Franx Tayler stared at the rain-smeared window of his Manchester flat, the kind of relentless drizzle that turned the Pennines into a blurred watercolor. Forty-two years old, prematurely gray at the temples, he nursed a tepid mug of builder's tea and scrolled through the morning feeds on his holoscreen.
Quantum entanglement patents. Another black hole merger detected by LIGO's successors. Headlines screaming about AI theologians debating the anthropic principle. Bloody nonsense, he thought. God was the ultimate untestable hypothesis, a comfort for the weak, a ghost in the machine of wishful thinking.
His atheism wasn't born from some grand rebellion. It was simpler, sharper: his mum, gone too young to pancreatic cancer when he was twelve. No prayers answered, no divine hand extended. Just the cold mechanics of biology and the indifferent churn of the universe. Physics had been his refuge: relativity, quantum fields, the brutal elegance of constants like c, the speed of light at 299,792 km/s. Nothing faster for anything with mass. That was law.
The holoscreen chimed, overriding his feeds with an encrypted priority link. Unknown origin, stamped with UN Deep Space Authority insignia. Franx frowned, thumbed accept. A face materialized: Dr. Elena Voss, silver-haired director of the Exago Initiative, her eyes like polished obsidian.
"Dr. Tayler," she said, voice crisp over the lagless quantum relay. "You've been selected."
"Selected for what, exactly?" Franx leaned back, arms crossed. His flat was a shrine to skepticism, bookshelves crammed with Hawking, Dawkins, Plato's Republic, for the laughs, and a framed print of the cosmic microwave background.
Voss didn't smile. "The Exago Mission. LD-300.000. Fastest vessel ever built. Vacuum speed: precisely 300,000 kilometers per second. The absolute limit. You'll penetrate the observable universe's boundary, maybe beyond."
Franx's pulse quickened despite himself. LD-300.000. Whispers in physics circles: a drive that danced on relativity's knife-edge, using exotic matter to flirt with c without crossing it. Impossible for massed objects, yet here it was.
"And the point? Sightseeing at lightspeed?"
Her gaze hardened. "To end the God question. Once and for all. Crew of atheists only. You qualify. Nomasnauts. Wanderers leading out the truth. Exago: Greek for 'to bring forth.' We go to the edge, look beyond, and see if there's a Creator, or just void."
Philosophy slammed into him like a Lorentz contraction. Plato's cave flickered in his mind: the shadows on the wall, prisoners mistaking flickers for reality. What if they dragged the chained ones into the light? Would they see Forms, perfect essences, or just more cave? And God? The ultimate Form, they said. Ousia, the substance unchanging. On the being that is. Or bullshit metaphysics masking entropy.
"Why me?" Franx asked, voice steady but his mind racing. Billions prayed to Yahweh, Jehovah, Adonai, their names echoing through millennia like gravitational waves. Atheists like him laughed it off. But this? Punching through dimensions at physics' wall?
"Because you're the best relativistic navigator alive," Voss replied. "And because you lost faith early. No baggage. Report to Geneva in 48 hours. This isn't a debate, Dr. Tayler. It's proof."
The link cut. Franx set down his tea, staring at the rain. Outside, thunder grumbled, a cosmic joke. He thought of shadows, of light bending at the universe's rim. What if the void stared back, not empty, but brimming with the Absolute?
Nah, he snorted, grabbing his coat. Just more dark energy.
But deep down, in the quiet machinery of his doubt, something stirred. The call had come. And physics, for all its laws, hated loose ends.