FADE IN:
A MONTAGE - FOUR LIVES, FOUR FAILURES
We move through glimpses of four disparate individuals, united by a sense of profound disappointment. The visuals are distinct, yet a melancholic thread connects them.
- EXT. NEON-DRENCHED STREET - NEO-SHANGHAI - NIGHT (2087)
Rain slicks the towering chrome and holographic advertisements. LI WEI (40s, gaunt, haunted eyes) kneels on the grimy pavement. Once hailed as a piano virtuoso, his hands are now gnarled, scarred remnants – deliberately crushed years ago.
He closes his eyes. His fingers move with impossible grace over the wet ground, tracing patterns only he can see, playing a phantom piano. Notes seem to hang in the air, unheard by the indifferent crowds bustling past.
SUBTLE ANOMALY: Li Wei's SHADOW stretches towards a flickering street lamp, defying the light source. It quivers, elongated and unnatural.
- INT. CRAMPED APARTMENT - HOUSTON - NIGHT (2024)
- ELIAS VOSS (40s, unshaven, defeated) stares blankly at a flickering TV screen. The room is a graveyard of past achievements – dusty physics awards, framed certificates, a faded photo of a younger, brighter Voss shaking hands with a NASA official.
He raises a cheap whiskey bottle to his lips, taking a long swig. He was the boy genius who solved warp-field equations at sixteen, destined for the stars. Now, he adjusts insurance claims.
A framed newspaper clipping shows a teenage Voss: "Local Prodigy: Europa Bound?"
VOSS (V.O.) (Slurred whisper) They told me I'd walk on moons... Should have aimed for assistant manager. Safer bet.
ECHOING VOICE (O.S.) (Warm, proud - a memory) You were supposed to walk on Europa, son. Remember?
Voss flinches, drains the bottle.
- INT. RESEARCH LAB - EUROPA COLONY - DAY (2230)
TECH-SERGEANT ROOK (50s, weary resignation etched onto his face) pushes a high-tech floor buffer across a sterile white floor. His uniform is clean but basic issue.
Through a reinforced window, esteemed COLONY SCIENTISTS gesture animatedly around a holographic display showing complex molecular structures – alien nanotechnology.
Rook stops polishing, watching them. His eyes hold a flicker of recognition. The equations, the structures... they're identical to the sketches he made as a boy, when he first found the strange, living tech frozen in the Europan ice. He buried it, terrified. Became a janitor. Safer bet.
SCIENTIST 1 (O.S.) (Muffled through glass) ...unprecedented energy signatures! If these fractal cascades are stable...
Rook turns away, resuming his monotonous work.
- INT. UNIVERSITY LECTURE HALL - ALTERNATE EARTH - DAY (2145)
The environment looks familiar, yet subtly wrong. Steam rising from a beaker on the lecture table freezes mid-air, forming delicate ice crystals that drift upwards. Outside the window, breath condenses as shimmering waves of heat. Reverse thermodynamics.
PROFESSOR MIRA KOVA? (40s, brilliant eyes dimmed by bitterness) watches a younger, more confident COLLEAGUE present her unified theory – or a clumsy approximation of it.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Years ago, ridicule and disbelief led Mira to burn her own revolutionary notes. The lab fire itself behaved strangely – flames moving in frozen spirals, consuming the paper but leaving the desk untouched. She never tried again.
COLLEAGUE (O.S.) ...and thus, we propose a paradigm shift, linking macro-cooling phenomena with quantum heat signatures... revolutionary!
Mira grips the edge of her seat, knuckles white. A silent scream trapped behind her teeth.
THE COLLAPSE - INTERCUT
The montage accelerates. The four timelines converge on a single, terrifying moment.
NEO-SHANGHAI (2087): Li Wei looks up from his phantom piano. The neon sky begins to CRACK like obsidian glass.
HOUSTON (2024): Voss stares as the TV image dissolves. The cracks appear on his apartment window, spreading outwards.
EUROPA COLONY (2230): Alarms BLARE. Rook watches the reinforced lab window shatter inwards as the icy Europan sky fractures.
ALTERNATE EARTH (2145): Mira sees the lecture hall ceiling split open, revealing not sky, but swirling chaos.
ALL TIMELINES: The cracks widen, spiderwebbing across reality. Beyond them is not space, not atmosphere, but an INFINITE BLACK VORTEX, utterly devoid of light, pulling everything inwards. Buildings crumble silently. People dissolve into streams of particles.
Li Wei plays his phantom notes faster, a desperate requiem. Rook stands frozen, staring at the patterns he drew as a child now consuming his world. Mira watches the impossible physics of her world surrender to an even greater impossibility.
Voss stumbles towards his window, reaching out as the vortex fills his vision.
VOSS (Dying whisper) I could have... I could have stopped this...
He – and Li Wei, Rook, Mira – are consumed by the encroaching void.
CUT TO: PURE WHITE.
An absence of everything. Soundless. Featureless.
Slowly, four figures FADE INTO VIEW. Voss. Mira. Li Wei. Rook. They are disoriented, looking around the infinite, seamless white space. They are whole, unharmed.
MIRA Where... what is this? Did we...?
ROOK Europa... the colony... it just... cracked.
LI WEI (Looking at his hands - smooth, unscarred) My hands... The music...
Voss slowly pushes himself up, looking from one face to another. Recognition flickers, but it's buried under layers of confusion and trauma.
VOSS I know you... don't I? Neo-Shanghai... you were...
He trails off, memory hazy. Before he can place it, a PRESENCE fills the void.
Not a sound, but a shift in the nothingness. Light coalesces, shimmers, solidifies.
Standing before them is TIME.
Humanoid, yet utterly alien. Its form shifts subtly, skin like liquid mercury reflecting swirling galaxies within. It radiates immense age and power.
Its voice enters their minds – layered, melodic yet discordant, ancient and young simultaneously. Cate Blanchett mixed with a child's echo and faint cosmic static.
TIME (Voice overlapping, echoing) Elias Voss. Mira Kova?. Li Wei. Rook. The broken architects. The surrendered dreams.
They stare, awestruck and terrified.
TIME (CONT'D) You were meant to build eternity alongside me. Your potential was the mortar holding existence together. But you faltered. You quit. You hid. You feared. Your surrender wasn't merely personal failure... it was a structural weakness. A crack in the dam.
VOSS What... what are you? What happened?
TIME I am Time. And what happened... is the consequence of your choices. You broke causality. And Entropy... Entropy smelled weakness.
The white void flickers, momentarily showing glimpses of the horrifying black vortex consuming their respective worlds.
TIME (CONT'D) It is hungry. It has consumed 86,399 timelines before yours. Yours... was the last bastion. And you let it fall.
The four figures exchange horrified glances. The weight of the revelation crashes down on them.
MIRA Eighty-six thousand...?
TIME Existence unravels. Unless... it can be rewoven. Unless the architects learn to build again. Your training begins now. Not to save your worlds. They are gone. But perhaps... to forge a new one. Or reset the board entirely.
Time raises a hand, galaxies swirling within its palm. The white void begins to shift and dissolve around them...
FADE TO BLACK.
END OF SECTION 1