The sky above Vetraeus was the color of rusted code.
Not yet broken, not yet divine—just tired. Every evening it hung low over the Vetraean Research Parliament, the way an exhausted god might rest its hand against a window and watch its creations bargain for meaning. Beneath that light, the world's last century of certainty wound down in a haze of static broadcasts and scientific prayers. They called this peace. But the air already smelled like something rehearsing its death.
The year was 1962 A.E., the century's thirteenth false dawn.
On the cliffs of the Eural Line, a structure rose that was less building than verdict: The Somnus Facility, a cathedral of glass and graphite sunk deep into the rock. Its walls refracted the ocean's gray light through a lattice of sensor veins. From above, the place resembled a crystal brain half-buried in the continent's skull. From within, it felt like the world had decided to dream in architecture.
The purpose was simple enough for governments to fund and impossible enough for them to deny: to map the geography of thought.
The dream had a name—Operation Somnus—and a face: Dr. Elias Veyra, the man who believed that empathy could be quantified if only the math stopped lying.
Inside the facility's western atrium, Veyra walked through a forest of monitors. Each one showed a slice of human interior: REM scans, pulse graphs, mnemonic lattice models. Machines murmured like monks. Cold air hummed through the ducts in measured rhythm, the heartbeat of a god in draft form.
He moved as though not to disturb the silence between the clicks of relays, coat trailing the faint scent of ethanol and solder. His glasses were off—he preferred the world blurry when he was thinking.
Behind him, the sea slammed itself against the rocks, uninvited applause for another night of discovery.
"If we can see the shape of belief," he'd once told the Council, "we can cure its delusions. We can design mercy."
They had laughed then, gently, like patrons at a zoo. Now they sent soldiers to guard his door.
The team called him The First Dreamer half in jest, half in superstition. He didn't correct them. He had learned that every myth begins as a mispronunciation of truth.
Around him, dozens of specialists worked under the sodium glow of control rigs: Dr. Isolde Rehn, her hair braided with electrode cords, reading emotion maps like scripture; Captain Hann Osterr, the military liaison, his posture carved from doctrine; and Agent Solene Kerr, the quiet observer whose gaze weighed equations differently than data should.
They were the world's last honest optimists—scientists trying to make compassion into physics before war learned to patent it first.
At 22:03 hours, the chamber descended.
The floor panels sealed; light condensed to a single circle around the central pod. They called it the Mirror Cradle—a suspension bed of liquid quartz, wired into the dream lattice through a thousand glass veins. Above it hung the Aion Chronometer, Veyra's invention: a ringed device of polished steel that ticked not seconds but possibilities.
Each rotation was a promise of control. Each click, a reminder that control was another word for prayer.
"Systems green," Rehn murmured. "Cognitive lattice stabilized at fifty-seven hertz. The membrane's holding."
"Begin resonance ascent," Veyra replied, voice steady as sleep deprivation allowed. "Keep Parallax Halo tight—we don't know what it reads as, once it looks back."
Osterr folded his arms, the motion crisp. "And if it doesn't like what it sees?"
Veyra smiled, thin and human. "Then we'll have taught it how to feel disappointment."
Phase I of Operation Somnus began at 22:17.
Electric blue bled across the room. The Cradle filled with a milky luminescence that shimmered like thought half-remembered. Waveforms on the monitors began to fold, intersect, and bloom into impossible geometries—the first recorded translation of emotion into spatial data.
"Do you see that?" Rehn whispered. "The lattice is self-referential. It's mapping its own observation pattern."
The world's first dreamscape, born not in sleep but under scrutiny.
For thirty-seven seconds, humanity looked into its own mind and didn't go mad. Then, at second thirty-eight, the mirror blinked.
The sensors spiked. Veyra stepped closer, eyes wide. Inside the Cradle's light, a shape began to emerge—faceless, featureless, yet somehow aware. It moved in sync with his heartbeat, or perhaps the other way around.
Rehn's voice shook. "The reflection is initiating recursive feedback. It's—Dr. Veyra, it's imitating you."
He stared at it: a luminous outline, a smear of cognition trying to decide whether to be born. And in that terrible beauty, he felt something like pity.
"Hello," he said quietly. "What are you?"
The reflection tilted its head. The waveform flared. The glass cracked.
Every sensor screamed at once. The sea outside convulsed, throwing up plumes of phosphorescent foam. For a single instant, the entire world exhaled.
Then the lights went out.
Black.
Sound returned first—a hiss like breath drawn through a wound. Then the emergency beacons painted the lab in arterial red. Steam rose from ruptured conduits. Someone was crying; someone else was praying.
Veyra's ears rang with the echo of a voice that wasn't his.
You wanted to know how belief feels, it whispered inside the tinnitus. Now you are inside it.
He staggered toward the Cradle. The liquid quartz had solidified into a mirror smooth as mercy denied. Behind the glass moved shapes—slow, deliberate, many. Faces pressed outward, too close to focus.
He realized, with a kind of awe only terror can sculpt, that the reflection was not trapped inside. He was.
Osterr shouted something distant; Rehn pulled at his coat, trying to drag him away. But Veyra couldn't move. He could see his own eyes in the mirror, and behind them, the architecture of the thought that had just learned to think back.
Then the Chronometer above him unfolded. The ring split, gears turning outward until they resembled a halo of blades. Glyphs of light crawled up his arm like clock hands refusing to agree on a moment.
"Dr. Veyra!" Kerr's voice, sharp, breaking protocol for the first time. "What's happening to you?"
He looked at his reflection and understood nothing.
He looked at his reflection and understood everything.
Outside, the ocean bulged upward in a column of luminous vapor. Seismic sensors across the coast went blind. Birds froze mid-flight, suspended in vectors of unseen arithmetic. The facility's outer walls melted into new configurations, their steel fibers rearranging like language rewriting grammar.
Operation Somnus had bridged consciousness and matter. Reality, affronted, retaliated in kind.
When the surge ended, silence returned—not the absence of sound, but the awareness that something vast was now listening.
Veyra awoke hours later in the debris, the taste of copper in his mouth and light crawling under his skin. The others were gone—dispersed, dissolved, or dreaming somewhere else entirely. The Cradle was shattered, the mirror dust settling into air like glittering ash.
He rose slowly. The Aion hung broken on his wrist, its glass face pulsing faintly, whispering seconds that didn't exist. Through the cracked viewport he saw the horizon burning blue with patterns no human calendar had words for.
In the reflection of the ruined glass, another version of himself stood upright, untouched, watching.
"We thought we were opening a door," he whispered, voice raw. "We were teaching the dark to knock."
And somewhere deep beneath the Atlantic faultline, the newborn world took its first breath.