| Description |
|
In 2367, the USS Genesis responds to a strange distress signal from an abandoned Darwin Genetic Research Institute facility on a remote moon. The signal appears to have been transmitted decades out of sequence and repeats only three words: “First light. We are still here.” Reruk immediately recognizes the facility as connected to the illegal genetic experiments he was complicit with but also helped expose. The project was supposedly destroyed after the catastrophic containment failure of 2365, but Doxia Oroten disappeared before Starfleet could apprehend her, fleeing with an unknown portion of her research.
The station appears deserted, yet the Genesis crew finds evidence that its inhabitants died in horrifying circumstances. Bodies have aged hundreds of years in minutes, while others appear impossibly young despite being decades old. Some seem to have died more than once. Then the crew begins seeing impossible shapes moving through the station—things glimpsed only briefly in the darkness, captured on malfunctioning sensors or reflected in polished surfaces. Reruk discovers that Oroten had been using temporal fields to manipulate biological aging, hoping to combine them with genetic splicing to create organisms capable of continually renewing themselves. But her final experiments may have done something far stranger: instead of merely altering the subjects' biology, the temporal field appears to have opened a passage into an alternate reality—or perhaps an entirely different state of existence.
Deep beneath the facility, the crew discovers a sealed chamber overlooking something that should not exist. Beyond the threshold lies another world: dark skies, unfamiliar stars and enormous structures that seem grown rather than built. Moving within it are creatures that resemble the monsters of ancient mythology—serpentine beings with crowns of living tendrils, winged predators, vast many-limbed forms and figures whose bodies seem to shift between animal, plant and something almost humanoid. Reruk realizes with growing horror that humanity may not have invented its ancient legends at all. Perhaps early encounters with this reality—or fragments of it—became the source of myths such as Medusa, the sirens and other monsters remembered across countless civilizations.
The creatures have noticed the Genesis. They are not ghosts or alternate versions of the Darwin scientists; they are native inhabitants of whatever exists beyond the temporal boundary. And they are beginning to push through. The crew must destroy the facility before the passage becomes permanent, while Reruk is left with one final, terrifying possibility: Oroten may have discovered this realm years ago and deliberately crossed into it, believing its inhabitants held the secret to the immortality she sought. As the station collapses, Reruk catches one last glimpse through the dying portal—a vast serpentine creature staring directly at him, its many eyes opening one by one. Behind it stands the unmistakable silhouette of Doxia Oroten.
Then the portal closes. |