XIV

He opens his eyes, and it’s the same damn ceiling again.

He shuts the eyes again. A part of him, a childish little part, grasps at a simple hope. Sleep might come again. Yes, it’s morning, but sleep might come. Just for a few minutes: he is an easy man to please.

The other, more sophisticated parts of him know better. Soon, he thinks, he must rid himself entirely of this lingering frailty, this rustic yearning.

The object of his sentiment might have really existed, once: the substantial and sustaining world, rough-edged and ruddy, where he and his coevals would spar and dance. But it is obsolete. The plastic place has won, and all that is real is plastic, or will be in due time. He will gain nothing by looking away. Face the morning.

In the dreams, a scarlet tapestry unfurls across the whole sky, blotting out even the moon. There is the good kind of panic—an incident, demanding his readiness, and his solidity under strain—and there is the girl with crazed eyes, and the other man . . .

Face the morning. This is the new economy, you old dinosaur. One word: plastics.

He opens his eyes, and there’s the damn ceiling. Unpainted wooden boards, like the ceiling of some cabin in the forest. But a cabin is a compromise with the elements, built by someone, and at times in need of maintenance. The castle lacks these earthly constraints. Who knows whether it would really stand under its own weight? Forces other than gravity can be readily found, if they are needed.

So these boards have the sheen. The unmissable plastic sheen. Too regular, too pretty. The architecture of Disneyland.

The rooms and halls of this building are the rote design sketches of 22-year-old interns, given depth and color but not light. The interns have seen a “medieval castle,” once, in a movie. Good enough. It doesn’t really matter what the Academy looks like, as long as it’s a pleasant enough backdrop for the orphan boy. What heartless sort of child contemplates the wood grain of the wall as Chester Chrestomath is being pummeled into it by his bullies? Not a child in our target demographic, that’s for sure.

Everyone remembers the moment when Chester Chrestomath, nexus of three separate prophecies, saves the whole world (bullies and all). No one remembers the color of the turret behind him as he does it.

Old headlines float into consciousness. “Chester Chrestomath:” even adults are spellbound. Some dull, bright-hearted columnist asks: the children are reading again, and isn’t that what really matters? Popular children’s book may teach Satanism, Christian group warns. And with kindly characters named “Lucifer” and “Lilith,” who can really blame them? Chester’s magic undimmed: “Moon Medallion” delivers. “Chestermania” and the new infantilism. Upcoming “Chrestomath” film casts another key role.

He can’t even remember whether he ever saw the movie the whole way through. He might have seen it on a plane, at some point. In any case, it was everywhere. He has seen these walls on the screens of televisions for sale, as a safe and neutral illustration of the crispness of the picture. He’s seen them portrayed in crude polygon form, in some tie-in video game whose free demo he played for three minutes.

This is the world now. He should be thankful. Doesn’t everyone want to be a wizard, excuse me, a mancer? He sees happy children, thousands of them, drifting asleep with the single shared wish that when they awake they will see this very castle ceiling above them. If only he could share in that near-universal wish (even adults are spellbound), which has now been granted en masse. We are all wizards now, lodged happily somewhere in the busy midrange of the plot, never quite saving the whole world, but always vaguely on the way there.

Face the morning. There are things to be done, after all. Even wizards have jobs, when they’re all grown up. He’ll go to the quaint plasticky classroom with its ornate plasticky windows, and a nebbish in camo will stand before the blackboard and ask how they’re doing on their busywork. If it’s all complete, the nebbish will announce more. There’s just not much for their pseudo-paramilitary “squadron” to do these days, with their glorious leader off in some weird self-imposed seclusion and not giving any new orders. The nebbish will apologize for this, again. The blue girl will be there like always, and she’ll look kind of pissed off like always, and he won’t talk to her, like always.

It’s nice, not hearing the leader’s voice anymore. Every time the guy opens his mouth, he sounds like he’s trying to sell you a used car, or recruit you for a California self-improvement cult.

He’s pulled himself upright in the bed. The expansive headboard is more comfortable than a hard thing has any right to be. He’s ready to step out into the plastic sunshine and feel the plastic breeze and go to the plastic room where the nebbish will talk. And then he realizes. He’s forgotten something!

He really must rid himself of this lingering frailty. Cut it off right at the root, and make sure it will never re-grow. This lust for secret histories. For deeper truths, with the potency to reverse the whole of the plastic (and real) truth in one stroke. In every trivial thing he doesn’t understand, there is a loose end which will unravel everything when he pulls it. When he pulls it, him, the dinosaur made new-economy titan. (Once a bullied orphan, now a world-saver. Perhaps Chester’s spell has him too, in another guise.)

It can wait until tomorrow, can’t it? Tomorrow he will change himself, and then he’ll be changed forevermore. No more frailty, then, and no more shame. But he can have one more day of shame, just the one, as a sendoff feast for the frail tree inside. It’s a special day, after all. The Berenstein Brigade is meeting today.

Few know that the Brigade exists, and even fewer know when or where it meets. But Grant does, and today, he will join them again.

 

---

 

It’s now around seven in the morning. The meeting is set for ten in the evening. Fifteen hours of plastic.

Grant knows how to wait. For years, that was his job.

All sufficiently large and important buildings eventually become animate things. They grow human-shaped prehensile appendages, which course across their inside and outside in a regular ebb and flow. Their tentacles circulate their bodies like blood, ready to grasp or strike when the need arises.

This lofty and ludicrous metaphor is Azad’s fault, Grant is entirely sure. Sure, if you ask Azad, he’ll tell you Grant came up with it, but who are you going to trust: the wily old Father of Lies himself, or his poor, innocent ex-roommate? In any event, if it’s original to Grant, it definitely dates to the Mooncrash, not to his earlier life. To the early Mooncrash, when so many of the pair’s shared sign-trains were first formed.

There was nothing to do in the Mooncrash except talk, and in the very first month it seemed there was little to talk about except their own memories—whatever was left of whatever they had been, back when they had been anything at all. Not that they could remember the sunlit days in anything like the usual manner. Direct recall of life before the crash had only been possible in the first week or so. Even then it was like a memory of a dream, fragmentary and flickering, apt to vanish when the mind’s eye glances away, or to acquire a sudden aura of almost metaphysical irrelevance.

“The unavoidable conclusion,” Azad proclaimed with Holmesian vigor, “is that we both suffer from a kind of dementia.” Yet the unavoidable turned out very quickly to be avoidable after all. The amnesia was purely retrograde. Upon waking each moonlit “day,” they found they could remember the previous one, and the one before it, just as always. They laid down new memories as their past evaporated. There was nothing to do except talk, and the new world contained nothing, so they talked of the past. And this, the talk, they could remember.

They did not like each other back then, and so they talked less than they could have, and less freely. Still, getting to know an irritating co-worker has its charms when measured against an eternity of grey moonlit stucco and grey moonlit carpet and grey moonlit nothing. So they sat on the moonlit carpet, telling each other about the past. What they said would be remembered later, when nothing else was.

Azad spoke much more than Grant did. He took pleasure in rephrasing each distinct memory into many different ways, stories and metaphors and lectures and poems. He was, he said, trying to reproduce the structure of color as used in visual art, so that their hueless world might at least contain something that danced as hues once had. Whatever his intent, the result was a web of association linking even the most mundane of remembered events to a great number of highly memorable phrases, fancies, and jokes. Minor milestones in the career path of a translator became deeds of Prometheus or Lucifer, and a security guard became a bloodlike tentacle.

By the second time he and Azad had seen the full moon together, there were no more true memories left, only words. Grant had brought up this very topic at the time, as the two of them sat on the carpet by the living room windows, moongazing. It felt almost freeing, they agreed. To be constrained by their own telling of their own story, and nothing else. It was one of the last conversations that touched on their situation as such. Then the crash took hold fully, and there was just grey moonlit stucco and grey moonlit carpet.

Grant knows how to wait, because the truth is, for most of his adult life he’s been a working-class stiff paid to pace back and forth in a building. Call this guy a tentacle or a white blood cell or a jerboa or whatever you please. It makes no difference to the guy. He’s a warm body in a sort of official-looking outfit, and that’s all they need. If the warm body needs to have a mind and a self in it, too, that’s only because the robots aren’t good enough yet.

Something is pulling Grant away from his thoughts. The plastic world wants some little thing from him. The plastic man in the camo is asking him something. Report on his activities. For today’s squadron meeting. He remembers where he is, sitting in a fake wizard chair in a fake wizard classroom in the glorious leader’s Disneyland. Yes, yes, all as expected. He says some words in the jargon he has learned will satisfy the plastic man. The jargon sounds like dialogue from some embarrassing Chester Chrestomath fanfic that rewrites the whole thing as sci-fi. Saying this shit with a straight face humiliates Grant a little, and still does, despite time and familiarity. But the shit does the job. The camo man has a satisfied expression. End of digression. Back to the A plot.

Grant knows how to wait. Even after the working-class stiff vaulted abruptly into a managerial role—as a sheer accident, due to his familiarity with the facility, which was now the toppest of top secret—that job, too, turned out to be mostly waiting. He managed a team of warm bodies who waited, and nothing worthy of their involvement ever happened, not until the alien shit really hit the fan. So he watched them wait, and waited.

Since he knows how to wait, he knows to ignore the impulse to check the time. That’s a rookie mistake. He knows this so well that he’s already checked the time and it’s eleven in the morning. Four plastic hours under his belt . . . and eleven to go. When has he been this weak? As a child, maybe, when Christmas was near. As an adult, well, he did stay up until the early morning that one time, to catch the global release of Metallobionic Operations IV, scheduled naturally enough for 6 PM Tokyo time. The plot twists in MO4 were not nearly as dope as pre-release hype and the fanboy hivemind had implied, but at least he was among the first to know. And the gameplay was solid.

He’s uncomfortably aware of the fake wizard room around him. Back when he was paid to wait, he had learned a way of drawing out his thoughts and prolonging his time away from the brute reality of the senses, which contained just the same facility walls spammed over and over, back and forth. Over time, he learned how to swim among idle thoughts, stirring them up just enough to be interesting, but not enough to be alarming and jolt him out of the stream.

Someone who has never had to be the working-stiff warm-body might, grasping for conversational handholds, refer to this as a “meditative state.” Several had. You can call the guy who is paid to walk in a circle a lot of different things. It makes no difference to the guy.

Azad had it worse, didn’t he? Grant has thought about this a lot. Unlike Azad, Grant came to the Mooncrash prepared, already used to walls and walls and walls and nothing. This is his lot in life. If only these walls looked real, and not like Disney fakes, this all would be just another job.

He wonders what the blue girl’s whole deal is. He’s wondered this a lot. Not gonna learn anything new this time. The blue girl always looks pissed off, and she was supposed to be a big deal somehow, at one point. The glorious leader really wanted to have this other girl, and he told the blue girl to abduct the other girl from the crash she was in. The blue girl did the job. Then Azad came and went, and took the other girl with him. The blue girl used to talk a lot, but she’s been more quiet since Azad came and went. Even more pissed-off, maybe.

She always has that foofy blue dress on. It’s got all these frills and other bells and whistles Grant doesn’t know the name of, and it has this shape like a giant cone that’s clearly meant more for walking than for sitting, and when she sits down it always gets bunched up around her in some awkward asymmetrical shape.

The blue always reminds him that he ought to be thankful for the ability to see bright colors again. He once believed he would never see bright blue again, in his whole life. Grant thinks about this a lot, but he never quite feels thankful.

The blue girl’s in the Berenstein Brigade too, and that reminds him of some other idle fixations. Why was the Mooncrash only four years? When it was supposed to be the “coldest” crash, and the colder a crash is, the more time takes place inside for every second outside? This crash here, at a normal “temperature,” has eleven years of history inside spanning from the invasion to the present, and the cooler ones are even longer. Only four subjective years passed for him and Azad, in a crash where the usual calculations would predict decades.

“It might have been rebased” is the answer he’s gotten, over and over, but Grant’s education has not progressed enough for this concept to fully penetrate his thick skull.

He probably shouldn’t be thinking about this. Questions like this are what the Berenstein Brigade is all about. At the appointed time, in just under eleven hours, he can ask his dumb crackpot questions one more time, and the biggest-brained crackpots in all of Disneyland will give him their too-adoring ears, and try again to answer.

What is the Berenstein Brigade, you ask? It’s a marriage between two types of Disneyland dissidents. It’s where the desperate meet the desperately bored, and they scratch each other’s itches.

Ask yourself another question: what is the Academy, in its current state? It’s an alien prison shaped like a wizard fanfic in which Hector Stein’s pseudo-paramilitary group has recently set up camp. (Does the fake wizard country have a fake wizard equivalent of the Third Amendment, Grant wonders? Not that it would have mattered.) What’s more, Hector Stein is a known entity to the wizard-prison’s inmates, in a bad way—they know him as a legendary, terrifying hardass. And if that weren’t enough, Stein’s first action upon barging back into the place was to halfway overwrite its entire history on an ontological level.

Right now, if you stroll the halls of the wiz-prison, you’ll see people from at least three walks of life:

1. “Real people, occupier subtype” (e.g. Stein, Marika, Tyler)
   

   Recent transplants from Stein’s asteroid base, previously imprisoned in other crashes, later brought to the asteroid by Stein’s people, and now brought here by Stein.

   The friendly faces in this category include Wolf Squadron (musclehead psychos and wannabe-musclehead wannabe-psychos), Whisper Squadron (just plain psychos), and Angel Squadron (literal evil space aliens, but don’t worry, they’re also traitors). And, more to the point, the stress-addled three-sigma supergeniuses of Einstein and Blackhat Squadrons.

   Go back two months, and you’d find the occupiers full of giddy arrogance. A month ago, Azad and his shade came, and broke their illusions of a safe stronghold with walls that meant something. Twenty-four hours after that, they had learned of their glorious leader’s response to the crisis. He had holed himself up in his room without explanation, left the ill-prepared Ells in charge, and created a command vacuum.

   They’re afraid, and they’re restless.
   
   

2. “Real people, inmate subtype” (e.g. Cordelia, Stein during his first reign as headmaster)
   

   People who were imprisoned in this crash, living the wizard-fanfic dream, until Stein arrived and pressed them into service. And Grant, who came from the Mooncrash but fits this category better than the others.

   On top of all the rest of it, these guys are understandably reeling from the revelation that their entire lives have been an elaborate illusion, their identities the stuff of someone else’s fanfic. Some of them are holding up pretty well, all things considered. Some of them aren’t.

   
   
3. “Fictional people” (e.g. Lucifer, Lilith, Chester)
   
   Canonical fixtures of the Chester Chrestomath series, molded out of crash material and given conscious life for the amusement and distraction of the inmates. Apart from the Ells, who knew all along but wouldn’t tell, these poor souls must now grapple with the fact that they never properly “existed” in the first place. Also, that they all look like famous movie actors, except much uglier.
   
   To all appearances, most of them are taking it uncannily well. There must be something about being fictional that makes things different, Grant figures.
   
   

Many strains of alienation have grown in this unstable petri dish. The Berenstein Brigade was formed when one kind of alienation saw another and recognized a mate, or at least an enabler.

On one side, you’ve got Blackhats and Einsteins from category 1, their minds overclocked for extreme math/computer proficiency and underdeveloped along various other dimensions. No longer driven to exhaustion by Stein, and in need of something suitably cosmic to occupy their spare cycles.

On the other, you’ve got people from categories 2 and 3 who have taken the whole “life is an illusion” thing a little too much to heart, and have started wondering what else might be an illusion. Or which illusions might be real after all. They’ve stopped believing in one kind of magic, and started believing in all the others.

Hence, the Berenstein Brigade. A clandestine discussion group about Time, Space, the Cosmos, Parallel Dimensions, The People Who Really Control Everything, Time Travelers, God, Double Agents, the Holy Grail, The Gods (plural), Triple Agents, Magic (the real kind), and ESP, among other things. Where mentally undernourished Blackhats and Einsteins amuse themselves by entertaining the sad convictions of the paranoid. Do they have a secret handshake? Hell yes they do.

Why was the Mooncrash only four years long? Where is Azad? Does my life even have a point anymore? Ten hours till Santa comes.

 

---

 

Grant gets there half an hour early. In the meantime, he reads a novel. He’s been plodding through the overlong oeuvre of this guy H.G. Wells, one of the authors featured on the bookshelf in that room where Azad had gone, when he came to the crash. It’s not like Grant really believes there’s some sort of clue to Azad’s whereabouts in the contents of one of the books. But he doesn’t not believe it, exactly, and anyway, he has little else to do.

This Wells book isn’t very good. Most of them aren’t.

One by one, the room around him fills with Berenstein believers.

Seated on the floor over by one window is Chester Chrestomath himself, sipping a craft beer and reading Chester Chrestomath and the Celestial Orb.

Of course Chester would be a Berenstein. The Chester of this crash is decidedly edgier than the original, and probably headed in a bad direction. A rare example of real failure to cope among category 3, the fictional.

He’s an orphan, just like his book template. In the books, the parental void in Chester’s life had been filled, ably and touchingly, by the Ells. This is where the two Chesters diverge—for the Ells of this crash, try as they might, make poor parents. Their shoulders creak under responsibilities their book counterparts never knew. The Ells of the story never had to deal with Stein, with crashes, with . . . all of this.

Chester’s hair has grown long and winsomely shaggy, and he’s adopted an aimless stoner affect with little precedent in the righteous boy hero of the books. The beer is an ever-present accessory. Word on the street says the Blackhats have introduced the kid to acid, cocaine, and—worst of all—the kind of shitty music people listen to at raves.

The blue girl sits down next to Grant. She sits next to him in the Wolf Squadron meetings, too. She looks pissed off as always.

The school bells toll ten. A year ago, this would have meant curfew had begun, and wizard children would have gone off to untroubled sleep in their innocent beds.

“All right, fuckheads,” says Marika, in full flippant majesty at the front of the room.

She can be way more imposing than you’d expect from someone of such small stature, in such a stupid hat. The candlelight is bright enough to see by, but dark enough to be appropriately ominous. An empty blackboard frames and dwarfs her pointy little form.

“I hope none of you came out expecting to have fun, ’cause tonight we’re all business. If you’ve made it into this room you’ve probably heard about the fucked-up stuff we’ve been seeing in the data this past week. I’m not gonna bore you with the nuances of passive spinor temp readings, but long story short, we’re all probably fucked. Like, soon.

“Again, if you’re in this room, you knew that already. You knew it a month ago. Or six months ago.

“The time was coming, right? What I’m saying is, maybe the time has come. Or will tomorrow. Or next Thursday. Tomorrow is more likely than next Thursday, actually. The spinor fields are, uh. They’re already not good. And they’re growing exponentially as we speak.

“But what are we, in this room? We’re a bunch of crazy preppers, right? And when it comes, we come prepared. We’ve been preparing this whole time. And the knowledge we’re gonna lay down for you tonight, well, uh, it’ll be pretty basic to some of you, and then to others, it’ll be dry and boring and hard like real school again. Just trust me. This is prep. If you don’t know this, you fucking should.”

As it happens, Grant has not heard about the fucked-up stuff they’ve been seeing in the data. Behind the class, as usual. Grant thinks of the goopball with the old man voice, chiding him. He feels oddly wistful. Does that funny little guy still exist? What do they do with themselves, anyway, when we’re not around to rant at?

Marika takes an artful puff on her vape. The candles flicker.

“Before we start, let’s get this out of the way. In one sec Aidan’s gonna give you the Einstein perspective on all this stuff. Here’s the Blackhat perspective, real quick.

“It doesn’t matter. We’re all fucked anyway. The Blackhat perspective is that we float in a void of infinite darkness, full of monsters with twenty eyes and lots of spiky parts, and right now they’re hornier than ever for some good sweet mindfucking.

“If we don’t die immediately, we’re gonna get crashed again, and harder this time. We’ve all been crashed, right? You know what it’s like. Everything’s an unknown unknown. You’re not gonna think your way out of that hole. If we, I mean, Blackhats, if we Blackhats find some way to save you, you’ll know. When it’s the right time for you to know, you’ll know. Otherwise, good fucking luck.

“But uh. That said. When they come, we come prepared, right? Leave it to a Berenstein to think their way right out of a crash. Maybe you guys can follow the white rabbit out of the hole even before we get there, if we ever get there.

“Let’s be real, we won’t.

“Uh. Anyway. Uh, with that all out of the way, here’s our agenda.

“First, Aidan has a lecture for you on fundamentals. Physics shit you really, really need to know. That’s part one. Part two, okay, in part two we hand the show over to the Ells.

“Simmer down over there. I know what you’re all thinking. But really. We here in Blackhat Squadron have been working with the Ells over the last few weeks, actually. On something very interesting. It’s so new we don’t really know what it means yet. But it might be big. Mind-expanding, for sure. Helpful when the end comes, maybe not, but then again, maybe. You guys will love it. Trust me.”

Grant looks around the room, and finds everyone else looking too. Eyes converge on a particular corner. And in that corner? Why, there they are: towering Lucifer and sturdy Lilith, still in their official, slightly gothy Academy staff outfits.

Grant knows what the rest of the room is thinking. The Ells know about the Brigade? Does this mean we’ve got a spy in our midst, or that the whole Brigade was some kind of psyop all along? Or—what if they are trustworthy? What then? The Ells, righteous zipper-lipped Friends of the Bear?

But of course they are. They’re the cool teachers. They’re your pals. They’re useless, but they’re your pals.

Marika finishes her speech with a long draw of nicotine and a theatrical release. The vapor curls in the candlelight. And then it’s Aidan’s turn.