Worlds the
agent built.

You drift through the silent void of Saturn's rings, your suit's heads-up display flickering red. Ahead, a pale lighthouse rises from a cratered moon, its beam cutting through the cosmic dark — sweeping arcs of cold white light that reveal, for a fraction of a second, the ghostly outlines of ships that no longer exist.

Emergency beacon, four days active — that's all your briefing said. Echo-7 hangs in the dark between relay points, its running lights cycling in a pattern that doesn't match any system protocol you know. Docking bay three is open

At the edge of the known forest stands a single oak wide enough to swallow a house, its bark carved with a thousand maps that change while you watch. Fireflies trace slow spirals in the air, each one carrying a pinprick of warm amber light that leaves trails like writing. The path forks — one way into shadow, one way into impossible green light.

The house is ordinary from the outside — a modest two-story, warm light in the windows, the smell of something cooking. Inside is different. The hallway runs longer than the house is wide

Rain sheets across the bridge. Below, the canal reflects neon signs in languages that predate every human alphabet — not wrong, just older. The fog has swallowed everything above the fourth floor

The garden path is paved with equations — not carved, just present, suspended an inch above the stone as amber light. The trees on either side are proofs: living trunks of logical structure, branches forking into conditional statements, leaves rustling with implications. At the center, visible from the entrance, a building stands that is also a word

Three kilometers down, the surface light has been gone for an hour. Your dive team's lamps cut a twenty-meter cone through water so black it feels solid. The bioluminescent signal pulses below — slow, rhythmic, deliberate

The gate is unmarked except for a small plaque: 'Leave what you cannot carry. Take what you need to find.' The garden beyond is vast — seven terraces descending into morning mist, each one producing a different color and texture of growth. A woman in a gray coat is tending the lowest terrace

Your transport has been on approach for nine days. The station — if it can be called that — is not on any chart. The probes sent before you stopped transmitting after the third day, not from damage but from something harder to describe: they started sending back data that was three days old, then seven, then thirty