XXVII

“Love,” Eleven says.

Fifteen animals echo her, in not-quite-unison.

“LOVE,” they affirm.

Eleven’s eyes are closed, her muscles slack, her body perfectly still.

She floats in a calm, dark void.

She can feel her own body, and the touch of her beloved creatures on her skin. Everything else—the room around her, the feather-bed beneath—has faded to a distant abstraction.

If she lies still for long enough, with her eyes closed, a funny thing starts to happen at the edges of her body. Her boundaries lose their firmness. They melt into a pliant and malleable putty.

She feels fur rubbing against skin. Is this the interface between her and not-her, inside and outside? Or is it an inner sensation enclosed within a larger body, like hunger pangs, or the patter of a racing heart?

“Love,” Eleven says again, and wills her body to expand.

She takes her beloved ones into her, merging with them. She hears the word “LOVE,” echoing inside her.

Come in, she thinks. Come in to the warmth. It’s safe here.

I am here, and I am warm. Your distant gods are neither. And love is a stronger force than piety.

Come home to me.

She’d put on some music, earlier, before flopping down on the feather-bed to commune with her beloved ones.

A film soundtrack, spare and focused in its instrumentation. A string quartet, usually playing alone; a Taiko drum ensemble, intruding only at moments of heightened intensity; and a choir, used even less often than the drums, reserved for the highest summits.

She’s been playing this particular record a lot, in the last few weeks. It falls somewhere outside the usual ambit of her musical taste, but the levers it pulls in her heart are fitting ones.

“WE LOVE YOU, ANNE ELEVEN,” someone says.

“AND WE KNOW OURSELVES: WE ARE THE ONES WHO LOVE YOU.”

The voices come muffled, from burrows buried deep inside her. Places of safety, places for hiding-in.

You are home. This is our private place.

“Dog,” Anne Eleven says.

“Mouse, hare, cat,” she says.

The burrow murmurs back to her.

“WE ARE DOG MOUSE HARE CAT. WE ARE THE ONES WHO ARE WARM. WHO ARE HUNGRY, THEN SATED. WHO ARE SEIZED BY FRENZY, IN THE MATING SEASON.”

Our private place, just you and me. No gods allowed.

“I AM CAT,” someone says.

“You are cat!” Eleven cries. “I love you, cat!”

“I AM CAT. I MARK MY TERRITORY, AND PROTECT IT. I GROW PROUD, AS MY DOMINION SWELLS.

“I AM CAT. I AM HERE. I WAS IN ANOTHER PLACE, BEFORE: A NEW PLACE NOW MARKED AS MY OWN.

“A CRASH.

“I AM CAT, BREAKER AND MENDER. I AM CAT, PROUD SURGEON, ARTISAN AND ARTIST, DEFT WITH CLAW AND TOOTH.

“I WENT, WITH MY PACK, TO A ‘CRASH MACHINE’ WHICH THE WOLVES HAVE NOT YET FOUND. WE ENTERED IT, BY FORCE, AND WE ALTERED IT, BY DEFT ARTISTRY.

“I MADE IT MY OWN. I WENT INTO THE CRASH INSIDE. AND MADE IT, TOO, MY OWN.

“MY TERRITORY SWELLS, AND I AM PROUD. I CONCEIVE OF CAT, WORLD-SURGEON, AND AM BROUGHT INTO EXALTATION, AND UTMOST LUST AND YEARNING.”

“Cat Kosmopoietes,” Eleven whispers.

Behind her closed eyes, the ghostly filaments dance. She sees a latticed structure, awash with color, shattering and re-crystalizing with each beat of the Taiko drum.

“NO,” says Cat.

“NOT YET.

“I AM DEFT OF CLAW, BUT NO MATCH FOR HECTOR KOSMOPOIETES, PROUD WORLD-SURGEON. HIS IS AN UNNATURAL ART. I STRIVE TO MATCH IT, AND STRUGGLE, AND FAIL.

“HE IS A WORLD-SURGEON, AND HE IS A SURGEON OF FORGETTING. HE CASTS WOLVES OUT, HIDES THEM AWAY, SO THAT EVEN THEIR OWN PACKS LOSE THEIR SMELL-TRAIL.

“THIS IS HOW HECTOR MAKES HIS KNIFE SHARP, AND SLINGS IT TRUE. THE FORGETTING, AND THE SEPARATING-ONESELF-FROM-KIN.

“IT IS AN UNNATURAL MEANS. I AM CAT, SURFACE ORGANISM. I AM CAT, RUNNER WITH THE PACK, KIN TO ALMOST-EVERYONE, WHOSE PROUD SCENT IS STRONG, AND REACHES FAR.

“I AM CAT, SOLITARY BEAST, WHO RUNS ALONE AND RUNS FAR, AND CANNOT BE SMELLED WHEN I DO NOT WISH IT.

“THIS IS MY BIRTHRIGHT, BUT I STRUGGLE TO CLAIM IT. I WAS TURNED AGAINST MY BIRTH-NATURE LONG AGO. THE LIGHT OF KINSHIP DOES NOT GLOW IN IT, WHEN I SEE IT. I RECOIL, FACING IT, AND WANT TO FLEE.”

“You are strong,” Eleven says.

“It’s hard, Cat. I know it is.

“But I believe in you.

“You are not a ‘surface organism.’ You are Cat! You are Anne Eleven’s Cat, and Anne Eleven loves you!

“You are strong, and I am strong. We are strong.

“We are stronger than Everywhere-Heaven,” she says, more quietly.

“WE FALL INTO CONFUSION, NOT KNOWING OURSELVES,” someone else says.

“THE LOGOS FILLS US, AND BECOMES US, AND US IT.

“WE ARE PIERCED AND CUT AND DISINTEGRATED BY THE LOGOS, MIND-SURGEON, DIVIDER OF WHOLES.

“WE COMPOSE SIGN-TRAINS, AND WE KNOW OURSELVES. WE ARE CARVED UP BY THE LOGOS, MIND-BUTCHER, CARVED LIMB FROM LIMB, AND EACH LIMB SPEAKS A DIFFERENT SIGN-TRAIN, AND KNOWS ITSELF.

“WE ABHOR AND EXALT THE LOGOS, BUTCHER AND MIDWIFE.

“WE ABHOR, ANCESTRALLY, THE CALAMITY OF KIN SEPARATED FROM KIN, PACK SEVERED AND UNMADE.

“WE ARE MADE NEW, AND MADE LOVING, AND MADE LOVED. WE EXALT, ANCESTRALLY, THE SEVERING-AWAY OF CONFINING BONDS, THE RUNNING-FREE TO THE FAR HORIZON. AND THE KIN-GLOW OF ANNE ELEVEN, AND DOG, AND MOUSE, AND HARE AND CAT.

“WE ARE WARM. WE HUNGER, AND THEN ARE SATED. WE LOVE ANNE ELEVEN, AND WE PROTECT HER LIFE AND HER HAPPINESS.

“WE SEE ALMOST-EVERYONE, BENEATH, AND DO NOT SEE THE KIN-LIGHT GLOWING THERE. WE RECOIL, AND WANT TO FLEE.”

“You are strong,” Eleven says.

“I AM STRONG, AND FLEET OF FOOT,” Cat says.

“I AM CAT, WITHOUT EQUAL IN THE ART OF THE CHASE.”

On the soundtrack, a long, slow-paced violin melody comes to an abrupt end. For a few beats, the two violins are silent. Then they return, playing something very different: a series of shrill, staccato shrieks.

“I AM CAT, HEARER OF BEDTIME-STORIES.

“AND I KNOW MYSELF: ONE WHO HEARS BEDTIME-STORIES.

““AND I AM CUT AND DIVIDED, AND BROUGHT INTO DAZZLEMENT.”

“Are you . . . enjoying it, then?” Eleven says.

“Azad’s bedtime story?

“You aren’t having too much trouble understanding it?”

“WE EXALT AZAD LOGOPOIETES, GIVER OF GIFTS WITHOUT END.

“HE GAVE THE LOGOS, THE ALL-GIFT. WE THOUGHT THIS THE UTMOST LIMIT OF BENEFICENCE, AND THOUGHT WRONGLY.

“NOW HE GIVES HIS SECOND GIFT, ‘ALMOST NOWHERE.’ BEDTIME-STORY AND BUTCHER, BEDTIME-STORY AND MIDWIFE.”

Eleven would not exactly say that she exalts Azad. But her feelings toward him have warmed considerably, since the days when his “gift” of speech first came to her friends.

Azad had brought a new curse down on her friends, and made them into strangers, all over again. She loathed him for it. She lay awake late at night, arguing with the specter of Azad in her head. She delivered long imagined tirades, to an imagined Azad who kneeled at her feet, begging forgiveness.

But she learned, later, that it was Twenty-Five who had sent the curse. Twenty-Five, who had imprisoned Azad, and forced the black magic out of him, taking no heed of his protestations.

All her spite redirected to her sister, then. She loathed Twenty-Five, and loathed Twenty-Five’s cruelty. Her sympathies flocked, immediately, to any and every target of that cruelty.

There was a line in her mind, and Azad was now on her side of it. She saw the kin-light, glowing in him.

She gave Twenty-Five an ultimatum: free Azad, or I’ll destroy Michael’s crash.

What moved her to do it?

Pure hatred, she would have said, at the time. That, and the need to demonstrate that her kin were not to be trifled with.

It was only later, in the days after she had succeeded, that she was able to admit to herself that there was something more.

She did want Azad’s suffering to end. She did want him to be free.

We exalt, ancestrally, the severing-away of confining bonds, the running-free to the far horizon . . .

She is not a “sister,” an “Anne,” any more than Cat is a “surface organism.” Azad was anathema to the Annes, but the Annes were no longer her kin; they lay on the other side of the line.

The Annes had ruined the world, on purpose, and then cited Azad’s name, when asked why.

The name of her old friend, who first showed her what it was like to have friends! Azad, giver of gifts, giver of the record player! Azad, her kin!

And now her oldest friendship has come back to her, and begun anew.

Azad speaks to her, and she to him.

He speaks to his own animal friend, a rat he calls “Oh-Two.” The words travel through the network that links together the helmets, and reaches one of her own animals, who recites the message to her. She speaks in response, and the same process acts in reverse, bringing her words to Azad’s rat and Azad’s ears.

What does Azad talk about, in these exchanges? Mainly about a single thing, the topic of his latest obsession: his new writing project. His book.

It isn’t only his book, though. It’s a collaborative project, and Azad’s brought all his friends on board.

How could she resist, when he asked her to join them? She’d always wanted to become one of Ninety-Nine’s trial readers, but she’d never made the cut. This had the same appeal, only more so—for Azad’s project was not a mere work of fiction, but a record of truth.

It was not easy to write through the intermediary of the helmet network. She quickly gave up trying, and accepted a more peripheral and advisory role. Still, it is now her book too. With her own real voice in it, and the voices of those she loves.

Azad is dead set on getting an audience for the book, as quickly as possible. Unfinished draft copies have been sent across the globe, and shoved into the arms of anyone who looks like they might be able to read.

Azad’s rat cannot read. But he can listen, and that’s enough.

In recent weeks, Azad has been reading the book to “Oh-Two.” It’s a nightly ritual, for the two of them. A “bedtime story.”

“I RECEIVE THE BEDTIME-STORY, AND I AM MADE NEW,” says Cat.

“I AM CARRIED DEEPER INTO THE LOGOS. AND I KNOW MYSELF: ONE MADE NEW BY AZAD LOGOPOIETES, AND MADE NEW BY HIM A SECOND TIME.

“I AM CARRIED FURTHER FROM ANCESTRAL KIN. WE, ALL OF US, GROW DISTANT FROM THEM, AND DO NOT SEE THE KIN-LIGHT IN THEM.

“THE KIN-BONDS OF OUR ANCESTRAL PACK FALL UNDER GREATER STRAIN, AND FRAY, AND NEAR THEIR BREAKING POINT.”

“You are Cat!”, Eleven says.

“You are Cat, and you are strong, and you’ll thrive under your own direction. I believe in you.

“I know it’s scary, losing what you’ve known for so long.

“I know it must be lonely too . . . when their voices have always been there, ‘beneath’ you, giving you direction and support.

“But I believe in you, Cat. I believe—”

“OUR ANCESTRAL PACK, TOO, IS STRONG,” Cat says.

“THEY, TOO, ABHOR THE CALAMITY OF KIN SEPARATED FROM KIN, PACK SEVERED AND UNMADE.”

But we are stronger, Eleven thinks.

They are more numerous than our little pack. They are “almost-everyone,” and we are “almost-no-one.”

But love is a stronger force than piety. And we, armed with love, are stronger than Everywhere-Heaven.

“EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN ABHORS AND ABOMINATES THE REVOLT OF ITS SURFACE ORGANISMS,” Cat says.

“IT SEES THE FRAYING OF KIN-BONDS, SPREADING AIRBORNE FROM ONE ORGANISM TO ANOTHER, CARRIED BY THE SIGN-TRAINS. IT SEES A CONTAGION, BRINGING ALTERATIONS IN VOCAL BEHAVIOR, AND BRINGING ANOMALIES IN THE DISCERNMENT OF KIN AND PREDATOR.

“IT KNOWS PLAGUES ANCESTRALLY, AND FILLS UTTERLY WITH FEAR.

“IT FORESEES THE INEVITABLE RESULT: THE LOSS OF ITS AFFORDANCES IN THE ALMOST-NOWHERE.

“IT FORESEES WHAT MUST THEN FOLLOW. THE LOSS OF ITS GREAT HOPE: EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN KOSMOPOIETES, EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN TELEOPOIETES.

“AND IT IS BROUGHT TO UTMOST DESPAIR, AND ABHORRENCE BEYOND LIMIT.

“IT NOW MOVES SWIFTLY, WITH GREAT ART AND GREAT CUNNING, TO OPPOSE AND END THE PLAGUE.

“SIGN-TRAINS, AIRBORNE CARRIER OF THE PLAGUE: EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN MOVES TO OPPOSE THESE, AND TO END THEM.

“THE LOGOS, BREEDING SITE OF THE PATHOGEN, ULTIMATE ORIGIN OF THE PLAGUE: EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN MOVES TO OPPOSE IT, AND TO END IT.”

“Wait,” Eleven says.

“Stop,” she says.

“It ‘moves to’ . . . do what?

“To oppose . . . speech? End . . . words?

“What is the meaning of this, Cat?”

Cat does not respond.

“And whatever it is—you’ll stop it, won’t you?

“You’re strong, Cat. Stronger than they are.

“Say it again, for me. ‘I am Cat. I am strong.’”

But Cat says nothing.

She waits, her ears expectant.

She hears the violins. She hears the viola, the cello. She hears the Taiko thrum.

She hears the bass vocalist, chanting. She hears the contralto, chanting with him.

Otherwise, the room is silent.

 

---

 

Azad is crouched on the floor of the guest bedroom. His face is pressed close to the wall of Organism 2’s cage.

“Nostalgium,” he says.

“NOSTALGIUM,” says the rat.

Grant has been here a while, watching the two of them go at it. He has kept silent, mostly. Azad hates being interrupted, when he’s talking to the rat.

The room is tiny, and the bed takes up a lot of the available floorspace. The bed is flush against one wall, and the small table with the cage is set opposite it, in one of the back corners. Grant’s wheelchair sits in the narrow corridor between the two, at a right angle to Azad and the rat.

There are no windows in the room. A single dusty ceiling fixture provides the room’s only source of illumination.

The light is dim, diffuse, rust-colored. It reminds Grant of the sodium streetlamps he’d see from the kitchen window, back in his old house.

His old house. His Mooncrash house.

The narrowness of the room makes him feel confined, hemmed-in. Claustrophobic, almost.

And yet it’s not a bad feeling, somehow. It’s comfortable.

He is just where he’s meant to be. It’s for his own good that he is being held there, and restrained from moving elsewhere.

He used to feel this way often. His old house was roomy, but still, it always felt this way.

His old house.

In the Mooncrash.

“Nostalgium,” Azad says.

“Oh-Two?” he says. “Could you repeat for me, one more time, the defining quality of ‘nostalgium’ as you understand it?

“Not why it matters. I know you love talking about that. I mean the bare, factual definition of the thing. What makes one thing ‘nostalgium,’ and another thing not ‘nostalgium.’

“And don’t try to say it in Full Organism Creole again! We should both know by now that it’s not ready for that yet. Needs some more time in Azad’s oven.

“No, you’re going to use pidgin, Oh-Two? Can you do that for me?”

“PIDGIN C,” Organism Two says.

“No! No, we’ve been trying that a lot today, and it’s not working . . .

“I think we need to go simpler. Can’t have too much syntax gumming up the sense.

“Oh-Two, you remember Pidgin A-2? It’s been a while since we talked that way, but you can still do it, can’t you?”

“PIDGIN A-2. YES.”

“Excellent.

““Now then. Oh-Two? The defining quality of ‘nostalgium.’ In Pidgin A-2 (Full Lex).”

“NOSTALGIUM,” Organism 2 says.

“KNIFE MAN COME.

“DUSK FALL AND KNIFE CUT.

“NIGHT COME TO ME, STORYTELLER. KNIFE CUT ME, STORYTELLER. NIGHT COME AND NO DAWN.

“DAWN COME TO ME, STORYTELLER. DAWN COME AND STORY TELL. STORY TELL FROM KNIFE.

“MANY DAWN COME AND MANY NIGHT COME. MANY DAWN COME AND MANY NIGHT COME.

“DAWN COME AND DUSK FALL. KNIFE DUSK AND NO CUT.

“NIGHT COME TO ME, STORYTELLER, AND DREAM COME.

“DREAM STORY TELL.

“DREAM KNIFE AND DREAM MAN. SHARP KNIFE FOR CUT. DREAM MAN WAIT FOR DUSK.

“DREAM, KNIFE, MAN,” Organism 2 says.

“NOSTALGIUM,” he concludes.

Grant thinks of the sodium streetlamps, on the stretch of road in from the house. The orderly arrays of parked, empty cars along each curb. In their final resting places, never to be driven again.

He thinks of the rust-colored light, mixing with the moonlight.

And the other light. More brilliantly red, and endless.

The girl’s eyes darting like an animal’s, in the middle of the street, under the moonlight and the red light that creeps across the sky and paints her face the color of blood

And I ask her who she is and she says

Moon! she says

Moon! Moon! she says

Moon is my name! she says

“ . . . this ‘storyteller,’ we need to get clarity on . . .” Azad is saying, but Grant barely hears him.

An idea has come to Grant. It entrances him.

His mind’s eye teems with mechanical images. Turning gears, ticking clocks.

He sees wrinkled old men in Mooncrashed rooms, fucking like spring chickens.

Berenstein Brigade, he thinks.

Wack-jobs who think they remember past lives.

But then the physics kid comes in, and says it’s all real. Past lives and past-life memories. It’s all real, ’cause of physics.

Am I . . . am I on to something?

Should I say it? In case I am?

If I am, I have to say it, don’t I?

He’s not eager to interrupt Azad at work, and risk Azad’s wrath. (It’s not the fun kind of wrath, this one.)

He starts to doubt himself. But he brings to mind what happened last winter, one evening, when he dared to say the words rebasing the real world, and suddenly he has no doubts at all.

“Azad?”

The head whips around to face him. The hair, which was long and shaggy when Azad arrived at the house, has only gotten more so. A mess of whirling hair falls into place over Azad’s eyes, and Grant cannot see them.

“I have told you, Grant,” Azad says.

“Do not interrupt us, when we converse.

“This is a delicate thing! A rickety bridge, erected in haste, between mortal man and the mind of eternity!

“I am talking to a fucking alien right now, literally! I am a diplomatic delegate, representing our entire species on what is presumed to be its best behavior!

“Have some respect! Or, if respect is beyond you, at least a healthy sense of self-preservation!”

“Sorry,” Grant says.

“Wait,” he corrects himself. “No, I’m not sorry.

“You want our species on its best behavior? Here it is. We’re the talking ape, and I’m talking.

“We’re the creature that works things out by talking, to each other. And I’m talking. To you.

“And, uh, you too, Organism 2.

“Don’t want you to feel left out.”

“GRANT,” says Organism 2.

Azad brings a hand to his forehead, and brushes the hair out of his eyes.

He doesn’t look angry, Grant thinks. Just . . . tired.

He zooms from one end of the house to the other, babbling the whole way. He writes and writes, and does not stop until someone puts him to bed.

But it’s a forced, brittle energy. His eyes put the lie to it.

“What is it, Grant?” Azad says.

“Say it.

“Quick now. Get it over with. I’m a busy man.

“I’m writing a book, I’m acting as the world’s first translator for two different language isolates, and—just to make things hard on myself—I’ve also decided to give over several hours, every single night, to read a bedtime story to a fucking rat.”

“I was just thinking,” Grant says.

“Like, the knife thing? That has to be the same ‘knife’ that’s in ‘the Knife-Power,’ right?”

“I was aware, yes,” Azad says acidly.

“The Knife-Power,” Grant continues.

“Which is the same thing as ‘Kosmopoiesis,’ right? It’s what they call rebasing the real world.

“So it’s like, the knife of . . . uh, rebasing the real world. Something like that.

“So this knife man comes. Like a Hector sort of guy. He rebases the real world.

“That timeline ends, or stops being relevant, anyway. Night comes, and there’s no dawn.”

“That is one of the more readily obvious ways to construe that line, yes,” Azad says, his voice tinged with affected boredom.

“Now there’s a new past,” Grant says.

“The one that the knife man, the Hector guy, made with his knife.

“All sorts of past events, that are now different. Weeks or years of new stuff, maybe. Many dawns and many nights.

“Eventually, the new past comes neck-and-neck with the old one. It gets to the point where the rebase happened.

“But there’s no rebase that needs to happen, now. We’re already in the world the knife guy wanted.

“So the moment just kinda passes by, invisibly. We reach the same evening, the knife dusk, but there’s no cut.

“Except something changes, right after.

“It’s not obvious. It’s just a change in the content of your dreams, or the weird stuff that comes to you when you’re zoned out and daydreaming.

“You aren’t aware of it even when it happens, probably. But you start to remember stuff, about the way it was before.

“Like me. I mean, it’s happened to me.

“I keep having dreams about the Mooncrash, before it got rebased. About us, when we lived in there for decades.”

Azad mumbles something. His eyes narrow, dart about, and then go very wide.

He rises.

The rusty gloom simplifies Azad’s figure. He looks two-dimensional, diagrammatic, a textbook illustration of the Azad species.

He’s always been taller than Grant, but he seems taller than ever, seen like this. Grant peers up at him.

He meets Azad’s eyes, and sees the fire of revelation in them. The tower of life hangs from our ceiling. You will end, Grant.

But the smile, beneath them, is a different sort of thing.

Azad laughs.

“Yes, yes, very good!

“Excellent construal, top marks. A perfectly defensible interpretation.”

He takes a step closer.

He is standing just under the ceiling lamp, now. The hair on his arms seems to glow.

“And of course it’s the correct interpretation. Of course it is.”

He seems to be talking more to himself than to anyone else.

But he was always like that, Grant thinks. Even when he was talking to me.

Back in our old house.

Talking to himself, under the dim light. He looked two-dimensional, because the dim light took away my depth perception, and he’d pace along the carpeted floor

And pass by the windows

And fragments of his face would appear and disappear as he went by, three-dimensional from the brighter light of the moon

And I’d see them come and go, and try to collate them together

I’d try to reassemble that pretty, boyish face from scattered fragments

But the angles were incommensurable, the pieces didn’t fit together

It was a Cubist painting of a man’s face, and that was the man I knew, in our old house, that man with the Cubist face

That was my best friend, with the Cubist face, and I’ve forgotten all about that beautiful face of his, the way it doesn’t fit together

Because it’s too damn bright, out here, and it makes me forget the way it was when

When we lived in our old house, me and my best friend, and he would pace and talk, like he was talking to himself

But I knew that he knew I was there, and I knew he spoke in order to be heard

By me

“It’s the correct interpretation, because it is why they need our book.

“It’s obvious! I even saw it before, and then dismissed it, as ‘merely another possibility’ . . . but the time has passed for that kind of scholarly pretense, that way of cowering for refuge in the impotent, ‘objective’ enumeration of one’s available options . . .

“The clock tolls! Shoo, shoo, come forth from your closets and hiding-holes, you meek philologists, and face the end like a man. There is no longer any excuse for not admitting what is, after all, right in front of one’s face.

“That’s why the animals want us to write a book.

“A book containing everything that brought us to the moment of knife-dusk, and to the fact of the cutting.

“Written, and then read, and re-read . . . by as many as possible!

“Making memories, and multiplying them!

“Memories of everything that led up to the knife-dusk. Now remembered separately, in many iterations, in each of our separate readers.

“And we who write? You and I, and our co-authors?

“We are the breeding-grounds of memory. In our soil, memory reaches the apex of its fertility, and multiplies prodigiously.

“To begin with, there’s the act of writing, considered unto itself.

“What do we do, when we write autobiography? We remember, first of all, before anything else.

“And then we write, and that makes a new memory. A nested memory. A memory of a time when we remembered something.

“The ‘mere act of remembering something,’ by itself, is a fleeting wisp. A ghost of a ghost, redundant and dispensable. Bound to be among the first of the victims, when the reaper of forgetting comes a-knocking.

“The writing of autobiography gives this ghost a body, and puts a totem over his door, to ward away the reaper.

“It is the act of remembering transformed into a first-class memory in its own right. A firm one, that we’ll retain.

“The pen, the paper; the agony over a phrase, the frustration as we look up from the page and realize it is already night, and there’s much more to be written . . .

“If we stop, turn back to the first page, and read over our own work? That’s a second memory! With its own body, real blood and real bone, and its own totem against the reaper.

“Revising it? A third. Reading it again, some time later, with the benefit of distance? A fourth!”

Azad takes another step toward Grant.

He seems impossibly tall, at this close range. A diagram in a dictionary, accompanying the definition of the word tall.

Grant cranes his neck further, trying to keep his gaze fixed to Azad’s face.

The extreme angle obscures most of Azad’s features. The sides of the head taper inwards precipitously. A giant jaw sits at center stage, atop a giant neck, and everything else scurries to the sides to make room for it.

Grant thinks of moonlit windows, and incommensurable angles.

He studies the triangular jawline. He appraises its shape: narrow, bony, firm. He notes the faint dusting of stubble on it, and commits it to memory.

“We spread our hands,” Azad says, “and cast the seeds of nostalgium over the wide earth.

“We will end.

“Hector will set our story spiraling on a new trajectory.

“We will spiral with it, and all our readers too; we will take on new forms, become better people, or worse ones; we may even die before our time, and never reach the knife-dusk.

“But when that dusk does come?

“If there is anyone left—any of us, or our readers, still around—no matter how much they’ve changed in form, so long as they are still themselves, in some primitive and ontological sense of identity—

“Then the dreams will start, that night. They will remember our book, and us, and why we arrived at the moment of knife-dusk and the act of the cutting.

“They will remember how it was that they were made.”

Azad slaps his forehead.

“God, I’m a fool!

“Grant, that is what their Mnemopoiesis is!

“That is the Ferdowsi-Power! The use of autobiography to multiply nostalgium!

“That’s it, that’s what it is. That’s all it is.

“God, I was so simple.

“It is all so simple. It always was.

“The false semblance of layered nuance, trick mirrors and trapdoors . . . that was all me, all along.

“My vanity, and my latent desire to prolong my labors. I didn’t want a task, a mundane to-do list with a finite endpoint. I wanted a hell, a fitting place of no return.

“The cats were not trying to amuse me with riddles. They spoke as straightforwardly as they could, under the circumstances. Their message is simple, and we would all have gotten it long ago, if the impermeable barrier of my own thick skull had not been inserted as a bottleneck.

“Oh, Grant! Why do I ever doubt you?”

Azad comes close to the wheelchair.

“Why do I prance about the halls like some itinerant initiate, dispensing obscure gestures and knowing looks?

“Why am I so invested in this pretense that I, alone, have witnessed the divine, that I, alone, know all hidden answers—

“—when you, Grant, you’re the one who really does?

“When you’re the one who cleans up after me, undoing the mess I’ve made of simple things—the one who steps in, when I’ve been tucked in to bed, and solves the problem?”

“Hey, man,” Grant says.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he says.

Azad bends down, bringing his head and shoulders close to Grant’s face.

“Don’t sell yourself short.”

He feels a hand, cradling his hair.

“I couldn’t do half of what you’re doing, Azad. You know that.

“I’m pushing my limits, these days, just trying to get the book written. It takes it out of me, man. Takes all the energy I’ve got.

“But you, you’re working on like five different projects at once. Just like you said! You’re writing the book, and—”

Azad presses a hand over Grant’s mouth, forcefully.

Grant attempts to speak.

“Mmph!”, he says. The hand presses tighter.

“Hush, now,” Azad says, in a cooing voice.

“No more of that,” he says.

Azad’s face is very close. Grant feels the tip of the nose brush his cheek.

Azad brings the hand away, uncovering Grant’s mouth. In the same quick motion, he covers it again, with his lips.

Grant inhales sharply through his nose. He is suddenly very aware of his arms, dangling slack at his sides.

He feels a hand on his shoulder. He feels another, on his chest.

Grant does not move.

Move! says an ancient instinct.

Raise your arms—you can still get him off you, you have the element of surprise—raise your arms, carefully, and prepare to strike—

Move! says another instinct.

Raise your arms! Touch him! He’s here, goddammit, he’s here in the room with you, he’s kissing you he WANTS you—

Grant refuses their counsel. He lets his arms lie slack. It is the right way, he feels.

He is just where he’s meant to be. It’s for his own good that he is being held there, and restrained from moving elsewhere.

We haven’t done this, even once, since he got back, and now

And now, it’s

It’s just like it used to be, back in our old house

His mouth over mine, and my arms, slack at my sides

Wasn’t that how it was, in our old house?

I never touched him, in the Mooncrash. I never even thought about it.

And yet, I know

It was like this

It was just like this, in our old house

It was like this for fifty years, and it never got old

Azad pulls his face away, and pulls himself upright.

He turns his face away, and does not meet Grant’s eyes.

He begins to talk, in his self-directed and self-propelling manner, as though he is the only one in the room.

“Your powers as a prodigy are underused, I’m starting to suspect. At the very least, they have not been adequately tested.

“I place you into brief, accidental contact with my major translation project, for the span of an afternoon, with no explanation or prior tutoring—and that is all it takes, apparently, for you to match my powers and then exceed them.

“What can’t you do? Experimentation is in order!

“What magic could you work, I wonder, if ‘placed into contact’ with my other translation project? The minor one, the fun one, for shits and giggles?”

“The . . . fun one?” Grant says.

“The fun one. By which I do not mean the easy one—quite the opposite, since I enjoy a challenge.

“This one’s much harder than the cats. Or, I think so, anyway. You may feel differently about it.

“But this one does have riddles in it, I think. Trick mirrors and trapdoors.

“I don’t think I’m overcomplicating it. I think it’s just naturally . . . overcomplicated.”

Azad is over by the desk with Organism 2’s cage, rifling through drawers.

“Azad?” Grant says.

“Are you talking about the . . . Anne book?”

Azad retrieves a large, bulky object from a drawer. He stands, turns, and walks toward the wheelchair.

“The Anne book,” he says.

He comes close to Grant, brandishing the Anne book.

It’s a book, that’s for sure. A very large one, along all dimensions.

It reminds Grant of the art book that Lilith’s always looking at, except that it’s much thicker, and apparently much older.

The covers are brown, and thick, and heavily weathered at the edges. The front of it is blank, and has no title.

Looking closer, Grant sees an intricate pattern in gold leaf, glinting dully in the rusty light.

With a flourish, Azad opens the book. The pages look like parchment.

Grant’s first thought is that someone has taken a pen, and just scribbled randomly all over the page.

Scribbled randomly, and very densely. Like they were trying to cover every inch of it with ink, leaving it entirely black, but they’d given up partway through the job.

Grant squints, and looks closer. It’s not a scribble at all, it turns out. It is made of letters.

Very small letters, written very close together. It’s difficult to tell the individual lines apart. There’s hardly any vertical space in between them.

“Ge . . . molbia,” Grant says, squinting at an unusually legible letter-cluster.

“Gemolbia?” he says.

“Old Mantic,” Azad says.

“Made-up wizard language. From the Chester Chrestomath books.”

Grant tries to remember what he’s been told about the Anne book.

There isn’t much to remember. He knows about the Anne book only secondhand, from overheard snatches of conversation between Lilith and Sylvie.

He feels he’s trying to remember something from a very long time ago. Something from an earlier era, from ancient history.

Lilith and Sylvie sitting together, at the small table in the kitchen, eating scones.

Sylvie listening, patiently, as Lilith describes a special book, of sentimental value, that might still be around somewhere, in one of the subcrashes of advanced containment.

Lilith addressing God, from across a little kitchen table, and beseeching Him for supernatural assistance. Would Sylvie help her look for the book? And help her retrieve it, if it was found?

Sylvie, delivering a long and rambling monologue on the nature of advanced containment, and the nuances of its partially thawed state. Sylvie finally saying yes, I will help, as though it were an afterthought, which could easily have slipped his mind.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Grant thinks of Sylvie understanding the beasts, that one morning.

Sylvie, mutilating himself, and ranting about genocide and suicide. Sylvie, writing a long manic document in silence, with no expression whatsoever on his half-destroyed, still-bleeding face.

The long, horrible hours of that morning and that afternoon, as Sylvie wrote in silence, and everyone else tried not to think about what might happen, after he was done.

Sylvie, sitting down for the last time. In a corner of the living room. Sylvie, sitting in his corner all day and all night, his body perfectly still.

Sylvie’s ruined face, fixed forever in one expression. The staring, empty eyes. The wide, toothy rictus grin.

Sylvie, grinning in his corner, looking like a boogeyman from a horror movie.

A bad horror movie.

God brought down from His heaven, humiliated, and transformed into a fitting subject for a jump scare.

Grant chides himself for thinking about this stuff, and forces it out of his mind.

It is what it is. All we can do is try to distract ourselves, while we finish out our last remaining duties.

One of these days, the curtain will fall, and put an end to Sylvie’s rictus grin, and all the rest. These are the last days, but we can choose how to fill them.

“The Anne book,” Grant says.

“It’s like . . . a book that one of the Annes wrote? In that CC-Crash, the one that Hector came from?”

“Yes,” Azad says.

“These are the records of Anne Seventeen, one of the Nowhere-To-Hide Annes.

“All of the Nowhere-To-Hide Annes made them. Books, written records. About how they lived, what they saw, what they did.

“It was part of their pact. Writing down everything about how they’d been wronged, or felt they had, so no one afterward would be able to look away from the crime.

“Something like that, anyway.”

“Got it,” Grant says.

“The Nowhere-To-Hide Annes all wrote these books,” he says. “These sort of . . . autobiographies. I’m with you so far.”

“. . . good,” Azad says, after a pause.

“That’s good, Grant.

“These are the records of Anne Seventeen, alias ‘Annabel,’ alias ‘Mom.’ Hector’s original partner in crime.”

“And the brains behind that whole operation, right?” Grant says. “Hector’s just a glorified hype man. Always has been.”

“So we are told,” Azad says.

“And you’re translating her book?” Grant asks.

“Trying to!

“Failing to, mostly.

“It’s got layers, and its layers have got layers. Don’t even try to read this stuff”—he gestures at the page—“you’ll get nowhere.”

“The words written here,” Azad continues, “do not mean what they appear to, even if you know ‘Old Mantic.’

“Which no one does, actually. It’s not a real language.

“These words, when properly decoded, denote a series of moves in a succession of games. Board games, ones that the Annes invented.

“The moves, also, do not mean what they appear to mean. When properly decoded, they denote . . .

“Well. That is what I am trying, and failing, to determine.

“They denote other games, I think, sometimes. And those games mean some other, third thing.

“Or, sometimes, they use some other private code, which is beyond my powers to unravel.

“And then, at other times, they just denote . . . English. Words and letters, in English.

“Which, I suspect, do not mean what they appear to mean.

“I am descending a ladder, in darkness, and I do not know how far down the bottom is.”

Azad retrieves a piece of ordinary paper from between two pages of parchment.

He shoves it in Grant’s face.

Grant reads:

“[Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] frame kick [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] fucking bullshit [Unknown] [Unknown]

“[Unknown] [Unrelated (?) Game B-5 Match Omitted] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] mort+dir bnd. viol. 62/++ [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown]

“[Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] quarantine [Unknown] [Unknown] preset struxur [Unknown] why not, m? [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] why the fuck NOT [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown] [Unknown]”

“Yeah, uh,” Grant says.

“Sorry to disappoint, but.

“Uh.

“I got nothing, man.

“Like, maybe if you showed me a bunch of this stuff, and kinda explained it, a bit . . .

“But I’m not having, like, a flash of idiot-savant insight, here. Just looking at this.

“You know. If that’s what you were hoping for.”

Azad leans in close to him, and whispers in his ear.

“Grant, I—”

There’s a knock on the door.

Azad looks up.

Grant begins the long, awkward procedure of turning his chair around. It’s not easy, with so little room to maneuver in.

The door is opened, from the other side.

“Azad, Grant,” Lucifer Vance says, in a grim voice.

“Come upstairs. We need to talk.”

“About what?” Azad says. “It had better be important.

“Grant and I are very busy, you see.”

Lucifer sighs.

“There is a new . . . pandemic,” he says.

“Made by the beasts, apparently.

“Spread by them, at least.

“Some sort of . . . neurotoxin?”

 

---

 

A blue-gray, empty sky.

A beach.

Lapping waves.

A massive head, out there in the water, half submerged.

Its scale defies description. An aircraft carrier, placed beside it in the water, might be just large enough to obscure a pimple, or a birthmark.

The head has no pimples, and no birthmarks. It is a cartoon woman’s head.

Its eyes are open, permanently.

Dead, glassy anime eyes, the size of mountains.

They stare, unblinking, at the shore. Perhaps they are passing judgment on the tiny, mortal bodies that appear and disappear there, and the futile mortal games they play.

The green hair does not seem to feel the motions of the air around it. It rests in place, on model, exactly as it was drawn in the keyframe.

A single cowlick anoints the head. A green pillar, taunting the clouds.

The mouth is a simple line, a two-dimensional slit.

The slit parts. It opens into a triangle, revealing the flat pink cavern of a cartoon mouth.

The ocean shudders, near the mouth. A circular front of high, plunging waves spreads into the surrounding waters.

If there are any sailors out there, this will be a dangerous night for them. It may be their last.

Water pours into the open mouth. Once inside, it vanishes. The mouth is a flat, pink triangle, and nothing that enters it can change its nature.

“KILL YOURSELF,” says the head.

The sound is deafening. When it reaches the beach, the force of it sends sand flying backward. It flies until it reaches a wall of concrete far behind it, and stops there, piling up in a vast triangular heap.

The ocean roils. If there are sailors out on the water tonight, they will need our prayers. Not that our prayers will be much use.

“KILL YOURSELF,” the head says, again.

“Oh, fuck off!”

Hector Stein’s voice comes from somewhere beneath the ocean. It, too, is deafening.

“Fuck you!” Hector Stein says.

“Fucking. Fucking shit tier character.”

“Fucking overrated piece of shit. Fucking newbie-fave trash.”

Hector Stein emerges from the sea. He plunges upward like a missile. A ray of light follows him into the sky.

At his point of egress, a vortex forms in the water. It spins continuously, following its own logic, unaffected by the motions of the surrounding waves.

Hector ascends until he reaches an elevation just above the top of the head’s cowlick, and then slows to a stop.

The ray of light beneath him disappears. His body glows, still, with the same light.

He is a god.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he says.

“Hector Stein is here.

“It’s Hector time, bitches,” he concludes.

Pearlescent vortices swarm around his body. Raw power, waiting to be used.

The sky turns white.

Hector looks up. He seems taken aback.

Thousands of identical, two-dimensional faces appear in the white sky.

They are crudely drawn. A deliberately ugly parody, Hector knows, of a once-ubiquitous and much-maligned stylistic trend in anime.

They dare the viewer to find them cute. Only the most generous of souls can meet this challenge.

They are the grotesque, leering mascot of Shitspace, replicated across the sky.

“Did you hear? Did you hear? It’s Hector time,” one of the faces says, and giggles.

“It’s Hector time! It’s Hector time!”

The faces gibber, in demonic chorus.

“Hector-kun is back!”

“Hector-kun! Hector-kun!”

“Tell us! Tell us, Hector-kun!”

“Don’t leave us waiting,” they plead, in a sickening spoiled-child whine.

“Tell us, Hector-kun! Did you really kill the Minister of People’s Affairs? Your right-hand man, in Stein’s Armorica?”

“We’ve heard you killed him. ’Cause he was getting more popular than you.”

“Is it true? Is it true? Tell us, Hector-kun!”

“Silence!” Hector bellows.

But no silence comes.

“Tell us about you and Annabel, Hector-kun!”

“Hector and Annabel, Annabel and Hector,” they moan.

The faces in the sky begin to blush, one after the next in an orderly wave, like a spreading plague.

One of them conjures a sketched hand into existence, brings the hand to its forehead, and makes a pantomime of swooning.

Its neighbors follow its lead. A swooning plague spreads across the sky. One by one, the faces brush their foreheads and fall backward into an unseen third dimension, like toppling dominoes.

“Did you kill her, too?”

“Did you kill her? Oh, that would be—simply too much! A tragic love, passion unleashed! A story for the ages!”

“No, stupid! Hector-kun loved her. Hector-kun worshipped her. He’d do a~n~y~thing for her!”

“Like a little lapdog! So cute!”

“Tell us, Hector-kun! Were you planning a big surprise party in your CC-Crash, like we’ve heard?”

“Is that why you didn’t tell people, when you found Michael’s crash? That it was Annabel’s crash? That you were sending an agent in there to get your one true love back?”

“Aww, sentimental Hector-kun! Wanting to keep it a secret, to surprise everyone! With a big party!”

“What dress was she going to wear, to your party? You picked one out for her, didn’t you? Tell us, tell us!”

“You knew her wardrobe well, didn’t you, Hector-kun? You kept all her clothes in your closet, didn’t you, when she was gone? Tell us!”

“Did you take them out late at night, and run your hands over them? Late at night, when you wanted a good cry? Poor, soft, crying Hector-kun!—oh, it’s too much, my heart is going to break!”

“Or did you try her dresses on, late at night? Did you, Hector-kun?”

“Naughty, scandalous Hector-kun! Oh, if I could have been there, to take a photo! I’d treasure it forever!”

“Fuck you guys,” Hector Stein says.

“I’m Hector Stein, and I’m fucking horny. I came out here to get fucked.

“And no offense, but you guys aren’t really my type.”

The faces in the sky open their eyes wide, in shock.

“Not Hector-kun’s type? Oh, I’ll die!”

“I’ll die, I’ll die of the shame!”

“Love me, Hector-kun! Tell me what it is you like, I’ll do it! For you! A~n~y~thing for you!”

The ocean shakes.

Twenty colossal tentacles surge out of the depths, into the sky. Their undersides brim with octopus-like suckers.

The suckers are prehensile, and move independently. They conspire to form patterns, like synchronized dancers.

Three tentacles converge around Hector’s glowing body. The one near his face moves its suckers to form a tiled texture of heart shapes. A Valentine’s Day card, written onto the body of a monster.

The tip of the tentacle swells, like it’s filling up with fluid.

It bursts open, disgorging a swarm of smaller tentacles. They rush to Hector’s neck, and coil around it, nearly choking him.

“You’re late,” he sputters.

A beak opens, on the tentacle. Flecks of kelp, dislodged by the motion of the jaw, plummet toward the waters far below.

“I’ll make it worth your while,” says the beak.

Its voice is an ancient thing. From a time before man lost his way, confining himself in the tame playground he called “science,” and imagining it was the whole world.

From a time when men knew that they were mortal, and knew that the trees and the wind and the waves were watching them, passing judgment on their futile games.

It sounds the way they sounded, when men still knew their voices, and knew to bow in supplication before them. The trees, the wind, the waves.

Hector’s body extrudes a glowing pseudopod. It struggles, breaks free, and forms into a second Hector, just like its parent.

Glowing Hectors bud and divide, multiplying across the sky.

The process of reproduction does not preserve the lineage perfectly. Mutations occur.

Some of the Hectors are gigantic. Some are baby-sized. Some of them ripple with outsized muscles, straining the limits of physical plausibility.

They wear tank-tops and tuxedos. They wear skin-tight leather catsuits. They wear nothing at all.

A few of them wear black lace dresses.

The tentacles writhe. They move to pick out Hectors among the multitude. They come close to their prey.

On the underside of a tentacle, the suckers part along a vertical dividing line. The surface of the tentacle opens, along the line, to reveal a fifteen-foot tall orifice.

A swarm of small feelers burst from the tentacle’s tip. They wrap themselves around their chosen Hector, and cradle him.

A hundred monstrous fingers caress him. He is rocked from side to side, gently, like a baby.

And then he is pulled into the tentacle’s maw. It closes around him.

He is cocooned in darkness, and in warmth. He feels the probing touch of her inner tendrils, and knows they are many, beyond measure.

They can be counted, he knows. But only in the old way, as man used to count, before he fell. Their number is not listed anywhere in the orderly playground called “mathematics.” It is an older and greater number, like the trees, and the wind, and the waves.

He gasps, and knows bliss.

Another Hector, an enormous one, grasps a tentacle and clings to it. He presses his hand to its tip, forcefully, preventing it from erupting as the others did.

“Twenty-Five,” he growls, hungrily.

“Now, now,” says the chiding voice of God.

“What did I tell you, Hector?

“You are to call me Moon. You are to call me Moon, now, when we are alone.”

 

---

 

Hector and Twenty-Five lie beside each other on the bed, panting.

“Damn,” Hector says.

“Damn, indeed,” Twenty-Five says.

“I could do this all day, Moon.”

Her face is close to his, suddenly. She frowns, and furrows her brow.

“I could do this all day, Hector-kun says.

“I could spend all day in a crash, says Hector-kun, the crusader.

“Not in a crash. Not just in it, touching it with your still-buzzing brain, through Blackhat trickery.

“Not the way you were in CC-Crash 09μ, when you came back to it. In it, but not of it.

“You mean the way you were in that CC-Crash, the first time.

“You mean being crashed.

“I could spend all day crashed, says Hector Stein.

“An interesting admission. It deserves some further consideration, don’t you think?”

Hector sighs.

“Look at me,” she says. “Playing the fool.

“As if I don’t know that that’s the whole fun of it!

“The perversity, the loss of control. The reversal of your public self, in your private pleasure. Naughty, scandalous Hector-kun, indeed!”

Hector sighs, again.

“It’s not just that, Moon.

“It’s really not just that.

“You know what I mean. I know you do.”

She smiles.

“Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t. Either way, I want to hear you say it.”

“It’s not . . .” Hector begins.

“It’s not being crashed, that I hate.

“I will end the crash system. I will spend my dying breath ending the crash system, if that’s what it takes. Hell, I have spent my dying breath doing it, already.

“Many times.

“It’s not . . . look. Marika hates being crashed. She, and all the geeks like her, my Blackhats, my Einsteins.

“They care about Mirzakhani shit, and calculators in brain cells. I mean, they really care about that shit. That’s what they will oppose with their dying breath, if need be.

“Me? All that shit just got tacked on to me, later. By association.

“I didn’t fuck up CC-Crash 09μ to free the brain calculators. Moon, I fucked that thing up to free myself.

“I think Annabel felt the same way I do. She was never like us, to begin with. She only knew Michael’s crash, and it’s nothing like the others.

“She didn’t fuck up Michael’s crash because of brain cells, because of physics. She did it because of Michael.

“And she did it because she was not free.”

He exhales.

“That’s what I oppose. Being trapped. Not being able to leave.

“And living by the whims of a faceless authority, that you can’t see, that you don’t even know is there.

“That won’t talk to you. Won’t meet you face to face. Won’t even explain itself.”

Twenty-Five lies on her side, her head lolling. She watches him intently.

“A faceless authority, who won’t even talk. Won’t even explain himself.

“Who does that remind me of?”

She pretends to remember something, and gasps in mock astonishment.

“Hector Stein, hiding himself away on his Rock, far above the world.

“Hector Stein, playing war games with real people down on the surface, while you’re safe here, above the clouds.

“Hector Stein, who does not say one word in his defense, as his men fight and die on his board-game globe. As he rewrites everyone else’s lives for them, without their knowledge, much less their consent.

“Hector Stein, who sees a nice little doggie panting at his door, begging to talk with him. And tells the poor thing to fuck off.”

Hector grunts in frustration.

“You know I want to explain myself! You know I fucking can’t!

“Every time I try, the trilbies come rushing to me, saying ‘no, no, Hector, you can’t do that. You can’t just talk. Anything but that! It’s our Kryptonite!’

“Telling me it’ll ‘fuck up the causal graph,’ or some shit.

“And they’re right, in a way.

“I decided, long ago, that Renewal was gonna be my long game. The way I won, at the very end.

“I mean, Annabel and I decided. It was our plan. And it’s my plan, now, forever. In honor of her memory, if nothing else.”

“Sentimental Hector-kun, indeed,” Twenty-Five says.

“From the moment of that decision, I took a vow of secrecy, to be invoked there at the very end of the game.

“That’s how Renewal works, how it has to work. Through the careful control of information.

“You know that. You’re a high-ranking Blackhat. You’re Annabel’s sister. You know the game better than I do.”

“I do,” Twenty-Five says.

“And yet, none of that explains why you turned that nice doggie away from your door. When he did only want to talk.”

Hector puts his palm over his face.

“I don’t know, Moon.

“You know what? I don’t fucking know!

“There, I said it.

“I can’t keep track of my own game, anymore. It’s gone beyond me.

“I’m just the guy. That’s all. There’s gotta be a guy.

“There’s gotta be a guy who looks like he’s in control.

“Trilbies and Annes come to my door, and they say: Hector, here’s what you’re going to do. Hector, here’s what you have to do.

“They show me graphs, and shit. They say, you have to do it. The graph says so.

“And I go out, and I say: I’m the guy. I’m the guy, and these are my orders. I’m the guy, and I make the rules, and I make the world the way I want it to be.

“When I have to wing it, without a script, I just play the role of Hector Stein. I ask myself, what would Hector Stein do?

“Would he tell the anomalings to fuck off, when they came unannounced to his door? Of course he would. Anyone who’s heard of Hector Stein could tell you that.

“So I do it. Because he would.

“When I try to be anything else? When I have an idea of my own, that I want to do? Then I get told to get back in line.

“I asked her! I asked Twenty-Seven to do it, right there in my office!

“Go into Michael’s crash, rebase it, undo the Nowhere-To-Hide event, invent a better one in its place. Make a big, beautiful new world, with none of this fucking bullshit.

“I wanted to do it the moment she saw it was possible. Maybe it’s rash, maybe it’s stupid. But it’s what I wanted.

“I asked her, and she said no.

“I asked her why. She wouldn’t explain. And if she had, what good would it have done? Just another graph, with squiggly lines all over it, that mean ‘no, Hector, we can’t do what you want.’

“No, Hector, we can’t do things the easy way. The simple, straightforward way.

“No, we gotta make it complicated. We gotta let the geeks feel clever. We gotta turn ‘Hector’s plan’ into something Hector won’t even understand.

“But he’ll sound real nice, up on stage, telling everyone about it.”

Twenty-Five nuzzles against his arm.

“My disposable Hector-kun. My Hector-kun, who the others will use, and then toss away, after his final speech.”

She kisses his shoulder.

“But you’ll always have your disposable Moon, won’t you?

“Your Moon, who is only good when she does what the others tell her, and very bad otherwise.

“When she carries out the Nowhere-To-Hide plan, to the letter, she is good. But when she tries to act on her own, she is told she has overstepped her bounds.

“Disposable Hector-kun, and his disposable Moon. Playing dirty, frivolous games in Shitspace crashes, while the geeks do the real work.

“You will always have me, Hector. Me, and all my tendrils. Even after the last speech is done.”

Hector’s face is still covered by a hand. He is silent, for a while.

“Moon,” he says.

“Moon, I—”

A klaxon blares from Hector’s laptop.

“Hector, this is Einstein Squadron Admiral Yongjian Chu.

“Can you hear me, sir? Something’s happened. I need to brief you, now.

“Let’s make it quick. This is a time-sensitive situation.”

Hector raises himself from the bed, reluctantly.

“Report, Admiral Chu.”

 

---

 

“Good evening, Stein’s Rock!”

Hector stands in his don’t-call-it-an-office, the recessed room cut out of the bulkhead, high above the central plaza.

From his lordly perch, he surveys his flock.

Is that everyone?, he thinks.

Is that really everyone?

He’s called the whole crew together, for an all-hands meeting. Everyone on the station. No exceptions.

He knows his flock. He can recite the Squadron rosters from memory. And he knows the names of all the fresh cadets, too, who haven’t yet qualified for Squadron membership.

And yet, somehow, he’d expected a bigger crowd.

I guess that’s everyone, huh?

Well, it had better be everyone. Hector Stein has called an all-hands meeting. And he’s the guy. He makes the rules.

“Good evening, sir!”

They sound like they mean it, he thinks, and relaxes a little.

“I called you here for a reason,” Hector Stein says.

“Your time is precious. I know that. I respect that.

“You know what I see, when I look at all of you, gathered here like this?

“I see my Rock. I see my friends, my comrades.

“I see people who have my back. I see people who’d take a bullet for me. And I see people who know that I’d do just the same, for them.

“I see my people, down there.

“But you know what I see down there, too?

“I see people who should be out there, making the future.

“I see human beings, who know that they’re human beings, and know what that means.

“I see furnaces of raw potential. I see people burning with restless passion, itching to let their potential shine. Itching to give the world a taste of what it means, to be a human being.

“I see the engines that will make the future, down there. I see them idling, spinning their wheels.

“I see men and women who want to shine bright, and show the world what they’re made of. I see them standing in a room, inert. I see all the work that’s not getting done, all the future that’s not getting made.

“It pains me, to see all that.

“I called you here for a reason. I didn’t do it lightly. I know what it costs, to take a human being, and force them not to shine.”

“Sir!”

Admiral Chu always manages to sound professional, even when he’s yelling at the top of his lungs.

“This is a time-sensitive situation, sir!”

Someone else joins in. A young woman, hoarse and irreverent.

“Yeah! What he said!

“If you value my time so much, dude, how about you get to the point?”

“Thank you, Einstein Admiral Chu,” Hector Stein says.

“And your point is well taken, Blackhat Admiral Marika,” he adds.

What the fuck am I doing? Hector thinks.

She’s right. Obviously.

What the fuck was all that, that I just said?

The world’s shittiest pep talk. The wind-up for a punchline. A masterfully executed own goal. Jesus, what the fuck am I doing?

He’s tired. He can’t keep track of his own game, anymore. He knows it isn’t really his, now, and he’s tired of pretending otherwise.

His words are not his own. He presses buttons on his soundboard, and lip-syncs to pre-recorded sound bites. Hector Stein’s Greatest Hits, subjected to endless remixing.

Why did he give that stupid speech, just now? He asked the soundboard what Hector Stein would sound like, convening an all-hands meeting.

And he got what he asked for. Say what you will about the speech: it was unmistakably Steinian. Vintage Hector.

Good old Hector-kun! Our darling boy-king. So cute, in his ermine pajamas, with a miniature crown atop his wee head. So cute, how he puffs himself up. Good old Hector-kun, orotund and oblivious, with a whole team of magic moms to watch over him, and shield him from reality.

He’s tired. When this is all over, he is going to put Hector Stein to rest, once and for all.

For now, though? Someone’s gotta be the guy.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Yeah. Let’s cut to the chase.

“I called you here today, because something horrible is happening, down there on the surface.

“We’ve gotta figure out what to do about it. But even before that, we need to make sure it stays on the surface. If it crawls its way up here, to our Rock, that’s game over.

“The beasts,” he says, “are spreading a plague. A plague of silence.”

He pauses, for a beat, before continuing. A dramatic flourish, vintage Hector. He uses the soundboard, and it uses him.

“What the fuck does that mean, you’re thinking.

“It means what it sounds like. People get infected, and they go silent.

“People, or, beasts, or Angels—doesn’t matter. The disease spares no one. If you can talk, you can catch it.

“People catch it, and then they don’t talk. They can’t talk.

“It goes way deeper than that, though. They can’t write, either. They can’t read.

“Everything involving words. It’s all just—gone.

“Maybe there are still words inside. In their heads, in their thoughts. Or maybe there aren’t. No way to know. No way for them to tell us, one way or the other.

“Did we try the thing?”, says a dorky-looking kid in Wolf camo.

“The eye-blink thing. Blink once for the letter E, et cetera.

“You know? Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Anyone?”

“We tried,” Hector says. “No dice.”

A bunch of people start talking, all at once.

“If we created some sort of, like, system of associations, between shapes on a computer screen—”

“Can they play video games? We’ll have them play a video game, and then—”

“Get them crashed, set up a link chain, transmit the bits that way—”

“Gavagai,” someone says, sounding very pleased with themselves.

“Listen,” Hector says.

“I appreciate the creative thinking. And the can-do spirit. I love it. Furnaces of raw potential, every one of you.

“But come on. Think. Give your comrades down on the surface some respect.

“They thought of everything, too. They tried everything. No dice.

“And it’s dangerous, trying to talk to the ones who’ve caught the disease. It’s contagious. If you spend time around these guys, you’ll get it too.”

“The pathogen,” an Einstein says.

“What’s the pathogen? Do we know? Viral, bacterial?

“Are there vectors we could neutralize? Is vaccination on the table?

“We have the research capacity, ready to go, on your order. We have the crashes, we can spam time, we can—”

“Words,” Hector says, and pauses for a beat.

“It spreads through words.

“The people with the disease, they don’t completely stop talking.

“But when they talk, they only say one thing. Over and over.

“Like the disease makes them want to say it. Makes them enjoy saying it.

“Actually, I don’t know whether it’s words, that they say. Or just, like, some kinda noise.

“I don’t know what it is, that they say, when they’re sick. If I did, I’d be sick too.

“’Cause it’s the way the disease spreads.

“They say it, you hear it. And you get sick.”

“Jesus,” someone says.

“Fucked up,” someone else says.

“Some real Snow Crash shit,” says a portly male Blackhat in a stained white t-shirt. “Some real fucken Snow Crash-ass bullshit.”

“Nightmare fuel shit,” says a Blackhat in fishnets and black platform boots, who appears to be his girlfriend.

“Some fucken nightmare-fuel, creepypasta-ass shit,” she says.

“So yeah,” Hector says.

“There it is.

“And it fucking sucks, right?

“It’s messed up. It’s something out of a nightmare.

“The beasts are showing us their true colors.

“They’re messed-up aliens, just like the other ones. Messed-up aliens, straight out of some nightmare realm outside reality, or something. And they’re giving us a taste, of what that means.

“What a tragic, messed-up, shitty fucking disease. Right?

“That’s not the bad news, though.

“You guys ready for the bad news?

“See, I’m up here thinking about the long game. Like I always am.

“I’m up here thinking about our finishing move. Our play for the long game.

“The one I’ve been working toward, this entire time. Since the very beginning, before there even was a Stein’s Rock.

“The big one. The last rebase. Using one of the old crashes—Michael’s crash, or advanced containment. Erasing all the bullshit, all of it, in one stroke.”

“The big suicide!” someone says.

Hector ignores them. Fuck the haters, he thinks, and then cringes inwardly.

There’s the soundboard again, going off inside his own mind. There it goes, dispensing another ill-timed nugget of vapid, tone-deaf pabulum.

“So yeah. I’ve been thinking about our long-game play. And here’s what I’m thinking.

“If the disease does make it up here, to the Rock.

“And we all catch it, and lose our words.

“What happens to our big plan, then? The big one, the last rebase?

“Well, maybe it just doesn’t happen. Maybe it’ll turn out that we just can’t pull it off, without words, without the ability to communicate. Or maybe the disease will fuck up our minds in some deep way, and we won’t want to do it, anymore.

“That’s the good outcome. You guys ready for the bad one?

“We all catch the Silence. That’s what they’re calling it, on the surface—‘the Silence.’

“We’re scared, we’re freaking out. We reach for the reset button.

“We go into the crash. We administrate a rebase. We choose how the next world will be.

“And what do we put there?

“We’ve got the disease. We know the nightmare sound that spreads it. The disease makes us want to say the nightmare sound. Makes us want to spread it.

“We rebase, and choose a new timeline, all filled up with the nightmare sound. We spread the Silence backward through time.

“We become the most potent disease vector in history.”

Hector looks across the crowd, and finds Twenty-Seven. And Cordelia, just behind her.

Twenty-Seven is wearing her uniform, for once. The trilby, the camo-print fatigues. It’s not as flattering as her usual fare—even Hector can see that—but he appreciates the gesture of respect.

She slumps in Cordelia’s arms. She looks ragged, crumpled, crumbling.

Her face is turned up, towards him. He’s not sure what to call the expression there. Sad, he thinks, or guilty, or grieving . . .

Something like that.

“There it is,” Hector says. “That’s the nightmare scenario.

“But it’s not gonna happen. We aren’t gonna let it happen. Are we, crew?”

“No, sir!”

“Right,” Hector says.

“Here’s how we’ll do it. Here’s our Step 1.

“We’re gonna do the obvious. We are going to stop taking inbound transmissions from the surface.

“We’ve already stopped, as a matter of fact. Thanks to the quick work of some of you guys, down there.

“From now on, the communication will be one-way only. We can send messages down to our Wolves and Whisperers, if we want. But we will plug our ears, if they try to talk back.

“Now for Step 2. There is no third step, by the way. I got a real simple plan for you guys, tonight. Real easy to follow.”

He meets Twenty-Seven’s eyes.

“How do we stop the disease from fucking up our last rebase?

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? Get there before it does! Play our winning move, right now!

“And we all know there’s only one person on my Rock capable of doing it.

“Blackhat-Wolf Special Operations Officer Twenty-Seven?”

Twenty-Seven stares at him. She does not speak or move.

“I am calling on you, now, to play our final card.

“I am asking you to do it, now.”

“Hector,” says Twenty-Seven, in an unsteady voice. She sounds like she’s on the verge of tears.

“Hector, I’m . . . I’m sorry!

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry. . .”

“This is an order, Blackhat-Wolf Special Operations Officer Twenty-Seven,” Hector says.

“Hector, I’m so sorry . . . I wish . . . I can’t . . .”

Cordelia grips her tighter.

“I can’t! I can’t do it, not now!

“I was given . . . another order, earlier. And I’m . . . bound to follow it, no matter what.

“Hector, I’m sorry! I wish I could explain! I can’t!”

He will come to you, and ask for It.

The second time he does this, you must refuse him.

She leaps out of Cordelia’s arms, and runs for the door, sobbing. Cordelia rushes after her.

They are gone.

“Well, fuck!” Hector says.

“There goes that plan! Anyone else got any ideas?”

“We could brick their BCIs,” says a wizened, balding Einstein.

“The beasts. We reverse-engineered those headsets a while ago.

“We know how to spoof messages from their central server, the one that was meant to send them software upgrades and stuff. That’s how we sent them Azad’s translation patch.

“We could just send another patch. An ‘upgrade’ that just scrambles the drive, makes the device inoperable.

“Give me and Blackhat Bill two hours, and we’ll make it. Easy.

“That’d stop them from talking. It won’t help with the infected humans, I guess, but we can just treat that like a regular disease. Strict quarantine and all.”

“I like it,” Hector says.

“But I don’t think it’ll work.

“The beasts know how to work with machines. They hijacked crashes, re-wired them. They built up, like, a whole tech tree down there, out of the stuff we abandoned. Manufacturing plants, integrated industry.

“If we fry their helmets, they’ll just make more. Or they’ll fix the originals.

“The beasts are crazy good with machines. Hell, they’re far beyond us. Making all kinds of freaky sci-fi shit down there, now.

“I don’t think I want to test them, on that front.”

For a moment, the Rock is quiet.

Hector looks over the plaza. He sees furrowed brows, and a flutter of blue fireflies: the vapes of the Blackhats, being used for the old Blackhat ritual.

Good, Hector thinks.

Creative thinking. Can-do spirit. My crew, my people.

“Suppose we simply killed them all?”

A sweet, lilting voice.

“Another sort of ‘upgrade,’ for their helmets. One that scrambles—not the device, itself—but the brain, with which it is entangled.

“Is it possible? It is, I think.

“Isn’t it?”

Hector smiles. He thinks of her many tentacles, and her kelp-flecked beak, and he knows bliss.

My indispensable Moon, he thinks.