Kairo stood at the beginning of everything. This was not a place, not in any conventional sense. It was a seething, boundless ocean of potential, the raw stuff of existence moments after its own conception. The nascent universe swirled around him, a symphony of fundamental forces finding their voice. But one note in that symphony was flat, dangerously weak.
The strong nuclear force—the cosmic glue that binds atomic nuclei together—was faltering. Here, at the very dawn of time, the flaw was already dooming the cosmos to a stillborn fate. Without this force, protons and neutrons could not form stable nuclei. Complex atoms would never coalesce. There would be no stars, no planets, no chemistry, no light. Only a vast, expanding cloud of hydrogen, growing colder and more diffuse for all eternity. A universe of pure, endless potential, forever unfulfilled.
This was not a repair of something broken, but the prevention of a break that was about to happen. It was foundational work.
Kairo felt the weakness as a chilling absence, a lack of binding energy in the furious dance of quarks and gluons. To fix it, he could not use a memory of a finished thing, like a star or a planet. He needed a memory of binding itself. A memory of a force that creates stability from chaos, that forges unbreakable connections.
He found it in the most potent memory of his long existence: the moment he, as Astra, had sworn the Unbreakable Compact with the people of Vesper. It was not just a promise; it was a foundational law for a new society. It was a force of will that bound disparate souls—Saiyans and humans—into a single, resilient people. It was the strong nuclear force of a civilization.
He held that memory, the absolute, unwavering certainty of that bond. He felt the profound strength that comes not from domination, but from mutual commitment, from a shared purpose that is stronger than any individual part.
He did not impose this on the universe. He did not force it. Instead, he offered the conceptual template of the Unbreakable Compact to the nascent strong force as an example, a blueprint of what it was meant to be. He showed the faltering force what "unbreakable" truly meant.
Then, he turned the key.
There was no sound in the void, but a wave of profound solidity rippled out from him. It was a qualitative shift, as if the very concept of "connection" in this region of spacetime had been recalibrated to a higher, more resilient standard.
The effect was instantaneous and universal.
Across the nascent cosmos, the quarks, which had been flitting in and out of unstable alliances, suddenly held. Protons and neutrons snapped into existence, their bonds firm and powerful. The path was now clear for the nucleosynthesis that would, in the billions of years to come, forge the heavier elements in the hearts of the first stars.
The universe had been given its foundation. The cradle was no longer flawed. The darkness had been banished before it could ever truly form.
Kairo stood within the newly stabilized inflation, a silent midwife to a cosmos that would now have a chance to live its story—to blaze with stars, to form planets, and perhaps, one day, to give rise to life that would look up at its own night sky in wonder.
It was perhaps his most profound repair yet, affecting quintillions of future lives with a single, precise adjustment at the dawn of time.
As the nascent universe continued its lawful, energetic expansion, a new call reached him. It was not a cry of distress or a foundational flaw, but a simple, persistent tug of imbalance. A single, perfect Dyson Sphere around a dying star had, through a miscalculation in its metaphysics, begun to leech not just energy, but meaning from the star's final, beautiful supernova, robbing the cosmic event of its significance and trapping the star's concluding story.
A small, aesthetic repair. A story deserved a fitting end.
The Forever Repairman acknowledged the call. From the birth of universes to the death of stars, his purpose remained the same: to ensure the story could be told. He stepped out of the cradle of a new reality, and towards the silent, trapped finale of an old one.