She closed her eyes.
Not in surrender. Not because she'd been told to. It was simply the last decision still fully hers, and she intended to spend it carefully.
Breath first. Slow in. Slower out, until her lungs felt completely empty. Feet on whatever passed for ground here. Weight present. Spine upright. A body, accounted for.
The knowing was still there. It hadn't faded when she stopped looking at the space. If anything, it sharpened - less noise, fewer distractions. Like a lab after hours, equipment humming quietly, nothing demanding attention until you chose to give it some.
It didn't resolve into pictures on its own.
That was the first surprise.
No spinning globe. No data overlays. No helpful labels. What surfaced instead felt closer to imaginative memory - relationships snapping into place the way formulas did when you'd stared at them long enough, but... pulled concepts from the memories in her own mind.
Inputs. Outputs. Tolerances.
A baseline.
She felt it settle the way a control sample did: not exciting, not dramatic, just _true_. The shape of things when nothing was being actively pushed.
That should have been comforting.
It wasn't.
The baseline organized itself around a place she knew.
Not emotionally. Structurally.
The Mississippi first—inevitable, heavy, patient. Transport arteries branching off it. Rail lines. Highways. Distribution hubs. Flood plains drawn not as geography but as probability.
Pressure accumulated where it always did. Neighborhoods that bore the weight of policy decisions made decades ago. Infrastructure stretched thin, not broken, just tired. Systems compensating for other systems that had already failed.
She recognized the pattern the way she recognized a flavor profile she'd spent years learning to balance.
She saw it the way she saw her work.
Not as culture. Not as morality. As interaction.
How tiny changes propagated outward. How smoothing one spike created pressure somewhere else. How removing volatility didn't remove harm—it just redistributed it. Like melting sugar...
The presence didn't argue.
It waited.
She opened her eyes before anything else could be added.
The space hadn't moved. The voice hadn't spoken. Whatever they were preparing next hadn't started yet.
Good.
Because now she understood the first thing they were actually showing her.
Not the future.
The control.