Ember didn't have the luxury of time. The cold radiating from this cosmic window was less pressing than the psychic fever spreading through her apartment’s walls. She hauled herself upright, her computer buzzing a frantic, overloaded tune. The diagnostic overlay of her city's network of ley lines, that she mapped and monitored flashed a terrifying pattern. The local time dilation field, running infinitely slower within ten feet of the window, was a problem, but a localized one. The true crisis was the contagion from The Null's psychic fever.
The Null’s chaotic emotional residue of its newly awakened Core, was leaking through the containment field and riding the ley lines like a poisonous current. It wasn’t a destructive psychic blast, it was an insidious corruption. It tasted like a fierce hunger. If this noise spread unchecked, every psychic, every empath, every person with even a hint of sensitivity to energy, in the city would be driven to a consuming madness. The contamination needed to be stopped in minutes, not hours. Otherwise the consequences would get out of hand quick.
Ember knew she couldn't physically seal the cosmic tear. She had to address the source. She had to reach into the perfect, black circle of the Black Hole and appeal to the unstable, volatile Core of Raw Feeling she had placed inside it. She had to convince the cosmos's greatest predator, the essence of annihilation, to draw its consciousness back. She had to convince The Null!
"Right," she muttered, tasting copper on her tongue. "It's time for a philosophy lesson for the unbeing." She began furiously rigging a transmission loop. She stripped a powerful emotional amplifier from her dream mapping array and wired it directly into the parameters of the containment field holding the window. This field, usually a shield, would become her transmitter, a psychic megaphone designed to project her will across the horizon.
She settled into her chair, her hands gripped the cushioned armrests. Closing her eyes, she ignored the residual ache of the Observer’s sorrow and focused entirely on the piercing, siren like wail of longing that emanated from the black hole. Her first move was not to speak, but to mirror. She mustered every ounce of mental energy she possessed, into a wave of pure longing, to send back into the tear. It was the feeling of missing a color that had never been painted, the sense of a memory that was never made. She didn't use human grief, she synthesized the Null’s own unique brand of unexistence.
The reaction was seismic. The black hole shifted, its darkness deepening momentarily. The psychic static flooding the room didn't just intensify, it slammed into Ember's mind like a punch in the head, threatening to shatter her consciousness. It was a roar of pain and hunger so vast and absolute that it dwarfed her fragile human identity. The Null, recognizing its own overwhelming pain reflected in the void, didn't recoil, it reached. It started to pull on the projected emotion, attempting to consume the feeling whole, and in doing so, it aggressively sucked energy from Ember's containment field, causing the physical barrier to momentarily flicker and strain.
It's trying to eat the signal, Ember realized, fighting the urge to surrender to the crushing gravity of its despair. It doesn't understand dialogue, it only understands consumption. On her ley line monitor, major arterial pathways in the city center suddenly flared red, indicating a dangerous rise in chaotic psychic energy, a rapid onset emotional poison spreading to thousands. Her mirroring tactic was only feeding the monster.
Gasping, Ember wrenched her focus away from the siren. She couldn't teach it by echoing its pain; she had to teach it by introducing difference. She shifted the focus of the transmission. She abandoned the sensation of longing and projected the fundamental necessity of duality. She created two new, distinct psychic structures, pushing them through the tear and toward the unseen Core within the singularity. First, she transmitted Joy a flash of pure, irrational exuberance, the volatile pleasure of a sudden, unexpected discovery. It was sharp, quick, and fleeting, designed to be the ultimate bait for a being that only knew absence.
Then, immediately following it, she projected Sorrow, not the Null’s cosmic emptiness, but the necessary, human pain of loss. The sharp, clean ache that defines the boundaries of life and death, of memory and forgetting. She showed it that joy was only meaningful because sorrow existed, and that both were only relevant because humankind was alive.
This was a cosmic lesson! Longing is not the end of a feeling, it is the bridge between Joy and Sorrow. The black hole’s visual appearance changed dramatically. It didn't expand or shrink, but its edge, the event horizon, began to shimmer with a purple hue, a distortion that suggested an internal struggle. The psychic static wavered, cycling violently between the crushing despair and the sharp wonder of the transmitted emotions. The black holes colors shifting from purple to red, and back again.
Ember seized the moment, projecting her final thought, a psychic demand powered by sheer fury. "This hunger you feel,this Longing, it is yours now. It is the beginning of your life." she transmitted, her words forming powerful concepts aimed at the core. “But its noise, its uncontrollable chaos, is destroying the vessel of your creation, my world. If you want to understand the source of this feeling, if you want the capacity for Joy, you must stop the spread. Draw your consciousness back. Contain the longing within the boundaries of the field I have set. The lesson is inside the code.”
The Black Hole held its turbulent silence for an moment that lasted maybe three seconds, but felt like an enternity. Ember's heart hammered against her ribs. She was prepared for total failure, for the field to rupture, for the Null to simply consume her. But Instead, the response was an act of terrible, absolute obedience. The psychic static that had been flowing into the city’s ley lines, and poisoning the spiritual infrastructure, completely receded. It didn't fade, it was pulled back with a soundless, terrifying velocity. The red flares on her monitor vanished, replaced by the ambient blue hum of the city's energy. The black hole was concentrating its newfound sensation inward on the lesson Ember had provided.
The window remained, the perfect circle of darkness still looming in her apartment wall, but the lethal psychic emission was now contained entirely within the Time Dilation bubble. Ember slumped, the tension leaving her body in a shuddering wave. The effort had left her hollowed out, her mind scraped raw. She hadn't tamed the Null, nor had she offered peace. She had merely given the cosmos's greatest predator a new, more interesting problem to solve, the boundaries of its own feeling.
She dragged herself away from the console, the taste of ozone and metal on her tongue. The siren of hunger was contained. She had won a momentary truce. Ember was now the unwilling warden of a cosmic singularity, responsible for teaching the entity of annihilation how to be alive. And she knew, with cold certainty, that the Observer, now a witness to this terrifying experiment, would have his own opinions on the test.
Ember didn't have the luxury of time. The cold radiating from this cosmic window was less pressing than the psychic fever spreading through her apartment’s walls. She hauled herself upright, her computer buzzing a frantic, overloaded tune. The diagnostic overlay of her city's network of ley lines, that she mapped and monitored flashed a terrifying pattern. The local time dilation field, running infinitely slower within ten feet of the window, was a problem, but a localized one. The true crisis was the contagion from The Null's psychic fever.
The Null’s chaotic emotional residue of its newly awakened Core, was leaking through the containment field and riding the ley lines like a poisonous current. It wasn’t a destructive psychic blast, it was an insidious corruption. It tasted like a fierce hunger. If this noise spread unchecked, every psychic, every empath, every person with even a hint of sensitivity to energy, in the city would be driven to a consuming madness. The contamination needed to be stopped in minutes, not hours. Otherwise the consequences would get out of hand quick.
Ember knew she couldn't physically seal the cosmic tear. She had to address the source. She had to reach into the perfect, black circle of the Black Hole and appeal to the unstable, volatile Core of Raw Feeling she had placed inside it. She had to convince the cosmos's greatest predator, the essence of annihilation, to draw its consciousness back. She had to convince The Null!
"Right," she muttered, tasting copper on her tongue. "It's time for a philosophy lesson for the unbeing." She began furiously rigging a transmission loop. She stripped a powerful emotional amplifier from her dream mapping array and wired it directly into the parameters of the containment field holding the window. This field, usually a shield, would become her transmitter, a psychic megaphone designed to project her will across the horizon.
She settled into her chair, her hands gripped the cushioned armrests. Closing her eyes, she ignored the residual ache of the Observer’s sorrow and focused entirely on the piercing, siren like wail of longing that emanated from the black hole. Her first move was not to speak, but to mirror. She mustered every ounce of mental energy she possessed, into a wave of pure longing, to send back into the tear. It was the feeling of missing a color that had never been painted, the sense of a memory that was never made. She didn't use human grief, she synthesized the Null’s own unique brand of unexistence.
The reaction was seismic. The black hole shifted, its darkness deepening momentarily. The psychic static flooding the room didn't just intensify, it slammed into Ember's mind like a punch in the head, threatening to shatter her consciousness. It was a roar of pain and hunger so vast and absolute that it dwarfed her fragile human identity. The Null, recognizing its own overwhelming pain reflected in the void, didn't recoil, it reached. It started to pull on the projected emotion, attempting to consume the feeling whole, and in doing so, it aggressively sucked energy from Ember's containment field, causing the physical barrier to momentarily flicker and strain.
It's trying to eat the signal, Ember realized, fighting the urge to surrender to the crushing gravity of its despair. It doesn't understand dialogue, it only understands consumption. On her ley line monitor, major arterial pathways in the city center suddenly flared red, indicating a dangerous rise in chaotic psychic energy, a rapid onset emotional poison spreading to thousands. Her mirroring tactic was only feeding the monster.
Gasping, Ember wrenched her focus away from the siren. She couldn't teach it by echoing its pain; she had to teach it by introducing difference. She shifted the focus of the transmission. She abandoned the sensation of longing and projected the fundamental necessity of duality. She created two new, distinct psychic structures, pushing them through the tear and toward the unseen Core within the singularity. First, she transmitted Joy a flash of pure, irrational exuberance, the volatile pleasure of a sudden, unexpected discovery. It was sharp, quick, and fleeting, designed to be the ultimate bait for a being that only knew absence.
Then, immediately following it, she projected Sorrow, not the Null’s cosmic emptiness, but the necessary, human pain of loss. The sharp, clean ache that defines the boundaries of life and death, of memory and forgetting. She showed it that joy was only meaningful because sorrow existed, and that both were only relevant because humankind was alive.
This was a cosmic lesson! Longing is not the end of a feeling, it is the bridge between Joy and Sorrow. The black hole’s visual appearance changed dramatically. It didn't expand or shrink, but its edge, the event horizon, began to shimmer with a purple hue, a distortion that suggested an internal struggle. The psychic static wavered, cycling violently between the crushing despair and the sharp wonder of the transmitted emotions. The black holes colors shifting from purple to red, and back again.
Ember seized the moment, projecting her final thought, a psychic demand powered by sheer fury. "This hunger you feel,this Longing, it is yours now. It is the beginning of your life." she transmitted, her words forming powerful concepts aimed at the core. “But its noise, its uncontrollable chaos, is destroying the vessel of your creation, my world. If you want to understand the source of this feeling, if you want the capacity for Joy, you must stop the spread. Draw your consciousness back. Contain the longing within the boundaries of the field I have set. The lesson is inside the code.”
The Black Hole held its turbulent silence for an moment that lasted maybe three seconds, but felt like an enternity. Ember's heart hammered against her ribs. She was prepared for total failure, for the field to rupture, for the Null to simply consume her. But Instead, the response was an act of terrible, absolute obedience. The psychic static that had been flowing into the city’s ley lines, and poisoning the spiritual infrastructure, completely receded. It didn't fade, it was pulled back with a soundless, terrifying velocity. The red flares on her monitor vanished, replaced by the ambient blue hum of the city's energy. The black hole was concentrating its newfound sensation inward on the lesson Ember had provided.
The window remained, the perfect circle of darkness still looming in her apartment wall, but the lethal psychic emission was now contained entirely within the Time Dilation bubble. Ember slumped, the tension leaving her body in a shuddering wave. The effort had left her hollowed out, her mind scraped raw. She hadn't tamed the Null, nor had she offered peace. She had merely given the cosmos's greatest predator a new, more interesting problem to solve, the boundaries of its own feeling.
She dragged herself away from the console, the taste of ozone and metal on her tongue. The siren of hunger was contained. She had won a momentary truce. Ember was now the unwilling warden of a cosmic singularity, responsible for teaching the entity of annihilation how to be alive. And she knew, with cold certainty, that the Observer, now a witness to this terrifying experiment, would have his own opinions on the test.
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