Perplexity
The ring glowed like a halo around Earth, a silver ribbon laced with blue light. Inside its vast, circulating corridors stretched shelves of photons — the Archive of All Thought, humanity’s orbital library. Every word ever written shimmered within walls of solid light, each volume weightless, touchable only through intention. People sometimes called it the “last mind of humanity.” To me, it was home.
Rain slanted across the window of the Seabrink Post Office, needling the glass like it wanted to write something on the surface. The last ferry horn moaned far out in the bay, its sound swallowed by thunder. Ava Kerr stood behind the counter, flicking through the small stack of undelivered mail that nobody wanted to claim after dark.
The storm had no sound in Nareth Hollow that night—only a terrible stillness, as if even thunder feared to disturb the old workshop at the end of the crooked lane. There, behind warped shutters and smoke-blackened panes, the Clockmaster worked.