Misalignment

At age forty, Alex has already stepped out of his own life - no debts, no obligations, and no one waiting for him anywhere. A lottery win erased the past, but it didn’t replace it with anything. So he does what’s left to do when nothing matters anymore: he drives. Quiet roads, empty towns, routine breakfasts - a life reduced to motion without direction. Then, in a diner in the middle of nowhere, his past catches up to him. Only it isn’t his past. It’s Mike. His friend, but not his Mike. This one knows things he shouldn’t. He finds Alex where no one could. And he casually introduces him to something impossible: a ship that doesn’t travel through space… but through reality itself. Not by breaking physics, but by selecting it. Every choice. Every outcome. Every version of the world is branching endlessly - and this ship can navigate those branches like a library of alternate lives and realities. Some of them are familiar; some of them are better. Some that should never be visited in the first place; they will not be visited again. Mike is dying. The cost of traveling between worlds is already written into his body, and Alex, out of billions of his versions, is the one closest to the man Mike once knew and trusted - the one he’s willing to hand everything over to. His ship. His mission. And a choice: to walk away… and go back to a life that no longer fits and makes sense. Or step inside, and risk losing the only version of himself he still understands.