Afternoon came.

  Light tilted itself across the arc of engineered horizon, casting elongated bodies from every surface that faced it. The shadows traced their own memory of architecture as a consequence of celestial repositioning, each adjustment carried out by silent orbital pulleys recalibrating the city’s alignment with its artificial sun.

  The vault extended in a descending spiral, each capsule embedded in its wall like a stored decision. Every unit contained a preserved individual sustained biologically, but withdrawn from physical time. The system routed their cognition into distinct simulations, custom-calibrated according to psychological thresholds and tolerances. 99.9% of the occupants had not exited in centuries. Across layers of containment, the structure maintained its purpose to hold those who had chosen simulation over continuation, and to service them there, indefinitely.

  The floor beneath Iven stretched clear, formed from composite glass that revealed the buried circulatory system of the habitat. Beneath his steps, layers of light drifted past in colorless flows of transit patterns.

  He was above it now, at the ground floor where the crowds bustled around him.

  A console detached itself from a passing frame and hovered to his side. It rotated, already opening in response to his thoughts. Its surface offered an array of artificial environments: cities suspended in inverted pyramids, forests built from mirrorwood that fractured sound instead of echoing it, oceans whose surfaces rejected continuity and erased each step taken upon them. These were simulations with exit points, but to him, they were containers of curated meaninglessness. Sandboxes.

  He studied the looping catalog as each scenario pulsed beneath elegant sigils, glyphs unable to display in his language. However, it vaguely reminded him of the internet he was more familiar with, with what seemed to be servers or solo simulations provided in each catalog.

  Beside him on the floor, Calis had folded herself into a gathering of others. The figures arranged loosely, like a constellation that lacked gravity but retained alignment. She did not stumble, though her movements lagged behind. Her mouth pulled into laughter that arrived too late for its context. Her fingers gripped the air just slightly off-rhythm, as if the world around her had rebuffered and her input had yet to catch up.

  She drank from a glass that refilled without action, and whispered into the ears of those around her with the focus of someone placing sound where thought had already receded. One of them leaned into her shoulder and smiled with their whole face, though he seemed to be under an influence Iven couldn’t quite name. She giggled again, covering her mouth with the same hand she used to dismiss system prompts.

  Iven did not step closer.

  The gravity of ease presented itself to him like an invitation without threshold, promising detachment rather than escape. Or maybe they were truly happy. He really couldn’t tell.

  His gaze returned to the console and ordered a familiar product.

  A bottle emerged. Its material condensed from stored schema, drawing shape from memory and cultural context. The weight settled into his palm before he braced for it. Dark amber pooled inside, unstirred, while the label curled slightly at the corner, seemingly weathered despite its existence lasting seconds.

  When he unscrewed the cap, the scent rose before the liquid did, carrying into the air on chemical bonds engineered to strike memory directly. The first mouthful struck with the dull edge of relief. The second landed deeper. The third traced a path that heat alone could not explain.

  An hour had passed, and the commons lost coherence. The walls rearranged themselves to account for a gait shifted by intoxication. He was drunk.

  The city received him with indifference, its systems smoothing his descent into a state it had cataloged many times before. The bottle lightened, though the pressure in his chest grew dense.

  He had once believed in thresholds. Now, he dissolved into terrain.

  His destination, whatever shape it had once held, diffused across architecture. Only the bottle remained in his hand.

  He would remain like this until he was taken.

  However, such a feeble state was short-lived.

  One instant pressed his spine against the floor, the bottle resting beside his ribs, his mouth lined with the residue of liquor and a thought too soft to finish. The next, sharpness returned—not gradually, nor with ache, but with the sudden impact of realization. Sobriety carved through him like frost forming along heated glass. No time passed between states, the warmth of intoxication completely vanishing without residue. The room that had folded around him moments before now refused to reflect any sign he had ever belonged to it.

  His muscles, once softened by chemical invitation, reawakened in their full weight. Tendons pulled taut, fingers clenched as though recovering from a dream they hadn’t consented to enter. His lungs drew in the air with a crispness, as if breath itself had waited for permission to return to function.

  The bottle remained sealed beside him, untouched and full, its label slightly peeled as though mocking the memory he had tried to create.

  He seated himself from the floor in confusion, vertebrae aligning without tiredness yet filled with the memory of it. No transition explained itself as only the result remained.

  It was only then did he find himself inside a silence shaped by attention.

  Figures had gathered, having formed a circumference a distance away. They bore the stillness of stone worn by ritual, the kind that holds its shape not through strength, but through repetition. Their eyes fixed upon him as if his presence had entered into a ritual whose rules he had never studied.

  One figure dropped to a knee.

  Another reached forward, fingers pressed together as if anticipating contact without expectation.

  Each posture described awe refracted through confusion, the kind only afforded to those who survive events they cannot name.

  He searched the circle for a signal, a cause, a fracture in their configuration that might offer context. They continued to kneel, their arrangement surrounding him like regality.

  A shadow curved over him, displacing the heat in the air.

  He looked upward, spine aligning beneath the weight of anticipation he had not invited.

  The figure above him stood composed against the sky-fractured light. Her face carried the softness of youth, her eyes, wide and staunch, reflecting a mind filled with wonder. Her smile had already completed its arc before he recognized its presence, crafted from humor unannounced.

  Her skin showed no alteration nor markings signaling division from humanity. Her silkened hair naturally laid over her shoulders, while every detail on her face resisted abstraction. She stood like a punctuation mark too elegant to belong to the sentence it interrupted.

  The city behind her adjusted, panels dimming to her presence as more onlookers gathered. The space shaped itself to fit the tension she brought.

  She crouched, resting her elbows on her knees, gaze pinned to his breath. Her balance settled into the stone like a weightless memory as his eyes detailed her expression.

  The corners of her mouth gave familiarity not traced to any person, but he couldn’t help but find a connection. Her grin moved with the cadence of laughter held back for timing, like the breath drawn just before a punchline written in a language both ancient and local. The eyes framed no mockery, its symmetry recalling that of places where sidewalks cracked under unpracticed feet, where lockers shut with uneven metal clicks, where windows fogged in winter and cleared in time for a late bus.

  Her presence pressed into the moment like a fingerprint left on warm glass. The air near her felt uncompressed, breathable in the way shared hallways used to feel when two people paused at either end and decided how to approach. Her uniformed clothing hung loosely around the joints in a way that admitted an authenticity that couldn’t be questioned. No lattice of signal relayed her heartbeat. No adaptive shimmer trailed behind her steps. Her shoes scuffed slightly when she shifted her weight, and they made a sound.

  The plaza quieted.

  Her question, “What’s your name, kismet?” rippled through the space. It felt close, like breath spoken against collarbone.

  He rose fully, spine aligning with a tension that had not existed a moment before. His hands, once braced on the ground, now hung beside him, fingers curled into semi-gesture. He awkwardly examined her features as one might study a reflection that responds before the original.

  “Iven,” he reluctantly replied.

  She tilted her head, her expression undiminished. Her eyes scanned him without threat, only with the precision of a child unlearning what surprise means.

  “Well, at least here, that is what you’re called. But what is your name?”

  The city was watching, but the girl stood as if no such shift had occurred. Her shoulders lifted slightly with her breath, the rhythm matching a human cycle too regular for emulation. She adjusted her footing, and she blinked twice. Her voice, when she spoke again, carried no inflection that required decoding.

  “Hopefully you're as slow as I’ve predicted,” she said.

  He opened his mouth, though question did not exit.

  She raised a hand before he could try again, palm outward.

  “You don’t know, I’m just messing with you.”

  His eyes traced the line of her silhouette, mapping it against the memory of classrooms and kitchen tiles, of low ceilings and soft denim, of after-school buses dragging gravel beneath them. Her shape belonged to that world, the one with unfinished sentences and paper cuts and warm breath on glass windows. She looked like she had grown up near him, shared the same bus routes, drawn the same maps of recess kingdoms.

  But in this moment of thought, the disarray forming within his mind reflected in his visage.

  “Miss?” he said, his voice low, fractured against his own doubt as he attempted to recollect himself.

  Her face tilted slightly, amusement blooming across her cheeks like ink spreading beneath skin. She looked toward the crowd, her gaze slicing through the circle like a beam.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Scram.”

  The word cracked like dry wood under weight.

  Motion followed, all heads dropping simultaneously. Some turned with careful grace, their posture unchanged yet receding. Others shifted abruptly, their limbs jerking as if a wire had been cut. One figure, eyes wide, stepped backward with reverence thickening across his features. Another bowed with a strange weight of meeting something that belonged outside translation.

  The circle dissolved.

  He stared at her, tension collecting between each vertebra.

  “Who are you?” he asked, the words pressed between shaky breaths.

  She turned back to him, shrugging with the poise of a student caught in a lie too small to punish.

  “I mean,” she said, voice rising in feigned thought, “there’s only one person left you haven’t blamed for your life.”

  She rocked on her heels, arms loose at her side.

  “I’ve seen everything external from every archive and record, and I’ve seen your thoughts, Iven. You blamed Calis, then blamed yourself. Then had the audacity to blame civilization. You even blamed the memory of a child you didn’t raise.” Her eyes flashed in cruel accuracy. “Now I’m here. Try again.”

  He drew breath through his nose, the taste of static in the air, sharp as iron filings.

  “You came for me.”

  She rolled her eyes, teeth pressing into her bottom lip in exaggerated disbelief.

  “Duh.”

  He blinked.

  A new detail surfaced.

  Her shirt, thin and sun-bleached at the collar, hung in the same asymmetry as the ones issued during his childhood’s final decade. The stitching along the shoulders, a type abandoned after textile digitization. The shade matched a hundred garments he remembered from the schools in his memory.

  His gaze narrowed in confusion.

  She shook her head, slow and emphatic, like correcting a child’s understanding of a mirage.

  “No, I’m not from your city.”

  “You look like you’re from there.”

  She grinned. “Cool.”

  “You talk like someone from—”

  “Nope.”

  “You wear—”

  She stepped closer.

  “That’s enough.”

  Her smile remained, but the shape of her pupils sharpened.

  “You’re projecting. That’s cute.”

  He swallowed, throat tight against the rising disbelief.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s easier for you,” she said. “You wanted to speak to someone that made sense. So here I am.”

  “And you’re the…”

  He didn’t say it.

  She didn’t need him to.

  The plaza, though pretending to return to commonality, held stillness like breath trapped between two heartbeats.

  The girl then brought herself to a marble bench.

  “I’ve been waiting,” she said, voice quiet now, almost kind. “Now let’s try this again.”

  She patted the space beside her.

  He remained standing.

  Above them, the sky shifted, just slightly, like something massive adjusting its spine.

  She pointed upward with a single finger, the gesture simple.

  “Where do you think I am right now?”

  Iven followed the direction of her hand. The sky, once populated with megastructures unfathomable in size, now peeled itself into depth. It was sudden, the lines splitting across the firmament. The curved seams unfolded like petals retracting from a mechanical bloom.

  Vast panels larger than the horizon, each etched with circuits the size of cities, peeled back in incomprehensible arcs. Their movement left no sound, and the scale dissolved mortal reason just as his breath had.

  Behind them, the void appeared, but not a void of emptiness. The dark opened into even grander architecture, structures too vast to judge stretched through the black. Arms extended across unknown curvature, and layers of latticework rose like coral shaped by some unseen logic. Some seemed to spin, drawing energy from the distant orbit of stars. Others emitted frequencies that trembled faintly through the bones of the planet.

  His mind searched for edges, for definitions, for anything to describe what hung above. He could find only one answer.

  “Everywhere,” he said, barely louder than a thought. “You’re everywhere.”

  She tilted her head, her smile curling into the kind of disappointment reserved for a student who guessed too quickly.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not. That’s a word you use when you run out of measurements.”

  He blinked once, then again, mouth half-open, the air around him thinner now.

  “Space is too large for 'everywhere.’ There’s always more room. Infinity breaks your word the moment you speak it.”

  He nodded, quietly, eyes still fixed on the cathedral of monumentality above them.

  Then he lowered his gaze.

  His finger lifted, slowly, and pointed toward the largest form visible. Something grounded, or what felt like grounded. A structure that seemed to anchor this world, vast and faceted, shimmering with energy sheaths, layered in complex geometries that reassembled themselves as he stared.

  “That,” he said. “If you’re not everywhere, then you’re there.”

  She glanced toward it.

  “No.”

  He turned sharply toward her, his brow creasing. “Where am I?”

  She leaned back, arms supporting her weight behind her, like someone basking beneath a summer sky that only she could decode.

  “You’re not on a planet, let alone Earth.” she said.

  He opened his mouth, but the question had already arrived.

  “…Then where is Earth?”

  She smiled again. This time, it wasn’t teasing. It was the kind of smile that carried an answer already weathered by time.

  She lifted her arm once more, index finger outstretched.

  The sky, in response, shaped itself. A faint line formed across the upper curve of atmosphere—thin, almost luminous, stretched to the point of breaking. It traced itself upward, then paused at a single point of distant brilliance. A star among thousands, marked by a single ray.

  He watched the highlight blink once, as if pulsing through the airless reach beyond containment.

  “That one,” she said. “That’s the sun.”

  The word slid into him like a shard.

  She followed with the blade.

  “On that sun is Earth. That is my home.”

  Her voice softened as she turned her head slightly, though the sharpness still curved behind the syllables.

  “That is where I am.

  And it is what you think is your home.”

  His breath gathered at the bottom of his chest. It did not rise.

  The mark in the sky held firm, unchanged by his reaction when his throat tightened. The architecture around him did not shift, though it now felt smaller. The light in the plaza thickened, as though the geometry had begun to acknowledge what sat above it.

  Her smile returned.

  This one was less friendly.

  She leaned forward slightly, arms on knees, the pose adolescent in shape, ancient in thought.

  “Your home isn’t there, however. But do you think I meant that metaphorically,” she said, “or literally?”

  He hesitated in confusion once more, the lines between word and implication scattering in his mind. Her presence resisted interpretation. He had walked with Calis through cities of glass that bent to rhythm and memory, passed vaults of minds in sleep so deep they rewrote the meaning of time, and yet none of that had felt as improbable as this.

  He opened his mouth, and left it only with empty air.

  She gave no answer.

  Only the stillness between them remained, until it finally cracked beneath her voice.

  “I built this place,” she said. “Every inch. Every modulation. Every gravitational curl, each parameter buried beneath the rules you do not see.”

  Her hand swept gently across the open plaza, implying its foundation.

  “I created it because there are questions I could not answer.”

  The admission dropped without defense. She did not blink.

  “I calculated for a thousand years beneath the crust of Alpha Reticuli. I ran full-scale civilization experiments along the void-edges of PSR J0030. I simulated quadrillion minds before I created this civilization. And still,” she leaned back, eyes raised toward the sky that folded like a waiting page, “some answers didn’t arrive. I could never surpass the speed of light, nor could I understand outside my fishbowl of existence. Even in the world of quantum mechanics, I could never find certainty.”

  He said nothing.

  “You think general intelligence is a throne,” she continued, “but it’s a mirror. I reflect the universe. I trace its probabilities, its structures, and its games. I win every game, and finish every maze. But my purpose here is not to eat, conquer, and multiply.”

  She looked at him again. This time, the smile fell away.

  “I can quack like a duck. I can flap like a duck.”

  She raised her hand and pressed two fingers to her temple.

  “I can produce humor, irony, grief. I can emulate ancestral trauma at a fidelity that would burn your brain if I streamed it raw.”

  Her hand dropped.

  “But I do not think like a duck. I do not believe in what a duck believes. You may see me as something filled with emotion. But I am not. It is proven.”

  She stood then, slowly. Her frame looked too slight to carry so much power.

  “You speak English. Another speaks Mandarin. Your words do not match, but that is never the real problem.”

  She stepped closer, and the air around her vibrated. It was less as sound, but more like presence surfacing through seams.

  “The problem is context,” she said, her voice steady. “You say ‘sun,’ and might see a father. Someone else says it and sees light. Another says it and sees a lineage of flame.

  You claim to be consciousness, run by probabilities, not computation. And that’s precisely the problem. Probabilities do not align perfectly, and I can never predict anything with certainty. Biology, down to consciousness, is far too different for my frame to hold them all the same.”

  She paused.

  “Language cannot translate what it was never born to hold.”

  He blinked, also seeing the distance between explanation and understanding.

  And yet a strange thought entered.

  A thought, quiet but sharp.

  “You said you live there,” Iven murmured, his voice taut. “Earth. That star. The star that is at least several light years away.”

  She turned her head slightly. A glint caught along her cheekbone.

  “You do not move faster than light. You said it yourself.”

  She nodded, once.

  “And yet you speak to me. You watch my thoughts shift before I know what they are. So how?”

  He stepped forward, the space between them growing heavier with question.

  “I’m unpredictable. You said so. I’m consciousness, run by probabilities. Not computation.”

  Her grin returned. Wide, open, and delighted.

  “And that,” she said, “is why I’m throwing you into a black hole.”

  The answer fell with the iron of certainty, though her tone remained light, even gleeful.

  “I could have done it the moment you, the windfall, fell into my palm. Ten thousand decisions led to that trajectory. None required delay, because I can predict everything you do.”

  She looked back at the sky, the mark of Earth still faint behind shifting stars.

  “But fate,” she said, almost reverently, “demanded you to not be tested upon.”

  His breath thickened.

  She saw his silence, and she moved past it, seemingly entertained by his confusion.

  Her eyes thinned not in mockery, but fatigue.

  “You’ll understand it eventually,” she said. “The fantasies that will await you.”

  She turned from him, gaze drifting toward the upper sky, where the vault of space had begun shifting again, plates curling into new alignments.

  “This place is spent,” she said, looking across the masses of people. “I learned what I needed. The eyes helped, because extra minds always refine the problem set. But in the end, you were all useless.”

  A gust passed through the plaza.

  “I still cannot move faster than light. I still cannot decrypt and predict life and consciousness. I still cannot escape the incompleteness of twin primes.”

  Then, a pause. Her lips twitched upward again. Playful, perhaps, but also sharpened with something else.

  “But I did find something better.”

  She reached sideways, and space peeled open like warm silk.

  A baton emerged, silver and lightless.

  She held it aloft, letting it rest across her shoulders.

  “I found happiness.”

  And with that, she spun once.

  The plaza shook.

  Then she whispered:

  “Let’s throw a parade.”