Chapter 1: The Senator’s Private Submission
The hum was all wrong.
Chase Reilley blinked at the coffee stain on his apartment ceiling. The familiar sixty-hertz drone of city power lines, the muffled bass from his neighbor's terrible music, the relentless itch of his own thoughts—it had all flattened into a single, oscillating tone. It was the sound a fork makes when you flick it, just before the vibration fades. It was the sound of reality thinning.
He hadn’t slept in thirty-eight hours. Empty energy drink cans formed a precarious monument on his desk, buried under schematics that weren’t schematics, and equations that used numbers he’d literally dreamed up. The core of it glowed on his workbench: a mesh of copper wire, a reclaimed laptop battery, and a cracked quartz crystal singing that wrong, perfect note.
It wasn't a machine. It was a tuning fork for the universe.
His hands were trembling, and not just from the caffeine. This was it. The forums said it was impossible. The physics papers called it fantasy. The ADHD that made three consecutive sentences a battle had, instead, given him the ability to see ten connections at once. The connection between the resonance frequency of a fictional narrative’s descriptive language and the quantum foam. Between the emotional signature of a beloved character and a localized dimensional fold.
He was aiming for Tolkien. For a quiet field in the Shire. Something green and calm.
His finger hovered over the final connection. He’d programmed the narrative coordinates, pulled from the combined emotional weight of a thousand fanfics and his own relentless, specific longing. He’d input the file for The Phantom Menace. The green velvet of the Senate robes. The weight of a queen’s duty. The sharp, intelligent eyes above a painted mouth.
He swore he’d input the file for The Phantom Menace.
He touched the wire.
The hum didn’t get louder. It got inside. The coffee stain on the ceiling boiled away into shifting gold and deep blue. The scent of burnt circuit boards and old pizza was sliced through by something clean and floral. The air grew thick, tasteable. He felt a lurch, not in his stomach, but in his very atoms, as if they’d been told to line up differently.
He took a stumbling step forward, not on his stained carpet, but on a floor of polished, warm stone.
The air in Padmé Amidala’s private anteroom was cool, scented by the night-blooming shuura flowers from the courtyard below. The only sound was the soft click-click of her undoing the ornate clasps of her heavy senatorial gown. The debates had been tiresome, full of procedural nonsense masking true corruption. She ached for the simplicity of a blaster in her hand, for the clean lines of a pilot’s jumpsuit, not these layered symbols.
The weight began to slide from her shoulders.
A rush of displaced air, a sudden density in the center of the room. A sharp, ozone smell, utterly foreign.
She spun, the half-shed gown tangling around her arms.
A man stood there. Not a guard. Not an aide. He was dressed in coarse, simple fabrics—a grey t-shirt, dark blue trousers. His hair was a mess of brown. He was breathing hard, his eyes wide, sweeping the room—the tapestries, the stone, her—with a frantic, consuming hunger. There was no weapon in his hands, but his gaze felt like a violation.
“Okay,” the man breathed, a shaky grin spreading across his face. “Okay, not the Shire. Way, way better.”
Her training took over, locking the panic away in a sealed compartment. Her voice was steel, regal, even as her heart hammered against her ribs. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”
He took a step forward. His eyes never left hers. They were bright, intense, tracking her every micro-expression with a frightening avidity. “Chase. My name’s Chase. And you… you’re exactly… the movies don’t do you justice. The pixels. They don’t capture the… the vitality.”
It was the word pixels that confirmed this was no political foe. This was something else. Something insane. She reached for the hidden blaster she kept on her at all times.
“How did you get in here?” She asked firmly as she drew her pistol and pointed it at the stranger.
The blaster didn’t waver. The barrel was a small, dark circle, but it felt like the mouth of a reactor core. Chase’s grin froze, then slowly melted. The adrenaline cocktail in his veins—triumph, desire, raw awe—soured into a sharp, metallic fear.
“Whoa, okay,” he said, his hands coming up, palms out. The gesture felt absurdly modern in the stone room. “It’s a long story and very hard to explain.”
“Explain. Now.” Her voice was colder than the stone. Her eyes, which he’d romantically described to himself as ‘liquid brown,’ were hardened amber, assessing him like a security threat.
“Okay how do I put this?” Chase asked himself out loud, clearly frightened and nervous. “Okay. So long story short, I’m not from your universe.” Chase ducked his head protectively expecting a blaster bolt to be fired in his direction. To his shock, none came. When he looked back up towards the senator, she had lowered her weapon and looked confused.
“Prove it.” Padme requested, clearly intrigued in what he had to say.
Chase’s mind was a roaring static. Prove it. The command echoed.
“Okay well I can tell you what I know about this universe. Starting with this: I know you are secretly married to a Jedi knight named Anakin Skywalker.” Chase stated, tentatively testing the waters.
The blaster didn’t lower, but something in Padmé’s posture shifted. The weapon became a statement, not an immediate threat. The hard planes of her face smoothed into the inscrutable mask of the Queen she had once been. Only her eyes remained utterly alive, sharp as a vibroblade, dissecting him.
“That is a dangerous thing to say,” she said, her voice so low it was almost lost in the hum of the room’s climate control. “A reckless, impossible thing.”
“I know it is,” Chase rushed out, the words tumbling over each other. The initial terror was mixing back with a giddy, unshakeable wonder. She’s real. She’s right there. “I know everything. Well, not everything, but… the broad strokes. I know about the Clone Wars. About Palpatine. About the twins.” He gestured vaguely toward her, then instantly regretted it. “Not that there are… you know. Yet. But there will be.”
Her expression didn’t crack. “Twins.”
“Luke and Leia.” Saying the names aloud in this room felt like a blasphemy. A delicious, terrifying blasphemy.
“You speak in fantasies,” she stated, but the denial was automatic, hollow. The security sweep of this suite was absolute. The doors had not opened. He had simply… appeared. And now he spoke the most closely guarded secret of her heart, a secret known only to herself, Anakin, and a single droid.
“It’s not fantasy where I’m from,” he said, gaining a sliver of confidence. He took a half-step, his sneaker silent on the stone. “It’s story. History. Entertainment. You’re… you’re a legend.”
“A legend.” She let the word hang. The blaster’s muzzle finally dipped, pointing at the floor between them. It was a calculated risk. “And what does a legend mean to someone who can simply walk into her private chambers?”
The question was a trap. He could feel it. He answered with the blunt, ugly truth. “It means you’re the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.” His voice dropped, losing its frantic edge, gaining a warmth that felt more intrusive than his sudden arrival. “I’ve watched your life a hundred times. I’ve seen your courage. Your compassion. I’ve… dreamed about it. About you.”
Padmé felt her heart flutter. She didn’t know this man, but yet she was strangely drawn to him.
He took another step. The space between them, which had felt like a chasm, was now just a few feet of cold Naboo stone.
Padmé didn’t retreat, welcoming his advancement as she put her blaster away.
She studied his face, her gaze tracing his features as if reading a foreign text. “You say you know me. Tell me one more thing thing.” It wasn’t a demand. It was a plea, wrapped in steel. “One thing you could not know, could not guess. Something… small. Then I will believe you.”
He thought fast.
His memory, hyper-focused and leaping with ADHD clarity, scrolled through a thousand flickering images.
His memory, hyper-focused and leaping with ADHD clarity, scrolled through a thousand flickering images. The grand speeches, the battle of Geonosis, the apartment on Coruscant. But she’d asked for something small. Something you couldn’t guess.
His eyes, which had been darting around the room, locked onto the hollow of her throat. There, just visible above the layered collar of her half-removed gown, was a thin leather cord.
"The japor snippet," he said, the words quiet. "The necklace. Anakin carved it for you on Tatooine. You told him it would bring good fortune." He paused, watching her breath catch. "You never take it off. Not even here. Not even when you're alone."
Padmé’s hand flew to her throat, her fingers closing around the carved wood pendant hidden beneath the fabric. It was an unconscious, protective gesture. A tremor went through her, fine and deep, like a crystal glass struck just before it shatters.
No one knew. Anakin had given it to her in the desert, a lifetime ago. She had kept the sentiment, and its origin, locked away in the same quiet chamber as her love for him. For this strange man to know it… it was impossible. It was undeniable.