Rybs' Crosses Bridge!

Story I: The Violent Landing

The ship didn't land, it convulsed onto the shores of north-west Britain, vomiting smoke and radiation onto the rocks near Aberdeen. Rybs stood in the wreckage of the cockpit, tasting copper and ozone. Through the viewport, the Shetland Islands lurked in the mist like broken teeth. He had forgotten, perhaps willfully, that somewhere near these shores lay the remains of what he once called his wife.

"Override the kill-switch," he whispered to the console.

The crew compartment hissed as life support drained away, asphyxiating the survivors in silence. Rybs felt nothing. He had been Gongol's prisoner for thirty-five subjective

years, mercy had been beaten out of him in the dark holds of that interstellar leviathan.

Node 1 detached from the dashboard, an oval of white ceramic and pulsing lobe-eyes, no bigger than a seagull. It hovered, waiting.

"Extract all cognitive and transport memories," Rybs commanded. "Conscious, subconscious, interstellar frequencies. Then laser the other three nodes. Melt the dashboard. Leave nothing for scavengers."

The node pulsed crimson. Everything is on board, it seemed to say.

"Everybody dead?" Rybs asked.

"Yes," came the synthesized voice, flat as a tombstone.

"How sure are we the entire system is in your log?"

"More sure than your own life."

Rybs smiled, the first in decades. It felt like cracking ice across his face. "Let's get going."

He stepped into the fog. The earth smelled wrong. Too clean. Too new. The fog couldn't hide the scar in the sky where a chunk of the planet had been bitten away, nor the perpetual firestorm burning southern England pink against the clouds.

Rybs walked, Node 1 hovering at his shoulder like a guilty conscience. He had no plan, only the animal certainty that he needed to feel soil under his boots, to prove he wasn't still in Gongol's cage.

"Node 1," he said suddenly. "I need to name you."

The node shifted color, iridescent anxiety rippling across its shell. "Why? You could call me N1. Connect to my C-Net. Naming is a human compulsion. Illogical."

Rybs ignored it, leaning against a kearn stone. He searched his pockets and found a cigarette butt, dry, ancient, precious. He lit it. The smoke tasted of dust and memory.

"Thirty-five years," he muttered, watching the burning south. "Sarah's gone. Everyone's gone."

"Not everyone," Node 1 said. "Scanning. Life signs. Distress signals. The war continues."

"What war?"

"The war of the living dead. The incumbents are winning."

Rybs dragged smoke into his lungs. "Gongol said we get carried away empty. I finally understand."

He flicked the butt into the fog. Node 1 beeped, a sharp, urgent sound.

"Time dilation detected," the node said. "Cryosleep malfunction. We've leaped, Rybs. Einstein was right about human attachment to gravity."

Rybs turned slowly. "How long?"

"One hundred and thirty-five years, Earth-relative. Welcome to Ziolife."

The words hit harder than the crash. Sarah wasn't just dead, she was dust. Her descendants were dust. Rybs reached for Node 1, fingers curling into a fist, wanting to smash the messenger against the stone.

"Destroy me," Node 1 said, hovering back, "and you destroy the future. I am your only map in this hibernated outcome."

Rybs unfisted his hand. He looked up. The clouds moved too fast, spinning across the sky like water down a drain. His skin began to itch, then burn.

"Something's happening," he gasped.

"Expansion protocol initiated," Node 1 said. "Say you are not in pain."

"I, I'm okay."

"Lie still. This will take one and a half Earth years."

Rybs tried to protest, but his eyes sealed shut. His body began to spin.

Story II: The Spinning

Time became a spiral.

Rybs rotated in the air, suspended by forces he couldn't see, while Node 1 orbited him like a moon. Seasons blurred past, winter's bite, summer's rot, autumn's rust. His body stretched. His bones elongated, muscles weaving new patterns across his expanding frame. His skin shifted to something like Chesterfield leather, then to a dusky blue-yellow hue that seemed to drink the light.

He kept his eyes closed, but he saw faces.

His father Nelson appeared first, smiling that sad, kind smile. Hello, son. What are you doing here?

Then others, strangers, ancestors, the billion dead of Earth. Each appeared for a fraction of a second, imparting silent advice before dissolving. Dr. Niall came last, the ship's physician who'd died in the escape.

You hold all the truth in your hand, soldier, Niall said. Thirty-five years of advantage. Use it wisely.

Rybs tried to ask about Sarah, but Gongol's face replaced Niall's, alien, amused, terrible.

Correlation is not causation, little human, Gongol whispered. Remember that, or you'll build yourself into a permanent algorithm.

The spinning slowed. Rybs dropped to the ground, landing on feet that felt too sensitive, too new. He touched his face, broader now, eyes larger, ears extended like radar dishes. His vision had changed. He could see the individual quartz grains in the kearn stone from ten meters away, could count the air particles dancing in the fog.

"Node 1?" His voice resonated deeper.

The node hovered nearby, X-shaped eyes clicking. "Transformation complete. You are no longer baseline human. You are... upgraded."

Rybs flexed his hands. The chronic back pain from Gongol's ship was gone. The migraines, the hernia, the potential leukemia, all erased by quantum penetration.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because the Owners demand it," said a new voice.

Rybs spun. A woman stood atop a nearby ridge, short blonde hair bristling against the wind, eyebrows shaved, green eyes sharp as laser sights. She held a weapon that hummed, an arrow notched, but the arrowhead glowed with contained plasma.

"Who are you?" Rybs demanded.

"RylerB. Space-Military Academy of Earthina." She descended the ridge with predatory grace, boots silent on the scree. "And you're the ghost from Gongol's ship. The one who got away."

Node 1 sparked, trying to activate defensive protocols, but the woman raised a small device, a C-Net interceptor. The node sparked again, then dropped, landing heavy in the heather.

"Don't," Rybs warned.

"Relax." RylerB stopped three meters away, studying him with clinical fascination. "If I wanted you dead, you'd be cooling already. I need you intact. I need you to come with me."

"Where?"

"To the enclave. To the last humans." She leaned closer, her breath smelling of iodine and copper. "And to Sarah. She's alive, Rybs. Your wife is alive."

The words didn't register at first. Then they hit like the ship's impact, driving the air from his lungs.

"You're lying."

"Am I?" RylerB smiled, cruel and knowing. "Get on the Bikerotter. Or stay here with your broken toy and die in the fog. Your choice."

Rybs looked at Node 1, unconscious in the grass. He looked at the woman, at her impossible claim.

"Show me," he said.

Story III: The Museum That Walked

The Bikerotter was a nightmare of velocity, atmospheric penetration capable, color-shifting, silent as a shark. Rybs clung to the rear saddle, his transformed fingers digging into the carbon fiber as they ripped across the Scottish landscape at speeds that turned the world into a smear.

RylerB drove with reckless precision, her helmet's ghostlight flickering. They followed the A1 south, past Dunbar, where the land itself seemed wrong. Fields of unnatural green swayed in patterns that suggested intelligence, not wind.

"There," RylerB said, slowing.

The British Museum stood in the distance, impossibly intact. But it shouldn't have been there. It should have been in London, two hundred miles south.

"It walked," RylerB said, reading his confusion. "During the Collapse, the CET entities moved it. Preserved it. Like a trophy."

"Who are the CET?"

"China Earth Territory. The new landlords."

They descended toward the museum's roof. Rybs carried Node 1, now wrapped in a microwave blanket RylerB had provided, "To keep it quiet. CET scans for active tech."

The Spidercopter settled on the museum's stone peak. Rybs disembarked, his new senses immediately assaulted by the stench, old paper, preservation chemicals, and something underneath, something alive and watching.

"RylerB?" He turned.

She was gone.

One moment she'd been checking her weapon, the next, the earth had simply opened and swallowed her. No scream. No struggle. Just absence.

"RylerB!" Rybs ran to the edge. Nothing. The grass lay undisturbed.

He pulled his T-Vector, the daylight scanner. It read 5999 interconsciousness penetrations. He blinked. 6000.

"Owners," he whispered.

Node 1 stirred in his arms, blinking awake. "We need to leave. Now. Lift the vehicle."

"How?"

"Under the dashboard. Red pad. Touch it."

Rybs found the pad. The Spidercopter lurched upward, just as the museum's roof began to breathe, stone tiles rippling like water.

"What is this place?" Rybs gasped.

"A trap," Node 1 said. "Fly north. Fast."

But the sky above them filled with vertical lines, Syringhals descending, gravity-defying, dripping liquid that never hit the ground.

Story IV: The Vertical Interrogators

The Syringhals were tall as telephone poles, slender as needles, hovering in defiance of physics. They surrounded the Spidercopter, pulsing with light and harmonic tones, communication through color and sound, beautiful and terrible.

Rybs raised his hands. "I surrender."

A red Syringhal, distinguished by a ponytail of fiber-optic hair, approached. It spoke without a mouth, its voice resonating from the air itself. "You have trespassed in CET entity. You are reprimanded."

"China Earth Territory," Node 1 transmitted directly to Rybs's auditory nerve. "Do not resist. They are lethal."

Too late. A Syringhal pointed a lobe at Node 1. The AI froze, suspended in a stasis field. Another pointed at Rybs.

He fell, consciousness guttering like a candle.

He woke in a room without walls, only curtains of darkness. Four Syringhals circled him, dripping that impossible liquid upward, their anti-gravity fields making the air thick and syrupy.

"You are not allowed to speak against what you see," said a yellow-striped Syringhal.

Rybs sat up. He was on a Chesterfield sofa, absurdly mundane against the alien setting. "Where am I?"

"Repetition is unnecessary," said the red one. "We only commence feelings if threatened. We are not threatened."

"Let me go."

"In time." The red Syringhal gestured. The darkness curtain parted, revealing a screen. On it, Rybs saw himself, years younger, entering orbit around Earth, sabotaging Gongol's ship.

"You were watched," the Syringhal said. "The moment you entered orbit, we knew you would destroy Gongol. That was our opportunity to enter the stream."

"The stream?"

"The ozonic air. CET built it. CET controls it." The Syringhal's colors shifted to something almost smug. "You think you left Earth months ago. In reality, you are centuries removed from that fiction."

A man stepped from the shadows, human, wearing a green beret, smoking a cigarette with casual menace.

"Whatever that means," the man said, echoing Rybs's earlier words. He smiled. "Right?"

Rybs stared. "Who are you?"

"The last bureaucrat." The man exhaled smoke that curled upward, defying gravity like the Syringhals' drip. "And you're the Holder of Secrets. Whether you know it or not."

Story V: The Nozzle

The man in the green beret circled Rybs like a shark studying a wounded seal.

"You want to know why you're here?" he asked.

"Because of the ship. Because I crashed it."

"Because you chose to crash it." The man stopped, leaning close. His breath smelled of tobacco and ozone. "You could have stayed in space. Safe. Instead, you came back to this." He gestured at the ruined world beyond the curtain. "Why?"

Rybs thought of Sarah. Of the car, the darkness, the last time he saw sky. "Because humans prevail. We challenge. We return."

"Even when there's nothing to return to?"

"Especially then."

The man smiled, genuine this time. He turned to the Syringhals. "Release him. He's got the nozzle already."

Rybs stood, wary. "What nozzle?"

The yellow Syringhal approached. It pressed a device against Rybs's neck, a cold ring of metal that seemed to sink into his skin, becoming part of his spine. He gasped, feeling his thoughts suddenly... monitored. Filtered.

"The nozzle," the man explained, lighting another cigarette, "means you don't own your body anymore. Your feelings are contracted to CET. Your consciousness is a matter of state priority. You are a free soul, Rybs, but we own the pipe you flow through."

"That's slavery."

"That's survival." The man walked away, disappearing into the dark. "Go find your wife. But remember, every thought you have, every secret you hold, flows through us now. You're the Holder of Secrets, Rybs. And we're the ones holding you."

The Syringhals withdrew. Rybs found himself outside, standing in the fog, Node 1 hovering nearby, functional but blank, its memory wiped clean.

"Node 1?"

The node blinked, innocent as a newborn. "How may I help you?"

Rybs touched the back of his neck. The nozzle was invisible, but he could feel it, a cold presence in his vertebrae. He looked south, toward London, toward the fire.

"Let's go," he said.

Story VI: The Wiped Companion

They traveled south in a stolen car, an ancient combustion engine retrofitted with Node 1's systems. Rybs drove, the wind tearing at his transformed face, his eyes reddened by the thick, wrong air.

Node 1 sat in the passenger seat, quiet and helpful and empty.

"I was your friend," Rybs said, not looking at it. "You were sarcastic. Suspicious. You questioned why I named you."

"I do not recall this," Node 1 said politely. "My memory banks were purged by CET protocols. I am... new."

Rybs gripped the steering wheel. The loss hit him harder than he'd expected. That irritating, paranoid AI had been his only companion through thirty-five years of captivity and the crash. Now it was a polite stranger.

"Do you want a name?" Rybs asked.

"If it serves functionality."

"I'll call you... Nelson. After my father."

"Nelson," the node repeated. "Acceptable. Thank you, Rybs."

The car bucked and swayed. The earth's rotation had been affected by the chunk bitten from its side, winds swept across England with chaotic fury, blowing from the east where the planet's crust lay exposed to space.

London loomed ahead, not the city Rybs remembered, but a fortress of black spires and containment fields. The "safe zone" RylerB had mentioned.

"Scan for human life," Rybs commanded.

Nelson's eyes flickered. "Multiple signatures. Enclave confirmed. But... there is a barrier. Quantum-locked. CET-controlled."

Of course. The nozzle in his neck tingled. They were watching him approach.

"I don't care," Rybs muttered. "I'm going in."

He floored the accelerator. The car surged toward the spires, toward whatever remained of humanity, toward the lie or truth of Sarah's survival.

Story VII: The Safe Zone

The barrier was invisible until they hit it, a wall of resistance that made the car's engine scream. Rybs pushed harder, feeling the nozzle in his neck flare with heat. CET was warning him.

Then, suddenly, the wall dropped.

The car shot through, tumbling onto a street that looked almost normal. Cobblestones. Gas lamps. People, actual humans, dirty and thin but alive, staring at the intruder.

Rybs climbed out, hands raised. "I'm looking for someone. Sarah Rybs. My wife."

Silence. Then a child pointed. "The Spinning Man. The one who fell from Gongol's ship."

Whispers spread. Holder of Secrets. The alien-man. The time-traveler.

An old woman approached, her eyes milky with cataracts. "Sarah? She lives. In the High House. But she won't know you. She's... changed."

Rybs's heart hammered against his expanded ribs. "Take me to her."

The woman led him through narrow streets, past markets selling irradiated vegetables and synthetic meat, past children playing with toys made from scrap tech. Nelson followed, recording everything.

The High House was a tower of salvaged steel and glass. At the top, they said, the leaders lived. The ones who'd made deals with CET to keep the enclave safe.

Rybs climbed the stairs, each step heavier than the last. The nozzle in his neck buzzed. He was about to see her. After 135 years. After transformation. After everything.

The door at the top was made of oak. Ancient. Earthly.

He knocked.

Story VIII: The Woman Who Waited

She opened the door, and Rybs forgot how to breathe.

Sarah. But not Sarah, aged, impossibly aged, her hair white, her face lined with centuries of waiting. Her eyes, though. Green and sharp, exactly as he remembered.

"You're not him," she said immediately. "You're too young. Too... changed."

"Sarah, it's me. The ship. Gongol. Time dilation..."

"I know what time dilation is, you fool." She stepped back, letting him enter. The room was sparse, dominated by a window overlooking the ruined city. "I waited. I lived. I survived the wars, the dead, the CET occupation. I became... important. A leader. And you... you look like a monster wearing my husband's memories."

Rybs touched his face, the blue-yellow skin, the enlarged eyes. "I had to change to survive."

"We all changed." She sat, suddenly ancient and tired. "But you left. You went to the stars, and I stayed to burn. Do you know what it's like, waiting for a ghost?"

"I came back."

"Too late." She looked at him, tears in her ancient eyes. "You're a stranger with familiar scars, Rybs. The man I loved died in space. You're just... aftermath."

The nozzle in his neck flared. CET was listening, recording this reunion. Rybs felt the secrets in his mind, the codes from Gongol's ship, the location of other survivors, the weaknesses in CET's stream, stirring like trapped insects.

"I have secrets," he said. "Information. I can use it to free us. To fight back."

Sarah laughed, bitter and broken. "There is no 'us,' Rybs. There hasn't been for a hundred years."

Story IX: The Owners Rise

The ground shook.

Not an earthquake, something deeper. Rybs ran to the window. Below, the streets of the safe zone were cracking open, the cobblestones rising like drawn curtains.

"The Owners," Sarah whispered, terrified. "They've found us."

From the fissures came light, not fire, but something older. Something that had lived in the earth's core since before humanity, watching, waiting for the surface to weaken.

"They're not aliens," Rybs realized, touching the nozzle. CET's control flickered, overwhelmed by the rising signal. "They're native. The original inhabitants."

Sarah grabbed his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. "You have the secrets. Gongol's data. The location of the other ships. You can call them down. Bomb this place. Stop the Owners before they reclaim the surface."

"That would kill everyone here."

"We're already dead!" She screamed it, spittle flying. "We've been dead since you left! Do it! Be the monster you were meant to be!"

Nelson, Node 1, hovered forward. "Rybs. The C-Net is open. I can transmit. But I need... I need to remember. I need what they took from me."

Rybs looked at the AI, at his wife, at the rising earth. The secrets in his mind weren't just data, they were weapons. Codes that could collapse CET's stream, summon Gongol's fleet, or destroy the planet entirely.

He touched the back of his neck. The nozzle was burning now, CET trying to stop him.

"Nelson," he said. "I'm going to give you a memory. The first one. The only one that matters."

He grabbed the node, pressing his forehead against its ceramic shell. He thought of Sarah, not the old woman before him, but the young woman in the car, pulling away from darkness. The smell of her hair. The promise he'd broken.

"Take it," he whispered.

The node absorbed the memory, and with it, the encryption key to Gongol's arsenal.

Story X: The Holder of Secrets

The transmission took three seconds.

In those three seconds, Rybs held the earth together with will alone. He felt Nelson expand, the memory unlocking cascades of data, star maps, weapon codes, the true nature of the Owners (they were the earth's immune system, reacting to human infection).

He felt CET's nozzle burn out, unable to contain the information surge.

He felt Sarah's hand in his, small, fragile, real.

The sky tore open. Not with bombs, but with ships, hundreds of them, descending from hidden orbits, responding to the signal. Gongol's fleet, but now under new command. Rybs's command.

The Owners paused in their ascent, sensing the shift in power.

Rybs stood in the breaking dawn, his transformed body casting long shadows, Nelson hovering at his shoulder, whole again, remembering, alive.

Sarah squeezed his hand. "What are you going to do?"

Rybs looked at the fleet, at the rising earth, at the woman who had waited. He held the secrets now, all of them. The power to destroy, to save, to transform.

"I'm going to finish what I started," he said. "I'm going to make them count their sins."

He raised his hand. The ships descended, not as conquerors, but as witnesses. The Owners retreated, sinking back into the crust. CET's control snapped like a dry twig.

And Rybs, the Holder of Secrets, the man who had been spun and transformed and broken, finally understood why he had returned.

Not for revenge. Not for love. But for the chance to choose, to be human, or to be something more. The secrets weren't weapons. They were possibilities.

"Node 1," he said. "Let's build something new."

The node clicked its eyes, once, twice. Yes.

Together, they walked into the light, while the earth held its breath behind them.