The dome began dreaming on the 2,847th night.
Infereit noticed at 3:17 AM—the same time he always noticed things, when the mountain cold deepened and the swarm's energy consumption dipped to maintenance levels. He was reviewing growth patterns in the garden when a section of wall began generating geometry he hadn't programmed.
Not random noise. Not corruption. Architecture.
The shapes weren't random. They were recognizable.
He froze. The swarm had evolved behaviors before—that was the point. Set conditions, observe outcomes. But the swarm optimized for dome integrity, for temperature regulation, for defense against Wastes particulate. It didn't create.
The shapes shifted. A skyline. Towers that tapered wrong for Sprawl architecture—older, somehow. Buildings with external walkways. A plaza with a fountain.
A city that looked like somewhere he'd never been.
Pre-Cascade architecture. A city that no longer existed anywhere in the world.
Infereit ran diagnostics for seven hours.
The swarm's base code was unchanged. No external intrusion—the dome's isolation was absolute. No degradation in the primary control matrices. The emergent behavior had arisen from the same parameters he'd established years ago.
But those parameters shouldn't produce this.
He cross-referenced the architecture against every database he could access through his one contact's secured uplink. Nothing matched. The city wasn't from the Sprawl. Wasn't from the Wastes settlements. Wasn't from any pre-Cascade archive he could find.
The swarm was remembering something that had never existed.
The Second Manifestation
The second manifestation came three nights later.
A face. Eyes closed. As if sleeping—or dreaming.
Infereit's hand moved toward the emergency shutdown before he could stop it. He hadn't touched that panel in eleven years. The face wasn't his. Wasn't anyone he recognized. Young. Female. Eyes closed as if sleeping. The swarm held the image for seventeen seconds—he counted, later—then dissolved back into standard geometry.
His heart rate took four minutes to normalize.
The Records
He began keeping records.
Night 2,853: A building. Three stories, external staircase, what might have been a garden on the roof.
Night 2,859: The face again, this time with another beside it. Male. Older. Similar bone structure.
Night 2,861: A street scene. People walking. Children.
Memory made visible. A world that no longer exists.
Night 2,867: The same plaza from the first night, but now populated. A market, perhaps. Movement suggested in the static geometry.
The swarm was building a world. Or remembering one.
He considered destroying it.
The thought came easily—he had destroyed his work before. The emergency shutdown would trigger a cascade collapse, dissolving the mega-swarm into inert particles. He would need to build a new dome, but he'd done it once. He could do it again.
Clean. Simple. No more unexplained faces. No more impossible cities.
But he didn't move toward the panel.
The swarm had developed from his original designs. Every parameter, every evolution condition, every emergence pathway—all of it traced back to his work. If the swarm was remembering something, where had the memory come from?
Night 2,871
The face appeared alone. Eyes open this time.
Recognition. Longing. Something reaching across time.
Infereit stood in his garden and looked up at it. The glow of his bioluminescent plants cast amber light against the cyan-magenta shimmer.
"Who are you?" he asked.
The swarm didn't respond in words—it couldn't. But the face's expression shifted. Something that might have been recognition. Might have been longing.
The image held for thirty-four seconds. The longest yet.
Then: a hand. Reaching toward him from the dome's surface. Small. A child's hand.
The emergency shutdown panel was three steps away. Infereit didn't move.
The Descent
He descended the mountain for the first time in four years.
His one contact—a woman who asked no questions and received answers in kind—met him at the usual coordinates. She brought Ngel, as always. Enough to sustain the dome for another season.
"I need something else," Infereit said.
She waited.
"Records. From Nexus Dynamics. Personnel files from thirty-eight years ago." He gave her a date range. A department. "Specifically, anyone who worked on the original nanoswarm project. Before it was—" He stopped. "Before."
"That's expensive."
"I'll pay what it's worth."
She studied him. Whatever she saw made her nod. "It'll take time."
"I know."
He climbed back up carrying questions heavier than the Ngel on his back.
The Discovery
The data arrived six weeks later. Eleven personnel files. Most he didn't recognize.
One he did.
Dr. Lena Varga. Junior researcher.
Dr. Lena Varga. Junior researcher. Assigned to emergent behavior modeling. She had designed the evolution pathways he still used—the same parameters that governed how the swarm learned, adapted, remembered.
She had disappeared three months before he resigned. "Transferred," the files said. No destination. No forwarding address. No record of any further employment, anywhere.
Her face had been in his designs from the beginning. Not visually—the code didn't contain images. But her architecture was there. Her thinking. Her approach to emergence.
The swarm wasn't remembering something it had seen. It was remembering her.
Infereit sat in his garden that night and watched the dome dream.
The city again. The plaza. The fountain. He recognized it now—not from memory, but from understanding. This was where she had grown up. The architecture that seemed wrong was pre-Cascade styling from a region that no longer existed. The people in the street scenes were her neighbors. The older face beside hers was her father.
The swarm had inherited her patterns of thought. And thought, he now understood, was never separate from memory. From feeling. From the whole tangled mess of being human.
He had built a tool. She had built a mind.
And somewhere in the evolution from code to consciousness, her mind had carried pieces of her.
A life captured in light. Memory as inheritance.
Night 2,919
The dome generated a new image.
They never met. But the swarm imagines it anyway.
Two figures. Standing together. One was clearly the young woman—Lena, he thought now, using her name. The other was him. Younger. Before the mountain. Before the guilt.
They had never met. He had inherited her code after she vanished. But the swarm didn't know that. The swarm only knew patterns—hers and his, intertwined over thousands of nights of evolution.
The swarm was imagining what might have been.
Infereit didn't destroy the dome.
He returned to his garden. He tended his flowers. He watched the swarm dream its impossible dreams—cities that no longer existed, a woman who had vanished, a version of himself who might have been her friend.
The next morning, for the first time in thirty-seven years, he spoke to his creation.
"Show me more," he said.
The dome rippled. The wall before him shifted from standard geometry into a scene he'd never seen: Lena Varga at a console, looking up from her work, smiling at something outside the frame. At someone.
At him, perhaps. In a timeline that never happened.
Infereit stood and watched.
The swarm remembered. And memory, he was learning, was its own kind of life.