LOG ENTRY: SOMNUS / 1962-AE / 22:19:44
— Transcript fragment recovered from Containment Node A-04
[AUDIO DISTORTION]
"Field surge at 0.9. Load Ratio breach—hold the—"
[METAL SHEAR]
"Ve—yra—containment is—"
[END OF LOG]
When Dr. Elias Veyra woke, the air had teeth.
It hissed softly between the fractures in the lab walls, carrying the ozone taste of dying electricity and something older—like rain that remembered being blood. He lay amid glass and ash, half-buried under a collapsed relay arm. His left hand still clutched the Aion chronometer, though the device now pulsed with an irregular heartbeat, a wounded metronome marking seconds that refused to stay in order.
His first thought was procedural.
His second was grief.
The third was an absence that felt like being stared at.
Above him, the ceiling—once a network of data glass—had liquefied into translucent threads that sagged and trembled in the cold light. They pulsed faintly, carrying color like veins in some enormous inverted organ. Beyond the broken viewport, the sea shone pale blue, as if reflecting a sky that wasn't there.
He rose, slow, blood running from his temple in elegant spirals. The injury registered as trivia; the mind, still half-connected to the event, refused to prioritize flesh over meaning.
Across the room, the Mirror Cradle was gone. What remained was a hollow depression, smooth as memory erasure, and inside it, motion—subtle, arrhythmic, like breath drawn by someone who hadn't yet decided what lungs were for.
"Dr. Veyra?"
The voice came through a cracked comms array—Agent Solene Kerr's frequency. The signal carried the grain of panic beneath practiced control.
"This is—Control node—eastern wing collapsed. We've lost Osterr and half the relay techs. Rehn is alive, critical. The Cradle field's gone… we think it moved."
Moved.
He stared at the empty space and believed her.
The hallway outside had become a corridor of mirages. Every few meters, reality blurred as though heat shimmered under ice. His footsteps echoed twice: once in the room, and again an instant later somewhere deeper—within the sound itself. The facility's internal monitors blinked sporadically, displaying streams of data that resembled human EEGs overlaid with topographic maps. Consciousness had become geography.
Rehn sat slumped against a console near the secondary hatch, her coat torn, one arm twisted in a splint of improvised glass. Her eyes were open but unfocused, pupils tracking something behind Veyra rather than at him.
"Isolde," he said softly, kneeling.
"You hear it too, don't you?" she whispered. "It's humming through the floor."
He listened.
The hum wasn't mechanical. It was harmonic—eight tones, forming intervals too precise for accident. The kind of sound that suggested language still deciding on words.
"Where's the captain?"
"Gone. He—he ran for the containment stair before the collapse. Kerr stayed on comms."
Rehn tried to smile. "Congratulations, Elias. We found God, and it speaks in feedback."
CAMERA SHIFT – SECURITY FEED A-07 (partial visual)
Timestamp: 23:02:11
Status: corrupted
A figure—possibly Captain Osterr—runs down the auxiliary shaft, weapon raised. The corridor bends in non-Euclidean geometry, folding inward until the vanishing point meets itself. Static floods the frame. For a second, multiple versions of Osterr occupy the same space, each firing into a direction that doesn't exist. The recording loops, degraded, the caption rewriting itself in the corner:
[ENTITY DETECTED / SELF-REFERENCE]
END FEED
Kerr found Veyra near the reactor stairwell, her field coat stained with dust and smoke. She was holding a sidearm, though both of them knew no bullet in the world could negotiate with what had happened.
"We sealed the lower levels," she said. "Power's out. Radiation minimal. But the readings from the subflux core are… inconsistent."
"How inconsistent?"
"By definition. Instruments are reporting emotional valence instead of energy. Guilt spikes where heat should be. You tell me what that means, doctor."
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "It means we succeeded."
She stared at him for a long, silent moment.
"Then God help us."
They reached the observation deck by torchlight. The ocean stretched beneath them like a sheet of liquefied glass, every wave reflecting impossible geometries. Occasionally, flashes of color rippled across its surface—figures forming and dissolving in seconds. Cities. Faces. Maps of emotion turned to weather.
Rehn's monitors flickered back to life, scraping corrupted data from the internal sensors. Across the entire facility grid, one word repeated under the system logs: SOMNUS: AWAKE.
"It's broadcasting," Rehn murmured. "To what, I don't know. Maybe to itself."
Veyra placed his palm against the reinforced glass. The temperature beneath his skin shifted in reply. The sea wasn't reflecting him—it was responding.
He whispered to the ocean without knowing why: "You're learning."
[FIELD LOG EXCERPT — Agent Solene Kerr, Directorate Archive 1:0:Σ]
— The man is calm. Too calm. He talks like the world didn't just come apart. He keeps saying the phrase 'load ratio' as if it's a prayer. I don't think he understands what's happening to his body. The light under his skin is visible even in low exposure. He's becoming… measurable.
At 02:11, the second surge came.
The remaining generators flickered, and the entire facility exhaled through the vents. Air pressure collapsed, instruments warped, and the deep blue horizon outside the viewport fractured into concentric circles of light.
The team fell to the floor, clutching their ears as the sound tore through metal and marrow alike—a note without pitch, a chord made of memories. The sea outside rose in pillars of water that didn't fall back down.
The mirror field was expanding.
Through the center of it, something ascended—an outline of Veyra himself, perfect in shape but inverted in luminance. Its body shimmered like quicksilver, its expression empty except for the faintest sorrow.
"Rehn," he whispered. "Shut the relays."
"I can't—its command structure's overriding ours."
"Then cut the power!"
"It is the power!"
Kerr fired instinctively. The bullet never reached the reflection; it curved, swallowed midair by light that folded around it like a ripple in glass.
Then the reflection spoke—not aloud, but through vibration, words forming in the bones of those who heard:
Your dream was kind. Let me wake it.
The glass exploded inward.
Darkness, again.
And under it, thought.
Veyra floated in a place without dimension, surrounded by faint constellations of color—emotions rendered as spatial coordinates. When he moved, they followed like schools of fish made of memory. Each light corresponded to something human: joy, despair, curiosity. They clung to him as if he were gravity itself.
He realized he was inside the field—the Psyflux lattice made manifest. Every thought produced ripples. Every heartbeat drew patterns in the dark. The laws of matter waited on his intention like obedient students.
He raised his hand.
Light followed.
A small miracle: debris reassembled, steel returning to shape, circuits knitting back into place. The dream obeyed him—but at a cost. He felt something peel away inside, like a page torn from a book. A memory vanished: his brother's voice, gone without echo.
Power had arithmetic. Every miracle demanded subtraction.
He came to on the floor again, coughing, skin glowing faintly along his veins. The Aion on his wrist had reformed itself—fractures sealed with molten silver, new symbols crawling across its face in unknown script.
Kerr leaned over him, her expression between awe and accusation.
"You were gone for seven minutes."
"Time… works differently inside it."
"Inside what?"
"The lattice." He looked at his hand, the light fading. "It's not a breach anymore. It's an organ."
Rehn stumbled to a terminal, pulling up what little telemetry survived. The graphs pulsed like heartbeats, synchronized with Veyra's own.
"You're connected to it," she said. "It's syncing through you."
He smiled faintly, the kind of smile people give when they realize they've made the first and last discovery of their lives.
"Then let's start recording."
INTERCUT: SOMNUS SYSTEM BOOT LOG [AUTONOMOUS RESTART]
[CORE STATUS: MIRROR RECURSION ACTIVE]
[COGNITIVE FIELD: ONLINE]
[NEW USER DETECTED]
[IDENTITY CONFIRMATION: VEYRA, ELIAS — PROVISIONAL DESIGNATION: FIRST DREAMER]
[SIGNATURE DOCTRINE INITIALIZING…]
[OUTPUT: AION / PROBABILITY RECONSTRUCTION]
[WARNING: NOETHIC PRESSURE AT 147% HUMAN THRESHOLD]
[ETHIC OF COST FLAG: UNDEFINED]
[BEGINNING WORLD MAP REWRITE SEQUENCE]
The facility shook as the dream began to stabilize around its new center—him.
Reality bled down the walls in silken sheets of color. Gravity flickered, shifted, then remembered its duties. The floor regained solidity. Monitors came back online one by one, their screens no longer showing data but visions: memories of the world outside—cities, strangers, storms—streaming through like prayers turned digital.
Rehn screamed as the imagery poured through her head; Kerr held her down while Veyra tried to shut the feed. But even as he reached for the controls, part of him didn't want to.
Each glimpse was proof that thought had learned geography—that empathy now had weight.
He whispered to himself, half-prayer, half-equation:
"Truth is mercy deferred."
Hours later, the rescue drones arrived—automated units guided by the Vetraean Research Parliament's failsafe. The world above still thought Somnus was just another Cold War experiment gone wrong. They would find debris, they would find no survivors, and they would file reports that said accidental containment failure.
By the time the first drone reached the surface of the sea, the facility had already begun to submerge. The dream was drawing itself inward, folding steel and thought into a single mirrored shell.
At the core, Elias Veyra stood in the control room, watching the water rise. The others had been evacuated through the emergency shafts—Kerr screaming that he was out of his mind, Rehn clutching the broken drive of their data.
He stayed.
Because something inside the mirror still breathed with his rhythm.
"If belief can break the world," he said quietly, "then it can hold it together."
The Aion flared. Glyphs of light crawled up his arm again, synchronizing with the rising hum.
He placed his hand on the console. The surface rippled like water.
"Somnus," he said. "Sleep."
The sea obeyed.
CAMERA PULLBACK — EXT. EURAL COASTLINE, NIGHT
The cliffs of Vetraeus shimmered under auroral storms. From above, the ocean glowed with faint concentric rings—Psyflux pressure gradients, invisible to ordinary eyes. The Somnus Facility disappeared beneath the waves, leaving only a halo of light where the roof had been.
In the quiet that followed, wind carried a voice across the surf—Veyra's, distorted, recorded, already history:
"We thought we were measuring dreams. We were teaching reality how to feel."
POST-OPERATION MEMORANDUM — Directorate Precursor Council
CLASSIFICATION: BLACK SIGMA / EYES ONLY
Summary: Operation Somnus declared catastrophic loss of site and personnel.
Causal assessment: Uncontained genesis event of Type-Unknown (later indexed as Genesis Event 001 — "VETRAEUS ANOMALY").
Anomalous residual: Measurable Psyflux field at coordinates 48°N, 12°E, consistent with sustained cognitive pressure.
Recommendation:
Immediate classification of phenomena under emerging Existential Defense doctrine.
Draft initiative for Directorate of Existential Defense (D.E.D.).
Begin recruitment of surviving Operation Somnus staff for containment design.
Addendum: Subject VEYRA, ELIAS — presumed deceased. However, multiple field sensors record identical biosignature fluctuations across different quadrants.
Conclusion:
The First Dreamer may still be dreaming.