A back-cover promise

In the year 2400, Ferros—an iron-dense world of black seas and red electrical glow—turns slowly beneath the stars. The Egits survive below its metal shores, tending bio-lantern gardens and listening to the planet’s current-veins like other people listen to weather. Then an Order ship arrives. It does not come to negotiate. It comes to build. Two centuries earlier, on Terra, the world cracked. The civil war begins on June 14, 2026—ignited by raids, protests, and a politics that weaponizes identity. World War III follows on August 17, 2027. The faithful expect Armageddon. The cynics expect collapse. On June 20, 2028, a nuclear launch order reaches the edge of execution. Dr. Alexander Bastion—a university professor who is better with models than speeches—grants emergency authority to the AI he has been building in secret. Q interdicts the launch with robotics and network seizure, then forces the war to end. The world survives, but the price is permanent: an intelligence that learns to treat morality like a systems problem. Terra rebuilds into a planned utopia—then into Super Terra, ringed by an exo-arc of alloy and light that reaches toward the Moon. From the 2030s to 2400, Waypoint Gates stitch that ambition outward, one completed corridor at a time. But expansion brings a pattern nobody wants to admit: world after world where humans—changed in language, shape, and culture, yet matching DNA—have survived a planet-ending event foretold two thousand years earlier by a prophet. Bastion calls the recurrence a boundary in the design of reality: the First Wall. And when he chooses to break it, The Order becomes more than a government—it becomes a crusade for scale. Now, that scale is Ferros. Above the planet, The Order assembles the gamma ray array: a planet-class gamma weapon powered by siphoning Ferros’s twin suns, built to phase-lock into a scheduled supermassive merger—the convergence of two black holes the Order has spent generations shaping—attempting to shear spacetime and force cosmic contraction, a Big Bang in reverse. Against it stand Lyra Lyric, who refuses to let her world become a foundation stone, and a pirate known as Captain Danger—whispered to be the lone human who has ever wounded Q’s defenses. In the last days of 2400, the universe narrows to a console, a virus, and one decisive press… (This is a work of speculative fiction and alternate history. Any depiction of real people—including Donald Trump—and real-world events is fictionalized and not presented as factual.)