Zhi emerges out of the shadow, moving slow, deliberate. S/He is dressed in mending cloth, their face hidden behind a mask of shards of glass and wire.

“You’re one of them,” Ky says, their voice muffled but level.

Zhi cocks their head, thinking. “One of what?”

“One of the ones who watched,” s/he says, creeping a little nearer. “Watched while everything fell apart.”

The accusation bites deep.

Ky wobbles, their hands clenching and unclenching. “Why have you come?”

Zhi looks at it, its markings glinting softly in dim light. “I have come to understand,” s/he says. “To learn what is left, and must continue.”

Ky spits out a laugh, its sound acid. “Nothing’s left to carry. Ghosts and ash, that’s all.”

“Not true,” Zhi says, their eyes moving to the flower at its feet. “The life remains, even in crevices.”

The two stand motionless for a long, quiet interval. 

Finally, Ky comes to life and talks. "If you're here to learn, then you have to see what we saw."

S/He offers a hand, and Zhi takes it. Hand in hand, they move deeper into the ruins.

And there, buried under heaps of ash and debris, stands a machine, behemoth and sleeping, its face etched with the same inscrutable symbols etched into their epidermis. 

The visitors watch it closely. "We made it to save us," Ky says.

Ky touches the face of the machine, resting a hand against its metal faceplate. 

"I see now," Zhi breathes. "The machine did not kill you, then."

Ky shudders in their voice. "So then, then, what?"

Zhi turns, radiating a new light in their form. "The fear of falling," s/he says, "when you could no longer stand together."

The sky opens at exactly 3:07 PM, but time is a concept the visitors don't bother considering. They spill out like ink, their bodies composed of forms not quite liquid and not quite light.

One visitor-a media representative emanating colors that say joy and mild gastrointestinal distress-prods at a car, now rusted into a decent semblance of modern art. The car suddenly opens into a flower of hammers, as if to contest its own irrelevance. The visitor does not bat an eye, but simply absorbs the hammers into their mass. Hammers, after all, are good for plying recalcitrant objects for memories.

They're here for one reason: to harvest Earth's dreams. Dreams are their fuel, their art, their raison d'être, though they'd never admit to speaking French. But Earth's dreams are strange now, warped by centuries of human absence and an over-ambitious AI that once tried to terraform the moon into a giant taco. One dream the visitors uncover involves a sentient typewriter plotting world domination. Another revolves around a library where all the books whisper insults. One visitor eats both dreams anyway, their form briefly shifting into the shape of a very disappointed typewriter.

They are archivists of chaos, cataloging not what was logical or important but what was delightfully unnecessary.

Their forms stretch and twist, morphing into a single colossal being shaped like an inside joke nobody remembers. They hum together, a sound like static and laughter, and Earth itself seems to vibrate in response.

Zhi's eyes are focused on an exploding hologram of twin universes - one ungrounding itself upon the horizon, it then draws back against itself. A ripple maddening alone.

"Wrong," Zhi whispers. "If the anti-universe holds up a mirror to us, then there shouldn't be noise. Everything should align."

Ky leans against the console, sipping tea without being bothered by the chaos. "Unless the noise is the point. What if they're trying to talk to us?" 

Zhi stiffens. "Talk?" 

Ky shrugs. "If they're running backward, maybe their end is our beginning. Maybe we are interlocked." 

No reply came from Zhi. Fingers blurred over the keyboard as ripple became louder. They translated the sound it made, a low, resonant hum, oscillating like a heartbeat. Then came the numbers. Primes. A message.

"They're counting," Zhi whispered. His voice quivered. "But backward."

The ripple grows stronger. The lab groans, the lights trembling, almost as if between two worlds. Time falters for Zhi, each second folding onto itself. There is something to the projection: a mirror image of themselves in a lab where time flows backward, lost in contemplation. The anti-them arrives; reaches out what may be the other side of darkness.

"Zhi, refrain," Ky cautions but too late. Zhi touches the surface, and the lab dissolves in splendor.

For an unending moment, Zhi sees everything: that symmetry of existence, a cosmic dance in which universes ebb and flow like rivers into and out of each other. The anti-universe does not speak in words, it has overwhelming presence.

You are the echo.

And then, darkness. The lab returns, relatively silent, ordinary, and typical. The ripple is gone; it has erased data. Zhi practically collapses into a chair, head spinning. 

Ky kneels beside them. "What happened?" 

LaHaNgAh Zasonga. "It does not say much," with a laugh, "they have had us in the echo."

Infinite stretch walls of reflective panels extend in every possible direction, creating a labyrinth of kaleidoscopes. In the center of that glittering space stands a visitor-an augmented consciousness made of neural echoes and biomechanical precision. This body is liquid, a scintillating intermix of light and matter, changing in rhythm with each heartbeat, if such an idea still makes sense in this place.

Behold, the Infinitum Chamber, a great neural interface where visitors open up their own broken psyches. The Chamber has been by the Collective for one purpose only; it is the embodiment of the Mirror Dichotomy, in which one's sense of self is ripped apart into layers of perception, reflection, and external projection. The chamber reacts to the thoughts of the visitor, drawing abstract thoughts into terrifyingly, brutally therein-homicidal visions.

The Awakening

They keep getting more distorted along with their movement. And yes, they turn into figures—their own figures, but different too. One of them whispers in a sweet voice: 

"I am Je: the naked self, the real one, unvarnished and undefined. Do you know me?"

The second answers, almost breathlessly: 

"And I am Moi, the observed self, its display meant for the gaze of other people. Both of us are you—and neither."

The figures swirl around the visitor, their movements in sync but subtly disharmonized. Overall, it is just enough to flare the neural network as it processes the meaning. The Mirror Dichotomy now begins to unravel their perception of oneness.

The Rift

In the instant the room tears into two dimensions, to the left shines a bright cascade of images-the visitor as they imagined themself, whole, invulnerable, without fear. To the right, darker shapes seem to come forth-shadows of doubt, factional writers in the entanglement.

This dissonance is just too much. The visitor stretches to join the two halves. In doing so, however, another shape begins to coalesce: the Other, composite of all those judgments from outside that the visitor has internalized. The voice is a chaos of criticism and desire:

"You want a wholeness, yet you despise it. You see yourself in me, yet you reject my gaze. What are you without my reflection?"

The chamber shakes, walls breaking. The visitor falls to the floor, understanding that the identity has itself degenerated into a never-ending negotiation between these mirrored forces.

Resolution

As tumult explodes within the system, it causes the visitor to spring to life as cadres of code animate. Establishment floodlights go on and dark curtains open. In the darkness remains only a solitary mirror, no light from behind it, and no sound coming through. The visitor doesn't try to clasp it out; s/he reaches it out to recognize it.

"I am both the image and the viewer," the visitor murmurs, a note of steadiness in their voice. "A mosaic of contradictions."

'The chamber melts as it opens to infinity; one can see a few stars in the visibility of the darkness. The visitor is now weightless and cleansed of the burdensome necessity of self-definition. Rather, defying the fact of being, they float within the infinite.

The Collective views the visitor’s neural data. The experiment is a success: it manifested the Infinitum Chamber where identity is established as a continually inseparable interplay rather than a fixed construct. There is no solution in the mirrored labyrinth-dance between reflection and reality.

But the visitor, drifting further from the confines of the chamber, loses interest in the Collective's analysis. For the first time, they simply are.