The second seminar was different from the first in ways that Yuji started cataloguing the moment he saw the equipment.

  The first seminar had been a presentation. Sael at a podium, information flowing one direction, the school gymnasium arranged in the configuration of an audience receiving something. Passive. Controlled. The kind of event you could film and broadcast and point to as evidence of open and transparent cultural exchange between humanity and its new galactic neighbors.

  This one had machines.

  They had arrived the day before in a transport that the news coverage described as a diplomatic support vehicle and which Yuji, watching it unload from the school roof during lunch, thought looked more purposeful than that. Eight units, each approximately the size of a large cabinet, matte silver, with the particular quality of Aethon technology that made it look less manufactured than grown — surfaces smooth in a way that suggested intention at a molecular level rather than machining. They had been carried into the gymnasium by Aethon support staff who moved with the efficiency of people who had done this many times before.

  The announcement had gone out the previous afternoon: Special Workshop — Flux Perception Development. Three-day event. Voluntary participation. Voluntary, Yuji noted, but the school had strongly encouraged attendance and several teachers had used the word historic in their encouragement, which was the educational system's way of communicating that voluntary had limits.

  Daichi had signed up immediately. Yuji had signed up because not signing up felt like a decision that required explanation and he didn't want to explain it to anyone.

  The gymnasium on day one had the atmosphere of something trying to be casual and not quite managing it. The machines were arranged in a line along the far wall, each one with a single chair in front of it, and students cycled through in groups of eight, supervised by Aethon technicians who guided each student through what they described as a simple focusing exercise.

  The technology was designed to do what years of training accomplished in a fraction of the time — stimulate the flux perception pathways that apparently existed in every human nervous system and had simply never been activated. The machine did something to the local flux field, the student focused on the sensation, and perception opened. Not widely, not deeply — the technicians were clear this was an introduction — but enough to see something.

  Most people got there by the end of day one. Yuji watched classmates come out of their sessions with the particular expression of people who had just experienced something their existing categories couldn't quite hold. Some were excited. Some were quiet. One girl sat down on the gymnasium floor directly after her session and stayed there for several minutes while a technician checked on her.

  Daichi spent the evening sending Yuji increasingly incoherent messages about how the cafeteria looked completely different now.

  His session was scheduled for day two, mid-morning.

  He sat in the chair in front of the machine and looked at the Aethon technician assigned to him.

  "Before we start," Yuji said.

  The technician waited.

  "Why students."

  The technician's expression shifted slightly — not surprise, but the adjustment of something that had been expecting a different kind of question. "The program targets educational institutions because—"

  "I've heard that answer," Yuji said. "The cultural exchange answer. I'm asking why students specifically. Why this age group. Why the school system rather than research institutions or the general adult population."

  The technician was quiet for a moment.

  "Students represent the future of your species," they said finally. "Introducing flux literacy at this stage allows for more natural integration. It will become foundational knowledge rather than acquired knowledge."

  "And flux is going to be introduced as a power source," Yuji said.

  "Correct."

  "So you're training the generation that will grow up using it. Before you introduce it publicly. Before the adults currently making decisions have access to it." He paused. "That's an interesting order of operations."

  The technician looked at him with the careful attention of something recalibrating. "The program is designed to ensure the smoothest possible integration for humanity's benefit."

  "I believe that you believe that," Yuji said.

  He sat back in the chair. "Okay. Let's do it."

  The session lasted twenty minutes.

  Somewhere in the twelfth minute something shifted. Not dramatically — more like a filter being partially removed, a layer of the visual field becoming slightly more present than it had been. The machine hummed at a frequency he felt in his back teeth and then something in his perception quietly rearranged itself.

  The gymnasium had a quality it hadn't had before. The air between things had texture. The Aethon technicians were brighter than the humans in a way that had nothing to do with light.

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  He sat with it for the remaining eight minutes and didn't say anything about what he was seeing.

  Afterward he walked back to the waiting area and sat next to Daichi.

  "Well?" Daichi said.

  "It works," Yuji said.

  "That's all?"

  "That's all I have right now."

  Daichi made the sound of someone deeply unsatisfied with a non-answer. "My turn," he said. "They bumped me to a supplementary session — apparently my initial results were flagged for something. Different calibration setting." He didn't seem concerned. Daichi had a consistent talent for not being concerned about things Yuji thought warranted concern. "The technician said it was routine."

  Yuji looked at him. "What did the first session feel like?"

  "Nothing," Daichi said cheerfully. "Just the humming and then it was over and everyone else was talking about colors and I was just sitting there." He shrugged. "Hence the supplementary session."

  He stood up when his name was called and walked across the gymnasium to the machine at the far end — the one the technicians had been using for students whose initial results had been flagged. Yuji watched him go and filed something in the back of his mind.

  He heard it before he saw it.

  Not an explosion. A resonance — a frequency that bypassed the ears and arrived somewhere more fundamental, felt in the chest and the back of the skull simultaneously, and Yuji looked up from his thoughts with the reflexive attention of someone whose body had decided this was important before his mind caught up.

  Daichi was glowing.

  Not metaphorically. Not the ambient flux quality that newly opened perception gave to everything — this was different, this was visible to anyone regardless of perception, this was light coming from Daichi's skin in a way that light did not come from human skin. Warm and steady and wrong in every physical sense except that it was there and it was real.

  Daichi was standing in front of the machine with his hands at his sides and his eyes open and the expression on his face was the most purely content expression Yuji had ever seen on a human being.

  The machine had stopped. Not damaged, not sparking — just stopped, the way things stopped when whatever they were doing had already been done. The Aethon technician at the station had taken three steps back. Yuji noted this specifically — three steps back, not the measured professional retreat of protocol but the instinctive step of something that had encountered something unexpected and needed distance.

  The technician said something in their own language. Short. Sharp.

  Then said it again, louder.

  "What," Daichi said pleasantly, "is happening to my hands."

  His hands were the brightest part of him. The light pooled there, concentrated, the way flux concentrated in something generating rather than just conducting. He turned them over and looked at them with the serene curiosity of someone who had noticed something interesting and had not yet been told to be alarmed.

  The lead technician crossed the gymnasium in twelve steps. Yuji counted. A clipped exchange with the station technician — a briefing rather than a conversation — and then they turned to the room.

  "We ask all students and staff to move to the gymnasium walls," they said. "Calmly. This is a precautionary measure."

  Nobody moved calmly. They moved the way people moved when a calm voice said something that wasn't calm — quickly, toward the walls, with a lot of looking at Daichi, who was still examining his hands with the equanimity of someone in a very good mood.

  Yuji moved to the wall. He did not look away from Daichi.

  The lead technician spoke into a communication device on their wrist, the exchange too quiet and too fast to follow. Then they looked at Daichi.

  "How do you feel?" they asked.

  "Good," Daichi said. He looked up from his hands. "Really good, actually. Like — really good. Is that supposed to happen?"

  "It is not common," the technician said carefully. "What you have experienced is a full soul awakening. It is—" a pause that felt like translation — "uncommon. Among species at your stage of development."

  "Soul," Daichi repeated.

  "It is the closest word in your language. The actual term does not translate directly."

  "Is it bad?"

  "It is not bad. It requires specialist attention. People better equipped to assist you than we are."

  Daichi considered this. The glow had not diminished — if anything it had settled, the initial brightness evening out into something steadier, clearly not going away. "Okay," he said, in the tone of someone still feeling very good and deciding to be cooperative about it.

  A vehicle arrived.

  Yuji did not know where it came from — no sound of approach, no shadow through the high windows. It was simply there when the gymnasium doors opened. Purpose-built. Not for appearances. Two Aethon he hadn't seen before came through the doors with the focused movement of people who had come specifically for this and already knew what they were doing.

  The lead technician looked at the room. At the students pressed against the walls. At Yuji, who they held for a moment longer than anyone else.

  "Your friend is not in danger," they said to the room. Then, specifically to Yuji: "He is not in danger."

  Yuji said nothing.

  One of the new arrivals spoke quietly to Daichi. Daichi nodded. He looked back at Yuji across the gymnasium — his expression still the content one, the one that had no business being on someone's face in this situation — and gave him the small shrug of someone who had decided to trust the process.

  Then one of the new arrivals touched his shoulder and Daichi's eyes closed and the glow dimmed and he was caught before he reached the floor, smoothly, by someone who had been expecting exactly this.

  They carried him to the vehicle. The doors closed. The vehicle was gone.

  The school sent everyone home early.

  Yuji walked home the long way.

  The flux was there now when he looked for it — thin, the layer the session had opened, the texture in the air between things. He watched it as he walked and thought about supplementary sessions for students whose initial results had been flagged, and the technician's word: uncommon.

  Not impossible. Uncommon.

  Which meant they had seen it before. Which meant they had known it could happen. Which meant the machine at the far end, the one specifically for flagged students, had been there for a reason.

  He sat at the kitchen table. Took out the notebook. Opened it to the page with the kind you need before a war written small in the margin.

  He wrote: Daichi. Soul awakening. They knew it could happen.

  Added: They came prepared.

  He put the pen down and looked at the wall and thought about his friend's face in the moment before they took him — content, glowing, completely unconcerned — and felt the specific sensation of a thread pulled taut.

  He picked the pen back up.

  Find out what ''soul'' is.

  Find out why they were ready for it.

  He closed the notebook. Outside, Tokyo continued its evening in the ordinary way of a city that did not know what had happened in a school gymnasium this afternoon. He sat in the kitchen light and thought about his sister, who had disappeared two years ago, and his friend, who had just disappeared this afternoon, and the word the technician had used when they looked at him specifically across the gymnasium.

  Not in danger.

  Present tense. Current knowledge. The certainty of someone who knew where the person they were talking about was and what was happening to them.

  He sat with that for a long time.