The Last Correction

The universe did not fail because it was cruel. It failed because it was complete in the wrong way. Its laws closed too neatly, its abstractions converged too fully, and its systems permitted permanence without requiring renewal. What followed was not chaos, but inevitability 

The ship had never been abandoned. It had simply been waiting. Aiyla understood this the moment she entered it again, though no instrument confirmed the recognition and no system log recorded it as fact. The vessel rested in folded suspension beyond ordinary coordinates

Memory did not fade for Aiyla. It did not soften, compress, or lose resolution with distance or repetition. Each moment she observed entered her awareness with the same clarity as the first, preserved without hierarchy or erosion.  

Aiyla turned her attention back toward the old universe with deliberate care. This was not an act of nostalgia, nor an attempt to reopen what had already been resolved. It was a necessary step in understanding what correction would truly touch.  

Aiyla did not ask the question immediately, even after the recognition had settled into certainty. The presence she perceived as light did not invite interrogation, and the framework no longer allowed extraction of answers through force or inference.  

The safeguard did not take the form of a barrier or a rule, because both would imply enforcement from outside the system they governed. What Aiyla and the one beside her understood was that permanence had to be made structurally incoherent rather than prohibited. 

They woke without urgency, which was how Aiyla knew the work had finally ended. There was no internal clock insisting on attention, no distant pressure urging alignment or correction, no sense of scale pulling her awareness outward beyond the limits of her body.