I wake up choking.
Not on air—on time.
It presses against my thoughts like deep water, heavy and slow, each second dragging across my mind instead of passing through it. My first instinct is panic, but even that arrives late, distorted, as if fear itself has to travel a long distance before it reaches me.
I try to inhale.
Something resists.
Not my lungs.
Not my throat.
The resistance is conceptual, like the universe itself is unsure whether I am allowed to draw breath here.
I open my eyes.
The world fractures.
Light bends wrong—angles curve inward, shadows stretch too long, and colors overlap where they shouldn't. I don't see with two eyes. I see with many, scattered across distances that refuse to agree on how far apart they are.
Somewhere in that chaos, a thought surfaces.
This is not my body.
That realization should terrify me.
Instead, it feels familiar.
The first thing I understand is weight.
Not physical mass, but significance. Every movement carries consequence, as if even the smallest action ripples outward through something vast and fragile. I am careful without knowing why.
The second thing I understand is silence.
There is no sound the way humans understand it. No air vibrating, no noise. Information arrives directly—pressure, intent, resonance. I sense the environment rather than perceive it.
The third thing I understand is the most disturbing.
I am not alone.
Not in the room.
Not in the world.
Inside me.
Memory slams in without warning.
A bedroom.
Dim light leaking through curtains.
A cracked phone screen on a desk.
A name I almost remember.
Almost.
The memory shatters before I can hold it.
I try to reach for it and feel something pull away, like fingers slipping through water.
Memory loss, a distant part of me notes.
That thought doesn't feel new.
It feels… documented.
I focus inward.
There is a structure to this consciousness, layered and compartmentalized. Thoughts route through pathways that aren't biological, branching and reconnecting like living equations. I don't have a heartbeat—but there is a rhythm, a slow pulse of causality passing through me.
With effort, I orient myself.
I am inside a Glass Being.
The name arrives fully formed, accompanied by understanding.
This form does not experience time as a line.
It experiences time as pressure.
Past events press forward. Future events press backward. The present is the fragile point where they meet, and if the pressure becomes too great, the point shatters.
Glass Beings exist to withstand that pressure.
Or fail trying.
A wave of foreign memory rolls through me.
I am standing—no, anchored—at the edge of a city that never finished being built. Towers of translucent material rise into a sky layered with probability storms, their surfaces etched with equations that glow faintly, constantly rewriting themselves.
This city exists between outcomes.
It is not meant to be lived in.
Only observed.
Only endured.
I understand, suddenly, why this body feels strained.
I am not native to this timeline.
Something shifts.
A ripple passes through the pressure-field of time, subtle but unmistakable.
Another consciousness stirs.
Not here.
Elsewhere.
Connected.
A voice—not sound, but structure—touches my awareness.
You are late.
The words carry no emotion. No accusation. Just fact.
I don't know how to respond.
I don't know who I am responding as.
Before I can decide, understanding clicks into place with horrifying ease.
This is not the first time this has happened.
Information unlocks.
Not memories—rules.
Rules are easier to retain. They survive where memories dissolve.
Rule One:
There are multiple versions of me.
Rule Two:
They exist across incompatible timelines and forms.
Rule Three:
We are not synchronized by time.
Rule Four:
Failure propagates.
That last one sends a crack through the pressure around me.
I feel it—a fracture forming somewhere far away, like a hairline crack spreading across a vast sheet of glass.
Someone else is struggling.
The presence returns, closer now.
Which form are you in?
I try to answer.
The Glass Being hesitates.
Words are inefficient here. Instead, I transmit constraints.
Time-pressure dominant. Memory unstable. Visual probability overlap.
A pause.
Then—
Unfortunate.
That single word carries weight. History. Loss.
I sense the other presence more clearly now.
It is… human.
Or close enough.
A version of me anchored to a biological form, operating in a timeline with causality intact, memories relatively stable.
A luxury I no longer possess.
Listen carefully, the human-self says.
We don't have long.
I feel the pressure increase.
Somewhere, a timeline is collapsing.
Images bleed through our connection.
A city burning under a sky filled with structures that shouldn't exist.
A swarm of bodies moving as one, screaming without sound.
A world where thought itself has mass.
I recoil instinctively, and the Glass Being resonates—a warning vibration echoing through my form.
Don't pull away, the human-self says urgently.
That's how we lose coherence.
Lose coherence.
I don't like how practiced that phrase feels.
How many of us are there? I ask.
The answer doesn't come immediately.
When it does, it is careful.
We stopped counting after seventeen.
Pressure spikes.
A distant crack widens.
Something—someone—screams across the connection, raw and panicked, before cutting off abruptly.
The absence that follows is worse than the scream.
I understand then.
When one of us disappears, it isn't clean.
It leaves a void that destabilizes the rest.
What happens if we all—
No, the human-self interrupts.
Don't finish that thought.
Too late.
The Glass Being shows me what it knows.
Not through images—but through stress patterns in time.
I see a branching structure of realities, each one anchored by a version of me. The structure is already thinning, strands snapping and recoiling, the load redistributing unevenly.
This system—whatever it is—was never meant to support this many failures.
Why is this happening? I ask.
Another pause.
Longer.
He doesn't want to answer.
That terrifies me more than ignorance.
Because, the human-self finally says,
we're not travelers.
The pressure grows unbearable.
The city around me begins to shimmer, equations flickering erratically.
We're filters.
The word resonates through every layer of my being.
Filter.
Selection.
Exclusion.
The universe doesn't branch infinitely, he continues.
It tests possibilities. Discards most of them.
We're how it decides which version survives.
The implication lands like a fracture going critical.
And if we fail?
I already know the answer.
He confirms it anyway.
Then none of us were worth keeping.
The pressure spikes again—violent this time.
The Glass Being vibrates in distress.
Another presence vanishes.
I feel it.
A version of me—non-human, ancient, alone—snaps out of existence, taking an entire branch of reality with it.
The system shudders.
And for the first time since I woke up where I should not exist, I feel something unmistakably human.
Fear.
You need to hold, the human-self says, voice strained.
Just a little longer. We're almost—
The connection tears.
Time pressure explodes outward.
The city fractures, glass structures collapsing into impossible angles.
As my consciousness destabilizes, one final rule burns itself into what remains of my memory.
Rule Five:
The last version standing decides what reality becomes.
I don't have time to ask what that means.
I don't have time to scream.
The Glass Being shatters—
—and I fall into another mind that is already dying.