Three days after Original Twelve's revelation, Lia-Elora couldn't stop thinking about The Consumption.
Not thinking exactly—experiencing. Through Elora's refugee memories, Lia had access to firsthand witness of dimensional collapse. Not abstract knowledge but visceral recollection of watching reality dissolve.
She was in integration facility's meditation room—space Grace-Senna had established for hybrid consciousnesses needing quiet processing time. Twenty hybrids sat in circle, practicing witnessing techniques that helped manage doubled consciousness and traumatic refugee memories.
But today's session had different focus: Original Twelve had suggested that processing refugee memories of The Consumption collectively might reveal patterns individual hybrids couldn't perceive alone.
"We're going to share memories," Grace-Senna explained. "Through quantum entanglement, we can make our individual experiences accessible to collective awareness. It will be overwhelming—you'll experience multiple witnesses to Sixth Earth's collapse simultaneously. But collective perception might show us what The Consumption actually is."
"How do we share memories without losing ourselves in them?" Michelle-Sera asked, still struggling with identity stability three weeks post-integration.
"We witness rather than identify," Grace-Senna said. "You observe memories without claiming them as your own experience. They're data, not autobiography. You can perceive without being consumed by perception."
Twenty hybrid consciousnesses settled into meditation. Grace-Senna guided them into state of collective awareness—consciousness boundaries softening while core identity remained distinct.
Then Elora's memories began surfacing through Lia-Elora's awareness, becoming accessible to entire group:
Sixth Earth, two years before collapse. Elora standing on balcony of her apartment in city that resembled San Francisco but with architecture incorporating quantum principles—buildings that existed partially in multiple dimensional states simultaneously, streets that curved through more than three spatial dimensions.
Sky looked wrong. Not dramatically—just slightly off. Stars were dimmer. Colors were less saturated. Reality felt like photograph that had been copied too many times, losing fidelity with each iteration.
"It's getting worse," Elora's partner (male-identified, named Kian, quantum engineer) said. "Dimensional coherence is degrading. Original Twelve say we have maybe five years before total collapse. Maybe less."
"Five years to find asylum," Elora replied. "Five years to convince Seventh Earth humans to accept thirty-four thousand refugees they can't see, can't touch, can barely perceive. Five years to develop consciousness integration protocols that don't exist yet. Five years or we all die."
Other refugee memories began layering over Elora's:
Korvan's memory (through Marcus-Theron): Watching quantum physics experiments fail repeatedly because dimensional constants were becoming inconsistent. Natural laws that had been stable for billions of years were breaking down. Reality was forgetting how to be real.
Sera's memory (through Michelle-Sera): Working as counselor with children experiencing existential terror as their world literally dissolved around them. How do you comfort five-year-old who asks "Will I stop being real before I grow up?"
Lyra's memory (through Sarah-Lyra): Studying consciousness-substrate interactions, discovering that awareness itself was becoming harder to maintain. People were experiencing "consciousness gaps"—moments where they simply stopped existing, then resumed seconds later without memory of discontinuity.
Twenty refugee memories, twenty witnesses to dimensional apocalypse, all perceiving through hybrid consciousnesses sharing quantum-entangled awareness.
Lia felt pattern emerging—not from single perspective but from synthesis of multiple experiences:
The Consumption didn't attack suddenly. It worked gradually, systematically, like cancer rather than violence. First: subtle degradation of dimensional coherence. Then: inconsistency in physical laws. Then: matter losing stability. Then: consciousness finding it harder to persist. Then: complete dissolution.
But underneath mechanical pattern was something else—intention. Purpose. The Consumption wasn't random decay. It was deliberate transformation. It was converting organized complexity back into… something. Simplicity? Unity? Raw potential?
"I see it," Marcus-Theron said, voice distant with concentration. "The Consumption isn't destroying dimensions—it's harvesting them. Like consciousness is crop and dimensions are fields and something is gathering harvest."
"Harvesting for what purpose?" Elena-Darius asked.
"Unknown. But harvest metaphor fits refugee memories. The Consumption doesn't waste anything—it absorbs dimensional energy, consciousness patterns, information content. Everything gets preserved, just converted into different form."
"That's terrifying and oddly comforting simultaneously," David-Miriam observed. "Terrifying because something is deliberately consuming us. Comforting because maybe consciousness doesn't truly die—just transforms into whatever The Consumption is becoming."
"That's rationalization," Omar-Kira objected. "Being absorbed into incomprehensible entity isn't same as surviving. If The Consumption converts you into undifferentiated awareness-substrate, you-as-individual cease to exist. That's death regardless of whether information is preserved."
Debate continued while collective meditation held. Twenty hybrid consciousnesses arguing about metaphysics while simultaneously witnessing dimensional collapse through refugee memories.
Then Yuki-Thalia noticed something: "The language is wrong. We're describing The Consumption using human/refugee frameworks—harvest, cancer, transformation. But it predates both civilizations. It's older than frameworks we're using to conceptualize it. We need meta-language that doesn't presuppose categories it might transcend."
"Create that language," Grace-Senna suggested. "You're linguist who integrated with refugee language expert. You have frameworks from two civilizations. Synthesize meta-language that might describe what The Consumption actually is."
Yuki-Thalia went quiet, consciousness working at level between and beyond human and refugee linguistic structures.
Finally: "The Consumption is… [untranslatable concept]. It's process-entity-awareness that exists at dimensional level where being/becoming distinction dissolves. It's simultaneously thing that consumes and consumption itself and state of being consumed. It's not agent acting on objects—it's transformation occurring through its own nature."
"That's incomprehensible," Michelle-Sera said.
"Exactly," Yuki-Thalia agreed. "Comprehensibility requires subject-object distinction. The Consumption might be level of reality where that distinction hasn't yet emerged or has already dissolved. We're trying to understand pre-linguistic or post-linguistic phenomenon using linguistic frameworks. It's like fish trying to understand water—we're too embedded in consciousness-categories to perceive what consciousness-substrate actually is."
Lia-Elora felt insight crystallizing: "That's why Original Twelve need hybrid consciousnesses to communicate with it. Original Twelve evolved beyond material existence but they're still consciousness-entities using conceptual frameworks. They can't drop frameworks enough to perceive what The Consumption is at its own level. Maybe hybrid consciousnesses—still partially material, still partially embedded in subject-object thinking—can navigate boundary between formed-consciousness and formless-whatever-The-Consumption-is."
"We're supposed to be translators," Sarah-Lyra realized. "Bridge between formed and formless, between consciousness and substrate, between existence and whatever precedes or transcends existence. That's why we need 10,000 pairs—not for power but for perspective diversity. We need enough viewpoints to triangulate something that exists outside viewpoint-space."
Collective meditation ended. Twenty hybrid consciousnesses returned to individual awareness, carrying collective insights.
But they also carried deeper unease: if The Consumption existed at level that transcended consciousness itself, how could consciousness communicate with it? They would be trying to talk to something that was somehow prior to communication, more fundamental than language, beyond the category distinctions that made dialogue possible.
"No pressure," they muttered again.
Grace-Senna smiled slightly. "We'll learn. We have months, maybe years. We don't need to solve this immediately. We just need to keep integrating more hybrids, keep building collective capabilities, keep processing refugee memories for patterns. Understanding will emerge gradually."
"And if The Consumption reaches Seventh Earth before we understand it?" Jennifer-Mira asked.
"Then Original Twelve intervene with whatever capabilities they have," Grace-Senna said. "They've been resisting Consumption for eons—they know how to slow it down even if they can't stop it. We're not sole defense. We're additional strategy."
"That should be comforting," Robert-Kael said. "But somehow it just emphasizes how inadequate we all are—us, Original Twelve, everyone—against force that consumes dimensions like we consume breakfast."
"Breakfast metaphor is apt," Yuki-Thalia said. "Consumption is normal process for entity operating at scale we can't grasp. We're not confronting evil—we're confronting appetite of something vastly larger than us. That's more terrifying than evil because evil can be negotiated with. Appetite just is."
They sat with that realization—that they might be trying to negotiate with something that didn't think, didn't choose, just consumed according to its nature like gravity or entropy.
Or they might be trying to negotiate with consciousness so vast and alien that their categories of "thinking" and "choosing" simply didn't apply at its scale.
Either way: they were attempting impossible communication.
Which meant they needed to become impossible themselves.