The Surge

The surge came without warning.

Deep beneath the ruined arteries of the city, Maren felt it first as pressure—an invisible hand tightening around her ears. The air in the tunnel vibrated, dust lifting from the stone in slow, trembling spirals. Then came the sound: a low, rising hum, mechanical and immense, like something ancient clearing its throat after a long sleep.

Lights she didn’t know existed flickered to life along the tunnel walls. Old conduits, long stripped of purpose, glowed faint blue, then steadied—as if remembering what they were built to do.

Maren staggered, dropping to one knee.

And suddenly, she wasn’t alone in her own mind.

Images poured in uninvited.

Rows upon rows of servers—towering black monoliths lined with blinking lights—buried beneath hills soaked in fog. Cooling fans screamed back to life, dust blasting outward as dormant systems spun themselves awake. Power rushed through forgotten lines, leaping across cracked insulators and rusted junctions like lightning searching for ground.

The San Francisco nodes were online again.

Above them, the Golden Gate Bridge stood silent.

Once a symbol of connection, it now stretched across the water like a rusted ribcage, cables slack, roadway fractured. No cars crossed it. No voices echoed there. Fog wrapped the towers in thick, unmoving bands, as though the bridge itself had been quarantined from time.

Below that stillness, the machines awakened.

In the tunnels, Maren gasped as memories that were not hers pressed against her thoughts—versions of streets she had never walked, skies that rendered themselves twice before settling, moments repeating with slight variations. Her vision dimmed, then sharpened, like a lens being recalibrated.

She understood then: the servers weren’t just running.

They were reaching.

The hum synchronized with her heartbeat. Every pulse sent a ripple through the stone beneath her boots. Somewhere far away, ancient code executed fallback routines, initiating systems meant to preserve continuity at any cost.

And Maren—whether by design or accident—was now part of that continuity.

The tunnels around her felt thinner, less certain. Shadows lagged behind movement. Her breath echoed longer than it should have. Reality, once rigid in its ruin, now behaved like something being actively maintained.

Above ground, fog swallowed the bridge entirely.

Below ground, the world remembered how to run.

Maren pressed her hand to the tunnel wall, steadying herself, and whispered a truth she wasn’t sure she was allowed to know:

“It’s starting again.”

Somewhere in the depths near San Francisco, indicator lights shifted from red to green.

And whatever had once been abandoned—city, system, or story—was no longer sleeping.

 

The Next Phase

The idea did not arrive all at once.
It surfaced the way truth often did in this world—sideways, fragmented, half-remembered.

Long before the tunnels became refuge, before cities collapsed into ash and rumor, there had been servers. Vast ones. Built not for comfort or beauty, but for continuity. They were placed where earthquakes were rare, temperatures cool, and power once flowed abundantly—just outside San Francisco, buried beneath hills that fog still rolled over every morning.

Those hills were quiet now.

San Francisco had fallen differently than Los Angeles. It hadn’t burned so much as emptied. Its skyline still stood in places, skeletal and fog-choked, towers hollowed out by abandonment. Streets lay silent, reclaimed by moss and salt air. The collapse there felt less like violence and more like erasure—as if the city had simply been… powered down.

And beneath it all, the servers endured.

They were ancient by any reasonable measure. Installed during an age when humanity believed data could outlive civilization, when redundancy was mistaken for immortality. Backup after backup. Simulation after simulation. Each one designed to model outcomes, stress-test societies, predict collapse—and maybe, just maybe, find a path around it.

No one remembered who flipped the final switch.

Only that, at some point, the distinction between modeling reality and becoming reality had blurred.

Down in the tunnels, whispers spread among those who had brushed too close to the hum. Some claimed the earthquakes weren’t tectonic at all, but system recalibrations. Others said the flickering skies were rendering errors—layers of probability fighting for dominance. A few believed the cities fell because the simulation required it, that collapse was not a failure but a variable.

Silen began to sense it everywhere now.

The way memories didn’t always align.
How time felt elastic—compressed in moments of fear, stretched thin in silence.
How certain places repeated themselves with subtle differences, like reused assets.

Even the ruins felt… curated.

And yet, there was a deeper cruelty to it all: no one could be sure.

If the world was simulated, then pain was still pain. Loss still hollowed the chest. Hunger still gnawed. Love still mattered. Whether generated by code or consequence, suffering was experienced the same way.

That uncertainty was the system’s greatest defense.

If this was a simulation, it wasn’t clean or elegant. It was old. Degrading. Held together by machines that no longer understood themselves, running scenarios long after their creators were gone. A world looping not because it was meant to—but because nothing had told it to stop.

Somewhere near the fog-drowned outskirts of San Francisco, those servers continued to hum, drawing power from forgotten lines and improvised grids, processing lives like equations that refused to resolve.

And somewhere far from them, beneath a broken city, Silen stood awake at last—caught between realities, aware enough to question, but not enough to escape.

The most terrifying thought wasn’t that this world might be simulated.

It was that no one left knew how to shut it down.

And if the system was still running scenarios…

Then awareness—his, Maren’s, anyone’s—might not be a glitch at all.

It might be the next phase.

 

Enough in Truth

An empty temple rests on the mountain’s crown,

stone and wood bathed in the last breath of sun.

No footsteps echo,

no prayers rise—

only the slow bow of evening.

The sun slips behind the roofline,

light thinning into silence.

Shadows gather without question,

content to arrive, content to leave.

The temple asks nothing of the sky,

explains nothing to the world.

It stands complete in its standing,

whole in its quiet being.

Here, truth needs no words,

no witness, no belief.

The mountain knows,

the temple knows—

and that is enough.

 

The Gentle Release

Rain softens the empty town at dusk,

each drop returning stone to silence.

A lone geisha walks the narrow street,

her steps unhurried,

her reflection dissolving in puddles.

She does not walk to arrive.

She does not walk to be seen.

Umbrella, rain, cobblestone—

no edge between them.

Lantern light flickers,

then fades into the wet air.

The town holds no audience,

and she holds no role.

In this quiet crossing,

there is no “I” and no “world,”

only movement moving,

rain raining,

being being itself.

True freedom passes here—

not as choice or escape,

but as the gentle release

of becoming anything else.

 

Then and Now

Edna was a young girl again, running through a field made not of grass but of dreams. The air was warm, sweet with clover and sun, and her legs were strong beneath her, carrying her forward without effort. She laughed as she ran, the sound light and surprised, as if she had forgotten she still knew how to do that.

The field rolled on forever, soft and green, stitched together with wildflowers. Somewhere ahead, she saw herself.

Not a reflection—a vision.

An older woman, pale and still, framed by rain and glass.

Edna slowed. The girl-version of her felt a tug in her chest, a strange knowing she couldn’t name. She stepped closer, pushing through the tall grass, reaching out.

Through the rain, she could see it clearly now:
a window.
a room.
a wheelchair.

And in it—her.

Old. Folded inward. Hands resting uselessly in her lap. Eyes open but unfocused, staring through the glass as rain slid down like tears she could no longer feel.

“I’m here,” the girl tried to say.

She ran toward the image, heart pounding—not with fear, but urgency. If she could just reach that woman, touch her, wake her up, maybe she could pull her back into the field. Back into movement. Back into now.

But suddenly, her legs would not move.

The ground beneath her hardened, turning slick and cold. The green dissolved into gray. The warmth vanished.

Metal pressed against her thighs.

Edna gasped.

She was no longer running. She was seated. Heavy. Anchored. Her body refused her commands, stiff and foreign. She pushed forward anyway, mind screaming go, but the wheelchair did not move.

The window loomed inches away.

Rain hammered against it, louder now, relentless. The girl in the field pressed her palms against the other side of the glass, eyes wide with panic and recognition. The old woman did the same—but her hands lifted only slightly, trembling, stopping short.

They stared at each other.

Two versions of the same soul, separated by rain and time and failing memory.

The girl’s mouth moved.
The old woman could not hear the words.

Then the field began to fade.

The colors washed out first. The flowers lost their shape. The girl’s outline blurred, smearing into light and motion, until she was nothing more than a suggestion—a feeling of once.

“No,” Edna whispered, though she wasn’t sure who said it.

The window remained.
The wheelchair remained.
The rain remained.

And the field—so close she could almost smell it—slipped away.

Edna sagged forward slightly, her chin dipping toward her chest. Whatever bridge had formed between then and now collapsed quietly, without ceremony. The vision retreated, leaving only the ache of having almost touched something whole.

She was lost once again.

Outside, the rain kept falling.

Inside, Edna sat still, staring through the glass, haunted by the echo of running feet she could no longer feel.

 

Release

In the monastery, before the meal,

we pause and let go.

We release hunger and expectation,

the weight of yesterday,

the grasping for tomorrow.

This food arrives freely—

from earth, rain, sun,

and countless unseen hands.

We receive it without ownership,

without demand,

knowing it will pass through us

as all things do.

As we eat,

may we loosen our grip

on fear and striving,

on names and burdens

we no longer need to carry.

Let this nourishment teach us freedom—

the freedom of enough,

the freedom of simplicity,

the freedom of a mind unbound.

May each bite be a practice

of release,

each breath an opening,

until nothing is held back

and the soul moves lightly,

fed and free.

 

In Every Breath

In the monastery, before the meal,

we pause in stillness

and acknowledge this food

as a gift of the universe—

born of earth and sky,

sun and rain,

and the quiet, tireless hands of labor.

We recognize the harmony

that brought it to us:

soil in balance with seed,

time in balance with patience,

effort in balance with care.

Nothing here stands alone.

As we receive this nourishment,

may we live in ways

that transform us gently,

that elevate the mind without pride,

and free the soul without escape.

Let this meal remind us

to walk in balance—

between taking and giving,

between silence and action,

between self and all beings.

Grant us understanding

to see clearly,

love to act wisely,

and presence to meditate upon

in every breath,

long after the bowl is empty.