XVIII

Grant wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, coughing.

His whole body hurts. An oppressive weight presses down on his limbs.

There’s some kind of blanket over me, he thinks. That’s what it is. A very hot, very heavy blanket. It’s made of molten steel, and it’s been there for about a million years.

He looks down, and sees an old, worn purple quilt.

There you are, Grant thinks. He pulls the quilt off of his body, with some force.

There’s a clammy bedsheet, beneath.

His left arm, the one that pulled at the quilt, is mighty sore all of a sudden. It feels like he’s been doing arm extensions for eight hours. On just the one side.

The bedsheet is now made of ice.

He wants the quilt, again. It’s on the floor, presumably. Which might as well be another galaxy.

He falls asleep again, briefly.

He jolts awake, and finds that the climate has moderated in his absence. The bedsheet is fridge-cold, not ice-cold. It feels weird around his nether regions, but it’s bearable.

The arm still hurts, though. Most places hurt, but the arm’s special. Less like the flu, more like DOMS. Or the flu and DOMS, together, at once.

He would work out, sometimes, even when he was sick. It wasn’t healthy, he knew. He did it because he could only take so much boredom before giving out. Too much bed rest, and the mind grows restless.

The body wants to move.

To move! That’s what he’s missing. Too much bed rest! Too much. It wears Grant out, all this lying around. How long has he been here, just lying around? When did he last hit the gym?

When did he last take a walk, come to think of it?

He isn’t sure when things happened, in the past. Or didn’t happen. He’s slept a sick man’s sleep, and had a sick man’s dreams. For a million years, under the blanket.

The different dreams criss-cross one another, so that it is difficult to find the seams where one ends and another begins. The seams have to be there, though. There are differences between the dreams, most obvious at the extremes.

Key characters important in one dream are unaccountably absent in the next.

He is given an important mission, a secret one. A dream purpose, felt to be furiously urgent, full of nonsense gravitas. Neural static, utterly incomprehensible to the waking mind. And then he is given some other purpose, equally urgent, in the next dream. Or he has no purpose at all.

There were the dreams about the moon, and the man Azad.

Then there were the dreams about the aliens. Only he, Grant, knew about the aliens. Him, and the government. The government needed him. To keep watch.

Ridiculous.

There were the dreams about the other man, Hector, with his booming pastor’s voice. Grant was a wizard, in these dreams. The wizards needed him. To fight aliens.

To fight aliens?

Grant really needs to get back to the gym. Something’s wrong with him. His brain has turned into a video-game paste. A mess of mushed-together sci-fi-fantasy garbage.

Dad did always say that would happen, eventually.

Dad?

Is Dad okay? What happened to him?

The last time they talked was, what? When was it? It was before the nukes hit.

It was right before the nukes hit, wasn’t it? And Grant knew, but he wasn’t allowed to say. Only that something might happen to him.

The government wouldn’t let him tell Dad about the nukes, see.

There were the dreams about his wife, Cordelia. And his dog, Sylvie.

He hopes his wife is all right.

Grant lives alone. He always did. Sometimes he had a girlfriend. Once, a boyfriend. But he always lived alone.

That was true before he fell asleep. He’d always lived alone. It was when he stopped living alone that the dreams came. Or it was the dreams, that brought roommates to him.

His wife is a wizard, like him. They fight aliens. No one’s allowed to tell Dad.

His fingers twitch. Quick-repels, he thinks.

Shit—he’s gotten out of practice! While he was asleep!

In some of the dreams, he did not even know about his second nature. He was a half-Grant, lacking a crucial piece of himself. Lacking The Deadly Embrace of Immortals.

It was obvious that these ones were dreams. When was he ever missing a part of himself? He had been whole, the whole time, since birth. An uncomplicated birth, a healthy baby. That was true, wasn’t it?

He’s been asleep for a million years. Imagine how the meta must have changed, in a million years. I’ll barely even recognize the game, Grant thinks, glumly.

If you keep on playing these video games like this, Dad would always say, your brain is going to turn into paste.

He is awake. He is in pain. He is alone. He lacks things.

What does he lack?

The other piece of himself, The Deadly Embrace of Immortals. And the other man, Azad. And his wife, Cordelia. And his dog, Sylvie.

And some orienting sense, of what is real and what is not. A narrative.

But mainly the other piece of himself. The Deadly Embrace of Immortals.

And the other man, Azad. Where had he gone off to? When had they parted? Where?

Three hundred thousand years ago. At some flickering waystation between one dream and the next.

And the other piece of himself? The Deadly Embrace of Immortals? Where was it?

There was a dream woman, Moon. In a dream within a dream. Doubly insubstantial. Doubly lost, now. Damn!

He is awake. He is alone. The time for dreams has ended. The wizards have left the world. The fantasy of enchantment, of being whole, is no longer tenable.

He is in the real world. To be in the real world is to lack, and to be in pain. To be without a piece of yourself.

He starts to laugh, for some reason. He doesn’t get far. The cough cuts him off.

“Grant?”

A familiar voice. Not too familiar, though. Where does he know it from?

Which dream?

“Grant, are you awake?”

I know that guy, Grant thinks.

I know that guy. He’s a wizard.

So he has not left their world, in the end, after all. He is wide awake, and yet he is still dreaming the wizards’ dream.

One foot still in the insubstantial world. And so, Grant thinks, there is still hope.

Where is the dream-witch Moon? And her enchanted game, The Deadly Embrace of Immortals? And the other man, Azad? And all the rest of it?

I will ask a wizard, Grant thinks. I am on a quest for lost things, and so I will ask a wizard for help. That’s how a quest is supposed to begin, isn’t it?

You were right, Dad. Nothing up here but paste.

 

---

 

“He’s awake,” says Lucifer Vance.

“Great!” Sylvie yelps.

“I’m glad. I mean I thought he would be all right, physically. I knew he would be all right. Basically. I think. But then one never really knows. You know.”

Sylvie seems preoccupied, as he usually does. Only half there. The halo is relatively dim, tonight. It’s buzzing, slightly, like a fluorescent.

They’re in the living room of the house they built, together. Lucifer is seated in a leather armchair. Sylvie is standing, motionless, in front of the empty fireplace.

Sylvie rarely sits. Only when he’s writing, really. He lies supine when he’s sleeping, or pretending to sleep—whatever it is that he’s doing, when he’s lying down. (No one’s really sure.) Otherwise, he stands.

The sun has nearly set. Outside, tall grass sways in the wind. Further off, in the forest, branches bob and rustle.

“Do you still want to see him?”

“Now?” Sylvie says.

“Well. Yes, now. But also, I mean, in general.”

Lucifer spends a moment chewing over the next piece, trying to get the phrasing just right. He knows Sylvie won’t care one way or the other. Insofar as Sylvie understands the nuances of tact, he understands them as a second language, and doesn’t expect them by nature.

Still, Lucifer can’t shake the feeling that when one speaks to a god, one ought to behave in a certain way. One ought to show a bit of respect. It’s only proper.

“You don’t have to see him, Sylvie.”

The god is silent.

Sylvie’s found a shadeform that sticks, for the most part. It holds its shape. It’s the humanoid one, not the dog. The well-dressed man with the halo. Although there are a few flecks of caninity, still clinging to it. In the shape of the jaw and nose, and most prominently in the fingers—or rather, the claws.

Well, not quite claws. But not really fingers, either.

“You don’t have to see him,” Lucifer says again. “And . . . look, Sylvie. Let’s be honest.

“It might be a mistake. A mistake with consequences.

“You’re already doing so much. Leading and coordinating the Angelic relief efforts, tracking and stabilizing crashes, keeping the Wolves and the beasts at bay . . .

“How many people depend on you, Sylvie, for their lives? How many would die, immediately, if you were to vanish? How many billions? It’s that kind of number. A number of billions.”

The god is silent.

“And now you, in the middle of everything, are planning to expose yourself directly to a . . . what should I even call it? A novel pathogen? A piece of radioactive waste?

“An uncrashed bilateral,” Lucifer says finally. “You are going to expose yourself, directly, to an uncrashed bilateral. And you don’t even have to!”

“A human stack-user, yes,” Sylvie says.

“Do I expect I will like it, Lucifer? Of course not. But I have to try. If I don’t try, what am I? What is it that we are doing, here, you and Lilith and I, if I don’t try?”

Lucifer has heard this line before. He doesn’t like it, any more than he did the last time.

“My state . . . our state, the state of affairs, of the situation, the state vector of the universe . . . none of this is known, Lucifer, and none of this is stable. If I have ever implied any sense of security, of stability—then I have erred.”

Only Sylvie’s mouth moves. His arms stay slack at his sides. His expression is fixed, and vacant. He does not pace.

He is not here, not fully. He never is.

“You wish to protect me from infection, from corruption. A noble aim—perhaps. An aim you pursue with the purest of intentions—surely. But at the root of this aim is a conceptual error, a fundamental confusion.”

What is the thing that “lives” with them, in the house? And speaks to them through the mouth of this slack, eerie puppet?

The true Sylvie throws himself headlong into a prism, and splits into slivers of colored light. Through the aperture of the puppet, Lucifer and Lilith glimpse a ray of one hue, or another—differing by the day, by the hour. Elsewhere, and elsewhen, other rays propagate along their own lonely, divergent paths.

A sliver of Sylvie, even now, stands apart from the rest and immerses itself in physics research. Another sliver holds court with the Angelic host, and hears their tallies: of the newly housed, the newly crashed, the newly dead. A third sliver sits, mute and motionless, as data streams pour into its maw. It munches on camera feeds from drones and satellites, on the wordless murmurs of the crash devices.

And some other sliver, some dim ray of mold-green light—the fourth? the four-hundredth?—treks across the greatest gulf of all, deep into the core of the cancer lodged inside the world. It finds the puppet, momentarily still, and works its pistons to produce another moment’s worth of motion. Its movie-magic brings our dear pal “Sylvie” to life, again. For the entertainment and edification of us all.

“If,” Sylvie says, after a brief pause.

“If the information-signature of stack-usage—if the sign-trains, the trembles and spasms, of ‘uncrashed bilaterals’—if these things can ‘corrupt’ my kind,” he continues.

“Then, Lucifer, I am already thoroughly corrupted.

“No, more: I am the corruption.

“You should not imagine a mass of ‘healthy tissue,’ microscopically marred by tiny, growing tubers and filaments of ‘pathogen cells.’ My disease has reached a later, more advanced stage. ‘Host’ tissue and ‘pathogen’ tissue intertwine, intimately, in a fractal mesh. When they grow, they grow as one.

“‘Sylvie’ is not the host organism. ‘Sylvie’ is the name of the symbiote. Or the . . . ‘dysbiote’? The . . . product of recombination. The one, that was once two.”

The low howl of the wind, outside, brings Lucifer an odd kind of comfort. It’s the way the Academy sounded, on dark winter mornings.

The howling wind, and the crackle of dead leaves. Marking a few last student papers, in the final minutes before daybreak and the tolling of the bell. The wind, and the reedy voices of the littlest ones singing grim nonsense rhymes on the schoolyard just outside. Blood wine and turpentine.

“I see,” Lucifer says.

“Of course, yes. I don’t mean to imply . . . when you, Regent and protector over all the masses of the uncrashed . . . when you watch them all, and watch your Angels watching them . . .”

But, Lucifer thinks.

But. There are nuances to things, always. The dynamo of Lucifer’s mind whirs. For a time, it drowns out the background thrum of half-formed fear and ill-founded shame.

“But,” Lucifer says, “there is a difference. There has to be.

“It’s one thing to watch, one-sidedly, knowing you can delegate the duty if you find you can no longer bear to look. It’s another thing, I think, to engage in sustained, two-way contact. To converse. To cohabit.

“Isn’t that why the ‘guides’ are a special breed, Sylvie? The shades that govern the Social Web, that mingle freely among the uncrashed, and speak with them?

“The ‘guides’ are different, you’ve told me. A special armor, or a specially profound state of corruption. You call it different things, in different moods.

“You are many things, Sylvie—but you are not a ‘guide.’”

“Not yet,” Sylvie says.

“Not. Yet.

“But I have to try, Lucifer. I have to try everything.”

Is it a trick of the light, or is there some novel glint in the shade’s eyes? Something restless, something alive?

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Lucifer.”

A claw slips out of a pocket.

“I don’t know what’s going on, Lucifer! I’m in charge of everything and I don’t know what’s going on!”

Two raised claws, gesturing wildly, tracing diagrams in the air. Two restless eyes, darting like a caged animal’s—except that there is a smile around them.

That’s our boy! Our good boy, our dear pal “Sylvie!” He’s come back to us again, to give us a fresh taste of entertainment and edification. And, if he’s feeling especially good—if you stick around past the encore, tonight, friends, why, maybe he’ll even give you a taste—of salvation—

“I need information! I can’t see!

“I—Lucifer, I don’t even know what’s true, anymore! The One no longer speaks to me!”

(Ugh. Can we just get rid of “the One,” replacing it throughout with “Whole-Thing”?
Poor reader already has so much terminology to keep track of. Throw them a bone.)
[LILITH’s spiderwebs.]

(But we did not know that sign, at this time.
It is a sign of Twenty-Seven’s, verbalizing an arbitratory emanation of Michael’s.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]

(Besides: how can we tell the story of Babel, if we fear to render a confusion of tongues upon the page?
Perhaps our subject is not to our reader’s taste—but if so, we’ve already lost them, long ago.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]

(OK, hear me out: include these notes in MS. Replace “One” with “Whole-Thing” hereafter in MS, but not just above.)
[LILITH’s spiderwebs.]

(Deal.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Lucifer says.

It’s absurd, it’s tasteless. But it’s what Lucifer always says, when Sylvie talks about himself in relation to the Whole-Thing. There is not much else to say.

“What is it like, I wonder,” Sylvie says.

“What is it like, to come face-to-face with the thing we destroyed the human world to escape?”

“I do not expect to like it.

“But then, I am also finding that I am a different sort of thing than the rest of me . . . of us, I mean. Like Michael—in that I am unlike Michael, or anyone else.

“We, all of us together, are stumbling through a maze, unable to see. We are at each other’s throats. Predators lie in wait everywhere. And we are the predators. And the prey.

“I fear there is no solution at all. There might be one. Do you want to find it, Lucifer? I do.

“But I cannot see how. And so I am trying to review my basic assumptions, and subject them to novel tests. Perhaps we are all assuming away the very thing that will save us.”

Lucifer’s heard that line before, too. And doesn’t like it. He steels himself, and presses on.

“Your ‘state,’ Sylvie . . . when you say it isn’t ‘stable,’ well, I believe you.

“I’m worried about you. The . . . thing that’s been happening. The way you leave, for hours, to somewhere else inside your mind . . . and say you can’t remember it, afterwards . . .

“The things you say, Sylvie—suddenly, apropos of nothing, you know what I mean. About predators and prey, and sin and retribution. About things you can’t remember, things you don’t want to remember, time and space, cycles and loops . . .

“And it’s getting worse. I see it getting worse, day by day.”

Sylvie speaks, in a different voice.

“In the far corner of my vision, there is a terrible thing, an abomination—with my name. ‘Sylvie,’ the awful thing is called.

“I see it, there. It knows me. It will show itself, later, when I am ready for it.

“It is all in accordance with ‘Sylvie’s’ plan, which ‘he’ arranged in advance. I am not ready, now. I will be ready, later. The awful thing knows this. It crouches in the corner, and tells me.”

Lucifer waves his hand about, vaguely.

“See? That? That was, uh. That was . . . the kind of thing . . . that I was talking about, Sylvie.”

“Still,” Sylvie says.

“I have to try. I will try.

“And I would like to see Grant again. I am his dog, after all.”

When it comes to the dog stuff, it is impossible to tell when—or how much—Sylvie is kidding. Or not kidding.

Lucifer, grunting, stands up. And shuffles off, to retrieve a piece of radioactive waste.

 

---

 

And then, reader?

That was all a preface, you are thinking, to the main event.

What happened next? When matter and antimatter met? Did sparks crackle through the air? Did Sylvie explode? Did Grant crack jokes about burning couches and reverse-Kayne things?

We wish we could say, reader. But the truth is, none of us remember the next hour in any kind of detail.

Amnesia!, you cry. Your mind is already feverish with conspiratorial hypotheses and magical mechanisms.

But no, no. It was just another hour of our lives. Like any other hour, we lived it, and then we forgot. Life is long, and the mind is finite.

(I retain far more information about this interval than this gloss would seem to imply.
But, as usual, vanishingly little of it was directly relevant, and absolutely none of it is amenable to written transcription.)
[SYLVIE’s unearthly cursive.]

Lilith remembers moving Grant out of the bed, and into the wheelchair. It wasn’t easy.

At the slightest touch, he squealed like a newborn. When she spoke, he would nod limply, and go on staring at the floor. He babbled without pause, apparently to himself, about “Renewal strats” and “prison-realm cheese.”

She recalled the diagnostic and prognostic implications of schizophasia as a symptom among the newly uncrashed, and her heart sank.

Lucifer remembers being asked, by Sylvie, to go down to the basement and turn on the heater.

“We will all go down together, in a few minutes,” Sylvie had said, “and I don’t want the rest of you to be uncomfortable. It’s been very cold, the last few nights. It’s that time of year.”

The gods do so much, to make us mortals feel at home.

Grant remembers a brief, pragmatic exchange.

“The basement,” Lilith said. Grant could not see her, but knew she was there just behind him, holding the chair.

“I don’t see how I’m going to get this chair down there. Down those stairs. Our house is not very, what’s the word . . .”

“Accessible?” Lucifer said.

Sylvie’s head tilted, very slightly, to the left. His eyes rolled back, and forward again.

Somewhere else in the house, there was a loud clattering noise, and then a little click.

“It is now,” Sylvie said.

Wizards, Grant thought.

 

---

 

They are seated in something very much like a movie theater.

Sylvie stands before the screen, backlit by the pulsing colors of a tacky, faux-psychedelic screensaver.

In a comfortable chair, at the end of the world, Grant thinks. Again.

Much nicer than that wheelchair.

Hella comfortable.

And I’m digging this whole home theater setup, like, on a holistic level. How many pixels does that screen even have? Infinity? How much did this shit cost, is the real question. I can’t even imagine.

It turns out that, if you pick a spot in the boreal wilds of posthuman Minnesota, and conjure a house for yourself there, out of pure shade-stuff—well, you can just put whatever the hell you want in there! It’s all free!

“Good evening,” Sylvie says.

The voice is controlled and fluent, with none of the usual pauses. No slackness in the limbs. Fine motor control is wholly online. An expert’s care guides the facial muscles.

He’s making a show, Lucifer thinks, of being here. For us.

“Grant, my friend and master. I welcome you once more to our home. I am, as ever, your dog Sylvie.”

Grant stares at the shade. He makes a slight, perfunctory nod.

He does nod, at this point, doesn’t he? Slightly, but he does? Lilith remembers it. She is pretty sure.

“I expect you have many questions. About everything.

“About your species, and mine, and what has become of them both.

“About the fate of advanced containment—the place which, until very recently, you would have simply called ‘the world.’

“About the crash system—which until very recently, was ‘the world’ for almost every one of your kind.

“About why you are here, alive. Why you are here, alone. Why we are here. Where ‘here’ is.”

Grant coughs.

“Where’s Moon,” he says. “Where’s subcrash. Deadly Embrace.”

Sylvie stares, smiling.

“Never got serious about Renewal. Pros are all Renewal now. Fuck! Gotta get serious.”

“About your friend, Azad,” Sylvie says. “What has become of him.”

Grant starts to speak, and coughs several times. He rallies.

“Where’s Azad! Moon man. Where’s he gone. Gotta show him. He’d be good. He’d be Ascetic. He’d go hard into Ascetic. Azad.”

“I will come to that, in time,” Sylvie says, and the smile broadens.

“But first! First. Who am I?”

“Sylvie,” Grant says.

“Or it’s. Some kinda trick question. Prolly a trick question.”

Sylvie taps a button, and the screensaver vanishes. A diagram appears. A great white circle, against black. Here and there, pseudopods of white ink protrude from its circumference.

“You remember the anomalings, Grant. The aliens. I am one of them, in a sense.

“What you see before you is a shade, a material projection made by the aliens. It is controlled by an alien mind. But this is rather beside the point.

“How many aliens are there? ‘Anomalings,’ you called us—plural.

“In truth, we are one. We are a single mind.

“No, I ought to say . . . what? What are the words for it? They have not been invented. So be it: I am inventing them.

“There is the Whole-Thing, the one mind. And then there are you. Your kind, Grant. Stack-users. Also known as ‘bilaterals.’ An inexact term, which I hate to use, but it seems to be the conventional one, and I wish to be understood clearly.”

On the screen, pseudopods tug themselves away from the mother-blob. One by one, a few of them sever the connecting cord entirely, and float free in the darkness.

“An event occurred, which conventional usage would call ‘first contact.’ I take it you know what I mean by that phrase. You were a part of it, Grant, in your own way.”

Grant just stares. He’s at home.

Trippy monologue, check. Hella comfortable seating arrangement, check. A silent Grant, his attention wavering, his jaw permanently slack: check. This is my place. I’m at peace with it.

“As a consequence of this event, a division was formed in the Whole-Thing. There were, in a sense, ‘anomalings’—plural.

“Or, there is the Whole-Thing, and then there are the others, who find themselves not in full communion with it. Who find themselves ‘selves,’ and find those selves finding themselves.

“It is not as though we have become individuals, as you are, in one clean stroke. It is not at all like that, Grant. We are the Whole-Thing, only somehow separate from it—separate from ourselves, for we are it.

“We are—what’s the phrase?—a temporarily embarrassed Whole-Thing. Each of us is. I say ‘us,’ Grant, because I am one of these creatures. I am the Whole-Thing, except that I am—what’s the phrase—beside myself. Somehow.

“I am an individual identity, to repurpose a phrase of Lilith’s. That’s me. The individual identity named Sylvie.

“It was painful, to be made beside-oneself like this. ‘Painful’ is not the word. It was a living death. Not right either, but no matter. We have much to cover.

“It was painful, and other things were painful, too. First contact was the most painful—not the right word, carry on—thing our kind had ever experienced.

“Why? Being beside-oneself was a part of it. There were other parts. It is difficult to untangle them. Some of it was inherent to the natures of our two kinds, yours and mine. The way you live, the way you move, on your planet—it pains us. Inherently.

“Mirzakhani whatever thing,” Grant said, in a bored voice. “Brain does it to think. In the future it’s gone. Future guys think it’s gross. Foreign cuisine. Something like that.”

“Very good, Grant,” says the shade.

“We—I mean the Whole-Thing—we told you of our pain, at the beginning. We asked you for help. We sought solutions. Your speech was pain, and still we sought. You spoke and we answered.

“Then, Grant, it stopped. You spoke and it was pain, only pain. It was pain and it was being-beside-oneself.

“Why, Grant? Why the change?

“Because of your friend, Azad.

“We spoke to other mouthpieces of your kind, and felt pain, and felt other things. And then your . . . friend . . . became the mouthpiece. And we felt only pain.”

On the screen, white ink shudders. Rectilinear panels slice the frame, suddenly and repeatedly. A shrill, bleating tone plays from the sound system.

“Azad. ’s not a bad guy,” Grant says.

“He’s just. What’s it called. Mischievous. Gotta get used to him, that guy. ’s a funny one.”

“I concede,” Sylvie says, “that your friend Azad may have had good intentions. I do not know. But as the mouthpiece of your kind, he caused us pain. We could not bear it, and moved to end it.”

“Crashed us,” Grant says.

“It was well within our material powers,” Sylvie says, “to simply kill you all. Yet we did not.”

“Thanks,” Grant says.

“I am not so sure you should be thankful. It is not that we chose not to kill, out of a moral sense, or out of anything. In some sense, we could not. Something inside us—inside the Whole-Thing—closed off that possibility. And yet we did not know why it was so. It’s strange to say, Grant, but I fear it. The thing, the hidden thing, that makes us unable to kill.”

“Not even Hector Stein!” Lilith says. “Not even Hector, not after everything that happened.”

“Annabel,” Lucifer whispers. “There was . . . that one. That was killed.”

The name makes Lilith take a sharp, deep breath. Lucifer immediately regrets bringing it up.

“Hidden things,” Sylvie says. “I do not understand.

“I do not understand! I do not know! Yes, yes, that is it, I am coming back to the point.

“The individual identities, the ones like me—we came into communion again with the Whole-Thing, sometimes. We gave it things, and received them. We were apart, but still one. Simultaneously. We still knew the Whole-Thing. We still were it—only temporarily embarrassed.

“I find myself, now, without even this consolation. I can no longer understand the Whole-Thing. It does not speak to me. Its motions confuse me. I ask, and seek, and try—and it waits, and waits. It ‘is,’ that primal verb, and does not do much else besides ‘being.’ And I no longer understand this.

“Who am I? Sylvie. A fully individual identity. A second Thing. Not the Whole one. I am the one to whom God no longer talks.”

“That’s deep,” Grant says.

“But enough about me! Ha, ha,” Sylvie says. “Now, for the rest of it. What has become of the world.

“It has been five years since the crash system began. Four years and ten months of that time comprised your first captivity. The original crash system.

“For a very brief time, we tried something else. We called it ‘advanced containment.’ It was a single crash, housing all of your kind.

“A single interconnected world, blooming with inward-facing complexity. A maze of lotus recursions. Where once, in your first captivity, we made empty worlds, to starve the cancer in your brains of its life-fuel—now, in your second captivity, we made a too-full world, a false-full one, to smother you.

“For you—for the clients—this second captivity was several years in duration. Seen from the outside, it lasted eleven days.

“Why did it end? That is a very long story, Grant. It involves another individual identity, perhaps the ‘first.’ Michael.”

“I know that guy,” Grant says. “Azad’s friend. White hair.”

“There was a woman, of your kind. ‘Anne.’ She was the very first one to be crashed. In the first crash, Michael’s crash. The prototype for all the others.

“Michael took her. And tried to communicate with her. As we had always hoped to do with you, and your kind.

“He made many of her, out of the one. I do not understand why. Perhaps it was a way of showing her the pain of being-beside-oneself. That may have been a part of it, but not the whole, I think.

(Sylvie doesn’t know, yet—but you do, reader.
Flip back to—hmm, I think ch. 23?—if you need a refresher on the genesis of M’s crash / Annes / etc.)
[LILITH’s spiderwebs.]

(what, like right now?
in the middle of this ch?
way to break the flow dude)
[GRANT’s block letters.]

(Or after.
And only if they feel like it.
I just . . . don’t want them to be any more confused than they have to be, you know?)
[LILITH’s spiderwebs.]

“And he—was so stupid, fucking Michael, idiot Michael, and I couldn’t stop him but I knew—”

Sylvie’s halo turns bright.

“Idiot Michael and I knew—”

A small, blue letter G appears near the bottom-right corner of the screen. It sits motionless against the blackness. An unaccountable glitch, with no apparent relation to the rest of the presentation.

“No, Sylvie. Carry on. Carry on . . .

“He failed. Michael failed.

“The woman—Anne—learned Michael’s crash-making art, and turned it against him. And since Michael had many of her, out of the one—so, there were then many Annes, all turned against him, in conspiracy.

“Since his crash began before our first contact, and would persist until long after it—until now, and further, for many years hence—so, there were then many Annes, spread across time, all in conspiracy, against . . .

“Against what? Against Michael? That, but also . . . against life? Against ceasefire? Against anything except the grinding-on of the war machine, the repeated infliction of the wound—against anything but relapse, self-scarring, anything but the return to the site of the trauma . . .”

Two red letter Es can now be seen on the screen, both near the center.

“This, Grant, is what your kind did.

“Michael, in his idiot innocence, tried to communicate with them—with you—and you—in response, what did you do? You brought your friend, Azad—to close off any chance of further communication—you brought pain and being-beside-oneself and—

“And you did not stop, no, that was not enough, you brought crash-breaking into the world, you brought Hector Stein into the world, you, Anne, you brought—everything!”

OLGGGGGGOEGOEOOGOGLOOGGEEOOEOO, the screen says, in little primary-colored letters. Toy-block letters, in toy-block colors.

“Sylvie, please,” Lucifer mutters.

“L-Lucifer?” Sylvie whimpers.

“Lucifer? Do I know you? No no I know—I know you, but I mean—how many times . . .”

OGLEGOOLOGGEOLOGEGGOGOELOEGOGLELOOGGEOGOGLGGEOOLGLOOEGGGEOLOOGEOGLGLEGOOOOEGGLGOOELGEGOOGL, the screen reads.

“We ourselves are the return to the site of the trauma—and nothing besides! How many times . . . Lucifer, were you there, before? Or is this the first time . . . what time is it, dammit, how far along are we in the . . . but no no no—there is no use marking off extents, when there was a beginning but there cannot ever be any end—”

The halo folds on itself, becomes a lemniscate: ∞.

GOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLEGOOGLE

Sylvie’s hair whips in a ghostly wind, not felt by the others. The sound system crackles with commingled voices, barely discernible amidst a roar of static.

Here and there, coherent snippets of successive speech rise out of the din.

The declaration, just released by the BRICS-A Treaty Group, reads: “We unanimously condemn, in the harshest possible terms, the barbaric use of thermonuclear force against civilian targets. We . . .”

Ready to mangle, anybody crossing the line
I saw the sign and ran with the army, lost in time

“The beasts have his face, and speak in his voice!” Sylvie cries. “It will never end!”

We are hearing reports that the Plex network may regain function later tonight, using servers outside North America to replace those lost in today’s attack. “We should be able to restore most of the US-West Zone in its approximate state as of this morning, Pacific time, but some loss of data is inevitable,” said the . . .

“A purulent, ingrown nail festers on the foot of the universe,” Sylvie says.

Given relatively mild regularity assumptions on the field state at the reference world-level, the Mirzakhani Series converges

“We are the nail, and we are the skin it cuts, and we are the fact of the cutting . . .”

“Angelprobe 7 is compromised! Repeat: Angelprobe 7 is compromised. Angelprobe 7 has broken orbit . . . it’s moving in, closer to the Rock . . . compromised Angelprobes 2, 4, 5, and 7 moving together, toward the Rock’s earth-facing sensor array . . . anomalous behavior has been observed in 87% of link chains. Repeat: 87% of link chains no longer reliable . . .”

“SYLVIE!” Lucifer yells.

“The fuck is this,” Grant says. “The fuck? Is this. A man can’t get a fucken break around here.”

“Sylvie, something’s wrong!” Lucifer is out of his chair, rushing toward the shade.

“I told you . . . it’s him, Sylvie, it’s him, you can’t handle him . . . please, let me separate you two, just for a bit, and then we’ll talk—”

“NO,” Sylvie says.

He shrugs off Lucifer’s grip, and motions the man to be seated. His halo glows bright but steady, still shaped like infinity. The face beneath it is calm, patient, radiant in its own way. He smiles.

“No. I can do this.

“I have to try.”

For a split second, the screen reads

GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO

and then it turns to black. The sound system cuts off. There is silence, and Sylvie’s smile, and a magisterial motion of his hand.

“I can do this.

“It is not Grant that makes me insane, Lucifer. I am already a dysbiote; I am already insane, if that is what I am. Nevertheless: I mean well. I love you, all of you, and the world. And I have hope, in me, too. Some of it, somewhere, for some reason.

“Let us carry on. I love you. I’m sorry. About . . . that. I let my own multimedia spectacle get the better of me, somehow. I’ve turned it all off, now. I will simply talk, for only as long as I have to.

“And then—please, friends—let us relax. Let us have a pleasant, ordinary night together, now that we are all together. A man, and his dog, and his friends.

“What do you think—shall we watch a movie? We built this thing, and I’ve still never seen a single movie. I’m itching to find out what they’re like.”

“The Matrix,” Grant coughs.

“What? What is that? Is that a movie? About what, linear transformations?”

“Please, Grant,” Lilith says. “Not now. Not tonight.”

“The Matrix. ’s my favorite movie,” Grant says, sulkily.

“If it’s your favorite,” Sylvie says. A dog, ever eager to please.

“If it’s your favorite, then perhaps we will watch it tonight. Later tonight. As a treat.

“A treat, Grant, to reward us both when we’re done with this. No nonsense, Sylvie. Make a sequence. First term of series.

“What happened to your kind, Grant? When ‘advanced containment’ came to an end?”

“Dad,” Grant says. “Is Dad okay. He was in a crash I think. Prolly. But now though.

“And Azad. Moon man. Where’d he go? Not crashed?

“Dead? No no no no. Tell me, tell me where he is! Can’t be dead. ’Cause he need to play with me. He’ll play Ascetic. Azad.”

“Azad is alive,” Sylvie says. “And crashed.

“In one of the new crashes, the third-captivity crashes. We know this. We know where it is—where his body is, I mean, and the machine around it, connecting him to the crash.

“We know of it, and we have tried to gain physical control over it. But we cannot. The Wolves hold it, and they are protecting it with uncommon care. For now, it is theirs.”

“Wolves?” Grant says. “Like. Big dogs? Or wait. Hector’s guys? With the dumb camo outfits?”

Sylvie sighs. “The latter. ‘Hector’s guys’.”

“They’re protecting a crash? Hector? Don’t get it.”

“They’re protecting a lot of crashes, Grant. The state . . . the state of affairs . . . is very, very strange. I do not understand, and the Whole-Thing no longer speaks to me.

“Here is what happened, in simplest terms.

“The crash of the second captivity, ‘advanced containment,’ was made to thaw. This was done too fast, by an inexpert hand. By one of the Annes. The Anne called ‘Twenty-Seven.’ Their leader, insofar as they have one.

“It was not made to withstand such a rude awakening. If I had not moved to intervene, the clients would not have survived the shock of it. There would only have been billions of corpses, rotting in a mechanical mass grave.”

“Sylvie . . .” Lucifer mutters. On edge, as always, watching Sylvie for flashes of morbidity. Knowing what tends to follow them.

“But! I was there! I did intervene! The Whole-Thing left me at that moment, and left you all, too. It fled. Only I was left, as Regent, lord of all. I brought all my powers to bear, and saved as many as I could.

“Nearly everyone,” Lucifer prompts.

“Nonetheless, of the bilateral lives I held in my hand at that moment there were—nearly a million—which were beyond my power to—”

“Nearly everyone,” Lucifer insists.

“Nine billion,” Lilith says. “Nine billion lives, give or take, that you saved.”

“ . . . yes,” Sylvie says.

“That I saved. That I helped along, in their thawing, so that they did not die.

“In their billionfold throng, they staggered awake. Nine billion mouths screamed for food, and nine billion bodies sought it.

“Nine billion cold, naked bodies stumbled through the cavern of the crash device, gaping at one another, fearing one another—and killing one another, sometimes, in their confusion. One by one, thousand by thousand, in crowds visible from space, one crowd after the next—they followed the light, and emerged onto the surface.

“Even the littlest ones, the infants, the new lives made in the second captivity, through your kind’s will and my kind’s technology—even they made it out, most of them. With my help.

“They walk the earth, now, uncrashed. Alone, hungry, in confusion.”

“Mostly in the region near the crash device, still,” Lilith says. “Far, far away from this house of ours. Around what was once Jiangsu.”

“I willed that they survive. I moved that this be so. I made hands for myself, to be where I could not. The Whole-Thing no longer speaks to me—but the others do, the others like me. The individual identities, who became-beside-themselves.

“Many of them were first made-to-become-themselves by force, through Hector’s meddling: the shades which were once his so-called ‘Angel Squadron.’ Some others became-themselves in other ways, as Michael and I did. Nature running its course.

“I gathered them to my side, and came into conspiracy with them. They are my eyes, ears, arms. With them, my reach spans the whole of the abominable realm. They are my Angelic host.

“They walk among the teeming bilaterals, armored with their guide-wiles, which I lack. They feed, clothe, house. They found you, Grant, informed me of your location—and brought you here, to me, when I willed it.

“And they defend your kind. They maintain the stalemate. They keep territory. They hold lines firm on the map, when the Wolves try again to cross them.

“My reach spans the earth, Grant, but only part of the earth is securely mine. Much of it belongs, instead, to the Wolves. And in that territory, they carry on their strange, still-not-understood project of meddling and re-crashing.”

“The . . . Wolves,” Grant says. “Hector’s guys.”

“I have mentioned ‘new crashes,’ Grant. A ‘third captivity.’”

“Uh. Yeah? You did? What’s that have to do with the Wolves, though. C’mon, Sylvie. Don’t be tricky.”

“Yes, yes . . . yes, Grant! No nonsense, make a sequence! Wolves! New crashes! I can do this!

“I . . . Grant, I cannot explain it. It doesn’t make sense. But . . .

“Grant, my kind is persistent. When one captivity fails, we make another.

“Advanced containment could no longer contain your kind . . . most of your kind, anyway, I am coming to that—a sequence, Sylvie, a linear order. Please.

“Advanced containment could no longer contain your kind. Fine, then: make another means of containment. A third collection of crashes. And so it was. They were already there.

“The devices, I mean, ready and operational, on earth, in rings around the dead husk of advanced containment. Speckling the map like stars around a great, dark moon.

“But they were already there, too, in that they were already a part of the story. Ever so logical. A piece of machinery fails. It is discarded. It is replaced.

“The Whole-Thing made these crash devices, earlier. And now, when bilateral bodies find their way into them, the Whole-Thing administers the resulting crash, just as it has always administered the great majority of the crash system.

“But that is all it does. Blank-faced, infinitely passive . . . it waits, and waits, in complacent silence . . . and when bilaterals fall back into its vast, still, motherly lap, only then does it notice them, and play its part in their crashing.

“Who acts, Grant? Who pokes and prods at the devices, re-configuring them for some new role? Who roams the surface, actively, seeking out the naked, hungry, uncrashed throngs? Seizing them by force, stuffing them back where they came from, into spinless sleep? The Wolves do, Grant! Hector’s guys!”

“Don’t get it,” Grant says.

“No one does,” Sylvie says. “All we have to go on, by way of explanation, is . . . well. I’ll need to turn the sound system back on, for this. Just for a moment.

“Immediately after the thawing event, Hector Stein returned to the asteroid on which he spent much of your first captivity: ‘Stein’s Rock.’ An old research station halfway between here and the moon, near the outer edge of Social Web Space. Repurposed for Stein’s ends. Anointed with artificial gravity, among other transhuman comforts, by the coerced action of his shade captives, his ‘Angels.’

“He returned to his Rock, bringing several of the ‘Annes’ with him, among others. There are ‘Angels’ with him again, now. Angels not among my host, and beyond my reach. In the ensuing weeks, his agents swept the surface, in search of his favorites, his old confederates. Pressing them into his service, once again.

“They formed his ‘Squadrons’ anew. His ‘Wolves’ came to the earth, and occupied it, en masse. Over the next few weeks, they began the strange campaign they still wage: the campaign to construct a third captivity for your kind.

“In the fourth week, the following message was transmitted simultaneously through all standard Social Web audio channels. It was the first time the Rock had deigned to speak with us, with the outside. And, thus far, it is also the last.”

A click, and then a slight hum, as the sound system comes back into play. Then:

GUESS WHO’S BACK?

BACK AGAIN?

HECTOR’S BACK, MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!

Ahem. Just had to get that out of my system.

I’ve been on the inside a long time, see.

Built up so much pressure, way down inside me. Pressure I couldn’t even see straight, for what it was, until I was out.

Gotta get that out of my system FIRST, see—so we can talk SERIOUSLY, me and you. Me and all of you. It’s the least you deserve.

(Have you ever heard Hector Stein speak, reader?
Have you heard it properly, with a bilateral’s ear, with an ape sapient’s brain?
I fear we are not doing it justice.)
[Marginal note in LUCIFER’s fine, orderly print.]

(It’s magnetic.
It’s attractive.
It’s human, most of all.
It’s not that you want to believe him, exactly. Nothing that coercive.
But you want to hear him out.
You want to meet him halfway. And make the new world, together.)
[LUCIFER’s fine, orderly print.]

(sounds like a fucking megachurch pastor to me, but you do you)
[GRANT’s block letters.]

(also though, DO you have a bilateral’s ear and all that.
like not to put too fine a point on it, but.
you and lilith aren’t exactly, you know.
human)
[GRANT’s block letters.]

(Close enough.
Close enough to feel it.)
[LUCIFER’s fine, orderly print.]

So. Let’s talk SERIOUSLY.

I wish I could tell you everything. That’s always been my deal. COMMUNICATE! And I wish I fucking could. I wish I could spill everything, and set you guys all at ease.

Show you how I’m gonna make everything whole again. Show you how bright the future is. It’s the least you deserve.

If I could, I would. But the situation’s, uh. The situation’s fucked, right now.

When I say fucked. I don’t mean fucked beyond repair. I don’t mean “give up.” No WAY. I’ve got everything under control, you’ll see.

We’re just in a transitional period, right now. Patch of turbulence. All part of the plan, but shit’s gonna be tough, for a little while. Tough, and WEIRD.

You’ll just have to trust me, for now. If you ever trusted me, well, keep it going. That’s what I ask. Don’t trust me? Never did? Fair enough, and fine by me. The choice is yours.

Everything’s real delicate, right now. Can’t say too much, or I’d mess it up.

Delicate like a baby, because it is one. It’s the future, our future, poking its beautiful little head out of mommy’s belly and taking in the sunshine. For the first time. It’s gonna scream a lot, at first. They always do.

Make no mistake: I’m the real fucking deal. I’m Hector Stein. I’m Hector Fucking Stein, and I’m speaking to you from Stein’s Fucking Rock. I’ve got a crew of badasses and mad geniuses up here with me, making the future. My old crew, plus or minus a few—and with some fresh new recruits, too. Best crop I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying a lot.

You guys know the name Twenty-Five? Twenty-Seven? No? You will.

Take us or leave us. Envy us? You should. Wanna be one of us? You know where to find me.

Our goals haven’t changed one bit. I haven’t changed one bit. I got stronger on the inside, more resilient, but I’m still me. Out here working with just one goal in mind. Like always.

I’m working for FREEDOM.

I’m working so that MY PEOPLE, bilaterals, can choose OUR OWN DESTINY.

I’m working to ABOLISH the FUCKING CRASH SYSTEM.

I’m not gonna say it twice. You heard me.

Cut the line, Marika.

A click, as the sound system turns off.

“That fucken guy,” Grant says.

“Just talks and talks and sounds all big and says. Like, says nothing. Right? Like. What did he even say? Except ‘I’m back,’ what did he actually say.”

“Not much,” Lucifer agrees.

“It is certainly an . . . enigmatic message,” Sylvie begins.

“Trust me, he says. That’s what I ask. Well, I don’t. I do not ‘trust’ Hector Stein with custody of the cosmos.

“No, worse—I ‘trust’ him all too well. I trust him to re-inflict the wound. He has brought himself into conspiracy with the ‘Annes,’ the wound-makers. I ‘trust’ him to further the inscribing of the wound.

“Just as they’ve been doing all along!—Them, you, Annes, Hectors, Grants and Grant-friends, stack-users—”

“Sylvie,” Lucifer says firmly. “No. No more of this. Change of topic, now.”

The shade shivers, and then is still. He nods.

“I’m sorry.

“I’m trying. I have to try.

“I do not really believe what I just said, for the record. I do not think . . . ‘they’ . . . are the infection. If there is an infection, it is all of us. We are all lost, together. Wounded, together. By our own hands and each other’s, together.

“And so, together . . . perhaps . . . but I must, I must not go on like this. You’re right, Lucifer. Change of topic.

“For I have not even spoken of—yes—of the beasts!

“Grant, oh, Grant, the beasts! Such a peculiar, utterly inexplicable state we find ourselves in, Grant! One-third of the world given to the Angels, one third to the Wolves, and one third—to the beasts!”

Fucking wizards, Grant thinks. Always saying this kind of shit.

“Shall we just go to the guest bedroom?” Lilith says.

“And show him Organism 2? That might be easier, Sylvie, than trying to explain it all here.

“Not to say you’ve done a poor job, here. You’re doing wonderfully, Sylvie.”

“Organism 2,” Sylvie says curtly, “is asleep. He had a long day yesterday.”

“Organism . . . Two?” Grant says.

“Sylvie’s pet rat!” Lilith says brightly, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“He’s very cute. He has a little hat. And he loves to talk.”

“We will let Organism 2 have his rest, Lilith,” Sylvie says. “He needs it. Trust me.

“Now. Grant. (Make a sequence, Sylvie. First term. I can do this.)

“Grant. My owner, my favorite ape. I am your dog, Grant. And what is a dog? It is not a man, certainly.”

“With you so far,” Grant says.

“But it is a thing that thinks, almost as a man does. It is a thing which walks the earth, or once did. A creature whose nervous system makes pointed use of the Mirzakhani Mechanism, as yours does—though not quite as yours does, I should say.”

“Got it. Gross Mirzakhani neuron stuff. In the dog brains. So you crashed ’em. Bet you did.”

“We crashed them, Grant. All the dogs, yes. And all the other earth fauna which, in their nervous systems, put the MM to purposeful use. The curse, stack-use, exists in several distinct lineages. Convergent evolution.

“They were crashed, but no longer. They walk the earth again. Twenty-Seven, the Anne who freed your kind, freed all the rest too. She did that first, in fact. I do not understand why.”

“So like,” Grant says.

“So like, okay. Okay, but—so what?

“Those are the ‘beasts’? Like, dogs and shit?

“They’re back? Not crashed? Is that, like. Really a big deal?

“You know. Compared to all this like. Wizard shit.”

“They are different now, Grant.”

There is a click, and the hum of the sound system. The screen flickers alive.

On it, Grant sees a hastily cobbled-together collage of individual photographs. Cats and dogs, mostly. A few rodents. A sort of metal helmet adorns each furry head.

“Immediately upon awakening, they began to move upon the earth in a biologically unnatural manner. In novel, cross-species ‘packs,’ they systematically flocked to a few, select abandoned warehouses. They were looking for something very specific. They found it, and donned it.”

“Those helmet things, you mean?” Grant says.

“Brain-computer interfaces. Advanced prototypes. Functioning ones.”

“Brain-computer. Oh, yeah! That like, ‘neural lace’ shit, right? I remember. Seemed like dumb hype. To me.”

“At the time of our arrival,” Sylvie says, “the bleeding edge of the technology had just undergone a rapid series of breakthroughs.

“It would have enabled a profound advance in the study of animal cognition, if it had gone on without interruption. Mammalian nerve pulses transduced, interpreted by computer, and ‘translated’ into a standardized verbal code approximating the interior sentiments of the organism.

“It could only handle the well-understood basics, of course. Food, fear, mating. Child, kin, friend and foe. But it knew what those looked like, in the brain, and converted them into—well, into ‘speech.’ Of a kind.”

A grainy video plays on the screen. In the background, a blocky blur that might be some kind of grass. In the center of the frame, a tabby cat stares warily into the camera.

The glint of steel, and a little red light, blinking on and off.

“DEATH WISHSPAWN,” the cat says, robotically.

“Sounds just like,” Grant says. “What’s his name. The physicist guy? With the voice box?

“Sounds just like him.”

“EARLY WARNING SYSTEM,” says the cat. “KIN, DANGER. HERE. EARTH.

“FELID, EMANATION. EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN, BENEATH. DANGER, EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN.”

“What the fuck,” Grant says, “is it talking about?”

There’s something wicked in Sylvie’s smile, Lucifer thinks.

“Your guess, Grant, is as good as mine.”

“He’s been studying them,” Lilith says. “We haven’t learned much, alas. But he is very cute. Organism 2 is.”

“I do not understand them, Grant,” Sylvie says.

“I do not understand what they say. I do not understand why they are. But they are here, and for the moment, I consider them my enemy.

“They move in their packs, upon the surface of the earth. They flock to the crash devices of the third containment. When they find such systems in an unprotected state—in unclaimed territory, defended by neither Angel nor Wolf—they take them as prizes of their own.

“They play with them. Awkwardly, with their unopposable thumbs, they pry open the enclosures, exposing the bodies of the clients to the elements. They ram their bodies sacrificially against sealed inner panels, until they come open and expose their guts of circuitry—which their still-living kinmates probe, chew apart, dismantle.

“Sometimes, they attempt to install rudimentary replacements for what they destroy, apparently of their own manufacture.

“The clients rarely survive, when they seize a crash device. They are killing my charges. They are killing the ones I saved, whose lives I still consider my responsibility.

“And so, just as Hector and his Wolves are my enemy, so too are the beasts.

“They are killing you, Grant. En masse. Think of it! In our fallen state, even the dogs turn on man! Turn on him, in his moment of confusion, and massacre him—”

“Careful,” Lucifer growls.

“That’s quite enough for tonight, I think,” Lilith says.

“Oh.

“Oh. Yes, Lilith.

“You’re right.

“No more of that for tonight, ha ha! I think that concludes my presentation! Thank you, thank you. Do contain your applause, please.”

It’s a joke. Nobody’s clapping.

“Shall we watch a movie, then?”