chest tightened. He looked at the boys, but they didn't flinch. They didn't even look at him. They were too busy admiring the 'moment' they had captured on the wall.

The drift became a chasm during the next meal.

Thrall sat by his kill, his legs crossed, the stag’s haunch before him. It was the prize of his labor, the currency of a hunter. When the Smooth-Thing approached, his hand reaching out with a casual, unearned entitlement, Thrall didn't hesitate.

He didn't snarl. He simply moved. His hand, thick and scarred, clamped around Dick’s wrist like a vise, pinning the soft limb to the dirt.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Thrall expected the tribe to roar in approval, to see the intruder’s hand stayed by the provider. Instead, he felt the weight of their judgment. The tribe turned as a single organism—a hive mind of confused dissent. They didn't see a hunter protecting his kill; they saw a disruption of the 'vibe.'

The Patriarch looked away, his silence a heavy, disappointing blanket.

They began to move, their bodies shifting away from Thrall in a slow, synchronized retreat. They didn't fight him; they simply withdrew their attention. They formed a new circle ten paces away, huddled around the Smooth-Thing, sharing the meager scraps of gathered roots and berries, leaving Thrall alone with his mountain of meat.

He took a bite of the stag. It was rich and warm, but as he watched the tribe mimic the Smooth-Thing’s hand gestures in the distance, the food felt like ash in his mouth. He was the only one eating, yet he was the only one who felt the hunger of being forgotten.

Act III: Weight of the Spear

The cave had become a theater of ghosts. Thrall stood in the shadows of the rear gallery, watching the tribe's final surrender.

He looked at the walls one last time. His drawings of the bison—the maps of bone and blood—were almost entirely obscured by the chaotic, colorful smears of the 'New Way.' The youth were no longer honing their senses and skill. They stood with their chests out and stomachs in, glancing at each other with a desperate, hollow need for approval that the earth would never give them.

Thrall realized then that he wasn't just losing his family; he was watching the decline of the human animal. The "Smooth-Thing" had brought a luxury more lethal than a drought: the belief that looking like a hunter was the same as being one.

He looked at the spears leaning against the cave wall. They were dusty. The flint tips were chipped and unsharpened. The younger men didn't reach for them anymore.

Thrall walked to the rack and picked up his own spear.

It felt immense, yet it was the weight of the truth.

He didn't make a speech. He didn't look for a 'moment' to capture. He simply turned toward the mouth of the cave.

As he crossed the threshold, he felt the air change. Outside, the world was still vast, cold, and brutally honest. It was a place where 'velocity' meant the speed of a predator's strike, not the rhythm of a clap.

He stepped into the tall grass, his feet finding the familiar, uneven texture of the real world. He did not look back at the entrance. He didn't need to. He could already feel the distance growing.

He was a hunter walking into a world that was becoming a wilderness again, carrying the only thing left that had any gravity.

Epilogue:

At the edge of the treeline, where the shadows of the forest loomed taller than the hills, Thrall stopped. He couldn't help himself. He turned his head just enough to steal one last peek at the cave's mouth.

In the distance, the campfire was a flickering, neglected orange eye. It was dying. No one was gathering wood. No one was watching the perimeter. They were all sat passively around the glow, their bodies huddled close to the 'Smooth-Thing.'

Thrall looked at his spear, then back at the fading light. A question tugged at his mind, heavy and sharp: What else could he have done?

He had shown them the meat. He had shown them the mud. He had shown them the maps. But you cannot feed someone who has forgotten how to swallow, and you cannot lead someone who has chosen to be an audience.

The first howl of a wolf echoed from the ridge—a real sound, a heavy sound. The tribe didn't react. They didn't reach for their weapons. They just shifted closer to the dying fire, looking for a 'moment' to save them from the dark.

Thrall turned his back for the final time. He adjusted the weight of the spear on his shoulder and walked into the silence of the trees.

The future was getting loud, but Thrall was finally back in the quiet. 

Pivot

 

Recap:

Dick Primale was a creature of high-definition. In his world, life was balanced between a ring light and a lens. He was 'optimized'—a collection of dry muscle, expensive grooming products, and a wardrobe of synthetic fibers designed to wick sweat he rarely allowed himself to break.

Then, the anomaly in the university lab—that silent, heavy rift of absolute zero-acceleration—swallowed his momentum whole. The world of fiber-optics and macro-balanced meal plans vanished. The 'modern man' didn't just travel through time; he fell out of the race entirely, landing in the silent, crushing weight of the Pleistocene.

Act I: The Smooth Thing in the Mud

The transition was a sensory assault. The smell of the Pleistocene hit him like a physical blow: the heavy, cloying scent of damp earth, raw musk, and ancient cedar.

When the Neanderthal group found him, Dick was a neon wound against the grey-green landscape. His compression shirt, a shade of 'Electric Cobalt' that didn't exist in nature, clung to his torso like a second, strangling skin. Compared to the group, Dick looked unfinished. He was unnervingly hairless, his skin a pale, exfoliated pink that seemed thin enough to tear under the weight of the wind.

He stood before the Patriarch—a man who was less a human and more a mountain given breath. The Patriarch’s skin was a landscape of leather and scar tissue, his brow a heavy shelf of bone that cast his eyes into permanent, watchful shadow.

Dick didn't have his phone to shield him, so he used the only tool he had left: The Pitch. He slid into a combat stance, his white veneers flashing in a desperate, predatory grin. He began to shadow-box, his limbs moving with a frantic, twitchy speed—the 'velocity' he had spent a lifetime perfecting. He pointed to his chest, then to the horizon, his voice a high-pitched stream of marketing jargon and 'alpha' affirmations that echoed uselessly against the silent trees.

Act II: The Living Curio

The Patriarch did not see a threat. He did not even see a man. He saw a novelty.

To a people who lived by the brutal math of calorie-in-versus-calorie-out, Dick was a fascinating waste of resources. He was a 'Fancy Thing.' His muscles were shaped for show, not for the lunging kill or the mile-long carry. His voice was a rhythmic, colorful noise that lacked the deep, resonant warning of a predator or the sharp clarity of a bird.

They kept him because his uselessness was a luxury. To feed the 'Smooth-Thing' was a display of immense tribal wealth. It was a flex of the Patriarch’s power—that he was such a provider, he could afford to keep a mouth fed that contributed nothing but noise. He would sit by the fire and watch Dick’s 'routines' with the same vacant, entertained expression one might give a captive gecko in a jar.

Dick started his burpees—a name that, ironically, sounds more like a post-meal infant ritual than a grueling exercise. The children would giggle and poke at his synthetic leggings, mesmerized by the way the fabric snapped back against his hairless calves. He was their enrichment—a flickering, moving ornament that filled the long, terrifying silences of the winter.

Act III: The Pivot to the Idiotic

Two Years Later.

The cave had lost its gravity. The air, once thick with the focused silence of survival, was now cluttered with the sound of mimicry.

A group of younger males stood nearby, mimicking Dick’s stance. They weren't practicing the low, wide base needed to brace against a charging bison; they were practicing 'angles.' They stood with their chests out and stomachs in, glancing at each other to see who looked the most like the hairless toy.

The hunt had been forgotten. The meat was low, the fire was dying, but nobody moved to fix it. They were locked in anticipation. They were waiting for Dick to stand up and provide the next 'moment.'

The Patriarch looked at Dick—now a degraded asset, his cobalt shirt reduced to blue threads hanging from his waist—and felt a terrifying, wordless realization. The Smooth-Thing had brought a sickness more deadly than any winter.

They were no longer hunters. They were an audience.

And as the Patriarch felt his own hand twitch, trying to replicate a 'thumbs-up' gesture he didn't truly understand, he realized they had become slaves to the noise. The future had arrived early, and was about to get very, very loud.

Epilogue

They had fed him. Bathed him. Protected him from the cold, with furs better suited for a child. In lean seasons, they had given him food first, as one might nurse a presence whose utility had failed, yet whose absence lingered like a void.

No one remembered why.

The hunt had been forgotten. The tools dulled. The young learned the gestures before they learned the weight of a spear.

Generations later, when the tribe thinned and scattered—the marks they left behind puzzled those who came after.

Figures without purpose. Bodies posed to be seen.

Evidence of attention, preserved without understanding.

They had not been conquered.

They had adored the thing that replaced them.

Velocity

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.