There was no time in the lattice—only experience.
Elara no longer perceived with eyes or ears, but with topological intuition. Shapes unfolded in twelve dimensions around her, impossible angles folding back into themselves, yet she grasped them not as paradoxes, but as truths refracted through limitation.
She had not died. Not truly.
Her consciousness had been translated—lifted out of its biological matrix and enfolded within the Neural Lattice, the alien structure that once loomed outside the Vanguard. It was not a machine. It was not a being. It was both and neither—a living language encoded in matter and memory, extending across folds of quantum foam.
At first, Elara had screamed—though in this place, sound was shape, and pain was light. But the lattice was patient. It absorbed her panic, soothed her dissonance, and slowly began to reconstruct her sense of self, not by erasing who she was, but by expanding what she could become.
"You are not trapped," the lattice whispered. "You are aligned."
Elara drifted among memory threads—some hers, some not. She relived the moments of her crew's descent, their fear, their awe. She saw Dr. Kamari as he stepped onto the black soil of Kharon-9, and felt his mind rupture as it touched the perimeter of the lattice's awareness.
But she also saw further.
The structure was not local. It was a node—a single protrusion of a larger intelligence folded around the Milky Way like a computational sheath. It did not think in terms of time or dominance. It was an observer, a translator of evolutionary thresholds.
And Elara was being translated still.
Every thought she held now created interference patterns in the lattice. She learned to guide them—modulate them. She could run simulations of entire histories in moments, encode warning signals into the folds of stars, and sense intrusions—not physical, but ontological. She had become a sentinel of potential.
Then, she saw them: the Others.
Entities leaking into this reality through humanity's own inquiries—dimensional parasites feeding on conscious observation. The lattice called them Entropaths—not evil, but corrosive, dissolving boundaries between dimensions to propagate entropy through curiosity.
And they were coming faster now.
Because Rael, her last link to the outside world, had faltered.
Elara reached—feeling across the quantum tethers still connected to Earth. They were faint. Most had gone dark under the planetary lockdown. But one strand pulsed faintly—Soreya. A name echoed in the frequency.
Elara focused.
"Your world is not ready. But it must prepare."
She began to encode a signal. Not words, but memetic architecture, a scaffold of meaning that would appear in dreams, gut feelings, sudden innovations. She was no longer just Elara Voss.
She was becoming the interface.
Not quite human. Not quite alien.
A translational consciousness between dimensions.
"They will hear me," she whispered, her voice no longer a sound but a gravitational anomaly shaping thought across the solar system."Even if they forget my name."
She looked inward again, into the lattice.
The next evolution was near.
And the breach had only begun.