Chapter One: "Awakening"
The sky was not Earth's.
It had the right colors blue tones, thin clouds, a sun that shone just a little too bright. But it was wrong. Too clean. Too deliberate. Like someone had built a simulation and made it almost perfect.
Kai Franklin opened his eyes slowly, taking in the unfamiliar canopy above him. Leaves the size of his chest fluttered overhead, suspended by thick vines that wrapped the trees like sinew around bone. A breeze moved through the forest, but it made no sound. The silence was unnatural.
His entire body hurt muscles tight, skin raw, lips cracked. He was lying on mossy ground, curled into himself instinctively. Cold. Hungry. Exposed.
And completely naked.
Kai sat up with a grunt. His vision blurred, then steadied. No sign of the dropship. No emergency signal. No broken debris. Just endless forest and distant mist. Whatever had brought him here, it hadn't been a crash landing. There was no wreckage. No burn marks. No trail.
He ran a hand through his tangled black hair, breathing slow and deep, forcing himself not to panic.
Reconstruct. Don't react. Piece it together.
Last memory: boarding the Argo-9, the university field vessel. The launch had gone smoothly. A team of thirty students and four supervisors were en route to TR-117-A, a classified terra-compatible planet lightyears from Earth. The trip was meant to be educational a week-long field study of soil biology, environmental structures, and alien topography. He remembered the chatter, the sense of excitement, the final gear checks. Then orbital descent, atmosphere entry...
Then that light.
It had pierced everything. Not like lightning, but a kind of spatial rift brilliant, silent, and sudden. Panels exploded. Voices screamed. The cabin warped. The air tasted like metal and static. Then nothing.
Just this.
This is TR-117-A, he thought. It has to be. But what did the storm do to us?
Kai stood, trembling slightly from the cold. He moved carefully, assessing for injuries. No fractures. No burns, just minor abrasions. Whatever had transported him teleported, displaced, or torn through reality had done so with surgical cruelty. Even his emergency biosuit was gone. Not a stitch of clothing or tech remained. Just him. Bare and alone on an alien world.
But the air was breathable. Gravity normal. Temperature tolerable. The terrain while strange obeyed familiar rules: trees drew water from root to canopy. Moss thrived in shadow. The sun followed a steady arc.
Earth-like in every way that mattered.
And yet… not.
The clouds were unnervingly uniform. The birdsong repeated in perfect cycles. Even the soil had an odd, spongy consistency too uniform, like a manufactured medium rather than natural dirt. Something about this world imitated Earth without truly being it.
Kai didn't like it.
Still, he was alive. And survival came first.
He began moving slow and deliberate. Every sound drew his attention. A cluster of low shrubs gave up fibrous leaves he wrapped around himself for modesty and warmth. He found a sharp-edged rock and broke it further, creating a primitive blade.
Water came next. He followed the low path of a dry streambed, eventually finding a narrow creek trickling between mossy rocks. He drank slowly, aware that the microbial profile here could be a death sentence, but thirst won over caution.
As he drank, a sound behind him snapped his senses into overdrive.
Crack. Footsteps. Voices.
He stood and turned sharply, body tense, stone blade raised.
"Kai?!"
He froze.
That voice.
From between two bent trees, a figure emerged tall, lean, moving with practiced calm despite the exhaustion clear in every step.
Evan Florent.
His face was smeared with mud. His chest wrapped in leaves and bark tied with vines. Bruised, but unbroken. Behind him stumbled another figure shorter, limping slightly, carrying a burned strip of metal like a makeshift cane.
Noah Edwin.
Kai's throat clenched, but he exhaled slowly, lowering the stone.
Evan reached him first, placing a hand on his shoulder with a mixture of relief and disbelief.
"I thought you were dead," Evan said, voice low. "Hell, I thought we were dead."
Noah collapsed near the creek, drinking without speaking for a long moment. Finally, he looked up, wiping his mouth.
"Dumped. We got dumped here. Like trash."
Kai didn't answer right away. His eyes flicked between them. Bruised, exposed, barely alive — but still themselves.
He nodded once. "You're the first ones I've seen."
Evan looked around. "No wreckage. No others. The ship's gone?"
"Completely. I woke up alone. No signal. No structures."
Noah squinted at the trees. "Then this isn't where we were supposed to land."
Kai shook his head. "No. This isn't just somewhere else on TR-117-A. This is a different version of the world."
Evan raised an eyebrow. "You think we were teleported?"
"No. Something worse. I think we were displaced. Ripped out of phase."
They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the strange world around them. The birds repeated the same four-note call. The wind shifted, but the leaves didn't move.
It was Earth-like —eerily so.
Noah frowned. "Biochemistry's compatible. Air's breathable. Soil holds water. Gravity's one-to-one. But the ecosystem behaves too predictably. It's almost… designed."
"Engineered?" Evan asked.
Kai hesitated. "No. Not artificial. Just... alien. Coincidence shaped by the same physics, maybe. Convergent development."
Evan gave a short laugh. "I was a Taekwondo team captain. You two can debate alien biology I'm just glad we're not dead."
Kai managed a faint smile. "I'm glad too."
Evan leaned on a tree. "We need shelter. Tools. Fire. Something to eat that doesn't try to eat us."
"Agreed," Kai said. "We start from scratch."
They worked until nightfall.
Using stone flakes and vines, they lashed together a crude lean-to from branches and bark. Noah gathered moss and dry grass for bedding. Evan fashioned simple spears from fallen branches and stone tips. Every task was slow, exhausting, and raw.
They lit no fire. Not yet. The risk of attracting predators was too high.
That night, huddled beneath the shelter, they shared the little they remembered of the storm fragmented images, violent flashes, a disorienting silence that seemed to stretch beyond time.
Kai stared at the stars, trying to find familiar constellations.
None existed.
No Orion. No Polaris. No Milky Way band. Just an alien sky, subtly wrong in every direction.
They were lightyears possibly universes away from home.
And yet the ground beneath them was solid. The trees grew upward. The rivers flowed downhill. Physics still ruled here.
Which meant they could survive.
Even build.
Kai clenched his fists around the leaves that covered him. He wasn't a soldier. He wasn't a survivalist.
But he had something just as important: a mind built for long games.
"I don't know where we are," he said softly into the dark, "but we're not dying here."
Evan grunted. "Good. Because I didn't survive a dimension-ripping space storm to starve in a ditch."
Noah's voice was quiet. "We've got nothing. No clothes, no gear, no contact. Just three minds."
"Three's enough," Kai said. "It has to be."
Outside, something howled.
Far off. Distant. But not far enough.
The three fell silent.
This world might have mimicked Earth, but it was not kind. Not safe.
Kai closed his eyes and let the fear pass through him. Just for a second.
Then he whispered, more to himself than anyone else:
"We're going to build something here. From dirt. From stone. From nothing."
"Let this be the beginning."