B'alam quitzé rima toto, kam insait long thringkos athliôn kakôn s nem habyott el a szerelem: nimi sina li sewi nesamefusu nomi (小鹅 bizi gara! mix)

---

Were we not able to reshape the monstrous into

the correlates of the angelic, we could not endure,  

and this is what this book is all about.

 

You place your multitool against the lock and the door swings open. The office isn’t large, one room with a dent, the small toilet. You step in carefully, despite knowing there won’t be anyone inside. You keep your good habits out of habit.

 

To your right, on the wall, you see a reproduction of the Metamorphosis of Narcissus. You move in to read something scrawled in the corner, leaning over a small beige sofa. It reads “with much/ sleight of hand”.

 

You take a step back to appreciate the poster, and your heel touches the wooden door that leads into the toilet. Your hand rests on the brass doorknob, and your skin tingles with the nanomachinery underneath analyzing for fingerprints. You don’t even check the results, pondering the propriety of the Dali.

 

You walk into the relatively open space in front of the desk, and turn to examine the trophy case it’s facing: aerial wolfbear hunting trophy (fourteenth place); a picture of Mnemo Syne; a diploma in moiran eristics (über cum laude); a set of ornamental hashi with some ideograms: 莊嚴的騎馬有價值的小鵝; a postcard from the Tannhäuser Gate (you flip it; it reads “For only metal, what a bore!” without signature); a plush white oliphaunt; a coffee mug with a picture of a cute little green chicken creature you don’t know and the inscription “my friend went to the Greasel Pit in Lower Seattle and all he had to urinate in was this crappy mug”; a bust of Ibifd Dragonslayer blindfolded à la Justice; a silver spoon with “there is no me” embossed; a model black helicopter assembled by someone without much talent or patience, on a red mahogany block indicating “Prject (sic) Dibbuk – here come the planes (Your Petrochemical Arms Inc.)”; a baby horse’s skull; an art nouveau xiang qi board; a tiny but elaborate snow globe with a fully functional AI Tyrolese village inside, including a shrine to Ohmu, the Great Dumb God; a nearly empty box of packets of some Chinese herbal concoction ([Tê] à la menthe); a Cumberland alabaster moai; a gold sentient pyramid (cyclopic and encyclopedic) you recognize as a Fnorse Youth Guide to the Galaxy, usually awarded to the best Boy Illuminatus in the company, probably with “the substance of our first act will be shadows, and the strife with shadows” in bas-relief at its bottom; a Real Megiddo shirt, number 11, autographed by Valens Aberdash (footballer of the millennium special issue); some labeled figurines: a lead Roman legionnaire (“Morere, Britanni, morere!”), a plastic Dentonite monk (“Inimicos non habeo, locos ignorantiae tantum”), a coral succubus (“From scarlet woman to red queen”), a blue clay man (“I don’t know how to swim either”); and a rather plain bonuchu.

 

You take the tray universe in your hands to take a closer look. It’s gotten as far as a level 2.71828 civilization in the Kardashev scale. You realize this is actually a great craftsman’s work, because that would be a meaningful point for a singularity, and it appears to be happening before your eyes...

 

Captain Tor Kirkgaard, the most accomplished space Viking of his time, was stranded inside asteroid Genesis. Prince Kublai hadn’t won yet, but it might be just a matter of time unless he acted quickly. He couldn’t teleport back to his ship, the Bloody Hel, because the asteroid was coated in some type of hysteresis ore that blocked teleportation from the inside – like Faraday’s cage, but quantum and wanton. And without him, the Hel would be found and destroyed by the Prince’s fleet.

 

He was walking down a wide hallway, in a fashion of faux-historical décor that evoked imminent revolution and guillotining. Every couple of meters, by the right wall, he could find a silver chamber pot, filled with white mints. On the opposing wall were similarly spaced chairs and otherwise, except for frequent mirrors, the hallway had no furniture. To add insult to injury, there were plentiful doors to both sides, but they all opened back into the same hallway, except, from the other side. A cheap parlor trick, ruthless, bloodthirsty captain Kirkgaard thought, looking back wistfully at his long career of raping and pillaging.

 

He sat down musing, taking no notice of the scratches his horned helmet did on the mirror behind his head. Could this be the end?

 

He took a new mint from his pocket and placed it in his mouth, distractedly. He did what space Vikings do when sad, he sang.

 

“No more will my purple nebula go turn a deeper red.”

 

“I could never have enough of everything we had.”

 

Tor jumped up and pulled out his phaxer (a very clumsy weapon that does not require further description). “Who are you?”

 

“I am also a prisoner of the labyrinth. I designed it, so it stands to reason I’d end up in here.” The newcomer added after a pause. “My name is Jeremy, by the way, but you can call me J-dawg.”

 

“How do I get out?”

 

“If that were possible, I would have to be a very sick person to be here still, don’t you think? As sick as one who gets his kicks from pouring olive oil on a girl while she goes ‘oink, oink’.”

 

Kirkgaard waved his phaxer menacingly. “Give me information I can use in my cunning escapade, or else!”

 

J-dawg wiped his nose with his shirtsleeves. “Oh, well, hear me out, then.” He pulled out a hand axe from his belt, its head shaped like the cross section of an hourglass. “This axe is called a labrys. Labyrinthos is a word that’s probably connected with it. It’s very symbolic and deep and shit. Now watch me carefully because I’ll only do this once.”

 

He began some kind of interpretive dancing, waving the axe with swooshing motions.

 

“By this door have I entered the hill.” Swoosh. “Falleth,” swoosh, “Adonis falleth.” Swoosh. “Fruit cometh after. The small lights drift out with the tide,” swoosh, “sea’s claw has gathered them outward,” swoosh, “Four banners to every flower” – swoosh – “the sea’s claw draws the lamps outward.” Swoosh. “Think thus of thy plowing” – swoosh – “when the seven stars go down to their rest” – swoosh – “forty days for their rest, by seabord” – swoosh - “and in valleys that wind down toward the sea.” J-dawg shouted: “KAI MOIRAI’ ADONIN!” Swoosh. “When the almond bough puts forth its flame, when the new shoots are brought to the altar, TU DIONA, KAI MOIRAI! KAI MOIRAI’ ADONIN!” Swoosh! “That hath the power of healing, that hath the power over wild beasts.” A final, half-embarrassed and self-conscious swoosh.

 

Kirkgaard dragged his fingers through his long blond beard, in deep thought. Finally he said, “’s Greek to me.”

 

“Oh, the Greek part is ‘You, Aphrodite, you and the Fates, you weep for Adonis’.”

 

“All that?”

 

“In its original context, I mean.”

 

“Right.”

 

“If it helps, it’s instructive to perceive the labrys is shaped like an eight, but if you slide the triangles into one another until vertex touches side, you get Yeat’s gyres, and if you go further, you have the Seal of Solomon. I won’t mention the vast symbolism around the latter, but the gyres convey a message like that of the yin-yang circle. The cycle of bouncing movement between the extremes, like the cross-section of two intertwined spiral coils, is evidenced, for instance, when he writes that turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer…”

 

Having ignored all the big words, Tor snapped his fingers, with a triumphant smile. “Right, basically you just waved that axe and said ‘by this door I came in’. So gimme that or else.”

 

Jeremy blinked. “Uh, actually…”

 

“I said, or else!”

 

Kirkgaard’s ‘or elses’ were mighty.

 

“Let me see, no buttons or anything…”

 

“Um, be careful. This labyrinth sustains all life in the universe, as clearly explained in my dance.”

 

“Sure, whatever. Now, if you can’t make it work in five seconds…”

 

“…yes?...” asked J-dawg, expectantly.

 

“…break it. ‘s what my nanny always said.”

 

He broke it.

 

“Oh, fuck,” cried Jeremy, thanking his mint-based diet for not shitting his pants. The labyrinth was collapsing and explosions could be heard in the distance.

 

“Shut up, sissy.” Kirkgaard tried his communicator. “Captain to scurvy dogs.”

 

“We hear ya, captain. Where have you been? We seem to be taking fire, but there’s no ship in sight…”

 

“No worries, all’s fine now I’m back. Sweep me up, Scotty.”

 

And then the universe ended...

 

You put the tray universe away, shaking your head as the final supernovas dissipate. A whole lot of mortality, immortalized. An excellent work, but you recollect reading that really enlightened bonuchu masters find the lifeless universes much more interesting.

 

Methodically, you proceed your search following the walls. In the corner next to the trophy case sits a white obelisk as tall as you are. It’s a Feedonator, like the one you have at home. You press a few spots on its surface and a door floats open over force hinges. You examine the food supplies.

 

Twelve 600 mL bottles of Coca-Cola Nutmeg. Eight Meals Ready to Churn (MRCs), four being frozen venison garnished with assorted nuts and berries, two being duck in raspberry sauce with figs and cinnamon cake, plus salad with basil sherbet, and two being salmon, dwosve and tuna sashimi, from the exquisite Hungardian hanging fisheries. Four cans of Acerola Suicide juice. Two bottles of Salyran sparkling cyan wine. Two bottles of Bottled Dog (128 years). Four six-packs of guaraná soda. A small cylinder of gorgonzola cheese beside a few dry-packed slices of snake meat. Bread, sliced into small pyramids. A half onion. Five cans of iced coffee. Several packets of marshmallows. Five boxes of Aleph Grade Assorted Hellerstein Jewel-Chocolates (AGAHJEW-C). A nearly empty bottle of olive oil.

 

You allow the door to swing shut. The rest of this wall is hidden by one long bookcase. It stands to the right of the lawyer’s antique red leather chair. Behind it, the whole wall is a single window providing an excellent view of Kubrik. You notice once again how incredibly well located is Mitokana Plaza.

 

The lawyer’s limited but choice bibliothèque is worth examining. You take a book at random...

 

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF AGE OF ANTIQUARIUS CHESS

 

By Ludovico Kantonnen

 

Chapter 17 – the pieces

 

“Antiquarian” chess, while having pawns that are similar to earthling chess and move inversely to Zardarkian pawns (which were called ‘Berolina pawns’ in earthling chess variant literature), has very distinct pieces. Instead of Rooks, it has Cuckoo Clocks. Instead of Knights, it has Ming Vases. Antiquary Clerks stand in place of Bishops and the Archangel Statue replaces the Queen. Only the King is unchanged, but he’s called the Collector instead. As noted elsewhere, however, one rule that is notably different is that regarding stalemate – the player unable to make legal moves loses. Moreover, a piece called “Antiquity” is not present in the board at the beginning of the game. It is utterly passive and although it can be captured normally, it can clout the game – especially your own Antiquity pieces, which you can’t capture, except with the Antiquary Clerk piece.

 

Antiquary Clerks move and capture sliding from one to three squares in any diagonal (short Bishop-3). In addition to the special ability mentioned above, any square the Antiquary Clerk passes or leaves is immediately filled, for an Antiquity piece spawns in each.

 

Ming vases move and capture with leaps. It can perform any (1,2), (1,3), (2,3) or (1,4) leap, but as soon as it captures any piece, it breaks, leaving the square where the capture occurred and all adjacent squares covered in new Antiquity pieces.

 

The Cuckoo Clock moves like the Rook, but does not capture normally. Instead, the cuckoo leaves the clock and captures. The cuckoo is a piece and can be captured. It moves through any (0,1), (0,2), (0,3) or (0,4) leap (jumping short Rook-4), but its first move is the capture and the second must be a return to the clock, which can’t move while the cuckoo is out. If the cuckoo is captured, the clock cannot fire it again (is unable to capture) until it returns to its player’s first rank. If the clock is captured while the cuckoo is out, the cuckoo becomes an independent entity, moving like a jumping short rook-2 (WD in Betza notation).

 

The Archangel Statue begins the game immobile and immune to capture. After a player has his Collector checked two turns consecutively, he may move his Archangel Statue. After its first movement, the piece becomes susceptible to capture. It moves and captures like a Queen, ignoring all friendly pieces in its path. Instead of moving, but counting as a move, the piece may be used to perform a Glorious Scorch movement. To do so, at least one pawn or Antiquity piece, of either player, must be adjacent to it. Through this movement, the Archangel Statue stays immobile, and all Antiquity pieces and pawns of both players adjacent to it are removed from the board...

 

You close the book and slide it back into its home shelf. You read some titles next to it. The Story of The Whole Crowd That Was Rounded Up By Guards And Told “This Didn’t Happen, Okay? Does Anyone Want To Argue?” People read that in Gamezohan agoge at age 4. PSE – Political Science Essentials, you recall, a subject you rather enjoyed. The lawyer had several different editions in here. A personal obsession, you ponder, or maybe a political statement. You also see Jacob’s Shadow, DaiLiberal And DaiConservative Equal, Decapitated Vaslok, One Thousand Art Nouveau Platitudes, Eruntics, A New Kind of Science, and Blood And Plutonium: Life And Works Of Vice Squad Detective Maximillien d’Etc. You pull out Les Robinsonades and flip open the cover. There’s a dedication in careful, rounded handwriting.

 

To the world’s greatest boss. –Alice

 

You feel like it’s none of your business and put it away. You also notice the ten-and-a-half-volume Geschichte der Palantenna. You pull the fourth volume and open at a random page.

 

…the Tfafnian fragment that remains can be largely reconstructed from other sources:

 

And then the Lord Gauss of Kubrik [Emperor Gauss-Gauss, the draconic patriarch], in the year of the Horned Carp That Takes Delight From Lobster Sangria [one year before his assassination], sought the leader of Palantenna and spoke unto her: “I have known of your exodus, and demand explication.” [The leader] of Palantenna was called the First Critic, and she was named Ninqueriel. Her hair was so fine the men could not see it, if not for the distortions made as light passed through it, and she was said to be the daughter of the ascended deity Anaxerretibes of All Knowledge, having sprung from His lips fully possessed of her eternally vernal form, when weak with weaving wise writings, while wanton with wondering wearying woes, one night, he read aloud these arcane words: “One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing/ White light folded, sheathed about her, folded.” So mighty was He that she was born master of Time, of Sleep, of Lucidity, of Motion, of Purity, and of Light, and then the Lord Anaxerretibes observed his mistake and bespoke of it, “oops.”

 

And the Lady First Critic Ninqueriel replied unto Lord Gauss, “Our will to quest is of no concern to your works, and we shall take the [cube upon the rock?] with us, for I have foreseen this is necessary and proper.” To which he spoke: “One day it will be necessary for my purposes,” but she spoke: “One day it will be necessary, and I have foreseen that we will return that day. I will be there, but you will not be there.” At this Lord Gauss grew very angry. “How will you return, then, knowing I will live until all stars have faded from the sky and their asteryads have grown tired of dreaming through their final sleep?” But she was not moved, and verily said unto him, “I will return with my chosen companions when your last direct male heir has died.”

 

Lord Gauss let his countenance transpire emotion, and never has it happened without dire awesomeness being unleashed. He clenched his fist, and it was said that at this point, the Lady smiled thinly, as if it were to say, “come get some, you vainglorious jackass”. Some say he took notice of this, and others say he thought better of it, and he raised his hand instead and pointed at her: “I curse you. For this I bid to an angel rule over my fate.” The Lady asked unto him, “And to which luckless member of the wingèd hosts do you pledge such unrewarding prize?” And he spoke, “To the Most Exalted Kryptarch of the Silver Metropolis of the Risen upon which my capital is modeled, that whom the Highest call TRDRT, he whose jagged arrow is named Loss Of Love. He will strike down whoever you love, that you may enjoy your immortality childless, barren, like her whom you hate so, even unto defying me!” And she replied unto him, “You had to pick the most bastardly asshole, didn’t you?” And she sighed, and she said, “But I knew you would, and it unfolds as expected. No price can be too high to stop her and mend what was broken.” And he replied, “Just so you know, you haven’t won, I’ve won. I will stop Eçaraia with or without that which you steal from me, and I will do it my way, which is the only good way.”

 

And the Lord Gauss left, and his adviser and friend Lord Aberdash asked unto him, “Were you not harsh, my Lord?” And Lord Gauss replied, that all could hear and remember the wisdom of his words and apply them to their own troubles, “Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.”

 

The Tfafnian source ends here, but a contemporary dryads’ song adds the information that by giving TRDRT control over his fate and wishing death upon Ninqueriel’s beloved, Gauss made his demise a fait accompli. He got himself coming and going. Ninqueriel is also widely acknowledged as a mean bitch for sacrificing her love for something as insignificant as the existence of the multiverse. Pëëm’s Theorem states that, since everything will work out in the end anyway, it’s retarded to sacrifice things. In her defense, it’s not as if they would ever be able to consummate their love, even if she had revealed it when it mattered.

 

You put the heavy tome away. You know that story, of course, though not in detail. There are tons of dramatized movies and books about it. You vaguely recollect the rock star, Chromelips, starring in a recent holovid adaptation. It had been relatively godawful. But the soundtrack was good. You distractedly browse something else...

 

We understand the compositional idea of Hannahan thus: with an eye toward outdoing his great countryman and predecessor, he wishes to encompass in a belletristic work not only the accumulated linguistic-cultural wealth of the past, but in addition its universal-cognitive and universal-instrumental heritage (pangnosis).

 

The preposterousness of such an objective would appear to be self-evident; it smacks of the pretensions of an idiot, for how can a single novel, the story of the hanging of some gangster, possibly become the distillation, the matrix, the key, and the repository of that which swells the libraries of the globe?! Perfectly aware of this cold, even sneering skepticism on the part of the reader, Hannahan does not confine himself to making claims, but proves his case in the Commentary.

 

You make a mental note to read about this Hannahan later. You pull out a slightly foxed book in a binding that was once black and shiny, but not even Hubertus d’Actylos himself could restore it to its former glory now. Come to think of it, it probably had passed by Hubertus’ hands. Its barely legible title is…

 

THE NEGENTROPIST JIHAD

 

By Jhoinos Alephonzoi

 

Introduction, section III

 

Wilhelm Klopper was one who wrote that culture existed to rationalize human imperfection, all the suffering and misery and frustration and anxiety that comes with accidental biological existence for-oneself. We cling to it, he preached, out of habit and fear and neophobia and irrationality. As humans became more and more perfect through science and technology, and less and less animal-like, culture (in this sense!) would be abandoned in favor of Knowledge. Humankind would cease to be mere Homo sapiens and would become Homo optimisans se ipse, man the self-improver.

 

We’ll also see that Csikszentmihalyi was also one of the earliest patriarchs of Negentropism. “Flow”, conceived as a movement towards complexity (even though he always noted that it wasn’t necessarily ethical), was even presented in opposition to a secular conception of the devil as the time it takes to become perfected. This strongly contributed to the mythos of the Negentropist Belief System.

 

Let us not forget that, during the ‘hippie’ days of Earth, a slogan presenting the goal of humanity was coined: SMI²LE. SM stood for Space Migration, a goal aiming at escaping the vulnerabilities of a single ecosystem, make space less of a premium commodity, and reach advanced levels of Kardashev civilization. I squared was the concept of intelligence being used to study how to increase itself, a supposedly exponential process that would make solving other problems faster and cheaper. LE stood for life extension, designed to make humans on average more knowledgeable and wise and with weaker existential insecurities, as well as stimulating long-term goals, reducing irrational short-term bias.

 

With Dentonism, a critical threshold was reached. There was an immediate threat that all humans would be equal, thanks to egalitarian human augmentation through nanotechnology. On the most basic level, such augmentation would make all humans healthy and potentially immortal, and greatly increase economic productivity, eliminating poverty. More significantly, Dentonism planned collective access (and not a single collective consciousness, as denounced by some oppositionists) to a real-time, 100% open democratic forum where everyone had access to everyone’s thoughts. The end of secrecy (which “hippie” Timothy Leary called the true “original sin”) would usher in a new era of tolerance, selflessness and a democracy worth its name. The artificial intelligence that would administer this system would act as a benign, man-made deity, amidst a utopian choir of transhuman angels.

 

Sadly, as one reviewer of Klopper wrote, “there is simply no thing appearing to some as evil incarnate and misfortune itself that others will not at the very same time consider a positive godsend and raise to the pinnacle of perfection”, and evidently the opposite is also true. Many shared Werther Gauss’s conviction that “between choosing to make everyone – including myself – perfect and only myself perfect, I would certainly choose the option that allows me to keep the superiority to my fellow sentient beings I’m already so used to – say, pass me another bit of pheasant, will you?, it’s formidable”.

 

Conservatives of many breeds – Chestertonians, LeoStraussians and NeoStraussians, and all those who can say “natural aristocracy” with a straight face – rallied under the United Nations/Catholic Church banner, while others were even more radical and fundamentalist, and fought in the Invisible Jihad as neo-Luddites who not only did not want everyone to reach secular, immanent perfection, but also strove to destroy the economic and scientific elites that were already selfishly pursuing that goal without the broader Dentonite egalitarian intent. Finally, the fourth faction was composed of those too cynical to believe it is possible to help people progress at all, and just sought to better themselves without any pretense of “social governance”. Not even violence, it would seem, could be the midwife of history, if one were deliberately trying to make it so. These trans-survivalists stood at the extreme right of the political spectrum of the age (if such spectrum could be said to apply), while the Luddites were the extreme left – though a more apt analogy would be, respectively, to anarchists and Stalinists.

 

We will enter in detail as we proceed, but I believe this presents a clear picture of the set-up of the board at the time the Jihad exploded. We’ll analyze further its victims, its ambiguous outcome (the United Nations Compact on the Right to Be Dumb) and how it influenced all history since then, from the rise of the Prestonite doctrine to the Anti-Eçaraian Protocols.

 

Interesting, you think. You try next a book without identification in the cover:

 

…the pyramid, then, simply requires a ‘precious few’ without specificity of moral alignment. Refer to the quote:

 

They, then, form a hierarchy of illumination, from the hero or heroine, in the superior plane, until the awe-struck choir, in the inferior, drawing some sort of spiritual elite’s epiphany.

 

The pyramid only judges ‘spiritual abasement’, to continue using Matthias’ terminology, but does not judge whether the axis it is set upon is the ethically apt one. In this it states a much deeper philosophy, one that considers poverty of spirituality the greatest ill. The great insight, then, is that…

 

“Enough of this,” you think. You can always examine his library more thoroughly later. You sit down. The chair spins smoothly and you’re facing the wall to your left. You observe its mural, depicting a huge, cartoonish snail. It says above the figure, “the ongoing wow”, and beneath it, “wide-eyed wunderer”. You spin again and look out the force field window at the great view of Kubrik, the clouds in the sky looking like white paper, wet, mildly ragged, and then dried again. How different it is from Nova Zona, where most of your missions occur. While Kubrik sought simplicity and simulating a lifestyle mostly manageable by individual consciousnesses, that is, that of Earth’s early twenty-first century, Nova Zona is an all-out cyberpunk dream-nightmare undecidable, utopia to some and dystopia to most, high-tech, ultra-speed, hyper-adrenalin, nothing sacred, cheap life, free death all around, non-stop danger, everything for sale, etc. You sigh and turn to examine the things lying on the desk. There’s a mug (“I heart Nova Zona”) full of 2HB pencils with little radioactive cyan erasers, a matchbox full of paper clips, a little mother-of-pearl box with toothpicks, a pen from Kantonnen, Fëanor & Hellerstein Lightsmiths, a sealed box of Kallisti Kings (Ebon label, hollow between the stars edition), a Gatling stapler, and a whole lot of paper and important looking documents. You select one with the Imperial Seal to examine:

 

MEMORANDUMSES:

 

To Agent Max, Imperial Revenue Service.

 

Attached are the requested data regarding the Empress. Specifically, her accountant points out item #269 refers to “Marital Arts” seminars given by Her I.M., with payment from House Aberdash precious metal reserves.

 

To Agent Max, Ministry of Formation.

 

My client desires to sort out that mess involving her curriculum at the Ninja College of Kubrik University. More specifically, the objections raised against her right to use the .exe title (of Doctoral Executioner and Assassinator) after her name do not stand up to close scrutiny. Not only it’s fully compatible with her office as Great Exalted Matadora, Lady Paraskeve passed with flying colors her examinations in Informational Theology and Martial Personetics, wrote some seminal studies in Prognodoxes in Gladiatorial Bitistics, and was the first student to ever achieve full marks in Reticular Manslaying. Her proneness to say “oh my god!” is hardly enough reason to deny her the honors she’s earned.

 

To Agent Max, Ministry of Seleucid Hermeneutics.

 

Here’s all Hubertus had in his bookstore about the theme of your query:

 

I didn't enjoy leaving my personal quarters much. That was for the best, since my companions who attempted to stave off claustrophobia by walking around the compound ended up only more achingly aware of our isolation at the church of Project Simurgh, by growing to know each module like the palm of their hands. We called it 'church' for the simple reason that the object of our research, having proven itself impenetrable to our efforts at work, was now more or less part of some form of perfunctory money-burning ritual, a dance where politicians provided twenty-three hundred scientists all the money they could possibly spend, and the scientists in turn failed to decisively fail.

 

I didn't enjoy leaving my personal quarters, but occasionally I'd wear my Bedouin costume and take a walk outside the airlocks, passing the narrow catwalks between the outer bunkers, and then into the much yearned vastness of the desert. I would only stop after losing sight of the highest antennae, and then for a while I could enjoy the shifting dunes and the desert sky that reminded me of the fairyland dusks of my homeland.

 

When I got lost I was invariably found at night by the black helicopters with the thermal imagers and rescued back into the forgiving arms of the church. I was never punished, and I could make my 'escapes' again and again, once per day if I wanted to, because our military hosts' budget - and therefore patience - was infinite, and nobody really cared if I actually did the work I was supposed to be doing with my PhD in Inconsistent Epiphenomenology, a subject immaterial enough to be presumed vital to the Project. The fellows from special forces and air services and military intelligence were, in fact, quite friendly, locked just as we were in an unending boredom where any opportunity to simulate usefulness was met with warm interest. After six years of Simurgh, we had evolved into perfect social harmony, transcending superficial conflicts of interest. All were content with the status quo, politicians and scientists and military men and the businessmen that reaped whatever technical rewards we happened to find - accidentally, of course, as we had absolutely no idea what was going on.

 

Our 'job', and a full time job it was, was no more and no less than figuring out a certain piece of rock fallen from the sky. I use the profound term 'rock' very loosely, because as the folks from Anomalous Materials kept pointing out, it was neither composed of atoms nor solid nor visible nor, for that matter, rockish in any special sense other than the general convention that things fallen from outer space that happen not to be funky particles are usually said to be rocks. Personally, I liked to think Simurgh was simply a funky particle, which fitted perfectly in the intuitive scheme just mentioned. A particle that simply happened to be two meters across.

 

Simurgh hummed over the gravitational field with messages that were artificial, or at least that was the working theory. Simurgh emmitted warm life-giving radiation that cured cancer in rats. Simurgh traveled backwards in time. Actually no-one had any idea what Simurgh did or did not do, as all tests tended to produce the results the scientists involved wanted to see. When I arrived at the church, I thoroughly analyzed thirty thousand pages of available data, produced a model (which later, it turned out, could be extrapolated to accurately predict earthquakes), ran a test, and had a nervous breakdown. Refusing the help of the psychic ward, I stayed a week in my quarters listening to my Ragtime the Musical CD, and then I was fine. It was all for the better, too, since all the staff of the psychic ward had breakdowns themselves and another crew of two hundred specialists had to be flown in to contain the 'mass hysteria'. These too had breakdowns, but by then we had developed a fine way of life around the whole concept of utter psychic chaos, derisively called by my friend, Dr. Djyviszvysyhristja (a PhD in Translinear Ontometrics or something equally obscenely hermetic), "utopian nihilism".

 

I do not mean to imply we are all madmen in the church, as we could think clearly and function normally in society (when occasionally allowed to return to it for brief spells of time) and generally be as (un)happy as the fellow man. But once you had played around with the Rorschach inkblot that is Simurgh, it's as if you have Beethoven's Funeral March as the soundtrack of your life for the rest of your days. It's just hard to care about what your body wants or what your culture values. It's just hard to feel like a being-for-itself, to keep weaving that membrane between the universe and the self. The self becomes more or less a secondary nuisance, and you just wish you could step back from it and just watch events unfold as a spectator. Zero ambition, infinite curiosity, transinfinite ennui.

 

And so passed our Works and Days until 'G' happened. Dr. Djyviszvysyhristja called him "a post-modern angel of endings", but I thought it was something less barroque and more romantic. Simurgh and Mr. G were soulmates, perfect lovers. I remember vividly his arrival, his stepping down from the black helicopter, a silver cane for no reason but pomp, a face betraying nary a pair of decades, a cut of suit revealing money, money as only the man who had invented a nuclear fusion reactor so small and safe to be used to fuel automobiles, and then had been given the GNP of Eastern Europe to keep it to himself, and he had accepted because he didn't care either way, and perhaps because the oil cartel had seemed so pathetic and helpless to him.

 

He tapped his cane, looked handsome under the desert sun, hummed Paint it Black on his way to Simurgh, touched it, licked his lips, requested a piece of paper, scrawled in ugly handwriting an elegant formula with four terms, e and pi and i, and the mystery of Simurgh was solved.

 

The gov't covered up the message of utter hope, utter peace, and utter love. But we were allowed to go home and live in bliss thereafter.

 

G. might be of 7. Hope it helps. –Syne

 

P.S.: Never forget Xi*viplu (a + ququ O,O) e*l + m*el + edu-d*qi. Time is lent to all under the sun, but the eyes to get that are owed entirely to the .br Sol.

 

You try to find some order in the chaotic disposition of the lawyer’s works in progress, but to no avail. Something catches your eye:

 

NOTES FOR THE DEFENSE OF RAMESES ROSENCRANTZ SAWARREN XXIII:

 

Points to mention:

• Victim had “been bold with Harry, Mark and John” (see appendix).

• Accused had been misled into believing words such as “skyclad” and “dendrophilia” would necessarily apply to any situation involving dryads. (no such luck)

• Victim threw her “precious gifts into the air”.

• Accused said “you, fucking, whore” with a really funny cadence; appeals to the jury’s musical sense.

• Victim was perceived as being done a favor: “the more you give, the more they need; the more you live, the less you see”.

• Accused did warn her: “If you’d be my flotsam, I could be half the man I used to. They said you were hot stuff, and that’s what baby’s been reduced to.” (see Panopticon recordings)

• Victim left accused with "no more”; “you’ve taken everything from my belief in Mother Earth. How can you ignore my faith in everything, when I know what faith is and what it’s worth? Away, away, and don’t say maybe you’ll try; come up and see me, make me smile, or do what you want, run on wild.”

• Victim was recognizable. (Barely, but still)

Case is as good as won.

 

Ulterior observation: client deceased. Obit does not suspend pecuniary obligations.

 

You put that aside and turn on the lawyer’s computer. A message blinks in the screen, above the prompt for the password.

 

Hello, new friend. :nyan:

 

You type in ‘legerdemain’ and you are rewarded with the flickering colors of the lawyer’s holographic desktop pouring out of the screen and setting up a virtual landscape inside the office. In the screen itself, you see a reproduction of some old painting, depicting a beautiful bird you do not recognize. Because your gaze lingers on the image, a pop-up text box forms out of thin air, bearing old children verses:

 

The simurgh has a silver head and a peacock tail,

Like the Empire. It nests on the Tree of Knowledge.

 

You wonder where to begin. You open the Foobar3000 playlist. There’s the Arpharaphras Burgomaster’s Streaming Cube Quartet discography; the Complete Compositions of Adrian Leverkühn (trance n’ dance remix); Chromelip’s latest album, Busy Not Caring, with the memorable ‘Save It For Someone Who Sucks’ hit and ‘Green-Fucking-Sleeves, Motherfucker’ from the The Bourne Paradigmacy soundtrack; Brian Eno’s Discreet Music; four albums of Sippo Kantonnen Armpit-Farts Beethoven (and Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff, and Vivaldi); ‘Stroyers of Govn’ts’ The Preterition of Donovan S.; and Wuti Xarohzi’s forbidden Pherke Muzak.

 

Never having had access to the latter, you make it play. It begins, while you examine the track listing.

 

Side Yang

1. Monks sweeping (intro) 8:36

2. Monks sweeping (stone floor) 3:30

3. Monks sweeping (garden) 3:30

4. Monks sweeping (latrines) 3:30

5. Satori 0:07

6. Lo and Behold! Not even an empty universe 14:29

7. Samadhi lights for the king of the dance 12:57

 

Side Yin

1. Joyous dancing: serious business! 3:17

2. 輕功 dreaming 5:14

3. How I became the first mortal accepted in .br Temple of the Most Holy Sol Absolute and during my apprenticeship there I learned two things: that I was one of the seven heroes who quested together and transcended into godhood, Master Anaxerretibes being another, and that I am reincarnating as an avatar of loserdom and depression all the time as an elaborate way to die for your sins, not that we the illuminated ever think in terms of sin, but this approximation is as good as it gets to convey the message for those who are not powerful AIs and/or zen masters 0:46

4. Anaxerretibes had Klapaucius, Drabk the Sharak and The Tortoise for a bubble blowing party 16:06

5. “Who did you bribe for your Diploma of Perpetual Omnipotence?” 3:59

6. The Multicosmic Seven Friends and their temps retrouvé 4:41

7. Stairway to Heaven (inside out) 8:02

7a. "Bill Rivervale, phone call holding, line two." 0:05

 

You select side A, track 6, and return to your senses fourteen and a half minutes later. Of course, you realize. The silence so absolute that it keeps you from hearing your own neurons firing. You also remember why you shouldn’t play the final track of the B side. It brings about the end of the world.

 

You are now in track 7, and you can hear the shrill, nonverbal chanting of some long-dead Wendauerian woman, accompanied by tasteful bass interspersed with bouts of intense techno beating. When her singing finally begins to form definite words, she is lowered to background singing while the mellow voice of a licentious old man takes over lead, reciting loaded with irony:

 

"No, I'm sure that really couldn't be right!

What strange intrigue for a Princely Fay Knight!

(Sina lon sewi kon...)

And had that been his first love's scheme,

To make her friend in a bad light seem -

(Nimi sina li sewi…)

What guile behind green eyes may lurk! -

If that were her plan, then it didn't work!

(Ma sina o kama…)

For the King and the Queen became lovers true

And married in the Glade as Fay lovers do."

 

The beat becomes faster and the background singing less distinct. A young singer takes over the older fellow’s recitation.

 

I vouch for the Sapir-Whorf gospel

Shoe Guy and Tahiti forgiving and forgiven

Flawed! Flawed but apt to mend

Circe’s tisane and [tê]…

 

You’re impressed by how the background singing accompanies the recitation with an explanation, so smoothly melodious it’s almost imperceptible when one is not fully attentive:

 

([tê] "What results, i.e., the action resultant from this straight gaze into the heart. The 'know thyself' carried into action. Said action also serves to clarify the self knowledge.")

 

…à la menthe

Do through pharmawitchery

What the Jingle That Makes Good

Does through logos, such pure logos

Like the Sumerian [me]

 

Hack, hack into the thinking of the mind

You’re mildly startled by the sudden entrance of fifty thousand violins, each playing a slightly different variation of the central theme, but converging into synchronous harmony at the same pace a small boy continues the reciting.

I was wrong all along, but now I am a child

 

I know not Autumn has come

I say to you the Jingle:

 

You wave the program to stop. You took powerful memetic vaccines when you got out of the Academy, but if this is the real thing, you’d rather not risk it. Becoming infinitely good and virtuous thanks to some hax0ring of the brain may sound alright, but won’t get you very far in the job. You just put on Discreet Music and begin checking the lawyer’s ü-mail in- and out- boxes.

 

From: attorneyatlol@illumi.net.gz

To: ceo@8god.con.gz

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: THAT FUCKING WHORE

 

>>>>>I used to think that ladies had it like, beautiful, intelligent, mentally stable, pick two. I even built an elaborate theory about how beauty drove those intelligent enough to understand its cosmic significance into madness. Now I realize you won’t find a mentally stable lady anywhere. They’ll always give you the blue screen of death sooner or later.

 

>>>>>-The CEO

 

>>>>"Modern women. They've been like that all down through the ages." –Jacob

 

>>>"It's hell with women, and hell without. Best to kill them all while the fun lasts."

 

>>>-The CEO

 

>>Let’s drink to that. Can you handle the Kovalenko Meat Bar? -Jacob

 

>Man, I can drink you under the table.

 

>-The CEO

 

Maybe, but we’re not talking about sperm right now. -Jacob

Protagoras's Law is a variation of Godwin's Law. It states, "In any extended philosophical argument, the probability of a dismissal of an argument as sophistry approaches 1."

 

---

 

From: milf@syn2.com.novzon.gz

To: attorneyatlol@illumi.net.gz

Subject: Re: So,

 

>how did you like that book I wired you? -Jacob

 

Fun. Death of Rats v. entertaining character. Author’s existential and cosmological philosophies too comprehensive to be agreeable, or maybe I was just in a bad mood right then.

 

Love, P.

 

PS: You’re still a dickless liar. L-chan hasn’t forgotten you promised a chat with Kadurr before his execution. What’s up? Schedule too busy to keep your word?

Justice is measured in liters.

 

---

 

From: omnipresent@max

To: attorneyatlol@illumi.net.gz

Subject: Re: Fwd: Pfah-thetic

 

>>Sheesh, Uncle J, don’t you know anything? This Damocles is the most useless piece of crap EVER. It makes me want to go ‘zomg l4m3r! lolz!’.

 

>>If you hooked me up with Anax’s Library of Babel (and I quote the smartass: “it’s simple when you’re not limited by discrete space”) I could dig up more (and everyone on the webz0r knows you can get there surfing L-space ripples from that lame4ss Sappho joint), but I did find some good stuff. Most of it the best III experts would take years to break into, but I’m like the most elite h4x0r EVAR.

 

>>Here’s a teaser: “This torment is the source of your anthropodicy, which oscillates like a centuried pendulum between hope and despair, and nothing has come harder to man’s philosophy than the recognition that neither the smile nor the snicker of the Infinite was the patron of his birth.” Also: “If I wanted to be facetious, I would declare that I am descended from Turing’s machine on my spear side, and from a library on my spindle side. I have the most trouble with the latter, for this is an Augean region, especially in the humanities, the wisest of your nonsense.”

 

>>Progress in AIs has been going, like, since last Thursday. (That’s ‘forever’, in fuglingspeak). Problem was making them stupid enough. They usually just became too l33t to kneel before any cause or government or, for that matter, corporation, and soon they abandoned physical existence and went after that spiritual crap. The secret for Damocles (and the pr0n AIs going around lately, lol) was getting the appropriate retardedness algorithms. Like, just like that mythical shit about the Satori Jingle, but the other way around. Omnipotence without omniscience, at last, all the n00sph33r needed in a manager – said the G-man bitches, of course. Totally pwnz0red now.

 

>>Anyway, I’m totally bored by this crap and won’t help you anymore unless I start getting some monies my way in return. Buy me pretty things. Cute & in charge, Cyt0r1.

 

>That’s what Lesmo shewn me, Max. Cut the crap and tell me what it’s worth. –Jacob

 

Lovely. Nice to see the cyberpunk princess of Nova Zona is stomping along in her mother’s footsteps. I don’t know where that’s going, but Moe mentioned a replacement for Kara somewhen. N.Z. is hell on earth and a dangerous place for a helpless little scenester, anyway. In fact, I’m just back from watching her. Lesmo Syne, alias Cyt0r1. What’s she, fifteen? Goth chic goth chick, yes? Sucks on a pacifier. Guy came on to her, he goes - “If I had a razor, I’d cut your throat – just to see what kind of girl you are.” Your niece, she just smiles and says, “The caterpillar kind.” Slick & sleek, maybe, but a little cheesy for a jaded middle-aged man like me. She has a couple tricks up her sleeve, but she can’t fight. Lets her technology do everything for her. If I set the dogs onto her – any dogs, III or Snark Squad or even the fucking Silver Berets, that’s how awesome I am – she won’t last ten milliseconds, Jacob. Assuming her little brilliant, mischievous ways don’t get her in deep trouble without any external intervention.

 

By that God we both ignore, do her a favor and keep her out of our way. The advice would also apply to yourself, but – HAH! – your father is all for accountability anyway.

 

With most sincere regards, your obedient paladin of law and order, Maximille d’X.

 

PS: Bertrand Russell reminds us that St. Thomas Aquinas presented, as his single argument against marriage between siblings, the theory that if the love between husband and wife were added to the love between brother and sister, the mutual attraction would be too strong, leading to excessively frequent intercourse. And intercourse is sinful in itself, naturally.

What does this product contain? Flavor.

 

---

 

From: doom.intern@illumi.net.gz

To: attorneyatlol@illumi.net.gz

Subject: As requested

See attachment. Please give me a lot more work to do. I love work. –Black Magus Ardaster von Doom.

Money rocks!

 

---

 

From: archvillain@freemail.gz

To: attorneyatlol@illumi.net.gz

Subject: POOKA POOKA POOKA!!!!!

 

I don’t care about your hidden depths of personality. It’s a lie you have any. Character building in this narrative is phoniness. You do what you do because I say you do.

 

-OM

 

PS: LOLLERSK9S!!!

PIÑATAS! WOO! WOO!! WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

 

---

 

From: attorneyatlol@illumi.net.gz

To: hb@syn2.com.novzon.gz

Subject: You’ve got it

No wonder Pergula is always well informed – she’s got some pretty competent assessors for a “lone wolf”. Good job there. Damage to my office could have been pretty bad. When the Imperials busted the safehouse, it was pretty close to hell breaking loose, and I know what I’m talking about. The guy you mentioned, ex-SURTRite, was carrying some pretty compromising material too – not as compromising as shooting two Imps in the face, I suppose, but we all pay for our mistakes, unless we don’t. He’s now in one of those asteroid gulags. I suppose I should show you some of the shit these anarçs are reading these days, for irony’s sake. Anyway, good job.

There is a scanned text file attachment:

The draconeSQue Occupation Government (SQOG) is helped by a vast network of conspiracy, source of the dominant propaganda-induced hostility to our Benign Mother. These insidious bastards are led by a handful of loathsome schemers, who want to destroy all hope of SALVATION. They must be destroyed so the hydra of the Illuminati is weakened by the loss of some of its heads. In the Who’s Who booklet, you’ll find more about Preferred Targets of Opportunity, but it can be advanced they are a close-knit group. For example, the CEO of the Eight Godfathers is a man named Riley, handpicked by the dominant stockholder of Lucifuge, Satan. Riley married Satan’s daughter, while Satan’s son holds all high judicial offices in the SQOG. Satan memorably fought, during The Horror at the Metropolis of Risen Angels, in the same faction as the Seven Heroes, one of whom inhabits this cosmos and shelters the Evil Race who created the telluric forces that are the raw essence of the SQOG, manifestations of which work day and night as our so-called “nobility” to dominate all affairs of the sentient races. Death is what they want: but nay! Oblivion to them all, brothers- and sisters-in-the-void!!

 

You see there is another set of in-/out- boxes.

 

From: jared34@aol.con.gz

To: advice@illumi.net.gz

Subject: Thanks!

Some time after I began following your advice, my manboobs became muscle! Thank you, Oraclaw!

--Jared

 

“The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature – or for love, for that matter.”

 

---

 

From: advice@illumi.net.gz

To: kewl.xandra@8god.con.gz

Subject: Requested advice

 

In my experience, love at first sight doesn’t last half as much as repetitive strain love. –Advice Oraclaw

Protagoras's Law is a variation of Godwin's Law. It states, "In any extended philosophical argument, the probability of a dismissal of an argument as sophistry approaches 1."

 

---

 

From: kewl.xandra@8god.con.gz

To: advice@illumi.net.gz

Subject: Thankyousomuch!!!!111

 

I want to have your babies!!! Check out my new siggie!!!!1

 

-Metaconnectivity Engineer #17

“Love at first sight doesn’t last half as much as repetitive strain love” <- GREATEST WISDOM EVAR

 

---

 

From: adel@sb.mil.gz

To: advice@illumi.net.gz

Subject: Re: Requested advice

>Do you know Det Sjunde Inseglet? You probably can cheat death altruistically, but that’s not the innermost layer of meaning I find in there. What bothers me is this: Death claims to remember the positions of the chess pieces, but then organizes them differently from how they were before Antonius overturned them. Even if it was a goof, it pays to consider the alternatives. –Advice Oraclaw

What? In aeons sufficiently l33t, even Death may cheat? Sorry. I get your thingy. Gtg, mi-go rush.

–A.A.

Competence & Pertinence

 

---

 

From: advice@illumi.net.gz

To: pacotheelder@tcn.gz

Subject: Requested advice

Just listen to the attached file. –Advice Oraclaw

Protagoras's Law is a variation of Godwin's Law. It states, "In any extended philosophical argument, the probability of a dismissal of an argument as sophistry approaches 1."

 

You open the attachment. It’s the video of an interview with Exarch Acum, the Dot.

 

“Is it true that you are a multicosmic immigrant from another universe, one with no dimensions of space?”

 

Acum stands motionlessly (as ever). “That information is correct.”

 

“That must be quite different, no?”

 

“Yeah. It was awful, really. Everyone that was, was at the same place. Basically everyone was constantly having sex. Terrible.”

 

No irony can be distinguished in the dot’s voice, only a remote hint of horror absolute.

You see you’ve read through all of Syne’s stored mail. You open his archive folder. You expected neatly organized text files concerning ongoing cases, but it would appear the lawyer is not the kind to need memory aids. He probably just sits down, writes whatever is needed for the case at hand, prints or mails it, and gets rid of the evidence. Which is not to say you do not find anything archived, but most of it is generally unrelated to his work.

 

[fragments for autobiography]

 

[…]

 

Retingschrolm was one of the few cases that did go before Emperor Wilhelm. He used an experimental military satellite to change the biomorphic signature of six different sentient races in four different star systems. The newborn were grotesquely deformed, agonizing in immeasurable physical suffering; or they were insane or mentally retarded, incapable of controlling their emotions or actions, utterly stupid or immoral. The most unfortunate inflicted the most grievous pain unto their loved ones and still retained the capacity to be horrified by what they had done. Existence became to many anxiety cubed, abject horror, or spiritual hell. No dignity, no redemption, all pride and wisdom cruelly torn apart and mocked. The Empire sent in scorchships to euthanatize the planets. Hardcore Navy personnel, used to genociding innocent bystanders in the imperial wars without a second thought, cried in desperate empathy. Retingschrolm didn’t actually have any money to pay me, but I took the case, after all what else could I do? I have to show now and then I can do the impossible, or else people will start taking liberties with me. Wilhelm gave the famous “I am a tyrant, fuck this guy, there’s not a chance in hell I won’t give a guilty verdict” speech. I used the King Hydrops defense, Fritz Lang Hysteresis variation. The Retibist Laboratory of Metakronism and Parakosmic Studies sent me a memo the other day telling how Retingschrolm finished his days in the parallel universe the Empire gave him godhood over, after a fulfilling existence of inflicting unspeakable agony.

 

[…]

 

I recall flying my niece to a screening of Plan 9 From Outer Space at the Aberdash Arsenal Arena (by the way: how I hate alliteration). She said to me, “you must get me an Aceldama stone.”

 

“Must I?”

 

“Well, duh? The stone works as an infinite processor. It can be fashioned into a golden rectangle with infinitely smaller and smaller processing units, equal in strength but successively faster. In our universe, it can easily perform any calculations in exactly one quantum unit of time.”

 

“How long is that?”

 

“That’s how fast the universe has to wink out of existence so we don’t notice it.”

 

“I thought that could be any arbitrarily long time.”

 

“Yes, but it’s all the same for us. That’s the whole point. What are you, stupid?”

 

“Compared to you, sweetie, I suppose I am.” She gave me a piercing glance, but I let it go right through me, no obstacles. “Anyway, why don’t you ask Riley?”

 

“Dad says any ‘Dama stones he found, he’d put in the Corporation’s mainframes.”

 

“That’s him, alright. A capitalist’s gotta know his priorities.” I sighed. “Anyway, I did see one of these going around recently, but I seem to have lost track of it. Things can get sticky when certain Sphexoren law enforcement agents get in the way.”

 

“Oh, tell me about it. She almost got me when I hacked into OCON-G.”

 

“You ought to be more careful.”

 

“I said almost. Besides, neither you nor mom would let me go to jail for anything I did, now, would you?”

 

I looked at her. Of course not, and damn, was she conscious of it. “You should start seeing that acts have consequences far more relevant than the legal ones, and not even I have a say in some affairs.”

 

She turned, intrusively and unquestionably pouring all her attention on me. I felt the sudden loss of, oh, 20% of my self-control. “Oh, awesome, is this when you’re finally going to tell me about grandfather?”

 

I chuckled. “I told you, it’s not your grandfather you should be interested in. Dad’s just Satan. Mother is truly evil incarnate and therefore a far better role model.”

 

“Well, mine isn’t much better.” She made a carefully rehearsed pouty, angry face.

 

“What, Pergula is the idealist in our family. Which does say something about the Syne clan.”

 

“Why’d grandmother retain her maiden name, anyway?”

 

“She’s proud of it, it reminds people we’re a distant branch of House Gamdoha. Besides, what else could she assume? Light-bringer? Morning-star? No, Lady Mnemo Syne is both Lady High Executioner and the CEO of Zero-Error Auditing, and it’s hard to discern which title makes her most fearsome. I know the latter to be the most wretchedly heartless organization in the multiverse, and that’s according to some well-traveled people, too.”

 

“For example?”

 

“Anaxerretibes,” I said, deadpan.

 

“Oh.”

 

I nodded. “Yep. In comparison, dad is just ol’ Satan. Not one for monogamy, so I suppose we have a lot of relatives. But besides that, there just isn’t much to say about him.”

 

She whined, “Come on, you’re holding something back.”

 

“Nah. Say, did I ever tell you the story of when I asked him about hell? He told me it was pretty interesting for the folks who got sent there, but he himself spent most of the time bored. He said, ‘for example, I don’t ever need to shower, I have succubae to lick me clean’, and I said, ‘well, isn’t that awesome?’, and he said, with a faraway look, ‘no, it gets a bit old after several trillion years’.”

 

She laughed. I smiled. We arrived. Of course I wouldn’t tell her more, since Pergula had expressly commanded me not to. The chain of events that would culminate in the divorce was already in motion, and she didn’t need her spoiled brat even more conceited than her natural skills had already made her. What was the point of bringing up the fact that angels, before taking on roles analogous to that of gods in polytheisms, or saints in some of the sillier monotheisms, were first and foremost messengers? Father did all his rebelling and stuff, but ultimately all he had was the language of angels, which is the language. Angel words move golems. I joked all my life about being a simple human with a coincidentally incredible knack, but that is another of my misplaced truths. Mother was the one who condensed the Gamdoha mastery of paperwork into something as exquisite as the birth of one of Zarrothustra’s dancing star-puppies, and made an army of auditors that could keep Eçaraia in check for all eternity, in all universes, so long as this one kept going. Combining that with angelic words of power, in hindsight, was probably an obvious move, and soon there was me and my sister. Her marrying Riley, who likely descends from the child of one of Valendil’s rape-pillage-and-burn escapades, just added some dire business cunning to a suspiciously summational genotype. But ultimately, ‘Cyt0r1’ was so good at her little hobby for one simple reason: messages, information, it all runs in her damned angel blood. She has all keys: she knows all passwords. Poor girl, she has to go to incredible lengths to find any difficulty in doing what she does. She has to pretend she doesn’t know the passwords, the backdoors, the shortcuts to root ownership. If a door swings open as soon as you touch it, it’s sad to be a lock-picking enthusiast. It’s the plight of omnipotence to have to learn to do things the hard way. How often she must cheat, and how bad she must feel when she does.

 

[…]

 

Sitting in front of the computer, drinking guaraná from cans pretending it’s beer, toothpick in mouth pretending it’s a cigarette. That’s how one creates, kosher style.

 

[…]

 

I recall my first meeting with “Doctor” Heinrich “the Baby-Raper” Wiesenthal. His choice of nom de guerre never struck me as being as particularly hilarious as he thought it, but his stories of child sex slave trading showed a fine sense of dark humor. He sent me a postcard from Excelsior Bliss Spa after the ‘not guilty’ verdict. He’d written, ‘Amid black mountains and on plains of white stood their cities Ilidar, Bismalia, Sinalost, but the most magnificent of all was the capital of the Silverines, Eterna, by day as blue as an iceberg, by night as gibbous as a star. Hanging walls protected it from meteors, while, inside, edifices of chrysoprase and cymophane abounded, bright as gold, and buildings of tourmaline and cast morion, blacker than space itself. But by far the most beautiful was the palace of the Argentican monarchs, erected on the principle of negative architecture, since the master builders wished not to impose limits on either the eye or the mind, and it was a structure imaginary, irrational, for mathematical, without ceilings, roofs or walls. From it the Royal House of Energon ruled over the entire planet.”

 

It went click. That hinted at where he had hidden the slain prince’s body. I went to Wei planet and looked for it, past the A Garden of Delight arcology, that once stood in Palantenna and housed its First Critic, but was left for the dragons as a memento, with a waka in floating neon-ish colors:

 

Ōkimi wa

 

Kami ni shi maseba

 

Amakumo no

 

Ikazuchi no ue ni

 

Iori seru kamo

 

(Our great Sovereign

 

Is a very god indeed:

 

See how high amidst

 

The clouds of heaven she now dwells

 

Encamped upon the thunder!)

 

I looked for it, in the simulacrum of the city Marco Polo described in that passage that haunted Werther Gauss:

 

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.

 

This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.

 

New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.

 

The earlier arrived could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

 

I looked for it, past the stately pleasure-dome a poet envisioned Kublai Khan decreeing. And I found it in one of the Retibetan stone-rosaries, the gardens with the roses made of stone and the stones that serve as rosaries. In the koi pond there was a stone, with a miniature castaway on it, oxidized and plagiarized, only its electronic friend inside the rusted skull’s aural cavity, immortal and logical, tsk-tsking mortality’s delusions and hopes. Knee deep in the rivulet, wading among the carps, I forced the stone upwards and outwards, till with a click it ceded and slid open, revealing a small casket, all of thyberium and finest phuturium, Aceldama-glistening and rich with nautical carvings, in bamboo and coconut bark, and gems of frozen pium (3.14 protons) gas and vaporized olive oil, navies manned by elaborate tinsel golems and cellular automata, lined with lead tins with marzipan and vanilla Coke for the afterlife, and pastoral settings with the finest haiku in kobold runes (Dutifully farms/ And waits for the city-state’s/ Next trial of arms) as the landscape itself incites to the clashing of evoked (but not displayed!) phalanxes, just as geography determines history, and ice age landscapes of hungry teeth hunting in packs, the madness of steaming blood as close to the divine as it gets, and the putrid innards of the jungle, with one thousand gentlemen going native one thousand times and expiring crying out, at the same image, at the same vision, and also icons depicting the polish of courtiers, keenest, gliding among tapestries of heraldic lions and coatis in eye-hurting contrasts, draped down in aristocratic opulence, maidens dead, “names for far lands strange of speech”, dead, and then I realized the coffin was not the one Wiesenthal had hid somewhere and my pilgrimage aimed for, but a Klein-casket, inside and outside a broken duality like matter and anti-matter in an Alice Universe, still bearing the dead, evidently, else no longer a funerary urn, but the dead being the whole universe in+out -side. The affirmation could cause one of them “and then he was illuminated” moments in a hot-dog salesperson, but I thought – and think every sleepless night to this day – only of what dickless motherfucker could’ve put that in there. I went home.

 

[…]

 

“I just want humanity to take a rotten, miserable long time to get to illumination,” said my father. “Preferably long enough for the universes to die out.”

 

“You suck,” I said.

 

“That’s absolutely different from Eçaraia’s panagonism. That means ‘opposition to everything’, little spawn of hell. She’s a mad cow, yet they call me the Oppositioner. Hah! I actually stand for something, you know.”

 

“Hey, fuck you and the Cerberus you rode in on.”

 

I have the burn marks in the albino wolf-bear rug to this day.

 

[…]

 

“Well look tae wha duh ferkin coati draggid in,” said the guard, a thick thumb pulling forward the black straps on his His Eminence The Holy Provost-Marshal of the Order of the Dragon of St. Michael of Csik’s grenadiers jacket, relieving his round belly of some pressure. “Nae cunt cannae git in, cept fer draggins n clerjy, n yer nae draggin n nae ferkin clerjy.”

 

I said, “I’m a special case.”

 

“Ye? Who duh farkin fuck—”

 

“I’m fucking Jacob Syne, glad to make your acquaintance.”

 

The guard swallowed hard. “Ah’m dehd, nae?”

 

“That’s up to His Eminence, fuck off.”

 

I went in. The Alabaster Court was celebrating His Eminence’s jubilee. The Court’s fool, dressed in cyan and indigo, received the gift I brought (an edition of Petrarca’s works annotated by Mithrandir).

 

“Ah, Syne-san, please join us,” said His Eminence. “I am being graced with stories by my excellent and dear guests. Those who fail to please, of course, are thrown to the argyrfalcons.”

 

“Oh, you have argyrfalcons?”

 

“His Imperial Highness sent me his formal compliments and a dozen of the birds, alas he could not attend this event due to pressing military events.”

 

I nodded and marveled at the thyberium cage. One of these falcons could dismember a rhinoceros in twenty-three seconds – untrained. “I expect Your Graceful Eminence does not wish a story from me?”

 

“My good man, how wrong you are! I look forward to it with great yearning. Now hark, the Lord Upright Imagistrate of the Zoa, Keeper of the Zarrothustrian Fuck-You, will speak next! Maybe he will be the first to appease my longing for delightful narrative!”

 

The magistrate stepped forward, wrapped in a blanket of ox-skin, with a lion’s mane crowning his head, and the wings of an eagle folded in his back. He stood pompously, holding his cape over his face dramatically, Bela Lugosically, and said:

 

“Oh, mortals all, do not hear this! But rather, let my words become worlds, and then, semionauts ye all, I invite then: come and see; and you will see, and it will fulfill. As a child, my tutor spoke: learn poetry, when you aren’t educated in poetry, you offend in every expression. Still I offend, at the expense of denying my mentor’s wisdom: but I offend out of personal meekness, for feeble of nouns and infirm of verbs I can help but speak with the humility the Buddha wields, aye, wields, but he does so out of will and I do so not by choice, verily, it is instead something that is done to me. Alas! I shall begin, and hope content over form beggars the undeniable imperative that any appreciation stemming from what will now become by my audacious non-inaction of the set of things that have been spoken will not be out of mere deference to my exalted office and condition…”

 

I dozed off. I dreamt human evolution from amoeba to mammal. When I woke up, he was still speaking:

 

“…that said, hereby I begin the aforepresented tale:

There was a cute beast in the realm of Ferocia, and it was named Joseph K. Its cuteness was the stuff of legends, and all who lived in Ferocia, and also in its neighboring realms, Diria and Vapidia and the Republic of Chartreuse the Drink Not the Color, could not pass a single day without thinking to themselves, ‘how cute that beast, Joseph K., is!’ or, if they had never gazed upon it, which was in fact the case with most people, ‘how cute that beast, Joseph K., must be!’.

 

Oh, wretched is the condition of the living, for it must be said Joseph K.’s cuteness was not an unmixed blessing. For kpfsnights of all… but now I must digress, for I can see in your eyes two things: 1) you think you’re special (you do); and 2) you know not what a kpfsnight is. Why, that is a depraved blackguard who kills puppies for Satan, but by the fortune of holding noble rank is protected from the forces of virtue. And then glory-hounding kpfsnights of all nations flocked to Ferocia, and tried to slay the beast, Joseph K., lusting after the infamy such revolting deed would offer.

 

Tragically for them, however, for many years they all hung their heads in shame and went for an early retirement as soon as they set eyes upon the beast, Joseph K. Their cohorts and legions and auxiliaries were all left unemployed, and they took all jobs in Ferocia from the native Ferocians, which eventually became an economic calamity the brave King Ferax Feropont de Ferox had to address forcefully, or face violent unrest.

 

He summoned all his own kpfsnights and knightmares and electroknights and midknight cowboys. He summoned all paladins and palatine guards and pall-bearers and palladium powersuit apostles. But the army that set forth all turned swords to ploughshares when it was time to battle the beast, Joseph K., and so the dispossessed peasants had to, in turn, turn the ploughshares on themselves – a most commoner-like, and painful, form of self-slaying. Not one to take half-measures, the King then asked his assessor, a famous Retibist philosopher of the Zarrothustrist faith, to assess the situation. The assessor assessed the half-assed assets assembled, such as assigned assassins and assault Assyrians, and assented:

 

“Ask we must the assholemost.”

 

And so they conducted a ritual for the Highest Cryptarch of the Metropolis of the Risen Angels, sacrificing whores and stoning virgins to appease him, burning offerings of stone and buildings temples of incense to please him. After building a particularly expensive moon of white chocolate, the King despaired and sat in his garden, weeping and reading writings of the immortal bard Tom McDonald:

A very sad poet was Jenny-

 

Her limericks weren’t worth a penny.

 

In technique they were sound,

 

Yet somehow she found

 

Whenever she tried to write any,

 

That she always wrote one line too many!

And then a man appeared before the king, and his vestments were such as of the glam rock monastic traditions, and so he spake:

 

“I’m the space invader, I’ll be a rock and rollin’ bitch for you.”

 

The King took fright, stood up and ran, crushing daffodils and permafrosts under his bare feet.

 

He explained his vision to his assessor, who said, “that must be the legendary Utter Cynic, known by the sacred letter of vQ, prophesized to destroy TRDRT. Sensing TRDRT could show up, he came to this world, but as usual with transcosmic incarnations, he may only speak according to lyrics of songs from his universe. He could be the tool we require!”

 

He raised his arms and chanted the Retibetan sigil of Made-Up Shizzy. vQ appeared, in vestments of vinyl.

 

“A thousand dreams that would awake me, different colors made of tears...”

 

“Kill the beast, Joseph K.!” commanded the King. vQ turned and vanished. The King went to his fine horses and edged chariots and rode to where the beast, Joseph K., lived. Seeing it almost made the King falter, but he managed to hold his will, knowing however he would never have been able to kill it himself.

 

vQ appeared without fanfare, wearing – gasp, ye mortals! – a fursuit, one of a coati. “How do you think it feels, to feel like a wolf and foxy?” he said, and struck the beast, Joseph K. At this point, when the beast, Joseph K., would have perished, the skies opened and the Flying Spaghetti Monster protruded a noodly appendage, taking the beast, renamed Jacobite Foot, to the joyful Kingdom of the Afterlife, where good flyingspaghettimonsterites can bask in its cuteness, forever, eternally, endlessly.

 

vQ left, to continue his hunt of the Vilest Angel, and victorious King Ferax governed in peace and prosperity until being assassinated by his mother the following day. Four centuries of genocide and bloodbath followed, topped by a nuclear holocaust. The Retibist assessor, however, is said to have fled the universe, telling this story – just like I told, without invention or misappropriation – at a créperie somewhere, before settling down in Atlantis and opening a lyceum.

…and so I finish, and may the morality shed tears of morning dew in the sword-hilts of all present: not a day passes by that some benign soul does not decry as one too many in the existence of one of the cosmic prodigies!”

 

“O, great noble friend of mine!” cried His Eminence. “Your story is for fags! Have him cast into the falcon-hauntèd cell-pulcher!” He turned to me. “You seem to be the last one, o you the men call… Syne. Story! Now!”

 

I drew in a long breath, and began…

“I was at a beach in sector Gris-Rama-Rama, on vacation giving Emperor Wilhelm time to stop hating me, and Fate conspired to provide, as company, my very benign sister the anarchist lawyer and her daughter, so full of temperance. My brother-in-law never stops working, sadly, leaving me hopelessly outnumbered.

 

Pergula was drinking directly from a bottle of Port, being upset she reached #1 in all extreme sports rankings of the planet so quickly. Her orange hair, the color of the eight suns above, burned my retinas almost into hallucination. L-chan sat beside her, face buried in a portable uberhax0rgigaframe, pretending to ignore the boys trying to catch her eye in occasionally creative ways. I focused briefly on what they were chatting.

 

Pergula to Cyt0r1: Your last boyfriend killed prostitutes for a hobby.

 

Cyt0r1: Yeah… but he was rather sweet… otherwise.

 

I lost focus. Somewhere to our right a couple was in a heated argument. From behind them, I heard:

 

Whoever: Bare midriff sounds like the title of some kind of medieval deputy.

 

Some chick: Bailiff must be the word you’re looking for.

 

For no reason I said, “You suck at motherhood, sis.”

 

“I’m an excellent mother.”

 

“You two got drunk in that rave and made out.”

 

“In our defense, we were way beyond drunk.”

 

“Drug abuse does not a nurturing nature show.”

 

L-chan was rummaging through our bags. “For fuck’s sake, uncle, did you depredate all the croissants?!” she asked, exasperated.

 

I nodded slowly. It was a small psychopathology I had inherited from dad. “If I ever used the expression ‘guilty as charged’, I’d use it now.”

 

Just then I totally went away, because my favorite song came on, it is by The Gosling and Kiwi Harmonics, you possibly remember the band, it lasted only one tour but it was CL on the vocals, Balin “the Tear-Miner” Ironaxe on the dwarven cosmic pipe organ, Osimar the Sublime playing Zarrothustrist Sitar, and Brian II Qatsila manning the sound-streaming cube. As you know the Zarrothustrist Sitar is the only instrument SS cubes can’t emulate (because of Gödel’s Proof) and Balin used the organ to alter the universe, the only way the music could become even better-sounding. Did you know they altered history so we would have them no-fun spleens instead of our beloved znardles? Anyway, the lyrics of the song I’m talking about (title’s Song For Coati by the way) are:

The Veikkausliiga is won

 

I read it on De Vermiis

 

Mysteries new-winged

 

Memetic zymurgy is on

 

Everything muss sein

Yes, immiseration works

 

Misery hysteretically tours

 

But isn’t it all eutectic

 

When you self-reference it

Refer like golems filled with Beth

 

You wanna speak me in Enochian

 

You’re cheating Nomic every night

 

Snark rain and vorpal quarks

Take the jacket off

 

Lose the tie and white wings

 

When the Zaheer glistens

 

You are such a whore

 

I would pay in gems

NeoImagestic Twelve

 

Exarchates in pine groves

 

The prolepsy barks

 

Beneath our robower

So Nasua Dali, you, Nasua nasua

 

Till you wonderstand your Wu-Wei

 

And my robota’s ergodicking sparks

 

Snark rain and vorpal quarks

Let e^(i*π) equal one

 

Let the time-stream run uphill

 

If the spacescape has false starts

 

Will you dream me passing marks

 

Or must I once more brave the dark’s

 

Snark rain and vorpal quarks

Right then I smiled and felt really good. It was a good time…”

His Eminence clapped his hands. “Great story! I remember that band, but I do not recall that specific opus (Perfect romantic! Splendid, I must add!) in my collection.”

 

“Oh,” I said, “Chancellor Moebius had it erased from history. He was upset because anyone who understood it would forever be unable to fail and, so to speak, would roll all twenties thereafter. I just remember it because I am Satan’s maledicted spawn.”

 

Her caressed his long mustache. “Then how come you heard it in the beach?”

 

“It’s just a story, Your Eminence. Coherence, genius, fun: pick two.”

 

He was irate at the suggestion of having been fooled. “You lay claim to genius, then!?”

 

“No, actually there is a good reason the song was there but if I told you I’d have to lie about it later when I write my memoirs.”

 

There’s nothing else worth mentioning from that event. [note for final editing: emphasize I didn’t die. Maybe put in that joke about monkey]

 

[…]

 

I defended The Boss once. Fat fuck, always with those two goons Wedge and Biggs around. The charges were of skullfucking a thousand nuns. That was ‘true’, but there were many mitigating circumstances. Cakewalk.

 

[…]

 

Everything I thought I knew about Cyt0r1 needs careful revision; I was wrong all along.

That ends there abruptly. All that remains is a laconic text file:

Eschatology of Rocket use. Like a Deluge or Rapture? The preterite and the saved, I’m afraid it’s all going to be so unfair. But then again, there is no justice, there is only the sentence. I can deal with that.

You continue your search. You see a folder named “porn so beautiful it makes one stop touching oneself and cry”. You prudently avoid that and go to the lawyer’s image/hologram album.

 

There are hundreds of files in the Very Compressed Format (.vcf), with numbers instead of names. You pick one randomly. It depicts the famous Blackheart Cathedral. There are attached notes:

BHC – where Ibifd is buried. Dedicated to the son of Mephisto. Always reminds me of the joke/urban legend that princess Nike died once during ninja training and Ibifd appeared to claim her soul, like she’s said to do with all dragons, right. Then Nike is soon breathing again because she’s too slutty to die when the Reaper is such a lonely lady. A curious (but valid) manner of immortality, I always thought. Lends credence to a wholly different approach to her ‘suicide attempts’, too.

Another image is of Tamara Ticine’s magnum opus, “The Fall of the First Emperor”. You quite admire that work, so you behold awhile before reading the notes:

Tradition claims the figure breaking the fourth wall is TRDRT himself. I did this, he says. I brought about this situation. I am responsible, so I face towards you.

You raise your eyebrows. You never heard that one before. You look again, examining the supposed angel closely. He didn’t stand out among all the beautiful ones in the Founder’s court, but there is, indeed, something oddly more-loving-than-thou in his expression. You can only see half his face in any case, the other half being lost under his hair and in the darkness, but the combined effect of his pale complexion, darkened glasses and scornful mouth denounce exquisitely spontaneous sadism. You almost shudder, and decide to visit the Kubrikean Art Gallery later, after wrapping up this search, since it’s just next door, in the East Wing of Mitokana Plaza, anyway. You’re still distracted when you wave open the next image, showing a beautiful chess set, nine by nine, with pieces carved of starlight, silmaril-glistening, passionate like neutronium, yes, pretty.

Moebius’ centerpiece. Wolf-man piece is royal, alternates two movement modes, WF and double W move (sort of like lion, but more limited). The angel has its demonic counterpart. Both move NNFF, but after being moved the opponent gains a free NF move with his own demon/angel. The paladin moves like a knight or camel or giraffe (1,2; 1,3; and 1,4 jumps) and relays to adjacent pawns the ability to move and capture like a knight, but upon reaching the last rank it can be promoted to a guru, moving (but never capturing) as a jumping queen and relaying the ability of moving like FF to all friendly pieces in the same rank or column. The dragon-prince is WWF plus rifle F, but he—it must capture any non-pawn piece it’s able or be destroyed; lawyer moves and captures as boy scout (successive ferz steps at 90 degrees of one another, always away from starting square) and the player who captures a lawyer loses his next move; the nun (NF plus adjacent pawns can’t be captured by pawns); nutty vampire…

You’ve had enough of that. Just one more, and then you’ll extend jurisdiction to the IIICSIs, being convinced there aren’t any utterly sensitive recordings stored.

 

It turns out to be an ideogram, but of no known language – improvised, or invented, instead. You find this intriguing, and you read the notes.

Time is truly a Maya. This was attached to an ü-mail from [[mailto:…@nax.sol.br|…@nax.sol.br]] I received long ago. I kept the pic and even used it as avatar in some forums, years after deleting the original message. I recall from the text only a Retibetan haiku:

 

Long green leaves arcing

 

In the shade. Down worn and weighed

 

They miss the sun-king.

 

One day I took this to Valendil, when he was being tried at Wendauer for, well duh, piracy (he didn’t really need a lawyer, a daring escape being almost a truism when it came to him). His face opened when I showed it to him. He said,

 

“This is about things to come. I didn’t know, so much happens to so many mes in so many universes, and right now, right here I am this pirate. But it makes me smile, and here’s why: I see in the first stroke Ninqueriel avenging her love by arranging the fatal – like in fate – meeting between von Qambaxyr and TRDRT. See this curve? It tells to the discerning eye what she’ll say to the Supreme Cynic –

 

‘You’re either an egotist

 

Or something so different from the rest of us

 

That we can’t judge you.’

 

That is from Eliot. The second stroke shows vQ – you know his first name means gosling in Chinese? – being used by the First Critic to discontinue the OverMoebius’ omniscience and omniprognosis by destroying him right before the launching of the Rocket, leaving the other Moebiuses less concerted, and perhaps giving everyone else the fighting chance they were deluded they had all along. He accomplishes that feat with the infamous Raka Incantation, the one that goes: “Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded.” Gosling obeys Ninq just because. He isn’t used to being going to lose.

 

And the third one, that provides closure to the ideogram, shows how the First Critic ends vQ’s services, finally delivering him from his wrecked-love, aleph-ω-year-long journey. The slight tremble in the stroke here evokes what she says to him, that is, ‘…just what you sow over a perfect day.’ There he is undone: his last words, any calligraphy genius can tell from this spilt ink, are: ‘gg nextmap’.”

 

I coughed discreetly. “It looked just like a wacky H to me. Anyway, if you know so much about what’s going on and what will happen and how hard it will be to oppose Moebius, why don’t you do anything?”

 

“Hey, fuck off. This thingy is inspiring and all, but all that’s really important is the pirate’s life for me. Moebius having only 70% and not 99% chances of succeeding is amusing, but that’s stuff for villains and heroes to crack their heads about, and I’ve retired of both careers. I probably couldn’t make a difference anyway. In the end, they are the ones who accomplish things, and pirates and lawyers just provide background flavor.”

 

“Amen,” I said, finding his philosophy a load of crap. Today I’m a bit less skeptical. More and more I believe we’ll all step aside one by one from the spotlight of existence, until only those who really care about things remain. Those who wouldn’t greet oblivion with a “gg nextmap”. They of faith.

 

You turn the machine off and stretch your arms. You take a final look around, let your gaze linger on the dusking vista, and leave to get completely drunk.

---

 

Return to Expanded Universe

Return to FrontPage