For six months, they had been living on Epsilon Prime - an orbital station far beyond the asteroid belt, where Earth was now just a pale, distant dot in the black sky. Susanna, the daughter of the chief engineer, always went out to the observation platform right after her shift; her bunny suit reflected the starlight, and through the armoured glass she collected more unusual shots of space nebulae for her e-notepad. Meanwhile, her friend Alex, the commander's son, was monitoring the atmospheric sensors, pretending it was routine. In reality, he was looking for something unusual - a disturbance he could figure out before the adults caught on. That Thursday, as the orbital clocks chimed noon, the platform trembled. Susannah all the way dropped her notebook, and Alex pulled a homemade gravitational field detector out of his pocket. - What was that? - Susanna gathered herself from her knees, looking around uncertainly. - 'A signal from outside the spectrum,' Alex muttered, staring at the pulsating LEDs. - 'That shouldn't be here. They were joined by Tian - a silent robotics genius. Without a word, he opened the floor hatch and looked into the darkness of the service tunnel. - He pointed to the lower deck. Maybe it's another sensor error? - suggested Susanna, although there was hope in her voice that it wasn't. For the next few hours, the three youngsters made their way through the claustrophobic corridors of the station, guided by the faint light of their torches and the increasingly strong signal of Alex's detector. When they reached the maintenance airlock, Tian stopped abruptly and looked at them with seriousness. - 'If we go in, there's no turning back. - He whispered, lifting the small reconnaissance robot. - The indicators are going crazy. But curiosity won out. The airlock flap hissed open, and a huge oval chamber spread out on the other side, filled with a silent, pulsating light. There was an indefinable metallic smell in the air, and coloured dots shimmered everywhere, forming patterns that seemed to invite but also warn. - 'It's never been here before,' whispered Susanna, grasping Alex's hand. Suddenly, Tian turned on the robot, which silently flitted across the shiny floor. The moment it touched one of the pulsating walls, the whole room lit up with a fever of lights and the screens on their wrists filled with a code they had never seen before. They took a step forward. Behind their backs, the airlock slammed shut with a deafening bang. At the same instant, a quiet, synthetic voice rang out from the depths of the chamber: - Sequence initiated. Please prepare to move through. Susannah's heart beat faster. Alex tried to switch off the communicator, but nothing was responding, and Tian stared into the light as if he saw something only he knew there. The chamber began to vibrate and the light became more and more intense. In one second they felt as if the whole reality around them began to change....