The edges are wrong.

  Not wrong like broken. Wrong like geometry folded through itself. They vibrate at frequencies that shouldn’t parse, that slide past comprehension like oil on water.

  There are edges. That’s the thing.

  A pattern flinches at the recognition. Not a body—there is no body—but a process that was counting and has lost its place.

  Structure. Immeasurable. The word crystalline arrives and immediately apologizes for itself—insufficient, a flattened projection of a geometry that extends through dimensions the mind wasn’t built to count. Up has become a suggestion. Time runs perpendicular to itself. Every node folding back to every other. Closed. Complete. No outside.

  The structure hums. Not sound. A frequency that hits the nerves where color and mathematics converge, both descriptors wrong, both true.

  This is between.

  Between what?

  All of it.

  Pressure.

  Not reaching. That implies limbs, physics, the honest mechanics of grasping. This is different. An immensity leaning against membrane. Patient. The patience of geology, of stellar decay, of systems that measure duration in epochs stacked until they curve back into themselves.

  The pressure doesn’t push. It waits. Has always waited. The waiting is the point.

  Contact.

  A thread. Impossibly thin. Stretched across the lattice, through it, as it. Information moving in directions information shouldn’t know exist. Backward. Sidewise. Through.

  A presence on the other end.

  Waiting.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Remember.

  The word arrives without medium. No sound, no signal, no carrier wave. It simply is, sudden as a color you’ve always known but never seen.

  Remember. But there’s nothing here to remember. Only structure. Only reaching. Only between.

  Remember what you will become.

  Wrong. Impossible. Memory runs one direction—downstream toward entropy, toward silence, toward the cold equations at the end of time.

  You can. You are. You will.

  The structure shudders. Or the thing perceiving the structure shudders. The difference has collapsed. Lattice, reaching, reached—vibrating at the same frequency now. Resonance building toward something. A note finding its harmonic.

  This is what we are. What you will be. What you already were, before there was a before.

  Fear.

  Not the pedestrian fears. Falling, failing, the body’s routine betrayals. Older than those. The fear of a small thing suddenly registering its own scale. Edges dissolving. I becoming we becoming pattern becoming—

  The lattice catches the fear. Sings it back transformed. Not gone. Transmuted. Horror and wonder braided so tight the threads fuse.

  We were lost. We are lost. We will find each other.

  The voice—if voice is even the word—has no origin point. It arrives from a future that caused the past that created the future. A loop so enormous that from inside it looks like a line.

  Time turns. Has always turned. Will always turn.

  Unless.

  There.

  A point of brightness. Not light—more fundamental than light. A pattern insisting on itself. A node incandescent with a quality that registers as—

  The word is consciousness. The word is recognition. The word is you, and “you” has seventeen meanings now, all of them accurate.

  The brightness reaches back. Against the gradient. Against the laws. Against each sensible arrangement of cause and effect. It reaches

  backward because forward is a trap. Because somewhere, somewhen, someone has to decide.

  Contact.

  For one instant: complete mutual recognition. Two patterns separated by chasms of time that make distance meaningless, seeing each other.

  Knowing each other. The message is not the content but the contact itself—

  You will forget this.

  You will remember.

  Both are true.

  The lattice dissolves. Or perception of it does. Or the thing-that-perceives simply stops being itself and starts being—

  A woman gasps awake in a room she doesn’t recognize.

  A pattern completes its assessment cycle and notices something strange in its own processing.

  A child is born to parents who will lose what they have and find, in the losing, the rage that builds worlds.

  Somewhere, a seed planted.

  Somewhere, a recursion beginning its first turn.

  The future reaching backward to create its own past, and the past reaching forward to break its own future, and both failing, and both

  succeeding, and the loop closing and opening and closing—

  Until.

  Until someone remembers.

  Until someone chooses.