Two years post-merge, the world didn't look the way it had before. Not just dimensionally—though the overlay had stabilized into something most people navigated now without constant distress, ghost-flickers of adjacent realities at the room's edges that had become background noise the way traffic became background noise to people who grew up in cities. But in the social sense too. In the political sense. In the sense of what people understood to be possible and what they accepted as the terms of living inside possibility.
Hope was six years old. Developmentally closer to twelve. She had stopped trying to resolve the gap and started treating it the way she treated the imprisoned consciousness—as a permanent condition around which she organized the rest of her life rather than a problem to solve on her way to being normal.
