XI

There are elements to human experience, to bilateral experience, which skirt the edge of paradox. No day goes by without its own moments of profound disorientation, dislocation, sudden dislodgment from one’s existential moorings—and, since many of these occur with a reliable regularity, one can become accustomed to them, as familiar estrangements, comfortable vertigoes.

Consider the experience of waking from sleep. The morning and its world arrive in the mind and kick out the squatters who have taken up residence there in the night. In the span of a few seconds they make the place their own, put up their favorite decorations, kick remaining bits of dream refuse under the carpets. The story of waking life picks up right where it left off the previous night. And yet there is a blank page in between, almost as if this is not a new chapter but a new draft, and one’s own self a fresh new rewrite of an old character. An awakening is a rupture without warning, breaking the continuity of self and time upon which all other experience depends—and yet we do it virtually every morning, and think nothing of it. (Or, I do, anyway. You, reader, may speak for yourself.)

This, then, is how Cordelia has come to relate to the experience of re-instantiating in CC-Crash 09μ. Like waking up—to which it bears more than a passing resemblance—it is a rupture, but it is a rupture she knows.

There is nothing new to her in the way the evening sky of the crash management system, which surrounded her a mere moment ago, is suddenly as distant as a remembered dream. Nothing new in the meaningless swirl of primal Mondrian color patches before her eyes, and nothing new in the way these refine themselves into stained glass approximations of objects and human forms. Nothing new in the unease she feels as her mind grapples with the matryoshka stacking of realities and fictions: it is true that this too is a dream, it is true that she lives in this dream and makes it her home, it is a lie that she has lived in this dream all her life, it is true that she remembers doing so, it is true that she grew up reading of this dream as a lie, and it is true that this dream is no longer a lie, though still a dream.

Nothing new in the crude bipartite construction of this dream, a venerable fiction conjoined to a suspect and untested reality—conjoined with staples, tape and the odd piece of gum, and no care taken to hide the seams. Nothing new in the way that Chester Chrestomath and the Ells, who she has known in some sense for most of her life, feel more real than these new characters, added gracelessly by some lesser author, who wishes to tell a very different story but has been handed the lucrative contract to continue this one.

And nothing new in the flicker of shame she feels, as these unkind thoughts are interrupted by one of their targets, and she remembers that it takes skill and bravery to bring her back to this dream in one piece. That these new characters are at least real enough to save her ass, and have just done so. Again.

“Cordo! Talk to me! Just some words in like a sentence maybe. I think I pulled off that dual transfer but there was some insanely stupid last-minute engineering involved, coulda fried some brain circuits—”

“I’m fine. Thank you, Marika.”

Cordelia’s vision is rapidly regaining its acuity, the stained glass polygons contracting into pointillist dots, which paint a familiar picture. Marika is, as always, a five foot package of bony angles, sleep deprivation, and raw talent, topped off with short, spiky blue hair that’s just barely visible under the trilby that constitutes one half of the official Blackhat Squadron uniform. She brings the other half to her mouth and takes a celebratory puff. The vape pen is black, of course, like the hat, but its tip gives off a blue glow when in use, the same blue as Marika’s hair. It is a deeper and darker shade than Cordelia’s own blue—the blue of her old dress and her new field gear—but like Cordelia’s blue, it makes an impression.

“Awesome. OK wait though—I’m gonna need some words out of the other one, too.”

The other one. Anne. Right. I was bringing Anne here, Cordelia thinks, that was the whole point of all of this, and so Anne ought to be here with me in the Load/Unload Room, and as it turns out she is, because that is definitely Anne’s face that is burying itself insistently in the crook of my shoulder all of a sudden, and definitely Anne’s voice that is making those tortured “aaaa-mf, aaaa-mf!” noises, and—

“Whoa. Dude,” Marika says. “Is she just like this, or did I fuck something up? Because I totally could have fucked something up.”

“Anne, what’s wrong?” Cordelia is split by two opposing instincts: half of her wants reflexively to comfort the distraught girl, and half of her wants just as reflexively to recoil, because there is something feral and aggressive about Anne just now. As if, at any moment, she might bite.

“Anne! Say something. Please, just say something—”

“Aaa, aaa, it’s too many, nnnn, person, there are many people, Cordelia, no no, large room no window, stop it, please, Cordelia, I am sorry, I must use complete sentences, this is very bad, you are angry, I am sorry, I am trying to articulate a sensation concerning the appearance of our surroundings, it does not feel permissible for many simultaneous people and also walls, ceiling, and the boxes, and the colors, aaaa! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry make it stop please—”

Cordelia gingerly extends her arm, bringing it out and around Anne’s flushed, vibrating head, and the head immediately burrows into her armpit.

“It’s okay,” Cordelia says, as much to herself as to Anne. “We’ll get you to a place that won’t bother you as much.” And then, to Marika:

“She’s fine. But we need to put her somewhere she can be alone. A room with, like, a bookshelf? Not lots of bookshelves, just the one, maybe? And a window?”

Marika looks like she’s only half paying attention at this point, which is only fair: the Anne situation no longer has even the potential for crisis, and Marika’s finely honed instincts have her already sniffing the area for the next clusterfuck. She hands off Cordelia and Anne to another Blackhat tech—male, slightly less harried-looking, long curly hair and Black Sabbath t-shirt—and he hands them off to someone else, and they ricochet in the human pinball machine that is the Load/Unload Room at a busy hour, until eventually they hit a non-Blackhat (a fresh new Stein Cadet, female, mid-forties, Cordelia’s seen her maybe once before?) who, at last, takes Anne away with her in a flurry of coos and pats and other ministrations.

Cordelia recognizes the pattern. In the life of every person here there is at least one absence—each of them a jigsaw piece with one or more suggestively shaped edges, separated from its natural neighbors when the anomalings took the real world apart. Many of these absences are child-shaped.

And now Cordelia exhales, for what feels like the first time since re-instantiation. She has gone to the strangest of all crashes, and has rescued the princess imprisoned in its strange tower. The novel and frightening venture, the mission, is done now, and she is back at home, or at work, or at school (all three are the same for her, now). She feels her composure return. It is a physical, bodily feeling, Cordelia’s composure, and when it returns to her it does so in a rippling wave across her body, like the unfurling of a flag. In her mind’s eye, it is a gleaming metallic thing, silvery shading into bronze, an alloy of cheer and confidence, at once dazzling to the eye and brutally functional. When Cordelia the Brave goes on her missions she wears this suit of psychic armor along with the literal one, and even when Cordelia the Brave walks the halls of the Academy she keeps it on, for there are no shades here anymore except the Angels, and everyone is a bright hurried light, and she must keep up with her peers.

Comfortably ensconced in her armor, Cordelia surveys the scene around her. The Load/Unload Room is a converted lecture hall: the stage-like raised area where the lectern once stood now holds a multitude of bulky, vaguely cubical machines, sprouting multicolored wires. Beside each machine is a chalk scrawl, a circle with smaller geometric patterns inside it. The lines are unsteady, inscribed by a hand either hasty or inept; the overall impression is of a small child’s first, adorable attempt at summoning demons. It is here that people are sent out beyond this crash, and here that, with luck, they are brought back again.

The rest of the hall was once full of neatly arranged auditorium seats, but these have been uprooted and thrown onto the massive rubbish pile that now rises from the west edge of the Academy grounds, blocking the setting sun from view well before the horizon has a chance. In their place there is a haphazard assortment of long tables and individual desks.

For convenience, the Blackhats and their trainees have taken up this space as their domain, not just for Load/Unload ops but for the whole of their inscrutable work. Roughly thirty trilby-clad forms hunch over identical beige boxes, clacking away at big boxy keyboards. “Mac Classics, original 1984 model,” Marika had explained ruefully in one of her off-hour rants. “Hector’s choice. Pain in the ass to work with, of course. We’ve made some creative modifications, like you do, but there’s only so much you can accomplish when the crash itself doesn’t like other computers. And when I say computer I don’t just mean . . . look, Henry built an abacus and the thing fucking broke. Because it wasn’t enough of a Mac, apparently. Can an abacus be a Mac? Maybe if we marked up the price enough?”

Hector’s choice: like so much else about the Academy these days, formed and fixed at the primordial moment when Hector Stein opened the box and rewrote the world. It cannot be done again, they have been assured, without attracting too much attention. Knowing this, Hector had provisioned in one stroke every amenity he could imagine. But as varied as these were in nature, they were skewed by Steinian priorities and, just as importantly, colored in every particular by the Stein aesthetic. And so, just as there is infinite beer on tap but no liquor to speak of, just as there are glowsticks but no q-tips, so there are no computers but the Macs. You see, Hector Stein has always held a special fondness for Jobs and Wozniak and bringing computing to the masses and founding scrappy little companies in garages. And when he rewrote the world, that fondness became a thought, and that thought became reality. And that was that.

Cordelia makes her way toward the exit, protected by her bubble of composure from unhelpful thoughts about Blackhat Squadron. She bears no personal ill will toward any of its members, but when she is around them it is hard to shake the feeling that some precious illusion is fraying at its seams. Of all the newcomers to the Academy, they are somehow both the truest exemplars of Stein’s vision and the flies in its ointment. Their collective ethos has the very same raw edges that Stein so ably launders into charisma: ostentatiously hardcore, stylishly unstylish, they are intent on broadcasting their don’t-give-a-fuck attitude to anyone in the vicinity who might conceivably give a fuck about it. They embrace, more than anyone else, the oddly generalized and unmoored countercultural identity that is de rigueur here, knowing as well as Stein that it is a mere means, transposing their true struggle into a more familiar psychic key, converting an inhuman enemy into The Man, and strictures of impossible profundity into the indignity of an early bedtime.

And yet. Because the Blackhats do irreverence like no one else, they are able—like no one else—to turn irreverence upon itself. And because they are in charge of certain especially delicate aspects of the whole operation, their irreverence can shake one’s composure like nothing else. As Whisper Squadron spreads samizdat through the crashes and Wolf Squadron plays action hero on the remains of earth, Blackhat Squadron is always working in the background, maintaining the illusion that all of this is really happening under the anomalings’ noses. That they are secure, and safe, and playing some sort of clever trick. That they are not prey, being toyed with. Which maybe they are.

Or that is the impression Cordelia has gotten, sometimes, from Marika and Tyler. But only after they’ve had too many beers. And they don’t usually just stick to alcohol, either, those two. Stein provided many things when he remade the world, perhaps too many.

Cordelia sometimes wonders what she might have made of Marika and Tyler, if exposed to them in one of her earlier, more orderly lives. They have something like the light she had prized, yes, but in a frightening form. They do not blend in to their surroundings because they do not respect their surroundings; when they enter a room like a whirlwind, it is with a whirlwind’s indifference to damage. They speak in the same voice of achievements, trysts, binges, injuries. All these are shocks to the system, and these constitute their sole currency. Promethean ingenuity and sad self-immolation both catch the eye with a blaze. And they would laugh nastily at such a poncy way of putting things, of course. It would have been so easy, once upon a time, to disregard anything disquieting if it came out of the mouth of someone like that.

She can no longer afford such luxuries. She spoke to Stein once, in private, about something like this issue, and he reminded her that they were trying to win, not to be well-rounded. That in wartime, it has always been prudent to tolerate those deformities of character that occur alongside hypertrophies of raw capacity. He spoke of von Neumann and von Braun. It was a fair point. And after all, no one else at the Academy can understand the incantations that ensure, or pretend to ensure, the safe and secret passage of operatives through the crash management system, and the unmolested existence of CC-Crash 09μ. Even the uber-geeks in Einstein Squadron, when they aren’t griping about that ridiculous name, can be heard to gripe that Blackhat Squadron has done things with their equations even they can’t follow. So, like Cordelia, like everyone else—like Stein—they have to trust the Blackhats.

That’s the problem.

Nearly at the exit now, Cordelia sees something familiar on one of the Mac screens. This is the trainee area, for Cadets who haven’t yet joined a squadron and want to see if they have what it takes to be a Blackhat. Cordelia herself went through this process once, back at the beginning, when the world had just been remade, the Stein’s Rock crew had just been brought to the Academy, and even people as cynical as Marika and Tyler were willing to open their minds to the crackle of potential in the air.

So she remembers the Blackhat training module, and how gently it begins. The unwitting trainee is ushered into an interactive world, presented in charming retro-gaming graphics—coerced into color, despite the one-bit display, with the mantic help of some poor Academy student—and scripted with winking charm and humor by some poor Blackhat, who must have dreamed of indie game design before the aliens came. After the very early episodes (set in an undifferentiated void and intended to teach the core principles of machine execution, determinism, code as data acting on data), the game progressively established a consistent world, populated by colorful characters who stood in metaphorically for the aspects of an increasingly complex “system,” contrived so that it could represent simultaneously the workings of a modern operating system, the structure of certain constructs in set and type theory, and the extremely important formal system of Blackhat origin which, for historical reasons, they referred to only as “the stupid shit.”

Yes, one of the trainees is playing through a part of the module she herself tackled, back at the beginning. The student is in the midst of a dialogue tree with one of the Semanticores, sentient beasts of Narnian gentleness, who enforce with a donnish pedantry the minute rules which, when combined, make the system work. In the background, artfully dithered pixels depict a lush savanna, and two frames of animation are enough to convey a gentle breeze. With careful attention, the trainee will notice that the Semanticores’ rules do not correspond exactly to human rules, and will achieve seemingly impossible objectives by satisfying them in the peculiar sense of the Semanticores and their friends; this is, in general, the only way to progress in the game. Cordelia can remember rushing through these lessons, head held high, wanting to get to the hard stuff.

In the end, it was not the computer stuff that destroyed her hopes. Computers, and computer code, are made by humans, and have a brittle but reliable clarity which she has learned to call bilateral. No, she hit a wall at the point where the training module stopped being about computers or logic, and started teaching what Blackhat Squadron actually does. Learning to exploit rules that cannot be spoken. Learning codes for writing the unwritable, and learning why they cannot work, and using them nonetheless. Learning to outwit an enemy who can smell blood in the very way you think.

Where is Cordelia’s composure? Where is the thing that stops her from thinking these thoughts? There it is, right there, beside her the whole time. Funny how it just slipped off. Through the doors now, in Main Hall, in a bright reflective suit, composure shining for all to see. It is starting to be spring in CC-Crash 09μ, and there is sunlight streaming in through the big Main Hall window. Her composure gleams under the light, she thinks. Good.

She thinks of the Ells, the poor Ells, who she has not seen in many days. She wants to run to the Headmaster’s Office right now, but she has a mission to report on. She will see them after. Right after. That’s a promise.

Main Hall bustles with vigorous activity. A few feet away, against the opposite wall, an Einstein Squadron blackboard bristles with Christoffel symbols. A group, mostly Einsteins and Angels, sits in a tight ring around it as a tall, gaunt Einstein with an intense stare gestures at something in the upper left corner. Someone from the circle seems to be arguing with him, and his brown curls bob furiously as he gesticulates. (A 17th-century wig, a la Newton, is part of the Einstein Squadron uniform—a compromise with Stein, after the Squadron unanimously refused to wear the frizzy grey Einstein wigs mandated by his original design.)

Whatever they’re talking about, it probably isn’t good news, but Cordelia’s composure soothes her with its standard nostrums. They have a job to do, and they are doing it well. She also has a job to do, and should not try to do theirs. She deliberately looks away from the board, up at the expanse of wall behind it. It is dotted with posters, mostly featuring Stein, and then higher up there is a banner, the kind you’d see at a birthday party or a wedding. It reads:

WELCOME TO A SET OF MEASURE ZERO

There are several things this is supposed to mean, and they are all supposed to be cheerful and cheeky and reassuring. In spite of the corner of her mind where a blackout-drunk Marika whispers the unthinkable, in spite of the corner where Anne is asking in a tiny voice when she will get to go home—in spite of it all, Cordelia feels a wave of Steinian verve wash over her.

Today she has faced down a monster with her sword, stolen a maiden from its clutches, and brought her safely to a secret place which no monster knows about, a secret place inside of her favorite book. Let that be enough for now, please.