The Gravity of Tomorrow
Copyright© 2026 by Sci-FiTy1972
Chapter 1: The Man Who Came Home
Ty Morgan came home the way most soldiers did.
Quietly. Without ceremony. With more carried inside him than anyone could see.
The airport in Fort Wayne didn’t stop for him. No flags, no applause, no brass band waiting at the gate. Just a tired terminal humming with ordinary life—families reuniting, business travelers rushing past, the low drone of announcements echoing through polished corridors. Ty stood in the middle of it all with his duffel slung over one shoulder, feeling like a ghost moving through a world that had already learned how to live without him.
Four years in the Army had taught him many things.
How to listen more than he spoke. How to move without being noticed. How to make decisions that never truly left you afterward.
What it hadn’t taught him was how to come back.
Civilian life was loud. Not just with sound, but with excess—too many words, too many opinions, too many people convinced that urgency meant importance. Ty noticed it everywhere: in conversations that spiraled into arguments over nothing, in news that changed tone by the hour, in a culture that seemed to shout because it had forgotten how to listen.
He didn’t judge it.
He just didn’t fit into it anymore.
His sister met him in the parking garage, throwing her arms around him so hard it knocked the breath from his lungs. He hugged her back just as tightly, grounding himself in something real, something that hadn’t changed while he was gone.
“Welcome home, big brother,” she said.
Ty smiled. “Good to be back.”
It was the truth. Just not the whole truth.
He took a small apartment on the edge of town—nothing fancy, nothing temporary. A place that felt neutral. He worked days repairing communications systems for a regional contractor, a job that fit him better than he expected. Radios, signal towers, network hardware—systems that depended on clarity and precision. He liked that machines didn’t lie to you. If something failed, it failed for a reason.
People were harder.
At night, when the city settled into quiet, Ty would sit at the small table by his window and stare at the lights across the street. Sometimes he thought about the men he’d served with. Sometimes he didn’t think at all—just let the silence exist without trying to fill it.
And sometimes, without realizing it, his hand drifted to his chest.
Beneath his shirt hung a thin chain. At its center, a small T-shaped pendant. And in that pendant, a black jewel that never reflected light.
He had found it in the Middle East two years earlier, in a place that hadn’t appeared on any map he’d been given.
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