Reintegration

Miranda stares at the cup of coffee and it stares back at her. There is nothing else to do but participate in this staredown. A 17.8 kCept heteropneum is unprecedented and presumably spells the imminent death of her and everyone else in the Sphere. But then “presumably” is always a slippery word when it comes to pneuma, as Ratio would no doubt assure her in his piping tones were he here. She has no reference frame whatsoever. She is terrified and does not know whether or not this is rational.

She pops another Valium.

There is a prickling of the hairs on the back of her neck.

Miranda stares at the cup of coffee and it stares back at her. This is no longer a metaphor. There is a discernibly human face formed in the ridges and depressions in the surface of the liquid, fixed in a mask of what is either agony or hilarity.

She stares at the coffee and the face ripples, shifts expression.

She looks up and there are faces in the walls. Faces everywhere. It is impossibly cold in the room. A ghostly feeling passes through her left shoulder and she shudders as if the shoulder is now no longer a part of her body and will never be one again.

All of a sudden, an aggressive hiss that builds and builds, becomes deafening, resolves into a cacophony of voices speaking in unintelligible tongues. There are so many faces on every surface that at this point it is hard to tell what distinguishes face-ness in particular from mere shape. Miranda is standing now, apparently, though she cannot distinctly remember standing up. It seems that her hands are pressed to her forehead. This is presumably because her head is full of shouts and screams and some primitive part of her thought this gesture could force the noises out.

Out of the chaos, a man screams “blame my muscles!”

A chant builds: “blame my muscles! Blame my muscles! Blame my muscles!”

Someone whispers, mordantly: “I find codpieces work best.”

In response, the “blame my muscles” voice screams in absolute, vaunting triumph.

Miranda is slumped against the wall, which leers out at her through the innumerable eyes of an intricate mosaic of faces-within-faces. She does not know why she has chosen to go closer to, rather than further away from, this tiling. She shivers because it is very, very cold. Some primal part of her complains that she has strayed outside the normal range of operation of the human body. A rectangular face in the center of her vision opens its birdlike beak and exclaims, “eat my flecks, bull boy!”

•

RATIO: So you know the album art for In the Court of the Crimson King right because that is exactly what that one is reminding me of right now.

CECELIA: [stifling a laugh] I can see it.

RATIO: It sure is fucking cold in here. I wonder what the marginal effect of ethanol on my body temperature would be? [takes extensive swig of beer]

CECELIA: It’s hard for me to hear because . . . the fucking voices . . .

RATIO: [expansively] Fuck these voices. These voices don’t know shit.

CECELIA: [with slight hesitation] Word.

[A pause.]

HERMES: You know what this is, don’t you? You must know.

CECELIA: Feels a lot like a really heavy Boltzman storm.

RATIO: Brilliant deduction, genius. [He hiccups.]

CECELIA: We’re getting fucked in the ass right now by like the biggest heteropneum ever so what do you expect?

HERMES: No. These aren’t from the heteropneum. They’re from what it’s doing. Reintegrating us.

CECELIA: Oh shit, so if you do the back-of-the-envelope for that compared to the usual reintegration that must be like what . . . around a billion times as much energy as usual? [Slumps head on table for emphasis.] What the fuck?

RATIO: No see because dude think about it that means we’re a far-from-centroid branch that’s getting integrated with the main branch. Everyone’s getting integrated at once because we’re all just subsidi [verbally stumbles] subsidiary copies. We aren’t the main timeline, we’ve been the fucking alternate universe all along! Fuck, man! [takes another extensive swig of beer, which is now nearly gone]

HERMES: That’s right. We are a branch in which souls cannot coherently split, which is a kind of sin.

CECELIA: I don’t know what the fuck that means.

RATIO: [with inscrutable and bizarre facial expression] So you’re saying Soul Coherence Theory is bunk?

HERMES: Bunk for this universe. But if we’d abandoned it, we would have brought about horrors beyond my power to describe.

RATIO: [Has climbed onto the table and is performing an intricate set of dance moves structured as a theme with variations, in which the theme is a kind of triumphant pelvic thrust]

CECELIA: What the fuck. What the fucking fuck.

HERMES: You are flat children and you will die with this world.

CECELIA: What does that even me—[she is distracted by a Boltzman shouting high-speed gibberish in her right but not her left ear]

RATIO: [Has collapsed upon the table, knocked over his own nearly finished beer mug, and appears to be having a conversation with some set of Boltzmen arrayed on the ceiling] I don’t . . . care . . . about your muzhiks or your capital . . . investment . . . strategies . . .

HERMES: [Sighs, waits for the blissful embrace of oblivion]

•

Maria opens her eyes. She is whole again and she is in the sub and she is not dead.

She remembers thrashing, things moving in many directions, searing heat. She doesn’t have to cover her eyes anymore. When she gets a hold of what she is seeing, she realizes this is because the bright heteropneum is not so close anymore. In fact, it is getting further and further away.

Abnormal storm of Boltzmen is no longer within combat interval. Heteropneum is moving away from our location steadily at a speed of 5 m/s.

Maria is about to tell the sub’s interface to pursue when she realizes something. There are no telltale indicators of Sphere activity on the Pneuma Light display—no wires pulsing with mild Boltzmen, no pneuma-resistant walls reflecting the heteropneum’s glow. She is facing out into the open water. The heteropneum has turned and fled from the Sphere.

Maria is not even thankful, yet. She can’t be anything but baffled.

•

James is running through the monotone halls of the dormitory wing, yelling “Kyle! Kyle!” Eventually he is so winded, and the halls so cold and loud and unforgiving, that he has no choice but to fall on his face. The floor is filled with many faces, but none of them are Kyle’s.

•

Kyle is in a room walled by what look like windows, which is not of much help when all you can see through a window is pure black. He has still not thought to ask anyone what the purpose of this is.

The room is shaped like a dome whose circular, metal base centers around a circular hole ringed by handholds. There is a ladder into the hole.

He is here. He takes a few short breaths. Then the voice of LUDWIG rings out:

“Kyle, you have done so well by coming here, indeed succeeded in the face of a course of human history which I dare say, and I do dare, is as a rule biased toward failure rather than success. You are the nugget of honey taking its humble place among a wide field of common raindrops. But one motion lies between you and my [,,,,]-mates, and that is to step forth into the 1-sphere directly before you and give yourself up before the crushing waters.”

There is no other way this can go. Kyle has chosen to follow the computer’s instructions this far; he doesn’t know why, but he doesn’t trust anyone here more than anyone else, and on some level he doesn’t care. So he steps toward the ladder, and climbs down into the circular pit.

A voice: “this won’t [hurt].”

There is a sudden rushing feeling. There is darkness around Kyle except light shining from a receding circle above him. The receding circle is obscured by a tiny shriveled thing, of no recognizable shape.

“Is that . . . my body?”

The voice: “that form was merely a [branch-local?] [husk]. [we] want to become [friends] with [you-who-individuates]. [friendship] is a [relationship] between pneumas and not [husks]. a [husk] that cannot withstand [dynamic?] [forces?] is not a [kyle] with whom [one-who-does-not-individuate] can be [friends].”

Kyle, or what is left of him, sinks slowly downward and the tiny thing that once was his body recedes into nothingness. He briefly wonders if pneumas are buoyant. But then he looks to his left and right and sees furry cartoon creatures, covered in overly slick CGI-like fur, grasping ahold of his invisible soul-body and dragging it toward the ocean floor.

The voice: “the [sacrament] will take place far from the dwelling of human pneumas. the [Unfolding] dictates that [you-who-individuates] follow us to the [world axis?]. no human pneumas will be [destroyed] in the process of [reintegration?].”

Gentle cartoon eyes swarm his face and cloud his vision, their exaggerated eyelashes making wild angles at this close range.

A dim light appears, somewhere to his left.

“a potential [friend]. it wishes to [eat?] the [Pneuma Heat?] created by the [reintegration?]. but if it becomes a [friend] it will not oppose the [Unfolding]. we [teem] with [storge?] for those who do not yet [see] the [Unfolding]. hear us out, potential [friend].”

The cartoon creatures rearrange themselves in a flutter of activity. Something complex and difficult to make out occurs. The far-off light disappears entirely.

“[you-who-individuates] will always be [our] [friend] after this sacrament. let [our] [hearts?] all be buoyed with overflowing [joy?], [joy?] beyond all [hydrodynamics?].”

Kyle’s bodiless soul finds its resting place in some dark furrow. It is very warm here. Slowly but steadily, fairy lights begin to glow around him. Small spheres of light float upward and then bob up and down gently, a few feet above him. They illuminate a multitude of cartoon bugs swarming about him, through the fractal crags of this warm hole in the ocean floor.

“let the [sacrament] begin!”

All the eyes of all the cartoon bugs face him at once and he suddenly hears a plangent minor chord in his head, the purest and saddest chord in the wide world of music theory, and tears seem to flow from his nonexistent eyes into the surrounding water. He weeps for the world, and for himself as he weeps for the world, and so on and so forth yea unto infinity.

•

War Conditions Journal, 17/93/3982

On this night my sisters and I, keeping watch after dark, saw a great pillar of light appear above the ocean. A monstrous storm, defying all description, attended its appearance and woke the others, and we all huddled together very fearful for our lives until the storm mercifully abated near break of day. It was as if Iah Himself were displeased with us and sent this as a message to chastise us, as He sent our ancestors a message during the Great Thefts. It is a cold morning on the cape today. We are few, but Iah is with us, as He has been for thousands of years, since before the Becoming were cleaved from the Become.

END OF PART 1