welcome to the future

The gunshot's echo hadn't faded when Paulina pivoted smoothly, her weapon now trained directly on Kai's chest. Her expression remained eerily calm, as though executing Mason had been nothing more than swatting a fly. Only now, that same clinical detachment was focused on Kai.

"Target acquired," she stated, her voice suddenly devoid of its earlier warmth, taking on the same mechanical cadence that Benson had used. "Initiating primary protocol."

Time seemed to slow as Kai processed what was happening. The blood pooling around Mason's slumped form. The gun aimed at his heart. The sudden realization that they'd been betrayed.

Ray moved with surprising speed for his bulk, launching himself at Paulina with a roar of rage. "Fucking tin can bitch!"

His massive frame collided with her smaller one, but instead of toppling her as expected, he bounced back as if he'd hit a wall. Paulina didn't even stagger, her aim never wavering from Kai.

"Defensive protocols engaged," she said flatly, her free hand shooting out to grab Ray by the throat with inhuman strength. Her fingers dug into his flesh as she lifted him off the ground like he weighed nothing.

"She's a Sentinel!" Caroline shouted, already firing her pulse rifle. The energy bolts slammed into Paulina's side, causing her synthetic skin to peel away, revealing the metallic endoskeleton beneath.

Kai's combat instincts kicked in, overriding his shock. He dove for cover behind a console as Paulina casually tossed Ray across the room. The tattooed fighter hit the wall with sickening force, bones audibly cracking before he crumpled to the floor, unmoving.

Max grabbed Kai's arm, hauling him toward a reinforced door at the back of the room. "Move! Now!"

"But Ray—" Kai began, looking back at the fallen fighter.

"He's dead," Max cut him off, his voice brutal with certainty. "We will be too if we don't get to the chamber."

Caroline positioned herself between them and Paulina, her rifle spitting pulses of blue energy that kept the Sentinel temporarily at bay. "Go! I'll hold her off!"

To Kai's shock, Caroline reached out and pulled Max into a fierce, desperate kiss. "See you in another body, love," she whispered against his lips before shoving him away.

Max's expression cracked for a split second, a glimpse of raw anguish before his features hardened once more. "Find me," he told her, the two words heavy with meaning Kai couldn't decipher.

Then they were running, Max practically dragging Kai through a maze of corridors as alarms blared and distant explosions rocked the structure. Behind them, the sounds of combat—energy weapon discharges, inhuman screams, and the crash of breaking equipment—told Kai everything he needed to know about Caroline's fate.

"What did she mean?" Kai demanded as they sprinted down a sterile white hallway that looked nothing like the rustic cabin above. "Another body? What the hell is happening?"

Max punched a complex code into a keypad, and a massive blast door slid open. "I'm sorry, Kai. I wanted to prepare you properly. To explain everything." His voice carried genuine regret. "But we've run out of time."

The room beyond resembled something from the science fiction novels Kai had read in secret during his time with X-23. Sleek metallic walls curved into a dome, at the center of which stood a row of cylindrical pods connected to humming machinery. Each pod was large enough to hold a person, their smooth surfaces glowing with a soft blue light.

"What is this place?" Kai asked, his voice barely above a whisper as Max sealed the blast door behind them.

"Our last hope," Max replied, moving to a central console and beginning to activate the system. His fingers flew across the interface with practiced precision. "Everything I did after Cairo, taking you from the orphanage, the training, even letting you think I'd become a monster, it was all to prepare you."

"Prepare me for what?" Kai demanded, frustration and fear mingling as the room's machinery hummed to life around them.

A massive impact against the blast door interrupted Max's response. The reinforced metal buckled inward, creating a fist-sized dent in what should have been impenetrable armor.

"Dammit," Max muttered, working faster. "Listen carefully, Kai. None of this is going to make sense for now but I need you to listen to me." His Gray eyes bore into Kai, transfixing him in place "The imperium is a cruel world, you must not settle for anything other than being a Palatine, otherwise you won't survive what's coming, trust me I've seen it. "

Another impact. This time, the door groaned, dust sifting from the ceiling as the entire chamber shook.

"That's impossible," Kai argued, even as his mind raced through the contents of the book he'd memorized. His father talking about the imperium and the palatine knights as real life figures was one thing, but claiming he had seen them himself was outlandish. He watched his father fidget over sophisticated controls around the pod and wondered if his old man had finally gone mad.

Max looked up, his eyes locking with Kai's. For a moment, Kai saw something in those eyes he hadn't seen since before Cairo, a father's love, mingled with bone-deep regret.

"I was sent here for a reason Kai. But it all went wrong, must have calibrated the wrong temporal coordinates, I'm not sure. But the mission was a failure from the start, I was trapped here. When I met your mother I knew she was the one, her memory was a gift, I'm happy you inherited it. Now it has to be you. You see, all this, the war, the rise of the mega-corps, the AI systems, it was all orchestrated to create a particular future. A future where humanity is extinct, and something else inherits the Earth."

The blast door buckled further, a hairline crack appearing in its center. Whatever was on the other side was seconds from breaking through.

Kai shook his head, backing away from his father, from the pods, from revelations that threatened to shatter his understanding of reality. "This is insane. You're insane."

"I'm out of time," Max said, his expression hardening into resolve. "I'm sorry, Kai. I truly am."

Before Kai could react, Max lunged forward. Years of combat training had honed Kai's reflexes to near-superhuman levels, but there was something about his father's movements that seemed...wrong. Too fluid, too precise, as if he knew exactly how Kai would respond before Kai himself did.

They exchanged a flurry of blows, Kai blocking, countering, trying to create distance, but Max anticipated every move. It was like fighting a ghost, someone who had memorized his combat style down to the smallest detail.

"You're getting rusty," Max observed, his voice oddly detached as he slipped past Kai's guard. "Work on that."

Pain exploded in Kai's neck as Max plunged a syringe into his jugular. Instantly, Kai's muscles seized, his limbs becoming leaden weights he could no longer control. He collapsed, unable to break his fall, his head cracking against the metal floor.

Max caught him before he could fully hit the ground, lifting him with surprising gentleness. Through rapidly blurring vision, Kai watched his father carry him toward one of the pods, which had opened to reveal a cushioned interior lined with blinking sensors.

"Remember everything from the book, Kai," Max instructed, laying him inside the pod. "That knowledge is your only advantage, your only guide. The world you're going to is crueler than anything you've experienced. The mission is greater than any one person should have to bear." His voice turned grave, "Remember to never trust the Amara "

Kai tried to speak, to protest, but his tongue had turned to stone in his mouth. He could only watch as his father's face hovered above him, lined with a sorrow that seemed to age him beyond his years.

"I hope someday you can forgive me," Max whispered. "For everything."

The pod began to close, its clamshell design sealing with a pneumatic hiss. Just before it shut completely, Kai heard his father's final words, words that made no sense yet sent a chill through his paralyzed body:

"You were a good son. He would have been proud of you."

The implication struck Kai like a physical blow. The man who had raised him after Cairo, the harsh, demanding commander who had shaped him into a weapon, wasn't his father at all.

Who was this man wearing his father's face?

Before he could process this revelation, the pod sealed completely. Through its transparent upper section, Kai saw the blast door finally give way, explosive decompression filling the room with dust and debris. Shadowy figures moved through the chaos, their forms blurring as whatever drug Max had injected began to take full effect.

The last thing Kai saw was his father—or whoever he was—turning to face the intruders, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth as he keyed in a final command sequence.

Then the world dissolved into blinding light.

---

Time ceased to have meaning. He floated in a sea of fractured memories and sensations, his mother reading to him by lamplight in the ruins of Istanbul, his father's face changing after Cairo, Mia's laugh as she held on to him tightly, speeding through the city on his bike. Images from the Jovan Sovereign book flashed through his mind with new clarity: the free cities of the moon, the technopolis of mars, the fleets of starwings in the belt, and the large hulking figures of the alien xenobytes far past the outer reaches of pluto.

He tried to cling to consciousness, to make sense of the kaleidoscope of light and sound assaulting his senses, but the void pulled him under repeatedly. Sometimes he thought he heard voices, clinical, detached, speaking in a language that should have been foreign yet somehow made perfect sense.

"Neural mapping complete."

"Temporal stabilization at ninety-seven percent."

"Subject integration proceeding as expected."

Then, like a drowning man breaking the surface, Kai gasped awake.

Cold metal pressed against his cheek. His lungs burned, filled with some viscous fluid that his body desperately tried to expel. He convulsed, coughing violently, the liquid spilling from his mouth and nose in glowing blue rivulets that evaporated as they hit the floor.

"Easy now," a voice said above him. "First jump's always the worst."

Kai's vision swam, the world around him a blur of metallic surfaces and pulsing lights. A figure loomed over him, small of stature, with angular features too sharp to be fully human.

As his sight cleared, Kai found himself staring at what could only be described as an imp. It was no more than four feet tall, with pointed ears, iridescent skin that shifted between green and blue, and eyes that were entirely black, without sclera or iris.

"What..." Kai tried to speak, but his throat felt raw, as if he'd swallowed glass.

To his shock, when the imp responded, it spoke in a language Kai had never heard before—a melodic series of clicks and whistles that should have been incomprehensible. Yet he understood perfectly.

"The procedure was successful," the imp was saying, checking something on a tablet-like device. "Minimal neural degradation, temporal displacement sickness within expected parameters."

"Where am I?" Kai managed, the strange syllables flowing from his tongue as naturally as his native language.

The imp grinned, revealing teeth too numerous and sharp to be human. "You're aboard the Andromeda, en route to Venus orbital station. A bit ahead of schedule."

Kai struggled to sit up, his muscles protesting as if he hadn't used them in years. "That's impossible. Venus is uninhabitable."

The imp's expression turned sympathetic. "Not in 1456 JD, it's not."

The date struck Kai like a physical blow. 1456 JD—Julian Divergent. The calendar system used in the Jovan Sovereign, dating from the moment the timeline split, creating the alternate future his mother's book had described.

On unsteady legs, Kai pushed himself upright, stumbling toward what appeared to be a window though he recognized it as a high-definition screen designed to give the illusion of looking outside. What he saw made his knees buckle.

Against the velvet blackness of space, a planet hung suspended. Not the cloudy yellow orb he'd seen in textbooks, but a gleaming world of swirling white clouds over glimpses of blue ocean and green landmasses. Orbital platforms surrounded it like a crown of artificial stars, with ships of impossible design moving between them in choreographed precision.

"No," Kai whispered, unable to process what he was seeing. "This isn't real. It can't be."

"I assure you, it's quite real," the imp replied, moving to stand beside him. Its head barely reached Kai's elbow. "The terraforming of Venus was completed nearly three hundred years ago. It's ruled by Lady Astra, hallowed be her name, and her family."

Kai turned to the creature, desperation clawing at his chest. "What year is it? The real year?"

The imp tilted its head, those black eyes studying him with something like compassion. "By Old Earth reckoning? The year 3763 CE. By current standard?" It gestured to the approaching planet. "Welcome to 1456 JD."