Rael awoke in a place that defied definition.
There was no ceiling. No floor. Only gradients of gravity curling inward, like thought made tangible. Around him, reality fractured — not violently, but precisely, like glass cut by a master's blade.
He wasn't dreaming.
This was the summon.
The moment Elara crossed into the higher dimension, a seed had activated inside him — something implanted during the Vanguard project, encoded into the quantum substrate of his cerebellum. A contingency. A firewall.
"You are awake," said a voice — but not in his ears.
It came from within the geometry itself, vibrating across planes of cognition. The entity before him looked vaguely human, but only if viewed through a prism of collapsing possibilities. Eyes that multiplied when you tried to count them. A form that became mist when you tried to define it.
"Who are you?" Rael asked aloud, though he didn't need to.
"We are the Witness Protocol. Your species' last line of resistance against what leaks through."
Memories returned in flashes — Project Sentinel, the classified mission to Kharon-9, and the fragments of Elara's final transmission that never reached the public. She hadn't just vanished.
She had breached a boundary not meant to be crossed.
Now, that boundary was weakening.
"I wasn't trained for this."
"You were never meant to be trained. You were meant to adapt."
Suddenly, light twisted around Rael's body. Not photons, but conceptual vectors — data structures carried on strings of encoded cognition. The interface injected new mathematics directly into his neocortex — axioms that couldn't be written, only experienced.
The process was agony.
It wasn't pain like burning or pressure. It was ontological collapse. The feeling of your thoughts rewriting their own definitions while still inside your head.
"Firewall construction initiated."
The Witness extended a hand — or what resembled one — and touched Rael's forehead.
Rael convulsed. He saw a flood of visual data: maps of multi-topological manifolds, recursive timelines bleeding into one another, dark forms writhing beyond Event Layer Zeta.
"Those are the invaders?" he managed to ask.
"No. Those are their shadows. The invaders are thoughtforms. Anti-entropy. They do not invade space — they invade meaning."
Rael's spine arched. More data poured into him — language, not of syntax but causal influence, the kind that could rewrite what a thing had always been.
He began to understand what Elara had seen.
And why she had chosen not to return.
"Rael."
The Witness now stood behind him.
"To defend your kind, you must sacrifice a part of your narrative self. There are concepts the human mind cannot safely retain. You will need to forget your origin... and hold only purpose."
Rael's breath slowed. He looked down at his hands.
They were dissolving — or rather, detaching from linearity. His body no longer obeyed Euclidean metrics. He had begun the phase shift.
"I'm not ready," he whispered.
"No one ever is."
And with that, the firewall came online.
From Earth to the outermost reaches of the solar veil, the neural lattice flickered — as if the universe had just blinked.
Rael was no longer alone.
He had become the first defense.
The first firewall.
And the war for meaning itself had begun.