Dr. Sean Tanaka watched CWS Magellan disappear from existence with a blank face.

The quantum folding test had been scheduled for 14:00 hours. At 14:03, the fifteen-thousand-ton starship simply wasn’t there anymore. Not destroyed—erased. Where Magellan had orbited Titan, space itself had been carved away like a cancer.

The void was growing, consuming everything it touched. No, not consuming—erasing. Obliterating space and time itself from existence. In ninety-two minutes when the tear reached Earth, billions of lives would be blotted out in an instant. Deleted from reality completely, mind, body, and soul, as if they’d never been born. The anomaly would simply… edit them out.

He’d spent five years warning them this would happen. Five years of being called paranoid, alarmist, a crank physicist clinging to discredited theories. The Commonwealth’s best minds had dismissed his concerns about quantum vacuum metastability.

They’d been wrong.

Sean rose from his desk in the underground bunker and walked to the equipment locker. His go-bag sat ready, exactly where it had been for the past three years. Forty-eight hours of rations, water purification tablets, medical supplies, backup power cells. Everything vacuum-sealed and organized by priority.

The quantum cascade would propagate through the Commonwealth’s entanglement network instantaneously. Every quantum-enhanced system across seventeen star systems would destabilize simultaneously. Ships would explode. Communications would die. Civilization would collapse in minutes.

But not his systems. Sean had shielded everything with null-state buffers three years ago.

He checked his comm and fired off a pre-recorded message he’d prepared years ago to other members of the Life Seed Cooperative, then scrolled through his contacts and frowned for a moment before tapping his ex-wife’s entry.

Shouldering the go-bag, Sean headed for the tunnel leading to his launch facility as he waited for her to answer.

“Sean?” Her slurred voice stuttered with packet loss and he could hear laughter and a deep bass boom in the background.

“It’s happened,” he said tersely.

“Happened? What’s happened? Oh my God, you don’t mean—?”

Sean’s footsteps echoed in the concrete tunnel. “Are you still in Alpha Centauri?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Good. Jess, listen closely. Every single quantum-enhanced system in the Commonwealth is about to fail—interstellar comm relays, power grids, everything—but you have years before the anomaly reaches you. People are going to panic anyway, and things are going to get really bad, but you need to stay calm. You remember William Rogers?”

“Bill? Sure. Why?”

“I’m sending you his contact information. He can get you to a safe place. Just you. Do you understand?”

The line went dead and Sean swore.

He reached the launch bay and palm-printed the security lock. The massive doors slid open, revealing his ship, Far Haven: a modified Hermes-class courier, stripped down for speed and range. She sat upright on her underground launch cradle, fuel tanks topped off, life support systems in standby mode.

He’d been ready to leave for three years. All it took was walking up the ramp.

The ship’s AI greeted him. “Good afternoon, Dr. Tanaka. Shall I begin pre-flight?”

“Do it.” Sean strapped himself into the pilot’s seat and watched the status board light up green across the line. “How long to reach minimum safe distance, Ada?”

“At maximum burn, forty-seven minutes to clear Earth’s gravity well and achieve sustainable cruise velocity.”

“Good.” He triple-checked the diagnostics on his screens and then took a deep breath. “Initiate launch sequence.”

The launch cradle shuddered as magnetic clamps released. Chemical boosters ignited beneath the Far Haven, sending her rocketing up through the reinforced shaft he’d carved into the mountainside years ago. Concrete walls blurred past the cockpit viewport.

Emergency broadcasts flooded the comm channels. Reports of ships exploding in orbit. Power grids failing across North America. The quantum cascade was spreading exactly as he’d predicted.

At two hundred meters, the shaft opened to blue sky. Sean engaged the pulse fusion drive and groaned as blood pooled in his legs and his vision tunneled from the increased acceleration. Below, abandoned vehicles clogged highways as people fled the cities on foot.

They had no idea where they were running to.

“Orbit achieved,” Ada announced thirty-one minutes later. “Earth’s gravity well cleared ahead of schedule.”

Sean looked back at the blue marble shrinking behind them. In less than an hour, it would simply stop existing.

“Expansion front detected,” Ada warned.

He turned his attention to the navigation display and grinned. “Right on target. Increase velocity and position us to catch that wave. Just like Teahupo’o.”

“A world-famous surfing break located on the southwest coast of Tahiti, French Polynesia,” Ada recited. “Have you been?”

“Met Jess there.” Sean frowned at the memory. He’s been on leave between deployments with the Commonwealth Second Special Operations Group and Jessica…

But that was another life, a lifetime ago.

Fifty-seven minutes later Far Haven slipped smoothly into the quantum friction building along the wavefront’s edge.

“The spacetime distortion is carrying us at effective eighty-seven percent light speed,” Ada reported. “Exactly as you predicted.”

“How long until we can break free?”

“Current deceleration rate suggests eight hours until expansion drops below our sustainable velocity. At that point we’ll have sufficient distance to maintain our lead.”

Sean studied the AI’s predictive graphs on a display. “And if the friction’s stronger than I calculated?”

“We break away sooner with a larger safety margin. Your spacetime models appear conservative.”

“I’d rather be conservative than erased from existence.”

“Indeed.”

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