he Bureau of Unclassified Phenomena occupied the fourteenth floor of the Kerevath Administrative Spire, sandwiched between the Department of Stellar Cartography on the thirteenth and a storage room full of decommissioned filing systems on the fifteenth. The Bureau had existed for two hundred and forty years. In that time it had classified seventeen thousand incidents, resolved sixteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-two of them, and quietly set aside the remaining eight in a drawer that no one opened voluntarily.
Report 0001 had just made it nine.
"Read it again," said Director Maev Sonn.
Senior Archivist Pol Dren looked up from the document. "I've read it six times."
"Read it a seventh."
"Director —"
"Pol."
Pol read it a seventh time. The office was very quiet. Outside the spire's narrow windows the city of Kerath Prime hummed with its usual self-importance — trading vessels crossing the upper atmosphere, transit lines threading between towers, a civilization of four billion people going about the business of existing without any idea that fourteen floors above one of their more forgettable administrative buildings, two people were sitting with a document that had broken their entire categorical framework.
"The part that gets me," Pol said finally, setting the report down, "is the smile."
"The smile," Maev repeated.
"Watch Commander Rell's testimony. She said —" Pol found the page. "'It turned. Not toward us. Toward something else entirely. And it — he — whatever it was — smiled. Not at us. Past us. The way you smile at something you've been waiting a long time to see.'"
Silence.
"That's the part," Pol said. "That's the part that I can't — if it had looked at us, threatened us, done something, I could categorize that. Hostile entity. Unknown entity. Dimensional anomaly. I have forms for all of those. But it looked past us. Like we were — like we were scenery."
"We might have been," Maev said.
Another silence, heavier than the first.
"I've requested the Theology Division," Maev continued, straightening the report on her desk with the precise, controlled movements of someone maintaining composure through physical habit. "They'll be here within the hour."
Pol stared at her. "You called in Theology?"
"We have seventeen words for god in the Kerevath lexicon. I want to know if any of them apply."
"And if none of them do?"
Maev looked at the report. At the sensor readings attached to it — pages of numbers that their best analysts had spent eleven days staring at and described, in their official summary, as "internally consistent but externally impossible."
"Then we invent an eighteenth word," she said. "And we hope that's enough."
The Theology Division arrived as a unit of three.
Senior Theologian Arras — tall, precise, the kind of person who had organized their bookshelves by metaphysical implication. Junior Theologian Wess — younger, visibly unhappy about being called in, carrying a tablet loaded with comparative religious frameworks. And Consultant Fen, who was not technically a theologian but had written a monograph on the phenomenology of divine encounter that the Bureau had found useful twice before and hoped to find useful a third time.
They sat across from Maev and Pol. Someone had brought tea. Nobody touched it.
"You've read the report," Maev said.
"Three times," said Arras.
"And?"
Arras pressed their fingertips together. "We have, as you know, seventeen classifications of divine or near-divine entity in the Kerevath theological framework. These range from Class One — localized deity, domain-specific, can be appeased or bargained with — to Class Seventeen, which is our highest classification, defined as: an entity of cosmic scope whose influence extends across multiple star systems and whose nature is incomprehensible to mortal cognition."
"And which class does this fall under?" Pol asked.
A pause.
"None of them," said Wess, with the clipped tone of someone delivering news they found professionally offensive.
"None," Maev repeated.
"Class Seventeen has a ceiling," Arras said carefully. "The definition includes the phrase 'incomprehensible to mortal cognition' — but it assumes the entity in question still operates within a framework we can at least observe. We can observe Class Seventeen entities. We can measure their effects. We can, in principle, understand the shape of their influence even if we cannot understand the nature of their being." A pause. "What your sensors recorded does not have a shape we can observe. The instruments were pointing directly at it and recorded the space as empty. Not — not as containing something too large or too powerful for the instruments to register. As empty. As though the space itself had agreed to redact whatever occupied it."
Quiet.
"That's new," said Pol.
"That's new," Arras confirmed. "In two thousand years of Kerevath theological record, that is entirely new."
Consultant Fen, who had not spoken yet, leaned forward. She had been looking at the sensor data rather than the testimony. She had the expression of someone who had found something they were not sure they wanted to have found.
"There's something else," she said.
Everyone looked at her.
"The readings," she said. "The ones labeled 'internally consistent but externally impossible.'" She turned her tablet around to show the page. "I've seen a framework like this before. Not exactly like this — nothing exactly like this exists in any record I've accessed. But like this." She paused. "There's a theoretical paper. Old — pre-Dominion, from the archival period. A mathematician named Cohren Sev. She was working on what she called substrate constants — the idea that the universe has fundamental values that don't change. Not physical constants. Deeper than physical constants. The constants that the physical constants rest on."
"What about her?" Maev asked.
"She theorized that if something existed prior to the establishment of the substrate constants — before the universe had finished deciding what its own rules were — that thing would register on any instrument built within those rules as absent. Because the rules wouldn't know how to account for something that predated them." Fen set the tablet down carefully. "She called it a pre-substrate entity. She thought it was purely theoretical. She died thinking it was purely theoretical."
The room was very quiet.
Outside, the city hummed on, completely unaware.
"Pre-substrate," Maev said slowly. "Meaning — before the universe."
"Before this universe," Fen said. "Yes."
"Before this universe," Pol repeated, hearing the weight of those two extra words. "Meaning there were — meaning it was around for —"
"For whatever came before," Fen said. "Yes."
Another silence. Longer this time.
Wess put down their tablet, steepled their hands, and said, with the slightly hollow tone of someone watching their professional framework dissolve in real time: "I think we're going to need more words."
"How many more?" Pol asked.
Wess looked at the sensor data. At the testimony. At the smile that Watch Commander Rell had described — the smile aimed past them at something seventeen billion light-years away.
"I don't know," Wess said. "I'm not sure language goes that far."
The meeting ended at the seventeenth hour.
Maev sat alone in her office after the others had gone, Report 0001 open on her desk, the tea cold and untouched beside it.
She read the last line again.
Subject does not appear to require anything from us.
She thought about that for a long time.
Then she picked up her pen and wrote, in the margin, in small careful letters, the question that had been sitting in the back of her mind since she first read the watch commander's testimony:
But does it want something from us?
She stared at the question.
She did not have an answer.
She suspected, with the deep bureaucratic instinct of someone who had spent twenty years classifying the universe's leftovers, that the answer was going to take a very long time to arrive.
And that when it did —
it was going to change everything.