The NUKAN Project

INTRODUCTION

Lily always knew her father was different from other dads. He could close his eyes and see things that were miles away, or even years into the future, and he worked for a secret part of the government that no one was supposed to talk about. They called him a remote viewer, which meant he used only his mind to spy on enemies and find lost people without ever leaving his chair. But one day, when Lily was just twelve years old, her father went to work on a covert mission at a secret facility in a place she never knew the name of, and he never came back home.

The government men came to her house with sad faces and fake sympathy, telling her mother that her husband died in a terrible accident. They said the mission was scrapped, the project was closed forever, and the whole thing was just too dangerous to continue for anyone involved. Lily never believed their lies for one single second, because she knew her father was too smart and too careful to die from a simple mistake. She promised herself that night that she would grow up and find out what really happened to him, even if it meant breaking every rule in the book.

Now Lily was twenty-two years old, and she had already managed to mess up her life in almost every way possible. She dropped out of the state university after two years because she could not stop fighting with her professors, who said she was reckless and stubborn and refused to follow their instructions. Her fiancé, a gentle boy named Marcus who loved her wild heart, got pulled into a mysterious cult that wore black robes and spoke in whispers, and she lost him to their strange rituals just three months ago. On top of all that, the university finally kicked her out for good after she got into a screaming match with a senior professor named Dr. Harrow, who was supposed to be her boss on a very important project.

That project was about opening veils into other dimensions, alternate realities, and the multiverse, which sounded like science fiction but was actually real and very dangerous. Dr. Harrow thought he was the smartest man in the room, and he treated Lily like a dumb assistant who only existed to fetch his coffee and type his notes. But the truth was that Lily was ten times brighter than him, and she had already figured out the flaws in his math that would have gotten everyone killed if they had tried his method. She tried to tell him, but he would not listen, and the other professors feared her because they knew she was dangerous and reckless and too smart for her own good.

The cult that took Marcus was called the Veil Society, and they believed that our world was just a dream inside a bigger reality that they wanted to tear open. They thought that by sacrificing people like Marcus, they could punch holes in the sky and let something from the other side come through, something old and hungry and very wrong. Lily tried to save him, but she was too late, and watching him disappear into their circle of black fire broke something inside her that she did not think could ever be fixed. After that, she did not care about school or rules or what anyone thought of her, because the only thing that mattered now was finding answers.

But the world had other plans for Lily, because while she was busy falling apart, a mission of incredible importance was going terribly wrong many light years away from Earth. A team of astronauts had been sent to explore a strange and dangerous planet called Xylos-4, which was supposed to be empty but turned out to be full of things that did not want visitors. Their ship was damaged, their communications were failing, and the government back on Earth could not figure out how to bring them home before time ran out. They needed someone who could see what normal eyes could not see, someone reckless enough to try the impossible, and someone smart enough to actually pull it off, and that someone was Lily.

The government men who had taken her father came back to her life with a desperate offer that she never expected to hear. They told her that the remote viewing project was not really dead, just hidden, and that they needed her unique and dangerous talents to save the lost astronauts before they died out there in the black silence of space. Lily looked at them with her father’s eyes, cold and knowing, and she said she would do it on one condition: they had to tell her everything about the night her father died, no more lies and no more secrets. The men looked at each other, scared of her but more scared of losing the astronauts, and they nodded their heads in agreement.

So Lily packed a small bag with nothing but a change of clothes, a picture of Marcus, and her father’s old remote viewing journal that she had kept hidden for ten years. She walked away from her ruined apartment and her ruined life, and she got into a black car that took her to an airport that did not exist on any map. The plane flew for hours over empty ocean until they landed on a hidden runway cut into the side of a mountain, and Lily stepped out into the cold air of a secret facility that looked exactly like the one where her father had died. She did not feel scared, because she had already lost everything that mattered, and a girl with nothing left to lose is the most dangerous person in any room.

The facility was buried deep underground, with white hallways that all looked the same and doors that opened only for certain badges and certain eyes. Scientists in lab coats walked past her without saying hello, because they had been told she was trouble, and they were right to be afraid of what she could do. A tall woman with a sharp haircut and no smile introduced herself as Director Vance, and she told Lily that the lost astronauts had only eleven days of oxygen left before they would suffocate on that terrible planet. Eleven days to figure out how to see across the universe, find four human beings, and bring them home, all while fighting against the same dark forces that killed her father and stole Marcus away from her.

Lily sat down in the remote viewing chair, which was old and worn and still smelled faintly of her father’s cologne after all these years. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and she felt the whole facility go quiet around her as everyone waited to see if she would fail or fly. The distance to Xylos-4 was so far that light itself took twenty years to make the journey, but Lily was not using light to see, she was using something much older and much stranger. She opened her mind to the darkness between stars, and for the first time in ten years, she heard her father’s voice whispering to her from wherever dead remote viewers go when their bodies give out but their minds keep traveling.

The mission to save the astronauts was supposed to be impossible, but nobody told Lily that impossible was just a word that weak people used to explain why they never tried. She had lost her father, her fiancé, her school, and her reputation, but she had not lost her stubborn and reckless heart that refused to quit. The government feared her because she was dangerous, and the professor hated her because she was brighter than him, but the lost astronauts did not care about any of that, they just wanted to come home. And Lily, sitting alone in that cold underground room with her eyes closed and her mind on fire, was going to get them back or die trying, just like her father taught her to do.