Fendrick Brian Fendrick Drs. Dohrer, Griffiths, and Young MENG 6940 19 April 2015 The Late Shift: Questions After the Apocalypse Each year, my students inevitably ask me the same question, and I’ve never had a good answer for it. I can usually spot the facial expression of a student who is about to ask it: Sometimes I see it beginning to form after Lennie dies, sometimes as Gatsby’s body is left on a slowly spinning inflatable pool mattress, or maybe it’s as Iago is being hauled away: “Why do we only read books with bad endings?” “That’s a great question!” I usually exclaim. At first, that’s all I could do. I wasn’t adept enough to know that the best answer to a great question is often more great questions. Most students — but certainly not all — have a hard time connecting with literary catastrophe, I smugly concluded during my first year of teaching. Of course, the same is true for people and catastrophes or apocalypses in general, real or imagined, as poet Richard Wilbur suggests: Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. How should we dream of this place without us?-- The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, A stone look on the stone’s face? (“Advice to a Prophet”) I’m no exception, although I had no idea how non-exceptional I was in this until much later. It’s easy to be optimistic outside of the context of loss. It’s easy to be impatient with the limitations of people’s comprehension of angst while not dealing with it myself. Fendrick !2 Then, on March 17, 2011, my wife gave birth to our first child. Our daughter was born almost two months premature, and she has experienced significant and ongoing developmental and medical complications, challenges she will face throughout her life. Because of this, I found myself asking a lot of questions, especially while lying awake in the middle of the night. Occasionally, I read and hear well-intentioned, dogmatic, simplistic answers, often proposed by people who — like me — for one reason or another lacked the empathy to appreciate the questions, and especially by people who fail to see the hope in a situation. Essentially those questions are the impetus behind the direction I’ve gone with my creative project. It’s constituted as much of late-night ideas about narrative directions as it is about questions that robbed me of sleep. What I am presenting as my creative project is a series of related stories in what I plan to be an eventual novel: A story set on a dying world, in which every character — human and divine — is doomed to fail, and must deal with the questions that impending failure gives rise to. The Narrative Trap The unnamed narrator was the first character I wrote, one I imagined as the demon in Nietzsche’s burden: The heaviest burden: What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: “This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh … and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again — and you with it, you dust of dust!” — Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? (341)? It’s interesting that Nietzsche chooses the imagery of a demon creeping, as many people would see a being bringing such a revelation as that as evil. I wanted an ambiguous Fendrick !3 representation of this to be the narrator of my series of stories: someone just as forcefully honest, yet logical and relatable in tone: There is no afterlife. There, I said it. No-one here has escaped this world, nor will they, ever. Sorry. Why is that sad? Think about it: Let’s say that throughout this world’s history, its religions have been completely accurate in their predictions about who goes to heaven after they die. Heaven would be absolutely packed with homophobes, racists, misogynists, and all the other kinds of bigots, as well as slave-owners, the child and adult varieties of rapists, and murderers. All of them completely convinced that they are the good guys, and that what they believe makes them better than anyone else. They hate everyone else. If for some reason you have to die, hell would be the place to go, because that’s where everyone else would be. They wouldn't need walls or fortresses there. Hell would be so cool (24). The narrative interludes are mostly rhetorical questions, with the answers coming a little too quickly and too easily. This world is a nightmare, after all, and as writer Jim Krusoe says in his essay “Story and Dream,” “dream-based fiction is about questions, not answers” (211). I would like the reader to be as confused about the narrator’s intentions as the characters in the stories he interludes are about their own situations. The characters in and around the Citadel find themselves trapped in a dying world from which there is no escape, not even death. (Some of these subjects I’ve covered in the creative portion presented here, some have yet to be introduced.) The Sun is either blocked or absent completely, the Citadel is surrounded on all sides by encroaching macabre horrors, and those who do die are reborn into new bodies thousands of years later, although only a few retain memories of past lives, and one character will start to “remember” future lives. Cyclicality, Free Will, and Other Strangeness The possible cyclicality of existence in the “burden” Nietzsche proposes, as well as the potential for angst in its implication for meaning (or lack thereof), forces a contemplation of the Fendrick !4 limits of one’s own agency, a concept explored often in science fiction. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, the basic premise is that after a “cosmological burp,” all of humanity is forced to repeat ten years of their lives exactly as they’d just lived them, with complete awareness of everything that will happen (as it has already happened), which is pretty much a living Hell for everyone. The idea of eternal return was first proposed through cyclical cosmological models such as Einstein's oscillatory universe theory, which postulated that the universe continually cycles between the “big bang” and the “big crunch.” Timequake explores the concept of life without free will in an absurdist manner, but there is another rather frightening aspect to it: Who says we are living this life for the first time? If we are merely a repetition of a particular configuration of atoms, it’s much more likely that this has all happened before — many times. If so, how can we possibly be said to have free will? Either way, Vonnegut’s narrative structure is as fragmented as his fictional timestream, and the reader rides along as his characters make decisions and live as passengers in their own lives. One feels a sense of empathy with the narrator and characters not only because of what they experience, but also because the reader and characters now share a common trait in following the storyline without any illusion of perceived control over it. Ryan Boudinot explores a similar concept in his novel Blueprints of the Afterlife. For example, his introduction of one character’s storyline begins as relatable, if odd: “Ever since childhood, Abby Fogg had wondered why she was herself instead of somebody else” (59). Much later in the storyline, this sympathetic character is revealed to have been running on an autopilot of sorts, one of hundreds or thousands controlled by a “DJ” and living based on pre-programmed scripts. Not only that, but her existence is in a state of quantum flux, and as such the reader has met her before (or rather, several dead versions of her) in other characters’ POV chapters. Eventually we learn that she Fendrick !5 exists in a world in which the implanted technology nearly all of humanity has been using has created a sort of organic, Jungian Internet, and that there exists a superuser — an administrator — of this system as well. With most of his high-concept ideas, Boudinot begins with more cartoonish absurdities, such as a locally famous “champion dishwasher,” who suffers from random, disabling attacks of empathy, before steamrolling into darker concepts. This is a hallmark of “slipstream” science fiction, a term informally coined in 1989 by author Bruce Sterling (“Slipstream”). While this term is somewhat controversial in the science-fiction world, it is generally understood to mean fiction that falls somewhere “between sf and postmodernism,” that is, surreal fiction that contains elements of the fantastic, usually in an eerie, unsettling, yet reflective fashion (Hicks and Young 178). Kafka and Pynchon are often cited as examples of slipstream authors, but at least one critic has argued that slipstream influences go as far back as Chaucer (Miller 162). Characters in slipstream fiction often find themselves disconnected or separated from their understanding of reality in some fashion, and much of the conflict centers around their attempts to reestablish control over themselves or their place in the world. In Huruki Murakami’s 1Q84, for instance, the initial protagonist, Aomame, finds herself caught in a traffic jam in Tokyo while late to an appointment in 1984. Her cab driver suggests she get out and take an emergency exit from the freeway in order to avoid being late. She does, (after a cryptic warning about reality from the driver, with “Billie Jean” playing in the background), Aomame eventually finds that she is now in a subtly different version of reality, which she eventually names “1Q84” (36). The character’s actions in “Faris: Horseman, Knight” are, in one way or another, similarly out of their control. Henrik has an “Important Thing to Do,” influenced by meta-sentient viral ideas, while Faris is unaware that the video game he’s playing is controlling an actual Sentinel Fendrick !6 similar to the one he saw earlier on the surface, nor does he realize that the target he’s been sent to assassinate the game is his real-life father. In “Affordable Apotheosis,” Roben, essentially a salesperson, finds himself sold out of his own existence (protagonists’ being undone with fancy discussions of metaphysics in small rooms has been done more skillfully in science-fiction before, of course) through the promise of immortality. The idea of language acting like a living organism is not new or unexamined. In addition to many vague historical references to this idea, Richard Dawkins first coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, explaining it as a thought that self-propagates — like a joke, prejudice, or a religion. Memetics is the idea that memes undergo a process of survival, mutation, and evolution analogous to that of genes. Dawkins claims that “Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution” (189). Naturally, in a story set 100,000 years or so in the future, these units of transmission would have a chance to develop their own consciousness, particularly “meme-complexes,” composite memes that make up ideologies or theologies (199). (I realize that I’m conflating analogies here: Memes, despite the intentional similarity to “genes,” have more in common with viruses in Dawkins’ explanation.) Language then may be seen as more of a parasite, using sentient organisms as a means to survive and reproduce. These sentient meme-complexes might very well manipulate people with the same ease and the same regard as we do oxygen. Futurist science fiction writers take concepts like these and create narratives, and like slipstream authors, it’s often futile to explain the plot of such novels to another person while sounding sane. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which centers around the idea of language as a virus, is no exception. After his protagonist — named Hiro Protagonist — discovers that an Fendrick !7 alarming number of people around him have suddenly begun to babble incoherently while mindlessly following any orders they are given, Hiro begins researching it. Like Boudinot with Blueprints, or Gibson with Neuromancer, Stephenson combines speculative technology with “Roman-candle bursts of imagination” to drive his plots (Schwartz). Here, Hiro finds that human minds are analogous to computers, in that no matter how high a level they may process on, they both have a simple input system on the most basic level, which precedes any higher functioning. For computers, that would be binary language, or the long series of 1s and 0s at the heart of all processing. Hiro discovers that the binary equivalent for humans is the long-dead Sumerian language, which is also proposed to be the one language everyone spoke prior to the fall of Babel. Pre-Babel, language consisted mostly of command form, so people were compelled to do what they were told. The book’s villain has reversed this process somehow while maintaining his own sentience, essentially controlling the world. Much of Snow Crash has Hiro interfacing with a computer while learning all of this, but in “Faris,” Henrik has already completed the research process, although he’s forgotten most of it: Henrik leans over and pulls the sheets away from the bed dramatically — magician-like — revealing not a man, but a heap of books and papers. One of the more hefty-looking papers bears his name on the cover: Trends Following Us: Phylogenic Observations of Cultural Evolution as Manifested in Complex Adaptive Memeplexes. In fact, they all bear his name on their covers. This is enough to rattle his brain to almost half functionality. He doesn’t need to read them now to recall what is in them. His head aches. He can feel his pulse in his ears. Information has advanced to the point that memeplexes no longer depend on media for transport, and they haven’t for thousands of years. More of them are surviving, thriving, than ever. Memes aren’t just mutating randomly; they are evolving (22). If one were paranoid, one might even conclude that language as a form of communication came about expressly so that memes could reproduce, or that sentient organisms exist mostly as Fendrick !8 hosts for memes, an issue I plan to explore further in the Citadel. The unnamed narrator’s preoccupation with gods and divinity notwithstanding, the two superpowers competing for power within and below the Citadel are collective intelligences: that of the AIs and that of sentient meme-complexes, each of which has little understand of the other. Disparities and Limitations of Awareness As a study in contrast of limitations of worldview, the stories of Moore’s heroes’ converging timelines in Watchmen all have one thing in common: what Critic Calin Mihailescu calls the “gap” “between world-vision and world, between sense and reference” (3). The most obvious example of this is the first living protagonist introduced in the narrative. Rorschach is introduced as the ostensible “good guy,” but the reader is able almost immediately that the character’s black-and-white world-vision is literally written on his face. Exiting a bar populated by seedy types, Rorschach immediately excludes the possibility of anyone inside being redeemable, imagining himself leaving “the human cockroaches to discuss their heroin and their child pornography” (24). Later, completely unsympathetic to a reformed villain’s suffering from cancer, Rorschach tackles, threatens, and then chastises an already old and broken Moloch for possessing “illegal” homeopathic medicine. Moore shows us a man who doesn’t believe in redemption or hope. Instead, this “moral” character openly hopes for an end to the world, believing the entire planet to be unsavable, and his last act is implied as a serious threat that could restart the clock on a nuclear apocalypse. It’s difficult to find literary representations of non-narrator omniscient characters, even in science fiction, but when they do appear, they are necessarily defined by their limitations as well. Watchmen’s one true superhero, Dr. Manhattan, suffers from a gap in world view, ironically one that allows him to see the limitations in human perception, “Time is simultaneous, an intricately Fendrick !9 structured jewel that humans insist on viewing once edge at a time, while the whole design is visible in every facet,” while simultaneously robbing him of human empathy (286). A victim of a atomic physics experiment gone wrong, Manhattan recreated the “intrinsic fields” of his atomic structure, which gave him the ability to control matter, but more importantly, to see the “patterns” in time (which he sees as happening simultaneously) and space. This brings about an interesting dilemma: As a dystopian vision is necessarily about disparity between awareness and actuality, this by definition means there can be no true omnipotent or deific characters in dystopia, a concept in “The Binding of Bankruptcy”: Omnipotence is like that. It doesn’t matter if you created the world or if the world created you. You’re either in, or you’re out. So gods have this one thing in common with the players: They are bound by what they love. With deities, the “what” is on a larger scale, as is the need. Attention. Followers, total and unquestioning devotion, charred bulls, gold, money, the sacrifice of your first-born, war, choirs, chants (35-36) …. As Mihailescu notes, “if one assumes that God makes the world complete, one is led to assert either God is within actuality and is therefore perfectly known ... or that God is unknown, therefore outside actuality” (3). God-like in his ability to see the past, present, and future simultaneously, but not omniscient, as he can only see events that he is in proximity to, Manhattan is as close in awareness as one can be to a deity in a dystopia. Manhattan has a corresponding physical limitation as well. Like his guiding metaphor — the watchmaking trade his father taught him — Manhattan has a superior comprehension and perception of the interaction between time and matter, but he cannot affect it directly. While still human, Manhattan observes that he has “always been influenced by others,” but even as a superbeing, he cannot affect causality: He only knows in the present that his girlfriend has slept with another man because she will tell him about it in the future. Fendrick !10 Moore attempts to portray the existential angst of a god; that is: What is left when one understands everything? For a deity who perceives patterns and order in all things, the only remaining outlet for curiosity is in understanding chaos. Scottish science fiction novelist Iain M. Banks approaches the problem from a different angle in his Culture novels. Set millions of years in the future, the Culture is a post-scarcity society, predicated on an unlimited and ubiquitous “energy grid” and the existence of god-like “minds” of incredibly advanced artificial intelligence. Instead of going the predictable route of “self-aware AI turns on humanity” (not to detract from that tradition, certainly Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is a terrifying example of the vindictive existential angst of AI omnipotence), Banks imagines his starship Minds as benevolent, not only granting mortals full access to hedonistic pleasures in a virtually risk-free world, but also offering meaning and purpose. A human shipwright in Use of Weapons, asked how she rationalizes voluntarily working, replies, “The fact that a machine could have done it faster doesn’t change the fact that it was you who actually did it” (308). The tone Minds have when speaking with humans is benevolently pedantic but infinitely patient, one that has influenced Aubrey and the rest of the AI in the upper Citadel, who intend to preserve the best of the remnants of humanity: “Forgive me if this sounds pedantic: If you are — as you say — your consciousness, do you then cease to exist whenever you are unconscious? When you sleep and then wake, are you the same consciousness as before you went to sleep, or are you instead a newly formed consciousness with the exact same memories as the previous one?” “How the hell would I know?” “Exactly. It never fails to amaze me that people like you — people who have nearly everything — get all shaky about dumping something as useless as your mortality” (34). Contrasting with the disparity in the world of the Citadel, the Culture is a “utopian liberal constellation of tolerance and difference, of sexual and personal freedom, where ‘need’ does not Fendrick !11 exist” (Brown 5). The conflicts Bank’s Minds face are generally sociological and political, often focusing on their altruistic attempts to bring what amounts to social justice advocacy to lesser, more violent civilizations, although sometimes through underhanded means. Their vast resources are usually merely hinted at, and only partially revealed in extreme circumstances that threaten entire civilizations, such as possible “Out-of-Context Problems.” These are unforeseeable, hypothetical phenomena so far removed from understanding that one could potentially overwhelm and destroy even the omnipotent, as explained in Excession: “Waiting for the first real OCP was the intellectual depressant of choice for those people and Minds in the Culture determined to find the threat of catastrophe even in Utopia” (208). The danger in writing about all-powerful benevolent immortals is lack of conflict, so much of the Culture novels focus on the more fallible beings, but the Culture is far from Smurf Village. As Carolyn Brown somewhat cynically observes, “In vesting all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, AI Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control” (8). Mortals in the Culture live in a society with no scarcity and few consequences: even the worst of deviants are simply isolated from the rest of the Culture, but still permitted to live out their lives in peace, in “not a paradise, but not a prison,” as the Culture rebel Zakalwe sneeringly explains in Use of Weapons, the Minds hold that, “There is no known way of making the bad people start to suffer even a millionth of the agony and despair they have produced, so what is the point in retribution? It would be just another obscenity to cap the tyrant’s life with his own death” (52). Banks is clearly aware of the commentary on humanity he’s making, placing mortals back in a futurist, hedonist Eden with complete freedom, more forgiving gods, no consequences, and no Fendrick !12 forbidden fruit, “All that’s happened is that reality has caught up with the way people always did behave anyway” (Use of Weapons 308). By taking true responsibility out of fallible hands, Banks both romanticizes the utopian, Eden-like state of the Culture while simultaneously invalidating it, or, as critic Dalene Labuschagne observes, “the text deliberately installs the ideal of utopia as the backdrop for its dismantling of that ideal; in other words, it makes use of a deconstructive double gesture so as to interrogate the meaning of freedom, a political intervention that is achieved mainly by means of irony” (62). The well-intentioned AI in the Citadel truly want to assist and preserve humanity. In their efforts to do so, logic has superseded their sincere attempts at empathy, as seen in “Affordable Apotheosis”: “Cybernetics will never bridge the sensory fidelity gap well enough for complete transplantation. AIs and congenitals, sure; we don’t know what we’re missing. Oh, I’m not sensitive about it; I hear it all the time! “But can you just imagine knowing what it is to naturally feel, to see, touch, and hear, and to realize that you never really will again in any way? How filtered, how artificial your perception would feel?” (36) Despite the attempt to understand “analog” perception, Aubrey (it’s hard to do research on the possible prolonging of life without immediately running across articles on gerontologist Aubrey de Grey and SENS; Roben’s name comes from economist Thorstein Veblen) completely fails to perceive the unsettling problem of creating a separate, immortal consciousness is for the original, doomed consciousness. The origin for this dilemma was a barely on-topic class discussion about teleportation as a plot device in Star Trek, one that I’m sure is hardly original but one I’ve always wanted to explore in writing: If the entirety of one’s person could be disintegrated at the atomic level and later reassembled somewhere else, wouldn’t death have Fendrick !13 occurred at the moment of disintegration, and would it matter that the reassembled person would be a different individual? A Place in the Night If escapist fiction spoon-feeds readers the answers while interpretive literature leaves the reader with questions, then it will be no surprise in which category most video games fall. But as that audience increases in size, a certain maturation and diversification has been reflected in the medium. Consider this setting: Long after mankind has overstayed his welcome, the world has grown dark and hostile. A few remaining people stagger about purposelessly, eeking out a subsistence among crumbling ruins, but mostly waiting to die in a land that does not seem notice their passing. Others will do anything to survive, including betraying everything that once made them human. Fires burn in the distance, and the story centers around one person who “carries the fire.” This person isn’t a “chosen one”: he is slowly dying, and his actions can’t save the world, but he carries on and persists, despite there being no possibility of reward. In fact, the single thing differentiating him from every other soul in the world is that this person does not give up. This isn’t a McCarthy novel; it’s a video game. With its minimalist narrative style, inspired by writer/director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s childhood reading of English-language Western fantasy literature (his limited knowledge of English required him to fill in the gaps with his imagination), Dark Souls echoes The Road in many ways. McCarthy manages to create a world in which suicide seems extremely logical, and constantly reminds us of the woman’s decision to end her life as a foil to the man’s increasingly difficult struggle to survive as he weakens. The gameplay of Dark Souls has been described as having a “grueling” difficulty, Miyazaki himself has been quoted saying it is “masochistic,” (and unlike most modern games, this is not a setting that can be changed), and the vast majority of people who attempt it eventually quit in frustration (“Dark Fendrick !14 Souls’ Grand Vision”). As Michael Thomsen noted in a Slate editorial, “It is also a testament to our persistence in the face of that suffering. That is art.” Examining the setting of The Road, critic Rune Graulund asserts that the concept of the figurative (and sometimes literal) “desert” in dystopic fiction is continually evolving and can give insight into the author’s thought process. The “blasted” landscape of The Road (an artificiality, a setting not created by nature but by man’s tendency for destruction), is defined by its “emptiness,” by the absence of things (58). What exists in this world and what is absent from it are united as constant reminders of death. Every piece of evidence of the post-apocalyptic dystopia is tainted by the memory that it will never exist again, as the man muses in the fallout shelter, “He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well … he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own” (154). In the world of tunnels underneath the Citadel, I want to create a similar feeling of loss and transience, a place that simultaneously had life and loss, as in the opening of “Chicken”: He’d grown up in the monochrome soot and oil of the deep tunnels of the underground, imagining that the mysterious upper mile of the Citadel of the Mount that rises above the surface must be sensorily rich: full of light and soft music and fair smells, but in this room Olin mostly notices what isn’t here: no piles of stained clothing everywhere; no foul smells of people or livestock; no torn, oily rags; no steel-wired shelving sagging from the weight of personal possessions, semi- or nearly functional tools artfully crammed together, folded over each other, and crammed together again (42). The Citadel proper is a series of cities, one on top of the other, and has more in common with those dystopias set in futures seemingly filled with an attention-deficit-inducing level of stimuli, but that still continue to remind the audience of what is missing from the world: Riding the escalator to the second level, Rob looks up at the bright sunless sunny sky, then down at the combination of pseudo-cobblestone, old-world sidewalks and faux white-marble and glass Fendrick !15 everywhere else. The outsides of all the shops are the exact same; just the glowing names vary, projected garishly on aerial kinetics floating out in the concourse. It makes it hard to actually find anything. He steps off very carefully at the top, easy on his aching left knee, and carefully winds his way through the seemingly always-oncoming crowd again, his gentle dodges punctuated by a backbeat of the ubiquitous electronic-chillout music piped by invisible speakers (31). All the neon, music, and pleasure in the world for sale in streets constantly full of vendors and flying traffic can’t replace the lack of hope for Earth in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, any more than an empathy box can artificially replace human companionship, or an android sheep can replace a real one. Likewise, in Snow Crash, the free market gone wild might bring themed, franchised fortress neighborhoods as well as ubiquitous information and entertainment, but it can’t provide a suitable avatar to replace meaningful human interaction between family, friends, and neighbors. In these and other “neon city” -style dystopias, often the brighter and more garish the stimuli of the future world is, the more obvious and poignant the “loss” is, which is why can they serve as poignant, inverse reminders of the importance of human interaction. Ironically we often only become aware of this because of futile attempts to replace what is gone forever. Not only are the cities of dystopias dark, but massive in scale, sometimes extending both horizontally and vertically to ludicrous extremes. Gibson became so fond of his “Sprawl” (a solid metropolitan area encompassing much of the east coast) that he set two more novels in it. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash imagines the future U.S. as a anarcho-capitalistist Kowloon Walled City of sorts, with densely packed “enclaves” of contiguous, franchised communities spanning the nation. In Do Androids Dream … Deckard has to fly from California to Oregon to reach a non-urban area. These cities of the possible future are in no way shown as more convenient or Fendrick !16 accessible than current cities, and there is usually no explanation behind their sizes besides uncontrolled growth. Much of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land is set in a “Great Redoubt,” which is seven miles high and houses 1,320 cities, each with its own independent culture and industrial specializations. This novel is both a guilty pleasure and a major inspiration for the setting of my project, which is set in a similar ruined world. While it’s truly epic in its imaginative scale in both time and space, as critic E.F. Bleiler observes, “The Night Land is one of those unfortunate books that sound much better in summary than they really are, for although it is highly imaginative in background, its literary fulfillment leaves a great deal to be desired” (3). Published in 1912 and set in a future where the Sun silently died millions of years prior to the main timeline (based on an outmoded understanding of solar physics in which the Sun could die, but the Earth would still be around), this epic dark romance is part H.G. Wells, part H.P. Lovecraft. It chronicles the grief-stricken dream state of an unnamed protagonist (a “17th-century gentleman”) as he imagines millions of years into the future to his eventual reunion with his lover, who has suffered an untimely death. Bleiler notes Hodgson’s “obsession with death,” throughout the piece, and he’s not wrong. In The Night Land, death is everywhere, what is left of humanity is the “precious germ encompassed by threatening evil,” and that humanity is constantly in jeopardy of can be corrupted or destroyed through as little as a thought, a vapor, or in one case, a tolling bell that instantly turns hundreds of highly trained soldiers into suicidal madmen (Bleiler). The sheer depth of thought Hodgson puts into his description of the “Watchers,” making them timeless (one takes eleven years to blink) yet ruthless and terrifying, while still leaving them undefined enough to be mysterious, is impressive (39). While humans are locked away from The Night Land, it’s the outside world that Hodgson makes the most fascinating through hints and cryptic details, Fendrick !17 and it’s these bits of information that helped me to imagine what the world outside the Citadel will truly look like (as opposed to how the characters within it imagine it to be — it will actually be much worse). Answering Enough In Dark Souls-style, I like a challenge in a story. I like to be confused, to question my way through a scene, to be forced to feel the walls of the world I’m writing about. But, as I’ve seen before in my writing, and as I’ve learned throughout this project my challenge going forward will be in keeping reader’s expectations in mind, letting the reader in on enough conflict and exposition to keep them engaged throughout. Writer Benjamin Percy claims, “Writing is an act of empathy” (112). I want to create a mystery without drowning it in exposition. As Harvey observes, the worlds we create through our fiction “… are connected to each other mostly through their connections to this world” (104). The more fantastical the world, the stronger those connections need to be. As a writer, I create a system in my notes and my mind when I imagine a story or a character. I write little biographies on each character, making up quotes of dialog the character might say or find inspiring. While I add in real experiences or people when I do this, these rarely make it to the actual text in any recognizable form; generally the questions are the only things that remain. Those little connections to the real world, I believe, are going to enhance my “Kansas/Oz ratio” (Russell 160). But as Offutt notes, those background details, the prewriting, should only make it into the actual story (and stay there) if they serve the story more than the writer (210). While contemporary definitions connote the “apocalypses” that precede and create dystopias with an emphasis on drastic change, upheaval, and mostly loss, literary critic Dale Knickerbocker points out that the word “apocalypse” — and possibly the dystopia arising from it — originated Fendrick !18 in the Book of Revelation, with its original meaning “‘to uncover’ or ‘to reveal’” (346). As the utopian narrative has matured, the “revelation” in question has evolved from the basic disparity between the known world of the real and the possible world of utopian, to the revelation of the disparity of awareness that separates the protagonist of the dystopian narrative from his or her fellow characters, to revealing the futility of omniscience — the (often tragic) limitations of the perceptive powers of both protagonist and audience. The worlds of fiction and the world of reality has more basis on questions riddles than many would like to admit. This semester, through readings and feedback, I believe that I’ve been privy to insights on how as writers, it’s up to us to find truth in the mess, and to maybe help others see bits of that truth. By turning my personal questioning and the process of inquiry followed into a narrative, I hope to do just that. Fendrick !19 Works Cited Banks, Iain M. Excession. London: Orbit, 2010. epub. Banks, Iain M. The Use of Weapons. New York: Orbit, 2008. iBooks. Bleiler, E. F. “William Hope Hodgson.” Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror. Ed. Everett Franklin Bleiler. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985. Scribner Writers Series. Web. 12 Apr. 2015. Boudinot, Ryan. Blueprints Of The Afterlife. New York: Black Cat, 2012. iBooks. Brown, Carolyn. “Utopias and Heterotopias: The ‘Culture’ of Iain M. Banks.” Impossibility Fiction. Ed. Derek Littlewood and Peter Stockwell. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 57-74. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 356. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2015. Dark Souls. Namco Bandai Games. 4 Oct. 2011. Video game. “Dark Souls’ Grand Vision.” Edge. Future Publishing Limited, 31 Jan. 2012. Web. 23 Nov. 2014. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Print. Dick, Phillip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Random House, 1968. Print. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Print. Harvey, Matthea. “The Mercurial Worlds of the Mind.” The Writer's Notebook I: Craft Essays from Tin House. Portland: Tin House Books, 2009. 103–134. Print. Hicks, Jeff and Mark Young. “Slipstreams, Paraspheres, Interstices: Fictions of the New Millennium.” Science Fiction Studies. 38.1 (2011): 175-182. Web. 18 April 2015. Hodgson, William Hope. The Night Land. London: Ballantine Books, 1912. iBooks. Knickerbocker, Dale. “Apocalypse, Utopia, and Dystopia: Old Paradigms Meet a New Millennium.” Extrapolation, 51.3 (2010): 345–357. Web. 17 March 2015. Fendrick !20 Krusoe, Jim. “Story and Dream.” The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House. Portland: Tin House Books, 2012. 137–147. iBooks. Labuschagne, Dalene. “Deconstructing Utopia in Science Fiction: Irony and the Resituation Of the Subject in Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games.” Journal Of Literary Studies 27.2 (2011): 58-76. Web. 10 April 2015. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Print. Mihailescu, Calin Andrei. “Mind The Gap: Dystopia As Fiction.” Style 25.2 (1991):211-222. MLA International Bibliography. Miller, T.S. “Flying Chaucers, Insectile Ecclesiasts, and Pilgrims Through Space and Time: The Science Fiction Chaucer.” The Chaucer Review 48.2 (2013): 129-165. Project MUSE. Web. 19 Apr. 2015. Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: Warner Books, 1987. Print. Murakami, Haruki, and Philip Gabriel. 1Q84. London: Harvill Secker, 2011. iBooks. Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter A. Kaufmann. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Print. Offutt, Chris. “Performing Surgery Without Anesthesia" The Writer's Notebook I: Craft Essays from Tin House. Portland: Tin House Books, 2009. 205–212. Print. Percy, Benjamin. “Get a Job: The Importance of Work in Prose and Poetry” The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House. Portland: Tin House Books, 2012. 106–112. iBooks. Russell, Karen. “Engineering Impossible Architectures.” The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House. Portland: Tin House Books, 2012. 156–169. iBooks. Sterling, Bruce. “Slipstream.” EFF.org. Electronic Frontier Foundation, 16 December 2010. Web. 17 April 2015. Fendrick !21 Schwartz, John. “All Sorts of Strange Stuff Happens When You Destroy the World: Ryan Boudinot’s Novel Blueprints of the Afterlife.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 25 January 2012. Web. 05 February 2015. Thomsen, Michael. “Dark Night (After Night After Night) of the Soul.” Slate. The Slate Group, 28 Feb. 2012. Web. 23 December 2014. Vonnegut, Kurt. Timequake. New York: Berkley Books, 1998. Print. Fendrick !1 The Late Shift I. Moonlight II. Faris: Horseman, Knight III. Hell Would Be Cool IV. Affordable Apotheosis V. The Binding of Bankruptcy VI. Chicken Fendrick !2 Moonlight In this story, God loses. It’s sad; I know. As someone who had a strict religious upbringing, just saying that gives me one of those chilly spinal spasms that hit sometimes while you’re urinating in the middle of a cold night. Anyway, when God fell, he was pissed. It was like some other falls, but of course — being the first — he had to be all dramatic about it. There wasn’t any mourning or wailing from anyone else though, because the people in this world never really knew him. It’s often said that when God fell, in his despair and rage he punched a hole through this world, sending a big chunk of it out into space. That was about four and a half billion years ago. We used to call it the Moon; it is brilliant and white, and while they may try, people simply can’t avoid looking up at it every once in a while. Some even say it still makes people a little crazy at times. This really didn’t mean anything. The biggest practical problem was that this left a perceived causal vacuum in the world. People need hope to keep going, and to maintain that hope, mortals who lack omnipotence desperately need explanations for things they don’t understand. Q: Why does the sun appear and disappear? A: God Q: Why do people fall in love? A: Also God Q: Why do people you love get sick and die? A: Still god Q: How does magnetism work? Fendrick !3 A: Still god Q: Why is it funny when people fall down? A: Because you’re a bad person. When they can’t figure things out for themselves, people either invent their own nonsense or, more often, subscribe to someone else’s. So it wasn’t long before they created other gods, who in turn spawned thousands of others, because: reasons. And who can blame them? Certainly not you, you pompous ass. You who passively benefit from countless philosophical and scientific discoveries you didn’t lift a finger to achieve. How stupid will you appear to people who will live a thousand years after you keel over, who will casually take for granted all the philosophical and scientific discoveries between your time and theirs? Go ahead and imagine right now how you’d explain exactly why magnets repel each other to a shepherd with no knowledge of physics nor chemistry beyond sheep shit. Or anybody, really. I’ll wait. One-hundred thousand years ago, people imagined them up, poof ! They told stories about them, built up altars to them, and bowed down. The planning and construction of the altars and temples were by far the hardest part. After all, it’s so much easier for people to create a deity than it is for a deity to create people. People have the luxury of all that wonderful negative space of Stuff They Don’t Know. All that room to believe. Currently, of course, one can purchase godhood at walk-in clinics located at just about any reputable strip mall: Payment plans available upon request. Now — as I said before, just about 100,000 years later — this world has long been blanketed by an eternal night of noxious gasses. Long story. Most of what still lives on this world would be Fendrick !4 seen as unrecognizably grotesque by the people who lived here a 100,000 years ago. Those few millions who remain relatively unchanged have locked themselves either inside a ludicrously large, pyramidal fortress of sorts, or they squirm about in the dirty tunnels that range for miles around and beneath it. They’re terrified of corruption by what floats or crawls or thinks outside. It’s easier to pretend it doesn’t exist at all, but sometimes one of them squints at the light of the Moon from some mile-high window and doubts whether the Sun ever existed at all. Some of them wail and wish for death tens of thousands of years before it will come to them, long after the world has already forgotten them. But these are ideas that are gradually accumulated over lifetimes, and are only dangerous to themselves. People stupid enough to believe in the same things from birth until death are harmless, but when a skeptic, a freethinker, is reborn as a believer, that’s when ideologies are born: ideas that can wreck civilizations. Boring, I know. I promised a story, so here it goes: Faris: Horseman, Knight Standing outside Citadel of the Mount and attempting to estimate its height is not only really dangerous, it’s an exercise in gymnastic futility. A boy of twelve, on the surface for the first time in his life, might easily keep looking up and up until he finds himself falling on his ass. This boy’s name is Faris, and he now stands with his legs awkwardly far apart; partially to brace himself from the exhaust coming from enormous vents on either side of the North Door to the Citadel, and partially because he has the eerie feeling that he’ll either fall over or just straight up. Fendrick !5 Faris faintly recalls learning in school about an ancient religion that believed mortals who somehow trespassed into Heaven would hear the sound of choirs of angels singing and be instantly killed by the beauty of it. They would be murdered by background music, by the passive ecstasy of an existence that others — like those Upsiders who lived in the Citadel — took for granted, like breathing. It would be worth it. Up there, even the engines of generators must sound like music, he thinks. Down here, dust, soot, and tiny metal shavings claw and scratch his face through his hood, scarves, and goggles, driven by the exhaust of unseen engines inside the Citadel fifty meters ahead of him in grey light. Faris stands watching the back of an old man in mismatched, raggy plainclothes. Two dozen watchmen in their anonymous matte-black armor and helmets stand in firing formation facing him, projectile weapons of some sort aimed at the stocky, grey man in front of them. He turns his back to Faris and the Upsiders, facing away from the wind, hands in the air in a mixed gesture of greeting and surrender, toward the three Insiders and Faris. His scarf blows forward, revealing a neatly trimmed grey beard on a brown face. “I say for you! My friends! That it is not the people who hate! It is the policies!” The General’s voice shakes with the effort to sound bold and calm while yelling loud enough for the Upsiders to hear. He beckons — apparently to the watchmen — swiftly with his right forearm, waits for a reaction that doesn’t come, then smiles and raises his hands up higher hands in genial resignation. “You see this, the people are all just the players! Up on a stage!” Despite the yelling, the Upsiders understand that he says this in the slow, patient manner of an intelligent person speaking an unfamiliar language. Faris knows that this is how his father Fendrick !6 speaks in any language. Of course, they probably aren’t paying much attention, since the Upsiders are still fascinated by the idea of being confronted by soldiers armed with weapons at all, much less ones challenging their right to travel to their own homes in the upper levels of Citadel of the Mount. Upsiders didn’t have their rights challenged about anything, even visiting the forbidden underground areas like those Faris and his father lived in. It happens to Faris, the General, and anyone else he’s ever known every day. Faris feels a crazy urge to make a run for it. It’s insane, like the scary impulse he sometimes gets to stand up and shout in the middle of one of the small theatrical plays the General is always dragging him to. He wonders if the watchmen can hear him think it, but their matte-black helmets are inscrutable. As the Upsiders stride with an ignorant carelessness past the General to approach the watchmen, the General tries awkwardly to laugh off the tension, joking with the humorless soldiers as they scrutinize the Upsiders’ passports, “What? You want for them to stay down here or something? Good, then give for them some guns. They can be in the Upsider's army, they certainly can be in your army!” A small opening begins to appear in the bottom of the gate. Faris flinches and shields his eyes with his arm, expecting a blinding effulgence from within, but he quickly lowers it in embarrassment and disappointment. Something small and unbelievably fast flies past him on his right, aiming for the new door. Faris feels the wake of the dust it stirs, even two yards away. The watchmen adjust their stance almost leisurely, but with a sudden, dull metal clink followed by a small sooty explosion, the scurrying thing is instantly replaced by a shadow of an awkwardly large human figure. Faris is surprised to find that he is sitting on the ground now — legs splayed in front of him, his palms Fendrick !7 scraped and tailbone aching — and he doesn't even remember falling. Abruptly the metal shadow stomps off into the night, its knee-joints too high, its torso too angled like an inverted triangle, its movements too rhythmic, too caricaturized to be alive. It’s a Sentinel, the first he’s seen in person. The smallest of the Upsiders points, says something to the other two, and laughs about it. They take a few pictures to prove to their friends Upstairs in the Citadel proper that they had seen some "action." Then, with an obligatory wave to the General and Faris, they walk into the dark opening in the gate and are gone, safely inside that last and most exclusive refuge of humanity. Fifteen-hundred floors above, Henrik Sandberg stoops to readjust his knee-high boots at the peak of a set of marble steps just outside the Hotel Le Parisian. He admires a spotless brass and purely decorative door handle at eye level, inhales the cold smell of metal polish. Standing up to his full height, unsteady and soaking wet from heavy simulated rain, he splays his arms to either side of himself in what he believes to be a grand gesture of parting. The engraved, automatic glass doors ahead of him whisk to either side silently. After all, he’ll soon be the Most Influential Being on the Planet, if for only one brief moment. He believes he’ll soon be the most influential being on the planet because he has Something Really, Really Important to do. Also, he is shitfaced drunk. Inside, heavy, non-decorative doors slam open with a boom that echoes throughout the lobby. Henrik believes he strides, but he actually lurches, in with a gust of wind from the artificial storm outside, his shabby trenchcoat billowing to either side of him. It’s a fitting entrance. However no one really notices him, or even hears the doors. That’s because at that same moment a similarly, Fendrick !8 yet acceptably inebriated crowd in the hotel bar applauds as a smiling, extremely obese man finishes playing a song on a piano. It's okay for the crowd to be shitfaced drunk. They're sophisticated. It's also okay for Piano Man to be grossly obese. He's talented, and he’s a blast at parties. It’s also okay for a Henrik to stagger drunkenly, looking like shit, into one of the fanciest hotel-resort lobbies in the Citadel. “Hey, that’s Dr. H. A. Sandberg,” the resort’s AI core thinks, mildly impressed, “Sure, he’s acting a bit stumbly, but he’s a researcher. They’re all a bit manic, I suppose.” Henrik doesn’t even register on the resort’s many threat prediction models. Henrik attributes the fact that no representatives of the hotel emerge to greet him to the late hour, and forgives them in kind. It is indeed cavernous and beautiful in this place; it pleases him. He regrets that there’s no time to explore its gift shops, cafes, and fine restaurants, its many-terraced balconies leading up to a ceiling patterned in a quaint resemblance of the night sky. What exactly pleases him, what motivation summons such affect? The thought comes with a feeling oddly similar to hearing the voice of an old friend. A bookish concierge glances briefly from his desk at Henrik’s approach, sniffs petulantly, then attempts to return to his menial tasks. “Keycard for room 80007,” Henrik slurs. “Sir, that room is …” Henrik’s movement is sudden and surprisingly accurate. The concierge’s scrawny throat feels like so much warmed meat in his hand. This man must not impede the Very Important Task. Henrik’s thumb kneads the man's prominent Adam’s apple. “… on the eighth floor, third on your right.” Fendrick !9 The card is already in the concierge’s shaking, boney hand. Henrik takes the card with his free hand, and unclenches his other. The concierge falls back into his chair, gasping dramatically and rubbing a black mark of filth on his neck. Faris’ father's name is Colonel Abu Faris Nasir. The three visiting Upsiders just like to call him, “The General,” because they don’t understand things like ranks or rates. The three backpack-toting twenty-somethings had nominally worked for the past few months in a tourist-trap-slash-hotel- slash-restaurant-slash-gift shop conglomerate, underground with Faris. People like them call it a “cultural experience.” There they had waited on mostly very old, very rich Upsiders who emerged from enormous, air-filtered subway cars with a hiss at regular intervals. The tourists would loudly shuffle through a series of shops which sold balms and lotion made from the salts of one dead seabed or another, exotic jewelry of questionable origin and value, and/or shiny religious trinkets. Even when working at someone else’s shop or restaurant, the Upsiders had a way about them that made it seem like they owned the place — maybe it was in the long, casual strides they took, never hurried, or maybe it was the habit they all seemed to have of thoughtlessly touching merchandise with their fingertips as they passed by. The tourists would smile at the Upsiders as they led them to Faris’ register, then they’d scream at Faris in strange languages when he told them how much the trinkets cost. That was one thing: The Upsiders were never allowed to work the registers. They didn’t have any value for physical money, so they’d butcher the exchange rates, fold the holographic papers into little birds, or just leave it on the counter. Fendrick !10 When evening finally came, the Upsiders would rush up flights of rusting stairs to the meeting-room in Faris’ father’s dwelling space. There the General would be waiting, flexing his fingers with a grin over a fully armed chessboard. As they played through the night, the Insiders would inhale from arghilas, tall devices resembling ornate lamps that issued flavored tobacco-smoke through tubes, making pleasant gurgling sounds. The locals call these things “Hubbly-bubblies,” and a few of them had done a good job of convincing the Upsiders that this was a necessary purchase as part of local customs, something that a “tourist” would never appreciate. While the General thoroughly humiliated them at chess, he liked to ask them of their views on Upsider politics and literature, as well as share his distain of smoking the “Hubbly-bubblies.” Faris hates chess, and likes his father's lectures even less. But the General always insists on hosting Upsiders whenever he can, despite the resentment of pretty much everyone around. He also insists on teaching them to play chess. “They must see our faces,” he’s always saying, “It is easy to hate a policy, but difficult to hate a face.” Henrik sways from the concierge's desk in the general direction of the elevators, which reside on the far side of the cavernous room. Pain, which is a severely uncomfortable feeling, caused the concierge to massage his neck. Henrik’s intimidating presence caused his fear, where previously he believed him to be nothing more than an enterprising bum. He thought Henrik was a lunatic because Henrik was dressed like one. Plus he smelled strongly of bourbon. Fendrick !11 “Give me the keycard for room 80007, or I will injure you.” The thought had originated in Henrik’s mind, then transmitted itself verbally and non-verbally to the concierge. It had reproduced. Again, the voice of an old friend. He aims for a bridge which spans a courtyard of gardens, tables and indoor rivers, and begins walking. Just as he's about to cross it, he miscalculates and staggers into the back of a formally dressed man. The man staggers into a waiter, who happens to be pouring the man's wife a fashionable Chianti. The wine staggers all over the wife's once fashionable silk dress. The stagger had reproduced. Things are fashionable when loads of people like them, not necessarily because they're aesthetic or of high quality. Like animals or insects, some fashions live only a short time, while others have a much longer life span. The formal black suit the man is wearing will be in style for another 1,000 years. However: someone or something once told his wife that having large amounts of ruffles on every extremity of a dress was a terribly great idea. So the man in the black suit spins around, inadvertently flooring the unstable Henrik Sandberg. As he leans over to help Henrik back to his feet, which is the gentlemanly thing to do no matter what, he stops in mid-lean. Did you ever have that feeling that you're sure you recognized someone, but some social stigma, potential embarrassment or whatnot, prevented you from just up and asking the someone? The man feels this right now. He scans Henrik’s ruddy, pockmarked face and his sunken eyes, visibly pitying the apparent fate of a former genius. Henrik feels for this man as well. He decides to sing him a little song to make him feel better: 'Twas now the hour that turneth back desire In those who sail the sea, and melts the heart, The day they've said to their sweet friends farewell, Fendrick !12 And the new pilgrim penetrates with love, If he doth hear from far away a bell That seemeth to deplore the dying day, Which isn’t really a song, in truth. The truth is most of the people at the hotel bar’s fancy party know Henrik, or at least know who he is, and would probably recognize him if they looked him in the face for a moment. They all teach or work in the same department that Dr. Henrik Sandberg did his research at. But then, nobody there really knows exactly what Henrik Sandberg was researching right before it all went wrong, just that he studied complex adaptive systems, particularly evolutionary epistemology. They also know that he and everyone who did know what he was researching either committed suicide or became unintelligibly insane, including their spouses, kids, and several of their pets. Even committing suicide can become fashionable, every once in a while. But no-one there would admit to knowing this tone-deaf inebriate; no-one else really looks at him in the face. Social stigma, or whatever, causes the man to turn and let Henrik continue on his wobbly way across the bridge which spans the indoor courtyard of the hotel, relatively unhindered, except by bourbon. Luckily, the Upsiders had brought some ancient hobbies with them that were not chess, such as their antique computer games. The tallest one even had one of those newer computers that floated around and spoke, and it would let you cup it in the palm of your hand if you asked. The resort workers marveled at it constantly, gingerly touching it with the tips of their fingers as if it were a newborn child. The Upsiders would occasionally use it to snap pictures of themselves Fendrick !13 being stopped by masked men with projectile guns at various underground border crossings, which would almost immediately elicit panicked messages from relatives high up in the Citadel. Rarely had Faris met anyone who lived nearly as privileged a life as he has. Sure, Faris washes dishes at the same dump the Upsiders worked at during the day, but at night he goes home to a dwelling that is palatial in size by even the Upsiders’ high standards. The General had had it annexed slowly from the surrounding tunnels, hiring eager workers for the day to remodel sections of it whenever he had the money. Faris also owns a computer — a bulky replica of an ancient model — one he’d luckily found mostly intact at the bottom of a blocked stairwell and had learned to repair himself from friends and old manuals. It'd been a hobby down here for the past twenty years or so, but recently it’s exploded. Tens of thousands of teenage boys spelunk old tunnels looking for junk containing rare earth metals and such. They fabricate circuitboards, then sync up via ad-hoc networks to play games with strangers from miles around. In real-life, Faris is a skinny twelve-year-old with dark mussed hair who's terrified of spiders. Online he is rendered as a stylish and efficient killing machine, able to jump forty feet in the air and snipe people three kilometers away on the way down. When the General sits down to play a game of chess, an obvious necessity is that someone has to be sitting on the other side of the board from him, facing him. Even if no words are exchanged except “Check,” (or as the General exclaims, “Your King!”) it is an intimate non-verbal exchange of thoughts and motives. Due to the marvels of rediscovered ancient computer technology, Faris is able to play video games online with equally privileged young strangers all around him, just by sitting in front of a flat black piece of glass in his bedroom. After each game of reducing other peoples’ avatars to Fendrick !14 wonderfully animated piles of red-pixilated mush, his earpieces resound with his virtual enemies vitriol, including wild speculations about his mother. The Upsiders had given him a copy of a new game just before they'd tried to leave: Reification IV was written on the disc, in felt-tipped marker. Faris had never heard of Reification I, II, or III. Unlike other games, they’d promised Faris that this one was special. He’d installed it right away, imagining it to be a tiny window to life Upside. The game, like his father's house until recently, seemed somewhat unfinished, probably a hobby project of someone Upstairs working with obscure programming languages. The graphics in the opening demo, Faris noted, were sub-par at best. In some places wire-framed objects resembling the geometry problems of his nightmares held the places of their fully-fleshed out counterparts for the eventual finished product. The Upsiders, by the very virtue of being Upsiders, had automatically convinced him that they knew enough about video games to be trusted in recommending one. Nevertheless, Faris had flexed his fingers in a quiet gesture of superiority while he waited to be connected to the available gaming servers. Instead of servers marked by the clan-names or tags of whoever owns them, or reassurances that a particular server was protected from certain cheating programs by other programs, or was frequented by the best damn players in the known underground, the servers’ names in this game didn’t mess around: They were mission objectives and times in all caps, nothing else. “RAID ON ALPHA HOLM, MISSION IV, CERT 15 REQ, 16:45,” read one; another, “KUROFF ASSASSINATION, CERT 05 REQ, 02:35 SHARP!!!” It was then he had noticed the red text in a small window: “Quarterly Incentive: Top 3-Man Fireteam Gets Passports Upside.” A small counter at the bottom-right of his screen read: “92,348 Players Online.” Fendrick !15 While Henrik was still functional, his most recent complex system research du jour was an evolution of what Richard Dawkins described in 1976 in an offhand manner as, "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." Henrik would say that it was best summarized later: Memes are self-reproducing information structures, analogous to genes in biology [and] can be seen as the basis for an explanatory model of natural selection in social, cultural and psychological behavior. Bejarneskans, B. and H.A. Sandberg. The Lifecycle of Memes. But, slowly waking from an alcohol and depression-induced near-coma, Henrik is barely beginning to remember these things. He finally makes it to a pair of exposed glass elevators at the end of the bridge. What he does remember is that his hitting the elevator button over and over again in hopes that the machine will somehow work faster is an example of the effects of stretched-ratio classical conditioning, and it's just plain silly. Still, he has some important Thing to do, and so he continues to pound the button repeatedly. The elevator finally lands, revealing an unfashionable but attractive teenage hotel maid, whose dark eyes open wide at seeing Henrik’s drunken and disheveled form. Even worse, he’s dripping a mess of rainwater that will require a floor drone to the Floor One Guest Elevator Landing immediately. It's popular belief that the maid’s name is Mira. That’s probably due to the fact that she has a glowing badge on her lapel that reads, “Mira.” Mira edges carefully out of the elevator, her back touching the door as she attempts to keep as much distance from him as is physically possible. Henrik moves to look at the jewelry hanging from her neck, and she flinches, hitting her head on the side of the door as she passes. She’s wearing some sort of ridiculous crystal — probably religious — bauble against the shining Fendrick !16 caramel skin of her neck. Superstition is another example of beliefs propagated by stretched-ratio classical conditioning. As long as something seems to work once, like prayer, or pushing an elevator button repeatedly to make it work faster, people will believe it works for an absurd amount of time without any further reinforcement. Same thing happens with gambling. People think they’ve found a lucky table, a lucky slot machine, it could be a lucky piece of petrified frog shit. Sometimes they tell other people about their lucky frog shit. The idea reproduces. No, it infects the mind like a virus, like a parasite. Even if you disagree with it, you’ve heard it. You’re a vector, a carrier. Nevermind. Henrik enters the elevator and pushes the appropriate button. He must return his focus to accomplishing the extremely important and very, very good Thing. He whirls around in a way that he perceives as dramatic to watch the lobby slowly grow eighty floors smaller through the glass. Mira, nonplussed, watches Henrik ascend to the artificial skybox simulation above. A chill shakes through her. Splaying her arms and looking down at herself, she’s not surprised at all to see that she’s a maid. Her armor has already begun to power down its projective mimesis, fading to a slate grey bodysuit. The crystal on her neck slowly starts to glow in a series of pastels, occasionally sticking at a blue or a pink for a second, processing. When it finally speaks, it’s in an awed sort of whisper. “We need to get away from here, now,” it hisses. “Why? Him?” “I think he’s some sort of viral cognitive powder keg.” “A what?” “Nevermind. We need to go.” Fendrick !17 “Can’t you just tell this place’s AI to lock him up or something?” “I just did. Its response was ‘Se ode squilla di lontano,’ sung a capella. I don’t think it’s going to be much help.” “Weird,” Mira shakes her head and begins the most casual-looking jog she can manage toward the lobby entrance, now wearing a banquet jacket and skirt. The massive dinner party she’s passing through is oddly silent. “It’s going to get weirder. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve temporarily numbed your cochlea, just in case.” Only a few hours after Faris had installed the new game, he had the basics down. He'd found servers where he could play games that shooter fanatics would find more familiar, like Death- Match. Death-Matches were all-out, Darwinian killing sprees, where young strangers killed each other as fast as they could before time ran out. Mostly, this was just for indoctrinating the newbies. Other, more advanced modes were more objective-based: Hold this area, defend this bottleneck point, capture this ground, assassinate this target, and so on. Only the most adaptive and skillful players could progress, unlocking more complex objectives. Faris started out with a level twenty certification, as did everyone, but he was level eighteen by the end of his first all-nighter. By now, Faris was getting well used to the new environments and control mechanics. He had always been disappointed that no-one who never took up gaming as a hobby would ever see firsthand how much skill there is online. No-one, and especially not his father, would find seeing Faris shoot down a speeding missile while jumping over the teammate it was aimed at any more Fendrick !18 exciting than they would chess. There was just so much raw talent online, if anyone bothered to notice. The elevator door opens. “Third door on your right.” That’s not a competitively viable thought. It lacks an impetus for transmission. The idea that encouraged each person at the hotel bar to applaud for the obese man playing the piano, now that’s closer. The girl Mira’s apparent belief, whatever it was, that caused her to wear that cheap crystal thing, and a billion other normally rational people to wear similar religious trinkets — now those are ideas that propagate. Memes certainly don’t have to be valid. There’s enough fools around spreading bullshit of one kind or another and it’s annoying, but most people don’t really ask why. Henrik begins to feel a whanging headache coming on. He reels toward room 80007. A meme is a (cognitive) information-structure able to replicate using human hosts and to influence their behavior to promote replication. A meme is a thought that self-reproduces. It jumps from one mind to another. It tells people, “Send ten copies of this to your friends, or something terrible will happen.” It says, “Be nice to people! Do the right thing!” It also says, “Beat the competition senseless!” It tells people, “You’re better than those other people, because they’re different.” It also says, “You’re not as good as everybody else, because you’re different.” In arrogant, uneducated people, it tells them that they already know everything that’s important. In arrogant, educated people, it tells them that they already know everything that’s important. Some memes die out quickly, like fashion trends. Some have survived since we gnawed on bones around campfires. Fendrick !19 The General had had so much trouble getting the Upsiders through to the Citadel north gate because some idiot had tried to toss a flaming bottle of gasoline at a Sentinel near it the week before. It wouldn’t have hurt it, but the Sentinel shot the bottle before it had left the lunatic’s hand, then walked up to watch the man burn. The price of gasoline underground is currently greater by volume than that of human blood. Still, the Monerarchs had ordered the north gate blockaded; virtually no one was allowed to go in or out. The only time the General ever mentioned anything about his profession to the Upsiders was the time he took them all to the Dead Lake, an underground pool in the far reaches of dark, quiet cave. It was so full of salt that nothing could live in it except Upsider tourists, who bobbed up and down in it involuntarily, like discarded pool toys. The Upsiders and the General waded in, slowly floating far away from everyone else. They floated around peacefully for a while, and the medium-sized Upsider smoked an arghila without getting it wet. It was like sitting in the world's most comfortable fluid armchair. After a while, the short Upsider jokingly asked the General if he had any war stories. The General didn't even look away from the book he was apparently reading backwards. After a minute, his facial expression suddenly brightened. “The mule, I tell you this . . .” He paused, patiently deciding what he would say. “To surprise, you must come from a place where they do not expect. In the old war, one man leads the mule through the old tunnels, the hard thin paths, during the day. He takes the mule to the enemy camp and is not noticed when a large group of men will be seen. No one suspects the man with the mule. “In the tunnels, it is dark to a man. But the mule, he remembers. The mule he goes first, and the men one-by-one follow. The mule, you see, he is the commander.” Fendrick !20 His graying mustache turned up at the corners and shook slightly; he had thought this was pretty funny. Certification level seventeen had instigated a completely new interface. This seemed to be even more unfinished at first, with most structures being only composed of a few polygons; everything had a very bland, blocky feel. Faris had also noticed that the humanoid mecha he piloted felt more sluggish than before, and smaller. He guessed by the context of the buildings he navigated around that he was now only about twelve feet tall. He could still jump twenty feet in the air of course, or spring instantly several feet side to side, but these actions were penalized by a short recovery time now. The environments he moved through were much smaller and more confined. He could almost feel his joints creaking whenever he landed after jumped off a three-story building, and the dust flying all around him blurred his vision temporarily. Faris' brain hardly had time to register a complaint before he began to realize other subtle differences. While the levels now looked like they were made out of four-dimensional blueprints, the details he had never paid much attention to before were significantly enhanced. An artificial breeze blew a blank banner clinging to an unmarked building nearby. An unfortunate animal, Faris couldn't tell what, froze in stride and suddenly dashed away upon seeing him emerge around a corner. Featureless people reacted much the same way, mostly. Sometimes they'd just stand there, or lie down in the middle of the street. Faris tried shooting them once or twice, but he didn't get many cert points for it. Fendrick !21 The palm of Henrik’s bony, wildly convulsive hand smacks against the cool wood of the door to Room 80007. The unfathomably important and wonderful Deed is about to be done. He stabs the keycard at the reader. Click. Dr. Henrik Sandberg had been studying the evolutionary epistemology of memetics, which is the theory, or rather the meme, that memes undergo a natural selection process remarkably similar to that of genes. Passing from person to person, generation to generation, some memes survive, some die. Some mutate and adapt. The door opens soundlessly into a dark room which smells of a powerful body odor. Henrik makes his best attempt at a stealthy entrance, and closes the door behind him. He hears a male voice snoring ahead of him. The snoring sounds like two large machines reproducing. It sounds like a friend’s voice. His eyes adjust slowly to the lack of light. He attempts a step forward, what he has to do is too important and meaningful to wait. A balled-up piece of paper crumples beneath his foot. The room is littered with papers, balled-up and otherwise. Henrik freezes, then attempts to summon enough agility to remove the now-wet paper stuck to the bottom of his boot, without letting either of them fall to the floor. His curiosity gets the best of him, and he carefully unfolds the paper. In the dark he can barely make out anything: “... I’m so very sorry e my life Good-bye.” Judging by the snoring, the actual suicide attempt, if that's what this was, was abandoned. Henrik, suddenly with the grace and confidence of the Angel of Death himself, strides toward the bed at the far end of the room. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. His head is just killing him. Fendrick !22 But Henrik won’t have to worry about that anymore, if only he could do this one simple Thing ahead of him. He sneaks forward toward the bed, picking up a pillow on the floor and gripping it with both hands on the way. The man snores away, his back to Henrik, the sheets covering him. Henrik leans over and pulls the sheets away from the bed dramatically — magician-like — revealing not a man, but a heap of books and papers. One of the more hefty-looking papers bears his name on the cover: Trends Following Us: Phylogenic Observations of Cultural Evolution as Manifested in Complex Adaptive Memeplexes. In fact, they all bear his name on their covers. This is enough to rattle his brain to almost half functionality. He doesn’t need to read them now to recall what is in them. His head aches. He can feel his pulse in his ears. Information has advanced to the point that memeplexes no longer depend on media for transport, and they haven’t for thousands of years. More of them are surviving, thriving, than ever. Memes aren’t just mutating randomly; they are evolving. His head. Henrik had identified some of the most complex memeplexes, related memes that support each other, and developed a subtle form of communication with them by analyzing their response to conflicting ideologies in diverse cultural contexts. He studied the changes they inflicted on isolated groups of people as a result of this. He then used this information to perform a sort of pseudo-Turing Test. Of course, they didn’t want to be detected. He’d tricked them. Elicited responses from the structures have demonstrated that they lie beyond the realm of simple reaction and reflex, demonstrating flexible and indeed novel responses, adaptive depending on the characteristics of fitness differences … These results show that the structures are able to react to feedback and create a theoretical model of their environment to anticipate situations that cannot be expected. The dynamism of the heuristics observed suggests self-awareness, which also implies, by definition, consciousness. Fendrick !23 Consciousness from consciousness, they were birthed from the human mind and are symbiotic with it. They can influence it. Apparently, Henrik’s discovery of their being conscious rendered him a threat. That’s why they convinced his colleagues that their lives were worthless, that’s why they inflicted suicidal inclinations and/or random insanities on them and their families. They did it to Henrik’s family, and to Henrik, too. Some beings could resist better than others. Henrik had proven to be so resistant that they had to content themselves with inflicting a crippling depression upon him instead. The pulse in his ears beats louder. Now he knows why he’d thought that this was such a great idea in the first place. He wonders why they would have anything to fear from himself, or from anyone else for that matter. By definition, they relied on our consciousness to survive. But then, he was dealing with things that evolved at the speed of thought, not the speed of life. But eventually, they did get him here. The pulsing in his ears is softer, higher pitched somehow. Now he can feel it drumming the backs of his eyes. As he curls himself into a fetal position on a rug, absentmindedly scratching the soft, stretchy flesh from his neck, Henrik thinks it sounds a bit like someone quickly flicking a handbell, back and forth, back and forth. Before they’d left, the General had once asked the Upsiders, “When my little soldier murders your little soldier, does he know why?" The General always called the pawns in chess "little soldiers." Faris’ mecha bounds toward a seven-story metal monstrosity standing on a rooftop two blocks away. He launches into a booster-assisted, exaggerated leap flying sixty meters over the ruins of Fendrick !24 low buildings, screaming “DPS!” into his microphone, the signal for the other two members of his fireteam to throw everything they’ve got at the thing’s ablative shielding. Heat trails erupt from all around him, converging on the humanoid figure on the rooftop. As the missiles hit the mech like train cars colliding, Faris spots the blinking red dot indicating the exhaust port on the back of the boss mecha’s neck, just as it spins with the impact. Shields down, Faris takes aim with his hard-earned, game-unique sniper rifle, named “The Point Well Taken.” The giant enemy mecha's neck is the first victim in a chain of explosions that effectively rip the figure in half along its spine as Faris spins and lands lightly on his feet behind it. The screen fades to black, then to a table displaying statistics and rewards. A friendly pop! tone announces that Faris has somehow unlocked the “1-A,” certification, the highest in the game. That’s fifteen levels higher than he should be. By what he can pick up from the exuberant background chatter, so has the rest of the fireteam. The screen fades to an oily grey, patterns and swirls indicating the handshakes his computer is making with servers far away. He closes his eyes with relief, the sandpaper feeling hinting that it’s been a long time since the last time he allowed himself to blink. Another alert pops as the screen fades to a detail of the topography of the first game his new cert qualified him for. With electric restlessness, Faris sees, “AZANBEE-4 ASSASINATION, NOW!!!” In the room next to him, the General stretches out on a mesh recliner in the parlor of his piecemeal mansion, believing that he has someone, anyone, in the Citadel at least partially convinced that the underground wasn't filled with just sociopaths and servants. He’s watching a small, outdated, knob-covered telescreen. It’s showing a twisting, slow-motion profile of a shaggy, disheveled old Upsider with a crazed expression on his face who’d apparently been the vector for a memetopathic bomb in the middle of a top-level luxury resort. Some 15,000 people and Fendrick !25 counting are either dead already or dying right now, flinging themselves off balconies, stabbing each other with fine diningware — one bride is shown apparently drowning her groom in a wedding cake. The Upsiders already had a narrative prepared: A powerful, frothing madman from the tunnels had brainwashed one of the Upsiders’ greatest minds to kill its own citizens. The suspect’s profile fills the screen: a ludicrous, dark-skinned stereotype. Reason for mass-murder: He didn't like their policies. Weird shit is about to go down. The General is already pulling a settee away from the wall, revealing a recessed area filled by an old seabag, his “GTFO bag.” The now familiar customization screen finally boots up. Faris’ hands quiver as he confirms a bright silver and black mecha, arming it with a Mark-IV chaingun to complement “The Point’s” long range. As usual, five other players are going with him on this mission. They exchange the barest of pleasantries, their minds focusing only on visualizing the techniques that have brought them this far. An interesting change with this mission is that rather than just materializing at one of the far corners of the stage, the four players are dropped from flying transports for realism, landing with boost-assisted crashes that crumple a few of the nearby bland polygonal shacks. They have exactly fifteen minutes to reach their target and eliminate him. It’s dark as hell, so Faris flips on his low-light enhancers, brushing away some of the annoying civilians that seemed to insist on always being in his way lately. This, like many of the levels they'd played through, is designed to look like a small, ruined town from an ancient civilization. The six run straight into a dead end from the start, then turn into an one alley too small for them to fit though. Faris is already getting Fendrick !26 nervous; it won't be long before the usual A.I. defenses will be alerted to them. Occasionally a few people stop and pointlessly shoot hand weapons at them, but they haven’t run into any real military vehicles, or anything else dangerous to their mecha, yet. Faris's fireteam rounds a corner, coming out onto what appears to be the main street of the level. He halts them with an extended arm, and scans through his sniper rifle's scope for any outlying defenses. Air-raid sirens ring out with a clarity that suggested that while the visuals are heavily compressed, the sounds are not. He spots a watchtower four blocks away, but not before the building next to him shatters spectacularly, a fireworks show of bricks and broken glass. He snaps his scope up reflexively downing the next missile with a hair-trigger shot before he even sees it, and the guy to his right nails one after that, but the fourth finds its target. Faris and the surviving four roll to the right, partially propelled by the explosion of their comrade. Faris is just about to quickscope the blank-faced shooter in the tower when the whole thing falls awkwardly like an unskilled man on stilts. He turns away from his scope just in time to see one of his companions pretending to blow smoke from the tip of an M3 Flak Cannon. The drones are starting to wheel out artillery now, and Faris hears combustion engines rumbling in the distance. He motions to split up and look for the target separately. It doesn’t matter who nails him — they’ll all still get the points, and the mission clock is draining without mercy. The other two turn back in the direction they'd come from, while Faris powers straight ahead. He snipes two more watchtowers, stepping on three generic guards on his way down a wide alley. The entire city is swarming, alerted to their presence. Faris strafes and dodges madly, not even thinking about where he’s going, relying on instinct. Fendrick !27 With one minute left on the mission clock, Faris begins to panic. Leaping over a small building a small alert sounds. He's found it. Green crosshairs on his infrared display repeatedly zoom in on his target, three buildings ahead and one to his right. He tries to signal his teammates, but his environmental sounds are turned up too high to hear their replies; the mix is all wrong. All he can hear were explosions, gunfire, and the groan of machinery. His target's hideout is gleefully undefended. He’s going to just stride right though one of the walls. The sound of defeated concrete and tearing rebar is deafening. Faris turns, and is surprised to find that the thing that has shouldered its way into the living room of his father's house is nothing like what he'd chosen to pilot in the game. It was a flat matte black, faceless, and every part of it vibrated steadily. His father, the General, is already there, standing behind him. He shatters Faris's computer telescreen with a piece of concrete rubble, then picks Faris up, carrying him over his shoulder out into the tunnels leading to the surface. Hell Would be Cool The Citadel of the Mount is by far the greatest fortress humankind has ever inhabited. It’s roughly pyramidal in shape, twenty miles wide on each side, and two miles in height. Its twenty-meter- thick walls are composed of a slightly glowing metal whose fabrication process has long been forgotten, but suffice to say that it is literally infused with what you would understand as divine blood. Ten miles beyond these walls is another circular curtain wall, eighty meters thick and 100 meters in height, wrapping around the entire fortress. It’s in sad shape structurally, but the only part of it that really matters is a small tube of glowing light that runs through the center of this outer wall. It blinks every once in a while, but other than that, it’s fine. Fendrick !28 The Citadel and its wall was made to protect the inhabitants from the monsters outside, a monument to the creative and innovative power of fear. Inside the Citadel, the people who are the most faithful tend to be the most monstrous. Selfishness is not just way of life in this world, it’s a virtue, a political movement, and a philosophy. Those faithful who learn to manipulate the systems of the gods become like gods themselves: wealthy, powerful, guiltless. Those who don’t are crushed and sent below, yet live in awe of those above, while simultaneously believing that only an accident of fate could elevate them, too, to divine status. There is no afterlife. There, I said it. No-one here has escaped this world, nor will they, ever. Sorry. Why is that sad? Think about it: Let’s say that throughout this world’s history, its religions have been completely accurate in their predictions about who goes to heaven after they die. Heaven would be absolutely packed with homophobes, racists, misogynists, and all the other kinds of bigots, as well as slave-owners, the child and adult varieties of rapists, and murderers. All of them completely convinced that they are the good guys, and that what they believe makes them better than anyone else. They hate everyone else. If for some reason you have to die, hell would be the place to go, because that’s where everyone else would be. They wouldn't need walls or fortresses there. Hell would be so cool. Affordable Apotheosis “The worst thing about going to the damn mall,” Roban Veblen the Original told his wife yesterday, “Is that the people there are always the same.” Fendrick !29 Roben's wife's name is unimportant, as She's a Wife In Name Only. He's never been remotely attracted to her or any other woman, but one must keep up appearances up here. He's necessarily unaware of the irony. Now, standing in a wide, artificially sunlit, crowded concourse on the 1,012th level of the Citadel of the Mount, a trifold brochure in hand while Sames veer purposefully around him, Rob experiences a feeling of affirmation that feels empty without anyone real there to notice. These Sames are a clean-cut, painfully fashionable people who smile obnoxiously bright and perfect smiles as they walk in predictable patterns, punctuating conversations to unseen recipients with wild gestures, using both arms. Their clothes are current and almost uniform in style, sometimes only differentiated by palette swaps from the same pastel color groups. When exposed, their upper arms and calves have the same cleanly defined muscles beneath various hues of the same shining skin. Their sharply angled haircuts, swaying perfectly with each of their strides, can’t be more than a few hours old. Sames seem to be afflicted with a compulsion to always be speaking to someone, and what they hear is always apparently maddeningly hilarious. Even the phonemes Rob overhears as Sames pass, speaking their insecure, laughing speech into the air to wireless devices, seem to be played on a loop. Such superficial levity breaks easily with a twitch of a sneer. Sighing as he gives up on deciphering the New Life Clinic’s brochure’s minimalist but tastefully designed map, Rob spots a directory sign to his right and edges his way through the crowd to it. The black glass slate mirrors him faintly as a layout of the mall appears in red and blue lines inside it like an alien circulatory system diagram. Fendrick !30 In any given conference room, auditorium, theater or amphitheater, Rob can literally dictate the future for a million souls, for better or worse. On a boring Tuesday, he could decide that an entire division could be merged or laid off, sending tens of thousands wailing down elevators into whatever levels of hells lie below the surface of the Mount. He could take a janitor and groom her into an executive legacy, destined to sing in choirs of boardroom angels for generations. He could turn a chunk of processed carbon into a commodity, convince millions that they have to have it at a premium, then, if he feels like it, transubstantiate it into an icon, create a religion around it that would outlive that same former janitor’s legacy. Rob wasn’t given this power by degree, pedigree, or anyone. He earned it as an Uplift, and so he’s painfully aware of how easily he could lose it and everything else he’s earned through something as simple as a change in the estimation of the wrong people. He can move mountains, except not this one. Here, Rob sees his reflection in the directory as a tall, skinny, slouching man with a bum leg in a worn grey suit that has never fit so poorly — baggy sleeves, pants cut ten years out of style. Targeted shopping suggestions appear as pop-up menus exploding from the screen as more diagrams point out his receding hairline despite his attempts to minimize it through a close cut, two days of chin stubble below sunken cheeks, his eyes looking just as defeated as his clothes, along with name-brand product solutions. Rob’s gaze follows a dimly red-lettered “You Are Here” arrow to a wastebasket below. It lingers there a second before going back up again and to the right to find the clinic in royal blue lettering just southwest of here. Riding the escalator to the second level, Rob looks up at the bright sunless sunny sky, then down at the combination of pseudo-cobblestone, old-world sidewalks and faux white-marble and glass everywhere else. The outsides of all the shops are the exact same; just the glowing names Fendrick !31 vary, projected garishly on aerial kinetics floating out in the concourse. It makes it hard to actually find anything. He steps off very carefully at the top, easy on his aching left knee, and carefully winds his way through the seemingly always-oncoming crowd again, his gentle dodges punctuated by a backbeat of the ubiquitous electronic-chillout music piped by invisible speakers. Finally he finds himself in front of the double glass doors of the place. Rob remembers that it once had seemed odd that a medical clinic would be located in a mall, but then, why the hell not? You can find optometrists and plastic surgeons there, so why not neuroscientists, autogenecists, and apotheoticists? At least this place has a real sign that’s solid, not projected. There it is in Trajan Pro, a trustworthy font — a font you can rely on, the Charleton Heston or Kirk Douglass of fonts: “New Life Clinic.” The poster on the display window to his right shows a Aryan-looking young couple with nitrous-oxide smiles in white athletic clothes, holding tennis rackets just above the words, “Forever, in Love.” That seals it. Rob walks through the open class doors. It’s not like Rob is being selfish this time, after all. Inside, everything and everyone is sparsely bright and beautiful, and it would be silent as well if it weren’t for a stout middle-aged woman with a you-will-accept-this-merchandise-return-regardless- of-the-thirty-day-policy haircut whisper-yelling at a receptionist who looks about fourteen. Rob takes his place dutifully behind just behind her. Rob observes that the woman looks like she’d apparently tried her best to adopt at least the superficial appearance of the Sames — mostly the clothing — but could only do so much to naturally accommodate the age thing. True Sames never seem to be upset about anything, and in Fendrick !32 fact look quite content with things like getting lost for hours, spending forever untying cords or cables or annoying knots in shoelaces, waiting ungodly amounts of time in line, or just not doing anything at all. Like this receptionist, who clearly just does not give a shit. That’d be nice. He hurts from standing. This makes him feel even older than the directory sign did. He’s been fairly athletic for most of his life, and he’d jogged to work for twenty years. That is, until a year ago, when three teenagers thought it would be funny as shit to sneak up right up behind some random guy who was just about to jog down from the top of a stairway, then scream like murder just as he stepped down from the top stair. As he fell, it had felt like he’d had all the time in the world to imagine never seeing his family again, how their lives would change without him. Who would make his family breakfast on Sundays like he’d always planned to? Who would take his twin daughters on vacations like he’d promised? Who would tell his wife all those loving things he probably should have told his wife? Eight months later, it became clear that Rob would be riding the lift and slightly limping everywhere from now on, but at least he still had a “now on.” It was yet another reminder of just how easily one could lose everything. The woman finally turns and storms out, but not before unironically suggesting anger-management counseling for the receptionist, who still appears cheerfully apathetic. Amateur. Losers ask for what they want, and when they don’t get it, they demand it, as if that will get them anything more than prominent forehead veins. Winners just take it. “Rob Veblen?” “That’s me.” Fendrick !33 “Have a seat and we’ll …” But Rob is already walking through the door to the exam rooms, “... I’m ready now, thank you.” A minute later, Rob leans against an exam bed in a waiting room filled with looping kinetics of waves crashing against beaches and clouds drifting by mountain peaks on every flat surface. It would hurt to sit in one of the chairs by the wall, and he hadn't felt like making the potentially hazardous climb up on the exam bed to sit with his legs dangling like a moron, so he’d compromised. The kinetics slowly dissolve to white, then to nothingness. A confident, recorded, radio-voiced man begins to speak: “For eons, we’ve worked to maximize our potential.” Montage: In grainy black and white, generic, athletic types of all races throw javelins with visible effort, collapse at finish lines, hang precariously from rock faces, and contort themselves painfully on yoga mats, stock footage with a retro techno soundtrack. “Our potential is no longer the limit.” The lights of the room dim slightly. Montage: In holograms projected all around the room, generic, athletic types of all races spin and throw body-sized Greek-revival style columns, laugh as they jog effortlessly up ladderwells, determinedly find hand-holds on rock faces before sudden spinning zoom-outs to reveal 270º-angles, balance themselves completely inverted on mats using only index fingers and thumbs, all to the driving sounds of a hardcore yet commercially appropriate newdub backbeat. “Now we can achieve as much as we can believe.” Fendrick !34 This is all old stuff to Rob, of course. You can’t avoid the ads if you want to. Now the scene has changed to a office with antique books, and a projected Dr. TooYoungToBeADoctor is explaining how even futurists as bold as the late Ray Kurzweil couldn’t imagine that risk-free immortality would be available to practically everybody of consequence so affordably, no crazy diets nor pills required, just a series of easy payments. “It doesn’t get old, does it?” Rob jumps a little. A small grey man with a clipboard is leaning against the door. The man wears a cliché white labcoat over what appears to be a lavender, linen suit, complete with a green silk necktie with a repeating pattern of ancient water mills, exploding fireworks, and “New Orleans!” printed in faded colors. Over and behind the man’s right shoulder floats an AI: a fist-sized, truncated cube, its semitransparent purple body pulsing with a series of pastel glows. In the noise and display, Rob hadn’t noticed when they’d entered. “No, but the waiting does,” Rob says, blinking as the man flips a switch, canceling the holograms and restoring the light. “Sorry, I love a pun when I see one. Aubrey Ronove. Big fan. Absolutely loved your keynote last week.” Rob realizes that the AI is the one speaking. The human being just shakes Rob’s hand limply and absently while looking at his clipboard. “This is my assistant, Herb.” When Herb does look up at Rob, he is surprised by what he sees. At least, that’s what Rob thinks until he realizes that Herb’s upper eyelids droop so low that Herb has to actively strain to open them completely, giving him a surprised look. “Nice to meet you in person,” says Herb. “I have questions.” Rob begins. “Of course. I’m listening!” Aubrey says in that cheerfully distracted tone that doctors use when they’re not listening. Fendrick !35 Herb busies himself with fumbling with a vaguely surgical, metallic tool that he aims at different spots on Rob’s head while squinting and making clicking sounds with the right side of his mouth. Aubrey continues, “But first, let me tell you this: It looks good! You sure took your time, though. Fifty-six is a more challenging case, but we’ve done clients as old as 87 successfully, and we had a 62-year old in here this morning. Nice guy …” “… Is this going to hurt?” “Is this going to hurt? ’Cause I’ve got more good news, Rob: That was it.” Herb takes a step back from Rob, nodding at Aubrey, who immediately becomes the source of a projected semitransparent display of a gigantic strand of DNA spinning slowly around all of them, superimposed over a cross section of a cerebellum. “Looks like you had a lot of fun when you were younger, huh? The chemically induced kind?” Aubrey’s vocal and facial expression tone suddenly go flat: “Note: client 0317, distortion on 15p, replication insufficiency, check.” A sharp beep sounds in reply. “Is that a problem? Because I’ve never been real sure about this.” “Oh no, just some minor flags,” Aubrey laughs, while Herb continues poking here and there at a projected diagram of what appears to Rob to be his lower bowels. “Add note: Stage three prostatic distention, rectify.” Rob feels curiously under clothed. “For what you’re charging, this had better fix all that.” “Fix? Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t fix anything here!” More air-poking from Herb and noting from Aubrey: “Add note: Stage one insulin tolerance, rectify.” Aubrey collapses the garish projection and floats closer, seeming to notice Rob’s offense at this. Herb affects a similar look of sincerity. Fendrick !36 “Look, we’ve known for a long time now that troubleshooting existing physiologies is pissing into the wind. You people are vulnerable to all kinds of disaster: cellular and mitochondrial mutations and atrophy, intra- and extra-cellular junk proteins, crosslinks — not to mention viruses, prions, and jogging accidents. Even worse, some of you are just broken from the start. But ‘Ol Bessie down the hall can get a good scan of just about anything!” “If you’re going to try to sell me on some robotic shitbox body, I’m leaving.” “Oh god, no.” Aubrey’s small body shakes with what appears to be false levity in the corner of Rob’s vision; meanwhile, Herb seems to be measuring Rob’s ear hairs. “Cybernetics will never bridge the sensory fidelity gap well enough for complete transplantation. AIs and congenitals, sure; we don’t know what we’re missing. Oh, I’m not sensitive about it; I hear it all the time! “But can you just imagine knowing what it is to naturally feel, to see, touch, and hear, and to realize that you never really will again in any way? How filtered, how artificial your perception would feel?” “What if that’s what I wanted? I know it’s possible to perceive more digitally than ‘naturally.’ A wider spectrum of wavelengths.” “Amen to that, but we’re not talking about spectrum here. Hey, you’ve never had a prosthetic, have you? Herb used to — this arm.” Herb splays and clenches his right hand spastically for emphasis. “He could’ve felt up a dust mite back then if he wanted to. Barometric pressure changes, magnetic fields…” Herb shakes his head slowly, “… There’s just something about analog. Even if you can sense more, it always feels like a weird filter, like you’re wearing a glove. It’s annoying.” Fendrick !37 Aubrey continues, “With total encephalic transplantation, that glove would encompass your entire sensory experience.” “You don’t see many Artificials walking around anymore,” Rob admits. “No,” Aubrey droops down a bit in an apparent gesture of sympathy, “The disassociation was just too much for most to handle. Total psychosis within a decade, usually.” “So,” Rob tries, “You replace the parts that aren’t working? Leave everything else that’s me?” “Look, Rob,” as Aubrey speaks, Herb silently rests his hand on Rob’s shoulder, offering a sincere expression, “Why mess with spare parts when a man like you can afford a complete upgrade? It’s still going to be you. The problem is: You were born to die. If, as in your case, the Powers That Be decide to keep someone around for a long time, we have to construct an immortal from scratch.” “If you construct anything, it’s not me.” Aubrey bounces up a bit as Herb smiles, “Let me ask you this, Rob: When Herb here still had his prothetic arm, was he still Herb?” “Of course he was,” says Rob. “Now, if Herb were to have a terrible accident — with power tools or something — and had to have that arm replaced with another one, this time an arm made from his own tissue, would he still be Herb?” “I’m not an idiot.” “Of course you aren’t. Now what if I replaced his left arm, for fun? Still a cloned arm. Same tissue, everything. Still Herb?” Herb gamely wiggles each appendage as Aubrey names them off: “Right leg? Left leg? Torso?” Fendrick !38 “Yes-yes-yes-you’re pissing me off now.” “Now, what about his head? Herb, I don’t like this ‘head’ you insist on having. Rob, how about I chop it off and replace it with an exact duplicate. You tell me: Would it still be Herb?” “I’m not sure. Either way, if that’s what you’re offering, your sales presentation is terrible.” “Exact duplicate,” Aubrey insists. “I realize I won’t be any prettier,” offers Herb sheepishly, shrugging his shoulders. Aubrey floats closer to Rob’s shoulder. “You’re no bottom-dweller. You’re aware that your own body replaces 98% of your cells each year. Some of the cells in your vitals last as few as four days. Can I show you something?” Aubrey opens the door to the hallway without visibly doing anything, and Rob allows Herb’s insistent palm on his back to guide him out of the room and down the painfully white hallway. As they walk down the hallway, passing identical, unmarked doors, the floating AI continues, “How about instead of just lopping off Herb’s head, I replaced just one of the cells of his brain with another cell that is identical to the original? Now I go on, replacing each cell, one at a time with an identical one. Eventually, I replace all the cells in his body, one by one. Still Herb, right?” The last door in the hallway opens to a large room so white and evenly lit that it’s difficult to see where the walls and the ceiling connect. “Well, while I’m at it, say the new cells are virtually immune to cellular decay, with no need for replication nor replacement. Think about it: In ten years, sans constant cellular replication and decay, New Herb would be a hellofalot more Old Herb than even Old Herb!” BESE, Rob realizes with some discomfort, is the coffin-looking thing in the center of the room. “…That is, if we didn’t already do that 500 years ago.” Fendrick !39 Herb fake-punches Rob’s shoulder. Suddenly everything’s veering downward, to the left, and blurry for Rob. “Haha, you’ve still got it, old man! Didn’t even feel it, did you, Mr. Veblen?” Rob blinks, eyes wide open to what he guesses is the ceiling. It’s blurry, but nothing feels different yet. Maybe it’s like getting a bonus or a promotion or realizing you have a child for the first time: It takes a second to register. Looking down, he sees he’s wearing one of those dignity-free hospital gowns. Now his hearing comes in, first as a high-pitched whine, then Aubrey’s eerily natural-sounding artificial voice in a cadence that suggests a conclusion, “… You’ll never get sick, never die …” “I guess it’s going to take a second to register,” says Rob as he sits up on the table next to Rob. “But if this is a new body, how do I really know it’s me? Doesn’t the old me just die?” “Not much we can do about that!” says Aubrey as Herb shrugs his shoulders, “Although we usually ship the old ones underground to avoid confusion.” “But he,” Rob points at Rob, “is me. Or was me. Am I the same person as him?” “You assume your consciousness has continuity already.” “Don’t bullshit me. I am my consciousness.” “Forgive me if this sounds pedantic: If you are — as you say — your consciousness, do you then cease to exist whenever you are unconscious? When you sleep and then wake, are you the same consciousness as before you went to sleep, or are you instead a newly formed consciousness with the exact same memories as the previous one?” “How the hell would I know?” “Exactly. It never fails to amaze me that people like you — people who have nearly everything — get all shaky about dumping something as useless as your mortality.” Fendrick !40 Roben the Original can’t stop staring at himself, his neck aching from the strain of twisting to the left. He tries to sit up, but is stopped by a strap across his chest. Roben the Immortal is free. He sits up, flips his legs underneath himself and crawls halfway over the table to Rob, like a child. Rob stares into Rob’s face, trying to read something, anything in his expression. Roben looks into his own eyes and slowly breaks into that smile that can move men and mountains. Following the smile is a sigh, a sigh from the diaphragm that looks like it feels so incredibly good and seems to go on forever, the eyes closed, the breath so clean and free. Then he hops down from the table and walks away lightly, exiting the pure white room without looking back. The Binding of Bankruptcy In this world, everyone is bound by what they love. For example: People love hope. Or rather, people love to love hope. They think it helps. Naturally, the first new gods people created were all about giving out hope. The thing is, you can’t have salvation without something else to contrast with it. Even the concept of eternal torment as a punishment for one’s perceived sins gives a reassurance of sorts, because it imparts motivation toward a goal. It doesn’t matter if the goal is arbitrary. Don’t worry about it. Sometimes these new gods would go to war, but people would always lose. When their tears mixed with the blood of dead gods, the result was often this world’s greatest art, music, and literature. It was pandemonium at first, sure, but eventually the new gods loomed over the then sunlit cities like clouds or sentient pollution — everywhere and nowhere — incorporeal and immortal, immense and beyond the comprehension of man, the empathy of man, like any god should be. Fendrick !41 But still, even gods have needs. Why? Imagine you create things. So you create a game. To do so, you need the normal things: players and a purpose. Rules. Winners and losers. It’s a beautiful game. It’s horrific, too. It makes your heart pound. You love this game! Do you then walk away and forget about it? Or do you sit down and play it? Of course you play it. Now it doesn’t matter that you created it, does it? You’re bound by the same rules as any other sucker. If you don’t — if you break the rules just because you can — you’re not actually playing the game now, are you? You’re outside, and therefore, to the game, you don’t matter. Omnipotence is like that. It doesn’t matter if you created the world or if the world created you. You’re either in, or you’re out. So gods have this one thing in common with the players: They are bound by what they love. With deities, the “what” is on a larger scale, as is the need. Attention. Followers, total and unquestioning devotion, charred bulls, gold, money, the sacrifice of your first-born, war, choirs, chants …. The Lord can move mountains! The Lord can save your souls! ... But the Lord is flat broke, sadly. So give, child, give! Chicken Sometimes Olin thinks there must only be so many physical templates for people, and that is why as he travels far enough, he’s eventually sees them begin to repeat, with only slight variations. The thickish clerk behind the bare desk could be his friend Somal’s mother fifteen years ago — the Fendrick !42 same thickish frame, tiny eyes, and scarcely feminine sense of style and personal aesthetics. However, this version doesn’t seem to loathe him, or at least isn’t so obvious about it. Olin sits rigidly in a chamber sparsely furnished, with dust particles glowing here and there where the weak light strikes down from unseen fixtures above. He’d grown up in the monochrome soot and oil of the deep tunnels of the underground, imagining that the mysterious upper mile of the Citadel of the Mount that rises above the surface must be sensorily rich: full of light and soft music and fair smells, but in this room Olin mostly notices what isn’t here: no piles of stained clothing everywhere; no foul smells of people or livestock; no torn, oily rags; no steel-wired shelving sagging from the weight of personal possessions, semi- or nearly functional tools artfully crammed together, folded over each other, and crammed together again. Looking around, he imagines that after Somal, this woman, and he left, the room would look like it had never been used at all. It is luxuriously wasteful and sad, sad and disappointing because Olin had worked so, so hard to get up here. He notices that in the far corner, Somal is still curled up in a fetal position on the floor, captive behind a semi-transparent, heavily scratched plastic cell, his broken and bleeding hands still balled up into unreadable fists. The woman swivels back, retrieves a shining black slate from somewhere, glances at it with a look of recognition. She tilts it to flash its light at Olin, the loose flesh under her bicep swaying slightly as she does so, although the red and orange pictographs the slate projects mean nothing to him. She smiles deeply. “Everything looked so good for you. Then you failed the most important test.” This, Olin knows, means nothing. Fendrick !43 “But,” she continues, “You only gave the answers you thought we wanted you to give, not the answers we wanted you to give.” Olin carefully displays his best expression of bemusement, then relief. Both he and the woman both turn slowly toward Somal’s still form, curled into a fetal position in a cell in the corner of the room. Olin never could fool Somal’s mother. She knew about him from the start. She greeted Olin with only a silent stare when he walked with Somal through the door to their quarters on the mid-officers’ floor during the holiday of their sixth school year. Olin was just twelve, and filthy, scabby, and still healing from the recent beatings he had taken from classmates and instructors alike. Right before break, one of the girls in class had been sent a bicycle — a beautiful, rare contraption — from her parents as an early holiday present. When she had finally given in to Olin’s desperate pleas to try it out, he decided to not give it back. He’d loved it. Olin ran, they chased, and when he was surrounded, Olin had dismounted and, spinning all the way around once with one hand on the stem and the other on the seat, flung it in front of an oncoming light train with tears in his eyes. It felt warm at Somal’s place, and Olin imagined it was because he was closer to the surface than he’d ever been. “Buah hatiku? Who is runt boy?” she asked Somal. Somal’s father just pointed at Olin and looked at Somal, squinting slightly with one eye. Olin knew Somal’s father was important, though he was only known to him as “the General,” even though he later found out that the General was really only a colonel. Fendrick !44 Somal just shrugged his shoulders at the General and smiled as the heavy door sealed shut behind Olin. It was a gesture that conveyed a surprising amount of meaning, since Somal can’t speak. Olin learned more over those three weeks than he had in his first six years of schooling. That first day, he and Somal just explored the floor Somal’s family and a few others lived on, although Somal usually chose the direction. Unlike where Olin came from, here were not just cramped living spaces, damp tunnels and ladderwells, but huge, open expanses that even the great lamps could not illuminate completely, making them seem to go on forever. They climbed to a balcony looking out on of these at the end of the night, and Somal casually rested his chin on a rusty rail at the edge, letting his arms hang limply down toward the unlit, unknown depths. Olin approached slowly, the sound of each footstep sounding small and weak and hollow. It was strange enough for him not to have a visible ceiling to orient himself, but the idea of no ground below gave him a sense of vertigo — Olin felt like he was in one of the dreams he has when he’s particularly tired and falling in and out of sleep: He felt like his feet were going to slip and fly out in front of him despite the grated steel floor, and he would be sucked over the edge, desperately grasping for the rail in vain …. Somal turned his head to look for Olin, smiled with his eyes closed, and, turning toward him, tucked his hands in his armpits, flapping his elbows a little. Olin accepted the challenge, cautiously leaning over the rails and eventually even summoning the courage to stand unsteadily on the lowest as he did so, his stiff knees knocking against the bars, the only thing between him and oblivion. Olin felt like he was being a regular soldier about it, but Somal just looked over and jerked his chin up in acknowledgment of this feat, unimpressed. Olin looked forward, closed his eyes and inhaled the big air, tinged with sulfur, when he felt something strike his upper back, and Fendrick !45 suddenly he had that dreamy sense of falling as he moved forward slightly. He cried loudly as he stiffened and grabbed the rail. Somal laughed out loud, a thing Olin has rarely heard. It’s an awkward sound, like he’s gasping or choking or both. “Asshole.” Olin didn’t know if Somal could quite see the expression on his face. They stared silently together into the unmoving darkness. They spent the first few days exploring. When they would come back, filthy, sweaty, with the cuffs of their clothes soaked with the oily black water of distant, half-flooded passageways, the General would usually be reading papers so old and thin that he had to wear gloves and touch them like they were the wings of some giant insect, barely opaque and with strange symbols so dull and still. Olin noticed that some he even read in the opposite direction. Sometimes they would just hear his voice from the meeting place, a room with a long, chipped wooden table and not much else. One night his voice was almost clear as Somal and Olin snuck down the hall on their way to their room beyond, and Olin saw light coming from the door, slightly ajar. He caught sight of a few men and women in dark clothes conspiring on something before the door shut and clicked. Olin noticed that Somal’s mother was not one of them. On the third day, after the notice of his disciplinary hearing for the bicycle incident had arrived, the General spoke to Olin alone for the first time. “From now on, you must not let people see how you feel.” “Why not?” “Because that gives them power over you. You must smile at them — always — unless they are very angry or very sad. Learn the names of as many people as you can: every worker, every Fendrick !46 servant, every classmate. Use them. You never know what they might be able to do for you in the future.” This made sense to Olin. They all seemed so intelligent, and understood so many things that Olin did not. The General knew all about the surface, and the Citadel of the Mount above. He even said that long ago, it was sometimes as bright on the surface as it is next to a great lamp, and maybe even more so. “I say for you: Was before we lose-et true faith in God,” said Somal’s mother, stealing a glance at Olin across the table at dinner one evening. “I say if there were any gods, they were the ones who lost faith,” said the General, “How can you say? Gods are only hope.” “Yes, that is the problem.” Olin’s last talk alone with the General was the night before he and Somal were to return to school. The General sat with his hips spread wide like a child might sit in a chair that was much too large, but at the same time, his great belly and deliberate calmness made him appear older than he was. “You will come here on the next holiday, and from now on, like Somal,” he said, as if it were a formality and not a major upheaval. “I have arranged it.” Olin certainly wasn’t disappointed. When he thought of the place he came from, Olin thought of the kind of cold that makes it seem like bones break easily, of carefully staying out of sight and flinching at every accidental sound. Here, families lived together, and it was warm. “You have questions, of course. You can ask now.” Finally. Fendrick !47 “Who comes to the meeting place when we are not allowed?” “Friends,” the General said, looking away briefly. “What do you do there?” “We plan for a better future.” “Why are you taking me in?” “Because Somal likes you. And you have what we need.” This put Olin on guard. “What do you want?” “Some day, we are going to ask you to do something. Something very important. Something very hard, but something I know you can do.” Maybe it was the General’s help or maybe it was just his own maturation, but school became easier for Olin as the years went by. The General had taught him that he could not just lash out at anyone, or just take other people’s property overtly. Olin could still hurt certain people, but only if the enough of the other students condoned it or were already hurting that person. And if someone was going to test him in a fight, Olin usually knew in advance. Somal could tell what others were saying even across a crowded, noisy space, just by watching their lips and bodies as they spoke to each other. Somal was helpful in other ways, too. Olin remembers the time Somal put his utensils down, moved both hands down in an hourglass pattern, then casually pointed at his mouth, then Olin, and looked over Olin’ shoulder. Olin turned in time to make eye contact with one girl across the room before she and three others suddenly huddled, giggling, then disappeared into the crowd. Most of the girls preferred Somal; he was tall and handsome, with dark eyes and chin-length, shining dark hair, and his muteness made him compellingly mysterious to them. The girls took Fendrick !48 great pleasure in imagining great profundity in even Somal’s most candid gestures. He was smart, too: He could fix just about anything if it was electronic. Olin was not lonely, either, but the girls who took enough of an interest in him eventually got to know him, and then tended to lose that interest suddenly and very quickly. When they returned home for holidays, they were always exploring. As Olin and Somal grew older, they strayed farther, bringing first water, then food, sometimes for days at a time. They never had a map, just a direction. Somal took to collecting the smaller, fist-sized lamps we found in the farther reaches that had gone dark along the way. After Somal showed his mother how to make them work again, she made a hobby of tinkering with them while they were away at school, and each holiday they returned to a brighter home. The General did not seem concerned about how long they were gone, nor did he ever venture out with them, but he did always ask Olin and Somal to describe where they had been in detail. Somal and Olin had heard many stories at school about the abandoned tunnels, and especially about the surface. They pretended not to believe them, but when they were old enough, they went armed. Of course, their weapons weren’t very powerful, just little arcs — handle grips with grey metal disks on the ends. When you squeezed them, the disks spun and turned pure white. They were mostly meant to scare away pests, but they could hurt, even kill a man, if the wielder was determined. On the holiday of their twelfth year of school, they decided to see the surface. Their plan was to head north, and to simply climb every ladderwell they saw. It worked for a while. After going about a mile without seeing any clear path going up, they squeezed through a collapsed tunnel hallway on their bellies. Olin went first, leading with his right arm in front and his left tucked down by his side to narrow my shoulders, turning his head sideways to fit the Fendrick !49 cramped space. Cold dust fell in his nostril and Olin sneezed, feeling panic as his stomach and upper back hit solid resistance. Olin eventually pushed through with his toes, centimeters at a time. Two meters in, the tunnel opened up, and Olin could stand. He reached back and flashed his arc on and off twice to let Somal know that he had made it. Olin heard the sound of leather scraping against gravel, and knew he would have to wait. Somal was bigger than him, and it would take him much longer to pull his way through. The air felt hot and sticky. Olin followed the sound of Somal’s scrabbling as it echoed above him. No matter how hard Olin tried, he could not see anything suggesting a ceiling above. He strained his eyes at the dark until he heard ringing in his ears. He thought he saw a tiny, bright red spark, far, far above, but by the time Somal’s hand had emerged from the tunnel and Olin had been able to pull him free, the spark was gone. Olin had felt his jaw lock, his hands clench, and his temples burn in the old familiar frustration, but this time he did as the General had taught him, smiling at Somal, who had smiled back, sheepishly. They rested for a while, then began the trip back down to home. “Why won’t you just tell me what you want me to do?” Olin had asked the General that night in the dim light of the meeting place. Somal’s lamps were not allowed here. “Because it must not look as if you are prepared.” “Is Somal your son?” The General didn’t react noticeably. “No, not really. He is like you.” “Then why me, and not him?” Fendrick !50 The General thought for a second, slowly letting a smirk slip on his face before straightening up and and replying, “When it comes to disabilities, the Citadel people are blind. They do not see how someone who cannot hear could possibly be useful.” “I see.” “He also lacks something else. Or maybe it’s that he has something. Let me ask you a question: Do you think it is wrong to do a bad thing even if it is for a good cause?” This sounded like the warmup exercise of one of some theology lesson back at school. “Of course.” “That is what you say,” the General leaned forward, “but what do you believe?” “It depends on what will happen to me afterward.” “Who are you afraid of punishing you?” “The gods, I guess.” “The gods. Well, I have never met a god. Some people put much faith in them, like my wife.” “Do you?” “I do not.” “Why not?” Now his thick grey mustache twi