Prologue

Personal log of Dr. Viktor Blackwell

October 10th, 2027

I should have never said 'yes' to Wolf's offer to buy my company. Easy for me to say now when I'm not begging investors for cash. But if I had known his intentions regarding my idea, I would have immediately rejected his offer.

Yesterday started just like a normal day. Dr. Patel and I were in the lab, analyzing phase shift differentials and cross-referencing quantum signatures from previous drift cycles. In three years, since we established the Drift, we have covered around 0.04% of the multiverse—and it's only my rough estimate. No one knows how many universes are out there, and that's fine. Mapping the multiverse is an arduous task, and I always insisted that quality was more important than quantity. If we cover even ten percent of the multiverse by the end of the century (by "we" I mean whoever will inherit my work), I still think it would be a success.

Wolf had a different opinion. From day one since he bought my company, he was asking if there was a way to make things go faster. I always said no. What's the rush? We still do not know how to enter the multiverse, let alone traverse it. But the risks of doing it fast were far too big.

The Drift isn't just a window–it's a beacon, too. Only a fool would use it without encryption. We carefully masked every scan and every cycle, blending them into the natural background noise of the multiverse fabric to ensure no one would see us. Yes, we were mapping the multiverse. But we were also hiding from it. Strip the security layer out and you can ramp up detection tenfold, maybe even a hundredfold. But that would mean broadcasting our presence with every sweep. It's like shining a flashlight into the darkness. And no one—not me, not Patel—knew what might look back.

But Wolf didn't care about it.

He showed up in the lab in the afternoon with Trenton, his right hand, and four men I had never seen before. Each one carrying a gun.

"Games are over," he said, pushing me aside from the control panel. "If you can't do what I need from you, I will do it myself."

Dr. Patel tried to stop him, but Trenton hit her in the stomach with his rifle butt, and she fell to the floor, gasping.

"You try to stop me, and the Colonel will kill you both," Wolf said, not even looking in my direction. The man, so charming during all those meetings prior to the deal, turned into a maniac.

One of his men grabbed me by the collar and pushed me on the floor, next to Dr. Pattel, who lied on her back, staring at the ceiling. She still couldn't take a breath and I could see tears forming in the corners of her eyes. She probably had the same regret as me about selling to Brandon Wolf. But I will never know what she was thinking—two hours later she died from internal bleeding on the same floor of the lab we had built together.

"You're too slow, Viktor, too slow. What have you found, huh?" Wolf said, standing behind the control panel, stripping away layer after layer in our encryption. His eyes were fixed on the blue surface of the portal and, at this moment, he looked like a madman. I had never seen him so agitated as on that afternoon.

"Don't do it, Brandon," I said, trying to reason with him. "We don't know what is out there. There are millions of worlds. What if you contact something evil?"

But he just shook his head. "That would be better than waiting." Then he looked me in the eye and said, "You're a coward, Viktor. Your view of progress is outdated. Real scientific revolution requires courage, my friend. Courage and sacrifice. You should be happy that you have me."

With that, he disabled the last encryption layer; then he typed several commands into the terminal to initiate the broad scan. The portal flickered as the Drift harmonics destabilized, starting an unshielded quantum sweep. The system's safeguards screamed warnings—signal obfuscation offline, broadcast amplification at maximum! But he just silenced the alarms and sat in the chair as if he was in a cinema theater waiting for the movie to start.

"You're gonna destroy us!" I shouted and crawled on my hands and knees towards Wolf. If I had to beg him to stop this madness, I would do it. His men, however, wouldn't let me approach him. A heavy blow landed on my head and everything went black.

When I woke up, I lay on the floor next to Dr. Patel. Her face was white, and her eyes were wide open, as if she'd seen a ghost. Only she saw nothing because she was already dead. I closed her eyes with my hand and looked around.

I don't know for how long I was out, but there was no one in the room except for me and Wolf. Trenton and his men were gone and Wolf stood by the portal, his eyes closed, as if he was meditating. My head was throbbing with pain from the blow, and I was sure I had suffered a concussion. The room swam before my eyes as I tried to stay conscious.

"Brandon," I said in a raspy voice, but Wolf didn't even move a muscle, as if he was in a trance. And then I heard it. Or, better yet, I felt it. There was someone else in the lab room. Not physically. But I could feel its presence. It's impossible to explain, but I swear it felt like someone was staring at me from the portal. And this someone tried to talk to me.

This someone was so distant and yet so close that I could probably shake hands with it. It could see me and it could see through me. And it wasn't shy. I could feel it rummaging through my mind, searching for something, searching for clues. Clues to what? A sudden realization came to me. The thing, the mind from the other side, was looking for a very specific thing. It wanted to know our location.

Through the pain and lightheadedness, I crawled to the control panel, pushed Wolf to the side, open the lid of the emergency breaker and pushed it. It worked by injecting a high-frequency quantum disruption pulse into the drift field, collapsing the resonance cascade—which effectively burned the portal. Push the button once, and you have to start everything from scratch. I put it exactly for such situations and had never used it before.

The portal whined and shut down.

"No!" Wolf screamed, realizing what I had done. He jumped to his feet and rushed to the panel, trying to undo the shutdown. But it was too late. The Drift was no longer there.

I am still surprised that he didn't kill me. Perhaps he was so shocked by what I had done that he just let me go. Not looking back, I rushed out from the lab that I had been building for so many years. The work of my life fell victim to one crazy man.

I don't know yet if there will be consequences. Maybe it—whatever it was—didn't have enough time to locate us in the multiverse. I want to think that not. But I have a feeling we'll find out soon.

I just hope that no one gets hurt.