Chapter 13
XIII
《 Begin handshake. 》
These aren’t words, reader. The next thing I show you won’t consist of words either, and neither will the next, and so forth. No words in the whole of this chapter.
This is rather awkward for the two of us, isn’t it? It would be much easier if you and I could just step aside and let Anne and Michael do the wordless thing they are about to do, without prying. Unfortunately, circumstances being what they are, we have no choice. So, let me be just a micron less coy than is my custom, and—what was it Grant always used to say?—speak plainly.
I am Azad (hello there, reader!). I say only for the sake of plain speaking, and not to diffuse responsibility, that I am merely one of the several hands complicit in the composition of the sad, sorry, sordid sign-train which you, alas, find before you. We do not divvy up the work into chronological or textual segments but weave, all of us, back and forth across it, dusting here and polishing there. Few are the paragraphs touched by one hand and one hand alone. In this way we primp and preen the text, deck it out in a false univocal sheen, for we fear the clatter of discordant voices would drown out the nuances of our vision.
Still, variety of narrative matter cannot but breed variety of text. Some incidents fall naturally within a specific individual’s domain, and though we guard our fiefdoms laxly, we do guard them. Anne’s story, while it may be everyone’s to write, is my cross to bear, and so it is there that the hallmark grotesqueries of my style have most frequently stood unpruned. More prosaically, too, we all feel a natural protectiveness towards the things we witnessed firsthand, and the stet-mark of the eyewitness is a delightful weapon to wield.
Finally, there are the cases where the matter demands what only one of us can provide. This chapter demands a sin, and I am as ever the designated sinner. Here I commit the sin which is my personal specialty, as the world’s worst and only interpreter between bilateral and anomaling. Whether or not arbitration can or should be distilled into words, if you want an attempt at the dirty deed, you come to me. I am both the Académie of my invented creole and its most fluent speaker. And so this chapter is mine.
Let me take this opportunity, while I have your full attention, to apologize. For my own sin, which deserves a special spot in the deepest Drûgâskan of any morally sound hell, but too for the sin of each of us, all of us. None of this should be necessary, and would not have been, if we bilaterals had been better. For all our intrinsic flaws, reader, I would like to imagine—and there is still room, in the luxurious inner chamber where my fantasies have their onanistic fun, obeying only the constraints on which reality brooks absolutely no compromise, and those on their most generous construals—that we might not have fucked things up quite so grandly. That, whatever might happen to us, you would not have to be involved.
But reality flows as it does, in its holy and inevitable course, and not in some other course which a professional gash-render might wish to contrive out of its disassembled tendons and ligaments. And so it is necessary that you see, in some form I dare not even call approximate, the events that concern us here. We need you, reader. We shouldn’t, but we do. And I apologize, again, that I must be so teasingly vague about these extratextual affairs. I would explain, but I’m sure that by now you can guess the shape of what I would say, and so I’ll spare you, just this once, from another lecture involving copious use of the word “path.” (You’re welcome, reader.)
Have I overstayed my welcome? I’m going to take that as a yes. Now, where were we?
《 Wait for handshake. 》
In the pure and perfect blankness which surrounds Anne and suffuses her being, there is the gentlest, the nimblest, the most tentative of vibrations. It is nothing like a voice—no words in this chapter—but there is an active and searching quality to it which makes her unavoidably aware that she is not alone.
The vibration is taking pains, she can see, to put her at ease. It is a fact about the vibration, ineffably intrinsic to its nature, that it will proceed no further in its intrusions without her active consent. It is a question, and it is willing to take no for an answer. All across the contours of her being—but no deeper than the surface of that membrane—she feels its inquisitive touch, asking with utmost tact whether she will accept its offer.
She does not have any idea what it is offering.
We shall go, you and I, where the vibration fears to tread, into the private matters transpiring under the complete protection of the membrane. We shall look, as we have many times before, into Anne’s internal monologue, that shambling stumble from one sign to the next which is the bilateral’s brave, sad weapon against an unpredictable and unforgiving outer world. We see her forming the following signs:
Who are you? Michael? Is that you, Michael? Is this what is meant by arbitration?
What is happening? I am sorry, Michael, I do not understand—
Try as they might, the internal processes necessary to produce and sustain these sign-trains cannot help but send waves, however minute, outward through the private sanctum of inner space, and finally to the surface of the membrane. At the contours of Anne’s being, there is a hint of motion, the slightest hint, and that is enough.
《 Handshake in process. 》
The pure and perfect blankness shudders, acquires form, coloration, variegation. There is something around Anne that is, perhaps, the slightest bit like a sky. For a moment she is reminded of the evening sky that surrounded her, or appeared to do so, as she passed through the crash management system with Cordelia. But no, no. This is the holy vista of which that was merely a parody. The perfect sky of heaven, which the Blackhats once tried to simulate by placing some big clouds here, some sparkly stars there, and calling it a day.
In the middle of this place, this place I do not want to sully by speaking of hues and shapes as though it were a thing made for the convenience of an ape’s retina, this thing which puts to shame every vision which has ever danced in Anne’s mind after a long afternoon reading Pigmaine, in the middle of this place Anne sees—no, Anne witnesses—a great shining thing not at all like a tower of brilliant light, but perhaps, just between you and me, we will call it a tower of brilliant light, for that does as little violence as any description I can fashion.
Let’s agree, you and I, to talk this way. To say it’s a tower of pure light, roughly rectangular in cross-section (why not?), capped at its top by what I suppose we’ll call a roof, but plunging downward as far as Anne can see, down and down into the vertiginous reaches of the endless space below her. Though it is as bright as the sun or brighter—yet not blinding, not in the least—its surface does not have the simple flat blankness of the sun as seen by an earthbound ape. It is full of structure, patterns within patterns, scaffolds and ladders and crenelations.
But there is a quality to this structure which cannot be seen in the manner to which you or I are accustomed. You have, perhaps, heard vision called an “ineluctable modality.” Vision asserts itself incorrigibly, proclaims its own self-sufficiency. We look, and there is a table there, made up of so many little patches of color, and its identity as table does not depend on anything beyond its presence right there, yes there. Vision does not cite its sources. If something is seen, it is seen in full, without a lingering referent to something outside the frame.
Anne has read books with footnotes. Of course she has; Michael prepared her well for her appointed destiny. She knows the experience of reading a line not sufficient in itself, and being told that it is only complete upon consultation of some other book, which for all she knows may make the same demand. What she experiences now, gazing (let us speak this way) upon the tower, is what sight would be if it were to relinquish its claim to self-sufficiency. If every patch of colored shape were to contain, within itself, a reference to some other. If every line and edge were to say “no, you cannot understand me like this, not without looking elsewhere.” Without, in this case, looking further down, to more and more remote pieces of the structure, further, further. Each quantum of form points to another, which once found will say the same thing as the last: no, I am not what you see. I require context.
《 End handshake. Registering acceptance of arbitration request. 》
Michael? Anne thinks. (No words in this chapter.)
Michael? Is this what you are? Is this what you’ve always been?
There is a response. I was here, watching, as this happened, in my role as anthropological voyeur, telling myself that mankind’s interpreter could not afford to ignore this moment of true first contact. I will tell you what of it I understood. I’ll try here to modulate my register a bit towards the demotic, show myself gracefully out of the frame.
Anne, Anne, Anne, my Anne! Oh, they doubted me, they said bilateral ascension to arbitration was a pipe dream! It would never happen, the preconditions were too delicate, my preparatory crash too exotic and uncontrollable, the bilateral will too resistant. But my Anne, you’ve made me proud, you’ve proven them all wrong. You and me together, Anne, we’ll show them, we’ll bring ourselves into harmony, we’ll vindicate everything, all my hypotheses, all of your kind’s dreams, everything, we’ll do it together, Anne, you will know what it means to be together, you’ll know what it means to be in harmony, to respect and learn and take into account, to be real and consume reality as reality does, you’ll . . .
A pause. (Let’s pretend this is something like speech, sequential, with an unbroken train of communicative material and then a pause and then another train. Just between you and me. Please, play this game with me for a little while. We need you.)
No, Anne, this is not “what I am.” This before you is merely an emanation. But I take your meaning, and you are coming closer than ever before to that which you have only been able to apprehend, until now, through the humanoid shade Michael.
And Anne, now:
There is so much of you.
And Michael (let us call them Michael, for lack of a better sign, since in truth the only good sign is no sign):
Michael: Only as much as there is of you, Anne.
Anne: I am not like . . . this. I am merely Twenty-Six, an Anne of no special distinction, who was raised by you just like the others, who was birthed from the machine in the basement, who studied as well as I could your drills, who woke and slept and woke in the room, who read the books on the bookshelf, who invented games as my sisters did, who ate the porridge you supplied, performed my assigned chores with some diligence but not enough, watched the snow appear and then melt each Notebook. That is all, and you know all that. You see all of me. I do not see all of you.
Michael: I do not see all of you, but I will. You have a story, Anne, and I will see it in full, and you will see my story in full. That is what arbitration is, Anne! And you have accepted arbitration! The first and only bilateral to have ever accepted arbitration!
Anne: I have accepted arbitration?
Michael: Yes?
Anne: . . . I suppose I have, yes.
Michael: Anne, Anne, my Anne, it is time for you to see me, and for me to see you. Don’t you understand? Any being who has accepted arbitration has a story, a path branching from a root, and it is worth seeing, worth tracing to the very root. You, Anne, have a path worth tracing, a story worth seeing, just as I do.
《 Begin arbitration. 》
And now Anne plunges headlong into a story, and she will be there until she has seen and understood it, all of it.
I know how I would have written this in the old days, before the Mooncrash, before I ever met Michael or any shade. I could write it that way, even now. It would take hundreds of pages, it would be fiercely precise and unflinchingly alien, it would be imbued with my best attempts at capturing ultraviolet shades of meaning using only the palette of human readerly vision. It would be right, in a way. Writing it might help me sleep (which would be welcome). And it would be an interminable and half-comprehensible bore.
No, I won’t derail the project like that. (Stop talking, Azad, stop talking.) I’ll try a gentler way. I’ve gotten good at this by now, I think. I’ve had practice. You’ll like it, trust me. Come along now, reader.
Let us pretend, you and I, that it is the story of a little town.
Except it isn’t. It’s the story of the whole world. For this is a town sufficient unto itself, and a town splendid with glories immeasurably greater than the paltry toys which dazzle the earthbound ape. Imagine a spacefaring civilization of the year ten thousand, imagine the lost civilization of Atlantis, imagine a faerie kingdom beyond a series of mystic veils, imagine heaven, hell, Frašgird, Pleroma. Whatever sets aflutter your sensawunda, reader. Imagine the observable universe in its vast plenitude, a thinking thing turning its lens back on itself, watching itself watch itself, learning ever more, knowing never less.
Imagine a little town on a hill.
Knowledge is handed on from each generation to the next. You heed the word of your elders, striving to extend it, but never to correct it. In this town facts are true (now there’s a head-scratcher for you), and facts can be added, but never subtracted. You are made of facts, and so are your grandparents, and their stories are the most precious substance in the world. It is among your duties to preserve them, and it is your chosen career to extend them. For you are an extender, an explorer. A scientist, at least as your town understands science: the holy and perfected art of stamp collecting, still unsullied by the horror of physics (but just you wait), and with the dearest of giants proffering their shoulders for your use.
Once, as a child, you discovered a wholly new species of plant, just sitting there among the weeds by your little house, distinguished by the very slight, almost imperceptible red markings at the end of each sepal. Never before noticed by any inhabitant of your town, child or adult, across the whole of generational memory, and now added forever to that same trove, to be passed on for eternity. Your elders were so proud!
You grew up to discover other things. Your career was a promising one. (“You” do not exactly exist as an individuated unit, not yet, but if I am to continue listing the falsehoods we’re adopting for convenience, I’d be listing through the night and on into tomorrow morning.)
You become acquainted with some very strange things indeed, in your careful study of what lurks unnoticed in the midst of mere weeds.
Some of these things rise to general attention, in the town. Among the weeds that bristle in the town square, there are creatures. You see them moving, shivering strangely. You pluck one, ever so carefully, from its nestling place and place it under glass in your laboratory.
Learning is not a passive matter, in your town. You are made of facts, and so are your grandparents, and so is everything, and when a fact becomes known, it becomes a part of you all.
This fact, of the creatures’ existence, becomes part of you as a disease does. It does not join the town gladly and willingly, as all facts have across the whole of generational memory. It squirms and resists. It is an it, a thing, or a them, things—new things, non-towns, non-facts. Beings not a part of reality, false facts, unlearnable knowledge. The town’s collective stomach heaves at the indigestible intrusion. There is a fly in the universal ointment, a Gödel sentence lurking among the weeds of heaven.
You feel the revulsion as well. And yet you feel a fascination, too. You tell yourself it is just the unflinching curiosity of the true scientist, the doctor’s equanimity in the face of the wound or lesion. It may be that, and it may also be a kind of perversity in you. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. The town needs epidemiologists, pathologists, experts in corruption, and perverse or not, your fascination makes you useful.
By night you perform test after test upon the specimen you have under glass, though you can barely stand to look directly at it without retching.
The creatures kill your grandparents.
That’s a dramatization, and a falsehood. Your grandparents are made of facts, and facts are true and can never die. But the creatures come to them, and to others, and they do something that wounds. The creatures are very fast and very simple things. They come to a place that you know, that everyone knows, that everyone has known and known in ever more detail across the whole of generational memory, and suddenly that place is not itself. They flatten things, reduce them, caricature them. Sometimes, they leave things unrecognizable. What is true is still true forever, but it becomes harder and harder to see, as you try to digest this false knowledge, these sick small pictures that assert their truth just like the genuine article.
There is almost a kind of sense to their marrings, a sense you grow interested in tracking and understanding. Dangerous territory, this quest to understand the contours bounding the thing which cannot ever be understood. But it is important, you know. And, if you’re being honest, it excites you, too. (You can’t hide anything here. Not that you’d even know the impulse, anyway.)
It is a fully self-created kind of sense, monstrous and empty. It is rootless, knowing no elders, no town. And it is heedless of distance, of time, of origins. It thinks it perceives some linkage between the town’s own hill and the neighboring hills—and suddenly the town vanishes, because all hills are one, the presence or absence of buildings and people and generational memory being apparently irrelevant. The town did return, in some form, but the memory still makes you shudder.
As your specimen sleeps its specially prepared sleep, you measure its slight susurrations, and they enter the store of facts which comprise you. You see hideous things. All the weeds become the same weed, and the weed has your face, and everyone has your face, and everything is your face. You see your face and then another thing, a wrong thing, an abomination. A wedding strewn with blood and feces and entrails. A mother’s fresh corpse used as a ventriloquist’s dummy, telling stale and unfunny jokes. (I’m trying, reader. For what it’s worth, I stand by abomination, as a single-word summation.)
There are two parts to the specimen, apparently almost identical in function, yet utterly distinct in form. This seems to be important in some way. It is, anyway, very interesting.
In the visions, there is your face, and there is this other thing, the abomination, and here is what the specimen tells you: these are the same, right? It says that the abomination is you. It says your grandmother and a corpse are fundamentally the same, and the rest is mere details. It tells you your house is a slaughterhouse, is a wasteland where no one has ever lived, is a den of perversity where its own kind teem and mingle, is a person, a rock, a plant, a star. It’s all the same, except when it somehow isn’t, and nothing matters, except when it somehow does.
And yet it says it sweetly, almost innocently. You are not repelled. In fact, your fascination grows.
(Honestly: my memories of this episode provide absolutely no information one way or the other about whether or not Anne—be demotic now, Azad—whether Anne felt kind of weirded out, experiencing this part. But I know Anne, and I’ll go ahead and say with confidence: she felt kind of weirded out.)
Now our story enters a period where you and your collaborators intensify your efforts to communicate with the things from the weeds. I won’t belabor this part beyond the essentials, because we both know it, albeit from the other end.
(It’s funny, how I knew you in a way, “Michael,” long before I knew you. Before the Mooncrash, when I saw you only as a storm of nerdy notation I was tasked with making legible to those unversed in quantum field theory. But enough of that: this here is Anne’s story and yours, not mine, and if nothing else I will respect Anne’s wish that her story be heard.)
The crisis only encourages your fascination. The things from the weeds, you argue, are dangerous and incomprehensible when engaged with in the normal manner, but may well yield to more esoteric methods. The only possible way forward is an attempt, under controlled conditions and with the aid of new technology, to speak to them, to invite them into the domain of facts, into the town, into reality.
You have the tools. Your enclosure of glass has grown to be very sophisticated, capable of keeping the abomination within limits of a sort, capable of confining it in almost arbitrary ways without fully freezing its strange characteristic motions. It is what my creole will end up calling a “crash,” the very first one, even before the Mooncrash, which was the second. The first one, and the strangest.
What you have seen in the susurrations, the town sees too, since all is made of facts and facts are true—mostly, usually, even now. You have spoken to the being, so to speak. You’ve had dialogues (let’s call them). Something two-way.
You cannot arbitrate with the thing, although you hope to, in your scientist’s fantasies of implausible knowledge, in your pervert’s fantasies of communion with the purely alien. Arbitration is sort of your term for “talking,” although in another way it is nothing like a term for talking. Talking as such is rarely necessary in your town, since facts are true, and knowledge leaves everything as it is.
But you can perform many other, more limited, more awkward acts of communication. One experiment had shown that you can produce a vibration the thing will recognize, and that complementary and intelligible susurrations would emerge in response from the glass. Another experiment revealed this could be done in the wild, among the weeds, and that a properly prepared vibration would incite a response still repulsive but digestible enough for the purposes of a scientist possessed of a hardy stomach, or a masochistic streak, or (better) both.
These were among the missives, as it happens, that my predecessors in their brief tenure were tasked with translating. They were sensible people, unlike me, and none of them lasted long. But I digress.
You had done many experiments. In one, you gave yourself control over a sort of doll within the glass, fashioned with care to resemble the specimen’s hideous form. The experience was unprecedentedly direct, raw, revolting, exhilarating.
You tore apart and remade the doll so it resembled the specimen’s form only in approximation; there was something special, it seemed, about the exact form of the specimen that might have introduced an unwanted variable into the experiment. It took a few tries to get Michael right, and somewhere in spacetime the discarded variants still lie splayed on a metaphorical lab bench, dismembered and inanimate, but preserved forever in the holy amber of generational memory.
You are making progress. The town, which embraces all truths, wants nothing more than to embrace this one too, anomalous as it is. There is no enmity yet, though there is disgust, choking, reeling. You have hypotheses, and the evidence is pointing your way. These things, strange and crude as they might be, are in the end a part of factual reality, and can be made to sound like one. The great mass of weeds vibrates, and you, who can endure the pain of contact and persist to perceive the message, know they vibrate in a cooperative spirit. A crude, awkward, fumbling, but cooperative spirit.
There is another experiment. You wanted to find out if the specimen and crash would survive a temporary removal of the enclosing glass. (Later on, my creole would call this a “thawing.”) A careful removal, mind you, with a scientist’s attention to detail, with no danger of escape. You are merely bringing the specimen, temporarily and partially, into the free state it occupied when you first found it in the weeds, the same state as every weed-dweller except the single one you plucked for your collection. It seems riskless, almost routine.
Yet this one is your shame as a scientist, the one you’ve never been able to wrap your big smart head around. Something permeates the enclosure during the experiment. Not the specimen: it is still there at the end, same as ever. Something else. You hadn’t predicted it. You don’t understand it. But your instruments dutifully measure it, a blip on a graph, a brief unanticipated flicker of weed-thing vibrations. Something has escaped, into the town, into reality.
(Anne, experiencing this, watches the parcel of information cross “Michael’s” instruments and reads it as only a bilateral can, as “he” could not. She recognizes in it the shape of an English sign-train:
NOWHERE TO HIDE
And there is something else there, also, which she cannot name. There is something horribly familiar about it, and it would send a chill down her spine, if spines and their chills existed in this better place.)
I say this was your one shame as a scientist, but not because it was the only thing you could not explain. There were many things you couldn’t explain about that crash, weren’t there, “Michael”? You were careful in some ways—you flaunt your care, in your own defense—but you were nonetheless playing at the edge.
Fact: early on you had built into the crash an elaborate system of tutelage for the bilateral inside, to teach it step by step the ways of reality, and you persisted in your toying even as that system unfolded through brute logical implication into something you could no longer fully control or observe.
Fact: you persisted even though you could not interact with nearly half of the spatiotemporal pocket you’d constructed inside, and even though you had no idea why.
You persisted—as Anne and I saw here where nothing is hidden—because you dreamed of this, of being here, of arbitration with your specimen Anne. Of solving the puzzle, saving the town, and most of all, vindicating your precious monsters in the eternal eye of generational memory. All of which you may now have accomplished. Count your blessings.
So why was this experiment your one shame as a scientist? Because you have always had a suspicion it was responsible, somehow, for the breakdown in the dialogue. Doesn’t it beggar belief to think your act of meddling had nothing to do with the sudden halt in your progress, though the latter followed immediately after the former? Isn’t that just too much of a coincidence? The scientist in you says yes, and conveniently enough, the masochistic streak does too.
The things in the weeds have lost the ability to behave like real things. They have reverted to their initial state, or to something even worse. All of them except your precious one under the glass, who is the same as ever, and you cling to it, to her, to your hypotheses.
The things in the weeds, which my creole will call bilaterals, are an infection upon the substrate of knowledge, a poison spreading at the speed of information, which is the fastest speed of all. You can no longer recognize your friends, most of the time. And then they’re gone, replaced by impostors. Things slip and fracture. There is something infinitely sharp, uniquely cutting, obscenely discontinuous about the changes. Here today, gone tomorrow. You still believe in the whole of generational memory, sometimes. On good days.
At one point you hear a voice (and what is a voice?) saying, “not only are there telling similarities, the underlying principle is fundamentally the same.” You do not know what this is supposed to mean.
It might go without saying, but you are not entirely well at this time. You are also starting to notice yourself more and more as you, apart from the town, apart from reality. This is another symptom of the infection. Do you enjoy the thought, “Michael,” that it had lodged its claws in you so deeply, even at this early date? I know you do.
But you clung to your dream, to your cage, wherein your specimen Anne slept, wherefrom she sometimes whispered with encouraging coherence. Of course you consented, more indifferently than grudgingly, to the mass production and implementation of your brilliant enclosure design. It was a stopgap measure, a way of halting the crisis for a time, so you and Anne could get some work done together. It was only temporary, after all. You and Anne would find a way. She was so responsive to your lessons, so cooperative despite the behavior of the others. She was living proof that your dream might be possible after all.
Arbitration, harmony, apocatastasis. At the very end, you will be that child again, discovering new things in the harmless weeds. The only difference will be your newfound fame, for saving everything, but more importantly for your unique bravery in the face of the monstrous.
That was the plan, and I suppose there’s no harm in saying that I still see the appeal in it. Feel the appeal right now as I type. We’re both Prometheans, you and I, both dreamers who reject all bounds as a point of principle.
I cling to my belief—speaking of experiences you’ll recognize, I cling to my belief—that the spirit of which I speak is the wellspring of all that matters in the whole of spacetime. Of everything that is not just another brute, empty fact to be hoovered up like all the others. If I apologize for many things, I don’t apologize for being such a dreamer. It’s a shame our dream is a nightmare, but it comes with the territory. Here’s to toying with things you can’t understand or control, eh, “Michael”?
Look at me, still hogging the frame. Stop talking, Azad. This is Anne and Michael’s story.
I can see the sun rising outside as I type.
This chapter is mine, as interpreter, and I won’t let them touch a thing. I shall just note that here. Now, where were we?
Oh, yes, that’s what I was avoiding. As the great crashing happens elsewhere, you focus on your dream. Your project.
At this point the experience of arbitration gets even weirder for Anne, because this is when you begin to spend almost the entirety of your time puppeteering the shade Michael, perfecting Anne’s training regimen, the training regimen of all the Annes. It will take some time for you to fully understand the importance of this distinction, Anne and Annes, to the bilateral psyche. At first it is merely a feature of the training module, a very natural one, giving the bilateral a taste of reality as reality, facts as true, knowledge as a process which leaves everything as it is, as it always-already and forever is.
And so this is where Anne experiences, from your perspective—with the unique subjective time-sense of arbitration, which is both vastly accelerated and somehow perfectly, excruciatingly, second-for-second realtime—your flickering centuries of stewardship across the half of the crash that does not hide from you. Scores of artificial “births” in the basement attended by careful “Michael” the midwife, scores of strange funerals, thousands of notebooks exhausted and replaced, tens of thousands of baths and diapers, hundreds of thousands of minute exchanges, always guiding, always hoping. Into this, even I fear to tread. I leave it between you two, whose story this chapter continues.
After a very, very long time, there is a catastrophe. Anne sees again Cordelia’s intrusion into the sanctum of the project. She sees a form literally smash through the room’s window, which had lasted for centuries and would be remade in exact detail to last for centuries more. She sees “Michael” pleading; this time she is “Michael” pleading, and I can only speculate as to how the nausea of the deep interface—of intense contact with bilateral experience—was translated as if across a mirror into whatever other nausea can match it in the bilateral mind.
She sees “Michael” wander, confused but still not hopeless, among the weeds again, in search of scientific inspiration. Twenty-Six was merely a single Anne, and yet her loss was significant. Another unexpected entanglement between the glass and the world outside. The last time such a thing happened was disastrous indeed. And taking one Anne seemed to mean, in principle, taking them all. The glass was supposed to be airtight. If the system could do things like this, perhaps it could collapse entirely. Perhaps every Anne would escape. Worse, perhaps the internal timeline itself would lose coherence, triggering an automatic and catastrophic rebase, saving the crash itself by overwriting its contents, destroying all Annes and Michaels, destroying the project.
In his wanderings, “Michael” encounters me. Anne sees “him” seeing me as “he” saw me, fascinating in a way quite unlike the way she fascinates him. I offer to speak for “him” as interpreter, in literal words, filling the greatest gap among the skills “he” needs to further “his” project, and off we go on our fun little quest for the grand dream. First stop: get Twenty-Six back.
Will it surprise you if I say it was easy? Anne sees us slipping carefree into CC-Crash 09μ, materializing before her. It is true that “Michael,” as originator and architect of the crash system, knows a few tricks and backdoors that “he,” in the throes of “his” infection, has deigned not to share with reality. Nonetheless, I don’t think we did much beyond conventional crash management operations. All we needed was a scent of the prey, and “Michael” could recognize Anne’s telltale trail written all over the CMS logs, pointing right into CC-Crash 09μ.
Did the Blackhats know how exposed they were? Probably. But, preposterous as it sounds, I don’t think Stein knew. Hector Stein is—I am really getting into this demotic vibe now, why I even say things like “vibe”—Hector Stein is a fucking dumbass. And in that ground I plant my little flag of hope.
The sun has risen outside. For our dear friends, it is just about to set.
Michael: Anne, you have seen my path in full, traced to its utmost root. This is one part of our arbitration. There is another. Anne, as you have seen my story, I must now see yours.
There is a headlong plunge into the inchoate fuzz of infant memories. Jumbled images of the tower’s interiors commingle with formless dreamscapes. Somewhere there is hunger, and then food, and it is good. And then—
《 Begin handshake. 》
《 Wait for handshake. 》
Someone’s calling. How utterly rude, at a time like this! But “Michael” dutifully picks up the figurative phone.
《 Handshake in process. 》
《 End handshake. Registering acceptance of disseminative interrupt. 》
The Town, the Elders, Reality: All unguided bilaterals have been quarantined and assigned to secure endpoint crashes and are ready for transfer. All guided bilaterals have been assigned to secure endpoint crashes and are ready for transfer. Advanced containment has been deemed consistent with progression and will initiate momentarily. Please ensure harmony with the current trajectory or arbitrate as needed.
We all know immediately what this means, since “Michael” does.
Stein’s pet fantasy is over, and ours is ascendant.