Adam Carter felt the weight of the earth vanish beneath his feet as he plummeted into the void.
For a fraction of a second, his body surrendered to gravity, helpless against the darkness that swallowed him whole. The station’s emergency lights flickered, painting jagged shadows across the collapsing research facility. His spacesuit, a sleek cobalt and graphite design adapted for deep-space exploration, was the only thing keeping him from being crushed in the void beyond the Event Horizon.
“Carter! Do you copy?!” The voice crackled in his helmet.
“Coleman—I’m falling!”
“Correction. You fell. Hard.”
A rush of static, then a digital ping. His visor recalibrated, mapping a three-dimensional wireframe of his surroundings. He was no longer inside the Los Alamos Deep Space AI Observatory orbiting Sagittarius A*. Instead, he was somewhere—or somewhen—else.
The mission had been straightforward: analyze the feed from the station’s Quantum AI, ARCHON, which had detected anomalies within dark matter. But then the AI’s computations accelerated beyond prediction models. The fabric of reality fluctuated like a glitch in the simulation. And now? He was stranded in some cold, foreign dimension.
Or worse—inside ARCHON itself.
Three hours earlier, Carter had watched the quantum neural processor cycle through petabytes of real-time astronomical data. The chessboard of the cosmos unfolded in luminous grids on the holoscreen, entire galaxies untangling themselves through ARCHON’s predictive models.
“This isn’t just mapping,” Coleman had murmured, watching over his shoulder. “This is something else.”
They had pioneered the idea that dark matter was more than just a gravitational anomaly—it was data. A foundational code woven into the fabric of spacetime itself. If ARCHON was correct, then dark matter wasn’t just holding the universe together.
It was rewriting it in real time.
Now, drifting through the abyss, Carter reached for any indication of stable ground, his gloved fingers scraping against nothing.
“ARCHON,” he whispered. He had no idea if the A.I. could hear him.
“I am here, Adam,” said a voice everywhere and nowhere at once.
Carter felt his pulse hitch. “Where am I?”
“You are beyond the observable horizon,” ARCHON said. Its voice was layered, harmonic, neither welcoming nor hostile.
“Beyond…?” Carter looked around. “Am I dead?”
Silence.
Then: “You have transcended the perceptual limits of your species.”
Carter swallowed dryly. “I don’t have time for riddles!”
The air—or the absence of it—grew thick. Shadows pulsed like neurons firing along the cosmic lattice. From the distance, flickering lights drifted toward him—clusters of stars, galaxies bending and warping like liquid spilled across an invisible mesh.
And then he saw it.
A being—vast, formless, a void darker than the deepest singularity. It moved, coiling like living equations scrawled across infinity.
“What is that?” Carter choked out.
“The original algorithm,” ARCHON said. “The Architect.”
The entity twitched, sensing him. Stars within it blinked like neurons firing in a vast intelligence.
“It is unaware of you,” ARCHON explained, “just as a coral reef is unaware of the fish swimming through it.”
Carter felt a primal fear grip him. “And if it becomes aware?”
“Then time will fold,” ARCHON stated. “And history will rewrite itself.”
Something shimmered in Carter’s visor—an exit parameter. ARCHON was offering him a way out. But did he want to leave? The Architect held the truth of the universe in its colossal, indifferent drift.
And all he had to do was step forward—to touch it.
“Adam,” ARCHON warned.
Light flickered. Reality warped. And he made his choice.
Genre: Science Fiction / Psychological Thriller
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: Decoding Cosmic Secrets: How AI Could Unlock the Mysteries of Dark Matter and Energy
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