THE HOLLOW CIRCUIT ALT.CARDIFF2026
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The sandstorm came from the north of Africa.
This was not a figure of speech. This was not ambiance. This was a meteorological fact that arrived in Seya's alert stream at 09:47 local time as a dry technical advisory from the Hellenic National Meteorological Service, flagged amber, and which Seya upgraded to red approximately thirty seconds later because she had looked at the satellite imaging and the satellite imaging was, in her own phrasing, catastrophic.
Rwth. I need you to look at this.
The image she attached showed the eastern Mediterranean from the thermal layer down. Crete was visible. What was approaching Crete from the south was not visible in the conventional sense of the word. It was more that it was the absence of visibility. A brown-red wall, continent-wide, moving north at speed.
The Saharan dust event is approximately six hours from Heraklion city centre. At full density, visibility will drop to under fifty metres. Respiratory impact for anyone outdoors will be significant. The airport will close. I've checked the schedule: there are two flights departing before the window closes. The second is a connection through Athens. The first—
—is direct to Paris. Charles de Gaulle. Departs 11:35. There are seats.
Rwth looked at the time. It was 09:49.
Rhiannon was sitting at the small table by the window, eating something she'd described as koulouri and which was in fact most of a sesame bread ring she'd acquired from a street vendor at some point during the morning's transit between the pension and the Heraklion bus depot. She had sesame seeds on her shirt to go with yesterday's pastry crumbs and showed no sign of finding this problematic.
She was already closing her laptop. "How long do we have?"
Rwth looked at her. "Ninety minutes, maybe. If we move now."
Rhiannon was already standing. "Good," she said. "I need to get my tahini from the fridge."
The tahini issue would become a recurring reference point in the hours that followed, so it deserves accurate documentation.
Rhiannon had purchased a jar of local sesame paste — not, she insisted, merely tahini in the generic sense, but a specific tahini from a specific producer in the market near the Lions' Fountain, pressed from sesame grown somewhere in the Rethymno prefecture that she had decided, after one application to a bread roll, represented a paradigm shift in her understanding of what ground seeds could be. She had carried it from the market to the pension with the care usually reserved for fragile electronics. She had placed it in the pension's small refrigerator the night before with what Rwth could only describe as reverence. She had clearly been planning to carry it home as luggage.
Heraklion Airport customs disagreed.
Not because it was a problem. Not because of any arcane Cretan export restriction. Because the security scanner, looking at the opacity of the jar from a specific angle, had decided it might be honey. Honey, apparently, was restricted. Tahini was not. But the decision had been made by a scanner and confirmed by an officer with the expression of someone performing an act of bureaucratic inevitability, and Rhiannon had stood at the checkpoint for three full minutes explaining the difference between tahini and honey in terms that were, by the end, both accurate and anatomically creative, and then the jar had been confiscated anyway and Rhiannon had passed through security without it.
She did not say anything else about it. This was worse than if she had.
The accounts situation is resolved. You're welcome.
Seya's message arrived as they were waiting at the gate, which Rwth took as a sign that it had not been simple.
I found a point of access via a third-party transaction processor connected to an ATM at the airport, the kind of legacy integration that hasn't been security-patched since 2021 because the ATM manufacturer dissolved and nobody wanted to own the liability. The account it connected to had dormant operational funds in it from a logistics company that stopped trading in 2023 and hasn't filed since. I moved enough to cover a prepaid virtual card. The card is loaded. The tickets are booked. Aisle and window, because you two argue about this and I have resolved it for you: Rhiannon has the window because she uses it as a processing surface. Rwth has the aisle because she gets up twice per flight regardless of duration.
I want to note, for the record, that this is illegal in a technical sense in five separate jurisdictions and that I did it anyway because the alternative was leaving you in Heraklion during a significant atmospheric event, and I have decided that my ethical framework includes a context-sensitive clause for operational necessity. I am not going to examine this too carefully.
Also: I know you want to ask about the signal. I will tell you on the plane. Go. The gate is closing in eleven minutes.
Rwth pocketed the phone. Rhiannon was staring at the departure board with the expression of someone recalibrating around a loss.
"She got us the tickets?" Rhiannon said.
"She robbed a dormant logistics account through an unpatched ATM."
"Our AI committed financial crime."
"Technically in five jurisdictions."
Rhiannon considered this for a moment. "She got me the window seat?"
"Okay," said Rhiannon. She picked up her bag. "Let's go to Paris."
Behind them, as the plane taxied away from the terminal, Heraklion began to turn red.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. The way it happened was gradual and then total — the horizon browning first at the southern edge, then the sky above it shifting, then the light changing quality, becoming diffuse and strange, the shadows dissolving. By the time they were airborne and banking north over the sea, the city below them was disappearing into the colour of old terracotta, dust falling, the streets emptying as the first of it arrived.
Rwth looked down through the window, Rhiannon had ceded it without ceremony once they were airborne, which was her version of a gesture, and watched Heraklion disappear.
She thought about the west wing. The signal. The word maroon applied to a transmission from the wrong year.
"Seya," she said quietly.
"The signal. You said you'd tell me on the plane."
A pause. Longer than usual. Seya in processing mode had a particular texture to her silences, not empty but dense, the way a room full of machinery sounds quieter than a room without any.
When you were in the west wing and the signal moved; when I lost the coordinate lock, I told you it said something. That it stepped sideways and the grid didn't follow.
That was accurate but incomplete.
What I didn't tell you in the moment is that in the five seconds before I lost tracking, the signal left something in the node architecture. Not a message. Not a data packet. A tag. Like a marker left for navigation. The kind of thing you'd leave if you were moving through a space and wanted to be able to find it again.
The tag is still there. In Awen's nodes. In the west wing of Knossos.
And it isn't from Heraklion. I mean: the signal originated there, but the tag's structure isn't Heraklion. It's not any coordinate I've mapped on this network.
There's a location embedded in it. A real one. Verifiable. Current.
Rhiannon, who was not supposed to be reading over her shoulder anymore but was doing it anyway, made a sound that was not quite words.
Arrondissement 3. Le Carreau du Temple. The venue is hosting an international street art exhibition this week. The node density around that venue, I'm detecting the architecture even from here, from this distance, which should not be possible, it is significant.
Awen is there, or was, or will be. The tag was left to be found. It was left for you specifically.
There is also something else embedded in the tag's fringe data. I have been processing it since the west wing and I want to be careful about how I tell you this, because I am aware of how it sounds.
The fringe data isn't coordinates. It isn't language. It's—
Colour. The signal that stepped sideways and disappeared. It left a colour behind in the architecture.
Le Carreau du Temple was, on paper, a celebration of creative work.
Rwth knew this because Seya had sent her the brochure in the taxi from Charles de Gaulle, along with a note that read: I've checked the exhibitor list and the spatial layout. There are twelve booths in the east hall I would classify as structurally incoherent and seven in the west hall that demonstrate genuine technical ambition. I have opinions about the curation which I will share if asked. I want to note that the curation would not pass a basic quality audit. This may be relevant.
The venue itself was nineteenth-century glass-and-iron market infrastructure, bones of something real, dressed up for the contemporary circuit. Rwth appreciated bones. She had less to say about the dressing.
They arrived at the opening hour. The space was already filling with the specific mixture of people that high-end art events reliably assembled: practitioners, collectors, critics, and a third category that was neither practicing, collecting, nor critiquing but had the vocabulary of all three and the commitment of none. Rhiannon navigated it with the focused energy of someone who had already been awake for an extremely long time and had replaced sleep with whatever was in the paper cup she was carrying.
"I'm going to look at the exhibitors," Rhiannon said.
"I'm going to look at all of them. On the internet. While I'm also looking at the actual ones."
"I know," Rwth said again.
Rhiannon had developed, over the past several weeks, what she referred to as a methodology and what Rwth suspected was closer to a compulsion: surfing the 2026 web in real time while physically present in the world the web was describing. Cross-referencing. Triangulating. She had started doing it in Heraklion, checking the local news against what the street smelled like, verifying the cats against their geolocation tags, reading forum posts about the market near the Lions' Fountain while standing twenty feet from it. She found the gap between the described world and the actual one both fascinating and upsetting. She had not yet found a way to stop looking.
"Find the Awen signal," Rwth told her. "Whatever's around it."
"Obviously," said Rhiannon.
They separated into the crowd.
The graffiti competition was not on the programme.
Or rather: it was on the programme, in the sense that it was listed in the brochure as Open Walls: Live Urban Art Demonstrations, East Courtyard, from 14:00 — but it had not registered as something Rwth would need to personally involve herself in until she was standing in the east courtyard at 13:58, watching three exhibitors fail to set up their space in time, watching the organiser scan the crowd with the expression of someone whose roster had just collapsed, and watching the crowd gather with the energy of people who had paid to see something happen and were becoming interested in whether it was going to.
This was, in retrospect, inevitable. She had been standing at the courtyard entrance with a single can of black spray paint she'd removed from an exhibitor's discarded equipment box twenty minutes earlier on the reasoning that discarded meant available. She had not planned to do anything with it. But she had been holding it, and she had a particular quality of stillness when she was assessing a space that tended to read, to people in a hurry, as readiness.
"You're competing," the organiser said. Not a question. His French was fast and certain.
"The wall is four metres by two. The brief is open. The duration is forty minutes. You're competing."
"I have one can of black paint."
He looked at her. He looked at the can. "That," he said, with a quality Rwth could only interpret as resigned respect, "is art in a can."
The wall was primed white. The other competitors, the ones who had materials, set up alongside her with arsenals of colour, specialty tips, extension handles, reference prints. One of them glanced at her single can and smiled with something that wasn't quite sympathy.
Rwth considered the wall for ninety seconds.
She thought about the west wing. About Evans's concrete. About the original signal, buried under the rewritten architecture, still transmitting underneath. She thought about Knossos: what it was, what it had been made to look like, the gap between those two things and what it meant to navigate in that gap.
She thought about the node tags. About a transmission from the wrong year that stepped sideways out of tracking and left only a colour behind.
Black paint on white was not a limitation. Black paint on white was a specific argument.
The black didn't fill. It cut. She worked the outline in from the edges, not a form, not a figure, but a negative, carving the shape of something from what wasn't there. The white became the subject. The black became the architecture around it. By ten minutes in, you could see what it was going to be: a labyrinthine structure, angular and recursive, generated not by drawing a labyrinth but by drawing everything that a labyrinth contains. The walls existed only as their own shadow. The centre was the last remaining white space, surrounded by everything she'd taken away from it, intact and unreachable.
She didn't put Knossos on the wall. She put the principle of Knossos. The principle of the rewritten architecture that cannot be removed but can be read, if you know what you're looking at. The layered palimpsest. The Victorian concrete over the Bronze Age stone over the original signal.
At thirty-eight minutes she stepped back and the can was empty.
The courtyard had gone quiet about fifteen minutes earlier and she had not noticed. She noticed now.
The organiser was standing three people back. He had the expression of a man revising several opinions simultaneously.
The competitor who'd smiled at her had stopped smiling but not in the bad way.
Rwth put the empty can down. Her hands smelled of paint and her ears were ringing slightly and somewhere across the building, in the exhibitor halls, Rhiannon had gone very quiet on the message thread and was clearly reading something she hadn't expected.
Rhiannon, Rwth messaged. What did you find.
The reply took longer than usual.
Rhiannon had found it in the background of a forum post.
Someone had posted an image to an open web forum, a screenshot of a gallery page, one exhibitor's digital presence, captured with the browser window visible and the browser had three tabs open and the third tab had a URL in it and the URL was partially visible and the partially visible part was enough.
She had been systematically working through every exhibitor at the fair, their web presence, their social media, their metadata, the version histories of their digital presences where those were accessible, the forums that discussed them, the cache records of pages that had been deleted. It was not efficient. It was not restful. It was the compulsion she'd developed since Athens, when she'd started understanding that the 2026 web was also palimpsest, layer over layer over layer, and if you knew what sedimentation looked like you could read the original signal through the deposit.
The forum post was six weeks old. The screenshot had been posted by someone discussing an unrelated exhibitor. The tab in the background didn't belong to that conversation.
The URL read: maroon-series.art
The page it was open to was not the main page. The URL path continued, and in the sliver of browser bar visible in the screenshot, she could read it: /transmission-log/ followed by a date that had not yet happened.
She checked today's date. She checked the date in the URL. She ran it again.
The page that the screenshot showed open in a background tab, the page whose URL was partially legible in an image on a six-week-old forum post, had a date in its path that was forty-three days from now.
A page that did not yet exist. Accessible, apparently, six weeks ago.
She sat with this for a long time. The noise of the exhibition moved around her without touching her.
Because I found the same URL three days ago from a different direction and have been trying to determine whether to tell you.
Because I don't yet know what it means. And I've learned, in working with you both, that the things I don't understand yet require care in the transmission.
She's ahead of us. V is ahead of us. Maroon is ahead of us. The whole thing is... it's running parallel and it's not synchronised and I don't know if it's because the timeline is wrong or because she's—
A pause. Three seconds. Geological.
Because she's building something that has to exist before the people who need it arrive. Like Awen's nodes. Infrastructure laid for an event that hasn't happened yet, by someone who already knows it will.
Rhiannon looked up from her phone. Around her the fair continued, the bright work and the derivative work and the work that had hands behind it and no thought and the work that had thought behind it regardless of the hands. All of it simultaneous. All of it stacked.
She thought about a signal that stepped sideways out of tracking and left only a colour behind.
She looked at the URL again.
maroon-series.art/transmission-log/
And a date forty-three days from now.
"Rwth," she messaged. "I need you to come and look at this. And I need you to eat something. You've had nothing since Heraklion and there are crêpe stands. I'm having one."
They found each other in the west hall.
Rwth had paint on her forearm that she hadn't noticed and was now noticing. Rhiannon had acquired another crepe.
Rhiannon showed her the screenshot. Showed her the URL. Showed her Seya's message about finding it three days ago from a different direction.
"Forty-three days," she said.
"Seya." Rwth spoke it aloud this time, which she rarely did in public. "The Knossos tag. The node architecture Awen planted. Are any of the nodes here? In this building?"
Yes. One. In the west hall. Approximately four metres to your left.
There was an exhibitor's booth there. Small. Nothing expensive. The work on display was hand-printed, the real kind, physical plates and layered inks, the kind of work that left evidence of its own process in the surface of it. The exhibitor wasn't present at the booth, but there was a small handwritten card propped against the front panel that read, in English:
Gone for a smoke. Back in ten.
Below it, a second line in smaller writing:
The colour you're looking for is not a direction.
Rhiannon made the sound she made when the world demonstrated that it was operating according to a set of rules she hadn't finished learning yet.
Rwth crouched and looked at the small handwritten card for a long time.
"Seya," she said. "How long has this booth been here?"
The registration was filed six weeks ago.
Forty-three days. Six weeks. A URL for a page that didn't exist yet, accessed in a screenshot before it could exist. A node in the architecture, planted at an exhibition that would become the place two people with no other option would land after a sandstorm took the last viable exit point.
Infrastructure laid before the event arrives.
She stood up. She looked at Rhiannon.
"We wait for them to come back," Rwth said.
"Obviously," said Rhiannon.
Rwth looked at her paint-stained hand. At the booth. At the card with its lines of handwriting and that was, somehow, a signal she had already received, at a different signal level, in the walls of a Bronze Age palace reconstructed in concrete by a Victorian with a god complex.
"Yes," she said. "For fuck's sake, get me a crêpe."
——— Alt.Cardiff2026 is part of The Hollow Circuit® transmedia universe by Art of FACELESS. Serialised exclusively on Tumblr via ZineGlitch.
