The Fracture
| Classification | Origin Event |
| Estimated Occurrence | ~13.7 billion years ago |
| Official Designation | Primordial Expansion Event (PEE) |
| Common Name | The Fracture |
| Status | Unsolved Cosmological Anomaly |
Abstract
The universe did not begin with a bang.
It began with a wound.
The Event
According to prevailing cosmological models, our universe emerged from a singularity—infinite density collapsing into infinite expansion. Standard model. Accepted theory.
The math works. The observations align. The cosmic microwave background radiation tells a consistent story.
But the math has… irregularities.
Embedded in the fundamental equations that describe our universe’s birth are mathematical structures that shouldn’t exist. Discontinuities. Terms that cancel themselves out before they can affect any measurement. Ghost variables that appear and disappear in calculations like artifacts of a corrupted file.
Most physicists ignore them. Rounding errors, they say. Quantum foam fluctuations. Computational artifacts.
But some have noticed a pattern.
The Void Sectors
Scattered throughout known space are regions that don’t quite fit.
They’re not black holes. Not dark matter halos. Not nebulae or stellar nurseries.
They’re gaps.
The Void Sectors are areas where space itself seems… thinner. Where the cosmic microwave background radiation shows impossible cold spots. Where ships report navigation drift that can’t be explained by gravitational lensing. Where sensors occasionally detect particles that violate causality by existing before their creation events.
In these sectors, the universe feels younger—as if these pockets of space are still expanding at the rate they should have stopped expanding 13 billion years ago.
Most pilots avoid them. The navigation problems alone make them hazardous.
But in every Void Sector, you find something else.
Asteroids.
Thousands of them. Millions. Dense, improbable clusters of asteroidal debris with compositions that don’t match any known stellar formation process.
The Fragments
The asteroids in Void Sectors are old.
Isotope analysis consistently dates them to within the first hundred million years after the Big Bang—an era when planets and asteroids shouldn’t have existed yet. Stars were barely forming. Heavy elements were still being forged in first-generation supernovae.
Yet here they are. Rocky. Metallic. Rich in refined minerals that require geological processes that take billions of years.
They’re called Remnants in academic papers. Fragments in mining circles.
Most are worthless rock. But some—maybe one in ten thousand—contain something miners call substrate.
Substrate
It doesn’t appear on standard surveys.
Miners find it by accident. A drill cuts through ordinary rock and hits something that resists. Not harder rock. Resistant in a different way. Like drilling into frozen smoke.
Substrate looks like crystal, but it isn’t. It has mass, but less than it should. It reflects light at wavelengths that don’t exist on the visible spectrum—the color describes as “dark silver” or “negative shine.”
When extracted and refined, substrate has unusual properties:
- Perfect thermal conductivity at all temperatures
- Zero electrical resistance above 400 Kelvin (room-temperature superconductor)
- Structural integrity that increases under stress rather than decreasing
- Extremely high value on galactic markets (military, tech, research sectors)
Nobody knows what it is.
Chemical analysis shows it’s primarily carbon and silicon—but the molecular structure is wrong. The lattice is recursive, fractal, self-similar at every scale down to the atomic level.
It’s geometry that shouldn’t be stable. But it is.
The Whispers
Here’s where things get strange.
About 1 in 500 miners who extract substrate report… anomalies.
Persistent tinnitus that doesn’t show up on medical scans. Dreams of geometric patterns that resolve into star charts for regions of space that don’t exist. A feeling of being watched when alone in the extraction bay.
Most chalk it up to isolation psychosis. Deep-space mining is lonely work.
But then there are the incidents.
In 2403, a mining crew on the independent hauler Bitter Prospect extracted a substrate seam from an asteroid in Sector 47-Theta. Over the following three weeks, five crew members reported seeing their own reflections moving independently. Four reported hearing voices speaking in a language they described as “backwards math.”
The ship returned to port on schedule. Log files were intact. Cargo delivered.
But the crew couldn’t agree on how many days the trip took.
Ship logs said 19 days.
Three crew members insisted it was 22 days.
Two said it was 16.
The ship’s black box recorded 19 days, 14 hours, 37 minutes… and then, buried in the timestamp metadata, an extra 22 million seconds that the system had automatically corrected as an error.
The Truth Hiding in Plain Sight
Substrate isn’t mined from asteroids.
Substrate is the asteroids.
Or rather—substrate is what asteroids become when observed at a frequency beyond conventional matter.
You’re not drilling into rare crystals embedded in rock.
You’re drilling into space itself—and substrate is what happens when the wound in reality bleeds.
The Question Nobody Asks
If the universe began with a Fracture—a wound instead of a bang—then what caused the wound?
What was the universe cut away from?
And why do the Fragments—these impossible asteroids scattered through reality’s thin spots—why do they resist being observed?
Why does substrate exist in a state of quantum uncertainty until it’s extracted—until someone chooses to look at it and call it real?
Why does it feel like the asteroids are afraid of being found?
Miner’s Superstition
There’s an old joke in mining circles:
“The universe didn’t start with a bang. It started with someone saying ‘oops.‘”
Miners laugh.
But late at night, alone in the extraction bay with the drill cutting into another Fragment, listening to the sound of metal cutting stone that sounds almost like breathing—
—nobody’s laughing.
Addendum: Pattern Recognition
Dr. Elias Kade, xenoarchaeologist, disappeared in 2408 while researching Void Sector distribution patterns.
His final paper—unpublished, recovered from his personal files—contained a single image:
A map of all known Void Sectors, overlaid with the trajectory paths of extracted Fragments, animated across 13 billion years of backward-traced orbital mechanics.
When run in reverse—when you trace where the asteroids came from rather than where they’re going—
—they converge.
All of them. Every Fragment in every Void Sector across every observed region of space.
They converge on a single point.
A point in spacetime that existed 13.7 billion years ago.
A point with no coordinates.
Because coordinates require space to exist.
And at that moment, space was still bleeding into being, torn from somewhere else, leaking through a wound that should have healed but didn’t—
—and left behind Fragments.
Shrapnel from the Big Bang.
Evidence of the crime.
[END DOCUMENT]
Classification
Level: Public scientific record Clearance: None required
Advisory
Miner advisory councils recommend psychiatric evaluation for any personnel reporting perceptual anomalies after substrate extraction. Standard protocols apply.
See Also
- Void Sectors — Where the Fragments are found
- Substrate — The material extracted from Fragments
- United Mining Guild — Who profits from extraction
- Maven Cheung — A miner who found what was inside