Player: Aelsius

Grant Barnes is a tall, lean man with weathered pale skin marked by faint scars from years of hard labor. His short, dark brown hair is usually tousled, and his steel-gray eyes hold a quiet intensity. He dresses in practical, worn workwear (heavy-duty jumpsuits with reinforced patches) always ready for the next repair. His angular face is often shadowed by a few days’ stubble, giving him a rugged, no-nonsense look.

HISTORY *There’s a point where running stops being flight and starts being vision. For Grant Barnes, it came with the scream of stripped bolts and the smell of burnt insulation. *

Sol was dying. Everyone said it in different ways-wrapped in headlines, in warnings, in corporate press releases that pretended to be hopeful. But Grant Barnes had known it years before the Yasuda Incident or the Siege of Phobos. Sol didn’t die in a headline. It died the day Clarke Gamma went dark. It died the moment his father’s voice cut out mid-patch and never came back.

He was fifteen then. Still lanky, still growing into his hands, but already seasoned by vacuum, already fitting conduits in crawlspaces older than he was. That day, he remembered the lights dimming, just briefly, followed by the sound of pressure failure echoing through steel like a drumbeat from hell. The comms burst alive with a scream-but only for a second. Then silence. He ran. He always remembered the run. His boots scraping the floor grating, the fogged visor, the sound of his own breathing pounding louder than his heart echoing in his ears. But by the time he reached the corridor, there was nothing left. No body. No rescue. Just a maintenance bag spinning slowly in zero-g, one strap torn clean by shrapnel.

After that, he stopped asking who was in charge. Stopped trusting systems, or protocols, or bureaucrats who hadn’t felt the deck tremble under their feet. He welded. He repaired. He built-not because he dreamed of it, but because *something* had to hold. And if no one else would build it right, he would.

Two decades passed like station pulses-short, dim, rhythmic. He worked for everyone and no one. UNAS, Martian terraformers, Freebelt rigs half held together with glue and spit. Always the same job: get there, make it stable, get out before someone “up-chain” decided the funding was better spent on propaganda or weapons platforms.

The only thing that ever lasted was the work. Never the place.

Then came the whispers. Not just stories now-leaks. Project OLYSSIA. A unidirectional jump gate, tethered to a black hole in a system named Anubis. The last out. A corridor for the chosen, the fast, or the lucky.

People lost their minds. Politicians made speeches. UNAS cracked down. Grant made a list.

At the time, he was working aboard MCR Spine, a Martian drydock strung together with steel guilt and flickering life support. The heaters barely worked. The hydroponics were mostly moss and prayer. Outside the windows, Callisto hung like a frozen bruise. Inside, the engineers were scavenging old bulkhead panels for trade.

Grant didn’t announce his plans. He started liquidating-quietly. The old shuttle he’d been gutting for spare parts? Sold. His habitat shares in a failing Jovian outpost? Cashed. He reached out to people he trusted-well, people he could *predict*. A salvager from the Europa drift belt, a former foreman who owed him, and a long-haul pilot who still remembered how Grant had saved her rig from a reactor fire a decade back.

They didn’t go with him. He didn’t want them to. But they helped him pack everything he would need into a container rated for vacuum and impacts. The thing looked like any other medium-bay cargo module-but inside, it held the bones of a new beginning. Habitat scaffolding. Modular frame supports. Redundant oxygenators. Power coils. Drill heads. Processor kits. Not a single weapon. Not a gram of wasted space. He designed it himself, built it with his own hands, loaded it with the care of someone laying their own tombstone-and then shipped it ahead, under his own name, aboard the vessel that would carry him out of Sol forever.

The ship was called the Artemis. Not UNAS, not Martian, a private chartered under a civil consortium registered out of Saturn’s belt. Old ship. Reliable drive. No military escorts, no special treatment. But it had jump certification and a Gate slot, and that was all that mattered.

He arrived early. Always did.

Security was thin but strict-drones, facial scans, a long wait through medical decon. When they checked his manifest, the officer glanced at the contents.

“All this just for you?”

Grant nodded. “Solo crew.”

The officer arched a brow. “No passengers on this manifest-just you, two techs, a quartermaster, and five tons of colony-grade prefab. ”

“That’s the idea,” Grant said, voice flat. He didn’t elaborate.

Inside the holding bay, the crates were already secured. He walked the length of them slowly, hand brushing each cargo lock like he was checking a patient’s pulse. Every latch sealed. Every mark scannable. His life, in twelve metal boxes.

He took a seat near the bulkhead viewport and waited. The Gate was still ten hours from activation. The bay was quiet-just the low thrum of power cycling through induction coils, the hum of long-range scanners trying to make sense of a black hole they couldn’t yet see.

Across the hangar, other ships were prepping. Refugee barges. Sleeper pods. UNAS arks lined up with orbital escorts, painted sterile white and branded with mission codes like it made them righteous. Grant didn’t look at them long. That wasn’t his world anymore. Maybe it never was.

He took out a flask from his coat-metal, scuffed, filled with water that tasted like nickel filters-and sipped once. Then he fished the bolt out of his pocket.

It was always there. A 10mm hex bolt. Dull. Worn. The first thing he ever installed solo. Clarke Gamma, duct 3B. His father had said, *“You get this right, and no one dies. You get it wrong, and we all learn your name the hard way. “*

He got it right.

The station exploded three months later.

He kept the bolt anyway.

Now, he rolled it between thumb and forefinger, staring out the viewport at the stars. Somewhere out there, the Gate was coiled and waiting-alive with synchronized reactors, vibrating with math that bent reality just enough to let something through. They called it progress. He didn’t call it anything.

Because names didn’t matter out there. Specs did. Airflow did. Structural integrity did. Sol was noise now-too many people fighting for too little of what was left. Laws without teeth. Ideals without oxygen.

Anubis wasn’t a promise. It was a chance. One more build. One last unknown.

And if everything beyond that Gate turned out to be frozen hell or burning vacuum, so be it. At least he wouldn’t die patching someone else’s mistake.

He wasn’t here to find a better world.

He was here to make one.