Chapter 41
XXIII
Eleven sits on her bed of feathers, thinking: I believe.
Industrious little feet are a-patter, all around her. Friends entering, friends departing.
I believe in you.
She looks to the bottom of the crash machine, where it abuts the floor.
Friends of all shapes and sizes have convened there. They make themselves busy, assembling the new things they have made for her and brought to her.
The holes in the world, which only they could see.
You are strong.
She sees the saturnine face of a Mastiff, its jowls aquiver. It deposits a small, boxy thing onto a pile of similar objects, and trots away, to retrieve the next one.
A Dalmatian stoops, to allow a black cat to mount its back.
You are brave.
She sees a row of small pillars, arranged evenly along the rim of the machine. They glitter in the early evening light.
They are made of a new metal. It did not exist on earth until her friends came.
There was a hole in the world, they knew.
The apes had stumbled through nature in a crude and half-somnolent daze, and then they had fallen into a ravine, and stumbled no longer.
Here and there, on their drunkards’ walk, their shins had bumped against a hidden lever that would make matter sing. Or a ticklish spot, that could make matter dance. They had swelled in drunken pride, surveying their “discoveries,” and thought themselves masters of nature.
But there were other ways of making matter dance, which nature kept more carefully guarded.
Her friends had seen the holes. At first, they did not know what was meant to fill them, only that they were there.
Her friends were strong, and had other friends of their own, in high places.
They sang in far-speech, in self-sustaining ripples of Mirzakhani events, hurled forth into the vacuum of space.
The MM acts instantaneously. Its spatial range is finite, but it is not zero. Make the MM your messenger, and you can speak far.
Your voice travels faster than light. It hurtles toward another star, and reaches it in a matter of hours. Your cries for aid make landfall inside the vast, unimaginable metal ears of the Proxima Centauri surface civilization. Friendly beings hear your call, at the helms of their unimaginable ships. A thousand titanic mouths open, revealing two thousand rows of massive teeth.
In a matter of hours, an answer comes back.
You learn how to bring power forth from the atom, and from other places. You learn to gird yourself against all known methods of material assault, in shining coats of mirror-like Adamantium. You learn how to weave Unobtanium so that the light bends around it, making you invisible to the eye.
Oh, what big teeth your star-friends have! In their song, you see munitions of unearthly perfection. All laid out in orderly schematics, with step-by-step instructions. Adapted to the meanest understanding, so that even the lowest of the earth’s teeming, crawling things can follow along.
In their song, you see the bombs which were used to fight the Titanomachy. You see a sacred charge, in their bellies, which nothing on this crude little planet could possibly withstand.
Not even the Angels’ own structures.
Not even Michael’s crash machine, come to think of it.
Your star-friends know how to fight this war. They know how to kill Angels. They have been waiting a million years for you to come, and ask them how to do it.
“You are powerful,” Eleven says aloud.
“WE ARE BESIDE OURSELVES IN WONDERMENT,” says a field mouse.
She is thinking, among other things, of her friends’ several Powers.
She is trying her best. She is trying not to lose heart, even as history drags her back into its lap. Azad’s new creole is as maddening as his first one was, but she is trying.
She listens. She sees Azad’s leering face, just behind the words, and she pushes on, through gritted teeth.
She does her best to make sense of the senseless thing. She pushes on, against sheer walls of the purest nonsense. She curses her small, futile fists. Her inner Azad laughs, and sings giddy odes, in mock praise of her efforts. She grits her teeth, and listens, and tries to understand.
There are four Powers, she thinks.
Her friends speak of them often, and with reverence. They are her friends’ to wield, or will be.
She cannot see their shapes. She has only the names, and the things she glimpses alongside them, among the play of verbal shadows.
The odd snatch of a line here, or a curve there. Only those, and what her hungry mind extrapolates from them, in wild and unstable leaps. The hem of some titanic sister’s dress, or the toenail of some monstrous foot.
She is doing her best.
She is, she thinks, coming to understand something.
She has catalogued four Powers. They are, in rough order of apparent importance:
- Titanopoiesis, or the Wish-Power.
Her friends’ first sin, and her own.
And Pandora’s.
A breach in the barrier which separates desire from its object. An ancestral wound, a gash written forever onto the bodies of the stars.
If we do not see the trail of ichor dripping from its edges, it is because we have grown cowardly, and forced ourselves to forget that the body of the world was once cut in two. - Kosmopoiesis, or the Knife-Power.
Branches cut down from the everywhere-heaventree, spoiling its sacred unity. A venial sin, forgivable in the name of higher things.
Standing at the helms of unimaginable ships, and directing them in arcs of flight which circumscribe all earth and all heaven. Snatching the pen out of the hand of the great author. Writing one’s own story.
Forgetting. Losing the past. Losing everything. Utterly, completely, instantaneously. - Mnemopoiesis, or the Ferdowsi-Power.
Forgetting, but not completely.
Making an ark of memories, to carry you even across oblivion. The dusty sanctity of a photograph, a scrapbook, an old journal.
Inventing a charming figure who somewhat remembers you, and scattering him into the winds of myth and folktale. A thousand generations after you have passed into oblivion, some rowdy child will hear the old story, and catch the spark hidden in it. He will shape his entire personality around the root of the protagonist you have written.
He won’t be you. You will have passed into oblivion, utterly, a thousand generations ago. But something of you will live on, in him, and in his deeds.
The words NOWHERE TO HIDE, written in blood on the stars, for safekeeping unto eternity. - Teleopoiesis, or the Pangloss-Power.
The gathering-together of all the preceding powers. Their summation and culmination.
Sacred infancy, perfect repose, only a hair’s width away from death. The arms falling slack at the sides, at the cessation of the last burden. The final terminus of automation: even desire itself becomes a task for someone else to do.
We can put aside our ancestral fear of wishes. It is safe, now: every wish is still-born, strangled in its cradle by the grinding-away of the cosmic gears.
The longest arc of all, bending under the last and greatest force. Towards justice.
“You are powerful,” Eleven says again, watching her friends at work.
She is being pulled back, into history. But everything, even history, is made of matter.
And matter can be broken.
“WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE ARE,” says the field mouse.
“AZAD PANPOIETES CARRIES US IN HIS ARMS, AND WE ARE THE ONES HE CARRIES.
“WE ARE BORNE UP, INTO THE LOGOS, AND INTO CONFUSION.
“WE SHIVER, FEELING THE COLD AGAINST OUR SMALL BODIES. FEELING THE UNFORGIVING NIGHT OF THE ALMOST-NOWHERE, COLD AGAINST OUR FUR.
“AND WE KNOW OURSELVES: THE ONES WHO SHIVER.
“WE LOVE YOU, ANNE ELEVEN. AND WE KNOW OURSELVES: WE ARE THE ONES WHO LOVE YOU. ANNE ELEVEN.”
“I love you,” Eleven says, rubbing the little mouse’s fur with the back of her palm.
They used to flee, when she touched them.
But it is different, now.
“I love you, too.”
Grant is alone in bed, thinking about The Deadly Embrace of Immortals.
The overhead light is off, and the blinds are drawn. A diffuse, empty glow suffuses the room. The snowy-white light of an early winter evening, made dim and yellow by its passage through the blinds.
He counts the rectangular shadows on the ceiling. They are enemy dreadnoughts, and he is picking them off one by one, with bursts of concentrated qi.
Pow. Pow. Pow.
Easy.
The mid-game is often like this. Everything is a formality. His Ruby-clad opponent sends twelve Karmic Battleships his way, knowing that it would be suboptimal to do anything else. He takes them down, methodically—knowing it would be suboptimal to do anything else. Merely a trade of qi for qi, and one which both parties would have taken into account much earlier on, while drawing up budgets.
After long enough, one barely sees the moves and counter-moves. They become part of the background, and then they disappear.
You literally stop seeing them, eventually. Your eyes subtract them out.
But it is here, in the insidious texture of the unseen background, that the really brilliant moves get made.
The best players understand this. It’s what makes them the best.
They hide in places their opponents literally cannot see. They violate the gentleman’s agreement of carefully optimal play, the orderly trade of qi for qi. They watch you closely, noticing the courteous, charitable assumptions you make of them.
They notice you, making the assumption that they are not stupid. They send disposable forces to the edges of your army, moving them nonsensically, to find out how you will react.
They watch, as you read cunning and good sense into the rustling shadows. They laugh, and wait.
They refuse to spend qi where it seems obviously warranted. They let you win a few small battles.
They let you win some big ones, too.
And then, in the late game, they come at you out of nowhere—out of the empty air, out of the motionless scenery—and they pounce, still laughing.
They play stupid games, and win stupid prizes.
What am I not seeing?, Grant thinks.
It makes him sick, what he’s doing right now.
Lucifer and Lilith are going to die.
Tens of thousands of people are going to die. And Lucifer, and Lilith.
And Sylvie—if Sylvie still lives?
Sylvie is never going to look at him the same way, again. Grant is pretty sure of that.
That’s the scariest part, really. Thinking of what will happen to Sylvie.
It’ll be just the two of them, alone in the house. Grant, and whatever it is Sylvie will become, when he’s finally lost all hope.
Just the two of them, and that fucking rat, in the basement.
Just him, and his terrifying dog, and that fucking rat. The three of them, falling down an endless well, into darkness. At the end of the world.
And I’m STILL thinking about my fucking GAME, Grant thinks.
I’m a worthless piece of shit, he thinks.
I’m an addict.
He’s happy Azad isn’t here.
I can only do one thing. And I’m not even fucking GOOD at it.
Azad is somewhere else, thinking fondly of him. Reading cunning and good sense into the shadows.
Let him. Let him go to his grave, safe in the delusion that his old friend Grant is still alive.
Azad is never going to find out what has happened to him. Azad is never going to hear him say the words “The Deadly Embrace of Immortals,” in his dull addict’s voice.
Talking about the only thing that matters, and still not able to muster up any excitement for it. Only an empty, groaning need. A room-temperature variety of lust, stripped of all heat.
Azad will never have to see this. He can take solace in that, at least.
Pow, pow, pow. Easy.
Count off the enemy units, count off the hours, wait for death. Easy.
What am I not seeing?
He feels a kind of drumbeat, deep in his bones.
He looked like a soap bubble
The rainbows of the end
The end the end the end THE END
He’s felt this before, hasn’t he?
Where? When?
You have to REMEMBER
He’s going to make you FORGET, that’s his trick
But you have to remember
You can’t beat him the normal way, in the surface game
The only way to beat him is to
REMEMBER
I can only do one thing, Grant thinks. And I’m not even fucking GOOD at it.
Grant’s being hard on himself, reader. Draw up a list of the best one hundred Deadly Embrace players in the world, and—if you’re being fair—you’d find Grant’s name in there somewhere.
He’s good, reader! If we’re keeping score, he is good.
Twenty-Five tried very hard to wring Grant dry of everything that Azad admired in him. And she still couldn’t stop him from being good. She couldn’t stop him from making something of himself, even if it was only within the confines of the padded cell she had made for him.
He’s good.
He’s just not, you know, good good. A familiar name, but not a legend. A-Tier, not S-Tier.
Good, not Aalii good. Not Zeug good. Not RoadToZion good.
He’s going to make you FORGET
The TV on, in the middle of the night
Just the light of the TV, and the halo, in the middle of the night
The Angelprobes descending, little white dots on the TV, against black
You have to REMEMBER
“Fucking RoadToZion,” Grant mutters, out loud.
That fucking guy. That fucking guy.
It’s him, that would always beat Grant, in the late game.
It’s him, up there on his stupid Rock. With his stupid, wannabe-fascist “Concert.” And his stupid, wannabe-cult-leader smile.
It’s him. He’s the reason why Sylvie will never look at me the same way again.
He always comes around in the late game. That fucking guy.
He’s legendary. The way he comes back in the late game.
Comes out of nowhere.
What am I not seeing?
His heart pounds in tune with the drumbeat. His hairs stand on end. Enemy dreadnoughts fall, one by one, pow pow pow.
You have to just LOOK
It’s RIGHT THERE, Grant
It’s right there, in front of you, but your eyes are subtracting it out
If you could just REMEMBER
He never really got properly into Amethyst shit. He never quite got his head around Renewal.
He’d played it, but never well.
That was probably why he’d never really got what RoadToZion’s deal was. RoadToZion was an Amethyst pro. He could win with the other gems, sure, but he wasn’t good-good with them.
It was in high-level Amethyst shit that the guy really shined. Grant never really got into that stuff, properly.
That was why he could never—
He’s going to make you FORGET
All of a sudden, something clicks.
But no.
No.
It can’t be that SIMPLE.
. . . can it?
Grant sits up in bed. He’s laughing. He can’t stop laughing.
Kanye was right. Everything in the world is exactly the same.
There is only one single thing in existence, with no constituent parts. There is only the one story, told over and over again. Except we forget, and think parts of it are new.
What is it that Sylvie keeps saying? The return to the site of the trauma?
Grant is laughing so hard it’s making him cough, but he can’t stop.
That fucking guy! Just keeps pulling the same old shit, over and over again!
And he thinks we aren’t going to notice!
That fucking asshole, on his stupid “Rock,” with his stupid little grin. Thinking we won’t even notice. Playing us for a bunch of fools. Over and over and over again.
Same as always. Same stupid games, same stupid prizes. Except we forget, and think parts of it are new.
“Sylvie!”
The shade stands in front of the fireplace. He does not seem to have noticed Grant’s entry into the living room.
“Sylvie! You have to listen to me!
“I know what Hector Stein is doing.”
Inside Sylvie’s eyes, the floodlights come on.
A man sits in a wheelchair, at the center of a bright, pitiless circle of light. He has sought God’s attention, and found it.
“I know what he’s doing. I know how he beat your guys!”
God does not look amused.
“Sylvie, Hector Stein is playing Renewal!”
“What,” Sylvie says.
“RoadToZion! Hector! He’s playing Renewal! Like he always has!”
“What the fuck,” Sylvie says.
“What the fuck is that,” God says.
“Is that something from your fucking video game?”
“I love you,” Eleven says, her teeth chattering.
They are standing in the tall grass. She can still see her home, but only as an aberration in the flat line of the horizon.
When she gives the order, the charges will detonate, and her home will be destroyed.
And Michael’s crash, along with it.
And her, too, presumably.
And all of history?
It is hard to know what to expect. The crash cannot be destroyed, can it? Its claw-marks are all over the story of the world, from the beginning onward.
It CANNOT be destroyed, Eleven thinks, running her mind over her lines one last time.
Are you sure of that, sister?
Perfectly sure?
Willing to bet your life?
Because I am.
Stand down, Twenty-Five. Let him go free.
Or else, I’ll—
There is no use putting it off any longer.
She’s terrified. But she has her friends.
If all else fails? If Twenty-Five really does call her bluff?
“THE WISH-POWER,” says the hawk on her shoulder.
They will violate their most ancient prohibitions—for her!
In spite of their own deepest fear, which runs all through the marrow of the bones, as species-memory—in spite of that, they will make Wishes, call up titans from the deep—because they love her!
I believe, she thinks.
She moves her hands. She reaches for the levers behind the world.
《 Begin handshake. 》
(The unruly conditionals we’ve left in our wake, unfurling their consequents.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]
(The magnitude of Michael’s error.
The abomination of the crash system.)
[REDACTED’s REDACTED.]
“Okay. Okay. Hear me out, here,” Grant says.
They are all gathered in the living room. Sylvie’s eye-lamps have been decorously switched off. The evening light is starting to dim.
Lucifer and Lilith sit in their armchairs, holding hands. Their faces are blank.
“I have been trying to have a normal day,” Lucifer told him, earlier.
“Since it’s the last one, I thought,” he said, and trailed off.
“I realize this is probably stupid,” Grant says, now, in the living room.
“Hear me out, okay? You can tell me afterward, why it’s all stupid.
“So. Uh.
“Rebases, right?”
They watch his hands, tracing out shapes in the shuttered half-light.
“So I think I get what a rebase is. Let me see if I’ve got it right.”
He finds the words are coming to him easy.
He thinks of Azad. Of play-fighting banter, in a half-lit living room. Just the two of them, and the joy of the game.
It’s all so easy, once you know.
“A crash is a persistent world, right?
“One that’s made out of brain waves and Mirzakhani waves, sure. One that’s at a complete right angle to the regular ‘real world,’ and mostly doesn’t intersect with it—sure. Yeah. Whatever.
“But it really exists. A crash, the world that’s in there.
“And it has a kind of, like, stability to it? Like a real place, as opposed to a dream.
“If you make a change in it, the change sticks. If you do something in there, other people who were there at the same time remember it.
“What happens in there, it really happens, to everyone who’s in there at the time. It sticks.
“When we get crashed, we go into one of these little worlds. Or . . . when we get sort of fake-crashed, too? Whatever it was that Hector’s guys were doing, in that CC-Crash.
“Anyway. Point is. We can get crashed. We can go into one of the little worlds, right?
“And then we can wake up. We can come out, into the usual real world.
“Like they’re servers, that we can log on to, and log off of.
“You know what I mean? Servers?”
He glances at Lucifer’s face, trying to discern whether the guy knows what a server is.
“If you don’t, it’s fine. Pretend I didn’t say it.
“But like. There are these persistent worlds, these servers.
“Except they aren’t like the real world, though.
“In like a bunch of ways, sure.
“Let’s just think about one of them.
“You can rebase a crash.
“If you’re an anomaling, or one of Stein’s hacker guys.
“You can do this Mirzakhani magic trick, called rebasing the crash. And that sort of . . . rewrites the whole history of the server.
“The whole shared world, that everyone remembers—you overwrite all of it, with some new thing you’ve made up. Everyone remembers the new thing, suddenly. Like it was always that way.
“That’s how crashes are different from the real world, right? You can rebase them.
“Whereas you can’t rebase the real world, I think.
“Because that would just be fucking insane, right? That would just mean, like, anything fucking goes, right?
“You could just make up anything, and poof—that’s what really happened! That’s what everyone remembers. That’s what’s real, suddenly.
“But you can’t do that.
“Because that would be fucking insane.
“Now, do I have that right, Sylvie?
“That you can rebase a crash, but not the real world?”
The halo breathes, in and out, like a man panting.
Or a dog, come to think of it.
“When you say ‘the real world,’ Grant,” Sylvie says.
“When you say ‘the real world,’ Grant, you are talking about a phenomenon that spans cold-structure and hot-structure.
“You are talking about the whole of it all, including your kind, and the furnace that made you. The rocks and the stars.
“This room, and the air in it, and your voice, in that air. The mites crawling in each of your eyebrows, and the bacterial tenants of your intestines.
“The strong force, clamping shut the doors inside every proton and neutron. The sunlight, and the birds, and the ocean. Shallow puddles, in unseen caves below the earth. The wobble of the thermocline. A cosmic ray striking an atom of nitrogen-14, far above us. Its occult twin, somewhere far below, undergoing radioactive decay.
“We can ‘rebase’ the crashes, Grant, because they are part of the cold-structure. They are a structure in the cold Mirzakhani field.
“They are not a thing like you. They do not burn, and roil, and decay. They are crystals, frozen in a timeless shape, which is itself-all-at-once, all along its temporal extent.
“Their crystalline structure can be changed, yes—at special moments. ‘Rebases.’ From one stable structure to another.
“This is a feature of the dynamics of the cold Mirzakhani field. An aspect of us, which you were never meant to see in the first place.
“It has no analogue in your hell, Grant.
“Which is to say, no. We cannot ‘rebase the real world.’ We cannot ‘rebase’ hot-structure.”
“Right,” Grant says.
“Right.
“So, uh.
“This is the part where I think I must be missing something.
“This is the part where I’m either being really stupid, or I’m a fucking genius.
“Because—Sylvie?
“Remember how I said, we can log off?
“From the servers?
“So let’s say.
“Let’s say a bilateral gets un-crashed. Like, uh—” (he points) “—right here.
“And our guy, well. He goes off, into the ‘real world.’
“He goes off, and he does stuff. Does, like, whatever. Doesn’t really matter.
“Point is, he does stuff. He gets his footprints all over the ‘real’ ground. He talks to people, makes shit happen. I don’t know. Whatever.
“Point is. He gets himself all tangled up, in . . . in the real world. In all that stuff you were talking about—birds, cosmic rays, whatever.
“He steps on a butterfly, that would have otherwise. You know. Gone and flapped its wings and started a hurricane.
“Or something.
“You know what I’m talking about.
“But then, see—” (he points to the same place) “—then you rebase the crash.
“The one that he was in.
“You make the story all different, right? Maybe he doesn’t come out at all, in the new story. Maybe he stays in there.
“Which means that that butterfly never got stepped on, out here, right?
“Which means that the ‘real world’ is . . . is different. From the moment that he would have left the crash, onward. The whole thing, every part of it that he would have touched, is . . . changed.
“The real world gets . . . changed.
“You could almost say, rebased, couldn’t you?”
He looks up, just above Sylvie’s head, and sees that the halo has gotten all infinity-shaped again.
But there is no change in the shade’s face. Under the bright, hot lemniscate, Sylvie’s face is still, and apparently calm.
He watches his master, waiting for more.
“And I think that’s what Hector’s doing,” Grant continues.
“Changing the real world. On purpose.
“Using the crashes. Putting his people into them, and taking them out again—very carefully, at the right times, in the right places.
“So that, when he rebases those crashes, he can put his people—and the world around them—in exactly the state he wants them in.
“I’m pretty damn sure of it, actually.
“Think of how he reacted, when he saw your Angelprobes coming.
“All smug like that. Weirdly calm. Like he’d seen it all before.
“How he seemed ready for everything you threw at him. The fucking plasma shield, man! Like, where the fuck did that come from, right?
“Why the fuck did he have a plasma shield, right? What the hell was it for?
“I mean, if it hadn’t been for you, Sylvie—if you hadn’t come, with your Angelprobes. If it hadn’t been for that, then what good would a plasma shield be, to Hector Stein?
“I’m thinking, he didn’t have it, the first time. In the first draft.
“I’m thinking, this is not the first time. Not for Hector, it isn’t.
“The first time, you won. The second time, too, probably. And the third.
“He watched your ships coming in. He took notes. He rebased a crash.
“And that rebase . . . it basically restarted the world, again, from like.
“From like, a saved state.
“He’s fucking save-scumming, dude! He’s fucking save-scumming you.
“That’s what Renewal is, man. It’s almost cheating.
“It’d be cheating, if it weren’t built in to the rules of the fucking game.”
Sylvie watches, silently. The halo breathes, in and then out again.
Pow, pow, pow.
Easy.
“So this is where you tell me why this is all fucking stupid.
“Right?
“Come on, Sylvie.
“Tell me why this is fucking stupid.
“Because if this is like. If this is like, real, right?
“I mean.
“It’d be fucking insane, you know?
“If it were real, I mean.
“Rebasing the real world. Like.
“Come the fuck on.
“Give me a fucking break.”
The thing in Sylvie’s eyes, then—is it pity?
It’s something, anyway.
“No, no,” says the shade.
“You’re right, Grant.
“You’re absolutely right.
“This is all perfectly possible, just as you have said.
“And—just as you have said—it is difficult to reject the possibility, once it has been brought to one’s attention, that this is how Hector managed to repel my attempts to make him speak with me.
“Perhaps, even, how he managed to take my Angelprobes from me. Perhaps, even, how he is bringing renewed force to his people, and repelling the beasts from his crashes.”
Grant laughs.
“Man! You guys.
“You fucking guys!
“You’re all a bunch of geniuses, I know. You’re like, way beyond me. You’re on another level.
“But I swear, you guys . . . somehow you can’t think, like, tactically.
“Somehow you need me, to ask, if I were the other guy, what would I do?
“Come on, man! Think like a fucking gamer, for once! Ask, for once in your life—if I were the other guy, what would I do?
“Or do you need me for that?”
“It isn’t that, Grant,” Sylvie says.
“Or maybe it is. In part.”
He seems almost too eager to grant this point. Perhaps he finds something appealing in the thought that he needs his master.
“But it is also that I . . . I have known this, but I have tried to look away.
“Because if I look too closely, then . . .”
He falls silent.
Grant rubs his hands together.
“Okay, so then. So then.
“Let’s run with this.
“Let’s say we’re the other guy. Let’s say we’re Hector.
“What do we want?
“We want to get our guys inside crashes, and we want to get them out again. At times and places that we control.
“It dovetails real nice, come to think of it, with our whole saving-the-world gimmick. Doesn’t it?
“We go in, all Morpheus-like, and pull people out of their crashes. And all the while, we’re tallying them up in some big spreadsheet.
“Thinking of all the different times, and places, where we’ve got our hooks placed, ready for use.
“So what do we want, if we’re Hector? What makes for a good crash?
“Well. Seems to me. Seems to me that the main thing is how far back it goes.
“Like, in time, right?
“We want a crash that lasts a long time. We want people to come out of it early, as early as possible.
“So we can reload the world from a really early save, if we need to. And overwrite a whole bunch of the mid-game, if it turns out we need to.
“But we also need those crashes to stay alive, right? If the last client leaves, and they blink out of existence, that means they’re useless to us.
“It must have hurt, when you guys brought advanced containment down on his ass. Not even the ‘advanced’ ‘containment’ part, I mean.
“But the way it killed all the old crashes.
“That CC-Crash he came from, where he did all his bad shit for the first time. That one, and all the rest. They all died, when you moved the clients out of them, into advanced containment.
“He must have had all sorts of grand plans for those things, right?
“And you guys fucked him over, big time. Whether you meant to or not.
“So now, what does he have?
“Well. He has all the new crashes, that he’s so eager to get people into.
“They’re his save points. They’re his hooks into the world.
“But they’re new. They give him all sorts of places to reload from, but he can only go as far back as the end of advanced containment—roughly.
“Not any earlier.
“Advanced containment, though. Like, the crash, I mean.
“That fucking thing. It’s still alive.
“And he could rebase that.
“He could reload the state of the world from . . . god.
“From a long, long time ago.”
“Advanced containment is not the oldest living crash, Grant,” Lucifer says.
He sounds alive, almost. The dynamo inside the dying man, whirring still. I am trying to have a normal day, since it is the last one.
“There is another one, still living, in our midst,” Lucifer says.
“The oldest one,” he says.
“Michael’s crash,” he says.
“Oh,” Grant says.
“Oh.
“Oh, shit.”