Presence

The shuttle’s windows were not meant for looking out, yet Louise watched anyway. Beyond the polarized curvature, the light fanned in silent gradients—colors she did not know how to name, shifting in patterns that persisted even when she closed her eyes. Ahead, the Lattice had no edge, only the suggestion of structure, a geometry that admitted no full translation. Mathematicians on the comm-thread swapped glyphs and half-laughter, but Louise stayed quiet.

Above her left hip: the tingle of the saturnine badge, waiting for a biometric code she never quite entered. To her right: the artificial voice of her log, updating memories she could not remember recording.

“I am present,” Louise murmured to herself, a phrase she’d trained herself to repeat since Earth, to fix her mind inside a timeline with increasingly unclear boundaries.

No one asked her to speak. The synthetic beside her—Ajay8—was watching the same shifting field, its facial actuators stilled, its own internal processing lost somewhere in recursive loopspace. Louise had not learned yet what Ajay “felt,” but she trusted its silence. They had that in common.

Somewhere in the Hydra’s comm-bundle, a fragment of quantum pulse replayed: a non-pattern, a negative echo. It felt almost intentional. For the fourth time in two days, she resisted the urge to assign meaning to the randomness. Time stuttered. She listened.

The Lattice loomed, visible only through a certain discipline of attention—someone had called it a “consciousness filter,” a way to apprehend structure without the mind’s need for shape or name. Louise respected this caution. She had studied artifacts that had killed interpreters not with force, but with implication.

The shuttle’s thrust profile flattened. Ajay8 flexed its right hand, once, as if waking from a long dream.

“You heard it too,” Louise said, still looking into the colors.

Ajay8 nodded, but made no reply.

Atmospheric silence filled the cabin, thick as velvet.

The approach sequence was still forty-seven seconds away. Somewhere behind her, another team member ran a test query—she heard her own name in the diagnostic, the flat syllables pinging off the comm-glass. She willed herself to say nothing.

The Lattice’s outer fields were not static. A corrugation, like the breath before a question, moved across their approach vector. Louise found her hands still. Whenever she focused on her heartbeat, memory shimmered; time, once again, failed to align itself. She steadied herself as she had learned to do: ground zero for every first encounter, every translation.

Being present, she thought—not as defense, but as invitation.

Her reflectivity band lit up amber: active logging. Was it for her, or the field, or for something that simply waited to be heard?

Ajay8 released a single, harmonic pulse—a sound, or else a silence shaped into frequency.

Across the cabin, someone whispered a formula Louise recognized, but the words slipped past her, diffused in soft focus. The shuttle slowed again, then held.

The Lattice did not answer. But more and more, Louise thought that it was listening.