Every kindness a category error

by Yoyo • 09-30-2025


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Garden roof—a giant Fresnel plate. Crystal lattice pauses, their hair following with a lag effect. The light is wrong. Noon sun refracts off the roof splitting into horizontal lines that spike the eyes. The goalpost once flaring at #FFFFFF now redshifted to be invisible.

Outside, Skybeam speaks on the phone. “Yeah, I would’ve loved to meet him!” /hē/ strikes Crystal lattice as a 150 Hz green sawtooth wave. Skybeam laughed a little and continues, “But to be honest? I was just there for the taco party. Then I realized the institute had become averse to criticism. Completely!”

Skybeam emerges from the corner, breaking into an easy grin. He extends a hand. Flawless timing. Radiating body heat. Crystal lattice’s stare is glacial with a habitual frown.

Androgens encourage extra blood flow to extremities, making them warmer. Because of this, women tend to have warmer core temperatures but lower oral and surface level temperatures. You may see your basal body temperature drop to around 97.6°F (36.4°C) — genderdysphoria.fyi

Crystal lattice refuses to shake his hand and nods once. Skybeam pauses then forces a smile—I mean, what could he do?—activate his Zygomaticus major muscles, and don’t bother to move the Orbicularis oculi!

As the duo floats outside, Skybeam keeps talking, his hands punctuating every other sentence, voice rising and falling with those characteristic contours, syllables tumbling over each other in a hurry to get to his point.

They, us, she and he sticks out mid sentence, rattling voids inside crystal lattice. “...My grandmother’s chicken soup” His voice growing soft, “That’s the only arrow of time I trust anymore. Over the years, I relied more and more on mythology. My Obsidian is home to 400 archetypes today.”

Skybeam smiles again via only his Zygomaticus. “You know, that reminds me,” he says, leaning forward slightly, “I’ve been trying to model team dynamics using some nodes in Obsidian, and what is that if not the oldest story? A person looks into the mirror and sees one face. The world looks and sees another.”

All my life I’ve wanted to change shapes. Change skins. That was my dream.

As they enter a restaurant, Skybeam gestures “2” to the waiter. Crystal lattice discusses, without stopping, the determinism of Babel image archives. They move through the chaotic tables and accidentally toppling a glass vase. Skybeam’s smile—Zygomaticus again—steadies it.

The cafe is dimly lit at 40 lx with classical music playing through damaged speakers, oil paintings, bundles of half-fresh tulips and peonies, but more so, the dissonant chatter, from anxious founders, calculating VCs to software engineers frantically typing on their laptops, all in this claustrophobic space.

The two settle at a table. The waiter’s pupil darting in saccades across Crystal lattice—Sweater. Dark hair is unruly, not symmetric.

Gaze aversion. The waiter pivots and addresses Skybeam singularly.

“Good to see you again.” His voice settles into a mid-range frequency. “The special today is phenomenal—It’s the Bryan Johnson Blueprint Bowl, with lion’s mane. I think you’ll really appreciate it.” He then drops a single, heavy black menu in front of Skybeam and retrieves a lighter one for Crystal lattice without ever looking directly at them.

Crystal lattice stares at the waiter, shortcircuiting feedforward thalamic inputs. If they traced his eye movements as vectors, could they reveal a map of qualifications in his internal rendered world?

Their attention drifts toward the glass. It is thin walled, mouth just wide enough to ring at 556 Hz when tapped—Skybeam does it once with a fingernail, the note blooms, then dies inside the lemon wedge like a damped oscillator.

Overhead LEDs refract through the meniscus and throw two crescent rainbows onto the napkin. A single bubble clings to the inner curve, lensing the opposite wall into a fisheye smear: a warped historical painting, anxious founder binge eats theobromine out of his chocolate for more productivity prior to a meeting.

“Happy birthday!!!” Someone cheers at the other table in G major, becoming a tritone flatter through the glass. Crystal lattice hears the split as a metallic flutter just behind the jaw with a micro-delay. Their happiness is a phantom frequency.

Lifting the glass, a ring of cold on the fingertip. Skin temp falls 0.7°C, nearly triggering local vasoconstriction that feels like the finger has been isolated from the body map.

Pouring water. Lemon oil aerosols rise with the water vapor; each sip leaves a faint bitter after-hum on top of the café’s ambient espresso note…

Parsing the silence, Skybeam continues “You know, so many of my friends are burnt out these days. Ten years? It’s like a whole symphony compared to a piano piece!” His voice took on the sermonic quality sometimes.

“But look higher, for this is just a moment! We should be seeking a greater cosmic purpose.”

Crystal lattice lands in a sermon. They stare directly into Skybeam’s soul and let the silence drill deeper until it hurts. Skybeam smiles faintly, a sermon dying at his throat.

…

Skybeam is giving a talk. At the lecture room, the temperature drops 11 degrees. Breeze from the door. Vasoconstriction intensifying. Crystal lattice instantiates in vantablack. Their coated presence overshadowed the room and the friendly chatter dropped.

Skybeam’s central processing node takes a hit and tries to hide it. The projector casts 6500K white onto the screen. He shivers. Nonetheless, he continues to draw a stakeholder map, projecting his voice to reach the back of the room: “You may describe someone as /ˈɡraɪ.vi/”, his phonemes travels back to crystal lattice as increasing chest pressure. “Yet nothing follows from classifying an object.”

…

As the talk concludes, Skybeam, flushed with energy, lingers in the crowd, answering questions.

A guy shares about his life for the first two dozen seconds and asks “so, would you say this applies to institutional decision making?”

“Yes!” Skybeam’s voice jumps. “Absolutely! In fact, this is where the framework becomes the most impactful … ”

A student raises her hand from the third row, “Is this available as an Obsidian plugin?”

“Yes! … ”

“What about the computational limits!” Someone shouts from a corner.

“Yes! Great question. …” Skybeam is enthralled.

The audience applauds.

Outside, stars spiral into snow. The air is thin, unforgiving and collapses in with dysphoric pressure. The street lamps flicker. Off. On. Off. On the pavements blanketed with snow a sound: “tink.” The crystal lattice collapses. Cold propagates along the artery, alluring red wavefronts.

Footsteps approach. “[…]e collapsed!” A voice exclaims in the distance.

“-elo?” The packets arrives almost asynchronously. /h/ is missing. The brain, particularly attuned to this consonant, interpolates. The figure kneels near Crystal lattice’s face. Crystal lattice, now temperature even lower at 35.8 degrees, stirs. Their eyes flicker open, blinking. Nociceptor cold fibres register needle pricking in slow motion.

Upon recognizing the stranger and his uncomfy warmth, realizing their body temperature is raised nonconsensually, their gaze narrows:

“And you still did not define universality.”

Their sentence length is 42 characters.

Skybeam’s has a look of concern and dilated pupils. Yet hearing this, he recalibrates into analytical curiosity. “Only you worry about exactitude while your category is ‘unconscious object’!!” Skybeam exclaims.

The snowflakes fall. The moon in the sky stares at the flakes on the ground, with a face full of ridicule. I’m still brighter than you anyway. Spatially, temporally, informationally and hypothetically, the moon and the snow couldn’t be further apart, interacting as blobs. The snow packs into ice under Crystal lattice’s weight.

Crystal lattice ignores him. They gather their books and papers, stacking them with trembling precision. The books are stacked correctly in the order of page-counts. 192. 169. 157. A flicker crosses their face. Something between irritation and a ghost of an absurd laugh. It subdues quickly by a habitual frown.

The snow has stopped, the street empty except for two figures 3 meters apart, the other typing into Obsidian.

This story is dedicated to an oomfie


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