On the final day, Iven rose late. Sleep had not soothed him, clinging to his body like damp cloth. His joints held the memory of tension unspent. His dreams, if they had meaning, had fled before forming shape, leaving behind only the outline of their absence.

  He moved through the atrium slowly, his steps folding through garden corridors where the vertical flora breathed light into chlorophyll veins and released scentless humidity. The plants followed internal cycles, old and undisturbed. No current of motion suggested urgency, maybe the entire city was absent such a concept. He was not delayed, because delay implied friction, and this place had long since eroded anything that could resist its own pacing.

  The mural remained where he had left it. The canvas stood silently, the spiral still drawn inward, the brush reset beside its tray. The pigments had cured into a texture that no longer shimmered, and the colors sat saturated, smooth, and unapologetically still.

  He examined it once. Then he lifted it.

  The frame pressed against his forearms as he crossed the corridor. Eventually, he approached the wall seemingly designated for public display. It recessed slightly, forming a cradle for what was meant to be seen. He placed the work there and stepped back, watching as the ambient light shift to a new focal point.

  Beyond the canvas, figures walked. Some were alone, some in slow-moving clusters. Their movements were fluid, gestures animated with unseen conversations. Iven watched them drift past, and in his mind, their steps accelerated into a kind of timelapse, threads of motion smearing through the mural space across his vision. They didn’t glance toward his work. Not once.

  They were expressive, absorbed in things he couldn’t name nor understand. But this, his spiral of strokes, held no interest for them. It was simply beneath notice, without any form of dismissal nor glancing nod.

  He had created something that passed like dust between tides. Insignificant and fallen to obscurity.

  Iven noticed a figure passing by on a levitating device and offering a brief glance, not toward the painting but toward him, before adjusting her sleeve and continuing toward an interface console. The mural behind Iven glowed faintly with the presence of strangers, each absorbed in their own structure and task, with none reaching outward.

  Expression, in this place, coiled inward. Completion served not to announce, but to satisfy one's needs of satisfaction.

  He turned from the canvas, neither resentful nor comforted, and looked toward the upper ring. A structure rose there, taller than the rest. Its frame spiraled upward like a helix drawn into the sky. Its surface pulsed with color and animation in incredible complexity. Projection danced across its geometry as dozens of figures worked in continuous adjustments. Some hovered over pigment flows while others embedded text into the walls. The architecture swelled with melody Iven couldn’t imagine himself participating.

  This was a collaboration drawn into monumentalism.

  And below it, his canvas hung like a lost stone beneath a tower of sound.

  He left it there, because removal would have been a declaration. Remaining allowed it to vanish slowly, like an echo swallowed by distance.

  He moved through the plaza next. The light tracked his respiration, adjusting luminance across walls and walkways, warming the color palette to sustain his alertness. His steps still gathered sleep at their edge, but his senses began to reassert themselves, each detail arriving as if from great depth.

  Residential alcoves grew from pillar shafts like nested roots curling into stone. Study halls floated between structures, their interiors shaped by suspended glass and kinetic ink. Garden towers rotated through light exposure while attendants with spindle-fingered hands tuned the nutrient channels without speech.

  He passed a communal kitchen where meal rituals played out as if choreographed. Steam trails rose in spirals, with plating seemingly pointless as food began to spill from their top. Some of the philosophy appeared not in books, but in spatial diagrams layered through walls and walkways, their arguments traced with a particular movement rather than words.

  He could not comprehend it.

  He saw figures with black rings fastened around their arms, as if they bore the orbit of judgment. A few moved with mouths sealed by adaptive film, their expressions reduced to blink, tilt, and breath. Others walked in structured formation, their spacing tight and their direction fixed. Whether punishment or practice, the world did not explain to him.

  In a recessed alcove, Iven noticed a figure surrounded by broken tools. They held metal warped by heat, bent into forms no longer functional. The figure moved carefully, arranging the pieces into square grids, then shattering the order and building it again. Their hands worked, the outcome resembling defiance more than construction.

  Contradiction, Iven thought, had space here. Yet among all the other forms he could never fully understand, he found himself facing alienation again.

  No one watched. Across the space, others created as they pleased, not for an audience or for reaction, but for reasons that stayed locked within their own minds. Even when a piece appeared unique, like the person layering rust into delicate loops and heating it until it cracked, no one stopped to look. No one said anything.

  And in the midst of that alienation, he saw something else.

  It was a quiet moment, but Iven realized then that it had all likely been done before. Further down the corridor, he had seen a similar distorted sculpture, abandoned and half-covered in light. It was made by the same person, only slightly different from the sculpture of the spine torn figure.

  The city had not reduced itself to art. It had expanded beyond it, deeming it already complete. Or rather, it had accepted that art was nothing more than a cycle. The new became old. The old reemerged as new. The process spiraled away with its innovation, leaving nothing but rediscovery and imitations.

  Iven thought of all the time granted to this civilization, and what remained only being self-expression and self-satisfaction, fragments carried forward by the human instinct to create.

  Millions of years had passed within this bottled civilization. Time had layered itself over every school of form, every technique and metaphor. It continued until the library of Babel, once infinite in theory, had quietly exhausted itself.

  Nothing felt like uncharted waters anymore.

  From that imagined library, he pictured the people building a tower, their purpose shedding their wants for progress, and even for glory, for the simple habit of ascent. A tower to pierce the heavens and sit beside god. And yet, as the tower reached its summit, he saw heaven for what it was.

  A room already emptied of questions.

  Everything worth receiving had already scattered across the scaffolding. Beyond those fleeting moments of grip and effort, the shared glances between those who carried stones, the brief suspensions of breath as the next handhold appeared, they had transformed long before they stepped onto the summit. Change had fused with their motion, soaking into the mortar of every level. Heaven, in the end, received them only as a surface. In the end, it did not descend to meet them.

  By late morning, the weight of this thought had coiled into the architecture of his posture. He found Calis near the base of the spiral lifts. A thin interface coiled around her wrist, shifting glyphs in rhythm with her pulse.

  No greeting passed between them.

  “I think I’ve seen enough of this world,” he said tiredly.

  She turned, slowly. Her eyes traveled across his face with the expression of someone measuring the consequence of a certain action. The delay that followed contained no gentleness.

  “You haven’t,” she said.

  Her voice landed like a line drawn through wet ink.

  “Even your tone retracts. You’re trying to convince yourself, and that illusion requires more effort than the truth.”

  He didn’t respond. His silence answered her suspicion.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “You see enough,” she repeated, “because you mistake containment for completion.”

  He tilted his head slightly, a motion more defensive than curious.

  “I’ve seen enough for my world,” he said.

  Her expression sharpened.

  “That’s the boundary, then?”

  Her interface dimmed at her side. She dismissed it with a blink and faced him fully.

  “You say as if this place must conform to your scale of measurement. As if the portion you can name defines the whole.”

  He stood motionless, his thoughts churning at her accusation.

  “You don’t even know my name,” she said eventually.

  His mouth opened, half-formed into a question, before she continued.

  “You call me Calis because it arranges itself neatly within the limits of your phonetics, because the syllables bend easily across your tongue. The name was chosen for its symmetry against your language’s framework.”

  He asked quietly, “Then what is it?”

  Her gaze remained level.

  “Do you write your name or do you say your name?”

  “...Write, usually.”

  Her hand lifted halfway, then lowered, as if resisting the impulse to draw something in the air.

  “If I were to give it a written form it would fill a page that could never be turned. The symbols would stretch along multiple axes, folding syntax into meaning with recursive symbolism. You would see diagrams rather than letters, references stacked across cultural matrices you have never parsed. Every segment would contain an argument, while every argument would imply its opposite. It would take you months to read a sentence, years to translate a clause.”

  He narrowed his eyes slightly. “Then why not show me?”

  “Because you would try to finish it,” she said. “Then give up, already convince you that you had seen the whole.”

  He lowered his gaze, the admission forming beneath his tongue before dissolving.

  “You shouldn’t know it,” she continued. “People like us are not meant to settle. That's what life is.

  I won’t be here when you go, and you’ll step forward convinced the story has reached closure. That idea will preserve your ability to leave.”

  She stepped to the side, leaving a small space between them.

  “If I told you my name, you’d begin to imagine you could stay. You would imagine this world could be known, then your own would shrink in your memory. It would lose resolution, and you’d begin to measure yourself by a language that wasn’t meant for your frame.”

  She pointed upward, toward the spiraling glass above.

  “You are leaving soon. But it isn't a tragedy.”

  Her eyes flicked once toward the mural halls. Then beyond it, fixed on the point where the halls abandoned perspective and dissolved into a gradient of architecture and light. The space folded inward there, as though the structure had grown tired of definition. Her fingers twitched once at her side, subtly, like they rotated the memory of a tool once held and forgotten. She turned slowly.

  “Have you left this quarter?”

  The question shaped itself like a key slipped into a lock already built for it. Just a pressure placed against silence to see if it gave way.

  Iven’s posture shifted, no longer loose. He lifted his eyes toward the layered sky above the spiral lifts and answered with restraint. “The atrium. The display quadrants. The museum’s upper levels. My room…”

  She blinked, her lids closing with the same rhythm as the rotating irrigation towers in the outer gardens.

  “You’ve entered two.”

  She stepped past him without waiting for clarification. Her voice followed. “There are thousands.”

  The number dropped into his chest like sediment falling through deep water. He felt no need to apologize.

  “I’ve seen nothing,” he admitted.

  She turned her shoulder just enough to imply direction. “Then follow me.”

  They moved across a causeway that no longer resembled stone or concrete. It was made of thin strands of light, woven into something that felt solid only while stepped on. The surface gave a faint warmth underfoot, like sunlit tile, while the path curved gently. Every few steps, the direction shifted just enough to force awareness. Corners did not meet at clean angles, and no two edges stayed the same for long. It felt like walking through a building that kept changing its mind, as if the laws holding it together were being rewritten with each footfall.

  Their route led them past suspended vaults with glass that never reflected, through intersections where sound canceled itself before arriving, into rooms that inhaled rather than echoed. What had once resembled corridors now widened into limbs of a structure that might have once held unity but had since split apart by decision. Curves collapsed into angles and reformed as openings. Surfaces folded into themselves as if the walls were swallowing their own certainty.

  One building loomed ahead, its exterior neither inviting nor repelling. It appeared at first like a broken mechanism, its facade bearing seams that curved without joining. Columns supported nothing, while stairwells led into shadows.

  Calis approached it, her hand pressing into the seam where two pieces of material argued over direction. The surface unfolded, unwrapping the entrance like fabric pulled from a wound.

  Inside, the ground receded immediately. The ceiling expanded as the floor sloped downward. It wasn’t steep, but was constant, like a corridor pulling itself into its own reflection. As they walked, the walls dropped away and revealed something vast.

  What he had assumed was a chamber opened into an immense atrium. Circular, tiered, and sunken, it carved into the shape of a spiral buried into the earth. The air thickened, like the atmosphere knew to hold still here.

  Each level unfurled like a ribbon of stone, stacked in concentric rings that led toward a central basin. On every ring, hundreds of pods had been set into the ground, arranged with such consistency that their alignment erased all sense of scale.

  The pods, softly elliptical and casings transparent, glowed with colorless light. Within each, a figure rested. Their positions differed slightly, but all appeared locked in a rhythm of absence. Their chests were still while their limbs lay loose.

  Their eyes remained closed. Peaceful, as if returning to a womb.

  Iven stepped further in. There were no wires nor mechanical frames, at least none that were visible. Yet nothing about them suggested lifelessness.

  He traced his gaze across the tiers. The bodies filled the space: a hall of sleep, a cathedral of pause, a preservation of thought too dense to dissolve. The entire chamber held its own weather as light diffused in a way that refused sharpness, and air moved as if unwilling to wake the resting.

  He walked the perimeter of the first ring, his steps absorbed by the floor, each footfall erased before the next could land. These capsules resembled seeds arranged in ritual as he descended, until he slowed beside one pod. An elder figure with palms folded gently across the chest, their face relaxed into an expression that carried neither peace nor longing.

  “What are they for?” he whispered.

  Calis’s profile etched against the layered descent of the chamber. The ambient light refracted against her skin without casting a shadow, as if the room refused to mark presence.

  “This is where they go,” she said, “when this world fails to arrange itself into something livable.”

  Her voice was only in observation, like a researcher describing a chemical reaction she had watched too many times to fear.

  “They lay there to enter others.”

  He looked again at the pods, their gentle glow diffusing across the floor like mist trapped inside glass. None flickered nor stirred. The figures within remained poised, as if paused between one thought and the next.

  “Each one,” she continued, “experiences a different place. A world within the code.”

  She stepped forward, brushing her fingers against the seam of a capsule. The surface did not ripple, and accepted her touch without interaction.

  “Some of these worlds run parallel to ours. Some branch off from probabilities so narrow they could fit inside a single gesture. Others were seeded from stories. Half-finished ones, often. Narratives that broke their authors but survived through time.”

  She gestured broadly, her eyes drifting across the upper tiers. “There are simulations sculpted by machines, entire ecosystems run on recursive logic. Some are fractured civilizations, modeled down to the friction in their economic exchanges. Others are nothing but motion and sound, created for those who’ve forgotten how to think in language.”

  Her tone shifted, a trace of humor bleeding in.

  “A few still run old fantasies. Kingdoms with blade-wielders and god-riddled deserts. Cities that float just above oceans and break apart once every thousand years.”

  He turned toward her. “Do they remember who they are?”

  “Some request to forget,” she said. “They sign out of continuity, voluntarily cutting the line between what they were and what they now inhabit. The system obliges, and memory becomes an optional parameter.”

  She stepped down to the next ring, and the pods continued, another tier of silent minds adrift in chosen realms.

  “None of them return, because they find something in those layers that this place never managed to offer.”

  He looked across the vast spiral once more. Every tier felt like a preserved choice, each pod an exhale that refused to end.

  “This is where those who cannot interpret their world come to rewrite the question.”

  Calis smiled faintly, an edge forming at the corner of her mouth.

  “Fantasy,” she laughed. “Of course it would come to this. Even in a civilization that rewrote the scaffolding of suffering and pulled gravity to their will, people still prefer dragons.”

  Her gaze met his again. “They retreat to rules that shift to their liking, lovers inhabiting a world where they were always destined to meet.

  To magic that doesn’t require itself to be explained, so that ignorance could be a form of bliss.

  To stories that close when the last page turns, so that they could begin another.”

  She didn’t laugh aloud, but the shape of it hovered in her throat.

  “It’s strange,” she said, “how often we return to the very illusions we once considered survival.”

  The spiral stretched out before him, an archive of unshared worlds.

  The silence passed again. This time, it did not ask to be broken.