Odyssey Of Survival

The moment Jack stepped into the room, he froze.

He stared ahead with a mixture of confusion and irritation, his eyes locked on the strange object displayed in the center of the room. It was a large rock encased in glass—its core embedded with a pitch-black stone, like a shard of void pressed into hardened ash. Jack blinked a few times, then tilted his head, unimpressed. This? This was what they dragged him all the way here for? A black pebble inside a fancy rock?

He slowly turned his head toward the woman beside him, raising an eyebrow like she had just asked him to build a spaceship out of mashed potatoes.

"This is a joke, right? You brought me here to stare at a painted rock? Am I supposed to build a doomsday laser with this or what?"

The woman didn't respond right away. She looked at Jack calmly, letting his sarcasm fizzle out before she finally stepped forward. Her heels clicked softly on the cold metal floor as she placed a palm on the transparent glass casing.

"I understand how it looks," she said. "But what you're looking at isn't from Earth."

Jack rolled his eyes, folding his arms. "Oh great. Now you're telling me it's from Mars?"

"The Moon, actually."

Jack paused, blinking.

"Come again?"

"This object," she said, motioning to the stone, "was found embedded deep beneath the surface of the Moon. It was excavated during an undocumented mission fifteen years ago. It predates Earth. It predates our Sun. According to our top researchers, this object is as old as the universe itself—and potentially even older."

Jack stared at her as if she had grown a second head. Then he burst into laughter, clutching his stomach.

"Oh my god, that was good! That was... wow. You people are serious? You wrote a whole sci-fi script, rehearsed it, then brought a ten-year-old into your top-secret facility just to act it out?"

She didn't laugh.

Jack's laughter slowly died as he glanced at her stoic expression.

"Wait... you're serious?" he asked.

"We were skeptical too at first," she replied. "Until the events on that island happened. When we witnessed what you, Nate, and the others did... people manipulating ice, shadows, illusions—things that should be impossible—it forced us to re-evaluate everything we thought we knew. If people can gain powers like that... then maybe this stone isn't just a myth."

Jack scratched his chin, suddenly less amused and more curious. "Okay... let's say, hypothetically, that you're not totally insane. How do you know this thing is that old? Or powerful at all? For all we know, it could be some weird mineral. Doesn't make it magic."

"That's why we're showing you this. But what you're about to see cannot leave this room."

Jack nodded slowly.

She walked over to a control panel on the wall and tapped a few keys. A projector descended from the ceiling, humming softly as the lights dimmed and a screen came to life.

An old video began to play. It was a man—mid-forties, wearing a lab coat. Wild gray hair, intelligent eyes that sparked with intensity. Jack's breath caught.

"No way," he whispered.

He knew that face. Everyone in the scientific world did.

Dr. Victor Halden. The greatest mind of their time. The man who developed tech that was decades ahead of its era. He died ten years ago... on the same day Jack was born.

As if reading his thoughts, the woman said, "This footage was recorded ten years ago. The very day Dr. Victor died. He left it encrypted with a time lock that only opened recently."

On screen, Dr. Victor stood beside the very same glass casing now in front of Jack. He carefully lifted the glass and exposed the black stone beneath it. His voice was quiet, but clear.

"This object defies all known physics. Every element in it registers zero on every scientific scale. No magnetic field. No atomic vibration. Nothing. It's as if the stone exists outside the laws of this universe. But when I made contact with it..."

Dr. Victor reached out and touched the stone. His body tensed.

"...I felt it. Something unlocking in my mind. Not knowledge. Not memory. Potential."

The video glitched briefly, then returned. Dr. Victor looked more strained now, sweat on his forehead.

"This artifact amplifies cognitive evolution. Not just intelligence. Consciousness. The brain doesn't just get smarter—it evolves. It thinks in higher dimensions. We need to be careful, but if we harness this..."

The video cut off abruptly.

Jack was frozen, eyes wide.

"He called it... cognitive evolution?"

"We've started calling it Neural Ascension," the woman said. "Because what it offers is far beyond brain power. It's the next step of conscious evolution."

Jack sat down on the metal bench near the projector. For once, he was silent.

"And you want me... to do what, exactly?"

"To help us understand it. You're the only one with the mental elasticity and creativity to even attempt it. Our best minds couldn't even begin to crack this thing. But you? You built a functioning particle destabilizer when you were nine. You reverse-engineered ancient alien tech without ever having seen the original schematics."

"They knew about the portal already?" he murmured as he glanced at the stone again, then leaned forward slightly.

"...And you said Dr. Victor died the day he recorded this?"

"Yes. Heart failure, supposedly. But we believe it was the stone. Too much contact, too fast. You won't be touching it. Just studying it. We need you to do what no one else can."

Jack exhaled slowly, fingers steepled in front of his mouth.

"...This might be the dumbest thing I've ever done," he muttered.

Then he looked up at her and grinned.

"But also the coolest. Let's see what this thing can really do."

****

For the next three days, Jack submerged himself entirely in his work. The lab became his world—walls of screens, towers of equipment, piles of notes scattered across every surface. He rarely spoke to anyone and didn't ask for help, working with a focus so intense it seemed inhuman. His small hands darted between machines, typing on custom interfaces, adjusting microscopic tools, and running simulations back-to-back. For most kids, the workload would have been impossible, but Jack wasn't like most kids.

At the same time, miles away, Nate was buried in his own obsession. He had taken over Jack's personal lab, working tirelessly on the neural interface helmet. Wires were strewn everywhere, lines of code flooded every screen, and his clothes stuck to him from sweat. Neither he nor Jack ate, slept, or rested. It was as if time stood still—three straight days of raw, uninterrupted focus.

On the fourth day, just as the sun crept over the horizon, Jack finally stopped. His eyes, dry and bloodshot, stared unblinking at the black stone resting in its containment frame. His breath was heavy, his body trembling slightly as if it had finally realized how much energy he'd been burning through.

The door hissed open behind him, and the woman—now dressed in a sleek military uniform—stepped inside.

"Did you find anything?" she asked calmly, though her eyes hinted at curiosity and impatience.

Jack didn't respond immediately. He turned away from the stone, walking around the lab in slow, pacing steps, trying to compose his thoughts. It took him nearly a full minute before he stopped and finally spoke.

"This stone... it shouldn't be here," he said, his voice almost a whisper.

The woman raised an eyebrow, confused. "What do you mean?"

Jack wiped the sweat off his face and took a deep breath. "I've run every test I can think of. Spectrometry, density mapping, radiation, chemical composition, energy fluctuations... even invented a couple of new tests. And I'm telling you—this thing isn't just not from Earth. It's not from this universe."

The woman folded her arms, clearly skeptical. "Jack, we don't even know point zero followed by infinite zeros of what minerals exist across the universe. What makes you so sure it's not just an unknown element?"

Jack gave a dry, almost exhausted chuckle. "Because all known elements in this universe—even theoretical ones—they obey universal laws. Gravity, for example. Every mineral, every atom answers to gravity. But this? It doesn't follow gravity. It manipulates it."

He walked back to the containment frame and gestured to the floating instruments around it. "This isn't levitating—it's distorting the gravitational field around it. When I drop objects nearby, they don't fall in a straight line. They curve, like they're being bent around a hidden force. And not just gravity. It resists magnetism, absorbs light frequencies selectively, and emits energy in wavelengths we don't even have names for."

The woman's expression darkened slightly as she began to understand. "You're saying... this thing isn't just alien. It's not from our dimension."

Jack looked her straight in the eyes. "Exactly. This stone belongs to a higher dimensional reality."

Silence filled the room.

The woman opened her mouth but no words came. She thought she had heard the most impossible things already—people with powers, unnatural storms—but this? A higher-dimensional artifact?

Then Jack's voice broke through the quiet again, this time even softer.

"There's one more thing."

The woman looked up.

Jack hesitated, rubbing his arms as if a chill had passed through him. "I think... I think it's alive."

Her eyes narrowed. "Alive? You mean like a parasite?"

Jack shook his head slowly. "No. I mean it has... intelligence. It responds to stimuli. It pulses differently when I approach it. It absorbs only the information I feed it. It learns. And the way it emits energy—it's not random. It's patterned. It's communicating. Not like a machine. Not like AI. Something else. Something older."

He stepped closer to the stone, staring at its faint, pulsing glow. "It's watching me. And I don't think it likes being watched back."

The woman was silent for a long while, taking in the weight of his words. Jack had confirmed what they'd only feared before—that they were dealing with something far beyond their comprehension. Not a weapon. Not a mineral. Not a tool. But a presence.

And it was now in their world.