The World Returns

The mist lingers at dawn,

slow to release its hold,

as if savoring

one last moment of sleep.

Light slips gently between the folds,

not forcing,

not persuading—

only waiting.

Then the mist begins to part,

thread by thread,

revealing mountain, pine, and sky

as if they were never gone.

The temple emerges quietly,

roof first,

then walls,

then the stillness it has always held.

Nothing announces this unveiling.

Nothing applauds.

The mist simply moves on,

the world simply returns,

and the temple remains—

unchanged, unbothered,

standing where it has always stood,

at ease with being seen

or unseen.

 

Reset Phase

The sky fractured first.

Silen felt it before he saw it—the way pressure changes before a storm breaks. His aircraft shuddered as if passing through invisible turbulence, though the instruments insisted everything was nominal. Altitude steady. Engine green. Fuel marginal but sufficient.

Ahead, the Pacific stretched endless and darkening, but the horizon line wavered—flattening, then curving, then briefly pixelating like a bad transmission before snapping back into place.

“Vigilance flight, report,” crackled the radio.

Static answered him instead. Not the usual hiss—this was layered, rhythmic, almost patterned, like a machine clearing its throat.

Below, the island target came into view again, but it wasn’t the same island. The coastline repeated itself in mirrored segments. Palm trees rendered twice. Bunkers half-buried in geometry that hadn’t finished deciding whether it was earth or concrete.

RESET PHASE INITIATED, something whispered—not over the radio, not in his ears, but behind his thoughts.

Silen tightened his grip on the controls.

Memory tried to peel away from him.

He felt it happening—the war asserting itself, the script pushing forward: complete the sortie, drop payload, return to carrier, repeat. The comforting inevitability of duty pressed in, smoothing out doubt like a sedative.

But now he knew the sensation.

This wasn’t courage or fear.

This was compression.

The clouds ahead rolled unnaturally fast, time-lapsed, their shadows stuttering across the sea. Anti-air fire began to rise from the island—black bursts blooming in identical patterns, the same explosion repeating three times in three slightly different places.

The world was reusing assets.

“Silen,” a voice cut through—not command, not crew.

Maren.

Her voice didn’t come through sound. It came through alignment. Through the same tug he’d felt on the carrier deck. Through the same hum beneath the tunnels.

They’re resetting you, her voice said, strained but steady. Hold on to something real.

“What’s real?” he muttered aloud, teeth clenched as tracer fire stitched the sky beside him.

For a heartbeat, the Pacific vanished.

In its place: a tunnel wall slick with moisture, candlelight trembling, maps curling at the edges. His hands overlapped—one gloved in a pilot’s gauntlet, the other bare and scarred. Two bodies. One will.

The island surged back into view violently.

A new indicator flashed on his panel—one he’d never seen before:

COGNITIVE STABILITY: DEGRADED
IDENTITY CONSOLIDATION: IN PROGRESS

“No,” Silen growled, banking hard, pulling the aircraft out of the attack run.

The plane protested. Alarms barked. The script didn’t like deviation.

Below him, the island flickered—then briefly revealed something impossible beneath the jungle canopy: a grid. A massive subterranean lattice glowing faint blue, like the underlay of a map that had forgotten to hide itself.

Servers.

Not metaphorical.

Actual.

The Pacific war wasn’t history.

It was containment.

The Reset Phase intensified. The sky dimmed as if someone had lowered a global brightness slider. Sound dampened. The radio repeated the same half-sentence over and over, clipped and distorted.

“—report—report—report—”

Silen laughed once, sharp and humorless.

“So this is how you fix it,” he said. “You drown me in heroics.”

The aircraft shook violently. Reality fought back.

But now—now—he did what the simulation hadn’t accounted for.

He let go of the controls.

Not physically. Mentally.

He stopped flying the plane as a pilot and began observing it as an artifact. Every vibration became data. Every alarm a suggestion. The cockpit thinned, its edges becoming translucent.

The Reset faltered.

For the first time, the system hesitated—caught between finishing the war and losing the man who made it believable.

Far below, the island glitched out of existence.

Ahead, the carrier winked out, replaced for a split second by a tunnel opening lit by a lantern.

And Silen understood, with sudden clarity:

The Reset Phase wasn’t meant to erase him.

It was meant to choose.

And this time, the simulation wasn’t sure which version of Silen it needed more.

 

The Quiet Truth

Edna is gone.

There is no struggle left in the room, no breath to count, no quiet rally or fading return. Whatever tether once held her here has loosened and slipped away. The nurses come and go with soft voices and practiced care, but they are tending only to absence now.

The wheelchair sits where it always has—angled toward the window, its worn handles catching the last gray light of day. It faces the city as if still keeping watch, as if someone might yet return to claim the view. But the chair is empty. Utterly, finally empty.

Outside, dusk settles under a veil of rain. The city blurs into itself—buildings reduced to silhouettes, streets softened into ribbons of reflected light. Headlights pass below like slow-moving stars, their glow smeared across the wet pavement. Each one flares briefly, then vanishes, leaving no trace it was ever there.

The room is quiet now. No memories drift through it. No fields bloom. No diners hum with imagined laughter. Those things have gone with her, carried off into whatever comes after remembering.

The rain continues, indifferent and patient, tapping against the glass the way it always has. The window holds only reflections now: the dim outline of the wheelchair, the faint glow of a lamp, the ghost of a life once lived.

Soon the chair will be rolled away. The room will be cleaned. Another will take this place, another set of final hours unfolding beneath the same gray sky. The city will not notice the subtraction of one woman from its countless millions.

But for this moment—this thin, fragile moment at dusk—the emptiness remains.

An empty chair.
A rain-darkened city.
And the quiet truth that someone once sat here, watching, remembering, fading—until there was nothing left to fade.