Elias looked at the blank monitors and smiled weakly. "You can’t cage the woolly bits, Sarah. The moment you think you’ve mapped the wild, it finds a new way to bite." AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more

"Well," Sarah said, wiping a drop of coffee from her cheek. "I guess that’s the thing about chaos."

Elias watched as the strange attractor on the screen leapt from the monitor, manifesting as a shimmering, translucent ribbon of light in the center of the room. It was beautiful and lethal—a visual representation of a system that had finally found its "fixed point."

"It’s not rhythmic," Elias realized, his voice trembling. "It’s feeding ."

Elias leaned in, his glasses slipping down his nose. The graph on the screen wasn't a jagged line of unpredictability. It was a perfect, looping spiral. A strange attractor. But it was growing.