The hollowed out walls of the mine pulsed with light as if leaking through from the other side. Before the xenoarchaeologist even asked the question, Dr. Brooks’ echoing response came from ahead: “It’s a causal illusion, light reflecting from our helmets before we arrive.”

“How did you…” Lieutenant Commander Taylor asked as he looked forward in the direction of the sound. But Dr. Brooks wasn’t standing there. The old astrophysicist was trailing behind, neither looking at him, nor speaking. It was as if the universe had materialized the response all on its own, Dr. Brooks not party to his voice.

“A causal strand,” Voragh explained from beside the xenoarchaeologist. He’d heard the same voice too, the voice from a reality that had not yet come to pass in their frame of reference, but he understood it. “The echo of a moment that has not yet earned its place in the song.”

Lieutenant Commander Taylor understood the metaphor, but not the mechanism. “I thought we were insulated from the anomaly’s effects?”

“We are, but the air between us is not,” Voragh answered. “This tunnel sings a thousand songs, each in a different key.” It was the reason they’d seen so many scenes of sorrow as they’d made their way across Chorad IXa. But now, deep beneath the surface, it was just them and themselves.

“The temporal compression gradient tightens the deeper we go,” Lieutenant Commander Sena noted as she reviewed her tricorder. “All chronometric field lines collapsing inward towards a locus.” That’s how she knew they were still headed in the right direction.

As they continued downward, the effect became more and more pronounced. Light, sound and shadows manifested spontaneously all around, products of movements and speech in moments that had not yet come to pass. And some that never would.

Eventually, the Romulan drew to a stop again, intrigued by the readings. “It’s notable how rapidly the periodicity is tightening,” she offered, her voice overlapping itself as if the air had become viscous medium. Some syllables dragged. Others raced ahead. “From hours on the surface to minutes at the entrance to fractions of seconds down here.”

“We’re close,” Dr. Brooks nodded. He didn’t need a tricorder to know it. He could feel it.

“The symphony draws toward its final note,” Voragh offered as he reached out into the empty space in front of him, his gloved hand appearing to blur as photons themselves, those crossing beyond the frame-anchored envelope that surrounded him, scattered across overlapping instants. “Every beat pulls closer to the conductor.”

“It’s almost beautiful,” Lieutenant Commander Taylor reflected, finally starting to accept it rather than just fighting it. It was an almost out-of-body experience, and where it had felt discordant at first, especially up on the surface face-to-face with colonists caught in the terror between moments, down here, the nonsensical was almost starting to make sense in its own way.

Dr. Brooks smiled at the xenoarchaeologist. There was still hope for him yet.

“Keep your wonder for the report,” Dr. Hall replied curtly. “Let’s keep moving.” To her, this was just a mission, and she had not forgotten that the power supplies attached to the chronometric anchors would not last forever. If they ran out before the mission was complete, they would fall into the chaos of the chronometric sea.

The distortion thickened with every step. 

The walls around them changed, no longer a corridor hewn into stone, but now a smooth surface that appeared more materialized than carved. The conduits that ran the floor ended abruptly now too, swallowed by rock as if the Choradians had just stopped digging. 

Yet still the path continued.

And then, at last, the tunnel opened into a chamber almost indescribable in form. It was vast, and the air itself seemed to hum. The walls were no longer stone at all, but rather like facets of translucent lattice, veins of blue light running through them like frozen lightning. 

At the chamber’s center sat an ethereal spire, rising from the chamber floor. It was nothing like the alloys and stonework of the Choradian operation above. Its surface pulsed with light too slow to be real, each beat delayed as if time itself was hesitating, and its glow was uneven, layers of radiance folding atop each other, rippling through impossible geometries that made the eye want to trace the untraceable pattern through the air.

The scientists moved forward, tricorders at the ready.

“No known harmonic pattern,” Lieutenant Commander Sena reported as she reviewed the telemetry coming back. “Frequency spectrum beyond universal limits.” The data was impossible and incomprehensible. “Whatever this is, it exists outside any temporal frame we can define.”

“This is not science as we know it,” Voragh gave a low rumble. None of the data made a lick of sense to him either.

Dr. Brooks smiled faintly, studying the impossible reality. “Then don’t try to understand it as we understand the galaxy. Instead, try to understand it as it understands the universe.”

Dr. Hall watched amusedly, enjoying the character study into what happened when you took three know-it-alls and erased every ounce of their understanding. Even with the ever-present countdown to a moment when their anchors would come unstuck, what more could she do? This was most certainly not her domain. She was just along for the ride.

Lieutenant Commander Taylor understood no more of what the scientists were talking about than Dr. Hall, but as he stared at the walls, he saw something. Those frozen streaks of blue lightning weren’t random. They weren’t mere artifacts of distortion. They carried intention. He was a xenoarchaeologist, not linguist, but he knew his way around language, and while these were unlike any glyphs he’d ever seen before – no spacing, no syntax, no obvious beginning or end – but still he was certain that’s what they were.

What did they mean?

The xenoarchaeologist took a step closer. When you couldn’t tokenize the expression because symbological breaks were unclear, you could still infer meaning from the structure itself. He started by mapping repetitions, looking for cadence, mirrored shapes, and rhythm in the geometry. Structure could speak even when words did not.

While Lieutenant Commander Taylor stared silently at the wall, Lieutenant Commander Sena attempted to interface her tricorder with the spire. “All readings suggest this is a computational system of some form, but how it works, I have not the slightest idea. Not only does it not use binary or quantum sequencing, but it appears to not rely on the notion of sequence at all.”

“How does computation work without sequence?” Voragh inquired.

“I don’t know,” Lieutenant Commander Sena shrugged. “Anything that looks like a process, it completes without starting, each instruction carrying references to itself.”

“Just like the reality around us,” Dr. Brooks noted. “A system not solving for outcomes, but simply realizing existence.”

In the background, Lieutenant Commander Taylor, still staring at the walls, muttered something to himself. “These aren’t words. They’re durations. Records of how long, not when. Language without sequence or tense.”

Dr. Brooks turned towards him, the xenoarchaeologist’s words striking a chord. “Durations without sequence…” 

Suddenly, it made sense. 

Dr. Brooks turned back to the Romulan. “It isn’t processing through time,” he conjectured. “It’s sustaining through it.”

“That’s not computation,” Lieutenant Commander Sena frowned. “That’s… stasis. A process that never begins or ends cannot accomplish anything.”

Dr. Brooks shook his head. “Not accomplish. Maintain.” He turned back towards the spire, his eyes full of reverence. “If this artifact isn’t solving for results, what if it’s holding conditions constant?”

“How?” Lieutenant Commander Sena asked skeptically.

“That, we may never understand,” Dr. Brooks answered cryptically. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t what it is.” There were many mysteries of the universe that they didn’t fully understand, but that didn’t make them any less part of their reality.

The Romulan looked less than pleased. She was an empiricist, not a mystic.

“But the glyphs, the spire, the field lines, they are… and thus, this may be…” Dr. Brooks continued as his worlds trailed off, lost in thought. The implications were incredible. This could explain so much, not just about Chorad IXa, but about the Shroud itself.

Dr. Hall was tired of the non-descript antics. “May be what?” she asked impatiently.

Dr. Brooks ignored the question and turned back towards his colleagues. “Voragh, Sena, have you both read the reports on the ancient obelisks others in the Fourth Fleet have identified?”

The pair nodded.

“And the hypothesis that they may have been responsible for the Shroud by manipulating micro-gradients within subspace to prevent the grab necessary for velocities above warp two?”

They nodded again.

“Consider what it would take to hold that sort of field steady,” Dr. Brooks offered, following what seemed like a logical line. “You’d need a phase clock… something to keep local inertia and time dilation locked in sync with the Shroud’s chronometric envelope… something to pin normal space to a single temporal beat while the Shroud flows around it.”

“A metronome to keep the Shackleton Expanse in tune,” Voragh’s eyes widened at the realization. “But when your people built the Wall, they changed the tempo of spacetime. The Shroud collapsed, the manifold expanded, but this relic… it did not follow. Now its beats overlap and tear at each other, discordant with the symphony around it.”

“Where once it stabilized the differential, now it creates it,” Sena expanded on the notion as she looked down at her tricorder once more, the readings suddenly making a lot more sense than they had just moments earlier. “The conflict isn’t energy. It’s a mismatch in reference frames. This device is, through means we do not understand, trying to drag the system back to a chronometric baseline that no longer exists, while the galaxy forces it forward.”

“And these fractures in time,” Dr. Brooks smiled. “They are the universe’s compromise.”

For a moment, the three simply stared at the spire, not in triumph, but with a quiet satisfaction that at last they understood.

Dr. Hall wasn’t content with that though. “Assuming you are right,” she said sharply. “What exactly are we going to do about it?”