What Happened Before The Opening Of The Novel

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Before the novel begins, Mike was part of a ten-member crew assembled and trained by the Teravada Corporation for a space mission. The mission was not improvised. The crew had undergone preparation, the procedures were known, and the departure was expected to be controlled. Mike was one of the participants, operating within a mission structure that still made sense to him and to the others.

The launch took place from a base located on a moon or natural satellite. At that point, nothing appeared anomalous. The crew entered the omniship, the mission began, and the vessel lifted off according to plan. For a brief moment, the situation remained normal.

Then, only seconds after departure, something happened.

The crew heard a strange impact against the vessel, like a stone or physical object striking the outside of the ship. The sound was wrong. It did not belong there. Almost immediately, the alarms began to sound. Rudolf, the captain, understood that something catastrophic had begun, but the nature of the event did not correspond to any expected failure.

Then the crew started disappearing.

One by one, members of the crew vanished from the omniship. They were not visibly killed. They were not attacked by a creature. They were not pulled into space. They simply ceased to be present. Those who remained tried to stabilize the vessel, interpret the alarms, understand what was happening, and preserve the mission, but the event continued beyond their control.

Eventually, Mike disappeared as well.

The novel does not begin by showing this event directly. The reader does not witness the launch, the impact, the alarms, or the first disappearances in chronological order. Instead, the novel begins much later from Mike’s subjective point of view, with him opening his eyes in the desert, already disoriented, fragmented, and without memory of how he arrived there.

The desert sequence at the opening is not the beginning of Mike’s experience inside that reality. It is only the point where the narrative enters.

By the time the first chapter begins, Mike has already spent an incomprehensible amount of time inside the desert reality. He did not awaken near the omniship at the start. He began far away, in other regions of an enormous non-human desert, and was gradually guided by a mysterious voice across vast distances and repeated cycles. The reader sees him only near the end of that hidden traversal, when he is already close to finding the ship again.

Later, calculations based on the omniship’s ticks and the cycles of the desert suggest that Mike may have spent approximately 132 million human years inside that environment. This cannot be proven conclusively, because the desert does not operate according to ordinary temporal logic. The number is an estimate, a conversion from alien cycles into human-equivalent time. But the implication is devastating: what seems at first like a short nightmare of disorientation may in fact be the final visible fragment of an experience lasting longer than the history of human civilization by an almost absurd margin.

This is one of the first major ontological shocks of the story. The opening chapter does not show Mike entering the nightmare. It shows him after he has already been inside it for an impossible length of time. The real beginning has been erased from his memory, hidden from the reader, and buried beneath cycles of death, movement, guidance, and recurrence.