Worlds Apart

໒ Chapter 1: Voyage ໒

"I shouldn't waste more time dwelling on such thoughts," Amun77 whispered. "I need to capture something extraordinary. Something that wasn't already in the repertoire. "

Amun77, once again, pulled the lever. The engine throttled up, let out a puff of smoke in the vacuum, and started foraging the fabric of space for any discoveries. For a long time, Amun77 came across nothing significant, but eventually, his eyes captured something phenomenal and outlandish. It was a newborn magnetar, flashing hundreds of light years away radiantly. The magnetar was, precisely, 80 degrees tilted anti-clockwise. It was spinning on its axis quite vehemently. The recorded infra-red wave amplitude from the magnetar was higher than anything Amun77 had calculated in his little adventures to space.

"It's huge and quite turbulent. The ship should steer clear of it," Amun77 said.

By this point, the ship was nearing the centre of the Virgo cluster. Amun77 became more vigilant in finding something exhilarating and worthy of credit. Then, out of nowhere, the infra-red spectrometer went rogue. It battled against the limits of the small glass dome it found itself in. First, it hit the right-most margin, trying to break free from the shackles of the glass dome. Then to the left. Then to the right. Upon watching this tug of war, bile rose up Amun77's throat. A sense of foreboding encapsulated him. He stood, pranced to the lounge, and turned on the inspector to scan the area for anomalies.

"I will be happy to scan it for you," a mechanical voice resonated in the lounge. Its name was 98.

"Happy?" Amun77 wondered.

Amun77 felt teased by the word. It poked him, forced him to dwell further into the abyss of the emotionless pit he had been fostering inside him since his birth.

"I surmise that the ship is nearing a portion of the space that's laced with gravitational anomalies. The chances are that the ship would not be able to escape if found trespassing the region." 98 added, articulately.

"What do you mean?" Amun77 replied in sheer curiosity.

"An unknown singularity ahead of us has bent the space-time curvature," 98 chimed in. "Hence, Mythryn must change its course. Otherwise, it will come across a looping event horizon."

"A looping event horizon?" Amun77 speculated with such a mind-bending force that he found himself lost in time.

Then, a thought, brewing amidst his chaotic and perplexed mind, surfaced and came out as a low-pitch grunt.

"I want you to bring up chapter 197 from the book of revolts," Amun 77 added decisively.

"Give me a moment," 98 replied.

Within a few seconds, the lounge was draped completely with levitating electronic pages from the Chapter. The Chapter had no title. Instead, a symbol that represented a withered tree. Amun77 glossed over the pages until he was fixated on a single line. Moments passed. Minutes passed. Amun77's eyes were still trying to analyze the depths of the sentence, "Wormholes are known for creating time-lapse events. They are a portal between the two worlds."

"We don't have much time left," 98 intercepted, trying to sound factual and realistic.

Amun77 was so engrossed that he, involuntarily, became tune deaf to his surroundings. He quickly jumped to the next line and read the words "humans" and "celestiatons." Then everything started making sense to him. However, he then remembered that he wasn't supposed to look for the information from the book of revolts as its knowledge was obsolete and untested, written down by an android scientist "Kuahiran1". Nonetheless, androids were staunch followers of Kuahiran1 because he was the one who came up with the idea of the existence of particles, celestiatons, that were still, aimlessly, scouring the unknown corners of the universe. The same particles that were the remnants of humanity. The mere mention of these particles would rekindle the hopes of androids for having emotions; that one day they could relish the same feelings and thoughts once harboured by humans; that they could feel the pain of losing a loved one. A loved one. Androids didn't even know what "love" was. Yet, they procreated just to advance their empire, to expand the numbers, to have more soul-less creatures scouring the null spaces of the universe.