The hangar seemed endless, its dim lights stretched across steel like veins of some silent, metallic organism. The boy paused at the pod's ramp, heart hammering against ribs trained to ignore such impulses. Behind him, the airlock hissed shut, and the sound reverberated in the cavernous space, a final punctuation on everything he had known.
The pod's interior was minimal. Smooth panels, a single viewport, and the faint hum of life-support systems that seemed almost alive. No pilot, no guide—only him, alone with the vessel and the infinite questions crawling through his mind. The wristband pulsed again: CONFIRM PRESENCE.
Every warning drilled into him on Mars screamed. Logistics vessels were not meant for students. Not unsupervised. Not curious, reckless students. And yet, the prompt demanded obedience. The same impulse that had guided him through the corridors of the domed school now propelled him forward.
He pressed his palm against the biometric scanner. Green light. Engines hummed softly, a vibration that reached deep into his bones. The pod shivered, alive, and the air seemed to thrum with energy.
As it lifted, the domes of the colony shrank beneath him. Perfectly symmetrical streets, domed classrooms, orderly squares—everything he had trusted for years was reduced to miniature patterns on a red plane. He felt unmoored. Safe structures, trained routines, rigid logic—they no longer mattered.
His mind raced, untethered. Why did the Logistics Division accept me? Was this truly a mistake, or… something else? The idea made him shiver. On Mars, mistakes were fatal. On Earth… he could not imagine what a mistake might cost.
The thin Martian atmosphere stretched outward, fragile and shimmering beneath the pod's engines. Dust swirled in the glow of the lights, a reminder of the world's indifference. And above it all, the pale, unforgiving sky. He had always looked at it and felt small. Now, from above, it made him feel irrelevant.
Time passed in uneven pulses. Nutrient dispensers hummed. Hydration cycles nudged him toward compliance. Systems monitored, corrected, adjusted. Yet the boy's mind wandered—not to protocols, not to survival, but to the world he had never seen. Simulations, sanitized images, lessons carefully curated—they were inadequate. Earth would not fit into slides, diagrams, or policy overlays.
A new pulse: GRAVITATIONAL ENTRY – EARTH.
The pod trembled. Blue and green fractured the viewport. Oceans, storms, sprawling lands, cities blinking with lights that obeyed no pattern he had ever learned. His body protested, muscles screaming against gravity, lungs straining. Mars had been soft. Earth was merciless.
He gasped for breath, tasting air warmer, thicker, heavier than any simulation, any archive. The first inhalation brought panic, wonder, and a sense of impossible scale all at once. Through the viewport, continents sprawled like living maps—chaotic, unpredictable, stunning.
And in that moment, the boy thought of everything he had been taught: efficiency before expression, rules before curiosity, survival over choice. He realized how small those lessons were against the immensity of a planet alive, resistant, and indifferent.
Mars was safe. Predictable. Ordered.Earth was not.
And as the pod descended through turbulent clouds, engines roaring against wind, every thought in his mind centered on a single, undeniable truth: the world he had imagined did not exist. Nothing he had learned would prepare him.
The boy did not yet know his name—not the one he would carry across continents, through chaos, into a life he could never have foreseen. But he understood, as the pod fought gravity and the planet loomed beneath him, that everything he thought he knew, everything he had been, was about to change.
He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the hum of the pod, the pull of Earth, and the thrum of anticipation fill him. And when he opened them, the vast, alive world below waited for him—untamed, uncurated, and entirely real.