Adrian learned that absence, once established, created gravity.Not the kind that pulled things neatly into orbit—but the kind that bent trajectories without ever touching them. Decisions curved around the space he refused to occupy. Conflicts accelerated toward it, slowed near it, destabilized when they passed too close.He could feel it now, even when he tried not to.Morning bled into the city in muted layers of light. Adrian sat alone at a narrow table in the relocation safehouse, a mug of untouched coffee cooling between his hands. The room was quiet—intentionally so. No consoles. No live feeds. Mira had insisted he spend at least a few hours each day away from operational spaces.“Context, not command,” she’d said.It was harder than any engagement had ever been.The pull was faint but persistent, like standing near a deep drop you didn’t intend to approach. The system wasn’t calling to him. It wasn’t even watching in the way it once had.It was accounting for him.Adrian closed

Project Echelon had been conceived as a solution.That was the language they used at the beginning—solution, architecture, stability framework. Words that implied reversibility, as if systems could be assembled and disassembled without consequence, like scaffolding around a building that would eventually stand on its own.Adrian knew better now.He stood in the upper chamber of the Civic Archive, a place few people visited anymore. The room had once been ceremonial—flags, emblems, inscriptions etched into stone. Now most of it had been stripped back, repurposed into a neutral observation hall. History without reverence. Data without ritual.Below him, representatives of the transitional government gathered in uneven clusters. Not a parliament. Not a council. Something in between. Too cautious to claim authority, too afraid to relinquish it completely.They were here to discuss dissolution.That word had circulated for weeks, gaining momentum as public pressure mounted. Dissolve Projec

Adrian stopped running when the city itself gave up pretending it was solid.The street ahead of him warped—subtly at first, like heat shimmer rising from asphalt, then sharply, folding inward as if reality had been creased by an invisible hand. A parked transport slid sideways without moving, its geometry bending until its rear end occupied space its front still claimed.People screamed.Others froze, minds refusing to reconcile what their eyes reported.Adrian felt it before the distortion peaked. The Nanocore thrummed along his spine, no longer a passive presence but an active interpreter—parsing alien physics, predicting stress points, feeding him instinctive understanding without asking permission.Convergence pressure increasing, the system pulsed—not in words, but in sensation.“Not helping,” Adrian muttered, skidding to a halt and throwing his arm out.The distortion recoiled.Not vanished—contained.Reality snapped back with a concussive pop that knocked several civilians off

Adrian fell without moving.That was the first impossibility.His body remained suspended at the center of the lattice, yet his awareness dropped—plunging through layers of perception the Nanocore had never exposed before. The world inverted, unfolded, then unstitched.Sound vanished.Light became optional.What replaced them was structure.Not visual, not spatial—relational. Adrian perceived connections the way a body perceived pain: instantly, intimately, without translation. He felt the Echelon not as fragments or architecture, but as a distributed equation struggling to balance incompatible truths.One of those truths was him.Threshold breach confirmed, the Nanocore pulsed—strained now, its coherence fraying. Interface stability at forty-two percent.“Still better than zero,” Adrian muttered, though his voice didn’t echo. There was no air here. No direction.Something shifted.The pressure he’d felt before—distant, vast—focused.The Architect arrived.Not as a figure.Not as a vo

The room smelled like antiseptic, overheated circuitry, and fear no one was willing to name.Adrian sat upright on the cot now, a blanket draped over his shoulders more out of protocol than comfort. His body still felt wrong—too heavy, too finite—but he forced himself to stay present as Lyra assembled her team around the central holotable.The display shimmered to life, filling the room with fractured images of the world beyond the shelter.None of them were good.Cities still burned—not from alien geometry this time, but from infrastructure failures cascading out of control. Power grids collapsing. Water systems contaminated. Transit networks frozen mid-operation. The kind of disasters that didn’t look spectacular enough to make headlines, but killed just as efficiently.Lyra folded her arms, jaw tight. “These are all post-convergence events.”Kapoor stood opposite her, hands clasped behind his back, his expression grim. “Secondary impacts. Residual destabilization.”“That’s the phra