★★★
If you’ve ever breathed a mantra that rearranged your nervous system, you’re already inside.
★★★
The Opening Communication
Michael crossed the threshold. Something inside him clicked, not mechanical, organic. A radio finally finding its frequency after years of static; a key discovering it had always fit this lock.
Coherent resonance, that’s what Brayne would call it later. In the moment, Michael just felt his internal state get louder than doubt, louder than analysis, nudging him toward something that suspiciously resembled trust.
A corner of his brain kept score anyway:
Impossibility 1: Interdimensional travel.
Impossibility 2: Meeting my own pseudonym.
Impossibility 3: Feeling better than I have in years.
The math didn’t add up. His nervous system had already voted: keep going.
The Enhanced
He followed Brayne through corridors filled with people who looked like a lucid transhumanist dream.
Some had crystalline growths at their temples, not implants so much as skulls sprouting gemstones that refracted thought instead of light. Others moved with dancer-gravity, their steps leaving brief ripples in the air. A woman hovered in lotus three feet up, meditating with the ease of someone who’d simply forgotten gravity existed.
Each worked a different modality: yoga folding through actual angles that shouldn’t exist; meditation like controlled lightning; martial arts against invisible opponents who might have been hitting back.
A spiritual gym, Michael thought, designed by people who never learned the word impossible.
The Mantra
Brayne clocked Michael’s fragility like a barometer catching a storm, but the intent felt steady, not predatory.
“I’ve got a grounding mantra for you,” he said. “Follow me. Listen to Return.”
In a quiet corner, Brayne’s voice dropped into a deeper, rhythmic register – words turned to medicine, syllables like small surgeries:
♡¤♡¤
Return
Breathe in.
Let it rise.
The hum is not noise—
It is memory, unwinding.
Breathe out.
Let it fall.
The weight you carried
Was never yours at all.
Feet on ground.
Mind in sky.
You are the still point
As the wires pass by.
Thoughts flicker—let them.
Sounds echo—bless them.
You are the observer
Between pulse and pattern.
You do not have to fix.
You only have to feel.
Each breath is a signal:
You’re allowed to heal.
The Click
The words settled into his nerves like seeds, finding perfect soil.
Dissonance clicked into harmony – a cosmic tuning fork struck somewhere in his chest, and every frequency remembered the same song. The white-knuckle need for logic loosened. The part of him fighting the impossibility finally agreed to a ceasefire.
This is happening, he realized. The thought felt clean. I don’t need to understand it. I just need to not break it.
Brayne had primed him to hold the whole truth at once: interdimensional refugee, diabetic mystic, writer whose “fiction” was documentary from a parallel. The contradictions didn’t cancel; they harmonized.
Next came integration – acting inside this new reality without cracking its fundamentals. Moving without breaking the spell.
Some healing happens not when you figure everything out, but when you stop trying to.
Field Notes from the Other Side
[FIELD NOTES — Syndicate Training Hall. Time unstable 00:00/∞. Source: unknown.]
Subject: First Contact Protocol – Success
Status: New arrival (designation: Michael / Anchor) achieved primary resonance. Mantra Return effective. Paradox tolerance at acceptable levels.
Next: Action integration without reality fracture.
Note: Skeptical subroutines active but non-interfering. Optimal. Total belief creates different problems.
Recommendation: Proceed with standard orientation sequence. Subject ready for deeper protocols.
— Brayne Snax, Integration Specialist
☆☆☆
[End of Episode 4]
Reader’s Note
If that mantra worked on you, pay attention. Sometimes, the medicine finds you first. If you’re breathing differently right now, welcome to the Syndicate.
