Chapter 1

Chapter 1

2 years later.

The hum of the floor buffer echoed faintly through the empty halls of Calderwood University’s athletic complex. It was the kind of sound that could make a man feel like the last person on Earth—steady, dull, and unrelenting.

Eli Thompson guided the machine with one hand, the other tucked into the pocket of his hoodie. He moved down the long corridor of trophy cases, as he passed the trophies lining the hallway, his reflection flashed briefly in the glass. He turned his head quickly, eyes flicking away.

In one of the cases, a photograph of his father smiled back at him—Arthur Thompson, frozen mid-roar as he lifted the Calderwood Division II Championship Trophy over his head.

Arthur Thompson, MVP, 1998.

Eli’s gaze lingered too long this time. The hollow feeling in his chest stirred, bringing back the pain and grief. He exhaled through his nose, closing his eyes for a two count. When he opened them, he noticed the glass smudged with fingerprints from visitors who’d lingered too long earlier in the day. Their faint outlines remained, as if mocking him, waiting for someone to come along and wipe them clean. “I am that someone.” He muttered to himself.

His shift had started at 10 p.m., like it did every night. The building had emptied hours ago, leaving Eli to work alone. It was better this way—no small talk, no pitying looks, no one who knew his name.

Eli Thompson, once the future of basketball, now the tragic downfall.

Calderwood University’s custodial crew had hired him on as a night shift worker this past summer—his dad’s old teammate Mike Reynolds had dropped a word to the facilities manager.

“Just a little something to get you started, kid, maybe you can even enroll next semester?” Mike had said, patting him on the shoulder. Eli had no intentions of enrolling, but just smiled and said “Yeah, maybe.”

By the time Eli wheeled his cleaning cart out of the gym, the air outside had turned cool. He pulled his hoodie tighter around his shoulders and made his way across campus. Calderwood University’s campus looked beautiful under the pale glow of streetlights—ancient brick buildings, ivy-covered walls, walkways lined with old oaks. The physics building was next on his list, it loomed ahead, its windows glowing faintly like a beacon.

Eli had only been at Calderwood for about 6 months, starting 2 weeks before the semester started. He had been through most of the buildings, but it didn’t take long to figure out that the physics department was… different.

Every week, they seemed to cause some kind of minor catastrophe.

A campus wide blackout.

The fire alarm went off at least twice a week.

Tonight, was no different. As soon as he opened the building’s front door, the faint smell of burnt plastic hit him, followed by a distant crash and a string of muffled curses.

Eli sighed. This better not be an all-night type of clean up.

He pushed his cart toward the lab shaking his head, bracing himself for whatever mess they’d made this time.

When he reached the door, the chaos inside didn’t disappoint.

The physics lab hummed in the dim glow of emergency exit signs and the cold blue light of computer screens.

Eli leaned on his mop, his bad leg protesting as he took in the chaos. The place looked like a mad scientist's garage sale—whiteboards crammed with equations, half-dismantled machines strewn across tables, and cables snaking across the floor like veins. The air smelled like ozone, burnt coffee, and the faint metallic tang of liquid nitrogen.

Eli had met this crew during his second week, when they'd needed help cleaning up some failed experiment - a polymer foam that had expanded violently, swallowing two workstations whole. He still wasn't sure if the sticky residue in the corner would ever come out.

Liam was holding court by the main console as usual, his tweed blazer absurdly formal against the lab's grime. Eli had learned quickly that the sharp-eyed theorist considered everyone else intellectually inferior, though he made exceptions for Kelly, the human calculator currently folded into a chair, her frizzy hair obscuring the equations she'd scribbled on the desk, as she had “ran out of paper” she had told Eli.

Near the cryogenics station, Marcus and Sam were engaged in what looked like a heated debate, though Marcus's D20 earrings swung as he laughed. The stocky quantum mechanic was always ready to talk D&D, complete with dramatic hand gestures. Beside him, Sam's towering frame made his habitual clumsiness more dangerous - last month he'd taken out an entire sensor array by turning too fast.

Practical Sarah moved through the chaos like a surgeon, her braids pinned back and jumpsuit pockets stuffed with tools. She was the only one who ever thanked Eli for his work.

Nearby, engineers Raj and Nina worked in silent tandem, their matching grease stains and resistor-colored hair ties marking them as the lab's backbone.

“Seriously?” Eli said, leaning against the doorframe. “You guys trying to invent time travel or take us back to the dark ages?”

Six heads snapped toward him in unison. One stayed buried behind a computer.

Liam grinned sheepishly and flipped the extinguisher right-side-up. “Technically, we were stabilizing a quantum field generator.”

Eli raised an eyebrow. “Looks like the stabilizing needs some work.”

“Minor setback,” Liam replied, waving him off. “Totally normal.”

“Normal for who?” Eli muttered, pushing his cart into the room. “Next time, warn me before you guys tear a hole in the universe, I will take the day off.”

As Eli started sweeping up debris, Sarah stepped over, hands on her hips. Her dark hair was pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail, and her sharp eyes flicked to the mop in his hand.

“You know,” she said dryly, “you’re here so often we should just put you on the payroll. What do you say? Official physics department custodian?”

Liam snorted. “Nah, make him part of the team. He’s already more useful than Raj and Nina combined.”

“Hey!” Raj, typical looking grad student with unruly hair, protested from across the room, where he was fiddling with the charred remains of the machine. Nina elbowed him but didn’t bother defending herself.

Eli was pretty sure Raj and Nina were a thing. Nina was taller than Raj, she had dark brown skin and green eyes.

“Agreed,” Kelly, a small mousey blond with glasses falling down her nose, murmured from her usual perch behind a laptop. The room went silent for a beat as everyone stared at her, shocked. Kelly rarely said more than a few words in any given day.

“Wait, Kelly agrees?” Marcus said, clutching his chest dramatically. “Also, you get paid for this?”

Marcus was thin and lanky with brown eyes and dark skin, he always had a grin on his face.

Eli chuckled, “Great. Where do I pick up my lab coat?”

“You’d look good in one,” Marcus said, studying him. Then he tilted his head, his expression shifting. “You know, I have been thinking you look familiar.”

Eli stiffened slightly, well it was a good six months of anonymity, his hands tightening on the broom handle. “Don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” Marcus pressed, narrowing his eyes. “I’m sure I’ve seen you before.”

“Yeah, in here, every time we blow something up!” Raj said.

“Probably just recognizing the height,” Sam interrupted with a grin. “Us tall guys, man. What are you, six-four? If we’re not playing basketball, people act like it’s some kind of crime against humanity.”

Sam was the goofy tall kid. He looked like he shot up to over six foot five and just never figured out how his limbs worked. His glasses seemed too small for his face but he was always pushing them back up.

Eli half grinned, trying to find a way out of this.

Sarah noticed Eli’s lack of a normal comeback and jumped in, her tone breezy. “Or maybe he’s an undercover spy sent by MIT to sabotage us. You know, using his height to sneak into ventilation shafts.”

Sam snorted. “Ventilation shafts?”

Sarah elbowed him lightly. “I don’t know, I am tired and need to stop watching stupid spy movies.”

Eli, eager to deflect the attention, leaned on the broom handle and asked, “You’re all crazy smart. Like, ‘should-be-inventing-teleporters’ smart. So why are you at Calderwood? Why not MIT or somewhere with shiny labs and fancy grants?”

Marcus, perched on a stool near the table, grinned. “You think we’re not fancy enough for MIT? I’ll have you know this lab has three oscilloscopes, thank you very much.”

“And one of them actually works, sometimes.” Sam added, deadpan.

“I don’t even know what that means.” Eli said.

Sarah smirked and leaned against the desk, crossing her arms. “Eli’s got a point, though. Calderwood’s not exactly the Ivy League. You would think we are missing out on, like, golden hallways and robot butlers?”

“Yeah,” Liam said, tossing a wrench onto the cluttered workbench. “I cry myself to sleep every night over it.”

He shot Eli a look. “For the record, some of us could have gone to MIT. But we chose this.” Kelly just raised her hand behind her laptop and put it back down.

“Why?” Eli asked, raising an eyebrow.

Sarah straightened, her tone turning more serious. “Because Calderwood lets us do things those other places wouldn’t.”

“Like blow out the power grid?” Eli teased.

“Exactly,” Sarah replied with a laugh. “But seriously, it’s because of Professor Barlow. He’s… unconventional.”

“Unconventional?” Eli asked.

“He’s weird,” Marcus interjected, spinning a screwdriver in his hand. “But the good kind of weird. Like Doc Brown from Back to the Future. You know, without the time-traveling DeLorean. Yet.”

“Barlow’s the reason we’re here,” Sarah explained. “Most places—MIT, Stanford, whatever—they’d tell us to focus on things with ‘practical applications.’” She said looking around at the other students.

“Stuff that gets grants or tech patents. But Barlow? He doesn’t care about any of that. He just wants us to push boundaries.”

“Sure we have had multiple inquiries into our work, but Barlow ‘forgets’ to submit the paper work detailing exactly what the project is doing. And the Department of Energy just classified our grant as "theoretical" insisting that ‘no practical results expected.’” Liam explained.

Sam chimed in from the corner, where he was untangling a mess of cables. “He basically handed us the keys to the lab and said, ‘Go nuts.’”

“Exactly,” Sarah said, gesturing toward Sam. “That’s why Liam’s obsessed with him.”

Eli frowned, leaning his shoulder against the wall. “I figured Liam was just obsessed with himself.”

“Not untrue,” Nina muttered, not looking up from her soldering iron.

Raj and Sam just pointed at Nina as to say, “She is correct, but also she said it.”

Liam grinned and pointed a finger at her. “Hey, I heard that. But for the record, I’m also obsessed with Barlow’s theories. He wrote this paper a few years ago about resonant frequencies and the multiverse. Blew my mind.”

Liam looked over at Eli, “You know, creating worm holes to far away galaxies.”

“Uh-huh,” Sarah said, rolling her eyes. “It’s basically Liam’s Bible.”

Eli tilted his head at Sarah. “And you? You think Barlow’s close to these worm holes?”

Sarah hesitated, her fingers drumming lightly on the desk. “I think… it’s interesting. His ideas are wild, sure, but there’s something about them that feels possible. Like he’s seeing something no one else can.”

“Or he’s insane,” Marcus offered helpfully.

“That too,” Sarah said, smirking.

Eli nodded slowly. “That’s… kind of cool. Sounds like a mad scientist villain plot, but cool.”

“Reckless is kind of our brand,” Marcus said with a shrug.

“And Mad scientist is mine.” Liam said with a smirk on his face.

“Yup,” Sam agreed, untangling the last cable and tossing it onto the table. “And honestly, if the choice is between shiny labs and this chaos, I’d pick this every time.”

Eli couldn’t help but smile. As strange as they were, this group had something rare—a shared passion that tied them together.

It was something he hadn’t realized he missed.

When the lab was finally clean—or as clean as it could get—Eli wheeled his cart to the door.

Before stepping out, he turned back to the group, his voice dry. “Again, if you plan to rip any holes in the universe, let me know so I can call in sick.”

“No promises,” Liam called after him, already elbow-deep in another project.

The night air was crisp, carrying the faint scent of pine and damp earth. He was halfway across the quad when he heard the sharp, rhythmic beep of a truck backing up in the distance.

The sound cut through the quiet, its shrill pitch sending his mind back 2 years ago.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The faint beeping of monitors broke the silence. The fluorescent lights above burned too bright, blurring at the edges. Eli’s body felt heavy, foreign, like it wasn’t quite his anymore.

“Eli?”

The voice was familiar—Miles. His father’s best friend. Eli turned his head slowly, wincing as pain flared down his back. Miles was sitting beside the bed, his usually sharp features drawn and tired.

“Welcome back, kid,” Miles said, his voice soft.

Eli tried to speak, but his throat felt like sandpaper. “What…?”

“You’ve been out for a couple days,” Miles explained, hesitating before continuing. “You were in an accident. A bad one.”

Eli blinked, the words struggling to sink in. His memories came back in fragments: rain on the windshield, headlights, the sickening crunch of metal.

“My parents,” he rasped.

Miles’s expression shattered, and Eli knew the answer before he said it.

“I’m so sorry, Eli. They didn’t make it.”

The words hit him like a punch to the gut, stealing the air from his lungs. He stared at the ceiling, his vision blurring as hot tears slid down his face. The sound of the monitors beeped steadily, cruelly indifferent to the storm raging inside him.

Eli shook off the memory as he stepped into his apartment, his movements mechanical.

It had been a little over two years and he still thought back to that time once or twice a day.

His apartment was small, barely more than a box, with peeling wallpaper and secondhand furniture. He set his keys on the counter and grabbed a slice of leftover pizza from the fridge, tossing it into the microwave.

The low hum of the appliance filled the silence, grounding him. When it beeped, he grabbed the plate and sat on the couch, flicking on the PlayStation with a practiced motion.

The screen flared to life, bathing the room in blue light. His login screen appeared, and he stared at it for a moment.

Two accounts greeted him: one with a name that felt like it belonged to someone else—EliSwish_15—and the other, the one he used now, where no one knew him: QuietPhoenix23.

The friends list was empty.

All but one.

TheDungeonMaster_81.

Miles.

His phone buzzed on the coffee table.

Miles: Did you see the TikTok I sent earlier? Funniest thing you’ll see all week.
Miles: How are you holding up, kid? Don’t ghost me.

Eli picked up the phone, his thumb hovering over the screen.

After the accident, Eli’s phone had buzzed constantly. At first, it was friends, teammates, and coaches, their messages full of sympathy and encouragement.

““Let us know if you need anything, man.””
“You’ll be back stronger than ever.”
“We’re all here for you, Swish.”

Then came the reporters.

“Eli Thompson: From High School Phenom to Broken ‘What if.’”
“Basketball’s Brightest Future Dimmed Forever.”
“Rising Star’s Dreams Shattered in Tragic Crash.”

They swarmed the funeral, cameras flashing as Eli sat in the front row, his casted leg propped up on a chair. The pastor’s words about his parents were barely audible over the whispers and clicking shutters.

Miles had been the one to stand between him and the media.

As Miles rolled Eli out in his wheelchair. Miles had said.

“Ignore them, they don’t deserve your story.”

But ignoring them hadn’t stopped the headlines.

Eli blinked, the screen of his phone coming back into focus. He typed out a quick reply.

Eli: Shift was fine. Heating up some pizza. Hopping on PlayStation. You getting on?

He set the phone down and logged into his new account. The lobby music filled the room, cheerful and empty.

This was his routine: work, eat, play, sleep. And if he didn’t think too much about it, it was enough. Enough to keep him from thinking about the last two years at least.