The dream had opened wide, limitless. She had been soaring, carried effortlessly on the back of something delicate and radiant, a creature spun from light and memory, its wings bleeding color into the sky. Possibility stretched in all directions, weightless, infinite. But then—collapse. The sky folded inward, the horizon bending like melted glass, until all that remained was a single, impossible structure: the mansion.

Emily barely registered the transition. One instant, she had been drifting through something boundless, and the next, her feet touched solid ground. The sky that had once been endless was suddenly framed, bound by walls too grand to be real. The mansion loomed before her, a cathedral of wealth and excess, suspended in the soft illusion of the dream. Marble columns coiled upward like smoke, twisting and shifting in slow, rhythmic pulses. The facade shimmered, flickering between deep obsidian and reflective gold, mirroring Emily’s own breathless anticipation. The doors were set into the structure like a mouth, too large, too ornate, yet utterly unyielding. There was nothing beyond them—no glimpses through windows, no fractured outlines of what lay inside. The mansion’s presence was absolute, towering over her, daring her to step forward.

Doors blinked into existence as Emily moved, massive and gleaming, their dark wood carved with intricate filigree that seemed to shift if she looked too closely. The handles, sculpted into something between bone and gold, waited for her hand. She hadn’t seen them appear, yet somehow, it felt as if they had always been there.

A low hum filled the air, faint but steady, as if the space around her was brimming with something unseen. The mansion loomed before her, its edges flickering between shapes, shifting in quiet uncertainty. A terrace spiraled into a tower before smoothing back into stone. Arched windows melted between stained glass and empty voids. The system wasn’t just constructing the dream—it was caught between possibilities, struggling to decide what it was meant to be.

Inside the control room, the projections stacked, layered over one another in ways they shouldn’t. Every potential variation of the mansion flickered across the displays, as if the system was hesitating, unable to commit to one. Some versions were grand and open, others shadowed and enclosed, but all of them existed at once, shifting faster than the models could finalize them. Emily stood there in front of it, her movements slowed, her perception stretching across too many overlapping versions of reality at once. She was seeing everything—and then losing it the second it changed.

“She isn’t reacting,” Maya mentioned, skimming the data feeds.

“She’s processing it,” Raj corrected, his voice tense. “But she’s forgetting just as fast. If the environment doesn’t stabilize, she’ll start rejecting the dream.”

Dylan leaned against Alex’s console, arms crossed, scowling at the flickering projections. “We’ve pushed it far enough. Shut it down before this whole thing folds in on itself.”

Alex barely heard them. His eyes were fixed on his screen, watching as the mansion’s variations flickered in and out of existence, the system trying and failing to commit to a final version. He had seen shifts before, but never like this. The mansion wasn’t responding to Emily’s subconscious—it was cycling through too many interpretations at once, never fully locking in place. She stood in the middle of it all, her expression uncertain, her gaze flicking from one structure to the next without recognition. It was as if her mind had already discarded each iteration before she had time to understand it.

“This isn’t just a delay,” Raj muttered. “If we don’t narrow it down, she’ll—”

“We proceed,” Locke said, cutting across him.

The tension in the room thickened. Dylan exhaled sharply, muttering under his breath, “Let’s just fry her brain while we’re at it.”

Locke didn’t look at him. His eyes stayed on the monitors, watching Emily, tracking every flicker of hesitation, every recalibration the system made in response to her presence.

“She’s already adapting,” he said, his voice measured, unshaken. “We push forward.”

The doors stood impossibly tall before Emily, carved with intricate details that seemed to shift when she wasn’t looking. Gold filigree curled along the edges, folding into unfamiliar patterns before smoothing back into something refined, deliberate. There was no glimpse of what lay beyond, no crack of light from within, no hint of depth or distance. Just a doorway—sealed, waiting.

Raj's voice cut through the quiet. "Hold on. We’re blind past the entrance."

Dylan straightened. "What?"

"The projections aren’t rendering beyond the threshold," Raj continued, scrolling through a data stream. "No pathway, no structure. It’s not an error—there’s just nothing there."

Alex glanced at the interface. Raj was right. The system should have been ahead, constructing every possible variation of the interior before Emily stepped inside, but past the doors, there was nothing. The mansion’s exterior had been uncertain, fluid—but inside, it wasn’t shifting at all. There was only a pause, a lingering hesitation in the fabric of the dream, as if reality itself had yet to decide what should come next.

Dylan exhaled sharply, shaking his head. "I guess this is what happens when you let a rookie take the wheel."