The observation deck of Station Kepler-9 offered a view that never failed to humble. Lin Da'is stood before the reinforced viewport, watching Earth rotate slowly in the infinite black, a blue marble suspended in nothing. He'd been assigned to this orbital facility for three years now, and the sight still made him pause during his maintenance rounds.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
Lin turned to see Dr. Sarah Chen approaching, her magnetic boots clicking softly against the deck plating. She carried a data tablet, her expression troubled.
"Always is," Lin replied. His voice was steady, unremarkable. He was the kind of person who blended into the background of the station—reliable, competent, forgettable. As a general maintenance technician, he kept the life support systems running, the corridors pressurized, the thousands of tiny details that kept three hundred souls alive in the vacuum of space.
"I need your help," Sarah said, glancing around the empty observation deck. "Something's come up in Cargo Bay 7. Classified shipment. The scanners are going crazy, and Command wants someone to investigate before they send in the security team."
Lin raised an eyebrow. "Why me?"
"Because you're cleared, you're calm, and you don't ask stupid questions." She handed him the tablet. "Plus, you're already on shift."
The data showed anomalous energy readings—patterns that made no sense, wavelengths that shouldn't exist. The shipment had arrived two hours ago from a deep-space recovery mission. Officially, it was marked as "geological samples from Sector 447." The readings suggested otherwise.
"What do you think it is?" Lin asked.
Sarah's jaw tightened. "That's what scares me. I don't think. The readings are... impossible. Energy signatures that violate conservation laws. Quantum states that shouldn't be stable. It's like the damn thing is pulling data from somewhere else."
"You want me to open it?"
"I want you to look at it. Assess if it's safe. Then we call the specialists." She paused. "Lin, be careful. Whatever this is, it's not from any technology I recognize."
Cargo Bay 7 sat in the station's lower ring, a pressurized chamber used for sensitive materials. Lin cycled through the airlock, his suit's HUD displaying normal atmospheric readings. The bay was dimly lit, automated systems humming their eternal song.
In the center of the bay sat a containment unit—sleek, black, about the size of a coffin. It wasn't standard issue. The surface seemed to absorb light, and faint symbols glowed along its edges. Symbols that shifted when he looked directly at them.
Lin approached slowly, scanner extended. The device's readings were nonsensical. Temperature fluctuated between absolute zero and temperatures found in stellar cores. The containment field reported it weighed both nothing and several thousand kilograms simultaneously.
"Command, this is Lin. I'm at the container. Readings are... anomalous."
Static answered him.
"Command, do you copy?"
Nothing. His suit's communication system showed green across the board, but no signal reached the station's network. He was alone.
The container began to open.
Not with hydraulics or mechanical locks—it simply unfolded, reality peeling back like paper. Inside, suspended in nothing, was an object roughly the size of a grain of rice. It glowed with colors Lin had no names for, colors that hurt to perceive, that made his eyes water and his head ache.
A microchip.
But calling it a microchip was like calling the sun a candle. Even from three meters away, Lin could sense something profound about it—information density beyond comprehension, computational architecture that made quantum processors look like abacuses. This wasn't advanced technology. This was something else entirely.
His scanner died. Not powered down—died. The screen showed fragments of impossible data before going black. The symbols on the container pulsed faster.
Lin should have backed away. Should have called for help. Should have followed every safety protocol drilled into him during training.
Instead, he stepped forward.
The microchip rose from its suspension, drifting toward him like it recognized something. Lin extended his hand, not understanding why, driven by instinct or curiosity or something deeper he couldn't name.
The moment his finger touched it, the universe folded.
Pain wasn't the right word. Pain implied damage, nerves firing, biological responses. This was restructuring. The microchip didn't enter his body—it integrated, bypassing skin and bone and biology, settling somewhere between his atoms and his consciousness.
Lin collapsed, every system in his body screaming contradictory signals. He was burning and freezing, expanding and contracting, existing and not existing. Data flooded his mind—not words or images, but pure information, concepts that had no human translation.
He saw:
—Civilizations rising and falling across billions of years—
—Stars being born in cosmic nurseries, dying in supernovae, collapsing into black holes—
—Dimensions folding like origami, realities stacked infinite and thin—
—Something vast beyond the multiverse, watching, waiting, hungry—
The visions cut off as abruptly as they'd begun.
Lin lay on the cargo bay floor, gasping. His suit's vitals showed normal—no, better than normal. Heart rate steady. Oxygen saturation perfect. Temperature regulated. But he knew, with absolute certainty, that he was no longer entirely human.
He could feel the microchip now, not as foreign object but as extension of self. It hummed with potential, with power that made nuclear reactors look like birthday candles. Information flowed through him—schematics, equations, concepts that would take human scientists centuries to understand.
And beneath it all, a timestamp: Origin Point +6.5×10⁹ years.
Six and a half billion years in the future.
Lin pulled himself to his feet. His hands were steady. His mind was clear. Too clear. He could see the molecular structure of his gloves, count the atoms in the air, perceive wavelengths of light that human eyes couldn't detect.
The cargo bay door opened. Sarah Chen stood in the threshold, flanked by two security officers with weapons drawn.
"Lin! Thank God. Communications went down. We thought—" She stopped, staring at him. "What happened to your eyes?"
"My eyes?" Lin touched his face. His vision was normal—no, enhanced. He could see Sarah's pupils dilating, her heart rate elevated from the climb down from the upper decks, the slight tremor in her hands.
"They're... glowing," she whispered. "Lin, what the hell happened in here?"
He looked past her, through the walls of the station, past the hull, into space beyond. He could see it now—the fabric of reality, the quantum foam underlying existence, the dimensional boundaries holding everything together.
And he could touch it.
Without conscious thought, Lin reached out—not with his hand, but with something else, some new sense the chip had given him. Space folded around his fingers, distance becoming meaningless. The far wall of the cargo bay was suddenly within reach, thirty meters compressed to centimeters.
Sarah screamed.
The security officers opened fire.
Lin didn't move. Didn't need to. The bullets entered the fold in space and exited somewhere else—passing through the walls harmlessly, lost in the station's infrastructure. He hadn't meant to do it. The chip had responded to threat automatically, protecting him with technology from a future that wouldn't exist for billions of years.
"Stop!" Lin raised his hands. "Don't shoot. I'm not a threat."
"What are you?" Sarah backed against the wall, eyes wide with terror.
Good question. What was he now? Human with a chip? Or something that had been human once? The microchip contained more than technology—it held memory, purpose, warning. It had been sent back through time for a reason. Someone, something, in that impossible future had needed him to have this power.
But why?
The answer came unbidden, floating up from the chip's data core: Because what's coming can only be stopped by someone who can fold reality itself.
Lin felt it then—a presence, vast and cold, existing between dimensions. It had noticed the chip's activation. Noticed him. Something that lived in the spaces between universes, that fed on reality itself, was now aware that a human had touched technology from a timeline that should have been erased.
The cargo bay lights flickered. Not from electrical failure, but from something else—reality stuttering, dimensional barriers weakening. Through the viewport, space twisted. Stars bent in ways that violated physics. Something was trying to push through.
Sarah saw it too. "Oh God. Lin, what did you do?"
He didn't answer. Couldn't. Because he understood now—the chip wasn't just a tool. It was a weapon. A last desperate gambit from a future where humanity had achieved godhood... and then faced something worse.
The microchip pulsed once inside him, releasing another fragment of data: WARNING: DIMENSIONAL BREACH IMMINENT. ENTITY CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN. THREAT LEVEL: EXTINCTION.
Lin looked at his hands, at the space folding around his fingers, at the power thrumming through his cells. He was a maintenance technician. A nobody. Someone who kept life support running and didn't ask questions.
Now he was something else.
Now he was humanity's only hope against horrors that existed beyond human comprehension.
The viewport cracked. Something pressed against it from outside—not physical, but conceptual, an idea trying to force itself into reality. Lin could see its true form in dimensions humans weren't meant to perceive, and the sight nearly broke his mind.
He clenched his fists. The space around him rippled.
"Everyone out," Lin said quietly. "Get to the evacuation pods. Now."
"Lin—"
"Now!"
Sarah grabbed the security officers and ran.
Lin stood alone in Cargo Bay 7, facing the thing trying to tear through dimensional barriers to reach him. The microchip fed him information, tactical data, power calculations. He had the capability to fight this. Had the technology to fold space, bend reality, rewrite the rules of existence itself.
He just had no idea how to use it.
The viewport shattered.
And Lin Da'is, maintenance technician, discovered what it meant to fold infinity.