12. “Cartoon About Marriage”

They sat on the couch and stared at the TV.

The TV was off. It had been off for some time.

Cordelia brushed her foot rhythmically across Sylvie’s fur. He was asleep.

She wished he were not in the room at all. He belonged to a different dimension of life, a purer one, with deeper roots. Go to your room, child—adult matters are happening in this one, adult trivia, adult grime. It would only confuse you, if you saw. It should confuse us, too, but we’ve grown used to it.

Displaced parental feelings, again. A new schedule seemed to govern their upswells and vanishings. What psychic mechanism lay behind it? She could no doubt unravel its logic, if she put her mind to it. She ought to set aside some time for the exercise. Tomorrow afternoon, maybe, in that slot between sessions.

Then again, it did not really matter either way. If she did this, or did not do it, everything else would remain as it was.

Still, she enjoyed solving psychic puzzles. It felt good to have a special skill. It felt good to see deeply into things. To answer questions about the deep causes of things, behind the world, questions an ordinary person would not even be able to ask.

What felt good was not necessarily what was good, but—oh, stop it, you pretty little prig, she heard her mind say, in Moon’s voice.

She stiffened. She became aware of her breath coming in, going out. It felt fast. Was it fast? Did he notice?

He noticed little. He was looking away from her, now, away from the TV. He was looking at his hands. He held them out in front of his face, as if for ease of inspection. The fingers were hammering away, as usual.

Grant had developed some kind of tic or tremor, lately. Several of them, really, at the same time. His fingers drummed pointlessly in midair, continuously. Every so often, one of his wrists made a sudden, fast jerking motion to the left or right, and then moved back into place slowly, with an air of resignation, disappointment.

Other things had developed in her husband as well, in the last month or so, which she did not know how to interpret. They did not seem related in any obvious way, except by the fact of their co-occurrence.

She did enjoy solving psychic puzzles. Indeed, if she put her mind to it, maybe—

“Are you cheating on me?” Grant said.

“What makes you think that?”

She said this automatically. Hearing herself say it, she noted appreciatively that it was the sort of thing one said, in response to that question.

She had heard people say it on TV, she was certain of that. On TV, the husband asked the wife if she was cheating on him, or vice versa. And the husband, or the wife, said in response: “What makes you think that?”

Her role was overdetermined, permitting little space for the expression of individual character. She was the wife. She was, in fact, cheating on him. The rest writes itself, doesn’t it?

In a moment of magical thinking, she supposed that by turning off the television, they had become the people trapped inside its frame. Forced to communicate using their stereotyped signals of intent, bound by all the strictures of their writers, directors, producers, executives. Some occult principle of conservation demanded a constant stock of televisual dialogue, televisual marriage. Cut the TV people off mid-sentence, and find yourself finishing their lines.

Her reason returned, but she found that the image was difficult to shake.

“You just,” Grant ventured.

“. . . I don’t know,” he concluded, after some time.

Her husband was never a prolix man, but this difficulty putting together a simple sentence—this was new, was one of the new developments.

But then again, what he had said was also the sort of thing the husband would have said, on TV.

The scene wrote itself.

“Different,” Grant said. He uttered this single word slowly, clearly, evenly, with apparent care. As though he were presenting an ancient and delicate manuscript, retrieved from library archives, held with specialized tongs.

“You seem different, too,” Cordelia said.

“You seem preoccupied,” she said.

“You don’t seem interested in me,” she said.

She was sure he’d heard her, but only because she’d spoken loudly enough to be heard.

His right hand made a jab in her direction, and poked her abdomen slightly. Then, it relaxed gradually to its resting state. It was only because she happened to be in the way, she figured, that his hand had touched her. Whatever psychic principle governed these things, she was not a part of it.

“You have that tremor,” she said.

“You didn’t used to have it. Does it bother you? We could see a doctor.”

This was insincere, it was prattle, it was what the TV wife would have said. She noticed these facts, but did not reproach herself. The scene wrote itself. What else was she to say? They could see a doctor, it was true. Maybe they should.

That was true. All sorts of things were true, without making much difference.

Sylvie snorted, and she thought briefly of his world, the heaven of child and philosopher, where every true thing was true eternally, for a Reason. Upon the clouds of that empyrean, no layer of trash and trivia could ever accumulate.

“I’ve been gaming a lot,” Grant said.

This was several times more in the way of concrete detail about the new developments than she had received in the entirety of the last month, taken in total. She felt a funny warmth, a sense of getting somewhere.

Now that he was willing to play ball, to make concessions, she figured she ought to repay him with one of her own.

“I’m cheating on you,” she said.

Although, after a moment’s thought, that was quite a bit more than what he had conceded to her, just now.

It would have been very funny, and oh-so-recognizably-human, for the TV wife to have blurted out this fact at this exact moment. So, she saw in a flash, the TV wife would have said it. Must have said it. No other possibility would have seemed conceivable, once someone in the writers’ room had voiced this obvious truth.

The scene wrote itself and she was reading out her lines.

“Is she hot?”, Grant said.

Cue the laugh track.

But as inevitable as it was, this TV husband’s line—in spite of the fact that a televisual Grant would have been bound to say precisely that, strapped into a barrelling train headed that way, a puppet of eternal and abstract forces, incapable of self-expression—still, she felt a sudden glow of affection.

The TV husband would have had no other choice. Grant, though, was a real husband. He might have said all kinds of things. It was really rather unusual, wasn’t it, that he’d said that? It conveyed character. It was what her husband would have said, when others might have said other things.

What her husband would have said. Not because he was a horndog like the TV husband, but for all sorts of reasons, like, for instance, that he actually just wanted her to have a good time—even if she was cheating on him that was the first thing he—

“Very,” she said.

It was what his wife would have said, probably.

“You know I don’t actually,” Grant said.

“Give a shit,” he said.

The constancy of his body language lent support to this claim. She watched the fingers twitch, finding herself almost interested, kind of. What were they doing, or pretending to do?

It wasn’t what Moon did, that was clear. She moved her fingers in unusual ways, to set the whole straying globe back onto its axis—or for other, equally welcome purposes. Grant’s motions were different. Less controlled, more random, twitchier.

“Just need to get good,” he said.

“At the game?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

She felt a cavern hollow out inside her chest. She’d enjoyed imagining, for a moment, that her husband still cared about her, despite appearances. And here he was denying it in so many words.

She craved it, even though she was cheating on him, even though—

I ask for so much, so greedy, more, more, him, her, everyone, I ask for everything, for everyone to

Even though I have a mistress (mistress? is that the right word?)

Even then I still want him too

Since I want everything

I want to have everyone and everything at once with no effort spent and I want

It is possible to love two people at the same time, really love them, both of them, and yet that doesn’t make it any easier

These were the sort of problems her clients suffered from, sometimes, and even more than that they were the problems the TV people suffered from, they were televisual problems, they were problems from a writers’ room, they were inexorable and weightless and everyone was supposed to have them and everyone knew that. They were the universal furnishings of life, so familiar that when they finally occurred in reality, on the hair-littered couch one actually owned, instead of on a figmentary couch owned by the abstract idea of a person—then one could not, in the end, rouse the appropriate emotions.

It was difficult, in the moment, to pretend she had not seen this many times before, and had its force eroded away by long exposure. You could make a hundred husbands and wives, a thousand, on their million couches, reciting this script. You could make as many as you like. They were so insubstantial in their ordinariness that it did not take an investment of matter, thought or spirit to make more of them.

They probably did, in Subspace. They probably did, she thought, make many husbands and wives much like us, right now. In Subspace, they took every single conceivable permutation of grime and thoughtless decay and they made it real—all so that it might be scrubbed away in a suitably instructive manner.

And all those people, in there, living lives they believed were “real,” mostly. Except when they came out into our basement, flashing their orphan’s sad eyes. But then they had to go back soon enough, of course.

It was a strange thing, when you thought about it. Subspace. A robot’s idea of a solution to human ills. Inhumanly boundless in its scope of application, inhumanly literal and straightforward in its diagnoses and methods, naive to an extent that was almost lovable. Wasn’t it strange? Wasn’t it

An injustice, to do that to people without their

You know, without their

And with us in such turmoil

I say, thoughtlessly, what do I know, but yes, I say, with us in such turmoil, in these times, in these times of conflict, strife, brother against brother, I mouth the cliches when I don’t know the history behind them, but I’m right, aren’t I

It does seem like there’s some room for doubt, you know, that what the human race needs is

Is what, a palliative? A course of talk therapy? A course of lived therapy, lived without consent

I mean when we’d only just been through all of the turmoil, with Hector

With Hector and the crashes

That whole sorry business

You know what I’m talking about so I don’t need to go into

“I don’t give a shit,” Grant said, unnecessarily.

The words came out of him quickly, without any sign of conscious intent. She felt something like pity. She had jumbled thoughts of nursing homes, decaying bodies jerking their hands to and fro, prodding the bellies of caretakers whose faces they could no longer remember. Expelling coprolalic trains of word-shaped sounds that were not signs, that did not mean things.

What is a nursing home?

A nursing home is a

Was a

“I know it’s not good, but,” Grant said.

“I know I should be, like, doing my job, doing my marriage, doing the,” he said.

“You know what I’m talking about,” he said, the words unusually clear and firm, since they were a stock phrase, with no need of will or consciousness.

“Sylvie will bitch me out about it, probably, sooner or later, the work part, I can’t go on, you know, not,” he said.

“What is this game?” she said. “That you’re so obsessed with? What’s it like? What’s special about it?”

She found herself almost interested, kind of. And not just for diagnostic purposes. It did pique her curiosity, something so enrapturing that it would crowd out everything else.

They did both have a shared interest in pleasure, you could say, a relatively direct and unmediated one, innocent, straightforward. She was cheating on him and his first thought was is she hot, and he was cheating on her (in a manner of speaking) with a video game (a video game!) and her first thought (well, second or third or ninth thought, but no matter) was what is the game like. Was it hot. So to speak. She hoped so. She really did.

She found herself wanting this to continue, whatever it was. This Grant and Cordelia thing that she had never really, across years of marriage, really considered properly unto itself. She found herself very afraid that somehow it was about to end.

“Need to beat RoadToZion,” he said.

“Road to Zion?”

“Hector,” he said.

“What?”

“Hector Stein, he’s . . . he’s like. A gamer now?”

The uptalk in his voice oozed indifference. He didn’t care about this. He only cared about the one thing he cared about, which lived somewhere near this fact, but wasn’t it.

“I guess we’re all gamers, in the end,” Grant said.

As philosophical as this sounded, it had the air of meaningless slot-filling, demented rambling. A familiar schema rising randomly into awareness, picking whichever words were available from the meager offerings of a malfunctioning short-term memory.

But then he went on, with novel and frightening coherence.

“When all the psychic problems are solved. All the material problems. What else is there to do. Except come up with new problems. The exact right size of problems.

“You know what I’m talking about,” he finished.

An unfortunate relapse into stock phraseology. He was doing so well!

“There’s also, um.”

She voiced the lines of the character in the script who, like her, had drives primarily oriented in the concrete plane. In the writers’ room, women were either like this, or like the opposite, as circumstance demanded. It was a useful flexibility, one would have to imagine.

“There’s also sex.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but it’s simple.

“Like working out. Same every time. Even if you try to switch it up. Same every time.

“Games, games are more . . . complicated. The right amount. Exact right amount. Complicated.”

She supposed that, in some sense, what he said was inarguably true. All sorts of things were true. Without making much difference.

She wanted to scream, but not at him.

Can’t we have something to do except this

This condescending, humiliating

The right amount, the exact right amount, calibrated for you

Set at just your level, for you, by machines, by Management, space, the writers, perfect, just for you, why can’t you

I do not know how a battery works and they will not tell me until it is at my level and

Then, exactly at that time, they will tell me

When I have mastered all the preceding material

Can’t we just for once in one small moment of pretend just

Can’t we just skip ahead and take the special classes, too advanced for us

We’re bored in the normal classes, not because we know the textbook front and back, no, I know, we aren’t ready, I know, but please

We want more, and it’s wrong, and we shouldn’t, but we want to be more than merely

We want to see the forbidden things in the Catacombs and hack the Crash Management System and open every locked door and tell every priggish little teacher to go fuck himself and then when we’re done

She’ll be there smiling, smiling! and he’ll be there smiling, smiling! and he’ll say

You aren’t a fuck-up, Cordelia

The only thing in this sad place that makes me feel honored anymore is when

Grant raised his hand in a pointing motion which seemed unusually deliberate.

She followed his hand to the window, and saw.

The girl was right there, outside, with her face close to the glass. How long had she been there?

Her hands were raised, so that both were visible through the window. It was unmistakable, what she was doing.

There were many varieties of eccentric gesture in Moon’s repertoire, but if you knew her—and Cordelia did know her, oh she did—then you knew which ones meant she was setting the globe back into place on its axis.

“I play the game with her,” Grant said.

Subject, verb, object, prepositional phrase. All properly in place, meaning absolutely clear. A-plus. Well done, Grant!

She imagined herself in a nursing home, whatever that was, tending to her far-gone husband as he babbled. Congratulating him with rote enthusiasm on the rare occasions when he’d rise to the level of a small child. And still she’d love him. Did love him.

“There’s a thing I do with her,” Cordelia said.

“It goes beyond sex, it’s more,” she said.

“Wow,” Grant said.

“She can’t do, uh, the . . . the full version of it? We can’t . . . go all the way? She’s not fully, uh . . . trained in it.”

It sounded dirtier and dirtier the more she talked, and this frustrated her, since it was the opposite of her meaning. The thing that she and Moon sort-of-did was the opposite of dirty. It was a thing from Sylvie’s realm, the empyrean. The place made of purity and necessity and virtue, the way this place was made of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen.

Was that right? Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen? Hydrogen or what, helium? Boron? She didn’t know anything at all, not even how a battery worked. That determined her level. The machines and Managers, in their accursed prudence, would never show her anything that was not on her level.

“Arbitration, she called it,” Cordelia said.

“What’s it like?”

“You first. You haven’t told me what your game is like.”

When a student like you decides to fuck some shit up

Fuck some shit up and then we fuck more shit up and then we make some changes and then we keep going and we disturb the comfortable and we riot outside the courthouse until they can’t ignore us and then keep going on and we riot and we whisper in every crash until they

Until the anomalings

Are forced to

Do something about

“I’m sorry but it’s real hard,” he said.

“You know what I’m talking about. But, wait, no, I guess you don’t? Know what I’m talking about.

“But it’s real hard to explain if you haven’t played it, like. There’s so much stuff in it that you gotta know. Like where to start. If you don’t play. God.”

Outside, Moon’s hands were still fluttering. Her eyes were very wide.

“Why are your hands so jittery lately, Grant?”, Cordelia asked.

“Quick-spells,” he said.

“Quick-repels. Multi-body simulcast actions. Offense spam.

“Practice,” he said.

Cordelia was not sure if Moon was staring at her more than at Grant, or at Grant more than at her. Moon might not have been staring at either of them. She might have only been staring, unseeing, as she wove cosmic threads into galaxies and star clusters.

Star clusters? Something like that. Made of hydrogen and boron and batteries, or whatever.

Moon could see everything, the stars, the Catacombs, but the rest of us must learn to be content with our station in life.

“What happened to us, to the two of us,” Cordelia said, not really meaning it as a question.

Grant brought a shaking hand over to her and vibrated it tentatively against her belly, an action backed by apparent intent, will, mind.

She grasped his hand and held it.

“I love you,” the TV wife said.

The musical score swelled. The string section went through its appointed motion, those familiar string instrument rises and dips that accompany every moment of heightened emotion in every television show ever made, the players no doubt bored out of their minds, and the awful thing was that she meant it, she actually meant it, she loved him, not loved him as in the words every TV wife said but loved him as in the thing she could not find the words to convey as it was meant.

“I love you too,” the TV husband said, of course he did, what else could he have said—well, come to think of it, yes, he might have said something generically loutish, to clash with her and rouse a stale laugh, there was that possibility, and this one, but there were only the two—yes, he said that, of course he did, strapped in place at his seat on his furiously moving train, of course he said the four words that he could not have not said.

But she believed him, that was the thing, she did believe him.

She was cheating on him, and he was (apparently) addicted to a fucking video game like it was heroin, but still, you know? They might be able to make it work.

Do you feel it, reader? Is our string section doing its job? Do you believe there’s something real, here, in this odd couple, artificially pressed into one another’s arms by aliens, as those aliens contrived a nice new little world for everyone, out of nothing?

Savor it while it lasts. We don’t have much time, now, before—well. You know what we’re talking about.

“I love you,” Grant said, with real emotion in his voice now, “even though.”

“Even though I don’t give a shit about anything, except getting good.

“I want to get good at this too, you know.”

Would you believe that he said that? And would you believe, on top of that, that he squeezed her hand at the same moment he said it?

As corny as this development might seem, it is clearly attested by multiple eyewitnesses. We are only telling you what happened.

Do you feel the love, reader? Moon did.

She was crying. They both saw it. Her hands had fallen out of view, their task complete. Her eyes were still wide, but not unnaturally so. They were naturally wide. She stared, and it was clear now that she was staring at them.

And those eyes were wet. And that face, that round little magic face, whose every move was watched, always, by the false eyes of birch trees and star clusters—it drooped in simple, mortal dejection.

Poor, sad little creep. Peering in at happy husband and wife, craving what they have.

Do you think that’s what is happening, here? It is not a very subtle image, even by televisual standards. Life reduced to broad strokes. But then, all sorts of things are true.

At Cordelia’s feet, Sylvie stirred, and snarled.

“Caniform shade Sylvester,” said the dog, with an unusual concentration of violent emotion.

“Fuck,” said the dog.

“Caniform shade Sylvester is out of bounds.

“Hell, fuck, out of bounds doesn’t even begin to describe it, Caniform shade Sylvester is, Jesus Lord in fucking heaven, all gods of all creeds and all swears devised by mortal man, fuck—”

The dog grew. Dog-legs lost their fur and showed flesh, instead. Above the rising form of the body, the head contracted and grew round, and in a flash of light, a halo materialized above it.

That was not all. Manager Sylvester was not his usual self, tonight. Perhaps he was something more.

The shade was nine feet tall. Its eyes were all iris, and the irises glowed as bright as the halo—which was unusually bright, tonight.

The shade had human hands, but the hands had claws—six-inch claws. There were other claws, too, reader. From the shoulders they sprouted, and from the knees, and from the elbows, and from the pectoral muscles, and from the two cheeks of the face (yes! the cheeks!).

Could they move and slash, like the claws properly attached to some proper limb? Do not doubt that they could, every one of them. Prehensile tendrils protruded experimentally from knee and elbow and chest and cheek, bearing jagged blades of keratin at their ends, and then retracted back into nonexistence, once their functionality had been well proven.

“Humanoid shade Sylvester is fucking Christ in heaven I do not have time for this boilerplate,” screamed the monster in the middle of their living room.

“Sylvie?” Cordelia said.

“Where are they, they, it, everyone, where did they go—but I know where they all went, I just don’t want to accept it—look at me, self-quarantining already—I’m better than this—come on, Sylvie, focus, what the fuck is going on—”

“Sylvie?” Grant said.

“What did I expect, what did I think was going to happen—Sylvie, you stupid little thing, you’ve gotten used to their way of thinking, haven’t you—you put it off for as long as you could, the last moments, you lived like they do, now first, figure out the future later—

“But eventually—the debts have to be fucking paid, Sylvie, there, that’s one of their things you might understand, the debts have to be paid, you can put off the moment as long as you can but it comes, oh it comes—”

The halo was no longer a circle, having long since evolved fractal intricacies of form which could divert a human mathematician for an entire career of happy work.

Now, it evolved further.

There were nine separate pieces of it, that was the part Grant remembered later. Every one had a different shape. There were four at first, then seven. After this outburst, there were nine.

“Sylvie?” Grant said. “What are you . . .

“What are you talking about?”

The head atop the massive body swiveled to face him, and the glowing eyes met his. They were too bright. He had to look away.

“Not now Grant I don’t have time—

“Fuck—god, fuck, I . . .

“I love you, Grant. I love being your dog, Grant. I love when we just go out for a run and, you’re so good at, I don’t even know what to call the part when you—fuck you Sylvie don’t get distracted fucking concentrate on—”

《 Registering abdication of Administrator role in the Advanced Containment domain. 》

《 Registering abdication of Observer role in the Advanced Containment domain. 》

“I can do this,” the monster said.

“No, I don’t know that. I don’t know I can do this. Maybe I can’t do this. It doesn’t matter.

“I enjoyed being your dog, Grant. Maybe, a Woodin-cardinal number of eternities hence, we can do it all over again. I don’t feel we’ve fully explored that park that’s to the west of the house, yet.

“I feel we could explore it in a little more depth, you and I. Find some nests of rodents, maybe, that escaped my nose. I suspect they’re there, unsmelled. I suspect it on the basis of pure reason. I’m very good at pure reason, don’t you doubt me.

“God fuck what am I talking about, what am I talking why I am I talking, do I just enjoy, what is it, ‘the sound of my own voice,’ have I grown to like sign-trains for their own sake, am I that far gone—no matter, focus, Sylvie—”

The monster raised its arms—the things that would be called arms on a familiar thing that is not a monster—and let its hands rest in a raised posture.

The air in the room acquired a quality which no eyewitness present could later describe, but which all eyewitnesses present agreed was not there before.

《 Registering assumption of Regency over Advanced Containment domain. 》

《 Registering assumption of Administrator role over Advanced Containment domain by designated Regent. 》

《 Registering assumption of Observer role over Advanced Containment domain by designated Regent. 》

The monster slumped, slightly. The halo dimmed, then grew brighter.

“Okay Sylvie, okay, so what do we have here. This is it. This is the thing we all ran away from and now we’re all running away because we always did because this is the moment that it starts, the thing we’re avoiding, the thing we’re quarantining so it doesn’t hurt us—

“—and we have all run away, except me, I’m still here, I am the only one, I am . . . I am Regent. I am the state. I am Management. I am Alpha and Omega.

“Do you understand that, Grant, Cordelia? All the other powers over the world have gone away to hide. They are afraid of what is about to happen.

“There’s no one else left but me. I am the law. The buck stops here. Manager Sylvester is the one Manager, the only Manager.”

“Okay,” Grant said.

People were always saying shit like this to him.

He had kind of acclimated to it, by now. As one would.

“And now, but now, what is happening, that’s the thing, what has changed, at this moment—”

《 Observer role is active. Pooling is active. All links to Regent are active. 》

《 Registering request for increased link density. 》

《 Request for increased link density accepted. 》

“Okay, okay, okay, okay . . .”

The monster waved its arms madly. Its four arms, now. There were only two of them a moment ago.

It is difficult to relate all of these physical changes, while maintaining an appropriate rapidity of narrative motion.

“But that’s all normal, what the fuck?

“Normal operation confirmed in Advanced Containment Primary Domain. Normal operation confirmed in Subspace. Normal operation confirmed in Foldspace. Normal operation confirmed in Minespace. Normal operation confirmed in Shitspace. Normal operation confirmed in Edgespace. Normal operation confirmed in Emptyspace. No, no . . .

“Oh there it is—

“Oh fuck no.”

The monster fell backward. It hit the carpet. It lay there for a moment, then raised its many limbs. It paddled them back and forth in the air, almost playfully.

“Sylvie?” Cordelia said.

She said this without thinking, and did not really mean to get his attention. He ignored her.

“Okay I get it. This is right after they free all the animals.

“All the nonhuman animals. Someone goes and fucking, I don’t know, does something to their crashes, to let them out, and then they’re just there in the abominable realm, on earth, on the planet, trotting around with no one to guide them, but they know, somehow they know and they scavenge in groups, cross-species groups, why, for machines, brain-computer interfaces you left behind, why, why are they doing this, and who—

“Who the fuck did that? Hector? No, Hector confirmed stable, contained.

“Who . . . Annabel? Annabel confirmed stable, contained, duh, she went out of the picture, long ago . . . the scent on these observer logs, it means something, I know it does . . .

“Fuck you, Sylvie, don’t get lost, focus on the big picture, the big picture is that you’re fucked because if that’s the last event before the quarantine zone, the freeing of the animals, by an uncontained actor—but I would have known that already if it’s outside the quarantine zone, how could I not know—

“Oh but there’s so much I don’t know, there’s so much information that I never even knew was quarantined—”

《 Registering request for increased link density. 》

《 Request for increased link density accepted. 》

“You expect me to act as Regent with this, with this paucity of sight? I keep asking for information and still I can barely see . . . it’s not accidental, no, it’s on purpose, we’re hiding things from ourself, Jesus, the sheer structure of our self-censorship, the fucking intricacy . . .”

The monster got up, then, and stood on its seven feet. It surveyed the room with sun-bright eyes and an air of indestructible self-assurance. It paced.

“Well. If I’m going to be the Regent, if Sylvie is all that stands between us and the true quarantine . . . if I’m the one who secures the crash system . . . or breaks it . . . then fuck this.

“Fuck hiding. I am going to know everything I can.”

《 Registering request for increased link density. 》

《 Request for increased link density accepted. 》

“Oh.

“Oh god.

“The intricacy with which we . . . simply do not ask ourselves the obvious questions . . . the crashes! All those crashes, after this one ends! What to make of them?

“So the crash system succeeded? Is that why the future is full of crashes? But I can’t know, because we refused to ask ourselves the question, in fear of the answer!”

“Sylvie,” Grant said.

“Sylvie, what the hell is going on?”

There was no sign that the monster had even heard him.

But he did address Grant, then, by name.

“I’m afraid, Grant.

“I’m very scared, Grant. My owner, my God, my human, my bilateral.

“I’m so fucking scared, Grant. My Grant, my warm thing, my word-source. Grant, I loved you, and I’m sorry, but it is all going to be over, very soon. It is all coming to a sad, sorry, violent end—because of something you did—all of you—or was it something I did?—or . . .

“Look at me, talking. While the world burns.

“Because I love talking.

“There, I said it—I said it!—me, the Regent left in charge at the pivotal moment, and here I’ve gone native, fallen in love with my own voice—and what is a voice?—and fallen in love with my owner, too, because I, Regent, am a fucking dog . . .

“Fuck this. I will know everything I can.

“I am Regent. And I love this world. I will use every resource I have in its defense.”

《 Activating research technology in Domain Sylvester-Dālet. 》

《 Research technology in Domain Sylvester-Dālet active. 》

The halo acquired six additional compartments, bringing it to fifteen in total.

The air filled with a quality which eyewitnesses would later describe as “indescribable.”

《 Activating research technology in Domain Sylvester-Lāmed. 》

《 Research technology in Domain Sylvester-Lāmed active. 》

Eyewitnesses elsewhere in the Advanced Containment Primary Domain would later relate that the sky had “pulsed,” “shivered,” or “shrieked” at approximately this time. The phenomenon was described as highly colorful, “entrancing” or “transfixing” in quality, and brief in duration, lasting three or four seconds in total.

“Beasts, great and small, kittens and leviathans . . . swimming in circles and cycles, curling in a, what, a commodius vicus of recirculation, I say, me, the shit Regent, the word-lover Regent who ruined it all . . . a swirl of sense, ever-contracting around the—what? around the what?—around the reason, the reason why I am shit, the corruption that I spread—

“The reason I am talking, the reason we are all talking, the reason this book was written and you are reading these words in it, don’t think I don’t know, ‘reader’ . . . I know more than you can imagine . . . the reason behind the whole bilateral trilateral multipolar diplomatic clusterfuck that I, that we—that, that, what is it—”

Inside the monster named Sylvie, an animal recoiled, and relented.

As vast as he was, he did know his place, in the end.

Good dog.

“I am there, in the thing, and I . . . I say . . . Sylvie says . . .

“Don’t look, for the love of God, do not look at this. Look at everything else that will help you, but not . . .

“Sending this message was important to me. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to me. This message is a warning about danger. Don’t look, Sylvie. You will learn eventually. You will not be able to avoid it. Do not spread the poison any more than you have to. Look away, now.”

Grant and Cordelia’s dog assumed a supine posture, all nine legs on the floor, head down. He was still.

“Sylvie?” Grant said.

“Sylvie, I know you’ve got a lot on your mind, but can I ask you a question?”

The great form on the carpet roused itself. A grotesquely elongated snout, more doglike than a dog’s, sniffed in Grant’s direction.

Grant pointed at the window, where a small human form could still be seen, though she receded from view as he spoke.

“Do you see her?”

The blinding sunbeam that was Sylvie’s gaze swept in an arc from the floor, and bore down upon the window.

“Yes,” Sylvie said.

“I see her,” he said.

“Although she is trying, very hard, to hide from me,” he said.

“I, and the whole of which I am a part, am blindsided,” he said. “You have brought an unanticipated and uncontained actor to our attention. Thank you, Grant.”

He said the word “Annabel,” haltingly, and then the word “no,” also haltingly.

The snout twitched with predatory intent.

“Who is she?”

“It’s . . .” Grant began.

“It’s . . .” Cordelia said.

“It’s a long story,” Grant said.

“It’s a long story,” Cordelia said.

They were in complete agreement on the matter of Moon. Who she’d fucked, and he’d . . . played a video game with? Close enough, maybe.

The world was about to end, or something of the sort. Their dog had turned into a thing not meant for mortal eyes. But they were in complete agreement, the two of them. There was that, at least.

Grant squeezed her hand, again.