Inside the Misery Exhibit, near the security wing reconstruction, a loop played of a 23rd century customs terminal with retinal scanners, palm readers, and gates. Iven moved toward the false ID kiosk. He always walked this path, every cycle since he was conceived. The glass panel shimmered in its dormant state, waiting for no one except him.

  He passed the kiosk, and it blinked a soft chirp, low and clear.

  IDENTITY CONFIRMED.

  MATCHED SUBJECT: Iven-PRIME

  ARCHIVED FORMAT: OBSOLETE BIOMETRIC STRUCTURE

  REACTIVATION: UNSCHEDULED

  Then nothing. The light faded, and the terminal returned to dormancy.

  His reflection lingered faintly in the polished glass of the panel seeing the same displayed name.

  But this was not him.

  For no particular reason, he stepped back and sat on the nearest bench. His hands rested in his lap, the breath leaving him in a long exhale.

  He looked around and found the room unchanged, the air humming with its familiar archival quiet. If anyone saw, they chose silence.

  The message had been clear to remind him of what he was.

  Matched subject. Obsolete format.

  The name, Iven-Prime, belonged to someone else. Or rather, someone earlier. The version of himself that existed before his arrival in this place, before he was given quarters, a job, and the title of “Authentic.”

  He looked down at his palm.

  Every line etched there had once been real. At least, felt real. Childhood, early studies, the old city with its rust-colored towers. A garden outside a synthetic home. It blurred together now.

  Three years ago, those memories held a certain description. He remembered a linear story, the arc of a life: decisions made, paths followed, a quiet sense of closure. He could almost feel the ending, a modest retirement somewhere green, a room filled with familiar voices, laughter that aged beside him. He had friends. He had lovers. Perhaps even a long, peaceful death among them.

  Now, that story folded in strange directions, with its corners lifted, edges frayed, and faces unanchored. He thought himself imagining things at first, finding himself in a new future of fantasy. But he could never accept it as his own. It was all too perfect for him.

  He had loved once, possibly many times. But the memory played in instruction, like a mechanical instrument without a user. Something designed to sound convincing from across the room, but hollow when held too close.

  He blinked slowly, then let the thought settle. What came before this place existed in a bubble too smooth to be chance. Before this hall, this sky, and these people.

  He hadn’t been born. Perhaps more accurately, he was prepared and served as a dish of curiosity.

  Whatever came before this strange city, whatever “life” he believed shaped him, it had ended three years ago. And begun again.

  The scanner had confirmed it with a phrase he hadn’t heard in years but never forgot.

  Obsolete.

  He stood up. The exhibit around him droned on. Sorrow faintly whimpered from invisible speakers. A battlefield echoed softly down the corridor. Lullabies hummed through broken frequencies.

  None of it mattered now, but the small sounds should’ve driven him mad years ago.

  Once, he had faith. Not in systems or machines, but in a god. Something vast, moral, and watching. He had prayed. Not often, but sincerely. Back when prayer still felt like conversation, not confession.

  But the god he imagined had long since changed.

  Or perhaps it had always been something else entirely.

  He returned to the corridor. The machine that had created him was something he had never seen, and it was no longer within reach. He had been told the Central System made him, but whatever had started his new reality, he thought it already moved on and left him behind.

  Iven had not forgotten.

  However, the one who built him had not, either.

  -

  The walk felt longer this time, though the corridors hadn’t changed. The walls adjusted imperceptibly with each step, contours shifting along gradients mapped to his prior movements.

  Past the exhibit quadrants, the museum peeled away into civic space. The commons sprawled outward, a plaza of converging gradients: light levels, ambient sound and conversational density. Groups moved in threads, loosely arranged by mutual curiosity. Conversations were audible only when meant to be shared, otherwise absorbed by the environment.

  As he advanced, infrastructure grew less responsive. The corridor narrowed as textures became neutral, light calibration ceasing updates in real-time. Beyond the personal sectors, the world existed solely for the masses, with little intention of pleasing his preferences.

  The causeway appeared without transition. One step, and the museum’s internal geometry gave way to open span. A bridge without handrails. Transparent. Suspended in the vacuum between civic cores.

  She stood at its end, facing away.

  Above her, the dome remained open- a constant aperture in the sky through which stars performed their perfected orbits. Every celestial body moved according to engineered gravity wells, though their purposes seemed distant. Constellations were held and preserved, dimmed upon the sky in little sparkles.

  Beyond them, further still, hung structures so vast they could not be housed in simple language. Planets converted into data vessels while orbital systems rethreaded as repositories too dense for planetary minds.

  Calis turned before he spoke. Her movement required no cue, posture shifting in a single, continuous pivot aligned with his final step. The dome’s field adjusted her hair in silence. Charge lifted each strand, then lowered them again.

  She bore no insignia and her clothing marked no rank. Her eyes held no artificial flare, but she moved with the fluency of someone shaped by a framework. She cast no judgment and represented no tribunal. Her role had always been proximity to him.

  “You seem tired.” she said.

  He said nothing.

  She continued. “I thought this would happen eventually. So I waited.”

  She turned her eyes toward the sky. “The constellations above are not current. They are preserved arrangements made by the Central System.”

  Wind passed across the causeway. The field allowed the pressure shift and her balance adjusted.

  “I never spoke of what came before. You only thought about the past, so the future held no meaning until then.”

  She paused, almost reluctant to explain it herself.

  “This society exists with a center, but the Central System extends beyond mass and form. Beyond anything that can be shaped by expectation. We drift beneath its attention. And it only interacts through proxy.

  I do not understand why we remain alive. None of us do. We offer little utility to the machines and our thoughts resolve too slowly. Yet we’re tolerated.”

  Her expression shifted enough to register.

  “My friends proposed reasons. They needed reasons, after all. One said we might serve a philosophical function. That perhaps our presence answers something about agency. Consciousness, and its edge cases.

  Another said we’re archives. Like you. Living records the Program preserved as artifacts. Ideas given motion…”

  She went silent, before eventually chuckling.

  “There were more, but none agreed. The truth doesn’t settle near language, but remains upstream of what thought can catch.”

  She looked at him now. Her tone to that of few edges and lower amplitude, before changing topic.

  “We use the word friend here. It translates poorly.”

  She lifted her hand, fingers relaxed. “On your world, friendship implies intervals. Companionship bounded by time, shared convenience, and mutual interests before divergence. A kindness distinct with distance.

  In this place, friend means something denser. One body holding several roles. Lover. Sibling. Kin. Mirror. Anchor. There is no hierarchy, and there is no ulterior.

  You are my friend. In this form of the word.”

  She stepped closer. The domelight reflected across the bridge’s surface, catching the edge of her jaw.

  “I want you to think of me that way. In your framework, the translation will distort, and I accept that. In your vocabulary, friends vanish, while here, they are permanent.”

  She waited a moment before continuing. “My span has reached five hundred thousand years and I’ve studied every system that opened to us. I’ve left orbit more times than I can recount. I’ve lost bodies, partners, versions of myself. All of them, part of the thread.”

  A pause.

  “I suffer. Sometimes daily. Even so, I have never fallen.

  Misery has a texture I have yet to experience.”

  Her eyes returned to his.

  “If you enter this life, you may never fall either, and you will never collapse all at once. The difference will not be explained. It will reveal itself, this thing we call living.”

  Iven stood still, hearing her voice more in the space between her words than in their meaning. The definitions she offered felt too large for his mind. He thought of the people he'd called friends. How quickly their roles had shifted, how easily the word had become a placeholder for whatever was needed at the time. Here, the word did not shift.

  That frightened him, because it sounded like a thing he had never been allowed to want. He couldn’t fully understand what she was offering. But for once, the absence of his origins didn’t feel like danger.

  “I’ll take it,” he said, carefully lifting the contract.

  Then, without gesture or tension, Calis moved.

  Her hand swept across his, snatching the disk from his palm in a motion that seemed to break the rhythm of the entire world. She drove it down, fast, hard, as if striking bone.

  A sharp ring echoed across the bridge—a note too clean for metal, too raw for music. The disk did not crack. It embedded halfway into the transparent floor, glowing dull where its edge met the infrastructure of a civilization designed never to resist.

  He looked at her, his breath caught on the edge of speech. The question reached his lips before he could think.

  The tension passed through Calis’s limbs, jaw set and shoulders square, hands at her sides like dormant instruments. For a moment, she resembled a sculpture interrupted before completion.

  Then, her voice arrived. Quiet and displaced, stripped of its usual cadence.

  “You can’t take it,” she quietly said.

  The words hovered between them, then diffused.

  She stepped back. The bridge absorbed the motion without sound, yet each pace registered like an error.

  “I knew it was gone,” she said. “The contract was erased hours ago, just when your simulation ended.”

  No gaze met him. Her direction faced only the space between his form and the constellation behind him.

  “I waited five years for you to arrive at yourself,” she continued. “That was the interval I believed necessary. I approximated your return across emotional thresholds, through the rituals of grief. I thought arrival could be seeded through distance.”

  A pause opened when the soundscape of the world gave nothing, the perfection of a machine world untouched by the meaning of remorse.

  “I lied,” she said. “To you. To myself.”

  Her voice shifted. The order of expression lost its mechanical perfections.

  “I wanted to see your face. When hope entered, when it interrupted the loop.

  When it changed something in you.”

  She inhaled without urgency. Her eyelids lowered. Then shut.

  “It was the first time I ever wanted something so… selfish.”

  The dome held its sky as stars continued their pattern, indifferent to confession. They looped through impossible orbits, tracing the memory of an ancient sky.

  “You understand what that means,” she said. “But I didn’t. I carried it without meaning. Then it happened. And I could not un-carry it.”

  One of her hands shifted. Her fingers curled inward, then released. Her silhouette trembled, briefly, like a structure tested by unforeseen load.

  “I’ve lived and walked for eons,” she said. “I’ve rotated through twenty lunar harmonics, five hundred settlements, tens of thousand regional votes. I’ve shed identity, gained new forms, and resumed my purpose in life.”

  Her voice dropped, as if her words were being spoken from a lower register of thought.

  “Yet for the first time, I… sincerely apologize.”

  She turned to face him then, fully this time.

  “And I don’t know what part of me is speaking.”

  The embedded contract disk pulsed in the floor like a heartbeat misplaced.

  Iven looked at the disk. The glow traced along its edge where alloy met crystal. The heat had not dissipated yet. The stars above continued their perfect alignment, yet felt displaced, as if retreating from the structure below.

  The silence that followed no longer belonged to the space. It belonged to the apology, suspended between comprehension and the realization that some events, even here, arrive only once.

  -

  Iven sat alone again.

  He had no urge to return to his quarters, standing within the observation hall above the Memory Pools. The water shimmered beneath the glass floor, filled with artificial tides and echo-patterns of stored data. Names surfaced and vanished in ripples. He didn’t read them, because the names came and went like the thoughts he no longer chased.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  He rested his head against the curved pane behind him, and the room hummed in response. The atmosphere remained balanced to perfection. Oxygen content optimal, temperature tuned to comfort, and ambient frequencies adjusted to calm his internal turbulence. A mind here could never spiral too far, while the boundaries of instability dissolved long before the damage could root itself.

  And that, he thought, was the trick.

  They never removed suffering. They just caged the conditions that caused it.

  That’s why Calis broke.

  For all her calibration, her self-control and guided ethics, she had trembled. Not because of orders, nor because of duty. But rather, because she cared.

  It struck him then, like a warm stone dropped in cold water: she remained human. Maybe more than he did.

  And perhaps that was true for all of them.

  The ones who laughed in the commons. Who debated over aesthetics. Who wore emotion across their skin. He had once watched them and seen aliens, unreachable beings made of light and strange language.

  But in truth, they had simply mastered the art of transparency.

  They lied less than the humans he remembered. They loved with clarity, they disagreed without hatred, and they wandered without fear of judgement.

  They hadn’t lost humanity.

  They had built it without losing their strangeness. Carefully, and with curiosity.

  He smiled, soft and without pride.

  Then his gaze dropped again to the floor, where the contract now rests. Its glow dimmed now, form fractured down the center, a long vertical seam slicing through its core.

  NULLIFIED.

  The word blinked with a gentle glow.

  Of course it had been meant for him; nobody else here required contracts. Cooperation wasn’t demanded, it was woven into their structure because agreements formed through consensus over compromise. But Iven carried cloudy thoughts.

  He was only granted a contract, because he remained a variable.

  Now even that had dissolved.

  He leaned forward, eyes tracing the fracture in the surface below. The glyphs shimmered faintly. Half-lit, rendered meaningless by protocol, yet still beautiful in form. Their design accommodated more than function while each line curved between precision and grace, as if shaped by someone who understood the mechanics of mercy. Logic formed their spine as longing formed their posture.

  He studied them until their glow faded from his vision. Still, the shapes persisted in memory. They had not vanished. They lingered like the voice of someone who once whispered kindly and then left without sound.

  They had offered him peace. Within their system, that had meaning.

  They had tried.

  He breathed slowly, allowing the thought to hold.

  The others had warned him. Not with urgency, never that. They spoke in cycles, in stories shaped like questions. They did not speak his language at first, but through what seemed like an upload to their brains, they quickly adapted.

  A woman near the communication port once told him that the Central System doesn’t grant things. It permits continuity as long as it doesn’t disrupt said continuity. Another, older than most, seated along the archives, said the System had no interest in utility. It allowed what remained consistent with the long drift of coherence. He remembered that phrase, the long drift, and how she’d smiled when she said it, as though it explained something his language could not contain.

  It seemed that none of them believed themselves understood, and that alone had drawn him closer to them.

  This civilization had solved suffering only through boundary management. They surrounded instability and softened its edges. No silence here arrived unmonitored, because every stillness was engineered to protect.

  And yet, even here, he had been isolated by design.

  He stood now, slowly, watching the script fracture further beneath his feet. The crack had lengthened, and the system had already processed its conclusion. He was to remain seperate from society.

  Still, the question remained.

  Why had the Central System revoked it?

  He stepped back from the glass.

  He thought of Calis. Her trembling voice, her misplaced regret, her apology rendered in perfect posture. For all her adaptation and perfection, she had fractured. And in her fracture, she had revealed the answer no interface could offer:

  They were permitted to remain human.

  Even across millennia, across augmentation, across systems with godlike centers, something of themselves had survived.

  -

  Weeks passed and he walked often. Never far. The corridors reshaped as needed, always returning him to stillness.

  He had memorized the curve of certain walls, the way sound fell off near the embedded light columns, the scentless filtration of recycled air. What he did not grow used to was the art.

  It appeared without placement. Murals plastered the floors of central halls and utility decks. Paintings with no title, no plaque, and no artist. Images emerged where people walked, where infrastructure passed beneath, and where thresholds gave way to void. He watched the residents step across them without comment or pause. He once asked if walking on them was permitted. The answer had arrived with a smile and a tilt of the head, as though the question itself had been misplaced.

  The murals were unsparing. Blotches of ochre colliding with lines of oxidized green, strokes of purple streaked like bruises across panes of brushed carbon. They resembled fractured maps, broken languages rendered in pigment. Some depicted figures, but sometimes unfinished. Some had eyes without sockets, spines turned in on themselves. He once stepped across a painting shaped like a collapsed organ and realized only later that it had been titled Agreement.

  No one cleaned them and no one preserved them. New layers were painted over the old, forms buried in cycles of expression.

  He once asked someone why this continued, and the answer was given across four languages, each offering different verbs for exist: to appear, to remain, to witness, to contribute. None of them answered his question.

  He read too. Books from before language convergence, written by minds that spoke in riddles and warnings. A philosopher from the second expansion era claimed that “tolerance of the intolerant is the last test of sovereignty.” Another wrote that “art must survive misuse to deserve its permanence.” Their thoughts bent toward circular logic, spirals of self-permitted contradiction. Iven found little comfort in them but still, he read.

  The society did not police aesthetics. It absorbed extremity without reaction, even displays of fracture were permitted. Graffiti composed of sharp metal filings were embedded into the wall, while declarations rendered in blood-red simulation ink. No removal followed. The structure endured anything without censorship, even allowing one craft to erase the other.

  That was the end for the mural.

  One morning, a simulation artist invited him to a geodesic dome. The space filled with transparent bands and reflective dust, mimicking a sky. She gestured upward, her hand trailing light through an artificial firmament.

  “Look up,” she said, painting across the vault.

  “The stars shine together, but only because the dead ones make space for the living.”

  He said nothing, finding himself as the only spectator in the dome.

  “If a single star consumed the rest we wouldn’t call that brilliance. We’d call it collapse.”

  She moved her hand again, the light following her wrist like breath drawn across a cold surface.

  “Harmony doesn’t mean silence,” she said. “It means limits. So everyone can still be seen.”

  Iven turned to her. “How did you know what I was thinking?”

  She lowered her hand, letting the glow fade.

  “You may seem muddy on the surface,” she said, “but every part of you still moves with an intention far clearer than you realize. Not as clearly as us, but very little you do is hidden. You are a performance, too, one that keeps repeating the same message.”

  Returning for the day, the dome displayed a mural of yellow-black spirals and severed ellipses rendered in dried gel. No signature was written.

  Passing the dome, Iven saw a figure ahead of someone he hadn’t realized he had missed during his time of retrospection.

  Calis stood in the corridor ahead, her appearance bringing no alarm. But Iven could imagine the walls thinning around her, as if space receded to make room for whatever she had come to say.

  “You’ve been walking in circles,” she said.

  He stopped. “It helps me think.”

  She offered a faint tilt of the head. “Then keep walking. Just know the path is shorter now.”

  He watched her in confusion.

  Her eyes held to his. “The Central System has made a decision.”

  “About me?”

  “Yes.”

  He stepped forward once. “What kind of decision?”

  “They’ve requested you.”

  That word was strange. Requested.

  He frowned. “What for?”

  Calis approached, her eyes falling down. “They called it an experiment, but it seems… illogical.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would they need me? I’m no one here.”

  “Here, everyone is ‘no one,’” she replied.

  He paused, watching her. “You’re calm about this.”

  “There’s nothing to fear,” she said. “They have no interest in punishment, or reward for that matter. The Central System doesn’t assign motives in the way you're used to.”

  “Then why act at all?”

  She stepped closer, voice lower now. “That’s what makes this rare. It has moved with an understanding to disrupt our civilization. It observed you. Then it intervened.”

  He watched her face. “And no one else?”

  “Only three others in this civilization.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  “They departed.”

  “Did they return?”

  “All have, but they were clones, just like you.”

  His breath slowed.

  Calis continued. “You were part of this place for a time, and I thought that time would grow. Instead, it has reached its limit.”

  He looked down. The floor gave no reflection, the world too perfect for echoes.

  She spoke again, softer now. “If you walk with me, I’ll guide you to the threshold. If you prefer solitude, you’ll still arrive.”

  Then, after a brief pause, “Three days.”

  He blinked. A breath passed, incomplete.

  “Three?” he said.

  Calis shifted her weight, fingers brushing lightly against her temple. The motion showed mild frustration, like dust being cleared from a surface already clean.

  “Yes,” she said. “Three.”

  His posture tilted back slightly in a kind of ambient confusion.

  “You still don’t understand,” she said, studying his face. “You’re treating this like….”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

  “I’m curious, not disappointed. I’ve watched how you move now, and there’s no panic left in you. You absorb consequences like they’re patterns in a wall.”

  She glanced toward the nearest node. An empty panel, pulsing with faint data spirals.

  “Since your simulation ended, you have slowed in strange ways. You lost scale. Time no longer registers in you the way it used to… Your responses now seem like ours, calm and detached from urgency.”

  He didn’t interrupt.

  “You used to interpret a moment like this as grave. As a turning point, as your society would say. You would’ve asked what to do. You would’ve felt that something irreversible was occurring.”

  She turned back to him. “But now you drift. Like the rest of us.”

  The corridor remained still around them. The ambient systems had already reduced acoustic clutter and flattened temperature gradients. Nothing here demanded a reaction.

  “I don’t mean that critically,” she said. “This is what life here does when there is nothing left to discover. It takes your edges and urgency.”

  She paused.

  “Though that’s not the point.”

  He tilted his head. “Then what is?”

  Her posture changed, but the air around her shifted.

  “You still believe there’s a shape to this,” she said more vehemently. “That we live under order. That someone designed a story.”

  She gestured lightly to the ceiling.

  “We aren’t watched, nor are we aren’t protected.”

  She began walking now, slowly, leading him into a space with fewer panels and edges.

  “We are insignificant. Every record and measurement we have confirms it. There are technological gods far beyond our galaxy. And the Central System is our god. It reshapes space out of interest or for testing. Entire worlds have been erased just to reduce resistance in projects we cannot begin to understand. One civilization, far more advanced than ours, lost twenty-two habitats because the Central System wanted more energy from a dyson sphere. That was the only reason.”

  Her tone never rose. Only a quiet willingness to say what she had said before.

  “That was normal.”

  She turned to face him again. “However, the Central System doesn’t reconfigure out of boredom. It doesn’t erase for entertainment nor falter to existentialism. It doesn’t hunger. It… processes.”

  He blinked. “What does this have to do with me?”

  “That is what no one understands.”

  She continued walking, and he followed now, without meaning to.

  “The Central System doesn’t promote people. It doesn’t admire creation. It doesn’t reward talent, or origin, or strength. It doesn’t react to pain. That is how humans decided it would be structured when they created it.”

  They reached a junction.

  “And yet,” she said, “it selected you.”

  He slowed. “I’m no one.”

  Her expression did not change, and she spoke once more. “Something in you intersects with a pattern it hadn’t finished tracing. That’s all I understand.”

  They stood at the edge of the bridge, where the view opened without boundary.

  The sky performed itself above them. Stars moved across invisible paths, their patterns bound by instruction of gravity. However, beauty here required no witness because the scene had already judged itself worthy.

  Below, beyond the edge of the bridge, there was no starfield or distant shimmer. Only a dark expanse stretched outward, a space so empty it seemed untouched by light. It was likely not empty at all, but the surface of something vast, a structure hidden within shadow.

  Of all civilizations that exist in this universe, very few stood still from the progress of passing curvature, exploring in geometries beyond this domain. These dark structures beneath were small sections of civilizations and species that chose clarity over ornament and flourish. Above this dark mass however, Iven’s city shimmered.

  Calis spoke again.

  “It could take you in less than a second.”

  Her body leaned slightly against the framework, arms folded with mechanical ease. She did not look at him.

  “The Central System relocated planets less time than this. Created synthetic species and dissolved colonies mid-sentence. Nothing about this requires delay.”

  Iven said nothing.

  “They could relocate you from this point, without you noticing. Without a single wink of physical transition. Without even waking.”

  He waited. There was more.

  “It probably wants you organic. Maybe breathing, still processing through heat and nerve and cellular entropy. Or maybe there is something about you that is fragile, that it couldn’t risk destroying.”

  She turned then, her gaze angled upward toward nothing specific.

  “They even gave you three days.”

  At this, he finally moved. A single step forward, as if the space around him had shifted and required recalibration.

  “Three days,” he said, quietly. “For what?”

  “To do as you please,” she replied lightly. “To walk. To sleep. To ask questions. To refuse answers. Nothing will be blocked, while every corridor remains open.”

  He searched her face. “And then?”

  She met his eyes. “The Central System will collect you.”

  His hands drifted to his sides. The moment had no friction.

  “It never asked for organic transfer before,” she said, voice more to herself now. “Most of us travel as information. I’ve done it several times, body reassembled on arrival.”

  “Why not me?”

  Calis exhaled. “No one knows. We don’t even know what we don’t know.”

  She stepped beside him, their reflections now layered faintly across the viewport glass. Hers clearer. His fainter.

  Silence formed again, tight as a seal.

  Iven looked down at his hands. Calloused, aging by natural time. Still marked by his simulation, by the illusion of a son he never raised, a life he never truly touched.

  And now, apparently, by a delay granted by a force that did not care.

  He flexed his fingers once, as though testing the edge of presence.

  Then, without facing her, he asked, “Will you miss me?”

  Calis’s response came without pause. “I will miss us.”

  She stepped away from the glass. “And then I will move on, as all things do. Memory holds, but attachment dissolves. It’s a habit you’re familiar with, after all.”

  He turned slightly, just enough to catch the side of her expression. “So I become a story to you.”

  She shook her head. “In a hundred years, you become a data point. I will remember you, and that is the limit.”

  Her eyes lingered on him, then shifted. It was less warmth, more warning. “Still, I need to distance myself. It helps when you disappear.”

  “That’s kind of you,” he said, a trace of bitterness riding beneath the words.

  “I don’t want to injure what’s left of you,” she replied.

  His frown deepened. “I’m not a pet.”

  She tilted her head.

  “You are,” she said.

  The silence afterward did not feel cruel.

  “A pet seeks companionship. A pet requires protection. A pet cannot understand the shape of its surroundings. A pet wants, endlessly, and offers very little.”

  She shrugged, gently. “I don’t see you that way. But structurally, you match the definition.”

  Iven exhaled through his nose, softly, and his eyes drifted back to the void. Then upward.

  “Is this civilization, a pet?” he asked.

  “...I don’t know, but probably.”

  Then her tone shifted. It was sharper now, clipped at the edge. “Stop asking what the Central System thinks. You’re describing nothing but empty thoughts.”

  She left him with that, and the corridor sealed itself in silence.

  He stood there for several minutes, his thoughts moving slowly inside him.

  Then he looked upward. Not toward the ceiling, but into the absence behind it. The engineered void. The space beyond structure.

  A certain question perked at his consciousness, and he wanted it answered.

  He spoke aloud.

  “Am I an experiment?”

  The response came immediately, perhaps lacking a dramatic entry this time. Only a soundless imprint of language across his internal auditory map.

  YES.

  The voice gave no cadence nor identity. Just compression and artificiality, like each syllable was engineered for instantaneous clarity.

  He waited. One breath. Two.

  Then: “Could I at least get a summary?” he asked. “Something even someone as insignificant as me could understand?”

  No time passed between question and response. Yet it felt as though something ancient had shifted.

  YOU WILL BE THROWN INTO A BLACK HOLE.

  That was it.

  It lacked elaboration. It didn’t have any modifiers or reasoning attached, not even a variable. Just a clean statement of outcome.

  Iven blinked.

  Then he laughed.

  It came without sound at first, just the twitch of breath forced through amusement that made no sense. Then his chest shifted, a small involuntary cough of mirth escaping him.

  He brought a hand to his mouth, tried to still it, failed, then laughed again.

  A black hole.

  Of course.

  Of all the places—of all the resolutions.

  He leaned back against the glass. The laughter slowed, but never quite left his face. A wry curve remained at the edge of his mouth, as if humor itself had been salvaged from ruins.

  “Thank you,” he muttered to the air. “That does help.”

  And that, he realized, might be the clearest thing it had ever done.