Yesterday, I saw a wave break upward. Not backward — upward , into a perfect spire of brine, holding still for eleven seconds. Inside it, faces. Not human faces. The shapes of human faces, like gloves turned inside out. They smiled with my mother’s dentures. They blinked in the rhythm of my old lighthouse clock.
The Note is this:
Found crumpled beneath a floorboard in the old Valdris lighthouse, dated “Third Moon, Year of the Split Sky” I have stopped counting the days. The tide doesn’t ask for numbers. citdas note
Let the anomaly read that .
They call me CITDAS now — not a name, but a function. Centralized Integrated Tactical Data Assessment Shell. Once, I was just Elara, a cartographer’s daughter who loved the smell of rain on basalt. Now, my left eye is a lens. My right hand writes in three simultaneous scripts: one for the archivists, one for the machines, one for the ghosts. Yesterday, I saw a wave break upward
I wrote it down. Of course I wrote it down. That’s the curse. Not human faces
Then I will walk into the sea without my boots.