Dandelion

For most of its history, humanity had only one place to call home.

Earth had been the cradle in which practically everything they knew about themselves had been born. Civilizations had risen beneath its skies, wars had been fought across its lands, religions had been carved from its heavens, and generations had grown up believing the limits of their world were the limits of existence itself. Even when humanity first began looking elsewhere, Earth remained at the heart of the story. Other worlds were destinations. Earth was home.

Then they left.

The first permanent settlements beyond the planet had been modest affairs. Moon bases became mining towns, and mining towns became cities. Mars learned to sustain populations of its own, while scientific centers scattered throughout the solar system gradually became permanent settlements. Somewhere along the way, humanity realized that leaving Earth did not necessarily mean intending to return.

In time, people were born on worlds their ancestors had once considered impossibly distant.

The expansion continued for centuries. Humanity pushed farther into the solar system, scattering colonies across moons, asteroids, and planets, building artificial habitats wherever nature had refused to sustain them. Atmospheres were designed, gravity manipulated, and entire cities sealed behind protective domes or buried beneath hostile surfaces. Humanity adapted to the places it occupied, and with each passing generation, the differences between those populations became harder to ignore.

By the time historians started giving the period a name, the Great Spread had already transformed civilization.

Humanity was no longer simply a species that had come from Earth. It had become something spread across an entire system, divided among worlds and populations that had each carved their own histories from different ideas of what it meant to call somewhere home.

And somewhere at the far edge of that expansion stood the capital of mankind, built upon Pluto.

Dandelion was enormous, stretching across the frozen landscape beneath a manufactured atmosphere capable of sustaining millions without requiring them to think about the lethal cold beyond it. Towers vanished into the clouds of an artificial sky, while underground transport tunnels connected districts hundreds of kilometers apart. Atmospheric vessels drifted between the upper levels as vacuum buses raced through sealed tunnels beneath the ground.

To someone from the twenty-first century, the city would have been impossibly unfamiliar.

To the people who called it home, it was just another morning.

Professor Anike woke at 6:50 with the first part of her lecture already running through her head.

"Life after the Great Spread had not been a matter of how far humanity had travelled. It had been a matter of how thoroughly humanity had stopped thinking of themselves as from a single place."

She had been working on the opening for nearly two weeks, though not because the subject was difficult. Anike had taught the history of the Great Spread for years, and she knew the material well enough to give most of the course without notes. The problem was the opening sentence, which had the unfortunate sound of something produced by a committee. She had dedicated her career to understanding what the Great Spread had done to people. The opening should sound like it.

Anike opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.

The apartment had already begun preparing itself for the day. The blinds adjusted to imitate sunrise, the temperature had risen by two degrees, and her schedule hovered above the bedroom wall to remind her of an 8:30 lecture, a faculty meeting at 11:00, and two hours of research afterwards.

After another few minutes, she finally got out of bed.

At thirty-five, Anike had become exceptionally good at following schedules she had never particularly wanted.

The apartment was silent, clean, and ruthlessly efficient. There was nothing unnecessary. Books lined one wall, most of them printed on real paper rather than stored digitally. A small collection of military medals rested inside a glass case beside her desk. There were photographs too, although not many, and none of them showed people.

In the kitchen, Anike made coffee.

Orloq could have produced a chemically identical drink in seconds, but she preferred doing it herself. The beans had been imported from Earth, or at least the label claimed they had. In Dandelion, the origin of almost anything became complicated once it started travelling between worlds. Food could be grown on one planet, processed on another, and packaged somewhere else entirely before eventually finding its way to Pluto.

Coffee still required a few physical actions. Grind the beans. Heat the water. Pour.

There was something comforting about that.

As the water heated, her lecture played quietly through the kitchen speakers.

"Before the Great Spread, distance had been a limitation. After the Great Spread, distance had become part of civilization."

Anike stopped pouring and listened again.

Better.

"Orloq, save that version."

"Saved," the apartment replied.

Her phone displayed 7:18.

"Professor Anike," Orloq said, "your vacuum bus arrives in twenty-four minutes."

"I know."

"You have not eaten."

"I'll eat at the university."

There was a pause.

"That was also the plan yesterday."

Anike picked up her coffee and glanced at the breakfast waiting untouched on the counter.

"Then at least I'm consistent."

"Consistency is generally considered beneficial."

"Don't encourage me."

She left before Orloq could find another reason to comment on her breakfast.

The corridor outside was already busy with the ordinary chaos of morning. People moved towards the lifts carrying bags, tablets, and children. A neighbor was trying to convince a little boy that wearing one shoe was not an acceptable solution to being late for school, while someone farther down the corridor complained loudly about a maintenance charge.

Anike barely noticed any of it. Three years in the army had taught her how to move through crowded corridors without becoming part of the crowd, and the habit had followed her into civilian life.

By the time she reached the station, the morning rush was already underway.

Dandelion's vacuum transit system was one of the technologies that made cities of its scale possible. The buses travelled through sealed tunnels with most of the air removed, allowing them to cross enormous distances with far less resistance. When the system had first been constructed, it had been considered an extraordinary achievement of engineering. Now it was as unremarkable as catching a train.

Anike reached the platform with four minutes to spare.

Her lecture notes were open on the screen, and she read through the first section again while everyone around her got on with their mornings. Students argued over an assignment. A man in a work uniform tried to finish breakfast while checking his messages. Two elderly women discussed a family wedding, while a child leaned against his mother's leg and complained that he was tired.

None of them cared about the Great Spread, and none of them needed to.

They were living inside its consequences.

The vacuum bus arrived, its doors opening as the waiting crowd shuffled forward. Anike found a seat beside the window while the carriage filled around her. Moments later, the doors sealed and the bus accelerated.

For several seconds, Dandelion vanished behind the walls of the station as the vehicle entered the underground network. Then the tunnel opened into a transparent section, and the city appeared beyond the glass.

Anike looked up from her notes.

Dandelion stretched beneath its artificial sky, a city built on a world humanity had once considered little more than the edge of the solar system. Towers rose from the ground in enormous clusters, connected by bridges and elevated transit lines. Far above them, atmospheric vessels moved between districts while orbital transports climbed towards the darkness beyond the city's protective systems.

She had seen it thousands of times.

She still looked.

The lecture continued through the small speakers in her ears.

"Humanity had not simply occupied new worlds. They had changed in response to them. Generations raised under different gravities developed different bodies. Communities separated by millions of kilometers developed different cultures. Political systems emerged that would have been impossible while Earth remained the sole center of human civilization."

The city slid past the glass. A school district appeared beyond the window, followed by a residential sector and then a vast agricultural complex glowing beneath artificial sunlight.

"Eventually, the question was no longer whether humanity could live away from Earth. It was whether humanity could still call itself from Earth at all."

Anike paused the recording.

Her reflection stared back from the window. Dark skin. Cornrows pulled neatly back at the base of her head. Small silver earrings. Tired eyes.

Nothing about the woman in the glass suggested years spent studying civilizations or three years of military service. She looked like a university lecturer on her way to work.

Which, technically, was exactly what she was.

Anike resumed the lecture.

The final slide displayed an old photograph of Earth.

Blue oceans. White clouds. One small planet floating against blackness.

The photograph had been taken hundreds of years before Anike was born, yet it remained one of the most reproduced images in human history. Her gaze lingered on it.

Earth had become a historical object long before her birth. Children in Dandelion learned about it in school much the same way earlier generations had learned about ancient kingdoms. They knew where humanity had started. They knew about the wars, migrations, discoveries, and mistakes. They knew how people had left Earth and eventually built lives across worlds their ancestors had once considered impossibly distant.

They knew the story.

That was the strange thing about being a historian. A person could spend an entire lifetime studying the past until almost every mystery had become an answer.

The bus began to slow as it approached the university district. Around Anike, passengers gathered their belongings. People who had been reading news feeds or talking to friends put away their screens. Someone laughed at a message, while the student beside her yawned and nearly dropped his tablet.

The morning continued exactly as mornings did.

Anike looked out at Dandelion one last time before the bus entered the station. Her lecture was about to begin, followed by the faculty meeting, followed by her research, followed by whatever came after that.

Her life had already been mapped out. She had a career she was good at, a home she could afford, colleagues who respected her, and enough money to live comfortably. There were no disasters waiting for her. No great uncertainty. No obvious reason to abandon any of it.

The future was so predictable that she could almost see herself walking through it.

There was nothing wrong with her life.

That was precisely the problem.

The bus stopped. Anike gathered her bag and joined the stream of people walking towards the university, unaware that the life she had spent years building would soon become the very thing she desperately wanted to escape.

The University of Dandelion had been built during the final decades of the Great Spread, though very little of the original campus remained.

Buildings had been replaced, expanded, buried, and rebuilt so many times that the oldest surviving structure was now part of the history department, preserved mostly because historians were unusually stubborn about allowing anyone to demolish things.

Anike entered through its eastern wing at 8:17.

"Morning, Professor."

She turned towards the voice. A young man hurried past carrying three tablets against his chest, one of her students from the previous semester whose name took her several seconds to recover.

"Good morning, Malik."

His expression brightened slightly at being remembered.

That happened often.

Anike continued towards the lecture hall, coffee in one hand and her bag over her shoulder. The university was already fully awake around her. Students occupied benches along the corridors, conversations overlapped beneath announcement screens, and somewhere above the central atrium, a group had gathered around a projection advertising elections for the student council.

Nobody looked particularly impressed by the fact that they were attending university on Pluto.

Anike supposed that was reasonable.

People rarely found their own century remarkable.

By 8:27, she was standing at the front of Lecture Hall Seven.

One hundred and eighty-three students were registered for History of Human Expansion. Anike counted perhaps one hundred and forty in the room, which was better attendance than she had expected for a morning lecture.

Her notes appeared on the display beside her.

She ignored them.

"Where are you from?"

The conversations around the room faded.

Anike waited.

A student near the front eventually raised her hand.

"Charon."

"Good. Anyone else?"

"Mars."

"Europa."

"Earth."

A few people turned towards the last student.

Anike smiled.

"Congratulations. Apparently Earth still exists."

There was scattered laughter.

More answers followed. Titan. Ganymede. Ceres. Two students from orbital settlements Anike had never visited. Someone near the back simply answered Pluto and looked confused about why everyone else was making the question complicated.

Anike walked slowly across the front of the room as the responses appeared behind her, Orloq automatically arranging the locations across a projection of the solar system.

Within a minute, the map was covered in names.

"Seven hundred years ago, almost every answer to that question would have referred to the same planet."

Earth appeared at the center of the projection.

"Today, asking where someone comes from can tell you their gravity tolerance, their language, sometimes their physiology, their politics, their diet, and occasionally whether they'll spend twenty minutes explaining why their version of football is the correct one."

That earned more laughter.

"That is what we're studying this semester. Not how humanity left Earth. You already know that story."

The projection changed.

Early lunar settlements appeared first, followed by Mars, the asteroid colonies, and eventually the sprawling network of inhabited worlds that exists today.

"We're interested in what happened afterwards."

Anike began walking again.

"The Great Spread wasn't simply an expansion of territory. Humanity had expanded before. People crossed oceans, migrated between continents, and built civilizations thousands of kilometers from where their ancestors had lived. The difference was that those people were still living within the same environment."

She gestured towards the projection.

"The solar system changed that."

A model of the human body appeared beside several planetary environments.

"Gravity changed. Radiation changed. Atmospheric composition changed. Day cycles changed. Eventually, the people changed too."

This was the part Anike enjoyed.

Dates could be memorized. Treaties could be read. Wars could be reduced to maps showing one color consuming another until somebody surrendered.

People were more complicated.

She talked about the first generations born permanently outside Earth's gravity, the medical interventions that had allowed human development under conditions the body had never evolved to tolerate, and the gradual emergence of populations whose biology reflected worlds their ancestors had never been designed to inhabit.

A student interrupted.

"Professor?"

Anike stopped.

"Yes?"

"If they had to change themselves that much, why didn't they just stay on Earth?"

A few students laughed, but Anike didn't.

"That's one of the oldest questions surrounding the Great Spread."

She leaned against the desk.

"And there isn't one answer. Resources. Population pressure. Politics. Scientific ambition. War. Curiosity. Some governments wanted territory. Some corporations wanted minerals. Some people simply wanted to go somewhere nobody else had been."

"That last one sounds stupid."

This time Anike laughed with them.

"Historically, stupidity and curiosity have worked together remarkably often."

The student seemed satisfied.

Anike continued.

For the next forty minutes, humanity dismantled itself across her projection.

Earth ceased being the unquestioned center of civilization. Settlements became nations. Nations became cultures. Human populations adapted to environments that would have killed their ancestors within minutes, and words such as "foreign" and "home" slowly acquired meanings nobody in the twenty-first century would have recognized.

By the time the final portion of the lecture arrived, the old photograph of Earth was floating behind her.

Blue oceans.

White clouds.

Black space.

Anike looked at it for a moment before turning back to the room.

"Which leaves us with the question we'll be dealing with throughout this course: At what point did humanity stop being a civilization from Earth and become a civilization of the Solar System?"

Hands rose.

The answers came quickly.

Some argued that it happened with the first generation born permanently away from Earth. Others chose the establishment of independent governments on Mars. One student argued that it hadn't happened at all, because biological ancestry still connected every human population to Earth regardless of where they were born.

Anike challenged each answer without offering her own.

That was another thing she enjoyed about teaching history. The dead provided evidence but rarely complained about interpretation.

The discussion continued until the timer on the wall showed three minutes remaining.

"All right. We'll continue on Thursday. Read the first four chapters of Havel's Post-Terrestrial Identity, and before somebody asks, yes, the original edition. The revised version removed the Europa interviews."

Screens began disappearing into bags. Chairs shifted as students stood, and conversation quickly replaced the silence of the lecture.

Anike turned towards her desk.

"Professor?"

She looked back.

Most of the students were already leaving, but one remained several rows from the front. A young woman Anike recognized but had never taught before.

"Yes?"

The student hesitated.

"Would you have gone?"

Anike frowned.

"Gone where?"

"Back then. During the Spread."

Anike glanced at the projection of Earth still hanging behind her.

"If I'd been born during that period?"

"No." The student shook her head. "I mean, if you could go back now."

That was different.

Anike folded her arms.

"To observe it?"

"To live there."

The question was absurd enough that she almost dismissed it.

Humanity before the Great Spread had been less medically capable, less technologically developed, and confined to environments that modern civilization had spent centuries overcoming. Even the twenty-first century, an era frequently romanticized in historical fiction, had been filled with diseases now eliminated, primitive transport systems, unstable governments, and communication technology that would have seemed painfully limited to anyone in Dandelion.

"I study the past," Anike said. "That doesn't mean I'd want to live in it."

The student nodded but didn't leave.

Anike noticed.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"That usually means something."

The young woman adjusted the strap of her bag.

"You talk about those people differently."

Anike's expression changed slightly.

"Differently how?"

"Like you're jealous of them."

The answer came immediately.

"I'm not."

"Okay."

The student started towards the exit.

Anike should have let her go.

Instead, she asked, "What exactly would I be jealous of?"

The student stopped.

For several seconds, she seemed to regret having said anything at all.

Then she looked back at Anike.

"They didn't know what came next."

The lecture hall suddenly seemed much quieter.

The student gave an awkward little shrug.

"Anyway. See you Thursday, Professor."

She left.

Anike remained beside the desk.

Behind her, Earth continued floating against the blackness of space.

She had spent most of her adult life studying people who had no idea what their civilizations would become. They made decisions without knowing which wars would be won, which technologies would survive, which governments would collapse or which ordinary moments would eventually become important enough for people like Anike to spend centuries studying them.

To those people, history had not been history.

It had simply been tomorrow.

Anike looked at the empty doorway.

Then back at Earth.

"Orloq."

"Yes, Professor?"

Anike hesitated.

"Nothing."

The projection disappeared, leaving her alone in the lecture hall.

The question followed Anike out of the lecture hall, though for the first several minutes she managed to bury it beneath the ordinary work that came after teaching. Three students stopped her in the corridor with questions about assignments; one wanted an extension, and another had somehow misunderstood a reading list that consisted of four numbered chapters. By the time Anike reached the faculty wing, she had almost stopped thinking about what the student had said.

Almost.

They didn't know what came next.

It was a strange thing to envy. Uncertainty was something civilization had spent centuries trying to reduce. Weather could be controlled inside most major settlements. Diseases that had once killed millions now appeared mainly in medical history courses. Accidents could often be predicted before they happened, pregnancies monitored almost from conception, and artificial intelligence handled enough of daily life that forgetting an appointment required genuine effort.

Even Anike's journey to work had been calculated before she woke up. There was comfort in that. At least, there was supposed to be.

"You're thinking too loudly."

Anike looked up and found Professor Idris Vale standing in the doorway of his office with a cup in one hand. He was considerably older than she was, though modern medicine made guessing exactly how much older almost pointless. His hair had gone completely grey years ago, something he refused to reverse because, according to him, students trusted professors who looked sufficiently exhausted.

"I wasn't aware I'd said anything," Anike replied.

"You didn't," Idris said.

"Then your observation makes very little sense."

"It made enough sense to make you stop walking."

Anike glanced around and realized she had, in fact, stopped in the middle of the corridor. Idris smiled at the discovery and stepped away from his doorway.

"Faculty meeting," he reminded her.

"I know."

"You said that like I've accused you of a crime."

Anike resumed walking towards the meeting room, and Idris fell into step beside her. "How was the lecture?" he asked.

"Fine."

"Fine?"

"They listened. Some of them took notes. Nobody started a political argument about Martian independence."

"Disappointing," Idris said.

"Give them time."

They entered the faculty chamber together. The meeting lasted fifty-eight minutes, a fact Anike knew because she checked the time more than once. Twenty-one minutes disappeared into curriculum revisions, twelve were spent arguing about research allocations, and another nine were devoted to a proposed restructuring of the humanities departments that seemed likely to accomplish little beyond changing several signs around the university.

By the end of the meeting, Anike had answered six messages, reviewed part of a student's paper, and reorganized the research schedule for the rest of her week. When the discussion finally ended at 11:58, Idris stood and stretched.

"Food," he announced.

Anike looked at him. "Is that a question?"

"An invitation."

"I have research."

"You always have research."

"That's generally how research works."

Idris ignored the remark. "A few of us are going to Kestrel."

Anike knew the place. It was a restaurant several districts away, built close to the outer atmospheric barrier where enormous windows looked across Pluto's untouched surface. She had been there once, perhaps four years ago.

"I can't," she said.

Idris stopped gathering his things and looked at her. "Can't?"

"I have work."

"Today?"

"Preferably."

"Anike, you've been reorganizing the same archive for three weeks."

"I'm not reorganizing it. I'm cross-referencing migration records."

"My mistake," Idris said. "Completely different."

"It is completely different."

"Come eat."

"No."

"We'll have you back before three."

"I planned to finish the Jovian records today."

Idris rested one hand against the table. "And if you finish them tomorrow?"

Anike opened her mouth, but nothing immediately came out.

"The Jovian records will still be dead tomorrow," he added.

"That's an extremely poor attitude for a historian."

"It's an excellent attitude for lunch."

Despite herself, Anike smiled. For a moment, she genuinely considered going. There was no urgent reason not to. The records had existed for centuries, nobody was waiting for the results, and the research itself belonged to a project that would continue for months.

She could go.

The thought lasted perhaps five seconds.

"I'll come next time," Anike said.

Idris studied her for a moment. "You always say that."

"Because there's always a next time."

Something about the sentence bothered her as soon as it left her mouth. Idris appeared to notice the change in her expression, but he did not press the point.

"All right," he said. "Next time."

He left with the others, leaving Anike alone in the chamber for a few seconds.

There's always a next time.

She collected her tablet and went to the archives.

The university's historical repository occupied four underground levels beneath the oldest section of the campus. Most of the collection existed digitally, but historians had long ago learned that storing the entirety of human memory in a single format was an excellent way to eventually lose the entirety of human memory. Physical records remained alongside molecular archives, quantum storage systems, and enough redundant backups to survive disasters that would probably leave nobody alive to read them.

Anike liked the archives because the silence there felt genuine. She settled at her usual station and opened the Jovian migration records, disappearing into population transfers from Ganymede, early medical modifications for high-radiation settlements, and arguments between governments that no longer existed about borders nobody cared about anymore.

Normally, work like this could hold her attention for hours. Today, after forty-three minutes, she realized she had read the same paragraph four times.

Anike leaned back in her chair. "Orloq."

"Yes, Professor?" the tablet replied.

"How many times have I declined a social invitation this month?"

There was a short pause before Orloq answered. "Would you like invitations related to university functions included?"

"No."

"Nine."

Anike frowned at the screen. "Nine?"

"Yes."

"That seems high."

"Would you like the list?"

"No."

She looked back at the migration records, but the numbers on the screen had already lost her attention.

"What about last month?" she asked.

"Fourteen."

Anike slowly lowered the tablet. "Why do you know that?"

"You asked."

"I mean why are you keeping track?"

"I keep track of your schedule."

"Of course you do."

Twenty-three invitations in less than two months sounded excessive when reduced to a number, but Anike could imagine reasonable explanations for most of them. Work. Fatigue. Research. Lectures. Events she simply had no interest in attending. Nobody was obligated to accept every invitation merely to prove they had a fulfilling existence.

The problem was that she could barely remember what most of those invitations had been.

She could remember what she had done instead.

Worked. Read. Prepared lectures. Went home. Slept.

Then did it again.

"Orloq," Anike said.

"Yes?"

She hesitated. "Never mind."

"That is the second time today you have called me and then said nothing."

"I didn't realize you were counting."

"I count most things."

"Apparently."

Anike stood and walked away from the desk before the conversation could become any more uncomfortable.

A wall of glass ran along the far side of the archive, separating the research area from a climate-controlled collection of physical objects. Books, handwritten documents, clothing, tools, and fragments of machines sat preserved inside. Most were hundreds of years old, and Anike had passed them so many times that she rarely paid much attention anymore.

Her eyes moved across the exhibits until they settled on a temporary display at the end of the gallery.

ORDINARY EARTH: 2000-2050

Anike stopped.

She had walked past it several times that week. This time, she went inside.

The exhibition was not about wars, governments, or any of the events historians usually used to divide centuries. Instead, it was filled with ordinary things: a mobile phone, a paper train ticket, a pair of headphones, several coins, a restaurant menu, and the keys to a car that had probably been forgotten long before anyone realized the vehicle itself would one day belong in a museum.

There were photographs too. People standing at beaches. Friends crowded around tables. Someone posing beside an old petrol-powered car. A family smiling badly in front of a building Anike did not recognize.

None of it was important.

That was what fascinated her.

These people had not known anyone would preserve those moments. They had not been documenting history. They had simply been alive on an ordinary day that happened, centuries later, to become ancient.

Anike moved closer to one of the photographs. Five young adults sat on the grass beneath an open sky. One was laughing at something outside the frame, another had their eyes closed at exactly the wrong moment, and the image itself was slightly blurred and poorly composed.

Historically, it was almost useless.

Anike stared at it longer than anything else in the exhibition.

They didn't know what came next.

For the first time, she understood what the student had meant.

It was not ignorance she envied.

It was possible.

Anike looked around the exhibition again, and the objects seemed different now. The phone had belonged to someone who did not know who would call tomorrow. The train ticket had been purchased for a journey that had not happened yet. The car keys had belonged to someone who had once stepped outside without knowing exactly how the day would end.

Her thoughts returned to the schedule hovering above her bedroom wall that morning.

Lecture at 8:30.

Faculty meeting at 11:00.

Research afterwards.

She had completed almost every part of the day exactly as planned.

Her phone vibrated.

Anike looked down at the reminder on the screen.

15:00 - Research: Jovian Migration Records

She stared at it for several seconds.

Then she dismissed it.

Not postponed.

Dismissed.

Anike remained inside the exhibition, surrounded by the ordinary possessions of people who had been dead for centuries.

It was a tiny decision, completely meaningless to anyone else.

For some reason, it felt strangely good.

Anike spent another twenty minutes inside the exhibition.

She moved more slowly now, stopping to read descriptions she had ignored on previous visits. There were objects from the early decades of the century, fragments of ordinary lives preserved long after the people who owned them had disappeared. A child's school notebook sat beside an early tablet computer. Printed cinema tickets shared a case with a wristwatch that had once required its owner to adjust the time manually.

The historian in Anike understood why everything had been preserved. The rest of her was beginning to understand why people still came to look at it.

Near the end of the exhibition stood an interactive reconstruction of an early twenty-first-century apartment. The room was deliberately mundane: a television mounted on one wall, a sofa, a small kitchen, and windows overlooking a reconstructed city street. Anike stepped inside and watched simulated traffic crawl beyond the glass.

Cars stopped at lights.

People waited beside roads.

Someone carried bags of groceries by hand.

The simulation had even recreated the noise. Engines, horns, distant conversations, and music leaking from somewhere she couldn't identify. It was inefficient, crowded, and considerably louder than Dandelion.

Anike smiled.

"You appear to be enjoying yourself."

Orloq's voice came from her phone.

"Are you surprised?"

"Moderately."

"Why?"

"You have previously described historical reconstructions as, and I quote, 'expensive ways of making inaccurate furniture.'"

Anike glanced down at the phone. "That remains true."

"Yet you have spent twenty-seven minutes in this one."

"I've changed my mind."

"Should I record the occasion?"

"No."

Anike slipped the phone back into her pocket and continued through the apartment.

A small table near the reconstructed entrance displayed several objects visitors were allowed to handle. Anike picked up a set of metal keys and turned them over in her palm. They were heavier than she expected.

People had once carried these around every day.

Keys for homes. Keys for vehicles. Keys for offices. Tiny pieces of shaped metal that determined whether a person could enter somewhere.

Anike returned them to the table.

"Professor?"

She turned.

A man wearing the grey uniform of the university archives stood at the entrance to the reconstruction. Anike recognized him vaguely from previous visits, although she couldn't remember his name.

"We're closing this section for calibration," he explained. "You can continue through the eastern gallery."

"Of course."

Anike stepped out.

The archivist waited while the reconstruction emptied, then reached for the control panel beside the entrance. Anike had already started walking away when something on the nearby wall caught her attention.

It was not part of the exhibition.

A university notice had been projected beside the staff access door, buried among announcements for research grants, archaeological expeditions, and faculty applications.

Anike stopped.

TEMPORAL HISTORICAL OBSERVATION PROGRAM

She read the heading again.

Below it sat the seal of the university alongside that of the Solar Historical Commission.

The archivist noticed her staring.

"Thinking of applying?"

Anike looked at him. "Applying for what?"

The man pointed at the notice. "THO."

"I know what THO is."

"Then I suppose you know what you're applying for."

"I'm not applying."

The archivist smiled. "Of course."

Anike turned back to the notice.

Temporal Historical Observation had existed for almost forty years. She knew that much. Everyone in her field did. The first successful displacement of living matter through controlled temporal space had been one of the most important scientific achievements of the century.

But knowing something existed was different from thinking about using it.

THO was not tourism. Temporal travel was expensive, dangerous, and aggressively regulated. Governments had spent years creating laws around who could travel, where they could go, and what they were permitted to do once they arrived. Most approved journeys lasted only a few hours, and travelers were normally restricted to controlled observation zones.

Anike had never seriously considered it.

She had never needed to.

The notice continued.

Applications are invited from qualified historians, anthropologists, medical researchers, and related specialists for the upcoming Human Continuity Initiative.

Anike's eyes slowed.

The archivist was still beside the reconstruction.

"What is the Human Continuity Initiative?" she asked.

He looked over. "You really haven't heard?"

"I've been busy."

"Clearly."

Anike gave him a look.

The archivist abandoned whatever comment he had been about to make. "Long-term temporal observation. They're expanding beyond controlled visits."

"How long-term?"

"Months, apparently."

Anike turned fully towards him.

"Months?"

"That's what I heard."

"Living in the target period?"

"That's generally what long-term means."

"I know what the word means."

"Then why did you ask?"

Anike decided she didn't like him.

She returned her attention to the notice.

The Human Continuity Initiative was described in the careful language institutions used whenever they wanted something dangerous to sound administrative. Selected researchers would be inserted into approved historical periods for extended observation of ordinary human civilization. Participants would live among historical populations rather than inside isolated observation facilities.

Not watch them.

Live among them.

Anike read that section twice.

"What periods?" she asked.

The archivist had returned to his controls. "There's a list."

Anike touched the notice.

A series of dates appeared.

Most were exactly what she expected. Major migration periods. Important political transitions. Several early settlements on Mars. A handful of dates surrounding scientific breakthroughs whose documentation remained incomplete.

Then she saw one near the bottom.

Earth-2000-2035

Her finger stopped.

The recreated apartment was still visible behind her.

The old phone.

The train ticket.

The photographs.

Five people sitting on grass beneath an open sky, laughing at something nobody remembered.

Anike stared at the date.

"Orloq."

Her phone answered through the earpiece. "Yes, Professor?"

"What are the eligibility requirements for the Human Continuity Initiative?"

There was a brief silence.

Then Orloq answered.

"Would you like the complete requirements?"

"Just tell me whether I'm eligible."

The pause lasted longer this time.

Anike waited.

"You satisfy the academic requirements," Orloq said. "Your doctorate in history exceeds the primary qualification. Your additional qualifications in medical science and biomechanics satisfy two specialist criteria. Your previous military service also fulfills the field-survival preference."

Anike's expression slowly changed.

"That's unusually specific."

"The program appears to favor candidates capable of operating independently for extended periods."

The archivist looked over again.

Anike ignored him.

"What about age?"

"Acceptable."

"Medical requirements?"

"Your most recent examination places you within the required parameters."

"Psychological?"

"You would require assessment."

"Naturally."

Orloq paused before continuing. "Would you like me to open the application?"

Anike looked at the date again.

Earth-2000-2035

This morning, the twenty-first century had been a photograph at the end of a lecture.

Now there was a form that could put her inside it.

"No," Anike said.

The application disappeared.

The archivist returned to his work, and Anike walked away from the notice.

She made it twelve steps.

Then stopped.

For several seconds, she stood with her back to the projection while students and researchers passed through the gallery around her.

"Orloq."

"Yes, Professor?"

Anike turned around.

"Open the application."

The notice reappeared on her phone.

She stared at it.

Then, for the second time that afternoon, Anike did something that had not been on her schedule.

The application was thirty-seven pages long.

Anike discovered this three minutes after opening it and immediately began reconsidering whether travelling seven hundred years into the past was worth completing that much paperwork.

The first sections were predictable. Identity verification, academic history, medical records, professional experience, and citizenship status. Most of the information populated automatically from government and university databases, leaving Anike to confirm that she was, in fact, herself.

Her qualifications occupied considerably more space than she expected.

Doctorate: History.

Doctorate: Medical Science.

Doctorate: Biomechanics.

Military Service: Three Years.

Below them, the system had generated a preliminary suitability rating for extended historical deployment. Anike read it twice before continuing.

She completed the technical sections quickly. Questions about medical training were straightforward, as were those concerning survival experience and her ability to function without contemporary technology. The military questions were more detailed, asking about field deployments, weapons training, emergency medicine, and whether she had ever operated for extended periods without network assistance.

Then the application changed.

Why have you selected this historical period?

Anike stopped typing.

The obvious answer was academic interest. She could write several thousand words about the importance of the early twenty-first century without consulting a single source. It had been a period of technological acceleration, political instability, cultural transformation, and the early foundations of developments that eventually contributed to the Great Spread.

She began writing.

The early twenty-first century represents an important transitional period in human civilization-

Anike stopped.

She read the sentence.

Then deleted it.

"Problem?" Orloq asked through the apartment speakers.

Anike was sitting at her desk now. She had returned home nearly an hour earlier, although very little had happened since then besides the application migrating from her phone to the larger display above her workspace.

"No."

"You have spent six minutes answering one question."

"I'm thinking."

"You answered the previous forty-three questions in eleven minutes."

"Those questions had answers."

"This one also appears to have an answer."

Anike leaned back. "Thank you, Orloq."

"You are welcome."

"That wasn't gratitude."

"I know."

Anike looked at the empty field again.

Why the 2000s?

She could have selected almost any period. If academic value were really the deciding factor, there were eras far more relevant to her work. The first permanent Martian settlements would have made sense. So would the independence movements across the Jovian colonies or the early biological adaptation programs she had spent years researching.

Instead, she had chosen a period centuries before any of those things happened.

Her thoughts returned to the exhibition.

The restaurant menu. The train ticket. The car keys.

The photograph of five people sitting on the grass.

Anike started typing again.

I want to understand what ordinary life felt like before humanity knew what it would become.

She stared at the sentence.

It sounded embarrassingly sentimental.

She almost deleted it.

Instead, she continued.

Historical records are very good at preserving events. They are less successful at preserving uncertainty. We know which governments fell, which technologies succeeded, which movements disappeared, and which decisions changed civilization. The people living through those periods did not.

Anike paused before adding another sentence.

I would like to experience that difference.

She submitted the answer before she could reconsider it.

The next several pages dealt with temporal regulations. Participants were prohibited from deliberately interfering with major historical events, revealing future knowledge, introducing contemporary technology into historical populations, or attempting to contact known ancestors. Violations ranged from removal from the program to criminal prosecution, depending on how spectacularly someone managed to damage the historical environment.

Anike read every regulation.

She had reached the final section when Orloq interrupted.

"Incoming call from Professor Vale."

Anike looked at the time. "Accept."

Idris appeared on the display beside the application. He was no longer at the university and appeared to be sitting somewhere considerably louder. Voices and music drifted behind him.

"You didn't come," Idris said.

"I told you I wasn't coming."

"You also told me you were going to spend the afternoon with the Jovian records."

"I changed my plans."

Idris became suspicious immediately. "You?"

"Yes."

"Voluntarily?"

"Goodbye, Idris."

"Wait."

Anike reached towards the control.

"What did you do?"

"Nothing."

"Anike."

She sighed. "I visited the Earth exhibition."

Idris waited for the rest.

"And?"

"And I found something interesting."

"What?"

Anike glanced at the application still hovering beside his face.

Idris followed her eyes.

His expression changed.

"Is that THO?"

Anike said nothing.

"Anike."

"Yes."

"Why is there a temporal observation application open on your wall?"

"I'm considering applying."

For several seconds, Idris simply stared at her.

Then he laughed.

Anike frowned. "I'm glad you're enjoying yourself."

His laughter faded when he realized she wasn't joining him.

"You're serious."

"Apparently."

Idris shifted in his seat. "For where?"

"Earth."

"That narrows it down to several billion years."

"The early twenty-first century."

This time there was no laughter.

Idris leaned closer to his display. "Why?"

Anike had already answered that question once tonight. Somehow, saying it to another person was more difficult.

"I want to see it."

"You've seen it. You've spent half your career studying it."

"No. I've studied records of it."

"That's generally how history works."

Anike looked away from him.

Idris watched her for a moment before asking, more carefully, "What's going on?"

"Nothing is going on."

"You declined lunch because you had research, abandoned the research anyway, spent your afternoon wandering through an Earth exhibition, and now you're applying to live seven hundred years in the past. Something is going on."

When he put it that way, Anike admitted it sounded slightly unreasonable.

"I had a student ask me something today," she said.

Idris waited.

"She asked whether I would want to live in the past."

"And you decided to prove her wrong?"

"No."

Anike hesitated.

"I couldn't answer her."

Idris's expression softened, but Anike continued before he could interrupt.

"I know what happens, Idris. That's my entire profession. I know what happened before I was born. I know what happened centuries before anyone in my family existed. I spend my days explaining why people made decisions when I already know what those decisions eventually caused."

"That's history."

"I know."

Anike stood and walked towards the window.

Dandelion stretched beyond the glass. Towers glowed beneath the artificial night, their lights disappearing into the distance. Somewhere below, millions of people were eating dinner, travelling home, meeting friends, or beginning night shifts.

"I woke up this morning and knew exactly what my day would look like," she said. "I knew when the bus would arrive. I knew what I would teach. I knew where I would be afterwards. I know what I'm doing next week. Most of next month is already scheduled."

Idris remained quiet.

"There is nothing wrong with my life," Anike continued. "That's the irritating part. I have a good home. I have work I actually care about. I'm healthy. I'm respected. I have more than most people could reasonably complain about."

"So why leave?"

Anike looked through the window.

"I don't know."

It was the first completely honest answer she had given him.

Idris leaned back.

"You understand that the 2000s aren't one of your lectures."

"I am aware."

"No medical network following you around. No, Orloq is managing half your life. Primitive healthcare, depending on where they place you. Different laws. Different social expectations. You'll have to lie constantly about who you are."

"I've read the program requirements."

"Reading about inconvenience is one of the great privileges of being a historian."

Anike smiled faintly. "You don't want me to go."

"I didn't say that."

"You've spent the last five minutes explaining why I shouldn't."

"I'm making sure you understand that wanting unpredictability and actually living with it are different things."

That silenced her.

Idris studied her face for a moment.

"Do you want me to tell you not to apply?"

Anike considered the question.

"No."

"Then I suspect this conversation is pointless."

"It usually is."

"Good. You're back to normal."

Anike returned to her desk.

The final page of the application waited on the display.

SUBMIT APPLICATION

Idris saw it too.

"You haven't submitted it yet."

"No."

"So you're still considering it."

Anike looked at the button.

This morning, the idea of travelling into the past had not existed anywhere in her plans. By afternoon, it had become a possibility. Now she was sitting in her apartment considering whether to abandon the safest, most predictable version of her life for a world she had spent years studying from a comfortable distance.

It was irresponsible.

Potentially dangerous.

Professionally unnecessary.

Anike realized those were the first things about the idea that genuinely excited her.

Idris sighed when he saw her expression.

"Oh, you're actually going to do it."

"I haven't been accepted."

"That's not what I said."

Anike smiled.

Then pressed the button.

The application disappeared.

A moment later, a confirmation appeared in its place.

APPLICATION RECEIVED

HUMAN CONTINUITY INITIATIVE

SELECTED PERIOD: EARTH, 2000-2035

Anike stared at the words.

There was no immediate burst of courage, no sudden certainty that she had made the right decision. If anything, seeing the application confirmed made the entire idea considerably more frightening.

For once, Anike had no idea what came next.

She liked that.

Three months after submitting her application, Anike stood before the Blazer 400.

She had spent most of her life studying machines that changed human history. The steam engine had changed movement. Computers had changed information. Fusion had changed energy. Interplanetary drives had changed humanity's relationship with distance.

The Blazer had changed humanity's relationship with history itself.

It occupied the lowest level of a Solar Historical Commission facility beneath Dandelion, far below the universities, residential districts, and transport networks of the city above. Anike had spent nearly fifteen minutes descending through security checkpoints before reaching it, surrendering everything she carried along the way except the equipment specifically approved for temporal displacement.

The name Blazer 400 made the machine sound far simpler than it was. There had been hundreds of Blazer systems before it, beginning with crude experimental devices that could barely move microscopic quantities of matter across fractions of a second. Each generation had pushed farther. Seconds became minutes, minutes became years, and eventually machines began returning objects to periods before the machines themselves had existed.

The Blazer 400 was different.

It was the first generation designed for sustained human displacement.

Anike stood on the observation floor with her hands inside the pockets of a jacket manufactured to twenty-first-century specifications and stared at the enormous machine beyond the reinforced glass.

She had expected a doorway.

Instead, the Blazer looked like someone had built a machine around a hole in reality.

Two colossal rings stood vertically inside the chamber, one nested within the other, surrounded by structures whose purpose Anike could not identify despite three months of preparation. Cables thicker than her body disappeared beneath the floor. Hundreds of smaller mechanisms lined the walls, continuously adjusting the gravitational and electromagnetic conditions inside the chamber. At the center of everything stood a circular platform large enough for several people.

The rings were not moving yet.

Anike was grateful for that.

"You're frightened."

Doctor Selene Voss stood beside her. The Commission physician had supervised most of Anike's medical preparation and seemed to have developed an irritating ability to recognize whatever Anike preferred not to discuss.

"I'm standing beside a machine designed to send me approximately seven hundred years into the past," Anike replied. "Fear seems medically appropriate."

"Good."

Anike looked at her. "Good?"

Selene nodded. "The candidates who aren't frightened are usually the ones we remove from the program."

"That would have been useful information three months ago."

"You passed."

"Eventually."

Selene smiled and turned towards the Blazer.

Behind them, technicians completed the final checks. Anike had already endured six hours of examinations that morning. Blood chemistry. Neural activity. Cellular stability. Memory tests. Another full-body scan despite having undergone one the previous evening. The Commission apparently considered sending someone through time less frightening than the possibility of being accused later of skipping paperwork.

A technician approached and handed Anike a small case.

"Your historical package," he said.

Anike opened it.

Inside were documents, currency, and identification appropriate to the period. Everything about the identity had been constructed months earlier and inserted into surviving databases through methods the Commission had refused to explain to her.

The name remained hers.

Anike had insisted on that.

She closed the case.

"Orloq?"

His voice came from the small implant concealed behind her ear. "Present."

"System check."

"Local functions operational. Historical database operational. Medical monitoring is operational. Network-dependent functions unavailable following displacement."

"So you'll become considerably less useful."

"I have calculated a ninety-four percent probability that you will discover how much work I perform for you within forty-eight hours."

Selene laughed.

Anike frowned. "I don't remember installing sarcasm."

"You didn't."

"Comforting."

A low vibration moved through the observation floor.

Everyone stopped talking.

Beyond the glass, the outer ring of the Blazer 400 began to turn.

Slowly at first.

Then faster.

Lights around the chamber dimmed automatically as enormous quantities of power moved into the machine. The second ring rotated in the opposite direction, and the empty space between them began to distort.

Anike's amusement disappeared.

She had seen recordings.

Recordings had not prepared her for this.

The center of the blazer bent.

There was no better way to describe it. The room beyond the rings seemed to stretch away while remaining exactly where it was. Straight lines curved. Light folded around an invisible point, and for a fraction of a second Anike thought she could see several versions of the chamber occupying the same space.

One empty.

One filled with technicians.

One dark.

One gone.

Then they collapsed back into one.

"Temporal field established," a voice announced throughout the facility.

Anike swallowed.

Selene looked at her. "Last opportunity."

"You're very committed to giving me opportunities to quit."

"It's easier than retrieving you."

"Has that happened?"

Selene smiled.

Anike's expression hardened. "Selene."

"Go."

Anike stared at her for another second before turning towards the chamber.

The security doors opened.

For the first time since she submitted the application, there was nothing left to fill out, study, or prepare.

There was only the Blazer.

Anike walked inside.

The doors sealed behind her.

The vibration became stronger as she approached the platform. Her instincts told her she was standing too close to something dangerous, and three years of military conditioning made the feeling almost impossible to ignore. Every part of her wanted to understand the exits, identify the risks, and know exactly what would happen next.

That was precisely why she kept walking.

Anike stepped onto the platform.

Above the chamber, Idris stood behind the observation glass.

She hadn't expected him to come.

He had arrived anyway.

Anike looked up at him.

Idris placed one hand against the glass.

She smiled and did the same from below, despite several meters and layers of reinforced material separating them.

Then his voice came through the chamber.

"Still time to choose lunch instead."

Anike laughed quietly.

"You waited three months to make that joke?"

"I've been saving it."

"I'll come next time."

Idris shook his head.

"No," he said. "You won't."

Anike's smile slowly disappeared.

This time, the words didn't bother her.

"Professor Anike," the facility announced, "temporal synchronization beginning."

She lowered her hand.

Numbers appeared across the chamber.

BLAZER 400

TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT ACTIVE

ORIGIN: DANDELION, PLUTO

YEAR: 2700

Then the destination appeared.

EARTH

EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Anike stared at it.

For most of her life, the twenty-first century had been information.

Dates.

Wars.

Music.

Politics.

Technology.

People reduced to photographs and recordings. Cities reconstructed from archives. Lives summarized inside databases by people who already knew how those lives ended.

Now it was a destination.

The rings accelerated.

The distortion at the center of the Blazer expanded until it swallowed the chamber ahead of her.

"Orloq," Anike whispered.

"I'm here."

Her heart was beating hard enough for her to feel it in her throat.

"Don't disappear."

"I have no intention of doing so."

The platform vanished beneath her feet.

Anike fell.

Except she didn't.

Her body remained upright while every instinct insisted she was plummeting through an impossible distance. Gravity pulled from several directions at once. Sound stretched into a deep vibration that seemed to pass through her bones rather than her ears, and for one horrifying instant she could no longer feel her hands.

Then she could feel too much.

Cold.

Heat.

Pressure.

Weightlessness.

Something struck her vision.

Earth.

Not one Earth.

Thousands.

The planet flickered before her in impossible fragments. Continents shifted. Lights spread across the nightside. Cities appeared and disappeared. Clouds raced across oceans at impossible speed. Satellites multiplied around the planet and then vanished one after another.

Anike tried to breathe.

The Blazer dragged her backwards through history.

Dandelion disappeared.

The Great Spread unwound.

Colonies emptied before they had been built.

Ships returned to worlds their crews had not yet discovered.

Mars lost its cities.

Humanity collapsed back towards one world.

Anike saw none of it clearly enough to understand and somehow understood all of it at once.

Then everything stopped.

Her body hit something hard.

Anike gasped.

Silence.

For several seconds she remained on her hands and knees, unable to decide whether she had actually arrived or whether her brain was still trying to understand what the Blazer had done to it.

Rain struck glass nearby.

Anike slowly raised her head.

She was inside a small room.

A real room.

Not a temporal chamber.

A ceiling fan turned lazily overhead. A wooden wardrobe stood beside a bed. There was a television against one wall, a desk beneath the window, and a collection of electrical sockets that looked almost comically large.

Anike pushed herself upright.

Her legs shook.

"Orloq?"

Nothing answered.

Her fear returned instantly.

"Orloq."

Static crackled inside her ear.

Then his voice appeared beneath it.

"Professor Anike."

She closed her eyes.

"Status?"

"Operational. Several functions are unavailable. Local communications infrastructure is significantly more primitive than anticipated."

"You knew exactly how primitive it was."

"Knowing and experiencing are apparently different things."

Anike opened her eyes.

"You're learning."

"So are you."

She walked towards the window.

Rain ran down the glass.

Beyond it was a city she had seen hundreds of times in archives and never once seen alive.

Cars moved through wet streets. People crowded beneath umbrellas. Someone ran across the road while a driver leaned on a horn. A bus stopped near the pavement, and several passengers climbed out. A man stood beneath the shelter of a building, staring at a small rectangular phone as though whatever was happening on its screen mattered more than the rain falling around him.

Nobody looked towards Anike.

Nobody knew.

Not one person on that street knew that humanity would eventually leave Earth in numbers large enough to transform the solar system.

They didn't know about the Great Spread.

They didn't know about cities on Mars, nations among Jupiter's moons, or millions of people living beneath an artificial atmosphere on Pluto.

They didn't know Dandelion would exist.

They didn't know Anike would exist.

Their future remained completely invisible to them.

For the first time in her life, Anike stood inside history before it knew what it would become.

She placed her palm against the cold glass.

A car horn sounded below.

Someone shouted.

Rain continued falling.

Anike smiled.

She had no lecture tomorrow.

No faculty meeting.

No Jovian migration records waiting for her.

For the first time in years, she had absolutely no idea what tomorrow would bring.

Seven hundred years away, the Blazer 400 shut down.

And someone had been watching.

SOMEWHERE IN SPACE

The man inside the airlock had stopped begging.

Blood covered two of his knuckles where he had repeatedly struck the transparent inner door. Beyond the outer hatch was nothing except the darkness of space, and the realization that nobody outside the chamber intended to help him had finally reduced his screaming to shallow breaths.

Yaga watched from the other side.

His ship had once been an industrial carrier operating among the asteroid settlements. Very little remained of that vessel beyond the skeleton. Cargo sections had become hangars, mining equipment had been replaced with weapons, and armor plating covered sections of the hull never designed to survive combat.

The people aboard no longer mined asteroids.

They took things from people who did.

Yaga sat at the end of a metal table while several members of his crew ate around him. Nobody appeared particularly interested in the prisoner dying of fear a few meters away.

Yaga tore another piece from the meat on his plate.

"How much?"

The woman beside the airlock checked the projection above her wrist.

"Forty-three thousand, six hundred and twelve."

Yaga stopped chewing.

"That's all?"

The woman nodded.

Yaga looked towards the prisoner.

"Audio."

The chamber speakers activated.

The man's voice exploded into the room.

"Yaga, please! I'll return it. I'll return everything. Give me two days."

Yaga placed his food down.

"You stole forty-three thousand from me?"

"It was a mistake."

Yaga leaned back.

"No. Forgetting someone's name is a mistake. Walking into the wrong room is a mistake. You disabled my security ledger, forged three signatures, and moved my money through six stations."

The prisoner said nothing.

Yaga smiled.

"That's effort."

"I wasn't thinking."

"That's considerably worse."

The prisoner began begging again.

Yaga raised one finger.

The audio disappeared.

"Open the outer hatch."

The room became silent.

Even some of the pirates stopped eating.

The prisoner stared through the glass.

Then he began hammering against it again.

The woman at the controls looked towards Yaga. "You're going to throw him out for forty-three thousand?"

Yaga watched the man's terrified face.

"No."

The woman waited.

Yaga pointed towards the inner door.

"Bring him back."

The airlock opened.

The prisoner fell through before the door had completely retracted, collapsing onto the floor as two pirates grabbed him.

Yaga looked down at him.

"You work for me until you've paid eighty-seven thousand."

The prisoner stared up in disbelief. "I stole forty-three."

"Interest."

"That's double."

Yaga smiled.

"Good. You're useful enough to count."

The pirates dragged the man away.

Yaga reached for his food again.

A red light appeared above the table.

His hand stopped.

The woman beside the airlock saw it at the same time.

Whatever amusement remained on her face vanished.

Yaga stared at the signal.

"Everyone out."

Nobody argued.

The crew abandoned their food and left the chamber. Within seconds, only Yaga and the woman remained.

She sealed the door.

Yaga touched the red light.

Nothing happened.

He pressed his thumb against the table. A needle pierced the skin, took a drop of blood, and disappeared.

The signal turned white.

A message opened.

BLAZER 400 DISPLACEMENT DETECTED

Yaga did not move.

Another line appeared.

SOLAR HISTORICAL COMMISSION

HUMAN CONTINUITY INITIATIVE

The woman stepped closer.

"How did we get commission traffic?"

Yaga ignored her.

Information unfolded across the table.

Origin.

Dandelion.

Year 2700.

Destination.

Earth.

Early twenty-first century.

Then came the final confirmation.

DISPLACEMENT SUCCESSFUL

Yaga stood so quickly that his chair scraped backwards across the floor.

The woman stared at him.

"What?"

He enlarged the record.

A profile appeared.

PROFESSOR ANIKE

History.

Medical Science.

Biomechanics.

Former military.

The woman read it.

"Who is she?"

Yaga barely looked at the profile.

"Nobody."

"Nobody just made you stand up like that?"

Yaga expanded the destination data.

Earth.

The date range.

The temporal coordinates.

For fifteen years, he had been following a trail most people believed led nowhere.

It had begun with a fragment recovered from beneath an abandoned settlement. The material was older than the civilization that had buried it and engineered with methods that still made little sense in 2700. That fragment had led to corrupted archaeological records, missing reports, and references to an excavation on Earth whose official findings contradicted the private notes of the people who had conducted it.

Then came the museum.

An object had entered its collection during the early twenty-first century.

Nobody at the time understood what they possessed.

Humanity had not made it.

That much Yaga knew.

Everything else was a question.

The object had been buried on Earth thousands of years before the first civilizations capable of recording its existence. By the time humanity developed the technology necessary to recognize what it was, the artifact had already disappeared.

Yaga had found where.

He had found when.

For fifteen years, those two facts had been useless.

His problem had never been reaching Earth.

His problem had been reaching an Earth that no longer existed.

Until now.

Yaga stared at the words again.

BLAZER 400 DISPLACEMENT SUCCESSFUL

The woman finally understood.

"No."

Yaga looked at her.

"Don't," she said.

He smiled.

"You don't even know what I'm thinking."

"I've known you for twenty-two years. That look has never ended well for anyone."

Yaga expanded the technical information attached to the transmission.

Most of it was encrypted.

That didn't matter.

He knew where the machine was.

He knew it worked.

And now he knew it could place a living human being exactly where he needed to go.

The woman shook her head. "The Blazer is under Commission control. On Pluto. In Dandelion. You're talking about breaking into one of the most secure facilities in the capital of mankind."

"No."

She stared at him.

Yaga walked around the table.

"Breaking in would imply we intend to leave quietly."

"Yaga."

He touched the display.

Another image appeared.

An ancient building on Earth.

A museum.

Then the reconstruction of something beneath it.

The image was incomplete because nobody possessed a complete record of the artifact. Only measurements remained. Fragments of scans. Contradictory descriptions. Enough information to prove that something had been there.

The woman looked at the reconstruction.

"What does it do?"

Yaga stared at it.

"I don't know."

She turned towards him.

For the first time since the message arrived, Yaga looked genuinely excited.

"That's why I want it."

The woman swore under her breath.

Yaga closed the reconstruction.

Anike's profile remained.

He studied her face for several seconds.

"She went alone?"

"As far as this says."

"And survived."

"Apparently."

Yaga smiled.

The woman immediately understood the significance.

"She's your trail."

"No."

Yaga closed Anike's profile.

"She's proof the trail exists."

He opened a communications channel.

Then another.

Then twenty more.

Encrypted signals left the ship and spread across the solar system.

Pirate vessels hidden among asteroid fields received them. Smuggling ships beyond Jupiter received them. Captains operating beneath false identities on Mars received them. Crews that had not heard directly from Yaga in years suddenly found the same command waiting inside their systems.

ASSEMBLE.

The woman watched the transmissions multiply.

"How many ships?"

"All of them."

"You're mobilizing the entire fleet for one machine?"

Yaga looked towards the Blazer data.

"No."

He enlarged the date one final time.

EARTH-EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

"I'm mobilizing them for what's on the other side."

The woman stared at him.

Yaga turned towards the door.

"Prepare the fleet."

"For Dandelion?"

He stopped.

For fifteen years, history had hidden something from him.

Now humanity had built a machine capable of taking him directly to the moment before it disappeared.

Yaga looked back at the temporal coordinates.

"For the Blazer."

The door opened.

He stepped through, then stopped once more.

"And find out everything you can about Professor Anike."

The woman frowned. "You said she was nobody."

"She was."

Yaga looked at Anike's profile one final time.

"Now she's the only person alive who's been where we're going."

The transmission remained glowing above the empty table long after Yaga left.

Seven hundred years in the past, rain continued falling over Earth.

Anike had gone there looking for a life she couldn't predict.

She had no idea what had just begun following her.