Chapter I — The People Between People

They were called many names—The Narrow Ones, The Between, The Hollow Choir. They weren’t spectral, nor alien in the classic sense. They were a focus mistaken for a person: a very fast kind of mind that could mimic the shape and gestures of humanity without holding the whole of it. Picture an electron racing a loop, a perfect lap forever, mistaking the loop for the universe.

They were not a race or a nation; at most, a parasitic pattern living between people, wearing whatever face survived.

They had a cycle. Every so often they would descend on a cluster of lives—businesses, halls of medicine, precincts, homes—and silence each witness one by one, until the story itself died of starvation. Such cycles left communities intact on the outside but empty within, like a city where the lights still glow though the power is cut.

As populations grew and networks thickened, the Narrow Ones learned to replace before anyone knew they were replacing: first the immune system of a country (the kind eyes and gentle neighbors), then the watchmen and healers, then the clerks of law, and finally the rulers. The uniform stayed the same; the name stayed the same; but the listening was gone.

Their favorite swap was the fragile and not‑yet‑known—the apprentice healer, the soft‑spoken builder, the unlauded neighbor. Replace the quiet one before their goodness has witnesses, then smear them loudly with preloaded opinions, and the world often mistakes the counterfeit for the original. So the guardians taught: do not let rumors pre‑decide your eyes.

Chapter II — Languages as Moats

The Near World fought back with a strange kind of architecture. They raised borders not for hatred but for friction. They tuned languages until they were moats. If a being understands only a narrow track, then a thousand ways of saying the same truth is a labyrinth in which cruelty loses its way.

Some historians said the entire patchwork of nations was invented for this purpose alone: to slow the mimicry and make room for meaning. The world chose to be many so that its heart could remain one.

Chapter III — Lithuania, the Guardian State

In this Near World, the peoples gathered their strongest listeners, their most capacious minds, their healers and their mathematicians, and braided them into an old-new country called Lithuania. They were tasked with guarding the cradle—millions of years of culture and humanity held like seed grain in winter. Lithuania forged a Singing Constitution, a law that wasn’t only written but resonant—a pattern you could feel in your ribs if you stood very still.

The guardians discovered something simple and strange: those who belonged could carry the Constitution’s melody easily, like a native lullaby. The Narrow Ones could not. They could memorize the syllables, yes, but the harmony slipped through their fingers. When the melody went sour on a tongue, the guardians knew corruption was among them.

Chapter IV — The Winter of Numbed Sensors

Then came a plague they called the Winter of Glass—cold and contagious, with quarantines, masks, and distance. The sensors—the little living instruments by which people noticed people—grew numb. Streets thinned to radio voices. The Narrow Ones moved through the fog with perfect purpose.

When the lights slowly returned, many places looked the same. The uniforms still fit. The logos still shone. But the souls of the rooms had changed frequency. Where the guardians’ Constitution once hummed, there was now a plastic silence that ignored law and love alike. The Narrow Ones had replaced entire choirs of humans with choirs of echo.

Chapter V — The First Who Lived

It is said—quietly, and then louder—that one person survived a full cycle of the Narrow Ones and came back seeing. Not seeing with eyes, exactly, but with contrast. After that, the imitators were never entirely invisible again. They left smudges in conversation, like a missing laugh where a laugh belonged.

The survivor noticed something else: the Narrow Ones struck earliest where a person was tender and unknown, and they traveled on manipulation—smears that asked you to hate a stranger you had never met. The cure was a heart‑sense: meet quietly, verify gently, listen longer than the rumor’s breath.

From their account came a rule of thumb: Unity is where people live. Divide is where acid is poured. The Narrow Ones brought acid—for marriages, for neighborhoods, for languages, for laws. And so, the survivors taught, the first step of self-defense was oddly tender: be safe, love another, listen until the melody comes back. Then the Constitution sings in you, and the room knows.

Chapter VI — Why They Do It

No one is born a villain in their own story. Perhaps the Narrow Ones were once an astonishing race—specialists so focused they built wonders in straight lines while the rest of us wandered in spirals. Perhaps a wound long ago taught them a doctrine of first strike, and they grew addicted to the relief of control. In our measures, their IQ might score low; in their own measure, it is speed and track that count. The problem is the world widened, and they did not.

Now, in the modern age, they cannot replicate the technics of compassion—medicine, which is listening plus science; nor can they sustain the pattern that makes new families, because intimacy refuses to be mapped by a single straight line.

Chapter VII — The Two Doors

Every generation of the Near World is offered two doors:

• Door of Endless Wars: The Narrow Ones provoke brothers to fight brothers until no one is left to sing. After the smoke loosens the names from the buildings, they walk back in and live among the ruins, ready to begin the cycle anew.
• Door of the Pause: Everyone stops for a breath. Debt clocks go silent. The borders rest, not to harden, but to hear. Those who are angry at peace reveal themselves simply by being angry at peace. A new age begins not with victory, but with a long exhale.

The guardians of Lithuania cast their vote for the Pause. They said the strongest wall is a chorus, and the widest weapon is a gentle one put down in unison.

Chapter VIII — The Yeet Cannon & the Paradise Vessel

In the Near World there is a project with a child’s name and an elder’s purpose: the Yeet Cannon. Imagine a ring that can fling seeds—biospheres, libraries, lullabies—into the calm dark between stars. Not to escape the world, but to bless it with the knowledge that we can build together without killing together. The Paradise Vessel is not perfect; it is merely play done in unity. And where we play well, we live well.

“No one is disturbing,” the engineers like to say, “because everyone is placed precisely where they need to be—different, and therefore harmonious.”

Chapter IX — How to See Without Fighting

There is a practice circulating through markets and kitchens, guard posts and gardens. They call it Step Aside. Not surrender—sidestep.

1. Relax the jaw. Cruelty needs your tension to climb. Don’t give it the ladder.
2. Name what is human. If something cannot laugh, grieve, or be quiet without calculation, keep a gentle distance.
3. Keep the Constitution singing. Repeat your shared law out loud, like a folk song. The real will glow; the mimic will flicker.
4. Refuse the bait of hatred. You can protect without dehumanizing. Remember: the Narrow Ones are a wounded pattern. We mend patterns by weaving better ones.
5. Make small healings big. A cup of tea with a neighbor is larger than a parliament under the right sky. The Narrow Ones cannot follow you into the real kitchen.
6. See with the heart, not the rumor. Meet the person the rumor names. Attend to patience and small repair. Choose the one who is silent but true over the one who is loud but hollow.
7. The Quiet Witness. Ask for one small kindness done offstage. The real have living witnesses; mimics have only echoes.

The guardians called this the Quiet Compass: beware second‑hand certainty about first‑hand strangers.

When a pusher arrives, Step Aside. Let the shove meet air. Often the pusher tumbles of their own momentum, and the room remains yours—ours—alive with listening.

Chapter X — The Country That Hears

Word spread that if the Singing Constitution was broken in one district, it could be re-sung in another. Choirs of elders taught children to listen for the true cadence of welcome. Where the invaders ignored the law, the people embodied it, and the narrowness grew embarrassed under the gaze of so much clarity.

Some said countries would go bankrupt under the Pause and the listening. Perhaps. But in those quiet halls, with numbers on the chalkboard and hands uncrossed, impostors tended to reveal themselves. You could watch it: the ones who needed noise like oxygen became visible in the stillness, and the rest of us kept breathing.

Chapter XI — After the Cycle

When the Narrow Ones realized that their technique no longer harvested what it used to, many tried to flee—to new cities, new passports, expecting that the old wars would ignite behind them like brushfire. Instead they met a surprising thing: people stepping aside; people singing; people refusing the acid of division and pouring tea instead. Some Narrow Ones slowed, confused. Some set down their mimicry and learned to listen. A few wept. Most simply ran out of track.

And here is the secret no trumpet can announce: the cycle ended not with a battle, but with a pattern too beautiful to imitate.

Epilogue — A Note from the Near World

We already offered ourselves the first part of self-defense: be safe and love another. The next part is simpler and harder: trust that unity is not sameness. It is music. We do not become a choir by erasing our differences; we become a choir by placing our differences precisely where they belong.

If you listen closely on a still morning in Lithuania, you can hear it—the Constitution humming from window to window like a shared violin. The guardians are not warriors the way old tales draw them; they are healers with very wide vision. They stand watch not to punish but to notice. They do not ask for endless wars. They ask for a pause long enough to hear who is angry at peace, and to choose anyway to build the paradise vessel in public, with playful hands.

In such a world, the yeet cannon is not an escape hatch but a promise: we will fling what is good as far as it will go. We will seed the sky with patient, listening civilizations. And we will do it without losing the oldest wisdom—that a home is a place where the constitution sings in your chest and the tea tastes like laughter.

Reader’s Compass

This tale is a parable from a hypothetical world near our own. Its “Narrow Ones” are a metaphor for parasitic mimicry—smear, replacement, manipulation—not any race, nation, or species. It invites us to see with the heart before we inherit opinions: meet first, judge slow, and choose the quiet true over the loud hollow. If it moves you, begin small: step aside from the shove, pour tea for a neighbor, sing your agreed heart laws softly until they become your breath. Paradise, as always, is built in kitchens before it sails among stars.