While Umbria prepared for a magical war of apocalyptic proportions and Nyx savored the impending feast of cosmic Chaos, in Cancún, Mexico, a small group of people watched the world crumble through a very different lens.
It was the evening of Wednesday, April 2, 2025. There was little more than a day until the estimated arrival of the entity Cthulhu. The group was gathered in a modest makeshift laboratory near the beach, surrounded by modified electroencephalography equipment, complex diagrams of neural fields, and worn copies of Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum's works. Outside, although the official news was confusing and contradictory, there was a palpable tension in the air, a psychic pressure that made the skin crawl and provoked unsettling dreams. They had seen fragmented reports of strange global phenomena: swarms of impossible creatures in Spain, silent craft over Asia, colossal structures emerging in the Americas.
Dr. Elena Rossi, a theoretical physicist who had spent years following Grinberg's leads, looked at a monitor displaying anomalous energy fluctuations on a global scale. "The patterns are... incoherent, Mateo," she said, addressing a young psychology student with an unusual intuitive sensitivity. "They don't follow known physical laws. It's as if... as if the very fabric of reality is being stretched, deformed."
Mateo nodded, pale. "I'm sorry, Elena. It's like the 'noise' Grinberg spoke of, the interference in the 'lattice,' but amplified a million times. It's... aggressive. It tries to undo perception."
"The syntergistic theory," Elena murmured, more to herself than to the others. She picked up a copy of 'The Creation of Experience.' "Grinberg postulated that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain, but rather interacts directly with a fundamental matrix, a pre-spatial structure that contains all the information in the universe. That perception is the result of the neural field's interaction with this 'synergic lattice.'"
"And he believed," Mateo added, "that a sufficiently coherent consciousness, a highly syntergic neural field, could not only perceive the lattice more clearly, but also... influence it. Modify it."
There was a silence as they processed the enormity of what they were thinking.
"These... things that are coming," Elena said, referring to the Cthulhu threat they could barely name, "seem to operate at that fundamental level. They don't just attack physically; they attack perception, reality itself. They bend space, induce madness... interfere with the lattice."
"So," Mateo said, a mixture of terror and intellectual excitement in his eyes, "could it be the other way around? If they attack the lattice... could we use the lattice to defend ourselves?"
"Use consciousness as a shield?" asked another member of the group, a skeptical philosopher named Javier. "Against... that?"
"Not a passive shield," Elena clarified, her eyes blazing with intensity. "Grinberg believed in the possibility of creating fields of coherent consciousness. If we could reach a state of high syntergy, perhaps we could... stabilize the lattice around us. Create a kind of 'island of coherent reality' that resists external distortion. Or perhaps even... project that coherence outward, interfering with those entities' connection to our reality."
The idea was astonishing, almost madness. Could the human mind, understood through the theories of a vanished scientist, stand against cosmic gods? They had no magic like Umbria's, no alien technology, no power of Chaos. They only had their minds and a radical theory about the nature of reality.
"But how?" Javier asked. "Grinberg's experiments barely scratched the surface. We would need a level of coherence, of synergy, that has never been achieved. And... how much time do we have?"
Mateo looked at a clock. "Less than thirty hours, if the estimates are correct."
They looked at each other. They were a handful of researchers on a beach in Mexico, while the world prepared for a cosmic invasion and wars between gods and monsters. It seemed desperate.
"We don't know," Elena admitted. "We don't know if it's possible. We don't know if we can achieve the necessary synergy. We don't know if it will help against... Cthulhu." She paused, taking a deep breath. "But Jacobo's theory is the only tool we have that could operate at the same fundamental level as the threat. Are we going to sit back and wait for the end, or are we going to try to use the only weapon we have... our own consciousness?"
The question hung in the tense air. Amid the magical and alien chaos enveloping the planet, a small group of humans in Cancún contemplated the possibility that the key to survival might not lie in ancient spells. Or advanced weapons, but in the very nature of mind and reality, as glimpsed by a scientist lost in time.