Topography of a Thought

He hadn’t expected to find anything up here. The hike had been an accident – a reflex to escape the noise of digital life. No signal, no plan, just a narrow trail winding through stone, root, and silence.

The world had gone quiet over the last few hours. No voices. No screens. Only the rhythm of his footsteps crunching gravel.

And then – at the highest ridge – he stopped.

At first, it was just beautiful.
Unreal, postcard-beautiful.
The kind of beauty you try to capture even though you know no camera ever could.

But then something shifted.
Not in the view.
In him.

His eyes swept across the land, paused, returned. There it was. Not moving. Not calling attention to itself.
Just there – a shape too precise to be natural.

A ring.
A hollowed core.
A line drawn not by time, but by intention. And no one had ever built here.

He blinked. Was it a trick of the light? A dream?

No.
He knew this symbol.
He had seen it a thousand times – in wallets, on Telegram, embedded in shitposts and chart frenzies.
But never here. Not carved into the world. Not made real.

A sudden dizziness. As if reality and memetics had briefly overlapped.
As if the digital had crossed over.
Not as graffiti.
As topography.

What did it mean?
Who had done this?

Or… was the real question:
Why did he recognize it at all?

He laughed, quietly – startled.
Not because it was funny.
But because it was too much.

Too much meaning for a meme.
Too much gravity for a joke.

And yet… there it was.
Unmistakable.
Unavoidable.

The irony was complete.

He took a long breath, let the image sink deep, and turned away.

He knew he’d never unsee it.

Not the symbol.
Not the moment.
Not the realization.

Crypto ubique est.