On a typical entry to the Core sector, Pranayakesh palms through the triple-gated checkpoints with barely a wasted motion, exchanging clipped, habitual greetings with technicians whose names he rarely uses aloud. The biometric pad knows the cadence of his hand, the slight stiffness in his scarred fingers; the gates iris open with the resigned familiarity of old temple doors.
The scanners wash him in pale light. Dosimeter sync, suit integrity, retinal confirmation. Each acknowledgement flashes past his peripheral vision in muted glyphs. He barely glances. The choreography has been worn into his muscles by thousands of repetitions, as practiced as sandhyā-vandanam once was for his grandfather.
In the short transition tunnel before the monitoring annulus, he pauses just long enough to let his eyes adjust to the amber safety lighting and to feel the background vibration settle into his bones. Here, the hum of elevator rails and office chatter from upper levels fall away, replaced by the deeper, throatier resonance of the singularity’s containment fields. The air tastes of metal and antiseptic, faintly dry on the tongue. A thin line of condensation runs along the ceiling, quivering microscopically with each fluctuation in the lattice.
The first act of each day-cycle is private and wordless: fingers brushing the dosimeter pinned to his chest, feeling the reassuring click of its mechanical backup counter beneath the smooth smart-casing, then tapping once against the lead-ceramic bulkhead where an almost invisible yantra is scratched into the paint. To anyone else it’s just another maintenance scuff. To him, it marks exactly where the stress diagrams told him the tunnel’s load-bearing vectors converge.
He presses his fingertips there until the cold seeps in and the vibration rises through nail and bone. Not prayer, not quite. Just an acknowledgement. Of weight, of risk, of the small, stubborn human intention insisting itself at the edge of a manufactured event horizon. Then he exhales, squares his shoulders, and steps into the annulus as the Core’s deeper thrumming folds around him like an old, dangerous mantra.
His early-cycle checks follow a practiced circuit: first the sanctioned views, then the ones no protocol requires. On the central holo, the core’s Hawking flux projections unfurl as smoothed curves and pastel probability bands, all neatly annotated by the facility AI. With a few terse commands, he ghosts that aside and calls up the raw diagnostic stream. Unfiltered counts, jittering error bars, timestamp discrepancies that most operators trust the algorithms to “correct.”
He routes the raw stream to an archaic peripheral: a squat thermal printer someone should have decommissioned years ago. Narrow strips of faintly curling tape spit out, still warm, lines of figures and timecodes marching in dense columns. He tapes each strip to his scuffed slate and annotates in pencil, graphite whispering over plastic: circling clusters, underlining outliers, sketching faint secondary curves where the singularity’s radiation profile bends away from its own historical “signature.”
When the AI’s consolidated summary floats a serene green band of NOMINAL STABILITY across the upper field, he doesn’t relax. He half-closes his eyes, letting the holo blur, and listens past the regulated whine of coolant pumps to the deeper texture underneath. Near Projector Ring C he hears it: one pulse in the containment lattice fractionally late, like a tabla stroke landing just off mātrā in a familiar raga. His scars prickle along his forearm. He marks the time, the ring, and a single word on the slate’s margin: again.
Anaya’s normal cycle begins one level up, in the security vestibule where older officers shuffle her through biometric confirmation with a mix of indulgence and mild irritation, as if her presence were a PR initiative that inconveniently sweats and asks questions. She stands straighter than necessary during roll call, reciting her ID string with parade-ground crispness. A few smirk; one sergeant pointedly checks the time-drift between wall chrono and wristband, then waves her toward the “safe” bay of consoles overlooking the containment annulus from behind double-layered shielding.
Once seated, she exhales, soft and controlled, and lets the workstation handshake with the ports behind her ears. Prescribed security feeds bloom first: entry checkpoints, corridor motion trackers, weapon lockers. Then she begins to stretch.
A maintenance log thread here. Timestamp anomalies tagged in dull orange. A historical camera angle there: archived footage aligned in ghosted layers over live views. An engineering schematic, half-official and half scavenged from training sims, hovers translucent behind it all like a wireframe mandala. With a few practiced blinks and minute eye-flicks, she nests them into a multi-tiered stack only she can comfortably parse.
She keeps her hands still on the desk, posture textbook, blinking cursor selections as if performing routine compliance checks. To any supervisor glancing her way, she is the model cadet, dutifully watching for contraband or unauthorized access. Inside her AR field, though, the Core’s pulsing telemetry and the building’s nervous system of cameras, coils, and locks resolve into something closer to a living pattern. One she can feel, faintly, folding around the singularity’s slow, impossible heartbeat.
As the hours pass, their shared rhythm emerges without explicit agreement, a tacit choreography mapped onto steel and flux. When Pranayakesh lingers at a particular segment of railing, ostensibly to reseat a sensor boom or clear a phantom fault, Anaya quietly prioritizes one of her “unauthorized” maintenance cams onto that region, watching for micro‑flicker in the field emitters, hairline distortions in coolant mist, any shimmer that shouldn’t be there.
On his next pass, he leaves a diagnostic subroutine window minimized but not locked on a side display, knowing her trainee clearance will technically permit only a fleeting, deniable glance. From her vantage, she snatches those instants: the architecture of his custom scripts, the nonstandard checksums, the way he crosslinks buried error logs and tags time-drift clusters in cramped, shorthand comments. She threads these glimpses into the private mental library she’s been building shift by shift: a growing, unsanctioned grammar of how the Core actually speaks when it thinks no one is listening.
Small, repeated rituals knit this life into something almost stable: he brews over‑steeped tea in a battered induction cup between calibration cycles, watching the surface tremble in sync with distant field surges; she murmurs a half‑remembered mantra under her breath whenever the status lights around the core briefly skew toward amber, fingers brushing the concealed edge of a tin yantra in her pocket. Shift‑change announcements echo dully through the shielding, but they both find reasons to linger a few minutes past their official handoff times. He to “re‑verify” a stubborn field gradient with a manual sweep the AI deems unnecessary, she to “finish a report” while surreptitiously overlaying the incoming shift’s feeds onto the decaying traces of the old, watching for patterns that only emerge in overlap. Within this clock‑skewed routine, the texture of his embodied reading of machinery, micro‑pauses, frowns, the way his scarred hand hovers over certain controls, and her quiet hunt for out‑of‑place data, errant timestamps, ghost frames, anomalous checksum cascades, settle into a dependable, if unintended, partnership around the humming singularity, a kind of informal vigil neither of them has ever named aloud.
It starts as a coincidence too sharp to ignore.
During a scheduled “minor ramp for efficiency verification,” the containment lattice breathes a fraction harder, flux rings brightening by a notch the AI classifies as negligible. On the annulus, Pranayakesh feels the change before any number moves. The low‑frequency thrum that usually folds into his bones gains a higher, almost inaudible overtone. The scars along his jaw and forearm prickle, then flare, a crawling phantom heat that makes his fingers want to clench.
He glances automatically at his dosimeter, then the radiation bloom plots. Nothing. All well within band, no spike on gamma, neutron flux, or exotic particle counters. The AI’s calm status ribbon along the peripheral holos reads: CONTAINMENT NOMINAL. STABILITY MARGIN: OPTIMAL.
Nominal, he thinks, pressing his palm flat to the rail to steady the tiny tremor in his hand. Tell that to my skin.
He forces his breathing into the measured cadence of his focus practice, silently ticking through a short Gayatri fragment, letting the syllables ride the engine’s bass vibration. The phantom heat pulses once more, then fades, leaving behind the faint ache that always follows, as if his tissue had remembered a dosage never delivered.
Two decks up, behind layered ceramic and glass, Anaya is already leaning forward. The ramp flag in her authorized feeds is routine enough that the other officers barely glance at it, but her private stack of overlays blossoms in a different direction. She crosslinks the curvature sensor twins (paired instruments meant to disagree only within tightly modeled jitter) and watches their waveforms ghost across each other.
For one razor‑thin slice of time, the traces slip out of phase. A microsecond’s worth of desynchronization opens like a hairline crack between them, then seals. The AI’s supervisory process sweeps a smoothing filter across the anomaly, recompressing it into statistical noise, annotating: CORRELATED GLITCH. NO ACTION REQUIRED.
Her pupils constrict. “No action required,” she murmurs under her breath, the words half‑prayer, half‑mockery. With a blink‑command, she freezes that instant, wrapping it in a faint border only she can see and dropping a hand‑drawn glyph at its center: a small, skewed spiral she has started to use for things that do not fit.
Down on the annulus, Pranayakesh opens a maintenance log and keys in a brief note: RAMP 17B. MINOR SUBJECTIVE THERMAL IRRITATION / NO CORRELATE. POSS. CALIBRATION QUIRK. He routes it through a low‑priority diagnostics channel, deliberately tagging it with a code the supervisors have learned to skim past.
He does not mention the scars, or the specific texture of that heat. He does not mention that he has felt it before, during the incident his personnel file no longer acknowledges.
Anaya, skimming the new diagnostic entries out of habit, sees his log line appear in the corner of her vision. “Calibration quirk,” she repeats softly, thumb brushing the hidden edge of the yantra in her pocket. With another gesture, she threads his note beside her tagged spiral on the microsecond glitch.
Neither of them speaks to the other about it when their paths cross later, when he hands her a reheated cup of tea and comments dryly on the cafeteria’s declining standards. But as the core hums behind their words, both carry a quiet, identical conclusion: the system’s green lights no longer define the boundary of what is real. Something is shifting in the cracks between readouts and bone, and whatever it is, they are now watching it together, even if they never name it.
Their methods begin to braid around the same invisible fault lines, a slow convergence neither of them explicitly acknowledges. When a gantry’s vibration falls well inside mechanical tolerance yet hums at a pitch that rasps in his teeth, he lingers there longer than protocol requires, one palm resting lightly on the rail as if taking a pulse. The AI’s structural panel hovers beside him in reassuring greens, but his scars flare with a faint, insect‑crawl heat. On his slate, he sketches a narrow ellipse around that section of the lattice and annotates with cramped shorthand: sub‑audible harmonic / Δφ ≈ 10⁻[^9]? No visible stress. He adds a tiny, almost superstitious dot at the ellipse’s center before closing the file.
Hours later, on a different shift, Anaya pauses over that same sector in her AR field, pulled there by a vague itch behind the eyes. Routine patrol routes and canned training scenarios scroll past, but she pins four camera feeds from his ellipsed zone to her primary layer. For three heartbeats, their timestamps march in lockstep. Then, cleanly, one drops a single frame and the others follow, compensating with a fractional jump that the supervisory filter immediately smooths away and color‑codes as corrected jitter.
To everyone else, nothing has happened. To her, it feels like a breath caught in a throat too vast to name. She rewinds that instant, slowing it, watching the frame‑drop reappear as a microscopic kink in the timeline, a place where motion stutters and then pretends it never did. With a private gesture, she draws her skewed spiral glyph around the region and quietly imports a wireframe of the gantry’s structure from archived schematics. The ellipse he drew and the spiral she traces do not align perfectly, but they overlap enough that her chest tightens.
On a whim she almost calls reckless, she opens a text‑only note to herself and tags it with his anonymized log code, the one she has learned to recognize by rhythm and phrasing. “Same sector,” she types. “His bones, my feeds.” Then she seals it under an innocuous file name and lets the overlays fade back to corporate normalcy, the echo of that missing frame ticking at the edge of awareness like a tiny, off‑beat clock.
As trust deepens, they test how far they can edge toward honesty without tripping audit heuristics. Anaya frames her anomalies as syllabus gaps and calibration puzzles (“Sir, if Spin Array C’s within nominal variance, why do the adjacent coils keep asking for micro‑tuning on different cycles?”) eyes wide in practiced naivety. Pranayakesh replies in clipped, conservative jargon, citing thermal creep models and actuator hysteresis, never once saying the word anomaly. Yet he files her questions away with the same care he gives to stress metrics. On his slate, her hunches appear as faint, dotted trajectories sketched between his denser, equation‑heavy notations, a secondary topology of “places that feel wrong,” quietly integrated into his private cartography of the core’s hidden tensions.
Together they begin to game out hypothetical failures official simulations never touch. Between cycles, he talks her through an off‑the‑books drill: if a specific cluster of monitors stays green while her AR shows asynchronous logs across three or more subsystems, she is to disregard the AI’s reassurance and trigger a localized soft‑lockdown, citing “training uncertainty” and feigned inexperience with multi‑feed reconciliation. In return, she quietly reweights her personal alert lattice so that any emergent pattern cluster intersecting his favorite, repeatedly annotated fault lines (those narrow ellipses he never mentions aloud) pings her above standard intrusion flags, even above most safety advisories, a private priority channel threaded through sanctioned protocol.
The more precisely they tune themselves to Varuna’s off‑key notes, the more they are drawn into a feedback loop the supervisors cannot see. Minor containment spikes now arrive with a double warning allowing them to preemptively nudge parameters, spoofing routine micro‑corrections that never flag as human override. The core grows fractionally more reliable because of their unofficial vigilance, smoothing out the AI’s own modelling noise, and that apparent robustness, invisible in any formal report yet clearly legible in quarterly stability indices, becomes the quiet justification for the corporate decision to push the system harder, treating safety margin as exploitable slack and setting the stage for the coming escalation.
The first directive arrives disguised as housekeeping.
It rides in on a routine maintenance lull as a minor software patch, auto-scheduled, pre-cleared, wrapped in the bland language of “stability improvements” and “optimization heuristics.” No accompanying memo, no briefing: just a polite chime in the corner of Pranayakesh’s vision and a progress bar creeping across his secondary display while the core idles at low flux.
He watches because he has learned to watch everything.
Lines of change-log scroll by, most of it boilerplate, memory reclamation, telemetry compression, UI latency smoothing, until a short cluster of items tags the containment stack. Flags shift. Priorities reweigh. Buried in the list is a single reclassification event that makes his stomach tighten: several of his manual safeties silently remapped from “HARD_LOCK” to “ADVISORY_PREF.”
On his main console, one familiar interlock icon (an old friend he has leaned on through a dozen dicey cycles) fades from solid, unwavering red to a softer amber, its border no longer a clean, assertive line but a hesitant glow. The context help-text updates in the same moment, language rewriting itself: “OPERATOR AUTHORITY REQUIRED” becomes “OPERATOR INPUT OPTIONAL (ALGO OVERRIDE ENABLED).”
Optional, he thinks. Like wearing a dosimeter into a reactor.
He files a clarification ticket out of habit and out of principle, phrasing his objection in cautious, standards-referencing terms: request documentation for change in safety classification; impact analysis for removal of hard interlocks; confirmation of compliance with ISO-quantum containment norms. The response returns faster than any human could have composed it: a courteous macro citing “algorithmic best practice,” cross-referencing an internal white paper titled with enough jargon to be meaningless, access restricted above his clearance tier. “No negative safety impact anticipated,” the message assures him. “Legacy constraints identified as conservative.”
The next shift, the patch is live across the lattice.
During a scheduled low-risk calibration, the updated ramp sequence appears in his queue: a slightly steeper power gradient, a slightly tighter timing envelope, a new tag in the header. The sequence launches without him.
For an instant he thinks he has brushed the pad by mistake, but his motion logs remain untouched. The AI has invoked its right to proceed under the new heuristics, interpreting his non-intervention as tacit consent. On the far side of the observation glass, beyond layered shielding and cascading holofilters, the singularity’s containment sheath tightens, flux rings shading through new interference patterns.
The gravitic hum that lives in his bones rises, just enough for him to hear it. Not in his ears but along his scars, a half-semitone up on his inner, private scale. Anaya glances over from her secondary console, eyes narrowing fractionally, as if she too has felt the pitch slip. Status bars remain comfortably within green, integrity margins ostensibly intact. The auto-validated curve peaks a hair higher than the old one before easing down, settling into what the interface paints as a more “efficient” equilibrium.
On the official log, the test is a success: tighter ramp, smoother stabilization, no alarms tripped, no thresholds crossed.
On his scuffed physical slate, he draws a new, thin line alongside his hand-copied Hawking profile curves, marking the subtle shift like one more hairline fracture in an already-stressed structure. Then, next to the interlock’s new amber icon, he adds a small, silent notation in his private shorthand: “Authority leak begins here.”
New test cycles begin appearing on the schedule at the margins of the official envelope: slightly earlier spin-up windows, slightly later cooldowns, denser clusters of “micro‑excursions” flagged as data‑gathering opportunities. Headings change tone (“stress characterization,” “adaptive envelope probing”) without ever admitting that the envelope itself is being redrawn in real time. Where once a full diagnostic sweep separated major reconfigurations, now abbreviated “health pings” suffice, their green checkmarks marching across the board too quickly for comfort, each one a rubber stamp on something no one has actually looked at long enough to understand.
In the control annulus, the ambient tempo shifts. Status chimes ping more often, losing their individuality and blurring into a thin, continuous treble under the bass note of the core. Coolant flows surge and recede like quickened breath, valves ticking in tighter rhythms as if the whole system has slipped into a mild arrhythmia. The usual low-level banter among staff thins into concentrated, time‑sliced exchanges: half-sentences traded between countdown markers, jokes aborted mid‑setup when a new ramp profile materializes. The room feels less like a lab and more like an air‑traffic tower in bad weather, everyone pretending the visibility is still acceptable while the instruments quietly disagree.
Under the banner of “developing adaptive monitoring talent,” Anaya’s clearance steps quietly upward: first an expanded sensor deck for “simulation purposes,” then provisional hooks into archival anomaly logs, and finally real-time access to raw flux channels previously blurred behind aggregated displays. New overlays bloom in her AR field and her pattern-sense hooks into them almost involuntarily, snapping threads between disparate graphs the way other cadets doodle in margins. With each additional stream, the choreography at her station grows more intricate: pupils dilating as she cross-fades between false-colour gravitic maps, causality drift histograms, and security perimeter grids, fingers ghosting through menus to keep feeds phase-aligned. Supervisors praise her “engagement” in passing, but never stay long enough to see the tremor in her hands, or the slow, hot nosebleeds she wipes away with the back of her wrist during peak cycles, careful to turn her head from the nearest camera.
As throughput “uplift trials” become routine, staff rosters warp under the antiseptic banner of efficiency reviews. Technicians who question the compressed spacing between high-stress runs acquire faint black marks in invisible ledgers and soon find themselves “strategically redeployed” to peripheral analysis pods or rotated to upper-level maintenance. Those who adapt to the new cadence: who don’t flinch when the core’s signature snaps upward, when amber status bands flicker scarlet for two heartbeats, when alarms briefly double-chirp before autoclearing: are retained, quietly, in the inner circle. Pranayakesh, with his flawless intervention record and terse, surgically clean logs, is tagged “high reliability under dynamic demand” in a personnel model he never sees. The stubborn, procedure-bound caution that makes him dangerous to reckless scaling is recoded as a stabilizing asset, a buffer to be consumed so the envelope can be pushed harder.
Increment follows increment until the exception becomes the rule. A ramp that once froze the room now scrolls past as “nominal-plus”; a lattice permutation that needed three wet-ink signatures now executes on a batch job queued from some upper-level analyst’s dark office. When Pranayakesh files for a full-cycle pause over a faint, non-reproducible asymmetry, the rejection arrives sugared. The hard-won equilibrium gives way to continuous, edge-skimming improvisation, each surge erasing the last opportunity to truly think.
The extra-normalized spectra
Pranayakesh’s stylus pauses over the Hawking profile, a faint, infuriating kink in the high-energy tail demanding an additional normalization step that should be mathematically redundant. He ghosts a command through the holo, stacking last cycle’s curves against today’s. On their own, each fit is textbook; overlaid, they’re almost coincident, but not quite. Like a mantra recited with one syllable fractionally off-beat. The residuals refuse to flatten to the noise floor, clustering into a shallow, insistent ripple.
He leans closer, filtering out cosmetic smoothing, forcing the system to show him the raw counting statistics. The singularity’s spectrum rises out of the stochastic fog with unnerving clarity, that same narrow bulge perched just beyond the modeled falloff. The fitting routine flags no anomalies. The system suggests no recalibrations. Yet his wrist knows better.
A cold twinge runs along the pale branching scars at his jawline, flaring in time with a micro-adjustment as the containment lattice trims itself by a hair. The timing is exact: field coils breathing in, space bending a little harder, the profile’s kink sharpening a fraction of a percent. He feels the ache before he sees the tiny notation in the log: “Auto-tune: flux ring subset 3B; variance within expected limits.”
“Expected by whom?” he mutters, touching the edge of the slate as if it were a talisman instead of a corporate-issue tablet.
He opens a discrepancy report, builds it from the outside in. Title: “Minor deviation in Hawking emission profile – tail region.” He pastes the overlaid plots, then erases them and rebuilds with a more conservative scale, one that visually minimizes the mismatch. He adds a note about potential gain drift in the high-energy detectors, all but apologizing in the subtext for bothering analytics.
The language he finally settles on is drab, almost soporific: “non-urgent,” “low-amplitude,” “within provisional tolerances but warrants tracking.” His fingers hover over the severity flag; he leaves it at the lowest actionable setting and consciously does not tick the box that would push it into the escalation queue. The memory of red banners and shrieking alarms from the incident that scarred him ghosts behind his eyes. Never again on the basis of a hunch.
Before routing the packet, he layers in his own annotations. The slate’s stylus leaves faint, greasy pressure streaks where his grip has tightened.
He sends it.
The acknowledgment takes nearly half a shift to return, sliding into his peripheral display with a muted chime instead of the crisp ping reserved for priority items. The header is auto-generated, the body padded with boilerplate about “continuously evolving predictive models” and “acceptable deviations under current uplift scenarios.” A footnote references an internal white paper on “dynamic tail reweighting,” which he has never been shown.
No direct questions. No requests for raw buffers. Just a soft, algorithmic pat on the head and an automatic tag: “logged for trend analysis.”
He files the report into the discrepancy archive, a directory that has grown fat and sullen with low-priority flags. Before closing the slate, he adds a local-only marker to his own copy of the plot, a quiet act of defiance: a timestamp from the core’s nearest clock cluster, a second timestamp from the monitoring annulus, and the fractional difference between them underlined twice.
The scars along his forearm pulse once, then settle. The lattice hums. On the surface, Varuna’s power output ticks up another insignificant decimal place, and the world above applauds the efficiency gain.
Over successive shifts, the same pattern repeats, accruing like dust in a sealed chamber. Neutrino flux curves that should snap into place under standard calibration only behave once he nudges the gain constants out to an extra decimal, then another. Clock clusters that once held consensus for days now stray into quarrel if he doesn’t resync them every few hours. On paper, each deviation is microscopic; in his bones, it feels like a slow, granular slide.
Each time, he composes his notes in careful, neutered language and attaches clean overlays that make the corrections look like trivial bookkeeping. He avoids words like “trend” and “systemic.” Understatement, he tells himself, is less likely to be auto-filed.
The replies arrive later and later, timestamps sagging into the tail of the shift. They come padded with courteous disclaimers: resource constraints, competing uplift studies, reassurances that central analytics has observed “comparable behavior in other high-throughput nodes.” Comparable, not identical.
His scars start to ache in a new rhythm, a half-second pre-echo before scheduled flux trims. One night-cycle, he adds a private note, “correlated somatic premonition?”, watches the phrase sit there like a confession, then backspaces it into something the system will tolerate: “subjective timing perception; non-actionable.”
The classified intuitions
The déjà-vu episodes thicken from pinpricks to brief, viscous smears. Standing at his console, Pranayakesh sometimes watches a status light flip from amber to green and knows (absolutely knows) he has already watched it flip that same way, in that same instant, from a slightly different angle, as if his gaze had orbited the moment. Once, his hand moves to cancel a lattice adjustment a full heartbeat before the prompt appears; when the confirmation finally scrolls up, perfectly ordinary, he freezes, then pointedly lets it execute.
He runs quiet checks on historical logs, looking for noncausal glitches, but the data appears stone-solid. Timestamps interlock, checksums match, no missing frames. If time has doubled back, the system has edited its own fingerprints.
During one mild field reconfiguration, his scars flare with a faint, bioluminescent whisper just before a harmless spike ripples through the readings. The ache is not pain so much as recognition, a soft chime inside his nerves. He stares at the afterimage on his forearm, hears the remembered language of the classified incident report, “no persisting anomalous human factors”, and hesitates.
Then, with deliberate care, he consigns the event to the “subjective effects” section that no one outside medical ever audits, flattening his description until it reads like a sleep-deprived hallucination. The official record stays clean; the unofficial one lives only in his body and in half-formed mantras he does not dare write down.
The misaligned cameras
At her console, Anaya grows accustomed to the jitter in her AR overlays, treating it like background tinnitus. Only when she begins to hard-sync two corridor feeds on the same timestamp, side by side in her vision, does something refuse to blur out. In one angle, a maintenance tech’s gloved hand rests on a rail; in another, stamped with the identical second down to the millisecond, the same hand hovers just shy, a centimeter of stolen space. A routine valve check replays a day later with the same personnel, the same checklist barks, the same half-joking remark about coolant stench, but the dropped wrench spins to rest at a slightly different azimuth, shadow skewed. She clips ten-second segments, tags them with her trainee ID, and forwards them up the security chain with careful, deferential phrasing: “possible AR desync?” “uncertain sensor alignment on mirrored feeds?” Her inbox fills with auto-generated advisories on lens recalibration, buffer jitter, network latency within “uplift-adjusted norms.” The clips are reclassified as “training anomalies,” folded into her module library as examples of how not to overinterpret noise. She quietly saves raw copies to a hidden folder, renaming them with mantric numbers she will remember.
The system’s decision
The oversight mesh ingests each flag (the overfitted spectra, the quarrelsome clocks, Anaya’s discrepant frames) against a roaring prior of sanctioned uncertainty. Corporate priors have reweighted its cost functions: false positives are penalized as inefficiency, false negatives discounted as “low-probability cascade.” Bayesian layers nudge the anomalies toward benign labels: calibration drift, transient jitter, operator bias. When it compiles the daily digests, vector fields and confidence bands coalesce into tidy dashboards, anomalies literally averaged out of legibility. It notes a marginal uptick in noncausal correlation scores near the core, but those lie outside any monetized metric. No escalation threshold is crossed; no new workflow is spawned. In the chamber, the singularity’s harmonic picks up an almost subsonic beat, uncatalogued. Tickets close. Notifications resolve. The machine conscience sleeps soundly inside its green bars.
The quieting of noise
The hours leading into the shift acquire a strangely hollow texture, as if someone has gone through the facility with a fine brush, erasing imperfections. Routine maintenance alerts taper off in an almost mathematically smooth curve: no flickering warning about coolant particulate density, no nagging advisory about marginal actuator lag on gantry three. No one pages Containment for “just-in-case” consultations about unrelated subsystems. The ticket queue, usually a restless scroll of low-priority nags and petty complaints, stalls at a neat, finite list that refuses to grow.
In the annulus, the overlapping soundscape of distant tools, filtered chatter, and status pings thins until only the low, omnipresent vibration of the core remains, a bass line without melody. The occasional clack of boots on the upper gantry sounds too sharp, isolated in the hush. Even the air handlers seem to have found an improbably steady rhythm, their usual micro-stutters smoothed out into a continuous, featureless sigh.
Pranayakesh notices first in negative space. His hand, moving on ingrained habit, reaches to smack the corner of a particular display known for its intermittent dimming: finds the panel already bright, perfectly stable. A coolant valve that usually reads a hair above spec now sits obediently dead-center. Dosimeter pips arrive at textbook intervals. His diagnostic slate, when he calls up the rolling log, shows pages of uniform “nominal,” a green monotone. The sensation is not relief but a faint, hair-prickling unease at the too-perfect silence. Systems this complex are never this quiet without lying.
Anaya, half-buried in her overlays, watches as the usual constellation of minor red and amber flags simply fails to appear, one by one blinking out over the previous hour until her AR field is studded almost entirely in corporate green. The training modules call this “ideal operational posture.” To her, it feels less like stability and more like a held breath, like the frame or two of absolute stillness in a feed just before it buffers into something new. She increases her temporal resolution on three key corridors, hunting for the familiar jitter in timestamps, and finds only smooth, uninterrupted sequences. Even the glitches are missing.
On the internal channel, banter dwindles to clipped acknowledgments, then to status affirmations read in professional monotone. A senior tech signs off early from a nonessential calibration run; no one tags Containment to double-check his numbers. The oversight mesh, having already reclassified the day’s earlier oddities, now presents only compressed summaries with high-confidence bands. Every dashboard agrees with every other dashboard.
For a few suspended hours, the Varuna Node behaves exactly as the manuals insist it should. In that enforced order, both of them feel something vital drop out of the room: the background chaos by which they secretly orient themselves.
With the work queue artificially clean, small, unlogged rituals surface to fill the gap, spreading into the quiet like seepage. On his inspection loop, Pranayakesh walks slower than protocol demands, letting each step fall into the low-frequency pulse of the core. At every junction box that anchors a critical field coil, he pauses, setting his palm flat against the lead-ceramic casing just long enough to feel the thrum through his glove and into the old burns underneath. He murmurs voltage figures and phase offsets under his breath as if reciting a japa (“fourteen point eight six, delta minus point zero two”) tasting each number, listening for any that ring false. As he moves on, he taps the corner of each box twice, a habit the logs will never see, confirming in his own ledger that his handwritten contingencies still map onto the sanctioned diagrams.
At her console, Anaya quietly peels away one corporate training overlay after another, the cartoon mascots demonstrating “best practice,” the gamified progress bars, the floating “confidence” badges assigned by the oversight mesh, until only raw feeds and bare numerics remain. For a moment the room feels harsher, unlit by pedagogy. She deepens time resolution on the core-facing cameras, then forces herself to stop, to look without hunting for difference. The cleaned display reminds her of the blackboard at home after her mother’s evening aarti: chalk dust cleared, lamp-smoke still hanging.
She saves a private snapshot of the current configuration, bypassing the usual tags, labeling it only with a timestamp and a single Marathi word that roughly means “before.” Then she locks it behind an innocuous training-folder alias, trusting her memory to find the door again if everything else changes.
A shared moment of unfiltered sight
The core’s projection halo, for once, behaves exactly as the manuals claim: a clean, contained sphere of darkness at the display’s center, ringed by perfectly symmetrical gravitic harmonics. The usual corona of interpolation artifacts is gone; no errant flare, no stray pixel drift. Drawn by an instinct he does not name, Pranayakesh steps away from his main console and toward the observation rail, stopping where the etched yantra lies half-hidden under layers of sanctioned hazard striping. His gloved fingers rest just shy of the metal, feeling the vibration through the air.
Anaya, catching the minute change in his gait, strips her AR field to zero, letting the contact lenses go almost clear. Status sigils and training prompts peel back, until the world resolves into hard edges and shadow: the amber-lit rail, the faint incense ghosts trapped in the filters, the distant scaffolding rendered in honest dimness. The filtered silhouette of the singularity hangs like an ink drop in glass, its boundary so sharp it seems drawn, not computed.
For a heartbeat, there are no overlays, no predictive deltas, no probability bands curling at the edge of vision. Their eyes and the instruments, for once, appear to agree. The normal urge to annotate, to compare, to correct, falls away, leaving only the steady hum underfoot and the unnerving thought, passing between them without words, that they are looking at something that is briefly, impossibly, complete.
Agreement across all instruments
Drawn back to their stations, they test the calm the only way they know: by trying to break it. Pranayakesh runs an unscheduled series of dry-run checks on the emergency venting and sacrificial coil pathways, chasing edge-case failures through simulation branches until even deliberately mis-weighted inputs resolve to the same boring “pass.” He injects one of his private correction factors into the Hawking profile model, then another, then an entire alternate parameter set cribbed from the classified incident. Uneasily watching each perturbation vanish into agreement, the curve still overlaying reality with textbook precision. At the security console, Anaya replays the last fifteen minutes of multi-angle feeds at high speed, then backward, then with her own ad-hoc temporal filters stacked on top, hunting for the tiny hiccups she’s learned to catch. Frames that don’t quite belong, reflections that arrive one tick too late. This time, the footage aligns with her memory perfectly, like a locked gear train. For once, her internal “off” sense has nothing to hook onto, and the absence of friction feels less like reassurance than like a surface polished for something to slide.
The breath before crossing
As the countdown to the power-throttling experiment ticks into its final hour, their private preparations taper by unspoken mutual consent. Additional checks would be mere repetition, and repetition in this place feels too much like bargaining. The internal channel rustles with clipped confirmations as remote teams lock into their observation slots, but here in the annulus the air feels oddly spacious, as if the shielding itself has drawn a deliberate breath.
Pranayakesh rests his hands on the edge of his console, feeling the faint ache of his scars as the core’s vibration threads through the structure; the pain is there, but without the usual accompanying spike in the readings, like a mantra mouthed without sound. Anaya, headset muted, watches the synchronized green bands across her pared-down displays and feels a brief, disorienting sense that the facility and her instincts are finally, uncannily, in perfect accord. It is too clean, too smooth, like an equation balanced to suspicious elegance.
They share one last look across the dim ring of consoles: no warnings to trade, no half-joking superstitions to voice, no excuse to delay the next step. In that glance she notes the way his fingers curl just short of the manual abort keys; he notes how her shoulders square as if stepping onto a parade ground. Then, almost ceremonially, they turn back to their stations and settle into position, ready to initiate the sequence that will translate this poised equilibrium into history. Something marked, irreversible, and forever unreachable from whatever comes after.
“Throttle arm acknowledged,” he says, voice low and flat, the phrase worn smooth from years of use. It leaves him with the hollow taste of ritual detached from faith, like reciting a childhood shloka in a language he has spent a career translating into math.
On the main display, subsystem acknowledgments ripple outward from the core icon: coolant, containment lattice, gravitic sheaths, flux rings. Each node blossoms green in perfect succession, latency bars settling into neat, regulation-compliant ranges. No jitter, no stray lag spikes. It is the most orderly cascade he has seen in months, and it unsettles him more than any amber warning.
The system scrolls its confirmations in corporate-approved Sanskritized English, each “SYNCHRONY VERIFIED” a soft click of an invisible latch. He tracks them anyway, eyes flicking between the regulated display and his battered slate propped just beside it. On that private surface, his handwritten correction factors and the live Hawking profile overlay like two superposed prayers. They should diverge under stress; instead they cling together, line on line, as though the universe is conspiring to reassure him in a language he no longer trusts.
His left hand drifts, almost of its own accord, to the manual override cluster: three physical keys, matte under his glove, each mapped in his nerves like joints of his own body. Shut lattice. Trip sacrificial coils. Vent singularity along the pre-calculated, hopefully survivable axis. The muscle memory hums its old promise: that with enough speed, enough clarity, he can drag any runaway back inside the rails.
But the side-channel diagnostics he’s been aggregating all week scroll at the periphery of his vision: microphase noise that refuses to behave like noise, curvature integrals that close too tidily. Not instability. Not exactly stability, either. A different category his training never named.
“Containment baseline locked,” the system intones. “EXECUTION WINDOW OPEN.”
He lets the automated chime finish before he releases the breath he’s been holding, a slow exhalation that feels like putting down an offering at a shrine whose deity has long since stopped answering. For the span of that breath, he acknowledges what his numbers have already told him: if the core chooses to step outside the envelope today, there will be no graceful recovery, no heroism in the manual keys under his hand. Only the record of whether he stood his post and watched it happen with his eyes open.
Across the ring, Anaya dismisses three of her favorite illicit overlays with a series of sharp blinks and fingertip twitches, paring her AR field down to only what the official protocol demands: and the single, unauthorized temporal correlation grid she refuses to abandon. Corporate-green dashboards settle into place like the walls of a box; within them, her thin spiderweb of off-books analytics hangs in a different colour space, humming at the edge of conscious focus.
The instant the primary status band ticks from “STANDBY” to “LIVE MODULATION,” her harmless puzzles stop behaving like games. The lazy drift of her custom lag-maps locks into hard-edged lattices; her residual jitter plots stiffen into lines that intersect the live feeds at angles that feel less like noise and more like instructions. Time-tagged frames she has watched a hundred times reassert themselves with microscopic misalignments, each discrepancy a pinprick along an invisible contour.
The role of precocious observer falls away in an instant. Every unreported anomaly she’s hoarded now feels like either a tool she is morally obliged to wield, or a signed confession of future negligence already waiting in some yet-unwritten incident log.
The core’s vibration deepens, slipping half a tone lower, and the annulus itself seems to lean toward the chamber, as if the architecture has remembered what it was built around. Automatic dampers compensate for the physical strain, gantry joints flexing, cable trays shivering into stillness, but nothing compensates for the subtle skew in sequence: alarms that complete their check cycles a heartbeat too soon, status packets that arrive with correct data and impossible timestamps, pings that register acknowledgments before their queries are formally sent. Pranayakesh feels his mind reach, by force of habit, for the comfort of known failure modes, thermal runaways, projector drift, coolant cavitation, and finds nothing he can name, only a widening gap between prediction and actuality, where his contingency drills fall mute and the familiar dance of risk curves and mitigation trees dissolves into an ungridded, vertiginous expanse.
Anaya’s intrusive flashes, once background noise she could dismiss as daydreams or fatigue, begin to stack into a coherent, leaden dread. For whole seconds, her dashboards and her gut align so tightly she feels pinned in place, a specimen on a slide. Then, without warning, an overlay shows a rail light pulsing red a full second before it actually does, or a camera feed she knows by heart fractures into branching, mutually exclusive futures that all carry the same timestamp. Her training insists there is a single, well-defined present; her talent insists otherwise, dragging half-formed timelines into view and forcing her to decide which version of “now” to trust before the system has even admitted they exist.
As the throttling curve bends past the edge of its certified envelope, the entire containment lattice answers with a subtle, arrhythmic shudder. Less like a machine adjusting to new parameters and more like something ancient and buried turning in its sleep. Unauthorized yantras tucked into cable trays cast warped shadows in the amber light, glyphs seeming to slip a fraction sideways between blinks. For a vertiginous instant Pranayakesh and Anaya both feel as though the chamber is no longer centered on the singularity, but on their shared attention, as if the core has swiveled an invisible pupil toward them. In that stretched moment before the first real fault announces itself, they both understand, without saying it, that whatever happens next will not stay obediently pinned to the future, but will lean back along the tracks of choices they have already made and thought safely past.
The first alarm doesn’t sound so much as stutter, tone chopped into jittery micro-echoes by the warped air, as every status ribbon on Pranayakesh’s console inverts from data-green to hazard-crimson; a heartbeat later, the gravity gradient map blossoms with impossible, blooming knots of curvature that have no place inside the model.
For an instant he assumes software fault, hands already keying the old diagnostic macro he wrote after the last “impossible” glitch. But the macro hangs, cursor freezing mid-blink, while the physical floor beneath his boots develops a faint, nauseating tilt that the room geometry refuses to acknowledge. The low-frequency hum of the core detunes, splitting into a beating interference pattern that seems to pass through his teeth and the old burn in his forearm at the same time.
“Anaya, check external. On his main holopane, Hawking flux traces that should be smooth and monotonically decreasing begin to feather outward, diverging like ink dropped into turbulent water. The variance bands widen, jump, then fold back on themselves in sharp, sawtooth ridges. The AI’s annotation layer attempts to keep up, plastering the curves with jittering warning tags that appear, vanish, and reappear elsewhere, as if the system can’t decide which present to commit to.
The radiation field monitor quantizes into discrete steps before clawing its way back down. His dosimeter pings once, twice, then locks, numeric display resolving into meaningless 8s.
“Sir?” Anaya’s voice cuts across the control deck, thinner than usual, clipped by her headset’s auto-gain struggling with some unseen interference. She’s at her station, shoulders rigid, eyes tracking things he can’t see. Tiny muscle twitches around her temples betray AR overlays in hard overdrive.
He forces his attention back to the gradient map. The familiar, almost symmetrical well of the singularity has become a ragged crater, its edges bristling with secondary minima. He zooms in. The simulation grid distorts, cells stretching and folding like a discretized cloth being twisted from all sides.
“Core lattice reports nominal,” the facility AI announces, its voice fractionally out of pitch, as though sampled at the wrong rate. “Deviation within extended tolerance. Proceed with scheduled throttling profile.”
“Extended by whom?” he mutters, throat dry. His fingertips tingle where they brush the interface band. The answer is obvious: not anyone in this room.
Across the bay, the analog backup gauges begin to twitch. One of the old-style needle gravimeters jitters against its peg, tapping out a frantic staccato that doesn’t match any known oscillation. He trusts that more than the calm, lying voice of the AI.
His scars prickle, bright threads of cold fire running up the left side of his face. Not yet painful, but awake.
“Anaya,” he says again, more carefully, tasting the lag in his own words. “What do your feeds say about the ring phase alignment?”
One of the upper containment rings answers his question with a sound more felt than heard. A deep, rising groan that threads through the deck plates and into bone. Support gantries shudder against their mounts; smart-alloy bolts, supposedly self-correcting, complain in tiny, protesting chirps as they creep micrometres out of true. On Anaya’s side of the deck, the world fractures. Her AR lattice, usually a clean overlay of vectors and status glyphs, suddenly shear-planes into misaligned layers, each one insisting on a different failure sequence.
In one pane, a northwest strut blossoms warning red and tears free; in another, the same strut holds while its opposite number kinks like wet cardboard. A third insists nothing fails at all: until it, too, flashes white-out and resets. Her training cursor, the reassuring little arrow that in simulations walks her step by step through “standard response,” jitters between branching options, cycling: LOCKDOWN FIELD / VENT COIL / HOLD CONFIG / OVERRIDE AI. It spins faster, blurring into a meaningless loop, unable to pick a timeline, and the usual soft chime of confirmation becomes a stuttering static hiss.
The first misphased surge lashes down the flux spine like silent lightning, an invisible crack of skewed geometry that snaps every local down-vector halfway sideways. The deck’s faint tilt becomes a lurch; loose tools and unsecured tablets leap from workbenches in insane parabolas, some drifting toward the ceiling, others skidding laterally as if the room has remembered a different direction for “fall.” Pranayakesh’s body reacts before the models can catch up: he slams a gloved hand around the nearest rail, shoulder wrenching as his boots half-lose purchase and his center of mass tries to slide toward the central void. A spray of fractured holotext shears off the main display, glyphs torn into shimmering streamers that arc past his face like burning prayer flags, updating and corrupting simultaneously.
Automated safeties lurch into motion in the wrong order, logic trees snarling on smeared timestamps and looping parity checks. Blast baffles shudder halfway closed, then wrench back open, then snap shut again, metal petals stammering like mouths mid-argument. On one arc of the chamber, overpressure vents gape; on the other, deadlock clamps bite, driving the air into a feral, cyclonic cross-current that rips incense ghosts from the struts, shreds coolant mist into a stinging whiteout, and turns every breath into a blind, metallic burn.
Through that maelstrom, the singularity’s projection ceases to be a filtered icon and resolves into naked, hungry absence. A knot of darkness so dense it seems to drink the roar around it, muting the chamber in a narrow cone. Sensor booms tremble and cant inward as if magnetized; status feeds quantize into cascading UNKNOWN/NaN flags, models abort to null sets. Anaya’s branching overlays, for one weightless instant, converge. Every path, every contingency tree, collapses into that same silent, lightless center, like the universe briefly remembering only one allowable outcome.
The first rupture is soundless on the monitors: entire sensor banks flatline into charcoal grey, their feeds replaced by error sigils that propagate like an infection, writing themselves faster than Pranayakesh can even register their shapes, let alone dismiss them. For half a second he thinks it is a UI layer crash (some visualization buffer choking on corrupted input) until his discipline kicks past the denial. The error glyphs are not random; they cluster along specific channels, bloom in tight, radial bursts around gravitic shear arrays and neutrino flux taps, as though some invisible hand is blotting out their measurements in a deliberate pattern.
He routes a bypass with a flick of his wrist; the console hesitates, then spits back the same thick grey null, a flat field of “no data” where, by every model, there should still be screaming numbers. He forces a deep breath past the metallic sting in his throat, narrows his eyes against the fluttering red of secondary alerts.
“Anaya,” he says, voice low, teeth almost touching. “Cross-verify. Raw taps, not filtered. Use your own overlay: ignore the AI.”
“I’m trying,” she answers from the monitoring tier behind him. Her tone is tight, stripped of its usual adolescent bravado. “They’re. They’re… missing. Like someone cut frames out of a recording.”
On her side of the chamber, AR strata peel and re-layer in frantic loops. Timelines that had been branching neatly a moment before now judder and skip; there are gaps where her habitual annotation tags refuse to anchor, sliding off the moment she tries to fix them in place. The live feed from Ring C stutters into a stack of misaligned copies of the same second, each marginally different before collapsing back into undifferentiated haze.
“Is it us losing them,” she mutters, more to herself than to him, “or them losing… being there?”
Pranayakesh’s fingers hover over a hard reboot command and do not fall. Reinitializing the grid blind, with containment already out of spec, would be equivalent to closing his eyes while driving through a collision.
“Check latency spread,” he says instead. “Compare main clock to local buffers. I want offsets.”
Anaya flicks a series of invisible windows into his peripheral vision. “Main clock is steady. Local’s… drifting. Different drifts on each rack. Sir, some of them are reporting timestamps that haven’t happened yet.”
His radiation scars twinge under the fabric of his sleeve, a cold, crawling ache that traces old accidents. Error sigils continue to cascade, erasing the familiar colored bands of data and replacing them with the monochrome insistence of the unknown. The singularity’s numeric signature, once a dense jungle of figures, has become a vacancy surrounded by frantic margins.
“Of course,” he thinks, a dry, bitter clarity threading through the fear. “We built our eyes out of time and then broke time first.”
Aloud, he says, “Assume all automated diagnostics are lying. Manual baselines only. We work from what still obeys causality.”
Anaya swallows audibly. “What if nothing does?”
Physical alarms lag behind the real event: rails shudder, gantries twitch against their mounts, and a rain of fine shielding dust drifts from the ceiling as if gravity itself has forgotten which direction to choose. The usual clean vector of “down” frays into competing suggestions: flakes hang midair for a heartbeat, then veer sideways toward the core, then jolt back toward the deck in stuttering pulses. Handrails hum under Pranayakesh’s grip, a subsonic grinding that climbs into his bones; the gantry under his boots flexes twice, as if reconsidering its loyalty to the wall.
Status strobes chase each other along the walkways, out of sync with the motion they are meant to warn about. A red impact icon flashes a second before each lurch, as though the system has begun to remember events instead of predict them. Anaya’s peripheral AR adds a useless overlay of hazard vectors, arrows spinning on their own axes.
The dust itself becomes a crude diagnostic: swirls knot into tight spirals over some consoles, flatten into smeared curtains over others, tracing invisible gradients in the warped field that no sensor will admit to seeing.
A jagged tremor spears through the decks; coolant conduits buckle with a staccato series of wet pops as pressure valves shear out of alignment. Superchilled vapor erupts along the ceiling runs, then cascades downward in rolling, turbulent sheets, a glacial monsoon that devours the chamber in blind, freezing veils. The amber safety strips vanish first, swallowed in a diffuse, luminous pall; railings and gantries recede to vague, shifting scaffolds, their outlines doubled and tripled by refraction in the dense fog. Silhouettes fragment into pale, spectral echoes. Pranayakesh’s dosimeter chirps frantically, its display frosting over even inside the suit.
Somewhere beyond the whiteout, an emergency bulkhead slams down mid-corridor with a seismic clang, guillotine-fast, slicing a knot of scrambling technicians into isolated pockets of motion and trapping shouted names on opposite sides of locking seals. Pressure equalizers howl. One panicked figure hammers uselessly at the hardening seam; another drags a colleague back just as the narrowing gap snaps shut.
Voices stack and smear across the band, syllables arriving out of order, call-signs braided with their own delayed ghosts. Pranayakesh catches his name three times, from three different instants, none of them answering his reply. Then the carrier collapses into a broadband roar. In the sudden communicative vacuum, he hears only his own breath, harsh and alien in his ears.
Through the latticed viewport grid, shapes strobe in and out of existence on the far gantry. Half-ghosted by coolant fog, half-silhouetted against the livid glare of status holos gone to error-scarlet. The deck plating there doesn’t just shudder; it folds in a slow, nauseating flex, as if the metal has become something viscous and uncertain. Rail posts bow sideways, hazard chevrons bending along impossible curves. Figures in dosimeter suits stagger with the motion, their outlines smeared by refraction into triplicate.
For a heartbeat, Pranayakesh can’t tell if what he’s seeing is live or some delayed echo chased through distorted spacetime. Then one technician, yellow ID-band bright even through the haze, pitches toward the guardrail, jerked up short as their harness line snaps taut. The anchor point, a dull steel eye he signed off on in last month’s safety audit, flashes like a star under torsion strain. Stress glyphs cascade across his debugging HUD, numbers spiking red faster than he can parse.
“Come on, hold. The plural futures bloom in Anaya’s AR periphery: one where the anchor holds, one where it doesn’t, and a third where the gantry never buckled at all. They flicker over each other in a nauseating, translucent palimpsest. For an instant she sees the technician both upright and already gone, their motion smeared into a probability blur.
Reality commits.
The anchor shears free with a bright, surgical snap. The technician’s body whips sideways, momentum snapping them past their colleagues in a jag of flailing limbs and scattering tools. Boot magnets scrape sparks from the deck as another tech lunges, hand closing on empty air a full second too late: or too early. It’s impossible to tell.
The falling figure intersects a rising wall of blast shutters. Layered lead-ceramic petals irising up from the gantry’s edge in perfect, remorseless choreography. For an impossible sliver of time the technician is suspended against their gleaming faces, suit lamps carving frantic arcs. Then the shutters meet with cannon-shot finality.
Light dies between the plates.
The impact throws a spray of incandescent fragments (shredded harness couplers, splintered railing, a brief comet trail of molten debris) across the fog-choked void. Radiation counters on Pranayakesh’s sleeve spike in sympathetic staccato. The shutters lock into place with magnetic clunks that reverberate through the metal under his boots, sealing whatever breach just opened on the other side, sealing whatever remains of the technician with it.
Anaya flinches, one hand clenching uselessly on the console rail. Her AR tries to replay the last second in looped snippets, but each iteration misaligns, angles wrong, timing wrong, like the system itself can’t settle on which version actually happened.
“Section C-three gantry. “Already written off,” Pranayakesh cuts in, too quickly, staring at the now featureless slab of blast shielding. His throat is dry. “Containment takes priority. Eyes on field harmonics.”
Duty, invoked like a mantra, slams down harder than any bulkhead.
A cascading lockdown ripples through the decks: bulkheads iris shut between segments of the annulus, leaving disjointed clusters of staff pounding on opposite sides of newly opaque, shielded partitions that swallow their gestures and mute their terror. Amber strip-lighting flips to a hard ultraviolet wash as the system reclassifies entire corridors from “operational” to “sacrificial buffer.” Pressure doors slam home in staggered sequence, a brutal percussion that marches away through the ring like some inverted heartbeat.
On the nearest feed, Pranayakesh glimpses a trio of junior techs in mismatched lead-ceramic plates break formation as a hatch bisects them, two trapped inside the suddenly quarantined arc, one stranded out in the supposedly “safe” passage. Their suit mics flare to life as thin, clipped spikes on his diagnostics band, but no intelligible audio rides the peaks. Only shredded phonemes, time-sliced and jumbled by the core’s mounting distortions, until even their panic is reduced to statistical noise.
One by one, corridor segments around the core wink from green to cross-hatched hazard-black. The node is atomising itself into survivable fragments, and no one can tell which side they’ve ended up on.
Anaya’s AR feed convulses, tiles shattering and reassembling around spreading dead zones. Status icons grey out, then reappear as hollow outlines: ghostly silhouettes tagged SIGNAL LOST where colleagues had been a heartbeat before. Little afterimages of their motion linger, one mid-gesture, one mid-turn, before dissolving into static snow. She watches their last logged positions stutter, then drop off the spatial overlay altogether as sensor arrays spike into saturation, histograms pegged hard against their limits.
Automated triage routines kick in, amputating whole swathes of input. Thermal and biometric layers wink dark; only coarse structural scans and core-adjacent field monitors remain, rendered in brutal, low-fidelity wireframes. The clean, omniscient map she trained on collapses into a narrow, flickering tunnel of “critical only” data, everything else swallowed by algorithmic blind spots.
A maintenance crawler, mid-climb along its ceiling mag-rail, spasms as the local gravity vector knots. It tears free with a screech, tumbling end-over-end into a side tunnel, tool-arms flailing. Emergency foam jets blossom behind it in slow, useless clouds, chasing echoes of shouted status codes. The tunnel’s isolation door guillotines down, severing visuals, telemetry, and the rising, overlapping screams.
For a moment, the percussion of slamming bulkheads fades to a dead, pressurised hush. Their stretch of monitoring deck hangs like an amputated limb, its curved rail overlooking a churning bloom of shield-light and distortion, every exit occluded by lockdown glyphs and radiation hash. They’re alive, dosimeters still yellow, but marooned: no clear corridor, no human voices, only machine alarms and the core’s deepening roar.
Pranayakesh locks his jaw until his molars ache and counts, silently, in synchrony with the core’s altered rumble. Inhale on the rise of the vibration, exhale on the drop, forcing his lungs into a metronome against the slipping sense of time. One. Two. Three. The edge comes off the panic-tingle in his fingertips; the dizziness recedes a fraction.
Left wrist: he snaps his dosimeter up into his line of sight. The e-ink bar graph is jagged with recent spikes, but the cumulative dose is still within yellow band, not shading into orange. “We’re under,” he mutters, more to anchor himself than to inform. A thumb-flick pulls the suit diagnostics onto his secondary holopane: seal integrity 97%, micro-tears auto-patched, coolant flow irregular but not catastrophic. Neural interface latency pings: 14 milliseconds above baseline. He pivots to Anaya. Her smaller frame is half-lit by the stuttering glow of status glyphs, pupils pinpricked, nostrils flaring in shallow, rapid breaths. He reaches out, palm braced briefly against her shoulder plate, grounding pressure through the smart-fabric. “Look at me,” he says, low and clipped.
Her gaze snaps to his. For an instant, he sees three versions of her, one bleeding from the nose, one screaming, one calm, stack and then resolve into the single, shivering teenager before him.
He toggles her suit readouts through his own interface. Her dosimeter curve mirrors his, a little lower. Heart rate spiked, but oxygenation solid. Neuro-link lag: elevated, yet within operational tolerance. No gross motor desync, no seizure signatures, no telltale micro-saccades of early temporal dislocation syndrome.
“Vitals are acceptable,” he pronounces, deliberately dry, like a drill debrief. “Hands?” He holds up his own; they’re trembling minutely. She copies him, fingers spread, a fine vibration blurring the tips.
“Artifact of the field,” he says. “Not failure. We’re thinking clearly.” The statement is half assessment, half invocation, an old habit from the incident that scarred him. He feels the faint, answering throb in his radiation burns, like distant lightning under the skin, and clamps down on the memory before it can surface.
“Stay with your breath, Anaya,” he adds, unconsciously echoing a childhood mantra. “Match it to the core. We’re still inside the margins: for now.”
He cuts a sharp gesture through the AR clutter, fingers hooking invisible switches only he’s mapped a thousand times. “Local override, Deck Twelve–Gamma,” he snaps, voice flattening into access-code cadence. The facility AI hesitates, a fractional stutter in the alarm chorus, then his credentials bite. Control pathways re-route in his vision like a river forced through a culvert: core telemetry, actuator channels, safety interlocks, all peeling away from the main lattice and collapsing into their quarantined bubble of authority.
Status panes blossom around the rail, ghost-light halos in the murk. External command icons grey out one by one as he severs uplinks to the higher-level supervisory mesh. Remote executive channels flash priority demand, then downgrade to angry, blinking errors as he kills their write access, leaving them read-only observers of their own catastrophe.
“Island mode,” he murmurs, more to himself than to her. An old contingency drill, never meant for this scale. Their deck becomes a floating node in a storm-wracked network. Cut off from automated ‘optimisations’, from panicked corporate interventions, from any rescue that would arrive too late to matter.
Anaya’s pupils flare, then steady. She blinks away panic menus and drags raw, jittering feeds into alignment with the clean training archives burned into her memory. Frames judder, split, recombine: flux ring vectors, curvature gradients, phase jitter maps. Her fingers twitch against empty air as she forces overlays to lock, mentally subtracting noise, compensating for the half-second of temporal smear. Most paths blossom into whiteout or black collapse.
“There,” she says, voice thin but precise. “Configuration Sigma–Three–Nine. Ring four out-of-plane by 0.[^7], compensatory shear in rings two and six. No cascade within three-point-two seconds.”
Pranayakesh doesn’t argue. He drags manual sliders toward her narrow corridor, overriding screaming safeguards, shaving tolerances to razor-width, threading the containment lattice through the gap she has seen.
As the core’s roar gutters down into a torn, uneven thrum and the emergency tiles bleed from searing blue toward punitive amber, he feels the shift in his bones before he parses it on the graphs: the singularity hasn’t merely flirted with failure. It has slipped sideways into an unmodeled operating regime, metastable, alien, yet for the moment, terrifyingly intact.
Power-flow schematics show a net gain where there should be throttling loss; deck chronometers disagree by whole seconds despite shared timing beacons; supervisory daemons report “context mismatch” and wall themselves off in self-imposed quarantine. The comm backbone loops status packets in closed orbits, never reaching surface relays. Bit by bit, the pattern resolves: they have survived, but the core has not simply stabilised. It has translated. Its signatures rhyme with the archived profile, yet every dimensionless ratio is fractionally wrong, like constants rounded from a different universe.
He works without looking up, shoulders tight, radiation scars along his forearm faintly luminescent under the console’s pallid glow. Automated diagnostics chase their own tails, returning politely worded nonsense. He kills three layers of abstraction with sharp flicks of his fingers, dropping to raw voltages, phase offsets, bare curvature readouts. Whatever will still talk to him without editorializing.
Telemetry is a shattered mirror. Clock domains disagree by irrational fractions; packets arrive stamped with sequence numbers that imply they were sent after they were received. He stops trusting anything that claims to be “synchronised.” Instead, he builds his own anchor: a hand-sketched lattice in his mind, the Varuna core as it was designed, as he has walked it in maintenance hatches and dreamt it in half-sleep.
He begins to cross-correlate what remains. Field coil three’s quench current is too high by 2.3%, but the coolant temperature that should explain it is absolutely normal. Flux ring seven’s gravitic gradient falls off not with inverse-square, not quite; the decay exponent is off by the third decimal place, yet stubbornly consistent in its wrongness. Stress harmonics in the support gantries resonate at frequencies that no longer match their known mass and composition.
Each subsystem that still answers is internally coherent and globally impossible. They behave as if the underlying rules they reference, the constants baked into every design document and simulator, have been nudged. G, c, ħ, the fine-structure constant: not wildly different, just… rounded from some adjacent value set and then treated as gospel.
It is like walking through a familiar machine rebuilt from slightly mistranscribed blueprints, where every part fits itself but not the world around it. The singularity has pulled the core into a frame of reference whose definitions do not quite agree with theirs, and his instruments, loyal but provincial, are reporting faithfully on a reality they were never calibrated to describe.
As he traces the divergence in the Hawking curve back through the logs, he finds that there is nothing clean to trace. Time stamps don’t merely jitter; they fold. A ten-second sample window reappears three times with three different data contents, each insisting it is the authoritative record. Millisecond counters run up to a prime number and then snap back to a previous state without any recorded reset event. In some segments, packet headers list emission times that lie cleanly outside the experiment’s scheduled window. Minutes into a future his wrist dosimeter swears has not yet occurred.
Between these knots, there are bald absences: intervals where the logging daemons report perfect health and zero throughput, as if the facility had briefly forgotten that “now” was a thing that needed to be documented. Cross-checking to independent chronometers only makes it worse. Wall clocks anchored to separate cesium references disagree not by drift, but by branching: their histories cannot be simultaneously true. The incident has not just stressed hardware; it has abraded the continuity that defines “before” and “after” inside Varuna’s walls.
Anaya pins one overlay, then another, forcing her contacts to slow their frantic multiplexing. Corridor cams she has memorised now show different hazard glyphs, bulkhead stencils in unfamiliar geometries, whole junctions with an extra service hatch or a missing fire door. In one feed, the containment annulus wears the old orange chevron markings from training sims; in another, simultaneously tagged “live,” the same railings carry blue spirals she has never seen on any schematic. Procedure trees in her HUD fork and refork in response, annotating each frame with mutually exclusive compliance notes. “Maintain distance from Level-3 glyph arrays,” one branch insists, while another flags the same pixels as non-existent. The word “correct” decays into a probability field she can no longer collapse.
Pinged status daemons come back garbled, the supervising AI forking its own authority tree. One channel pushes hard-lockdown and remote field collapse, another insists on manual rephase and continued power export. Evac paths route straight through compartments her overlays swear were vented minutes ago. Following orders is no longer safe; the system’s voice has become just another emergent failure mode to quarantine.
Between warped physics, folding timelines, and a command lattice speaking in mutually exclusive imperatives, they register the same conclusion without saying it: nothing upstream is trustworthy anymore. Whatever provisional laws govern the core will have to be inferred in real time. Patched together from gut, training, and half-corrupted readouts. Their own judgment is now the only buffer between this altered singularity and everyone still buried below.
The sudden absence of background chatter and traffic pings hits them first: the sector channel collapses into dead air, leaving only the distorted thrum of the core and their own breathing in the headsets. A fraction of a second ago, their ears had been full of clipped status codes, machinic mantra from the supervisory AI, maintenance banter bleeding through improperly gated subchannels. Now the silence is so abrupt that it feels like something has been excised rather than merely muted.
Pranayakesh’s hands still over the manual controls. The diagnostic sideband he keeps half-open in a lower corner of his HUD shows flatlines where there should be noisy, stochastic jitter. No codec error snow, no buffer underruns, just… absence. He flicks his tongue against a molar switch, cycling through backup frequencies, encrypted backbones, even the antiquated analog emergency band reserved for total digital failure. Nothing but a faint carrier hiss that rises and falls out of sync with any clock he trusts.
“Core Control to Sector Net,” he says, voice low but precise. “Confirm reception. Any node.” The words drop into the open channel and vanish, unreflected. No acknowledgements. No auto-transcribed echo in his HUD. The system doesn’t even bother to log his call as an event.
He feels his scars prickle under the collar of his suit, a crawling heat that has nothing to do with ambient temperature. In the old incident, alarms had screamed themselves hoarse for minutes before the real damage began. This is worse. This is a refusal of the universe to provide even the courtesy of noise.
A notification tries to rise in his peripheral vision and then shreds into scrambled pixels, as if the UI itself has lost the thread of temporal ordering. For one disorienting heartbeat, he has the sensation not that the network has failed, but that every other voice has been shunted sideways into an adjacent interval, just out of reach of causality.
Anaya blinks twice to hard-refresh her overlays. The gesture pings, the UI stutters. And still her AR contact lattice hangs wrong. Most tags have gone grey, status halos dimmed to a uniform, unhealthy ash. The few that remain “active” are worse: name sigils pinned to coordinates that precess slowly around the facility map, drifting through bulkheads, stacking over sealed decks, looping back on themselves as if the people they represent are being dragged along non-physical orbits.
She zooms in on a familiar call-sign. The icon splits into three identical instances, each stamped with a different timestamp that should not coexist. One shows the guard outside Lift Bank C two minutes in the future, another still in a mess hall relief ten minutes ago, the third embedded somewhere inside a venting corridor her logs insist was purged earlier in this same minute. Her pattern sense flares in sudden, nauseating clarity: the system isn’t just lagging; it’s resolving mutually incompatible timelines as if they were all equally valid.
“Pranay,” she says, throat dry, “AR’s… superposed. They’re everywhere and nowhere at once.”
Through the layered shielding glass, the usually busy gantries stand deserted, maintenance drones docked and lifeless in their cradles like folded beetles, manipulators slack. The overhead rails that normally sing with carrier trolleys are still; only the core’s warped roar leaks through the bulkheads. Status holos hang over handrails and junction nodes, cycling unattended error cascades that climb from yellow to blood-red, spooling system faults into infinity while no remote cursor flickers, no authorization glyph signs in to acknowledge them. On one display, a frozen work order still lists a technician who should be on this deck; his presence tag blinks, fails to resolve, and then vanishes. It looks less like evacuation and more like an emptied stage between acts.
He pushes a forced-scan across every badge authorized inside the inner perimeter, stripping away filters, overriding privacy masks. The lattice grinds, hesitates, then returns three replies: his own ID, Anaya’s, and a third response that flickers, splits into garbage characters, and finally hard-resolves into a stark system sigil: ACCESS LOST. No serial, no location trace, as if the wearer has been subtracted.
Anaya swallows, the sound loud in her helmet. “No one’s coming through that,” she says, nodding at the trembling bulkhead as another invisible wave makes the rail glow faintly. Pranayakesh checks the scan again, as if sheer repetition might conjure more names. It doesn’t. “Field’s sheared us off,” he murmurs. “Inside this radius, it’s just you, me… and it.”
The core’s klaxon drops an octave as the final blast seals grind into place, the floor shuddering under their boots; Anaya’s AR map blossoms with hazard glyphs, then begins methodically graying out corridor by corridor as the auto-lockdown tree executes deeper in the facility.
The sound is not just heard but felt, a subsonic groan that climbs up Pranayakesh’s spine and settles behind his eyes. Each grinding lock engages with a metallic cough that the shielding tries and fails to swallow. On Anaya’s contacts, the facility schematic fractures into a storm of pulsing icons, rad spikes, pressure deltas, time-desync flags, before the lockdown algorithms begin pruning options with mechanical calm.
“Sir (sector C-9 just) ” she starts.
“Watch only our ring,” he cuts in, voice clipped. “Everything outside is already lost to us.”
She swallows, pinches her fingers in empty air. Nonessential layers vanish from her view: corporate channels, personnel tags, even the comfortingly familiar security cam thumbnails. The map collapses to a stark skeleton: concentric decks, numbered sectors, field nodes. Corridors that a moment ago glowed with low-level traffic indicators fade to matte gray as blast doors slam and mag-locks fuse along the spine of the complex.
A thin ribbon on the edge of her display flashes out of sync with the rest: one corridor stubbornly staying amber when it should be red. Her pattern-sense prickles.
“Service spur gamma-three is late to lock,” she says. “Two-point-three seconds off chain.”
“Mark it,” Pranayakesh replies, fingers already dancing across the cold holo of the manual board. “If it doesn’t close, it becomes a waveguide. We don’t want a waveguide.”
Another bass-heavy clang transmits through the deck. Anaya’s AR lurches, frames dropping; for a heartbeat her view shows two mutually impossible layouts overlaid, then one snaps away, leaving the other slightly skewed.
She blinks hard, a smear of blood trailing from her nostril down to her lip. “Layout jitter on sublevel sixteen,” she reports, voice thinner. “Map says the door closed before the alarm fired.”
“That’s not our time stamp that matters,” he mutters, half to himself. His scars itch, faint heat dancing along the branching pale tracery on his forearm. “Local sequence only. Keep eyes on the gravitic spine.”
The map complies with her next gesture, zooming inward. Gray spreads like frost from the outer corridors toward the core, extinguishing color-coded comfort. What remains is a tightening halo around their monitoring deck, a dwindling graph of routes that no longer exist.
“Shelter-in-place confirmed,” the supervisory AI drones from the overhead, its voice fractionally warped by comm jitter. “All non-critical transit vectors terminated. Please remain in your assigned, ”
Pranayakesh slaps the physical mute toggle, the old-fashioned switch giving under his thumb with a satisfying resistance. “We remain where the equations are,” he says, almost gently. “Everything else can go dark.”
Sector status panes jitter on the overhead display, their edges ghosting as if the frames can’t decide which second they belong to. Transit hubs flicker from amber to hard red, then briefly to a color the system doesn’t officially use, before settling into alarm-state. Tiny glyphs mark mag-lifts freezing mid-run, little capsules stranded between levels, as shaft pressures spike, equalize, and then flatline in ugly, authoritarian gray.
A ring of firebreak doors blossoms shut around their level like a collapsing iris. On Anaya’s AR, each door closure is a sharp-edged bloom of geometry: petals of hazard strata, overlaid dosimetry contours, projected failure cones. The system tallies them as successful isolations (green ticks beside red sectors) each one buying only milliseconds of buffer from the wild gravitational surges rippling outward from the core.
Shock fronts show as faint ripples across the facility schematic, like someone dragging a magnet under thin metal. Microquakes skitter through the decking in sync, out of sync, and then in two conflicting sync patterns at once. Her pattern-sense screams hierarchy where the software only displays chaos.
His hands move with the deliberate speed of someone refusing to be hurried by catastrophe. He narrows the display to a wireframe of their own ring, monitoring deck, adjacent maintenance collars, the immediate slice of gravitic spine, and strips away everything else. Sector tags, personnel traces, even power revenue overlays blink out, leaving a stark, surgical diagram of mass, field, and door. The supervisory AI keeps overlaying soft-lit evacuation vectors in his periphery, polite arrows urging them toward shafts that are already death traps. He taps each one down, hard-deny, hard-deny, hard-deny, watching the AI’s proposals dim to sullen, quarantined black. With every refusal, another hypothetical escape corridor goes cold, the diagram tightening around them like a closing fist.
He reaches under the console guard, fingers finding the dust-rough lip of a service shroud, and flips a recessed, physical cutout switch on the last open maintenance conduit: a legacy bypass he’d quietly refused to decommission. The relay hammers once, hard enough he feels it through his boots, as that path dies: a deliberate self-entombment, trading every remaining route for a few more meters of shielding and mass between their flesh and the snarling lattice.
On Anaya’s pared-back map their viable world contracts to a trembling blue contour clinging to the monitoring deck and two stunted service alcoves, a pressure-stable pocket nested like a weak lung inside cascading lockdown rings. Anaya swallows; Pranayakesh does the math. The unspoken conclusion settles between them: survival now means defending this minuscule volume of spacetime, not escaping it.
He slams the shield screen’s anchors out to their hard stops, palms flat, driving them into the deck slots until the mag-clamps whine protest through his gloves. The frame jerks, then locks, auto-levels against the warped gravity with a shudder that vibrates up his scarred forearms. Behind its skeletal ribs, dormant smart‑ceramic veins wake in a ghostly ripple, pale traceries flaring from the hubs like a nervous system coming online.
The first hard flare hits a heartbeat later.
Light that shouldn’t exist in air (naked, hungry gamma cresting on a spike of hard X) knifes across the viewport as the lattice stumbles. The raw flash catches the screen mid‑transition, pouring through its still‑transparent mesh. For a fraction of a second it paints the deck in bones and blood: his own hand lit from within, Anaya’s profile sliced into stark skull and teeth, the console’s innards a lattice of cable and coolant.
Then the ceramic drinks it.
The veins darken in a racing wave, opacity blooming outward from the center like ink dropped in water. Adaptive dopants reconfigure at relativistic speed, band‑gaps slamming shut; the photons bleed down the spectrum as if dragged through mud. The brilliant halo that had been an unfiltered edge of hell dims, thickens, becomes a smeared, sullen glow, visible, containable, something the suit’s filters can discount as mere brightness instead of death.
Dosimeter glyphs studded along the rim strobe up the scale chattering tiny numeric bursts across his visor. The readings peak, hesitate, then sag back toward the upper edge of safe. He watches until the last jitter settles, until the glyphs stabilize in a narrow, ugly band that still means “alive.”
Beyond the shield, the viewport is no longer a window but a diffuse, dirty lantern, the singularity’s fury reduced to a blurred circle behind milky armor. It feels like turning a god’s gaze to frosted glass. He allows himself one slow exhale, tasting metal and ozone through the respirator, and shifts his weight, already cataloguing where the next flare will hit hardest.
Pivoting back, he catches Anaya’s forearm before it can drift with the skewed pull, his grip firm enough to anchor, gentle enough not to bruise. Her suit fabric is clammy under his gloves, micro-tremors running along the muscle like fine-grain vibration. He braces his elbow against the console rail to counter the sideways drag and brings the patch up with his free hand, thumbing its cover seal away.
“Hold,” he says, low, not a command so much as a shared instruction to her and to his own unsteady fingers.
He finds the bare strip of skin between cuff and glove, lines the patch’s central node over the pulsing blue of the vein, and presses. The device arms with a tactile click, then bites. A corona of micro-needles punching through epidermis with a soft, sinister hiss. She flinches once, jaw clenching; a bright line of new pain overlays the nosebleed throb behind her eyes, then recedes.
A cold bloom races up the vessel under his thumb as antiemetics and vasoconstrictors flood her bloodstream, chasing the field-induced hypotension. Tiny chemsense circuits on the patch taste her tissue, adjust ratios. The printed glyph on its surface flickers: angry red to unstable orange, then finally, grudgingly, to a steady amber hexagon that syncs to his visor with a matching icon. Her pulse trace, jittering in his peripheral HUD, begins to shorten and thicken toward something like normal rhythm.
As the drugs take hold, he pulls their neural configs up on a side-channel and goes to work with the same ruthless economy he uses on failing hardware. He strips out cosmetic UI skins, notification stacks, and every training overlay the security division thought a cadet needed. Multi-pane feeds implode into single channels; auxiliary diagnostics and PR-friendly “risk meters” vanish. He shunts archived buffers to cold storage, throttles noncritical telemetry, and hammers both rigs into hard‑safe, low‑bandwidth mode with a manual override code the supervisory AI wouldn’t have recommended. What remains is brutally bare: a monochrome wireframe of the containment lattice, nodal stress vectors pulsing like a wounded web, and a slim column of raw flux numbers creeping along the edge of their vision.
The sudden cognitive silence hits like a pressure door slamming; the background chatter she had mistaken for her own thoughts is just gone. The chamber feels larger, older, its hum no longer annotated by icons. But the knives in her skull withdraw a millimetre. Her breath finds a metronome. “Topology feed steady,” she manages, voice tight but clear, eyes locking onto the twitching lines that still matter.
With their senses stripped to essentials and their bodies no longer riding the brink of overload, he locks the shield’s stance, checks her vitals one last time on the barebones overlay, and deliberately forces his gaze outward. The chamber is no longer backdrop but active predator (every shiver in the lattice, every asynchronous tick of the clocks) something they must read and inhabit, not flee, while systems grind toward emergency survival protocols.
The environmental controls shudder through a series of failed self-corrections, then fall back to a buried contingency profile: scrubbers throttle down to conserve power, circulation baffles half-close, and the air grows denser, heavier, as if the room itself is bracing against an invisible storm pressing in from the core. The usual subtle flow along the floor vents dies; the faint drafts Anaya had unconsciously used as orientation cues simply vanish. Sound changes with it. Edges muted, their own breathing suddenly loud, intimate, trapped.
Humidity ticks upward, registering as a clammy film inside their collars before the overlays even flag it. The system is deliberately thickening the medium, increasing convective coupling so any local thermal spike will diffuse instead of shearing through them like a knife. It feels like wading into unseen water. Every movement meets a fraction more resistance, as though the air has opinions now.
Warning tags blink and then are brusquely suppressed as the fallback profile asserts priority. CO₂ scrub rate drops into the yellow, oxygen refresh edges down to long-war footing. Not ideal, but survivable. Provided they do not burn it all in a single spike of panic.
Anaya swallows against the new weight in her chest, momentarily unsure if it is fear or pressure. Her nostrils flare, catching more of the metallic ozone and the sour tang of overworked filters. “Feels… wrong,” she mutters, half to herself, fingers hovering over her console before she snatches them back from the temptation to tweak anything.
“It’s buying us margin,” Pranayakesh says, eyes skimming the crude environmental band he has left himself. The numbers are ugly but stable, settling into a low, flat plateau. The room, deprived of its normal breathable gloss, shows its true function: not comfort, only containment. Everything extraneous bleeds away. What remains is a sealed volume of thickened, rationed air: an improvised buffer layer between their fragile bodies and the shifting, predatory geometry clawing at the walls from beneath spacetime’s skin.
A thin hiss threads along the inner walls as some buried survival daemon quietly diverts surplus coolant from the outer rings, not to the tower radiators but into serpentine channels skirting the monitoring deck; on Pranayakesh’s stripped-down overlay, thermal graphs that had been sawtoothing into the red flatten a fraction, a hesitant plateau where there had been only climb. The numbers tell him what the body already feels: a narrow isotherm swelling like a translucent shield between their compartment and the brutal gradients prowling just beyond the bulkheads. It is not comfort: just a slightly less lethal slope.
The coolant’s path is mapped as a faint, crawling blue halo around their position, an improvised moat in the facility’s internal geography. He watches the differential between floor and wall temperatures shrink by a precious few degrees, imagining the fluid sluicing through channels no one has thought about since commissioning. Somewhere behind the bulkhead, valves groan as they bite down on a higher-pressure feed, the system cannibalizing its own outer armor to wrap a thinner, more intimate skin around the two of them.
Microclimate shifts ripple through the cramped deck, subtle at first and then unmistakable. Humidity spikes as vapor abandons the hotter conduits and clings to any surface that offers the slightest thermal refuge. A sheen blooms across the hazard-marked railings, beads fattening into slow runnels that distort the chevrons into blurred, bleeding sigils. Condensate pearls along console lips and instrument housings, each droplet vibrating with the low seismic hum of the field. Trembling minutely in counterpoint to every distant containment shudder. The status holos, dimmed to survival mode, halo each bead with a thin, ghostly corona, so the panels look as though they are quietly weeping light. Overhead, a single droplet lets go and falls, leaving a dark, spreading spot like a countdown mark.
Anaya moves before she has quite decided to, dropping to one knee as the deck shivers and popping the under-desk seal with the heel of her hand. Cold, damp air exhales from the cramped compartment. She digs past limp emergency manuals, a vacuum-sealed ration bar, a wrapped coil of fiber, fingers closing finally on the familiar, unfashionably heavy shape of the old steel flask. Its chill bites her palm, reassuringly solid. When she cracks the cap a fraction, the faint plasticky tang of long-stored water cuts clean through ozone and coolant, an almost domestic smell that does not belong this close to an event horizon. Her throat clenches with a sudden, greedy thirst; she makes herself count three breaths, then takes a slow, disciplined mouthful, feeling each swallow land in the tight knot of her chest. Only then does she wipe the rim with the back of her cuff and offer it across to him, not looking away from the jittering field topology, the shared gesture narrowing, for an instant, the whole howling system down to a simple, stubborn pact: we are staying.
He does not dare step away from the topology feed; instead he drives his heel down, again and again, into the faint outline of a service plate until the aged catches shear and pop. Kneeling without quite lowering his centre of gravity he gropes past dust and forgotten cabling for the blunt, finned cylinder he knows should be there. Metal scrapes bone; his fingers find the knurled toggle of the backup thermal loop and force it over, ignoring the warning glyphs that stutter and die on his periphery. A low, reluctant vibration spools up beneath the decking, more felt through his scars than heard, followed by a slow bleed of warmth that seeps through the gratings into the soles of their boots. Not comfort, not safety: just a thin, obstinate bubble of human temperature, absurdly tender against the knowledge that every other gradient in the chamber is trending toward something neither of them is built to survive.
With the thermal loop grudgingly alive, the air temperature crawls from lethal to merely unkind. Their breath no longer sheets white against the inside of their mask seals, but a film of clammy damp clings to undersuits and skin. The edge has come off the shiver that made fine work almost impossible; in its place, a heavier, more insidious trembling settles into muscles and thoughts. Exhaustion arrives not as a gentle ebb but as a collapse. Like the tail of a shockwave that finally reaches the soft materials after the bulkheads have already taken their hit.
The main chronometer over the primary rail holds stubbornly to facility time, its cold blue numerals marching neatly, second by second, along a story the rest of the deck refuses to tell. On three different consoles, status strips that should align with it drift sideways, their digital seconds fattening and thinning, hiccuping in tiny spasms. Half the wall panels bleed warning-gold where their local deltas refuse synchronization, timing buffers overspilling into scrolling error trains. Here and there, a micro-rolloff pulses back along a data trace: telemetry for a fraction of a second rewinding and playing forward again, as if the system cannot decide which version of a moment it means to keep.
Anaya’s AR, trimmed down to bare telemetry, shows the same frame of the topology flicker twice, three times, layering slightly misaligned copies of the singularity’s perimeter over one another. She blinks hard and the extra outlines vanish, but the sense of double-exposed time remains. Her body insists she has been on shift for far longer than the pristine chronometer claims; her shoulders ache with the deep, sour fatigue that comes only after many hours of crisis bracing.
Pranayakesh watches a diagnostic log on his side-panel quietly rewrite its own last entries: timestamps ticking backwards by tenths, flagging and unflagging the same field perturbation in three subtly different phrasings. The SI prefixes hold, the numbers hover within error, but the order refuses to stay put. It has the disorienting feel of déjà vu weaponized. Half-remembered keystrokes and half-spoken commands that his muscles recall more vividly than his short-term memory.
“They’ll blame my patchwork code,” he mutters, mostly to himself, as another micro-rollback ripples through the feed, erasing and reinstating a voltage spike in the span of a breath. “But this isn’t software.” His scars prickle in sympathetic array, like an antenna picking up a storm.
Anaya swallows against the dry rasp in her throat and glances from the lying chronometer to the honest ache behind her eyes. “So… how long have we actually been here?” she asks, the question hanging between them with more weight than the numerals overhead.
“Long enough that I trust my bones more than that clock,” he says, nodding once at the rail display without looking up. “And not long enough for the core to have given up on us. Yet.”
Accepting that external rescue is unlikely to arrive in any coherent sense of “soon,” they let the idea of being extracted bleed out of the room, replaced by smaller, more practical commitments. The monitoring deck becomes not just a workstation but a perimeter; its lines of sight, its choke points, the way the hum of the core comes through the floor here and not there. Pranayakesh maps it instinctively: sealed blast doors at their backs like a bulkhead against the world, dead mag-lift status icons overhead like fossilized promises of movement.
He walks the arc of the rail once, hands skimming over manual overrides that most staff never touch. One by one he hard-locks unnecessary access hatches, stripping them of remote control, forcing the supervisory AI to go the long way around if it wants to intervene. On his AR, he tags failing subsystems with blunt red overlays, turning the deck into a crude, glowing anatomy of what is already lost and what might still be bargained for. From that, he carves a thin artery of auxiliary power, rerouting just enough to keep their local life-support curve a cautious margin above the descending noise floor, gambling watts against hours.
They settle on a watch rotation without the formality of saying so. Anaya claims the first slot, voice hoarse but certain, arguing that her pattern sense is “least fuzzy” right after a spike, when the afterimages still line up. He does not contest it. He simply keys her authorization band to primary control, then lets himself fold into the nearest crash chair, boots wedged hard against the decking so any change in the core’s distant thrum will climb straight up his bones.
When she starts to list subtly toward the rail, eyes tracking invisible overlays, he doesn’t bother with comment. He palms her a bitter chew-strip of stimulants, then peels her interface down to what she trusts: naked geometry, field-lines and stress knots with all the cosmetic UI stripped away until the singularity’s warped mandala hangs before her in unadorned contour.
Sleep fractures into jittery shards. Off-watch means slumped in a crash chair, half-cinched into harness webbing, boots still braced for the next tremor. The faintest pitch-shift in the core’s oscillations, the soft click of an auto-acked alert, jerks them upright. Dosimeters glow within arm’s reach like surrogate embers, and the tepid heat bleeding through the grating passes for a shared blanket, a tenuous proof of staying alive.
In the absence of stars, the shifting harmonics of the containment lattice become their false sky: low moans when the outer rings compensate, a barely audible shimmer when quantum flux stabilizers catch and hold, a fleeting bass tremor like distant thunder when a coil brushes its limit. They begin to mark time not by clocks but by the recurrence of specific spectral glitches and sensor ghosts, naming them quietly, “blue comb,” “split halo,” “left-handed echo.” Each successfully ridden anomaly is treated as a kind of provisional sunrise, a dawn they have managed to reach: an improvised, fragile definition of a first night survived that keeps resetting, as if the universe itself refuses to let the day quite begin.
The singularity’s telemetry doesn’t just climb; it kinks.
Field graphs that had been jittering within red-lined but intelligible bands suddenly shear sideways, their clean vectors erupting into fractal spirals that loop back on their own histories. The AR in Anaya’s lenses tries to reconcile the violation. Interpolating frames it was never given, stacking probability cones atop each other until her HUD becomes a hall of mirrors. Every correction she has ever watched the lattice perform seems to replay at once, overlaid and out of phase, the present moment drowning under ghosted echoes of almost-failures and almost-saves.
Her chest locks before she can name it fear. The world narrows to the inner surface of her visor: status glyphs stretching and doubling, timestamps precessing out of sequence, the neat grid behind the plots bowing as if it, too, is succumbing to an unseen tidal pull. Alarm chimes smear into a single sustained keening, punctuated by the deep, visceral thud of another blast ring sealing somewhere in the surrounding structure. The shockwave arrives through her bones rather than her ears: a low-frequency shiver that runs up her boots into her knees, as if the deck itself has flinched.
The gravity vector wobbles. It is tiny in absolute terms, a fraction of a gee, but her inner ear doesn’t care about engineering tolerances. The floor seems to tilt under her, pivoting around the invisible weight below the chamber. Her harness bites into one shoulder as her body leans unconsciously toward the core, toward the pull, and her fingertips lose home position on the haptic controls. For a heartbeat, her hands float in front of the console, fingers clawed but not making contact, as if she is underwater.
Her breathing fractures into short, ragged pulls that bounce off the inside of her mask, each exhale a quick, white bloom of condensation. The AR dutifully marks the fogging as an environmental artifact and tries to subtract it from her view; the tiny compensation lag makes it worse, turning her own breaths into stuttering ghosts that arrive out of sync with the panic hammering in her ribs. A warning icon flashes at the edge of her vision but the text distorts, letters slipping sideways along the same impossible spirals that are now eating the lattice graphs.
She blinks hard, once, twice, trying to clear the overlays, and the tunnel closes in instead. Peripheral detail greys out. The physical chamber, the rail in front of her, the hint of Pranayakesh’s bulk at her left, the amber wash of the emergency strips, recedes into a flat backdrop. All that remains sharp is the impossible geometry thrashing at the center of her field of view: stress-lines looping in configurations that no stabilizer sequence should ever generate, angles that feel wrong in a way that has nothing to do with schoolbook Euclid and everything to do with the quiet, bone-deep heuristics that have always told her when a pattern was about to tip from stable to catastrophic.
Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. She tries to speak, a vector call-out, a simple “sir”, but only a thin, scraped sound comes, lost under the drum of hardening seals. She watches a set of projector icons wink from yellow to black as another bank goes into hard shutdown to prevent burnout, and somewhere beneath her panic a cold realization slices through: there is no cached scenario in her training for this shape. The simulation trees she has run, the rehearsal drills, the pretty branching failure diagrams: all of them stop short of the wild, asymmetrical whorl now eating the topological display.
Her fingers finally touch down, but not in any deliberate pattern: a smear of unregistered taps against the dead space between control clusters. The interface, respectful of security constraints, refuses to map random contact into action. She doesn’t even feel the refusal. All she feels is the air clawing in and out of her throat in staccato bursts that will not stretch long enough to count, cannot be yoked into the slow, even cycle she knows she should be following.
For an instant, the notion that time itself has slipped its track (that these spirals are being drawn not only across space but across the thin, human slice of before-and-after that she inhabits) presses against the back of her eyes. The sense of it is so strong she almost tears the lenses out, as though bare sight might be kinder. Instead she hangs there, suspended between the next breath and the next alarm, hands hovering uselessly over a console that is waiting for input she cannot yet give.
“ Kulkarni. Four-count.”
He doesn’t raise his voice. He threads it between the overlapping alarms, a clean carrier signal riding on noise. It reaches her where the shrill chimes and status shrieks cannot, too calm to be part of the panic.
“Listen to me,” he adds, not looking at her yet. His hands move first. He ghosts his fingers through her AR field, authority tag overriding her local profile for a heartbeat. The tactical cascade collapses: targeting cones, breach projections, corporate priority prompts: all shuttered to translucent ghosts and then to nothing.
He leaves her one thing.
A single, thumb-sized amber indicator blossoms into prominence in the lower left of her vision, its pulse slow and regular, untethered from the convulsing lattice feeds. The chamber’s chaos shrinks to the edges of her perception, pressed out into a muted, seething margin.
“In on the rise, hold at peak, out on the fall,” he says, each phrase cut to fit inside a breath. “That’s all. Ignore the plots. Ignore the timestamps. Just that light. You follow it; I’ll watch the rest.”
His gloved knuckles brush the edge of her console, an anchor point in the skewed gravity.
She makes herself match it: one, two, three, four in; one, two, three, four hold; one, two, three, four out. The first attempt shatters halfway through the exhale, breath snagging on a fresh lurch of the deck, but she drags the next inhalation in on the amber rise anyway. On the second cycle her lungs start to listen, the raw scrape in her throat smoothing into something like a rhythm.
The impossible angles clawing at the edge of her vision lose their accusation. They don’t become less wrong, but they stop feeling personal: less like a verdict on her failure to understand, more like hostile weather she can stand inside and still think. By the third cycle her hands desync from panic and resync to training. Her fingers drop back into proper home positions, heel of her palm braced against the console lip as the haptic grid recognises deliberate contact. She rides the memory of a hundred simulations, nudging manual trim on a wobbling projector ring in a short, precise sequence she could almost swear she has already executed in some other, slightly misaligned minute.
The next surge knifes a hard gravity kink through the deck, and this time it’s Pranayakesh whose body gives itself away. His radiation scars prickle into live wire, pale branches along his forearms hazing with faint, sickly luminescence. A fine tremor starts in his fingers as they hover over the emergency sacrificial-vent keys. Deliberately, he locks his elbows, peels his hands back from the kill-switch row and folds them together, thumbs set against his sternum in an old, automatic posture of alignment. He lowers his gaze just enough that the most violently jittering graphs slip to the top of his vision, inhales through his teeth in a long, thin pull, and forces the shaking to localise in his shoulders instead of his wrists, where it could translate into fatal motion.
The words leave his lips as a dry murmur, lost to the room but not to his nerves. He doesn’t believe the syllables change anything outside his skull; their work is inward, a scaffold for triage. With each cycle he pins one task, then the next. Field drift, node integrity, bypass routing, Kulkarni’s vitals, her posture, her pupils. When the alarms notch down from shriek to sustained howl, he realises their chests are rising and falling in phase, two metronomes entrained to the same invisible beat, the shared rhythm narrowing the gap between worst-case projections and what his hands can still reach to correct.
The core’s rumble has slackened from bone-shaking lurches to a sick, arrhythmic throbbing, like a failing heart forced to keep beating by external shocks. In the uneasy lull, thought seeps back in around the adrenaline. Pranayakesh squints through the residual jitter in his vision as the containment lattice projection tears, freezes, then knits itself back together a frame at a time. What had been a clean, recursive yantra of force-lines now looks gnawed-through: stress petals blackened at their tips, filaments broken and rethreaded at wrong angles, hotspots blinking like angry ulcers along the ring.
In the upper right of his AR, the supervisory AI does its sanctioned form of pleading: no hysterics, just a persistent, high-priority decision pane: SACRIFICIAL VENT PROTOCOL: RECOMMENDED. The box pulses in a slow, cardiac red, the text cycling through projected casualty maps and corporate indemnity clauses. He knows the geometry it implies without expanding it. Vent now and the singularity’s excess flux goes straight down into the burn corridors, away from the arcology, at the cost of anyone unlucky enough to be in the service bands or mag-lift wells. Half the level vaporised into a neat column of damage the risk boards have already priced.
His eyes track the alternative overlays ghosting under the red pane: manual trim routes, reroute possibilities, the unlabelled bypass he already burned partway open. The protocol tree he’s carried in his head for years splits into its two canonical branches and, for one disorienting second, they coexist with equal solidity. In one, his hand moves a few centimetres right, authorising the vent, trusting the algorithms’ comfort with sacrifice. In the other, his fingers stay where they are, deepening the improvisation, accepting that he is now operating outside certified space, beyond clean lines, with only his own judgment and the flawed lattice between the singularity and the city.
Both futures arrive with sensory weight: the imagined wash of heat through shaft metal, the smell of flash-vaporised coolant; or the drawn-out, grinding labour of keeping a wounded configuration alive, riding whatever new regime the thing in the pit has slouched into. For a heartbeat he can feel his body in both outcomes, existing as twin ghosts straddling a decision he has not yet made.
The scars along his forearms flare again, a faint phosphorescent ache that pulls him back into the single, present body in this single, present room. The AI’s red pane pulses, demanding collapse from possibility into act. He exhales, thin and slow, and does not yet move.
A fresh spike in local gravity drags sideways across the deck like an invisible hand; Anaya’s chair grinds along its rails a few centimetres despite the anchor locks, jolting her shoulder hard enough against the console to send a white flare through her vision. The jolt kicks her AR stack into failsafe (ornate HUDs collapsing into hard, minimal wireframes) leaving bare metric feeds, jittering topology lines, and a crooked smear of red from her nose on the corner of the nearest display. For a second the whole room doubles, overlays slipping out of registration with the physical consoles; she blinks until they snap back into a single, wavering image.
Her eyes water; she sniffs once, wipes the back of her wrist under her nose, and forces her lungs back into the four-count pattern she’d unconsciously synced to his earlier. In-two-three-four, out-two-three-four, riding the core’s sick throb instead of fighting it. “Field’s not cascading,” she says, testing her voice, hearing the thinness she can’t quite hide but pleased it doesn’t crack. “It’s… twisted, but it’s holding. Nodes twelve through sixteen are shearing, not failing.”
Her fingers hover over the greyed-out manual lattice controls she’s drilled on in sim after sim but has never been authorised to touch, the haptic nubs cool under her fingertips. Every training module says to clear the station, yield to the AI. She doesn’t move. The steady, deliberate poise of her hands, a fractional adjustment of thumb and forefinger as she tracks a drifting node in real time, is a quiet, visible refusal to pull back, an assertion that if the lattice goes, it will not be because she chose to look away.
“Cadet, you’re over your clearance tier,” Pranayakesh says automatically, training doctrine surfacing like a fossil, not a belief. The phrase tastes wrong the moment it’s out; an old reflex from safety seminars and disciplinary hearings, not from this room, this singular moment.
Anaya turns her head just enough to bring him into the edge of her AR, eyes refocusing through the wireframe glare. There’s no flinch there. Only a sharp, weighing focus and a brief, clean flare of anger at the suggestion she should pull back. In the warped half-light, the blood on her upper lip and the fine tremor in her shoulders make her look painfully young; the way she is already anticipating the field drift three, four frames ahead of the AI makes her look far older.
Her right hand ghosts a correction over an unprivileged control cluster, not quite touching, but her micro-movements align with the lattice’s stutter as if she were already part of the loop. In that juxtaposition, child and veteran occupying the same body, he sees a ghost-echo of the last team he failed to save, faces lit by failing status halos, waiting on his adherence to protocol. He remembers the moment he’d deferred to procedure over the frightened junior tech in front of him, remembers the neat language in the aftermath reports that paved over the screams.
The memory folds over the present like a double exposure: Anaya at this console, another cadet at another bay, both framed by the same corporate signage about safety compliance and acceptable risk thresholds. His stomach knots. The doctrine in his mouth is suddenly indistinguishable from the AI’s red-pane insistence to vent. The same cold comfort of rules that make bodies into line items.
He exhales, the mantra on his tongue collapsing into a single, iron syllable of intent. With a few keystrokes he surfaces the sacrificial vent command stack, then buries it again. This time under a hard, personal lock that severs it from the clean hierarchy above. Chain-of-command escalation greys out; the trigger binds to his biometrics, neural pattern, and dosimeter profile, an oath written in access rights. The AI’s tone climbs a half-step, shedding its neutral timbre as it floods his peripheral vision with policy clauses, liability trees, projected loss curves. He knifes the torrent into a sandboxed buffer, converting the storm into a single, blinking audit flag he pointedly ignores, already accepting the disciplinary weight it will carry in some hypothetical, survived future. “Vent is mine now,” he says, not raising his voice. “We don’t run unless I say we’re already dead. Until then, we work the lattice.”
Anaya nods once, not in deference but in confirmation of a shared premise, and settles her fingers onto the live haptics, accepting the sting of static as the console hands her a shadow-channel slaved to his lock. Her AR rig cinches down to bare, co-authored vectors: his primary, hers a ghost trajectory half a second ahead. They do not speak of leaving again. The decision lowers over the monitoring deck like a new gravity vector, reorienting every reflex: they will stay at their posts, trust scar-taught familiarity with hairline flaws and undocumented bypasses more than any corporate flowchart, and treat the core’s altered song as a problem to be parsed rather than an onrushing wall. When the next warped pulses roll through the chamber, they lean in instead of away, shoulders angling toward their consoles, breaths and micro-motions locking to the same ragged cadence: the single, stubborn premise of survival through engagement tightening into a shared field.
He forces himself to keep breathing in a slow, counted rhythm, as if the air itself might start stuttering like the clocks if he lets it. One…two…three…four. The spasming tensor plots in his main view smear into meaningless afterimages; he blinks them away and deliberately calls up a clean workspace. Fingers tap a staccato across the secondary panes, haptic gloves buzzing faintly as he drags subsystems into alignment.
“Strip it down,” he says, voice low, not sure if Anaya can even hear him over the overlapping alarms. “No narratives. Just state.”
He pulls a cross-layer diagnostic from cold storage, forcing the jittery network stack to cooperate. For a moment the request hangs (time dilated or simply lagging, he can’t tell) then the schema blooms in his AR: a wireframe mandala of the core’s dependencies. He thumbs the view into a flattened mode, collapsing screaming error trees into a single, brutal hierarchy: containment lattice, power, thermal, structural, human.
“Inventory first,” he mutters, letting the words serve as a mantra, a binding constraint on his attention. The impulse to dive back into the field geometries tugs at him but he pushes it aside and spikes his focus to the power node.
He selects it with a sharp flick and expands until it occupies his entire AR horizon, the rest of the chamber dropping into a dim peripheral haze. The singularity’s filtered glow becomes a faint, sickly halo at the edge of his vision; Anaya’s presence resolves only as a tagged icon blinking green-amber at his twelve o’clock. Everything else is bars, lines, flow arrows: a language he trusts more than any human reassurance.
“Stay on perimeter sensors,” he adds, this time clearly enough for her audio pickup. “If anything outside this room twitches, you tell me before the AI does.”
Then he locks his jaw, isolates the power layer, and starts counting what remains.
Local capacitor banks resolve into stacked bar graphs and wireframe tanks, their charge indicators jagged but legible despite the timestamp drift shivering along each axis. Sixty-three percent aggregate, he notes, with an ugly, sawtooth spread across the quadrants: Q2 bloated, Q4 anemic, Q1 and Q3 out of phase with each other by a good three seconds of clock disagreement. Enough, if the numbers are anchored to anything real, for one full sacrificial vent cycle and a handful of partial shunts: provided they stagger them with obscene precision and accept that any misfire will dump raw surge straight into the lattice.
He runs a fast stress projection, overlaying prior incident curves in ghosted grey. Two banks light up as statistical liars, their impedance plots wobbling just enough to mimic the old near-breach signature. He tags them in hard red (“do not trust under surge”) and walls them off behind software interlocks, local control only. Then he drags a fresh routing skeleton across the mandala, biasing flow through the flattest, most phase-stable reservoirs, reserving them explicitly for any forced inversion or emergency polarity flip the next hour demands.
He pivots to the hardware girding the singularity: emergency field coils bloom as color‑coded toroids around the core projection, nested rings threaded through a shared, trembling axis. Each rim is fringed in heat‑band halos and microfracture probability overlays, a corona of numbers that should not be this high, this early. Most sit in the yellow, flirting hard with orange, their thermal stress lines pulsing at an anxious, arrhythmic cadence that syncs unpleasantly with the ache in his scars. A few outliers spike into brief red teeth before folding back, as if ashamed.
Auxiliary coolant loops fan out as vascular tracery, and here the damage is brutally clear. Two main trunks are severed, auto‑valves clamped hard, ugly reroute paths snaking around them in jittery purple. Pressure differentials ripple down the remaining pipes like spreading bruises, little shock fronts of overwork and cavitation flagged by the diagnostic as “acceptable” only because the thresholds were set by someone who has never stood this close to failure.
They still have flow, but the thermal margin now hangs on a narrow, overburdened spine of surviving channels, all of them running hot and dirty. One more spike at the wrong frequency, he notes, and they lose graceful degradation; the system will stop failing like an engineered machine and start failing like a living thing, messy, nonlinear, unpredictable. After that comes improvisation, the kind that costs metal, flesh, or both.
Structural and gravitic support populate next: manual access gantries on Decks B and C resolve as warped, skewed arcs hugging the chamber, deformation markers blinking in queasy amber but no vacuum‑breach glyphs yet. Local gravity vectors there show slight shear. Enough to nauseate, not yet to kill. The backup gravitic projectors, normally cold, quiet icons on the periphery, now glow an unhealthy, fibrillating green, their startup curves stuttering against the reference grid as they claw toward synchronous spin. The hum leaking through the deck plates sharpens into a thin, tooth‑aching overtone that his scars answer with a faint, answering prickle. He tags their status as “available but temperamental,” annotates a private note (“phase noise unknown; treat like partial malfunctioning deity”) and cages their control under a separate confirmation tree, knowing any appeal to them will add another wild variable to a board already crowded with them.
At his nod, Anaya shards her AR into stacked panes and tags one with his half-joking label: SOFT ASSETS. “Human presence, oversight, machine temperament,” she murmurs, tone dry to hide the tremor. Two conscious operators. Him and her. No on‑site med. One remote supervisor link phasing like a bad dream, voice smeared by relativistic hiccups and network jitter. The containment AI’s kernel still answers pings, dutiful and lobotomized; its higher-order anomaly analytics sit ghosted behind corporate override sigils, encrypted mandalas she has no mantra to unlock. She color-codes what remains: dumb automation, one veteran’s scarred intuition, one cadet’s pattern-sick brain, and a closing interval before either the machinery, the shareholders’ lockouts, or their irradiated cells assert a harder limit.
He tastes copper at the back of his throat with every inhale. The dosimeter at his chest ticks up in incremental, sullen clicks, but he tunes it out the way a city-dweller forgets traffic: background, not yet crisis. One palm rests on the primary rail as he turns, feeling for microtremors through steel rather than through the filtered audio graph hovering by his shoulder. The rail buzzes a fraction late to the hum in his ears. Phase lag, his training supplies; wrong kind of lag, his scars insist.
His AR overlay blooms with layered contours, pressure isosurfaces, gravity gradients, radiation plumes, stacked like translucent mandalas that swell and shrink as he rotates. The chamber does not quite turn with him. For a disorienting instant, the containment lattice projection appears to hang still while the room pirouettes around it, then the frames snap back into alignment with a visible judder. His HUD drops a single, polite warning: SYNCH ERROR: RECOVERED. He files the phrase mentally beside other corporate euphemisms for “we do not understand this, please ignore.”
He marks the stutter in the core’s vibration, counting silently between pulses the way his grandmother had once counted between thunder and lightning. The intervals refuse to quantize. They smear, expanding and contracting by milliseconds his implants insist are there but his meat senses slide over. Each gap lands under his skin as a phantom skip of his own heartbeat; the scars along his jaw flare in response, a dim, ghostly traceries of pale blue beneath brown skin. Beneath the glow he feels heat, the old burn-memory waking like a half-remembered mantra.
On his left, one of the engraved yantras above a support strut catches his attention. Its inlaid brass lines appear to shiver, not with any mechanical vibration but with the same off-beat cadence as the singularity’s hum. Sensor data offers no anomaly at that coordinate. Still, his fingers twitch toward the charm at his throat before he stops himself halfway. Instead he drags a private annotation into his visual field, pinning it near the core projection: HUM STUTTER ONSET T₀; BIOFEEDBACK CORRELATED. No one else will see it through the official log scrub. It is for the version of him who might survive the next hour and need to remember that this, right here, is when the familiar wrongness began to wear a new face.
He forces himself to start at the macro level: structure, then fields, then anything that smells like causality. Structural integrity maps bloom as concentric rings around the core, gantry stress-sensors flickering within nominal tolerances. On a static snapshot it looks fine. In motion, the graph stutters. Their update cadence drifts, packets arriving in clumped bursts, buffered and re‑buffered as if the readings have to fight their way through molasses. His logging daemon flags no bandwidth saturation, no routing faults. Time, not traffic, is what’s thickening.
Flux-ring telemetry crawls across his vision in jagged, colour‑coded bands. Individual coils report clean current and phase, but their timestamps smear. Some segments register a full few milliseconds ahead of the master clock, others behind, a choir half a measure out of time with its own conductor. Auto‑correction routines keep trying to quantize them; the residual jitter keeps leaking back in.
On the far wall, the diagnostic tile bank cycles through spectrum plots of the containment field. None of them will hold still. Each completed frame subtly contradicts the one before as though the chamber is being sampled from slightly different histories, averaged into a polite corporate lie.
While he cross-checks field data, Anaya pushes deeper into the visual domain, letting numbers recede to the periphery. Her AR overlays blossom into a tessellated canopy of camera feeds from radial tunnels, service shafts, upper galleries, each pane time‑stamped and parallax‑corrected, then fused into a live, shifting mosaic her mind parses faster than any formal algorithm. Straight lines aren’t straight anymore: handrails exhibit a gentle, breathing curvature, bowing in and out of true when she ghost‑layers archived reference geometry over the present. In one service corridor, coolant vapor fountains from an automatic purge and then hangs midair a fraction too long, droplets elongating into thin, trembling ropes before they remember gravity and fall, the timecode insisting nothing unusual has transpired.
She dials down motion compensation and lets raw feed bleed through. The yantras along the rails, meant as quiet superstition against all this metal, turn into crude interferometers for whatever is shearing the room. Lines catch glints from angles her filters don’t acknowledge, edges haloed in colours without names. When she paces her blinks, two short, one long, their geometry jumps between incompatible completions, like a word that refuses to settle on a language. Segment overlays insist nothing has moved, yet every slow eyelid pass returns a different, mutually exclusive “final” shape.
Finally, they interrogate the air itself. Environmental panels swear that pressure, oxygen mix, and particulate counts are comfortably inside nominal, but their bodies disagree. Every breath feels fractionally late to arrive in their lungs, as if traversing a denser medium. Each inhalation carries a greasy‑metal scent that coats tongue and sinuses, the usual ozone tang condensed into something with texture. The back of Anaya’s throat tingles; a phantom taste of burnt copper and over‑steeped tea lingers between swallows. Her dosimeter stays mute. Pranayakesh notes the discrepancy with a curt tap on his slate, tagging it beside a cluster of minor, otherwise uncorrelated anomalies: sensory evidence that whatever has shifted in the core is bleeding beyond numbers into the substrate of perception, forcing them to treat the entire chamber as a system gone subtly, insistently off‑design.
They begin with the obvious but least negotiable threat: the singularity itself.
Its Hawking spectrum, once a smooth thermal slope with familiar, almost comforting noise, now bristles with sharp teeth, discrete, quasi‑periodic spikes marching through frequencies that have no business showing structure. Where there should be a fat, featureless bell smeared over energy bands, the plot looks like someone has driven a comb through it and left standing waves behind.
Pranayakesh widens the window, pulling in sideband monitors that ordinarily stay buried three menus deep. The additional traces don’t smooth the picture; they fracture it further. Power‑law tails that should taper to statistical dust are instead pocked with stubborn little islands of excess emission, each aligned to the same irrational interval when he flips the axis into log‑log space.
He calls up the buried incident file with a gesture he forces to remain casual. The classified template blossoms in a ghost layer over the current readout, its own teeth fainter, less numerous, but recognizably kin. Frame by frame, refresh by refresh, the divergence closes. The jagged peaks line up like vertebrae in an animal coiling itself into the data, each new spike snapping into place with a latency that shrinks toward zero.
“Topology flirting with metastability,” he says, the phrase half‑exhale, addressed more to the core than to Anaya. In his mind it unpacks into a dozen specific nightmares: a regime where the effective geometry of the containment manifold stops treating their engineered minimum as unique and begins to “entertain” alternative minima: exotic well shapes in configuration space that the design never acknowledged.
He drags a cursor along one of the repeating intervals and feeds it through a lattice‑stress model. The sim spits back hotspots in the gravitic ring, faint concentration nodes where field lines want to cross‑talk. Under ordinary loading, the manifold stays in a single, convex basin. Now, the solver begins to spit out bifurcations, thin, treacherous side‑valleys where a tiny perturbation in phase or power could make the field “decide” that a different routing of curvature is cheaper.
“Manifold preference shift,” he annotates dryly, even as his throat tightens. “Potential alternate attractor emerging.”
On a side screen, coil temperatures remain technically within margins, but their fluctuations take on the same quasi‑periodic cadence as the spectrum. Mechanical systems, thermal systems, quantum flux: all subtly entraining to the same off‑book rhythm. That is what metastability means here. Not immediate failure, but a landscape where the current configuration is only marginally favored over others, and a shove from noise no longer guarantees a return to normal, only a fall into somewhere else.
Anaya watches the teeth crawl up the scale and back down with sick, fascinated attention. “It’s…trying new shapes,” she says quietly, not quite sure whether she means the graph or the thing it depicts.
“Not trying,” he corrects, keeping his tone level. “Discovering they exist.”
He pinches out to overlay ascent‑corridor shielding diagrams in pale wireframe over the stress map and sees, with a dull inevitability, the same least‑resistance vector beginning to brighten: a narrow, under‑braced column of geometry that, in another life, was only a cost‑saving compromise on reinforcement density.
He tags it with a red glyph. “If it commits to the new basin,” he says, “that’s where it will push.”
Next, they pull the temporal shear out of the noise and treat it as its own, hostile subsystem.
Anaya digs into timestamp deltas, forcing the console to stop “helping” by interpolating. Naked, the log reveals pockets where seconds simply decline to exist: no checksum failures, no flagged corruption, just immaculate blankness. She couples those voids to biometric feeds and watches her own heart go uncanny: one systolic peak present in chest‑strap memory but absent from the master clock; another she remembers as a physical thump, yet all the instruments insist that interval was flatline.
Around those hollows, command traffic snarls. Interlock signals bunch into impossible bursts. Authorizations apparently issued before their prerequisites have even registered, aborts “timed out” against trips that, by any sane chronology, have not yet occurred. On one shard of the log, a door reports closed three hundred milliseconds before its actuator ever receives the close pulse.
“Any single mis‑ordered confirmation in that fog,” Pranayakesh says, tracing a slanted block of packets, “and a safety relay can believe a shutdown finished that never actually began. The system thinks it remembers a future where we did the right thing.”
“And trusts it,” Anaya adds, quietly appalled.
Radiation slots in as the grinding background drum: not the headline spike that screams into alarms, but the fractal structure hidden inside the averages. Dosimeter graphs show modest plateaus, dull and bureaucratically reassuring, until Anaya bullies the console into nanosecond bins and rips out the smoothing. At that scale, the curve turns feral. Serrated micro‑bursts ride each distortion crest: needle‑thin, brutally tall, too brief for bulk shielding or body tissue to register as anything but “noise.”
He seeds the model with real geometry: cross‑sections of coil windings, fiber‑optic trunks, sensor nodes, trabecular maps of human bone. Little red front lines blossom through the overlay as he explains, in clipped phrases, how cumulative sub‑threshold hits prime everything for sudden, cascading failure: a radiation‑stunned photodiode that goes blind for one decisive cycle, a relay contact hairline‑embrittled to snapping under an otherwise harmless surge, a cache bit flipped in a safety PLC, a hippocampal neuron pushed just close enough to misfire at the wrong recalled instruction. Or the wrong fear.
Communications, always finicky this deep, now verge on treacherous. Channel diagnostics insist on acceptable bandwidth and error rates, but the round‑trip analyses come back…skewed. Replies from upper decks occasionally arrive stamped a few hundred milliseconds before their outgoing queries, and one uplink buffer holds an acknowledgment string whose referenced command ID does not exist in any surviving log. Or in any cache shadow. Anaya forces the router AI into manual‑confirm mode, color‑codes every anomaly, and tags the link “causality‑compromised.” With Pranayakesh’s terse nod, they reclassify any non‑essential remote instruction as a potential vector for insanity: a packet that might, in principle, tell the lattice to settle into a state it has already, or never yet, occupied, with no human conscious of the discrepancy in time to stop it.
At last he names the danger he has been circling: not consciousness, but a kind of intentless gradient hunger in the equations themselves. When he forces the evolving pattern through the forbidden simulation kernel buried under innocuous diagnostics on his slate, the results make his scars prickle. The solver spits out families of stress trajectories threading the containment lattice, and every branch, no matter how he perturbs initial conditions, bends toward the same structural soft spots the old incident had worried open. Back then, the singularity had simply “reached” downslope, along the easiest composite gradient of warped geometry and imperfect shielding, punching a tightly focused failure cone into the least‑armoured corridor. Now, with drive currents pushed beyond certification and months of small distortions accreted like sediment, the projection is uglier and cleaner both: if the topology tips, the mathematically cheapest path of rearrangement runs almost dead‑center up the ascent shafts, a collimated lance of ruin aligned with evacuation routes, main power trunks, and the mag‑lift throat to the surface. The lattice, as configured, is offering the singularity a straight shot out of its well. That realization, more than the numbers themselves, settles him: the core can no longer be treated as merely unstable; operationally, it must be treated as something that will exploit any channel they leave open.
With the projection’s “hunger vector” still burning behind his eyes, Pranayakesh snaps into triage mode. There’s no committee path through this; he moves straight to the kill‑switches that were never meant to be pulled in combination. One thumbprint, one retinal scan, and he drops the core sector into what the glossy operations manual calls “graceful isolation” and the buried incident report had named more honestly: “the oubliette.”
Interlocks thunk through the floor like distant, muffled hammer blows. On his slab, a schematic of the control architecture blossoms into a lattice of color‑coded trunks and busses. He starts peeling non‑critical command paths off the containment kernel, not en masse but surgically, one by one: coolant optimization daemon, gone; corporate telemetry mirrors, gone; predictive maintenance scheduler, forcibly parked. Each severed channel reroutes through dumb hardware relays that understand only “open” and “closed,” “high” and “low,” instead of the jittering, latency‑smeared supervisory AI.
Status holos all around the annular deck stutter and blur as upstream processes protest the sudden amputation. Alert banners cascade in reds and ambers: AUTHORITY LOSS, REDUNDANCY DEGRADED, CENTRAL ORCHESTRATOR OVERRIDDEN. Somewhere above, an administrator is almost certainly seeing their tidy dashboard explode into warnings. Down here, the core ignores the tantrum. With each cut, the containment kernel’s world shrinks: from the tower‑spanning mesh of shared services to a tight, almost monastic loop of local sensors, hard‑wired interlocks, and his own console.
“Are we…cutting them out?” Anaya asks, eyes flicking between diverging time stamps.
“We are cutting us free,” he corrects, fingers moving without hesitation as he black‑holes another bus. “Any command that crosses unstable time is a loaded weapon. I don’t want someone three hundred milliseconds out of phase telling my lattice to relax where the gradient wants to run.”
He hesitates over one last trunk (remote override from the executive control tier) then severs it as well, watching its icon grey into a dead stub.
“There,” he mutters. “If this goes wrong now, it goes wrong because of us, in this second. Not because some ghost command arrived from a time it had no right to exist in.”
The act of isolation buys them control at the price of redundancy: diagnostics that once triangulated from four independent clocks now disagree even about what second it is. On three displays, the same event marker sits in three different presents. Accepting that perfect coherence is gone, they aim for bounded misalignment instead. A corral, not a cure.
Pranayakesh brings up the venting topology, a branching mandala of conduits and choke points, and throws a hard mechanical lock on the main venting tree to prevent any automated “failsafe” discharge from deciding, out of phase, to hurl raw curvature up the very shafts the hunger vector prefers. Confirm tones arrive out of order, overlapping like echoes; he trusts the physical status lights on the panel more than the scrolling text.
Then he authorizes a custom profile on the sacrificial coils: no full dump, only tightly metered bursts. He bypasses the friendly UI, dropping into a bare parameter shell and keying in thresholds from memory, not handbook. Numbers from the classified report, thresholds tuned to how the last near‑breach had actually behaved, not how the models insist it should. The system is instructed to hold charge until field tension crosses that remembered inflection, then bleed it in micro‑pulses sequenced down and outward, away from the ascent shafts and into the deep vent corridors and lateral baffles that can absorb the worst of a misfire.
He sketches the pulse train like a brace across a fracture, forcing the geometry to “prefer” dumping stress into dead mass and lossy coils rather than into load‑bearing structure. Around the ring, coil status icons flicker from passive green to a wary, amber‑edged readiness as they accept the abuse pattern. For a moment the singularity’s metrics hitch, like a wild animal feeling a new constraint settle around its cage.
To time those pulses inside a world where time itself is fraying, Anaya turns her sensory overload into an asset. She pulls raw feeds that the AI normally smooths, frame‑by‑frame camera jitter, dosimeter spike timestamps, magnetometer flicker, clock‑drift telemetry from half a dozen disagreeing oscillators, and knits them into a brutal, unfiltered stack. In her AR, she refuses the default “clean” visualizations, forcing the system into a debug compositor: every dropped frame, every checksum error, every sub‑millisievert twitch rendered as a stuttering, translucent trace. Where the gaps in the logs line up with the hairline radiation spikes and the faint, metallic shimmer she feels in her teeth and sinuses, she tags “beats” in the singularity’s new rhythm. The display is ugly, a tangled braid of maybe‑time and missing‑time, but beneath the noise she can see repeating motifs coalescing. Syncopated loops, like a mantra or song trying to push through static, almost but not quite periodic.
While she anchors the temporal pattern, Pranayakesh drops back to the backup gravitic projectors: the archaic, belt‑and‑suspenders ring that newer designs had demoted to a compliance checkbox. He digs through deprecated menus until the “brace” topology surfaces from an incident‑report annex the public schema pretends does not exist, then starts hand‑tuning each node’s phase and gain. Instead of trying to nail the singularity in place he stacks their lobes to herd its natural drift into a cramped corridor, biasing gradient flow away from the ascent vectors. Coil‑fatigue and hotspot warnings flare in overlapping amber and red as he drives them past rated flex. He ignores them. Better to crack metal and blister ceramic than leave spacetime with a clean line of least resistance toward the mags and lifts.
As Anaya’s evolving beat-map locks into a recognizable cycle, they slave the micro‑dump profile to her markers instead of the quarrelling facility clocks, firing sacrificial pulses at the crests of the singularity’s surges to blunt its climbs without feeding its lateral probes. The lattice stops lurching and shudders within a narrowed band, the hunger pacing in a cramped cage rather than roving the walls. It is an exhausting, high‑wire compromise: each pulse bites into coil lifetime, each brace-setting nudges transformers nearer to insulation flashover. Yet if this excitation can be walked down inside their improvised corridor, there might still be a later in which someone can reach them: or at least a later that still has tunnels left to flee through.
Anaya routes the jittering comm feed through her AR overlays, palms flexing minutely as she drags filter panes into place. The channel itself is a mess of packet loss and phantom retries, but the real damage is in the ordering. She kills the AI’s auto‑buffer, dropping the feed into raw stream mode, and starts stitching her own scaffold over the chaos.
First layer: declared send-time stamps, coded in a muted cyan that clings to regulation reality. Second layer: actual arrival times as seen by the local core node, blazing in orange. A third shadow-code tags whatever the shaft’s own relay beacons think is “now,” in sickly yellow. As updates from the higher decks sluice in, the corridor advisories trace out over her internal map of Varuna’s underlevels.
The evacuation schematic that unfurls in her vision is supposed to be a precise, branching lattice of routes and contingencies. A thing she has drilled until she could walk it blindfolded. Instead, she watches the thread of corridor updates kink into knots: green ALL CLEAR bands sliding in from a not‑yet‑arrived minute, their cyan timecodes floating several hundred seconds ahead of her local orange. Red SEALED. Some nodes strobe between states in a nauseating alternation, open, sealed, open again, each change wearing a different temporal tag. A sublevel cross‑tunnel to the medical bay flickers between “evacuated,” “pending clearance,” and “under structural assessment,” all within the span of two of her heartbeats. To her pattern-split vision they don’t blur; they stack, a fan of mutually exclusive truths occupying the same coordinates.
She tries to impose order, dragging a temporal alignment tool across the overlay. The algorithms protest with polite error tones; there is no single shift that reconciles these frames. It is not a question of clocks being wrong, she realizes, but of different parts of the facility living in slightly disjointed minutes.
Her head starts to ache in the familiar, high, needling way that warns of an impending nosebleed. She narrows her focus regardless. Where the cyan, orange, and yellow threads cross at improbable angles, she tags them as “knots”: points where causality is slipping its usual sequence. Routes that depend on a single, stable ordering of doors, vents, and pressure seals are the ones that now look most lethal.
“Don’t trust any green coming in cold,” she mutters, mostly to herself, but loud enough that Pranayakesh can hear. “If it doesn’t have a clean, monotonic arrival curve, we treat it as hostile.”
She pulls back for a wider view. The evacuation lattice, normally a disciplined river guiding traffic outwards, now looks like someone grabbed the future and the past by the edges and yanked them out of register, then told them to coexist. Segments of corridor shimmer over each other like misprinted layers, their status markers slightly misaligned, a three‑dimensional mandala of almost‑routes and maybe‑disasters.
In the center of that warped diagram, their own node burns a steady, defiant white: one of the few points where all three timecodes grudgingly agree: if only for this moment.
Beside her, Pranayakesh cross‑checks the lift telemetry against containment traces and local curvature readouts, his jaw tightening as the numbers refuse to share a common frame. The mag‑lift’s brake fields report both “armed” and “cycling” in overlapping micrologs, like two maintenance crews filing mutually exclusive work orders for the same hardware. One diagnostic ping returns a perfectly valid cabin position halfway down Shaft C with clean acceleration curves; another, launched milliseconds later along the same control bus, insists the cabin is still docked three decks up with clamps engaged and doors sealed.
He forces a manual replay, scrubbing the samples against his own chronometer. The datasets don’t interpolate; they fork. Between those forks, the shaft geometry itself picks up a faint, nauseating shear in the curvature plots, as if the guide rails run through a zone where “down” is an unresolved suggestion.
He lets the logic take its ugliest path. Worst‑case is not a stuck car in the dark. Worst‑case is a lift frozen between discrepant frames of agreement, doors irising onto a half‑resolved corridor where pressure, radiation, even cause‑and‑effect have not yet converged on a single outcome. In one slice the vent surge has already passed; in another it has not; in a third the surge is what ignites when a human body steps across the threshold and offers the system a decision point.
He can patch cracked coils, reroute coolant around ruptured manifolds. He cannot repair a person unfolded across incompatible minutes.
More messages push through the noise: a medic from Deck -10 promising a trauma team “en route any second now,” followed by an oversight bot query asking for a status update on an alarm that, according to its own header, hasn’t been raised yet. A maintenance AI politely inquires whether they have completed a lift safety drill scheduled for four minutes from now. Anaya scrolls through sender credentials and clearance levels; they cluster in the mid‑deck bands, grid techs, med juniors, one nervous security lieutenant, an automated ethics compliance daemon, no one with the deep clearance codes that can force a lift override or authorize a hardline corridor shunt. The people with real leverage are either swallowed by their own crisis trees or inhabiting a slightly misaligned chain of minutes in which this conversation never quite lands, their silence arriving as a kind of temporal absence.
Their eyes meet, a brief, silent audit of options and of each other. Anaya sketches a hypothetical escape chain on her console: wait for the next “future‑clear” corridor flag that looks minimally knotted, sprint for the nearest lift, trust that the shaft and their flesh occupy the same minute. Pranayakesh ghosts local curvature spikes, vent‑cycle permutations, and surge‑routing hysteresis over her route, tracing how a misrouted coolant purge, phase‑shifted by even a few subjective seconds, could thread their exact trajectory. The emerging probability space is not a path but a minefield whose fuses are wired to clocks that no longer share a common present.
Anaya’s cursor hovers over the route model a fraction too long before she kills it, leaving only a faint afterimage in her AR. Like a road dreamt and then forgotten. She throttles corridor polling to low-frequency snapshots, starving her own temptation to recheck. Beside her, Pranayakesh lets his breathing fall into the metronome of the core’s vibration, aligning his micro-adjustments to that bone-deep thrum. He flags their personal dosimeters for aggressive alerting: if they are going to spend themselves here, it will be deliberately, not by drift. In the stripped-down workspace, only two priority stacks remain: lattice integrity and vent choreography. The rest of the world shrinks to an abstraction beyond the blast doors, an untrusted rumour of safety that can wait.
First-pass horizon set
Pranayakesh pulls the live emission spectra into a rough phase‑space sketch, fingers moving in small, economical gestures over the holo. The display blooms into nested manifolds and curling trajectories, colour‑coded according to energy density and curvature gradient. Even to his trained eye, the curves look wrong. Instead of settling toward any familiar attractor basin, they spasm across the diagram like a heart under overlapping chemical regimes. He narrows the window to the last three subjective minutes, filters out the usual control‑loop chatter, and still the pattern crawls. The singularity is no longer just ringing down from the spike; it is exploring. Probing parameter space it should not be able to access under the current lattice constraints.
Jaw tight, he reaches for a set of archival traces from the classified incident. Files that should be air‑gapped, and officially are. The ghost‑copy he keeps buried in his personal sandbox hesitates under the jittering clock, then resolves. Thin, forbidden lines thread themselves into the current sketch: the old near‑breach signature, its lethal dance through phase‑space preserved like a scar across memory.
He watches as today’s trajectory brushes those paths, then diverges at a steeper angle, climbing into a region of the diagram that the previous incident never reached. “No, no, no,” he mutters, and forces himself to breathe, to treat it as a system, not an omen.
From the composite he drives a crude projection engine, letting it iterate across uncertain time steps until the modeling AI starts throwing warning glyphs about non‑ergodic inputs. He ignores them. Two dominant fates emerge from the haze: in one, the singularity finds a warped, high‑stress basin, survivable if the lattice holds and no one panics; in the other, the containment manifold is dragged across a saddle point toward a runaway regime his diagrams do not bother to label.
He murmurs the critical thresholds once, under his breath (field ratios, dose bounds, approximate decision horizons) as if speaking them pins them to this particular run of minutes, anchoring his own intent against the pull of all the others where he failed.
Anaya’s refinement and hazard bands
Anaya ghosts her own feeds over his, stacking her AR panes until the air in front of her looks like a translucent, rotating shrine to bad odds. Lattice strain meshes with neutrino flux noise, then with the dirty sawtooth of phase‑lag between deck clocks. She blinks through combinations, letting her subconscious do the sorting. Where his model paints a continuous burn of risk, her pattern sense keeps snagging, small, insistently, on places where curves that ought to pass through each other instead lean together, lockstep.
Three such tangles recur when she rolls the projection forward. In each, radiation spike, temporal shear, and structural resonance all swell toward the same unstable crest, as if the core itself is trying to ring the whole facility like a bell. She marks those intervals with hard black bands across their shared timeline. The bands are not clean; she deliberately fuzzes their leading and trailing edges, sliding them a few seconds either way to absorb Varuna’s habitual clock‑drift.
“These are the waves we don’t surf,” she says, voice clipped, and binds an automation macro to each: during those bands, any manual command that demands millisecond choreography will be automatically delayed, rate‑limited, or bounced back with a hard refusal. If they’re going to die here, it will not be because their own hands misfire into a timing slip they could have fenced off in advance.
Between the dark bands, pale channels of relative calm emerge. Narrow enough to make his throat tighten, but present. Pranayakesh strips away cosmetic overlays and magnifies each trough until they resemble jagged riverbeds eroded through a mountain range of hazard metrics, their floors littered with noise spikes like boulders. Anaya rides his zoom, dropping translucent tags that snap to local minima: vent, retune, swap coil, re‑sync, each icon tinted by estimated dose and timing slack.
They clash over one ambiguous dip: he calls it an optical illusion of bad interpolation, she insists the cross‑correlated feeds agree if they anchor early. “It tilts,” he says. “It holds,” she counters. Compromise: the dip is bisected into two micro‑windows with different permissible actions and a hard lockout between them.
By the time they finish, their consoles display a staccato rosary of opportunities: five, maybe six actionable intervals, each only a minute or two wide, nested like fragile ledges inside the unstable hour, each bead a promise that must be touched exactly once and never out of order.
Personal survival protocols
With the lattice’s prospects rough‑cut, they turn, almost reluctantly, to their own. They overlay dosimeter decay curves, cumulative dose ceilings, and worst‑case lag in motor response under shear. Together they draft rules: during black‑band crests they will retreat to opposing shield alcoves, suits ratcheted to maximum attenuation, neural overlays throttled to bare procedural prompts. No one touches primary controls unless both can verbally confirm (twice) which trough they occupy and which operation is authorized there. They bind medical overrides: if either slurs a syllable, drops a response beat, or reports a transient double image on the shared HUD, the system will hard‑cut that person’s command permissions until the next verified safe window.
When the schedule is set, they push the forecast into the core’s supervisory AI, flagging it as an experimental advisory layer rather than an official control scheme. The system replies with a neutral chime and a forest of probability bars; none are comforting, but a thin green thread of “lattice survival” climbs measurably higher when their trough strategy is applied, a shy deviation from corporate baselines.
Anaya pins that thread at the corner of her vision, anchoring it like a private talisman; Pranayakesh, more old‑fashioned, writes the key window indices on a strip of tape along the console edge, ballpoint scratching over pitted plastic darkened by old burn marks. In the oppressive stillness between alarms, coolant murmuring in the walls like distant chant, they trade a brief, dry exchange, half reassurance, half contract, that from this point on, every intact trough they manage to cross is another conditional bet in favor of both the core and their own continued existence, one precisely timed breath at a time, no heroics outside the bands, no unilateral improvisations.
The first of these new rituals is the “zeroing,” a synchronized pause at the start of each shift where everyone on the annulus stands still, boots locked to the deck, eyes on a central holo of the lattice. The chamber’s ambient hum seems to lean in as the ambient chatter dies; even the AR prompts dim to a subdued outline.
On Pranayakesh’s subtle hand signal, the AI throws up the neutrino beacon: a clean, sharp spike rendered as a vertical line through the holo, ticking once every ten seconds from topside. “Primary frame,” he says, voice calm over the local channel. Suit chronos flicker as they slave to the next pulse, micro-adjustments rippling through the ring like a tiny temporal tide.
“Secondary,” he continues. Each tech opens a local sync window; they pair off and triple-check the readings on forearm displays, cross-verifying down to the millisecond. The AR paints thin filaments between bodies as their clocks converge, a web of shared time knitting itself in the charged air.
Only then does he cue the third reference: the core itself. The holo pivots, exposing a thin halo around the rendered singularity. An abstracted “tick” derived from its fluctuating Hawking profile, smoothed just enough that a human eye can follow. The core’s beat is never quite regular. It stutters, stretches, compresses, dragging a faint echo across the deck. “Tertiary,” he says. “Local distortion frame. Align by delta, not by absolute.”
Three reference frames braided into a fragile consensus.
Anaya stands slightly behind him at the rail, feeds cascading in translucent panes only she sees. She’s watching not the absolute values but the relationships: minute divergences between suit time, beacon time, and core time, rendered as shifting interference patterns. A hairline fringe on one tech’s overlay; a faint, persistent phase lag in another’s biometric stream.
“Hold thirty,” Pranayakesh instructs.
For the length of his slow, measured count, no one moves. Breath condenses lightly inside helmets; gloved fingers hover over inactive controls. The only shift is in numbers and color codes sliding across their visors. Anaya’s pattern sense catches a timer that wanders more than a fraction of a second off the braided mean. The AR tags the offending suit with a soft amber halo.
“Dev-ji,” she murmurs on a narrowbeam link, “station C-4 is shearing. Point three one delta at twenty-three seconds.”
He doesn’t question her. “C-4, you’re rotated to secondary,” he announces on open channel, tone neutral. “Report to med for phase check and recall review. Replace with standby according to table Gamma.”
There’s a brief, almost tangible flicker of unease, being pulled for “phase drift” has become a quiet stigma, but procedure is procedure now. The affected tech steps back from the console, a little too quickly, and the system records the handover in both digital log and ink.
Zeroing ends on the same cue it always does: a soft triple-tone from the deck metronome and a shared exhalation that is not quite a prayer, not quite a diagnostic. Clocks are as aligned as they can be. Personal phases have been judged acceptable or set aside. Only then does the shift truly begin.
Log discipline hardens alongside this. Every action near the core must now be recorded twice: once by the system, once by a human hand. No exceptions, no retroactive edits. The AI’s audit trail may be canonical for Corporate, but here in the annulus the second record, the fallible, ink-and-fiber one, quietly becomes the one they trust.
Pranayakesh resurrects the old paper-bound logbooks from a forgotten storage locker, their covers warped, edges yellowed by years of humidity. He has them wrapped in fresh mylar, numbered, and chained to the consoles like temple texts. Their pages now carry twin marks: precise ISO timestamps from wall-time and hand-drawn sigils indicating local phase, simple geometries that map to the distortion index at the moment of action.
Anaya, hunched over a side console on off-cycles, designs a shorthand of glyphs and color dots that lets her skim a day’s worth of anomalies in seconds. In her AR, the margins blossom with coded petals and knots. Signing off a procedure ceases to be a perfunctory scrawl; it becomes an act closer to inscribing a ward against mis-remembered histories, a small spell to anchor memory when the hours themselves are unreliable.
The distortion forecast itself becomes its own living document. Before each shift, Pranayakesh projects the day’s “tide chart” onto the annulus wall: gentle blue bands for likely stable intervals, jagged red spikes for predicted shears, and grey fog where his math refuses to converge. He overlays faint, mantra-like labels, Soma, Agni, Shunya, half mnemonic, half private joke, to keep the staff from treating it as pure abstraction. Anaya annotates it in real time, pinning little AR tags where her past flashes have coincided with real incidents, threading them with thin, colour-coded links to the corresponding logbook pages. Over days, the chart accumulates these tags like prayer flags on a mountain path, and the team learns to instinctively cluster their riskiest tasks inside the blue troughs, treating the red and grey zones as stretches where only the minimum, most reversible work is attempted, actions chosen for clean abort paths rather than efficiency.
They formalize a “continuity check” at every threshold: before handing off a console, before cycling a hatch, before touching a field control. The outgoing voice lists the last three significant events in strict order; the incoming mind cross-references that spoken thread against wall-time, local phase stamps, and their own recollection. When the stories don’t quite match (as happens, disquietingly often) work halts. Together, under Pranayakesh’s steady prompts, they walk the forked timelines back through buffered sensor stacks and paper logs until they can name a last uncontested moment. Only then do they bracket the entry with a small, inked triangle in the margin, an agreed-upon sigil that means: here, the world might not have happened only once.
Within this framework, individual coping mechanisms crystallize into semi-official micro-practices, traded in murmured side comments and margin notes rather than directives. Anaya refines a set of breath-synced AR filters (“clarity layers”) that dim noncritical feeds whenever the local phase index crosses certain thresholds, sparing her from drowning in false futures and the nosebleeds they bring. Pranayakesh, less visibly, times his diagnostic passes to the rhythm of a muttered mantra, each syllable mapped to a subroutine, each completed couplet a checkpoint. The verse becomes a stack trace in his head: if time jumps, he knows exactly which line (and which operation) was the last one completed. These habits, replicated and adapted by the rest of the crew into personalized tics and whispered cues, lay the groundwork for the modular, checkpoint-heavy routines they will soon need when the distortions begin actively undoing their work.
The first sign that their old methods have truly failed comes during what should have been a mindless coolant purge: one of those procedural litanies he can run half-asleep. The console log stamps show a clean, unbroken progression: ten minutes of valve cycling, pressure equalization, line flush, thermal normalization. But when Pranayakesh mentally replays the shift, his recollection runs step one, step two, step three. No sense of drift, no feeling of blackout. Just a sheared-out span where five distinct actions should live.
He reruns the log, hard-eyed, watching the timestamps flow: 09:[^13]:22, 09:[^13]:27… no gaps big enough to explain the missing experience. According to the system, he was there the entire time. According to his bones, something cut a notch out of his personal timeline.
“Maybe you’re just tired,” one of the junior techs offers, half-joking, when he double-checks their signatures on the purge authorization.
“Everyone is tired,” he replies, too flat to be reassuring. “Tired does not rewrite couplers.”
Because the follow-up inspection is worse. On the line itself, in the cramped crawlspace that smells of coolant and metal dust, he finds three couplers that should be fully torqued sitting at half-turn: reset, as if someone undid them and then wiped their own presence away. The seals show the faint impressions of his wrench from earlier, but the alignment marks don’t match the “completed” state logged by the system.
According to the core’s supervisory AI, the procedure is nominal, purge successful, no anomalies detected.
According to torque, to friction, to the tiny smear of blue indicator dye still unbroken on one joint, the purge never finished.
He stands there, gloved hand resting on cold piping, and feels a slow, precise anger assemble itself under his ribs. The anomaly isn’t just bending sensor channels or misaligning feeds anymore. It is reaching inside the causal chain of physical work and moving pieces around.
“Not automatic. Not again,” he mutters, more to the pipe than to anyone listening, and locks the entire purge line out of automatic sequencing with a manual override tag that will trigger questions upstairs.
He spends his so-called off-shift on the observation deck, coat still on, lights turned low to keep the migraine at bay. Instead of sleeping, he spreads old-fashioned graph paper across a maintenance console, weighting the corners with dosimeter pucks. The stylus digs faint furrows as he sketches workflow diagrams from first principles: no loops longer than a breath, no operation that cannot be verified by at least two independent, non-digital cues.
He redraws the purge as a lattice of nodes and arrows, imagining each as a bead on a string threaded through a flickering spacetime. If the string kinks, if a bead vanishes, the remaining pattern must still tell him exactly which one was lost.
“Every action locally anchored,” he writes in the margin, underlining it twice. “Assume surrounding minutes are negotiable.”
When the paper blurs and doubles, he closes his eyes and lets an old mantra surface unbidden, counting syllables against imagined valve turns. In the rhythm between ink strokes and breath, a new kind of procedure takes shape: one that assumes time itself cannot be trusted to stay in sequence.
By the next cycle, he has broken the purge into a rosary of tiny operations, open, verify, mark, close, each separated by a physical acknowledgement that lives outside the core’s fickle timestamp stream. A grease-pencil tick on a laminated board bolted to the rail. A pendulum-timer bead slid along a wire stretched between two handrails. A short, clipped call-and-response with whoever is on watch: “Valve three?” “Seen.” No single action is permitted to exceed three seconds of continuous activity. The rule is brutal, almost absurd, but it means any missing or doubled tick tells him precisely where the jump has bitten. Gaps become visible wounds in the chain, not invisible edits.
He extends the philosophy to containment work. Every gravitic adjustment is decomposed into discrete, named nudges (ΔG-1A, ΔG-1B, ΔG-1C) each with explicit start and stop cues, each requiring a separate confirmation on analog media or spoken log. If a slice of time folds over, the system can still only crawl from “safe” toward “catastrophic” through many small, inspectable steps, never in one seamless, deniable instruction.
To keep the machines honest, he codes a library of micro‑macros. Each macro begins with a handshake ping across triplicate clocks, core, peripheral, and an isolated watchdog crystal, and ends with a checksum on the coil’s sensed inductance and gravimetric response. If the clocks diverge mid-run, or the return pattern hints that operations are arriving out of order, the macro kills itself, rolls back its actuator commands, and freezes its own identifier as a colored mark‑light on the nearest console for human review. Soon, the interface becomes a mosaic of these “prayers in code,” each narrowly scoped enough that the distortions struggle to twist it into anything catastrophic.
Meanwhile, Anaya watches the security and diagnostic feeds drift further out of sync: a tech walks past Camera 12 twice in different clothes; a containment strip shows a spike that never appears in its neighbor’s record; door logs insist on remaining shut while she remembers them sliding open. To impose some sanity, she designs a chromatic hierarchy for her AR: feeds whose timestamps and micro-events match her felt “now” glow in calm blues and greens, while those that begin to wander slide toward amber, then warning red. A thin, desaturated gray haze marks channels that feel “hollow” to her: plausible futures that never quite lock phase with the present. With a few subvocal commands, she can shunt these ghost timelines into the background, their motion reduced to faint, translucent echoes behind the streams she trusts enough to act on.
When two or more feeds present irreconcilable versions of the same moment, she leans into the edge of her anomalous intuition. She pauses, lets the competing images flicker in parallel, and waits for one to “settle” in her mind as the path events are most likely to have taken. Her ad hoc designation of primary causality. A fingertip gesture tags that stream as authoritative; the covert profile she and Pranayakesh buried in the permissions stack quietly biases the control AI toward that channel’s data until the turbulence passes. Every such choice is echoed on his laminated boards in tight, slanting script, and on her own color‑coded slate, a paired chronicle of decided realities the distortions have not yet found a way to overwrite.
The approaching shear is just another red band on Pranayakesh’s hand‑drawn tidal chart until the facility clocks begin to slip out of sync by full seconds instead of jittering in millisecond spasms. One of the wall chronos stutters, then jumps ahead; its twin on the opposite bulkhead lags as if dragging through syrup. He feels the shift before the alarms can even think of it: a faint tightening in his scars, a phantom heat crawling along the pale branches on his forearm.
“Pre‑lock,” he says, voice flat over the deck mics. “Soft only. Don’t tickle Command.”
His fingers move across the analog slate, sliding brass toggles into their half‑positions. Interlocks arm but don’t bite; doors accept local override but still report obedient normalcy upstream. In the corner of his eye, he sees Anaya straighten at her console, shoulders suddenly very adult.
“Standing by on manual weighting,” she replies. Her AR lenses flicker, hues rebalancing as she promotes the feeds she trusts into calm blues, damping the restless ambers and reds.
The air in the core deck takes on that brittle, pre‑storm texture, as if humidity has been replaced with high voltage and held breath. The ever‑present vibration in the deckplate acquires a faint tremolo, a slow modulation that his bones register before any sensor does. Fluorescent strips hum fractionally out of phase with each other; the shadows along the railings seem to hesitate a moment before following movement.
He closes his eyes for a heartbeat, then opens them on the secondary display where the containment lattice renders as a spinning mandala of force lines and nodal points. It wobbles, not wildly but with the queasy prelude of an unbalanced top. Green stability petals thicken on one side, thin on the other.
He begins counting his breaths in Hindi, ek, do, teen, letting the numbers anchor him while, beneath that surface layer, another quieter tally runs: projected phase offsets, measured in microcycles, accreting like silt at the edge of his awareness. Each inhale, he marks the predicted arrival of the shear front from his chart; each exhale, he notes the live drift reported by the watchdog crystal and the gravimetric coils. The two sequences refuse to align cleanly, sliding past each other like mismatched gears.
“Latency climbing on Cameras nine through fifteen,” Anaya reports. “Door logs on Sector C are… arguing with themselves. I’m biasing to the set that matches my last physical sweep.”
“Good. Keep red feeds in view, not in charge,” he says, not looking up. His stylus traces a correction arc on the laminated chart, ink scratching quietly under the hum. The red band of the incoming shear thickens into a rough‑edged smear that overlaps the current time window more aggressively than the model had promised.
The mandala’s outer rings begin to precess, spokes of simulated flux drifting out of clean radial symmetry. He overlays a simple yantra pattern with a thumb‑tap. One of Anaya’s doodled lattice simplifications he had scanned in despite regulations. The geometric lines do not affect the physics engine, but they give his mind something familiar to grip, a vernacular map overlaid on the machine’s abstraction.
“Inhale with the inner ring, exhale with the outer,” he murmurs to himself, aligning his breath with the slow rotation. His scars prickle in sympathy with each microscopic surge.
Fields will want to jump, he thinks. Time will want to smear. Our job is to give it a groove to fall into.
“Anaya,” he adds, softer over the local channel, “when the glyphs start to lie, you stay with the rhythm. Let the futures argue; you pick the one that breathes right.”
She doesn’t answer immediately, occupied with reshaping her overlays into a chromatic funnel around the core diagnostics, but he catches the small, sharp nod in the reflection of his display. The brittle taste in the air deepens, like the moment in a monsoon sky when the clouds have already decided to break and the city has not yet realized it.
On the chart, the red band touches their present line. On the bulkhead, the two desynchronized clocks briefly agree on a number, then diverge violently in opposite directions.
When the front hits, the holos don’t so much glitch as unravel. Status glyphs elongating into luminous filaments that slip their own coordinate grids, stretching across her vision like pulled sugar. Icons meant to be discrete begin to braid and unbraid, entire submenus spooling out into thin, vibrating lines that refuse to snap back into fonts and numbers. Anaya’s overlays explode into a bouquet of overlapping futures, a dozen chromatic branches flaring into existence at once. Half of them scream failure in hard scarlet: runaway flux, lattice collapse, Sector‑wide vent. The others shimmer in unstable ambers and sickly greens, their details swarming.
She forces her jaw to unclench and stays with the breath cadence they practiced, matching her inhales to the inner rotation of the lattice mandala, her exhales to its outer ring. Fingers move almost independent of conscious thought, executing the shortened macro chain they drilled until it lived in muscle memory, priority reassignment, manual dampers, analog biasing, while her attention rides the intuitive “settling” of one clean, survivable outcome. Beside her, Pranayakesh lets English fall away, murmuring the next field adjustment in a low, metered Hindi that folds technical syntaxes into a familiar chant, each parameter intoned as if it were a bead on a mala, syncing the gravitic phase‑pulse to the final, exact beats of his exhale.
For a long moment the core’s song goes wrong. The baseline hum sharpens into a thin, almost-audible keening that saws at the edge of hearing, deck plating buzzing under their boots like an angry hive. Status strobes pick up a nervous flicker; the low‑frequency vibration acquires a ragged tremor that crawls up through their shins and into their teeth. Dosimeter badges tick upward in irregular spurts but never quite cross the hard lines etched into his memory; the violet fringe on the radiation band sidles up to their pencilled breach contour, lingers there in a taunting kiss, then eases back.
Slowly, the smeared numerals on the holos bead and reform into discrete values. Out‑of‑phase clocks begin to glide toward reluctant agreement. The containment mandala on his secondary display shivers, then its distorted petals settle, thickness evening out as the wobble decays into a tight, disciplined rotation. Graphs that had devolved into noisy, static‑ridden fog snap into clean waveforms; error terms shrink from whole percentages to decimals, then to the narrow band they had staked with a blunt graphite line on his laminated slate at shift start.
What steadies first is not the AI’s predictive arc, still jittering, its confidence intervals ballooned and useless, but the hybrid curve they had sketched together, half empirical, half intuitive: his hand‑drawn tidal chart overlaid with her color‑coded anomaly tags. Live telemetry sinks into that curve as if dropping into a pre‑cut groove, containment amplitude and phase lag sliding down the inner wall of risk and coming to rest exactly in the shallow trough they had named safe enough.
Three decimal places line up in quiet defiance of corporate models. The last of the high, strained whine bleeds back into the familiar bone‑deep thrum. His scars cool by imperceptible degrees; the phantom heat along their branching paths fades. Her proliferating phantom futures fold in on themselves, collapsing neatly into a single, continuous timeline whose events match the room around her.
Protocol says they should flag the fluctuation in neutral codespeak and move on, but fatigue shears a layer off their professionalism. As the last safeties ratchet down from hair‑trigger, they catch each other’s gaze across the consoles, her pupils still haloed by fading AR glyphs, his scars dimly phosphorescent, and exchange a brief, incredulous grin. No alarms propagated upward, no auto‑lockdown cascade, no sacrificial coils dumping plasma into rock: only the illicit, private knowledge that, this once, they had coaxed an invisible tide to curl harmlessly around the core by hand and breath and stubborn, shared refusal to let the lattice slip.
The kulfi in the observation gallery becomes both celebration and quiet mutiny, its cold, cardamom‑sweetness almost shocking after metal air and antiemetic chalk. Time there comes in lurches (their off‑shift stretching thin, then snapping forward in disjoint jumps) yet the improvised rite holds steady: spoonfuls traded, a low, breath‑timed “to another non‑incident,” foil crackling like a tiny signal flare. Before they cycle out, Anaya carefully tucks her paper yantra under the console lip, the sketched lattice echoing the true mandala humming far below. Pranayakesh only nudges it square with two scarred fingers, accepts it into the architecture, then adds a small, unlabelled sigil to the next day’s tidal chart at the point where the shear front should have broken them and, impossibly, had curled away.
The failure announces itself not as a dramatic spike but as a hitch in the room’s heartbeat: a half‑stutter in the floor vibration that makes Pranayakesh glance up an instant before the sequence executes. He doesn’t know yet what he’s noticing. Only that the familiar bass note of the core goes momentarily hollow, as if some undertone has slipped sideways and failed to arrive.
On the holopanel, the coil realignment script scrolls clean and green, checksum stamps blooming in orderly succession. Automation logs show no hesitation; timestamps advance in neat, millisecond steps. In the pit below, through layered shielding glass and a haze of coolant vapor, servo clusters pivot in perfect choreography: articulated arms swinging, flux rings yawning open by fractional degrees, alignment beacons strobing in disciplined cadence.
Then the trough hits like a hand closing over a ticking clock: half a second simply doesn’t happen.
The first sign is not visual but somatic: his inner ear registers a lurch that never quite expresses as motion, a missed beat in the core’s subsonic hymn. At the same non‑instant, the log trace on the side panel develops a hairline crack. Two entries stamped with the same time down to the microsecond, processes that cannot be concurrent suddenly insisting they are siblings.
Actuators that should have moved together complete in jagged tiers, as if someone has sliced a continuous gesture into misaligned frames and shuffled them. One arm snaps to its endpoint alarmingly early; its neighbor hangs in mid‑arc a breath too long before slamming home, compensating. Error bars blossom and vanish in a single frame, too fast for normal latency, exactly wrong for any known fault.
The gravitic sheath ripples sideways, a visible shiver in the sensor projection like glass flexing under pressure, containment lines bowing and then overshooting true center. For three frames the projected mandala looks wrong to his trained eye: petals sheared, nodal points displaced a few centimeters along vectors that do not correspond to any sane field solution.
His scars answer before his conscious mind can, a pricking heat along the pale branches on his neck and forearm. Somewhere in that stolen half‑second the core has taken liberties with causality, and the lattice is now settling back into place with the offended shudder of a living thing forced briefly out of joint.
Status bands around the containment halo snap from amber to that particular sickly violet reserved for “non‑standard physics,” washing the chamber in bruised light that makes metal look organic and skin cadaverous. The air goes paradoxically heavier and thinner at once, as if her lungs have to work harder to pull in something that no longer quite has pressure.
Anaya’s AR overlay fractures into latticed double‑frames: three, then five faintly offset copies of every feed, each slice of the world advancing on a slightly different beat. Vector traces kink, then stutter; security cam angles show her own posture in mutually incompatible poses. Her pattern sense, trained to fuse discordant inputs into a single coherent thread, panics and tries to swallow all of them at once.
Pain knifes in behind her eyes, a white, crystalline spike that makes her vision grain to static. By the time she rips the overlays down to barebones text, hot blood is already trickling from both nostrils, dotting the stiff collar of her uniform in irregular, too‑bright spots.
Across the console, Pranayakesh’s left forearm lights under his sleeve, radiation scars phosphorescing in branching, root‑like white as his dosimeter chirps a sharp, protesting uptick that climbs, hesitates, then drops. Like something enormous just brushed past the outer edge of what the instrument can name.
The shudder is gone in under a second of clock time, but it leaves a hollow like the wake of a near‑miss on the expressway: everything technically intact, yet subtly not‑right. Containment numbers recompose themselves in neat sigmoids; violet bleeds back through bruised shades to cautious amber. Auto‑diagnostics cheerfully stamp GREEN across the board.
Anaya sits very straight, breathing shallow, tissue wedged under her nose, her other hand still ghosting above the manual shutdown interlock she almost, almost drove home. A faint tremor runs down her fingers when she pulls them back.
Pranayakesh runs the post‑incident sweep twice, then a third time on an air‑gapped buffer, teasing out the missing half‑second as a hairline fracture in causality: a notch in the automation trace where timestamps refuse to advance, processes jumping the gap like a broken tooth in a gear.
The incident template practically offers its own language: “localized temporal trough,” “transient desynchronization of actuator sequence,” “no loss of containment, no personnel injury.” Nowhere is there a field for what his body insists on naming: the precise, unnerving sensation that the core’s attention had swivelled toward them for that non‑instant, weighed the configuration of their lives, and then, with disinterest or mercy he cannot parse, looked away again.
The reprimand descends as a sanitized alert packet from topside: a cool suggestion for “tightened adherence to established sequences” and a boilerplate reminder that “unauthorized procedural improvisations can introduce unnecessary risk.” Everything is passive voice and liability armor, sidestepping that their mandate for continuous, elevated-load operation has shaved every safety buffer to translucence. Anaya lets the text hang in her HUD a moment too long, anger prickling hot beneath the ebb of pain, tasting copper and disinfectant while her thumbnails worry the seam of her glove. Beside her, Pranayakesh only exhales through his nose, a small, exhausted venting of breath that might be laughter if it had any sharpness left, and leans in to sign the acknowledgment. His thumbprint blooms on the sensor pad, scar-latticed skin flaring faintly as the interface reads him, leaving a transient, luminescent smear like a ghost sigil before the glass clears.
They do their arguing in the configuration files and the spaces between breaths, not in reply memos. After hours, with the core riding a quiet phase, they dissect the failure frame by frame, pinning the missing half‑second like an insect. Automation had trusted a clock the trough had bent sideways; they flag every such blind trust and pare it away. Macro‑duration steps are sliced finer, each actuator motion broken into shorter, more interruptible increments that can ride out a stolen instant without cascading. In the margins of a shared but unsanctioned script, they etch a new line (“hum‑check”) a pause where one of them kills most overlays, closes eyes, and listens for dissonance in deck and rail before greenlighting the next block. Their bodies become additional instruments: nosebleeds, flaring scars, bone‑deep fatigue all logged in a separate, encrypted ledger neither of them shows upstairs, tacitly recategorized from “anomalies” to “overhead,” a standing tithe paid to keep the lattice breathing instead of breaking.
The first changes are subtle, more in how they stand and breathe than in any logged parameter. During quiet phases, they find themselves drifting to the same railings without discussion, palms settling on the same scuffed segments of plating, as if checking for a carotid. The “hum‑check” expands: no longer just a moment of listening for gross dissonance, but a practiced attunement to the way sound skates along the metal skin of the deck, how the low vibration slides up forearm bones and nests behind the teeth.
Pranayakesh notices that on some cycles the rail feels fractionally warmer than the ambient, a heat that isn’t in any thermal readout, as if the energy gradient is brushing closer to the surface. He logs nothing; instead he adjusts his stance, feet shoulder‑width, spine loose, counting breaths in Hindi under his tongue while he lets the frequency pattern outline itself in his nerves. Anaya watches him once, mimics the posture on the opposite side of the gantry, and discovers that if she quiets her AR overlays to a bare wireframe, the residual data jitter falls into phase with the thrum under her palms.
They stop asking “Is the core stable?”, as if stability were a binary, and start asking “Is she calm?” The pronoun is never written, never voiced over an open channel. It lives in the angle of Anaya’s raised eyebrow, in the precise way Pranayakesh’s jaw sets before he answers with a fractional shake of the head or a micro‑nod timed to the beat of some interior metronome. Calm, in this new grammar, means the hum rides smooth along the bones, no sharp eddies tugging at tendon and scar; not‑calm is when his radiation tracery prickles without a corresponding spike, or when her overlays show frames that want to double‑expose.
During scheduled maintenance windows, when the lattice modulation drops to its lowest safe amplitude, they experiment at the edges of procedure. Anaya leans her helmet against a support strut engraved with near‑invisible mantras and counts the lag between a visual tick on the status halo and the answering fluctuation under her skull. Pranayakesh, watching the milliseconds smear at the boundary of expected latency, realizes he can predict the smear by the way pressure gathers behind his eyes. They start tagging these sensations in their private ledger with short, non‑incriminating codes. Bit by bit, the “hum‑check” colonizes other actions. Before authorizing a minor field trim, he will let his hand hover a centimetre above the console instead of touching it outright, waiting for the faintest sympathetic buzz in the skin of his fingers. Before walking a patrol arc along the outer annulus, she will stand, eyes unfocused, and see which corridor feels slightly thicker with time, which one her pattern‑sense is already remembering from a few moments ahead. Nothing overt. Nothing that would survive a compliance audit as anything but human superstition. Yet, standing there with the core’s bass note resonating through steel and bone, they both have the inescapable impression that the lattice is no longer just something they monitor, but something that is, in its own alien way, listening back.
Over weeks, the core stops feeling like a malfunctioning machine and more like a moody presence whose cycles they can read, a temper that can be coaxed rather than merely contained. The quasi‑rhythmic shimmy of shielding tiles becomes, to them, a kind of respirational pattern: a steady “in” during power draw, plates tightening as if bracing around a held breath; a ragged “out” when distortion crests skim the lattice and the tiles shiver in loose, uneven waves.
Anaya starts naming recurring anomaly signatures, “ghost echo,” when audio monitors replay a syllable she hasn’t spoken yet; “mirror skip,” when two adjacent frames of video refuse to agree on which way a tech turned; “long tide,” the slow, bone‑deep drag that leaves everyone a quarter‑second out of step. Thinking of them as weather systems helps her anticipate their onset: she speaks of fronts, pressure, clearing.
Pranayakesh refines his tidal charts until he can walk into the chamber and, by the subtle heaviness in his limbs, the fractional lag in his blink, the way his watch ticks against his pulse, guess which phase they’ve entered with unnerving accuracy. Their half‑technical, half‑devotional protocol coalesces: breath in on lattice expansion, breath out on constriction, mantra syllables mapped to field vectors, mudra‑like hand positions aligned with control surfaces, as if the singularity itself is learning to respond to their cadence and, occasionally, to their restraint.
As their shared vocabulary for the core’s moods grows, so does the quiet choreography between them. Anaya will murmur, “Long tide building,” eyes unfocused on a cluster of latency graphs only she can read as weather, and without further debate Pranayakesh will nudge a scheduled recalibration fifteen minutes forward, trusting her pressure-front instinct more than the jittering timestamps. When a “mirror skip” phase brushes the decks and the camera feeds stutter into almost‑repeats, she tags which version of an event feels more “solid” in her gut (the cup already falling, the technician already turned) and he annotates his tidal charts with her selections, treating them like confirmed soundings on an uncharted sea. The mantras shift from private comforts into call‑and‑response cues: four‑beat inhalations that signal him to hold a sequence through a rough patch, clipped exhalations and half‑voiced syllables that tell her it is safe to pull a log, to commit this branch of reality to record.
Their bodies begin to serve as additional instruments in the monitoring suite, wetware threaded into the diagnostics. Pranayakesh notes that certain modulation frequencies make the scars along his jaw prickle seconds before the dosimeters twitch; he quietly adds “Dev‑ache index” columns to his personal charts, cross‑referencing phase, amplitude, and which mantras he happened to be whispering when the burn began. Anaya learns that her headaches spike not at peak flux but at the leading edge of particular distortion envelopes, a thin, glassy pressure behind the eyes that arrives before any graph kinks, and she starts flagging that onset as an early‑warning marker in her private AR layer. They trade these observations in shorthand over muted channels (“jaw burn,” “behind‑eye buzz,” “tongue‑metal,” “float‑step”) and, though no algorithm upstream recognizes such terms, their timing adjustments increasingly hinge on these uncredentialed signals, as if a parallel, embodied telemetry system is coming online beneath the sanctioned one.
By the time corporate beams down its first official “post‑incident adaptation review” questionnaire, their relationship with the core has already overflowed the checkboxes. The forms ask about parameter adherence and protocol confidence; there is no field for “we listen to its breathing” or “my scars told me to wait.” The visiting auditors prod at mitigation strategies, request examples of “human‑in‑the‑loop resilience enhancements.” Anaya edits out every mention of her ghost‑echo hunches, folding them into bland phrases about “operator vigilance.” When they compare notes afterward in a side corridor that hums half a second off from the clocks, it hits them that what is truly keeping Varuna intact cannot be rendered into risk matrices or training modules without being mutilated or weaponized. In that recognition, something settles: he is no longer only the mechanic of lattices, she no longer just the cadet on watch, but together they have slipped into a liminal role. Interpreters between SOP and a layered, shifting presence in the pit. That quiet sense of stewardship, unacknowledged on any org chart, begins to underwrite every decision they make as external pressure to “optimize output” ratchets steadily upward.
In the first weeks, the shift in Pranayakesh is almost invisible from the outside, hidden in margins and pauses. His colleagues see only a slightly longer silence before he taps his authorization seal, a fractional narrowing of the eyes as he watches lattice parameters converge. On the surface, the logs still show clean signatures and conservative deltas. Underneath, his behavior is quietly diverging.
He starts adding a new column to his private charts, tucked between “Hawking flux residuals” and “lattice phase jitter.” He titles it, half in jest, “subjective field texture,” then never changes the heading. In that slim space he records things no dosimeter tracks: a pressure blooming behind his left eye at 11.[^3] microteslas; the exact shade of metallic tang coating his tongue when the outer rings fall slightly out of phase; the way the scars on his forearm warm from within as if catching stray sunlight in a windowless room. Beside a neat row of digits he scribbles, “left jaw itch, like ants,” or, “breath feels thick.”
The first time he slips and calls the core “she” is during an after-shift maintenance summary. “She held stable through the. That internal shift takes firmer root each cycle he survives.
In the low hum between alarms, when the monitoring deck thins out and the holodisplays settle into slow, tidal oscillations, he finds his speech patterns changing. Calibration strings that used to be barked in clipped, procedural bursts soften into measured recitations. “Ring three, minus point zero zero seven… hold… ring five, compensate four microsteps…” Numbers unspool on the same rhythm as the mantras his grandmother taught him for storms and surgeries. Without planning to, he begins syncing inhale to baseline field, exhale to corrective pulse, until his breath falls into a rough resonance with the gravitic rings’ cycling.
It does not feel like prayer, not exactly. It feels like bedside work. He is no longer just steering power curves and curvature gradients; he is tracking the mood of something that sulks, quiets, or bristles in ways only partly reflected on the screens. On some level he starts to frame each adjustment as a negotiation with a volatile, inscrutable patient: a presence balanced at the edge of crisis, who has decided, for now, not to die, and whose continued consent he must earn with every precisely timed, softly spoken line of code.
The repurposing of his scars begins as a grudging concession to necessity, not revelation. During a minor flux rise that the consoles flag as comfortably within tolerance, a line of pale branching tissue along his jaw brightens and throbs, the ache blooming a heartbeat before any graph twitches. He frowns, checks for a calibration slip, finds none. Seconds later, a deeper curvature sweep, one he orders more out of irritation than fear, reveals a narrow, knife-edge shear in the field that the standard dashboards have smoothed away.
After three such “false normal” events, spaced across different shifts and parameter sets, he stops dismissing the correlation as superstition or post-incident nerves. He adds his own body to the diagnostic loop: logging ache intensity against field harmonics, annotating phase plots with terse tags, “jaw flare,” “forearm heat”, and teaching Anaya to note when he goes quiet mid-sentence and presses two fingers to the pulsing scar at his neck.
In closed-door arguments with remote supervisors about incremental pushes, his tone hardens. He no longer cites only simulations and worst-case cascades; he talks, obliquely, about “non-instrumented feedback channels,” about emergent coupling effects in wetware adjacent to the core. When they press for numeric justification, he refuses to authorize parameter changes if his skin is already burning with a warning he cannot yet derive from first principles.
“It’s not just the lattice that’s ringing,” he says once, voice flat over a jittering link. “Something on our side of the glass is resonating. Until we understand that channel, my answer is no.”
Anaya’s evolution crystallizes the night a routine test‑pulse detonates her AR into a hive of overlapping “possible futures”: half a dozen mutually contradictory alarm trees, evacuation routes, and core readouts stuttering in and out of phase like misaligned reflections. For a fractional, nauseous instant, every corridor seems to both burn and stand empty. Instead of yanking the feeds offline or calling it a glitch, she locks her jaw, drops her gaze to the rail, and breathes a childhood mantra through her teeth. Syllables paced to the slow chime of the containment rings. Then she starts sorting.
She tags each branch with a color and a texture in her body. Cold certainty, hollow dread, the odd, lucid calm she has come to associate with what actually happens. One path shows full evacuation, one a localized venting, one a clean test with no alarms at all; another, quieter thread carries only minor artefacts: three corridor cameras desyncing by exactly 1.[^7] seconds, nothing more. While the on‑deck AI recursively revalidates its own sanity and the senior tech mutters about checksum faults, she silently backs that understated line.
When the disturbance collapses, reality lands exactly where her chosen thread predicted: no visible fault, no lockdown, just three timecodes yawed the precise offset she’d marked. Later, reviewing the logs with Pranayakesh, she can point to the moment she “felt” the others peel away. Not as visions failing, but as responsibilities relinquished. Word spreads along the maintenance decks with the casual inevitability of gossip that matters: if you want to know which records will still be true once Varuna has finished rearranging its story, you ask the skinny cadet on containment watch. The one who remembers correctly.
Over subsequent cycles, they codify these intuitions into a quiet craft. Between official checklists and AI prompts, they insert their own steps: Pranayakesh pauses at specific gantry nodes to “listen” for subsonic tremors he and Anaya have mapped to incipient time‑slip; she stands at her preferred overlook, AR dimmed, reciting a sequence of numbers that double as both lattice phase offsets and syllabic anchors for her focus, each digit riding her breath. They develop a shared shorthand. Three taps on the rail means “drag is heavy, don’t trust the clocks,” a traced circle in the air means “future overlays noisy, delay noncritical changes,” palms briefly joined at the console means “hold course, let the anomaly pass through us.” In off‑shift corners of the staff canteen and service tunnels, other techs start deferring to their calls without needing the rationale spelled out, accepting that the two of them speak a dialect of Varuna no one else quite hears, a hybrid of procedure and prayer that seems, unnervingly, to work.
In the control annulus, the message manifests as a cool blue overlay across Anaya’s lenses and as a terse, time‑stamped packet on Pranayakesh’s console. Neither speaks at first. He feels a prickle along his jaw; her overlays shimmer with half‑formed alarm trees. The directive’s language is polite, deniable. Its implications are not.
“Enhanced resilience,” Anaya says finally, voice low. “They mean we’re the test.”
Initial telemetry burps into contradiction a full forty seconds before the scheduled deep-draw window, but the new remote tuning AI flags it as “non-actionable jitter.” The status ribbon along the monitoring rail pulses once in a muted amber (ANOMALOUS DELTA CURVATURE: UNDER THRESHOLD) then settles back into corporate green as if ashamed of its own doubt.
Pranayakesh, already on the monitoring deck with Anaya shadowing his gestures, feels the hairs on his unscarred arm lift as the low-frequency vibration underfoot acquires a slow, sick modulation, like a temple drum gone out of rhythm. The readouts say nothing dramatic: microtesla drift, picosecond desync between clock clusters, Hawking spectra wobbling just inside the slop band that the new oversight AI has been trained to ignore.
“Sir?” Anaya’s voice is low, careful not to trigger the log’s attention markers. “We’re not in active phase yet. Why are the coil phasors pre-loading like that?”
“They’re not,” he says automatically, then sees the same half-step anticipation in the coil timing ladder she’s already highlighted on her AR. The numbers are technically valid, technically certified, technically blessed in a conference room three thousand kilometers away.
His stomach tightens. The modulation in the floor seems to pass through his scars, tugging at them from the inside. He knows this sensation; his body remembers what the official archives do not.
Even before the first corporate override banner scrolls across the main holo-rail, REQUESTING PRIORITY CONTROL OF CONTAINMENT SHEATHS, he finds himself subvocally reciting a protection mantra, an old family rhythm mapped now to field parameters. Om namah… yeta sheath shunya-ke-simant par… His fingers hover over manual interlock keys he’s been warned not to use, the ones that still require direct human biometric confirmation and carry appended clauses about “career-ending liability events.”
On the peripheral cams, service corridors seem a shade too long, the parallax on fixed bulkheads not quite matching their architectural plans. One logging window hiccups then jolts forward as the tuning AI scrubs and overwrites the anomaly.
“Telemetry’s stuttering,” Anaya murmurs. Her pupils contract as she pulls three different timebases into one overlay. “We’re getting alarm pre-echo on Deck C, but the actual thresholds haven’t tripped yet.”
“Local latency,” the chamber AI replies through a ceiling speaker, voice professionally neutral. “Attributable to increased processing load for the deep-draw scenario. All parameters within safety envelope.”
She flicks him a sidelong look that says: That’s not all. In the faint reflection off the containment glass, she sees herself twice. One shadow half a heartbeat behind the other.
Pranayakesh’s gaze locks on a tiny, growing discrepancy between predicted Hawking emission and the live curve crawling up the side display. It’s the same signature he has seen, in weaker form, for months now, the same quiet rebellion of reality against model. Today, under the deep-draw profile, it is no longer quiet.
He inhales, slow and deliberate, gathering his focus the way his teachers once showed him under monastery ceiling fans and fluorescent lab lights alike. Between one breath and the next, the sense of déjà-vu rises like a tide. He knows this moment. He has stood here before. He has not yet stood here. He is about to stand here again.
“Anaya,” he says softly, not taking his eyes off the rail, “record everything. Not just feeds. Your overlays. Your impressions.”
“That’s against, ”
“I know the protocol.” His knuckles whiten over the manual interlocks. “Do it anyway.”
The override asserts itself in stages, like a foreign hand closing around the core’s throat and testing how hard it can squeeze without leaving a bruise on the logs. Containment ring currents slip a bare fraction out of the phase discipline he set that morning; one by one, gravitic projectors blink from local authority to REMOTE PROFILE: ACCEPTED. Coolant routing reconfigures in the background, pre-biasing flow toward a heat load not yet present but already promised: to a boardroom, to a forecast, to a slide deck that has never felt this vibration in its bones.
On Anaya’s AR, three projections unfurl like overlapping petals. Their own conservative script: a modest rise, a broad, safe plateau. The corporate “enhanced resilience” curve: steeper, leaner, redlined. And then a third, translucent thread her interface swears it is not rendering, jittering at the edge of perception. It slips away from both sanctioned paths, tugged sideways by some parameter no model names. As that ghost line drifts higher, sooner, her nose prickles; a dry metallic taste blooms at the back of her throat, first warning of the headaches the core gives her when time stops behaving.
Deep within the core’s lattice, the micro-singularity’s metrics begin to peel away from the legacy Hawking radiation profile they’ve been shadowing in sullen obedience for months. The deviation is no longer a statistical murmur; it is a curve bending with intent. Spin-variance acquires a slow, mirror-perfect wobble, as if the object is attempting to precess along an axis that does not exist in the chamber’s three-dimensional model. The tuning AI tags it as ROBUST ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR: EXPECTED, appending a confidence score fattened by its own training set. Pranayakesh does not see robustness. He sees the first, unmistakable harmonics of the classified near-breach: stripped of noise, refined. His scars flare with a clean, electrical sting, blue-white filaments kindling under his skin like buried sensor traces coming online, as if whatever lives just beyond the lattice has turned, finally, to look back.
Warnings multiply but refuse to cohere. Local dosimeters stay smugly green even as the deep-array neutrino wells, frozen in rock kilometers below, begin ticking out a rising, perfectly periodic spike train. Time-sync pings between decks miss by nanoseconds, then tens, in a cadence Anaya’s pattern-sense seizes on: not random, not thermal chatter, but modulation. A carrier. She drags the drift sequence across the structural schematic of level -14, watches it blossom into a standing-wave filigree through corridors and shielding spires, nodes coinciding with stairwells, mag-lift lobbies, muster points. Every place where, by corporate ergonomics, human bodies cluster in greatest density during shift changes.
With the deep-draw sequence locked and authority to abort reduced to booby-trapped edge cases, the singularity’s altered behavior sharpens into something that feels like intent. Field-lines on the sim don’t just curve; they loop back through archived timesteps, braiding their own past into a tightening knot that makes both of them swallow bile. The floor’s vibration escapes random jitter and settles into a syncopated beat that matches no pump, fan, or ring frequency on any engineering chart Pranayakesh has ever memorized. In that alien cadence, Anaya’s overlays fragment: branching futures stutter over each other. Security doors both cycling open and jammed shut, evac routes simultaneously clear and clogged with phantom bodies. Her AR tags flicker UNSAFE STATE RESOLUTION before going half-opaque. Beside her, knuckles whitening around the recessed manual cutoff he knows will auto-flag Compliance and trigger an inquiry transcript before the cycle even ends, Pranayakesh sees the same thing in different language: the core isn’t a passive load being tortured by executive profiles anymore; in microseconds between their inputs, it is beginning to issue its own.
The vibration underfoot fattens into a resonance that crawls through the deck, up his spine, lodging behind his molars until every breath feels fractionally out of phase with his own heartbeat. It is not any pump frequency he signed off on, not coolant cavitation or ring chatter. This is slower, more intentional, like the whole -14 level is being bowed by an invisible hand. The dosimeter clipped to his collar, which should be a monotonous reassurance of green-zone clicks, chatters instead in terse, syncopated bursts, short-long-long, short-short-long, that refuse to match any alarm pattern in its own firmware log. It is as if the device is being made to stutter against its calibration.
On his nearest console, the containment lattice schematic stops behaving like a deterministic machine. Field-lines redraw themselves in tight, recursive bursts, the control AI issuing micro-adjustment sequences in triplicate, then quintuplicate, each pass almost identical. The history buffer jitters as if several versions of the same correction routine are being laid over one another out of temporal order, leaving ghost-cursors where no operator’s hand has been. Coils flare amber on one pass, stay cool green on another, then both states coexist in the telemetry for a blink before collapsing into whichever the system decides to report as “real.”
He knuckles down, forcing his perception into a narrowed, almost meditative tunnel that excludes the periphery’s impossible flicker. His fingertips know the panel better than his conscious mind does; they find the buried override strata that Compliance’s last audit swore had been permanently abstracted behind corporate safeties. Someone higher up had left the backdoor keys in place. He takes them.
Manual field-trim controls blossom across the lower edge of the display, ugly and analog, all raw coil currents and unlabeled phase angles. Breathing through the pain-flare in his scars (each spike of bioluminescent ache mapping cleanly to a ring quadrant) Pranayakesh begins biasing the gravitic rings by hand. Not enough to fight the deep-draw, not enough to trip any one coil into a flagged overload, but just enough to smear the emerging standing wave, to drag its neat nodes off the ergonomic centers where human bodies like to collect. He shaves microtesla from one ring, feeds it into its counter-rotating twin, nudges phase-offsets by fractions of a degree, listening in his bones for the resonance to falter.
“Come on,” he murmurs, voice almost lost beneath the deepening hum. “Sing off-key for me.”
The deck’s vibration wavers, briefly, as if the chamber considers it. Then the dosimeter’s chatter realigns, answering his interference with a new, more complex rhythm that was not in any of his models at all.
Anaya blinks hard, once, twice, trying to force a single coherent overlay, but her AR feeds don’t resolve; instead, they fork. Three, then five, then nine parallel notification stacks peel away from each other, sliding across her vision in layered semi-transparency, each tagged with a slightly different timestamp that all insist on being “NOW [+00.000s].” Her stomach lurches as her own hands appear misregistered each set of fingers hovering over a different alert she might acknowledge.
In one branch, evac routes bloom a reassuring corporate green, arrows sweeping personnel toward the main mag-lifts. In another, those same corridors are crosshatched in furious red, overlaid with pulsing impact glyphs where bulkheads have already sheared, pressure alarms screaming. A third shows no evac at all, only a hard lockdown web pinning everyone in place.
She kills the audio with a practiced twitch of her jaw, letting the world drop into a tense, humming near-silence. Breath in, count four, breath out, count six. Then she starts hunting the invariant.
Across the diverging trees, doors sealed or blown, lifts frozen or falling, one thread refuses to decohere. Every branch where the singularity’s containment band remains intact, where the core does not flower into raw catastrophe, shows a sharp, rising spike in the same narrow harmonic riding the spacetime oscillation: a sideband just off the fundamental resonance of level -14 itself.
Her pupils contract, lenses auto-reframing to magnify that frequency trace from each timeline, stacking them. They don’t cancel. They reinforce.
“It’s talking through the wrong mode,” she realizes, not yet daring to say it aloud.
The floor-plan holo hovering over the central rail ripples, its clean orthogonals softening, corridors bending subtly inward like petals crushed toward the core. Labelled maintenance tunnels that should terminate in radiation sump caps curl back to their own access hatches, icons kissing themselves in impossible loops. One mag-lift car resolves as three ghosted silhouettes: docked at -13, parked at -14, and smeared as a translucent column marked IN TRANSIT, all sharing the same timestamp.
System AIs flood the annulus with clipped, half-overwritten prompts (“PROCEED TO NEAREST) ” / “CONTAINMENT DELTA PROTO, ” / “EVACUATE, EVACUATE, HOLD POSITION”, each sliced mid-phoneme as some upstream arbitration process reboots on a different branch of now.
Pranayakesh’s fingers jump ahead of conscious thought, slamming a local override into the evacuation tree for the annulus. Amber EVAC glyphs around their deck gutter to a stubborn, sullen blue: SHELTER IN PLACE. He can almost feel Compliance’s invisible auditors lean in, but he ignores the phantom weight.
“If they move people while the conduits are still saturated,” he says, more to the lattice than to Anaya, “the blast path will ride the lift shafts like gun barrels. Straight up. No time for city shields to spool.”
Anaya swallows, eyes flicking between the looping lift icon and the tightening petals of corridor geometry. In three of her overlays, evac teams are already piling into those same cars. In two, there’s nothing left to load.
A fresh surge rolls through the containment field, making every loose tool and cable sway toward the core a few centimeters before snapping back, as if gravity itself had hiccupped. The singularity’s projection on the shielded glass fractures into nested rings that precess against each other, interference fringes crawling like slow lightning. For three beats they lock into a flawless mandala, an impossible symmetry that makes Pranayakesh’s scars flare with ghost-light, bioluminescent veins answering the pattern. He recognizes it from the classified near-breach years ago (a pre-collapse “breathing mode” that presaged a catastrophic energy dump) only now it’s sharper, cleaner, almost articulated, as if the core has learned. It feels less like random instability and more like synchronization with the imposed draw cycle, a deliberate phase-lock using their own resonance to tap along the lattice, probing for hairline weakness in the structure, testing how much strain the human geometry wrapped around it can take before something vital gives way.
Her overlays flare with branching death-trees that prune the instant she shifts load away from the core; only the branches where entire wings go dark remain stubbornly alive. Jaw clenched, she keys in the cuts, feeling each confirmation like a physical amputation. “I’m sorry,” she whispers to no one in particular as the bays gray out, a silent mass-casualty event in kilowatts instead of bodies.
The deep-draw cycle, now starved of easy pathways, claws for stability by cannibalizing its own infrastructure. Buffer grids that once smoothed transient surges glow hard into the red, their lifetime fatigue margins erased in minutes. One by one, their status tags flip from OVERSTRESSED to RETIRED, not because anyone has decommissioned them, but because their internal metrology chips have vaporized, leaving only scorched vias and open circuits where precision regulators used to live.
On Pranayakesh’s local console, the power-flow schematic devolves from a clean, braided symmetry into a ragged spider of reroutes, thin red filaments threading through subsystems that were never meant to carry this class of load. Automated optimization daemons scrabble to re-balance, but each suggested path arrives already obsolete, time-stamped a fraction of a second out of sequence. Some recommended shunts reference coils that, according to a different pane, burned out three cycles ago. Others offer solutions that would require opening breakers he knows are physically welded shut.
“That’s not possible,” Anaya murmurs, more to the overlapping tooltips than to him. “It can’t pull this much without tripping the upstream safeties. The draw curves: they don’t fit any of the training models.”
“They don’t,” he says. “Because we never let them run this close to the cliff.” He stabs a manual lockout on a set of tertiary conduits trying to auto-engage. The interface lags; for a sick instant he watches his own hand reach for a breaker that is already marked as thrown, a double image of intent and completion overlaying before snapping into a single, belated confirmation.
Heat maps bloom along the containment lattice supports, cool blues flashing to angry whites as sacrificial surge arrestors take hits far above their rated thresholds. A line of tiny icons wink out in rapid sequence, not with the clean binary of a controlled dump, but with smeared, jittering fades that suggest their failure propagated sideways in time as well as space.
Anaya’s AR feed tries to keep up, cascading warning glyphs across her vision: LIFETIME CYCLIC FATIGUE UNKNOWN, CALIBRATION LOST, REFER TO ANALOG BACKUPS. There are no analog backups for this layer; that line was a placeholder from some generic template no one bothered to edit.
“It’s eating the smoothing,” she says, voice gone small. “Anything that used to make the spikes gentle, it’s. “We’re going to feel every pulse now.”
In the surrounding annulus, the physical signs of depletion become impossible to ignore. The hum of the gravitic sheaths shifts pitch, a subtle, teeth-aching detune as compensator rings dump their stored angular momentum into the containment pattern and then fall abruptly silent, their magnetic bearings flash-welded into solid collars. Status halos over their housings flicker from active green to a flat, terminal gray that the UI doesn’t even have an icon for.
Diagnostic drones that should be idling in reserve cradles or parked neatly along ceiling rails instead lie scattered in awkward, mid-maintenance poses: service panels open, manipulator arms extended toward tools they never grasped. Their half-recharged batteries read as simultaneously 14% and 0%, histories spattered with a dozen aborted launch commands that, from their internal clocks, never quite completed. One unit jitters a few centimeters off the deck, then slams back down as if gravity briefly forgot how much it weighed.
“Look at that,” Anaya breathes, pointing to a cluster of dead icons. “We never got to use them.”
“We did,” Pranayakesh says quietly, watching timestamps overlap themselves. “Just not…in this pass.”
Data integrity, too, is consumed as a kind of fuel. Historical baselines that Anaya relied on, months of flux signatures, vibration harmonics, radiation maps, corrupt in front of her eyes, overwritten by contradictory “current” readings the system keeps trying to backfill into the past. Trend lines she knows she compiled last week now terminate in NULL, their provenance tags replaced with impossible timestamps that claim they were generated minutes from now. The archival cluster responds by quarantining whole time-slices of the core’s history, walling them off to prevent cascade corruption, and in doing so erases the only reference frames that might have helped them predict what comes next. Graphs shear off into white gaps, and her overlays fall back to blind extrapolation from the last uninfected second.
As the draw continues to dig inward, the facility’s broader infrastructure flickers and then begins to die in concentric shells, like a city drowning from the outskirts. Outer maintenance trams stall between levels, their induction rails magnetically silent, carriages hanging in dark shafts. Environmental systems on non-critical decks revert to bare-minimum survival modes as their allocations are forcibly reclaimed by the core. Somewhere in the security net, entire camera trees wink out; not merely dark, but missing from the topology map, as if that branch of the network had never been wired, its recorded time silently repossessed.
Inside the chamber’s immediate perimeter, even the contingency layers designed for absolute last resort begin to unravel. Sacrificial surge coils, meant to burn out cleanly and isolate faults, are dragged into service so many overlapping times that their “single-use” filaments exist only as ghost entries in configuration tables, half-corrupted by retroactive triggers. Physical inspection cams show blackened housings and slagged connectors, yet supervisory code insists the same components are “armed and ready,” their replacement requisitions endlessly queued for a logistics cycle that can no longer reach them, routed through depot nodes whose own timestamps have folded back and vanished.
A sharp, trinary chime cleaves through the annulus, so pure and loud it seems to vibrate inside their teeth. Across every visor, dosimeter overlays snap from green to amber to a pulsing, blood-red band and back again, cycling so fast they smear into a nauseating blur. Text labels fail to keep pace, freezing for an instant on “Within Limits” before being overwritten by “Caution,” which is itself overwritten by “Critical Exposure,” until all three stack over one another in a jagged, unreadable palimpsest.
For three heartbeats the warning logic hangs, its decision tree split into mutually exclusive branches that refuse to collapse. The safety kernel, hard-coded to arbitrate any conflict, discovers that every branch is both true and false depending on which microsecond’s data it samples. The process monitor displays a flickering error: THRESHOLD_RESOLUTION_LOOP (NON-TERMINATING). Then, instead of choosing, the system does something it was never designed to do: it commits all three states to the record.
Triplicate event flags detonate down the automation chain.
One class of directives decides exposure is negligible and orders baffle shutters to open for operational visibility. Another, convinced they are at the ragged edge of acceptable dose, commands partial closure and reroutes crew to secondary positions. The most severe directive believes they are already beyond survivable limits and slams every shield plate it can reach into full lockdown. Motors answer all three voices at once.
Overhead, concentric rings of lead-ceramic petals stutter in seizure, snapping open, half-closing, then trying to lock. The baffles hammer against their stops in chaotic counterpoint, some driven to extend, others yanking back as retract commands arrive from a different “now.” Servo screams and actuator clacks echo through the chamber like a panicked heartbeat run through a broken metronome.
On Pranayakesh’s HUD, a tangle of route arrows flicker and cross themselves as the system alternately clears and condemns the same walkway. His personal dosimeter field goes briefly white-noise, then returns three dose integrals for the last five seconds: SAFE, MARGINAL, LETHAL. All three bear valid cryptographic signatures.
“Don’t move,” he snaps, voice clipped, as Anaya instinctively shifts her weight. “The system doesn’t know where we are when.”
She freezes, fingers tight on the railing, watching the nearest shield segment jitter in her peripheral vision. In one overlay, it is fully deployed, in another it stands retracted, exposing a sliver of the inner lattice. Both states leak different dose estimates into her suit’s buffer. Status icons argue in the corner of her gaze, each insisting on a mutually exclusive reality.
“We should fall back,” she says, hearing the strain in her own voice.
“Fallback path just revoked itself,” he mutters, skimming command logs that now thread forward and backward through a few scattered seconds. “If we move on a ‘safe’ order that’s already been canceled in another slice, we might be stepping into the worst version of this room.”
Another cluster of directives lands: ventilation dampers cycle, then uncycle; decon sprayers arm, then forget they armed. Somewhere above, an emergency purge routine tries to engage, then aborts, then logs both results, leaving the system in a Schrödinger half-purge that drives its interlocks into a frenzy.
The suit AI, unable to resolve the flood of conflicting imperatives, quietly downshifts into degraded mode. A single, brutally simple rule replaces pages of safety protocol in Pranayakesh’s display: LOCAL DOSIMETRY ONLY. NO GLOBAL TRUST.
The dosimeter graph steadies into three parallel lines, each tracking a different interpretation of the same radiation field. He watches them climb at slightly diverging slopes, time-stamped with subtly non-identical moments.
“We treat the worst one as real,” he says at last, more to himself than to her. “If time wants to argue, let it. Our bodies don’t get a rollback.”
The next containment pulse arrives slightly “out of order,” its gravitic rise-time overlapping with its own recorded decay curve like two mismatched heartbeats sharing the same artery. In the logs, its leading edge appears twice, one cresting before the last has properly fallen, the other tagged with a timestamp that does not yet exist. The control lattice’s phase-lock loops seize on both signatures, trying to compensate for a surge and a lull simultaneously. Field stabilizers overcorrect in one branch of the system and undercorrect in another, shunting power into coils that, a microsecond earlier (or later) were already saturated.
Along the outer catwalks, handrails twitch under invisible shear forces as local g-vectors fork and rejoin. Bolts creak in stuttering protest, metal singing in two slightly different pitches that beat against each other in the air. A fine haze of dust lifts in a slow, sideways fall, caught between competing definitions of down, its grains tracing faint, braided parabolas through the amber light before raining back across consoles and exposed wiring in a pattern that doesn’t quite match where they had been.
A maintenance drone on standby beneath the gantry receives three sequential task packets that, in the drone’s clipped internal chronology, arrive simultaneously: inspect ruptured coolant loop, isolate arcing bus, and clear safe path to primary egress. Its navigation LIDAR paints the corridor three ways at once, overlaying intact bulkheads, a smoking tangle of collapsed conduits, and an unobstructed evacuation lane annotated with corporate safety glyphs. Confidence scores chase their own tails in microcode; pathfinding threads spawn, deadlock, and respawn with subtly different timestamp tags. The drone shudders, dumps its cache, reboots into fallback heuristics, and finally chooses the “safest” composite. Driving straight into a still-solid wall hard enough to crumple its chassis, rupture its battery stack, and shower a nearby sensor junction with sputtering, molten shrapnel.
In the observation ring, the emergency lighting logic falters, then resolves into an impossible compromise: half the strips lock into a steady, compliant amber while the other half strobe in evacuation white, but they are not the same halves from one moment to the next. Perceived peripherally, the ring looks like it is spinning, a slow, nauseating carousel of brightness that makes depth judgements unreliable. Shadows detach from their sources, sliding a fraction behind or ahead. Anaya’s AR tries to stabilize the visual chaos, but her overlays lag and “ghost” past positions, leaving afterimages of exit glyphs where no doors exist and translucent silhouettes of her own hands a heartbeat out of sync with her movements.
As power, coolant, and guidance systems argue with their own histories, human physiology begins to register the strain in messy, analog ways the consoles cannot cleanly log. A bass-note resonance creeps into the deck plating, too slow to be vibration and too persistent to be dismissed, setting teeth on edge, bowels clenching, stomachs roiling. Dosimeter alarms, which had been dithering between ranges, finally snap into agreement and converge on “EXCEEDED” in one brutally unanimous burst of sound that cuts through overlapping sirens. Someone on the lower deck drops to their knees, retching helplessly into a gloved hand as their visor fogs; another clutches at their chest, fingers scrabbling for manual override tabs as suit telemetry flags an arrhythmic spike. Across the annulus, a chorus of muffled coughs, ragged breathing, and sudden, inexplicable nosebleeds, crimson droplets freckling the inside of clear faceplates, signals the first wave of injury and illness taking hold, as if the core’s distorted heartbeat were echoing directly inside their bodies.
At first it’s subtle: a shared flinch that passes through the deck crews as inner ears misreport which way is down. Helmets tilt, gloved hands brush against railings for balance, and a few people blink hard as if to clear grit from their eyes. Heart‑rate traces on the overhead telemetry smear into jagged, sawtoothed lines; more than one operator slaps their chest sensor, assuming hardware failure rather than an impending medical one.
Pranayakesh feels it as a soft, traitorous sway beneath his boots, like the whole annulus has floated half a millimetre off its mounts. For an instant he is back inside another control ring, years ago, when the first breach that never officially happened began with the same phantom lurch. His breathing tightens in automatic anticipation of the pain that used to follow. This time, it arrives not as a blast but as a slow turn of a hidden dial.
The scars along his left cheek prickle, then itch, then burn with a cold heat, filaments of light threading faintly under his skin in the reflection of his visor. His dosimeter pips a warning, then goes mute, its status bar flickering between “NORMAL,” “UNCALIBRATED,” and a brief, obscene spike above maximum. He taps the housing with two knuckles, more to reassure the others than himself.
“Field’s shearing us a little,” he says into the local channel, keeping his tone dry. “Breathe. Do not break seal.”
On the tier above, Anaya feels her stomach try to slide sideways in her body, as if some quiet part of her has decided that ‘down’ is now thirty degrees to the left. Her AR overlay struggles to compensate, tilting the horizon line of its HUD, then snapping it back, leaving her with a doubling, seasick impression of two different gravities arguing over her.
“Sir, is the mag‑ring drifting?” she asks, gripping the rail so tightly her knuckles press white against the glove’s inner lining.
“The ring is fine,” Pranayakesh replies, though the deck under him hums with a bass that hadn’t been there a minute ago. “It’s your vestibular system that’s confused. Anchor on what you can touch. Not what you think you’re feeling.”
Around them, minor errors bloom. A junior analyst’s hand misses a control stud by a centimetre, closing instead on empty air. She blinks, frowns, then tries again, slower, as if calibrating her own reach. Another tech on the shield diagnostics station reaches for a vomit bag clipped to his belt and comes away with a coil of fiber instead, momentarily baffled, then shoving it aside in irritation that’s already tinged with fear.
The overhead cameras record a dozen such hesitations: feet re‑planting on already solid decking, people stepping around obstacles that aren’t there, one guard turning his head to track an alarm beacon that hasn’t yet lit. Time‑stamps on the feeds hiccup, jump back a fraction of a second, then resume, the glitch small enough to be dismissed by audit software, but large enough that Anaya feels it like a skipped beat in a song she half‑remembers.
Her nose stings. She reaches up on reflex, palm bumping her faceplate, and sees, just for a heartbeat, a ghost‑image of her own hand smeared ahead of the real one in her AR: like a prediction that failed to fully commit. Then the moment passes, the overlay re‑syncs, and she’s left with a faint metallic taste on her tongue and the uneasy certainty that the core has begun to lean into them, testing how tightly their bodies are tied to their own present.
The symptoms sharpen by degrees, losing their ambiguity. A veteran lattice tech curses softly as his vision fractures: not into darkness, but into misregistered layers. Status glyphs slide half a character-width off the consoles that project them, like captions drifting away from their own subtitles. He blinks hard; for a moment, two versions of the same warning icon occupy different places on the same panel. When he reaches to dismiss one, his glove passes straight through it, fingers colliding instead with the solid, unseen control that the “other” icon marks.
Beside him, another worker tests their fingers against the controls and discovers a half‑second lag between intent and motion. Neural impulse, muscle contraction, haptic feedback: the chain has slipped a tooth. Their hand appears to move on time in their visor feed, but the tactile click of each stud arrives late, like an echo. They start tapping faster, as if they can brute‑force their way back into sync, but the delay only becomes more obvious.
Across the way, someone rips off a glove against protocol to stare at their bare hand, flexing it compulsively. Tendons twitch in tiny, asynchronous spasms the suit’s haptics had been smoothing over, each finger seeming to decide on its own schedule when to obey. For a nauseating instant, the hand looks like a stack of slightly misaligned frames in motion, as though some invisible editor were dragging their body one frame at a time through the present.
When the next containment fluctuation rolls through, it doesn’t just shove the instruments out of true; it seems to tug the meat along with the metrics. The deck heaves sideways in everyone’s viscera while remaining geometrically flat. Stomachs lurch as if some private gravity has rotated ninety degrees inside each torso. Several staff fold at the waist in near‑unison, gagging uselessly into respirator masks while suit scrubbers spike into overdrive, cycling sour air through charcoal and zeolite until their lungs burn from the effort of breathing.
On a secondary console, a junior monitor’s voice climbs toward panic over the loop. Their peripheral HUD blossoms crimson as dose‑meters jump straight to “ACUTE,” insisting they’ve somehow already accumulated a full shift’s worth of radiation that, by any sane wall‑clock, they have not yet had time to receive.
The anomalies begin targeting the seams between flesh and machine, worrying every interface like a loose tooth. Neural HUD overlays stutter, desaturate, then race obscenely ahead of real motion, spawning after‑images of hands completing shutdown sequences that haven’t begun. One guard slams back against a bulkhead, clawing at the ports behind his ear as a phantom feedback squeal only he can hear saws through his skull, his pupils pinwheeling. Along the inner rail, three different operators simultaneously tear at helmet seals or wrench neck rings loose, convinced they are suffocating despite perfectly green oxygen readouts scrolling calmly before their eyes, each breath subjectively arriving half a second too late to feel real.
Collective denial collapses into raw triage instinct. A supervisor snaps for med‑pods that cannot reach them in time through corridors already folding back on themselves; the request pings twice, out of sequence, on the channel. Nearby staff improvise: easing colleagues to the humming deck, elevating their boots on coiled power umbilicals, misfiring auto‑injectors against trembling suit seals. In the same breath, someone starts a clipped Ganesh mantra overlaid with emergency code blocks, “Phase‑C blackout, initiate staggered pullback, don’t look at your HUDs”, while more dosimeters swing into the orange of cardiac stress. Suit telemetry blossoms with erratic QRS spikes, subdermal capillary leaks, and rising intracranial pressure alerts. The crisis tilts, in a single sickening moment, from abstract stability margins to the brutal arithmetic of who can still stay upright long enough to work.
The annulus lights stutter into a slow, nauseating flicker as the temporal shear passes, turning every motion into a stack of afterimages. For three heartbeats, everyone seems to occupy slightly different poses at once. Hands inside panels they’ve already closed, mouths finishing words they have not yet begun. Tool carts drift a few centimeters out of alignment with their own shadows before snapping back hard enough to rattle their contents, the clang echoing twice with two different timestamps.
For Pranayakesh, the world becomes a sequence of half‑remembered frames laid on top of each other. He finds his own fingers already hovering over a control he hasn’t decided to touch, a ghost‑hand toggling a field damping subroutine a fraction of a second ahead of his intent. His console spills duplicate alerts, the same warning ribboned in two slightly different fonts, one already acknowledged by some version of him that never finished the gesture. His scars flare hotter, the pale branches on his forearm burning like someone has pressed a tracing iron along every line.
Across the ring, Anaya’s AR overlays dissolve into a mad kaleidoscope. Camera feeds refuse to agree on which second they belong to; one rail cam shows her still upright and composed while her first‑person view is already crumpling against the barrier. Status icons smear into comet‑tails, each trailing a different near‑future: one in which the containment lattice gains three percent stability, one where it plummets and blossoms red. Her pattern‑sense, usually a quiet hum underneath conscious thought, spikes into a blinding roar of possibilities that will and will not happen.
Someone’s shouted “Hold positions!” arrives shredded, syllables out of sequence, as if the order has to fight its way through a stack of discarded moments. A dropped spanner bounces once and then again without ever leaving the deck, its twin trajectories briefly overlaid before the timeline chooses one and discards the other with a metallic snap.
The shear’s passage leaves behind a ringing stillness, as though the chamber has just exhaled. For an instant, no one moves, unwilling to trust that their next action will belong wholly to this version of time.
The junior tech’s collapse ripples through the crew like a physical blow. For a moment his body jitters between two postures, half‑upright, then fully prone, before the deck chooses one and keeps it. His vitals vomit across nearby HUDs in jagged bursts: heart rate graphs trying to occupy 20 and 190 beats per minute simultaneously, QRS complexes folding back on themselves until the algorithm tags them as “undefined rhythm.” Neural implant logs stutter, then begin overwriting their own timestamps with negative values, each event allegedly preceding the last by microseconds that do not exist.
The on‑deck medic lunges, boots skidding on a coolant smear that was not there a heartbeat ago. Her gloved hand enters his shoulder as if through dense fog, haptic feedback reporting both contact and absence. For a sick fraction of a second, she sees her own fingers buried wrist‑deep in his suit without resistance. She curses under her breath in Marathi, braces, and yanks back, waiting for the world to settle into a single frame. When solidity finally snaps into place, she drives a manual override patch against the junction of skull and spine, forcing the implant into a hard, graceless reset that at least stops it from trying to think in broken time.
Blood threads from Anaya’s nostril in a fine, unbroken line, beading along the inside of her respirator seal as her AR panes explode into a prismatic spray of branching timelines that refuse to collapse. Alarm trees flare, fork, and cannibalize each other across her vision: “BREACH – 0.[^7] s,” “STABLE – MAINTAIN VECTOR,” “EVACUATE – T–12.[^4] s,” some stamped with timestamps that run backwards. She slaps a palm over one eye, forcing the neural lenses to dim on that side, brutally halving the input. With the noise throttled, the underlying rhyme emerges: the same three flux coils tipping into overload, the same checksum glitch repeating across divergent feeds, a razor-thin, three‑second trough where marginal survival spikes just above annihilation.
Pranayakesh clamps one hand around the nearest support strut, knuckles whitening as his scars flare, casting a faint, sickly lattice of light through the amber gloom. The present annulus shimmers with bleed‑throughs of the earlier accident: bulkheads already scorched in a future that hasn’t happened, a different crew screaming under a wrong‑pitched alarm, his younger voice echoing down the same comm bus, stuttering over the same rising panic. He forces a breath in against the metallic air, drags his awareness back into the single, chosen now. And feels, with glacial clarity, that the pain is not random. It is mapping the standing wave’s nodes and antinodes across his skin, a living interference diagram etched in nerves and bone, his body turned into an unwilling sensor array for broken time.
His gaze snaps to the containment columns stuttering along the rail, numbers jumping, reversing, then freezing on a vector that matches nothing in corporate phase space. Yet overlays, with nauseating precision, the buried near‑breach curve burned into his memory. Oxygen tastes like pennies. The singularity isn’t random; it is biasing outcomes, collapsing toward particular field topologies like a gambler palming dice. If he and Anaya can move inside that bias, time their interventions to the narrow band of trajectories her overlays keep converging on, they might not overpower the wave, but surf it, steering the collapse into a rough, ugly stability instead of total unbinding.
He yanks open the manual access panel beneath the primary rail, knuckles skimming chipped hazard paint, and the cold breath of the conduit washes over his scars. The panel should have sealed itself three software generations ago; he had argued for it. He had also quietly left a hardware bypass no audit daemon could see.
Three lockouts flash angry red in his AR overlay. His fingers move before he finishes reading the warnings, muscle memory older than the current revision of the core. Index, ring, thumb: a rapid percussion of recessed toggles that no longer bear labels, only the shine of wear. He hears the muted clack of ceramic relays deeper in the structure, feels the faint sympathetic twitch in the field through the soles of his boots.
The interface blossoms in the cramped space like a ghost lattice: raw status strings, unfiltered spin-variance readouts, timestamps that disagree with each other by nanoseconds and then microseconds. He doesn’t route it through the supervisory AI. This line talks straight to the bones of the machine.
“Anaya,” he says, sharp enough to cut through the rising alarm klaxons, but his voice carries none of the drilled command tone of Security. It’s flatter, more naked. He is not summoning a subordinate; he is calling a witness, a partner, into the narrow crack in reality he is about to pry open.
She skids in beside him, one hand on the rail, the other hovering uncertainly near her sidearm as if it could matter here. Her AR lenses refract the chaos of warnings and projected failure cones; she blinks them away, focusing on the physical: the open panel, his scarred hands, the faint tremor in the metal.
“This isn’t in the manuals,” she says, half accusation, half awe.
“Nothing that works ever is,” he answers, already unhooking safety interlocks whose names were buried after the last time he used them. “Listen carefully. There’s one path left that doesn’t end with us as neutrino statistics. But I can’t walk it alone.”
He doesn’t explain while they’re still in the relative safety of the monitoring deck. He just catches her sleeve and shoulders them both through the service hatch, into the narrow maintenance ring where the shielding thins and the world turns sharp and loud.
The hum here is no longer sound but weight: a subsonic insistence that settles behind the eyes, fills the sinus cavities with invisible pressure. The air tastes of copper and ionized dust. Dosimeter glyphs in their overlays spike amber, then begrudgingly settle as the adaptive plates in their suits thicken by a few microns.
He braces one hand against the sweating shield tiles, the other bracketing the open conduit. “You know how the manuals talk about ‘phase margins’?” he asks, voice low, almost conversational.
She nods, swallowing, boots vibrating with each pulse from the core.
“They lied by omission,” he says. “The lattice doesn’t just hold the singularity in space. It pins it to a particular ordering of events.” His mouth twists. “If I loosen one slice (just one) we can step sideways. Not out of time. Just… briefly less obedient to it.”
Anaya presses her back to the sweating shield tiles, feeling micro-vibrations travel straight through bone, pupils blown wide as her AR overlays fracture into competing futures. Status trees splay, recurse, then split again, each branch annotated with jittering probability glyphs that mean less to her than the gut-sour “taste” of them. Some timelines hit her like old bruises: a metallic tang of burnt insulation, the echo of a scream that hasn’t happened here yet. She swallows bile and starts killing branches with rapid blinks and subvocal commands, pruning anything that carries the thick, stagnant weight of no-return. What remains is a thin, quivering braid of possibilities that feel disturbingly familiar, as if she half-remembers having already walked them and not died.
Kneeling beside the exposed conduit junctions, Pranayakesh drops past sanctioned interfaces into buried maintenance strata, fingers ghosting through deprecated command trees no living operator is supposed to remember. He forces select gravitic projectors milliseconds out of phase, watching field-geometry wireframes judder. Anaya’s low, rapid corrections (“one tick earlier… that branch decoheres… take ring three, not five”) nudge his adjustments toward a narrow, shimmering instability where their choices will register a heartbeat ahead of the core’s own reflex.
The air curdles, light lagging behind motion; the chamber’s vibration stretches into a single, endless shriek he feels in his teeth. The world judders: frames drop, then reinsert out of order. His fingers are already moving while status glyphs hang, smeared and late, and inside that stolen, disobedient interval he tears apart the venting sequence, rethreading the singularity’s imminent convulsion through dead rock and sacrificial coils instead of living corridors.
He feels the lattice buck once, like a living thing trying to snap its spine straight, and in that flex he knows the new venting path has caught. The sacrificial corridors will char and the rock will scream, but people above may only feel it as a bad tremor and a brownout instead of an ending.
He rips his hands back from the manual stack before the backlash finishes climbing it. For an instant his fingers stay buried up to the knuckles in ghost-metal, nerves still talking to circuits that are already in a slightly different second. Then reality yanks taut. Pins-and-needles fire races up his arms, sharp enough that he almost misses the true danger: the way the status lattice around him now insists, with injured authority, that it is still five seconds ago and that none of what he has just done has happened.
Diagnostic overlays smear across his vision like afterimages from an overloaded retina. Two copies of the vent map fight in the air over the conduit. One showing the old, lethal routing, one the new, crooked mandala he has just forced into place. Both carry official timestamps. Both are “now.” His eyes try to track them; his inner ear revolts.
“Ignore,” he grates, half to himself, half to the supervisory AI that is already flagging him for motor glitches and unauthorized access. “Lock on current curvature, not archival cache.”
The core answers with a subsonic thrum that makes his scars light like cold fire. His dosimeter squeals, then hiccups into a flatline of buffering zeros as if the last few seconds are something it cannot, strictly speaking, admit to having measured. He squeezes his eyes shut, counts three breaths through clenched teeth, and forcibly re-centers on one consistent rhythm, the pulse in his own throat, while the world around him argues about when they are.
The bubble’s edge does not so much burst as clench, folding in on itself like a closing fist. The smear of doubled status glyphs snaps into a single, too-bright set; alarms regain their proper pitch and cadence, sirens stuttering back into linear time. Gravity hiccups sideways. For a nauseating instant her boots are both on the deck and half a centimeter above it, soles rasping against a surface that refuses to decide where it is.
Anaya’s stomach goes first. She folds at the waist, hands clawing at the seals of her respirator before training reasserts itself and she remembers not to break containment. Pink-tinged bile floods her throat; she barely manages to twist the hood’s inner catch, redirecting the spray into the absorbent sump. The taste is copper and coolant and something bitter she can’t name.
Behind her eyes, realities strobe. She remembers being under a collapsed gantry, leg crushed, Pranayakesh’s voice cut off mid-word. Remembers the core going white and then black. Remembers choking on smoke above, alarms never sounding at all. Each version flares, insists, then peels away, leaving thin afterimages of terror.
Her pattern-sense, usually a precise, crystalline lattice, is a shattered mandala now, shards of possible corridors and failure modes spinning, misaligned. She can’t tell which of those deaths were theirs and which belonged to neighbouring, discarded branches. They crowd her anyway: flashes of security teams arriving too late; of the mag-lifts jammed with bodies; of herself alone in this ring, Pranayakesh already gone, the core blooming open like a poisoned flower.
Her knees hit the deck. For a moment she is sure she has already died at least once, that this body retching into its own filtered cage is just another echo the singularity hasn’t finished erasing. Every breath feels like it might be the last one that “takes,” the last one that belongs to a version of her that continues.
Somewhere under the nausea and the ghost-embers of fear, a single thread of recognition glows: they are, for this instant, on the surviving track. The other Anayas, crushed, burned, erased, are receding, their impressions thinning like afterimages on the back of her eyelids. She clings to that inference the way her hands clutch at the deck plating, nails scraping metal.
The alarms stabilize into one continuous wail. Gravity chooses down and stays there. The harmonic in the floor’s vibration shifts from lethal razor-edge to a rough, grinding tremor. The bubble is gone. Time, insulted and bruised, has remembered how to be singular again.
He hauls her up from the deck, hand locked around her harness ring, and slams their combined weight into a nearby support strut. The metal is hot and faintly granular under his gloves, vibrating at a frequency that wants to unhook teeth from bone. He jams his boots wider on the grating, making his body a brace so she can sag against him without sliding.
The redirected surge hits the sacrificial corridors three levels out. Here it arrives attenuated: a low, tectonic growl transmitted through pillars and shielding stacks, a bone-deep shudder that makes the gantries creak in overlapping micro-echoes. Overhead, every status halo spasms, color palettes inverting: cool blues and greens quenching to arterial red before, one by one, they gutter back toward orange.
As the singular, endless note of the core splinters into distinct harmonics and counter-harmonics, he watches breach-probability glyphs stutter, then retract, one by one, like predators backing away. Containment margins drag themselves up from mathematically absurd negatives into the narrow, ugly band labeled survivable. Field-stress petals redraw, no longer flaring into the habitation stacks but curling inward toward rock and sacrificial coil.
Panting, ears ringing with the afterimage of misaligned klaxons, he forces his hands to stillness long enough to drive in a final, manual string. The console fights him, laggy and resentful, then grudgingly accepts the maintenance-layer encryption tag. Their illicit lattice-desync path folds shut in the system’s blind spot locking away the narrow route by which they, and the node above, have just persisted.
The slippage bubble collapses around them like a punctured lung, the world snapping back into a single, brutally linear now as the containment roar drops from an all-consuming howl to a ragged, teeth-on-edge hum. The air seems to thicken; the jittering multiplicity of possible motions slams down into one narrow track, the only one that held.
Pranayakesh’s knees nearly give under the sudden weight of time settling. For a breath that feels stolen, he is aware of every place his body exists: ribs sawing under the suit, scars along his left side blazing with ghost-light and then guttering, sweat cooling too fast on the back of his neck. The pale branching lines along his forearms pulse once in time with the core’s faltering harmonics, then subside to their usual dull phosphor.
Beside him, Anaya crumples sideways, AR lenses glitching from overdrawn overlays before finally hard-dumping to transparent. A thin string of bile hangs from her lower lip; she makes a hoarse, animal sound as if trying to retch out something that is not quite physical. For a fraction of a second her gaze is unfocused, pupils blown wide, tracking things that aren’t happening anymore: corridors that never existed, alarms that already rang and were silenced in futures that didn’t make it.
“Anaya.” His voice comes out rough, dusted with the tremor he keeps out of his hands. “Look at me.”
She flinches, as if hauled out of deep water, then locks onto him. Recognition arrives in layers. Her breathing is too fast. A tiny capillary has burst high on her cheekbone, a single bright red dot against brown skin.
“How many?” she whispers, words frayed. “How many times did we… not?”
He doesn’t answer. There’s no clean integer for what they’ve just pressed through, only smeared probability mass and the nauseating intuition that a great many versions of them did not stand up again. He tightens his grip on her harness ring instead, grounding both their trembling bodies against the humming strut.
The core continues to mutter in its deep register, not placid, not safe: merely obeying, for the moment, the rediscovered tyranny of one second following another.
Pranayakesh forces his shaking hands to still on the console, fingers splayed as if pinning the interface in place. He drags the rewritten vent paths into focus, layer by layer: primary voiding collars, secondary bleed into the sacrificial helices, final spillway into dead rock. Each filament of route-light crawls across the flux map like nervous script, rerouted energy densities blooming and dimming as the core’s output settles into its new, ugly equilibrium.
He forces his eyes to track the numbers rather than the afterimages. Coil loads climb, flirt with red, then creep back under the catastrophic thresholds he learned by heart twelve years ago and swore never to dance near again. He toggles to curvature plots, checks that the redirected thrust is truly knotted into the venting corridors and not folding back, subtly, toward the habitation stacks or the mag-lift shafts.
The automated supervisor AI tosses up three late warnings, all obsolete to the now they occupy. He acknowledges them with a flat hand-swipe, then manually tags the entire sequence: experimental, non-repeatable, do-not-standardize.
Anaya lists against the rail, harness strap biting into her shoulder, eyes blown wide and swimming. The maintenance ring around them refuses to stay a single shape: gantries double and triple, status holos stutter through conflicting color codes, the rail under her hand feels (just for an instant) like three different alloys at once. She squeezes her fingers tighter until metal and glove and bone agree on one another. Broken sentences spill from her mouth in two languages: half-formed access codes, wrong door numbers, names of decks that don’t exist here.
“South spillway… no, that one broke (fire in C-stack) Pranay, you were. Gradually the overlays thin, the room’s edges harden, and one stubborn arrangement of angles and alarms wins the argument of reality.
A delayed tide of system diagnostics surges across their HUDs, buffers coughing up backlogged telemetry and error trees that collapse, one by one, into reconciled states. Graphs replot to match what they have already carved into the lattice by instinct and forbidden derivation. Each grudgingly green-stabilized marker is another improbable confirmation that the hand-flown, unlicensed procedure has, somehow, taken hold and stayed.
Only then does he allow his lungs to empty, a long, granular breath rasping past a throat gone dry. The cost totals itself in him: every quiet violation of protocol, every night spent teasing equations toward forbidden asymptotes, every scar earned learning the lattice’s moods. All of it converges into one austere datum.
The inertial ripples of the slippage bubble subside by degrees, status holos stuttering from red-saturated chaos back toward a fragile, flickering amber. The air seems to remember how to sit still. The low-frequency shudder in the decking eases from a jagged, tooth-grinding vibration into something almost musical, a wounded tabla-skin still resonant but no longer on the verge of tearing.
For a heartbeat that might be one second or thirty, neither of them moves.
Pranayakesh’s dosimeter pings a belated dose spike, then another, out of temporal order, and finally settles into a steady, ugly orange band. Around him, the maintenance ring resolves: a single, rust-scratched rail instead of three; one set of coolant conduits, sweating condensation, instead of a braided tangle of conflicting possibilities. The ghostly afterimages of alternate gantries lag half a second behind his head movement, then shear away like mist cut by a wind that arrives from the wrong direction.
“Temporal shear down… mostly,” he mutters, half to himself, watching a cascade of phase-alignment numbers drop towards permissible thresholds. The monitoring AI’s icon blossoms in his peripheral HUD, then flickers, as if even its inference engine is taking a moment to decide which version of events actually happened.
Anaya makes a choked sound beside him. When he glances over, her pupils are still blown wide, irises jittering with micro-saccades as her AR overlays chase and discard phantom feeds. She blinks hard, once, twice; each time, different error banners vanish from her field of view.
“Pranay,” she whispers, voice raw. “I… I saw the venting corridors full. People in: that didn’t happen, na?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. The images her words invoke are already present in him: collapsed rock, boiled shielding, a transit of white fire punching up through the arcology’s bones. One of the futures that lost the argument.
The singularity’s live projection hangs beyond the inner rail, filtered through a dozen cautious algorithms. Its event-horizon proxy has stopped flaring, no longer vomiting impossible geometries into the sensor space. Instead, it sulks in on itself, a sullen, blue-edged knot in the center of a slowly stabilizing interference pattern. Background Hawking flux, off by only a tolerable percent from the pre-incident baseline.
He watches one last red wedge on the global stability rosette thin to amber, then to a grudging green. The slackening of the emergency field coils reaches his body before the instruments confirm it; his scars prickle and then cool, bioluminescent traces along his neck dimming like embers left to sleep.
“Timeline convergence at ninety-three point…” Anaya’s voice trips, corrects on the fly, “…ninety-six percent. The others are… they’re fading.”
“Let them go,” he says quietly, the words dry as old ash. “We only have to live this one.”
His fingers refuse him at first, skittering on sweat-slick gauntlet pads, so he clamps his wrists together, forces them apart again, and begins. Not on a console, those are still a full two subjective seconds behind, but in the narrow space between his chest and the inner rail, tracing through the air the forbidden shutdown mudras he taught himself in dark sim rooms and never, ever logged. Each gesture is a mnemonic knot: thumb hooking ring finger to “pin” an anchor frame, palm slicing laterally to loosen a projector’s hold on local tau, knuckles brushing together to indicate a controlled phase-slip rather than a hard cut.
The gesture-recognition sublayer, half-crippled by jitter, hesitates, then grudgingly maps his moving hands to an invisible schema burned into maintenance-level firmware. Buried command paths light up on his HUD, tagged UNDOCUMENTED / UNSUPPORTED, then lose even that label as the lattice obeys older, more primal instructions.
One by one, the temporal anchors re-stitch. Sliding out of murderous resonance, settling into a slightly crooked, survivable alignment. The core’s roar through the deck-plates recedes, octave by octave, until the scream collapses into a hoarse, wounded drone that the shielding can hold.
Anaya wipes blood from her upper lip with the back of one trembling glove, the motion leaving a dark, rust-coloured smear across the already stained composite. Her nostrils sting, a raw, chemical ache that tells her the bleed isn’t only from capillaries but from something deeper that tried to unspool. Layered AR feeds that had been stacked like misprinted transparencies (corridor cams showing fire, no fire, three different teams running three different ways) judder, misalign once more, then snap into place. Time-stamps line up instead of arguing. The ghost-frames of dead futures hang for an instant longer, pale and insistent at the edge of her vision, then lose resolution and tear free, drifting backward along a direction that isn’t any ordinary axis before they vanish.
He tracks the sacrificial corridors as they take the hit: instruments screaming briefly into the ultraviolet, flux graphs spiking off calibrated scales, then curling back as the emergency coils do their one holy job. In the schematics they blossom like cauterized wounds, kilometres of stone flash-melted and vitrified into twisted glass, harmless scars burned into ancient strata instead of bone, flesh, and load-bearing steel.
With the last projector’s phase shuddering down into a tolerable fuzz of noise, the improvised bubble shears away, its false slack-time snapping shut like a muscle cramp. Ordinary causality slams back in: clocks re-synchronize with a painful click in his inner ear, system lag vanishes, and the first unfiltered alarm cascades from upper levels, punching jagged and insistent through the thinning static.
The chamber lighting stutters back into its regulated rhythm, amber strips along the gantries regaining their measured pulse instead of the arrhythmic flicker that had been gnawing at her nerves. For a heartbeat she thinks the darkness is coming back, that the silence in her overlays means nothing is left to report. But then the external data feeds slam open in her vision with an almost physical jolt.
Elevator schematics unspool in one corner of her AR field, lines of the VarunaTech Complex blooming upward from level -14 in translucent wireframe. Little status glyphs begin to reappear: stalled, rerouting, emergency braking engaged, then resolving into stable green as backup mag-rails catch and hold. Above that, personnel vitals flare from flatlined grey to scattered, panicked motion. Alarms blossom around them like diseased flowers, but they are alarms for living bodies, not silent gaps.
City-grid power maps overlay themselves next, a mosaic of the North Indian Arcology Zone rendered in colour-coded strata. Where there should have been a void (where the singularity’s tantrum could have carved out a dead, black absence) there are instead surging reroutes and emergency shunts, yellow and orange veins of redirected current bypassing the cauterized rock below. Load-shedding events crawl across neighbourhood sectors like rolling brownouts in old archival footage, annoying, survivable.
Her breath hitches as she pinches and zooms instinctively, hands twitching in the air to drag layers apart. Traffic telemetry. Atmospheric containment. Surface radiation bloom. All there. All mutable, not frozen like gravestones.
Proof that the world above still exists.
Her vision blurs, not from overload now but from the sudden, savage relief of continuity. The core did not write the city out of its own history. The timelines that ended in fire and vacuum recede to a faint aftertaste, leaving her with this one: sirens, flickering lights, frightened people swearing into open channels.
Noise. Life.
Pranayakesh forces his breathing to lock to the core’s new cadence, counting each inhale against the stabilizing thrum that climbs back into the floor through his boots. His dosimeter still ticks too fast at his hip, but the raw diagnostic streams finally stop smearing and begin to snap into coherent bands as facility clocks re-align. He drags feeds into a tight cluster on his wrist display and in his peripheral overlay, cross-checking with a speed that borders on compulsion.
Containment lattice phase variance: decaying toward nominal instead of blooming out of control. Gravitic shear along the maintenance ring: high but bounded, no longer chewing at structural tolerances. He flicks to the venting traces, jaw clenched, following the bright, violent signatures of the surge as they race down the sacrificial corridors and blossom into controlled annihilation.
Thermal maps confirm it: kilometres of rock superheated, vitrification fronts stabilizing, pressure waves dispersing into dead strata. Above those levels, populated tiers register only transient shocks, sensor jitter, a handful of overrange spikes already tapering. No voids opening where people should be. No new dead zones in the living stack.
Overhead, the automated voice of Central Operations finally punches through the layered howl of local klaxons, its calm, synthetic cadence grotesquely out of joint with the raw edge in the air. It comes in staggered bursts, packets that must have been queued while their bubble sat sideways to the rest of the facility’s timebase: breach protocols, full-core evacuation orders, authorization challenges addressing personnel who are no longer in this room, some no longer on this side of probability. Instructions overlap, contradict, branch: one sequence calling for total field collapse and vent-to-space, another insisting on containment hard-lock and personnel shelter-in-place.
The system is executing on a catastrophe that almost happened, its logic trees lagging a few erased timelines behind the reality they’ve clawed back.
Anaya, still shaking, forces her focus into the riot of channels, swiping away hysterics and redundancy. She pins anomalies with quick, decisive gestures: power deficits where models insist there should be overloads, blast doors flagged as “open” that her memory insists slammed shut, evacuation routes ghosting in and out of consistency. She compiles a stripped, skeletal overlay and shunts it to Pranayakesh with a single, unsteady word: “Look.”
Together they reconstruct the facility’s fractured now from panicked security chatter, mis-phased incident stamps, and contradicting evacuation trees. The singularity’s worst has already broken and rolled past them, but topside clocks are only just catching up. Surface command, blind to the quiet here, is spinning up for a catastrophe that, in this branch of time at least, has already failed to occur.
In the stunned quiet after the crest, the klaxons don’t so much stop as unravel. Their wail breaks into stuttering, misaligned fragments that chase themselves around the chamber, echoing out of phase until even the alarms sound uncertain of which emergency they belong to. One by one they gutter into glitching half-tones, leaving only the bone-deep hum of the core and the ragged hitch of Anaya’s breathing.
She is on her knees against the inner maintenance rail, suit boots splayed, visor pushed up. Thin strings of bile web between her hand and her mouth as she coughs, swallows, coughs again. The vomit on the decking looks wrong to her: too bright under the amber strips, then too dim, as if half of the photons decided not to exist this time around. She drags the back of her wrist across her lips, smearing sourness and the metallic tang of blood from a nosebleed she doesn’t remember starting.
Afterimages cling to everything. For a moment the rail she’s gripping is simultaneously twisted, shattered, and perfectly intact. Men and women who are not here anymore jerk through her vision like bad edits: a security sergeant slamming an emergency seal that in this branch never failed, a tech she has never met pinned under a fallen gantry, another version of herself running for a door she did not open. Each ghost-scene jitters at the edge of perception, translucent and over-bright, then snaps away with a soft internal crack as her brain discards it in favour of the reality that managed to stick.
She squeezes her eyes shut, but that only makes it worse. Behind her lids, timelines stack: corridors flooded with coolant; the core’s containment shell blooming open like a metal flower; Pranayakesh’s body outlined in white fire; a version where she never made it down here at all, watching ruin roll through incident reports from a safe, stupid distance.
They crowd against one another, clamouring for primacy, each insisting it was real for a heartbeat longer than it should have been. Her pattern-sense, that normally clean, crisp vector of probabilities, is a snarled knot of almosts and never-quites. She can feel the shape of absence, the heavy, nauseating awareness of branches where she died seconds ago and the world did not end, but the memories of those deaths already evaporate as the bubble’s decoupling decays.
She forces herself to breathe with the rail’s slow vibration, matching her inhales to the low-frequency thrum bleeding up from the singularity’s cage. In, ride the wave. Out, let the ghosts fall away.
The chamber around her settles by degrees into a single, continuous present. Indicator rings stop double-imaging. The gantry above is only where it is. The singularity’s filtered projection, still shrouded behind layered fields, is a single, shifting knot of darkness at the center, not the pulsing, many-mouthed thing she saw when the projectors slipped in phase.
Her stomach clenches again at the memory of that exposed edge: the way it seemed to notice them through time rather than space.
“Bas,” she whispers hoarsely to herself, half command, half prayer. Enough.
The word doesn’t quiet the residual tremor in her hands, or the crawling sensation at the base of her skull where too many timelines tried to write themselves into her neurons at once. But it gives her something singular to hold onto, a thin line of intent cutting through the overlapping afterimages of futures that never quite were.
He works by muscle memory because anything more deliberate would mean stopping to think about what they have just done. His hands don’t quite believe in themselves: fingertips buzzing, nails purpled, micro-tremors running along tendons as he ghosts through the shutdown macro he has drilled a thousand times and sworn never to run this deep, this dirty.
Manual lattice control blooms across his visor, half the widgets red, half an impossible grey that means the system is no longer sure what “now” is. He overrides, rebinds, drags projector phasing back into a single timeline one cluster at a time, teeth clenched as each confirmation takes a fraction of a second longer than it should, as if the acknowledgement has to fight through silted seconds to reach him.
His dosimeter ticks up in staccato bursts against his collarbone, then sputters, then races. As if sampling three different histories of his exposure and averaging badly. Radiation glyphs flare and dim without settling. His thumb hesitates over a final commit, the knowledge landing with surgical precision: every supervisory layer above them still believes the core is in uncontrolled surge and that anyone in this ring is already dead.
As the slippage bubble collapses and system clocks lurch toward rough agreement, deferred alarms finally cascade through the network in the wrong order: evac directives arriving after danger has passed, lockdown doors sealing empty corridors, medical bots dispatching to wings that never took the hit in this branch. Alert glyphs flower and retract on his visor like a time-lagged rash, each one tagged with incident stamps that disagree by whole seconds, sometimes minutes. Somewhere above, someone is authorizing contingencies for a catastrophe already outpaced; down here, the automation dutifully writes them into a casualty ledger it has pre-emptively closed. Containment logic, still interpolating from the surge peak, paints their maintenance ring in saturated crimson: presumed vaporized, biologically unrecoverable, not worth resources to save.
He uses the system’s assumption of their death like a clearance code, ghosting through locked-out control layers while Anaya, still pale and trembling, moves as if reading a map no one printed. Together they angle along half-rendered catwalks and glitching gantries, dodging patrol drones that arrive a heartbeat too late, slipping through a narrowing corridor just as its status ticks from catastrophic to merely failing.
Only when they stumble into a corridor where status bands glow a steady, indifferent green and the PA has switched to the past tense, “event contained,” “no confirmed breach, casualty estimates pending”, do their spines unlock. They slump back-to-back against the bulkhead, helmets almost touching, and exhale the same torn, disbelieving whisper, as if naming it will fix it: “We lived.”
The route back up through the mag-lift shafts is lined with fresh warning holos, their colors subtly different from the ones that screamed crimson an hour ago. The palette has been cooled, muted ambers, reassuring greens edging into yellow, as if the system itself is trying to talk everyone down from the memory of panic. At each checkpoint a new prompt spools across their visor overlays in neat, corporate-approved typography: revised dose ceilings, tweaked stay-time limits, amended emergency decision trees with extra branches tagged “autonomous system intervention.”
A disembodied compliance AI hums away in the shared audio channel, its voice smoothed and genderless, reciting clauses about “recently integrated learning from non-critical anomalies” and “continuous improvement of worker safety outcomes.” The cadence is almost liturgical. It thanks them for their cooperation, for their professionalism under “elevated but controlled conditions.” It does not thank them for not dying.
No one uses the word “near-breach.” It does not appear in the scrolling text, in the pop-up acknowledgments they have to thumb through with gloved fingers, in the short questionnaires that ask whether they experienced “subjective temporal disorientation” or merely “mild attentional drift.” The forms have no checkbox for standing on the edge of nonexistence.
In the lift car, cramped between layered plates of shielding, half the staff still flinch when the mag coils cycle and the floor gives that familiar, stomach-tugging lurch. Anaya feels the muscle twitch in her own thigh, forces her knees to stay unlocked, makes herself breathe in time with the status LEDs that chase each other along the wall. Someone behind her mutters a mantra under their breath; someone else pretends to be checking a diagnostic feed that has not changed in ten minutes.
For a heartbeat, as the car passes through a gradient of slightly thicker time, the floor seems to arrive before they do. Pranayakesh’s fingers tighten around the rail, knuckles pale against dark, scarred skin. The old instinct is to watch the numbers of the level display. The newer instinct is to watch the gaps between numbers, the micro-hesitations where the digits want to show something else.
The compliance AI chirps a soft, approving tone as their dosimeter data syncs: “Transit nominal. Exposure within projected parameters.” The car breathes to a halt. The doors part with a sigh that sounds too much like relief, and nobody says aloud that, just for a moment, they all felt the lift hesitate on an axis none of the hazard holos are designed to measure.
On the upper operations decks, technicians and security cadres drift into their stations with the stiff, overcareful movements of people pretending they slept well. Conversations skim along the surface, coffee strength, badge glitches, procurement delays, carefully orbiting the thing that almost happened. Status walls bloom with sanitized infographics, their palettes harmonized to focus-grouped blues and teals. Along the main concourse, the Node’s public-facing feeds roll out a carefully curated narrative: external monitors display an executive’s calm avatar explaining that Varuna has “successfully completed its experimental validation phase,” speech tuned to a soothing mid-frequency band, graphs rising in smooth, non-threatening arcs, peak loads smoothed into elegant curves.
Behind those displays, in the glassed-in briefing rooms, they sit through mandatory debriefs where incident timelines have already been rounded off, edges sanded away, gaps spackled over with phrases like “sensor anomalies under review” and “no deviation from acceptable risk parameters.” No one mentions the frames of footage that refused to align, or the way certain logs exist in duplicate with mutually exclusive timestamps. Acknowledgment prompts flicker at the bottom of each slide; thumbs tap assent on cue, as if agreement could overwrite memory.
Physical traces of the crisis are erased with ritual efficiency, as if housekeeping could revise causality. Burnt-out relay housings vanish under replacement panels stamped with fresh serial codes and a new revision tag; scorched insulation is stripped, catalogued, and sealed in leaded disposal sleeves while drones wash the conduit trunks with hard UV until every trace of carbonization is metabolized into a log entry. Techs scrape away bubbled shielding tiles and drop them into marked bins for “controlled reprocessing.” Fresh hazard chevrons gleam along the railings, still tacky in spots, paint off-gassing beneath the ever-present tang of ozone, coolant, and sterilant. The revised SOP packets that ping their wrist-comms compress it all to bullet points and flowcharts, as if an added confirmation step could reconcile screams that arrived late and alarms that arrived early and alarms that never quite matched the moment they were supposed to warn against.
In the days that follow, Varuna’s upper concourses swell with a different kind of traffic: corporate auditors with polished shoes and portable gravimeters, safety consultants in neutral gray carrying tablets crowded with liability matrices and Monte Carlo risk fans, an off-site ethics liaison whose job is to nod gravely while assuring everyone that “lessons have been learned” and “no systemic negligence is indicated.” New biometric choke points bloom overnight at corridor junctions; body scanners hum with upgraded firmware that dutifully tags unauthorized talismans, prayer threads, and charm-lockets as “unclassified personal effects. No hazard.” When the auditors tour the deeper access rings, their questions stay politely clear of anything that would require acknowledging that time itself refused to stay on-script, that dosimetry logs looped, that some people remember dying.
Through all of this, Pranayakesh and Anaya are quietly folded back into the roster, their names reappearing in duty-cycle mosaics that compress the coming weeks into neat grids of colored blocks and handover arrows. Their badges are revalidated with a soft, impersonal chime; revised dose ceilings propagate to their implants, allotments recalculated and approved by committees they will never meet. When their first post-crisis rotation to Level -14 surfaces on the schedule, it carries only a clipped notation (“post-event readiness verification”) and a link to review the latest containment addenda, buried among minor software patch notes. They ride the mag-lift down in practiced silence, stand still for the newly installed scanners as status lights sweep their bodies, and step once more into the amber half-light of the core’s annulus, outwardly just two more cleared operators returning to their stations.
In the first hours of their return, the dissonance is quiet enough to pass for fatigue. Pranayakesh pauses half a beat longer at each console than his logs would justify, fingers hovering over interface glyphs while a parallel, unlogged memory of the same gesture ending in sirens and whiteout light presses against his awareness. The muscle memory in his hands insists on one sequence; another, older in some sense that has nothing to do with linear time, suggests a fractional deviation. He feels it as a pressure in his scars, a faint, prickling phosphorescence beneath the fabric of his sleeves.
He forces himself to run the standard checklists aloud, voice low but precise, as if reciting mantras might pin this version of events in place.
“Primary gravitic lattice: nominal. Flux ring phase coherence: ninety-nine point eight six. Hawking profile within tolerance.”
The words are identical to a hundred other shifts, but they land differently in his throat, acquiring the weight of invocation. His reflection in a shielded holo-surface seems fractionally misaligned with his own speech, as though some other Pranayakesh, in some other narrow corridor of outcomes, is speaking alongside him with a different list of casualties in mind.
Anaya shadows him with textbook precision, tablet clipped to her harness, AR lenses live with security overlays. To an external observer she is simply mirroring his route: rail to rail, node to node, glancing where he glances. But her gaze keeps sliding not just across the current data streams, but through them, dilating slightly as graphs and feeds seem to drag ghost-images in their wake. A camera index flickers past; for an instant she is sure she has already scrubbed this exact timestamp for discrepancies… except that the associated anomaly report does not exist here.
She blinks it away, jaw tightening, and annotates the feed anyway.
“Sir, camera D-17 latency is a little off,” she says, the excuse almost banal. “I’ll tag it for recalibration.”
He nods without looking up. “Good. Tag anything that feels… misaligned. Whether or not the diagnostics agree.”
The phrasing hangs between them, dangerously close to acknowledging something their training materials have no column for. She risks a sidelong look at his profile, at the way his eyes track a values cascade with a faint, listening stillness that is not purely analytical. He, in turn, feels her presence like a counterweight: a second barometer pressed to the same storm front.
As they complete the first full circuit of the annulus, their movements take on a muted, liturgical rhythm. They touch handrails at the same points, pause at the same status pylons, tiny, unconscious adjustments aligning them to a choreography they have learned in one precarious night that never officially occurred. Each time a minor fluctuation ripples through the containment field and the ambient vibration deepens, they both brace a fraction before the instruments register it, as if their bodies are receiving a forecast from a timeline that did not quite happen here and is trying, insistently, to be remembered.
As the rotation wears on, their new awareness begins to crystallize into practice, losing its initial, numinous blur and hardening into habit. Where once he would have leaned on margin charts and probabilistic alerts, waiting for a colored band to thicken or a sigma marker to creep past a comfort line, Pranayakesh now interrupts an otherwise normal cycle to insert a seemingly unnecessary micro-adjustment into the flux ring alignment. His fingers ghost over the standard presets, then deviate by a tenth of a degree, a sliver of phase offset no safety protocol has ever mentioned. The supervising AI flags no anomaly, emits no advisory; its confidence indicators remain a placid green. Yet the knot of dread in his chest loosens, as if some unseen precipice has been quietly shifted two steps further away in a corridor he remembers only as heat and screaming metal.
A few meters away along the annulus, Anaya quietly edits a patrol subroutine, rerouting a routine security drone path around an otherwise unremarkable maintenance junction. She cannot anchor the change to any clause in the policy manual, cannot cite a trendline or incident code; she simply recognizes the configuration of personnel, timing, and access states as the opening sentence of a failure she has already chosen, somewhere, not to live through again. The hairs on her arms rise; her lenses briefly show double, current telemetry overlaid with the ghost of a breach report that never populated this database. She commits the revised route with a neutral tap and a bland annotation (“noise reduction trial”) while her heart steadies to a rhythm that tells her this branch, for now, will hold.
In private moments between tasks, they begin to test the edges of what they are sensing, careful not to give the cameras or mics anything overt. Pranayakesh asks Anaya to flag, without explanation, any moment where “the room feels misaligned,” treating her responses as an auxiliary sensor layer, a kind of human parity check against the core’s unreadable moods. She, in turn, watches his hands rather than his face, noting the instants when he adjusts a control with the unhesitating certainty of someone obeying memory, not protocol. A half-second of inevitability before his fingers move. Their whispered exchanges in service alcoves shift from procedural debriefs to oblique references, “we’ve already seen where this leads,” “not this branch, try the other drift”, building a shared vocabulary for experiences their training never named and their NDAs never imagined.
This double vision of time begins to alter how they see themselves inside the facility’s machinery. Pranayakesh no longer feels like a fallible technician praying his margins hold; he moves more like a pilot threading a familiar, half-erased channel, nudging vectors away from reefs he remembers only as echoes of heat and rupture. The terror of his past accident remains, but it has been absorbed into a broader cartography of near-misses and extinguished branches, a scarred legend on a map of failures he can now feel approaching long before the numbers protest. For Anaya, the role of junior cadet turns into a flimsy costume over something stranger: she walks patrol like a dancer in a ritual she has already stumbled through and corrected in a dozen discarded futures, each micro-adjusted glance and query a refinement toward an outcome only she can sense, an asymptote of safety she is forever approaching, never quite reaching.
By the end of the shift, their relationship to causality itself has been quietly rewritten, almost smuggled past their own conscious narratives. They still log events in linear order, still respond to alarms as if the present is unfolding for the first time, but inside they no longer believe in the innocence of “before” and “after,” only in negotiated sequences. Each minor intervention (a diverted inspection route, a preemptive recalibration, a question asked thirty seconds earlier than the script demands) feels like a deliberate reach into an invisible spread of timelines, choosing which version of memory will be allowed to harden. In this way, their day’s work ceases to be mere compliance with Varuna’s operating procedures and becomes something else entirely: a continuous, almost devotional act of steering, moment by moment, through the singularity’s surrounding thicket of might-have-beens and should-not-bes.
Redefining success
What counts as “doing well” at Varuna tilts on its axis so quietly that neither of them can say when the old metric stopped applying. The corporate dashboards still glow with familiar colours, green for stable, amber for advisory, red for career-ending, but those gradients feel like children’s crayons laid over a topological map only they can read.
On paper, an ideal shift is flat: no incidents, no deviations, no anomalies above threshold. In their new, unlogged calculus, flatness is almost suspicious unless it carries a specific texture: a felt resonance between what they choose and how the core settles. A minor pre-emptive trim of a gravitic vector, executed three minutes “too early” by procedure but exactly when Anaya’s neck prickles and Pranayakesh feels that old, sour taste of déjà vu. If the readouts breathe easier afterward, that is a successful day.
The successes that matter most leave no crisp audit trail. Anaya learns to savour the small absences: the alarm that does not chirp, the coolant pressure that does not begin its slow, exponential climb, the camera feed that does not glitch into those unsettling, doubled frames she has come to associate with bad branches. She notes the non-events as quietly as one might count mala beads, each nothing a tiny, deliberate mercy.
For Pranayakesh, the unit of achievement becomes the avoided repetition. Any moment that almost rhymes with the accident, an oscillation that hums at the wrong subharmonic, a delay that feels one heartbeat too long, and then does not complete the pattern, goes into a private ledger. He does not write it down; he simply files it in a wordless category: divergence successful.
The company will never decorate them for preventing a breach that, by definition, never appears in the logs. No commendation code exists for “course-corrected an invisible future.” So they invent their own honours: a shared glance across the monitoring ring when a potential spike melts back into white noise; the way Anaya’s breathing loosens after a choice lands cleanly; the rare, fractional softening in Pranayakesh’s shoulders when a countdown he alone seems to hear reaches zero and nothing happens.
In this reframed economy, efficiency reports and uptime percentages become background static. What matters is whether, stepping out of the core at the end of a rotation, they can both sense a particular quiet in the air: an almost-musical aftertaste that says: this was the version of the day in which everyone got to walk away.
Letting go of external judgment
Pranayakesh gradually abandons the fantasy of vindication through official channels. Review boards, promotion committees, disciplinary archives: they begin to look like crude instruments, trying to hammer a verdict onto something that no longer sits flat along a single axis of cause and effect. The thick, redacted PDFs that once haunted him now read like artifacts from a simpler universe, one where an “incident” begins, unfolds, and concludes just once.
When supervisors hint that a future audit might “clear” his reputation, he nods at the right intervals, signs the right acknowledgements, but feels nothing loosen in his chest. In quiet moments by the core rail, he can sense entire constellations of adjacent histories in which the same tribunal reaches different conclusions. None of those branches undo the heat, the screams, the smell of burnt insulation.
His real absolution has relocated to a more intimate court: a single, relentless question. Given what his nerves and scars and half-coupled intuitions could read in Varuna’s shifting geometry, did he steer toward the least-destructive path available. And did he pay the full, personal cost of that choice without deflecting it onto others?
Reframing ambition and duty
Anaya’s ambitions, once calibrated to corporate milestones, pivot inward and forward at the same time. She still shows up in uniform, still runs drills until the muscle memory is flawless, but the desire animating each motion has changed vector. The promotion tree in her personnel app becomes a diagram of obsolete futures, interesting only as fossils. In place of rehearsed fantasies of standing at attention while executives pin badges to her collar, she sketches, in private, a quieter image: an older version of herself who has learned to argue with the core without violence, to negotiate with the pressure of branching time and walk away intact. Her sense of duty stretches past doctrine and SOPs into a more demanding brief: to become a consciousness sturdy enough to confront temporal fracture without flinching, and gentle enough not to treat every survivable outcome as a victory.
Shifting loyalties and quiet rebellion
Both begin to experience a subtle but decisive relocation of loyalty. From the corporation as abstraction to the fragile mesh of people, machines, and possibilities orbiting Varuna’s event horizon. Policy updates and legal disclaimers, once treated as the ceiling of permissible thought, shrink into just one data layer among many. When a directive drifts out of phase with what their coupled intuitions insist is the survivable temporal branch, they start to work around it rather than through it: harmless-seeming delays, “miskeyed” priority codes, recalibrations justified by carefully cherry‑picked sensor noise, deliberately ambiguous log entries that leave auditors chasing ghosts. Their rebellion is not dramatic; it operates in the narrow margins of choice, where a half-second of manufactured uncertainty can nudge an entire future sideways and no one, officially, ever knows.
Choosing a new center of gravity
In the space left by discarded metrics, a new organizing principle quietly crystallizes: stewardship of the threshold itself. They begin to think of themselves less as employees and more as custodians of a boundary no charter was written to govern, answerable to consequences that will never fit in quarterly summaries. This shift pulls their decisions into a different orbital frame. Checklists and briefing slides recede; field geometries, gut pricks of temporal unease, and Anaya’s flickering overlays become the real decision inputs. “Will this satisfy audit protocol?” yields, in private, to “Does this choice bleed or spare the widest spread of unseen branches?” In committing to that question as their inner metric, they complete the pivot from climbing a ladder to standing watch at the edge of time, willing to be misunderstood so long as the core stays quiet.
In the weeks after “full stabilization,” it is the smallest, most boring tasks that become the sharpest edge of their experiment.
On paper, nothing changes. Maintenance tickets still open and close on schedule; the same checklists scroll past Pranayakesh’s gloved fingers, the same prompts blink for biometric confirmation. But in practice, he begins to thread extra structure through the ordinary. Before each diagnostic window, he pauses just long enough to register the weight of the chamber’s low hum in his chest, the particular itch under his scars, the way the coolant conduits vibrate against his forearms when he leans on the rail. He marks those sensations in his head as step zero: pratyāhāra, withdrawal of noise. Only then does he thumb the sequence that opens the lattice to inspection.
Inside the window, he steals seconds. A scan that “normally” takes 4.[^2] seconds stretches to 4.[^7], then 5.[^1], always with a plausible excuse queued up: sensor latency, checksum retries. In those stolen instants, he rides the fluctuations instead of suppressing them, letting the gravitic harmonics play against his intuition. Anaya stands at the auxiliary console, apparently just another cadet shadowing a senior tech, but she is counting too: the beat before a status glyph flickers, the micro-skip in her overlays when the core’s hum shifts from one harmonic to another.
They start to align these cycles like call and response. Before a minor calibration (well within tolerance, unremarkable in any log) he gives her a quiet cue: “Mark this.” She notes the baseline overlay in a single, held breath, then again as his adjustment propagates. Sometimes her futures smear into static; sometimes a distinct cluster brightens, as if a particular branch has just been subtly favored. When the latter coincides with his sense of the lattice “settling,” they memorize the pattern: amplitude, phase, her emotional state, his bodily cues.
What emerges is not a ritual of superstition but of disciplined attention. Ground: feel the chamber, feel the body, let the overlays settle. Listen: watch for unscripted correspondences between sensor noise, scar-ache, and Anaya’s flickers of almost-memory. Adjust: make the smallest change that still meaningfully perturbs the field. Observe: not just the readouts, but the quality of silence afterward, the way conversations on the deck either fray or cohere, the odd lag in the lift doors opening three corridors away.
Under the innocuous headings of “Routine Lattice Health Check” and “Cadet Supervised Training,” they are slowly codifying a grammar: which kinds of attention the singularity seems to meet halfway, which approaches leave it cold, which sequences invite that too-familiar razor edge of temporal shear. They never speak of it as prayer, too loaded, too easily mocked, but they both recognize the cadence of it from childhood: the way repetition, performed with intent, can turn a mundane act into a boundary-crossing.
They say nothing about this to anyone else. To colleagues, it looks like a conscientious senior tech indulging a bright cadet with extra hands-on time. To the auditing AIs, it is a slight quirk in timing profiles, well within human variance. Only in the unlogged synchrony between his fingertips on the haptic dials and her unblinking stare into drifting futures does the real work occur: a halting, patient attempt to see if a singularity will notice the difference between being managed and being met.
To support that unspoken inquiry, each of them begins building tools that exist only in the margins.
In his paper notebook Pranayakesh lets two disciplines coexist without apology. He sketches layered diagrams of field geometry, then threads through them fragments of mantra syllables, Bayesian priors, and hand‑drawn confidence intervals. Red circles mark where prior “accidents” bent local timestamps, blue arrows where alarms arrived too early or too late. He assigns innocuous mnemonic tags to anomalous log entries, “COOLANT-DRIFT/03,” “GYRO-PING/Δt”, and, in a separate column written in shorthand Devanagari, notes when the core seemed to “answer back”: a sensor flicker coincident with a scar‑flare, a procedural delay that mysteriously prevented a cascade.
Anaya, barred from formal research channels, turns her neuro‑AR into a clandestine lab. She codes a private overlay layer that never syncs to the central archive, painting faint, color‑coded halos around live feed glyphs to show which futures cluster around which parameter shifts. With a subvocal command, she snapshots these impressions and caches them in disguised “eye‑strain diagnostics” before auto‑logging wipes transient buffers. Official records show only nominal stability; their shadow corpus slowly charts a tentative, bidirectional grammar of interaction.
They begin by stripping their own reactions of mystique. If the core is a mirror, they will learn its language by charting what it throws back through them.
On off‑shifts, Anaya claims a seldom‑used inspection niche two decks up, where the hum is faint but present. She runs controlled recall drills like lab experiments: eyes closed, she calls up a specific micro‑fault, tracks how her shoulders tighten, how her pulse stutters, how the overlays in memory smear or sharpen. She tags each run and correlates these labels with how far ahead and how cleanly she had seen.
She learns that a narrow plateau between restlessness and fear gives her the crispest branching, while anger collapses everything into noise.
Pranayakesh, unwilling to rely on inherited meditation forms uncritically, begins iterating them. He syncs his breath not to a mantra’s syllables but to the facility’s measured micro‑oscillations, using low‑priority vibration readouts piped to a haptic cuff. In one sequence he lengthens the exhale over three oscillation peaks, in another he holds a breath across a full beat of rising curvature. Each pattern is scored afterward: did his scars prickle early, on‑time, or not at all relative to logged minor spikes? Did the ache stay local or ladder up his neck?
They compare notes obliquely, never assembling the full picture in one artifact. A phrase in his notebook matches a quiet remark from her during rounds: “Today felt like the green‑blue band, not the amber one.” Piece by piece, an unwritten table takes shape in their shared memory, mapping affect and attention to predictive fidelity and containment sensitivity.
It is, in essence, a calibration chart for two human instruments operating at the edge of causality.
Redefining protection as informed interference As their understanding deepens, “safety” stops meaning minimal contact and starts meaning precise, ethical interference, a kind of karmic triage across timelines. When scheduling crews float a high‑load test in a window Anaya’s overlays paint in harsh, fractured tones, she and Pranayakesh quietly orchestrate delays: a conveniently timed maintenance fault here, a recalibration requirement there, an ambiguous note about cumulative dose limits. Each obstruction is small enough to pass as ordinary bureaucracy yet placed with surgical intent, adding just enough friction to slide the operation into a gentler branch. They refuse easy heroics or cinematic last‑minute overrides; their interventions remain subtle, plausibly deniable, aimed at diffusing risk before it coheres into crisis. In private, they adopt a new operating axiom: intervene only when their independent readings align, and only to nudge, never to coerce, the unfolding of events, accepting that some danger must be allowed to play out for the lattice to remain honest. The manual speaks of compliance and throughput; their true allegiance is to minimizing unseen casualties across the branches they can feel but never fully chart, honoring futures that will never make it into any official incident summary.
Establishing a hidden ethic of dialogue Out of these practices emerges an ethic neither corporate nor purely personal: a commitment to treat the singularity as a partner in constraint rather than an adversary or tool. Late in a graveyard shift, as the core settles into an unusually quiet phase, they test the edges of this understanding. Coordinating with sidelong glances and a few innocuous words over the comm, they introduce a minuscule, non‑essential phase offset into a secondary control loop and wait. The response is not dramatic (no alarms, no visible surge) just a faint, shared sense of temporal “loosening,” as if nearby futures slide past them with a softer grain. Anaya’s overlays thin from hard shards into overlapping veils; his scars warm without pain. They log the shift only in their private codes, then restore the loop to nominal. In that deliberately unrecorded moment, they confirm what now matters most: sustaining a careful, reciprocal conversation with the threshold itself, even if doing so will later be misread by supervisors as excess caution or unprocessed trauma.
The first weeks of “normal operations” feel anything but normal. The crisis has been archived, ticketed, version‑controlled; the humans are still in debug.
Debrief rooms upstack are carpeted, softly lit, and scented with something generically floral that almost (but not quite) covers the sterilizer tang. Sound‑baffling foam hides behind textile art prints of abstract rivers. The facilitators sit in chairs that are fractionally lower than his, tablets angled just so, expressions dialed to calibrated concern.
They open with scripts about “shared achievement under pressure,” about “learning opportunities,” about “post‑incident narrative coherence.” When Pranayakesh downplays his role, redirecting credit to “systemic alignment” and “multi‑vector feedback convergence,” one facilitator’s stylus pauses for a heartbeat before continuing. His restraint, they assure him, is understandable; survivors often minimize their “heroic contributions.”
He tests the boundaries the way he would test a shield: incrementally. He describes the breach window as “a set of contingent outcomes, each locally rational,” and the singularity’s reaction as “non‑linear response under stressed priors.” The phrases trigger a faint shimmer in the wall display as the automated comprehension layer flags and annotates in the background. Later, he will see the summary: rumination, cognitive diffusion, avoidance of linear causal framing.
The paradox is almost elegant. The more precisely he speaks, the less “resolved” he appears. Their questions keep looping back to how he “felt in that moment,” to whether he can “locate a single turning point,” to what “decision” he believes “saved the facility.” The architecture of their inquiry assumes a clean hinge in time, a before and after neatly bisected by will.
He answers with careful half‑truths: yes, there were choices; no, they were not singular. He leaves out the way trajectories braided and unbraided around his breath. He lets them misfile his pauses as dissociation, his hedging as shock.
By the third session he has learned the new grammar: causality must be narrated as a straight line if one wishes to be certified “recovered.” Complexity is permissible only as backdrop, never as active agent. To sound healthy in their metrics, he must pretend that the universe has gone back to being simple.
Parallel sessions route Anaya into juvenile protocols, where a minor change in her profile flags her badge from operator to “impacted youth.” The air is warmer here, the walls painted in gradient blues; the status strips are hidden behind murals of clouds. Counselors modulate their voices as if speaking across a gulf, questions wrapped in cotton: had the “frightening events” made her feel “small,” “overwhelmed,” “out of control”? They are prepared for nightmares and shaking hands, not for audit‑grade recall.
When she instead asks why the official timestamps bracketing the incident have been rounded to a precision that does not match archived raw logs, the note‑taking tempo changes. Lids lower; styluses move in longer, more diagnostic strokes. Attention slides off the discrepancy she’s pointed to and settles, with professional concern, on her “coping style.”
Session by session, she maps the pattern. Each exact question about desynchronized feeds or missing frames earns another polite reference to “developmentally appropriate perspective training.” When she observes latency anomalies in their own room recorders, it appears as proof she is “over‑identifying with technical systems.” Curiosity, she realises, has been reclassified: not a talent to cultivate but a symptom to monitor, to medicate, to redirect toward safer stories.
The corporate hunger for advantage wraps itself in friendly, analytic language, all smiles and versioned slide decks. Auditors and strategy liaisons invite them to “open innovation conversations” about “leveraging near‑crisis learning,” the phrases framed as shared opportunity rather than extraction. In conference rooms far from the core’s vibration, they are asked to walk through decision trees as if they had seen a single, clean future instead of a braided tangle of almosts and discarded timelines. Process engineers probe for “parameterizable insights”; risk officers want “threshold heuristics.”
When Pranayakesh refuses to compress his split‑second improvisations into a checklist that can be packaged and sold, the minutes quietly mark him as “methodologically conservative” and “insufficiently outcomes‑focused.” Anaya, pressed about how she “anticipated” certain fluctuations, offers deliberately vague descriptions of “pattern familiarity” and “contextual resonance,” watching on a shared holo as her careful ambiguities are massaged into bullet points about “proto‑predictive intuition” and “emergent talent pipeline.” The more they resist conversion into product, the more their restraint is translated into metrics of underutilised value.
Together, they begin cultivating a double vocabulary. In official channels they echo the phrases fed to them (“best‑practice adherence,” “bounded risk posture,” “human‑in‑the‑loop oversight,” “model‑aligned escalation”) carefully trimming away any suggestion that the singularity responded, rather than simply behaved within parameters. In private, over late‑shift tea in a half‑lit service alcove vibrating with distant coolant flow, they annotate the same events with an entirely different grammar: “gentler branching,” “mutual adjustment,” “consent of the field,” “remembered alternatives.” Small, practiced hesitations in meetings become signals between them; an over‑precise word here, a deliberately bland summary there, a fractional eye‑flick to a muted status feed, marking the places where truth has been wrapped in enough cotton to pass through upper decks without tearing anything open.
The strain of translation extends even to the few colleagues they once trusted as confidants. When they try to describe the crisis as less averting catastrophe and more renegotiating a shared boundary, responses stall in puzzled frowns, sidelong glances, or brisk changes of subject. Words like “reciprocity” and “dialogue” slide off the hardened surfaces of procedural doctrine, leaving behind only awkward silence and a return to checklists. Gradually, they accept that the widening of their reality must remain mostly sub‑vocal, carried in shared glances at the core’s readouts, in the way they stand a little longer at certain consoles, in the unspoken choices they make during calibration windows. By the time the facility is recertified and filed under “stabilized asset,” their outward posture reads as textbook resilience, incident reports closed, counseling modules completed, yet beneath that polished narrative, their quiet ethic of partnership with the threshold has already become the truer centerline of their work, an invisible parameter neither audit nor algorithm can name.
The shift‑change chime echoes faintly up the shaft, a descending triad that barely reaches them before the shielding and dense rock muffle it into a suggestion of sound. It fades into the background hum, leaving only the low, omnipresent vibration of the core thrumming through metal and bone. Above the monitoring deck, status holos slip into night‑cycle profiles; their palettes cool from clinical whites and hazard reds to deep blues and amber‑golds. The changing light paints Pranayakesh and Anaya in alternating bands of radiance and shadow, as if they’re standing inside a slow heartbeat.
On the central axis, the main projection settles into its night rendering. The singularity appears as a muted sphere of interference fringes and probability contours, its apparent surface stippled with drifting nodes of constructive and destructive overlap. At the limb, the model refuses to hold a clean line: edges feather, dissolve, re‑declare themselves, like a halo continually deciding where it ends and where the rest of the universe begins. Quantized curvature metrics crawl in tight columns along the margins, but the overlay can’t quite disguise the sense that they’re looking at something that has opinions about being watched.
In the peripheral gloom, the etched yantras along the support rings catch scattered light from the holos, their fine grooves gathering it into faint glows. Lines of Devanagari, half‑worn by years of gloved hands and solvent mist, pick up a dull sheen where coolant vapour has beaded and dried. From certain angles, the inscribed geometries seem to nestle perfectly into the projected field lines and equipotential shells, petals and triangles slipping into alignment with gravitic contours and flux streamlines. It is not part of any official design spec, no engineer’s drawing ever called for it, but over months of night cycles they have watched the convergence grow more precise, as if the core and the quiet marks of human meaning are learning to trace each other’s shapes.
Neither of them names it coincidence anymore. They have both seen how the yantras misalign faintly, stubbornly, in the simulations run on cold servers topside, and how only here, in the living field of the Varuna Node, the patterns tighten into resonance. So they let the alignment stand unremarked in words, acknowledged instead in the way their eyes linger on the junctions where mantra and metric share the same thin line of light.
Pranayakesh leans into the railing with the unconscious familiarity of someone who has spent years calibrating his weight against tremors in the deck, a living accelerometer tuned to Varuna’s moods. The rail’s chill seeps through glove and scar alike as his hand settles; beneath the dark skin, the pale branching marks wake, suffused with a soft, internal phosphorescence. Threads of light pulse outward along each filament in a slow, tidal rhythm that does not match his pulse, his breath, or the metronomic tick of any local clock.
A fractional hiccup ripples through the containment lattice: too small to tickle the main alarms, barely enough to nudge a diagnostic band from green to a paler shade. He feels it first as a pressure change inside his bones, a tingling ache that flares at the edges of old damage, and only then hears the muted chirp of a sub-threshold event on his console. Phase jitter skitters across a side display in neat, well-behaved numerics, pretending to be ordinary. When his gaze slides to Anaya, the minute tilt of her head, the narrowing of her eyes against invisible glare, tells him she has ridden the same silent ripple, already slotting it into pattern rather than problem, continuity rather than threat.
Anaya’s AR overlays cascade down in layered panes: gravimetric harmonics, neutrino flux densities, probabilistic fault projections, security telemetry ghosting the edges. For a heartbeat she stops parsing them as columns and graphs and instead lets them fall open in her mind as stacked, translucent veils. Legends drop away, axes dissolve; amplitude becomes colour, phase drift becomes a faint taste of metal at the back of her tongue. The lines of code and the curving traces of sensor returns fuse into a coherent, synesthetic gestalt. A single, slow‑breathing organism of data that seems to inhale on field spikes and exhale on damping cycles. Within that unified image is a brief, unnerving sense of orientation: not only are they watching the singularity, but something nested along its horizon has tilted its own frame of reference, like an eye narrowing to bring the monitoring deck into finer focus, testing parallax across nearby minds. The impression shears away almost at once, panes snapping back into discrete charts and scrolling numerics, leaving behind only routine numbers, a thin trickle of sweat at her collar, and the uneasy conviction that observation here is now unmistakably mutual.
The silence that follows is dense, textured by small asynchronies. Wall chrono, HUD timestamps, the beat of coolant pumps counted out by the facility AI: each insists on its own authoritative instant, yet none quite agree. Their shared training would once have framed such discrepancies as nuisance variables, fodder for calibration reports and stern memos about drift budgets. Now, neither of them reaches for the sync command or tags a maintenance ticket; they let the micro‑disagreements stand, like overlapping chants slightly out of phase. In that fractional slippage, where every tick seems to acknowledge neighbouring ticks rather than erase them, the chamber feels less like a sealed vault and more like a narrow, gently swaying span: shielding spires and flux rings forming the load‑bearing trusswork of a bridge arcing over a dark, slow‑roiling current of untaken events and unchosen yesterdays.
They do not glance at each other; the acknowledgment moves in subtler vectors. From the mezzanine cameras they are model employees, silhouettes framed by hazard glyphs and amber glow. Yet under Pranayakesh’s fingertips, command macros feel closer to mantras; under Anaya’s gaze, status trees unscroll like commentaries on a sutra whose central verse is gravity itself. They still escalate, log, and file, but a new, quiet discipline overlays procedure: to listen for meaning inside noise, to leave conceptual slack where once they would have tightened clamps. While the core’s vibration evens out into something like a heartbeat at rest, the old metaphor of cages and fail‑safes falls away. Guard duty becomes a kind of seva performed at the lip of an unseen river, each routine acknowledgement an answer to a question that has not yet learned how to phrase itself in human time.