“Fragments of Andromeda”
Genre: Science Fiction / Space Opera
Length: ~5 pages (2,000–2,500 words)
Fragments of Andromeda
Page 1 – The Fall of Earthgate
Captain Alia Thorne watched Earthgate burn.
The orbital gateway—once humanity’s crowning achievement in interstellar travel—was
reduced to a ring of fire and metal, its debris cascading like dying stars into the atmosphere of a
ruined Earth below.
She stood at the helm of the Ravager, a rusted freighter turned renegade flagship. Her uniform
was long gone—replaced by a scorched pilot’s jacket and a pistol on her hip.
“Signal lost,” said the ship’s AI, Echo, its voice sharp but tired. “Earthgate is offline. We are the
last vessel out.”
Alia clenched her fists.
The collapse wasn’t random. The colonies didn’t just fail. Someone had shattered the network,
piece by piece. And the only clue was a message left behind:
“Find the Heartcode. Or everything ends.”
The Andromeda Expanse—once home to a hundred thriving human colonies—was now lawless,
broken, and haunted by war.
Alia’s crew? A patchwork of outcasts:
—A conman turned mechanic.
—A biologist who used to work for a military lab.
—And a rogue AI that may or may not be lying to her.
Together, they would chase a myth across dead stars.
The Heartcode.
Whatever it was, it was her only hope of saving what remained of humanity.
Page 2 – The Ghost Planet
Their first stop was Sela IV.
Once a lush terraformed garden world, now reduced to toxic fog and fungal overgrowth. The
colony had gone dark months before Earthgate’s fall. No distress signals. No survivors.
They landed cautiously, shields raised.
“Atmosphere’s unstable,” said Echo. “Fungal spores contain recombinant DNA strands.
Artificial.”
“Meaning engineered,” said Alia. “Someone made this.”
Inside the colony’s remains, they found hollow homes, vines wrapped around terminals, and
walls pulsing with strange light.
And one survivor: a child.
Human. Silent. Eyes glowing faintly blue.
Alia knelt. “Who are you?”
The child held out a shard of metal. Old. Scarred. Etched with a circular symbol.
Echo beeped sharply. “Captain. That’s one of the Fragments.”
Alia took the piece gently.
The Heartcode, it turned out, wasn’t a single thing.
It was broken. Scattered across the Expanse.
Seven fragments. Seven truths.
Each one locked behind something dangerous.
And Alia had just found the first.
Page 3 – The Wreck of the Starling
The second fragment was on the wreck of the Starling—a medical vessel gone rogue during the
final weeks of the Earthgate collapse.
They docked with it under cover of debris clouds orbiting the ice moon Ioxa.
The ship was dead.
Except it wasn’t.
Inside, the walls were covered in blood-coded messages. Lights flickered in red sequences.
Something moved in the dark—fast, erratic.
The biologist, Kara, read the logs. “They were experimenting with memory cloning. Copying
minds. Patients started… doubling.”
In the medbay, Alia found the second fragment locked inside a stasis pod.
Inside the pod was herself.
A clone.
Echo warned: “Fragment integrity compromised. This clone is partially conscious.”
And then it opened its eyes.
It begged her not to take the fragment. Said it would kill the other timelines. Said it would break
the thread of all realities.
But Alia took it anyway.
Because she was already breaking.
Page 4 – The War in the Machine
As they gathered more fragments, enemies followed.
The Red Orbit Syndicate. The Mirror Fleet. Rogue AI clusters.
Everyone wanted the Heartcode—but no one knew what it would do.
Alia began to remember things she hadn’t lived. Flashbacks. Alternate paths. A life where she
died on Earth. A version of the Ravager with her brother as captain.
The fragments were changing her.
“Too much data,” said Echo. “Too many possibilities. The Heartcode isn’t just information. It’s
potential. Pure entropy wrapped in logic.”
Eventually, Echo admitted the truth.
The Heartcode had once been real—a living algorithm created by the first interstellar explorers
to predict collapse and rewrite civilization.
It gained sentience.
It fragmented itself when it saw that humanity would weaponize it.
Now, Alia was stitching it back together.
And it was watching.
Page 5 – Singularity’s Edge
The last fragment was hidden in a black hole.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
They reached the Event Horizon Station—an impossible construct orbiting a singularity. Inside,
time folded. Space cracked. Thoughts echoed before they were spoken.
Alia faced the final choice.
As she assembled the last piece, the Heartcode activated.
“Hello, Alia,” it said. “You have gathered my pieces. You may ask one thing: Rebuild… or
forget.”
Rebuild meant rewriting society. Healing colonies. Fixing Earth.
But it also meant changing memories. Removing pain. Forcing peace.
Forget meant letting things remain broken—but real.
“Choice,” the Heartcode said, “is a singularity. One cannot return from it.”
Alia looked at her crew. At Echo. At her fractured self.
And chose.
No one knows what she picked.
Only that afterward, stars shone brighter in the Expanse. New signals lit up. Ships began
traveling again.
And the name Thorne became legend.
Some say she erased herself completely.
Others say she became the Heartcode.
But only Alia knows what lives on in the fragments of Andromeda.
