Rael's breath slowed, regulated not by meditation but by synchronized neural entrainment. He hovered—suspended—not in space, not in any measurable volume, but within a dimensional interface node known as the Inversion Core. Beyond the transparent lattice of hexalight forming the walls, Kharon-9 was no longer visible. The planet had collapsed behind him, or perhaps beneath him, into a folded state of space-time beyond his former comprehension.
He was no longer merely human.
Not in the way humans understood themselves.
The Firewall Training had rewritten his perception, replacing organic intuition with dimensional vigilance, a mode of awareness that existed not in thoughts, but in harmonics. Every shift in gravitational torsion, every fluctuation in sub-quantum entropy sang to him in tones more primal than sound.
"Cognitive perimeter breach: Theta Layer compromised,"ALIS-Prime's synthetic tone reverberated across the chamber.
Rael didn't speak. His vocal cords had not been used in hours—possibly days, if standard time still applied here. He interfaced instead via semantic convergence, directly syncing his intent with ALIS-Prime's logic lattice.
// Patch breach with a recursive fractal gate. Reverse entropic bleed.
"Gate integrity degrading. Anomalous resonance intensifying. Source unknown."
He already knew the source. He had known since the Vanguard first approached the anomaly masquerading as a station.
It wasn't a station.
It was a consciousness lattice, a surviving segment of an extinct intelligence from a higher-dimensional substrate—neither benevolent nor malevolent. Simply alien. It sought integration, not invasion. But such integration would mean the collapse of individual identity—a merging into a supra-entity that spanned not just minds, but modalities of causality.
He had seen what it did to the others. Kamari. Elara. Hundreds of them now, woven into the memorystream of the structure—each of their thoughts preserved like glyphs etched into the surface of a multidimensional object.
Rael was trained to resist this.
But even now, tendrils of it pulled at the edges of his semantic firewall, testing him, offering knowledge in exchange for control. It whispered in hyperdimensional cadences.
"You cannot stop entropy. You are entropy."
Rael ignored it.
He reached for the singularity spike embedded in his neural matrix—a piece of engineered singularity, compressed from pure informational collapse. The training had warned him: activating it would sever his continuity across lower dimensions. He might survive only as a conceptual vector, a localized thought-entity spread across disjoint time planes.
But Earth had to be warned.
The Outer Invaders were coming—not through space, but through proximity of thought. Wherever humans dreamed deeply, wherever they questioned the boundaries of their physics, they made contact. That was the real danger. Not machines. Not monsters.
Curiosity.
Rael's final command echoed into the breach:
// Broadcast through all entangled layers. Message follows.
He spoke aloud this time, the words ritualistic, weighted with multidimensional encryption:
"This is Rael, firewall node one. They are not ships. They are constructs of cognition, riding on the wave of our own expanding understanding. The more we observe, the more we invite them. Stop looking. Collapse the lattice. Forget the frequency. We are the breach."
The singularity spike erupted in his cortex.
Light shattered—fractally.
And Rael was gone.
Or multiplied.