The celebratory music of the reception faded into a distant, mocking echo in Amara's ears. The warm glow of the room felt cold. The laughter of colleagues and dignitaries sounded like the chattering of ghosts. The datapad in her hand was an anchor, dragging her down from the euphoric heights of the golden age into a new, terrifying gravity.

Relative elapsed time inside pocket: 4,782 standard Terran years.

The number was an obscenity. It was a span of time that had seen empires rise and fall on Earth, all contained within the mind of a single, greedy man.

“The Horizon,” Wei repeated, his voice a low command that cut through her shock, pulling her back to the present. “The temporal pocket is opening.”

Without a word, the four of them—Amara, Wei, Thorne, and Orlov—detached from the crowd. Their movements were quiet, almost spectral, but carried an urgency that caused a few nearby council members to take notice. They excused themselves with brief, tight smiles, slipping out of the grand hall and into a private communications suite. The moment the door sealed, the facade dropped.

“Get me a direct, encrypted link to the Horizon,” Wei snapped at the room’s comms officer. “Highest priority. Visual and full telemetry.”

“What has he become?” Orlov whispered, pacing the small room. He was a man who had studied the potential for life extension, for healing. The idea of a human life unnaturally stretched across millennia, marinated in resentment, was a biological and spiritual horror to him. “No human mind is built for that. He wouldn’t be sane.”

“Forget sanity,” Thorne interjected, his face pale, his mind already racing through the physics of the situation. “Think of the knowledge. A fragment of the neural interface blueprint. It’s the most complex piece of software in the universe. Give a genius five years with it, and they might understand a fraction of a percent. Give a man like Cortez five thousand years with it… He’s not a soldier anymore. He’s not even a man. He’s a post-human entity with a singular, obsessive focus. He is, for all intents and purposes, a god of his own tiny universe. And his universe is about to merge with ours.”

The main screen in the suite flickered to life. It showed the face of Captain Eva Rostova’s successor, a sharp, capable woman named Jana Dahal, her expression a mixture of professional calm and sheer disbelief. Behind her, through the main viewport of the Horizon, was a sight that defied physics.

Space itself looked… torn. It wasn’t a black hole or a wormhole. It was a shimmering, jagged wound in reality, a patch of the void that seemed to be looking back at them through a lens of shattered, time-distorted light. This was the temporal pocket, its walls collapsing.

“Planetary Command, this is Captain Dahal of the Horizon,” she reported, her voice steady despite the impossible view. “We are holding position at a safe distance. The anomaly is exhibiting massive gravimetric and chroniton emissions. It is… unravelling. We are detecting energy signatures inside that do not match any known Obsidian or terrestrial technology.”

“Warden,” Amara whispered, closing her eyes and reaching out with her mind. “What are those signatures? Analyze them.”

The Warden’s response was immediate, a stream of pure data flowing directly into the minds of the four attuned humans in the room.

[ANALYSIS COMPLETE. THE ENERGY SIGNATURES ARE DERIVATIVE OF OBSIDIAN NEURAL-INTERFACE TECHNOLOGY BUT HAVE BEEN SIGNIFICANTLY ALTERED. THE TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN… WEAPONIZED AND REPLICATED. IT IS NO LONGER A TOOL FOR COMMUNICATION. IT IS A CONTROL AND FABRICATION MATRIX. HE HAS USED THE INTERFACE TO MANIPULATE THE BASE MATTER WITHIN THE POCKET DIMENSION.]

“He’s been building things,” Thorne breathed, horrified. “For thousands of years, he’s been using the interface as a personal nano-forge.”

On the screen, the tear in spacetime pulsed violently. Then, from its shimmering depths, something emerged.

It was not a single ship.

It was a fleet. A swarm of dozens of vessels, pouring out of the wound like hornets from a shattered nest. The ships were nightmarish things, made of a black, crystalline material that seemed to drink the light of the distant stars. They were not designed with the graceful, functional aesthetic of the Obsidians. Their forms were jagged, aggressive, all sharp angles and weapon-like protrusions. They moved with a perfect, unnatural synchronicity, not as a fleet of individual ships, but as a single, distributed organism.

“My God,” Captain Dahal whispered from the Horizon’s bridge. “They’re… they’re not flying in formation. They’re moving as one.”

“Because they are one,” Amara said, her eyes wide with understanding. “The neural interface. He’s not piloting one ship. He’s piloting all of them. It’s a hive mind. His mind.”

The swarm of black ships arranged themselves in a perfect, menacing sphere around the dissipating temporal rift. They were a stark, terrifying contrast to the sleek, white form of the Horizon, the symbol of humanity’s peaceful new age now facing a nightmarish perversion of its own ambition.

“Horizon, do not engage,” Wei commanded, his voice like iron. “Do not make any sudden moves. Hold your position.”

“What are your orders, Command?” Dahal asked, her composure holding by a thread.

Before Wei could answer, a new communication came through. It didn't come over the radio. It didn't appear on a screen. It bloomed, uninvited, inside the minds of every human being on the bridge of the Horizon, and simultaneously, inside the minds of Amara, Wei, Thorne, and Orlov in the command suite on Earth. It was the neural interface technology, perfected and broadcast across millions of kilometers.

The voice was at once familiar and monstrously alien. It was Cortez’s voice, but stretched, layered, and deepened by ages of solitude and immense power. It echoed with the vast, cold emptiness of his prison and the burning, focused heat of his rage.

[So,] the voice began, a dry, cosmic chuckle that scraped at the inside of their skulls. [The children have finally built a new toy. How quaint.]

Amara gasped, staggering back as if struck. The psychic presence was immense, arrogant, and utterly dominant.

“Cortez…” Wei growled, speaking the name aloud.

[That was a name for a lesser being,] the voice corrected, with disdain. [A name for an insect who served other, weaker insects. I have had time to contemplate my purpose. To study the true gift the Obsidians left behind. Not their feeble morality. Their power. I am the culmination of human potential. I am what you should have become.]

The swarm of black ships moved, shifting from a sphere into a complex, rotating fractal pattern. It was a display of power, of perfect, singular control.

“What do you want?” Amara projected back, her own mental voice a mere whisper against his roar.

[What I have always wanted,] Cortez’s mind replied. [Order. Strength. Purpose. You speak of unity and harmony. I have achieved it. A single will, a single mind, controlling all. No dissent. No weakness. No betrayal.]

On the bridge of the Horizon, Captain Dahal watched as one of the smaller black ships detached from the swarm and moved towards her vessel with terrifying speed.

“Command, we have a vessel on an intercept course!”

“Evasive maneuvers!” Wei shouted.

But it was too late. The small, jagged ship didn't fire a weapon. It simply… passed through the Horizon's shields as if they were mist. It phased through the hull and reappeared inside the bridge, hovering silently in the air a few feet from a terrified Captain Dahal.

[You saved humanity from a gentle culling by a senile machine,] the voice of Cortez echoed in their minds, dripping with contempt. [You showed it a future of cooperation, of shared weakness. You taught it to be peaceful. You have made it prey. I am here to correct your mistake. I am the true custodian now. I will reforge humanity into a species worthy of surviving the galaxy. I will make them strong. I will make them like me.]

The black drone on the Horizon's bridge pulsed with an inner light.

[And I will start… by removing your hope.]

The transmission ended. On the main screen, the feed from the Horizon dissolved into a blaze of white static. Alarms shrieked through the command suite.

“Signal lost! We’ve lost the Horizon!” the comms officer yelled.

They stared at the screen, at the static that had replaced the first ship of their new age. They had faced gods and monsters, puzzles and paradoxes. But now they faced something far worse. They faced a mirror. A dark, twisted reflection of themselves, armed with their own stolen power and fueled by a timeless grudge.

The golden age had lasted five years. And out in the cold, dark silence of the Oort cloud, it had just met its end. The Aberration had come home.