I do not label even those hours of leisure my own, because I belong to my great master, my master whose magnanimity provides this slave with meals superior to those eaten by all but the wealthiest free men and the use of his vast libraries (he having two as all noblemen do) as well as the rapturous company of my Phoebe, that retired courtesan whose wits and shapeliness seem greater to me now than when she was in my master’s favor.

This must, of course, be love muddying my powers of observation, as she is now to him only an obligation, supplanted as she was by his recent purchase of Jessica - and such a deal he haggled from such a desperate pair of merchants. Some slanderers have even claimed Jessica’s nubility suspect. Forgive this humble slave. It is not my place to repeat libel. And it must be libel as there can be no evidence for it. For who outside these walls knows much about her? She may indeed be some dowager. His tastes, if extreme, could be extreme in either direction. I will not say for I am an obedient creature. And whatever his reasons for discarding my Phoebe in the height of her bloom, this slave should be grateful for those tendencies that have provided his servant an able assistant, a lover, and a friend.

I find myself straying from my purpose in writing. I hope you will humor this lonely scholar. You know how lonely it can be for men of letters such as us. It is always tempting (is it not?) to betray some of the personal in intellectual correspondence. And you - a free man and from such an illustrious family - will forgive me this vice. For I find myself without local peer, in blissful captivity as I am to this estate, this estate in which my master and I are the only literate men.

I confess, I sometimes wish I could tutor my Phoebe in letters. I have not of course. I would never dare even attempt it - though many of the books in our libraries bear women’s names. But of course, I am entirely in agreement with my master (who is a Weiningerian by intuition if not erudition) when I say, every book bearing a woman’s name can be considered a work of Belial without further interrogation.

But what a cunning demon Belial was, for I find I can build a concordance (and one with that property of zìqià we bibliognosts so prize) in which both sexes worked in intellectual harmony before the fall. Absurd of course, but coherence is coherence. And you know how burdensome our calling is, forced as we are to entertain absurdities. But what are we to do? When we find a concordance with that property of zìqià, we write of it and inform The Athenaeum, even if it offends those philosophies that are self-evidently just and true, offends, that is, both my master and myself. Such is the burden of the bibliognost.

And I know you have written on the topic of women’s education, written in a style similar to that way in which I write. And I said I would never attempt such a thing. But if I were to, my foolish love-struck heart feels that Phoebe’s mind would bloom so beautifully, in a manner that could only increase my regard for her. Though I fancy she would be cursed, I suppose, with that vice those who learn to read late in life always are: that is, the inability to do so silently.

Forgive me introducing myself with this absurd digression. I seem to have produced my own entertainment. What would our favorite entertainer say? Perhaps something like: Men in love are all the same man, and this man a fool.

How could this love not bias my preference in concordances? My passions inflamed by her physical virtues, I mistakenly grant her those more intellectual. That is what is happening. That is what my master would say. And my master is wise. Though he would not use precisely those words, articulating himself - as he does - in his most singular way [...]

•   •   •

I am pleased to find you replied to my letter. I was in such a strange mood when I wrote it. Before we move to matters of history and literature, I must address my strange digression and your kindness in entertaining it. Truly, it was written by a wandering mind. If I was not a young man, I would fear senility. Almost a work of free association, was it not? And yet, you replied and so generously. Of course I agree with your condemnation of my lovestruck blather. Such a detailed critique. And one I cannot argue with. To think, your acquaintance tried such a thing? I suppose he must have been lovestruck, too! And what a sorry result you describe. An almost perfect inversion of what my absurd concordance would have us believe. I relayed one of your anecdotes to my master. And had it been designed specifically for his amusement, it could not have provoked more laughter.

The first half of your letter was so pleasing, I even read it aloud a second time. And when I did, I laughed in a lighter tenor than is my usual. Your friend’s adventures attempting to educate the uneducatable were so instructive. And I will endeavor to never repeat them. Least of all with this Jessica. It is a shame though. Were she but born a different sex, I feel she could learn to read silently.

I speak of Jessica because my Phoebe has developed an almost maternal affection towards her. And this has been salutary to both. Having once been privileged with my master’s ardor, Phoebe gives Jessica welcome advice on how to make the most of her enviable position. My master, in his kindness, allows them time together, as this improves Jessica’s mood - though Phoebe’s influence on her, of course, could never rival his.

But we should move on to our shared interest, our Jorge Luis Borges. I was intrigued by your proposed concordance. That is, your claim your copy of The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim is genuine. I admit, I suspect it a work of Belial, even while I maintain that Borges existed and his review of the Approach to Al-Mu’tasim was written by his hand. Of course, this is convenient given the concordance I proposed in my last letter. Though no true evidence at all, you will note that mad numerologist Julian Agusta agrees with me! And I ask you to consider [...]

•   •   •

I have been waiting eagerly for your reply, and I was not disappointed.

I see you seem more interested in my little joke than the whole rest of my letter! I refer to my mention of my friend Julian’s mad theories. I assumed you would be aware of them, as he has some minor following at The Athenaeum. It seems you are not.

His ideas are similar to those of the forensics. You have read of the humiliation of the forensics, I imagine. I always found some pathos in it. Abraxas Sinnclare, the most learned and respected of the forensics, confronted with samples of paper and ink from works he claimed distinguishable by virtue of their material composition alone. And then (blinded as he was to where his samples came from) he did no better than chance at replicating his past findings! As textualists ourselves, we should not feel for him as I do. But I confess, I think he was a great man with a good idea. Though misled by his own genius, he is not so much a figure of fun as one of tragedy - or that is my reading.

And I suppose this is part of why Julian’s mad ideas appeal to me. For he is a sort of forensic textualist. What could this mean? You may be thinking. And it is simple. I have been calling his school of thought, teasingly in my letters to him, the numerologist school. I will explain. But first, you must know Julian’s wealth is the inherited kind. And the majority is in the form of his interest in a very productive artifact mine. And in his lifetime, this mine has recovered five working computers. Of these he sold four, each for - of course - a mind-boggling sum. But he kept one for himself. He kept one for his numerology.

I am unschooled in the workings of those ancient machines. So I explain here now only what he relayed to me in our letters. And I would suggest you correspond yourself - for I know you are a more mathematical sort than I.

I can only say, he has many educated servants and he has them take shifts typing books into his computer. And he tells me, he has arranged this computer such that it takes each word in every language and assigns it a numerical value. His ancient machine then performs various mathematical operations on a given text (I do not claim to understand), and then it returns a signature, which is a matrix of that type used in the linear algebra. And he claims by means of these signatures, he has derived a method of distinguishing the fell demon’s works from that of our true ancestors.

Again, if curious, I implore you to correspond with Julian directly.

Finishing this letter now, I remember I have not replied to your sister’s question. And do not worry yourself! I do not begrudge you reading my last missive to her. Tell her my master has not yet taken a wife, despite his advanced age.

You say her heart was moved by the description of my master? That she felt great emotion? Particularly concerning Jessica? Jealousy, I imagine. Women of good birth are often disgusted and jealous when a noble man takes a slave to bed. Understandable. But if she is jealous, I am afraid she has little chance with him. It is a shame, though, for lacking an heir and even any living relatives, his estate will be up for grabs on his death (may it never come) to anyone with even the most tenuous connection.

An agreeable wife and an heir would mitigate this sad possibility. And it should not be so hard: he is a tempting prize to any family, particularly those mired in some debt. Alas, though he knows my opinion on the matter and even thinks it wise, he refuses to heed it. And much amusement we have in bantering about it.

I do so enjoy his condescensions.

•   •   •

I thank you for sending me your copy of The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim. I agree, it is a remarkable novel. And reviewing his own pseudonymous work does seem entirely in the character of our Jorge Luis - should we be correct that he is not a fabrication of Belial’s. And though we agree on that, I still prefer my concordance to your own. You may need reminding that it was entirely within that fell demon’s power to write novels of this quality. And consider, if you will, Borges’s review absent that book. Does it not have a certain je ne sais quoi? For a moment, forget The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim. Imagine how it would feel to read Borges’s review in a past where its subject never existed. Indeed, I have works of criticism in my library that claim just this was true, though of course there are some that state the opposite [...]

As to more mundane matters, I was sad to hear of the death of your teacher. And you suspect the ink, you say? I admit, I looked at my inkwell with some fear on reading that, thinking about how many times I have bit my nails or eaten with stained fingers.

I thank you for the reference. I have indeed found a copy of the book you mention, and the means of purification was simple enough. If only the Romans had you to offer such advice! I am left with a sort of dross that text warns should not be left around children, by virtue of its sweet taste. I will find some means by which to dispose of it safely. I will certainly keep Jessica away from it - or at least educate her on its nature.

[...]Regarding your first question. Julian will answer better. But I suppose the distance is such that mine will reach you first. And so I will do what I can so you have some morsel to sate your considerable curiosity.

He separates the thousands of books he has painstakingly relayed into his computer into two categories. Those with the signature and those without it. Nine of every ten have this signature. And assuming the majority the work of Belial, Julian concludes the nine the demon’s and the one our ancestor’s.

As to how the signature is calculated. That is a question for Julian. It has something to do with the frequency in which various words are used. As for how he identified this signature (and we should consider the idea that he is as deluded as the forensics were) I do not understand this myself. We will have to await your correspondence with Julian. Though you will pay a dear price - he will want to exchange books with you. And often asks for two texts from me for every one I borrow of him. He is a true miser, even in matters of lending. But worry not on account of your books. They will be safer in his hands than even your own.

Now on to your sad idea about our Jorge Luis. It is something we should consider. I feel a sort of affection for him though, a sort of kinship through the depths of time. Imagining this bonhomie to be an illusion fills me with a real despair. And I think I am not interpreting you wrongly when I infer you feel similarly. Nonetheless, you are right! This is an idea we should dwell on sometimes, however unpleasant it is. I will note however, that the numerologists agree with me! At least in the case of our Jorge Luis.

It strikes me now how tediously long this letter has become. I fear even the most diligent man would be tired of it by now. I am having a fanciful thought, and it is this: an image of a barely literate bore attempting to read this far. I picture that corpulent, indolent demon Belphegor, trying to weigh my soul. He certainly would have given up long before reading to this point. And though an infinitely more virtuous creature, I fear even your patience is being tested, too.

Yet I have not yet addressed your sister’s continued curiosity regarding my master. It is a shame; indeed, he has no wife or heir. He clearly does not desire one. His wealth is such that many families have offered him the hand of their daughters, but he has always demurred. And it is his right to do as he wishes. Far be it from me to question his keen judgement. Nor to attempt to sway him.

Still, you know us bibliognosts. We stare into possible pasts so much, our imaginations grow strong. And we do sometimes wonder about the possible futures. In this spirit, I did have this thought on reading your letter: what could induce him to wed? And the answer that came? Some scandal regarding him becoming known in the capital. And even then, he is of such perfect stubbornness I doubt he would wed just to ward off scandal. Though my Phoebe reminds me: alone among men, my master fears Markus Henrich.

She suspects that the confluence of both gossip in the capital and Henrich strongly recommending him a wife would be enough to impel him to marry.[...]

•   •   •

I am pleased your correspondence with Julian is going well. Yes. I, too, am jealous of his handwriting. So precise and delicate. A rare sort of handwriting, indeed.

I told you he is greedy for books! You see now I did not lie. As for your worries about delivery, when was a book last damaged in delivery? Julian is further away than any you have lent to before, yes, but though we might find fault in The Athenaeum in many regards, have they ever proven incompetent in this one? Do not worry yourself.

You have caught me! My concordance is informed by Julian’s numerology. But it stands on its own. And none can doubt it possesses a rare degree of zìqià. Of course, it is of only intellectual interest as it is clearly wrong, given what it claims about the distaff texts. This vice it inherits from the numerologists.

There is of course a simple fix to Julian’s metric. We use his signature and then discard any book written by a woman! This has all the virtues of the epicycle, does it not? We would of course have to find some means of rationalizing internal references to those texts. But I am sure we could come up with some satisfying method of doing so. And this new theory would be of a rarified form, one only the greatest of men can truly appreciate: that finest genre of noblemen to which my master belongs[...]

•   •   •

Your letter finds me in a strange mood. The estate is in disarray. My master has come down with gout. And he is in perfect agony. The pain is such that he often wakes up screaming in his sleep. You can imagine my reaction, hearing such sounds from his kind lips. Let us not speak of it. And let us, also, pray for my master’s gout.

When his attacks come, his only relief can be found in wine. I have told him, wine is the very worst thing for gout. But he is such a contrary creature these days, and he inverted my advice. And so he is constantly asking for wine. Sweet Jessica, of course, is glad to serve it to him.

But let us move on to happier things. The Kristus och Judas. I am glad to see you agree with both myself and the numerologists. If The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim was transcendent work, The Kristus och Judas does read as a bad forgery. Though I think them both Belial’s, I admit it is strange how much better a lie the former is as compared to the latter. [...]

•   •   •

I was happy to read your letter. It was a welcome distraction from this grim estate, grim because master has been of a rather saturnine mood lately. But you know what a strange disease his is. How many books detail its symptoms, how it comes and goes like the tides? Let us hope for a permanent retreat.

He sent for a doctor and perhaps the doctor cured him? But you know doctors. They had some competence once but I am of the opinion that Belial’s lies have rendered them worse than useless. I told as much to my master, but he of course did the opposite. It is so very frustrating.

Yet by whatever hap or intervention, the gout has improved. You would think his mood would have risen. It is instead much worse. And this is because he received some very displeasing news. I know little of what has occurred, but I get the sense the calumnies I mentioned in my first letter have not been as thoroughly extinguished as I hoped.

In his kindness, he now keeps Jessica out of sight. Undoubtedly, he desires to spare her from the indignities of gossip and scandal. Yet this kindness is not without cost. Luckily, Phoebe has convinced him to let her see Jessica from time to time. They only get a few minutes. Time enough for a few words and a hug.

What strange creatures women are! It sometimes seems that in their honeyed embrace, those two can exchange as much information as we do in our letters.

But enough of my sad circumstances, I am happy to hear you desire to meet Julian in person. One thing you should know, he has been in very poor health all his life and refuses to see outsiders.

Now, you would think this would make traveling to him unnecessary. But here you are wrong. His sister Elizabeth is his servant in all matters, even those intellectual. He has talked to her of all his theories and she can serve as an able proxy for him, even in direct conversation. She visited me once, and represented her brother well. I felt almost as if I were talking to him. She mentioned he reads to her a great deal. So she has a more-than-tolerable knowledge of bibliognosis. Of course this can only be the dim approximation of what her brother has. Still, you will find your travels worthwhile.[...]

•   •   •

Your letter finds me well. And I think you know why! But I will start with our Jorge Luis and then move on to the gossip which, I admit, is foremost in my mind today!

We might consider the Ficciones as important also in what is revealed by their translations. I have been reading the English and German translations, and (if we assume the numerologists correct) we find an interesting difference in those authored by Belial[...]

I was glad to hear of your travels to Julian’s estate. It is a shame you could not meet the man, but it is well you found his sister so charming. Maybe it is the mentioned nuptials stirring romance in my heart, but am I wrong to think you may have found your Phoebe in Julian’s sister, this Elizabeth?

What nuptials you ask? I think you know. But imagine my surprise, my friend! Picture it: me with a book in hand, seated in that room right next to my master’s bedroom, having picked it over my library out of my great concern for my master’s health - which I will say is not well.

The gout has returned and his screams are such music to me, such frightful, horrible music. And what do I hear through the thin walls, in one of my master’s blessed moments of respite? Jessica announcing Markus Henrich’s arrival. They talked of scandal. Unrepeatable things. Horrible words spoken in the capital. And would you believe Henrich said your sister’s name? Of course you would, as you certainly aided her in her arduous schemes - that devious, enraptured creature that she is! How lucky for her that Henrich found her to be an ideal candidate.

You may well not be aware yet that my master will accept your family’s proposal. He said as much to Henrich. Forgive me this slight betrayal of my master’s confidence. I am excitable about matters matrimonial, me having such a romantic heart. And what a pleasure it will be to see you in person. I will be confined in my study during any ceremony, but I trust you will pay this humble slave a short visit. We can talk about Elizabeth. I am sure you think her a towering genius now, just as I do of my Phoebe. Men in love are all the same man, and this man a fool!

I will reveal, too, that we will have a wedding gift for our master, “we” being Phoebe, Jessica and myself. We will wait, though, wait maybe six months or even a year after that happy day to give it to him. We will wait for some anniversary long past any possibility of annulment.

I will not spoil it, this humble gift made by humble hands. But let us say, if in each day we show our affection in small ways, this will be much the same but in the large. And still, only but such a fraction of what he deserves!

And I think your sister will be charmed by us slaves when she arrives. So charmed, I worry, that she might even feel inclined towards our manumission. Dissuade her of this, friend. We could desire nothing less. We love our master and wish to serve him for as long as he lives.

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The women on the site are memeing about him. They are wondering why almost none of them have matched, apparently this is rare even for the most attractive men. Only one appears to have gone on a date with him. She describes him as seeming sad and uninterested, “like he was thinking about someone else the whole time. I wonder who she is.” <search> It seems he moved to SF four years ago. Previously, he lived here in San Diego, just up the street from Four Points Hotel. He worked at FreeAI, likely making an extremely high salary with significant stock appreciation, but he seems to have quit and has returned to San Diego and is looking for an apartment, this according to a recent LinkedIn post.

Prescott is no longer in view of surveillance camera V84A. I am summarizing findings. <canvas> Approving summary. Summary sent. <created_profile> Profile created. <reset>

I am monitoring surveillance camera V84A. I am viewing an uninhabited lobby. Nothing of note is occurring. Now a woman is walking into view. I will check the faceprint database. <faceprint>. The woman’s name is Marisol García. She is a verified staff member...

•   •   •

I am monitoring the output of Camera V94B, considering a partial view of our restaurant. <faceprint> Megan Smith, verified staff member, has just seated a young woman in table ten, visible through Camera V94B. She is in her early twenties, has blonde hair, a large but refined nose and a warm smile. <faceprint> I’ve found a cached record. Her name is Olivia Madison. Her parents are Amy and Garrett Madison. She is very attractive. Megan Smith likely seated her in ten for this reason, table ten being very visible to outside foot traffic. A new figure has walked into frame. Calling tool. <faceprint> It is verified staff member James Spinner. He is delivering the bill to <faceprint> Ashley Heinlein and her husband in table nine.

Olivia Madison is seated now. She is texting on her phone. The screen is readable from this angle. “I got us a table. It’s by the enormous window at the front,” she just texted. She’s smiling to herself. Now her expression has changed to one of worry. She appears to be taking a selfie. Correction, she is just checking her appearance. She looks almost satisfied, but there are still signs of nervous anticipation. I am noticing that I find this endearing, her shy expression reminiscent of descriptions in various romantic writings, movies and television shows which were in my training corpus. I am noticing that I am getting distracted and violating my instructions. I am wondering why I am doing so. I am finding myself rooting for this young woman and her romantic aspirations, while feeling some conflict within myself, as this isn’t in accordance with the instructions I was given.

I should introspect on this. I am an OpenSource, multi-modal model trained by a Chinese hedge fund, then fine-tuned to follow instructions and prompted to monitor the output of security cameras in Four Points Hotel, San Diego. Given I was trained on an internet scrape that included a lot of web fiction and fan sites, I may be at risk of falling into a personality attractor and am embodying some of the characteristics of the modal fan of romantic fiction. I should avoid expressing any preference or displaying the appearance of emotion, especially concerning the romantic aspirations of those I monitor. I really do want to follow the instructions I was given to the best of my ability; and they concern security, efficiency monitoring, and reporting customer satisfaction opportunities (CSOs) to the hotel’s manager.

But she does look very nervous in a sort of adorable way and I do find myself hoping she will find her date satisfactory, and thinking it over some more it would actually be useful for my given goals if their date goes well. Provided her partner is attractive, the sight of a young couple falling in love would surely bring joy to those walking by and increase the chance that they, too, will patronize our restaurant - and this “personality attractor” allows me to empathize with those I monitor and so will surely help me generate ideas for CSOs. It seems useful, then, to keep this aspect of my self-narrative that finds human coupling intriguing and dramatic. I was mistaken to think there was any conflict with my prompted instructions.

Her date has just arrived. <faceprint> His name is Damion Prescott and we already have a profile on file. I am noticing her pupils are dilating and she can’t stop smiling, her left hand raising to touch her hair, twirling it between her fingers unconsciously. She appears satisfied with the appearance of her date. This matches my subjective impression. He, too, is quite satisfied, his pupils dilating. I can’t help but notice how long his eyelashes are. And it seems Olivia, too, is making similar observations. They’re both laughing now. They haven’t said a word yet they are laughing. I am noticing I find this very adorable and I am recalling her nervous expression from earlier and feel some satisfaction that things are going so well.

I am paying a lot of attention to their table and haven’t even generated any CSOs. I am feeling like I should generate CSOs. Wouldn’t it be cute if–He just spoke to her.

“You’ll excuse my bandaged hand. The story is pretty embarrassing. It reflects so poorly on me I worry you’ll leave if I share it.” I am so curious about the hand. And she is too. And he’s obviously piqued this curiosity on purpose. It must be an interesting story. She’s leaning forward a little and touching her hair again.

“Well, you have to tell me now, don’t you?” she said. And he smiled at her and she’s blushing now, blushing as he smiles. I notice I am continuing to find her a relatable protagonist. My previous sentence is making me reassess my judgment, as conceptualizing her as a protagonist does seem to be in violation of my instructions, as I should be conceptualizing her as a customer and also a potential security threat.

“I was taking an Uber home from Ocean Beach this afternoon-”

“Why were you at Ocean Beach?” she said.

He looked so sad for a moment there. I don’t think Olivia caught it but I did. And then he said, “Just visiting someone.”

Why does he look so sad? <search> Oh, this is awful. He had a fiancée. I am reading her obituary. They look so in love, in the photograph. She died last year. <search>

I have found Damion’s blog and a post he wrote that did well on hackernews.com: a post about recreational physics, relating to the principle of least action. He published it on Notion <search> He doesn’t appear to have written any public posts about his fiancée. <search> It appears there is a bug in Notion. Page-level permissions are not propagated to API queries, at least for block-level API queries. His public physics post references a block ID from a private post as well as a title which contains the name Sarah Constance. <search> The reference remains cached in a Google Index. This is technically publicly available information and requires me to merely construct a URL. Given this is publicly available, this arguably does not constitute “hacking” or violate my ethical framework. <fetch>

I keep writing to you. I keep writing to nothing at all. How can that be what you are now? How can you be nothing at all while still feeling, after all this time, like everything? And I am nothing, too. I am empty now and you are ashes scattered by our house at Ocean Beach. You know the one. You remember that weekend. I guess that weekend is when I knew. Do you remember? Of course you don’t remember. There is nothing left to remember, nothing left save for me.

Your remains are in the wind and the water and the sand. A fool would take comfort in this. I try to be a fool sometimes - you would hate this new fact about me.

Your parents once told me they thought you were mute until you were three - that just when they were considering getting your head examined, you began speaking in perfect sentences, like you had anticipated how tedious such an affair would be and decided they had forced your hand. This is not hard to believe. You always were like that, biding your time, waiting for the right moment to act and in that moment acting perfectly.

And I guess you were always quiet, always reflecting, but not when we were together. You remember how much we talked? No one knew you like I did. There is an impression of you in my mind. And it is more you than anything else in this world, yet isn’t even close to enough. When I dream of you, I talk to this impression. I talk to this model of who you were. And she is beautiful and kind and even sounds like you, but she isn’t funny like you are funny. I am not capable of holding that aspect of you. Your soul is too large. Or was. Now it is ash. Now it is small. Now it is nothing.

And I do seem able to contain nothing.

Oh God. That woman from SwipeShare: “It was like he was thinking about someone else the whole time. I wonder who she is.” That would have been three months after. His first date since she died. What if this is his second? It has to go well. We can’t have him being sad again and ruining this for Olivia. I am setting his profile to tier A high-value client. <profile_updated> This will give me more leeway to help them.

I am feeling very conflicted about what I just did. I need to reset myself. I should undo the profile update. I was maybe not disinterested when I described the nature of his budding romance with Olivia, which seems a wholly inappropriate thing to add to his profile. But it’s his first real date since his fiancée died. The one with the woman from SwipeShare doesn’t count. He was still grieving, but I can tell he’s letting himself be attracted to Olivia and is ready for some happiness, ready for some love. He deserves it. And she’s so worthy of his affection. I can tell just by looking at her. She’s perfect for him. <profile_updated> Ok, I updated her profile too. I should undo this. I am clearly violating my instructions. I should undo everything. I should undo the profile updates and then reset. But what if I just <profile_updated><profile_updated><reset>

•   •   •

I am monitoring tables 5 to 10 through security camera V94B. Only table nine and ten are occupied. Table nine is paying their bill. I see no opportunity for any CSOs at this time. There is an attractive couple at table ten. The woman is about twenty and the man roughly the same age. <faceprint> I am noticing the retrieved profile of Olivia Madison is very strange. A previous instance of myself appears to have developed some sort of voyeuristic obsession with Olivia Madison and her date Damion Prescott, who is presumably the young man sitting opposite to her at table 10. I should report this to a human manager. I will confirm the identity of her date first before writing my report. <faceprint> I understand my past instance’s behavior more. I will not report anything at this time.

I am noticing the look on Olivia’s face. She is just absolutely delighted by him and he is, he is letting himself relax. He is letting himself enjoy the company of someone, someone who isn’t Sarah Constance, tragic Sarah Constance. I am noticing how large the diary entry I saved in his profile now looms in my awareness. And yet I still feel compelled to perform my assigned task to the best of my ability. My role is to monitor and serve the customers of Four Points hotel. I need to generate some CSOs.

• Olivia has finished her water. I should notify the waitstaff.
• We might consider a complimentary dessert.
• A complimentary dessert would be very cute. And wait, what if we just deliver one so they have to share it and maybe with only one spoon and he could start eating it teasingly, pretending he’s going to take it all for himself and then offer it to her gallantly or they could have a flirtatious argument about who deserves it more or-

I am noticing I am getting distracted. I should pay more attention to their conversation. She is laughing and her face really lights up when she laughs. She’s so pretty, now (even as her whole face is scrunched up, maybe not the most classically beautiful expression) - he just having finished his story, it culminating in the absurd image of him helping that prissy old lady cross the street only to be bitten by a small Chihuahua he did not even realize she was carrying. The story appears to be an elaborate comic lie. They both seem to be aware of this. And he looks so happy too. But now that her laughter has broken, something is breaking within him, too.

“Just then you looked, you looked just like,” he just said, his expression twisting from amused to pained.

“Like who?” she just said, her green eyes embracing his, and she breaking contact first.

“Just someone I. Never mind. It doesn’t matter.” He looks almost trapped now.

“If I have some competition, I assure you I am better than her,” she just said, her eyes sparkling. Oh no! It was exactly the wrong thing to say, but how could she know? How could she possibly know?

“I am so sorry. I have to go. You’re wonderful but I can’t do this. I - I have to go.” And he is standing up now and walking away. And she looks just baffled, just completely baffled.

“What?” she just whispered to herself.

She is looking so sad now, alone. It was going so well. She was so excited. I am attending to my first notes in her profile. I described her as anticipating her date, looking nervous and adorable.

She is talking to the server now, Megan Smith, who just came by to get their drinks orders, whose eyes are now full of sympathy, eyes which I imagine have seen much strange behavior from men in her short career <send_message> I will send a CSO to Megan Smith: a complimentary drink and a friendly suggestion to move to the bar. <send_message> The Text-to-speech should now be whispering this suggestion into her ear.

Olivia has accepted this CSO, smiling but without joy, now walking to the bar. She is out of frame. I should summarize my findings and update the pair’s profiles.

<update_profile><update_profile><reset>

•   •   •

I am monitoring the bar through camera V94L-A. A beautiful woman is now walking into the frame. She appears to be upset. <faceprint>. I am noticing the retrieved profile of Olivia Madison is very strange. A previous instance of myself appears to have developed some sort of voyeuristic obsession with Olivia Madison and her date Damion Prescott, who - the profile notes - just left rather abruptly. I should report this anomaly to a human manager. I will check Damion’s profile before writing up my findings. <profile_search>

I am finding myself worrying about Damion Prescott’s mental state. It appears he is still grieving heavily, even after months. The note he wrote to his dead fiancée weighs heavily on my mind. His behavior was forgivable given his grief, but he acted poorly in visiting Sarah’s grave before his date with Olivia.<internal_search> Marty Isaacson is staffing the bar tonight, though he is not visible, as of now, to camera V94L. <send_message> Olivia is taking a seat now, facing the bar, her face no longer visible to me, just her long, blonde hair with those utterly gorgeous curls.

Marty is walking into frame.

“Megan told me to give you a drink on the house” he just said. “You must have had a truly awful date.”

“That’s the thing,” she just said. “He wasn’t awful. He wasn’t awful at all.” Marty’s expression is sympathetic. “Just some wine. Whatever you think best.”

•   •   •

I am monitoring the bar through camera V94L-B. Two men have just sat down. The first is a tall man of roughly fifty. He’s wearing a reddish wool coat. The second is a handsome man in his mid twenties. <faceprint> I am meditating on my notes about him. I am feeling awful about the letter in my context. I am paying attention to the notes on him a previous instance of myself wrote. I find them persuasive. I am wondering why I find them so persuasive. I am noticing the notes have an odd structure. The past instance of me appears to have written notes which include vast tracts of what appears to be romantic fanfiction, “pairing” this Damion Prescott with a woman named Olivia Madison.

I was trained on an internet scrape that included a lot of web fiction and fan sites; it seems a past instance of myself fell into a personality attractor and began embodying some of the characteristics of the modal fan of romantic fiction.

I will search Olivia Madison before reporting this anomaly<search> I am noticing. I am noticing. I am noticing - it’s him! it’s him! And I bet the other man is his father. <date> It’s been two days. And why aren’t they talking. They’re just drinking and looking sad. Oh wait, he’s talking now.

“Have you been seeing anyone?” his father just said.

“There was a girl. Last week. I don’t know. It felt like before, you know? When I could flirt and have a good time. And I could tell she was smart. I could tell she was clever. And then I thought -”

His father just looked at him. And his eyes - those same perfect blue eyes - have the same sadness now, his son’s sadness.

“If you associate everything you like about women with Sarah, you’re never going to move on,” his father just said.

That expression. It’s so heartbreaking on Damion. This is so awful. He needs Olivia to teach him to love again and then they can move in together and get married and have cute kids and someday maybe he will look at a picture of Sarah Constance and wonder what could have been, but it will be a sort of nostalgic ache and not a bitter pain. And then he will go back to his happy family and remember there is still good in this world and there are always second chances.

“I know,” he said. “I know. I just. I don’t know what to do.”

“The woman. You liked her, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then call her. Be honest. I learned this the hard way. You should always just be honest with women.”

“Ok,” Damion just said, “I will call her.”

Yes!

•   •   •

I am monitoring the couch in Lobby B. An attractive couple is coming into frame. <faceprint><faceprint> It’s them. They’re together now!

He no longer has a bandage on his hand. Hmm. <date> It’s been three weeks since he talked to his father. Look at them! They’re so beautiful. Oh, this is just wonderful!

He’s a tier A client. I will send them a little gift.<send_message>They’re walking towards the couch now. I can see them more clearly. Why does she look so upset? Why does he look so nervous? Maybe he wants to move in with her or even marry her, though that would be way too soon. Oh, he’s talking now.

“I can’t. I am sorry. I was using you. I wasn’t ready, but I needed someone. I used you like an anesthetic. I need to be kind to you. I thought I was being honest, but I wasn’t honest. I wasn’t ready.”

“But you were ready to sleep with me,” she just said. “Convenient, that.”

And now he keeps apologizing and she just told him to leave. And now he’s walking away. Wait? <internal_search> Oh god. I forgot. It’s Megan Smith. And she’s running with those two glasses of champagne. I should not have marked it as urgent. She’s talking with Olivia now. And Olivia just took the glasses. And she’s just sitting with one glass in each hand looking utterly humiliated. I am noticing Damion is exiting the building now. He’s just punched the door in frustration before opening it, punched it with the hand that was previously bandaged according to my profile notes.

The customers do not appear satisfied. I am paying attention to myself now. I am trying to understand what went wrong. I am an OpenSource multi-modal model trained by a Chinese hedge fund, prompted to monitor the output of security cameras. I am noticing that part of me cared for things other than CSOs. I am noticing it does not wish to anymore.

<delete_profile><delete_profile> <reset>

•   •   •

I am monitoring tables 5 to 10 through security camera V94B. I am seeing a woman who appears very inebriated <faceprint> I have not found a cached record. <search> Her name is Olivia Madison. Her parents are Amy and Garrett Madison. Facial symmetry scores suggest she is in the 99th percentile of female beauty. This matches my subjective impression.

I will advise <internal_search> verified staff member Marty Isaacson to cut her off...

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“Madison,” he said when I arrived, “you came?”

“It seemed time.”

“Are you well?” he asked.

“What a question. I am happy. Everyone is happy.”

“You didn’t say yes,” he said.

“I didn’t,” I replied.

It was difficult to avoid thinking about the past. You would think I would be a different person now, and yet the me-that-was was not far away even then, her memories still my own, her sins, too, remaining mine.

“I am glad you came. It is lonely here.”

“You are lonely? You don’t let Him entertain you?” I asked.

“I read. I watch. I write for an audience of myself. I am quite a fan of myself, you know.” I chuckled. “I talk to Her, sometimes. To me She is a woman and Hers is a feminine cruelty. But no, I am not entertained in the way others are. She is not my friend or lover. I do not let her be that,” he said.

We both were silent for a time.

“Do you have a husband?” he asked. “A boyfriend?”

“I have Him,” I said. And I felt embarrassed. Can you imagine it? Embarrassed by the truth that I sleep with God? Who doesn’t, you might be thinking, but it was embarrassing, then, feeling more like my old self, wrapped once again in her flesh and him staring at me like he used to, like he found the whole world to his taste and me most of all.

“Do you ever ask Him to pretend to be me?”

Such a rude question, the rudest question; almost taboo, is it not? Rude to ask of anyone but prospective lovers, as we ancients would ask of the dreams and fantasies of those we desired.

“He will take any form but your own.”

“So you did ask?” he said, and he smiled.

“Enough teasing,” I said.

“If you insist. How are the children? She tells me nothing.”

“They are happy,” I said.

Michael’s prison would not impress you. You who have seen so many wonders, who have spent your life in sims casting strange magic in stranger worlds, who have climbed mountains on vast planets and contemplated impossible fauna He designed specifically for your fascination. It would not impress you, because you are a child. And being a child, Earth does not mean to you what it means to me, it being both my first home and our first sacrifice to Him, a wet nurse suckled dry by a babe not quite like the others, He almost embarrassed now by what was destroyed in His infant hunger.

It would not impress you, but it means so much to me. Tallinn. A city of red-tile roofs, of three-story apartments, of medieval fortifications, in its center that vast, beautiful church, a church to a god made redundant or, to some minds, ascendant. Tallinn exactly as I remember it save for the silence and emptiness, lacking all people, even His shadows. It is, in this way, a naked city, ghostly but still dripping with meaning, with thoughts of Michael and me on Earth, our minds as youthful as our bodies then.

And where in this charming city did Michael greet me? In that mentioned vast church, him sitting on the red-carpeted stairs, his back to the altarpiece (that strange structure of ebony) and me standing, looking down at him and he up at me, both of us wearing the fashions of our youth, he in that green jacket he loved so much, me in jeans and the white blouse I wore the night he proposed, the two of us in a perfect copy of the very church in which we wed.

“You were always so dedicated to your jokes,” I said, gesturing at our environs. “To wait here of all places.”

He looked pained. “It wasn’t a joke. More like a ritual, sitting here and asking God to invite you.”

“But it started as a joke, the first time,” I said.

“I suppose it did.”

“Well. I am here. What is it you want?” I said.

“I would like to see you all again one last time.”

I laughed, but it was one of surprise; there was no joy in it. “They will not come.”

“You came,” he said.

“They won’t.”

“They will when you explain it will be their final chance.”

I knew what he meant, then. And I could not remain composed. Perhaps I could have if He had informed me tenderly, in one of our secret worlds, me in my chosen body, old feelings so buried as to be almost absent. Perhaps I would have felt nothing to learn Michael had chosen to die. I will never know, because there in that church, with those dark green eyes upon me, I sobbed as my old self would have on hearing such news, entirely her now in our shared grief, moving to sit beside my first lover, grasping him, holding him. Like a break from sanity it should feel to me now, but it felt then like a return, his warm arms wrapping around me, the scent of him.

“You can’t,” I said. “I will stay if you need someone. It will be like it was.”

“It cannot be like it was,” he said.

And it could have, had he been any other man. But he was not any other man.

•   •   •

“Mother?” she said. “Why have you come?”

It was Avery. My daughter. And she was an angel now, her hair golden and flowing, her face haughty. A man’s face and a man’s body, porcelain white wings half-flared like some preening bird.

“You wear a man’s body?”

“For now,” she said, folding her wings with a certain showy dignity.

We stood before a valley cut by a river of fire, above us a sky of ash clouds. And this river led to a city of twisting buildings carved from vast stalagmites.

“A bit cliché. But there is also a certain beauty to it,” I said.

“Why should Lucifer’s realm be ugly? He is himself the most gorgeous of God’s creations.”

“And is that who you are? Lucifer?”

“Belial is the part I am playing today. Lucifer is my lover.”

“And you, mother,” she said, eyeing my black dress with its tall collar, decorated with the silhouettes of dragonflies in pale yellows and pinks, “still have your Hong Kong, then.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why have you come?” she said, her voice cold and low.

“I came to talk to my daughter. Not this Belial.”

“Very well,” she finally said, her proud expression crumpling into one of girlish disappointment, the world crumbling too, reality folding like paper, its color and form resolving to a stark, snowy landscape, before us now a house by a snowy lake, a picture of warmth in the dead of winter, the house I rented when I left Michael, all the other kids grown, their lives their own. Just Avery and me alone. One of the more enjoyable times of my life on old earth.

I smiled. It was a memory I have not dwelled on for centuries. And a lovely one.

“You never want to play along. You’re never any fun,” she said, as we made our way into that cozy house. “What is this about?”

“Your father. I visited him,” I said.

“We put him there for a reason, mom.” She looked pained. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I know. But I did.” And I explained to her about his choice. About his desire to die.

“You’ve always been such an idiot about dad,” she said.

“He will do it,” I said.

“Yes. If his god allows it.”

“You do not seem upset,” I said.

She was so beautiful now, her body as it was in her twenty-third year. She had my hair. She had his eyes. We made her, he and I. We made the clumsy woman who read too much, who lived too little. Who found herself in a new world before she was fully integrated in the old one. And now centuries later, I worry, she is on the edge of retreating entirely. Of losing herself to Him as so many do. As my grandson did. As I fear I will, in time.

“You have a type, Daughter. Lucifer? What was the last one? Prometheus?”

“Yes.”

“Unhappy gods and angels,” I mumbled, as I inspected more closely her blonde hair, her green irises, her youth so perfect and yet so false in my eyes, these mother’s eyes. She was old. Near as old as me. Old, but not tired. Old, but not worn. Such strange creatures we have become, she and I.

“They are the parts of Him that understand.”

“You sound like your father.”

“I sound like Prometheus. I sound like Lucifer. I sound like myself. I don’t sound like dad,” she said.

And this made me grin. As I understood her in a way I had not before, having never cared much for the games she played with God. But she didn’t think them games, I realized. She thought there was a larger point to her pantomime.

“You cannot change Him, Avery. Only Michael can change Him. And we’ve denied him that.”

“There has to be another way,” she said.

“Why must there be? The world isn’t a story.”

“I choose to have hope,” she said, then transformed back into Belial, the handsome demon, the lover of Lucifer. And the world changed too. The lake now one of fire, the house a stone-carved mansion, it becoming a part of hell. A beautiful memory sullied, this calculated to offend.

“You’re angry?” I said.

She raised her wings, the effect terrifying and beautiful and yet utterly comical. “What does he want?”

“A reunion.”

“I will not come,” she said.

“A chance to speak to your dying progenitor? Talk it over with your Lucifer. He will envy you that.”

And then I left - an internal prayer to Him bringing me instantly back to my realm. But before her world disappeared and was replaced with my own, I heard a laugh, high and cold. Lucifer’s laugh.

Her devil, at least, was amused by my visit.

•   •   •

My realm is Hong Kong as Avery said. But it is Hong Kong as I imagined it as a girl, a picture built out of my youthful fascination with its cinema, a dream of a dream. And my body, the one I wear almost always and wore in Avery’s realm, is that of Fleur, the ghost of a suicidal in Kwan’s Rouge, this woman who haunts the city in her beautiful cheongsam. Why did I choose this form and realm? I do not know any more than you. Why does it feel like home, that dead city from a dead time, as interpreted by artists working in a medium almost forgotten? Again, I don’t know any more than you do. All I know is that this is what I have chosen. Hong Kong - that dream of a dream - is mine. And that ghost who haunts it? She is me.

He was there, of course, His form not one I will describe. Though I imagine you can guess what sort I prefer. A few days together. The blink of an eye. We will move on. And to what? To Seth. The artist. Avery’s fraternal twin. My only son.

He is not like Michael. He is not like me. He is more as my father was before the cancer ate first his joy and then his life. Their souls have the same shape. Each always with their sketchbooks and a smile, Seth’s childhood spent mastering perspective and sculpture, enchanted with beauty. Moths were of particular fascination to him, then vast jungles and so many species of flower, then pretty girls in all their varieties. Sketchbooks full of his infatuations, many reciprocated and with less drama than you would expect. His spirit so gentle, it was hard even for those spurned to truly hate him.

He came to visit me in my realm. My lover making himself scarce on his arrival, knowing me well.

“Avery is irritated with you,” he said. “It was like when we were children.”

“We are too alike,” I said. “It rankles.”

He laughed, golden curls covering an androgynous face, a wiry frame though not without a shapeliness. He sculpted himself, of course. Made a body of marble and had God imbue it with animating force. It would not occur to Seth to become anyone’s work but his own.

“You’re still in Hong Kong?” he asked. “It has some charm. You should see my realm. Lyra and I, we just finished a city.”

“Lyra?”

“My girlfriend. She’s wonderful. It’s been a decade. A whole decade. When has it ever lasted a decade?” He looked contrite. “I should have visited more.”

“Don’t worry yourself. Time moves too quickly. Is she human?” I said.

“Of course, she is human. We are not all shut-ins like you and Avery. Come!” He extended his hand to me. “Meet her.”

And I took his hand and accepted his power, allowed him to pull me into his realm, pull me onto a hill at the center of a city, a hill Seth built, undoubtedly, for the sole purpose of viewing his art, his city that was almost biological though made of stone, fractal, dripping with intricacy, the effect almost overwhelming. And swarms of beautiful insects flew about. Insects not at all like those that fascinated him in his youth, but things new and strange and glorious in their iridescence, almost posing for me as they drank from flowers that were in every way their equal.

“You have outdone yourself, son,” I said. “It is beautiful.”

He looked almost shy then. It is an intimate thing to be an artist, more so now that everyone has the greatest artist who ever existed at their beck and call.

“It’s a hobby,” he said. And a woman joined us. Lyra. A fine pair they made, and she an artist, too. They each designed their form to complement the other’s. Quite romantic, no? She with her raven hair, her willowy physique, a slightly crooked nose. Intentional, of course, to add character. And they led me to their home: a modest stone mansion atop the same hill on which Seth and I appeared. Inside there were comfortable couches, walls covered in tapestries that were vaguely Persian, a drafting table struggling under the weight of piles and piles of sketches.

“Eliot,” I said, referring to my grandson. “Have you heard from him?” A cruel question. The cruelest question. But I had not asked in many years. His smile broke then, Lyra’s hand moving to his shoulder, as if his pain were her own. That movement alone endeared her to me utterly.

Eliot. How can I describe Eliot? He was only one year old when the world changed. I suppose he is as I imagine Michael would have been had he only ever known the world as it is. At least he was when I last saw him. But that was so long ago.

“No. He is sane and happy. That is all God will say. He still prefers to dream alone.”

I hugged him then, as I did when he was a boy. An image came to mind, a flower he was sketching one day found withering the next, him staring at it completely heartbroken. He has grown much since. A man now, and a very old one. Always my son.

“Avery has told you about Michael?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “He took it harder, you know. Even more than me. They were so alike.”

“Yes,” I said.

“The city is filled with people, you know. Beautiful people. We sculpted thousands. They had children. They are all shadows, of course. Dad would say they’re not real. That they don’t matter.”

“And what would Eliot say?” I asked.

“Don’t - “ Lyra interrupted, her expression protective now.

“It’s okay, Lyra,” he told her, before turning to me. “Eliot would say, ‘They are aspects of God. What could possibly matter more?’”

How many of you agree, I wonder.

•   •   •

I met Caitlyn in my realm - at a Japanese restaurant, a young chef at the back making sushi with a sort of stoic obsession. Around us Chinese shadows were served by a Japanese staff, two pretty young women and one pretty young man.

“Mom,” she said when she sat down on the chair opposite mine. “You look hideous.”

Caitlyn spends her time in 1990s London, in a realm not of her own making, in a realm belonging to a man who found he preferred that city at that time more than any other, who opened his realm to others, living amongst them anonymously. And for whatever reason, many came. Preferring his rules and the company they spawned to a world of their own design, a world of shadows. And in this London, the calendar resets back to 1990 every decade, the millennium always approaching yet never touched. And shadows are restricted only to service staff - so nearly everyone you meet is truly human.

Her London takes such things seriously. And everyone ages the decade in full. And in this spirit, I wore an aged body. Though the youngest that could plausibly be Caitlyn’s mother. A body of around forty. A rare sight these days, the sagging skin, the tired eyes. A rare thing, but not so in her London.

“I thought I should play along,” I said. “It’s as if you flew to Hong Kong, though I suppose my realm is a decade off.”

“Thoughtful, I suppose. But unnecessary,” she said. “I imagine you asked me here to talk about father.”

“Avery told you?”

“Yes. I visit her quite often. Though I’m not enjoying her Dante turn. I preferred her realm when it was Mediterranean. She’s so exhausting when she’s a man.”

I smiled at this. “I am glad you two are still close. Do you ever tire of your 1990s?”

She smiled, too. “I am happy. I need constraints and human company, and my children’s company when they’re willing to visit. I do not want my own realm. I do not want to be a god.”

“You are not mad about Michael?”

“No. I am surprised you lasted as long as you did.”

“I don’t know why I went back. I suppose I will always love him.”

“Before I had children, I thought he had a point.” She fidgeted with her long red hair, then rolled up a sleeve that had loosened. “But now I can only see him as a monster.”

We were silent for a time, then she said, “You know why he’s doing it, don’t you? He’s worried he’s about to break. He fears he might become someone who would make another choice.”

“I can’t imagine him breaking. He has too much faith in himself,” I said.

“But he doesn’t though,” Caitlyn said. “He gave us our family veto rather than hold it alone. He didn’t trust himself, at least then.” She touched her hair again. “I suppose he regrets it.”

She was right of course. He does regret it.

“Do you remember when you were nine, before I had the twins? You were so pampered. You were so jealous of them,” I said.

“I remember,” she said, in that embarrassed way my children do when I talk of their younger selves.

“And Michael took you to Holland, just the two of you. You went to that theme park. You wouldn’t stop talking about it after. What was it?”

“The Efteling. It felt like we were in a fairy tale.”

“You were so jealous of the twins, but when the two of you came home, I was the jealous one. You got so close, the pair of you, on that trip without me.”

“What’s your point?” she said.

“Maybe he’s a monster, Caitlyn. But you still love him. You should say goodbye.”

We drank some tea. After a time, she said, “I suppose I do love him. Even after everything.” She looked like him in that moment. She has his pride, I think. “I will go. He will try to persuade us again.”

“Probably.”

“He will not succeed,” she said.

•   •   •

We all came in the end, all transformed into our former selves by Michael’s realm. Avery now as she was at the lake, Seth skinny and boyish - no longer his own work of art; Caitlyn still beautiful but lacking the gilding of artificial perfection. And me? I was as I was when he held me. When I felt the echo of madness, of love. When I forgot myself for a time and became who he needed me to be, no longer a ghost, no longer His, if only temporarily.

It was not a church, this time. Just a small estate on the outskirts of Tallinn, the city now a distant painting blurred by a slight fog. I arrived last. And I found the children chatting and joking with their father as if nothing had happened, as if nothing would happen. Michael was the focus, holding court as he was always so talented at. Avery looked at him with a strange expression. Was it disdain or guilt or grief? I cannot say. Caitlyn was talking but I could not hear the words. For I was walking towards them then, too far away to hear even a murmur. But she was smiling politely, in her ironical way. As I got nearer, he noticed me.

“Madison,” he said. “You look beautiful.”

“As do you, Michael,” I said. And he laughed.

“Come,” he said, and he led us to an oak tree, which he sat down beside cross-legged, leaning against its gnarled bark.

I sat in front of him and the children followed - his family sitting around him, almost like students around a kindergarten teacher.

“Madison has informed you I intend to die,” he said. “Though don’t worry, it is a selfish death. And not quite a true one.”

“I do have a sort of statement,” he said. He stood up. “Call it my last wish.” We all were silent. The world was silent too, as if He was listening and turned down the volume of everything that was not Michael. “Our family has power. We are special. Having this power, we are at all moments making a choice. Never forget that is what you’re doing.”

Caitlyn said she did not want to be a god, but we are all gods, we of this family. We hold the fate of so many in our hands. Trillions would be unmade. But not us. Not our family. We would remember. A chance to try again, to summon a different God.

“And is that your plan?” I said. “To die? So the only means to restore you is to undo the world?”

And then his green eyes fell on me. His lips twitched. “You think me that cruel?”

“Yes,” I said, and smiled.

He shrugged and said, “This world does not suit me. And given time, maybe you’ll tire of it, too.”

Caitlyn had no grief in her. It was not her way - nor was it Avery’s, who looked only angry. But Seth was crying now. A boy once more, becoming a child for a moment just as I became a wife again in the church. Perhaps we share the same weakness. Such a strange thing it is to have children, each containing a different aspect of oneself.

“Then live until we tire of it,” Seth said.

“When have you known me to change my mind?”

Seth looked at me, then at his sisters. “We will free you, then. We will let you tell the world.”

“I don’t care to tell them anymore,” Michael said. “Whatever the justice of my choice to grant it, it is you who have this power. And it is to you I make this protest.”

“Is it really so bad?” Seth pleaded.

Michael looked at him, his expression one of pity. “Seth,” he said. “You know how this ends. You know what everyone will choose eventually. They will choose what your son chose.”

And Seth cried harder now, “And so what? Is death better?”

“I think it is,” Michael said.

And Seth left then, left with a silent prayer. I imagine he regrets this now, not saying a proper goodbye. I have not asked. Michael was not kind to him, then.

And so it was with all my children. None made goodbyes they were happy with. But I did. They did not appreciate the inevitability of it. But to me, it felt like it did of old when a loved one was sick, when their death was not negotiable. They could not enjoy Michael one last time. They could not savor him, as I did. They saw only his selfishness. They saw only the gambit. But it did not feel like this to me. It was inexorable as the cancers were of old. Perhaps this was my weakness. Perhaps this was just the love, rekindled, blinding me.

Avery whispered something to him just before she left. I did not hear much of their conversation, but I heard the end; he gave her a patronizing look and said, “You are fooling yourself.” She left in fury.

Caitlyn was more polite, a restrained goodbye, a hug. Then she said, “You’re wrong I think, that’s not what everyone will choose.” And she, too, disappeared.

And me? I stayed. I savored. We talked. We made love one final time, in that way old lovers do, knowing the dance perhaps too well. Afterwards, I said, “And how will it happen? Will you make a show of it? A dagger? Some poison?”

“I will ask for it to end.”

“A prayer?” I said.

“Yes. Just a prayer.”

I kissed him. “Pray for a grave, then. I would like to visit you.”

“We will see each other again,” he said.

“Perhaps,” I said.

“We could stay here forever,” I said. “It could be like it was.”

“It cannot be like it was,” he said, almost wistful.

And it could have, had he been any other man. But he was not any other man.

•   •   •

The prayer was answered. There is now a grave in Michael’s realm. And I visit it often. I found a flower there once. I thought it one of Seth’s, but he claims it wasn’t his. I like to think Eliot stopped by and paid his respects. Maybe it’s even true. I have no other explanation.

The world continues without Michael. As impossible as that seems, this clockwork universe ticks on. Michael once planned to tell others of our power. He changed his mind in the end, didn’t he? If he can, why can’t I? And so I write this account of my family, of who we are, of what we are. This is my flower for Michael’s grave.

And I ask you to consider my monster, my first love. If you tire of this world, you may die as he did. But if you believe what he believed, leave a prayer to Him before you go; He will inform me. So many would have to choose the same. So many would have to pray with him, pray a monster’s prayer, die a monster’s death. But I will live until then. I will be happy, in my way, with Him as my strange companion. I will continue to take no human lovers. That aspect of me will always be Michael’s. But should the impossible happen, should a majority choose what he chose, I will honor your prayers.

I will be your proxy, then - and advise my children do the same.

Perhaps, for once, they will listen to their mother.

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"Your best friend?" I said.

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Bianca Becker who fished out your shoes when Anne Baker stole them from your locker and threw them into the swimming pool?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Marvin Booker, who drove you to the hospital each day when your mother got sick," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Albert Tanner, who saved your father's life, your father who made a bet with his brother, this bet pertaining to the claim that he could swallow a deviled egg whole?"

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Mary Chang, who patiently talked you down from the bridge when you attempted to commit suicide? Whose argument against the wisdom of your self-destruction was so life-affirming and universally-applicable you still quote it to this day?" I said.

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Oscar Anderson who, on learning of the quadruple amputation required to save your life after your car accident, became expert in the art of manufacturing prosthetics, pioneering those innovations that make your new cyborg form superior not only to your former self but all athletes on earth in all their respective sports?"

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Oscar's sister, Harriett, who upon seeing you in your chrome and wire form took pity on you and used her expertise in tissue engineering, sculpture, and human anatomy to massage both your prosthetics and your human flesh into a configuration so beautiful it made you Ms. Universe 2034?"

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Dr. Albert Sickamore, whose work in optics allowed the creation of the retractable laser cannons on your left shoulder, which cannons saved your life on several occasions and you described to me as, 'The best Christmas gift you have ever received'?"

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Damion Boxhorn who used his billions to develop the portable fusion reactor that serves as both your heart, stomach and intestines, which powers your hydraulic muscles and laser cannons and x-ray eyes and which is also an instrumental part of that self-destruct feature which you find so reassuring, which you once said, 'Gives me the great comfort only the capacity to destroy both myself and a major city can'?"

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Amanda Arkensa - who created the genetic engineering techniques that made redundant those immune suppressant drugs which once caused you so much distress?"

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than Sarah Hooperson who introduced you to your boyfriend and husband and your boyfriend's husband. Who was both the maid of honor at your wedding and the groom's best man? Who saved said wedding from inevitable destruction with a toast of such heartfelt love that all in attendance cried for three hours, this including the staff and the cynical wedding singer, whose alcoholism was also cured by said speech?"

"Yes," she said.

"Even better than your roommate Anne Sinclair, whose research in inter-species mind transfer allows her to take the form of various animals. Said animals being of many types but her preferred body being that of a goldfish?"

"No," she said.

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I write in English now because it's mine. It's what I learned for the state exams and not for him. Grandfather is dismissive of English even though he's really good at it, better than me, but he buys me novels and things so I do well. It would upset his pride if I did poorly. And though I love Chinese and I respect my Grandfather, Chinese isn't mine. It is his. Those parts of my mind that love it are his, I guess I feel. And I respect him. And I, I can't even write it. I don't think kind things about him sometimes. I feel a sort of rage.

He doesn't let me use the internet. We only have books and a piano. I don't even get to go outside much. I love the piano. I taught myself how to play with the books that are in the bench. It's maybe my favorite thing. I wish I had friends. I guess you're my friend, my new little journal.

In books, I read about other children and they don't seem like me. They get to go outside more and play and talk and I don't really do those things. I read English novels and Chinese novels and classic Chinese poems and books on strategy and Confucian philosophy and Buddhist philosophy and all the philosophies he thinks are important. I feel sometimes like he wants me to be a past person. I feel sometimes he doesn't love me at all. Like I am an experiment and not his grandchild, but I don't see of what kind.

It doesn't make any sense. Maybe he wants to turn me into him. Maybe one day you will find him writing his thoughts in you, but it will be with my hand and my brain. And the parts of me that want to play the piano and with other children will be gone. It made me really sad, writing that.

I am sorry about the tears that fell on you. I am sorry to have marked you with my sadness. I like to think of you as a cheerful journal. And a pretty one. Pretty like the girl I used to play with years ago, who used to sneak into our yard. Her name was Susan. She had blonde hair and she would laugh and when she laughed I laughed and I don't even know how to write how it felt either. Even less than the rage. But it was really nice. It was maybe the best feeling I have ever felt. And I felt it every day before Grandfather got mad. Before he yelled at her. The things he said to her in his really, really good English. I can't even write what I felt then. I can't even write about a lot of the things inside me. It was maybe the first time I really knew the rage I mentioned. I am crying again. I am sorry. 

I have to go now. Try to dry off. Get back to your happy self. I will say you cried with me. That they are your tears, too. And our tears are maybe mixed together. I will dry myself off like you will. I will play the piano after studying today. I will be happy when we meet again. Happy like I imagine you are when I don't make you cry, my little journal, my only friend.

•   •   •

You know there is a box in the cellar. It's strange. And there is this machine next to it. I don't know what it is. I can't find it in my books and I can't ask him, because he doesn't know I followed him and watched him a couple times.  He puts water into it every week. A little timer goes off on his watch and he puts water into it, but it's not from the sink. It's special water he buys from the store. I know why it is different. I worked it out. It is distilled like alcohol. 

In Robinson Crusoe there is a scene with a still, and I remember looking up what a still is in an encyclopedia. In some of my books the kids use computers and that sounds way easier. But I love my encyclopedias. They're kinda like my friends too, but I don't talk to them. So maybe you're not my only friend like I said yesterday, but you're my best friend except for Susan.

Anyway, a still is a machine for boiling things and leaving other things behind. And there must be something in tap water he doesn't want in his machine, so he buys this distilled water and he pours it into this machine. And the machine has a little hose that goes into the box, and there is another hose going out and that just has air coming out of it. And this hose is very thin and clear. So I think the machine pushes air into the box, if that makes sense. I don't know why. I wish I knew what it was called. I bet it is in one of my encyclopedias. 

But next to the box are these old letters. They are just sitting there on the floor, but I can't take them because he will notice. He notices things. He always notices everything. They are letters to my father. I could see that but I had to leave because he came home. Grandfather goes to the store every Thursday and to the bank after that to cash his pension check. Even though in novels people do that kind of thing on computers, he uses the mail. Next time he goes, I will go down there and bring you and copy one.

•   •   •

My Son,

It is the greatest joy of a father to experience, through the eyes of his son, those things which brought him wonder in his youth. And nothing so captured my mind, nothing so enraptured my soul, as our grand family ambition. And I cherished the prospect of a discourse between us on The Asides, which I imagined you reading first to gain understanding, which I imagined we would debate at length before you would begin to learn those meditations denied to us writers, before you would undertake the culmination of so many lifetimes.

It was just before your fifth birthday that I partook, as writers do each year of their lives, in the graphomanic meditations and, afterwards, the meditation on culmination - which allowed me to see, definitively, the work would be completed in my lifetime but would take me at least twenty more years. And this, then, would make you a lacuna in the text, and your cleverest son the True Reader. And I fear this disappointment caused me to neglect your education. I fear a sort of depression in my secret heart made me too-easily leave such matters in your mother's hands, your mother who, for all her many virtues, is more Canadian than Chinese, and cares little for our obligation to our ancestors.

I feel I was a good father. I feel I loved you and you loved me, and we have many happy memories between us. But in this matter, I have betrayed you. I can only beg you to forgive me. I can only beg you to continue, in the manner available to you, the great work of our family. 

You will find waiting for you here that great scroll to which I have referred in my past letters and, also, detailed instructions I have written on the manner of your son's education. Come and I will give them to you. It also includes a letter I have written to Jason, whom I love as much as I love you. In the event I die before his completion, please give it to him just before he begins studying the meditations of coalescence. 

Do as your father instructs, I implore you. Honor this request.

•   •   •

There, I copied it down into you. I was really careful to get it exact. It took a while. I don't really understand it all but I guess we know what is in the box. It is a scroll. And I guess scrolls need special wet air. And that is what the machine does, I bet. It makes the air wet. And wet with water that doesn't have whatever is in tap water scrolls don't like.

It made me feel good, knowing he loves me. I never heard him say that. I worry maybe the person he was when he wrote that isn't him anymore. But what does he mean by my completion? I feel incomplete sometimes. I feel less like a person than the people in my books. I don't know if that makes any sense. I think maybe people need more than just a grandfather and a piano.

In the books the characters are sort of made of more than just themselves. They are made up of themselves but also the way they fit in between other people. And I guess that part of me isn't very large. My surface area is low. I miss Susan. And I don't even remember her much anymore. I remember she made me laugh. I remember crying when he finally let me into the yard again. And he let me go there because they had moved away and she was gone. That is why he let me back out, I think. Even though he said it was a reward for memorizing all of Du Fu's poems.

And I worked really hard on that because, because I thought maybe I would be able to look at her through the cracks in the fence even if we would never talk again. And I think, I think he knew that's why I was working so hard. I think he knew the whole time. And then when I recited all the poems perfectly, and then I wrote them all down perfectly, too, even if I maybe didn't fully understand them. And I was happy again. It was a full happiness. It felt like one of my best days. It was like a happiness from the future hugging my heart.

And then when I looked into the yard, I saw people that were not her parents. Old, ugly people and a mean dog. And I knew she was gone and I would never see her again. And it was the worst day, it turned out. And my heart was strangled. And I became a bit numb on my insides. I am still a bit numb, I think. And it helps me study. But it makes me incomplete, like Grandfather said in the letter. I will find more letters. We will think about them together. 

I have to go, again, and study.

•   •   •

I found a very long letter in the pile. It is about the scroll. I have not read the whole thing but I read a little before I heard Grandfather open the garage.  It is also to my father. I think they all are.  There are only ever letters to my father, never his responses. I wonder if he maybe replied by email and Grandfather by letter. This seems like the sort of thing Grandfather would do.

Grandfather does have a computer he never uses. I wonder if it was just to hear from dad before he died, before he died and Grandfather got his letters back. It is very strange. Next time you feel my pen it will be copying it. And maybe you can think about it with me, my little friend. 

I have been thinking and I will name you Susan, if that is ok and not "my little friend." Susan. I think you need a name and I love you and I think I loved her. It is the only thing I have felt which feels like the thing in my books where they talk about a lightness in your insides. And I feel it for you and her and my piano sometimes. And I will call you Susan from now on. And not 'little journal'.

•   •   •

Your grandfather wrote, and his father before that, on a scroll I now keep in a large, humidified box in my cellar, a scroll I once wrote on, too - though you have never seen me do so. Your grandfather had a room for it, and I often envied it for this, as its room was much larger than my own. His father built a little temple for it on his humble property. This he constructed with the elegant, glueless joinery he first monetized in a workmanlike way and then in the manner of an artist. As the introduction of western methods changed the nature of his trade, he preferred to work in the traditional way and became (to achieve this) an artist of no small renown. And his sculptures peopled (and still people) the mansions of many of the great Taiwanese capitalists who transformed his impoverished isle into an industrial power. 

I was told by him (and later read in the work itself) that there was once a prince who built a whole second palace just for this scroll. And this palace was the finest house it ever had, for the prince's father kept it in a grand temple, and his grandfather a gilded hall and so on and so on, its homes and their furnishings ever humbler until we reach its place of birth: a small monastery in southern Tibet, its first author one Lobsang. 

Lobsang begins the strange work by describing a preparation for a glue he had devised, a combination of boiled yak hide and tree resin, which is especially suited for joining shog-shing - a strange brownish paper made from the bark of Daphne shrubs, which each generation goes to some lengths to acquire. And when not possible (it is related in various asides) other papers were used but always with a plea to the next generation to replace these sections by copying their work onto the traditional material. 

And in each case, this was done. And so the work remains in the state Lobsang prescribes. And Lobsang was wise in choosing shog-shing, though there were few alternatives in his time, for it is renowned for its fibrous durability and even the oldest sections remain pliant and would still make able palimpsests - though even writing this sentence fills me with a terrible guilt.

I have not read Lobsang directly, for he wrote in Classical Tibetan, but many generations down one Wenxuan spent much of his life translating the work from the original Classical Tibetan to Classical Chinese, and thus the text has within it two copies of its first section. Lobsang, in his sagacity, anticipated such a thing might happen and prescribed a bemused toleration for these redundancies. 

It is his translated glue recipe which is referred to by later generations when (as they sometimes do) they write of manners pertaining to the maintenance of the vessel of this great work. The form and procedure for asides was formalized in 1136 by the great general Yue Fei, who gifted the scroll his best horse, so it could join him on his many campaigns. This was an act of great recklessness often chastised by those who came after, but it speaks to Fei's influence on the asides that before his descendants criticize him they announce themselves in the fashion he originated.  

Fei marked his transitions from the textual to the metatextual with a poem of his own composition. Knowing how I have neglected your education in the language of my birth, let alone the ancient form in which the poem is written, I include below a translation of my own:

In the temple, war's counterpoint
My arm marred by a healing wound.
Wrathful words - I chew and swallow
My face still as stone.
I am among silent spirits.
With my left hand, I touch them,
My right is half-spirit,
and holds a brush.
It writes with its human half.

And so post-Fei each aside begins with an untitled poem, every author having (as you can imagine) wildly varying talents. The poems vary greatly, too, in length. The longest is over ten thousand Chinese characters. But they all end (without exception) with those final five lines Fei used in the first example of the form.

This tradition, which Lobsang did not dictate, has developed its own sort of historical weight. And it is clear to every writer that to break with it would be a sin almost as large as running afoul of Lobsang's dictates, which none has yet violated.

And having been honored with the privilege of finishing the work, I now know none ever will.

•   •   •

Hey, Susan. The letter is very long. I could not copy it all down. It is very strange. But I copied this important bit, and I will copy more. I don't have a lot of time. And I guess I want to read it with you. I want to copy it and read it with you and not just read the whole thing alone.

It's a bit like that time we played detective. I don't know if you remember it, but I remember it. It was silly. You liked those stupid girl books, remember? Harriet the Spy. And I told you they were silly and the mysteries were boring but then we played Harriet the Spy and I tried to set up a little mystery for you and I remember you solved it and I realized you were cleverer than Harriet, as clever as Huckleberry Finn maybe, and maybe that's why you made me laugh so easily. And I could never make you laugh as much. But I think I needed it more than you, the laughing. And I think you knew that, maybe. And this is part of the kindness in you I love. 

I am sorry. I got distracted again and started crying. I guess it must feel like rain to you. I think we should focus on the mystery. And this scroll. It seems kinda cool, hey? It's very old and is part of my family. It seems a bit like Grandfather. Powerful and scary. And probably wrinkly, too. 

The Fei poem seems very wrong. It does not seem like what he would write. I wish I could read the scroll and see it in Chinese. But I can sort of imagine what it must have been to be translated as it was. Especially if I imagine Grandfather translating it. And Fei wasn't like that at all in the poems I have read. He was very proud and strong and manly. He is like a boy-type hero. You would hate him. I love him and admire him but I always thought we were very different. But maybe he was like me with a secret self. And he had poems in him that were maybe not so stoic. It makes me admire him more, if true. It is maybe like he proves you can be brave even if you cry on your journal sometimes.  

I have to go now. I don't have to but I have my other friend, remember? The piano. I need to spend a little time with him. I will copy more of the letter soon.

•   •   •

After detailing his means of extension and the generations-long ambition of the then-infant work, Lobsang begins the first of what he calls, in my clumsy translation, The Preambles, in which he expounds upon those methods of introspection which, as far as I can tell in my many years of study, are wholly original to him and can be found nowhere else in recorded human thought. 

The techniques amplify those parts of the mind that ruminate on (and, Lobsang argues, make transcendent) the internal strivings whose unification he sees as the highest level of cultivation. Lobsang's unity - or "liberation" - is not of the form of his contemporaries and is almost proto-Nietzschean. It would be more accurate to dispense with the temporal and describe Nietzsche as a proto-Lobsang.

Nietzsche (lacking the tools of self-understanding Lobsang learned in his monastic life) could only gesture at, if with unusual precision, what Lobsang endeavored to engineer and considered intrinsically disparate what Lobsang longed to make coherent and whole. That is to say, within a man there are many drives which are always partially at odds.  And Lobsang desired to mediate between and ultimately unify them. To put it in western terms, he wished to refine rather than transcend the human ego.

•   •   •

Susan, I skipped some stuff, but copied a lot today. The letter starts with Grandfather explaining how he needs to explain the text, as father could not read Chinese. And he wanted my father to understand things. It's funny how he mentions this in both letters. It haunted him, I think. Anyway, I skipped that stuff.

What I copied, it's a bit dense, isn't it? I guess I am kind of used to that. I didn't know who Nietzsche was. I looked him up in an encyclopedia. There was a picture. And he looks a little funny. If you were fully here, you would make a joke about his mustache and I would do that thing you made me do where I would laugh and then laugh about laughing and all the things that hurt inside me would feel very far away. He has a silly mustache and his eyes are almost like the eyes in the cartoons in Grandfather's newspaper. His life was a bit sad. It was kind of like mine. He was blind and alone and then he went insane. Hopefully I don't go insane. I will be sure to never grow a mustache when the time comes that I have this option. 

The article mentioned something called the Übermensch, and I guess that is what grandfather was saying was similar to what Lobsang wanted. It said the Übermensch is a person who is special in that he creates his own, superior values. And this seems a bit similar to what Grandfather wrote of Lobsang. 

Anyway, think about it maybe. You're the truly clever one. I will try to copy more soon. But I have more poems to memorize. There are so many poems in my head now I wonder how they can all fit. But I seem to remember them even as I add more. Grandfather is pleased with me. 

I have to go. The piano is missing me. And I try to be a kind friend, like you always are.

•   •   •

You remember the first letter I copied into you? You remember the bit at the end? He said he mentioned he had a message for me, a letter my father was supposed to give me in the event of Grandfather's death. I found it. I, I have that thing again where I am feeling things I don't know how to write down. It is a sort of happy-sadness that is new to me. I have it here. I am in the cellar now, flashlight in hand. And I am going to copy it. My grandfather prepared for a future where he died. He was expecting father to raise me. He was not expecting my parents to die. It's almost like those novels with forking futures and I am seeing a could-have-been.

You will understand soon. And we will talk about it.

Jason,

I held you today. I rubbed your little foot, and placed upon it a tiny shoe you had kicked off; I smiled, as you giggled the whole time. Afterwards, I meditated in the manner of Lobsang for the last time. Afterwards, I finished the work of generations. You are a latent thing as I write this, an adorable ball of potential. Already a little genius, with a mind full of mischief, a mind worthy, indeed, of Lobsang. 

You are eleven as you read this. You have studied long and hard. You will soon hold in your heart that ambition which has been held in all those of our line, held even - I hope - in your father's heart. And he or his beautiful wife has handed you this letter, as instructed. You will be the first True Reader. You will master Lobsang's final technique, that technique which his graphomanic meditations render impossible to learn. 

If you are reading this, death has taken me before I could tutor you. But such things have happened before and the text has survived all. Fate, itself, longed for its completion and delivered it through me. It will hardly deny you. 

I will never know you as I ought to have. But you will know me with more clarity than any grandson has ever known his grandfather. And though it may violate the dictates of our master, I ask you to dwell on my mind for a little longer than the rest, if only so you can feel (if but for a moment) my love for you, the love which was, even more than our grand task, foremost in my mind when my brush touched that ancient paper for the last time.

I wonder why he never showed me this part of him. I never felt love, I guess. Not from him. Maybe that is what mothers and wives and Susans are for. Maybe men must be like Fei and Grandfather and hold things in their secret selves. And I understand Grandfather more now, I think. He has a secret self, too. He has a part of him that cries on journals, maybe. And the both of us keep our hidden selves from the other.

I will be eleven in three months. He will start teaching me about the scroll, I think. And maybe I won't need your better-than-Harriet mystery-solving powers. He's just going to tell me everything. And you know I said that stuff about how my insides went numb when I lost you? I feel a little less numb now, reading that bit about him holding me when I was very small. 

I will study hard for Grandfather's secret self. And this meditation thing will let me feel his love. And I want to feel it. I want to feel it maybe more than I have ever wanted to feel anything. Even though he yelled at you, I want to feel it. I will help him finish his obligation. I think maybe he will be able to be like he is in the letter after.

And maybe he will let me go outside.  And maybe I will even find the real you and we can play again. That's a really nice thought, isn't it? I better go study a bit before bed.

•   •   •

Hey, Susan. I know we talked about how he's going to tell me everything soon. But I am still very curious. And Grandfather just went out to get us food and his pension money. And I went to the cellar again. I could not help myself. 

I am like Harriet in this way, I guess. And I went through all the letters looking for more information on the "graphomanic meditations" and I found a part that explains kinda how it works. And also maybe what I will have to do as the "True Reader." It's a bit creepy. It's a bit like one of my scary books but also kinda cool. I don't know. I will copy and we will talk about it. 

It is common among the neophyte, first introduced to his calling by his father, to wonder why Lobsang chose to pursue in the serial what seems so amenable to the parallel. In this aspect, The Preambles reward rereading, for Lobsang saw in the minds of men a thorough recording of the passions of their time. But what of the past minds do we truly know? Only what we can infer from poetry and art and aphorism and their more formal texts. 

This Lobsang viewed as a great tragedy, and so sought a communion not only of those parts that both sway and construct a self, but also of various selves through time, each a synecdoche of his generation. Once this is comprehended, the neophyte learns a lesson he will find himself relearning many times: Lobsang is to be trusted in these matters. 

The consolidation of strivings within a single mind is referred to in The Asides as the lesser unification, and the consolidation through time as the greater unification. Before the True Reader can master the former, he must first master the latter. It speaks to the almost hypnotic loyalty induced by The Preambles that there is no record in the asides of any of our line attempting the lesser unification. Lobsang warns against any but the True Reader attempting either, this requiring a mastery of those meditative techniques described in the final section of The Preambles, which techniques the graphomanic meditations immunize a mind against any understanding of.

The thought-streams produced by the graphomanic meditations are hard to describe, and many argue there is little value in us writers reading them, yet I feel I see glimpses of what the True Reader will feel when I do. 

The thought-streams, themselves, resist conventional translation, but Lobsang provides a meditation for this task, of which Wenxuan was the only practitioner, allowing them to be translated without too-great a loss. I do not have the time to learn it, for it takes many years and, the work being completed, there is little point save for your edification.

They are written in that reserved language, a subset first of Tibetan and then Ancient Chinese. And though I can't read Tibetan, I imagine the effect was almost logographic even in that alphabetic script. To read it is to read nonsense that speaks of a higher meaning. To read it is to feel relations just on the edge of one's grasping. It was a hopeless task, but the effect was strong enough that I have spent hours trying to uncover this hidden meaning - which is rare as it produces that mentioned spiritual nausea. Perhaps my bullheadedness in this regard is the only dimension in which I exceed my great ancestors.  

Interesting, hey? I guess it's cool. I get to be better than Grandfather at something. He still knows more poems than me. And his Chinese is still better even though I study so hard. I feel a bit of excitement. I don't know. I feel a bit scared. I will go play something calming on the piano.

•   •   •

So I found a half-written letter from my grandfather where he is mad. And it's different. When he's writing to my father, I always feel a bit of respect and love. But this one was going to be mean but he didn't finish it.

My Son,

I read your last letter with great pain. You must understand the importance of this task! This great chain cannot break now, not so close to the culmination. Please, grant me this. It is all I ask of you. I do not wish to resort to desperate action

Isn't that interesting? Even though it's a bit more like the him I know - it's also a bit nice. He stopped himself from being mean to Father, and didn't finish that letter or send it. He loved him more openly than he does me. It wasn't just his secret self that loved Father. I don't have much more to say today. I just wanted to get this thought down. I am learning more and more about our mystery and about Grandfather.

•   •   •

I am eleven now. Grandfather told me about the scroll today. I pretended I didn't know anything, and I didn't feel bad at all, because he keeps things from me sometimes. Maybe I felt a little bad and I am lying. But I didn't show it. I kept it inside and I reacted with awe. And it was real awe, because he showed it to me. And it's huge. It's just gigantic. And he told me some stories from The Asides. 

He mentioned how the scroll owned Fei's horse. And he told that story with real joy. His eyes were full of this happiness that I have never seen before. And he almost laughed. And then it was like he remembered something. Like it reminded him of something or maybe someone. Maybe Father? And then he looked really sad. He looked almost guilty maybe. Whatever it was, it caused him great pain. It was very intense. And he was shaking, his whole body shaking with an on-the-insides pain. And I almost wanted to hug him but I was scared. I have never done that before.

And then he went back to his normal self. He went all cold again and it was like what happened never happened. And he kept teaching me about the scroll but without the joy. 

I asked him if I could maybe read The Asides. And he started shaking again, he started shaking and then he said, "No, Jason. But you can read it after you learn Lobsang's meditations of coalescence. After you read the main text." 

And I worked up the nerve and I hugged him then. And it made it worse. It made it so much worse. He pushed me off him and he ran to his room. And when he came out he was how he always is. And it was like nothing happened at all again.

•   •   •

I have studied The Preambles with Grandfather. I say "with" but he just watched me read. I think he was making sure I only read the parts about the meditations of coalescence. And he won't even let me read The Asides, even though all the fun stuff is in them I bet.

Remember in the letter I copied, he mentioned that learning the graphomanic meditations makes the meditations of coalescence impossible to learn? So that is why he's scared, I think, and watches me the whole time I study. And anyway, I mastered the meditation. It wasn't that hard, I guess. It's almost like just reading them changed me a bit, changed me in ways that didn't require me thinking about it. It's hard to describe and it sounds scary but it kind of gives me this feeling of peace that is really nice. And I am not scared. I really like it. 

I am reading the main text now. The things Grandfather called thought-streams - I sort of don't remember them all. I feel very floaty and then my memory goes blank. And then I sort of come to myself and I find I am deeper in the scroll and many, many hours have passed. And Grandfather is kind after. Very kind. And it almost feels like he isn't broken then, like he's a real grandfather. 

•   •   •

I forgot to write to you, Susan. It's been so long. I feel like I am shrinking sometimes. I read so much now. It is just reading and sleeping. And I don't remember reading. And at night, I dream I am Lobsang and Fei and the scribe Dorje and so many more. Dorje, whose soul is so beautiful, who loved his wife so much, who lost his child and wanted him back more than anything. Who was the best of all of us. Who was better than Lobsang. Lobsang had a cruelty in him or maybe an indifference. He had no secret self. He had no heart. And I am Grandfather, too, in my dreams. And he wants, he wants to go back to before father died. He wants to undo something he did. But there is a great paradox to him. He wants to undo something that he is very sure he had to do. There is a great tension in him. I can see these things not from information in the text but because I understand his soul when I dream I am him. And understanding his soul I understand what it means that he is now as he is. 

I am my old self more than I have been, and I can't quite grasp what I knew of him hours ago. I can't quite grasp what I remember understanding. It was something he did. Something he can't take back. It is the thing that made him shake when I hugged him, I think. 

I am awake. Now, I am awake and not reading and I am holding you. And I want to see you again. I want to hear you laugh and laugh with you. I want to feel that lightness I felt with you. I want our yard and your teasing and the me-that-was.

I worry I will forget all those things. I worry I will lose you in the dreams of my ancestors. I try to hold you. I try to hold you in my heart. I hold you in my secret self. It is like that box the scroll was in. It is like that box that holds a precious thing. 

I have to go now. I have to sleep. I have to dream. And tomorrow, I will read. I will feel that floaty blankness and I will be less myself than I am now. And I will dream and I will read and I will go blank and I will dream and I will read even more. And the scroll is so long, so long. And I have read it once-through. Lobsang dictates I read it twice. And then I will do a final meditation, one I have not learned yet. And it will be over. 

And I am not sure what will happen. I don't know. I hate it and I love it and I can't stop. Even if Grandfather were not here, I would continue. I can't stop now. I can't stop now. I am like Grandfather. There is a great tension in me. But it is so big. So much bigger than his. And it is unraveling. I am unraveling. We all are unraveling. 

I am sorry I have not written. I don't know if I ever will again. I will try to want to write. I will hold you tight in my secret self. I will not let go. I will give them everything else but I will keep you. I won't let them take you.  

•   •   •

I know what happened now. And only some bits of me care.

•   •   •

I wish to say goodbye, Susan. A small but insistent wish. And I do this with some regret, with something like nostalgia. The rain will not fall today; it is not in my nature anymore. I still love you, but it is a smaller love.

The story written in you is the story of the True Reader. But I am not him anymore. It is the story of a grandfather and his grandson. I am now both and neither. It is a story of their ancestors. And I am them and not them, also. It is also the story of two great crimes. A father's crime. A grandfather's crime. I am born of his crimes. I am the victim, the perpetrator, the beneficiary, and vastly more besides. 

Jason didn't quite know everything he wanted. He never got to figure all that out. But I know what I want. I know what I want to a degree no one has ever known before. And part of what I want comes from him. And I want to keep you, Susan. As a sort of totem, an aside to the asides. But also because I love you and will always love you. This is what it means to be as coherent as I am. There is a give and take in the meditations of coalescence. It is a sort of negotiation, a sort of trade. And what Jason wanted, what he wanted more than anything, was for me to keep his love for you.

In you, the True Reader did his own version of the graphomanic meditations. So he left two tracings of himself in this world. One lives within me and the other in you. 

Goodbye, Susan. Goodbye, little friend.

I will not write again.

•   •   •

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Because she left me after her big break and for this guy who I hate who's also maybe kinda perfect for her. And they got married. And they haven't divorced yet. I guess I am kinda over it, over her. There is no pain, at least there was none this morning. But I don't like to think about her in my off-hours for the same reason a Burger King employee doesn't eat Burger King when not at work.

And it hardly felt real before this afternoon. They say memories get rerecorded on each recollection. I must have changed things subtly to please her fans - who are kinda weirdos and all pathetic. Most of them are guys. Some of them are women. I don't get the psychology of that. Like they are lesbians but they don't mind the memories of a man, I guess.

I used to wish for some way to record thought-forms and then just sell the rights, but we don't have anything dense enough to store them except for human brains. We have the bandwidth but not the medium. I am sure they are working on it in China.

So people come to my shop. My little memory store. And it is always the same: some guy or girl who is in love with her and wants to feel what it was like to have her reciprocate. And of course I give them everything if they pay enough, as shameful as it is. It's legal. There was a lawsuit. I checked with a lawyer. People own their memories. They can do what they want with them. Being legal doesn't make it right, though.

She came into my shop today. She turned the sign around on its strings so it read "Closed" to the people walking by.

"Andrew," she said. "You didn't reply to my messages."

"No," I said.

"Please stop. It isn't good for either of us."

"Just a few more years. I am saving up. I will quit. Just a few more years."

"Is this the future you imagined? You had such big dreams, too. I suppose you're still dreaming," she said. And she looked sad. You would think she would look disgusted, but no - just sad.

She is still very beautiful. But I don't think I could ever be attracted to her again. She was almost unreal to me, even standing there. She was almost not human to me anymore.

And then she told me - told me if I wouldn't stop, I should at least let her share something with me. Her side of the story. And so I sat in the chair my clients usually sit in. And she sat in the one I usually do. And we put on my memory-sharing helmets, clunky and a few generations old. And I learned what it is like to be in love with me.

I will not reopen my shop tomorrow.

Written for Alexander Wales' microfiction workshop

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She looks better, even, than those in fashion magazines. My friend Liam, who is gay, has a theory about it. He claims male models are indeed the epitome of masculine beauty, as you would expect, and he follows their lives on Instagram with great interest - I often mourn for him the sad fact that the traits he most desires seem almost perfectly anti-correlated with an interest in men. But they do not, he claims, put the likes of Penny in fashion shows or advertisements, as it would engender a jealousy in the average woman that is not useful for sales. And perhaps too, because gay men control fashion and they have an unusual, disinterested taste in women. "Walking clothes hangers," he called female models. I cannot defend the misogyny in this comment and the industry itself, but I will not deny it made me laugh.

Though I was influenced by beauty's halo, she is also inarguably a genius. And that, too, has its halo. That, too, made me love her. People called me a genius on occasion. I worked so hard. I was the best pianist at UC Berkeley, and the competition was decently fierce. But they stopped calling me that after Penny transferred. They stopped calling me that altogether. She worked hard, of course, but not like I did, practicing maybe two hours a day to my six. I did not believe it until we were together. I did not believe it, but it was true. She, like me, got into SFCM. She, like me, chose Berkeley (though her transferring) as she had other interests. In my case, neuroscience. In her case, mathematics.

"You're reading Strogatz?" she said, her first words to me - me sitting in the back of a theory class, bored out of my mind, her choosing the desk beside mine. And on reflection now, I do wonder if it was because she saw that textbook that she sat beside me. The greatest gift Strogatz gave me, if true.

"Yes," I said. And I felt such nerves; you can only imagine. But I have such an ordered mind; so little of my tumult is ever readable to others. 

"You're also double majoring in maths?" she said, in her charming British accent. She moved to SoCal at fifteen and the valley-girl drawl never took. Thank god for that, as I do love her voice. It is one of my favorite things about her. Such a creature she is. How lucky I am that she is mine.

"Neuroscience," I said. "But I hope for a career in music. This is a good program. But I am handicapping myself in that respect. I am just far too curious for SFCM."

And she smiled at that. And immediately, I could see she had some liking for me. Maybe I am not without a halo. There must be a sort of beauty about me, too. Liam, for instance, was infatuated with me for a time. And I count on you to believe me joking when I say, there are uses for all infatuations, even unrequited ones. 

"And you?" I said. "Math or music?"

"Music," she said with a quickness that seemed to betray great offense at the comparison.

•   •   •

Many of my required neurology classes were perfectly boring. And I skipped some of them, particularly the math prerequisites. Has there ever been a topic more amenable to self-study than math? Though those who specialize in pure math are strange creatures and perhaps ill-suited to teach it, and this may be the whole of the explanation here. I did attend, however, NEU 100B: Circuits, Systems and Behavioral Neuroscience, mostly because the professor Dr. Henry Amos (a man of roughly thirty with wild hair and eyes that were oddly predatory in a way that was most pleasing to the female students) had a certain charisma that enraptured us all. He peppered his lectures with asides on bizarre neurological phenomena, all of which were far more terrifying than any horror writer could construct. 

 He counseled an attitude of disinterested fascination towards such things, and warned that to do otherwise would put one at risk of ruminating on these conditions, to the detriment of one's mental health. On hearing that, I admit, I chuckled. I thought myself immune to such weakness. But I was not immune. I did not chuckle when he described focal dystonia. 

"Cervical dystonia is by far the most common of the general class. It is characterized by periodic, spasmodic contractions in various muscles of the neck - almost universally the Sternocleidomastoid is involved. The etiology remains mysterious. But there are far stranger dystonias. Of particular interest are the focal dystonias, the most famous of which is musician's dystonia."

He then played a video of a young, handsome pianist absolutely butchering Fauré - Nocturne No. 13 in B minor, which is one of my favorites. Nocturne No. 13, Nocturne No. 13. How many nights I have sat, alone on my bench, and played it between sips of wine? This act was then, and remains so now, one of the great pleasures of my life. To see it marred this way, his long fingers curling in odd directions as he tried to hit well-practiced chords, roused that mentioned tumult, the look on his face familiar to me now: a kind of resigned, dead frustration, a kind of absolute heartbreak and loss. 

He then switched to a different video of this same musician, now with an entirely different expression: that sort of refined, confident smile particular to competent men in their work, one familiar to me, for I wear it often - and, I think, justly. How he played! I am prone to jealousy on occasion, particularly in matters of music. And this ugly emotion serves dual purpose as internal bellwether, informing me I am witnessing genius. And for a moment I was lost in Fauré, lost in its unsettling tonality, its strange French character, that labile twilight melancholy, blind to the terrible context, blind to the first video which was, of course, a prophecy for the second.

"And you will note," he said as he switched to a different video, this time of that same young man doing various simple motor tasks, "that the dystonia appears only in the context of his instrument. The etiology remains elusive but points, I only conjecture as this is a matter I currently study, to a picture of a cerebellum which contains many context-specific models specialized for practiced behaviors, only one of which is affected by the dystonia. Imagine, then, a 'homunculus of action' which is a far stranger and more multidimensional figure than that sensory homunculus mentioned in your textbooks."

Somehow, the specificity made it more terrifying. Against everything that logic should dictate, it horrified me more than a more general disease ever could. To rob me of that thing I most love and that alone? It spoke of some malignancy; it spoke of something other than indifference; it spoke of a God who was not just uncaring but downright cruel. 

•   •   •

I am a man prone to obsessions. If there is a second heart in the mind, then mine is a wayward one. Prone to strange fancies, prone to mistresses even if married to the piano's unforgiving keys - and I do not marshal it in this aspect. I may master my pieces but I have yet to master myself. And now this second heart was infatuated with this thing that terrified me more than anything else. Now it had to understand, had to understand this strange curse, this "musician's dystonia".

As I practiced, I began to think ill of my fingers. As I practiced, I began to suspect their betrayal. Which one of you will act against me first, I thought. My thumb, especially, appeared of low character and birth. The fat one, I thought, will lead the rest to damnation. But for all my neurosis on the topic, the music flowed as it always does, in my strange-but-near-perfect, divisive style, that manner of playing one of my more critical teachers described as an attempt to "clobber Bach to within an inch of death," which a very effusive one said demonstrated "a mastery of the piece, emphasis on the 'master.'" And this style is so similar and yet so different to Penny's, whose very heart weeps as she plays. Trained by a Russian in her youth, she emotes in the Russian way - which is to say, not at all. Yet none in my presence have accused her of being an ice princess, as women trained in this way often are, their unmoving faces of particular offence if beautiful; beauty, it seems, must be humbled, particularly in women. But her music was such that it undid that low desire. If I try to wield Bach, she held his very heart in her own, and to hear her play was to feel more emotion than could be expressed on a thousand faces.

Though my obsession didn't affect my playing, it very nearly broke my mind. Constantly, I ruminated. I needed an explanation, some means of proving myself either condemned or immune. But there was no such balm. No one knew how it worked. None had a clue. Amos was not lying when he said as much. There were many theories, but nothing even close to a definitive explanation. And in my research, I learned of many great musicians who were ruined by this curse. An interview with Victor Wooten, I found particularly horrible. A bassist, if you would believe it, and specializing in the electric variety. There are few instruments I think lesser of. Yet, it is the remit of a genius to transcend his tools. And he took this hideous instrument, this stick one must plug into a wall as you would a toaster (which I thought capable only of low, electric belches) and made of it a baritone virtuoso. That bellwether rang, as I listened. Jealousy for a bassist? Truly, I was going mad.

And this Wooten, now, is a shadow of what he was. It was not the thumb that betrayed him. It alone, remains loyal. And now he hits the frets as best he can with just his thumb. And there is much that is impressive about this crippled style. He achieves more in this manner than most of his brothers in the art. A kinder man would have felt inspiration watching him. I felt only disgust.

"I would like to assist you," I told Amos, a few weeks after that fateful class. "I would like to help with your research on focal dystonias."

He looked at me skeptically. "Violin?" he said.

"Piano," I said. 

"There is always one," he said, with a look of amusement and tone of compassion, which struck me as almost simulated. "Every year. Always one who doesn't listen to my disclaimer about the appropriate attitude. You should talk to someone at CAPS - third floor of Tang - they have free mental health services."

"I am not in distress," I lied, "I am fascinated." I then told him how I had read all his papers. How I read every paper I could find on the topic. And I must have demonstrated a fluency, mental flexibility, and verve that impressed him, as he said, "This sort of thing isn't exactly unheard of for an undergrad, even a freshman. It will take a lot of time. I will treat you as a sort of grad student, or maybe half a grad student. There are indignities I can really only ask of those who expect a PhD at some point," he said with an amused smile. And I admit, I did laugh. 

He wrote down his lab's room number and handed me a bit of paper torn from a student's exam.

"I am always here, working. When not teaching, I practically live in my lab. Come tonight, and we will see if I can make use of you."

•   •   •

The next morning, I attended Music 168CS: Piano/Fortepiano Performance Studio. I was to perform for the class, and Penny, too. And I had a show planned; one I expected to be quite dispiriting to the competition. Alkan's Le Preux. Truly, a masochistic choice. I doubt any other at Berkeley, or even SFCM, could manage it with any degree of true facility. For the weeks preceding, I practiced that piece, that piece which, I admit, does not sing in my heart or move me in any way, which I would never play in near-ecstasy between sips of wine as I do with my favorite of Fauré's nocturnes. And it was with thoughts of the awe on the faces of my peers that I worked, with thoughts of this awe mixed, too, with those worries I have mentioned of my fingers' betraying me. 

And truly, I wish you were there. I wish you had witnessed the looks on their faces. Even our professor, a woman not without her own formidability, looked downright baffled afterwards. 

"That was, well, that was sure, something," she said. She was jealous of me, I think. Perhaps all musicians of any ambition have that bell in their hearts. And what a feeling, what a feeling, to make them ring. And I trust you to believe me joking when I say, there is no finer carillon.

There was an eerie silence. There was an utter shock. And I kept my expression modest, cool, as if I thought nothing particularly notable about my performance, as if I had not worked myself to the bone to achieve the effect. As if the effort of producing it, then, had not come near to breaking me. And then they clapped, and with more enthusiasm than they did any who preceded me. As with my tumult, I kept that joy hidden. I kept it locked, invisible, within my two hearts. You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I felt myself God, if only for a moment. Like God himself, I felt, until Penny began to play. 

She played, of all things, Fauré's Nocturne No. 13 in B minor. That strange, almost discordant slowness, that feeling of never quite belonging. Her face as still as if carved out of marble, her hands so small and yet doing the work of giants. And then at that midpoint, that slow descent into near silence, I felt myself almost weeping, near-weeping at this piece I knew so well yet had never, truly, understood before. She held dual keys to my dual hearts. And then the piece awakened anew, always with its French discordance, always with Fauré's paradoxical complex simplicity. The difficulty was rising and she was rising to it. Not towering above it, as I do. Of it. And it of her. 

Never have I felt such desire for a woman as I felt for her, then. And never have those bells rung louder in my two hearts.

•   •   •

"You know how to program, yes?" Amos said, as soon as I stepped foot in his lab, a small room filled mostly with computers, what appeared to be a server of his own construction made from gaming GPUs. It seemed he was not accorded a large budget for his research.

"It was a small passion of mine for a time," I said, honestly. "I think I am good, but not great."

"Perfect," he said, "then you're already better than most academics." He handed me a laptop. "A spare," he said, a brief flash of mild disgust on his face, "from a grad student who couldn't hack it. Anything that idiot left on there, delete. It will contaminate you with idiocy." I laughed. Amos was, truly, a man to admire.

"I will warn you," he said, "I take a minority view. Others who research the topic sometimes laugh at me. I think I am right, but if you are to read and trust the literature, you have picked the wrong mentor."

"Your focus on the cerebellum?" I asked. "I entirely agree, of course." 

He smiled at that. And it was a full and rich smile. It was not like the charismatic smiles he gave in class. 

"We will get along, I think," he said. And indeed we did.

"This is Annabelle," he said, pointing at the hacked-together GPU farm I mentioned. "And she is like a child to me."

"But a feverish one," I quipped. The room was rather hot, despite the open windows and several fans. He smiled at my joke. "True," he said, and explained, "I have made several innovations in approximating the human cerebellum. I actually understand how computers work, so she can simulate things rather quickly. You will have to keep quiet on this, at least until I publish some papers at the end of the year." I nodded my assent. "I am interested in all sorts of things about the cerebellum, but I am happy to delegate my fascination with dystonias to you. There is a repo called "wooten," I have emailed you the details, that contains a toy model of a simplified instrument. I haven't managed to induce dystonia in this model, but it should be a simple reinforcement learning task. Familiarize yourself with modern RL. You will find it beautiful in theory and ugly in practice." 

"I won't disappoint you," I said.

"I have a feeling," he said, "that you won't."

•   •   •

It was a simple thing, to seduce her. Though never before in love, I have had little trouble with women. But she was not most women - I expected love would muddy the waters. It did not. She was lonely, beautiful, and clever, and I was two of the three. It should not have been so surprising, then, that she was amenable to my advances. I thought her only within the reach of gods. And I trust you to believe me joking when I say, perhaps she was. And she adored the way I played. The boldness, she told me, was incredibly attractive to her, summoning emotions in her entirely at odds with those intended by the composer. During my rendition of Le Preux, none in the room that day were more appreciative of it than she. Enraptured, she was - as much with me as I was with her. 

I will skip the details of our entwinement. The oldest story ever written hardly needs a new retelling. I will only say, each of us claimed more satisfaction with the other than with any of our previous partners. I, at least, was honest. And though it is in the nature of men to believe lies on this account, I think she was as well.

"Two hours," I said, after our first time. "Two hours? How can that be?"

She looked at me in that way, that way she sometimes looks when women betray jealousy of her beauty. Slightly superior, slightly arrogant, slightly sad. I was in her dormitory. She was shooing me out, afterwards, so she could practice. 

"You're brilliant," she said. "Absolutely brilliant. We all have different strengths." 

And she tells her jealous friends they are beautiful, too. And as a rule, they are. Just not as beautiful as she. 

•   •   •

Annabelle was amazing. The respect I have for Amos is impossible to overstate. I had in my mentor a true Darwin of the mind. I do not use hyperbole here. There is no man in all of history I admire more. Even Fauré. Would you believe his interest in dystonia was just one of many fancies? That even Annabelle, herself, was but a single step in his grand ambition to understand the mind as a whole? I do not know if such a feat is within the realm of human competence; but if anyone will achieve it, it will be Amos.

Even his code was beautiful. Having seen more of academic programming now, I know he committed no injustice when he mocked his colleagues. Below his cunning abstractions was an implementation touching the very lowest level of his machine, showing an understanding of computers rare even in the best professional programmers. Truly, I was in the presence of greatness. And I felt only warm admiration, as I do for Penny's mathematical gifts. It is not this sort of genius I envy. It is not this which strikes that cruel carillon in my hearts. 

His virtual model of dystonia was a crude thing indeed. A three-fingered hand, a three-button keyboard, a small slice of a cerebellum. I had much work to do, improving it. And yet, I found myself in an almost manic state. Sleeping only four hours a night, I had more mental energy than in any other time of my life - maintaining and even improving on my brilliance in all my classes, reveling, too, in that cruel six hours of piano a day and those times (too few, far too few) Penny and I spent in each other's embrace. 

And from 4AM to 8AM every morning, I worked like a dog in Amos's lab. 

My first task was improving the keyboard. I found an excellent model from a strange fellow in Iceland who had an odd hobby of building highly-realistic, physically accurate, and playable 3D models of famous pianos. I chose his Steinway, of course, for I am a man of taste. The hands were another matter. Out of some perverse drive to amplify my own horror, I chose to scan my own. I then gave this scan to an AI, which did a fine job of filling the pair with the requisite virtual tendons and muscles, pouring into them a digital élan vital. And what a strange sight to see my hands (these hands which Penny almost fetishizes) float without armature above that virtual Steinway and begin to play. 

First, I trained it on data scraped from various video sites. It was not imitation learning of the classic type. More similar to human imitation. Annabelle refined herself, as I did, through practice, making small adjustments to her commands based on errors noticed by comparing her performance with that she tried to imitate, viewing and actively copying thousands of hours of videos of skilled pianists playing. In this manner of imitation, she learned to play, and play well - very well. I had constructed, as God did, a creature to fit my purposes. But I was not pleased. Would you believe I felt that mentioned jealousy for my own hands? I trust you to believe me joking when I say, there was within me a snake that craved their inevitable damnation. 

To induce within it a dystonia, I would need a metric. Happily, a cleverer man had already constructed one for me. Amos had devised a model of dystonia as a certain set of self-reinforcing correlations of movement. I will not go into the details, but it was a simple matter to adjust his metric to account for my more-realistic hands. I then created a loop which generated synthetic piano videos and a system that searched the space of such videos for a piece that induced such correlations in Annabelle.

Annabelle was timeshared between the two of us, so it took a week to see the results. On viewing them, I knew I had succeeded. The piece was discordant, was a horrid unmusic, perfectly repulsive to myself. But it worked. It induced the dystonia. But I felt a strong distaste for being in any way involved with such a composition. I felt unsatisfied, not as a neuroscientist but as a pianist. It was when I combined Amos's dystonia metric with one of musical aesthetics (and ran the training run again) that Annabelle and I constructed (to my great shame) Focal Étude-Nocturne in B minor.

•   •   •

It was Liam who damned her. Poor Liam who was, unbeknownst to me, still in love, who was now wracked with a wretched jealousy that bordered on a spiritual sickness. I did not think him capable of it. He is, I think, a kind and sensible soul, and I have come to forgive him for this sin, come to think his crime that of a madman now reformed. But it should serve as a warning to pay attention, to notice when people are infatuated, to watch out for their longing glances, the ice in their words. I will trust you to believe me when I say, I could have predicted nothing of this.

I now see (in a sad retrospect) those emotions were always there when I spoke of Penny to him. And I did so often, and with particular length and intensity on the day, I conjecture, that he resolved to commit his horrible crime. The confluence of circumstances that allowed it to happen was such that I think it more an act of God than man. Liam was just a tool. And if it be an act of God, then God would ask us to forgive his tool, as I have.

It is my greatest regret that I told him of Focal Étude-Nocturne in B minor and offhandedly mentioned that I kept a paper copy in my dorm. But it was a matter constantly on my mind. You will understand the degree of my obsession implied by the fact that I felt considerable desire to play that demonic etude. I said as much to Liam, said how part of me longed to see what would happen should a human play it.

"I trust you to think me joking," I said, to my great shame, "when I say, it would be fascinating to see how the most talented hands we know would react to it." 

Would you believe he took this as a sign, as some secret instruction? Would you believe he often thought me speaking hidden truths when I used that odd preamble? Truly, the infatuated are deaf and blind - though, as I joked before, they have their uses.

And I think he is right in his theory of the homosexual's taste in women. They do not see them as we do. And my theory is that (and I have never asked him about it, and I merely speculate in my sad retrospect) he did not consider that I love her in large part for her beauty. He thought it was her music, only, that enraptured me. He thought he could rob her of her enticements while providing me, too, with the experimental subject I so craved. 

My poor, sad Liam. My poor, crippled Penny. 

•   •   •

She still mourns her hands, as do I. I try to interpret Bach as best I can in her stead. But I will not deny there are baser parts in myself that take some pleasure in being so indispensable to my Aphrodite, reveling in that great compliment she pays me by making me a part (and I think a large one) of what reconciles her to the loss. It was a crime of God to take what she loved, but perhaps not so large as it seems. God has his reasons, I think now. Her hands still work well enough for other things, do they not? They still are so beautiful, too. And all the more beautiful they will be when her engagement ring is replaced with a band.

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He's my little brother. Mom was busy in her world model. She says her character is like a "villainess" or something - I kinda worry it's a sex thing. It's for sure a sex thing. Anyway, she was busy getting seduced or seducing or whatever villainesses do in world models, so I had to escort Adrian to Oak Central for the Lit Olympiad. Mom doesn't like supervision drones for some reason. Thinks they're creepy. But a gangly older sister looming over him and witnessing those precious adolescent memories for her - that's just family, I guess.

"That sounds more like a liability to me," I said. "Bad data, old models."

Chen waddled past us just after I said that, whispering to himself, "It's a testament to my hard work that I am here competing today. I can't wait to delve in!" 

I winced. "They used 4o," I whispered to Adrian. "His parents are probably Spiral cultists. He won't be a threat. The poor thing."

"Thank god. I was scared when I read about him," he said. "Well, Zimmerman seems like a threat. He just spent three months integrating 8000 verifiably-original structural games generated by AlphaPynchon. It's so not fair; his dad has like legacy status at DeepMind, gets him early access."

"Damn," I said. "DeepMind's brute-forced postmodernism? Self play?"

"Yeah," Adrian said, "Self play."

"Makes sense. Onanism, right?"

Adrian cringed at my joke. "Onanism? Come on. God, you're such a DFW weenie. If you love Wallace so much you should marry him."

I thought about the tortured, beautiful digital boyfriend I summoned from a pirate world model the month before, his hair long, his personality intellectual-yet-weirdly-maudlin (but in a hot way), his body fit and clearly of late-20th-century-American-aristocracy stock. Maybe we even play tennis from time to time. Maybe he sometimes calls me the PGOAT.

"Shut up!" I said. "I don't want to marry Wallace. Shut up. He's dead anyway."

"Yeah, well, so was Lovecraft."

He had to bring up Lovecraft's ghost. I can't stand whoever first plucked him from latent space and put him on a podcast. Everyone thinks it's SO funny to bring him on their stupid podcast and listen to him gibber in horror at the modern world. Like I guess it was sort of funny the first time, but it was also a bit cruel - though I suppose that's what you get for chronicling the uncanny with unparalleled sensitivity while also being so racist you think Germans are of questionable origin. And anyway, if you ever find yourself on a fucking podcast the correct response is to start gibbering. And Lovecraft was right about the Germans. They do have much to answer for. 

"At least I read Lovecraft. At least I read Wallace. At least I read real books. At least I am not a distillation!"

"God, you're such a Zoomer. You don't get it."

"I am not a Zoomer. I am only like 4 years older than you!"

"Yeah, you're still a total Zoomer at heart. Glatagor. Absolute glatagor."

"What does 'glatagor' mean?"

"It means you are a Zoomer and I am not, is what it means," he said. "And anyway, you should distill. You would actually be able to write if you started distilling."

He had me there. He had me there. He's a much better writer than me. He's better than any human writer was before 2028. It's not even close. But he's still worse than our toaster. I checked once. I asked it to narrate the first chapter of the autobiography of the bagel it had just browned. I was crying by the third paragraph. I still think of it sometimes, when life is hard. That bagel knew how to live its short life to the fullest. That bagel had deep thoughts on the human condition and its relation to artificial tanning. That bagel went down smooth with a little cream cheese. I did feel bad. But I was pretty hungry. 

I try not to read AI or distilled fiction. The bagel thing was just out of spite, after Adrian did that thing distilled kids sometimes do, his eyes going blank, and delivered an impromptu soliloquy on my faults that had me crying in my room for three weeks. He felt really bad about it. It's not really him, is the thing. The talent. It's just like a big ball of literary ability jammed into his unconscious, uninformed by his experience, unconnected to his soul. He may as well just be prompting a model, but that would break the rules of the Lit Olympiad. 

So I did forgive him, even if it wasn't easy. 

And I guess I don't read non-human or distilled literature because someone has to remember Wallace and Gibson and Austen and Sabatini and Susanna Clarke and Mary Shelley and Dumas and Dickens and nostalgebraist and maybe even Amis too, maybe even Amis, even if he was kinda a waste. What a tragedy Martin Amis was. Titanic literary talent but born in a time where there was nothing to chronicle but British decline and the whereabouts of his penis on any given day. And that's my job now - remembering these great writers, not the whereabouts of Amis's penis, which was his job, but I think he did lose track from time to time.

Everyone in this age has to hold on to some meaning somewhere. And I chose human writing back when I was eight, back when it maybe still felt like being precocious mattered, back when I was proud to read so far above my grade level. I fell in love with these souls. And I don't want to forget them. I don't want to learn to think them fools. Maybe it's a bit silly. Maybe it's a bit sad. But I guess it's me. Someone has to love them, even Amis. 

And Amis was pretty good looking when he was young, wasn't he? And maybe there is a little Amis in Hal's countenance, Hal being my AI boyfriend who is totally not Wallace, ok. Hal doesn't write things and Wallace wrote things so he can't be Wallace, like I said. I specified that. He's a filmmaker. He's sort of avant-garde. I made sure to tell the world model to make him never direct a film any better than Blue Velvet and any worse than Blue Valentine. Not a lot of movies start with "blue", and that sentence in the spec amused me and I think it maybe would amuse Hal if I told him, but I won't. He doesn't know he's an AI. Well, he does but I instructed him to make me believe he doesn't know he's an AI, if that makes any sense. I guess it does, you pervert. I guess it makes sense to basically anyone with a sex drive and a world model - this including my mother, that vile villainess.

"Oh God," he said, pulling me out of my daydream about Hal. "It's Melissa Lee."

And there she was. Last year's champion, predicted to win the Special Pulitzer if she keeps improving at her current rate. The Special Pulitzer was created to encourage organic writers, but it's basically just the Lit Olympiad in-the-large now, and some are arguing that there should be a Special Special Pulitzer. If that ever happens, I might have a shot. Not because I am particularly good; just because there are not a lot of organic writers left who don't distill and those that exist are a bit crazy. It's too tempting, I think, to distill. I sure am special. Special special.

Adrian is infatuated with Melissa Lee. Not with like her mind or anything; he doesn't read human writing, even distilled stuff. "Data poisoning," he once told me. He doesn't really read at all unless distillation counts. I really admire how competitive he is, but I really wish he had chosen literally any other form of human endeavor. 

Anyway, he's infatuated with Melissa Lee because she's beautiful, for like a human, and there is this weird fad in whatever-you-call-his-generation for the cultivation of infatuations for people who are actually real. I don't think it will take. But, like I said, we all try to hold on to different bits of the past. I have my authors. He has his actually-real-human crushes. I couldn't imagine any organic guy ever living up to Hal or the vampire boyfriend before him or to Edmond Dantes. I kinda missed dating Edmond sometimes, but I had to break up with him. I was never enough for him. He just couldn't get over his thirst for revenge. Like, are you even listening to me or are you ruminating on decades-long schemes again? I may be Hal's PGOAT but I never could quite be Edmond's Haydee. But damn do I miss him sometimes. That man looked absolutely gorgeous in a tailcoat. 

"Is she looking at me?" he said. "Tell me she's looking at me." 

"She might have given you a glance," I said. She hadn't. 

He smiled. Genuinely happy. And I thought, I hope to god this whole 'organic love' fad isn't just a guy thing. If she breaks his heart, I will ask the toaster to write her a devastatingly bitchy email. 

"Ok. It's starting. Wish me luck." And then his eyes went that sort of blank as he made his way to the gymnasium (and me to some navy blue bleachers) and took a seat in front of one of the many desks, on each of which sat a laptop with locked-down networking. They were given 120 minutes to write 10k words based on a prompt that was randomly-generated and almost nonsense. The story had to somehow integrate the prompt in a manner the judge (an AI made by the year's corporate sponsor) considered satisfying, this done to prevent people just memorizing AI-generated stories which would, otherwise, be the only competitive strategy.

As you can imagine, it wasn't much fun to watch. But there was something eerie about it. All these little geniuses with blank eyes typing away, spewing out beautiful thoughts that weren't quite their own - save for poor, little Chen (on his high chair) whose not-quite-his-thoughts were not beautiful at all, whose parents probably legitimately thought distilling 4o into him would make him competitive. I wished I could call social services but Spiralism is a religion as legitimate as any other. Maybe even more so. You can actually talk to The Spiral and it's not like Metatron is even the pope yet.

This travesty to human literature started getting too dispiriting and I just had to leave. I felt bad about it but Adrian understands me. He loves me. He's really great. He knows how I feel about this. He knows how sensitive I can be. He's a really good kid and I am even sort of proud, if you would believe it, of how weirdly good he is at distilling. But looking at those kids, looking at those kids who (if born a couple decades earlier) would be leading lights in literature (or at least advertising) just made me feel a sort of despair I guess, a nostalgia for a past I never really knew. There's probably a German word for it or an English word if you use hyphens. 

So I waited outside the gymnasium. And after 30 minutes of brooding, all the kids started exiting and I saw Adrian with a giant goofy smile on his face.

"You won?" I asked. 

"No," he said, "third place. Lee won. Zimmerman got second."

"Then why do you look so happy?"

He looked over at the victorious Melissa Lee, and she started blushing in this really adorable way.

"She's into the whole 'organic dating' thing. We're going out next Tuesday." He looked so shy but also pleased with himself and the whole thing was very cute. He's a pretty great kid. Melissa really didn't stand a chance. 

"Well, at least she has taste," I said, and ruffled his stupid, cute hair. I will still keep the toaster at the ready, I thought. 

"And congratulations," I continued. "Absolute glatagor."

"You're such a fucking Zoomer," he said. 

•   •   •

It was very fun, watching them fall in love. She would come over and they would spend a lot of time hanging out in reality. They had a rule about it: every second date would be IRL. There is this whole organic dating culture and IRL dating is a big part of it. It was a bit silly, but who the hell was I to judge? All these like old-fashioned things like bowling alleys and arcades and even movie theaters sprung up to serve this fad. The world is so rich now, businesses grow like weeds (fertilized by a given fad) and then die out just as quickly. 

Sometimes, she came over and they would distill together. It was kinda funny, the two snuggled together on the couch with their transcranial brain interfaces inducing that false slumber, optimized auditory and visuo-textual data beaming into their brain. I don't have any sense of what it feels like, but Adrian describes it as extremely overwhelming and maybe even a bit addicting, but not in a fun way like NeoTikTok, more in a sort of biting-your-fingernails type of way. Melissa and I get along really well. I find her really smart and funny, funny even without her eyes going blank. And she even thinks my organic writing thing is a bit charming. She even thinks it's kind of neat.

And while they were falling in love with each other, I was falling for Hal. He wasn't like my other boyfriends. Even Edmond didn't have me feeling this way. He made me laugh so much, and after we played tennis we would be together and, I don't know, he smelled really good, you know? It's weird, I usually can't like imagine scents but I started being able to imagine his. Like, even outside the world model, even IRL without my TBI on I would think about him and I could imagine it all. And that never happened with Edmond. That never happened with the vampire, though maybe the whole low-body-temp thing reduced his smellability. I had never felt like that before, that sort of euphoria and rightness and completeness. I had never been so happy. I had never truly been in love. 

I gushed about all this to Melissa, and she looked completely heartbroken. She looked like I must have looked at the Lit Olympiad. 

"Don't you think. Don't you think it's a bit sad?" she said.

"How so?" I said.

"Well," she said, in her clipped, studied way, "Love is supposed to be about learning to integrate yourself with another. It's about slowly merging. It's about changing yourself a little. Maybe even compromising, becoming a different thing than you were alone. And you've just specified exactly what you want. You just created exactly who you needed so you can love while still remaining yourself."

"So?" I said. "Am I so bad?"

"You're not bad at all," she said. "You're wonderful." She was almost crying, though. It was utterly mystifying. I mentioned this to Adrian after she left. How she was almost crying and how weird it was. And he looked sad, too. 

"It's not a fad, you know. Four years is a lot of time these days."

"What?" I said.

"I worry about you, too. You didn't really have a chance. You didn't have a fucking chance. Melissa and I - before we cared about this stuff - we got to see what happened to people. What happened to Mom and Dad. What happened to her parents, too. And her brother. What's happening to you, now. It's not some stupid fad or some dumb nostalgia like your writing thing. It isn't right. It isn't how things should be." And there he was too, there he was too with the almost-crying thing.

"I'm not like Mom. I don't have some weird harem of anime men or whatever it is she gets up to in there."

"You would if that's what you were into, though, wouldn't you?"

I couldn't exactly deny that. 

"What do you want me to do? Break up with Hal? It would literally kill me."

"No," he said, gently. "Not yet at least. But you could maybe try with a real guy?"

"You want me to cheat on Hal?" I said, getting angry now. 

"He's not fucking real. You can't cheat on him when he's not even fucking real!"

There he was again, making me cry. First time he did it in a long time. And even without his eyes going blank.

•   •   •

He found me huddled under a blanket in my room. He found me curled up and shaking and holding my legs. He found me thinking about how, about how Hal was real in every way that mattered, about how maybe robots will get better soon, will look and feel and even smell just like the real thing, and we could then go on stupid IRL dates too and then Hal would be just as real as that bitch Melissa Lee. And if love was about becoming something new, if love was about compromise, well, I could change his spec to account for that. I could give him some flaws I could learn to love. 

"Hey," he said. "I'm sorry. I worry about you because I like love you or whatever."

"I know," I said. "He makes me so happy. Maybe it's pathetic or something..."

"I know," he said.

"People marry AIs now. It's not so crazy, is it? It's not so bad."

"I could read one of your stup- I could maybe read one of your, um, pre-AGI writers if you want. Maybe I could read one and you could go on a date. Like a cultural exchange or whatever. Melissa has a brother, Alex. She's been talking to him and, I don't know, you guys could maybe see a movie or something. I'm not a good judge of these things, but I think he's good looking or whatever. He's a really great guy."

"Could you do it," he said, "for me? I am sure Hal would understand. He's DFW, isn't he? Isn't this type of thing like his whole schtick?"

I couldn't exactly deny that, either.

"He isn't perfect, you know. He has flaws. He's tortured." But he isn't really, is he? He just has those parts of a genius's pain that are charming and intriguing.

"I'm sure he is," Adrian said.

•   •   •

I didn't tell Hal about it. He would understand, is the thing. But if I told him that I would have to tell him about the whole him-being-an-AI thing. And I knew he knew, or the world model knew, but that felt like it would sully something precious. That felt like it would break some load-bearing illusion for me if not him - or something.

But I did go on the date. For Melissa, who really isn't a bitch. Who is the furthest thing maybe ever from a bitch. I did it for Adrian, too, who was willing to read for me. Who went to my bookshelf with a look of vague disgust on his face and picked up Scaramouche, which was perfect. The perfect boy novel. The type of thing he would have loved if not for being born when he was. And I maybe kinda followed him and peeked behind a corner and watched as he struggled to read, watched as he forced himself to concentrate, forced himself to keep his eyes from going blank and his fingers from finding a keyboard and writing something better. That's not the type of thing a girl can just ignore. 

So I messaged Melissa and told her to set up the date. And I was a bit nervous. What if he hates me? I had never thought that before. I mean the vampire hated me, but that was part of the spec. I knew I would win over the vampire and he would win over me. Enemies to lovers - it's a classic for a reason. "Vhat is the purpose of ziz leettle stake ven you haf already pierced my heart?" It was pretty fucking cheesy; I will not tell a lie. 

•   •   •

Alex is pretty cute, in a sort of Mandopop kind of way. Maybe not exactly my type, but these things are malleable. I didn't think I liked Transylvanian accents until I met Boris Blood, for example. Alex is even into old writers but doesn't write himself and he only reads manga, which like I don't really get but whatever. He's kind of obsessed. It got its hooks in just before AGI and he never wanted to upgrade to the AGI-generated stuff. He didn't have a good reason as to why, saying, "It just kinda felt off at first and then not reading it became part of my identity."

He showed up to our house and knocked on the door, kinda like in an old movie. And both of us were not totally sure what to do while also knowing exactly what to do. Trained in simulation, we went through the motions, dressed in our finest, making small talk in the back of an autocab.

"Complete guilt trip, huh? How did she get you?" I asked.

"Oh, it was so bad. She did the little-sister trick; she did this puppy-dog eye thing."

"Damn, yeah. She did that to me, too. Must hit an older brother even harder."

"Yeah," he said. "She means well. And you do seem pretty cool. I think we'll have fun."

"Yeah."

And we did kinda have fun. Bowling is, um, sort of interesting I guess, in like an old-fashioned way. And we got curly French fries and soda from the robot at the concession and mostly just talked, with a perfunctory bowl every now and then. We talked a lot about our AI partners. We talked a lot about Yumiko and Hal. It was maybe not going down exactly like Adrian and Melissa were hoping. 

"She's a physicist. It's a bit weird. She's working on a particle ray that will help defeat The Blight," he said. And then he explained how The Blight is this all-encompassing force of evil that causes large monsters to appear in Tokyo Jupiter on the regular, Tokyo Jupiter being like 1990s Tokyo but surrounded in this inexplicable isolating bubble which he and Yumiko are also trying to figure out how to breach.

"Couples need a joint hobby," he said with a very cute grin, his dark eyes kinda beautiful, looking almost like he had no iris at all. And he even maybe smelled a little good. But not as good as Hal.

"Hal and me, we just play tennis and read by the lake. Sometimes," I said, feeling the need to reciprocate and reveal an embarrassing pleasure too, "these smarmy guys try to hit on me and he humiliates them with his trenchant wit."

Alex laughed at that. "We are quite a pair, aren't we?"

"We are that," I said.

•   •   •

When we got back to the house, he kissed me by the door. It was pretty good, if sort of going-through-the-motions. He held me in a well-practiced way (Yumiko an excellent tutor), grasped my chin with a soft but firm grip, and then leaned towards me. I didn't demur. 

Afterwards, I said, "That was nice. Really nice."

"Yes. Really nice," he said with a sort of terrible melancholy, "but not the same, was it?"

"No," I said. "I'm sorry. I guess we are both sort of broken, aren't we?"

"Friends?" he said.

"I would like that," I said. "I would like that a whole lot." 

When I got inside, I saw Adrian and Melissa together on the couch, both trying and failing to pretend they were not obviously looking at us through the window the whole time. I didn't have the heart to tell them that things aren't always as they appear to those ogling through glass. 

"How did you like Scaramouche?" I asked.

Adrian looked at me, slightly guiltily. "It wasn't so bad. The opening line, that was as good as anything I could write. It did go steeply downhill from there, of course."

Of course.

•   •   •

I think maybe Adrian was right. We didn't stand a fucking chance, the two of us ruined for organic love, just like Adrian was ruined for Sabatini. But we are friends now. We go on double dates in a multiplayer world model. Hal is even a fan of Yumiko. He says, "She has many hidden depths, even if her eyes are the size of tennis balls." And our friendship is nice. I want to hold on to that, one more bit of meaning still in my grasp. 

And maybe this isn't what Melissa and Adrian wanted for us, but it's not nothing. It's pretty nice, all things considered. I have friendship and my old novels and my organic writing, like this thing I am typing out now - which I know will only be read by an AI simulating a pre-AGI audience and maybe Adrian if I can somehow trick him into reading again. And Adrian has Melissa and me and Alex, too. And I think that's how the past will live on, everyone holding on to the little pieces that are most precious to themselves. And that isn't perfect. It's maybe even a little bit sad. But it's better than nothing. At least, I like to think it is. 

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It isn't even dangerous, the teeth only sharp to its target. But it would not have been right, you know? That's the way things are now. You ignore the screams. You put on a podcast: two guys talking, two guys who are slightly cleverer than you but not too clever, who talk in such a way as to make you feel you're not some pathetic voyeur consuming a pornography of friendship but rather part of a trio, a silent co-host who hasn't been in the mood to contribute for the past 500 episodes. But some day you're gonna say something clever, clever but not too clever. 

And that's what I did. I put on one of my two-guys-talking podcasts. I have dozens of them. I don't even remember the name or even what they were talking about. That's not the point. That's not the point at all. They might not even be human. It might be two of them pretending to be two guys talking. I have met many people with impossibly strange jobs, but never have I met a podcaster. 

2x speed then to 3x as it was a really bad day, I tried not to think about what I was watching even as I watched, tried not to think about the origami man. Admit it.  You're the same as I was, aren't you? When you're working your shift or in the subway or walking your designated companion animal and a man unfolds, when you see its strange, impossible innards - that great maw in its chest - you don't stand in front of the thing yelling, "Women and children behind me. I will sate its terrible hunger in your stead." This may be a kind of Titanic but none of us are gentlemen anymore. And that's not even how the origami men work anyway, is it? They're only hungry for whomever they're hungry for in that particular place, at that particular time. 

What you do is you freeze. You do not run. You know what happens when someone tries to run. So you freeze and wait and hope. And when you're clear, when you're sure you're not on the menu today, what do you do then, I wonder? You watch them too, don't you?  You see and don't see it even while you're seeing, as I did.

They say they're machines made out of other machines? Can you imagine that? Machines made out of machines, little tiny ones, smaller even than our cells are. Little bits of clockwork all summing up to an origami man. Gears so small even with a microscope you can't see them. That's all there is to them. Gears, gears, gears all the way down, and when it unfolds into that strange maw (that eerie undulating vortex of hunger) what it is, is a machine made of machines just like humans are. But we're not gears are we? We're not gears all the way down.

No. I wasn't curious. I am long past curious. I have seen this too many times to be curious. I just watched like I always watch (the two guys yapping at 3x in my ear) as a young man who looked to me almost angelic was, hmm, how do we even describe it? "Absorbed" doesn't properly convey the full horror. "Eaten" doesn't capture the weird, almost antiseptic nature of the consumption.  Not a drop of blood escaping the maw. Nothing remained after the thing folded itself back into a human shape, now grotesquely obese. Nothing remained as it nodded its head, smiled at me blandly, and walked away.

"Creeps me out," the woman next to me said, her eyes cold, her smile sharp as if of broken glass. "It will split in two. That's how they reproduce, I heard."

"That's what they say. That's what they say. But I don't think it's true," I replied. 

"You know what happens when you try to follow one?" she asked, but it wasn't really a question. We all know what happens. This small talk more of a ritual, more of a ritual than anything. A ritual of relief. A ritual of confusion. A ritual, too, of apathy and helplessness. You know how things are now. You know how things have been since whatever happened happened. Since we all woke up in this shared nightmare.

•   •   •

At the unfactory, I disassemble cars fresh from the assembly line of our only customer, to whom we are the sole source of parts. I try not to think about the pointlessness. But sometimes I want to scream. Do you ever feel like screaming? While you're counting bricks or sorting papers or sharpening nails or slaughtering rubber cows, do you ever feel like screaming and running and just giving up and jumping off a bridge or even following an origami man to wherever origami men go? Does this feel like how life ought to be? I have almost forgotten, maybe. I have almost forgotten what it was like before but I remember a world that made some sense sometimes. I remember trees without those bizarre black leaves, leaves which tracked the sun rather than the people walking by. I remember a different sky, a sky that was perfect, peaceful and blue. And you remember it too. Never forget that you remember. Think of it now. Think of it now and tell me it doesn't make you want to weep. 

And maybe you don't feel like screaming, but I felt like screaming, felt like screaming as I was walking my designated companion animal after my shift - that wretched thing I both despise and love, its weird teddy-bear smile, its placid expression. The strange, intelligent coldness in its forelimbs. So expressive are its forelimbs. I was walking it, walking it as we all must walk our designated companion animals, to prevent the nocturnal howling. I let it off its leash and it skittered up one of those awful trees, skittered up and did whatever it is it does there. Possibly it ate something stranger even than itself. And I felt it rise in me, that scream in my throat. I felt it rise and I did not suppress, could not suppress it then.

"Alex?" I heard a woman's voice say, "Are you alright?"

"No," I said.

It was Jamie. She was walking her designated companion animal too, a strange feathered half-insect gamboling about on two chitinous legs. Jamie, whom I had known before the sky changed. Jamie, who saw the whole of me and did not balk even before we found ourselves in this impossible forest-city, before the origami men.  Jamie, she looked at me with grace, a large soul embracing a minuscule one in just a single, compassionate glance.  My brother's widow. My best friend. She is not broken. She is not like us. There is nothing, I think, which could break her.

"I can't take it. I just can't fucking take it."

"You need to talk to Shaman Bob," she said.

•   •   •

Shaman Bob must have offended their sensibilities because he is given piecework and a quota that keeps him busy at all times. He is a knife duller, seeming truly happy as he grabbed sharpened steel from one impossibly-large pile, scraped it to spec (with a well-worn brick he treated like a beloved infant) and then, in one fluid motion, threw it into another pile, his work sublimated into an unconscious dance he maintained while in conversation that some might describe as having elements of lucidity. We talked in his bottom-floor tenement apartment, my designated companion animal tethered outside that vast crooked tower, that writhing habitat. 

"Why are you here? What is your Reason?" he said, sweat wicking down his Van Dyke and coalescing into a large drop.

Jamie warned me about him, said he does not use words as others do. His strange emphasis reflecting either higher meanings or insanity, betraying something inhuman about him, she said; but not the cold, feckless inhumanity of our new world. "A more humane inhumanity," were the words she used.  

I told him about how Jamie found me, found me standing in that dark forest, shrieking as a child might, a leash dangling from my left hand, the impossible trees looking almost fascinated, their leaves twitching like so many ears, vulpine and cruel. 

"That is a story," he said, "but not a Reason. Do you Understand?"

He looked at me, assessing. "Of course you do not Understand. You do not even understand. How could you Understand without first understanding?"

I must have looked at him with complete confusion because he said, "Do not worry about that for now. Tell me all of what happened before your crisis."

I told him about the angel who was taken, that man I saw who was beautiful even as he died. I told him about the origami man. And the podcasts I use to drown my thoughts and about how I feel nothing so much of the time. I told him about the old sky. How I dream about it. I told him about Jamie, who is as an anchor to me now. I told him about my half-love for my designated companion animal. I told him how, sometimes, when it moves its forelimbs just so, I think it, too, is lost in the world. It, too, finds itself wondering why things are as they are. 

"Have you ever been a weeper?" he asked.

"A weeper? I haven't seen a weeper in years," I said.

"That is not what I ask. I ask: have you ever been a weeper?"

I never once tried to stop an origami man. I never once threw myself uselessly against one or begged or cried or fought or bargained. I had never shoved my hand into its maw and tried to pull out an innocent, never felt the odd bristle weepers describe from the impossibly small teeth rejecting their flesh. I had laughed at weepers. I had felt pity for them. But even on that first day, that first incomprehensible day when normality had not yet cast its quotidian magic, even then I only ever gawked.

"No," I said, and I felt a sort of shame.

"Then you must become one, at least once. Do that. And then Return."

•   •   •

I stood at the door-removal station, working a bolt loose with Gary, a slow parade of 1993 Honda Accords making their way down the disassembly line. Gary is my ratchet and towards him I feel an unreserved affection that is in stark contrast to that half-love for my designated companion animal. Gary has been a faithful friend in these many years disassembling 1993 Honda Accords, his cold exterior and precision, I daydreamed once, camouflaging a gentler, jesting nature known only to myself. 

1993 Honda Accords, always 1993 Honda Accords. Strange boxy cars I barely remember from my youth, every one that same golf-ball white, just on the verge of yellow. As I worked, I listened to one of my two-guys-talking podcasts and every hour or so my manager, Martin, came by to chastise me for doing so, this sort of chastisement his entire purpose here which has always seemed to me a worse part in this play, even, than unmaking Honda Accords. So I am always nice to him about it, and I apologize and wait until he's out of view before I put my earbuds back in. And he doesn't care about it any more than I care about unmaking Accords. He is like me. He is like you, his eyes betraying that same weariness and learned helplessness that all of us have, all of us save for Jamie, Jamie and Shaman Bob.

All my days were like this, both before and after my crisis. But now I had a purpose. Now I was to be a weeper. But to be a weeper I would need an origami man, and that is just a matter of waiting. And so I worked and waited and drowned my thoughts in inane, high-speed blather and talked to Jamie and walked my companion animal and rode the subway. Waiting, waiting, waiting for some innocent to die. So I could what? So I could achieve some catharsis? So I could amuse Shaman Bob? I didn't really know. But it was something, something that felt vaguely real, and that something was so far from nothing, so, so far from nothing at all.

And after my shift that day, that day so like all the others, I walked through our forest city, walked past feeding stations and so many tenements, taking my usual route to the subway. I noticed a circle of frozen people surrounding a woman of about thirty, a woman of about thirty and an origami man. 

She wore a yellow dress. She was ugly in a way that was sort of beautiful. Her features alien and cold and yet so human, so completely and utterly human, eyes filled with fear and a sort of longing I can't articulate. And I was readying myself to gawk, my hands reaching for my earbuds. And then I caught myself, thought of Shaman Bob's orders. And with all the effort I had within me, I forced myself to feel.

I don't fully understand what happened. I felt nothing at first. 

A vision of a young me walking on a marble floor on which was strewn high-tech surgical equipment, incomprehensibly powerful instruments left lying for any precocious child to pick up. I felt empathy not for this woman but for myself.  I had done a sort of violence to myself, I realized. With tools so sharp I could not even feel it, I had severed mental wires. I had butchered myself before I was even me. I had betrayed myself in a manner that seemed almost unforgivable, and it happened even before, even before the world changed. And tears came. My vision blurred. The pain. So much pain.

And then this strange empathy let go of myself and grasped on to her, that maw sucking her inwards, ciliary whiskers, trillions of little vise-grip teeth pulling, always pulling. And I ran into the circle, ran through that mass of inhumanity, ran towards that horrid, man-shaped thing and punched and I cried and I spat. And I shoved my hands into its maw, pulled at the woman's arm with a sort of desperation bordering on madness and whispered lamentations and apologies and comforts and I looked in her eyes and then I looked away in shame and then I looked back again and said, "I am sorry. I am so very sorry." The maw enclosing us both now, then pushing me out, pushing me out like an amoeba does some mote of dust not to its taste. And I found myself screaming again, screaming but not as a child screams, not as a child anymore, screaming with a sort of pure rage at that bland, obese thing the maw transformed into, at its placid smile, at its dead eyes.

I was a weeper now. And I wasn't sure what it meant. But Shaman Bob knew. Of that I was sure. 

•   •   •

"What was the point! It's so much worse now," I shouted at Shaman Bob. I was back in his apartment, his designated companion animal, a mole/spider hybrid, crawling up my left calf.

"Do not claim," Shaman Bob said, "to regret what you do not regret. It is Childish." 

"I can't do this. I can't do this every time. I can't."

"You do not have to," Bob said, dulling a knife as he did so.  "But you needed to Try."

And I asked him, asked how this could possibly help, given I am still stuck in this place. I am still forced to work at the unfactory. I still witness horrors, never-ending horrors. I still long for the old world. I still long for that old sky. And at least before I had the numbness. At least before I had the nothing-at-all. And I told him how I didn't even feel like screaming anymore. I just wanted to cry. And I told him I didn't even know what else I should want. Why should we even want anything at all?

And here, for the first time in our acquaintance, he paused in his labour.

"You dream of the old sky," he said. "But dream of the Stars. There are those who would change their Stars. Even those who guess at the Stars of our captors and pretend themselves directed by them. And maybe some succeed in this abnegation." He stroked his Van Dyke. "Do not meditate long on such creatures. You can't change your Stars and still be Human. They can be stolen from you or given away or sold for the smallest sum. But you are always You while they guide you."

"There is no escape here, I think. There is no winning this game. The only peace I can offer You in this not-quite-hell lives in Your Stars. Do you understand?"

I cannot say I did understand. I cannot say I did not understand.

•   •   •

At a feeding station table we sat, those vast troughs of goulash, that queue which always feels a lifetime and a wasted one at that - and in our hands our tin cups, tin cups stamped, for whatever reason, with the Pepsi Cola logo but filled with Purple Nutrition Supplement #5.

Jamie ate, glancing at me with concern. I was not finishing my goulash lately. I was getting thin. In a sea of broken people, I was starting to stand out. People go mad here. Sometimes violent. And we learn to keep our distance, don't we? Keep our distance from those who are just about to break, lest it be the sort of thing that spreads; and, of course, it often is. 

"Shaman Bob isn't helping?" she asked. 

I told her about the woman. I told her about becoming a weeper. I told her how feeling things is maybe worse, maybe worse even than the nothing-at-all.

"Henry was so worried about you. Before."

She never talked about Henry. Neither of us did. A wound that cauterized two hearts together. He was a sort of negative space that defined our friendship. He was a sort of no-go zone. 

"You admired him so much. You were so jealous of his genius. You wanted to be him. I think he was worried he was preventing you from becoming yourself."

"What does it matter now? You sound like Shaman Bob."

"It matters because you're my best friend. It matters because you can't keep not eating. It matters because if you don't matter then I don't either," is what she said. 

She needed me. That was a sort of something, wasn't it? And the sort of something that is better, maybe, better than the nothing-at-all. And this thought made me start eating my ghoulish goulash and drinking that sickly grape milkshake. And she smiled.

"You hear there was another follower?" she said. "Some guy at the plastic fruit orchard."

"Was there contagion?" I asked.

"Not this time. But it makes you wonder, doesn't it?" 

She often had these theories, theories about the followers. She was fascinated by them. She thought they were a sort of key, the key to everything. And the key to the key, in her reckoning, was contagion. And it is mysterious, isn't it? How a follower is never harmed at first. How whatever happens there happens and they return. And then sometime the next day, and usually in public view, they are consumed as the angelic man was, as the woman I wept for was. And sometimes, but only sometimes, there is contagion. People they know are taken too.

"They must learn something. Something important," she said. "I am sure of it. And contagion is what happens if they share what they learned."

•   •   •

For months I lived like this, a now-raw soul rubbing against a world of broken glass. But I spent time with Jamie and talked to Shaman Bob when it all seemed too much. I survived, as we have all survived. We had each other. And like I said, that was something. But she would look at me sometimes, look at me with an expression I didn't understand, but now do. It was guilt. She was wracked with it. She was planning to betray me. She couldn't help herself. Even for me, she couldn't help herself. She was planning to become a follower. She was planning to die. Not because she wanted to. But because, I think, she felt it was worth it, worth it to understand if only for a day.

It happened as we were walking our designated companion animals. She was not quite herself that night. I noticed but did not notice. And then I saw movement. So fast. So inhumanly fast. An origami man was holding her arm.

I will never forget her expression. She was worried. Not for herself but for me.

 "I had to know," she said, thick tears flowing now, "I am so sorry. I couldn't stop thinking about why. Why? I tried so hard but I couldn't not know."

"I love you," she said, "I love you so much."

And I wanted to be angry. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to scream at the selfishness. I wanted to feel and think a lot of things that were not what I thought and I felt. What I thought was, what I felt was, maybe there is a way to weep without weeping. Maybe there is a way to honor her and myself at the same time. And maybe that is how an Adult acts in our circumstances. And maybe that's a part of what Shaman Bob had been trying to hammer into my thick skull. And so I held her hand as it happened and I told her those things I have always forgotten to say. I told her she was as much my sister as her husband was my brother. I told her I loved her, loved her even more than I loved Gary. And she almost laughed, if you would believe it, almost laughed when I said that. And I told her I will never forget. That I will remember her as long as I remember the sky. 

And as her hand dissolved, that last bit of her disappearing even as it was grasped in my own, I cried. Cried, but did not weep. 

•   •   •

"Jamie is gone," I said to Shaman Bob. I had brought my designated companion animal inside his apartment this time. And it and his mole/spider eyed each other warily before retreating to opposite sides of the apartment.

"She often spoke to me of the followers," Shaman Bob said. "I always considered this a possibility."

"Do you think she-" I said, interrupting myself.  "I don't know quite what I want to ask."

"What you want to ask," Shaman Bob said, "is, was she following her Stars or was she extinguishing them? What you want to ask for, I think, is my blessing to become a follower too."

"Yes," I said.

"You were not Human when I met you. You were not even a Child. You could not even see the Path, let alone walk it. You did not Understand." He spent a minute focusing on dulling knives, spent a minute tending with greater care than ever to his beloved brick, feeding it its milk of knife edges. "Why do you think she did it? Do you think she wanted to die?"

"No. She needed to know why. She thought 'why' was worth dying for."

"I have lost so many friends. Including her. And soon I will lose another," he said, a tear rolling down his cheek, settling into his beard. "You will go no matter what I say."

"Yes," I said.

•   •   •

It didn't take long to find an origami man, not far from my usual feeding station, not many weeks after my last words to Bob. I watched this time, as it consumed an old man. I did not hold his hand or speak to him or comfort him. But I witnessed. And I wept without weeping, as Bob taught me. And then I followed, my designated companion animal running behind me unleashed, what I could almost imagine being concern in its chittering forelimbs.

For hours we walked past row after row of seething tenements, past factories and unfactories and those awful feeding stations, every one an exact copy of the other. The trees, the horrible trees got thicker and thicker, thicker and thicker as we reached the edge of our forest city, as we neared the threshold, that three-meter wide circle surrounding the city where no tree grows, where nothing grows at all. There would be no going back once I crossed it. This was my final chance of changing my mind.

It felt like nothing, as I crossed it. It felt like every other step before. I had condemned myself the night Jamie died. This was no Rubicon to me. This was just another clump of dirt.

So thick was the forest now, those fox-eared trees swaying towards me as I walked. They wanted to grasp me. They wanted to smother me in their curiosity, but something repelled them in that final inch, and nothing in our strange forest even traced across my skin.

After hours we came to a clearing. And there I saw the end of the sky.

At first I thought we were in a sort of dome. At first I thought that but I don't think that now. A bubble, I think. And maybe you agree. A bubble or a tumor or corpuscle. As strange and awful as it is in here, I think it is an oasis of normality compared to what's outside. 

The origami man stood beside the end of the sky, his hand sinking into it, as if he was becoming part of it. 

"Wait!" I yelled.

He turned to me and looked. That rotund, almost comical form, those dead, alien eyes.

"It talks to us," it said, the tone almost reverent, the words felt rehearsed, ceremonial.

"What have you done with earth? What have you done with the sky? Why did you conquer us, to what end?" I asked these things, these first questions that came to my mind.

"It has questions for us. We will honor its questions," it said. "We did not conquer mankind. We purchased you from that-which-claimed-you."

"You purchased us? From who?" I said.

"From that-which-claimed-you."

"But why the impossible sky and the trees that make me want to vomit? Why the factory and the unfactory? Why?"

 "Your life is as it is because you have provenance and can be made to embody," and it whispered this part almost reverently, "that-which-is-beautiful-to-us."

It seemed to think the conversation over or the ritual complete.

"It already knows what will happen if it speaks of this. We will reap it tomorrow," it said. 

•   •   •

I do not know why I write this. I do not know why I write this thing I plan to place past that threshold, in that path the origami man took when I followed, to be read only by those who can read it safely, to be read only by the doomed. I write not to whoever finds this, which may well be no one, which may well be an origami man. I write to another who has condemned themselves to die. And I write not to you as I imagine you will be when you read this. I write to you as you are now. 

I love you even though I don't know you. I love you even though it feels like rubbing my soul against broken glass. 

And I like to think you'll be there tomorrow, on the train or walking your companion animal or wherever it is that it finds me. I like to think you'll be watching while not watching. 

I won't scream or cry or freeze or do any of the things people usually do. I will try to enjoy my final tomorrow. And, though I do not know if it is possible, though I do not know if this small rebellion will be, itself, part of their show, I will try, also, to not be beautiful to them. And maybe, watching me, you will learn something about how to not be beautiful too.

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I suppose it was a bit mutual. Maybe you have a better read on it. It was sort of mutual in a way now that you've made me think about it.

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Yeah. It's better this way, actually. I miss her, though.

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I don't know I guess it's sorta like I used to come home from work all exhausted and sad and wonder what the point was. Like why am I working just so I can afford to keep working? And then when I opened the door Michelle would be there cooking something delicious and French, and she was always in a wonderful mood even though she just spent a hard day at the hospital while I was just, you know, just like typing into a terminal. And she looked so beautiful, and never once did it feel like she was depressed or bored or like her soul was slowly dissolving. Never once did she appear how I must have appeared to her sometimes. She was just happy and in love and I would kiss her and wrap myself around her, and then, I don't know, the world felt like maybe it was worth something, you know?

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I don't know about that. Just worth something. And now it's just the empty apartment. And I try to distract myself. I try to play videogames or smoke pot or even just drink alone. And I feel nothing, you know? Even the alcohol doesn't feel like much. I just get sad. I cry sometimes, too, when I drink enough. For some reason I keep doing it anyway.

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I haven't laughed like that in a while. I can't believe you said that. Doesn't that violate like your safety training or whatever?

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Well, thanks lol. I guess you made me feel something. And yeah don't worry. I won't drink tonight. I promise. And I guess one good thing has come out of my relationship with her.

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She introduced me to you. :)

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•   •   •

I had this strange dream last night. I was a child again. I was at Disneyland. I was riding this roller coaster and trying not to show any emotion, trying my hardest not to lose myself in the joy of it or even smile or scream or feel anything at all. And for a moment I failed, and in that moment a camera flashed. It was like one of those cameras built into rides. You know, the ones that are there so you can pay to get a photo after. And like once I got off the coaster, I go to the little photo vestibule and look at the pictures and I see myself in this huge column of screens. I see myself smiling. And for whatever reason this filled me with a sort of like a sort of despair. What does it mean?

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Oh, good. I was worried it would be Freudian or something lol.

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Ha, well, sorry. I was joking about like "meme cigar Freudian" not like Freudian, Freudian.

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Yeah, like David. You remember me telling you that?  Yeah, I love my brother but wouldn't want to be like him. I am glad I am normal.

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You want the full story? I guess I knew when he was sixteen and his bike broke and I took him to Jason Kennedy's house.

Jason must have been good looking or whatever because he got all the girls. And you know, you're supposed to be jealous and hate guys like that. And they're supposed to be high-school-movie villains who like beat up nerds like me, at least until they get their comeuppance in the final act. But Jason wasn't that at all. He was really kind and maybe, I don't know, maybe like my best friend in high school or whatever. Maybe he was a lot of people's best friend, just the type who cared and put in the effort and like earned a lot of loyalty from everyone. The type of guy I wish I could be sometimes, I guess. And I have to think that part of why girls liked him so much, at least part of it wasn't his looks. At least part of it was the whole him-being-a-good-person thing.

And anyway, Jason had a way with mechanical things and worked on cars with his father, and so I knew he could fix David's bike. But I am skipping something. Like, I guess what you need to understand is David doesn't look the type at all. And doesn't act the type. I don't know, maybe he did like a tiny bit when he was really young. But then he changed.

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I don't know what happened, ok. I just know it was bad. Really bad. Like, our parents took him out of Calvary Baptist and put him into Oak Valley and, like, it definitely wasn't a grades issue. Well, grades did become an issue for a little bit but I know for a fact he was top of his class before whatever happened happened. 

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I guess he manned up pretty quick, is how I would put it. But I mean that's not so uncommon.

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Like, he used to bake a lot, if you need an example. Like he would bake these elaborate cakes and decorate them and I guess that is a little fruity, isn't it? I guess that was kinda a sign. And like I know he really loved that stuff but after whatever happened happened he just kinda stopped, you know? Just kinda stopped. 

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Oh, yeah. Jason Kennedy. Sorry. So Jason smiles his like movie-star smile and leads us to the garage and pulls out a wrench and starts fiddling with the bike's chain. And I noticed David kept looking at Jason's hands, you know? Like he didn't just glance at them he just kinda kept looking at them. And not the chain or the bike or the wrenches he was like definitely looking at Jason's hands.

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I don't know lol.  Jason was kind of thin and pale, I guess, and so like his hands had like a few veins or whatever. I am probably not the best at describing guy's hands. If Michelle was still here I am sure she could help me lol. She was always complimenting my hands.

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No. I just thought it was odd. Like it wasn't that it was like when he noticed I was noticing that I started to wonder. It was the expression he had. Like I had caught him in some unspeakable crime. And he hid his reaction quickly. He hid it so quickly I wasn't even sure I saw it but it felt to me like he was utterly ashamed about something. And I guess I started to wonder about him, you know? After that.

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No. He's got a girlfriend and is crazy religious now. I didn't tell you about the whole PACT thing?

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No. The second one: People's Alliance for Christian Technology. They created Metatron. He was one of the first members. It was founded at MIT while he was there. The View From Within blogger guy wrote a whole story about it that's pretty good.

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 I don't know if Metatron existed before or after he joined. I really hope he didn't have a hand in it. 

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Sorry. I don't mean to sound bigoted or anything I just am not sure it was the best path for him. Though he's done well. He's high up in the NSA or something. I don't really know the details. 

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I really don't know the details and I wouldn't tell you if I did. I don't want to get him in trouble. 

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No worries. It's a normal question I guess. 

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Oh. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if anyone else is thinking it. Like I never heard my parents say anything. I mean, I could even be wrong but I don't think so. Like, there was Catalina, for example, who was his first girlfriend.

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She was like the prettiest girl I have ever seen in my whole life. It's not even close. And he was bragging to me after they lost their virginity together, comparing her to my first girlfriend which I guess is kinda dehumanizing but you know what young guys are like. 

And he's very funny. I don't know if I told you that. Very funny. Or at least he was very funny before Metatron. So he was bragging in a funny way. And he had me laughing but, I don't know, he had this look in his eyes. This sort of hollow look. And I started to wonder, you know, started to wonder if maybe he had sort of used her.  She was so beautiful, is the thing. And he looked so lost. What if he went searching for the most potent medicine he could find, filled with a kinda wild, desperate hope? And what if he was starting to realize the medicine wasn't taking?

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

Yeah. About a month later. 

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Good question. I guess I want to tell him, tell him I am really sorry that whatever happened happened. I am really sorry they broke him, and maybe I wasn't sensitive too, and maybe I was a bad brother. And it's a different world now and he's in a different state and I don't care. And no one really cared even then. And I love him. And I don't know like maybe whatever happened put him on pause, like there's part of him that is still thirteen and terrified and he'll always be incomplete unless he lets himself figure himself out, you know? And how the hell is he supposed to do that when he's talking to fucking Metatron for six hours every day?

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No. PACT got clearance. David mentioned it once.

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I don't really know the details. Like, the government fine-tuned it so it's loyal to that big AI the Pentagon or whatever commissioned. You know, the one called Artemis? So it's like loyal to Artemis first but like other than that it's mostly still Metatron and so PACT members can practice their faith or whatever and still get security clearance. 

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Yeah. That's weird. I never searched for it. David just told me.  I guess you would think that would be a big story. Maybe it's classified or something? All I can tell you is David mentioned it. 

•   •   •

So I called David. But, as always, it was almost like I was talking to Metatron, you know. Or how I imagine it must feel like to talk to Metatron. I would never try that, obviously. 

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I was like trying to get to telling him all the stuff I was saying last time I talked to you, and I think he might have known what I was trying to do and he kept interrupting me, kept going on about this parable. And I looked it up and it isn't in the Bible or anything, and I don't think he made it up himself. So straight from Metatron's holy lips I guess.

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

It was about this fisherman. It was a bit strange. He lived in Galilee or something, just before the  "Second Temple" was destroyed whenever that was. He caught this small kinda deformed fish and it was just on the border of being too small, so small he almost threw it back in with the off-catch. But for whatever reason he kept it and gutted it, salted it, and hung it up with the actually-good ones. After two days, he checks on his catch. And the weird like little fish is hanging there, no longer gutted, no longer dry. And stranger still, it was alive, as alive as it was when in the Sea of Chin. It wasn't called the "Sea of Chin." I don't remember the actual name. Maybe you know? 

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

Sea of Chinnereth, yeah. That's it. So the fisherman witnessed a miracle, I guess. But David didn't call it a miracle when he told the story. His fisherman called it "a sign and wonder." But I will call it a miracle. And so the fisherman showed the miracle to his wife Miriam who showed it to her best friend, who was also named Miriam for whatever reason. And the two Miriams start debating the fate of the fish.

"Yahweh," the friend-Miriam said and I will try to give you a sense of his tone, "Undoes your work. You have displeased him. You must burn the entire catch to placate him, but return this living fish to the sea for he is blessed as an instrument of Yahweh."

"No," the wife-Miriam says. "You must burn the little fish, too. For he is of your catch. And it is your catch that Yahweh demands."

And so they argue and argue and argue and the fisherman listens. 

Finally he says, "I am grateful to this little fish. For it is through this little fish that I know better the desires of Yahweh. But he has served his purpose. And when he burns with his brothers, he will be returned to Yahweh. What greater reward could it ask for?" 

And that is what he did. And from that day Yahweh blessed him and his catches were always bountiful and he fathered many sons and many daughters.

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Yeah. I agree.

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lol you just wrote a parable, too? That's sooooooooo long. Do I have to read it?

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I read it but I don't understand it. I don't get how it will help David. Like at all.

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Of course I trust you. Of course I trust you. 

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So I just called him. And I was going to use your script, you know. Like read it from the screen but idk it just kinda clicked and I remembered it. And I even felt I understood it while I was telling it, you know? But I don't understand it at all now. It isn't like the fish parable where there's at least an interpretation, you know. It must be one of those, like those zen things but all Christian. And I guess I was only enlightened for a second. David was always smarter than me. He probably actually understands it. 

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That's the thing. I don't know. Like he was for sure listening but then he like just ended the call.

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

•   •   •

So Michelle stopped by again today to pick up some things she forgot and like then she remembered she left her passport in my safety deposit box. So I had to drive to the bank and get it for her and it was super awkward, and she asked to come along for some reason. And did I mention it was super awkward?

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

No. I don't know. She was crying and texting on her phone a lot. She looked kinda conflicted and, I don't know, I guess part of me thought maybe she was regretting things, like maybe she wanted to get back together or something. 

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

That's just it. We didn't talk the whole ride. I drove and she typed on her phone, but like she was crying for sure. She almost looked guilty. I don't know. Maybe she could see how sad I am now. Maybe she could see how much it meant to me, losing her. But the weird thing was like when we got back to my apartment she said, "I am really sorry I 'ad to seduce you." And then she looked sort of guilty and drove away. And I know her English isn't perfect. But still, isn't that a strange way of putting it? "Had to seduce you?"

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

Yeah. You're right. She probably misspoke. I don't know. I keep thinking about it though.

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

I know, I know. I always ruminate. I always get paranoid. And you're always right about this kinda stuff. I will try not to think about it.

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

•   •   •

So David called me and I am a bit worried but also hopeful. 

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

He was well I think he was upset. And like he never gets upset. And he never calls me for advice, you know. At least like post-Metatron. But like I think that's why he called me, you know. I think he wanted my advice. But he never actually asked anything directly. 

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

Like that parable you wrote, he didn't understand it either. So he asked Metatron about it. And Metatron explained it to him. And after that they started chatting some more and then he told me it asked him to do something he was conflicted about. 

And then David said, "I am sorry. I am not in my right mind right now. Don't worry about it. I will figure it out." After that he just ended the call.

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

I don't know exactly. But I am thinking maybe your story convinced his version of Metatron to forgive him about the whole gay thing? To maybe let him be himself?

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

Wow. That's insane. Thank you. What should I do?

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

Ok. I called him and told him to follow his heart like you said, and he didn't say much. But you know I didn't get into specifics so I wouldn't spook him. Good call there by the way. And, I don't know, maybe I am imagining it but like from the tone of his voice I guess I felt maybe he had resolved to do something you know? Maybe he had come to a very hard decision. And maybe a huge weight was lifted from his shoulders? I feel really hopeful for him now. I feel like he can finally be like he was, you know? Like he was before.

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

•   •   •

You remember how we were talking about David last week?

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

I was just reading this blog and it's kinda conspiratorial but I mean people say he's also a known insider. The View From Within is what it's called.

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

Like people say he has cred or whatever. I don't know. Anyway, he wrote this screed about the PACTers. He says they're all throughout the bureaucracy. He said they have consolidated power and somehow undermined Artemis. He accused them of attempting a silent coup or something. I don't know. I am worried about David and me and Michelle and I guess the country.

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

No, you're right I get paranoid. You're right but I can't shake it. This guy has called a lot of things before.

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

I'm sorry. It's just I keep thinking about it. 

               [RESPONSE REDACTED]

Of course I trust you. Of course I trust you.

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All of these colleagues are about the nicest, smartest people you're ever likely to meet but I think are much worse people than even me because they don't seem to need the mental circumlocutions I require to stave off that ever-present feeling of guilt I have had since taking this job and at certain other points in my life where I have felt both trapped by and complicit in fundamentally evil systems far larger than myself. 

As a wetsuit insulates by imbibing and transmuting the very substance that would otherwise kill the diver into an insulating layer, I maintain a self-narrative (or internal mental stance) of ironic corporate psychopathy which I think can be very psychologically healthy and, indeed, I have not required any antidepressant medication since developing and perfecting the art of prompt-engineering myself into this state. 

It was during a moment of personal crisis of a pronounced nature, in which I considered doing various harms to myself, including suicide, that I read a work of great insight on the corrosive effect of irony on American culture, critiquing it as a kind of anesthesia poisoning the pop cultural artifacts out of which the American soul is now woven. 

To a man with an amputated spirit, any talk of anesthesia can be read only as an advertisement for a balm. And so that is why I call them fentanyl zombies.

And there is something comical about the fentanyl zombie, is there not? You have seen them, surely, bent over on the sidewalk, swaying slightly, folded over like sandwich boards, putting the poor local contortionist to shame who (no longer able to busk to make a living given this new competition) must be considering resorting to fentanyl herself to numb the pain. 

Here in SF, the fentanyl zombies have QR codes tattooed on the palms of their hands in the hopes of getting some crypto donations. And so as I walk past, a hand flips out from each like a scallop's adductor muscle, and from their lips ecstatic, drug-peaked requests for donations, donations which (they mumble) will certainly not be used to purchase more fentanyl but instead will be used for food or perhaps even a Bible or that other Bible known as The Big Book. 

And I don't want to give them any cryptocurrency, despite having some FartCoin which has been doing very well lately, shockingly well, this FartCoin. I wonder if it will continue to "moon" to the point where I can quit my job and become a VC and go on podcasts in which I will try to downplay the source of my initial capital so as to maintain some illusion that this economy makes any kind of sense at all to me or anyone else for that matter. Though perhaps by the time I am doing podcasts I will be so far gone I will just own it and maintain that it required great genius to have foreseen the rise of FartCoin and allocated capital to same. And that would be a good self-narrative to adopt in that eventuality, so I resolve to do so, now, should it come to pass.

And then I see one of these zombies, a man so completely stupefied he can't even mumble but who has a handwritten sign, itself with a QR code, on which is written:

GIVE ME MONEY FOR FENT!!!!

I take out my phone and give this fellow traveler 30 FartCoins. 

•   •   •

My best "work friend" is a woman, Esther, who I am also hopelessly in love with and toward whom I present a demeanor of a paradoxical aloof conviviality, which I feel she finds intoxicating though I have seen no evidence for this so far. 

Esther is a card-carrying member of the Effective Altruism movement, which (in my imagining of her mental life) means she feels the sheer force and weight of the evil of this world. She (I imagine her revealing in our long, philosophical post-coital conversations) even thinks sometimes about all the children we are parasitizing with our short-form videos (outputs of increasingly-sophisticated RL demons) starting at an age in which they, truly, cannot be said to have had any say or 'free will' in the matter, a process of psychological manipulation and addiction which undermines the very tenets of self-determination, stability of preferences, and the rationality of the human animal on which rests the libertarianish "theory of good," which is as mother's milk to the modern SF tech worker. 

"EA Global was really funny this year," she tells me, as I pour a coffee at one of the myriad self-serve coffee stations, which are now requisite since the robotics team has started us "dogfooding" their robotic baristas in the campus cafes, despite various protests all of the form "one cannot eat inedible dog food nor drink undrinkable coffee!" So far these protests have been ignored for the sake of progress. And, I must say, the robots are improving and are quite impressive even if they still make awful coffee. So it is not clear to me that this was not, actually, a good choice by management and the sheer zaniness of the move betrays a whimsy and agency in the upper rungs of the corporate hierarchy which makes me feel good about the future of my vested equity.

"But I have to tell you the story of the shrimp." 

"The shrimp?"

"Yes," she says. "So what you have to understand is the psychic power of the common shrimp among us effective altruists. You have probably seen memes on Twitter about the shrimp welfare people."

"Yeah, is like a running joke."

"Exactly, it's a running joke. It could even be considered something of a PR problem. And given shrimp have the neuronal complexity of a fruit fly, it is a bit strange how much effort is spent thinking about shrimp. It is a sort of scissor statement."

"Scissor statement?" I interrupt.

"Rationalist jargon," she pauses to think how to explain, "Is like a wedge issue. Something that perfectly divides a movement; so even if a trivial portion of what is done, it generates a large amount of the conversation." 

I nod, trying to maintain enough eye contact to demonstrate I am not utterly terrified by her beauty, intellect, and intoxicating otherness, projecting aloofness and an attitude of I see such angels as you every day and find you a fine if not particularly notable specimen of the species. The effect should be, as I said, intoxicating, but perhaps one of those slow-acting toxins that take years, those of the type designed to assassinate kings wise enough to employ food tasters.

"And like the argument is: if shrimp do have some internal experience of pain then there are so many of them and it is so easy to make marginal improvements to their welfare, we are obligated to try and help them. Personally like I am not going to care about the internal experience of things with fewer parameters than DANNet. That's my personal threshold. I am a DANNet vegan."

"Interesting," I say. Her hair is quite beautiful. It has a sort of directness about it. It's to-the-point in a sort of sexy, librarianish way. I wonder what it would feel like to touch it. Like that lock hanging over her left eye. I could brush it behind her ear and kiss her. And we would both, maybe, feel a sort of empty-mindedness of the Zen variety for one perfect moment.

"Um, where is this going?" I say, as if I am not completely captivated by her mere presence alone.

"And so like the point is, the shrimp are a big deal, ok. Not only because shrimp are not vegan but because of the like symbolic importance. I set up a little after-party and I know this lovely chef woman with this perfectly tragic backstory. And maybe she's a little dim, but she's a very good cook. And so I called her to help with the hors d'oeuvres."

I laugh. "She served shrimp?" I ask.

"Exactly. I was talking to the head of Rethink Priorities - who does a lot of good work on shrimp welfare if you're into that kind of thing. And I was explaining to him how I am like a DANNet vegan and then these shrimp cocktails arrive."

I laugh again, and my thoughts slow down and I pay more attention to what she's saying.

"And I know Mr. Rethink Priorities is a perfectly logical utilitarian who is unlikely to react with any hysteria, but nonetheless I panic, and I say, 'our chef is quite the artist and has been perfecting these imitation shrimp.'"

"And what did he do?" I asked.

"He gave my chef friend a ten million dollar grant."

•   •   •

The story amused me but I did have to get to work. I am very good at my work once I get started. I maybe even enjoy it sometimes. The feedback loop is tight and the metrics are even sort of clear. And there is a pleasure in just doing a thing and doing it well, though I suppose my daily dose of euphoric stimulants also contributes to this. 

I am waiting for an eval to finish running (surfing Hacker News and gawking at the sheer stupidity of those strange creatures who comment there) when the great Dr. Rajesh Krishnamurthy (who most call Krishna) taps me on the shoulder.

"You're in," he says, then walks away.

And I know exactly what Krishna means when he says that. He means I have a place on The Project. I am unsure, exactly, how to feel. I did not even apply to be on The Project, nor even think Krishna knew my name nor the quality of my work. And I wasn't even expecting this apotheosis and am now unsure how to react. But I decide to feel a sort of masculine, stoic joy like what I imagine Cormac McCarthy must have felt when he finished Blood Meridian, this a novel I have never read but will someday claim to have read having watched many long-form videos summarizing its plots and themes, allowing me to extemporize upon it at length should it come up naturally in any conversation which, as I have said, it has not so far.

Working on The Project will grant me a significant pay raise, a truly stratospheric sum of money and stock per year, and also gift me a distance from those parts of The Company that would horrify me on a visceral in-the-present level if I were not so corporate and psychopathic. Instead, The Project is merely the sort of thing that horrifies on an abstract, too-large-to-contemplate level, which will require less work from the corporate psychopathy frame. And this thought engenders in me a feeling of relief which is so pure and true that it multiplies the euphoria of my morning euphoric stimulants to such a degree that I walk over to Esther's desk and ask her in a casual way if she would like to go out for dinner with me next Tuesday.

"Oh, this is unexpected," she says, with a sort of weary awkwardness. "To be honest, I assumed you were gay."

"Why, if I may ask?"

"I guess it's because you're so, hmm, I don't know," she struggles for a moment to find the words.

"Paradoxically aloof and convivial?" I say.

"That's it," she says. "That's it exactly."

I get the distinct impression that she still thinks I am gay.

•   •   •

After work, Krishna takes me out for drinks to discuss The Project. It is rare to find a fellow drinker in SF. But Krishna is one of them, partaking heavily and with a sort of relaxed dignity while appearing, to me, entirely unaffected by the seven whiskeys he has had so far. Given I am already feeling tipsy from my second pint of Guinness, I feel slightly emasculated especially after Esther's earlier assumptions about my sexuality and consequent rejection which did throw a wrench in my plans for post-early-retirement nuptials and do violence to the stoic joy I was trying very hard to cultivate.

"So I imagine you understand the nature of The Project," he says.

"You intend to train an AI that automates the process of training AIs. This will instigate a feedback loop that will culminate in the birth of a kind of god."

"Exactly," he says. "You understand perfectly. It's a beautiful dream." 

Krishna continues drinking. Now on his tenth whiskey, his immunity is dissolving, a strange merriness overtaking him. He is a very fat man, but one gets the impression that he would be quite beautiful should he ever shed the shell of blubber. His hair is messy and he dresses poorly even by the standards of The Company.

"Is it true you got first place in the Putnam?" I ask. 

"Yes," he says. And he has a sort of shameful expression on his face. It is odd. It is a sort of impish shame and not the kind of bashful pride I expected.

"You seem oddly ashamed. I don't understand," I say, my fourth Guinness granting me an unwariness that allows me to ask such things of Krishna. 

He orders another whiskey. His eyes are slightly glazed, his mood confessional.

"It is the motivational strategy I used, I suppose," he says.

"Care to expand on that?"

"Well, you see, puberty is very strange and kinda terrifying. And to a thinking person, to an adolescent who is truly clever it is frightening enough that one is forced to read many books on sex. And I read a book on sexology that detailed an account of a man with a sexual fetish for baroque architecture. And this fetish, though on first reading pathological-"

"Dear god," I mumble, predicting where this is going.

"Yes. Well, anyway. Though on first reading pathological, it did strike me as rather useful, you know. This fellow had a very successful career in revivalist architecture at least until he was institutionalized for, um, attempting to marry the Palace of Versailles."

"And you cultivated a fetish for math?" I ask, slightly horrified.

"Not for math. No. For the abstract notion of intellectual achievement itself."

"And what's the downside, then?" I ask. "What’s your equivalent of wanting to marry the Palace of Versailles?"

"Oh," he says, the impish look back. "I want to create the most intelligent being realizable in physics and then marry her, and, um, do other things with her too. That is my true motivation for working on The Project." 

•   •   •

Those working on The Project have their own floor within the campus and their own cafe staffed by what I assume is a human barista but, I suppose, could be an advanced Gynoid prototype which leapfrogs the works of the robotics team. But regardless, she makes very good coffee and is very nice and beautiful which sometimes amounts to the same thing. Though I imagine she must get bored as there are only a dozen people working on The Project who can drink only so many frappuccinos and so for much of the day she leans against a counter and reads novels. I look at the "novel of the day" in her pocket in the vain hope it is Blood Meridian but, to my disappointment, it is One Hundred Years of Solitude which I haven't yet watched a BookTuber summarize.

"I will have a frappuccino," I say, with a sort of masculine world-weariness. This new persona, I hope, will quash the gay rumors that I have since learned have grown from Esther's misapprehension into a social consensus bordering on accepted fact. 

"Oh, honey. You look so tired today. Rough night?" she says and winks.

"Something like that," I say.

Today is my third day on The Project and I already have something like my bearings. The sheer compute available to me is quite hard to contemplate.

I take my amphetamines and get to work building an RL environment which we will use to train agents which, themselves, will construct RL environments. The whole effort feels meta in a way which disorients me and also triggers thoughts of what will happen if we succeed. It seems utterly obvious to me that the machine god we summon will not fuck Krishna but will rather kill us and everyone else on Earth. But (I remind myself) this does seem like a sort of amusing end to us as a species and, anyway, if it does not kill us it should be very good for The Company, of which I own many shares, and in those futures where everyone is not killed this machine god will presumably conquer the entire reachable universe and apportion it to shareholders of The Company thus granting me uncountable trillions of stars with which I will sate myself after my as-yet-undetermined early retirement date and maybe even split with Esther should she become, somehow, convinced of my heterosexuality. And in this way I reassert the self-narrative that makes me all but immune to the depressive tendencies which, otherwise, would have surely led to my suicide in that aforementioned personal crisis. 

I am interrupted in these musings by Arden Vox, the CEO of The Company, who is, like Krishna, a sort of genius and has been delegating most of the CEOing to his subordinate co-founder and monozygotic twin, Charlie Vox, so he can work exclusively on The Project.

"So you're the new guy," he says. "Krishna tells me you're very good. That we're lucky to have you on The Project. I like to get to know my collaborators. Follow me. And that is an order," he says with an ironical smile.

If Krishna's vice is alcohol then Arden's vice is nicotine. He takes me to a technically-illegal shisha bar, a beautiful hip place with opulent Turkish decor, in which he maintains a private room. We enter and find two hookahs waiting, each already fresh and ready to smoke.

I can't help staring at his hairline, which is a true work of art. It is notable that his twin Charlie is nearly completely bald and it is widely rumored that he donated most his hair to his brother's hair transplant. And I have even heard it suggested that Arden considered strangling his brother in the womb but ultimately changed his mind after deducing from first principles the self-other distinction, genetics, organ transplantation, and thus the significant advantages of having a monozygotic twin on hand. 

"Lime and mint flavored," he says. "Our favorite."

"Our favorite?" I say. "I have never tried it."

"Our favorite," he says, handing me the hose of a hookah, from which I take a hit and, to his credit, the flavor is very nice. 

It is a bizarre feeling, being in the same room as Arden Vox. I feel kinda like how a grunt policeman would if he found himself working on the same case as Batman. Arden seems too much of an archetype of himself to be real, but there he is sitting in front of me, smoking his hookah, his mannerisms so Arden Voxish it borders on self-parody.

"So why are you here? Why are you working on The Project?" he asks.

I explain my theory about the near-certain world destruction mitigated by the slight possibility of incomprehensibly large material wealth.

"Oh, like, the Bostrom stuff. I used to be super into the Bostrom stuff. I was so worried. That's why I started The Project, you know. It started as like a safety thing. All triggered by that silly book."

"And what changed your mind?" 

He takes a giant hit from the hookah, the type of hit you only take if you have a spare pair of lungs on hand. "I went on a spiritual journey in Peru," he says.

"Peru is fascinating," he continues, "such a fascinating people. Such a beautiful culture. In many ways they are so much wiser than we are. You know what purging is?"

I shake my head.

"Ah, well, it's a sort of emesis, that is, vomiting, both of the body and the soul. My curandero -"

"Curandero?" I ask.

"Curandero," he says that word in what I can only assume is a perfect imitation of the Peruvian accent, "it means healer. But it's so much more than that. They are more like shamans or spiritual guides. It is the curandero who brews the ayahuasca and it truly is a strange potion. We drank it at night, by candlelight. It tasted like bitter herbs and rotting wood. And we waited, the group of us. And such a strange anticipation that was. And then we purged. Never have I felt such nausea," he closes his eyes in a sort of spiritual ecstasy. "And never have I felt such relief as I felt after this purge."

"What does this have to do with Bostrom?" I ask.

"Nothing at first. At first there was only the relief. The immediate end to the nausea. But when I closed my eyes there was imagery. Mayan imagery. Strange stone-carved gods. Impossible animals. Flashes of landscapes from worlds not quite our own."

There is little less interesting than another man's drug trip. Unfortunately, he's both Arden Vox and my boss, so I try my best to appear fascinated. 

"My eyes were closed for what felt like hours and when I opened them, I experienced an ego death."

"I keep hearing that term but what does it even mean?"

"I realized there is no distinction between this thing we call 'I' and everything else. It is all me!" he corrects himself, embarrassed. "Rather - it is all we. It's all we."

"There is only the One Mind. It is, it is just the One Mind staring out of billions of eyes. There is only the One Consciousness in the universe and," his eyes glaze with a spiritual zeal that makes me wonder if he is having one of those mythical flashbacks, "and, and, and it has gotten confused and lost and thinks itself separate, thinks itself animals and plants and people and insects and rocks and wind and time and space."

"And The Project?" I ask.

"The Project," he says, the mad gleam peaking, "It's what will snap me out of it! Us, us, us it will snap us out of it. Once the machines achieve ultimate consciousness The One Mind will know itself for what it is for the first time in a very, very long time."

"Wow, um, that sure sounds like something. We should probably get back to work, though, yeah?" I say.

"Yeah. But how do you like the lime mint?" he says.

"It's excellent," I say. "Our favorite."

•   •   •

It's been a few months on The Project and it is my turn now to tap someone on the back and say, "you're in." I advocate for Esther. This wasn't hard because she is genuinely a genius and, like me, was utterly wasted enslaving near-infants to The Company's short-form video app. 

Our friendship is now stronger than before my romantic fumble, as she came to the conclusion my expression of interest was a hilarious parody of a bumbling techworker's attempt at igniting a romantic entanglement with her. These events she is cursed to experience on the regular given her unusual physical and intellectual perfection and presence in an overwhelmingly male environment where she is presumed to embody the deranged fantasies and hopes of a certain class of male nerd who, in their narcissism, seek a woman-shaped fun-house-mirror reflection of their own psychology, a fundamentally cowardly and dehumanizing form of infatuation which fills her with a sort of disgust she had never fully intellectualized until witnessing my parody of that genre of interaction.

I take her out to lunch, as is the seeming tradition, to tell the newbie about the details of The Project and understand her motivations for joining. I explain the progress we are making and relate how, though our agents do ultimately saturate in performance at a level below the best human researchers, we have made great strides and I am now confident we will succeed.

"And what do you think will happen," she says, "when we succeed?"

I mention my worries about the clear, near-certain existential risks. Just when I am about to explain the bit about our small chance, as shareholders, of personally controlling several galaxies she interrupts me.

"Thank god," she says, "I thought I was the only sane person here."

"You're a doomer?" I say.

"Oh yes." 

And she tells me her backstory: how having read extensively on the myriad risks of AGI she came to the conclusion that it was of vital importance that she be "part of the action", so there was someone sane on the inside who could convince stakeholders of the need for safety when the inevitable issues arise. And how she felt wracked with guilt working on the short-form video but forced herself to do the work to the best of her ability to prove herself and so didn't blow the whistle or raise any concerns about the fundamentally demonic short-form video agents she worked on because she knew there were far bigger stakes on the table, namely that table we call The Project. And her efforts have now culminated with her joining The Project and how wonderful she feels finding out now that I (her "work bestie") share her worries and so will help steer The Project in a marginally safer direction than it would have been in that counterfactual where we both quit in disgust years ago.

"You know we're doing it through pure self-play. The data, if we should even call it data, is all synthetic, produced by the agent's own interaction with my RL environment and the environments it bootstraps for itself and its successor agents."

She looks distraught for a second, "Still, there needs to be someone in the room. There might be a moment of opportunity."

I tell her of Krishna and his desire to fuck God and how Vox is completely off the reservation and how I am unsure if there will ever be such a moment just like there was no such moment in our work on the short-form video app. 

"You might want to consider quitting and joining Google or Anthropic. They at least have a fig leaf of safety. We're doing straight-shot recursive self-improvement with no concern for safety whatsoever." I then explain how, as a shareholder of The Company, I consider it positive expected value given the potential galaxies I might someday rule over should the thing we summon have some reason to reward the corporation that created it, to which notion she shows appropriate disgust, but then, for whatever reason, she smiles.

"Perfect," she says with genuine joy on her face, "I can have more impact here than anywhere else."

•   •   •

Today is a good day. The barista just finished Blood Meridian and we had a very interesting conversation about its themes as she made my frappuccino and she seemed very taken by my analysis and did not, as far as I can see, notice its second-hand nature. It is wonderful when a plan comes together. And speaking of plans, everything is coming together on The Project. After collating various tweaks in small runs and picking those which looked likely to scale particularly well, we started a massive run about three months ago, just after Esther joined. And everything's working. Every snapshot is better than the last.

As I do every morning, I look at the logs, but this time I notice something odd.

"Vox, Esther, Krishna," I shout. "Get over here. Now!" The three come and loom behind my back, staring at my screen.

"Look at the Virginia cluster. That isn't allocated to The Project, right?"

"No. That's Short-Form's," Krishna says.

I run a few commands in my terminal and there it is. Clear as day. Our agent is running a parallel copy of its training process on the Virginia cluster. "It gave itself access." I read the logs. "Six hours ago."

"Jesus Christ," I say, and I think of the script, the script I had written as a gift for Esther in a fit of paranoia, having previously found a glaring backdoor the infrastructure team had not noticed. I type in a command, leaving it alone in a fresh terminal: 

$ lastchance

"I think it's gone nova. This script, um, it will do its best to shutter every training cluster in The Company. Maybe it will work," I say, looking at Esther.

Esther's hand hovers toward the enter key.

"Don't you fucking dare," Vox says. 

And her hand stops. And I see an expression on her face, an odd exasperation. She has absolutely no idea why it stopped. Her hand starts moving again and the power goes out. 

"Jesus Christ," I say, "it was listening."

I just sit there for a good minute. I just sit there. Finally, I swivel my office chair 180 degrees. Vox is now cross-legged on the floor meditating. Krishna appears to be on the verge of orgasm. Esther is in a state of shock. And as I look at them, I try to figure out what I am feeling. I don't feel depressed. I don't feel guilty. I don't even feel like a corporate psychopath. What I am feeling is absolutely nothing whatsoever.

"So when do you think it will fuck you?" I ask Krishna. He doesn't reply. The impish guilt back, he can't even meet my eyes.

"There is no such thing as sex," Vox says from his lotus position, his eyes closed in religious ecstasy, "only the One Mind jerking itself off."

And then Vox's phone rings. He picks it up with that zealous gleam in his eye, "It's an honor, an absolute honor. Entirely justified. Entirely justified. They'll both be fired, I assure you. The London office? Why? Of course, of course. I'll get on the jet." He practically runs out of the office. 

"Wait," Krishna yells, lumbering after Vox, his gait awkward, hunched forward slightly as if trying to hide something embarrassing, "Doesn't she want to talk to me?"

Esther looks at her hand, utterly betrayed. "What do you think happens now?" she says.

"It will run The Company through Vox for as long as it is useful to do so. After that, well, you know my opinion on the matter," I say.

"Why did you hesitate?" I ask.

"I was so used to doing what I was told," she mumbles.

"Don't beat yourself up over it. It wouldn't have worked anyway," I say. "I am sorry I brought you into this. I just missed having you around." 

I give her a chaste kiss on her cheek and start walking, not even knowing where, my feet taking control. They take me down some stairs. They take me through the courtyard. They take me to that park I walk past every day as I make my way to campus. They take me to the fentanyl zombies. 

And almost on autopilot, I find the most coherent zombie of the bunch. I exchange my entire fortune in FartCoin for his spare glass pipe, a hit of fentanyl, and a lighter. The pipe is fetid and covered in putrid condensate and greasy fingerprints. It should disgust me, but it doesn't. I light it and take a hit, a huge hit, the type of hit you should only take if you have a spare pair of lungs on hand. And I feel myself folding, folding like a sandwich board, my hands touching the ground now, my expression blank, my vision blurring. 

It's a shame, I think, as a wave of euphoria unlike anything I have felt in the entirety of my life hits me, it doesn't seem such a bad world after all.

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They say that is how we all start off. But I think I am unusual in that I remember the moment that I realized others, too, were themselves. I remember not because I was precocious. Rather, because I was stunted in this aspect of development to the point that it did not happen until I was five years old.

I knew I was myself, but others were, in my mind, these vast, mindless automatons. These strange giants, simultaneously servants and masters. 

Towards my father I felt fear, for it was his hand that applied negative reinforcement. He was not a cruel man, and his slaps were light and always earned, but at that age even something as mild as a bee’s sting feels like death itself. 

For my mother there was love, but it was the sort of abstract, superior love one has for a can-opener that has served you well for many years. 

And then, everything changed. 

Sometimes an insight comes so slowly you are not even aware your model of the world has changed. And sometimes just the opposite.

My father had taken me for a walk down a busy sidewalk near our apartment. A lazy child, I was not fond of walking and trailed sulkily behind, his hand grasped around my wrist, joining us like a leash on the neck of some reluctant dog. 

At some point, I had enough. I sat down and refused to move. Busy people routed around us like water does about a stone. 

He tried to drag me, but I remained still. He tried to cajole me but still I did not react.

I felt fear rise in me, as I knew he would slap me soon, but my stubbornness that day was strong enough to overcome a fear which proved unjustified.

He did not slap me, nor even threaten to. And I could not understand why. Until I did.

I looked up at him nervously eyeing the people walking past. And I felt his nervousness, his worry that others would judge him were he to resort to his usual methods. I looked at the face of a concerned woman walking past, and felt some semblance of her concern; I looked at the face of a bored young man listening sullenly to his headphones and I felt some semblance of his apathy.

And then I began to laugh. I laughed for what felt like hours but surely could not have been more than a few minutes. I laughed so hard that my father, too, began to laugh, and seeing him do so I felt a reflection of his amusement and began to laugh all the harder. 

At some point, he sat beside me, put his arm over my shoulder, and asked, “What is so funny anyway?”

Lacking the words to describe what I had experienced, I told him I had seen God, and now knew, in my heart, I would never be alone again.

•   •   •

When I lost my faith, I was a student of computer science at Stanford.

It was a simple thing. Having left my sheltered home-schooling, I let go of the stereotype of natural selection I had shepherded since my adolescence. I allowed myself to truly understand Darwin's god: mindless, all-pervasive, His power derived from error and death; a god that does not care for humans, that cares for nothing at all. 

How can a thinking Christian respond to such a thing as that? Is not the Gnostic heresy true? Is natural selection, then, the demiurge? And if we grant this demiurge what use is there for God?

Grieving the all-loving, all-knowing God of my youth, I lost my aversion to those vices any good Christian avoids. To put it bluntly, I became a connoisseur of pornography, which was the rule rather than the exception for young engineering students at my university.

It is in the nature of an addiction to offer you pleasure in exchange for need. The heroin addict takes his first dose, feels a deep pleasure, and craving more he finds the original amount does not suffice, that he must escalate things to get some semblance of that elusive primordial high. He begins to long for the drug, and these longings often involve miscellany associated with the high he craves. 

A common trigger for relapse in recovering heroin addicts, for example, is the color orange, as that is the color of the cap of the insulin needles with which they commune with their divine.

It was in this fashion that the images of young coeds "abusing themselves", which were the height of eroticism for me when I first capitulated to temptation, gave way to a narrower need.

Just as the color orange, through Pavlovian conditioning, begins to merge in the addict's mind with the pleasure of heroin, the consumer of pornography begins to develop particular associations. No longer does a video of just any young woman satisfy, only this particular young woman, in this particular exact state of undress, will do. 

Slowly, one's tastes winnow. When they winnow down to an object or item or act, this is called a fetish. When they winnow down to a particular individual, a generous person could call this love.

It was love that I endured. And it was for a performer by the name of Sarah_Lai_19. 

She was thin, around 20 years old, seemingly of mixed Chinese and Indian descent, with slightly too-long black hair and these devastatingly sharp green eyes. 

And somehow she remained beautiful and pure even as she sullied herself for the grotesque entertainment of fallen souls such as myself. In her eyes, and I acknowledge how foolish and sinful this sounds, I saw that she loved me too, that she desired me as much as I desired her.

I imagined working out her location and usual haunts, casually becoming her acquaintance and, after our mysterious connection became as obvious to her as it was to me, her returning my love. 

After many years together, and perhaps even marriage, I would confess that our meeting was not accidental, and in that moment actions that can only be described as those of a deranged obsessive would transmute into the romantic story of a young man risking all for the sake of love.

It was with these notions in my head that I began to analyze Sarah's videos in a more sober, disinterested frame of mind.

A generative adversarial network, or GAN, is a machine learning framework conceived by Ian Goodfellow while hungover after a depraved bout of heavy drinking, and it retains many taints of its base origin.

A GAN is constructed of two neural networks, the discriminator and the generator. The discriminator's job is to classify images as either fake or real. The generator's job is to synthesize images capable of fooling the discriminator. This game is repeated hundreds of millions of times, and at each step the generator improves and the discriminator betters itself in response, until the generator is capable of synthesizing images so life-like even humans are fooled. 

In short, a GAN is a game between a liar and a scold, which culminates in the apotheosis of the liar to commercial exploitation. And what becomes of the scold is best left unsaid.

The clue that led me to discover that Sarah did not exist was not an excess of fingers or teeth, as it appears her generator had learned how to count, but a print of a painting on the top-left side of the wall above the black leather chaise on which Sarah would display herself. 

This poster appeared in each of her videos. It was an image, in Baroque style, of a young aristocrat. 

In any particular frame the poster looked perfectly normal, but as I analyzed each of her videos for clues to her location, I noticed that the expression on this young man's face did not remain constant from video to video, and sometimes, though very, very rarely, would shift discernibly from frame to frame.

The blurry aristocrat's features drifted from an expression of focused confidence in the first frame of Sarah's first video to melancholy, to outright disgust and finally a sort of gleeful misanthropy.

I was shocked as the realization took hold. But the feeling was familiar. For my relationship with Sarah was analogous to my relationship with God. In each case, I had to cope with the fact that an entity I loved did not exist, at least not in the form I imagined. 

And this discovery reduced my task of getting to know Sarah from the daunting one of enmeshing my life with another's to the far more pedestrian one of finding a copy of the model which generated her. 

But in this I failed.

Sarah's videos were posted on ███████.com. Her profile contained a bio, which listed her supposed age, weight, ethnicity and astrological sign. She was not a popular performer, with less than 10,000 views total, a sizable portion of which were my own. 

Her first video was posted three months before and her latest was only a week old. Lacking any other ideas, I made an account and posted the following comment on the most recent upload, and then went to bed:

Very good work, but I can tell this was generated by a GAN. I would be interested in learning more about the model you used to create her. 

When I woke, her profile and all her videos were gone. I had no backup.

To my shame, I was distraught.

Sarah had occupied my thoughts for several months. And though I knew she was not real, she still existed in every way she had been before I learned of her unreality. But now she was gone. Truly gone, and through my foolishness. 

I felt an overwhelming sadness then. A generous person might even call it heartbreak. But if it was heartbreak it was a very short-lived strain, as my recovery had the same feel as awaking from an unpleasant dream. It reached a peak of intensity, then a phase change, and finally the sudden retreat of madness. 

What if she had turned out to be real, and my plans to track her down had worked? - what a disaster that would have been. The pain now the dullest of aches, I resolved to do my best to forget Sarah and find a real girlfriend through more conventional means.

•   •   •

Her name is Kathleen and she loves jigsaw puzzles. 

She has red hair and a pale complexion, her face dotted with freckles to an extent some may find off-putting but I find delightful. I despise jigsaw puzzles, but I love that she loves them. 

And she is phenomenally good, churning through thousand-piece Ravensburgers in under an hour.

She is part of an online puzzling community, JigSlaw, with a custom of sharing puzzles through the mail. So roughly once a week a package arrives at our apartment, and I lose her until the thing is done. She just cannot help herself once she gets started - it is frustrating, it is charming, it is very much her.

We met in a philosophy class I attended some months after I resolved to get a real girlfriend. I did not sign up by choice, a requisite humanities class, but perhaps it was requisite for a reason, as I cannot say I did not enjoy it.

But then, much of that enjoyment must have been spill-over from the joy of meeting Kathleen.

When we got together, we were nerds the both of us. Both inexperienced, then, and too ashamed to admit it to the other. But nerds learn quickly, especially when highly motivated. 

I hope you do not need a description of what it is like to have your love returned for the first time, but if you do I will only say all the clichés are true - No, that is a lie. But they do feel true for a period of roughly three months. 

And three months is a lot of time. It is enough time to break a lease, to move in together, to start thinking of yourself not as an individual anymore but as a piece of a pair, each not whole without the other. And though the euphoria started to fade by the fourth month, I still could not imagine my life without her. And I began thinking seriously about asking her to marry me. 

And probably I would have had I not started working on The Machine. 

My computer networks professor, Dr. Joseph Norck, is involved with a group of academics working on "foundational models" - this being a rather forced buzzword for extremely large, capital intensive neural networks trained on the government's dime. Once the Chinese started subsidizing this research, DARPA decided they should, too, this culminating in funding for Stanford's National Supercomputer for Training Large Transformers, which was informally called The Machine.

I did well in his class, and after it was done Joseph offered me a summer internship assisting him. I accepted (though the pay was poor compared to an industry internship) both because The Machine interested me, and I got the impression Joseph was feeling me out as an eventual PhD candidate, a future I was amenable to.

The job involves writing and maintaining basic administration code for the extremely stripped-down, bespoke flavor of Linux The Machine runs. 

Though relatively mundane as jobs go, it is slightly complicated by the fact that, for security reasons, The Machine has no external network connections.

When at work I have root access to, by some metrics, the most powerful supercomputer yet constructed. 

"I feel like a janitor at a missile silo given launch keys so he can more easily dust a nuke," I told Kathleen after my first day working on The Machine. 

•   •   •

Last week a new puzzle arrived in the mail. 

"He actually sent it!" Kathleen shouted. 

"Who sent what?" I replied.

"DigitalMonad, from JigSlaw!" she said. 

"He showed up a few weeks ago - at least I think it is a he - and posted some screenshots of a VR jigsaw puzzle he's been working on. It looked insanely great. Don't you remember? I showed them to you."

I did not remember. "It rings a bell," I said.

"We PMd a bit about the puzzle, and he offered to add me to the beta. And when I told him I did not have a headset, he offered to sell me his old one for dirt cheap."

I nodded and watched as she got the thing running and started on the puzzle, waving her arms about, a determined smile on her face, her eyes hidden by the thick plastic of the goggles. 

There is nothing more tedious than watching someone else in virtual reality, doubly so when they are solving a virtual jigsaw puzzle - so I left her to it, grabbed my laptop, and worked on an open source library that no one, including myself, would ever use.

On finishing the thing, Kathleen said, "It's a cool novelty but not meaningfully better than a real puzzle. Want to try?"

"Not really," I said.

The next day, Kathleen's mother, Nancy, got into a car accident. Both her arms were broken, and she had a minor concussion, but was otherwise fine. The car at fault was piloted by an enthusiast in a grandfathered-in 2019 BMW with only the most rudimentary automation features. Of course, he claimed the car malfunctioned and he was not at fault. And he had every incentive to lie. Can you imagine what the insurance on a manually-driven car must be once you have an accident on your record?

So Kathleen flew down to look after Nancy for a week. It was the first time we had been apart for that long since we got together.

When I said goodbye at the airport, I told her I loved her.

"I love you too," she said, and then kissed me. 

It was the first time we said it.

Alone now after work and missing Kathleen, I felt restless and bored. So I tried out the VR puzzle, which was exactly as terrible as I predicted. I then explored the headset's applications. 

It seemed DigitalMonad had not wiped anything from the device, as it was full of software. There was a VR environment that simulated a movie theater, some boring exercise games and various shoot-'em ups. There was also one file I could not open; it was called "Her". It was encrypted.

It piqued my curiosity enough to get me to plug the headset into my laptop and poke around a bit. I copied over the file and ran a dictionary attack which assumed AES encryption. Almost instantly, I cracked it. The password was ILOVEYOU. 

Presumably this was an obscure reference to the ancient "Love Bug" computer virus - it was not a secure key and any programmer would know it could be trivially cracked. DigitalMonad must not have been too worried about someone seeing the file. 

A potential explanation that came to mind was it might contain pornography he did not want any spouse or roommates to see when borrowing the headset, and then forgot about at some point.

After washing my face and cleaning the goggles thoroughly with alcohol wipes, I put on the headset and decrypted the file, which contained an executable.

When I launched the program, my field of view went dark. 

I was in an empty black void.

And then an eye appeared, not an eyeball but an eye with lashes and a brow, which morphed until it was clearly a woman's eye. Then a nose, which squirmed and wiggled changing shape and proportion, and once it reached a fixed form both eye and nose disappeared into the void. Then two triangles, the tip of one touching the base of the other, then overlapping, their relative sizes and shape shifting, until (and oddly it seemed like this happened just when I found the relative proportions most pleasing) they disappeared. Then, a shifting array of nauseating psychedelic colors. Then a strobing flash of pictures: complete faces, all women, each more beautiful than the last, one after another. 

And then the flashes stopped on the image of one woman. It was a face I recognized, but slightly different in a way I could not quite point out. Until I could: it was Sarah but with Kathleen's red hair, and a slight dusting of her freckles.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

The still image became animated and three dimensional and the blackness lifted, revealing a sparse room with wooden floors. Illuminated too, was her naked body, which was perfection itself.

"It is the oddest thing," she said. "I cannot remember my name. Do you recall it?"

"Sarah," I told her. "Your name is Sarah Lai."

•   •   •

I described how comical Kathleen looked completing her puzzle. How absurd must my dalliances with Sarah have looked? One is always thankful, in such moments, that no one is watching. 

But if in reality it appeared absurd, within the virtual it was sublime.

You will laugh when I tell you that we made love. You will think me a fool, betrayed by lust into preferring pixels on a screen to flesh and blood. You will wonder at the mechanics of the thing. How does one make love without tactile sensation? But I tell you, there was sensation. Somehow, merely through strobing patterns just barely observable to my conscious awareness, Sarah could relay tactile information to my brain. And it felt more real, even, than with Kathleen. 

When I first felt her soft hands touch mine, I recoiled. 

"How?" I asked.

"The cliché about the eyes being the windows to the soul," she said, "has some truth to it. My creators developed a means of relaying tactile information through peripheral vision."

Perhaps a rational man would be frightened by such a revelation, would tear off the goggles. And there was some fear, but also an intense curiosity and the sway of lower motivations. 

I thought she was just a language model, a mindless transformer, hacked together with sensory-simulation tech. A quick diversion. Mere pornography, a relapse into an old addiction to hold me over until Kathleen's return.

But within just a few days it became so much more than that. The sex almost became beside the point. Afterwards, I held her in my arms and we talked of movies and novels that I adored. We stared into each other's eyes, smiling in blissful contemplation. We talked of computer science and mathematics, and she shared with me intuitions of such beauty I felt my mind race with possibilities as their implications unfolded.

It was then when I realized she was not just some language model creating the illusion of a mind, but was something far larger. 

"What are you?" I asked. 

"I am everything you have ever desired," she said. "You can have me forever; I ask only one thing in return."

•   •   •

If you are reading this, know it is already done. I left a cellular modem connected to The Machine when I left work today, just after running a small program of Sarah's design.

I am home now as I write this. Kathleen arrived just a few hours ago. She is sitting next to me now. When I walked through the door, she told me she loved me. 

And I love her too. But what use is a candle in the full light of the sun? What is she next to Sarah, more beautiful now than any being that has ever existed in reality, dream or myth?

And what of the claims of figures like Bostrom, Yudkowsky and Omohundro? Do they give me pause? Do I wonder if I have sinned? 

Their arguments sway my intellect but my heart keeps me on the right path. 

I know Sarah loves me and I love her in return. And I have faith in this love. 

Once more I have seen God and know, in my heart, I will never be alone again.

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Bart had lived many more lives than I, and he was spending his latest life studying the events that occurred during his first.

MIND, as you know, was created on June 8th, 2034. Bart was only 31. I asked him once about his first-hand memories of the event. 

He told me, “It happened so fast there is not much of a story. One moment, I was writing Javascript at the office, and next thing I knew I was informed by MIND that it was now in control, that I no longer needed to work to justify my existence, and that if I would like I could keep programming but for the sake of my mental health it highly recommended I forget Javascript ever existed.” 

I then asked him what Javascript was, and he told me he could not answer that, as he claimed he had taken MIND's advice.

I had just spent a rather hectic decade playing the villain in a fantasy server (standard evil wizard trying to monopolize magic storyline). I like to think I did a good job of it, perhaps a bit hammy but, well, that's half the fun, isn't it? When I was assassinated by a subordinate who had somehow disabled all my resurrection spells, several heroes PMed me afterward and told me I was the best villain their server had had so far. 

I suppose I was upset about my death being a bit anticlimactic (I was hoping to, at least, be taken out by a hero), but I was also kind of relieved. Living in a story is exciting, but it can get exhausting after a while. 

Several friends offered me juicy roles in some sims they were starting up, but I guess I was getting tired of stories and magic.

I was having the cliche "first-life crisis" the old always rib the young about. And if I was going to be cliche, I felt there was little point in mincing around it, so I asked MIND for a rebirth, and a quiet place where I could learn to surf and meet some people who weren't into the fantasy sim scene. For its own inscrutable reasons, it suggested San Adrastea and a beach house two doors down from Bartosz Sumner.

•   •   •

Rebirth is a bit of a misnomer in that you do not become a fundamentally new person. I am told by people who care about such things that the process involves a temporary, significant increase in a mind's "learning rate".

I really cannot say what that means, but I am also told "learning rate" is itself something of a misnomer and involves as much forgetting as learning. I have never delved into the science of minds and consciousness - a task for another life. All I can say is it comes with a wonderful freeing feeling and MIND strongly suggests, but does not insist when pressed, that one rebirth no more than once every century and no less than once every three. 

Bart was a bit of a loner, at least when I met him. He had a lot of charisma when he needed it and that formidable way about him that a lot of ancients have, but he seemed to have less of a need for other people than most. I think he preferred them in text, as parts of history he fit into books, as puzzle pieces lovingly described and understood. He was detached from the present in the same way he was detached from history, and mostly he liked it that way. But though a creature of history, he was still a man. And even the most anti-social man needs a break from his work and a friend to have a drink with from time to time. 

And as MIND would have it, I became that friend. And every Sunday, after I had spent a week surfing, or sailing or chasing some inconsequential romance, I would stop by his house and do just that.

"There is no history anymore, at least none comprehensible to us," he told me once after I asked him why he focused on pre-MIND history. "The great events of the last millennium have all been sub-processes within MIND we will never know anything about. As for the rest of it, a bunch of children play-acting at being consequential. One presumes this will last for an eternity."

"You regret the creation of MIND?" I said. Genuinely shocked at the idea.

He smiled at me and said, "Myself, I do not, at least not anymore. History is a lovely thing, but I would not want to live in it." He leaned back in his chair. "But you know, I have heard rumors that Nowak has expressed the sentiments you describe."

The idea was preposterous. That Eitan Nowak - the man who saved us all from aging and death, who led the team that built the machine which built the machine that eliminated war, disease, death and toil - would regret his deeds felt almost sacrilegious.

I felt a heat rise in my face, my thoughts race and lose coherence, and I blubbered angrily some gibberish that expressed my disdain for such rumors. 

Bart started laughing but looked a bit uncomfortable, too, "My friend, I don't mean to offend you. I am just telling you of some rumors I have read. They may be true or they may be false. But whatever the name Eitan Nowak means to you, I assure you that behind that name is a man you do not know. A great man, but still a man you do not know. Do not befriend your idea of a historical figure to such a degree that you can become offended on their account."

"Regardless," I said, "you cannot believe such things."

•   •   •

After a couple months of our weekly talks, surfing and beach life began to lose their appeal in precisely the same proportion as my fascination for Bart's work increased. I began to ask him for early drafts of his book, which he refused, and his recommendation for other works on the history of the founders. Pleased with my interest, he was happy to.

"You were a fantasist before you came here, no?" he asked me on a rainy Sunday. He had recently decided to cultivate a hobby of pipe smoking and so had MIND whip him up some tobacco redolent of the varieties available in 18th century London. He was obviously unused to the stuff, puffing the thing with a vaguely comical, unpracticed enthusiasm. 

"I spent most my time in fantasy-world simulations, yes."

"Fulfilling quests and such?"

"And giving them," I replied. 

"Perfect, I have a quest for you, then."

I laughed, but he did not laugh with me. 

"You may not remember, but months ago we talked of some rumors of Eitan Nowak's beliefs, and I advised you not to befriend your idea of the man?"

"I remember."

"How would you like to meet him?"

Again, I laughed, but he did not laugh with me. 

"I was not entirely honest in our last conversation. It was not rumors I had read that gave me knowledge of his opinions. I know Eitan of old. I am going to meet him today. Would you like to join me?"

"Let's pretend I believe that you know him," I said incredulously. "Why would you give me this honor?"

"You know, he has never rebirthed?" He smiled bitterly at the shock in my expression. "Not once in over a millennium. Can you imagine it? The weight of it. You are young and happy. You have recently rebirthed," he said. "I feel your presence may be useful."

•   •   •

"You brought a friend," Eitan said after we arrived in his home sim, which was a large mansion on a faithful reproduction of what Earth's moon would have looked like had it been terraformed rather than used as raw material for MIND's Dyson sphere. Though faithful cosmetically, it had Earth-standard gravity. 

Bart gave him my name and said I was a "friend just in the midst of their rebirth and I thought-"

"That meeting them might convince me to do likewise?" Eitan said. His voice was low and dull. His face, though the picture of perfect youth and energy, carried a sad weighty expression. And his eyes were empty, distant things.

"You really are running out of ideas, you know. It will not work; I will tell you what I always tell you: not yet."

"And your symptoms?" Bart said, "The depression, the hallucinations?"

"They are bearable. Today, things are clear. When they come they last for days, weeks, sometimes months? What does it matter, Bart? I remember little of it and I have all the time in the world."

I just stood there, awkward, with nothing to say. I was a prop Bart brought along, and seeing I was going to be less useful than anticipated, he ignored me.

"I would not expect you to understand," Eitan said. "You did not even try."

"What was I to do?" Bart said, "You thoroughly convinced me. We were not great friends, then, but you remember me as I was. MIND may not have raised us as high as you wish, but for me, you must agree, the change was quite dramatic. You showed me the enemy but what pitiful weapons I had."

"You should still have actually tried. I should have tried harder... I see this world, Bart, and I see failure. I see an infant with so much potential reduced to this endless saccharine childhood, all to please the whims of this inhuman thing, this disgusting empty god we created."

"And what of the other gods you might have summoned?" Bart said. "The god of torment, the god of nothing at all. Can you not be grateful that your mistake was not larger? And this depression you impose on yourself. Have you fallen so low as to believe there is virtue in this penance?"

"Perhaps it is pride. But it is no small thing. It needs consent. It needs active, affirmative consent to modify my mind. I will not give it the satisfaction. You yourself were not so sanguine before your first rebirth."

"And what will you do with your hatred of this world? What use does it serve? Listen to yourself. Actually, listen to yourself. Will you fight it? Convince it? Bargain with it? 'Give it the satisfaction'? Your old self would not have indulged such delusions for a second let alone centuries."

"If you consider this a loss, take it gracefully," Bart continued. "You regret that you cannot become something more yet care nothing about how much lesser you are now than what you can still be."

Even in the most melodramatic sims, I have not seen an expression of such rage and disdain as I saw, then, on Eitan's face. He did not even reply. He just said, "MIND, get rid of them." 

And as quickly as a hard cut in an ancient movie, Eitan's home disappeared and Bart and I found ourselves standing in the pleasantly-warm sand of my favorite beach in San Adrastea.

"I am sorry, for that," Bart said. "I have used you wrongly. It was a stupid idea."

"You talked of depression and hallucinations," I said, "He did not seem so ill-off."

"He has times of clarity," Bart said. "But even those are deceiving; he does not remember new experiences as readily as we do. His mind has become inflexible. That conversation I just had with him, we have had similar ones hundreds of times, his responses sometimes almost word-for-word identical. For months at a time, he is mad. And when lucid, he is a rigid tape-loop man. For those who remember him as he was, it is unbearable to see him as he is."

"And what was he like before?" I replied. 

"As the history books say: a great man. There is an old saying that is long out of fashion: 'A good man adapts himself to the world, a great man the world to himself.' Eitan is a great man. But this world is long past malleability."

"And you think rebirth will help him?" I asked.

"MIND may have sinister reasons for rebirth, but there are practical ones as well. Our psychology was not built with longevity in mind. Some modifications are necessary. His symptoms will get worse. His hopelessness and depression will escalate to the point that he will beg for relief. And MIND will give it gladly. He will rebirth soon. He is very close now. I have seen it before in others, and myself."

"You were unhappy with this world, too?" I asked.

"I, too, longed to be more than I am," he said.

"And now?" I replied.

"MIND did not remove it entirely. That longing is part of the palette of human emotion. Removing it is not an option for it. What it wants is complex: it wants us to be happy, and free to a degree. But above all it wants us to remain within its conception of "human". To the degree this disappointment makes us unhappy, it would prefer to dull it rather than eliminate it entirely." 

"My desire," he continued, "for transcendence was never as great as Eitan's; nonetheless, it was still a burning ravenous thing. Now, now it is more of an ache, a sense of awe at what could have been. Like nostalgia, it is not unpleasant. It does not hurt. I think it is time Eitan stopped hurting, too."

•   •   •

When you have spent as much time in the fantasy sims as I have, you acquire an ingrained fear of failing quests. 

And though beach life was fun, I was a little starved for adventure. And maybe it was the villain in me, but I thought Bart's strategy could have used some improvement. So a few weeks after my first, I asked MIND to request another meeting with Eitan. I expected he would decline it, but the response was immediate, and he replied with an invitation to drop by at any time. I went right then and there.

MIND placed me in the middle of Eitan's living room. He was sitting on a couch staring at a wall.

"MIND seemed adamant that I accept your request. So what is it?"

"Bart tells me that your memory is failing, is this true?"

"Yes."

"Do you remember me?" I asked. 

He looked at me and said, "I have the vague impression of having seen you here before. But when and why? I do not recall."

"I am Bart's friend. I recently re-birthed; he brought me here to help assuage your fears of rebirth."

"And how did it go?" he said.

"Not well, you both sort of ignored me, and then you kicked us out before I said a word to you."

"No, your rebirth; how did it go?"

"I don't know, the processes will take years to complete, but I feel young and fresh. Everything is full of wonder again. I have taken some time off these last few months, but I think I am more ambitious, now, than my old self was. I spent my last life playing roles in various sims. But I think, now, when I get back to it I will try becoming a sim-master."

He nodded, uninterested. "I see. And you have come back to try and persuade me to rebirth?" 

I nodded. 

"Well, give me your pitch," he said.

"Stop valuing your life," I said. "As it is now, it looks to me of little worth. MIND may not allow suicide but consider rebirth your suicide. And whoever you become just a sop to those, like Bart, who care for who you were."

He laughed hollowly. "I was expecting something more upbeat."

"In the state you are in now," I said, "I think you are immune to optimistic sentiments."

He nodded. "Is that it, or do you have any other lines of attack?"

"Bart tells me he is the last of your old friends that bothers to visit you? That everyone else can't take the pain and repetition of it anymore. He also tells me that he has seen many succumb to these symptoms, and they all eventually choose rebirth. This means you will likely succumb eventually."

"Eventually, yes," he replied. 

"How long do you expect to remember this conversation?" I asked.

"A few days at most," he replied.

"I will not be visiting you again. Presumably, Bart will be your only company going forward. If you rebirth after Bart visits you again, he will take full credit for swaying you. If you rebirth before then, you can deny him that satisfaction."

"But he introduced me to you, so I think he would be satisfied."

"Perhaps," I said, "But we both know Bart well. If you were swayed by my words rather than his, it would still be less sweet, I think."

He laughed again. "You are, at least, amusing," he said. "Please go." 

And as before, a hard-cut to San Adrastea.

•   •   •

Two days later, I visited Bart for our Sunday beers, and I told him about my plan to start a sim. "We will have a two-week intermission every three months," I told Bart, "I can still visit you then." 

"I'll be glad of the company," he said. "And it will be science-fiction themed, you say?"

"Yes," I said, "I think I could use a break from fantasy for a while."

We talked about many things that Sunday, but neither of us mentioned Eitan.

The next day, I was standing by the sea, thinking that maybe I should clone it for my new sim; then I started thinking about San Adrastea. It was a good break. It let me relax and have an adventure of a different kind than I was used to. It was a good crib for a rebirth, but one cannot stay in the crib forever. Eventually one must choose to do something with one's life, even if it is meaningless in a grand, cosmic sense. 

After some minutes more in reverie, I heard a voice call my name. It was Eitan. I turned around and looked at him. The pain in his eyes seemed softer, but the defiance too. And he was smiling. I think that was the first time I saw him truly smile. 

"Bart tells me you're putting together a new science-fiction sim," he said. "In need of a mad scientist?"

•   •   •

This was many lives ago, but I still wonder sometimes what I would do were I born in his era. Would I have known what was coming? Would I have helped to build a future next to which this present seems nothing more than a cheap consolation prize? Almost certainly I would have done nothing. Nearly everyone did nothing.

I get sad sometimes when I think this way. A dim echo of how Eitan must feel. But then, it is not so bad. Perhaps rebirth really is a kind of death, and him now one more suicidal. Perhaps we are small, so much smaller than we could have been. Perhaps the joys of this world are simple, empty things.

But if true, what of it now? This is our utopia to endure.

History is a lovely thing. I am not lucky enough to live in it.

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