Scene 3, A stray feed flickered across my secondary HUD,stuttering as if dragged sideways through versions of itself.In an upside-down glance, I saw a blur, a face carved with terror.She shielded two children into a reinforced floor shelter.The image warped, doubling, collapsing inward,replaying from a slightly different angle, as if unsure which version to commit to.Mom, mom, it’s me. She disappeared. Children secured. Her eyes peering back.Swirling dizzy, trying to grab gravity back, I forced myself to believe that was her.I threw my arm out and tapped the screen as it slid out of alignment,then exhaled sharply as I bounced wall-to-wall, still grabbing for gravity.She glanced toward the camera for a split second,a hope or plea or something else entirely. A whisper,son, meteor, I lov… Then the feed snapped, folded, gone.Still there, just out of sync. I held a single breath as the vortex tightened.The weight of a thousand families compressed into my lungs, expanding and compressing again,out of rhythm. But something shifted in that fraction of a femto, something aligned as I wasdragged deeper, faster, tighter. There I stood at the helm of the Papatuanuku,where the reality grid began to tear, stretch, shear and overlap itself in swirling layers.Hold on tight brace, brace, brace, we zigged and zagged and darted towards them.There yonder I witnessed the gathering of the knights and whispers of Salah ad-Dinunder the Matariki cluster. The Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, rotating into view throughthe vortex, sliding sideways, then locking for a split second of impossible clarity. I swear,I saw a mum within the ether of the nebula, something like her held in the haze, bending aroundher form, even as my sensors spiked violently with gamma bursts and plasma surges that didn’tagree with what I was seeing. Still, resolute they stood, anchored while everything else twisted,appearing anchored because everything else refused to stay still,swords sheathed, taiaha in hand. Is that my destiny or the deceiver’s mirage refracted throughdimensional drift? Or is the drift the truth and stillness, the illusion? Why does Papatuanukuresist? Or is it correcting course against a current I can’t map? My eyes cloud with fear,my heart with can it truly be, as the helm resists harder, then yields, then resists again.The navigation wheel feels locked in lead, dragging against forces pulling in opposite directionsas the ship slips, skids, and is yanked off course across multiple planes at once. I fight theweight muscles burning as momentum tears me forward, sideways inward through the void, faster andfaster one blur. Then another mission control streams past in old school Instagrams, shorts,and micro dramas untold. Brace, brace, brace, the condition clears and in that immeasurablefraction between existence and erasure, as I am pulled through it, the cascade initiates.A flash of ignited code ancient, knightly unknown burns through every layer at once, stitchingand tearing instantaneously. Before the Tomahawks could vaporize the shelter where the innocentdwelled protecting the Ken & Barbie. Something older than command had already taken hold,threading through the vortex itself, rewriting the path midspin. The Knight code initiates,Sequence does not simply react, he is activated across all planes simultaneously, no delay, nohesitation, no alternative outcome. Within a femtosecond he reforms the atomized particles,wrenching them from the minions grasp, mid dissolution, mid possibility. This is the cascade oncetriggered. It will not stop and I can feel it running alongside me, through me ahead of me beforeI even perceive it. Every fragment of life force stabilizes, rewrites and is covertly transferredto a protected sub-dimension of Orion’s Belt.
