Prologue: "Echo of the Rift"

March 9th, 2239. Quantum Dawn Laboratory, Sector 17.

Kyle adored mornings in the station's habitat module. Ella, his little sunbeam, often woke before Maria and would put on a "morning concert," singing her simple songs while her toy robot, creaky and well-worn, marched across the table. In these moments, the laboratory, that buzzing hive of advanced technology and hidden risks, seemed a distant, almost unreal world, having nothing to do with their cozy, almost illusory family idyll. Illusory, because the underlying tension of the impending experiment already hung in the air, even if they tried to ignore it.

The air vibrated. Not from heat or cold, but from something deeper, something that was born in the very depths of the reactor, as if reality itself was stretched taut like the string of an ancient, out-of-tune instrument, ready to snap with a deafening dissonance. Kyle Rain stood at the control panel, his fingers, usually flitting confidently over the sensors, frozen above the screen, the pale, anxious light of the indicators reflected in his dilated pupils.

"We're on the edge, Kyle," the voice of Eva Carter, his colleague, sounded tense, cracking with metallic notes through the communicator. Even through the interference, he felt her fear, mixed with that steely resolve that had always been her essence. "If we don't launch the stabilizer now, everything will collapse. Do you hear me? The energy is out of control! We're losing it!"

On the small holographic window in the corner of the panel, Maria, his wife, smiled restrainedly, but in her eyes, so dear and beloved, a тревога (trevoga - anxiety/worry) splashed, which she so desperately tried to hide from Ella. This smile cut Kyle to the heart more sharply than any shard of glass.

"Daddy, catch!" Ella shouted into the camera, her ringing voice breaking through the hum of the laboratory, lifting her postcard, sparkling with cheap, but so precious glitter, towards the screen. "And you promised! You promised to be back for dinner!"

These words, innocent and demanding, echoed in Kyle's mind, intertwining with Eva's cry. Promises. Each one now pulled not just a burden, but a red-hot chain of remorse.

He heard. But he couldn't tear his gaze away from that small window into another, still living life. They were so close – only three hundred meters away in a straight line, behind armored glass and layers of protective barriers that now seemed thinner than a spiderweb. Ella, five years old, with her funny, tightly braided pigtails that always came undone by evening, held a hand-drawn card with the crooked, yet so sincere inscription "Daddy is a hero." He promised to be with them in an hour, after the final, triumphant test. An hour that was supposed to change the world for the better.

"Kyle!" Eva barked, her voice almost drowned out by the rising wail of sirens. "The reactor is at 112%! Damn it, Arden was wrong! That initial fluctuation… it wasn't interference! We should have…"

Her words were drowned out by a low, vibrating hum that rose from the depths of the laboratory, from the very heart of their ambitions and mistakes. The floor beneath his feet trembled with such force that Kyle barely kept his balance, and at the same moment the central screen flashed a blinding red: "CRITICAL ANOMALY. SPATIAL RIFT IMMINENT." Kyle felt icy sweat trickle down his temple. This wasn't supposed to happen. They had calculated everything down to the smallest detail. Quantum energy, their brainchild, their hope, was supposed to be salvation, an endless source for a dying planet. But they missed something, something fundamental. Perhaps the very "insignificant interference" that Eva had shouted about.

And suddenly – silence. A moment of absolute, deafening silence, stretching into agonizing eternity. And then – an explosion. Not a sound, not a flash, but a feeling as if the world, the very fabric of being, had split in two, revealing something ancient and monstrously alien.

Kyle fell to his knees as the glass in front of him, the vaunted armored glass, cracked, covered with a network of silver spiderwebs, and shattered into a myriad of shards. Behind it, in the habitat module, he saw space distort. The walls curved as if made of water, colors mixed into a nauseating cacophony, and then began to tear like worn fabric, revealing a dark, pulsating, internally glowing emptiness. A rift. The First Rift. He saw Maria, his Maria, grab Ella, holding her close, saw her lips silently scream his name, but the sound didn't reach him, absorbed by this silent horror. The emptiness swallowed them, pulled them into its insatiable maw, leaving only an echo – a strange, low, vibrating hum that now seemed to sound directly in his skull, in his soul.

"No…" his voice broke into an animalistic rasp as he crawled towards the shattered glass, not noticing how the sharp edges cut his palms, leaving bloody marks on the metal floor. "Maria! Ella!"

But where their cozy module had been, now only a crack in reality gaped, radiating a cold, ghostly, unearthly light. Kyle stared into it, into this wound on the body of the world, until deafening sirens drowned out his thoughts, and the laboratory, their temple of science and hope, began to collapse around him, burying under its debris not only his family, but the entire former world. This was the end. And the beginning of an endless nightmare.