NEW  Vedanta in Plain English, Book 1: Who Am I, Really.  Now available in paperback and eBook

The lab had the kind of cleanliness that erased time. No windows, no clock. Air filtered until it forgot it ever smelled like anything. On the far wall, a red light above the door blinked every seven seconds—the only pulse in the room that felt personal.

Mira settled the visor against her temples, waiting for the slight suction of the cups and the soft click of the electrodes finding home. The cable arced from the crown of her head to the console like a careful question.

“Baseline stable,” Ana said, eyes on the graphs. “You’re clear.”

Mira exhaled. “Starting at twenty.”

The fern on the bench reorganized first, as if relieved to drop the mask it wore for human eyes. The lazy label plant fell away, and what remained was insistence: fronds splitting into smaller fronds, angles holding steady across scales like a promise kept too many times to count. She could feel the visor subtracting—turning down the brain’s running commentary until structure stood without narration.

“It’s there,” Mira said. “It’s always been there.”

Ana’s pencil tapped the clipboard. “Self-similarity. Cheap way to build from a thin genome. Nature’s been compressing data since before we had a word for it.”

Mira smiled without looking away. “You always manage to make beauty sound like accounting.”

“Accounting is how you keep beauty honest.”

Mira tilted the fern gently; the leaves answered with tiny changes in torsion. Not metaphor. Mechanics. “I want water next.”

Ana wheeled the cart closer. A stainless cup under a gooseneck lamp. The meniscus curved, a taut confession at the edge. When Ana blew across the rim, ripples ran like messengers, canceled, reappeared from the far side with second-hand news. The HVAC signed its name in delicate crosshatching. Even her own pulse, amplified through fingertips on steel, revealed itself as a traveling wave.

Mira’s throat tightened. Not from sentiment. From relief. Seeing the pattern felt like setting down a weight she hadn’t known she was carrying.

“Note that,” Ana said. “Relief.”

Mira resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I’m not a subject.”

“You’re the first subject,” Ana said, too evenly. “Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-eight.”

The bowl of river stones refused to remain background. Smoothness decomposed into history: grain sizes broadcasting flow speed; nicks and concavities as ledger entries of collisions; a gloss that spoke of time under pressure. She picked one up. It was heavier than it looked—mass asserting itself against the lie of sight.

“Ordinary rocks,” Ana said, not quite masking an edge. “I still can’t hear the choir.”

“You don’t have to hear it,” Mira said softly. “It’s singing anyway.”

The corner camera watched them, a glass pupil where wall met ceiling. It didn’t move. 

It didn’t have to. Its existence had a way of lengthening pauses.

“Thirty-two,” Mira said.

Ana’s hand hovered over the dial a beat longer than necessary. “You push, you’ll eat semantics.”

“Do it.”

The world sharpened. The bench stopped being bench and became a compromise between human reach, weight limits, and low-bid materials. The stool admitted it was a solution to torque and fatigue. The fern, stripped of its noun, stood on ratios alone and didn’t mind.

“Δ equals point five six,” Mira murmured. She had invented the index to soothe the part of her that needed numbers: a crude measure of how much her perceptual prior was being turned down. “At first, subtraction makes things cheap. Then it makes them rich.”

Ana scribbled. “That line will kill at a conference.”

“Only the first time,” Mira said, and it made them both smile.

“Something mechanical,” she added. “I want flow.”

Ana produced a plastic desk fan from under the bench like a magician’s slightly ashamed rabbit. Mira flicked it on. Blades that were formerly a blur resolved into a moving equation of torque resisting air. Currents braided into ribbons, shed vortices, tugged the fern with a signature Mira could almost spell. The motor hummed a chord with a wobble: one blade fractionally heavier than the rest; a manufacturer’s indifference fossilized in sound.

Ana leaned in despite herself. “I’ll never look at my fan the same way.”

“Careful,” Mira said, smiling. “That way lies madness.”

“Useful madness,” Ana said, and Mira couldn’t tell if she meant it as a joke.

They took a break at the sink. Paper cups, lukewarm water. The visor sat in its cradle, faintly lit like a small animal at rest.

“How long until you let me try?” Ana asked the faucet.

“When it’s safe,” Mira said, and immediately wished she’d said it differently.

Ana dried her hands on the back of her lab coat. “You mean when it’s safe for you.”

“Don’t make me the villain,” Mira said, but she kept her tone light. “I’m being the adult in the room.”

“The adult in the room has a cable coming out of her head,” Ana said, and they both laughed, and the air thinned in a good way.

Back at the bench, Mira asked for a mirror. It wasn’t part of today’s plan, but the urge arrived like a tug. Ana fetched a square from a drawer and set it in Mira’s hand with the ceremony of an offering she didn’t approve of.

Mira lifted the mirror. Expected herself. Got planes and ratios instead. Symmetry held, but not perfectly—childhood bike crash still in the tilt of a cheekbone; years at a screen in the set of the shoulders; diet and sleep, genetics and chance, all negotiating quietly and leaving their minutes in the face. Her eyes blinked back with no caption attached. Not I. Just constraints solving for survival.

She lowered the mirror carefully, as if it might bruise.

“Different when the subtraction is you,” Ana said, almost gently. “Leaves and stones don’t argue.”

Mira nodded.

“What’s the number?” Ana asked.

“Δ is point six zero,” Mira said. “Enough for today.”

Ana didn’t argue. She powered down the amplifier with a sequence of clicks that was probably, to some engineer, also music.

Mira opened her notebook. Perception is prediction. The visor subtracts the prediction. What remains is pattern. Patterns everywhere. Beauty = compressibility. Wonder = the relief of fewer bits. She paused, then added a line she didn’t entirely want to see on the page: Ethics: when we turn this on people, what exactly do we take from them? If labels go, does blame?

Behind her, a switch snapped. “Or meaning,” Ana said, not looking up. “Maybe that goes, too.”

Mira capped the pen. “You don’t believe that.”

Ana lifted a shoulder. “I want to know what’s really there. Not what I hope is there.”

The door beeped. The red light above it leveled into a steady on, then went dark again. 

No one entered. The room went back to being a sealed idea.

They logged the session. They put away the fern and the stones like props after a show. The visor cooled in its nest.

In the hallway, their badges opened a door that didn’t look like a door until it did. A guard nodded the way people do when nodding is part of the uniform. The corridor smelled faintly of lemon and long decisions.

“Tomorrow,” Ana said.

“Tomorrow,” Mira said. She didn’t add what rose in her throat: Let’s keep it on stones a little longer.

Outside, evening had remembered how to smell: cut grass, a food truck’s grill, rain far enough away to be a promise. Mira stood a moment under the split sky and watched students cross a green with the ungainly grace of people learning themselves. The visor was in a case at her side, quiet as a kept secret.

She considered calling her father, telling him that the spirals he drew on napkins weren’t just pretty lies—that beauty really was compression, that patterns could carry wonder without permission. She put her phone back in her pocket. The words weren’t ready. Some truths needed to warm in the hand before they could be given.

At the crosswalk she waited with everyone else. Red meant wait, white meant walk. Lawful enough to trust, for now. When the light changed, they moved as one and didn’t step on each other, which felt, in its way, like a small miracle.

Tomorrow they would point the visor at faces.

Tonight she would let the world keep its gloss.