PREFACE

If this entry ever reaches another human being, I would like it entered into the official record that I, Dr. J. Jubenstein, did not volunteer for this field expedition.

One moment I was in the Grand Council Chamber, tastefully restrained, listening to a panel of overdecorated idiots read a list of my “crimes” in their most solemn voices. The next moment, reality folded in half. My stomach did a cartwheel. And I was falling through screaming green light.

They call it banishment. I call it gross misuse of my portal array.

The landing was not graceful. I met something sharp, then something soft, then something that made a crunch sound that I am fairly certain came from me. When I finally stopped, I was lying on a carpet of glowing moss that hummed ominously beneath my face.

No lab. No equipment. No backup. No coffee. Just me, my torn clothes, a half-melted wrist chrono, and a planet that did not come with a manual.

The moss beneath me actually pulsed when I moved. When I pushed myself up, it brightened… then discharged a sharp crack of electricity into my palms. I yelped and flung myself sideways. The moss dimmed, smugly.

Welcome to exile.

When I finally got a proper look at the world, it was this: rolling hills of that same faintly glowing ground cover, dotted with towers of fungus so large they might as well have been buildings. Two of them, in particular, dominated the valley—colossal mushrooms with stems like columns and caps that glowed from beneath like hanging moons.

They were the first things here that looked like they might forgive me for existing.

This is supposed to be punishment. An exile. A scientific death sentence. The Council’s official position is that I am too dangerous, too “ethically compromised,” to remain on Earth. They’re not wrong about the dangerous part. They’re infuriatingly small‑minded about everything else.

Let the record show my “crimes” as they described them:

• Unauthorized genome recombination in higher mammals.
• Human augmentation trials without “sufficiently clear” consent forms. (They signed them. I used bold text.)
• Temporary dimensional instability in District 9.
• Persistent failure to display remorse.

Remorse is not an experimental variable. Progress is.

And so, instead of a lab, or prison cell, or even a nice clean firing squad, they used my own portal work against me. They calibrated it—poorly, I’m sure—to some uncharted coordinate, chained my hands, and flung me through.

I do not know where I am. I do not know if this atmosphere will kill me slowly. I do not know how long I will be here—hours, days, years. I do not know if “here” is even the same galaxy.

But I do know this: the Council made one critical mistake.

They dropped me onto a world that is alive.

The moss crackles. The trees shimmer with impossible leaves. The sky is wrong in ways that make my eyes itch, and those twin mushrooms are just begging to be hollowed out and turned into something reckless.

I am bruised, underfed, concussed, and unreasonably excited.

So I’m starting this diary.

• To keep my thoughts in one place.
• To leave a record, in case I die in some spectacularly educational way.
• To map this world, turn its biology into tools, and—if possible—build a way back.

I don’t have a lab yet. I don’t even have a roof that doesn’t try to electrocute me. But I have a brain full of designs, a planet full of raw material, and a very persistent grudge.

Somewhere far away, the Council is sleeping peacefully, certain they have disposed of me. I intend to correct that miscalculation.

Step one: don’t die tonight. Step two: find shelter. Step three: turn one of those giant mushrooms into the first outpost of a new C.C. Labs—Creature Creator Lab—whether the planet likes it or not.

End Preface. Day 0.