Chapter 1: Fusion

The magnetic field coils sang quietly as they reached operational power.

From his station in the fusion control room, Scotty Gardner stared at the plasma readouts on the central display; a perfect, stable ellipse spinning in real-time, locked within the reactor's vacuum chamber. Just where it should be.

[Plasma temperature holding at 152 million Kelvin.]

[Magnetic confinement field at 98.7%.]

[Neutron flux nominal.]

He didn't blink, eyes boring into the read outs, flicking from one screen to another.

"Maintain current parameters for the next three minutes," he said, voice even and precise.

Around him, the team moved like clockwork. Engineers, analysts, techs, all quietly focused, immersed in the data and readouts on the various instruments and screens. The only sound was the low hum of machines and the tapping of keys, flicks of switches, taps on screens. Every eye in the room looked toward him after executing their commands, waiting for the next.

Scotty leaned forward slightly. Not because he was nervous, but because this part mattered.

They had conducted simulations for months. But today was the actual event. Controlled fusion. Continuous burn. No fluctuations, no spikes, no unexpected outcomes.

This wasn't just a milestone for the reactor. This was his milestone.

[Confinement duration: 120 seconds... 150... 180...]

The lead operator glanced over. "Three minutes and holding, sir."

Scotty scanned the diagnostics one last time. Heat exchange, fuel input, tritium value, magnetic stability, neutron output — all green. The Q value wasn't just 1.0, the breakeven point. The Q value was an incredible 14.5, the ratio required to maintain plasma in a sustained state, producing 14.5 times more than the initial energy input. This was a new world record, and the start of the implementation of clean energy for the world.

He gave a small nod and gently sighed. "Begin shutdown protocol."

A few keystrokes later, the display dimmed as the plasma cooled and the field coils powered down. Silence fell across the room, save for the slow, collective exhale of the control team.

"Holy shit…" one of the junior techs stated, voice tight with disbelief. "A Q value of 14.5? Are you serious!? Dr. Gardner we did it!"

Scotty allowed himself a breath. "Yeah," he said. "We did."

The sound of applause erupted, a brief yet weary clapping that resonated with genuine appreciation. Each clap echoed with the fatigue of the audience, their hands slightly heavy from the long evening. It was 2am. Despite the sincerity of the moment, he remained still, choosing not to partake in the tribute that surrounded him.

He felt a hand pat him on the shoulder a few times. Scotty looked over to see Chris, his only real friend he'd made here, if he could even consider it that. Could you consider the only person you spoke more than commands to a friend?

"You did it, man! I can't believe it's actually viable! That patent you came up with completely changed the direction of this project and now we're here!"

Scotty gave him a small half smile but it didn't reach his eyes. He couldn't look at his face full of elated enthusiasm.

Instead, he turned his gaze toward the upper-left screen, a split cam feed of the reactor housing itself. A massive steel cylinder, wrapped in superconducting coils and buried ten meters below ground. It sat quiet now, but just minutes ago, it had been a miniature hyper star, 100 million degrees Celsius. The hottest star in the observable universe was only around 209,000°C.

It was his remnants of a supernova.

The applause had died down. The team dispersed. Briefings and paperwork could wait.

"Scotty! We've got to celebrate! You want to go out to that bar down the road I always invite you to but you never come to? If there's ever been an occasion it's this one!" Scotty turned toward Chris, a small smile that actually had a spark of emotion.

"Maybe after the last safety test tomorrow. If we get through that, then you can get me wasted for all I care. Right now though, I think I'm going to go pass out on the couch in my office."

"Hey I'll hold you to that!" Chris laughed joyously, like he finally won a long battle of attrition. "Well you get some rest then, because you won't be getting any tomorrow night if I have a say in it! Maybe I'll invite my girlfriend's friend Monica. I know she's been stealing glances your way whenever were all together." Chris wiggled his eyebrows suggestively.

"Ha!" Scotty barked out a laugh. "Yeah, maybe that's just what I need to cheer myself up and celebrate, to get laid." Scotty couldn't help the sarcastic smile from forming on his face.

"Now you're speaking my language!" Chris put his arm around Scotty as they walked out of the room. "I'm gonna show you the world Scotty!"

"Oh I'm sure," Scotty snorted out.

Once him and Chris parted ways, Scotty finally stepped into his office and let the door seal behind him with a soft hiss.

Silence.

It was a large room — executive-tier — but sparsely decorated. No personal photos. No plants. No clutter. The walls were cool steel and matte white. The shelves held awards he hadn't openly displayed. Glass dry erase boards filled with equations were near his desk, a smart holographic table in the middle of the room to display 3D prototypes.

A digital display on one wall looped a rendering of the reactor core from today's test — the peak of modern physics, captured in neat rotations and color-coded readouts. A leather couch was against the wall. The wear on it suggested that he slept more here than he did in his own bed.

Tonight was probably going to be the same. He had to prepare for that safety test tomorrow.

He walked to the window. It didn't overlook a city or skyline, just the reinforced hangar where the reactor sat in cold shutdown. He watched the engineers below celebrating, hugging, shaking hands as they walked out to go home for the day, back to their families.

Then he turned away. That wasn't for him.

His eyes landed on the small velvet box resting at the corner of his desk. He reached for it slowly, like his hand knew the motion before his mind caught up.

The velvet box yielded to his touch, the hinge whispering open, and he found himself staring down at the locket. It was a silver oval, small enough to conceal in a closed fist, but heavy with its own gravity.

Years of handling had worn the metal smooth and dulled its shine, but the antique clasp still caught the light, and on the reverse, his mother's initials curled in looping, elaborate script—a relic of a more elegant age. He pressed his thumb against the letters and a shallow indent, made by decades of fingernail, greeted him with familiar intimacy.

He flicked the locket open with practiced eased. Inside, the tiny photograph: a young Scotty, maybe five years old, perched on his mother's lap in the brittle sunlight of a spring afternoon. She looked impossibly alive, laughing at something the camera had missed. Her eyes, so vivid, almost dared the world to disappoint her.

His smile in the photo was unpracticed, all teeth and round cheeks, a smile that belonged to a child who had not yet learned the reflexive self-doubt of adulthood.

He traced the edge of the locket with his thumb. Still warm from the last time he held it.

It had been three months since she passed.

Cancer, they said. Stage IV, metastatic, as if the numbers could be parsed into a manageable equation. As if the slow, systematic colonization of her nerve roots and marrow was just another sequence of technical steps, like a process control schematic.

Even when his sister called, voice torn with the effort of not breaking down, Scotty had listened with the same detached focus he brought to the fusion control room—measuring metastases in millimeters, cross-referencing the clinical notes, asking about the latest change in dosage like he was querying a test run.

Like if he only arranged the right words, he could halt the progress, slow the numbers. He never even realized, not until the third call in as many weeks, that she was already in hospice, the doctors quietly all out of ideas.

All those months of simulations and sleepless troubleshooting, of subsisting on vending machine ramen and the green light burn of spreadsheets, and he had promised himself: after next month's milestone, he'd take the first flight home.

"Just one more trial," he had whispered, as if the machine's needs could be traded for time with her. As if physics could grant extensions on the absolute. The last time they spoke, she had sounded so small on the line, but she said, "Go win your Nobel, honey. I'm right here."

He believed her until the call came two days before the test. Her voice was gone; his sister's was all that remained.

"You can come say goodbye," she offered, making it sound like a favor, and he said yes, of course, anything, while already calculating the next available flight, the necessary layovers, the hours he could salvage. He missed the connection in Philadelphia. Weather delay, a rogue sleet front grounding the regional jets.

He spent the night in a beige terminal chair, surrounded by the unremarkable static of airport life—children in pajamas, couples face-glowing in the blue of their screens, the rhythmic cleaning of the floors. It was 11:14pm when his phone woke him, vibrating with the message that it was over. The world did not shift, did not even pause.

The coffee kiosks opened, and the televisions resumed their endless sports highlights. He was still wearing his badge and lab coat when he checked the luggage, numb through the next two days, through the quick, practical funeral that went on without him, his sister reading a brief eulogy over the scratchy speaker of a community chapel in the next town over.

A lifetime of science had taught him that matter was never truly lost, only transformed. But nothing about this felt like a transformation—just subtraction, something vital stripped away and unrecoverable.

Afterwards, everyone told him the same thing. "She'd be so proud of you." They said it with the robotic certainty of a ritualistic blessing, as if pride were the only currency the dead could spend on the living. No one asked whether she'd forgive him.

No one knew about the last conversation, the brittle silence after her forced laugh when he told her he couldn't make it back, not yet, not until the test. He wondered, as he had a thousand times since, if she'd ever truly believed in what he was doing, or if she just wanted her son to come home.

He stared at the locket, still open in his palm. He turned it over, running his thumb along the initials, the metal smoothing away the ridge so many times before. The photograph inside had faded at the edges, warping slightly from time and sweat, but the two faces remained—hers, alive and bright and unafraid, and his, a child's mask of uncomplicated happiness.

He had not cried. Not at the news, not at the funeral, not in the weeks since. The inability to grieve felt like a flaw in his design, as if the years of social isolation and single-minded work had atrophied the part of his brain capable of feeling anything more than duty, relief, or regret.

He wanted, more than anything, for the tears to flow. To have the catharsis that seemed to come so easily to others in the grieving process. Instead, he only felt the slow, ambient pressure of regret, a cold, conductive medium that filled the empty spaces left inside, like the environment that stars called home. He tried to remember the last thing he'd actually said to her, but the recollection was drowned out by the endless white noise of meetings, deadlines, the omnipresent hum of the reactor core.

He sat in the chair, inert, staring at the locket as if it might suddenly warm his hand or pulse with some sign from the past. But it was just metal and history, an artifact of a family that had quietly disappeared while he was busy making history for the rest of the world.

He closed the locket with a gentle snap, pressed it to his chest for a moment, and then set it back in the box, fingers lingering on the velvet for a final slow second. It was, in some way, an act of surrender, a white flag to the memory of a life he hadn't been present to finish.

He leaned back, letting his head hit the top of the chair, and exhaled through his nose, slow and deliberate. The room responded with a chorus of ambient sounds: the distant whir of cooling fans, the cycling of the air exchangers, the soft, digital chirps of the secure clock as it marked each second.

Somewhere, in another sector of the building, a group erupted in sudden laughter, probably celebrating with the cheap champagne Chris had smuggled in for the occasion. Scotty tried to imagine joining them, holding up a glass, telling the story of the breakthrough. He pictured himself laughing, clapping Chris on the back, maybe even letting the moment wash over him. The image was so foreign that it almost made him smile.

For a minute, he just sat. The office was a shock of white, chrome, and algorithmic precision, but it felt like the inside of a mausoleum. Every surface was clean and cold. There was nothing left to fix, nothing left to optimize. He had done what he set out to do—bottled a supernova, built a legacy. At what cost, he was only just beginning to understand.

And one thing he did understand. He was going to die in this mausoleum. Or maybe he already had, long ago.

He stood and crossed to the shelf of awards. Plaques, medals, framed letters from government ministers—he reached out and straightened a glass obelisk that had tilted slightly, an old habit from his mother, who believed that the order of things signaled your respect for them. They felt meaningless.

She'd always swept her fingers across every picture frame, every knickknack, as if the world would unravel if a single thing was off-kilter. Scotty smiled at the memory, and for a second, the ache in his chest felt less like emptiness and more like something alive, something quietly persistent, eating away at his soul.

He drifted back to the desk, sat down with less ceremony than before. There was paperwork to be done—there was always paperwork—but it could wait. Instead, he reached for the locket again, holding it between his forefinger and thumb, weighing it as if he could measure its true mass.

He thought about his mother's voice, the way it had never once sounded disappointed, not even at the end. He wondered if she'd have been prouder of him if he'd failed and come home, or if she really did want him to win the prize, to bring his invention into the world.

He had always believed that the universe rewarded relentless focus and selfless pursuits. That the only way to change the world was to give it everything you had, no matter the cost. But the universe, he was learning, was indifferent to sacrifice. It took from you whatever you were willing to give, and then kept taking after you were empty until it ripped your very being apart.

He set the locket down on the desk and pressed his fingertips to his eyes, willing the tears to come. They did not. Instead, he found himself mapping the problem, as if it were a thermal loss in a closed system, a minor inefficiency that could be corrected if only he ran enough simulations.

He thought about the plasma in the reactor, so perfectly contained, spinning for just a few minutes in a history-making ellipse before it, too, had to be shut down. No system could sustain itself forever. Not a star, not a family, not a man.

He reached for the dry erase marker and scrawled a fresh equation on the glass board—something about entropy, the tendency of even the best systems to drift toward disorder. He thought, not for the first time, that maybe the only real victory was delaying that drift for as long as possible. Maybe that was all anyone could hope for.

He picked up the velvet box again and placed it with unnatural care on the corner of his desk where it could forever serve as a reminder. A reminder of what, he wasn't quite sure.

Scotty closed the locket's box and sat in silence, fingers loosely folded, elbows on the desk.

Across the office, a single sheet of reinforced glass looked down into the test chamber. The containment shell dominated the space below, still humming faintly from the successful run. The last of the technicians moved through the facility with a relaxed energy, the kind that came only after brushing against history.

He watched them without really seeing them.

The reactor was beautiful in a way only a physicist could appreciate — a fortress of superconducting coils and vacuum insulation, built to cradle energy that emulated a dissipating supernova. The numbers from the test still looped across his internal recall: energy output exceeding input by a factor never before seen. The breakeven barrier — the holy grail of fusion technology — had finally been cracked.

He had been the one to propose the solution—an idea no one else in the world had thought to try, or dared to. The breakthrough would be traced back to a single patent, his name at the top, though the patent office would never appreciate the elegance of what he'd done.

It was so simple, really. Stabilize the plasma sheath through a resonance cascade of layered electromagnetic frequencies: a symphony of fields, each tuned to counteract the instabilities of the next, a recursive, recursive, nigh-infinite feedback loop. The committee had nearly laughed him out of the conference room, the equations so beautiful and strange they felt more like poetry than physics.

But he'd run the models, convinced a grad student to risk a prototype in the dead of night, and watched the simulation hold—just long enough for awe to settle in before the power blew out in the entire building.

Now, the world would have to rewrite every textbook, recalibrate every simulation, and for a while, at least, everyone would say his name the way people said "Edison" or "Shannon." It should have felt like everything he'd ever wanted. It should have filled his chest with heat and light.

Instead, as he watched the reactor coil dim from its brief, unnatural star-life to the familiar blue-black of after-hours, he only felt the old, growing chill.

He leaned back in his chair, eyes still on the darkening reactor chamber. His mind drifted — not to the breakthrough, not to the accolades surely coming — but to the path that led him here. The choices. The trade-offs.

He'd been top of his class, always. Graduated from MIT before most people figured out what they wanted to major in. Started postgrad work early. Skipped holidays. Declined vacations. Ignored birthdays. While other people his age were falling in love, screwing up, getting heartbroken, living, he was calculating thermal tolerances and magnetic envelope designs. He even used to be an avid watcher of anime, reader of manga and fanfiction, player of video games. His career demanded otherwise. These were normal activities.

He didn't have time for normal.

Everything in his professional life had to have a purpose, a goal. No wasted motion. No indulgence.

And now, at twenty-six, he'd helped build the first commercially viable fusion reactor in human history.

And yet... nothing. No exhilarating rush of fulfillment surged through him, nor did he feel the heavy burden lift from his shoulders. Instead, there lingered only a faint, familiar ache nestled deep behind his ribs—a dull reminder of loss that had settled there ever since the funeral he couldn't make it to.

It was a sorrowful vacuum, a constant companion that pulsed like a distant echo of cosmic rays reaching the depths of the universe, refusing to fade away but ever persisting in utter emptiness.

"You can build a star," he thought, "but you can't bring light into your own life."

His reflection stared back from the glass — lean, sharp features, tired eyes that hadn't seen proper sleep in weeks. A man carved down to the essentials.

Below, the last of the lights in the reactor chamber powered down, leaving the reinforced shell in shadow. He wondered if this modern marvel ever got lonely.

Scotty didn't move from his chair for a while. Luckily, it was comfortable.

XXX

The office lights were dim, save for the low blue glow of the standby displays. Somewhere nearby, the building's HVAC system murmured like distant wind.

Scotty blinked awake.

His neck ached from the angle he'd slept in. The couch under him — cracked leather, well-worn — groaned as he sat up and rubbed the grit from his eyes. The locket box still sat on the desk, untouched since last night.

He didn't look at it.

Instead, he stood, stretched once, then moved toward the building's on-site facilities. A quick rinse in the sterilized staff shower room was enough to shake off the heaviness from his chest — if not his mind. Cold water, synthetic soap, standard-issue towel. It wasn't comfort, but it was routine. And routine kept things together.

Fifteen minutes later, he was back in a fresh change of clothes — black slacks, pressed shirt, lab coat — hair still damp as he entered the command room.

Everyone was already in place.

Today was the final safety test—the absolute last trial before the reactor would be farmed out for international demonstration, an event that would likely be livestreamed to every classroom from Tokyo to New Jersey. Protocol required the whole team present, but the air was thick with the certainty that whatever happened today, the world would change.

He made a decision, and continued on his way to the reactor control room. The velvet box on his desk now sat empty.

On the big screen, the familiar blue torus shimmered with the trapped plasma, spinning like a demon's halo. Scotty's eyes flicked to the telemetry row: the numbers were trending correctly, but there was a perceptible tension in the room, a sense that everyone was watching closely for the first sign of a problem.

Chris was at his usual station, feet up on the lower rung, hands behind his head like he was waiting for a bus. He caught Scotty's eye and raised an eyebrow.

"You see the delta in the sheath oscillation?" he said, low enough that only Scotty could hear.

"It's within tolerance," Scotty said, "but it's not pretty."

Chris grinned ruefully. "So, excited for a night out with Monica?"

Scotty didn't answer. He slid into his seat, logged into his console, and watched the real-time data stream begin to populate his display. Edge fluctuations, ion density, field containment—all the values he knew by heart, all behaving themselves, except for a tiny, persistent blip at the perimeter of the plasma.

A technician from Korea—Hana, maybe, he'd never been good with names—leaned over the rail. "Thermal load stable, but I'm seeing ghosting on edge diagnostics. Should I escalate?"

"Log it and keep an eye," said Scotty. "Let's not overreact to a decimal point."

But inside, a cold suspicion had settled. Edge instabilities were notorious for being fine until suddenly, catastrophically, they weren't. He remembered the stories of the early Russian tokamaks—chambers buckling, the roof plates peeled back like sardine tins. The lesson was clear: it only took a single slip to lose everything.

He felt his thumb unconsciously rolling the locket inside his lab coat pocket, like a talisman or a worry stone.

"Alright," he said, "let's bring it up to full power."

A murmur of assent traveled through the control room. Fingers danced across keyboards. Graphs surged upward. The plasma inside the reactor glowed brighter, the ellipse tightening, blue-and-white coruscations flickering across its surface. It was beautiful, in a way that made Scotty feel both omnipotent and irrelevant: the machine did not care who watched it.

"Magnetic field at 98.3%," Chris reported, voice now clipped and professional. "Slight drop in coil strength on the B-side, but nothing outside the error bars."

"Noted," said Scotty, but his mind's eye was already simulating a thousand possible evolutions. The main screen displayed a ghostly cross-section of the plasma, where the edge now pulsed with something that felt alive, a fractal turbulence that made his skin crawl.

"Heat exchange holding steady," another engineer chimed in, but there was an unspoken question hanging in the air.

"Neutron flux nominal, but plasma edge fluctuations increasing," Hana said, more urgently this time.

That word—fluctuation—was a gunshot in Scotty's brain. He remembered a late-night paper he'd read on edge-localized modes, disruptions that could, in a heartbeat, dump gigajoules of pent-up energy into the chamber wall. The numbers on his own screen suggested they had time, but the part of him that had obsessed over this machine for years said otherwise.

He toggled the override and keyed in a command: "Adjust the frequency modulation again. Layer the electromagnetic sheath by—let's try plus point-seven-five percent."

There was a silent pause as the machine obeyed. For a heartbeat, the edge turbulence seemed to relax. Scotty exhaled a fraction.

Then the main display spiked. A red line on the edge of the graph leapt off-scale, triggering a cascade of alarms. Every screen on the wall began to flash.

"Alpha modulation spike!" Chris shouted, suddenly all business. "Plasma shift detected—safety factor dropping—Q is skyrocketing—shut it down!"

The sound of the emergency alarm was instantly deafening, but Scotty's inner world had gone silent. He was mapping the event in real time, seeing the monstrous instability coiling at the edge of the plasma, ready to rupture containment and vaporize half the chamber.

"Chris!" he barked into his headset, "Get clear. Now!"

Chris hesitated, his eyes wild but locked on Scotty. "You sure? We've got buffer reserves—"

"I said run! Get to the blast doors!" Scotty's hands were already flying across the controls, trying to initiate a controlled quench, to bleed off the magnetic fields before the plasma could detonate. It was too late.

He saw Chris vault the console, grabbing Hana and a junior tech as they sprinted for the exit. The whole world had slowed down. Each red pulse of the alarm was a lifetime. Scotty could feel the charge building in the air, taste the metallic ozone as the field collapsed and the metal cage imploded.

He realized, with a strange clarity, that he could still walk away. There were thirty seconds left. Instead, he dove into the emergency substation and began shutting down the interlocks manually, one by one, each switch a small act of defiance against the inevitable.

A hollow boom shook the floor. The pressure wave knocked him against the reinforced glass, fracturing it but not breaking through. On the other side, he saw the containment shell begin to vent blue-white fire. For a moment, it looked like the birth of a tiny, furious sun.

He turned and ran. Behind him, the reactor began to scream.

Corridors blurred past. He could barely make out Chris and the others ahead, tumbling through the blast doors as the automatic lockdown sealed behind them. Scotty kept running, every muscle burning, the locket cold and heavy in his vice grip.

He reached the final checkpoint and keyed in his override. The first blast door opened just long enough for him to shove Chris and Hana through, then caught his own wrist as it slammed shut. Pain shot up his arm, but he barely noticed. His hand was gone. On the other side, Chris pounded the glass, shouting something lost in the rising cacophony.

"Go!" Scotty mouthed, hoping they understood him. "Run!"

He turned back toward the heart of the machine, where the plasma was now raging out of control, the whole chamber vibrating at some frequency that felt like it might tear apart not just the building but reality itself.

He realized that no one else would be able to stop it now, that he alone could make sure the fail-safes engaged before the whole system vaporized the campus—or worse, triggered a secondary cascade that would make Chernobyl look like a kitchen fire.

His vision tunneled; time lost its meaning. He raced down the hallway —muscles likely spraining from the exertion— directly into the reactor room. Radiation and temperature weren't even a concern. There was only the goal to save the minds that worked on this project. He noticed a shield plate had been blown off; a faulty part that caused this disaster, not that it mattered now.

He reached the core interlock and slammed the manual trigger, his skin partially melting from the heat inside the room. A premature detonation that would localize the blast to around 100 meters, the distance to the blast doors that took his hand.

Less than a second after hitting the trigger, the world erupted in light, a blue-white explosion brighter than consciousness.

He was aware, for a fleeting instant, of every detail—the heat, the shockwave, the impossible beauty of the plasma arc as it tore through the walls. He felt his own atoms begin to disassociate, the searing pain registering as only a distant, abstract sensation.

Mostly, he thought about the locket. How stupid, how trivial it was, compared to all this. But he clung to it, even as his hands dissolved, even as his mind collapsed under the tidal wave of energy.

There was a moment—impossible to measure in human time—when he floated in darkness, unanchored, bodiless. He wondered if this was death, or something stranger. He felt, in that interim, a peace so profound it almost erased the agony, the terror, the regret.

Then a sensation like falling. Or maybe being born.

He heard a voice: his mother's, he thought, but twisted, mechanical, reverberating through a thousand speakers.

"You did it," said the voice. "You saved them."

Then silence.