Blazar

His mouth was dry, his eyelids crusted over, and his right arm and foot were itching like crazy. Rolling his head over, he tried to peel his eyes open, yet he currently lacked the awareness of his strength to do so. Everything was vague, figments, and barely coming to. His senses were awakening and the external world was crashing upon him like a wave does to a beach's shoreline.

Shifting his weight over to his left, he brought his arm from behind his shoulder, tucked behind his back. Unable to raise it to wipe his face, he started to shake it in hopes of regaining circulation as quickly as possible. The only nuisance pain that he despised worse than a body part "falling asleep" was hitting his funny bone against something hard. Incognizant of his left hand, he tried to raise that one to wipe his face.

Cling!

The metallic sound rang out.

"Hmmm?" Looking over to his side, he could barely peer out through the holes that his eyelids could see through the crust. There was a light flicker, a low humming sound, and his wrist... it felt... cold.

Rubbing his eye on his shoulder wiping off the eye boogers, finally being able to view his current position, he was greeted by the sight of a steel rod. Yet, the most concerning thing to him was that he was handcuffed to it.

"What the-," he stammered, "What the hell?" Slapping his right arm against the bench in hopes of gaining full mobility of his free hand, he felt the blood pumping more fervently than before. It didn't matter if the back of his hand would be a bit bruised, he needed to assess his surroundings.

Yanking his arm against the metal rod, the metal clinging was waking him up even more. Sad to say, it also alerted his captors. Hearing a low murmuring nearby, his mind started to race about where he was last and to where he possibly was now.

Finally gaining mobility of his right arm, he wiped the rest of his face before running a hand through his hair. Looking up past the pole, the short hallway lead to a door with a blacked-out window. "Am I," he thought to himself, "am I on the Quilter?" Turning his head to where the sound of footsteps were coming from, he was greeting with a familiar face. "Oh for fu-."

"'Bout time you woke up," the woman sitting a seat across from him stated, "goodness, we didn't drug you that hard. You were good at resisting it, but once Philippe hit you with that haymaker, I was confident you'd be out for at least a half a day. Still though, it wasn't like you'd been doused with a rhino tranquilizer."

"Morning Aleesha," he groaned, "so, where are you taking me, and to whom do I owe the pleasure of you working for?"

"Oh Gerald, come on now, we used to be such good friends," she pouted at him.

"Yeah, thing is, friends don't spike other friends' drinks. I knew you were trouble the moment I saw you working at the bar. Hustle culture my ass about you needing to work more than one job. I knew you were over qualified to be working there from the get-go no matter how smooth of a mixologist you are. Your party tricks don't fool me."

"No, they don't. It was your eyes that did. Well, more so your trust in yourself than anything. It didn't matter how well you watched me do all those party tricks. You may be able to catch a professional cheater from getting away in a poker circle, but you can't win when the deck's literally stacked against you."

"You mean the whole place was a flash mob paid for by Force?"

"Well, we rented the place out, and of course naturally there were regular casuals in there. Force actually sent out emails through DoorDash, Grubhub, and Beer-Pong alike. Sure, it wasn't cheap, but better to give away cheap alcohol to gain something more valuable in the end."

"So, everybody there wasn't in on it?"

"Yeah, as always the best lies have a few kernels of truth to them."

"How many?"

"What?"

"How many civilians got caught up in this little skirmish."

"Oh don't worry, Gerry. After they passed out either in their booths, stools, or on the dance floor, they were ferried back to their homes. They'll just think of it as a bad hangover. Like, a first timer binging the punch bowl mixed with nothing but vodka."

"I told you never to call me that."

"Ah, did I strike a nerve?"

"No, you pulled a cord, just like your pathetic organization. Besides, what's with all the getup," he squinted at her, "a machine rifle, a military uniform, please. Who do you think you're fooling? The hardest thing you've ever done was kick out your ex-boyfriend's hot fling. You don't got the guts to use that."

"No Gerry, smart people like you know how to make, work, and care for these things. People like me actually have the drive to use them. You may be smarter than me, but you're less capable than what you think you are. Don't let your championship wins of BJJ go to your head. You wouldn't kill a fly so long as they stayed the hell away from you."

The door behind Aleesha opened up. From in it two suited men exited standing aside the door, as from behind them a man in a white trench-coat topped with a floppy brimmed fedora and large circular shades strolled out. When the two looked eyes with him, he grinned devilishly. This man was the sort of man that Gerald would imagine would stroll out of the song "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" or as a male model for "The Devil Wears Prada." Everything about him, no matter how clean, screamed pure deceit.

Pointing two fingers forwards, indicating for the bodyguards to start walking, they strolled their way over towards Gerald and Aleesha, with several other armed personnel following suit.

"Ah, Gerald Planckitus Pauli the VII, to whom do I owe the pleasure?"

"Can it, Albert. I can understand what credentials you want me for, but where the hell are we?"

"Don't you know? Why, we're aboard the Quilter! How more exhilarating could this be?"

"Gee, I don't know, I could be at home with my niece, watching her take her first steps for the second time, or helping my nephew with his astrophysics homework."

"Awe, such a family man as always. It is a shame what happened to their parents, but physics, like alcohol can become addicting." He leaned in close between Gerald and Aleesha, "Especially when you keep living in denial."

Gerald grabbed Albert by his cravat in a fit of rage that swept over him as a tsunami does to a small island archipelago. Yet, not realizing the danger he was in, or not caring enough for his own safety, the body guards ripped him off, kicking him in the process, just as Aleesha jabbed him with the butt-end of her rifle betwixt his ribs and hips.

"Now, now Gerald. Can't we all get along?"

"No we can't. Especially when we have people like you bringing our existence closer to extinction."

"Goodness Gerald! How daft can you be!" He looked over towards his body guards, "Come on now, unchain him, but hold him tight. We're going to need him to remedy our situation, whether he wants to or not." While one guard undid his handcuffs, the other pinned Gerald's arm behind his back.

"Damn it. I just woke that arm up." He could begin to feel his circulation being cut off again.

"Chop-chop. Come on now," Albert continued. Forced to his feet, Gerald was made to walk after Albert, with one guard between the two, a guard behind him, and finally followed by Aleesha. "You see David, after all of the millennia that humanity has existed for, even with moving on from fossil fuels, subsisting our food markets with cellular agriculture, and even reaching a new version of a type III civilization, I just couldn't fathom the process of why we were in such a rush. That was until I learned about your sister's and brother-in-law's discoveries."

"Yeah, what about them," Gerald grimaced.

"You see, though I'm not fond of black holes and their ability to erase informational data from the universe, besides rearranging its context before displacing it arbitrarily elsewhere, I'd knew that I'd never liked the idea of this reality's fabric stretching from around us, if not us ourselves, until we were pulled apart."

"So is that why you stole the Quilter?! It's because of your fear of non-existence?!"

"No, no, Gerald. I didn't steal it. It was merely liberated."

"Yeah, yeah, everybody likes to say under new management, but all you've done is stolen a self-photon propelled train to try to escape the fabric of the universe from shredding from underneath your own feet." Albert turned around and looked at him as if he's heard this all before. "You've stolen one of humanity's last harbinger's of hope for expedition into always carving a home for ourselves, and used it because deep down inside your hope died long ago, leaving you with nothing but existential fear and dread."

Albert could sense the hate and disgust just from his voice, and the look in Gerald's eyes, but he couldn't trifle himself with nonsensical emotions. In this realm, rational reigned supreme.

"Dread? Please Gerald, you know nothing of dread. Even death has more comfort than dread. At least death has the possibility of existence. Goodness, if you want to be loony for all I care you can go ahead and join a religion or make one up for yourself. Maybe you can find a comforting home in death in one of those. I know that most of them tend to have three places, if not the bare minimal two."

"Go to hell!"

"Ah, so you have joined one," Albert quipped. Sighing, he continued, "Nevertheless, your family members, Maria and Nikolai made fascinating advancements! I have to say, I do envy them for their discoveries. However, I pity them for not understanding, let alone being capable of grasping that which they knew of."

As they continued walking, they eventually got to a staircase for the engine room. Dismissing the rest of the guards to the entrance of the engine room, Albert kept his small entourage of guards with him, including Aleesha. She's done good enough work thus far, and he thought that she might deserve a promotion for when and where they were going.

"Quite the powerplant isn't it? Oh, don't worry, it's not nuclear, but if it does have any radiation, I'd assure you, you're DNA would be scrambled worse than the eggs for a Denny's omelet."

Upon getting to one of the harmonic piston oscillators, Albert entered the code unlocking the titanium-lead door. Sliding out a long shaft, he pulled out one of the eight tubes from the power plant.

"Do you know what this is Gerald," Albert asked him.

"Simple, it's a power core," Gerald spat out the answer. "Indeed, but do you know what powers it, or how it's even powered in the first place?"

"No." Gerald's mind raced. "It can't be. How- how in reality did he get his hands, let alone his mind of that information. I thought we burned the patents and documents once the first one got loose."

"It's an egg, Gerald. See?" He tilted the power core to its side, "What a little cutie. Right? At least, that's what Maria and Nikolai thought at first too. Also, I knew you were there at the time of their first discovery. No use in trying to hold onto spilt beans."

"How the hell you'd get your hands on a dragon egg?"

"Dragon egg," Aleesha's ears perked up at the sound of that.

"Oh Gerald, you know that humanity's been constructing dragons ever since the first Dyson Sphere was being formed. Reality is built up on systems. It is a system of systems. Your very body itself is an ecosystem of microbial beings that rely on your organ systems to function in this macroenvironment. Once we realized the types of cells we could build and design, we knew that they'd had to be stored in batteries capable of withstanding such potential stress. From the first constructed Helios dragons whos eggs were incubated within and then contained the power of the suns themselves, to the dragons that pulled our planet across the cosmos itself from galaxy to galaxy for eons. We were a harvesting planet, a scourge on the universe, devouring everything in its path with our engines of consumption. If they weren't a motif for capitalism, I don't know what. What they didn't know though was that their systems only helped to advance us closer to the eventual heat death of the universe."

"Yeah, yeah, the last of the sun dragons perished well over five-thousand years ago. Its in the annals of history that the when the last red giant began transitioning into a dwarf star, that the Dyson chains were cut as it'd be better for our planet to drift with the energy from our radiation plants keeping our oceans warm than to be crushed under that gravitational force."

"Precisely, but these aren't sun dragon eggs Gerry, and I have a feeling that you know what they are don't you? Come hither, take a closer look you know what kind of gears those are aren't you?"

"Duh, their photon gears composed from photon particle crystals. What about them? The Quilter has the same wheels and type of shell for its material composition. How else do you think that we're going through the depths of space with no dust for galaxies. With no traction and no form of propulsion, we'd wouldn't even be adrift. We'd be stationary."

"An object in motion remains an object in motion. An object at rest remains at rest. That is unless acted upon. Gerald, it's their ratio that makes them important. I know that you can't feel it, but we've actually been traveling faster than the speed of light itself. You have the shell to thank for that."

"What about the gear ratio?"

"Tch-tch-tch," Albert said whilst waving a finger. "This is a GOOGOL gear reduction ration. It's actually meant to be slower, and there's two of these of both sides of every core."

"Wait? We're speeding up, how? Nothing's faster than the speed of light?"

"Well, when Maria and Nikolai discovered that you can make particles with light, they started making some form of photon DNA. In a sense, the first of those creatures that was successfully viable was that of the photon dragons. However, when the first escaped from its mirror and lead encased prison, you'd figure that they'd stop, but no. Nikolai just had to use photon particles to encase something even more absurd."

"You don't mean?"

"Yes, I do. I'm talking about tachyons, Gerald. Of course, Nikolai's thirst for knowledge couldn't be stopped. So, mirroring Maria's work of photonic DNA, he made a crystal capturing system. More successful than the discovery of neutrons, things went right for all the wrong reasons. Though you know, don't you?"

"We- we- burned those documents and the patents too. We knew that if those creatures could be manufactured again that they could potentially lead to-."

"A fate worse than a nuclear winter. Like sending a hydrogen atom beaming through the earth at the speed of light, but worse. You got lucky that the first photon dragon to escape hit the principal axis, and that nothing was in its way upon exiting our planet's atmosphere, let alone our solar system."

"But, how'd you know?"

"Simple," Albert pointed to Aleesha, "she led us right to you. You think that we wouldn't find it suspicious that the most prestigious physics organization would dismiss of all of its lower ranked employees, from scientist to operators alike? Sure, your company may have been an immovable object, but that chink in your armor was all we needed for us to break through as the unstoppable Force."

"What do you plan on doing with those?"

"Simple," Albert stared at Gerald, "I'm going to use them to power this behemoth that is the Quilter beyond the fabric edge of our universe's string theory to latch onto another. If there's space between spaces, there's bound to be universes between universes, and with these hypothetical creatures as our power cells, and I plan on continuing this legacy known as humanity with or without earth. Though, by the way things have shaped up, looks like I'll be doing so without earth."

"And what do you want with me?"

"You're the babysitter." Albert smiled with horrendous glee. "You're going to give us all the knowledge you know to keep those gears running. We do need a photon engineer after all. By the way, you'd better also earn your degree in tachyon engineering as well, cause these babies are growing and fast. The GOOGOL gears are actually halting their growth, but there's only so much photon gears can do when it comes to tachyonic particles. It's like their trying to break out of their eggs so soon. They just can't wait to be hatched, and personally, I like keeping them as embryos."

"What about my family?! My niece! My nephew!" He pointed to the guards, "What about their families?!"

"If you learn fast enough, we may be able to travel back in time for you to pick them up. That is, if earth is still around by then. Then again, we're probably traveling so fast, that they haven't even aged an entire day, let alone an hour since our departure."

"Your a sick man."

"No, Gerald," Albert looked him dead in the eyes, "I'm a rational man. Unlike your sister and her ignorant husband. The both of them were so stupid that they believed we could find entire plants composed of photon and tachyon particles, let alone live on them. You've should've seen their designs for the physical matter, wave matter suits. Absolutely absurd. They would've caused humans to mutate past our species' origins so far that you wouldn't be able to recognize yourself even if you had the self-awareness of a stage VI civilization." He looked at Gerald with an intense sense of pity for his ignorance. Then again, that was the reasoning for his pity. Gerald was in the need to know, but like a child to parents, was never allowed until absolutely needed.

Continuing, Albert said, "Nikolai should've know that tachyons would've been too destructive, just look at how their forms have been mutated from the photon dragons whose DNA they were modeled after. Not of single bit of resemblance. Then again, I shouldn't be surprised since they're different particles after all. Guards," Albert snapped his fingers, "confine him to the lab and take this power core with you. He needs a control sample for his experiments."

Just as they moved towards Gerald and the power core.

POP! POP!

Both guards fell to the floor immediately. One clutching his side, and the other his back. The sound being so loud, Gerald and Albert jumped, and the power core almost dropped from its position.

"What in the fabric do you think you're doing Aleesha?!" Albert was furious. However, he was rational, too rational. He let his pride cloud his own judgement.

POP! Putting a bullet in his chest, Aleesha said, "Simple, I sent the schematics for the Quilter back to its rightful owners, Maria and Nikolai. Men like you don't deserve to have nice toys such as this." Her eyes turned towards the dragon egg, "Nor do you deserve to use the lives of creature's such as this for your own gain or survival. I've already sent a detailed message."

"But how," Gerald asked, "They're dead. The first tachyon dragon that was forged, though a success, splattered their atoms across the walls of their laboratory. There wasn't a single drop of blood anywhere, and just like the first photon dragon, it left via the principle axis."

"Oh, Gerald, even you have to have heard of the tachyon telephone. If worst comes to worst, we just end up repeating this, but I'm not planning on living in deja vu for the rest of existence."

"But the GOOGOL gears, they're photon gears, not tachyon gears. The Quilter may be traveling faster than light, but we're nowhere near traveling back in time."

"Oh, I don't plan on that. Luckily for me Maria left a few photon gears lying around. I gotta tell ya', those crystals make for excellent tips for my bullets."

"Wait... What?"

"See ya' Gerald. It was nice knowing ya' while it lasted. Oh, and like I said, unlike you, I am more capable."

POP! With that last bullet she had cracked the case of the power core holding the tachyon egg. The dragon, faster than the speed of light, started to grow at an exponential rate beyond that of what either of them could know. The fear in his eyes was palpable, but worse than trying to comprehend infinity, all Gerald could do was cry as he raised his voice.

"ALEESHA!" The last sound heard aboard the ship before the roaring of the dragon as its breath broke through the Quilter's photon shell sending a blast of neutrinos in every which direction.

Meanwhile, somewhere, somewhen, off in the universe, a little girl was taking her steps for the first time, into her uncle's arms.

***

Author's Notes: The

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