Prologue · The Unfinished Biography
“Claude Evers was a genius, outstanding, and great scientist who forged a new century for humanity.”
This sentence is the first line of the preface to Biography of Claude. Today it is a banned book.
The author was named Liu Yao, a Superstarkin. Writer, actor, politician—three identities stacked on one person, inherently carrying a whiff of performance. He directed the movie adaptation of Biography of Claude and starred as Claude himself. A Superstarkin acting in a film as a human scientist branded a heretic.
The movie was banned. The book was banned. Liu Yao himself was later certified insane. Still later, people found him at the bottom of a cliff.
No one knows whether he jumped or fell.
After his death, Liu Yao’s students organized his class notes, which contained a valuation of Claude that the students copied verbatim:
“Claude invented and improved the solar sail—the prototype of modern spacecraft. He discovered limonite and applied it to superconducting technology, achieving zero power loss. These, and more besides.”
“And more besides.” —The sentence breaks off here, like Liu Yao himself, before it could be finished.
This is almost the most honest summary of Claude’s entire legacy. For those things that were “more besides” were later renamed, one by one.
I. The Signal
What Claude Evers discovered first was a technology surpassing electromagnetic waves. Humans called it “the Claude Signal.” It made transmitting information through a vacuum possible—unfettered by distance decay, unhindered by magnetic fields, like stringing an unbreakable telephone line through the void.
In an era when communication relied solely on light-speed delay and signal attenuation, the Claude Signal was humanity’s first step on the threshold of instant interstellar communication.
The government renamed this wave “the hypersignal.”
A substitution of names, neat and clean. From then on, in all textbooks, encyclopedias, and public databases, there were only the words “hypersignal.” Claude’s name was excised from the records of its birth. As though this wave had grown on its own—spontaneously “discovered” by some anonymous collective wisdom in some blurry stretch of history.
This was not an isolated case.
After the Claude Engine—humanity’s first long-range spatial transfer device—came into being, a young man named Geoffrey Bray called it “the Bray Engine” in public. He was twenty-one years younger than Claude. He did so merely to “attract attention.” At the time, Infernal scientists were not rare, so nobody paid much mind to it.
But later, Bray actually built the engine.
Except his engine and Claude’s original were not the same thing.
II. Enemies
Bray once sent an email to Claude. Its content was polite: I can help you improve the engine.
Claude looked at his model.
The model could indeed achieve living transfer—this was the shortcoming of the Claude Engine at the time, as it was only dared to be used for cargo and equipment, not living beings. But Bray’s design had a “small problem”: it damaged living functions during transfer. Arterial blockages, organ degradation, chronic disease at best, and at worst—
Claude publicly published a paper criticizing Bray’s design by name. The paper’s wording exceeded normal academic conventions. He called Bray a “terrorist.”
Those four words became Bray’s lifelong ammunition against Claude. One scientist calling another a terrorist looked like personal malice no matter how you viewed it. The scales of public opinion began to tilt from that moment.
Bray indeed made it later. The Bray Engine—Bruce Sinclair was his close friend and one of the “co-inventors”—solved the issue of living transfer. How much did it solve?
Public research showed: a three-year-old Infernal toddler, transferred from Berlin to Washington, aged a full year upon landing.
One life, transferred once, loses a year.
Bray and his allies responded: Infernals live longer than humans. We will overcome this hurdle in the future.
This statement was put on record, and no one held them accountable. Because the status of Infernals back then was roughly that of something you could use without needing to care about.
III. The Mentor
The history textbook’s final assessment of Claude was a single sentence:
“Claude was a complete scientific madman; he even deceived his own mentor, Gao Fangwen.”
Gao Fangwen.
This name appeared in Chapter 1. Rumor says he lived to four hundred. Rumor also says he died in a prison, his official crime being “theft.”
A man who brought the Source Stone back to Earth, a name that ought to be carved on a monument, ended up convicted of theft. What he stole was not written in the verdict.
And textbooks said he was Claude’s mentor.
What did this mean? It meant that the man who returned alive from the fissure of Neptune, from that green light belonging to no spectrum, lived on Earth for another four hundred years—long enough to personally mentor a student named Claude, long enough to see the stone he brought back turn from top secret to taboo, from taboo to legend, from legend to a novel nobody took seriously.
What did Gao Fangwen teach Claude?
Textbooks called it a hoax. Liu Yao’s biography called it a legacy. Two claims, from two texts of the same era, pointing in opposite directions.
No one knows the answer. Gao Fangwen died in prison. Claude also died in prison.
Two men who touched the same secret, in two different cell blocks—one lived four hundred years, while the other’s biography was never even finished.
IV. The Square
Brown Star. Quila Square.
Douglas Cromwell, Governor of Brown Star, stood on the high platform in the square. He was built broad, the medals on his chest glinting under the spotlights to the point of hurting one’s eyes. His voice was naturally suited for public speaking—deep, resolute, unquestionable.
Below gathered all the citizens of Brown Star. Claude stood beside the Governor, standing awkwardly, hands behind his back, motionless. He wore formal but ill-fitting clothes, looking like a scholar dragged straight out of a lab with no time to change.
Douglas spoke:
“This is a great day. Our outstanding scientist, Claude Evers, leading his team, has initially mastered the technology of spatial transfer. This will provide the strongest technological support for humanity to sail out of the Milky Way.”
The crowd cheered.
Claude stood on the stage; his lips parted slightly, then closed.
He did not say that crucial sentence.
—“This technology cannot yet be applied to living beings.” —He had spoken this sentence in person to Douglas thirty minutes earlier, in an office occupied by just the two of them. “Mr. Cromwell, I want to show you my latest achievement, and I hope you can use your influence to help promote it.”
“I will, Mr. Evers.”
“However, this technology cannot yet be applied to living beings.”
Douglas nodded and waved his hand, signaling that he could leave.
Claude remained anxious on his way back. If Bray published his engine ahead of him, it would be a true scientific disaster—an engine capable of transferring living beings while quietly killing them, released to the world under another man’s name.
He needed Douglas’s influence. Douglas was the Governor, the most powerful man on Brown Star, the only one who could buy him time and get the word out ahead of Bray.
Douglas indeed spoke for him. In Quila Square, before all citizens, under the spotlights and cameras.
He had simply swallowed the most important half of the condition.
Claude stood on stage. His mouth opened, then shut. He did not correct him.
No one knows why.
Later generations split into two camps on this. One side said he was immersed in his own joy, blinded by applause and flashbulbs, forgetting—or unwilling—to speak that mood-killing condition. The other side said he was never a pure scientist, merely a seeker of fame and gain, a man who surrendered truth willingly before power.
Both arguments held weight. Neither argument was complete.
Liu Yao wrote this scene in Biography of Claude. He wrote of Douglas’s arrogance, Claude’s awkward distress, and the cheering across the square. Then, at the very point where everyone most wanted an answer, he wrote a single line:
No one knows why Claude himself did not speak up.
No analysis. No speculation. No defense of the deceased.
Only this sentence.
Then he wrote the next chapter.
V. The Plastic Bag
Records following Quila Square were fragmented.
Claude’s team—those he trusted most—left one by one. Some received better offers, others were told, “Bray needs you more.” By the time Claude snapped back to reality, the laboratory around him was empty. The team he trusted now belonged to Bray.
The Bray Engine debuted. Carrying the selling point of “living transfer,” it flooded the entire interstellar travel market. The price—a year taken off one’s life per transfer. No one wrote this on the advertisement pages. An Infernal’s life, converted to Alliance credits, was roughly the profit of a single ticket.
Claude continued publishing papers. He publicly attacked Bray’s engine, his exact words being: “He altered the core architecture, causing irreversible harm to users.”
By this time, however, no one cared what Claude had to say. He was “that man who kept silent in the square,” “the loser envious of Bray,” “the petty coward who attacked others because he couldn’t handle living transfer himself.” The blades of public opinion were sharper than Bray’s emails, gouging the name “Claude” out of scientific history, cut by cut.
The Claude Signal became the hypersignal. The Claude Engine became the Bray Engine. The patent for the solar sail went to another company. For the superconducting application of limonite, textbooks didn’t mention the discoverer’s name in a single word.
In the end, history textbooks retained only one sentence—“Claude was a complete scientific madman.”
Then Claude died.
He died in a prison. The official account: he covered his face with a plastic bag and suffocated. In the cause-of-death field was written “suicide.”
Liu Yao did not depict Claude’s death in his biography. Not out of subtlety. He simply hadn’t reached this point.
Biography of Claude was never finished. Its last page stopped at an unsettling moment—Claude was still in his lab, the lights were still on, and the ore specimen still sat on the workbench.
And then, nothing more.
Identical to the ending of Gao Fangwen’s Memoirs. What followed seemed to have been neatly clipped away by someone.
Epilogue · Cheerful Air
September 9, 2553. Berlin.
Hubery Phillip’s forty-birthday banquet. He was a promoter of the Infernal rights movement, an orphan who crawled out of a trash heap and was raised by an Infernal cleaner named Sara, entering the Humboldt University history department at seventeen. Today, he was the center of Berlin’s social scene.
The banquet hall was filled with people. Only one was human—Hubery himself. The rest were all Infernals, red eyes glowing softly beneath the candlelight.
Bruce Sinclair and Geoffrey Bray were also seated. They were honored guests, social elites, allies of Infernal rights—at least for tonight.
“To be honest, I also think the Claude Engine is garbage, far inferior to the Bray Engine.” Sinclair raised his glass, his voice loud enough for neighboring tables to hear.
“Why mention him? Claude was just a scientific madman.” Bray said with a smile. When he smiled, the wrinkles around his eyes ran deep. He was no longer young.
Laughter echoed in the hall. Glasses clinked.
No one mentioned that plastic bag. No one mentioned the Claude Signal. No one mentioned whether that three-year-old child transferred from Berlin to Washington had aged another year.
That banned biography, along with the Superstarkin who wrote it, vanished off the cliff. That beam of green light brought back from Neptune’s depths waited quietly, patiently, inside an archive deeper than top secret, older than oblivion.
It could afford to wait.
It had already waited once.
—End of Chapter 2.