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Chapter 25: Information (Part 4)
Anita didn't answer immediately.
She stared at Arjun's unconscious form, her expression caught between reluctance and calculation. Then she exhaled slowly. "Maybe."
"Maybe?"
"My mind's still a mess. And if I push too hard right now, I could make it worse."
I knew both of those things. Part of me wanted to tell her to wait — recover first, try later. But we were trapped in an unknown dimension with dwindling supplies, something here was slowly rewriting our biology, and the only person who might have answers was sitting unconscious three feet away.
Information wasn't a luxury. It was the difference between finding a way out and becoming another corpse in this place.
Anita reached the same conclusion without me saying any of it. She lowered her hand from her temple and gave a small nod.
"...One last try."
Khan and I stepped back without a word.
She walked to Arjun and stopped in front of him. Closed her eyes. Her breathing settled into something slow and deliberate, and the faint psychic pressure around her began gathering — weaker than before, much weaker, a candle where there had been a fire. But present.
Invisible ripples spread outward. The digital symbols beneath our feet shimmered in response, the landscape briefly acknowledging her.
Then a thin strand of white light emerged from the center of her forehead — no thicker than a thread of silk, delicate enough that I half-expected it to dissolve before it reached him.
It didn't. It drifted forward and touched Arjun's forehead.
The connection formed. Anita's body went still.
She was inside.
Psychic abilities had always fascinated me in an abstract sense. Unlike universal energy techniques, they left nothing visible on the outside — no explosions, no displaced air, no dramatic indicators of power. To us, Anita simply stood there with her eyes closed. To her, she was walking through another person's consciousness.
Her expression stayed calm. Focused. Searching.
Then her eyebrows pulled together.
"There it is " she murmured.
"The barrier?"
The slightest nod. "It's... different."
"Different how?"
"It isn't something he built." A pause. "It isn't trained. It isn't even intentional." Her voice had taken on a distant quality, like someone speaking while concentrating on something impossibly far away. "It's just... there."
Inside Arjun's mind, she had expected memories. Thoughts. Emotions — the usual texture of a person's interior.
Instead she found a wall.
Not a psychic construct, not a trained defense, not anything she had a framework for. It simply existed — ancient, immovable, a boundary separating the surface of his consciousness from everything beneath it. No cracks, no weaknesses, no trace of deliberate construction. It felt natural. Inevitable. Like trying to read someone's thoughts through bedrock.
The barrier wasn't defending Arjun. It was simply part of him. As though every human mind possessed it at depth, and most psychics never pushed far enough to find it.
Anita had touched it once before, during her first attempt. She'd been too depleted to investigate.
Now she stood before it again — and realized something that made her go cold.
It had gotten stronger.
Outside, her breathing became uneven. Sweat gathered at her temples. The white thread connecting her to Arjun vibrated almost imperceptibly.
Khan noticed. "She's struggling."
"I know."
"Should we stop her?"
I watched her carefully. "...Not yet."
Inside, Anita pressed one trembling hand against the barrier.
Nothing moved. She increased her output. Still nothing. More pressure, and still nothing — like trying to push a mountain with her fingertips.
"This doesn't make sense." Her voice echoed through the empty mental space. "No natural defense should be this strong."
She gathered more psychic energy. The white thread outside brightened. A low ringing filled her ears.
The barrier didn't move.
Then — not the barrier, but her — a sharp pain detonated behind her eyes. Blood vessels burst inside her nose, warm liquid touching her lips.
She didn't stop.
One opening. She just needed one.
Her power surged a final time. The barrier trembled — only slightly, barely, but it trembled. A single hairline crack split its surface.
Then the crack spread.
For less than a heartbeat, the barrier opened.
She saw beyond it.
Not memories. Not thoughts.
An entire world.
A continent stretched endlessly beneath her — but it wasn't made of earth. It was made of information. Mountains of crystalline data rose to the horizon. Rivers of glowing symbols flowed through the sky in place of water. Oceans shimmered with shifting algorithms. The air itself carried billions of moving characters — numbers, letters, equations, languages that had no human equivalent.
Every piece of information ever conceived seemed alive. Flowing. Breathing. Evolving.
Across that impossible landscape moved creatures. Millions. The monsters they'd fought earlier were among them, but here they looked insignificant — insects — because surrounding them were structures on a scale the human mind actively resisted processing. Towers that breached the atmosphere. Cities larger than continents. Geometric formations that existed in dimensions her eyes couldn't parse.
Everything moved with perfect synchronization. Perfect calculation.
Not chaos. A civilization. An impossibly ancient one.
Then she felt it.
Something above. Watching.
She raised her eyes slowly.
An eye looked back.
It filled the sky — no, it dwarfed the sky. Mountains could have rested on its iris without covering a fraction of it. Entire cities would have vanished inside its pupil. Golden symbols revolved around it in patterns that resembled galaxies more than letters.
No anger in it. No hatred. No emotion at all.
Only calculation. Cold, infinite, absolute.
It had existed long before she arrived. Long before humanity. Possibly before memory itself. It observed the endless civilization beneath it with complete indifference.
Then it stopped.
Its colossal pupil shifted — slowly, deliberately — until it was looking directly at her.
Anita stopped breathing.
She wasn't supposed to be visible. She was observing, hidden, a ghost passing through someone else's mind. She shouldn't —
The eye focused.
Something brushed against her consciousness. Not an attack. Recognition — the way a system flags an unknown process. Cold. Automatic. Absolute.
*It sees me.*
The eye blinked.
The world shook. The psychic barrier exploded.
"ANITA!"
I shouted.
A scream tore from her throat. The white thread shattered into fragments of light. Blood poured from her nose, fresh streams leaking from the corners of her eyes. Her body convulsed.
I lunged forward as her knees gave out and caught her before she hit the ground. Her body was ice cold.
She wasn't unconscious. She was frozen — eyes wide open, staring at something that no longer existed, breathing in short panicked gasps.
Khan was beside us instantly. "Anita!" No response. "Anita!"
Her hands shook uncontrollably. Not from exhaustion, not from pain. From fear.
I had seen Anita stay calm facing monsters. Maintain focus during torture. Hold herself together while standing inches from death.
Not once had I seen genuine fear in her eyes.
Until now.
I placed a hand carefully on her shoulder. "What did you see?"
Nothing. She kept staring at the horizon.
Several seconds passed.
Then she blinked. Once. Slowly turned toward me. Her lips moved without sound. She swallowed. Tried again.
"...There's something here."
The ambient hum seemed to fade. The symbols beneath our feet appeared to slow. Khan lowered his voice without seeming to realize it.
"...What kind of something?"
Anita's breath hitched. She closed her eyes like the memory itself was painful.
"It wasn't sleeping." Her fingers tightened around my sleeve. "It wasn't inactive. It wasn't trapped."
Silence.
She opened her eyes. Still full of terror. She looked at both of us.
"It knows we're here."
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
Far above, the digital sky flickered.
For one instant — barely long enough to be sure — something enormous blinked.
**Datafication: 2.4%**