Light faded away in the town of Hastings that cool November night, where soon fate would change forever. Lamps ghosted many of the empty streets, but to the east, the bulbs at Ore Railway Station, old and failing, left it bathed in premature darkness. Nothing stood on the age worn concrete, paint peeling from the yellow warning line that had no one to caution of the dangers below, and no warning sign at all for the momentous events that were soon to follow.
At over one hundred and twenty-three years old, Ore Station resided here in obscurity as long as living memory. Since opening in the late nineteenth century, the poor station had suffered a troubled life. Platforms scarred by gum, rusted fences and graffiti, and a sense of abandonment clung to rusted rails as if bound by fate. Most residents of the town didn't visit Ore, using instead Hastings's main station, or avoiding the line altogether. Years of neglect and vandalism meant that many saw it as run down, broken and even dangerous. Though all it appeared to be was the end of the line, residents and those who saw it took to calling it the end of the world.
But there was one at least who didn't share such cruel thoughts. She sat alone on the bridge, the scuffed knees of her faint blue school trousers - a shade that matched her tired eyes - pulled in tight. She kept her head bowed against the late autumnal chill, shuddering in her thin inadequate coat. Beneath her, Heather Aislinn felt the rumble of the departing train, as it caused the whole structure below to shudder and creak with age. Lifting her head, she watched the train glide out of sight, then returned her head to her knees. She kneaded her long blonde hair in her hands, the rest trailing into her lap to avoid catching dirt from the worn steps. Silence returned to the station, leaving the whisper of the wind as her only company. She gave a small sigh, one that shuddered in the cold and turned to cloud, drifting on what breeze there was.
About to switch off from the world once more, Heather snapped to attention as the noise that would change the course of history began. The bridge began to stir from its slumber as a low growl of metal protested a new onslaught. A noise like that that Heather knew would mean a fast approaching service to Brighton. She frowned, then looked at her watch, a plastic well-worn strap and faint digital face she would never let the world pry away from her, for what it meant. What the watch showed however was that it was 18:12. While Heather knew that train times go awry - after so many nights here alone, Heather knew the train timetables by heart - the Brighton service wasn't due for at least another eight minutes.
Standing to look over the railing, Heather saw no train headlights around the faint bend leading to Three Oaks station, nor as she turned back were any glowing in the distance of the tunnel towards Hastings. As Heather gazed into those dark depths, an unusual aura did catch her eye above. The strange light waivered with a liquid effervescence against the leaves swaying above, ebbing and flowing from a point beneath the opposite side of the bridge in a flame’s crackling sweep, little pinpricks of spectral fireflies dancing on the dew. Light of any kind that didn't emanate from a train was an unusual sight at Ore. These colours pulsed and shifted behind her, flickering against the leaves overhead in time with a strange sizzle. As she listened, she heard a crackle emanating from over the railing.
Heather's stomach turned. Had a helpless animal touched the third rail of the tracks? No, she reminded herself, the electric rail stopped short of the station itself. She’d seen as much on the rare occasions other kids came here, boys who would dare each other to rush onto the tracks, their peers seeming disappointed when they emerged unharmed. This glow also appeared to come from under the stairs and on platform two, not the tracks. As she peered over the other railing, the night around her lit up in a sudden blinding flash. She held her arm up to shield her eyes as a roar of sound overwhelmed her senses, a shockwave sending her in a backwards stumble for the opposite railing to catch. A few birds in slumber above her took flight from the old broken camera array.
Blinking away the haze of the sudden light, Heather rushed back to the railing and bent over, staring down at an object unlike any she’d seen in her life, bar when she stared at the burning plasma ball in the day-time sky. No bigger than a light bulb but far too bright for that, it looked more fluid than solid, as if it rippled with a thousand tiny hurricanes. It was like staring into the actual sun itself, manifested at ground-level in her semi-abandoned escape from the world. The object burned and distorted the air around it, warping the edge of the platform, an electrical discharge enveloping, arching from and striking the sphere again. It looked alien against the lifeless concrete, a tiny star on Earth.
As Heather tried to decide if this was in her head or a bizarre and intricate floater in her eye, the weird ball vanished in a blink. Beneath her, the bridge stood still once more, and once again, the station fell quiet. Above the trees swayed in grey melancholy as if nothing happened, their leaves a charred-green shade in the shadows once more, and Ore returned to its slumber. Heather leaned as far over the edge as she felt safe, onto the tips of her worn-pink Converse shoes despite the fraying soles, and tried to see anything unusual. The platform lay dormant.
Curious by her nature and with growing confidence, Heather brushed dirt from her aged trousers, and made her way forwards. She travelled down the steps of the bridge onto platform two and to where she had seen the strange light. A scent of burning hung on the breeze, the scent of a shorted-out plug socket in a damp home. She’d become quite familiar with that smell in her house these last few difficult years. Straining her eyes, she hunted for an old signal or burned electrical parts or even wood; it had looked fire-like.
There was nothing; litter and the usual chewing gum that lines platforms across England were all the concrete had to offer. Nothing here would cause a bright light like that, let alone enough force to move even a frail steel bridge. She tried to shake the nearest support of the crossing, but even with age and neglect the bridge proved solid. She removed her hand, took note of the grime the brief contact left, then with a sigh brushed this away on her leg. Raising the hand once more she tested her forehead. A fever maybe? Not one she could feel against the frozen back of her hand. Heather didn’t know if the chill or sudden fear drained the last of the heat from her numb hands.
A glint shone in the corner of Heather's eye as she lowered her arm. Her eyes shot back to the fence and its dense hedge and foliage, widening as she spotted a glimmering twinkle nestled between the leaves. It quivered and recoiled out of view, fearful in its tiny movements. Making her way towards the shimmer with cautious steps, she bent down, and looked into the gap in the fence.
A petrified tabby cat stared back at her. Large pearl eyes gazed at her as if she were a spectre of its impending demise. The poor creature looked like it was as shell shocked as she felt. It didn't look hurt, but all the same Heather reached out towards the scared animal. It looked about ready to bolt from stress, but accepted the hand, the petting seeming to steady it. After making sure the creature was calm enough not to freak out, Heather reached into the gap in the fence and retrieved the animal.
"It's ok. Come on." Heather set the cat down onto the platform. It must have come from the surrounding houses. The dilapidated station must make an interesting roaming ground, Heather reasoned; when it wasn't exploding that was. She watched as the animal, now with recovered poise, waltzed up the embankment and past the trespassing signs without a care in the world. It had made a miraculous recovery, which was more than Heather could say for herself.
A new faint rumbling began, this time distant and growing. Heather turned in time to see the actual Brighton train pull round the corner in the distance to Three Oaks. That made it 18:20, which she then confirmed. Her mother would begin to fret over her safety if she stayed out much longer, more so than usual anyway. It was best to not prompt the dreaded 'where were you' question, both for her mother’s likely disapproval of her little hideaway, and the awkwardness of any conversation at home these days. She couldn't resist one final look, but in the light of the shining green and white Electrostar train, nothing stood out on the platform.
Heather had a weird sense of fear leaving Ore that day, her legs a little less sure footed on the long ramp that led back to the town. However, as she always did departing the station, she vowed to come back. This was her safe place, and in spite of the anxiety coursing inside her she had a strong desire to find out the origin of the strange light. By the time she reached her front door darkness enveloped all but the sprinkle of shining points, and waning gibbous moon above. Before putting the key to lock, she gazed up one last time at the stars that twinkled above as Hastings did below. She would give anything to be able to escape and lose herself in them. There, she would never be in the way, in the infinite void of space.
Space had always captivated her, and she knew many of the brighter stars in view by name. She also knew that light can only travel so fast. That meant what she gazed out on in the sky above was what those stars looked hundreds to thousands of years ago. As noble an obsession as space could be, it had a knack of making her feel small and alone like nothing else. For all Heather knew, Earth was alone in the universe...
Hundreds of lightyears away and deep beneath the surface of his planet, Halos stood back from the particle chamber. He stared ahead in the middle of his dank and dismal lab, silent but for the low hum of machinery. Alone here, he could hear his own breathing in the absence of the experiment’s din, how it ran faster and shorter than it had any right to, unless his eyes weren't lying about what they saw.
He blinked a few times, and as he did he saw it once again. A faint orange flash, a glow of fire no bigger than his hand, one that burned into his eyes because, while it was bright enough to make him flinch, he could not take his eyes off it. In cycles of running this routine, time and again for all his life, the same set of results flickered back at him. For the first time he could remember, tonight, he'd seen something new.
His goggles lay unused around his neck, tattered and weary but functional, much like himself. He should have worn the goggles for the test, but often didn't from lack of imminent danger, and a certain reckless streak. His occasional carelessness when running experiments was a fault he was well aware of, though in his defense, the readings were not of a large enough body for meaningful risk. The goggles kind of hurt after a while too; his father had a smaller head than his, and there was little chance of finding a larger pair. He’d be lucky to find a second pair at all unless it turned up in the landfill deliveries; he was lucky to have any PPE at all.
Without taking his eyes off the point where the new reaction occurred, Halos dropped back into his chair. He spent his whole life around the lab, so many years now that he knew where any given piece of furnishing was without looking. Even if the chair hadn't been there though, Halos doubted he could stay on his feet much longer. He only realised once he sat down just how much his whole body shook. Trying to work through the shock, Halos ran over what he'd seen once again in his head, his recall far beyond the normal abilities of his kind, a family trait dating back centuries.
Most runs when he checked a nano-craft, the reaction it gave to the atmosphere around it was the same: nothing. He would get perhaps five or six alerts from different nano-craft each day, each shot into the great beyond from all angles of their adopted homeworld generations ago; calling the small rocky ball a ‘world’ didn’t sit right with Halos, but calling it a spherical asteroid made an already depressing situation tenfold worse. An alert meant one of the billions of dividing crafts flying out into the infinite void had come to rest on solid ground. If there was no reaction when he established a physical link to the craft - a marvel of engineering that bent spacetime between those two points - it meant the ground that craft landed upon was an asteroid, with no gas and trace mass. No chance in other words at sustaining even microbial life, apart from the odd extremophile.
That, or a craft would survive a crash into a gas giant, causing the chamber to ignite in a massive firestorm when he linked up. Those were rarer, but he'd had plenty enough of those happen; once had been enough for a lifetime. You could tell most of the time before making a connection if there was a risk of this, because the craft would throw any number of errors. Apart from being useless to his research, this was a nightmare to clean out afterwards. Those times were what the goggles existed to protect him from, and to his credit he almost remembered to use them, sometimes.
He'd braced for one of these tonight, after the pre-readings this craft sent back, but that wasn't a 'massive ignited firestorm'. It was small, controlled, but it had ignited by itself, and not for a mere blip either: a sustained low burn. He turned to the nearest screen, patchwork like almost all of his machines and with a monitor in a precarious balanced dangle, and brought up the test results. As he scanned down the figures in black and green on the flickering screen, his pulse quickened, with anxiety or excitement he couldn't be sure. Essential gas for supporting complex life, for liquid water, for habitability seemed present in abundance. That suggested an atmosphere, and all this on a planet that seemed about forty thousand units in circumference.
A chill ran down the length of Halos' spine, electric fire spreading through each nerve of his body to his fingertips with the same static charge now burned into his retinas. It was the kind of shudder that comes from knowing you're looking at something that could change one's little life forever. He sat for a few moments letting it wash over him, before leaning over and turning off the screen. Halos was a cautious soul, despite his seeming love for dangerous experiments and occasional lapses in self preservation. In the lab he moved without constraint, but the family name knew the sting of mistake and failure all too well, and he was shy at heart at the best of times. Being hasty outside these walls could cost him far more than this life already had.
His head swum in a slow spin. Halos tried a drink to calm his nerves, but found little comfort in the dirty water. There were small particles of grey in the waltz within the fluid, like the dance of complex but stable gasses he saw on the craft. He shook his head; dirty water was just dirty water and he was overthinking this by seeing the experiment everywhere he looked. He needed distance, fresh air; this was too much to take in while confined to the dank rocky surroundings of the lab. He stood, and made his way towards the thick metal door at the back of the lab.
Thicker than the width of his spread hand, the solid metal door remained ambivalent to his push at first, so heavy he imagined it could when bolted keep a small army out, at least for a short time. Even unlocked, it took his full strength to shift it enough to fit through a small gap; there was some advantage to his lean borderline famished body. The door against his skin burned him with void cold, but a moment later he could taste the surface air. A long tunnel ran to the surface, the light at its end feeble but blazing against the darkness below. That light, the ‘fresh’ air and openness were all illusions of this artificial world, but on some primal level they still provided him comfort.
He began to walk up the long dark corridor, crude-cut into the rock itself, and felt as it inclined beneath his feet towards the heavens. A gentle hiss came from the oxygen system built into the passage, cooing to him as he climbed. His legs fought him tooth and nail as he tried to keep his gate steady, desperate to run of their own accord. As he watched the light at the far end of his journey, he pictured himself traveling the void of space towards this new star system, to this mysterious new hope. It was possible he would one day, if they allowed him to go on. He doubted that, but unlike many of his kind, Halos could still dream.
The night bit him with ice, even with the artificial heat from the domes encasing a third of the planet. He had spent all his life here, and still never grown used to that violent chill; artificial heat could only do so much, even with a close to limitless energy source. Before him was a long stretch of dirt road flat as could be, and beyond that lay an empty wilderness, far away from any civilization. The slope leading back to the dark lab would be invisible to any observer on the horizon; that was the point, they did not want him found.
Halos gazed upwards. The domes were clear as they always were, and as he had many a time before he looked out on a brilliant wash of stars and galaxies. From his pocket, he withdrew a small metal instrument the size of his palm, with a damaged keypad, bent screen and small viewfinder soldered to its top; yet another improvised invention from the refuse of the rest of this world. With care, he entered the coordinates of the tiny nanobot that had made the discovery of a lifetime, having twice to fix errors caused by shaking thumbs. Standing resolute, he held the device above his head, and began scanning the skies.
After a long search, it lit up in his hands, the buzz almost enough to make him lose his nervous grasp. Gazing through its lens, he saw the tiniest of faint dots hidden away. A main sequence star six hundred and forty-two light cycles away. His people still used the 'light cycle' as a unit of measurement to this day. A light cycle was the distance light could travel in a 'cycle'. Indeed, they still accepted the concept of a 'cycle' in general society. This was how long their old world took to orbit its star. But it was hundreds of times shorter than the time taken to orbit their new one.
As he lowered the device, gazing across the flat horizon, he could see the new star emerge. Their new sun burned a deep red in the clear dark sky; a small but fierce red dot among the white and black, looking down with anger over their world. It was as if the ball of burning rage felt they were not supposed to be there, as if their existence alone enraged it. Had his people still worshiped deities, it would inspire the thought of a cruel and vengeful god.
Halos did not stand alone out here of course. Varsus, his one guard and 'protector' watched the boy a short distance away. He was not surprised to see the boy emerge. He would have retreated to the lab to inspect him soon enough anyway. Dressed head to toe in matt black, outside he appeared devoid of light on the eerie surface. In the lab, he instead became a living shadow, watching over the boy for any signs of concern. He wouldn’t act, unless Halos made to escape, as pointless as that would be so far into the wilderness. Varsus would catch him without expending any energy; he would save that for the beating. That he clearly didn’t care what Halos chose to do made him all the more unnerving.
For once, Halos could put him out of mind, not even seeing his warden as he became lost lost in dreams of another world. Halos felt excitement, but also terror at what the future could now hold. It looked in that moment, as the sun rose high and all-powerful in the sky, that his people's exile on the tiny world of Ori might be near its end.
