Synopsis
He calls himself the first telekinetic warrior with ears. The swagger arrives before he does—tilted helmet, a grin sharp enough to cut vacuum, jokes that make the quartermaster forget how many favors he’s already asked for. The new Mars explorer team is boarding soon, and he intends to be on it. He hustles a prototype amplifier, sweet-talks his way onto the tryout list, and slips past a stamina pre-check with a forged scan. The room fills with cameras and clocks; he offers proof by the pound—short, clean lifts, curated clips, telemetry trimmed to look perfect.
But clean isn’t the same as safe. Under pressure his power spikes, then collapses, and a trainer tells him flatly, “You’re strong, but not safe.” He nods, promises to fix it, and heads straight for the easy wins. When teammates start to question how his graphs never show the shakes they all feel, he smothers doubt with a bigger stunt and a brighter smile. There’s still the problem of the pass that gets him onto the roster. Minutes before the deadline, he submits a packet that isn’t right. The gate opens. He gets what he wants.
Training compresses into a countdown. He sees the breathing modules and panic drills as soft stuff, more meditation than muscle, and shrugs them off. Better to stack wins in the simulator, pre-setting parameters for tidy outputs the instructors can’t argue with. Confidence swells on a diet of curated runs. Then reality intrudes—mixed gravity, uneven flooring, a sudden weight where there shouldn’t be any—and his power flares, uncontrolled, rattling the rig and the people inside it. Worry nicks his edges. He doesn’t report the near-miss; he doesn’t have time for that kind of paperwork. He chases badges and endorsements instead: attendance logged, gear signed out, instructors’ names checked in the right boxes. The record says he’s ready. Inside, he knows he isn’t.
When the questions won’t go away, he answers them the way he always does: with a neat story and a poster. The fault’s in the instruction, he says. The next sim will be the clean one. He films a hype reel—ears up, stance wide, the whole “warrior” look—for the team bulletin and the outer-ring press. The dream feels better than the drills. It all breaks the night before launch. Cross-checked logs land like a hammer: timestamps don’t match, gain curves are too clean, the packet was cooked. His slot is revoked. The rookie he once helped, the one he was sure had no chance against him, gets his place. Security walks him to the line. The hatch hisses closed on a mission he was never truly ready to join. He stands in the bright wash of the floodlights and finally runs out of excuses.
Hours later, Mars throws a tantrum before the ship ever leaves the ground. A dust shear tears the outbound stack; a support gantry twists and pins part of the crew. From ground control, he’s assigned to sift data, to find the fault and feed it up the chain. He starts with what he knows best: blame. Faulty sensor. Glitched actuator. Anything but the ugly resemblance to his own unstable signature. Then the readouts line up—breath, stress, surge—like a mirror he can’t avoid. The trapped team doesn’t have time for his pride. He asks for emergency clearance. The officer in charge stares at him through tempered glass, sees the same rabbit who joked his way into a forged pass, and says nothing for a long time. Then she nods.
On the pad the wind is a living thing. Metal screams. Oxygen drains. The rookie looks up at him from beneath the twisted steel with the same mix of fear and faith he once sold for a laugh. He strips off the amplifier and stops chasing the act. No more staged lifts, no more tidy clips. He breathes the way the veteran showed him, the way he swore was a waste of time, and reaches into the weight with everything he is—fear, pain, focus, the rush he called “uncontrolled” because it scared him to feel it. The gantry rises half an inch, then a full inch, then enough for bodies to slide and hands to catch. He holds it long enough for them to get out. Long enough to hear a voice in his ear say, “That’s it. That’s enough. Go.”
It isn’t enough for the mission. The structure collapses after the evac, taking the launch with it. The countdown dies on a black screen. Debrief is a quiet room full of clipped questions. He tells the whole truth. He doesn’t ask for his slot back. He doesn’t try to point at glitches or instructors or anything that isn’t his own choice to cut corners and cover them with charm. There are consequences—there should be. He accepts them. He signs up for the training he dodged. He watches the rookie brief the press on the scrubbed launch, hears her refuse the narrative that makes him a villain or a hero. “He did what had to be done,” she says. “That’s all.”
Weeks later you wouldn’t know him if you were looking for the poster. He still jokes, sometimes, but the jokes are smaller and aimed at the right places: tension in a room, not the truth itself. He stays late for the drills he once called optional and shows up early to steady someone else’s breath when they start to shake. The power is still wild in him—the rush is still a rush—but he doesn’t wrestle it to look clean anymore. He learns where to plant his feet and how to carry fear without letting it carry him. He doesn’t get Mars. The window is gone and the mission will become someone else’s story.
His, for the first time, is not a lie. He wanted a warrior’s title, and he wrote himself a myth to wear it. What he gets is a quieter thing: the habit of doing the necessary thing when it costs him, and the willingness to live with doubt instead of hiding behind it. He walks past the poster one morning, ears tucked beneath a scuffed helmet, and doesn’t stop to straighten it like he used to. He heads for the door that never had a side entrance after all. Inside the bay, breath fogs his visor, the floor hums, and the work starts again.
Tip: Resist the urge to chase your “favorite” settings. Let the model surprise you.
Principle: Intent through story. We aren’t matching a storyform to a preconceived plan—we’re discovering the plan by obeying the storyform.
Why: If Solution keeps popping in, you deflate the pressure and the audience never gets that final “leap.” Keep the heat on.
