The corridors that once felt artificial now felt… provisional, as if they had always waited for him to arrive in this particular state. The walls curved around his motion without emphasis, while the ambient tones adjusted without direction. Nothing guided him nor denied him.

  He revisited the atrium gardens first. Plants without genus swayed in nutrient-light, growing in geometries that no forest on Earth had ever known. The air here had been tuned for respiration, yet tasted faintly of dustless stone. He sat near a growth structure that resembled coral woven into scaffolding. He watched it move as if it breathed, but no plaque was there to explain it and gardeners were to be seen.

  Then he visited the murals again.

  He walked the lower decks where pigments still stained the floor, burnt orange and chrome blue clashing in patterns that resisted rhythm. Before, he had stepped over them. Now, he crouched to examine the layering. Some paintings were six, seven strata deep. Scraped, repainted, edited by silent consensus.

  He found a group kneeling near one of the more chaotic murals. Five individuals, each mid-discussion, their arms gesturing slowly. One traced an arc in the air with their wrist, another responded by adjusting color through interface. They talked with motion more than words.

  He approached, cleared his throat, and asked, “Where would I get a paint bucket?”

  They looked up.

  One, augmented only lightly at the temples, chuckled. “A bucket?”

  Iven nodded, smiling at the absurdity of his own request.

  Another, broader across the shoulders, laughed quietly. “He means analog.”

  The tallest of them rose, stepping forward, holding something in his hand. It looked like a tablet, if a tablet had been carved from shifting resin and light. He held it out.

  “Try this,” he said.

  Iven hesitated. “I’m not… equipped.”

  The man blinked once. Then, with a grin that widened slowly, like a tiger drawing breath through its teeth, he tapped the side of the device. The screen shifted and a brush handle extended from its base. A small UI unfolded like paper made of light, soft and tactile, scaling to his hand size.

  “It knows now,” the man said. “It’s listening.”

  Iven stared at it, unsure.

  He wondered if this interface always existed within the device, waiting for the right input? Or had it generated itself at that moment, responding to context, language, and gesture?

  The question drifted into his mind like a gear half-formed, then he shook himself.

  He looked at the UI again, thumb sliding across the projection. It followed his motion with a low shimmer, offering brushes made of static light, sponges shaped like flowing fabric, and gradient fields wrapped into cones of shifting pigment.

  He frowned, tapped once on the edge of the interface, and said aloud, “I just want a paint bucket.”

  The projection paused. Then, without ceremony, a paint bucket appeared in his hand.

  It was made of neutral polymer. Smooth, matte, and perfectly geometric.

  Empty.

  He stared down at it. Then at the brush. Then back at the others.

  The broad-shouldered man rose again and approached, chuckling.

  “You’re taking it literally,” he said. “That’s fine. The system gives you what you ask.”

  Iven looked at the bucket. “It gave me a container.”

  “Have you thought of the color? Substance? You didn’t imagine.”

  “I imagined a bucket of paint,” Iven muttered.

  The man laughed quietly, then took the device back from his hand with a motion so fluid it barely interrupted Iven’s grip.

  “Try this instead.”

  He tapped twice on its surface, pulling an expression of thinking. Then once more.

  The projection expanded. Tools unfolded from its side like furniture unpacking itself from invisible memory. A canvas appeared. It was wood-framed, slightly tilted on a triangular brace. Three wooden buckets settled to the floor beside it, filled with thick, viscous paint in primary tones. Brushes followed. Small ones with soft tips. Broad ones with horsehair. The handles were wood-grain, etched with wear patterns from hands that had never touched them. It was a complete, historically accurate painting set, pulled from a time Iven only understood through books.

  The man handed the device back. “Basic,” he said. “Enough for you.”

  Iven took it without reaction, his expression quiet and unreadable.

  The man’s smile deepened. “You think in shapes without gravity. Your mind sketches smoke, and the device had only two decisions. When a problem is too simple, it either acts alone, selecting a solution that satisfies one need while ignoring all others, or it defaults to the lowest common denominator, choosing what is simplest to implement, not what is most precise.”

  Iven clenched the handle of the brush. Then let the tension drop.

  “Thanks,” Iven said at last.

  The man offered a gesture of farewell and returned to his side of the mural wall with the others.

  There, with their own focus, they began shaping something new.

  It formed slowly, rising in jagged lines from a blank panel on the floor. Metal, flesh, light, and texture, all blending in impossible proportions. It pulsed with suggestive shapes but offered little to no clarity. Arms extended from asymmetrical shoulders. A face split between expression and geometry. Wings, or maybe spires, lifted from its back in spiraling lines.

  Iven tilted his head.

  It resembled something almost human. Something beautiful, terrifying, and incomplete. A cursed sculpture. Or maybe a cultist shrine.

  The man looked over his shoulder once, grinning.

  “Many of us have a model,” he said. “This one’s mine.”

  Iven said nothing.

  The sculpture stood nearby, towering over its makers. The contours of its anatomy left bare as Iven watched. It was half-woman, half-construct, its symmetry undermined by details that never quite resolved. One wing lifted higher than the other, spine divided like a split corridor, and face caught in the tension between tenderness and mechanical weight. The figure radiated a conviction Iven didn’t understand, something between desire and design, fused without explanation. The artist admired it openly, his expression loose and amused, as if baring an intimate confession with no shame at all.

  Eventually, Iven turned back to his own space. The canvas stood upright in its frame, pristine, an object untouched by anything except possibility. He approached with the brush in hand, already stained in deep red. The pigment shimmered slightly in the artificial light, thick and slow-moving, more like fluid metal than paint.

  He raised the brush and made a single stroke.

  The red line dragged across the canvas in a slight downward tilt, too soft to seem deliberate, too straight to suggest emotion. He paused, tilted his head, and examined it as though it might shift on its own. Nothing stirred, and no reaction surfaced in him. It was neither ugly nor beautiful. It wasn’t exactly wrong. It simply was. A red mark without story, like a scar left behind by someone else's mistake.

  He stepped back, hoping distance might unlock meaning, but the line remained inert. The silence it created felt passive, unresolved. The stroke didn’t invite anything after it. It closed nothing, and opened nothing. He lowered the brush slightly and waited, expecting some kind of momentum to emerge, some inner rhythm to guide the next move.

  None arrived.

  He thought, maybe, that starting had been a mistake. The first stroke hadn’t led him forward. It had only revealed the space between him and the act of making. One gesture didn’t mean he had begun. Motion, he realized from the man’s words, was all he thought.

  He stared at the canvas, as if the answer might emerge from that thin red gesture. It did not.

  Around him, the others worked unaware of his canvas. One artist adjusted the color spectrum of their entire mural by twisting their wrist against a hovering interface, shifting gold into verdigris and shadow into smoke. Another hovered a device above a surface, letting an odd pigment drip onto programmed cloth that rearranged the drops into fractal blooms. A child passed by, dragging a stylus across the floor, which left behind a swirl of static that eventually hardened into something like geometry. They were fluent in expression, in a culture where creation moved faster than doubt.

  Iven placed the brush down beside him and lowered himself to the ground, sitting cross-legged on the smooth flooring. The canvas loomed in front of him, still white except for that lone red stroke. It was quiet, incomplete, and now permanent.

  He didn’t feel frustration, for there was no urgency in him. Only a strange vacancy, like thought had uncoupled from motion, and both had drifted in different directions.

  He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, watching the line with the vague expectation that something might shift. Perhaps later, he would try again. Perhaps not.

  A shadow passed across the edge of the canvas. A moment later, a voice followed.

  "That's all you've done?"

  Iven didn’t turn.

  The broad-shouldered man stood beside him again, arms folded, chin lifted as though addressing a museum exhibit of questionable value.

  “I see nothing in it,” he said, with genuine disappointment. “Which means it either says too much, or it says nothing.”

  Iven glanced up at him passively. “That’s one way to motivate someone.”

  “I didn’t come to motivate,” the man said. “I came because I was bored.”

  He turned without waiting for a response. “Come, and look at mine again, something with a little more structure.”

  Iven hesitated, but the alternative was continuing to stare at a red line that refused to offer insight. He stood and followed.

  They crossed the mural space until they stood before the sculpture. The same strange, towering figure, part woman, part abstraction, held together by conflicting ideas. Metal ribs curled around soft tissue that pulsed with color. The face hovered between serenity and distortion. The limbs extended outward in unbalanced geometry, more suggested than finished.

  The man gestured at it proudly.

  “Well?”

  Iven took a long breath, studying it.

  “She’s…” He faltered. “She’s a lot.”

  The man laughed. “Correct.”

  Iven tilted his head. “Do you know what she is?”

  “Of course. She’s mine.”

  “...That’s not what I meant.”

  “No, but that’s the answer.” He stepped closer, running a finger along one of the outer ridges that formed the sculpture’s side. “Every curve and angle here means something to me. Not to anyone else. You don’t need to understand it, I’d never want you to.”

  Iven stared at the sculpture’s fractured face. One eye recessed, the other oversized and shining like a polished stone. “You made her from memory?”

  “Memory. Dream. Failure. Need. All the things you think don’t qualify as art because they don’t form clean ideas.”

  He turned to Iven, expression proud.

  “You’re hesitating because you think art has laws.”

  Iven said nothing.

  The man shrugged. “You’re welcome to keep staring at your red line. Or you can make a mess, something you’ll regret.”

  He paused, as if tasting the words.

  “Everyone starts with something bad. Then we lie to ourselves until it’s good.”

  He turned back toward his sculpture. The light around it pulsed faintly as the materials adjusted, flesh tones softening into metal, then reconstituting into pigment. Nothing in the piece held still for long.

  The man circled it, touching nothing and speaking over his shoulder.

  “She started with a ribcage. A real one, from a memory of a friend. Thirty-seven ribs, too many for any living body. It stretched out like an open jaw.”

  Iven watched in silence.

  “Then I built skin over it. Roughly textured. Layered like muscle torn in recoil. You can’t see it now. It’s inside. But I know it’s there.”

  His voice remained cheerful. Gentle, even.

  “I gave her legs made from splints, bones snapped and torn in loops. Took me years to find the correct angle of tension. A curve that eventually became sensual, but only barely.”

  He stepped back, admiring his own creation.

  “I designed her smile to be uncannily incorrect. You won’t notice unless you know how real smiles break along the zygomatic curve. Hers folds about three degrees too wide.”

  Iven felt a coldness that wasn’t physical. Something in the man’s cadence, the surgical joy with which he described the grotesque, disgusted him.

  He took a half step back. “You think like this often?”

  The man nodded, matter-of-fact. “Every day.”

  He didn’t say it for effect, nor was he posturing.

  “I’m what your time would’ve called unstable. Probably kept in containment, evaluated, managed, or likely just removed.”

  He grinned, wide. “But here, I can express myself.”

  He walked to one of Iven’s buckets, dipped his fingers into black pigment, and dragged it across the sculpture’s face, forming a shape like a fracture.

  “If I act, I die before it even happens. Instantly, and no warning. You’ve at least heard of the Central System. It will know before I even tried.”

  He looked up, his eyes sparkling towards his sculpture. “So I create instead.”

  Iven swallowed. “Would you prefer a different world? Where you could?”

  The man tilted his head and stood again, wiping his hands along his outfit, leaving streaks.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I can only imagine a world like yours. Where consequence felt close. Where you could still see the bones after the fire. Where loss was counted without archivals.”

  He smiled again, smaller this time.

  “But I’m educated. I’m civilized. I understand that those things remain fictional. I accept that, so I build models. I make pieces, and I fill my head with catastrophe and pour it out slowly.”

  He walked past Iven now, pausing only once.

  “You’ll need to find your own poison. Something inside you that doesn’t want to stay inside.”

  He glanced back toward the canvas Iven had left behind.

  “Make that thing bleed. Or burn. Or rot. At least then it’ll be alive.”

  Then he was gone, folded into the background like he’d always belonged there, part of the mural, like a madness disguised as civility.

  Iven stood alone again, unable to determine the time that had passed before returning to his station.

  He stared at the red line, trying to meet it on its own terms. He could almost hear the artist’s voice again, echoing behind his ribs. Find your poison. As if every act of creation required something broken.

  He didn’t like that. The idea sat in him like a seed soaked in rot. He felt no anger toward the man, only a vehement rejection. Not even philosophical. Just instinctual.

  What was his poison? What rage, what loss, what fracture was he meant to conjure? He didn’t know, as when he tried reaching inward, he found only half-formed ghosts. Such ghosts were only the memories from a life he didn’t earn, a family that dissolved when the simulation ended, a child who never existed yet left fingerprints on his sense of self.

  He wasn’t sure if he hated this place. Some days, he almost admired it.

  He imagined setting the canvas ablaze. Smearing it with black and grey, turning it into a wound. Then walking away, having "said something." That was the easy option- anger always gave the illusion of substance.

  Still, he couldn't do it.

  He didn’t want to hurt this space, and he didn’t want to perform suffering just to be legible.

  He didn’t want to leave a mess.

  He didn’t want to lie.

  It felt small, this resistance. Weak. Like trying to smile while drowning.

  He wasn’t a visionary. He wasn’t a threat.

  He especially wasn’t profound.

  He lacked confidence. He lacked focus.

  He lacked, most of all, a reason.

  And yet, he wanted something. No, needed something, to stand here for him once he was gone.

  He looked around. The others hadn’t noticed his hesitation. Or they had, and simply moved past it. No one here interrupted silence, and that was its own form of grace.

  He stepped closer to the canvas and touched the frame once with his fingers.

  Then reached for the brush again.

  He dipped it in blue, a tone lighter than the red. It was cooler, thinner, the kind of blue found in shadows reflected on water.

  And made the second stroke.

  It curved slightly, the bristles dragging softly against the canvas, leaving a half-arc that reached toward the red line.

  He stepped back, and studied it.

  Red. Blue.

  And for a moment, that was all.

  But then something stirred. Not in the lines themselves, but in what followed: the space between them, the tension of their placement, the pattern forming just beneath awareness.

  He hadn’t planned a story. He had made a mark, then added another.

  Yet he could tell something had been said.

  Red had come first. Without thought. A solitary choice carelessly motioned. It stood alone for a time… Then blue. A cooler color, curved, slower. A response.

  A dialogue.

  He had told a story without realizing it.

  He couldn’t explain the arc of it, only that something had shifted between the first stroke and the second. Red was instinct and blue was reflection. Red was isolation and blue was the return.

  And for the first time, he felt pulled toward a third.

  He remembered, then, how little respect he once had for abstraction. Back when his team worked under halogen lights, buried in practical questions, and building biodegradable insulators with mycelium scaffolds and silica-laced protein. Their designs had real world applications. Their work answered real needs. Paint had seemed like entertainment for the masses, with occasional inspirations but mostly noise. Abstract painting, especially, was lazy, indulgent, and evasive. He used to say, with confidence, that art without structure was a refuge for those too fragile to face design.

  Now, he understood how little he had understood.

  He glanced around the mural space. Dozens of others were still working. Some kneeled over textured walls, while others mid-gesture with instruments that were painted in particles. No one explained their work, and no one asked about his. As he stepped away from his canvas, holding the device loosely in one hand, an idea took shape. It was quiet and undeveloped, but there.

  He approached the nearest person, an older figure with long arms and skin marked by soft bioluminescent traces, sketching spirals along the floor.

  “What are you painting?” he asked.

  The figure looked up, offering a brief smile. “An old apology. I never sent it.”

  Iven nodded, unsure what that meant. Then he asked, “What color do you think matches that?”

  The figure blinked once, considering an answer perfect not for her, but for him. The figure then answered, “Ochre. Dry ochre. Like a ruin in wind.”

  Iven nodded, though the answer didn’t settle in his mind. Dry ochre. The phrase sounded functional more than expressive. Still, the tone had enough conviction.

  He returned to his canvas, disregarding the buckets of paints and instead stopping at the interface unit attached to the side of the brush apparatus. With one tap, the pigment panel opened in front of him, a floating grid of color, its options shifting subtly as the ambient light changed. He located ochre quickly, third row, rightmost column. But he didn’t select it immediately.

  Instead, he examined it.

  The default tone leaned too dark. It was too brown and heavy. It reminded him of dried clay, compacted and resistant. It didn’t match what he imagined when he thought of dry. He adjusted the brightness manually, dragging the value slider upward, letting the color desaturate slightly. It became paler and flatter, with more yellow in the base. Still, it wasn’t right.

  He made one final adjustment, reducing contrast and cooling the warmth.

  Now it resembled something closer to weathered stone. A color that felt neither fresh nor ruined.

  The brush reacted with a soft vibration as the color filled its synthetic fibers. He brought it up to the canvas and hovered there, just short of contact. He traced the stroke in air, shoulder still, wrist adjusting angle. Then, he pulled back, reassessing the gesture.

  Then, without ceremony, he applied it.

  The stroke landed just above the red and blue. It was short, broken, and slightly downward at one end. The bristles separated mid-motion, leaving a small frayed edge. The imperfection felt right.

  He took a step back.

  It looked unbalanced in relation to the others, but that didn’t bother him. Each line came from a different state. Red had been instinct. Blue had been dialogue. This one had been received.

  It wasn’t his story. It was a response to someone else’s.

  And that, he realized, had its place.

  He glanced around the space.

  To his right, a woman knelt in stillness.

  There was no canvas nor sculpture in front of her.

  She was painting directly onto herself.

  Her skin was bare, fully nude, though the nudity had no performance nor draw for attention. It was ceremonial in its indifference. With a thin instrument, she traced spirals across her chest, arms, and abdomen. Fine lines, almost invisible until caught by the side-glow of the room’s filtered lighting. The pigment was a semi-reflective, low-opacity silver with flecks of conductive film, catching only at specific angles, like oil across a cold surface.

  The spirals overlapped, feeding into one another. Some stopped short. Others continued along her collarbone, or behind her ear. Each line curved with accuracy, as if mapping something internal she couldn’t name aloud.

  Iven watched for a moment before stepping closer.

  “What are you writing for?” he asked, voice low.

  She finished her current line. It was a curve that circled her ribcage before tapering off, before she set the instrument down beside her, careful not to let the tip touch the floor.

  “For memory,” she said.

  Her voice was flat yet comforting, with introspection hindering her gaze from lifting.

  “I chart divergences,” she continued. “Moments where language failed. Where I said less than I should’ve. Where I said the wrong thing.”

  Iven looked down at the spiral closest to him. It ended in a taper just beneath her sternum.

  “You remember the exact words?”

  “No,”

  He paused, then asked, “What color would it be?”

  She tilted her head slightly, eyes scanning across her own body.

  “Slate grey. Cold, with low pigment.”

  He nodded, thanked her, and walked away, leaving her to her silence.

  He returned to his canvas and brought up the color panel again. Sliding through the greys, he adjusted the value downward, lowering the saturation until the tone settled into a pale, slate-like hue with a muted undertone. It was cool, but without shine. The interface registered the choice, and the brush darkened accordingly. He made the third stroke beneath the others, diagonal and soft-edged, tapering near the end. It leaned just slightly out of alignment.

  Further along, seated near the base of a projection terminal, another figure hunched over a device. Androgynous, angular, and small-framed. They were adjusting something inside a tool that resembled a folded origami sculpture. It was mechanical, humming faintly, its edges in constant recalibration. At times, it seemed solid. At others, the corners blurred and vanished, like parts of it existed one moment and not the next.

  Iven watched them tinker, carefully sliding thin strips of material through open seams, watching how each changed the pulse of the device.

  “What does that do?” he asked.

  The figure looked up. Their face was unreadable, neither surprised nor engaged.

  “It breaks,” they said simply. “So I fix it.”

  “What is it?”

  “A creation interface. Or rather, one of the older ones. It generates shapes from its user’s emotional schema and occasionally struggles to provide an accurate output.”

  Iven crouched slightly, getting a better look at the object. It now resembled a three-dimensional diagram of an object in motion, all compressed into a single shifting frame.

  “You’re trying to make something with it?”

  The figure shook their head.

  “No. I just keep repairing it. I don’t really make anything anymore, because there’s nothing left to design that matters. This is old, and it resists completion. That’s why I prefer it.”

  They slid another strip into the housing. The motion triggered a flutter in the device. Part of it disappeared again, like it had flickered out of sync with reality.

  “I used to make containment systems. Agricultural patterning.” A chuckle was heard. “A lot of tool logic.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  The figure kept their eyes on the device, speaking with the slow clarity of someone reciting something long held but rarely shared. “I was here long before the Central System reached structural consensus, when the networks still argued with themselves and optimization was theory. We built systems that failed often, designs that needed tending, and tools that aged and wore down like everything else.

  The work changed as the structures changed, and slowly there was less to touch, less to monitor, and less to fix. I stayed because I know how to dismantle and rebuild, and this interface is the only thing I’ve found that still interrupts my rhythm. Sometimes I think about stuttering again, about forgetting a step and having to trace it back. I believe its still possible... But I’m happier than I was before, so I guess it's better left in the past.”

  Iven stood, looking at the shifting object again.

  “Could you assign a color to what you’re feeling?”

  The figure shrugged. “White, I guess. Washed out. Like plastic that’s been bleached by light.”

  Iven thanked them. They weren't particularly bitter. They were just listless, so they expressed their gratitude and moved elsewhere for other business, or maybe to avoid further conversation.

  He returned to the canvas with the answer. He brought up the pigment panel and selected a pale, low-saturation white. Then added the faintest grey tint, just enough to dull its sharpness. When the brush absorbed the color, he added the fourth stroke. It was horizontal this time, low on the canvas and disconnected from the rest.

  He stepped back and cleaned the brush again. The bristles retracted, flushed, and reset, ready for the next stroke. He needed to walk.

  Outside the lobby, just beyond the last of the public corridors, the light changed. It was warmer here, filtered through an atmospheric hue calibrated for comfort. There, seated along the curvature of the outer wall, was a young woman with soft features, holding an expression that never quite settled between amusement and ease. She was surrounded by what looked like decorative shells, bits of translucent fiber woven into circles and left in piles. She tossed them in the air occasionally, watching how they spun before collapsing at her feet.

  She didn’t seem to be performing any art.

  Still, when Iven approached, she smiled as if she’d been waiting.

  “Do you need a color?” she asked before he could say anything.

  He hesitated. “Yes. If you have one.”

  “I always have colors,” she said, tossing another shell up, letting it arc and fall. “What for?”

  He gestured vaguely toward the corridor behind him. “A canvas.”

  She lit up. “That’s sweet.”

  Then, without pause, “Use pink. Cottony and edible.”

  He didn’t have to ask for clarification while she leaned back on her elbows, the shell pile spreading around her like a nest.

  “You’re invited, by the way,” she said, gesturing loosely toward herself and, presumably, whoever else was part of her orbit.

  “Invited?” he repeated.

  “Yeah,” she replied, casual, cheerful yet retaining respect in her suggestive posture. “We’re open. You seem kind.”

  He forced a polite smile. “I appreciate that. I’m just passing through.”

  She shrugged. “You can pass through with someone too, you know.”

  He chuckled awkwardly and gave her a small bow of thanks before turning back.

  He returned to the canvas and selected the tone she’d described. A warm pink, lightened slightly but not artificial. He adjusted the tone to match texture over hue, matte with minimal sheen. When the brush was ready, he added the fifth stroke, slanted slightly upward, placed near the blue arc but without touching it.

  It was the brightest mark yet, strangely pinker than any pink he had ever seen before.

  He let it dry before lifting the brush again.

  -

  The day became two days.

  Iven continued the work in long intervals from morning to night, cleaning the brush, speaking with someone new, and choosing a color that matched the shape of their voice or the structure of what little they shared. With each conversation, his strokes grew smaller. He wanted to keep everything on the same canvas. It felt right to see these marks occupy the same field.

  Eventually, the lines began to spiral inward.

  Not perfectly circular, but close enough. His hand adjusted slightly with each curve, bending the composition around its own rhythm. There was no center nor hierarchy. Just accumulated thought, scattered across layered color, shrinking gently toward convergence.

  He stood back at last, brush dry, arms at his sides.

  The canvas was full.

  Each stroke he recalled a voice. Some sharp, some soft. One color was nearly invisible under another, while a few cuts of pigment still stood out, bright, awkward, and persistent. None of it resolved into an image but it felt whole.

  He smiled.

  The smile was not out of pride. Not because it was beautiful. But because it was strange. Because every stroke had arrived from someone else’s orbit and landed here, in this quiet corner of the world.

  He hadn’t expected them, the people, to be so different. Almost all of them held a contradiction. Some built machines they didn’t understand, others wrote apologies onto their skin, or invited strangers into their polyamorous constellations without shame. They were open, strange, and honest. And most importantly to Iven, all unalike.

  They didn’t care whether he belonged, and that, more than anything, had surprised him.

  He looked at the painting, then at the others nearby. They were still creating art, still walking, still folding small pieces of themselves into the edges of this place.

  There wasn’t much time left, though he didn’t mind if it ended just now.

  Until he remembered one more person.

  The center of the canvas remained empty. Every other mark curved around it, like an orbit around an unseen mass. He had noticed it a day ago and ignored it, assuming it would fill itself in time.

  But now it was clear who it waited for.

  Calis.

  He hadn’t spoken with her since the announcement. Their last exchange still lived in his memory, clean and unresolved. Since then, she had been present in function, only appearing for system notices, responding to logistical matters, speaking with the composure of someone who had already rehearsed detachment.

  She no longer looked at him directly and he had remembered why.

  And he couldn’t fault her for that.

  What surprised him was how she had managed the distance. She had studied his culture down to its nuances. Understood his symbols, social rituals, and deflections. Read enough of his people’s history to know what certain silences meant. It wasn’t difficult for her to see what he felt now. Even without words, she would have recognized it: the tension around his jaw, the soft movements of his fingers, the long pauses between decisions.

  He was thinking of her.

  And she knew.

  Somewhere nearby but unseen, Calis paused in her movement with her peers. Her body remained still, but internally, she questioned whether she should speak with him. Whether closure was worth the wound.

  She understood how Iven constructed meaning. It was not abstractly, but spatially through action. The canvas was a system to him. An archive of interaction. And the center had been left open.

  That made it harder to come.

  Still, she came over.

  She appeared when the area was quiet, when the others had drifted away. Iven didn’t speak. He simply stepped back from the canvas, offering her the device. She held it with the familiarity of someone who had already imagined this moment, her gaze sweeping slowly across the clustered strokes, absorbing their placement without expression.

  Then, in one smooth motion, black and white merged through a single drag of the brush. She placed a familiar symbol at the spiral’s center, then handed the device back and stood beside him.

  For a moment, she didn’t speak.

  Then her eyes lifted toward the upper atmosphere, as if the dome ceiling were no longer in the way.

  “They’re sending you into a supermassive,” she finally said. “No filtration and no containment logic. The event horizon has been crossed by conscious matter, but it was usually for no particular reason. We’ve mapped the gravitational slope up to a theoretical maximum, but beyond the event horizon, every model collapses. Entropy accelerates past interpretability, and causality becomes non-linear. The singularity doesn’t just bend space. It scrambles time until nothing remains but asymptotic descent.”

  She turned to face him.

  “Which means you are, by all practical accounts, being sent to your death.”

  But there was no fear in her tone, as if she had already moved on from his to-be passing. “That’s the summary.”

  She paused. Her next words came slower, shaped more by curiosity than certainty.

  “And yet, this is where it breaks.”

  Her fingers pointed and pressed against his forehead.

  “There should be no interest in this mission. The Central System gains nothing from irreversibly lost information. Observation requires return, and data requires continuity. Even in theoretical risk studies, we don’t engage one-way experiments. So either this is failure, or…”

  Her eyes crystallized with intrigue.

  “…something has changed.”

  She stepped closer, her voice dropping in pitch..

  “And if that’s true… If the Program has detected an outgoing artifact from something that breaks the laws of physics, then they’re sending you as the matching key. A shape that seemed to be purely organic, or in your own language, natural. A vessel made to fit the echo.”

  He said nothing, and she reciprocated with silence.

  Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “Or they’re watching for symmetry. A black hole, or-”

  She nodded toward the canvas with a grin.

  The yin-yang at its center had already begun to dry.