Kael sat up, gasping.

He frowned. He had no memory of saving Earth. He had left it to die.

His finger hovered over ENTER .

“Upload 261,” he whispered.

He thought of the old Earth—oceans, rain, the smell of coffee. He thought of the probe arriving in forty thousand years, because light was slow and relativity was a cruel joke. He would be decompressed into a body made of alien elements, on a shore beneath a red sun, with no memory of the journey.

The scanner whined. His vision shattered into a trillion tiny squares. He felt his thoughts being folded, like origami, over and over until they were the size of a grain of sand. There was a sensation of falling through a tunnel made of pure mathematics.

The receiver wasn't a satellite. It was a von Neumann probe he’d launched a decade ago, currently drifting through the Proxima Centauri system. The probe had one function: decompress .rar files into living, breathing bodies using raw stellar carbon and pre-programmed genetic scaffolding.