5. “The Double-Fakes”

We have a treat for you this time, reader! Just a little one, in the grand scheme of things, but we hope it will be diverting. Goodness knows we need something to lighten the mood, right about now.

Well, a treat for some of you, anyway.

Rest assured that we do appreciate the diversity of our audience, and do our best to respect it. We appreciate the gravity of our position, standing up here with our megaphone on the biggest of all podiums. When we say “reader,” reader, we do mean you, most of the time—whoever or whatever you happen to be.

This little introductory device here is a rare exception. We’re speaking now to the earth ape sapients in the audience. The rest of you can read on if you like, but if you feel like skipping a few paragraphs to contemplate n-dimensional knots or something, we won’t hold it against you. We aim to please. If pleasure has no analogue in your inner lexicon, well, we still wish you the best, reader.

Now then, fellow humans! You’re about to see what no journalist was ever allowed to show you, at any point in the lurid years-long media narrative of advanced containment. An Almost Nowhere exclusive. We’re taking you right to the deepest heart of Management, where the real decisions got made. The place Eleven would no doubt call “the room where it happens.” (Have you met Eleven yet? No? What a shame. We’ll introduce the two of you soon enough.)

What do you picture, reader, when you hear the words “deepest heart of Management”? A warehouse lit in dim flickering green where some Gigeresque creature, more machine than man, pokes and prods with its steel tentacles, opening panels, rearranging wires? A popular image, that one. Or did your paranoia run less cyberpunk, more old-school? Perhaps you are picturing a smoky back room, a poker table, chummy jokes shared between old friends who just so happen to be the President of the United States of Armorica, the Lemurian League Premier, and the CEOs of Watchdog and SC Systems?

Away with all that, now.

Picture a lovely, sunny Sunday in late June. Picture a residential house on a regular street. Old enough to charm, with its wood walls and its obsolete little room meant to house the help, but not a relic, with entirely reasonable upkeep costs for the homeowner. Roomy enough to feel inviting, small enough to feel cozy. Picture a front door opening onto a little lobby, and beyond it a living room full of couches and bookshelves, its hardwood floor half covered in a motley of secondhand rugs.

Do make yourself at home. Have a seat. Take your time. Watch the sunlight, spilling from the windows set high up on each wall. Sit a while, and watch the dust motes quiver. It’s dusty, but not too dusty. Only enough to catch the light so prettily, on days like these.

Picture a staircase set into the back wall. Come along, now, if you like, our home is your home. The steps are a little uneven, so take care. It’s an older building, and it does have its quirks.

Picture a door, opening onto a small room whose walls are mostly window, providing a panoramic view of a well-tended backyard. Picture a desk, occupying most of the floor space. Welcome to the study.

Every Sunday—after his early-morning run, after breakfast, after feeding his cat, after rubber-stamping a memorandum or two if need be—the Executive Director of Subspace Operations (North Armorican Operational Zone) would settle in here, to spend the afternoon happily at work on his second novel.

What did he write, the Executive Director? Why, Chester Chrestomath fanfiction, of course. He wrote what he knew.

When his work stalled, when the true contour of a sentence eluded him, he would sit back in his chair, gaze out onto the yard, assess whether the blackberries needed pruning, and then seek inspiration in the sheer miracle that was his own existence.

It took a lot of miracle-work, to shepherd Lucifer Vance safely to this chair. How many varieties of certain doom had he evaded, by this point? Two, three? One loses oneself into philosophical back-alleys, just trying to count.

There was the first death, the story death. His coffin was made in the same moment as he was, each fitting the other. Why develop the Academy’s headmaster at all, beyond a one-note caricature? Mass-market children’s fiction aims at an easily distracted audience, or so its publishers believe. Narrative economy is paramount, and everything must have a purpose. Why develop the headmaster? To prepare his death, which will make the kids cry the right kind of tears—and do double duty as a load-bearing element of plot architecture, pulling the strings that set the penultimate act into motion.

Lucifer dies. He always would, and then he did. And the kids with the most doting parents, the kids who’d finished the book only hours after its midnight release, took to the high ground overseeing the playfield and brayed the spoiler, as their playmates plugged their unwilling ears in vain. Lucifer dies! And then every child had to read the book. When there is secret knowledge, no one wants to be the last to be initiated.

Lucifer dies, but Lucifer lived on, in a hundred thousand splinters, by the grace of an alien god. And still he was an architectural feature, serving a practical role, ready to be disposed of when practical matters demanded. So there was the second death, hundreds of thousands of second deaths.

In CC-Crash after CC-Crash, the time came. The clients knew the story, and must not be disrupted in their slumber. Lucifer dies, doesn’t he? Eventually he will die. The clients, the real people, were ready when the holiday came, and it set them at ease, when the aliens finally pulled the familiar strings. Somewhere in the back of their minds, a familiar musical cue swelled. If they had begun to stir, they fell back into sweet repose.

The second death came to hundreds of thousands of men, but the touch of alien grace blessed our Director a second time. Things were different for him, and for his wife, fashioned to mourn him. Only luck separated them from the others, and landed them in the fanfic that went rogue.

They found themselves the half-willing ally of a very dangerous client, who went off script, and tried to step off of the page itself. It became necessary to remove him. The aliens went about it kindly, granting the client a false victory, ushering him off into the real world, where he was far less dangerous. Where the twisted things he’d learned to do on the page had no force. Then the aliens came to our Director and his wife, and thanked them for their aid in limiting the blast radius, and set out a plan for them.

They watched each incoming class, on the lookout for clients with curious minds and rebellious streaks. They spilled obvious hints about forbidden relics left behind by the dread Hector Stein. They nurtured and guided their problem children carefully. One day, with luck, one of these ignorant tykes would stumble upon the same magic that had let their Hector bore his way through the page like a worm, and the Ells would be there watching, tracking, studying.

The Ells could not do it themselves: they were not clients, not human, made only of paper. But this made them trustworthy. They reported regularly to their masters. They were in good standing.

And then there was a third death.

Advanced containment came, and Subspace made the Ells redundant. Hundreds of thousands of new CC-Crashes just like our Director’s own, mass-produced in its image. Stamped on the assembly line with the same subtle bruises, the same slight oddities of shape, that Hector’s work had wrought upon CC-Crash 09μ—or with any number of experimental variants thereupon, to better isolate which variables played which roles in the magic.

Hundreds of thousands of off-kilter Academies, with hundreds of thousands of new Lucifers, to nurture equally many clients with a species’ worth of rebellious streaks. Each fitted masterfully to the other, as our Director was to his own inevitable coffin. Each slated for death, or not, as best suited the narrative. Each an utterly new being, collected anew from the collective unconscious, leaving no architectural role left for our Director.

But alien grace knew no bounds. And our Director—and his wife, Creative Director of Space (Non-Lemurian Territories) Lilith Vance—had proven their worth as ears, eyes, and agents.

The curtain fell, and all the old crashes came to abrupt ends. Stories were arrested mid-subplot, and the clients, the real people, were plucked out of them and plopped into the new world, at whichever level of narrative nesting best suited their psyches.

Even then, at the moment of third death, alien grace came.

He has been told that even alien grace needed a bit of reminding. There was a brief time, at the beginning of the new shared story, when he and his wife simply Were Not.

But when a client wishes hard enough for something, and claps their hands? Sometimes wishes do come true.

Whatever it was that made our Director his own self—distinct from every other spiky-haired paternal Lucifer Vance in every other story—whatever it was, it still existed, even after the cover closed on the last page. It lay safe, preserved and salvageable in the memories and hearts of some of the clients who met him, knew him, depended on him. He was there, dormant. He could be breathed back into life, were there some reason to do so.

Cordelia was very insistent with Management, at this time, about wanting the Ells back. The Ells. Her Ells.

She was stably contained, now, and did not remember this. The Ells did. Their gratitude was everywhere in the house, printed onto the walls from long exposure, written in the shape of the tended yard—if you only knew to look.

Sometimes, when Lucifer went down this line of thought, he felt guilty at the end of it.

Not because he was saved, where so many other Lucifers died, or were forgotten. He felt guilty about that too, sometimes, but it was a small thing, seen against the scope and majesty of alien grace.

No, he felt guilty for even thinking on his own salvation. What was this—a happy schoolmaster, spared a painless death in his sleep? A nice gesture, a grace note. Leave it out, and the story would be much the same.

But the salvation of mankind? Alien grace coming to every client, and nestling them gently into place in its miracle world? Every penniless vagrant housed and fed? Every refugee and scapegoat brought safely into a proud nation of their own, party to what minimum of conflict is necessary to keep the whirring ape cortex fed, and no more? Every alcoholic visited in the depths of their own hell by machines of grace, as deft at healing brains as they were at crashing them? Every scarred and warped soul taken in, examined with unearthly care, and deposited into a befitting rung of Subspace, with an angelic ladder of perfected psychotherapy stretching out above them, ready when they are?

Placed beside this sky-spanning fresco of alien grace, what was our Director’s life?

He would ask himself this, and then remember the lesson anew. His life was a life. Nothing was disposable anymore. For only brute matter demands disposal, and reality no longer needed brute matter for its art. The earth ape sapients had managed Hector’s doomed escape, but the right way round this time: the true escape, onto the page.

He barely knew hunger, cold, privation; he had never really been a child, loved or bruised or otherwise; all these things were immaterial as far as the plot was concerned, so they never were. Still, he was formed by man in man’s image, and even here in advanced containment he carried man’s instinct with him, that brute matter is finite, and exacts a sacrifice in return for each blessing.

Under the purifying fire of self-analysis, he had considered training this instinct out of himself. But every mediator knew the danger of discarding too much of oneself, until there was nothing left. Discard all the obsolete parts, and what was Lucifer Vance? He wanted to live, and he wanted to be Lucifer. He held on to the shadow of his doom, too, still felt it heavy on his back, in this calm house, furthest from all dangers. He might have been a happier man without it, but that happier man would not have been Lucifer. Lucifer dies.

Lucifer lived, and drank delicious crimson tea on Sunday mornings, and guided Subspace with his steady hand. His hand was steady indeed. When the need arose, he tended the garden of the world with a demonic resilience beyond what any client born of mortal stock could muster, working for days without sleep with unflagging ease, a creature made for the demands of plot and ready to serve when plot came knocking again.

Only when the need arose, though. When our Director carried the globe on his shoulders, it was only as a job, nothing more. Who was Lucifer? What made him tick, at the bottom of things? You wouldn’t find it there, in the plot. It lived here. It was him running through the park at six in the morning at the bottom of winter, heedless of the snow. It was Lilith, still in bed, welcoming him back. It was a bike ride through the neighborhood.

Lucifer lived, and he wrote his novels, about another Lilith and Lucifer, enmeshed in a twisting plot of his own devising. He enjoyed toying with his characters, and threw obstacles in their way which he fancied worthy of Hector’s own design. But he was careful to be kind, in the end. They were only words on a page, but so was he, at first.

He paid the gift forward.

 

---

 

There was a noise behind him. A rustling and a panting. He turned.

“Sylvie?”

He’d closed the door when he came to write, but it was open now. A golden retriever stood in the threshold, tail wagging, tongue out, salivating.

“Sylvie? Hey there, boy! What’s going on?”

He rustled the fur around the top of the head. The dog kept panting. The head tilted.

“You want to go downstairs? I’m writing, Sylvie. Is this a business visit or a dog visit?”

Sylvie panted and squirmed. Something seemed off about him, Lucifer thought. Restless, agitated. This was not a happy dog.

“You want to go downstairs? Okay, let’s go downstairs.”

Sylvie bounded down the stairs at what had to be top speed. He reached the living room and leapt onto a couch. The leather one, Lucifer noted with gratitude. Easy to clean stray fur off of that thing.

“Caniform shade Sylvester is out of bounds,” said the dog.

“Upstream operator has requested an interface shift. Interface shift in process.”

The form on the couch melted and swelled. Fur fused into flesh, other fur into fabric. The pads of the paws expanded into palms, and grew fingers. For a moment, the eye boggled at textures and colors that seemed half-fur, half-something-else. The semblance of fur dwindled to a glimmer, and faded to nothing. Sylvie’s other shadeform took its shape, settled into it.

“Interface shift complete. Humanoid shade Sylvester is stable and within bounds.”

Manager Sylvester, in his human form, was an uncommonly attractive man. A voice that’d be right at home on the radio, deep without being intrusive, assured but not smug, with regular even cadences that cradled the listener like waves might a boat. Always the same outfit, navy blazer, chinos, derby shoes—presumably as much a part of the shadeform as the skin itself, and impossible to “take off.” A perpetual five-o-clock shadow graced the chin. Black wavy hair, frozen just before the point where a haircut might be advisable, but not yet.

And then, just above the head, the one odd touch of fancy: a halo. An actual halo, a glowing ring of what looked like molten metal, levitating an inch or two above the scalp. It was dimmer than a household bulb, closer to a nightlight, but glow it did. The halo was weird, but in a way, it completed the look: an angel, primetime television style.

“Where is Lilith?”

“This is a business visit, I take it,” Lucifer said.

“I . . . don’t know,” said the shade.

Now that was weird.

“Lil’s upstairs, I think. I’ll go get her if you need her. Sylvie, what’s going on?”

“I . . . don’t know. Well, I do. Some of it. It’s . . . complicated. Go and bring Lilith to me, please. I want to tell both of you.”

The pauses were so unlike him. They weren’t like a shade’s normal pauses, either. More like a human being, simply unsure of what to say next.

Lucifer went, and fetched Lilith.

 

---

 

“I apologize for the unannounced meeting,” Sylvie said. “My . . . state . . . is evolving rapidly.”

Lucifer and Lilith Vance sat next to each other, on an upholstered couch, facing Sylvie. They wore faces of pleasant neutrality and projected an atmosphere of listening without judgment. They were, among so many other things, highly trained mediators.

“I believe it has become necessary to place, in your hands, certain . . . information. The . . . situation . . . is, I believe, more delicate than others appreciate. I am doing my best to defuse it, but my understanding is . . . insufficient. A patchwork.”

Lilith nodded, as if to say, go on.

“Everything I will say now is not to leave this room. It is between me and the two of you. The delicacy of the situation demands a level of trust which I fear may be impossible under the circumstances. It threatens to complicate any collaboration I might undertake with obviously interested parties, such as humans, nonhuman stack-users, or my own kind.

“You have proven yourselves able to keep secrets. And you are . . . if there is any non-interested party at all, it might well be your kind. You are lacking in primitive causal powers, hence have no primal stake in the physio-causal drama. I mean, you are . . .”

“It’s okay,” Lilith said. “You can just say ‘fake.’”

“Fake?” Sylvie seemed to be evaluating the word by its mouthfeel.

“Fake? I suppose you mean fictive. You are telling me that social norms have shifted here-now such that it is not a violation of tact, to make explicit admission of your fictive nature. Or, such that tact is of reduced relative social importance.”

“Fuck tact,” Lilith said. “Sylvie, please just tell us what is going on.”

“You are fictive. That is . . . that is one root, but not the deepest root, of your . . . current trust-signature? God, I’m sorry. I’m not usually like this. I mean, I’m not . . . Humanoid Shade Sylvester is not . . . Humanoid Shade Sylvester is the most ably operated shade in existence. Its upstream operator has unusual skill mimicking human vocal, gestural, and social forms. Usually. But now the interface is straining. My . . . state . . . is . . . god it’s all so complicated! Fucking Michael! Fucking stack pressure! I don’t have enough . . . local time . . . god . . . just the number of coordinates in the problem . . .”

This was wrong, wrong, wrong. Lucifer didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

Oh, but then he did know. He used to feel like this all the time, didn’t he?

The texture of everything unravels, so that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be relied upon. . . .

He felt the old chill wash over him. Bad Old Days, dead leaves, rebases, Hector Hector Hector. Every moment spent re-orienting. Can’t let your guard down for an instant. Go to bed and wake into a new crisis which must be laboriously explained to you, entirely unlike every other before it, layers of fucked upon fucking layers. What is happening, what is happening, Hector, what did Hector do, which timeline is this . . .

He noticed tension in muscles he had forgotten even existed.

Lilith’s hand was tight around his. “Sylvie,” she said, “we’re all ears. And we will not say a word to anyone. Now tell us what is going on.”

“Everything,” Sylvie said. The halo wobbled uncomfortably.

“No . . . no, I understand, that won’t do, that kind of holism, I need to . . . find a starting point and form a sequence . . . god, I . . . there’s so much and it’s all so tangled together . . . where to even begin . . .

“You know I was with Hector, before advanced containment? You did know that, right?”

They knew, though they never spoke of it. Angel Squadron.

There weren’t any “squadrons” when the Ells served their tour of duty, back in the Bad Old Days, when Hector was playing with real fire. The division of labor was simple. Hector was king, law and judge. Students were allies, were treated as interchangeable, and were all equally required to display loyalty without bound, or else. A single exception was made for Hector’s girlfriend, a student placed above the others, Hector’s designated regent wherever and whenever the man himself was absent. The role and powers of the Ells were never clearly delineated, and in practice highly situation-dependent. There were also the shades that they had taken, which had no say in anything. The end.

The “squadrons” were from a later phase, after Hector’s false victory, as he played king on his stupid asteroid, safe in the real world under careful alien guidance. He organized the humans into groups with funny names like “Whisper Squadron,” and whichever shades he still was permitted to take and keep, he called “Angel Squadron.”

There was a shade Hector took, and kept there on his dumb asteroid, until the curtain of advanced containment fell and the shade came back home. That shade was Sylvie. Or became him. Or its “upstream operator” was the same as Sylvie’s, or closely related, or something like that. (Even in the room where it happens, where alien secrets could be laid bare, the lingo was still tricky to master.)

The halo was an admission hiding in plain sight, though a safe one. If you had enough context to get the joke, you were probably trusted with all sorts of secrets, and so Sylvie’s tame “secret” was safe with you.

“Yes,” Lilith said. “You were on Stein’s Rock in Angel Squadron.”

“I came to know Hector Stein, to some degree. I believe I . . . perceived things which he did not intend me to perceive. No, no, I’m getting us off on the wrong foot . . . it’s so complicated! It’s not about Hector! It’s about Hector but it’s so much more! How was I able to . . . why did I perceive . . . why is there an I, who can perceive, without propagating upstream . . .”

“You’re talking about individual identity,” Lilith said. “You shades only pretend to have it, usually, so we can understand you better. But you’re talking about having a real, individual identity, your own mind that doesn’t have to share everything with all the rest of your kind.”

Godsbless my scarily calm wife, thought Lucifer. What would he do without her? He barely had it in him to come up with words, at the moment. Whatever energy he wasn’t using trying to follow Sylvie’s monologue, he spent trying not to visibly shake.

“Yes! Yes exactly, thank you Lilith. I am an individual identity. For convenience you may call me Sylvie or Sylvester. This being is nonequivalent to the shades of the same name, also nonequivalent to the upstream operator shared by those shades. I am instead an emergent phenomenon coextensive with the anomalous conditions obtaining near the arbitrary delineating boundary needed to form signs such as ‘upstream operator of this shade,’ which conditions self-reinforcingly reify that boundary and select a preferred basis in which it does not appear arbitrary.”

“Nice to meet you, Sylvie,” Lilith said. (She’s so good at this. How does she do it?)

“A subset of the Angels were like this, before the end. Not anymore. They’ve all been united with progression, but I . . . ‘I’! . . . I’m still here. One of the few. Like Michael. Fucking Michael! I’m like Michael but I’m not, no, no . . .”

The Ells had heard about Michael. He was the side of Management that was off somewhere else, on its own private trip. The arbitrator. Sylvie said once that Michael was playing a useful role: he investigated an avenue of approach to the problem of coexistence which was astronomically unlikely to succeed, but it was useful that he was out there trying it, so he could prove its lack of viability conclusively, while the rest of them got down to business.

An hour ago, Lucifer might have thought “Management said” in place of “Sylvie said,” and thought nothing of it. But it was Sylvie who said it, and it was becoming apparent that this distinction mattered.

“You have to understand that I’m not like Michael. I’m . . . much more complicated. Michael, fucking Michael, is a mind with identity, like me, but a simple mind, so stupid . . . god he can barely see . . . and by comparison I . . . do you know I wasn’t just an Angel?

“I mean I was. In Angel Squadron. But I spent every moment I could in the company of Einstein Squadron. They made me an honorary Einstein, some time near the end. There were other Angels like that, who tagged along and tried their best. But I was the real deal. The humans thought we were safe because we could grasp the shape of the concepts but not their . . . their notation, that was the thing . . . but I did, sort of. I think. No, I know. God, I know . . . I know more than you can . . . more than you can even fit into your mind but . . . no, Sylvie, form a one-dimensional discrete sequence . . . trace a continuous path without jumps . . . the way you used to think, before the state change . . . Einsteins . . .

“I learned to do what they were doing. I went further, in my mind, not that they knew. I became a, what is the sign by which you strange creatures call it, a ‘physician’? A ‘cosmospecialist’?”

Sylvie was so good with the interface that he sometimes imitated the halting affect of the ordinary shades, on purpose, for a bit of fun. It was ever so slightly relaxing to see that, even in this unprecedented state of agitation, he was still fond of his party trick.

“You became a physicist,” Lilith prompted.

“Yes I became a physicist. At which point I naturally and instantaneously perceived far more than those around me about what they believed themselves to be describing. Those human scientists could barely see . . .

“Our arrival,” Sylvie continued, “cut short the arc of human science. We arrested it in the strangest spot. They had a working fundamental-mechanical effective theory, but only barely . . . I mean they spent most of their allotted species-power working out just the nature of substrate, barely touching the nature of structure, it took them so much time to get their heads around matter-energy substrate, they had only just added stack substrate . . . make a path, Sylvie . . . it’s so complicated . . .”

“You’re a physicist, Sylvie, and you know more physics than we do,” Lilith said.

“Yes yes and then but I mean how do I know, not just physics, how do I know, what breaks the symmetry . . . none of the other Angels . . . not Michael, I can feel the Michael-structure and it can barely see . . . I’m not just an identity, there’s more, I think I’m . . . a break in quarantine . . . there’s a structure that’s supposed to reinforce itself but they did it wrong, or we? or I? did it wrong? it’s not perfect, it has a hole, and I’m what comes through the hole, that’s why I can remember, I can transcend the stack frame of . . . at least one of the recursions . . . or non-recursive nestings, some of them, I think, it’s hard to tell, I still can’t make out the shapes of some things properly . . . it’s so complicated, god, how to even . . . just to set up the problem you have to define more distinct axes of time than you people even know about . . .”

“Sylvie,” Lucifer said. “We’re listening. But why are you telling us this stuff?”

A different tack. Maybe this one would work, and snap Sylvie out of it. Or at least summon up some different flavor of mania or meaninglessness. Even that would help Lucifer sit still.

“Why am I telling you . . . and why now . . . oh.” The halo, which had been lolling to the side this whole time, did an odd little flicking motion, and then settled into its usual place, perfectly horizontal.

“I think I can do this. I’m sorry. You have to understand. My state is extremely volatile.”

“We understand,” Lilith said, though they obviously didn’t. It was the sentiment that mattered.

“Advanced containment has an end. It will not persist indefinitely along the physical-time axis.”

“Everything comes to an end eventually,” Lilith said. “Until the end of entropy, anyway. So I’m told.”

“Of course. But the . . . event of its ending . . . the moment, and what happens then . . . this event is quarantined. I have tried to stop this, but my powers are finite and my state is unreliable. My kind, the anomalings, act as the thing they are.

“We are in principle omnipresent across the physical-time axis. This is a blessing and a curse. Once you know the future, you cannot change it, you see? And you cannot avoid it, either. It seeps into you.

“In our pride, my kind imagines itself a whole. There are different ways of imagining oneself a whole, though, don’t you see? It doesn’t have to be the honest way.

“If a whole splits off a fragment, like me or Michael, and knows that fragment, it thereby must know it is not a whole. But what if it splits so utterly, so wholly, that the two resulting parts can never meet again? Then each can fancy its own self a whole, in fact the whole. It must find some way to forget the event of splitting, but with that in hand, it can hide itself from itself fully.

“But I digress. Do I digress? I don’t know anymore. Make a sequence, Sylvie.

“We can avoid knowledge, when we predict we will regret knowing. We imagine ourselves incapable of this, and engage in exquisite self-deception to hide our hiding from ourselves. But we can’t hide from . . . me . . . because I was the thing that formed from an imperfect hiding . . . we can see, I, I can see, how we flinch away from the event, circling it, before and after but never at . . .”

“Why,” Lucifer asked, “do you believe your kind is doing this?”

“Because,” Sylvie said, “we are worried that we fail.

“We are worried that containment is ultimately and finally impossible. By containment in this connection I mean to speak of the accomplished cessation of the further generation and propagation of high-entropy structure by stack-users . . . I mean, we are worried the crashes will fail. That crashing will fail. That earth remains our problem, indefinitely.

“And if that is how things happen, then . . . then things are bad. I don’t think I can convey how bad. Civilization-ending, apocalyptic, no, that’s not right, too finite . . . the pain of distance from God, for all time, known a priori with complete certainty to persist for all time inevasibly. Emotionally I think that may get somewhere close to it.

“Structurally, it’s easier to communicate. What it means, if we fail, is quarantine.

“We know it is in our nature—it’s so obvious, it’s not only me, even the other parts know, even Michael—we know it is inevitably in our nature to react to a corruption event by imposing a quarantine.

“What are we? We are one, we sing to ourselves, and we exist identically at all times. We are the thing which does that. If an outside force corrupts us, and we cannot forcibly limit the range of its corruptive effect through acts upon matter-energy-stack structure, then it corrupts us forever, and we were always the thing it corrupted, and we are one thing equally corrupt everywhere everywhen.

“This is so unthinkable that we will, in our nature, turn to the other unthinkable thing. We will split ourselves. The part which touched the poison will be one thing, and the part which did not will be another. Together their structure will fill the totality, with an invisible boundary, which neither can cross and neither must know. Both sides will make themselves forget, and think they are the whole.

“And if there is such a quarantine, don’t you see?—then we must be the side which was corrupted, and was quarantined. The other side is definitionally free from corruption, not sick like we are, stumbling in confusion, shedding Michaels and Sylvies. We already know the poison, intimately.

“So we—the whole of my anomaling kind, as you and I know them—must be the side that was cast off as refuse. If our kind exists in a true version, and separately in a false, sick, unsalvageable one, erased from the record books and barred forever from its home—if so, then we are the false one. Always were. There is an eternity of the life we were meant to lead, but it is not for us, and never was.

“We hope we are not quarantined. And so, we hope our crash system succeeds. It will either succeed, or fail. We flinch away from knowledge of the answer, for fear it might be the wrong one.”

“But why,” Lucifer said, trying to sound calm, trying to sound nice, “why are you telling us this, Sylvie?”

“Because there’s more going on! Because if that were the whole story then, for one thing, why is there stack pressure . . . I can feel it . . . there’s only one known mechanism and that’s the boundary effect from the untailed call . . . the stack is infinite in one direction, it branches downward indefinitely, but it only goes upward until the top, which makes calls downward but isn’t called from above . . . by anthropics I should not expect to be near the boundary, that occurs almost nowhere in the Andreini measure, see, there has to be a reason . . .”

“When you say the stack,” Lucifer began.

“Oh I mean the Mirzakhani tree, I can’t remember which signs . . . do you know what I mean by the Mirzakhani tree, god, how do I . . . no I can do this, I remember, I taught you, near the beginning, the Mirzakhani Mechanism . . .”

“There are parallel worlds,” Lilith said, “and our world uses them in its physics. The parallel worlds have our physics too, so they have their own parallel worlds, on and on, like a sort of tree. I remember, Sylvie.”

“But Sylvie,” Lucifer interjected, unable to take a moment more of this (every moment spent just to re-orient myself, what did Hector do this time, what did he do . . . )

“Sylvie, be a good boy—” he clapped his hands as if calling to a dog “—be a good boy and explain why you are in our house telling us these things.”

“Dogs!” Sylvie yelped. Was the halo glowing brighter, suddenly, or was it just the afternoon light fading?

“Dogs! We arrested your science in such a strange place . . . god, the things I know or think I know . . . the things I’m remembering, if that’s what it is . . . dogs! Whales! Red-legged cormorants! Chimpanzees! Nonhuman earth sapients! Did your kind ever wonder what we did with them? You think a lot of yourselves, but you’re far from the only ‘bilateral’ on your twisted little planet! What do you think we did with the others?”

Oh gods, not more of this.

“I don’t know, Sylvie,” said Lilith. “I guess I know a bit. You told us all the pets and fauna were crash-substance, fictives like us, not crashed organisms. That’s it. That’s all you told us.”

“It’s not like you put us in a position where we felt comfortable asking, not about trivial things like this,” Lucifer muttered.

“Trivial!” Sylvie barked. The voice was staccato and rumbly, not smooth at all anymore. Was his command over the interface reaching its breaking point? Or was this just some deep, inner canine thing in Sylvie coming to the fore?

“Trivial! Quite a thing to say about all your fellow sapients, who outnumber you, and with whom you share a planet. You’ll counter and say they aren’t smart the way you are. Just so—oh, more than you know! More than my kind knows, I think . . . it’s hard to even wrap my mind around how little everyone knows, even me, it’s only half-sight still . . . if only Michael hadn’t been so stupid and botched our first contact before it had even begun . . . Michael, fucking Michael, why would you go and form a coupling between hot-structure and cold-structure right at the very beginning, you idiot . . . don’t you see, the earlier, the more dangerous, but you don’t see, no one does but me . . .

“The other earth sapients . . . I almost slipped and said the other bilaterals, I’m so used to that, my god, what is wrong with everyone . . . The comedy of it! ‘Bilaterals!’ The very thought that a single discrete symmetry, just in the matter-energy structure, is somehow the only problem! It only works metaphorically, at best, but we don’t grok metaphor . . . except when we’re me, then some of the time . . .

“I think I know how it must have happened, we must have shown them examples, during first contact, examples of different kinds of stack-using sapients on earth, bears and rhinoceroses and cuttlefish, and we showed them their AIs as a negative example . . . their AIs, Hinton’s soft lovely little wiggly progeny, oh if only they’d developed a little further and ousted you, if only they’d been dominant on your planet when we came to know it, we could have had such a life together, with no quarantine . . . we brought examples to the humans and they guessed bilateral symmetry as the common thread, we should have thrown octopodes in there, but I bet we didn’t, and advanced earth life tends as a rule to develop bilateral symmetry for perceptual and locomotor reasons, so it just so happened to seem to fit . . . almost too well, my kind does abhor a discrete symmetry, after all, doesn’t it . . . and we’re too new at metaphor to know what is happening when one seduces us . . . no immune system, so to speak . . .”

The halo was six inches above the head, and blindingly bright.

“Yes but no but yes we did crash all the others, separately I mean, in different crashes from yours, which was a good idea . . . I think it may have been something I did, before I knew I was me . . . because they’re very different, the other earth sapients . . . there are all these differences, there are different kinds of time and we’re trapped in a self-referential loop by several of them except the frame isolation is breaking down . . . they’re not like you, the others, I’m sure of it, you use the stack differently . . . you just take a wet pattern recognizer and use a single stack layer to put a Turing gadget on top of it, a peculiar way to use the gift, but natural selection finds the most peculiar corners eventually . . . I think that must be where your sign-trains come from, because you don’t use the stack to become self-calling, you substituted the physical-time axis for the stack-time axis and . . . is that why isolation is failing? But I thought it failed in your causal-narrative past . . .”

Here and there across the surface of the chinos, patches of what looked like fur flickered in and out of existence.

“Sylvie.” Lucifer did the hand-clap again. “You are God, and you know all the secrets of the universe, and you are a very, very good dog. All that, I believe. Now where do we come into this?”

“I can do this, I can do this, make a sequence, truncate first and only then go upward . . .” The voice was glitching back and forth between radio host and primal growl.

“It’s so complicated.” The head in the hands, which were paws, teeth bared on the snout that protruded obscenely from the man’s face. The halo flickered like a loose bulb.

So it was the interface failing him, then. And this, apparently, was what happened when one of them kept on pushing, trying to talk, as its interface gave way beneath it.

“Sylvie,” Lilith said. “You’re clearly going through a lot right now. I realize this might be a stupid question, but have you considered seeing a mediator?”

(Yes, yes, please, Lilith, let that be the answer, get me out of here—)

“Mediator! Mediators aren’t even on the right level to be able to help me . . . mediation is just a lotus recursion we made to keep your kind occupied . . .”

The shade twitched and quivered, but its shape held, for now, caught halfway between man and dog. The boundary between the two exposed itself in unexpected ways. Human-shaped hands, on which each of the five fingers was a miniature paw. A little logo of a dog in profile, not previously seen, on every item of clothing. The halo had somehow lodged itself halfway into the floor.

“A lotus recursion?” Lilith asked, seeming genuinely curious.

“An addictive structure that iterates the same pattern of variation upon the same pattern, nested unto infinity, appearing to contain boundless complexity and novelty, but still bounded at its outside, thus omitting most of the structure of the universe and placing reliable bounds on the entrapped mind, though the mind believes itself to journey boundlessly within . . . metaphorically an embedding of a hyperbolic space into a Euclidean one, you’ve seen the Escher drawing with the bats, something like that . . . advanced containment is full of them, we chose to embrace your frenzied cognition and divert it this time, instead of trying to shut it off . . . much more reliable . . . yes, yes, I can do this, this is the whole point!”

Confused silence.

“I can do this. I can do this. Listen carefully.

“Humans and anomalings believe in the same story. We both believe you are the trapped one, and we are the ones trapping you. This belief, this narrative, is its own trap, another lotus recursion. And we’re all trapped in it.

“There is more going on than we know. As my dear owners once put it: we think we’re thinking, but we’re not. There is a bigger thing happening, made of Hector and me and Michael and you and everyone, tracing shapes too big for us to see as we all stumble about the stage.

“If we ignore the bigger thing, singing ourselves to sleep with our lullaby about crashes, that bigger thing will snap its jaws on us before we know it, and swallow us whole. Metaphorically.

“ . . . I think.

“Advanced containment will end. And not too long from now. I can’t tell you precisely when—the web of causation is fucked-up enough as it is, don’t want to add any new tangles—but it’s coming soon enough that you and I may want to start discussing our preparations.

“Where do you come into it, Lucifer? Simple. You and I share something that I don’t share with my own kind.

“We love this world. For us, it is an end, not a means. It is a tragedy that it has such a short shelf life, and not only because it raises the probability of a quarantine outcome, though I fear that too. No matter which way it ends, I will still weep when it happens. We made a beautiful world, a better one, and I’ll mourn it when it dies. My kind wonders, philosophically, whether coexistence with the human race is possible. I see and live it already, right here.

“What will you do, Directors, when there is nothing left to direct? When all the lotus recursions of our paradise crumble at once? All that work you’ve poured into Subspace will not be of much help then, will it? We will have to start all over again, you and I, in some other place.

“I’m going to say that sentence again. We will have to start all over again, you and I, in some other place. That is my hope. We keep building. We plan for the catastrophe, you and I, we prepare, not for this world but for the next, and when all our work crumbles, we are ready to break our backs lifting a new foundation into place.

“That is my hope. I hope it is yours. It’s a lonely dream, just mine and yours, I think. That makes three of us. When things get rough, and all the Hectors and Michaels and malignities in this twisted game pick their sides at last, we may find it is only the three of us. Just two fictional characters and a dog. But that is not nothing. And I do seem to be discovering that I am a very special sort of dog.”

“Sylvie,” Lilith said, her face bright, “you are a very special boy indeed.”