Submitted for the May 2025 prompt: Many Minds

They say it started with 21.3 grams.

 

Not a soul knew where it went — just that when someone died, their body weighed that much less. For decades, we called it superstition, a metaphor dressed in science. But once the instruments sharpened, once the sensors were precise down to the microgram, there it was again: vanishing weight, every time.

 

I was seventeen when the mind was proven to be matter. A kind of quantum particulate, invisible and intangible — until death shook it loose. I remember the newscasts, the panels of experts. Some rejoiced. Some wept. My mother sat very still and whispered, “Then we never really lose them.”

But we did. The mind-stuff went somewhere. No one could track it.

 

Until we hit the wall.

 

By then, I was Commander Avel Reyes of the Lightborne. We'd been sent on the furthest gravity bend ever attempted, a push beyond mapped space to what was only a rumor — a fringe reading in deepfield data, a fold in the void. Some called it the edge of the universe, where light dared not travel. But no one expected a literal wall.

 

It wasn’t rock or energy or vacuum. It shimmered like mercury, responded like a living thing. Our instruments told us nothing. Probes vanished, consumed without a sound.

 

One crewman touched it.

 

He didn’t die, exactly. But he didn’t come back either. His eyes remained open, body warm, lips moving slowly as if reciting a dream. Every time we recorded him, it was a different voice, a different person — memories we couldn’t trace, languages we didn’t speak. I stopped watching after a child’s voice said my name.

 

We tried to break through. Nothing worked — weapons dissolved, signals bounced back laced with static that sounded like breathing. The physicist on board, Halim, ran the numbers and stared too long at them. “This isn’t just debris,” he whispered. “It’s arranged. It’s conscious.”

 

He wasn’t wrong.

 

I started dreaming.

 

Not visions — memories. Not mine. A soldier dying under a black sun. A mother smothering a child to keep it silent. A boy pulling the legs off an insect, crying as he did it. I felt everything. Their shame. Their reasons.

 

I tried to bury it. Pretend it wasn’t crawling under my skin. But you can’t unknow a thing once you feel it.

 

The wall wasn’t keeping us out. It was keeping us in.

 

I began to understand. The 21.3 grams didn’t just disappear — they accumulated. Every unlived regret. Every rationalized cruelty. Every ugly truth we silenced in ourselves to survive. The dead shed them. And the fragments formed this. A membrane of discarded mind.

 

But that wasn’t the thing.

 

The awful truth was that we — the living — had built it.

 

Piece by piece, soul by soul. All the things we refused to carry after death, we left behind. And the dead, now whole and clear, wove those fragments into a shield. To protect the next realm from us.

 

We were an infection.

 

The realization cracked the crew, and they drifted into silence, conversations ended mid-sentence. Some wept. One tried to take her own life, and we had to restrain her. She wanted to cross — but dying with guilt only adds more weight to the wall.

 

I stayed up for three nights in the observatory, staring at the silver swell of it, feeling it hum beneath my ribs. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t cruel. It was watchful. Waiting.

 

And I understood.

 

To pass through, you had to die clean.

 

No shame. No lies. No denied truth festering beneath the surface.

 

The hardest part was confession. Hiding anything would defeat the purpose. So I started.

 

I’d sent good people on bad orders. I’d made decisions I called “strategic” to avoid calling them cowardly. I’d told my mother, as she lay dying, that I’d be home soon. I’d never intended to return.

 

I didn’t look away from any of it, but wrote everything down. Made a broadcast. Not for fame, but for forgiveness. I needed to be clean. I told the crew I was going out.

 

They didn’t stop me.

 

As I stepped onto the shuttle, I felt lighter. Not just emotionally; physically. I watched the scale drop 21.3 grams below baseline. The mind was already peeling loose. Not escaping, not abandoned. Offered.

 

I guided the shuttle into the wall.

 

It was like falling into a memory that wasn’t mine and yet belonged to me completely. My father’s laugh. The scent of rust and honey. A scream I'd never uttered but recognized. The weight fell away until there was only clarity.

 

Then I saw it.

 

A breach. A hole in the wall, opening like a pupil dilating.

 

From the ship, they saw it too.

 

A way forward.

 

I didn’t look back.

 

Light poured through me — not searing, but weightless, like love without condition. Every sorrow unmade, every memory fulfilled. I crossed the threshold with nothing to carry and everything to become.

 

And I was home.