My name is Jacob Hale, and I was born on July 19th, 1952.
Nothing special about my childhood. Nothing extraordinary. No memories of another life. No fantasy birthmark or prophetic visions.
I was just a kid in Houston whose father worked oil rigs and whose mother handled paperwork at a refinery. We were poor, but we lived close enough to the Johnson Space Center that rockets felt more real than religion.
Everything changed on my seventeenth birthday.
I woke up screaming.
Not from pain, but from the sudden flood of information pouring into my head like a dam had burst.
Schematics. Equations. Databases.
Robotics frameworks. Reactor blueprints.
Slipspace geometries. Atmospheric processors.
High-thrust fusion engines I had no name for.
Exosuits built for environments I'd never seen.
Images of cold metal corridors.
Gigantic blue gas giants.
Armored soldiers.
Synthetic humans.
Alien terraformers roaring to life.
And then a voice.
ASTRAFORGE SYSTEM LINK — ONLINE
User Recognized: Hale, Jacob Alexander
Tech Libraries Loaded:
— RDA Industrial & Exosuit Archive
— Weyland-Yutani Synthetic BioSystems
— MCR/UNN High-Efficiency Fusion & Drive Tech
— UNSC Naval Engineering, Slipspace, Materials
Directive: RESTRICT ALL DATA.
Do Not Reveal.
Survive. Build. Expand.
I thought I was losing my mind.
For weeks I stayed quiet, terrified of being institutionalized. I hid everything, wrote down nothing, pretended to be normal while my brain solved engineering problems thirty years ahead of anything on Earth.
I built my first prototype battery at nineteen. It held twenty times the energy density of a lithium cell.
I smashed it with a hammer.
I built my first micro-reactor model at twenty-one.
I melted it down before anyone could see.
At twenty-five, I filed the paperwork for a company I called:
ASTRAFORGE AEROSPACE, LLC
A small garage. No employees. No contracts. No attention.
Exactly how I wanted it.
For the next three years I built quietly—fabricators hidden in rented storage, power cells disguised as industrial equipment, a synthetic intelligence seed buried inside an offline computer. Every time I made something too advanced, I buried it deeper.
Then the anomaly happened.
June 1969.
The Soviets landed on the Moon first.
And I froze.
That wasn't how history was supposed to go.
Not mine. Not anyone's.
News anchors spoke with shock. America panicked. Politicians raged. NASA scrambled.
And I realized the truth:
This world wasn't my Earth at all.
It was For All Mankind.
A world where the space race would never stop. Where progress would accelerate. Where humanity would reach for the stars out of fear instead of ambition.
A perfect world for the technology locked inside my mind.
But also a dangerous one.
Because the governments of this world were desperate. Watchful. Paranoid.
And if they found out what I truly was?
They would dissect me.
Or disappear me.
Or force me to build weapons this world wasn't ready for.
So I stayed quiet.
Until NASA knocked on my door.
It was a humid August evening when a woman approached my garage workshop. Small, sharp, intense.
"Margo Madison," she introduced herself. "NASA flight dynamics. We heard about your… engine proposals. You're either insane or a genius, Mr. Hale."
I kept my face calm. My heart felt like it was trying to punch its way out of my chest.
The papers she held—my sanitized, watered-down, barely-scratching-the-surface propulsion papers—had only been sent to three places. Apparently, one of them had listened.
"NASA is creating a special task division," she said. "We want you on it."
I hesitated for exactly three seconds.
Then I nodded.
"Alright," I said. "Show me the lab."
Inside, I was screaming with excitement.
Because now I had access to the one thing I couldn't create alone.
Infrastructure.
NASA had machinery, launch facilities, materials, and skilled engineers.
And behind my polite smile, one truth echoed:
They thought they were recruiting me.
But I was infiltrating them.
Because someday soon…
AstraForge wouldn't just be a small company in a garage.
It would be the foundation of humanity's first multi-planet civilization.
And no one could ever know that all of its technology came from worlds this Earth had never seen.