Title: The Fracture of Finite Skies
We were not the first to dream of the Ceiling. Our ancestors’ bones are sediment in the trenches, their stories dissolved into the broth of the abyss. They believed the Shell was the belly of a sleeping leviathan—that if we woke it, the walls would contract, and our world would be digested into nothing. But the drills kept biting.
Our civilization was built on borrowed thermodynamics. The Great Conveyor: a slow, eternal churn. Heat vomited from the vents, rushed upward through farms of pulse-fish and shockweed, then cooled and descended as sleet-metal snow to feed the smoldering depths. We thought this was the only possible geometry. A closed circuit. A perfect ouroboros.
But perfection is a cage.