There are people who are born chasing something—dreams, ideals, fame, love. And then there are those like him. People who wandered through life not because they had no direction, but because no direction ever seemed worth the walk.
Author Gale was lazy, not stupid. For as long as he could remember, he'd been trapped in a world that didn't offer him anything worth chasing. Sure, people told him to "find his passion," but how could he when the world seemed so limited? Everything he wanted was impossible. Power? Freedom? A world that wasn't so predictable? He lacked the talent, the willpower, and most importantly, the patience to achieve any of it.
That all changed when the satellite fell from the sky and hit him square on the head.
When Author Gale woke up, the first thing he noticed was the quiet rhythm of machines. Beep. Beep. Beep. The second thing was pain—dull, deep, and everywhere.
"Welcome back," said a voice, soft but alert. A nurse leaned over him, tablet in hand. "You're lucky to be alive. That satellite came down like a meteor. Honestly, I don't know how you're still breathing."
"Was it… American?" Gale croaked. "The satellite."
She blinked. "Uh… Chinese, actually. Or maybe Russian? They're still arguing about it."
Gale closed his eyes. Satellites. Orbit. Decay rate. Velocity at impact… wait. How did he know any of that?
Something clicked in his brain like a door opening. Equations unspooled in his head. The nurse was still talking, but her voice faded into the background.
"Escape velocity," he muttered. "Why does that equation feel… inefficient?"
"What?"
"Never mind." He glanced around. "Do you have a pen? No—paper. I need to write."
The nurse raised an eyebrow. "You can't even move your legs, and you want to write?"
"I just figured out how to build a magnetic lens that can bend gravity," he said, dead serious. "If I don't get it down, it's gone."
There was a long silence.
"…I'll get the doctor," she said slowly, backing out of the room.
Gale leaned back and stared at the ceiling. What the hell is happening to me? He didn't know how. He didn't know why. But he knew this wasn't normal.
It took two weeks of physical therapy, a mountain of paperwork, and a psych evaluation to convince the hospital to let him go. Gale passed all of them with flying colors—though he couldn't resist correcting the therapist's use of neuroplasticity in session three.
Now, he stood in front of his condo door, plastic hospital bag slung over one arm. His key trembled a bit in his hand—leftover nerve damage, they said. He told them it was anticipation.
"Well," he muttered, staring at the chipped numbers on his door, "home sweet overpriced rental box."
He pushed the door open. Same creaky hinges. Same dim hallway. Same dusty stack of ignored mail on the floor.
"I survived being orbital-struck by a Chinese satellite, and somehow this carpet still smells like ramen and cat piss." No cat, though. Never had one. The smell was legacy.
He dropped the bag on the couch, collapsed beside it, and stared at the ceiling. Everything looked the same. But his brain wouldn't stop.
He remembered facts he didn't know he'd ever learned. Every physics formula, from Newtonian to quantum, danced in his mind like a carousel on fast-forward. Then theology slipped in — paradoxes, proofs, holy texts, all flowing as if they shared the same underlying code. Magic too, not fantasy magic, but… the logic of it. Systems that bent causality with rules so clean they could pass peer review.
"This is either enlightenment," he muttered, "or a very creative coma dream."
He sat up suddenly. "Wait. I just mentally derived the Aleph-Null Resonance Theory… and I don't even think that exists yet."
Gale flopped back onto his couch, still sore in places he didn't know had nerves. His fingers twitched with leftover tremors, but they worked well enough to unlock his phone. Notifications piled up like guilt — missed calls, news pings, something about space debris, and a dozen "are you alive?" messages.
He ignored them all and opened a blank note. Five minutes later, he'd written what might be the unified field theory. Ten minutes later, he accidentally rewrote the laws of conservation.
Out of habit, he tweeted a cryptic line: "Gravity is a lazy liar." Then opened Reddit, scrolled through nonsense, and commented on a physics thread under his old handle: @LazyInertia.
Three minutes later, his phone rang.
Caller: Riley.
Riley (voice): "Bro. What the hell? You almost died and now you're live-posting like nothing happened?"
Gale: "I was bored. And technically, I just got mildly obliterated."
Riley: "You're trending. Reddit thinks you're either the Antichrist or a simulation glitch."
Gale: "Honestly, I'd vote glitch."
Three months later...
Gale stood in the middle of his living room, staring at the wall like it owed him answers.
He had already 3D-printed a solid gold cube using aluminum, carbon, and sheer disrespect for the periodic table. He reverse-engineered cold fusion in his rice cooker. He'd written an algorithm that could bankrupt a stock exchange before breakfast—then deleted it, because he figured that'd be a bit much for a Tuesday.
Now he was bored. Again.
Gale sat with his laptop open and three screens glowing:One showed an equation predicting the heat death of the universe.One was paused on a cat video.One was asking him to log in to LinkedIn. Again.
He stared at them.
Gale:
"I could fix global warming in an afternoon… or invent a self-petting cat bed.""Why not both?"
He spun slowly in his desk chair like a haunted office worker.
"Okay, what do people with infinite intelligence do after they beat the game of life?""Speedrun it? Mod it? Break it for fun?"
He pulled up a doc titled: 'Plan: Become God?'The only bullet point so far was: "Pros: omnipotence. Cons: potential smiting."
He deleted it.
Suddenly, a voice pinged through his apartment.He forgot he'd left the assistant AI running.
AIVA (flat, synthetic):
"You have been idle for 47 minutes. Would you like me to recommend productivity apps?"
Gale:
"How about a nap app that lets me astral project?"
AIVA:
"Searching… I found thirty-seven unverified options. Most involve chanting."
Gale:
"Tempting."
He walked to the window. The city buzzed below, full of people chasing jobs, rent, lovers, and overpriced coffee.
Gale had outgrown all of it.But instead of feeling powerful, he felt… detached.Like a gamer who unlocked god mode but forgot what the quest was.
Then it hit him:If the world was too small for him now… maybe he had to build something bigger.
Gale (quietly mutter):"What's the biggest thing a human mind can reach?"
He opened a new note and typed two words:
Another World.
Six years,that's how long it took Gale to go from "guy who got hit by a satellite" to "tech mogul with questionable ethics and untouchable patents."
He never gave any interviews. Never showed his face. And yet somehow, his inventions were everywhere.
A phone that charged in ten seconds.
A water purifier the size of a coin.
A coffee maker that brewed based on your mood (still in beta — it once made cyanide when someone was sad).
The internet called him "The Ghost Engineer."
The conspiracy forums were already certain he was the reincarnation of Nikola Tesla.
Riley, his former roommate, just called him "Moneybags McLaserbrain."
Gale stood inside his private lab, a twenty-story tower in the middle of absolutely nowhere, surrounded by sand, sky, and silence. Perfect for working. Or going insane.
His eyes were fixed on the holographic structure floating in front of him — a glowing tangle of rings and impossible angles.
"Still too early," he muttered. "If I opened this now, I'd probably tear a hole in the universe the size of Brazil."
A pause.
"…Which honestly sounds kind of fun, but let's not."
His personal assistant, Mira, stepped into the lab — tablet in hand, dressed in sleek corporate black and wearing the permanent expression of someone underpaid for the nonsense she dealt with.
Mira: "Your 2 PM meeting is here. Some investor from Japan. He wants to buy the gravity anchor patent."
Gale: "Mmm. Did he bring snacks?"
Mira: "No."
Gale: "Then tell him no. But make it sound like I'm deeply honored and spiritually touched by his offer."
Mira: "You want me to emoji that?"
Gale: "Smiley face. Maybe a koi fish."
She sighed and left. He loved Mira. She never asked what he was building. Just handled logistics and made sure he didn't forget to eat.
Speaking of…
Gale looked down at the digital simulation again.
It pulsed faintly. Not in color, but in… pressure. As if the model itself knew it shouldn't exist.
The Singular Gate.
That's what he called it now.
He still didn't know what it was. Not exactly. Just that it should be possible.
A machine that pierced the rules. Bent the logic of this world and reached for something outside. Not magic. Not science.
Something else.
"Just a little more," he whispered.
"One more breakthrough. One more push."
He smiled.
Then blinked.
Then frowned.
"…Did I eat today?"
Authur Von Gale. Age: 53.
The name sounded like it belonged to a war hero, not a man who once argued with a microwave and lost.
His beard had gone gray. His hair, thinner. But his eyes still burned with that restless gleam — the one that had carried him through three decades of obsession.
And now, it stood before him.
The Singular Gate.
It didn't look like a gate. Not in the traditional sense.
No golden archways. No glowing runes.
Just a circular, rotating structure — layers of invisible geometry folding over each other in ways reality shouldn't allow.
It didn't hum. It didn't shine. It simply was.
Gale (narrating internally):
"Twenty-nine years. That's how long it took to teach a machine what it means to be human… and then, what it means to be free."
He'd gone mad at least five times during the process.
Not because the math was hard. But because human values were so… stupidly inconsistent.
One person's joy was another's curse.
One man wanted peace. Another wanted war.
Someone thought pineapple on pizza was freedom. Another thought it was a war crime.
And dogs? Dogs thought eating garbage was a good day.
How do you code that into logic?
So he built an adaptive learning engine — something that could analyze human media, history, art, behavior, memes, and madness.
It absorbed everything: tragedies, novels, sitcoms, Reddit arguments, bad fanfiction, war documentaries, cat videos.
Then, it built a framework. A map of what "freedom" looked like for the average human mind.
And that was the only thing Gale could control.
"I didn't decide what you'll become," he muttered, placing a hand on the machine.
"That's up to the system now. Dragon, god, peasant, sword, ghost — I don't care. As long as it's freedom."
What came after?
Completely random.
The Gate didn't promise safety. Or peace. Or glory.
Just that, wherever he went, he wouldn't be trapped anymore.
No gravity of expectation.
No boring laws of physics.
No more limits.
Gale (smirking):
"Knowing my luck, I'll reincarnate as a rock with Wi-Fi."
He paused.
"…That actually doesn't sound too bad."
Lights shifted. Rings aligned.
The structure began to glow — not visibly, but in something deeper. Something that tugged at the soul.
It was ready.
And so was he.
White clouds drifted past him.
No ground. No sky.
Just light.
Just data.
Just fragments of thought, floating in a space that didn't exist.
Gale didn't know if this was a loading screen, a dream, or a hallucination caused by a wormhole tearing apart his nervous system.
Doesn't matter, he thought lazily.
He floated.
Arms crossed behind his head.
Body upside down.
Expression? Half-asleep.
Just how he liked it.
The scenery changed again.
The white clouds became glowing lines of code. Then static. Then nothing.
Gale didn't react. His eyes just tracked it all slowly, like watching clouds from a tower rooftop.
"People always thought I was lazy," he said to nobody in particular.
"I wasn't. I was just… content. I liked grass. That's it."
And it was true.
All he ever wanted was to lie on a hill, wind brushing against his face, with no deadlines, no sirens, no noise.
No goals. No hustle. No grind.
Just… quiet.
But the world didn't like quiet people.
The memory came like a pulse.
The smoke.
The ash.
The sound of sirens that never stopped.
Burning cities flickering on the news.
Governments falling like dominoes.
Gas masks becoming school uniforms.
"World War III," he muttered, eyes half-lidded.
"Really killed the vibe."
The floating changed. Now he drifted through images — like broken TV frames.
A child coughing into cloth.
A city buried under ash.
A meadow turned to mud.
A tower crushed by shockwaves.
He had watched it all happen. Watched the systems fall apart.
Watched corporations swallow governments. Watched the sky turn gray.
Watched his favorite hill get bulldozed to build a "breathable residential complex."
That's when something in him cracked.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just… cracked.
Like a branch bending one time too many.
"If the world's broken," he whispered, "then I'll find one that isn't."
That was it. That was the reason.
Not justice.
Not revenge.
Not ambition.
Just a man who missed the wind.
And so he spent thirty years — not chasing greatness, not dreaming of godhood —
but trying to build a machine that would let him lie down in peace again.
A Singular Gate.
One shot.
One escape.
To a world that might let him breathe again.
He blinked.
Light enveloped him. The space folded in on itself.
The clouds disappeared. The code disassembled.
And somewhere in that swirl of sensation and silence…
…he smiled.
"Please," he whispered to the machine.
"Anywhere with grass."