A Note on the Annihilation Boundary (As Officially Understood)
An official explanation of the Annihilation Boundary—where matter meets antimatter at the edge of observable space—and what the Soul Dam chooses to acknowledge about what happens there.
At the edge of the observable matter cosmos there is not, as some optimistic people imagine, a tasteful fence with a sign. There is a reaction front: a place where matter and antimatter meet and immediately stop being matter and antimatter at all, converting their mutual outrage into energy—mostly the kind you don't want anywhere near your eyes, your ship, or your continued eligibility for lunch. This is why the boundary behaves like a hard edge without being a wall: any serious "mixing" destroys the evidence of mixing, so the interface keeps re-forming as a thin, lethal rind. Most of the time it can be eerily calm, because vast emptiness is an excellent mediator; then a drift of particles, a turbulence knot, or a curious expedition nudges the two sides into contact and the calm becomes a gamma storm—brief, brilliant, and terminally educational.
The Soul Dam refers to everything that happens there as Boundary Interaction Phenomena, which is bureaucratic language meaning something is happening and we would like it to stop being our responsibility. Officially, nothing "out there" is permitted to be a someone: any apparent patterns are blamed on instrument feedback, any sense of being addressed is blamed on fatigue, and any report containing emotional verbs is treated like a minor infection and managed with rest, reassignment, and an aggressively calm smile. This policy holds up wonderfully in public, right up until you notice that the sealed training archive contains "non-sentient patterning examples" that look uncomfortably like grammar and, in a particularly inconsiderate flourish for something that allegedly lacks agency, refers to the Soul Dam by name.