Yekase and Lu Yao had barely sat in Richard’s office and sipped water when news from Zone 59 rolled in like a fresh breeze.

Since three days ago, their gravitational wave system pinged the same disturbance every ten hours or so, a heartbeat in the dark. They’d chalked it up to a glitch, but fold in the intel that the aliens left Earth, and the pieces clicked like gears.

Richard burst through the door like a storm breaking. “We found it! Miss Luciferin, we found it!”

Spies on Earth are nothing to celebrate, yet the spark of discovery lit his face like morning sun.

“Found it? Where?!”

“Low orbit around Saturn— they suspect an artificial wormhole opened there! Ten hours, thirty-three minutes, thirty-eight seconds— that’s the period the mouth swings to face us as Saturn turns. The gravitational anomaly they detected comes from a massive star on the far side!”

“Does a wormhole mouth swing with the planet?”

“It should be a structure mounted on a mechanical frame, like a door on a hinge!”

A star gate, then. Yekase noted how these aliens flaunted interstellar navigation, but otherwise their ceiling didn’t sit far above ours. With current tech, Alchemy could reproduce a mechanical stargate outright.

“Can we catch up?” Lu Yao asked, her voice tight as a bowstring.

“Zone 59 is prepping to investigate the frame itself.”

“What’s the travel time?”

Richard handed over a few printed sheets like maps unrolling. “We’re lucky. Earth and Saturn are at their closest. With their best sublight ship, about twenty hours. Want me to snag two seats?”

“Probably not luck. Professor M picked the closest-return window.”

Lu Yao sighed; logic laid the trail even when the numbers looked like a forest of thorns.

They both turned to Yekase, waiting for her call.

“We take our own ship.”

“You have a spaceship?!” Richard and Lu Yao blurted in near unison, voices colliding like bells.

Yekase drained her glass like a clear stream and stood. “Just follow me. First, we ask Zone 59 to let us hitch a ride through the Earth-Moon Star Gate.”

“Oh, they’ll never loan an untested gate! That’s safety, and that’s aviation pride!” Richard shook his head, stubborn as a mast.

“Tell them that when it’s over, I can share the tech on behalf of Arcadia.”

“In my position…” Richard still wavered, his doubt fluttering like a torn flag.

“You’re coming too.”

“I’ll reconnect right now!”

He shot out like a streak of smoke.

Yekase eyed the door swinging ajar, rolled her eyes, and sank back onto the sofa. “I knew it. Infinite Power scholars are the same the world over.”

Two hours later, Yekase, Lu Yao, and Richard stepped into Zone 59.

The secret aerospace base sat on a man-made island east of Washington, rough as coral against the sea. Labs and dorms dotted the grounds like scattered stars, and here and there small Huaxia vegetable plots stitched green into the concrete— a chaotic stew, clearly light on grand planning.

The ring-shaped Star Gate stood as the base’s most pristine piece, solemn to near sacred, like an altar in steel. Workers and machines swarmed around it, cranes and hands busy as bees, setting it off like a metal idol.

The broad mechanical runway could rise like a spear to launch rockets or lie flat for spaceplanes. Safety chimes echoed across Zone 59, yet the runway sat empty like a calm lake at dawn.

No— look close. Dead center crouched a plastic-box-like oddity, no bigger than a home PC, parked at the starting line like a prank someone forgot to pick up.

You sharpen the blade before the chop; checks take time. Richard went to catch up with old friends, while Yekase and Lu Yao wandered like cats through sunlit alleys.

Lu Yao eyed the base with bright curiosity, so Yekase played guide.

“This is the flight control tower. They gather and process craft telemetry in real time, like a lighthouse of numbers.”

“Mm.”

“This is the lab building. No extra gloss needed.”

“Mm.”

“This is the dorm. Next to it, fenced off, two rows of greens and one of parsley, neat as rain-carved furrows.”

“Mm.”

“This is…”

They stopped before a suspicious building.

It tucked itself into an unremarkable corner, not far from the trash station and the water purification array, so Yekase first took it for a utility, a quiet lung of the base. Its exterior mimicked the dorms up front, but for a back-of-house dorm, it felt too large, like a whale in a koi pond.

Yekase stalled, her mind a compass spinning. What is this place?

They stood there for minutes, ready to leave with a small regret like sand in a shoe— when the first-floor door swung open, and a cube drifted out.

A cube, spun from countless tiny cubes stacked like sugar. At each moment, some shrank and some grew, shifting in a layered pattern like ripples fanning across a pond. No matter the dance, five seconds later it settled back into a perfect cube, clean as a cut stone.

It seemed to notice their gaze. The rhythm snapped to a new sequence, the return tightened to three seconds, and from the mystery core wrapped in those small cubes, a voice came.

“Waibi, waibi, waibi, babb.”

“I… didn’t understand a thing!”

Was that its language? Was it an unknown life, or a lab-made robot? And this nondescript building— was it here to hide it, a shell around a pearl?

“This kid is called Yuan Cell— it’s a life that self-evolves.”

Another shape drifted out from inside: a ring.

An ivory cloud of molecules gathered like fine sand, bound tight into hundreds of fist-sized spheres. The spheres strung in two chains like beads, then crossed and turned into the double helix any school kid knows, head-to-tail joining into a circle.

“The Garden Warden?!” Yekase blurted, shock in her voice like a struck gong.

“You survived the annihilation of the Cosmic Bubble? By your own power?!”

The ring turned, its base pairs humming like plucked strings.

“I’m not that noble recorder. Once, in the Perseus Arm’s W3 sector, a normal new human, in the Great Collapse, drove his ship into a black hole. His material basis was torn apart. The information left behind, by the law of conformal mapping, projected me into this newborn universe.”

“I… didn’t understand a thing!”

Yekase had no idea what to say to this “projection person.” She couldn’t exactly ask how fluctuations of Infinite Power shattered the Galactic Federation, even if that topic glowed in her mind like a forbidden fire. And the Yuan Cell— could it even talk, or was it only rain moving over a lake?

Luckily, the loudspeakers rolled out the announcement that launch prep was complete, and they excused themselves like leaves slipping off a branch.

Back by the runway, Richard was ready.

He’d even suited up in a full EVA set, a huge backpack bulging like a tortoise shell, his face lit with springtime eagerness.

“Take that off,” Yekase said, blunt as a blade.

“What?!”

“My cardboard-box ship has an Alchemy environmental maintainer inside. Stay in there, and it’s as comfy as your living room.”

She headed for the ship first and set a foot on it like a dancer stepping onto a stage.

But the scene Richard imagined— her boot crunching a flimsy box— refused to happen.

Like light bending in water, her leg twisted at a strange angle and shrank.

Then her whole body was pulled in like a swallow into a purple-gold gourd, and a living person vanished on the spot.

Under Richard’s stunned stare, Lu Yao hopped in after her, fast as a sparrow into bushes.

The view snapped and reformed, and in a blink they stood in the foyer of a house, warm as dusk light.

“I built it as a studio layout. We can share one bed if we squeeze. Where does Richard sleep?” Yekase asked, realization late as a trailing bell.

“Do we need that long?”

“Our space-curvature engine is making its first true flight. I don’t know its top speed. I don’t know what’s beyond the gate. If we have to chase Omega M out in open space, the trip will drag for days.”

“Let him sleep on the floor.”

“Works. There’s a closet that’s sleepable, too.”

Richard stumbled in, dropping to the floor behind them like a rock.

“There’s this much space inside?! Is this Huaxia’s ‘world in a pot’?!”

“Uh… you could see it that way.”

Right on cue with an American’s odd stereotypes— like last time, the one about Huaxia being full of Mind Energy adepts and kung fu masters— Yekase couldn’t be bothered to correct him. So be it.

Richard took the sofa. Lu Yao followed Yekase to the main control by the window— a desk-like panel you could find anywhere, only dotted with a few buttons and lights, small stars ready to glow.

“Space compression, OK.”

“Environmental constancy, OK.”

“Hull integrity, OK.”

“Limiters off. Calibrator online.”

“All clear— launch!”

Out the window, the Earth-Moon Star Gate still looked its normal size, though normal was vast as a canyon.

The mechanical ring sang a deafening drone, and silver ripples fanned inside it, hiding the buildings behind like curtained rain.

When the ripples settled smooth, the far side came into view— ash-white ground, ringlet mountains rising and falling, and a black backdrop sown with bright stars.

The Moon.

10—

9—

8—

7—

“Damn it, can’t wait. Punch it!”

“Now, of all times?!”

Richard tumbled to the floor.

Lu Yao moved to stop her, then lost her nerve.

Yekase stomped the throttle.