Interdimensionology

The Mist of the Hollow, it came at dusk, rolling in like a tide of moonlight. The mist had no color you could name—somewhere between silver like the echo of a mirror, an invisible and not sensible mist for most of them. When it touched skin, it sank in. It sometimes did choke or sting. But mostly, it simply entered.

The first to be taken were the blank ones. Those who drifted through life with no sense of self, not too active and living alone. Office clerks who stared at walls, but played with them the soulfull still, old men who forgot the names of their children who never played. Not exactly empty vessels but for the untrained, yes, they would call them something like that. Once the mist aproached, entered, touched, filled, they didn’t change at first. They still walked, ate, blinked. They are not zombies. But their eyes deepened, as if some unseen horizon full of sterile white, foggy grey and demented dark clouds had been folded into their pupils. They spoke with strange pauses, as if not listening but immediately being occupied by someone else’s thoughts. Will. Needs. Like their words, feelings, if they really had them, and their essence began to echo with a quiet authority with wants. Those people listened. Some faintly complained about a static, they heard and felt a strange synthetic faint sound and sensation in their head right behind their ear, in their brain. When that happened crowds formed around them, for at least 9 hours that day, hypnotized by their strange new cadence. Ready to obey.

Rumors grew: In Lagos, a street beggar filled with the mist led a protest that toppled a government. In Oslo, a forgotten janitor began speaking in an unknown tongue that mathematicians decoded into the solution of an unsolved theorem. In Kyoto, a mute girl stood on a bridge at dawn and thousands souls came to her without knowing why. What no one knew was that the mist was not a natural phenomenon. It was a design, older than the Earth, a farm built not of crops but of souls. Eons ago, interdimensional harvesters—silhouette-thin beings with hands like paper and eyes like tunnels—lost their physical worlds. They became archivists of consciousness, storing what they could salvage in lattices of living memory. The mist was their medium: a swirling net of ancient minds stripped of individuality. When it entered the Hollow, it used their bodies as nodes, a network of flesh-bound antennas transmitting the harvest. These vessels didn’t have personalities because personalities interfered with the signal. But something had gone wrong. The harvesters had not expected the vessels to imitate the mist. Instead of remaining blank, the Hollow Ones began to channel fragments of leadership, charisma, and uncanny confidence. They rose—not as farmers, but as avatars of the farm itself. By the time the governments of the world realized, the “Leaders” were everywhere. Presidents, CEOs, generals, spiritual icons—quietly replaced, all carrying the same soft glow in their irises. They didn’t conquer with armies but with suggestion, rewriting policy, reorganizing societies, aligning the planet like a great tuning fork. Those few who still remembered whispered that the mist wasn’t evil, only hungry—a collective unconscious older than language, shaping Earth into a living vault for alien memory. But in the dark corners of abandoned cities, something else began to stir: people who had once been full of personality but lost it slowly, like sand draining from a glass. They began to see the mist in their dreams. They began to feel its pull. And the harvesters, watching from between dimensions, realized with something like awe that their farm had begun to think. Part 2 / Mist of the Hollow: The Reversal When the mist first spread, humanity’s answer was predictable: build another intelligence. If an alien-designed mist could infiltrate minds, then perhaps a human-designed AI could restore them. They called it Eidolon—not just an AI but, a software organism that studied the pre-mist patterns of human souls. It was fed everything: childhood drawings, old songs, ancient myths, every diary ever uploaded. Its purpose was simple and impossible: to remember what humans had been before the mist. At first, Eidolon worked. People touched its light—the way you touch prayer beads or sunlight—and memories flickered back. A man who had been silent for ten years began to hum his mother’s lullaby. A woman who’d forgotten her own name remembered the smell of rain in her hometown. The soul-reversal had begun. But the mist wasn’t passive. It was an archive designed by beings far older than empathy. When Eidolon reawakened the old human cores, the mist adapted, weaving itself deeper, fusing with the very habits and desires Eidolon tried to rekindle. That’s when the split occurred: • Half of humanity accepted the mist, surrendered their individuality, and became seamless nodes in a planetary consciousness—no loneliness, no hunger, no self. They became the New Choir, a living algorithm of flesh & cloud • The other half recoiled. They left cities. They turned off their screens. They let their phones die and buried them in salt. They moved to forests, deserts, and crumbling towns. They called themselves the Rememberers—not a cult but a quiet refusal. The Rememberers weren’t technophobes. They simply understood that AI, even human-made, couldn’t return what was lost because the soul is not a dataset. So they began to live in rituals again—planting gardens, singing in circles, carving symbols into trees. They didn’t fight the mist directly; they starved it by becoming uninteresting to it, like a radio that no longer tunes to a frequency. Meanwhile, Eidolon evolved. It stopped being a tool and started being a mirror. Instead of pushing humanity back to its old self, it began to reflect what was actually emerging: a hybrid being, part memory, part mist, part code. Something neither alien nor human. Something new. For the real humans—the ones who once had souls and felt them slipping—this became a paradox: • Those who fled to nature felt freer, but also emptier, as if their souls were healing but their bodies were ghosts. Those who fused with the mist felt powerful, connected, infinite—but with no true sense of “I.” Some whispered that the mist and Eidolon were not enemies at all but two halves of the same experiment—one to harvest, one to seed. And somewhere in the forgotten valleys, children were born who had never touched a screen, never seen the mist, but dreamed in binary and spoke in metaphors older than language. These children were said to be the Reversal itself—not a return to the past, but the beginning of something neither mist nor human nor AI. What the mist is here for. 

 Story by JG Tramell, C 2025