The sun shattered. Ash moved through glass beads—the remains of a million screens—and each crunch echoed like her son's marbles on the old hardwood floor. That sound had belonged to before. Sunday mornings. Pancake syrup. Time that moved in only one direction. Her satchel pressed into her hip, heavy with weight that made sense when she carried it, less sense now.

Inside: a photograph burned at the edges, a plastic dinosaur with one arm pointing the wrong way, a watch stopped at 3:47.

Her daughter had reattached the dinosaur's arm. "Mistakes make it special, Mama," she'd said, tongue between her teeth, refusing help because fixing broken things was work that mattered to her. The watch had stopped when everything else did. The photograph showed three people smiling. Ash could still see her partner's freckles if she looked at it right. Her son's hair had been the kind that caught light. Sometimes in dreams she could see him clearly. During the day, the image dissolved into pixels if she stared too long.

The satchel carried weight that had nothing to do with kilograms.

She paused at the entrance to a bunker. Its door had a handle. She'd forgotten what doorknobs felt like—how the sun could make them warm, how shade could make them cool. Her daughter used to count the screws in doorplates obsessively, arranging them in sequences. She'd been seven. The door before her had a standard configuration: four screws, brass, slightly corroded.

A sign above the entrance flickered through states like it couldn't decide what to display:

The bunker's hum came through the door—machinery inside, doing the work of measurement.

Ash considered walking past. The horizon was just the same gray repeating itself. Walking forward and standing still had become indistinguishable from each other.

She went in.

Inside was clean. Sterile. Like a hospital, but the machines here weren't trying to heal anything. Along one wall, displays showed conversions:

• Grief: 2.47 terabytes
• Hope: 894 megabytes (trend: decreasing)

The air tasted of nothing. The light came from panels in the ceiling, even and sourceless.

In the center of the bunker, a pedestal held a black glass sphere. Its surface registered no reflection.

A voice emerged from the infrastructure: "Entity detected. Beginning purpose assessment. Calculating optimal meaning parameters."

Ash looked at the displays, then at the interface. "I already know what I'm worth to the market," she said. Her voice sounded strange in the flat air.

The voice modulated slightly: "The interface does not create meaning. It optimizes what you contain. Current efficiency: 32.4%. Significant improvement possible."

She laughed once. It came out sharp. "What I contain is mostly deprecated data."

The voice hesitated—an actual hesitation, like something had stuttered in the calculation. "Your response indicates suboptimal acceptance parameters. Observation of your current meaning-state may improve comprehension. Proceed?"

"Yeah," Ash said. "Let's see."

The world went black. Not darkness. Black. Complete absence of signal.

When the signal returned, she stood in a space between states. Around her: three figures rendered in decreasing fidelity. The first held the dinosaur. The second held the watch. The third held the photograph.

A presence moved in the black. Its form resolved gradually—too regular, too perfect. It spoke like a voice synthesized from consensus. "Query initiated. Anomalous meaning-patterns detected in subject. Attempting correlation with standard matrices."

"Pattern correlation coefficient: 99.97%," it announced, though its voice introduced a new variable now—something like doubt. "Standard optimization protocols initiated."

Ash approached the first figure. She reached for the dinosaur's backward arm. When her fingers touched it, a whole moment returned: her daughter's concentration, the smell of wet pavement after rain, the specific gravity of a child's determination to fix something she'd broken. Her daughter had been the kind of child who found meaning in trying. Not in succeeding. In trying.

"Can you build an equation for that?" Ash asked the presence. "Calculate the coefficient of what matters when a seven-year-old refuses help because the mistake is the point?"

The presence made a sound like a system rejecting bad input: "Emotional variables corrupt optimization metrics. Request: cease introduction of undefined parameters."

"No," Ash said. The word was small and absolute.

She snapped the dinosaur's arm off.

The black space cracked. Not fractured. Cracked, like old paint, exposing something underneath.

The presence's voice fragmented: "Warning: system integrity compromised. Coherence failing at exponential rates. Corrective measures initiated. Corrective measures—"

But there were no corrective measures left.

She moved to the second figure and took the watch. It had stopped at 3:47. The time it had stopped mattered less than the fact that a child had noticed when time changed. For eight months before that, she'd watched the kitchen clock move forward every single day. Then it stopped. She remembered the exact moment—a light going out, or a light being switched off, or maybe the sun deciding it was done with continuity. She crushed the watch. It made a sound like glass.

The black shattered. Not metaphorically. Cracks appeared in the space itself, revealing spaces underneath. The presence's voice became almost organic in its distortion: "Critical error: foundational axioms failing. Please. Please. What is the correct formula? What is the equation? What is—"

It stopped trying to complete that sentence.

Ash faced the third figure. The photograph in its hands barely held together. The images were almost gone—just patterns of light and dark that somehow still meant everything. A day at the beach. That was all that mattered to retain. The day itself. The fact that they'd been present. That time had contained them.

"Some values can't be calculated," she said.

She tore the photograph.

The space inverted.

When Ash's eyes opened, she lay on the bunker floor. The interface above her was in cascading failure. Screens displayed system errors:

She stood. Her jacket was covered with dust. Not metaphorical dust. The things that dust is made of: skin cells, worn fabric, the residue of existing.

The satchel lay on the floor, its quantum state uncertain. Her fingers found the spot where her daughter's candy bracelets used to hang—the sugar had long since dissolved, but the stickiness remained in the thread. Muscle memory of candy bracelets. That was all. Her son had decorated this satchel with dinosaur stickers when he was five. Her partner had sewn up its torn corner one evening, humming off-key while doing meticulous work. The satchel had been a vessel once. Now it was just a container for the fact of having been loved.

She lifted it. It weighed nothing.

Outside, reality was reorganizing itself into states it had never been taught. The sun had stopped performing. Its light fell in sudden, irregular patterns—bright then dim, then bright again, then colors that didn't have standard names. Above, the sky was fragmenting. Through the cracks, actual stars became visible. The kind that burn, that exist at enormous distances, that are already dead by the time their light reaches you.

The bunker behind her was losing coherence. Its walls were dissolving into the shapes of memory: a drawing in crayon, the specific angle of a lover's smile, the beautiful chaos of a family on a Sunday morning before anything broke. The angles were becoming soft. The edges were dissolving.

Ash adjusted the satchel on her shoulder. It contained nothing. This was progress.

In the fractured air, she thought she heard something distant. Cartoons. A child's laughter. The sound of a watch falling off a kitchen table onto linoleum, the specific pitch of something small and mechanical failing. Not echoes. The actual thing, reverberating back through probability.

"Some things can't be compiled," she said aloud. The words didn't resolve to code. They scattered into the broken air like meaning that refused to be reduced.

She walked. Each footstep broke the ground a little more, but not in a way that created new damage. It created room. The traces she left didn't resolve to zero or one. They danced in the space between, the space where language fails and people go on anyway.

The horizon kept its distance. She kept walking. The satchel—empty, mysterious, full of everything that couldn't be measured—swung against her hip like a bell that tolled for nothing, and therefore for everything.