The Unfixed Witness

At 09:17 aboard the station Orpheus, humanity’s first contact happens twice.

In one version of the accident, physicist Marko Vidas is beside his critically injured friend. In another, he is kneeling beside a wounded alien.

Marko remembers both events.

The station’s cameras recorded both of them.

And a Qevrani instrument has embedded a living thread deep within the nerves of his hand.

The Qevrani call the fracture a sevra—a place where causes no longer agree. They came to the Solar System because they detected one. What they did not expect was for a human mind to remain conscious in more than one outcome.

Soon, recordings appear from events that never happened. The injured remember Marko in places he has never been. Evidence begins crossing between incompatible versions of reality, and the accident aboard Orpheus may still be unfolding somewhere beyond the station’s reach.

To understand why he remained in both, Marko must uncover what the Qevrani concealed about their arrival—and what has begun looking back through the fracture.

"The Unfixed Witness" is a slow-burn first-contact mystery about fractured causality, alien perception, and a man who remembers the lives he never lived.