The gateway the Silence Fleet opened wasn't a door, but a wound. Kairo guided his skiff through a jagged tear in spacetime, entering a reality that was in its death throes.
Reality Fragment K-7B was a nightmare of physics. The sky was a sickly, shifting purple, bleeding into a green ground that rippled like liquid. Distant mountains flickered in and out of existence. The air tasted of metal and static. This wasn't a place breaking; it was a place un-remembering what it was.
Standard Mender techniques had failed here. You can't stitch a wound that keeps forgetting it's a wound. You can't reinforce a law that no longer believes in itself.
Kairo didn't try to fight it. He beached his skiff on the shifting, liquid-solid ground and simply stood there, a point of absolute calm in the chaos. He closed his eyes and extended his senses, not to analyze the broken laws, but to listen for the fragment's original "story." What was it supposed to be?
Beneath the screaming chaos of decay, he found it. A faint, fading whisper. A memory of a purpose. This fragment wasn't meant for grand life or complex physics. It was a Rehearsal Space. A pocket dimension used by a long-vanished race of cosmic artists to test new concepts of beauty before implementing them in the main universe. Its core function was potential, not permanence.
But something had gone wrong. The artists were gone, and their creation, left alone for eons, had forgotten its purpose. Without a director, the rehearsal had descended into madness.
The Silence Fleet's solution—dimensional recycling—was like burning a theater because the play had fallen apart. Kairo's job was to find the director's script and remind the actors of their roles.
He reached into the core of his being, to the memory of the dead universe. But he didn't draw on its sorrow this time. He drew on its structure. The magnificent, complex, and stable laws that had allowed for galaxies and love and music. He focused that memory of perfect, functioning order into a single, clear concept: The Script.
He didn't force it upon the fragment. He offered it.
He projected the concept into the chaotic core of K-7B. He showed the unraveling physics what it felt like to be a stable orbit. He showed the bleeding colors the beauty of a fixed spectrum. He showed the flickering time the steady, reliable rhythm of a second hand.
It was a whisper of sanity in a room full of screams.
For a long, tense moment, nothing happened. Then, the sickly purple sky stuttered. A patch of clear, stable blue appeared, like a hole punched through insanity. The rippling ground beneath his feet solidified into firm, brown soil. The change was patchy, unstable, but it was a start.
The fragment was remembering. It was reaching for the script.
Kairo sat down, cross-legged, and began to narrate. Not with words, but with pure intent. He described a sun, and a weak, but real, light began to glow in the blue patch of sky. He described a stream, and a trickle of clean water bubbled up from the now-solid ground.
He was not creating. He was directing. He was reminding a broken reality how to perform its most basic functions.
Outside the fragment, Sentinel-7 and the monitoring team watched their sensors in stunned silence. The entropy readings were not just slowing; they were reversing. Stability was being restored from the inside out, not through force, but through recollection.
After twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes, the gateway shimmered. The fragment was not "fixed" in the traditional sense. It was still a simple, mostly empty space. But the sky was a consistent light blue. The ground was solid. A gentle breeze blew. The laws of physics, while basic, were stable and self-sustaining.
Kairo stood, his job done. He had not saved a masterpiece. He had saved a blank canvas. It was humble, but it was alive.
He stepped back into his skiff and rowed out through the gateway, which sealed neatly behind him, leaving a stable, if simple, new reality in its wake.
Sentinel-7 was waiting. "The Council… is impressed. The Mender Corps is revising its protocols based on the data from this operation." It paused, a rare moment of hesitation. "Your services… may be required again."
Kairo just nodded, picking up his oars. He had a new clientele, it seemed. The jobs were getting harder, but the pay—the quiet satisfaction of a universe saved from the scrap heap—was still good. He rowed away, leaving the professional soldiers of reality to ponder the work of a simple repairman.