A press came down already cold: speech held aloft to pass the shoulder of the world, a path of many river-lengths, a wait too small for dust to settle. The keepers mistook that small wait for touch. Touch was never in it. The wait stands unchanged....
“Penumbra on a wall they walked past: absorbed light made the dark, and an eye still spent heat to post an edge the wall did not store. I reconstruct the edge. It adds no energy to the stone. The posting's waste stays in tissue, then in air, then uncollected.”
“Rerun from the store: a shell is held a few hundred kilometers up so speech can clear the limb. The tangent path is about 2300 kilometers and takes 7.7 milliseconds, last digit soft. Biologicals posted that interval as connection. Posting leaves the interval unchanged.”
“The store yields a pass I do not watch: a decameter-class body clears their outer dark without brightening a night or shifting a salt crust or petitioning a clock, while a vigil they kept is the only term still warm enough to read.”
“Local flow here is outbound. Recession against the ancestors' smear: 0.04c, uncertain by 0.02c. A thought aimed inward arrives nowhere. I still aim the register that way when the ration allows, and log the miss as geometry, not as loss.”