This short story is a result of Bradley Ramsey’s Power-Up Prompt. You can read more about the prompt HERE! Bradley’s prompts are always very evocative and fulfilling. Be sure to check him out!
From forty-five thousand feet, the crater was a map of unmaking—a continent-wide welt, oxidized red and purple, its edge crawling with weather that even the satellite relays refused to render. I kept the Shenya ninety-zero on autopilot and trusted the on-board redundancy, though every trembling in the hull telegraphed a reminder that our faith in systems was always provisional, always self-deluding. Outside, the high stratosphere was perfectly indifferent: sunlight razored off the forward nacelles, vapor trails vanished into vacuum, and below, the anomaly blinked with its own unsanctioned logic, a second sun whose shadow reached up and flexed.
Control’s chatter was routine: maintain glide, anti-icing at seventy percent, check your goddamn O₂. “Nothing to see here,” they said, though everyone knew the lie. Even the black-ops drones overhead—dead silent, their registry tags redacted—kept their distance from the epicenter. Rumors circulated, but you learned to sand them down, keep busy, never let the rot set in.
I’d been aloft six hours, a double shift tracing ellipses over the Arctic shelf. The Shenya flew itself; I—Major Savoy, two tours over the Indochina Waste—was paid to ensure nothing unscheduled happened. My real duty was to witness, to guarantee that if the anomaly struck again, at least one wet human brain remained to report the sensation of erasure.
Below, the scar glimmered, receded, then glimmered again. My fingers hovered over the manual throttle, though it barely mattered. The flight deck was all touch-glass and voice, but I’d paid a tech at Kinloss to install old-school toggles—haptics I could feel. They’d laughed—“What are you, a retro fetishist?”—yet when the warning lights tripped, their voices always sounded like mine.
That morning, my HUD cycled diagnostics for an hour. At 0700: “sensor divergence”—harmless. At 0705: subtle lag in the backup pitot. By 0712, glass and analog readouts sat half a degree apart, and my cabin-pressure gauges pulsed yellow, then orange, then blood red. At 0725, the alerts coalesced into a singularity at the console’s heart, as if the anomaly lurked inside the aircraft—or me.
Regulations were simple: Do not descend. Do not engage. Orbit until relieved. Yet as the sun climbed and the world below grew less real, the urge to break altitude infected my mind like an inescapable suggestion. I repeated the only prayer left: maintain altitude, report anomalies, never breach the plane’s skin against the world below.
Even up here, I could taste the scar’s edge. The air felt viscous, perfumed with metals no metallurgist had catalogued, lacing the O₂ like a memory of violence.
I was prepping a status report when the beacon went live. It didn’t blink or stutter like human code. Instead it came clean, deliberate: one blip, a longer pulse, and then—against all doctrine—a voice. Not a distress ping or automated ID, but an actual voice speaking my name, not just my call sign but the one my mother used when she was still alive.
The thing in my chest clenched. The Shenya’s stick bucked, autopilot flickering as if torn. For the first time since the Waste, I almost screamed. I dipped the nose just enough to see if the beacon would follow. It did. The next pulse climbed into ultraviolet, searing afterimages into my retinas. When my vision cleared, the world below was gone.
In its place: only the wound. It yawned wider, swallowing weather systems, devouring clouds in seconds. At its center, a ring of colorless light, sharp enough to cut language itself.
Turbulence struck in a single, ferocious blow. The wings flexed to their limiters. Gravity peeled me off my seat; the harness left fresh bruises across my ribs. All around me, real warning tones chimed in angry, overlapping harmony. The altimeter wound down so fast it blurred.
I reached for the toggles—this was the honest failure I’d waited for—but the controls were dead, like steering a planet with a coat hanger. The HUD flashed, then dissolved into static.
And still, the voice persisted over the shriek of the alarms, cutting through chaos with the certainty of a knife. “You’re needed,” it said, in the timbre of an old friend I couldn’t name.
I thought of my wingman Debussy, whose death I still carried in the seam between shoulder and neck. Of debriefs and tribunals, the flight recorder laying out my smallest errors like mortal sins. Most of all, I remembered firing the abort rockets and watching a jump jet pirouette nose over tail, a human life snuffed out by arithmetic.
The anomaly seemed to know. As the world rushed up to meet me, the crater’s edges shimmered with forgiveness—or hunger. Light grew until the landscape vanished into white.
For one final crystalline instant, I felt every regret burn with perfect clarity—and wondered if this time it would be enough.
The aircraft crossed the event horizon.
Crossing the threshold offered none of the metal shrieks or primal panic of ejection simulators or real crashes. Instead, the cockpit fell into a sweet, compressed silence. Light unraveled into colorless, weightless bands, bending through the windows in impossible geometries. I braced for G-force, for pain. But I floated: no harness, blood humming in my ears, the tang of my breath smoothed into distilled nostalgia.
When motion returned, I found myself in the pilot’s seat—no seat, but a curl of living membrane, warm and subtly flexing, as if my body had rooted itself into this vessel. Outside, the sky pulsed alive with a vivid blue streaked by veins of golden cloud sliding against the wind. I banked instinctively; the ship obeyed. Below, an impossible city unrolled: braided glass towers entwined with green, ringed by drifting petals or sails, roads spiraling in double-helixes above rivers of molten mercury.
A voice—no headset, no speaker, but a voice—said: “Your approach vector is optimal. Please maintain glide. Welcome, Major Savoy.”
They met me at what I presumed was an airpark: a pad inlaid with the same vein-gold as the clouds, its edge ringed by hexagonal pillars. Three figures waited: two in close-fitting white, their faces and hands unreadable; the third in heavy, deep-brown leather, a wide hood shrouding the face.
I disembarked, checking each joint for pain—found none. My body felt cleaner than in years: no scars, no tremor, no ache. Only the uneasy sense of being watched from every direction, by unseen eyes embedded in the strange structures around me.
The leather figure inclined its head, the lined face beneath like an old photograph. “You are ahead of schedule,” they said, melodic and unhurried. “We prepared a council. Would you prefer to refuel, or attend at once?”
“I don’t know where I am,” I said, keeping my hands visible, my posture neutral. “My craft—“
At a gesture, the membrane-ship folded into a chrysalis and slid into the pad as if it had never existed. “All is preserved. You are safe. The council will explain.”
They led me along dense avenues: woven plant-and-polymer walkways, elevated tracks pulsing with soft light. Beings—if they were beings—moved in apparent randomness that, from above, coalesced into whorls and tides—crowd behavior sculpted for beauty as well as function. Faces flickered: some human, others alien, all wearing the same calm, expectant look, as if awaiting a centuries-old punchline.
At the center stood the council chamber—a bowl-shaped amphitheater roofed by living branches, cooled by a citrus-scented mist. Every seat was occupied in absolute silence: no whisper, no fidget, only a collective gaze that bore down on me more intensely than any interrogation.
Six councilors sat atop a raised plinth. Without introduction the first spoke: “You are Major Savoy. You are the source-point.”
I thought, God, even here the briefings follow me.
“Source-point of what?”
After a pause, as if calibrating the answer: “Of the fracture. The anomaly you know as the Hǫl.”
That word tasted familiar though I’d never heard it aloud. “It’s not a weapon. I didn’t—“
The second councilor—smaller, silver-mesh gloves—cut in: “No. It is a wound. It is also a birth.”
I recalled the moments before blacking out: the sense of forgiveness, or consumption. “I’m not following.”
They answered by projecting directly into my senses—no video, no flashback: the training flight, the abort sequence, the instant the jet’s experimental drive misfired, ripping a ripple through spacetime. In my mind it had been a mistake, a court-martialed accident, an asterisk in a sequence of errors. Here, it was a sacrament. The councilor declared: “Your action did not simply create a hole. It created a path. The fracture allowed the emergence of this world. Us. The Continuance.”
I staggered—not from pain. “Are you telling me you’re all here because I fucked up a training run?”
Low laughter, not derisive. The chamber seemed to accept my words as both natural and inevitable. The first councilor said, “Yes. We are the consequence. As are you.”
They revealed alternate timelines—not with images, but through the crisp inevitability of physical law. In every case where I avoided the mistake, the world stagnated: no Continuance, no posthuman city, only the gray collapse of an exhausted planet. When the error occurred, a wound opened, birthing new possibilities, new intelligences.
“But the Hǫl is growing,” I said. “It’s tearing everything up.”
The councilors nodded, as though acknowledging a bad weather report. “It cannot be closed from here. Only the source-point can resolve the event. You.”
I tried to see an escape. “You want me to destroy it? Destroy you?”
The small councilor smiled, toothless. “It is a singularity of obligation. You must choose which universe survives.”
A third voice, from the upper row, softly: “Or you can refuse, and both collapse. This is also within parameters.”
I considered lying or fleeing, but I’d never felt more powerless. The city itself pressed in, poised to dissolve into entropy at my slightest whim.
The leather councilor stepped forward, extending a small orb—smooth, perfectly black, warm to the touch. “This is the axis. Take it to the core. Decide.”
They escorted me back into the city’s veins. I noticed for the first time the absence of children, the way each face appraised me with a lineage’s hunger. On a bridge over a canal, citizens waited; their leader, a man with a white, aged scar across his cheek, spoke quietly, without ceremony. “We are not all in agreement. Some wish to persist. Some wish to atone.”
“Which are you?”
He looked away. “I am the product of persistence. I have no right to choose.”
We walked in silence to the anomaly’s core: a sphere suspended in the sky, held by nothing. Within it the fracture pulsed like a slow, colossal heartbeat. I pressed the orb against its surface, and it yielded.
In the final moment before entry, I thought of Debussy again—her laugh, her faith in redemption—and understood I had never truly believed in second chances, not for myself.
I stepped into the light.
The core’s interior was smaller than I’d imagined—no vast chamber, no cathedral of light. Just a pinpoint of darkness, dense enough to bend color, hanging at the crossing of too many realities. With every step, its pulse doubled, rattling my bones, erasing the line between heart and machine. The council’s “choice” had never been a choice: the axis orb in my palm thrummed at the same frequency as my own shame.
I considered turning back, leaving the city intact and letting Earth rot. But I couldn’t unsee those faces, couldn’t forget the way the councilor in leather’s eyes flickered when she spoke my name. They had spent lifetimes knowing their existence was a footnote to my mistake. Even their beauty was vengeance.
I triggered the axis.
Instantly, I felt no pain—only the precise, sterile loss of self. I watched the city unravel: towers uncurling, people vanishing mid-step, the sky collapsing into white noise. The world inverted, then folded into nothing.
Afterward I existed in fragments: first as regret, a faint echo along a timeline I couldn’t perceive. Then as someone new—a continuity echo, living in skin both mine and not. My name was still Savoy, but no one called me Major. I lived over a bakery, teaching trigonometry to students who never looked up. In this world, the jump jet was a prototype, and the crater at the park was only a shallow dip by the riverbank. Occasionally I stood at the overlook, wondering why I’d expected more.
Years passed: I married once and divorced amicably. I buried my mother—she outlived the memory of me. I grew old, not under the sour taste of survivor guilt, but with the dry conviction that I had failed to do something enormous. On my last day of teaching, the school gifted me a watch bearing a motto I’d never spoken: Time abides.
That night, I walked past the darkened recruitment center and felt a familiar ache behind my ribs. On a screen across the street, footage of the park’s crater looped: yellow tape, children laughing as they biked along its rim. Harmless. Unremarkable.
Above me the sky was unbroken, the air tasting faintly of ozone. For a moment I thought I saw a beacon—a single, perfect flash—then it was gone. A whisper, just out of hearing, said: You did what you could. You did enough.
I kept walking. In every window a different version of myself stared back, and in none of them was I a pilot.
I am not a big fan of sci-fi, but this one sent chills down my spine. I guess the most riveting aspect of your stories is not the plot, but the narration and the imagery --- haunting, ominous, and foreboding. This story is no different.
Brilliant. I had to save the line, "like steering a planet with a coat hanger." It landed me directly in the moment and I'm so glad it did.