The attic had never felt more alive.
The glow from Owen’s tablet lit up the dust dancing in the air. His breath caught in his throat as he stared at the puddle of water on the wooden floor; still shimmering, still holding that bizarre, almost sacred shape.
He leaned in closer. It was a pattern. Not random. Not abstract. Deliberate. Intelligent. Planted.
“Dots. Lines. Intervals...”
Morse code.
He grabbed his notepad, brushing away debris as he knelt and decoded the water trail. His pen flew over the paper, translating short and long notches into dashes and dots, and then finally into letters.
But what came out made no immediate sense.
“ESACAR?”
Then it hit him.
“Caesar Cipher,” he breathed, eyes widening.
Intrigued, Owen, with his MIT background and knowledge of codes, recognizes the patterns as a rudimentary form of Caesar Cipher code and Morse Code. His heart quickens. This is no ordinary spill; it's a deliberate message, bypassing the digital networks.
He recalibrated. Shifted the letters back; three, then four, then finally six positions.
It clicked.
“BODMAS”
His pulse quickened. The ancient rule of solving equations:
Brackets → Orders → Division → Multiplication → Addition → Subtraction
And below it; a cryptic expression etched in faint scratches under the wood:
13 ÷ (2 - 5) × 7 + 10 - 15
He scribbled quickly.
One method yielded:
-81.909
Another interpretation gave:
113.923
His fingers trembled. Those weren’t just numbers.
A world map is spiraled on the attic floor beside this code, very dusty and a rare physical copy in a world dominated by interactive digital displays. Owen's eyes dart between the numbers he calculated and the map. A jolt of recognition! The numbers on the map, marked in faint ink, match the coordinates he deciphered.
Latitude -81.909, Longitude 113.923
But these coordinates point to a remote region in the Antarctica, a place largely untouched by modern civilization, a stark contrast to the hyper-connected world he knows.
Doubt wars with a flicker of hope. Could this be a job offer? A mistake? A trap?
The persistent pull of the unknown, the strange way the message appeared, seemingly bypassing all modern communication systems, and the desperation of his situation compel him.
He stared at the spot as if it would blink back.
A forgotten region. A shadow on the world map. No networks, no colonies, no AI systems. Just snow, ice, wind, and silence.
He stood, adrenaline surging, purpose roaring through his veins like rocket fuel.
Back in his room, Owen didn’t waste a second. He opened the hidden floorboard under his bed and pulled out his emergency savings; roughly $3,200 in compressed universal credits. Enough for one way. Not enough for a return.
He shoved only what mattered into his old, weather-worn MIT bag; items that defined who he was and what he still believed in. First went his propulsion research notes, scribbled over years of trial, error, and genius. Then, the pages of his warp corridor thesis, the very work that once caught the attention of journals before the world forgot his name. He added printouts of unsubmitted research, ideas too bold for peer review but too valuable to abandon. Tucked into the side pocket was his journal, filled with rough sketches of starships, flight equations, and dreams that never left him.
He slipped in his old paperback on Einstein-Rosen bridges, the corners dog-eared, spine cracked; his first brush with theoretical wormholes. And finally, the most important piece: a single worn photograph of a ten-year-old boy with wild hair and bright eyes, proudly holding a model spaceship built from scrap, unaware that one day, he’d be chasing the real thing.
He stared at it for a moment.
“This is it,” he whispered. “The beginning or the end.”
He checked the HyperJet network. One sub-orbital flight to the South Pole Transit Hub.
Departure: 9:00 PM. He had less than two hours.
As he slung his bag over his shoulder, a soft humming vibrated the air.
Red drones hovered outside his window, the eviction timestamp counting down in brutal red:
T-Minus 8 minutes until auto-lockdown.
He didn’t even turn around.
He walked out, never looking back, as the door sealed permanently behind him with a mechanical hiss. A drone chirped:
“OCCUPANT: REMOVED. UNIT: CLEARED.”
He reached the Cambridge HyperJet Terminal glowed with sterile blue light and polished alloy floors. Unlike most intercity hubs, this one was quieter; only researchers, cold-zone engineers, and security AI came through here. No tourists. No casual travelers.
Owen approached the one active gate:
927A – Destination: Antarctica – Final Boarding
He passed the biometric scan. The attendant raised a brow at his outdated ID, but let him through.
As he moved through the corridor, his heart felt like it was pulsing in his throat. The terminal smelled like ozone and disinfectant. And then…
He froze.
Near Gate 4, beneath the soft flood of terminal lights and the whispering hush of the snowy skyline outside, he saw her.
Just a silhouette at first; still and poised under the glow of the skylight; but then she turned, just enough for the light to catch her face. And that was all it took.
Owen froze.
Time fractured around him like ice beneath his feet. Every breath in his lungs left in one sharp exhale.
She stood with her back partially to him, one hand resting on her duffel bag, the other curled gently around a steaming cup of tea. Her posture was unmistakable; confident, but effortless. Like she belonged there, waiting at the edge of the world.
And then… her face came into full view.
Short, wind-tousled hair framed her delicate features, tucked under a snug gray beanie. Her hazel-blue eyes, half-shadowed by the slant of light, shimmered with the same sharp depth he remembered; eyes that looked like storm clouds pierced by sunlight. She wore dark jeans, hiking boots, and that faded MIT jacket, sleeves rolled up slightly like she always did when she was working with field samples.
And then; her lips moved. She whispered something to herself. A name? A note? He wasn’t sure.
But the voice; low, thoughtful, melodic; it sent a shiver up his spine.
It was her.
Sarah Williams.
The girl who had once made photosynthesis sound poetic. Who had told him, over bad coffee and better equations, that she'd never look at a tree the same way again after mapping neural growth patterns in human-botanical analogies.
"From Oxford," he whispered to himself, stunned.
She had taken the Oxford hybrid biology-botany course, specializing in human analogy; a rare field that mapped plant resilience and adaptive intelligence to human neurofunction, bridging ecosystems and emotion.
She had always seen the world differently.
Where Owen saw stars, she saw roots beneath everything.
Back in MIT, before she transferred out, they used to argue playfully over the future; he believed salvation lay in the stars; she believed it grew from the ground up.
“Why escape Earth when we haven’t finished understanding it?” she once asked him, tucked into the library's corner booth, sketching neural-vascular similarities on a napkin.
He never got the chance to answer. She transferred to Oxford mid-semester. No warning. No goodbye. Just... gone.
And now she was here. At Gate 4. In a terminal that leads only one place.
Antarctica.
His mind raced. Could she be part of a climate-biological research team? Was she investigating ancient sub-glacial flora? Did she know about the coordinates?
“Sarah,” he breathed aloud.
But before he could take a step forward, before he could move a single muscle; she disappeared.
Gone.
Owen stood rooted to the spot, heart thundering, eyes fixed on the spot where she had vanished. But as he rushed forward, weaving through the terminal crowd, the glass corridor she had stepped into was empty; no footprints, no security record, no trace of her departure. He asked the gate assistant if a woman in a gray beanie and MIT jacket had boarded. They checked twice. No such passenger. His breath caught in his throat. The hum of the terminal grew louder, distorted, surreal. Had his sleep-deprived mind conjured her? A desperate fragment of memory stitched into reality? He turned slowly, staring back at Gate 4.
Nothing. Just sterile lights, cold floors, and silence. It hadn’t been her. Sarah was never there. Just an illusion; a cruel, beautiful ghost born from longing and exhaustion. And yet, the ache in his chest remained as if she’d truly touched his world again... only to disappear all over.
The flight doors opened. He stepped inside, taking the last available seat near the observation dome.
As the jet lifted vertically and arced toward the stratosphere, Owen looked out the glass, the city shrinking below.
He was leaving everything behind. All for a code in a puddle… A coordinate in the cold… And maybe; just maybe; a second chance at something bigger than science.
