The sterile white walls of the lab glinted under fluorescent lights, the air tinged with the metallic tang of antiseptic. Elara Voss’s fingers danced over the console, her breath steady as she initiated the next phase. Across the room, Kael…
## The Static Bloom Dust motes danced in the single beam of Elara’s headlamp. The air, thick and cool, smelled like wet earth and something older – decay barely contained. She traced the whorled pattern on a fossilized leaf, its…
## Echo Bloom The grit tasted like static. Kai blinked, trying to force focus, but the starmapper interface still fractured across his vision. Each shard pulsed with false data – system habitability reports blurring into nebulae, planetary assessments dissolving like…
## The Static Bloom The air tasted like burnt sugar and regret. Not a chemical tang, but something deeper, woven into the particulate shimmer that coated everything on Isohel Prime. Thirty layers of atmosphere did *that* to a planet, apparently.…
Dust motes danced in the beam of Leo’s headlamp, a miniature galaxy swirling within the dome of the abandoned Lowell Observatory. The air tasted of rust and regret. He traced a finger across the chipped enamel of the telescope’s base,…