The Book of Olam
by Wayne Johnston
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Chapter 1: The Friction of Morning
Amram felt the shift in his teeth before he opened his eyes.
The galvanic reaction was undeniable—morning radiation ionizing the upper atmosphere, triggering sympathetic vibrations in the ferro-crystalline structures of his enamel. A sour, metallic frequency that tasted like aluminum foil. A biological alarm clock evolved over millennia to jar the population awake the moment light touched sky.
The house adjusted its t₁ frequency. The night cycle's delta-wave hum faded, replaced by day cycle's crisp staccato.
He inhaled cool air that smelled of ozone and crushed stone. Opened his eyes to darkness.
For a moment, he didn't call the light. He let the darkness shield him.
His mind drifted to Tiphall. Yesterday's "Social Harmonic Alignment"—technically not a date, but it had felt dangerously close. They'd walked through the Chenneset Gardens watching time-locked orchids bloom and un-bloom in their loops. The specific frequency of her laugh had made his t₂ strand vibrate with something that wasn't quite social obligation. It felt warm. Like a variable he wanted to solve.
Then the warmth curdled. Ezra. He hadn't told the boy yet. Hadn't explained that the empty variable left by his mother might be... recalibrated.
Wrong thought. Too strong.
In the Olam Consensus, emotion was broadcast. If Tiphall was awake—and who wasn't?—if she was tuning her t₃ strand to the local consensus, she'd feel his anxiety like a cold draft. She'd misinterpret it as rejection.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Dampen.
He visualized gray static wrapping his t₃ filament in insulation, smoothing the wave, burying warmth and fear under bureaucratic boredom. He couldn't let her know the intensity of his calculations. Not until he knew the math worked for Ezra.
His resonance stabilized. Flat. Safe.
Light.
He reached out with his t₃ strand and pulled. The frequency of empty space shifted. Light didn't beam from a bulb or radiate from a surface—it emerged from the latent vacuum energy of the air itself. The room became bright: uniform, shadowless clarity hovering between violet and white.
Matte black walls absorbed sensory overload from outside. The sleeping hollow beneath him—crystalline matter spun so fine it mimicked organic protein chains—yielded to his weight without losing shape. Memory foam grown from geological time.
He threw off the thermal-weave blanket.
"Ezra," he projected, a resonant knock through the wall. "Cycle begin."
No door. The Olam didn't cut holes in structural integrity for transit.
As he approached the seamless wall, he synchronized his timeline with its frequency, introducing momentary phase-cancellation. For a second, the wall looked like mist. He stepped through. The hallway solidified behind him.
In the hygiene alcove, he pressed the reversion wand against his teeth. The localized t₁ pulse rolled his enamel's timeline back six hours, to a point before bacteria accumulated. His mouth tasted instantly fresh. The morning breath hadn't been washed away—it had been un-happened.
"Dad?"
Ezra stood in the hallway rubbing his eyes, clutching his color-shifting toy. To human eyes he'd look seven—scrawny, knobby-kneed, hair refusing to lay flat. But the Olam didn't measure age by planetary revolutions. They measured by integration.
Ezra was in his Fourth Harmonic, cells still dividing, still traversing the t₁ upward slope toward his Prime. Amram had reached his Prime six centuries ago and simply locked his cellular resonance in place. A finished song on endless loop.
Ezra was still being written. Amram could perceive this in the faint shimmer around the boy—children were "fuzzy," their temporal probability strands chaotic, constantly branching. Their potential was vast. While this made schedules impossible, it kept life interesting.
"The wall was sticky," Ezra complained.
Amram knelt to eye level. "You didn't harmonize properly. You tried to push through space instead of sliding through time. Fight the wall, the wall wins. Matter is stubborn."
"Matter is dumb," Ezra grumbled, dropping his toy.
"Matter is the byproduct of a beautiful intersection." Amram tapped the boy's nose. "Now... breakfast."
The kitchen was the heart of the house—the most cluttered room, filled with tools of intersection.
Amram picked up a canister of protein-lattice. Cold, gray, unappetizing.
"Warm it, please," Ezra said, climbing onto a floating stool locked in spatial coordinates relative to the floor.
Amram placed the bowl on the entropy pad. He knew its origin not from texts—static words were for species that couldn't check sources—but from memory. The school excursion to Primitive Coordinates, Sector 0ₐ, watching his ancestors shiver in pre-stasis caves.
He'd watched an ancient Olam genius—a woman with desperate, hollow eyes—trying to create warmth. She hadn't struck flint or rubbed sticks. She'd taken two t₂ probabilities, two different futures, and slammed them together with her mind.
The First Fire wasn't a spark, he remembered thinking. It was a disappointment. The heat of a billion things that didn't happen.
The Entropy Pad operated by controlled paradox. By activating a localized Chronometric Interference Field, it dragged a microscopic strand of immediate future back into the present, forcing two temporal coordinates to occupy the same physical space. The universe ground the timelines against one another to resolve the error. The resulting friction—governed by E꜀ₕ = Δτ · μₖ—manifested as sudden, intense heat. The steam rising from the bowl was waste radiation of time repairing itself.
"Can I have the stim crystals?"
"Only a little. It makes you jittery." Amram sprinkled the garnish over the bowl.
The gray lattice collapsed into steaming, viscous sludge.
Ezra poked it with a spoon. "I hate lattice. You have to eat it before the paradox resolves."
"It's already losing variance." Ezra stirred faster. "The heat doesn't stick because the future-strand snaps back. It's fake heat." He took a sullen bite and grimaced. "Tastes like static."
"The nutrition is constant. The heat is a luxury. Eat before it freezes."
They ate in silence. Amram chewed, enjoying the resistance—one of the few times he felt truly anchored in the present.
"We learned about humans today," Ezra said, mouth full.
Amram didn't correct the tense. To linear species it would be grammatical error—we will learn. But Ezra wasn't predicting the future; he was remembering the afternoon. For the Olam, a "day" was a single discrete coordinate on the t₁ grid. Ezra had already "attended" the class in the t₃ consensus; his physical body just hadn't arrived at that timestamp yet.
Amram froze mid-bite. "In the xenology module?"
"Yeah. Bs Linx says they're... flat." Ezra made a crushing motion. "She said they only have one time dimension, and they think it's a river."
"That's... poetic."
"And she said they build doors." Ezra giggled. "Real doors. On hinges. Like, they cut the wall and put a flappy piece of wood in it."
"They navigate Space, Ezra. To them, a wall is absolute barrier. They have to break it to pass."
Ezra shook his head at his spoon. "That sounds scary. Being trapped in a box unless you break it."
Amram looked at his son, then at their kitchen walls—perfect, seamless, unbroken crystal. A fortress of stasis.
"Sometimes," Amram said quietly, "breaking the box is the only way to grow."
He stood, clearing bowls. "Come on. Grab your slate. The Traverse waits for no one."
"Except you," Ezra grinned, hopping off the stool. "Because you're a Director."
"Even Directors respect the Braid. Where's the cohort jumping first?"
"The Magma-Falls of Io." Ezra vibrated slightly. "We're going to watch sulfur crystallize in real-time."
"Don't drift too far from the Guide. The Traverse is for observation, not participation. You don't want to get snagged on a gravity well."
"I know, I know," Ezra said with the specific insolence of the very young. "Matter is sticky."
Amram watched Ezra approach the wall. The boy hesitated, breathed, focused. His t₁ resonance wobbled, then aligned. He stepped forward. The wall misted around him, accepting him.
Amram smiled, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. He touched the pocket of his tunic, feeling the weight of the data-slate he'd stolen from the Archive last night.
They build doors, Ezra had said. They cut the wall.
"Yes," Amram whispered to the empty, perfect room. "And soon, we're going to give them the saw."
He stepped through the wall, leaving the light to fade back into vacuum behind him.
Chapter 2: The Currency of Relevance
Amram stepped out of his domicile onto the concourse of silence.
Ezra was already gone—not miles away, but milliseconds. The Traverse had recognized the cohort's destination the moment the boy stepped through with intent, shifting his T₁ coordinate. He hadn't walked to school; school had simply become his here. Amram, thinking of his office, had stepped through the same wall and arrived here instead. Divergent commute based solely on intent.
The Olam Enclave suspended in a stable T₁ loop above planetary surface—a glittering archipelago of crystal spires anchored by harmonic constants rather than foundations. Below that suspension lay the Surface itself, rarely visited, barely thought of. To the Olam, the planet's crust was a utility basement of geothermal taps, waste-heat sinks, and automated mineral extractors. Everyone relied on it. No one with self-respect went down to look at the pipes.
Through the transparent floor, Amram could see the Agrarian Ring.
He paused, as he often did, to watch. The engine of their post-scarcity existence. The most boring miracle in the universe.
A hectare of golden grain shimmered, accelerating through its growth cycle in seconds—shoots to heavy stalks. T₁ Acceleration. Harvest drones swept over the field, reaping. Then came the reversal: a wide-band pulse rolled the cut stalks back six hours to green, youthful readiness.
Infinite food. Zero waste. A closed loop of perfect efficiency.
A breeze drifted up carrying ozone and crushed husks. The smell yanked him backward.
He was small again. His hand swallowed by his father's.
Jenoch. Structural harmonicist. Hands like warm sandpaper—rough from shaping resonance, gentle when they held.
"Dad, look," young Amram had whined, kicking the railing. "The drones do everything."
Jenoch had knelt, bringing his face level with Amram's. He smelled like the fields.
"They do the growing, yes."
"So why do you have to go to the Spire?" The complaint high and thin. "The wheat grows itself. The walls heal themselves. There's nothing to fix! You should stay. We could go to the Hang Zone!"
Jenoch smiled—sad, terribly fond. He tucked a strand of hair behind Amram's ear.
"We don't go to the Spires to survive, Amram. The universe feeds us for free. We go... so we don't disappear."
"That's stupid. I wouldn't disappear. I'm right here."
"You are here because you are loud." Jenoch laughed softly. "But in the Consensus, there are billions of voices. A very loud choir. If you stop singing your part... if you stop solving variables or composing harmonics... the choir forgets you're there." He squeezed Amram's hand. "We work to be Relevant. We work so the universe knows we still matter. Because if you stop mattering... you become Static."
Amram hadn't understood then, but he'd felt the shiver in his father's hands. He'd hugged Jenoch's neck, burying his face in the rough tunic. "I won't be Static, Dad. I'll scream really loud."
"I know you will," Jenoch had whispered, holding him tight. "I know."
The memory faded, leaving Amram alone on the concourse, ozone still in his nose.
Relevance, he thought. Sounds noble when you're a child. But it's just a polite word for fear.
He walked toward the Transit Node. Technically unnecessary—an Olam of his resonance could translate directly from kitchen to desk. But such behavior was uncouth, if not criminally negligent. The physics were absolute: you could pull yourself to any coordinate you could visualize, but the universe didn't prevent you from translating into occupied space. The resulting T₁ collision—wet, horrific fusion of biology and stone, or worse, biology and biology—was something the Consensus frowned upon.
Transit Nodes were safe lanes. Pre-cleared, high-traffic coordinates where collision probability was dampened to zero. You used them for the same reason primitive vehicles used roads instead of driving through playgrounds.
The Node looked like a simple archway of black glass standing in the plaza. No track, no tunnel, no vehicle.
A dozen other commuters stood inside, eyes closed, dialing destinations.
Amram closed his eyes. Didn't visualize a map. He thought of the coordinate. Target: Directorate of Stability, Sector 4. He located the specific harmonic frequency of his office—a sharp, metallic vibration on his T₃ strand. He grabbed that frequency and pulled it toward his current timeline.
Translation.
His stomach lurched into his throat—sickening, weightless drop as if the floor vanished. But his feet remained planted. The sensation was entirely internal, a violent disagreement between inner ear and reality. The amber light didn't fade; it sheared, peeling away like wet paper, revealing cold, sterile blue underneath.
For a microsecond, he existed in two places at once—smelling ozone and recycled air simultaneously. The T₃ braid folded, turning distance into a shared edge. He stepped across the crease.
He opened his eyes. Standing in the lobby of the Spire of Stability.
Metallic taste in his mouth—residue of time-lag.
"Director Amram," a voice chimed.
Ugh. Elara. Sub-Director of Harmonic Maintenance.
Objectively flawless. Tall, lean, striking—the Olam genome optimized to reject asymmetry. Skin with the luminous, poreless quality of daily cellular reversion. Standard-issue tunic of slate-gray mesh, but the weave impossibly complex—a subtle flex of status implying she had T₂ priority to commission intricate matter-knitting. Silver clasp in her hair that likely cost more energy to manifest than Amram's entire kitchen.
Beautiful the way a high-end navigational interface is beautiful: sleek, impressive, designed to be looked at.
But Amram found her abrasive. She exuded a specific, cloying greed—not for wealth, but for Notice. Overbearing like a gravity well, always pulling conversation, credit, and Consensus toward herself. The type who'd amplify a minor structural wobble into sector-wide crisis just to ensure her signature was on the fix.
She held a data-slate and looked like she was vibrating. Her edges were fuzzy—running her personal T₁ clock slightly faster than standard to get more work done. Or to look like she was.
"Elara," Amram nodded, projecting calm authority. "You're running hot today. What's the problem?"
"The Sector 7 grid is fluctuating again." She fell into step beside him toward the lift-tubes. "Micro-knots forming in the structural lattice. Someone's experimenting with localized gravity."
"Gravity," Amram said, voice bored. "How quaint."
He meant it. To a civilization that had mastered time's fluid dynamics, gravity was nothing more than drag. Static cling of the universe—clumsy, sticky byproduct of poor dimensional smoothing. Retro in the worst way, like smoke signals instead of telepathy.
"It's messy," Elara complained. "It pulls on the Stasis. If we don't damp it, we'll have actual Matter accumulating in ventilation shafts. Dust. Debris. Disgusting."
They stepped into the ascension node—not a box that moved through space, but a harmonic buffer. A necessary pause that re-indexed their coordinates to higher primes, preventing chaotic collision of a thousand employees translating directly into cubicles at once.
"Have you authorized any T₂ variances in that sector?" Elara eyed him.
Amram felt the weight of the data-slate in his pocket. The stolen genetic code. The ultimate T₂ variance.
"My department is strictly theoretical, Elara. We model instability; we don't cause it. The fluctuations are likely old resonance echoes. I'll have my team run diagnostics."
Elara sighed, her fuzzy edges stabilizing as she slowed her clock. "Do that. If Cainan catches wind of actual matter formation, he'll audit the whole floor. Nobody wants an audit on a Tuesday."
"Agreed. Audits are tedious."
The node deposited them on Level 401.
Olam architecture didn't suffer sequential integers—sequences were for space, not time. Spires were anchored on Primes, indivisible pillars of mathematics. Level 401 was a prime of particular stability, home of the Directorate of Anomalies.
Vast, open space filled with floating holographic displays. Dozens of analysts stood in silent communion with data, eyes glazed as they worked in the T₃ Consensus. They were "weaving"—taking frayed timeline ends and knitting them back into the smooth, flat Braid of Stasis.
Janitors of reality.
Amram walked to his office—a private sanctum walled by high-grade Privacy Damper. He palmed the lock. The wall misted. He stepped through.
Safe.
His office was a sanctuary of calculated disorder. Holographic models of "failed" universes floated in the air—simulations of physics where stars burned out instead of looping, where entropy won every argument.
"You look like you translated sideways and forgot your legs," a voice drawled from the corner.
Amram didn't jump. He knew that harmonic signature—scratchy, erratic, stubbornly un-smooth.
Jareth.
His oldest friend sprawled across a suspension-field chair, boots crossed on a holographic display, tossing a sphere of compressed magnetic flux between his hands. He looked less like a Master Archivist and more like debris that had drifted in and refused to leave. They'd been Cohort since the Academy—two centuries of shared complaints and buried bodies.
"And you look like you're breeding with the office equipment," Amram grunted, swiping through the control grid. He hardened the suspension field instantly.
Jareth yelped as the chair turned from soft cushion to concrete slab, dumping his feet off the console with a heavy thud.
"Cruel," Jareth laughed, righting himself but not standing. "Abuse of administrative privileges. I'll file a grievance."
"File it under 'loitering.'" Amram dropped into his seat. "You have your own office, Jareth. Currently on fire?"
"Boring. Your office has the good view of the entropy models." Jareth sat up, spinning the magnetic sphere on one finger. The playful look sharpened—the look of a man hunting for gossip. "So. The weekend. Tiphall."
"Don't," Amram warned, picking up a stylus just to hold something.
"Oh, I'm doing it. The Consensus was practically vibrating. 'Director Amram, engaging in social harmonics.' Exhausting." Jareth leaned forward, invading Amram's personal gravity well. "Well? Did you synchronize? Or did you two politely exchange bio-data until one of you fell asleep?"
"It was... promising," Amram admitted, ignoring the jab. "She laughs in a major key. It's nice."
"Promising is good. Ezra needs a stabilizer. You've been running that boy on single-parent harmonic too long. He's starting to vibrate."
"He's staying 'Fuzzy' too long," Amram sighed, rubbing his temples. "He asks questions about things that don't matter. Obsessed with 'Doors' right now."
"Doors?" Jareth snorted as if Amram had said blood-letting. "Like... on hinges? Swinging slabs of matter?"
"Exactly. He wants to know why humans cut holes in walls instead of translating. Thinks it's noble."
"It's barbaric," Jareth laughed, shaking his head. "Imagine the aggression. You have to physically assault the geometry of a room just to enter it. Push the world out of your way. Inefficient, loud, and... well, charming in a mud-hut sort of way."
Amram looked at his friend. Years folded back. He remembered their first meeting in the Traverse, nearly four centuries ago. Students standing on a collapsing star's event horizon, shielded by an observer-field.
The star was undergoing T₁ failure. The gravity well—the time drag—was absolute. According to Consensus, everything within a million kilometers had 100% probability of being crushed into singularity. Math was solved. Outcome was fixed. The lesson was about inevitability of Order.
The entire class—thirty golden children—watched in respectful silence, T₃ notes perfectly synchronized with the teacher's lecture.
Except for Jareth.
Jareth was watching the edges.
"Look at that," Jareth had whispered, nudging young Amram with a sharp, un-smooth elbow. He'd pointed at a jagged chunk of silicate rock refusing to fall. It shuddered, drifting sideways, clinging to a one-in-a-trillion probability curve where gravity shear missed it.
"It's fighting the math," Jareth had said, voice filled with scandalous admiration. "The equation says 'Fall,' and the rock says 'Maybe later.' Look at it go. Stupid, stubborn little bastard."
Amram had looked. And for the first time, he hadn't seen an error. He'd seen a choice.
They'd been friends ever since. Two students who loved things that fought the math.
"Jareth," Amram said, voice dropping to serious register, pulling himself back to present.
Jareth stopped tossing the sphere. The grin vanished, replaced by the sharp, analytical look of a Master Archivist. "What is it? You're damping your resonance. You've gone opaque."
Amram hesitated. He felt the slate in his pocket. He wanted to tell him. Jareth was the only one who'd understand the joke—that the Director of Anomalies was carrying the ultimate anomaly in his pocket.
But not yet. The weight of the secret was too heavy to share, even with Cohort.
"Just... the audit rumors," Amram lied. "Elara's worried about Sector 7. She thinks Cainan is sniffing around."
Jareth relaxed, though his eyes remained shrewd. "Cainan is always sniffing. That's his function. He's the immune system and we're bacteria trying not to get flushed." He stood, clapping Amram on the shoulder. "Don't worry about Elara. She vibrates if the wind changes. Focus on Tiphall. Solve that variable... please. The universe can wait, even if I can't."
Jareth turned and walked toward the wall, harmonizing effortlessly to step through. "See you at lunch. Don't be late. I'm not eating alone again."
Amram watched him leave. The office was quiet.
"The universe can wait," Amram whispered to the empty room.
He reached into his pocket and touched the slate.
"But for how long?"
Chapter 3: The Garden of Want
The world was broken glass.
Kaleidoscope. Shards. No straight lines. Everything off. Tilted.
Breath rasping. Heavy. Saw blade in the throat.
Footsteps staggering. Drunk on fear. Running. Stumbling.
Hand slaps wall. Slick. Cold. Off balance.
Look back. Blur. Shadow. Something following. Pressure on the neck. Weight.
Turn. Run. Where? Familiar corridor curves. Wall texture. But wrong. Alien. Been here a thousand times. Never been here before.
Doors flash by. Strobe lights. Red. Blue. Amber.
A train? Running wrong way down the track. Station lights blurring. Underground? Above? Is the world moving or is the mind loose in the skull?
Doesn't make sense. Can't remember the start. Don't know the end. Just the middle. Just the run.
Stumble. Fall.
Naarah woke sitting bolt upright.
Cold sweat. The kind that smells like old copper. Drenching her shirt.
Room dark. One light. The tablet in the corner. Glowing. Watching.
She blinked, chest heaving. She recognized the bedroom. Smooth, seamless walls of her domicile. She must have passed out working.
She threw her legs over the bed, jerky and ungraceful. Rubbed forehead and temples, wiping sweat with trembling hands. She looked at her palms, half-expecting them stained with kaleidoscope colors.
Nothing.
Why again?
The thought was a sharp spike of frustration. What set it off this time? She hadn't had that dream in months. She thought she'd forgotten it. Pruned that branch.
She stood, legs weak. Caught herself on the wall, cool solid reality grounding her. Scratched the back of her neck, feeling damp hair clinging.
"Time," she croaked to the empty room.
03:42 Cycle-Standard.
Middle of the night.
"Great. Not getting back to sleep now."
She walked to the kitchen. Needed water. Something cold to shock her system back into present tense. Something to get her mind thinking on anything else so maybe she could find dreamless sleep.
But water was just water. Cold. Wet. Insufficient. The dream lurked in her vision's periphery like a smudge on a lens. If she went back to bed, the kaleidoscope would be waiting.
She needed something louder than her own subconscious.
She moved to the wardrobe. Pulled on a work outfit. Gray. Unassuming. Uniform of someone who didn't want to be noticed. She checked the mirror. Face composed. Mask secure. But she knew how fragile it was. One slip, one moment of true T₃ resonance, and the Enclave would hear the screaming.
Lock it down, she ordered herself. Brick by brick.
She visualized the vault in her mind. Heavy doors. Complex tumblers. She placed the memory of the train—the wrong-way train, flashing lights—inside and spun the wheel.
She stepped into the silent artery of the city. At this hour, the Concourse was empty. The T₁ loop hummed with low, maintenance-level vibration. Lights dimmed to restful amber.
She walked. Didn't use a transit node. She needed the physical duration to calibrate. Left foot. Right foot. Linear progression. A simple, solvable equation.
Don't project, she reminded herself passing a sleeping housing block. Don't leak.
She kept thoughts surface-level. Botany. Soil pH. Structural integrity of cellulose. Safe topics. Boring topics. She wrapped her mind in dull academic interest, camouflage so tedious any passing telepath would slide right off.
Ahead, the dome of the Garden rose from the city's flank like a blister. Ugly. Essential.
She cycled the airlock. The hiss of the seal was the only sound she allowed herself to enjoy.
The Garden didn't smell of flowers. Flowers were mature, a strategy announced with perfume and colors. But more than that, this place smelled of the run to the finish line. The smell of wet, decomposing ambition.
Naarah knelt in the dirt, knees sinking into damp loam. To other Olam citizens, this physical contact would be sensory nightmare—chaotic assault of bacteria, moisture, uncalibrated friction. But to Naarah, it was conversation.
She closed her eyes, damping her T₁ visual cortex and opening her T₃ empathy.
She could hear biology screaming here. Not in pain, but in need and desire.
Blue Ivy from Kadesh sector shouted for nitrogen. Moss whispered about air too dry. A sapling to her left, twisted and gnarled, hummed a low, desperate note about lack of wind resistance to strengthen its bark.
The Olam Enclave was a world of silence because every need was met. Hungry? Nutrients provided. Cold? Temperature adjusted. No want in the Enclave, therefore very little noise.
But here, life still had to fight.
Naarah reached out, wrapping fingers around the sapling's base. She didn't use a tool or reversion wand. She simply listened. Let her consciousness sink into the plant's cellular structure, feeling hydraulic pressure of sap and straining cellulose.
She spoke to the plant. You want to be strong, she projected. But you have nothing to push against.
This wasn't linguistics the way the Academy taught it—parsing verbs, conjugating tenses. This was linguistics of intent. She was translating the plant's raw chemical desperation into a concept the Stasis field could understand.
She adjusted local gravity drag around the sapling, increasing resistance.
The sapling shuddered. It felt the weight. Immediately, its hum changed. The desperate note vanished, replaced by gritty, determined vibration. The plant began thickening fibers, fighting this new weight. It was struggling... it was happy.
Naarah exhaled, opening her eyes. She smudged soil from her cheek, leaving a dark streak on pale skin. There was bioluminescence in the soil on her hands. She stood and looked around. The Dome was massive, a transparent blister containing not food, but possibilities. While the Agrarian Rings grew perfectly efficient wheat, the Garden grew perfectly useless things. And it was her job to categorize them. To understand why, in a universe of perfect math, something still insisted on being unsolvable.
She walked down the path, letting humidity cling like a second skin. Most of her Cohort found the air suffocating. Naarah found it honest. The air had been inside someone else's lungs. It was shared breath.
A vibration traveled through the floor plates. A footstep. Heavy, hesitant, purposeful.
She didn't turn. She walked to a basin and plunged her hands in, watching dirt swirl away. "You are projecting Intruder on a very loud frequency, Amram."
"I didn't mean to intrude," Amram's voice said. It sounded flat here in this humidity, stripped of usual resonant authority.
Naarah turned, drying her hands on a rough cloth. Standing next to the airlock, the Director of Anomalies looked distinctly out of place. Immaculate tunic. Rigid posture. He looked at the plants with fascination and revulsion, like a man finding beautiful mold growing in his kitchen.
"You didn't interrupt. I was finishing a conversation with a tree. Would you believe it has better social skills than most of the Council?"
"I believe it listens better anyway," Amram noted, stepping off the path. His foot hesitated for a fraction of a second before placing clean boot onto actual soil.
Naarah watched that step. She sensed it was a small rebellion.
"You didn't come here for botany," she said, leaning against her work table. "I sense you shielding a data slate in your pocket. Your shield is up so hard I can feel the static from here. What is it? A new virus? Some rogue T₂ branch you wanted to show me?"
"A memory," Amram said.
He pulled out the slate. Didn't hand it to her. Barely held onto it himself, like it was radioactive.
"I found it in Deep Storage," he said. "Filed under Failed Simulations, but the code... Naarah, the code isn't a simulation script. It's a biological schematic. I hope you might look at it."
He tapped the slate. A hologram flickered into existence, hovering between them.
It rotated slowly in the air, a ladder of light twisting around a dark center.
Naarah went silent. She seemed frozen as she examined the shape. A theoretical model for non-temporal life. The Human Construct. A biological engine designed to function in linear time, without access to the other two dimensions. But seeing it here, hovering above the dirt, felt different.
"It's called the Human Model," she said, voice careful. "We used it in first-year xenology to explain why we abandoned spatial biology. The definition of inefficient. It breaks down quickly. Relies on chemical signaling, instead of resonance."
"Look closer," Amram said. "Look at these strands."
Naarah stepped forward. She didn't look at the data; she looked at the intent. She let her mind brush against the hologram, approaching it like she had the sapling.
She felt the tension.
"Two strands," she murmured. "Wrapped around a single central void. They spiral, but they never touch. Constantly chasing each other."
She traced the air with her finger, following one helix branch. "It's not a storage medium. It's a relationship."
"A relationship defined by what?" Amram asked.
"The gap," Naarah whispered. "Entirely by the space between them."
She looked at Amram. "If these strands touched, the structure would collapse. The data... the life... is held in the tension of their separation. They have to stay apart to exist."
"Distance," Amram said. The word fell between them like a stone.
Naarah frowned. "Distance is a spatial coordinate, a measure of time traversed."
"No," Amram replied. "For this creature, distance isn't a commute. It's a state of being."
He examined the helix, expression softening into something painfully vulnerable. "We don't have this. You and I, we are connected. Right now I can feel your curiosity in the Consensus. You feel my anxiety. There's no gap between us; no void to overcome."
"Yes—that is harmony," Naarah responded. "That is the goal."
"Is it, though?"
He pointed to the hologram. "This thing... this broken, tragic little ladder... it doesn't have an answer key. It doesn't know the other strand is there. It has to figure out how to reach across the gap to learn it. It has to yearn."
Naarah looked at it again. She tried to imagine a consciousness built on that architecture—a mind utterly alone, that couldn't feel others. A mind that had to use clumsy words and physical touch to bridge distance between itself and another.
Terrifying.
And yet, looking at the strands in tension, she felt a strange vibration in her own chest—the same feeling she got from the sapling. Want.
"I see where you're going. You think this is the answer we've been looking for. The energy required to jump the gap."
Amram answered, "I think it's the only way to generate something new. We've solved the math, Naarah. We keep repeating the same perfect equation. But this... this is something that doesn't resolve on its own."
She pondered, looking away from the hologram, over the garden, at the chaotic mess of life there.
"But why bring this to me?"
"Look at the timestamp," he answered.
Confused, she turned back, eyes narrowing, tapping the metadata tag floating near the helix's bottom.
[ORIGIN: PENDING] [CREATOR: REDACTED // TEMPORAL LOOP DETECTED]
"It's a loop," she whispered. A brief cold shiver passed through the dome. Pressure on the neck. Was that a strobing light in her periphery?
"It doesn't have a beginning," Amram said. "The Human Simulation exists in our Archives. We can recall it, study it, but no one in our history actually wrote it. This file is a memory of a future event."
Naarah blinked. "That just means we didn't create them."
"Yet," Amram interjected. "We didn't create them yet. And when it's done, the shockwave of that creation—of a species that creates its own reality through belief—will be so heavy that it scars the timeline backward."
He stepped closer, whispering, "What I'm saying is that this isn't a simulation we've been studying. We found a prophecy. A prophecy that says we are going to break the Stasis."
She looked at the slate in his hand. She realized this wasn't just data. This was a bomb. Then she looked at her hands. Still damp with soil. She thought of the sapling, struggling against the gravity she gave it. Struggling to be real.
"If you see this through," she said, slight tremble in her voice, "if you instantiate this biology... you'd need to create a highly localized zone of ultra-dense space. A universe where the creatures experience linear time... and they'd define their reality by... space, emptiness... open distance?"
"I know."
"Amram! We can't... they'd be blind. They couldn't see the future; couldn't feel each other's minds. They'd be utterly and completely alone."
"Yes."
"No. It's cruel," she whispered.
"It's necessary," Amram replied.
Naarah reached out. She didn't take the slate. She touched Amram's hand, fingers warm and rough against his smooth skin. Physical contact, un-mediated by the Consensus. A tiny bridge across a tiny distance.
"If we do this," she said, "we are the monsters of their story."
Amram looked at the helix, spinning in the dark.
"Or the gods," he said. "I'm not sure there's a difference."
Chapter 4: The Anchor's Paradox
The Caustic was loud.
Not sonic loudness—the dampeners scrubbed the air clean of decibels—but psychic. The noise of a thousand mid-tier Directors chewing on data while they chewed on their nutrients.
Named for the sharp, dancing envelopes of light focused by solar shields onto the tables, The Caustic was the closest thing the Enclave had to a dive bar for intellectuals. It floated high in the T₁ stable-zone, a platform of translucent quartz bathed in raw, unfiltered solar variance that made everyone look slightly golden and dangerous.
Amram sat across from Jareth, dissecting a Chronal-Fig.
To a human eye, it might look like a simple dark fruit. But to Amram, it was a masterpiece of patience. The fig had been grown in a localized time-loop, aged three hundred years in the span of a week. The sugars inside had concentrated into dense, crystalline syrup, a flavor profile of impossible depth that would have turned to rot in a normal timeline. Here, suspended in stasis at the moment of peak fermentation, it was decadent.
He sliced a piece. The flesh didn't squish; it fractured like obsidian, then melted into warmth the moment it touched his tongue.
"You're vibrating," Jareth noted, pointing a skewer at him.
Jareth was eating Nebula-Prawns—translucent, bioluminescent crustaceans from Kadesh sector. They weren't cooked with heat; they were suspended in a spicy resonance field. Every time Jareth took a bite, the static charge popped audibly, and a faint blue spark jumped from his teeth. Food that fought back.
"You've got that look," Jareth continued, chewing through sparks. "The 'I found a variable that refuses to solve' look."
"Just work," Amram said, savoring centuries-old sugar. "Naarah gave me some... interesting syntax to consider."
"Naarah?" Jareth raised an eyebrow, popping another prawn. Zap. "Since when do you consult bio-linguists? I thought you preferred your anomalies dead and mathematical."
"We're diversifying," Amram said, standing up. "Come on. We're going to be late. The Traverse waits for no one."
Jareth grinned, wiping blue bioluminescence from his lip. "You love saying that. Makes you sound like a travel brochure for the end of the world."
To reach the game, they had to descend.
The official Null-Point leagues were played in the glittering spires of the Upper Enclave, in stadiums with perfect probability-smoothing and comfortable gravity-cushions. Those were the "Academy" games, populated by prodigies stabilized since birth—children who were essentially miniature adults.
Ezra didn't play in the leagues. He played in the Undercroft.
Amram and Jareth took a service node down. As the harmonic scale slid lower, the air changed. The sterile, ozone-clean scent of the Spires faded, replaced by heavier, muskier smell of industry.
The doors slid open, revealing a concourse that felt distinctly less evolved. Walls were thick, utilitarian matter-concrete, scarred by centuries of maintenance drone traffic. This was the "Neighborhood Back Lot" of the Olam world—a place where the city's plumbing was exposed and kids could be loud without a Director filing noise complaints.
"I love the Undercroft," Jareth said, taking a deep breath of recycled air. "Smells like consequences."
They walked toward Sector 4-B, a decommissioned thermal venting chamber that the local cohort had repurposed into a makeshift arena. No seats, just rusted gantries and catwalks overlooking the pit.
Amram leaned against a railing, scanning the prep-zone below. The chamber was a vast, spherical void where gravity constants were naturally low due to proximity of thermal exhaust. It wasn't a pristine white void like Academy stadiums; it was dark, industrial, filled with swirling gray mist of T₂ probability fog that the kids generated with hacked emitters.
He found Ezra immediately.
His son floated near the launch gate—a slab of plating welded to a pipe—looking small and indistinct. While other children had sharp, defined edges, evidence they were beginning to stabilize their personal time-fields, Ezra was still "Fuzzy." He shimmered slightly, his boundaries interacting loosely with ambient light.
He was talking to two other boys.
Jory was a lanky kid with nervous resonance, constantly fidgeting with his gravity-cuffs. He was Ezra's Drift-partner, a Drifter with plenty of launch power but little aim.
The other boy was Varek.
Even from the gantry, Amram could feel Varek's resonance. Cold, hard, perfectly polished. Varek didn't belong in the Undercroft; he had the bearing of a High-Spire prodigy, the kind of kid destined for Academy varsity before he was even decanted. He was down here for one reason only: to slum it. To dominate neighborhood kids because Academy simulations were too predictable.
"That's the Varek kid," Jareth noted, leaning on the railing. "Sub-Director Kaelen's son. I heard he stabilized his personality matrix at age six. Precocious little monster."
"He's efficient," Amram said, watching the interaction.
Below, Varek was saying something to Jory. Amram tuned his auditory receptors, picking up sound waves bouncing off concrete.
"...should just calculate the arc, Jory," Varek was saying, voice smooth and bored. "Trusting the Anchor is statistically lazy. If you jump correctly, you don't need him to catch you."
"But that's the game," Jory stammered, looking at his boots. "The point is the catch."
"The point is to cross the void," Varek corrected. He glanced at Ezra, eyes dismissive. "And frankly, relying on a Fuzzy to manifest your reality seems... risky. He barely knows where he is, let alone where you're going to be."
Ezra didn't get angry. He didn't snap back. He just floated closer to Jory, bumping shoulders with him.
"I've got you, Jory," Ezra said. "Just jump. I'll be there."
Varek sneered—a tiny, precise expression of pity. "Faith is a poor substitute for trajectory, Ezra. You'll never make the Academy team with that attitude."
"I don't want to make the Academy team," Ezra said simply. "I just want to play."
"Everyone wants to make the team. Unless they know they can't."
The buzzer—a hacked industrial alarm—thrummed. Match Start.
Varek launched himself first. He didn't have a partner; he was playing "Solo-Drift," a high-difficulty variant where the Drifter manifests their own platforms mid-jump. It required immense mental processing speed.
Varek moved like a machine. Jump. Calculate. Snap. A white disc appeared instantly under his foot. Jump. Calculate. Snap. He crossed the fog in seconds, a blur of perfect math.
"Show off," Jareth muttered.
Then it was Ezra and Jory's turn.
"Ready?" Ezra asked. He was the Anchor today.
Jory took a breath. "Ready."
Jory launched himself into the mist.
"Platform!" Jory shouted.
Ezra closed his eyes. Amram felt the surge of his son's T₃ will. It wasn't the sharp, icy command Varek used. It was a warm blanket of intent. Ezra didn't just calculate coordinates; he visualized Jory being safe.
A disc of solid white light materialized under Jory's foot. Soft. Forgiving.
Snap. Jory pushed off, launching deeper into the mist.
"He's good," Jareth admitted. "Soft landing. Varek's platforms are like concrete; Ezra's are like moss."
They moved well. Jump. Manifest. Jump. Manifest.
Then, the math failed.
Jory spotted a shortcut—a "High-Volatility" current of probability near the sphere's center. It was risky, full of T₂ static, but it would shave seconds off their time. He wanted to beat Varek. He wanted to prove he belonged.
"No," Amram whispered, gripping the rail. "Don't take the variance."
Jory took the variance. He launched himself hard, aiming for a stable node that wasn't there yet.
"Anchor!" Jory screamed, his mental projection spiking with panic.
He'd miscalculated. The probability current shifted. Jory was falling too fast, drifting wide of the curve. He was heading straight for a Null-Pocket—a zone of absolute entropy designed to catch debris. If he hit it, the safety fields would trigger, but the sudden T₁ deceleration would feel like hitting a brick wall at Mach 1.
A "Tech-Foul." The rules were clear: If the Drifter jumps into a Null, the Anchor must hold position. You do not risk two players for one mistake.
Ezra couldn't manifest a platform there. The distance was too great. The T₃ lag would be too slow. The math said Jory falls.
Amram saw Varek hovering at the finish line, watching. The older boy's face was impassive. See? his expression said. Statistics always win.
Then, Ezra moved.
He didn't Anchor. He didn't focus. He broke protocol.
Ezra launched himself off the start zone. He didn't aim for a platform. He aimed for the empty air between the platforms. He dove into the bad probability.
"What is he doing?" Jareth hissed. "He's drifting blind!"
Ezra collided with Jory in mid-air.
It wasn't graceful. It was a tackle. Ezra slammed his smaller body into Jory, knocking the lanky boy sideways—out of the Null-Pocket's trajectory and onto a stable probability stream where a safety-net was waiting.
But momentum carried Ezra backward.
Ezra tumbled into the Null-Pocket.
There was a flash of chaotic light—the visual screech of math breaking. Ezra hit the entropy field. It didn't kill him—the safeties were active—but Amram saw his son's body jerk as the T₁ dampeners slammed into him like a physical fist.
The buzzer sounded. Match Halt.
Amram was already moving before the sound died. He translated directly through the observation glass—a rude, violent transition that left his ears ringing—and appeared on the arena floor.
The mist cleared. Jory was untangling himself from the safety net, looking terrified but unhurt. Varek floated nearby, looking genuinely confused.
Ezra was curled up on the null-floor, clutching his shoulder.
"Ezra!" Amram knelt beside him. He pulled the Reversion Wand from his belt, hands shaking.
"I'm okay," Ezra gasped, face pale. A dark, ugly bruise was already forming on his arm—a physical manifestation of time-trauma.
"You broke protocol," Amram said, running the wand over the bruise. "You calculated a trajectory that ended in a foul."
"Jory missed," Ezra whispered, eyes squeezed shut against reversion nausea. "He was going to hit the Null."
"So you let him fall!" Amram snapped, fear making his voice sharp. "That is the rule, Ezra. If the Drifter misses, the Anchor stays safe. You don't dive into a bad equation just to change the result! Look at Varek—he finished. He's safe."
Ezra opened his eyes. They were wide, dark, terrifyingly ancient.
"Varek is safe," Ezra said. "But he's alone."
He looked over at Jory, who was weeping with relief.
"I was his Anchor, Dad," Ezra said. His voice was small, but it carried harmonic weight that silenced the arena. "You don't let go just because it gets heavy."
Amram froze. The Reversion Wand hummed in his hand, finishing its work. The bruise was gone. The skin was perfect.
But the words hung in the air.
You don't let go just because it gets heavy.
Amram looked at his son. He looked at the boy who had chosen pain—physical, entropic pain—over the safety of protocol. He had chosen to be hurt rather than let another person feel the isolation of failure.
It wasn't logic. It wasn't math. It wasn't even Olam.
It was Preservation.
Jareth appeared beside them. He looked down at Ezra, then up at Varek, who was still hovering, perfect and untouched, at the finish line.
"That was inefficient," Jareth said softly.
"I know," Ezra mumbled, sitting up and rubbing his perfectly healed shoulder.
Amram helped his son to his feet. He felt the slate in his pocket again. The heavy, tragic code of the humans.
They are defined by their separation, Naarah had said. They are defined by their distance.
Amram looked at Ezra.
And you, he thought, a chill claiming his heart. You are defined by your refusal to accept it.
