Kael stared at the unconscious version of himself lying on the lab floor. The resemblance was uncanny—same bone structure, same scar under the left eye—but this man bore the weight of a thousand lives behind his closed eyelids.
"Scan him," Kael said, gesturing to Reeva.
She activated the biometric sweeper. "Vitals are strong. But his neural activity... it's chaotic. Like he's dreaming multiple timelines at once."
Kael moved to the console, pulling up ORBITAL's internal logs. The machine had recorded a sudden surge—an energy pattern he hadn't seen before. Not natural. Not terrestrial. The signature matched nothing in known physics.
"What is this?" he muttered.
The system chirped. A data stream began auto-decoding from the intruder's suit. Encrypted. Complex. But buried within it was a strange identifier: K-Myles-9912.
"Universe 9912?" Kael frowned. "He tagged himself."
Reeva blinked. "He's you. From a parallel universe."
Kael didn't respond. His mind spun with possibilities. Every theory he'd written off as academic fantasy was now bleeding into his reality.
Suddenly, the man stirred.
Kael knelt beside him as he opened his eyes—one milky white, the other piercingly blue. "You... finally stabilized," the stranger said weakly.
"Who are you?" Kael asked again, quieter this time.
"I told you," the man croaked. "I'm you. But that's not the important part." He struggled to sit up. "I came to warn you."
"Warn me of what?"
"The Convergence. It's begun. A cosmic alignment—thousands of universes syncing. Reality's foundations are... weakening."
Kael helped him sit upright. "We noticed anomalies. The fracture in the sky—"
"That's just the beginning," the stranger interrupted. "The multiverse is collapsing into itself. And someone is making it happen."
"Who?"
He hesitated. "We called him The Architect. No one knows who he was originally. A god? A man? A machine? All we know is, he remembers every universe he's ever destroyed."
Kael looked to Reeva, who stood pale, speechless.
The stranger continued. "In my world, we tried to stop him. We failed. I'm the last survivor. I encoded my escape coordinates into my suit's quantum key, jumped into the Drift before my Earth folded into entropy."
Kael took a step back. This was beyond him. He was a physicist, not a soldier, not a hero.
"You came here for help," Kael said.
"I came here because your Earth is next. And if we don't act, there won't be anything left."
Reeva spoke up. "Why us? There are others. Governments. Agencies—"
"No time," the stranger said. "They won't believe you. They'll try to contain me or weaponize the Drift. But you built ORBITAL. You cracked the code first. That makes you the key."
Kael's hands shook slightly. His science was never supposed to become a battlefield.
The stranger placed a hand on his shoulder. "You don't have to save the multiverse. Just help me find the ones who can."
Kael stared at the data stream still downloading.
The fracture in the sky was growing.
Time, he realized, was already running out.