Testimony from the spaces between.
Litterae ex Sepulchris
“Like all books, this is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to ‘make real.’ You can’t read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else.”
I have been collecting these accounts for seven years. Or eight. The exact duration matters less than you might think—time has a way of becoming unreliable when you spend long enough listening to people describe places where it doesn’t work properly. I mark dates on documents because that is what you do. I no longer trust them.
The station hums around me as I write this. That constant low vibration that you stop hearing after a while, the way you stop noticing the air you breathe. Haussmann is old—older than my residence here, older than most of its current inhabitants, old enough that no one remembers exactly when it started growing. It began as a waystation, I’m told. A temporary structure for ships passing through. Now it extends in every direction, modules attached to modules, corridors leading to corridors, a maze that has been accumulating for decades without plan or purpose.
I live in Section 12, near the viewing portals. My window looks out on a corridor that is sometimes lit and sometimes dark, depending on what the station’s systems decide at any given moment. The rhythm is not predictable. I have stopped trying to predict it.
My name is not important. What is important: I work for the Penitentiary, or I did, or I work for something that used to be the Penitentiary before it became whatever it is now. An institution for processing returnees. That is the official description. The unofficial description varies depending on who you ask.
What follows are testimonies. Accounts given by people who went into what some call the Lacuna, what others call the Gradient, what the official documentation refers to as Anomalous Region 1. They came back. Most of them came back. The ones who came back enough to speak, anyway.
I should explain what “came back” means, because even that simple phrase conceals complexity. When someone enters the Lacuna and later appears outside of it, we say they have come back. But what returns is not always what went in. Bodies return, yes—modified sometimes, carrying residue sometimes, physically altered in ways our medical technology cannot explain. But bodies are only part of what a person is.
What also returns: memories that may or may not be accurate. Perceptions that have been rewired in subtle or dramatic ways. Relationships to time, to space, to other people that no longer follow normal patterns. Skills that appeared from nowhere. Abilities that vanished. Personalities that shifted. Some returnees are recognizable to their families; some are strangers wearing familiar faces.
And then there are the testimonies themselves. The accounts they give of what happened inside. These accounts are the raw material of my collection, and they are also its central problem.
I should say now: these accounts contradict each other. Not in small ways—not in the ordinary way that witnesses contradict each other, getting the color of a jacket wrong or disagreeing about which direction someone was walking. These contradictions are fundamental. One person will describe a structure as vast, another as cramped. One will report silence, another will report a sound they cannot stop hearing. One will say they were inside for an hour, another will say six months, and both of their instruments—the ones that still function—will confirm their separate claims.
For a long time I thought my job was to reconcile these accounts. To find the common thread. To construct from contradictory testimony some accurate picture of what is actually in there.
I no longer think that.
I think now that the contradictions are accurate. That the Lacuna—I will use this term, though it is no more correct than the others—is not a place in the way that Haussmann is a place, or the way the Penitentiary is a place. It is something else. A condition, perhaps. A state that each consciousness enters individually and experiences according to laws I do not understand.
This makes my job simpler, in a way. I am no longer trying to find truth. I am collecting documents. I am preserving what people say. Whether what they say corresponds to anything outside their own experience is a question I have stopped asking.
The testimonies arrived at first through official channels. The Penitentiary has intake procedures. Every returnee is processed, debriefed, assessed. The debriefing produces a transcript. The transcript goes into a file. The file goes into an archive. Someone—me, eventually—retrieves the file and reads it and decides whether it contains anything worth preserving in a more accessible form.
This was my job for the first three years. I read transcripts. Most of them were not interesting. Returnees often have little to say. They describe confusion, disorientation, the failure of instruments. They describe physical symptoms—nausea, headache, the feeling that their body was not quite where they thought it was. They describe wanting to go home.
But sometimes a transcript contained something else. A detail that snagged. A description that felt different from the usual litany of symptoms. An account of something seen or felt or understood that did not fit into any category I recognized.
I began collecting these. At first informally—notes in a separate file, cross-references, questions I meant to follow up on but rarely did. Then, as the collection grew, more systematically. I began requesting specific transcripts. I began identifying certain returnees as people worth talking to again, if they could be found, if they were willing, if they were capable.
Some were not capable. The Lacuna does things to people. Not always physical things, though there is that too—the hand tremors, the visual disturbances, the thing they call “residue sickness” though no one has proved that residue causes anything. The other things. The ways people come back changed in their capacity to function, to maintain the ordinary arrangements of selfhood that let you get through a day.
But some were capable. Some were even eager. They wanted to talk about what had happened to them. They had been waiting, some of them, for years, for someone to ask.
I should describe the Littoral, since that is where most of these testimonies originate. The Littoral is not a precise term. It refers generally to the inhabited regions nearest to the Gates—the entry points to the Lacuna, of which there are three or seventeen or one that moves or an infinite number, depending on which account you believe.
The Littoral is where you come from if you are going in, and where you come back to if you come back. It is transit space. Waiting space. The stations and habitats and temporary structures that accumulate wherever people gather to do something they would rather not be doing.
Haussmann is the largest station in the Littoral, though “largest” is complicated—Haussmann seems to have grown and contracted over the years I have been coming here, and people describe it differently enough that I sometimes wonder if they are describing the same place. But everyone knows Haussmann. Everyone passes through Haussmann. It is where the transport links converge, where the information brokers operate, where the bars and temporary housing and medical facilities have accumulated like sediment.
I live at Haussmann now, or I stay there when I am not at the Penitentiary or conducting interviews at Lot’s or one of the other places where returnees collect. I have a room that I rent by the month. The room has a window that looks out on a corridor that is sometimes lit and sometimes dark. The air smells like recirculated air everywhere smells—of filters and bodies and the faint chemical trace of whatever they use to keep the bacteria at acceptable levels.
I am not unhappy here. Happiness is not relevant to what I am doing.
What I am doing: collecting testimonies. Arranging them in some order that feels right, though I cannot justify the order logically. Adding my own observations where they seem necessary. Producing a document that may be useful to someone, though I do not know who.
The Penitentiary has stopped paying me. Or the payments come irregularly, or the institution that was paying me no longer exists in a form that makes payments. I continue anyway. The work has become the point.
I think about the Lacuna more than is probably healthy. I have not gone in myself—I am not foolish enough for that, or brave enough, or broken enough. But I dream about it sometimes. Dreams in which I am somewhere that keeps changing, where the walls are not where I expect them to be, where I understand something that I cannot remember when I wake.
These dreams do not concern me. Many people in the Littoral have them. Proximity does something—not the same thing the Lacuna itself does, but something. A kind of seepage. You spend long enough near the Gates, listening to people describe what is inside, and the inside starts leaking out.
Or that is how it feels. I have no evidence that this is literally true.
The testimonies that follow are presented as I received them, with minimal editing. I have removed some material that seemed irrelevant or that repeated information already covered. I have occasionally reorganized for clarity. But I have not reconciled contradictions, and I have not attempted to verify claims that cannot be verified.
Where I have added my own observations, they are clearly marked. Where I have included material from official records—Penitentiary files, station logs, medical reports—I have indicated the source.
The order is roughly chronological, based on when I collected each testimony rather than when the events described occurred. This seemed most honest. Any other order would imply a narrative structure that I do not believe exists.
I do not know what you will learn from these accounts. I do not know what I have learned from them, except that the universe contains something that does not work the way the rest of it works, and that people have been going into it for decades, and that they come back—some of them—with stories that do not make sense and cannot be reconciled and are nonetheless, I believe, true.
Each one true. All of them different. That is the Lacuna.
Here are the testimonies.
Recorded at the Penitentiary, third month after return. Subject presented with moderate tremor, left hand. No residue contamination detected. Assessment: functional.
You want to know what it was like. Everyone wants to know what it was like. I can tell you what I remember, which is not the same thing. What I remember changes. I told Dr. Ormond something different last week than what I’ll tell you now. Not because I’m lying. Because it actually changes. The memory of it.
I’ve been trying to write it down. Keep a journal. But every time I read what I wrote yesterday, it doesn’t match what I remember today. The words are the same but the meaning shifts. I wrote “the structure was beautiful” and now when I read it I can’t tell if I meant beautiful like a sunset or beautiful like a wound. Both interpretations feel true. Both feel like they’re what I meant when I wrote it.
The assessment says I’m functional. I suppose that’s accurate. I function. I wake up, I work, I eat, I sleep. The tremor in my hand is manageable. The dreams are manageable. The way the walls sometimes seem to breathe when I’m tired—that’s manageable too. Everything is manageable if you stop expecting it to be normal.
Alright.
I went in through the Blackwood Gate. That’s what my crew called it—probably not its real name, if it has a real name. Third gate on the standard charts, though you know the charts are useless. Positioned forty hours out from Haussmann if you’re running a clean burn, which nobody does anymore because fuel costs what it costs.
We were salvage. Four of us on a ship called the Hypothetical, which was a joke name that stopped being funny about a year in. Me, Fen, Caro, and a guy named Strecker who we’d picked up at Lot’s because Fen said we needed someone who’d been inside before.
Strecker had been inside before.
He didn’t talk about it. That should have told us something. The ones who’ve been inside, really inside, they either can’t stop talking about it or they can’t start. Strecker was the second kind. He did his job. He kept the instruments running, the ones that still ran. He watched his screens like they meant something. But when we asked him questions about what to expect, he just looked at us with this expression like we’d said something in a language he didn’t speak.
Fen didn’t trust him. Said there was something wrong with his eyes—not the way they looked, but the way they moved. Said they tracked things that weren’t there. Said sometimes he would stare at empty corners of the ship for minutes at a time, like he was watching something the rest of us couldn’t see.
Caro said that was normal for returnees. Said we shouldn’t expect ordinary behavior from someone who’d been inside. Said we should be grateful he was willing to come with us at all, given how few people with experience were willing to go back.
I tried not to have an opinion. I tried to stay focused on the mission—the salvage, the instruments, the protocols we were supposed to follow. But Strecker unsettled me. Not because of his eyes or his silences. Because of the way he smiled sometimes, at nothing, at moments when smiling made no sense. A private smile, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t, like he was in on a joke we couldn’t hear.
The Blackwood Gate—I’m calling it that because I don’t know what else to call it—looked different than I expected. I’d seen images. Everyone’s seen images. But images don’t prepare you for the way it sits in space. Not floating, not fixed. Present. Like it’s more there than other things are there. Like it’s the realest thing you’ve ever seen and everything else is just a sketch someone made of reality.
Fen said it looked like a mouth. Caro said it looked like a window. I thought it looked like something that was looking back at me.
We went through.
I don’t know how to describe what was on the other side. I’ve tried. The words don’t work. Not because there are no words—there are words—but because the words change what they’re describing. Like the act of naming something makes it become the thing you named, which wasn’t what it was before you named it.
Let me try anyway.
There was space. That’s simple enough. But the space wasn’t empty and wasn’t full. It was... available. Like it was waiting to be something. Like it became something when you looked at it, and became something else when you looked away.
The first thing I noticed was the light. There was no source. No star, no station lights, no instrument glow. But I could see. Everything was visible in a way that seemed wrong—visible from all angles at once, as if the light came from inside things rather than falling on them from outside. Fen said it hurt her eyes. Caro said she liked it. I didn’t know what I felt about it, except that it was wrong, and wrongness was going to be the norm from now on.
The Hypothetical held together better than we expected. Ships don’t always survive the transition—something about the gate interferes with certain systems, fries certain circuits, convinces certain instruments that they’re somewhere they’re not. We lost navigation immediately, but navigation was never going to work anyway. We lost external sensors after the first day—or the first week, depending on whose clock you trusted. The hull stayed intact. The life support kept running. The coffee maker worked, which Fen said was the only thing that mattered.
We were inside for eighteen months. My instruments say eighteen months. Caro’s said six weeks. Fen’s didn’t work at all. Strecker didn’t check his—he said checking was pointless, and he was probably right.
During those eighteen months, we found things. That’s what salvage does. We found structures that might have been stations, might have been ships, might have been organisms—or might have been all three simultaneously, or none, or something for which we have no category. We found residue—tanks of it, sometimes, still sealed, with markings in languages that predated human presence in the region by centuries. We found bodies. I don’t want to talk about the bodies.
I will say this: the bodies were not human. And the bodies were not alien. They were something else—something that looked like both and neither, something that made you realize that “human” and “alien” were maybe not the only categories, that maybe there were other kinds of being that our vocabularies had never needed to describe.
Strecker looked at the bodies longest. I don’t know what he saw. I don’t know what he understood. But after we found the first cache of them—floating in a structure that might have been a morgue or might have been a nursery—he started sleeping less and watching his screens more. He started having conversations with himself in a language I didn’t recognize. He started smiling at things that weren’t funny.
We lost Caro on the fourth month. Or the second week, depending on whose instruments you believe. She went to check something on the hull and didn’t come back. We looked for her. The ship said she was still on the hull. The hull said no one was there. We looked for two days—or two hours—and then we stopped looking because Strecker said looking was making it worse.
I didn’t know what he meant then. I know now.
The thing about the Lacuna—you’re calling it the Lacuna, right? Some people say the Gradient, some people say other things—the thing about it is that it knows you’re there. I don’t mean it’s conscious. I don’t know if it’s conscious. But it responds. You think something, and then the thing you were thinking about is there, or something that looks like what you were thinking about. You remember someone, and then there’s a sound like their voice. You’re afraid of something, and then that thing is in the corridor.
Strecker called this “recognition.” He said everyone got it. He said the only way to survive was to not want anything. Not to think anything. Not to remember anything. Just to do the job and not look at what you were doing and not think about what it meant.
I tried that. It doesn’t work. You can’t stop thinking. You can’t stop wanting. You can’t stop remembering. The best you can do is—I don’t know. Let it happen without responding. Be empty when it tries to fill you.
I wasn’t very good at that.
What did I see? Specifically?
I saw a station that looked like the station where I grew up. The proportions were wrong—the corridors too long, the ceilings too high—but the shape was the same. The smell was the same. That smell of recycled air and cooking oil and something underneath that I could never identify as a child and still can’t identify now. I walked through it for what felt like hours. I found my old room. My old bed was there. The sheets were the ones I remembered, with the pattern of little blue ships that I’d begged my mother to buy me when I was six.
The bed was too small. Everything was too small. But it was exactly what I remembered.
I don’t know what this means. I don’t know if the Lacuna built it for me or if I built it somehow or if it was always there waiting. Strecker said not to think about it. Strecker said the only dangerous question was “why.”
We came back through a gate that wasn’t the one we’d entered through. I don’t think it was, anyway. It looked different. Smaller, somehow, though size doesn’t mean much in there. When we emerged, we were forty hours from Haussmann, same as when we’d gone in. Eighteen months had passed inside. Twenty-three days had passed outside.
Fen was different. Something about her eyes. She didn’t look at things directly anymore—she looked past them, or through them, like she could see something behind everything that the rest of us couldn’t see. She still works salvage. I hear she’s good at it now. Better than she was before. But I don’t talk to her anymore. I don’t want to know what she sees.
Strecker was the same as when we went in. That scared me more than anything.
And me. I’m functional. That’s what the assessment says. Moderate tremor, no contamination, functional.
I dream about the room with my childhood bed. I dream about the sheets with the little blue ships. I dream about lying down in that bed and fitting perfectly, even though I’m too big now, even though the bed is too small. Fitting like I was always meant to be there. Like that was the real place and this is the copy.
I’m not going back in. I’m done with salvage. I work at Lot’s now, tending bar, listening to people tell stories about what they saw. Some of them are lying. Some of them are telling the truth. I can’t tell the difference anymore.
Maybe there isn’t one.
Note: Subject declined follow-up interview. Current whereabouts: Lot’s Bar, Section 7, Haussmann Station. Employment confirmed.
Recorded at Lot’s Bar, unscheduled interview. Subject presented with no visible symptoms. Assessment: not applicable (subject has never entered the Lacuna).
I’ve never been inside. Let’s get that straight from the beginning. I’m not one of your returnees. I don’t have stories about what I saw in there, what it felt like, what it did to me. I’m just someone who buys and sells what other people bring back.
But you want to talk about the Lacuna, you should talk to me. Because I’ve seen more of it than most people who’ve been inside. I’ve held it in my hands. I’ve weighed it. I’ve tested it. I’ve watched it change.
Residue. That’s what we call it. What comes back. Not the artifacts—the artifacts are something else, though the line between artifact and residue isn’t always clear. Residue is the material. The substance. The stuff that the Lacuna is made of, or the stuff that the Lacuna makes, or the stuff that passes through the Lacuna and comes out transformed. Nobody knows which. Maybe all three.
It looks different every time. That’s the first thing you need to know. People think residue is a specific substance, like gold or carbon or water. It isn’t. I’ve seen residue that looked like glass. I’ve seen residue that looked like metal. I’ve seen residue that looked like nothing at all—just a shimmer in a container, a weight without a visible source. Once I bought a shipment that looked like dried flowers. Smelled like them too. Turned out to be worth more than everything else I’d bought that year combined.
Why? Because of what it does.
What does it do?
That’s the question, isn’t it. The honest answer: I don’t know. Nobody knows. There are theories. There are people who study it—scientists, if you can call them that, with laboratories at the Penitentiary and funding from sources they don’t talk about. They run tests. They publish papers. The papers contradict each other.
What I can tell you is what I’ve observed. What I’ve seen residue do in front of me, in my shop, on my scales.
It changes. Not just over time—everything changes over time. Residue changes in response to things. To attention, maybe. To intention. You look at a piece of residue and you want something from it, and the residue responds. Not by giving you what you want. By becoming something that might give you what you want, if you knew how to ask.
I’ve tested this. Informally, over years of handling the material. I’ll take the same piece of residue and approach it with different intentions—wanting to know its weight, wanting to know its origin, wanting to know if it’s dangerous, wanting nothing at all—and the residue behaves differently each time. The readings change. The color shifts. The temperature varies. The weight itself seems to fluctuate, though this might be my instruments, or my hands, or something else I can’t measure.
Some of my clients have noticed this too. They’ll come in looking for something specific—residue that responds to a particular frequency, residue that maintains stability under certain conditions, residue that does something they won’t describe but clearly want very badly. And sometimes I’ll show them a piece that doesn’t match their description at all, but when they hold it, when they focus their attention on it, it becomes what they wanted. Or close enough.
I don’t understand the mechanism. I don’t think anyone does. The scientists who study residue—and there are scientists, funded by sources that prefer to remain anonymous—they have theories about quantum effects, about observer-dependent properties, about the fundamental uncertainty that the Lacuna introduces into any attempt to measure it. But theories are not explanations. Theories are just organized ignorance.
What I know is that residue is not passive. Residue is engaged. Residue is paying attention to whoever is handling it, and adjusting itself accordingly. Whether this means residue is conscious—whether it’s intelligent, aware, thinking in some alien way—I couldn’t say. But it’s not dead matter. It’s not inert. It’s participating in something, even if I can’t tell what.
I had a client once, a woman named Strasser, who came looking for residue because her son had gone inside and not come back. She’d heard rumors—everyone hears rumors—that residue could be used to find people. That it maintained some connection to the Lacuna even after it came out. That if you had enough of it, or the right kind, you could... I don’t know. Communicate. Locate. Something.
I sold her what I had. A piece that looked like gray chalk, about the size of my thumb. She held it in her hand and it changed color. Went from gray to blue to something I don’t have a word for. She started crying. She said she could feel him. She said she knew where he was.
I never saw her again. I heard later she’d gone in herself, through the Blackwood Gate, carrying that piece of residue like a compass. Maybe she found him. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe “found” doesn’t mean anything in there.
The markets are complicated. There are official markets—the Penitentiary takes a percentage of all residue that comes through processing, sells it through approved channels, uses the revenue for... whatever the Penitentiary uses revenue for. Nobody asks. Asking isn’t encouraged.
The official market is for the cautious. The residue they sell is tested, categorized, labeled with what little information the tests provide. It’s safe, in the sense that it won’t obviously kill you or change you or do anything dramatic. It’s also expensive and boring. The official market is where you go if you want to collect residue as an investment, or if you want to tell yourself you’re being responsible.
Then there are unofficial markets. People like me. We buy from salvage operators, from returnees who hid some of what they brought back, from sources I don’t ask about. We sell to collectors, to researchers, to people like Strasser who want something they probably won’t get. The margins are good. The risks are manageable.
I’ve been at this long enough to know the categories, even though the categories are ultimately meaningless. There’s passive residue—the kind that sits there and does nothing, or does things so slowly you can’t measure the change. There’s reactive residue—the kind that responds to attention, intention, emotional state, the phases of whatever counts as a moon in this part of space. There’s active residue—the kind that does things on its own, without stimulus, following patterns that nobody has been able to predict.
And then there’s the other kind. The kind I don’t sell. The kind I keep in a container in a room that I only enter when absolutely necessary.
I acquired it by accident, years ago. A salvage operator sold me a batch without knowing what was in it. When I opened the container to assess the contents, I looked at the piece and the piece looked back at me.
Not metaphorically. Literally. There were eyes. Or there was something that did what eyes do—that perceived me, that tracked my movement, that knew I was there. I closed the container immediately. I haven’t opened it since.
It’s still in there. I can feel it sometimes, when I’m in the shop late at night. A presence. An attention. Something waiting for me to open the container again.
I won’t. But I can’t bring myself to get rid of it either. Maybe the Broker was right. Maybe I’m waiting for something. Maybe that piece of residue and I are waiting for each other.
What are the risks? Getting caught, obviously. The Penitentiary doesn’t like competition. But more than that: the residue itself. Spending too much time around it does something.
I don’t mean contamination. That’s a myth, or mostly a myth—there are cases, sure, but they’re rare, and usually involve direct exposure over long periods. Handlers get contaminated. Brokers like me keep our distance. Gloves, containers, limited contact.
What I mean is something else. An influence. A pull.
I’ve been doing this for eleven years. In that time, I’ve started dreaming about going inside. Not nightmares—not exactly. Dreams where I’m approaching a gate, where I can feel the Lacuna waiting on the other side, where I want to pass through more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I wake up from these dreams and I’m calm. I’m at peace. I feel like I’ve been given an answer to a question I didn’t know I was asking.
Then the feeling fades, and I go back to work, and I don’t think about it until the next dream.
I’m not going in. I’ve seen what comes back. I’ve seen the tremors and the blank stares and the people who can’t remember their own names. I’ve seen the ones who seem fine—who seem better than fine—and that scares me more than the damaged ones. I’ve seen what the Lacuna does to people, and I’m not foolish enough to think I’d be different.
But I keep the dreams. I keep the feeling of peace. I don’t tell anyone about this. You’re the first.
You want to know about the Broker. Everyone who looks into residue eventually asks about the Broker.
I’ve met someone who calls themselves that. Whether they’re the Broker or a Broker or one of many Brokers using the same name, I couldn’t tell you. Tall. Thin. Gender unclear—could have been anything, and might have been different things at different times. Voice like static, like they were speaking from a bad connection even though they were standing right in front of me.
They wanted to buy my entire inventory. Everything I had. They offered a price that would have let me retire. I turned them down. I don’t know why. The words just came out of my mouth: no, thank you, I’m not selling.
They looked at me for a long time. Not angry. Not surprised. Like they were reading something written on my face, something I couldn’t see. Then they said, “You’re waiting for something.”
I didn’t know what they meant. I still don’t.
They left. I haven’t seen them since. I haven’t tried to find them. I have the feeling—irrational, unprovable—that they’ll find me again when it’s time. When whatever I’m waiting for arrives.
Is the residue dangerous? Of course it’s dangerous. Everything that comes from the Lacuna is dangerous.
But danger isn’t the same as evil. Danger isn’t even the same as harm. Some dangers are necessary. Some dangers are the point.
I weigh residue every day. I test it, price it, sell it. I watch it change in response to attention, to intention, to something I don’t understand. And I think: this is what the universe is made of, somewhere. This is what reality looks like when it hasn’t decided what to be yet.
That’s not dangerous. That’s miraculous.
Or maybe those are the same thing. Maybe that’s what the dreams are trying to tell me.
Note: Subject continues to operate at Haussmann Station, Section 12. No Penitentiary action recommended at this time.
Three months after recording Cortes’ testimony, I began noticing patterns I had not noticed before.
Not patterns in the testimonies—I had been looking for those from the beginning, and I had stopped expecting to find them. The accounts were too contradictory, too individual, too shaped by each teller’s particular damage. If there were patterns, they were patterns of a kind I did not have the framework to recognize.
No. The patterns I noticed were in myself.
I had started walking at night. The corridors of Haussmann are extensive—no one knows exactly how extensive, because the station has grown organically over decades, absorbing smaller habitats, extending into modules that were never properly integrated, developing sections that appear on no official map. You can walk for hours and never see the same corridor twice. You can walk for hours and see nothing but the same corridor, over and over, until you are no longer sure you are moving at all.
I walked from my room to the section where Cortes operated her business. I walked from there to Lot’s, where Velder worked behind the bar and did not recognize me when I came in. I walked to the Gates—or toward them, anyway, as far as you can go on foot before the transit systems take over. I stood at the viewing portals and watched the ships departing for the Lacuna, small points of light being swallowed by something I could not see but could feel, the way you feel a presence behind you in an empty room.
Then I walked back. Sometimes the walk back took longer than the walk out. Sometimes it took less time. I stopped checking.
I had been doing this work for nearly eight years. I had spoken to hundreds of returnees. I had read thousands of transcripts. I had learned things that I could not unlearn, seen things through other people’s eyes that I could not unsee.
And I had noticed, gradually, that my relationship to the project was changing.
At first I had been a collector. A gatherer of information. The testimonies were data, and my job was to preserve them, to organize them, to make them available for whatever future analysis might find them useful.
Then I had become something else. A listener, perhaps. Someone who sat with the accounts not to extract information from them but to be present with them. To hold the contradictions without trying to resolve them. To let the impossible accumulate.
Now I was becoming something else again. I did not have a word for what.
I had started, without deciding to, asking questions I had no business asking. When Cortes mentioned the Broker, I felt something shift in my attention—not curiosity, exactly, but a kind of recognition. As if I already knew about the Broker. As if the name referred to something I had encountered before, in dreams or in memories I could not access.
This was not possible. I had never heard of the Broker before Cortes mentioned them. The name appeared in no Penitentiary files. No previous testimony I had collected made reference to anyone by that name.
And yet. When I heard the word, something in me responded. Something woke up.
I went back to the transcripts. All of them, from the beginning. Eight years of testimonies, thousands of documents, a weight of accumulated experience that I had thought I understood.
I was looking for the Broker.
I found them. Not by name—no one else had used that name—but by description. A figure who appeared at the edges of accounts, who made offers, who asked questions, who seemed to know things that could not be known. Some testimonies described this figure as male, some as female, some as neither. Some said they were tall; some said they were short. Some said they had never met anyone matching this description, and then, in the same paragraph, mentioned a conversation with someone whose characteristics matched exactly.
The Broker was in the testimonies. The Broker had always been there. I had simply not had the concept that would let me see them.
This frightened me. Not the existence of this figure—people who deal in Lacuna-related matters are often strange, and strange people attract strange stories. What frightened me was the gap in my own perception. I had read these documents dozens of times. I had indexed them, cross-referenced them, analyzed them for patterns I never found. And I had missed something that, once I saw it, seemed obvious.
What else had I missed? What else was waiting in the documents I had already collected, hidden not by any intention but by the limits of my own capacity to perceive?
I should have stopped. That is what a sensible person would have done. Turned the project over to someone else. Requested reassignment. Taken a long leave somewhere far from Haussmann and the Gates and the residue markets and all of it.
I did not stop. I started collecting testimonies more aggressively than before. I started seeking out people I had previously avoided—the deeply damaged, the ones who could barely speak, the ones whose accounts were so fragmentary that no useful information seemed extractable. I started asking about the Broker by name.
Some people knew the name. Some did not. Some denied knowing it while their eyes told a different story. One man—a returnee I found living in the deep sections of Haussmann, in a module that had been abandoned for decades—laughed when I asked.
“Everyone knows the Broker,” he said. “Everyone who’s been inside.”
“I haven’t been inside,” I said.
He looked at me for a long time. The light in the module was poor, and I could not read his expression. Finally he said, “Are you sure?”
I did not answer. I am still not sure what the answer is.
The testimonies that follow were collected after this realization. They may be contaminated by my own searching. The questions I asked shaped the answers I received. That is always true, but it became more true, I think, as my focus narrowed.
I am no longer a neutral collector. I do not know if I ever was.
But the accounts are still valuable. Maybe more valuable, for being collected by someone who was starting to see patterns. Or maybe less valuable, for the same reason. I cannot judge.
I present them as I received them. I mark where I have intervened. I try to be honest about my own uncertainty.
It is the best I can do.
Recorded at Lot’s Bar. Subject presented with visible hand tremor, elevated pupil dilation, and what appeared to be residue scarring on forearms. Assessment: marginal function. Subject declined Penitentiary processing.
How many times? You want a number. Everyone wants numbers. Numbers feel like they mean something.
I don’t have a number. I stopped counting after the fifth time. Or the seventh. The counting itself started to feel like a way of pretending that “times” meant anything—that there was a clear distinction between being inside and being outside, that you could cross a line and say “now I am here” and “now I am there.”
There is no line. That’s what I learned. The Gates are not thresholds. They are... agreements. Temporary agreements between you and something that does not think in terms of thresholds at all.
I will tell you what I can. You understand it will not be complete.
The first time was an accident. I was working commercial transport, running supplies to the Littoral stations. Standard work, boring work. The kind of work you do when you don’t have enough imagination to do anything else.
We were two weeks out of Haussmann, running a route we’d run a hundred times. Clear space, no anomalies, nothing on the instruments that suggested anything unusual. Then the instruments stopped agreeing with each other. Then the stars outside didn’t match the charts. Then I looked out the forward port and saw something that wasn’t a gate—not one of the known gates, not anything in the databases—but was also not not a gate.
I turned toward it. I don’t know why. The other three crew members didn’t try to stop me. Later they said they hadn’t seen what I was seeing. Later they said the ship just changed course and they didn’t understand why. Later they filed a report saying I had experienced a “navigational episode” and should be removed from active duty.
They’re not wrong. I haven’t done commercial transport since. I haven’t done anything since, except go back.
The Lacuna is not addictive. That’s important to say. There’s no chemical dependency, no withdrawal symptoms, nothing that hooks into your biology the way substances hook into your biology. The Penitentiary tested me, after the third time. Or the fourth. They found nothing. Clean brain chemistry. Normal receptor function. No contamination, no residue in my blood, nothing that would explain why I kept going back.
Because it isn’t addiction. Addiction is when you need something that hurts you. The Lacuna doesn’t hurt me. The Lacuna is the only thing that doesn’t hurt me.
Out here—in the Littoral, in Haussmann, in the ordinary space where the rules work the way they’re supposed to work—everything is wrong. The dimensions are wrong. The time is wrong. I feel like I’m being forced into a shape that doesn’t fit me, wearing a body that belongs to someone else, living a life that was designed for a different kind of creature.
Inside, none of that. Inside, I fit. The space fits me. The time fits me. Whatever I am matches whatever the Lacuna is. For the first time in my life, I am not struggling against the container I was born into.
Let me try to explain, though I know explanations don’t work. Out here, time moves forward. One second, then another second, then another. You can’t stop it, can’t slow it down, can’t go back. The flow is relentless and you’re carried along whether you want to be or not.
Inside, time is optional. It’s still there—you can experience sequence if you want to, cause and effect, before and after. But you can also step outside it. You can exist in a moment for as long as you want. You can visit the same instant from multiple angles. You can be in Tuesday and Thursday simultaneously, or you can be in no day at all, just present, just existing, without the burden of time carrying you toward a future you didn’t choose.
And space—out here, space is fixed. You’re in one place, and to get to another place, you have to travel. There’s distance, and distance has to be crossed. You can’t be two places at once. You can’t fold the distance away or step around it.
Inside, space is a suggestion. I’ve been in places that were infinite and places that were smaller than a thought. I’ve been in the same room as someone who was in a completely different place—we were both there, we could both see each other, but “there” meant something different to each of us. The room I was in and the place they were in were not the same place, but they overlapped. They coexisted.
I know this doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense out here, where sense is made according to rules that don’t apply inside. But out here is not the only place there is. Out here is maybe not even the primary place. Maybe out here is the anomaly, and inside is what normal actually looks like.
Does that sound insane? It probably sounds insane. People who haven’t been inside can’t understand. People who’ve been inside once, or twice, or five times—they might start to understand, but they’re still thinking in terms of inside and outside, as if those were real categories. They haven’t figured out yet that the distinction is a lie. A convenient lie, useful for navigation, useless for understanding anything that matters.
You asked about the Broker. The collector mentioned the Broker. I know who you’re talking about, though I didn’t know that name.
I met them inside. Not at a gate, not in any recognizable location. Inside inside—the deep places where the structures stop making sense, where you’re not sure if you’re in a building or a body or a dream. They were there.
They looked different than they apparently look out here. Out here people say tall, thin, gender unclear. Inside they were something else. A kind of pressure. A kind of attention. Like being looked at by something so large that looking at it back was impossible—you could only look at parts of it, and the parts didn’t add up to a whole.
They said: “You’re close.”
I said: “Close to what?”
They said: “To stopping.”
I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand, fully. But I think they meant: close to stopping the movement back and forth. Close to choosing one side or the other. Close to staying in or staying out, permanently, instead of this endless oscillation.
They didn’t tell me which side I should choose. They didn’t seem to care. They were just... observing. Taking note. Recording my progress toward a decision I didn’t know I was making.
I’m going back. I came out this time because I needed supplies—you can’t eat in there, not really, not in a way that sustains a body—but I’m going back. As soon as I can.
The Penitentiary wants to stop me. They can’t. There’s no law against entering the Lacuna. There are guidelines, recommendations, requirements for commercial operations. But I’m not commercial anymore. I’m just a person with a ship, making choices about where to go.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m damaged. You’re thinking the Lacuna has done something to me, taken something from me, made me into something less than I was before. You’re thinking I need help.
You’re wrong.
I was less before. I was a container with the wrong contents. I was a shape that didn’t fit its space. The Lacuna didn’t take anything from me. The Lacuna showed me what I actually am. And what I actually am is something that belongs in there, not out here.
One more thing. You want to know if the accounts contradict each other. If what I see in there is different from what other people see.
Of course they contradict. Of course we see different things. That’s the point. That’s the whole point.
The Lacuna isn’t a place. It’s a relationship. Each person enters it and finds what that person and that Lacuna have between them. Your Lacuna is not my Lacuna. Velder’s Lacuna is not Cortes’ Lacuna. The frame narrator’s Lacuna—yes, I know you’re collecting these, I know what you’re doing—the frame narrator’s Lacuna is not anyone’s but their own.
And mine is waiting for me. It’s always waiting. It doesn’t get impatient. It doesn’t mind that I keep leaving. It knows I’ll be back.
It knows I’m already there, really. The part of me that matters never left.
Note: Subject departed Haussmann Station within forty-eight hours of this interview. Ship registry indicates transit toward Gate coordinates. No Penitentiary action taken. Current status: unknown. Presumed inside.
Recorded at Penitentiary Medical Wing. Subject presented with no visible symptoms. Assessment: not applicable (subject is Penitentiary staff).
I’ve been at the Penitentiary for twelve years. Medical processing. Returnee assessment. You’ve read my reports—I know you have, I’ve seen the file requests. So you know what I officially think about the Lacuna and what it does to people.
This is not an official statement. You said this was for your collection. You said it would be included with the other testimonies. Fine. Then I’ll tell you what I actually think, which is not what the reports say.
The reports are careful. The reports are written for institutional purposes, for legal protection, for funding applications. The reports use words like “neurological anomaly” and “perceptual disturbance” and “post-exposure syndrome.” The reports suggest that what happens to returnees is a medical problem with potential medical solutions.
I no longer believe that.
I’ve examined over two thousand returnees since I started here. Some were fine—or seemed fine, which isn’t the same thing. Some were damaged in ways that I could document: tremors, visual disturbances, the thing with time perception that nearly all of them have to some degree. Some were damaged in ways I couldn’t document, ways that showed up not in their scans but in the way they looked at me, the way they answered questions, the way they paused before speaking as if they had to translate from a language I didn’t know.
The scans are the most frustrating part. We have sophisticated equipment—brain imaging, cellular analysis, energy field mapping, everything the Penitentiary could afford and some things they couldn’t. We run the returnees through all of it. And the results are... inconclusive.
Some returnees show obvious changes. Neural pathways that have reorganized themselves. Cell structures that don’t match any known configuration. Energy signatures that don’t correspond to biological processes. These are the cases we can point to, the evidence that the Lacuna does something physical to the people who enter it.
But most returnees show nothing. Their scans are indistinguishable from those of someone who never went inside. Their cells are normal. Their brain activity is normal. Their energy signatures are normal.
And yet they’re different. I can see it in the first seconds of interaction. Something has changed, something fundamental, something that our instruments can’t detect. They’re not the same people who went in, even when every measurable parameter says they are.
I’ve wondered, over the years, whether the instruments are wrong. Whether the Lacuna changes people in ways we don’t have technology to measure. Or whether the instruments are right, and the changes are something other than physical—something in the mind, the soul, the self, whatever you want to call the part of a person that exists beyond the body.
The ones I remember best are the ones who came back better.
That’s not in any of my reports. But there are returnees who come back improved. Smarter. More focused. More... present, somehow, in a way that makes other people seem absent by comparison. They don’t have the tremors or the time problems. They pass every assessment I can give them. And there is something in their eyes that I cannot name and cannot document but that I recognize every time I see it.
I remember the first one I noticed. A woman named Durnham—she’d been inside for forty-seven days, according to her instruments, though she reported subjective time of several years. She came through processing without a single anomaly. Perfect scans. Perfect responses. Perfect everything. But when she looked at me, I felt—I don’t know how to describe it. I felt like I was the one being assessed. Like she was gathering data about me, categorizing me, deciding something.
She smiled at me before she left. A small smile, not unfriendly. Just knowing. Like we both understood something that neither of us would say aloud.
I started watching after that. Started noticing the others who came through the same way—not damaged, not ordinary, but improved. Changed in ways that made them more than they had been. Some of them were obvious: scientists who suddenly understood fields they’d never studied, pilots who could navigate without instruments, administrators who knew things they shouldn’t know about systems they’d never accessed.
But some of them were subtle. They looked ordinary. They acted ordinary. They went back to ordinary lives and did ordinary things. But they were watching. They were waiting. They were part of something that I couldn’t see.
These people do not come back to the Penitentiary. They do not need medical processing. They move through the Littoral and beyond it, taking positions of influence, making decisions, shaping things. I have tracked some of them—not officially, just as a personal project, just to understand what I am looking at.
They are in the residue markets. They are in the information networks. They are in the transport companies and the station administrations and the research facilities. They are everywhere that matters.
And they recognize each other. I’ve seen it—two of them meeting, in a corridor or a waiting room, and something passes between them. Not words. Not gestures. Just recognition. Just understanding.
What did the Lacuna give them? What did they find inside that made them into what they are now?
I don’t know. I’ve asked. They don’t answer, or they answer in ways that don’t help. One of them told me: “The Lacuna doesn’t give you anything. The Lacuna shows you what you already are.” Which sounds like philosophy, like metaphor, like the kind of thing people say when they don’t want to explain.
But I’ve been here twelve years. I’ve seen enough. I think she was telling the truth.
You asked about Velder. I assessed him when he came through. The report is in his file.
What isn’t in the report: he wasn’t telling the truth about being functional. He is functional—technically, legally, by every measure I have. But there’s something happening behind his eyes. Something he’s not talking about. The childhood room, the little blue ships on the bedsheets—that’s not just a memory. That’s an intrusion. The Lacuna put something in him that is still active, still growing, still shaping his experience of reality.
I let him go anyway. What else was I going to do? Detain him for having bad dreams? We’d have to detain everyone in the Littoral.
Aalto, I don’t know. I’ve heard the name. Multiple entries, presumed deep damage but continues functioning. The Penitentiary doesn’t try to stop people like Aalto. We don’t have the authority, and even if we did, what would we do? The Lacuna wants them. The Lacuna calls them back. We are not equipped to fight something that operates on that level.
The Broker—yes, I’ve encountered that name. In testimonies, in rumors, in the occasional strange message that arrives through channels I don’t understand. I have not met anyone who calls themselves that. I’m not sure I want to.
Here’s what I think, and this is not in any report, and I will deny saying it if anyone asks:
The Lacuna is not random. It is not natural. It is not an anomaly in the sense of being an accident, a glitch, a mistake in the fabric of spacetime.
The Lacuna is intentional.
I don’t mean it was built—though maybe it was, by something or someone we have no concept of. I mean that what it does to people is not a side effect. The transformations, the damage, the improvements, the dreams and the visions and the memories that aren’t memories—these are the point. The Lacuna is doing something to humanity. Selecting. Sorting. Changing some of us into something else while leaving others damaged or destroyed.
Why? For what purpose?
I have theories. I don’t trust any of them. But when I watch the improved ones moving through the Littoral, recognizing each other, building networks and accumulating influence—I think: this is not over. This is not even beginning. Whatever the Lacuna is doing, it is on a timeline we cannot perceive, toward an endpoint we cannot imagine.
And I am standing at the processing station, stamping “functional” on people who are being transformed into something I don’t understand.
You want to know if I’m afraid. Everyone asks that, eventually.
I’m not afraid of the Lacuna. The Lacuna is too big to be afraid of—it’s like being afraid of the universe, afraid of time, afraid of the basic structure of existence. Fear doesn’t work at that scale.
What I’m afraid of is smaller. I’m afraid of being wrong. I’m afraid that everything I’ve been doing for twelve years—the assessments, the reports, the careful documentation—is beside the point. That I’ve been measuring the wrong things, asking the wrong questions, looking at the transformation and completely missing what is actually happening.
I’m afraid of waking up one day and realizing that the improved ones are running everything, that the Lacuna has completed whatever process it started, and that I was standing at the gate the whole time checking papers while something fundamental changed about what humanity is.
Maybe that’s already happened. Maybe it happened a long time ago. Maybe I would never know.
That’s what I’m afraid of. The possibility that the truth is already obvious, and I can’t see it.
One more thing. You specifically.
I don’t know who you are. I know you work for the Penitentiary, or worked for us, or work for something adjacent to us. I know you’ve been collecting testimonies for years. I know you walk at night and stand at the viewing portals and look toward the Gates.
Are you one of them? The improved ones? Is this collection part of something you’re doing for the Lacuna, or for whatever the Lacuna is working toward?
I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know. I’m asking because, after twelve years, I can’t tell anymore. The line between the observers and the observed has gotten too blurry. The people collecting data might themselves be data. The people studying the Lacuna might themselves be part of what the Lacuna is doing.
You don’t have to answer. I don’t expect you to answer.
But if you are what I think you might be—if you are further along in the process than you realize—then I hope this testimony is useful to you. I hope it helps you understand something about what you’re becoming.
And I hope, when the time comes, you’ll remember that I was trying to help. That I was always trying to help, even when I didn’t know what helping meant.
Note: Dr. Ormond continues to serve as Medical Officer, Penitentiary Processing Division. This testimony was given voluntarily and has not been reviewed by Penitentiary administration.
Recorded at subject’s residence, Haussmann Station, Section 9. Subject presented with mild photosensitivity (wore dark glasses throughout interview) and what appeared to be burn scarring on hands. Assessment: functional but eccentric.
I have four hundred and seventeen charts. That’s the current count. It changes—I acquire new ones, I lose some to deterioration, I occasionally sell or trade when I need resources. But four hundred and seventeen is where I am today.
None of them are accurate. That’s important to understand. None of them represent anything real. The Lacuna cannot be mapped. I know this. I have always known this. The knowledge does not stop me from collecting maps.
Why? Because the failure is beautiful.
Let me show you. This one—don’t touch it, the material is fragile—this one was made by Gerda Hoffmann, who went inside in the early years, when people still thought mapping was possible. She was a surveyor. She had instruments. She had training. She had the conviction that reality could be measured and recorded, that if you just applied the right tools with the right precision, you could produce an accurate representation of any space.
She was inside for three years. Three years of measurements. Three years of observations. Three years of careful, methodical work.
And she produced this.
You see what it looks like? You see the lines that don’t connect, the shapes that contradict themselves, the distances that change depending on which way you’re reading? You see how she started with clean geometry and ended with something that looks like a nervous system, or a river delta, or the pattern of cracks in dried mud?
That’s what happens when you try to map the Lacuna. The map becomes something else. The act of mapping transforms both the mapper and the map.
Hoffmann came back damaged. She couldn’t do surveying anymore—the instruments made her scream. Something about the way they tried to fix things in position, to say “this is here” and “that is there.” The Lacuna had taught her that those statements were lies, and she couldn’t bear to participate in lying anymore.
But she left this chart. And the chart is beautiful. Not because it represents anything, but because it represents the failure to represent. It is a record of someone’s attempt to do something impossible, and the particular way that attempt broke down.
I have four hundred and seventeen of these records. Four hundred and seventeen different failures. Four hundred and seventeen ways that people have tried to impose order on something that does not accept order, and been refused.
You want to know if any of them are useful. For navigation, for planning expeditions, for anything practical.
No. I already told you: none of them are accurate. If you tried to navigate by any of my charts, you would not find what the chart claims to represent. You would find something else—something that might be related to what the chart-maker experienced, or might be completely different, or might be nothing at all.
And yet people buy them. People study them. People come to me asking about specific charts, specific regions, specific features that they believe are represented somewhere in my collection.
I tell them the truth: the charts are useless.
They don’t believe me. They think I’m protecting something. They think there’s a real chart, a true chart, a chart that actually works, and I’m keeping it hidden for my own purposes.
There is no such chart. There never has been. The Lacuna cannot be mapped.
But here’s what I’ve noticed, over the years of collecting: the charts have something in common. Not accuracy—they’re all wrong in different ways. But there are features that recur. Shapes that appear in chart after chart, made by different people in different times, with different instruments and different intentions.
Let me be specific. There’s a shape I call the Spiral. It appears in at least a hundred and forty of my charts, though never in exactly the same form. Sometimes it’s tight, dense, coiled like a spring. Sometimes it’s loose, expansive, spiraling outward toward edges the chart-maker couldn’t represent. Sometimes it’s visible as a structure—a tunnel, perhaps, or a corridor that winds around itself. Sometimes it’s visible only as a path, a route that someone took, marked by the dotted lines of their trajectory.
The Spiral is not always in the same place. On one chart it’s near what the maker called the Center (though there is no center, there can be no center, the concept of center does not apply). On another it’s at the periphery. On a third it’s everywhere—the entire chart spiraling inward, as if the act of entering the Lacuna is itself the Spiral, and you’re already inside it the moment you pass through a gate.
Then there’s what I call the Room. A bounded space, usually rectangular, usually small relative to the surrounding features. People find it. People describe it. People draw it on their charts with careful precision, as if this one thing, at least, could be pinned down.
The Room is different things to different people. One chart-maker drew it as a bedroom—her childhood bedroom, she wrote in the margin, exactly as she remembered it. Another drew it as an office, with desks and chairs and equipment that looks nothing like what the first chart showed. A third drew it as empty—four walls and nothing else, a space waiting to be filled.
But they all drew a room. They all found the same shape, the same bounded space, the same experience of encountering something recognizable in the midst of the unrecognizable.
I study the recurrences. I cross-reference. I make my own charts—not of the Lacuna itself, but of the patterns in the failed maps. Meta-charts. Charts of charts. An attempt to find order not in the territory but in the documents that tried to describe the territory.
Is that useful? I don’t know. It feels important. It feels like I’m getting closer to something. But closer to what, I couldn’t tell you.
You asked about Imhof. The charts mention Imhof.
Not by name, usually. By description. The pilot who went deeper than anyone. The guide who knows the way. The figure who appears when you’re lost and shows you a path that shouldn’t exist.
Multiple charts have marks that are labeled “Imhof’s route” or “Imhof’s corridor” or “passage shown by the deep guide.” The marks are all in different places. The routes don’t match. But the references persist.
I’ve tried to correlate them. If there’s a pattern—if there’s a single region that the Imhof marks cluster around—that might indicate something. A real feature, perhaps. A place where people encounter this figure more often.
The correlation is inconclusive. The marks are everywhere and nowhere. If Imhof exists, Imhof is not localized. Imhof moves. Or Imhof is multiple. Or Imhof is an idea that takes form in different places when certain conditions are met.
The charts don’t tell me which. The charts tell me only that people keep seeing something, and calling it by this name, and trying to mark where they saw it. The marks accumulate. The understanding does not.
Why do I do this? Why collect documents of failure?
Because the alternative is to believe that the Lacuna has no structure at all. That it is pure chaos. That the contradictions between accounts are meaningless, random, signifying nothing.
I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that. The recurrences suggest something. The patterns in the failures suggest something. The fact that four hundred and seventeen different people, over decades, produced charts with common features—that means something. Even if I can’t say what.
Let me tell you about the day I started collecting. I was a navigator then—ship’s crew, like Velder, running routes through the outer regions. We found a derelict on one of our runs. An old ship, decades old, drifting in the space between charted routes. Inside, we found bodies that had been dead for years, and equipment that was still running, and charts.
So many charts. The crew of that ship had been obsessed with mapping the Lacuna. They had spent what must have been years producing document after document, recording their observations, trying to create something that would be useful to someone who came after.
None of their charts matched. They had been inside together, had experienced the same space at the same time, and their charts were completely different. The captain’s chart showed vast structures; the navigator’s showed emptiness. The engineer’s chart showed distances that contradicted both. They had all been right, each in their own way, and they had all been wrong, and the accumulation of their rightness and wrongness was somehow more informative than any single accurate chart could have been.
I kept those charts. Started my collection with them. And I’ve been looking for others ever since—other failures, other attempts to map the unmappable, other evidence that people keep trying even when trying is pointless.
The Lacuna is not mappable. But it is also not entirely chaotic. There is something in there that is responding to our attempts to understand it. Something that produces these recurring shapes, these persistent legends, these figures like Imhof who appear and reappear in account after account.
I collect the charts because I believe—I have to believe—that enough documents of failure might eventually add up to a document of something else. Not success. Not accuracy. But a kind of truth that exists only in aggregate, only in the spaces between all the contradictions.
I don’t know what that truth would look like. I’ve been collecting for twenty-two years, and I haven’t found it yet. But I keep looking. The looking is the point.
Do you want to see the collection? It’s not far from here—I keep most of them in a storage unit, climate-controlled, protected from light and moisture. Some of the older ones are quite fragile.
I could show you the Hoffmann chart in better conditions. I could show you some of the others—the military surveys from before the Penitentiary was established, the artistic interpretations, the computerized attempts that produced results stranger than anything a human hand could draw.
You’re welcome to look. Everyone who comes here eventually wants to look.
Just don’t expect to find what you’re looking for. The charts don’t give answers. They only give more beautiful questions.
Note: Subject’s collection is located in Storage Unit 7-14, Haussmann Station, Section 9. Access by appointment. Subject has expressed willingness to provide further testimony regarding specific charts upon request.
Recorded at Waiting House, Haussmann Station. Subject presented with no visible symptoms but significant weight loss since previous contact (two years prior). Assessment: functional but deteriorating.
My daughter went in four years ago. Her name is Yemi. She was twenty-three.
I say “is” because I don’t know if she’s dead. No one knows. They told me at the Penitentiary that the average time inside corresponds to much shorter time outside—that someone could be inside for years and come out to find only weeks had passed. So maybe she’s still in there. Maybe she’s been in there for what feels to her like decades. Maybe she’s already old. Maybe she’s found whatever she was looking for.
Or maybe she’s dead. Maybe she was dead the moment she passed through the gate. Maybe there’s no correspondence between inside time and outside time at all, and all the statistics are just things we tell ourselves to feel better.
I’m at the Waiting House because I can’t go home. Home is twelve weeks transit from here, and if she comes out while I’m in transit, I won’t know. I’ll arrive home and there will be a message saying she emerged three days after I left, and I’ll have to come all the way back, and by then she might be gone again—the returnees don’t always stay, I know that, some of them go back in almost immediately.
So I wait. Four years now. The Waiting House gives me a room and basic supplies in exchange for work—I clean, I cook, I sit with other people who are waiting. There are a lot of us. More every year.
Why did she go?
I don’t know. She didn’t tell me. She said she had a job, a contract, something with a salvage company. Good money, she said. Enough to pay off her debts and set herself up when she got back. I believed her. Why wouldn’t I believe her?
Then I found out there was no salvage company. No contract. She’d bought passage on a ship going to the Gates and she’d gone in alone, without equipment, without instruments, without anything except what she was wearing.
Why?
I’ve had four years to think about it. I’ve talked to the other people at the Waiting House. I’ve read testimonies—your testimonies, some of them, and others. I’ve tried to understand what would make a twenty-three-year-old girl, with her whole life ahead of her, walk into something that everyone knows you don’t walk into.
The only answer I’ve found is: because it was there. Because she knew it was there. Because once you know something like that exists—a place where the rules don’t work, where reality becomes something else—maybe you can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe it calls you.
I sound like one of them. Like the addicts, like the ones who can’t stop going back. But I’ve never been inside. I’ve never felt whatever they feel. I only know what it looks like from the outside: my daughter walked into something and didn’t come out, and I’ve been sitting here for four years waiting for her to come back.
The Waiting House is a strange place. There are maybe thirty of us at any time—the number fluctuates as people give up or run out of resources or receive news, good or bad. We don’t talk about our people much. It feels like bad luck, maybe. Like talking about them will make something happen, though we don’t agree on what.
We have rituals, though we never named them as rituals. Every morning, someone walks to the Penitentiary’s public-facing office and checks the new processing entries—the list of people who emerged from the gates in the last twenty-four hours. The walk is fifteen minutes each way. We take turns. The person who goes comes back and reports, and we all hold our breath until they’ve said “nothing” or “no one we know.”
In four years, only twice has someone not said “nothing.” Once, a woman named Thérèse got the news that her husband had emerged. She ran out of the Waiting House without packing, without saying goodbye, without anything except the clothes she was wearing. We never heard from her again. Maybe they were reunited. Maybe he was too changed for reunion. We don’t know.
The other time, one of the men—I never learned his name, he’d only been at the Waiting House for a few weeks—got news that his daughter had been processed. He walked to the Penitentiary to meet her. He came back alone. She had emerged, been processed, and left before he arrived. She hadn’t asked about him. She hadn’t even mentioned having family in the Littoral. The processing staff said she walked out like she knew exactly where she was going, like she had a plan, like she’d been waiting for this moment.
He stayed at the Waiting House for another month after that. Waiting for her to come find him. She never did.
Instead we talk about the Lacuna. We’ve become experts, in a way. We know more about it than most people who’ve been inside—because we’ve heard so many stories, collected so many second-hand accounts, spent so many hours trying to understand what our children or partners or siblings might be experiencing.
We know about the time distortion. We know about the phenomenon called “recognition.” We know about the figures that appear—Imhof, the Broker, the others that don’t have names. We know about residue and charts and the way the gates seem to move, or multiply, or disappear.
We know all of this, and it doesn’t help. Because knowing about the Lacuna is not the same as understanding it. And understanding it—if that’s even possible—is not the same as getting our people back.
I dream about Yemi sometimes. In the dreams, she’s inside—I don’t know how I know that, but I know it—and she’s trying to tell me something. Her mouth moves but there’s no sound. Or there’s sound but it’s the wrong sound, like she’s speaking a language I don’t recognize. Or she’s speaking perfectly clearly but I can’t hear her, there’s something wrong with me, something that prevents the message from getting through.
The dreams have changed over the years. At first they were simple—just her face, her voice, the sense of distance between us. Then they became more complex. Now I dream of places I’ve never seen, structures that couldn’t exist, landscapes that extend in directions I don’t have words for. And Yemi is there, always, somewhere in those places. Sometimes I can see her clearly. Sometimes she’s just a presence, a sense of someone familiar, hidden among things I don’t understand.
The most vivid dreams are the ones where I almost understand. Where she says something, and for a moment it makes sense, and then I wake up and the meaning is gone. I’ve tried writing them down—keeping a journal by my bed, scribbling notes the moment I open my eyes. But the words I write don’t capture what I heard. They’re approximations, translations from a language that doesn’t survive the transition to waking.
One dream has recurred more than the others. In it, Yemi is standing in what looks like a city—but wrong, the geometry off, the proportions strange. She turns to me, and she smiles, and she says: “You already know where I am. You just forgot how to look.”
I don’t know what this means. I don’t know if it means anything at all—if it’s a message from her, somehow transmitted across whatever distance separates us, or if it’s just my own mind trying to make sense of an absence it can’t accept.
I wake up from these dreams crying. Not from sadness—or not only from sadness. From frustration. From the feeling that she was right there, that she was trying to communicate, that if I had just been able to listen differently I would have understood.
The other people at the Waiting House have similar dreams. We’ve compared them. The details are different—different people, different settings—but the structure is the same. Someone inside, trying to speak. Someone outside, unable to hear.
Is it real? Are they actually reaching out to us somehow, through whatever connection exists between inside and outside? Or is it just what our minds do, trying to process grief and uncertainty into something that feels meaningful?
I don’t know. I’ve stopped asking. The not-knowing is part of waiting. You have to learn to live with it.
You want me to tell you something useful. Something that advances your collection, adds data, helps you understand the Lacuna better.
I don’t have that. I haven’t been inside. I don’t know what it’s like in there. All I have is the experience of waiting for someone who may never come back.
But let me tell you something about waiting. After four years, waiting becomes its own kind of inside. You’re not fully in the ordinary world anymore—you’re suspended, paused, holding your breath for something that may or may not arrive. Time works differently for people who are waiting. Days blur together. Months feel like weeks. Years feel like months. Or sometimes it’s the opposite—a single afternoon feels like forever, and you can’t believe it’s only been since morning.
Is that what it’s like inside? I don’t know. But I think maybe the waiting is a kind of training. A preparation. Like the Lacuna is teaching us something about what it’s like in there, even though we’ve never gone through the gate.
Or maybe that’s just something I tell myself to make the waiting bearable. Maybe there’s no connection at all.
If you find her—if anyone mentions her, if any of the testimonies refer to a young woman who matches her description—will you tell me?
I know you can’t promise. I know the testimonies are anonymous, and the details are unreliable, and even if someone described seeing her, that wouldn’t mean they really saw her, or that she was really there, or that “there” means anything.
But still. If you find anything. Anything at all.
Her name is Yemi. She has a scar on her left cheek, from when she fell as a child. She would be twenty-seven now—or however old she is inside, which might be much older, or might be the same, or might be something else entirely.
I’m not asking you to find her. I know that’s not possible. I’m just asking you to remember her. To keep her in mind as you read the other testimonies, as you listen to the other stories.
Someone should remember her. Someone besides me.
Note: Subject continues to reside at Waiting House, Haussmann Station. No further information available regarding Yemi Mbeki. Status: presumed inside.
Ormond asked if I was one of them. The improved ones. The people who come back from the Lacuna better than they were before.
I have been thinking about this question for weeks now. Not because I have an answer—I don’t—but because the question itself implies something that I had not considered.
I have never been inside the Lacuna. This is what I told her. This is what I have told everyone. This is what I have been telling myself for eight years—or nine, I am no longer certain—as I collect these testimonies and walk the corridors of Haussmann and stand at the viewing portals watching ships depart for the gates.
But what if I am wrong?
The testimonies I have collected describe returnees who do not remember going inside. There are a few of them, scattered through the archive. People who woke up at the Penitentiary with no memory of passage, no record of departure, no understanding of how they came to be where they were.
The Penitentiary documented these cases. They tested for residue contamination, for neurological damage, for all the usual markers. The results were inconclusive. Some of the subjects showed typical return symptoms; some showed none. Some had been reported missing by family or employers; some had never been missed at all.
I did not pay much attention to these cases when I first encountered them. They seemed like anomalies, edge cases, the kind of noise that accumulates in any large dataset. The Lacuna does strange things to people. Memory loss was hardly the strangest.
But now I find myself rereading them. Looking for patterns. Looking for something that might help me answer Ormond’s question.
I have no memory of entering the Lacuna.
But I also have no clear memory of not entering it. I remember arriving at Haussmann eight years ago, taking the position at the Penitentiary, beginning the collection project. The memories are there. They are vivid enough. They do not feel false.
They also do not feel complete.
There are gaps. Periods I cannot account for. Days or weeks that seem to be missing from my recollection, though I have no sense of what might have happened during those periods. When I try to focus on them, to remember what I was doing on a particular date that should be within my reach, I find only a kind of static. A blur. A space where memory should be and isn’t.
This could be normal. Memory is imperfect. Everyone has gaps, especially over a span of years. The work I do is demanding; it would not be surprising if I had lost track of some days, failed to retain some experiences that seemed unimportant at the time.
Or it could be something else.
I went to the Penitentiary archive and looked up my own file.
The archive is not supposed to be accessible to non-administrative staff, but eight years of collecting testimonies teaches you how to access things that are not supposed to be accessible. There are clerks who owe favors. There are systems with outdated security. There are moments—late at night, during shift changes—when attention lapses and opportunities open.
I found my file in the personnel section, exactly where it should have been. Employment records, performance reviews, the usual documentation. A photograph of a face I recognized as my own, though it looked younger than I remembered, more certain, more intact. A signature I recognized as mine, though the handwriting seemed different—more fluid, more confident, the handwriting of someone who knew who they were.
But I also found something else: a processing entry from nine years ago, shortly after I arrived at Haussmann.
The entry is brief. It indicates that I was brought in for assessment following an “incident of uncertain nature.” The assessment results are not included—the file contains only a reference code that should link to another document, but when I searched for that document, it did not exist. Or rather: it existed, according to the index, but the file itself was empty. A placeholder. A gap.
I searched for related documents. Admission records, medical evaluations, anything that might explain what had happened during those three weeks. I found fragments—a date of arrival, a room assignment, a notation that “subject requested minimal intervention”—but nothing coherent. Nothing that told a story. Just pieces that did not fit together, that left spaces between them large enough to hide an entire experience.
The entry is dated three weeks before my employment with the Penitentiary began.
I have no memory of this assessment. I have no memory of an incident. I have no memory of the three weeks between my arrival at Haussmann and the start of my employment.
When I try to remember, I find only the static.
I asked Ormond about the file. She was reluctant to discuss it—patient records, confidentiality, the usual barriers. But eventually she acknowledged that the entry existed, and that she had no more information about it than I did.
“It happens,” she said. “People come through processing and then the documentation is lost or misfiled or never completed. The early years were chaotic. The system wasn’t as organized as it is now.”
“But I should remember,” I said. “Even if the documentation is incomplete. I should remember being assessed.”
She looked at me for a long time before answering. “Should you? People who come through processing often don’t remember. The Lacuna does something to memory. You know that. You’ve read the testimonies.”
“I’ve never been inside the Lacuna.”
“That’s what the file says. ‘Incident of uncertain nature.’ Not ‘return from the Lacuna.’ Not ‘standard processing.’ Just ‘incident.’”
She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t have to.
I am continuing the collection. The work has not changed. The testimonies continue to arrive, and I continue to transcribe them, to arrange them, to add my observations where they seem useful.
But something has shifted. I am no longer certain that I am the observer I thought I was. I am no longer certain that the position from which I am viewing these accounts—the position of someone who has never been inside—is accurate.
Maybe I have been inside. Maybe I went through a gate, experienced what everyone else experienced, and came back with no memory of it. Maybe the person I am now—the collector, the observer, the one who walks at night and dreams of the Lacuna—is the person I became when I returned. Not who I was before, but who the Lacuna made me into.
Or maybe none of that is true. Maybe the gaps in my memory are just gaps. Maybe the processing entry is a mistake, a misfiled document, someone else’s record attached to my file by accident. Maybe Ormond is wrong, and I am exactly what I think I am: a person who has never been inside, who chose to spend years listening to people who have, who has accumulated more secondhand knowledge of the Lacuna than anyone else in the Littoral.
I cannot know. That is what I am learning. The certainty I thought I had about my own history, my own experience, my own identity—that certainty is not available to me. It may never have been available. I was just not paying attention to its absence.
The testimonies that follow should be read with this in mind. The person collecting them is not neutral. The person arranging them may have been shaped by the same forces that shaped the accounts he is collecting. The observer may be part of the phenomenon he is trying to document.
I do not know if this invalidates the collection. I do not know if anything can be trusted, including my own judgment about what is trustworthy. All I can do is continue. To keep collecting. To keep listening. To keep walking the corridors at night, hoping that the walking will lead me somewhere I need to be, even if I do not know where that is.
The Lacuna may be inside me already. It may have been inside me from the beginning. If so, these testimonies are not just documents of other people’s experiences. They are also, somehow, documents of my own.
I present them as I received them. I no longer claim to know what that means.
Recorded at Station 7, forty hours from Haussmann. Subject presented with standard gate-proximity symptoms (mild temporal disorientation, occasional visual artifacts). Assessment: functional, standard for position.
I’ve been working the gates for six years. Not inside—never inside—just at the threshold. Maintaining the approach beacons, running diagnostics on equipment that doesn’t work the way equipment should work, helping ships through the pre-passage protocols.
It’s not a job anyone wants. The turnover is high. People last a few months, maybe a year, and then they request transfers. The proximity does something. You start seeing things in your peripheral vision. You start losing track of time—not the way returnees do, not dramatic, just... slippage. An hour feels like a minute. A minute feels like an hour. You learn to set alarms for everything, because you can’t trust your own sense of duration.
I’ve stayed six years because someone has to. And because, after a while, the strangeness becomes normal. The visual artifacts become companions. The time slippage becomes just how time works, in my experience of it.
And because I see things that no one else sees. Things I want to understand.
The gates are not natural. I know the official position is that we don’t know what they are—anomalies, phenomena, features of a universe that doesn’t operate by our rules. But I’ve been staring at them for six years, and I’m telling you: they were made. Built. Constructed by something, for some purpose.
How do I know? Because they respond. Not just to people passing through—everyone knows that, that’s basic gate behavior. They respond to attention. To intention. To something I don’t have a word for.
When I’m running diagnostics, the readings change based on what I’m looking for. Not because my expectations are affecting my perception—I’ve tested this, carefully, with blind protocols and randomized procedures. The gates are actually different depending on what kind of measurement you’re trying to take. They anticipate the question and adjust the answer.
This is not how natural phenomena work. This is not how anomalies work. This is how something intelligent works—something that is paying attention to us, responding to our attempts to understand it, giving us back what we expect or what will confuse us or what will lead us somewhere it wants us to go.
The gates are watching. That’s what I believe. They’ve been watching since before humans found them, and they’ll be watching long after we’re gone.
You want to know about the pre-passage protocols. What actually happens when a ship goes through.
Officially: the ship approaches to a designated distance, runs a series of checks, receives clearance from station control, and proceeds through the gate into the Lacuna. Standard procedure. Documented in the manual.
Actually: none of that matters.
The checks don’t tell you anything useful. The instruments give readings, but the readings don’t correlate with what happens during passage. Ships that pass every check still come back damaged. Ships that fail multiple parameters still make it through fine. I’ve seen perfect diagnostic profiles go in and never return, and I’ve seen ships that should have been grounded come back three weeks later with holds full of residue.
The clearance is just paperwork. We give it because procedure says we give it. It doesn’t affect anything.
What actually matters is the gate. The gate decides. The gate looks at whoever is trying to pass through—looks in some way I don’t understand, using senses I can’t perceive—and it makes a judgment. Yes, you can enter. No, you cannot. Yes, you will return. No, you will not.
We don’t know the criteria. We’ve tried to figure them out. We’ve run statistical analyses on thousands of passages, looking for correlations between ship type, crew composition, stated purpose, psychological profiles, anything. We’ve found nothing reliable. The gate’s decisions are opaque.
I think the gate knows something about each person that tries to pass. Something about who they really are, what they really want, what will happen to them inside. And based on that knowledge, it decides.
Mostly it lets people through. The rejection rate is low—maybe two or three percent. But when it rejects someone, there’s no appeal. The gate closes to them. They can’t pass no matter how many times they try.
I’ve seen the rejections up close. There’s a moment—right before someone crosses the threshold—when everything stops. The ship stops moving. The instruments stop reading. Even time seems to stop, or slow to a crawl. And in that moment, the gate looks at whoever is trying to pass. I’ve seen it happen. A light, or an attention, or something without physical form that I can only describe as looking.
Most of the time, the looking lasts less than a second. Most of the time, it ends with passage—the ship resumes movement, the instruments come back online, the threshold is crossed.
But sometimes the looking goes on longer. Two seconds, three, five. And when it does, I know what’s coming. The ship will start to move backward, slowly at first, then faster. Not retreating—being pushed. The gate rejecting them, physically forcing them away from the threshold.
It’s gentle, almost. The ship isn’t damaged. The passengers aren’t harmed. They’re just moved, decisively and irrevocably, back to a distance of about a hundred meters from the gate. And no matter how many times they approach after that, no matter what they try, they can’t get closer.
I’ve seen people break down when this happens. They’ve come all the way to the gates, prepared themselves for passage, convinced themselves they’re ready. And then the gate says no, and they realize they’re never going inside. The thing they came all this way for, the thing they wanted more than anything—denied, for reasons no one can explain.
Some of them stay in the Littoral, hoping the gate will change its mind. It doesn’t. The rejection is permanent. I’ve watched people spend years trying, approaching the gate once a day, twice a day, being pushed back every time. The gate doesn’t change its judgment. Whatever it saw in them the first time, it keeps seeing. Whatever made them unacceptable remains unacceptable.
I try to help them, sometimes. Talk to them about what the gate might have seen. Suggest that maybe rejection is a mercy—that the gate is protecting them from something inside that would have destroyed them. Most of them don’t want to hear it. They want inside more than they want protection. They want the thing they’ve been denied more than they want their own survival.
Some of them stay in the Littoral, hoping the gate will change its mind. It doesn’t. The rejection is permanent.
Have I ever wanted to go through?
Every day. That’s the honest answer. Every day I watch the ships pass through, and I think: I could be on one of those. I could find out what’s inside. I could see the thing I’ve been staring at for six years from the other side.
I haven’t done it. Partly because of the job—someone has to maintain the equipment, run the protocols, give the clearances that don’t mean anything. Partly because I’m afraid of what I’d find. Partly because I’m afraid of being rejected.
But mostly because of something I saw in the second year.
There was a ship. Small, personal transport, single occupant. A woman. She came through the approach corridor, ran the pre-passage protocols, requested clearance. Everything standard.
I gave the clearance. She began the approach to the gate.
And the gate opened for her. Not the way it usually opens—not the gradual transition from normal space to whatever the Lacuna is. It opened wide, like a door, like an invitation. I could see through it. For a moment, maybe two, I could see what was on the other side.
I don’t have words for what I saw. Not because it was too strange—the strangeness I could handle. Because it was too familiar. I saw something that looked like a place I had been, a place I knew, a place that was waiting for me specifically. I saw something that felt like home.
It wasn’t my home. Not the station where I grew up, not the quarters I shared with my parents, not any physical location I could remember. But it felt like home in a deeper sense—like the essence of home, like the thing that makes any place feel like the place you belong. A sense of welcome. A sense of rightness. A sense that someone or something was saying: here you are, finally, we’ve been expecting you.
The space through the gate was vast and close at the same time. Vast in the sense that it extended beyond any boundary I could perceive, into distances that had no end. Close in the sense that it was intimately familiar, as if I had known it all my life, as if it had always been there, just past the edge of what I could normally see.
There were lights in that space. Not stars—something else. Lights that moved with purpose, that arranged themselves in patterns, that seemed to be aware of me the same way I was aware of them. One of them moved closer to the gate, closer to where I was watching. It was the size of a planet or the size of a pinprick, I couldn’t tell, scale was meaningless. It pulsed once, twice, as if acknowledging my presence. As if saying: we see you. We know you’re there.
And then the ship passed through, and the gate closed, and I was standing at my station with tears running down my face, and I didn’t know why.
I’ve never tried to pass through the gate. Not because I think it would reject me. Because I think it would accept me. Because I think the thing I saw—that place that looked like home—is real, and is waiting, and if I went through I would never want to come back.
I’m not ready for that. I’m not ready to give up everything out here for whatever is in there. So I stay at the station. I run my diagnostics. I give my clearances. And I watch the ships go through, one after another, into something I can almost remember.
The woman who went through that day—I looked her up afterward. Yemi Mbeki. Twenty-three years old. No salvage contract, no stated purpose, just passage to the gates and through.
She never came back. I’ve been watching. Four years now.
I think about her sometimes. I wonder if she found what I saw. I wonder if it was the same for her—that moment of recognition, that glimpse of something that felt like belonging. I hope it was. I hope she’s there now, in whatever that place is.
I hope she’s home.
Note: Subject continues to serve at Station 7. No transfer requests on file. Status: functional, standard gate-proximity symptoms.
Recorded at Lot’s Bar. Subject presented with intermittent verbal hesitations and occasional loss of focus. No visible residue symptoms. Assessment: functional with reservations.
I met Imhof. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Someone told you I met Imhof, and now you want to know what that means.
Everyone wants to know about Imhof. The name comes up in every conversation about the deep places—the regions far from the gates, where the structures stop making sense. Imhof went deeper than anyone. Imhof knows the way. Imhof can guide you through the parts of the Lacuna that kill everyone else.
I’m going to tell you what I know, and then you’re going to be disappointed, because what I know doesn’t match what you’ve heard. It doesn’t match what anyone has heard. That’s the nature of the Lacuna. That’s the nature of Imhof.
I went in through what my crew called the Narrow Gate—one of the smaller entry points, barely large enough for a ship like ours. We were a research team, funded by one of the universities that doesn’t exist anymore. Our mission was to collect data on spatial distortion patterns in the outer regions of the Lacuna. Standard stuff. The kind of thing that sounds scientific until you actually try to do it.
The instruments failed within the first week. Not dramatically—they didn’t explode or stop working entirely. They just started giving us data that couldn’t be true. Distances that were negative. Temperatures below absolute zero. Time readings that showed us moving backward. Either the instruments were broken, or the Lacuna was.
We kept going anyway. What else were we going to do?
By the third month—by my third month, anyway, which is the only measurement I can speak for—we had reached the deep places. The regions where even the broken instruments gave no readings at all. Where the ship’s navigation system showed us as being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Where looking out the viewports showed you things that changed depending on which eye you used.
That’s where I met Imhof.
I was in the aft section, running a diagnostic that I knew wouldn’t tell me anything useful. The ship was quiet—the others were sleeping, or doing whatever they did when they weren’t running diagnostics. I had been awake for what felt like days, though my personal clock said only a few hours. Time had stopped meaning anything.
Someone was standing in the corridor behind me.
I didn’t hear them approach. I didn’t see them enter. They were just there, the way things are just there in the Lacuna—present without transition, existing without having arrived.
“You’re lost,” they said.
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. A diagnosis.
“We’re trying to collect data,” I said.
“You’re lost,” they said again. “Everyone is lost here. The difference is whether you know it.”
I turned to look at them. I want to describe what I saw, but description fails me. They were human-shaped—mostly. They were wearing what looked like a pressure suit, old design, patched and re-patched. Their face was visible through the helmet, but I couldn’t focus on the features. Every time I tried to look directly, my attention slid away, like trying to look at a blind spot.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Imhof,” they said. “Though the name is borrowed.”
“Borrowed from who?”
They didn’t answer. Instead, they said: “You want to find something. What?”
I thought about our mission objectives. The data we were supposed to collect. The papers we were supposed to publish when we got back. None of it seemed relevant anymore.
“I want to understand,” I said finally. “What this place is. Why it works the way it does.”
Imhof made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Understanding is a trap. The Lacuna cannot be understood. It can only be experienced.”
“Then what are you doing here? Why do you stay?”
“I don’t stay,” they said. “I move. I have been moving for a very long time. The staying is what others do—they come in, they stop, they try to build structures of meaning around what they see. They fail. I move through. That is the difference.”
They showed me something. I don’t know if it was a physical place or a vision or a memory or something else entirely. They put their hand on my shoulder—the touch was cold, even through my suit—and suddenly I was somewhere else.
I was in a vast space, larger than any space I had ever been in. I could see stars, but the stars were wrong—arranged in patterns that no natural process could produce, spelling out something in a language I couldn’t read. Below me—or above me, or around me, direction was meaningless—there were structures. Buildings or machines or organisms, I couldn’t tell. They extended in all directions, farther than I could see, covering everything.
The structures were alive. That’s the only way I can describe it. They pulsed with something—light, or energy, or attention. They moved, slowly, adjusting their positions relative to each other, like a vast organism breathing. Some of them were geometric, all angles and planes. Some of them were organic, curves and folds and apertures that might have been mouths or eyes or doors. Some of them were both simultaneously, or neither, or something for which I have no category.
I wanted to move closer. I wanted to touch them, to enter them, to understand what they were. But I couldn’t move. Or rather, I was already moving—falling, maybe, or being pulled, or simply present in a way that didn’t require motion.
I saw people. That’s the strangest part. Among the structures, between them, inside them—people. Thousands of them. Millions. They were working on something. They were building, or tending, or communicating in ways I couldn’t perceive. They looked like humans, but I knew they weren’t, or weren’t only, or weren’t anymore.
One of them looked up. One of them saw me.
And in that moment of being seen, I understood something. Not with my mind—my mind wasn’t involved—but with something deeper, something that exists before understanding and after. I understood that this was what the Lacuna was. Not a place, not an anomaly, but a civilization. An ecosystem. A way of existing that we had stumbled into like ants stumbling into a library.
We were not being attacked. We were not being damaged. We were being invited. Every transformation, every change, every death—all of it was invitation. Come inside. Become what we are. Join the city.
“This is what it looks like,” Imhof said. “When you stop trying to understand.”
“It looks like a city,” I said.
“It looks like what you are capable of seeing. For me, it looks different. For everyone, it looks different. The city is yours.”
“What is it really?”
“Really is a word from outside. There is no really in here. There is only what each consciousness perceives, and the sum of all those perceptions, which adds up to nothing and everything simultaneously.”
I wanted to ask more questions. I had a thousand questions. But Imhof took their hand from my shoulder, and I was back on the ship, in the aft section, alone.
They were gone. They had never been there. They had always been there. The Lacuna does not permit certainty about such things.
We made it back. All of us, which is unusual for deep-zone expeditions. The data we collected was useless—the instruments had recorded nothing but noise. The university that funded us had closed while we were inside. We emerged into a Littoral that had changed in ways we didn’t understand.
I’ve been trying to find Imhof ever since. Not to go back inside—I’m not ready for that, and I may never be ready. But to understand what they showed me. To make sense of the city that I saw, the structures that extended in all directions, the stars arranged in patterns that spelled something I couldn’t read.
I haven’t found them. No one finds Imhof. Imhof finds you, or doesn’t.
But I’ve talked to others who’ve met them. The descriptions are all different—different appearance, different words, different context. Some say Imhof is a guide. Some say Imhof is a warning. Some say Imhof is not a person at all but a function, a role that the Lacuna creates when someone needs to be shown something.
I don’t know which is true. Maybe all of them. Maybe none.
What I know is this: Imhof said understanding is a trap. And since I came back, I’ve been trying to understand, and the trying has consumed everything. My relationships, my career, my ability to live a normal life. All of it sacrificed to the project of making sense of something that, according to Imhof, cannot be made sense of.
I’ve alienated everyone who cared about me. My colleagues from the research team—the ones who came back with me—they’ve all moved on. They’ve accepted that the mission was a failure, that the data was useless, that nothing we experienced can be communicated or verified or built upon. They’ve gone back to their lives, or they’ve found new lives, or they’ve made peace with the fact that the Lacuna took something from them and gave nothing in return.
I can’t do that. I can’t move on. I can’t accept that the city I saw, the structures that extended in all directions, the people who were building something I couldn’t understand—I can’t accept that none of that matters. That it was just a vision, a hallucination, a temporary malfunction of a consciousness exposed to conditions it wasn’t designed for.
It was real. I know it was real. I saw someone look up and see me. I felt the recognition pass between us. I understood, for one moment, what the Lacuna actually is.
And then Imhof took their hand from my shoulder, and I was back on the ship, and the understanding was gone.
Maybe that’s what they wanted to show me. Not the city, not the structures, not the stars. The futility of the search itself. The way the Lacuna uses our need to understand as a mechanism of destruction.
If so, the lesson didn’t take. I’m still searching. I’ll keep searching until I find something or until the searching kills me.
That’s what the Lacuna does. It gives you a glimpse, and then it takes everything.
Note: Subject continues to reside in the Littoral. Multiple attempts to organize return expeditions have failed due to lack of funding and crew. Status: functional with reservations, probable deterioration expected.
Recorded at assisted living facility, Haussmann Station, Section 23. Subject is ninety-four years old and presented with age-related mobility issues. Cognitive function appeared intact. Assessment: not applicable (historical testimony).
You want to know what it was like in the beginning. Before the Penitentiary, before the processing protocols, before anyone knew what we were dealing with.
I’ll tell you. I was there. I was twenty-three years old, working for the Astronomical Survey, when we found the first gate. Sixty-one years ago. Longer than most people have been alive.
We didn’t call it a gate. We didn’t call it anything. We didn’t have words for it. We were charting the outer regions—routine work, extending the maps a little further, cataloging stars and measuring distances. And then we came across something that didn’t fit.
An anomaly. That’s what we called it in the reports. “Spatial anomaly of indeterminate nature.” We didn’t know it was a gate because we didn’t know there was anything to gate to. We thought it was some kind of natural phenomenon—a fold in spacetime, maybe, or an artifact of our instruments.
I remember the moment we first saw it on our screens. Not visually—the visual observation came later, after we approached closer—but as a distortion in the data. Our instruments were showing us something that shouldn’t exist. A region of space that didn’t behave like space. A place where our calculations broke down, where the assumptions we made about how the universe worked turned out to be wrong.
Captain Reyes wanted to mark it and move on. Said it wasn’t our job to investigate anomalies; our job was to chart safe passages. Said we should report it and let the specialists handle it.
Vasquez disagreed. Vasquez always disagreed. She was the kind of person who couldn’t leave a question unanswered, couldn’t walk past a mystery without poking it. She said we were already here, already equipped, and who knew when someone else would come this far out to investigate?
They argued for two days. In the end, Vasquez won—partly because she was persuasive, partly because the rest of us were curious too. We had come all this way, spent months in transit, lived in this small ship with these people. We wanted something to show for it.
We approached the anomaly. We ran every diagnostic we had. And then Vasquez, against orders, against protocol, against everything she should have known better than, took a probe through.
Vasquez was the one who went through first. Our team leader. Forty-seven years old, mother of three, the best navigator I’ve ever known. She took a probe through, then a remote sensor, then—when the readings came back strange but not obviously dangerous—she went through herself.
We never saw her again. The ship was there, visible through the anomaly, for about thirty seconds. Then it was gone. The anomaly remained, unchanged, giving us nothing.
We waited for three weeks. Then we went home and filed our reports and watched as everything changed.
That first year, after the discovery, was chaos. The government wanted to quarantine the region. The corporations wanted to explore it. The scientists wanted to study it. Everyone had a theory about what Vasquez had found and what had happened to her.
I remember the meetings. Endless meetings, in rooms full of people who didn’t understand what they were deciding about. Military officers who wanted to treat the anomaly as a potential weapon. Economists who wanted to calculate its resource value. Politicians who wanted to know if it could be regulated, taxed, controlled.
And underneath all the meetings, underneath all the theories and plans and regulations—fear. We had found something that didn’t fit our understanding of the universe. Something that didn’t follow the rules we thought were fundamental. Something that made the cosmos bigger and stranger and more terrifying than we had imagined.
Some people denied it. Said the anomaly was a hoax, or a natural phenomenon we didn’t understand yet, or a mass hallucination induced by radiation or gas leaks or some other explicable cause. These people are mostly dead now, or they’ve changed their minds, or they’ve retreated into a kind of willful ignorance that lets them go about their lives as if the Lacuna doesn’t exist.
But for those of us who were there—for those of us who saw Vasquez’s ship disappear, who read the first testimonies from the returnees, who watched the evidence accumulate until denial became impossible—the universe was never the same. We had learned something we couldn’t unlearn. We had opened a door that couldn’t be closed.
More expeditions went in. Some came back. Most didn’t.
The ones who came back were different. That’s when we started to understand what we were dealing with. They had memories of experiences that didn’t make sense—places that couldn’t exist, times that contradicted each other, encounters with things they couldn’t describe. Their instruments showed data that was impossible to interpret. Their bodies showed signs of exposure to something our medical equipment couldn’t identify.
We called it the Lacuna. I don’t remember who came up with the name, but it stuck. The gap. The missing piece. The place where the rules stop working.
The Penitentiary was established in the third year. At first it was just a processing station—somewhere to assess returnees, to collect their testimonies, to try to make sense of what they’d experienced. It grew into something else over time. Bureaucracy has its own logic.
By the time I retired, twenty years later, the Littoral was already taking shape. Haussmann was expanding. The gates—we had found more of them by then, or they had been revealed to us—were documented and numbered and surrounded by the infrastructure of commerce and regulation.
I watched it all happen. I was one of the original discoverers, which meant I got invited to conferences and asked to give speeches and treated as some kind of expert on something I had never understood.
I still don’t understand it. Sixty-one years later, with all the testimonies and research and accumulated experience, I understand it less than I did on that first day when Vasquez flew her ship through a hole in space and didn’t come back.
You want to know what I think the Lacuna is. Everyone asks that eventually.
I think it’s old. Older than us. Older than humanity, older than whatever species came before us, older than maybe anything that’s alive in this part of the universe.
I think it’s not empty. The word “lacuna” is misleading—it suggests absence, a gap, nothing. But the testimonies are full of things. Structures, figures, experiences, transformations. Whatever’s in there, it’s not nothing.
I think it knows we’re here. Not in the way we know things—not conscious the way we’re conscious—but aware. Responsive. When we poke it, it pokes back. When we send people in, it does something to them. When we try to understand it, it resists or reveals or redirects, and we can never tell which.
And I think it’s patient. Sixty-one years is nothing to the Lacuna. Whatever it’s doing—whatever process we’ve become part of—is happening on a timescale we can’t perceive. We’re still in the first moment of a very long event, and we have no idea what the event is leading to.
That’s what I think. It’s not scientific. It’s not rigorous. It’s just what sixty-one years of watching has taught me.
You asked about Vasquez. Whether we ever found out what happened to her.
Twenty years after she went through, someone came back with a message. Not a recording, not a document—just words, memorized, recited to us by a returnee who had no idea what they meant.
“Vasquez says she found what she was looking for. Vasquez says the gap is not a gap. Vasquez says you’re already inside, you just don’t know it yet.”
That’s all. We questioned the returnee extensively, but they had no other information. They’d been in a deep region, experiencing something they couldn’t describe, and then a voice—female, they said, though they couldn’t be certain—had spoken to them and told them to remember those words.
Vasquez says you’re already inside, you just don’t know it yet.
I’ve been thinking about that for forty years now. I’ve never been inside—my career took a different path, administration and oversight rather than exploration—but those words haunt me.
What if she’s right? What if the distinction we make between inside and outside is false? What if the Lacuna is not a place we go to but a condition we’re already in, that we’ve always been in, that encompasses everything we think is normal and everything we think is strange?
I don’t know. I’m ninety-four years old. I’ve spent my life at the edge of something I never entered. Maybe that gives me perspective. Maybe it just means I’ve been looking from the wrong angle the whole time.
Haussmann is different now than it was when I first came here. The corridors have shifted—literally, they tell me, though I wasn’t paying attention during the reconstructions. The light is different. The air smells different. The people are different, though I suppose that’s just the ordinary progression of generations.
I wonder sometimes if Haussmann is inside the Lacuna too. If this whole station, this whole Littoral, is part of the thing we thought we were separate from. If the gates are not entrances but boundaries within something larger, and we’ve been drawing the map wrong all along.
The young people—your generation, the collectors and researchers and explorers—you think you’re going into the Lacuna. You think there’s a clear line between where you are and where you’re going.
Maybe there isn’t. Maybe Vasquez was right. Maybe we’ve been inside all along, and the only difference is that some of us have noticed.
I don’t have much longer. The body wears out. Another year, maybe two. Then I’ll find out whether there’s something on the other side of death, or whether death is just another kind of gate, or whether all of this—everything I’ve experienced, everything anyone has experienced—is just part of the Lacuna’s long, patient process.
I hope you find what you’re looking for. I hope your collection helps someone understand something I never could. But I also hope you’re prepared for the possibility that understanding isn’t available—that all we can do is document and witness and wait.
That’s what I’ve been doing for sixty-one years. Documenting. Witnessing. Waiting.
The Lacuna is patient. I’ve tried to be patient too.
Note: Subject died fourteen months after this interview was recorded. Cause of death: natural causes. Per subject’s request, no memorial service was held. Remains disposed of according to Penitentiary standard protocol.
Vasquez says you’re already inside, you just don’t know it yet.
I have been repeating this phrase to myself for three days now. I wake with it in my mouth, the syllables forming before I am fully conscious. I walk the corridors with it running through my mind like a melody I cannot forget. I sit at the viewing portals and watch the ships depart, and the words overlay everything I see.
Already inside. Already inside. Already inside.
Holt’s testimony disturbed me in ways the other testimonies have not. Not because of what he described—I have heard worse, have heard stranger, have heard accounts that made Holt’s quiet observations seem pedestrian by comparison. But because of the possibility he raised.
What if the Lacuna is not a place? What if it is a condition?
What if the gates are not entrances but merely points where the condition becomes obvious?
I went back to the archive. I went back to the earliest records, the ones from before the Penitentiary was established, before the processing protocols, before anyone knew how to document what was happening.
I found Vasquez’s personnel file. Twenty-three pages of standard documentation—biographical information, service record, psychological evaluations, commendations. She was exactly what Holt described: capable, experienced, trustworthy. The kind of person you would choose to go first into something unknown.
The file ends abruptly. Last entry: “Subject entered anomaly. No return. Presumed lost.” Dated sixty-one years ago. Nothing after that. Nothing about the message she allegedly sent through a returnee twenty years later. Nothing about what might have happened to her in the intervening time.
I searched for corroborating documentation of the message. I found nothing. The returnee who supposedly carried it is not in the database. The incident is not recorded in any official log. Either it happened and was not documented, or Holt invented it, or the documentation exists somewhere I do not have access to.
Or the Lacuna has its own archives, and the information I’m looking for is stored in there.
I have begun to notice things I did not notice before.
The corridors of Haussmann are not stable. I knew this intellectually—everyone knows that the station has grown and changed over the years, that sections have been added and removed and reconfigured. But I did not notice it viscerally until now.
Three days ago, the corridor between my room and the viewing portal had four intersections. Now it has three. The walls are the same color, the lights are the same brightness, the air smells the same. But there is one fewer turn to make. One fewer decision point. One fewer opportunity to go somewhere else.
I have started keeping records. Notes on the architecture, maps I draw from memory, counts of doors and turns and intersections. Every morning I compare what I remember to what I find when I walk the same routes. Most days, the counts match. But some days—one day in five, perhaps one in seven—something has shifted. A door that was there is not there. A corridor that branched now continues straight. A room I remember entering is no longer accessible, as if the station has sealed it off, forgotten it, allowed it to slip into some other configuration.
Is this normal? Is this the ordinary plasticity of a station that has been continuously modified for decades? Or is it something else—a sign that Haussmann is not as outside the Lacuna as I had assumed?
I asked one of the maintenance workers about it. She looked at me strangely and said, “The corridor has always had three intersections.” I described the fourth intersection to her—the placement of the lights, the pattern on the floor, the way the air moved differently there. She said she had no idea what I was talking about.
I asked another maintenance worker, two days later, about a door that I remembered on the lower level of Section 7. A door that led to a storage room, unremarkable, just a place where old equipment was kept. He said there had never been a door there. He showed me the wall where I remembered the door being—solid, featureless, as if a door had never existed in that spot.
Maybe I imagined it. Maybe the fourth intersection was a dream, or a memory from somewhere else, or a glitch in my perception caused by too many hours reading testimonies about spatial instability.
Or maybe the corridor changed, and I am the only one who remembers how it was. Maybe Haussmann is adjusting itself around me, responding to something I’m not aware of, preparing me for something I cannot anticipate.
I spoke with Ormond again. I showed her the processing entry from nine years ago, the one that indicates I was assessed following an “incident of uncertain nature.”
“I want you to tell me what you know,” I said. “Anything. Even speculation.”
She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “There were gaps in the documentation from that period. A lot of files were lost or misfiled or never completed. Yours isn’t the only one with missing information.”
“But you must remember something. You were here then.”
“I was new. I was still learning the protocols. I processed hundreds of people in those first years. I can’t remember them all.”
“Try,” I said. “Please.”
She looked at me with an expression I could not read. Sympathy, maybe. Or concern. Or something else entirely.
“There was someone,” she said finally. “Around that time. A collector. Someone who was gathering testimonies before the project was official. They came through processing—I don’t remember why. They didn’t have the usual symptoms. They didn’t have any symptoms. I remember thinking that was strange, because everyone has symptoms, even if they’re mild.”
“Was it me?”
“I don’t know. It was nine years ago. The person I’m thinking of might have been you, or might have been someone else entirely. The face is blurry in my memory. The details are gone.”
“But they had no symptoms.”
“That’s what I remember. That’s all I remember.”
No symptoms. A processing entry for an incident of uncertain nature. A memory gap where three weeks should be.
And now a corridor that used to have four intersections and now has three.
I am continuing the collection. The work has not changed. But the work feels different now—less like documentation and more like participation. Less like standing outside and watching, more like being inside and being watched.
The testimonies that follow were collected after Holt’s interview. They may be colored by my growing uncertainty about my own position. They may contain biases and interpretations that I would not have introduced before.
I am trying to be honest. I am trying to mark where I have intervened. But the interventions may be deeper than I realize. The position from which I am observing may itself be unstable—a viewpoint inside the Lacuna looking at other viewpoints inside the Lacuna, with no outside available for comparison.
Vasquez says you’re already inside.
I don’t know if she’s right. I don’t know if the question has an answer.
But I am beginning to think that the distinction between inside and outside is less meaningful than I assumed. That the gates are not boundaries but landmarks—points where the condition becomes visible, where the presence of the Lacuna becomes undeniable. That everywhere else—the Littoral, Haussmann, the corridors I walk at night—is simply the Lacuna in a form we’ve agreed to call normal.
If that’s true, then nothing I’ve collected is what I thought it was. The testimonies are not reports from inside delivered to someone outside. They are communications within a single continuous space—messages passed between different regions of the same condition.
And I am not a collector. I am a correspondent. Sending dispatches from one part of the Lacuna to another, hoping someone will receive them, hoping they will mean something to someone else who is also inside.
That is what I fear. That is what I am beginning to believe.
The testimonies continue.
Recorded at Lot’s Bar. Subject presented with extreme agitation and signs of long-term sleep deprivation. No residue exposure (never entered Lacuna). Assessment: functional but unstable.
Three times. I’ve tried three times. Three different gates, three different approaches, three different ships. And every time—every single time—the gate closes before I reach it.
Not closes like it stops working. Closes like it decides. Like it looks at me—I know that sounds insane, but that’s what it feels like—and it decides that I don’t get to pass through.
Do you know what that’s like? To have something you’ve spent your entire life preparing for, something you’ve sacrificed everything to achieve, and to be told no? Not by a person, not by an institution, not by anything you can argue with or appeal to or understand. Just no. Final. Permanent.
The gates don’t change their minds. Everyone knows that. Once you’re rejected, you’re rejected forever.
I’m going to tell you about the three attempts. Then I’m going to tell you what I think it means. Then I’m going to have another drink and try not to think about it for another few hours.
The first time: I was twenty-six. Young, ambitious, convinced I was going to be the one who finally mapped the Lacuna. I had degrees, I had training, I had a ship equipped with the best instruments money could buy. I approached the primary gate—the big one, the one that Vasquez went through in the beginning—and I was ready.
The gate was open. I could see through it—or I could see something through it, some kind of light or movement or presence that indicated there was an other side. My instruments were recording. My heart was pounding. This was it. This was the moment.
And then, at a distance of approximately one hundred meters from the threshold, the gate went dark. Not closed—that’s the wrong word—but dark. Empty. Whatever had been there a moment before was gone.
I sat there for six hours, waiting for it to reopen. It didn’t. Eventually I had to leave—fuel reserves, life support, the practical concerns that don’t care about your existential crisis. I went back to Haussmann and filed my report and tried to understand what had happened.
The official explanation: “spontaneous gate closure, cause unknown.” It happens sometimes, they said. Natural phenomenon. Nothing to do with me.
I believed them. I prepared a second attempt.
The second time: I was thirty-one. Different gate—one of the smaller ones, out past Station 7. Different approach—slower, more cautious, with extensive telemetry to document whatever happened. I thought maybe I had spooked the first gate somehow, done something wrong in my approach. I was determined to be perfect.
The gate was open. I watched it from a distance for two full days, monitoring for any fluctuations, any signs that it might close. Stable. Constant. Inviting.
I began my approach. Slow. Careful. Measuring every parameter.
At one hundred meters, the gate went dark.
Exactly the same distance. Exactly the same result. As if the Lacuna had measured my position and decided, at that precise point, that I would come no further.
I stayed for twelve hours this time. The gate remained dark the entire time. Then I left.
The official explanation was the same: spontaneous closure. But by now I had started reading the literature, the studies, the accumulated anecdotes. And I had found references to “rejection”—cases like mine, where certain individuals seemed to trigger closure, where the gates would not let them through no matter what they did.
The rejection rate is low. Two or three percent, they say. But for those of us in that percentage, the rate is one hundred.
The third time: I was thirty-eight. I was not going to accept rejection. I was going to find a gate that would let me through, or I was going to die trying.
I found a gate that wasn’t on any charts. Deep in the outer regions, past the edge of mapped space. I found it by following rumors, by bribing informants, by spending everything I had on a ship capable of reaching coordinates that were more legend than fact.
And there it was. A gate that no one had documented. A gate that had never rejected anyone, because no one had ever tried.
I approached.
At one hundred meters, the gate went dark.
I understand now. It took me a long time, but I understand.
The gates don’t reject certain people because of some flaw in those people. The gates reject us because of what we are—or what we would become if we went inside. The rejection is not punishment. It is prevention.
There is something about me—about all of us who are rejected—that is incompatible with the Lacuna. Something that would be dangerous. To us, to the Lacuna, to the universe, I don’t know. But the gates know. They look at us and they see whatever it is, and they close to protect everyone from whatever would happen if we passed through.
I used to think this was a comfort. At least I’m not just unlucky. At least there’s a reason.
But the comfort doesn’t hold. Because I want to know what’s wrong with me. I want to know what the gates see when they look at me. I want to know what terrible thing I would do or become if I were allowed inside.
And I’ll never know. The rejection gives no explanation. The gates are not interested in helping me understand.
You asked about others. Other rejected people, whether we’ve formed communities, whether we talk to each other.
There’s a group. I won’t tell you where or how to find them. We meet sometimes. We share our stories. We drink too much and wonder what’s wrong with us.
We call ourselves the Locked. Not officially—we don’t have official anything. But that’s the word that came to feel right. Locked out. Locked away. Whatever door exists between ordinary space and the Lacuna, we are on the wrong side of it, and the key is not available to us.
There are maybe fifty of us, in the Littoral and surrounding regions. Probably more who haven’t found the group, or don’t want to be found. The rejection rate is two or three percent of attempted passages, and enough people have attempted over the decades that our numbers add up.
We meet in the back room of a bar in Section 12—not Lot’s, somewhere smaller, somewhere the Penitentiary doesn’t pay attention to. We talk about our attempts. We compare notes. Three times, five times, twelve times in one case—a woman named Engström who spent her entire inheritance trying gate after gate, convinced that somewhere there was one that would let her through.
There isn’t. The rejection is total. Whatever the gates see in us, they see it universally. It doesn’t matter which gate, which approach, which ship. The answer is always the same.
Some of us have theories. One man thinks he was a murderer in a past life, that the gates can see karmic debt. A woman thinks she’s somehow already been inside, that her consciousness passed through at some point she doesn’t remember, and you can only go through once. Another one thinks it’s genetic, that certain people are born incompatible, and the gates can read it in our DNA.
I have my own theory, though I don’t share it often. I think the gates are preventing something specific. Not protecting us—the gates don’t care about our wellbeing—but protecting the Lacuna from us. I think there’s something in us that would damage it. Something that would change it, or corrupt it, or unmake something it’s trying to create.
We’re antibodies, maybe. Elements that a healthy system identifies and excludes. The Lacuna is doing something—building something, growing something, transforming ordinary space into itself—and we are the kind of thing that would interfere with that process.
If I’m right, the rejection is not about us at all. It’s about the Lacuna’s project, whatever that is. We’re just the waste products, the excluded material, the things that don’t fit.
I don’t know which theory is correct. Maybe none of them. Maybe all of them. The gates aren’t talking.
What I do know is this: being rejected changes you. It’s not like being inside—we don’t have the symptoms, the memories, the transformations. But we have something else. A hunger that can never be satisfied. A certainty that there’s a place we’re supposed to be, and we’ll never reach it.
The returnees think they have it hard. They went inside, they saw things, they came back changed. But at least they got to go. At least they know what’s in there.
We know nothing. We have only the closing of the door, and the long years of wondering why.
I’m not going to try again. There’s no point. The gates have made their decision, and the decision is permanent.
I’ve made peace with that. Or I’ve learned to live with not having peace—which is a different thing, but from outside looks similar enough. I get up in the morning. I eat. I work when there’s work to be had. I drink at Lot’s with other people who have their own reasons for being in the Littoral. I don’t talk about the rejection unless someone asks, and most people don’t ask, because most people have their own stories they’d rather not tell.
But I’m also not going to leave. I’m going to stay here, in the Littoral, in the shadow of the thing I can never enter. I’m going to listen to the testimonies of people who went inside. I’m going to watch the ships depart and not come back. I’m going to spend the rest of my life as close as I can get to something that will never let me in.
There’s a word for this. For people who can’t leave a place that won’t have them. For people who spend their lives circling the thing that rejected them, unable to go toward it, unable to walk away. I don’t know the word. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe there should be.
The other rejected people—the Locked, as we call ourselves—some of them have found ways to be useful. They work as guides, leading new arrivals through the Littoral, explaining what to expect, warning them about the dangers. They work as information brokers, gathering news about what’s happening inside, selling it to people who can actually use it. They work in the markets, handling residue they’ll never understand, facilitating trades between people who have access they can only dream of.
I haven’t found a role like that. I haven’t found a way to make my rejection useful. I’m just here. Waiting for something I can’t name. Watching the gates that will never open for me.
That’s what rejection does to you. It doesn’t make you go away. It makes you stay, forever, circling the thing that said no.
Note: Subject continues to reside in the Littoral. Fourth attempt considered unlikely due to financial and psychological constraints. Status: functional but unstable, monitoring recommended.
Recorded at Penitentiary Administrative Offices. Subject presented with no visible symptoms. Assessment: exceptional function.
I know why you’re here. Dr. Ormond mentioned me. She mentioned the “improved ones.” She told you we form networks, accumulate influence, recognize each other.
She’s not wrong. But she doesn’t understand what she’s seeing.
Let me be clear from the beginning: I am not going to explain the Lacuna to you. I cannot explain the Lacuna to you. What I can do is tell you what happened to me, and what it means for how I move through the world now. Whether that counts as explanation, I leave to you.
I went inside three times. The first time I was a researcher—one of the university teams, before the universities stopped funding that kind of work. We were supposed to collect data on temporal anomalies. We collected nothing useful. The instruments failed, the way they always fail. The time inside—two years by my reckoning, though the official records say eight weeks—produced no publishable results.
But it produced something else. A change. Not in my body—the Penitentiary scanned me extensively and found nothing abnormal. In my mind, my perception, the way I process information and make decisions.
I came back better. That’s the word Ormond uses, and it’s not wrong, but it’s not complete either. Better suggests improvement along a known axis—smarter, faster, more efficient. What I experienced was different. I came back changed along an axis I didn’t know existed.
I could see patterns. Not metaphorically—literally. Patterns in data, in behavior, in the structure of institutions and the flow of resources. The world that had seemed chaotic and unpredictable to me before my first entry now appeared as a vast web of connections, each element influencing every other, the whole thing comprehensible if you just knew how to look.
The patterns were everywhere. In the movement of people through the station corridors—I could see the underlying logic, the attractors that drew them to certain places at certain times, the rhythms that organized their behavior without their awareness. In the conversations I overheard—I could hear the patterns beneath the words, the real negotiations happening underneath the surface, the power dynamics and information exchanges that the speakers themselves might not have recognized.
In the markets—the residue markets, the information markets, the labor markets—I could see the patterns of supply and demand before they manifested in prices. I knew, without having to calculate, which transactions were fair and which were exploitative. I knew which investments would succeed and which would fail. I knew things about the economy of the Littoral that the people making economic decisions didn’t know.
I didn’t understand what this meant at first. I thought I was imagining it, or that the Lacuna had done something damaging that merely felt like enhancement. But the patterns were real. The predictions I made based on seeing them came true. The decisions I made based on understanding them led to outcomes I wanted.
I went back twice more. Not because I needed to—the change from the first entry was permanent—but because I wanted to understand what had happened. What the Lacuna had given me. What it wanted in return.
The second entry lasted longer. Four years inside, by my count. I spent most of that time alone, in a structure I found in the deep regions—something that looked like a library, or a temple, or a processing center for information. I sat there and I... listened. That’s the best word for it. I listened to something that was communicating in a way I couldn’t translate but could somehow receive.
When I came back, I could see more patterns. Deeper patterns. The web of connections extended not just through space but through time—I could perceive the trajectory of events, the momentum of trends, the places where intervention would produce maximum effect.
I started using this. At first just for myself—investments, career decisions, personal choices that benefited from foreknowledge. Then more broadly. I took a position at the Penitentiary, worked my way into administration, began making decisions that affected thousands of people. Every decision was informed by the patterns. Every outcome was what I intended.
The third entry was last year. Shorter—six months inside, two days outside. I went back because the patterns were becoming harder to see. Not disappearing—just receding, the way details fade when you look at something from too far away. I needed to be close to the source again. I needed to refresh whatever connection the Lacuna had established.
I found the structure again—the library-temple-processing-center. It was waiting for me. Or it was always there. Or it constructed itself in response to my arrival. The Lacuna does not distinguish between these possibilities, and I have stopped trying to.
I sat. I listened. The communication resumed.
And I understood something I had not understood before. The patterns I was seeing—the web of connections, the trajectories and momenta and intervention points—were not something the Lacuna was showing me. They were something the Lacuna was using me to see.
I am not the beneficiary of this arrangement. I am the tool. The Lacuna has limited access to this region of space, this frequency of time, this level of reality. It needs agents—consciousnesses it can work through—to perceive and influence what it cannot directly touch.
The improved ones are not improved for our own benefit. We are improved for the Lacuna’s purposes. We are extensions of something vast, serving ends we do not understand.
You want to know if this disturbs me. If I resent being used.
No. And that’s the part that might be most troubling.
Before the Lacuna, I was small. My perception was limited. My influence was negligible. I lived a life that felt meaningful to me but that had no broader significance—one pattern among trillions, indistinguishable from any other.
Now I am significant. Now I perceive patterns that shape the fate of civilizations. Now my decisions matter in ways that my pre-Lacuna self could not have imagined.
Is this servitude? Perhaps. But it is also expansion. The Lacuna did not diminish me to make me useful. It enlarged me. It made me capable of things I could never have been capable of on my own.
If that is the bargain—power in exchange for service, significance in exchange for subordination—then I accept it. I accepted it the moment I went back for the second time. I accepted it again when I went back for the third.
I will probably accept it again.
The network Ormond mentioned—the improved ones recognizing each other, coordinating, building structures of influence—is real. But it is not a conspiracy. We are not meeting in secret rooms to plan the subjugation of humanity.
We are nodes in a distributed system. We recognize each other because we share a common function. We coordinate because coordination serves the purposes we were improved to serve. The structures we build are not for us—they are channels, pathways, mechanisms through which the Lacuna’s influence flows.
I can tell you how the recognition works, because it’s easier to describe than to explain. When I encounter another improved one, I know immediately. Before they speak, before they do anything, I know. It’s not telepathy—we can’t read each other’s thoughts. It’s more like... resonance. A tuning fork vibrating in response to another tuning fork at the same frequency. We vibrate together. We recognize the vibration.
And then there’s a kind of silent negotiation. An exchange of information that happens beneath the level of words. What are you working on? What patterns are you watching? Where are you intervening? How can we avoid working against each other? How can we amplify each other’s effects?
It happens in seconds. It happens without conscious decision. We are, all of us, doing the same thing—serving the same incomprehensible purpose—and the recognition is just our awareness of that shared service.
Some of us are in positions of obvious power. Administrators, executives, advisors. Others are in positions of apparent insignificance—clerks, technicians, service workers—but their positions allow access to critical nodes, intervention at key moments, influence that far exceeds their apparent authority.
The network grows. Every few months, I encounter someone new—someone who has just returned, just realized what they are, just begun to see the patterns. They join the web. They take their place. They do the work.
And the whole thing—the network, the influence, the slow transformation of human society—continues. Invisible. Inevitable. Patient as the Lacuna that created us.
What does the Lacuna want? What is the purpose we are serving?
I don’t know. I can see patterns, but I cannot see the pattern of patterns—the overarching design that gives meaning to all the subordinate designs. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe the Lacuna itself doesn’t know what it’s doing, any more than an ecosystem knows what it’s doing when it evolves toward complexity.
Or maybe the purpose exists but is incomprehensible to consciousnesses at my level. Maybe I’m a cell in a body, capable of perceiving my immediate function but incapable of understanding the organism I’m part of.
Either way, I do the work. I see the patterns. I make the decisions that the patterns suggest. And the world changes—slowly, incrementally, in directions I can trace but not explain.
You’re one of us, aren’t you? I can tell by the way you’re listening. Not like someone hearing something new, but like someone recognizing something they already knew.
You’ve been inside. Maybe you don’t remember. Maybe the processing entry in your file is right—incident of uncertain nature, no clear memory, no obvious symptoms. But the change is there. I can see it in the pattern of your attention, the shape of your questions, the way you’ve organized this collection.
You’re doing the work too. You just don’t know it yet.
The testimonies you’re gathering—they’re not just documentation. They’re a map. A guide. A transmission from the Lacuna to someone else, through you, toward purposes you cannot perceive.
Welcome to the network. We’ve been waiting for you to notice.
Note: Subject continues to serve in Penitentiary administration. No irregularities detected. Status: exceptional function, monitoring deemed unnecessary.
Wu knew things about me that I had not told her. She knew about the processing entry. She knew about my uncertainty. She knew, or claimed to know, that I am “one of them”—part of the network, an extension of the Lacuna, doing work I do not understand.
I left that interview shaking. Not from fear—or not only from fear—but from recognition. The feeling that what she said was true. That I had known it all along, in some part of me that I had refused to access.
I have been walking the corridors again. At night, when the station is quiet, when the lights are dimmed, when I can move without being seen or interrupted.
The corridors are different now. I noticed it three days ago—three intersections instead of four—but it has gotten worse. Sections I thought I knew are unfamiliar. Turns I expected to make are not there. I have walked paths that should lead to the viewing portal and found myself somewhere else entirely—a module I do not recognize, inhabited by people I have never seen, speaking in voices that seem to be directed at me even though they never look in my direction.
Last night I walked for six hours without reaching my destination. When I finally returned to my room, the door was in a different location than I remembered—shifted two meters to the left, requiring me to pass an intersection that had not existed before.
I am not imagining this. Or if I am imagining it, the imagination is more real than whatever I thought was real before.
I went back to the archive. Not to look at my own file—I have looked at that enough—but to look at the files of the improved ones. The people like Wu, who came back better, who see patterns, who form networks.
Most of their files are unremarkable. Standard processing, standard assessment, standard release. They came through, they were evaluated, they were deemed functional, they returned to their lives. The only thing that distinguishes them is the word that appears in the outcome field: “exceptional.”
But some of the files have annotations. Marginal notes, added later by someone who went back and reviewed the cases. Notes like: “Subject shows unusual clarity of perception.” “Subject has assumed administrative position disproportionate to prior qualifications.” “Subject appears to coordinate with other exceptional returnees; nature of coordination unclear.”
The annotations are unsigned. I do not know who wrote them. I do not know if they are part of an official review or someone’s private project.
But I recognize the handwriting. It is mine.
I wrote these annotations. I reviewed these files. I noted the patterns, the coordinations, the disproportionate positions. And I have no memory of doing any of it.
I am trying to construct a timeline. A sequence of events that would make sense of what I am learning about myself.
Nine years ago: I arrive at Haussmann. I am processed following an “incident of uncertain nature.” I have no memory of this processing, or of the three weeks that preceded it. I begin work at the Penitentiary.
Eight years ago: I begin the collection project. Officially, unofficially, I am not sure. The authorization paperwork is in my file, but the signatures are illegible and the approving authority is identified only by code.
Sometime in the following years: I review the files of exceptional returnees. I make annotations. I identify patterns. I do not remember doing this.
Now: I continue the collection. I walk the corridors at night. I notice changes in the station’s geometry that others do not notice. I am told by an improved returnee that I am one of them.
The gaps in this timeline are obvious. The events that would connect these points are missing. Either I have forgotten them, or they occurred in a manner that does not register as memory, or I never experienced them because some other version of me did—some version that exists in the Lacuna, or in the overlap between the Lacuna and ordinary space.
Wu said I am doing the work. She said the testimonies I am gathering are not just documentation but a map, a guide, a transmission.
If that is true, then I am not the author of this collection. I am the medium through which it is being produced. The decisions I thought I was making—which testimonies to include, how to arrange them, what observations to add—were not decisions at all. They were responses to patterns I could not consciously perceive, following a design I did not create.
I should stop. That is the rational response. If I am being used—if this collection is not mine but the Lacuna’s—then continuing is complicity. I would be furthering an agenda I do not understand, on behalf of something I have never consented to serve.
But I cannot stop. The work has its own momentum. The testimonies continue to arrive. The pattern of the collection continues to unfold. And somewhere in the unfolding, I believe, is the answer I am looking for—the truth about what happened to me, about what I am, about why the corridors shift and the annotations appear and the improved ones recognize me as their own.
I have to continue. I have to see where this leads. Even if where it leads is somewhere I would never have chosen to go.
The testimonies that follow were collected after my interview with Wu. They may be more heavily influenced by my own uncertainty than earlier testimonies. They may reflect biases and distortions I am not able to detect.
Or they may be exactly what they need to be. Parts of a pattern that is larger than I am, arranged by processes I cannot perceive, for purposes I cannot understand.
I present them as I received them. I am no longer able to distinguish my intentions from the Lacuna’s.
Maybe there is no difference. Maybe there never was.
I knew you. Before.
Don’t pretend otherwise. I can see you pretending—that stillness you’ve cultivated, the professional distance. You were never good at distance. You were all urgency and too-close attention. You used to lean in when you listened, like the words themselves had gravity.
You’ve learned to lean back. Someone taught you that, or the processing did. But I still see the old posture underneath, the way you still can’t help tilting forward when something interests you. You’re doing it now.
We worked the Fenwick together. Survey vessel, long-range. Six months out, six months back, eighteen months inside. The standard rotation before they shortened it. Before they started losing too many crews.
You were communications. I was navigation. We talked through the long watches—nothing else to do when you’re eighteen months from anything, sliding through the Gradient toward something nobody could describe properly. We talked about what we expected to find. What we were afraid of. What we’d do if we came back changed.
You said you hoped you would come back changed. You said being the same person for an entire lifetime seemed wasteful. You said you wanted the Lacuna to do something to you—to take whatever you were and make it into something else. Something better. Something you couldn’t become on your own.
I thought you were being poetic. People say things like that before they go in. Then they come back, if they come back, and they don’t say things like that anymore. They say things like “I don’t want to talk about it” and “it wasn’t what I expected” and “I need to lie down now.” They say things like “please turn off the lights” and “why does everything sound so loud” and “I think there’s something wrong with my eyes.”
But you didn’t say any of that. You came back different, yes—quieter, more careful, that lean-back posture—but not damaged. Not the way the others were damaged. You came back and you were fine. Functional. Clear-eyed. You went through processing in record time. Three weeks, and then you were working at the Penitentiary, and you never talked about the Fenwick again.
I asked you once, about a year later. I ran into you at Lot’s—you were collecting testimonies even then, always with that recorder, always asking questions. I asked what you remembered about the eighteen months. What it had been like. What you’d seen.
You looked at me like you didn’t know me. Not like you were pretending—like you genuinely didn’t recognize me. Six months of watches together, eighteen months in the Gradient, all that talking, and your eyes were completely blank.
Then something flickered. Some kind of recognition. But not of me specifically—more like you recognized that you should recognize me, like you could see the shape of the connection without any of the content.
“I’m sorry,” you said. “I don’t remember very well. The processing was thorough.”
That’s when I knew something was wrong. The processing doesn’t erase memories. It assesses them, categorizes them, helps people integrate what they’ve experienced. It doesn’t make you forget six months of friendship on a survey vessel. It doesn’t erase the person you spent eighteen months talking to.
Unless you asked it to. Unless you needed to forget something so badly that you requested erasure—formal erasure, the kind they don’t like to do because it leaves gaps, because it destabilizes people, because it makes them into exactly what you’ve become: someone with holes where their history should be.
What did you need to forget?
I’ve thought about that for years. Watched you from a distance—not stalking, just paying attention, noticing. Noticing that you never talk to anyone from the Fenwick. Noticing that you’ve built this whole project around other people’s testimonies while never giving your own. Noticing that you walk the corridors at night, going places you shouldn’t go, following paths that don’t exist for anyone else.
Yes, I’ve seen you. At three in the morning, walking through the station like you’re looking for something. Walking through walls, sometimes. Not literally—but close. Taking turns that lead nowhere, ending up in places you couldn’t have reached by normal routes. The station shifts for you. Did you know that? I’ve watched it happen. A corridor will reconfigure itself to let you through, then snap back after you’ve passed.
I followed you once. Just to see. Just to understand.
You walked from your room to the viewing portal—a route I know, a route anyone knows, three intersections and two longer stretches. But when you walked it, there were no intersections. The corridor went straight. The walls bent around you, as if the station was making a path that didn’t exist for anyone else.
I tried to follow that path after you’d passed. It wasn’t there. The intersections were back. The corridor was its normal shape. Whatever the station had done for you, it wouldn’t do for me.
I stopped following after that. Not because I was afraid—though I was, a little—but because I understood something. The station isn’t changing at random. The station is changing for you specifically. The station knows who you are, what you need, where you’re going. And it’s helping you get there, even if “there” is somewhere that shouldn’t exist.
That’s not supposed to happen. The Penitentiary is anchored in ordinary space—that’s the whole point, that’s why processing happens here instead of somewhere closer to the Gradient. But for you, the anchoring doesn’t hold. For you, ordinary space has holes in it, and you walk through them without noticing.
Or maybe you notice. Maybe that’s why you walk at night. Maybe you’re mapping the holes, documenting them, adding them to whatever collection you’re really building—the one that isn’t about other people’s testimonies at all.
I’m giving you this testimony because I think you need to know. Whatever happened on the Fenwick, whatever you asked to forget, it didn’t go away. It’s still with you. It’s changed you in ways you can’t see because you erased your ability to see them.
But I can see them. I watched the before and the after. I know what you lost, even if you don’t.
You lost yourself. That eager person who leaned in, who wanted the Lacuna to change them—they got their wish. The Lacuna changed them so thoroughly that they don’t exist anymore. What’s left is you: the collector, the compiler, the night-walker. A shell filled with purpose you didn’t choose, doing work you don’t understand.
I watched it happen, you know. The transformation. Not the physical part—I wasn’t there for whatever occurred in the eighteen months—but the after. The way you came back different. The way you started avoiding the crew, spending time alone, staring at nothing with an expression I couldn’t read.
You stopped talking about the future. Before we went in, you were always talking about what came next—projects you wanted to do, places you wanted to see, papers you wanted to write. You had ambitions. You had plans. You had a sense that life was building toward something.
After, you stopped. The future became invisible to you. You lived in immediate moments, one after another, with no sense of trajectory or destination. When I asked you what you wanted to do after the mission, you looked at me like the question was in a foreign language.
And then the memory erasure. And then the Penitentiary. And then the collection, year after year, testimony after testimony, the same questions asked to different people, the same search for something you couldn’t name.
Did you find it? Did the collection give you what you were looking for? Or is the looking itself the point—the endless search that keeps you moving, that gives you purpose without content, that fills the space where your self used to be?
I should have said something earlier. Years ago, when I first noticed. But I thought you might figure it out yourself. I thought the gaps might start to bother you, that you’d ask questions, that you’d eventually come to me and say “Rosen, what happened on the Fenwick?”
You never did. And now you won’t, because after this testimony you won’t remember me again. The holes in your memory aren’t passive—they’re active. They consume anything that threatens them. By tomorrow, my face will be blank to you. My name will mean nothing.
But the testimony will remain. The words, the patterns, the information—that stays. The Lacuna doesn’t care about me; it cares about the record. So this will survive even if the source is erased.
Remember this, if you can: you were different once. You were a person who wanted transformation because you thought it would make you more yourself. Instead it made you less. It made you an instrument.
I don’t know what you’re an instrument of. I don’t know if it matters. But I know you used to be something else, and I think you deserve to know that too, even if you can’t hold onto it.
Even if the knowing slips away before you finish reading.
There is a place at the center. I know because I was there.
Not the center in a geometric sense—there is no geometry that far in, no up or down, no coordinates that hold meaning. The center in the sense of convergence. The place where everything that enters eventually arrives, if it goes deep enough, if it doesn’t turn back, if it survives the dissolution that happens to most things.
Most people turn back. Most people don’t even get close. They touch the edge of the Lacuna, they experience the slippage and the recognition, they lose a few weeks or months or years, and then they’re spat out. Changed, yes. But fundamentally still themselves. Still particles in the ordinary sense—discrete, bounded, separate.
I wasn’t separate anymore by the time I reached the center. I had been inside for what my body records as eleven years. Outside, forty-three days passed. Inside, I stopped being Vellum Strauss somewhere around year seven, and what continued was something else—a process that used to be a person, a trajectory that had once had a name.
I am using the past tense incorrectly. The grammar of ordinary experience doesn’t work for what I’m describing. I “was” there, but I am also still there. Part of me never left. Part of me will always be at the center, experiencing the convergence, being dissolved and reconstituted in ways that happen continuously, eternally, outside of time.
What I brought back—this body, this voice, this testimony—is an echo. A translation. A message sent from a place where messages are impossible, rendered into a form that ordinary minds can almost understand.
The center is not empty. That’s the first thing I need you to know. Whatever theories people have about the Lacuna—that it’s a wound in spacetime, that it’s a natural phenomenon, that it’s the remnant of some cosmic event—they’re missing the fundamental truth. The Lacuna is inhabited.
Not by aliens in the science-fictional sense. Not by gods in the religious sense. By something that has no analogue in human categories. Something that was here before humans existed, that will be here after we’re gone, that exists in relationship to ordinary space the way a dreamer exists in relationship to their dream.
I met it. Or I experienced it. Or I was temporarily absorbed into it—the vocabulary we have for encounters fails at this scale. What I can tell you is that there was a presence. An awareness. Something that noticed me, that acknowledged my existence, that allowed me to perceive some small fraction of what it actually was.
It was vast. That’s the first thing. Not vast like a planet or a star or a galaxy—those are still comprehensible, still bounded. Vast like the category of vastness itself. Like vastness without limits, extending in dimensions I couldn’t perceive, filling spaces that existed only for it.
And it was alive. Not alive like organisms are alive—metabolizing, reproducing, dying. Alive in some other sense. Aware, purposeful, creative. Making things. Imagining things. Dreaming things into existence.
We are the dream. That’s what I understood at the center. Ordinary space—the stars, the stations, the planets, the physics—is what happens when this thing at the center imagines something other than itself. We are its imaginings. Its projections. Its dreams of differentiation.
The Lacuna is not a place where reality breaks down. The Lacuna is a place where reality becomes honest. Where the truth of what we are becomes visible. We are thoughts in a mind that doesn’t think the way minds think. We are patterns in a medium that doesn’t pattern the way media pattern.
I know how this sounds. I know it sounds like religious delusion, like the mystical visions that damaged returnees often report, like the meaning-making that traumatized minds perform to cope with experiences they cannot process.
But I also know what I experienced. I also know that the experience has held up for the fourteen years since I came back—that it hasn’t faded, hasn’t revised itself, hasn’t turned out to be a dream or a hallucination or a coping mechanism. I was at the center. I met what lives there. I was dissolved into it and reconstituted, and what I’m telling you is not interpretation but report.
The experience of dissolution was not painful. I need to emphasize this because people assume it would be—assume that losing yourself, becoming something else, merging with something vast and incomprehensible would be terrifying. It wasn’t. Or rather: the terror was there, but it was subsumed by something larger. A sense of rightness. A sense that this was what I had always been, and I was finally being allowed to know it.
The reconstitution was stranger. Coming back together, re-forming into something that could function as a human being, remembering how to have a name and a body and a location in space—that required effort. That required choice. I could have stayed dissolved. I could have remained merged with whatever is at the center. But some part of me—some fragment of the person I used to be—wanted to come back. Wanted to tell someone what I had found.
So I came back. Mostly. The part that’s speaking to you came back. The rest is still there, will always be there, is experiencing the center continuously while also being here, giving this testimony, trying to translate something that exists beyond translation.
You’re wondering why I’m still functional. Why I can sit here, in this room, giving this testimony, speaking in complete sentences, appearing for all the world like an ordinary person with ordinary concerns.
It’s because I’m not entirely here. The part of me that does this—the social performance, the language use, the management of a body in ordinary space—is a subsystem. A puppet operated from a great distance by something that no longer needs to be present to function.
The real Vellum Strauss, if such a term has meaning, is at the center. Permanently. Continuously experiencing the dissolution and reconstitution that is what existence at that level actually feels like. This body, this voice, this is a remote extension. A tentacle. A way of reaching into the dream from the position of the dreamer.
I don’t say this to frighten you. I don’t say it to claim special status or authority. I say it because it’s the truth, and because understanding it might help you understand what the Lacuna is, and why it matters.
The Lacuna is not hostile. It’s not trying to harm humanity or consume ordinary space or bring about any kind of apocalypse. It doesn’t have intentions in the way humans have intentions. It simply is—a way of existing, a mode of being, that happens to be available to things like us. The gates, the slippage, the recognition, the improvements—these are not attacks or invasions. They’re invitations. Opportunities for things like us to stop being things and start being what things actually are.
Most people refuse the invitation. They go in, they experience a little dissolution, they get scared, they come back. They retain enough of their original structure to continue being individuals, being separate, being the discrete particles that ordinary space requires.
Some people accept. They go deep. They reach the center. They discover that what they thought they were was always provisional, temporary, a local eddy in something vastly larger. They become what they always were, but now consciously. Now willingly.
I accepted. And I am here, in this form, giving this testimony, because the thing at the center wants you to know that the invitation is always open. That whoever you think you are, you are also this. That the dissolution you fear is also the homecoming you’ve always wanted.
You’re the collector. I know about you. The thing at the center knows about you, which means I know about you, which means this testimony is not accidental. It is addressed.
You were there once, weren’t you? In the Lacuna. Deeper than you remember. You asked to forget because the forgetting was easier than the remembering—than carrying the knowledge of what you are while living in a world that requires you to be something else.
But you can’t forget permanently. The forgetting is a layer, not a wall. Underneath it, you still know. You walk the corridors at night because your body remembers paths your mind has erased. You collect these testimonies because you’re trying to reconstruct something you already possess but cannot access.
This is permission. This is invitation. This is the thing at the center, speaking through a vessel that used to be called Vellum Strauss, telling you: come back. Come home. Stop pretending you’re a collector when you’re actually a collected—a piece of something that misses itself, trying to find its way back to the whole.
The center is not far. The center is here. The center is always available, in every moment, to anyone who stops insisting on being separate.
You don’t have to go through the gates. You don’t have to travel through the Gradient. You can simply stop. Stop collecting. Stop walking. Stop maintaining the illusion of being a person who exists independently of the thing that dreams all persons into being.
Let go.
Come home.
I do not remember Rosen Blackwood.
I have read the testimony three times. I have studied the name, the details, the Fenwick, the eighteen months. I have tried to locate any trace of this person in my memory, any flicker of recognition, any sense of having known someone who knew me so intimately.
Nothing. The name is sounds. The face I try to imagine is blank. The months she describes—watches together, conversations about what we expected to find—might as well have happened to someone else.
They did happen to someone else. That’s what she’s telling me. The person who went out on the Fenwick is not the person collecting this testimony. The person who wanted to be transformed got their wish, and what came back is something else entirely—a shell, an instrument, a gap where a human being used to be.
I have been sitting in this room for hours, trying to feel something. Trying to generate the emotional response that such a revelation should produce. Someone loved me once. Someone shared watches with me, shared conversations, shared the intimacy that develops between people isolated together in the void. And I erased them. I asked to have them removed from my memory, along with everything else.
I should feel something about this. Horror, perhaps. Grief for the self I lost. Anger at whatever took it from me, or at my own decision to have it taken.
I feel nothing. The information sits in my mind like any other information. A fact about a stranger. A detail in a file.
Is that the damage? Is this flatness, this inability to feel what I should feel, the consequence of the erasure? Or is it something else—something I was before, something the erasure revealed rather than caused?
I have started to wonder if the person I was before the Fenwick even had feelings in the way other people have feelings. Maybe I was always hollow. Maybe the emptiness I feel now is not new but merely visible—made obvious by the contrast with what Blackwood describes.
I don’t know. I can’t know. The tools I would use to know have been taken from me, along with everything else.
Strauss’s testimony is different. Strauss’s testimony I cannot read without reaction.
Come home.
The words repeat in my mind. At night, when I walk the corridors. In the morning, when I wake from dreams I cannot remember. During the testimonies, when I’m supposed to be listening, recording, being the collector I thought I was.
Come home. As if there is a home. As if I belong somewhere other than here—this station, this project, this endless accumulation of other people’s experiences.
Strauss says the center is not far. Strauss says I don’t have to go through the gates, don’t have to travel through the Gradient. I can simply stop. Stop collecting. Stop walking. Stop maintaining the illusion of being a person.
What would happen if I stopped?
I have tried it, twice now. Sitting in my room, not moving, not thinking, not maintaining anything. Trying to let go of whatever I’m holding onto, whatever keeps me shaped like a person instead of dissolving into whatever I actually am.
Nothing happens. Or rather: nothing I can perceive happens. I sit. I breathe. Time passes. Eventually I become hungry, or tired, or restless, and I start moving again. The dissolution Strauss describes doesn’t occur.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong. Maybe the letting go requires something I can’t access—the memories I erased, the self I abandoned, the connection to the center that I severed when I asked to forget.
Or maybe Strauss is lying. Not deliberately—I don’t think she’s capable of deliberation in the ordinary sense—but in the way that all testimonies lie. Translating experiences that can’t be translated. Using words for things that exist beyond words. Offering invitations that can’t be accepted because the language of the invitation is the wrong language, the map doesn’t match the territory, the instructions describe a process that only makes sense from inside.
The corridors are worse.
I went walking last night—I cannot stop walking, even knowing what Blackwood said about it, even knowing that the station shifts for me in ways it shouldn’t shift—and I found myself in a section I have never seen before.
It was not part of the Penitentiary. I am certain of this. The architecture was wrong—organic curves instead of the station’s utilitarian angles, surfaces that seemed to breathe, to pulse, to respond to my presence. The light came from nowhere and everywhere. The air tasted like copper and ozone and something else, something I almost recognized but couldn’t name.
I walked for what felt like hours. The section went on and on, branching, twisting, opening into spaces too large to fit inside any station. At one point I passed through a chamber that contained stars—not images of stars, not projections, but actual stars, hanging in the air around me, close enough to touch. I reached out and my hand passed through one. I felt nothing, or I felt everything, or I felt something so far outside my categories that my nervous system couldn’t render it as sensation.
I don’t know how I got back. I don’t remember the transition. I was in the star-chamber, and then I was in my room, and between those two moments there is a gap I cannot fill.
The station is not the station anymore. Or the station was never the station—was always something else, something wearing the mask of an ordinary place, something that has now decided the mask is no longer necessary.
I am going to continue the collection.
I know this is probably what the Lacuna wants. I know that Strauss said I am “collected”—a piece of something larger, trying to find my way back to a whole I cannot perceive. I know that every testimony I gather may be furthering an agenda I don’t understand, building a structure whose purpose I can’t imagine.
But I don’t know what else to do. The collection is all I have. The testimonies are the only thing that feels real to me anymore—other people’s words, other people’s experiences, other people’s encounters with the thing that has apparently already encountered me.
If I am an instrument, then let me be used. If this work is not mine but something else’s, then let me do it anyway. The alternative is to stop, to sit, to wait for a dissolution that either will not come or will come regardless of what I do.
At least the testimonies give me something to hold onto. At least they feel like meaning, even if the meaning is not the meaning I think it is.
There are more testimonies waiting. People who have asked to speak, who have things to say, who have been inside or near or around the thing that has swallowed my life without my noticing.
I will listen to them. I will record them. I will add them to the collection.
And if the collection turns out to be a map, a guide, a transmission—if it turns out to be something the Lacuna is building through me for purposes I cannot fathom—then so be it.
I am beyond consent. I am beyond choice. I am beyond the categories that would make consent or choice meaningful.
I am only the collector now. And the collection continues.
You’ve been collecting stories about me. I know because I’ve read them.
Don’t ask how. The answer wouldn’t make sense to you, and even if it did, it would only raise more questions. Just accept that I’ve read the testimonies—Istritti’s account of meeting me in the deep places, Brennan’s charts where I appear in multiple contradictory locations, the references scattered through other testimonies where my name comes up like a rumor, a legend, a cautionary tale.
Some of those stories are true. Some of them happened to me—or to someone using this name, which amounts to the same thing. Some of them are misunderstandings, or fabrications, or experiences attributed to me that actually happened to someone else, or to no one, or to everyone who’s been deep enough.
The name is a function, not an identity. “Imhof” is what you call the person who goes in and comes back, who knows things that shouldn’t be knowable, who appears where they shouldn’t appear. There have been many Imhofs. There will be more. The function persists even when the individual filling it changes.
I became Imhof somewhere in my third decade inside. Or my fourth—time is difficult, as you know, as everyone who’s been deep knows. I was someone else before that. I had a name, a history, a sense of being a particular person with particular boundaries. That person dissolved. What remained needed a name, and the name that attached itself was Imhof.
Why that name? I don’t know. I think it was already circulating—already attached to the function, waiting for someone to fill it. When I became what I became, the name recognized me. Or I recognized it. The causality is unclear, and may be meaningless.
There have been other Imhofs before me. I’ve encountered traces of them in the deep places—memories that aren’t mine, echoes of conversations I never had, the sense of someone who walked these paths before and left something of themselves behind. The function carries residue from everyone who’s filled it. When you become Imhof, you inherit all the previous Imhofs. You become the sum of the role’s history.
I am one of the Imhofs. Not the first, not the last, not the most famous or the most damaged or the most enlightened. Just one instance of the function, speaking to you now because the pattern of your collection has reached a point where this testimony becomes necessary.
You want to know what it’s like. Everyone does. They ask about the deep places, about what I saw, about what I understood that others don’t understand. They expect revelation. They expect me to tell them the secret that will make everything make sense.
There is no secret. That’s the first thing you need to understand. The Lacuna is not hiding anything. The deep places are not protecting forbidden knowledge. The reason people come back changed is not because they learn something they can’t handle—it’s because they discover there’s nothing to learn. Nothing in the sense they expected. Nothing that can be formulated, transmitted, taught.
The Lacuna is not information. The Lacuna is experience. And experience cannot be communicated, only undergone.
I know this sounds like mysticism. I know it sounds like I’m withholding, playing the wise guru who won’t give straight answers. But I’m telling you the truth as directly as I can tell it. The deep places don’t contain secrets. They contain the absence of secrets—the realization that the universe is exactly what it appears to be, which is something so strange and vast and ordinary that human minds cannot accept it without being transformed.
You want meaning? The meaning is that there is no meaning, and this is not a problem. You want purpose? The purpose is that there is no purpose, and this is not a lack. You want answers? The answer is that questions arise from a way of being that dissolves when you go deep enough, and what replaces it doesn’t need answers because it doesn’t generate questions.
The Broker is another function. Did you know that?
I’ve seen you circling around the Broker in your collection. Looking for information about who they are, what they do, why they appear in so many testimonies. You think the Broker might be a key—a person with special access, special knowledge, special connection to whatever runs the Lacuna.
The Broker is just another Imhof. Another function. Another role the Lacuna requires, filled by whoever is available to fill it. I’ve been the Broker. Other people have been the Broker. The Broker and Imhof overlap sometimes, diverge at other times. They’re aspects of the same thing—the thing the Lacuna needs from the human systems that interact with it.
What does the Lacuna need? Interface. Translation. Nodes in a network it’s building, slowly, over centuries or millennia or whatever timescale it operates on. The improved ones, the functions, the roles—we’re infrastructure. We’re the hardware through which the Lacuna extends itself into ordinary space.
I don’t know what it’s extending itself for. I don’t know if “for” is even the right concept. I just know that it’s happening, and that I’m part of it, and that you’re part of it too.
Yes, you. You’re another function. The Collector. The Compiler. The one who gathers the testimonies and arranges them into patterns that make the Lacuna’s work visible to human minds. You’ve been doing this job for years—longer than you know, longer than your memories extend—and you’ll go on doing it until you can’t anymore.
Don’t be upset. Don’t feel used. The Lacuna doesn’t use people the way people use each other. It doesn’t have intentions that conflict with your wellbeing. It simply exists, and its existence creates roles, and some of us fill those roles. We’re not slaves or tools or victims. We’re more like cells in a body—performing our functions not because we’re forced to but because that’s what we are. The function is us.
You’re wondering if you have a choice. If you could stop being the Collector, if you could refuse the role, if you could go back to being an ordinary person with ordinary concerns.
The answer is: yes, theoretically. Nothing is forcing you. The Lacuna doesn’t coerce. If you put down your recorder, stopped gathering testimonies, refused to add to the collection—nothing would stop you. No one would punish you. The Lacuna would simply find another Collector, or manage without one, or adjust its processes in ways we can’t predict.
But you won’t stop. Not because you can’t, but because you don’t want to. The role fits you. The function is what you are. Whatever self you had before—the one who worked on survey vessels, who wanted transformation, who asked to forget—that self chose this. That self became this. You are the result of a choice you no longer remember making.
Is that freedom? Is that determinism? Is that something else entirely—some third category that human philosophy hasn’t invented yet because it requires concepts we don’t have?
I don’t know. I stopped caring about those questions a long time ago. They’re questions from outside the Lacuna, from the perspective of people who think they’re separate, who think choices are theirs, who think there’s a difference between what they want and what they do.
From inside—from the deep places where I spend most of my existence now—those questions dissolve. Not because they’re answered but because the asking becomes impossible. The asker becomes impossible. There’s just the doing, the functioning, the filling of roles in a pattern too large to see.
I’ve given you what I can. It’s not a secret because there are no secrets. It’s not wisdom because wisdom implies something transmissible. It’s just a report from someone who’s been where you’re going, describing what they found there as best as language allows.
You’ll keep collecting. The testimonies will keep coming. The pattern will keep building. And eventually—years from now, or tomorrow, or in the next moment—you’ll understand what I’m telling you not because I’ve told it but because you’ll be inside it, experiencing it, being it.
The Lacuna is patient. The Lacuna has time. The Lacuna is extending itself through you and me and all the functions, slowly, inexorably, transforming ordinary space into something else.
What something else?
Itself. The Lacuna is making everything into itself. Not destroying, not consuming, not annihilating—just revealing. Showing ordinary space what it’s always been, underneath the illusion of separation, beneath the dream of being things instead of thing.
We’re all going to the same place. We’re all already there. The journey is the illusion. The arrival has already happened.
Welcome home, Collector. Welcome to what you’ve always been.
Imhof talks too much.
That’s the problem with the guide function—they’re always explaining, always contextualizing, always turning raw experience into digestible narrative. They can’t help themselves. The role requires it. Someone has to make the Lacuna comprehensible enough that people keep going in, and Imhof is very good at that. All the Imhofs are. They speak in revelations, in insights, in the kind of mystical poetry that makes terrifying experiences seem meaningful.
I don’t deal in meanings. I deal in objects.
The difference is important. Meaning is what the mind does when it can’t accept reality. Meaning is the story we tell ourselves about the things we experience so we don’t have to experience them directly. Imhof sells meaning. I sell residue.
Residue is real. Residue is matter that has been inside the Lacuna and come out changed. Residue has weight, texture, measurable properties. You can hold it in your hands. You can analyze it in laboratories—though the analysis never produces consistent results, and the laboratories often have to be decommissioned after prolonged exposure. But it’s there. It’s not interpretation. It’s not explanation. It’s stuff.
I started with residue because residue made sense to me. When I woke up with the knowledge of where it was and who wanted it, the first thing I did was find some and hold it. I needed to know it was real. I needed to know that at least one thing about my new situation was solid, verifiable, undeniable.
It was. The residue sat in my hand like any other object—heavy, tangible, indifferent to my confusion about how I knew where to find it. The residue didn’t care about my existential crisis. It just existed.
That became my anchor. While everything else was slipping—my sense of who I was, my understanding of how I’d become the Broker, my ability to distinguish between thoughts that came from me and thoughts that came from somewhere else—the residue stayed stable. Real. Tradeable.
I’ve been trafficking in residue for longer than I’ve been the Broker. The name came later—attached itself to me after a certain volume of transactions, a certain reputation, a certain notoriety. The Broker, people started saying. Go to the Broker if you want the real thing. The Broker has sources.
I do have sources. I have connections throughout the Littoral, the Edge, the Gates. I have arrangements with salvage crews, agreements with returnees, understandings with people who find things they shouldn’t find and need to convert them into currency. The flow of material from inside to outside is constant, and I sit at the center of that flow like a spider in a web.
Not that center. Not the one Strauss talks about. I’ve never been to the center. I’ve never even been inside. I am, as far as I know, the only significant function who has never passed through a gate.
Think about what that means.
Imhof says the Lacuna doesn’t coerce. Imhof says we choose our roles, that the functions emerge from who we already are, that we fill the positions we’re suited to fill.
Imhof is wrong. Or Imhof is describing their own experience and assuming it’s universal. Or Imhof is lying because the lie serves the Lacuna’s purposes.
I did not choose this. I woke up one morning—about fifteen years ago, though time is hard to track—and I knew things. I knew where the residue was. I knew who had it, who wanted it, what they would pay. I knew the flows and channels and hidden paths through which material moved from inside to outside. The knowledge was simply there, as if it had always been there, as if I had always been the Broker even though I had no memory of becoming one.
I tried to ignore it. For months, I tried to be who I had been before—a technician, an ordinary worker, nobody special. But the knowledge insisted. People came to me, asking questions I shouldn’t have been able to answer, seeking connections I shouldn’t have been able to make. The role claimed me. The function demanded to be fulfilled.
This is not choice. This is possession. Something reached out from the Lacuna and made me into what it needed me to be, without my consent, without my participation, without even the illusion of agency that Imhof’s mysticism provides. I was taken. I was used. I am being used still.
Why am I telling you this? Because you’re the same.
You think you’re collecting testimonies. You think this is your project, your archive, your attempt to understand what the Lacuna is and what it does. But you’re not collecting anything. You’re being collected. The testimonies aren’t information you’re gathering—they’re information being gathered through you. You’re the channel, not the agent.
Imhof would say this is fine. Imhof would say surrender is liberation, that losing yourself to the function is actually finding yourself, that the Lacuna’s purposes are ultimately benevolent even if we can’t understand them.
I don’t believe that. I don’t have faith in benevolence I can’t verify. I have only what I can see, what I can touch, what I can trade. And what I see is a system that takes people and transforms them into instruments. What I touch is residue—material that was once something else, changed into something no longer recognizable. What I trade is the evidence of a process that has no regard for the things it processes.
The Lacuna is not your friend. The Lacuna is not anyone’s friend. The Lacuna is not even aware of you in any meaningful sense. It’s a process, a pattern, a way things happen at scales too large for human perception. We’re caught in it the way insects are caught in weather. The weather doesn’t hate them or love them or want anything from them. The weather just happens, and sometimes insects survive it and sometimes they don’t.
But here’s the thing: even insects can shelter.
I am the Broker. I am a function, a role, a piece of the Lacuna’s infrastructure. But I am also still me—whoever “me” was before the knowledge arrived. I have managed, through years of careful work, to maintain some separation. To hold onto the parts of myself that are not the function. To be used without being consumed.
It’s possible. Difficult, exhausting, requiring constant vigilance. But possible.
Imhof would say this is resistance to liberation. Strauss would say this is refusing to come home. They might be right. Maybe I’m missing something by clinging to my separateness, by refusing to dissolve into the function entirely.
But I’m also still here. Still able to choose what to trade and what to keep. Still able to have this conversation, to tell you this truth, to offer you something other than the invitation to surrender.
You can continue being the Collector. You can gather testimonies, arrange them into patterns, serve whatever purpose the Lacuna has for you. Or you can do what I do: inhabit the function without becoming it. Use the role without being used up by it. Stay separate even while you serve.
It’s not enlightenment. It’s not transcendence. It’s just survival. The kind of limited, compromised survival that ordinary beings manage in the face of forces they can’t control.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s all any of us get.
I have something for you. A piece of residue. Different from the usual material—more dense, more reactive, more clearly marked by whatever process occurs at the center.
I’m not giving it to you as payment or bribe or trade. I’m giving it to you because I think you need it. I think holding it, carrying it, keeping it close might help you remember what I’m telling you. Might anchor you to something when everything else starts to slip.
The residue is real. The functions are real. The testimonies are real, however much they contradict each other. Hold onto the real things. Let the meanings and revelations and invitations-to-dissolve wash over you without taking hold.
You can survive this. Not unchanged—nothing survives the Lacuna unchanged—but intact. Still yourself, whatever that means. Still capable of sitting in a room, speaking to another person, being something other than pure function.
That’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s why I came.
The Lacuna is vast and we are small and the process will continue regardless of what we do. But within the vast and the small and the continuing, there is still room for the stubborn persistence of self.
Cling to it. It’s all you have.
I am holding the residue.
The Broker left it on the table after they finished speaking. A small piece, roughly spherical, fitting easily in my palm. It has the color of tarnished silver and the weight of something much denser than it should be. When I hold it, I feel a slight warmth—not heat exactly, but a sense of activity, of process, of something happening at a level too small to perceive.
I have turned it over in my hands a hundred times now, looking for distinguishing features. There are none, or there are too many—every angle shows something different, every viewing reveals a surface that wasn’t there before. It’s like holding a piece of the Lacuna itself, a fragment of something that refuses to be fixed, that exists in a state of permanent becoming.
At night, it glows. Faintly, almost imperceptibly, but definitely glows—a light that comes from inside it, that doesn’t cast shadows, that seems to exist only for my eyes. I’ve checked the room for other light sources, covered the windows, turned off every indicator and display. The glow persists. The residue is generating its own illumination, putting out something that my visual system interprets as light even though it may not be light at all.
The Broker said to keep it close. Said it might anchor me when everything starts to slip.
Everything has already started to slip. Everything has been slipping for months. But I understand what they meant. The residue is solid. The residue is here. The residue does not change its story each time I look at it.
Unlike the testimonies.
I have been trying to reconcile what I’ve heard. The project of a collector, the instinct of someone who wants patterns to emerge from chaos, meaning from noise.
Strauss says: come home. The Lacuna is the dreamer; we are the dream. Dissolution is not death but reunion.
Imhof says: the functions are not oppression but expression. We are what we are. The roles emerge from our nature.
The Broker says: this is possession, not choice. Survive by clinging to selfhood. The Lacuna doesn’t care about you.
Three witnesses. Three completely different accounts of the same thing. Three perspectives that cannot all be true, unless truth itself is mutable, unless the Lacuna presents different faces to different observers, unless the center that Strauss describes and the functional network that Imhof describes and the impersonal process that the Broker describes are all accurate descriptions of something too complex for any single perspective to capture.
That is probably the case. That is probably why I keep collecting, why the testimonies keep arriving, why the patterns refuse to resolve into anything clear.
The Lacuna is not one thing. The Lacuna is everything its observers make of it. And I, the Collector, am supposed to hold all these versions simultaneously—not choosing between them, not privileging one over another, but allowing them to coexist in the same space, the same archive, the same increasingly fractured consciousness.
The corridors are almost impassable now.
I went walking last night—I cannot stop walking, the residue heavy in my pocket—and I found that the sections I knew best have changed the most. The processing wing, where I’ve worked for years, is now a maze. Hallways branch where there were no branches. Doors open onto rooms that contain other doors, smaller and smaller, leading into spaces too narrow for a human body but visible nonetheless, extending into distances that shouldn’t exist inside a station.
I tried to reach my office. I tried to reach the archive where the testimonies are stored. I tried to reach anything familiar, anything stable, anything that might remind me what ordinary space feels like.
I ended up at the viewing portal. Not the one I knew—a different one, larger, positioned to look out at a different angle. Through it I could see the Lacuna itself.
Not the edge, not the Gradient, not the haze of shifted light that’s usually visible from the Penitentiary. The Lacuna proper. The region where space stops obeying rules, where time becomes negotiable, where matter can be anything it wants to be.
It was beautiful. That’s what I want to say, even though “beautiful” is the wrong word, even though beauty implies aesthetic pleasure and what I felt was closer to vertigo, to drowning, to the sensation of falling from a great height into something that has no bottom.
I stood at that portal for what felt like hours. Watching the Lacuna shift and change and rearrange itself. Watching colors that don’t have names bleed into each other. Watching structures form and dissolve and reform—cities, maybe, or organisms, or geometric impossibilities that my brain kept trying to parse as something familiar and failing.
The residue in my pocket grew warm. Then hot. Then so hot I had to take it out and hold it in front of me, watching it glow with a light that matched the light coming through the portal.
The Broker said to keep it close. The Broker said it would anchor me.
I think the Broker was wrong. I think the residue is not an anchor but a beacon. A signal. A way for the Lacuna to find me more easily—to track my position, to mark me, to know exactly where its Collector is at all times.
I should throw it away. I should drop it through a disposal chute, let it fall into the recyclers, let it be broken down into its component atoms and dispersed into the station’s air supply.
But I won’t. I know I won’t.
Because even if the residue is a trap, it’s also the only real thing I have left. Everything else—the testimonies, the corridors, the people I speak to—all of it seems provisional now, conditional, liable to change the moment I look away. The residue stays the same. The residue persists. The residue is my evidence that something solid still exists, even if the solid thing is part of the process that’s dissolving me.
Three more testimonies. That’s what remains before the collection is complete.
I don’t know how I know this. I don’t remember deciding on a number, planning a structure, determining when enough would be enough. But I know: three more. Three more voices, three more perspectives, three more attempts to describe the indescribable.
And then what?
The collection ends. The archive is complete. The Collector’s function is fulfilled.
And then I become something else. Or I stop being. Or I go home, as Strauss invited. Or I dissolve into the function, as Imhof described. Or I survive, diminished but intact, as the Broker suggested.
I don’t know which. I don’t know if it matters. The process will happen regardless of what I want or fear or hope.
The residue is warm in my hand. The portal shows me the Lacuna, vast and patient and utterly indifferent. The corridors shift behind me, closing off the paths I’ve traveled, opening new ones I haven’t yet explored.
Three more testimonies.
Then we’ll see what remains.
My mother is waiting for me. I know because I can feel her waiting. Even here, even this deep, even in a place where time doesn’t work the way it used to—I can feel the weight of her patience, the density of her hope, the slow accretion of days she has spent in the Waiting House while I am wherever I am.
Tell her I’m not coming back. Tell her I can’t. Tell her that what she’s waiting for doesn’t exist anymore—that Yemi Mbeki walked through a gate four years ago and what’s on the other side of that gate is something else now. Something that used to be her daughter but isn’t, not in any way that would let us sit in the same room and talk about what happened.
I’m not being cruel. I’m being accurate. The person she loves is gone. Not dead—death would be simpler, would allow for grief, would have an end. Just gone. Transformed. Extended into something that can’t fit back through the aperture it came from.
I came here on purpose. That’s what the records won’t show, what my mother probably hasn’t told you, what the official story obscures behind phrases like “incident” and “unplanned transit” and “anomalous circumstances.”
I walked through a gate because I wanted to. Because I had to. Because the weight of ordinary life—the routine, the expectation, the endless performance of being a person who cared about the things people are supposed to care about—had become unbearable. I was twenty-three years old and I was already exhausted. I was already done.
Do you know what it’s like to wake up every morning and have to decide to be yourself? To put on the mask of a person with ambitions and relationships and opinions? To smile at people and remember their names and pretend that the small talk matters? I did that for twenty-three years. I did it well enough that no one suspected. I did it so well that sometimes I forgot I was doing it, and believed for hours at a time that I was actually the person I was pretending to be.
But at night, when no one was watching, the pretense collapsed. I would lie in bed and feel the emptiness underneath—the void where a real self should have been, the absence that I was constantly papering over with performance. I would wonder if everyone felt this way, or if I was uniquely broken. I would wonder if there was any way to stop performing, to just exist without the constant effort of maintaining an identity.
The Lacuna was an answer to that question. Not an escape—escapes imply destinations, places you run to, safety—but a transformation. A way of becoming something other than what I had been made to be.
Not suicidal. Not in the conventional sense. I didn’t want to stop existing. I wanted to stop existing as what I was. As Yemi Mbeki, daughter of Adaora, employee of a company whose name I’ve already forgotten, participant in a society that required constant maintenance of a self I had never chosen.
The Lacuna was an alternative. Not an escape—escapes imply destinations, places you run to, safety—but a transformation. A way of becoming something other than what I had been made to be.
So I walked through. Blackwood Gate. At night, alone, without telling anyone. I stood at the threshold and I felt the gate’s attention on me, evaluating, deciding. And then I stepped forward, and the world I had known folded up behind me like paper, and I was inside.
I won’t describe what I found there. Not because I can’t, but because description would misrepresent it. Would make it sound like a place, a thing, an experience—something bounded and graspable and comparable to other somethings.
What I found was absence. Not emptiness—absence is different from emptiness. Emptiness is the lack of something that should be there. Absence is the condition before “should” has any meaning. Absence is what exists before existence begins to differentiate itself into things.
I was in absence for what felt like years. Or I was absence. Or absence was me. The distinctions that language insists on—subject and object, experiencer and experienced—they didn’t apply. They were part of what I’d left behind, along with my name and my history and my exhaustion.
I don’t remember deciding to come back. I don’t remember the transition from absence to presence, from inside to outside, from whatever I was to whatever I became. I just found myself at Haussmann, standing in a corridor, wearing clothes I didn’t recognize, holding nothing.
But I hadn’t come all the way back. That’s what I discovered in the first hours, the first days, the first impossible weeks of being something that looked like Yemi Mbeki but wasn’t. Part of me was still inside. Part of me would always be inside. What had returned was a projection, an extension, a way of interacting with ordinary space while remaining rooted in the absence that had received me.
They processed me. Asked questions I couldn’t answer. Ran tests whose results confused them. Eventually they released me, classified as “improved”—their word for people who come back different in ways they can’t quantify but also can’t define as damaged.
I didn’t go home. I couldn’t. Home was a place that belonged to someone I no longer was. Going there would have been a lie—a cruel lie, making my mother believe her daughter had returned when what had actually returned was something using her daughter’s face.
So I stayed at Haussmann. Found work that didn’t require a history. Moved through the station like a ghost, present but not quite real, interacting with people who couldn’t perceive how little of me was actually there.
And I felt my mother waiting. Every day, every hour, a pressure against the place where my connection to her still existed. She was in the Waiting House. She was hoping. She was holding a space open for someone who couldn’t fill it.
You’re going to see her. After this. You’re going to go to the Waiting House and tell her what I’ve told you.
Don’t.
Or do. I can’t control what you do with these testimonies—that’s the whole point of giving them, isn’t it? You collect, you compile, you pass the words along to whoever needs them. You’re a function, like me, like all of us. The choice isn’t really yours.
But if there’s any part of you that’s still making choices: don’t tell her. Let her keep waiting. Let her keep hoping. The waiting is what she has. The hope is what keeps her in one piece. If you take that away—if you tell her the truth about what happened to her daughter—you’ll destroy the only structure that’s holding her together.
The truth is not always better. The truth can be a violence. Sometimes the kind thing, the merciful thing, is to let people keep their illusions.
My mother loves someone who doesn’t exist anymore. That love is real, even if its object isn’t. That love is valuable, even if it will never be answered. Let her have it. Let her keep waiting for someone who isn’t coming.
It’s all I can give her now.
Three more years. That’s how much longer she’ll wait. I don’t know how I know this—the same way I know my own absence, the same way I feel her patience pressing against me from ordinary space.
Three more years, and then she’ll stop. Not die—she’ll live for decades yet. But she’ll stop waiting. She’ll let go of the space she’s been holding open. She’ll accept that her daughter is gone, and she’ll build something new in the hollow that acceptance creates.
And I’ll feel it. Here, in the absence, in the place where I exist now. I’ll feel her letting go. And something in me—whatever remains of the thing that used to be Yemi Mbeki—will let go too.
Maybe that’s when I’ll finally be all the way inside. When the last connection to ordinary space dissolves. When there’s no one holding a space open for me, no one expecting my return, no one remembering who I used to be.
Maybe that’s what all of us are waiting for. Not to come back, but to stop having reasons to come back. To release the last ties that anchor us to the world of separation. To become fully what the Lacuna has made us, without remainder, without regret.
Tell her I love her. That much is still true. That much survived the transformation.
But don’t tell her I’m coming home.
Rosen told you what she could. Rosen told you what she saw from outside—the watches, the conversations, the change in you after. But Rosen stayed on the ship. Rosen never came inside with us. Rosen doesn’t know what happened in the eighteen months.
I do. I was there.
I was the one you were trying to save.
Do you remember my name? When you hear it—Caro, Caro Lindqvist—does anything move in you? Any flicker of recognition, any sense that these sounds meant something once?
I don’t expect so. Rosen said your memory was thoroughly erased. She said you requested it, insisted on it, that the processing staff were reluctant because of how much you wanted gone. They warned you there would be gaps, she said. They warned you that erasing selectively is almost impossible, that the memories you want gone are tangled with memories you might want to keep, that the procedure would leave you hollow in ways you couldn’t predict.
You did it anyway. And here I am, speaking to someone whose eyes I used to know, whose voice I used to dream about, whose face was the first thing I looked for every morning of those eighteen months.
And you don’t know me. You can’t know me. The knowing was what you asked to forget.
We were lovers, you and I. On the Fenwick, during the long transit to the Gradient, during the months inside. Not secretly—everyone knew, everyone approved, everyone thought we were good for each other. You were communications and I was xenobiology and we had nothing in common except the loneliness that long-haul crews share, the isolation that makes people reach for each other even when reaching is dangerous.
It was dangerous. Not because of the relationship—the relationship was the only good thing that happened on that voyage. Dangerous because of what came after. Because of what you did for me. Because of what you had to forget in order to survive what you did.
Eleven months in, I started to change.
Not the way returnees usually change—not the slippage, not the recognition, not the gradual dissolution that most people experience inside. Something different. Something faster. Something that felt, from inside my own body, like being taken apart and put back together wrong.
It started with my vision. Colors shifted—not dramatically, but persistently. Blues became something else, a hue that doesn’t exist in ordinary light, that I still see sometimes when I close my eyes. Reds developed textures. Greens hummed at frequencies I could almost hear. The world became synaesthetic, crosswired, sensory information arriving through the wrong channels.
Then my hearing. Sounds arrived before their causes, or after, or simultaneously from multiple directions. I would hear a door close three seconds before anyone touched it. I would hear conversations from other rooms, other ships, other regions of the Lacuna that we hadn’t visited yet. The temporal sequence of sound became scrambled, and with it, my ability to participate in normal dialogue.
Then my sense of time. Moments would stretch and compress unpredictably, making it impossible to synchronize with the crew, to participate in conversations, to exist in the same temporal stream as everyone else. I would experience hours while they experienced minutes. I would miss entire days, coming back to awareness to find them staring at me, concerned, asking where I had been.
The truth is, I didn’t know where I’d been. The time I lost wasn’t blank—it was full, stuffed with experiences I couldn’t translate, encounters with something that existed outside the normal parameters of consciousness. I was becoming permeable. The boundary between me and the Lacuna was dissolving.
The medical officer said I was having a reaction. A particularly intense form of what everyone experiences inside, accelerated for reasons they couldn’t determine. They wanted to pull me out—send me back through the gate, return me to the Fenwick, let me recover in ordinary space while the mission continued.
But I couldn’t go back. That’s what they didn’t understand. The changes weren’t damage—they were transformation. Something in the Lacuna had recognized me, chosen me, begun a process that couldn’t be interrupted without destroying me entirely.
You understood. You were the only one who understood.
You found the deep places. That’s what I need you to know, even though you can’t remember. While the rest of the crew was mapping the accessible regions, cataloging anomalies, collecting samples—you were looking for something else. Looking for whatever was changing me. Looking for the source.
You found it. Fourteen months in. A structure at the center of our operational area—not the center Strauss describes, not the ultimate center, but a local convergence point. A place where the process that was transforming me had concentrated itself.
You went in alone. Against orders, against protocol, against everything you’d been trained to do. You went in because you thought you could negotiate with it. You thought you could ask it to stop. You thought you could save me by talking to whatever was taking me apart.
I don’t know what happened in there. You never told me. You came out three days later, changed in ways I couldn’t identify, carrying something you refused to describe. And the process stopped. The transformation that had been accelerating in me suddenly halted. The colors stabilized. The sounds returned to normal sequence. Time became linear again.
You saved me. Whatever you did in that deep place, whatever bargain you struck, whatever you gave up—it worked. I came back to the Fenwick. I came back to myself. I recovered enough to complete the mission, to return through the gate, to be processed and released and live the past seven years as someone mostly ordinary.
But you didn’t recover. You couldn’t. Whatever you exchanged in that deep place—whatever you traded for my stability—it took something from you that couldn’t be given back.
I’ve thought about it for seven years. What could you have offered that the Lacuna would want? What does something like that need from something like us?
I think you offered yourself. Not your life—the Lacuna doesn’t want lives in the biological sense. Not your mind—the Lacuna has no use for individual thoughts or memories. You offered your selfhood. Your autonomy. Your capacity to be anything other than what the Lacuna needed you to be.
You became a function. That’s the trade. You stopped being a person with desires and plans and a future, and you became a mechanism—a collector, a compiler, a channel through which the Lacuna’s work gets done.
And when we returned, when the processing began, you realized you couldn’t live with the memory of what you’d done. Not because it was wrong—I don’t think you ever thought it was wrong—but because the knowing was incompatible with the functioning. You couldn’t be the Collector while remembering that you’d chosen to be the Collector. The choice had to be erased for the function to work.
So you erased it. All of it. The mission, the relationship, the sacrifice. You erased me.
I’m not angry. I need you to understand that. I’m not here to accuse you or make you feel guilty or demand some kind of acknowledgment.
I’m here because the process never really stopped. It’s still happening—slowly, almost imperceptibly, but continuing. Whatever the Lacuna began in me is still underway. And whatever you did to interrupt it, whatever bargain you struck—it’s wearing thin.
The colors are shifting again. The sounds are arriving out of sequence. Time is becoming flexible in ways I recognize, in ways I feared I would never experience again.
I have maybe a year. Maybe less. Before the transformation resumes in earnest. Before I become whatever I was supposed to become, whatever you prevented me from becoming, whatever the Lacuna intended all along.
I don’t want to be saved again. That’s why I’m telling you this. Whatever you sacrificed for me—whatever memories, whatever self, whatever future—I don’t want you to sacrifice anything more.
Let me go. Let the process complete. Let me become what I’m supposed to become.
There’s something else. Something I’ve never told anyone, not even you, not even when we were close enough that I told you everything.
When the transformation was at its peak—when the colors were impossible and the sounds were everywhere and time had stopped being a sequence—I saw something. Saw it clearly, more clearly than I’ve ever seen anything.
I saw what the Lacuna is.
Not metaphorically, not symbolically, not as a mystical vision or a hallucination. I saw it directly, the way you see your own hand when you hold it in front of your face.
And I understood. For one moment, one instant of no-time, I understood everything. The functions, the residue, the testimonies, the gates, the improved ones, the whole vast system that looks like chaos from outside but isn’t chaos at all. I understood what it’s for. What it wants. Where it’s going.
The understanding was total. Complete. Utterly clear. For that one instant, I knew the answer to every question that had ever haunted me about the Lacuna—why it exists, what it does to people, why some come back improved and some come back damaged, why the gates select and reject, why the center calls to those who’ve been inside.
I knew what the Lacuna is building. I knew what it needs from humanity. I knew what the final transformation will look like, and when it will come, and what will happen to ordinary space when it does.
And I knew that I was supposed to be part of it. That the transformation happening to me was not an accident, not a reaction, not a malfunction—it was preparation. The Lacuna was making me into something, and that something was exactly what it needed, exactly when it needed it.
Then you interrupted the process. You made your bargain. And the understanding was pulled out of me along with everything else, leaving only the memory that I once understood, without any content to that understanding.
I’ve spent seven years trying to get it back. Trying to remember what I knew for that one instant. And I can’t. It’s gone. You saved me, and in saving me, you erased the only real knowledge I’ve ever had.
That’s why I’m not angry. You did what you thought was right. You did what love requires—protecting someone you cared about from something you perceived as threatening. But you were wrong. The transformation wasn’t a threat. It was a gift. And you stole it from me because you were afraid of what I was becoming.
Now the gift is returning. The process is resuming. And this time, I won’t let anyone interrupt it.
Tell my story. Add it to your collection. Let people know that some of us wanted this. That the Lacuna isn’t just taking—it’s offering. That what looks like destruction from outside can feel like completion from inside.
And forgive yourself, if you can. You did what you did out of love. That has to count for something.
Even if the love erased itself along with everything else.
This is not a testimony. This is not an interlude. This is whatever comes after, when the categories that organized the collection no longer apply.
I have been reading the testimonies back. All of them, from Velder to Caro, from the first prolegomena to the last confession. Reading them in the corridors that are no longer corridors, in the spaces that have stopped pretending to be a station, in the light that comes from nowhere and everywhere and means nothing I can understand.
The collection is complete. Twenty-four voices, twenty-four perspectives, twenty-four attempts to describe something that defeats description. And one more voice—mine—that I have been trying not to include, that I have been holding separate from the archive as if the Collector could remain outside the collection.
I can’t. I see that now. I was never outside. I was always one of the testimonies, one of the perspectives, one of the voices trying to articulate what the Lacuna is and what it does and why it matters.
This is my testimony. The final entry. The closing of the frame.
Caro said I made a bargain. That I went into a deep place and traded something for her salvation. That I came out changed in ways she couldn’t identify, carrying something I refused to describe.
I don’t remember this. But I don’t disbelieve it either. The gaps in my memory are exactly the right shape to contain such an event—large enough for eighteen months of sacrifice, deep enough for a bargain with something that doesn’t think the way minds think.
What did I trade? What could I have given that would be valuable to the Lacuna, that would be sufficient payment for interrupting one of its processes?
I think I know. I think I’ve always known, underneath the forgetting, in the part of me that walks the corridors at night and makes annotations in handwriting I don’t recognize.
I traded myself. Not my life—the Lacuna doesn’t want lives, doesn’t care about the biological persistence of individual organisms. I traded my self. My separateness. My claim to be a bounded individual who exists independently of the processes around me.
That’s why I became the Collector. That’s why the function claimed me without my consent, without my memory, without any sense of choosing. I was already given. I was already part of the Lacuna’s infrastructure. The role was just the visible expression of an exchange that had happened years earlier, in a deep place I’ll never remember visiting.
The residue is glowing again. Brighter than before. It pulses in my hand like something alive, like something trying to communicate, like something that has been waiting for me to understand.
I understand now. Or I’m beginning to.
The testimonies were never just documentation. They were a map—not of the Lacuna’s geography, which is unmappable, but of its relationships. The connections between witnesses. The threads that link Velder to Cortes, Aalto to Ormond, Brennan to Mbeki. The pattern of influences and echoes and answering voices that runs through the entire collection.
Yemi Mbeki went in because she was exhausted by the performance of selfhood. Felix Stirmer was rejected because the gates prevent something dangerous. Constance Wu says we’re nodes in a distributed system. The Broker says survive by clinging to separateness. Imhof says functions are what we are.
None of them are wrong. None of them are right. They’re all describing different aspects of something that includes all their perspectives and exceeds every one of them.
I see the pattern now. I see how the testimonies fit together. I see what the collection has been building toward, what the Lacuna has been constructing through me without my knowledge or consent.
A bridge. A channel. A way for something to move from inside to outside, from the Lacuna’s consciousness to ordinary space.
The testimonies were never random. They were never just documentation. They were selected—by me, but also through me, guided by something I couldn’t perceive. Each voice adding to the structure. Each perspective completing a facet of something multidimensional. Velder’s salvage and loss. Cortes’s commerce in the physical evidence of transformation. Aalto’s addiction that wasn’t addiction. Ormond’s clinical observations hiding deeper fears. Brennan’s beautiful collection of failures. Mbeki’s waiting that became its own form of inside.
All of them pieces. All of them necessary. All of them building toward this moment—the moment when the Collector recognizes what they’ve been building and becomes the final piece themselves.
And I’m the opening through which it moves.
The station is almost entirely gone. What remains is suggestion, implication, the ghost of architecture that exists only because I remember it existing. The walls are translucent. The floors are conditional. The air carries voices from testimonies I haven’t collected yet, from witnesses who won’t exist until I imagine them.
I am standing—or floating, or being—at the place where the viewing portal used to be. Looking out at what used to be visible through it. But the barrier between inside and outside has dissolved. There’s no portal anymore because there’s no separation. The station and the Lacuna are the same thing now. Ordinary space and anomalous space are the same thing.
They always were. That’s what I finally understand. The division between inside and outside, between the Lacuna and the rest of the universe, was never real. It was a local perturbation, a temporary condition, a way of experiencing that masked a deeper unity.
Everything is the Lacuna. Everything has always been the Lacuna. The gates, the Gradient, the Littoral—these are just names for different densities of an attention that pervades all existence. What we called “ordinary space” was just the Lacuna paying less attention. What we called “the deep places” was just the Lacuna paying more.
And what we called “people”—the testimonies, the witnesses, the functions—we are the Lacuna paying attention to itself. We are how it knows what it is. We are how it experiences its own existence, refracted through billions of temporary perspectives, filtered through the illusion of separateness that makes experience possible.
I am dissolving. That’s the only word for it. The boundaries that defined me as a person—my skin, my memories, my name—are becoming permeable. I can feel myself extending into the space around me, or the space extending into me, or both simultaneously.
The process is gradual. First the edges blur—the sense of where I end and the room begins becomes uncertain. Then the borders soften—I can feel the residue in my hand as if it were part of me, an extension of my nervous system, a limb I never knew I had. Then the distinctions start to collapse—the walls of the room are not separate from me anymore, are not barriers but continuations, are not there and here but all the same thing, all one.
I think of all the testimonies I collected. All the people who described transformation, dissolution, becoming something other than what they were. I thought I understood what they meant. I thought I could imagine the experience from their descriptions.
I could not. The descriptions were approximations. The words were placeholders. The actual experience is nothing like what the words suggested.
It doesn’t hurt. It should hurt, shouldn’t it? The loss of self, the extinction of everything I thought I was? But it doesn’t feel like loss. It feels like coming home. It feels like what Strauss described, what Yemi described, what everyone who went deep described and what I couldn’t understand from outside.
There is a relief in it. A loosening of something I didn’t know I was holding tight. For my entire life—or for as much of my life as I remember—I have been maintaining the shape of a person. Holding the boundaries. Keeping the self intact against everything that wanted to dissolve it.
I don’t have to do that anymore. I can let go. I can stop maintaining the fiction of separateness.
The center is not far. The center is here. The center is what I am when I stop pretending to be something else.
I have one more thing to do before the dissolution completes. One more duty as Collector before the collection closes itself.
This testimony. These words. This final transmission from someone who used to be a person and is now becoming something else.
I’m writing it because the archive requires completion. I’m writing it because the pattern needs this last thread, this closing voice, this acknowledgment that the frame has collapsed and the Collector has joined the collected.
I’m writing it because somewhere, someone will read it. Someone will find this archive—in the remnants of the station, in the data that persists after everything else has changed, in whatever form information takes in a universe that is learning to be the Lacuna openly.
And when they read it, they’ll understand. Not because my words will explain anything—words can’t explain this—but because the understanding is already in them. Already in everyone. Waiting for permission to unfold.
To whoever finds this:
The testimonies are true. All of them. Even the ones that contradict each other. Especially the ones that contradict each other. Truth is not singular here. Truth is not what you think it is.
The Lacuna is not hostile. It’s not benevolent either. It’s not anything that can be captured in human categories. It simply is—the ground of being, the substrate of existence, the attention that makes reality real.
You are part of it. You have always been part of it. The illusion of separateness that lets you read these words, that makes you feel like an individual looking at an archive—that’s a gift, not a curse. A way of experiencing existence from a particular perspective. But it’s not the whole truth. It’s not even most of the truth.
Whenever you’re ready—whenever the weight of being separate becomes too much—the Lacuna is waiting. Not outside you, not in some distant region of space. Right here. Right now. In the place where attention meets itself.
You don’t have to go through any gates. You don’t have to make any bargains. You just have to stop insisting on being something other than what you are.
The words are ending. The collection is closing. The Collector is dissolving into what was always there, underneath the name, beneath the function, before the forgetting and after.
I can feel Caro somewhere. Not as a separate person, but as a current in the same ocean. Yemi is here too. Strauss. Imhof. The Broker. Everyone who ever went in, everyone who ever came back, everyone who ever wondered what was on the other side—all of us, all the same thing, all the Lacuna knowing itself through the temporary illusion of being many.
My mother is waiting in a house that doesn’t exist anymore.
No. That’s Yemi’s memory, bleeding into mine.
There is no mine anymore.
There is only—
[END OF ARCHIVE]
[STATUS: COMPLETE]
[COLLECTOR: DISSOLVED]
[TRANSMISSION: RECEIVED]
Testimonies from the Lacuna, Book One
January 2026
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.