1. “Subterranean Hikikomori Blues”

Maybe he should board up the windows, he thought.

Board them up, or black them out, or whatever it was people did with windows. He didn’t know what people did, exactly, but he knew he’d heard of it. It probably involved going to the store. Not the store across the street, but a special store for windows or boards or something. If he were a normal he would know these things.

Still, he felt it was the kind of thing people like him did, on occasion. He could ask the hive mind. Someone would know. Maybe one of these days he would get around to asking. Some day this year. Viewing his life on a yearly timescale provided a comfortable illusion of volition, hand following will following thought, as easy as that. 2015 was the year he finished version 3 of his Guide. 2016 might be the year he boards up the windows.

It was really only the balcony window that mattered. The kitchenette room had a small window above the sink, but a door separated that room from the big one where his life took place. The big room had its own windows, along each wall near the ceiling, but they never let in enough light to bother him. The problem was the balcony connected to the big room, with its glass sliding door and thin, silky-white curtains. A glowing wound.

Half the time his sleep schedule was nocturnal, and the wound did not glow, or glowed dimly. Even in the weeks when the wound glowed, he did not always notice it. When life was best, he could go days without noticing it.

When life was best, yes . . . this was why he felt a sinking feeling whenever he noticed the light. It meant that all his games and shows and feeds had failed. Life was best when he could sink into half oblivion among safe things. Things like him, with no substance or mind but what they reflected and refracted from the others. Weightless, ephemeral, meaningless, pure. The light could cut a hole through all that. It brought unwelcome reminders of the normal world, with all its heavy sagging forms, and its way of standing still in the face of his whims.

When he noticed the light, it meant his world had become boring. When he tired of gaming, he turned to his watchlist. When he tired of shows, he turned to the feeds, and to Shitspace. But Shitspace had its slow days.

And then in would come the light, and there was his room, rendered in spurious detail. His disarrayed bedsheets blossomed with folds and crannies, more unnecessary shape than a hand-drawn world would ever allow. The weight rack he never used. Old boxes that had gone dusty. Reminders related to the body often arrived at the same time. He would find himself suddenly possessed by an exotic hankering for some food other than the nutrition bars, ready to hand on his desk, which usually sustained him without friction or awareness. Instant ramen, that old temptation, would beckon from the pantry. And always, always he would notice his bladder.

In Shitspace there was a running joke about how we would not have to urinate anymore, in the future. In the imagined future that belongs to us. Which was its own sort of running joke, come to think of it.

He imagined telling April about his interest in boarding up the windows. She would not like it much, he supposed.

April was his case worker. He liked her. They shared, like a secret pact, a fundamental understanding that she could do absolutely nothing to change the deep facts of his life. With this grounding premise firmly in place, she tackled his surface woes with a winsome gusto and a ruthlessness he could appreciate. Some trivial “problem” of his, one which he had no particular interest in solving—the spells of paranoia he occasionally experienced when walking over that little hill by his apartment, for instance—would become an appealing puzzle when April got interested. Use the tools available to you as efficiently as possible, knowing there must be some accessible solution: whether or not April gamed, in her own unimaginable private life, she was a gamer at heart.

She reminded him of Hikako, the sprightly schoolgirl detective. Best show of Fall 2014, by his lights, maybe best of 2014 overall. Hikako was appreciated on Shitspace, but never enough.

His paranoia more generally was a recurring topic, when he and April met. April would engage him on the topic without prompting, her eyes a little wide and her face a little close—she never quite could hide her excitement over his case considered as a problem in pure psychiatry. He had to imagine this was a frowned-upon attitude, in her profession, but for his part, he found it endearing. She saw him as a means to her ends (a future publication, a ticket up the career ladder); he saw her as a means to his (an apartment of his own, probationary permission to venture into space); why pretend otherwise? April knew what was up. A gamer at heart, and a proper cynic of his kind. One of that mythical race, the good normals: not us, no, but they see it, they know what is up.

Anyway, April traced his brand of paranoia to a case of “mixed delusions with posttraumatic confounds.” Which (he gathered) meant that he sometimes worried about things that weren’t real, but it was hard to tell when this was happening, because he had plenty of real things to worry about, too.

For example. He would ask her, every other meeting or so, why there were flocks of shades stationed around his apartment, watching at all times. Why they followed him everywhere he went, on the rare days he went outside. Usually he would mention the obvious explanation that the Ells had sent them, to keep tabs on him. And she would fight her hardest at first, saying this sounded like a textbook delusion of persecution, that shades were everywhere in this day and age, that there were shades in her neighborhood all the time, that anyway shades are people like you and me, almost, in their own way, and if a shade wants to go to the same place you’re headed, at the same time of day, who are you to say they can’t when you can?

And yet the shades were there. Ever the detective, she had taken his invitation to follow him around the neighborhood, one day. She saw, just as he did, the identical bodies arrayed in a ring, motionless, staring at his apartment from every angle, just staring. Turn around, he told her—and she saw the shade plodding methodically ahead a block behind them. With, more often than not, backups to their left and right, prepared to take point in the event of an unexpected deviation from his usual routes.

He would press further with the obvious. April would not deny—how could she?—that the Ells had an established and malign interest in him personally. A longstanding pattern of surveillance and control. He had spent eight years of his life waiting for a weak spot to emerge in their complex, inventive obstructions, which were targeted at him alone and had no discernible purpose other than to stand in his way, foil his aims, spite him, break his spirit. None of this April denied. It was all true.

He was full of worries at all times. Sometimes they would be about the real things, other times not. It was best for everyone when he worried about the real things—best for April’s peace of mind, and for his own safety. This was another special difficulty of his case. He could never keep track of which fears he was meant to encourage, and which he was meant to dismiss.

April felt a deep sympathy for his unique challenges, as a mentally ill black man in Armorica. She wanted him to know this. Would reiterate it, sometimes, as a spurious intro or outro tacked on to some wholly unrelated line of conversation. The shoulders hunching forward in the faux-conspiratorial manner of the aggressively sympathetic. It was his least favorite of all the things April did.

He would nod, and he would silently think the words did you pity me when you saw me on the news, did you pity me when you saw thousands marching behind me, did you pity me when Management and all its spy tech couldn’t do shit to trace me down, did you fucking pity me then, huh, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and he would keep saying these words over and over inside his head until the conversation moved on.

He really did like April, though, most of the time. Let’s not lose sight of that.

He was aware of the light. The thought of boarding up the window had been a nice diversion, with a decent enough duration of action, but any thought about meatspace brought the mind ultimately back to meatspace. Here he was. Long shadows spilled from the hated balcony. The bright enemy had taken his bed, but the corner where he sat was still dark. Light meant the normals were up, out there, at jobs, on dates. Whatever it was they did, swarming the hot streets with their beatific placid faces. And then here he lurked, in the dark wet place under a rock. A squat hulking toad, slick and malodorous, speckled with dull flesh facts: the cramps and strains of computer use, a craving for salt and MSG, a tepid and joyless lust.

He simply could not handle Shitspace today. That was the cause of all of it, he realized. They were having another one of their debates, somehow, about why it was that they didn’t all just pull the trigger and move to Subspace. As though they hadn’t answered the question for themselves a hundred times. As though this were not the whole of what they were: to answer the question in this way, this stubborn spiteful recalcitrant way.

They gave up, but on their own terms, not their betters’. They chose a life as scum on the soles of the normals, the very worst of the people who might matter, rather than accepting rule and riches in some tame spammed CC-Crash, with a complement of students who would never know the potential locked within, and some middle-of-the-road, cut-and-paste Ells in charge, instead of a strong, firm, inspiring, dominant headmaster.

He just plain could not handle Shitspace when it got like this. Not like they would ever really do it, of course. A marginal few might take the plunge, yes, and never be heard from again. But the proposed dissolution of Shitspace, its whole teeming userbase jumping ship en masse, no, never.

Still, even in hypothetical form, the very thought repelled him. For one thing, entry to Subspace was forbidden by the terms of his sentence. An exodus of the proposed magnitude would leave him simply alone. But even then? If he did have the choice? Hell no. He had his pride. Better an unseen nothing, inert under a rock, than an emitter of waste products, known and tracked and indexed and cleaned up after. He would never give the vile Grant and Cordelia that pleasure.

A fleeting anxiety gripped him, and passed. Everything was perfectly fine. The rendezvous was scheduled for tomorrow, not today. He hadn’t missed it.

Tomorrow he would meet with one of his moles in the security detail of the False President of Armorica. Not that it mattered. He was pretty sure by now they were feeding him false information. Probably on orders from the Ells, although he could not rule out capture by another, parallel tentacle of Management. The distinction between these two possibilities mattered in obscure ways, understood only by him and the most senior of his enemies.

He had long since become tight-lipped around his moles, and took care to slip them the occasional piece of false information. The meetings had to continue, though, to keep up the status quo. He could not afford to introduce anomalies. Management would read things into them, and move to parry some imagined blow.

The shadows were long, and the light ever so slightly dimmed, red-shifted. The one good kind of light. Something that felt like hope spurted through the neuroendocrine system of the flesh thing at its shadowed desk. It even met, at its apex, the purer hopes of the real thing he was. Stimulus and response. When the sun sets, the Moon rises—

He was open with April, almost completely. She was of course an agent of Management, transparently so, and no doubt much of what he told her got back to his enemies. She was trustworthy with the parts that mattered, though, and she could tell which parts those were. He knew this. It was a thing you felt.

It wasn’t from any concern about Management, then, that he concealed from her the deepest level of his delusion. It was simply that some things were not of her world. He had his pride, still. There was one thing that belonged only to him and to his truest confidante. His only true confidante. Let him have his game of pretend. Let him feel like the Hector Stein who was Hector Stein, just in this one way, along this one restrained channel, once a month or so, in the privacy of his own home.

Hector Stein—the man, the legend—always had a secret beyond secrets, ready to whip out at the last of the last moments, when all really seemed lost. Find it in your heart to let poor, oppressed Hector have one of those, too, of his very own. Don’t worry, it’ll be a dud. A nonfunctional fake. Poor Hector suffers from delusions, you know.

Was it tomorrow that he was scheduled to rendezvous with the mole? Or was there no schedule, and no mole, and no hard core of the Stein’s Armorica Committee still loyal after everything? There were various layers behind the appearances of things. Peer under one layer and you uncover another one beneath it, and others still at its edges, overlapping, interleaving. Significant findings in one frame of reference would sometimes point laterally, at phenomena from another frame entirely.

The whole picture could not be held in mind all at once. It simply didn’t cohere. From day to day he would shift his balance, emphasizing one set of frames and then another. If he got lucky on a given day, he’d pick the parts that corresponded to elements of reality, and then April would look happy, and say he was making progress.

It was a crapshoot. There was no way to tell the pieces that were meant to be real from the other ones—they looked the same, as far as he could see. The stories that made April happy had no distinguishing aura of good sense. They left his critical faculties unsatisfied. They were as full of gaps as any of his stories—no, more so. Anyway, did April even ask for the same “reality” every time, or did she shift the ground underneath him, to confuse and demoralize him? He had his suspicions. It would be a natural tactic for Management to use. One he could imagine using himself, in their shoes.

He only wanted to be left alone. Hector Stein had grown beyond his old self-obsession. If only Management could do the same. He had a good run. Let him retire. But no, Management must run its restless fingers over the myriad details of the Hector Stein situation, prying and fiddling and pondering, with no rest in sight.

What could they possibly expect to find? He played computer games, he ran a feed that reviewed and ranked mass-produced cartoons, he argued with losers about consumer goods, he maintained Shitspace’s most well-trafficked Guide to PSCs for Version Lock Evasion . . . that last one was a crime, but the very tamest, and everybody did it and everybody knew. They got Capone for tax evasion, not jaywalking.

Look, Management, there’s nothing here. There are no moles or loyalists, or maybe there are, but they don’t matter, I would ignore them if only you would let me.

Spies were the worst. Spies and hackers and everyone of their ilk. Scrawny geeks who could not command respect fairly and honestly, by the power of their character, and instead built an impenetrable shield for themselves, covered all over in spiraling words, you must respect me because I know what you don’t and if you only knew you’d respect me but I can’t let you know and if you knew why I can’t let you know then you’d . . .

They were all the same. He hated the FBI only as much as he hated that smug little girl who told him she could stop them. No, he hated her more. She never got it, did she? The weight, the dignity of the shoes he had asked her to fill. He gave her his trust, he gave her a great honor, and she hadn’t even understood it, much less lived up to it.

The sniggering useless bitch haunted him still. She wouldn’t leave. Management confused her with him. It thought he was still spinning her pointless webs. Smitten, obsessive, it imagined its own webs twisting around hers, coiling, clinging. It’s what spies did. A substitute for getting laid, probably.

He noticed the light. The figurines on his desk cast shadows three times their height. Plastic skin turned ruddy. The rainbow of hair lost its definition, yielding to a single three-note melody, gold then blood then night.

Only Izumi-chan still looked herself. Her hair already black by nature. He could always rely on Izumi-chan. Faithful Izumi-chan, so devious, so merciless, yet faithful, pure. The best character in existence, according to his published tier list.

He liked it when April would tease him about the figurines. It was honest. Why pretend she would ever spend time with someone like him, if not ordered to? He was scum on a normal’s sole, alien without being intriguing, faintly repugnant but comfortably harmless. He knew and April knew.

Much as he liked it, he could never allow April to linger too long on the topic of the figurines. It was harmless in itself, but it lived next door to danger. If they spoke too long about the figurines, they would have to talk about Izumi-chan, and then April would pry and pry, and he would be unable to protect the deepest place from her eyes any longer.

He only wanted to be left alone, with some private things left, like any other man. It was the rest of the world that was still addicted to Hector Stein. Refusing to face reality, they begged and begged: Hector Stein must be more than a man, or else less than a man. He cannot be just a man. He must be unmasked, he must be brought down to earth, we must elevate him to heaven so we can bring him back down again.

Has the time come, they asked, to re-evaluate the Stein’s Armorica Committee? The time had always come. They asked themselves what Stein meant, stood for and achieved—in the end, in the last analysis, when all is said and done. They had always reached the last analysis, and would never reach the end.

He told April about all the people who never felt like they had a place in Armorica until they met him. He told her (because it was true) that the Stein’s Armorica Committee numbered tens of thousands at its peak, spanning from its hard core in the underclass to its operatives in the highest places, with his own moral force coursing through the whole.

April listened patiently, with a slightly pinched expression, and then said: Hector, have we talked before about grandiosity? You can learn to control thoughts like these, even when they’re happening. Some techniques are very effective.

The world deflated him, only to re-inflate him immediately after, the better to deflate him again.

You make it sound like you were a cult leader, April would giggle, and he would laugh with her, saying, since when did you ever meet a cult leader who was into anime?

 

---

 

“Hector-kun~”

A voice called to him from the balcony.

The sun sets, the Moon rises. The forbidden things that twilight can hide. The hope, the craving, the center, the deepest place.

The glass door slid open. He never did figure out how she managed to open it from the outside, given that it had a lock. She had her ways with things.

She was there in the threshold, or she had already entered the room, or they were already together on his bed. These moments tended to blur together. The mind is an efficient device and does not retain irrelevant information.

“How are you, Moon?”

“I am unobstructed,” said the girl. He was flat on his back. She crouched over him, looking fascinated.

“Are you hungry?”

“I cannot tell, Hector-kun. When I think upon my belly, I can discern no unfilled void. When I think upon ramen, however, I find the image pleasant to hold in mind, and persistent in its grip. I ask the specter of ramen to leave me alone with Hector-kun, and yet it remains. I direct my attention to Hector-kun’s face and still I see noodles proffering their tender bodies.”

In the kitchenette room, as they waited for the microwave to finish, he surveyed her. She wore her white dress, the one that was originally white, anyway. The dress was torn in places, near the shoulders and around the hem. When Moon’s clothes tore, she would carefully extend the damage with scissors, creating some new design, jagged but purposeful. He had never seen her fully give up on an article of clothing, though it must have happened.

Her posture never failed to intrigue. Moon seemed to abhor simple forms and right angles—aesthetically, physiologically, morally, or all three. She folded herself into any available space, and stood or sat with a jaunty tilt whenever balance permitted it. On her last visit, she had perched on the kitchen counter like a gargoyle. This time she merely reclined against it, but in her own way, one leg bent to rest on the drawers, the other flat on the floor, one arm reaching way out with its fingers idly drumming the counter surface, the other up in her hair where it pulled at some knot or itch.

She was not a native to the corporeal world. To her all pleasures were new, raw, immediate. Hector knew this. It was a thing you felt.

“Have you seen anything new?”, he asked, after a pause of some time. They were probably on the bed again.

“Nothing is ever new!” Moon said. She enjoyed this routine.

“Things happen, Moon. Time passes.”

“I will grant you some fraction of that,” Moon said, “and we need not involve ourselves in another discussion of the particular fraction. We understand one another, bicker as we might over the language. Oh, but it is fun to bicker over language! I love it so, but then we differ in places, alas.”

“Your records, they . . . contain more events than they did, when we last met?”

“I am unobstructed. When relevant information enters my awareness which is not yet reflected in my notes, I take steps to remedy the gap.”

“Have you been happy, Moon?”

“I have experienced at least one variety of delight or satisfaction on each day, most commonly several of each. I admit I still do not pay nearly enough attention to these incidentals. I ought to know by now how they matter so, to my Hector-kun, if not to me.”

“I don’t just want you to look happy to me. I want you to have what matters to you, whether I understand it yet or not.”

He meant this, simply and sincerely. It was not an emotional noise from his soundboard. With her, he could set the soundboard aside. He opened all of himself to her, even the parts of Hector Stein which would be unthinkable for Hector Stein.

“My appointed mission fulfills me wholly. I am filled whole by it, and filled even further, more than whole, when I consider its purpose. It is a joy to be of service to you, my Hector-kun.”

“Grant hasn’t given you any more trouble?”

“Oh, Hector-kun, it is so sweet”—she cooed, and poked his cheek—“how you worry your little head over trivia! You will see in time how there is no need to worry. The whole sky is already open for us, waiting.

“You grow so afraid, poor Hector-kun, when you see a minor piece advancing on the board. You and I cannot be captured, for we are not pieces. We play the game.

“Grant has been dealt with. There will be a partial lacuna, I admit, and some information will forever be lost. Much information is lost, always. I am only one girl, and the cosmos flutters with information. Grant set his pebble atop the mountain of loss. My mission continues. I am unobstructed.”

“I wish I had your confidence,” he said.

She smiled silently. Her limbs uncoiled and refolded.

“I’m scared, Moon. I’m tired and I’m scared. The shades are getting to me. What do they fucking want? What could I have to hide? Except you. There is nothing they could be watching except your visits to this apartment.”

Moon rolled her eyes. She made a dramatic performance out of this, with a little toss of the hair, the head turned to the ceiling, the eyes lolling backward and then falling, finding him again, pinning him. She peered in condescension.

“Humor me. Were they there when you came in? How did they respond when you approached? Give me details.”

She grinned, and sang tunelessly:

“Shades can’t see me~ shades can’t see me~”

“I wish I could believe you,” he said.

He realized then that he had not yet asked the question.

“When will it happen?”

He asked the question every time. His voice was hungry.

“I am not yet in contact with the others, and I know nothing more than what I was given at the time of my assignment. Hector-kun’s worldline intersects the moment of Hector-kun’s destiny at a point still in the future of that worldline, and not known to my records.”

The conversation stuttered like a disturbed flame. Their limbs coiled and uncoiled. With her all pleasures were new, raw, immediate.

“. . . when it happens . . .” he muttered, at some point.

He could feel her breath on his ear as she whispered.

“The forces of fate converge upon Hector-kun, to coronate him. With a kiss, I place a laurel wreath atop his head. The whole sky spreads before us, and all destinations are equally open. Where we go, a matter of Hector-kun’s will alone.”

“Will I have my people again? Not the ones who stabbed me in the back. But I need people. I can lead them.

“You know I’m not like you, Moon. I’m not magic. I don’t know anything other people don’t, I can’t do anything other people can’t. I just look big and talk big and I’ve got a big vision. That’s nothing without the people.”

She was so small, and still he felt himself surrounded by her. The body above him was so light, and still he could not move. She wrapped him in her cocoon.

“Not the ones who stabbed you in the back,” she teased. “Hmm.” She pretended to mull something over. There was sarcasm in the smile.

So devious, so merciless, yet faithful, pure.

“The next ones will be different, I presume? One does wonder what will make the difference. Perhaps my Hector-kun has matured, in his exile? Has he lost his famous aptitude for picking the wrong friends? A new Hector-kun, all grown up . . . will he still have patience, one wonders, for his poor, old, oldest little friend Moon?”

“I don’t know how to make people trust me. I never did. I don’t now. If you . . . I need help. Help me, Moon. Please.”

She was never still. Her face had gone off somewhere he could not see. She was a voice, and a hand on his cheek.

“Mine is a harsh medicine. You see, Hector-kun, there is a final truth, about ‘people.’ Life has taught it to me. It has begun its lessons for you, too, but the moral has not yet stuck.”

“You don’t understand. You don’t need people the way the rest of us do. You don’t have any other friends, and somehow it’s fine. You don’t have a church, a country, any—”

The cocoon collapsed. Angles folded and receded. She was hurt and it was his doing.

“I’m sorry.”

Even before he said it, he saw her kind eyes, her gentle smile. As though her spirit could ever really leave him. She was by his side always, in every instant, suffusing and supporting.

“You are young, Hector-kun. You will understand when you are older.”

They coiled and twined. He was king and plaything. A love like a mother’s protected him. His reign would span the earth. Kingdoms and fiefdoms readied themselves, their magistrates bustling.

As they moved she whispered things that he didn’t quite understand. She sang her quiet, rustling songs.

“Open sky~ Nowhere to hide~”

He did not always hear all of the words. He would go to another place. She understood.

He was in the other place for a long time, and then she said something that brought him back.

“All the same, they’re all the same . . . bilaterals, anomalings, it doesn’t matter . . .”

Something shifted in him, and the gears began to turn. A different frame of reference came online. Behind the girl and the bed and the room, he saw the layers of hidden structure. Hidden, but not to him.

“This isn’t working. We need to rebase again. Which clients are prepared? I need names. I need a timeline. We are going to do it in the next thirty minutes. Tell me how the next thirty minutes are going to happen, and then make them happen.”

“Silly Hector-kun, you’re all confused again! Your head has gotten itself lost in the past. Come back to the present, dear. You will find you like the present. It contains me.”

A strange argument. Wasn’t she by his side, always, in every instant?

“Bilaterals, anomalings,” he said, deflated. Magic words. He glimpsed their power dimly, and knew it was not for him.

“You will understand,” Moon said, “when you are older.” It was irresistible, this schoolmistress side of her, with its smug pronouncing voice.

 

---

 

When at last they found their bodies no longer willing, they lay side by side, hands enmeshed, and considered their next move.

“Shall we enumerate the people we loathe, and categorize their many flaws? It might,” Moon reflected, “be our second favorite pastime.”

“I’m feeling warm tonight, Moon. I don’t feel any hate.”

“I have been soft with sweet Hector-kun, and made him tame. Keep the fangs, dear, you will need them later. Will it be our third favorite pastime, then?”

They made popcorn in the microwave. Moon was never at a loss for words, when they watched anime together. She was full of opinions. With a little more grounding in the classics, she could write a feed as good as any in Shitspace.

In times like these, on nights like these, Hector Stein’s interregnum could feel almost tolerable.