The first chapter in the PoS superstory.

Chapter 0
The Gate

	The ship beams faintly in the dark, lighted by the faraway rays of unknown stars. I’m lost. I’ve been lost for centuries. I lived and died so many times that my past existences are barely memories drown in dreams. I explored every corner of this universe.  Every planet, every galaxy. Every civilization. I saw their beginnings and their demises. Their struggle to conquer, to fill their insatiable hunger to keep going, keep exploring, keep claiming, keep taking a piece of this dark-blue canvas, and call it theirs.  
	A beep in the cabin. A sound so simple and abrupt at once. The sonar was capturing a weak signal. Could it be it? I looked out from the shield. Forever darkness, eternal null. I shook my head. Maybe I smiled. I remembered the last human conversation I had, a few centuries before.

— It’s madness, a girl’s voice said.  
— It’s destiny.  
— No, E. It doesn’t exist. It never existed. Is this your call? How you want to spend your last centuries?  
— It is.  
A painful silence.  
— Goodbye, E. May the stories be always with you.

I closed my eyes. That was the last encounter I had with a human being in over two hundred years. Then, the strangest period of my life began. My solitude and stubbornness created a life that I didn’t recognize anymore. A life without people, without words, with nothing but stars and planets — always near and forever away. I used to waltz, at night, at the sound of lost songs from the 1970s and 1980s. Bowie, Queen. They were beautiful evenings, passing by the spectacles of birthing and dying stars, exploding in colors I’ve never seen before.  
	Then the record player finally broke. The days grew more and more similar. The universe, too, got colder. I passed the last human outpost a little over seventy years ago.  
	The rest is uncharted. No more maps. No more beacons. Nothing. Dark territory. Without stars, without planets. A dull, ominous, black blanket. The sudden disappearance of light made the past few years gloomy, beak. I got old. My skin became paler, my eyes were barely visible under the bags that were growing heavier by the day. But it was almost the end, I thought, looking at the emergency red light lighting up the cabin like a savage dagger. The heater had broken a few hours before. The temperature was getting lower every minute. The universe was taking over. My tired vessel was finally giving up.  
	To come this close, and miss? To reach the end of the universe and find nothing? I shivered. A skeleton ship with a skeleton captain, destined to roam the forever lands that no one will ever see. To haunt, to be forgotten. I wanted to scream, but I forgot how. Words were just thoughts at this point. I wanted to punch the instruments, open up the shield, destroy the glass. I wanted to become null, zero. To be annihilated. But I had no strength anymore. I was, suddenly, an old man. I could only shiver in silence, lost in the warm sea of my past lives’ memories. My hopes, my dreams were suddenly naked, wrong. I could see the lie I’ve been telling myself, like a prayer, over and over and over again. You need to keep going to find balance, like a mad bicycle. And yet, it’s only in that speed, in that prolonged journey, that I felt alive. I felt like I had a purpose. And now, suddenly, the veil was torn. And there was nothing behind it.  
	A beep broke the silence once again. I looked up to see a tiny point lighting up on the sonar’s screen. It was the first signal in a little more than 50 years. It could have well meant that the instrument was broken. Or space dust. A lost asteroid. Whatever that was, it suddenly disappeared from the dark green screen. A glitch.  
	I closed my eyes again, trying to figure out how I ended up there, at the very edge of the universe, dying on a ship stolen two centuries before. And the truth is, I don’t remember it anymore. It started off as a vague dream. All the worlds have already been explored, they said. There’s nothing left. What is an explorer, without worlds to chase? A driver, when he realizes he had already passed by all the roads that were ever built? That nothing new was standing? There needed to be something more. Something else. A place where all those stories weren’t just ending, but kept on living. That’s what I was looking for. The secret engine, the hidden core of the rest of the universe — that pulsating heart that was moving it all, and yet was inaccessible, was always a step away, like when children chase the long shadows of faraway sunsets. I spent years studying those who came before me. All those failed attempts. All those bankrupted expeditions. All the logs and records of obsolete ships that took my same course, and never arrived. I met them all, years before. Floating, lifeless, abandoned to their eternal, soundless lullaby. A dead caravan, a space graveyard. But I was now past the literature, past the story, past the records, past the ships. I was alone.  
	The beep burst again. That tiny point on the map was suddenly much closer and much bigger. I used all of my strength and stood up from the frozen chair. A deep panic took hold of me. Was I dreaming? Was I dead? The point kept coming closer every second.  
	The sound of an alarm exploded.  
	— Approach incoming, approach incoming, the speaker screamed from the depths of the cabin.  
	The rest of the instruments went crazy. They were sensing something that simply wasn’t there. I looked up from the window shield. Absolute, pure darkness. The voice changed again.  
	— Approach imminent, please break now.  
	The point on the radar was beeping more and more often. Every other alarm mechanism on the ship started to break out.  
	— Approach imminent, please break now.  
	I looked up one last time, and my breath froze.  
	And as the beeping kept rising, as the alarms kept bursting, as my shivering hands took the frail instruments and eventually commanded the ship to finally stop its tyrannic race across the worlds, and a light stronger than the strongest star flooded everything, blinding me and blinding the ship —then, in the last moment of my lucid wake I saw it — solemn, metallic, incomprehensibly singular.  
	At the end of the universe, there was a gate.