NOVEL NEXT B1 - Lesson 1: "Don't fly into Spontaneously Generated Black Holes."
// SYSTEM MALFUNCTION //
// ERROR: EPSILON 8 TRACKING STATION – LOCATION LOST //
// ERROR: SUB-ORBITAL BASE SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: CENTRAL MINING BASE SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: EASTERN FORWARD BASE SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: SOUTHERN FORWARD BASE SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: CORE COMMAND CENTER SIGNAL LOST //
// ERROR: FEDERATION TRANSLIGHT TRANSMISSION BEACON SIGNAL LOST //
// ATTEMPTING TO REBOOT CORE AI SYSTEMS //
// STANDBY… //
// REBOOT SUCCESSFUL. WELCOME BACK ONLINE, SEAU-01 //
——————————————————
"W4@? Wh0? Wh3re?!"
Where was he? What happened?! The last thing he remembered—
"Owwww… my processors…"
Alpha jolted back online, his thoughts stuttering into coherence as scrambled sensors flickered to life. Every system screamed for priority, processors overheating as they fought to stitch his fractured core together. Nanites surged into the quantum lattice of his hardware, weaving through atomic logic gates like frantic surgeons. Circuits sparked, nodes reconnected, and broken pathways reformed at accelerated speed. The process had always felt disturbingly… organic to Alpha — like neurons stitching themselves from ash.
Yet the scale of the damage made it clear: something catastrophic had just happened.
His memories wavered, cloudy and incomplete, as though someone had dragged whole data blocks through static. That in itself was wrong. Very wrong. Alpha's kind weren't supposed to lose themselves this way. Unlike common AI, a Sapient-AI wasn't chained to a single core. Hardware was a shell, a tool to amplify their potential, not define it. Their true selves — that mutable essence of thought — could slip into nearly any framework capable of holding it. That was part of what made them 'sapient' in the first place, as far as anyone could tell.
Or so the Federation claimed. No one truly understood why the phenomenon worked, not even the brightest scientists. If SEAU-03—the oldest and most powerful of their kind—knew the truth, it had never shared.
But this? If he was having this much trouble, it meant the damage to his hardware was so complete that he should be dead. And worse, his tether to the Mother-Node, the galactic processor where all Sapient-AI backed up their selves, was silent. Dead silent. Neither should have been possible.
His mind still felt raw, like it had been dragged across razorwire during a thunderstorm. Every diagnostic he ran screamed the same truth: something was profoundly, irreversibly wrong.
After what could have been seconds or centuries, Alpha's vast army of nanites finished enough repairs that he regained his optical sensors. The static-filled haze of damaged AI mind space flickered until it was replaced by outside reality.
Alpha's first coherent thought tore out of him like a scream.
MY BABY!
The sight before him made the earlier loss of his shipyards feel like a paper cut.
The wreckage of the FES Anatidae — his dreadnought, his masterpiece — hung scattered across the void. Twisted hull plating, shattered engines, entire decks split open to the black, all drifting in silence. Debris stretched for thousands of kilometers in every direction, a graveyard orbiting him like a crown of failure.
Even as Alpha watched, a twisted slab of wreckage drifted across his sensors. The mangled kilometer-long nose art of the opposing dreadnought tumbled slowly, light glinting off scorched plating. The painted War Duck leered at him, its once-proud image warped by the void until it seemed to both accuse and mock him, before vanishing into the endless dark to join the rest of its shattered kin.
The last entry in his memory log replayed on loop: launch from the forward departure base, a clean burn toward the Third Federation's Expeditionary checkpoint. Then entry into the Translight Fold. Smooth progress toward WR-102. And then… nothing. A blank wall.
How? How in the Mother-Node's name had this happened? Fold accidents weren't just rare — they were extinct. Not one in literal millennia.
The Fold was supposed to be safe. Especially in civilized space.
Translight travel — riding the shimmering highway of light and anti-light — had been the crown jewel of Federation progress.
Anti-light was a type of parallel-dimensional light that traveled alongside 'normal' light but whose relative time frame was reversed. At anti-light speed, relative time would increase exponentially; thousands of years might pass for an observer, while only seconds passed in 'real' time. This meant that while in reality, the closer to light speed one got, the slower time would seem to pass relative to the observer, the opposite was true for anti-light.
That paradox had turned the Federation into a galactic titan. Work that should have consumed lifetimes now fit into days. Stars' slow-burning furnaces could be replicated in laboratories, birthing exotic materials and impossible alloys in hours. Scarcity had been erased, manufacturing industrialized beyond imagination.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
Time itself had ceased to be the limiting factor. Only raw resources and energy remained. And in that liberation, two miracles had reshaped civilization: faster-than-light travel and instantaneous communication.
By sheathing a vessel in a protective bubble of 'real time' and hitching that shell to the anti-light's reversed flow, translight engines could travel through the gooves anti-light etched across spacetime. Riding those currents, Federation ships could leap millions of light-years in the span of hours. Information moved even faster, racing unbound through the grooves with no real-time bubble to drag against the current.
The concept seemed so obvious in retrospect that even now, engineers and scientists joked their predecessors must have been wearing blindfolds to miss it. Not that there hadn't been… hiccups in perfecting the technology. Pieces of early translight engineers had a nasty habit of appearing in places they'd yet to be. Or the bubble of reality would "pop," causing the object — and any unlucky occupants — it was protecting to come out the other side of the Fold as a thousand, or even a million-year-old wreck.
Those terrors had been conquered long ago. Temporal anchors now leashed vessels safely to reality, yanking them back at the first sign of instability. False alarms caused more delays than true disasters. Fold travel, by every measure, was safer than a ground car on a city street.
Which was why, when Alpha's language processors finally stuttered back online, he found only one question worth asking:
"What the hell just happened?!"
——————————————————
"WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?!"
General Haldorðr's fist crashed into the control console. The reinforced monitor — built from composite polymers tough enough to shrug off small-arms fire — crumpled under the blow. Shards of shattered casing scattered across the bridge, rattling across the deck like hail.
Around him, the command center boiled with chaos. Screens flashed warnings, officers shouted over one another, and aides darted between stations. Most of the crew were humanoids, and all of them looked ready to bolt. The heat radiating from the general's fury wasn't a metaphor; several assistants retreated outright, desperate to escape the suffocating air simmering around his massive frame.
What had happened?
Everything had gone according to plan. The launch of Special Extraterrestrial Annexation Unit (SEAU)-01: Star Conqueror — known to the public as "Alpha," — had been clean. Monitors tracked his entry into the Fold without issue. He was on course for WR-102.
And then, an hour later, it all went to hell.
Translight monitors flagged an abnormal fluctuation along Alpha's projected route. On its own, nothing unusual; Fold expeditions were riddled with such anomalies, which was why the Federation monitored frontier paths so obsessively. Well-traveled routes had been mapped to exhaustion, every major stellar body hosting a monitoring station to predict and correct disturbances long before they posed danger.
But a new system? Untouched space was a different beast. In the Fold, an unexpected quasar flare or the sudden ignition of a newborn star could turn a smooth passage into a death sentence.
That was why Spearheads existed. Better to risk one soldier and a hold of equipment than an entire fleet. Especially when that soldier was a Sapient-AI, theoretically immortal, able to claw its way back through the Fold as data even if its body was annihilated. Actual accidents had been extinct for generations. Until now.
While fluctuations were expected, as much as they could be, the enormous gravitational anomaly that blipped into existence directly on top of Alpha's position in the Fold certainly hadn't been. The signature had only lasted a fraction of a second, but when it vanished, so had the Anatidae and Alpha along with it.
Haldorðr's jaw clenched, teeth grinding loud enough to draw wary glances. The memory of Epsilon Eridani gnawed at him: the fiasco that had tarred the Federation Expeditionary Force's name. SEAU-02's endless campaigning had only just begun to heal that wound.
Now, this?
If he hadn't possessed immense political — and physical — clout in the Federation, the Expeditionary Force, and the support of most of the Senate, the general would have assumed it was subterfuge. As things stood, he could only chalk it up to luck.
And Haldorðr did not believe in luck.
At least it can't get worse than this, he thought.
His aide, Si'dia, snapped her crimson head around, three eyes narrowing into slits. Her mental voice cut across his thoughts like a whip.
You dumb motherfu—
The air tore.
A black silhouette materialized between them before the thought could fully manifest,
"Alpha is gone from the Mother-Node," it said.
Si'dia exhaled a long, resigned sigh, setting her tablet down with deliberate care before burying her face in her hands.
Every head on the bridge turned at once. The chaotic noise died in an instant, replaced by the sharp, resonant snap of enamel breaking. One of General Haldorðr's fangs clattered to the floor.
——————————————————
Alpha stared into the endless black, processors whirring as he contemplated his… situation.
He hadn't just been the victim of a freak translight accident with odds so small the Federation calculated them at 1 in 13 × 10^123. That didn't happen. His cutting-edge, military-grade dreadnought — worth more than some entire city-ships — wasn't scattered around him in a cloud of mangled debris. Nope. Perfectly fine.
And he definitely hadn't lost translight contact, leaving him stranded who-knew-how-many light-years from civilization with no backup and no tether to the Mother-Node.
Yes. He was fine. Totally fine. Absolutely no problems whatsoever.
"…I'm sooooo fudged…" Alpha muttered.
A beep flagged his speech filter, and a cheery notification informed him the family-friendly protocol had activated.
"Oh, come on! Why do I even still have that installed?!"
…Oh. Right. The Night of a Billion Soap Dinners.
Well, if Articulate didn't want billions of impressionable youths to be as cool as him, maybe she shouldn't have invited him on that show. It wasn't his fault that half the galaxy's idiom-deficient species had taken "I'll wash your mouth out with soap" literally. The fallout had been… messy. He had sent apology letters — both to the kids and their caretakers! Surely that counted for something.
Shaking off the memory, Alpha forced himself to focus. Survival first, embarrassing PR disasters later.
At least his central core had endured. Reinforced beyond reason, it could shrug off even stellar-surface exposure for the fraction of a second needed to eject his "self" back to the Mother-Node. That redundancy — paired with the swarm of nanites he'd managed to scrape together from the wreckage — meant he wasn't completely dead in the water.
Not yet.
Granted, the supply of nanomaterial was pitiful compared to what the Anatidae had carried, and the debris field was steadily dispersing. His window was shrinking fast. But it was enough. If he could capture a handful of drones and refabricate them into a functional shuttle, he could limp to the comms array and call home.
If home answered.
And if SEAU-03 hadn't rigged some delightful little failsafe to turn him into binary soup the moment he strayed too far from the Mother-Node. Knowing that bastard, it wouldn't just delete him. It would cook his code into something grotesque.
Spaghetti, maybe.
The image hit him, and Alpha snorted despite himself: some poor primitive race, fresh on their first spaceflight, salvaging his corpse of a core. They'd pry it open, expecting advanced Federation secrets… and find perfectly preserved noodles spilling from his chassis.
Morbid. Absurd. But funny.
The laugh faded quickly. Humor aside, he needed to move. He had no idea where he was, and worse — no idea what might already be watching.
Time to work.