3 YEARS BEFORE THE INCIDENT

“You don’t believe me, Dr. Rust.” Stanley Domin said matter-of-factly. 

Vivian Rust let out a small laugh. Their footsteps echoed cleanly as they made their way through a series of winding corridors. Akin to a cross between a hospital ward and an underground bunker, the facility’s halls were myriads of plain grey, pale white LED tube lights slitting each hallway down the belly. Every few meters, a blazing red logo sat upon the wall: a seven-pointed star, trapped in the middle of a winding, circular labyrinth. Vivian trailed behind Stanley, watching as people they passed muttered “Mr. Domin” in acknowledgement before glancing at her in thinly veiled curiosity. 

“Call me Vivian,” she said. “It’s very hard to believe. I speculated about what ‘The Daedalus Project’ could possibly be for you to slam so much money at me to come out to some desert in the middle of nowhere. I had a couple wild, wild ideas, Mr. Domin, but this was not one of them.”

“Call me Stanley,” he replied warmly. “I understand that this whole project is… unorthodox. But by now you should know how important it is. Here in our Labyrinth, we essentially hold what’s powering all of America. Fossil fuels only lasted us so long, and by then, it was far too late to switch to renewable energy. Even if we pulled that off,” he leaned down to swipe his keycard, opening another set of doors, “given the rate we were spitting out new toys — AI, supercomputers, hovercrafts — it might not have been enough.”

“I understand that, Mr. Do- Stanley,” Vivian said. “I just don’t understand how you did it. Everything I’ve learned, the Laws of Physics, common sense itself, states that this whole project, this ‘Labyrinth’, isn’t possible.”

The two stopped in front of a set of bulky doors labelled with bold, red text: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. They slid open to reveal heavy darkness. 

“See for yourself,” he said. 

Tentatively, Vivian peered into the shadows. As soon as she entered the room, machines hummed to life around her, computer screens blinking open, all flashing numbers and oscillating graphs. On the far side of the room, a control panel gleamed in the dim light.

“This room is known as the Observatory.” Stanley appeared beside her, surveying the shadows before striding over to the control panel and pressing down a button. Hissing softly, the walls in front of her sank down into the floor, and a dazzling white light flooded into the room. Startled at the abrupt brightness, Vivian’s eyes slammed shut. 

“It takes a while to adjust,” Stanley said, “but I recommend taking a look.”

The floor-to-ceiling glass in front of her was heavily tinted a shade of dark grey, but despite that, whatever was behind it still gleamed with a blinding white and gold. Snake-like pipes and great waterfalls of wires slunk around the room, shimmering in the heat. In the center was something akin to a disk, eerily perfect in its roundness. She could only glimpse bits and pieces out of the corner of her vision. Whenever she tried to stare directly at it, her eyes would slam shut, stinging circular afterimages burned onto the red of her eyelids.  

Her brow furrowed. 

“Is that…?” She gasped.

This Labyrinth housed no minotaur. Instead, encircled within shields of thick concrete to suppress its radiation, encased in state-of-the-art insulation, and bound to systems of pipes transferring the otherworldly heat throughout the facility, was a monster unlike anything Vivian Rust had ever seen before: a star.  

—————————————————————————————

137 YEARS AFTER THE INCIDENT

A beam of light cut through the dusty shadows. 

“Adam, look! It’s that symbol.” Xavier said, bringing his flashlight up and circling the red markings in a pale grey. A seven-pointed shape sat in the center, surrounded by an intricate pattern of lines. Underneath it read: THE LABYRINTH. THE DAEDALUS PROJECT. “I told you, we’re getting close.”

A smaller figure stumbled out of the darkness after him, leaning against the wall, the ghost of his footsteps ringing in the hall. “Are you sure?” Adam panted, out of breath. “Heck, we see that symbol every couple of minutes, how can you be sure we haven’t passed this one before?” 

Xavier let out a long sigh, watching specks of dust dance in the light. “I… don’t know. I guess it’s called ‘The Labyrinth’ for a reason.”

“I’m beginning to think that this was a very bad idea.” Adam massaged his temple with a huff. “We should’ve just listened for once, and stayed away. Everyone keeps saying that this place is cursed, and I’m beginning to believe it. There’s no moss, or leaves, or dirt. No cicadas, no roaches, no nothing. No trace of anything alive. Only that stupid symbol.” 

The dull star on the wall stared lifelessly back at them. 

“Oh, come on. We’ve come this far!” Xavier said, continuing onwards through the darkness. Adam hastily followed. “We’ve only heard about the Labyrinth in classes and stories and all,” he exclaimed. “A literal star used to be here, that’s like, magic.” 

“Yeah, ‘magic’ that decimated the Old World.” Adam said. 

“Hey, look. Any nuclear radiation would be long gone by now.” Xavier raised the metal gadget in his hand, waving it in the air. “And the moment the radiation levels increase even a little, we’re out of here.”

“If we even remember the way out.” Adam muttered under his breath.   

It seemed that time itself had also gotten lost in the Labyrinth’s winding halls. Occasionally, they would find rubble scattered on the ground or wires sticking out of a hole in the roof, and oftentimes they had to make their way around broken metal rods and unrecognisable debris. Aside from that, every corridor looked identical. The eeriest thing was the silence. Bleak, sterile silence. Nothing but the echo of their footsteps. 

“What do you think we’ll find at the end of this thing?” Xavier pondered out loud. 

Adam shrugged in the darkness. “Who knows? No one’s ever seen a dead star up close before.”

“Isn’t that exciting?” Xavier laughed. The shadows laughed back at him. “We’ll be the very first human beings to lay our eyes on one. Maybe it looks like it does in those sci-fi movies about the Incident, like smouldering embers. Or maybe it’s a supernova-!”

Abruptly, he heard the clatter of metal hitting concrete behind him. Xavier spun, eyes scanning the darkness. “Adam? Are you okay?”

“I, I think you should come and look at this.” Adam’s voice trembled, leaning down to pick up his flashlight. Xavier hurried over. 

“What’s wrong? What did you-!” He cut himself off as his eyes settled on what had stopped Adam in his tracks.

On the wall, was a symbol exactly like what they had seen hundreds of times over already, ‘THE LABYRINTH. THE DAEDALUS PROJECT.’ Except for one key difference: in blood red, someone had scribbled out the word “Daedalus,” replacing it with another. 

ICARUS.

—————————————————————————————

5 MONTHS BEFORE THE INCIDENT

He found her in the Observatory. Vivian heard his footsteps approaching, fast and harsh against the concrete. The door slid open with a heavy hiss. 

“I should kill you, right here and now.” Stanley Domin seethed, red in the face. 

“Don’t bother. We’ll all be gone soon anyways.” Vivian Rust deadpanned. 

Against all odds, he seemed to get even madder, his face growing redder even without the star’s pulsing light. 

“You don’t-!” He began, but Vivian quickly cut him off.

“Except I do, Domin. You think I’m stupid?” Vivan laughed. “You dragged me into this whole mess because you hit a dead end. You didn’t know what you were doing anymore, and of course you fucking didn’t!” Vivian took a step towards him. “You trapped a star in a man-made cage. What you’re playing with — what we’ve been playing with, it’s not science, Stanley. It’s not just science anymore. We’re testing God.” 

Her voice shook. “And God has had enough.”

“I saved the goddamn world, Vivian.” Stanley spat. “We saved the world. Mankind was biting off more than it could chew! Our energy was bleeding dry, and yet we still kept going, kept pushing the boundaries, building bigger machines, revelling in our creations like- like a dog, a dog that just kept devouring and devouring and devouring and stuffing itself to death. The Daedalus Project saved that stupid dog’s sorry arse.” 

“Mankind was never supposed to have that kind of power.” Vivian turned back towards the Observatory’s viewing panel with a sigh. 

The star glimmered silently in the distance. The metal pipes that once captured its heat glowed a painful red, dripping like melting wax. When she first arrived, the star had been no larger than a basketball, twenty-five-or-so centimeters in diameter. Now, it could fill an entire auditorium with angry, boiling red. 

“You told the world about her. Every major government body, every influential publication, everyone knows now.” Stanley said. “All of our work. The lengths we went in order to hide this — you ruined it all.”

“People deserve to know that their world is ending, Stanley.” Vivian said. “Over the past three months, we’ve had to relocate thrice because that thing is expanding at a rate faster than any of us could have predicted. Face it.” She turned to him. “This labyrinth we’ve built is not enough to contain a dying star. And when she dies…”

Stanley opened his mouth to speak. He closed it again. The two of them stood side by side, watching the celestial body in front of them. The star seemed to hum silently, basking in crimson light. Maybe it was humming, singing to itself in a frequency humans couldn’t hear. 

“But if people know now, well, they have time,” she said. “To prepare. Build bunkers. Hide.”

“The world hates us now, Dr. Rust.” Stanley said, voice cracking. Vivian glanced at him, brows furrowing in concern, before blinking in surprise. The man’s eyes glistened in the crimson light, silent rivers of red slipping down his weathered face. For all they’d been through, Vivian had never once seen Stanley Domin cry. Until now. 

“Why can’t they understand?” He rasped, barely audible. “I was doing this for them. I was only trying to save everyone. Now they- they hate us. They hate me.”

Vivan turned to him, and a strange thought crossed her mind: he looked like a child, his unbreakable image and dignity melting away with each sob that wracked his weary frame. But, at the end of the day, weren’t they all merely children? Children, who had played with fire and singed their fingertips. Children, who had flown too close to the sun. 

“Yes, the world hates us,” she said gently, eyes softening. “But at least there’s still going to be a world left to be hated by.” 

—————————————————————————————

137 YEARS AFTER THE INCIDENT

“Icarus, Icarus, Icarus,” Xavier murmured under his breath. “I wonder…”

A scream cut through the steady rhythm of their footsteps, and Xavier felt something crash into him. “Adam!” He flinched backwards, adrenaline spiking, before tripping over his own feet and tumbling to the ground. The other boy crumpled beside him, breathing heavily, stammering unintelligibly. 

“Adam, Adam, breathe, you’re gonna want to breathe,” Xavier heaved himself up, shaking Adam’s shoulders.

Adam didn’t say a word, his eyes wide, merely raising a trembling arm and pointing at something behind Xavier. 

Xavier froze. Gradually, he turned around. 

His stomach lurched as he flung himself away from the things, pressing himself against the cold wall. Were those… people? No, they remained unmoving, still. A man, it looked like, was running towards them, one leg still lifted. Another person was trailing behind him, arms outstretched. A few meters to their right, two people looked as if they were embracing. They were silhouettes, crisp black on grey concrete. 

Shadows without their bodies. 

“What- what are those?” Xavier whispered, eyes widening. 

With a shaky breath, Adam slumped into him, a quivering hand clasping Xavier’s. “I don’t- don’t know. Hey, you- you sure there’s no radiation? I- I don’t feel so good. Feel like vomiting.”

Xavier glanced down at the screen. “Nope, nothing. Ugh, I have a headache too.”

The two sat in the darkness for a bit, watching the silhouettes on the wall. 

“Why’d you think Icarus did it?” Adam asked.  

“Hm?” Xavier looked down at him.

“Fly towards the sun.” Adam closed his eyes. “Though his dad, smart guy, told him not to. They… they told us not to either.”

Xavier let out a stale laugh. “What? You aren’t making any sense, Adam. Hey.” He reached down and shook the other boy’s shoulders. “Don’t fall asleep on me here.”

“We flew anyway.” Adam let out a trembling sigh. “We- we shouldn’t have. Why didn’t we listen? Now we’re lost, and we’ll never-!” His breath quickened as he shrunk into his shoulders, eyes clenching shut. “It hurts, Xav’, it hurts, it- it’s, it’s cold. It’s so cold. Why is the sun so cold?”

“Adam!” Xavier grabbed him, panicking. The boy curled into a fetal position, stilling. “Adam, talk to me!”

“It’s,” Adam whispered, “it’s cold.”

Xavier pursed his lips, shivering. “Yeah, you’re right. The breeze isn’t helping either.”

Suddenly, he sat up. Adam peered at him groggily. “Wha’s  wrong?”

“Why is there… a breeze?” Xavier said, vision sharpening. “There’s wind! There’s wind, Adam, that means that we’ve reached the exit!”

He jumped up, before a massive wave of vertigo sent him crashing against the opposite wall. Still, he tried to ground himself, gasping in cool air, before reaching a hand out to pull Adam up again. “Come on!”

The two boys stumbled forward, hand in hand, the silhouettes on the wall dancing in the shadows of their swinging flashlights. Light, light, there was no doubt about it, there was light in the distance.

Xavier skidded to a stop, laughing. “We’re out of here, Adam, we-!”

His voice died in his throat. A gust of wind slammed into him, his eyes stinging. It was as if somebody had cut the halls they had been walking through right open, like dissecting a colossal, concrete frog. He gazed out at a great landscape of half-formed stairwells, corridors broken in two like a shattered bone, melted pipes bleeding out of its rubble wounds. 

In front of him, there was a gaping expanse of nothing. Nothing at all. Just an eternity of rubble and the infinite night sky. In the distance, however, he saw the strangest thing: colours. Gold, magenta, purple, red, they glimmered above the horizon like some celestial deity had descended to the Earth and weaved an eternal sunset into the air itself. They shifted and danced in glittering plumes, the brushstrokes of the wind swirling them together. Something deep in his trembling bones screamed at him to turn and flee, yet his eyes refused to tear themselves away, glued tightly to the mesmerizing waltz. 

The corpse of a star, iridescent blood and marbled guts sprawled across the rubble. It drifted like a jellyfish on the ocean’s surface, searching for the cold touch of space and only finding Earth’s dirty grasp. Xavier’s bones were right. No mortal was ever supposed to lay their eyes on something so pure, so angelic. 

Yet, he had. 

Why did Icarus do it? Xavier hadn’t answered when Adam asked him, but he knew, now. He felt like laughing. He felt like crying. He felt like everything — the cold and the colour and the concrete, all of it was spinning and spinning and spinning, he felt like vomiting, he felt like throwing his head back and screaming into the sky, he felt… he, he felt… he… 

He fell. 

—————————————————————————————

FOUR MINUTES BEFORE THE INCIDENT 

Blood red. Everything Vivian could see was painted blood red. The star gasped for air, spluttering and wheezing, spitting out writhing tendrils and showers of sparks. Vivian Rust and Stanley Domin stood side by side as alarms blared above them, gazing into the crimson abyss. 

“Hey, Stanley?” Vivian asked. 

“Yes?” 

“Why did you name it the Daedalus Project?”

Stanley furrowed his brows. “You know why. Daedalus was a brilliant inventor, and this complex is named after his labyrinth-”

“That’s not all, though, is it?” Vivian said. “You could have chosen any other name. Maybe even something star-related. But instead, you chose the name of some Greek inventor, forced to use his creations to trap a monster.”

Stanley hummed, watching the star writhe. “I did.”

“Not only that, but Daedalus isn’t only known for his Labyrinth.” Vivian said. “His son. Icarus.”

“Yes, Icarus.” Stanley murmured, turning the name over slowly in his mouth. 

The metal walls beyond the glass were beginning to melt, rigid plates coming apart in a dripping, mess. Melting wax, Vivian mused. How fitting. Despite the blaring screams of the alarm, despite the crimson light flooding into the room, despite the waxing waves of thick heat rolling over her, for a moment, all she felt was calm. 

Sweat beaded on her forehead. “Stanley, have we flown too high?” 

Stanley smiled quietly beside her. “Maybe we have. Maybe we have.”

“I wonder what Icarus felt like, the moment his wings dissolved,” she whispered. “When he reached for the sun, and, even for a moment, was higher in the sky than any mortal who had ever lived before.”

She breathed in, and out again. “I wonder what Icarus-”

With a silent shriek, the star took its dying breath. 

Then, there was Light.