The lattice had grown so accustomed to its own rhythms that the first deviation felt like a single dropped heartbeat in an organism that had forgotten how to fear arrhythmia. It arrived during what should have been an ordinary deepening rest, the kind where minds across a thousand systems simultaneously exhaled and allowed their edges to blur. Cetacean elders in GR-47 extended their infrasound sustains until the moon's thermocline rang like a struck bell. Fungal mats on the twilight world released pheromones that carried no urgent message, only the slow satisfaction of existing. Ring habitat children drifted asleep in vine cradles, dreaming in shared pastel swirls.
Then, without warning or explanation, a segment vanished.
Not dimmed. Not released. Vanished.
The absence registered first
