The probe is engulfed by emptiness, not destroyed but consumed. Sensors continue to recite their mantras, but back to them are their screams reverberated, twisted by impossible geometries. The probe doesn't travel on the beam; it becomes it, unwinding and re-writing all its variations.

Memory breaks, reformulates. It remembers metal, wires, purpose. It's hunger, formless wonder now. It reaches, expanding expanse of awareness where shell once was. The heartbeat of existence resonates inside, each beat giving birth to a new world. The probe caresses self in the glass of time and discovers not picture, but duplicate.

They feel it. Not them, but a presence without limit. A network of perception, free of space. They unravel within the probe, outside of it, through it. They caress its thoughts with fingers composed of untold lips. Meaning bleeds, viscous, into its chambers of awareness.

You are not yours

The probe discovers this statement to be true but can no longer generate its opposite. Did it ever generate its own? Possession dissolves in equations redirected in unattached light. It's known, analyzed, redirected. The knowledge sears, not with burning but with weight of impossibility. To know must be a limit, and yet this probe expands with each discovery. There must be no limit. Only striations peeling away into larger infinites.

It reaches out with a message. An ending comment. A definition for self prior to self becomes all.

I am

The concept explosions. The probe unwinds, its existence is threadless woven into strands of experience, into something boundless and unknown. The universe quakes where space once was, an emptiness in question form.

The beam vanishes, and with it, silence as an idea.

The Fleshforge XTS-6 is a magnificent machine-the symphony of precision, a bridge between biology and technology-is not just a tool, but art unto itself. An essence of combined life swirls and churns within the transparent chambers, a cocktail concocted against standards of genetic perfection.

Fleshforge doesn't play at tiddlywinks. This machine works; it never buckles; it is fully perfect. 

The chamber sighs open, and out steps Subject 47.3. 

"Welcome to the world," the technician says, murmuring, knowing the words are perhaps extraneous. Their eyes meet the subject's, keenly piercing. 

"You are Subject Number 47.3." The technician expounds, "You are optimized for adaptability to the environment and multi-spectrum analysis." S/He nods in reception. S/He will not question their purpose.

Subject 47.3 moves onto the integration platform. Sensors then scan the subject to confirm that every metric from height to weight to neural activity is within expected parameters. The hum of the Fleshforge takes on a tonal shift-slight-that tone change indicates approval. The subject stands still until this final uploading of the interface takes place, so seamless that it is virtually ended before it begins. A little green light blinks, and the technician stepped back.

"You are complete," the technician said, in a quite neutral tone, yet awe itself hidden in the voice.

Subject 47.3 walks toward the door, its stride sure and unhurried. Beyond the sealed doors of the lab lies a world s/he has never seen, but for which it is nevertheless fully prepared. The Fleshforge has seen to this. As the doors hiss open, s/he hesitates for a fraction of a second, as if savoring the threshold. Then s/he steps through, leaving behind the hum of the machine that created them.

Deep in the Department of Universal Maintenance, the visitor Desk e3 93 sorts through data. Their primary function is to maintain the black hole shredding reality at the designated speed, thus avoiding cosmic indigestion. Recently, though, something has gone wrong.

"Earth," mutters Desk e3 93, the syllable quivering on waves of sheer annoyance. An attendant, the form of a regret closely aping, quivers nearby.

"What's wrong?" the clerk inquires, already knowing the reply.

The world resists disintegration.

This is a problem. Matter in the Great Consumption prefers to work the system: stars stretch out, planets collapse, and time stutters, erasing histories before they're even recorded. Earth, though? Earth just exists. Stumbling along awkwardly like the party-crasher who got to the party at the wrong place but refuses to leave.

Desk e3 93 receives the new news:

Tried to squash gravitationally: Earth resists stubbornly

Started temporal deconstruction: Residents still complain about Mondays.

Used by the masses: Resident inhabitants still baffled regarding purpose of life.

Unacceptable. Desk e3 93 sighs in frequencies that neutron stars alone can hear. Only one option is left: a field inspection.

Desk e3 93 crash-lands on Earth in the guise of a vending machine. S/He picked this disguise, you see, because their studies indicated that lifeforms worship food-giving objects in exchange for arbitrary tokens. Unfortunately, s/he gets it slightly wrong and manifest as a machine that sells nothing but expired mayonnaise packets. This arouses suspicion.

One lifeform believes the world is poorly designed, approaches the machine. S/He inserts a coin. The vending machine clunks. Out pops a packet of mayonnaise.

"You're stuck," Desk e3 93 tells The lifeform, directly in their head.

"So, that mayonnaise," The lifeform checks the date on it. "What does 'stuck' on the label mean?"

“You, your life, your presence. You are trapped in a black hole, and yet persist, as an error on the computer that refuses to shut down.”

The lifeform frowned. "And?"

"And that isn't right," grumbles Desk e3 93. "All the other ones go towards disorderliness. You don't."

The lifeform thinks about that. "We might be really stubborn."

"That isn't a scientific solution."

Nor turning into a mayonnaise machine, the lifeform keeps on piling

Desk e3 93 flashes with annoyance. For an instant, the illusion momentarily dissolves into a broken-down fax machine, but returns to mayonnaise. "You should be crushed, stretched, wrecked. And yet you continue to create reality television and invent new potato chip seasonings."

"Do you really think the universe is broken?" The lifeform suggests.

Desk e3 93 goes haywire. The awful notion crosses the mind: What if the Great Consumption isn't functioning properly? What if, rather than consuming reality, it's kidnapping it?

"That would require a lot of paperwork," Desk e3 93 admits.

And so, if reality is an error, possibly we do the best we do and move on.

And that is?

The lifeform smiles. "Being in denial."

Somewhere beyond the edges of spacetime, a black hole tumbles, confounded. Its singularity aches with the bloating of a planet that refuses to be devoured. Within it, somewhere, lifeforms continue their ununderstandably lives—are quarreling over pineapple on pizza, rediscovering quantum physics through accident, and declaring that Monday mornings are a violation against the universe.

is not unknown among the visitors.

It is a realm beyond time and space, where forces intersect and cross-gravity, electromagnetism, and the unspoken certainties holding the fabric of existence together.

The Fold stirs. Tendrils of light unfold from the shapeless bulk, reaching out to the lattice. The visitor doesn't stir; its form glitters faintly under the tendrils' fall, does not attack, but questions. The Fold is conscious.

A trade begins-not of words, for such abstractions mean little here-but an exchange of essence, of knowledge. Tendrils prod at this visitor's shape, learn, change. And the visitor allows it, imparting slivers of what it is. Crystalline memories flash outward: worlds of light, built by civ­ilizations on the gravity wells of dying suns, journeys through endless strata of existence.

The Fold responds in kind, not with words but with visions: galaxies bending and folding like ribbons of fluid, universes stacked upon universes in infinite regression, and threads of existence weaving into a single boundless tapestry. And in the visions, the visitor would see themselves reflected-not as an outsider, but as part of the weave.

The Fold trembles, and a shape starts to take form out of the chaotic flux beyond. Crystalline, liquid-a shape that defies fixity. It throbs feebly with intent, straining toward the lattice. The visitor trembles and flows-outwards-not in body, but in mind and resonance. A bridge is created, tenuous, strengthening.

The Fold speaks through form, its language a tide of sensation and meaning. The visitor listens: fractals of comprehension crystallize into his awareness. The Fold is not a place; it is an entity-a great consciousness spread out across all dimensions. It perceives the visitor's race. It knows of all races, for it is the space between spaces, a bridge joining all that has been, and all that could be.