Time passed with a relentless rhythm aboard the Voyager. For Liam, every day blurred into the next—wake, train, rest, repeat.

The monotony would have driven most people insane, but for someone like Liam, each day brought measurable progress worth the isolation.

His training regimen was brutal by design. Six hours of intensive power development, pushing his telekinetic abilities until his skull felt like it would split open. Four hours of lighter practice, refining control and exploring the boundaries of his electromagnetic sense. Then rest periods that weren't really rest at all, as his body and mind worked overtime to repair the damage he'd inflicted on himself.

The physical toll was severe. Nosebleeds became routine, headaches followed every training session, throbbing pulses behind his eyes that would have hospitalized an ordinary person and dizziness struck without warning, his inner ear confused by the constant mental strain.

For anyone else, this training would have been suicidal. Pushing mental capacity to absolute limits day after day should have caused permanent neurological damage—strokes, aneurysms, cognitive degradation. But Liam possessed three crucial advantages that made the impossible merely painful.

First, his molecular enhancement. The nanites had restructured him at the cellular level, reinforcing neural pathways and strengthening blood vessels in ways that conventional biology couldn't achieve. His brain could withstand stresses that would kill unenhanced humans.

Second, his physical stats. He was at least five times stronger than the most elite trained human, and that advantage extended beyond muscle to every system in his body. His cardiovascular system could handle the blood pressure spike.

Third, and most importantly, his regeneration trait. So, while every training session damaged him, every rest period restored him—stronger than before, with slightly higher tolerances, marginally better capacity. It was painful evolution compressed into weeks instead of millennia.

The results spoke for themselves. His flight speed had increased from 900 km/h to nearly 1,100 km/h at maximum, with cruising speeds up to 750 km/h. His telekinetic radius had expanded to forty-five meters, and within that sphere, he could now crush level five military-grade steel with focused effort. Level six doors remained challenging but were no longer completely beyond him.

Almost a month had passed since Saturn. The Voyager maintained its course toward the edge of the solar system, its fusion drive humming constantly as Lucy piloted them toward the heliopause—the boundary where the Sun's influence ended and interstellar space began.

Liam stood on the flight deck, watching the viewport as they approached this invisible line in space. According to NASA's definition, crossing the heliopause meant entering interstellar space. They'd be following the path of Voyager 1 and 2, the only human-made objects to have crossed this threshold.

But Liam knew better. The Oort Cloud still lay ahead—a vast, spherical shell of icy debris surrounding the solar system. This cloud, extending from roughly 2,000 astronomical units to as far as 100,000 AU, represented the true outer boundary of the Sun's gravitational domain. The comets that occasionally plunged into the inner solar system originated from here, shaken loose by passing stars or galactic tides.

The Oort Cloud was so vast that light from the Sun took over a year to reach its outer edge. Objects within it orbited so slowly that a single revolution might take millions of years. It was the solar system's final frontier, largely unexplored and barely understood.

The Voyager crossed the heliopause without ceremony. One moment they were technically still in the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles blown outward by the solar wind. The next moment, they were in interstellar space, surrounded by the thin plasma that filled the void between stars.

Nothing changed. The viewport showed the same stars, the same darkness. No dramatic transition, no visible boundary.

"Lucy," Liam said, settling into the captain's chair, "locate Voyager 1 and set a course for it."

The AI responded immediately. "Voyager 1 located. It's currently 43,000 kilometers from our position. Current velocity: 17 kilometers per second relative to the Sun. Setting intercept course now."

The Voyager's engines adjusted minutely, altering their trajectory to match the probe's path. Within minutes, they'd closed the distance.

Liam made his way to the docking bay, where maintenance drones waited in neat rows. He wouldn't need the shuttle for this—just his exosuit and the specialized equipment Lucy had prepared.

The massive bay doors opened silently, atmosphere venting into the void. Liam activated his exosuit's flight systems and drifted out into space, the maintenance drones following like obedient pets.

The Voyager spacecraft hung nearby, its kilometer-long hull a testament to Nova Technologies' capabilities. But ahead, barely visible against the star field, was something far more humble and infinitely more significant.

Voyager 1 tumbled slowly through the darkness, a battered testament to 1970s engineering still functioning nearly five decades after launch.

The probe was surprisingly small—about the size of a compact car—with a distinctive golden record mounted on its side and a large dish antenna pointing vaguely toward Earth.

Time had not been kind. Micrometeorite impacts had scarred the thermal blankets covering its main body, leaving pockmarks and tears in the insulation. The magnetometer boom extended awkwardly, slightly bent from some ancient collision. One of the antenna support struts showed visible stress fractures. The golden record, humanity's message to the cosmos, was dulled by cosmic dust and radiation damage.

The radioisotope thermoelectric generators that powered the probe were failing, their plutonium fuel decayed to the point where output had dropped below critical levels. Soon—within months or years—Voyager 1 would go silent forever, its systems shutting down one by one as power became insufficient.

Liam drifted closer, matching the probe's 17 km/s velocity with casual ease. His exosuit's systems tracked the relative motion perfectly, making it seem as though the probe was stationary before him.

He activated his helmet's recording systems, capturing video and high-resolution images of the probe's current state. This moment deserved documentation—not for a livestream, but for history. Humanity's first interstellar ambassador, still faithfully traveling outward after all these years, deserved to be remembered as it was before he changed it forever.

The upgrades would be substantial but carefully designed. Voyager 1 was ancient technology, built with vacuum tubes and magnetic tape, its computer less powerful than a modern calculator. But it was still functional, still talking to Earth when power permitted. The upgrades needed to work within those constraints.

Liam gestured, and the maintenance drones moved forward with surgical precision.

The first upgrade was the most critical—power. The failing RTG was carefully removed, its radioactive fuel still warm after decades of decay. In its place, the drones installed something that would have made NASA engineers weep or laugh hysterically depending on their temperament: a zero-point energy capsule.

Lucy had developed the technology recently, capturing minute fluctuations in the quantum vacuum and storing them in a containment field smaller than a fist. The physics was so far beyond conventional understanding that explaining it would require rewriting textbooks, but the results were undeniable: 500 kilowatt-hours of continuous output with an effectively infinite lifespan.

The probe's power concerns were solved forever.

Next came the communication upgrades. The original X-band antenna was supplemented with a metamaterial phased array that unfolded like origami, extending hundreds of meters yet weighing almost nothing. The array could focus its transmission into a beam narrow enough to hit Earth despite the vast distance, dramatically improving signal strength.

The system was upgraded to support Ka-band transmission, which NASA's Deep Space Network already had receivers for. Advanced modulation techniques—LDPC encoding, turbo-class forward error correction, deep interleaving—were integrated into the probe's ancient systems through interface modules that bridged seven decades of technological evolution.

Finally, the probe received onboard storage and compression capabilities. It could now record observations, compress them aggressively using algorithms that hadn't existed when it launched, and transmit during optimal windows when Earth was properly aligned.

The entire process took twelve minutes. Twelve minutes to transform a dying relic into something that would continue transmitting for centuries, perhaps millennia. The probe's systems rebooted, power flowing through circuits that had been slowly failing, bringing every instrument back online at full capacity.

Liam captured a final series of images, documenting the upgraded state, then ended the recording. The probe looked different now—sleeker, with the new antenna array catching starlight in ways the original never had. But its core was the same, that golden record still mounted prominently, carrying humanity's message to whoever might find it.

What Liam didn't notice, focused as he was on the upgrade process, was Voyager 1's dormant camera activating for the first time in decades. The probe, newly empowered, automatically captured an image of the scene: a figure in an advanced exosuit, surrounded by maintenance drones, floating in the void of interstellar space.

That image would begin its long journey to Earth immediately, traveling at light speed but still requiring over twenty-two hours to reach home. When it arrived, NASA would experience several simultaneous heart attacks trying to explain it.

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