My forehead tingled as the woman walked by and an ice pick stabbed between my eyes. I couldn’t see, couldn’t scream, couldn’t subvocalize. All routines froze. Datalocked.

She was unbeheld.

Unusual. Almost impossible. Even the crisp pain couldn’t distract me from the improbability. Unbeheld.

Reflexively, I massaged my head, fingers finding forehead and temples. The pain eased, sense returned, subroutines rebooted. My shakti was restored, energy flowed, perception spread, data channeled, function found, and I stood as before. Three eyes on the world.

An other self would have chased down the woman. Challenged her. Marked her. For shivakind demands that. To make visible, to be known, to lay bare the interior world. Beheld.

Yet this self could not. The pain, sensory loss, datalock were not an assault, not a warning, they were an invitation. A door opened, a path cleared, a mystery offered. The woman was shivakind and more. Beyond beheld.

Where was that to take me? Shivakind was meant to pierce the veil, reveal all, and one woman walking past scoffed at the illusion. In a glance she pierced the implant in my forehead, pierced shivakind. My superiority, my complacency, my arrogance: all telling to my failure of imagination. What I believed of minds and machines was a parody of thought.

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None of my selves understood what shivakind promised: to tap akasha, the aether of information, of knowledge, of being. The unseen made seeable.

Yet, this woman, this parvati, this equal and complementary force of being, rendered all my selves powerless. And therein it turned. The wheel. Unspun. Uncharged. Chakra depleted, shivakind bereft. All unbeheld.

I wandered the hot, dusty streets of the city for a time, reviewing the encounter, spooling, collating, quantifying, but not thinking. Unbeheld thought felt dangerous. And then she was there. Sitting under a tree whose broad canopy slowed light, welcomed shadows, stilled the air. Head bowed, she beheld. But not as shivakind.

I kneeled at her rough feet, sensing the power of one well travelled, though not in my world. Her energy did not flow as my data did. She was connected elsewhere. The longer I knelt, the less I felt of myself. The implanted third eye of shivakind was to bring clarity, true knowing, beyond karmic memory. To behold oneness.

In her presence, I felt separated, though not separate. Alone, though not lonely. My third eye shut down. My world was unbeheld, but hers was before me. She lifted her head, her pupils sparkling like diamonds. Like Vjarasana.

I saw. I had only to clear my cache.