The search for the "Wildflower" had been a frustrating dead end. For days, the crew of the "Odyssey" had dug through every piece of data they had, but the word appeared nowhere. They were looking for a needle in a haystack, but they weren't even sure if the needle existed.
And then, the universe started to feel… different.
It wasn't something you could see with your eyes. It was a subtle, creeping change, like the feeling in the air just before a big storm hits.
The first sign was a report from a friendly observatory in a distant sector. Their astronomers reported that the fundamental constants of physics—the boring but very important numbers that keep the universe from falling apart, like the speed of light and the strength of gravity—were fluctuating. They weren't changing by much, just a tiny fraction of a percent. But they weren't supposed to change at all. It was like waking up one morning to find that the number 2 had decided it was now worth 2.001. It was deeply unsettling.
