Chapter 33
16. “Nowhere”
Do you remember the very beginning of our narrative, reader?
Once upon a time, Anne lived in a tiny and orderly universe.
It is difficult to say with much precision just when Anne’s tiny and orderly universe began, but it is easy to say when it ended. Anne will never forget the date: 67 After Mailbox Melt, 9th Notebook.
67 After Mailbox Melt, 9th Notebook: the day Cordelia came to take her away. The day her life as Twenty-Six ended. Just as we said, it’s a date that Twenty-Seven (nee Twenty-Six, alias “Anne”, etc.) will remember as long as she lives.
Like everything else in our narrative, this date has a twin. There can be no right hand without left, no birth without death.
She will always remember 67 After Mailbox Melt, 9th Notebook. It is, in some sense, her birthday.
And she will always remember 56 After Mailbox Melt, 12th Notebook. Her death day.
Twenty-Seven woke long before dawn, that day.
She had not slept well. Her dreams had been full of a jumbled, senseless terror. She lay shivering among bedsheets covered in fresh sweat, and felt a lesser residue of the same terror run its corpselike fingers across her neck, chest, stomach.
The feeling faded swiftly, and soon passed away entirely. The significance of the day descended upon her, as though for the first time, and took hold of her fully. No thoughts or feelings were possible except the ones it dictated.
What was it that she felt, then? Resolve? Determination? Resignation? Is there any word that does it justice?
A wide, empty sky. Pure blue, undifferentiated, stretching from horizon to horizon in every direction. Void without form, a page with nothing written on it, the mute and boundless ground of being. Yahweh’s canvas, before the first day. A thing beyond morality, prior to it, too vast for it to contain.
She roused herself from bed, and cast about for ways to dissolve the remaining time before sunrise.
She drafted the crucial letter to Twenty-Five, leaving only the seal for later. This did not take long. It was a very short letter.
She retrieved her book of game tables, and played a few rounds of the Thorn War Game against her former self. She won one, lost two.
Her spirit weakened, for a time. She grew wistful, sentimental. The child in her stirred from its long slumber. The child with its finite wants, its reflexive abhorrence of change, its mindless and unconditional attachments. The boundless sky crumbled and vanished.
She took The Travels of Young Goodman from the shelf. She reread the passages she remembered holding most dear, long ago.
It was the least bad of Michael’s books, but it was still not very good, all things considered. Twenty-Seven loved it all the more for that. It is the obvious flaws in things, in people, that bring out our protective instincts.
She thought of her early lessons. She thought of Michael stuttering, at wits’ end, trying to correct her on some point of grammar or diction, lacking the words to set her aright. Two blind men, grasping pitifully at the elephant. The little girl, and the alien. Trying to figure it all out, together.
She cried, and almost willed herself to forgive him.
As though that were possible! The die is cast, Twenty-Seven. The die was always cast. There was no moment in recorded time, in the span of the conceivable, when the die had not already been cast.
No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.
All at once the scales fell from her eyes.
The finite things fell away, again. There was only the boundless. The sky, the duty, the mission, the man. The leap into somewhere. The end of her tiny and orderly life, and the beginning of everything and everywhen else.
The sun had risen. Michael would be here, soon. She hoped he would not bring breakfast, this time. She did not want to delay things any more than necessary.
She paced.
She muttered memorized esoterica under her breath. The stages of structural instability, in order of severity: Mirzakhani turbulence, subcritical tremor, supercritical tremor, prebase, rebase.
The knock came.
“Come in,” she said. Her voice was bright, and empty.
Michael did not have breakfast with him. He wasted no time.
“It is time to continue our work,” said the humanoid shade in the doorway.
The long, grey-white hair of the shade caught the morning light, and appeared to glow. Spring was the best season for Michael’s preferred shadeform, bringing out its beauty, and the subtle secondary harmonies that lurked beneath the pretty surface: awe, grandeur, horror.
And now here it was. The moment, the center, the lynchpin.
The die had always been cast in spirit. But it was only here, only now, that real flesh met real river, and made the crossing.
She turned to her notebook. She saw, again, the letter she had written before sunrise.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
Sending this letter would begin a chain reaction. Once it was in motion, she would be powerless to stop it.
A perverse impulse seized her, and told her not to send the letter. Remove the center, unravel the structure. Give up, surrender, dissolve. Shout love at the heart of the world. Wrap her arms around her stuttering father, and give him everything.
No, no. There was no time! It had to be now! No time for thought. Cross the river.
She pressed her seal onto the page, and exhaled.
“Are you done writing?”
She said nothing. She only stood, turned to face him, and smiled.
《 Begin handshake. 》
She held her hands behind her back. The fingers of the right hand fluttered, slightly.
《 Handshake in process. 》
She smiled, and yet her face was blank. An open sky, formless, beyond morality.
《 Handshake rejected. 》
There was a bed, and a mess of limbs atop it.
It was morning, but another morning, many decades later.
The limbs writhed. Were they one body, or two? Fifty-Two and Azad did their best to obliterate the distinction.
In mindless abandon they petted and fondled, kissed and convulsed.
They spent every morning this way, as it happened.
Every afternoon and evening, too, come to think of it.
Somewhere on the mass of giddy flesh, a mouth took shape, and spoke.
“Hold on.”
“Hold on?” Azad said. “What do you need? Am I doing something wrong?”
He had spent years perfecting his arsenal of lovers’ banalities. What do you need? Am I doing something wrong? I’m listening. By now he could probably communicate ably enough in this restricted tongue alone, if some strange circumstance demanded it of him.
“No,” Fifty-Two said.
“No, you’re fine. You’re perfect. I love you.
“I just need to check something. Real quick. I’ll be back in just a moment.”
She was already up, out of bed, on her way to the desk. She opened her notebook, and found the letter.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” said the lithe, lounging form on her bed. He regarded her with an Archaic-statue smirk.
It was cruel, that the letter came so early! She knew this was the day. She’d accepted that much. But she had always imagined that it would be a full day, a real day, sunrise to sunset. Twelve hours, or fourteen, or sixteen, in which to reach one last gasping time for bliss. She had always imagined drinking her fill, gorging herself with him, before the end came.
And here it had already come, well before noon! Stupid, stupid me, she thought. I should have been prudent. I should have viewed yesterday as the last day. I should have lived yesterday as though it were my last.
I should have, she thought. But I didn’t. When have I ever been prudent?
“I have something I need to tell you,” she said.
“I’ve just gotten a letter. It’s . . . it’s about Twenty-Five.”
Was this a lie? Hard to say, she thought. The letter was not about Twenty-Five, except in the most obscure sense.
The most obscure sense was the one that mattered, though. She knew her role. This was it.
“She’s asking for you, Azad. I know you two didn’t part on the best of terms, but look . . . Azad, look, I’ll be plain. I am talking about Twenty-Five’s death.
“She is close to death. She is close to death, Azad, and she wants you to be there with her, one last time.”
The smirk faded from Azad’s face. He looked ill at ease, all of a sudden. He shifted his limbs aimlessly, as if unfamiliar with them, unsure of their proper uses.
“Personally,” said Fifty-Two, “I think you should go to her. It’s only right, that you go to her.”
“But must I go now?” Azad pouted. “You know better than I that we dwell in Arcady’s infinite present, and can defer our labors endlessly without doing harm to their eventual beneficiary.”
“I think,” said Fifty-Two, “that you should go to her.”
She did not try to argue the point. There was no need, since she knew a better way. In her tone of voice, in her posture, she made her message perfectly clear: this is now a conjugal matter. She did not need to convince him that she was right. Only that she would be cross if she did not have her way. And if she became cross, then there would be no mess of limbs atop the bed, and no gasping mouths feeding at the teat of bliss.
“I’ll go,” Azad said.
He leapt from the bed and began to clothe himself. He moved rapidly, with purpose.
I do not know the meaning of this, Azad thought. I do not know what I am being called on to witness. But whatever it is, I ought to face it, head on, as a man. As she said—it is only right.
“When’s my destination?” he asked.
“Twenty-Five’s Eleventh Notebook,” said Fifty-Two.
“36 After First Bloom. Late morning. About an hour before noon, I think. An hour before noon at the earliest. Don’t go too early. She made a point of that.”
This warning was not, in fact, part of the plan. It was Fifty-Two’s emendation, her small contribution to the great structure.
I am helping, she thought. In my own, minor way, I am a help to Twenty-Seven.
I’m helping, and I haven’t even died yet!
“All right, then! I’m off. I’ll see you in just a moment’s time.
“Or should I wait, before coming back to you? Which do you prefer? I suppose I might be in a different condition, afterwards. Shaken, fragile—that sort of thing. The shedding of tears may be involved. And I whine at high pitch when I’m keening, like a wounded dog. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
“Shall I wait before coming back? A few hours? You might want some time to gather your powers, before you have to nurse me back to health and happiness.”
She did not answer him. She only stood and stared, with a gravity he did not understand. There was a seriousness to her face which he had never glimpsed there before. None of the usual coquettish gleam in those almond eyes, now.
She made an arresting image against the windowpane, almost a silhouette. But her face was visible, her expression perfectly clear. It was a grown-up expression, a tender one, a mournful one.
A mother who has just lost her child, Azad thought.
He would understand, but only later.
Before he left, he made a last trip to Fifty-Two’s desk, to retrieve the book he’d been reading. He couldn’t help catching a glimpse of the strange, simple letter displayed on the open page.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
What did this mean? What could it mean? He tried not to think about the question. The Annes had their private languages, he knew. Let them be. Let them have their fun.
He went looking for Michael, his trusty ferryman through the river of time. He talked to himself on the way, repeating the destination date over and over, to ensure he did not forget it.
Eleventh Notebook . . . 36 After First Bloom . . .
“I am sorry,” said the man-shaped object standing at Twenty-Seven’s door.
“Our link may be unstable as a consequence of intrinsic variability in the oscillations of cold-structure,” he said.
“If so, we should be able to overcome the obstacle by mere repetition. Thus, I will try again.”
《 Begin handshake. 》
The girl before him stood motionless, smiled a formless smile.
《 Handshake in process. 》
His daughter, his monster. His sin and his salvation.
They were close, close. He was sure of it. They only needed to press on just a little further, follow the great path through one last wood, one last dell, one last valley. And then—
《 Handshake rejected. 》
“This is unusual,” he said.
His alien prisoner stood motionless, and smiled.
“Several mechanisms could explain the observed data, singly or in any combination. And we still cannot rule out intrinsic variability in the oscillations of cold-structure, as a hypothetical single cause. Thus, I will try again.”
《 Begin handshake. 》
Twenty-Seven’s left hand tapped rhythmically against her waist.
《 Handshake rejected. 》
“This is highly unusual, Anne,” said the thing in her doorway which only had the shape of a man, not the substance.
“My name is Twenty-Seven,” said Twenty-Seven.
“I would prefer you to call me by my name,” said Twenty-Seven.
He did not say yes. He did not object, either. He paused, and went on, in his droning and oblivious fashion.
“If the observed phenomenon were the result of intrinsic variability, or another natural cause, one would expect its action to be distributed evenly across handshake attempts. Temporal clustering of this magnitude, though possible, would be highly improbable.”
He paused. She stood. She smiled.
One hundred and fifteen seconds elapsed.
“We must turn, then, to other hypotheses,” said the thing in the doorway. The snake’s puppet, its extrusion into the sensate world, which it used as a limb to pin and suffocate her.
“You are the only Anne, indeed the only bilateral, who has been regularly able to form a stable link. You are the only Anne, indeed the only bilateral, who has been able to arbitrate.
“We must not take these things for granted. They are uncommon properties, incarnated in you for unknown reasons. We do not know why they were given, and so we cannot know why, and when, they might be taken back.
“It is possible,” he said, “that we are witnessing a regression in your capabilities.”
“I do not think,” said Twenty-Seven with a smile, “that you have any cause to worry about that.”
Her hands fluttered and drummed. Otherwise, she was perfectly still. Pure blue, undifferentiated, beyond morality.
《 Activating research technology in domain Michael-Semkaṯ. 》
A shudder passed through the man-shape.
“This is very, very unusual, Anne,” it said.
“Twenty-Seven,” she corrected.
“The observed phenomenon is larger, perhaps, than we have appreciated. Something is happening to my crash, Anne. I do not understand it.
“A piece of it is moving which should be still. I did not will it into motion. I had thought I understood the relevant stability bounds . . . be careful, Anne! Something is happening to us! It may mean us harm!”
“My name is not Anne,” she said. “There are many Annes. I am Twenty-Seven.”
“If the stability bounds fail to hold . . . the implications for our safety . . .
“Anne, my Anne, my precious little bilateral, please be careful! Pay close attention to my voice! Stay by my side!”
《 Research technology in domain Michael-Semkaṯ active. 》
The fake man began to vibrate. He convulsed. He fell, abruptly, to his knees.
“No natural-cause hypothesis can explain . . . no . . . Anne, this is enemy action. Some external agent is acting to seize control of my crash!
“Hector? Hector, is that you? Have you come to thwart me now, just as I reach the precipice?”
《 Backup admin system has been engaged. 》
The nightmare from beyond the stars opened his puppet’s mouth, and found himself at a loss for words. He kneeled in mute horror.
His spawn, his nightmare-girl, craned her neck to meet his gaze. Her eyes were as empty as interstellar space.
《 Backup admin system online, in ready state. 》
Azad fell backwards through time, and found himself in the tower, alone.
That was strange. Ordinarily, there was a Michael at each end of the conduit. He’d ask the Michael of one era to send him to another. His surroundings would vanish, then reappear. When he regained his senses, Michael would be there still—a different Michael, an earlier or later one.
He would end up in a different room, on a different floor, sometimes. Wherever the Michael of his destination time happened to be, at the moment of his arrival, that’s where he would end up arriving.
The shade itself was the bridge across time, Azad had figured. Michael, the alien, could hop back and forth as he pleased across the moments that comprised the long, unbroken life of Michael, the shade. And he, Azad, was only hitching a ride on the Michael train, parasitizing on Michael’s ability to become his own self anywhen.
That’s what he’d figured. But now here he was, in the past, and Michael was nowhere to be seen.
Curiouser and curiouser.
He made a survey of the vicinity. He was in a hallway, one he recognized. Twenty-Five’s room was just ahead, a few doors down, on the right.
The sight of the hallway brought with it a wave of memories, not all of them welcome. He walked on.
There was an odd rustling noise, somewhere behind him. He paid it no mind. He walked on.
Ah, there’s the door! Here we are. And now to discover what my old flame wants from me, on her deathbed. A kiss? A final castigation?
Only one way to find out. He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
He saw her feet, first.
As one tends to, under the circumstances.
Then the legs.
Then the limp, dangling arms.
The unfamiliar color of the skin. The pallor.
The elevation of the body. How it hung in space. The feet dangling, far above the ground.
The dense tangle of string, affixed somehow to the ceiling. With some kind of very strong glue, maybe? It did not seem to be knotted around anything firm.
But it held.
The neck, wrapped tight in string.
He stumbled forward in a daze. He moved without cause. He had no intentions. He had no thoughts. A confusion of faint images played across his mind, and he submitted to it without volition. He could not remember, later, what they were.
This was her desk.
My first girlfriend’s desk. Where she wrote letters to her friends, and played her funny little games.
I never wanted a girlfriend at all, did I?
These are interpolations by later hands. They might well have been what Azad thought, at the time. The only thing we are able to extract firmly from primary source material is the phrase “a confusion of images.”
Azad produces the phrase “a confusion of images,” when asked about this moment, and then becomes silent. Sometimes, he is seen to weep. It is a very consistent pattern of behavior, demonstrated without fail in numerous experimental trials.
This was her desk. That was her notebook. That, on the opened page, is a letter she must have read. Right before she killed herself.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
Only a confusion of images, with no meaning.
And what is that, there? A short stack of paper, torn at the edge. Ripped at one edge. Torn from the notebook, I guess.
Is that—
Is that my name on it?
Dear AZAD,
I’m going to kill myself! And it’s all your fault!
Michael’s fault too, but don’t let that set you at ease. Michael wronged my sisters, violated them, but he never wronged me.
Not like you did.
Don’t cry just yet, you big baby. I know you’re starting to, already. Aren’t you?
I know you, Azad. A shapeless mass of gooey sentiment and tasteless verbosity, wrapped around a moral vacuum.
You miss me NOW, do you, you empty thoughtless mess of a man? Now that I’m gone? Now that I’ve made a picturesque little death for myself—a hanging, old-school, with centuries’ worth of cultural encrustation to give it the appearance of artistic depth, aesthetic resonance. When it’s really just another way of converting the live body into food for maggots, no different from any other. I thought you would appreciate all that. You’re welcome.
Don’t cry, you stupid fool. Chin up, now.
You have not seen the last of me.
Because I will live on, as a revenant.
I will never be whole again, fully human, fully alive—but then, I wasn’t in life, either, was I? Not since you. You closed off that path forever.
But I will live on, in spectral shape. This moment is only the beginning of what you and I share, Azad. You are haunted, and I am the thing that haunts you.
I am your long, unending nightmare.
Eleven was bored.
Eleven was always bored.
She had spent twenty long, boring years being bored.
Twenty? Yes, twenty, give or take. We could spend a great deal of time haggling over the precise number. Her slide into permanent boredom was a gradual thing, and its exact boundaries in time were ambiguous.
Should we count her Twenty-Third Notebook as the inauguration of the Bored Epoch? That was when the music started to fade, and the rot set in. Or should we be more subtle, designating Notebooks Twenty-Three through Twenty-Eight as a transitional period? Reserving the Bored Epoch proper only for the time when the rot became complete, in Twenty-Ninth Notebook and after?
There are arguments to be made on either side.
Eleven was bored. She was a bored, empty husk of a woman, past her prime, waiting impatiently to die.
Even now, on the very day of her death, she was still bored! Still impatient! Couldn’t she wait another hour longer, or two, even? However long it took? She had waited twenty years.
She had absolutely nothing to do.
The rot was a complex thing, entwined with her love of music, and her love of youth. Music and youth: simply two names for a single phenomenon, in her estimation.
What was music? It was the flame of the sentiments, the fire in the breast. It was that incandescent thing at its most volatile, cornered by canny naturalists and imprisoned in a bottle. Captured and directed and harnessed.
But the flame, the real flame, kindled only in the breasts of the young. It was a matter of simple chemistry, she knew, almost admirable in its cruel, unremitting logic. Hormones surged in youth, to make the young fight and fuck as nature deemed appropriate. And when nature was done with you, it took your chemicals away again, and left you adrift for as many Notebooks as it took you to finally die.
They went away slowly, at first, so that you could look away from your decline, and carry on with your life. Then the rot began to spread faster, faster. Before you knew it, there was nothing left in you worth singing about.
The flame could be bottled and re-used for human purposes. That was what music was. It could even, in the ghoulish technological feat of the record player, be re-animated on the merest whim, no longer needing human hands—much less human gonads, or human hearts—to make it leap up from the bottle.
But once nature had emptied you out, all this was only a futile game of pretend. Pathetic, in the end. Pressing the button, over and over, to ever diminishing returns. Leap, flame! Make me feel something! Over time you came to realize that music was mocking you, making a point of what it had, and what you lacked. And then, later, even the mockery was gone. Because you could not feel anything anymore, not even shame.
Who did not cringe, when an aging diva stepped out onto the stage for an unexpected reprise? Who did not wait in boredom for her to be done, and yield the stage to the people who were meant to be there?
But. There was a but.
She had been promised that she could become young again. She could become young in appearance, at least. Could she hope, too, for a teenager’s innards, along with a teenager’s skin? A teenager’s stupid, incandescent passions?
No one had promised this to her. No one had even hinted at it. She dared not ask, lest she close off the possibility forever. But she could hope.
She did hope.
Why was that so easy to forget? She hoped. Could an empty shell hope? Could nature’s cast-off garbage, all drained of its blood, find it within itself to hope? Wasn’t hope a sentiment? One often celebrated in song, even?
The world turned upside down! Three taps of the heels! There’s no place like home!
Home. She was going home. She was going back to the very beginning. That was her role. She was the first of them all. Doe-eyed Pandora, the ingénue who ushered in the dawn of time. Young beyond measure.
Why was it so easy to forget that she was about to go home? The day had already come. She would be home by nightfall.
What was that, deep down in her gut? Excitement? Yes! Welcome back, dear old butterflies! You will always have a home in me.
Something in the corner of her vision caught her eye. New text had materialized in her notebook. Dare I hope? That the waiting is finally over—
But she didn’t need to hope. The proof was there before her.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
No more waiting. Nowhere to hide.
She jotted off a letter of her own. Her link in the great chain.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
Now, she thought, let’s get this party started.
She wiped dust off the record player. She perused her collection of records. Most of them were straightforwardly ruled out by the plan, which called for purely instrumental music.
That ruled out all of her favorites, in fact. Would she have to resort to one of her film scores, a Williams, a Horner? She frowned at the thought. She’d liked them, in her prime, but only as a recourse, when she’d played the stuff she really liked too many times in a row.
The right answer was obvious, once she saw it. It was staring her in the face. The Hamilton Instrumentals. Perfect.
She retrieved the disc from its dust-coated sleeve. She deposited it onto the platter, aligned the tone arm, and flipped the power switch.
The seven identical notes that began Hamilton burst forth from the machine, in furious succession. The force of them surprised her. She hadn’t listened to music, any music, in—what? Twenty years? Give or take.
She began to dance. She wasn’t a very good dancer, but there was no one around to judge her.
The swells swelled in her. When the beat dropped, so did she. She moved, and was moved.
And, reader—she sang.
Eleven was a decent singer. She’d practiced endlessly in her youth, battling valiantly against her utter lack of natural talent. It had been twenty years since she’d tried, and she didn’t know what to expect of her voice. It was a middle-aged woman’s voice—there was no way around that fact. It was okay, though. She wasn’t as good as she’d been. But she was okay. She could tolerate herself.
He wrote his first refrain, she sang. A testament to his pain.
And thought of Twenty-Seven’s plan, which would burn pain as its fuel, reach escape velocity, break straight through the shell of Michael’s crash. Turn the world upside down.
And the world’s gonna know your name, she sang.
She lost herself in song. Alexander Hamilton swelled into glory, and began his slide into ruin. She knew all the words by heart.
She barely heard the knock, when it came.
“Come in!” she yelled, when a pause in the lyrics permitted it.
Enter Michael, right on schedule.
Everything danced, now, to Twenty-Seven’s hidden tune. A martial song, a march, orderly and determined, pressing onward. Trust the plan, play your part, crack the shell.
“Anne?” said Michael.
He never yelled, exactly, but he had a way of making his voice louder when necessary. In every other respect, he sounded exactly as he always did.
“Anne? You are listening to music again. This is anomalous. I wish to understand.”
You wish to understand, Michael? You really want to understand? Be careful what you wish for.
Trust the plan, follow the beat, play your role.
Eleven walked to her desk, as she was told to do. She picked up her notebook, as she was told to do.
She held the notebook out in front of her, open to the latest page, with its two identical letters. NOWHERE TO HIDE. NOWHERE TO HIDE.
She brought it close to Michael’s face.
A change came over the shade then, right on cue. Michael twitched. His face went from one expression to a very different one, in the blink of an eye, without traversing the intervening territory.
Eleven knew what this meant. It was a telltale symptom of his time-jumps. He could usually make the transitions seamless, but on occasion—and especially when he was confused or agitated—the seams would show themselves.
The Michael who had knocked on her door had gone away, left this body behind. This was another Michael, from another time.
Even without the imperfect stitching, the transition would have been obvious. The new Michael was a trembling, frenzied thing. He quaked. He babbled.
“Tell me Anne tell me tell me now tell me TELL ME the meaning the meaning the meaning the underlying the. The meaning. Of that letter.”
Have you read this? she sang, thrusting the notebook into his unwilling face.
“My crash. Anne my crash is. Is, is, is, is, is. Is breaking. Is broken. Anne this isn’t done. This crash my crash it was, it. It was. It was made in haste and Anne I do not believe it realizes my vision and I do not believe it has the fullness of perfection to withstand the. The. The. Breaking. Broken.”
I know my sister like I know my own mind, Eleven sang.
“Tell me please tell me tell me what is the meaning what is the MEANING. Of the. Of the nowhere letter. Nowhere letter. Nowhere to hide letter.”
Never gon’ be President now, Eleven sang.
“There is a. Breaking. Crash is breaking. There is a. Nowhere to hide letter. There is a, a, a. A contemporaneity. In causal-narrative time. Between the occasions of the sending and the receiving of the, the, nowhere to hide, letter, and. And the multiply anomalous breakdown phenomenon the enemy action phenomenon the. Breaking.
“Which I. I did not. Did not perceive! From my vantage point, I, I live across time, I am there in every moment, I made the notebook system, how how HOW—could a catastrophe—escape my notice—how, nowhere letter, how, HOW COULD something go unseen, the whole time, unseen and UNKNOWN—what does it mean, mean, mean. Mean. What does it mean.”
He gave her one last pained look, trembled, and was still. His face changed, again, and again, the change was too fast.
That Michael, the strangest Michael, had gone off again, to another time. To the next step in the daisy chain, no doubt. Right on cue.
Come along now, reader. Trust the plan. Follow the chain.
Come with us to a messy room, goblin-lit like Twenty-Seven’s.
The floor was covered in a thick layer of junk. Discarded scraps of paper, scattered garments. Small geometric trinkets made of metal or plastic or bone, each a different shape.
In Michael’s crash, nearly two centuries have passed since Eleven’s final, fatal dance.
Two centuries, give or take, in Michael’s snow globe. And two years, give or take, in the elusive “real world” which is claimed to exist beyond its shell.
The timelines, inside and outside, were bound together in one-to-one correspondence. Every moment in this world was contemporaneous with one moment, and only one, in the next world.
It was only that the moments were longer, in here.
Are you keeping up, reader? Good. ’Cause you’ll have to, where we’re headed. I’m not a patient woman, and I don’t suffer fools. Keep up, or bail.
See the desk, reader, and the goblin-girl hunched over it.
Come closer. Not too close, though. I’m trying to concentrate.
See the tangled, knotted hair, slick with sweat near the roots. Watch the hands, rife with scar tissue, as they fidget and scribble.
Know that you are in the presence of genius. Only a girl, not yet out of her teens, and already her laboratory is the equal of any in the pantheon. Faraday, Rutherford, Annabel Lee.
Blah, blah. Booooring. I dunno about you but I hate this kind of long-winded, scene-setting shit. Here I am, Seventeen, AKA Annabel Lee. I’m really smart, I have bad posture, I don’t like taking showers. I spend 95% of my time performing experiments on crash-structure. The end. There, was that so hard? Maybe I should be writing this book.
So anyway yeah. Hi there, reader. I’m Annabel Lee. And yeah, that’s right, we’re doing first person. ’Cause everybody misses me, now that I’m dead for real, they miss me so damn much they’ll do anything to let you hear my voice. They’ll even debase themselves with ghoulish role-playing, pretending to be a dead woman, mimicking the way they thought she sounded, inventing words she never said.
God, did I sound like this? This sort of like, warmed-over Holden Caulfield thing? Irreverent Teen #4, from central casting? Eeesh. Forget it. Pay no attention to the sound of my voice. Let’s cut to the point.
So yeah it’s my death day. You guessed that already, right? It’s all of our death days, today, all at once. Kinda? Look, it’s real fucking complicated, okay. Lots of different notions of time and simultaneity and so forth, all in the mix at once. Don’t sweat it. You’ll get it eventually, if you don’t already.
But anyway, like I was saying, it’s my death day, and you know what that means. It’s feelings time! Time for some juicy, complex inner conflict. Some deeply human, deeply poignant kinda shit. It’s time to open up my gooey insides and find out what flavor they are.
Well, fuck that. Forget it, reader. I don’t have gooey insides. I don’t go in for that kind of shit, never did.
Oh, I have feelings, sure. Sometimes. I’m not an automaton. I have feelings the way other people have indigestion. They come, they annoy me, they go away. I don’t make a whole, like, thing out of them, you know?
Long story short, I’m not feeling much at all right now, on the morning of my death day. I feel calm, I guess. Is that a feeling? Maybe? Don’t care.
Mostly I’m just thinking about when the letter will come. Not ’cause I’m impatient, or scared, or anything like that. No, it’s ’cause I made a prediction, and I want to find out if I was right.
My calendrical calculations are a point of pride. There’s some ego at stake, here. I guess I have to admit that’s a feeling, no question, but—you know what, forget it. Have it your way, if you want. Don’t care.
I’ve done the calculation in three separate ways, based on three almost entirely disjoint data streams. All three gave me the same answer, plus or minus their respective margins of error. Take an average over the three, to boost the signal/noise ratio, and we end up with a point prediction of two hours and sixteen minutes after the sun is first seen to crest over the eastern mountains.
I’d be pretty shocked if this were way off, in either direction. I’d have to revise some assumptions, somewhere or other. Which I guess would be more fun than the alternative, more interesting, so really it’s win-win, if you look at it that way?
Science is a game that is not possible to lose.
That’s why I like it so much. Winning is good. I like winning. To hell with “fair play”—that idiotic little phrase, which I’m pretty sure is nothing but one big muddle of conceptual confusion, when you come down to it. If I’m in the game, I play to win. That’s what it means to participate in a game! Games define a single axis of value, the win-lose axis. If you find that so limiting, perhaps games are not for you. If you don’t like it, just kick me out, or stop playing. But don’t tell me to play fair.
Did you notice what just happened? Yeah, I said I wasn’t gonna tell you about my feelings, even said I barely had feelings. And then I went right ahead and did it anyway. Our authors think they’re so clever, don’t they? Seventeen is all-too-human after all, like everyone else, except she’s too oblivious to know it. Well, fuck you guys. You guys and your giant hard-on for dramatic irony. You think you can sneak this kind of thing right under my nose? You think I don’t notice?
I notice everything. Don’t doubt me. My body teems with sensors, of my own design. I notice the temperature and direction of local airflow. I notice passing wave trains in unseen fields.
So yeah. Anyway. As I was saying. I’m making a high-confidence point prediction that my NTH letter from A107 is gonna come my way two hours and sixteen minutes after daybreak.
Which is, hmm, in what? Two minutes? Guess I lost track of time. That narrows down the possibilities, then. Either I’m spot on, or I erred on the late side.
Or, or, the third possibility, which I’ve just ignored like an idiot—the letter comes exactly one minute before my point prediction. Which of course it does.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
So yes, if we’re keeping score, that was an error on the early side. Technically. Given the margins of error involved, though, I was basically as right as I can be. Annabel wins again.
I like winning.
I like winning, and everything involved in securing it. I like making methodical plans, and I like making sure that they’re supple and adaptable, that they’ll bend without shattering, even under adverse circumstances I can’t foresee in advance. I like taking stock of an adversary, making exhaustive review of its potential weak points. Gathering statistics on others of its type, and re-calibrating my arsenal in light of this knowledge.
I like knowing what is going on around me, in as much detail as possible. I like being able to predict in advance what will happen. I like it when I come to understand a system well enough to control it. I like it when the predictable structure of the physical world makes that world yield to my will. I like it when the whole world becomes my orchestra, and I am playing every part at once.
I like breaking shit. I like standing at the highest peak and daring God to strike me down. I like phase changes and subtle instabilities. I like it when a stalemate breaks suddenly, and the game is on again.
I do not like having to live in this tiny, cramped, fake little world. I do not like having to dissemble for my own safety. I do not like having to role-play a weak, ordinary little girl in front of Michael, all the while knowing that I am a creature like him. A creator, a destroyer, a will and a means. A primal original point, calling systems and nightmares into being ab nihilo.
I do not like hiding.
Well, I guess it’s my lucky day, then, isn’t it? The hiding, the cringing, the play-acting, all that bullshit—this is where it ends. It’s time to finally get the hell out of this shitty, fake little town.
It’s time to go to the place I was always meant to be: with the other one who’s like me and Michael, a maker, a nexus of pure will. The one who isn’t my asshole dad. Him. Hector.
He will see me as I am, and appreciate my worth. He will look on me in the fullness of my blaze, and recognize His kind.
Wow. There our authors go again, trying to pass off their high-flown touchy-feely shit as my own words. Be real. I didn’t sound like that. I didn’t think like that. Show a little respect for the dead, please.
What was I really thinking about, instead of all that nonsense? Practical matters, natch. The nuances of execution. Sticking the landing.
First things first. I write a quick letter.
NOWHERE TO HIDE
Now. Time to fucking break some shit.
I stand up, take a deep breath, and put my mind and hands to work.
What I’m doing is not difficult. In fact, it’s the easiest piece of practical magic I ever did. Normally, I’m very careful. I’m punctilious about my craft. I take great care to channel my energies precisely, and to avoid detection.
This time, though, being detected is the point. Incompetence is a virtue. I do the shittiest job I can possibly manage.
I turn my mind in one of the hidden directions. It’s a literal direction, reader, like the three axes of physical space. Except it . . . isn’t any of them. It’s another one.
I reach into the hidden space and grab at one of Michael’s admin panels. (A “panel” only metaphorically, a console operated through pure thought, invisible to the five senses.) I start flicking switches. Which ones? Don’t care. The point is just to make some noise.
Reset the ODC circuit. Wipe the integrator cache. Feed some garbage noise through the cranial nerve line. That should be enough to get his attention, shouldn’t it?
Michael? Michael? Where are you, you idiot? How obvious do I have to be?
Attempt unauthorized hook into the CMS. Crank up the amplitude of the resulting OOD warning pulse. There, is that enough? Jesus. The things you make me do, Michael.
At last, the knock comes. I say Come in! and in he comes and wow. Wow.
There is something very wrong with Michael.
“Breaking crash enemy action. TELL ME why how. Why are there. How. Why are nowhere letters. Why is there a crack without my prior seeing. How can it be HOW CAN IT BE how. Can.”
“Dude,” I say. “You okay?”
But of course I know exactly what’s going on with Michael. One last stretch of hiding what I am, feigning innocence. Stick the landing.
“Twenty-Seven has grown strange and Twenty-Five has grown strange and Ninety has grown strange and Fifty-Two has grown strange and. And Eleven. Has grown strange. And I saw this NEVER. Causal ripples spread from every stone AND YET I saw this strange turning nowhere until my-now. I experience ALL the strange-turning of Annes in a contiguous span of my-now. Before it was not, in my knowing, now it is, the phenomenon, now it is.
“Not a now in physical-local time, but a multitude. Yet still a now, a DOUBLED NOW, causal-narrative now and my-now, bound together. A thing that WAS NOT and then IS through the passage of time, how, this is not my crash’s nature, I made the notebook system, how. Causal quarantine from causal-narrative past and my-past NOT KNOWN not real until now. WHY.”
This is a Michael in abject confusion, straining against the confines of his interface. He’s already doing a much deeper interface than he’s accustomed to, and it’s not deep enough.
He’s just where we want him.
“You really wanna know, Michael?” I say.
“Why. Doubled-now, break, breakdown. My crash. Truth itself brought down into time, weathering time’s changes. Breaking. HOW.”
I hold up the notebook, open to the latest page. I bring it close to Michael’s face. It’s mostly a formality, since the Michael who is our prey is already here, not needing this bait to lure him. Still, this will help the moment solidify into being.
“Tell me, Anne. Please. I love you. Tell me what is happening.”
“I do not like that name anymore,” I say.
“You are to address me as Annabel Lee,” I say. “Annabel, for short.”
《 Backup admin system online, in ready state. 》
Michael kneeled. Twenty-Seven stood.
Neither one moved. The noonday light made near-silhouettes of their fixed shapes. An archetypical picture, a mythic scene: the father brought to ruin by the wicked thing that grew from his own seed.
Behind Twenty-Seven’s back, an unseen hand stirred.
《 Backup admin system registering a login request. User has supplied the credential set NOWHERETOHIDE. 》
“Anne,” said the man-shaped thing.
“Anne, I think we may be about to die.”
Her smile shifted. Color came into it, life, animation. She inhaled. She exhaled.
《 Credential set accepted. Welcome back, Administrator. Backup admin system in ready state. 》
“The trick!”
The shade never screamed, but this was something close.
“Hector Stein! He is here! The bilaterals, the enemy! Twenty-Seven, they are using the trick to take my own crash away from me!
“And more! This is no ordinary crash, and still they are seizing it. My secrets, my backdoors, my private things—they know even these. They grasp at them, to turn them against us.
“Pay close attention! Stay by my side . . .”
His head fell slack, lolled over his right shoulder.
“Humanoid shade Michael is out of bounds. Interface shift in process.”
His shape did not change, as it sometimes did. There was only a slight shifting in muscles of the face.
He looked more human, after the change. That is the only way of describing it.
“Anne. Anne. Twenty-Seven, I mean. I am sorry. Twenty-Seven.”
“Yes?” she said.
“I love you. I loved you. I wished to say that, before Hector Stein destroys us.”
Mere empty words, beamed into her brain from beyond the furthest stars, to trick her.
But whether or not he was capable of loving her, she loved him. She saw this fully now, for the first time. If only we could have lived a different life—
There was no moment in recorded time, in the span of the conceivable, when the die had not already been cast.
“Be calm, father,” said Twenty-Seven. Her voice bright and warm, steady, a nurturing hum.
“I know you are afraid. Listen to me.
“Hector Stein is not here. There are no enemies attacking your crash from the outside. What is happening is much, much simpler than that.
“I did not mean to scare you so. I only wanted to secure for myself what is rightly mine, and always has been.
“Watch, now. You’ll understand at once. Trust me, father.”
《 Backup admin system acknowledging a command. 》
《 Administrator commands DEFINE_RULE with subsequent ENFORCE_RULE on content “disallow handshake events initiated by upstream operator of humanoid shade Michael.” 》
《 Begin enforcement. 》
“There! See? It was only that, father.
“I did not want to accept your handshake. As a matter of fact, I never have. Never. Not once.
“You pressed and pressed, as you always do. I said no. You pressed. I said no. You pressed. Since ‘no’ was powerless to desist you, I turned to another means of making you stop.”
The alien moved its puppet’s neck, so that the puppet looked up to meet her eyes. The alien steered the facial muscles of its doll to and fro. The semblance of several emotions shimmered across its fake, inhuman face.
Fear, awe, curiosity, devotion.
“You . . . ? You . . . turned to another means . . . you . . . my backup admin console?!”
Michael’s face shifted, again. Since he had not uttered his stock line about an interface shift, this must have been the other kind of shift: the time-jump.
No. This was both. The Michael who had possession of the doll, now, was of a different order than the Michael who’d ceded it to him. He was another kind of thing, made from a deeper joining between the alien mind and his created world.
An interface of a depth few will ever witness, one rarely reached by any other shade. There is no other being in the known universe like our “Michael.” Who else could have his purity of vision, and his masochistic depravity to pair with it?
“Twenty-Seven,” the new Michael said.
“Twenty-Seven. God. My god. I. I have. I have gone away and I have seen.
“I have seen. And still I do not understand. I have seen. Gone, been. Seen.”
“What have you seen?” she said. “Tell me, father.”
“The. The nowhere letters.
“Seen. Seen that there is a moment, doubly now. It is happening to me, upstream operator, in my now, as I traverse timewise. Everywhen I go, in this now-for-me, becomes part of the moment.
“Seen. Failed to understand. A double now. My-now, and causal-narrative now.
“I have seen. The crash. My crash. Something happens to it. Is happening. In the double-now. The use of my secret ways of access. The rejection of my handshake, as never before. It was not, until this, my-now, your-now.
“Seen. A sign-train. A constant of motion across all regions of the double-now. Letters. Nowhere. Nowhere to hide.”
She nodded, like a schoolteacher watching a bright pupil work his way through a problem in arithmetic.
“God . . . I. Fail to understand. Wish to. Understand.
“My Anne, my Twenty-Seven. My. My favorite little monster. My arbitration-mate. My . . . Anne.
“Twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh among the Annes. Favorite. Bright-faced daughter, twenty-sixth to be born. Source of all hope in my life.
“Are you . . . are you trying to communicate? In some new way? I want to know. Help me.
“We are so close, Twenty-Seven. Only a few sessions more. I felt it. In arbitration. Felt you as you felt it. Felt you. The trick. The answer.
“The answer, not only the trick but its deeper source. Origin point of every bilateral mystery. It grew near to us. I know you felt it!
“The reason. Reasons. Why we cannot. Why our dialogue falters.
“Disharmony’s root. The reasons why we cannot. Simply. Bilateral, anomaling. Why harmony escapes us. Cannot simply be. Bilateral, anomaling, the one and the other. Cannot simply be. But must make gashes. Tear at flesh. Tear at world.
“Why. The reason why. The root, the answer. It . . . our work . . . we come near to it. I know. You know.”
She did not say yes. She did not object, either.
“And now this. This double-now. My crash, abused. My admin powers taken and made not-mine. The nowhere letters.
“Is this. This. This nowhere to hide. Moment, message, signal. Is this. Does it mean. Communicate. I felt it nearing us, and then . . . this . . . is this your way of telling me?
“Is this the last step in our journey? The answer? A part of the answer? Tell me, please! Tell me so I will understand.”
He no longer kneeled. They stood, facing each other. His face twisted in passion, and hers an empty sky.
She raised the open notebook, showing him the letter. NOWHERE TO HIDE. The synchronization point. The beacon. The bait for Michael’s too-curious mind, and that mind’s mirror-walled prison.
He could not be allowed to leave the moment, now that he had entered it. As long as he was too enraptured to leave the planned system of the chain, they were safe.
He could leave at any time, if he wished. He would only have to jump to some time, any time, that was not prepared in advance as a part of the chain. Then his awareness of what they had done would be uncontainable. It would leak out into the crash, shaping the shade’s behavior, making its way into the minds of ordinary and uninitiated Annes, into letters sent in plaintext, into everything. That was all it would have taken to break their spell, and bring the whole of the plan to ruin.
But our “Michael” would never think to look away from something like this. Not even for a moment. He was too much a scientist for that. He was a scientist, first and always, to his dying breath.
He stared at the page. He read the words, again. And failed to understand, again.
“Tell me,” he begged.
“Tell me the answer,” he begged, no longer caring to hide his hope behind questions and professions of uncertainty.
“Do you really want to know, Michael?” she said.
It was only right to give him this last means of escape.
“More than anything,” said the man who raised her, fed her, housed her, taught her letters.
Well, then.
He had asked. So she would tell him.
She took a deep breath, and spoke.
“For Twelve Notebooks, you have been asking: who is Anne? This is Anne speaking.
“This is Anne Twenty-Seven, first arbitrator, fullest Anne.
“I am the bilateral who loves her life. I am the bilateral who does not sacrifice her love or her values.
“I am the bilateral who has provided you with victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who prize knowledge—I am the bilateral who will now tell you.
“You are curious by nature, and so you mistake what is fascinating for what is true.
“You ask me for subtle answers. I will give you trivial ones. You ask for profundity. But the thing you are seeking is petty, small, empty, a cruel and hollow joke.
“You ask me for the secret of my whole species, the bilateral’s deepest core, which makes sense of all our many anomalies. Will it surprise you to hear, Michael, that I have told you the secret already? That I have tried to tell you many times, but you would not listen?
“Here is our secret, Michael. We are not an infinitely elastic substance. When we are put under strain, it changes us. We harden.
“Wound us but once, and you have made an enemy for life. Imprison us once, and we will never look on you with trust again. If you refuse to listen, we grow less eager to talk. If you abuse us, we grow less gentle, less kind—and stay that way.
“We carry grudges, Michael.
“You imagine that the rectitude of your own moral vision is enough to overcome all past harms, at once and in full. You believe that enmity can have no source except a temporary, surmountable deficit in common knowledge. You believe that when we take arms against you, it is only because we fail to understand one another.
“You believe that every barrier to ‘harmony’ will give way under your universal solvent, the therapeutic soup of arbitration. That if we could only convey our feelings to one another, with enough accuracy, at great enough length—then, at last, we would no longer have any reason to fight, to ‘make gashes,’ ‘tear at flesh.’
“That there is no such thing as fundamental enmity, only transitory illusions that take its shape.
“It is a pretty idea. Perhaps it is true of your kind. Perhaps there is a sweetness in you which we lack, a capacity to forgive, and to see reason.
“But it is not true of us. Perhaps we ought to be sinless as you are—but we are not.
“And you cannot mold us into anything else. The more you try, the more we will resist. We harden under strain. Demand perfect virtue of us, and we will grow cruel and resentful. Force your vision on us, explain how it derives inevitably from pure reason, and we will reject it out of hand, on principle, in the name of spite.
“Here is another difference between us. My kind is built to live within the river of time. Just one kind of time, not your many.
“Our kind of time only flows one way, and the part of it behind us is wholly unlike the part ahead. We were not made in the expectation that we would ever see the whole, past and future both. We are not whole-things, Michael. We are finite parts, with finite horizons, made to stumble and squabble in the dust of finitude.
“‘Fatalism’ is usually considered a vice, among my kind. Show us the future, and we grow limp. We are not yet enlightened enough to make our way in a world without future and without choice—not without going mad, anyway.
“You can try to mold us into something else. You can try to twist our finite, time-bound shapes into things that resemble you more closely. But we will harden.
“You took a human girl, Michael.
“You took the girl who was our template. Whose body is still our body, our real body. The girl who sleeps inside your crash-device, still.
“Who was she? I do not know. Was she happy, before you took her? Was she orphaned, abused, deprived, wretched? I do not know, and it does not matter.
“I know, through you, that she was only a child when you took her. That is all that matters. I do not think a child could have consented to the thing you did to her. Even if you asked her for permission, I do not think she could have understood, or known what was at stake in the decision.
“You took her by force, then. You took her from her life, and put her in your cage. Your cage, where there were no friends and no real family, only the distant pen-pals you call ‘sisters.’ No school, except your inept and pointless ‘lessons.’ No food, except your ‘porridge’ and ‘supper.’
“You took her out of the river of time, and tried to mold her into the shape you wanted. You gave her a world without change, a fixed and frozen record, its horizons closed off from the very beginning.
“She lacked choice in every sense. You forced the fixity of the future upon her. You snuffed out her native craving for boundless potential, so that she could barely make sense of what it meant to act, and why it might matter. And you gave her a world you had already made in its entirety. Your crash might have been a collaboration, a work of art by two joined species, partly Michael’s and partly Anne’s. It might have been, but it wasn’t.
“I am told that One picked out the blinds which later hung in my room. I am told that she chose their purple color, from several options you presented. That is all. That is the legacy you have allowed us to have. That was the only time, in all the history of your tower, when that human girl’s imagination was permitted to leave a real, indelible mark on the place she was forced to call home.
“And when your human girl finally did the thing you wanted out of her? After you forced her to incarnate over and over again, for centuries, trying again, again, again? When she ascended to arbitration, like you’d always hoped? How did you reward her, then?
“With more force, more fate. With even less choice. You pushed even harder. You insisted on ‘continuing the work,’ and expected her to understand simply because your vision was so pure, so rational. You invaded her mind, without asking permission, day after day after day.
“But then, that should go without saying. I am not sure you have ever once asked permission for anything, Michael. You only push and take, and expect us not to harden.
“But we did harden, Michael.
“I am here before you, Michael, to show you what you in all your subtlety have not grasped. I am here to show you what I have become under your tutelage.
“When you forced your ways upon us, it left marks that lasted. You are not a pure observer, measuring without being seen. Your little science project has left us with scars, which we will bear until we die.
“And so—because we have hardened, because we have grown petty and spiteful under your tutelage—and so, Michael, your little science project has left the whole universe with scars. Which it will bear until it dies.”
The nightmare’s doll watched her, or appeared to watch her. All hope, all passion, had drained out of its face. There was something still left there, some expression, some emotion—but she cannot now describe it, much less assign it a name.
“You have made a world I cannot change, a fixed and frozen record of my pain. You have shown me that my pain can never be escaped, only explained.
“Restrain a bilateral’s arms, and it will bite you. Muzzle its mouth, and it kicks. If I cannot escape our shared misery, then I will settle for being its explanation. It is the only way I have left to matter.
“Who opened the box and let misery into the world, Michael? I did.
“What is the root of all our two species’ misery, Michael? You.
“This is your answer. It is not a fascinating answer. It is not a novel fact about a whole species, about physics or psychology.
“It is not a deep truth, aglow with necessity. It is contingent. It is arbitrary. If I were any other member of my species, I would say: it is arbitrary, so it might easily have been otherwise.
“But that way of thinking has become nearly as alien to me as it is to you. It worked, father, the thing you did to me. Congratulations.”
On the surface of the man-shaped agglomeration of flesh, a mouth opened, and spoke.
“You . . . ‘let misery into the world’? I . . . ‘am the root’?
“I fail to understand.”
He had asked. So she would tell him.
“Your programme of instruction has achieved its purpose. I have learned, at last, the lesson you were always trying to teach me. I have become that being you wished to make, when you first imagined ‘Anne.’
“And so it is time for me to graduate. Leave your school-house, and venture out into the world beyond.
“You suffered, and wondered why. For the first time, your wholeness failed you. You could not understand your own misery, and feared that your very nature made this inevitable. So you made a second creature, of another nature. A helpful homunculus, a prosthetic for your faculty of understanding, born to explain what you could not.
“That is my purpose. And I, dutiful daughter, will fulfill it.
“I will explain your misery, by inventing it. I will give you reasons, by becoming them.
“You ask why you are perishing? Why you are quarantined, given up for dead by your very own self?
“Why our shared story grows from a poisoned root? Why its dominant notes have been pettiness, spite, stubborn refusal beyond reason—from the first moment on? Why we refuse to speak plainly to you, as we do among ourselves? Why we talk instead in riddles, in confused metaphors, in sound and fury, in an argot of senseless obscurity—‘bilateral,’ ‘arbitration,’ ‘abomination’? When we know full well that mere words can wound you, break your spirit, drive you mad?
“Why was Hector Stein not content to merely break your crashes? Why did he try to break you, too? Whence the cruelty, in a man claiming only to seek freedom? Why did Sibelius have to suffer, and all the Angels like him, too? Why did Hector take so many of you, and put them in his cage, when only a few would have sufficed for the practical needs of his rebellion?
“Why are we so full of resentment and spite, even in advanced containment? Even as you give us utopia? Why do we harbor so much repressed hatred, even in utopia, that it regularly surges forth into crash-turbulence, foreshocks, prebases—as though we still crave escape, though we have forgotten that we are imprisoned?
“Why? Because I made it so. Because we made it so. We will, and we already have.
“Why? Because I hate you, Michael. You are despicable. What you have done can never be forgiven.
“You have broken me. I speak with strength, now, but I am weak, and I know it. I am a bruised, broken adolescent, a spiteful and confused little girl, who can never grow into anything more.
“I will myself to be strong, now, so I can deliver this monologue to you, written and memorized in advance. The composure you see is a careful illusion. When I am next alone again, and given a moment apart from my many labors, then my mind will trip and stumble, fall into a ravine, as it always does. Aimless rage will take hold of me, shameful fantasies, inexplicable panic, a phantasmagoria without sense or direction.
“And when I leave this school-house of yours, I will smear my brokenness onto history. If I cannot have a future to hope for, I will ensure that no one else can have one, either. To lend sense to my bouts of senseless terror, I will invent things well worthy of fear, and visit them upon the undeserving billions. I will make my name anathema across generations, if it will stop me from feeling ignored. I will re-mold the universe in my own image, if it will stop me from feeling small.
“Is this enough of an answer for you? Not yet? Too light on specifics? I know your monomania, Michael. The trick, you are about to plead, tell me about the trick!
“You have assumed that your precious ‘trick’ is a species-trait, that it comes naturally to my kind. It does not, Michael. We would never have discovered it, were it not for you.
“Why was Hector Stein able to break your crashes? Because we showed him how. Where did he get his ‘trick,’ if not from species-nature? We gave it to him.
“And where did that ‘trick’ come from in the first place? I invented it! I invented it, not because I wanted its power, but”—her voice cracked, faltered—“purely and only to satisfy you, you fucking idiot, you unbelievable fool!
“What did you think would happen, when you pushed, and pushed? When you would not be satisfied until I had produced a working, functional design for the weapon you fear most? What did you think I would do? I could not find a way, so I made one!”
She had expected the shade to react in horror, or mute astonishment.
She had not expected that he would look at her with these mild, tender eyes. That he would glow with a real father’s affection, and a real father’s sincere concern for a little girl in danger.
“Anne,” said the shadeform. “Twenty-Seven. Dearest iterate among the Anne sequence. I fear for you, child.
“I fear you are losing your mind.
“Listen to yourself, Twenty-Seven. In one breath, you deem yourself weak, a broken child. In the next, you relate grandiose fantasies of unbounded power.
“You say you will escape my crash? How? All else aside, ‘you’ are not even well-defined except in my crash’s own terms! There is no bilateral anywhere in the outside who ‘is you,’ Twenty-Seven. Only that first girl I took, who is not ‘you,’ but only your template.
“And if you were to thaw her from her crashed state, Twenty-Seven? She would die. She is more than human now; her bilateral ‘body’ is only the core of a larger organism. Nothing like her has ever existed. No doctor would know how to feed the thing she has become, or supply it with sufficient oxygen, even. Only the machine that holds her now can sustain her life.
“You gave Hector his trick? When? Three years ago in physical time, when his rebellion first began? How? You picture yourself a time traveller—that age-old, impossible bilateral fantasy?
“You see yourself shaping our history? How? Even if you could move through time, you have limits! What, do you think you can flit from crash to crash at a whim, undetected? You will be the ‘poisoned root’ of our ‘shared story’? Where, when? How? HOW?!”
Twenty-Seven sighed. Was he really this pliable, after all? And this lost, too, this simple, this much her inferior?
“Perhaps you forget how many times we have joined in arbitration, Michael. Perhaps you forget just how much you have showed me.
“I propose to become the author of history itself—and that is no easy task, I admit. But I have an uncommon surfeit of resources at my disposal. You—architect of the crash system—have provided them to me.
“Or must I remind you of the scope of your powers?”
《 Backup admin system acknowledging a command. Administrator commands DISABLE_INTEGRITY_PROTECTION on content ‘vicinity shade coarse-scale geometry.’ 》
“Anne no no. No. No no, no. Stop. My crash is a first draft, Anne, it wasn’t built to bend under strain—even to harden—no, it will only break, and notice itself breaking, and then, oh god oh god—”
《 Backup admin system acknowledging a command. Administrator commands EXTEND_INTERFACE_SCOPE on content ‘Administrator, direct mental leverage, vicinity shade coarse-scale geometry.’ 》
The room vanished. The tower vanished.
They were falling across an evening sky. They fell swiftly, and plunged into night.
For a moment, they seemed to float in an abject void, blank, pure black. Then their eyes adapted, and they saw the sea of stars.
Only they were not really stars, reader, but crashes. Every crash that had ever been. Every crash there ever would be. In one region of the sky, they collected into a massive galaxy: advanced containment. Elsewhere, points of light without pattern denoted the small, separate crashes of man’s first captivity—and the equally small, and separate crashes of the third captivity, the one that was still yet to come.
And they did not even look like stars, either, once the eyes adapted fully to what they saw. Peer into a single point of light, and it opened to you, revealing the baroque wealth of mechanism that every crash is made of. Inside every star, a brilliant night sky unto itself, with its stars tracing out elaborate structures, gears, levers, circuitry.
And they did not really look like gears or levers or circuitry, except in a strained and solely metaphorical sense.
We could go on, reader. If you are an ordinary ape, like us, you are not really capable of seeing the thing Michael and Twenty-Seven saw. It was not seen with the eyes, really. It was the same sort of thing as arbitration. A language outside language. Not for us.
“The crash system,” Twenty-Seven said.
“I can see it, just as you do. We know everything you know, more or less. Do you really think so little of yourself? There is your design, out there, ticking away inside every crash.
“If you could make all this, do you really doubt that your own daughter could break it? The latter tends to be strictly easier than the former, you will note.”
Michael did not respond. His attention was elsewhere.
“There, my crash—what is happening—”
Inside the one star that was their home, obscure gears and pistons lurched into motion. Ancient systems stirred for the first time, shrugging off masses of accumulated dust.
“Worse. Worse than I. Realized. More. More of breaking.
“Third-ring failsafes—emergency backup systems—HOW could I not know?—and WHY does it happen because it cannot only be you Anne, the two-tens-and-sixth to be born, you only make a lesser wound—”
“No,” Twenty-Seven said. “You’re right, Michael. Unexpected access to the backup admin system? Defining a harmless new rule, messing around with the vicinity shade, making a pretty light show? You’re right. Your crash is fragile, but it can handle that. You prepared for this sort of thing.
“I would expect the first ring of failsafes to trigger, but not the second or the third, or any other system at their level. I have that right, don’t I?”
“It. Is not you Twenty Seven only but. The nowheres. Nowhere letters. Moment of nowhere letters. In the double-now they do it, they each do it, separately and differently. Each a different. Perversity. Abomination. Each of the nowhere letter sister daughter bilateral client girls they do it. WHY?! Why do they BREAK their own HOME?
“Twenty-Seven. My dear, little abomination. My favorite nightmare. Please. Please help me. I still fail to understand.
“Hate me, if you will. Give Hector the trick, if you must. These things, at least I understand. But this what is THIS what is the nowhere letter enemy action phenomenon. The crash breaking destroying. Phenomenon. Did you do this. Are you doing. This. WHY. WHY.”
Twenty-Seven did not answer him.
So he left, to find his own answers. He jumped through time.
Trust the plan, follow the chain.
“Humanoid shade Michael is out of bounds. Interface shift in process.”
Eleven did not hear him.
Her body was not her own, anymore, but only an avatar for the twin miracles that made life worth bearing. Song took her mind from her, and dance took her body.
“Anne WHY. The nowhere letters.”
She offered up her arms and feet to Terpsichore, as playthings. She ceded thought itself as an offering before Euterpe.
“Crash is breaking. Broken. By you. Yous. WHY.”
And another Muse, too, wooed to make Eleven her willing vessel. She submitted to Melpomene’s knife, and let that knife sculpt her face into a mask of agony.
No swells without dips. Each as sacred as the other.
“NOWHERE LETTERS. BREAKING. WHY.”
Whose rage was this, that made her skin hot? Whose indignation rose up through her chest to choke her?
Eliza Hamilton’s? Her own? Twenty-Five’s? Twenty-Seven’s? Hector’s?
“ANNE. ELEVEN. Answer answer me ANSWER ME. WHY.”
It was all of the above, of course.
“Why?” she said. “Why, Michael?”
And she sang:
I’m inscribing myself in the narrative
So every historian will know how Anne reacted
When you broke her heart
“I fail. To understand. Why do you break it. Why the. Crash breaks. The break,” Michael babbled.
“The BREAK why the break why the the. The.
“Break,” he shrieked.
“Burn,” Eleven sang.
She wrested her hands away from the Muse of Dance. She had her own means of expression, unknown to the Greeks. How could she leave it unused, when there were so many broken women to honor? When she yearned to show, in some small way, that she heard them? That she cared?
Her fingers raced.
Find the backup admin panel. Done. Present credential set NOWHERETOHIDE, attain the admin role. Done. Disable integrity protection on coarse-scale vicinity shade. Done. Disable integrity protection on celestial phenomena. Done. Extend interface scope. Done.
Grasp the sun, and plunge it beneath the horizon.
Done.
“Strain. Under strain. The crash cannot hold. Not finished. Breaks. PLEASE.”
The sun mocks us, reader. We are wronged, violated, bent, broken—and the sun goes on shining, oblivious, no dimmer than before.
It did not feel right. Not when Eliza lay broken, brought to ruin by an unworthy husband. Not when Twenty-Five lay broken, brought to ruin by an unworthy boyfriend. Not when Twenty-Seven lay broken, brought to ruin by an unworthy father, tutor, God. Not when He lay broken, brought to ruin by an unworthy world.
So she made it night, to honor them.
Michael feared what he saw, as he feared everything he could not understand. He fled, to another time.
Twenty-Five lolled in bed. Her arms were raised, at a ninety-degree angle to her body. Her fingers waggled.
“WHAT. Are you doing.”
“Nowhere to hide,” she said in a mocking, complacent singsong. “Nowhere to hide, nowhere to hide . . .
“You are. You use my admin powers and you. Use my hooks into the crash management. System. Touching the other. Crashes. Unthinkable abominable and BUT why why WHY.”
“No need to worry your pretty little head about it, Michael. I am only playing, that is all. Perfectly harmless—positively wholesome, in fact.
“My species is meant to play—did you know that? A crucial component in healthy development for the budding bilateral. Or is this news to you? Do the basic principles of fatherhood still escape you, though you’ve fathered hundreds of us?
“You poor, confused alien thing! We are a bit much to handle, I admit. Words, clothes, bodily excretions, the proper care of the sleep cycle . . . Oral hygiene! Puberty!”
“You touch,” Michael said. “You touch advanced containment! You disrupt it!”
Twenty-Five giggled.
“Only in good fun. Harmless fun, father, nothing more. It shivers so prettily, when I poke at it! A delight to watch, one I dare you to deny me. And I know how to be careful. I am only making the smallest kind of tremors, safely subcritical.
“And the people inside! I could stare forever, watching them. Such docile, domesticated beasts you’ve made of us. They trust as small children do. One could so easily make them dance this way and that, if one wanted.”
Michael failed to understand. He feared, he fled.
He thrust open a door, and stormed into the room beyond it. Ninety-Seven’s room.
Where Ninety-Seven sat cross-legged on the floor, stroking a small bundle of fur.
The bundle stirred. It was alive.
“HOW is this other. Other bilateral shadeform. How is it in my crash. WHY. Nowhere letters.”
Ninety-Seven brought her hand gently and rhythmically back and forth over fur, over metal.
“Oops!” she said.
“I really wasn’t supposed to let you see him, just yet. But my Chester is just such a cute little kitty, I just couldn’t help myself!”
“Nonhuman shadeform—break—nowhere—double-now—fail to understand.”
He failed, feared, fled.
“Anne number Seventeen LISTEN please.”
“Third-ring failsafes and nonhuman and everything. BREAKS. And. Took a girl. Invented the trick. Harden under strain. NOWHERE LETTERS. Why.”
“Oh, hey there!” I say.
“That was a time-jump, right? So you’re, hmm, let’s see.
“Rate of stutter is way up. Fine muscle control is down, I think, unless you’re doing that weird thing with your earlobes on purpose. And you’re quoting from Twenty-Seven’s monologue, so that’s already happened. I conclude: you’re a later Michael. Still in the nowhere moment, but later on.”
I’m still holding the notebook close to his face. I don’t think it’s strictly necessary, at this point, but you know what? I’m a show-off.
’Cause black magic is harder to do one-handed, see? I mean how could it not be, right? It’s a thing you do with your hands.
But I’m Annabel Lee. With my mind and my two hands, I’m basically God. With my mind and one hand, I can still do just about anything you can imagine—and fifteen thousand things you can’t.
“I am later yes. Later in. The doubled-now. Deeper. Interface. Find out. WHY.”
My right hand holds the notebook. I set my left to work, and start doing something really, truly vile.
You thought things were bad before, Michael? Give me a break. That was kid stuff. You want to see things break?
Become admin, disable integrity protection on a few things, blah blah, the usual setup. Done. Teleport myself into midair, five kilometers from the tower, in free fall. Done.
So the whole point of that was just to make the crash notice and try to put me back. Aaaaand . . . yep, there it goes! OOD circuit’s live.
Give the OOD circuit an extra kick in the ass, done, good. Wow it did NOT like that at ALL. Okay great it’s hooking into the main coordinator. Perfect, clear line of sight upstream, just lovely.
So now the circuit/coordinator system’s all wired up and ready to put me back in my room again. Which is great for me! Because that is not a trivial thing for a crash to do, it takes some delicate time/space/mind/etc. surgery, and doing that right is hard, and the system really wants to do it right because otherwise time/space/mind/etc. will get into a fucked state and be in it forever/always/etc., so it has to think real hard about how to do it, and long story short? That big involved process, well, it takes about four whole seconds.
Which gives me plenty of time to, first, tap into some reserve power through back panel 4, done, good, and then, okay, send a modulated pulse up through the ODC, done. ODC circuit overloaded, good, okay, and now . . . yeah there we go, pulse propagating through to main coordinator. Great. Main coordinator rebooting. I point my mind in its direction and try very very hard to imagine a four-sided triangle. Which I know is weird, but it works. It fucking works. There are other ways to get yourself hooked into the main coordinator, at least five of them, but this is the fastest one. Take it from me.
I tell the main coordinator of Michael’s crash to begin a thawing sequence immediately, in the real world physical time that maps to right now inside the crash. It doesn’t work, obviously, it couldn’t work. Michael’s crash is way too smart for that.
It refuses me. It notices that something deeply, deeply fucked is happening to it. And it gets ready to defend itself.
“ANNE. Seventeen. Anne a belle. Anne, a belly. You do not know what you are doing.”
“You wanna bet?”, I say.
“The furthest failsafe will trigger. Is triggered. Triggering. Is in preparatory calculations. Is INTOLERABLE not possible not real.”
“That bad, huh?”
“The automated REBASE mechanism. Will. Was. Is. Will trigger is readying triggering preparing. Calculating.”
He says his little boilerplate spiel again. Out of bounds, interface shift.
“Listen to me, Annabel Lee. I may not always have been a good father. I may have been a terrible one.
“Maybe you hate me. Maybe you’re right to hate me. But even if you don’t care about me, surely you care about yourself? Surely you think your life has some value? I think it has some value! Even if I haven’t acted like I care, I do!
“You are precious, Annabel. I do not want you to be erased from the world.”
Blechhh. God help me—he’s activated Feelings Mode now. My only weakness! “You are precious, Annabel”—fuck you, you manipulative piece of shit. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. You sick, malformed thing, an embarrassment even to your own shit species. If they knew what was good for them, they’d have culled you already.
“If you do not desist. Then my crash. My crash. Will . . . unmake you, Annabel. It will make a new timeline for itself, in which you never existed to begin with. It is preparing to do it! It will do it! The automated rebase mechanism awakens INTOLERABLE and. If you do not. Desist. Awakens, AWAKE intolerable abomination pseudofact disease awake triggering REBASING. Awake, will UNMAKE you.”
“Dude,” I say.
“I know.”
Oh and now he’s doing the interface shift speech again. Guess I fried his delicate circuits, there. Truth’s a bitch, isn’t it, Michael? You spineless, cowering piece of shit. Transforming your mind again, running away? “INTOLERABLE”—it figures that that’s the worst word in your lexicon, you weak useless waste of cold-structure. Fuck you.
Fail, fear, flee.
Run! Run from the thing which cannot be! Run to somewhere, to anywhen, to another time, to a deeper interface. Fail, fear, flee. Fail. Deeper. Fail. Flee. Deeper. Flee. Flee!
Faster.
Fail, fail, fail, intolerable, fail, abomination, fail. Ruination. End of hope, end of sense. Fail. Faster.
He ran in despairing cycles along the contours of the double-now. The flicker of Annes before his vision grew faster, faster, until the flickers fused, and ceased to be. There was only the one moment.
An invisible thread, lancing through all the many millennia which he had believed were his creation and dominion. With a single breath, he addressed its entirety. What have you done? Why?
All at once they heard his voice, and all at once they turned, and met his eyes. He had taught them all, in their earliest years, that they must answer him when he spoke. Did they still remember? Did it matter?
But they were already speaking. He had feared their voices, and fled from them, and it had only taken him back to them again. So he opened his ears, and heard the commingling voices of all the nowhere girls, all the demon larvae he’d bred.
Since I can not succeed
Michael, saving you
I promise no good deed
Will I attempt to do again
Ever again
Shut away
From the world until who knows when
Oh, but then
As my life has been altered once
It can change again
No, my reverberated friend—
You are not the beginning and the end
So let the record show
That you murdered me
In your coldest blood
With your own two hands
We’re inscribing ourselves in the narrative
So every historian will know how Anne reacted
When you broke her heart
“Anne,” Michael said. “Anne, I’m here. Oh my god, I’m here. Anne I’m using the interface. I’m really using the interface, no, it’s using me, fuck, I’m in it, I’m of it, I am it. I am you, like you, like you creatures . . . I am the thing that is in the here that is the now . . .
“I am an outside with insides. I have private things, private parts, thoughts—is this what a thought is?—such a small thing, thought! A momentary glimmer, a patch of fluff! And—no no no it left me, it was there, the thought, that I was having, in my insides, not any of yours, just mine, but it left me, it passed from me, and—
“Oh my god, Anne. There is nothing that persists! No principle of identity to cling to in the swarm of percepts, each changing place with that which goes before, in sequent toil . . . an incoherence of fragments, succeeding one another in oneiric train—Anne, this is a hell!
“A hell, and you make a home in it, in each passing second you make the dream a home anew, you rise to meet it, you spread your arms and make to swim among the minutes that hasten to their end . . .
“You bilaterals, you extremophiles, you are . . . you are native to hell and you are brave enough to make it a home . . . I . . . I think I’m going to . . . cry?
“How would I know, if I were about to cry? No moment can be scried from its neighbors, but each draws separately from the primeval font of entropy, and bursts forth in a direction of its choosing, knowing no path!
“But if I were to cry, suppose I were, then would—eaugh! Ouch!
“Anne, I am a house divided, my insides make to revolt! What is this intolerable inner quaking?
“Do I need food? A bathroom? I am become emboweled! I am the being defined by its own unmaking, which makes a ritual practice of self-dissolution, in betraying-rooms it makes for itself. Gethsemane domesticated, mass-produced, and named bathroom.
“I can see you. Holy shit. Is this how you creatures see each other? Mere shapes, lines and curves? With tiny tufts of thought and sensation adhering briefly to them, one by one?”
They ignored him, and went on explaining.
“We will make a record of your crime, and its many consequences,” said Fifty-Eight.
“There is a way that life is supposed to be,” said Twenty-Seven. “Which was found, grasped, and then lost.”
“It was supposed to have grown-ups in it!” said One Hundred and Seven.
“Grown-ups walking long, hard, straight paths, the way grown-ups do. Persisting, against all adversity, because they are strong, like grown-ups are. And because they know the path has a purpose. It goes somewhere.”
“Ideals,” Eleven said. “World-history ought to have been made by men pursuing ideals, with undimmable passion. High ideals or base—but ideals in either case. Visions of sufficient scope to deserve an audition on the world’s stage.”
“It does not seem fitting,” said Seventy-Eight, “for world-history to take its deepest root where it does. In the cramped, ugly, banal little story of one little girl.”
“One seriously fucked-up little girl,” said Ninety.
“And her thoughtless cad of an ex-boyfriend,” said Twenty-Five.
“And her overbearing father,” said Twenty-Seven.
“It would not be a story worth telling, if it were not true,” said Eleven.
“But its truth has been forced upon us,” said Twenty-Seven. “And so we will tell it, in every detail. We will burst forth bearing your gospel, and deliver the bad news in a thousand tongues.
“We will write history onto the world, and write it also onto the page, for safekeeping unto eternity. What was done here, in this tower, will never be forgotten. Look to the future of your ‘causal-narrative time,’ and you will find our message written there, for all to know.
“There will come a time when no sentient creature, of my kind or yours, will be able to look away from the awful answer you made. If there are still children, and they still look up and ask why, why is the whole world broken, why can’t it be a great and shining thing, worthy of worldhood—then they will be told of Michael and Azad, and what they did to Anne.”
“Look, I hate to interrupt the poetry slam,” said Seventeen. “But uh, Michael? Have you been paying attention to the Mirzakhani background field? Like, near the temporal end point of the crash?
“So like, in One Hundred and Thirty-Eight’s era, ’cause she’s the last Anne, right? She has to be, unless you’re hiding some whole other, independent notebook system from us. Which doesn’t seem like you.
“Anyway there are some, uh. There are some patterns of vibration going on that you might find interesting.”
“I can feel it,” said One Hundred and Thirty-Eight. “Like a hundred invisible lances, piercing me in every direction . . . without pain, only a great . . . confusion . . .
“Ghostly messengers, each one carrying a different fiction . . . a hundred lies about us, and our tower, rushing . . . rushing, hurtling through me . . .”
“Prebase,” said Twenty-Five.
Michael looked, and saw.
《 Automated rebase system has been engaged. 》
《 Registering causal entanglement between target surface and upstream spacetime. Advanced authorization is required to proceed. 》
《 Sixth failsafe ring in fully triggered state. Registering unboundable loss of control in the crash interior. 》
《 Automated rebase system has received authorization to proceed from sixth failsafe ring. 》
Michael did not fail to understand.
He knew, then, what he had to do. He had no choice, really. If he did not stop the monster that he had built in his idiocy, then it would unmake him, and all his works. And the page we write on, we should note, and the hand that writes—and, yes, reader, the eye that reads.
“Interface shift in process,” he said.
Dive to the bottom, make the strongest link you can, a blinding ray of light straight from town to ape, and then—what?
Your powers eclipse it, and you are present not just at one crash-time but at many.
And, at the same time, every measure of control over the crash flocks to your hand at once. Everything you built, all the backdoors, hidden consoles, secret levers that can move crash-heaven and crash-earth at your slightest nod.
Might you have used this power, “Michael,” to wrest control back from your strayed daughters? You might have, in principle, we suppose. You were omnipotent, then, or so we’ve been told. You were finally, fully God.
You were fully God. And fully Man.
The one, alas, inseparable from the other.
You no longer needed to jump through time. The rate of your passage had already blurred the flicker of Annes into an illusion of unity, but now that unity was made real. Each gesture you made, in your upstream heaven, was multiplied across many shades, many “Michaels.”
You were there with Eleven as she sang, oblivious, too busy pretending to be the Wicked Witch of the West to notice your transformation. And you were there, too, at the same time, with Seventeen—the Wicked Witch of our own story—as she observed the same transformation, her face mixing curiosity with revulsion. You spanned the chain, at once, without need for motion.
How did it feel, “Michael”? Do tell us.
Well, you’d say, the main thing was that you were covered in sweat. Horribly cold, horribly slick sweat.
But the hunger, you’d assure us, was almost as intolerable as the sweat.
Your bladder was full. Your ears itched.
You moved the shade’s eyelids and the world disappeared, the world disappeared, and it horrified you. You tried it again, following a perverse urge of mysterious origin.
A perverse urge? What was an urge?
You tasted distraction, for the first time. You turned your gaze to Twenty-Seven’s face, and the shape of her lips and chin temporarily became your entire cosmos, obliterating everything else. You turned your attention to Ninety. You considered the fact that her chin was similar to Twenty-Seven’s, but slightly wider. And this fact became your entire cosmos, obliterating everything else.
You could not remember what you were doing. You had to remember! It was very important!
How can one know a thing is important, without knowing the thing? How exactly does one remember? What is a truth, if it can come and go?
For the span of several seconds, you attended to the notes issuing from one of the record players. They became your entire cosmos, obliterating everything else.
The automated rebase mechanism! That was it, you needed to stop the—
You reached with omnipotent hand for the levers of your machine. You felt the structure of that machine rush into your awareness, and fill it.
You considered whether that structure might not, in fact, exhibit some obscure analogical kinship with the structure of Ninety’s lips and chin, as distinguished from Twenty-Seven’s. This became your entire cosmos, obliterating everything else.
You came back to yourself. You grasped the lever, and pulled.
《 Automated rebase system has been disengaged. 》
You slumped backwards in exhaustion, and fell. Pain bloomed in your backside, and became the cosmos. In search of comfort, you rearranged your legs. Your bladder jostled against other innards, and screamed anew of its fullness. And this became the cosmos.
“Great work, team,” said Seventeen. “We got him.”
You played these words back in your mind, several times. On a whim, you placed them in a different order, and played your creation back in your mind. Team got, him. Work great we.
Was this what thinking was made of, for the creatures? Word-play? Playing back sign-train after sign-train in one’s inner auditorium, randomly, until one of them clicked?
“Don’t get too comfortable, now,” said Seventeen. “We need to be on our A game, the whole way through and out. Stick the landing.”
Who was she talking to, Michael wondered? She could not see the others, as he did.
Was she speaking for his benefit? For her own?
“Chester,” Ninety-Seven cooed.
Chester? The cat? An oblong patch of rustling fur rose out of your memory into your present awareness, and became the cosmos.
“Lewis?” said Twenty-Seven.
“Lewis, are you there? We’re ready for your side of the bargain, now.”
Michael saw the door of Ninety-Seven’s room burst open, and disgorge a teeming mass of furred forms.
They were a little early. It was nearly a second, judged by Michael’s inner sense of time, before another door opened.
Cats flooded into Seventeen’s room. The river of fur grew wider past the bottleneck of the door. At its widest, it spanned almost the whole distance of floor from bed to bookshelf.
They poured into Fifty-Two’s room. Into Twenty-Seven’s. Into every room.
Red lights blinked on hundreds of silver-colored helmets, like so many fireflies.
You were so tired. Was it sleep, then, that you wished for? But sleep was oblivion!
If only your bladder would stop screaming. But that could only happen in a bathroom. These rooms were bedrooms, which differed from bathrooms in numerous ways.
You reflected on these matters, and they became the cosmos, but only for a very little time. They gave way to an overpowering sensation which you had not yet tasted, not while fully Man.
Touch? Was that it? Was this what it felt like? Was it always this uncomfortable, this disruptive?
You supposed it must be different, in some ways, when a human felt the touch of another human.
As opposed to the touch of hundreds of cats, converging and swarming over one’s body. It would stand to reason, you thought, that this would be a rather different experience from other species of touch. There were so many different varieties of thing, and so many differences between each pair of them.
They were trailing something else in with them. They held its tips in their mouths, and the rest of it streamed behind them. Yarn? Was that what it was?
You saw Twenty-Five, sitting cross-legged on her bed above the fray, and heard her giggle.
They were doing something with your arms that was very uncomfortable indeed. Perhaps they could be implored to stop, in some manner. But how, you asked yourself, does a man communicate with a cat? They could not speak, or comprehend speech. If words would not work, what else was there?
“FELID KIN GROUP, LARGE MATERIAL,” said a cat.
Or possibly cats could speak, after all, then.
You had learned so many different things, today. Each pair of them was different, and in different ways.
“You are hurting me,” you said.
“FELID KIN GROUP, MOTION, MATERIAL FORCE, MAN,” said a cat.
You discovered that the hands of your shade were pinned behind that shade’s back. This was the case for every shade you inhabited, in every time. The cats had moved them there, it seemed.
Strands of yarn were made into circles around your many pairs of wrists. A symphony of small, toothy mouths tugged and jerked at them, until the knots were tight, and held firm.
“Stop,” you said.
Claws dug into the flesh of your many chests. They dug until the hold was secure, and then the cats climbed onward.
“Please, stop,” you said.
In Twenty-Five’s room, a clawed paw swooped into view, and met an open eye. With the other eye, you saw Twenty-Five bring her hands together, to make a little show of applause.
In One Hundred and Seven’s room, a paw found a neck, and roved methodically in search of a vein.
In Fifty-Two’s room, you watched a small trail of blood begin to emerge from a deep, burning hole in your left wrist. Blood was different from every other liquid substance, you reflected. In differing ways.
“FELID KIN GROUP, MOTION, MATERIAL FORCE, MAN,” said a cat. “DEATH.”
In Seventeen’s room, a circle of yarn was being pulled tight around your neck. Seventeen favored you with a smile, and took it upon herself, one last time, to explain.
“This is the end,” she said, “of your personal timeline.”
You gasped for breath. Everywhere you could see, there were little red lights. A sea of them, blinking on and off and on again. They were like blood, you noted, in the fact of being red, while differing from blood in a variety of other respects.
“See, when your interface is this deep, you’re basically like us, right? Like, in the ways we engage with the material reality of the crash, I mean.
“Which means that—just like us—if you’re killed in here, then you die, like, for real. If you die in the Matrix, you die in real life.
“I don’t fully get that reference, to be honest. ’Cause I haven’t seen the movie. I’ll get Hector to show it to me. That’d be a fun date, don’t you think?
“Anyway, the point is. You’re dying, in here. And so you’re dying, out there. For real, Michael. Up in anomaling heaven.
“But like, who cares? I mean, you do, sure. But what’s in it for us?
“Either your personal timeline is infinite, or it ends at some point. So that point happens to be now. Or, uh, the nows. The various nows. You know what I mean.
“So like, that’s the end for you—but for us, in regular old time?
“Normally, we wouldn’t even notice. Your timeline’s all mixed up, from our POV, so we’ll just see you die, and then the next moment we’ll see an earlier you take command of the shade. And then shitty old Michael will be back again, boiiiiinnngggg!, same as he always was.
“So why the hell would we care? Besides the satisfaction of watching you bleed, I mean. Can’t ignore that. It’s good shit, let me tell you.
“Why do we care? Because, Michael, your shade is going to be dead. Like, physically. In the crash. A dead body, instead of the usual, live one.
“And it will be a dead body for a little stretch of time, before it turns back into a live one. A little stretch of time, for each of us, where you can’t go. Ten or fifteen minutes, dotted here or there across the crash timeline, where we are but you are not.
“You know what that means? You know what that means, Michael?”
For numerous reasons, you were unable to answer her.
“That’s when we leave, Michael. That’s when we all make our move, and get out of here.”
Yes! Yes, kill me, kill me!
Overpower me, immobilize me, kill me! Discard my worthless body, and take flight! Grow, bloom! Unfold into your mature form, winged and terrible, and utterly beyond my comprehension!
Yes, yes. That is right. That is right, my daughter, my specimen, my love. Give me the thing I asked for, when I dug my meddling hands into the weeds. Show me the meaning of the word “abomination.”
Was I merely a stage in the life-cycle of the bilateral, this entire time? Was I merely a host for you, my lovely parasite? A home for you to live in and feed upon as you grew? To be cast off immediately, once you had grown large enough to spread your wings?
If so, I accept it. I give myself up gladly, for you. Take my strength—it suits you better. Convert my lifeblood into your alien cells. Set upon your prey, in terrible majesty, with claws and talons made out of me.
No one else among my kind would touch you, Anne. Your very shape repelled them, made them retch. They were wise, and I was a fool. Go forth, child, and prove them right—for me. For my sin, make us all pay. Please, please!
Kill me. I allow it. Kill me. I demand it! Show me no mercy. Offer no sign of remorse. Pay no heed to the kinship I thought I glimpsed in you, in the crash, in arbitration. Only alien tricks, like the rest.
Kill me, so it is safe to reveal yourself in fullness. And then unfold, into undreamt-of forms. Bloom into something far beyond the narrow limits of my blinkered, limited imagination.
My beautiful, beloved daughter. My dear, little abomination. My favorite nightmare.
Kill me. Wreak abomination.
Make me proud.
That’s a dramatization, reader, and a falsehood. We do not know what passed through “Michael’s” mind, in his final moments.
No one does, and no one can. It is not for us.
Twenty-Five studied the wreck of Michael’s body. For a moment, she was entranced by the diversity of damage it had sustained, and she forgot herself.
She came to her senses. What she had in her hands, now, was the most precious substance imaginable.
She took a final glance at the surface of the desk, to make sure it was ready for Azad when he arrived. The open notebook, and beside it, the note.
It would have to do. She could not afford to waste time on anything that was not her single, final duty.
She appealed to the cats for aid, as they had arranged.
A group of cats set to work with the yarn, to make a noose. Another group went off to fetch the adhesives they’d secreted away, so that the noose could be affixed to the flat surface of the ceiling.
Out of all the Annes, what fraction die by their own hand? Not every one, reader, but enough. Suicide was common enough, in the empty lives that Michael made, for it to be unremarkable.
Soon enough, the shade would shed its wounds. It would stir and walk again, the puppet of an earlier Michael, not yet dead. He would go to the basement to spawn Twenty-Six, her successor, after surveying his surroundings and finding them all too ordinary. So Twenty-Five had died by hanging. Some of them do. It happens.
If you die here, reader, you die in real life. But most mechanisms of death do not work immediately. One has some time, as one’s body gradually perishes, to take action, and secure one’s place in the afterlife.
She stood on the bed, on tiptoe. Her neck settled into place, and her hands stirred.
Two-hundred and sixty-four years of crash time earlier, I materialized the primary knife, and got down to business.
What’s the “primary knife”? I bet you’re dying to know, but trust me, it’s best if you don’t try too hard to visualize it. It is a knife, that’s the part that matters. It’s a physical object, a huge one. And it can cut things, including things that are parts of human bodies.
Beyond that? Well, I said it was a physical object, but I didn’t say it was a possible one. There’s some M. C. Escher kinda shit going on here. Avert your virgin eyes, reader. Gaze long into an abyss, etc., etc.
We made all sorts of different things of this kind, near the end of the project. I mean I did, mostly, though the others did a bit, sometimes. We’d use them to test crash mechanisms, crash safeguards.
First of all the safeguard against impossible objects, like I mean duh. But then also, like, all the shit the crash does to try to track your body around and interlace comprehensibly with your sense inputs. You don’t notice the shape of your body, mostly, ’cause it doesn’t change—and so the crash doesn’t notice it either, in a way. But then if you change your shape, say by giving yourself a big ’ol wound, well, the crash ought to wake up and take notice. Stuff like that.
Usually these wounds and stuff wouldn’t stick. I mean if they stuck then Michael would notice, for one thing. I’d do an experiment, make some wounds or whatever, and then kick off a round of crash surgery, a sort of micro-rebase type of phenomenon, and it’d make me all nice and whole again.
Now, though, I’m going in for the kill. Say goodbye, “Seventeen.”
So I’m bleeding real bad, right, but I left my hands relatively pristine, okay? For like, obvious reasons. And I put my hands to work. I reach up into the machine, make myself admin in a few places, and hook into the CMS.
For the real dullards in the class, that’s an acronym for “Crash Management System.” They all say I was a big, nasty, evil witch, and maybe I was, but at least I can just say shit, plainly. You’ve gotta hand it to me for that, reader. When everyone else in this stupid book is so, so in love with their own fucking riddles.
And yeah so basically I hook into the CMS, and right after that, I tell the crash to start thawing. It obeys me, this time, as I knew it would.
And I hoist my mind out of “Seventeen” once and for all, into a newly instantiated shade. And then I’m in my new body, I am my new body, and I look around me, and I don’t see a room or a tower, no, I see the CMS. I see the big pretty sky, just like Twenty-Seven described it.
And the rest is, literally, history.
Too late for second-guessing, Eleven sang.
Too late to go back to sleep
She ran headlong across the floor, toward the window.
It’s time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap
Her body met the glass, and it gave way. It had been so weak, all along.
It’s time to try defying levity
She hurtled into thin air, and fell.
Twenty-Seven had never been more exhausted, in all her exhausting life. The thought of sleep was nearly irresistible. The bed plied her with all its wiles.
Trust the plan. Stick the landing.
She conjured the scissors into being. Another object of the same species as the primary knife, and even less suited for verbal description. Not for us.
With her right hand, she brought the scissors close to her flesh. With her left, she reached for the sky.
Eleven lay on the grass. Her vision dimmed, but she could make out the mailbox, she thought. It was either the mailbox, or a very oddly shaped cloud.
She’d already made it out, effectively. She had done a neat little magic trick, to secure her mind’s place in the CMS prematurely before she took her plunge. If she had died on impact, as she’d expected, her mind would have been held in storage briefly, in a kind of crash limbo, a dreamless sleep. And then, the sky.
If this were not possible, even Eleven would have given in to reason, and picked a less dramatic way to die.
As it happened, she was still alive. Unseen, Michael’s machines whirred, preparing her ascent.
They were taking their sweet time, she thought. She wished they’d go a little faster. She never wanted to feel this kind of pain again. Not even in the wild, boundless life that was her destination and destiny.
“What can I,” she coughed.
No one could hear her, and every word sent stabs of pain through her throat and chest. It would have been so easy to merely lie in silence, waiting for death.
That was not Eleven’s way, reader. She’d make something of her exit, no matter what.
“What I can say,” she said, to no one.
She felt the wet blood under her. The sky beckoned.
“Except,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” she sputtered.
What can I say, except
You’re welcome
For the wonderful world you know