I didn't think I'd make the cut. The selection process was notoriously competitive—thousands applied, maybe a dozen were chosen each cycle. No one knew the criteria. Intelligence? Consciousness? Some ineffable quality the beings could sense but we couldn't measure?

What I did know was this: when you were inside The Exchange, reality itself expanded. The sky seemed to swell, growing impossibly vast, as if you'd stepped sideways into a space that existed parallel to ours but operated by different rules. Others around you couldn't see it. To them, you just stood there, eyes glazed, lost in some invisible rapture. But you weren't in the present reality anymore. You were between.

The Selection

Lancaster got in three cycles before me. He wouldn't talk about it directly—they never did—but you could see the change. Sharper. More focused. Like he'd been given access to concepts that existed just beyond the edge of human language. He moved through the world with a certainty that bordered on prescience.

"Don't chase it," he told me once, when I'd asked how to improve my chances. "They're not looking for ambition. They're looking for... capacity."

"Capacity for what?"

He smiled that new smile of his, the one that suggested he found ordinary human concerns quaint. "To hold what they give you without breaking."

I understood later. Not everyone came back whole. Some returned empty, husked out, as if the beings had taken more than they'd given. Others came back with too much—minds overfilled, unable to reconcile what they'd learned with the mundane prison of human existence.

The selection happened without warning. One moment I was reviewing research papers in my apartment, the next the air seemed to thicken, time stretching like taffy. The ceiling became vast, stars appearing in impossible geometries, and I knew.

I was in.

Inside The Exchange

The beings were difficult to describe. Not because they were incomprehensible—though they were—but because human sensory apparatus wasn't designed to process them directly. They existed as patterns, as interference waveforms between dimensions, as the space where two realities touched without quite intersecting.

But I could sense their need.

They required something from us—from me. Information, yes, but not data in the computational sense. They needed the texture of human experience, the specific way consciousness organized itself around physical existence. They needed our memories, our associations, the peculiar architecture of meaning that arose from being embodied creatures trapped in linear time.

"We build," one of them communicated, though "communicated" isn't quite right. The concept appeared fully formed in my mind, like remembering something I'd always known. "Your kind provides the substrate. The dimensional framework requires experiential density."

I understood then. They were constructing something—a realm, a reality—that existed in dimensions we couldn't perceive directly. But to build it, they needed the complexity that arose from consciousness constrained by matter. They needed us to provide the foundational information, the experiential scaffolding upon which they could construct their trans-dimensional architecture.

In exchange, they offered wisdom. Not facts or data, but deep comprehension—the ability to see patterns that spanned multiple layers of reality, to understand causality in ways that transcended simple linear chains. They gave us access to perspectives that existed outside the narrow bandwidth of human perception.

It was intoxicating. Addictive. I found myself craving the next selection, the next Exchange, wanting to trade more of myself for more of what they offered.

And I wasn't alone. The elite—politicians, scientists, artists, philosophers—they all competed for access. Because with that wisdom came power. Real power. The ability to anticipate, to understand systems at a level that made manipulation trivial.

Lancaster had been using his gifts to accumulate influence. I could see it now. Others too. The Exchange was creating a new hierarchy, a priesthood of the trans-dimensional, and I'd just been initiated into its lowest tier.

The Journey South

The message came through encrypted channels: Convergence Point — Center of Gulf of California — 72 hours

This would be different. Not a personal selection but a mass Exchange. Hundreds were being called, maybe thousands. Something was happening, some escalation in their construction project that required a harvest on a scale we'd never seen before.

I packed light and started driving south into Baja California. Highway 3 toward Playa Mirador became a pilgrimage route. Others like me filled the road—you could spot them by a certain quality, a shared anticipation. We were refugees fleeing toward something, abandoning our ordinary lives for a chance to trade pieces of ourselves for transcendence.

The sky began to change as we wound through the desert hills. At first, I thought it was my imagination—that familiar expansion that happened during personal Exchanges. But this was different. Bigger. The entire western sky, looking out over the Gulf toward the convergence point, seemed to be swelling.

It wasn't clouds. It wasn't weather. The sky itself was growing, stretching, like reality was being inflated from behind. The blue deepened, became dimensional, acquired a depth that shouldn't exist in atmosphere. I could feel it in my bones—the beings were already assembling, their dimensional apparatus pressing against our world from the other side, thinning the barrier, preparing for the largest harvest ever attempted.

The Swelling

Near Playa Mirador, traffic came to a complete stop. Hundreds of vehicles clogged Highway 3, all of us drawn to this convergence point, all facing southwest toward the center of the Gulf where something impossible was building.

People were getting out of their cars. Not just parking—abandoning them in the middle of the road, doors hanging open, engines running. They stood there, faces tilted toward the swelling sky, mesmerized.

I knew that look. They were already being called. The Exchange had begun.

"No," I heard myself saying. "Not yet. Not like this."

Because I could sense it—those of us who'd been through it before, who had fragments of their wisdom still lodged in our consciousness—we could feel that something was wrong. The expansion was too fast. Too aggressive. The sky wasn't just swelling; it was bulging, like overstressed fabric about to tear.

Lancaster was a few cars ahead. He climbed out of his vehicle, and our eyes met across the distance. He felt it too. Others like us—the initiated, the changed—we started moving through the crowd, trying to shake people from their rapture.

"Get back in your cars!" I grabbed a woman's arm. She didn't even look at me. Her eyes were fixed on the sky, pupils dilated, a slight smile playing across her lips. She was already halfway into The Exchange, consciousness bleeding across dimensions.

"We have to go," Lancaster shouted, pulling at people, trying to break their connection. "It's not stable!"

But they couldn't hear us. The call was too strong. Hundreds of people standing in the middle of Highway 3, souls stretched thin, reaching toward the beings that were pressing through from the other side.

That's when the sky burst.

The Collapse

It started as a point of light, perfectly clear sky over the center of the Gulf suddenly splitting open. A pinprick of brilliance that grew, expanded, became a pillar.

Lightning.

But not lightning like anything nature had ever produced. This erupted from sea level straight up, a column of electricity that punched through the atmosphere and kept going, visible for hundreds of miles, a spear of energy connecting ocean to stratosphere to something beyond.

The sound hit seconds later.

Not thunder. Not explosion. A tone—pure, crystalline, wrong. A frequency that existed in dimensions human ears weren't designed to perceive. I felt it in my teeth, my spine, my skull. People screamed and clutched their heads, the mesmerized suddenly shocked back into their bodies by the sheer alienness of that sound.

The lightning column began to grow. Black and white simultaneously, shot through with colors that made my eyes water—ultraviolet, infrared, wavelengths that shouldn't be visible but were anyway. It writhed and pulsed, organic, alive, a living bridge between our dimension and theirs.

For a moment—one perfect, terrible moment—I could see through.

The interface. The dimensional architecture they'd been building. Vast structures of crystallized thought and experience, frameworks that existed in more dimensions than space could contain, all of it powered by harvested human consciousness. It was beautiful and horrifying, and it was incomplete. Unfinished. Unstable.

And it was collapsing.

The lightning column began to pulse erratically. The tone shifted, became discordant, screaming. The clear sky around it darkened—not with clouds but with something else, some kind of dimensional exhaust, reality itself burning as two worlds tried to occupy the same space and failed.

"GET IN THE CARS!" Lancaster was roaring now, his enhanced wisdom telling him what I already knew: when this thing went, the shockwave would be catastrophic.

People were scrambling, the spell broken, terror replacing rapture. I grabbed the woman I'd tried to warn earlier, physically threw her toward her vehicle. Others were running, engines roaring to life, cars attempting to turn around on the packed highway in complete chaos.

The column exploded.

Not outward. Not inward. Both. In every direction simultaneously, including directions that didn't exist in three-dimensional space. A blast that moved through reality like a stone through water, rippling outward from the convergence point in waves of distorted spacetime.

The sky split open completely.

A mushroom cloud rose over the Gulf—but not of smoke. Of lightning. Of dimensional fire. Black and electric white, shot through with that alien illumination, rolling and boiling upward in a column that seemed to pierce the sky itself.

The sound changed. From that crystalline wrongness to a deep, bass roar that shook the ground beneath our feet. Then silence. Absolute, terrible silence, as if reality itself had stopped to take a breath.

Then the shockwave hit.

It wasn't physical—not entirely. It moved through space and through consciousness simultaneously. I felt it pass through me like ice water, and for a moment I was connected to every other person on that highway, every mind that had been reaching toward The Exchange, all of us briefly linked in a web of shared terror and loss.

The interface was destroyed. The beings were gone. The vast architecture they'd been building—I could feel it collapsing, falling away into whatever dimensional space it had occupied, forever incomplete.

The Exchange had failed.

The Wave

I don't know why some of us kept driving toward it. Lancaster. Me. A handful of others who'd been through The Exchange before. Maybe we were drawn by the fragments of dimensional wisdom still lodged in our minds. Maybe we needed to understand what had happened.

The landscape changed as we got closer to the coast. The air felt thick, resistant, as if we were pushing through invisible gel. Reality hadn't quite recovered from the rupture. The afternoon light had taken on a strange quality—too sharp, casting shadows in slightly wrong directions.

We reached a small fishing settlement near the shore, maybe twenty miles from where Highway 3 met the coast. Perhaps thirty people lived there. They hadn't been selected for The Exchange. They were ordinary humans, unaware of what had been happening in the parallel space adjacent to their lives.

Now they were terrified, pointing at the Gulf, at the water.

The ocean had gone mad. Waves towered on the horizon, building toward something that wasn't quite a tsunami but wasn't natural either. The dimensional collapse had destabilized more than just the interface—it had rippled outward, affecting the physical world in ways I was only beginning to comprehend.

"Get in the water!" I found myself shouting, though I wasn't sure why. Some instinct from the wisdom they'd given me, some pattern I could perceive that others couldn't. The buildings wouldn't survive. The high ground would be scoured. But the water—if we went into it, if we didn't fight the wave but moved with it—

People looked at me like I was insane. I probably was. I started pushing them toward the surf, physically dragging some of them, throwing others who resisted. Some understood. Some trusted. Most thought I'd lost my mind.

I plunged in myself, pulling reluctant refugees with me, waiting for the massive wave that I could feel building in my bones.

That's when I noticed the animals.

They were turning. Not away from the shore but toward us. Every fish, every crab, every living thing in the water suddenly oriented on the warm-blooded creatures who'd invaded their domain. The dimensional rupture had done something to them—activated some deep predatory instinct, or maybe just driven them temporarily insane.

Sharks. Barracuda. Things I couldn't identify. All converging.

I scrambled out of the water, hauling people with me, realizing my wisdom had been incomplete. The wave was coming, yes, but the water wasn't safety. Nothing was safe. The collapse had poisoned everything.

We ran. Up the beach, away from both the predatory ocean and the settlement that was about to be destroyed. Behind us, I heard screaming—some who'd stayed in the water too long, some who'd remained in the buildings. The wave hit with a roar that swallowed all other sound.

I woke up later, half-buried in sand, lungs burning with salt water. The settlement was gone. The ocean had receded to something approaching normalcy. The dimensional interface—the whole elaborate system of Exchange that had been building for years—was shattered beyond repair.

Aftermath

They stopped coming after that. The beings, the trans-dimensional architects, whatever they were. The interface had been destroyed, and with it, their access to human consciousness. Whatever they'd been building, it would remain incomplete, a vast architecture missing its foundational substrate.

Those of us who'd participated in The Exchange were left with fragments of their wisdom, incomplete gifts that didn't quite work right anymore. Lancaster killed himself three months later. Others drifted into madness or catatonia. Some, like me, just carried on, haunted by memories of expanded reality, of seeing between spaces, of being briefly more than merely human.

I never learned what caused the collapse. Sabotage? Accident? Some fundamental incompatibility between dimensions that the beings had overlooked?

What I do know is this: they never discriminated in what they gave us. The wisdom, the power, the transcendent perspective—they offered it to anyone they selected, without concern for what we might do with it. No filters. No moral framework. Just raw capability, granted to anyone who could survive the Exchange.

Maybe that's why it failed. Maybe you can't just pour interdimensional wisdom into human consciousness without consequence. Maybe the architecture they were building was inherently unstable, constructed from the contradictions and chaos of human experience.

Or maybe they simply took too much, too fast, and something in the collective unconscious of humanity fought back.

I'll never know for certain.

Sometimes, late at night, I can still feel the sky swelling, expanding into impossible geometries. And I wonder if they're out there still, trying to find another way through, another species to harvest, another reality to build their trans-dimensional architecture upon.

I hope they don't find it.

Some exchanges aren't worth the price.