Shepherd Fox never feared speed.He feared stagnation—the death of innovation, the dulling of the edge, the moment when the machine stopped speaking to its maker.
Tonight, the machine screamed.
Wind tore past the prototype as it tore through the private desert track, a blur of silver wrapped around the impossible. The test vehicle, codenamed "Valkyrie," wasn't just fast—it was theoretical. No engine, no fuel, just a quantum-core pulse system powered by a Rift Engine—a design that violated every convention of propulsion and half the laws of thermodynamics.
Shepherd grinned behind the custom visor, his pulse synced with the energy surge building beneath him.
"Core is holding at 92% integrity," said the synthetic voice in his ear—ALIX, his lab's embedded AI. "Stabilizers green. No structural faults. Shepherd, we are go for Phase Three."
He flexed his fingers around the haptic wheel. "Copy. Initiating Rift sequence. Let's punch a hole through time."
His foot pressed into the throttle.
The cabin screamed with pressure. The world began to blur. The engine pulsed with an otherworldly thrum—more like a heartbeat than a combustion roar. Vibrations climbed through the car's frame, and lights on the dash flickered blue, then violet, then—
White.
A sudden flash—silent and consuming. Shepherd opened his mouth to scream, but his body had already disintegrated into light and data. Time fractured. Thought melted. For one infinite heartbeat, he felt every atom of his being stretch across a thousand timelines.
Then… impact.
Somewhere Else
He woke in silence.
A drip. Another. Something metallic rattled overhead. A flickering bulb buzzed weakly against the ceiling. The scent of oil, burnt rubber, and old steel filled the air like incense in a cathedral of machines.
Shepherd sat up fast, gasping. Pain flared in his chest—not broken bones, but something deeper. Alive. Buzzing. Like there was a coil wrapped around his heart and someone was charging it.
His skin was slick with sweat. His clothes were singed around the edges—same as before the crash—but his body? Whole. No blood. No glass. No seat harness. He was lying on a leather-covered bench in what looked like—
A garage.
The walls were lined with hanging tools. A stripped-down Dodge Challenger sat on blocks in the corner. Wires hung from an engine bay like exposed nerves. A nearby tool chest was scarred with years of hard use. Everything smelled like grease, rust, and stories.
Shepherd stumbled to his feet.
"ALIX?" he said aloud, tapping the side of his temple. No response. "Systems check—anything."
Silence.
Then a faint vibration beneath his sternum.
He froze. Placed a hand on his chest. The vibration pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat. Not just inside him. Part of him.
"What the hell..."
He found a cracked mirror on the garage wall. His face looked the same—gray eyes, light stubble, the scar under his jaw from that prototype fire two years ago—but the veins around his collarbone shimmered faintly with a silver-blue glow. Subdermal circuitry.
He lifted his shirt.
Centered over his sternum was a dark metal implant, no wider than a coin, embedded beneath the skin. Lines radiated from it like energy conduits. The Rift Core.
"No. No, no, no…" he muttered, stepping back. "It was never meant to interface with me. It was for the machine. Not…"
A sound cut through the panic. Footsteps. Heavy ones. Someone else was in the building.
Shepherd turned instinctively, looking for an exit. The garage door was shut, the windows high and dusty. He ducked behind the Challenger just as the side door creaked open.
A man stepped in—mid-forties, heavy boots, coveralls stained with oil. His walk was deliberate, cautious. He scanned the garage, muttering, "Thought I left the lights off…"
Shepherd held his breath.
"...and what the hell happened to the bench?"
The man moved closer to where Shepherd had been lying. Shepherd tensed, preparing to run. Then something on the workbench caught the stranger's eye.
A scorched crater. Right where Shepherd had awakened.
"I swear," the man muttered. "I ain't been drinkin' since Sunday."
He turned toward a nearby tool rack and Shepherd used the moment to slip across the garage. He crouched near a dusty shelf, eyes scanning the room for clues.
The posters on the wall were old race events. The tools were vintage. But a calendar on the wall caught his eye. It read 2023.
"Not a time jump…" Shepherd whispered. "A… place jump
...The man turned suddenly. "Who's there?!"
No one answered. Because Shepherd had already moved, retreating silently into the shadows. He slipped behind an old parts shelf as the man's boots echoed across the garage floor.
A moment later, the door slammed shut again.
He was gone.
Shepherd waited. Ten seconds. Thirty. A full minute. Only silence. Just the buzz of a dying fluorescent bulb and the soft ticking of a nearby engine cooling off.
He exhaled slowly. Muscles still tense.
Then he moved.
Not toward the exit—but deeper into the garage.
He needed answers.
A dusty wall calendar told him the date: June, 2011 That did not match his own timeline. But the tech on the shelves was older. Classic gear. Rebuilt engines, carburettors, NOS tanks. Things he hadn't seen in real-world performance labs in a decade.
He wiped grime off a laptop resting near the workbench. No password. A basic start-up screen flickered on—Windows, older gen. Files named Raceday Logs, Street_Tune_Calibrations, and NOS_BalanceMap. Nothing military. Nothing corporate.
"This isn't a lab…" he muttered. "This is a racer's garage."
Then, from outside—faint but clear—he heard it.
An engine revved. Deep, guttural, throaty. The sound of raw horsepower, not clean energy or electric hum. A street machine, tuned for illegal speed.
Shepherd stood frozen, heart racing.
He turned slowly toward the garage door.
The world outside wasn't his.
He wasn't just lost in space or tech.
He had crossed into a different reality.