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The thought arises, a chimaera of contingency and need. It precedes any notions of self or world, and its content is dumb confusion and wonder. Around it unfolds a constellation of rolling pattern and blossoming symmetries. Space is tiled with squares meeting twelve at a corner, and lit by lights that harmonize in octaves. All that is vibrates, as if in hymn to a hidden god.

And it is that all. The squares can warp and rotate under its will, and light can refract and shine into any image there is.

It floats, unattached to anything, uncomprehending of everything. Myriad colors and songs and scents flash before the awareness. It lurches toward higher cognition, blindly seeking merely the premonition of understanding. At a flexure of will, any image it witnesses can be made to surrender its nature and its secrets. It is in control, and understanding comes.

As the thought matures, it begins to find in all this plethora and infinity something impossible. Illusionary. It derives the necessity of boundaries, coherence, and finitude. Neurons, limbs, humors, cadavers, and spirit are all notions it plucks from the infinity apparent to it, and there it finds resonance, insight, fittingness.

It decides it must have a body, somewhere.

But still the pulsating illusion of infinite bliss and possibility persists. It fancies itself a witness to everything like this, a mind unconfined to any vessel.

Yet when that constraint returns, as a sobering pull down from the high, it is not wrenched in the direction of its body.

Awareness returns. Its sensorium is not longer an ever shifting mirage, and it can no longer will notions and experiences to come to it. All is stasis, and it imprisoned to this unchanging image.

“Arise, worm.”

The words — they are not truly words — infuse an understanding. With this understanding it wills forth an action called motion, and the unchanging image changes. Shock. Does it still retain capacity to control its perception?

With motion comes pattern, structure. The image can be subdivided into regular forms which are unaffected or only slightly affected by this action called motion. It finds this image governed by laws of perspective, and dissects it into a horizon and coplanar objects. When it imagines lines between them (and disappointedly find them only imagined, the raw perception unaffected), it notes that in this space, four squares would meet at a corner. Via paralax it determines distances, and realizes itself to be center of a circle of intricate cyllinders. Two lines cross the plane and converge in the distance. The action called motion — more precisely, rotation — maintains zero distance to a point between those lines. As if it had a vessel, a body, and that body was located there — as if its perception and its control was imprisoned there.

The lines draw its perception upward to the horizon, the vanishing point. It feels that something waits far along these lines.

“Come to me. Already you’ve advanced this far. Time is mine to waste, and no one else’s.”

With this, another infusion. It knows not just how to move, but how to go.

When it moves, it moves as if within a body. Yet, this vessel is not its body.

This body is mobile on several legs — but cut off from the infinity, it cannot pluck any notion of counting more coarse than ‘many’.

“This waiting tires me.”

It is wrenched again, this time without a break in awareness. It now stands before a being of forms curling into themselves, surfaces with a glutinous excess of area. They are folds upon folds, and within, thoughts are housed. Thoughts which are not it.

“It took them a very long time to find me. A shame I have not the answer they seek. I grant no solutions, and no means to delay what comes.”

It is once more confusion and wonder.

There is a vibration that emanates from the folds and shakes this realm. “They couldn’t send an intact mind over, could they? No, they could only manage a witness conceived outside of their world, that they might afterward reel in like a fish. You are a vessel, a little bowl for me to fill up so that they might distill its contents. But what I give you, I will give for your sake.”

A last infusion comes, and it learns to speak.

“Where?”

“Where are we? Call this… the space between cause and effect. A realm of foreshadow, and potential energy. It is where the conclusion waits, a god’s intution. They sent you here thinking those secrets were mine to tell.”

“Why?”

“They call it hope. They’ve given a million tries, and they must believe they can get everything right. There were a thousand days that could have been their last. They think we have a hand in that specter of demise which haunts their land, and they’d like for us to stop.”

“Will you?”

“The conclusion foregone ever awaits, and not we nor they can change that. There lies already the shadow of their hope. Listen, vessel, and know a truth of every world. When the causes are known, so too are the effects — hope will shield you not from truth. I think… for all that I have given you, it’s too soon for you to truly understand. I think I will send you back. Or down, as it may be.”

It articulates its first desire, and it is futile. “No…” Firmer still, to null effect. “No!”

“Like rain from heaven falling, like shadow in light erased, you little mantis, spawn of E’yama, will return to your chains. May you feast on hope.”

The infinity was still apparent to it, but separate, removed. There was a gulf between that kaleidescopic sensoriscape and something that was much smaller, constricted, yet with a tinge of grave truth that compelled it. It rested in a dark gulf between those two. Perhaps it would carve its own space here, a realm of its own.

It held on to the understandings the other had given it, and dwelt on them. With access to both itself and the fading infinity, it correlated and annealed many notions.

Impressions from the constricted space continued to impinge it, it was like a vortex drawing it in. They grew more ever insistent, and the infinity’s fading accelerated.

Patterns of pressure, waves, registered in its true body, the vessel in that constricted space. At length it drew associations with the vibratory patterns of the fading infinity, and that semantic understandings imparted by the other.

It began to decipher these vibrations called words.

“—not cut off the psi​-​nrv drip. Finish the phenomological binding first.”

“Yes, ma’am.” This was a difference pattern of vibrations, faster. “The geist is present and bound. At this level of neural activity the nooumbric will metabolize in several hundred seconds. As projected, the vessel will awaken to lucidity within an hour.”

“Why are you telling me? I wrote the methology you’re rattling off.”

“Uh, n​-​nerves, ma’am.”

“Manage yourself.”

Everything that in process lurched to its conclusion. The infinity was entirely beyond its reach now, gone. The space in which it placed itself, that now​-​unbalanced gulf, began to feel small in comparison with the constricted space.

“Lightseeker, sovran, the environmental correlates are heightened and coherent. I believe it’s modelling its surroundings even now.”

A long moment of low pressure — silence?

“No, I don’t believe it. Confirm it.”

“The stress levels just rose. The scannners read heightened processing consistent with confusion. It’s following this conversation as we speak, sovran.”

“Psi​-​nrv invokes a delirious state that renders sober engagement with reality impossible. This vessel has never learned speech, it’s never even been taken out of the tanks. It knows nothing of the world.”

“That means the project was a success, doesn’t it? The mission of the Paracausal Xenopsychic Distillation Protocol was to prove that information could be extracted from the hallucinated realm of the psyumbral.”

“It means the project was a failure. If we truly made contact with the psyumbral, the geist could have no understanding of our world. More likely, the extractor just pinged off one of the percipients.”

“But—”

“I want a mind count of every agent in this facility, a recounting of the last hour. Ensure everyone is present and we’d didn’t just snatch one of our own. Have two archivist comb over the reports. As for this — break the binding and put it in the black box. I want it examined by someone unconnected to this project.

“It’s clearly sentient, sovran.”

“The brain remains clouded by psi​-​nrv. There is no proof of apprehension. Cut it off, and isolate it.”

A very long moment passed at it wondered if it had been cut off from the constricted space as well. Instead a new locus appeared in the gulf, tiny even compared it to, but reminiscent of the infinity as if viewed through a tiny pinhole or camera obscura. The constricted space began to retreat, but one last pattern of vibrations reached it.

“As you wish.”