No, not just sight—consciousness.
I am every version of myself at once: bloodied and victorious atop the wreckage of a Grolgath dreadnought; cradling the head of a comrade whose name I can’t remember but whose dyingbreath fogged my visor; standing before the Assembly Tribunal, dishonored, or maybe revered—I can’t tell. All of it flickers through me like static-wrapped flame. And then it gets worse.
Places I’ve never walked. Voices I’ve never heard.
A woman’s laugh, high and unguarded. A child calling my name with fierce joy. The smell of fried grease, ozone, and earth after rain. Rain. I have never felt it fall. But here it is—soaked into the marrow of my hallucination, cold and strange and real.
The illusion ends not with clarity but with heat.
White-hot, atmospheric drag howling against what remains of my hull. The air tears at the seams of the cockpit, plasma shearing off in molten curls. Everything rattles. The canopy glass turns orange, then a deep, demonic red. The temperature climbs beyond tolerable; my scales singe despite dermal plating.
“Impact imminent,” croaks the onboard VI, barely functional through the system’s hemorrhaging data stream.
“Where?” I demand, slamming my hand against the console.
The answer appears in crude planetary glyphs:
EARTH. COORDINATE GRID: NORTHWEST SECTOR 38-42. TEMPORAL INDEX: A.D. 2025.
My heart hammers. Earth.Notin the present.Notduring the war. A.D. 2025. Ancient, primitive, still riding the fumes of its last global mistake.
The ground comes fast.
I don’t get to think, or brace, or pray.
I crash.
The sound is like reality being ripped in half. Earth does not receive me gently—itrejectsme. The Starfighter gouges through trees and soil like a divine meteor, carving a wound into the landscape. The impact punches the breath from my lungs and drives me down into the pilot seat so hard I feel vertebrae shift. Screams of tortured metal swallow me whole. Branchessnap, stones explode into shrapnel. We hit something concrete—manmade—then flip. Once. Twice.
The world stops spinning, and I hang upside down in a coffin of fire and carbon stench.
Smoke fills the cockpit. Not synthetic coolant or plasma venting—real smoke, fromreal fire. I cough. Pain ricochets through every nerve cluster. One eye swells shut. My fingers twitch, seeking purchase on a melted harness buckle. Every breath is agony, and not just because of injury—there’s something wrong with the air. Too much particulate. Unfiltered.
The windshield is a cracked spiderweb of soot and dying systems. Through it, I glimpse sky—gray, roiling with storm front and smoke, but not war smoke.Naturalsmoke. Trees, I realize. Trees are burning.
I punch the release.
The canopy doesn’t open.
I punch it again.
This time, the locking mechanism gives. The glass hisses, then shatters outward, scattering bits of shattered cockpit like broken teeth into the air. A gust of wind slaps me in the face, thick with burnt pine, diesel, and wet earth.
It isso loud.
Crickets scream. Birds shriek. Somewhere, a dog barks with panicked insistence. This worldbreathes, and it isalive, and I am no longer in space.
I unbuckle and fall onto the ship’s ceiling—which is now the floor—with a meaty thud. Something in my shoulder pops. My head reels. My tail drags uselessly behind me, numb. I crawl.
Outside is chaos. Not war-chaos. Nature-chaos.
I stumble out of the husk of my once-proud Starfighter into a world that has no idea what I am. My boots sink into grass and dirt, still slick from the scorched path of my descent. The bluff overlooks a scattering of rooftops below, too symmetrical to bewild, too careless to be military. Human dwellings. Primitive architecture. Water towers. That enormous red bottle—I realize with stunned clarity—it’s a monument. A local tribute to some tribal condiment, perhaps.
A sign sticks out of the hillside rubble near the crash trail. Painted in English.
Welcome to Collinsville, Illinois. Home of the World’s Largest Catsup Bottle.
I stare at it.
