Chapter 1: Anomaly at the Edge of Nothing
Table of Contents
The object at the edge of the solar system had no right to exist. Nolan Cade had been looking for it for eleven years.
He floated in the observation bay of the Perspicacity, one hand on the cold viewport frame, watching sensor readouts refresh on the main display. Nineteen days since the burn that changed their course — twelve degrees, manageable delta-v, a decision Commander Vasik had made with the expression of a woman signing a document she knew would be used against her. The crew spoke to him when duty required it. Otherwise, silence.
He had earned every degree of that cold.
Dr. Ren Hakoda, the ship’s astrophysicist, worked at the main console with his back to Nolan, running the latest gravimetric scan. Dr. Yuki Taniguchi, the quantum physicist, was asleep in her berth after a double shift. Commander Lena Vasik was on the bridge, where she spent most of her time now — not avoiding Nolan, exactly, but maintaining a distance that accomplished the same thing.
Three scientists, one commander, and one civilian passenger who had lied his way aboard. Eighteen months past Neptune’s orbit, approaching something that would either vindicate a decade of solitary obsession or prove that Nolan Cade was exactly what the scientific establishment had always assumed: a wealthy eccentric chasing patterns in noise.
The ranch outside Casper, Wyoming, sat on a hundred and sixty acres of grassland and antelope under a sky so dark you could see the Milky Way’s dust lanes with the naked eye. No neighbors for seven miles in any direction. The house was small, unremarkable, and full of equipment that didn’t belong in it: a twenty-inch Ritchey–Chrétien telescope on a permanent pier mount in the yard, a radio dish on the north ridge, a climate-controlled shed housing three more telescopes on automated tracking systems, and a computing cluster in the basement that drew enough power to make the utility company call twice.
Nolan had bought the ranch in 2121, the year he turned thirty-eight and walked away from Bridger Quantitative — the algorithmic trading firm he’d founded, built, and sold for a figure that made further ambition optional. He was good at finding signal in noise. The markets had rewarded this talent obscenely. But the markets had never been the point.
The point was the sky.
He’d been an amateur astronomer since he was twelve — since his father, a pipeline welder who worked nights, had driven him up Casper Mountain on a moonless August evening and pointed a department-store refractor at Saturn. The rings. He saw the rings, and something in his chest locked into place and never unlocked. Everything after — the mathematics degree, the trading career, the money — was scaffolding for the only thing he actually wanted to do: look up.
And he looked up for decades. Thousands of nights on the ranch, alone with a thermos and a folding chair and the hum of tracking motors, studying objects that were beautiful beyond language and impossibly far away. The Orion Nebula, thirteen hundred light-years out, a cathedral of gas and newborn stars. The Andromeda Galaxy, two and a half million light-years, a trillion suns in a spiral so perfect it looked designed. Globular clusters older than the Earth, their stars packed so tightly they blazed like cities seen from orbit.
He loved them. And he could never visit them. Nobody could. The distances were not merely large but punitive — the universe built on a scale that seemed calculated to mock the ambitions of anything living in it. A human lifespan measured against a hundred-thousand-light-year galaxy was a mayfly against an ocean. You could look. You could never touch.
He’d done the math, because doing the math was all you could do. The Perspicacity — the fastest crewed vessel ever launched, its advanced nuclear-thermal drives pushing two hundred kilometers per second — traveled at less than one-thousandth of the speed of light. At that velocity, Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, the very first rung on the ladder, was a journey of six thousand years. The Orion Nebula he’d photographed from his porch a thousand times — two million years. Andromeda, visible to his naked eye on any clear night — nearly four billion. A number that stopped being a number and became a headstone.
Even the most ambitious proposals — antimatter engines, beamed lightsails, concepts that existed only in white papers and funding pitches — topped out at a few percent of light speed. Call it five, absurdly generous. Proxima Centauri drops to eighty-five years: a human lifetime in a metal tube, arriving old and alone to find one star. The Orion Nebula was still twenty-seven thousand years away. Andromeda, fifty million. The universe was not merely large. It was sealed — a cathedral with the doors welded shut, every window a viewport onto something you could never reach.
Unless someone had built shortcuts.
The idea had taken root so gradually he couldn’t point to a moment of inception. It grew out of the looking itself — out of thousands of nights contemplating distances so vast they made thought stutter, and the quiet conviction that kept forming in the silence after: if I were an ancient civilization, billions of years old, this is the first thing I would do. He would look at that same sky and feel that same ache and say this is unacceptable — we need a faster way. Traversable wormholes were not just theoretically permitted by general relativity. They were architecturally motivated. The universe was too big and too beautiful to be experienced at light speed, and any civilization that reached maturity would come to the same conclusion he kept reaching on his porch in Wyoming.
Motivated reasoning. He knew it. His belief that wormholes existed — natural or artificial — was fueled by longing, not evidence. But motivated reasoning and correct reasoning are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes the people who find things are the people who were looking, and the people who were looking are the people who wanted it badly enough to look.
So he built a pipeline. A multi-modal anomaly detection system, running on the computing cluster in his basement, mining publicly available astronomical archives — gravitational microlensing catalogues, infrared surveys, spectral databases. Decades of accumulated sky data, the largest observational dataset in human history, and Nolan wrote machine learning models to search it for one thing: the compound signature that a traversable wormhole would produce.
Not any single anomaly — those were common, easily explained. A microlensing event alone could be a rogue planet. An infrared point source alone could be a brown dwarf. But a microlensing signature with the specific Ellis wormhole profile — the characteristic central brightening and the shallow symmetrical “gutter” dimming just outside the Einstein ring — co-located with a thermal point source whose blackbody curve was subtly distorted by curved throat geometry — that compound had no natural explanation. It was the fingerprint of engineered spacetime.
The pipeline found it on a Tuesday in September 2133. An anomaly at ninety-seven AU from the Sun. The gutter was there, clean and symmetrical. The infrared source co-located to within the astrometric uncertainty. The blackbody curve distorted in exactly the way his theoretical models predicted.
He checked it for three months. Every control, every null hypothesis, every alternative explanation he or anyone else might propose. None of them held. The compound signature did.
He did not publish.
He knew exactly what would happen. A paper claiming evidence of an engineered wormhole, authored by a man with no institutional affiliation, no academic track record, and a fortune made in algorithmic trading. The methodology was sound — but the claim was extraordinary, and the author was easy to dismiss. The fringe would pick it up before the mainstream did, and the association would poison whatever credibility the data carried.
He didn’t need the world to believe him. He needed a ship.
“Nolan.” Ren’s voice, flat and careful. “Come look at this.”
The gravimetric scan had resolved. At ninety-seven AU — close now, less than six days out — the anomaly that had consumed eleven years of Nolan’s life was no longer a statistical abstraction. It was a gravitational signature strong enough to lens background starlight in real time, visible on the Perspicacity’s instruments as a warping in the positions of distant stars.
“The magnification profile matches,” Ren said, addressing the data rather than the man floating behind him. “Central brightening with the anomalous gutter. Four percent dimming outside the Einstein ring crossing. The infrared point source is co-located, exactly where his model predicted.” His model. The possessive wielded at arm’s length.
“It’s real,” Nolan said quietly.
Ren didn’t answer.
He had found the ship the way he found the wormhole: by looking at data until a pattern emerged.
Commander Vasik’s deep-system survey — the Perspicacity mission — was publicly catalogued in the UN Extrasolar Affairs database. A multi-year voyage to study Kuiper Belt objects, trans-Neptunian chemistry, the heliopause. The planned trajectory would take the ship to roughly eighty-five AU. Not quite to his anomaly at ninety-seven. But close enough that a twelve-degree course correction, on remaining delta-v, could reach it.
The civilian ridealong program existed as part funding mechanism, part public engagement — wealthy enthusiasts could buy passage on extended science missions, provided they passed medical and psychological screening and accepted the commander’s absolute operational authority. Nolan’s application described his interest in the outer solar system, his background in data analysis, his decades of amateur astronomy. All true. He simply omitted the wormhole at ninety-seven AU and the fact that the Perspicacity’s trajectory could be bent to reach it.
For eighteen months he was the model passenger. Quiet, helpful, out of the way. Running his own analysis on the ship’s sensor feeds in private, watching the anomaly sharpen in the data as the light-lag shrank. Carrying a secret that got heavier every day.
Past Neptune, with the mission nearing the end of its planned survey corridor, he requested a private meeting with Vasik and laid everything out. Eleven years of analysis. The compound signature. The coordinates. His conviction that a traversable wormhole sat at ninety-seven AU.
The fury in Vasik’s face was controlled and absolute. Not at the science — she understood the data immediately. The fury was at the betrayal. She ran a ship where crew cohesion was a survival requirement, not a luxury. Eighteen months of spaceflight with a man who had been lying about why he was there.
She brought in Ren and Yuki. They examined the data independently. Confirmed it was sound. Identified the correction: twelve degrees, nineteen days, manageable.
Vasik made the burn. Not for Nolan. For the science.
Then she stopped speaking to him about anything not operationally necessary, and she did not resume.
Six days after Ren’s gravimetric scan, they were close enough for optical resolution, and what they saw ended every argument that might have remained.
A sphere of distorted starlight approximately two hundred meters across. Not an object — more an absence with edges. Stars seen through it were displaced, their positions smeared in concentric rings that shifted as the Perspicacity changed its angle of approach. At the center, where a black hole would show nothing, there was something: a faint, shimmering disk of light that didn’t match the background star field. Different stars. Wrong constellations.
Nolan stared at it through the viewport and felt something he had no name for — a sensation beyond vindication, beyond the exhausted triumph of having been right. It was closer to grief. Eleven years of solitary certainty, of being the only person alive who believed this was here, and now it was here, two hundred meters of engineered spacetime hanging in the dark, and the distance between knowing and seeing collapsed into a single luminous point.
“That’s the exit mouth,” Yuki whispered. She had been awake for thirty-one hours. “We’re looking through it. Those stars — they’re somewhere else.”
“Somewhere in the Milky Way?” Vasik asked from the bridge, her voice clipped and professional.
Yuki studied the spectral data, matching star types and brightnesses against galactic models. “Still the Milky Way — but barely. The stellar density is wrong for the disk, too metal-poor for the bulge. And the background glow is consistent with the galactic plane, but the geometry is off — we’re seeing it from a completely different angle.” She ran the model twice. “Outer halo. Tens of thousands of light-years from Earth. Maybe more.”
“The infrared signature around the mouth,” Ren said quietly, “has a periodicity. A slow modulation. The throat is oscillating. And there’s structure to it — I’m reading what looks like a stabilization field, something maintaining the geometry. This isn’t natural.” He paused. “It’s engineered.”
Vasik appeared in the observation bay doorway. She looked at the sphere of warped starlight, at the alien constellations shimmering through its center, at the data cascading across every screen. Then she looked at Nolan. It was the first time she had met his eyes since the burn.
“How long has this been here?” she asked. The question was directed at the room.
Yuki pulled up the stability analysis. “The vacuum energy configuration sustaining the throat is in an extraordinarily deep equilibrium. The entanglement tether maintaining traversability…” She paused, rechecked her math. “Commander, this thing is old. Not centuries. Not millennia. The coherence characteristics suggest it has been stable for billions of years.”
The observation bay was silent.
“We have to go through,” Nolan said. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud.
“No,” Vasik said.
“Commander —”
“The tidal forces across the throat are within the ship’s structural tolerance,” Yuki offered. “Barely. If the throat radius is what I think it is — about forty meters — the Perspicacity fits.”
“No,” Vasik said again. “We are a survey vessel with a civilian passenger, not an exploration mission equipped for transit through alien infrastructure. We do not know what is on the other side. We do not know if the transit is survivable in both directions. We do not know if passage triggers a decay.” She looked at each of them in turn. “We study it. We document everything. We transmit to Earth. And we go home.”
Nolan opened his mouth.
“Mr. Cade.” The formality was a wall. “You have given us the most significant discovery in human history, and you have done so through deception that I will be documenting in full in my mission report. Both of those things are true. Do not test which one I find more significant.”
She held his gaze for a moment longer than necessary, and what Nolan saw in her eyes was worse than fury. It was recognition — the cold, clinical assessment of a woman who understood exactly what kind of person could maintain a lie for eighteen months in a sealed tube hurtling through the void, and who had just classified him with the precision she brought to everything. Not a madman. Not a fool. Something more dangerous: a man who would always find a way to make the right call impossible to refuse, and who would never stop finding doors to force open.
They spent three weeks at the wormhole.
Three weeks of every instrument aboard the Perspicacity trained on two hundred meters of engineered spacetime, cataloguing its properties with the systematic thoroughness of scientists who understood they were documenting the most important object ever found. Yuki mapped the throat geometry, the vacuum energy topology, the entanglement tether that held the structure open — a quantum coupling between the two mouths generating the negative energy to prevent collapse, stable across distances and timescales that dwarfed human civilization. Ren characterized the stabilization field: a configuration of metamaterial structures orbiting the mouth, ancient but perfectly functional, maintaining the throat’s geometry against perturbation like buttresses around a cathedral arch. Yuki had taken to calling them the Throat Engines — a name that stuck because it was accurate. They were engines, in every meaningful sense: Casimir cavity arrays converting vacuum energy into geometric stability, holding a tunnel through spacetime open across billions of years. But her analysis suggested they were operating well below their full design capacity — the wormhole maintenance was a baseline function, the equivalent of keeping the lights on. Whatever else these machines had been built to do, it was dormant here at the network’s outer edge, and the Perspicacity’s instruments could detect the idle architecture without being able to determine its purpose.
They measured everything. Transit readiness assessments. Tidal gradient profiles. Throat radiation spectra. The data stream to Earth was the densest continuous transmission in the history of human communication.
On the fourteenth day, Yuki flagged a secondary anomaly — faint enough that it hadn’t appeared in the initial surveys, emerging only after she stacked two weeks of continuous gravitational wave monitoring data. A structured periodicity in the local spacetime background, cycling at intervals too regular for any known astrophysical process. Not the chirp of merging objects or the steady pulse of a binary system. Something slower and more deliberate, like a heartbeat measured in hours, with fine structure in each cycle that her instruments could detect but not resolve.
“Probably resonance from the throat stabilization field,” Ren suggested when she showed him the data. “The Throat Engines are maintaining the geometry — some vibration leaking into the gravitational background would be expected.”
“Maybe,” Yuki said. She didn’t sound convinced. The periodicity didn’t match any of the throat’s known oscillation modes. It was something else — a signal woven into the fabric of spacetime itself, patient and persistent, directed inward along the wormhole’s axis toward the galactic center. She noted it in her survey report as an unresolved gravitational wave anomaly and continued her work.
And every night — or what passed for night aboard a ship where the Sun was a distant bright star — Nolan floated alone in the observation bay and looked through the wormhole at the other side.
He could see it. A different sky. Stars in configurations that matched no catalogue compiled from Earth. Forty-two thousand light-years away, or a hundred thousand, or more — a place he could see but not reach, because the commander of this ship had made the right call and he knew it. Even as every cell in his body strained toward the shimmering disk of wrong constellations like a compass needle toward true north.
He had spent his whole life looking at things he couldn’t visit. This was the most exquisite form of that old torment: the door was right there, open, lit from the other side, and he was not allowed to walk through.
On the twenty-first day, Vasik ordered the final data burst to Earth and set a course for home.
Nolan watched the wormhole shrink in the aft sensors until it was a point of distorted light, then a data signature, then nothing. The stars around it were ordinary again. The sky was just a sky.
But it wasn’t. It would never be just a sky again. Somewhere behind them, a door stood open in the dark, and on the other side lay the rest of the universe.
He would find his way back. And next time, the decision would not be someone else’s to make.