The last line of code compiled at three in the morning, which meant Asher Sinclair had officially won Tuesday. He leaned back in his desk chair, rolling his shoulders until something between his shoulder blades popped. The apartment stretched around him—one bedroom, a kitchenette, a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in—but it was his, paid for with freelance programming gigs and the stubborn refusal to let anyone tell him what he couldn’t do. The windows were open to let in the warm summer air, and somewhere three floors down, a car alarm blared its nightly protest against existence. Asher glanced at the clock. “You and me both,” he murmured. His computer chimed with the client’s approval. Payment would arrive in the morning, assuming the client didn’t discover a sudden spiritual objection to invoices. Asher grinned, shut the laptop, and pushed back from the desk. At nineteen, he’d gotten good at making a little go a long way. He’d learned early not to count on parents, safety nets, or the comforting assumption that somebody else would handle the unpleasant parts. He didn’t know what had happened to his mother and father. The absence had become a fact of life, not an open wound he picked at every day. He’d built his own routines, paid his own bills, and learned whatever he needed from books, videos, and the occasional mistake expensive enough to be educational. That left his evenings mostly his. Tonight, a strategy game waited on the monitor, paused at the edge of a fictional kingdom’s collapse. Asher had been debating whether to save the villagers or the granary. He’d chosen the granary. A kingdom could rebuild its morale; it couldn’t eat morale. He dropped into the chair again and loaded the game. Beyond the screen, his small apartment was quiet except for the fan and the distant city. It was a comfortable life, in its way. Work when he wanted, exercise when he remembered, and no one demanding an explanation for why he’d spent forty minutes reading about Bronze Age irrigation instead of going to bed. Still, every so often, the ordinary world felt a little too well mapped. He liked fantasy, survival stories, old histories, and the kind of games where a patch of wilderness could become a thriving settlement if you made enough smart choices. He liked martial arts and fitness, too—not because he expected to fight a bear, but because being able to do things with your body seemed like a sensible investment. The bear, naturally, would have to be a very understanding bear. A pale line shivered across the screen. Asher stopped moving the mouse. The image steadied. The game’s little soldiers continued marching toward their inevitable doom. He leaned closer. “Graphics card, don’t embarrass me in front of the peasants.” The line appeared again, this time not on the monitor but across his vision—a thin ripple, like heat wavering above asphalt. It vanished when he blinked. He sat still and listened. The fan hummed. Traffic murmured below. The car alarm had finally given up. Nothing out of place. Then the room went quiet. Not silent. The fan still turned, its blades still cut the air. But the sound seemed to recede from him, as though the apartment had grown impossibly large between one breath and the next. The city outside became a distant memory. Even the soft buzz of his computer faded. Asher stood. The chair rolled back and bumped the wall. He looked toward the window, then the hallway. Nothing had moved. The air felt cool against his skin, though the night was warm. A dark seam appeared above the floorboards. It ran from the corner of his desk toward the center of the room, straight as a crack in glass but without breaking anything. The space around it bent inward. The desk’s legs seemed to angle toward the seam; the far wall stretched, then snapped back into place. His mind reached for explanations and found only bad ones. A gas leak? A migraine? Some kind of electrical failure? None of them explained the way the room was folding in on itself. He took a step backward. The seam widened, revealing no darkness behind it, but a depth that refused to behave like distance. His stomach lurched. The floor tilted under his feet. Asher reached for the doorframe. The pull caught him first. His hand slid across the wall. The room stretched into long, blurred bands of color, and the seam opened like a wound in the world. He tried to grab the desk, but his fingers met a sensation like cold water and sparks. Then the apartment—and the whole familiar shape of his life—vanished. There was no up or down. No sense of falling, though his body insisted he was. Pale fragments drifted around him, or perhaps he was passing through them. His thoughts scattered whenever he tried to hold on to one. A strange pressure moved through his bones, his skin, his eyes. For one impossible instant, he felt himself being taken apart and made over—not painfully, exactly, but with a force so complete that pain seemed too small a word. Then the void released him. He hit the ground on one shoulder and rolled through damp leaves. The impact knocked the breath from him. He lay still, chest heaving, face pressed into cool soil. The first thing he noticed was the smell: wet earth, crushed greenery, and something sharp and resinous. The second was the sound. Insects rasped nearby. Water rushed somewhere beyond the trees. Farther off, a low call rose and fell, too deep and rough to belong to any bird he knew. Asher pushed himself onto his hands and knees. The forest towered around him. Trees rose in immense columns, their trunks broader than cars and their branches vanishing into a canopy so high it seemed to hold up the sky. Thick roots knuckled through the soil. Ferns and unfamiliar plants crowded the spaces between them, some glossy as if lacquered, others pale beneath the green shade. Sunlight fell in scattered shafts, turning drifting motes to gold. Beautiful, his mind supplied. Potentially lethal, it added a moment later. He stayed where he was and took stock. No obvious blood. No broken bones. His clothes were still intact: jeans, T-shirt, sneakers. His phone was gone. So was the apartment. So, presumably, was the city. “Okay,” he whispered, then stopped. His voice sounded too loud in the enormous quiet. He tried to remember the last few seconds at home. The distortion. The pull. That strange passage through something that might have been a void—or a concussion inventing poetry. He had no idea where he was. He couldn’t even be certain he was still on Earth. Panic pressed at the edge of his thoughts. He let it sit there without handing it the controls. First: water. Shelter. A way to understand the terrain. He’d watched enough survival videos to know that “drink the first clear water you find” was how people earned a memorable final paragraph. He’d need to inspect it, and even then, unfamiliar plants and animals were not a puzzle to solve by tasting them. He rose carefully. His balance felt different. Better, somehow—his feet settled beneath him with a precision he didn’t remember having. The ache in his shoulder was already dulling. He flexed his fingers, then his arms. His body felt alert, responsive, as if he’d slept for a week and gone for a run afterward. That was… not normal. A faint rustle came from the undergrowth to his left. He turned before he consciously registered it. Something small skittered through the leaves and disappeared. The sound had been crisp and close, but he could also hear the rush of water beyond the trees, the buzz of insects, and a faint cracking noise somewhere far off. His senses felt sharpened. Not superhuman—he had no useful baseline for that—but different enough to make him pause. Asher moved toward a shallow pool gathered between stones. He crouched beside it, scanning the water and the ground around it before using the surface as a mirror. A stranger stared back. His hair, once an ordinary brown, had turned black—so dark it caught a subtle red glimmer where the light touched it. His eyes were a vivid crimson. Beneath them, his face looked more defined than he remembered, the features refined into an almost startling handsomeness. His skin was fair, his build lean and athletic, and the man in the water looked like Asher, if Asher had been recast by someone with a dramatic sense of lighting. He touched his cheek. The reflection did the same. The sight should have made him scream. Instead, he stared, stunned, and then let out a breath that might almost have been a laugh. “Well. That’s new.” He didn’t know what had happened to him. He didn’t know whether the change was dangerous, permanent, or even real. He resisted the urge to test his strength by punching a tree. Trees had been minding their own business long before he arrived, and he saw no reason to start a feud. The forest floor showed signs of life everywhere: broken stems, scat, small tracks pressed into damp earth. One set of prints was larger than his hand, with long, narrow toes and deep impressions. He couldn’t identify the animal. He could only tell that it was heavy, and that it had passed recently. A distant call rolled through the trees again. This time, the sound seemed to vibrate in his ribs. Asher looked toward the slope where the ground dipped. The rush of water grew clearer in that direction. Water was a sensible first objective, though he’d stay alert and avoid blundering into whatever had made those tracks. He chose a route that kept the slope in view and the thickest undergrowth to one side, moving slowly enough to notice what lay beneath his feet. He still had no idea how he’d gotten here, or whether home was anywhere he could reach. That problem could wait until he was alive, hydrated, and less likely to step on something with teeth. A few paces later, he found a tree trunk scored by three deep grooves. The cuts were too high and too wide to be from a small animal. Fresh splinters clung to the bark. Then, from somewhere beyond the trees, came a soft, deliberate scrape—followed by the heavy crack of a branch giving way. Asher stopped. The forest held its breath around him. He tightened his hands, glanced at the tracks, and picked his way toward the sound of water, careful not to turn his back on the trees behind him. Whatever lived in this place, he was going to learn what it was before it learned what he tasted like.

A World Beyond Earth