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The night the sky tore open, Pip was lying on the hood of her grandmother’s red Ford F-150, trying to figure out what exactly she was meant to do with her life.
She wasn’t supposed to be out past eleven. Grandma had rules about the dangers that lurked in the dark, chief among them the mosquitoes ‘carrying mysterious government diseases’, as theorised by old man Isaiah at the grocer’s.
But the air was thick and warm and humming with late-summer boredom, and Grandma was at bingo at the local community centre. Pip had decided that if there was some extraordinary epiphany she was meant to have while stuck in this small town, it would probably have something to do with stargazing.
Nothing came to mind.
Maybe she would keep working at the comic book and VHS store forever, play video games, live small. Would that be so terrible?
A few planes blinked red on their way to the nearby military base. Otherwise, the universe remained unhelpfully silent.
With a sigh, she turned up the volume of her cassette player. The opening riff of Guns N’ Roses’ Sweet Child O’ Mine crackled through her headphones.
The air smelled of cut grass, gasoline, and one of her neighbours overcooking a steak. Probably her friend Zayne’s dad, who was always helpless when his wife went on her annual retreat.
Just as Axl Rose wailed, Where do we go?, the stars flickered.
Pip sat up.
A white seam split the sky.
Blinding light tore downward, in a fast and violent free-fall.
Pip rubbed her eyes. “Okay,” she whispered to absolutely no one. “Maybe old man Isaiah’s government conspiracy theories have some truth to them.”
The UFO would probably crash somewhere in the desert mountains, miles from town. A few neighbours might mention it at Saturday’s farmer’s market, peering over tomatoes and homemade jam, but when the local paper reported nothing, the story would fizzle out like all the others.
Except the light stopped mid-fall, fighting gravity. It zigzagged, corrected course, and then, after two brief light pulses, it plummeted straight behind the apple trees bordering her grandmother’s backyard. The thunderclap of the collision rattled the Ford’s windshield.
The ground shuddered. Pip whipped her head toward the hedge line, scanning the neighbouring roofs. The lights in her house, in Zayne’s next door, even in Xavier’s down the road, blinked out at once.
Her cassette player died on the first notes of Paradise City. Pip slid off the hood, pushing her headphones down around her neck, and held her breath in the sudden silence. The hairs on her bare arms, exposed by her tank top, prickled against the sudden chill.
There are moments in life where your brain politely suggests staying inside. Where it says, you are eighteen. You have college applications to think about. You have no business investigating airborne anomalies.
Pip vaulted the fence anyway.
The grove smelled of ozone, splintered wood, and scorched metal. At the far edge of the trees, a perfect crater smoked in the dirt.
Pip walked toward it warily, her heart racing like a drum, and saw that it was an oval chrome pod, sleek and reflective, like something designed by the creators of the Batmobile.
She didn’t have much time to inspect it. The panels hissed, sparks snapped along the seams, and a thin line began to glow faint blue.
Pip took a cautious step back just as the pod split open.
Inside, tangled in wires and dim emergency lights, was a young man.
At first glance, he looked human. His dark hair was tousled, his chest was rising and falling with unsteady breaths. But the light of the full Moon caught faint, pulsing circuitry along his arms and a soft glow in the seams of his dark gunmetal chest plate.
The suit hugged him like a second skin, flexible at the joints but armoured in places, humming faintly as if alive. As his visor retracted to reveal bright, alert eyes, subtle thrusters along his back and glinting panels suggested there was something in him a bit beyond mortal.
Pip focused on his eyes, his human-looking eyes, that made him seem like someone she might pass on a road trip two towns over.
No. His eyes weren’t alien.
They were confused.
And furious.
The boy tried to sit up without success. Sparks jumped from his shoulder joint.
Pip stared, mouth open.
He stared back.
“Where,” he said hoarsely, “am I?”
She blinked. “Lincoln, Nebraska?”
The young man did not respond immediately but he processed that like it was catastrophic news.
“What year is it?”
Pip’s mind, weaned on too much Doctor Who, made several rapid connections.
“Uh. July, nineteen eighty-seven?”
He closed his eyes briefly, like someone recalculating a math problem they desperately wished was wrong.
“That’s… inconvenient.”
Smoke started to curl from the edge of the pod.
Pip crossed her arms.
“Okay,” she said carefully, because this was clearly either a dream or a gas leak poisoning. “Time out, star-boy. You just fell out of the sky into my grandmother’s orchard, looking like a failed science fair experiment. So I’m going to need, like, a brochure explanation. Stat.”
He turned his head toward her fully now. Up close, she could see silvery fault lines along his collarbone.
“My name is Caleb,” he said slowly, attempting dignity while half-collapsed in a crater. “I’m a mecha-human prototype with neural-mechanical integration. I come from the future — you don’t need to know how far.” The last part came out snottily. She scoffed at him. “I need temporary shelter and access to basic mechanical tools.”
Pip laughed incredulously. “This is a family farm, not NASA.”
His gaze flicked toward the truck and the shed in her backyard.
In the distance, the porch light snapped on, electricity flickering back after being disturbed by whatever magnetic waves Caleb had emitted when he fell.
Pip’s eyes went wide as she realised what he was hoping for. “You cannot be here,” she hissed. “You are extremely not normal.”
He tried to push himself upright again and nearly short-circuited. “Neither,” he muttered darkly, “is the organisation looking for me.”
That did nothing to calm her. Pip looked at the boy, the metal breastplate, the smoke from his broken pod and the literal crater.
The boy looked right back at her, assessing her in his own way. “If they find me,” he said with a trembling veneer of calm, “you will also be located.”
“What’s this organisation?”
“They’re called EVER,” Caleb said flatly. “Cliff notes version is they’re a paramilitary organisation that does illegal human experimentation. And they are evil.”
“Yeah,” Pip agreed, rolling her eyes at him. "I got that from the illegal human experimentation bit.”
The night felt suddenly very small. Pip exhaled slowly. “You’ve been here five minutes,” she said, “and you’re already ruining my life.” She jabbed a thumb toward the shed. “You can stay there for the night, but if I hear any weird noises — or if you try to enter the house — I’m using my dad’s rifle without hesitation.”
Caleb blinked at her. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t cause any more trouble.”
“You better not!” Pip snapped.
She grabbed his arm and helped him to his feet. “Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
He took an unsteady step, somehow managing to look both heroic and ridiculous.
Pip guided him to the shed. An old couch leaned against the wall — her dad had moved it there after buying a new one when she was four. Next to it stood her mother’s woodcarving workbench. Shelves overflowed with car gear, garden tools, and a scattering of old DC comics.
Caleb grunted as he lowered himself onto the couch. His fingers danced over invisible buttons along the exo-suit, and the upper half of his armour retracted with a soft whir, detaching to reveal a simple beige tank top emblazoned with a band logo.
“AC/DC?” Pip enquired, curious.
He snorted at her judgmental stare. “I love listening to retro music.”
“They’re not so retro now,” Pip hurried to inform him. “They just had a tour last year. I read they’re recording a new album.”
Caleb’s mouth fell open. “Blow Up Your Video, right!” he marvelled. He tilted his head, obviously pleased. “Perhaps there’s something good about being stranded in the past.”
“I’m more of a Whitesnake, Dire Straits, and Mötley Crüe kind of girl but whatever floats your boat,” Pip told him. Then she eyed him critically. “I’ve got a few bottles of water here, in case of a boil water notice, and some snacks lying around for when I tinker with stuff.”
Caleb nodded, surveying the shed. He grabbed the water and a bag of shrimp-flavoured crisps, and settled into the ratty couch with its worn grey blanket draped over one arm.
Pip turned toward the door. “Okay, if anything happens — unless you’re, like, dying or that organisation is trying to break in — don’t shout.”
“Wait!” His voice wafted out from behind her.
“What now?”
“You never told me your name,” he said with amusement.
“Philippa Xia,” she said. “But everyone calls me Pip.”
Surprise parted his lips but he erased it with a twitch of his jaw. “Nice meeting you, Pip,” he told her affably. “Wish we’d met under less catastrophic circumstances… but honestly, I can’t think of any other way we could’ve met, so here’s to that.”
Pip huffed a small smile, narrowed her eyes in mock exasperation, and closed the door behind her.
Something impossible had just fallen from the sky, and she had to make sense of it before Grandma returned from bingo. The world had tilted on its axis, but she kept her cool — there was no way she was going to look out of her depth in front of a boy, of all things.
Meanwhile, in the shed, Caleb crouched over a flickering, transparent card-like device. Sparks danced along its edges, until the screen steadied and revealed an image of an older Philippa Xia.
A robotic female voice droned an excerpt from an article as he rose, reaching for a screwdriver on the shelf to prod at the faintly smoking seams of his exo-suit.
Philippa “Pip” Xia (b. 1969 – presumed lost 2034)
Philippa ‘Pip’ Xia is widely regarded as one of the foundational figures in early neural-mechanical augmentation through collaboration with EVER Group neurosurgeons and other specialists.
Disappearance and presumed death:
After her pioneering neural-mechanical integration method was released, she was reportedly involved in a catastrophic accident at the EVER facility, which also housed early prototypes of experimental time-travel devices.
The records are fragmented, and most presume she perished in the explosion. Yet by 2087, leading temporal physicists and chrononaut specialists speculate that fragments of her consciousness may have “splinched” across time, space, and multiple dimensions. Some believe that countless versions of her may yet exist, each living out pieces of her life in parallel timelines.
This ‘Pip’ might be exactly the person Caleb needed after a temporal crash. He dug into an internal pocket of his exo-suit and pulled out a small, lighter-shaped device. It looked like he’d finally have to put this to use.
Morning found Pip in a rare good mood. For the first time in years, the world felt interesting again. Barefoot, she padded into the kitchen, inhaling the warm, buttery smell of pancakes sizzling on the griddle.
“Morning, Pip,” Grandma said, flipping a pancake onto a plate with the practiced flick of her wrist and sliding it toward her.
“Morning, Gran!” Pip chirped, opening the old fridge, which groaned like a tired motorbike. She grabbed the strawberry syrup and a carton of apple juice.
“Don’t forget to save some of that juice for Caleb,” Grandma called casually, pouring more batter onto the hot pan.
“Caleb?!?!” Pip repeated, eyes widening in disbelief.
“Morning, Gran,” the so-called boy called behind her, innocently strolling through the backdoor with easy confidence. She whirled around. Caleb wore a pair of her dad’s old flared denim jeans, cinched with a black leather rocker’s belt, chains clinking from the loops. The belt still carried the white-and-blue rubber loom keychain Pip had made for her dad when she was eight. On top, he sported a different AC/DC shirt — a worn-out khaki green one, probably also swiped from her dad’s wardrobe. “Morning, Pipsqueak. Did you sleep well?”
“What are you doing here?” Pip demanded, barreling across the kitchen to jab him in the chest with her index finger. He only smirked at her in response. “Why does my Grandma know you?”
“Of course I know him,” Grandma said, cutting across them. “He’s only my adoptive grandson.”
“Your what?!” Pip rounded on Caleb again, as if he bore full responsibility for this delusion. Which he probably did.
“I know what this is about,” Grandma said sagely. “It’s the summer holidays, and you don’t want your big brother in your hair all the time. Well, don’t you worry, Pip — I’ve found him a job.” She glanced at Caleb, who looked like he’d been promised chocolate and got a lemon instead. Grandma nodded once, decisive. “Sylus at the repair shop is looking for help, old man Isaiah told me yesterday. You’re not loitering in my yard all summer until you go back to the Pilot Academy, young man.”
Caleb stared helplessly at Pip.
“What a grand idea, Grandma,” she said slowly, setting the plate on the table before grabbing Caleb’s hand and dragging him outside to the backyard.
“Caleb, what the fuck?” she snapped promptly. “You brainwashed Grandma!”
He at least had the decency to look sheepish. “Right,” he said. “I should probably tell you my stay’s… indefinite for the moment. I really need somewhere to stay, and your house is just prime real estate.” Caleb’s eyes practically sparkled as they roamed the backyard where they stood and then through the kitchen window. “High ceilings, airy space, a decent shed. In the future, this would cost about three kidneys and come with a waiting list.”
“Caleb,” Pip ground out through clenched teeth, “you can’t just hijack my life and pretend to be my brother.”
The boy leaned in slightly, all casual charm. “I’ll fix this,” he promised. “Once I repair my exo-suit and the pod, I’ll be gone as if I never showed up, I swear.”
Pip flopped onto the edge of the porch for a second, as she tried to breathe through the chaos in her brain. “Yeah, in the meantime you’ll even earn some cash at the auto shop.” Pip’s eyebrows arched as she circled him like a tiny general inspecting a rookie. “So, spark plugs, timing belts, bleeding brake lines — ever done any of that?”
“Please,” he said, mock-offended, standing a little taller. “I’m a man. I can drop a V8, replace the distributor, tune a carburetor, and still fix an old Tesla with my eyes closed.”
“A what?”
“Sorry,” Caleb clucked his tongue, “wrong decade.”
She smirked. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re actually doomed.”
He turned towards the kitchen again. “Mind if I grab some pancakes before the doom strikes?”
“Sure,” Pip said, easing up a little. “But the strawberry sauce is off-limits. And I’m never calling you my brother.”
She noted, with zero sisterly instinct, that his back was kind of impressive.
“Whatever makes you happy, Pipsqueak,” Caleb said, voice all snotty again, like he could read her mind.
They stepped into the kitchen, keeping their truce unspoken, and closed the door with a soft click.
“Pilot Academy, huh? For real?”
“For real. Well… Just not in this century.”
High above the town, something invisible adjusted its trajectory. Slowly, imperceptibly, it began a descent toward Earth, and the world below, blissfully unaware, went on eating breakfast.